Lexington Books Adorno, Radical Negativity, and Cultural Critique: Utopia in the Map of the World

The notion of utopia has largely gone missing from the world. Not coincidentally, though strangely, the notion of utopia has also gone missing in prevailing discourses on the work of Adorno. In Adorno, Radical Negativity, and Cultural Critique: Utopia in the Map of the World, Kathleen League remedies this absence. Advancing explications and arguments as sharpened instruments, League demonstrates that Adorno spiritedly defended the concept of utopia, and he did so in ways that are increasingly relevant. With all the spark and passion of his often punchy, aphorisitic style, with all the fierceness of his critique of an increasingly administered, commodity culture, Adorno embraced and carried forth the spirit of utopia. League shows how his searing insights and analyses are ever more relevant and convey the necessity of the concept of utopia, not only for his time, but for ours. The book's thesis is pursued through encounters with a diverse set of thinkers and artists such as Jacques Derrida, Richard Wolin, Pierre Bourdieu, Oscar Wilde, and even the Sex Pistols. These encounters show that Adorno defended utopia not in an easy or naive way, but rather as the needful radical affirmation at the heart of any serious determinate critique of reality. This book will prove valuable to anyone interested in critical theory, social and political philosophy, and contemporary aesthetics and nineteenth and twentieth-century art. Kathleen League's Adorno, Radical Negativity, and Cultural Critique reveals utopia as the beating heart of Adorno's philosophy. In the end, the proposal of this book is that utopia is the beating heart we need now if we are to have hope for a better future. Review Kathleen League has given us a timely, well argued book on T. W. Adorno's concept of utopia and its implications for the philosophy of art. Adorno, Radical Negativity, and Cultural Critique offers rewards to readers at several levels, ranging from those who have had only the briefest introduction to Adorno's thought to those engaged by the recent controversies of his critics. This richly informed book, drawing on materials from Oscar Wilde to the Sex Pistols and Avatar, both explicates Adorno's argument and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary culture. League builds a persuasive case that Adorno's cultural criticism is even more important now than it was at the time of his death in 1969.--Gary Shapiro, Tucker-Boatwright Professor in the Humanities-Philosophy, University of Richmond This text is a welcome blend of a close reading of Adorno and an appeal to the continuing need for the utopian in contemporary society. League puts Adorno in conversation with his critics and successors in order to provide an important argument about the decline of the possibility of utopia in the modern world as well as the dangers that rejection of utopia brings about for our society. This is an important contribution to Adorno scholarship and an equally important contribution to contemporary social theory.--Richard A. Lee Jr., DePaul University, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University About the Author Kathleen League, PhD, is an independent scholar.