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.

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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.