The Arcades Project - Operi

4"Of course, Marx and Engels ironized an absolute idealist faith in progress.
(Engels commends Fourier for having introduced the future disappearance of
humanity into his reflections on history, as Kant introduced the future disappearance
of the solar system.) In this connection, Engels also makes fun of "the talk
about illimitable human perfectibility. '''3,t2 Letter of Dunckel' to Grete
Steffin, July 18, 1938. [J64,2]
The mythic concept of the task of the poet ought to be defined through the
profane concept of the instrument.-The gteat poet never confronts his work
simply as the producer; he is also, at the same time, its consumer. Naturally, in
contrast to the public, he consumes it not as entertainment but as tool. This
instrumental character represents a use value that does not readily enter into the
exchange value. [J64,3]
On Baudelaire's "Crepuscule du soir": the big city knows no true evening twilight.
In any case, the artificial lighting does away with all transition to night. The
same state of affairs is responsible for the fact that the stars disappear from the
sky over the metropolis. Who ever notices when they come out? Kant's transcription
of the sublime through "the starry heavens above me and the moral law
within me""" could never have been conceived in these terms by an inhabitant of
Baudelaire's spleen is the suffering entailed by the decline of the aura. "Adorable
Spring has lost its perfume:" "" [J64,5]
Mass production is the principal economic cause-and class warfare the principal
social cause-of the decline of the aura. [J64a,l]
De Maistre on the "savage"-a reflection directed against Rousseau: "One need
only glance at the savage to see the curse written . .. on the external form of his
body . ... A formidable hand weighing on these doomed races wipes out in them
the two distinetive characteristics of our grandeur: foresight and perfectibility.
The savage cuts the tree down to gather the fruit; he unyokes the ox that the
missionary has just entrusted to him, and cooks it with wood from the plow."
Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, ed. HattieI' (Paris