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This paper examines the dialectical relationship between myth and utopia, fantasy and reason. The text presents 'interpretive keys' that enable historical consciousness to interpret the past and critically decipher glimpses of utopia in the traces of the present. The presented theoretical models are primarily those of the Frankfurt School philosophers Benjamin and Adomo, who base their positions on Hegel’s philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adorno and Benjamin's common intellectual project has been labeled, by Adorno, an Inverse Theology. This re-translation of theology into it's metaphysical truth contents can be only fully comprehended by taking into account their position towards the work of art. In this article, I locate the place where the categorical framework of "inverse theology" is displayed in a most complete manner in the discussion of Kafka's prose and extrapolate the outline of an Inverse theology from Adorno and Benjamin's readings of some of his most famous texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between the philosophical concept of the “autonomy of art” and the cultural policy-notion of “artistic freedom”? This article seeks to answer this question by taking the Swedish governmental report This Is How Free Art Is (Så fri är konsten 2021) and its reception in the Swedish main stream media as an emblematic example and by reading it symptomatically. Firstly, it traces the critical history of “artistic freedom” and the interrelated term “arm’s length distance”, primarily in the context of Great Britain. Secondly, it critically reconstructs the concept of the “autonomy of art” in the history of Western philosophy by making a critique of a fetishized notion of art’s autonomy in the name of l’art pour l’art. The main argument is that the idea about art’s autonomy, on which the Swedish report leans, resembles such philosophical and art historical idea of art’s autonomy. The claim is also that such an understanding of art does not tie up, either philosophically or historically, with the arm’s length principle, since they ultimately rely on different conceptions of art’s freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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.

O propósito deste trabalho consiste na reconstrução dos conceitos de constelação, parataxe e ensaio no pensamento de Theodor Adorno, no intuito de aproximá-los por afinidade, porém, demonstrando a maneira que cada qual expressa, dentro de suas especificidades, a insistência de Adorno em um modelo de pensamento no qual o não idêntico: 1) resiste à subsunção conceitual, ao se dispor em uma configuração constelatória; 2) não sucumbe a justaposições subordinadas próprias da linguagem meramente comunicativa; e 3) encontra sua melhor expressão filosófica na forma ensaio. Para tanto, tomar-se-á como ponto de partida o rearranjo da categoria de constelação como herança do pensamento de Walter Benjamin, para, em seguida, apresentar a ampliação dessa categoria no pensamento de Adorno, relacionando-a tanto à concepção de parataxe como à acepção da forma ensaio, mas visando a entender essas categorias enquanto modo de se pensar filosoficamente, com vistas à elucidação do lugar do não idêntico no âmbito do pensamento dialético.

Referência do artigo comentado: FRANÇA, Fabiano Leite. Constelação, parataxe e ensaio: os arcanos do pensamento da não identidade. Trans/Form/Ação: Revista de Filosofia da Unesp. v. 45, n. 4, p. 33-54, 2022.

Referência do artigo comentado: FRANÇA, Fabiano Leite. Constelação, parataxe e ensaio: os arcanos do pensamento da não identidade. Trans/form/ação: revista de Filosofia da Unesp, v. 45, n. 4, p. 33-54, 2022.

This article intends to identify how the cognitive procedure of Kant's critical philosophy is related to the enlightened principle of expanding the world. My hypothesis is that the task of the critical philosophy on knowing "how is it possible the synthetic a priori judgements?" takes to the enlargement of the faculty of judgment and the possession of objects by the intellect. Notions such as Copernican Revolution, Experience, and Space-Time are forms which cannot be seen as bare principles for knowing objects but also as elements that allow to have the world through judgments; this expresses a model of modernization as well. That was noted by the young Benjamin and the elders Adorno & Horkheimer, which, despite to have different views on Kant's philosophy, realized its strength in a way that these principles could still be observed at the social domain in the first half of 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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El texto esclarece el lugar que Freud y su invento tuvieron en la obra y pensamiento de Walter Benjamin. Lo hace recurriendo a la correspondencia entre Benjamin mismo y Theodor Adorno, y al testimonio al respecto de Gershom Scholem. Muestra cómo Adorno envía a Benjamin hacia Freud y su obra al menos un par de veces, una con relación al sufrimiento psicológico de su hijo, Stefan Benjamin, y la otra con relación a su proyecto de los Pasajes. Ambos envíos tienen un articulador explícito: la decadencia de la imago y la función paternas en la modernidad industrial, llamada por Benjamin ensoñación moderna. Al final del escrito se conjeturan algunas razones de la distancia que Benjamin mantuvo siempre con relación a Freud y su obra, y que, no obstante este hecho, existen una serie de paralelismos entre La interpretación de los sueños y los Pasajes.

En Roland Barthes por Roland Barthes (2018 [1975]), el crítico francés nos exhorta a leer su ensayo autobiográfico como dicho por un personaje de novela. Este es uno de los hitos donde se suele ubicar el comienzo del denominado "último Barthes", etapa marcada por una voluntad expresa de que su obra tienda a la novelización. Unos años después, en la Lección inaugural (2015 [1978]) dictada en 1977, se autofigura como un "sujeto incierto" por no haber escrito más que ensayos. El presente trabajo se propone leer la escritura de La cámara lúcida (2009 [1980]) en el horizonte de esa doble tensión. El polo novelístico de dicha tensión, además de las propias inquietudes de Barthes por el carácter eminentemente realista de toda literatura, nos permite preguntarnos el modo en que el libro barthesiano sobre la fotografía pone en juego la mímesis realista a través de ciertos aportes de Walter Benjamin (Cfr. 2007). Por otro lado, el polo ensayístico, que impulsaría a formular un pensamiento verdaderamente crítico, invoca la inquietud de leer la obra en su dimensión formal (en el sentido adorniano de la expresión [Cfr. 2013]). Ambas líneas de pesquisa iluminan el problema del medio o la mediación como eje central de la tensión entre novela y ensayo.

A new production of a Richard Wagner work can in no way be compared to other stagings from the current repertoire in its demand of artistic, technical and financial capital. The aesthetic and ideological universe as envisaged by the composer is caught up in a profoundly bourgeois dialectics of regression and progress, which is played out through an intricate interrelationship between nature and machines. This paper investigates the signification of the machine as object and as metaphor in the works of Wagner, as well as in the cultural context from which his operas emerged, aiming to show how the mechanistic universe of the industrial nineteenth century is simultaneously upheld and subverted through Wagner’s reconstruction of nature and myth.

This second part of Tidhar Nir's essay on the aesthetics of the shock deals with Adorno and Benjamin's dialectical implementations of Freudian concepts such as Thanatos, repetition compulsion, and Eros as part of their relation to the autonomy of art. Interpreting works of art as uncanny and as animistic fantasies reveals how art, in their mind, is related to social reality and social struggles for individuality. Benjamin's account of the French photographer Atget stresses commercial fetishism by giving the inanimate new life through the absence of subjectivity. Atget's empty city is uncanny in its repetitiveness of unused objects, and nostalgic trends give a paradoxical expression to a yearning for innovation amidst the ``always the same.'' Alienation in this context can be understood in two different ways: 1) as the conjunction of inner and outer reality that takes place when the ego is objectified and comes to be regarded as a mere instrument; or 2) as a blurring of ego with outer reality in an effort to undermine the forces that have fixated the ego erotically by conjoining it with other life elements. Adorno designates this phenomenon as the ``return of nature'' or the aesthetization of the ego. Adorno's interpretation of poetic language draws the contours for a narcissism in which repetition compulsion may be expressed as an unintelligible sound. But that sound is not meaningless: it reiterates and uncovers the trauma inherent in the reification of language.

Signs between old Bedouins. An epistolary analysis of Benjamin. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Gerhard Scholem (1897-1982) were bound by a deep friendship, intertwined since 1912 and continuing until 1940, when Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, terrified of being handed over to the Nazis. The two intellectuals, both of Jewish faith, made different existential choices: Benjamin remained in Germany until the racial persecution of the Nazi regime forced him to roam around Europe, while Scholem settled in Palestine and worked at the University of Jerusalem, where he could devote himself to the study of Jewish mysticism. The essay concerns the correspondence between the two scholars, particularly on Zionism, the proximity of Benjamin to the communism, the relationship with the scholars of the Institute of Social Research directed by Max Horkheimer and with Bertolt Brecht. On the background of the correspondence is clearly visible Benjamin’s attempt not to give up his intellectual research and friendship, even though he was forced to look for marginal and peripheral places where he could survive in a Europe by then handed over to Hitler's wars.

This article examines the turn to the aesthetic dimension in early 20th century critical theory, particularly in the work of Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno. It focuses on the concept of play (Spiel), which garnered particular attention as a possible form of aesthetic resistance to the reification of reason in modern society. The article traces the concept of play from the work of Lukács, who engaged with Schiller's notion of the play-drive but ultimately viewed it to be an inadequate form of aesthetic resistance, to the work of Benjamin, who optimistically embraced the revolutionary possibility of play. In contrast, the article argues that Adorno's work tacitly advances a critical concept of dark play that offers a third perspective between Lukács's pessimism and Benjamin's optimism, thus avoiding both the retreat into an apolitical aesthetic dimension and the uncritical embrace of play's revolutionary potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Freud's well-known concept of the uncanny has gained considerable influence in the field of aesthetics and beyond, the meaning of the term still remains vague. Is it a mere psychological concept with aesthetic and social implications or is it a culturally produced experience? And although Adorno’s aesthetic theory does not place the concept of the uncanny as its central axis, when linked to Freud's theory, Adorno's conception deepens not only various interpretations of modern art, but also our understanding of the very nature of artistic practice. Psychoanalytic interpretations of modern art couple the uncanny with technology and progress since human-machine interactions usually entail disturbing experiences. Yet no psychoanalytic interpretation of art to date has seen the uncanny as the theoretical foundation of all art. The first part of this essay deals with Adorno’s concept of aesthetic representation in relation to Freud’s uncanny and examines Benjamin’s application of that reasoning in interpreting the technological uncanny and the artistic uncanny.

The article analyses comparatively two essential aesthetics debates of the XXth century, mechanical reproduction and kitsch. Both of them were developed throughout the 20th and 30th decades, and had as protagonists, among others, Adorno and Benjamin. The article defends that exist many common elements between the two debates, that elucidate the philosophical controversy between the two philosophers. Despite that the discussion emerged with the mechanical reproduction issue, there are several elements in their texts about kitsch that indicate in advance the disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé - Abstract Can one cull from Adorno's oeuvre a single coherent theory of musical performance? One wonders, since the main work he devoted to the topic, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, is incomplete and often enigmatic. However, one especially suggestive desideratum for performance is evident in Adorno's praise for musical amateurs: "Lively music-making, by children, amateurs . . . supplies the theory with the most important exemplary material. Firstly, because here the music appears with all its cracks and holes, so to speak . . . through [which] one can observe, as with broken toys, how it 'works'." These and other remarks point to parataxis being a crucial performative criterion for Adorno. This essay substantiates that thesis by, first, reviewing Adorno's theory of musical performance; second, placing it in the wider context of his philosophical thought; third, rehearsing his remarks on Schubert, for him a paratactic composer par excellence; fourth, proposing some performative equivalents to hypotaxis and parataxis and pondering the repertoire for which each performance style may be suitable; finally, exposing deficiencies in Adorno's approach while at the same time trying to salvage it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Gerhard Scholem (1897-1982) were bound by a deep friendship, intertwined since 1912 and continuing until 1940, when Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, terrified of being handed over to the Nazis. The two intellectuals, both of Jewish faith, made different existential choices: Benjamin remained in Germany until the racial persecution of the Nazi regime forced him to roam around Europe, while Scholem settled in Palestine and worked at the University of Jerusalem, where he could devote himself to the study of Jewish mysticism. The essay concerns the correspondence between the two scholars, particularly on Zionism, the proximity of Benjamin to the communism, the relationship with the scholars of the Institute of Social Research directed by Max Horkheimer and with Bertolt Brecht. On the background of the correspondence is clearly visible Benjamin's attempt not to give up his intellectual research and friendship, even though he was forced to look for marginal and peripheral places where he could survive in a Europe by then handed over to Hitler's wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay defends that mimesis is an inherently agonistic and paradoxical human practice. The divergent views on mimesis by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by Adorno and Benjamin, are the philosophical manifestation of an agonistic tension of human mimesis that is not resolved in the exclusive truth of one of the positions, but remains as a permanent possibility to create alternative paths in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow, an unidentified subterranean creature struggles while digging in a burrow, constantly engulfed in anxiety for potential intruders. His obsessive anxiety starts to be materialised in his hearing of a noise everywhere and at constant intensity. Incessantly speculating the cause of this noise, his dreadful imagination first finds it as a swarm of small fries, eventually growing into a single gigantic monster threatening his burrow, as if desiring an irresistible entity that goes beyond the idea of the individual. Inspired by this story of a creature suffocating from his lonesome effort of nesting, this paper discusses how an individual sensation of dread could potentially transcend to an ability to imagine social totality, drawing on the philosophical readings of Kafka’s other character Odradek by Benjamin and Adorno. I further argue that this process is aesthetic, correlating Freud’s idea of the uncanny with Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience which examine the negotiation between individuation and socialisation in an experience of desubjectification. By sketching out the anxious hearing in The Burrow in reference to the disturbing seeing of object-creature Odradek, I discuss the feeling of dread that marks the transformation of individual entities into a transcendent social/collective being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to briefly analyze the characteristics that the form of the essay assumes in György Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno’s thought. I focused on one single point: the central function that the essay acquires within the relations between particulars and system. The results are particularly interesting since, in the face of a substantial agreement on initial diagnosis, the three autors propose very different solutions: Lukács intends the form of the essay as the only possible way to overcome the fracture between world and totality; on the contrary, Adorno intends that same form as the only form adequate to express the insurmountability of the fracture; finally, Benjamin tries to keep both sides togheter: the autonomy of the trascendent and the salvation of the immanent.

A crítica cultural da “Escola de Frankfurt” não se resume apenas à questão cultural ou artística, tampouco pode ser considerada “pessimista” ou “elitista”. A crítica cultural relaciona tanto a crítica à cultura quanto à sociedade, do mesmo modo que Marx mostrou a relação entre a produção material e a reprodução espiritual da sociedade. É desta maneira que Benjamin elaborou sua crítica ao cinema, Adorno cunhou a expressão “indústria cultural” e Marcuse a “dessublimação repressiva”. Benjamin constatou a afecção da experiência pelas novas tecnologias de reprodução cultural. Adorno apontou a regressão da audição no fenômeno da distribuição musical, mas poder-se-ia estender a noção para a regressão dos sentidos. Marcuse também elaborou a “perda” com o conceito de “dessublimação repressiva” apontando para a sociedade unidimensional. As mudanças na sociedade contemporânea mostram os limites da crítica cultural frankfurtiana, mas, ao mesmo tempo, revelam sua atualidade.

Estamos en medio de una onda enorme de protestas, rechazos masivos y multitudinarios de las condiciones contemporáneas. El trabajo se pregunta qué significa decir NO en una sociedad que requiere de los pobres y miserables que subsidien el sistema financiero para mantener la ilusión de una riqueza abstracta. Este subsidio es necesario en la sociedad existente, para asegurar su riqueza y prevenir su implosión. La sociedad capitalista no puede combatirse de una formadirecta e inmediata - ¿qué significa realmente luchar contra el dinero, resistir el movimiento de monedas, combatir el movimiento de tipos de interés, luchar contra los movimientos de precios, y resistir a la pobreza en un modo de reproducción social que conlleva la pobreza en su concepto de riqueza? El rechazo a aceptar las cosas tal y como son es enteramente negativo con respecto a las condiciones existentes de reproducción social. Demanda que su progreso continuo se ponga en suspenso.

Augustine holds that each society needs to be oriented to “God and the good.” He invidiously compares the earthly city as receptive to the true God with the earthly city as opposed to the true God, and he resolutely holds that only an earthly city oriented to the true God can be genuinely described as just and legitimate. At first glance this “political Augustinianism” hardly seems very attractive to non-believers or defensible in the eyes of modern secular liberals, and yet in this article I wish to defend it and commend it universally, that is, to promote its benefits and critical insights beyond religious circles. I commend an emphasis on “the divine” (to theion), rather than on God (hotheos), as a bridge to God for believers but also, and more importantly in the West's present liberal pluralist context, as a common halting place where believers and non-believers alike can sense “the beyond” (Augustine's “God and the good”) in their midst. I develop my argument that the “divine,” thus understood, can provide us with a common conceptual space where we can abide, converse, and even agree: (i) by engaging with Jacob Taubes who powerfully criticises such an emphasis on the “divine,” (ii) by considering “divine” natural law as a bridge and halting place between immanence and transcendence, and (iii) by reflecting upon the work of Rémi Brague who has recently given powerful support to the importance and utility in the present intellectual climate of the divine (to theion) as a bridge to God (ho theos). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Philosophical readings from Walter Benjamin to Hans Blumenberg and beyond often emphasize the death-boundness of Franz Kafka's prose, characterizing his work as a literature determined by the certainty of finitude. This article explores a series of critical moments in Kafka's oeuvre where finitude is explicitly called into question for the sake of a movement of survival ("Überleben"). Survival manifests as a fragile mode of persistence that is neither governed by the authority of death, nor does it simply fall on the side of infinity. Instead, it indicates something like a precarious future--the subjunctive anticipation of a remainder beyond the limit of finitude. Advancing an understanding of Kafka's work in terms of a prose of survival, this article suggests an intense kinship between Kafka's works and other literary endeavors invested in probing the limits of finitude, most notably in works by Jorge Luis Borges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trata-se de uma resenha crítica da controvertida correspondência entre Theodor W. Adorno e Walter Benjamin - dois dos mais expressivos representantes da chamada primeira geração de teóricos críticos associados ao Instituto de Pesquisa Social. Além de remeter suas cartas à respectiva experiência intelectual de cada um deles, este artigo busca oferecer uma análise fundamentada dessa instigante interlocução filosófica, para além da rígida bipolarização entre "adornianos" e "benjaminianos", que, via de regra, tem predominado em sua recepção especializada, dentro e fora do Brasil. Para isso, procura-se enfatizar o contraponto produtivo entre a Dialética negativa de Adorno e o projeto das Passagens de Benjamin, tomando como centro gravitacional o processo construtivo deste último trabalho - cerne tanto das afinidades, quanto das insolúveis dissonâncias entre os dois autores. Esta pesquisa tem o apoio da FAPESP.

The essay by Adorno and Horkheimer about The Culture Industry (in the volume Dialectic of Enlightment) represents for Alberto Abruzzese the starting point of a reasoning on the intellectuals' role, the crisis of humanistic and academic knowledge and the new “screen and network” society. The author uses The Culture Industry as a text on the western civilization's sunset and at the same time on the metamorphosis of mass cultural production. Abruzzese refers to those scholars who deepened these issues with passion and acumen. From Benjamin to Canetti, from Debord to Foucault, from Lukacs to McLuhan: Abruzzese analyses a whole research path in media culture with the frankness of a personal self-examination.

Este texto é um ensaio de linguagem, ou seja, um ensaio sobre a linguagem. Mas é, também, a investigação da linguagem do ensaio, isto é, do tipo de escrita que entra em jogo na forma de prosa que chamamos de ensaios. Para tanto, ele mobiliza autores como Heidegger e, principalmente, Walter Benjamin, Lukács e Adorno. Todos eles, porém, entram em cena no intuito de ajudar num estudo sobre a importância da linguagem no enfrentamento da situação contemporânea do pensamento, cuja problematização filosófica fica evidente a partir das dificuldades, por exemplo, de escrever uma tese acadêmica tradicional.

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This article examines an experimental genre of philosophical writing known as the Denkbild (‘thought-image’) practiced by members of the Frankfurt School to show how it is resurrected in the Augmented Reality installation of the artist-scholar Caitlin Fisher. It argues that Circle (2012) renews the Frankfurt School’s project of reaching to art to find a way for critical theory to bring about ‘a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality’. However, as a material and virtual artifact that produces a unique circuit of exchange, the digital artwork is able to provide a sharper picture of that reality, positing community as the context and goal of philosophical thinking. Through a complex sculpting of its form, content, and image of its own thoughts, Fisher’s Denkbild strives to create a fluid, ‘disconnected and non-binding’ form capable of building what Adorno described as a ‘shared philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the historical development from modernism's critique of the traditional authoritarian museum to the inclusive museum practices of today, arguing that the development often has not led to freedom, democracy, equality, and inclusion in the museum but rather to a semblance of the aforementioned notions. From an examination of current inclusive practices and their failings, the article discusses the possibility offurthering the museum as a democratic institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J. M. Coetzee's affinity with Franz Kafka is bound up with the weakly messianic role Kafka plays in modernist aesthetic theory and the philosophical discourse of modernity. The redemptive aesthetic of modernist allegory modelled on Kafka implies a philosophy of history that, by giving metaphysical scope to the ideas of justice and guilt, puts modernity on trial. Reading Coetzee's Disgrace alongside Kafka's Trial complicates the familiar allegory of state persecution, however, and suggests the persistence of myth in modernity as an enabling device that reveals as much of the moral autonomy of the subject as it does its entrapment in the rationalised relations of modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a subcategory of Art proper, it is worth reconsidering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’, mass-produced culture which presents a ‘flattened’ version of reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a context, making the focus on the reception of the work important. The dialogue held between Adorno and Walter Benjamin post-Second World War is interesting because, between them, they consider both the possible positive emancipatory and negative politicization effects of film as a mass produced and distributed storytelling medium. Reading Adorno alongside Benjamin is a way to highlight the role of the critical thinker who receives the film. Arguing that the critical thinker is a valuable citizen, this paper focuses on the value of critical thinking in the reception of cinematic artworks. It achieves this by reconsidering Adorno and Benjamin’s theories of mass art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on an apparently secondary aspect of Adorno’s argumentation in the Positivist Debate: social physiognomy. Physiognomy forms part of what the historian Carlo Ginzburg called an ‘evidential paradigm’. Based specifically on semiotics, it began to assert itself in the human sciences in the late nineteenth century. The art connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud showed how through its application, information considered marginal could enable understanding a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality. Benjamin and Adorno also set physiognomy at the centre of their complex, anti-reductionist theory of culture, which focuses on aspects neglected by conventional approaches. While traditional ‘rationalistic’ historical and sociological approaches generally focus on overt aspects of ‘culture’, such as language or words, physiognomy seeks more far-reaching significance through the conviction that mental abilities are reflected in the corporeal nature of human beings. Physiognomy thus considers those aspects of culture that are neither rational nor logical and not explicitly revealed. For this reason, physiognomic practice generally focuses on analysing myths, dream states, and covert aspects of the mind and body – cultural expressions that are not produced by the conscious, logical mind, but are involuntary and repressed. Today, more than half a century after the Positivist Debate, the topicality of Adorno’s sociological thinking can be seen to lie more in his efforts to unify abstract theorising, object, and aesthetic representation, than in his explanatory analysis of capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ludoarchaeology is a discipline that is methodologically rooted in archaeology with the aim of finding forgotten games—and texts on games. The discipline’s objective is to reinterpret the history of games and play via material objects from the past. This essay offers an example of one such case, revisions to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. In 2012, the author conducted an excavation in Gelderland, near Arnhem in the Netherlands, where Johan Huizinga spent his last years before his death on February 1, 1945. The excavation team found a document that was obviously a manuscript page of a major revision of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. The text consists of an annotated version of page 41 from the 1938 edition of Homo Ludens with comments that completely change our view of how Huizinga thought about “free play,” rules, and order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]