Henry Pickford, “Thinking with Adorno: Metaphysical Experience and Aesthetic Autonomy”
9:30 – 11 a.m. EST
Fri, Mar. 12, 2021

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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.