What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoervice Gaze is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—which is to say, both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from one’s orientation in the work of art and the ... More

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoervice Gaze is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—which is to say, both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from one’s orientation in the work of art and the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one to the primacy of the object and beyond. Along the way, the book makes vivid the notion that Adorno can best be understood through the lens of his highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze.” This gaze designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: it moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it. As this book also shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased historical predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.