"Post modernity ‘originated under the star of’ neoliberalism and should be seen as much a system of market discipline as a philosophical set of ideas expressed through cultural forms. It is both the alibi and indictment for neoliberalism, but is too ironic, too cool to call itself out." –Leo Hollis, editor
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.
A translation of Isidore Isou’s "Between Isou and Marcuse," published in the Lettrist journal Youth Uprising in the summer of 1968.
A 1967 conversation with Ernst Bloch on the difference between hatred and anger.
A collection of aphorisms on music written by Theodor Adorno between 1927 and 1951.
As we start our descent towards the seasonal hell of present buying, mutual recrimination, and buyer's remorse, it’s worthwhile to reflect on Adorno’s thoughts on gift-giving.
Today we might say the most relevant place to look for ideology in the world of culture is online, on social media.
Stuart Jeffries presents a timeline from 1881–2004, threading the lives of leading Frankfurt School thinkers through the major events of the times in which they lived.
Stuart Jeffries on the Frankfurt School's absence of women and the points of contact between the thinkers associated with the Institute für Sozialforschung and theorists of feminism.
Below is a short essay on train station novels written by Walter Benjamin for Frankfurter Zeitung in 1930, collected in The Storyteller, and translated by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski.
Max Horkheimer's 1960 essay on the arrest of Adolf Eichmann, collected in Critique of Instrumental Reason.
To mark the publication of Stuart Jeffries' Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School we're publishing excerpts and pieces related to Frankfurt School thinkers. Grand Hotel Abyss is now out in paperback and 30% off.