Books
Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno are considered today to be the two most significant early t... more Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno are considered today to be the two most significant early theorists in founding critical theory. In their works and correspondence, both thinkers turn to art and the aesthetic as a vital way for understanding modern society and developing philosophical methods. This volume of original essays seeks to understand how they influenced each other and disagreed with each other on fundamental questions about art and the aesthetic. The books deals with a variety of key philosophical questions, such as: How does art involve distinctive modes of experience? What is the political significance of modern art?What does aesthetic experience teach us about the limitations of conceptual thought?How is aesthetic experience implicated in the very medium of thought, language? Ultimately the book presents a systematic argument for the foundational significance of the aesthetic in the development of the early critical theory movement.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2021
Forty years after publication, Suttree remains McCarthy’s most enigmatic novel. The one consiste... more Forty years after publication, Suttree remains McCarthy’s most enigmatic novel. The one consistent element of the, by now, expansive body of scholarship is an agreement regarding the centrality of the title character. Yet while critics agree Suttree is the key to Suttree, there exists little agreement about the larger message of the novel. Against this confusion, we argue that it is a quest to reconcile his sense of self and understanding of life that drives Suttree’s actions throughout the novel, this quest illuminating not only McCarthy’s well-documented critique of Western culture but, more importantly, his own alternative conception of life, this alternative an egalitarian vision of society that brings to light the novel’s ethical imperative.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Mississippi Quarterly, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Cormac McCarthy Journal , 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Symposium, 2018
This paper follows the question of violence as a guide to exploring the link between the metaphys... more This paper follows the question of violence as a guide to exploring the link between the metaphysical, social, and political in Adorno's thought. More specifically, I argue that violence, in the form of the exclusion, domination, and fungibility of life, marks the shared space of the metaphysical, material, and ethical for Adorno. Hence, this project contests the longstanding Habermas-inspired notion that there is something unclear in the way in which Adorno's metaphysical and methodological critiques connect to his social and political concerns -- most specifically, his desire to address real suffering. In addition, this paper contributes to the growing interest in Adorno's Marxism, showing that it is through his commitments to Marx that Adorno sees the real, material importance of his critique of metaphysics and ontology, as well as the possibility for resisting the forces of social domination.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Cormac McCarthy Journal , 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Symplokē, 2012
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Politics & Policy, 2006
Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” represents an important concept in understandin... more Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” represents an important concept in understanding why Marx’s prediction regarding the collapse of capitalism has not been realized. Baudrillard adds to the Marxian concepts of use value and exchange value, suggesting that, in today’s consumer-oriented society, commodities take on a symbolic value that constitutes their “status” and, therefore, power. In the Western industrial societies that are “networked” into information cultures, the generation of symbolic value results from a constantly changing symbolic environment in which new demands for access to symbolic status are generated. Baudrillard sees the United States as the farthest along on the path to a simulated environment of symbolic exchange. Manufacturing for symbolic exchange is directed toward the production of the fetish: an object that is positioned purely for its symbolic value. By directing production increasingly in the direction of the fetish, as an object to be used in symbolic exchange, capitalism is able to sustain itself even after the material needs of the population are satisfied.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Peer Reviewed Book Chapters
Philosophy, Film, and the Dark Side of Interdependence, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Biopolitics, particularly as developed by Michel Foucault and his Italian interpreters, has had l... more Biopolitics, particularly as developed by Michel Foucault and his Italian interpreters, has had little to say about animals or animal studies. Even the work of Giorgio Agamben, which most directly addresses animal life, presents a human-oriented and ultimately anthropocentric account of such life. Yet, there has been a growing body of work that brings together the discourses of biopolitics and animal studies, most specifically, in the analysis of biotechnology and the critique of capitalism’s role in the exploitation of animals and the natural world. In addition, there has been a recent attempt to cull from the diverse array of biopolitical discourses what one might call a general account of biopolitics, an account that, as I show, identifies, at the heart of biopolitics, a concern for the way in which the constituting of the categories of ‘life’ and ‘politics’ necessarily involves the exclusion of some ‘other’ life. On the basis of these developments and particularly this concern for the exclusion of life, I chart a common ground between biopolitics, Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and the work of Jacques Derrida, whose thinking provides the theoretical basis for much recent work in CAS. In particular, I contend that, read through the lens of this common concern for exclusion, one sees that Derrida’s concept of sovereignty is fundamentally biopolitical, not just in the sense that it involves life and politics, but more specifically, because it exemplifies the logic of exclusion at stake in biopolitics. Hence, this paper charts current developments in biopolitics by putting them into conversation with animal studies, mapping the deep affinity between the discourses of biopolitics, CAS, and the work of Derrida.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Going Postcard, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Translations
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
Peer Reviewed Book Chapters
Translations
Episode 40 is a long ride through rough country as we dig into The CROSSING, McCarthy's masterful middle volume in the Border Trilogy. My guests today are twin scholars Jonathan and Rick Elmore. That's right, twins. Jonathan Elmore is Associate Professor of English at Savannah State University and the Managing Editor of Watchung Review.. He is the editor of Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss (Lexington) and co-author of An Introduction to African and Afro-Diasporic Peoples and Influences in British Literature and Culture before the Industrial Revolution (ALG). His scholarship has been published in The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, The British Fantasy Society Journal, Orbit, The Journal of Liberal Arts and Humanities, and The Criterion, among others.
His twin brother Rick Elmore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and Senior Managing Editor of book reviews at Symposium. He researches and teaches in the areas of twentieth-century French philosophy, critical theory, animal philosophy, and Cormac McCarthy Studies. He is the co-editor of The Biopolitics of Punishment: Derrida and Foucault (Northwestern University Press). His articles and essays have appeared in Politics & Policy, Symplokē, Symposium, Mississippi Quarterly, and The Cormac McCarthy Journal, among others.