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This article argues that our current situation is one that both prevents us from telling 'grand narratives' and necessitates us to 'think big'. This makes the task of the essay today a dialectical one. Following Adorno, the essay is not merely seen as a literary genre but also as a mode of thought that reflects and criticises a particular socio-historical condition. The essayistic mode of thought attempts to reinstate or revive particularity as well as our experience of it, in a world wherein all things appear as a function or exemplar of something else. At the same time, however, and exactly through this intense focus on the particular object or experience, the essay brings to light something universal. This makes the essay the philosophical and aesthetic form par excellence of our current time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that Adorno's dialectical principle that reason and nature co-constitute each other is evidenced in Beckett's novel Molloy. Adorno argues that reason regresses to myth – that is, it becomes irrational and reified – in modernity; and that, conversely, myth shows itself to be rational – that is, myth reveals that it has already inhabited enlightenment. In Molloy, Moran relies on dubious positive metaphysical principles in an attempt to spiritualise his bees; however, such spiritualisation leads directly to their death, because his experience of the bees is undialectical and static. Thus instead of the uncritical reproduction of conventional metaphysical principles, metaphysics must show itself to be damaged by historical events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical experience less so. In this article, I explore two quite different descriptions of this kind of experience as set out in two mid-twentieth-century Irish novels. In one, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the narrator watches one of the titular sergeants enjoy music that he – the narrator – cannot hear. In the second, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza, the narrator watches as a village priest mimes playing the piano on a café table, a performance he 'hears' and appreciates. Speculatively combining and extending these episodes, and using the figures of the philistine and the aesthete in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as a key, I suggest that an anxiety about music and musical expression characterized the newly independent Ireland, an anxiety linked to wider concerns often read as 'postcolonial'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beautiful passages are passages of 'pure presence' inasmuch as they cannot be separated from an absence, from an absence that cannot be revoked by restoring a 'pure presence'. Beautiful passages are passages that move and inspire because they do not withhold anything, though their gift and their surrender lies in an ellipsis that is essential to 'pure presence' and that cannot be sidestepped, as if a remainder, a reserve, or a surplus inhered in them. It is impossible to get a grip on beautiful passages. They are riddles that have been solved but persist in the midst of their solution and do not forfeit any of their enigmaticalness. Their beauty resides in an experience of intensity, in an experience based on an elision, on a tightening and an averting. Such averting is an immediate turning towards the one who feels the intensity, touching and stimulating him as a consequence. This paper explores the question: Are there beautiful passages in Of Grammatology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines accounts of negation or the apophatic in Pseudo-Dionysius, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida alongside a contemporary work of art by London Fieldworks, Null Object: Gustav Metzger Thinks about Nothing (2011). By exploring models of negative knowledge offered in these works, it asks what happens to the work of art when it becomes preoccupied with negation and how a work of art might embody or manifest — without reproducing — philosophical discourses about negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a historically contextualized reading of what is perhaps the most explicit engagement with radical politics in Beckett's work, the encounter in The End (1946), Beckett's first piece of postwar fiction, between the narrator, a homeless beggar, and a Marxist orator who abuses him as a 'leftover' and denounces the charity of the passers-by as a 'crime'. With reference to Beckett's later rejection of existentialist interpretations of his work with the words 'I'm no intellectual. All I am is feeling ( sensibilité)', and Theodor Adorno's contemporaneous diagnosis in Minima Moralia (1944-1947) of the 'barbarism' of cultural criticism's relentless demand to unmask the material relations enfolded in the notion of sensibility, this paper reads this scene as a parody of the callously unsentimental rhetoric of the Parti Communiste Français and the Sartrean existentialist humanism that was the official philosophy of de Gaulle's Fourth Republic. In particular, the orator's castigation of the protagonist as a leftover ( un déchet) can be read as part of a long tradition of Marxist excoriations of the lumpenproletariat-the amorphous class of ne'er-do-wells to which so many of Beckett's postwar protagonists belong-that has a precise historical origin in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and its denunciation of the role of la bohème, the 'scum, offal, refuse of all classes', in the 1851 counter-revolutionary coup d'état of Louis-Bonaparte. Before 1851, however, the amorphous mass of the destitute and homeless was capable of serving as a figure of revolutionary potential, as Walter Benjamin's study of Baudelaire shows, where it was the ragpicker's 'obscure state of revolt against society' rather than the optimism of utopian theorists that inspired Baudelaire to fight on the barricades in the failed uprising of 1848. In its presentation of a confrontation between the callous optimism of political futurity and the contemporary extremes of human suffering, The End stakes an allegiance with the war's 'leftovers' that is out of step with the official radical politics of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the interwar period onwards, music now known as jazz transcended geographic and political boundaries thanks to increased mobility and new media. Commonly associated with American mass culture, jazz music and jazz musicianship evoked strong emotions, ranging from love to hate. In this paper, feelings about jazz as a new form of cultural anxiety are the main subject of analysis. By looking at jazz as an emblem of different kinds of fear of the non-European, we can reconstruct the changing perception of Europe's internal frontiers from the dissolution of Europe's continental empires to the early Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the idea that photograph is capable of manifesting primal phenomenon. The author interprets the phenomenon in terms of optical unconscious made manifest through photography from Walter Benjamin's writing and from a contemporary perspective with the aid of psychoanalytic theory that informs Julia Kristeva's aesthetics. Additionally, it considers the juxtaposition of photography and phenomena which Theodor Adorno compared to photographs of the earth taken from space.

This essay revisits the relationship between philosophy and poetry. It argues that a crucial term, ‘verse’, is often missing from discussion of that relationship. The broader term, ‘poetry’, is so difficult to define that it offers insufficient specific resistance to large philosophical schemas. The question is explored here through an analysis of the prosodic microstructures in John Wilkinson's The Speaking Twins. I conclude that Wilkinson's poem is an instance of ‘unfree verse’ (in a sense which I define in the essay) and that the poem's verse technique is also the site of its historical truth-content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of ‘perversion’ is introduced, with all its resonances from the vocabulary of psychopathology and more generally in critical philosophy, in juxtaposition to the philosophy and values of the Enlightenment, following Adorno and Horkheimer's evaluation in the light of the monstrosities of twentieth-century history. The author considers recent perverse developments in the culture of late twentieth-century science, in particular cognitivism, in their relation to the psychoanalytic tradition and the vision of humanity found in these competing traditions. The paper finally considers three modern test-domains: contradictory responses to prostitution; pornographic therapy; the borderlands between the animal, the robot and the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the aesthetic in the criticism of Edward Said through a reading of two lesser-explored texts, Musical Elaborations (1991) and On Late Style (2006). It explores how, by drawing upon ideas from Gramsci and Adorno, Said advocates a convergence of social and aesthetic approaches to musical analysis and criticism. Although critical of some of the tensions arising from Said's varying perspectives on music and society, the article suggests that we can nonetheless detect a distinctive ideology of the aesthetic in Said's writings on music. It argues that Said's ideas on the temporal or narrative structure of certain musical works or performances function, within his wider thinking, as an aesthetic paradigm for undermining fixed identity and linear or totalizing narratives. Thus Said's reflections on music do not simply retreat from social and political concerns, but rather elaborate a utopian thinking regarding the interface between criticism and the aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]