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This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. It revisits some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the work of Walter Benjamin, whose varied engagements with the subject of melancholia prove to be far more mobile and complex than traditional accounts. It also looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory's engagement with the world of objects, exploring the affective politics of hope. Situating the affective turn and the new materialisms within a wider context of the 'post-critical', it explains how critical theory, in its originary form, is primarily associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. The book presents an analysis of Theodor Adorno's form of social critique and 'conscious unhappiness', that is, a wilful rejection of any privatized or individualized notion of happiness in favour of a militant and political discontent. A note on the timely reconstruction of early critical theory's own engagements with the object world via aesthetics and mimesis follows. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the 'end of history', created a sense of fearlessness, righteousness, and unfettered optimism. The book notes how political realism has become the dominant paradigm, banishing utopian impulses and diminishing political hopes to the most myopic of visions.
2012 , p. 260); or indeed it is a Cold War ‘anti-utopianism’ arising from her opposition to ‘ideological extremism’ (Thaler 2017 , p. 6). It is an example of ‘negative morality’, in that it does ‘not add up to a moral system or decision procedure’, and instead tells us merely ‘what to think about’ rather than ‘what to think’ (Misra 2016 , p. 86), and, in this light, it inspires Williams's ‘realist’ political theory (Sagar 2016 , p. 381). Although not a perfect consensus, there does seem to be broad agreement that her scepticism stands opposed
Tracey Hedrick , Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900–1940 ( New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press , 2003 ); Jean Franco , The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2002 ); Roberto González
. Although the EU has grown continuously from 1957 to the 2013 accession of Croatia, I have deliberately not included enlargement among its constitutive features. The political reunification of Europe after the Cold War was the second great historical mission of the EU after securing permanent peace between the adversaries of two world wars. Yet a goal of continuous enlargement is particularly hard to square with a unanimity requirement in treaty
until 2003 by bifurcating Europe’s previously shared (western) framework of collective memory. By questioning the status of 1945 and the Holocaust as the focal points of European memory politics, the accession of postcommunist Europe has forced continental institutions and existing members of the EU to ‘negotiate the past’ in new and disruptive ways. 6 The post-Cold War ‘revenge of memory’ – as Tony Judt refers to this phenomenon in the epigraph to this chapter – also sparked memory-based conflicts between neighbours, further threatening the surprisingly thin
whose expertise was needed for reconstruction. Since these postwar governments had to recreate functioning democracies while simultaneously dealing with the geopolitical problems engendered by the emerging Cold War, working through the past was not their top priority: ‘Economic recovery and political legitimacy, not additional purges, were the proper medicine. Democratic renewal went hand in hand with silence.’ 2 A mere twenty years after the end of the Second World War, all of this had changed. The silence of the late 1940s and 1950s was followed by an explosive
of fascism, retreat is not an option. The globalisation of economic interests, which have successfully moved beyond the nation-state and generated protectionist responses across Europe, have not been matched by an expansion of politics to a similar level. On the contrary, developments since the end of the Cold War show that the power of the state to control events within its borders, which is crucial to the traditional doctrine of sovereignty, is in decline. According to Matti Koskenneimi, ‘The pattern of influence and decision-making that rules the world has an
integration.’ The period of optimism following the end of the Cold War only increased interest in the Euro-polity. A united, more muscular and financially integrated continent that deployed power in a civil, ‘normative’ manner instead of focusing on its hard, military aspects, made ‘[t]he European Dream [into] a beacon of light in a troubled world.’ 5 With the accession of the first postcommunist states to the EU in 2004, its formula of community-based integration seemed to be ‘destined eventually to serve as a model for the nations of the world.’ Indeed, for a time the
conceptualize and experience objects. As a result, a key distinction is drawn between today’s avowedly post-critical, non-humanist ontologists on one side, and the critical proto-humanism that motivates the early Frankfurt School on the other. Chapter 4 explores the affective politics of hope. I begin by surveying the ways in which historical events and their narrativization –both on the right and on the left –have (re)produced certain ideological positions and affective dispositions. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the ‘end
–6, but the real political battle over the format of European cooperation only emerged with the outbreak of the cold war.’ 5 Building a union of European peoples based on community institutions with autonomous decision-making powers was not the only solution to Europe’s problems after the Second World War. Both the traditional approach of dismembering Germany and a confederal model, which sought to weave Germany into the fabric of international society through intergovernmental institutions like the interwar League of Nations, had greater historical precedence and