Like one of the old Greek sophists, I go to any city state
that will have me and talk on anything I am asked about. My first publication was in the Harvard Crimson, my second in Astounding Science Fiction. Over the years, my words have appeared in
many settings, but this morning is a first.
I have been asked to contribute to a comic book. A scholar at UPenn is soliciting one sentence
statements about Herbert Marcuse for a comic book on him to be introduced by Angela
Davis [I am not making this up.]
Naturally, I agreed. There seem
to be thirty or more others. Here is my
sentence:
“Herbert Marcuse, the imposing presence who teased me, just
after I had published my first book on Kant’s Critique, by proposing to Barrington Moore and me A Critique of Pure Tolerance as the
title of our little volume, reassuring me when I objected that “No one will
ever read it,” the Germanic philosopher who sat on the floor with my three year
old son twirling a toy globe to show him the countries of the world, the
world-historical presence who was that rarest of beings in
the exalted realm of high theory and kulturkritik,
a good friend.”
9 comments:
Considering the attitude of the Frankfurt school towards pop culture, it's ironic that Herbert Marcuse will end up in a comic book.
I realize that Marcuse is not as elitist as Adorno, but still I doubt that he said a single positive thing about pop culture in his entire published work.
That’s one sentence? Oh boy
You should see some of the others! I took some literary license.
Off topic, but this weekend I finally got around to viewing on YouTube the seventh (and last) of your Marx lectures.
I should probably watch the last ten minutes or so again, but I guess I wanted a little more unpacking of "putting the irony into the equations," though I can see, more or less, how your revised equation(s) are an improvement on what they replace (with that omega [or whatever the letter is] showing labor's different, lower 'rate of return' on its 'capital'). I found myself wondering what the audience in the room might have made of it all, and whether they would have found the closing injunction to "go out and change the world" a bracing reinforcement of something they already were planning to do or a somewhat jarring non-sequitur (or something in between).
I think the point about how capitalism misrepresents itself as a fair, market exchange between equals when it's really a system of exploitation was clearly made and tied to some key passages in Capital. And even if there hadn't been more (which of course there was), I think the lectures were worth watching for that alone. Not that I was unaware of the point before, but I think the lectures did a good job of communicating it in an accessible way.
A good friend.
Marx was on the front page of the NYTimes business section today. Sort of.
Completely off topic, but John Le Carré's characterization of Christopher Hitchens seems worth wider circulation:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/22/john-le-carre-letter-british-politics
Wait, was the sentence ("sentence") to be about Marcuse, or about you?
bravo!
Who is the audience for this "comic book"?
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