Preface: Reclaiming Spaces of Withdrawal for Democratic Politics -- Introduction. Reading Thoreau with Adorno -- Pt. 1. Two Interlocutors for Thoreau: Adorno and Emerson -- 1. Damaged Life, the Microscopic Gaze, and Adorno's Practice of Negative Dialectics -- 2. Alienated Existence, Focal Distancing, and Emerson's Transcendental Idealism -- Pt. 2. Thoreau's Democratic Withdrawal -- 3. Man as Machine: Thoreau and Modern Alienation -- 4. Huckleberrying toward Democracy: Thoreau's Practices of Withdrawal 117 -- 5. Traveling Away from Home: Thoreau's Spaces of Withdrawal -- Conclusion: Alienation and the Anti-Foundationalist Foundation of the Self.