Report on Working Group Activities (06/04/2024)

Created in June 04, 2024

2024

Written by: James Crane

Not the good but the bad is the subject matter of theory. Theory presupposes the reproduction of life in its existing forms. Its ele­ment is freedom, its theme oppression. […] Uncompromising hatred of the terror inflicted on the last of the earth’s creatures legitimizes the grati­tude of those who are spared. Invocation of the sun is idolatry. Only the spectacle of the tree withered in its heat gives a presentiment of the majesty of the day which will not scorch the world on which it shines. – Adorno & Horkheimer. “For Voltaire”, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Critics and theorists – thank you for joining and listening in to our late 2023 sessions! Sign up for free on our patreon to listen to those recordings:

If you want to support the work we do, consider becoming a patron – thanks to those of you who have! Your support has helped us cover the cost of running last year’s sessions and enabled us to set more ambitious plans into motion for our first journal issue (we anticipate early fall publication), our forthcoming podcast, and future collaborations with scholars, translators, and artists.

2024 Reading Group Schedule – Summer and Fall Sessions

I. June-July: The Fight for the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Starting Saturday, June 1st, join us for 7 weeks of sessions on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a book (to tweak Nietzsche’s subtitle for Zarathustra) for no one and no one. In this exploratory session, we’ll have it out with the authors, the last half-century of their readers, and each other as we work to establish a general sense of the core problematic and project of the text and try to reconstruct the reasons for its hyper-conscious and hyper-confounding method of presentation.

Sign-up now by sending a direct message to our ‘X’ account Or by emailing us directly. Both found on the footer of our website.

One of the primary desiderata of this session will be making the ‘esoteric’ (Marxist) text of DoE – in the (largely untranslated) preparatory sketches and notes, internal IFS seminars, letters, and Diskussionsprotokolle – exoteric by (1) collecting the strongest extant English-language secondary literature on the topic and making it accessible in a shared file and (2) working together on first-pass English translations of some previously untranslated primary source materials.

II. Fall (2024): The (Critical) Political-Economic Foundations of Critical Theory

Despite the central role of political economy – and the critique of political economy – for the theoretical self-conception and social research projects of the early Institut and Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, this has largely been overlooked in the reception of ‘first generation’ critical theory. During this session, we’ll read and discuss the role (critique of) political economy – especially their heterodox Marxian conception of value and crisis – plays in their cultural criticism, (psycho-)analytic social psychology, history of modern natural science, and critical history of philosophy.

We’ll also try to cover some previously untranslated material on economic planning and debates about “socialization” that appear in the first few issues of the ZfS.

CTWG Blog – Late April / Early May

Stay tuned for blog posts in the next few weeks – from recaps of previous presentations on Adorno’s belligerently communist music theory to reports from the Erich Fromm archive on the early plans for what would become the IfS’s Studien über Autorität und Familie (1936). In the future, expect to see more regular posts on our blog as we generate studies, write up research reports, and summarize past presentations/discussions.

Stay sharp! Or: Nil admirari

Editorial board: Anatarah Bin AlKaf, Esther Planas Balduz, James Crane, Jefferson Lin, Zachary Loeffler, Mac Parker, Sam Thomas, J. E. Morain, Re Tejus