Apoplexy of Enlightenment. posted by Richard Seymour

This excellent piece by the Adornian on Enlightenment fetishism couldn't fail to remind me of the uncomprehending attacks on Derrida when he hit the earth (See here and here for a couple of decent burials). In particular, Adornian reports:

I have been forced back into the blogsphere by my irritation, firstly at getting round to reading Francis Wheen's "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World" and a recent post on Harry's Place which displays a similar crude Enlightenment fetishism.

Wheen's book is often on target - taking apart the culture of new age mysticism, pseudo Buddhism and generally quackiness. Actually, as an aside, I find Zizek funnier and more astute on these matters - particularly his suggestion that, were Max Weber alive today, he would be writing "Western Buddhism and the Spirit of Late Capitalism" instead of "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism".

Anyway - it was only really two pages of Wheen's book that really caught my attention - where he suggests that Adorno blames the Enlightenment for all modern ills and fails to recognise that it is really only through the Enlightenment that modern ideas of rights, justice etc. came about. Moreover, he berates the idea of their being a connection between Enlightenment thinking and the Holocaust. Wheen follows in the tradition of those whom have obviously failed to get through the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Adorno and Horkheimer say the following.

"We are wholly convinced...that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless...we have just as clearly recognised that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms - the social institutions - with which it is interwoven, already contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today."

Indeed, the sputtering refusal of Enlightened intellectuals to read the text is becoming acute where before it was merely chronic. The reactions to Caroline Merchant's feminist-environmentalist critique of Francis Bacon yielded similarly block-headed views in which much of what Bacon wrote has to be ignored and the critique is misconstrued. ("Oh yes, Bacon may have used the odd colourful turn of phrase to convey what his new empirical methods, but...").

Now that imperialist apologetics takes precisely the form of defense of rationality, science etc., it is becoming more obvious what is valuable in the poststructuralist critique of these notions; indeed why the Marxist attempt to revolutionise (not reject) modernity and its totalising apparatus of reason is so necessary.