Date: Tue, 09 Jun 1998 10:26:49 -0400 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [PEN-L:481] Re: Joel Kovel on the Frankfurt School Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >All this needs a context, evidence, or a fuller explanation. I doubt >very much that Adorno (or Marcuse) were ever defenders of US >imperialism. Adorno a supporter of the Vietnam war?! ricardo > >From Andrew Rubin's review of Adorno's "CRITICAL MODELS: Interventions and Catchwords" in a recent Nation magazine: Adorno accused the [antiwar] students of self-interest and narcissism. He criticized their blind faith in collective struggle. "The question 'what is to be done?' as an automatic reflex to every critical thought before it is fully expressed...recalls the gesture of someone demanding your papers," he wrote in "Marginalia to Theory and Practice." He questioned the limits of their political solidarity with the Vietcong and argued that their bourgeois self-interest would in the end prevail. He wrote: R: Yes, this sounds more like Adorno, the critical theorist. "It would be difficult to believe that Vietnam is robbing anyone of sleep, especially since every opponent of colonial wars must know that the Vietcong...use Chinese methods of torture. Whoever imagines that as a product of this society he is free of the bourgeois coldness harbors illusions about himself as much as about the world; without such coldness one could not live." R: Again. ricardo (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
