Dialectical Zach Zack Loeffler

#spiceupmarxsky

don’t remember if i posted here or not but here’s a snippet from Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer in the middle of their worst fight (1935) where A goes “By the way I LOVED Dämmerung if you even still care…” lol

Adorno and Hegel on Subject and Object (2025) This chapter focuses on assessing the significance of Hegel's infuence on two key pillars of Adorno's thought: first, his critique of constitutive subjectivity; and second, his priority of the...

New paper, “Adorno and Hegel on Subject and Object,” now out in the OUP Handbook of Adorno www.academia.edu/143573230/Ad...

Anyone hear about the federal appeals court ruling that the structure of the NLRB is unconstitutional?

I've now been allowed and asked to share more details about what's going down at the University of Oregon, which involves imminent announcement of firings, among others, of tenure-track and tenured faculty. Given the units impacted (see below), please share this with your professional networks in related disciplines and start getting ready to put pressure (or begin putting pressure already) on the University of Oregon upper admin to abandon this alleged plan before they finalize it. It appears that, with no prior consultations, the departments of Religion and Classics (two separate units), and the programs in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, German & Scandinavian, Judaic Studies, Arabic Studies, and Holocaust Studies (the latter five all parts of a previously-consolidated mega unit called the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages) are facing imminent announcement of elimination (expected the week of Sept 7), with layoffs of pre-tenure, tenured, and career faculty in these units. The reason given is "financial exigency" -- upper administrations of several universities across the country (and in blue states like Oregon also) appear to be giddy to use the context of Trump attacks on higher ed to dismantle the humanities. Faculty at OU won a faculty union not long ago; this may be, in part, a retaliation for that, I've been told. The union is working with AAUP, etc.; my understanding is that the maximum spotlight is needed at this point.

A massive attack on several humanities units (Arabic Studies, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Classics, Religion, German & Scandinavian, Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies) *and* tenure now unfolding at the University of Oregon (a blue state!). Closure of units and faculty layoffs threatened.

Episode 2: Politics of Early Critical Theory | crittheoryworkgroup Get more from crittheoryworkgroup on Patreon

NEW: EP2: Politics of Early Critical Theory.

Join your hosts J.E. Morain & yours truly for an intro to the rogue's gallery of far left dissidents (communists, socialists, anarchists, etc) at the core of the 'Frankfurt School' from the early 1920s-late 40's!

www.patreon.com/posts/episod...

we’ve been quiet because we’ve been working on this for a minute—see you in just over a week for the first session on Kanafani’s “On Zionist Literature”!

12 July 1957 lecture by Adorno to UChicago students on “the purpose of education” defending disciplinary specialization. “the shortest path to genuine universality is to be found precisely when we abandon the quest for the merely general.”

AAUP AHD open letter This is an open letter from members of the University of Chicago community to the university administration. It is sponsored by UChicago AAUP, but you do not need to be a member to sign (though we enc...

U Chicago AAUP fights back docs.google.com/document/d/1...

translation from the minutes Pollock took during Horkheimer’s lecture on Marx (Summer 1931): on the the uniqueness of Marx’s dialectic & his double-distance from the absolute

here’s a translation of the discussion protocols Horkheimer & Adorno held in October 1946 for the second planned installment of “Dialectic of Enlightenment”!
open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

in Feb 1947, Marcuse writes 33 Theses on the libertarian communist anti-program for postwar critical theory, which Horkheimer will use as a foundation for his own marginal reflections on class, revolution, & freedom for 2+ years. Translated for the 1st time here (🔗⬇️)

Can I add screenshotted by Adam Tooze to my CV?

Finally getting around to reading Adorno's lectures Volume 2: Social Theory and Politics and the end of the lecture on The Relationship Between Individual and Society is fucking great

2)Adorno is often criticized for his heterodox thinking about praxis, but the way he squared off against the Rockefeller foundation tells a more complicated story than the one we usually tell. Jameson makes a similar point.

two preliminary thoughts from my first deep dive into the radio research project: 1) Adorno’s theory of the culture industry is clearly a response to seeing first hand how capital, the state, and academia ‬came together to develop administrative techniques for influencing the public musically.

From 1939 lecture Adorno gave at the Rockefeller-funded Princeton radio Research Project explaining his approach wouldn't be like the usual ones where “the guiding interest…is basically one of...how to manipulate the masses” but “a social critique of radio” based on the following axioms:

Adorno:“Dialectical thought is not merely intellectualist in character, since it is precisely thought’s attempt to recognize its limitations by recourse to the matter [die Sache] itself. How does thought succeed w/in its own thought-determinations in doing justice to the matter?”

Thanks Crane!

My article on the antinomy of encore-loving and -hating is an attempt at a music-oriented critical theory inspired by Adorno. It’s been in the works for a long time + is the closest I’ve come to saying something. Thanks to @crittheoryworkgrp.bsky.social for notes. online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-...

check out Zach’s ( @thezachloeffler.bsky.social ) new piece—a critical theory of the encore on the model of Adorno’s writings on music! a lot of us (myself included) talk the Adorno talk but Zach walks the walk! one of my favorite pieces of writing in years

online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article/...

I’m on the executive committee of the NTT union, and even I don’t have much info. Meetings with AAUP and other groups are just being organized now. Lots of people out of town obviously.

I haven’t talked to any faculty in music, but I’m not sure anyone knows exactly what’s going on. I am worried that music could be “consolidated” with the other “arts” depts. I really have no idea. First thing I thought of yesterday when I learned about all this.

Not entirely sure what’s happening at Chicago yet, but it’s happening fast and largely in secret—I’ve heard the provost has ordered the dean to consolidate depts in the humanities div with fewer than 15 TT faculty. Could be the end of some very important depts and PhD programs.

have to admit though that my favorite of Horkheimer’s critical recoveries of Nietzsche is from Dämmerung (1934), “Nietzsche & the Proletariat”!

To combat “indoctrination,” everyone has to take a year-long seminar called how positivism became philosophy by negating philosophy:the problem of truth amid the irreconcilability of universal+ particular and the incoherence of an objectively binding factuality unmediated by subjectivity

Heat Map | The Brooklyn Rail Late on the night of June 14, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sent out a triumphant post on X that summed up the volatile situation in the city, at least from her vantage point.

Disturbing stuff. Great piece by @profitratedown.bsky.social

The One-Man Plague | The Brooklyn Rail The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the decisions made across the world to shut down normal economic and social life to contain its spread were real enough. But the idea that the global recession...

“It’s one thing to propose that ‘another world is possible,’ but it actually seems impossible even to curb police violence, much less reconfigure the whole apparatus of production and distribution. And yet this is what must be done.”

Mattick on point as always

brooklynrail.org/2025/07/fiel...

Art and Abolition: A Proposal - Journal #155 Dominique Routhier on “art” as a fictional bourgeois category that arises from capitalist relations of production.

"Against vexingly persistent elitist and transhistorical conceptions of art as existing outside the material conditions of its production, Routhier offers a 'categorical' critique of art."

- I have a new essay out, read it here:

www.e-flux.com/journal/155/...