Continental Philosophy

The Centre for Social and Political Thought (University of Sussex) is hosting a one-day conference on the 6th August 2009 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the death of Theodor W. Adorno.

Anyone interested in presenting at this event is invited to submit either a paper proposal or abstract (no more than 500 words) to adorno.spt@gmail.com

Please include with proposals/abstracts your full name, email address, institutional affiliation, and position within institution.

We welcome papers on any issue directly related to (or influenced by) Adorno’s work – areas of interest may include aesthetics, memory, technology, ethics, politics, ideology, literature, theory/praxis, fetishism, culture and critique, as well as Adorno’s legacies, influence and contemporary relevance.

The deadline for receiving abstracts or paper proposals has been extended until the 30th June 2009. Time allocations for presentations will be 45 minutes (25-30mins for the paper, with an additional 15-20mins for questions).

We have three key speakers confirmed for the conference. They are Prof. Max Paddison (University of Durham), Drew Milne (University of Cambridge), and Nicholas Joll (Open University). please send abstracts/proposals via email to either Simon Mussell s.p.mussell@sussex.ac.uk or Chris O’Kane co41@sussex.ac.uk

1.  Editorial: In this Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy – The Editor

Featured Essay:

2. To Build or to Destroy?  The Philippine Experience with Walls and a Southeast Asian Perspective – Ranhilio Callangan Aquino

Articles:

3. Some Useful Lessons from Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy for Philippine Postcolonialism – F. P. A. Demeterio

4. Adorno, Obama, and Empire: Reflections on the U.S. Presidential Election and the Next President – Lukas Kaelin

5. Heidegger, Hegel, Marx: Marcuse and the Theory of Historicity – Jeffry V. Ocay

6. Derrida’s Turn to Franciscan Philosophy – Marko Zlomislic

7. Deconstruction and the Transformation of Husserlian Phenomenology – Chung Chin-Yi

8. Toward a Return to Plurality in Arendtian Judgment – Jack E. Marsh Jr.

9. Mistaking Judgments of the Agreeable and Judgments of Taste – Francis Raven

10. The Limits of Misogyny: Schopenhauer, “On Women” – Thomas Grimwood

11. Haecceitas and the Question of Being: Heidegger and Duns Scotus – Philip Tonner

12. Kong Zi on Good Governance – Moses Aaron T. Angeles

13. The Problem of the Inefficacy of Knowledge in Early Buddhist Soteriology – Ryan Showler

Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts could be called a brief “guide for the perplexed.” The perplexed include scholars in many disciplines who encounter Adorno’s ideas. They also include a larger public that confronts the issues he addressed: cultural segmentation, ecological destruction, democratic deficits, and paradoxes of globalization. Reading Adorno raises questions about the prospects for a world in which economic exploitation and political violence threaten to make life impossible.

Adorno experienced these threats in a visceral way. Driven from Germany during the Nazi regime and writing his first mature books in American exile, he returned to become a leading philosopher and social critic in post-war Germany. From there the influence of his ideas has spread to diverse fields around the world. Yet the center of his work lies in philosophy, and it is in philosophy that his most important contributions must be assessed.

The book under review reflects these patterns. It begins with surveys of Adorno’s thought and its genealogy written by the editor, Canadian philosopher Deborah Cook. The next four chapters, by British and Norwegian philosophers, are on Adorno’s reflections concerning logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy — arguably the canonical core of modern philosophy. The last five chapters, written by American, British, and Irish scholars in sociology, German studies, English literature, and philosophy, address Adorno’s social philosophy, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of history.

The rest of the review

Nick Smith
University of New Hampshire

Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 275-306, 2007

Abstract:
Although Adorno and Levinas share many arguments, I attempt to sharpen and evaluate their disagreements. Both held extreme and seemingly opposite views of art, with Adorno arguing that art presents modernity’s highest order of truth and Levinas denouncing it as shameful idolatry. Considering this striking difference brings to light fundamental substantive and methodological incompatibilities between them. Levinas’ assertion of the transcendence of the face should be understood as the most telling point of departure between his and Adorno’s critiques of instrumental reason. I attempt to explain why Levinas believed this move was justifiable and how Adorno would understand Levinas’ notion of illeity as a cultural byproduct and a form of dogmatism. Adorno’s historical and sociological account of the disenchantment of the world and the destruction of aura within a culture fully administered by scientific rationality and economic reductionism sharply contrasts to Levinas’ transcendental phenomenology, and I argue that Adorno’s thoroughgoing refusal to constrain dialectical reflection is ultimately more compelling.

Link

A review of Adorno and Heidegger

This volume proposes a significant undertaking: an investigation of the relation between the philosophical thought of Adorno and Heidegger. The editors write, “there is much to be gained from working through and reassessing the differences that have kept these two thinkers’ works quarantined from each other for more than seven decades” (4). The book is, without a doubt, an important contribution to the field. However, the range of articles would have benefited from a more detailed introduction indicating the contents and interrelation of the various contributions.

Read the rest of the review

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

TOC

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

TOC

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.

TOC and articles

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

TOC

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

Being Jewish– Emmanuel Levinas

The welcome wound: emerging from the il y a otherwise — Merold Westphal

The neighbor and the infinite: Marion and Levinas on the encounter between self, human other, and God — Christina M. Gschwandtner

The drama of being: Levinas and the history of philosophy — John Caruana

Adorno vs. Levinas: Evaluating points of contention — Nick Smith

Gestures of work: Levinas and Hegel — Silvia Benso

Ethical alterity and asymmetrical reciprocity: A Levinasian reading of Works of Love — Michael R. Paradiso-Michau

David Ingram reviews Adorno’s History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965

As a student-activist during the Vietnam War my first introduction to Adorno and Critical Theory came by way of my philosophical apprenticeship under Herbert Marcuse, whose work I studied assiduously, despite his own modest advice directing me to read classical figures in the philosophy of history, notably Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, with an occasional nod to contemporary figures, including Sartre (who was still much in vogue) and several of his own former colleagues, uppermost being Adorno. At the time this advice was given I was too ignorant of Adorno’s life and thought to appreciate fully the irony of Marcuse’s gesture. Marcuse had been embraced as the guru of the very student movement that had scorned Adorno for allegedly being a mere academic pedant who was afraid to commit himself wholeheartedly to the revolutionary task of building a new emancipated society. As is well known, Adorno’s last course on dialectical thinking, which he began in the summer semester of 1969, never progressed beyond a few lectures to its central theme due to frequent interruptions by students in attendance. That’s a shame, because the theme in question — the classical Marxian theme concerning the relationship between theory and practice and specifically the relationship between history (and philosophy of history) and revolutionary practice — was obviously pertinent to their concerns. Yet one need go no further than the lecture series on history and freedom delivered in 1964-1965 to discern the core of Adorno’s argument on this topic — a topic that emerged with considerable urgency in Adornos’ thought as early as 1932, when he taught a course on Lessing’s Education of the Human Race with Paul Tillich, who also directed his second dissertation, and continued up until his last writings, ‘On Subject and Object’ and ‘Marginalia to Theory and Practice,’ both of which contain material that doubtless would have been included in that last lecture series.

Rest of the review

By Steven Helmling

This essay is part of a larger study about how Adorno writes, and how self-consciously he writes: about how his thinking and his writing are functions of each other, implicated in each other, how indeed they produce each other. My premise is that in Adorno’s usage such terms as “constellation,” “dialectic,” “concept,” “negation,” and “immanent critique”[1] exert their force as much on questions of (to adapt Gertrude Stein) “how the writing of critique should be written”–how Adorno’s own writing is written–as on questions of critical or cognitive motives or purposes. Their point-d’appui is how to write as much as, maybe more than–or perhaps simply as–how to think. It is usual in this connection to cite Adorno’s mid-1950s essay, “The Essay as Form,” because it is so patently a manifesto for Adorno’s own work as a writer-critic. Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s Exact Imagination, for the most prominent example, makes “The Essay as Form” the centerpiece of her chapter on “Configurational (sc. “Constellational”) Form” (103-36; see especially 105-13, 123-30). I want here, however, to treat an essay much more charged and thus more suggestive for Adorno’s writing practice and for his view of language, the important late text dating from 1963, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel”–an essay not only about reading Hegel, but about the problems of philosophical writing and expression in practice, and specifically about Adorno’s own critical practice.[2]

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Via Wood’s Lot

Via the publisher's site.

Link 

(h/t: Alex) 

Originally published in: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941, IX, 17-48.

“A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization.” This thesis is the starting point of one of Adorno’s first essays on popular music, written after he fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and joined his colleagues of the Frankfurter Schule at the Princeton Radio Research Project, led by Paul Lazersfield. Below you’ll find the first part of this lengthy essay on the musical material. The next parts treat the subjects of the presentation and the impact on the listener.

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