Overview of all pages with the tags #Theodor W. Adorno

Lenin's liberalism

June 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

At the 2011 Left Forum, held at Pace University in NYC between March 18-21 , Platypus hosted a conversation on “Lenin’s Marxism.” Panelists Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Paul LeBlanc of the International Socialist Organization, and Lars T. Lih, the author of Lenin Reconsidered: “What is to be Done” in Context were asked to address, “What was distinctive about Vladimir Lenin’s Marxism? What was its relationship to the other forms of Marxism and Marxists of his era? [Read More]

Art, Culture, and Politics

Marxist Approaches

April 30, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Panel held as part of the third annual Platypus International Convention, on Saturday, April 30, 2011, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element A transcript of Bret Schneider’s remarks appears in Platypus Review #37 Panelists Omair Hussain Lucy Parker Pac Pobric Bret Schneider Description After its apparent exhaustion as a project of social transformation, Marxism seems to remain alive as a cultural and hermeneutic endeavor. [Read More]

Platypus International Convention 2011 Aesthetics Art Contemporary art Culture Leon Trotsky Marxism Politics Jacques Rancière Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

The Politics of Critical Theory

April 29, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

The opening plenary of the 3 annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on April 29, 2011. Co-sponsored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Departments of Art Education, Art History, Liberal Arts, and Visual and Critical Studies, and the SAIC Student Association. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Transcript in Platypus Review #37 [Read More]

Platypus International Convention 2011 Critical theory Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno

Postcolonialism or postmodernism?

April 2, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

On February 11, 2011 – the day Hosni Mubarak resigned the office of President of Egypt – Chris Mansour interviewed Susan Buck-Morss, professor of political philosophy and social theory at Cornell University and author of The Origin of Negative Dialectics and Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, on behalf of The Platypus Review. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Chris Mansour: What were the stakes of introducing Critical Theory into a postmodern culture that widely considered its ideas obsolete? [Read More]

Marxism Susan Buck-Morss colonialism postcolonialism postmodernism modernism Egypt Islam history Theodor W. Adorno

Praxis, theory, and the unmakeable

March 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

On February 19, 2011, Chris Mansour of Platypus interviewed Robert Hullot-Kentor, noted Adorno translator and author of Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Chris Mansour: For several decades you have been translating and interpreting the relevance of Adorno’s thought for us. In your most recent essays, however, it seems you have mostly wanted to save Adorno’s ideas from appropriation by the postmodern and contemporary canon, which you claim have done “immense damage” to his insights. [Read More]

Art Critical theory Francis Bacon Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Martin Heidegger Karl Marx Robert Hullot-Kentor Theodor W. Adorno

The relevance of critical theory to art today

January 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2010, Platypus hosted a panel entitled “The Relevance of Critical Theory to Art Today” moderated by Chris Mansour at The New School for Social Research in New York. The panel consisted of Philosophy Professors J.M. Bernstein (The New School), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University), and Gregg Horowitz (Pratt Institute and Vanderbilt University), and Chris Cutrone (Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Member of Platypus. [Read More]

Art Marxism Art and culture Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

The Marxist hypothesis

A response to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis'

November 6, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

Against Badiou ALAIN BADIOU’S RECENT BOOK (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj Žižek’s work for the last few years, “the communist hypothesis.”1 This is also the title of Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review2 on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.3 There, Badiou explains his approach to communism as follows: What is the communist hypothesis? [Read More]

Alain Badiou Communism Karl Marx Marxism Slavoj Žižek Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin

Adorno and Freud

The relation of Freudian psychoanalysis to Marxist critical social theory

June 10, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ADORNO’S HABILITATIONSSCHRIFT was on Kant and Freud. It ended with Marx. Why did Adorno think that Marx addressed the problems of both Kantian and Freudian accounts of consciousness? The distinction between Kant and Freud turns on the psychoanalytic concept of the “unconscious,” the by-definition unknowable portion of mental processes, the unthought thoughts and unfelt feelings that are foreign to Kant’s rational idealism. Kant’s “critical” philosophy was concerned with how we can know what we know, and what this revealed about our subjectivity. [Read More]

Sigmund Freud Immanuel Kant Karl Marx Theodor W. Adorno

Is the funeral for the wrong corpse?

April 8, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

_HAL FOSTER IS a prominent critic and art historian who contributes regularly to Artforum, New Left Review*, and The Nation. He is also an editor of October. In the fall of 2009, he sent out a questionnaire to 70 critics and curators, asking them what “contemporary” means today. Foster notes that the term “contemporary” is not new, but that “What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. [Read More]

1917 Art Art and Culture Artforum Artists Contemporary art Guy Debord Hal Foster Modernism Postmodernism Robert Smithson Stalinism Theodor W. Adorno

Book Review: Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music

March 15, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE NEW TRANSLATION AND REPUBLICATION of Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music1 is a further clarification of modernism, necessitated by the latest discontents with postmodernism’s vulgarization, which keeps it at a fictitious distance. Perhaps as his remedy for the most fragmented part of the whole of the arts, namely music, translator Robert Hullot-Kentor has in recent years been steadily reintroducing Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy to English readers.2 The republication of Philosophy of New Music continues this process, further introducing readers to Adorno’s complex aesthetic theory, also elaborated recently in Current of Music, which embodies Adorno’s aesthetic hopes for the early emergence of radio transmission. [Read More]

Arnold Schoenberg Art Igor Stravinksy Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno Music