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Survivor in a lesser world

by
June–July 2005, no. 272

Adorno: A political biography by Lorenz Jaeger (translated by Stewart Spencer)

Yale University Press, $69.95 hb, 239 pp

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory edited by Fred Rush

Cambridge University Press, $59.95 pb, 388 pp

Survivor in a lesser world

by
June–July 2005, no. 272

In the winter of 1968–69 the buildings of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt – the symbolically resonant home of what had come to be known as the Frankfurt School – were occupied by students. The police were called in, and Theodor W. Adorno, one of the great radical theorists of the twentieth century, pressed charges against a young man whose doctoral work he was supervising. Two months later, a group of women forced their way into Adorno’s lecture, handed out leaflets proclaiming that ‘Adorno as an institution is dead’, and ‘surrounded him, strewing flowers, performing a dumb show and … baring their breasts’. In action after action, the contempt of the students for the radical theorists of an older generation was made clear.

Adorno: A political biography

Adorno: A political biography

by Lorenz Jaeger (translated by Stewart Spencer)

Yale University Press, $69.95 hb, 239 pp

The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory

The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory

edited by Fred Rush

Cambridge University Press, $59.95 pb, 388 pp

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