“Peirce denies a thing in itself in the sense of transcendental philosophy, a reality that affects our senses while yet merely appearing under the transcendental conditions of possible objectivity and thus unknowable as such. The predicate ‘real’ has no explicable meaning apart from states of facts about which we can make true statements.”
—Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests
Plato’s Seventh Letter
Roma (2018) is a beautiful film, yes? But Cleo, the family maid and nanny, labors like a dog throughout—“Clean up the shit”—and the film ultimately buries that exploitative relation in sentimentality, that is, through the familiar bourgeois lesson that the maid, too, is one of the family. Even the sisterhood that comes when Cleo’s boss’ husband leaves the family—“All women are alone”—is part of that strategy. So I think one has to ask whether Roma’s unobtrusive camera eye on Mexican daily life sacrifices class critique for family romance (director Cuarón’s, if not Cleo’s).
Aesthetics and Politics
“For the pursuit of reflection knows itself as a movement of emancipation. Reason is at the same time subject to the interest in reason. We can say that it obeys an emancipatory cognitive interest, which aims at the pursuit of reflection.”
Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests
STEVEN WEXLER 