Re: WB's Anthropological Materialism

[simon smith <clov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <99A8845375@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, L Spencer
<L.SPENCER@xxxxxxxxxx> writes
>As promised, a quotation (Adorno in a letter to Benjamin dated 6
>September 1936) which is suggestive and intriguing. It certainly
>helps me understand why I have always found Benjamin the more
>rewarding writer...
>
>"All of the points on which I differ from you, despite our fundamental and
>concrete agreement on
>everything else, can be grouped together under the heading of an
>anthropological
>materialism to which I cannot give my allegiance.
>
>It is as though for you the measure of concretion were the human
>body."
>
>(Adorno to Benjamin, 6 Sept 1936, Gesammelte Schriften vii s. 864)

This is interesting, for I have found Adorno's work to be saturated with
references to the human body and to the senses. In Minima Moralia he
mourns the loss of the ability for 'erotic self-abandonment' and ' he
alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure, which,
satisfying the ultimate intention, is intentionless, has a stable and
valid idea of truth'. The suffering body is a continual theme in his
work, and in a late essay he discusses how the only true empathy with
someone being tortured in some distant country must come from the
ability to feel that sympathy in ones own body.

As to the notion of 'mindlessness' as a state of which Bloch and Adorno
are mooted to be afraid - Adorno's thought is constantly misunderstood
in this area, mainly because of people's refusal to comprehend the
distinction between mind and intellect. They are not the same. Dancing
is not 'blind somatic pleasure' - that is just a touchstone - it always
contains an element of intention. The ideal of dance might be 'mindful
joy' - quite the opposite of the 'jitterbug' which appears to me the
most *regimented* form of movement - to the most regimented form of
music (even worse than Beethoven.)

As Hullot-Kentor has pointed out, Adorno has barely even begun to be
understood in the US Kentor himself has written essays which brilliantly
combine the ideas of Adorno and Benjamin, and their critique of *all*
forms of art as semblance.
--
simon smith