Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays

Description

Few intellectual figures of the twentieth century dealt with such a vast scope of subjects as Theodor Adorno (1903-1969). His insights, therefore, lend themselves to critical overview as many have cross-disciplinary relevance, appealing to scholars from a variety of backgrounds. Adorno and the Need in Thinking examines questions dealt with in the works of Adorno, offering a glimpse at the development of his complex thought. This collection of essays, though dealing with different topics from section to section, is unified by the idea that, at least in the English-speaking world, there are numerous facets of Adorno's work that have been hitherto neglected in terms of critical scholarship. Adorno and the Need in Thinking addresses these forgotten nuances, whether they apply to questions of politics, language, metaphysics, aesthetics, ecology, or several of these at once. Also included for the first time in English is Adorno's important early essay, "Theses on the Language of the Philosopher." At a time when Adorno scholarship is on the rise, this collection sheds light on new areas of critical research, adding another dimension to the existing literature on this most important intellectual. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE: LANGUAGE 1 Theses on the Language of the Philosopher 2 Adorno’s Dialectics of Language 3 The ‘Aesthetic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language 4 The Linguistic Image: Mediation and Immediacy in Adorno and Benjamin PART TWO: METAPHYSICS AND SOCIETY 5 Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics 6 From the Actual to the Possible: Non-identity Thinking 7 Experience and Aura: Adorno, McDowell, and ‘Second Nature’ PART THREE: COMMUNICATION, REIFICATION, AND THE NON-IDENTICAL 8 Mystical Kernels? Rational Shells? Habermas and Adorno on Reification and Re-enchantment 9 Politics beyond Speech: Communication and the Non-identical 10 Adorno’s Aesthetics of Reconciliation: Negative Presentation of Utopia or Post-metaphysical Pipe-Dream? PART FOUR: AESTHETICS AND CULTURE 11 On Adorno’s Aesthetics of the Ugly 12 ‘Three-Minute Access’: Fugazi’s Negative Aesthetic 13 A World of Difference: Adorno and Cultural Studies 14 ‘On the Morality of Thinking,’ or Why Still Adorno PART FIVE: ECOLOGY 15 Adorno and Ecological Politics Contributors