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”.
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)
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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)
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:
The Program in Critical Theoryoffers 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
