James Crane

best shot at “Der Untergang der Theorie,” a 1p Sütterlin script note that’s stumped me for 1 year+ lol—if right, wld b a good set up for the rest, mostly notes abt how 20th c ppl imagine they’re too enlightened for a caricature of religion but also refuse self-enlightening enlightenment of socialism

Attempted reconstructs of weird, (mostly) unpublished sketches from Horkheimer’s early 1940s notebooks for/around the earliest drafts for work w Adorno on Dialectic of Enlightenment. (Limited by my inability to read handwritten Sütterlin script lol) 🔗 ⬇️

everyone says oh why do you have so much candy then they come over for movie night & go bananas

Horkheimer: Miscellanea for the Philosophical Fragments (ca. 1940-44). Attempted reconstructions of (mostly) unpublished sketches from the early 1940s notebooks.

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

Attempted reconstructs of weird, (mostly) unpublished sketches from Horkheimer’s early 1940s notebooks for/around the earliest drafts for work w Adorno on Dialectic of Enlightenment. (Limited by my inability to read handwritten Sütterlin script lol) 🔗 ⬇️

she is very concerned about the worms

Volume 53 Issue 1 (157) | New German Critique | Duke University Press

German Memory Politics at a Crossroads

Very happy to be part of this new special issue

I wrote my article
“Staatsräson as State Racism: Notes on the Authoritarian Turn in Contemporary Germany”

last spring … and the authoritarian turn hasn’t slowed down

read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-c...

Armed & ready to do battle: Don Quixote, riding off in search of a worthy foe, followed at more leisurely pace by Sancho Panza. Wonderfully captured in 1866 by Honoré Daumier, born OTD in 1808.

Book cover with text: "Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is to be done under real subsumption?", edited by Anthony Iles and Mattin.

Years ago I wrote some stuff for this book, coming out of a debate we participated in as Endnotes. I had thought the project gone, but it has risen from the dead. Odd to have something you wrote come out so long after the event. Glad they got there though!
minorcompositions.info?p=1690

Dialectics is also about the breakdown of our methods for what to do about breakdowns! Which is again why it has to be more of a skill—the good conscience of the bad conscience of past methods that turns knowledge of their flaws into the means & motive to keep thinking.

I’m sympathetic & I get your worries, but I still have to disagree! It’s not esoteric, just very hard! It takes a lot of practice, & anyone can master it (often people do it without realizing it) but if it’s a science it’s more like Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva or Zhuangzi’s Cook Ding

this quote is about science! but i’m saying dialectics is an art/craft in the sense we’d also say some people are “skilled” scientists—so the asymmetry holds here too! dialectics in particular can’t be method because it’s about a knack for situations where method breaks down

because “art” is a craft or skill, cultivated in practice, whereas method is a specification of practice in procedure. So there is no dichotomy, but there is an asymmetry—art always involves method/s, but method doesn’t imply art.

Only definition of dialectics I’d defend is: it’s an art & not a method or technique, but the good conscience of the bad conscience of many methods & techniques of thinking since Socrates & Confucius, & that you can’t pick it up without getting pulled into the history—which is the whole point

she’s recently also discovered that she can find slugs & stuff to eat by picking apart rotting logs with her teeth lol

we would be great at mapping woods stuff, Cat & I have recently become very interested in mosses

!!! what is iNaturalist lol

every now & then Cat will take us on a detour to revisit some of her favorite local stinks. A very stop & smell the rose kind of attitude but for like hot sewer fumes oozing out of manholes

i have not this goes hard as hell

The cover for the Japanese translation of adorno and horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is impossibly raw

got my ass for sure

if anyone can read this hit my line lol

trying to decipher Adorno’s chicken scratch ass handwritten notes whenever i think i see “Marx” or “Marxismus” in one of em

scolding people “now now some of us are just slow learners, give him a chance” about Julius Streicher

Chr*s R*fo, welcome to the resistance …

how come no one says “up yours” anymore, it’s such a great thing to say

where my slime lickers at

admittedly in a dog poop bag

neighbor said oh do you want me to throw that poop bag away from you i’m going to the trash taking my dogs poop bag. i said no thanks it’s not poop it’s asparagus