“A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.“

We got it all: communist phronesis of self-critique for revolutionaries in defeat, nested dialectical-biological dissolutions of the individual, setting up a speculative deduction of homosexuality, dialectical-logical vanishing acts, & our forays in materialist history of philosophy! tap in freaks

Critical Theory Working Group@crittheoryworkgrp.bsky.social · 2mo ago

MARGIN NOTES 2 IS OUT! Featuring original contributions from J. E. Morain and CTWG alongside translations of texts by Georg Lukács, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Julius Schaxel, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno—all appearing here in English for the first time! ctwgwebsite.github.io/projects/3_p... 👇🧵

MARGIN NOTES 2 IS OUT! Featuring original contributions from J. E. Morain and CTWG alongside translations of texts by Georg Lukács, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Julius Schaxel, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno—all appearing here in English for the first time! ctwgwebsite.github.io/projects/3_p... 👇🧵

A great essay - well supported by its engagement with the inimitable 'Dictionary of Untranslatables' (edited by Barbara Cassin).

Boston Review@bostonreview.bsky.social · last mo.

“Mathematics only makes sense as a gift economy. It has no trade secrets. Substituting a monetizable ersatz culture for the one evolved through historical experience is a particularly insidious form of knowledge collapse.” Mathematician Michael Harris on the AI companies coming for math:

Etienne Gilson on the role of the teacher for St Thomas Aquinas: far from an isolated, intellectual pursuit, the work of teaching is both contemplative and active, employing both theoretical and practical reason to mediate the truth to oneself and others.

“Sometime I want to understand every kind of way any one can have the feeling of being distinguished in them and every kind of thing that can give any one a feeling of such distinction of such virtue in themselves inside them.” Me too, Gertrude Stein, me too.

“The disputed questions of the thirteenth century include few formal syllogisms but breathe the spirit of a very sincere search for truth. […] Demonstration was the work of reason, not of authority” (from introduction to Aquinas, Truth, vol. I, xvi).

I dreamt last night that I was about to watch The Muppets Ring Cycle. Siegmund, Sieglinde, and Siegfried were to be played by these bozos. I think we couldn’t get the subtitles working, and then I woke up. What could this mean?

It's the Countdown: For Margin Notes vol. 2, James Crane has collected and translated a series of texts by Horkheimer and Adorno related to the former’s unrealised project to write a book on dialectical logic.

I think about this point by Adorno so often of late.

"What actually happens when we read the words on the page, look up the key terms, push against the ideas in a text, scan a bibliography, find the sources, identify a conversation, and put down our own thoughts in language?"

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

defector.com

the eclipse is sort of interesting but I think something much more interesting happens every night: the sun is blocked not by the moon but by the earth itself. it sort of goes round behind it. don't ask me how I know

“One can conceive of writing infinitely on past texts, or at least I can. [...] There would be an activity of proliferating commentary, branching out, recurrent, which would be the true writing activity of our time.” (Barthes, Grain of the Voice, p. 148).

🥵

"I believe that the state of consciousness which would exemplify the Absolute Idea is love, since in love we have a state of harmony in which neither the subject nor the object can be considered as determinant" (McTaggart, 'Commentary on Hegel's Logic').

In recent news, I became Mister Dr Greg! 💘

Tidied up the writing desk 📖✍️

don't watch the anime if you haven't read the manga..

from a handful of short sketches Adorno wrote in the late 1940s on problems in moral philosophy after the decline of the revolutionary communist party

lol lmao

Helen@wokesteppenomad.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I need to Ritsuko-maxx

Geocities 'encouraged us to see ourselves not as passive consumers or content generators, but as workers actively building a shared environment. As platforms evolved — and we were reconfigured into users — our labour became invisible.'

We were all workers on GeoCities - Overland literary journal

GeoCities remains an important reminder that collective labour on the internet is not new — and that recognising ourselves as workers is the first step towards organising as such.

overland.org.au

My latest on the Preface to Hegel's Phenomenology -- turning from the opening critique of method to the outlines of a new system, and the necessity of a phenomenological exposition thereof. tinyurl.com/y4wp3b8e

Reflections on four books recently read, by Marion Milner, Doris Lessing, Robert Burton, and Antonia Pont — on methods of organising oneself. tinyurl.com/yuyddcx5

The latest on Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology -- this time turning to his polemic against Schelling and the debate over metaphysical first principles. Whew! tinyurl.com/y8znk3sy

My attempt at an accessible introduction to the thought of Erich Auerbach and his history of literary technique -- focused on the question of how the everyday became fit for serious represention. tinyurl.com/y7vwn755

Notes on the rational ambitions of literary criticism, its systematic tendencies, and its presumption of an intelligible order in the literary object. tinyurl.com/39r8vh7d

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time (c. 1634-36).

A commentary on Hegel’s concept of history as totality and the task of philosophy in revolutionising historical consciousness. tinyurl.com/2s4e5j7z

A new commentary on Hegel’s criticism of intuition as the sovereign faculty of Romantic philosophy. tinyurl.com/3tusbzat