Alt Text
“so that’s an image of my childhood: the workers hunched over in the middle, a line of policemen with their billy clubs and pistols in the back, and the priests in the front pontificating”
it’s so cute when he gets all choked up at 00:38:00 talking about bookshops
ah yea this is the interview where he says it (01:26:00): “i rewrote [the book] every year [for five years]. it went from 600 pages to 98 pages in the last two rounds of revision, and i decided i had to publish it or else it might stop existing”
01:36:00 “i don’t think there are pre-given, determinate, real human interests… the point of the book is the last sentence - which no one ever reads or comments on. ‘don’t think of this as science or in terms of categories of truth, think about this in terms of degrees of enlightenment’“
01:33:00 “everyone says to me: ‘you’re very pessimistic, very bleak, you give no hope. you have no positive project.’ i’m not a priest; my job is not to give people hope - i’m trying to understand something. i loathe to censor the results i come to jolly people along.”
it’s the very standard philosophy-bro response but i think it means a lot more in the context of the development of a critical theory.
there are so many sickeningly saccharine lefty analyses that are activistic and flacidly gesturing at a positive vision of the future. it’s placative and wishful thinking and misdirects their entire project.
01:44:00 “everyone kept telling me there was this great philosopher immanuel kant[…] i spent 10 years of my life reading and teaching kant. i’m afraid i had the experience every time i read his books that i found his views less plausible and more repellant. why would anyone subject themselves?”
01:40:00 “i tried so hard not to be long winded and redundant that i produced this thing that even people of good will and were friends of mine completely missed my point. so i’ve become more prolix; i’ve become a blabbermouth and endlessly repeat myself to get through to people.”