By Charles Kollmer · Tuesday, August 2, 2011 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Charles Kollmer looks at David Jenemann’s “Adorno Unplugged: The Ambivalence of the Machine Age,” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009).
 The work of Theodor W. Adorno is replete with paradox, and the abundant and irresolvable tensions in his writings reflect the disheartening milieu in which he wrote. Based on a cursory reading of “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, we might be left with the impression that Adorno wielded this rhetorical weapon in a uniform manner, indicating the ways in which the modern fruits of Enlightenment contradict the original ethos of Enlightenment thought. Indeed, these are difficult charges to refute, as modernity’s myriad episodes of mass violence render notions of teleological “progress” rather untenable. Poststructuralist thought exhibits a reverence for this innovation in thinking. According to Antoni Negri, “Adorno’s model of cultural criticism genuinely uncovered the ontology of the new world” (cited in Jenemann). Yet these same tracts always contain caveats, noting that, despite the paradox and contradiction inherent in modern infrastructure and society, modernity presents us with multitudinous opportunities for radically disrupting the stasis of the status quo. This is the “situation of those who are living through the passage from modernity to postmodernity,” writes Negri. Such caveats imply that Adorno’s critical theory fails to recognize these possibilities for change, at worst typecasting him as a grumpy Luddite.
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By Laura Groenendaal · Wednesday, July 27, 2011 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Laura Groenendaal looks at Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s “From Oedipal Hermeneutics to a Philosophy of Presence,” from Telos 138 (Spring 2007).
In his article “From Oedipal Hermeneutics to a Philosophy of Presence,” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht responds to a colloquium’s debate on whether “academic heresy” can produce “revolutions within the humanities” by rejecting its language:
I see the humanities as a cluster of disciplines that continuously shifts and, by shifting, transforms itself—mostly (but not always) without any programmatic direction, and sometimes stirring up sudden splashes, waves, and even tsunamis in the formless ocean of the public sphere. If anything, such splashes, waves, and tsunamis follow (and here I am producing my own metaphorical contradiction) an emotional “logic” of family romances and oedipal revolts, rather than the institutional logic of heresies and revolutions.
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By Howard Eiland · Monday, July 25, 2011 Howard Eiland’s “Allegories of Falling” appears in Telos 155 (Summer 2011). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 Although the story of the Fall of Man, as recounted in the biblical book of Genesis, has been a continual source of literature and thought, its meaning remains elusive. At issue in the story is the conception of self-consciousness, understood as a power of reflection on the immediacy of experience, a division in being (I am now “beside myself” in shame) that parodies the original division and articulation of things in the act of Creation. Adam and Eve awaken from their child-like absorption, awaken from and to their nakedness; they fall into the world and into history, as into adulthood. It is in the context of this mortal knowledge and emergent negotiation of distance that the ur-Christian problematic of the “now,” involving the distinction of chromos from kairos, manifests its paradoxical gravity, something obscured by linear eschatologies. The messianic awakening is not a simple restoration of immediacy, nor any solid “ground,” but readiness for the sudden transformation of chromos into kairos, an allegorizing of experience as the play of eternal transience. Among the many literary afterlives of the garden/world allegory, this article focuses on examples from the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Kafka.
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By Maurizio Meloni · Friday, July 22, 2011 Maurizio Meloni’s “Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves” appears in Telos 155 (Summer 2011). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
Scientific naturalism, according to Jürgen Habermas, represents one of the “two countervailing trends that mark the intellectual tenor of our age,” the other being religious worldviews. Using Foucault’s distinction between philosophy as an “analytic of truth” and philosophy as an “ontology of the present” and “ontology of ourselves,” this essay addresses naturalism less as an epistemological issue than as a global way of rethinking humanness, that is as the theoretical “correlative” of certain local practices, which, under the influence of leading sciences such as neuroscience and molecular biology, contribute today to the naturalization of the human. In the second part of the essay, I will discuss three hermeneutic models through which leading Continental thinkers have reacted to this intertwinement of naturalism and the human condition in modernity: naturalism as a break, as a danger, and as a loss. From their reactions, the antinaturalistic legacy of much of Continental philosophy emerges clearly, and invites us to think of the present naturalistic epoch in a more radical way.
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By Fabian Freyenhagen · Tuesday, July 19, 2011 Fabian Freyenhagen’s “Adorno’s Ethics Without the Ineffable” appears in Telos 155 (Summer 2011). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
There is a perennial problem affecting Adorno’s philosophy: his critical theory seems to lack the resources to account for the normative claims it contains. In an influential article, James Gordon Finlayson has analyzed this problem and offered an intriguing solution to it. According to Finlayson, Adorno subscribes to a normative ethics, but this commitment is in tension with his view that we cannot know the good or any positive values (in short, with his negativism). Finlayson argues that by drawing only on resources within Adorno’s philosophy, it is, however, possible to provide access to a kind of good that is suitable as a normative basis for his ethics (namely, the good involved in the experiences of trying to have insights into what is ineffable); and this is the best way to resolve the tension between Adorno’s normative commitment and his negativism. In this essay, I show that this proposal is unsuitable both (1) as a normative basis of Adorno’s ethics and (2) for explaining how it is possible for people to act according to this ethics. I outline an alternative solution that relies only on Adorno’s conception of the bad and defend it against objections.
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By Charles Kollmer · Monday, July 18, 2011 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Charles Kollmer looks at Kai Evers’s “The Holes of Oblivion: Arendt and Benjamin on Storytelling in the Age of Totalitarian Destruction” from Telos 132 (Fall 2005).
 A central concern of critical theory revolves around the difficulty of communicating in the wake of modernity’s crises. Unprecedented trauma and violence obliterate tradition, which historically formed the necessary context for lucid and comprehensible stories. Walter Benjamin famously observed that veterans of World War I returned “not richer but poorer in communicable experience.” In the wake of the war, he notes, the word bekanntlich, or “as everybody well knows,” lost its currency, leaving only Erfahrungsarmut, “the new poverty of experience.” In response to this situation, Benjamin valorized the anti-aesthetic manifest in the works of Karl Kraus and Berthold Brecht, concluding that “all that remains is the discipline of those who destroy.” A similar current of thought underpins many of the philosophical and aesthetic developments in postwar culture, from the Frankfurt School’s critique of Enlightenment empiricism to the Dadaist rejection of canonical artistic authority.
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