Ulrich Plass (Wesleyan University) will lecture on “Adorno’s American Experience: What’s metaphysics got to do with it?”
Adorno’s philosophy can be understood as an expression of and response to the existential experience of emigration and survival, of guilt and fear. In this lecture Ulrich Plass argues that Adorno’s American writings, especially his Minima Moralia, offer a philosophy of “damaged life” that must be viewed in relation to his later idea of “metaphysical experience,” a concept with which Adorno hopes to reclaim for philosophical thought the possibility of happiness.