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

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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