Product details
- ISBN 9780226828572
- Weight: 513g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 02 Jan 2024
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness—now in paperback.
"Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism."—Jürgen Habermas
Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.
Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History and a faculty affiliate in philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of many books, most recently Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization.
