Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader / Edition 1

by Theodor Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann, Rodney Livingstone

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804731447
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	05/28/2003
Series:	Cultural Memory in the Present
Edition description:	1
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a prominent member of the Frankfurt School and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Rolf Tiedemann is the literary executor of Adorno and of Walter Benjamin and the editor of the German editions of Adorno's collected works and his posthumous writings.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: "Not the First Philosophy, but a Last One": Notes on Adorno's Thought	xi
	Note on Sources	xxviii
Part I.	Toward a New Categorical Imperative
1	The Meaning of Working through the Past	3
2	Education after Auschwitz	19
Part II.	Damaged Life
3	Selections from Minima Moralia	37
	Grassy seat	37
	How nice of you, Doctor	38
	Le bourgeois revenant	39
	Proprietary rights	40
	Refuge for the homeless	40
	Baby with the bathwater	41
	Savages are not more noble	43
	Out of the firing line	44
	Johnny-Head-in-Air	47
	Back to culture	47
	Invitation to the dance	48
	On the morality of thinking	49
	Morality and temporal sequence	50
	Folly of the wise	52
	A word for morality	53
	Melange	54
	Unmeasure for unmeasure	55
	People are looking at you	56
	Little folk	56
	Uninformed opinion	57
	Pseudomenos	59
	The paragraph	60
	Deviation	60
	Passing muster	62
	Picture-book without pictures	63
	Monad	64
	Bequest	66
	Late extra	68
	Boy from the heath	71
	Il servo padrone	72
	Model of virtue	73
	Rosenkavalier	75
	The bad comrade	77
	Expensive reproduction	78
	Juvenal's error	80
	Consecutio temporum	82
	Toy shop	83
	Novissimum organum	85
	Knackery	87
	Don't exaggerate	89
Part III.	Administered World, Reified Thought
4	Reflections on Class Theory	93
5	Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?: The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society	111
6	Progress	126
7	Cultural Criticism and Society	146
8	The Jargon of Authenticity	163
9	Crowds and Power: Conversation with Elias Canetti	182
Part IV.	Art, Memory of Suffering
10	Heine the Wound	205
11	Notes on Kafka	211
12	Commitment	240
13	Trying to Understand Endgame	259
14	Beethoven's Late Style	295
15	Schubert	299
16	Wagner's Relevance Today	314
17	Mahler	333
18	Alban Berg	357
19	Art and the Arts	368
Part V.	A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive
20	Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment	391
21	Selections from Metaphysics: Concept and Problems	427
	Lecture Fourteen, "The Liquidation of the Self"	427
	Lecture Fifteen, "Metaphysics and Materialism"	436
	Lecture Sixteen, "Consciousness of Negativity"	444
	Lecture Seventeen, "Dying Today"	452
	Lecture Eighteen, "Metaphysical Experience"	461
	Credits	471
	Translators' and Editors' Notes	473
	Index of Names	519

Editorial Reviews

" Can One Live after Auschwitz? provides a very useful cross-section of Adorno's work on the task of thought after the Holocaust."

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"Can One Live after Auschwitz? provides a very useful cross-section of Adorno's work on the task of thought after the Holocaust."—The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"Despite his conviction that no philosophy could presume to approach an event like Auschwitz, this collection of Adorno's essays and aphorisms attests to his extraordinary effort to regard human suffering as the precondition of thought and as the undoing of all claims to totality. Adorno's cultural criticism emerges here as a moral philosophy for a 'world that has outlived its own demise.'"
—Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

From the Publisher