Adorno

For the left, Adorno was always too much the aesthete; for the right, he was too much the Marxist, whose thinking was blamed for the student movement’s spiraling descent into terrorism. Writing in this issue's opening essay, Adorno's biographer Detlev Claussen presents him to us through a collection of misunderstandings: the proliferation of misquotations that popularized misrepresentations of his positions; the misunderstanding with his mentor Siegfried Kracauer; the gap that opened up and continues to grow between Adorno and his reception in the influential work of Jürgen Habermas; and perhaps above all, the painful break with the German student movement. Where Adorno and, more broadly, Critical Theory are still treated dismissively, especially in some German academic circles, these various strands of misunderstanding and even mutually exclusive criticisms coexist in an overdetermined antipathy. This issue of Telos demonstrates the vitality of the current Adorno discussion, and the timeliness of aspects of his work.

Russell A. Berman
Introduction

Detlev Claussen
Malentendu? Adorno: A History of Misunderstandings

Russell Perkins
Adorno's Dreams and the Aesthetic of Violence

Lauren Coyle
The Spiritless Rose in the Cross of the Present: Retracing Hegel in Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Related Lectures

Timothy Hall
Reification, Materialism, and Praxis: Adorno's Critique of Lukács

Roger Foster
Lingering with the Particular: Minima Moralia's Critical Modernism

Eric S. Nelson
Revisiting the Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and the Frankfurt School

Fabian Freyenhagen
Adorno's Ethics Without the Ineffable

Maurizio Meloni
Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves

Howard Eiland
Allegories of Falling