Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Holderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstract possibility....
Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffe...
'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Muller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.
This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time,...
'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this majo...
The articles and essays collected in this book were written during the decade of Lukacs's life when he was most active in politics. The first texts mark his transition from an anti-bourgeois aestheticism to Marxism and the newly founded Hungarian Communist Party. They are followed by material which displays the full range of his activity and thought during the subsequent ten years. Some of these essays were written when Lukacs was deputy commissar of education in the embattled, short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Others include the famous article on parliamentarianism which earned its...
The articles and essays collected in this book were written during the decade of Lukacs's life when he was most active in politics. The first texts ma...
He was famously hostile to biography as a literary form. And yet this life of Adorno by one of his last students is far more than literary in its accomplishments, giving 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.
The biography begins at the shining moment of the German bourgeoisie, in a world dominated by liberals willing to extend citizenship to...
He was famously hostile to biography as a literary form. And yet this life of Adorno by one of his last students is far more than literary in its a...
Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Compared to faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict are insignificant. The New Testament says: 'We are all equal in the sight of God'. To be sure, this equality applies only to those who acknowledge God's existence. What this means is that alongside the abolition of class and nation within the community of believers, religion introduces a new fundamental distinction into the world the distinction between the right kind of believers and the wrong kind. Thus overtly or tacitly, religion brings with it the...
Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Compared to faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict are insignificant. ...
