{"id":405,"date":"2017-03-10T23:39:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T23:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/?p=405"},"modified":"2017-03-12T16:55:45","modified_gmt":"2017-03-12T16:55:45","slug":"new-book-by-peter-e-gordon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/?p=405","title":{"rendered":"New Book by Peter E. Gordon"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Peter Gordon<\/a>\u00a0(Harvard) has a new book on Adorno, which should be of interest to the readers of this blog. We are\u00a0very happy that Peter will be joining us to discuss his book at the 6th annual meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies (Duke University, see post<\/a>). The panel (with Espen Hammer<\/a>, Gordon Finlayson<\/a> and Iain Macdonald<\/a>) promises to be very interesting.<\/p>\n

Here’s a\u00a0short blurb and some comments from the page at HUP<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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From the beginning to the end of his career, the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, verging on polemic. In Kierkegaard he saw an early paragon for the late flowering of bourgeois solipsism; in Heidegger, an impresario for a \u201cjargon of authenticity\u201d cloaking its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch. Even in the straitened rationalism of Husserl\u2019s phenomenology Adorno saw a vain attempt to break free from the prison-house of consciousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most scholars of critical theory still regard these philosophical exercises as marginal works\u2014unfortunate lapses of judgment for a thinker otherwise celebrated for dialectical mastery. Yet his persistent fascination with the philosophical canons of existentialism and phenomenology suggests a connection far more productive than mere antipathy. From his first published book on Kierkegaard\u2019s aesthetic to the mature studies in negative dialectics, Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ultimately, Adorno saw in them an instructive if unsuccessful attempt to realize his own ambition: to escape the enchanted circle of idealism so as to grasp \u201cthe primacy of the object.\u201d Exercises in \u201cimmanent critique,\u201d Adorno\u2019s writings on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger present us with a photographic negative\u2014a philosophical portrait of the author himself. In Adorno and Existence<\/i>, Peter E. Gordon<\/b> casts new and unfamiliar light on this neglected chapter in the history of Continental philosophy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Written with elegance and meticulously researched, the book focuses on Adorno\u2019s successive encounters with Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger over the years as a key to unlock Adorno\u2019s own difficult thinking. A major contribution to Adorno studies and beyond.\u201d\u2014Seyla Benhabib, Yale University<\/span><\/p>\n

Adorno and Existence<\/i> struck me as almost inevitable: how is it that no one had thought to write this necessary book previously? With a rare combination of narrative brio and analytic insight, Peter Gordon tracks Adorno\u2019s repeated confrontations with Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Kafka, & co. This is a fine, even irreplaceable study with a superb and riveting final chapter.\u201d\u2014Jay Bernstein, The New School<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis extraordinary study is a marvelous interpretation of the whole of Adorno\u2019s philosophical thinking by making convincingly clear to what surprising degree it is dependent on some constitutive ideas of Kierkegaard. Gordon successfully integrates two aims, the systematic re-interpretation of Adorno\u2019s philosophy and the subtle reconstruction of his intellectual development. This is a tour de force<\/i> for which Peter Gordon deserves highest admiration.\u201d\u2014Axel Honneth, Goethe University Frankfurt and Columbia University<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOn first reading Adorno\u2019s early study of Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin intuited that it was \u2018very possible that the author\u2019s later books will spring from this one.\u2019 When Adorno reissued it many years later, he admitted to Ernst Bloch that it had \u2018the character of a dream-like anticipation.\u2019 With Peter Gordon\u2019s arresting new interpretation of Adorno\u2019s life-long struggle with Kierkegaard\u2019s legacy, a struggle generating the dynamic force field of theology, aesthetics and social critique he called negative dialectics, we can understand for the first time how right both of these observations actually were.\u201d\u2014Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Gordon\u00a0(Harvard) has a new book on Adorno, which should be of interest to the readers of this blog. We …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43,16],"tags":[118,18,40,22,119,117],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-publications","category-theodor-w-adorno","tag-adorno-and-existence","tag-annual-meeting","tag-espen-hammer","tag-gordon-finlayson","tag-iain-macdonald","tag-peter-e-gordon","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}