Download or read book Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity written by Eric Oberle and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identity has become a central feature of national conversations: identity politics and identity crises are the order of the day. We celebrate identity when it comes to personal freedom and group membership, and we fear the power of identity when it comes to discrimination, bias, and hate crimes. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between positive and negative liberty, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity argues for the necessity of acknowledging a dialectic within the identity concept. Exploring the intellectual history of identity as a social idea, Eric Oberle shows the philosophical importance of identity's origins in American exile from Hitler's fascism. Positive identity was first proposed by Frankfurt School member Erich Fromm, while negative identity was almost immediately put forth as a counter-concept by Fromm's colleague, Theodor Adorno. Oberle explains why, in the context of the racism, authoritarianism, and the hard-right agitation of the 1940s, the invention of a positive concept of identity required a theory of negative identity. This history in turn reveals how autonomy and objectivity can be recovered within a modern identity structured by domination, alterity, ontologized conflict, and victim blaming.
Download or read book Theodor W Adorno written by Gerhard Schweppenhäuser and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno written by Renee J. Heberle and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adorno is often left out of the &“canon&” of influences on contemporary feminist theory, but these essays show that his work can provide valuable material for feminist thinking about a wide range of issues. Theodor Adorno was a leading scholar of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, otherwise known as the Frankfurt School. With Max Horkheimer he contributed to the advance of critical theorizing about Enlightenment philosophy and modernity. Inflected by Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, Adorno&’s thinking defies easy categorization. Ranging across the disciplines of philosophy, musicology, and sociology, his work has had an impact in many fields. His Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer) was profoundly influential as a critique of fascistic and authoritarian impulses in Enlightenment thinking in the context of late capitalism. Questions addressed in the volume range from dilemmas in feminist aesthetic theory to the politics of suffering and democratic theory. The essays are exemplary as works in interdisciplinary scholarship, covering a wide range of issues and ideas in feminism as authors critically interpret the many facets of Adorno&’s work. They take Adorno&’s historical situatedness as a scholar into consideration while exploring the relevance of his ideas for post-Enlightenment feminist theory. His philosophical and cultural investigations inspire reconsideration of Enlightenment principles as well as a rethinking of &“postmodern&” ideas about identity and the self. Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno will introduce feminists to Adorno&’s work and Adorno scholars to modes of feminist critique. It will be especially valuable for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in contemporary political, social, and cultural theory. In addition to the editor, contributors are Paul Apostolidis, Mary Caputi, Rebecca Comay, Jennifer Eagan, Mary Ann Franks, Eva Geulen, Sora Han, Andrew Hewitt, Gillian Howie, Lisa Yun Lee, Bruce Martin, and Lambert Zuidervaart.
Download or read book Jazz As Critique written by Fumi Okiji and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “lucidly argued, historically grounded . . . and timely book” reexamines the relationship between black cultures, jazz music, and critical theory (Alexander G. Weheliye, Northwestern University). A sustained engagement with the work of Theodor Adorno, Jazz As Critique looks to jazz for ways of understanding the inadequacies of contemporary life. While Adorno's writings on jazz are notoriously dismissive, he has faith in the critical potential of some musical traditions. Music, he suggests, can provide insight into the controlling, destructive nature of modern society while offering a glimpse of more empathetic and less violent ways of being together in the world. Taking Adorno down a new path, Okiji calls attention to an alternative sociality made manifest in jazz. In response to writing that tends to portray it as a mirror of American individualism and democracy, she makes the case for jazz as a model of “gathering in difference.” Noting that this mode of subjectivity emerged in response to the distinctive history of black America, she reveals that the music cannot but call the integrity of the world into question.
Download or read book Can One Live after Auschwitz written by Theodor W. Adorno and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive collection of readings from the work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the "Western legacy of positivity,” the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from "metaphysical experience.” In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: "Toward a New Categorical Imperative,” "Damaged Life,” "Administered World, Reified Thought,” "Art, Memory of Suffering,” and "A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive.” A substantial number of Adorno’s writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno’s work.
Download or read book Origin of Negative Dialectics written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1979-12 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Buck-Morss examines and stresses the significance of Critical Theory for young West Germ intellectuals after World War II. Looking at the differences between German and American situations during this time period, Origin of Negative Dialectics convincingly sketches the learning process that ended in antagonism. “[The Origin of Negative Dialectics] is by far the best introduction for the American reader to the complex, esoteric, and illusive structure of thought of one of the most seminal Marxian thinkers of the twentieth century. It belongs on the same shelf as Martin Jay’s history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination.” – Lewis A. Coser, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Download or read book Critique of Identity Thinking written by Michael Jackson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-05-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent world-wide political developments have persuaded many people that we are again living in what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” Jackson’s response to this age of uncertainty is to remind us how much experience falls outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible. Drawing on such critical thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Jaspers, whose work was profoundly influenced by the catastrophes that overwhelmed the world in the middle of the last century, Jackson explores the transformative and redemptive power of marginalized voices in the contemporary conversation of humankind.
Download or read book Adorno and Existence written by Peter E. Gordon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise. As Peter E. Gordon shows, Adorno’s writings on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger present us with a photographic negative—a philosophical portrait of the author himself.
Download or read book Adorno on Popular Culture written by Robert Winston Witkin and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unpacks Adorno's critique of popular culture in an engagingly, looking at the development of theories of authority, commodification and negative dialectics. Goes on to consider Adorno's writing on specific aspects of popular culture.
Download or read book History and Freedom written by Theodor W. Adorno and published by Polity. This book was released on 2006-12-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress." -- Cover, p. [4].
Download or read book Dialectic of Enlightenment written by Max Horkheimer and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1993 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.>
Download or read book Essays on Music written by Theodor Adorno and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-08-08 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A book of landmark importance. It is unprecedented in its design: a brilliantly selected group of essays on music coupled with lucid, deeply incisive, and in every way masterly analysis of Adorno's thinking about music. No one who studies Adorno and music will be able to dispense with it; and if they can afford only one book on Adorno and music, this will be the one. For in miniature, it contains everything one needs: a collection of exceptionally important writings on all the principal aspects of music and musical life with which Adorno dealt; totally reliable scholarship; and powerfully illuminating commentary that will help readers at all levels read and re-read the essays in question."—Rose Rosengard Subotnik, author of Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society "An invaluable contribution to Adorno scholarship, with well chosen essays on composers, works, the culture industry, popular music, kitsch, and technology. Leppert's introduction and commentaries are consistently useful; his attention to secondary literature remarkable; his interpretation responsible. The new translations by Susan Gillespie (and others) are outstanding not only for their care and readability, but also for their sensitivity to Adorno's forms and styles."—Lydia Goehr, author of The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy "With its careful, full edition of Adorno's important musical texts and its exhaustive yet eminently readable commentaries, Richard Leppert's magisterial book represents a brilliant solution to the age-old dilemma of bringing together primary text and interpretation in one volume."—James Deaville, Director, School of the Arts, McMaster University "The developing variations of Adorno's life-long involvement with musical themes are fully audible in this remarkable collection. What might be called his 'literature on notes' brilliantly complements the 'notes to literature' he devoted to the written word. Richard Leppert's superb commentaries constitute a book-length contribution in their own right, which will enlighten and challenge even the most learned of Adorno scholars."—Martin Jay, author of The Dialectical Imagination: A History of The Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research "There is afoot in Anglo-American musicology today the first wholesale reconsideration of Adorno's thought since the pioneering work of Rose Rosengard Subotnik around 1980. Essays on Music will play a central role in this effort. It will do so because Richard Leppert has culled Adorno's writings so as to make clear to musicologists the place of music in the broad critique of modernity that was Adorno's overarching project; and it will do so because Leppert has explained these writings, in commentaries that amount to a book-length study, so as to reveal to non-musicologists the essentially musical foundation of this project. No one interested in Adorno from any perspective—or, for that matter, in modernity and music all told—can afford to ignore Essays on Music."—Gary Tomlinson, author of Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera "This book is both a major achievement by its author-editor and a remarkable act of scholarly generosity for the rest of us. Until now, English translations of Adorno's major essays on music have been scattered and often unreliable. Until now, there has been no comprehensive scholarly treatment of Adorno's musical thinking. This volume remedies both problems at a single stroke. It will be read equally—and eagerly—for Adorno's texts and for Richard Leppert's commentary on them, both of which will continue to be essential resources as musical scholarship seeks increasingly to come to grips with the social contexts and effects of music. No one knows Adorno better than Leppert, and no one is better equipped to clarify the complex interweaving of sociology, philosophy, and musical aesthetics that is central to Adorno's work. From now on, everyone who reads Adorno on music, whether a beginner or an expert, is in Richard Leppert's debt for devoting his exceptional gifts of learning and lucidity to this project."—Lawrence Kramer, author of Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History
Download or read book The Culture Industry written by Theodor W Adorno and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.
Download or read book A Companion to Adorno written by Peter E. Gordon and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive contribution to scholarship on Adorno, bringing together the foremost experts in the field As one of the leading continental philosophers of the last century, and one of the pioneering members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno is the author of numerous influential—and at times quite radical—works on diverse topics in aesthetics, social theory, moral philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, all of which concern the contradictions of modern society and its relation to human suffering and the human condition. Having authored substantial contributions to critical theory which contain searching critiques of the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘identity thinking’ of modern Western society, Adorno helped establish an interdisciplinary but philosophically rigorous study of culture and provided some of the most startling and revolutionary critiques of Western society to date. The Blackwell Companion to Adorno is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, this important contribution to the field explores Adorno’s lasting impact on many sub-fields of philosophy. Seven sections, encompassing a diverse range of topics and perspectives, explore Adorno’s intellectual foundations, his critiques of culture, his views on ethics and politics, and his analyses of history and domination. Provides new research and fresh perspectives on Adorno’s views and writings Offers an authoritative, single-volume resource for Adorno scholarship Addresses renewed interest in Adorno’s significance to contemporary questions in philosophy Presents over 40 essays written by international-recognized experts in the field A singular advancement in Adorno scholarship, the Companion to Adorno is an indispensable resource for Adorno specialists and anyone working in modern European philosophy, contemporary cultural criticism, social theory, German history, and aesthetics.
Download or read book Critical Models written by Theodor W. Adorno and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Critical Models' combines two of Adorno's most important postwar works - 'Interventions' and 'Catchwords"--And addresses issues such as the dangers of ideological conformity, the fragility of democracy, educational reform, the influence of television and radio and the aftermath and continuity of racism.
Download or read book Minima Moralia written by Theodor Adorno and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.
