Things beyond resemblance

"Adorno's philosophy took shape in dread recognition of the reversion of society to the primitive.... The problem that marks the center and circumference of his thought was the effort to comprehend and perhaps even circumvent this logic of progress as regression. Without a doubt the preeminent reason that his work must be of vital concern in the United States is for what precisely can be learned from it in a nation that has so palpably entered primitive times."-from Things Beyond ResemblanceTheodor W. Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together essays he has written over the past twenty years about the philosopher, his social theory, the American reception of his work, his affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical stance toward popular music.