Department of Philosophy and Religion

Biography

Professor Weiss teaches courses in ethics, social and political theory, continental philosophy, and aesthetics. His research attempts to think the intersections between each of these areas of study, with a particular focus on how the Frankfurt School can help us understand both the history of philosophy and the present political conjuncture. More specifically, his approach aims to preserve the critical lineage of classical German philosophy by thinking its essential concepts in relation to the ever-changing composition of capital. This approach has led to publications on topics as wide-ranging as Walter Benjamin's conception of the capitalist imaginary, Kant's conception of "universal history," the relationship between T.W. Adorno's "culture industry" and Guy Debord's "spectacle economy," as well as the significance of the technology of experimental music production. He just published a book entitled The Dialectics of Music: Adorno, Benjamin, and Deleuze.

Publications

Books        

• The Dialectics of Music: Adorno, Benjamin, and Deleuze (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).

 Essays

• “Tortuous Time: Undoing the Past in Jean Améry and James Baldwin,” James Baldwin Review 8 (Fall 2022): 86-107.
• “Understanding Fascism Today: Group Psychology, Nationalism, and the Return of the Old,” Rethinking Marxism 32, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 467-491. “The Old in New Critical Theory: Locating the Gambler and the Prostitute in the Image of Neoliberalism,” Telos 190 (Spring 2020): 117-135.
• “Charlie Brooker Meets Karl Kraus after the End of the World,” Adorno Studies 2, no. 1 (2018): 28-49.
• “Beyond the Ethics of Schuld: Kant, Universal History, and Eco-Catastrophe,” Theory and Event 21, no. 3 (2018): 703-724.
• “The Implicit Conception of Mimesis in Heidegger’s Being and Time,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 19 (2015): 167-186.
• “The Reproduction of Subjectivity and the Turnover-time of Ideology: Speculating with German Idealism, Marx, and Adorno,” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 8, no. 19 (2015): 77-88.
• “The Force of Critique: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Mimetic Redemption of Nature-History,” Telos 166 (2014): 42-55.
• “Transforming Mimetic Play: Adorno’s Resistance to the Formalism of the Death Drive,” Radical Philosophy Review 12 (2009): 273-287. 

Book Chapters

• “The Composer as Producer,” in The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno, ed. Nathan Ross (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 111128.

 Works in Progress 

•  “Surrealist Phantasmagoria,” forthcoming book chapter for the Palgrave Walter Benjamin Handbook.
•  “Baroque Virtuality,” forthcoming book chapter for Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of the Earth.