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wished to liquidate, in the expectation of the immediately impending revolution, was,
impatient with its claim, already at that moment lagging behind it. What is apocryphal in
materialism reveals that of high philosophy, that which is untrue in the sovereignty of the
Spirit, which the prevailing materialism disdains as cynically as bourgeois society had
done in secret before. The idealistic sublime is the cognate of the apocryphal; the texts of
Kafka and Beckett harshly illuminate this relationship. What is inferior in materialism is
the unreflective inferiority of prevailing conditions. What through the fault of
intellectualization did not keep up, as its failing principle, is in relation to that which is
higher, which was shamed by the sight of what was perpetually inferior, also that which
is worse. What is banal and barbaric in materialism eternalizes that extraterritoriality of
the fourth estate into culture, which meanwhile is no longer limited to the members of
such, but has spread over the entire culture. Materialism turns into the relapse into
barbarism, which it was supposed to prevent; to work against this is not the least of the
tasks of a critical theory. Otherwise that which is untrue of old will, with a reduced
coefficiency of friction and all the worse for that, continue. What is subaltern grows, after
the revolution went the way of the return of the Messiah. Materialistic theory became not
merely aesthetically defective in contrast to the hollowed-out sublime of bourgeois
consciousness, but untrue. This is theoretically determinable. The dialectic is in the
things, but it would not be without the consciousness which reflects it; no more than it
could be dissolved into the latter. In the One pure and simple, undifferentiated, total
matter, there would be no dialectic. The official materialistic one skipped over
epistemology by decree. The latter s revenge is epistemological: in the reflection-doctrine
[Abbildlehre]. The thought is no reflection of the thing  it is made into this solely by
materialistic mythology in Epicurean style, which discovered that matter sends out little
images  but aims at the thing itself. The enlightening intention of thought,
demythologization, nullifies the image-character of consciousness. What clings to the
image remains mythically ensnared, idolatry. The summation of images forms a wall
before reality. Reflection-theory denies the spontaneity of the subject, a movens [Latin:
what moves] of the objective dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. If
the subject is bound to the stubborn mirror-image of the object, which necessarily lacks
the object, which discloses itself only to the subjective surplus in thought, then the result
is the restless intellectual silence of integral administration. Solely indefatigably reified
consciousness imagines, or tries to persuade others into imagining, that it would possess
photographs of objectivity. Its illusion crosses over into dogmatic immediacy. When
Lenin, instead of entering into epistemology, compulsively and repeatedly asserted
against this the being-in-itself of cognitive objects, he wanted to demonstrate the
complicity of subjective positivism with the  powers that be [in English]. His political
need turned thereby against the theoretical cognitive goal. Transcendent argumentation
finishes things off by means of the power-claim, and for ill: by being left unpenetrated,
what is criticized remains undisturbed as it is, and is capable, as what has not been
properly examined, of being resurrected in transformed power-constellations any which
way. Brecht s offhand remark, that after the book on empirio-criticism no critique of
immanence-philosophy would be necessary anymore, was short-sighted. Philosophical
desiderata are enacted in materialistic theory, if it is not to succumb to the same
provincialism which disfigures the art of the Eastern bloc states. The object of theory is
nothing immediate, whose replica it could drag back home; cognition does not possess, as
the state police, a portfolio of its objects. Rather it thinks these in their mediation:
otherwise it would remain content with the description of the façade. The overextended [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]