Nostalgia For A Redeemed Future Critical Theory

by Ludovisi, Stefano Giacchetti; Saavedra, Agostini G.; Antomarini, B.

• ISBN13: 9780874130720
• ISBN10: 0874130727
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-01
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Summary

The articles in this book stress the relevance to the present of the early stages of Critical Theory. On the one hand they aim at the recognition of the fundamental role played by such authors as Benjamin, Bloch and Lukacs in the shaping of Critical Theory. On the other hand they reaffirm the fundamental importance of the works of the first philosophers of the Frankfurt School (and in particular Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse) against the sometimes hasty consideration of their work as outdated. Each article focuses on specific social, political and aesthetic issues. The essays are organized into three main themes. In the first part of the book are those essays that address theoretical issues in Adorno. The second part addresses more practical issues related to critical theory. The final part looks at elements in Benjamin's aesthetics and then in Adorno.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 5
The concept of domination in Adorno's Critical Theory	p. 9
The Over-Bourgeois and the Dissolution of Subjectivity: Adorno as Nietzsche's Scholar	p. 17
Philosophy and criticism. Some observations on the notion of critical theory in Adorno	p. 33
No easy way out: Adorno's Negativism and the Problem of Normativity	p. 39
Adorno and the Rediscovery of Autonomy	p. 51
Solidarity with Metaphysics at the Time of its Downfall: Adorno Contra Heidegger	p. 61
Pied Pipers and Polymaths: The Politics of Adorno's Late Lectures	p. 77
Technological Rationality and the Problem of Meaning	p. 93
Habermas, discourse ethics and doing justice to the exception: immigrants and the law	p. 105
The Constitution of Recognition: Towards a Critical Constitutional Theory	p. 129
Liberal society, emancipation and antisemitism, why current debates on antisemitism need more Dialectic of Enlightenment	p. 145
Safeguarding Memory against Catastrophic Transmission. Walter Benjamin and the Memory of the Shoah	p. 161
Herbert Marcuse: between technologisation and technocratisation	p. 179
"Hamlet could never know the peace of a 'good ending'": Benjamin, Derrida, and the Melancholy of Critical Theory	p. 199
Walter Benjamin: the afterlife of an artwork as cognitive heterocracy	p. 217
Equivocating Aura: On Benjamin's Conception of Mechanical Reproduction	p. 229
Walter Benjamin's Theology of the Corpse: Allegory in Lohenstein's Sophonisba	p. 241
Adorno and the autonomy of art	p. 251
Toward the aesthetics of emancipation? Critical Theory and the new pragmatism	p. 267
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