内容简介：
The unprecedented mass manipulation, mass death, and trauma of World War II created a heightened interest in technology and totalitarianism among European and American intellectuals. In The Disposition of the Subject, Eric Krakauer explores Theodor Adorno's attempt to hinder further atrocity through philosophical analysis of technology and of its contribution to totalitarianisms of various kinds: political, aesthetic, and epistemological.Starting with an elucidation of Adorno's discovery of a dark side to the Enlightenment, of its culmination in totalitarian thinking, and of the central role of the technologies of the culture industry in this process, Krakauer examines Adorno's "negative dialectical" critique and situates Adorno's work in relation to Hegel, Marx, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Arguing that Adorno's method is a type of reading that reveals itself most clearly in Adorno's texts on aesthetics, language, and foreign words, Krakauer finds in Adorno's writing a complex, nondialectical differentiating that radically threatens totalitarianisms, gives Adorno's work an affinity to that of Derrida and de Man, and sheds new light on the relationship among philosophy, subjectivity, trauma, and social suffering.