Blog: Substudies
Materials on Critical Theory (Updated: 7/17/25)
Check out the CTWG’s ongoing dossier on racket theory! Links here:
CTWG RACKET THEORY DOSSIER
Critics and theorists! Cross-posting this here because readers of ‘Substudies’ should be especially interested in the CTWG dossier on the ISR’s 1940s sketches on racket theory, or the return of direct forms of social domination under the impersonal rule of value in late capitalist society. With more to come this summer, our dossier thus far includes:
—James/Crane (6/24/2025)
Substudies is part of the ongoing project of the Critical Theory Working Group (CTWG) featuring translations, transcriptions, and research notes on the formation and development of ‘early critical theory’ (~1920-1950). The CTWG holds bi-annual open reading groups on texts and topics from early critical theory, which you can listen to for free through our Patreon. In December, 2024, we released the first issue of our journal, Margin Notes, now available as a free PDF on our website: Margin Notes: Volume 1, Kernels of Early Critical Theory. (Each of the articles has recently been converted into html. format for our blog: Margin-notes (articles).) For anyone interested, we are now open to blog submissions! Our most recent work has focused on a critical reconstruction of the ISR’s 1940s ‘Racket theory’ of class domination. We’ve published the first few installments of a dossier on Racketology to our website, and we have several more essays, fragments, and translations lined up for the next few weeks. —James/Crane (6/9/25)
Series on Substudies (updated: 7/13/25)
The posts on Substudies are divided into several running series. As of right now, none of the series are complete. (As of today, I’m about halfway through the materials I began prepping to share with people last fall!)
On Reading Critical Theory.
[Introduction to ‘Substudies’ as a project] On Reading Critical Theory I: Perspectival Distortions. First in a series on the interpretation of early critical theory (1930s-40s)
[Introduction to the method of critical theory] The Method of Concept-formation in Critical Theory (1941). Adorno and Horkheimer's “Notes on Institute Activities” + “Scope and Method.”
The Essais Matérialistes (1934-1939)
Introduction: Horkheimer’s Essais Matérialistes. Notes on an unfinished book (~1936-1939).
Translation: A Letter On Kant's Apriorism, by Max Horkheimer (1937). With three notes on Kant and Critical Theory.
Collection: Horkheimer's Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes (ca. 1935/36-1938). Translations of unpublished textual variants on the materialistic self-conception of early critical theory.
Revised Collection: Revolution and Rhetoric (1936/37). Supplements and Notes for Horkheimer's "Egoism"-essay (1936).
Revised Collection: The Materialist as Polemicist (1933-1938). Horkheimer's essays on Oswald Spengler, Henri Bergson, Theodor Haecker, Karl Jaspers, and Siegfried Marck. + Postscript: Adorno on Jean Wahl.
Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectics-Project (1939-1949)
Philosophische Fragmente (1944) / Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)
Translation: Adorno & Horkheimer's 1939 Discussion on "The Temporal Core of Truth. Experience & Utopia in Dialectical Theory." (Ed. Gretel Adorno). From the early discussion protocols for Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Translation: Horkheimer's Birthday Letter to Adorno (9/11/1938). On dialectics and dialogue.
Translation: Excerpts From The ISR Seminar on Needs (1942). With a note on the criterion of early critical theory.
Translation—Dialectic of “Decay”: Adorno's Letter to Scholem on the Zohar (4/19/1939). Jewish mysticism between myth and enlightenment.
Revised Collection—Schemata for the ‘Dialectic’ (1939-1944). I. Domination of Nature & Social Domination & II. Spirit & Enlightenment (April, 1942); + Appendices with Preliminaries for and Companion texts to the 'Dialectic' (ca. 1939-1944).
Society and Reason (1944) / Eclipse of Reason (1947)
Collection: Society and Reason (1943-1947). Transcriptions and translations of previously unpublished materials from and around Horkheimer's 'Eclipse' (1947)
Max Horkheimer: “Thomas More” (1948). [Movie pitch to Fritz Lang]
On the Dialectic, Part 2 (1945-1949).
Teaser: The Rapid Deactivation of the Subject (1944/45). From the Horkheimer-Adorno correspondence. (+ a speculative 'Memo')
[Collection] MAX HORKHEIMER: PHILOSOPHICAL PARERGA (1945-1949). Fragments on the fate of the late subjects of late capitalism.
Translation: Letters on the Problem of Prehistory (48/49). Two excerpts on Marx from Adorno and Horkheimer's correspondence.
Collection: "First Must the Site Be Cleared" (1945-1949). Adorno & Horkheimer's speculative digressions for Part 2 of the 'Dialectic.'
Notes: Towards a Reconstruction of the 'Dialectic,' Part 2. 3 Guidelines + 2 Tasks for future research.
The ISR’s Germany-project (ca. 1939-1941).
The Method of Concept-formation in Critical Theory (1941). Adorno and Horkheimer's “Notes on Institute Activities” + “Scope and Method.”
The Collapse of Germany Democracy and the Rise of National Socialism (9/15/1940). The first comprehensive draft of the ISR's Germany-project.
Cultural Aspects of National Socialism (2/24/1941). The final proposal for the ISR's Germany-project.
The ISR’s Studies in Anti-Semitism and Prejudice (ca. 1939-1949)
Collection: The Critical Theorist as Enemy Alien (1942-1945). Adorno and Horkheimer's Critique of Racial Classification.
Postwar Critical Theory (ca. 1945-1949/50)
Lectures: The Aftermath of National Socialism (March 1945). Lectures by Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, and Löwenthal.
Dämmerung and related texts (1920-1934)
Dämmerung I: Horkheimer's Weimar Journals (ca. 1920-1928). I. Philosophical Journals (ca. 1920-1923); II. Philosophical Journals (1925-1928).
Dämmerung Appendix I: Sketches for a Negative Metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse (ca. 1933). Translations of two previously unpublished fragments on (A.) 'Negative Metaphysics' and (B.) The Materialist Conception of Time, with a Historical-Philosophical Introduction.
Dämmerung II: Notes For Dämmerung (1926-1931). Fragments on the metaphysics of capitalist society, by Max Horkheimer.
Dämmerung III: Aphorisms From Dämmerung (1934). Dispatches in communist counterintelligence from and for times of reaction.
On Reading Critical Theory II: Notes on Dämmerung. Heinrich Regius Contra Late Horkheimer.
The ‘Scientific’ Writings of Early Critical Theory (ca. 1925-1935).
Collection—Horkheimer's Fragments on the Sociology of Sociology (ca. 1928-1934).
[Excerpts:] On The Method of the History of Philosophy (1926/27). Translations from Horkheimer's Lectures on Modern & Contemporary Philosophy.
Translation: Horkheimer's Lectures on The Radical Enlightenment (1927). From his “Introduction to the History of Modern Philosophy” course.
The Research Program of Critical Theory (1930s/1940s)
[Correspondence] Horkheimer’s Letters with Korsch (1938-1939). Their plans for the "dialectic": on problems in politics & positivism.
[Correspondence] M.N. Roy's “The Spiritualist West” as Critical Theory (1936). Ellen Gottschalk's Letter to Horkheimer on Roy's Prison Writings.
Collection: The Idea of an Institute for Social Research. Reports 1938-1944. Between the Self-Conception & Self-Presentation of Critical Theory.
On the Formation of Critical Theory (1920s).
Research Notes: Horkheimer's Marx/ism-Studies (1919-1927). Three reading lists.
Translation: Letters After Munich 1918/19. Horkheimer's correspondence with Germaine Krull & Katja Walch-Lux. (+ Notes).
Materials in the history of philosophy.
Guide to the Confucian Analects. Comparative History of World Philosophy Notes (I)
Announcement: Substudies (1/9/2025)
Critics and theorists,
It’s been more than a year since I last posted here. In fall/winter 2023, the Critical Theory Working Group (CTWG for short) began in earnest. (We have a new website: https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/.) Since then we’ve held two sessions, both of which you can listen to recordings from for free through our Patreon page.1 The first session centered on on the theoretical foundations of ‘early critical theory’ as they were developed in the ISR’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung over the course of the 1930s (fall/winter 2023); the second on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), beginning with problems in the reception history of the text (given its esoteric, Marxian core and the authors’ difficulty in finding any audience) and moving on to conceptual reconstruction of and critical reflections on the entire work, chapter by chapter (summer 2024). After nearly a year’s worth of writing, internal discussions, and editorial work, we released the first volume of the CTWG’s own journal, Margin Notes: Volume 1, Kernels of Early Critical Theory, which is available as a free PDF on our new site.2
I’m renaming this blog “Substudies: Materials and Notes on Critical Theory” and repurposing it for posting supplements to the collective efforts of the CTWG which, for whatever reason, are not or not yet a fit for the CTWG blog or forthcoming issues of the journal.
(I also plan to post translations and notes relevant to my dissertation research on Schelling’s Weltalter, the first within the next week. [See “Translation: "Report on Professor Schmid’s Pasigraphic Experiment in Dilligen," by F.W.J. Schelling (1811)”]
Take care, and Nil admirari,
James/Crane — 1/9/2025
Full link: patreon.com/crittheoryworkgroup