Category Archives: Publications

New Book: Théorie critique de la propagande

24 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by in Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Publications, Theodor W. Adorno, Uncategorized

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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

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

Posted by in Adorno in Context, Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Publications, Theodor W. Adorno

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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.)

New book: Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

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Eric-John Russell (Département de Philosophie at the University of Paris 8) has written to us about his new book: Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems (Bloomsbury, 2021), with a foreword by Étienne Balibar.

He notes that “while the monograph is primarily engaged with the work of Guy Debord and Hegelian philosophy, a central argument is that Debord’s work ought to be situated within the legacy of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, particularly Adorno.” And he also notes that there is also a free widget preview available for both the book’s introduction and Étienne Balibar’s foreword: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/6038b8f8e21b8400014cc099

Finally, this flyer will give you 35% off of the book.

Spectacular-Logic-in-Hegel-and-Debord-pre-order-flyerDownload

New Book: Adorno and the Ban on Images

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

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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.

—

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.

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.

New Book: Critical theory and demagogic populism

18 Wednesday Nov 2020

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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.

CfP: Adorno and Identity

31 Monday Aug 2020

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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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