Most of the chapters of the present text centre themselves around a reading of an article – sometimes more than one – or a chapter of a book by Adorno. This was also the method of Adorno on Music. In both volumes, I opted to undertake a close reading of primary texts and to preserve, for the reader, so far as is possible, the sustained theoretical tension of Adorno’s argumentation in the specific writings chosen for discussion. There is inevitably a certain degree of thematic overlap among topics but that, too, is a feature of Adorno’s own writings which, like the music he admires, develop a great many variations from a very few basic themes