Adorno, Radical Negativity, and Cultural Critique

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.