Re: Frankfurters

["Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan@xxxxxxxxx>]

OK, so this thread stirs to life:

Bryan Alexander
Department of English
University of Michigan
**********************

On Sun, 14 Jan 1996 LeoCasey@xxxxxxx wrote:

> Frankfurters require some hot political mustard, a little French dijon, for
> left-wing digestion.

Nyah nyah.
>
> As an intellectual school, Frankfurters are very interesting. In contrast to
> Althusser and his followers, they by and large upheld the idea of Marxian
> humanism, and so had a very different tack on the tradition. At the same
> time, they were politically very pessimistic, not simply giving up on the
> classical Marxist project, but on virtually all emancipatory politics --
> Marcuse's _One Dimensional Man_ was as clear a statement of this trajectory
> as any of their works. Consequently, their political -- as opposed to their
> intellectual -- impact has been sporadic and negilgible.

Yes, alas.
>
> There are many different elements in the contrast between the Althusserians
> and the Frankfurters. One important contrast is national intellectual
> cultures -- don't forget how many of the important influences on Althusser
> are from French intellectual life -- not simply Lacan and the Foucault, but
> also the Bachelard and Canguilhem (philosophers of science from which much of
> the idea of the epistemological break was taken); by contrast, Frankfurters
> were solidly and stolidly German, thoroughly indebted to and enmeshed in the
> German philosophical traditions of Kantianism and Hegelianism. The key
> difference in terms of their international influence was that the withdrawl
> from political engagement on the part of the Frankfurters has diminished
> their impact in terms.

Yep.  Hence different polemics, such as Adorno's lifelong assault on
Heidegger (one his his finest moments) vs. the nifty
Foucault-Deleuze-Baudrillard snarl.

 (There are, of course, exceptions to this rule:
> Habermas, the greatest living Frankfurter, has a significant presence in
> German politics, and was a key presence in the famous 'historians' debate
> over the significance of the Holocaust. At the end of his life, Foucault was
> engaging Habermas, but to what end I never figured out; I have always had
> some difficulty making intellectual sense of the last few years of Foucault's
> life.)

Personally, I can't stand Habermas.  His retreat from class and state
analysis, as far as I've read, is not only contrary to the F-School's
principles, and to Marxism, but leads to wimpy liberal reformism as
well.  I think Foucault was about to attack him in re: power as a good,
but haven't read the texts you clearly know - where's this show up in F.?

 >
> Louis is right that Adorno's and Horkheimer's_The Dialectics of
> Enlightenment_ (and Adorno's _Negative Dialectics_) are the Frankfurter texts
> most worthy of serious engagement, although these texts, in their repudiation
> of the Hegelian dialectic, are also in some ways the least characteristically
> Frankfurter. (Although not, Louis, because of Cockburn's fine jdugment; IMHO,
> he is little more than a Spart who knows how to read,  write and dress up in
> public.)

I agree, but with some caveats.  Received opinion holds that the NEGATIVE
DIALECTICS translation is wretched and reactionary.  Furthemore, it's
worth a read into THE JARGON OF AUTHENTICITY for the last word on
Heidegger and existentialism in general.  MINIMA MORALIA is gorgeous
reading with lovely style and dialectical thinking.  His best essays
beyond this are cultural, like those in PRISMS and NOTES TO LITERATURE.
I've heard great things about the early Horkheimer essays, and they're
worth a pop.  Benjamin is another question...

 >
> Like Althusserianism, Frankfurters have splintered into many different
> directions over the last two decades. The leading journal of American
> Frankfurters, _Telos_, has degenerated into a wretched right wing journal in
> a Mussolini type devolution. (I once wrote a posting to this list on the
> subject of this -- and Genovese's -- 'right wing' turn.) Among those who
> remain on the left, Seyla Benhabib's work is by far the most interesting and
> intellectually serious of the lot; Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato have also
> produced some interesting work. All three of them are roughly within a
> 'radical democratic' perspective, and Cohen and Arato were on the editorial
> board of _dissent_ the last time I looked.
>

TELOS gets pretty strange.  Although the last Zappa interview I read
there was hilarious - >
>
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