Overview

A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness.   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.

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Reviews

“A brilliant and lucid guide to the twists and turns of the master’s dialectics . . . [and] a masterly reading.” * Times Literary Supplement * “More than an erudite reconstruction of a philosophical debate—[A Precarious Happiness] offers a means of exorcizing ‘the spirit of cynicism’ from contemporary social critique. . . . Gordon paints a compelling picture of Adorno as a theorist of happiness and human flourishing.” * Hedgehog Review * ""Gordon’s book is well written, accessible and free of jargon, and an interesting read that brings to our attention an aspect of Adorno’s work that scholars have mostly overlooked: sources of normativity. It is crucial in that it provides a defense of Adorno vis-à-vis scholars, mainly of the contemporary Frankfurt school kind, preoccupied with providing normative foundations for critical theory and who have dismissed Adorno with the argument that he focuses exclusively on the negative and lacks any normative orientation."" * The Review of Politics * “An important challenge to Adorno's negativism.” * European Journal of Philosophy * ""Gordon’s confidently gripping and at the same time persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism. Engaging with Adorno's lectures, Gordon shows how the negative dialectic, though eluding direct access to statements about the 'good life,' means to spell out the contours of a 'right' life. Within the enchanted bounds of a distorted whole, Adorno searches for traces of a failed happiness. From the despairing criticism of the world’s hopeless condition, the Hegelian nonetheless discerns a transcending impulse of hope that points far beyond the Kantian encouragement to use our rational freedom."" -- Jürgen Habermas “With a fine sensibility, Gordon shows how Adorno, like Kafka, gropes in the gloom for glimpses of a precarious happiness, its possibility animating his critique of society.” -- Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin “Written in a captivating style, Gordon carefully analyzes the whole range of Adorno’s writings to demonstrate that the philosopher grounds his critique of contemporary societies in an idea of human flourishing that he takes as being accessible only in small, easily overlooked fragments within our damaged form of life. By this, Gordon manages something at which almost everyone else has failed so far: to give a coherent picture of the scattered pieces of Adorno’s idea of morality.” -- Axel Honneth, Columbia University

“A brilliant and lucid guide to the twists and turns of the master’s dialectics . . . [and] a masterly reading.” * Times Literary Supplement * “More than an erudite reconstruction of a philosophical debate—[A Precarious Happiness] offers a means of exorcizing ‘the spirit of cynicism’ from contemporary social critique. . . . Gordon paints a compelling picture of Adorno as a theorist of happiness and human flourishing.” * Hedgehog Review * “An important challenge to Adorno's negativism.” * European Journal of Philosophy * ""Gordon’s confidently gripping and at the same time persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism. Engaging with Adorno's lectures, Gordon shows how the negative dialectic, though eluding direct access to statements about the 'good life,' means to spell out the contours of a 'right' life. Within the enchanted bounds of a distorted whole, Adorno searches for traces of a failed happiness. From the despairing criticism of the world’s hopeless condition, the Hegelian nonetheless discerns a transcending impulse of hope that points far beyond the Kantian encouragement to use our rational freedom."" -- Jürgen Habermas “With a fine sensibility, Gordon shows how Adorno, like Kafka, gropes in the gloom for glimpses of a precarious happiness, its possibility animating his critique of society.” -- Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin “Written in a captivating style, Gordon carefully analyzes the whole range of Adorno’s writings to demonstrate that the philosopher grounds his critique of contemporary societies in an idea of human flourishing that he takes as being accessible only in small, easily overlooked fragments within our damaged form of life. By this, Gordon manages something at which almost everyone else has failed so far: to give a coherent picture of the scattered pieces of Adorno’s idea of morality.” -- Axel Honneth, Columbia University

“With a fine sensibility, Gordon shows how Adorno, like Kafka, gropes in the gloom for glimpses of a precarious happiness, its possibility animating his critique of society.” -- Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin “Written in a captivating style, Gordon carefully analyzes the whole range of Adorno’s writings to demonstrate that the philosopher grounds his critique of contemporary societies in an idea of human flourishing that he takes as being accessible only in small, easily overlooked fragments within our damaged form of life. By this, Gordon manages something at which almost everyone else has failed so far: to give a coherent picture of the scattered pieces of Adorno’s idea of morality.” -- Axel Honneth, Columbia University

Author Information

Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History and 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.

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