Anders Johansson

In this article, I argue that Adorno’s conception of a possible reconciliation with nature is neither one of complete synthesis, nor absolute alienation. The most elaborated formulations regarding the possibility of such a reconciliation, which would be tantamount to a liberated nature, are to be found in Adorno’s aesthetics, and particularly in his discussion of the art–nature relation. The article engages Simon Hailwood’s recent criticism of the concept of the Anthropocene and his discussion of Adorno’s conception of the domination of nature. While I concur with Hailwood’s insistence on the idea of “alienation from nature” in order to reach a more appropriate understanding of our current predicament, his analysis of Adorno’s take on this idea is problematic. I conclude by discussing another recent work on our troubled relationship with nature. While more attentive to artistic expressions than Hailwood’s work, Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Stormconstitutes an inverted parallel to the former through its negligence of Adorno’s contribution to the discussion of the human–nature dialectic.

This article is a discussion of Theodor W. Adorno’s comment, in the beginning of ‘The Essay as Form’, that interpretations of essays are over-interpretations. I argue that this statement is programmatic, and should be understood in the light of Adorno’s essayistic ideal of configuration, his notion of truth, and his idea of the enigmatic character of art. In order to reveal how this over-interpreting appears in practice, I turn to Adorno’s essay on Kafka. According to Adorno, the reader of Kafka is caught in an aporia: Kafka’s work cannot be interpreted, yet every single sentence calls for interpretation. This paradox is related to the gestures and images in Kafka’s work: like Walter Benjamin, Adorno means that they contain sedimented, forgotten experiences. Instead of interpreting these images, Adorno visualizes the experiences indirectly by presenting images of his own. His own essay becomes gestural

The article confronts contemporary ecocriticism with Adorno’s concept of natural beauty. If ecocriticism may be understood as a reaction to climate change – the gravity of the situation turns the academic into an activist – a fundamental question often remains unanswered: why should we turn to art if we are facing ecological disaster? The article then presents Adorno’s answer to this question, an answer that is closely tied to his theory of natural beauty. A crucial point in Adorno’s discussion of nature is that we no longer have access to it. We are stuck in a second nature which deprives us of all contact with first nature. But the closest we can get to this absent nature is art, and more precisely natural beauty, which contains both a memory of something lost, and a promise of something yet to come. Therefore the aesthetic experience is a moment where the subject may approach something unknown – something which is not subject, not human – in a non-dominating way. In that sense art may be our best option to get out of the anthropocentrism which prevents us from even understanding the current situation. After a comparison with contemporary theorists like Timothy Morton and Claire Colebrook, the article finally turns to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice in order to illustrate what the strange combination of memory and promise in natural beauty may look like in practice.

This study examines the role of executive compensation in public governance. We collect data on corruption cases that involve top-level executives in Chinese listed state-controlled firms. We find a significant positive relationship between underpayment of executives and the likelihood of an investigation into corrupt behavior. We also show that corruption is positively associated with firm performance and that the relationship between underpayment of executives and corruption is influenced by firm performance, suggesting that top managers are more likely to engage in illicit behavior if they are compensated poorly while the firms under their control perform well. Finally, we find that pay-performance sensitivity decreases when top executives are involved in corruption investigations, indicating a lack of pecuniary incentives. Our empirical findings point toward an important relationship between executive compensation and corrupt behavior, thus providing valuable input to the understanding of executive pay and its effects in China’s state sector.

Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure was mostly received as a depiction of the crisis of masculinity. And it is, but that particular theme is also placed within a larger context concerning questions of value, understanding, order, and control, questions asked not only on a thematic level but also through cutting, framing, and the use of camera views. Not accepting any simple dichotomy between form and meaning, Force Majeure places itself firmly in an avant- garde and modernist tradition. Thereby the film is also related to this tradition’s ambition of investigating Western thought, knowledge and art anew, problematising given forms of rational thinking in order for something new to emerge. In the wake of World War II it was, for thinkers like Adorno, Foucault, Stockhausen, and Boulez, seen as unavoidable and urgent to deconstruct the conventions and norms that had made Auschwitz possible. It is still urgent. This article takes its starting point in the connections between avant-garde serialism in music, Foucault’s serialist methods of research and Deleuze’s theories of modernist film, in order to grasp how the aesthetics of Force Majeure continues to deconstruct.

What does it mean that the author increasingly turns into a commodity? The article contains a discussion of some academic responses – taken from celebrity studies and autofiction studies – to this tendency. The texts discussed share an effort to rethink authorship, but nonetheless the implicit result is a reinforcement of a traditional, romantic notion of the author. Above all there is a lack of reflection on subjectivity in the authorship discourse, where concepts like “author”, “subject”, “self” often are treated as synonymous. In that sense the academic responses are part of the commodification they ought to be studying. On another level this commodification could be understood as an expression of a more general crisis of subjectivity: there is a need of stories about autonomous subjects just because of a more extensive desubjectivation. Finally the article turns to Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Rancière in order to find a more dynamic and apt understanding of subjectivity

In The Jargon of Authenticity Adorno criticizes the jargon he argues is to be found amongst followers of Heidegger. He describes it as displaying a fetishizing of understanding as belonging, and as a ground for authenticity, meaning and identity. This article develops the idea that Adorno’s critique also allows us to understand certain aspects of contemporary discussions concerning phenomena such as global warming and the Anthropocene. A common reaction to these phenomena is that we have to make them graspable through stories that make facts comprehensible, and that tie us together in unity and enable understanding. But if we were to follow Adorno, we might, instead of continuing to believe in meaning and communication within a community of understanding that has proven itself to be the part of the problem, try to create poetry that imitates “the dead speaking of stones.” Understanding could then, perhaps, be something else.