Rethinking Adorno Today: An Interview with Peter E. Gordon

By Mikko Immanen
This interview was conducted in February–March 2026 and was originally published in Finnish in Tutkimus & kritiikki.

1. Mikko Immanen: You have characterized your intellectual path as a transition from being a Heidegger scholar to being an Adorno scholar. In the past decade, you have written important works, such as Adorno and Existence (2016) and Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (2020), which explore various aspects of Adorno’s thought, such as his ambivalent stances toward existentialism and theology. In addition, you have made Adorno’s analyzes of authoritarianism, most notably the landmark study The Authoritarian Personality (1950), more familiar to contemporary readers. Your works have been pivotal in drawing attention to the continuing value of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and Adorno in particular. How would you describe your first encounter with Adorno and your subsequent, increasing interest in his thinking, the latest expression of which is the book A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity (2023)?

Peter E. Gordon: I don’t want to claim too much importance for my own intellectual biography, but I’ll try to offer some facts that may be of interest. Like many young scholars who are drawn to Adorno, I first encountered his idiosyncratic thinking when I was about eighteen years old and happened upon a copy of Minima Moralia in Jephcott’s English translation. I found the aphoristic style bracing but bewildering, and although I often found myself dipping into the book, I can’t say that I had a strong understanding of its philosophical implications. Some years later, I wrote my doctorate at Berkeley under the direction of Martin Jay, one of the foremost scholars of critical theory in the Anglophone world. Competing currents in modern German philosophy were also well represented at Berkeley, by scholars such as Hubert Dreyfus and Hans Sluga, both of whom also inspired me and served as important models for how to pursue philosophy in a non-dogmatic way that paid little notice to the much-policed divide between the so-called “Continental” and “analytic” schools. Although I was never an orthodox Heideggerian, I developed much of my own philosophical skills in college and later in graduate school by working on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. For many years I continued to write philosophical papers on Heidegger, and some of those found their way into collections edited by excellent Heidegger scholars such as Mark Wrathall. My first two books demonstrated a strong preoccupation with Heidegger, an interest that culminated in 2010 with the publication of my book, Continental Divide, a philosophical study of the encounter between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos.

After that my interest in Heidegger began to fade. Perhaps this was simply because I have a peripatetic mind or lack the sensibility of a devoted follower. But I think it was chiefly because I came to think that Heidegger, despite his extraordinary reputation, was not as careful a philosopher as I had once believed. I was especially dismayed by his understanding of the natural sciences. Thanks in part to Cassirer, who possessed an unparalleled understanding of the philosophy of science, it became apparent to me that Heidegger had a rather impoverished conception of natural scientific theory and practice: he tended to view it with disdain as yet another symptom of “deworlding” (Entweltlichung) and Seinsvergessenheit. This disdain was no doubt overdetermined: Heidegger’s misunderstanding of the natural sciences is only one theme within a larger polemic against modernity. His enchantment with National Socialism, of course, is intelligible only against the background of that same one-sided caricature of the modern world.

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School exhibits some of the same strengths as Heidegger’s existential ontology. Both are concerned with pathologies of the modern world. Both see those pathologies in the wider perspective of a philosophy of history that explores the ambivalent consequences of rationalization and disenchantment. But critical theory does not seek to rectify these pathologies through an act of backward-looking restoration. It wishes to redeem modernity with resources intrinsic to modernity itself. It also locates those resources in a social sphere that is accessible to willful change, not in a pervasive Seinsverständnis that lies at such a deep level of the world’s constitution that it appears as a fate beyond human appeal. Critical theory also directs its attention toward sociological phenomena that Heidegger largely ignored. Horkheimer inaugurated his tenure as director of the Institute for Social Research with a lecture on “the idea of a social philosophy.” Nor should we forget that, after the Second World War, Adorno held a professorship in both philosophy and sociology. It is a major strength of critical theory that it sustains its attention both to social suffering and modern philosophy. It is one of the consequences of this dual lens, however, that critical theory does not easily fit within the conventional pigeon-holes of the modern research university. You might recall that Adorno begins Minima Moralia with a personal meditation on what it means for an intellectual to find himself dismissed as a “dilettante.”

My turn to Adorno after Continental Divide reflects my own belief that problems of social suffering must remain at the center of philosophical concern. The first sign of this turn was my 2016 book, Adorno and Existence, in which I examined Adorno’s life-long engagement with phenomenology and existentialism. I think of that book as a kind of bridge: it assisted me in making the philosophical transition from the world of existential ontology and phenomenology to the world of critical theory. Of course, the 2014 German-language publication by Vittorio Klostermann of the first volumes of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte. I found Heidegger’s resentful scribblings and his anti-Semitic comments on the role of the Jews in the world-historical affliction of Seinsverlassenheit altogether repulsive. To be sure, I still believe that Heidegger is a genuinely important philosopher, and I have little sympathy for readers who would prefer simply to expel him from the philosophical canon. However, there comes a point at which one begins to suspect that a philosopher’s political record may be symptomatic of problems in the philosophy itself. For all of his purported depth and his ruminations on mortality or care, Heidegger is far too enchanted with philosophical abstraction. We are confronted here with the enigma of an inverted Platonism. Günther Anders once faulted Heidegger’s philosophy for its “pseudo-concreteness.” Although it may be true that philosophy begins in wonder, it should also respond to human need. Adorno spoke of “bourgeois coldness,” a term that applies quite well to Heidegger (though it may seem inappropriate to call him a bourgeois). In this respect Heidegger and Adorno are worlds apart. Not just Adorno but critical theory in general keeps its attention fixed on the problem of social suffering, and it nourishes the hope that we can improve our human world.

2. MI: In A Precarious Happiness, you question the widespread view of Adorno as a thoroughgoing pessimist, a view initiated by Jürgen Habermas and systematically articulated more recently by Fabian Freyenhagen. This view holds that Adorno saw modern Western society as a “context of delusion,” a bureaucratic machine with no space for independent thought or undistorted experience. You stress in contrast that an equally important aspect of Adorno’s thinking was his recurrent emphasis on “happiness,” in the sense of Aristotelian eudaimonia. In your reading, Adorno sees in the modern world not just the bad things but also the seeds of a better world. Would you elaborate on your interpretation a little more?

PG: I borrowed the phrase “precarious happiness” (prekäres Glück) from Adorno, who used that phrase when defending musical modernism against the charge that it simply wishes to be as ugly as the world that surrounds it. Adorno saw this as a misunderstanding.  In the new music, he said, there is as much precarious happiness as despair. From this specific claim, we can derive a more general lesson regarding the conflicted and dialectical character of society. Not unlike the conflictual sphere of art, so too we can find in society both conformism and emancipation. Society is, in Adorno’s phrase, a Kraftfeld. It consists in antagonistic elements that persist in an unresolved dialectic.  

Recalling Adorno’s status as a dialectical thinker, I would say that too much is made of his remarks on modern society as a “context of delusion.” This phrase is hyperbolic, and it has done some damage by encouraging the impression that Adorno denied that society allows any space for critical reflection. I am hardly the first scholar to note that this denial results in a performative contradiction. If Adorno understands himself as practicing critique, then it follows that the claim that critique is impossible must be false. It is true that Adorno himself once said that exaggeration is the only medium of truth. But that claim strikes me as a logical absurdity. First, it is self-refuting: if it is true, then it is not true. But let’s leave aside niceties of logic. Adorno quite often wrote without recourse to exaggeration. In his sociological work he tried to convey with precision what modern society is actually like, and he did so with scrupulous attention to facts. The Authoritarian Personality is thick with carefully assembled data, and so too is the Gruppenexperiment to which he contributed after the war. A critique of ideology presupposes factual accuracy: they are mutually implicative categories. Adorno understood that National Socialist ideology is little more than a tissue of fantasies and outright falsehoods. Without some standards of accuracy, our challenge to ideology would have no point.

Adorno confirms this argument in his introductory lectures on sociology, where he offers a brief comment on the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto, Adorno complains, said that all of social consciousness is “totally ideological” in character. But this idea of pervasive social falsehood encourages us to imagine social reality as an unbroken whole. Such a picture of society is prima facie implausible because, as Adorno claims, the very conception of totalizing ideology would make it “impossible to distinguish between true and false.” A world governed fully by false consciousness would disallow the practice of immanent critique. As Adorno explained, “one cannot talk of false consciousness, unless the possibility of a right consciousness also exists.”

I do not wish to be misunderstood. Adorno was deeply concerned that a form of modern society was emerging in which truth would eventually lose out to falsehood and the very concept of a better society would fall into total eclipse. But his critical work presupposes that this world has not yet reached its catastrophic conclusion. The very practice of criticism shows us that this nightmarish picture of totalizing delusion is still on its way but has not yet closed all spaces of critical reflection. Adorno still discerns what he calls “traces” of possibility within the context of damaged life. If society lacked all such traces, the very practice of social critique would be impossible.  

All the same, we should not infer that he somehow imagined that these traces are islands of perfection or total happiness in the midst of despair. Adorno did not believe it was possible to isolate moments of unblemished utopia. On the contrary, he claimed that any traces of the good are damaged by the conditions of their appearance. Those who know Negative Dialectics will recognize this claim from his rejoinder to Hegel. Hegel had famously said that philosophy always arrives too late and it can only adopt the complacent practice of “painting the grey of the world in grey.” Adorno strenuously rejected that Hegelian complacency: he insisted that even our despair presupposes a standard that the world has failed to meet. “Consciousness,” he writes, “could not despair at all over what is grey, if it did not harbor the concept of a different color, whose scattered trace is not lacking in the negative whole [Bewußtsein könnte gar nicht über das Grau verzweifeln, hegte es nicht den Begriff von einer verschiedenen Farbe, deren versprengte Spur im negativen Ganzen nicht fehlt].“ A colleague once suggested to me that “traces of a different color” might have been suitable as an alternative title for the book.

3. MI: I agree with the central thrust of your argument; social criticism needs a standard to be self-consistent, and this must be stronger than mere negative freedom. You stress, however, that Adorno defended a “maximalist” notion of happiness. This can be seen, for example, in Minima Moralia’s plea to “contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.” Beautiful as such passages are, is there not a danger of perfectionism here? Rahel Jaeggi, another scholar who has sought to rehabilitate early Critical Theory, argues that overcoming of philosophical liberalism should not happen in the name of ethical perfectionism. Such attempts, she maintains, rely on a notion of human nature that often comes with untenable perfectionist, or essentialist, implications. Do you see such essentialism as a problem in Adorno’s ethics?

PG: I recognize that the choice to characterize Adorno’s standard of criticism as “maximalist” is rather provocative.  But I would insist that it is accurate. Following Marx, Adorno practices what we might call a “ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Virtually nothing escapes his micrological glance. He condemns not only broad institutional and ideological forms but even the smallest social practices and habits of personal conduct that we might have deemed fairly innocent or inconsequential. His relentless critical gaze raises an important theoretical puzzle: what standards have been failed? What strong expectations do we have for the world such that virtually nothing strikes us as acceptable? The answer must be that our standard must be extraordinarily stringent. This explains the well-known reference to the “messianic light” at the end of Minima Moralia. It is only if we have the highest expectations for our society that we judge it to have failed in virtually all respects and to the point of near-total catastrophe.

But this means that Adorno is a maximalist. This maximalism does not contradict his negative assessment of present conditions; the one is the logical correlative to the other. You may recall the line quoted in my book from Benjamin: so long as even one beggar goes hungry there will be mythos. This is an extraordinarily demanding standard by which to motivate one’s criticism.  But Adorno, as we know, placed great demands on what the world should be. A theme of disappointment assuredly pervades his later work, especially in the opening line to Negative Dialectics, where we are told that philosophy lives on only because the moment of its realization was missed. And yet what did he imagine this moment of realization would consist in?  It would seem that what he expected was the realization of utopia within the bounds of a recalcitrant world. Perhaps Rahel Jaeggi is right that we should be wary of such perfectionism. But my book did not aim to defend everything Adorno wrote. My task was simply to reconstruct as faithfully as possible what I understand him to be saying. Ultimately, we may find that we have good reasons to resist some of his claims.

Was Adorno an “essentialist”? I am often puzzled by the allergy to essentialism that seems to have seized the field of social theory. It’s not an allergy I share. There are good essentialisms and bad ones. Inspired chiefly by Marx’s commitment to historicism, most social theorists on the left are proudly anti-essentialist about human nature. But most of them are relatively untroubled with essentialism when it applies to non-human nature. We speak readily and without theoretical scruples about what nature actually is and how human intervention has produced distortions into nature, and we call for those distortions to be rectified. A problem arises here, because there is no bright line between human and non-human nature. Notwithstanding our remarkable capacity as cultural beings for worldmaking (in Nelson Goodman’s phrase), we are also embodied and natural beings.  Adorno was alive to this fact of human nature. Much of what he wrote about our mimetic relationship to nature suggests that he was willing to embrace a kind of essentialism (though he would probably dislike the term). Does this mean that he went all the way toward a substantive essentialism that seeks to identify an ostensibly natural ground for all human characteristics? This inference would be absurd. One can endorse an essentialism of human capacities (much like Aristotle) without adopting crude notions of naturalistic determinism.

On the question of maximal standards, a final point deserves mention. One critic has objected that my reference to “standards” implies that we possess perfect norms, analogous to the perfect standards of weights and measures that are preserved behind glass at the Bureau international des poids et mesures in Saint Cloud near Paris. This objection has a polemical appeal, but the metaphor misses its target. Surely we can imagine standards that are imperfect, and yet they could nonetheless serve as standards for social criticism. It’s simply not the case that all norms or standards commit us to a kind of normative Platonism.

Let me explain a bit further. Rahel Jaeggi, in her Critique of Forms of Life (which is, in my opinion, one of the finest contributions to contemporary critical theory) introduces a helpful distinction between internal critique and immanent critique. Internal critique makes use of standards or norms that are currently available to us, and it only requires that we meet those current norms. In this sense internal critique can be norm-affirming, and therefore even conservative in its effects. Immanent critique is different in this respect.  Although immanent critique appeals to norms that are currently available to us, it recognizes that these norms, too, remain open to modification. Although the social critic makes use of such norms, this does not imply that we grant them absolute authority. The norms we use may change as the social conditions of their application change. Jaeggi’s distinction assists us in answering the worry about normative Platonism. Nothing in the very concept of a “standard” compels us to accept that a standard must be perfect. On the contrary, I would say that it’s an important feature of social criticism that we allow for the fact that our standards, too, are immanent to social reality. They may be extraordinarily demanding, but they are not world-transcendent: they exhibit the damage of our damaged world.

4. MI: An intriguing aspect of Adorno’s ethics is that his maximalism is counterbalanced by an insistence on the fleeting character of happiness. Modern society pushes alternatives on the defensive, and changing the world for the better looks difficult. Besides this practical problem, however, Adorno sees a theoretical one; an impossibility even to articulate what happiness would consist of. One can detect two versions of this difficulty in his works. On the one hand, he claims that modern capitalism dupes us to such an extent that we are not very reliable commentators of what an emancipated world would look like; that we project our distorted ideals, such as utility maximization, to the future. On the other hand, Adorno thinks that in the post-metaphysical age it is simply impossible to articulate “the good”; and this is so irrespective of how “damaged” capitalism has made our imaginative capacities. In my experience, what makes it challenging to follow Adorno’s reasoning is that he often seems to conflate the two difficulties. Would you agree? And which one do you think is more central to Adorno’s distinctive moral philosophy?

PG: These are excellent questions. I agree with you that Adorno is concerned about the distortion of our ideals. As I noted above, he allows for the idea that the very practice of social critique requires us to make use of certain norms or ideals, even while he also accepts that these ideals may appear to us in distorted form: we glimpse them as if through a glass darkly. Given the widespread damage of our social world, this is altogether expected.

Let me suggest some affinities between Adorno and Marx. As we know, Marx was highly critical of utopianism. He feared that utopian thinking indulges in fantasies that may have little connection to current conditions and may even encourage an otherworldly complacency that diminishes the energy for revolution. But we also know that Marx glimpsed in capitalist society the signs of its own overcoming. This dialectical understanding of society explains why Marx welcomed, for example, the Ten Hours’ Act as a “victory” for the proletariat. And we should not forget that he also welcomed the abolition of slavery in the United States (and he even wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln on that occasion). Such examples show that Marx did not see capitalist society as a seamless and self-affirmative whole. He saw it as an historically dynamic order that contained some favorable signs of progress and was generating its own immanent contradictions. G.E. Cohen called this the “obstetric motif” in Marx’s thought.  Adorno, too, subscribed to an obstetric and dialectical conception of modern society. It follows that Adorno is entirely right to discern within capitalism certain traces or anticipations of what may emerge.

In your question, you refer to the “impossibility” to express what happiness would consist in. But much depends on what we mean by impossibility. Adorno was typically wary of anthropological essentialisms, and he resisted the temptation to furnish his moral theory with a metaphysically secure and “thick” concept of human flourishing. In this respect, he may strike us as rather different from neo-Aristotelians such as Martha Nussbaum, who seem rather more confident in appeals to the realization of human potentials. At the same time, however, Adorno often refers to experiential evidence for what happiness or utopia would be like. This evidence is not wholly dispositive, of course, and he admits in his lectures on problems in moral philosophy that “We may not know what the absolute good is or the absolute norm.” But he also insisted that, “We must hold fast to the normative.” It should be altogether obvious that no experiential evidence would qualify as absolute. On the contrary, Adorno explicitly endorses a kind of fallibilism. The traces of happiness or utopia that are available to us in our current experience will be partial and transient. And yet transience for Adorno is a feature of all phenomena: we find it in bodily pleasure, in works of art, or even in those enigmatic moments that he calls “metaphysical experience.” We know that Adorno was fascinated by such experiences. Those who would see Adorno as a thoroughgoing negativist must ignore all such evidence; they flatten out his theory into a one-sided species of materialist Gnosticism. But in reading him this way they are compelled to dismiss much of his dialectical complexity.

5. MI: Adorno’s emphasis on the precariousness of happiness leads you to call his position “an ethics of vulnerability.” I think that there are interesting parallels between Adorno’s position and Hartmut Rosa’s recent work on “resonance”. Like you, Rosa thinks that Critical Theory must occupy itself not just with language but with more embodied dimensions of human life, dimensions crucial for the early Frankfurt School. What I see uniting your portrait of Adorno and Rosa’s thought is the accent on responsiveness, or some kind of healthy passivity or unpredictability, as a hallmark of happiness. You touch upon this similarity in your book, but only briefly. I would be eager to hear more about what you make of this relation between Adorno and Rosa.

PG: In A Precarious Happiness, I refer to Rosa’s idea of resonance. There’s an instructive resemblance between Rosa and Adorno on these themes. I’ve often felt that Rosa is one of the scholars who is seeking to retain a place for the category of experience in contemporary critical theory, despite the turn among so many others to questions of meta-ethics, normativity, and justification. One problem, however, is that Adorno’s themes of openness and vulnerability remain quite elusive. What criteria are available to us to determine whether a given experience exhibits the proper kind of vulnerability or resonance? Experiential or phenomenological categories such as these have an incorrigibly first-personal character, and it’s unclear to me how they can be evaluated, or whether they are always productive. As Rosa is aware, there are collective forms of resonance or pseudo-resonance in right-wing movements too.

6. MI: To return to the question of Adorno’s pessimism, you offer a fascinating reading of one of the most quoted passages in his works: “only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth.” Adorno said this in his lecture, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” in 1959. While he was adamant that in education one should abstain from exaggeration, in philosophy it occasionally had a role to play. You suggest that, at the darkest moments of Adorno’s social criticism, he may have been intentionally exaggerating to warn people of dangerous societal tendencies that had not yet fully actualized. Does this not mean that in reality Adorno did not think so pessimistically as the champions of the pessimist image of him would have us to believe?

PG: Adorno was at times rather too enamored of his own aphoristic skills. As I’ve noted above, it’s simply not true that only exaggeration is a medium of truth. Perhaps it can be, and on some occasions. But we must always specify in what contexts it works and what is being exaggerated. Übertreibung means over-statement.  It does not accurately describe a given state of affairs; it over-states that state of affairs. In Adorno’s contributions to empirical sociology, I see little evidence of exaggeration. Of course, when we make use of exaggeration we may feel a kind of rhetorical exuberance, or Rausch, to employ a Nietzschean word. Nietzsche himself exemplifies both the advantages and the risks of the hyperbolic style. My own view, as you rightly summarize it, is that most often Adorno deploys exaggeration in a monitory fashion. He means to warn us about conditions that are coming into being. Was Adorno a pessimist? Perhaps that’s not quite the right word. More accurately, I would call him a realist. His dark warnings about the emergence of unfreedom in late modernity strike me as sobering but factually warranted.

My chief quarrel is with those who insist that radical social criticism requires a stance of thoroughgoing normative skepticism. By this I mean a stance that blithely dismisses all normative language as ideology or as an indulgence in what is sometimes called “ideal theory.” Raymond Geuss, for example, has adopted this dismissive posture, and he seems to feel that it bespeaks a tough-minded refusal to accept the platitudes of political liberalism. But this is a philosophical error. There’s nothing tough-minded about granting reality the final word. For any social theory with an emancipatory intent, I find normative skepticism not just unjustified but philosophically unintelligible. Without some understanding that the world is not as it should be, what sense would there be in objecting to it at all?

7. MI: One contested theme in recent debates among critical theorists is the concept of progress. Once seen as a relatively unproblematic phenomenon—both as a historical fact and guiding ideal—progress has come under scrutiny in the wake of postcolonial criticism and climate change. Among critical theorists, I am thinking especially of Amy Allen’s The End of Progress (2017) and Rahel Jaeggi’s Progress and Regression (2025). What do you make of this concept and recent debates around it?

PG: I very much admire both Allen and Jaeggi. Like them, I recognize that the word “progress” has become historically tainted due to its historical associations with the legacy of imperialism, and, as Allen notes, we can only decolonize critical theory if the idea of progress is dismantled or at least revised. Perhaps that is so. But as human agents we logically require some concept of what it means to realize our moral and political aims. If we don’t wish to call it progress, we can surely call it something else: advancement, betterment, improvement. But no social theory with an emancipatory intent can dispense with such an essential concept.  

Allen distinguishes between progress as fact and progress as norm. I'm not convinced that this distinction can be sustained. Once a social movement has achieved a stated aim, through planning and struggle, and despite many setbacks, it’s surely permissible for social agents to look back at the historical record and endorse what they have achieved. As far as I can tell, Allen would deny this. But I may misunderstand her on this point. I would only add that I cannot agree with her interpretation of Adorno’s well-known essay on progress.  In that essay Adorno writes that “Progress occurs where it ends.” If I read her properly, Allen seems to think that this means that the concept of progress no longer has validity. But this characteristically Adornian phrase is structured with dialectical intent. He means that if we dismantle the ideology of progress we will have made a welcome step forward. Real progress will have been achieved. As we know, Adorno often prefers such dialectical phrases: they condemn a given idea or condition by appealing to its own model. This is of course a hallmark of immanent critique. Elsewhere in the same essay Adorno expresses this dialectic. “Too little of what is good has power in the world for progress to be expressed in a predicative judgement of the world, but there can be no good, not a trace of it, without progress.” We should take care to note both moments of his claim.

I believe the concept of progress-as-fact still retains at least some validity. I appreciate that both Allen and Jaeggi want to avoid all traces of teleological confidence: we aren’t moving toward a pre-determined end. To illustrate this point, Jaeggi borrows from Philip Kitcher the proposal that if we abandon the bad teleologies of the past we should no longer think of progress as “progress toward.” Instead we should adopt the more fallibilistic and pragmatic concept of progress as problem-solving or “progress from.” It’s an interesting distinction, but I’m not certain that it resolves our difficulties. After all, a social problem can be solved in countless ways. “Progress from” may just beg the question. Even if our movement is defined only negatively, as Jaeggi would prefer, we still need some assurance that we are moving in a better direction.

Needless to say, I don’t mean to diminish the important work that is being done to revise critical theory and overcome its epistemic paternalism and its entanglement with the ideologies of a mission civilisatrice. Those ideologies have introduced a grave distortion into even the most admirable forms of social theory, and that includes most forms of Marxism.

8. MI: I would like to come back to the question of maximalism once more, this time from the perspective of political authoritarianism spreading around us. In Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno introduced a new categorical imperative for post-Holocaust humanity: “to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” This maxim is usually taken to confirm that Adorno was an ethical negativist; his maxim tells us what not to do but nothing beyond that. In your view, however, much more is implied here than we commonly assume. What exactly?

PG: The crucial term in Adorno’s phrase is “nothing similar.” Today we see striking and manifold similarities between the fascisms of the past and the emergent neo-fascist movements of today. In our current situation, Adorno’s novel version of the categorical imperative has assumed an extraordinary relevance. Several years ago, during the first Trump administration, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a political statement that unequivocally condemned historical “analogies.” I found this philosophically perplexing and politically naïve. All historical understanding requires the use of conceptual categories that permit us to discern both similarities and dissimilarities. Together with a great many other scholars, I signed a statement to express my displeasure with the USHMM’s statement.

Some believe that the slogan “never again” means that the State of Israel, as the state of refuge for so many victims of the Holocaust, must be exempted from any and all criticism.  Surely that belief is mistaken. If the slogan retains any meaning today, it’s because it can serve as a universal warning: it can alert us to the constant possibility of authoritarian regression, and the real danger that mass-atrocity might be perpetrated upon vulnerable populations anywhere on the globe. Notice that Adorno phrases the injunction with a comparative logic. The demand that nothing similar should ever happen again has a validity as a categorical imperative if and only if it applies everywhere— to everyone and to every state without selectivity or exception. It must apply in Gaza, in Sudan; it must apply and at each and every border where immigrants and refugees are subjected to state violence.

This already injects Adorno’s slogan with a maximalist meaning. I agree with Fabian Freyenhagen on many points and consider him one of the finest scholars in contemporary critical theory. But on the question of Adorno’s minimalism, I find myself in sharp disagreement. Adorno believed that signs of authoritarian regression can be found everywhere. In this sense, the categorical statement that we must arrange both our thoughts and our conduct such that nothing similar should ever occur implies far more than a minor adjustment. At issue is something far more demanding than the reformist ethic of “living less wrongly” (a puzzling phrase). “Never again” implies a drastic transformation that touches upon nearly everything we think and do.

9. MI: To stay on the theme of authoritarian politics, am I right in observing that of all Adorno’s theories you find the “culture industry” the most timely today? And not primarily in the sense that one can see in Trumpism’s symbiosis with Fox News a crude example of the manipulative use of modern mass media. You have instead argued that Trumpism testifies to a much larger cultural malady, not confined to Trumpists and on display across the political spectrum, namely the withering of independent thinking amid “echo chambers” and the standardization of public discourse. Do I understand you correctly?

PG: The essay that you have in mind was one that I first presented at a conference at Harvard in the summer of 2016, some months before Donald Trump was elected to his first term as U.S. President. It was subsequently revised for publication, first in boundary2, and later revised again and expanded for a larger book on authoritarianism, alongside essays by two superb scholars, Wendy Brown and Max Pensky. Since that time, I have modified my views considerably.

In 2016, I had little knowledge of Trump. I vaguely knew that he was a brash personality who appeared in the popular media for his real-estate deals in New York, and for his role on “The Apprentice,” a reality-TV show in which he simply played himself. My early opinion of Trump was that he was little more than an absurdity, an excrescence of the popular media who excelled only at boasting and promoting himself as a commercial brand. Such a clown did not strike me as a viable candidate, and I was fairly confident that he would lose in the presidential elections. Clearly, I was mistaken.

I still think that Trump the individual is unimpressive, impulsive, and incurious. He is less an ideologue than a narcissist who seems to change policies and opinions for the most primitive reasons. But we must distinguish between the individual and his movement.  Today, I place a far greater emphasis on the political and socio-economic features of the movement that has formed around him.  

I also take seriously the analogy to fascism.  As you may know, several years ago a handful of self-appointed experts on American politics claimed that one cannot be a leftist and use the term “fascism” when referring to Trump. In their opinion, to use that term was implicitly defensive: it implied an admiration for the status quo ante of American political liberalism. Like most of my colleagues on the left, I find this charge preposterous. It conflates genuine diagnosis with a strategic game where arguments are evaluated not for their accuracy but for their political effects. It thrives chiefly in the overheated world of on-line political contestation where radicals try to outdo one another in signaling who is further to the left. Unfortunately, however, this kind of posturing has also started to overtake even serious academic discourse. The irony is that this originated as a right-wing talking-point. Trumpists often accuse the left of “Trump derangement syndrome” or “liberal hysteria.”  The debate over the fascism analogy reflects some of the same pathologies of American political culture that spawned Trumpism itself.  

As a matter of diagnosis, we must take great care to avoid the polemical valences of all our terms. Back in 2020 before Trump’s defeat, I entertained the possibility of a neo-fascist trend. But I also took care to say that the differences to fascism are legion. The MAGA movement bears some resemblance to mid-century fascism, and in other respects it is obviously quite different. Any reasonable observer should take note of both similarities and differences without turning the discussion into a contest for academic prestige.

One major difference is that MAGA did not emerge out of the ruins of a catastrophic military defeat. Mid-twentieth century fascism in Europe was essentially paramilitary in spirit and nourished a deadly zeal for a new world war. The new MAGA movement also has a carnivalesque and commercial aspect that strikes me as uniquely American. Even as President Trump holds rallies for his most zealous followers, they have little in common with the scrupulously choreographed military rallies of the fascist past. They are only the most recent representatives of patterns in American political culture that go back at least a century. In Trumpism, we can see the upsurge of a distinctive kind of Christian nationalism and racism that has recently regained its pseudo-populist appeal thanks in part to the radicalizing effects of the digital media. But this is merely a pseudo-populism: it makes use of working class resentment though Trump’s economic policies hardly work to their advantage. There is also the question of foreign policy. During his first term, Trump tended to uphold an isolationist stance: he condemned the Iraq war and insisted on an ‘America First’ policy that discouraged interventionism and foreign wars.  During his second term, of course, this isolationism has fallen away entirely. At first some observed that Trump had simply embraced a new version of the Monroe Doctrine, returning to the familiar habits of imperialism within the American sphere of influence. But that’s no longer plausible.  Since Trump took office a little over a year ago, the U.S. has bombed at least seven countries. As you and I complete this interview, the U.S. has commenced a war of choice against Iran. He has also made new initiatives, chiefly with immigration officers, to remilitarize American streets. The military and paramilitary spirit of mid-twentieth century fascism has returned.

This brings me back to the fascism analogy. For most of the twentieth century, the political left has recognized that the fascist tide is not confined to specific places or times: it ebbs and flows according to broader socio-economic and cultural crises. Democratic systems seem to be especially vulnerable to this form of political regression. Adorno himself used the term fascism in an expansive sense, and rightly so. There is great value in retaining the term for purposes of comparison. You’ll recall that in his address on “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” he observed, “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascistic tendencies against democracy.”

If we conceive of fascism in the generic sense as a mass movement of populist nativism, then it is plausible to say that what we are witnessing in the States represents a particular variant of fascism, but in a distinctively American form. The historian Robert Paxton summarized this point in his 2004 study, The Anatomy of Fascism:

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance.

Paxton’s comments strike me as quite prescient. But I am hardly an expert on the United States. Recent studies by scholars such as Sarah Churchwell and Eric Lichtblau provide further documentation regarding the past and present of fascist trends in America.  

Let me now address your question about standardization. Yes, I think we are witnessing an emergent pathology of mass-standardization in capitalist culture. It afflicts all of us, on both the left and the right, and not only in the commercial sphere. As Pierre Bourdieu argued, even among the intellectual class one detects a tendency to think within carefully policed boundaries and in accordance with algorithms that are reinforced by norms of academic discipline along with cultural and political affiliation. This problem may not be entirely new, and I don’t believe that capitalism alone is wholly to blame. Many anthropologists and sociologists of knowledge would agree with cognitive scientists that the human mind has a tendency to adhere to socially available categories or types. Processes of digital standardization may have only exacerbated this tendency.

10. MI: You show in A Precarious Happiness that Adorno was a much more robust moral philosopher than we have realized: a neo-Aristotelian, albeit a very idiosyncratic one. You point out, however, that what really concerned Adorno were moral sentiments or intuitions, and that he looked in askance at demands to offer rational justifications for them. Adorno was undoubtedly right in insisting that certain moral intuitions—most notably the “never again Auschwitz” maxim—do not need justification. But you note that this distrust of argumentation, when generalized into a principle, leaves Adorno’s ethics with no other authority than his own experience. To save Adorno from this danger, you hint at the need to marry his materialist insights with later Critical Theory’s emphasis on justification. How challenging would such a synthesis be? Any chance that you might undertake it yourself in the future?
    
PG: For those who admire Adorno (as I do), this suggestion may seem the most controversial. I do not think we should cling without criticism to any theorist as an incorrigible authority. We can think with Adorno even while we retain the freedom to think otherwise. One of the great strengths of Adorno is that he was willing to entertain genuinely radical thoughts without necessarily backing them up with the most rigorous arguments. As you rightly say, he pursued his own moral intuitions and sentiments. What I’ve called the “traces” of happiness in his work appear chiefly thanks to his own acumen for scrupulous and detailed description.

But this method also has its limitations. Adorno often writes as if the experiences he describes are self-certifying, and this is a major problem. If we experience the world in the right way, he expects that we will simply assent to his moral intuitions. But what if we happen to disagree? What if I do not experience a Mahler symphony in the way Adorno did? Or what if I do not believe that “metaphysical experience” (as Adorno calls it in Negative Dialectics) has the phenomenological quality he describes? Or what if I do not share his assessment of popular music? Although he had a tremendous gift for “micrological” analysis, we should resist the urge to see his conclusions as beyond criticism. This is why I suggest that two tendencies in Frankfurt School critical theory should be brought together: the first-generation theme of experience should be joined with the second- and third-generation emphasis on rational justification. I realize that this claim may leave me with few allies. Unfortunately, critical theory today seems fractured, and not in the good sense. It has broken into rival camps. This strikes me as highly unphilosophical: it’s a style of friend-enemy thinking that could lead to the destruction of a truly valuable philosophical tradition.

Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor in History and Faculty Affiliate in Philosophy and Government at Harvard University. His recent books include Adorno and Existence (Harvard, 2016); Adorno und die Quellen der Normativität (Suhrkamp, 2023; Chicago, 2024); and Walter Benjamin: the Pearl Diver (Yale, 2026).

Mikko Immanen is Academy Research Fellow at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki and the author of Adorno’s Gamble: Harnessing German Ideology (2025) and of Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School (2020), both with Cornell University Press.

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Global Social Theory

Editors: Gert Verschraegen und Raf Vanderstraeten. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham (UK) and Northampton, MA (USA) 2025, 383 pages. ISBN: 978-1-80392211-9 (Hardcover) bzw. 978-1-80392212-6 (eBook)

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Global Social Theory is a volume in the Elgar Encyclopedias in Sociology series. All volumes in this series are reference works for students, researchers and practitioners in various sub-fields of sociology. The volume reviewed here was edited by Gert Verschraegen (University of Antwerp, Netherlands) and Raf Vanderstraeten (Ghent University, Belgium). The entire book is written in English.

Sociology is, in itself, a relatively young academic discipline. Its origins lie exclusively in 19th-century Europe, primarily in France. From the 1970s onwards, this made it increasingly vulnerable to criticism as a bastion of Eurocentric worldviews, which, whilst not having lost themselves in the abyss of colonial bias as large parts of ethnology had done up to that point, Nevertheless, it was an undeniable flaw of the discipline that virtually all sociological discourse took place solely amongst Western researchers. The justification that there was too little academically qualified material coming from other parts of the world rang hollow in light of the academic practice of largely ignoring the voices of other cultures. For these voices did exist.

This volume now demonstrates that an open, intercultural sociology not only has a long history, but also brings with it very important new perspectives and corrections to established views. With 71 contributors and 65 encyclopaedic articles, the editors of this volume have created a work that is unique in its kind and long overdue. It is true that calls for an intercultural sociological discourse have been made for half a century. In practice, however, these discussions often get bogged down in accusations from representatives of formerly marginalised cultures, as well as justifications and expressions of remorse from Western participants in the discourse. This is precisely what makes this encyclopaedia so refreshing: it presents strictly objective research perspectives, without polemics.

Given the expected wealth of perspectives that emerges once one sets aside one’s Eurocentric blinders, the individual contributions can, of course, only provide an overview. It is true that, with 24 out of a total of 71 contributors, only around a third of the participating authors do not come from the core Western countries (Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). However, this is not particularly significant, as the remaining contributors are all equally well-versed in intercultural perspectives. With an average of five printed pages and a bibliographical reference at the end of each contribution, they all nevertheless provide a sufficiently detailed and academically precise insight into the respective sociological approach.

There is little point in reproducing a list of the individual encyclopaedia entries here. By clicking on the link above to Elgar Publishing’s website, you can easily get an idea of the range of topics covered in this volume. Mind you, this is an encyclopaedia, not a textbook. Yet that is precisely what makes it a work that will not become outdated any time soon. For whilst every single line of theory addressed here may continue to evolve, most of them will continue to shape global sociological discourse for many years to come, and some of them may even become far more significant. (ws)

Cary Wolfe: Jagged Ontologies (University of Minnesota Press 2026, 203 pages – ISBN 978-1-5179-2106-4)

Cary Wolfe (b. 1959) is professor emeritus of English at Rice University, where he served as founding director of 3CT: Critical and Cultural Theory and as a fellow at the Berggruen Institute. He is the author of several books, including Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations and What is Posthumanism?, as well as the editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Philosophically, Wolfe is not easy to categorize. He primarily presented himself as a posthumanist and developed a specific understanding of this position through a combination of systems theory (here with strong references to the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann), deconstructionism (also with strong references to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault), theoretical biology, and biopolitical philosophy (here again drawing on Foucault as well as the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito). He focuses on the ethical, social, and political challenges posed to the biosphere by humanity, which must redefine its role on this planet. By extending his approach across multiple disciplines and fields of practice that are normally rarely connected—from ecological theory and continental philosophy to law, public policy, and contemporary art—Wolfe reveals the contradictions that have so far gone unnoticed even in today’s most progressive approaches to the possible redefinition of human existence on Earth.

Wolfe’s approach is challenging; it is not bound to any particular philosophical or political movement or school, though it is closely aligned with Posthumanism and Critical Theory. Above all, it is holistically oriented. His approach may draw the ire of all anti-“woke” fundamentalists in the U.S., who are certainly not pleased by his frequent references to European—especially French—philosophers. Nevertheless, Wolfe does not directly intervene in the U.S. culture war, insofar as he does not engage in heated debates on topics such as gender relations and discrimination against non-white people.

When it comes to posthumanism, he draws a clear line between it and transhumanism, as popularized primarily by the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. Transhumanists favor the idea that humans should overcome their biological limitations and, for example, expand as an algorithmic complex in any technical and, above all, digital form  beyond Earth into the entire accessible universe. Wolfe does not subscribe to this view. Rather, he strives for a new collective self-image of the species “human,” in which the boundary between humans and animals is merely one of many—and of equal standing—boundaries within the Earth’s biosphere. He emphasizes that the individual organism and its environment must always be viewed as a structurally integrated whole, that culture is mediated biologically as well as technically and symbolically, and—referring in particular to Luhmann’s systems theory—that all systems generate their own boundaries and, as observers of the world, always remain an operative part of the systems they observe. However, he does not suggest that humans and animals are “the same” or that all differences disappear. On the contrary: Wolfe is particularly interested in the many differences that only come to light when one abandons the supposedly absolute special status of humans.

With that in mind, his latest book, Jagged Ontologies, can now be understood. The book is divided into seven chapters. In the introduction, Wolfe first explains what he means by “jagged.” In general, “the world” as a whole cannot be described—and certainly not from a single perspective. Ultimately, it is exceedingly complex and, on top of that, fundamentally more contradictory than we care to admit in everyday life.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to Wolfe’s ontology of the biosphere. Drawing on numerous other modern authors—from Gregory Bateson to Umberto Maturana, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Stuart Kauffman—he demonstrates that biological evolution unfolds within a fundamentally open space of possibilities for future developments. Living beings differ from prebiotic structures, among other things, in that they operate to a high degree in a self-referential and recursive manner, frequently shift the phase space of their conditions of existence, shape their respective environments according to their needs in the course of their own development, and behave in a goal-directed manner. In this sense, according to Wolfe, there is not “one” nature, but rather many interpenetrating natures with very different patterns of operation.

In Chapter 2, Wolfe focuses primarily on the relatively new term “sympoiesis,” which builds on the older, systems-theoretical concept of autopoiesis. The latter refers to a system’s self-perpetuation, such as in a species’ biological reproductive capacity. The neologism “sympoiesis” was coined in 1998 by the Canadian ecologist M. Beth Dempster in her master’s thesis, but was not popularized until 2016 by the American historian Donna Haraway. Wolfe criticizes the term as ideologically motivated, arguing that it romanticizes the interaction of diverse natural systems into a grand collaboration. In reality, however, nature is characterized not only by symbiotic but also by equally strong aggressive behavioral patterns. It is therefore misleading to deny this. Consequently, it is wrong to replace the concept of autopoiesis with that of sympoiesis, because this suggests that there are “actually” no boundaries at all in the the biosphere. The opposite is true: it is precisely these systemic boundaries that give rise to the multitude of species in the first place—and thus also to their completely different strategies for survival and development. The popularity of the term “sympoiesis” is more a result of the political tensions of our time, which seek in such ideas a relief from an existential lack of meaning.

In Chapter 3, Wolfe continues his critique of the anthropomorphization of nature. This applies in particular to the notion that nature acts in an inherently ethical manner. There is no empirical evidence for this, if only because animals and plants do not act in the same way that humans do. In this chapter, Wolfe also incorporates poetry into his reflection on the concept of nature, such as works by the American poets A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery (among others). Heidegger and Deleuze are also given a voice. Here and in the following chapters, it becomes clear that Wolfe’s integral approach explicitly includes artistic creation and its reflection on nature.

Chapter 4 illustrates the “fragmentation” of biological structures around the world using the example of Big Bend National Park, located in the U.S. state of Texas directly on the border with Mexico. There, within a relatively small area, lies a region that is biologically sharply demarcated from its barren surroundings and home to a rich variety of flora and fauna. In this chapter, Wolfe once again draws a broad intellectual arc by bringing this and similar phenomena into dialogue with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, the biopolitical approach of Roberto Esposito, and other authors in contemporary political philosophy. According to this approach, democracy is not the model of a grand consensus, but rather the mutual interpenetration of completely different lifeworlds. In this respect, the political program of democracy resembles general ecological complexity.

Chapter 5 is devoted to the German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), who, in his partly mystical art, also made a biopolitical claim. Wolfe defends Beuys against accusations of obscurantism and analyzes, with great sensitivity, some of his best-known and, in some cases, spectacular actions.

In Chapter 6, Wolfe links the idea of posthumanism with autopoietic dynamics and Michel Foucault’s biopolitical lectures at the Collège de France in the 1970s. Here, Wolfe once again demonstrates his deep familiarity with contemporary continental (European) philosophy. He defends Foucault from a systems-theoretical perspective, again drawing on Niklas Luhmann and other American (e.g., Wendy Brown) and European philosophers of Critical Theory. Wolfe also reiterates his specific understanding of autopoiesis and posthumanism: For him, the recognition of the hypercomplexity of the biological sphere—extending to all of human sociality, including the political—is at the heart of a badly needed new relationship to the world.

In the chapter 7, Wolfe ultimately demonstrates that the various claims and political ideas loosely associated with the concept of an “environmental movement” are in fact not only fundamentally different but even contradictory. In line with his view of an hypercomplex nature, he is critical of any simplistic concept of environmental protection, because behind it lurks humanity’s presumption to know better and to disrupt evolutionary dynamics. For Wolfe, “nature” is simply not “the environment,” for there are as many “natures” as there are environments.

When taking this fascinating book as a whole, many readers will find it difficult to reconcile the very broad spectrum of metaphysical, systems-theoretical, biological, postmodern, artistic, and even political perspectives. But that is apparently precisely Cary Wolfe’s aim: to highlight the abundance and wholeness of our existence on earth by looking at the very different worlds of which humanity is only a small part. (Wolfgang Sohst, Berlin)

Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (editors): Power, Neoliberalism and the Reinvention of Politics. The Critical Theory of Wendy Brown. (2022) The Pennsylvania State University Press, 196 pages.

Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta, two well-known exponents of contemporary Critical Theory, have produced a very concise volume of essays (in addition to two by Wendy Brown herself) from a total of six intimate connoisseurs of Wendy Brown's political philosophy from her first publications in 1988 to the present. These are: Robin Celikates, Loren Goldman, Asad Haider, Robyn Marasco, and Johanna Oksala. The presentation of the book is well done in several respects. First, all the contributors know Wendy Brown personally and also theoretically very well. They, therefore, approach her critically, but nevertheless with a positive attitude toward her principled approach that has nothing to do with the often admiring exegesis of similar volumes. Second, the volume itself is in a sense a conversation, not only because it was produced as the result of a discussion held on April 19 and 20, 2019, but because Wendy Brown once again summarizes the principles of her political philosophy at the beginning of the book (after a joint introduction with Eduardo Mendieta) and responds to the critiques of the other contributors at the end.

An important developmental step in Wendy Brown's philosophy is her departure, already twenty years in the making, from an identitarian feminism to a structurally much more thorough analysis of contemporary social conditions. In place of the social role type "woman", intersectional structures of discrimination have since become more and more central to her thinking. These are gender, race, class, culture, and religion. The focus of Brown's critique, however, is and remains today's neoliberalism, which has its most extreme blossoms in the USA. This in turn thrives on the foundations of a state that, at least in the global West, is ideologically strongly tailored to neoliberalism. This includes, in particular, the strict separation between the public and private spheres. This, in turn, has long been criticized by the now traditional feminism, insofar as only through this separation can the banishment of social reproduction, especially the rearing of children, be relegated to the private sphere. This, in turn, is one of the main reasons why women around the world, once they have children, revert to a politically deaf private world, forcing the public sphere and politics to be left to male design criteria.

However, the authors besides Wendy Brown also pose some critical questions to her. Brown, for example, places great emphasis on the political significance of the contemporary state, which places itself primarily in the service of the economy. The non-economic sectors of the social, especially biological reproduction, are thus not only primarily attributed to women, but fundamentally removed from the political. Behind this are certain hierarchies of values that should be questioned. In this regard, Eduardo Mendieta raises the very general question of how one can appear in political discourse at all without insisting either on the truth of one's positions or on some axiomatic principles. His somewhat provisional answer is that discourse is only open-minded when the participants reflect on the history of the development of their own position, ie. when they argue in a genealogical way. In another contribution, Johanna Oksala analyzes very precisely what space the political can actually occupy in relation to the economy if one opens up the usual restriction of the political to the public-economic sphere. It is questionable that the neoliberal-capitalist structure of society will be rendered invalid if only, for example, women and their reproductive services are brought back into the public sphere and thus also into the political sphere. Asad Haider examines a related question that is only seemingly contrary to Johanna Oksala's perspective. He examines the plausibility of Brown's repeated suggestion that a major goal of neoliberalism is the depoliticization of society. Haider shows with Foucault that things are not so simple. Power and structures of domination are located at a much deeper level than the relatively frequently changing political surface structures historically. Neoliberalism merely uses means typical of it to prevent the politicization of social issues that stand in the way of its program, for example, by means of a technical reduction of social problems, delegation to experts, and so on. In the end, it emerges here that the concept of the political already conceptually logically presupposes a boundary of the political to a sphere of the apolitical surrounding it, because both phenomena can only exist at all in their dialectical relationship. An important point, also raised again later, concerns the nihilistic tendency of neoliberalism.
An important point, also raised again later, concerns the nihilistic tendency of neoliberalism. Depoliticization and nihilism are closely related, insofar as with the loss of the political, the public criteria of social solidarity are also lost, leaving only private consumerism as a social dynamic. In particular, out of this development, the suppression of sexual needs in the period leading up to the end of World War II has been reversed into an excessive celebration and even ubiquitous promotion of the sexual, so that "sexual liberation" has now become part of the dynamic of depoliticization of society.

In her concluding rejoinder, Wendy Brown does not address in great detail the individual questions, some of them critical, raised by the other contributors. Instead, she tries once again to lay out her approach in one broad line. In doing so, she also addresses the sometimes contradictory attitude of the left toward the nation-state. On the one hand, the left criticizes the authoritarian or even oversized nation-state, as expressed, for example, in Russia, China, or the United States. On the other hand, it sympathizes with the demands for its own nation-state of, for example, the Palestinians, the Kurds, or the Puerto Ricans. And it also criticizes an attitude on the part of the left that transforms resistance to existing conditions from a means to achieve something better into an end. As a result, the left loses sight of the need to present a viable proposal of its own for a democratically better society in order to remain credible. And even in an optimal democracy, it will not be possible to completely abolish relations of domination. They would only have to be justified differently. Ultimately, however, this means working on a new concept of the political and also working on a new self-understanding of a polity, if it does not want to rely only on a state and its borders, which have somehow grown historically. The volume reveals that a constructive, new form of political discourse will only be possible if all participants agree to acknowledge their own historically evolved position and thus also expose themselves to change through newly occurring circumstances. Wendy Brown is one of the few critical political philosophers who openly states that the formulation of a new, better form of a modern polity is anything but an easy task and that today's left has much to make up for itself in this regard. (Wolfgang Sohst)