"Sourced from the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv (MHA), both fragments—“On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party” and “The Curse of Writing Today”—are located under the subheading “Miscellaneous Manuscripts (1946),”1 filed alongside three (of the four surviving) typescripts from Horkheimer’s “Conversations with Theodor W. Adorno,” recorded during the first two weeks of October 1946, about the planned sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment. These Diskussionsprotokolle were first published posthumously in Volume 12 of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften under the title: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik.”2 In addition to these discussions, the last two fragments under the same subheading were also selected for publication in the same volume of Horkheimer’s GS: “Towards a Critique of the American Social Sciences” and “The Fate of Revolutionary Movements,” each of which is also dated “October 1946.”3 One possible motive for the omission of the fragments below from Horkheimer’s GS is difficulty in determining authorship. Despite a number of indications to the contrary in the text of the fragments themselves, the archivists (tentatively) attribute them to Adorno alone—a problematic approach the archivists seem to have adopted for several other unpublished fragments from the archive with indeterminate authorship as well.4 In terms of content, there are two grounds for rejecting this attribution."

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/HA_Fragments_1946/

#CriticalTheory #Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno #Horkheimer

🎮

#capcom #frankfurtschool

Another great discussion w/ #RossWolfe about his trilogy of essays critiquing the late neo-Stalinist philosopher & historian #DomenicoLosurdo, w/ particular focus on #Losurdo's attacks on #WesternMarxism in his eponymously titled book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9QM64C1glw

(the trilogy is here:
https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/
https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/)

#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #socialism #politicalTheory #historyOfMarxism #Stalinism #campism #philosophy #books #bookstodon @bookstodon

Fascinating trilogy of essays by Brooklyn Rail's #RossWolfe critiquing the late neo-Stalinist philosopher & historian #DomenicoLosurdo, w/ particular focus on #Losurdo's attacks on #WesternMarxism in his eponymously titled book.

https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/
https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/

Also a great pod discussion of the series w/ Ross: https://www.patreon.com/posts/138384057

#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #politicalTheory #historyOfMarxism #Stalinism #campism #philosophy #books @bookstodon

"In his afterword, Gordon acts as an intellectual tour guide for readers who may be unfamiliar with Adorno’s oeuvre. Throughout the lecture, Adorno refers to a range of concepts and arguments from his other texts without fully explaining or clarifying them – Gordon graciously fills in the gaps. With a delicate touch, he also reflects on how we might read this text amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. While Adorno was willing to enlist police authority to stamp out antisemitism, Gordon points out that Germany’s strict anti-antisemitism laws have repressed legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies. To pick an ironic example, the translator of Fighting Antisemitism Today belongs to a pro-Palestinian Jewish activist group that had its bank account frozen after being accused of antisemitism by a state-funded research institute. Instead of trying to pin down the seemingly ever-shifting line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Gordon counsels us to hold true to the universalist ethos of Adorno’s lecture: ‘the concluding injunction that such a thing must never happen again expresses an ethical requirement that applies to all peoples and states without exception’ (67). It offers, for Gordon, the only valid standard for judging Israel’s actions in Gaza today. It is a reminder that the very impulses that motivate antisemitism are also present in Islamophobia and racism.

We are, once more, living through the resurgence of militant and excessive nationalisms, where ingroups around the world seek to deprive some Other of personhood and pity. It is up to us to stand against it and to stand firm. As Adorno warns in this lecture, ‘the worst thing is to relent’"

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22263_fighting-antisemitism-today-by-theodor-w-adorno-reviewed-by-a-j-a-woods/

#CriticalTheory #Adorno #FrankfurtSchool #Antisemitism #Germany

New in Artforum

Tools of the Trade
Yuk Hui speaks with Daniel Birnbaum about his philosophy of technology

[Technological reason's] distancing effects make it an enemy of more authentic forms of experience, like that of great art. For Martin #Heidegger—a thinker on the other extreme of the political spectrum from the Frankfurt School—what in German is called Technik represented the ultimate threat.

#FrankfurtSchool #YukHui
https://www.artforum.com/features/yuk-hui-daniel-birnbaum-interview-1234733869/

"To the extent early critical theory seems to us to have a tragic character, this does not derive from the fact it has largely been forgotten, but from the fact it is still needed at all. For us, as for the early critical theorists themselves, the enduring validity of the critical theory of society, of its critical diagnostic of capitalist society and its social theorists, is a bitter confirmation that its dream is still unrealized. Critical Theory is only right in a wrong world.

Following recent scholarship on the origin and formation of critical theory (a period stretching from the late 1910s through the early 1940s, though we focus on the 1930s), our recovery takes its point of orientation from the intersection of two premises. First, early critical theory was—and can only be adequately understood and evaluated as—a development and extension of the Marxian critique of political economy, which inherited the impulses of dissident (and particularly councilist) communism. Second, the traditional, and still predominant, reception of early critical theory has not interpreted it as such given, on the one hand, the popular context, intellectual and political, in which it has been received since the student movements of the late 60s, 2 and, on the other, the neglect in academic scholarship of the esoteric form of writing consciously cultivated by early critical theorists. 3

This esoteric form of early critical theory is configured by three elements: tactical self-censorship, esoteric technique, and the negative method of presentation required by the dialectical conception of the critique of political economy."

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/MarginNotes_1_1/

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Capitalism #Marxism #PoliticalEconomy

"This introduction to the special section “Critical Theory after Frankfurt” reflects on recent demands to reorient Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the wake of its centennial toward the critique of political economy, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and the climate crisis. It reviews concerns that critics have raised about Jürgen Habermas’s inheritance of Critical Theory, and it considers several of the alternative paths proposed for charting the Frankfurt School’s future. It argues that, in place of simply reviving the Critical Theory of the 1930s and 1940s, Critical Theory’s reorientation should also consider its diffuse receptions and trajectories among abolitionist, feminist, and left-wing activists and intellectuals in the United States, beginning with the student voices of 1968."

https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article/52/2%20(155)/1/402174/Introduction-Critical-Theory-after-Frankfurt

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #PoliticalEconomy #Capitalism

"The texts collected here belong to the materials on ‘racket theory’ composed by members of the Institute for Social Research between 1941 and 1944. More specifically, they were mostly (probably) written by Max Horkheimer, albeit with considerable input from Theodor W. Adorno and occasional feedback from others.
(...)
The history of the ‘racket theory’ corpus is difficult to reconstruct. We have found it helpful to divide our subsequent analysis of the racket theory project into three major sections, which are not exclusive in terms of content. Our narrative starts with the earliest use of the term in Max Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason” (1942). After this, we turn to analyzing the stream of texts which were explicitly composed for or about publication(s), mostly written between spring 1942 and fall 1943. Then we treat the topic of reflexivity and the specific character of the racket theory project that flows from its particular form of reflexivity. Finally, we briefly discuss some particularities of the core racket theory texts before concluding. Translations from additional German sources are our own."

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketIntro/

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #StateCapitalism

dev.dfaria.eu: It’s been awhile since I published this with Brill -

It’s been awhile since I published this with Brill, but it remains relevant to the issues of Islam in the West. #philosophy #philsky #islam #religion #academia #criticaltheory #Europe #frankfurtschool #sociology #USA www.dustinjbyrd.org

https://bsky.app/profile/drdjbyrd.bsky.social/post/3lwnglkpbs22i