James Crane

the picture of an aluxe posted by AMLO a couple of years ago

Todo es místico

alright here it is: the deeply strange lecture “The Lessons of Fascism” & the letters on, among other things, Sartre’s “No Exit”!

open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

???

Dark Marcuse

an image is worth an thousand words

if you find a rare enough smell in the woods your dinner won’t taste right. wonders wonders all around us

One of the best things about Horkheimer is that he was a Weird Little Guy

@wokesteppenomad.bsky.social you’ll like this: at one point he just block quotes Aristotle’s “Politics” then later adds a footnote directing the reader to the “Egoism” essay for clarification

it’s so cool that Horkheimer ended the UNESCO talk that was apparently too confusing to the audience for them to even object to it by asking UNESCO to fund a massive bespoke Freudian socio-psych study of all major German universities lmfao. shoot for the stars

alright here it is: the deeply strange lecture “The Lessons of Fascism” & the letters on, among other things, Sartre’s “No Exit”!

open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

Jeremy Kessler's 'The Problem of Authoritarianism in Marxist Legal Thought' presents a series of vignettes which capture five moments of Marxist encounters with authoritarianism:

1. Marx & Engels
2. Lenin & Luxemburg
3. Pashukanis & Stuchka
4. Neumann & Bloch
5. Poulantzas & the Neue Marx-Lektüre

These theses are dope. I’ve pulled out a few that resonated with the liberation psychology (Freire) and the decolonial analysis (Fanon) that I was reading about yesterday.

in Feb 1947, Marcuse writes 33 Theses on the libertarian communist anti-program for postwar critical theory, which Horkheimer will use as a foundation for his own marginal reflections on class, revolution, & freedom for 2+ years. Translated for the 1st time here (🔗⬇️)

Herbert Marcuse: Theses on Postwar Critical Theory (1947) + Adorno & Horkheimer's Fragments on Freedom of Spirit (ca. 1949/50)

Link: open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

in Feb 1947, Marcuse writes 33 Theses on the libertarian communist anti-program for postwar critical theory, which Horkheimer will use as a foundation for his own marginal reflections on class, revolution, & freedom for 2+ years. Translated for the 1st time here (🔗⬇️)

also: goes to see Sartre’s “Dirty Hands” play & is super impressed with it. (Writes about it in several letters to multiple people actually.)

Horkheimer delivers strangest lecture at the UN peace conference (on postwar sociology-psychoanalysis), name-drops Bukharin in Q&A, is never invited back

(wrote some notes here on Horkheimer’s Bukharin-Schopenhauer position in 1919

open.substack.com/pub/jamescra... )

lmfao at the 1948 UNESCO summit Horkheimer attends, the other attendees from both “East” & “West” camps decided they could at least agree on one thing: Horkheimer apparently brought up Bukharin to defend his position at one point & they all threw their hands up

Gaztambide provides a great little summary of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy for critical consciousness in his “A People’s History of Psychoanalysis.”

almost all interpreters of first generation critical theory who argue it was never *really* communist (even if they defend its Marxist credentials) are to date repeating various revisionist narratives Horkheimer invented in the last 15 years of his life

at a certain point the people who want to stress a continuity between the “early” (until he was ~60 [!!] lol) & “late” Horkheimer have to willfully ignore all of things he says & writes about how he’s changed his mind & has to suppress/“reframe” his earlier work

Horkheimer timeline:
pre-1918 — beautiful soul, anarchist-ish
‘18-52 — uncompromising revolutionary communist, scientific (‘25-38) & utopian (‘39-51) socialist
‘52-59 — defeated, extreme confusion & vacillation
‘59-73 — anti-communist enemy of humanity & arch-revisionist of CT

Welcome to the Anderscene | The Brooklyn Rail Günther Anders (Stern)—first husband of Hannah Arendt; second cousin of Walter Benjamin; student of Husserl and Heidegger; roommate of Marcuse; friend of Brecht; rival of Adorno; attendant of Kojève’s...

and if you don’t know about Günther Anders, the great critic of the nuclear bomb, read on brooklynrail.org/2024/07/fiel...

This is going to be a great time! And we may have one or two surprises during the show 😏