We are pleased to announce that the 11th annual meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies will be hosted by Alexandra Colligs and Philip Hogh at the Universität Kassel (Germany). The meeting will be held May 22nd and 23rd, 2025.
More information – including program and registration details – will be posted shortly.
William S. Allen wrote to us about his new book: Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History (Bloomsbury), which will be published in February. Here is the link to the publisher’s website and below you’ll find the publisher’s blurb:
Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History sets the works of Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant and Peter Weiss in dialogue, revealing how an interrogation of the aesthetics of ‘the whole’ and the conception of history in Western thought reveals new ways of thinking about history and historically.
To conceive of history as such it is necessary to conceive it as a whole, but doing so carries implications about its development and direction. Furthermore, such an idea makes it difficult to consider its parts without subsuming them to the whole, thereby making individuals merely instrumental to achieving the aims of history.
William S. Allen brings the thought of Kant, Adorno and Weiss to bear on these tensions, tracing how Adorno’s reconsideration of history through his readings of Kant’s Critique of Judgement are distinct from formulations offered by other thinkers (Marx, Hegel, Lyotard). Allen establishes that Kant’s Critique of Judgement is not only a sustained analysis of the development of forms, whether aesthetic or organic, but also a tacit interrogation of the form of the whole and the possibilities of thinking it.
Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History argues that Adorno has taken up this interrogation more than any other thinker and through his aesthetics has introduced an alternative thought, which has been modified and extended in the work of Peter Weiss in his last novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance. Within this thought lies the possibility of thinking history without the whole, without unity or purpose, which is a possibility that may offer new insights in the face of imminent environmental, economic and political collapse.
Gianluca Cavallo’s book Das falsche Leben: Schuld, Scham und die Grenze moralischer Freiheit has been published in German and is available from Campus (Frankfurt, New-York). Click here to access the book from the publisher’s website.
Here is a translation of the publisher’s blurb:
“There is no right life in the wrong one”: Adorno’s famous saying expresses our own entanglement in evil and bad. The subject feels guilty because he knows what he could do differently and better. But at what price? Is this price morally acceptable? Can the wrong life perhaps be justified? These are the questions that this book raises on the basis of Adorno’s reading. Since they do not allow for a clear answer, another one soon arises: How does the subject deal with this moral uncertainty? Gianluca Cavallo reconceptualises guilt and (moral) shame so that they are no longer experienced as failures, but as feelings that make the limit of our moral freedom perceptible – a limit that we should learn to accept.
Susanna Zellini wrote about her new book at De Gruyter. The full title reads Ästhetik der Form: Sprachkritik, Musik und Stil bei Nietzsche und Adorno. Here is the link to the publisher’s website and below you’ll find the publisher’s blurb:
The downfall of the systematic philosophies has raised the question of how to reconcile the radical critique of traditional forms of representation with a new need for form. This book compares the thinking of Nietzsche and Adorno along the axes of music, style, and language critique in order to reconstruct an “aesthetics of form” common to both, which proves to be an alternative to conventional twentieth-century philosophies of language.
