Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prelude: Adorno and the Ban on Images

Chapter One: Imageless Materialism
Part I: Materialism
Part II: Imagelessness

Chapter Two: Inverse Theology
Part I: Theology
Part II: Inversion

Chapter Three: Aesthetic Negativity
Part I: Aesthetics
Part II: Natural Beauty

Reprise: ‘Zum Ende’

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

Through a reconstruction of Adorno’s philosophy, this book sheds new light on the current debates surrounding utopia and the question of how we picture a better world.

About the Author

Sebastian Truskolaski is Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at King’s College London, UK. His research focuses on the relationship between modern and contemporary art, literature and philosophy.

Reviews

This is a breathtaking exploration of one of the most evocative and undertheorized themes in Adorno’s oeuvre. In this searching, lucid and dazzlingly original study, Sebastian Truskolaski manages to achieve what no-one has even attempted. He extricates the “ban on images” from religious pieties and from platitudes about the inexpressible-unimaginable-unspeakable, and demonstrates compellingly that this rigorously disenchanted figure lies at the heart of Adorno’s peculiar materialism and is the key to its radical utopian promise. This is a new, exciting reading of Adorno that will also transform the way we think about art and politics today.
*Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada*

In this exciting new book, Sebastian Truskolaski unpacks the ban on images around which he argues Adorno’s thinking is organized. Far from miring us in an abyss of despair, as Truskolaski presents it, the Adornian Bilderverbot not only offers considerable resources for challenging the status quo, but an incipient method for thinking our escape.
*Cat Moir, Senior Lecturer and Chair of Germanic Studies, University of Sydney, Australia*

Adorno and the Ban on Images admirably articulates the significance of Adorno’s reworking of the Old Testament ban on images in a variety of contexts, ranging from the musicological to the literary, and from the epistemological to the historical. Through strategic imbrication of meticulous scholarship, sober theoretical vigilance, and critical inventiveness—qualities that are increasingly rare to find—Truskolaski convincingly illuminates a central concern of Adorno’s notoriously refractory thinking.
*Gerhard Richter, University Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies, Brown University, USA*

The most interesting dimension of Truskolaski’s book is its forceful evocation of a political orientation in Adorno’s thought through an explication of the image ban ... His work will be useful not only to those who work on Adorno and the Frankfurt School more generally, but also to anyone with an interest in the theoretical and practical challenges facing the struggle toward a world free of exploitation.
*Marx and Philosophy Review of Books*