Adorno in Naples: How the Land of Dreams Became a Philosophy by Martin Mittelmeier

  • Year2017
  • LanguageRussian
  • Edition2000
  • Pages392
  • BindingPaperback
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Garage publishing program in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press

Martin Mittelmeier offers an original perspective on the culture that informed the theories of one of the key left thinkers of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno.

Tracing the evolution of Adorno’s Neo-Marxist views, Mittelmeier employs a unique methodology, connecting the tastes and the very style of thinking of the German philosopher to the city where he lived in the mid-1920s. 

Between the two world wars, Italy became one of the key destinations for European bohemian intellectuals, and with its burgeoning culture of mass tourism, leisure, and entertainment, Naples was one of the country’s most attractive cities. In those years, it became a temporary home for several thinkers who would later form the core of the Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel. In 1925, the young Theodor Adorno also embarked on a journey of Southern Italy with Siegfried Kracauer. 

How can a country and an environment produce a certain system of thinking? And why did the tired old Vesuvius—and not any other Italian city, Paris, Vienna, or in fact his native Frankfurt—make such an impact on Adorno’s life and ideas? In Mittelmeier’s analysis, which combines the history of thinking with a philosophical critique, the scholar and the city become two figures of equal importance.

‘If Capri was a provincial refuge for romantics, Naples was a refuge of a social kind. Naples is not that far south: it marks the beginning of the lower third of the Italian boot. However, for guests from the north it was a gate to a different world: a world that was not exactly European—almost oriental. People, who largely grew up in a protestant culture and were used to industrial working ethics, found themselves before a Moloch of creativity, idleness and lust; the idea of “European savages” was in the air. It was a paradise for anyone who wanted to escape civilization.’

Author

Martin Mittelmeier (b. 1971) is a German literary theorist, writer and editor. He has collaborated with a number of publishers and is currently an editor and author at Literatur verlagen. He has written extensively on philology and philosophy and is the author of Ungeschriebene Werke. Wozu Goethe, Flaubert, Jandl und all die anderen nicht gekommen sind (Munich, 2006).

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