Yes it is true, Le Marquis de Sade retourne encore une fois, une douce philosophe en effet. Ah bien, in the book that I have read, Mimesis on the Move: Theodor W. Adorno's Concept of Imitation by Karla L. Schultz, the author includes her adaptation of Adorno's theory of mimesus, and in chapter two of the book, brings about the relationship between mimesis and Le Marquis de Sade's book: Justine.
In Sade's book, the protagonist (a woman) is a "pseudo-subject historically without power. As such she is ideal material for education. Trained in the image of a real [male] subject, whose identity has hardened and little left to learn, she functions as the brilliant reflection of his success. While his mimesis has become limited by his subjectivity, hers is still free to repeat the process of his 'progress' albeit with an important distinction: where he once learned by identifying with the 'power' of nature, she now learns by identifying with the power of his reason" (Mimesis on the Move p.83). With the formation of this character, we begin to see her attachment to Sade directly, she begins to become similar to him in real life, becoming a sadist in every way, she becomes Sades image of the opposite sex in the novel, becoming enveloped in taking pleasure in tormenting others. Such is perverse, but it is also notable that the protagonist in this case mimics her tutor, and goes above his capacities in life, and her surrounding nature.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
McCall, you said that if we blogged on another blog we could get credit for it on our blog. Well, while procrastinating I commented on someone's status on Facebook and because it was very relevant, I think it should count too. Here it is:
Subat K.: at what point did everything in life become a money making scheme?
12 hours ago
Maleeh E. likes this.
Jeremiah D.:
Declaration of "Independance"
11 hours ago
Jamal K.
when we discovered fire
8 hours ago
Maleeh E.:
Amen to that yo.
Usman N.:
when they had to pay the hospital bills before they brought us back after we were born
7 hours ago
Annie Abbate:
That is my entire Contemporary Philosophy class in a nutshell.......Which I'm currently procrastinating on doing homework for.
They (the Frankfurt School) would tell you that it came about with the rise of capitalism and the development of the culture industry. They'll also tell you all about how everything in your life has become a commodity and a lie and make you really depressed.
So will your blog grade.
Jamal K.
Annie, don't worry about it. There's no such thing as the rise of capitalism or a culture industry. There is only fear, greed, and manipulation. Everything else stems from that.
Subat K.: at what point did everything in life become a money making scheme?
12 hours ago
Maleeh E. likes this.
Jeremiah D.:
Declaration of "Independance"
11 hours ago
Jamal K.
when we discovered fire
8 hours ago
Maleeh E.:
Amen to that yo.
Usman N.:
when they had to pay the hospital bills before they brought us back after we were born
7 hours ago
Annie Abbate:
That is my entire Contemporary Philosophy class in a nutshell.......Which I'm currently procrastinating on doing homework for.
They (the Frankfurt School) would tell you that it came about with the rise of capitalism and the development of the culture industry. They'll also tell you all about how everything in your life has become a commodity and a lie and make you really depressed.
So will your blog grade.
Jamal K.
Annie, don't worry about it. There's no such thing as the rise of capitalism or a culture industry. There is only fear, greed, and manipulation. Everything else stems from that.
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
It seems like there was a lot of confusion regarding my chosen book. Some misunderstood a FLAWED secondhand account of my presentation and believed my book to be a Chicken Soup for the Soul Book. Others sat through the entire presentation (no names of course) and for some reason thought that my entire presentation was on sex. Just to clarify that my book was neither a Chicken Soup book or the Kama Sutra, I have edited my slides and added material to give an overview of my book and my presentation.
Theory
• Man has emancipated himself from nature
• Separation causes anxiety
• Must find a new harmony, a new union, uniquely human.
• Alternative Unions
Alternative forms of Union
• Orgiastic union
o Many primitive tribes attempt to maintain their ties to nature through
religion and ritual
o When these ties weaken they are often replaced by orgiastic experiences (drugs and/or orgies)
o Inhibits uniquely human cognitive thought
o When practiced within a group creates unity
• Problems with Orgiastic Unity
o Only acceptable in select societies
o In our society cause shame which then causes further alienation
o Regardless of the society in which orgiastic unity is practiced it is only a transitory form of unity.
• Conformity
o Dominant solution to separation anxiety has been conformity
• Problems with Conformity
o Sameness v.s. Oneness
o Loss of the individual
o It is pseudo-unity
• Creative unity
o Unites man with his work (artist, musician, writer, etc)
• Problem with Creative Unity
o Lacks an intrapersonal aspect which is the goal of unity
Fromm’s Solution…
LOVE
Intro: Love as Art
• Problems with Love
o Commodities
o Delusions about “falling in love” (First love)
• Love as an Art (Love must be practiced as an art)
o Mastery of theory
o Mastery of practice
o Ultimate concern
Immature forms of Love
• Symbiotic Union (Ex: mother and child)
• Passive Union
o Attempts to escape separateness by making oneself a part of another
• Active Union
o Attempts to escape separateness by making another a part of oneself.
“If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word “activity”….One concept of activity, the modern one, refers to the use of energy for the achievement of external aims. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for.” In the most general way the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving,” (Fromm 20).
Aspects of Love
• Care
o Ex: Jonah and the Whale
o God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to “labor” for something and “to make something grow,” that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors, and one labors that for which one loves,” (Fromm 25)
• Responsibility
o Ex: Cain
o Am I my brother’s keeper? The loving person responds. The life of his brother is not his brother’s alone, but his own. He feels responsible for fellow man, as he feels responsible for himself,” (Fromm 25).
• Respect
o “Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect therefore implies a lack of exploitation and is only possible if I have achieved independence,” (Fromm 26).
• Knowledge
o To fuse with another person and transcend all components that cause a separateness.
Brotherly Love
• The most fundamental type of love upon which all other forms of love are built.
• Love for each other as a member of the human race, as part of mankind.
Love Between Parent and Child
• Motherly love (passive): “I love you because you are.”
• Fatherly love (active): “I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me.”
• As a child, the relationship with the mother gradually becomes less and less important.
• Mothers teach children to be secure, fathers teach children to cope with society
Self-Love
• Love “is not an ‘affect’ in the sense of being affected by somebody, but the an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love,” (Fromm 54).
• Cannot be achieved without first achieving self-love.
• Self-love is not narcissism and should not be confused with selfishness.
• “Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself…It is true that the selfish person is incapable of loving others but he is not capable of loving himself either,” (From 55)
• Selfishness is an overcompensation for a lack of self-love.
Erotic Love
• Polarities (pg 31)
• Rejects Freud
• “Erotic love is the craving of complete fusion, complete union with another other person,” (Fromm 49).
• Often confused
Sex without Love
“If the desire for physical union is not stimulated by love, if erotic love is not also brotherly love, it never leads to union in more than an orgiastic, transitory sense. Sexual attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of union, yet without love this “union” leaves strangers as far apart as they were before- sometimes it makes them ashamed of each other because when the illusion is gone they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before,” (Fromm 50).
Erotic Love without Love for Mankind
“The have experience of overcoming aloneness, yet, since they are separated from the rest of mankind, they remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves; their experience of union is an illusion. Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves the other person in all of mankind, all that is alive,” (Fromm 50)
Erotic Love as an Action (Non-Sexual)
“To love somebody is not just a strong feeling-it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision,” (Fromm 57).
The Practice of Love
Requirements
1.Discipline
2.Concentration
3.Patience
4.Supreme concern
5.Practice
Conclusion
• Overall: Fromm believes that most human anxiety or conflict is the consequence of man’s separation from nature. In order for man to rectify this situation he must create a new union formed by love.
•
• “To analyze love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social institutions which are responsible for its absence.”
• “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, (and) any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish in its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human existence,” (Fromm 120).
Theory
• Man has emancipated himself from nature
• Separation causes anxiety
• Must find a new harmony, a new union, uniquely human.
• Alternative Unions
Alternative forms of Union
• Orgiastic union
o Many primitive tribes attempt to maintain their ties to nature through
religion and ritual
o When these ties weaken they are often replaced by orgiastic experiences (drugs and/or orgies)
o Inhibits uniquely human cognitive thought
o When practiced within a group creates unity
• Problems with Orgiastic Unity
o Only acceptable in select societies
o In our society cause shame which then causes further alienation
o Regardless of the society in which orgiastic unity is practiced it is only a transitory form of unity.
• Conformity
o Dominant solution to separation anxiety has been conformity
• Problems with Conformity
o Sameness v.s. Oneness
o Loss of the individual
o It is pseudo-unity
• Creative unity
o Unites man with his work (artist, musician, writer, etc)
• Problem with Creative Unity
o Lacks an intrapersonal aspect which is the goal of unity
Fromm’s Solution…
LOVE
Intro: Love as Art
• Problems with Love
o Commodities
o Delusions about “falling in love” (First love)
• Love as an Art (Love must be practiced as an art)
o Mastery of theory
o Mastery of practice
o Ultimate concern
Immature forms of Love
• Symbiotic Union (Ex: mother and child)
• Passive Union
o Attempts to escape separateness by making oneself a part of another
• Active Union
o Attempts to escape separateness by making another a part of oneself.
“If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word “activity”….One concept of activity, the modern one, refers to the use of energy for the achievement of external aims. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for.” In the most general way the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving,” (Fromm 20).
Aspects of Love
• Care
o Ex: Jonah and the Whale
o God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to “labor” for something and “to make something grow,” that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors, and one labors that for which one loves,” (Fromm 25)
• Responsibility
o Ex: Cain
o Am I my brother’s keeper? The loving person responds. The life of his brother is not his brother’s alone, but his own. He feels responsible for fellow man, as he feels responsible for himself,” (Fromm 25).
• Respect
o “Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect therefore implies a lack of exploitation and is only possible if I have achieved independence,” (Fromm 26).
• Knowledge
o To fuse with another person and transcend all components that cause a separateness.
Brotherly Love
• The most fundamental type of love upon which all other forms of love are built.
• Love for each other as a member of the human race, as part of mankind.
Love Between Parent and Child
• Motherly love (passive): “I love you because you are.”
• Fatherly love (active): “I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me.”
• As a child, the relationship with the mother gradually becomes less and less important.
• Mothers teach children to be secure, fathers teach children to cope with society
Self-Love
• Love “is not an ‘affect’ in the sense of being affected by somebody, but the an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love,” (Fromm 54).
• Cannot be achieved without first achieving self-love.
• Self-love is not narcissism and should not be confused with selfishness.
• “Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself…It is true that the selfish person is incapable of loving others but he is not capable of loving himself either,” (From 55)
• Selfishness is an overcompensation for a lack of self-love.
Erotic Love
• Polarities (pg 31)
• Rejects Freud
• “Erotic love is the craving of complete fusion, complete union with another other person,” (Fromm 49).
• Often confused
Sex without Love
“If the desire for physical union is not stimulated by love, if erotic love is not also brotherly love, it never leads to union in more than an orgiastic, transitory sense. Sexual attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of union, yet without love this “union” leaves strangers as far apart as they were before- sometimes it makes them ashamed of each other because when the illusion is gone they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before,” (Fromm 50).
Erotic Love without Love for Mankind
“The have experience of overcoming aloneness, yet, since they are separated from the rest of mankind, they remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves; their experience of union is an illusion. Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves the other person in all of mankind, all that is alive,” (Fromm 50)
Erotic Love as an Action (Non-Sexual)
“To love somebody is not just a strong feeling-it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision,” (Fromm 57).
The Practice of Love
Requirements
1.Discipline
2.Concentration
3.Patience
4.Supreme concern
5.Practice
Conclusion
• Overall: Fromm believes that most human anxiety or conflict is the consequence of man’s separation from nature. In order for man to rectify this situation he must create a new union formed by love.
•
• “To analyze love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social institutions which are responsible for its absence.”
• “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, (and) any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish in its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human existence,” (Fromm 120).
Music
Spesh, I thought you might be interested in this post.
In Adorno's "On the Fetish Character of Music," Adorno discusses how music is no longer produced for the sake of listening but is driven by capitalism. He talks about how there is now a market for everyone and that because of this you can never escape it.
Until this class I didn't understand what many of my self-proclaimed "anticonformist" friends who are musicians really talked about when they talked about "selling out" when you made it big. I think Adorno would say that the "man" they would be selling out to would be the culture industry. The culture industry (as discussed in The D of E) would then warp the music and make it conform to a certain sound or image until it sounded exactly like everything else....or repeatedly expose or overplay a song until whatever made it unique has deteriorated and it is part of the status quo.
I guess my question is, is the only alternative now to escape this to just create your own music and not sell it? I, personally, don't think he would agree with this because even the music you would create would undoubtedly be heavily influenced by the popular music you are surrounded by.
Also what exactly makes popular music now much different from popular songs repeatedly sung before the development of the culture industry? I think, to an extent, they were likely repeated and equally as popular as music today but there are now more people to consume it. The only difference I see now is that music can be sold as a commodity because of the technology. But really how different is this than people paid to sing a song before recording technology? Didn't that make music a commodity then too?
In Adorno's "On the Fetish Character of Music," Adorno discusses how music is no longer produced for the sake of listening but is driven by capitalism. He talks about how there is now a market for everyone and that because of this you can never escape it.
Until this class I didn't understand what many of my self-proclaimed "anticonformist" friends who are musicians really talked about when they talked about "selling out" when you made it big. I think Adorno would say that the "man" they would be selling out to would be the culture industry. The culture industry (as discussed in The D of E) would then warp the music and make it conform to a certain sound or image until it sounded exactly like everything else....or repeatedly expose or overplay a song until whatever made it unique has deteriorated and it is part of the status quo.
I guess my question is, is the only alternative now to escape this to just create your own music and not sell it? I, personally, don't think he would agree with this because even the music you would create would undoubtedly be heavily influenced by the popular music you are surrounded by.
Also what exactly makes popular music now much different from popular songs repeatedly sung before the development of the culture industry? I think, to an extent, they were likely repeated and equally as popular as music today but there are now more people to consume it. The only difference I see now is that music can be sold as a commodity because of the technology. But really how different is this than people paid to sing a song before recording technology? Didn't that make music a commodity then too?
Benjamin
I was beginning to reread through some Benjamin stuff, especially his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which Benjamin discusses the loss of the aura. Benjamin describes photographs as lacking an aura unless it is of scenery or of a person.
What about a photograph of a photograph of a person? In this case the photograph is of an object (the photograph) not a person. But the photograph being photographed is of a person.
What do you think, Mike or Pat?
What about a photograph of a photograph of a person? In this case the photograph is of an object (the photograph) not a person. But the photograph being photographed is of a person.
What do you think, Mike or Pat?
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
So I found one article of sorts that mentions that Adorno's wife wrote the book based on conversations between Horkheimer and Adorno. I'll look for more. Here's the limited bit I was able to get.
Max Horkheimer: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (1944) |
In Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno brought together a collection of more or less fragmentary reflections on the cultural and political crises that had culminated in the rise of authoritarianism, and the systematic persecution of Jews and other minority groups. The book was completed in 1944 (being distributed first as a mimeograph, and formally published in 1947), while the authors were in exile in the United States, with the first draft having reputedly been taken down by Adorno’s wife, Gretel, from conversations between Adorno and Horkheimer. The style of the book perhaps reflects its origins. Following the shifting and unpredictable logic of a conversation, rather than the deductive logic of a philosophi
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Published 14 August 2006
Citation: Edgar, Andrew. "Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment]". The Literary Encyclopedia. 14 August 2006.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16366, accessed 3 December 2009.]
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