Language Without Soil : : Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity / / ed. by Gerhard Richter.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• MitwirkendeR: Bernstein, J. M.,; Düttmann, Alexander García,; Fisher, Jaimey,; Hohendahl, Peter Uwe,; Jarosinski, Eric,; Jay, Martin,; Kelley, Theresa M.,; Krell, David Farrell,; Larsen, Neil,; Plug, Jan,; Richter, Gerhard,; Savage, Robert,; Wischke, Mirko,
• HerausgeberIn: Richter, Gerhard,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2022]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)

Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. His analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives "after Auschwitz," of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly-conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, all speak to central concerns of our time. The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from Adorno's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a "language without soil." Adorno' s finely chiseled sentences perform a ceaseless gesture of thoughtful vigilance, a vigilance understood not in the sense of moralizing or ethical normativity but of a rigorous attention to the presuppositions of thinking itself. The volume's fresh readings conspire to yield a refractory and unorthodox Adorno, a suggestive and at times infuriating thinker of the first order, whose intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil. Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview Adorno gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Without Soil: A Figure in Adorno’s Thought Düttmann -- 2. Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness -- 3. Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory -- 4. Idiosyncrasies: Of Anti-Semitism -- 5. Adorno’s Lesson Plans? The Ethics of (Re)Education in ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past’ ’’ -- 6. Adorno—Nature—Hegel -- 7. The Idiom of Crisis: On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno -- 8. Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno -- 9. The Homeland of Language: A Note on Truth and Knowledge in Adorno -- 10. Of Stones and Glass Houses: Minima Moralia as Critique of Transparency -- 11. The Polemic of the Late Work: Adorno’s Hölderlin -- 12. Twelve Anacoluthic Theses on Adorno’s ‘‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry’’ -- 13. The Ephemeral and the Absolute: Provisional Notes to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory -- Appendix: Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno -- Notes -- List of Contributors -- Index