This paper discusses corporate entanglement, impactfulness and responsibility in the Anthropocene, amidst events and conditions that ‘uncontain’ time. It takes its direction of travel from artist Brian Jungen’s ‘Cetology’ (2002), a whalebone sculpture made out of cut-up plastic garden chairs, which conjoins the times of earth and world history, as it hangs in the air of the art gallery, ‘as if’ exhibited in the natural history museum. The paper relates ‘Cetology’s’ engagement with natural history, time, and commodification to matters of (...) corporate entanglement and responsibility within company law and governance. Problems with understanding the comparable imprint of large and multinational companies on matters, places, and communities are identified, after the domination of corporate legal frameworks over nature and the stability and perfection of economic incentives at law. The reading of this (critical-legal) situation is developed through theory and engagement with materialist and critical thinkers, who unite in their concern with distributed human–nature relations and the ‘concreteness’ that attends collisions in time, ruin and affect. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s writings are central to this analysis, and strengthen the commentary on ‘natural history’ themes curated by Jungen. The paper contemplates how times’ uncontainment might invoke a change in expectation and method for the company law field, assigning contingency to the corporation and provoking a new mode of reflection about corporate entanglement and responsibility at law. (shrink)

What unifies the accounts of history and progress presented by Adorno's Critical Theory and Metz's political theology? I show: that both resist the ‘magic spell’ of an Enlightenment totality on whose strength the violent excesses of modernity have been built; that both accomplish this resistance by memory of victims or the ‘losers of history’; and that both hold out hope for the possibility of progress in time. However, the two accounts differ in important ways. These differences stem from: the transference (...) of historical subjectivity from homo emancipator to the God of Jesus’ passion; the role of the ‘eschatological proviso’ in guaranteeing theological futuricity; and the fullness of Metz's eschatological justice as compared to Adorno's conception of progress as the mere ‘avoidance of catastrophe’. This project brings the work of one of the most influential social critics of the twentieth century into dialogue with that of a politically engaged theologian of the same historical-cultural context. In doing so, I hope to suggest the theological richness of Metz's approach but also the significant contributions of dialectical criticism to the practice of theology in the modern era. (shrink)

The present article aims at investigating the political aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, focusing mainly on the Philosophical Investigations. This theme remains rather marginal within Wittgensteinian scholarship, facing the key challenge of the sparsity of explicit discussions of political issues in Wittgenstein’s writings. Based on the broader anthropological and synecdochic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the main objective of the article is to make explicit the implicit political import of some of the main themes of the Philosophical Investigations. This is (...) done by correlating them with certain political concepts and issues, such as reification, mystification, emancipation, self-institution and the common. In such a way, a new light is shed on Wittgenstein’s influence on and his relevance to contemporary political theory, while at the same time the first steps are taken for the enrichment of the discussion regarding personal and social autonomy and the critique of late capit... (shrink)

Although Adorno criticizes the existential tradition, it is frequently argued that he and Heidegger share a number of theoretical interests. Adorno does come into direct contact with existential thought at certain points, but it is Kierkegaard, not Heidegger, who more closely approaches his concerns. I begin by reviewing Adorno's Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. I then argue that, unlike Hegel, who is also criticized by Adorno on various grounds, Kierkegaard has had an influence on Adorno that has been underappreciated. While (...) Adorno criticizes Kierkegaard for breaking off the subject-object dialectic, they converge in their attacks on identity-thinking, the retention of a negative utopian standpoint of critique, and a deliberately provocative style of writing, all of which are marshaled in defense of the individual, who is besieged by modern society. Unlike Kierkegaard, however, and despite the generally accepted view, I conclude by arguing that because Adorno does not break off the subject-object dialectic, he has the necessary theoretical resources to deal with the theory-practice problem. Key Words: Adorno • communication • dialectic • individual • Kierkegaard • subject-object • subjectivity • theory-practice. (shrink)

This dissertation critically engages the meaning and scope of the category of the ‘essay film’; a term that has gained increasing currency in recent decades in film studies and contemporary art to group a diverse array of moving-image works. Departing from recent literature on the essay film, the essay, as I argue, should be conceived less as a stable generic category, than as a dynamic form and experimental mode of writing and filmmaking, which employs and cuts across diverse literary, cinematic (...) and televisual genres and sub-genres, and which is historically subject to critical transformation as it encounters new social, technological and cultural forms and mediums. The introduction provides a critical survey of some of the leading proponents of the essay film, and outlines a working definition of the essay as a literary and cinematographic form. Chapter 1 examines the history of the essay and criticism as a literary and philosophical form, focusing on the essayistic and critical writings of Michel de Montaigne, the early German Romantics, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. Central to the critical and experimental nature of the essay, as the chapter underlines, is the deployment of various indirect, allegorical, and modernist rhetorical and poetic strategies and devices – such as citation, irony, fragmentation, and parataxis – which attempt to engage the reader in the text’s reflective process through the constellation of enigmatic and disjunct moments and perspectives. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of various essayistic forms in the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, relating debates around the privileging of literary and photographic documentary montage practices in Soviet Factography to Esfir Shub’s historical compilation films, Dziga Vertov’s experimental newsreels, and Sergei Eisenstein’s project to make a plotless film-essay based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Chapter 3 focuses on Jean-Luc Godard’s film and video essays – from Camera Eye to Histoire du cinéma – delineating the crucial shifts in Godard’s various attempts to present a critical discourse on cinema and the media through the montage of image and sound. Chapter 4 investigates the essay films, archival video essays, and essayistic video installations of Harun Farocki, attending to how his works endeavour to render the ciphered social life of images and the historical transformations in technologies and techniques of seeing and imaging available for critical interpretation. Central to my account of the essay as a literary, cinematographic, and videographic form is the question of compilation; namely, how knowledge and history is archived and assembled through the juxtaposition and critical weighing of disparate citations and images. Paramount in relation to Godard and Farocki, as I underscore, is their respective shifts to working with video technology, which afforded both filmmakers the capacity to more freely combine and analyze images from divergent media sources, as well as to devise novel forms of videographic montage based on the construction of historical correspondences between audio-visual elements. I conclude the dissertation with a consideration of the impact of digital technology on contemporary essayistic audio-visual practices, and how issues raised in the preceding chapters – around audio-visual criticism, the spatialization of montage in moving-image installation work, and documentary and archival film practices – have been affected by such technological and cultural shifts. (shrink)

Through a prolonged engagement with two indispensable works on the critique of energy — Fossil Capital and Capitalism in the Web of Life — Alberto Toscano develops a theory of universal exhaustion, positing a dialectics and tragedy of depletion and exhaustion that points to the limits to both nature and capital.

The idea of creaturely life has, in recent years, emerged as an important and illuminating category of literary and philosophical critique. In this paper I seek to contribute to this contemporary discourse by examining the references to the creaturely found in the writings of T.W. Adorno. Whilst much attention has been paid to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on creatureliness, Adorno, a thinker with whom Benjamin is often associated, has received comparatively little in this regard. I begin to redress this lacuna by (...) developing a reading of key passages of Dialectic of Enlightenment which orients itself towards Adorno’s remarks concerning the ‘inverse theology’ which he sees as grounding both his own, and Benjamin’s, thought. In placing theological core of Adorno’s philosophy in the foreground of my analysis, I argue that the notion of the creature, which I claim signifies a redemptive perspective on human existence, can be read as an important, if somewhat overlooked, concept in the normative framework of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. (shrink)