Since its beginnings in 1968, Telos has repeatedly turned to the work of Theodor Adorno, asking how his version of Critical Theory could cross the Atlantic and make sense in the United States. The extraordinary attention paid since to Adorno's American experience, like that of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gunnar Myrdal, derives in part from a constant fascination with the spectacle of the critical European intellectual's encounter with the antithetical culture of a resistant America. In this classic meeting of Old (...) World and New, misunderstandings abound. Americans regard the European intellectual as biased and arrogant, spinning grotesque caricatures of America…. (shrink)

Perhaps the gist of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's grand theory of modernity, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), can be summed up as follows: there is no progress without regression. The chapter most forcefully informed by their experiences in Southern California is called “The Culture Industry,” and it “shows the regression of enlightenment to ideology which is graphically expressed in film and radio.”1 This article seeks to contribute a fuller understanding of the term “regression” by placing it in the biographical context (...) of Adorno's friendship with film director and fellow Los Angelino, Fritz Lang. I will discuss three interrelated aspects: “regression”…. (shrink)

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to Literature explores Adorno’s essays on literature as an independent contribution to his aesthetics with an emphasis on his theory and practice of literary interpretation. Essential to Adorno’s essays is his unorthodox treatment of language and history and his elaboration of the links between the two. One of Adorno’s major but often-neglected claims is that truth is relative to its historical medium, language. Adorno persistently and creatively tries to narrow the gulf between (...) truth and expression, philosophy and rhetoric, and his essays on literature are practical examples of his effort to critically rescue the rhetorical dimension of philosophy. Rather than relying exclusively on aesthetic concepts inherited from his predecessors in the Western tradition (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard), Adorno’s essays seek to transgress and transcend the conceptual limitations of aesthetic discourse by appropriating a non-conceptual, metaphorical vocabulary borrowed from the literary texts he investigates. Thus, Adorno’s interpretations of literature mobilize an alternative subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discourse on language and history that eludes the categories that tend to predominate his thinking in his major work, Aesthetic Theory. This book puts forth the claim that Adorno’s essays on literature are of central relevance for an understanding of his aesthetics because they challenge the conceptual limitations of philosophical discourse. (shrink)

_Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno's _Notes to Literature explores Adorno’s essays on literature as an independent contribution to his aesthetics with an emphasis on his theory and practice of literary interpretation. Essential to Adorno’s essays is his unorthodox treatment of language and history and his elaboration of the links between the two. One of Adorno’s major but often-neglected claims is that truth is relative to its historical medium, language. Adorno persistently and creatively tries to narrow the gulf between (...) truth and expression, philosophy and rhetoric, and his essays on literature are practical examples of his effort to critically rescue the rhetorical dimension of philosophy. Rather than relying exclusively on aesthetic concepts inherited from his predecessors in the Western tradition, Adorno’s essays seek to transgress and transcend the conceptual limitations of aesthetic discourse by appropriating a non-conceptual, metaphorical vocabulary borrowed from the literary texts he investigates. Thus, Adorno’s interpretations of literature mobilize an alternative subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discourse on language and history that eludes the categories that tend to predominate his thinking in his major work, Aesthetic Theory. This book puts forth the claim that Adorno’s essays on literature are of central relevance for an understanding of his aesthetics because they challenge the conceptual limitations of philosophical discourse. (shrink)

A return to Adorno, called for by Robert Hullot-Kentor twenty years ago in this journal,1 has materialized as a welcome scholarly development, and Adorno is now being considered increasingly on his own terms. As the editors of a recent collection of essays on Adorno point out, he has suffered the ill fate of being taken to the task, on the one hand, by Habermasians for allegedly abandoning the “project” of Enlightenment, and, on the other hand, by academic theorists subscribing to (...) cultural and post-colonial studies who view his critical theory as burdened with an untimely allegiance to a Eurocentric notion…. (shrink)

ExcerptIn her superb book Looking Away, Rei Terada offers a sophisticated and highly complex analysis of “phenomenality and dissatisfaction” from Kant to Adorno, persuasively drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Taking her cue from Nietzsche's suspiciously overstated rejection of metaphysics in favor of an affirmation of the world as appearance, the premise of Terada's book is that artists and thinkers have always had difficulties dealing with “the given.” Is the phenomenal world the only world? If so, does one have (...) a right not to be satisfied with it? Is there not an objective obligation to acknowledge that facts have…. (shrink)