No, its not an Adorno riff on Jazz.
Read this Times Article on the 'replacement' daddies that are being handed out by the military and then tell me that Adorno is wrong. Just in case you wonder what a flat daddy is:
"Flat Daddies have been used by military families since at least 2003, when Cindy Sorenson of Bismarck, N.D., ordered a life-size photo of her former husband, Capt. Dave Bruschwein, on a piece of foam board when he was stationed in Iraq with the North Dakota National Guard."
Adorno's reflections on saying good-bye today:
To be lastingly apart and to hold love fast has become unthinkable. ?O parting, fountain of all words,? but it has run dry, and nothing comes out except bye, bye or ta-ta. Airmail and courier delivery substitute logistical problems for the anxious wait for the letter, even where the absent partner has not jettisoned anything not palpably to hand as ballast. Airline directors can hold jubilee speeches on how much uncertainty and sorrow people are thereby spared. But the liquidation of parting is a matter of life and death to the traditional notion of humanity. Who could still love if the moment is excluded when the other, corporeal being is perceived as an image compressing the whole continuity of life as into a heavy fruit? What would hope be without distance? Humanity was the awareness of the presence of that not present, which evaporates in a condition which accords all things not present the palpable semblance of presence and immediacy, and hence has only scorn for what finds no enjoyment in such simulation. Yet to insist on parting?s inner possibility in face of its pragmatic impossibility would be a lie, for the inward does not unfold within itself but only in relation to the objective, and to make ?inward? a collapsed outwardness does violence to the inward itself, which is left to sustain itself as if on its own flame. The restoration of gestures would follow the example of the professor of German literature who, on Christmas Eve, held his sleeping children for a moment before the shining tree to cause a déjà vu and steep them in myth. A humanity come of age will have to transcend its own concept of the emphatically human, positively. Otherwise its absolute negation, the inhuman, will carry off victory.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
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