Reading Session with Matthew Handelman, on Adorno’s “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism”

To RSVP, please email AJ Bauer (ajb551@nyu.edu) for the registration link.

This event is the first in a distributed online conference, “Theory of the Alt Right,” sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and co-hosted by Deutsches Haus NYU, NYU Department of German, and the Working Group on the Global New Right at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Further conference events to come in December.

The Frankfurt School’s analysis of the Far Right has come to new light recently, with the rise of a new Global Far Right obsessed with media and harboring a conspiracy theory, “Cultural Marxism,” which pinpoints the Frankfurt School itself as central to US culture today. The Working Group will convene a reading session, led by Critical Theory expert Matthew Handelman (Michigan State University), to discuss Adorno’s reissued lecture, “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism,” a short but prescient text.

Matthew Handelman is an Associate Professor of German and a member of the Core Faculty in the Digital Humanities at MSU. His research interests include German-Jewish literature and philosophy in the early twentieth century, the intersections of science, mathematics and culture in German-speaking countries, as well as the digital humanities and the history of technology. His first book, The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origin and Promise of Critical Theory appeared with Fordham University Press in 2019. It explores the underdeveloped possibilities of mathematics for critical theory, focusing on how mathematics helped Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer navigate the intellectual crises facing German Jews during the Weimar Republic. He’s currently working on the concept of Kulturpolitik at the end of the Weimar Republic. He’s published on these topics, as well as others, in international journals such as The Germanic Review, Scientia Poetica and The Leo Baeck Yearbook.

This conversation is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).