Veso

“In his inaugural lecture, Horkheimer opposed positivism because it ‘sees only the particular, in the realm of society it sees only the individual and the relations between individuals; for positivism, everything is exhausted in mere facts’.10 Positivism, an approach to social theory devised in the nineteenth century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held that society, like the physical world, operates according to laws. In philosophy, logical positivism holds that all we can reasonably claim to know is based on reports of sensory experience, along with logical and mathematical operations. Propositions not based on such reports or operations are metaphysical and hence nonsense, and even aesthetic or moral judgements, rightly understood, are not genuine judgements but more or less sophisticated grunts of approval or disapproval. Such a philosophy was developed almost contemporaneously with the Frankfurt School. The so-called Vienna Circle of logical positivism, founded by Moritz Schlick in 1922, consisted of a group of philosophers and scientists who met until 1936 at the University of Vienna. Some former members of the Circle went into exile from Austria around the time of the Nazi Anschluss of 1938, and the Circle went on to greatly influence philosophy departments in Britain and the United States, in part because their intellectual trajectory (they took most of Hegel to be metaphysical and therefore nonsense) was more amenable to the Anglophone universities.”
― Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

“The image of the punishing father was now projected into the authority of the state. Fromm even contended that the criminal justice system did not reduce the crime rate; rather, its function was to intensify oppression and crush opposition. These thoughts are echoed in our time by the American activist and professor Angela Davis, a one-time student of Marcuse. What she and other leftist intellectuals call the ‘prison-industrial complex’, a tawdry if tacit alliance between capitalism and a structurally racist state, results not in a reduction in the crime rate but in profits for business and a withdrawal of democratic rights for the US’s overwhelmingly black and hispanic inmates.”
― Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

“If just or justified violence is enacted by states, and if unjustifiable violence is enacted by non-state actors or actors opposed to existing states, then we have a way of explaining why we react to certain forms of violence with horror and to other forms with a sense of acceptance, possibly even with righteousness and triumphalism. The affective responses seem to be primary, in need of no explanation, prior to the work of understanding and interpretation. We are, as it were, against interpretation in those moments in which we react with moral horror in the face of violence. But as long as we remain against interpretation in such moments, we will not be able to give an account of why the affect of horror is differentially experienced. We will then not only proceed on the basis of this unreason, but will take it as the sign of our commendable native moral sentiment, perhaps even of our “fundamental humanity.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

“The idea of a legal war or, indeed, a just war, relies on the controllability of instruments of destruction. But because uncontrollability is part of that very destructiveness, there is no war that fails to commit a crime against humanity, a destruction of civilian life. In other words, the international law that prohibits crimes against civilians presupposes that there can be a war without such crimes, reproduced the idea of a “clean” war whose destruction has perfect aim. Only on such a condition can we distinguish between war and crimes of war. But if there is no stable way to distinguish permissible collateral damage from the destruction of civilian life, then such crimes are inevitable, and there is no non-criminal war. In other words, wars become permissible forms of criminality, but they are never non-criminal.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?