Update and Plan
Now, my excellent friend, said Herr C., you are in possession of everything that is necessary to comprehend what I am saying. We can see the degree to which contemplation becomes darker and weaker in the organic world, so that the grace that is there emerges all the more shining and triumphant. Just as the intersection of two lines from the same side of a point after passing through the infinite suddenly finds itself again on the other side—or as the image from a concave mirror, after having gone off into the infinite, suddenly appears before us again—so grace returns after knowledge has gone through the world of the infinite, in that it appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all—or has infinite consciousness—that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God.
Therefore, I replied, somewhat at loose ends, we would have to eat again of the tree of knowledge to fall back again into a state of innocence?
Most certainly, he replied: That is the last chapter of the history of the world.
— Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre1
Update and Recommended Resources
Subscribers new and old—hello! Thanks to those of you who visited because I plugged this substack on a podcast appearance on “What’s Left of Philosophy?”, an episode you can listen to here if you’re interested in Rose’s speculative re-reading of Hegel in Hegel Contra Sociology (1981) and the criticism of 20th century orthodoxy in sociology her re-reading enables. I can’t recommend WLOP enough (@leftofphil on Twitter), which has kept me in philosophical fighting form for years now and is truly a labor of love for Gil, Lillian, Will, and Owen, who each model the kind of generosity and rigor I aspire to! In their ‘What is Dialectics?’ series they’ve been doing God’s (Geist’s?) work of clarifying dialectical thought and returning it to its real context and stakes, and as of this month they have five excellent installments: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno + Horkheimer), Negative Dialectics (Adorno). If you’re reading this, I assume you’ll find these as interesting and helpful as I have! Regardless, check out their page if you have time, their catalogue is stacked with great eps and guests.
Another connection for readers of this page—the WLOP crew recently did an episode on Plato’s Republic with Owen Alldritt, whose patient reconstruction of Republic Book I is ongoing over at his substack, Moon Bear! It’s a reading you can’t unsee when you return to the text, and Owen’s been my guide through the Republic’s recursive demonstration that the city-in-thought does appear, and must, in the ordering of real cities and real souls.
The plan of the work
At the risk of overcommitting (humans plan, Geist laughs), I wanted to give an idea of what you can expect from this substack in the coming months barring unforeseen crisis or stasis. Going forward, the focus of this page will be critical theory—not ‘the possibility of critical theory today’ (not only is it already actual, but critical theory itself ought to disabuse us of the comforts of abstract possibility) but a partisan reconstruction of 20th century critical theory for the sake of 21st century extensions. It is my contention that the work of Gillian Rose2 and her retrieval of speculative thinking opens an unfinished project that is uniquely well-positioned to reassess the legacy of critical theory because of her refusal to apologize for the failings of previous critical theorists or capitulate to late-20th century intellectual trends that have eclipsed and cheaply historicized the project of critical theory as such.
Like Rose, by ‘critical theory,’ I refer first of all to the Frankfurt School, their predecessors, their successors, and their fellow travelers (including those who were recognized, misrecognized, or overlooked entirely). The fact this tradition needs to be specified to be distinguished from the pre-/post-/un-critical soup of theoretical fads it has been submerged in and diluted by is a sign critical theory has been both outlived and, to the extent it is still discussed, enervated by its opponents or enemies—fundamental ontology, ahistorical phenomenology, existential individualism, ‘left-populist’ reaction, social-democratic progressivism, the naive metaphysics of utility, liberal pluralism and nominalism, the imposition of normative judgments on the world from without, the pretense to impartial description of the world from within, and all the false promises of escape (through intuition, theology, event, aesthetic experience, etc.) from self-reflexive historical theory and struggle. The failure to sufficiently mark the significance of this difference between critical theory and its reception is, to my mind, one of the great failings of contemporary continental philosophy and Marxist/Marxian theoretical literature. Whether any agreement can be reached on what critical theory was (or even whether we can agree with the individual critical theorists) is beside the point, and my hope is that marking these differences will draw out the latent conflicts that prevent any retrospective understanding or contemporary extension of the project of critical theory presented in Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), which will be the focus of my next post. If critical theory can be more than the linguistic waste product of the ‘radical humanities,’ it will require a critical reconstruction of critical theory past and polemic toward ‘critical theory’ present. Critical theory has a tradition worth recovering without nostalgia and is a project worth resuming without compromise.
On the Marionette Theatre. Author(s): Heinrich von Kleist and Thomas G. Neumiller. Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 16, No. 3, The "Puppet" Issue (Sep., 1972), pp. 22-26 Published by: MIT Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1144768
For PDF links to several of Rose’s published works, see ‘Communists in Situ’: https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/gillian-r-rose/
Andrew Brower Latz has published an extensive bibliography of Rose’s work and responses to it here: https://www.academia.edu/27462680/Gillian_Rose_Bibliography
For biography, obituaries, unpublished writings, memorial lectures, and lecture recordings, see the official website dedicated to her work: https://gillianrose.org/