Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Host: Lucas Hoffman
Date: November 24, 2025
Guest: Dr. Sebastian Truskolaski (University of Manchester)

Overview

This episode features Dr. Sebastian Truskolaski discussing his book Adorno and the Ban on Images. The conversation explores Theodor W. Adorno’s recurring motif of the "ban on images" or "image ban": its philosophical, theological, and aesthetic meanings, and its relevance for contemporary critical theory. The discussion situates Adorno in dialogue with figures such as Marx, Kant, Hegel, Lenin, and contemporary thinkers like Quentin Meillassoux and Giorgio Agamben, illuminating the challenges of conceptualizing utopia, materialism, and the limits of representation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Book

[02:48]

• The book emerged from Truskolaski’s PhD research, sparked by Adorno’s repeated references to the Old Testament ban on images within a Marxist-materialist context.
• Initial curiosity about this theological motif in Adorno’s ostensibly materialist thought led to broader philosophical inquiries about epistemology, aesthetics, and utopia.
• Truskolaski notes,

  “As I began to pull that thread ... it began to resonate with other and more contemporary kinds of philosophical issues… So what started out as a kind of point of textual or philological curiosity wound up ... as a bigger sort of philosophical set of questions.” (04:37, Truskolaski)

2. Engaging Contemporary Thinkers

[05:19]

• Truskolaski explains his decision to include post-Adorno theorists (Meillassoux, Agamben, Lyotard, etc.):
  • To illustrate how Adorno addresses ongoing philosophical issues
  • To mirror Adorno’s dialectical method of playing positions off against each other.

• “Adorno was engaging with issues that continue to interest philosophers ... people from very different camps … Inhabiting this way of working would actually work well for the book.” (06:16, Truskolaski)

3. Adorno’s Epistemology and the Critique of Lenin

[08:03]

• The first chapter analyzes “imageless materialism” via Adorno’s polemical engagement with Lenin’s epistemology.
• Adorno critiques Lenin’s concept of “reflection theory,” where consciousness mirrors material reality—a view Adorno links to naive realism and dogmatism.
• He questions the political efficacy of this epistemology for revolutionary praxis and uses this critique to introduce the notion of a “ban on images.”

• “Adorno takes up this observation ... as a polemical occasion to sort of say that, well, all this ... is a kind of dogmatic and naive sort of realism ... which turns on an epistemology that ... relies very heavily on a notion of images, of the image.” (12:19, Truskolaski)

4. Adorno and Meillassoux: The Stakes for Contemporary Materialism

[16:48]

• Truskolaski links Adorno’s worries about Soviet materialism to Quentin Meillassoux’s “After Finitude,” situating both in a tradition that seeks access to mind-independent reality.
• He deploys an “Adornian lens” to argue that Meillassoux (like Lenin) risks fetishizing immediacy and neglects the somatic, suffering-filled core of materialist politics.

• “There’s a danger of a kind of fetish of immediacy ... 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...” (22:04, Truskolaski)

5. Theological Motifs: Inverse Theology in Adorno

[26:00]

• Adorno’s motif of the “image ban” draws on theological traditions, often prompting confusion about his materialist credentials.
• Truskolaski clarifies: Adorno adopts theological imagery not as positive theology, but as a formal, structural means to express the yearning for redemption or transcendence in a disenchanted world.
• He draws on Benjamin and Weber to note that “capitalism functions like a religion in the present,” making religious motifs powerful tools for critiquing modernity.

• “What survives ... is a yearning for transcendence, for reconciliation, for redemption of a certain kind, which ... is at the very least a kind of rhetorical or semantic strategy with which to intimate something beyond ... a spellbound sphere of existence.” (29:23, Truskolaski)

6. Adorno’s Politics: More and Less Than You Think

[33:44]

• Truskolaski addresses critiques of Adorno as apolitical or resigned. Adorno resists positive programs, instead demanding a radical transformation of thought and subject-object relations:

  “Adorno’s politics ... would require that one ... reconfigure the very manner of thinking in a way that is so far reaching ... that the prospective reconciliation ... is really what politics would have to mean.” (36:37, Truskolaski)

• Adorno’s “negativity” is not despair but a strict utopian hope that cannot be realized in current conceptual or practical terms.

• “To really think transformation ... is something very, very far reaching ... There’s something kind of uncompromising about it. What he calls a utopia of cognition.” (41:45, Truskolaski)

7. Aesthetics: The Ban on Images and Art

[44:47]

• The second half of the book turns to Adorno’s aesthetics and the role of the image ban for art.
• For Adorno, art’s significance lies in being both theoretically irreducible and demanding theory; it points toward what cannot be depicted or stated—utopia.
• The motif of natural beauty in Kant and Hegel is central: aesthetic experience becomes the oblique site where reconciliation of subject and object, or humanity and nature, might be intuited.
• Artworks—especially music and literature—are “imageless images” of utopia, visible only through their negativity and resistance to conceptualization.

• “Adorno wants ... the experience of beauty, and of the beauty in nature in particular, ... to be the arena in which a reconfigured relationship between humankind and nature ... can tacitly emerge.” (46:32, Truskolaski)

• “Works of art ... are supposed to be these sort of imageless images of Utopia, if you like.” (53:16, Truskolaski)

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Adorno’s Method:
  “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.” (06:07, Truskolaski)

• On Adorno and Theological Language:
  “He’s not doing theology or speculating on the Godhead, but there are these theological images that ... contribute formally to the way that Adorno is thinking.” (26:00, Hoffman)

• On Art and Utopia:
  “Artworks speak according to Adorno. And what they say ... is everything to do with the kind of, you know, rifts and dislocations of the present ... Works of art ... are supposed to be these sort of imageless images of Utopia, if you like.” (46:32 and 53:16, Truskolaski)

• On Transformation and Hope:
  “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.” (41:28, Truskolaski)

Important Segment Timestamps

• [02:54] – Origins of the project: from motif to philosophical exploration
• [05:19] – Inclusion of contemporary theorists: methodology and dialogue
• [08:03] – Adorno’s critique of Lenin; imageless materialism
• [16:48] – Discussion of Meillassoux and materialism’s stakes
• [26:31] – Theological figures and why theology matters in Adorno
• [33:44] – Adorno’s politics: negativity, hope, and transformation
• [44:47] – The aesthetic dimension: art, theory, and the ban on images
• [55:09] – Truskolaski’s upcoming project on community in Hölderlin and his readers

Closing Notes

Truskolaski’s Adorno and the Ban on Images offers a nuanced, interdisciplinary look at the intersections of theology, philosophy, and aesthetics in Adorno’s thought, emphasizing the ongoing relevance of his critique for contemporary debates on materialism, utopia, and the possibility of transformative politics. The conversation demystifies Adorno’s style and commitments, showing how his “negativity” is not a resignation but a rigorous, hopeful insistence on imagining and thinking the world otherwise.

Guest’s next project: A study of the concept of community in Friedrich Hölderlin’s works as interpreted by Benjamin, Landauer, and Rosenzweig—including the political and theological (yet non-national) implications of their ideas. (55:38)

Recommended for listeners interested in: Critical Theory, Adorno, Frankfurt School, philosophical theology, Marxism, speculative realism, aesthetics, and the philosophy of art.