Since his notorious 1961 lecture, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', Theodor W. Adorno's name has been frequently coupled with that of Samuel Beckett. This book offers a radical reappraisal of the intellectual affinities between these two figures, whose paths crossed all too fleetingly. Specifically the book argues for a preoccupation with the concept of freedom in Beckett's works - one which situates him as a profoundly radical and even political writer. Adorno's own more explicit reconceptualization of freedom and its scarcity in modernity offers a unique lens through which to examine the way Beckett's works preserve a minimal space of freedom that acts in opposition to an unfree social totality. While acknowledging both the biographical encounters between Adorno and Beckett and the influence Beckett's writings had on Adorno's aesthetics, Natalie Leeder goes further to establish a dialogue between their intellectual positions, working with a range of texts from both writers and seeking insight in Adorno's less familiar works, as well as his magnum opera, Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett's literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett's political aesthetic sharpens into focus. Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett's work up to Three Novels and Endgame.

Offers a striking new interpretation of Beckett's major fiction, demonstrating how his development as a writer was shaped by shifting twentieth-century ideas about the social function of literature.

Discusses the most recent advances in the Beckett field and the new methods used to approach it.

What different kinds of reason are possible, and which ones are the most appropriate for a legitimate, as opposed to a merely legitimated state?The book opens with an analysis of Weber as a figure who marks a key moment of sociological transition. Weber articulates a distinctly different view to Enlightenment thinkers who believe in the capacity of reason to improve society and emancipate humanity from ignorance and domination. Weber signals that the institutionalization of the instrumental reason particular to industrial society might actually be an effective tool in the struggle for social supremacy. He notes that in comparison with charismatic and traditional legitimation, modern forms of legal-rational legitimation are de-personalised, anonymously bureaucratic, and much more difficult to combat.The book then looks at various responses to Weber's diagnosis, from Lukács and Benjamin to Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, Arendt, Simmel, Foucault and Habermas. The study culminates with a sociological reading of critical theory that draws together Adorno's concept of non-identity with Habermas on communicative reason and Luhmann on social complexity and differentiation.

A compelling read, Very Little ... Almost Nothing opens up new ways of understanding finitude, modernity and the nature of imagination. Revised edition with a new preface by the author.

Brings together some of the most prominent and influential contemporary interpreters of Adorno's work in a wide-ranging collection of essays that explores Adorno's relation to themes and problems in postmodern thought.

Having studied philosophy at a time when its traditions were being seriously uprooted by the atrocities of World War II, Theodor Adorno had an enormous impact on thinking about aesthetics at a transitional historical moment when the philosophy of science and leftist politics were looking for new ground. Moreover, with his focus on the rise of commercial culture and its effects on identity-construction, Adorno can be said to have reinvigorated modernist concerns by introducing the prevailing terms in our contemporary versions of cultural politics and cultural studies. Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism traces Adorno's social and aesthetic ideas as they appear and reappear in his corpus. As per other volumes in the series, this book is divided into three parts. The first, “Adorno's Keywords,” is organized by the aesthetic terms around which Adorno's philosophy circulates. The second section is devoted to “Adorno and Aesthetics.” While Adorno's philosophical viewpoints influenced modernism's evolution into the 21st century, the history of modernist aesthetics also shaped his philosophical approaches. The third and final part, “Adorno's Constellations,” discusses how aesthetic form in Adorno's thinking underlies the terms of his social analysis.

While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno's negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx's critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno's work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adorno's critical theory and Marx's critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice.