Wounds of Democracy: Adorno’s Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism and the German antisemitism debate

Scholars of European history and critical theory observing American politics in recent years have often found themselves experiencing déjà vu. History, the truism goes, does not repeat itself, but last summer, with calls for ‘law and order’ and armed right-wing militias clashing with anti-racist protestors across America, many asked, what more are you waiting for? […]
Outside of a UKIP MEP's office in the European Parliament, with flags of Israel, Tenessee and Gadsden tacked onto the wall.

Critical theory and lived experience: Interview with Detlev Claussen

Detlev Claussen (b. 1948) is Professor Emeritus of Social Theory, Culture and Sociology at Leibniz Universität Hannover. In the mid-sixties he moved to Frankfurt to study with Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, where he was actively involved in the protest movements associated with the political upheavals of 1968. In the seventies, Claussen worked as […]

Jazz as a credo

Reivew of Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique
Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 160pp., £58.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 1 50360 202 1 hb., 978 1 50360 585 5 pb. During a public discussion to mark a 2018 career retrospective show at The New Museum in New York, John Akomfrah was asked a […]

Entrepreneurial subjectivity

Reivew of Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production
Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value in Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 254pp., £120.00 hb., 978 9 00429 137 9 When the Swedish artists Goldin+Senneby’s Eternal Employment was chosen as one of the main public art works to feature in the massive rebuilding of the […]

Late style and contrapuntal histories: The violence of representation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Livre d’image

If the category ‘late’ has generally served to designate an ever-extending period of Jean-Luc Godard’s filmmaking career – typically dated from his return to cinema at the end of the 1970s when Godard was approaching fifty – with the release of his latest feature, Le Livre d’image: Image et parole [The Image Book: Image and […]

From Berg to Beyoncé: Adorno and Politics: 1st Istanbul Critical Theory Conference, Boğaziçi University

The organizers’ opening address to this conference laid out an ambitious aim: to weigh up the Aktualität of Adorno’s critical theory in its capacity as a heuristic, pedagogical tool for the analysis of current political crises in Turkey and beyond; to go ‘with Adorno, beyond Adorno’ by applying the precepts of his negative dialectic to […]

Look at his marvellous hands!

Reviews Look at his marvellous hands! Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0. Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in […]

Truly Liberating

Yotam feldman Dialectics of liberationKevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence, 1954–1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, Lexington Books, Lanham MD and Plymouth, 2012, 269 pp., £49.95 hb., £21.95 pb., 978 0 73916 835 6 hb., 978 0 73916 836 3 pb. Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but […]

Elementary

Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, Unkant, London, 2011. 217 pp., £10.99 pb., 978 0 95681 760 0. David Cunningham In a much-cited March 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno famously remarks of the separation between autonomous art and mass culture that, while both ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism’, and ‘both contain elements of change’, they […]

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’: Adorno's critique of progress

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’ Adorno’s critique of progress Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel’s conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind’s march towards freedom: watching Napoleon […]

67 Reviews

Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice Bob Brecher Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy David Macey Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Alan Duiant Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English […]

63 Reviews

Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology Jonathan Hughes Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’ s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion Jonathan Rée Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, eds., Denken der Geschlechterdifferenz: Neue Fragen und Perspectiven der Feministischen Philosophie […]

Revealing the Truth of Art

Revealing the Truth of Art Andrew Bowie Philosophical discussion of art in English tends not to aim its sights particularly high, and some Anglo-Saxon philosophy has effectively denied art any serious philosophical significance at all. In this light a contemporary German book* which wishes to argue for the truth of art over that of the […]

The Return of the Subject in late Foucault

The Return of the Subject in late Foucault Peter Dews The following essay is an initial attempt to extend the comparison of the thought of Michel Foucault with that of the Frankfurt School, begun in my Logics of Disintegration (Verso, 1987), to cover the work ofFoucault’s last phase. It does not claim to be a […]

The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration

The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration J. M. Bernstein- SeylaBenhabib’ s Critique, Norm, and Utopia* is, without doubt, the most philosophically acute and learned history of the critical theory of society yet to be written. Because the intentions of Benhabib’s work are systematic rather than historical, her history is equally a major contribution to critical […]