In "The Nation", Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins talks with Peter E. Gordon (Harvard) about his book "A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity", and the future of critical theory:
What Adorno Can Still Teach Us
Excerpt:
"Adorno is too often seen as a thoroughgoing pessimist who devoted his criticism only to the task of exposing what is “negative” or irrational in modern society. The widespread caricature of Adorno as a scowling contrarian or snob continues to inhibit our understanding of his work. This caricature, I believe, does a grave injustice to the complexity of his thought. My general argument is that Adorno was far more conflicted - or, to use the more technical term, dialectical - than the standard interpretation allows. As a critical theorist, he devoted his work to exposing the negative, but with an anticipatory orientation toward the largely unrealized possibility of human flourishing.
His writing, though often dark and even ruthless in its criticism of present irrationality, is nonetheless shot through with glimpses of what happiness would be. These anticipations are admittedly uncertain, since in a damaged world we see as if through a glass darkly. But the concept of an unrealized good is already implicit in the critique of what is bad."
No comments:
Post a Comment