Category Archives: Theodor W. Adorno

CfP: Adorno and Identity

31 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in Adorno Studies (journal), Call for Papers, Frankfurt School, Publications, Theodor W. Adorno

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Jonathon Catlin asked us to share the following call for papers:

CfP: Adorno and Identity – Virtual Workshop and Special Issue of Adorno Studies

A virtual workshop on “Adorno and Identity,” with papers intended for publication in a special issue of the journal Adorno Studies, is now accepting abstracts from potential contributors.

Negative dialectics, Theodor Adorno wrote, “is suspicious of all identity.” Nevertheless, identity is one of the central concepts linking together Adorno’s wide-ranging corpus. This issue pursues a timely and interdisciplinary revisitation of the notions of identity, the nonidentical, and negative identity in Adorno, prompted by several recent studies: Eric Oberle’s Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity, Fumi Okiji’s Jazz As Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited, and Oshrat Silberbusch’s Adorno’s Philosophy of the Nonidentical: Thinking as Resistance. These works serve as a common point of departure for revisiting Adorno’s thought at a moment in which identity has become a central and hotly debated concept. The goal of this issue is twofold: to use Adorno’s work to develop more conceptually robust and nuanced notions of identity and nonidentity, and to advance critical theory by connecting Adorno’s work to broader conversations about identity.

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New article: “Adorno’s Critique of the New Right-Wing Extremism: How (Not) to Face the Past, Present, and Future”

21 Friday Aug 2020

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Harry Dahms wrote to us about the publication of his new article on Adorno’s recently published lecture course. You can find it here: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol29/iss1/14/

Here’s the abstract:

This paper serves three purposes relating to a lecture Adorno gave in 1967 on “the new right-wing extremism” that was on the rise then in West Germany; in 2019, the lecture was published in print for the first time in German, to wide acclaim, followed by an English translation that appeared in 2020. First, it is important to situate the lecture in its historical and political context, and to relate it to Adorno’s status as a critical theorist in West Germany. Secondly, Adorno’s diagnosis of the new right-wing extremism (and related forms of populism) and his conclusions about how to resist and counteract it are relevant to the current political situation in the United States, even though he presented his analysis more than half a century ago. Thirdly, Adorno’s lecture provided the model for a type of education that is oriented toward enabling students to face unpleasant facts about modern social life in constructive ways, including recognizing and resisting right-wing populism and extremism, in an age that imposes greater and greater uncertainty and challenges on individuals. In conclusion, it is evident that in a rapidly changing world, the “tricks” of right-wing populists and extremists are astonishingly unoriginal and static, which in part may explain their appeal and effectiveness. Reading the pedagogy Adorno suggested as a practical application of his critical theory highlights the importance of enabling individuals to recognize the “normalcy” of proliferating experiences of cognitive dissonance, and to respond to such experiences by adopting a productive rather than defeatist stance with regard to the increasing complexity and the intensifying contradictions of modern societies in the twenty-first century, as they are accompanied by myriad possibilities and threats.

New Book: Adorno and Neoliberalism

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

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Charles Prusik wrote to us announcing the publication of his new book, Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society, published by Bloomsbury in August of 2020. The foreword is written by Deborah Cook.

Here is the publisher’s blurb:

The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno’s critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno’s dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. 

Prusik explains the importance of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno’s work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno’s analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society.

9th Annual Meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies Details

27 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in Association for Adorno Studies, Conference, Theodor W. Adorno, Uncategorized

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Venue – University of Sussex, Falmer Campus
Date: May 1st/2nd, 2020
 
Friday 1st of May Gardner Tower Attenborough Centre
Saturday 2nd of May Arts A 108
 
Speakers
 Peter Dews (University of Essex)
 Estelle Ferrarese (Université de Picardie, Jules Verne)
 Kathy Kiloh (OCADU)
 Asaf Angerman (Kentucky University)
 Phillip Hogh (University of Oldenburg)
 Konstantinos Kavoulakos (University of Crete)
 Mahon O’Brian (University of Sussex)
 Nick Walker (University of Essex/Cambridge)
 Jacob Bard-Rosenberg (University of Cambridge)
 Iain Macdonald (University of Montreal)
 Lydia Goehr (Columbia University)
 Antonia Hofstätter (TYSKA-SU)
 Bruno Carvalho (São Paolo)
 Antoine Athanassiadis (UCD)
 Robert Ziegelmann (Humboldt)
 Jessica X. Daboin (Paris VIII)
 Sabrina Muchova (Charles University, Prague)
 Eric-John Russell (Kingston University)
 Robert Engelmann (Vanderbilt University)
 Hingley (Hertford College, Oxford)
 Robert Howlett (Sheffield University)
 Gabriel Toupin (University of Motreal)
 Aurelia Peyrical (Paris-Nanterre University)
 Lea Geckle  (Université de Picardie Jules Verne)
 
Confirmed Participants
 Fabian Freyenhagen (University of Essex)
 Prof. J G Finlayson (University of Sussex)
 Dr. Surti Singh (American University of Cairo)
 Dr. Pierre-François Noppen (University of Saskatchewan)
 Prof. Brian O’Connor (UCD)
 
General information:
 Traveling to Sussex University is easy. Here is some information on
 how to get here.
 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/about/directions
 
 Here is a Campus Map: 
 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/about/campus/map
 
Accommodation:
 
 Participants at the AAS conference are responsible for booking 
 their own accommodation. There are many hotels to choose from in
 Brighton though bear in mind that it is the Brighton Festival and 
 the May Bank Holiday, so best book early.

 I have arranged for their to be a Conference Discount Rate at 
 Jury's Inn. They have two hotels. One is by the station. This is
 convenient for travelling to and from the airport, and the Falmer 
 Campus. The other is on the Sea Front, which is a 6 minute taxi 
 ride, or 15 minute walk from the station. Rooms at the station 
 hotel are less expensive.
 
 If you select the hotel you want put in the group code <EVENT> 
 into the booking site, it will give you a 20% discount
 
 NB. May 1st is a bank holiday in England and the start of the  
 Brighton Festival. Consequently there is pressure on rooms so book  
 A.S.A.P.

 Jurys Inn, Brighton, 101 Stroudley Rd, Brighton BN1 4DJ
 Phone: 01273 862121
 https://www.jurysinns.com/hotels/brighton-city
 
 Jury's Inn Kings Rd, Brighton BN1 2GS
 Phone: 01273 206700
https://www.jurysinns.com/hotels/brighton-waterfront/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=local
 
There is very limited campus accommodation available 
to book at the Institute of Development Studies https://www.ids.ac.uk/ 
 

Minima Moralia Today @ Brandeis

16 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Conference, Frankfurt School, General, Links of Interest, Theodor W. Adorno, Uncategorized

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Perhaps this symposium will be of interest to our readers. It is on September 20, 2019 at Brandeis University.

The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the renowned critical theorist Theodor Adorno. To mark his passing, this symposium will reflect on, engage with, and theorize about the lasting impact of his work. In particular, this symposium takes as its core text Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, a philosophical touchstone for the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first. The symposium will investigate the ways that Adorno’s reflections address the damages of contemporary life and/or conceptions of that damaged life.

New Book: What Would Be Different: Figures of Possibility in Adorno

02 Monday Sep 2019

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Iain Macdonald has published a new monograph on Adorno and the concept of possibility with Stanford University Press. Here is the publisher’s description:

Possibility is a concept central to both philosophy and social theory. But in what philosophical soil, if any, does the possibility of a better society grow? At the intersection of metaphysics and social theory, What Would Be Different looks to Theodor W. Adorno to reflect on the relationship between the possible and the actual. In repeated allusions to utopia, redemption, and reconciliation, Adorno appears to reference a future that would break decisively with the social injustices that have characterized history. To this end, and though he never explains it in any detail—let alone in the form of a full-blown theory or metaphysics—he also makes extensive technical use of the concept of possibility. Taking Adorno’s critical readings of other thinkers, especially Hegel and Heidegger, as his guiding thread, Iain Macdonald reflects on possibility as it relates to Adorno’s own writings and offers answers to the question of how we are to articulate such possibilities without lapsing into a vague and naïve utopianism.

New Book: Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung V: Vorträge und Gespräche – Band 1: Vorträge 1949-1968

02 Monday Sep 2019

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Michael Schwarz has edited this collection of twenty of Adorno’s public lectures from 1949-1968. Topics range from anti-semitism and the authoritarian personality to critiques of public policy and aesthetic concerns. One of the lectures included in this collection, “Aspekte des neuen Rechts-radikalismus” has also been published as a stand-alone text, accompanied by an epilogue by Volker Weiß. This lecture is of particular interest to us today, given that it is a talk delivered in 1967 in Vienna in response to the rise of the far-right National Democratic Party. Adorno’s discussion of the similarities and differences between this new turn to the right and older forms of fascism, and his analysis of the enduring popularity of extreme right-wing politics, may be instructive for those of us grappling with current global politics.

Exposing Capitalism’s Blind Domination

30 Friday Aug 2019

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Lambert Zuidervaart (Emeritus, ICS and University of Toronto) has published a new essay on the life and work of Adorno on the website of the Times Literary Supplement, and it may of interest to readers. It is titled “Theodor W. Adorno: Exposing Capitalism’s Blind Domination,” and appears online in the Footnotes to Plato series.

New book: Das Ärgernis der Philosophie: Metaphysik in Adornos Negativer Dialektik

14 Wednesday Aug 2019

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Marc Nicolas Sommer (University of Basel) has written to us letting us know of a new book edited by him and Mario Schärli (University of Fribourg) titled Das Ärgernis der Philosophie: Metaphysik in Adornos Negative Dialektik (Mohr Siebeck, 2019). It may be of interest to our readers. The table of contents is attached below.

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