Category Archives: Theodor W. Adorno

New Book: The “Aging” of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Fifty Years Later

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Samir Gandesha, Johan H. Hartle and Stefano Marino have published a new edited volume, The “Aging” of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Fifty Years Later, with Mimesis International.

If 2019 was an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Theodor W. Adorno in August 1969, also 2020 has been an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Adorno’s great but unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, first published in 1970. Adorno’s intellectual legacy is still alive today and indeed important for the conceptual tools as it still provides to develop a critical, active and negative (instead than acritical, passive and affirmative) relationship with the real. In the vast and complex corpus of Adorno’s entire philosophical oeuvre, his aesthetic theory deserves an especially close and renewed attention today for the variety of intellectual provocations that are still richly offered to us in order to critically understand our age.

Find out more about the book here: http://mimesisinternational.com/the-aging-of-adornos…/

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

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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

Student-Led Reading Group on Adorno

03 Thursday Jun 2021

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Clint Montgomery, who just completed an M.A. at the University of Leipzig, wrote to share the news of summer reading group on Adorno.

Here’s the detail with the link to the reading Zoom meeting:

The Platypus Affiliated Society is hosting an 8 week student-led reading group on Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, the first session of which is happening this Wednesday, June 9th at 7 PM Central Time. We will meet every Wednesday at 7 PM Central for 8 weeks.

The recurring Zoom link is here:
https://zoom.us/j/95323669338

The reading schedule and readings can be found here: https://platypus1917.org/2021/05/08/summer-2021-adornos-negative-dialectics/
The dates in the reading schedule are different, though the chronological order is correct. We meet on Wednesdays at 7pm, same link as above. There are also other reading groups happening if that time does not work. 
All are welcome, especially those who are new to Adorno. 

Book Launch-Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction, May 17, 2021

29 Thursday Apr 2021

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Eleni Philippou (Oxford) has shared with us news of the upcoming book launch for her recently published monograph, Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction (Routledge).

Full Details on the launch are available here: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/discussion-group-book-launch-speaking-politically-adorno-and-postcolonial-fiction.


Eleni Philippou (Oxford)
Daniele Nunziata (Oxford)
Monday, May 17, 2021 – 13:00 to 14:00
Livestreamed via Microsoft Teams on 17 May

Join Dr Eleni Philippou in conversation with Dr Daniele Nunziata to discuss her monograph, Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction. In this monograph Theodor Adorno’s philosophy engages with postcolonial texts and authors that emerge out of situations of political extremity – apartheid South Africa, war-torn Sri Lanka, Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the Greek military junta. This book is ground-breaking in two key ways: first, it argues that Adorno can speak to texts with which he is not historically associated; and second, it uses Adorno’s theory to unlock the liberatory potential of authors or novels traditionally understood to be “apolitical”. While addressing Adorno’s uneven critical response and dissemination in the Anglophone literary world, the book also showcases Adorno’s unique reading of the literary text both in terms of its innate historical content and formal aesthetic attributes. Such a reading refuses to read postcolonial texts exclusively as political documents, a problematic (but changing) tendency within postcolonial studies. In short, the book operates as a two-way conversation asking: “What can Adorno’s concepts give to certain literary texts?” but also reciprocally, “What can those texts give to our conventional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?” This book is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.

The book can be purchased here: https://www.routledge.com/Speaking-Politically-Adorno-and-Postcolonial-Fiction/Philippou/p/book/9780367437930

Bios: Dr Eleni Philippou is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at OCCT and the Principal Investigator of the Prismatic Jane Eyre Schools project. Beyond her key research interests in postcolonial and world literature, she is also interested in critical theory, comparative literature, and translation studies. She is an award-winning poet, with a number of poems published in both British and international anthologies and journals.

Dr Daniele Nunziata is a Lecturer in English Literature at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. His research on postcolonial literature has been published in numerous journals (including PMLA and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and in the Columbia University Press series, Studies in World Literature. He is a contributor to Writers Make Worlds.

New Book: Ferrarese, The Fragility of Concern for Others

15 Thursday Apr 2021

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Estelle Ferrarese has informed us that her recent book on Adorno and care had been published in English translation (translator: Steven Corcoran) in January by Edinburgh University Press. The complete English title of her book is: The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care (2021).

Here’s the flyer.

Here’s the description from the publisher’s page:

A systematic reflection on the social conditions of caring for others

  • Offers a feminist renewal of Adorno’s philosophy
  • Stages a conversation between two strands of theory that, despite the importance that they each grant to human vulnerability, have yet to enter into discussion: the Frankfurt School and the ethics of care
  • Sheds light on the difficulties and the lacuna of Adorno’s Critical Theory concerning patriarchy
  • Highlights the difficulty involved in determining the meaning of a moral act in the capitalist context
  • Brings the work of one of the leading figures of the contemporary French reception of Critical Theory to an English-language audience

Estelle Ferrarese, one of the leading figures of the contemporary French reception of Critical Theory, offers a renewal of the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno. Ferrarese develops our thinking about the social conditions of caring for others, while arguing for an understanding of morality that is materialist and political – always-already political.

Taking the social philosopher Adorno as a point of departure, Ferrarese questions this social philosophy by submitting it to ideas deriving from theories of care. She thinks through the mechanisms of the social fragility of caring for others, the moral gesture it enjoins, as well as its political stakes.

In the end, Ferrarese shows that the capitalist form of life, strained by a generalised indifference, produces a compartmentalised attention to others, one limited to very particular tasks and domains and attributed to women.

New Book: Global Economic Crisis as Social Hieroglyphic (Routledge)

02 Friday Apr 2021

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Christos Memos has shared with us the news about the upcoming publication of his new book by Routledge. The full title of his book is: Global Economic Crisis as Social Hieroglyphic: Genesis, Constitution and Regressive Progress.

Here’s the flyer.

And here’s the publisher’s description.

Book Description

This book examines the 2008 global economic crisis as a complex social phenomenonor “social hieroglyphic”, arguing that the crisis is not fundamentally economic, despite presenting itself as such. Instead, it is considered to be a symptom of a long-standing, multifaceted, and endemic crisis of capitalism which has effectively become permanent, leading contemporary capitalist societies into a state of social regression, manifest in new forms of barbarism. The author offers a qualitative understanding of the economic crisis as the perversion, or inversion, of the capitalistically organized social relations. The genesis of the current crisis is traced back to the unresolved world crisis surrounding the Great Depression in order to map the course and different “inverted forms” of the continuous global crisis of capitalism, and to reveal their inner connections as derivative of the same social constitution. From a historical and interdisciplinary perspective, the book expounds critical social theory, elaborating on the intersection between the early critical theory of the Frankfurt School – mainly Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse – and the “social form” analysis of the Open Marxism school. Global Economic Crisis as Social Hieroglyphic critically addresses the permanent character of the 1920s–1930s crisis and the “crisis theory” debates; the political crisis in Eastern Europe (1953–1968); the crisis of Keynesianism; the crisis of subversive reason; the crisis, negative anthropology and transformations of the bourgeois individual; the state of social regression and the destructive tendencies after the rise of neoliberalism; and finally, the 2008 financial crisis and its ongoing aftermath.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Capitalism in permanent crisis, 1920s–1930s

2. Political crisis and the crisis of modernity: Eastern Europe (1953–1968)

3. The crisis of Keynesianism, the transformation of liberal oligarchies and the critique of politics

4. The crisis of critique, the eclipse of subversive reason and the question of social constitution

5. The crisis and metamorphoses of the bourgeois individual: On negative anthropology

6. Capitalism as social regression: Destructive tendencies and new forms of barbarism

7. The 2008 economic crisis as an alienated critique of capitalism

Author

Christos Memos is Lecturer in Social and Political Theory at the Abertay University, UK. He is the author of Castoriadis and Critical Theory: Crisis, Critique and Radical Alternatives (2014).

(Global Economic Crisis and Social Hieroglyphic Genesis is available now Via Routledge with 20% off by using code SOC21 at the checkout.)

Seminar/Conversation with Peter E. Gordon on “Adorno, Negativity, Normativity”

14 Sunday Mar 2021

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UC BERKELEY’S PROGRAM IN CRITICAL THEORY PRESENTS: Two Adorno-Related Events, with Peter E. Gordon

Two Events with Peter E. Gordon
Peter E. Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of History, Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University
“A Precarious Happiness: Adorno on Negativity and Normativity“

Monday, March 15, 5–7 pm PST
Online, register here to receive a personalized Zoom link to join the webinar.

It is a commonplace view that Adorno subscribes to a doctrine of “epistemic negativism,” or “austere negativism.” On this interpretation, Adorno denies that we can have any knowledge of the good, since our society is wholly false. Gordon’s talk offers, first, some arguments against this commonplace reading of Adorno’s work and, second, proposes an alternative explanation for the normativity that underwrites his criticism. First, Gordon argues that the epistemic negativist interpretation is overstated, insofar as it presents society as a) uniform and b) closed; meanwhile, it also leaves Adorno with no resources to defend his theory’s own self-reflexive possibility. Second, against the epistemic negativist interpretation, Gordon argues that Adorno’s practice of immanent critique can succeed only because he acknowledges normative resources in the midst of our false society. This is one underlying commonality between Adorno and Marx. These normative resources are available to us not primarily as concepts but as experiential “traces” of sensuous happiness. In this respect Adorno subscribes to a species “materialism,” broadly construed. But Adorno’s commitment to such sensuous or aesthetic experiences does not leave him vulnerable to charges of hedonism or aestheticism; on the contrary, he insists that these very experiences themselves are precarious: they register the damage of our damaged world even as they also point beyond it…(more)

Seminar/Conversation with Peter E. Gordon on “Adorno, Negativity, and Normativity”—Including a Discussion of the “Meditations on Metaphysics” section of Adorno’s book Negative Dialectics (1966)

Tuesday, March 16, 5-7 pm PST
Online, register here to receive a personalized Zoom link to join the webinar.

Please join The Program in Critical Theory as it presents Professor Peter E. Gordon of Harvard University in conversation with Martin Jay, UC Berkeley (History; Program in Critical Theory), Pardis Dabashi, University of Nevada, Reno (English), and Robert Kaufman, UC Berkeley (Comparative Literature; Program in Critical Theory). After presentations and colloquy among the panelists, discussion will open to attendees. Those attending are asked to read the “Meditations on Metaphysics” section of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. An open-source version of Dennis Redmond’s English-language translation of Negative Dialectics can be accessed at any of these three sites:

https://www.academia.edu/39707967/Negative_Dialectics
https://libcom.org/library/negative-dialectics-theodor-adorno
https://dennisredmond.weebly.com/publications.html…(more)

The Program in Critical Theory offers a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory to UC Berkeley doctoral students doing innovative theoretical work in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition to offering coursework on nineteenth-century social theory and philosophy, Frankfurt School and related twentieth-century currents in theory and criticism, and contemporary engagements with critical theory traditions, the Program sponsors graduate fellowships, hosts visiting scholars, and presents lectures, seminars, and symposia for the Berkeley campus and Bay Area community.

To receive regular announcements about The Program in Critical Theory, we invite you to sign up for our mailing list. For more information, or to make a donation, please visit criticaltheory.berkeley.edu. 

Henry Pickford, “Thinking with Adorno: Metaphysical Experience and Aesthetic Autonomy”

07 Sunday Mar 2021

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Henry Pickford, “Thinking with Adorno: Metaphysical Experience and Aesthetic Autonomy”
9:30 – 11 a.m. EST
Fri, Mar. 12, 2021

REGISTER HERE
Facebook event page (please mark “going” or “interested” to help us reach wider audiences!)

Please join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning series, tgiFHI! tgiFHI gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretative social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental (and interdepartmental) colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

Talk description:

In the spring of 1969, when Germany was convulsed by popular unrest and police violence, the editor of the German magazine Der Spiegel begins his interview with the philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno by saying “Professor Adorno, two weeks ago, the world still seemed in order,” to which Adorno responds, “Not to me.” The interview concludes with Adorno asserting, “I am not in the least ashamed to say very publicly that I am working on a major book on aesthetics.”

While Adorno submitted the oppressive tendencies of modern western society to withering critique, his practice as a public intellectual as well as his philosophy also seek to develop capacities of resistance and hope. The talk offers an account of some of these capacities, centering on two concepts advanced by Adorno: metaphysical experience and the riddle-character of modernist art.

Speaker bio:

Henry W. Pickford is Professor of German and Philosophy. He is the author of The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art; Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion and Art (also to appear in Russian translation): co-author of In Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist Manifesto; co-editor of Der aufrechte Gang im windschiefen Kapitalismus; editor and translator from the German of Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords and from the Russian of Lev Loseff, Selected Early Poems.

This event is cosponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.