"There is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that Adorno is the great survivor of the Frankfurt School, the only one whose thought retained its full actuality. However, the same thing he said for psychoanalysis – that its truth resides in its very exaggerations – goes for his own thought: he is at his most subversive when he gets involved in a deadlock. For this reason, this critical reader, focused on these deadlocks, is not just a commentary on his thought, but literally part of it. In short, this book is simply a must!" Slavoj Zizek, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institute, Essen

"Against all odds, Adorno has emerged at the dawn of the twenty-first century as arguably the leading theoretical inspiration of our time. These stimulating essays, written by fresh as well as familiar commentators on his oeuvre, go a long way towards explaining the power of his ideas and demonstrating their abiding relevance." Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Nigel Gibson is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches philosophy and postcolonial studies. He is also a research associate at Harvard University and at Brown University. He is editor of Rethinking Fanon (1999) and co-editor, with George C. Bond, of Contested Terrain and Contested Categories: Africa in Focus (2001).

Andrew Rubin is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is editor of The Edward Said Reader (2000), and has written articles for a variety of national magazines and newspapers, including The Nation.