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New Book: Susanna Zellini, Ästhetik der Form

04 Sunday Aug 2024

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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.

New book: Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory

21 Thursday Mar 2024

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Vassilis Grollios wrote about the publication of his new book at Routledge. The full title reads: Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A Study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists. Here’s the link and here the publisher’s blurb:

“Through the negative dialectics of Theodore Adorno, Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory offers an examination of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists, who put the concept of illusion at the forefront of their philosophical thought.

Vasilis Grollios argues that these political philosophers, except Castoriadis, have up to now been wrongly considered by many scholars to be far from the line of thinking of negative dialectics, Critical Theory and the early Frankfurt School/Open Marxist tradition. He illustrates how these thinkers focused on the illusions of capitalism and attempted to show how capitalism, by its innate rationale, creates social forms that are presented as unavoidable and universal, yet are historically specific and of dubious sustainability.

Providing a unique overview of concepts including illusion, totality, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking and dialectics, Grollios expertly reveals how their understanding of critique can help us open cracks in capitalism and radicalize democratic social practice today. Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory is a must read for scholars of political theory and political philosophy, critical theory, the Frankfurt School, sociology and democratic theory.”

New Book: The Dynamic of Play and Horror in Adorno’s Philosophy

10 Monday Jul 2023

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Bence Kun wrote to announce the publication of his book on Adorno next fall at De Gruyter, which should be of interests to readers of this blog. At he puts it, “the work deals with Adorno’s concept of playfulness and horror, focusing on his philosophical rhetoric and ‘Negative Dialectics’.”

And here’s the publisher’s blurb:

“Long before Wittgenstein drew attention to its complexities, the concept of play had captured the interest of theorists for millennia. How do games contribute to our knowledge of the world? Wherein lies their universal appeal? Play is usually associated with a certain blitheness and buoyancy – could it nevertheless be argued that playfulness is not quite as innocent as it might seem?

Bence Kun draws on Adorno’s writings to explore the relation between philosophical play (understood here as imaginative thought as well as experimental expression) and an experience of dread Adorno links to children’s first encounter with death. By investigating his less familiar works, some of which have not yet been translated, Kun challenges the received view on Adorno’s approach to metaphysics, the role of systematic inquiry and the modern condition. As he has Adorno say, the originary impression of shock at the heart of philosophical reflection can only be fully apprehended through an open-ended and defiantly creative intellectual practice.”

The release date is Oct. 23!

AAS 2023 Meeting Final Program

04 Thursday May 2023

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Association for Adorno Studies 9th Annual conference, University of Sussex

Supported by the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society of Great Britian and School of Media Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex

Thursday May 4th

Welcome: Drinks at the Walrus Pub, for those who want them 8pm onwards. 10 Ship St, Brighton, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 1AD

You are also invited to a launch event for philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark’s latest book ‘The Experience Machine’: The Experience Machine: How our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Waterstones Bookshop 71-74 North Street

 7-9 pm BST

A grand new vision in cognitive science explains how our minds build our worlds. Hear a leading philosopher of mind speak on the extraordinary explanatory power of the “predictive brain” for our lives, mental health and society. The event series is supported in part by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and all events are open to the public. Attendance is free, but registration is required in advance. Those who think that they might attend are encouraged to register for a (free) e-ticket right away in order to have accurate attendance numbers.

AAS Conference Programme

Friday 5 May – Leonardo Hotel, Brighton Station 

8.45 Coffee and Tea, Meeting Room, Leonardo Hotel, Brighton Station

9.00 Opening Address: Surti Singh (Villanova)

9.20-11.00 

Chair: Gordon Finlayson (Sussex)

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg (Cambridge) ‘Der böse Kamerad’/‘Der gute Kamerad’ Minima Moralia

Bruno Carvalho (São Paulo): Suffering and pessimism, on the actuality of Adorno’s critical project

11.00-11.20 Coffee and Tea 

11.20-1.00 

Chair: Surti Singh (Villanova)

Emily Shyr (Duke): Revealing a Schubertian Constellation: Re-reading Adorno’s ‘Schubert’ through Benjamin

Fumi Okiji (Berkeley): Aesthetic form in the new thing // Aesthetic sociality of musique informelle

1.00-2.10 – Lunch

2.10-3.50 

Chair: Pierre-François Noppen (Saskatchewan)

Kathy Kiloh (OCAD): Involvement and Animal Desire 

Adriano Lotito (Sussex): The cage of social labour and the (Im)possibilities of emancipation

3.50-4.10 Break

4.10-5.50

Chair: Iain MacDonald (Montréal)

Lydia Goehr (Columbia): ‘Mitigating expressions and euphemistic circumlocutions’: Adorno on work, analysis, and critique

Antonia Hofstätter (Warwick): ‘Closer to the Truth? Adorno’s Kinderbilder‘.

Drinks and Conference Meal tbc 

Saturday 6 May -Leonardo Hotel, Brighton Waterfront 

8.45 Coffee and Tea Reception, Leonardo Hotel, Brighton Waterfront 

9.20-11.00 

Chair: Marina Lademacher (Sussex)

Lars Rensmann (Passau): How Nature Matters: Environmentalism after Arendt and Adorno 

Toby Lovat (Brighton): Immanent Critique and a Rational Life

11.00-11.30 Coffee and Tea 

11.30-1.10 

Chair: Jessica Daboin (Paris-1 Sorbonne)

Salima Naït Ahmed (Sorbonne): Adorno and Sartre on Anti-Semitism: A Comparison of Frankfurt School and Existentialist Approaches to Racialization

Estelle Ferrarese (Amiens): Re-actualizing Adorno’s theory of exchange. A critique of ethical consumption

1.10-2.10 Lunch and Business Meeting Surti Singh (President) and Pierre-Francois Noppen (Vice-President)

2.10-4.30 

Panel discussion on Iain Macdonald’s What would be different? Figures of Possibility in Adorno” 

Taylor Carman (Barnard – Columbia)

Peter E Gordon (Harvard)

Nick Walker (Cambridge)

Iain Macdonald (Montréal)

4.30 Closing Remarks

New Book: Negative Dialectics and Event

28 Thursday Oct 2021

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Vangelis Giannakakis wrote to us about his new book, which might be of interest to our readers. His book is entitled Negative Dialectics and Event: Non-Identity, Event and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness. It is published at Lexington Books with a foreword by Brian O’Connor.

Here’s the editor’s blurb:

“History is replete with false and unfulfilled promises, as well as singular acts of courage, resilience, and ingenuity. These episodes have led to significant changes in the way people think and act in the world or have set the stage for such transformations in the form of rational expectations in theory and the hopeful anticipations of dialectical imagination.

Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness revisits some of Theodor W. Adorno’s most influential writings and theoretical interventions to argue not only that his philosophy is uniquely suited to bring such events into sharp relief and reflect on their entailments but also that an effective historical consciousness today would be a consciousness awake to the events that interpellate and shape it into existence.

More broadly, Vangelis Giannakakis presents a compelling argument in support of the view that the critical theory developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School still has much to offer in terms of both cultivating insights into contemporary human experience and building resistance against states of affairs that impede human flourishing and happiness.”

The book can be purchased on the publisher’s site – discount code for a 30% off: LEX30AUTH21 (valid until 12/31/2021).

New Books from Polity Press

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Madeline Sharaga has written to us on behalf of Polity Press about two new titles that may be of interest to members of the Association


  • Correspondence, 1939 – 1969     by Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem: This new volume brings together the long-running correspondence between two towering figures of German-Jewish intellectual culture, covering a wide range of their discussions on philosophy, religion, history, politics, literature, and the arts.
  • The New Music: Kranichstein Lectures by Theodor W. Adorno: Based on lectures that Adorno delivered in Darmstadt in the 1950s and 1960s, this volume illuminates Adorno’s thoughts on the relation between traditional and avant-garde as well as the problems of composition in contemporary music.

Polity Press is also offering a discount :

To get 20% off these titles, go to www.politybooks.com and use code ADR21 at checkout.

Offer expires 31 October 2021.

New Book: Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Caleb J. Basnett has published a new book: Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal with the University of Toronto Press.

Here is the blurb from the publisher’s website:

Built upon the principle that divides and elevates humans above other animals, humanism is the cornerstone of a worldview that sanctifies inequality and threatens all animal life. Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal analyses this state of affairs and suggests an alternative – a way for humanity to make itself into a new kind of animal.

Theodor W. Adorno has been accused of leading critical theory into a blind alley, divorced from practical social and political concerns. In Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal, Caleb J. Basnett argues that by placing the problem of the human/animal distinction at the centre of Adorno’s thought, we discover a new Adorno, one whose critique of domination is in dialogue with classic concerns of political thought forged by Aristotle, including questions of humanist political education and the role of art.

Through a close reading of primary sources, Basnett identifies the principal conceptual structure entwined with the understanding of human life as antagonistic to other animals, and outlines how forms of aesthetic experience disrupt this problematic concept in favour of a reconceptualization of what we call human. His analysis displaces the centrality of the human and attempts to open up a space for its transformation, both in terms of how humans relate to each other and in how humans relate to other animals.

More information can be found here:

https://utorontopress.com/9781487541446/adorno-politics-and-the-aesthetic-animal/

New Book: Théorie critique de la propagande

24 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by in Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Publications, Theodor W. Adorno, Uncategorized

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Here’s some belated promotion for a collection that Gérard Raulet and myself edited. The collection is entitled Théorie critique de la propagande (Critical Theory of Propaganda, Éditions la Maison des sciences de l’homme). It came out late in the fall and it could be of interest to some of our readers.

Here’s a link to the publisher’s page and to the OpenEdition platform where the individual contributions can be found.

I translate the short blurb: 

The studies collected in this volume echo the rediscovery of Siegfried Kracauer’s manuscript entitled Totalitarian Propaganda (Totalitäre Propaganda, 1937-1938). Their aim is both exegetical and political. On the one side, they shed light on an important moment of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, namely the debate on mass culture and propaganda that animated the German exiles in the 1930s and 1940s. On the other, they articulate what motivated these thinkers in order to elaborate a critical theory of propaganda that would live up to the challenges of the present. The topics they debated, such as the authoritarian excesses of liberalism, the manipulation of the masses and the media construction of the real, remain very actual. 

Contributions: 

Introduction, by Pierre-François Noppen and Gérard Raulet

Patrick Vassort, L’art politique examiné par la Théorie critique

Gérard Raulet, La théorie de la propagande dans son contexte: les réflexions de la Théorie critique sur le fascisme pendant l’exil

Olivier Agard, Convergences et divergences avec l’Institut für Sozialforschung dans La propagande totalitaire de Siegfried Kracauer (1937-1938)

Hans J. Lind, A cacophony of critical voices? Excavating the palimpsest of Siegfried Kracauer’s 1937-1938 study on fascist propaganda

Stephanie Baumann, Des nouvelles masse à l’ornement totalitaire: Siegfried Kracauer sur la propagande nazie

Vladimir Safatle, The fascist laugh: propaganda and cynical rationality in Adorno

Agnès Grivaux, Manipulation des masses et propagande fasciste chez Horkheimer et Adorno: esquisse d’une théorie psychanalytique du jugement

Lucien Pelletier, Militantisme, propagande et métaphysique: pour introduire à la “Critique de la propagande” d’Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch, Critique de la propagande

Pierre Arnoux, Le pouvoir de la monotonie: Adorno et l’analyse empirique de la culture de masse

William Ross, Current of Music: de la radio courante vers la possibilité qui court dans la radio

Pierre-François Noppen, Le langage des images: schématisme, cinéma et régression chez Adorno

Léa Barbisan, L’”inconscient optique”: plongée dans les “profondeurs de la mentalité collective”

John Abromeit, Siegfried Kracauer and the early Frankfurt school’s analysis of fascism as right-wing populism

German/French Philosophy Conference: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Theory, May 25-26th (online)

20 Thursday May 2021

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Aurélia Peyrical has written to us about a two-day German-French philosophy conference she is co-organizing with Lea Gekle.

Here’s a PDF of the program. Time zone: CEST

And here’s the detail:

To register, email Lea Gekle (lea.gekle@u-picardie.fr). A summary of each presentation (1 page) will be available this week-end in German and French for those who register. It will also be possible to take part in the discussion in English, as well as in German and French. Two extraordinary translators will help us manage to ensure that everyone feels at ease to participate. 

English: This two-day conference intends to throw light upon doctoral students / post-doc student’s current research conducted in Germany and France, working in the area of German Critical Theory (first and second generation) from a philosophical and also interdisciplinary point of view. “Interdisciplinarity” has now become somewhat of a buzzword in Europe. On the face of it, the term mostly refers to a certain idea of how disciplines are supposed to come to work with one another. But, in fact, the term has for some time now been quite often used as a part of the neoliberal narrative that accompanies the Bologna Process’s standardization and re-structuring of European university systems. Accumulating knowledge is, however, only one way of thinking about interdisciplinary. Disciplines are themselves complex bodies of knowledge that cannot simply be “linked” to others from the outside. Hence our question: what kind of interdisciplinarity does Critical Theory need in order to be able to formulate at the same time a contemporary critical theory of society ?

French: Ces deux journées d’étude visent à mettre en lumière les travaux en cours de doctorant-e-s et jeunes docteur-e-s allemand-e-s et français-e-s travaillant sur la théorie critique d’un point de vue philosophique mais dans une perspective interdisciplinaire. L’interdisciplinarité est, désormais, sur toutes les lèvres. Mais elle est la plupart du temps évoquée dans un cadre particulier qui ne dit pas son nom : celui du processus de Bologne et de la restructuration néolibérale des universités européennes. Contre ce type d’interdisciplinarité qui se pense en tant qu’accumulation de différents savoirs sans se soucier de la manière de les articuler, nous nous posons la question suivante : comment penser aujourd’hui, grâce à la Théorie Critique, une interdisciplinarité et une pluridisciplinarité qui ne soit pas un flatus vocis formaliste, mais dont l’approche inter- et pluri-disciplinaire permet l’esquisse d’une théorie sociale contemporaine véritablement critique ?