Lapsus lingue

I am currently at the Arts, Culture and Public Sphere conference in Venice, organized by the IUAV and the ESA. Yesterday Mark Jacobs gave a very inspiring lecture, where he pointed out three different perspectives from which art can be approached: art as market (the instrumental aspects of expressive practices), market as art (the expressive aspects of instrumental practices) and art as existential (existential and moral issues negotiated and expressed through art). I was captivated enough not to be able to take notes, so I will disappoint you by not recounting his lecture in detail. Yet there is one seemingly insignificant and minute detail that caught my attention, and I will report on it: the omission of Horkheimer from the authorship of Dialectics of enlightenment. One might think of it as nothing more than an accidental slip of the tongue, after all, as Freud noted: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Let us not engage into speculation about the possible latent psychological motivation of the author though - after all I would not like to reproach somebody I hold in the highest esteem with following ulterior motives - what is of interest is the act itself. I noticed the same phenomenon a few weeks ago when a friend sent me an MMS greeting from Berlin with a picture of the statues of Marx and Engels, or to be precise, with the statue of Marx; Engels had been cropped in Stalinist manner. This tradition of strategic concealment of the base has a long history. Plato wrote about dialectics as the highest form of human endeavour, yet never once mentioned that this freedom - the freedom to think, if not necessarily of thought - had been won only at the price of unfree labour of others. In German idealism the spirit hovered above the world, and it took the combined effort of Feuerbach and Marx to ground it in praxis. Similarly it was Horkheimer's enterprising spirit as head of the Institute that enabled Adorno to produce such a vast corpus of work. The bliss of philosophy – which for Adorno lay in the elevation above praxis – can be achieved only on account of others being subject to praxis the more ruthlessly. When thought is trying to escape the "wicked society" as Horkheimer and Adorno had called it in Dialectics of enlightenment, it is actually making this hell a little less bearable for those not as fortunate to be above it. The freedom one is given caries with itself an inextricable responsibility.