This book argues why Critical Theory – as first developed in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung – must be updated to help us tackling today’s capitalistpolycrisis, from economic via political to ecological crises. Yet, following the dissolution of the Institute for Social Research in New York, and the latest with the death of Adorno in 1969 and the death of Marcuse almost exactly ten years later, there has been a ‘domestication’ of the main strands of the Frankfurt School. To und...

Tragically, the moment art was born it was murdered. The historic avant-gardes performed their jobs professionally – as midwives for stillbirth. Yet, their sublation of art in life was also suicidal, since what they understood as ‘life’ in fact was the undead labour of vitalist capital. Hence, ever since art gives the formula first and foremost for one process: capital’s latest macrocosmic restructuring, which was its burial of the bourgeoisie.“In this sense, the salons of the 19th...