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Notes on Adorno - “History and Freedom” - Lecture 6

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Conflict and Survival In this lecture Adorno recaps the first five lectures and discusses the legitimacy of the bourgeois philosopher’s idea that conflict is reality and that society survives because of its conflicts rather than in spite of them. He asks how mankind survives under these circumstances and whether or not we can imagine a history that does not involve conflict. Recap of First Five Lectures The ‘universal’ asserts itself as an ‘historical process’ and has a ‘logical structure’ (49). It has negative aspects for individuals and positive aspects for the species; it “[joins] mankind together in societies...in a totality” (49). The totality both expresses and threatens the destruction of everything beneath it while at the same time it acts as a “cohesive force to which society owes its survival” (49). Marx’s Law of Value Marx agrees with this positive view and it forms an element of his “optimistic view of history” (49). In Marx, it is expressed in “the law of value...
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2019 Reading List

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**Mantel, Hilary.  Wolf Hall. Harper Perennial. 2009. Print. (Jan 14) Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. Penguin Books. 2004. ebook. (Jan 16) Waugh, Evelyn. Sword of Honour Trilogy. Penguin. 1965. Kindle. 2012. (Feb. 4) Chesterton, G.K.. The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare. 1908. Kindle. 2012. (Feb. 16) *Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Norton Anthology: English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century. 10th Ed. 2018. (Feb. 18) Wilson, Robert Charles. Vortex. Tom Doherty Associates. 2011. Print. (Feb. 19) Wister, Owen. The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains. 1902. Kindle. (Mar. 1) Tigar, Michael E. Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power. Monthly Review Press, 2018. Kindle. (Mar. 21) Milner, Marion.  A Life of One's Own. 1934 .  Routledge. 2011. Print. (Mar.30) Howey, Hugh. Wool. Self-published. 2011. Kindle. (Apr. 4) Wilson, Margaret. The Able McLaughlins. 1923 .  Library of America E-Book Classics. Kind...
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Notes on Adorno-"History and Freedom"-Lecture 5

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The Totality on the Road to Self-Realization In this lecture Adorno claims that there is a problem with Hegel's philosophical history. He argues that the idea of history as a "self-realizing totality" [a consolation of philosophy]  is irrational because no one benefits from it. It has only survived as long as it has because humanity has survived despite of all the suffering that has been inflicted in the concept's name. The Philosophy of History and Historiography  To "construct" an historical event, we need to know the context, the facts, and how they are connected to each other (39). The process of gathering "the relevant factors" related to "historical events" in order to understand them philosophically both "requires and presupposes historiography [the study of historical texts]" and the process of history-writing to explain them. i.e. in explaining an historical event we rely on historical texts and we create texts fo...
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2018 Reading List

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Playback  by Raymond Chandler. Hamish Hamilton. 1958. Kindle. 2013. Cranford  by Elizabeth Gaskell. 1853. Kindle. 2012.  How to Read Shakespeare  by Maurice Charney. McGraw-Hill. NY. 1971. Hardcover.a  How Shakespeare Changed Everything  by Stephen Marche. HarperCollins. Toronto. 2011. Hardcover. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Blooms Notes.  ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House. PA. 1996. Hardcover. The Cruellest Month  by Louise Penny. Headline Book Pub. London. 2007. Sphere. London. 2011. Paperback. *The Glass Menagerie  by Tennesse Williams. Random House.1945. New Directions. NY.1999. Softcover. *Frankenstein: 1818 Text  by Mary Shelley. Oxford World Classics. 1998. NY. Paperback. *The Tragedy of King Richard III.  The Oxford Shakespeare. 2000. NY. 2008. Print. *The Handmaid's Tale  by Margaret Atwood. 1985. Emblem. 2014. Print. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics  by Carl...
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2017 Reading List

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Testimony by Robbie Robertson. Alfred A Knopf Canada. Print. 2016.  Ways of Seeing by John Berger. BBC and Penguin Books. Print. 1972.  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Vintage International 1947. Kindle. 1995.  At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches by Susan Sontag. ed. Paolo Dilanardo and Anne Jump. 2007. Kindle. 2017.  Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay. Skeffington & Son. 1934. Poison Pen Press. Print. 2016. Studies in Classic American Literature by D.H. Lawrence. 1923. Kindle. 2016.  The Witch and Other Stories by Anton Chekov. 1931. Kindle. 2012.  The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick. Sphere. London. Print. 2013.  Ion by Plato, trans. W.R.M. Lamb. Perseus Project. Online. 2017. Barkskins by Annie Proulx. Scribner. Print. 2016. The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational  Hollywood Scandal of the 1930's by Joseph Eagan. Division Books. NY. Kindle. 2016. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene. Vintage...
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2016 Reading List

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The Republic of Plato trans. by Francis MacDonald Cornford, Print. 1941 A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer, Kindle. 2008 Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer, Kindle. 2009 Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry. Print. 2015 The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, 1913. Kindle. Heretics and Heroes by Thomas Cahill. Print. 2014 The Door in the Wall and Other Stories by H. G. Wells, 1911. Kindle. On the Sublime by Longinus, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, 1 A.D. Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus, ed. Philip Tody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy, Print. 1970 Medea by Euripides, trans. Gilbert Murray, 431 B.C. Kindle. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, trans. Lewis Campbell, 429 B.C. Kindle. The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde, 1889 (Essay) Race and Language by Edward Augustus Freeman, 1879 (Essay) Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, trans. Lewis Campbell, 400 B.C. Kindle. Antigone by Sophocles, trans. Lewis Campbell, 441 B.C. Kindle. Cometh the Hour: A Novel (Clifton Chron...
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Notes on Adorno "History and Freedom" - Lecture 4

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Lecture 4 - The Concept of Mediation In this lecture, Adorno discusses the universal as existing systems working through (mediating) particular events. He uses academics and the French Revolution to explain how the particular , a specific event, is often erroneously taken as a cause rather than a side effect of the workings of universal processes. He claims that once we acknowledge the workings of the universal in the particular we can see the "spirit," the real underlying cause of the event. Facts as Cloaks of Illusion A fact (a particular) acts as a cloak when we mistake it for a cause rather than a secondary effect, creating the illusion that we know what really happened. The better we become at recognizing the universal's effect on the particular and the particular's inability to have a like effect on the universal, the better we will become at recognizing that a particular is not a cause of an event but a byproduct of the universal process or "conte...
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