Adorno's Positive Dialectic [Hardcover]

Yvonne Sherratt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2002 | ISBN-10: 052181393X | ISBN-13: 978-0521813938

This book offers a radically new interpretation of the work of Theodor Adorno. In contrast to the conventional view that Adorno's is in essence a critical philosophy, Yvonne Sherratt systematically traces an utopian thesis that pervades all the major aspects of Adorno's thought. She places Adorno's work in the context of German Idealist and later Marxist and Freudian traditions, and then analyzes his key works to show how the aesthetic, epistemological, psychological, historical and sociological thought interconnect to form an utopian image.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It is a book which ought to be read not only by scholars and students of critical theory but also of those interested in Adorno who, despite themselves, yearn to describe the glass as being half full." Philosophy in Review

Book Description

This book offers a radically new interpretation of the work of Theodor Adorno. In contrast to the conventional view that Adorno's is in essence a critical philosophy, Yvonne Sherratt traces systematically a utopian thesis that pervades all the major aspects of Adorno's thought. She places Adorno's work in the context of German Idealist and later Marxist and Freudian traditions, and then analyses his key works to show how the aesthetic, epistemological, psychological, historical and sociological thought interconnect to form a utopian image.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 268 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (November 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 052181393X
• ISBN-13: 978-0521813938
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,144,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Precise, no-nonsense analysis of Adorno, February 27, 2006

By 

Edward G. Nilges "Author, 'Build Your Own .Ne... (Hong Kong, China) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Adorno's Positive Dialectic (Hardcover)

Yvonne Sherratt has applied her knowledge of Freudian theory to come up with an original reading of Adorno's work, that escapes from the rather gloomy impasse of "negative" dialectics without Panglossism, without forcing what Adorno said into a Procrustean bed.

A danger of her schematism, her neat lists of concepts and her diagrammatic approach would be self-application. IF knowledge becomes system, if knowledge becomes schema, and as a result regresses to myth (PowerPoint) and what Adorno called "the conquest of the thing represented by its representation", then isn't Ms. Sherratt's very neatness itself a danger? Is she the student who Adorno asks not to take notes in his lectures on Metaphysics?

Actually, this elementary try-on doesn't work as long as we remember that we're dealing with concepts and not things at the limit of our ability to think, which for Adorno took place INSIDE the arena constituted by our psychology (including instinctual drives) and history itself. As long as we're honest about the meanings of very fuzzy words, such as "id", what we're dealing with is not some representation of idness out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the shrinks.

Notice by way of illustration that Moderns, or PostModerns, or whoever these wet behind the ear 20-something opinion leaders are these days, speak of the Id or the Ego the speech is like the work of radiological techs. They can't really engage the Id, who in a world of systematically denied instinctual drives is no longer pale and interesting but instead frightening.

Nor can we, in political talk, describe or engage pure "irrationality" which is the operation of the Id, the Ego, or even the super-ego left to itself in a void without the other Stooges of psychology. Thus, the New York Times (for example) persists in trying to narrate the American president Bush as if he even, in a time of rapid psychological change in detail, aligns with his father in terms of his combination of drives.

What is in fact pure or *reinen* nasty bullying out of which the psyche never grew (as did former generations, through military service in most cases) has to be renarrated as if it made sense, and for any specific act, a *telos* has to be manufactured: thus, forcing prisoners to strip may have prevented counterfactual incidents of terrorism, you may be sure.

We're dealing instead directly with what Picasso drew in his series of etchings on the Minotaur, notably thst in which a young, female figure holds up a lantern to simultaneously illuminate and blind. The Minotaur is NOT ONLY the "terrorist" (or, more precisely, the *elite* Middle Eastern pol who finds bullies convenient, *thugee* useful, and is thinking about bringing back *suttee* *pour encourager*, for Job One may be the reversal of the Islamic enlightenment of the 20th century) he is also the Western pol, reversing the 18th century enlightenment.

That is: it appears that Ms Sherrat knows exactly what the "id" is and that it can't compromise with anything else, for good or ill. I do not know her political views, but in fact Freudian categories are probably more useful than talk about bloodstained "civilizations" like Samuel Huntington's.

It would be irrational, in the sense of impossible, for the "negative" dialectician to merely paint himself into a corner. IF thought is in large part an expression of a bundle of ultimately non-negotiable instinctual drives, those drives that advertisements cleverly manipulate while governments try to check and control, by saying, like Marlowe's Faust, go back and change thy shape, thou art to ugly to attend on me, it remains distinct from its motor, which persists.

What it generates when we ask, as did conceptual artist Jenny Holzer in 1980, WHAT IMPULSE WILL SAVE US NOW THAT SEX WON'T, is a revisit to the idea of aura in a world where xenophobia is the only acceptable attitude: towards its reverse.

For example, "aura" in a positive dialectic emerged from instinctual drives when in response to the greed of the music industry and the false perfection of digital reproduction, the imperfections of analog recording were seen to constitute its value.

Conservative and analytic philosophers set a great store by self-identity, and the saw or maxims of self-identity are asserted as proprietary as against "deconstruction" and "critical theory". Sure, Freudian concepts are notably vague. So is a planet that happens to be a gas giant, like Saturn, with an iron core.

Desire persists and insists on generating thought because desire is self-identical as a concept: this is what it does: gang bangers create gang banger culture in the ruin of the City (oh City) which in most cases was not the result of aerial boombing but of what is blessed and sanctified by Schumpeter as creative destruction.

The mass media in turn, miming what it sees as The End, is only feebly to replay this as Fight Club because a movie, today, can't have aura. It's a digital product by definition without aura (it doesn't contain, for example, the experience of being forced to watch a movie, whether because you've already bought the ticket, to get out of the rain, or because you've realized, like Oswald, that you are the fall guy, and might as well wait for the Dallas police department in a show).

Without meaning to, Sherratt finds a reason for genuine hope in Adorno, but only in those activities which refuse to reify thought. Actual instances of what she speaks of exist in any form of participatory and non-destructive knowledge, whether Diane Fossey's knowledge of mountain apes or train-spotting.

In a world where (as in the recent Korean scandal) Big Knowledge is systematically corrupted by megathymos and greed, this is the pause that refreshes.