Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides For The Perplexed) [Paperback]

Alex Thomson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 24, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0826474209 | ISBN-13: 978-0826474209

One of the most influential philosophers and cultural theorists of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno poses a considerable challenge to students. His works can often seem obscure and impenetrable, particularly for those with little knowledge of the philosophical traditions on which he draws. Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed is an engaging and accessible account of his thought that does not patronise or short-change the reader. Those new to Adorno - and those who have struggled to make headway with his work - will find this an invaluable resource: clearly written, comprehensive and specifically focused on just what makes Adorno difficult to read and understand.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (April 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826474209
• ISBN-13: 978-0826474209
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,134,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Responsible Secondary Sources Reborn, February 21, 2007

By 

Michael Morse (Toronto, ON) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides For The Perplexed) (Paperback)

Excellent secondary sources were a hallmark of postwar scholarship. Many of the finest minds devoted themselves to introducing for general readers the intellectual worlds of the past (Tillyard, Hollander), and the complex thought of individual writers and movements (Barrett, Heller). Numerous factors seem to have conspired to undermine the prevalence of that vital skill. The publish-or-perish academic culture drastically encouraged pedantic insularity and a virtually narcissistic hyperspecialization. Postmodernism's nihilistic insistence on mutually incomprehensible political solitudes undermined the will to clarity (as a bourgeois futility), at the same time exalting a baffling, obscurantist jargon.

Under the circumstances, it's scarcely surprising that the most complex thinkers of the era were as little understood as, simultaneously, they were lionized. Postmodernism's coarse party-line, "thinking otherwise," became a program of justifying non-reading with Derrida, media mysticism with Benjamin, and highly subjective non-listening with Adorno. Adorno in particular was ill served by grim translations, and tendentiously partial interpretations.

I think it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Alex Thomson's excellent study, together with the appearance of new and excellent translations by Robert Hullot-Kentor, will rectify at last this distorted situation. Unlike so many readers of Adorno, Thomson is truly comfortable talking about both music (and art) and philosophy. Especially in North America, the rule has been one or the other. As Thomson so eloquently explains, Adorno is virtually incomprehensible on that basis. Any vestige of the "common sense" distinction between artistic and philosophical experience will perforce render Adorno's thought trivial.

Thomson has the necessary education and breadth of perspective to understand Adorno's own radical breadth, his fundamental rethinking of supposedly generic categories of experience. Adorno's passionately careful effort this way has become, in North American hands, the vulgar tossing of all dimensions of experience into a single political pot. Thomson makes spectacularly clear just how far Adorno really is from the idiotic nostrum "everything is political."

Like all truly good secondary sources, this book not only provides a fair and balanced introduction, but stakes significant interpretive claims of its own. His brief for the importance of Kant for Adorno is especially impressive. As more of Adorno's work becomes available (in German as well as English), it becomes clearer that Adorno stands very far from the simplistic contradistinction of his friend Max Horkheimer between "Traditional and Critical theory." Above all, the abrupt separation of (outdated) cultural past from ("relevant") contemporary immediacy is profoundly alien to Adorno. Thomson carefully exposes the complexity of Adorno's real attitudes, and their irreducible dialectical richness.

For Adorno's thought--like Derrida's and that of his great antipode, Heidegger--cannot be summarized, paraphrased, or reduced to axiomatic slogans. What it can be, in the hands of a dedicated soul like Alex Thomson, is very well introduced. Without question, this book is a superb realization of that daunting task. And I've saved the best for last: Thomson's prose is exceptionally clear and intelligent. Though he writes nothing like Adorno himself, Thomson's lucid style is an excellent, even ideal preparation for Adorno's own writing. Like Freud (or, again, Derrida or Heidegger), Adorno is in fact a virtuoso writer himself. Once one has become used to his idiom, and the genuine profundity of what he has to say, reading Adorno is as stimulating as it is rewarding.

In sum, this is a marvelous book, and it does a great service to contemporary readers, to philosophy--and to academic culture, which will become obliged to rethink its obscurantist priorities, shamed by superlative clarity such as this.

MW Morse