Still Haunted by Adorno's Spirit? Some Questionable Elements of Hartmut Rosa's Resonance Theory

In one of the major contributions to current Critical Theory in the 21st century, Hartmut Rosa employs the notion of resonant subject-world-relationships to critically analyse structural features of modern societies that systematically undermine stable conditions for such relationships to unfold. The specific critical potential of resonance theory is based on its status as an account of the good life, which has to build on an account of human nature. Arguably, the best available account of human nature is given by evolutionary anthropology and psychology – pro- ceeding from a wide notion of evolution as natural and cultural. I propose to complement resonance theory with evolutionary approaches to the question of the good life. Resonance theory can offer crucial refinements of the concept of the good life as pre- supposed by authors working within an evolutionary perspective, while in turn being able to profit from the empirical insights of evolutionary anthropology and psychology.

ABSTRACTThis article offers a preliminary analysis of how Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance might meaningfully participate in the transformation of educational practices and institutions, through an exploration of its operational potential. The paper begins by briefly framing the issue of relational vs. individualized educational goals and addressing the complicated relationship between resonance and skill development. Two hypotheses that open up avenues for further research are then explored. The first hypothesis addressed the relationship between resonance theory and moral education through a confrontation with recent literature in education sciences on the development of responsibility, following the idea that, for educational policy to shift away from the skills approach that gels uncomfortably with resonance pedagogy, the latter would need to articulate its capacity to effectively promote a wide range of desirable outcomes beyond the theoretically indigenous aim of dispositional resonance. The second hypothesis posits two ways that resonance theory might affect decision‐making processes within educational institutions, examining the role that teachers might play in securing the institutional conditions of resonant pedagogical relationships and proposing a preliminary practical interpretation of Rosa's idea of a resonance compass. The paper closes with a short reflection on the practical distinction between resonance and responsiveness as conceptual levers for educational change, examining what sets resonance pedagogy apart from other relational approaches.

This article deals with the resonance theory of the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, which has aroused a lot of interest among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, including researchers in the field of religion. The article focuses on its importance for religion, particularly the science of religion and hope. The author presents Rosa’s theory first from the anthropological and sociological aspect. He then turns to Rosa’s understanding of religion. On this basis, the author draws his conclusions, which are as follows: The main significance of the resonance theory for religion and the science of religion is in the rehabilitation of religion as an anthropological constant. It follows that Rosa’s theory of resonance is an important contribution to substantiating the importance of religion and supporting its cultivation. Secondly, Rosa’s theory is an important contribution and support to the flourishing of hope due to its scientific support for religion. Another contribution of Rosa’s theory to hope is that it helps us understand the connection between resonance, existential hope, and meaning, and thus contributes to our being more successful in developing existential hope and discovering the meaning of our lives and world. This is important for our quality of life.

Mental health work in Norway has undergone extensive market-based liberal shifts in recent decades, which has put time under pressure. While streamlining services is claimed to improve quality of care , researchers have expressed concern about a devaluation of face-to-face relationships. This article explores how young service users experience the role of time in mental health work and how temporal dimensions affect professional relationships. To do so, we draw on the case of young service users from two third-sector organisations that provide low-threshold mental health services in Norwegian municipalities. In total, 14 semi-structured interviews with service users were conducted and analysed through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, as well as the concepts of chronos and kairos , were applied to shed light on the temporal and relational experiences of participants. The findings showed how time was experienced through presence and availability, including sharing vulnerable moments and being flexible in the use of clock time. Additionally, the findings revealed that professionals who stayed connected and supported young users over time obtained a more holistic view of the person and were able to provide stability during difficult phases. Through such continuous relationships, the young people experienced gradual inner and outer transformations where they saw themselves in a different light and explored new ways of being.

The purpose of this article is to understand the modern world better and to find what theology can contribute to it. Modernity has brought about many achievements for human beings, but they can be ambivalent in nature, sometimes with pathological consequences. The theory of resonance is an approach by a German sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, and is one of the meaningful responses to the ambivalent situations ofmodernity. It focuses on individuals’ ability to resonate in their life experiences. Its analysis ofthe modern society, which include Asian societies, and its proposals based on that analysis are very convincing, but some critical reflections from theological perspectives can provide a useful complement to the theory. The essay will use approaches from sociology and theology in order to access the resonance theory. The dialogue with theology shows that theology sheds light on the meaning ofpain and suffering in the human realities of evil and death, which the theory seems to neglect. It can bring about solidarity through prayers and offer a suitable pastoral approach. By enabling rethinking about time as a creation of God, theology can drive out fear against the phenomenon of acceleration and can help human beings to live out the present and to meet God in this very moment in life. Moreover, theology adds the dimension oftranscendence to life. On the other hand, Rosa’s concept ofresonance provides an occasion for these theological reflections and helps one to rethink the modern-day pastoral approach for people, believers and non-believers alike. In other words, confronting this theory helps Christianity to be more open to the modern world and to understand it better. It is hoped that the essay will further thedialogue of the theory with theology and the thoughts from other traditions such as in Asia

This paper explores a series of challenges presented by Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance viewed in the context of the normative and political dimensions of critical theory, a tradition in which he explicitly places his work (even as he draws on a wide range of other scholarly fields and domains). First, a tension between the anthropological and sociocultural aspects of his project raises questions about whether the avowed political commitments of the project can be incorporated into its theoretical framework. Second, the variability with which resonance can present, and its fundamentally pathic nature, makes it difficult to imagine how it might serve an emancipatory interest. Beyond this, the critical diagnosis of forms of impaired or deficient resonance introduces methodological questions with moral consequences. Despite these challenges, Rosa’s project importantly calls for a renewed relation to the world, one that shares affinities with parallel developments within the humanities.

Hartmut Rosa has grown to international celebrity thanks to his theory of social acceleration as a new interpretation of modernity, linked with the imperative of growth and the idea of alienation. His recent work has revolved around the concept of resonance, and although this has raised significant interest, its positioning within contemporary sociological theory still needs further study. This article starts situating the notion of resonance in the wider context of Rosa’s theoretical enterprise (section 1). The following section outlines the key concepts and the main argument comprising his theory of resonance, and briefly examines some specific challenges to resonance emerging in the current predicament (section 2). Finally, the article ends by connecting idea of resonance with a few pivotal themes in contemporary sociological theory, with a special focus on Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach and her theory of the Self and personal reflexivity (section 3). The core thesis of the article is that the notion of resonance still calls for better understanding within social theory, precisely because of the specific type of critique of modernity inherent in such a concept.

The standard thesis of the disenchantment of the world appears as a self-referential claim maintaining something about the claimant. In a nutshell, it contends that we, moderns, live in a world that does not resonate with us, which is mute, indifferent, mindless, and therefore usable, exploitable, consumable, but not intrinsically worthy or meaningful. In my chapter, I discuss an alternative view of the relationship between self and world by taking three interrelated steps. First, starting from a first-person perspective, I wonder why the experiences of enchantment have to cave in and give way to disillusionment: is this an inescapable feature of the human condition and, if such is the case, what sort of inescapability are we dealing with here? Second, as long as episodes of enchantment do happen, I ask then what kind of human potential is embodied by them. Third, I inquire whether there are ways to account for the reasons supporting the two stances of enchantment and disenchantment without making them mutually incompatible by focusing on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and asking whether a resonant world can be plausibly described as a reenchanted world.

Summary Based on her many years of experience with dance improvisation, the author explores the question of how to explain the observation that similar fundamental principles apply to improvising dance and leading TCI groups. The significance of body awareness in dance as well as for the holistic approach of TCI is one central theme of her article. A second one is that of experiencing resonance. Based on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, she shows that here again body sensation is fundamental. This leads to the conclusion that more attention should be paid to body sensation in TCI training.

This study discusses the Postdigital Laptop Ensemble at the University of Siegen (PULSE) as a model postdigital resonant educational space. Situated within postdigital discourse, the course treats laptops and portable digital devices as musical instruments within a hybrid classroom, fostering collaborative, creative, and embodied learning experiences. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, this study examines how spatial design and technology-mediated interactions in PULSE cultivate a Resonanzraum—a dynamic space of mutual transformation. Through qualitative methods, including (1) a student survey, (2) autoethnographic reflections, and (3) an analysis of audio-visual data, we identify six themes that contribute to the emergence of resonance: (1) spatial comfort, (2) collaboration, (3) spatial constraints/affordances, (4) technology-mediated agency, (5) iterative learning, and (6) future classroom implications. The findings suggest that PULSE creates an inclusive postdigital educational space that enhances student agency and multimodal engagement. However, scalability challenges, such as resource disparities, highlight the need for adaptive implementations. This study aims to bridge resonance and postdigital research, proposing PULSE as a model for designing equitable, sustainable, and participatory learning spaces that align with evolving pedagogical demands.

It is argued that Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance provides memory activists (those actors engaged in memory politics) with both a normative justification and qualitative metric by which sites of memory may be compared and evaluated. Resonance is a plausible candidate for an assessing concept on the grounds that there is overlap between Rosa’s sociological approach and the implicit appeal to resonance in the memory studies literature.

Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and alienation is a sociological theory of modern people’s relationship to the material and social world; the article explores if and how this theory might illuminate contemporary dying. After introducing Rosa’s key concepts of alienation and resonance, the article applies them first to the individual’s dying (my personal death) and second to the possible dying of western modernity, or even humankind itself, due to global warming and ecological degradation (our collective death). Each section looks at how, as the end of individual or collective life approaches, people’s material, social and existential worlds change, and hence how their relationships to the world change. An accustomed world that to some extent may have been resonant becomes alien; yet resonance is sometimes found in the newly alien world of the dying. Finally, resonance is compared and contrasted with some Majority World concepts of living well: Buddhism, ubuntu, and buen vivir; and with psychological concepts commonly applied in the West to both individual mortality and global warming, namely denial, awareness, anxiety and grief.

ABSTRACTThe paper compares Hartmut Rosa's resonance theory of “the good life” and Daniel Haybron's psychic affirmation theory of “happiness,” which he differentiates, as a descriptive notion, from “well‐being” as an evaluative notion. Haybron suggests that a central determinant of happiness has to be the somewhat reliable occurrence of positive affective states, in a nonevaluative sense of “positive.” Haybron's own explication comprises three “happiness‐constituting” dimensions: attunement, engagement, endorsement (which together make up the psychological state he calls “psychic affirmation”). But these notions are phenomenologically underdeveloped, and inept to provide a systematic explication of (nonevaluative) affective “positivity.” This can be provided with the concept of resonance. Furthermore, resonance can figure as explication of another important concept Haybron develops in his account of happiness: the “centrality” or “profundity” of affective states with regard to happiness. Overall, the concept of resonance can be inserted into Haybron's account of happiness, as an explication of the actual content of positive affective states. The notion of happiness as psychic affirmation, in turn, can provide a more detailed account of the structure of happiness over longer stretches of time. On this long‐term structural level, the notions of “dispositional resonance” and “resonance trust/confidence” are situated, which may be more precisely explicated through Haybron's framework. Moreover, the complementarity of resonance and psychic affirmation theory does not only seem fruitful on a theoretical and conceptual level, but also with regard to practical and political concerns. The two conceptions of happiness may help to unfold new motivational potentials complementing normatively inclined arguments in favor of greater social equality, as well as less severe status competition and consumption orientation.

The purpose with this paper is firstly to investigate whether an Indigenous, multidimensional, relationally intertwined onto-epistemology is present in a policy document regarding árbediehtu, traditional Sámi knowledge. The policy identify knowledge claims the Sámi parliament in Sweden wants to pass on to future generations, and is the closest to a Sámi produced curriculum we get in a Swedish context. A four-dimensional relational framework where relationality is unpacked through resonance theory by Hartmut Rosa is utilised as an analytical tool. Secondly, implications for Networked Learning, especially as occurring in remote Sámi language education, are elaborated on. The findings show that the framework can be helpful for understanding and describing a multidimensional relational onto-epistemology as relationships in the policy can be identified on three of the four dimensions in the framework. The last dimension involves the self and is mainly a reflexive tool. However, as the discussion initiated in the concluding section indicates, implications for Networked Learning and remote Sámi language education is not the only take-away. An unpacked understanding of relationality offers a glocalised as-well-as theoretical approach, which is important both locally and globally as issues of sustainability call for the development of a new social contract. According to resonance theory, resonant relationships are transformational, leading to the conclusion that a relational approach can lead to an increased understanding of learning and knowing, and a sense of self-efficacy and a stronger identity, all important aspects in transformational education. Further, the study is an example of how a national graduate school, GRADE, can offer epistemic space when researching digital technologies in education.

Critical educators based their proposal on the question of teaching to change the world and society. Our aim is to contribute to a rethinking of the role of education in building a more just society through the new perspective of post-critical pedagogy (PCP). The authors propose to overpass the paradigm of changing the world, guided by the idea that education today should focus on guarding the world. We discuss two different concepts, that conceive PCP in two different ways: Hartmut Rosa's concept of ‘resonance' on one side, and Michel Serres's idea of ‘mingling' with the world on the other. Resonance delineates a manner in which individuals and the world engage in a relationship, ultimately shaping each other's form. Rosa's resonance theory is connected with critical theory: for Rosa, resonance is a space of meaning within the accelerated and alienating world. Instead Serres refuses the critical moment: according to him, the act of knowing does relies on a respectful ‘mingling' with the world that does not entail any critical stance. Through this term, Serres encapsulates an ecological approach to knowledge, proposing a just relationship with the surrounding world as the foundation of knowledge. We will build on these concepts in order to affirm two different interpretations of PCP and justice, generally conceived as a just relationship with the surrounding world.