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Heiko Stubenrauch: How to Do Materialistic Dialectics with Words?  Adorno and the Resistance of Presentation
How to Do Materialistic Dialectics with Words? Adorno and the Resistance of Presentation
(p. 37 – 52)

Heiko Stubenrauch

How to Do Materialistic Dialectics with Words? Adorno and the Resistance of Presentation

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  • aesthetics
  • criticism

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Heiko Stubenrauch

Heiko Stubenrauch

is Research Assistant at the Institute of Philosophy and Science of Art at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He studied philosophy, sociology, economics, cultural studies and art history in Frankfurt, Lüneburg and Hamburg. From 2016 to 2019 he worked as a researcher and PhD student within the DFG research training group “Cultures of Critique.” He has published on critical theory, political philosophy and philosophy of technology. He is co-editor of What’s Legit? Criticism of Law and Strategies of Rights (Zurich: diaphanes, 2020). His main research interests are the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, German Idealism, Marxism, aesthetics and theories of the unconscious. In his PhD thesis, he examines the relationship between critique and affect, especially in the works of Kant, Adorno and Deleuze.
Other texts by Heiko Stubenrauch for DIAPHANES
Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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