Adorno and Philosophical Modernism

This book offers an original interpretation and vigorous defense of Theodor Adorno s idea of philosophy as the practice of what Roger Foster calls philosophical modernism . Adorno s philosophical writings, from the early 1930s through to the mature works of the late 1960s, are deeply informed by a distinctively modernist vision of human experience. This book seeks to establish that Adorno s unique and lasting contribution to philosophy consists in his sustained and rigorous development of this modernist vision into an encompassing practice of philosophical interpretation. The essential features of this vision can be discerned in all of Adorno s major writings in philosophy, social theory and aesthetics. Its defining element is the idea of a patterning underlying ordinary experience which, although not accessible directly, can be disclosed by the reconstructive work of philosophical or literary language. This vision, Foster argues, can be discerned in the major works of literary modernism (including Woolf, Proust, and Musil) as well as the interpretive technique of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud. The importance of Adorno s contribution to twentieth-century philosophy can only be fully appreciated by understanding how he develops this vision into an overarching practice of philosophical interpretation that furnishes a coherent and profound response to the decay of experience afflicting late-modern societies. In this book, Foster sets out to achieve this by expounding that interpretive practice, exploring its ramifications and in particular its relation with literary modernism, and by setting it into critical dialogue with alternative philosophical responses."