Art

Some notes on the introduction of electronic registers at Birkbeck College, University of London, the context of attacks on International Students and the refugee crisis, and some pedagogical implications. Previously published here: http://prolapsarian.tumblr.com/post/130912828202/the-border-in-the-classroom

Theodor W. Adorno noted down his dreams throughout his life, but never completed the book of them that he planned to publish in the late 1960s. In the years before his death he started to make selections, even having a number of typescripts of the texts prepared by his wife, Gretel. While some of these dreams appeared in the edition of his writing in the 1970s, they have generally been considered to be marginal texts to his oeuvre – indeed, almost all of Adorno’s theorisations of dreaming have been considered marginal. Taking Adorno at his word, that knowledge should address “that which fell by the wayside, […] the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic,” this paper explores the centrality of dreaming to Adorno’s thinking, through an essayistic reading of one of Adorno’s shortest and most enigmatic dreams from November 1956. Its interpretation establishes a constellation of problems and images of metapsychology, historical materialism, and the metaphysics of musical time, and their relationships to memory and forgetting, to regression and “Eingedenken”. Out of this constellation appears a history of critical theory in the twentieth century, ranging from Benjamin’s early essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ to Adorno’s final works. This history addresses the transformed conditions of critical theory – of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and aesthetics – in the wake of Auschwitz. Finally this leads to a problematisation of interpretation itself, of its “Trauer” to use Adorno’s word, in the aftermath of the holocaust.

These notes were written between 4th and 7th December 2015 in Ramallah, as an intervention and introduction to a workshop on Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay ‘The Destructive Character’ at the conference Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought, held at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, the International Academy of Arts, and Birzeit University, 6-11th December 2015. Benjamin’s short text is included here in English, and in German as an appendix.

An extended commentary on Adorno's 1954 essay, 'Contribution to the Theory of Ideology' (a new translation of which was published by the author.) This commentary addresses the development of criticisms of the Sociology of Knowledge by the Frankfurt School, considers the consequences of their theorisations of ideology for claims to philosophical autonomy, makes an argument about how Adorno addressed the division of intellectual labour, and considers how this was worked out with regards to philosophical approaches to experience.

An introduction to a seminar session on ‘The Stocking’, ‘Hiding Places’, ‘The Sewing Box’, and ‘Colours’, from Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 at a conference on Matter/Materie in Benjamin’s philosophy, held at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London, 21-22 April, 2023.