Bloomsbury Academic Adorno and the Ban on Images

This book upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism. Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno’s writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse. By re-appraising Adorno’s writings on politics, philosophy, and art, this book reconstructs this notoriously difficult author’s overall project from a radically new perspective (Adorno’s famous ‘standpoint of redemption’), and brings his central concerns to bear on the problems of today. On the one hand, this means reading Adorno alongside his principal interlocutors (including Kant, Marx and Benjamin). On the other hand, it means asking how his secular brand of social criticism can serve to safeguard the image of a better world – above all, when the invocation of this image occurs alongside Adorno’s recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God. By reading Adorno in this iconoclastic way, Adorno and the Ban on Images contributes to current debates about Utopia that have come to define political visions across the political spectrum. Review This is a breathtaking exploration of one of the most evocative and undertheorized themes in Adorno’s oeuvre. In this searching, lucid and dazzlingly original study, Sebastian Truskolaski manages to achieve what no-one has even attempted. He extricates the “ban on images” from religious pieties and from platitudes about the inexpressible-unimaginable-unspeakable, and demonstrates compellingly that this rigorously disenchanted figure lies at the heart of Adorno’s peculiar materialism and is the key to its radical utopian promise. This is a new, exciting reading of Adorno that will also transform the way we think about art and politics today. --Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, CanadaIn this exciting new book, Sebastian Truskolaski unpacks the <i>ban on images</i> around which he argues Adorno’s thinking is organized. Far from miring us in an abyss of despair, as Truskolaski presents it, the Adornian <i>Bilderverbot</i> not only offers considerable resources for challenging the status quo, but an incipient method for thinking our escape. --Cat Moir, Senior Lecturer and Chair of Germanic Studies, University of Sydney, Australia<i>Adorno and the Ban on Images</i> admirably articulates the significance of Adorno’s reworking of the Old Testament ban on images in a variety of contexts, ranging from the musicological to the literary, and from the epistemological to the historical. Through strategic imbrication of meticulous scholarship, sober theoretical vigilance, and critical inventiveness―qualities that are increasingly rare to find―Truskolaski convincingly illuminates a central concern of Adorno’s notoriously refractory thinking. --Gerhard Richter, University Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies, Brown University, USA About the Author Sophie Loussouarn is Associate Professor in British Studies at the University of Amiens, France.