Shelleyan Love

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-165
Author(s):  
Seth T. Reno
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Prometheus Unbound ◽  
Religious Sensibility ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Scholarly Attention

In this chapter, I show that Percy Shelley picks up on the waning of intellectual love in Wordsworth, continuing to develop this Romantic tradition after Wordsworth moves on to a more religious sensibility. The chapter outlines the development of Percy Shelley’s treatment of love over the entire course of his career. I examine five ‘clusters’ of writings that reveal his adoption, adaption, and revision of Wordsworthian, Godwinian, and Classical notions of love: (1) his essay ‘On Love’ (1819) and its related texts; (2) Queen Mab (1813) and the Alastorvolume (1815); (3) a sequence of lyrics from 1816-1818; (4) the Prometheus Unbound volume (1820); and (5) Epipsychidion (1821) and later poems. Shelleyan love has received the most scholarly attention in studies of Romanticism, yet it is almost always within the contexts of sex, sexuality, and metaphor; instead, I argue that Shelleyan love can also be understood as an aesthetic model of interconnectedness proposing a nascent negative dialectics, a concept developed by Theodor Adorno that both defers and affirms the reconciliation of subject and object at the heart of critical theory and love.

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Social Research ◽  
New Work ◽  
Abstract Concept ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Identity Thinking

Philosopher, musicologist and social theorist, Theodor Adorno was the philosophical architect of the first generation of Critical Theory emanating from the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Departing from the perspective of more orthodox Marxists, Adorno believed the twin dilemmas of modernity – injustice and nihilism – derived from the abstractive character of Enlightenment rationality. In consequence, he argued that the critique of political economy must give way to a critique of Enlightenment, instrumental reason. Identity thinking, as Adorno termed instrumental rationality, abstracts from the sensory, linguistic and social mediations which connect knowing subjects to objects known. In so doing, it represses what is contingent, sensuous and particular in persons and nature. Adorno’s method of negative dialectics was designed to rescue these elements from the claims of instrumental reason. Adorno conceded, however, that all this method could demonstrate was that an abstract concept did not exhaust its object. For a model of an alternative grammar of reason and cognition Adorno turned to the accomplishments of artistic modernism. There, where each new work tests and transforms the very idea of something being a work of art, Adorno saw a model for the kind of dynamic interdependence between mind and its objects that was required for a renewed conception of knowing and acting.

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Social Research ◽  
New Work ◽  
Abstract Concept ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Identity Thinking

Philosopher, musicologist and social theorist, Theodor Adorno was the philosophical architect of the first generation of Critical Theory emanating from the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Departing from the perspective of more orthodox Marxists, Adorno believed the twin normative challenges of modernity – injustice and nihilism – derived from the abstractive character of Enlightenment rationality. In consequence, he argued that the critique of political economy must give way to a critique of Enlightenment, instrumental reason. Identity thinking, as Adorno termed instrumental rationality, abstracts from the sensory, linguistic and social mediations which connect knowing subjects to objects known. In so doing, it represses what is contingent, sensuous and particular in persons and nature. Adorno’s method of negative dialectics was designed to rescue these elements from the claims of instrumental reason. Adorno conceded, however, that all this method could demonstrate was that an abstract concept did not exhaust its object. For a model of an alternative grammar of reason and cognition Adorno turned to the accomplishments of artistic modernism. There, where each new work tests and transforms the very idea of something being a work of art, Adorno saw a model for the kind of dynamic interdependence between mind and its objects that was required for a renewed conception of knowing and acting.

The Doctrine of the Providential Function of Commerce in International Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ileana M. Porras
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
International Exchange ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Religious Sensibility ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Francisco De Vitoria ◽  
Internal Effect

This chapter explores the doctrine of the providential function of commerce in the work of Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1492–1546), Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). In this chapter, I argue that the doctrine’s persuasive power lies in the interplay between two factors. First is the fact that while the doctrine is not in origin a religious doctrine, its elements and its narrative logic carried an unmistakable religious sensibility that became indissolubly associated with international trade. But the doctrine’s true efficacy lies in a more subtle internal effect. In essence, the doctrine, which holds at its core an act of exchange among distant peoples, allowed its adherents to idealize international trade by blurring the distinction between the act of commercial exchange and that of gift-exchange. In this manner, international exchange came to be portrayed as an act of friendship and community recognition, rather than a commercial act between strangers.

Queering Delilah with Critical Theory and Gendered Bible Hermeneutics

2020 ◽  
pp. 493-507
Author(s):  
Caroline Blyth
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Queer Spaces ◽  
Holy Man

Close your eyes and think of Delilah. Whom do you see? What does she look like? More often than not, this biblical character is visualized in both interpretive traditions and cultural retellings of Judges 16 as a femme fatale par excellence—a fatal woman whose exotic feminine allure and lethal sexuality ultimately destroyed Samson, that most heroic Hebrew holy man. In this chapter, I use gender-queer theory to interrogate the very “straight” ways in which these retellings make sense of the multiple ambiguities surrounding Delilah’s character within the biblical narrative. I take an intersectional approach, interpreting Delilah’s sexuality, gender, and ethnicity through a queer lens to conjuring up a myriad of alternative performances that her persona may inhabit. By so doing, I invite readers into delightfully queer spaces in the text that challenge essentialist reading habits and bring to light critical theoretical insights about Delilah’s interpretive and cultural afterlives.

scholarly journals The Frankfurt School and the authoritarian personality: Balance sheet of an insight

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110059
Author(s):  
Geoff Boucher
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Other ◽  
Authoritarian Personality ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
School Research

Frankfurt School critical theory is perhaps the most significant theory of society to have developed directly from a research programme focused on the critique of political authoritarianism, as it manifested during the interwar decades of the 20th century. The Frankfurt School’s analysis of the persistent roots – and therefore the perennial nature – of what it describes as the ‘authoritarian personality’ remains influential in the analysis of authoritarian populism in the contemporary world, as evidenced by several recent studies. Yet the tendency in these studies is to reference the final formulation of the category, as expressed in Theodor Adorno and co-thinkers’ The Authoritarian Personality (1950), as if this were a theoretical readymade that can be unproblematically inserted into a measured assessment of the threat to democracy posed by current authoritarian trends. It is high time that the theoretical commitments and political stakes in the category of the authoritarian personality are re-evaluated, in light of the evolution of the Frankfurt School. In this paper, I review the classical theories of the authoritarian personality, arguing that two quite different versions of the theory – one characterological, the other psychodynamic – can be extracted from Frankfurt School research.

scholarly journals Kritische Anthropologie?

2016 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Peter Krüger
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Complementary Relationship ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Critical Anthropology ◽  
Communicative Theory

AbstractThis article compares Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s foundation of the Frankfurt Critical Theory with Helmuth Plessner’s foundation of Philosophical Anthropology. While Horkheimer’s and Plessner’s paradigms are mutually incompatible, Adorno’s „negative dialectics“ and Plessner’s „negative anthropology“ (G. Gamm) can be seen as complementing one another. Jürgen Habermas at one point sketched a complementary relationship between his own publicly communicative theory of modern society and Plessner’s philosophy of nature and human expressivity, and though he then came to doubt this, he later reaffirmed it. Faced with the „life power“ in „high capitalism“ (Plessner), the ambitions for a public democracy in a pluralistic society have to be broadened from an argumentative focus (Habermas) to include the human condition and the expressive modes of our experience as essentially embodied persons. The article discusses some possible aspects of this complementarity under the title of a „critical anthropology“ (H. Schnädelbach).

Notes on Luhmann, Adorno, and the critique of neoliberalism

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
Laurindo Dias Minhoto
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Theoretical Terms ◽  
Normative Model ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Critical Interpretation ◽  
The One

This article discusses some possibilities for a critical interpretation of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. On the one hand, this theory could provide a sophisticated new sociological account of well-known modern social pathologies, such as alienation and reification; on the other, it could be considered a crypto-normative model for the reciprocal mediation between system and environment in which neither blind tautologies nor colonizations would take place. I argue that as a normative model this theoretical matrix seems to resonate with aspects of Adorno’s negative dialectics between subject and object and that the involuntary promise it contains could be fully realized only under other social conditions. The article also presents a preliminary critique of neoliberalism reconceptualized in systems theoretical terms as a dedifferentiation machinery that aims at establishing the primacy of economic rationality and the formation of ‘industries’ in different social spheres.

James and Hume

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yumiko Inukai
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Discrete Elements ◽  
Temporal Continuity ◽  
The World ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
The Subject

James contends that the rejection of conjunctive relations in experience leads Hume to the empirically groundless notion of discrete elements of experience, which James takes as the critical point that differentiates his empiricism from Hume’s. In this chapter, I argue that James is not right about this: Hume not only allows but employs experienced conjunctive relations in his explanations for the generation of our naturally held beliefs about the self and the world. There are indeed striking similarities between their accounts: they both use the relations of resemblance, temporal continuity, constancy, coherence, and regularity, and the self. Also, objects are constructed out of basic elements in their systems—pure experience and perceptions, respectively. Although collapsing the inner and outer worlds of the subject and object into one world (of pure experience for James and of perceptions for Hume) may seem unintuitive, this is exactly what allows them to preserve our ordinary sense of our experiences of objects.

Paul and Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-99
Author(s):  
Ole Jakob Løland
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Conceptual Revolution

Taubes’s readings of Paul demonstrate a hermeneutical art of disagreement within the intellectual life of post-Holocaust Europe. Taubes is a reader who looks for intellectual enemies with whom he can achieve a true disagreement without dismissing their true insights, whether they are historical or philosophical. This hermeneutic is not unattached to Taubes’s Jewish background but reflects a Talmudic spirit inherent within Taubes’s idiosyncratic readings of Paul. Moreover, Taubes’s readings are attuned to nuances, ambivalences, and contradictions within Paul, as Taubes powerfully demonstrates in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians. With the help of Nietzsche’s polemical reading of this Pauline epistle, Taubes detects the instances where Paul’s doctrine of the cross revolutionizes ancient perceptions and passages that contain the power to neutralize this very same conceptual revolution. This results in Taubes’s image of a contradictory apostle, who can be used throughout history for various purposes. In Taubes’s case, Paul becomes a messianic thinker and part of Taubes’s efforts to establish a powerful synthesis of the insights of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt—against what Taubes considers as the merely aesthetic tradition of “critical theory” in Theodor Adorno that remains indifferent to the historical struggles of the excluded.

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