Today I finally got around to reading the letter the Church of England’s House of Bishops sent to the members of the church about the upcoming general election. It is a pretty middle-of-the-road document, the main point of which is…
The following is a translation of one of the many discussions between Horkheimer and Adorno that led to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Critical footnotes are all my own. Square brackets indicate either my clarifications or those of the German editors. 23 October…
On the question of squirting/female ejaculation that has been doing the rounds since some research was published last week saying that it’s just pissing: these scientists are of course the same idiotic positivist lot who spend their lives trying to…
When I think about the history of 20th century philosophy I am glad that the angel picture by Paul Klee that Walter Benjamin owned was not the one called “Engel, noch hässlich” [“Angel, still ugly”]. But it looks a bit…
Today I received a response to my letter from the Editor of 19th-Century Music Journal about their publication of a rather dubious essay which centred on the charge that Adorno was attracted to the Nazis’ utopian project: Dear Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Thanks…
Does anyone else reckon one of the big historical problems of the French Revolution was that it allowed those who repeated its mottos as if they had overcome history to believe also that they had overcome xenophobia and domination? If…
The correspondence below took place in January 2015, after 19th-Century Music published an article that tried to claim Adorno, a victim of Nazi policies, was himself a crypto-Nazi, whose thought continued a lineage from Klages and Heidegger. The response from…
A little aphorism I wrote a while ago, ‘Elbow communism: a late night thought’, has just been translated into Greek by the αμφιφλοξ blog (where it is posted next to some poetry by the excellent Nikos Karouzos.) The translator tells me that…
Strewn across the pavements around the Volksbühne are quotations from Rosa Luxemburg’s books and letters. As rags or ribbons, they look like the rubbish of the city’s day, to be cleared away before the beginning of the work of the…
Sitting in a café near an older French couple on holiday – the sort that Haneke’s Amour would have us believe is the height of humanity – they are kind to each other in the distance they leave, the respect…