/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6663615]

How to get started with Adarno?

[Anonymous No.6663618]

By reading him.

[Anonymous No.6663643]

>>6663615
one book at a time. one page at a time. one sentence at a time. one word at a time. only one life at a time. think about it.

[Anonymous No.6663646]

>>6663615

maybe spelling his name right would help

[Anonymous No.6663808]

>>6663615

What's got you interested in him specifically?

I'm reading a collection of essays and correspondences between German Marxists on Aesthetics. The next section is a series of letters Adorno wrote Walter Benjamin critiquing some of his essays including "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction".

The book is mainly concerned with the back and forth exchanges between authors/artists/critics, and the way their ideas were pushed forward by these interactions. This has been my first serious look at the period, although I was already familiar with most of the names from art history survey courses. Brecht has been the most singularly interesting person among them to me, but I like the way this book looks across and between its actors as much as at them.

[Anonymous No.6663827]

>>6663615
I found this. Not sure, how good it is. Also interested. Is 'Dialectical Imagination' good?

[Anonymous No.6663829]

Get into Dialectics. Maybe even read Einführung in die Dialektik if you're german.

And if you're an englishman, then you're lucky. The translations are most of the times easier to understand because german is an ebin meme language.
And don't expect too much. His work is great and he had chosen the way he expressed himself really wisely. He endorsed Hegel's language so he must've obviously tried to emulate it somehow. But he used a really sublime language sprinkled with some 1950s everyday words. It's the reason critics call Adorno and Horkheimer elitist.
You won't get stuff after a few pages. Hell you'll maybe be 100, 200 pages into one of his books and you won't understand shit. A&H weren't really known for using examples to explain concepts so there's that. Don't give up though.

So basically

>get into dialectics. Secondary literature is fine. I'd recommend Einführung in die Dialektik by Adorno

>Read Dialectics of Enlightenment (maybe leave out his Ulysses interpretation, Culture Industry and their take on antisemitism are interesting)

>read his essays

>read Negative Dialectic

[Anonymous No.6663846]

>>6663827
It's important to note that most of the stuff on this list comes from really different (and sometimes fundamentally opposing) angles of what's called "leftism".
I'd especially pay attention to "Das Kapital", "State and Revolution", "One Dimensional Man", "Dialectic of Enlightenment" and "History and Class Consciousness" if you're taking the marxist route.

[Anonymous No.6663849]

>>6663808
Aesthetics and Politics? I'm reading that too :)

[Anonymous No.6663855]

>>6663829
>The translations are most of the times easier to understand because german is an ebin meme language.
This is a meme spread in bitter english departments.
Original>Translation
every time, and
German>English

>It's the reason critics call Adorno and Horkheimer elitist.
actually, it's mostly because they advocate modernist aesthetics

[Anonymous No.6663862]

>>6663855
They'll have a hard time reading Adorno in german for the first time if they're not native germans.
>it's a meme
well there's still something to it.

[Anonymous No.6663863]

You might as well get an icepick lobotomy if retardation is what you're seeking

[Anonymous No.6663871]

>>6663829
Oh, and you forgot to mention Minima Moralia, Jürgen Habermas says it is "his magnum opus and can be read as a summa of his work", it's also very readable.
I'd say get to know German Idealism and Marxism, the best way to do this is just to read the canon front to back, or just cobble it together.
Then Read Dialect of Enlightenment, then Minima Moralia, and then the rest.
Wikipedia gives these as the major works of the Frankfurt School, mostly correct I think, so read these too, mostly in order.

Major works
Reason and Revolution
The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Eclipse of Reason
Escape from Freedom
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Minima Moralia
Eros and Civilization
One-Dimensional Man
Negative Dialectics
The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere
The Theory of Communicative Action

[Anonymous No.6663870]

>>6663863
*fips tehora*

[Anonymous No.6663883]

>>6663862
Of course, but the meme implies that the English translation is actually clearer than the German original, which is false.
The original version of this trope, spread around in Anglo philosophy departments (I hear this quite frequently), is that supposedly German scholars read English translations of Kant rather than the original, total nonsense

[Anonymous No.6663885]

>>6663863
>pic

>>6663871
Oh yeah thx m8, totally forgot about it

[Anonymous No.6663896]

Someone explain what negative dialectics are.

[Anonymous No.6663912]

>>6663849

That's the one :)

Are you reading it for a class? I picked it up along with a bunch of other books on art/literary criticism and some others on Marxism. I've been very casually writing reviews of contemporary art shows for a while now, and am trying to broaden my base of knowledge to pull from

[Anonymous No.6663922]

>>6663912
No just reading it for laffs.
I can't imagine a class where they'd have us read that. Too pleb a university

[Anonymous No.6663931]

>>6663896
your best shot without reading the book:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#5

[Anonymous No.6663944]

>>6663922

Cool, it's nice to know there are other people here reading the same relatively obscure books with roughly the same motivations for doing so

[Anonymous No.6665086]

>>6663615
Stop and read operaismo instead while organising your union local.

[Anonymous No.6665462]

>>6663808
>>6663849
>>6663912
>>6663922
Hey, I've just bought Aesthetics and Politics too. Glad to know you guys are enjoying it.

[Anonymous No.6665468]

>>6663615
Minima Moralia, Then Eialectics of Enlightenment. The rest of his books requires some rather extensive knowledge of philosophy to comprehend, but there are some lectures being published once in a while, not sure if they're being translated, though.

[Anonymous No.6665477]

>>6663615
>>6663808
>>6663827
>>6663829
>>6663849
>>6663912
>>6665462
>>6663871
>>6663896
y'all faggots need to come to leftypol

sincerely,
leftypol

[Anonymous No.6665484]

>>6665477
Do you have antigermans? Or at least Milbank fanboys?

[Anonymous No.6665490]

If you're ever wondering why the fuck you'd continue to read such a pessimistic thinker, read the last aphorism of Minima Moralia. Then it'll all make sense.

[Anonymous No.6665494]

>>6665477
Why? What's leftypol?

[Anonymous No.6665509]

>>6663871
>reading anything written by Habermas after Adorno's death
I know I know, it's really nice how we're all getting along ITT, but why would you want to do that? Habermas transformed the Frankfurt School into a social democratic factory of ideology

[Anonymous No.6667325]

>>6665494
a leftist /pol/ on 8ch

some leftypolacks want to bring leftists from /lit/ to their board.

On the one hand, I don't want the marxfags to leave, on the other, /leftypol/ really needs more literate posters.

[Anonymous No.6667342]

>>6665484
>anti-germans
lol fuck no

[Anonymous No.6668127]

>>6663615
>>6663615
Read the Martin Jay book and maybe a few of his essays:
The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950

Good to know the ideas of Adorno and the rest of Frankfurt school, but they are extremely overrated in understanding or appreciating culture. This because hermeneutics is a shit way of understanding anything.

[Anonymous No.6668325]

from another thread

>>A certain gesture of manliness, be it one’s own, be it that of another, deserves mistrust. It expresses independence, surety of the power of command, the silent conspiracy of all men with each other. The archetype for this is the good looking man in a smoking jacket, who enters his bachelor’s pad alone one late evening, turns on the indirect lighting, and pours a whisky-soda: the carefully recorded fizzing of the mineral water says what the arrogant mouth does not; that he despises whatever does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream – above all, women, and for that very reason they swarm all over him. For him, the pinnacle of human relations is the club, the site of a respect founded on a considerate inconsiderateness. The joys of such men, or on the contrary of their models, which hardly anyone alive really matches, for human beings are always better than their culture, have altogether something of the latent act of violence. By all appearances, this is threatened to others, though he has long since had no need to do so, sprawled on his easy chair. In truth it is past violence against himself. If all pleasure sublates earlier displeasure, then here displeasure is raised – as pride in bearing it – unmediated, untransformed, stereotypically into pleasure: unlike wine, every glass of whiskey, every puff on the cigar still recalls the reluctance, which it must have cost the organism, to accustom itself to such powerful stimuli. According to their own constitution, the he-men would thus be what they are usually presented as in film scripts, masochists. The lie is concealed in their sadism, and it is as liars that they truly become sadists, agents of repression. That lie is nothing other than repressed homosexuality, which emerges as the only approved form of what is heterosexual. In Oxford one can differentiate between two kinds of students: the “tough guys” and the intellectuals; the latter are equated almost without further ado to those who are effeminate. There is a great deal of evidence that the ruling class polarizes itself according to these extremes on the road to dictatorship. Such disintegration is the secret of integration, of happiness of unity in the absence of happiness. In the end the “tough guys” [in English in original] are the ones who are really effeminate, who require the weaklings as their victims, in order not to admit that they are like them. Totality and homosexuality belong together. While the subject falls apart, it negates everything which is not of its own kind. The opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth fuse into a social order, which unreservedly asserts the masculine principle of domination. By making everyone, without exception – even presumed subjects – into its objects, it recoils into total passivity, virtually into what is feminine.

seems like drivel unworthy consideration

[Anonymous No.6668704]

>>6667342
>hating anti-germans
kek take off that kafiya, anglo