ADORNO FOR BEGINNERS

[Paul Murphy]

At 12:26 AM -0800 3/20/98, Ralph Dumain wrote:

>So I would be very interested in some feedback on this topic, in particular
>on Jameson's book and how it squares with Jay's and others.

As already noted, Jay's book is very fine 'for beginners' -- Jameson's book
struck me as idiosyncratic (ie., it says more about Jameson than it does
about Adorno). With the exception of a desultory gloss on the term
'constellation', FJ ignores Benjamin; as a result, FJ's Adorno tends to
look like Lukacs. His flippant style is also a serious distraction -- at
one point, he likens the key Adornian notion of Utopia to Altman's
_Popeye_, and at another point he offers what looks like a straight-faced
defense of Stalinism. Approach with caution.

Recently I've been quite impressed with the work of J. M. Bernstein; the
concluding chapters of _The Fate of Art_ and the long essay in the
anthology _The Semblance of Subjectivity_ (Zuidervaart and Huhn, eds, MIT
Press) are excellent. Unfortunately, the latter is a brand-new hardcover
and might be prohibitively expensive.

Regards,
Paul N. Murphy
Graduate Student
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto