Adorno

Rating:
Summary: highly readable,was the first committed to the Adorno fix
Review: Martin Jay was one of the very first scholars to embrace the Frankfurt School, and held a longterm committment to it running up through the present. Adorno has only within the last ten years become a dare I say fashionable focus for many scholars from many perspectives and disciplines and frightfully I dare say there are unthinkable categories still remaining for scholars to pursue with this recluse apolitical Mandarin-like thinker.

Jay's modest book touches on the primary categories, the Negative Dialectics,dealing within the Hegelian edifice,if in fact philosophy is still thinkable, that it in fact still remains because it has yet to be realized.

Adorno's thinking on music was in fact very unique with a full scope of other disciplines brought into the welter of analysis. It was never done,at least not with the level of vigour Adorno had brought to the endeavor of thinking of music from a context of the social and political. This is a chasm still not closed. Adorno musically had emphasized the cultural importance with a placement on the dodecaphonic means, the 12 Tone school of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, all of which Adorno had known during his lifetime. He had studied composition with Alban Berg.Jay metaphorically connects this to Adorno's "atonal" way of thinking of philosophy.

There is not much on "Aesthetic Theory",largely it was only available in German at the time of Jay's highly readable book.