I argue that Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy articulates a radical conception of hope. According to Lear, radical hope is ‘directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is’. Given Adorno’s claim that the current world is radically evil, and that we cannot know or even imagine what the good is, it is plausible that his conception of hope must be radical in this sense. I develop this argument through an analysis of Adorno’s engagement with (...) Kant’s conception of hope, Adorno’s references to hope and his critical diagnosis of a metaphysical need for hope. Having demonstrated that Adorno must reject both ordinary and Kantian hope, I examine why Adorno thinks that we still may have reasons for hope. I also show that Adorno’s conception of hope differs from Lear’s in one important respect. (shrink)

Providing an indigenous opinion on anything is a difficult task. To be sure, there is a multitude of possible indigenous responses to dominant Western philosophy. My aim in this paper is to assess dominant analytic Western philosophy in light of the general insistence of most indigenous authors that indigenous metaphysics is holistic, and to make some bold claims about both dominant Western philosophy in line with an indigenous metaphysics of holism. There will, of course, be different ways of expressing holism (...) according to the indigenous group, but most of the literature states, as a most basic concern, that a general indigenous philosophy is concerned with the groundedness of an individual as an entity related to and indivisible from the rest of the world.1 The consequences of any assertion about the holistic nature of metaphysics are vast, including for the interpretation of what is often perceived of as the antithesis: Western philosophy. (shrink)

What I will argue here is that the ethical potentiality of the human being that Aristotle cites in the Nicomachean Ethics refers to the general, rational capacity for someone to appropriate and develop their own specific, natural capacities which make them human; the name of this ability is called virtue, which, when expressed in actions, we call good. To separate out the concepts at work here demands an exegesis of the two kinds of dunamis in Metaphysics Theta, that is, dunamis (...) as causal power of change and dunamis as a potential way of being for an existent capacity. Once we grasp this, we can clarify the nature of virtue as the active, complete state of a capacity in human being which defines their function even though it must be acquired, and it need not ever be actualized. The concepts of habit (ethos) and practical judgment (phronesis) give Aristotle the means to solve the problem of how such a potentiality is acquired and how it is actualized, and hence we will end with a discussion of them. -/- . (shrink)

This article suggests reading Theodor Adorno not as a notoriously pessimistic sociologist but as a committed public educator. Partly drawing on still unpublished transcripts of lectures, public talks and radio broadcasts from the 1950s and ’60s, the article offers an account of Adorno’s concept and practice of a ‘democratic pedagogy’. The key question is how we should understand the difference between Adorno the social philosopher, on the one hand, and Adorno the educator, on the other. It is argued that Adorno’s (...) pedagogical interventions are not a footnote to his social theory, but a key to understanding his entire oeuvre. (shrink)

A novel rereading of the relationship between ethics and ontology in Aristotle.

This article considers Theodor W. Adorno’s thesis of the ‘liquidation of the individual’ as a contribution to the critique of political economy insofar as it links structural economic imperatives o...

This paper asks: Why is it morally good to foster the digital commons? How can we ethically justify the importance of the digital commons? An answer is given based on Aristotelian ethics. Because A...

Abstract That current ideals of cognition impoverish experience is a classical observation, and complaint, of the early Frankfurt School. Adorno reacts to this phenomenon in several ways, among them his conception of metaphysical experiences. Metaphysical experiences are conventionally understood as promissory notes, as metaphors for rich experiences. This article takes a different view of metaphysical experiences. It discusses them in light of Adorno's notion that objects have priority in experience and of his further remark that metaphysical experiences are constituted by (...) error. It argues that rather than promissory notes or metaphors for rich experiences, metaphysical experiences are attempts at taking things literally. (shrink)

The current economic and societal production system gives money a magnified importance, overlooking other essential flows necessary for human survival and existence. It focuses on monetary indicators like profits, dividends, and GDPs to evaluate organizational production, while often disregarding outputs that harm the biosphere. Money is treated as the constitutive being (ousia) and attributed undemonstrated explanatory properties. Intangible flow theory helps eliminate this metaphysical status of money by recognizing that monetary flows are just one of many necessary flows for human (...) survival and existence. Organizations deliver product-flows that require input-flows from and send output-flows back to the encompassing biosphere, whether they explicitly engage in environmentally friendly activities or not. Therefore, every organization is an ecological entity because it has a relationship with the biosphere, which participates in the manner through which humans integrate into their surrounding environment and relate to other living beings. Eliminating the metaphysical status of money integrates every organization in the biosphere, making organizations accountable for environmental harm caused by their activities. This can be achieved by deconstructing the metaphysical status of money in business models. (shrink)

Este artículo explora algunas de las relaciones entre dialéctica y filosofía dentro del programa de una dialéctica modificada de Theodor W. Adorno ¿Cómo pensar la tensión entre las categorías dialécticas y la filosofía desde el prisma de una dialéctica negativa? ¿Qué significa desde el pensamiento de Adorno a liberar a la filosofía y a la dialéctica de su carácter afirmativo? Elaborar estas preguntas es el objetivo de este trabajo.

This article argues that we should not abandon the noun ‘organization’ in favour of the verb ‘organizing’ in order to capture processes of change, flow and movement, but instead explore how such processes reveal themselves when the concept of organization diverges from the objects it is supposed to encapsulate. Here I make use of Adorno’s critique of identity thinking in order to show how the experience of organizational phenomena remains trapped within a contradiction: concepts are needed to describe objects even (...) though concepts can never fully exhaust the objects they describe. However, I maintain that it is precisely this discrepancy between concepts and objects that provides us the opportunity to experience the elusive state of organizations and their processual nature. Consequently, this article shows how organizational phenomena are always more complex, temporal and dynamic than what the concept of organization permits us to grasp. (shrink)

An extended review essay on Andrew Feenberg's Heidegger and Marcuse that argues that the concept of negation in Hegel is distinct from that in Heidegger which makes such an attempted synthesis problematic.

In this paper I argue that the idea ‘becoming-woman’ is an attempt to transform embodied experience but, because it is unable to concern itself with mechanisms, structures and processes of sexual differentiation, fails in this task. In the first section I elaborate the relationship between becoming-woman and Deleuze's ‘superior’ or ‘transcendental’ empiricism and suggest that problems can be traced back to an underlying Humean empiricism. Along with Hume, Deleuze, it seems, presumes a bundle model of the object which dissolves things (...) into episodic objects of perception and leaves the subject unable to distinguish between fanciful objects, erroneous perception and any other thing. The empiricist ontology thus has consequences for epistemology and leaves us unable to question the conservative tendencies of common sense. As an alternative to transcendental empiricism, the second section considers how transcendental realism, with its ontological commitment to the mind-independent character of things, may provide a more fruitful and productive line of enquiry. Given that there is such a choice, in the third section I speculate as to the specific desires that drive such philosophical abstraction; abstraction which culminates in the non sex-specific figure becoming-woman whilst disguising the mind-independent character of the mechanisms, structures and objects that affect the subject. So I conclude that, despite all appearances of radicalism, the philosophical model ‘becoming-woman’ – aligned as it is with schizo-processes and the philosophical loss of mind-independent things – is more of the same and sexual difference remains a hidden term. Due to this, I believe that feminists should view it with suspicion. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between ethics and metaphysics in critical theory through immanent criticism of Fabian Freyenhagen's reconstruction of Adorno. Endorsing Freyenhagen's overall defence of Adorno's position, it argues that several important features of Adorno's position as Freyenhagen interprets it can be made intelligible only on broadly Aristotelian metaphysical presuppositions. These should be thematized explicitly rather than ignored. Moreover, these metaphysical presuppositions are on independent grounds plausible, as recent Aristotelian and critical realist work has indicated, and special difficulties arising (...) for them in the context of a radical negative critical theory can probably be overcome. Further conversation between critical theorists, Aristotelians and critical realists should prove fruitful in elaborating and defending a radical critical theory alternative to the dominant postmetaphysical paradigm. Progress in this direction, though, will entail rejecting the basic postmetaphysical premise that critical theory must proceed in a metaphysically neutral way. (shrink)

This paper reexamines Adorno’s conception of utopia within the context of his critique of the concept of progress. It contests the standard interpretation which conveys Adorno’s conception of utopia to be imbued with an essentially extra-historical idea of redemption. I argue, contrary to this view, that the motif of redemption surfacing in Adorno’s conception of utopia negates a specific type of historical life – life under which historical consciousness sinks into oblivion – rather than history per se. In order to (...) reveal the historicality of Adorno’s conception of utopia, I examine his fragmentary yet consistent critique of the concept of progress, which, far from calling for total abandonment, aims to access and unearth its truth-content. Last but not least, I visit Adorno’s suggestion regarding the consonance of utopia with genuine progress, assessing its implications vis-à-vis a characteristic feature of mythological life, the ratio of self-preservation. (shrink)

Adorno’s ‘addendum’ names the experience by which socially constrained agents are jolted into resistance against their suffering. The impulse to action is simultaneously intra-mental and somatic, and thus forms the locus of a jointly conscious and bodily impetus to confronting the ideological and material forces that produce contemporary unfreedom. In this way the ‘addendum’ is a historically developing, indeterminate, yet inexhaustible glimmer of hope for both agents and theorists who make social suffering central to their critical analysis. This article explores (...) the structure of the addendum by unpacking its presentation first in Negative Dialectics and then by way of the one-sided and cautionary illustrations of Buridan’s ass and Hamlet in the History and Freedom lectures. While aesthetic, ideal, affect-centered and Freudian interpretations of the addendum have been developed, appreciating the somatic or bodily, the intra-mental or conscious, and the historicized accounts of nature and reason that Adorno weaves together to explain ever-present possibilities of resistance requires instead a non-reductive materialist and dialectical lens. (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)

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)

One of the central charges that Žižek levels down against Adorno is that his critique of ideology comes dangerously close to a post-ideological position in which all ideological contents, political actions or rituals are reduced to a cynical consciousness which automatically obeys certain social imperatives though being aware of their falsity. Against this, Žižek comes up with an alternative understanding of cynicism as operating not at the level of consciousness, but everyday practices. What the present article tries to show is (...) that Žižek's critique is misplaced, for Adorno has a much more subtle approach in which the problem of ideology lies neither simply in theory, nor in practice, but somewhere in-between, in the compulsion of gestures. Moreover, from an Adornian perspective, Žižek's commitment to a Hegelian self-referential approach obliterates the double-edge character of determinate negation, that of addressing both the present social-historical context and the possibility of an alternative social reality. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the current academic debate on the nature of embodied, intentional consciousness, specifically the attempt to inaugurate a rapprochement between phenomenological existentialism and critical theory. This is accomplished through a critical comparison of the concepts of negative experience and nonidentity in Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics and Jean-Paul Sartre's early phenomenology. By comparing how each engages with Hegel, I suggest that Sartre offers a broad, anthropological account of negative experience and nonidentity helpful to critical theorists but that there (...) remains a critical deficit which Adorno's more restricted—and political—sense of nonidentity remedies. Sartre's anthropological portrayal of ‘persistent negation’ worries Adorno but I suggest that it can be understood as a pragmatic presupposition for problem-solving rather than as a transcendental condition of experience. (shrink)

The main aim of this dissertation is to examine whether or not Judith Butler’s feminist philosophy (Queer theory) can be interpreted as what Theodor W. Adorno called a dialectical or immanent critique of dialectics. The rationale behind this examination can be found in two essays published by Carrie Hull (1997) and Marcel Stoetzler (2005). In these essays, both authors suggest that Butler’s argument (Gender Trouble 1999[1990]) would benefit significantly from being juxtaposed with Adorno’s reconceptualisation of dialectics as ‘negative dialectics’ (Negative (...) Dialectics 1990[1966]). However, while Hull and Stoetzler provide convincing arguments, their claims are, at best, superficial. Thus, this dissertation addresses this particular lack in state-of-the-art by thoroughly examining Hull’s and Stoetzler’s suggested reading of Butler with Adorno (and vice versa). ; The first chapter deals exclusively with Adorno’s theoretical development and negative dialectics. It focuses on how Adorno’s general philosophical outlook can be interpreted as a critical enterprise aimed at correcting the ‘wrongness of the present’, to show how and where society, politics, or philosophy has failed to live up to what they claim to have achieved e.g. how the notion of a shared national identity fails to consider the diverseness of the individuals it encompasses. Adorno’s central issue is thus with ‘Identity Thinking’ (1990), a mode of thinking aimed at providing an account of everything from a unified perspective. ; The second chapter, as preparation for the third (on Butler), is divided into two shorter examinations of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two figures whose works have greatly inspired Butler. Foucault and Adorno converge around their shared criticism of social structures, which permits nothing but themselves. Derrida and Adorno converge in their shared mode of criticism that seeks to, in Derrida’s words, deconstruct a text or a theory from within. Hence, by juxtaposing Foucault’s and Derrida’s critical philosophies with Adorno’s negative dialectics, the notion that Butler can be juxtaposed with Adorno is secured by drawing a straight line from Butler’s theoretical inspirations. ; The third chapter engages in a close reading of Butler and subsequently (relying heavily on Hull and Stoetzler) in a critical reinterpretation that reads Butler not as an anti-dialectical thinker but instead as an ambiguous dialectical thinker. Butler interpreted this paves the way for reading Butler’s feminism firmly within Adorno’s negative dialectics. Adding Adorno’s account of materiality to Butler, while still keeping Butler’s criticism of feminism’s ‘totalizing gestures’ (1999) intact, makes it more apparent how Butler’s argument contains a materialist account and gives materiality a more prominent place in Butler’s argument. The lack of materiality in Butler has been criticised by other feminists (New Materialism) since the publication of Gender Trouble. Thus, by adding Adorno to Butler, this criticism is met head-on. ; The conclusion goes beyond the initial scope of the dissertation by showing how Butler, with Adorno, can be juxtaposed with those critics who want to turn contemporary feminism away from the notion that ‘everything is culture/language’ (Butler) and instead focus on materiality and matter (New Materialism; Karen Barad). By reading Butler not against but with New Materialism, the dichotomy between culture and nature turns into a productive difference rather than something that is an unsurmountable contradiction. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so-called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non-identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic explains that adumbration. In the appraisive register, my principal contentions include these: Adorno’s transcendentalism makes (...) some sense of the aforementioned deformation claim; and negative dialectic qua method avoids mystery and metaphysical excess. (shrink)

The Holocaust throws the study of the history of philosophy into crisis. Critiques of Western thinking leveled by such thinkers as Adorno, Levinas and, more recently, postmodern theorists have suggested that Western philosophy is inherently totalizing and that it must be read differently or altogether abandoned after Auschwitz. This article intentionally rereads Aristotle and Hegel through the shattered lens of the Holocaust. Its refracted focus is the question of ontological identity. By investigating the manner in which the totalizing dimensions of (...) Aristotle’s thinking are both eclipsed and implicitly endorsed by Hegel’s appropriation of Aristotle’s conception of God, and further by following the surplus of Hegel’s (mis)interpretation back into the heart of Aristotle’s ontology where we find a more open conception of ontological identity, we come to recognize not only the dangers endemic to certain strands of traditional philosophical thinking, but also the resources this tradition itself brings to bear on the attempt to think ontological identity after Auschwitz. (shrink)

A presente obra assume-se como um projeto genuinamente interdisciplinar de reflexão ética, interrogando os seus fundamentos e explorando as suas interseções com diversas áreas das Ciências Humanas e Sociais. Reunindo especialistas de distintas áreas, oriundos de países diferentes, o livro tem como fio condutor um diálogo polifónico com o pensamento ético contemporâneo, enraizando-se na tradição crítica que procura refundar a racionalidade prática na construção humana de sentido e, por conseguinte, refutar o niilismo e o relativismo axiológico absoluto.