ADORNO, THE PROHIBITION OF THE IMAGE, AND MUSIC

Synthesizing existing scholarship on the specificity (and distinct Jewishness) of Adorno's understanding of the prohibition of the image in the context of music and revisiting debates on Moses and Aaron and the Survivor from Warsaw, this paper will defend Adorno against prevalent misunderstandings, including the notion that Adorno's aesthetics are predominantly fixated on the visual.

Lars Fischer was educated at Queen Mary and Westfield College and UCL where he is currently a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Before returning to UCL in 2013, he was the Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge and previously held lectureships in German History at UCL and Modern European History at King's College London. He is a Fellow, and serves on the Council, of the Royal Historical Society and was Secretary of the British Association for Jewish Studies (BAJS) from 2010-2012. His research focuses predominantly on non-Jewish perceptions of 'the Jew' and antisemitism and he published a monograph on The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany with Cambridge University Press in 2007 (paperback 2010). Inter alia, he is currently editing a volume on Constructions of Judaism and Jewishness in Baroque Music and rec ently completed a chapter on the GDR musicologist Georg Knepler.

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