Download or read book Grand Hotel Abyss written by Stuart Jeffries and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Marvelously entertaining, exciting and informative.” —Guardian “An engaging and accessible history.” —New York Review of Books This group biography is “an exhilarating page-turner” and “outstanding critical introduction” to the work and legacy of the Frankfurt School, and the great 20th-century thinkers who created it (Washington Post). In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century. Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. Benjamin, with his last great work—the incomplete Arcades Project—in his suitcase, was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Adorno failed in his bid to become a Hollywood screenwriter, denounced jazz, and even met Charlie Chaplin in Malibu. After the war, there was a resurgence of interest in the School. From the relative comfort of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.
Download or read book Grand Hotel Abyss written by Vladimir Safatle and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in Portuguese as Grande Hotel AbismoIn the last two decades recognition - arguably one of the most central notions of the dialectical tradition since Hegel - has once again become a crucial philosophical theme. Nevertheless, the new theories of recognition fail to provide room for reflection on transformation processes in politics and morality. This book aims to recover the disruptive nature of the dialectical tradition by means of a severe critique of the dominance of an anthropology of the individual identity in contemporary theories of recognition. This critique implies a thorough rethinking of basic concepts such as desire, negativity, will and drive, with Hegel, Lacan and Adorno being our main guides. The Marxist philosopher György Lukács said that the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, etc.) left us with nothing but negativity towards the state of the world. Their work failed to open up a concrete possibility of practical engagement in this world. All too eager to describe the impasses of reason, the Frankfurt philosphers remained trapped in a metaphorical Grand Hotel Abyss(Grand Hotel Abgrund). It was as living and being guardian of lettered civilization in a beautiful and melancholy grand hotel, of which the balconies face a gaping abyss. But perhaps in this way Lukács gave – and no doubt without realizing it himself – a perfect definition of contemporary philosophy, namely to confront chaos, to peer into what appears to a certain rationality as an abyss and to feel good about it. Touching Hegelian dialectics, critical theory and psychoanalysis,Grand Hotel Abyss gives a new meaning to the notion of negativity as the first essential step for rethinking political and moral engagement.
Download or read book The Grand Abyss Hotel written by Marcos Prior and published by Boom! Studios. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcos Prior and Eisner-nominated artist David Rubín (The Hero, Rumble, Battling Boy: The Rise of Aurora West) weave a politically satirical look at democracy today through the lense of hyper-violence and explosive action. Imagine a world overrun by big business and “fake news” via the social media machine . . . In The Grand Abyss Hotel neoliberalism has become a state religion, while the citizens quietly and then not-so-quietly rebel, giving way to violence on the streets and sowing chaos. A masked vigilante takes on the role of hero to battle politicians, the erosion of democracy, and social media. After the fires burn low and the dust settles, social order returns. Or does it?
Download or read book The Frankfurt School in Exile written by Thomas Wheatland and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology. He argues that, contrary to accepted belief, the members of the group, who fled oppression in Nazi Germany in 1934, had a major influence on postwar intellectual life.
Download or read book Everything All the Time Everywhere written by Stuart Jeffries and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical new history of a dangerous idea Post-Modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. It dynamited modernism which had dominated the western world for most of the 20th century. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was also the forcing ground of the 'post truth', by means of which western values got turned upside down. But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continue to today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes David Bowie, the Ipod, Frederic Jameson, the demolition of Pruit-Igoe, Madonna, Post-Fordism, Jeff Koon's 'Rabbit', Deleuze and Guattari, the Nixon Shock, The Bowery series, Judith Butler, Las Vegas, Margaret Thatcher, Grand Master Flash, I Love Dick, the RAND Corporation, the Sex Pistols, Princess Diana, the Musee D'Orsay, Grand Theft Auto, Perry Anderson, Netflix, 9/11 We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?
Download or read book Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School written by John Abromeit and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Max Horkheimer during the early and middle phases of his life (1895–1941). Drawing on unexamined new sources, John Abromeit describes the critical details of Horkheimer's intellectual development. This study recovers and reconstructs the model of early Critical Theory that guided the work of the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s. Horkheimer is remembered primarily as the co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he wrote with Theodor W. Adorno in the early 1940s. But few people realize that Horkheimer and Adorno did not begin working together seriously until the late 1930s or that the model of Critical Theory developed by Horkheimer and Erich Fromm in the late 1920s and early 1930s differs in crucial ways from Dialectic of Enlightenment. Abromeit highlights the ways in which Horkheimer's early Critical Theory remains relevant to contemporary theoretical discussions in a wide variety of fields.
Download or read book Social Acceleration written by Hartmut Rosa and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies in particular three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match future results and events. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School written by Peter E. Gordon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 1362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The portentous terms and phrases associated with the first decades of the Frankfurt School – exile, the dominance of capitalism, fascism – seem as salient today as they were in the early twentieth century. The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School addresses the many early concerns of critical theory and brings those concerns into direct engagement with our shared world today. In this volume, a distinguished group of international scholars from a variety of disciplines revisits the philosophical and political contributions of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others. Throughout, the Companion’s focus is on the major ideas that have made the Frankfurt School such a consequential and enduring movement. It offers a crucial resource for those who are trying to make sense of the global and cultural crisis that has now seized our contemporary world.
Download or read book In the Hotel Abyss written by Robert D. Lanning and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical analysis of a selection of Adorno’s work framed by four essential concerns: 1) Adorno’s method of analysis; 2) the absence of a theory of social change; 3) the relationship of his approach to the dialectics of Hegel and Marx, particularly, to others in and around the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Kracauer, Marcuse), and in contrast to scholars such as Lukács and Bloch; and 4) Adorno’s use of his approach with respect to jazz, popular music, radio and pro-fascist propaganda of the 1930s and 40s as an instrument to disparage the working class. The argument is not an affirmation of Adorno’s work, but argues against the significance of aspects of his theoretical perspective.
Download or read book Marxism and Totality written by Martin Jay and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Totality has been an abiding concern from the first generation of Western Marxists, most notably Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, and Bloch, through the second, exemplified by the Frankfurt School, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Della Volpe, up to the most recent, typified by Althusser, Colletti, and Habermas. Yet no consensus has been reached concerning the term's multiple meanings—expressive, decentered, longitudinal, latitudinal, normative—or its implications for other theoretical and practical matters. By closely following the adventures of this troublesome but central concept, Marxism & Totality offers an unconventional account of the history of Western Marxism.
Download or read book An Event Perhaps written by Peter Salmon and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher, film star, father of “post truth”—the real story of Jacques Derrida Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times. Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmon shows, was moved by a profound desire to understand how we engage with each other. It is a theme explored through Derrida’s intimate relationships with writers such as Althusser, Genet, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, and Kristeva. Accessible, provocative and beautifully written, An Event, Perhaps will introduce a new readership to the life and work of a philosopher whose influence over the way we think will continue long into the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Disordered Minds written by Ian Hughes and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disordered Minds offers a compelling and timely account of the dangers posed by narcissistic leaders, and provides a stark warning that the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes - extremes of social inequality and a culture of hyper-individualism - are the hallmarks of our present age. 'An excellent account of how malignant narcissism is evident in the lives of the great dictators, and how the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes have returned to haunt us.' Dr Kieran Keohane, editor of The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization
Download or read book Rethinking the Frankfurt School written by Jeffrey T. Nealon and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2002-08-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By exploring the work of the Frankfurt school today, this book helps to define the very field of cultural studies.
Download or read book The Space Hotel written by Victor Appleton and published by ABDO. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Tom and Sandy visit the Apogee, the world's first space hotel, Tom begins to notice strange happenings and when the billionaire guest of the hotel goes missing, Tom suspects foul play.
Download or read book Theodor W Adorno written by Detlev Claussen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
Download or read book The Dialectical Imagination written by Martin Jay and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-03-05 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.
Download or read book The Grand Hotel written by Scott Kenemore and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the hotel where nobody checks out. When a desk clerk welcomes a group of tourists into his mysterious and crumbling hotel, the last thing he expects is that a lone girl on his tour may hold the power to unravel the hidden mystery that has lain for untold centuries within the structure’s walls. The Grand Hotel is a horror novel by esteemed bestselling author Scott Kenemore (Zombie, Ohio) that takes the reader on a thrilling ride through an interconnected series of stories narrated by the desk clerk and the residents of the hotel itself. And while it is not known whether or not the desk clerk is actually the devil incarnate, it is strange that so many visitors who come for a tour of the hotel have a way of never leaving. As the narrator takes you deeper and deeper into the heart of the hotel, secrets that have been hiding for aeons begin to show themselves. Although he is quite prepared for this experience, there is some question as to whether or not the rest of the world shares this readiness. Kenemore’s incredible style and originality carry The Grand Hotel to places most people only see in their nightmares. And while we don’t know all of the secrets that lie within the Grand Hotel, we know that the person who does hold that knowledge puts fear into the narrator himself—a thought that ought to terrify everyone. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
