Getting my wife to type out my sexual fantasies in a letter to my mom

I do not believe that things will turn out well; but the idea that they might — that is of vital importance.

Theodor Adorno

I do not believe that things will turn out well; but the idea that they might — that is of vital importance.

Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

What flavour of communist and/or gay are you? /Gen

I'm not really sure what this means.

Not to spout clichés or take myself too seriously, but to some extent I think labels confine us within rigid structures which ultimately only serve our enemies. I know it's just a shortcut, but even the fact that you say 'flavour' kinda reiterates the idea that lots of the associated terminology positions us as existing for consumption.

Of course I know language matters. Indeed, I think a disproportionately large amount of leftist in-fighting is down to word choice and communication. More often than not, when anarchists refer to the state and Leninists refer to capital or bourgeois democracy, we're all talking about the same systems of harm and oppression. I also believe that what's most important is what we do, not how we identify.

I actively avoid the 'discourse' surrounding queer terminology. For years in my youth I railed against the word 'bisexual' because I didn't like that it implied I have two distinct sexualities, and for awhile I even called myself 'ambisexual' in an attempt to prompt a deconstruction thereof. But then I decided that I like the colours of the bi flag, which is really all that matters, because it's just aesthetics.

So I guess let me put it this way: I'm a trade union organiser who specifically represents queer union members. I grew up reading Marx, and some of the greatest influences through my adolescence on how I approach the world were Gramsci and Mao, and later Fanon and Butler. I spent a lot of my twenties questioning whether I count as trans, as I have always been very comfortable with both my masculinity and my femininity, but at some point I realised very clearly that the gender I was assigned at birth is not reflected in either.

I very strongly believe in the value of Lenin and Leninism to global struggle; but likewise I have taken a lot from Malatesta, Luxemburg, Adorno, and so on. I also think, while they are to be scrutinised rigorously, there is much to be gained from the likes of Trotsky, Foucault, or ‎Žižek. I am a staunch anti-Zionist, but Memmi nevertheless teaches us a great deal about the plight of the colonised.

I am probably closer to an orthodox Marxist than I am to a Leninist or anarchist, but ultimately I think all this orthodoxy reeks of bourgeois affectation. The questions we should be asking are: who is most impacted by the realities of a given situation, and what are they saying, what do they need? Once upon a time in the west, and certainly still in most cases, this is BIPOC and sexual others, so we read Davis and Feinberg and Öcalan and Ahmed and Tuck and Yang. It is the strength of the revolutionary to adapt to the material conditions at hand, and remain undaunted.

In the end, we have more in common with one another than we have with ruling classes, right? So let us gather together! If this is the final struggle, let each stand in our place.

I do not believe that things will turn out well; but the idea that they might — that is of vital importance.

Theodor Adorno

Solo serás amado el día que puedas mostrarte débil, sin que el otro lo aproveche para mostrar su fuerza.

Theodor Adorno.

So, that excerpt from Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia was quite interesting and so I decided I should put Adorno on my list, and I googled best Adorno translation which led me to this reddit thread which contains the following comment from user QuesyCampaign:

If you end up with the Ashton translation of [Negative Dialectics] (the only English translation to have been printed), there are some common terms that are completely mistranslated that you can just mentally adjust for (Jameson mentions a few of these in his Late Marxism): Vermittlung and related words often translated as "transmission", "transmitted", etc. - should be mediation/mediated. As in the disastrous "Transmission is transmitted by what it transmits". Anschauung translated as "vision" instead of the accepted English rendering "intuition" in philosophical contexts. Direct/indirect - if you ever see these, replace with "immediate/mediate". None of this will help with the significant failure to do justice to Adorno's German, nor with those sentences that just don't make sense, but they should help. If you ever work on or need to cite a passage, make sure you consult the German and the other translations first!

Guys, is it possible that a lot of continental philosophy's reputation as obtuse and incomprehensible is just because the people translating it are really bad at their jobs?

Bu dünyanın insanı irkilten yanı korkunçluğu değil, olağan görünüşüdür.

The MAGA base doesn't support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn't seem to believe he has flaws.

– Data journalist Nate Cohn at the New York Times.

The GOP is a cult of personality. It's dangerous for democracy when a large group of people believe that their faction leader is infallible and is above the law.

Trump is basically a corrupt buffoon in our eyes. But that doesn't mean we can lightly dismiss him. Too many people made that mistake in 2016.

Philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote this about mass support for Hitler in Germany:

More recently, historian Timothy Snyder wrote:

Fascism is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence, and it will be sustained by propaganda right to the end.

Being dismissive of clownish far right demagogues and trying to counter them in a strictly intellectual way shows a lack of understanding of the dynamics of fascism.

Defeating fascism has more to do with political organization than with political philosophy. In a democracy, getting pro-democracy voters mobilized and unified is the key. Vote slackers need to get off their butts and pro-democracy forces must remain on guard against hair-splitting internal ideological squabbles.

Trump may be a moron, but he still has a spell over a large segment of the US population who regard him as a god-emperor. The only way to break that spell is to repeatedly defeat him and his clones and not let up for any reason.

yiyorum, içiyorum, uyuyorum, gezmeye çıkıyorum. ama birden keyfim kaçıyor, bir boşluk duyuyorum.

gonçarov - oblomov

“the forgetting of Bach constituted a disaster in the history of music from which we have not recovered to this day”

(Theodor Adorno, in a 1957 lecture at Darmstadt.)

«Al mundo tal como existe», escribió Theodor Adorno, «nunca se le puede tener bastante miedo».

El dios salvaje, Al Álvarez.

String Quartet (1921), by Theodor Adorno

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