Ernst Bloch on Jazz, Kitsch and Colportage (Corre

["L Spencer" <L.SPENCER@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph Dumain

>"My body is intelligent."  -- Josephine Baker

I dont see the point of the kind of rhetoric indulged in many on this
issue but I think that the points made by you, Ralph are basically
correct. In a very revealling passage in one of his letters to
Benjamin, Adorno defines their differences by saying that Benjamin
represents a kind of "anthropological materialism" into which Adorno
cannot follow him and goes on to say that it is as if Benjamin would
make the body the point of concretion for his analyes. Sorry. I dont
have the refence  I will try to post it in full to this list.

Benjamin famously wrote his Habilitationsschrift on German
Trauerspiel while sitting next to the (jazz) band in one of the
cafes. Or so his tells us. And he follows Nietzsche in linking style
and body, the rhythms of thinking and the rhythms of breathing and th
body...

Yeah, maybe it is just that Adorno is too intellectual, Bloch too
religious. Both of them too Germanic and "Geistig". Still, Bloch's
vehemence on the issue of jitterbug seems to me pathological.

It is not the only place he slips up ... but it is surprising.

Lloyd