HULLOT-KENTOR, Richard, Things Beyond Resemblance. Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, Columbia University Press, 2006, 344 pp.
ISBN: 0-231-13658-7
Theodor W. Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together sixteen essays he has written about the philosopher over the past twenty years.
The opening essay, "Origin Is the Goal," pursues Adorno's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment to better understand the urgent social and political situation of the United States. "Back to Adorno" examines Adorno's idea that sacrifice is the primordial form of human domination; "Second Salvage" reconstructs Adorno's unfinished study of the transformation of music in radio transmission; and "What Is Mechanical Reproduction" revisits Adorno's criticism of Walter Benjamin. Further essays cover a broad range of topics: Adorno's affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical study of popular music.
Many of these essays have been revised, with new material added that emphasizes the relevance of Adorno's thought to the United States today. Things Beyond Resemblance is a timely and richly analytical collection crucial to the study of critical theory, aesthetics, continental philosophy, and Adorno.
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Origin Is the Goal
Back to Adorno
Things Beyond Resemblance
The Philosophy of Dissonance: Adorno and Schoenberg
Critique of the Organic: Kierkegaard and the Construction of the Aesthetic
Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music
Title Essay: Baroque Allegory and "The Essay as Form"
What Is Mechanical Reproduction?
Adorno Without Quotation
Popular Music and "The Aging of the New Music"
The Impossibility of Music
Apple Criticizes Tree of Knowledge: A Review of One Sentence
Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being
Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recovery of the Public World
Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno
Introduction to T. W. Adorno's "The Idea of Natural-History"
The Idea of Natural-History, Theodor W. Adorno
Index
About the Author:
Robert Hullot-Kentor has taught philosophy, literature, and the arts at Harvard, Boston University, Stanford, and Long Island University. He has translated several of Adorno's major works, including Aesthetic Theory, and has recently published Current of Music, a reconstruction of Adorno's unfinished study of radio broadcast music.