Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)
Theodor W. Adorno, Henry W. Pickford
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 023113505X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Critical Models combines into a single volume two of Adorno's most important postwar works ― Interventions: Nine Critical Models (1963) and Catchwords: Critical Models II (1969). Written after his return to Germany in 1949, the articles, essays, and radio talks included in this volume speak to the pressing political, cultural, and philosophical concerns of the postwar era. The pieces in Critical Models reflect the intellectually provocative as well as the practical Adorno as he addresses such issues as the dangers of ideological conformity, the fragility of democracy, educational reform, the influence of television and radio, and the aftermath of fascism.
This new edition includes an introduction by Lydia Goehr, a renowned scholar in philosophy, aesthetic theory, and musicology. Goehr illuminates Adorno's ideas as well as the intellectual, historical, and critical contexts that shaped his postwar thinking.
Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 260 (thesis 13) (translation modified).] d Cf. ibid., 494. [Translator’s note: English: ibid., 253–4 (thesis 2).] e Peter Altenberg, Auswahl aus seinen Büchern, ed. Karl Kraus (Vienna: Anton Scholl, 1932), 122f. f Ibid., 135f. Gloss on Personality In reflecting upon personality it is perhaps best to begin with an idiosyncrasy I’ve felt since my youth and would like to suppose was widely shared by the generation of
new type of heroine has appeared to help the man over this difficulty. She boldly takes the initiative in love relations and assures the man of her confidence in his masculinity even when he is not proving it. She estimates appraisingly the quantity of pleasure produced by a kiss, but does not seem to demand any all-out letting go of emotion, which might be difficult to achieve. Thus she approaches sex with a man’s point of view, helps the man who is inhibited when confronted by an excess of
speak about this matter because the very results of the test often depend on factors I have encountered and that are often not fully recognized by the candidates. An examiner would have the wrong attitude altogether if he did not fundamentally try to help those people whom he is professionally obliged to judge, even when such help has a sting to it. I alone answer for my words here, though my colleagues might share my opinion in many respects. In particular, I know that Horkheimer reached the
interior of works, not as something imposed upon them heteronomously. Such works must consciously measure themselves against the historical situation of their material: they must neither abandon themselves blindly and fetishistically to the material nor mold it from outside with subjective intentions. Only what is free from cowardice and ego-weakness and advances without protection, refusing everything indicated in the German language of the post-Hitler epoch by that loathsome expression “guiding
to be the lover of the heroine. His practiced distance, pseudo-realistically modeled after the analyst’s technique, fuses with the culture industry’s vulgar stereotype according to which the man must continually protect himself from the woman’s seductive arts and conquers her only by rejecting them. The psychotherapist resembles the hypnotist, and the heroine resembles the cliché of the “split ego.” Sometimes she is a noble, loving person, who represses her own feelings only because of certain