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)

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)

This thesis explores the theme of animals in Adorno’s philosophy through an examination of his critique of Kant.

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)

In this thesis I show how the challenges of producing a philosophy of history responsive to the negativity of the world benefits from working through the difficulties of G. W. F. Hegel’s systematic philosophy. By revealing the powerful and intricate ways that Hegel gives an illegitimate primacy to thought we can better appreciate the obstacles that face a philosophy which places new emphasis on the nonconceptual whilst recognising the genuine role of the concept. In the first half of this thesis (...) I reconstruct the important criticisms levelled at Hegel by F. W. J. Schelling and Theodor W. Adorno. I argue that both their criticisms illuminate our understanding of the metaphysical status of Hegel’s thought and expose the surreptitious means by which Hegel overextends the concept. The value of Adorno’s and Schelling’s reading of Hegel is also due to the fact that they do not cast aside Hegel’s ambitions as mere fantasy. Rather, they provide important insight into the goals philosophy should be striving towards—even if we cannot be as confident as Hegel in their imminent achievement. In the second half I reconstruct Schelling’s and Adorno’s philosophies of history in light of their criticisms of Hegel. The core problem addressed is how unwarranted optimism – entailed by the idealistic operation in Hegel’s theoretical philosophy – is to be eschewed whilst also avoiding a lapse into unwarranted pessimism. I argue that, while both Schelling and Adorno make important advances in this direction, Adorno’s philosophy of history is better able to make sense of both the prevalence of unfreedom in history and the ways in which we can respond to this situation. (shrink)