Theodor Adorno
Articles by or about Theodor Adorno, German Marxist intellectual and prominent member of the Frankfurt School covering sociology, philosophy, musicology and politics.
Robert Hullot-Kentor with Paul Chan
One early evening in February, on the occasion of his new book, Things Beyond Resemblance, the translator, critic and philosopher Robert Hullot-Kentor sat with the artist Paul Chan at the The Brooklyn Rail’s HQ in Greenpoint, where they exchanged reassessments of Adorno’s life and philosophy.
Paul Chan (Rail): You have a few new books. There’s your collected essays on Adorno, Things Beyond Resemblance, which was just published. And then there’s something called Current of Music, which I guess is a reconstruction of a book Adorno was writing when he lived in New York City in the late 1930s?
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Robert Hullot-Kentor in Conversation with Fabio Akcelrud Durão
One recent afternoon, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, a Brazilian literary theorist, paid a visit to the home of Robert Hullot-Kentor in Manhattan. The following is the result of their discussion of Adorno’s theory of a “web of unknowing,” psychoanalysis and politics, apocalypse, what words not to use, the gratuitous plural, and what art is.
Fabio Akcelrud Durão (Rail): I’ve always found Adorno’s idea of a societal “web of unknowing,” or “web of delusion”—what he calls the Verblendungszusammenhang—provocative and important. Could we discuss this idea and consider the concrete political relevance it might have for the present in such different contexts as those of Brazil and the U.S.?
[b]
On Pop Music - Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno's critical analysis of popular music in capitalist society.
Theodor W. Adorno
On Popular Music
With the assistance and collaboration of George Simpson
Negative Dialectics
Negative Dialectics
By Theodor Adorno
Suhrkamp Verlag 1970 Frankfurt am Main
Original text is copyright 1997 by Suhrkamp Verlag.
The text of this translation is copyright 2001 Dennis Redmond
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Theodor W. Adorno / Max Horkheimer
Dialectic of Enlightenment
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Culture Industry Reconsidered
Theodor W. Adorno
Culture Industry Reconsidered
The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of 'mass culture'. We replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme.
