Brown on Poetry, Dialectical Thinking, Dreams, for BtZ

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Regarding "the dialectical imagination" (which is, btw, the title of 
Martin Jay's history of the Frankfurt School), let me add that the 
formulation sums up the basic methodology of Adorno's social thought. In 
his introduction to sociology ("Einleitung in die Soziologie", 1968), 
Adorno names two qualities the good sociologist needs: (1) the evil eye 
("der böse Blick"), (2) exact fantasy ("exakte Phantasie"). While (1) 
refers to the 19th century classics of 'suspicion hermeneutics' (Marx, 
Nietzsche, Freud), (2) is largely inspired by the experience of great 
art. The experience of Schönberg, Trakl, or Beckett, to name three 
artists especially important to Adorno. Wish I'd know whether he ever 
read V.

On Norman O. Brown and the Frankfurt School, see the dispute between 
Brown and Herbert Marcuse - who asks Brown to "return to Earth" and to 
join the struggle for decidedly political liberation - from 1967. You 
can find this in the appendix of Brown's book "Love's Body" (in  the 
German edition it's pp. 232-247). Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization" got 
published in 1955, "Life against Death" in 1959.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Civilization

On 16.03.2016 21:47, Smoke Teff wrote:
> This comes in the final pages (318-319) of /Life Against Death/, and 
> is something I will keep in mind for the BtZ read:
>
> Psychoanalysis, mysticism, poetry, the philosophy of organism, 
> Feuerbach, and Marx--this is a miscellaneous assemblage; but, as 
> Heraclitus said, the unseen harmony is stronger than the seen. Common 
> to all of them is a mode of consciousness that can be called--although 
> the term causes fresh difficulties--the dialectical imagination. By 
> "dialectical" I mean an activity of consciousness struggling to 
> circumvent the limitations imposed by the formal-logical law of 
> contradiction. Marxism, of course, has no monopoly of "dialectics." 
> Needham has shown the dialectical character of Whitehead's philosophy, 
> and he constantly draws attention to dialectical patterns in mystical 
> thought. The goal of Indian body mysticism, according to Eliade, is 
> the "conjunction of contrarieties" (/coincidentia oppositorum/). 
> Scholem, in his survey of Jewish mysticism, says, "Mysticism, intent 
> on formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the 
> instrument of dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by 
> no means the only witnesses to this affinity between mystical and 
> dialectical thinking."
>
> As for poetry, are not those basic poetic devices emphasized by recent 
> criticism--paradox, ambiguity, irony, tension--devices whereby the 
> poetic imagination subverts the "reasonableness" of language, the 
> chains it imposes? [...] And from the psychoanalytical point of view, 
> if we, with Trilling, accept the substantial identity between poetic 
> logic (with its symbolism, condensation of meaning, and displacement 
> of accent) and dream logic, then the connection between poetry and 
> dialectics, as defined, is more substantially grounded. Dreams are 
> certainly an activity of the mind struggling to circumvent the 
> formal-logical law of contradiction.
>
> [...]psychoanalysis, either as a body of doctrine or an experience of 
> the analysand, is no total revelation of the unconscious repressed. 
> The struggle of consciousness to circumvent the limitations of formal 
> logic, of language, and of "common sense" is under conditions of 
> general repression never ending.

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