1. I can only write in manifesto form right now because I feel like I hate everything. Or rather, that amongst my emotions, the dominant one is hatred.
2. Hatred is implicitly also a form of love. This is classically Adornian, this dialectic. I hate the repressive structures of the world in which I see so much death and inadequacy because I intrinsically care about that world.
3. Adorno infamously hated jazz. I very much do not hate jazz. My favorite jazz record is Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which features Take Five, my favorite single track.
4. Take Five can be read two ways. The first is that it is the fifth take, or recording, of the track. Or that you should “take five”—as in take five minutes off of whatever, take a break.
5. How do you take a break when the world is burning?
6. Dave Brubeck probably knows but I don’t.
7. One way in which the structures of power of the world try to further implant themselves in you is in forbidding certain hatreds. As in, “you cannot hate the genocide committed by the State of Israel because you are a Jew.” Or “you cannot any hate writing by other women because you are a woman, and if you do you are a) a bitter hag or b) not a feminist, or even c) both.”
8. Actually, I can hate anything I fucking want. This is the power of the Hater. No one can really stop you from hating anything. We write constantly about love as a force in human society but hate—and in particular the hate signified by dislike or distaste—is equally interesting and forceful.
9. I hate that Adorno opposed student protests in his own Institute at the end of a life devoted to theoretically endorsing such thing.
10. Take five: the women protesting Adorno were topless. Take ten: he died in a shoe store in the Swiss Alps of a heart condition. Refrain: bitterness.
11. Adornian bitterness is always a little of Sappho’s bitterness, glukupikron, sweetbitter, in the sense that there is a sweet world in which things could have been otherwise that simply does not, and will not likely ever, exist. The bitterness of a broken heart. Maybe Adorno died bitter.
12. Is bitterness such a bad thing in a wrongly construed world?
13. Yes, yes, bitterness, as in medicine and poison, pharmakon, the arguments of Derrida which kind of misuse Plato for the purposes of Derrida, but which on the terms of Derrida are good for Derrida. The relationship of Derrida, a Sephardic Jew born in Algeria but accepted into the world of French Academe, to the Algerian Revolution, is complicated.
14. You would like to think your leftist predecessors all had good relationships to the idea of just revolution and protest, but of course the reality, like all realities of history, is more complicated.
15. If the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose, and différance is both difference and deferring of meaning, maybe sometimes you swallow the mystery capsule without knowing the exact dose and find out the differing meaning later. Hatred and bitterness both seem to have this capacity; with both you can’t really see meaning, or decide if you’ve poisoned yourself, until well afterwards.
16. Sometimes hating along with Adorno feels like medicine. Sometimes it feels like poison, as in the passages about jazz. We have the luxury of taking five that Adorno didn’t—he wrote when jazz on the radio was a relatively new cultural form, and in the midst of a Culture Industry whose insidious mechanisms he unfolded but could never escape.
17. The Zildjian cymbals you hear in Take Five were originally made by the Armenian Zildjian family starting in the 17thC Ottoman Empire. Never a world otherwise without a genocide.
18. If I am a bitter hag for my hatreds, please let me be a bitter hag in a world with Zildjian cymbals on the percussion line.
19. If in being up late into the little hours in your hatred of the world as it is allows you to love it as it might be better construed, is that really hating in the most profound send of the verb? Always already meaning the strikethrough of yourself: Jacques Derrida, get out of my head.
20. Pharmakon in theory is a cure for ills. The modern word that comes from pharmakon is pharmacy. I do not know if there are any pharmacies left in Gaza.
21. Neither Adorno nor Derrida claim or believe language or critique can itself serve as a kind of all-purpose pharmakon. But they both wrote their whole lives anyway.
22. What is the point of anything? I hate everything.
23. What is the point of anything in the burning world? I love it too much.
24. Mourn.
25. Take five.
26. Take ten. Take a million.
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