To people who come to this book looking for an analysis of the attacks on the World Trade Center this book will appear to be peculiar and eccentric, and therefore in questionable taste. Slavoj Zisek is a Marxist philosopher from the formerly Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. (At the same time he is quite caustic against those who think that Milosevic's horrors could have been avoided by an appeal to the cosmopolitan virtues of Titoism. Not within the party framework, at any rate.) He has a special interest in the French psychoanalyst Lacan, which does not stop him from discussing other imposing figures such as Hegel, Adorno, Foucault and, suprisingly in this book, G.K. Chesterton.
Most people first encounter Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) as one of the leading lights of the Marxist philosophers known as the Frankfurt School and as the collaborator with Max Horkheimer on Dialectic of Enlightenment, which argued that the Enlightenment emphasis on reason gave rise to Nazi politics and genocide. Yet Adorno's writings ranged widely from aesthetics and music to ethics and literature. This elegant translation of Claussen's 2003 biography of his teacher provides the first glimpse of the depth of Adorno's life and thought.
Language Without Soil - Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity
This is a magical volume. These beautiful essays transform the most canonical works of Adorno from monuments we thought we knew into opportunities for future thought. The Adorno of this volume is neither a matter of the past nor a straightforward thought machine, but rather an intricate, challenging, searching plurality of voices that are, at times, at odds with each other. In other words, this is a new Adorno, an Adorno not yet known to us, not yet explored, and an Adorno not yet complete. This new Adorno is a matter of the future, of reading, and discovery.
The range of Adorno's achievement, and the depth of his insights, is breathtaking and daunting. His work on literary, artistic, and musical forms, his devastating indictment of modern industrial society, and his profound grasp of Western culture from Homer to Hollywood have made him one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century thought.
In Adorno, Roger Foster argues that there is a coherent critical project at the core of Adorno's philosophy of language and epistemology, the key to which is the recovery of a broader understanding of experience. Foster claims, in Adorno's writings, it is the concept of spiritual experience that denotes this richer vision of experience and signifies an awareness of the experiential conditions of concepts. By elucidating Adorno's view of philosophy as a critical practice that discloses the suffering of the world, Foster shows that Adorno's philosophy does not end up in a form of resignation or futile pessimism.
