Robert Hullot-Kentor`s essay,
``What Barbarism Is?``, published in February 2010 in
The Brooklyn Rail, moves through a reading of Adorno`s concept of barbarism, rightly, of course, undertaking to elucidate how Adorno`s use of the term implied a criticality of ``culture`` itself. One point that Hullot-Kentor does not take up, even as he identifies how this once-critical concept (barbarity) no longer has any critical purchase, is the futility that Adorno himself identifies in being at this ``last stage`` of the dialectic of barbarism and culture. Being at the `` last stage,`` for Adorno, signals the fact that culture and barbarism are indistinguishable from one another, itself a form of horizonless society. As Hullot-Kentor claims, it is this perspective to which we are returning, now that ``the interregnum of the post-war years is over.`` Designating the post-war as a period of freedom from what he terms, the ``great fear,`` Hullot-Kentor exhibits how the idea of an interregnum is used to structure the contrast between a certain kind of freedom and the urgency or
necessity of our current world-historical situation. In fact, there has been no such interregnum, as Adorno himself identified when thinking about the how the resurrected culture of the postwar is itself this last stage. What emerges from Hullot-Kentor`s study is far less about the critical capacity of barbarism and what there is left for the artwork to develop in terms of the criticality that has been lost (for which the sculptural work of Richard Serra serves as exemplary), far more about this urgency, the ``great fear`` of a ``renewed`` unchangeable world. The ``anxiety`` about this world, as Hullot-Kentor acts out, can be contained by en explicit turn to the artwork; this perhaps is the most interesting and telling part of his effort to explain the philosophical and aesthetic structure of ``not knowing what we know,`` but we might also think of this as an endlessly therapeutic work--one that can identifed with a defensive strategy of containment or management (suggested by Hullot-Kentor`s admission that he returns again to the writing of five or so great authors) that founds the high-culture elevation of ``great works`` and that itself also participates in the feeling that the world is not only unchanging, but also enclosed, unified, whole...
[*post provoked after reading a preface...]
