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This book is a complete presentation of the most important themes of Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory, and of its relevance for the understanding of the modern society. After an Introduction, which traces Adorno’s biographical and intellectual profile, the book is structured in three parts. The first is devoted to theoretical philosophy, and in particular to the concepts of philosophy, negative dialectics and metaphysics, and his aim is to clarify the Adornian understanding of such difficult concepts. The second is devoted to the main themes of Adorno’s social theory: the concept of domination, the relationship with Marxism, the theory of the decay of the individual, the critique of mass manipulation. The third part is devoted to aesthetics and culture criticism, and entails a conclusion in which the author outlines a confrontation between the Adornian and the Habermasian critique of modernity.
This volume of lectures on aesthetics, given by Adorno in the winter semester of 1958–9, formed the foundation for his later Aesthetic Theory, widely regarded as one of his greatest works. The lectures cover a wide range of topics, from an intense analysis of the work of Georg Lukács to a sustained reflection on the theory of aesthetic experience, from an examination of works by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Benjamin, to a discussion of the latest experiments of John Cage, attesting to the virtuosity and breadth of Adorno's engagement. All the while, Adorno remains deeply connected to his surrounding context, offering us a window onto the artistic, intellectual and political confrontations that shaped life in post-war Germany. This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in the development of critical theory.
Perhaps the most important aesthetics of the twentieth century appears here newly translated, in English that is for the first time faithful to the intricately demanding language of the original German. The culmination of a lifetime of aesthetic investigation, Aesthetic Theory is Theodor W. Adorno's magnum opus, the clarifying lens through which the whole of his work is best viewed, providing a framework within which his other major writings cohere.
In Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adorno's epistemology and its material underpinnings, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the nonidentical. Hulatt's novel interpretation casts Adorno's theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth as substantially unified, supporting the thinker's claim that both philosophy and art are capable of being true. For Adorno, truth is produced when rhetorical "texture" combines with cognitive "performance," leading to the breakdown of concepts that mediate the experience of the consciousness. Both philosophy and art manifest these features, although philosophy enacts these conceptual issues directly, while art does so obliquely. Hulatt builds a robust argument for Adorno's claim that concepts ineluctably misconstrue their objects. He also puts the still influential thinker into conversation with Hegel, Husserl, Frazer, Sohn-Rethel, Benjamin, Strawson, Dahlhaus, Habermas, and Caillois, among many others.
An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. With an afterword by Fredric Jameson No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. In light of two pivotal developments—the rise of fascism, which culminated in the Holocaust, and the standardization of popular culture as a commodity indispensable to contemporary capitalism—Adorno sought to evaluate and synthesize the essential insights of Western philosophy by revisiting the ethical and sociological arguments of his predecessors: Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx. This book, first published in Germany in 1996, provides a succinct introduction to Adorno’s challenging and far-reaching thought. Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, a leading authority on the Frankfurt School of critical theory, explains Adorno’s epistemology, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and theory of culture. After providing a brief overview of Adorno’s life, Schweppenhäuser turns to the theorist’s core philosophical concepts, including post-Kantian critique, determinate negation, and the primacy of the object, as well as his view of the Enlightenment as a code for world domination, his diagnosis of modern mass culture as a program of social control, and his understanding of modernist aesthetics as a challenge to conceive an alternative politics. Along the way, Schweppenhäuser illuminates the works widely considered Adorno’s most important achievements: Minima Moralia, Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored with Horkheimer), and Negative Dialectics. Adorno wrote much of the first two of these during his years in California (1938–49), where he lived near Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, whom he assisted with the musical aesthetics at the center of Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus.
A major study of modern culture, Dialectic of Enlightenment for many years led an underground existence among the homeless Left of the German Federal Republic until its definitive publication in West Germany in 1969. Originally composed by its two distinguished authors during their Californian exile in 1944, the book can stand as a monument of classic German progressive social theory in the twentieth century.>
Introduction to Sociology distills decades of distinguished work in sociology by one of this century’s most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. It consists of a course of seventeen lectures given by Theodor W. Adorno in May-July 1968, the last lecture series before his death in 1969. Captured by tape recorder (which Adorno called “the fingerprint of the living mind”), these lectures present a somewhat different, and more accessible, Adorno from the one who composed the faultlessly articulated and almost forbiddingly perfect prose of the works published in his lifetime. Here we can follow Adorno’s thought in the process of formation (he spoke from brief notes), endowed with the spontaneity and energy of the spoken word. The lectures form an ideal introduction to Adorno’s work, acclimatizing the reader to the greater density of thought and language of his classic texts. Delivered at the time of the “positivist dispute” in sociology, Adorno defends the position of the “Frankfurt School” against criticism from mainstream positivist sociologists. He sets out a conception of sociology as a discipline going beyond the compilation and interpretation of empirical facts, its truth being inseparable from the essential structure of society itself. Adorno sees sociology not as one academic discipline among others, but as an over-arching discipline that impinges on all aspects of social life. Tracing the history of the discipline and insisting that the historical context is constitutive of sociology itself, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: the purpose of studying sociology; the relation of sociology and politics; the influence of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Freud; the contributions of ethnology and anthropology; the relationship of method to subject matter; the problems of quantitative analysis; the fetishization of science; and the separation of sociology and social philosophy.
An indispensable key to Adorno’s influential oeuvre—now in paperback In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher’s return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition, rather than a matter of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” Philosophy of New Music poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this translation, which is accompanied by an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an essential guide to the whole of Adorno's oeuvre.
This is the first book to offer readers a guide through the vast labyrinth of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, putting the work into historical context and outlining the main ideas and the relevant debates it participated in or spawned.Lambert Zuidervaart is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College.