Russell Jacoby - Critical Quotes

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Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … The greatness of Freud, wrote Adorno, consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality. … A parallel can be established between Marx's judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.

Russell Jacoby
Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of the individual. To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian concepts expose the fraud, not so as to perpetuate it, but undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not yet exist. To critical theory, psychoanalysis demonstrates the degree to which the individual is de-individualized by society.

Russell Jacoby
The free market in ideas has never been free, but always a market. To undo this necessitates not commissars and censors but critical intelligence loyal to an objective notion of truth. If there is a repressive tolerance, then there is also a liberating intolerance.

Russell Jacoby
Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.

Russell Jacoby
The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions.

Russell Jacoby