Judith Butler,‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’

Robert J.C. Young,‘Foucault on Race and Colonialism’

Scu’s new blog, Critical Animal, entries on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’

Part 2 and Part 3

And also his Culture Industry

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The time of hybridity — Simone Drichel

Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity — Rosalyn Diprose

Levinas, Habermas and modernity — Nicholas H. Smith

Antinomies of transcritique and virtue ethics: An Adornian critique — Giuseppe Tassone

A law’s tale: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Gertrud Koch

From avenging to revolutionary force: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Hauke Brunkhorst

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Toward a Theoretical Outline of the Subject: The Centrality of Adorno and Lacan for Feminist Political Theorizing — Claudia Leeb

Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault — Nancy Luxon

Voting the General Will: Rousseau on Decision Rules — Melissa Schwartzberg

Harriet Martineau on the Theory and Practice of Democracy in America — Lisa Pace Vetter

The new issue of Bookforum is out and it includes an essay on Adorno by Richard Wolin

Link

Theodor W. Adorno’s years in the USA represent a pivotal period in his life and career. Many of the writings that established his lasting significance as one of the outstanding critical thinkers of modernity are works of exile: In Search of Wagner (written in the UK), Minima Moralia, Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Philosophy of New Music, and The Authoritarian Personality (all written in the US). This issue of Telos will reconsider Adorno’s American experience from both intellectual and biographical perspectives, as well as from the interplay between historical and philosophical concerns. Adorno’s biographer Detlev Claussen has argued that Adorno’s American experience fundamentally shaped the development of his philosophy. Which elements of Adorno’s American experience in particular warrant scholarly examination in light of their larger critical significance? What lessons can we draw from his collaborations and intellectual friendships with American scholars and fellow exiles? How can we account for the dialectical tension between Adorno’s bleak views of many American institutions and social customs (the culture industry, the hegemony of empiricist social science, the perils of McCarthyism), and his lesser known embrace of America’s democratic culture and his appreciation of more humane forms of social interaction? Adorno observes in American society the thorough “penetration … [of] humaneness in people’s immediate behavior.” For Adorno, America not only represents “purely a society of exchange,” but also a democracy in which “there is an infinitely greater proximity between the political form of democracy and the people’s feeling of life” (from Adorno’s 1959 lecture “Kultur and Culture”). What are, broadly, Adorno’s American lessons (positive and negative) and how are they articulated in his writings during and after his time in exile? And, more specifically, what can Adorno teach us about America that is still relevant today, and what are, from our historically distanced point of view, the limits and shortfalls of Adorno’s critique of America?

We invite scholars from all disciplines to contribute to this issue. We seek contributions that will shed light on the complexity of Adorno’s life and work in America and the impact of the American experience on Critical Theory; we encourage contributions that do not rehearse the cliché of Adorno as a detached European mandarin of high culture.

Possible subjects for this issue include: Exile, Dialectics, Collaboration, Empirical Research, Pragmatism, Music, Film, Culture Industry (i.e., popular and mass culture), Thomas Mann, Hanns Eisler, Max Horkheimer, New Deal Politics, McCarthyism and American Institutional Reception, Anti-Semitism.

Possible works include: Authoritarian Personality, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Composing for Films, Minima Moralia, Philosophy of New Music, as well as various correspondences and minor works.

Please send abstract (no longer than 500 words) by July 15, 2008, to Joshua Rayman (joshuarayman@yahoo.com) and Ulrich Plass (uplass@wesleyan.edu). Completed articles should be no longer than 8500 words (including notes) and will be due by June 1, 2009. The volume is scheduled to appear in December 2009.

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Walter Benjamin on Photography: Towards Elemental Politics — Mika Elo

Benjamin, Trauma and the Virtual — Allen Meek

Cybersurgery and Surgical (Dis)embodiment: Technology, Science, Art and the Body — Julie Doyle

Fossilising the Commodity: Tactical Engagements with Time, Art and the Virtual in Models by Ricky Swallow — Marita Bullock

Aura as Productive Loss — Warwick Mules

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction — Martin Dixon

“Politicizing Art”: Benjamin’s Redemptive Critique of Technology in the Age of Fascism — Amresh Sinha

Dialectical Film Criticism: Walter Benjamin’s Historiography, Cultural Critique and the Archive — Catherine Russell

The Dissipating Aura of Cinema — Kristen Daly

From Flâneur to Web Surfer: Videoblogging, Photo Sharing and Walter Benjamin @ the Web 2.0 — Simon Lindgren

Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno & Media Art Criticism — Daniel Palmer

Tillers of the Soil/Travelling Journeymen: Modes of the Virtual — A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul

Paradise Regained? The Work of Mediation Technology in an Age of Open Communities — John Grech

Articles are available for download here

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'The Merchant of Venice' Through the Lens of Continental Philosophy — Oona Eisenstadt, Pomona College.

Shylock After Auschwitz: 'The Merchant of Venice' on the Post-Holocaust Stage–Subversion, Confrontation, and Provocation — Arthur Horowitz, Pomona College.

Reading the 'Merchant of Venice' through Adorno — Zdravko Planinc.

Shylock Between Exception and Emancipation: Shakespeare, Schmitt, Arendt — Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine.

Avoiding Tragedy in the 'Merchant of Venice' — Paul A. Kottman, New School University.

Shylock: The Knight of Faith? — Ken Jackson, Wayne State University.

Heart's Blood: Derrida and Portia on Translation — Oona Eisenstadt, Pomona College.

Unfinished Business: A Response to the Symposium "The Merchant of Venice and Contemporary Theory" –  J. Aaron Kunin, Pomona College.
   

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Beyond totem and idol, the sexuate other — Luce Irigaray, Karen I. Burke

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis — Sara Beardsworth

The errant name: Badiou and Deleuze on individuation, causality and infinite modes in Spinoza — Jon Roffe

The practical absolute: Fichte’s hidden poetics — Anthony Curtis Adler

A ravaged site: on time and the law — Peg Birmingham

Richard Polt: The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy — Stuart Elden

Stuart Elden, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation — Richard Polt

Alan Paskow, The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation — Robert J. Dostal