With Lucius Outlaw, Jacob Blumenfeld, Daniel James and Kristina Lepold
Due to a restricted number of places, please register for the event from 1 to 21 May 2025 here. You will receive then a confirmation email by 23 May 2025.
Topic
Critical Theory provides essential resources for understanding antisemitism—notably in the early Frankfurt School’s analyses, such as Elements of Antisemitism and The Authoritarian Personality. Yet, as critics like Lucius Outlaw have argued, these insights often fall short when extended to racism. Early critical theorists tended to sideline questions of race and racialisation, leaving significant blind spots in their theory of society. Addressing these limitations requires a rethinking of Critical Theory’s theoretical foundations: How does racialisation operate in both racism and antisemitism? Are there shared social-structural or ideological features of modern antisemitism and racism? And how might we conceive of their relationship within the framework of Critical Theory?
In this workshop, Prof. Lucius Outlaw (Vanderbilt University, Nashville) and Dr. Jacob Blumenfeld (Centre for Social Critique, Berlin) will join us to explore these questions and discuss the extent to which the Frankfurt School’s critical apparatus can accommodate analyses of both antisemitism and racism.
Lucius Outlaw
Lucius Outlaw is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in Africana philosophy and social and political philosophy. His works include On Race and Philosophy (Routledge 1996) and his influential 1990 paper „Toward a Critical Theory of ‚Race‘“, which critiques the Frankfurt School for its racial blindspot and argues for a critical theory that includes race.
Jacob Blumenfeld
Jacob Blumenfeld is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt University of Berlin. He is the author of The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel: Freedom, Right, and Recognition (Routledge 2024) and All Things are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner (Zero Books 2018). He is currently researching the socialisation of land and energy in times of climate catastrophe.