Category Archives: Theodor W. Adorno

New Publication: (In)aesthetic Theory

21 Saturday Feb 2026

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Vangelis Giannakakis’s book, (In)aesthetic Theory: An Essay on Adorno, Badiou and Aesthetic Modernism is now avaliable.

Vangelis Giannakakis is a Belgian-Greek philosophy scholar and Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His research engages with the first generation of critical theorists and contemporary continental philosophy, with a broader interest in alternative models of cultural and socio-political experience. He has published in the fields of Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Aesthetics, and Critical Pedagogy.

Click here to access the book from the publisher’s website.

Here is the publishers blurb:
A reckoning with the radicalisation of modernist aesthetics that took hold in the mid-twentieth century, (In)aesthetic Theory illuminates the limits of aesthetic presentation by bringing Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou’s divergent philosophies of art into critical proximity.

Both theorists uncover moments in which art ceases to represent and begins to insist – where its truth is not stated outright but intimated in a gesture beyond the world as given. Their respective frameworks suggest that aesthetic experience can open an affective breach in which the reifying impulse of cognition is negated, and that which otherwise eludes the regime of established appearances is encountered obliquely. This shared structural insight anchors this book’s central hypothesis: that art’s power to produce truth lies precisely in this zone of interruption, of failure, of withdrawal, and vanishing intensity.

Combining original theory with historically grounded comparative commentary, the text reflects on presence and absence, history and memory, politics and art, entropy and decay. With it, Vangelis Giannakakis offers a vitally current interpretation of aesthetic modernism.

New Publication: Adorno’s 1961-62 Lectures on Aesthetics (German)

20 Friday Feb 2026

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The Association for Adorno Studies is pleased to highlight a new publication:

Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung IV: Vorlesungen Band 8: Ästhetik (1961/62), Suhrkamp, 2025, 930.
Edited by Anne Eusterschulte

PUBLISHER’S BLURB

In this lecture, which spanned two semesters in the early 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno provides a basic outline of his conception of aesthetics. In an examination of the status of the arts from the perspective of the 20th century and with a socio-critical view of the art and cultural events of the postwar period, he outlines some of the central concepts of his ground-breaking aesthetic theory: appearance and expression, mimesis and rationality, art and autonomy, the beautiful in nature and the beautiful in art, the work of art as a field of energy, the primacy of the object, the sublime and form.

Adorno provides a systematic introduction to the major philosophical theories on the subject, but also pays attention to specific art forms and to the controversial question of the significance of art in society. He comments lucidly and uncompromisingly on the culturally conservative trends of his time. Most importantly, however – and this is what makes his analysis so utterly relevant to the present age – he redefines art and aesthetic experience as a critical practice.

More information:
Suhrkamp webpage for Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung IV: Vorlesungen Band 8: Ästhetik (1961/62)

New Publication: Adorno and the Question of Theology

09 Friday Jan 2026

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Rachel Rosner’s book, Adorno and the Question of Theology: Religion and Reason Beyond Foundations, will be published with Bloomsbury in May 2026. Click here to access the book from the publisher’s website. Request for a copy from Bloomsbury for review purpose can be submitted to here.

Rachel Rosner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Christosemitism ERC Project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received my PhD in Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University October, 2025, and my MA in Philosophy from Northwestern University.
Her book develops a sustained interpretation of Theodor W. Adorno’s engagement with theology, arguing that his use of theological language is neither residual nor instrumental, but central to his critique of foundational reason. It show how Adorno’s method of constellation offers a model of critique that resists both secular reduction and metaphysical retrieval, with implications for debates in Critical Theory, philosophy of religion, and postsecular thought.

Here is the publisher’s blurb:

Can we move beyond the religious–secular divide and live together ethically in a shared political world?
Adorno and the Question of Theology: Religion and Reason Beyond Foundations says yes-and shows how. Through close readings of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory, Rachel R. Rosner examines how Adorno reconfigures the relationship between reason and theology to confront modern fragmentation. Drawing on Adorno’s usage of constellation-a way of thinking that connects ideas without locking them into fixed systems-Rosner offers a way to move beyond entrenched dichotomies. In doing so, the book intervenes in contemporary debates on postsecular theory, critical reason, and political theology by rethinking how normativity and critique operate without foundations. Accessible to newcomers and illuminating for specialists, this book serves as both an introduction to Adorno’s comprehensive philosophy and a path beyond enduring paradoxes in his reception.

What they said:

Adorno’s sporadic, under-justified invocation of certain theological concepts has
confounded all who remember his debts to those resolute atheists Marx and Freud.
Reading negative dialectics as a strategy eschewing the search for firm foundations,
transcendent truths and teleological goals, Rachel R. Rosner makes an arresting case for
their crucial function in an historically dynamic conceptual constellation that resists the
gravitational pull of the status quo.

—Martin Jay, Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus,
University of California, Berkeley, USA

Adorno scholars disagree about why and how he uses theological concepts such as
redemption. Are they merely rhetorical? Metaphorical? Inversely or negatively theological?
Through careful and creative reconstruction, Rachel R. Rosner offers a new and thought-
provoking account of how theological concepts figure in Adorno’s thought and shows the
relevance of his approach today.

—Lambert Zuidervaart, Resident Fellow, Theory Centre, Western University, CAN

New Publication: The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

11 Saturday Oct 2025

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The Association for Adorno Studies is pleased to highlight a new publication by Espen Hammer (Temple University) and Fred Rush (University of Notre Dame):
The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Routledge, 2025).

This volume offers a comprehensive introduction to one of the foundational works of Critical Theory, tracing its historical context, conceptual architecture, and contemporary relevance.

Publisher’s Blurb

Composed whilst in exile in the United States during the Second World War, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the most famous and influential text of the Frankfurt School. A theoretical exploration of history, modernity, and culture, its core warning of crisis and regression remains highly relevant today. However, it is also a notoriously complex work of philosophy.

The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the first fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in philosophy and social theory, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. This Guidebook examines:

  • The conceptual and intellectual background to Dialectic of Enlightenment
  • The ideas, themes, and arguments of the text
  • The reception and legacy of Dialectic of Enlightenment

A comprehensive and clearly written guide to this important text, this volume will be invaluable to students approaching the work for the first time, as well as to advanced students and researchers in philosophy, politics, sociology, and the history of ideas.

More information:
Routledge webpage for The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Journal of Adorno Studies: Now Available

07 Saturday Jun 2025

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The wait is finally over!
The Journal of Adorno Studies is now available through Mimesis Journals.
Warm thanks to Samir Gandesha, Johan Hartle, Antonia Hofstätter, Han-Gyeol Lie, and Stefano Marino for their hard work and committed engagement.

The inaugural issue offers, inter alia, a Kaleidoscopics of short essays that testify to the richness and diversity of “the contemporary significance of Adorno’s work from a host of different viewpoints.” Contributors include: Robert Hullot-Kentor, Martin Shuster, Fabian Freyenhagen, Anastasios Gaitanidis, Polona Curk, Qianfan Zhao, Alastair Morgan, Lydia Goehr, Sebastian Tränkle, Fumi Okiji, Samir Gandesha, J.M. Bernstein, Kathy Kiloh, Andrew Bowie, Camilla Flodin, Gertrud Koch, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Stefano Marino, Iain Macdonald, and Henry W. Pickford.

The three volumes of the journal’s previous series (2016–2019) are also archived on the journal’s website.

New Book: William S. Allen. Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History

30 Thursday Jan 2025

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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.

New Translation: Adorno’s Public Lectures 1949-1968

16 Thursday Jan 2025

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The Adorno Vorträge 1949-1968 published in 2019 and edited by Michael Schwarz have been translated by Nicholas Walker and will be published in February at Polity Press. Click here to access the link for the first volume and for the second volume.

Here is the publisher blurp:

When Theodor W. Adorno returned to Germany from his exile in the United States, he was appointed as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Frankfurt and he immediately made a name for himself as a leading public intellectual. Adorno’s widespread influence on the postwar debates was due in part to the public lectures he gave outside of the university in which he analysed and commented on social, cultural and political developments of the time. 

The first volume brings together Adorno’s lectures given between 1949 and 1968 on music, literature and the arts. With an engaging and improvisational style, Adorno spoke with compelling enthusiasm on subjects as diverse as Marcel Proust’s prose, Richard Strauss’s composition technique and Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Germany, restoring its social and intellectual institutions, needed to embrace the new music and writers who had been neglected, particularly with regards to Proust. To rebuild was taken to mean rediscovery, but Adorno also nurtured a vision of tradition which – far from being unthinkingly conservative – would attest to society’s honestly-appraised relationship to the past while it underwent the process of modernization. The volume illustrates Adorno’s deep commitment to holding contemporary music and culture to standards commensurate with the aspirations of a modern world emerging from the horrors of war.

The second volume brings together Adorno’s lectures given between 1949 and 1968 on social and political themes. With an engaging and improvisational style, Adorno spoke with infectious vigour about architecture and city planning, the relationship between the individual and society, the authoritarian personality and far-right extremism, political education and the current state of sociology, among other subjects. After Auschwitz, it was incumbent on Germany to undertake intensive memory work and to confront the reality of its own moral destruction, while rebuilding its political and economic systems. To rebuild was taken to mean rediscovery and looking outward, but Adorno also nurtured a vision of tradition which – far from being unthinkingly conservative – would attest to society’s honestly-appraised relationship to the past while it underwent the process of modernization. The volume illustrates Adorno’s deep commitment to holding society to standards commensurate with the aspirations of a modern world emerging from the horrors of war.

These volumes of his lectures is a unique document of Adorno’s startling ability to bring critical theory into dialogue with the times in which he lived. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history and in sociology and politics.

New Book: Peter E. Gordon, A Precarious Happiness

05 Wednesday Jun 2024

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Peter E. Gordon published a fascinating new book on Adorno earlier this year, entitled A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and The Sources of Normativity (Chicago UP). Here‘s the link to the publisher’s website. And here’s the publisher’s blurb:

“A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness.

“Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism.”—Jürgen Habermas
 
Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.”

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.”