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1984, de George Orwell, é uma ficção futurista que aponta para uma distopia na Oceânia, um país comandado pelo Partido e seu regime totalitário. A ideologização ostensiva ocasiona a reificação das consciências. Winston Smith, funcionário do governo, questiona o totalitarismo e se torna alvo da Polícia das Ideias. Winston capitula, via tortura, diante do poder oficial. Os conceitos da obra de Orwell são discutidos à luz da teoria crítica da sociedade, representada neste ensaio por Adorno, Horkheimer e Marcuse. Estes autores dialogam com a obra de Orwell e ajudam a desenvolver uma interpretação segundo uma perspectiva crítica e emancipatória.

Although neither Sigmund Freud nor Jacques Lacan ever neglected the place of culture and the social field for the subject, they always opposed "culturalist" ideas, even when such ideas no longer used this label. It is important to examine what both of these figures said about culturalism, but it is just as pertinent to return to other criticisms of this movement, which developed in the United States during the last century, because at present this movement has returned covertly within French psychoanalysis. First, "culturalism" is neither a specifically American problem nor one that belongs to the past. Second, some decisive criticisms of this movement remain both germane and original: they are able to throw light on a theoretical current that, at least in France, now characterizes a dominant orientation of psychoanalytic work. Third, although Lacan himself foresaw it, the misuse of some of his notions has unexpectedly served as a Trojan horse that has enabled culturalism to return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists, economists, historians, anthropologists, political theorists, and literary critics have all turned their attention to the study of capitalism. But philosophers remain much less engaged. Why is this? And what could philosophy bring to the study of capitalism? Could it help in the development of a general theory? My main argument here is that philosophy does have an important role to play in the study of capitalism, particularly if we want to develop a general theory. Philosophers must describe something that is peculiar to capitalism, in philosophical terms, which has not been explained by sociological, economic, or psychological means. This subject matter does exist: it is the nature of rationality within capitalism. I suggest that this can best be explained by using the theory of the space of reasons, which helps to show how rational human practices shape social and economic institutions, and how our form of rationality is in turn shaped by those practices and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Was there a linguistic turn in Frankfurt School Critical Theory before Habermas's communications-theoretic one? Might later Wittgenstein and the early Frankfurt School have adopted similar pictures of language? I propose that both questions should be answered affirmatively, focusing on Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason. I argue that, thanks to the picture of language that Horkheimer and Adorno share with (later) Wittgenstein, we can reconstruct their theory in a way that renders it more defensible. Insofar as the human life form and language are inseparable, language can be an inextinguishable reservoir of what Horkheimer called "objective reason." Recognizing this allows us to answer Habermas's critique of Horkheimer and Adorno. Moreover, paying attention to this inseparableness can enable us to engage in disclosing social critique (for example, regarding current debates about sustainability). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze Adorno’s interpretation of Kafka’s work in his book Notes on Kafka, focusing on his idea that Kafka is an enlightened writer who, however, criticizes the Enlightenment, in order to find out whether this is coherent with Adorno’s own theory. For this purpose, I compare Adorno’s and Kafka’s reading of the sirens’ song in the Odyssey, and I analyze the differences between both. I conclude, partially against Adorno, that Kafka is a critic of the Enlightenment, but he is not an enlightened writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that for Theodor W. Adorno psychoanalysis illuminates the nature of literary interpretation. Particularly, Adorno’s metacriticism defines the interpretative procedures of literature and some affinities between the aims of literary and psychoanalytic interpretations. However, his arguments do not rest on a ‘top-down’ analysis but on a ‘bottom-up’ one. So, this article also argues that Adorno’s interest in Franz Kafka’s oeuvre focuses on literary criticism and defends some theses on metacriticism. Nevertheless, for Adorno, interpreting literature implies switching the reader’s attention from ordinary meaning understanding to aesthetic appreciation. In this respect, my article finally argues that what Adorno called (literary) ‘gestures’ works as the resource for metacriticism, analogous to Freudian slips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a response to "Disney, Salò and Pasolini's Inconsumable Art," an article written by Owen Schalk in the socialist magazine Monthly Review in 2021. In contesting Schalk's argument, the essay identifies the limits of the complaints about the way Netflix operates as the dominant digital streaming platform, using algorithms to determine what films are brought to users' attention, based on pre-existing customer selections. Writing against the argument that commercial imperatives built into algorithms overdetermine what users see, the response identifies the way consumer choice serves as an ideology that, in a dialectical sense opens up contradictory readings of the many avenues available for filmic consumption within contemporary ideation. Pasolini's film Salò is used by Schalk to inform Pasolini's theory of inconsumable and indigestible art, an orientation that generates an acknowledgment of capitalism within the general scheme of fascism. The theory still applies to inform cinema watchers of capitalism in the current cultural conjuncture. The case is made that rather than being suppressed by algorithms that predetermine what films can be watched on Netflix, the diversity of many sources of knowledge in the digital environment heightens ideological positions to enliven political struggles, manifesting as dialectical contradictions within a historical materialist approach. Postmodernism is presented as a framework that enhances digital fracturing of cultures generating richer contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Art Inquiry is the property of Lodz Scientific Society / Lodzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Filosofía (0034-8244) is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Además de is the property of Ademas de: Revista on line de artes decorativas y diseno and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, we suggest that the notion of “aesthetic cultures of protest” can be understood as designating two broad tendencies in the contemporary field of art and politics: on the one hand, the incorporation of the protest by the art world and, on the other hand, the appropriation of aesthetic traits by social protests. To counteract the ethical immediacy of both, we turn to Theodor W. Adorno’s more dialectical understanding of the relationship between protests and the aesthetic. After being marshalled against art’s internalisation of protest, and the protests’ appropriation of the aesthetic, we assess Adorno’s notion of form and autonomy through an immanent critique that is both conceptual and historical. We argue that Adorno’s aesthetics lacks an understanding of social labour, to which it itself ascribes great conceptual significance, and that recent changes in the global composition of capital and labour has affected the role of social labour in such a way that Adorno’s tendency to identify art’s autonomy with its negativity can no longer be upheld. Finally, we argue that the characteristics, which Adorno ascribes to the work of art has migrated to, and been realised by, a form of protest which reemerged simultaneously with the death of Adorno, namely the riot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto -- the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto -- the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Problems / Problemos is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay makes three connected moves. First, it examines various modalities of ‘the end’ in philosophy and contemporary neoliberal culture, asking what new political lessons might be drawn from each. Second, it looks at different dialectical ideas of catastrophe: Günther Anders’ and JeanPierre Dupuy’s notion of ‘enlightened doomsaying’; and Maurice Blanchot’s and Theodor Adorno’s contention that only in the face of extinction does humanity become visible in the first place. Third, the essay concludes by proposing a move beyond Blanchot and Adorno. We don’t just need to look the negative (extinction) in the face, but to move into the zone of politics proper: to recognise that only the negation of this world – a world of converging and multiplying catastrophes – ends the prospect of the end of the world – understood not as a sudden death, but rather as an incremental decay, the slow unravelling of intimately entangled forms of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the 2022 war from the point of view of its well-documented savagery. It addresses philosophical discussions of barbarism and gives a dialectical explanation of this phenomenon through the gradual polarization between the forces of Enlightenment and the obstinacy of the subject. This clash has a double shape: formality versus materiality and morality versus happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the centre of Adorno's critical theory of society lies the problem of Bann or Bannkreis: why do individuals systematically act in ways that reinforce conditions that are obviously incompatible with their freedom and pursuit of happiness? Despite criticism of Dewey's experimentalism by several Frankfurt School critical theorists claiming that the American pragmatist fails to account for systematic blockages to critique, Dewey does in fact formulate his approach to social critique as a response to the problem that social life might be made immune to transformative claims. In Human Nature and Conduct, thirty years prior to Adorno's Bannkreis, he conceptualizes a 'vicious circle' in which attempts to transform social life seem to be caught and points to a way out. This article shows that Adorno and Dewey share in a project at the heart of critical theory, the project of a disclosing critique of society. In different and mutually completing ways, the Frankfurt School critical theorist and the American pragmatist point out the extent to which their contemporary societies are caught in antagonistic and painful vicious circles and thereby point to the objective possibility of another form of social life. The article is historical, but it is animated by the intent to brush a fruitful path for disclosing critique today. From Adorno, this critical practice gains the idea that theory of society can be a disclosing gesture, which presents an important corrective to Dewey's failure to trace the eclipse of the public. From Dewey, it gets a reminder that these theories must find ways to continue into ordinary life experience through group action for their disclosure to come full circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insurgent Universality offers a novel attempt to access history through a problematisation of the notion of universalism. Its main argument is based on three notions articulated in revolutionary events: temporalities, universality and insurgency. In this article we review their theoretical aspects, comment on their limitations, and outline potential reformulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the question of why M figures in the names of all of Beckett's major characters. I connect M to the word murmuring, which proliferates in his work, and I claim that Beckett was influenced by a passage in Dante's Purgatorio, in which each face in a group of penitents is inscribed with the letter M. With a rounded eye socket below each arch, the faces of the penitents spell omo or man. I argue that M stands for man – not the humanist form of man that existed for Dante, but rather a ruined figure that is adequate to this moment. Throughout, I engage with critical approaches to Beckett that attempt to connect the posthumanism suggested in his work with the new form of ethics – and of love – that it makes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mohsin Hamid's novel, Exit West (2017) takes place in a world where magical doorways allow refugees passage between countries. Following the couple Saeed and Nadia -- refugees from an unnamed city undergoing fundamentalist insurrection -- the novel explores their grappling amid different political tensions. While commentators have discussed the way Hamid re-frames migration as form of connectivity, and the portals as utopian forms of escape, this article investigates the economic specificities of such connectivity, through three near-future communities that Hamid imagines for Nadia and Saeed: a Kensington townhouse reclaimed by refugees, the "London Halo" work-for-housing program, and the shanty city of Marin, San Francisco. These collectives defy the logic of capitalist realism (Fisher). In this way, utopian potential exists within the novel both in terms of magical thinking against the system (Adorno) and as embodied forms of solidarity amid crisis (Žižek and Jameson). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RESUMEN En sintonía con algunas reflexiones del campo de la estética que han señalado cómo, al postular un relego o incluso desprecio de Theodor W. Adorno por el cine, la mayoría de las recepciones empobrecieron el potencial crítico del pensamiento adorniano, el presente artículo avanza en algunos aspectos de la reflexión estética de Adorno sobre el cine. Por un lado, ponemos de relieve una lectura materialista y dialéctica de la afamada categoría de industria cultural. Por otro, llamamos la atención sobre el lugar central que tienen las primeras películas y reflexiones teóricas de Alexander Kluge para la postulación adorniana de una estética específica del cine. En ese marco, el artículo presenta uno de los problemas estéticos más interesantes que surgen del planteo de Adorno en diálogo con Kluge - y que, además, marca la actualidad de la empresa: pensar el cine contra la imagen. De allí se desprenden las consideraciones sobre un tipo de cine autoconsciente de sus aspectos formales, una reflexión sobre la imagen más allá de su carácter referencial y la centralidad de la técnica del montaje. Hacia el final, exponemos cómo en Adorno el cine muestra su afinidad con la experiencia subjetiva y con la escritura.

This essay aims at a double goal: reconstructing the problem of how Enlightenment created and sharpened the conceptual weapons that made possible the European colonialist/slavery-machine (reframing thus universal history as a project of universalization of European/colonialist reason); and arguing how black-feminist poetry plays a fundamental anti-colonial role not only in exposing/forcing into review colonialist/racist thought, but also in creating non-totalitarian worlds of possibilities. Mostly, these two poles are put in motion in a non-systematic argumentative movement: our medium of/for reflection are an assembly of Theodor Adorno’s philosophy and black-feminist poetry and thought. The analyses of Brazilian black-feminist inventions – particularly, Conceição Evaristo’s concept of “escrevivência”, Priscila Rezende’s Bombril (2010) performance and Tamara Franklin’s videoclip for Wakanda (2019) – is meant to allow for an innovative take on Adorno’s concept of art as social monad, which will be revisited in view of the key-concepts of technopolitics/technopoiesis.

Through the analysis of El trabajo, by Aníbal Jarkowski, this article reflects on one micropolitical practice carried out by the main female characters of the novel: the particular way they wear, choose and exchange their panties with each other. I propose this underwear carries several meanings in the text, since it testimonies the gender-based violence suffered by the female characters in their jobs; but also, in an intimate non-workplace, it builds a sorority capable of challenging the pillars of patriarchy and its ancestral alliance with capitalist logic. In order to elucidate the multiple meanings of lingerie shown in the novel, this research considers some concepts from sociology (Entwistle 2015) and theoretical feminism (Young 1990 and Rivera Garretas 1996), which have understood clothing as a source of subjectivity and as a political weapon.

Adorno's argument in this recently translated essay is that sociology is necessary in order to unlock the ‘epistemological power’ of the concept of ideology. This paper reads Adorno's argument with an Althusserian guilt in order to isolate the theoretically anti-humanist character of this epistemological power. The paper demonstrates how sociology, for Adorno, unlocks this epistemological power by shifting the field of inquiry away from the psychology of the individual subject, towards the “objectively prescribed contexts of delusion” located at the meeting point of specific material social relations. In order to make sense of Adorno's theoretical work here, the paper employs the concept of ‘anthropology’ as developed by Étienne Balibar, in order to demonstrate how Adorno mobilises the concept of ideology in order to think about subjective interpellation in an anti-humanist way, breaking with the vulgar psychology of traditional theories of ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 20th century, the format of domestic life became an explicit object of functional reworking and rewriting. Thanks to the industrialisation processes that affected it, the home entered the era of its technical reproducibility, becoming a container aimed at optimising the functions it is called upon to perform. The meanings that were associated with it in the bourgeois tradition of the previous century, first and foremost that of being the place of intimacy and family affection, underwent a significant transformation. The signs of this transformation are particularly evident in the experimental and futuristic projects on human domesticity by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Thanks to them, domesticity enters a new horizon of expression, even beyond the architectural imagination, anticipating elements and characteristics that define its contemporary condition.

Pretendemos pensar as relações entre arte e sociedade, tendo sempre em mente a tensão irredutível entre a autonomia e a heteronomia de uma em relação a outra. Para tanto, traçaremos uma análise dos argumentos principais a respeito dessa relação dialética, em dois momentos distintos da reflexão filosófica sobre o tema. Em um primeiro momento, traremos a defesa de uma certa autonomia da arte com referência não apenas à sociedade que a produz, como também aos valores morais que são ensinados através dela, com as reflexões e, sobretudo, com as críticas de Nietzsche sobre suas interpretações da tragédia clássica, a partir principalmente de O Nascimento da Tragédia, para, em um segundo momento, poder traçar um paralelo dessa argumentação com a constatação de Adorno a respeito da instrumentalização e da comercialização da arte, no contexto contemporâneo, expondo algumas das críticas de Nietzsche realizadas no séc. XIX sobre as produções culturais gregas do séc. IV a. C. e contextualizando-as em relação aos fenômenos estéticos contemporâneos.

Filmmakers have felt the impact of numerous films that have been petitioned or rejected by groups acting in the majority’s interests. The groups carry religious issues and view films as a new force capable of undermining the values (dogma) they believe. The views were infiltrated by efforts to homogenize discourses for a particular purpose rather than pure objectivity, resulting in petitions opposing certain films. In this regard, Adorno’s perspective on the revolutionary objective basis leads to the eradication of critical thinking against individuals associated with capitalism. The term “capitalists” refer to persons who control the Indonesian film industry. The underlying phenomena of this research are alienation and oppression, and the research sources are film industry actors who are directly affected by the phenomena above. Using Bogdan’s and Taylor’s qualitative approach in Moleong (2018), this study reveals that capitalists attempt to paralyze the joints of critical thinking to steer Indonesian films toward uniform themes, namely religious ones, that are “safe” from mass organizations’ petitions and rejections. These efforts mark the end of critical thinking and ideas in the creative filmmaking process.

This article explores Adorno’s engagement to tackle a concept of culture, avoiding the Scylla of historicizing its products as a cultural heritage and the Charybdis of their reification as a commodity. In this perspective, musical pedagogy is crucial in checking the possibility of art education understood as a production of sense. Drawing on the recent critique of Adorno’s aesthetics (Georgina Born, Tia De Nora, Antoine Hennion), the article claims that Adorno’s perspective – despite the obvious anachronisms – still represents a viable alternative to two opposite leading positions regarding the function of music education: music as a tool for social inclusion and the individual and social construction of the self, and music as sheer conservation of cultural heritage.

Walter Benjamin famously argued that the mass public of the twentieth century would necessarily correlate with a newly politicized art. But the world has changed considerably since Benjamin’s article was written, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer already were assessing less than a decade later. It is the purpose of this article to examine how the aesthetics of the Frankfurt school, though frequently still invoked, have lost some of their immediate relevance. The anti-establishment phase of the 60s, compounded by a pronounced taste for irony, rendered aura and exhibition outmoded values, while on the other hand, more recently, price escalation in the art market and digitization have made certain of the Frankfurt school arguments more pertinent than ever. Taking as examples Goldsworthy and Kentridge, this essay argues that a deliberate loosening of the artist’s control over both medium and reception displaces the warmed-over religious responses endorsed by Benjamin, positing instead increased intellectual agency on the part of viewers, whose identity as a mass public has become newly complicated.

RESUMO Na segunda metade da década de 1930, Theodor W. Adorno e Alfred Sohn-Rethel estabeleceram um rico intercâmbio teórico, no qual uma enorme convergência inicial evolui para um gradual afastamento. Apesar de não reconhecer de pronto a procedência dos argumentos de Sohn-Rethel contra a formulação de seu procedimento de crítica imanente, Adorno os incorpora anos mais tarde. Além disso, a descoberta dessa revisão subterrânea ajuda a explicitar o sentido da transcendência da crítica imanente adorniana e sua relação com a crítica da economia política marxiana.

Undoubtedly, the root of Adorno's thinking can be traced to his belief in the destruction of those philosophical ideas which seek to create immutable universals in the form of frozen and sound philosophical systems. The starting point for him, therefore, is not in the same idea, but in the contradiction or otherwise, which is only in one aspect of this oneness and not in its complete drowning. That is why the non-like is highlighted in order to breathe the breeze of freedom from falling into the vicious circle of absoluteness. In this regard, he defines the purpose of each work of art in a kind of irreconcilability with the whole. According to Adorno, this totality in the field of culture and art, in a pragmatic way, appears more in a phenomenon called the culture industry; because works of art are caught up in the mechanism of bureaucratization and assimilation by the commodity-production economic system, in which the individual subject is diminished. Such a danger is felt more and more in the cultural products of today's Iranian society (especially in the field of music), which can be examined in terms of Adorno's critical theories and the structure of Iranian classical music.

Para comentar o ensaio "Primo Lévi, razão, narração, lacunas”, de Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, exploro a herança iluminista do narrador sóbrio e meticuloso de É isto um homem? e proponho uma aproximação entre esse livro e Dialética do esclarecimento, de Adorno e Horkheimer. Considero que as duas obras, publicadas em 1947, logo após o fim da II Guerra Mundial, lidam com uma questão histórica subjacente: Como o projeto europeu das Luzes, que levou à queda do Antigo Regime e fundamentou as constituições dos Estados democráticos modernos, pode ter resultado no totalitarismo, no fascismo, na barbárie?

Apresentado oralmente no X Encontro do GT de Estética da ANPOF, o presente texto foi construído como um diálogo filosófico com as “Teses sobre a estetosfera”, apresentadas por Rodrigo Duarte no mesmo evento e também publicadas no número 29 da Revista Viso.

O artigo é orientado pela hipótese metodológica de que problemas centrais da estética da música – como o é o caso do problema da expressão – se deixam compreender melhor à luz das relações entre música e linguagem. Na primeira parte, procuramos mostrar em perspectiva histórica como a concepção de expressão varia sintomaticamente de acordo com as diferentes visões acerca de tais relações. Essa análise histórico-sistemática conecta nossa hipótese metodológica a uma hipótese teórica, desenvolvida na segunda parte: a de que o conceito de expressão não é um simples conceito empírico e sim um conceito constitutivo, do qual, no entanto, fazemos um uso regulativo na medida em que emprestamos nossa competência comunicativa a objetos como as peças musicais.

In this article, Levinas’ philosophy is interpreted as an ethical and Talmudic consideration of existential paths. After Auschwitz, the concept of otherness and the diversity of other faces presupposes a free and diverse “being on the road,” an ethics of journey, and denies theodicy and an essentialist interpretation of being. The thesis is proven by comparing Levinas’, Baranova’s and Adorno’s approaches to ethics and Exegesis. Levinas’ philosophy is elaborated by referring to the exegetics of the Exodus and the concept of an incomprehensibility of Auschwitz. The author discusses the philosophies of Levinas and Adorno who both consider the Holocaust as an occurrence not open to interpretation. Levinas advocates the end of theodicy as a justification for divine history and argues the primacy of ethics, while Adorno develops anti-theodicy and presents the relevance of critique of instrumental reason.

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Drawing from Bakhtin and Habermas, I will show how the different voices in Gordimer's novel seem to be enacting a democratic public sphere in which no voice is granted authority over others - a public sphere which carries the promise of countering the social and political hierarchies established by the racist South African regime. The promise, however, turns out to be an illusion. As I will demonstrate, the possibility of an Enlightenment bourgeois public sphere which the novel seems to be gesturing at is being irreparably undermined by racism. In a country where the Enlightenment aspiration to universalism and equality before the law are glaringly contravened by racism, Rosa Burger is painfully aware of her inability to fully access the predicament of the blacks. As such, Burger's daughter remains only Burger's daughter, and the children of Soweto the children of Soweto; at no point in the novel do they truly intermingle. Despite the fact that both are fighting racism - and the novel is devoted to the "coming-of-age" of both kinds of children - Rosa Burger remains only the daughter of a Bürger at the end of the novel, not the daughter of South Africa, much less to say the daughter of Black South Africa. She has finally "come into her own," but the "self" she manages to realize is at best that of a disillusioned bourgeois individual (that of a disillusioned Bürger, so to speak) - a "self" that recalls Hegel's "beautiful soul." To appropriate György Lukács's language, Bürger's Daughter could be described as "modern bourgeois literature bear[ing] witness against bourgeois society". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trans/Form/Ação is the property of Trans/Form/Acao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Trans/Form/Ação is the property of Trans/Form/Acao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide has led to renewed interest in the Frankfurt School theory of the authoritarian personality. In this article, I clarify the role of that idea in a class-theoretical critique of fascism by showing how it supplements the Marxist analysis. I first outline the Marxist theory of fascism with reference particularly to the puzzles of fascist politics and ideology, before arguing that the authoritarian personality construct helps solve some of these. Then, I clarify the fit between the theory of the authoritarian personality and Marxist theory by explicating its origins in the research programme of the Frankfurt School. Finally, I propose that the authoritarian personality construct explains the nature of the elements in the fascist ideological "medley," with reference to its key characteristics of rigid conventionalism, unquestioning obedience and authoritarian aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]