Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Nov 24, 2025

Sebastian Truskolaski, an Assistant Professor in German cultural studies at the University of Manchester, delves into Adorno's philosophical insights in his work. He challenges misconceptions about Adorno's fatalism, emphasizing the importance of envisioning a world beyond suffering. The conversation explores contemporary relevance by linking Adorno with thinkers like Meillassoux and critiques the role of images in materialism. Truskolaski also addresses the tension between negativity and utopian ambitions, highlighting the significance of art in bridging the gap between the real and the ideal.

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INSIGHT

Image Ban As Central Thread

Sebastian Truskolaski found recurring references to the Old Testament image ban in Adorno and made it the central thread of his study.
This motif links Adorno's epistemology, aesthetics, and his rethinking of Marxism for contemporary debates on utopia.

ANECDOTE

Book Originated From A PhD Thread

Truskolaski explains the book grew out of his PhD at Goldsmiths and began as a textual curiosity about Adorno's image references.
That curiosity expanded into broader questions on materialism, Marxism, and utopia.

ADVICE

Read Adorno With Contemporary Thinkers

Truskolaski deliberately engages contemporary thinkers to show Adorno's ongoing relevance.
He recommends reading Adorno alongside Meillassoux, Agamben, and Lyotard to reveal method and modern stakes.

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Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism.

Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse. By re-appraising Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, and art, this book reconstructs this notoriously difficult author's overall project from a radically new perspective (Adorno's famous 'standpoint of redemption'), and brings his central concerns to bear on the problems of today.

On the one hand, this means reading Adorno alongside his principal interlocutors (including Kant, Marx and Benjamin). On the other hand, it means asking how his secular brand of social criticism can serve to safeguard the image of a better world – above all, when the invocation of this image occurs alongside Adorno's recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God.

By reading Adorno in this iconoclastic way, Adorno and the Ban on Images contributes to current debates about Utopia that have come to define political visions across the political spectrum.

Lukas Hoffman is a Doctoral Candidate at the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies and is currently supported by a DAAD research grant as a Visiting Scholar at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how the persistence of religious imagery in German modernist lyric reimagines the ways in which traditional, religious attitudes overlap with revolutionary political thought. Recently, he has published an article in Monatshefte, titled “Love of Things: Reconsidering Adorno’s Criticism of Rilke” (Summer 2022) and has a forthcoming article in New German Critique, titled “Abject Eve: A Revolutionary Reading of Lasker-Schüler’s ‘Erkenntnis.’”

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