The Dialectics of Music Adorno, Benjamin, and Deleuze

By following the outermost mediations between nature, history, and technology, the book reflects on how advanced music critically responds to the ongoing catastrophe of both the Middle Passage and Auschwitz. Following what the author calls the "categorical imperative" of music, Weiss investigates the significance of a wide range of musical phenomena including the territorialization of the lullaby, the improvisation and sorrow song of the blues and jazz, as well as the cosmological limits of the electroacoustic avant-garde. In the era of commodity production, racialized violence and dispossession, the author defends critical music as a singular index of political possibilities.