Books by Theodor Adorno
The Stars Down to Earth: and other essays on the irrational in culture
The Stars Down to Earth shows us a stunningly prescient Adorno. Haunted by the ugly side of American culture industries he used the different angles provided by each of these three essays to showcase the dangers inherent in modern obsessions with consumption. He engages with some of his most enduring themes in this seminal collection, focusing on the irrational in mass culture - from astrology to new age cults, from anti-semitism to the power of neo-fascist propaganda. He points out that the modern state and market forces serve the interest of capital in its basic form. Stephan Crook's introduction grounds Adorno's arguments firmly in the present where extreme religious and political organizations are commonplace - so commonplace in fact that often we deem them unworthy of our attention. Half a century ago Theodore Adorno not only recognised the dangers, but proclaimed them loudly. We did not listen then. Maybe it is not too late to listen now.
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Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture
A collection of key articles on the irrational in mass culture, relevant to the understanding of phenomena such as astrology and New Age cults, the power of neo-fascist propaganda and the psychological basis of popular culture, showing Theodor Adorno at his brilliant and maddening best.
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In Search of Wagner (Radical Thinkers)
Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe’s most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner’s oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. A foreword by Slavoj Žižek situates Adorno’s reflections within present debates over Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the moral status of his work, proving why this book remains one of the most important character studies of the twentieth century.
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Towards a New Manifesto
by Theodor Adorno, Max HORKHEIMER
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism.
Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency.
A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.
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Towards a New Manifesto
by Theodor Adorno, Max HORKHEIMER
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism.
Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency.
A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.
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Essays on Music
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and―more than any other subject―music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.
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Theodor Adorno Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (Radical Thinkers)
This collection covers a wide range of topics, from a moving study of Bizet’s Carmen to an entertainingly caustic exploration of the hierarchies of the auditorium. Especially significant is Adorno’s “dialectical portrait” of Stravinsky, in which Adorno both reconsiders and refines his damning indictment of the composer in Philosophy on Modern Music. Throughout, Adorno is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it is capable of communicating inhumanity while resisting it. His belief in the benevolent and transformative power of music reverberates throughout these writings.
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Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
This volume makes available in English for the first time Adorno's lectures on metaphysics. It provides a unique introduction not only to metaphysics but also to Adorno's own intellectual standpoint, as developed in his major work Negative Dialectics.
Metaphysics for Adorno is defined by a central tension between concepts and immediate facts. Adorno traces this dualism back to Aristotle, whom he sees as the founder of metaphysics. In Aristotle it appears as an unresolved tension between form and matter. This basic split, in Adorno's interpretation, runs right through the history of metaphysics. Perhaps not surprisingly, Adorno finds this tension resolved in the Hegelian dialectic.
Underlying this dualism is a further dichotomy, which Adorno sees as essential to metaphysics: while it dissolves belief in transcendental worlds by thought, at the same time it seeks to rescue belief in a reality beyond the empirical, again by thought. It is to this profound ambiguity, for Adorno, that the metaphysical tradition owes its greatness.
The major part of these lectures, given by Adorno late in his life, is devoted to a critical exposition of Aristotle's thought, focusing on its central ambiguities. In the last lectures, Adorno's attention switches to the question of the relevance of metaphysics today, particularly after the Holocaust. He finds in metaphysical experiences, which transcend rational discourse without lapsing into irrationalism, a last precarious refuge of the humane truth to which his own thought always aspired.
This volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in Adorno's work and will be a valuable text for students and scholars of philosophy and social theory.
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Broken Music: Artists' Recordworks
by Theodor Adorno, Michael Glasmeier, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knížák, László Moholy-Nagy, Hans Rudolf Zeller
Facsimile edition of the definitive guide to records by artists
Broken Music is an essential guide and discography for recordings and audio works by visual artists, originally published in 1989 and edited by Ursula Block (founder of Gelbe Musik in Berlin) and Michael Glasmeier. Records chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: record covers created as original work by visual artists; record or sound producing objects (sculptures); books and publications that contain a record or recorded media object; and records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists. Hundreds of works are documented by artists such as Vito Acconci, albrecht d., Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Harry Bertoia, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli/Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Milan Knížák, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Hermann Nitsch, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Tom Philips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, selten gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Jean Tinguely, Yoshi Wada, William Wegman and Lawrence Weiner, among others.
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The Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brenswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford
This hugely influential study on the psychology of authoritarianism was written in answer to Hitler’s Germany—and now rings more relevant than ever as fascism and anti-Semitism sweep across America.
What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality is not only one of the most significant works of social psychology ever written, it also marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, showing him grappling with the problem of fascism and the reasons for Europe’s turn to reaction. Over half a century later, and with the rise of right-wing populism and the reemergence of the far-right in recent years, this hugely influential study remains as insightful and relevant as ever.
This new edition includes an introduction by Frankfurt School scholar Peter E. Gordon and contains the first-ever publication of Adorno’s subsequent critical notes on the project.
“Adorno and his colleagues could easily have been describing Alex Jones’s paranoid InfoWars rants or the racist views expressed by many Trump supporters.” —New York Times
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Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader
This is a comprehensive collection of readings from the work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the “Western legacy of positivity,” the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from “metaphysical experience.” In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: “Toward a New Categorical Imperative,” “Damaged Life,” “Administered World, Reified Thought,” “Art, Memory of Suffering,” and “A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive.” A substantial number of Adorno’s writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno’s work.
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Minima Moralia Reflections from Damaged Life
A reflection on everyday existence in the ‘sphere of consumption of late Capitalism’, this work is Adorno’s literary and philosophical masterpiece.
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Minima Moralia Reflections from Damaged Life
"A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature." —Susan Sontag
A reflection on everyday existence in the ‘sphere of consumption of late Capitalism’, this work is Adorno’s literary and philosophical masterpiece. Built from aphorisms and reflections, he shifts in register from personal experience to the most general theoretical problems.
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Aesthetics and Politics
by Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.
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