Jordi Maiso is Associate Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. His work focuses on Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its contemporary relevance, particularly the thought of Theodor W. Adorno. Bringing together Critical Theory and the critique of political economy, his research examines the social constitution of subjectivity and the transformations of social experience under advanced capitalism. He has published extensively on Critical Theory, aesthetics, social philosophy, the mutations of the culture industry, and authoritarianism. Maiso is Editor-in-Chief of Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica, Chair of the Spanish Society for Critical Theory Studies (SETC), and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Adorno Studies.
Prof. Jordi Maiso
Senior REACT Fellow
Period at the center: December 2026 – January 2027
Research Project: Self-Affirmation without Self-Consciousness: Freedom, Self-Preservation and Authoritarianism in Contemporary Capitalism
Email: amaiso@ucm.es
WebsiteResearch Project
Self-Affirmation without Self-Consciousness: Freedom, Self-Preservation and Authoritarianism in Contemporary Capitalism
Developed within the framework of the MSCA project REACT, this project investigates how the imperatives of self-preservation reshape freedom and subjectivity under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on Adorno’s analysis of the anthropological transformations of advanced capitalism, it examines what happens to the promise of individual freedom when self-preservation increasingly becomes the organising principle of subjective experience. As expectations diminish and living conditions become increasingly fragile, the struggle for survival intensifies, along with the fear of exclusion and social decline.
Against this background, the project explores forms of subjectivation prone to reinforcing authoritarian traits. As individuals become increasingly available to the imperatives of capital, freedom is increasingly experienced as the capacity to dispose of the world. Subjects may thereby come to mimic the systemic voracity that threatens them, fostering a predatory disposition towards the shared world that undermines the social and ecological conditions for the reproduction of life. This constellation may be understood as self-affirmation without self-consciousness: the blind assertion of a freedom that, in seeking to preserve and affirm itself, reproduces the very dynamics that threaten its conditions of possibility.
Selected publications
Monographs
From Damaged Life. The Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Bloomsbury, 2026).
Articles
“Negative Dialectics”, in: Research Handbook on Critical Theory, ed. Douglas Kellner & Rainer Winter (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2026), 162-171.
“Self-Preservation Run Wild: Theodor W. Adorno and the Mutations of Subjectivity in Catastrophic Capitalism”, in: Apocalyptica, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2025 (Forthcoming).
“The Critical Theory of Antisemitism and the Limits of Enlightenment”, in: Critical Theory and The Critique of Antisemitism, ed. M. Stoetzler (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 29-49.
“Zur gesellschaftlichen Produktion von Kälte”, in: Grenzsteine. Beiträge zur Kritik der Gewalt, ed. Th. Becker, A. Franze, J. Hayner & A. Kellermann, (München: Text+Kritik, 2016), 71-85.