This paper discusses prominent examples of what we call “algorithmic anxiety” in artworks engaging with algorithms. In particular, we consider the ways in which artists such as Zach Blas, Adam Harvey and Sterling Crispin design artworks to consider and critique the algorithmic normativities that materialize in facial recognition technologies. Many of the artworks we consider center on the face, and use either camouflage technology or forms of masking to counter the surveillance effects of recognition technologies. Analyzing their works, we argue (...) they on the one hand reiterate and reify a modernist conception of the self when they conjure and imagination of Big Brother surveillance. Yet on the other hand, their emphasis on masks and on camouflage also moves beyond such more conventional critiques of algorithmic normativities, and invites reflection on ways of relating to technology beyond the affirmation of the liberal, privacy-obsessed self. In this way, and in particular by foregrounding the relational modalities of the mask and of camouflage, we argue academic observers of algorithmic recognition technologies can find inspiration in artistic algorithmic imaginaries. (shrink)

Crisis jargon has become endemic in modernity. Whether in radical or in affirmative versions, the idea that ‘crisis’ offers ‘opportunity’, in accordance with the meaning of crisis as ‘decision’, is widespread. This paper questions the relationship between modernity and crisis, first by highlighting the ways in which modernity itself has been cast as ‘crisis’: first as crisis of tradition, then as crisis of modernity itself. The main part of this paper then consists of a reading of modernity-as-crisis inspired by Walter (...) Benjamin, most notably by his Passagen-Werk. It consists of an attempt to consider ‘crisis’ as what Benjamin calls a ‘wish image’, an image that contains hidden utopian ideals. In invoking ‘crisis’, I argue, a conception of modernity as shock, raised to the level of the collective, becomes apparent. Crisis jargon thereby remains wedded to what Benjamin calls a mythical conception of history. The paper ends with a discussion of the political consequences that follow from this that are grounded in the relation between messianism and profane politics in Benjamin. (shrink)

This contribution has two main goals. First, Pierre Bourdieu’s later work is critically reviewed. The question is posed whether or not his recent critical work has to be interpreted as the result of what might be called a ‘political turn’. Second, in reviewing the critical content of this recent work, a clarification of the critical potential present in Bourdieu’s general methodological and theoretical presuppositions is given. It can thus be seen that Bourdieu’s analyses have always been critical, because of their (...) anti-essentialist relational logic, and that there is a definite continuity between his ‘older’ work and his more recent work. However, his analyses have become more harsh in tone. To conclude, then, the foundations of Bourdieu’s critique are critically examined. First, it is noted that his recent change in tone reveals a theoretical inconsistency between his earlier work and his recent writings. Second, a critique is given of the theoretical basis of all of Bourdieu’s work: relational logic. It is argued that his anti-essentialism is founded on – in Putnam’s words – a ‘God’s eye point of view’, which seems to be incompatible with precisely this anti-essentialist analysis. (shrink)

In common-sense usage, violence is usually conceptualized as intentional physical harm. This makes violence identifiable, locatable, and it facilitates the governing of those identified as committing infractions upon the non-violent community. In this article it is illustrated how this conception of violence legitimates the state by blocking the state’s own foundational violence from critical scrutiny. It argues that the liberal state rests on the differentiation between active and reactive violence, whereby the latter is seen as the legitimate violence of the (...) people against violent infractions committed by private individuals. The concept of a ‘regime of violence’ describes the relation between various forms of violence, i.e. their selective and differential articulation and negation. Regimes of violence constitute a way of governing conduct in the medium of violence. The current regime of violence consists of what is called a trias violentiae, which is a specific conception of the relations and translations between private violence, state violence and structural violence. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopower thematizes the biopolitical distinction between what the 1789 Declaration distinguishes as citoyen and homme. In this contribution, Foucault’s and Agamben’s views on biopolitics are critically discussed. It argues that a crucial distinction exists between what can be called zoēpolitics and biopolitics. Whereas the former takes the biological body as its object and is only indirectly geared towards the social body, the latter more directly has the social body as its object. Citizenship can be regarded a (...) crucial form of population control that is both zoēpolitical and biopolitical in scope. It is zoēpolitical in that it distinguishes citizens from non-citizens. It is biopolitical in that it separates the life of ‘society’ from what is today, for instance, in discourse on immigrant integration, discursively articulated as the ‘outside society’. It is thus crucial to take seriously a discourse on what ‘society’ is, who belongs to it, and who resides ‘outside of society’, instead of taking the sovereign position of defining ‘society’ as a social body existing prior to its biopolitical articulation. (shrink)

Many contemporary conceptualizations of terrorism inadvertently reify political conceptions of terrorism. Mainly because they in the end rely on the intentions of terrorists in defining ‘terrorism’, the process of terrorism, which involves an unfolding dialectic of actions and reactions, is omitted from researchers’ focus. Thus, terrorism becomes simplified to intentional actions by terrorists, and this short-cutting of the causal chain of the process of terrorism facilitates both a political ‘negation of history’ and a ‘rhetoric of response’. In this paper, I (...) put forward a conceptualization of terrorism that transcends existing definitions and conceptualizations by first of all discerning between ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’, and by subsequently conceptualizing terrorism as a paradox: what terrorism is, is inextricably bound to the reaction to terrorism. It is, in fact, the reaction of some states to terrorism that, in a sense ex post facto, constitutes an act as ‘terrorism’ by ‘refolding’ actions that unfolded subsequent to an event into that event as the root cause of the entire chain of events. (shrink)

This book makes his work accessible to a wider audience by putting it to work in orientation towards current issues.

The facticity of sexuality is a key driver of the asylum procedure in “LGBT” cases, where non-heterosexual identities can be grounds for gaining” refugee status.” The procedure becomes a test of sexual veracity by means of a truthful performance. This performance is primarily discursive, but it is also bodily in terms of the way bodily comportment is considered indicative of a “true story.” Underlying this process is a conception of sexuality as a fixed, invisible but ever present identity. Sexuality, we (...) argue, gets configured in ways akin to what is commonly called an “infrastructure.” The veracity and facticity of accounts of, and for, this ‘infrastructure of selfhood’ can only be ascertained in live encounters during the asylum procedure. This article ethnographically highlights how such a particular facticity is composed in the Dutch asylum procedures. Building on Judith Butler’s work on narrative accounts of the self, we show how the state intervenes in crucial ways in asserting the authority to assign truth to such a narrative account. (shrink)

Review of Willem Schinkel's Theorie van de Kraal, de Hamsteraar, and Pandemocratie.

A multicomponential model of authenticity is presented which includes psychosocial, cultural, intrapsychic, personality and capacity related and neurobiological aspects of authenticity. Genetic, political and ethnic influences could also involved in authentic etiology. More research is needed into the correlates of authenticity in order to develop adequate intervention and prevention programs for individuals who demonstrate a lack of authenticity. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

This introduction provides an overview of the current state of the debate on the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. In sect. 1, we discuss the main concepts ‘ignorance’ and ‘responsibility’. In sect. 2, we ask why agents should inform themselves. In sect. 3, we describe what we take to be the core agreement among main participants in the debate. In sect. 4, we explain how this agreement invites a regress argument with a revisionist implication. In sect. 5, we provide an (...) overview of the main responses to the regress argument. In sect. 6, we address the question why blameless ignorance excuses. In sect. 7, we describe further issues that are addressed in the book. In sect. 8, we conclude with some discussion of future directions the debate might take. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that it is rational to suspend one’s belief regarding a certain proposition only if one’s evidence is neutral regarding that proposition. In this paper I broaden this condition, and defend, on the basis of an improved ancient argument, that it is rational to suspend one’s belief even if the available evidence is not neutral – or even close to neutral.

Ernest Mandel theorised the capitalist world economy as an articulated system of capitalist, semi-capitalist and precapitalist relations of production, linked to each other by capitalist relations of exchange and domination by the capitalist world market. This seems to be an interesting starting point for an historically well-founded theory, building on and going beyond Marx's work, of the worldwide expansion of the capitalist mode of production from its origins to the present. In his attempt to formulate his theory, Mandel did not (...) succeed in resolving all difficulties, however. His main works – Marxist Economic Theory and Late Capitalism – show a number of dangling loose ends. The central question is whether these loose ends are merely technical difficulties or whether they reveal fatal flaws in the theory as a whole. In order to come a step closer to answering this question, a conference was organised in Amsterdam, November 2003. This introduction formulates the five, closely interrelated issues that were highlighted at this conference. (shrink)

The general view is that metaphysical explanation is asymmetric. For instance, if resemblance facts can be explained by facts about their relata, then, by the asymmetry of explanation, these latter facts cannot in turn be explained by the former. The question however is: is there any reason to hold on to the asymmetry? If so, what does it consist in? In the paper we approach these questions by comparing them to analogous questions that have been investigated for scientific explanations. Three (...) main asymmetry criteria have been proposed for the latter: (i) causation, (ii) unification, and (iii) explanatory dependence. We argue that the last criterion, but not the former two, can be of help to metaphysical explanation: metaphysical explanations are asymmetric if the explanatory dependence criterion (in modified format) holds of them. (shrink)

This paper presents the progicnet programme. It proposes a general framework for probabilistic logic that can guide inference based on both logical and probabilistic input. After an introduction to the framework as such, it is illustrated by means of a toy example from psychometrics. It is shown that the framework can accommodate a number of approaches to probabilistic reasoning: Bayesian statistical inference, evidential probability, probabilistic argumentation, and objective Bayesianism. The framework thus provides insight into the relations between these approaches, it (...) illustrates how the results of different approaches can be combined, and it provides a basis for doing efficient inference in each of the approaches. (shrink)

Wellbeing describes how good life is for the person living it. Wellbeing comes in degrees. Subjective theories of wellbeing maintain that for objects or states of affairs to benefit us, we need to have a positive attitude towards these objects or states of affairs: the Resonance Constraint. In this article, we investigate to what extent subjectivism can plausibly account for degrees of wellbeing. There is a vast literature on whether preference-satisfaction theory – one particular subjective theory – can account for (...) degrees of wellbeing. This is generally taken to be problematic. However, other subjective theories – namely, desire-satisfaction, judgment- and value-fulfillment theories – do not suffer from the same difficulties. We introduce two models of degrees of wellbeing a subjectivist can employ: the Relative and the Absolute Model, and defend the claim that both models face difficulties. In particular, we argue that a subjectivist theory should describe instances of depression as instances of low degrees of wellbeing. We also argue that a reduction of desires may sometimes improve one’s degree of wellbeing, an idea we call the Epicurean Intuition. We then argue that the Relative Model fails to account for the disbenefit of certain types of depression, while the Absolute Model fails to meet a central commitment of subjectivism – the Resonance Constraint – and is unable to accommodate the Epicurean Intuition. The upshot of the paper is that subjectivist theories cannot account for degrees of well-being in a plausible way. (shrink)

Elinor Mason argues that there are different kinds of blameworthiness: ordinary and detached. In the following, I summarize the key aspects of both kinds, and critically discuss the exact boundaries between them. According to Mason, we should not blame wrongdoers in the ordinary way if they do not know that their conduct is problematic. This is plausible insofar as the function of ordinary blame is to remind wrongdoers of values that they already share, but I will suggest that we need (...) a slightly different account if its function is to communicate values that they do not share yet. (shrink)

The concept of well-being is increasingly gaining acceptance as an object of science, and many different types of well-being measures have been developed. A debate has emerged about which measures are able to capture well-being successfully. An important underlying problem is that there is no unified conceptual framework about the nature of well-being—a hotly debated topic of philosophical discussion. I argue that while there is little agreement about the nature of well-being in philosophy, there is an important agreement on some (...) important principles relevant for its measurement. I argue that well-being science has good reasons to accommodate these principles, but currently fails to do so. (shrink)

One widespread argument against the efficacy of subjective well-being as a measure of well-being is the adaptation problem as formulated by Sen and Nussbaum: the phenomenon that people may adapt to deprivation and find satisfaction or happiness in objectively bad circumstances. It is not generally noticed that there are two distinct arguments for why the phenomenon of adaptation is a problem for subjective well-being as a measure of well-being. The Axiological Adaptation Argument is a counter-example to theories of well-being that (...) rely on mental states. The Epistemic Adaptation Argument illustrates that levels of happiness or satisfaction cannot be measured well when people have adapted. I argue that the most serious threat to subjective well-being measures is not the Axiological Argument, but the Epistemic Argument. I reflect on the implications the epistemic problem has for the empirical literature in general, and for research on the phenomenon of adaptation in particular. (shrink)

Welfare in economics is generally conceived of in terms of the satisfaction of preferences, but a general, comparable index measure of welfare is generally not taken to be possible. In recent years, in response to the usage of measures of subjective well-being as indices of welfare in economics, a number of economists have started to develop measures of welfare based on preference-satisfaction. In order to evaluate the success of such measures, I formulate criteria of policy-relevance and theoretical success in the (...) context of preference-satisfaction measures of welfare. I present a detailed case study of the methodological choices put forward in a prominent generalized proposal for measuring welfare through preferences recently published in the American Economic Review. I contrast this with an alternative welfare measure which also uses preferences to weight aspects of welfare: the ICECAP-A measure. I assess the methodology of both approaches in detail and argue that the two goals of a preference... (shrink)

Does the moral badness of pain depend on who feels it? A common, but generally only implicitly stated view, is that it does not. This view, ‘unitarianism’, maintains that the same interests of different beings should count equally in our moral calculus. Shelly Kagan’s project in How to Count Animals, more or less is to reject this common view, and develop an alternative to it: a hierarchical view of moral status, on which the badness of pain does depend on who (...) feels it. In this review essay, we critically examine Kagan’s argument for status hierarchy. In particular, we reject two of the central premises in his argument: that moral standing is ultimately grounded in agency and that unitarianism is overdemanding. We conclude that moral status may, despite Kagan’s compelling argument to the contrary, not be hierarchical. (shrink)

Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into several large, interpretable groups, and that the discourse was greatly affected by American partisan politics. Over the course of our study, both Republicans and Democrats entered the (...) vaccine conversation in large numbers, forming coalitions with Antivaxxers and public health organizations, respectively. After the pandemic was officially declared, the interactions between these groups increased. Second, we show that the moral and non-moral language used by the various communities converged in interesting and informative ways. Finally, vector autoregression analysis indicates that differential responses to public health measures are likely part of what drove this convergence. Taken together, our results suggest that polarization around vaccination discourse in the context of COVID-19 was ultimately driven by a trust-first dynamic of political engagement. (shrink)

After explaining the well-known two-envelope paradox by indicating the fallacy involved, we consider the two-envelope problem of evaluating the factual information provided to us in the form of the value contained by the envelope chosen first. We try to provide a synthesis of contributions from economy, psychology, logic, probability theory (in the form of Bayesian statistics), mathematical statistics (in the form of a decision-theoretic approach) and game theory. We conclude that the two-envelope problem does not allow a satisfactory solution. An (...) interpretation is made for statistical science at large. (shrink)

New challenges are constantly emerging in the social sector in South Africa. Various social (non-profit) organisations are developing new and innovative ways to accommodate these challenges and to meet social needs. The aim of this research article is to measure the current social innovation capacity of the Dutch Reformed Church (DR Church), with reference to innovation capabilities, to determine at what level the church is meeting new social needs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data from six different congregations and (...) a governing body in the Pretoria area, South Africa, was included. Twelve participants were interviewed between August and October 2017. The participants, consisting of ministers and board members, each held a management position. The social innovation capacity measurement of the DR Church showed that the organisation was successfully developing new ways to serve as a social agent in society. There are obstacles that prohibit the DR Church from developing new innovative ways to meet the social needs of its society, for example, entrepreneurial, developmental and leadership change capacities. Recommendations are made to maximise social innovation capacity of the managers (ministers and board members). (shrink)

Many researchers studying subjective wellbeing (SWB) understand SWB as a concept that is close to Bentham’s notion of happiness. This conception of happiness is philosophically controversial, because it treats pleasure as a homogenous experience. I analyze an important deviation from Bentham in John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism and its relevance for SWB research: qualitative differences in pleasurable experiences. I argue that in cases where lives involving qualitatively different experiences are compared, Mill’s qualitative perspective is incompatible with an important assumption in the (...) SWB literature: that happiness can be meaningfully rated by people on a scale. I illustrate the problem by means of the question of whether becoming a parent makes people happier. I analyze whether the problem can be avoided on alternative views of happiness, but argue that on all plausible accounts of happiness, the problem persists. I conclude that the problem it poses for self-reported happiness is genuine and should be acknowledged by SWB researchers. I end by discussing the ways in which this conclusion can help the study of happiness move forward. (shrink)

Measures of happiness are increasingly being used throughout the social sciences. While these measures have attracted numerous types of criticisms, a crucial aspect of these measures has been left largely unexplored—their calibration. Using Eran Tal’s recently developed notion of calibration we argue first that the prospect of continued calibration of happiness measures is crucial for the science of happiness, and second, that continued calibration of happiness measures faces a particular problem—The Two Unknowns Problem. The Two Unknowns Problem relies on the (...) claim that individuals are necessarily a part of the measurement apparatus in first person measures of happiness, and the claim that we have no reason to believe that the evaluation standards people employ are invariant across individuals and time. We argue that calibrating happiness measures therefore involves solving an equation with two unknowns—an individual’s degree of happiness, and their evaluation standards—which is, generally, not possible. Third, we consider two possible escape routes from this problem and we suggest that the most promising route requires yet unexplored empirical and theoretical work on linking happiness to behavioral or neural evidence. (shrink)

This paper is on the update semantics for might of Veltman. Threeconsequence relations are introduced and studied in an abstract setting.Next we present sequent-style systems for each of the consequence relations.We show the logics to be complete and decidable. The paper ends with asyntactic cut elimination result.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper analyses the republican notion of non-domination from the viewpoint of individual dignity. It determines the aspect of individual dignity that republicans are concerned with and scrutinises how it is safeguarded by non-domination. I argue that the notion of non-domination as it is formulated by Pettit contains a number of ambiguities that need to be addressed. I discuss these ambiguities and argue for specific solutions that place great importance on a person’s moral beliefs and his status as a moral (...) being amongst others. Furthermore, I argue that the impunity interpretation is to be favoured over the immunity interpretation of non-domination. I show that whilst these solutions accord well with many important republican tenets, they have other implications that contradict known republican positions. In particular, I show there is both room and a need for retributivism within republicanism. (shrink)

In 2002, Belgium was the second country in the world to legalize euthanasia following the Netherlands. Since then, a few studies dealing with Belgium euthanasia practices have been published that are based on a survey given to a sample of physicians and nurses . All these studies from the past decade have implicitly proposed the practice of euthanasia as a medical act. Moreover, the last article published in this journal argued that the Belgian experiment concerning medical end-of-life decisions is unique (...) in the world and that the Belgian palliative care system, including euthanasia, should serve as a role-model for the rest of the world .The Belgium law provides a definition for euthanasia which lacks the analytical precision to apply it to medical studies . When analyzing the latest data provided by the Belgian Federal Euthanasia Comm .. (shrink)

Terminal kidney patients are faced with lower quality of life, restricted diets and higher morbidity and mortality rates while waiting for deceased donor kidney transplantation. Fortunately, living kidney donation has proven to be a better treatment alternative (e.g. in terms of waiting time and graft survival rates). We observed an inequality in the number of living kidney transplantations performed between the non-European and the European patients in our center. Such inequality has been also observed elsewhere in this field and it (...) has been suggested that this inequality relates to, among other things, attitude differences towards donation based on religious beliefs. In this qualitative research we investigated whether religion might indeed (partly) be the explanation of the inequalities in living donor kidney transplants (LDKT) among non-European patients. Fifty patients participated in focus group discussions and in-depth interviews. The interviews were conducted following the focus group method and analyzed in line with Grounded Theory. The qualitative data analyses were performed in Atlas.ti. We found that religion is not perceived as an obstacle to living donation and that religion actually promotes helping and saving the life of a person. Issues such as integrity of the body were not seen as barriers to LDKT. We observed also that there are still uncertainties and a lack of awareness about the position of religion regarding living organ donation within communities, confusion due to varying interpretations of Holy Scriptures and misconceptions regarding the process of donation. Faith leaders play an important educational role and their opinion is influential. This study has identified modifiable factors which may contribute to the ethnic disparity in our living donation program. We argue that we need to strive for more clarity and awareness regarding the stance of religion on the issue of living donation in the local community. Faith leaders could be key figures in increasing awareness and alleviating uncertainty regarding living donation and transplantation. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti argues that desert cannot serve as a plausible principle of stakes for luck egalitarianism. In this discussion note, we defend the claim that she is too pessimistic about this by introducing a simple, but plausible, desert-based account of stakes that is immune to her argument.

Most models of the formation of political coalitions use either Euclidean spaces or rely purely on game theory. This limits their applicability. In this article, a single model is presented which is more broadly applicable. In principle any kind of set can be used as a policy space. The model is also able to incorporate different kinds of party motivations: both rent-seeking and idealism. The model uses party preferences and power to identify stable coalitions and predict government policy as well (...) as to indicate which member of the opposition will be able to break up the governing coalition if no stable coalition exists. In the latter case it will also indicate on which issue the government is likely to split. Parties may have preferences over issues such as the composition of cabinet and/or the governing coalition as well as the more traditional issues of government formation. The model also provides a rationale for log-rolling. (shrink)

The measurement of wellbeing is among the central aims of the capability approach. I develop one particular challenge to the operationalizability of the approach in the context of wellbeing measurement. I argue that the capability approach is both committed to Individuation of Wellbeing—the view that the wellbeing contribution of different capabilities and functionings is person-dependent—as well as Rejection of Subjectivism—the view that wellbeing should not be conceptualized in terms of subjective judgments of preference-satisfaction or happiness. I argue that there is (...) a tension between these two commitments that cannot be resolved in a viable way. (shrink)

Dishonesty is ubiquitous in our world. The news is frequently filled with high-profile cases of corporate fraud, large-scale corruption, lying politicians, and the hypocrisy of public figures. On a smaller scale, ordinary people often cheat, lie, misreport their taxes, and mislead others in their daily life. Despite such prevalence of cheating, corruption, and concealment, people typically consider themselves to be honest, and often believe themselves to be more moral than most others. This book aims to resolve this paradox by addressing (...) the question of why people are dishonest all too often. What motivates dishonesty, and how are people able to perceive themselves as moral despite their dishonest behaviour? What personality and interpersonal factors make dishonesty more likely? And what can be done to recognize and reduce dishonesty? This is a fascinating overview of state-of-the-art research on dishonesty, with prominent scholars offering their views to clarify the roots of dishonesty. (shrink)

Zwischen 1934 und 1939 war die Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung für Walter Benjamin die zuverlässigste Publikationsmöglichkeit. Auch finanziell war Benjamin von der, vom ´Institut für Sozialforschung herausgegebenen, Zeitschrift abhängig. Zwei seiner wichtigsten Essays, L´oeuvre d´art à l´époque de sa reproduction mécanisée , Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire und vier weitere Beiträge erschienen in der Zeitschrift.Um die ersten beiden Texte entwickelten sich zwischen Adorno, der als Sachwalter der Redaktion auftrat, teilweise Horkheimer einerseits und Benjamin anderseits äußerst heftige Kontroversen. Es ging dabei nicht (...) nur darum, inwiefern marxistische Optionen unverhüllt ausgesprochen werden durften, sondern vor allem um systematische Fragen, die zwischen Adorno und Benjamin strittig waren und blieben. Mehr als die veröffentlichten Essays der beiden gibt der Briefwechsel zwischen Adorno und Benjamin überraschende Aufschlüsse über die tiefer liegenden, kontroversen Konzepte von Dialektik und anthropologischem Materialismus. (shrink)