Since the criticism of the concepts of the subject in classical German philosophy right through to the post-postmodern "styles of thought", it can be observed that problems surrounding the subject have been repeatedly discussed - partly with a critical perspective, partly with the aim of taking stock and partly with the aim of providing the concept of the subject with a different foundation. One problem that appears as a leitmotif in these discussions is subject-object dualism, which should be avoided. In a sense, "the subject" was never dead, as it either remained a negative object of criticism or deconstruction, or was taken as the starting point for constructive considerations. The question of critical subjectivity and aesthetic experience in the work of Bourdieu, Dewey and Adorno should be seen in this context. All three authors deal with the subject-object dualism in different ways, whereby different aspects of subjectivity and aesthetics are negotiated in each case.

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Bourdieu undertakes the cultural-sociological description, observation and conceptualisation of empirical actors in the field of art. In doing so, he explicitly opposes both an intentional definition of subjectivity and a definition of artworks in terms of their reception or aesthetic content, which represents a problematic narrowing. Ultimately, the description of sociological processes cannot reveal the formation of the subject as an intentional process. Dewey's pragmatism makes the concept of experience negotiable, so that the pragmatic-reflective abilities of subjects can be addressed alongside the cultural-sociological. Dewey constructs the intentionality of experience from what is experienced and does not attribute any independence to subjects outside of their cognitive and orientational function. For Dewey, aesthetic experience means the engagement with a reflected emotional state that is intended to empirically replace transcendental philosophical cognitive functions. This leads to problems in determining the critical faculty of subjects.
For this reason, Bourdieu's cultural-sociological observations and Dewey's concept of experience are finally placed in the context of Adorno's aesthetic categories. It will be examined to what extent his approach to the problems of the relationship between subject and object can mediate between the extremes of an idealistic understanding of the subject on the one hand and a levelling of the subjective on the other. The starting point is the principle of the primacy of the object, which in Adorno's work refers both to epistemological problems and to the experience of works of art and the social context, so that Bourdieu's and Dewey's motifs can be found and discussed here.
The aim of this end of project is to develop a concept of the subject that is understood as a constellation of the different aspects of subjectivity - social, aesthetic and transcendental - and critically mediates between the different paradigms of the three authors.

Here you will find the link to the International Adorno Bibliography announced in the Adorno Handbook. The bibliography is organised according to the system of the handbook and is divided into the following sections: Life - Elective Affinities - Music - Literature & Language - Society - Philosophy - Effects - Addendum to the Estate.
The information already published in the Handbook is systematically and succesively continued and expanded here.

You can find the International Adorno Bibliography as PDF here.

At the centre of the dissertation project is the critical theory of the German-Jewish philosopher, psychoanalyst and political essayist Ulrich Sonnemann (1912-1993). This thinker, who has been almost completely neglected in the reception of Critical Theory, will not only be given his own intellectual profile, but his significance for Critical Theory will also be fundamentally redefined. Sonnemann's late work in particular, which explicitly refers to motifs of Jewish thought such as the prohibition of images and to the various traditions of interpretation in Judaism, has a philosophical weight that has hardly been recognised to date. It also sheds light on the significance of Jewish thought within the critical theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The research project will use selected texts to work out the systematic position of this thinking in Sonnemann's work and - in the sense of an intellectual history - contextualise it biographically and (philosophically) historically. To this end, it will also draw on previously unpublished archive material.

The aim of this project is to examine, from a cultural and intellectual sociological perspective, the emergence and the intellectual and ideopolitical impact of the most important academic book programme in the German-speaking world. The programme in question is the Wissenschaften programme of the Frankfurt and Berlin Suhrkamp publishing houses, which was planned on the initiative of the publisher Siegfried Unseld in the mid-1960s and launched in 1968.

What makes this programme in the humanities and social sciences special in terms of the history of science is that the most important minds from these disciplines were involved in its conceptual design and implementation from the very beginning: Hans Blumenberg, Jürgen Habermas, Dieter Henrich, Jacob Taubes and Niklas Luhmann.