Go to [5 Nov] Theological Fellow-Travelling: Adorno and the Standpoint of Redemption

[5 Nov] Theological Fellow-Travelling: Adorno and the Standpoint of Redemption

2026-10-07

Co-organized by HKU Faculty of Arts, Department of Comparative Literature and Department of History  

Fall 2026 Lecture Series

Title: Theological Fellow-Travelling: Adorno and the Standpoint of Redemption

Speaker: Martin Jay, Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

Date: 5 November 2026 (Thursday)

Time: 4:00-5:30pm (Reception begins at 3:30pm)

Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre

Language: English

Delivery Mode: Face-to-Face ONLY

Facilitator: Steve Choe, Associate Professor and Director of the Arts Industries programme, The University of Hong Kong

Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109368

Registration will close at 12:00 pm, on 4 Nov 2026 (Wed)

You will receive a confirmation email upon successful registration. Please present it at the venue for admission to the event.

Abstract:

Beginning with Descartes, Western philosophy sought to free itself from its entanglement with theology. In the 20^th century, however, the failure of this effort became increasingly apparent, if not in Anglo-American analytical philosophy, at least in its continental counterpart. One of its symptoms can be called “theological fellow-travelling”: a willingness to draw on a hodgepodge of theological ideas without having any investment in the religious practices that underlie them. Adorno’s “negative dialectics” exemplifies this response, not only in his frequent evocation of the Jewish “Bilderverbot” or prohibition on images, but also in his recourse to the language of “redemption” as a normative vantage point of Critical Theory.  Focusing on the latter, this talk will explore the costs of effacing the boundary between theology and philosophy.

Biography:

Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus

Born in 1944 in New York City and educated at Union College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1971, Martin Jay taught for forty-five years in the History Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He specialized in Modern European Intellectual History, Visual Culture and Critical Theory. With Judith Butler, he co-founded Berkeley’s graduate Program in Critical Theory. Included among his twenty-one books are The Dialectical Imagination, Marxism and Totality, Adorno, Downcast Eyes, Songs of Experience, The Virtues of Mendacity, Reason after its Eclipse, Magical Nominalism and At the Crossroads of Philosophy, Politics and Culture. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and recognized by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and The American Council of Learned Societies, as well as residential fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Academy in Berlin. Among his awards are the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Award for best first book and its life-time achievement Distinguished Scholar’s Award, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Bard College. He has been a regular columnist for Salmagundi since 1987.

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