Max Pensky : The Trash of History

In Max Pensky’s “The Trash of History,” taken from the larger Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, Walter Benjamin’s use of the objective dialectical image is viewed in juxtaposition–and unwanted collaboration -with subjective allegorical imagery. The dialectical image, where past and present interact with one another, is Benjamin’s method and [...]

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Herbert Marcuse: On Science and Phenomenology

By Ben Daly and Rose Mackey
In his essay On Science and Phenomenology Herbert Marcuse attempts to lay out the ways in which a split has occurred between the scientific and philosophical views on the world, and how this split has been detrimental to the development of human society in the west. For Marcuse this [...]

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Max Pensky: Melancholia and Allegory

Everything is a composite of smaller group of factors, therefore everything is connected.  This is why Benjamin argues that art and science must find a way to coexist.  But, as the author points out, these claims also embody an aspect of hypocrisy.  As he states, “the claim that the Trauerspiel study ‘is’ allegorical is as [...]

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Canetti, Elias + Theodor Adorno: Crowds and Power

The article I read was a conversation between Theodor Adorno and Elias Canetti after Canetti’s publication of his book Crowds and Power in 1960. Adorno asks Canetti about the close relationship between crowds and power, survival and self-preservation, and his idea of the “invisible crowd.” Adorno begins by commenting that Canetti’s anthropological works reveal [...]

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Brian O’Connor : The Structure of Adorno’s Epistemology: The Priority of the Object

This chapter by Brian O’Connor seeks to illuminate the features of Adorno’s epistemology, putting a strong emphasis on the priority of the object in experience. In Adorno’s conception of contemporary models of philosophy, he sees a failure in their commitment to forms of subjectivism, excluding a model of experience that shows the reciprocity of [...]

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Gillian Rose : The Melancholy Science

Gillian Rose’s first published work, The Melancholy Science is a critical exploration of Adorno’s thought. The self-titled last chapter of the book seeks to outline the progression of complications Adorno’s social philosophy encounters and his emerging response. She establishes his social diagnosis as “approached as the immanent question of ‘the conceptual mediation’ of social reality [...]

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Josef Fruchtl : The Struggle of the Self Against Itself: Adorno and Heidegger on Modernity.

In this paper Fruchtl attempts to investigate the question of reflection on modernity. His main thesis is that to reflect upon modernity is to reflect upon the self. This immediately launches the investigation into the realm of subjectivity. He begins by building a picturing of the current dynamic concerning the subject. He creates a dynamic [...]

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Summary : “Subject and Object” : Adorno

Below is a summary of the class discussion we had on both Wednesday of last week and this past Monday. Please feel free to add any questions and comments that you might have!

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