The wait is finally over! The Journal of Adorno Studies is now available through Mimesis Journals. Warm thanks to Samir Gandesha, Johan Hartle, Antonia Hofstätter, Han-Gyeol Lie, and Stefano Marino for their hard work and committed engagement.
The inaugural issue offers, inter alia, a Kaleidoscopics of short essays that testify to the richness and diversity of “the contemporary significance of Adorno’s work from a host of different viewpoints.” Contributors include: Robert Hullot-Kentor, Martin Shuster, Fabian Freyenhagen, Anastasios Gaitanidis, Polona Curk, Qianfan Zhao, Alastair Morgan, Lydia Goehr, Sebastian Tränkle, Fumi Okiji, Samir Gandesha, J.M. Bernstein, Kathy Kiloh, Andrew Bowie, Camilla Flodin, Gertrud Koch, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Stefano Marino, Iain Macdonald, and Henry W. Pickford.
The three volumes of the journal’s previous series (2016–2019) are also archived on the journal’s website.
The 9th annual meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies took place in the beautiful coastal city of Brighton, UK, in early May. The meeting was held over two days in the venues of the Leonardo Hotel (May 5th: Brighton Station; May 6th: Brighton Waterfront). It was the first time since 2019 that the AAS was able to hold its annual meeting. It was very exciting to reconnect in person and to see so many new speakers and participants join our adventure.
Our thanks go to the Centre for Social and Political Thought of the University of Sussex for hosting the event. A very special thanks to Gordon Finlayson and Marina Lademacher for all the work they invested in organizing this wonderful event with such a stimulating and high-calibre program! The meeting was very well attended (we counted over 45 participants) and convened speakers and participants from several countries, including the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Greece and Brazil. Amongst other things, this year’s program offered a concentration of remarkable papers on Adorno’s aesthetics and philosophy of music, which made for a very sustained and thought-provoking conversation over two days. The last day ended with a much-anticipated author-meet-critics panel devoted to Iain Macdonald’s What Would Be Different. Thanks to Taylor Carman, Peter E. Gordon, Iain Macdonald and Nick Walker for the fascinating exchanges!
We held our business meeting on the second day of the event at lunch time, as is our custom. While members of the AAS met a number of times more or less informally during our pandemic hiatus, this was our first formal business meeting since 2019. Surti Singh (President) and Pierre-Francois Noppen (Vice-President) co-chaired the meeting. They shared news about recent developments in the AAS and submitted a number of points for discussion. Significant changes have happened over the last three years. And we have many people to thank for their help and their efforts in making these changes possible. Here’s an overview:
First, Martin Shuster and Kathy Kiloh (founders of the AAS, former President and Vice-President of the AAS, respectively, as well as founders and editors Adorno Studies since its inception) stepped down from the journal in 2021. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to both of them for their long and dedicated service and their extraordinary commitment to the AAS. Since then, a new editorial team has formed (Samir Gandesha, Johan Hartle, Antonia Hofstätter, Han-Gyeol Lie and Stefano Marino) along with a new editorial board. The new editors have been very busy preparing the relaunch of Adorno Studies at Mimesis Press. Antonia Hofstätter, who was present at the meeting, relayed some very exciting news (and shared some visuals!) about the next issue. Stay tuned! The event will be publicized on this blog.
Second, the AAS has been working on the transfer of this blog to a new server at UC Berkeley (thanks to Robert Kaufmann, Debarati Sanyal and Dan Blanton). The details should be announced soon. In the meantime, if you wish to be added on the mailing list of this blog, please contact Pierre-François Noppen directly (pf.noppen@usask.ca).
Third, we have announced that our executive is to be renewed at our 2024 meeting. It is worth noting that, on the model we agreed upon in 2012 at our first meeting (Johns Hopkins University), members of our executive serve three-year terms. While the pandemic upset our plans for a renewal of the executive, we are pleased to return to our pre-pandemic model with three-year commitments.
Fourth, we discussed a number of options for next year’s meeting (2024). The location will be announced by the end of the summer on this blog. We are also thrilled to announce that Peter E. Gordon has very graciously agreed to host our 2025 meeting at Harvard University.
All of this bodes very well for the future of the AAS!
Here’s the complete schedule of this year’s meeting.
And here are some pictures that were shared with us:
On April 26th and 27th 2019, the Association for Adorno Studies convened its 8th annual meeting at the University of São Paulo’s beautiful campus. The meeting was officially opened with remarks by host Vladimir Safatle, Surti Singh, and Pierre-François Noppen. It was the Association’s first meeting in Latin America and a welcome exposure to Adorno studies in Brazil. The well-attended meeting featured a strong program with speakers from Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The papers included excellent engagements with Adorno’s philosophy and aesthetics, as well as timely inquiries into the relevance of Adorno’s thought for current social and political issues.
Amid threats to academic freedom and invectives against cultural Marxism, our meeting coincided with Bolsonaro’s April 26th announcement on twitter that budgetary cuts would directly target philosophy and sociology. With the humanities facing an uncertain future, and colleagues and students in a dubious position, the meeting embodied a spirit of solidarity. Subsequently, a 30% cut to all university budgets was announced and the situation remains precarious today, with some universities uncertain about how they will conclude their current semesters.
During our business meeting, held on the second day, we discussed the general aims of the Association, possibilities for publication in the Association’s journal, Adorno Studies, plans for next year’s meeting with several options in Europe, and the future possibility of returning to Latin America.
On behalf of the entire Association, we’d like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Vladimir Safatle and Eduardo Socha for being such generous hosts, navigating us through the fascinating city of São Paulo, and for all their work and organization into making this yet another successful and productive meeting.
Iain Macdonald has published a new monograph on Adorno and the concept of possibility with Stanford University Press. Here is the publisher’s description:
Possibility is a concept central to both philosophy and social theory. But in what philosophical soil, if any, does the possibility of a better society grow? At the intersection of metaphysics and social theory, What Would Be Different looks to Theodor W. Adorno to reflect on the relationship between the possible and the actual. In repeated allusions to utopia, redemption, and reconciliation, Adorno appears to reference a future that would break decisively with the social injustices that have characterized history. To this end, and though he never explains it in any detail—let alone in the form of a full-blown theory or metaphysics—he also makes extensive technical use of the concept of possibility. Taking Adorno’s critical readings of other thinkers, especially Hegel and Heidegger, as his guiding thread, Iain Macdonald reflects on possibility as it relates to Adorno’s own writings and offers answers to the question of how we are to articulate such possibilities without lapsing into a vague and naïve utopianism.
The 6th annual meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies was held last weekend at Duke University (March 24-25, 2017). As cherry blossoms were bursting in color on Duke’s gorgeous campus, speakers and participants were gathered in the Fredric Jameson Gallery.
The meeting was opened by remarks from Henry Pickford, Joseph Winters, and Pierre-François Noppen. Unfortunately, the Association’s vice-president, Roger Foster, couldn’t attend this year’s meeting due to the restrictions imposed by CUNY on travels to North Carolina in protest against the sex discrimination laws that the North Carolina State legislature has introduced. The meeting was attended by speakers and participants from the United States of America, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Germany, and Austria. The high-caliber papers led to very engaging discussions throughout the meeting. This year’s author-meet-critics panel was devoted to Peter Gordon’s new book, Adorno and Existence (Harvard UP, 2016), which addresses an important weakness in the scholarship, namely Adorno’s repeated confrontation with Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger. It made for a very stimulating exchange between the author and his three respondents, Espen Hammer, Gordon Finlayson and Iain Macdonald. The first day ended with a reception to celebrate the publication of the first volume of Adorno Studies: an interdisciplinary journal. It was also the Association’s way of thanking the editors, Martin Shuster and Kathy Kiloh, for their outstanding work on developing this unique platform.
As is our custom, all were invited to discuss questions relative to the journal and the development of the Association in our annual business meeting (day one, at lunch time). Plans were discussed for next year’s meeting (a number of options are being explored). The location of the meeting will be announced on our website at the end of summer. Once again, we held an informal roundtable discussion on the second day (at lunch time), which focused on the shifts and disruptions in the contemporary political landscape.
On behalf of all the members of the Association, we would like to extend our gratitude to Henry Pickford, and to Thomas Manganaro, who assisted Henry in organizing this most productive and successful event.
Peter Gordon (Harvard) has a new book on Adorno, which should be of interest to the readers of this blog. We are very happy that Peter will be joining us to discuss his book at the 6th annual meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies (Duke University, see post). The panel (with Espen Hammer, Gordon Finlayson and Iain Macdonald) promises to be very interesting.
Here’s a short blurb and some comments from the page at HUP:
From the beginning to the end of his career, the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, verging on polemic. In Kierkegaard he saw an early paragon for the late flowering of bourgeois solipsism; in Heidegger, an impresario for a “jargon of authenticity” cloaking its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch. Even in the straitened rationalism of Husserl’s phenomenology Adorno saw a vain attempt to break free from the prison-house of consciousness.
Most scholars of critical theory still regard these philosophical exercises as marginal works—unfortunate lapses of judgment for a thinker otherwise celebrated for dialectical mastery. Yet his persistent fascination with the philosophical canons of existentialism and phenomenology suggests a connection far more productive than mere antipathy. From his first published book on Kierkegaard’s aesthetic to the mature studies in negative dialectics, Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise.
Ultimately, Adorno saw in them an instructive if unsuccessful attempt to realize his own ambition: to escape the enchanted circle of idealism so as to grasp “the primacy of the object.” Exercises in “immanent critique,” Adorno’s writings on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger present us with a photographic negative—a philosophical portrait of the author himself. In Adorno and Existence, Peter E. Gordon casts new and unfamiliar light on this neglected chapter in the history of Continental philosophy.
Written with elegance and meticulously researched, the book focuses on Adorno’s successive encounters with Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger over the years as a key to unlock Adorno’s own difficult thinking. A major contribution to Adorno studies and beyond.”—Seyla Benhabib, Yale University
Adorno and Existence struck me as almost inevitable: how is it that no one had thought to write this necessary book previously? With a rare combination of narrative brio and analytic insight, Peter Gordon tracks Adorno’s repeated confrontations with Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Kafka, & co. This is a fine, even irreplaceable study with a superb and riveting final chapter.”—Jay Bernstein, The New School
“This extraordinary study is a marvelous interpretation of the whole of Adorno’s philosophical thinking by making convincingly clear to what surprising degree it is dependent on some constitutive ideas of Kierkegaard. Gordon successfully integrates two aims, the systematic re-interpretation of Adorno’s philosophy and the subtle reconstruction of his intellectual development. This is a tour de force for which Peter Gordon deserves highest admiration.”—Axel Honneth, Goethe University Frankfurt and Columbia University
“On first reading Adorno’s early study of Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin intuited that it was ‘very possible that the author’s later books will spring from this one.’ When Adorno reissued it many years later, he admitted to Ernst Bloch that it had ‘the character of a dream-like anticipation.’ With Peter Gordon’s arresting new interpretation of Adorno’s life-long struggle with Kierkegaard’s legacy, a struggle generating the dynamic force field of theology, aesthetics and social critique he called negative dialectics, we can understand for the first time how right both of these observations actually were.”—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
