Nothing is sillier, dryer, more emasculated, more castrated than current American academic writing on the Frankfurt school by people who have never heard a mob in a street, who have never smelled a prison, who have never known what a concentration camp is, who dont know one single thing about the fact that these men lived their abstractions in bone and blood and gut and tripe, that they lived their century as our slick mandarins dont. These American discussions about the nuances of meaning in the sociology of the middle Adorno are hair-raising. They would have filled Adorno with sarcasm and wonder and a sense of defeat. To be in Lukácss room was to be in a storm center of our century. He was under house arrest when I was with him in Budapest. I was very young and unbelievably sentimental, and when I had to leave I had tears in my eyes: he was under house arrest and I was going back to the safety and comfort of Princeton or whatever. I must have made some remark, and the contempt in his face was overwhelming. He said, “Youve understood nothing of everything weve talked about. In that chair, twenty minutes from now, will be [Janos] Kadar,” the dictator who had put him under house arrest. “Hes my student. Were working through Hegels Phenomenology sentence by sentence. You dont understand.” And indeed I didnt, I hadnt understood. That story alone reeducated me about the bizarre byzantine world of Marxist intellectuality and cruelty and seriousness in which all this stuff operated George Steiner
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 05:26:24 +0000
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