This introduction outlines the importance that Hans-Georg Backhaus’s transcript of Adorno’s 1962 seminar on ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory’ has for shedding light on the relationship between Adorno’s critical theory and the critique of political economy. PartIsignals the importance of the seminar by assaying the Anglophone scholarship on Adorno. PartIIcontextualises the seminar in the development of his thought. PartsIIIandIVfocus on what the transcript tells us about Adorno’s interpretation of Marx and the importance this interpretation held for Adorno’s (...) critical social theory. PartVpoints to the influence this interpretation of the critique of political economy had on the formation of the New German Reading of Marx. (shrink)

What can one say about the state of the art in the Federal Republic? A number of aspects are discernible, not only in the practices and various traditions of intellectual history there, but also in its politics: the stark dichotomy between Marxists and anti-Marxists; the ever-present metahistorical question of which discipline, field, or method would set the political agenda; and the position of Jewish émigrés. These issues raise still more basic ones: how to understand the Nazi experience, which remained living (...) memory for most West Germans; how to confront the gradually congealing image of the Holocaust in private and public life; and the related matters of German intellectual traditions and the new order's foundations. Had the Nazi experience discredited those traditions and had the personal and institutional continuities from the Nazi to Federal Republican polities delegitimated the latter? These were questions with which intellectuals wrestled while they wrangled about historical method. In this introduction, I give a brief overview of these and other innovations in the field, before highlighting some of its characteristics today. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Partiendo de la recurrencia del motivo de la pobreza de la experiencia en el marco de la Teoría crítica y su entorno más afín, nos proponemos tematizar la equivocidad que presenta el mismo mediante la delimitación de sus diferentes sentidos en Adorno, Horkheimer y Benjamin. Ello nos permitirá dejar esbozadas las líneas generales de una problemática que, a nuestro entender, es producto de cierta complementariedad pero a la vez tensión entre dichos sentidos.

Resumo A teoria crítica tardia de Theodor W. Adorno é considerada por muitos como quietista e resignada. O presente artigo busca questionar tal veredito por meio de uma análise tanto do diagnóstico de época, feito pelo autor, quanto da relação entre teoria e práxis delineada nas obras do período tardio do pensador frankfurtiano. Sugere-se que, em vez de resignada, a teoria crítica de Adorno está engajada seja nos processos de resistência à barbárie latente, seja nas melhorias pontuais que poderiam ser (...) conseguidas no interior da ordem vigente. Tal engajamento, no entanto, não significa um abrandamento da tese de que a possibilidade de emancipação estaria bloqueada.Theodor W. Adorno's late critical theory is often regarded as quietist and resignated. This article seeks to question this verdict through an analysis of both the diagnosis of time made by the author as of the relationship between theory and praxis outlined in Frankfurtian thinker's late works. It is suggested that instead of resigned, Adorno's critical theory is engaged either in processes of resistance to the latent barbarism, whether in specific improvements that could be achieved within the existing order. This engagement, however, does not mean a mitigation of the thesis that the possibility of emancipation would be blocked. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno has often been portrayed as the prototypical example of the permanent exile, even though, after living fifteen years in Britain and the US, he returned to Germany in 1949 and spent the last twenty years of his life there. This article traces Adorno’s reflections on his homecoming and analyses how his experiences of exile and return shaped his mature thought. Conceiving homecoming not simply as a return to one’s origins but as a continuation of a radical experience of (...) the foreign, it builds on the remarkable continuity of Adorno’s theory of intellectual experience over time. The article also explores homecoming in relation to Adorno’s thought on language and translation, an aspect that has been little studied in the existing literature, both in terms of the articulation of a philosophy of language where the foreign plays an important role, and in terms of how language and translation were directly connected with Adorno’s return. (shrink)

My thesis reads Ernst Bloch’s materialist ontology with the aim of producing a utopian perspective on language’s materiality. As my Introduction outlines, set against the backdrop of a contemporary renewal in speculative philosophy, the present context is marked by a twofold limitation: (1) the perdurant marginalisation of Bloch’s form of utopian speculation, serving to couch contemporary materialism in thoroughly un-prospective tendencies; and (2), a relative failure of contemporary speculative philosophy to reflect on language, a failure attributable to the long drawn-out (...) dominance of post-structuralism’s linguistic form of relativism. To overcome these limitations I dedicate Chapter I of my thesis to expounding the core categories of Bloch’s materialism, casting a light on what I call its fundamental compositional structure: Incompleteness → Process → (possibility of an) Outfall, i.e. completion or arrival. In light of this, I argue that, placed within the horizon of Bloch’s materialism, incompleteness, process, and futural-directedness ought to be taken as cornerstones of language’s materiality. So as to better position what this means, in Chapter II a reading of the metaphysical Sens of Bloch’s materialism is given. There I consider Bloch’s materialism as a novel form of analogic metaphysics. Insofar as at the core of Bloch’s materialism there lies a metaphysical conception whereby being as such (e.g. Aristotle’s ontōs on) names an ultimate desire and not—pace the classical metaphysical tradition—an already existent beingness—a metaphysical conception Bloch proleptically terms the “ontology of not-yet being“—so then the essential dynamic of this materialism hinges on an incomplete analogy, for all things relate to that which is not-yet in existence; this not-yetness is the sustaining meaning of what is. In the final chapter I concretise my findings by turning to the question of language proper, reading “anacoluthon” as a speculative materialist figure of language which expressive this utopian analogic metaphysics. Anacoluthon denotes an interruption in syntactical flow (Greek: an-akóluthos, “not following“; German: Satzbruch, “sentence fracture/rupture“) and marginally features in Bloch’s corpus. But precisely because of its marginal status the figure possesses a real force in understanding language’s utopian materiality. Indeed, I read anacoluthia as expressive of the Blochian ontological composition. Anacoluthic discontinuities of speech are read as linguistic expressions of ontological incompleteness, ontological novelty, and ontological directedness to what is not yet. They linguistically express both the non-existence of ontological totality, but also, crucially, a real and open intending towards it: a utopian, creative, linguistically-based transgressiveness expressive of the world’s ontology. (shrink)

This dissertation deals with the tragic vision that motivates certain key aspects of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy. While in the formative early work, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer, the tragic views are clear, in later works, such as the Aesthetic Theory and the Negative Dialectics, they are only implicit. The study reconstructs the tragic vision found in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and uses it as a key to understand Adorno’s mature philosophy. A tragic vision is born when (...) specific philosophical convictions regarding agency and morality coalesce with certain ethical and political conditions. A tragic vision forms the grounds for tragic views. For Adorno, the key convictions rise out of the failures of reason and culture to enable the eradication of unnecessary suffering by creating the kind of conditions in which human beings could flourish. These convictions give rise to a view of humanity as blind to its own shortcomings and thus doomed to perpetuate suffering in the name of progress and growth. Adorno’s persistent negativism prevents him from offering practical solutions for changing the world, but he does offer a scathing critique of the modern world that continues to resonate with new generations of readers. The analysis of the tragic vision presented in this dissertation will highlight the fundamental philosophical and ethical commitments underlying Adorno’s views and will thus allow both situating his work into a larger cultural context and juxtaposing it with the work of other philosophers, as well as other writers, thereby opening new vistas for research not just on Adorno but on continental philosophy, social theory, and the domain of arts and letters at large. (shrink)