. In this essay I point toward the difficulties inherent in ontological objectivity and seek to restore our truth claims to validity through a relational ontology and the dynamic of coimplication in signals and noise. Theological examination of art and science points toward similarities between art, religion, and science. All three have often focused upon a “metaphysics of presence,” the desire for absolute presence of the object . If we accept a relational ontology, however, we must accept that the revelation (...) of presence is always simultaneously a concealment. This helps explain technoscientific achievement without recourse to a philosophically flawed objectivity. Twentieth‐century information theory shows the impossibility of a “pure signal.” By accepting that signal and noise are permanently interconnected, we begin to see how noise makes signal possible and even how noise becomes signal . Information theory thus underscores important similarities and leads toward new approaches in aesthetics, Christian theology, and scientific research. By comparing art, religion, and science, I argue that rejecting a metaphysics of presence without rejecting presence itself allows human beings to know the world. Although religion, science, and art often seek the absolute presence of their objects, they function better without. (shrink)

Using theories by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School that causally link art to class interests, this article examines the differential development of modern architecture in the United States and central Europe during the early 20th century. Modern architecture was the aesthetic expression of technocracy, a movement of the new class of professionals, managers and engineers to place itself at the center of rationalized capitalism. The aesthetic of modernism, which glorified technology and instrumental reason, was weak and undeveloped in the (...) US, because this class defined by its cultural capital was quickly integrated into modernizing corporations, where it was compelled to cater to the emerging mass market and drop its distinctive aesthetic. Modern architecture emerged mainly in interwar central Europe, because here industrial modernization was blocked, forcing the new class to pursue an alliance with state managers pushing modernization. Thus unencumbered by the demands of the mass market, modern architects were free to express their machine aesthetic in state-financed housing projects. (shrink)

Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book on cultural sociology argues that sociologists must grant the realm of ideas autonomy to determine behavior, unencumbered by interference from instrumental or material factors. He criticizes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as “weak” for failing to give autonomy to culture by reducing it to self-interested behavior that immediately reflects class position. However, Alexander’s arguments seriously distort and misstate Bourdieu’s theory, which provides for the relative autonomy of culture through the concepts of habitus and field. Because habitus (...) is a set of durable dispositions conditioned by past structures, it may contradict the changed structures of the present. Further, the influence of the habitus is always mediated by the structure and strategies of the field of contest in which it is deployed, so that the same habitus may motivate different actions in different circumstances. However, Alexander is correct to argue that in Bourdieu’s theory culture generally serves to reproduce, not contradict social structures. Yet Bourdieu addresses this and other problems in his later work, in which he argues for the existence of certain cultural universals transcending particular structures. (shrink)

The automobile as an object of consumption, carrying meanings and identities, has evolved through three ages during the 20th century, each characterized by a peculiar cultural logic. In the age of class distinction, the car served as a status symbol of the sort theorized by Pierre Bourdieu. It marked out differences between classes, while simultaneously misrecognizing and legitimating their origins. In the age of mass individuality, the car was a reified consumer commodity, as postulated by the theory of the Frankfurt (...) School. It served to obscure qualitative class differences underneath the illusion of mass individuality, in which consumers varied by the quantity of desired automotive traits they could afford. In the age of subcultural difference, the car expressed the different identities of lifestyle groups in a leveled and pluralized consumer culture, as theorized by postmodernism. The extension of the cultural logic of each of these automotive ages ultimately contradicted its configuration, and pushed the car forward to the next age. (shrink)

The theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno both conceive culture as legitimating the inequalities of modern societies. But they postulate different mechanisms of legitimation. For Bourdieu, modern culture is a class culture, characterized by socially ranked symbolic differences among classes that make some seem superior to others. For Adorno, modern culture is a mass culture, characterized by a socially imposed symbolic unity that obscures class differences behind a facade of leveled democracy. In his later writings, however, Bourdieu’s theory converges (...) with that of Adorno. He too begins to privilege the high culture of intellectuals over mass culture by employing the universal standard of autonomy from economic interests. But there remains one vital difference between these theories. Bourdieu grounds the origins of a critical, autonomous culture in specific social structures, while Adorno grounds it in technology. (shrink)

This article argues that the figure of Oedipus lies at the heart of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Oedipus is the prototypical Aufklärer as no one can rival him in his courageous attempt to employ his own autonomous reason `without direction from another'; yet self-knowledge remains beyond his grasp. Indeed, Oedipus' obsessive drive to bring the truth to light ultimately leads him to put out his own eyes because he is unable to bear the sight of the catastrophe that (...) this drive engenders. Oedipus' demise represents in allegorical form the self-destruction of enlightenment itself. Enlightenment is similarly driven to illuminate the world in its totality by reducing it to philosophical concepts. In the process, however, it becomes blind to the question of its dependence upon that which it purports to possess. In its attempt at total illumination, therefore, enlightenment does not effectuate an exit or Ausgang from the opacity of myth, as Kant had held, but rather is blinded, paradoxically, by the radiance of its own projections. Reading the dialectic of enlightenment through the tragedy of Oedipus leads back to the enigmatic question of art as the means by which the rationalization and disenchantment of the world can be reflected upon critically. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on ‘excentric positionality’ in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar ‘crisis of experience’ used to diagnose ‘what has gone wrong’, it allows us to re-learn how to work with ‘the experience of (...) crisis’ itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on ‘xeno-communication’. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these ‘excentric’ dynamics in turn suggests new ‘excentric methodologies’ based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. ‘Excentric methodologies’ constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. (shrink)

This article wants to answer three questions: first, why is not only sensibility but visibility important for modern democracy? Second, why is art or aesthetic experience important for both democracy and visibility? And third, how is it possible that aesthetic experience generates effects that conduce to democracy? Answering these questions aims at highlighting an inner connection between democracy, feelings and aesthetics. For a democratic community, on the one hand, cannot exclude feelings from political discourse, but, on the other hand, cannot (...) accept them in their immediate and absolute form. Feelings need ‘transformation’, and the best popular medium for this is aesthetic experience. (shrink)

When it comes to the relationship between art and nature, research on Adorno’s aesthetics usually centres on his discussion of Kant and Hegel. While this reflects Adorno’s own position – his comprehension of this relationship is to a large extent developed through a critical re-reading of both the Kantian and the Hegelian position – I argue that we are able to gain important insights into Adorno’s aesthetics and the central art–nature relation by reading his ideas in the light of Schelling’s (...) conception of this relationship. The article focuses on the similarities between Schelling’s notion of nature’s productivity and Adorno’s understanding of natural beauty. It concludes with a discussion on Adorno’s re-evaluation of the reconciliatory power of the exemplary unity of the artwork in conjunction with Schelling’s comparison between artwork and organism, as well as his concept of the construction of nature. (shrink)

The article takes critiques of the entanglement of law with violence as a point of departure for exploring the possibility of a ‘tertium of law’. It thereby seeks to overcome the dichotomous basic assumptions that see law as always oscillating between an apology for violence on the one hand, and a utopia of reason on the other. The text analyses the possibility of this ‘tertium’, a ‘legal force’ beyond legal violence and legal reason, in four steps, drawing on the work (...) of Jacques Derrida and authors of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. It argues that in a first step law needs to be dissociated from the State. The violence of law, however, does not stem solely from law’s ties with State power. Law itself is violent even where it is not State law. The second step of legal critique thus needs to consist in the commemoration of legal violence, followed by a third that demands the transformation of violence to force. These three instances of critique are the precondition for a last and essential step according to which a critique of law must facilitate the transcendence of legal violence by taking law and its promise of justice at its word in order to turn this promise against law itself. (shrink)

In the previous chapter ‘The Beauty of Sport', I made a distinction between classical and modernist aesthetics. The classical is exemplified in eighteenthcentury art criticism and its use of the la...

In the Olympic Art Competitions (1912–1948) Pierre de Coubertin expresses his conception of both sport and art as instruments of moral renewal. In this paper, this conception is criticised for failing to appreciate art and sport as necessary manifestations of modernism. The Art Competitions were informed by a traditionalist aesthetic, and thus played a highly conservative role within Olympism. A modernist art about sport, in contrast, would have been a source of critical reflection, potentially protecting the Olympic movement from corrupting (...) exploitation by commercial and nationalistic interests. The conclusion defends the need for Cultural Olympiads, as a source of such critical reflection, that are at once modernist in conception and yet, unlike their current expression, are centrally about sport. (shrink)

Best (1978, 117) argues that sport, unlike art, does not allow for ‘the possibility of the expression of a conception of life issues, such as contemporary moral, social and political problems’. For...

The article discusses the figure of the collector. We start with positioning the collector in relation to a lack, emphasizing that collecting is not about aesthetic beauty, pleasure or even perfect...

This paper explores the relationship between the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Jiddu Krishnamurti. It focuses upon how both thinkers employ a determinately negative epistemology and revise Hegelian dialectics as a manner of ratiocination to resolve socio-political problems. It is argued that Krishnamurti’s negative epistemology is rendered more robust when read along with Adorno’s critical theory, aesthetic theory, and notions of negative dialectics and non-identity thinking. It is hoped that this synthesis of thought raises the possibility for ongoing creative (...) responses to contemporary socio-political challenges over and above either political demonstration or intellectual retreat. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the way in which Feuerbach's attempt to develop a naturalistic, realist remodeling of Hegel's relational ontology, which culminated in his own version of “sensualism”, led him to emphasize the vulnerability of the subject and the role of affectivity, thus making object‐dependence a constitutive feature of subjectivity. We find in Feuerbach the first lineaments of a philosophical theory of object‐relations, one that anticipates the well‐known psychological theory of the same name, but one that also offers a broader (...) metaphysical basis in which all types of “essential objects” are shown to matter to subjectivity. This Feuerbachian theory of object‐relations, the paper then argues, foreshadows a number of important developments in 20th century post‐Hegelian philosophy. In it can be found an anticipation of Adorno's later theory of mimesis. Equally, this theory already emphasizes the “libidinal” nature of intentionality, in a way that announces Merleau‐Ponty's ontology of the flesh. Finally, the last section of the article proposes a model with which we might reconstruct the way in which object‐relations and self‐relations can be brought together consistently. In this instance, Feuerbach uses concepts that announce Freud's notion of “primary narcissism”. One contemporary philosopher who has proposed a sophisticated model of subjectivity, in which primary narcissism is shown to complement object‐dependence, is Axel Honneth. The last section argues that Feuerbach's full image of subjective identity as reciprocal scaffolding of self‐ and object‐relations reminds strongly of Honneth's core concept of “positive self‐relation”. (shrink)

This paper will take up the work of Charles Baudelaire, poetic and critical, in order to present the Baudelairean aesthetic and to make a case for its relevance in our judgments about art today. Baudelaire was the first poet of the modern built environment and is known as the father of modern poetry. While his poetry is still admired, his aesthetic has been historicised: deemed to belong to that time and place in which Baudelaire wrote. This paper will argue that (...) this historicisation by subsequent aesthetic theory and philosophy is a suppression of something integral to art and artists, without which art is liable to lose what is true about it and sink into a morass of irrelevance and triviality, or (as will be argued has partly happened) may become devoid of any value beyond the business interests that control it. In this regard, it will be suggested, Baudelaire’s aesthetic has important redeeming qualities. (shrink)

While Theodor Adorno is known for his philosophical reconstruction of aesthetic modernism, he also analyzes—and is critical of—the demotion of natural beauty in the hierarchy of aesthetic concerns following Kant. Recent scholars have acknowledged that natural beauty is important in Adornian aesthetics, but many do so in a manner that repeats the subordination of natural beauty and the aesthetic experience of nature to that of art. Against this tendency, in this article I demonstrate that not only does Adorno contest the (...) inferiority of the aesthetic experience of nature but his unconventional description and theoretical articulation of natural beauty is especially pertinent for our time of climate crisis. By unpacking his endorsement of Walter Benjamin's casting both nature and history in terms of transience, I argue that Adorno proposes an experience of natural beauty that is expressive of social historical content, offers a vision of a different relationship with nature, and discloses ethical claims on us to act in this world. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis sets out to solve the riddles and enigmas of the psyche. For Adorno, however, psychoanalysis itself is an enigma. Why, he asks, have both the theory and its therapeutic applications become entangled in insoluble contradictions? Adorno identifies to a certain extent with the great psychoanalytic riddle-solvers, Freud and Ferenczi, as he probes these contradictions. He hopes, however, to move beyond the limits of a theory that reduces all phenomena to psychological factors, so he also approaches the problem as a (...) sociologist. This perspective enables him to describe the static and dynamic aspects of the social structure within which psychoanalysis developed in the first half of the 20th century. And it frees him, furthermore, from the misconception that Freud passed on to most of his followers: the belief that they were pursuing a natural science of the soul, which would generate its own rigorously scientific psychological technique. (shrink)

Hegel's theory of tragedy has polarized critics. In the past, many philosophers have claimed that Hegel's theory of tragedy removes Kant's critical insights and returns to pre-critical metaphysics. More recently, several have argued that Hegel does not break faith with tragic experience but allows philosophy to be transformed by tragedy. In this paper I examine the strength of this revised position. First I show that it identifies Hegel's insightful critique of Kant's theoretical assumptions. Yet I then argue that it fails (...) to note the practical importance of Kant's separation of knowledge and aesthetics. I propose an alternative approach to tragedy that builds from the revised view and yet maintains the autonomy of aesthetics. Tragedy represents an action, a set of events that are internally unified and yet cannot be reduced to theory. This is to say that tragedy confronts us with an aesthetic sphere of making and doing that, while constrained, is incessantly open and free. (shrink)

The paper begins by comparing Adorno’s and Foucault’s accounts of the normalizing practices that socialize individuals, integrating them into Western societies. In this context, I argue that the animus against socialism can be read as an expression of profound anxiety about the existing socialization of reproduction in the West. In fact, Adorno and Foucault contend that really existing socialization has contained our political imagination to the point where even our ideas about alternatives only conjure up more of the same. Yet (...) Adorno and Foucault do outline what radical social change might look like. Since Foucault linked radical change to the development of a specifically socialist art of government, but offered few clues about what this might mean, the paper also explores Adorno’s work to put more flesh on the idea of a socialist art of government. (shrink)

The viscerally Freudian elements of Adorno's use of the concept of mimesis interweave with readings of Kafka in which certain thoughts about childhood play an important role. The first section of this article links biological mimicry with critical theory and art: both mimic what they criticize, while also conserving a repressed and childlike mimetic relationship with otherness and sexual difference. Adorno criticizes both the civilized repression of the mimetic impulse and its subsequently distorted return, a dialectic neglected by direct appeals (...) to mimesis. Good art tries to extricate itself from these distortions. Conversely, the second section of this article explores Adorno's suggestion that fascistic psychology is a refuge for a twisted mimesis of mimesis, which gratifies the worst side of repressed nature while ideologically appealing to the best. Anti-Semitic humour shows how the fascist mimics his own aggressive fantasy of natural law, while secretly envying the closeness to nature he thinks he detects in other races. The final section uses Freud's theories on sympathetic and sadistic comedy to unpack Adorno's readings of Kafka and Mörike. Adorno's critical recuperation of mimetically childlike moments of ridiculousness in art clarifies his differentiation of the varieties of mimesis, as well as countering the gloomy stereotype of the humourless intellectual. But the black side of Adorno's use of laughter dialectically maintains his commitment to painfully remembering the victims of history. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article integrates into critical discourse analysis concepts developed by the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson. These concepts include Jameson's theories of contradiction, mode of production, and social formation. By taking up Jameson's ideas, it is argued, researchers can strengthen CDA's underdeveloped theories of contradiction and historical change. Furthermore, this article shows how Jameson's theories can sharpen CDA's methods of studying texts. By taking a Jamesonian tack and viewing each text as offering ‘an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction', researchers (...) can track how antagonisms in the social order shape and are shaped by processes of textual production. Additionally, by foregrounding contradictions and resolutions, researchers can see how texts participate in processes of historical change. To demonstrate a Jamesonian version of CDA, this article concludes with an analysis of a text that charts a course through neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

Work in feminist and critical race aesthetics brings out a complex interaction between aesthetic, ethical, and political value. The interest in ethico-political considerations is also found in recent literature around art and ethics, such as debates about the work of immoral artists, cultural appropriation and heritage, and art in public spaces. These discussions are characterized by a social structural approach to the ethico-political value of art that focuses on relations between artworks, other artefacts, and individuals in specific sociohistorical contexts and (...) as they emerge from specific social organizations. In this paper I present the main features and assumptions behind these social structural approaches to the values of art. I examine accounts that take ethico-political value to depend on artworks’ contributions to public discourse and on their role in constituting social structures. (shrink)

Trying to assess Kant's impact on contemporary aesthetics is by no means a straightforward task, for the simple reason that the subject is saturated with his influence. In all aspects of the theory and practice of art, it is possible to observe concepts and attitudes at work which are either a reflection of, or a response to, Kant's thinking. This might seem a rather overblown claim and a difficult one to substantiate but, without going into too much detail at this (...) point, one has only to consider that the central tenets of both modernism and postmodernism can be traced back to Kant's Critical thought. There is the modernist's interest in the conditions of possibility of representation – as evidenced, for example, by the push towards abstraction in the visual arts and the attempt to paint not the world but the process of painting itself – and, responding to this, the postmodernist's concern that these conditions of possibility should not become universal absolutes. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. What is cultural ‘appropriation’? What is cultural ‘appreciation’? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as ‘the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another’, whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere ‘exploration’: ‘Appreciation explores whatever is there’. These provisional definitions suggest that there is an in-principle distinction between the two concepts that presupposes the following: what is appreciated is already available; what is (...) appropriated was, prior to its being taken, not already there or available. Moreover, perhaps appreciation, when contrasted to appropriation, is unproblematic precisely due to this basic difference. In this paper, we argue that the exclusive disjunction – appropriation or appreciation – rests on a false distinction between the two. We also show that this distinction presupposes a false normative principle that to the extent that x is appreciation rather than appropriation, then x is not – relevant to this issue – a wrong. Against these presuppositions, we defend the view that appropriation is already built into appreciation. This does not mean that we cannot ask questions of appreciation, but that questions of appreciation do not preclude the problematics of appropriation. (shrink)

What is cultural ‘appropriation’? What is cultural ‘appreciation’? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as ‘the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another’ (Young 2005: 136), whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere ‘exploration’: ‘Appreciation explores whatever is there’. (Gracyk 2007: 112). These provisional definitions suggest that there is an in-principle distinction between the two concepts that presupposes the following: what is appreciated is already available; what is appropriated (...) was, prior to its being taken, not already there or available. Moreover, perhaps appreciation, when contrasted to appropriation, is unproblematic precisely due to this basic difference. In this paper, we argue that the exclusive disjunction – appropriation or appreciation – rests on a false distinction between the two. We also show that this distinction presupposes a false normative principle that to the extent that x is appreciation rather than appropriation, then x is not – relevant to this issue – a wrong. Against these presuppositions, we defend the view that appropriation is already built into appreciation. This does not mean that we cannot ask questions of appreciation, but that questions of appreciation do not preclude the problematics of appropriation. (shrink)

The truth potential of art is realized not only by great art (of educated elites) but also by the cultural industry that has become the art of the masses. Great art and cultural industry do not only contradict one another but often interpenetrate and overlap subversively. Especially in critical periods of crisis (and revolution) great art and cultural industry go together with political action. However, in more counterrevolutionary periods as nowadays post-truth democracy, Adorno's gloomiest interpretation of the cultural industry becomes (...) topical again. (shrink)

This paper looks into Tsujimura Kōichi’s notion of the “circumspective,” which not only indicates a type of composition in traditional Chinese landscape painting but also a way of seeing and relati...

In thinking of my relationship to Peter McHugh as an intimate collaboration, I take some reactions elicited to a most recent unpublished writing of his on intimacy as an occasion for discussing both intimacy and collaboration as a notion in-itself and as applicable to us in particular, treating that space between the general and particular of intimacy as its zone of fundamental ambiguity. I try to being to view a story of the imaginary of community, its elemental stirrings, that Peter (...) might appreciate. In this, I reorient Arendt's notion of communicating with the dead to the problem of the intimate collaboration and of how each might be a practice that mirrors the other, intimate collaboration being one way of confirming the vow in communicating with the dead to witness, and reciprocally, such communication being a way of practicing intimate collaboration. This leads me to bring to view a range of unstated resonances of the discussion that have applicability to our shared history. First, is intimate collaboration possible in organizations such as the university and how does it coexist among adversarial exchanges, factitious coteries, alliances, and collégial networks? Second, is communicating with the dead another way of speaking of tradition and dissemination in any context as such and what could the manner and method of orienting to this desire say about the quality of life in commemoration per se? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the concept of culture industry developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno had a decisive influence on Jean Godefroy Bidima’s critique of black African modernity. Drawing on some of his writings, I seek to demon- strate how Bidima’s philosophical endeavor inherits the concept of culture industry and applies it to the modern context of black Africa, where it is transformed into the concept of colonial industry. In both cases, the same critical perspective is (...) at play, namely to formulate a broad critique of how cultural products (artworks in Horkheimer and Adorno, and philosophy in Bidima) are deprived of their substance to align with the mystification of the masses. The critique of the culture industry, which serves in Adorno as a fundamental criticism of the production of modern art and its decadence into mass production serves, revisited in Bidima, as a critique of the modern black African philo- sophical discourse. With the light provided by this connection, I propose a rereading of Bidima’s critique of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, the latter being presented as a promoter of a “discourse of mastery” in black African modern philosophy. (shrink)

This essay interrogates ignored works of art as a special kind of object that can shed some light on the nature of contemporary art worlds, as well as on wider social processes regarding our relationship with things and with our past. It provides a materialist perspective focused on discarded objects as an alternative to a mystifying view of the artworld that takes artistic autonomy for granted and obliterates the social conditions of creativity and success. Ignored works are normally outside the (...) reach of art history and the sociology of art, yet the increasingly bigger realm of unrecognized and unvalued art provides, after the failure of the historical avant-garde, a space where critical autonomy can still develop. This essay attempts to illuminate this mostly invisible realm by relating it to other similar categories such as waste and forgetting. Finally, ignored works’ connection to notions of authenticity is pointed out. (shrink)

The following reflections examine the new translation of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie in relation to the former one. These reflections assess the relative merits of both translations and attempt to show how this relation illustrates specific issues in Heidegger’s text concerning the first and other beginnings of Western thought.

This article examines similarities between Theodor Adorno’s account of the artwork’s disorienting effect on subjectivity in Aesthetic Theory and Emmanuel Levinas’s description of the effect...

In Politics without Vision, Tracy Strong claims that in order to adequately grasp the politics of the twentieth century, and so be capable of meeting the challenges of the present, political theory must think without banisters. In this article I take up the task of thinking without banisters through the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Following the startling claim made by Adorno in a lecture course in 1963 that the term ‘humanity’ tends to ‘reify’ and ‘falsify’ important moral issues, I (...) examine three different usages of the concept of humanity in Adorno’s work, which I develop as a critique of foundations. I argue that understanding Adorno’s critique of humanity and of foundations involves understanding the role played by art in connecting the concepts of morality and politics. In connecting morality and politics in this manner, Adorno moves from a moral theory of resistance to a political theory of transformation whose insistence on the radical discontinuity between the present and the future serves as a model of a political theory without banisters. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will offer some examples of the effectiveness of Adorno’s concept of mimesis for an analysis of extreme violence and for a defence of democratic institutions against possible regressions into authoritarian regimes. I will start by reading the concept of mimesis through the lens of the interlacement between the concepts of play and power. My aim is twofold: first, I wish to further the analysis of Adorno’s concept of mimesis by showing that it can be interpreted (...) as a form of play, which either empowers subjectivity or becomes a means of domination; second, I will use these speculations to highlight the relevance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s explanation of anti-Semitic violence when seen through the lens of the concept mimesis. Before concluding, I will briefly highlight Adorno’s ideas about what makes democracy vulnerable to potential regressions into extreme violence, and examine what can be done practically – from an Adornian perspective – to avoid regression: defending democratic institutions, and working towards a removal of those barriers that obstruct genuine mimetic experience and self-reflection. (shrink)