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 Thursday Apr 2021
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:
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.
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”
21 Wednesday Dec 2016
Posted in Adorno in Context, Frankfurt School, General, Theodor W. Adorno
Alex Ross has a piece in the New Yorker that should be of interest to many.
[Adorno’s] moment of vindication is arriving now. With the election of Donald Trump, the latent threat of American authoritarianism is on the verge of being realized, its characteristics already mapped by latter-day sociologists who have updated Adorno’s “F-scale” for fascist tendencies. […] As early as the forties, Adorno saw American life as a kind of reality show: “Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.” Now a businessman turned reality-show star has been elected President. Like it or not, Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one.
18 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted in Adorno in Context, Critical Theory
Tags
I’ve been reading through Wendy Brown’s new book on neoliberalism in the last couple of weeks, and I’d like to jot down some thoughts on it here (hopefully in prelude to a genuine review essay further along the road).
Brown’s book gets exactly right the nature of the transformation of both states and individuals in neoliberalism into self-standing entrepreneurial units forced to compete for investment funds with other such units. This is described as the eclipse of homo politicus by the all-encompassing neoliberal figure of homo economicus. Neoliberalism, Brown argues, literally swallows the space of the demos, the democratic space in which people gather to articulate common concerns around freedom, equality, and sovereignty. Our problem is not merely (!) the wasting away of public goods, public values and public participation. It is the evisceration of the very space in which it is possible to come together and form a public, the space that, for Brown, Aristotle (and Arendt) distinguish as different from ‘mere life’, and which Marx conceived as the ‘true realm of freedom’. Neoliberalism, Brown states, in a sentence that captures a dawning awareness of where things now stand, is ‘the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity’ (p. 44). Continue reading
19 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Adorno in Context
Tags
Adorno in Context, Aesthetics, Arab Art, Arab Spring, Cairo, Concept Art, Critical Theory, Egypt, Ganzeer, Hany Rashed, Pop Art, Surti Singh, Theodor W. Adorno
Installation view of Hany Rashed’s “Toys” (2014) at Mashrabia Gallery, Cairo. Image copyright the artist.
Over the past three years, Egyptian street art has become an iconic symbol of protest. It has appeared and reappeared with the same lightening speed as the rapid shifts in the political climate, directly participating in the events that transpired under the regimes of Hosni Mubarak, Mohammed Morsi, and Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi. In the hands of Egyptian street artists, art was a powerful revolutionary weapon. Now, in an atmosphere of repression, where many of the signs and symbols of the revolution have been painted over and protest has been outlawed, a new set of questions is crystallizing about the role of art in contemporary Egypt. Continue reading
08 Friday Aug 2014
Posted in Adorno in Context, Theodor W. Adorno
In a recent publication, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York took up the question: ‘Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs?’ The report, which attracted the interest of several mainstream news organizations, noted that, at the end of 2013, aggregate student debt in the United States exceeded $1 trillion, and more than 11% of student loan balances are either delinquent or in default. These unfortunate facts, however, do not vitiate the welcome finding that the college degree has maintained a steady ROI of 15%, which, the authors note, ‘easily surpasses the threshold for a sound investment’. Granted, this 15% has held steady only because the wages of people without college degrees have been falling faster than the wages of college graduates. But these unfortunate social facts are irrelevant to the concept of a sound investment in any case. The authors do go on to caution, however, that ‘while the benefits of college still outweigh the costs on average, not all college degrees are an equally good investment’. Continue reading
03 Sunday Aug 2014
Posted in Adorno in Context, General, Theodor W. Adorno
The Association for Adorno Studies would like to introduce a new series of blog posts, called “Adorno in Context,” wherein Adorno scholars write more casually, through a lens inspired and informed by Adorno’s thinking, on elements of the modern world. Upcoming, we will have an initial series of posts by Roger Foster (Burrough Manhattan Community College, CUNY) and later, others by Surti Singh (American University in Cairo) and Gordon Finlayson (University of Sussex). We hope you’ll find them interesting, and please do not hesitate to comment.