Adorno and Politics

Seyla Benhabib (Yale University), Jay M. Bernstein (The New School for Social Research), Susan Buck-Morss (City University of New York), Maeve Cooke (University College Dublin)

There is an urgent need to reassess Adorno’s main works in order to gain new insights into the permanent state of social and political crisis of our times. The 50th anniversary of the publication of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics in 2016 provides an excellent opportunity to explore the role that Adorno’s work can play for the future of critical theory. This conference will focus on the following topics in Critical Theory inspired by Adorno’s oeuvre:

• the relationship between politics and neoliberal economy
• art and political action
• language, concepts and their political / philosophical significance
• the (im)possibilities of political practice
• Adorno and modern / contemporary political theory
• exploring the paths opened up by Adorno’s thought
• with Adorno, beyond Adorno: expanding the horizons of Critical Theory
• relations and resonances between Adorno and other critical thinkers, past and present