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Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
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An interview with Sebastian Truskolaski
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Sebastian Truskalowski
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Lucas Hoffman
Meet the.
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Podcast Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Lucas Hoffman
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network Podcast and Critical Theory. My name is Lucas Hoffman and I'm one of the hosts of the podcast series. I'm also a graduate student in the Carolina Duke Graduate Program in German Studies and a visiting scholar at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Joining me today is Sebastian Truskalowski, an assistant professor in German Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. His PhD was awarded in 2016 by Goldsmith's University of London, where he was affiliated with the Department of Visual Cultures and the center for Philosophy and Critical Thought. Before going to Manchester, Sebastian touched German and comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin and King's College London, and was awarded a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for his research at the Leibniz Centrum for Literature and Kuturforschung in Berlin. Today we'll be talking about his book titled Adorno and the Ban on Images. Sebastian, welcome to the podcast.
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Thank you. Lukas thank you very much for having me. I'm very pleased to be here and looking forward to discussing the book.
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Lucas Hoffman
Yeah, yeah, I'm very much looking forward to discussing this with you. I really enjoyed reading your book.
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Sebastian Truskalowski
So let's just.
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Lucas Hoffman
Let's go ahead and start with the classic new books question. What brought you to write this book?
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Yeah, well, the book was born out of a PhD project. This is, in fact, a reworked version of my thesis, which, as you noted, I completed in 2016 at the University of London's Goldsmiths College. I began working there initially with Alex Duttmann, who had then, after some time, moved to Berlin. And I continued the project and then wound up finishing it with Alberto Toscano and some input from other colleagues who were on hand. I applied with a project on Adorno, having been struck in my reading by a kind of conspicuous recurrence of these references to the Old Testament ban on image making or idol worship, if you like. And it seemed to me to be an unusual kind of, you know, figure, motif or image, you know, no pun intended, for Adorno to reach for, you know, given his sort of explicitly Marxist and materialist orientation. And so I began to wonder about, you know, how it is that he made this or that he hoped to make this notionally theological figure work for him. And since it seemed to recur at kind of critical junctures in his thinking on epistemology, on aesthetics, but also in his kind of fraught relationship with. With metaphysics, it seemed to me that it might be, you know, at the very least, an interesting exercise to try and make sense of how that that works or doesn't for him. And as I began to pull that thread, you know, I found that, you know, it began to resonate with. With other and more contemporary kind of philosophical issues that were on my mind. Questions around materialism, around Marxism, around thinking of kind of utopia in the present. And so what started out as a kind of point of textual or philological curiosity wound up for me at least, as a bigger sort of philosophical set of questions and wound up, starting from this very modest sort of standpoint, in order to engage with Adorno's work and some of its contemporary resonance more broadly.
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Lucas Hoffman
Yeah, yeah, I think that comes through so clearly in your book. You do make the decision not just to sort of look at the sort of the back history of Edonian thought and looking at Marx and Kant and Hegel, but you also choose to include contemporary theorists like Mesa, you, Agamben, Leotard and others. Could you maybe talk a little bit about your decision to include post Edonian thinkers in this book as well.
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Yeah, I think the reason I decided to do that was partly to illustrate my sense that Adorno was engaging with issues that continue to interest philosophers also in the present, and also people from very different kind of camps and intellectual trajectories, if you like, people like Measu, like Agamben, like Lyota. But the reason I decided to include them in the book, apart from illustrating the kind of contemporary relevance of Adorno, was that I thought it spoke in a way to an aspect of Adorno's method, if you can call it that, which is that he tends to play off existing positions against each other by way of forging his own kind of standpoint, if you can call it that. And I thought that maybe inhabiting this way of working would actually work well for the book. So, yeah, kind of a two part answer on the one hand, to illustrate the contemporary resonance, I hope, contemporary resonance of what Adorno was doing and in part to work in a way that I hope is sensitive to the way that Adorno himself chose to work in engaging with questions of materialism, for example, in the case of Measu, but also aesthetic questions in the engagement with Lyotard.
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Lucas Hoffman
Yeah, I think the book does quite a wonderful job of arguing for the contemporary relevance of Adorno. And in many ways, I think a lot of thinkers have moved past Adorno without really engaging, especially the arguments from Adorno and this idea of the image band and Adorno's sort of motivations and arguments for a sort of ban on utopian thought. And they've sort of moved past it without engaging with it directly. And so I think, like bringing. Bringing back in those contemporary theorists really does draw in the contemporary relevance of Adorno's thought. So moving further, the first. The first chapter of your book, like, in many ways, right. Can be understood as a close explication of Adorno's epistemology.
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Right.
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Lucas Hoffman
As a sort of epistemological focus by a rather interesting means of a critique of Lenin. So you look at Adorno's critique of Lenin in order to explicate his epistemology. So can you maybe give our listeners a sense of the stakes of Adorno's imageless materialism, Right?
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Yeah, that's right. So the formulation of an imageless materialism is the title of a subsection of Negative Dialectics. The first part, what Adorno sometimes refers to as the kind of, you know, epistemological or epistemocritical sort of part of the book. The Reason that I engage in this chapter with Adorno's reading of Lenin really kind of forced itself on me, if you like, because of the fact that Adorno himself explicitly engages with Lenin there. However, he does so in a way that is ultimately, I think, kind of polemical, shall we say. Right? This is not reading of Lenin with Lenin and on Lenin's terms, so to say, it's an occasion for Dorno to intervene kind of polemically in a conversation about, you know, the philosophical stakes of Marxism more generally. And he chose to set up, you know, I mean, on some reading, one might say a kind of a straw man in the form of Lenin whose materialism or kind of concept of materialism he sketches in order to then take it down and in doing so kind of, you know, lay bare his own sort of take on the issue of philosophical materialism and the way that it relates to a thinking of politics and so on in, in Marx. The other reason I wound up with this, you know, engaging with this question of an imageless materialism is because the way Adorno sets up the case, the way Adorno sets up this polemic with Lenin is that he claims that Lenin's account of a primacy of matter, which is supposed to in the end, in Lenin's own big book on materialism and imperial criticism from 1908, this kind of meta scientific opus, the way he sets that up is that Lenin's epistemology, his account of the primacy of matter and the way that that's supposed to safeguard a primacy of kind of praxis through a series of kind of slightly singular maneuvers, relies on a theory of reflection, as he calls it, which he, that is, Adorno traces back all the way to kind of pre Socratic philosophies with the idea being that, you know, the world exists, you know, as it is, and is then somehow mirrored, if you like, as sense data by, you know, human sort of sensory apparatus. Lenin's book is a kind of peculiar one because it's really. It plays out a series of sort of factional debates within the sort of Soviet project, you know, circa 1908, via an engagement with other epistemologies and especially philosophies, engaging with questions of physics. And a lot turns on this idea of, you know, sensory apparatus mirroring a world that is above all, you know, material and real and somehow has primacy over these, you know, subjective whims that Lenin identifies in other. A range of other Russian and Soviet thinkers. And Adorno takes up this, this observation, you know, without Engaging actually with the issue in any. In any great depth as a polemical occasion to sort of say that, well, all this amounts to this kind of, you know, professing to an investment in the primacy of matter is a kind of dogmatic and naive sort of realism, right, which turns on an epistemology that on its own kind of self understanding, relies very heavily on a notion of images, of the image, so to speak. And what Adorno suggests more than spells out is that this approach to materialism that Lenin sketches via this peculiar kind of discussion of physics and philosophy in the Russian or Soviet context circa 1908, that this in fact sits very oddly alongside the political stakes of what Lenin is professing to do. So he claims, right, that it's difficult to see how the kind of, you know, theory of mind, if you want to call it that, that Lenin is laying out there how that is supposed to be conducive to the kind of revolutionary and spontaneous and so on, you know, praxis that is supposed to be at the heart of Marxism or any kind of communism, really. And identifying this particular aspect, whether he does so fairly or not, identifying this particular dimension of Lenin's thought, then sets up a kind of a semantic field in which Adorno can take up this notion of a thinking in kind of images, right, as the world as being primarily material and then being mirrored in thought in these kind of, you know, reflections in a manner that is supposed to recall even aspects of certain, you know, like pre Socratic kind of materialisms, atomism and so on. It opens up a semantic field where the polemic that Adorno sets up can turn rhetorically on a figure of an image ban, right? Because if you're not thinking in images that mirror reality in the way that Lenin supposedly outlines, then what are you doing? Well, presumably you're thinking in something that is not images, right? And again, because the way Adorno presents this is as a materialism that is the dogmatic root of a kind of. He calls it, I think, something like a religion of state, right? So he introduces not just a set of terms related to a thinking in images, which on a certain reading, of course, and via Benjamin and so on he does himself, but he introduces also a set of terms to do with questions of religion. And then suddenly, you know, you're in quite a. Quite kind of an interesting arena in which Adorno can, on the terms that he has himself and maybe a bit conveniently set up for himself, he can introduce the figure of the image ban as a polemical sort of, you know, like stab at a notion of materialism that is supposed to lie at the root of socialism as practiced in the Soviet Union and, you know, its wider sphere of influence, which, bearing in mind that Adorno was writing this in the 1960s from his position in West Germany as a Marxist of sorts, but one unsympathetic to the way the project had panned out in the so called Eastern Bloc, it kind of, you know, it occasions a rethinking of the philosophical stakes of Marxism, especially via the question of materialism in its relation to something like praxis, in its relation to something like politics. And that, I thought was a curious thread to kind of follow up, even though I have to say my own interest in Lenin per se, a bit like Adorno's, is. Is ultimately limited. And even though the particular kind of conflicts that Lenin was engaged in in his own time and in his own context are really, I would say, in a sense, a matter of kind of specialist interest today. Because they're so far gone, right? Not only the physics that informed them is, you know, now over 100 years later, kind of, you know, no longer state of the art, but also the sort of philosophical issues seem to have been overcome, in a sense, although then curiously, of course, they are echoed for reasons of his own, I suppose, in that famous essay by Quantar Meillassoux on April, Affinitude after finitude.
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Lucas Hoffman
Yeah, yeah, I was just going to follow up and ask, could you maybe say a few words about your adorning critique of Meillassoux? So you bring in at the end of this chapter on images, imageless materialism, you bring in meas after finitude, and you show that the epistemic concerns that Adorno is dealing with in his critique of Lenin are not outdated. Maybe you could, you could explain your sort of Edonian take on Mayassu a little bit further.
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Yeah, yeah, Gosh. When I first arrived at Goldsmith, just for context, Measu was like really all the rage. That was still something people really were talking about. That essay was widely discussed in my early kind of grad school days. I think the interest in that text in particular has maybe subsided a little bit since then, also since more of Measu's project has kind of come into focus and the particular status of that essay came to be debated along other lines than maybe it was originally. But yeah, Mayor Su, a figure that's often discussed in the context of what came to be known, for better or worse, as speculative realism, Mersu, often discussed alongside authors associated with Other new materialisms, including people like Graham Harmon and so on. I mean, for all the differences between them, it's a curious and interesting book which makes the provocative and I think on its own terms, persuasive claim that we may indeed and after all, have access to something like mind independent matter, which is, in fact, through our thinking, through our kind of philosophical lenses, which is, in a sense a claim that the book shares with Lenin's big book on materialism. That and certain other parallels are something that hadn't eluded some commentators. So I remember, I think it's Zizek, in his big book on Hegel, picks up on this and kind of, you know, makes the claim that Mea Sue's After Finitude is a reworking in a way of Lenin's theory of materialism or concept of materialism for the 21st century. I don't know if I'd go so far. I mean, the stated or explicit philosophical or, sorry, rather political stakes of Measu's book, you know, he keeps those much more. Much, you know, closer to his chest than Lenin does. It's not that this is in any obvious way a book about Lenin. It just so happens that some of its claims seem to mirror claims made previously by Lenin in their more pointedly sort of philosophical register, which is obviously not something that people tend in the first instance to associate with Lenin, who's for good reason, a figure thought of more in political terms and, you know, remembered for his kind of organizing and so on. Maybe then for his philosophical reflections as such. But be that as it may, the provocative claim, as I said, was that one can have, despite what Kant and others might have us believe one can have, according to Mersu, access to sort of mind independent matter, the great out there, so to speak, absolute primacy of a kind of material world. I try to then apply a kind of an adornian lens to this argument, which, as I say, in some respects mirrors Lenin's, to show that there's a danger of a kind of fetish of immediacy, I think, in such thinking. And that also in the specific way that Measu frames this question of being, this question of the necessity of contingency, as he puts it, the possibility of absolute, spontaneous, radical, ex nihilo transformation. This poses kind of what it poses, in a sense, kind of, you know, political problems, because it's hard to see in the way that Mayassu, but in related terms also Lenin, how they ascribe any kind of agency to any sort of active political subject, right in this process of transformation that in this case, Measu is. Is describing. So I hope that by bringing in, bringing Adorno's polemic against Lenin to bear on this particular text, the stakes of, you know, why we might want to talk about matter or materialism or the supposed primacy of matter in the context of a philosophical discussion that is, in one way or another, sort of Marx adjacent, at the very least, why that should matter. And it seems to me that actually Adorno's point about, you know, dogmatically asserting, you know, the great out there, as it were, that this is not helpful for a thinking about a transformative kind of politics, partly because for Dorno, the important thing about materialism is really to do with an alleviation of kind of bodily suffering and not with asserting the existence of a great beyond that you can, in one form or another, kind of access intellectual. So I wanted to bring it back, via Adorno, to a conversation not about the potential for ex nihilo transformation, because, you know, whatever intellectual apparatus prohibits us from seeing the fundamental instability of things out there, and bring it back to a conversation about what, at least according to Adorno. And I have to say, on this point, I'm inclined to agree. What matters about matter, not to labor. The pun, right? What matters about matter? Questions of bodily suffering, of need and privation, and of the alleviation of bodily suffering, which is ultimately what a kind of materialist utopia on Adorno's terms would have to be oriented towards. One thing I should add with regards to all of this is that the reason I begin with a chapter on epistemology is that, you know, in a very basic sense, I think the question of the image ban in Adorno is about how to figure, how to portray, how to represent, how to think, how to intellectually kind of, you know, fix an image of a world beyond suffering and privation, beyond injustice and all the rest. And the epistemic or epistemological challenge, I suppose, is, well, how do you portray, figure, represent a world that is categorically different to the one that we have, if the only tools that you have at your disposal for representing such a world are the ones that, by definition, as it were, already exist, Right? So how do you think your way out of that corner, so to speak? And it seems to me that Adorno's appeal to materialism is supposed to introduce into this kind of, you know, intellectual puzzle a kind of somatic dimension and the insistence on the mere existence, on the great, on a great beyond or a great out there, as it were. Right. You know, asserting the absolute primacy of mind, independent matter to Adorno. And I have to say, like I say, inclined to agree with him on this. It's not clear to me what that does to conversation about, you know, transformative kind of social practices or politics, for that matter.
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Lucas Hoffman
I think that that makes quite a bit of sense and really lays out the stakes that are oftentimes so obscured in the discourse on Adorno in this very sort of dense, dense thinker. I was wondering maybe, maybe we can move a bit to talk about this idea of inverse theology that you spend a lot of time. This is actually how I came to your work initially. I was looking, navigating the sort of various literatures on the theological discourse connected to Adorno, which is very disorienting when you first get there. And I really enjoyed that chapter in this book because I think you are one of the clearest voices that speaks to the particularities of how Adorno picks up on theological thought in a structural fashion.
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Right.
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Lucas Hoffman
In order to articulate his own theory. He's not doing theology or speculating on the Godhead, but there are these theological images that recur that are sort of like, contribute formally to the way that Adorno is thinking. So my question is maybe more for our listeners who might not be familiar with the theological discourse surrounding Ad Adorno. Why is theology a relevant concept when talking about Adorno at all? Right. When we're talking about this materialist Marxist thinker, why are we using theological metaphors to begin with?
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Yeah, quite right. Well, first of all, I'm glad you enjoyed the chapter and the article that it's based on. That's great to hear. Thank you. There is, as you say, a slim but kind of growing body of writings that is picked up on, if nothing else, the recurrence of kind of theological figures, motifs, terms and so on in Adorno's thinking. As I said at the beginning, it's striking that this should be the case because it's not obvious how that works. Adorno is quite explicit at various points throughout his work that traditional theology is kind of historically outmoded, positive religion is not restorable. These are facets of what he elsewhere might describe as a kind of dialectic of enlightenment. Of course, religion and theology and the kind of mosaic religions, Judaism, Christianity in particular, contain elements of truth, kernels of truth, and salvageable and redeemable moments. But overall they are what they are, which is to say kind of outmoded moments in the unfolding of a grand kind of historical narrative that Adorno adopts and adapts from Hegel to some measure. Having said that, one of the things that I believe justifies his recourse to terms like the image band to also figures like the messianic light to which he sometimes refers, is a peculiar kind of constellation, historical constellation, that emerges and that I think can be placed arguably under the banner of Adorno's friend. Walter Benjamin calls a kind of capitalist culture religion, modernity in its unfolding. In a story loosely akin to the one told often by the likes of Max Weber, whose work, of course, Bodono knew well, modernity and the unfolding of capitalism kind of usurps the traditional place of religion in the present on this version of events, to the point that capitalism in a way starts to function in the present almost like a religion with its terrible sort of feast days, as Benjamin describes them. And it means that in a sort of improbable move, if you follow Adorno via Benjamin, or via Weber, if you prefer, it means that the outmoded terms of theology lend themselves in an improbable kind of twist of events to the criticism of present, dominated by a kind of capitalistic cult religion, if you like. So that's one reason that I think if we follow Adorno on his own terms, justifies his recourse to such figures, and the other is that what survives in aspects of the kind of Jewish and Christian theology with which Adorno engages is a yearning for transcendence, for reconciliation, for redemption of a certain kind, which, again, you know, if nothing else, I think is at the very least a kind of rhetorical or semantic strategy with which to intimate something beyond, you know, what Adorno describes, I think evocatively as like a spellbound sphere of existence of, you know, a world that has been thoroughly kind of disenchanted, as it were. So there's the. There's the particular constellation of events which puts theology or religion into a particular kind of alignment with the capitalist present, on the one hand, and on the other hand there is the yearning for something like redemption, utopia, the overcoming of worldly injustice and so on on the other. And all those, or rather these two factors, I think, play a particular role. There is a third kind of dimension to this, which is a little more textual, if you like, and it is to do with Adorno's long standing friendship and close engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin, also through his friend and erstwhile kind of mentor, Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, through his engagement with Kierkegaard and a variety of other thinkers who operate with terms that are at least borrowed from religion or theology, even if they are not always in any positive sense religious or theological. So it winds up being a peculiar set of terms that lend themselves, for the reasons I hope I just was able to at least point to, that lend themselves to Adorna's effort to lay out the wider stakes of his kind of project.
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Lucas Hoffman
Yeah, thanks so much. I mean, I think that really helps to sort of clarify this other side of Adorno, which is oftentimes sort of not focused on. And in the focus on negativity, the way in which you see logical images operate in negativity point towards maybe some sort of perhaps a little bit more hopeful sides of Adorno. And in your reprise, the last, the last section of your book, you include a reflection on the politics that follow from Adorno's negative philosophy, from this idea of negativity, of imagelessness. And you write, quote, adorno's negative dialectic is both less and more political than his critics suggest. End quote. Can you maybe say a few words on how you understand Adorno's politics, how that sort of relates to this, this discourse of theology, and then how you think his critics get him wrong?
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Sebastian Truskalowski
Yeah. Right. Okay. Both less and more political than his critics suggest. Adorno's politics. Adorno doesn't have a positive conception of politics that he lays out in any of his major works. Adorno doesn't have a positive conception of a lot of things. Adorno carves out positions that you might then kind of from which you might then infer certain things, as it were, by playing off kind of existing positions. Right. It's often a case of, you know, playing off Kant against Hegel or Hegel against Kant and, you know, kind of course, correcting this, that or the other with a reference to Romanticism or with a reference to Weber or Kierkegaard or Marx or Benjamin or any of the other kind of players in his project or figures that inform his project. I think that can be said of various sort of like, nascent dimensions of his thinking, including, for example, his ethics, but also, and significantly, I would say, his politics. Adorno as a person, as a citizen, if you like, was, of course, a politically engaged person, up to date on current events and engaged in various struggles, famously and contentiously, with the German student movement. But if you read the lectures, there are frequent references to apartheid in South Africa, to the war in Vietnam. Adorno was a political person in the conventional sense. In what sense is Adorno less political than that might appear? Well, he's often criticized from a range of different camps for being a kind of resigned aesthete who has cornered himself in an impossible and total kind of negativity that doesn't allow for any hope or socially transformative praxis to take place because it's always already implicated in the workings of the kinds of coercive operations of reason which, in a way, he's trying to overturn. That's the classic kind of criticism. It's something that you get versions of in Habermas. It's something that you get versions of in, you know, to the left of that, in the camp of Adorno's former students, including figures like Hans Jurgen Kral. And you get a different version, but nonetheless related, I would argue, in the work of people like Agamben and Jakob Taubes who insist that, you know, Adorno. Dorna's negativity means that all he can ever do is kind of intimate, a sort of, you know, as if regulative image of what ought to be, but that can never be reached because of, you know, reasons that are ultimately similar to what Habermas says, which is that if everything is implicated, well, how can you hope to lay out positively an image of the redeemed world to which you are ostensibly. That you're ostensibly working towards. Why do I think that that's not a fair, in all instances, a fair account of Adorno? Well, it seems to me that if you take seriously the scope and scale of the transformation in thinking and, by extension, acting and kind of, you know, inhabiting the world that Adorno demands, then, in fact, you know, politics itself would have to undergo a certain kind of transformation. It starts fairly modestly in Adorno's kind of epistemology of thinking about relationships between what he calls subject and object. But these poles or coordinates in Adorno's project, I think, are supposed to have real material correlates in the relationship between, say, humankind and nature, as it were, right? Or let's stick with that one. And to think a rapprochement or a kind of reconciliation between these, just for the sake of explication, I'm going to call them sort of epistemological terms. You would have to reconfigure the very manner of thinking in a way that is so far reaching, right. That the prospective reconciliation between these poles. Right. Is really what politics would have to mean. The narrow sphere of kind of governance and administration is. I mean, you know, of course, those are things with which one must engage because this is the world that we, as it were, live in. But, you know, to really think a kind of Edonian politics in the emphatic sense, I think, would require that one to follow through on what it is that he demands. In various points in his work, including some of the ones I touch on in the book, Derrida once remarked of Adorno that it's an effort to. That the whole project can be summarized as an effort to think thinking differently. And I think it's only if you can do that, if you can kind of get to grips with this sort of puzzle, philosophical riddle or problem of what mean to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice from the inside out in acknowledgment of the fact that you are doing so in terms that are always already complicit in the problem that you're trying to overcome. Once you are squarely in that arena, then a thinking of reconciliation between these kind of, you know, poles that had once in the history of philosophy become torn asunder, right. Is really, properly speaking, the arena of kind of politics, I think, for Dornan in this respect, I would say he is more political than his critics let on, because the implications are so far reaching. It's only if you think thinking differently, right. That you can imagine a different kind of relationship between, let's say, subject and object, or humankind and nature. And it is only when you can attain the state of what Adorno, I think, very suggestively and evocatively calls piece, for example, in his writings on Huldalin, right. That something like a different conception of kind of universality, a different set of relations in which we. And with which we inhabit a world, right? And that seems to me to be rather more emphatic than the kind of, you know, local stakes, however legitimate. Okay. Of, for example, you know, the German student movement, important as those were to Adorno and important as they may be to us today. So, yeah, less political in the sense that, you know, Karl, for example, was surely right to point out that Adorno had abandoned the field of, you know, kind of struggle, you know, as part of the student protests. But I would say that there's ultimately something more political in what he was proposing because, you know, to. To really think transformation in the terms that he does is something very, very far reaching in. And it would. There's something kind of uncompromising about it. What he calls a utopia of cognition. You know, these notions of a differentiation without domination and what that would mean and how that would look is ultimately what Adorna's project, I think, aims at, except that it is faced with its own kind of abidance by this figure of the image ban, which means that those are only ever. How should I say? Those are only ever. I hesitate to call them like, you know, outcomes that you can kind of cast into relief. You can intimate them negatively, but they're elusive. Right. If you start to sketch them out in existent or in extant terms. Right. Then you're running the danger of reproducing the conditions that you're trying to overcome. It's a tricky position for Dorna to be in, but I do think that it has a very emphatically utopian prospective kind of horizon. And I think to acknowledge that rather than shirk back from it, as many of his critics, I think, do, seems to me to be ultimately quite a hopeful position rather than a hopeless one.
- [42:42]
Lucas Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's such a wonderful way of summarizing Adorno's thoughts in a way that overcomes this. This trendy way of presenting Adorno's politics as some sort of regressive or, you know, abstract ivy tower sort of mode of thinking and ties in the. The real materialistic concerns that are. That are always sort of carried with. Carried through with Adorno, but also sort of acknowledging the sort of divorce of the way that Adorno thinks transformation from a. Like praxis or like a translatable praxis. I think that that's really helpful. So maybe now, and I think this actually might help to. To elucidate some of the. Some of the politics that you were just talking about. We've talked about sort of the theological, the episode, epistemological roots or structures in Adorno's thought. I thought it might also make sense to talk about sort of the other half of the concerns that the title of your book confesses, namely the aesthetic. Right. As Adorno, the Old Testament ban on images has an aesthetic as well as a theological dimension. Right. So we're. You're very much about half. Half the book is. Is dealing with it, with the aesthetics of Adorno's aesthetic theory in a wonderful way that really elucidated things for me. You write, for Adorno, neither aesthetics nor theory turn out to be adequate for an understanding of art. What he proposes instead is a reflection on the inadequacies of these approaches, particularly where they are thought together. In short, for Adorno, the significance of art, it lies precisely in the fact that it eludes theoretization while at the same time demanding it. End quote. Could you maybe say a bit more about the epistemic contraction involved in the image ban and how that helps us to better understand art?
- [44:48]
Sebastian Truskalowski
Yeah, art in Adorno. You know, Adorno places a great burden on the sorts of operations, intellectual or otherwise, that he associates with, you know, what he calls autonomous works of art, which, in this passage that you just quoted back and that I quote in the book, he associates with the theological ban on images. I mean, again, there's a few different ways to approach this. I mean, just by way of kind of like mapping out the terrain. In the first instance, I think this is to do with the fact that Adorna picks up on the frequent, you know, surprisingly frequent recurrence of this motif of the Old Testament ban on images in the history of modern German thought, in Kant, in Hegel in particular. And these are two figures that I closely engage with through Adorno in that chapter on aesthetics. So Kant and Hegel in their respective writings on art and aesthetics. So that's one important thing to note. Adorno is taking us on a detour, kind of a renewed engagement with the history of German thought. A quick aside on that. I think that it's probably also worth noting that the reason that Adorno keeps kind of, you know, taking us back to conversations of the kind that are being had by Kant and Hegel, where these references to the image ban in their talkings about art and so on. The reason he does that is because he is, I think, skeptical of the notion that Marxism, and this is, you know, in the end, a tradition that I would say he considers himself a part of, that Marxism has, in fact, adequately dealt with philosophy and sort of left it behind. So, you know, revisiting figures like that in these times is important because the criticism of philosophy which is ultimately supposed to yield its kind of practical overcoming, is as yet incomplete. So he continues to engage with such questions for those reasons. Now, I think Adorno is, in a sense, also skeptical of the idea that philosophy, on its own terms, can produce its own overcoming. And so he displaces some of that work that would have to occur into different registers and different arenas. And the most prominent of these, I suppose, is art, kind of broadly conceived. I mean, to anyone who's read Machadorno, you'll be aware that at least half of the collected writings are writings on music. So there's really a good deal of engagement with music, with literature, less so with the visual arts, but certainly with problems of philosophical aesthetics. One of the specific aesthetic issues with which Adorno engages, via his reading of Kant and via his reading of Hegel, partly because this figure of the image ban occurs so prominently in their aesthetic writings, or at least at prominent kind of junctures, is this question of the beauty of nature. What Adorno wants is for the way that the experience of beauty, and of the beauty in nature in particular, the way that that is theorized, the way that that plays out. He wants that to. In works of art, paradoxically, he wants that to be the arena in which a reconfigured relationship between humankind and nature, subject and object, that I was saying before, to kind of tacitly emerge. He needs the aesthetic because it is also an arena of the kind of somatic. It is partly also to do not just with the structures of judgment, but also with a kind of bodily experience that preempts, I think, something else, as it were. Artworks speak according to Adorno. And what they say, if you engage with them carefully, excuse me, is everything to do with the kind of, you know, rifts and dislocations of the present. Ironically, for Adorno, nature, right, which is also kind of noumenal, not something that you can in any immediate sense, kind of put your finger on. It's something that appears kind of obliquely in its most thoroughly mediated kind of representations in art. It's through. It's a complicated set of kind of, you know, coordinates with which Adorno is operating, because he borrows a set of kind of assumptions from other figures along the way, which aren't just Kant and Hegel. An important one is Lukac. He borrows this idea of a second nature, which basically says that an immediate approach to something like a first nature, a real nature out there, is not possible, that we live in a world that is so thoroughly conventional that even Our relationship to what we call nature is, in a sense, always already heavily mediated by all of these factors. But the consequence of that is that the relationship to art as it plays out. Sorry, the relationship to nature as it plays out in art becomes an occasion to kind of obliquely relate to this point with which you might like to prospectively reconcile, right, as a subject, namely, nature. And. And it is through an experience of works of art that require you to undergo almost a degree of kind of suffering that you can intimate what ought to be, as it were. So it's a complicated kind of picture that he lays out for us, but in his engagement with the tradition of kind of philosophical aesthetics that goes from Kant via Hegel and Schelling and so on and into the present, Adorno wants to invite us to consider the notion of natural beauty in a bid to reimagine a possible kind of reconciliation, as he would call it, between humankind and nature. And that this is ultimately the arena in which the kind of utopian, you know, kind of thrust of his thinking, I think, really comes to be most palpable, albeit, as always, in a way that is kind of, excuse me, that is, you know, quite thoroughly negative. I don't know if I can put it any more clearly. It's a peculiar thing because it's where all of the registers of Adorno's thinking kind of overlap, right? There's an epistemological claim in there. There's a kind of ethical claim in there. And it all plays out in the sort of aesthetic arena. And to the extent that Adorno believes that all of the contradictions that, you know, unearths in, you know, various kind of philosophical texts, schools, approaches and so on, to the extent that he believes that they all have a real material correlate in kind of, you know, in historical life, as it were, this modest lens of looking at kind of artworks actually bears a really significant kind of weight. There's a lot that's going on there. And in a way, you can kind of retro engineer where Adorno sort of like, started in his philosophical concerns, starting with this inaugural lecture on the actuality of philosophy with his Critique of Idealism, you can retro engineer that from the standpoint of his aesthetics much, much later on on. It's the final formulation, if you like, of Adorno's thinking. And because it's a fragment, it's also a beautifully suggestive and inviting one. The aesthetic theory, I mean. And since there are such prominent references to the image ban in there in their relation to works of art, which are supposed to be these sort of imageless images of Utopia, if you like. I think it's well worth looking there for kind of answers or for clues. This is, of course, also where the kind of charges of elitism and so on kind of come from. Right. Because the works that Adorno cites are often quite demanding and presuppose quite a lot of viewers in a way that doesn't come easily. Right. But I guess. Well, anyway, that's where he chose to place his emphasis. Right.
- [54:35]
Lucas Hoffman
Thank you so much. I think that's just a wonderful sort of summary of the stakes that are going on in the book, but also sort of Adorno's thought as a whole, which is in a way sort of how I understood this book as I was reading it. Just, just wonderful, clear, crisp prose, which, on a subject dealing with Kant, Hagel and Adorno, is not what you always find. I really enjoyed it. We're unfortunately running out of time here. Thank you so much for joining us. I just have one final question, and that is what are you working on now?
- [55:09]
Sebastian Truskalowski
Well, first of all, let me just say once more, thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you about this book, which seems a long way away at this point. Like I say, you know, it started Life as a PhD dissertation. I completed it in 2016, and I haven't done a great deal on Adorno since then. So some of these points I'm trying to remember, you know, as we, as we speak. But I do hope that, you know, listeners will have taken something away from this.
- [55:37]
Lucas Hoffman
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [55:39]
Sebastian Truskalowski
What am I working on now? I am working on a project on the concept of community as it emerges in the writings of Friedrich Halderlin, the great late 18th, early 19th century German poet, quasi kind of romantic outlier on some readings. And in particular, I'm interested in the way that this term is brought out by three of his early 20th century readers, and they are Walter Benjamin, Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig. And I hope to turn this into a book eventually on figures of community in Huldelin and his readers, these three readers in particular. And what I'm interested in is how communities with nature, certain kinds of political community and certain kinds of community with divinity, if you like, are conceptualized by these authors in a manner that is in each case very pointedly not national, not nationally coded, which in the history of Haldalen's reception, obviously plays a kind of role. So whilst that, you know, maybe a footnote in a sense, sense to Hurdlen's reception and to Hurl Aline More generally, I do hope that the wider resonance of that theme actually will prove to have some bearing on the present, not just in the specifically German context but more generally.
- [57:25]
Lucas Hoffman
That sounds so exciting. Thank you so much for joining us. Sebastian Czkolaski everyone. The book was Adorno and the band on images. My name is Lucas Hoffman. Thanks for joining us.
- [57:36]
Sebastian Truskalowski
Thanks Lucas. Hey Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price price not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price so that means a half day. Give it a try at mintmobile. Com switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network spizzy taxes and fees extra. Cmnoble.
- [58:18]
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