Late Marxism: Adorno or The Persistence of the Dialectic

A solid option among books which introduce Adorno, and it has the benefit of being in print (unlike, say Martin Jay's 'Adorno'). The best thing here is that Jameson recognizes the importance of Marx for Adorno, which many of other books (especially Berstein's 'Adorno') don't. On the other hand, Jameson's Marx is a shifty figure based on Mandel and Harvey, and thus actually does a disservice to Adorno. It's like someone offering you chocolate with the promise that it's got just the right amount of cocoa in it... and then finding out that the perfectly proportioned cocoa was scooped up off the floor of a sawdust factory (Marx here = cocoa, not sure how clear that is).
Other downsides are a general vagueness which is probably inevitable show more given Jameson's Jamesian prose style; a too-swift examination of Negative Dialectics with a lot of chat about the aesthetics; and a fatuously 'hip' recourse to Althusser and the concept of hegemony as a corrective to Adorno's theory of ideology. This last is only necessary because Jameson doesn't understand Hegel at all, and fails to see how important the German Idealists were for Adorno's work.
That said, it's really not bad, and gets the general point right: Adorno's obsession with totality and so forth must be separated from an affirmation of totality and almost every other concept he uses, and we would do well to remember that. show less