Update on Spring 2025 Reading Group
I. Update on the Spring 2025 Reading Group
Critics and theorists,
Firstly, thank you all for joining and listening in to our 2025 sessions so far! Sign up for free on our patreon to listen to those recordings as they are uploaded. This is a brief update to situate you all as we move on to the second half of the 2025 Spring Reading Group: The Science of Society in Critical Theory. As a reminder, this coming Saturday we won’t have a discussion meeting as a small respite as we move towards the social psychology of the bourgeois era presented by our dissident artist Esther Planas Balduz on April 26th. For the full schedule, please visit this post. Regrettably, moreover, we will have to indefinitely postpone Zach Loeffler’s May 10th cap-off on Adorno versus the positivists due to scheduling conflicts. We are working to see if we can fill out this session with another, but tentatively, please assume that May 3rd will be our final meeting. Until then, we will keep you posted.
II. New Translations
Of interest, James Crane has tremendously translated various excerpts of early critical theory work on his substack; substudies: Materials and Notes on Critical Theory and the History of Philosophy. There is a lot of exciting material there that is surely of interest! In the near future, we plan to organize a lot of this material and post it here in the CTWG blog, so stay tuned for that as well.
III. Critique of the Podcast Form (A Critical Theory Podcast)
In case you missed it: we have begun podcasting. For our first episode, “Episode 0: Debrief on Margin Notes Vol. 1,” each of the contributors to our the first issue of our journal (Margin Notes Volume 1: Kernels of Early Critical Theory) recorded an ‘explainer’ to introduce the basic motivation and idea behind their essay, and you can listen to it for free through our Patreon (RSS feed available to subscribers) and on Spotify!
IV. CTWG Blog Posts
In case you missed it: new on the CTWG Blog: “Suffering Reified. On Adorno’s Thoughts on Reification and Suffering,” by Esther Planas Balduz. Originally written in 2020 as a reflection on witnessing the wave of ostensibly ‘Left’ deplatformings of UK Labor Party leaders and members by the abuse of allegations of “Anti-Semitism.” In this process, during which appeals were made again and again to the exclusivity of suffering and the transcendence of the position for those who can claim the trauma as theirs alone, the author argues that the living victims of fascism were displaced for the sake of a conservative political discourse of victimhood which reifies the suffering of the victims into second nature, enshrining and forgetting it; the cost of the self-certainty the UK ‘Left’ gained in this case was reinforcing the world founded on the defeat of the Left that made them so uncertain to begin with. The essay has been revised with a new preface that links the weaponization-by-reification of ‘Anti-Semitism’ in UK Labor—re-normalization of the party against the threat of a Left which might actually try to address the victims of business as usual—to the weaponization of ‘Anti-Semitism’ against the protests for Palestinian liberation today, which reifies genocide of the past in an effort launder genocide of the present, and through which all victims of fascism, past and present, are betrayed. At the end of this process, the author observes, unrepentant Francoists in Spanish politics accuse pro-independence politicians of being Nazis while passing laws protecting the Nazi sympathizers of Spain as prospective victims of hate crimes.
As always, stay sharp and nil admirari,
The CTWG Editorial board:: Anatarah Bin AlKaf, Esther Planas Balduz, James Crane, Jefferson Lin, Zachary Loeffler, Mac Parker, Samuel J. Thomas, J. E. Morain, Re Tejus
