Zuidervaart, Lambert. "Introduction." SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AFTER ADORNO. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

I remember well the month when I began to read Theodor W. Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie. It was May 1977, during a lovely spring in Toronto. Joyce and I were house-sitting for a professor of political philosophy. In the quiet of someone else’s study, surrounded by books that were not my own, I began to read Adorno’s impenetrable, compelling, evocative German prose. Some days I made little headway. Other days I found myself swept along by the drama of the text, yet unable to tell anyone else where I had been or what I had learned. Gradually, however, I began to glimpse the submerged dialectical structures that sustain Adorno’s thought. . . . Read the rest of the introduction: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521870276&ss=exc.