Category Archives: Theodor W. Adorno

Symposium on Adorno’s “Sexual Taboos and Law Today”– Sixty Years On, Feb. 25

13 Monday Feb 2023

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Antonia Hofstätter has written to us to let us know about an upcoming symposium on ‘Adorno’s “Sexual Taboos and Law Today”– Sixty Years On’, which will be held at the University of Warwick and on Zoom on February 25.

Symposium on Adorno’s ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’ – Sixty Years On  

Saturday, 25 February 2023, University of Warwick, UK  

The event will also be streamed online. Registration required. 

Webpage: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/news/conference/adorno/

‘It’s a nice bit of sexual utopia not to be yourself. […] What is merely identical with itself is without happiness.’ 

Programme: 

10.00–10.30 Registration and coffee  

10.30–10.45 Introduction by the organisers (Antonia Hofstätter & Simon Gansinger) 

10.45–12.15 Panel 1: Sex and Taboo   

  • Christine Kirchhoff (International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin): Sexual Taboos and Law Today? Reflections from the Perspective of Psychoanalysis  
  • Julia König (University of Mainz): Reflections on the ‘Minors-Complex’ in Adorno’s ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’ and in Current Moral Panics  

12.15–13.30 Lunch   

13.30–15.00 Panel 2: Sex and Society  

  • Marcel Stoetzler (Bangor University): Law, Lust, and Otherness in the Society of Total Domination: On Adorno’s Essay ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’  
  • Craig Reeves (Birkbeck): Persecution, Punishment, and the Potential for Freedom: Reactualising Adorno’s Critical Moral Psychology  

15.00–15.15 Coffee  

15.15–16.45 Panel 3: Sex and Crime   

  • Iris Dankemeyer (University of Art and Design, Halle): Presumption of Innocence: On the Topicality of Adorno’s Lines of Enquiry in ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’
  • Nicola Lacey (LSE): A Feminist Criminal Lawyer’s Retrospective on Adorno’s Text  

16.45–17.00 Coffee  

17.00–18.00 Roundtable with all speakers  

19.00–22.00 Dinner  

Description:

First published in 1963, Theodor W. Adorno’s essay ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’ responded to changing attitudes to love and desire during a period of sexual liberation. Critiquing repressive bourgeois morality and progressive sexual values alike, ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’ suggests that the utopian potential of intimacy is inseparable from the challenges sexuality poses to self and society. The essay’s most famous line – ‘It is a nice bit of sexual utopia not to be yourself’ – already locates the promise of sexuality in the momentary dissolution of identity. It meets with Adorno’s claim that without its anarchical and transgressive aspects sexuality becomes neutralised and inert. Yet, these aspects evoke society’s contempt: ‘What is specifically sexual is eo ipso forbidden,’ Adorno writes.  

‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’ sheds light on the dynamics of desire and disdain, freedom and punishment, losing oneself and finding oneself that characterise the ‘brittle integration’ of sexuality into modern society. Ultimately, these dynamics destabilise the sphere of law and morality, and problematise modern conceptions of subjectivity and identity.  

Today, in times of #MeToo, identity politics, and heightened public concern for gender equality and transgender rights, ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’ invites renewed scrutiny. This one-day symposium explores the tensions that Adorno’s text brings to the fore in the sphere of legal theory, social critique, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. Making these tensions fruitful for the present moment is the overarching aim of this event.  

This event has been organised with the generous support of the Department of Philosophy and the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, the Aristotelian Society, the Society for Applied Philosophy, and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.

Details:

Please follow this link to register for the event (attendance in person or via Zoom):

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/485669930837

Please note that participants intending to attend the event in person will be required to leave a £5 deposit when registering. £4.09 of your deposit will be returned to you when you attend the event in person (an administrative fee of £0.91 will be kept by Eventbrite).     

Lunch, coffee, and snacks will be provided. Please indicate on the registration form whether you would like to attend the conference dinner at your own expense.  

If you have any questions about the event, please contact the organisers at antonia.hofstatter@warwick.ac.uk or simon.gansinger@warwick.ac.uk.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/485669930837

Please note that participants intending to attend the event in person will be required to leave a £5 deposit when registering. £4.09 of your deposit will be returned to you when you attend the event in person (an administrative fee of £0.91 will be kept by Eventbrite).

Lunch, coffee, and snacks will be provided. Please indicate on the registration form whether you would like to attend the conference dinner at your own expense.

If you have any questions about the event, please contact the organisers at antonia.hofstatter@warwick.ac.uk or simon.gansinger@warwick.ac.uk.

Call for Papers: Adorno & Poetry

06 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by in Call for Papers, Theodor W. Adorno

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Henry Pickford (Duke) has forwarded the following call for papers, which I am happy to post here:

Conference: Adorno & Poetry

Organizers: Lukas Hoffman, Carolina-Duke Program in German Studies; George Kovalenko, University of Denver

We invite submissions for a proposed panel on Adorno and Poetry at the 2023 German Studies Association conference, to be held in Montreal, October 5-8. In the wake of many contemporary theorists (such as Jacques Rancière, Alan Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, or Judith Butler) pointing to poetic form as a place of political praxis—of community formation—this panel seeks to explore the lyric theory of Theodor W. Adorno, whose 1951 “On Lyric Poetry and Society” sparked an international conversation about the potential political character of poetic production. 

Paper topics may include Adorno’s own theory of the lyric, Adornian inflections or interventions in a range of lyric projects, critiques or explications of Adorno’s poetics, Adorno’s posthumous Aesthetic Theory and the lyric, transnational and transhistorical complications to the Adornian lyric, Adorno and the contemporary lyric, and poetry after Auschwitz. Interested parties should send an abstract in English or German of no more than 500 words along with a brief bio to george.kovalenko@du.edu by February 15th. Submissions in German are especially welcome.

Conference on Minima Moralia, Nov. 11-13

07 Sunday Nov 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Yasmin Afshar has written to let us know about an upcoming conference to mark the 70th anniversary of the publication of Minima Moralia. The conference will be held over three days (Nov. 11-13, 2021) in three languages (French, German, English) at the Centre Marc Bloch of the HU Berlin.

Here’s the link for the complete program.

Here’s the flyer.

Here’s an overview:

“Wer sagt, er sei glücklich, lügt” Kritische Theorie in Bruchstücken: 70 Jahre Minima Moralia

11. November | 09:00

Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin 11.-13.11. 2021

Organisation: Susanna Zellini, Pierre Buhlmann, Philipp Nolz, Tobias Nikolaus Klass

Verpflichtende Anmeldung / inscription obligatoire / obligatory registration:
https://forms.gle/jDcvLfKznZHzh4789

Einleitung
Die Minima Moralia ist sicherlich eines der wichtigsten Werke der Kritischen Theorie und gleichzeitig die literarisch anspruchsvollste Schrift Theodor W. Adornos. In dieser Doppelgestalt mag der Grund zu finden sein, dass die Singularität und Eigenständigkeit der Minima Moralia in der Forschung bis heute weitgehend unbeachtet geblieben ist. Wir nehmen daher den 70. Jahrestag der Veröffentlichung der Minima Moralia (1951-2021) zum Anlass, um uns im Rahmen einer  Tagung von 11. bis 13. November am Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (Kooperationspartner der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal) diesem Buch zu widmen. Dabei wollen wir über die traditionellen interpretativen und methodologischen Unterscheidungen hinausgehen, und im Dialog zwischen Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaften eine gemeinsame und eigenständige  Lektüre des Werks vorschlagen.

Allgemeine Beschreibung
Es war vielleicht bisher noch zu früh, um die Wirkung und Tragweite der Minima Moralia zu bewerten. Dennoch lässt sich ein Sachverhalt deutlich herausheben: die Philosophie hat vor der Minima Moralia versagt. Da die Minima Moralia als „zu literarisch“ und zu „persönlich“ angesehen wurde, um Gegenstand einer ernsthaften philosophischen Analyse zu sein, ist sie bis heute Grundlage weniger Studien, von denen keine eine umfassende und historisch fundierte Lektüre des Werkes vorschlägt, die dem genuin philosophischen Gehalt der Schrift Rechnung trüge. Das hat die besonders verbreitete Gewohnheit begünstigt, das Werk lediglich als ein Arsenal beliebig verfügbarer Aphorismen zu betrachten, um die Interpretation anderer ,philosophischerer‘ Texte oder anderer Reflexionsbereiche in Adornos Werk zu untermauern. Breiter und trotzdem ebenso problematisch war die Rezeption in der Literaturwissenschaft: Da sie die Minima Moralia gewöhnlich in die deutsche aphoristische Tradition (von Lichtenberg über Nietzsche bis Benjamin) stellt, richtet sie die Analyse vor allem nach einer eher stilistisch-formalen als inhaltlichen Forschung, mit dem Risiko, den historischen Kontext und das theoretische Projekt, innerhalb dessen das Werk entstand, aus den Augen zu verlieren.
Es geht uns darum, die verschiedenen Disziplinen zusammenwirken zu lassen, um eine Interpretation vorzuschlagen, die die Singularität des Werks in ihr Zentrum rückt, seine Genese, die Verflechtung der Quellen und Projekte, in denen es Gestalt annimmt (Dialektik der Aufklärung, Philosophie der neuen Musik…), sowie die begriffliche Entwicklung seiner Terminologie berücksichtigt. Dadurch aber erweist sich die Minima Moralia als „ideales Laboratorium“ der Philosophie Adornos der 1940er Jahre: indem es die Ideen und Projekte auf originelle Weise assimiliert und transformiert, die im Umfeld der Epoche zirkulieren, verwirklicht es auf möglichst vollständige Weise die Verbindungen und Korrespondenzen zwischen Ästhetik, Ethik, Erkenntnis, Psychologie und Sozialkritik, die den hybriden Charakter des philosophischen Projekts Adornos bestimmen. Wie lassen sich aber die Texte der Minima Moralia ineinander und zueinander verstehen? Wie erlauben sie es, der philosophischen Gehalte gewahr zu werden, die in Form und Stil zum Ausdruck kommen? Ist es trotz der Gebrochenheit der Bausteine möglich, eine kritische Theorie in ihnen zu erkennen? Welche Begriffe der Theorie lassen sich aus ihnen noch gewinnen?

Kontakt
europe.philosophique@gmail.com

Kontakt

Yasmin Afshar
yasmin.afshar  ( at )  cmb.hu-berlin.de

New Book: The “Aging” of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Fifty Years Later

13 Monday Sep 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Samir Gandesha, Johan H. Hartle and Stefano Marino have published a new edited volume, The “Aging” of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Fifty Years Later, with Mimesis International.

If 2019 was an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Theodor W. Adorno in August 1969, also 2020 has been an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Adorno’s great but unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, first published in 1970. Adorno’s intellectual legacy is still alive today and indeed important for the conceptual tools as it still provides to develop a critical, active and negative (instead than acritical, passive and affirmative) relationship with the real. In the vast and complex corpus of Adorno’s entire philosophical oeuvre, his aesthetic theory deserves an especially close and renewed attention today for the variety of intellectual provocations that are still richly offered to us in order to critically understand our age.

Find out more about the book here: http://mimesisinternational.com/the-aging-of-adornos…/

New Books from Polity Press

13 Monday Sep 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Madeline Sharaga has written to us on behalf of Polity Press about two new titles that may be of interest to members of the Association


  • Correspondence, 1939 – 1969     by Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem: This new volume brings together the long-running correspondence between two towering figures of German-Jewish intellectual culture, covering a wide range of their discussions on philosophy, religion, history, politics, literature, and the arts.
  • The New Music: Kranichstein Lectures by Theodor W. Adorno: Based on lectures that Adorno delivered in Darmstadt in the 1950s and 1960s, this volume illuminates Adorno’s thoughts on the relation between traditional and avant-garde as well as the problems of composition in contemporary music.

Polity Press is also offering a discount :

To get 20% off these titles, go to www.politybooks.com and use code ADR21 at checkout.

Offer expires 31 October 2021.

New Book: Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal

13 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by in Publications, Theodor W. Adorno, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Caleb J. Basnett has published a new book: Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal with the University of Toronto Press.

Here is the blurb from the publisher’s website:

Built upon the principle that divides and elevates humans above other animals, humanism is the cornerstone of a worldview that sanctifies inequality and threatens all animal life. Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal analyses this state of affairs and suggests an alternative – a way for humanity to make itself into a new kind of animal.

Theodor W. Adorno has been accused of leading critical theory into a blind alley, divorced from practical social and political concerns. In Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal, Caleb J. Basnett argues that by placing the problem of the human/animal distinction at the centre of Adorno’s thought, we discover a new Adorno, one whose critique of domination is in dialogue with classic concerns of political thought forged by Aristotle, including questions of humanist political education and the role of art.

Through a close reading of primary sources, Basnett identifies the principal conceptual structure entwined with the understanding of human life as antagonistic to other animals, and outlines how forms of aesthetic experience disrupt this problematic concept in favour of a reconceptualization of what we call human. His analysis displaces the centrality of the human and attempts to open up a space for its transformation, both in terms of how humans relate to each other and in how humans relate to other animals.

More information can be found here:

https://utorontopress.com/9781487541446/adorno-politics-and-the-aesthetic-animal/

New Book: Théorie critique de la propagande

24 Thursday Jun 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Student-Led Reading Group on Adorno

03 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by in Links of Interest, Theodor W. Adorno

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Clint Montgomery, who just completed an M.A. at the University of Leipzig, wrote to share the news of summer reading group on Adorno.

Here’s the detail with the link to the reading Zoom meeting:

The Platypus Affiliated Society is hosting an 8 week student-led reading group on Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, the first session of which is happening this Wednesday, June 9th at 7 PM Central Time. We will meet every Wednesday at 7 PM Central for 8 weeks.

The recurring Zoom link is here:
https://zoom.us/j/95323669338

The reading schedule and readings can be found here: https://platypus1917.org/2021/05/08/summer-2021-adornos-negative-dialectics/
The dates in the reading schedule are different, though the chronological order is correct. We meet on Wednesdays at 7pm, same link as above. There are also other reading groups happening if that time does not work. 
All are welcome, especially those who are new to Adorno. 

Book Launch-Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction, May 17, 2021

29 Thursday Apr 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

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.