Jensen Suther in Sidecar:
Few scholars have done more in recent decades to preserve the legacy of Theodor Adorno than Peter Gordon. An intellectual historian at Harvard, Gordon first rose to prominence in the 2000s with his prize-winning works on the affinities between Heidegger and Rosenzweig and the Heidegger–Cassirer debate. These were followed by Adorno and Existence (2016), in which Gordon set out to recover Adorno’s forceful critique of Heidegger, and existentialism more broadly, as a form of anti-rationalist metaphysics rooted in late-capitalist alienation. In his recent writings, including his introduction to the new edition of The Authoritarian Personality, Gordon makes the case for the continued relevance of the Frankfurt School’s analysis of totalitarianism, bringing it to bear on the rise of the contemporary far right. Yet his chief contribution arguably lies in his careful, systematic reconstruction of Adorno’s peculiar form of materialism – which is said to underpin his conception of the ‘good life’.
If the aim of Adorno and Existence was to highlight the ‘negative’ dimension of Adorno’s project – his critical interrogation of existentialism – then the central ambition of Gordon’s new book, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity, is to recover the positive, normative dimension of his theory of modernity. For Gordon, Adorno not only offers a scathing account of how the modern bourgeois form of life has failed; he also ‘measures that failure against a maximalist demand for happiness or human flourishing’.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.