The series of three seminars will be dedicated to a close reading and discussion of three key texts of Critical Theory, Adorno’s texts ‘Commitment’ (‘Engagement’, 1962, in Noten zur Literatur III) and ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, 1951, u.a. in Prismen), and Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (also known as ‘Theses on the Phi- losophy of History’, in the original: ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, written 1940, first published in 1942). ‘Commitment’ discusses the dialectic between the ‘committted’ (to be distinguished from ‘propagandist’) and the ‘autono- mous’ artwork, commenting on Sartre, Brecht and Benjamin; ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ plays on the double meaning of ‘Kulturkritik’ as critique of culture (or of civilization) or/and the criticism of cultural artefacts, and their relation- ship. Adorno points to a criticism of cultural artefacts that is committed to the progress of culture/civilization while refusing to be happy and at ease with its actuality. Benjamin’s text entirely resists summing up, but needs no introduction; at its centre it contains, amongst other things, a critique of the optimism of the labour movement.

Marcel Stoetzler is a lecturer in Sociology at Bangor University, Wales, UK. He works on social and political theory, intellectual history and historical sociology, and has lately concentrated on various aspects of modern anti- semitism, especially its interconnections with liberalism and nationalism and the emergence of the discipline of sociology. He has also published on feminist theory, critical theory (‘Frankfurt School’), Hannah Arendt, and Marx. His first book, The State, the Nation and the Jews. Liberalism and the Anti- semitism Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany was published in 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press. He serves on the editorial board of Patterns of Prejudice of which he has edited a special issue (May 2010) on Modern Antisemitism and the Emergence of Sociology.