2024 sees the 80th anniversary of the publication of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Written in the darkest years of the Second World War, this book remains the object of persistent public interest and scholarly debate. Its substantive claims are presented in a hyperbolic, apparently self-contradictory style that lends itself in equal measure to instant quotation as to misinterpretation. What can we learn from it today?
This seminar series will revisit this enigmatic and challenging work, seeking a reappraisal that takes its heterodox textual style into serious philosophical consideration and connects it to wider debates about Western modernity’s place in history, about gender and feminism, and about our relation to, and the domination of, nature.
All seminars will be online and take place at 4-6pm (GMT) on Fridays on the indicated dates.
For more information and to attend please register at: https://www.cicsi-uni.org/doe-at-80