Description: Examining Adorno's diagnosis of the "damaged life" created by the conditions governing existence in contemporary societies, The Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno asks whether emancipatory thought can still carve out spaces of hope amid the overwhelming power of social systems.
Brief description: Jordi Maiso is Associate Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. His area of specialization is contemporary social philosophy and aesthetics. He has published extensively on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, its history and its current interest. He is also Chief Editor of Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica, member of the editorial board of the Journal of Adorno Studies and president of the Spanish Society of Critical Theory Studies.
Review Quotes:
"In this book, Jordi Maiso brings the temporal core of truth in Adorno's Critical Theory to light, opening up a privileged path of knowledge through his work" --Detlev Claussen, Emeritus Professor of Social Theory, Sociology of Culture and Science at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany
"From the Spanish-speaking world arrives the finest book on Adorno in a generation. Jordi Maiso restores Adorno to the center of Critical Theory, one focused on the global social reproduction of life and capital. Sophisticated, precise, and urgently timely" --Silvia L. López, Maxine H. and Winston R. Wallin Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, Carleton College, USA "Between antebellum and postbellum we are now located dead center, post prefix: at bellum. The United States has shouldered the mantel of the most dangerous nation on earth, bristling with legalized hostility to itself, to its own population who are disappeared and murdered, and flaunting invasion the world over. The destruction of the environment has been raised to presidential Diktat. In horror, we know we have been here before, and must ask whether there has ever been anything but. This is the thesis of Jordi Maiso's brilliant, closely studied new work, From Damaged Life. That Adorno's reflections may seem lapsed, Maiso writes, is a kind of optical illusion. For the inheritance of our day is nothing but every defeat that befell Adorno's own. From this perspective Maiso presents a carefully reasoned, unified account of Adorno's work, unprecedented in English, that means to speak closely to a world face-to-face with the spectre of despair. From Damaged Life is an impressive, admirable work, the result of years of research and commitment, from which there is much to learn." --Robert Hullot-Kentor, critic, translator, and author of Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (2006) "Jordi Maiso is doubtless one of the foremost Critical Theorists in the Spanish-speaking world. It is therefore so crucial to have his brilliant book available in English translation. It's a profoundly refreshing alternative to the dominant Anglophone approaches increasingly obsessed with the question of normativity in Adorno's thought. Maiso rescues Teddie from his "devotees" by contending that Adorno's philosophy, which once seemed obsolete as a result of its recent domestication, lives on because the nihilistic conditions of late capitalism that produced it have, in recent, years only deepened and intensified at the global level." --Samir Gandesha, Full Professor and Director, Institute for the Humanities and Co-editor of the Journal of Adorno Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada