Being both very busy and very lazy at the time, I gave up on "the One-Dimensional Man" very shortly after beginning it in January 2002. That has since become my personal symbol of the repeated failure to seize my possibilities back then.
On returning to Marcuse (with some trepidation), at first I couldn't penetrate more than a couple of paragraphs. But with the help of a couple of trusty tools (pen, paper, my philosophical dictionary), I have come into the clear. Eight pages of tiny black scribbling and some orange arrows drawn to connect thoughts stand as testament to that. This morning I bested the rather daunting fifth chapter, "Negative Thinking, the Defeated Logic of Protest".
Gettting through this chapter in particular felt really refreshing. Like I had just gotten out of a sauna, having ejected some impurity through my pores.
*I say this as though I might have some reader who cares about the japanese stock market, marcuse, and the deomgraphic crisis.
2 comments:
did you make this book-cover? it looks exactly like the prof's office, where i toiled over "one-dimensional man" and "dialectic of enlightenment" once a week for a semester, while the prof was offering me helpful catch phrases like "the irrational character of rational society," "reification" and "institutionalized desublimation." i would say my grasp on the book was intuitive at best, like with most things i read as an undergraduate. i was really emotionally invested though, although i probably hardly understood what he was talking about. i remember that i saw everything he said about society come to life on my university campus on a grande scale, which is the intended effect i believe.
after you were such a good example, i will pick up the book again and see how much of my efforts have been wasted.
i really liked your minima moralia/blog analogy by the way. perhaps we should treat one-dim man (hyphenized abridgment) as if it was a collection of aphorisms too, i would be more likely to refresh my memory from time to time if i didn't have to go through it chapter by chapter.
say, will i get an award for most comments on your blog some time?
your award for most blog entries was presented in absentia last week. the playmobil figure pictured in my most recent flickr photo accepted on your behalf.
If you try to read 1-dM in tiny pieces it's even worse. I am finding that if I just slog through when he's inexplicably talking about husserl again, read further to figure out what it is that he wants to say and then come back, I understand much better.
You probably had a lot better a gut feeling for this stuff than I did back then. Now, I'm grasping it pretty well, but I'm not altogether sympathetic, except in terms of the larger project.
I'm gonna finish up ch6 and hopefully ch7 this evening. At first glance, Ch7 contains a lot of philosophical name-dropping, although maybe a little more restrained use of french. I don't think it's gonna breeze by very quickly.
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