Critical Models

Interventions and Catchwords

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Critical Theory/Marxism Literary Studies Literary Studies MOSTLY Theory Philosophy

by Theodor W. Adorno,

Translated by Henry W. Pickford,

Introduction by Lydia Goehr

Columbia University Press

Due/Published October 2005, 448 pages, paper

ISBN 023113505X

New in paper (F05)

After years of exile during the Second World War, Theodor Adorno returned home to Germany. Having stated, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," what would he now have to say about the remnants and transformations of the society from which he had barely escaped a few years before? The answer lies in Adorno's postwar work - trenchant essays, aphorisms, and radio addresses created in a wide-ranging attempt to reintroduce psychoanalysis, critical thinking, and philosophy to a culture that, in the wake of Nazism, had an "inability to mourn" and no sense of "memory." Between 1959 and his death ten years later, Adorno published fourteen paperback collections of his work, often combining revised and new essays - publications intended for an educated, politically and culturally influential audience. Two collections of those works are combined in this single volume - Interventions: Nine Critical Models (1963) and Catchwords: Critical Models II (1969). These books are passionate examples of Adorno's postwar commitment to unmasking the culture that engendered Nazism and its antihumanist nightmare.

Included here are Adorno's practical recommendations for reform in primary and higher education, his explanation for the enduring therapeutic value of psychoanalysis, and his appeal to raise public awareness of "propaganda tricks" that exploit prejudice and chauvinism. The collection also includes new translations of such classic pieces as "Why Still Philosophy," "Note on the Human Sciences and Culture," and "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America," a memoir of his exile in the United States."It is great news that this superb collection of Adorno's polemical, political, and thoroughly contemporary interventions--on television, teaching, nationalism, his years as an exiled scholar in the United States and much more--is finally available in a rigorous, very readable, and in every way exemplary translation." -- Thomas Levin, Princeton University"Contrary to the caricature of Adorno as an aloof mandarin unwilling to descend into the public sphere, these essays, elegantly translated and abundantly annotated by Henry Pickford, reveal the range and power of his contributions to the fragile German democracy he helped build after returning from exile. Without sacrificing his critical rigor, Adorno shows that even the most negative of dialectics can address practical problems and provide suggestive answers." -- Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley