Category Archives: Theodor W. Adorno

New Book: Adorno and the Ban on Images

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Links of Interest, Publications, Theodor W. Adorno

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UPDATE:

You are cordially invited to the virtual launch of Adorno and the Ban on Images. The author will be in conversation with Dr Cat Moir (Germanic Studies, Sydney).

The launch will take place as part of KCL’s Comparative Literature research seminar series via MS Teams on Wednesday 3 March 2021 at 4.30 pm GMT. The event is free, open to all and can be accessed here (alternatively copy the following link into your browser: https://tinyurl.com/1u30bmtp.) There is no need to pre-register.

Discount codes to purchase the book at a reduced cost (-35%) will be available on the day. In case of interest, the book can be purchased here.

For further information, please contact the organisers: anna.katila@kcl.ac.uk or maria.marino@kcl.ac.uk.

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Sebastian Truskolaski has written to us letting us know that his new book, Adorno and the Ban on Images, will be released shortly with Bloomsbury. Here is the publisher’s blurb:

This book upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism. 

Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno’s writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse. By re-appraising Adorno’s writings on politics, philosophy, and art, this book reconstructs this notoriously difficult author’s overall project from a radically new perspective (Adorno’s famous ‘standpoint of redemption’), and brings his central concerns to bear on the problems of today.

On the one hand, this means reading Adorno alongside his principal interlocutors (including Kant, Marx and Benjamin). On the other hand, it means asking how his secular brand of social criticism can serve to safeguard the image of a better world – above all, when the invocation of this image occurs alongside Adorno’s recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God.

By reading Adorno in this iconoclastic way, Adorno and the Ban on Images contributes to current debates about Utopia that have come to define political visions across the political spectrum.

Announcing New and Forthcoming Issues of New German Critique

19 Friday Feb 2021

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We look forward to the forthcoming Special Issue of New German Critique marking the 50th Anniversary of Aesthetic Theory. “Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory at Fifty” (NGC #143) is edited by Peter E. Gordon (Harvard University) and will feature essays by Eva Geulen, Max Pensky, Hent de Vries, Martin Jay, Sherry Lee, J. M. Bernstein, Ricardo Samaniego de la Fuente, and Mikko Immanen.

From New German Critique:

“It has been fifty years since Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was first published in 1970. The work appeared at an historical moment when political tension on the left was at its height, and when the modernist approaches its author championed were being eclipsed by competing movements associated with the 1970s, such as pop art and postmodernism. The initial resistance to Adorno’s major work created a legacy of misunderstandings, and even today, a proper reckoning with Aesthetic Theory in all of its dialectical complexity remains an ongoing and collective effort. This special issue of New German Critique originated in a series of lectures on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory held at Harvard University during the spring of 2019.”

The current issue (#142, February 2021) also includes essays that will be of interest to Adorno scholars. http://ngc.arts.cornell.edu/current.html

A more fulsome description of the current issue from the journal:

“NGC #142 features a broad range of exciting essays on Adorno, Lessing, Kafka, interwar socialist literature, and the concept of Leitkultur. On Adorno: Lydia Goehr’s contribution explores Adorno’s references to J.S. Bach in order to illuminate Adorno’s “critical theory of possibility,” and Kylie Gilchrist’s essay examines whether and how Adorno could critique advanced capitalist societies for their dehumanizing tendencies while at the same time refusing to define the human. Andrea Gyenge argues that the figure of the mouth in Lessing’s famous study of Laocoön tests the limits of eighteenth-century neoclassicism. Marit Grøtta’s essay examines the intertextual archive of Kafka’s Der Verschollene, bringing into play the hitherto overlooked nature theater movement of the early twentieth century. On interwar socialist literature: Sabine Hake’s contribution studies the writings of the largely forgotten August Winnig, and Christoph Schaub’s article explores how the world literature of socialist internationalism was imagined and practiced in the aftermath of World War I. Finally, Jana Cattien’s article interrogates Leitkultur discourse in contemporary Germany, aiming to expose how Germany’s colonial legacy simultaneously underpins that discourse while remaining hidden from it.

Lydia Goehr’s “Did Bach Compose Musical Works? Thinking with Adorno through Paradigms of Possibility,” will be available online without charge through May 2021 from Duke University Press.

The Adorno and Identity Seminars

14 Thursday Jan 2021

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Jon Catlin, Fumi Okiji, and Eric Oberle have written to us asking us to post about a series of seminars they will be curating around Adorno and Identity. More details are below:

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/689345985085105

Negative dialectics, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno wrote, “is suspicious of all identity.” The concept of identity and its negations—nonidentity and negative identity—are woven throughout Adorno’s wide-ranging corpus. This interdisciplinary series of virtual seminars on “Adorno and Identity,” convened by Jonathon Catlin (Princeton), Eric Oberle (Arizona State), and Fumi Okiji (Berkeley), revisits Adorno’s thought at a moment in which political, cultural, legal, and psychological notions of identity have expanded relevance and vexed public meaning. Across these sessions, scholars from diverse fields will return to Adorno’s theoretical framework in order to collectively develop more robust notions of identity, nonidentity, and negative identity, and to advance critical theory by connecting Adorno’s work to broader conversations about identity in adjacent fields, including the study of race, gender, sexuality, and technology.

This series of virtual seminars will meet on Zoom every two weeks over the course of the spring 2021 semester, beginning Friday, Jan. 29 (1–3pm Eastern US time). Each session will consist of two parts: three presentations of approximately 15 minutes each, followed by an hour of discussion amongst the participants and a public audience. On our Facebook event page you will find our current schedule. Please email jonathon.catlin@gmail.com to be kept up to date with sessions through our email list. A Zoom link and outlines of the presentations will be provided on our website prior to the first session.

Current schedule:

Introduction to Adorno and Identity: Adorno, Du Bois, and negative identity (Jan. 29, 2021, 1–3pm EST)
Jonathon Catlin, Eric Oberle, and Fumi Okiji

Rethinking Adorno and race, part 1: Revisiting Du Bois and critical race theory (Feb. 12)
Corey D. B. Walker – “The Wound of Blackness: Thinking Adorno and the Limits of Critical Theory”
Oshrat Silberbusch – “‘The World Thus Darkly Through the Veil’: Reflections on Identity (Thinking) with Du Bois and Adorno”
Charlotte Baumann – Adorno, Suffering & Critical Race Theory: Or, The Non-identical & the System

Rethinking Adorno and Race, part 2: Freedom through fugitivity and negation (Feb. 26)
Henrike Kohpeiß – “Identity Produced by Negation: Freedom after Theodor Adorno and Saidiya Hartman”
Romy Opperman – “Critical Black Feminist Theory”
Anders Bartonek – “Marronage and Non-identity”

Rethinking Adorno and race, part 3: Fanon, racisms, and the question of praxis (March 12)
Martin Shuster – “Adorno and Fanon on Antisemitism”Sid Simpson and Ryan Curnow – “Stripping Away the Masks of Identity: Adorno and Fanon’s Negative Dialectics”

Adorno and the politics of non-identity (March 26)
Frank Müller – “Reflections on the Politics of Nonidentity”
Ariane Mintz – “Unveiling the ‘Individualistic Veil’: On Narcissistic Reactions to Capitalist Mutilations”
Claudia Leeb – “The Feminist Subject-in-Outline’s Fight against the Extremist Right”

Adorno and queer dis/identification (April 9)
Asaf Angermann – “Queer Utopia and the Incommensurable: Adorno after Muñoz”
Kyle Kaplan – “Dear Adorno: On the Limits of Personal and Practical Advice”
Nicole Yokum – “The Politics of Avoidance: From Adornian Coldness to Edelmanian Antisociality”

Identity thinking, data, and the politics of algorithmic personalization (April 23)
Moira Weigel – An Adornian critique of algorithmic identity, machine learning, and personalization
Jerome Clarke – “Battle of Negroes in a Black Box: Nonidentity and Race Data”
Samir Gandesha – “Adorno’s Critique of Identity Thinking: Between the Abstract and Concrete”

Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation: Towards an Ethics of Thinking

31 Thursday Dec 2020

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Paolo A. Bolaños has written to us about his recent new book, Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation: Towards an Ethics of Thinking, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield shortly. Here is the publisher’s description:


Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation: Towards an Ethics of Thinking offers a philosophical notion of an “ethics of thinking,” a kind of thinking that is receptive to the non-identical character of the world of human and non-human objects. Paolo A. Bolaños experiments with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno, who are presented as contemporary proponents of the Frühromantik tradition. Bolaños offers a reconstruction of the respective philosophies of language of Nietzsche and Adorno, as well as a rehearsal of their critique of metaphysics and identity thinking, in order to develop a notion of philosophical praxis that is grounded in the ethical dimension of thinking. Via Nietzsche and Adorno, Bolaños argues that thinking’s performative participation in uncertainty broadens the domain of reason, thereby also broadening our conceptual capacities and our receptivity to new possibilities of thinking. As an ethical praxis, thinking guards itself from the error of solidification, thereby opening philosophy to a reconciliatory, as opposed to domineering, reception of the world.

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.

Continue reading →

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

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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.