Decisive historical actions carry an irreducibly hopeless subjective aspect at the moment they occur.

Evidence

And if against me you object that such adherence to philosophy is threatened by a relapse into conformity, I am the last who would dispute this – with the one caveat that there is simply no thought and no attitude today not faced with this threat, precisely because the world is converging into a total system and thereby tending to absorb everything. All we can do is resist this absorption – above all, I think, through language. … I mean something…difficulttoexpress,butverydialectical–thatinthemoment they happen, the decisive actions always have an aspect of hopelessness, of ‘impossibility’ – this is exactly the threshold to positivism, indeed to all bourgeois reason. God knows, this is not to say that these actions are objectively hopeless – then they would be pure martyrdom, which I’d want to idolise as little as you. But the absurd, ‘subjective’ aspect in them cannot be skipped over. Otherwise, it would be in the bag, and the all-important qualitative leap is exactly what one does not, not ever, under absolutely any circumstances have in the bag. But seriously pursuing these things really leads to a sphere about which one can talk but not correspond. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1204

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘threshold to positivism’ and ‘sphere about which one can talk but not correspond’ echoes the Wittgenstein ladder and Adorno’s critique of identity-thinking. — connects to: Acts can seem intentional yet lack conscious reason at the moment; Pessimism about historical transition masks a lack of will to live. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 89; The “end of history” moment produced civilizational despair rather than triumph. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 435
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that real historical action always happens under the sign of subjective hopelessness, yet is not thereby objectively hopeless, is a dense, paradigm-shifting dialectical insight worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Acts can seem intentional yet lack conscious reason at the moment #corroborates (0.85)