CRITICAL THEORY | SOCIAL ANALYSIS | POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
In my previous post, I discussed some of the parodic qualities by which the notion of madness occurred in the generation following Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Many readers will easily see the fluid connection with Michel Foucault’s work, and it has been part of my intention in this series of posts to highlight […]
I ended my previous post with the following sentiment. It is certainly worth rejecting Horkheimer and Adorno where they are wrong and not refusing to put them on a pedestal. It is also worth seeing the ways we might formulate our arguments in the twenty-first century within a larger critique of totalitarian impulses that they […]
As I ended my previous post in this series, the postsecular moment has brought with it a broadening of application of the anti-Semitism the Horkheimer and Adorno describe with respect to the literary figure of “the Jew.” It is especially important to note this transposition with respect to current U.S. politics and discussions of neoliberalism. […]
In this series of posts, I have been reviewing Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment from a ‘post secular’ lens. In my last post, I was tracing the authors’ descriptions of anti-Semitic behavior as “blindness,” and I quipped that this blindness is repositioned by neoliberalism, that it speaks “in no small way” to the rise […]
I have been working through a reading of Max Horkheimer and Thedor Adorno’s classic work of Critical Theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment. I am particularly interested in the use of literary concepts in their critique. As we have seen in earlier posts, their first few chapters moved historically, seeing the core of enlightenment in Odysseus as […]
In my previous post, I took a turn from direct analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment to engage with David Scott’s writing on tragic disposition in Conscripts of Modernity. I then focused on Emmanuel Levinas’s early essay, “Reality and Its Shadow.” I merged Levinas’s pessimism concerning art and his call for a distinctive kind of criticism with […]
I ended my first post in this series considering David Scott’s description of the tragic disposition as an obligated action in a world where values are “unstable and ambiguous.” I have been rethinking Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment with particular attention to the role a conception of the Literary plays in their work because that […]
I am often perplexed, sometimes disturbed, and generally intrigued by the use of Literature in philosophical arguments. While there is a robust tradition of Marxian-influenced material critique within Cultural Studies, the conception of “the Literary” within literary studies also went through its own kind of “secularization” during the latter half of the twentieth-century. In the […]
The following is the first of a two-part series. It continues with a theme developed in earlier articles, which can be found here and here. If we gaze at history with a panoramic angle of vision, we must draw the inevitable conclusion that the thesis of sovereignty radiates from the dialectic of subjection and abjection. […]
Approximately 75 years ago, as Soviet and Allied armies were converging from opposite directions to crush the demonic dominion of Nazi Germany across Europe, two books were published that would anticipate in remarkable ways the predicament we encounter at the start of the third decade of the third millennium. The first, The Dialectic of Enlightenment […]