Category Archives: Frankfurt School

Seminar/Conversation with Peter E. Gordon on “Adorno, Negativity, Normativity”

14 Sunday Mar 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

UC BERKELEY’S PROGRAM IN CRITICAL THEORY PRESENTS: Two Adorno-Related Events, with Peter E. Gordon

Two Events with Peter E. Gordon
Peter E. Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of History, Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University
“A Precarious Happiness: Adorno on Negativity and Normativity“

Monday, March 15, 5–7 pm PST
Online, register here to receive a personalized Zoom link to join the webinar.

It is a commonplace view that Adorno subscribes to a doctrine of “epistemic negativism,” or “austere negativism.” On this interpretation, Adorno denies that we can have any knowledge of the good, since our society is wholly false. Gordon’s talk offers, first, some arguments against this commonplace reading of Adorno’s work and, second, proposes an alternative explanation for the normativity that underwrites his criticism. First, Gordon argues that the epistemic negativist interpretation is overstated, insofar as it presents society as a) uniform and b) closed; meanwhile, it also leaves Adorno with no resources to defend his theory’s own self-reflexive possibility. Second, against the epistemic negativist interpretation, Gordon argues that Adorno’s practice of immanent critique can succeed only because he acknowledges normative resources in the midst of our false society. This is one underlying commonality between Adorno and Marx. These normative resources are available to us not primarily as concepts but as experiential “traces” of sensuous happiness. In this respect Adorno subscribes to a species “materialism,” broadly construed. But Adorno’s commitment to such sensuous or aesthetic experiences does not leave him vulnerable to charges of hedonism or aestheticism; on the contrary, he insists that these very experiences themselves are precarious: they register the damage of our damaged world even as they also point beyond it…(more)

Seminar/Conversation with Peter E. Gordon on “Adorno, Negativity, and Normativity”—Including a Discussion of the “Meditations on Metaphysics” section of Adorno’s book Negative Dialectics (1966)

Tuesday, March 16, 5-7 pm PST
Online, register here to receive a personalized Zoom link to join the webinar.

Please join The Program in Critical Theory as it presents Professor Peter E. Gordon of Harvard University in conversation with Martin Jay, UC Berkeley (History; Program in Critical Theory), Pardis Dabashi, University of Nevada, Reno (English), and Robert Kaufman, UC Berkeley (Comparative Literature; Program in Critical Theory). After presentations and colloquy among the panelists, discussion will open to attendees. Those attending are asked to read the “Meditations on Metaphysics” section of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. An open-source version of Dennis Redmond’s English-language translation of Negative Dialectics can be accessed at any of these three sites:

https://www.academia.edu/39707967/Negative_Dialectics
https://libcom.org/library/negative-dialectics-theodor-adorno
https://dennisredmond.weebly.com/publications.html…(more)

The Program in Critical Theory offers a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory to UC Berkeley doctoral students doing innovative theoretical work in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition to offering coursework on nineteenth-century social theory and philosophy, Frankfurt School and related twentieth-century currents in theory and criticism, and contemporary engagements with critical theory traditions, the Program sponsors graduate fellowships, hosts visiting scholars, and presents lectures, seminars, and symposia for the Berkeley campus and Bay Area community.

To receive regular announcements about The Program in Critical Theory, we invite you to sign up for our mailing list. For more information, or to make a donation, please visit criticaltheory.berkeley.edu. 

Henry Pickford, “Thinking with Adorno: Metaphysical Experience and Aesthetic Autonomy”

07 Sunday Mar 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Henry Pickford, “Thinking with Adorno: Metaphysical Experience and Aesthetic Autonomy”
9:30 – 11 a.m. EST
Fri, Mar. 12, 2021

REGISTER HERE
Facebook event page (please mark “going” or “interested” to help us reach wider audiences!)

Please join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning series, tgiFHI! tgiFHI gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretative social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental (and interdepartmental) colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

Talk description:

In the spring of 1969, when Germany was convulsed by popular unrest and police violence, the editor of the German magazine Der Spiegel begins his interview with the philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno by saying “Professor Adorno, two weeks ago, the world still seemed in order,” to which Adorno responds, “Not to me.” The interview concludes with Adorno asserting, “I am not in the least ashamed to say very publicly that I am working on a major book on aesthetics.”

While Adorno submitted the oppressive tendencies of modern western society to withering critique, his practice as a public intellectual as well as his philosophy also seek to develop capacities of resistance and hope. The talk offers an account of some of these capacities, centering on two concepts advanced by Adorno: metaphysical experience and the riddle-character of modernist art.

Speaker bio:

Henry W. Pickford is Professor of German and Philosophy. He is the author of The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art; Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion and Art (also to appear in Russian translation): co-author of In Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist Manifesto; co-editor of Der aufrechte Gang im windschiefen Kapitalismus; editor and translator from the German of Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords and from the Russian of Lev Loseff, Selected Early Poems.

This event is cosponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.

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

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, General, Publications

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

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

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

≈ Leave a comment

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.

The Adorno and Identity Seminars

14 Thursday Jan 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

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”

New Book: Critical theory and demagogic populism

18 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by in Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Links of Interest, Publications

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

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

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

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 →

Martin Jay in conversation…

13 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by in Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Links of Interest, Publications

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Martin Jay will be in conversation with Paul Breines, with opening remarks by Rob Kaufman. The event will occur on Zoom, August 25, 2020 @ 6PM PT / 9PM EST. You can find more details here.

The event is presented by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in conjunction with University of California at Berkeley Program in Critical Theory and Verso Books.

Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus, and former Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley, and Paul Breines, Professor of History Emeritus, Boston College

Tuesday, August 25, 6 pm PST/9 pm EST
Please note: the link for the free Zoom registration needed in order to attend this event will be forthcoming at City Lights’ URL: http://www.citylights.com/info/?fa=event&event_id=3678

Discussing Martin Jay’s just-released essay collection, Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (Verso Books, 2020).

Minima Moralia Today @ Brandeis

16 Monday Sep 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.