Forthcoming From NGC

Issue #153 (Nov 2024)

Special Section on Adorno

New German Critique’s 153rd issue includes a special section featuring five original essays on Adorno. William S. Allen contests traditional readings of the figure of Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment as a prototype of bourgeois instrumental reason, attempting instead to understand Adorno and Horkheimer’s depiction of him with an eye to the full breadth of the dialectic. Cecilia Sebastian’s groundbreaking take on leftwing student organizing by Hans-Jürgen Krahl in Frankfurt and Angela Davis in San Diego in 1969 offers a transatlantic student perspective on the theory-practice debate in Adorno’s and Marcuse’s contemporaneous correspondence, illuminating what was then a new path for post-1969 political iterations of Critical Theory. Robbie Spiers’s essay on “the possibility of love in capitalist modernity” places Adorno’s and Erich Fromm’s works side-by-side in unexpected ways, noting how love operates for both as a dialectical force at risk of commodification. Andrew McCann’s essay on Jünger and Adorno explores the authors’ rearticulations of the idea of natural history such that it anticipates contemporary approaches to environmental humanities, while Johannes Wankhammer’s consideration of Adorno’s notion of natural history amid “the postcritique debates” proposes an alternative to the otherwise “exhausted” paradigms of denaturalizing critique. The issue’s Adorno special section is followed by three new essays: Will Stratford’s contextualization of Joachim Bruhn and the Antideutsche (“Anti-German”) movement; Marco Abel’s study of Johannes Schaaf’s film Tätowierung (Tattoo, 1967) in relation to the “Aesthetic Left,”; and Jonas Heller’s exploration of Medea and apathy, which investigates the problem of violence and nonviolence in Medea’s actions, especially as these concepts were incorporated into Christa Wolf’s 1996 novel Medea. Stimmen (Medea: Voices).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Special Section on Adorno

William S. Allen • Odysseus and Adorno: A Note on Cunning and Dialectics
Cecilia Sebastian • Occupation as Critique: Leftwing Student Organizing in Frankfurt and San Diego, 1969
Robbie Spiers • Love, Actually? Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and the Possibility of Love in Capitalist Modernity
Andrew McCann • Ernst Jünger, Theodor Adorno and the Idea of Natural History
Johannes Wankhammer • The Nature of Critique: Revisiting Adorno's "Natural History" amid the Postcritique Debates

General Articles

Will Stratford • Joachim Bruhn’s Leftwing Critique of Anti-Zionism and the Capitalist State in the 1990s: An Intellectual History of the Antideutsche
Marco Abel • Johannes Schaaf’s Tätowierung (Tattoo, 1967), West-German Cinema around 1968, and the Joys of Violence; or: The Forgotten Case of the “Aesthetic Left”
Jonas Heller • Medea’s Violence: Apathy as a Politics of Withdrawal