Forthcoming From NGC

Issue #155 (Aug 2025)

Special Section: Critical Theory After Frankfurt

Special Section Editors: Paul Fleming and Cecilia Sebastian

NGC #155 features a special section, “Critical Theory after Frankfurt,” that continues the recent calls to reorient Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the wake of its centennial towards the critique of political economy, capitalism, globalization, colonialism and militarism. William Paris re-examines what distinguishes critical theory from other philosophies and insists on its commitment to emancipation, one that necessarily exceeds the walls of the academy. Nica Siegel returns to Herbert Marcuse’s 1960s correspondence with Raya Dunayevskaya to show how her collaboration with Black worker politics convinced Marcuse to reconsider his own fidelity to the Frankfurt School’s integration thesis. Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo locates the utility of Adorno’s negativism for decolonial studies, especially the importance of “sedimentation,” to understand the collective labor and political histories adhering to concepts. And Asaf Angermann recovers Adorno’s commitment to decriminalizing homosexuality in West Germany in the 1960s for its surprising affinities to contemporary queer theory. The issue then turns to a series of open essays: Javier Toscano explores the centrality of “awakening” in Benjamin, particularly as inflected by the works of Nietzsche, Jung, and Simondon. Next are two essays dedicated to underexplored dimensions of Adorno’s writing: Ari Linden probes Adorno’s engagement with real existing socialism, organized around the axes of need/nature, theory/praxis, and individual/collective; while George Kovalenko analyzes Adorno’s own poetic practice in relation to the question of lyric subjectivity in a sonnet he composed in 1943. The issue concludes with Seyla Benhabib’s 2024 Adorno Prize Lecture on his persistent critique of identitarian thought and the surprising convergence of Adorno with Arendt on the problems of identitarian thinking for epistemology and politics. Benhabib’s essay is prefaced by Martin Jay’s laudation written for the occasion and dedicated to Benhabib’s wide-ranging work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Special Section: Critical Theory After Frankfurt

Paul Fleming and Cecilia Sebastian • Introduction: Critical Theory After Frankfurt
William Paris • What Does Critical Theory Have to do with Self-Emancipation?
Nica Siegel • Desiring Politics: Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, and the Political Economy of Exhaustion
Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo • "After Frankfurt": Sedimentations, Colonialism, and Critical Theory
Asaf Angermann • The Natural History of Disidentification: Critical Queerness After Adorno

General Articles

Javier Toscano • Awakening: A Politico-Existential Understanding of Messianism; On Walter Benjamin’s Project for a New Humankind
Ari Linden • Adorno on Actually Existing Socialism
George Kovalenko • The Boulevard of Sunset: Adorno’s Lyric Subject
Martin Jay • Laudation for Seyla Benhabib: Introduction to the Adorno Prize Lecture—Frankfurt, September 11, 2024
Seyla Benhabib • Against False Universals and Identitarian Thought