>>7265406It's not fair to Benjamin, to Adorno - sort of.
Benjamin is basically a sort of Marxist sort of hippy mystic weed man literary critic. He wrote some really interesting pieces in a style that's not quite academic. He was interested in the Kabbalah like Borges was. Benjamin's famous essay uses the Kabbalah to offer an alternative to the conception of historical time in classical Marxism. Seriously, read his essays on hashish or his essays on children's literature or his essay on distraction and art.
Adorno's negative dialectics is mostly a critique of Hegel while still remaining Hegelian, I guess, sort of. He thought that anything that promotes "identity thinking" will encourage fascism, if even on a small scale. His arguments are strong but he feels incredibly elitist now and we're simply not ready to accept a lot of his views. Basically everything you do is gonna be "complicit" and encourage another Holocaust.
There's something missing about pop culture in Adorno - he couldn't understand it all and hated it. He bitched about Joan Baez protesting the Vietnam war (which Adorno opposed) because she did it in a simple musical style. Where you're sort of right for Adorno is that his philosophy is very Auschwitz centered and it seems like he's pointing the finger at a lot of the culture of the non-Jewish masses and saying "This is why we have disaster things."
Adorno is way too elitist to be part of the SJW, he would have hated it but I can't see how stupid critical theory is their fault. They were mostly into Hegel. Maybe the Frankfurt school invented and popularized critical theory, but there's no reason to single out Adorno and especially not Benjamin.
