16 Thursday Jan 2025
Posted in Adorno in Context, Links of Interest
Tags
The Nation‘s Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins met with Peter E. Gordon about “Adorno’s conception of happiness, his thinking about jazz and classical music, his relationship with the Frankfurt School, and the future of critical theory.”
Link to the article: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/adorno-peter-gordon-precarious-happiness-interview/
15 Sunday Sep 2024
Posted in Links of Interest
The Group of Studies of Contemporary Critical Theory (GETeCC – IIGG/UBA) from Argentina and the Institute of Philosophy of the Diego Portales University (IDF – UDP) from Chile invite you to participate in the reading space on Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.
The space is open to the general public and will be held fortnightly on Tuesdays, through Zoom.
Schedule
– 12:00-14:00 hrs. (Mexico)
– 13:00-15:00 hrs. (Colombia).
– 14:00-16:00 hrs. (Venezuela).
– 15:00-17:00 hrs. (Chile, Argentina and Brazil).
– 19:00-21:00 hrs. (Great Britain).
– 20:00-22:00 hrs. (European Union).
Start date: Tuesday, September 3
📑 Registration requests should be made to Agustín Lucas Prestifilippo’s email: alprestifilippo@gmail.com
03 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Links of Interest, Theodor W. Adorno
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.
11 Tuesday May 2021
Posted in Conference, Critical Theory, Links of Interest
Divya Menon (divya_menon@emerson.edu) wrote to inform us that she is organizing a panel discussion on Zoom that could be of interest to readers of this blog. The detail is below.
On Saturday, May 15th at 11 AM Eastern Time, the Cambridge (i.e. Harvard/MIT) chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society is hosting an online panel discussion on “The Politics of Critical Theory”.
Zoom link here: https://zoom.us/j/91211815231
Back in the autumn of 2010, the New Left Review published a translated conversation between the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer causing more than a few murmurs and gasps. In the course of their conversation, Adorno comments that he had always wanted to “develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin, while keeping up with culture at its most advanced.” Adorno, it seems, was a Leninist. As surprising as this evidence might have been to some, is it not more shocking that Adorno’s politics, and the politics of Critical Theory, have remained taboo for so long? Was it really necessary to wait until Adorno and Horkheimer admitted their politics in print to understand that their primary preoccupation was with maintaining Marxism’s relation to bourgeois critical philosophy (Kant and Hegel)? This panel proposes to state the question as directly as possible and to simply ask: How did the practice and theory of Marxism, from Marx to Lenin, make possible and necessary the politics of Critical Theory?
Panelists:
Paul Breines (Professor Emeritus of History at Boston College)
Tom Canel (SHARE/AFSCME, Democratic Socialists of America)
Paul Demarty (Communist Party of Great Britain)
Alex Steinberg (Marxist Education Project)
Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/3946296458740686
02 Tuesday Mar 2021
Tags
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.
—
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.
14 Thursday Jan 2021
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”
31 Thursday Dec 2020
Posted in General, Links of Interest, Publications, Theodor W. Adorno
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.
31 Thursday Dec 2020
Posted in General, Links of Interest
Moira MacKenzie, the communications coordinator for the newly established Institute for Advanced Dialectic Research wrote to us with the following press release:
Thinking Positively about the Power of Negative Thinking
World’s first Dialectical Research Institute Established on World Philosophy DaySEATTLE, Washington — Philosopher Herbert Marcuse described dialectic as “the power of negative thinking,” but that hasn’t stopped the founders of the newly-established Institute for Advanced Dialectical Research from thinking positively about their new endeavor. They chose World Philosophy Day (Nov. 19) during a worldwide pandemic to launch the world’s first institute dedicated to dialectical thinking … and they think the timing couldn’t be better.
“One thing we’ve learned from the response to the is that we aren’t limited to interacting with people locally or at big conferences in far-away places,” says Jersey Flight, the institute’s Director of Interdisciplinary Research. Discussion groups, book clubs, lectures, even those big conferences, he notes, have all moved online. “Connecting from quarantine has taught us that distance is no longer a barrier to intellectual engagement and collaboration, whether it’s with people in our own neighborhoods or in other countries around the world.” Dealing with the virus has been challenging for everyone, Flight says, “but it has also created unexpected opportunities for forging fruitful partnerships and developing dialectical thinking.”
Dialectic is one of the oldest branches of philosophy—with roots in ancient Greece, China and India—but its modern form begins with the 19th century German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who showed how our thoughts and experience can develop through a process of contradiction and negation that leads to higher levels of thinking and awareness.
“Dialectic is relevant in a surprisingly wide variety of fields,” says Executive Director, Justin Burke, DPhil, “from philosophy and psychology to physics and linguistics, but it’s rarely studied in its own right.” Dr. Burke, who did his doctoral research on Hegel at Oxford, recalls, “As a student, I used to think of dialectic in purely philosophical terms, but I’ve come to understand what Hegel meant when he said it’s all around us.”
Several years ago, after a lecture, someone in the audience asked Dr. Burke about Hegel and Martin Luther King. “I had to admit I wasn’t aware of a link between them,” he says. “Later, I was surprised to find that Dr. King had written about Hegel and dialectic in his autobiography.” And King wasn’t the only one—Dr. Burke says he discovered that Nobel Prize-winning physicists have written about dialectic: Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg; there are dialectical biologists, psychologists and sociologists; there is a journal of Dialectical Anthropology; there are emerging fields of dialect, such as neurodialectics and dialectical linguistics. There are also established disciplines, such as dialectical education and Critical Theory, plus non-western traditions, including Chinese, Indian and Russian dialectics. Considered as a group, Dr. Burke says, “There are dozens of potential areas ripe for research and, hopefully, the propagation of dialectical thinking.”
To carry out this research, the institute has established an international forum—the first of its kind—for discussion and debate about dialectic under headings such as “Hegelian Dialectics”, “Quantum Mechanics” and “Dialectical Psychology”. In another first, the institute has also launched a journal of dialectical research, and will organize an annual symposium on dialectic.
18 Wednesday Nov 2020
Posted in Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Links of Interest, Publications
Paul Jones has written to us announcing the publication of his new book, Critical Theory and Demagogic Populism (Manchester University Press, 2020).
Here is the publisher’s blurb for the book:
Populism is a powerful force today, but its full scope has eluded the analytical tools of both orthodox and heterodox ‘populism studies’. This book provides a valuable alternative perspective. It reconstructs in detail for the first time the sociological analyses of US demagogues by members of the Frankfurt School and compares these with contemporary approaches. Modern demagogy emerges as a key under-researched feature of populism, since populist movements, whether ‘left’ or ‘right’, are highly susceptible to ‘demagogic capture’. The book also details the culture industry’s populist contradictions – including its role as an incubator of modern demagogues – from the 1930s through to today’s social media and ‘Trumpian psychotechnics’. Featuring a previously unpublished text by Adorno on modern demagogy as an appendix, it will be of interest to researchers and students in critical theory, sociology, politics, German studies, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as all those concerned about the rise of demagogic populism today.
16 Monday Nov 2020
Posted in Conference, Critical Theory, General, Links of Interest
Robert Kaufman wrote to us about this event on 11/23/20 at 6pm (PCT). Featuring Judith Butler, Mary Ann Caws, Norma Cole, Jean Daive, Philip Gerard, Fady Joudah, Myung Mi Kim, D.S. Marriott, Michael Palmer, Doris Salcedo, Timothy Snyder, Roberto Tejada, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Raúl Zurita, and moderated by Robert Kaufman.