Ray Brassier Session 1 Final Repression Adorno and Marcuse on the Antinomy of Progress

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Dan. And thanks, Sepedi, for inviting me again. Okay, so what I'm going to present today is a draft chapter from a book I'm currently working on. The working title for the book is Fatelessness. So the concept of fate and fatality is fundamental to the book and Adorno plays a central role in the book, although Adorno's relationship

to Marx as foregrounded threads. So anyway, I'm presenting this. I've tried to reduce the arguments of the text to simplify it as much as possible, but it's still quite long. So I'll be talking for 45 minutes, I think. I hope not much more than that. And I hope the sound and image holds up throughout. I think I've improved the connection since last time or since I last tried to do this earlier this year.

So hopefully, we won't have too many connection problems. but let me know if you can't hear me or something goes wrong, just let me know. Okay, so this talk really kind of deals with, although only Adorno and Marcuse are mentioned, really the starting point is Walter Benjamin. Actually, I need to get, control of the screen share I'm not sure how to let me see if I can okay right just can every you screen right now we can see it okay good good everyone can see it and

And, okay, so a starting point is Walter Benjamin's famous description of the Angel of History, okay, so which I'm sure everyone is familiar with, but I'll just run through it one more time. So this is Benjamin's famous quotation, his ninth thesis on the concept of history. there is a picture by clay called angelus novus it shows an angel who seems to be about to move away from something he stares at his eyes are wide his mouth is open his wings are spread this is how the angel of history must look his face is turned towards the past where a chain of

events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise and has got caught in his wings. It is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. And what we call progress is this storm. Okay, so this history as the accumulation of wreckage perpetuates the homogeneity of

universal history in a negative register. Relentless deterioration is the inverse of steady amelioration, so that the continuity of destruction is as linear and homogeneous as the continuity of construction. So in other words, I think that there's a there's both a revolutionary and a reactionary reading of Ben Uman's account of the angel of history, and simply to kind of, you know, to, you know, to emphasize the, to claim that history is a single, you know, accumulation of wreckage or of destruction is simply kind of, you know, the negative obverse of progressivist universal

history, okay. The point is that this famous passage from Benyman is usually kind of, I think, taken at, you know, face value, the claim that history is, you know, a uniform process of destruction, you know, an unfolding catastrophe. But this is simply the kind of the inversion of progressivist universal history. So in other words, if you merely kind of reverse the positive valorization of history as progress to denounce history as continuous, continual destruction, you're not really challenging the frame of universal history,

which it seems to me is precisely Benyman's point. So what Benyman is challenging is the narrativization of history. If history as narrative is in question, simply replacing a single dominant narrative, whether it's progressive narrative of progress or a narrative of destruction, is ineffectual. Replacing a dominant narrative with multiple subaltern narrative narrative leaves the authority of narrative untouched and its possibility on question it seems to me it's the possibility of narrating history that benjamin is calling into question

the wreckage you know if history is truly catastrophic it's precisely what cannot be narrated what cannot be kind of sequenced into a narrative or you know comprehended in narrative form and that i think that's the most radical kind of implication of benjamin's thesis narrative relays the domination of myth it's not just through writing but through the telling of history that the victors raise themselves above the vanquished and to the extent that it singles out heroes and villains or distinguishes major from minor events historical narrative relays the domination inscribed in myth and the claim that that mythologization is a kind of uh you know

is domination is a kind of a it's a um you know uh subjugation it's a kind of self-abasement before a kind of a superhuman power or authority is i think obviously the aspect of benjamin's thought that is taken up especially by adorno and his account of dialectic of enlightenment and the dialectic of myth and enlightenment is precisely this claim that you know enlightenment you know re-mythologizes itself if it simply tries to encapsulate and comprehend history in a in a linear and uniform fashion. So for Benjamin, the point is the, you know, the puncturing,

or the interruption of this homogenizing, you know, narration of history. Once integrated into a narrative, the past becomes the precondition of the present. It is not just what has happened, but what had to happen or what was fated to happen the past is mythologized by being eternalized as fatality and mythical fatality for benjamin is countered by interrupting history um the present you know history is precisely what must be brought to a standstill so the present is no longer a point of transition but of interruption in which time is brought to a standstill but also

established in a unique encounter with the past the famous you know the tiger's leap out of history that Benjamin describes this encounter rests the past from what has been and charges it with a now time primed to blast the present out of the continuum of history. So it's a matter then of negating continuity rather than affirming discontinuity. The revolutionary counter to historicist progressivism does not consist in replacing integration with disintegration or unity with multiplicity. It consists rather in seizing continuity as a material to be acted upon,

a fulcrum for constructing a discontinuity that is not already given as the absence of continuity. And Benjamin's famous image of the emergency brake, you know, kind of pulling the emergency brake on the locomotive of history is this kind of, you know, figures this idea of an active interruption of historical continuity. And then, you know, what Benjamin, you know, the messianic interval in Benjamin is the determinant negation of universal history, not its disavow. It's not simply you can't abstractly negate or disavow universal history because you know you reconstitute it.

by disavowing it. So hence this gesture now bent in you know this this interruption of historical chronology ties into a logic of redemption for Benjamin because it is no longer exclusively oriented towards a future waiting to be realized the revolutionary activation of the present turns towards the past to release the future from what has been. This is the logic of redemption. Revolution is the reordering of time, the liberation of the unborn, a reordering which entails liberating the unborn without liberating unborn generations to come,

without that liberation being one at the expense of the victims of history, the expense of the dead. Only the redemption of the dead can liberate the unborn. This is why it's a matter of redeeming, you know, you can only liberate the future by redeeming the past. so this is why benjamin writes only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past which is to say only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moment each moment it has lived becomes a citation a lot unusual and that day is judgment day this is the the third

thesis on the concept of history. So the revolutionary present on Benjamin's account is the present of judgment day when the dead are rescued from their future oblivion, their consignment to oblivion if one simply, you know, affirms, you know, the necessity of moving forward or of affirming the future at the expense of the past. But there's two points here. think to me two significant points to you know to emphasize in ben heumann's account one is that the homogeneity of history is shattered in the name of a humanity whose unity is yet to come and not against this unity as such in other words it's not simply a matter of denying you know the

unity or negating unity the you know the bourgeois unification of humankind but of saying you know, a bit of suggesting that this unification is yet to come. It's precisely what has to be achieved by interrupting the progressive homogenization of history. so that the critique of bourgeois progressivism in Benjamin is carried out in the name of a more radical progressivism that would inaugurate the unity of humanity beyond the historical abyss separating those damned in the past from those saved in the future. and this unity is precisely what can't be envisaged from the vantage of the capitalist

presence whose premature assertion of the unity of humanity masks the rift between capitalists and proletarians in the present but also the rift between present victors and past victims And this kind of insight of Benjamins is I think taken up by Adorno explicitly in his essay on progress, which I'm going to be looking at. So Adorno writes in the essay on progress, which is written I think in 1960, 61, 20 years after Benjamins thesis on the concept of history so don't arise progress would be the very establishment of humanity in the first place whose prospect opens up in the face of extinction

the second implication of benjamin's account is that revolution is incalculable the revolutionary present is no longer sequentially articulated with an antecedent past and future with an antecedent past and a future consequent. It is part of what he calls a monological constellation, each fragment of which is seeded with time. This is a Leibnizian trope in Benjamin's thinking, which Adorno is also very interested in. But then this implies that historical development is no longer a condition of revolutionary possibility.

And obviously, this is the critique of historical determinism and, I guess, of the deterministic tendencies of a certain, I guess, kind of vulgar kind of Marxism or misunderstanding of Marxist thoughts prevalent in the early 20th century. Revolutionary opportunity then becomes historically incalculable. And as Benjamin puts it, every second is the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter. Okay, but if every second is a gateway opening onto the possibility of redemption, then this possibility transcends the order of possibility inscribed within historical time.

And this means that messianic temporality is figured as vertically transecting the horizontal imminence of linear or historical time. Blasting the revolutionary present out of the continuum of history renders the possibility of redemption transcendent vis-a-vis the imminence of history. And here we come to the first version of the antinomy of progress. In other words, progress is equivalent, is equivocal in this kind of account. It's both progress as a redemptive face and an emancipatory face, but there's a tension between these two aspects of progress or the concept of progress.

The messianic interval institutes an antinomony between redemptive transcendence and historical imminence. If progress is redemption, i.e. messianic transcendence, then history is absurd because it is unnecessary. The messiah could intervene to redeem humanity at any moment. But if progress is humanity's self-empowerment, it's self-emancipation, it can only unfold through history, you know, through the imminence of historical development. And therefore, historical suffering, which is to say repression, colonialism, genocide, etc., becomes the condition of human progress.

and Adorno formulates this Antinemone perfectly in the in the essay on progress so this is Adorno if progress is equated with redemption as transcendental intervention per se and by transcendental here I take him well I'm assuming he means something like messianic then it forfeits along with the temporal dimension its intelligible meaning and evaporates into a historical theology But if progress is mediatized into history, if it's mediated through history, then the idealization of history threatens, and with it both in the reflection of the concept as in the reality, the absurdity that it is progress itself that inhibits progress.

progress so the cost of severing the presence ties to historical and and antecedents and consequence is passivity towards transcendence messianic advent can only be passively awaited not actively precipitated but then progress as the revolutionary inception of human history is divinely dispensed And the overturning of human subjection, a human, you know, the self-empowering or the emancipation of the human, requires another subjection of the human. You know, the prostration before the, you know, the divine, you know, the Messiah or the God or whatever.

um the secular alternative to this premium on transcendence is the mediation of progress through history and on this account transcendence can only be achieved through imminence but the mediation of progress in and through history renders the ultimate institution of humanity consequent upon its prior destitution because the progress of subjection or what hegel famously calls the slaughter bench of history is necessary for the progress that is supposed to terminate subjection which is to say communism as the kingdom of ends so the rejection of any transcendent measure of progress turns history into its only measure

but on the but the reification of history as the sole measure of progress turns history in into the very transcendence it was supposed to abolish what what Adorno calls the idealization of history. So this is the you know the antimony. And the antimony is especially kind of you know inescapable because the contents of the concept of progress is necessarily social and historical for Adorno. So Adorno writes, without society, the notion of progress would be completely empty.

All its elements are abstracted from society. If society had not passed from hunting and gathering horde to agriculture, from slavery to the formal freedom of subjects, from the fear of demons to reason from deprivation to provisions against epidemics and famine and to the overall improvement of living conditions if one thus sought more philosophical to keep the idea of progress pure and say to spin it out of the essence of time it would have no content at all so that's why so it's precisely because the only you know the uh the only positive content that can be given to the concept of progress is social and historical that it seems that

you know the the dynamic that makes progress possible also implies an inescapable regression there's a there's a regressive element inherent in the dynamic of progress the realization of progress is stymied by the same social and historical conditions that give it content because those conditions harbor a regressive element and the regressive element is the link between progress and domination okay there's no progress without domination first of outer nature and then of inner nature but the expanding domination of nature ramifies into increasing social domination. In other words, the society that frees itself from being dominated by nature,

that wins its freedom from nature, does so then by subjugating its subjects, by dominating individuals as a second nature, by inculcating itself as second nature. So historical progress is conditioned by an antagonism between humanity and nature, as well as an intra-human antagonism between human tribes, clans, tribes, and nations. And this antagonism, the perpetuation of this antagonism, renders the fulfillment of progress impossible and it's this dissolution threatens to undo all of the concrete achievements of progress.

So then the question is. That's fulfilling the concept of progress without cancelling its concrete social gains requires the reconciliation of this antagonism. But reconciliation only becomes possible through this antagonism by traversing what is unreconciled, not only in the concept, but also between the concepts and reality. This is Adorno's emphasis here, he's saying that the contradiction in the concepts of progress mirrors a real contradiction, a fundamental or social contradiction. Okay, so this is Adorno again. Once the meaning of a concept, you know, the concept of progress

necessitates moving to facticity, this movement cannot be stopped arbitrarily. Once, you know, once the meaning of the concept of progress requires its realization, its concrete realization, then this movement of realization cannot be stopped arbitrarily. The idea of reconciliation itself, the transcendent telos of all progress measured by finite criteria, i.e. reconciliation of humanity and nature, but also reconciliation of humanity as such, you know, the abolition of divisions among human beings, this reconciliation cannot be broken loose from the imminent process of enlightenment that removes fear and by erecting the human being as an answer to human beings

questions wins the concept of humanitarianism that alone rises above the eminence of the world. Okay. um so this is where now the uh the you know the uh the antinomic structure of progress ties into adorno's account of the dialectic of enlightenment overcoming the antinomic structure of progress is inseparable from this dialectic of enlightenment enlightenment is the empowerment of humanity through the disempowerment of the superhuman whether understood as divinized nature or naturalized divinity.

But the reason that culminates in self-conscious spirit, the famous Hegel, or the kind of the self-consciousness as kind of promulgated in German idealism, and especially in the philosophy of Hegel, which epitomizes the Enlightenment progressivism, ends up on Adorno's account ends up endowing itself with a transcendence it withdraws from nature so in other words you know spirits you know demythologization or demystification of nature you know of the superhuman ends up you know divinizing or mythologizing spirits

or self-consciousness and this is what Adorno calls a spell. Reflective self-consciousness is not immune to the compulsiveness of nature or the drive to self-preservation. As Adorno writes in negative dialectics, something compulsive distinguishes animal conduct from human conduct and the animal species Homo may have inherited it but in the species it turned into something qualitatively different. And it did so precisely due to the reflective faculty that might break the spell and did enter into its service. So, this is a very interesting kind of passage, I think, because already

I don't know what distinguishes the human from other animals, or the specific difference, or the salient characteristic of human animality is its compulsiveness, but a compulsiveness which is you know, which is different in time from instinct. So, in other words, you know, the psychoanalytic distinction between instinct, biological instinct, which is programmed, and, you know, an unconscious drive is precisely, it's the compulsive nature of, you know, of human self-consciousness, of human reflexivity, that is both, you know, that allows

human beings to you know to to separate themselves from nature but also thereby um to to re-enchain themselves to nature um the spell is the aura of transcendence it converts the subjectively constituted object into a thing in itself um and self-consciousness is reified by being rendered absolute, i.e. wholly unthinkable. In other words, a dialectic is very simple. In other words, once self-consciousness realizes that what it took to be God-given is in fact human-made, then it forgets that it can keep doing this, but then the danger is to take this,

is to take self-consciousness, spirits or subjectivity as itself as something that is given and not made, as a transcendent force as opposed to a historically contingent factor. So this is the crux of the dialectic of enlightenment. David Sloan, So progress requires domination identifying what is non identical but domination blocks the reconciliation of identity and non identity or humanity and nature or subject and object. David Sloan, And it blocks the record this reconciliation that should be the rational key loss of progress.

progress. So here's Adorno again. The model of progress, even if displaced onto the Godhead, is the control of external and internal or human nature. The oppression exercised by such control, which has its highest form of intellectual reflection in the identity principle of reason, reproduces this antagonism. The more identity is posited by imperious spirit, the more injustice is done to the non-identical. The injustice is passed on through the resistance of the non-identical, which is to say the return of the repressed, and the resistance in turn reinforces the oppressing

principle, while at the same time what is oppressed, poisoned, limps along further. Everything within the whole progresses, only the whole itself to this day does not progress. So in other words, there's a compulsive repetition in the dynamic of progress. The consequence is that antagonism then is the condition for reconciliation. and unfreedom is the condition for freedom or as Adorno puts it the conditions for the possibility of reconciliation are its contradiction and the conditions for the possibility of freedom

are unfree are unfreedom okay so why because the only way in which human beings can be free is by freeing themselves from everything that, you know, that dominates them, by freeing themselves from the superhuman powers that have hitherto subjugated them. But to do this, they have to dominate domination. But the domination of domination repeats domination. domination. Okay, so that the paradox is in precisely, you know, in by winning their freedom, you know, humans compulsively relay or repeat the drive to domination, which is ultimately kind of

the defining characteristic of nature in Adorno. So it's this kind of, this circuit, this repetition, which has to be interrupted. And so here, Adorno, I think, takes up and in a way subtly, you know, redefines, you know, Benjamin's account of, you know, the redemptive phase of progress as the interruption of the

relentlessness of progress. So now it's not simply kind of historical. It's what has to be interrupted for Adorno is this is the subject or self-consciousness own compulsive compulsion to identify, compulsion to conceptualize and thereby dominate whatever is other. So then progress becomes reasons awakening from the spell of its own sovereignty. The social content of the concept of progress depends upon a historically unfolding domination of nature.

But the realization of the concept is figured as an interruption of compulsive domination, not ordained by history. and as with benyamin's this interruption is possible at every moment so adorno writes while the perpetual oppression that unleashed progress at the same time always arrested it this oppression as the emancipation of consciousness first made the antagonism and the whole extent of deception recognizable at all the prerequisite for settling the antagonism the progress which the in which the eternal invariant brought forth is that finally progress can begin at any moment

so this is the sense in which progress is the suspension of its own fatality but this suspension is precisely what is not historically determined. So I don't want to continue. So in this sense, progress is breaking the spell. Progress means to step out of the magic spell, even out of the spell of progress that is itself nature, in that humanity becomes aware of its own inbred nature and brings to a halt the domination it exacts upon nature and through which domination by nature continues. In this way, it could be said that progress, and here I think progress as emancipation,

occurs where it's, you know, progress as domination ends, okay? This is Adorno pointing out the kind of the you know the the equivocal nature of progress. This reconciliation that is made possible by the impossibility of absolute domination. Reconciliation is simply this self-interruption of domination okay which is a you know which implies then that only the power of the storm can solve the devastation it has wrought okay there's no, if we go back to the Benjamin image of, you know, the, you know, the, the, the relentless

storm, which is the progress of history, well, there is no other, there is no transcendent or divine power that can interrupt this, the storm, the storm can only kind of interrupt itself. The salvation of destruction is not history's completion, but it's incompletion. In other words, it's the accumulation of wreckage is prevented from ever being completed or totalized. Okay, so that the, in a way, the kind of the very logic of this relentless accumulation of destruction implies that it cannot be completed.

And this is the only sense in which, you know, this is the only redemptive aspect of history. So progress, then, on Adorno's account, is not the abolition of regression, but the resistance to the compulsion to abolish regression. As Adorno writes, progress is this resistance at all stages and not the surrender to their steady assent. In other words, this resistance to the compulsion to abolish regression is possible at every moment. okay um whereas so it's not a kind of a progressive so this is this is again adorno

relaying the benjaminian thesis of the um um the uh the messianic interval okay the uh the interval is possible the income it's you know history the incompletion of history that makes redemption possible arises at every instant or moment of history and this incompletion is precisely what cannot be programmed by you know the the imminent logic of history it is the historically mediated resistance to the absolute mediation of history okay and I think that this incompletion is another kind of aspect of what Adorno calls non-identity

although non-identity is the source of resistance it cannot be positivized as an autonomous force without reinstating the spell of transcendence non-identity is not the ontological remainder or leftover by subtracting conceptual identification. Instead, it is generated in and through identification as its ineliminable underside. It is the failure of identification. Every identification fails, is incomplete, and non-identity is the residue of this attempt. attempt. So in this in this regard, then non identity stands to identity as the unconscious

stands to consciousness for Freud, just as the drive does not pre exist repression, non identity does not pre exist identification. The conceptual problem for Adorno then becomes that of accounting for the possibility of resistance in terms of repression, since it is precisely identities repression of non-identity that fuels the dialectic of enlightenment. So then the question is, what is the source of the resistance to repression or the condition for the interruption of domination? Reflection cannot disenchant itself. critical self-reflection does not suffice to break the spell of enlightenment as we saw because

there's a compulsive element in um you know even you know allegedly critical self-consciousness on adorno's account um and especially the self-sufficiency of rational reflection perpetuates the spell of transcendence. So this is why Adorno suggests that reason must transition to praxis by seeing itself as a mode of social behavior. You know, reason in a way kind of, you know, breaks the spell of its own autonomy, you know, and sovereignty by understanding itself, by understanding the social basis of its power. It's ultimately, however elevated its manifestations

and whatever dizzying height it attains, these are sublimations and complications of modes of social behavior. So, then, this means that the transition, which is to say the transition to praxis, can't be ordained through reason's comprehension of its relation to social practice. In other words, there's no kind of, you know, there's no totalizing theory that tells you what is to be done. know at a given historical moment so that that dream that kind of uh the uh the dream of kind

of programmatism that the claim that you know there's a there's a theory that you know there's a theory of um the uh relationship between you know uh forces and relations of production that you know um determines what is to be done at any kind of given historical juncture no that It's precisely that, you know, the fantasy of such an account is precisely what prevents the, you know, the necessary transition to practice. To seal the gap between theory and practice is to reinstate the identification of subject and object that perpetuates domination. Okay. So this is the theoreticist temptation, which I don't want to reject.

But on the other hand, there's also a practicist temptation. Resistance cannot stem from activism either, or at least a certain kind of form of activism, whose spontaneity colludes with the totality against which it is protesting. This is Adorno's rejoinder to the student activists. Adorno is not simply rejecting practice and activity, but he's saying that there's a kind of, you know, there's a knee jerk or purely reactive praxis, which merely relays the domination of the social totality.

and therefore is incapable of truly resisting it. So for Adorno, it's the non-identity of theory and practical activity that allows for resistance as the interruption of domination. If domination is repression, then resistance is the negation of repression, which is the primary negation. But if resistance is the non-identity of reason and praxis, then its negation of repression remains dialectically indeterminate. And this indeterminacy threatens to reinstate the spell of transcendence by reifying the possibility of resistance as an abstract negation of history,

i.e. an abstract negation of the concrete progress of repression. um so here there's a there's a dichotomy here you know if resistance to repression cannot be aligned with concrete social and historical conditions because doing so would reinstate the unity of theory and praxis as a bad totality it remains utopian in a negative sense i.e it transcends history resistance just is this um you know ex nihilo this deus ex machina um and here this is where adorno this is where i think um marcusa's um intervention is very interesting um so i take

you know the what i find most interesting in marcusa's account of you know with the you know the dialectic of the dialectic of progress or the intimacy of progress is the suggestion that the overcoming of repression is made possible by a specific historical conjunction of the forces and relations of production so marcusa refuses to oppose utopian to historical possibility because he insists that the realm of freedom, i.e. redemptive progress, is imminent to the realm of necessity, i.e. repressive progress. Okay, so he wants to, you know, to really grasp the dialectical interpenetration of the redemptive and repressive aspects of progress.

and to do so then he begins by you know laying out a contrast between what he calls the quantitative technical conception of progress and the qualitative humanitarian one the former is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter on Marcuse's account in other words there can be no human freedom worthy of the name without freedom from natural strictures um however um capitalist civilization reifies this negative freedom this freedom from um you know uh these uh the structures of nature

and turns it into a transcendent value and this negative freedom which is to say the domination of outer and inner nature becomes the telos of progress under capitalism in the form of compulsive productivity. This negative conception renders transcendence autonomous. It automates transcendence. Freedom from libidinal gratification is not only transcendence, but the autonomy of transcendence. In other words, freedom from, you know, compulsion, from instinct and compulsion, is not simply kind of the transcendence of nature,

but a transcendence which becomes, you know, self-directing. And Marcuse sees this autonomization of transcendence as, you know, the abiding flaw in idealism in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. So Marcuse writes, just like the productivity to which it belongs, that this transcendence that is essential to freedom finally appears as an end in itself. Kantian freedom, numinal freedom, is simply the kind of freedom from every kind of, you know, from every kind of pathological, inclination of the human animal. But then this freedom becomes simply identified with the

negation, the abstract negation of pathological inclination. And it becomes what Marcuse calls a contentless transcendence. It's contentless because the autonomy of production, capitalism becomes the transcendent end to which every human goal must be sacrificed. Just as the moral law becomes the ultimate end to which every hypothetical imperative or instrumental injunction must be sacrificed in Kant's moral philosophy,

in capitalist production, production for the sake of production becomes the ultimate end to which every other human activity is subordinated. So this means then that progress requires productive renunciation, the repression of satisfaction that transforms individuals from bearers of the pleasure principle into bearers of labor power and through this repression libidinal energy is released for unpleasurable but socially productive labor but the social sublimation of pleasure presupposes a prior interiorization of repression the introjection of external sanction in the form of the superego

enables the divestment of individual satisfaction for the sake of collective gratification and hence the productive sublimation of libido and here marcus is simply kind of paraphrasing freud's account in civilization and its discontents so this generates another version of the antimony of progress okay this is marcus's version of the the intimating collective repression enforces the self-repression of the individual which in turn consolidates collective repression which then further intensifies individual repression and

this circuit of self-reinforcing repression underlies what Marcuse calls the automation of progress but this automation is driven by negation the repression of individual satisfaction that enables collective satisfaction is seconded by a repression of collective satisfaction thus the repression of satisfaction whether individual or collective serves only the limitless expansion of capital. And this means that the progress of the means to satisfy human needs must negate the satisfaction to perpetuate the progress of those means. So as Marcuse puts it, just as progress becomes

automatic through the repressive modification of instincts, so it cancels itself and negates itself, for it prohibits the enjoyment of its own fruits, and in turn precisely through this prohibition, it augments productivity and thus promotes progress. So this is the vicious circle of progress on Marcuse's account. Individual enjoyment is sublimated to ensure social productivity, but collective enjoyment is sublimated to enforce individual productivity. Or as Marcuse puts it, progress must continually negate itself in order to remain progress.

Inclination must continually be sacrificed to reason, happiness to transcendental freedom, in order that through the promise of happiness, men can be maintained in alienated labor, remain productive, keep themselves from the full enjoyment of their productivity, and thereby perpetuate productivity itself. So the consequence for Marcuse is that the progress of domination ultimately undermines the need to dominate. And his reasoning is as follows.

So according to Marcuse, the circle is a function of historically specific relations of production and thus is bounded by an internal limit. And this limit is the point at which the progress of repression generates such an abundance of means, means for the satisfaction of desires, that they negate the needs which made repression necessary. Or as Marcuse puts it, the technification of domination undermines the foundation of domination. So this means that the quantitative increase of repressive means, you know,

Now, the advancement in the progress in the technical sense, technical progress, yields a qualitative decrease in the need to repress. Renunciation yields such an abundance of means for satisfaction that these cancel the need for renunciation. Or repression produces a surplus of satisfaction that negates the satisfaction of productive repression. So here, and this is Marcuse's kind of summary of his dialectical arguments. The achievements of repressive progress herald the abolition of the repressive principle of progress itself.

It becomes possible to envisage a state in which there is no productivity resulting from and conditioning renunciation and no alienated labor, a state in which the growing mechanization of labor enables an ever larger part of the instinctual energy that had to be withdrawn for alienated labor to return to its original form. In other words, to be changed back into energy of the life instincts. And he continues, alienated labor time would not only be reduced to a minimum, but would disappear and life would consist of free time. A qualitatively different reality principle would replace the repressive one, transmuting the entire human psychic as well as socio-historical structure.

Sublimation would not cease, but instead as erotic energy would surge up in new forces of cultural creation. So Marcuse's account is this, you know, the self-sublimation of repression transforms the reality principle. The contradiction between individual and collective gratification is what conditions capitalism's reality principle. Renunciation is the condition for reconciling individual and collective interests. The reality principle in Freud is simply what is necessary.

okay it's what it's it's what obstructs the you know the the satisfaction of pleasure um you know the the drive to seek pleasure you know to seek you know to seek pleasure is obstructed by reality because reality you know imposes um certain costs upon the uh the satisfaction of pleasure and this is why the reality principle is what inaugurates renunciation. In other words, the social being must sacrifice its desire for pleasure

in order to kind of to ensure its survival. And this is the reconciliation of individual and collective interests. But the abolition of this contradiction together with the capital relation on Marcuse's account would entail a new reality principle which could be called communist. One in which the libidinal surplus released by mechanized labor would no longer be repressed for the purposes of social production but would instead create new forms of individual and collective gratification. And this is what transforms contentless transcendence into a contentful transcendence. So Marcuse writes contentless transcendence, which is to say negative freedom merely as freedom from nature or from inclination or from need.

This this kind of this is this kind of entirely negative characterization of freedom, which is enshrined in in, you know, capitalist productivism and the bourgeois philosophy, which fetishizes autonomy in this in this negative sense. So contentless transcendence would come to a close and freedom would no longer be an eternally failing project, eternally failing because human beings can't entirely transcend their, you know, their material, their fundamental material needs. Productivity would define itself in relation to receptivity.

And he's obviously, you know, he's talking in a Kantian register, you know, the productive activity of the understanding would no longer kind of simply be limited by the receptivity of sensibility, but actually would be positively enabled by it. Existence would be experienced not as continually expanding and unfulfilled becoming, but as existence or being with what is and can be. And here, you know, Marcuse's account, I mean, you know, it's a very interesting, he's kind of alluding to Nietzsche and Heidegger and to kind of, you know, the accounts of existential transformation, you know, set out in Nietzsche and Heidegger, but he's saying that they kind of,

the these are in those particular thinkers you know this kind of this existential transformation can only be achieved by the individual you know by the the unique or exceptional individual whereas Marcuse seems to be kind of proposing that actually this this existential transformation as positively characterized by Nietzsche and Heidegger can only be socially realized, collectively realized in and through communism. And this is a sense in which then Marcuse reinscribes utopia within history. Marcuse renders utopian possibility imminent to history.

to history. He renders radical, you know, existential transformation, the collective existential transformation for humankind, an imminent possibility, an imminent historical possibility, not the historical realization of utopian possibility, a realizability that reifies utopian possibility as a transcendent telos of history, but as a reinscription of utopian possibility within historical possibility. History kind of, you know, contains within itself the possibility of this radical unprecedented transformation.

Now, but the logic of Marcuse's accounts now hinges on an account of the nature of primal repression, which we now have to examine. I should only have another kind of, hopefully another five minutes to go. Primal repression de-libidinizes the organism by sexualizing the genital organs, fragmenting the libanonized whole into a multiplicity of partial drives. The segmentation and specification of libido are consequences of repression on Marcuse's account. Because primal repression negates an originally organic integrity, the sublimation of repression

configured as the negation of negation re-establishes organic cohesion at both the individual and the collective level. So on Marcuse's account, the primal repression that condemns humanity to labor for its enjoyment or coordinating work and play as means an end must be sublimated for labor to fuse with enjoyment and become an end in itself. The decisive modification of the origin of harmonization for Marcuse is the bridling of eros by the reality principle and the conversion of libido into reproductive sexuality. So as Mercudo writes, eros is originally more than sexuality in the sense that it is not a

partial instinct but rather a force that governs the entire organism and that only later is put into the service of reproduction and localised as sexuality. This decisive modification of eros means a desexualization of the organism and only this change can make the organism as bearer of the pleasure principle into an organism that is a possible instrument of labor the body becomes free for the expenditure of energy that otherwise would only have been erotic energy it becomes so to speak free of the integral eros that originally governed it and thereby free for unpleasurable

labor as the content of life. So on Marcuse's account the original disintegration of libido entailed by the social antagonism between individual and collective gratification is superseded by an ultimate reintegration or a re-libidonization of social relations once this antagonism is overcome. If primal repression then is the originary disintegration of organic libido into genital or organized sexuality and the separation of individual gratification from social productivity, then final repression is the sublimation that

reintegrates what capitalism has separated individual and collective pleasure and production or work and play but in order to understand you know the logic of marcusa's account we need to revisit freud's articulation of the three um you know fundamental um you know principles the three fundamental unconscious principles which he catalogues in civilization and its discontents these are eros and anki anki and athanas or or you know you know pleasure necessity and death libidinal disintegration is brought about in response to the reality

principle, what Freud calls anankhe or necessity. Eros, the life principle, binds organic substance into ever larger units, which thanatos, the death drive, seeks to unbind and dissolve back into what Freud calls their primordial inorganic state. In order to preserve its living substance, eros must accommodate itself to ananki or necessity since self-preservation requires adaptation to the environment eros and ananki are related as organic interiority to inorganic exteriority binding activity becomes constrained by inert material structures but thanatos is

neither inside nor outside neither organic nor inorganic but rather the boundary simultaneously connecting and separating them so it is a nanke that obstructs eros or that is its obstacle it's not thanatos on freud's account and freud writes thanatos is a residue left behind by eros a residue which escapes our notice unless it is revealed through being alloyed with eros. So this implies then that the death drive is not opposed to eros, it is the unbound residue of its binding activity.

um but if libidinal synthesis is constrained by necessity then thanatos is the unbound surplus resulting from pleasure's accommodation to survival and this unbound surplus sticks to repression as its residue just as it fuels the re-libidinization of production But if disintegration is not simply the opposite of integration, then the line from primal to sublimated repression or from negative to positive freedom cannot be drawn through the negation of negation. Richard K. repression generates a surplus that is not just a simple negation of necessity, a residue that complicates any straightforward demarcation between surplus and necessary or basic repression.

What is the difference between basic and surplus repression? Well, according to Marcuse, it's that basic repression is what he calls the modifications of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race and civilization, while surplus repression is defined as the restrictions necessitated by social domination. So basic repression is imposed by conditions of natural scarcity, impeding the perpetuation of civilized humanity. It indexes the domination of nature, whereas surplus repression is the means by which a cast or class perpetuates its privilege at the expense of another.

It indexes social domination. The social distribution of scarcity determines what Marcuse calls a performance principle, the historical specification of the reality principle proper to what he calls an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion. In other words, capitalism. but the problem is that nature does not suffice to fix basic repression on marcusa's account the domination of nature conditions social domination but social domination also conditions the domination of nature it is not nature that determines the modification of the instincts

required by civilization this modification already presupposes the existence of civilization or culture in the broadest sense and nature understood as the principle of necessity or scarcity does not determine the minimum of repression required for the existence of culture so then this the following dichotomy ensues then either this modification is brought about by a culture without social domination one in which the use of natural resources involves minimal domination by hunting and gathering and natural scarcity is equally distributed or it reflects a specific mode of social domination and hence a variety of the performance principle but in the

first case freedom from social domination obtains but at the cost of submission to scarcity to make this the paradigm of equilibrium between culture and nature is to naturalize basic repression as the perfect harmonization of pleasure and necessity whereas in the second case where the modification of instinct is compelled by social domination basic repression is inseparable from surplus repression and the reality principle becomes inextricable from the performance principle So, in either case, basic repression is either a mythical harmony, a mythical harmony between pleasure and necessity of humanity and nature, or a vanishing quantity.

You know, this vanishing boundary between, you know, reality, you know, between what is, you know, natural necessity and social necessity. So basic repression as condition for the perpetuation of civilization presupposes another more fundamental repression through which culture first emerges as a dislocated second nature. And if culture is the domain of normative as opposed to natural compulsion, then primal repression is what institutes the break between first and second nature or force and law. law. But law's emergence from force must be enforced. And Freud's myth of the murder of the

primal father is an attempt to schematize the structure of primal repression and account for the emergence of law as a relation of force against force. So this means that Freud's myth should not be understood as a narrative about how culture, which is to say the domain of law, emerged from nature, the realm of force, but as a dialectical schema explaining why repression is always already operative in culture. Freud's schema is dialectical because it's logically paradoxical. Repression is both the origin and the consequence of culture. This makes no sense if one is trying to understand the operations of the unconscious in terms of cause and effect.

that the unconscious is not a part of nature, it's what joins and disjoins culture and nature. And then it falls then that primal repression is the phenomenon in virtue of which culture is at once continuous and discontinuous with nature. It is coextensive with what we know as history and so cannot be understood as an event in history. Unlike basic repression, primal repression is not fixed by the trade-off between pleasure and scarcity. It is not the repression of a specific incompatibility between enjoyment and survival. What Freud calls over dragon you know the original repression that institutes the unconscious as interface of force and law is a process, not an event.

What is unconscious does not pre-exist repression as a positively existing thing, a being or a substance, subsequently forced down into the unconscious conceived as a subterranean chamber or reservoir. reservoir. This is the metaphysical substantialization of the unconscious. What is unconscious rather lies in between being and non-being or presence and absence. It persists as something whose negation fails but whose failed negation is also what succeeds in constituting it. So what is repressed persists because it is neither full being nor the complete absence of being it is

what alenka zupanchik calls not fully being congenitally incomplete or partial and this is zupanchik's kind of i think very useful kind of um you know definition of um of the unconscious of the domain of um what is not fully being what is neither present or absent whenever we are dealing with an unconscious content we are dealing with something which is constitutively unconscious that is to say that it only registers in reality in the form of repression as repression and not as something that first is and is then repressed this is why if we simply focus on the content we lose this specificity we lose this dimension of not fully being as the very mode of being of this

particular thing, which is precisely the mode of repression. Repression is not something we can simply lift and get access. We can simply lift and access in this way to the unstained unconscious content or representation. If we reduce the Freudian notion of the unconscious to the difference between a content that is present to the conscious and a content that is repressed from it, if we reduce it to the opposition between being or not being conscious of something, or between consciously accepting or not accepting something, we lose it entirely. This is from an essay called Hegel and Freud, between Aufhebung and Verneignen.

Okay, this means that there is no lifting of repression that could grant us access to a repressed content as if it existed positively and this understanding of repressionist process obviates the need to specify the boundary between basic or necessary repression and surplus or unnecessary repression this is to say that there is no functional rationale for repression it does not serve to harmonize pleasure and necessity what is originally repressed is not what is counter to social productivity rather primal repression fixes the difference between what

is productive and what is counterproductive and desubstantialized or unconscious pleasure is what Lacan calls enjoyment. But enjoyment does not pre-exist repression, rather repression constitutes enjoyment. So here we see then, you know, we can see the beginnings of a critique of Marcuse's or we can see what is, you know, what is, I guess, you know, questionable in Marcuse's account. Marcuse's account begins or has as a fundamental premise, a kind of a positive substantialization of libido as what he calls

a force governing the entire organism. Marcuse characterizes libido in terms of an originary plenitude or fullness that is subsequently fragmented into a multiplicity of drives by basic repression. And this substantialization of libido as a positive force, investing the whole organism, anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's claim that desire in the pure state would be, quote, a pure fluid in a free state, flowing without interruption, streaming over the surface of a full body. That's their definition of desire in Antioedipus. There's a weird,

or actually, it's partly acknowledged by Delos and Guattari itself, but there's a peculiar anticipation of some theses of Deleuze and Guattari in Marcuse, which is one of the sense in which Marcuse is the missing link between Deleuze and Adorno. It's this positivization of libido as a separate force independent of the death drive that fuels Marcuse's suggestion that quote eros freed from surplus repression would be strengthened and the strengthened eros would as it were absorb the objective of the death instinct but this is to assume that it is death as quiescence

or stasis that is the objective of the death drive but it is precisely death as unbound residue of libidinal binding that compels the drive and allows it to derive satisfaction from dissatisfaction. This changes the coordinates of the problem of liberation. The problem of liberation does not consist in working out how to eliminate surplus repression while maintaining necessary repression. it consists rather in understanding how the surplus of enjoyment generated by repression fixes the drive thus it is not repression that is the source of unfreedom but rather

enjoyment and marcusa's schema assumes the substantial positivity of pleasure at the outset a pleasure that is then repressed for the perpetuation of civilization But this basic repression fixed by the satisfaction of needs is in fact inextricable from a surplus repression fixed by the unequal social distribution of needs. For Marcuse, surplus repression is overcome when repression produces a surplus of satisfaction that negates the satisfaction of productive repression. but desubstantializing pleasure as enjoyment changes the parameters of the problem if

repression generates enjoyment then enjoyment also generates repression or as dupe entry puts it repression always protects some enjoyment whereas enjoyment could also be said to protect certain repressions. So liberation does not consist in overcoming repression, but in exposing what is repressive and enjoyment, or as Zupanchi puts it, in locating and naming the points where the repression of some aspect of this reality is being actively sustained. If the distribution of scarcity is fixed by social relations, so is the distribution of enjoyment.

If the process of repression is what can never be present in the sense of wholly actual, because it is not fully being, this is because, again, in Zupanchik's words, it takes place all the time, but it takes place precisely as a discontinuity of the present and of being. It appears as a complication, a torsion of the present being as such. So although repression as process is coextensive with history, it cannot be synchronized with it. Repression generates history but cannot be historicized.

This means then that the exclusive alternative between structure and process is subverted by Freud, but just in a way I think which usefully complements its subversion by Marx, because Marx's genetic reconstruction of social relations and capital is, and here I'm quoting Wolfgang Fritz Haug. is he puts it it's not it's not primarily about what has happened but rather about how certain activities driven by practical needs in certain social relations lead to structural transitions of the praxis forms and the social relations

This is to say that praxis generates forms which condition it in turn, or process gives rise to structures that condition process. Social experience unfolds in between the time taken by the reproduction of labor and the time required for the reproduction of capital, but neither time coincides with the time of consciousness. The unconscious is not in time, but it is not simply timeless either. It takes place all the time, but by twisting and bursting the time we experience as present.

So against the eternalization of the unconscious as transhistorical fate, Marcuse historicizes it to show that while it shapes social relations, it is also shaped by them. And this is entirely laudable. This is the aspect of Marcuse's thought, which I think needs to be affirmed. but the problem is is that this historicization is premised upon a substantialization of libido and it's this substantialization which then allows the stepwise sequencing of negations such that the repression of pleasure culminates in the sublimation of repression

But if repression is a process running parallel with but not synchronous with history, it becomes possible to understand liberation as a process inflected by history, but not incubated by it. And this inflection is marked by those points where the complicity between repression and enjoyment is actively sustained by the interaction between praxis and social form. So that's simply my attempt to draw together the tensions in the different accounts we've been examining.

So, the suggestion is that it's actually kind of Marx and Freud who provide us with the resources, you know, to articulate the, in a way to kind of, you know, to determinately negate the antinomy of progress and to reconcile, you know, the contradictory aspects of progress. either redemptive and the emancipatory aspects of progress. Okay, so I'll stop. Sorry, that took longer than I thought, but yes, that's... Yeah, totally fine, Ray. Thank you so much.

It was a great talk and it's definitely never too long or never too much. But we do need time for us to digest this a bit. a bit. But for now, so for a second part of the session, we can be a bit more interactive. You are all invited as panelists, means that of course you can turn on the camera. I think it's good to have your camera on, it just creates a more interactive environment, more appropriate for discussion. Even if you don't ask questions, just seeing who we are, that definitely helps. And the second thing I want to mention, now we can ask questions. We can do it live via chat. We can do it live by actually saying it. You can type it in the chat or in the Q&A feature in Zoom.

And of course it's good to keep your question focused and concise. Time is short. So again, please have your camera on and let's get into questions. I see Kirill has raised hands. So Kirill, please. Hi, Ray. Thanks a lot. That was very rich and stimulating. I want to come back to the interaction between practice and social form and maybe kind of take it from some of the Nietzschean suspicion and Heideggerian letting be back to some Hegelian trust. some of the anxieties about narrative I wonder whether they can be alleviated through a conception

like a thinner conception of narrative in terms of what Brandon would call recollect reconstruction or kind of how that kind of picture of hermeneutics I guess my figure in this but I guess I just generally felt like the Benjamin to Adorno transition seemed to stay within. So the attempt was to avoid a messiah. They seemed to kind of, in a way, stay within a kind of a messianic frame, as if there really was a danger that a messiah can come back. So, for example, okay, so nature being dominated involves social subjugation. And I can see how that's true, but it seems like there's a kind of like, so there's a judgment that that's bad.

So social subjugation, that's a thing that is bad and we should not want it. But it seems like we could see social subjugation as building, as learning. So I dominate the slab of marble by subjugating myself to the rules of sculpting, for example. So in, I guess the way sellers would talk about it, what you talked about as compulsion could be us being kind of compelled by rules. So we are compelled by rules and there's a kind of a domination involved there. But yeah, like, do we, I understand why you would want to push into the direction and be kind of critical there.

but I'm kind of, I guess I'm a bit worried about the opposition of reason on the one hand, and this sort of Nietzschean, Heideggerian kind of dimension opposed to that on the other, and whether, just to finish, so like in sculpting it seems like the marble and my reasoning about marble is very much structuring my sculpting and that's a kind of a progress I'm making in just that might be rephrased as self-determination in that kind of Hegel slash Spinoza sense of necessity

that's a bit different yeah those are a few things sorry that wasn't very clear. No thanks Thanks. I mean, there's a lot, you know, there's, you know, there's a, your question has a lot of facets to it. I mean, so I guess if I start with the first thing you asked about, about narrative, is, you know, is it necessary to kind of resolve, is the narrating, is a kind of retrospective narrative about who we are and how, you know, or who we became who we are necessarily complicit with oppression and injustice.

That's a difficult question, yes. I mean, look, but the problem is that the Brandomian kind of narrative where, well, very simply, the problem would be that it's hard to see how this kind of Brandomian proposition about the need to forgive or predecessors, to give the most charitable kind of, you know, hermeneutic interpretation of their motivations and achievements, so as to kind of, you know, to make them, you

know, optimally rational and benevolent, so that we can see that, you know, so we can salvage the rationality, the kind of the imperfect rationality or the incomplete rationality of actuality, is that, you know, the for the thinkers we're looking at in particular, this is just, you know, it's too Hegelian in the problematic sense. I mean, it means that the crimes of history can only be retrospectively redeemed through

through a narrative that makes compensation possible. So in other words, that if our predecessors you know committed um you know if their confusions and errors entailed what we now consider to be crimes um you know crimes against you know racism colonialism etc etc then we have to find a way to kind of um um you know to i guess to you know to to forgive or redeem them so in order to if we want to hold on to any hope of you know improving conditions in the present okay um and to which

you know the kind of the margin rejoinder is that um it's not necessary to um in a way this the problem with this account is that either you advert to the kind of the cunning of history you know the cunning of history there's a reason in history which is you know being played out um against all appearances to the contrary and our task is to kind of you know to to excavate the cunning of history to see how what happened had to happen you know and um and that's then the objection is that this becomes that the slaughter bench of history is redeemed,

but only redeemed by the narrative and not by the realization that the narrative perpetuates the injustice and we have to intervene now in history to transform the world. So the only thing that that we're actually kind of redeem what has happened or past injustice is a revolutionary intervention there but this revolutionary intervention is incompatible with um you know charity or trust towards the kind of you know the benevolent intentions of our predecessors So, I think the Marxian rejoinder is that, you know, it's not necessary either to, you

know, to trust or to kind of to indict, you know, the bourgeois predecessors, you know, bourgeois ideologues, those responsible for those who kind of try to kind of defend and articulate the virtues of progress, if we understand that they were in fact, you know, their proclamations were, you know, shaped by social forces, okay, which we can identify and which we can denounce without kind of um you know um simply kind of um you know condemning um condemning them in other

words what's to be it's not about either forgiving or condemning our predecessors it's about recognizing how what they said and how they acted was history was you know socially historically compelled by social forces, okay, over which, you know, which they contributed to, but which they ultimately were not in control of. And it's those social forces that must be condemned. And, you know, the point about the revolutionary intervention is to understand how, yes, it's necessary to history must be transformed, because, you know, the social dynamic that has been playing out and that has led us to the current you know conjuncture is um is pathological is destructive

and is incompatible with the actualization of of you know human freedom or humanity and this is why and i guess the problem with the the brandomian narrative is that it's a narrative that seems to preclude the kind of radical social transformation that would jeopardize the conditions of narration. Because that's the point about a revolutionary intervention is that you can't tell a story about a revolutionary break. There's no kind of, you can't bridge, there's no continuity between, or rather there's no kind of, you know, the norms of justification and of comprehension that we use

within the ambit of, you know, the current society in our current historical situation, you know, can't be used to kind of, to link up historical ruptures or historical discontinuities. Now, that's not to say, therefore, that there's a kind of, you know, that revolutions are, that there's an incommensurability, that there are historical incommensurabilities. And the points, again, and Marx is very, I think is very clear about why we can, you know, insist on the need, we can, you know, we can acknowledge the violence of history and the violent discontinuity of historical becoming without, and insist on its intelligibility,

without saying that this discontinuity implies some kind of incommensurability or unintelligibility between historical modes. That's why Marx is not Foucault. That's why it's not about epistems, it's about modes of production which don't kind of seamlessly evolve into one another, but which have been produced by human collaboration and human conflict, which are, you know, the products of both human antagonism and human kind of collaboration, and the challenge

is to understand both. And the claim is that we can, you know, we have the, you know, we need to develop the kind of the conceptual resources to understand, you know, the mechanisms through which both you know antagonism and collaboration are intertwined um and then and then this would be the you know this gets us out of either having to kind of either having to condemn or forgive you know our historical predecessors um history is not an object of judgment you can't judge history which is not to say which is to say it's neither to be affirmed nor condemned and i think

in a way the point about the benjamin quote is that it's often read as a as a negative judgment on history as if benjamin is simply kind of condemning history history is just this unfolding catastrophe but in a way that's another version of bourgeois moralism because it's a bourgeoisie shop on her you know shop on her you condemns history history is just kind of you know this relentless bloody catastrophe with no rhyme no reason to it okay but then that becomes an an apologia for reaction. So the point is that both, you know, whether you affirm or condemn history, everything remains, everything stays the same. And the point is that your understanding of history must compel you to transform it. And the claim is that no mere narrative can do this.

That's Marx's point, no story about history. And even when he says history, you know, the history, history is a history of class struggle. But the point is that class struggle is precisely what can't be narrated, what can't be kind of simply, you know, enveloped in a kind of, you know, all embracing narrative. Great, thank you, Ray. I'm going to get the chat, looking for questions, just a quick one in the chat for Dishand. He wants to know about your next books, when they are coming out, specifically the books on Kant, Stellars and Marx.

Sometime in 2060. No, it's right now. So I've accumulated all this material. I was going to, I had a plan to write a book about Sellars. But then Sellars got me into Marx, you know, and then I was going to try to write about sellers and marks but that proved theoretically unfeasible um so now i'm just you know working on this book on marks you know marks and these marxian thinkers um but i haven't abandoned sellers i'm hoping to gather the seller's material separately and kind of you know and perhaps you know turn it into a um a book of some sort so um it's just the kind of uh you know the focus has

changed but this this this uh the book on the you know the faithlessness project is the the thing i'm concentrating on right now okay great um i see uh raise hands from uh mario uh mario Free to unmute and ask the question. Thank you. Yes, hello. Okay. Hello, Ray. Thank you for the presentation. It was most insightful. So my question is about how, like, according to you, and I agree, Adorno's problem is that he somehow fails to provide a link between the interruption enacted by reflection, where the compulsory to identify is interrupted, and the revolutionary interruption that, like,

Benjamin will have in mind. So I guess my question is about a relationship between like the term and negation in thought and the term and negation in practice or the mediation between the two. And if I understood you correctly, you have argued that Marx give us the tool to think this mediation. And I tend to agree, but okay, I was simply wondering then, how do you think this mediation will work, like assuming that the party was traditionally the name for it. So that's the question. OK. Yeah, that's a very difficult question. Well, I would just say this is that understanding

the dynamic between practice and social form, okay? The interaction between practice and social form. So first of all, an attentiveness to the importance of Marx's analysis of the structure of social form. In other words, how everything we do, how we act, How we act and think is kind of shaped by these social forms which are not only imperceptible, but actually, you know, of which we have a kind of an inverted representation in everyday life, you know, or in everyday consciousness.

So I think understanding the topsy-turvy, what Marx calls the inverted world of the way in which the essential relations or the real relations of production you know, become inverted or become objectively kind of inverted. And it's this objective inversion that generates their subjective misrepresentation. I think understanding that is crucial for being able to analyze the situation or being able to achieve any traction on what it is that is actually happening.

actually happening. And the point about determining negation is that if you, you know, if the the negation is to destroy the workings of this kind of social machinery. And as facilitated by these forms, then we have to

In any kind of, well, any concrete situation, you know, realize what it is, you know, what economic, you know, I guess, what economic factors are in play. I mean, I'm talking, I live in Lebanon. To understand what's happening here, to understand the social crisis that is unfolding, it's obvious that it is driven by the activities of bankers and the complicity between banking sector and a sectarian system. and you know understanding you know who the the proper targets of political

intervention should be is something that's you know I guess that's the simplest way of understanding what it is to to determine negation or determining negation so theoretically so look I mean to answer your question is that theoretically I think you know there has to be you have to have the danger of saying that kind of you know the interruption of regression is possible at every moment is that it absolves you from the need from a concrete analysis of of the situation, okay? Okay, that's a familiar, but the point is that the concrete analysis of the situation

can simply kind of reiterate certain kind of formulaic categories or certain, you know, formulaic modes of analysis. And yeah, actually, you know, to relate this to the point of the paper is that what's going on, you know, what, you know, the absence, the psychic, you know, the psychic or libidinal factors in place, such, for instance, the kind of, the fact that even in an ostensibly revolutionary situation, a situation in which, you know, grotesque violence, you know, injustice is being kind of perpetrated on a population, the population does not, you know, seems incapable of,

you know, collectively organizing and, you know, reacting in the way in which it's supposed to react, according to a classical analysis. That's also important, understanding the ways in which people can be people's people can enjoy um their you know their degradation their immiseration okay that's a very concrete you know there's a sense in which if people sometimes inactivity or the the incapacity to act even when it seems your life is at stake you know that you're you're it's clear that you know you're going to die if this kind of condition is continues there's clearly there's a kind of, you know, there's a compulsive, you know, components at work there, and it

would help to be able to kind of, you know, to identify it, so that, you know, to figure out what, you know, so as to kind of, I guess, if something like, you know, to know what kinds of emotions might actually be relevant, could be intelligently processed in order to give rise to action. Because it seems that some people, sometimes anger and indignation can reach a kind of

pitch where they become, they cancel out and they become, you know, they lead to inactivity. So, so all this to say that there's, yeah, there has to be, it's, it's, it's too easy to simply say that kind of, you know, interruption, negation is possible all the time at every moment. It's not. And understanding why it's not is the only hope of negating that negation or understanding what prevents or obstructs the activation of negation or the spur to practical negation. So, yeah, that's a kind of vague answer to your question.

But it's really, I mean, the truth is, I don't think anyone really, you know, in the wake of the collapse of these kind of the classic program assist kind of models, you know, that after the kind of the demise of classical programmatism, then there's a kind of, you know, the, the alternatives we've seen have, you know, don't seem to be. well, yeah, the question is whether they are any more effective, you know, and I think that's, but I, you know, the answer to a question like that, people who are actively engaged, I mean, the answers to questions like this are not, can be, you know, I'm not in a position to give them,

they're not theoretical abstract spectators of questions, they're questions that really can only be kind of um um answered by through concrete analysis you know so people kind of you know you know describing you know what they're trying to do and why it's not working and what else might work you know so um yeah okay great thank you ray um looks like we have a few more more questions um going going in the uh in the uh order the hand was uh was raised i see raviv being first raviv first and you'd enter on your on the camera and yeah as the question thank you yeah actually he kind of addressed what i wanted to ask you about in his last answer i was just i wanted to i was

really interested in what he said about um uh the failure of programmatism and like the impossibility of establishing a definitive like what is to be done um but he kind of expanded that on that already so i mean i'm pretty satisfied with what he said about okay great uh let's move next to the following uh question i see erin being the following one i don't know uh raise your questions thank you yeah can you hear me yes we can yeah good so um my question is sort of not sure it's it's fair, but I want to raise the necessity and the adequacy of the kind of Freudian concepts and the Freudian framing for formulating and articulating the sort of necessary principles

for the kind of social transformation and practical transformation that would sort of emancipate us. And it seems to me like the issue here and what Freud captures is the sort of entanglement of rational necessity and causal necessity in concepts of progress and in, I guess, in Adorno's framing in the instrumental reason. And what I think is interesting and sort of unique to Hegel is the way that progress is a form that's inherent to any act of knowing, right? That knowing as it takes place in time has a progressive structure. And especially if we think of sort of philosophical enlightenment as a collective social practice conceived as science and as

Wissenschaft rather than as an individual process of trying to achieve enlightenment. Progress just is what it is to know more than you used to know, right? Like that the rationalness, the form of rational necessity that Hegel's trying to capture is progress. And so to be a rational actor is to see the world progressively because you know more than you knew, and you're in a better position to act than you did. And so I see when Adorno sort of imports the sort of Freudian framework to explain the failures of our rational capacities or failures of Marxist transformation, it seems to me he's kind of entangling rational

necessity and causal necessity. Instrumental reason is both practical reason and compulsion kind of bound up together in the unconscious. And I don't see, I see how you can sort of try to work through how we can get out of this, but I'm not sure of the necessity of the Freudian framing for it, especially if we take practical reason and sort of practical activity as what reason is and our capacity to have instrumental reason and theoretical reason as a function of practical reason, right? Sort of in a naturalistic account of rational normativity or conceptual normativity as a

sort of thing that we as natural rational animals can do. it's our practical capacities that allow us to evaluate and intervene on our compulsions. And so that's always what I saw as the problem with Adorno's instrumental reason. Isn't this other thing from practical reason? And I sort of get lost in thinking that when we need to make the necessary arguments and principles for intervening in our collective system of life, the Freudian conceptual inheritance sort of traps us in the kind of ghetto of contemporary continental philosophy. No one else uses them, and they're not an animal or tractable in the

same way that computational theory or other forms of naturalism are. So I guess I'd ask whether you see this framework is necessary and how it relates to other ways of thinking about psyche and practice. Okay. Well, I mean, I guess the, you know, the opening or the crucial claim is that, you know, Knowing more allows you to do more. I think you said that on the Hegelian account, that simply progress is simply cognitive progress, progress of rationality and rational self-understanding.

And therefore, this allows us to do more. But it's not so clear that that is, you know, it's not so clear where that has to be the case. In progress, for Hegel, it's also the kind of progress of freedom. because spirit is freedom. So the evolution of spiritual self-consciousness is a gradual coming to self-consciousness of freedom. And it's true. So in that sense, it's true that the more a spirit comes to recognize itself as spirit, it becomes

to kind of, you know, it starts to recognize its own power, its own capacity. It stops mistaking, it no longer kind of attributes to alien forces, you know, the results of its own doing, its own doings, its own activities. But then, I mean, look, I'm not, this is not to kind of, you know, I'm certainly not, I don't want to kind of, it's not, you know, I'm the last person to kind of want to kind of, you know, diminish, you know, the power of Hegel's kind of account or schema. And in many ways, I think Marx is still kind of, I mean, the claim is simply that there's a, I think that the Marxian claim is that if spirit really knows itself, and I think Adorno is making the same claim.

It's not that it has to recognize that it can't simply, you know, the question is how does it understand its dependence on non-spiritual forces? In other words, how does spirit understand its relationship to matter? If it simply asserts its sovereignty and independence, well, that's the kind of, you know, that's the delusion, that's the ultimate, that's the delusion at the heart of, you know, an incomplete enlightenment, okay? That's, and that's, and which is why in a sense that it's not just, it's not simply about kind of, you know, trying to reduce reasons to causes.

It's that the kind of, you know, the articulation of reasons and causes is complex, especially when it comes to precisely the realm of spirits, in that human beings, the claim is that, you know, rational agency and spiritual self-consciousness is also shaped by, you know, material causal factors, which have been unrecognized or which have gone unidentified. And by recognizing them, and that's what liberates spirit from, frees it from its throttle to instrumental rationality. Because in a way, it's precisely, so for spirits,

spirits kind of self-rationalizations, or rather, rationality becomes rationalization when you, you know, preemptively or prematurely, you know, assert your independence and autonomy from causes, from causal factors. And ultimately, so that, you know, when Marx says, you know, human beings make their own history, but they do not make it in circumstances of their own choosing. There's a dialectic of subject and object. What Marx is saying is that human beings produce human beings are agents and they're you know but they they are incomplete they're imperfectly

rational agents and what they want you know and what they you know the you know the reasons they have for you know for for for doing things and for you know transforming the world are themselves partly shaped by causes okay or enveloped causes and it's only you know retrospectively that they can disentangle reasons from causes. The claim is that because human beings are simultaneously spiritual and material beings, they're both rational and causal. And, you know, Hegel, you know, is keenly aware of this. But then, you know, if, you know, I take Marx's critique to be that kind of in,

there's a sense in which in rationalizing the institutions of bourgeois civil society, he failed to kind of, he imperfectly or incompletely, he failed to live up to the kind of the demand of, you know, which is to say to understand how, you know, Hegel criticizes, you know, Kantian autonomy, okay, he says that the point is to kind of, you know, overcome the opposition between heteronomy and autonomy, okay, but the claim that the opposition between heteronomy and

autonomy can be purely, can be overcome, you know, through the resources of spirit and the resources of a historically specific shape of spirit seem actually ends up resubordinating spirits to a disavowed heteronomy or a disavowed dimension of causation. And I guess this is what Marx and Freud are saying. It's not that human beings are the hapless puppets of libidinal and historical forces, but simply that we need to factor in the influence of these libidinal and historical forces in order to free ourselves from them.

because there was something we had failed to recognize. So in a way, it's perfectly consonant with Hegelian enlightenment, with enlarging the scope of spiritual self-consciousness, but precisely by not preemptively kind of, you know, absolutizing the sovereignty of spirits or the independence of spirits. I mean okay there's Hegel Freud there's a lot to say I mean there's actually this is something I'm very interested in kind of and I not just in the kind of you know the you know in the Slovenian school but there's there's other kinds of articulations of you know Hegel and Freud which I'm very interested in but the claim is that human beings in

In the human realm, reasons and causes cannot be simply, you know, kind of, you can't cleanly separate them. Okay. And it's not, and the problem is if you try to kind of insulate the space of reasons from the domain of causes, if you don't kind of count, if you think that the kind of, you know, the space of reasons is this hermetically sealed kind of, you know, living space. within the wilderness of causes, then, you know, that's the, I guess that's the, that's a kind of blindness, that's a kind of delusion. So I think it's not,

you know, it's about dialectically articulating the interdependence of reasons and causes and to show how, you know, it's, you know, to claim that reasons are shaped by causes. And, and in overcoming those causes, they regenerate, you know, unfamiliar causes is not, it's not a capitulation, it's not reduction, it's not reducing reasons to causes. It's simply saying that the separation of reasons from causes is an ongoing process and it's incomplete. And I guess that's what, I think that's the positive sense in which Marx and Freud are heirs

of the radical enlightenment. That's why they're not kind of genealogists. They're not genealogical debunkers. It's not all about power. On the contrary, it's about kind of the possibility of emancipation, but simply by comprehending these historical forces and, you know, libidinal factors. Okay, thank you, Ray. Thank you, Aaron. We have a few more questions coming up. The next one will be from Levin. Levin, please. Hello. Thank you, Dr. Brazier, for your wonderful talk. I have two

questions. The first question is, how do Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse help us to understand contemporary resurgence of new liberal identity politics? So you discussed about identity and and non-identity. So how does Walter Benjamin help us to understand new liberal identity politics? So that is my first question. My second question is, Walter Benjamin deployed theology to provide a new understanding of historical materialism. So do you think that Benjaminian secular deployment of more than human spiritual worldview contains the risk of secular reductionism.

How does Benjamin deal with secular spiritual dichotomy? Thank you. Okay. Well, the first question about identity. Well, it's really Adorno who talks about identity and non-identity and the dialectic of identity and non-identity. as I know, and I know my knowledge of Benjamin is very limited. So as far as I know, those are not terms he uses. So in a way, I can say something, you know, in Adorno identity, you know, identity and non-identity, it has a very different meaning to the sense in which people talk about

kind of you know identity politics or neoliberal identity politics as you just said. I guess the I mean it's a much for Adorno it's much brought it's simply that you know conceptual determination involves identification so reason can't do without you know identity. To conceptualize is to identify um but Adorno's point is simply that every conceptualization is you know incomplete and that um the mistake identity you know identity thinking only becomes pathological when it claims to be sufficient to the object when it you know refuses to recognize um you know the uh the

the discrepancy between its identification of the object and all the characteristics of the object. Or it assumes that the concept is perfectly adequate to the object. And that's what Adorno is criticizing. So identity politics is something different. It means constructing a kind of a political agenda on the basis of an identity, which

I guess, you know, can take many, many shapes and forms. I think there's a lot of, look, I mean, I think there's two kinds of identity politics, okay? There's neoliberal identity politics, in which, you know, marginalized, people who have been marginalized and oppressed and excluded, you know, rightly kind of, you know, proclaim their, you know, their rights, you know, want to kind of, you know, fight back against their kind of marginalization and, you know, use whatever pejorative identification has been used to kind of to denigrate and oppress them. they reclaim and try to use as a positive self-identification.

Unfortunately, in a capitalist society, those forms of positive self-identification by marginalized and oppressed groups became were kind of gradually came to be no cynically kind of instrumentalized and exploited by, you know, by capitalist institutions, when they saw a way when they, in a way they kind of, they saw a way of driving a wedge in between, you know, say the politics of identity and the politics of class because in a way that you know the the classic stories

identity politics emerges in the wake of the failures of the perceived failures of class politics so the um you know gender race sexuality you know which were ignored or disregarded by a kind of a certain form of class politics in the you know in the 20th century are gradually you know, kind of come to the forefront in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and up to today. But originally, those politics were not incompatible, were not seen as antagonistic to class politics. They were seen as a supplement to class politics, which is why there's a good sense, I think there's a very

positive legacy, you know, or because there's a good identity politics, perfectly legitimate identity politics, and it only becomes, you know, I guess it gets turned into the bad kind of neoliberal identity politics when you simply kind of completely separate these questions, you know, these issues about, you know, identity and identification from class. Now it's true that some people deliberately, you know, some, some liberals are particularly keen to seize upon identity and categories, and to brandish them against class and to kind of use this, you know, to claim that, you know, Marxists are, you know, entirely kind of insensitive or

indifferent to oppression based on race, gender, or sexuality. But historically, this is kind of a caricature. It's simply false. Marxists, there's anti-racism struggles. The Communist Party in the American South, you know, I think there's a, it's simply a lie to claim that kind of, you know, Marxists were never interested in, you know, race, gender, or sexuality. It's true that, you know, that they were, you know, I guess there was a kind of a certain, you know, an orthodoxy that belittled the significance of these categories, but I think that that's no longer

the case now, or at least, you know, I hope it's not. So that's, I think that the claim that class, you know, precludes, you know, any kind of struggle on the basis of, you know, race, gender, or sexuality is just false, and it's just unfounded. So I guess, I just think it's always important to say, yeah, whose identity politics are you talking about? So there's corporate identity politics, which is obviously kind of, you know, completely cynical and risible. And then there's people, you know, who've been, who have been, whose lives have

been made almost impossible by, you know, all sorts of like horrible forms of oppression. and those people are trying to be allowed to live and to enjoy the freedoms that others, I guess, that the majority of the population enjoys. But the key is to understand that those freedoms can't be achieved independently of class, I guess, that the class you can never separate, if you're talking about oppression, class can't be, you know, factored out of the,

you know, the mechanism of oppression. So that's why if you're rich, you know, if you're rich, and but of you know it doesn't matter if you're you know you're what your identity is so long as you're rich you're gonna you're gonna be fine whereas if you're poor and um you know belong to one of these marginalized identities your life is going to be kind of uh you know even more horrible than um than normal so yeah that's that's you know really all all i would say about that um Okay, thank you, Ray. Thank you, Lavin. I see Nicolas. Nicolas, please. Thanks. So my question might be a bit naive or left field, but I feel compelled to ask it. Nevertheless,

there seems to me to be some kind of intimation in this paper, if I'm not being presumptuous, that what you refer to as a revolutionary interruption may take the shape of something like an enactment or an activation of, let's say, Badoo's communist hypothesis as a way of breaking the kind of circuit that repeats domination through the self-undermining domination of domination and so on. And I'm wondering if this is, A, if this is an accurate characterization, and I guess maybe I'll leave it at that and just rephrase it. Like, in other words, do you think that Badoo's political project, vis-a-vis specifically his idea of like the rebirth of history, the opening up of history, addresses some of the challenges posed by things like the entwinement of basic and surplus repression and so on?

And if not, where might its inadequacy lie? And maybe even what might Badoo be overlooking or overestimating when his thought is applied to the kind of problematic of the antinomies of progress? Thank you. That's a very good question. Very interesting question. um okay it's clear i think that bad use whole theory of the event is generated you know as a response to the um you know the perceived failures of programmatic marxism the claim that you know the class struggle you know the claim that you know you need to identify what phase of the

struggle that what historical phase of the struggle we find ourselves in to be able to to determine what to do. And obviously the kind of the French Communist Party kind of miserable kind of embarrassment in May 68th is like what he has in mind. So the claim is that the event is precisely kind of something that is not programmed by history. It's precisely kind of it's indiscernible from the vantage of the state of the situation, state of the historical situation, any kind of allegedly historical representation of what is and is not possible now. So the account of the events and attempt to salvage possibility, to salvage a potentiality

that is not, you know, representable, that is not kind of commensurate with what is known about the situation. So, a situation includes more than it presents. So in any situation, there's a, you know, the task is to look for the trace, you know, kind of a site for a potential eruption. So it's clear what the political motivation for Bad Views Account is clear. And I think, and also in that sense, what is genuinely kind of admirable about Bad Views Account is a way in which he was trying to salvage

the possibility of revolutionary politics once all these, in the wake of the perceived collapse of the militant working class. So I think those are all positive and admirable aspects of Badiou's account. So in Badiou, the event is not kind of… It's interesting, in Badiou, there's a kind of cognitive discipline, even though the event is precisely what is subtracted from knowledge, it's not recognizable within the encyclopedial

situation, but there's a kind of discipline. You need to be able to tell the difference between an evental site and the element of a situation to be able to know whether an intervention is necessary. The other interesting thing in Badiou is that an event is precisely not something present. It's not something kind of, you know, it's not representable, but neither is it. It's not of the order of knowledge. So it's not present at hand in Heidegger sense, but nor is it of the order of lived experience. It's not about like how excited you are by something. It involves a kind of, there's a cognitive discipline in deciding to decide, deciding whether or not something has taken place and it's retroactive.

All the examples that he gives are retroactive. So that's why, but there's, but the limitations of, you know, I think the limitations of bad use account, I think, is that, you know, politics is, you know, politics are severed from political economy. I mean, it's one thing to kind of to reject the kind of the envelopment of politics from the critique of political economy, to say that, you know, the critique of political economy will tell you what to do, which is obviously, no, it won't. And surely it's hard to kind of, you know, the claim that it would, there's no pretense of that in Marx.

I mean, Marx clearly doesn't, you know, they're connected, but the task is precisely to work out how the kind of, you know, the abstract analysis of these mechanisms of, you know, social reproduction, et cetera, you know, how are they, you know, concretely kind of instantiated in this particular situation, so we can understand what might be possible. So the claim is that in the absence, if you disconnect politics from political economy entirely, then you just sever the bond altogether, then the theory of the event operates

at a level of abstraction which in a way is is both an antidote to quietism and to resignation and to you know the time is not yet rapism but it's also like it opens up um you know the problems about um whether or not an event you know um it also kind of opens up a kind of decisionism, a kind of, you know, the temptation of decisionism, you know, and, you know, whether or not, you know, all the examples that Badiou gives are relatively uncontroversial. Everyone is more or less agreed that, you know, 1789 and 1917 were

events you know um but um 1968 is an interesting example because it's much more equivocal because 1968 you know there's a sequence that leads straight to kind of uh you know corporate capitalism you know um or woke capitalism if you want on the one hand and the sequence that leads to a figure like bad use so it's not so clear and so then the claim is that it comes at a high cost this you know um freeing the possibility of radical intervention from historical progress programmatism although laudable it comes at a high cost which means that often like as if like nothing you don't need to know anything about you know um what's happening you know about the state

of the economy to figure out you know what can and can't be done and um so by the way i always find so however i find bad use analysis of political sequences and um you know situations actually interesting precisely because they they don't require the uh you know the you know the heavy machinery of his theory. So when he's writing about the rebirth of history, actually there's very little of it. His theory of the events or the philosophical machinery is really unnecessary. And that's because he has years of activism and of historical knowledge.

So in a way, I think there's a kind of paradox in Badiou in that he contrives this theory to kind of to salvage the possibility of radical, you know, improvisible intervention. But actually, in his own analyses of what, you know, for instance, his analyses of things like, you know, the yellow vests in France, which is very controversial, he really pissed a lot of people off for that but um you know he it's very concrete like he's saying that this is a you know what everyone proclaims as a virtue of this social movement i.e that the kind of the fact

that it seems to be a an indiscriminate combination of of right and left of patriotism and anarchism and everything in between you know he thinks no that's this great weakness that's why it's not going to kind of you know lead to anything and time will tell whether or not he's right but yeah so I think but anyway that diagnosis is entirely independent of his philosophical machinery so but I think that you know it is necessary at some point to you know it just enriches your your analytical resources for you know investigating a situation if you you know some understanding

of class dynamics is seems seems to be kind of indispensable so um yeah thanks for the question yes thank you thank you thank you nicolas and ray uh we have a question uh in the chat from from justin right i'm i'm wondering if you see it if you want me to read it or um from the chat it's really up to you uh let me see if i can see it um yes okay yes i can see it um uh so i'll read the question i appreciate the conceptual untangling to bring us to a space of more subtle analysis my question is how does liberation even conceived as a process

operate for you and how does liberation operate when there are many challenges to it having a stable transcendent basis outside the terms of history is your idea of liberation in the register of pragmatic ramification of possible futures or is there some essential utopia to to be revealed and for whom i.e what collective social entity is implied is there an organismic basis from history or is there an organismic bias from history of the human as the lone or important actor blinding us to future hybridity of subjects okay um um okay so let me just try to go through it step by step how does liberation even conceived as a

process operate for you um and how does it operate when there's so many challenges when there are many challenges to it having a stable transcendent basis well i don't think it there's it has any transcendent basis i think there is no basis for liberation outside of history so the only liberation is in and through history, even if it's liberation from, you know, what history has been up until now. Marx says that history hasn't started. What we're living in is prehistory, and the point, you know, history will begin with communism, but capitalism, you know, belongs as part of prehistory. So I think that liberation is, you know, it implies a kind of some notion of freedom.

and I think that Marx is the best and the most radical theorist of freedom, of human liberation. He means, you know, it's derived in part from, you know, classical German philosophy from, you know, from Kant and Hegel. In the sense that, you know, to be human is, you know, to be capable of freedom. And therefore, it is incumbent upon humans to try to kind of to realize their potential for freedom.

because only by doing so can they achieve their humanity, because humanity precisely is not an empirical category. But he said what's preventing the realization of this freedom are these basic material relations, the way in which we have organized our current society. and in that regard it's you know what what prevents us from being free is ourselves okay we are you know we are the ones who are kind of obstructing our own capacity for freedom so next so is your is your idea of liberation the register of pragmatic

ramification of possible futures. Well, by pragmatic, I mean, the question of liberation is a pragmatic question, because it involves, you know, the conjunction of theory and practice, you know, freedom is an idea, but it's an idea, which is, you know, inert, unless it is realized in practice. In other words, there's no such thing as purely intellectual freedom or cognitive freedom. You can only be free if you are practically free as well, which means that the task, the intellectual free, cognitive freedom, cognitive liberation, and practical

liberation are inseparable. And the possible futures, I mean possible futures, yes, know some future other than the one that seems to be kind of programmed by capitalism must be invisible if humans are to be capable of you know freeing themselves i mean there are plenty of people who think that they're not and you know that this idea is a pipe dream. So, I realize that there are plenty of people who deny the possibility of freedom in this sense and therefore who think that it's a delusion to think that human

beings can construct a future for themselves without capitalism. But those people are or, you know, that involves, to me, that those people are, you know, I think philosophically confused, because ultimately their rationales for these claims are philosophical, and I think that those philosophical rationales are defeasible. So that's why these possible futures, these other possible futures, are both, you know, cognitively and practically necessary. But there's not just, there has to be a kind of,

there isn't just one that's programmed by the present, but there are some obviously that we should strive to realize. And we know all the ones that we don't want to be realized, So we should try to invest all our energies in realizing the ones that are worth having. And you say, is there some essential utopia to be revealed? No, there's no essential utopia. There's simply the idea that the way the world is right now, it doesn't have to be this way. The way the world is right now is not programmed by a divinity, whether that divinity be a

kind of a traditional deity or whether it be some kind of, you know, some more, I guess, a more exotic kind of material force. And for whom is for, you know, for, you know, anyone who's oppressed and dominated. And it seems to me that, you know, the, it's becoming the people who, you know, I don't, I don't think it's, it's very kind of, the claim that there's something very, very wrong with the way the world is right now doesn't seem to require you know a very a lengthy

kind of philosophical rationale i mean um even the people who who think that there's nothing to be done about it wouldn't deny that there is something very wrong with the way the world is so the question is really whether we can or can't do something about it um and for whom it's i think it's for the majority of humankind because it's becoming increasingly impossible just to live in this current condition. What collective social entity is implied? Well, first of all, David Sloan- it's not clear it's not you know some form of collective social no entity is necessary what form it will take is open to you know to debate and that's precisely what has to be worked out okay.

Okay. For Marx, it's the commune. The commune is the necessary collective social entity that's required for the transition towards communism. It's not yet communist. I think that's important. I think some people seem to think that the commune is already communistic. And I don't think so. I think it's merely the first form of collective self-organization which, you know, facilitates the transition to communism. And finally, is there an organismic bias from history of the human as a loan or important action binding us to future hybridity of Soviets? Well, okay, you could say that, well, look, what's really interesting about the Adorno claim is that precisely humanity is precisely doesn't yet exist.

Okay, so all these claims about the privileging of the human assume that the human already exists and that there's some kind of, you know, selection. But, you know, in a way, the claim, you know, if the human, if the identification of the human is based on a discrimination between the human and the non-human, and especially a hierarchical discrimination, saying that, you know, this is valuable and human, and this is worthless and non-human, that's precisely the symptom of the failure of the, you know, the non-achievement of humanity, according to Adorno, because humanity would

only kind of be realized when it no longer, when it no longer fears, and therefore needs to dominate what is not human. That's what the achievement of humanity is. And that means that the realization of human freedom is precisely the termination of anthropocentrism. Because human beings no longer need, when human beings are free, they would no longer need to compulsively separate themselves from what is not human because they wouldn't fear what is not human. And again, that's part of the dialectic of enlightenment. It's precisely because, you know, we're threatened by the subhuman and the superhuman

that we are compelled to kind of keep reasserting our humanity. But this is an assertion compelled by fear. Okay. And that fear is an unfreedom. It means that we haven't realized our freedom, which is to say that we haven't achieved our humanity. So, there's no organismic bias, because to be human, humanity is not a biological predicate. And to be human is not simply to be a type of organism. And, you know, the future hybridity of subjects, well, in this sense, the kind of the kind of you know the achievement of humanity envisaged by adorno is one in which

humans could um you know again wouldn't you know the identity of the human wouldn't exclude you know non-identity wouldn't kind of suppress or dominate non-identity and here the term hybridity is unnecessary hybridity assumes that you can have two positive characteristics or two positive entities that you fuse or you conmingle in a way. And the rhetoric of hybridity in a way kind of assumes kind of substantial differences and then just proposes to kind of, you know, to mix them or fuse them. Whereas the overcoming of domination would allow

us to allow different kinds of creatures to coexist without there being a need for domination. And that's better than hybridity, I think. It's more desirable than hybridity. I don't know if that answers your question, but I guess it's kind of the most I can say right now. And I do see a follow-up question from David right below it. Okay, I'll read David's question relating to the question just above.

if the unconscious or repression is neither within historical time nor eternal is this an unresolved antinomony or is a solution to it at hand okay um yes this is another difficult question um should we do it next time bray if you think it's getting later I'll try to give a quick answer. I'll try to give an answer because then, you know, yeah, so, yeah, this is a real problem because it's like on the one hand, you know, so, you know, we said or I said, so, yeah, the, you know, the unconscious is not a historical.

It's not this kind of this trans historical kind of, you know, factor or element. It is shaped by historical and social forces. But then on the other hand, it's not simply kind of, it's not, it doesn't, it is not wholly social and historical. It's not, in other words, it's functioning and its character is not kind of simply socially and historically determined.

So that's what, so I think this is something I haven't worked out, you know, but I think the suggestion would be this, is that it's both that in a way that there's something that human beings, insofar as human beings make history and sociality, insofar as it's human activity that shapes, you know, social forms and kind of, you know, historical structures, then the claim would be that what is the unconscious is the factor in that formative activity, which is never perceptible or which is not accessible to those human agents themselves.

But it's also, you know, it's both subject and object. It's both on the side of the subjective human agent producing historical or social form, But it's also then, you know, on the side of those forms, it becomes in a way sedimented in those forms, and it acts back upon the subject. So I guess the idea is that it's like a stratum of, you know, it's a kind of, it's a stratum

which is sedimented within the social and historical stream, but doesn't flow smoothly within it. And actually also generates substantial structures. It's not just the silt along the riverbed, bed it also kind of forms and you know you know generates these kinds of uh you know submarine kind of structures which shape the current which shape the flow of the uh of the river um okay that's very metaphorical but that's um um so yeah it's um

you know i don't have a solution at hand but i think that this is definitely something that I think Marcuse is absolutely right to try to kind of overcome the antinomony and try to kind of articulate the unconscious and history. But then, and I think that's really one of the most admirable aspects of his work. It's just, I guess the only thing would be that he has too positive a conception of the drive, I think. I think desubstantializing the drive is the key factor. And here I think that Marx is necessary because in a way if you simply insist that the drive is

what articulates nature and culture and leave it at that, then you once again you remove the drive from, you know, you dehistoricize the drive. So I think you have to give an account of, of Marx's account of social forms is also an account of the shaping of the drive. So that's why I think that Marx has to be used to supplement Freud. But obviously, beyond that gesture, I mean, how exactly to do it is very... Samu Tomschik's work is very instructive in this regard the capitalist unconscious i think his work is really incredibly important so that would be the place to you know one of the places to start looking

that's right okay um Thank you David for the question, very good answer. Now this was a good three hour session, maybe it's time to wrap it up, unless Ray you want to go more than this, it's really up to you. I wouldn't mind calling a halt here, that would be a good place to stop, I think. Yeah, that's probably fair. Definitely was a good three hour session. So it's time to stop and resume next week. Just a few notes to close the session. We're going to have a few summer, summer recordings posted recordings posted on Instagram and also on YouTube.

This was the first out of the two sessions with Ray. The second one will be next week, same time and place. They will be called the Reproduction, Presupposition and Struggle, Pierre Dardot and Cristina Laval on Marx2Logix. I'm going to post the link in the chat. that's where you can find more information on the session and the Zoom link. Now, one question for Ray. I'm hearing that the readings are not English. So Ray, can you point us to the right place to find them? Well, okay. So next week I'll be discussing a book by Pierre Dardot and Christian Lavain,

Christian Laval who are a philosopher and a sociologist and their book is called the Marx Prénom Karl is not available in English although some of their other books some of their other kind of books have been translated into English but this book hasn't and also I haven't been able to find a PDF of it however I mean it's not I mean I'm just going to introduce their basic ideas or their bit you know the their the claims of theirs which i find most interesting um so i'll do i'll just kind of really try to introduce their you know that they're right there you know their analysis and um yeah um so it's not i hope you know it's not really

strictly necessary that people kind of read it um um although there's i see someone here uh um someone someone has done a chance you know even says i did a deep l translation um um which is great i mean yeah i didn't know if someone has been able to translate it i mean it's a huge book it's 700 pages so um but i'm just going to focus on like you know certain key sections of it um so So for now, it looks like it's exactly three hours since we started. So probably it's time to wrap up the session for today. So again, thank you, Ray, for a very, very good session.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. Well, yeah. Good night. or it's a good morning wherever if you're in in America okay so I'll see you next week