(Ebook) The Challenge of Surrealism by Theodor W. Adorno, Elisabeth Lenk ISBN 9780816656165, 9780816656172, 0816656169, 0816656177

(Ebook) The Challenge of Surrealism by Theodor W. Adorno, Elisabeth Lenk ISBN 9780816656165, 9780816656172, 0816656169, 0816656177

Despite the title, this book is more than just the correspondence between Adorno and Elizabeth Lenk, his PhD student. It includes her introduction to the 1966 German edition of Charles Fourier's "Theory of the Four Movements" and several other documents of interest. Lenk was a member of the Paris Surrealist Group, until she was kicked out for her statements sympathetic to the Situationist International, after the latter perpetrated the "Strassburg scandal" at the University of Strassburg, where Lenk taught German, in 1966. The Surrealist Group let her rejoin after the May '68 revolt, however. Her first-hand accounts of these and other events make the book riveting at times. And the exchanges between her and Adorno about these events and associated radical political and avante garde ideas illuminates the thought of the latter.