Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

Published by Fordham University Press 2010

Language Without Soil

Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

Edited by: Gerhard Richter

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823291991

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Contents

About this book

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.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Gerhard Richter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Without Soil: A Figure in Adorno’s Thought Düttmann Alexander García Düttmann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	10
2. Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness Martin Jay Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
3. Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory J. M. Bernstein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	30
4. Idiosyncrasies: Of Anti-Semitism Jan Plug Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
5. Adorno’s Lesson Plans? The Ethics of (Re)Education in ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past’ ’’ Jaimey Fisher Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
6. Adorno—Nature—Hegel Theresa M. Kelley Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
7. The Idiom of Crisis: On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno Neil Larsen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
8. Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno Gerhard Richter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
9. The Homeland of Language: A Note on Truth and Knowledge in Adorno Mirko Wischke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
10. Of Stones and Glass Houses: Minima Moralia as Critique of Transparency Eric Jarosinski Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
11. The Polemic of the Late Work: Adorno’s Hölderlin Robert Savage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
12. Twelve Anacoluthic Theses on Adorno’s ‘‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry’’ David Farrell Krell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
13. The Ephemeral and the Absolute: Provisional Notes to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Peter Uwe Hohendahl Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	206
Appendix: Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno Gerhard Richter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
List of Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 288

eBook

Published: March 24, 2022
ISBN: 9780823291991