Instead of an overture : no heirs -- The house in Schöne Aussicht : a Frankfurt childhood around 1910 -- From Teddie Wiesengrund to Dr. Wiesengrund-Adorno -- Adorno as "non-identical" man -- Transitions -- Bertolt Brecht : "to those who come after us" -- Theodor W. Adorno : "out of the firing-line" -- Hanns Eisler, the non-identical brother -- Fritz Lang, the American friend -- Frankfurt transfer -- Adorno as "identical" man -- The palimpsest of life.

Looks at the life and career of the the German philosopher who is credited as the developer of critical theory.

ExcerptMisunderstandings are the medium for communicating the incommunicable. Theodor W. Adorno, “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin”You can hear the terror in the words. If you can't hear it, you cannot understand the words. The history of the critical response to Adorno can be read as a history of misunderstandings. “The whole is the false.”1 Who can understand this if he doesn't know Hegel's philosophy? Adorno formulated this aphorism in Minima Moralia in German even though he had been living in America (...) for some years. But he did not write this sentence for an American or…. (shrink)

Because of his preoccupation with the formal aspects of music and literature, Theodor W. Adorno is often regarded as the most aesthetically oriented thinker of the Frankfurt School theorists. It is Adorno’s perceived commitment to aestheticism—the study of art for art’s sake and the study of art as a source of sensuous pleasure, rather than as a vehicle for culturally constructed morality or meaning—that many scholars have criticized as hostile to genuine, concrete, substantive political, social, and ethical engagement with the (...) arts. _Adorno and Ethics_—the first issue of _New German Critique_ to be published by Duke University Press—takes issue with Adorno’s critics. These essays reconsider Adorno’s unique brand of aestheticism, revealing a “politics of aestheticism” and exploring the political and ethical dimensions of his writings. One contributor links the ethical turn taken in Adorno criticism with related developments in American poetry and poetics. Another examines Adorno’s aphorism “Gold Assay” for the ways in which it anticipates one of his seminal works, _The Jargon of Authenticity_. Focusing on Auschwitz and the testimony of its survivors, one contributor explores the impact of the Holocaust on modern philosophy and reason, a relationship that he argues Adorno never specified. Another contributor considers the figure of the animal in the writings of Kant, Adorno, and Lévinas, exploring what it might mean to live, as Adorno suggests, as “a good animal.” _Contributors_. J. M. Bernstein, Detlev Claussen, Samir Gandesha, Alexander García Düttmann, Christina Gerhardt, Martin Jay, Robert Kaufman, Michael Marder, Gerhard Richter. (shrink)