Just began working on organizing the blog & converting to shareable PDFs, & it’s going to be a big project! For life reasons, it’s going to be harder for me to keep going now, so any support would be crazy appreciated! & thanks for reading & sharing Substudies! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

Just began working on organizing the blog & converting to shareable PDFs, & it’s going to be a big project! For life reasons, it’s going to be harder for me to keep going now, so any support would be crazy appreciated! & thanks for reading & sharing Substudies! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

chicago heads! tomorrow I'm doing a @nyreviewofarch.bsky.social panel with venerated Marxist scholar Doug Spencer about writing about architecture and the weird capitalist juncture we're in now chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/program/nyra...

meet Diablo, who is an ancient black cat, not afraid of humans or dogs, & the other night snuck up on us at night, tapped Cat on the butt, & bolted away into the darkness

She’s here!

OTD in 1880, Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants. D believed that plants are active agents in the world: “A radicle may be compared with a burrowing animal such as a mole, which wishes to penetrate perpendicularly down into the ground.” 🧪🌱🐋 #philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫

yeah we have ourselves a little Gutenachtgeschichte now & then

my phone overheated & crashed twice in a row because i kept trying to use photo editing software to make a picture of Adorno look more like a salamander. somebody upstairs does not want salamander Adorno to be born

To assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie. | Marx

added a note on how Horkheimer (& Adorno) dissolve the problem of “the revolutionary subject”!

ICYMI: A new translation of Horkheimer’s incredible fall ‘42 letter to Tillich defending the new style of theoretical writing Horkheimer & Adorno had recently developed together. Also: a critique of Tillich’s demand for a revolutionary subject, & a defense of Marx’s theory of prehistory!

gm! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

gm! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

link: open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

good morning

good morning

more translation work from Horkheimer’s fragments on dialectical logic—this one’s from an earlier draft of the (1944) fragment “Haupt- und Nebensatz” that Horkheimer quotes in a letter (also in the works!) to Tillich as part of a defense of his & Adorno’s new “style” of writing in 1942

🙋

Engels (1842) on his dog, “Namenloser” (“Nameless”), who he goes boozing with & taught one single trick: growling at anyone Engels points at & calls “aristocrat” lmfao

After an insane Sept ‘41 letter from Horkheimer on the contradiction of all speech that betrays its unintended intent of “addressing others as possible members of the future association of free human beings” (communism latent in universality of language), Adorno replies in unconditional affirmation:

After an insane Sept ‘41 letter from Horkheimer on the contradiction of all speech that betrays its unintended intent of “addressing others as possible members of the future association of free human beings” (communism latent in universality of language), Adorno replies in unconditional affirmation:

he did it again

Thanks Vin

just ate part of a pinecone (?). unapologetic. defiant.

don’t worry Horkheimer also has an extended (& i think beautifully formulated) critique of Hegel in another one of the short essays we’ll be putting out in the “Dialectical Logic” collection!

fucking finally it’s dark out at 6pm

don’t worry Horkheimer also has an extended (& i think beautifully formulated) critique of Hegel in another one of the short essays we’ll be putting out in the “Dialectical Logic” collection!

the last time F. Weil sees Horkheimer, H faux apologizes for publicly downplaying the Marxism of the pre-50s ISR & FW’s contribution. H stumbles on the train platform, & a stranger catches him. Weil (sounding like Regius) says: I hope the God of his new piety will be there to catch him soon too.

Horkheimer, “Reversal of the Idealist Dialectic” (1944)

sweater weather (she tucked herself in)

“what are your hobbies”

ICYMI: Posted my latest pass at translating Adorno’s 1932 review of Dolf Sternberger’s diss on Dasein & Death in Heidegger’s B&T—which A says sets the stage for an immanent crit of Heidegger’s “ontologization of the ontic” via the revenge of the ontic on ontology open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

CTWG editorial meeting devolving into impassioned dispute: how Fichtean *is* Badiou?

ICYMI: Posted my latest pass at translating Adorno’s 1932 review of Dolf Sternberger’s diss on Dasein & Death in Heidegger’s B&T—which A says sets the stage for an immanent crit of Heidegger’s “ontologization of the ontic” via the revenge of the ontic on ontology open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

no one comes down our block to the apartment complex anyway so Cat & were the halloween fairies & ran around doing refills for the neighborhood

tfw you’re the only one who shows up to halloween movie night in costume & your costume is Body Artist Saul Tenser of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022)

Gramsci, “I Hate Halloween” (1916)

happy hallowe'en!! why not celebrate by reading my musings on a witch story by E.F. Benson from the July 1929 issue of Weird Tales?

what is this… goblin town…

Adorno: “[O]ntic elements assumed into ontology exact their revenge. Heidegger’s ontological Entwurf [re:] the understanding of Being integrates elements which, because they belong to the mere ontic realm, withdraw from the understanding, … in the end, all that remains are empty words.”

Revised draft for a translation of Adorno’s glowing review (1932) of the immanent critique of Heidegger’s Being & Time in Dolf Sternberger’s “Der verstandene Tod. Eine Untersuchung zu Martin Heideggers Existenzial-Ontologie”! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

most importantly for ppl who want more Adorno-Horkheimer crits of religious socialism, Tillich invited both to a roundtable on it in ‘31 to represent the asshole Marxist position & they didn’t disappoint lol. Just posted a revised translation! (pics: A 1, H 2) jamescrane.substack.com/i/158566797/...

un new drink: i call it a “lemon sharp”—two double shots of ice cold vodka two double shots of lemon juice. wake you RIGHT UP