Things Beyond Resemblance

Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno

Robert Hullot-Kentor

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231510035
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

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.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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
• Notes
• Index