Critique & Humanism | 34 | 2010 | The Critical Theory and the Short 20th Century

Issue Editor: Darin Tenev
Issue: 4, 2010, p.289, ISSN:0861-1718

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Agonistic politics between ethics and politics

Chantal Mouffe

University of Westminster, London

chantalmouffe@compuserve.com

 

In this paper I examine the differences existing between the diverse theorists who advocate an agonistic approach. After a brief presentation of the main tenets of my own view – which puts the emphasis on the ineradicability of antagonism – I distinguish it from those who envisage an ‘agonism without antagonism’ like Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig and William Connolly. I argue that those theories do not offer an adequate conception of the political and that they should better be classifi ed as ‘ethical.’

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Getting people wild: Opium for the masses or democracy with no compromise

Boyan Manchev

New Bulgarian University, Sofia

b_manchev@yahoo.com

 

The article starts with a critical introduction of the historical debate on the political and civic potential of Bulgarian people, and especially of the elitist vision of Bulgarian people as constitutively opposed to modern political forms and state institutions (vision, dating back to elitist discourses from the 18th century). I argue that in the present situation declaring the political insuffi ciency of the people as responsible for the catastrophic situation of the country could easily lead to dangerous political prescriptions. In contrast, I am trying to show that the supposed ‘wilderness’ of people is, on one hand, a rhetorical political figure and on the other, a complex devise for collective subordination and control. The neoliberal strategies of ‘getting people wild’ (which precisely are responsible for the new consumerist ‘wildness’ of Bulgarian people – an ‘adequate’ response to postcommunist wild capitalism) represent an extreme mechanism for the depolitisation of the ‘people’ as the collective political subject and for its reduction to a ‘raw mass’, or to a conglomerate of atomistic egoistic and apolitical particularities: they are a privileged form of contemporary biopolitics. The fi nal question of the article is: Is there a possibility for collective political subjectivation and for new emancipatory projects in this new situation, in which the new forms of production, exchange and control are commodifying labour force and forms of life themselves and in that way discrediting the possibility of the common good?

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Derrida and Adorno: The resistance of the restance

Darin Tenev

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

dari5da@hotmail.com

 

The paper traces some of the common traits of Adorno’s and Derrida’s philosophical projects, outlining the critique, shared by both of them, of Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel, and then disclosing the conceptual affinities in relation to the non-identical. Beginning with a short discussion of Derrida’s comments on Adorno and his almost total dismissal of theNegative Dialectics, the author goes on to show in what way some of Adorno’s most important notions (such as the exchange principle, the external, the non-conceptual, etc.) have an exact counterpart on Derrida’s side, and vice versa. An emphasis is placed on the more or less explicit redefinition of the material as a radical heterogeneity, which resists appropriation. Attention is drawn towards some of the similarities between Adorno’s negativity and Derrida’s differance.

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Negativity (dis-)embodied: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno on mimesis

Artemy Magun

European University, Saint-Petersburg

amagun@eu.spb.ru

 

The article is dedicated to the affinities between the works of two twentieth-century philosophers, one belonging to the Frankfurt school, and the other to the so-called tradition of ‘deconstruction.’ For both authors, the central philosophical concept was mimesis, and both understood it as the non-identity responsible among other things also for the historical phenomenon of idenitarian rationality. Differences in the interpretation of mimesis by both authors have to do with its realization in art: to Adorno, this realization implied objectivation, embodiment; to Lacoue-Labarthe, mimesis was in principle impossible to objectify and its authentic existence was one of ambivalence and hesitation.

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Max Weber and the critique of critical theory

Johannes Weiss

Universität Kassel, Kassel

jweiss@uni-kassel.de

 

Max Horkheimer thought Max Weber to be he foremost protagonist of ‘traditional,’ i.e. non-critical by defi nition, theory. So, Weber’s sociological program used to be regarded as being fundamentally opposed to – and irreconcilable with – what Critical Theory (Frankfurt style) was all about. A closer look shows that things are by no means that simple. Leading theorists of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer himself and Adorno, Marcuse and, above all, Habermas) were, contrary to many Marxist dogmatists, well aware that Weber had to be taken very seriously – not only politically but also scientifi cally – and that there was a lot to learn from him with regard to the dynamics and pathologies of modern societies. This holds particularly – and the longer the more – true for Adorno who in his last university lecture (Introduction to Sociology, Summer 1968) gave much room to Max Weber as being the greatest sociologist of his time. More than that: Weber’s methodology may aptly be considered to be a kind of purgatory in Critical Theory’s long, incessant process of selfcriticism. This process, and Critical Theory altogether, comes to an end in the later work of Jürgen Habermas. Here, Weber has become quite obviously one of the most important socio-philosophical authorities with regard to an adequate, and suffi ciently critical, understanding of our time.

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Critique of autonomy

Stilian Yotov

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

yotov@hotmail.com

 

This paper focuses on the genealogy of the concept autonomy, tracing its different conceptualizations from Rousseau, through Kant and Hegel, to the Frankfurt School. The emphasis is placed, on one hand, on the way autonomy and heteronomy are intertwined, and, on the other, on the role the concept second nature plays in the construction of autonomy. The analysis of the methods for differentiating the first nature and the secondnature demonstrates the existence of naturalism produced by ourselves, but also reveals the paradoxes this naturalism leads to in our present days.

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The imaginary as an element of the socio-political analysis

Dimitar Bozhkov

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

dimitar_b_b@yahoo.com

 

This paper is about Marx’s use of some symptomatic vocabulary like ghosts, nightmares, illusions, fetishism, etc. This use may be interpreted in regard to certain interesting phenomena related to the imaginary that some social relations produce. I am interested also in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Marx, who researches a new culture of image and its ideology.

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Man as comedy

Miglena Nikolchina

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

nikolchina@gmail.com

 

Drawing on Mamardashvili, the text moves from the idea of femininity as the ‘irony of the Community’ to the idea of ‘man as comedy’ as a possible new framework for understanding human plasticity. Perhaps ‘man’ is fi nished but then again perhaps humanity has become unfi nished in an altogether different manner. The tragic mode of producing man through a ceaseless effort at differentiation from the sacrifi cial animal seems to have switched over to a comic principle (and here I rely on Mladen Dolar’s and Alenka Zupančič’s writing on comedy and the uncanny) of wrestling with the machine as the paradigm for unfreedom that better fi ts us today.

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Philosophy of art: The art of philosophy (Glosses to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory)

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

vladimirgradev@yahoo.it

 

If a work of art could be explained and understood in a discursive way, then its meaning would be outside it, in the discourse that defi nes it, and thus the work would have to deny itself, its own true contents. Tracing some of the most crucial paradoxes of art, as outlined by T. W. Adorno in hisAesthetic Theory – such as its being simultaneously a thing and more than a thing, or its enigmaticalness – this paper attempts to elucidate the way art requires philosophy and vice versa. The analyses of the notions of ‘second refl ection,’ ‘preponderance of the object,’ and the Absolute demonstrate how philosophy helps us conceive art, and how art helps us grasp, in the self-transcendence of appearance, what defi es the rational measure of reason.

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Art and reconciliation: The dispute of Adorno with Hegel

Ognyan Kassabov

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

ognian_kassabov@abv.bg

 

The paper investigates Adorno’s ambivalent attitude towards Hegel: on the one hand, Hegel is the philosopher of Modern Dialectics, of the critical force of the negative; on the other, he is also the philosopher of the totalizing system, of the identical par excellence. The emphasis is placed on the extent to which the problematic of separation, reflection, and reconciliation, developed by Hegel, is inherited by Adorno. Hence Adorno’s dispute with Hegel can be seen as a dispute on the question whether reconciliation is possible in modernity. This dispute and its results shape the particularities in Adorno’s and Hegel’s conceptions of the signifi cance of Art.

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What is Von Trier to Adorno or Adorno to him

Dimitar Kambourov

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

jimmy@slav.uni-sofia.bg

 

In a recent Von Trier’s film, a toddler falls out of a window while his parents are busy having sex; She is deeply depressed, He, a psychotherapist, subjects her to treatment in a solitary house amidst Nature, where things get worse as she castrates him both symbolically
and literally before she clips her clitoris, while remembering observing impassively their child’s death. Everything ends up with his strangling her, and the spectator feels relieved and requited. The fi lm is designed as a lucid allegory of female evil in the genre of dreamlike horror.

The text attempts to defend the movie by claiming it does use the culture industry weapons only to urge the beholder to go beyond the unequivocal nausea of the fi rst reading. It does so by provoking dissatisfaction and implying a more complex mystery – criminal, psychological, philosophical, cinematic. From this perspective, the film proves to be a cunning masterpiece that sends a different, more nuanced message if the viewer takes into consideration who sees what within the movie. The most important meaning at the end of the day appears to be the act – or rather the process – through which the beholder develops a critical refl exive attitude with regard to his or her own bias: his or her perspective is identifi ed as overlapping with the viewpoint of the male character, taken as both general and genuine. Thus the viewer acquires an understanding that deconstructs, or rather defamiliarises, the entire cognitive and ethical machine producing the initial effect of repulsion and revengeful relief. The latter is exposed as a forged provocation of culture industry automatisms. The film suggests that the only way to fi ght the culture industry is by conquering it through the backdoor.

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Adorno and popular music reception

Kalina Zahova

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

kalinaz@abv.bg

 

In his 1961 lecture Types of Musical Conduct Adorno suggests a typology of music reception which revises his previous attempts in this direction. In this paper, I am particularly interested in how Adorno’s criteria for ‘expert reception’ can be applied to an expert die-hard rock fan, whose three main privileges – knowledge, collection and experience – provide him/her with the highest level of fan capital among all fans.

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Industrialization of freedom

Todor Hristov

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

todor_hristov@gbg.bg

 

The paper proposes a reinterpretation of the concept of culture industry developed by Theodor W. Adorno able to confront the popular criticism that culture industry refers to phenomena such as the mid-twentieth-century radio, jazz or Hollywood cinema, which have already sunk deep into the past thus making Adorno’s concept irrelevant to a state-ofart analysis of media culture. The proposed reinterpretation of culture industry builds on Adorno’s analyses of free time and claims that the core of culture industry is freedom, the capability to sell freedom.

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On the faith of critical theory at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Interview with Deyan Deyanov by Dimitar Vatsov

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Hegels objective logics, Marx and the theory of intermediaries

Andrey Raichev

BBSS Gallup International, Sofia

a.raychev@gallup-bbss.com

 

The paper supports the following thesis: according to Hegel, the triple act of the God’s self-creation that unfolds through ‘is,’ ‘was’ and ‘will be’ (that is, through a development) does not proceed from past to present to future but – in a strange way – from now through
past to future. Precisely this triplicity of the act of self-creation, proceeding from ‘is,’ ‘was’ and ‘will be,’ is conceived by Hegel in the logics of being, of essence and of concept; that triplicity indeed is borrowed by Marx in The Capital when he traces the transformation of commodity into money and of money into capital; and that triplicity indeed can be rediscovered in the so-called theory of intermediaries: thus, the quantitatively expansive intermediaries are conceived as intermediaries of the present, those that hold the quality – as intermediaries of the past, and those that restore the measure – as intermediaries of the future. In conclusion, the paper sketches a scandalous thesis that, according to the author, follows from all stated above: the logical, the ethical and the aesthetical are three different forms of regulation of the transitions between the three temporalities. Or, aphoristically said, the good is a defi cit of power, the truth – a defi cit of information, and the beautiful – a fear of the future.

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Why ideology along with commodity fetishism?

Rastko Močnik

University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana

josip.mocnik@guest.arnes.si

 

This is the conclusion of a three-lecture cycle that has begun by asking why commodity fetishism is not enough for the capitalist system to reproduce without extra-economic ideological support and answering that economy’s structure already contains symbolic or
ideological components. Contrariwise, this lecture asks how ideology can reach economical processes, describing two main versions of existing theories of ideology, whence the requirement for a theory combining their strengths. According to part two, since the last third of the 20th century, the structure of labor and social relations radically differs from the so-called industrial capitalism, which causes changing ideological constellations. Part three shows how two general ideological constellations work in practice: national (obsolete) and identitary (contemporary) constitutions. The general goal is to demonstrate that what contemporary cultural racism represents as anachronisms or archaisms are in fact recent responses to the new situation, far from being the monopoly of the world system’s periphery.

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