From the Opium of the People to Acid Communism: On the dialectics of critique and intoxication
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2020.52276Keywords:
critique, intoxication, Benjamin, common sense, acid communismAbstract
There seems to be an inherent tension between intoxication and critique. We tend to associate intoxication with immersion, participation, and proximity, while critique is usually connected to the distance, separation, and an outsider-perspective. In this article I want to analyze this tension, but I also want to explore the possibilities, with the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin as my guide, of a critical intoxication and/or intoxicated critique. What would be the social, political and aesthetic implications for such juxtaposition for both of these categories?
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press.
Badiou, Alain. 1999. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Baudelaire, Charles. 1998. Artificial Paradises: Baudelaire’s Classic Work on Opium and Wine. Translated by Stacy Diamond. New Jersey: Citadel.
Baudelaire, Charles. 2010. Paris Spleen. Translated by Martin Sorrell. Richmond: London House.
Benjamin, Walter. 1994. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226279572.001.0001
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and others. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.
Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.
Fisher, Mark. 2018. k-punk. The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016). Edited by Darren Ambrose. London: Repeater.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. The Politics of Truth. Translated by Lysa Hockroth and Catherine Porter. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Gilbert, Jeremy. 2014. Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p7m6
Gilbert, Jeremy. 2017. ‘Why the time has come for “Acid Corbynism.”’ The New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/10/why-time-has-come-acid-corbynism.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and Translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies 14. 3: 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Höller, Christian. 2015. ‘“Un-Common Sense”. Social Critique and the Struggle over Commonality.’ In Spaces for Criticism. Shifts in Contemporary Art Discourses, eds. Thijs Lijster, Suzana Milevska, Pascal Gielen and Ruth Sonderegger, 93–108. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Homer. 1999. The Odyssey. Translated by Samuel Butler. Accessed on 5 July 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1727/pg1727.txt
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 2007. Late Marxism: Adorno Or the Persistence of the Dialectic. New York: Verso.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248. https://doi.org/10.1086/421123
Lijster, Thijs. 2016. Notes on Totality: In Defense of Pretentious Thinking. The Hague: West.
Lijster, Thijs. 2017. Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism: Critique of Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048531059
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. The Antichrist. Translated by H.L. Mencken. Accessed on 5 July 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19322/pg19322.txt
Rosa, Hartmut. 2016. Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2015. Inventing the Future. Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London; New York: Verso.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2013. What Makes Life Worth Living. On Pharmacology. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London and New York: Verso.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
