Re: BHA: Delivered up to the world

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Jan,

Many thanks for you comments. I wish I could read Dutch!

>- what's your opinion on his "Thesis against Occultism" (MM:151)
>related to Bhaskar's current (partial) exotic realism.

I think it's profound. I used it in my critique of *From East to West*
in my paper at the Lancaster conference, a revised version of which I
have submitted to the JTSB (not with any great optimism, because it is
possibly too much in the nature of a review article.) Here is a relevant
excerpt:

***
Theodor Adorno speaks of the tendency towards occultism or spiritualism
in late capitalism - a system with a 'veiled tendency ... towards
disaster' - as a symptom of a general 'regression in consciousness' and
as 'an unconscious projection of a subject decomposing historically if
not clinically'. The agent of any conceivable historical transformation
decomposes, and the subject decenters, possibly into madness - so in our
decenteredness, powerlessness, and possible madness, we turn to the
spiritual to re-empower us and make us whole, thereby 'den[ying] the
alienation of which [occultism] is itself proof and product'. For the
occultist 'draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of
commodities' as 'menacingly objectified labour assails him on all sides
from demonically grinning objects' and 'the social quality' that
animates them is 'split off and misremembered as being-in-itself' (1974:
238-40).
****

It is what I take to be pandering to this regresssive aspect of New Age
that I think is really problematic in *FEW*, not the turn to religion as
such. I think there is a progressive, as well as regressive, strand
within New Age which *FEW* also draws on (and which my paper touches
on), and should say I am by no means anti-religion as such, any more
than Adorno was.

Mervyn


Jan Straathof <janstr@xxxxxxx> writes
>Dear Mervyn, thanks for the beautiful Adorno lines,
>
>you wrote i.a.:
>
>>Here is the text of the 'Finale', broken up into 'verses',
>
>indeed, it's very appropriate to edit this text the poetical way you did,
>I believe Max Horkheimer praised Minima Moralia as Adorno's true
>magnum opus, not only because of its philosophical (and analytical)
>merites but moreso because it examplified the artistic, poetic and
>playful but deeply tragic style typical of Adorno's personallity and
>thinking.
>
>i remember the story of the first translation of the Moralia in dutch
>in the late 60, the publisher had offered the german manuscript to
>several renowned translaters, but none of them accepted the task,
>after a long search they finally found a poet -Maurits Mok- who was
>willing to do the translation, and he did a wonderful job, however
>some critics then found he had allowed himself too much poetical
>freedom, esp. because Mok had smuggled in some own neologism.
>
>- what's your opinion on his "Thesis against Occultism" (MM:151)
>related to Bhaskar's current (partial) exotic realism.
>
>yours,
>Jan
>
>
>
>
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--
Mervyn Hartwig
13 Spenser Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 ONS
United Kingdom
Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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