The Adorno and Identity Seminars

14 Thursday Jan 2021

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Jon Catlin, Fumi Okiji, and Eric Oberle have written to us asking us to post about a series of seminars they will be curating around Adorno and Identity. More details are below:

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/689345985085105

Negative dialectics, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno wrote, “is suspicious of all identity.” The concept of identity and its negations—nonidentity and negative identity—are woven throughout Adorno’s wide-ranging corpus. This interdisciplinary series of virtual seminars on “Adorno and Identity,” convened by Jonathon Catlin (Princeton), Eric Oberle (Arizona State), and Fumi Okiji (Berkeley), revisits Adorno’s thought at a moment in which political, cultural, legal, and psychological notions of identity have expanded relevance and vexed public meaning. Across these sessions, scholars from diverse fields will return to Adorno’s theoretical framework in order to collectively develop more robust notions of identity, nonidentity, and negative identity, and to advance critical theory by connecting Adorno’s work to broader conversations about identity in adjacent fields, including the study of race, gender, sexuality, and technology.

This series of virtual seminars will meet on Zoom every two weeks over the course of the spring 2021 semester, beginning Friday, Jan. 29 (1–3pm Eastern US time). Each session will consist of two parts: three presentations of approximately 15 minutes each, followed by an hour of discussion amongst the participants and a public audience. On our Facebook event page you will find our current schedule. Please email jonathon.catlin@gmail.com to be kept up to date with sessions through our email list. A Zoom link and outlines of the presentations will be provided on our website prior to the first session.

Current schedule:

Introduction to Adorno and Identity: Adorno, Du Bois, and negative identity (Jan. 29, 2021, 1–3pm EST)
Jonathon Catlin, Eric Oberle, and Fumi Okiji

Rethinking Adorno and race, part 1: Revisiting Du Bois and critical race theory (Feb. 12)
Corey D. B. Walker – “The Wound of Blackness: Thinking Adorno and the Limits of Critical Theory”
Oshrat Silberbusch – “‘The World Thus Darkly Through the Veil’: Reflections on Identity (Thinking) with Du Bois and Adorno”
Charlotte Baumann – Adorno, Suffering & Critical Race Theory: Or, The Non-identical & the System

Rethinking Adorno and Race, part 2: Freedom through fugitivity and negation (Feb. 26)
Henrike Kohpeiß – “Identity Produced by Negation: Freedom after Theodor Adorno and Saidiya Hartman”
Romy Opperman – “Critical Black Feminist Theory”
Anders Bartonek – “Marronage and Non-identity”

Rethinking Adorno and race, part 3: Fanon, racisms, and the question of praxis (March 12)
Martin Shuster – “Adorno and Fanon on Antisemitism”Sid Simpson and Ryan Curnow – “Stripping Away the Masks of Identity: Adorno and Fanon’s Negative Dialectics”

Adorno and the politics of non-identity (March 26)
Frank Müller – “Reflections on the Politics of Nonidentity”
Ariane Mintz – “Unveiling the ‘Individualistic Veil’: On Narcissistic Reactions to Capitalist Mutilations”
Claudia Leeb – “The Feminist Subject-in-Outline’s Fight against the Extremist Right”

Adorno and queer dis/identification (April 9)
Asaf Angermann – “Queer Utopia and the Incommensurable: Adorno after Muñoz”
Kyle Kaplan – “Dear Adorno: On the Limits of Personal and Practical Advice”
Nicole Yokum – “The Politics of Avoidance: From Adornian Coldness to Edelmanian Antisociality”

Identity thinking, data, and the politics of algorithmic personalization (April 23)
Moira Weigel – An Adornian critique of algorithmic identity, machine learning, and personalization
Jerome Clarke – “Battle of Negroes in a Black Box: Nonidentity and Race Data”
Samir Gandesha – “Adorno’s Critique of Identity Thinking: Between the Abstract and Concrete”

Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation: Towards an Ethics of Thinking

31 Thursday Dec 2020

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Paolo A. Bolaños has written to us about his recent new book, Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation: Towards an Ethics of Thinking, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield shortly. Here is the publisher’s description:


Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation: Towards an Ethics of Thinking offers a philosophical notion of an “ethics of thinking,” a kind of thinking that is receptive to the non-identical character of the world of human and non-human objects. Paolo A. Bolaños experiments with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno, who are presented as contemporary proponents of the Frühromantik tradition. Bolaños offers a reconstruction of the respective philosophies of language of Nietzsche and Adorno, as well as a rehearsal of their critique of metaphysics and identity thinking, in order to develop a notion of philosophical praxis that is grounded in the ethical dimension of thinking. Via Nietzsche and Adorno, Bolaños argues that thinking’s performative participation in uncertainty broadens the domain of reason, thereby also broadening our conceptual capacities and our receptivity to new possibilities of thinking. As an ethical praxis, thinking guards itself from the error of solidification, thereby opening philosophy to a reconciliatory, as opposed to domineering, reception of the world.

Institute for Advanced Dialectical Research

31 Thursday Dec 2020

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Moira MacKenzie, the communications coordinator for the newly established Institute for Advanced Dialectic Research wrote to us with the following press release:

Thinking Positively about the Power of Negative Thinking
World’s first Dialectical Research Institute Established on World Philosophy Day

SEATTLE, Washington — Philosopher Herbert Marcuse described dialectic as “the power of negative thinking,” but that hasn’t stopped the founders of the newly-established Institute for Advanced Dialectical Research from thinking positively about their new endeavor. They chose World Philosophy Day (Nov. 19) during a worldwide pandemic to launch the world’s first institute dedicated to dialectical thinking … and they think the timing couldn’t be better.

“One thing we’ve learned from the response to the is that we aren’t limited to interacting with people locally or at big conferences in far-away places,” says Jersey Flight, the institute’s Director of Interdisciplinary Research. Discussion groups, book clubs, lectures, even those big conferences, he notes, have all moved online. “Connecting from quarantine has taught us that distance is no longer a barrier to intellectual engagement and collaboration, whether it’s with people in our own neighborhoods or in other countries around the world.” Dealing with the virus has been challenging for everyone, Flight says, “but it has also created unexpected opportunities for forging fruitful partnerships and developing dialectical thinking.”

Dialectic is one of the oldest branches of philosophy—with roots in ancient Greece, China and India—but its modern form begins with the 19th century German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who showed how our thoughts and experience can develop through a process of contradiction and negation that leads to higher levels of thinking and awareness.

“Dialectic is relevant in a surprisingly wide variety of fields,” says Executive Director, Justin Burke, DPhil, “from philosophy and psychology to physics and linguistics, but it’s rarely studied in its own right.” Dr. Burke, who did his doctoral research on Hegel at Oxford, recalls, “As a student, I used to think of dialectic in purely philosophical terms, but I’ve come to understand what Hegel meant when he said it’s all around us.”

Several years ago, after a lecture, someone in the audience asked Dr. Burke about Hegel and Martin Luther King. “I had to admit I wasn’t aware of a link between them,” he says. “Later, I was surprised to find that Dr. King had written about Hegel and dialectic in his autobiography.” And King wasn’t the only one—Dr. Burke says he discovered that Nobel Prize-winning physicists have written about dialectic: Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg; there are dialectical biologists, psychologists and sociologists; there is a journal of Dialectical Anthropology; there are emerging fields of dialect, such as neurodialectics and dialectical linguistics. There are also established disciplines, such as dialectical education and Critical Theory, plus non-western traditions, including Chinese, Indian and Russian dialectics. Considered as a group, Dr. Burke says, “There are dozens of potential areas ripe for research and, hopefully, the propagation of dialectical thinking.”

To carry out this research, the institute has established an international forum—the first of its kind—for discussion and debate about dialectic under headings such as “Hegelian Dialectics”, “Quantum Mechanics” and “Dialectical Psychology”. In another first, the institute has also launched a journal of dialectical research, and will organize an annual symposium on dialectic.

New Book: Critical theory and demagogic populism

18 Wednesday Nov 2020

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Paul Jones has written to us announcing the publication of his new book, Critical Theory and Demagogic Populism (Manchester University Press, 2020).

Here is the publisher’s blurb for the book:

Populism is a powerful force today, but its full scope has eluded the analytical tools of both orthodox and heterodox ‘populism studies’. This book provides a valuable alternative perspective. It reconstructs in detail for the first time the sociological analyses of US demagogues by members of the Frankfurt School and compares these with contemporary approaches. Modern demagogy emerges as a key under-researched feature of populism, since populist movements, whether ‘left’ or ‘right’, are highly susceptible to ‘demagogic capture’. The book also details the culture industry’s populist contradictions – including its role as an incubator of modern demagogues – from the 1930s through to today’s social media and ‘Trumpian psychotechnics’. Featuring a previously unpublished text by Adorno on modern demagogy as an appendix, it will be of interest to researchers and students in critical theory, sociology, politics, German studies, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as all those concerned about the rise of demagogic populism today.

Under the Dome: Paul Celan at 100

16 Monday Nov 2020

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Robert Kaufman wrote to us about this event on 11/23/20 at 6pm (PCT). Featuring Judith Butler, Mary Ann Caws, Norma Cole, Jean Daive, Philip Gerard, Fady Joudah, Myung Mi Kim, D.S. Marriott, Michael Palmer, Doris Salcedo, Timothy Snyder, Roberto Tejada, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Raúl Zurita, and moderated by Robert Kaufman.

Click here for more details.

CfP: Adorno and Identity

31 Monday Aug 2020

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Jonathon Catlin asked us to share the following call for papers:

CfP: Adorno and Identity – Virtual Workshop and Special Issue of Adorno Studies

A virtual workshop on “Adorno and Identity,” with papers intended for publication in a special issue of the journal Adorno Studies, is now accepting abstracts from potential contributors.

Negative dialectics, Theodor Adorno wrote, “is suspicious of all identity.” Nevertheless, identity is one of the central concepts linking together Adorno’s wide-ranging corpus. This issue pursues a timely and interdisciplinary revisitation of the notions of identity, the nonidentical, and negative identity in Adorno, prompted by several recent studies: Eric Oberle’s Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity, Fumi Okiji’s Jazz As Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited, and Oshrat Silberbusch’s Adorno’s Philosophy of the Nonidentical: Thinking as Resistance. These works serve as a common point of departure for revisiting Adorno’s thought at a moment in which identity has become a central and hotly debated concept. The goal of this issue is twofold: to use Adorno’s work to develop more conceptually robust and nuanced notions of identity and nonidentity, and to advance critical theory by connecting Adorno’s work to broader conversations about identity.

Continue reading →

New article: “Adorno’s Critique of the New Right-Wing Extremism: How (Not) to Face the Past, Present, and Future”

21 Friday Aug 2020

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Harry Dahms wrote to us about the publication of his new article on Adorno’s recently published lecture course. You can find it here: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol29/iss1/14/

Here’s the abstract:

This paper serves three purposes relating to a lecture Adorno gave in 1967 on “the new right-wing extremism” that was on the rise then in West Germany; in 2019, the lecture was published in print for the first time in German, to wide acclaim, followed by an English translation that appeared in 2020. First, it is important to situate the lecture in its historical and political context, and to relate it to Adorno’s status as a critical theorist in West Germany. Secondly, Adorno’s diagnosis of the new right-wing extremism (and related forms of populism) and his conclusions about how to resist and counteract it are relevant to the current political situation in the United States, even though he presented his analysis more than half a century ago. Thirdly, Adorno’s lecture provided the model for a type of education that is oriented toward enabling students to face unpleasant facts about modern social life in constructive ways, including recognizing and resisting right-wing populism and extremism, in an age that imposes greater and greater uncertainty and challenges on individuals. In conclusion, it is evident that in a rapidly changing world, the “tricks” of right-wing populists and extremists are astonishingly unoriginal and static, which in part may explain their appeal and effectiveness. Reading the pedagogy Adorno suggested as a practical application of his critical theory highlights the importance of enabling individuals to recognize the “normalcy” of proliferating experiences of cognitive dissonance, and to respond to such experiences by adopting a productive rather than defeatist stance with regard to the increasing complexity and the intensifying contradictions of modern societies in the twenty-first century, as they are accompanied by myriad possibilities and threats.

New Book: Adorno and Neoliberalism

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

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Charles Prusik wrote to us announcing the publication of his new book, Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society, published by Bloomsbury in August of 2020. The foreword is written by Deborah Cook.

Here is the publisher’s blurb:

The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno’s critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno’s dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. 

Prusik explains the importance of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno’s work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno’s analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society.

Martin Jay in conversation…

13 Thursday Aug 2020

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Martin Jay will be in conversation with Paul Breines, with opening remarks by Rob Kaufman. The event will occur on Zoom, August 25, 2020 @ 6PM PT / 9PM EST. You can find more details here.

The event is presented by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in conjunction with University of California at Berkeley Program in Critical Theory and Verso Books.

Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus, and former Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley, and Paul Breines, Professor of History Emeritus, Boston College

Tuesday, August 25, 6 pm PST/9 pm EST
Please note: the link for the free Zoom registration needed in order to attend this event will be forthcoming at City Lights’ URL: http://www.citylights.com/info/?fa=event&event_id=3678

Discussing Martin Jay’s just-released essay collection, Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (Verso Books, 2020).