This seminar series will revisit this enigmatic and challenging work, seeking a reappraisal that takes its heterodox textual style into serious philosophical consideration and connects it to wider debates about Western modernity’s place in history, about gender and feminism, and about our relation to, and the domination of, nature.

World-leading expert speakers will explore how stylistic features can elicit affective disruptions or reorientations, perspectival shifts, and therapeutic conversions in authors and readers alike. They will speak about how Adorno and Horkheimer put style in the service of substance – how literary and other aesthetic devices deployed in the text serve socio-historical reflection about Western modernity and subjectivity, rather than merely embellish philosophical anthropology done from the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (as Lukács’s scathing phrase about Adorno has it).

This reappraisal is particularly important today in the context of various social ills and crises humanity faces, including the climate emergency. The difficulty in dealing with these crises is, arguably, not at the cognitive level, since we all know (or could know) very well what the problems are and that radical actions are required to address them, and urgently so. And yet, subtle and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing in the opposite direction of solutions– advertising, attention-sapping social media, lobbying, misinformation campaigns that target our affects and emotions, demonising propaganda in the media and increasingly in official policy settings, etc.

The challenge is to shift and work through affective attachments that result from these insidious influences – attachments to our consumerist way of life, to certain gender identities and hierarchies, to our curating our lives virtually at the expense of real encounters, to particular narratives of former glory and influence on the world stage, and soon. New readings of the Dialectic of Enlightenment will open so-far-unexplored avenues for how such affective reorientation by way of aesthetic means can take place.