Table of Contents

1. Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (University of York, UK and University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA) Part I : Adorno and the New Reading of Marx 2. Cracking Economic Abstractions: Bringing Critical Theory Back-In, Werner Bonefeld (University of York, UK) 3. Adorno and the Critique of Political Economy, Dirk Braunstein and Niko Bobka (Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt, and University of Göttingen, Germany) 4. Adorno and the New reading of Marx, and Methodologies of Critique, Charlotte Baumann (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany) 5. Marxian Economics and the Critique of Political Economy, Chris O’Kane and Kirstin Munro (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA) Part II : Critique of Political Economy as Negative Dialectic of Society 6. Economic Objectivity and Negative Dialectics: On Class and Struggle, Werner Bonefeld (University of York, UK) 7. The Liquidation of the Individual as a Critique of Political Economy, Fabian Arzuaga (College of William and Mary, USA) 8. Society as Real Abstraction: Adorno’s Critique of Economic Nature, Charles Prusik (Villanova University, USA) 9. Society Maintains itself despite all Catastrophes that may Eventuate: Critical Theory, Negative Totality, and Permanent Catastrophe, Chris O’Kane (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA) Part III: Subjectivity and Pseudo Practice: on Social Praxis 10. Conceptuality and Social Practice, Werner Bonefeld (University of York, UK) 11. Non-identity, critique of labour and pseudo-praxis: extra-marginal palinlegomena on the dialectics of doing, Marcel Stoetzler (Bangor University, UK) Appendix 12. Introduction to ‘Theodor W. Adorno on Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory. From a Seminar Transcript in the Summer Semester of 1962, Chris O’Kane (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA) 13. Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory: From a Seminar Transcript in the Summer Semester of 1962, Theodor W Adorno

Promotional Information

The first book to expound Adorno’s negative dialectic as critical to the contemporary development of Marx’s critique of political economy.

About the Author

Werner Bonefeld is Professor of Politics at the University of York, UK. He is the author of The Strong State and PoliticalEconomy (2017), Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury, 2014) and is co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (with Beverly Best and Chris O'Kane, 2018). He is also co-editor the Bloomsbury series Critical Theory and the Critique of Society (with Chris O'Kane) Chris O’Kane is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA.

Reviews

The illuminating studies gathered in this collection bring to the surface, for thought and discussion, capital’s submerged social content—concealed, as it must be, in the ‘objective illusion’ of the economy. One of capital’s deadly abstractions, the economy is neither the base of capitalist society, nor the source of its movement; it is, rather, the constellation of inverted appearances assumed by the capital-labour relation itself. Read this book because thinking Adorno and Marx together shows us how capital continues by moving on in the guise of something new—it always was the something worse yet to come.
*Beverley Best, Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada*

In this acute and unapologetically politicized volume, O’Kane and Bonefeld ask us to adjust our view of Adorno as a cultural critic of the administered world and instead to recognise his role as a Marxist critic of society: one who understood capitalism as a negative totality of “inverted sociability,” a topsy-turvy world in which capitalist categories depend on the vanished premise of real human suffering. These varied and lively essays point to the devastating compromises of a labour-centric politics of state socialism. They reject moral commitments to liberal categories of civic equality, justice, freedom, and reason. But they also pose, against simplistic notions of the structural, a concept of social form that can help us to understand how economic abstractions work on, through, and “by the hand of” wounded subjects
*Amy De'Ath, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, King's College London, UK*

Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy is an insightful collection of essays that adds to a growing body of Marxist scholarship correcting widespread misconceptions about both Marx’s critique of political economy and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory.
*Marx and Philosophy Review of Books*