#david sherman

[questcequecestqueca]

David Sherman - Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub.

[bookwormchocaholic]

I have a new crush now...

[weil-weil-lautre]

Foucault does offer “examples” such as free trade, freedom of the internal market, and a free labor market, but why are these Anglo‐American commitments the core of this one, ongoing “liberal” regime of truth? Foucault merely posits that liberalism as such is tantamount to Anglo‐American liberalism. Yet, there are other, less market‐directed forms of liberalism, such as the liberalism of Wilhelm von Humboldt, not to mention the libertarian socialists. Why don't they factor into his description of liberalism? Moreover, because Foucault grants that freedom involves a “productive/destructive relationship,” given that “limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations” are required to maintain it (p. 64), why doesn't he interpret the limitations, controls, and forms of coercion employed by the social democracies during and after the Great Depression as a “production” rather than a “destruction” of freedom and capitalism? This was how Keynes saw his project, which was based on the notion that without governmental intervention during severe economic contractions, markets can come to rest at equilibrium levels far below maximal levels of employment and output. Moreover, with respect to the threats to freedom that social democratic liberalism posed to classical liberalism, why didn't Ordoliberalism pose even greater threats? As Foucault says, Ordoliberalism was not a return to classic liberalism: It both rejected the idea that competitive markets naturally recur, thus justifying govern- mental intervention into them, and it justified robust governmental interventions into the social body to guarantee that its nature obeyed the foundational demands of the competitive market. Why are these interventions seen as productive (rather than destructive) of freedom?

David Sherman, “Foucault’s Neoliberal Ideology,” European Journal of Philosophy (2019)

[the-night-picture-collector]

David Sherman, Portrait of Danielle Darrieux looking at Chess Pieces, 1930s

[weil-weil-lautre]

By the time he writes Negative Dialectics, however, Adorno thinks that late capitalism's tendency to artificially perpetuate a condition of economic scarcity has led not to the unveiling of the metaphysical problems surrounding the concept of freedom in Kant's philosophy but rather to their demise. In other words, if once it was hoped that freedom would disappear as a problem because it would be realized, now it is feared that freedom will disappear as a problem precisely because it can no longer be realized. Thus, Adorno asserts, 'indifference to freedom, to the concept and the thing itself is caused by the integration of society, which happens to subjects as if it were irresistible. Their interest in being provided for has paralyzed the interest in freedom which they fear would leave them unprotected.' Under these circumstances, Adorno fears, the very concept of freedom itself might come to be 'wholly extinguished, perhaps without leaving a trace.' The problem of freedom, then, becomes nothing less than the problem of keeping it alive: 'Where freedom will hide out at any moment in history cannot be decreed once for all. Freedom turns concrete in the changing forms of repression, as resistance to repression. There has been as much free will as there were men with the will to be free.'

David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno, 250

[weil-weil-lautre]

[T]he theoretical space that constitutes the slight difference between the subject and [her] subjectivity, which is what gives the basis for Adorno's 'tiniest bit of self-reflection' (and, indeed, Sartre's nonaccessory reflection), is negated, and the subject becomes one with [her] situation, which is ontologized. This diagnosis, which was applied to Heidegger's thought, is no less applicable to Heidegger's linguistically oriented legatees (hermeneuticists and poststructuralists), second generation critical theorists, and philosophers of the body (who dissolve the subject into the play of bodily forces). For these theorists, the problem is not reconciling the individual subject with 'its other,' which for Adorno means transcending the repression of both nature (internal and external) and other human beings, but rather facilitating an idealistic reconciliation among human beings in language (Habermas), mourning the inability to bring about a reconciliation between human beings and their idealized 'other' through language (Derrida), or materialistically celebrating the libido in a way that either explicitly (Lyotard) or implicitly (Deleuze) results in a high-energy collapse into late capitalism.

David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno, p. 176

[weil-weil-lautre]

[F]or Marx no less than for Adorno and Horkheimer, reason and money are part and parcel  of the ordering logic of modern bourgeois society - an ordering logic that both lays the groundwork for human beings (individually and collectively) to actualize their full potential and, when ultimately fetishized at the expense of sensuous particularity, precludes them from doing so.

David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno, p. 189

[dipnotski]

David Sherman – Sartre ve Adorno (2025)

David Sherman bu kitabında öznelliğin hem toplumsal tarih tarafından şekillendiğini hem de onu dönüştürme gücüne sahip olduğunu savunan diyalektik bir yaklaşım geliştiriyor. Ona göre kıta felsefesinde yaygınlaşan özne karşıtı eğilimler, bilinç deneyimini tümüyle dışlayan indirgemeci okumalara yol açıyor ve bu durum hem fenomenolojiyi hem eleştirel teoriyi eksik bırakıyor. Sherman, özneyi edilgen…

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