A recent book on Adorno that may be of interest to our readers: Martin Shuster’s Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Available on Amazon.

 

From a recent review by Owen Hulatt in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

“Martin Shuster’s book argues… that the ideal of autonomy is not only a bulwark against the ills of modernity but, in its traditional form at least, also responsible for them. Our understanding of autonomy requires revision; and this is, by implication, a simultaneously political, ethical, and epistemic task. …[Shuster’s] reconstructed model replaces the traditional model of ethical action — in which intention and choice are paramount — with a jointly Adornian and Cavellian one, in which moral action is solicited from within interpersonally situated forms of life and experience. Shuster has developed this model with care, and makes careful interventions into the reading of some major figures in developing it. Throughout, the claims advanced are convincingly and helpfully situated in relation to recent scholarship within both Anglophone philosophy and the European post-Kantian tradition.”

Here is the table of contents of Shuster’s book:

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. I Against I: Stressing the Dialectic in the Dialectic of Enlightenment
1. Introduction
2. The Text of the Dialectic of Enlightenment
3. Enlightenment as a Historical Category?
4. The Concept of Enlightenment, and Enlightenment and Myth
5. Images and Signs
6. The Dissolution of Subjectivity
7. The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Kant’s Dialectic of Reason
8. Adorno on Kant’s Dialectic
9. The Necessity of the Dialectic of Enlightenment
10. The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Practical Reason
11. Conclusion

2. Beyond the Bounds of Sense: Kant and the Highest Good
1. Introduction
2. Morality and the Highest Good
3. The Highest Good in the Critique of Pure Reason
4. The Garve Review
5. The Highest Good in the Critique of Practical Reason
6. The Highest Good in the Critique of Judgment
7. Conclusion

3. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic as a Form of Life: Expression, Suffering, and Freedom
1. Introduction
2. Toward an Understanding of the Moral Addendum
3. Natural and Normative: Some Variations
4. The Addendum
5. The Background to Adorno’s Moral Thought
6. Speculative Surplus and Depth as Freedom
7. Freedom and Expression, Happiness and Suffering
8. Expressivity, Language, and Truth
9. Morality and the Nonidentical
10. Conclusion: Kant and Freedom

4. Reflections on Universal Reason: Adorno, Hegel, and the Wounds of Spirit
1. Introduction
2. The Methodology of the Phenomenology of Spirit
3. From the Science of the Experience of Consciousness to the Phenomenology of Spirit
4. Spirit
5. Universal Reason and Forgiveness
6. Conclusion

Model: Conclusion
Works Cited
Index