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Loading... Adorno (original 1984; edition 1984)by Martin Jay
Work InformationAdorno by Martin Jay (Author) (1984)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Probably the best general introduction I've read, but nobody is worse done by general introduction than Adorno. Particularly flummoxing is Jay's desire to eliminate Hegel from Adorno's work, and to separate him from Lukacs. He's good on Adorno's debts to Weber and Durkheim, pretty good on the musicology, but bad on the philosophical side of things, and makes some completely misleading claims (e.g., that the non-identical is an end in itself, when Adorno explicitly warns against believing that; that the 'exchange principle' is money, while for Adorno it is a/the Concept; that the Dialectic of Enlightenment is making trans-historical claims, when it is explicitly a theory of truth in time.) But it's well written at least. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading figure in the Frankfurt School and one of this century's most demanding intellectuals. His works, always informed by his variant of Critical Theory that he called Negative Dialectics, is notoriously difficult to understand bu has had an enormous impact on philosophy, sociology, musicology, literary criticism, psychology, and the study of culture. In an introductory section, Martin Jay gives a brief, lucid account of Adorno's notion of force-field, and of Adorno's extension of Walter Benjamin's concept of constellation. He distinguishes five impulses in Adorno's thinking: his Marxism, his aesthetic modernism, his mandarin cultural conservatism, his anticipation of deconstructionism, and the self-conscious Jewishness that led him to look for redemption and at the same time to refuse any definition of paradise. Professor Jay devotes the central sections of his book to the major aspects of Adorno's thought--his philosophy, his social theory, and his view of modern culture and aesthetic theory. He has succeeded brilliantly in the task of presenting Adorno's theories in understandable form while remaining true to their unresolved tensions. -- Amazon.com. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)193Philosophy and Psychology Modern western philosophy German and AustrianLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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