{"title":"Postmetaphysical Conundrums: The Problematic Return to Metaphysics in Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason","authors":"G. Shea","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9305498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9305498","url":null,"abstract":"Largely overshadowed by the renown of his colleagues Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer’s contributions to the Frankfurt School are often downplayed as those of the mere director of the Institute for Social Research and the lesser coauthor of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Despite occupying this position of marginality within the corpus of Critical Theory, Horkheimer’s work stands as a significant and sustained attempt to develop an interdisciplinary and materialist research program as a methodological alternative to metaphysical philosophy. As J. C. Berendzen notes, one of Horkheimer’smost significant contributions to philosophy is his development of materialism as a viable postmetaphysical critical social theory. Likewise,","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44479703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement","authors":"K. Karcher","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9305540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9305540","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48386516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affordances of a New Language: Abbas Khider’s Claim to Community in German for Everyone","authors":"C. Stan","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9305526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9305526","url":null,"abstract":"Tramps Abroad Abbas Khider’s fifth book, Deutsch für alle: Das endgültige Lehrbuch (German for Everyone: The Definitive Manual, 2019), is a slender tome of heavy laughter. Ostensibly motivated by a desire to help foreigners learn the language and natives to bring German among the elegant and accessible languages of the world, Khider echoes Mark Twain’s sentiment that the study of German is “harassing and infuriating.” Surely, the author of Tom Sawyer wrote inATramp Abroad (1880), “There is not another language that is so slip-shod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp”; when German speakers finish a very long sentence, they themselves must experience a “touching inquisitiveness” as towhat they have just said, he told journalists andwriters at the ConcordiaClub inVienna in 1897. Like linguists inpursuit of an ideal language, Twain and Khider streamline sentences, articles, and prepositions, straight-facedly","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49103443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the “Spiritual” in Aesthetic Experience; or, The “Nonfactual in Facticity”","authors":"H. Vries","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8989232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8989232","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article revisits the original meaning of “spiritual” as distinct from “intellectual” experience in Theodor W. Adorno’s late work. It does so through the implicitly Hegelian motifs in Wassily Kandinsky’s manifesto “On the Spiritual in Art,” a text that Adorno engages in passing in his Aesthetic Theory and that was, in turn, deeply influenced by the thought of Kandinsky’s nephew Alexandre Kojève, who also wrote an essay on his uncle’s paintings. This genealogy of motifs is of more than mere historical and anecdotal significance. At stake is nothing less than an accurate understanding of “spiritual experience [geistige Erfahrung]” as a more than merely theoretical matrix for what Adorno, in Negative Dialectics and the lecture courses, calls his materials studies. Rather than indicating largely esoteric or theosophical elements in Kandinsky’s influence on modernist aesthetic discourse, “spiritual experience,” in part read through the eyes of Kojève and, via him, Vladimir Soloviev, is thereby distinguished from what Adorno sees as an irrepressible tendency toward “spiritualization” in contemporary culture and the philosophy that reflects on it. Instead, it reveals a dimension of depth that the reception of Critical Theory has all too often ignored or disparaged.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43736852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teddie’s Landschaft","authors":"Sherry Lee","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8989260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8989260","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article considers the concept of cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft) from Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, exploring how the philosophy of natural beauty in relation to historical built environments resonates with ideas of musical landscape and experiences of peripatetic listening. If Adorno’s mature thought is marked by the fractured experience of exile, his late evocations of displacement actually echo youthful experiences on holiday—notably, the striking volcanic terrain of a summer vacation in Italy, which is transformed soon thereafter into a reflection on landscape, alienation, and song. Throughout the recurrences of the trope of landscape in Adorno’s writings before Aesthetic Theory, the philosophy of nature and history and experiences of tourism and exile constellate into an aesthetic that contemplates sublimity and kitsch side by side: modernist philosophy as shaped by experiences of music, travel, and landscapes of distance and estrangement.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41459430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Primacy of the Object”: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and the Return of Form","authors":"E. Geulen","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8989204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8989204","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The article assesses Theodor W. Adorno’s relevance today by engaging contemporary interests in form that have led to a surprising renaissance of his thought in recent years (in Tilo Wesche and Josh Robinson, among others). Comparing and contrasting this most recent focus with older trajectories of reception, the article suggests that Adorno’s concept of form is not as easily dislodged from its theoretical moorings as recent appropriations tend to argue: his insistence on form as what rigorously (and painfully) demarcates an artwork from its surrounding contexts is perhaps an antidote to current all-inclusive conceptualizations of form.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66082572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kant and Adorno on Mind and World: From Wild Beauties to Spiral Jetty","authors":"J. Bernstein","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8989274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8989274","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Theodor W. Adorno’s governing procedure in Aesthetic Theory is to reconstruct the terms and concepts of traditional aesthetics and the philosophy of art through the actuality of artistic modernism in its various guises. The necessity of this procedure turns on the recognition that modernist art has become a stand-in for the now-wrecked authority of living nature. Adorno contends that “natural beauty,” as elaborated by Immanuel Kant, is the recognition of that now-lost experience of nature, and that art beauty must be thereby interpreted as becoming the reconstructed afterimage of natural beauty. The article tracks the development of this thought from Kant’s account of “wild beauties” through Adorno’s chapter “Natural Beauty” to its actualization in Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45276417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adorno and the Role of Sublimation in Artistic Creativity and Cultural Redemption","authors":"M. Jay","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8989246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8989246","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Theodor W. Adorno resisted Sigmund Freud’s explanation of artistic creation as the sublimation of the artist’s libidinal drives. It focuses too much on the artist rather than the work and is in the service of accommodation to the status quo. But Adorno also questioned the simple reversal of Freud’s formula, pointing out the dangers of unmediated desublimation. The artist, he suggested, should sublimate his or her rage instead. No less significant was the retrospective cultural sublimation of objects from exhausted devotional or cultic contexts, which preserved the unfulfilled yearnings originally expressed in them.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42421344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Days of the Cavemen? Adorno, Spengler, and the Anatomy of Caesarism","authors":"Mikko Immanen","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8989316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8989316","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article addresses the controversial question of Theodor W. Adorno’s debt to right-wing Zivilisationskritik by a close reading of his essay “Spengler after the Decline” (1950). The article shows that despite Adorno’s harsh polemics against Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, 1922), he sought to make Spengler’s analysis of Weimar Germany’s undemocratic tendencies—“Caesarism”—serve progressive ends. However, Adorno’s essay was not just an effort at “coming to terms with the past” in Adenauerian West Germany. Reading the essay’s original 1941 version together with Adorno’s correspondence with Max Horkheimer sheds light on Spengler as an overlooked key (next to Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin) to their Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in 1941–44. Adorno’s daring effort to appropriate Spengler’s analysis of Caesarism makes Adorno’s critical theory an asset in understanding today’s authoritarian populism.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46058620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social Suffering and the Autonomy of Art","authors":"P. E. Gordon","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8989288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8989288","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article seeks to reconstruct a central claim of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, namely, that art is simultaneously autonomous and socially conditioned. The thesis of art’s “double character” is often misunderstood, especially by critics who wish to fault Adorno for his retreat into socially indifferent aestheticism. But his actual view was that art can remain art only if it is responsive to human suffering. For Adorno, it is only by virtue of its relative autonomy that art can address social suffering and sustain a critical posture toward the world.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43445895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}