Introduction

The introduction situates the main concerns of the book, especially Adorno’s concept of the “uncoercive gaze,” in relation to his work as a whole. It also analyzes Adorno’s “art of reading” and articulates some of the stakes of reading Adorno’s challenging texts. Adorno emerges both as a thinker who invites us to learn to think with him and as a thinker who himself thinks with others (such as Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, Arendt, Kafka, Derrida, and Agamben) and thus always is a thinker in dialogue.