Jesse > Recent Status Updates

Sometimes I forget how terrible Kant is - this is a great reminder. Free Will, Reason, and the irrational evil of "savages" are used to develop a secularization of "original sin" in terms of "radical evil". Because everyone hears the call of the Moral Law, and at every moment is Free to heed it, their continual failure to do so is empirical evidence for their prioritization of Self-Love over Duty.

Whew, finally finished reading the Stirner-critique. Not sure if I'll pause here or go on to the True Socialists.

I have been reading Gouldner's "The Two Marxisms", where the use of Weberian ideal types has repeatedly frustrated me and had me thinking "maybe Benjamin could teach us how to talk about these big concepts through concrete examples". So Adorno's endorsement of Weber as a more productive form of thinking with "constellations" than Benjamin's "metaphysical investigations" is really disappointing.

His argument for the human as opposed to divine origin of language was very nice. His portrait of language's childhood in terms of poetry, song, and painting was less compelling: combine a worship of the artistic "genius" of the Greeks, Home in particular, with extremely suspect anthropology/orientalism: eg. Chinese civilization never changes, so its tone inflections reflect the sing-song quality of early language?!

I wish the editor would stop trying to convince me that phrases like "women are the most volkish of the volk" are proto-feminist.

His interpretation of the Black Radical tradition as the "shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality", felt like it came out of the blue. I am not convinced that the evidence of the previous chapters supports such strong claims or that a metaphysical framing is appropriate.