GORDON, Peter - A Companion To Adorno PDF

A Companion to Adorno
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A Companion to Adorno
Edited by
Peter E. Gordon
Espen Hammer
Max Pensky
This edition first published 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Gordon, Peter Eli, editor. | Hammer, Espen, editor. | Pensky, Max, editor.
Title: A companion to Adorno / edited by Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer,
Max Pensky.
Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2019. | Series: Blackwell
companions to philosophy ; 71
Identifiers: LCCN 2019024545 (print) | LCCN 2019024546 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781119146919 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119146926 (adobe pdf) |
ISBN 9781119146933 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969.
Classification: LCC B3199.A34 C655 2020 (print) | LCC B3199.A34 (ebook) |
DDC 193–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024545
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024546
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: Akademie der Künste, Photo: Ilse Mayer Gehrken, © T. W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt
Set in 10/12pt Photina by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Notes on Contributors ix
Editors’ Introduction xv
About the Editors xix
Part I Intellectual Foundations 1

1 Adorno: A Biographical Sketch 3
Peter E. Gordon
2 Adorno’s Inaugural Lecture: The Actuality of Philosophy in the Age
of Mass Production 21
Roger Foster
3 Reading Kierkegaard 35
Marcia Morgan
4 Guilt and Mourning: Adorno’s Debt to and Critique of Benjamin 51
Alexander Stern
5 Adorno and the Second Viennese School 67
Sherry D. Lee
Part II Cultural Analysis 85

6 The Culture Industry 87
Fred Rush
7 Adorno and Horkheimer on Anti-Semitism 103
Fabian Freyenhagen
8 Adorno and Jazz 123
Andrew Bowie
9 Adorno’s Democratic Modernism in America: Leaders and Educators
as Political Artists 139
Shannon Mariotti
10 Inhuman Methods for an Inhumane World: Adorno’s Empirical
Social Research, 1938–1950 153
Charles Clavey
v
Contents
Part III History and Domination 173

11 Adorno and Blumenberg: Nonconceptuality and the Bilderverbot 175
Martin Jay
12 Philosophy of History 193
Iain Macdonald
13 The Anthropology in Dialectic of Enlightenment 207
Pierre-François Noppen
14 Adorno’s Reception of Weber and Lukács 221
Michael J. Thompson
15 Adorno’s Aesthetic Model of Social Critique 237
Andrew Huddleston
16 The Critique of the Enlightenment 251
Martin Shuster
Part IV Social Theory and Empirical Inquiry 271

17 “Nothing is True Except the Exaggerations:” The Legacy of The
Authoritarian Personality 273
David Jenemann
18 Exposing Antagonisms: Adorno on the Possibilities of Sociology 287
Matthias Benzer and Juljan Krause
19 Adorno and Marx 303
Peter Osborne
20 Adorno’s Three Contributions to a Theory of Mass Psychology and
Why They Matter 321
Eli Zaretsky
21 Adorno and Postwar German Society 335
Jakob Norberg
Part V Aesthetics 349

22 Aesthetic Autonomy 351
Owen Hulatt
23 Adorno and Literary Criticism 365
Henry W. Pickford
24 Adorno as a Modernist Writer 383
Richard Eldridge
25 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory 397
Eva Geulen
26 Aesthetic Theory as Social Theory 413
Peter Uwe Hohendahl
vi
Contents
27 Adorno, Music, and the Ineffable 427

Michael Gallope
28 Adorno and Opera 443
Richard Leppert
Part VI Negative Dialectics 457

29 What Is Negative Dialectics?: Adorno’s Reevaluation of Hegel 459
Terry Pinkard
30 Adorno’s Critique of Heidegger 473
Espen Hammer
31 Concept and Object: Adorno’s Critique of Kant 487
J. M. Bernstein
32 Critique and Disappointment: Negative Dialectics as Late Philosophy 503
Max Pensky
33 Negative Dialectics and Philosophical Truth 519
Brian O’Connor
34 Adorno and Scholem: The Heretical Redemption of Metaphysics 531
Asaf Angermann
35 Adorno’s Concept of Metaphysical Experience 549
Peter E. Gordon
Part VII Ethics and Politics 565

36 After Auschwitz 567
Christian Skirke
37 Forever Resistant? Adorno and Radical Transformation of Society 583
Maeve Cooke
38 Adorno’s Materialist Ethic of Love 601
Kathy J. Kiloh
39 Adorno’s Metaphysics of Moral Solidarity in the Moment of its Fall 615
James Gordon Finlayson
Index 631
vii
Notes on Contributors
Asaf Angermann is Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar in Humanities, Philosophy,

and Judaic Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Beschädigte Ironie: Kierkegaard,
Adorno und die negative Dialektik kritischer Subjektivität (de Gruyter, 2013), the editor of
Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail”: Briefwechsel
1939–1969 (Suhrkamp, 2015), and the Hebrew translator and editor of Theodor W.
Adorno: Education to Autonomous Thinking (HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 2017).
Matthias Benzer is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, England, where
he teaches social and sociological theory. Among his publications on Adorno’s sociology is
The Sociology of Theodor Adorno (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Matthias is currently
finishing a monograph (with Kate Reed) on the socio‐theoretical analysis of “social life.”
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for
Social Research. His research has focused on Critical Theory, aesthetics, ethics, and the
philosophy of law. Among his books are: Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002); Against
Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006); and, most recently,
Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (2015). He is completing a study entitled
Notes Toward a Minor Utopia of Everyday Life: Human Rights and the Construction of Human
Dignity.
Andrew Bowie is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway,
University of London. He has published very widely on modern philosophy, music, and
literature, and is a jazz saxophonist. His books are: Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to
Nietzsche; Schelling and Modern European Philosophy; F.W.J. von Schelling: “On the History of
Modern Philosophy”; From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The Philosophy of German Literary
Theory; Manfred Frank: “The Subject and the Text”; F.D.E. Schleiermacher, “Hermeneutics and
Criticism” and Other Writings; Introduction to German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas;
Music, Philosophy, and Modernity; and Philosophical Variations: Music as Philosophical
Language; German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction; and Adorno and the Ends of
Philosophy.
Charles Clavey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University.
Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and a
member of the Royal Irish Academy. She is the author of many articles in the area of social
and political philosophy. Her books include Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s
Pragmatics (MIT Press, 1994) and Re‐Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press, 2006). She is
on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals and has held visiting appoint-
ments at universities in the United States and Europe.
ix
Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at

Swarthmore College. He is the author, most recently, of Images of History: Kant, Benjamin,
Freedom, and the Human Subject (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Werner
Herzog – Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is the Series Editor of Oxford
Studies in Philosophy and Literature. He has held visiting positions in Bremen, Essex,
Stanford, Freiburg, and Sydney. He has published widely in philosophy of literature,
aesthetics, German philosophy, and Romanticism.
James Gordon Finlayson works at the University of Sussex. He teaches philosophy,
Critical Theory, and social and political thought and directs the Centre for Social and
Political Thought. He writes articles and books on social and political thought. He is the
author of The Habermas Rawls Debate (Columbia University Press, 2019), and is working
on a book on transcendental homelessness in Adorno’s life and work.
Roger Foster is the author of Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (SUNY, 2007) and
Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things (Lexington, 2016), as well as
numerous papers and book reviews on the tradition of Critical Social Theory. He teaches
philosophy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of
New York.
Fabian Freyenhagen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, UK. His publi-
cations include Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly (Cambridge University
Press, 2013) and articles and book chapters on Critical Theory. Among his future projects
is a historically informed ethics after Auschwitz that builds on Adorno’s work.
Michael Gallope is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota where he is a McKnight Presidential
Fellow. He is the author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (University of
Chicago Press, 2017), as well as over a dozen articles and essays on music and philosophy.
As a musician, he works in a variety of genres from avant‐garde composition to rock and
West African electronica.
Eva Geulen is Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research and teaches at
Humboldt University in Berlin. She studied German Literature and Philosophy at the
University of Freiburg and The Johns Hopkins University. She has held teaching positions
at Stanford University, the University of Rochester, and New York University and was
Professor of German Literature at the University of Bonn and at Goethe University
Frankfurt. Her research focuses on literature and philosophy from the eighteenth century
to the present, pedagogical discourses around 1800 and 1900 as well as Goethe’s mor-
phology and its reception in the twentieth century. Her publications include: Aus dem Leben
der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager (August Verlag 2016); The End of Art. Readings
of a Rumor after Hegel (Stanford University Press, 2006); Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung
(Junius Verlag, 2005, 3rd edition 2016); Worthörig wider Willen. Darstellungsproblematik
und Sprachreflexion in der Prosa Adalbert Stifters (1992); and essays on Nietzsche, Benjamin,
Raabe, Thomas Mann, and others. Since 2004, she has been co‐editor of the Zeitschrift für
deutsche Philologie.
Andrew Huddleston is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Prior to coming to Birkbeck, he was a Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. He specializes in
German philosophy, as well as in aesthetics, ethics, and social philosophy. He has published
x
a number of articles on these topics. His book Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of
Culture (2019) was published with Oxford University Press.
Owen Hulatt is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. He is the author of
Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth (Columbia University Press, 2016). His
current research interests include Spinoza’s metaphysics, Louis Althusser’s late work, and
aesthetics. He is currently writing a monograph on aleatory materialism.
David Jenemann is Professor of English and Film and Television Studies at the University
of Vermont where he serves as the co‐director of the UVM Humanities Center. He is the
author of Adorno in America (2007) and The Baseball Glove: History, Material, Meaning, and
Value as well as a number of essays on Critical Theory and cultural history. He is currently
writing a biography of Adorno.
Kathy J. Kiloh is Assistant Professor of philosophy at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.
Juljan Krause is a researcher in social philosophy, philosophy of technology, and science
and technology studies at the University of Southampton, UK. He is the editor of the
philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics. Juljan is currently working on a monograph that
explores the social and political dimensions of building the quantum internet.
Sherry D. Lee is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Dean of Research at the
University of Toronto Faculty of Music. A specialist in music and modernist cultures,
nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century opera, and philosophical aesthetics, her work appears
in JAMS, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music and Letters, 19th‐Century Music, the Germanic
Review, and several collected volumes, the more recent including the Oxford Handbook of
Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press, 2015), Music, Modern Culture, and the
Critical Ear (Routledge, 2017), and Korngold and His World (forthcoming 2019). Her mono-
graph Adorno at the Opera is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and with Daniel
Grimley she is preparing The Cambridge Companion to Music and Modernism.
Richard Leppert is Regents Professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching
Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His research is concentrated on Western European
and American cultural history from the seventeenth century to the present. His
most recent book is Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature (Opera –
Orchestra – Phonograph – Film) (University of California Press, 2015). His current research
focuses on the history of phonography and film music.
Iain Macdonald is Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. His area of spe-
cialization is nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century European philosophy, including Hegel,
Marx, Critical Theory, phenomenology, and aesthetics. Among other things, he is the author
of What Would Be Different: Figures of Possibility in Adorno (Stanford University Press, 2019).
Shannon Mariotti is Professor of Political Science at Southwestern University. She is
the author of Adorno and Democracy: The American Years (University Press of Kentucky,
2016) and Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). She is also co‐editor of A Political Companion to
Marilynne Robinson (University Press of Kentucky, 2016). Her work explores the practice
of democracy in everyday life, with a focus on sensory perception, experience, and aes-
thetics. She takes a comparative political theory approach to nineteenth‐century American
xi
Transcendentalism, twentieth‐century Critical Social Theory, and the emerging area of

Buddhist political theory. Her current book project is titled Zen Democracy: Buddhism,
Modernism and the Experience of Democracy.
Marcia Morgan is Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliate faculty member in
Jewish studies, sustainability studies, and women’s and gender studies at Muhlenberg
College. She is the recipient of the Donald B. Hoffman Research Fellowship for 2018–2019.
She has recently published articles in Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, and Thesis Eleven, and
book chapters in the anthologies, Critical Theories and the Budapest School (Routledge,
2017) and Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature (Routledge, 2018).
Pierre‐François Noppen (PhD, Sorbonne) is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. He specializes in modern and contempo-
rary German philosophy, social and political philosophy and Critical Theory. His current
research is on Adorno’s materialism. He served as president of the Association for Adorno
Studies.
Jakob Norberg is Associate Professor of German at Duke University. He is the author of
Sociability and Its Enemies: German Political Thought After 1945 as well as essays on Theodor
W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Georg Lukács, and Carl Schmitt.
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre
for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, London. He
has held Visiting Chairs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris 8 (2014,
2019), the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2015), and Yale University School of Art
(2017). His books include: The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant‐Garde (Verso, 1995,
2011); Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000); Conceptual Art (Phaidon Press,
2002); Marx (Granta, 2005), Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso,
2013); and The Postconceptual Condition (Verso, 2018). He is the editor of the three‐volume
Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2005). From 1983 to
2016 he was an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy.
Brian O’Connor is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He is the author
of Adorno’s Negative Dialectic (2004), Adorno (2013), Idleness: A Philosophical Essay (2018),
and editor of The Adorno Reader (2000).
Henry W. Pickford is Associate Professor of German and Philosophy at Duke University.
He is the author of The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art, Thinking
with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion and Art; co‐author of In Defense of
Intuitions: A New Rationalist Manifesto; co‐editor of Der aufrechte Gang im windschiefen
Kapitalismus; editor and translator of Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
and Lev Loseff, Selected Early Poems.
Terry Pinkard teaches philosophy at Georgetown University. Among his publications are
(with Cambridge University Press): Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (1994);
Hegel: A Biography (2000); German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (2002);
with Oxford University Press, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life
(2012); with Harvard University Press, Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical
Shapes of Justice, 2017. In 2018 his translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was pub-
lished by Cambridge University Press.
xii
Fred Rush is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of
Irony and Idealism (Oxford University Press, 2016), On Architecture (Routledge, 2009), and
the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press,
2004) and the Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus (2004–2014). He is
working on a book in the philosophy of film called Film’s Experience.
Peter Uwe Hohendahl Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Comparative
Literature and German Studies, Cornell University; Director of the Institute for German
Cultural Studies, 1992–2007; American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2003—; selected
publications include: Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870
(Cornell University Press, 1989); Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory
(Cornell University Press, 1991); Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (University of
Nebraska Press, 1995); The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited
(Cornell University Press, 2013); and Perilous Futures: On Carl Schmitt’s Late Writings
(Cornell University Press, 2018).
Martin Shuster teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD, where he is part of the
Center for Geographies of Justice. In addition to many articles, he is the author of Autonomy
after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity and New Television: The Aesthetics
and Politics of a Genre, both published by the University of Chicago Press, in 2014 and
2017, respectively. Most recently, with Daniela Ginsburg, he translated Jean‐François
Kervégan’s L’effectif et le rationnel: Hegel et l’esprit objectif, published as The Actual and The
Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit, also by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.
Christian Skirke is Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. He publishes on
Critical Theory, existentialism, and phenomenology.
Alexander Stern received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame and works on
the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, and aesthetics. His writing has
appeared in the European Journal of Philosophy and Critical Horizons, as well as in the New
York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His recent
book is The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning (Harvard University
Press, 2019).
Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political
Science, William Paterson University. Some of his recent books include: The Politics of
Inequality (Columbia University Press, 2012); The Domestication of Critical Theory (Rowman
and Littlefield, 2016); as well as the edited The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory
(Palgrave, 2017); Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics (Routledge, 2018); and,
with Greg Smulewicz‐Zucker, Anti‐Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in
a Free Society (Prometheus, 2018). He is the author of the forthcoming, The Specter of
Babel: Political Judgment and the Crisis of Modernity (SUNY) and Twilight of the Self: The
Eclipse of Autonomy in Modern Society (Stanford University Press).
Eli Zaretsky is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. He is the author
of Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (HarperCollins, 1985); Secrets of the Soul: A Social
and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Three Rivers Press, 2005); Why America Needs a Left
(Polity Press, 2012); and Political Freud: A History (Columbia University Press, 2017).
xiii
Editors’ Introduction
A full half‐century has passed since Adorno’s death in 1969. In the intervening years the
landscape of his critical reception has transformed and diversified in manifold ways. In the
early years Adorno was most often seen alongside his colleague Max Horkheimer as a par-
tisan of Critical Theory in the philosophical tradition of the Institute for Social Research,
also known as the “Frankfurt School.” Among his students, he was admired as a returned
émigré and public intellectual who embodied the spirit of the Weimar era and used his
moral authority to challenge the stifling atmosphere of conservativism and political
repression in postwar Germany. In publications such as Minima Moralia and in radio
addresses on political as well as cultural themes, he fastened his attention on the question
of how to reimagine philosophy and art after Auschwitz. Jürgen Habermas, who com-
menced his studies in Frankfurt in 1956, later wrote of Adorno that he was “the only
genius I have met in my life.” But this reputation was highly ambivalent. By the later
1960s, Adorno found himself at odds with more militant members of the New Left who
came to see him as an ally of the political establishment. His rarefied philosophical style
and his mandarin aesthetic sensibility left him vulnerable to charges of cultural elitism
and political quietism. His confrontation with student activists in the final months before
his death cast a shadow over his legacy that would take years to dispel. By the 1980s and
1990s, a new generation of scholars looked to his philosophical legacy with fresh con-
cerns. The ascendant wave of interest in the cultural and literary criticism of his colleague
and friend Walter Benjamin led to a deepened appreciation for Adorno’s own legacy as a
cultural critic, while literary and theoretical fashions associated with French
poststructuralism led to surprising if unlikely exercises in comparison. By the turn of the
millennium, Adorno had reemerged in scholarship in a rather new guise, as a thinker
whose works were best understood in their full independence as contributions to defining
questions of the philosophical canon. Fifty years on, the time has arrived for a summation
and critical reappraisal of this formidable legacy.
No doubt, the very idea of a comprehensive summary would have aroused Adorno’s ire.
From the beginning of his career Adorno looked with skepticism on philosophical efforts to
embrace all of human reality, both social and intellectual, within the logic of a single,
totalizing framework. In “The Actuality of Philosophy,” his 1931 inaugural lecture as pro-
fessor at the University of Frankfurt, he argued that “Whoever chooses philosophy as a
profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began
with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real” (Adorno
1931, 24). In his habilitation on Kierkegaard, Adorno presented himself as a materialist
who would read philosophical texts against the grain and resist the allure of the grand
xv
philosophical system. The concept that seeks to subsume the plenitude of reality became
for Adorno a sign of the subject’s will to mastery and a philosophical correlate for social
domination. In a conscious rejoinder to Hegel’s famous dictum from the Phenomenology of
Spirit that “the true is the whole,” Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia that “the whole is the
false”. This principled resistance to the totalizing ambitions of the mind helps to explain
Adorno’s conviction that dialectics could no longer strive for seamless reconciliation; only
a “negative dialectic” could remain attentive to the insufficiency of the concept and pay
homage to what he called the “preponderance of the object.” This emphasis on the unrec-
onciled condition of social reality, with its materialist appeal to the persistence of objective
suffering, became the leitmotif throughout Adorno’s work not only in philosophy but in
his cultural and aesthetic criticism as well. In the “late‐style” of Beethoven’s music and in
the ruined and unredeemed landscapes portrayed by Samuel Beckett, Adorno discerned
the “cracks and fissures” of the only aesthetic style suitable to the catastrophic world of
late‐capitalist modernity.
But Adorno was never only a philosopher in the conventional sense. His mind was
always restless, untethered from all disciplinary orthodoxies and the bonds of established
method. Trained in musical composition and gifted with an unusual sensitivity to both
music and literature, Adorno authored important studies on figures of the European
musical canon, including monographs on Berg, Mahler, Wagner, and the (unfinished)
study of Beethoven, along with literary analyses of Kafka, Hölderlin, and Beckett. Especially
during his years in exile in the United States, he came to appreciate the possibilities of
empirical sociological research; during his initial years in New York he collaborated with
Paul Lazarsfeld at Princeton University on a study of radio listening; and, during the later
1940s in California, he joined the research team at Berkeley in the landmark study in
social psychology, The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950. Upon his return to
Germany he continued his sociological research in the 1950s with inquiries into the
postwar persistence of Nazi sympathies in German public opinion, most notably in Group
Experiment and Guilt and Defense. Adorno also applied his critical and sociological skills to
the analysis of mass‐cultural or commodified art, the products of what he and Horkheimer
called the “culture industry.” Most notoriously, Adorno wrote a handful of essays on jazz,
which he condemned as an especially pernicious form of commodified art and pseudo‐
individuality. In all such inquiry Adorno sustained the uncompromising posture of an
intellectual who feared that the emancipatory promise of the modern age was falling into
eclipse and that it was the critic’s preeminent task to fasten one’s attention on the persis-
tence of negativity in the midst of an increasingly “affirmative” culture that denied the
possibility of genuine transformation. In his final and most formidable work of philosophy,
Negative Dialectics (1966) he set forth the core principles that would inform this task. In the
posthumously published and never‐finished Aesthetic Theory (1970), he entertained the
question of what sort of critical potentials might be said to survive in modern art in the
midst of an increasingly uncritical world.
In this volume, we have convened an extraordinary group of scholars from a variety of
disciplines to address what we believe to be the most promising and enduring facets of
Adorno’s intellectual legacy. The chapters that follow concentrate primarily on the
philosophical concerns that remained of central importance for Adorno himself. But the
chapters also speak to the centrality of aesthetic, musical, moral, political, and sociolog-
ical themes in Adorno’s oeuvre. As editors we have undertaken this volume with some
humility and in the recognition that no compendium of critical scholarship could p ossibly
xvi
do justice to the richness of Adorno’s thought. But we hope that this collection will serve
as a helpful resource for those who wish further to explore the still‐undiminished power
of his legacy.
Reference
Adorno, T.W. (1931). The Actuality of Philosophy. In: The Adorno Reader (trans. B. Snow;
ed. B. O’Connor), 23–39. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
xvii
About the Editors
Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Faculty Affiliate in the
Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Among is his more recent books are
Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010) and Adorno and Existence (2016). He is
also the co‐editor, with Espen Hammer and Axel Honneth, of The Routledge Companion to
the Frankfurt School (2018).
Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, Philadelphia. He is the
author of Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Polity Press, 2002),
Adorno and the Political (Routledge, 2006), Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical
Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and
Catastrophe (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Max Pensky is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University, the State University
of New York. His publications on Critical Theory include Melancholy Dialectics: Walter
Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), The Ends of
Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics (SUNY, 2008), and (with Wendy O. Brown
and Peter E. Gordon) Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (Chicago University
Press, 2018).
xix
Part I
Intellectual Foundations
1
Adorno: A Biographical Sketch

PETER E. GORDON
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund‐Adorno was born in Frankfurt am Main on Friday

September 11, 1903, the only son of Oscar Wiesengrund, a German‐Jewish wine mer-
chant, and Maria Calvelli‐Adorno della Piana, a talented singer of Corsican‐Catholic
descent. The young Theodor, known as “Teddie,” was baptized as a Catholic after the faith
of his mother, but grew up without a strong sense of religious identity. His household was
notably rich in music thanks to the influence of his mother and his maternal aunt Agatha,
a singer and pianist whom Teddie called his “second mother.” When he was not occupied
with his academic studies and his music lessons the young Teddie would play with friends
in the “spookily pleasurable” corners of the cellar beneath the house where his father
stored his wines (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 20). The young Adorno was a “pampered child,” a
“slightly built” and “shy boy” who was taunted on the playground as a “unique person
who outshone even the best boys in the class” (quoted in Müller‐Doohm 2005, 34; quoting
reminiscence of Erich Pfeiffer‐Belli).
Adorno received his education in Frankfurt, attending the Kaiser‐Wilhelm Gymnasium
from 1913 to 1921. In the early 1920s, Adorno forged an intimate friendship with
Siegfried Kracauer, and the two met together on regular occasions for an intensive study of
Kant’s first Critique. Adorno pursued a further education in music at the Hoch conserva-
tory in Frankfurt, where he studied piano and composition; he published music and opera
reviews throughout the early 1920s. Around 1923, Adorno met Gretel Karplus, the highly
educated and culturally sophisticated daughter of a leather manufacturer in Frankfurt.
Gretel received a doctorate in chemistry at age 23 and was known to spend her time in the
company of prominent intellectuals such as Brecht, Bloch, and Walter Benjamin, with
whom she formed a strong friendship. Teddie and Gretel would be married only in 1937;
they had no children, and it is perhaps revealing that in a letter to her friend Benjamin she
refers to Adorno her husband as their “problem child” (Sorgenkind).
At the age of 17, Adorno entered the new University of Frankfurt, where he studied
various fields: sociology, art history, musicology, and psychology, but mostly philosophy.
His chief instructor in philosophy, Hans Cornelius, was unusually broad‐minded; a spe-
cialist in neo‐Kantianism but also a pianist, sculptor, and painter. Under his guidance,
Adorno completed his dissertation in 1924 on “The Transcendence of the Thingly and the
A Companion to Adorno, First Edition. Edited by Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
3
PETER E. GORDON
Noematic in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” A critical study of Husserl’s phenomenology, the

dissertation examined the tension in Husserl’s work between the immanent objects of
consciousness and the consciousness‐transcendent objects in the world. Along with an
unsuccessful 1927 habilitation on the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, the
Husserl-dissertation is typically seen as an exercise in purely academic themes, but
Adorno’s effort to identify contradictions clearly anticipates the philosopher’s later practice
of immanent critique (Bloch 2017).
Throughout the later 1920s, Adorno found himself poised between two possible
careers. While he continued to pursue his philosophical interests, he also dedicated him-
self with greater energy to musical composition. It was in 1924 that Adorno first made the
acquaintance of Alban Berg, the composer who had apprenticed with Arnold Schoenberg
and was considered, together with Anton Webern, a member of the so‐called “Second
Viennese School” of musical modernism. The Schoenbergian breakthrough to atonality,
often characterized as “the emancipation of dissonance,” had an enormous impact on
Adorno, whose early compositional efforts, such as the String Quartet (1921) bear obvious
affinities to Schoenberg’s style; by 1925 Adorno had commenced studies in musical
composition with Berg in Vienna. Adorno’s talents in musical analysis and composition
were considerable (Paddison 1993). Throughout the later 1920s he continued under
Berg’s tutelage, publishing music reviews while devoting himself in earnest to composi-
tion; in December 1926, his Pieces for String Quartet was performed by the Kolisch Quartet.
Berg, however, recognized that Adorno found himself at a crossroads: “it is your calling,”
he wrote, “to achieve the utmost [and] … you shall … fulfill this in the form of great
philosophical works. Whether your musical work (I mean your composing), which I have
such grand hopes for, will not lose out through it, is a worry that afflicts me whenever I
think of you. For it is clear: one day you will, as you are someone who does nothing by
halves […] have to choose either Kant or Beethoven” (Adorno and Berg 2005, 44).
By the later 1920s, Adorno seemed to be moving toward a decision. Although he continued
musical composition and would remain seriously committed to musicological criticism, he
also selected a topic for a habilitation in philosophy, which he began writing in 1929. Accepted
by the theologian Paul Tillich in 1931 and published two years later as Kierkegaard: The
Construction of the Aesthetic, the book bears the strong imprint of the author’s deepening
friendship with Walter Benjamin, whom he had first met in 1923 and whose cultural and
literary criticism would remain, despite their considerable differences, a primary source of
inspiration throughout Adorno’s life. In works such as The Origin of German Tragic Drama
(1928) and in early drafts for a study of the Paris arcades, Benjamin had begun to develop an
idiosyncratic style of critical reading that fastened upon particular elements of cultural life in
a materialist mode, by plunging into their detail and drawing out allegorical lessons for
broader problems of history. Adorno’s study of Kierkegaard bears a strong resemblance to his
friend’s allegorical manner of materialist interpretation: rather than reading Kierkegaard as a
theologian or proto‐existentialist, Adorno seeks to expose the social‐historical underpinnings
of the Dane’s ideology as a child of the rising bourgeoisie. The typical living space or interiéur
of the bourgeois apartment is shown to be the materialist correlate to Kierkegaard’s subjec-
tivist philosophy. Submitted to the university in February 1931, the habilitation received
enthusiastic comments from both Tillich and Horkheimer, and Adorno had every reason to
hope that he could now embark on a successful career as a professor of philosophy.
Meanwhile, Adorno’s affiliation with the Institute for Social Research had grown in
importance and he had developed a lasting friendship with the philosopher Max
Horkheimer, who, like Adorno, had been a student of Cornelius and in 1931 was appointed
4
ADORNO: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
as the Institute’s new director (Jay 1996). That same year Adorno, equipped with a license
to teach, gave his inaugural address at Frankfurt, “The Actuality of Philosophy” (Adorno
2000). In the lecture Adorno speaks to the widespread sense of a “crisis” in the various
schools of philosophical idealism. He criticizes neo‐Kantianism, philosophical
anthropology, and Heideggerian ontology, all of which, despite their differences, remain
captive to the fantasy that they can grasp all of reality even while they are trapped in “the
realm of subjectivity.” Against these subjective and idealist tendencies Adorno insists that
philosophy must embrace what he calls “the thinking of materialism” (Adorno TP, 32).
Whereas traditional philosophy searches for “meta‐historical, symbolically meaningful
ideas,” the way forward will require a strategy of interpretation. The task of philosophy will
be “to interpret unintentional reality,” and this can be done only if philosophy looks away
from ideal forms to those that are “non-symbolic” and constituted “inner-historically”
(Adorno TP, 32–33). The new emphasis on historical interpretation must look away from
truths that are ideal and toward “unintentional truth” (Adorno TP, 33). The materialist
approach to interpretation is possible only “dialectically,” and this means that much of the
effort must involve immanent criticism or even the “liquidation” of reigning philosophical
systems that make claims to knowledge of totality (Adorno TP, 34). Philosophy must not
seek the security of idealistic systems and it should not protect itself from “the break‐in of
what is irreducible.” Against the illusions of a systematic form, philosophy must embrace
the form of the essay with its focus on appearance rather than essence, the particular
rather than the general. This critical method could be accused of “unfruitful negativity,”
but Adorno is ready to accept this charge. “For the mind (Geist) is indeed not capable of
producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail,
to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality” (Adorno TP, 38).
The inaugural lecture is striking in its anticipation of themes that would preoccupy
Adorno throughout his philosophical career. The appeal to that which is particular and
irreducible to thought already points toward the emphasis on the “non‐identical” and the
turn to the object as points of critical leverage for what Adorno would later call “negative
dialectics.” Other lectures and seminars from this period also bear witness to Adorno’s
enormous debts to Walter Benjamin. Despite the fact that his friend had failed to secure a
habilitation with the study of German tragic drama, Adorno continued to feel that
Benjamin’s work deserved serious philosophical attention: he devoted two seminars on
aesthetics to the study of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, and in 1932 also presented a lec-
ture, “The Idea of Natural History,” to the Kant Society in Frankfurt in which he lavished
praise on Benjamin’s method of allegorical interpretation as a route beyond the false
antithesis between history and nature. Benjamin responded with gratitude even as he took
note of the way in which Adorno had made extensive use of his ideas both in the lecture
and especially in the Kierkegaard book. “[I]t is true,” Benjamin wrote, “that there is
something like a shared work after all” (quoted in Müller‐Doohm 2005, 129).
With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 Adorno’s chances for a career in Germany came
to an end. By the terms of the April “Law for the Restoration of the German Civil Service,”
Adorno was classified as a “half‐Jew” and was no longer permitted to hold a professorship
in Germany. Adorno was by no means ashamed of his father’s Jewish identity, but the legal
designation imposed on him by the state bore little connection to his own self‐conception.
Baptized in his mother’s faith as a Catholic, Adorno had spent his formative years in a
strongly Jewish milieu and often found himself characterized as a Jew in spite of his indif-
ference to his father’s religious heritance and his general resistance to all categories of
ethno‐national or religious belonging. His childhood friend Erich Pfeiffer‐Belli would later
5
PETER E. GORDON
recall that “We all knew that he was Jewish” but also added that any persecution that the
young Adorno had experienced on the playground was “not anti‐Semitic” but was simply
due to the usual hostility that the “stupid” boys directed at the one who outshone all the
others in the classroom (quoted in Müller‐Doohm 2005, 34). By the mid‐1930s, however,
Adorno’s relative indifference to questions of personal identity was to matter far less than
the official ruling by the new authoritarian state that defined citizenship in explicitly racist
terms. In September 1933, he received a letter that informed him that his license to teach
had been revoked, and after some months of hesitation he made the decision to leave
Germany and set about seeking employment elsewhere. Uncertain plans for transferring
his professorial license to either Istanbul or Vienna fell through, and Adorno then applied
himself to the task of securing a position in England, where connections through his
paternal uncle seemed to promise greater success. In 1934, he was admitted as an
advanced student in philosophy at Oxford.
Adorno’s period of study in England did not prove terribly fruitful, despite some contact
with a few philosophers (most notably Gilbert Ryle) who shared his interests in phenome-
nology and other trends that were in vogue back in Germany but less appreciated in Oxford.
A.J. Ayer would later recall Adorno as “a comic figure” whose “dandified manner” could
not mask his “anxiety” to be taken seriously (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 190). Adorno spent
much of his time at Oxford immersed in studies of Husserlian philosophy that would only
appear in book‐length form after the war as Metacritique of Epistemology (1956). His aging
parents remained for some time in Germany and he made frequent trips back to Frankfurt
to see them and also to visit Gretel, who continued to manage the co‐owned factory in
Berlin. Oscar Wiesengrund, like many German Jews of his generation, had served in the
army during the First World War and had even received a Cross of Honor that he believed
would protect him from state persecution. As the political situation deteriorated and the
Nazis consolidated their rule over all spheres of government and society, Adorno gradually
awakened to the fact that it was no longer safe for his family to remain in Germany.
In these precarious circumstances Adorno could take some comfort in deepening his
personal and professional bond with Horkheimer. In fact, he had already begun publishing
in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the Institute’s journal, beginning with the inaugural
issue in 1932. His early essays for the journal demonstrate his continued interest in
working at the boundary‐line between musicology and socially inflected philosophy. In his
first essay for the Zeitschrift, “On the Social Situation of Music,” (1932) Adorno argues that
if music succeeds in resisting its reduction to the commodity form it will be able to portray
the antinomies of society within its own formal language. “It is not for music to stare in
helpless horror at society,” Adorno writes. Music “fulfills its social function more precisely
when it presents social problems through its own material and according to its own formal
laws.” Musical autonomy is not a retreat into social irrelevance but a precondition for
music’s social meaning; music will “call for change through the coded language of
suffering” (Adorno 2002, 393). The alternative was for music to abandon its claims to
autonomy and sink to the level of the commodity form where all critical possibilities would
be defeated. Adorno developed this point with especially polemical vigor in his essay “On
Jazz,” that was written during his stay in Oxford and appeared in the Zeitschrift under the
pseudonym of Hektor Rottweiler. Jazz, Adorno argued, was a thoroughly commercialized
musical form that promised only the illusion of freedom. “The improvisatory immediacy
which constitutes its partial success counts strictly among those attempts to break out of a
fetishized commodity world which want to escape that world without ever changing it,
thus moving ever deeper into its snare” (Adorno 2002, 478). It should be noted that
6
Adorno’s knowledge of jazz was severely limited: he knew virtually nothing about the
African‐American idiom and aimed his criticism primarily at “dance‐band commercial
jazz” such as the standardized music played by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra (Paddison
2004, 113.) He therefore had little patience for romantic claims that jazz could serve as a
vehicle for authentic self‐expression. “With jazz, a disenfranchized subjectivity plunges
from the commodity world into the commodity world; the system does not allow for a way
out. Whatever primordial instinct is recovered in this is not a longed‐for freedom, but
rather a regression through suppression” (Adorno 2002, 478).
The controversy over jazz should be understood within the context of Adorno’s general
critique of reification in capitalist culture. During the mid‐1930s, this critique grew espe-
cially pronounced in Adorno’s debate with Walter Benjamin, who took a rather more
favorable view of the possibilities of mass‐produced art. In late February 1936, Benjamin
sent to Adorno a draft of his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproducibility,” in which he argued that the dissolution of the aura thanks to modern
technical conditions of reproduction and circulation could open up new possibilities for
the mass‐reception of modern art as a medium for collective politicization. In a long letter
sent from London on March 18, 1936, Adorno sharply dissented from his friend’s claims.
He was especially troubled by what he considered the “anarchistic romanticism” that had
distorted Benjamin’s views of the proletariat. Under the influence of his friendship with
the more militant and communist‐inclined Bertholt Brecht, Benjamin was too sanguine
concerning the prospect for the masses to awaken to political agency by absorbing mass‐
reproduced artworks in a state of distraction. Nor was Adorno convinced by Benjamin’s
critique of the traditional ideal of aesthetic autonomy. “Dialectical though your essay is”,
Adorno wrote, “it is less than this in the case of the autonomous work of art itself,” “for it
neglects a fundamental experience which daily becomes increasingly evident to me in my
musical work, that precisely the uttermost consistency in the pursuit of the technical laws
of autonomous art actually transforms this art itself, and, instead of turning it into a fetish
or taboo, brings it that much closer to a state of freedom” (Adorno and Benjamin 2001,
129). Adorno did not mince words; he clearly felt that his intellectual friendship with
Benjamin was in jeopardy. “[M]y own task,” he wrote, “is to hold your art steady until the
Brechtian sun has finally sunk beneath its exotic waters” (Adorno and Benjamin 2001,
132). The debate with Benjamin was to continue even after the latter’s death; traces of
their dispute can be detected nearly everywhere in Adorno’s later work and even in the
pages of Aesthetic Theory.
Meanwhile, the situation in Europe was growing more ominous. By the autumn of
1937, Adorno had recognized that his chances for a new academic career in England were
slim, and as the Nazis expanded their anti‐Jewish policies his father’s business in Frankfurt
was under threat, which meant that he could no longer rely on financial support from his
family. On September 8, he and Gretel were at last married, a fact that only enhanced his
sense of bourgeois responsibility. Despite his growing attachment to the Institute and espe-
cially to Horkheimer, the Institute’s own financial difficulties meant that it had only been
able to provide him with a half‐time position with a diminished salary. It was therefore a
great relief when Horkheimer sent him a telegram with the good news of an invitation to
move to the United States as a research associate on the Princeton Radio Project with the
sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Adorno did not hesitate in accepting the offer and, in February
1938, Teddie and Gretel boarded a steamer for New York. Adorno’s parents, however, were
now in serious danger: Maria was briefly arrested, and his father suffered injuries when his
offices were broken into. Oscar caught pneumonia, which delayed their plans for escape.
7
PETER E. GORDON
Eventually they were able to leave Germany: they arrived in Cuba in May 1939, and then
made their way to the United States by early February 1940 (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 261;
Adorno 2006, 36).
As an émigré in the New World Adorno was eager to prove his worth as soon as possible.
His earliest essay, written during a summer sojourn in Bar Harbor, Maine, was “On the
Fetish‐Character in Music and Regression in Hearing,” published in the Zeitschrift in 1938.
The essay can be read as a rejoinder to Benjamin’s reflections on the artwork and its
mechanical reproducibility (Buck‐Morss 1977). Music, Adorno writes, has been converted
in capitalist culture into a commodity to such a degree that the exchange value of a musical
work now colonizes its very content. Mass music has become standardized to the extent
that musical works become interchangeable and are structured only for easy consump-
tion. This fetish‐character in turn afflicts the consciousness of the mass of listeners, who
consume the stereotyped products of mass society in a state of “deconcentration” that
bespeaks not freedom but instead regression and a “catastrophic phase” in modern culture
(Adorno 2002, 313).
The essay also served as an entry ticket for Adorno’s new position as a researcher with
Lazarsfeld in New Jersey. The Princeton Radio Project was meant to be an empirically based
study that would examine the role played in daily experience by this relatively new medium
of communication. The Vienna‐born sociologist Lazarsfeld was the director of the project
under the title “The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners,” for which he recruited
Adorno, whose work he had known and admired since the early 1930s. Almost from the
start, however, the collaboration was plagued by misunderstanding and dissent. Adorno’s
negative attitude toward radio listening comes through with unmistakable force in texts
such as “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” which he presented to his fellow researchers in
October 1939. “Commodity listening” on the radio allowed the listener to “dispense as far
as possible with any effort,” even if such effort were required for genuine understanding.
The intellectual element in listening was displaced by merely gustatory experience: “It is the
ideal of Aunt Jemima’s ready‐mix for pancakes extended to the field of music. The listener
suspends all intellectual activity when dealing with music and is content with consuming
and evaluating its gustatory qualities – just as if the music which tasted best were also the
best music possible” (Adorno 2009, 137). Later in life when he reflected on his experiences
as a European intellectual in America, Adorno would still recall with disdain what he con-
sidered the mindless emphasis on data collection that had characterized the Princeton
Radio Project. The machine that allowed research subjects to signal their “like” or “dislike”
during the radio performance of a given musical selection seemed to Adorno highly inade-
quate as a means of comprehending the place of music in mass society, not least because it
appeared to isolate the individual stimulus from the total context of society. When he was
confronted with the demand to “measure culture,” Adorno responded that “culture might
be precisely that condition that excludes a mentality capable of measuring it” (Adorno
1969, 347). Needless to say, such opinions did not sit well with Lazarsfeld’s team. When it
came time to renew funding for the project Adorno was not invited to continue.
Fortunately, Horkheimer was able to secure for Adorno a dependable and permanent
position as a member of the Institute, which had moved by then into its offices in New
York’s Morningside Heights in the vicinity of Columbia University. For reasons of space,
Adorno himself did not have an office in the building, but he nonetheless enjoyed a special
role as Horkheimer’s closest intellectual companion. By the end of the 1930s, the two men
were at the beginning stages of planning a work that they described as a “dialectical logic.”
Adorno would never feel entirely at home in the United States, and the experience of
8
islocation is a crucial theme in Minima Moralia, the book of “reflections from damaged
d
life” that he composed during his exile and dedicated to Horkheimer: “Every intellectual in
emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if
he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly closed doors of his self‐
esteem.” He felt himself to be a fish out of water, displaced not only from his native lan-
guage but also from the ambient horizon of cultural references that he cherished. “The
isolation,” he added, “is made worse by the formation of closed and politically controlled
groups, mistrustful of their members, hostile to those branded different” (Adorno MM, 13;
English version, 33). He nonetheless accepted invitations to lecture and made efforts to
strengthen his bonds, on the premise that it might prove necessary to remain in his adopted
country for the remainder of his life. In February 1940, he gave a lecture on “Kierkegaard’s
Doctrine of Love” at Columbia University; and he even spoke on the radio for the first time,
offering an introduction to a performance by the Kolisch quartet of musical works by
Schoenberg and Krenek (among others) (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 262).
But if his friendship with Horkheimer left Adorno with a growing sense of intellectual
satisfaction, his feelings of success in the United States were qualified by the daily reports
of the darkening political conditions in Europe. He was especially concerned for his friend
Walter Benjamin, whose situation in Paris in 1939–1940 had grown increasingly precar-
ious. In September 1939, Benjamin had been interned outside Paris and, later, at Nevers.
By February 1940 he had fled southward from Paris to Lourdes: “The complete uncer-
tainty about what the next day, even the next hour, may bring has dominated my life for
weeks now,” he wrote. “I am condemned to read every newspaper […] as if it were a
summons served on me in particular” (Adorno and Benjamin Correspondence 2001,
Letter 120, 339). Horkheimer was meanwhile struggling to secure a visa for Benjamin’s
safe passage from Europe to the United States, but the crucial French exit‐visa was still
lacking. On September 25, Benjamin wrote a final letter to Henny Gurland from Port Bou:
“In a situation with no escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all. It is in a tiny village
in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life must come to an end. I would ask you
to pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the situation in which I
have now found myself ” (Adorno and Benjamin Correspondence 2001, Letter 121). When
Adorno heard the news that Benjamin had taken his life, he wrote a despairing letter to
their mutual friend Gershom Scholem: “It is completely inconceivable,” he wrote. “What it
means for us, I cannot say in words, it has transformed our intellectual and empirical
existence to the innermost core” (Adorno and Scholem 2015, 33).
In the spring of 1941, Horkheimer moved to Los Angeles and settled in Pacific Palisades,
a neighborhood that had already become well‐known as a refuge for Central European
émigrés such as the novelist Thomas Mann, who lived nearby. Los Angeles had become a
kind of “Weimar on the Pacific,” thickly populated with intellectuals and artists such as
Arnold Schoneberg, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Bertholt Brecht. Adorno
soon came to feel that his proximity to Horkheimer was of highest importance if the two
were to embark upon writing their co‐authored “dialectical logic.” Once the decision was
made, it took several months for Adorno and Gretel to manage all of the logistics for the
move. By the end of November, Adorno wrote to his parents in New York about the journey
by train that he and Gretel had taken from the East Coast to Los Angeles: “We travelled
through the Rockies in the state of Wyoming on Monday night, and did not even notice the
difference in altitude. Tuesday through snowy Utah with the big Salt Lake. The landscape
seems strange, with those mountains that suddenly shoot up out of the plain like pyra-
mids, and increasingly disappear as one approaches Nevada.” Max Horkheimer and his
9
PETER E. GORDON
wife Maidon were at the station to greet the new arrivals, who marveled at the new sur-
roundings. “The beauty of the region is so incomparable that even such a hard‐boiled
European as myself can only surrender to it,” Adorno wrote. “The shape of the mountain
[…] is more reminiscent of Tuscany,” he added, noting with pleasure that “one actually has
the feeling that this part of the world is inhabited by humanoid beings, not only by gasoline
stations and hot dogs” (Adorno 2006, 70).
Adorno and Gretel now lived in a house not far from Horkheimer; a dwelling where
Adorno could arrange not only his library but also make room for a grand piano. Adorno
and Horkheimer were poised to begin working in earnest on the book that they now
planned to call Dialectic of Enlightenment. In conceiving of its argument, the memory of
their recently deceased colleague Walter Benjamin weighed heavily on their minds.
Adorno now had in his possession the manuscript of Benjamin’s essay, “On the Concept
of History,” and he shared with Horkheimer his sense of intellectual sympathy for its
themes: “It contains Benjamin’s final concepts,” he wrote, adding that “none of
Benjamin’s works shows him closer to our intentions than this. This relates above all to
the conception of history as permanent catastrophe, the critique of progress and mastery
of nature, and the place of culture” (quoted in Wiggershaus 1995, 311; from Adorno to
Horkheimer, June 12, 1941). Dialectic of Enlightenment was in most every respect a collab-
orative effort, though traces remain of primary authorship: Adorno, it seems, was respon-
sible for at least the initial drafts of the “excursus” on Odysseus, and the chapter on the
“culture‐industry.” But every portion of the book underwent extensive revision to such a
degree that each chapter ultimately reflects the imprint of both authors, who met daily
for conversations that were recorded by Gretel and then subjected to scrupulous revision.
It took nearly two and a half years for Adorno and Horkheimer to finish the manuscript,
and it was published in mimeograph format in May 1944 with a dedication to their
Institute colleague Friedrich Pollock.
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a highly speculative exercise that surveys the entire history
of human self‐assertion from mythic and Homeric times to the twentieth century. “What
we had set out to do,” the authors write in the 1944 preface, “was nothing less than to
explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a renewed
barbarism” (Adorno and Horkheimer DE, xiv). Its core thesis is that reason has betrayed its
emancipatory promise: rather than leading to genuine freedom it has been distorted into a
mere instrument for the domination of nature. If primitive myths were already attempts to
explain and thereby disenchant the nature that terrified and threatened the human being,
then myth was already a species of enlightenment. But because enlightenment has lost its
capacity for self‐reflection and has become nothing but a compulsive and thoughtless
exercise in domination it has come to resemble the myths it wished to dispel. The enlight-
enment thus describes a transhistorical pattern of self‐sabotage whereby reason has
become irrational. This general framework permits the authors to examine specific facets of
human conduct in distinct chapters that focus on Homer’s Odyssey, the writings of de
Sade, Kant, and Nietzsche, the effects of commodified culture, and the function of anti‐
Semitism. It is a book that reflects the darkness of the political era in which it was written.
In the preface, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that its critique of enlightenment is meant
“to prepare a positive concept of enlightenment which liberates it from its entanglement in
blind domination” (Adorno and Horkheimer DE, xviii). But many readers have felt that
this positive concept is lacking and inconsistent with the book’s overall argument. It circles
without resolution around the question as to whether a truly self‐reflective species of
enlightenment is historically possible.
10
During his years in Los Angeles, Adorno also devoted a considerable amount of time to
writings about music. By 1941, upon his move to the West Coast, he had already com-
pleted the final draft of The Philosophy of New Music, though the book would not be pub-
lished in its original German edition until 1949. In many respects it is a musicological
statement of its author’s own painful yet necessary sense of dissociation from his current
surroundings. Music, he writes, must sustain a stance of determinate negation: it “pro-
tects its social truth by virtue of its antithesis to society, by virtue of its isolation, yet by the
same measure this isolation lets music wither” (Adorno 2006, 20). Adorno portrays the
contemporary situation in modern music as a dialectical contest between Schoenberg and
Stravinsky, where Schoenberg’s early phase of “free” atonality with its strains of subjective
lyricism and expressionism signifies “progress,” while Stravinsky’s compositions with their
fusion of modernism and archaism represent the “annihilation of the subject” and a will
to “regression.” But Adorno complicates this dualism by indicting the mature twelve‐tone
compositional technique as a mindless mechanism that expels subjectivity. He faults
Webern in particular for a “fetishism” of the twelve‐tone row (Adorno 2006, 86).
Schoenberg’s compositions were split between expressionist intensity and “administrative
impassivity.” This very tension, however, was the culminating phase in the musical tradi-
tion. Although old conventions of musical meaning have reached a point of collapse, in
Schoenberg’s music one can hear how the “fissures” between “twelve‐tone mechanics and
expression” became the last ciphers of musical meaning. The history of modern music
thus describes a dialectic into unfreedom: “The possibility of music itself has become
uncertain” (Adorno 2006, 87).
This verdict on modern music repeats themes that were already apparent, for example,
in the 1937 essay on Beethoven’s “late style,” in which Adorno had sought to characterize
the fragmentation or dialectical tension that was typical of the German composer’s music
in his final years (Adorno 2002, 564–568). The essay and the manuscript of The Philosophy
of New Music drew the attention of Thomas Mann, who by the early 1940s was working in
Los Angeles on his novel Doctor Faustus and turned to Adorno for assistance in writing the
sections of the book that demanded musicological description. Mann borrowed extensively
from Adorno’s characterization of late style, especially in chapter eight of the novel, in
which the character Wendell Kretschmar gives a lecture on Beethoven’s final piano sonata,
Number 32 in C Minor (Opus 111): “Beethoven’s late work,” declares Kretschmar, is
“untransformed by the subjective”; what is most “conventional” emerges with an “ego‐
abandonment,” as if art itself has abandoned “the appearance of art.” In Kretzschar’s lec-
ture on the sonata’s second movement Mann included a small homage to his musical
advisor: written in the form of a theme and variations, the movement begins by stating an
aria that opens with three simple notes (C, descending to G, and then a repeated G), a
“tranquil figure” which Kretschmar likens to verbal phrases such as “sky of blue,” or
“meadow‐land” (Wiesen‐grund), a sly reference to Adorno’s paternal last name (Mann
1997, 57–58). Mann’s debts to Adorno for the musical passages in the book were indeed
considerable: Adorno even wrote out extensive passages that describe fictitious works by
Adrian Leverkühn, the novel’s protagonist, passages that Mann inserted into the novel, in
some cases with only minor alteration (for evidence, see Müller‐Doohm 2005, 317–318).
In a letter to his parents, Adorno reported frequently on the collaboration with Mann, evi-
dently taking great pride in his advisory role even though he called it “a very peculiar rela-
tionship” (Adorno 2006, 274).
The end of the war in Europe brought great relief but little optimism for the future.
Adorno wrote to his parents that “I at least cannot shake off the feeling of ‘too late’ – in
11
PETER E. GORDON
truth, the Germans have pulled the whole of civilization down with them” and “there is
every reason to believe that the principle upheld by the Nazis will outlast them.” He could
therefore hope for little more than “breathing spaces and loopholes” (Adorno 2006, May
1, 1945; quote from 217). In this rather grim mood Adorno did not believe that the United
States was in any sense immune from the fascist tendencies that had overwhelmed Europe.
The urgent question remained: What were the causes of the political catastrophe and what
potential was there for a similar barbarism to overtake the United States?
As early as 1942, Horkheimer had entered into discussions with the American Jewish
Committee to secure support for a major research study on anti‐Semitism as part of the
Institute’s multivolume Studies in Prejudice. By 1943, Adorno had agreed to join the study,
which demanded that he make frequent trips up the coast from Los Angeles to Berkeley,
where he convened with a research group of European émigré and American psycholo-
gists. The plan was to use surveys and intensive interviews to develop a social‐psychological
diagnostic tool that could identify the latent characterological traits of the fascist person-
ality. In helping to develop the questions for the study Adorno had drawn upon the
“Elements of Anti‐Semitism” chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Müller‐Doohm 2005,
296). His intellectual collaboration with the Berkeley group ranks among his most suc-
cessful experiences in empirical sociology. The completed book was published in 1950 as
The Authoritarian Personality. But the experience was not without its challenges: Adorno
found it especially troubling that the study seemed to place undue stress on psychological
rather than social factors in explaining the emergence of authoritarianism. The study also
tended to see individuals as identifiable “types,” a problem that Adorno tried to resolve by
suggesting that mass society itself was becoming increasingly standardized (Gordon,
Authoritarianism, 2018). Nor should we neglect the simple fact that by temperament and
with a few notable exceptions (Horkheimer, Mann) Adorno did not often find collaboration
a congenial experience. His discontent with universities and group research programs is
recorded in the very first entry from Minima Moralia (1951): “The son of well‐do‐do par-
ents who, whether from talent or weakness, engages in a so‐called intellectual profession,
as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the dis-
tasteful title of colleagues” (Adorno MM, 21).
In mid‐summer of 1946, Adorno received the sad word that his father had died. On
October 17, 1946 Adorno and Horkheimer received an invitation from Walter Hallstein,
the president of Frankfurt University, to return to Germany to assume new posts on the
faculty there. Adorno’s decision to return to Germany was not an easy one, not least
because his mother was now a widow and living alone in New York. As late as October
1947, he was writing to reassure his anxious mother that he did not plan to return to
Germany in the long term (Adorno 2006, 301). By October 1949, however, the decision
had been made though not without misgivings. In Minima Moralia Adorno had produced
an intellectual diary of his experiences in exile: “Nothing less is asked of the thinker today,”
he wrote, “than that he should be at every moment both within things and outside them”
(Adorno MM, 74). He could not feel that the return to Germany was a return to home since
the very idea of a homeland had assumed during his absence a monstrous meaning. “It is
part of morality,” he wrote, “not to be at home in one’s home” (Adorno MM, 39).
The Institute for Social Research reopened on November, 1951 in a new building, with
Horkheimer as its official director. Adorno found himself confronted with multiple respon-
sibilities that included both university teaching and overseeing numerous research pro-
jects for the Institute. His return was also punctuated by personal loss: he had been in
12
Germany for little more than two years when he received word in late February 1952 that
his beloved mother had died. For an intellectual who had always retained certain child‐like
qualities, emotional delicacy combined with irrepressible imagination, the event marked a
symbolic transition: a definitive end to his own childhood. But he would continue to cher-
ish memories of his childhood well into his last years.
As a returned émigré in the postwar Federal Republic, Adorno did not waste time in
establishing himself as one of the foremost intellectuals in the public sphere. The
atmosphere of repression that pervaded West Germany after the war troubled him; “for the
heirs of the Nazis,” he wrote to Horkheimer, “forgetting and cold deceit is the intellectual
climate that works best” (quoted in Müller‐Doohm 2005, 330). Confronted with this ten-
dency to repression, he asserted himself with even greater energy in public debates, in
journals and on the radio, on topics such as “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”
(1959) and “Education after Auschwitz” (1968). He also published at an astonishing pace,
introducing German readers to texts many of which he had already completed while living
abroad: The Philosophy of New Music (1949); Minima Moralia (1951); In Search of Wagner
(1952); Prisms (1955); the Metacritique of Husserlian phenomenology (1956); Mahler: A
Musical Physiognomy (1960); and Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962). Among his
many writings on literature were critical essays on Kafka, Hölderlin, and Beckett, all of
which bore witness to the author’s stylistic skills as a writer in the German language. In his
penchant for irony and in the very difficulty of his prose Adorno drew consciously on ante-
cedent writers such as Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. In the 1956 radio address, “Heine
the Wound,” Adorno extolled the German‐Jewish ironist of nineteenth‐century romanti-
cism as a critical resource against present‐day apologetics: “Heine’s stereotypical theme,
unrequited love, is an image for hopelessness, and the poetry devoted to it is an attempt to
draw estrangement itself into the sphere of intimate experience.” In a world that has been
injured, all language becomes as injured as was Heine himself. “The wound that is Heine,”
he concluded, “will heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation.” (Adorno 1994,
80–85: 85.)
Of all the literary figures in the modernist canon with whom Adorno felt the deepest
affinity, the most significant, it seems, was Samuel Beckett. Adorno had seen a production
of Endgame in Vienna in April, 1958 and he wrote to Horkheimer that the playwright’s
insights “coincide with our own” (Quoted in Müller‐Doohm 2005, 357). To Friedrich
Pollock he explained that “Beckett is concerned with the same phenomenon as critical
theory: to depict the meaninglessness of our society and to protest about it, while pre-
serving the idea of better things in that protest” (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 357). In late
November, 1958, during a lecture trip to Paris Adorno met Beckett for the first time and
the two engaged in an extended conversation. In 1961 he completed the essay, “Trying to
Understand Endgame.” For Adorno, Beckett’s singular importance lies in the fact that he
portrays characters in a landscape of catastrophe. Endgame resists any and all interpreta-
tion that seeks to discover a universal or humanistic “meaning,” and for this reason the
play is opposed to all existentialisms. It “mocks the spectator with the suggestion of
something symbolic, something which, like Kafka, it then withholds” (Adorno 1994,
241–275; 251). The absurdity that is staged in Beckett’s work does not represent something
ahistorical as the existentialists suppose. On the contrary: it portrays the absurdity of his-
tory itself, “the nonsense in which reason terminates” (Adorno 1994, 241–275; 273).
In addition to his literary and musical writings, Adorno continued to devote an equal if
not greater share of his attention to lectures on philosophical themes. During his tenure at
13
PETER E. GORDON
Frankfurt throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he offered lecture courses on such topics as
metaphysics, moral philosophy, dialectics, and aesthetics. These lectures drew a great
many students and helped to establish Adorno as one of the foremost voices in postwar
German philosophy. With Horkheimer’s retirement from the Institute in 1959, Adorno
was confronted with the added burdens of administration. In addition to directing the
Institute he also served as Chairman of the German Sociological Society and in 1961 par-
ticipated in the famous “positivism dispute” with Karl Popper. (See Müller‐Doohm 2005,
424–428; also see Adorno et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology.) Especially dur-
ing the early 1960s, his regular lectures at Frankfurt, and occasional visiting lectures in
Paris and elsewhere, also gave him an ongoing forum in which to refine his own
philosophical commitments in preparation for writing Negative Dialectics, the 1966 book
he lovingly described as his “fat child” (dickes Kind).
Negative Dialectics is widely seen as the culminating statement of Adorno’s philosophical
career. But it is a book with diverse themes that are not easily aligned with any systematic
intent. Extended sections of the book consist in a vigorous and critical dismantling of
major thinkers in the modern philosophical canon, chiefly Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. All
three philosophers were of central importance for Adorno, not only because they repre-
sented crucial phases in the history of philosophy; the confrontation with the philosophical
tradition also served as the dialectical preparation for his own philosophical arguments.
This was especially true in the case of Hegel, whose philosophy had been a constant source
of inspiration but also a foil for Adorno as he sought to formulate the principles of a nega-
tive dialectic against Hegel’s dialectic of rational reconciliation. Already in 1963, Adorno
published Three Studies on Hegel, a small book that collected his occasional lectures from
the late 1950s and early 1960s, which Adorno described in the preface as “preparation for
a revised conception of the dialectic” (Adorno 1963, xxxvi). The significance of Heidegger’s
philosophy for Adorno was less obvious but hardly less dramatic (Macdonald and Ziarek
2008; Lafont 2018). In postwar Germany, Heidegger’s existential ontology had grown in
importance notwithstanding the well‐known secret of Heidegger’s scandalous record of
public support for the Third Reich. Adorno was a fierce and unsparing critic of Heidegger
but not only because of the German philosopher’s political conduct; he also saw how the
mannered qualities of Heidegger’s language had contributed to the flourishing of a
pseudo‐spiritual cultural style in postwar Germany (Gordon 2016). Because this com-
plaint was directed as much against the cultural discourse of “Heideggerism” (Heideggerei)
as against Heidegger’s actual philosophy, Adorno eventually decided to publish the cultural
polemic in a separate and shorter volume as The Jargon of Authenticity (1964). The book
was a devasting exercise in cultural criticism that punctured the inflated pretentions of
existentialism and compared its language to the false promises of modern advertising. The
jargon of authenticity, Adorno declared, was “the Wurlitzer organ of the spirit.” To mark
its appearance Adorno agreed with his publisher Suhrkamp to give a public reading that
provoked “laughter and applause” (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 433).
Negative Dialectics was a far more challenging book written with far‐reaching
philosophical ambitions. Adorno had labored over the text for seven years and referred to
it with pride as “my chief philosophical work” (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 434; letter to Helene
Berg). A bold passage in the preface declared his intent “to break through the delusion of
constitutive subjectivity by means of the power of the subject” (Adorno ND, 8). If tradi-
tional philosophy had assigned itself the task of reconciling thought with reality, Adorno
pronounced this task an impossibility. The manifest irrationality and suffering of the world
14
resisted philosophical comprehension, and the merely conceptual medium by which phi-
losophy had sought to understand the world must now admit its radical insufficiency when
confronted with the “non‐identical.” After Auschwitz the metaphysical ideal of reconciling
the real and the ideal was exposed as an outrage. “The capacity for metaphysics is crip-
pled,” Adorno wrote, “because what occurred smashed the basis of the compatibility of
speculative metaphysical thought with experience” (Adorno ND, 354–358). Metaphysics
could survive only a state of decay and in fragments that signified the negativity of an
unredeemed world. Upon the book’s publication Adorno immediately sent a copy to his
friend Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. In the years since the death of their mutual friend
Benjamin, the two scholars had grown to admire one another and had forged a genuine
friendship, despite strong differences in philosophical orientation. Scholem wrote that he
had never read such a “chaste and restrained defense of metaphysics” but still detected a
strain of Marxist dogmatism that played the role of a deus ex machina in Adorno’s argu-
ments. (Adorno–Scholem, March 1, 1967; Letter 182, 407). Adorno hastened to respond
that the book’s materialism was altogether non‐dogmatic; it retained a deep affinity not
only with metaphysics but even with theology (Adorno and Scholem 2015, 414).
Negative Dialectics was the last major work to appear during Adorno’s lifetime. But its
completion by no means marked an end to the author’s productivity. Already in the fall of
1966, Adorno had begun to work in earnest on his book on aesthetics; he also offered at
least three lecture courses on the same topic (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 470). In November of
that year, however, he also received word of the death of his childhood friend and colleague
Siegfried Kracauer; in a letter to Horkheimer he recalled Kracauer’s importance as the
person who had first initiated him into philosophy (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 436). Adorno
himself had now passed his sixty‐third birthday and was slowly beginning to grasp the dif-
ficult truth that, for many of his students, he had become, despite himself, the embodiment
of tradition. In the late 1960s, as opposition to the Vietnam War flowed into a broader
spirit of social rebellion, Adorno’s relations with student activists in Frankfurt were
growing increasingly difficult.
The tension between Adorno and student activists in Frankfurt was due in part to
political controversies that swept through the Federal Republic in the later 1960s. In 1965,
the government amended the Basic Law to introduce the emergency powers laws or
Notstandgesetze, which students referred to as “NS‐Gesetze,” in reference to the Nazi‐era. In
1966 the Erhard government collapsed, leading to a grand coalition between the Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social‐Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) with Kurt‐
Georg Kiesinger appointed as chancellor. Between 1933 and 1945, Kiesinger had been not
only a member of the Nazi party but also a senior official in Goebbels’s ministry of propa-
ganda. For a great sector of the student movement it now appeared as if the German state
was an extension of Nazi‐era authoritarianism. Activists who saw the democratic system
as rotten to its core identified themselves as the “extra‐parliamentary opposition”
(Außerparlamentarische Opposition, or APO). In early June 1967, during a student protest
against the visit by the Shah of Iran, Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by police. At a
student conference in West Berlin to protest the killing, Rudi Dutschke called for
Kampfaktionen, provoking Adorno’s student Habermas to issue a warning about “action-
ism” and the risk of “left‐wing fascism.” By the spring of 1968, student groups were
beginning to occupy university buildings. Students at Frankfurt declared their school the
“Karl Marx University,” and an estimated 2000 students, led by the student activist Hans‐
Jürgen Krahl, moved to blockade the main building (Kundnani 2018).
15
PETER E. GORDON
Many students expressed great disappointment that Adorno did not speak more force-
fully in support of their cause. In September 1968, Krahl recalled that:
six months ago, when we were besieging the council of Frankfurt University, the only pro-
fessor who came to the students’ sit‐in was Professor Adorno. He was overwhelmed with ova-
tions. He made straight for the microphone, and just as he reached it, he ducked past and shot
into the philosophy seminar. In short, once again, on the threshold of practice, he retreated
into theory. (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 461)
But Adorno did not feel that participation in political activism was appropriate for someone
of his age or character. To student complaints that he had not joined the march on Bonn to
protest the emergency laws, Adorno replied: “I do not know if elderly gentlemen with a
paunch are the right people to take part in a demonstration” (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 461).
When the novelist Günther Grass accused Adorno of conformism, Adorno responded with
anger. In a letter from late 1968 he wrote to Grass that he would not “let myself be
browbeaten into what for years now I have called the principle of unilateral solidarity …
everything I have written makes clear that I have nothing in common with the students’
narrow‐minded direct action strategies which are already degenerating into an abominable
irrationalism” (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 461).
In early 1969 Adorno’s relations with Krahl and other student activists degenerated.
On January 31, students arrived at the Institute with a political program, and then occu-
pied the building. Adorno declared the occupation an illegal trespass and called for police
protection. In a written memorandum, he explained that:
The institute’s directors … had no choice, if only for legal reasons, but to accept the confronta-
tion that had been forced on them. They decided to ask for police assistance in clearing the
institute of intruders and to request them to bring charges for trespass against Herr Krahl and
others who had forced an entry into the building. (Adorno 1969b)
From Adorno’s perspective, the student militants appeared as a menacing mob with inde-
terminate aims. He wrote:
It is vital precisely for those who identify wholeheartedly with this aim of the extra‐
parliamentary opposition, that they should feel obligated to resist their own criminalization:
they should resist all authoritarian tendencies and equally all pseudo‐anarchistic acts of vio-
lence on the part of ostensibly left‐wing activists as well as crypto‐fascist actions from groups
on the extreme right. (Adorno 1969b)
In an April 1 letter to the film director and philosopher Alexander Kluge, Adorno expressed
his fears in rather more drastic and Kafkaesque terms: “[I do not see] why I should make a
martyr of myself to Herr Krahl, whom I picture putting a knife to my throat and getting
ready to use it and when I utter a mild protest, he responds by saying, ‘But Herr Professor,
it’s wrong to take these things personally’” (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 608–608).
The experience left Adorno feeling embittered and defensive. In a February 9 radio
address given on the Sender Freies Berlin, Adorno offered remarks on the theme of
“Resignation.” The remarks read like an explicit rejoinder to Krahl:
We older representatives of what the name ‘Frankfurt School’ has come to designate have
recently and eagerly been accused of resignation. We had indeed developed elements of a
16
c ritical theory of society, the accusation runs, but we were not ready to draw the practical con-
sequences from it. And so, we neither provided actionist programs nor did we even support
actions by those who felt inspired by critical theory.
In response to such accusations, Adorno insisted that student militants had misconstrued
the relation between theory and practice. They preferred “pseudo‐activity” to practice
informed by thought. What Adorno called “pseudo‐activity” was the premature rush to
realization that only instrumentalizes thought. If any idea were to be evaluated only in a
practical light, for its practical consequences, this would merely strengthen the spirit of
instrumental reason that had come to dominate late‐modern industrial societ. Students
who demanded immediate action were therefore the ones who had sabotaged the utopia
they claimed to uphold and had thereby betrayed the task of genuine emancipation. “The
uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets him-
self be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in” (Adorno 1998, 292).
Thinking became for Adorno the best means of protecting utopia against its betrayal and
its premature instrumentalization. Thinking in the critical sense was “a form of praxis,”
and had more in common with “transformative praxis” than activity that conformed to
reality for the sake of praxis. “Prior to all particular content, thinking is actually a force of
resistance” (Adorno 1998, 293).
Such claims were unlikely to satisfy student militants who thirsted for the actual trans-
formation of both the university and society at large. On April 22, 1969, Adorno began
the first of his lectures for the summer semester in a course on “An Introduction to
Dialectical Thinking.” Two students, affiliated with the “leather‐jacket party” (a faction of
Students for a Democratic Society who were committed to direct action), mounted the
podium and insisted that Adorno engage in self‐criticism for having called the police and
for bringing legal charges against Krahl. Although many students protested against the
interruption of the lecture, Adorno quickly found that he could not proceed. Three female
students surrounded him on the platform, showered him with flower petals, and then
bared their breasts. Adorno fled the hall (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 475–476).
The symbolism of this event was overdetermined. To many students it was clear that
Adorno had become a symbol of the establishment. After he had rushed from the room, stu-
dents distributed a leaflet that declared: “Adorno as an Institution is Dead.” To Adorno it felt
as if the critical spirit he had worked so tirelessly to awaken among his students had taken its
ironic vengeance. He was left personally shaken and humiliated. “To have picked on me of
all people,” he despaired, “I who have always spoken out against every type of erotic repres-
sion and sexual taboo!” (quoted in Müller‐Doohm 2005, 476). Although he tried to resume
his lectures in June, protests continued and he determined that it was necessary to cancel his
teaching at least for the coming semester. In a letter to Herbert Marcuse he described himself
as “a badly battered Teddie” (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 478). In a letter to Gershom Scholem he
resorted to more drastic imagery: he described the contemporary scene in Frankfurt as
“Tohuwabohu,” the Hebrew term for primordial chaos (Adorno and Scholem 2015, 521).
In search of solace from the political disruption in Frankfurt, Adorno and Gretel went to
Switzerland, and on July 22 they drove to a hotel in Zermatt. Against his physician’s coun-
sel they journeyed by cable‐car to a mountain peak, where Adorno began to feel chest
pains. Later that day he was taken to the St. Maria hospital. On the morning of August 6,
1969 Gretel was informed that Adorno had died. The funeral was held without religious
ceremony in the Frankfurt Central Cemetery, where he was buried in the family tomb. An
estimated 2000 mourners were in attendance.
17
PETER E. GORDON
Adorno’s intellectual legacy would long outlive his death. In her sadness, Gretel com-
mitted herself to preparing the manuscript on aesthetics that Adorno had left in a partially
unfinished state. The book, which bore the ambiguous title Aesthetic Theory, and that the
author had intended to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, was published posthumously in 1970.
A searching reflection on the possibility of modern art, it does not seek to resolve the par-
adox of aesthetic transcendence: “Art is autonomous and it is not,” Adorno observed. Only
by seeking to rise above worldly conditions can art comment on those conditions. But its
commentary succeeds only if it registers through form what it refuses to thematize as
content. “The unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent prob-
lems of form” (Adorno AT, 6). Adorno’s emphasis on formalism aligned him theoretically
with traditions of classicism and high modernism (Hammer 2015). But his commitment
to the ideal of aesthetic autonomy should not be condemned as a document of political
quietism or as a sign of the author’s retreat into “mere” aesthetics. On the contrary, Adorno
was acutely aware of the social and historical guilt that accompanies art like a shadow,
especially after the catastrophes of the mid‐twentieth century. He nonetheless insisted that
art sustains, through its very claims to autonomy, a dialectical bond with the social condi-
tions it outwardly resists. “[I]t would be preferable,” he wrote, “that some fine day art van-
ish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression” (Adorno 1997, 260).
In the years following Adorno’s death, some critics were inclined to dismiss him as a
bourgeois aesthete whose contribution to philosophy was either too rarefied in its content
or too recondite in its style to merit any lasting importance. More discerning readers, how-
ever, continue to discover in his work the resources for a critical style of thinking that
resists all complacency and refuses to sever philosophy from the social conditions that first
make it possible. The emphasis on the “negative” in Adorno’s thought is not mere nega-
tivism: it is all the more utopian the more it refuses to accept any image of utopia, since
only this refusal unbinds thought from any dogma and from the oppressive power of what
passes itself off as fact. “Thinking,” Adorno wrote, “is not the intellectual reproduction of
what already exists anyway.”
As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its
aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. The
utopian moment in thinking is stronger the less it – this too a form of relapse – objectifies itself
into a utopia and hence sabotages its realization. Open thinking points beyond itself. (Adorno
1998, 292–293)
References
Adorno, T.W. (1969a). Scientific experiences of a European scholar in America. In: The European
Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (eds. D. Fleming and B. Bailyn), 338–370. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1969b; 2000). Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, vol. 1 (ed. R. Tiedemann), 93–100. Munich:
Theodor‐Adorno Archiv.
Adorno, T.W. (1978). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). London:
Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1982). Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological
Antinomies (trans. W. Domingo). Basil Blackwell.
Adorno, T.W. (1991). Heine the Wound. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen), 80–85. New York: Columbia University Press.
18
Adorno, T.W. (1993). Trying to Understand Endgame. In: Notes to Literature, Vol. 1 (trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen), 241–275. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1993). Heine the Wound. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 1, (trans. Shierry Weber
Adorno, T.W. (1994). Hegel: Three Studies. (trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1997). Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1998). Resignation. In: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. H.W.
Pickford), 289–293. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2000). The actuality of philosophy. In: The Adorno Reader (ed. B. O’Connor), 23–39.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Adorno, T.W. (2002). Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert). Berkeley, CA: The University of California
Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2006). Philosophy of New Music (trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2006). Letters to His Parents, 1939–1951. (ed. C. Gödde and H. Lonitz; trans. W.
Hoban). Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2009). A social critique of radio music. In: Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory
(ed. R. Hullot‐Kentor), 133–143. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Benjamin, W. (2001). The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940 (ed. H. Lonitz;
trans. N. Walker). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Berg, A. (2005). Correspondence, 1925–1935 (eds. H. Lonitz and W. Hoban).
Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Scholem, G. (2015). Briefwechsel. “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 1939–1969 (ed.
A. Angermann). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. et al. (1976). The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby).
In:. London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Bloch, Brandon. 2017. “The Origins of Adorno’s Psycho‐Social Dialectic: Psychoanalysis and Neo‐
Kantianism in the Young Adorno,” (originally publihsed onine, forthcoming in Modern Intellectual
History).
Buck‐Morss, S. (1977). The Origin of Negative Dialectics; Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the
Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gordon, P. (2018). The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump.
In: Authoritarianism: Three Essays in Critical Theory (eds. W. Brown et al.), 45–84. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hammer, E. (2015). Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Jay, M. (1996). The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social
Research, 1923–1950, 2e. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kundnani, H. (2018). The Frankfurt School and the West German Student Movement. In: The
Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (eds. P.E. Gordon, E. Hammer and A. Honneth), 221–
234. New York: Routledge.
Lafont, C. (2018). Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. In: The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt
School (eds. P.E. Gordon, E. Hammer and A. Honneth), 282–294. New York: Routledge.
Macdonald, I. and Ziarek, K. (eds.) (2008). Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Mann, T. (1997). Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend
(trans. J.E. Woods). New York: Knopf.
Müller‐Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A Biography (trans. R. Livingstone). Malden, Ma: Polity Press.
Paddison, M. (1993). Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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PETER E. GORDON
Paddison, M. (2004). Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music.
London: Kahn & Averill.
Wiggershaus, R. (1995). The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (trans. M.
Robertson). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Further Reading
Jay, M. (1984). Adorno. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hammer, E. (2005). Adorno and the Political. New York: Routledge.
Bernstein, J.M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
O’Connor, Brian (2004). Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pensky, Max, editor. (1997). The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern.
Albany: SUNY Press.
20
2
Adorno’s Inaugural Lecture: The Actuality

of Philosophy in the Age of Mass Production
ROGER FOSTER
1. Introduction
In the 1920s, the neo‐Kantian philosophy that had dominated German philosophy since
the middle of the nineteenth century came under sustained attack by the new
philosophical perspectives that had emerged amid the cultural, social, and economic
chaos of the postwar period. Neo‐Kantianism had come to prominence some two genera-
tions before as Hegelian speculative philosophy was in irreversible decline and the social
and cultural legitimacy of the natural sciences was on an inexorable rise. Although it had
provided a stable resolution of academic philosophy’s identity crisis since the mid‐
nineteenth century, it proved no match for the urgency of the new impulses and aspira-
tions that began to filter into professional philosophy in the post‐war period. Life
philosophy, neo‐ontology, positivist philosophy and Marxism were all positions that were
taken up by critics to attack Kantian philosophy in the 1920s. When Adorno gave his
inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt in May 1931, the idealist philosophy that
had carried the bourgeois spirit through the transition to an industrial, mass society
appeared to be in severe crisis. In its inaugural period, idealism expressed the self‐
confidence of the bourgeoisie in its capacity to form the world in its own image. Through
the power to shape reality according to their own requirements, idealism reflected back to
the ascendant classes their economic and social importance in the early phase of capitalist
development. In the early twentieth century, however, idealism’s productive powers had
undergone a serious crisis of confidence that appeared to cast doubt on its capacity to
drive the creative appropriation of reality.
Adorno talks of this crisis in terms of the incapacity of thought to think about being
as a totality; thinking is simply incapable of encompassing being as a meaningful, artic-
ulated whole. That failure, however, is not the result of a mistake or problem in the way
academic philosophy has chosen to go about this task. In this case, the failure of philos-
ophy is simply a reflection of the fact that reality is not totally accessible and available to
thought. Thinking can therefore only grasp this reality in fragmented form, as the traces
and ruins that cannot be assembled into a coherent whole. The underlying historical
reality that is expressed in this philosophical failure is a substantial transformation in
21
ROGER FOSTER
the structure of capitalist society. In the nineteenth century, capitalist development was
driven by the entrepreneurial activity of the bourgeoisie. This was the form of capitalism
whose spirit was said by Max Weber (1985) to stem from the capacity for methodical
self‐control, permitting steady and predictable accumulation of wealth. Weber (1985,
24) described it as “sober bourgeois capitalism with its rational organization of free
labor.” But in the early twentieth century, this economic order had clearly begun to give
way to a new socio‐economic formation, in which the productive power of capitalism
had now become located in an impersonal process, involving the large‐scale application
of modern science, and divorced from the intentional planning and direction of
individual entrepreneurs. The proliferation of middle managers and bureaucrats to run
the large‐scale organizations dominating the economic landscape demonstrated the new
priority of specific and precise scientific and technical knowledge. The capacity of the
independent entrepreneur to survey the economic scene as a whole, and make produc-
tion and investment decisions based on his or her power to predict the shape of future
reality, was no longer such a vital force in the dynamism of capitalism. Weber (1985,
181) expressed this point in stating that the lives of all individuals in the modern
economic order are now “bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine
production.” The dominance of mass production meant that only impersonal, rational-
ized management was capable of assimilating the technical and specialized knowledge
that allowed for the planning of production. Weber’s charge that this development had
produced “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart,” (Weber 1985, 182) was
a romantic and nostalgic way of marking the difference of the new and impersonal
economic arrangements with the cultural power and authority of dominant entrepre-
neurs in capitalism’s expansive phase.
If the history of idealism can be interpreted as the history of the bourgeois spirit, from
its rise to ascendancy in the world of entrepreneurial capitalism through to its loss of opti-
mism and confidence in the world of mass production organized by impersonal scientific
knowledge, then academic philosophy’s identity crisis will turn out to be a reflection of
capitalism’s shift toward a new system of accumulation that is far less reliant on individual
foresight, initiative, and creativity. The neo‐Kantian attempt to re‐establish the idealist
ascendancy after the collapse of Hegelianism had been opposed from the beginning by
forms of materialism, scientism, and religious and speculative philosophy. By the late
1920s, powerful currents of life philosophy and existentialism were attacking the con-
stricted focus on narrow questions of epistemology in academic philosophy in the name of
broader dimensions of lived experience. These movements represented powerful cultural
reactions against the increasing dominance of a scientific culture allied with the needs of
the machine age. While Adorno saw these movements, particularly life philosophy, as
embodying important insights concerning the failure of that dominant culture, they were
also taken in by the seductive power of an irrationalism that identified reason as such with
its constricted form in current academic philosophy. Adorno’s attempt in his early writings
to avoid these two errors of a scientistic narrowing of reason and a reactive rejection of
rational thought in the name of what is excluded by this constriction of reason, would lay
out a path that he followed for most of his career. Adorno found the answer to this problem
in a view of philosophy as a form of interpretation. While undoubtedly influenced by
Walter Benjamin, I suggest that Adorno’s model of philosophical interpretation was actu-
ally rooted in early modernist aesthetic responses to the rigidified and flattened experience
of life in the age of mass production and consumption.
22
ADORNO’S INAUGURAL LECTURE
2. Idealism and Bourgeois Society
It would not be an exaggeration to say that in the late eighteenth century, idealist philos-
ophy captured the deep aspirations for a way of life released from the old order of hide-
bound tradition that was beginning to collapse in the 1770s. The revolutionary claims of
Kantian idealism, Terry Pinkard (2002) argues, would allow it to play a key role in articu-
lating the demands for collective and individual autonomy that would inaugurate the new
era. Kant’s assertion of the intrinsic connection between autonomy and morality, Pinkard
(2002, 214) suggests, captured the imperative to “assume responsibility for one’s own life,
not to be pushed around by forces external to oneself (either natural or social).” By the
1770s, the erosion of the normative force of the traditional order had created a “revolu-
tionary situation.” Philosophy stepped in to the brink to help guide and shape the aspira-
tions of the new order (Pinkard 2002, 11). With the emergence of new forms of economic
activity freed from the constraints of traditional social and communal relations, especially
in the towns, the emerging bourgeois order became particularly concerned with investi-
gating and justifying the idea of what it meant to live autonomously. The “fundamental
motor” of German idealism, in fact, was the need to “give adequate form to and validate
the modern conception of individual autonomy” (Gardner 2007, 20). Of course, the
Kantian notion of autonomy, if it were really to underpin the burgeoning bourgeois
culture, would have to be careful about what kind of “forces external to oneself ” were the
target of its critique. When launched against the remnants of feudalism and its social and
intellectual restraints, autonomy proved to be a valuable battering ram. But those aspira-
tions would also have to be restricted, so that the “forces external to oneself ” did not include
the social constraints placed on gender, sexuality, ethnicity or regional identity, and class.
Autonomy, in other words, would be harnessed to support the system of the accumulation
and legal transfer of bourgeois property, rather than constitute any kind of threat to that
system.
German academic philosophy entered a crisis of identity in the nineteenth century once
it became clear that the sciences could flourish by themselves seemingly without the need
for philosophical foundations (Schnädelbach 1984, 67). This coincided with the arrival of
the industrial revolution in Germanic Europe, leading to a rapid professionalization of sci-
ence as it became a major force in the system of production. As Germanic culture became
an increasingly scientific culture in the course of the nineteenth century, oppositional
currents took on an increasingly privatized, apolitical, and aestheticized cast. These exiled
currents of thought continued to hum along underneath the formal scientific culture, and
re‐emerged with a vengeance in the aftermath of the Great War. The failure to integrate
these currents left the dominant culture in a precarious position when faced with a major
threat to its existence in 1933. A very significant factor in this failure to integrate broader
cultural currents in official academic philosophy was the self‐limiting response of philos-
ophy to the post‐March political repression in Germany. This set official academic p hilosophy
on the path to a learned science that would reach its culmination in the rise of n eo‐
Kantianism (Köhnke 1991, 79). Broader philosophical worldviews, which gave personal
meaning to the self battered by the depersonalizing forces of the modern world, were shut
out of academic debate. Guided by the idea of a neutral, scientific resolution to the conflicts
among different philosophical worldviews, including materialism, egoism, and pessimism,
neo‐Kantians came to see themselves as preventing any transgression of the boundaries
between science and philosophical worldviews. In the process, of course, neo‐Kantians were
23
ROGER FOSTER
in fact defending a particular ideal of the autonomy of philosophy as a discipline, and of the
moral, autonomous individual as achieving mastery and self‐control through the sober,
scientific analysis of worldview claims that were seen as the cause rather than the
consequence of social conflict.
The large corporations that emerged in European and North American economies at
the end of the nineteenth century brought with them the managerial revolution that
replaced entrepreneurs with a vast general staff organized according to bureaucratic
notions of hierarchy. During this period, as Chandler (1990, 425) noted, German univer-
sities became leading research centers in science and technology, outperforming their
British and American counterparts in this regard. Germany was especially advanced in the
development of physics and chemistry and their application to modern and industrial
technology. These were the industries at the heart of the second industrial revolution.
Fohlin (2007, 21) asserts that between 1871 and 1908, 15 times more joint stock firms,
with about three times the capital, were founded than in the previous 45 years. Once enter-
prises were established and initial investment and production decisions made, they were
turned over to the cadres of professional managers whose organizational and technical
skills were needed for continued growth and successful performance (Chandler 1990,
598; Blackbourn 2003, 245). The result of the scientific‐technical revolution in produc-
tion was a fundamental reconstruction of the capitalist labor process. With the aid of the
new possibilities of control provided by the concentration of scientific knowledge, the early
twentieth century saw concerted efforts to dissolve the labor process as one controlled and
managed by the worker, and to reconstitute it as a process controlled and conducted by
management (Braverman 1974, 170). The subjective aspects of labor were increasingly
dissolved into objective procedures to be monitored and regulated by management. Rather
than a bearer of traditional craft knowledge, the worker was re‐conceived as an inter-
changeable element that was called upon to perform standardized and regulated move-
ments that, just like the material inputs, could be precisely controlled and deployed by the
new structures of professional management.
Looking back on this century‐long transformation in 1915, Thorstein Veblen gave voice
to the remarkably comprehensive displacement of philosophy, in its role as the expression
of the spirit of the community, by the new scientific attitude:
[German philosophy] is a philosophical expression of the Romantic spirit, it is viable only within
the spiritual frontiers of Romanticism; that is to say, since and in so far as the German people
have made the transition from Romanticism to the matter‐of‐fact logic and insight characteristic
of modern technology and applied science, the characteristic philosophy of Germany’s past is
also a phenomenon of the past age. It can live and continue to guide and inspire the life and
thought of the community only on condition that the community return to the conditions of
life that gave rise and force to this philosophy, that is to say, only on condition that the German
nation retreat from its advance into the industrial arts and discard such elements of the modern
scheme of institutions as it has hitherto accepted. (Veblen 1915, 219–220)
Veblen’s association of German philosophy with the proto‐capitalist and pre‐imperial past
gave voice to the magnitude of the transformation that had seen the German nation
become a leading, modern scientific culture. In his inaugural lecture, Adorno would speak
of the “liquidation” of philosophy through the dominance of a scientific attitude.
Philosophy’s claim to articulate the guiding spirit of a nation, its people, and its institu-
tions had clearly collapsed. The main options for philosophy included continuing the effort
of neo‐Kantianism to align philosophy with the new scientific culture, carving out a role
24
for philosophy within that culture as establishing the unity and universality of scientific
truth. Alternatively, there was the option of simply dissolving philosophy into the realm of
natural science, as advocated by positivism. Another option was to oppose the dominant
culture tout court under the banner of a version of life philosophy or a vitalism that attacked
the intellectualistic, congealed, and exhausted culture of the modern machine age. From
his initial philosophical writings onwards, Adorno would continue to reject all three of
these options. The task, as he saw it, was to search for an interpretive, dialectical philos-
ophy that sought to expand the scope of what might be encompassed by philosophy’s ratio-
nalized and hollowed‐out concepts.
3. Weimar: Social Experience and Industrial Society
The mix of archaic and contemporary social formations in Weimar often created social
friction between perspectives representing tradition and duty, and strivings that looked to
the future as a sort of liberation. Although ostensibly possessing a democratic constitution,
the Weimar Republic, as David Durst (2004, xxiv) points out, remained under the semi‐
hegemonic control of its military and agrarian aristocracy. At the same time, German
capitalism was becoming increasingly centralized in large organizations and financialized
through ever tighter relations with banks. The sense of discontinuity and the fragmentation
of experience were evident effects of this juxtaposition of the archaic and the possibilities
of the future. As a young man of 15 when the Great War ended, Adorno needed a teacher
to help him navigate the labyrinthine twists of social experience in the 1920s.
At just the right moment, Adorno was introduced by family friends to the 29‐year‐old
Siegfried Kracauer, with whom Adorno would spend Saturday afternoons poring over
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. From the beginning, Adorno (1974a, 388) wrote, he
learned to see the work not only as an epistemological argument, but also as “a type of
coded writing in which the historical status of the spirit could be read.” Kracauer, Adorno
acknowledged, taught him to see philosophical texts as “force‐fields,” where the task was
to find a way of getting beneath the surface to observe the play of forces that presented the
engagement of philosophy with social experience. In his early Weimar writings, Kracauer
sees himself as at the end of a historical process of “decay” characterized by “the disap-
pearance of a meaning embracing reality as a whole” (Mülder‐Bach 1998, 7). The same
theme is taken up at the beginning of Adorno’s inaugural essay, where he writes that total
reality is inaccessible to reason, which instead must seek to make sense of reality only
through its “traces and ruins” (Adorno 1977, 120). This inaccessibility of reality to
thought, Adorno claims, vitiates an enterprise like Heidegger’s that views being as a whole
as accessible and transparent to thought.
Kracauer’s 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament” provides a brilliant demonstration of his
interpretive technique, and its capacity to disclose the shape of cultural experience from
the analysis of objects and events that are understood as surface‐level expressions of
deeper historical tendencies. Kracauer’s focus in this essay is the choreographed perfor-
mances of dancers and athletes whose scripted movements give rise to different patterns
visible to spectators from a distance. What interests Kracauer about this phenomenon is
the way that it seems to give expression to a fundamental transformation of the nature of
human relationships in the age of mass production. The mass ornament gives expression
to the rationalization of human activity that has utterly transformed the social interaction
of human beings. Kracauer emphasizes that the mass ornament gathers and deploys the
25
ROGER FOSTER
individuals who constitute it as a “mass.” Kracauer means by this that the elements are
deprived of any characteristics that might emphasize their particularity or unique history,
and are deployed in the arrangement as parts that are interchangeable with one another.
This rationalization and coordination of human activity, furthermore, gives expression to
the transformation of work and human experience through a scientifically driven mass
production process. This can be seen, on the one hand, in the way human activity in the
mass ornament is completely liberated from the contingencies of nature and tradition, in
the same way that labor under rationalized mass production is divorced from its unique
craft and local traditions and treated as standard human labor power. It can be discerned,
on the other hand, in the way that the “meaning” of this coordination of human activity
is invisible to the participants themselves, and can only be comprehended at a distance,
from whence the movements can be choreographed and controlled. So the dancers, just
like workers for whom the meaning of their work has now been captured by a scientific‐
intellectual process of management divorced from them, are subjected to a kind of total-
izing perspective that they can neither understand nor control. For those involved in the
process itself, totality is inaccessible. Kracauer presents the “mass” as the collective
arrangement made possible by the liberation of people from older communities and tradi-
tions, but enslaved under a new set of abstract relationships, which manipulate them
according to the dictates of a logic that is absent from the consciousness of the members
themselves (Jonsson 2010, 290). Kracauer draws out the meaning of the mass ornament
as a surface‐level expression of a rationalized social order riven by fundamental class
conflict:
The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation. Since
the principle of the capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it must
destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as means or resistance. Community and
personality perish when what is demanded is calculability; it is only as a tiny piece of the mass
that the individual can clamber up charts and can service machines without any friction.
(Kracauer 1995, 78)
The mass ornament makes clear that capitalism only liberates the human subject in order
to resituate that subject as an exchangeable element under the control of an inscrutable
logic of calculation and efficiency. In the early twentieth century, the mechanization of
work and the focus on breaking the work process down into standard and simple tasks
allowed capitalism to destroy the traditional craft knowledge of workers and reconstitute
that knowledge in an abstract and centralized form.
Kracauer’s perceptive descriptions of the social and cultural consequences of rational-
ized mass production echoed the influential theory of reification developed by the
Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács in the early 1920s. In the essay “Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Lukács (1971) develops the concept of “reification” to
account for the distorting effects of rationalized capitalism on culture and subjectivity.
A consequence of a thoroughly mechanized work process, Lukács (1971, 90) argues, is
the destruction of the bonds that “had bound individuals to a community in the days when
production was still ‘organic.’” Like Kracauer, Lukács charges that mechanization turns
individuals into “isolated abstract atoms” who are no longer connected “directly and
organically” through their work. Lukács’ essay was influential because it provided a
scheme for thinking about the consequences of the rationalization and mechanization of
work for society and culture as a whole, beyond the production process. Lukács (1991, 99)
26
notes the proletarianization of the work of white‐collar workers, which resembles

“operating a machine.” This is a theme that would be taken up by Kracauer several years
later in The Salaried Masses, his ethnographic study of white‐collar workers in Berlin. The
rational‐bureaucratic reorganization of work, Lukács argues, leads to the increasingly
formal and standardized treatment of the objects of bureaucratic activity, leading to all
social domains becoming affected by the process of reification
The distinction between a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur faced
with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with the state of science
and the profitability of its application to technology, is purely quantitative; it does not entail
any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness. (Lukács 1991, 98)
In the second part of the essay, Lukács argued that the structure of reification could also
be discerned at the core of Kantian idealism. As in the case of the atomization and stan-
dardization of elements in the capitalist production process, knowledge becomes conceived
in idealism as the appropriation of isolated elements of reality through the operation of
formal and systematic laws. The unique history of the knower and the individual historical
trajectory of the object therefore become irrelevant, as knowledge is concerned with the
properties exhibited by objects conceived as standardized, repeatable elements that can be
processed by the laws of thought, as objects are processed by the formal procedures of
rationalized production.
In his inaugural lecture, Adorno extends Lukács’ critique of idealist philosophy to its
contemporary descendants, in particular Husserl’s phenomenology. Lukács argued that
the problems of idealism came fully into view within the consciousness of the working
class, the collective subject that would overturn the purely contemplative stance prevalent
throughout bourgeois society. Adorno, however, focuses instead on the question of what
the transformation of idealism since Kant discloses about the structure of bourgeois
society. The transformation is captured in the claim that Husserlian phenomenology
renounces the “productive power of mind, the Kantian and Fichtean spontaneity,” and
“resigns” itself to the passive registering of the given (Adorno 1977, 122). Where it had
earlier portrayed the subject as having a constitutive role in forming and constructing
reality, later idealism begins to reflect the formalization and standardization of the role of
the knower, and the atomization and abstraction of the object that had come to charac-
terize the interaction of subject and object across all domains of social experience. Husserl’s
philosophy, without actually intending to do so, takes up this experience of the interaction
of subject and object in later bourgeois society and shapes it into an epistemology. Adorno
expands on this critique in his dissertation on Husserl, which was written in the 1930s. In
this book Adorno attempts to show that Husserl’s phenomenology severs logical laws from
the practice of thinking and reifies them as sheer mental “facts,” “divested of any movement
of spontaneity and subordinated to the positivistic ideal of the sheer acceptance of irre-
ducible facts, that is, ‘givens.’” This takes place through Husserl’s notion of “evidence,”
which embodies the positivistic ideal of immediate givenness to consciousness (Adorno
2013, 57). Reification and idealization become equivalent in Husserl because logical laws
are presented as though they were “simply there” like objects are immediately given to the
senses. Husserl’s conception of the flow of consciousness, as Biceaga (2010, 126) notes, is
not a sequence of acts carried out by the ego, it is “an inherently passive dimension of sub-
jectivity as such which makes possible all inner perception.” If Husserl were to conceive
“the subject of logical validity as social and in motion rather than as isolated and
27
ROGER FOSTER
‘individual,’” then “he would not need to drive an ontological cleft between thought and
its own laws” (Adorno 2013, 57). But in establishing this separation between thought
and its own laws, Husserl is simply recapitulating the essential structure of reification that
drives a wedge between the subjectivity of the knower, his or her organic connections to
the community and to history, and the extracted and formalized cognitive structure that
assimilates the given in the manner of pure receptivity. It is the cleavage between subject
and object in the scientific, capitalist culture of the early twentieth century that finds its
way into Husserl’s work in the desperate and ultimately doomed effort to separate logic
from its social and historical context. Husserl’s attempt to save idealism by demonstrating
its capacity to reach trans‐subjective being ends up simply expressing the evisceration of
subjectivity that has made knowledge into a domineering system of classification, having
use for neither the history nor the particularity of the knower or indeed of the thing
known. The objectivity that Husserl believes he achieves is in fact simply the reification of
the work of thinking that confronts the thinker as though it were an alien world of things
to be passively registered by it.
“The real life process of society,” Adorno (2013, 26) writes, “is not something sociolog-
ically smuggled into philosophy through associates. It is rather the core of the contents of
logic itself.” Husserl’s conception of the givenness of logical laws to consciousness allows
him to reject the reduction of logic to psychological processes. However, Husserl’s presen-
tation of this argument embodies more truth than simply the critique of psychologism. His
account of the relation of logic to thought is saturated with the experience of living in a
society characterized by the estrangement of subject and object. That experience is ulti-
mately rooted in an epochal shift in the nature of capitalist society, in which the systematic
application of science to the production process renders obsolete the economic and cultural
authority of wealthy entrepreneurs. That historical process was at the root of the crisis of
idealism in the early twentieth century, when earlier idealist notions of the world‐shaping
power of human subjectivity lost credibility, since the power shaping human and social
reality now seemed to be a purely impersonal process divorced from guiding human
intentions.
4. The Actuality of Philosophy and Aesthetic Modernism
Adorno emphasizes in his inaugural lecture that the question of philosophy’s “actuality”
is not a question about philosophy’s place in the hierarchy of knowledge, but a fundamental
question about whether it is possible to answer philosophical questions at all. Every philos-
ophy concerned with truth is therefore faced with “the problem of the liquidation of phi-
losophy” (Adorno 1977, 124). The agent of that liquidation in the early twentieth century
is the positivist attempt to dissolve philosophical problems into questions that can be dealt
with in the natural sciences. In his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,”
Horkheimer distinguishes science and philosophy as two different points of view on the
social process. Science has become integrated into the process of production, and therefore
represents the specific interests of the production process with regard to growth, efficiency,
and profitability. The “scholar and his science,” Horkheimer (1995, 196, 197) states, “are
incorporated into the apparatus of society.” They are “moments in the social process of
production.” Positivism simply carries into philosophy the imperative that thought subor-
dinate itself to the needs of the production process. The standpoint of Critical Theory
emerges when human beings become aware that the process of production is a human
28
social activity, subject to the control and direction of collective human ends. The shift from
traditional to Critical Theory, according to Horkheimer, is one from a perspective where
philosophical thought is subordinated to the imperatives of capitalist society to one where
it is able to grasp the social process as a whole, including the way that capital introduces a
fundamental distortion into the relations of knower and known, subject and object.
Adorno does not take this route, but instead notes that problems such as the “given” and
the problem of other minds cannot be answered with the theoretical tools of positivism.
Since the nature of what is given to consciousness is socio‐historical, it cannot be grasped
by a theory that lacks an understanding of the interaction of subject and object in history.
The notion of the historical nature of truth is certainly a partial step toward Horkheimer’s
idea of Critical Theory, but Adorno’s reading allows that insight to emerge in the
philosophical critique of positivism, without suggesting that it serves as the placeholder for
a collective subject able to seize the mechanism of social production and redirect it toward
more humane purposes
It soon becomes clear in the lecture that what Adorno has in mind is a conception of
philosophy as a special kind of dialectical critique; philosophy illuminates the contempo-
rary social order as marked by the alienation of subject and object, but does not claim to
join up with a collective subject that is conceived as the agent of history. This is why, for
Adorno, science and philosophy are not distinguished from one another through their
respective roles in the social process of production; what differentiates them is the nature
of their relation to their given materials. As a form of “research,” science accepts its mate-
rials as static givens whose significance is readily apparent. Philosophy, as a form of inter-
pretation, must treat the material with which it works as enigmatic ciphers that are to be
understood through the painstaking work of interpretation. Adorno is careful to distin-
guish this idea of critique from a philosophical misunderstanding that misconceives it as
the discovery of essential truth beneath the world of appearance. Precursors of such a
perspective would include Plato’s discovery of an ideal being independent of the world of
material things, and Kant’s understanding of the in itself independent of how things
appear. Adorno makes clear that the alignment of interpretation with the philosophical
discovery of meaning misconceives the nature and purpose of philosophical critique.
The discovery of meaning has a justificatory function with regard to the world of appear-
ance that is vitiated by the inaccessibility and fragmentation of being in the twentieth
century. Any attempt to assert the meaning of being today would simply force philosophy
to regress to the formulation of a series of arbitrary worldview perspectives (weltanschauli-
cher Standpunkte [Adorno 1977, 128]). This sums up nicely the situation Adorno saw phi-
losophy facing in 1931. The movements that had emerged in the twentieth century in
opposition to the increasing narrowing of the interests of academic philosophy toward
epistemology portended a regressive aversion to the discipline of rational thought. This
was true especially of life philosophy and its offshoots (including Heideggerian ontology),
which, as Schnädelbach (1984, 139) noted, “led the attack on all that was dead and con-
gealed, on a civilization which had become intellectualistic and anti‐life,” and represented
a new sense of life in the idea of “authentic experience.” Adorno admired many aspects of
Bergson’s philosophy, but he remained convinced throughout his life that rational thought
must be taken up and expanded or loosened from within; attacking it from a position osten-
sibly independent of it would ultimately weaken the prospects for a rational solution to the
authoritarian structure of western rationality. But at the same time positivism, with its
exceptionally narrow and scientistic understanding of the function of rational thought,
was threatening to eliminate the space in which that critique of western rationality could
29
ROGER FOSTER
be mounted within philosophical discourse. The pincer movement of a burgeoning and

confident irrationalism joined with a corrosive positivism left a vanishingly small space in
which philosophy could stake its claim to relevance.
The idea of interpretation provided Adorno with a means to defend the critical potential
of philosophy against the positivist threat, but at the same time avoided the danger of a
regression to dueling, irrational worldview standpoints by outlining how it would involve
the rational reconstruction of empirical elements. Adorno (1977, 127) emphasizes this in
the lecture by adopting some of the language of a scientifically oriented philosophy,
speaking of the task of bringing its elements into “changing constellations, or, to say it
with less astrological and scientifically more current expression, into changings trial com-
binations.” The goal of interpretation is to arrange the elements of reality so that the criti-
cal imperative to transform reality is visible in the arrangement itself. The critical force of
the imperative to transform reality is not here rooted in the deeper philosophical and eth-
ical presuppositions of an encompassing worldview; it is expressed by reality itself once the
truth about its fragmentation is visible on the surface of the arrangement.
Adorno uses an example taken from Lukács’ (1971) essay “Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat,” on the dependence of the problem of the thing‐in‐itself
on the history of social practice. For Lukács, the limitations of the bourgeois standpoint
become apparent once the thing‐in‐itself problem is revealed, from the standpoint of the
proletariat, as a contemplative attitude to knowledge that is divorced from collective prac-
tice. But in Adorno’s account, the problem is not solved through the discovery of a collective
subject; it is dissolved in the arrangement:
Like a source of light, the historical figure of commodity and of exchange value may free the
form of a reality, the hidden meaning of which remained closed to investigation of the thing‐
in‐itself problem, because there is no hidden meaning which could be redeemable from its
one‐time and first‐time historical appearance. (Adorno 1977, 128)
The “source of light” that Adorno ascribes here to the power of interpretation anticipates
one of the most well‐known passages in Adorno’s writings, the call at the end of Minima
Moralia for perspectives that “displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts
and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light”
(Adorno 1974b, 247). Through interpretation, the demand for social transformation is
not ascribed to a specific social location or entity, but rather becomes visible as the very
meaning of the fragmented and distorted nature of the elements of reality captured in
their arrangement. Both Horkheimer and Lukács identify the critical perspective with a
social location from which the historical process as a whole can be understood in its trajec-
tory toward a classless society. In Adorno’s theory, the critical perspective is released by a
philosophical reconstruction in which it appears as the demand for wholeness and recon-
ciliation of a broken and antagonistic reality.
The antagonism of subject and object in early twentieth‐century capitalist society,
caused by the separation of formal or technical knowledge from material processes in
capitalist production, led to a crucial impoverishment of social experience. As knowledge
in its social application became increasingly formal and abstract, the corrosive effects of a
scientific‐rational culture in the service of capitalist accumulation began to become
apparent. Early twentieth‐century modernist literature responded to this situation by
exploring the boundaries of social experience, seeking thereby to open up a perspective
on what had been excluded or marginalized by the prevailing structure of experience
30
(see Foster 2016). In Robert Musil’s (1990) distinction between the “ratioid” and the
“non‐ratioid,” for example, the secure and communicable knowledge accessible to science
and deployed in production, is contrasted with a knowledge that exists in a personal
relationship to the knower, and in which the separation of subject and object has been
abolished. Musil often calls the non‐ratioid the “other condition.” Writers like Musil used
literature to investigate the presence of patterns of experience that are constitutively
excluded from social forms structured by the antagonism of subject and object. Virginia
Woolf (1985, 72) spoke of this capacity to discern meaning beneath the conventional and
formal structures as a “shock‐receiving capacity,” which is a “revelation of some order”
beneath the appearances that normally pass for life. Woolf refers to these moments of rev-
elation as “moments of being.” They interrupt the course of dull and conventional experi-
ence with a sudden burst of meaning in which, in an instant, everything seems to fit
together. Literature, for Woolf, does not experience these moments directly. Rather, it rep-
resents them in a reconstruction that involves “figuring out what belongs to what” (Woolf
1985, 78). In Marcel Proust, it is involuntary memory that breaks through the forms of
social convention that Proust calls “habit,” calling up a plenitude of meaning lying beyond
the fixed schemes of ordinary experience. The underlying pattern that is reconstructed in
the artwork is understood as genuine experience recovered from behind the dead forms of
convention, it is notre vrai vie, as Proust (1999, 2284) puts it, life as it really is, discovered
and revealed in its truth. What impressed Adorno in writers like Proust was that, unlike
the irrationalist currents that challenged abstract and formal rationality in the name of a
different principle or stem of knowledge, they sought to open up rationality from within,
expanding its sense of what could be encompassed in its categories. Proust, Adorno (2003,
109) claimed, had used the tools of conventional rationality in order to reach the concrete
and the indissoluble, which Bergson’s life philosophy had held to be impossible.
Adorno believed that finding a way back to the naivety and immediacy of experience
was crucial for the possibility of critical thought. The very possibility of articulating the
meaning of experiences of suffering and injustice depends upon the sensitivities and
responses of the thinker. Those capacities of the subject are able to find small cracks in the
forced unity of subject and object, which can then form the basis of a critique of the forms
of identity prevalent in society. Rather than the domination of the material by formal and
abstract concepts, this required the possibility that critical judgment would come as close
as possible to the self‐disclosure of the object. The identifying acts of rationality would here
emerge out of the self‐presentation of the object of experience itself, allowing it to unfold
the terms of its own judgment rather than being stamped with a classifying mark. The
crisis of experience cannot be discerned within ordinary experience because that experi-
ence is itself structured by the antagonism of subject and object. It can only become acces-
sible in a presentation that shows what happens to things when they become available
solely through a domineering rationality. The disclosure of the failure of current ratio-
nality points the way toward a more complete reconciliation of subject and object that is
unavailable in current experience.
In the lecture, Adorno (1977, 129) argues that the interpretation of current reality is
related to the potential for social change, in the sense that “out of the construction of a
configuration of reality the demand for its real change always follows promptly.” Adorno
follows this up with a reference to Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, asserting
that “only in the annihilation of the question is the authenticity of philosophic interpre-
tation first successfully proven,” and furthermore, “the annihilation of the question
compels praxis.” But how, exactly, does the “annihilation of the question” compel social
31
ROGER FOSTER
transformation? Adorno appears to be saying that in the work of interpretation, since

forms of experience essentially are able to show their own brokenness and express their
own failures, the demand for change emerges from within a form of life itself rather than
being imposed upon it by an external authority. The question is annihilated when the
riddle is solved, but the “answer” is not an underlying meaning; it is another way of seeing
reality, disclosed by the light of critical thought, in which the suffering and brokenness of
reality calls for its own (self‐)transformation. Adorno would later adopt a far more circum-
spect view of the connection of interpretation with transformative practice. In the o pening
lines of his major work of philosophy, Negative Dialectics, published in 1966, Adorno
(1973, 3) writes that philosophy, which “once seemed to have been surpassed, keeps itself
alive because the moment of its realization was missed.” We are situated here at the point
where philosophy’s interpretive work has failed to compel transformative change; all that
remains is to use its current breathing room to reflect on that failure. Perhaps, Adorno
writes, “it was an inadequate interpretation which promised that it would be put into
practice.” Since philosophy cannot simply conjure up a practice more suitable to its liking,
this leaves philosophy to occupy itself with the task of thorough self‐criticism.
5. Conclusion
The development of science and technology and their application to the capitalist system
of production from the nineteenth century onwards had generated a number of serious
pathological economic, social, and cultural consequences by the early twentieth century.
Veblen (1915, 73–74) noted that the scientific restructuring of capitalism in Germany led
to a new system based on “theoretical knowledge, rules, or certain broad propositions that
are simple in themselves and have very wide application in detail processes.” As a result,
the system “lends itself to oversight and control by a relatively few experts.” The new
system split expert knowledge from material work practices, locating the former in
instances of control, which could then be deployed to manage and direct the work process.
The result, as Braverman (1974, 125) noted, is that “the process of production is repli-
cated in paper form before, as, and after it takes place in physical form.” Labor becomes
conceived as regular, repeatable motion patterns that replicate the original mental plan.
The split between the physical/material and the intellectual/scientific components of labor
not only led to an intensification of exploitation, it also generated profound distortions of
experience. In particular, it created a hollowed‐out notion of rationality that severely
restricted the ways in which things could count as cognitively significant. Items of experi-
ence, according to the new dispensation, would count as rational providing they were con-
ceived as the bearers of properties that could also be embodied in countless numbers of
other identical items. In the 1920s, critical thinkers like Kracauer and Lukács began to
explore the way that this structure of rationality was beginning to distort human experi-
ence, reducing human beings to isolated, uprooted atoms whose movements were micro‐
managed by a distant technical rationality.
It made perfect sense in this context, for individuals acclimated to this form of experi-
ence, that the focus of critical attention would be directed at what escapes or resists the
possibility of standardization. In this situation, as Adorno writes in his book on Husserl:
the unconnected or “non‐integrable” becomes mortal sin. Thoughts are drastically and
fully brought under control by societal organization…. And all spiritual activity should be
32
repeatable afterwards by any other arbitrary individual. Understanding must practically

present its staff ID, if it wishes to be tolerated. It is evidence sought not for its intrinsic merit or
content, but rather as a print out of directions for future data. (Adorno 2013, 44)
In passages like these, Adorno gives voice to the comprehensive instrumentalization of

knowledge that was set in motion by this transformation. Rational thought becomes
valued increasingly for the distant, predictable, and standardized control it can exert on
things. What became problematic from the standpoint of this sort of instrumental
rationality was the contingent, the different and deformed, the non‐standard and non‐
standardizable dimensions of material life from the perspective of which the claims of
rational thought looked increasingly like authoritarian violence. While the entirety of
Adorno’s philosophy is concerned with this problem, it receives its canonical treatment in
the account of identity thinking in his mature work.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) develop a new
conception of critical social theory as the critique of instrumental reason, concerned with
a fundamental pathology of the western conception of reason, which the authors see as
reaching its culmination in the outbreak of European fascism. But Adorno’s tendency to
project problems of social experience back into the origins of western reason can already
be seen in his work in the early 1930s on Husserl, where Adorno (2013, 9) traces the
mathematization of thinking back to the pre‐Socratic philosophers. The mutations of
capitalism since Adorno’s death give credence to the idea that scientific‐industrial
capitalism was not the end point of western reason, but a historically specific capitalist
regime whose main experiential pathologies followed from its system of standardized mass
production (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017, 201–224). While the problems capitalism poses
for humanity today are not the same ones as Adorno faced, Adorno’s work remains vital
today for the resources it offers for understanding capitalist society as an encompassing
form of social experience.
References
Adorno, T. (1973). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T. (1974a). Der wunderliche realist. In: Noten zur Literatur (ed. R. Tiedemann). 388–408.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T. (1974b). Minima Moralia (trans. E. Jephcott). New York: Verso.
Adorno, T. (1977). The actuality of philosophy (trans. B. Snow). Telos 31: 121–133.
Adorno, T. (2003). Vorlesung über negative Dialektik 1965/66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T. (2013). Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (trans. W. Domingo). London: Polity Press.
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1979). Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming). London:
Verso.
Biceaga, V. (2010). The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology. New York: Springer.
Blackbourn, D. (2003). History of Germany. London: Blackwell.
Boltanski, L. and Esquerre, A. (2017). Enrichissement: une critique de la merchandise. Paris: Gallimard.
Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Chandler, A. (1990). Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press.
Durst, D. (2004). Weimar Modernism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Fohlin, C. (2007). Finance, Capitalism, and Germany’s Rise to Industrial Power. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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Foster, R. (2016). Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things. Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books.
Gardner, S. (2007). The limits of naturalism and the metaphysics of German idealism. In: German
Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives (ed. E. Hammer)), 19–49. New York: Routledge.
Horkheimer, M. (1995). Traditional and critical theory. In: Critical Theory: Selected Essays(trans.
M.J.O’ Connell), 188–243. New York: Continuum.
Jonsson, S. (2010). Neither masses nor individuals. In: Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects (ed.
K. Canning), 279–301. New York: Berghahn.
Köhnke, K. (1991). The Rise of Neo‐Kantianism (trans. R.J. Hollingdale). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kracauer, S. (1995). The mass ornament. In: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (trans. and ed.
T. Y. Levin), 75–88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lukács, G. (1971). Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat. In: History and Class
Consciousness (trans. R. Livingstone), 83–222. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mülder‐Bach, I. (1998). ‘Introduction’ to Kracauer. In: The Salaried Masses (trans. Q. Hoare). London:
Verso.
Musil, R. (1990). Precision and Soul, (ed. and trans. by B. Pike and D.S. Luft). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Pinkard, T. (2002). Germany Philosophy 1760–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Proust, M. (1999). À la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard.
Schnädelbach, H. (1984). Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (trans. E. Matthews). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Veblen, T. (1915). Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. London: Macmillan and Co.
Weber, M. (1985). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. T. Parsons). London: Unwin.
Woolf, V. (1985). A sketch of the past. In: Moments of Being (ed. V. Woolf). London: Harcourt.
Further Reading
Adorno, T. (2001). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1959 lectures; trans. R. Livingstone). Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Hammer, E. (2015). Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Honneth, A. (2008). Reification and Recognition. In: Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (ed.
A. Honneth), 17–96 (ed. and introduced M. Jay). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kracauer, S. (1998). The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in the Weimar Republic (trans. Q. Hoare).
New York: Verso.
Musil, R. (1995). The Man Without Qualities(vols. 1 and 2; trans. S. Wilkins). New York: Alfred Knopf.
Schnädelbach, H. (1984). Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (trans. E. Matthews). Cambridge:
Thompson, M.J. (2016). The Domestication of Critical Theory. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Weinstein, P. (2005). Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
34
3
Reading Kierkegaard
MARCIA MORGAN
“not to forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image”
(Adorno 1989 [1933], 131).
1. Introduction
Adorno’s 1933 Habilitationsshrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, has proven to

be one of the most provocative and yet relatively understudied compositions of the first‐
generation genius of critical theory. At the immediate time of its publication, the text elic-
ited only a few reactions, mostly by figures associated with the early Frankfurt School,
notably the reviews of Benjamin, Löwith, and Tillich (see Hullot‐Kentor in Adorno 1989,
xi–xiii; Morgan 2012, 34–35; Šajda 2012, 18–24 for a review of the reviews). However,
during much of the twentieth century, Adorno’s monograph served powerfully as a nega-
tive impetus for Kierkegaard reception in critical‐theoretical philosophy. Specifically, such
formative figures as Max Horkheimer (in the late 1930s), Herbert Marcuse (in the 1940s),
and György Lukács (in the 1960s) argued in consonance with Adorno’s claims that
Kierkegaard’s philosophy lacked concrete social and political action and, furthermore, pro-
moted isolated individualism or religious dandyism, which dangerously fed the irratio-
nality inherent to totalitarian thinking (Horkheimer 1937; Marcuse 1941; Lukács 1962).
These developments seemed to cement a turn‐around from Marcuse’s previously positive
interpretation of Kierkegaard for his work in the 1920s on a “concrete philosophy” of
action (Marcuse 2005 [1929]). From out of this history, Adorno’s reading thus led Susan
Buck‐Morss to declare in 1977 that Adorno had put Kierkegaard away once and for all for
the purposes of critical theory (Buck‐Morss 1977). However, the latter judgment has been
since overturned. In the last 50 years Kierkegaard has been overwhelmingly established by
some of the most renowned Kierkegaard scholars as among the most actively engaged
social‐political thinkers in the Golden Age of Denmark and an agitator against Christian
Nationalism (see, e.g. Nordentoft 1978; Bukdahl 1981; Westphal 1987; Kirmmse 1990;
Backhouse 2011). Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s philosophical writings on their own merit
have been comprehensively interpreted as manifesting strong socio‐economic and
politically efficacious critique (e.g. in Connell and Stephens 1992; Pattison and Shakespeare
35
MARCIA MORGAN
1998). These arguments, in their manifold and sometimes diverging variations, harken
back to Marcuse’s 1929 essay “On Concrete Philosophy,” which emphasized Kierkegaard’s
transition from isolation to taking action “in the street.” In the essay Marcuse aptly
described the role that Kierkegaard played for his early philosophy of praxis as follows:
[Kierkegaard] went, in the Socratic sense of this activity, into the street: wrote article after
article in a daily newspaper, gave out pamphlets, pressed his entire struggle in the public
domain […] directed in all acuteness towards a concrete movement of contemporary man,
aimed at a “true” change of existence, and his attacks and demands directed themselves
steadily towards concrete ways and tasks of this existence, holding the possibilities of achieve-
ment of the moment in full view. Only when one conceives how much Kierkegaard, in the
fulfillment of his concrete philosophizing came upon the urgent newness of a real decision,
upon a true movement and transformation of contemporary existence, only then can one
understand the sharpness of his attack, the agitational violence of his public performance, the
sought clash with the representative personalities of the public, the revolutionary concretion
of his demands. (Marcuse 2005 [1929], 124; cited in Kellner 1984, 66–67)
As it turns out, then, Marcuse’s intuition in the 1920s was far closer to capturing the
importance of Kierkegaard for critical theory than was evident in the middle period of the
twentieth century. Hence Marcuse’s early positive assessment of Kierkegaard has been
substantiated in the final decades of the twentieth century in numerous ways by
philosophical and theological scholars working on the connection between Kierkegaard
and Frankfurt School theory, the most important works of which include Deuser (1974,
1980), Marsh (1984), Westphal (1987), Habermas (1989), Kodalle (1988), Beck (1991),
Matuštík (1993), and Matuštík and Westphal (1995).
But there is more to the story. Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift has also been reassessed as
having much more to say than a mere rejection of the Danish religious philosopher. As
Klaus‐M. Kodalle wrote in 1988:
Søren Kierkegaard is actually everpresent in Adorno’s thinking. Indeed the Marxian and
Freudian thought impulses strongly influence this connection […] Adorno vacillates between
fascination and repulsion, between inheritance and distanciation (frequently announcing dis-
tance where the influence is greatest […]). This vacillation never rests in any coherent
Kierkegaard critique. (Kodalle 1988, 195–96, my translation)
Hermann Deuser (1980) went so far as to say that Adorno is simply not thinkable without
Kierkegaard. In this context, in the present century some scholars have newly interpreted
Adorno’s 1933 book as revealing substantive and generative clues to a great deal more
influence by Kierkegaard on Adorno, evident throughout different portions of Adorno’s
oeuvre and in varying manifestations of his methodologies, if not in in name, then in the
negative aesthetic‐theological intimations in Adorno’s philosophy inherited not only from
Walter Benjamin but also from Kierkegaard (Sherman 2001; Morgan 2003b, 2012,
58–61; Gordon 2016, 158–93).
In light of this “everpresence” in Adorno’s writings, as evidenced by Kodalle’s and
Deuser’s earlier texts and recently developed along a different path in an extremely compel-
ling manner by Peter E. Gordon (2016), in what follows I will present an analysis that re‐
examines and reconstructs how Adorno reads Kierkegaard and why he reads him in the
manner he does, and inquire what Adorno’s Kierkegaard may teach us about Adorno’s
later philosophic development. In the process of my analysis and in light of my answer to
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READING KIERKEGAARD
the latter question, we will come to understand Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard through
the following argument: (i) both a negative and positive theology are present in Kierkegaard;
(ii) Adorno embraces only the negative, apophatic and rejects the positive, cataphatic
theology because Adorno reads the latter as an escape from worldly needs and action; and
(iii) the negative theology that Adorno accepts is instructive of and bears an important
relation to Adorno’s 1970 Aesthetic Theory. The present chapter thus provides a sum-
mary of the most insightful and relevant scholarship on Adorno’s intersection with
Kierkegaard as well as a new argument about Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory from rethinking
this intersection.
2. Part I How and Why Adorno Reads Kierkegaard: Letting

the Thought‐Image Appear
How one ought to read Kierkegaard has been hotly contested since the beginning of his
authorship and remains so today. His infamous use of pseudonymity, or polynymity, pres-
ents only the first layer of difficulty. Within the polynymous works, he additionally employs
irony, parody, allegory, metaphor, and other literary devices of structural self‐interruption
and broken narratives internal to his philosophic musings, all of which are vast in number
and kind. In addition to his multiply pseudonymous authorship, he has composed a lengthy
parallel collection of direct discourses and numerous volumes of journals. As I have previ-
ously described the process of reading his works, Kierkegaard’s aim “is not to manipulate
or deceive the reader […], but to bring the individual experiencing the text to her own
decision of what is being claimed and what one could or should do in response to these
claims. One of the main goals of Kierkegaard’s authorship is to elicit the reader to
develop her own position regarding individual existence” (Morgan 2012, 29–30). Simon
Podmore has recently presented a convincingly productive approach to the difficulty of
interpreting Kierkegaard’s highly literary inventions. First, Podmore respects what
Kierkegaard expressed as his “wish,” his “prayer,” namely, to cite “the respective pseudon-
ymous author’s name,” not Kierkegaard’s own (Kierkegaard 1992, 627; cited in Podmore
2011, xiii). Second, Podmore reads the “hiddenness” of Kierkegaard in his works produc-
tively as a theologian: “the ‘hiddenness’ of Kierkegaard forces the reader to confront their
own hiddenness. Hence Kierkegaard frequently encourages his reader to read his works
aloud to themselves, so as to efface the authority of the author and discover a personal
address to one’s own hidden self that is contained within the act of reading.” At first
glance, Podmore’s description might be regarded as a defense of substantive subjectivity in
modern philosophy. But in Podmore’s writing, as in Kierkegaard’s, the reader receives
anything but such a limited viewpoint. As Podmore writes further:
But [my] work does not seek to evade the charge that the search for the self is often a dubious,
vain, or narcissistic enterprise, destined to suffer from its own futility and hubris. On the con-
trary, it is my contention that Kierkegaard’s writings contain some of the most valuable and
insightful expressions of abortive attempts at self‐knowledge in modern Western theology, phi-
losophy, and literature. (Podmore 2011, xiv)
For this reason, readings of Kierkegaard have initiated at least 12 different theological
interpretations and appropriations, as Lee Barrett has elaborated, including everything
from the neo‐orthodoxy of dialectical theology to postmodern apophaticism to a defense of
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MARCIA MORGAN
apostolic authority to “a valorization of fideism” or an “exposé of the fatal instability of

any comprehensive theological system,” arguably climaxing with the belief that one
“cannot support any theological reading at all because his texts are nothing but ironic ges-
tures lacking univocal meaning that doctrinal assertions require” (Barrett 2013, 528).
Because Kierkegaard infuses his texts with the terminology of Christian faith and tradi-
tional doctrinal topoi and thereby generates a “cacophony” of possible readings, Podmore
provides a powerful rendering in which the failure of modern subjectivity is not only “tran-
scribed” in Kierkegaard’s writings but doubly fails as a transmutation of “primal anxiety
into faithful religious selfhood as despair in its various guises.” Distinctive in Podmore’s
scholarship are its breathtaking moves to shatter sedimented notions of the subject in a
generative manner that is in turns literary, philosophical, and theological. Such an approach is
both similar to and different from Adorno’s Kierkegaard reading.
Almost a century ago, as the heterodox Marxian interlocutor of Walter Benjamin’s
messianic aestheticism, Adorno vigorously collapsed the house of cards of Kierkegaardian
subjectivity. As it is for Podmore in the present age, likewise for Adorno and Benjamin in
the 1920s and 1930s, the result was most redeeming. But unlike Podmore’s approach,
Adorno carried out his destructive maneuvers by disregarding many of the literary devices
in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, most importantly ignoring the roles of pseudonymity and irony. In
this way, Adorno aimed to read Kierkegaard literally against what he construed as
Kierkegaard’s own literary‐philosophic and religious results. For Adorno a methodology of
literality or Wörtlichkeit revealed new vistas for interpreting texts imbued with the power of
seduction. Whereas, in my judgment, Kierkegaard’s literary method “speaks for the non‐
linearity of personality inherent to modern subjectivity” and as “a paradigm in which the
individual cannot be reduced to any one form, content, or combination thereof ” in a very
helpful manner (Morgan 2012, 30), for Adorno, Kierkegaard’s writings had accomplished
precisely the opposite: a flattened out, positively dialectical model of representation
bound to the Hegelian Geist it supposedly aimed to overcome. In other words, Adorno
claimed that Kierkegaard’s subject fails despite what he regards as Kierkegaard’s best
attempts to save it. Adorno argues that, against Kierkegaard’s efforts to overcome Hegel’s
substantive subjectivity, Kierkegaard instead reifies it through an unintended, newly
positive dialectic.
In many ways, we can understand Adorno to be destroying Kierkegaard’s works by elim-
inating their ironic formulations in order, ironically, to save them for later posterity. Adorno
was fighting against any “dangerous power” or “fascination” that could be elicited by any
of the pseudonymous writings. He was crafting his monograph at a time when, as he later
noted, he aimed to get his message past the censors and reach opposition intellectuals in
Germany (Adorno 1997, 261). The book was published on February 27, 1933, the day
Hitler suspended freedom of the press and made the transition to dictator (Adorno 1989,
xi). In Kierkegaard Adorno writes: “Fascination is the most dangerous power in his work.
Whoever succumbs to it by taking up one of the imposing and inflexible categories he inex-
haustibly displays; whoever bows to its grandeur without comparing it with concretion,
without ever investigating if it is adequate to concretion, has fallen under its domination
and become the servant of a mythical realm” (Adorno 1989, 11). Adorno regards the
domain of Kierkegaard’s writings as permeated by Zauberspruch, or “magical incantation,”
and a “logical immanence in which everything must find its place.” He later presents similar
arguments against jazz and composers such as Stravinsky; he reads into the ascribed free-
dom a severe deficiency that paradoxically creates a realm of aesthetic d eterminism (Adorno
1973, 2002). Therefore, for Adorno, Kierkegaard’s paradoxical formulations invert into
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READING KIERKEGAARD
their own worst nightmares of the strictest preordained order. In his joint publication with
Max Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the structural logic of Adorno’s claims
from the Kierkegaard book becomes repeated and developed – where reason becomes myth
precisely when it envisions itself as emancipated. As Hullot‐Kentor has noted, “Kierkegaard
is the study of the unconscious reversal of history into nature, Adorno’s first analysis of the
dialectic of enlightenment,” (Adorno 1989, xi) because Adorno regarded Kierkegaard’s
theological literary inventions as a regression into myth. From Adorno’s perspective, in rel-
evant cases the best means to undercut such ideological “incantation” is by stripping the
author or composer of their chosen aesthetic devices.
Some previous publications have argued that Adorno’s Kierkegaard is not a reading of
the religious Dane’s writings, but rather a reading of Adorno’s own early methodology
and a foreshadowing of Adorno’s later philosophic development (Morgan 2012, 15–61;
Šajda 2012, 18–24). Heiko Shultz has fittingly described Adorno’s monograph as hybrid
of both a “receptive production” and “productive reception” (Schulz 1999, 220–44).
Schulz claims that Adorno’s book not only received the thought of Kierkegaard, but also
created a new “Kierkegaard.” I contend that Adorno’s newly constructed “Kierkegaard” is
illuminating not for a reading of Kierkegaard, but as an early insight into what will later
become some of the most distinctive features of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Morgan 2003b).
In order to understand this more substantively, it is important to return to what Adorno
means by the literality, or Wörtlichkeit, of Kierkegaard’s texts and to grasp how this relates
to Adorno’s later writings.
In Kierkegaard Adorno speaks critically of those interpretations that read him as a poet,
a method of reading Kierkegaard that became popularized in Europe in the early reception
and that emigrated to the Anglo‐American tradition later in the twentieth century. In
regard to the interpreter Theodor Haecker, Adorno writes: “It is as such that he regards the
pseudonyms, like forces of ‘geniality,’ as powers of fascination on the Kierkegaardian
landscape” (Adorno 1989, 11). He continues:
By rejecting [Kierkegaard’s] claim to be a poet, however, his pseudonyms are excluded as the
constitutive element of his philosophy. The possibility of a method fundamentally oriented to
them is therefore precluded. Kierkegaard’s fruitless attempt to compose self‐animating poets
confuses creator with artist and corresponds better to his idealist origins than to his theological
goal.
It therefore became immediately clear at the beginning of Adorno’s monograph that he set
out to read Kierkegaard philosophically and not poetically. Implicit in the abovementioned
passage is Adorno’s additional unstated goal to reveal the theological content of
Kierkegaard’s thought‐images against their anti‐idealistic intentions by uncovering their
idealistic outcomes. Hence Adorno’s emphasis on conceptuality as the most assured means
to counter abstraction, which he construes as the de facto result of any idealist or existen-
tialist system – and according to Adorno Kierkegaard’s philosophy actualized itself into both.
By stripping away the false names, as Samuel Weber has pointed out, Adorno attempted to
locate an “Archimedean point” in his critique of Kierkegaard “where conceptual‐thematic
content overflows in and into literal language itself ” (Weber 2001, 392). Weber, however,
is skeptical that a literality of words is possible through such an approach. Peter Fenves goes
even further, describing Adorno’s method as bombastic (Fenves 1992, 114). Allegedly, in
Adorno’s method, the “fox’s den” of Kierkegaard’s writing “has to be forced to enclose
itself.” However, on multiple fronts both in his own name and through fictional depictions
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MARCIA MORGAN
of ever‐evolving characters, Kierkegaard has facilitated a philosophical happening for

which both the words “speaking” and “writing” are inadequate. In the context of this event,
in a Kierkegaardian framework, a speaking which is at the same time a writing (as a signing
of itself) is mere “chatter.” Fenves proceeds by claiming that whatever is missed by this con-
fluence of speaking and writing – a surplus of speech – “does not belong to the register of
appearances at all” (Fenves 1992, 109). But for Adorno it does, if only in a negative and
affective response to the predicament of truth as irreconcilable.
The negative, affectively registered appearance of truth as untruth is precisely what lies
at the heart of Adorno’s later works such as Minima Moralia and, above all, the Aesthetic
Theory. This point underscores Adorno’s complex relation to the Hegelian dictum that the
essence of existence must disclose itself as appearance, a motto Kierkegaard vocifer-
ously rejected. But the Shakespearean adage that one “protests too much” rings true.
Kierkegaard ever preserved immanently in sensuous existence – both in the content and
form of his writings – what he was simultaneously intimating as ineffable and transcen-
dent. This is the case, however, in a manner not adequate to a positively dialectical rela-
tionship because of the particularly dynamic negativity in Kierkegaard’s irony, which
enacts resistance through the parody of the Danish Hegelians. In this context, it is
extremely illuminating to consider Richard J. Bernstein’s argument on Kierkegaardian
irony from his recent monograph, Ironic Life (2016). Bernstein implicitly agrees that we
must reject Adorno’s disavowal of the religious Dane’s irony and concludes that
Kierkegaard resolutely stands against any specious “either/or” whereby we would be pre-
sented with a stark choice of either an empty or a seductive Hegelian irony, both of which
Adorno claims Kierkegaard manifests. Bernstein writes at the end of his chapter on
“Kierkegaard: Irony and Ethical Passion”:
Yet Kierkegaard radically swerves away from the Hegelian Either/Or. This is anticipated in The
Concept of Irony, but becomes clear in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard (and
Climacus [the pseudonymous author of the text]) reject the way in which Hegel frames the
alternatives of this Either/Or. There is another way besides sheer emptiness or the seduction of
determinate negation. This is Kierkegaard’s swerve to ethical passion: freely choosing what we
are to become. This is no longer sheer negativity; but neither is it mediation and determinate
negation. Rather, it is learning how to exist, learning what is involved in becoming a human
being, learning – that is, choosing – how to live one’s life. And with this we have a new and dif-
ferent Either/Or. One can stay frozen at the stage of sheer negativity. There is no necessity or
compelling reason to move beyond this – even if it results in despair and melancholy. But it is
possible for each of us as “single individuals” to freely actualize ourselves as ethical human
beings, and thereby move beyond the unstable negativity of pure irony. (Bernstein 2016, 101)
Reflecting on Bernstein’s insights, the question arises whether Kierkegaard provides an

ironic prototype of Adorno’s own non‐ironic, negatively dialectical model in which the lat-
ter strives to capture “the nonidentical” aesthetically, namely as that which cannot be fit-
ted to any adequate identity relation of subject and object? The latter would exist
temporarily, without acting upon the subject in any directive form, and permit the subject
to construct a unique experience freely? Following Bernstein’s explication of Kierkegaardian
irony, it is clear that Kierkegaard does provide such a model.
In the 1933 monograph, Adorno constructs the aesthetic out of the breakdown of
subjectivity in Kierkegaard and thereby captures a surplus of speech, which can only be rep-
resented affectively by the subject’s own failure of selfhood over and against the societal
object. Adorno wants to show through images revealed by the bare conceptuality of the text,
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READING KIERKEGAARD
when stripped of its decorative fictions, where and in what sense language, when regarded as
a confluence of speaking and writing, fails to represent experience. As Walter Benjamin
pointed out in his review of the Kierkegaard book, only allegory was spared in Adorno’s dis-
section of Kierkegaard’s writings (Benjamin 1999 [1933]). The allegorical or figurative, for
the early critical theorists, is the thought‐image (das Denkbild) of human existence that shines
through the text in spite of the words used to represent it. In this way Adorno, the seeming
nemesis of Existenzphilosophie, advocates a more visceral encounter with the raw experienti-
ality of human existence in an attempt to debunk the existentialist pretenses of the times,
most of all Heidegger’s. This has led Peter Gordon, for example, to argue that Adorno stands
closer to the existentialist tradition than previously thought (Gordon 2016). This may well be
the case implicitly. Nonetheless, Adorno aims to save Kierkegaardian philosophy from its
explicit existential reception by transfiguring it into an aesthetic model that can be taken up,
critically, as a form of protest against any fundamental ontology or positively dialectical the-
ology, both of which relied on early existential developments.
Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard according to the strictures of Wörtlichkeit served as a
paradigm for Adorno’s later writings on the aesthetic representation of human existence.
Out of this he developed a methodology of striving for what he calls the “strictest linguistic
objectivity.” In Minima Moralia, first published in Germany in 1951, Adorno wrote: “If the
written language codifies the estrangement of classes, redress cannot lie in regression to
the spoken, but only in the consistent exercise of strictest linguistic objectivity. Only a
speaking that transcends writing by absorbing it, can deliver human speech from the lie
that it is already human” (Adorno 1974 [1951], 102). What Adorno seeks to capture in
his conceptually‐laden, atonal philosophic constellations – taking aphoristic thinking to
new heights, as seen in his Aesthetic Theory – is “a speaking that transcends writing by
absorbing it.” Such is a surplus of speech that can only be grasped affectively in contradis-
tinction to the abstract thought that evades the concrete experiences of the human being.
Because the surplus of speech is relegated to the affective domain of human experience,
Adorno describes it as “mute.” Thus, what Kierkegaard’s writings didn’t say poetically or
religiously became articulated for Adorno through a mute conceptuality of appearances
when read through a literality of the text.
Andrew Bowie has recently argued in a highly nuanced and convincing manner how
Adorno’s main developments are more philosophical than aesthetic in Adorno’s aesthetic
rehabilitation of philosophic thinking (Bowie 2013, 135). Adorno thought constellations
inextricably intertwine philosophy and art in a way that redefines philosophical truth.
Bowie explains that Adorno’s aesthetic constructions are more philosophical precisely
because of their inherent contradictoriness. We can think seriously about Adorno’s means
to counteract the reification of the subject in late modernity with the tools of contradiction
in philosophy as an aesthetic form. In explaining this method in Adorno, in a chapter titled
“Contradiction as Truth‐Content,” Bowie writes: “What determines us can, therefore,
function as a form of reification, but this can itself lead to the possibility of overcoming
reification, if we can become aware of the objective factors which had become part of our-
selves as subjects” (Bowie 2013, 50). Bowie proceeds by pointing out the error of modern
philosophy as it relates to Adorno’s alternative approach:
taking the stance required for scientific objectivity as the founding philosophical assumption
is a mistake, because our primary relation to the world is not cognitive at all, but rather […]
practical, mimetic, or affective. Modern philosophy oriented toward the scheme of subject and
object produces contradictions precisely because it seeks to ground our relation to the world in
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MARCIA MORGAN
a derivative mode of access to the world, in which the subject takes a neutral stance toward the
object. This stance can, in the hermeneutic view, only develop from a prior non‐objectifying
stance […]. (Bowie 2013, 51)
For this reason, Adorno contorts philosophic forms into aesthetic experiences of contra-
diction as a way of grasping such a “prior non‐objectifying stance,” which can only be
experienced mimetically, practically, and affectively. Is this a non‐ironic and therefore non‐
seductive form of Kierkegaard’s methodology that Adorno learned early in his own philo-
sophic development after reading Kierkegaard? The evidence speaks to an affirmative
answer to this question. Consider Kierkegaard’s repeated admonishing to the weary philo-
sophic traveler that “The contradiction continually expresses the task” (Kierkegaard 1980,
31). For Kierkegaard, the experience of contradiction – and not its abstract, systematic
resolution extricated from experience – invokes one to action through its concrete applica-
tion to “actually existing.”
What, then, remains of the debunked Kierkegaardian corpus for Adorno after his
reading method has been carried out? The answer lies in the concept of the thought‐image,
or Denkbild, referenced earlier. Influenced by Benjamin’s method of thwarting any inten-
tion of the author and following a trajectory of “truth as detour” (Benjamin 1998 [1963]),
Adorno deletes the irony of Kierkegaard’s writings and constructs a new aesthetic creation
of the literary. However, this is ironic “because literary writing, in its refusal to remain
buchstäblich or literal, demonstrates what is always the case in aesthetic experience: there
can be no direct or realist reading of an aesthetic creation capable of doing justice to art’s
irreducibly figurative nature,” as Gerhard Richter has clarified (Richter 2007, 32).
Therefore, for Adorno:
literary works […] are figurative or allegorical, possessing a wordless syntax even in linguistic
works. What these works say is not what their words say, so that meaning cannot be synony-
mous with authorial intention. What Adorno calls the allegorical Wahrheitsgehalt, or truth‐
content, of a text becomes perceptible when it divorces itself from its author’s intended
meaning: what speaks in a work of art is not the author’s voice but the artwork’s own formal
echoes. (Richter 2007, 32)
Richter synthesizes etymologically, “If the Greek root of allegory, allegorein, signifies the
process of speaking differently or of saying something else, then literature works to retain
and, indeed, to intensify this otherness.”
If Adorno is theorizing the aesthetic from the perspective of “damaged life” after
Auschwitz, as he expressed in Minima Moralia (Adorno 1974 [1951]), he is attempting to
save art from its historical forms of either propaganda or sheer entertainment, both of which,
according to him, lead to fascistic ends. Such a problematic dichotomy of appropriation was
precisely the fate of Kierkegaard’s collected writings in Adorno’s early years: Kierkegaard
was being read either poetically as a kind of decorative literary pleasure, or he was being
taken up by fundamental ontology and existential phenomenology in ways not distanced
from the “German Christians” affiliated with the Third Reich (Schulz 1999; Morgan 2012,
19–24; Šajda 2012). Schulz incisively outlines the problem of Kierkegaard reception by
figures such as Emmanuel Hirsch, a theologian who wrote his influential Kierkegaard‐Studien
in 1930–1933, precisely at a time he was energetically engaged with National Socialism,
and this significantly impacted the content of Hirsch’s claims about Kierkegaard
(Schulz 1999, 229). Within this context of the history of German fascism, Richter calls
what is expressed affectively and mimetically in Adorno’s aesthetic thought‐images a
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READING KIERKEGAARD
“communication of non‐communicability,” that is, “the scar of the Denkbild – in both the
genitive and ablative case” (Richter 2007, 30). Thus, for Adorno, “the political function of
the aesthetic is located in the very space in which it is inaccessible to instrumentalist
reasoning and unmediated political intervention.” From the abovementioned consider-
ations, we can see how and why Adorno recast Kierkegaard’s writings into a new aesthetic
form of the thought‐image that negated Kierkegaard’s literary intentions and reread
the allegorical truth‐content of his writings against any seduction of fiction in the early
twentieth century, even if Kierkegaard’s writings on their own merit did not warrant this.
3. Part II What we Learn from Adorno’s Kierkegaard:

The Sustenance of Negative Meaning
Specific sociological reasons, as well as philosophical insights related to the socio‐economic

and political developments of the times, were in abundance for Adorno to reconstruct
Kierkegaard against the grain of his intentions and receptions. The question of what more
we learn through Adorno’s recasting of Kierkegaard lingers. Is the book only a mechanical
restructuring for political ends? A mere tactical approach to the aesthetic would go against
everything Adorno stands for and convolute the substantive meaning of his brilliant
analytic rigor in constructing aesthetic experiences of contradiction to achieve greater
philosophical truth. In fact, internal to Adorno’s contradictory formulations, one can
accept neither a sociologism nor an idealism of the text; the meaning lies in neither and
both, true to his negative dialectical method. We ought to heed Richter’s reminder that for
Adorno “the political function of the aesthetic is located in the very space in which it is inac-
cessible to instrumentalist reasoning and unmediated political intervention.” Instead, the
answer to this question must return us again to the truth‐content of Adorno’s Denkbild, and
this undoubtedly brings us back to the theological. Hullot‐Kentor captures pointedly that
while “theological motives are […] dropped at many points” in Adorno’s Kierkegaard, this is
rather “more of a sublimation than excision, for theology is always moving right under the
surface of all of Adorno’s writings” (Adorno 1989, xxi). He continues: “Opaque ideas in
Adorno (as in Benjamin) often become immediately comprehensible when grasped in this
context of theological interests. The idea of ‘truth‐content’ for example, which has remained
so obscure, is a work’s content of hope.” But Hullot‐Kentor (Adorno 1989) cautions the
reader not to expect a hope from Adorno that is salvageable in the end. He writes, “Still, as
the research of hope, Kierkegaard wants to take hope under its wing; when it does it becomes
ministerial and damages itself.” Hope is the theological in Adorno’s early work, and Hullot‐
Kentor connects this furthermore to a loss of the theological in Adorno’s later revisions of
the text in 1962, drawing the Kierkegaard revised publication closer, in his judgment, to
Adorno’s 1970 Aesthetic Theory. In contrast, Peter Gordon (2016) has argued that
the theological traces in the early Kierkegaard book remain visible throughout later
works. I agree with Gordon and will develop this argument further in what follows.
Previously, I argued that Adorno’s Kierkegaard shows important features of Adorno’s own
early methodology that were later to reappear in aesthetic form in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
(Morgan 2003b). I will conclude the present chapter by returning to this theme, as it forms
a nexus with Gordon’s argument, and will elaborate in more detail how this is the case.
It is beyond the scope of the present chapter to adjudicate which is the correct reading
of Kierkegaard theologically, not to mention whether such a task is even possible, following
Barrett’s summary of interpretations. Instead, I return to Podmore’s research, discussed at
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MARCIA MORGAN
the beginning of Part I, as a guide to the theological in Kierkegaard because, as stated pre-
viously, I find it extremely insightful and generative as an understanding not only theolog-
ically, but also in a philosophic and literary sense fair and adequate to the nuances of
Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Moreover, Podmore emphasizes both the negative apophatic and
positive cataphatic interpretations, thus manifesting several important features of the two
predominant ways Kierkegaard is read theologically, and yet emphasizing the death of the
subject as an important intrinsic maneuver in Kierkegaard’s literary and philosophic
transition by moving from the negative to the positive. While Adorno is asserting the
destruction of the subject as an outcome against Kierkegaard’s intentions, Podmore makes
clear that such a self‐abortive attempt at any substantive subjectivity was already inherent
within Kierkegaard’s writings even if one reads him theologically and not merely poeti-
cally. This difference lies in the fact that Podmore countenances the literary devices of
Kierkegaard while Adorno dismisses them.
In regard to the negative and positive theological outcomes in Kierkegaard, Podmore
writes:
In one sense, Kierkegaard’s works could be read as developing an apophatic or negative

theological anthropology in which the failure of self‐knowledge is evoked in order to unveil a
cataphatic, or positive, truth of selfhood that cannot be attained by merely natural means. It is
only through the mystery of the self ’s relation “before God” that the self can come to know
itself […] And yet, in the endeavor to stand before God, the self is explicitly confronted by the
fear and trembling of the infinite qualitative difference between humanity and divinity.
(Podmore 2011, xiv)
Kierkegaard situates the human in an “infinite qualitative difference” before God, as

Podmore elucidates, whereas in Aesthetic Theory Adorno places the subject in the position
of an infinite qualitative difference – to borrow Kierkegaard’s phrase – before the societal
object, mimetically and affectively captured in the truth‐content of the artwork. Yet it is
important to point out that Kierkegaard is also already instigating the latter move as the
first step of his subsequent self‐relinquishment before God. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
recalls the surplus of speech that for Adorno does register in appearances, but not in any
positively linguistic manner, only through an objectivity that facilitates an affective experi-
ence of the human beyond writing (Adorno 1974 [1951], 102). Such an affective, mimetic
experience bespeaks the “rationalistic fiction” at the heart of Adorno’s aesthetic theory
captured by Albrecht Wellmer’s analysis of Adorno’s critique of modern reason (Wellmer
1991, 71). Wellmer contends that art therefore makes manifest non‐communicative forms
of expression. He argues that works of art for Adorno “point towards an expansion of the
boundaries of communication by virtue of their effect and not their being […]” (Wellmer
1991, 22). The experience of artworks, furthermore, does not constitute
a cognitive function at the level of philosophical knowledge, but on that of the subjects’ relation-
ship to themselves and to the world where works of art intervene in a complex network of atti-
tudes, feelings, interpretations and evaluations. […] The fact that the cognition that is achieved
through art cannot be expressed in words is not attributable to the inadequacy of the concept,
but to the fact that the enlightenment of consciousness signified by the term “cognition” here
encompasses cognitive, affective, and moral and practical aspects in equal measure.
Wellmer concludes that “cognition” in Adorno’s aesthetic theory means something “closer
to a capability rather than abstract knowledge, something more like an ability to speak, to
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READING KIERKEGAARD
judge, to feel or perceive than the result of cognitive effort.” How does the experience of
such an aesthetic appearance, then, relate to negative theological content in Adorno’s
reading of Kierkegaard?
In Adorno and Existence Peter Gordon provides a great deal of insight in further detailing
the theological connection between Kierkegaard and Adorno. Gordon enters into evidence
a few crucial developments in Adorno’s later thinking. First, Gordon demonstrates as a
thread throughout his monograph that “Adorno returned throughout his life to
Kierkegaard” and “eventually, he came to modify the rather stringent verdict of his earliest
study, in which he had scrutinized the Dane’s philosophy with the instruments of a so‐
called materialist criticism” (Gordon 2016, 160). Second, Gordon recalls Adorno’s letter
to Gershom Sholem in 1967 in which Adorno tellingly outlines his meaning of materi-
alism against any “cohesive,” “fixed,” or dogmatic methodology or worldview that “seems
to guarantee an affinity with metaphysics” or even – Adorno states hesitatingly – “I might
almost have said theology” (Gordon 2016, 158). A third point Gordon considers is
Adorno’s statement in the 1966 Negative Dialectics, that “At its most materialist, materi-
alism comes to agree with theology” (Adorno 2007 [1966], 207). Gordon synthesizes
these three historical developments in Adorno’s late thinking and connects them to the
logic of the dialectic of enlightenment Adorno theorized with Horkheimer. Gordon argues
that the alleged “unidirectional arc” of the loss of religiosity in the twentieth century,
diagnosed, for example in the move from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, instead for Adorno
“bends back upon itself in a covert regression to its religious point of departure.”
Where Kierkegaard moves to a positive theological position of a self liberated by the self‐
abnegation of its solipsism in the face of the unknowable God, Adorno requires the return
to the negative and unceasingly calls us to uphold it in contrast to what he regards as any
positive dialectical resolution. It is crucial to point out, however, that Kierkegaard’s positive
or cataphatic theology, if we consent to Podmore’s reading, which I argue we should do,
does not permit any resolution, but delimits itself by an unbridgeable gap between the
human and the Other of divinity, sustained in an infinitely negative manner in this world.
Gordon explains why a model of transcendence cannot work for Adorno in late capitalism:
“In the modern phase of capitalism, however, the very ideal of a strong subject can no
longer appeal to a transcendent support, and the language of bourgeois heroism becomes
no less mythical than the instrumental rationality that has already dissolved all other
myths” (Gordon 2016, 161). For this reason, following Gordon’s argument, Adorno’s
alignment of theology with materialism brings us to the primacy of the object over and
against the subject. Thus, Gordon advises, “It is therefore crucial to note that Adorno’s
affiliation with Kierkegaard did not imply anything like a genuine affirmation of theology.
While resisting Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, Adorno nonetheless saw in this faith a species
of negativity, although this theological negativity could never be transformed into a
positive religion” (Gordon 2016, 195). And further, “the direct affirmation of a transcen-
dent other beyond nature would contravene the imperative of this‐worldly redemption.”
This conclusion doesn’t negate Adorno’s relationship to Kierkegaard, but rather suspends
it without resolution – appropriate to Adorno’s negative dialectics. Gordon writes:
For Adorno, then, Kierkegaard held a double meaning: Even as Kierkegaard stood as the very
paradigm of bourgeois subjectivity, he also came to signify the possibility of resistance against
the degeneration of that subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s own ascesis in the face of public religion
thus stood for Adorno as the last remaining form of bourgeois heroism in a society that had
made true subjectivity a virtual impossibility. (Gordon 2016, 197)
45
MARCIA MORGAN
In the context of Gordon’s argument, I do want to emphasize nonetheless the immanent

emphasis of religion in Kierkegaard’s collected writings, both direct and pseudonymous.
Numerous Kierkegaard scholars, including the recent publications of Lee Barrett, David
Lappano, and Jamie Aroosi, in addition to those works referenced in the Introduction,
have each elaborated from their respective positions in theology, philosophy, and political
theory how Kierkegaard’s religious existence is intricately and intimately of this world
and cannot reside in any transcendent beyond. Moreover, there is no affirmation of reli-
gion for Kierkegaard in the sense of any coherent doctrine. At the conclusion of his article
on Kierkegaard as theologian, Barrett writes: “For Kierkegaard, theology is not done
through the development of a doctrinal system on paper, but through the assumption of
interpretive responsibility (and consequently the assumption of moral and religious
responsibility) in the living of one’s life” (Barrett 2013, 546). Aroosi has succinctly
captured that
Kierkegaard rarely affirms the content of Christian orthodoxy. In fact, he so rarely validates
Christian dogma, and so clearly interprets much of it in a deeply metaphorical light, that it is
legitimate to ask about the nature – and even the existence – of his Christianity […] And so, in
Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard seems to dispense with the entirety of Christian dogma,
arguing that its essential truth is nothing more than that “the god appeared in the humble
form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died.” (Kierkegaard 1987, 104; cited
in Aroosi 2018, 21–22)
Aroosi concludes most appropriately to the present discussion that “the challenge [for
Kierkegaard] is not to permanently leave the world behind in favor of some otherworldly
transcendence; the challenge is to return to it, so that we might learn to reconcile our tran-
scendent love with the fact that we are also limited, and embodied creatures” (Aroosi
2018, 21–22). Such a position has been elaborated in sophisticated and convincing detail
by David Lappano (2017). In his description of Kierkegaard’s theology as one of secular
encounter, Lappano writes: “We have seen that Kierkegaard challenges any notion of
Church that positively claims to carry within its authority and its practices the eschatolog-
ical promise of Christ on high […]” (Lappano 2017, 241), and “Kierkegaard’s edifying and
communicative praxis, ironically, seems more easily applicable to secular social develop-
ments than religious ones” (Lappano 2017, 243). Thus, Kierkegaard sustains a negatively
dialectical relation between the immanent and the transcendent in which neither resolves
to the other.
We can further develop Gordon’s provocative argument about Adorno’s philosophic
trajectory and extend it to the Aesthetic Theory for additional insight. In doing so, I argue
that the primacy of the object is best seen in its negatively theological context in the
Aesthetic Theory as what Adorno calls a “hope beyond hope” that resides in the artwork,
that is, a hope in this world without any positive content or reaching to the transcendent.
Hope, for Adorno, is the infinite and repeated upholding of the experience of hopelessness
for any beyond. For this reason, for Adorno, artworks ever and repeatedly empty them-
selves of any content. But they do this by “detach[ing] themselves from the empirical world
and bring[ing] forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other
world too were an autonomous entity” (Adorno 1997 [1970], 1). Note the Kantian sub-
junctive “as if,” the crucial constituent of the aesthetic. For Adorno continues the passage
by ascertaining that “As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the
unqualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never
46
READING KIERKEGAARD
have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation
that – shorn of any hope of a world beyond – strengthens the spell of that from which the
autonomy of art wants to free itself ” (Adorno 1997 [1970], 2). A bit later he adds: “In
their relation to empirical reality, artworks recall the theologumenon that in the redeemed
world everything would be as it is and yet wholly other” (Adorno 1997 [1970], 6).
Artworks therefore sustain a negative relationship to the societal object for the individual
subject experiencing them through the “as if ” of the artwork’s newness posited against the
fait accompli of empirical reality as the best means to counter any false representation of
individual human existence. The “as if ” of the artwork cannot appear in any content‐
laden form. Hence the prevalence of the Old Testament Bilderverbot in Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory: “The Old Testament prohibition on images has an aesthetic as well as a theological
dimension” (Adorno 1997 [1970], 67). This point recalls Adorno’s search for the “strict-
est linguistic objectivity” in Minima Moralia that resides only in a surplus of speech beyond
any adequate relation of speaking and writing, and that can only be experienced affec-
tively through aesthetic mimesis internal to the artwork’s construction. What kind of
meaning do we understand from this content‐less form?
In a culminating passage from Aesthetic Theory, Adorno sees meaning per se through
the lens of aesthetic meaning. He writes:
Everything depends on this: whether meaning inheres in the negation of meaning in the art-
work or if the negation conforms to the status quo; whether the crisis of meaning is reflected
in the works or whether it remains immediate and therefore alien to the subject. (Adorno
1997 [1970], 154)
Meaning is constituted as a contrast of the given with its other. This comprises the content
[Gehalt] of artworks, which is expressed through a mute language that mimetically and
affectively grasps “the new”: “the artwork is the language of this wanting [of the other].
The elements of this other are present in reality and they require only the most minute dis-
placement into a new constellation to find their right position. Rather than imitating
reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement to reality” (Adorno 1997 [1970], 133). In
this way Adorno’s theory of mimêsis connects to a memory of something that has never
existed, what Adorno calls “the new.” “The new” is captured through the experience cre-
ated by the artwork that upholds the contradictoriness of the subject–object relation in
late modernity. Adorno’s forced aesthetic construction of the writings of Kierkegaard into
a new “Kierkegaard” – one that never existed – negatively elucidates Adorno’s under-
standing of theological meaning against its rationalization in late modern times, viscerally
experienced by Adorno at the time he was writing his Habilitationsschrift between the
years 1929 and 1933. The meaning of Adorno’s “Kierkegaard” is best understood as a
mimetic displacement of what Kierkegaard had become against his intentions. Adorno’s
“Kierkegaard,” newly constructed from the philosophical crumbs of Kierkegaard’s actual
oeuvre, can be grasped as an early example of Adorno’s theory of the muteness of lan-
guage when language is regarded as a mere correspondence between speaking and writing
and when the literality of what has not yet spoken – the concrete expression of human
existence against its reification – is finally permitted to appear mimetically, allegorically,
in the truth‐content of the artwork. Adorno’s artwork, “Kierkegaard,” manifests a mute-
ness that discloses an “ability to speak, to judge, to feel or perceive rather than the result
of cognitive effort” (Wellmer 1991, 22) in communicating the theological content of
Kierkegaard’s message.
47
MARCIA MORGAN
References
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Philosophy of Modern Music (trans. A.G. Mitchell and W.V. Blomster). New
York: Continuum/The Seabury Press. In German: Philosophie der neuen Musik. 1958. Cologne:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
Adorno, T.W. (1974). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). London
and New York: Verso Books. In German: Minima Moralia. 1951. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Adorno, T.W. (1989). Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (ed. and trans. with a Foreword by
R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. In German: Kierkegaard:
Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. 1962. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Originally published in Heidelberg:
Mohr Siebeck, 1933.
Adorno, T.W. (2007). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York: Continuum. In German,
Negative Dialektik. 1966. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1997 [1970]). Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis: University of
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Adorno, T.W. (2002). Essays on Music. (ed. R. Leppert; trans. S.H. Gillespie). Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1998). Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. J. Cumming). New York:
Continuum. In German: Dialektik der Aufklärung. 1944. New York: Social Studies Association Inc.
Aroosi, Jamie. 2018. “The Future of Human Nature: Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, and the
Challenge to Human Identity.” American Philosophical Association Pacific Division, Panel
Presentation, Political Theology Group, San Diego, March 2018. Unpublished manuscript cited by
permission of the author.
Backhouse, S. (2011). Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barrett, L. (2013). Kierkegaard as theologian: a history of countervailing interpretations. In: The
Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (eds. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison), 528–549. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Beck, E. (1991). Identität der Person: Socialphilosophische Studien zu Kierkegaard, Adorno, und Habermas.
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Benjamin, W. (1998). The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. J. Osborne). London and New York:
Verso. In German: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. 1963. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
Benjamin, W. (1999). Kierkegaard: the end of philosophical idealism. In: Benjamin, Selected Writings,
Volume 2, 1927–1934 edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith (trans. R. Livingstone
et al.), 703–705. Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press. In German: Anonymous. April
2, 1933. Vossische Zeitung, Berlin.
Bowie, A. (2013). Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy. Cambridge, UK and Malden MA: Polity Press.
Bernstein, R.J. (2016). Ironic Life. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Buck‐Morss, S. (1977). The Origins of Negative Dialectics. New York: The Free Press.
Bukdahl, J. (1981). Om Søren Kierkegaard. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel. In English: Søren
Kierkegaard and the Common Man. 2001. Translated and edited by Bruce Kirmmse. Grand Rapids
MI and Cambridge UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Connell, G.B. and Stephen Evans, C. (eds.) (1992). Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community.
Atlantic Highlands, NJ and London: Humanities Press.
Deuser, H. (1974). Søren Kierkegaard, die paradoxe Dialektik des politischen Christen. Munich and Mainz:
Kaiser Mathias Grünewald Verlag.
Deuser, H. (1980). Dialektische Theologie: Studien zu Adornos Metaphysik und zu Spätwerk Kierkegaards.
Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag.
Fenves, P. (1992). Image and chatter: Adorno’s construction of Kierkegaard. Diacritics 22: 100–114.
https://doi.org/10.2307/465240.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, J. (1989). The New Conservatism: Cultural Critcism and the Historians’ Debate (ed. and trans.
S. Weber Nicholsen), 249–269. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
48
READING KIERKEGAARD
Horkheimer, M. (1937). Authority and the family. The Sociological Review 29: 1–19.
Kellner, D. (1984). Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The Concept of Anxiety (ed. and trans. R. Thomte in collaboration with
A.B. Anderson). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (ed. and trans.
H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, 1997–2007. Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag.
Kirmmse, B. (1990). Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kodalle, K.‐M. (1988). Die Eroberung des Nutzlosen. Kritik des Wunschdenkens und der Zweckrationalität
im Anschluss an Kierkegaard. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schönigh Verlag.
Lappano, D. (2017). Kierkegaard’s Theology of Encounter: An Edifying and Polemical Life. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lukács, György. 1962. Die Zersörung der Vernunft. Luchterhand Verlag. In English: The Destruction of
Reason. 1980. (trans. P. R. Palmer). London: Merlin Press.
Marcuse, H. (1941). Reason and Revolution. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Marcuse, H. (2005). Heideggerian Marxism (ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit). Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press. In German, Marcuse. 1929. “Über konkrete Philosophie,” Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik, Volume 62. Republished in Marcuse. 1978. Schriften, Volume
1: 385–406. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Marsh, J.L. (1984). Marx and Kierkegaard on alienation. In: International Kierkegaard Commentary:
Two Ages (ed. R.L. Perkins), 155–174. Macon GA: Mercer University Press.
Matuštík, M. (1993). Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas,
Kierkegaard, and Havel. New York: The Guilford Press.
Matuštík, M. and Westphal, M. (eds.) (1995). Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Morgan, M. (2003a). Adorno’s Reception of Kierkegaard: 1929–1933. Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter:
A Publication of the Edna and Howard Hong Library Number 46: 8–12.
Morgan, M. (2003b). The Aesthetic‐Religious Nexus in Theodor W. Adorno’s Interpretation of the Works
of Soren Kierkegaard. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest.
Morgan, M. (2012). Kierkegaard and Critical Theory. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
Nordentoft, K. (1978). Kierkegaard’s Psychology (trans. B. Kirmmse). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press. In Danish: Kierkegaard’s Psykologi. 1972. Copenhagen: G.E.C. GAD.
Pattison, G. (2012). Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the “Point
of Contact”. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pattison, G. and Shakespeare, S. (eds.) (1998). Kierkegaard: The Self in Society. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
Podmore, S. (2011). Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Poole, R. (1993). Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press.
Richter, G. (2007). Thought‐Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford:
Šajda, P. (2012). Theodor W. Adorno: tracing the trajectory of Kierkegaard’s unintended triumphs
and defeats. In: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: German and Scandinavian Philosophy (ed.
J. Stewart), 4–48. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.
Schulz, H. (1999). Die Theologische Rezeption Kierkegaaards in Deutschland und Dänemark. In:
Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999 (eds. N.J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser), 220–244. Berlin and New
York: Walter de Gruyter.
Sherman, D. (2001). Adorno’s Kierkegaard Debt. Philosophy and Social Criticism 27: 77–106.
Weber, S. (2001). As though the end of the world had come and gone. In: Adorno: A Critical Reader
(ed. N. Gibson), 384–399. Cambridge MA and London: Blackwell.
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MARCIA MORGAN
Wellmer, A. (1991). The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism
(trans. D. Midgley). Malden MA: Polity Press.
Westphal, M. (1987). Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society. University Park: Penn State
University Press.
Further Reading
Bensussan, G. (1995). Une Lecture dans Kierkegaard. Quinaine Litteraire 679: 21–22.
Jay, M. (1973). Dialectical Imagination. Boston, Toronto, and London: Little, Brown and Company.
Kirmmse, B.H. (ed.) (1996). Encounters with Kierkegaard. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kodalle, K.M. (1982). Hegels Geschichtsphilosophie – erörert aus der Perspektive Kierkegaards. Neue
Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 24: 277–294.
Löwith, Karl. 1985. “Rezensionen: Theodor Wiesengrund‐Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des
Ästhetischen. Tübingen (JBC Mohr), 1933.” In Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Peter Ukena, 391–
411. Stuttgart: J.B. Mezlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung.
Martinson, M. (2000). Perseverance Without Doctrine: Adorno, Self‐Critique, and the Ends of Academic
Theology. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Morgan, M. (2018). Adorno and Beckett: aesthetic mimesis and the language of “the new”. In:
Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature (eds. C. McCall and N. Ross). New York and
London: Routledge.
Nicholson, S.W. (1997). Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics. Cambridge MA and
London: MIT Press.
Pensky, M. (1993). Melancholy Dialectics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Rose, G. (1978). The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Shuler, J.A. (1989–1990). Adorno’s Kierkegaard. Telos 82: 191–196.
Schweppenhäuser, H. (1993). Kierkegaards Angriff auf die Spekulation: Eine Verteidigung. Munch:
Edition Text & Kritk.
Tillich, P. (1999). Gutachten über die Arbeit von Dr. Wiesengrund: Die Konstruktion des Ästhetischen
bei Kierkegaard. In: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11 (ed. R. Albrecht), 337–338. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
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4
Guilt and Mourning: Adorno’s Debt

to and Critique of Benjamin
Alexander Stern
A relationship between intellectuals is always something more than an intellectual rela-

tionship. It is no more immune from the strife, feeling, and material differences that per-
vade human relationships than any other. Benjamin and Adorno’s intellectual exchange,
in particular, was inflected by a reversal in their relative positions. In their early meetings
during the 1920s, especially during their famous 1929 “Königstein talks” – which took
place in a small town near Frankfurt – Benjamin had a right to come away thinking he had
gained something of a disciple, as Susan Buck‐Morss puts it (1977, 140). But Adorno’s
allegiance was in demand and, by the 1930s, which saw him established at the Institute
for Social Research as well as displaced first to Oxford and then to America by Hitler’s rise
to power, Adorno found Benjamin – without a professional home and at work in Paris on a
project that would never be completed – now dependent on him and Horkheimer for
material and editorial support.
It is against this background that Adorno found fault with what would turn out to be
some of Benjamin’s last writings before his 1940 suicide in flight from occupied France.
Although Adorno took himself to be advocating on behalf of Benjamin’s own former the-
oretical orientation, an orientation they shared, it would be more accurate to say that
Adorno responded from the place to which he had taken that orientation and wanted its
originator to follow. The fissures in their intellectual relationship emerged over issues of
culture – particularly Benjamin’s writings on film, high art, and Baudelaire – but they
were already present in Adorno’s uptake of Benjamin’s philosophy of language. While
each was loyal to the central insights discussed at Königstein and their later writings
exhibit remarkable agreement in particular details, those insights were attached to funda-
mentally different philosophical programs: in Benjamin’s case one derived from a Romantic
and religious linguistic philosophy first articulated by Johann Georg Hamann, and, in
Adorno’s case, an interpretation of Hegelian dialectic that became increasingly important
to his philosophy in the late 1930s (Lonitz 2001, 265–266).
A full accounting of this relationship – one of the most compelling in twentieth‐
century intellectual history and still profoundly relevant to a civilization and culture
struggling under the contradictions Adorno and Benjamin identified – would take a book‐
length study. Absent such an accounting, I would like to focus on three aspects of the
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Alexander Stern
r elationship: (i) Benjamin’s early philosophy of language and Adorno’s use of it in the con-
text of his Hegelian understanding of subject–object mediation; (ii) their differing under-
standings of the constellation or dialectical image, a central concept in each’s philosophical
methodology; and (iii) their sadly abbreviated confrontation, especially as it relates to
Adorno’s disappointment with Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Despite certain remarks of
Adorno’s – and much of the secondary literature on their relationship – the fundamental
issues in the break between Benjamin and Adorno lie in their respective understandings
of Benjamin’s philosophy of language, rather than in the influence of Bertolt Brecht on
Benjamin or any move on Benjamin’s part toward an “orthodox” Marxism.1
1. A Metaphysics of Language
The philosophy of language Benjamin developed in his mid‐20s provides the underpin-
nings for his entire corpus and was the focus of the first discussions between Adorno and
Benjamin.2 The works by Benjamin of central importance here are “On Language as Such
and the Language of Man,” an unpublished 1916 essay that grew out of correspondence
between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem over the relationship between language and
mathematics, and Benjamin’s withdrawn Habilitationsschrift, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, written in the mid‐1920s and published as a book in 1928, with its notoriously
difficult but very important methodological Preface.3 The influences on Benjamin’s
approach to language are diffuse, manifold, and idiosyncratically adopted; they include
the Kabbalah, Kant and neo‐Kantianism, neo‐Platonism, and Romanticism. But the
central influence is Johann Georg Hamann’s obscure, mid‐eighteenth‐century writings on
language, reason, and religion.4
Benjamin’s is not a philosophy of language in the usual sense. It does not restrict itself
to an investigation of the phenomenon of human language or its workings; it has little to
say about the sociality or intersubjectivity of language use; it is not interested in the
grammatical structure or truth conditions of given utterances. Rather, it attempts to locate
human language in a global ontology of expressive media, what Benjamin calls Sprache
überhaupt or “language as such.” The centrality of language to human life, on Benjamin’s
view, is such that to isolate it and study it independently would already be to distort it.
Hamann’s work provides the theoretical backbone for this ontology, especially through the
concept of condescension. In Lutheran theology, condescension refers to God’s humbling
or accommodating himself to human cognitive capacities, especially in the person of
Christ (it is closely related to kenosis – Christ’s “emptying” of his divine nature). Hamann
expands the scope of this idea, so that not just Christ but all of creation, including human
beings themselves, are understood as a product of God’s self‐limitation.5 This means all of
reality is communication by God to humanity. This is Hamann’s gloss on the identity of
God and the Word.
There are two important upshots of Hamann’s conception of condescension. First, it
entails a paradoxical ontology that problematizes God’s transcendence or immanence. As
both products and observers of His self‐limitation we are in no position to assert God’s tran-
scendence. It’s not clear what it would mean, since the self‐limitation of condescension is
limitation without the idea of a beyond – a self‐limitation, that is, that constitutes all of
reality. There is no outside. As Katie Terezakis (2007) writes, “For Hamann, the very idea of
condescension subverts ‘theology’ as oxymoronic” (20). Traditional theology presumes to
subject God, even if only partially, to the Word, or logos; this is a betrayal of the fact that He
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Guilt and Mourning
is all of nature, even if the theology purports to maintain it. God’s self‐humbling condescen-
sion to humankind in the act of creation requires a reciprocal epistemological humility on
our part. We are not just incapable of grasping anything transcendent, but incapable of
properly conceiving of a transcendence we are unable to grasp – not because it exists beyond
experience, but because it is always already there in our experience.6
Second, since reality is God’s communication to humankind, Hamannian condescen-
sion makes communication, or, as Benjamin calls it, communicability, the ontological
fabric of reality. Thus, in “On Language as Such,” Benjamin contends bluntly:
There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way
partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their meanings. This use of
the word “language” is in no way metaphorical. For to think that we cannot imagine anything
that does not communicate its intellectual nature in its expression is entirely meaningful; the
greater or lesser degree of consciousness that is apparently (or really) involved in such com-
munication cannot alter the fact that we cannot imagine a total absence of language in
anything. (1996–2003, vol. 1, 62)7
This is obviously not simply a thesis in the philosophy of language (though it certainly has
implications for the philosophical study of language). It is an expressive ontology, one that
serves like Hamann’s to refigure the dichotomy between immanence and transcendence.
Transcendence is not thought of as something outside the immanent expressive world, but
as the per impossibile, paradoxical completion or fulfillment of it. This impossibility of the
absence of meaning is ontologically basic for Benjamin’s understanding of reality as com-
municable, and it sets the terms for his understanding of the goals of philosophy as an
attempt to articulate and present an expressive reality.
Human language appears in this ontology not, as it does in so much philosophy of lan-
guage, as the correlate of the world – a map laid atop it, a picture corresponding to it, a set
of truth claims about it – but rather as a translation of it. Translation from one human
language into another, as Benjamin understands it, does not paradigmatically involve two
words or sets of words picking out the same content. Rather, “Translation is the transpor-
tation of one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Translation
passes through continua of transformation, not abstract regions of equivalence and simi-
larity” (1996–2003, vol. 1, 70). The theory of translation Benjamin sets out in detail in
the Preface to his own translation of poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal focuses on
the aesthetic or mimetic aspects of translation.
Benjamin uses the word “mimesis,” like the words “language” and “translation,” in a
much broader sense than usual. It refers for him not just to similarities that are recognized
by human beings and codified in language, for example, in onomatopoeic words, but
also to “nonsensuous” similarities produced by language (1996–2003, vol. 2, 720). Our
“mimetic faculty,” as he calls it in a short 1933 essay, makes us capable of producing such
similarities and stands at the foundation of our linguistic capacity. Nonsensuous similar-
ities include, for example, our sense that certain words that aren’t strictly speaking ono-
matopoeic nonetheless sound like what they mean, or the sense that letters of the alphabet
look somehow like the sounds they indicate. “It is nonsensuous similarity that establishes
the ties between what is said and what is meant,” Benjamin writes (1996–2003, vol. 2,
722). Where mainstream philosophy of language construes these aesthetic and synes-
thetic features of language as something auxiliary to the logical or practical functions of
language, for Benjamin they are absolutely foundational.
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Mimesis and translation would seem on their face to be far removed from one another,
but for Benjamin translation involves making one language like another, not just ren-
dering the sense or content of one medium of expression into another. He writes:
Translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorpo-
rate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recog-
nizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. (1996–2003,
vol. 1, 260)
The borders between individual languages are viewed as much more porous than usual.
The target language can, as it were, bring in or accommodate the home language, allow-
ing it to change the target language’s character. What might seem an infelicitous and over‐
literal rendering of a word or thought may, for Benjamin, be such an accommodation, not
merely of a new word or meaning only expressible in the home language, but of a new way
of meaning something that can already be meant in the target language. Translation can
afford the target language a new perspective on meanings it already has at its disposal; it
expands the resources of the target language. Such translations don’t provide an equivalent
but reveal both home and target language to be vastly limited in themselves; they show in
the translated work a “great longing for linguistic complementation”; and they point to the
“pure language” that both languages in themselves fall well short of. These are not limita-
tions on the designative or conceptual capacities of these languages: “pain” and “Brot” are
obviously able to pick out a class of objects as well as “bread” can (Benjamin 1996–2003,
vol. 1, 257). They are limitations in the expressive power of language: its ability to mimeti-
cally give voice to individual objects in all their particularity.
As Benjamin writes in the 1916 essay, translation has more philosophical import than
can be reflected merely in translation between languages. “It is necessary,” he writes, “to
found the concept of translation at the deepest level of linguistic theory, for it is much too
far‐reaching and powerful to be treated in any way as an afterthought” (Benjamin 1996–
2003, vol. 1, 70). This kind of translation is the manner in which always already linguistic
nature moves into human language. Of course, as with translation between languages,
meaning in nature does not move into human language perfectly, without loss. No human
language offers anything approaching a perfect and complete translation of natural
meaning – such a translation is an ideal that Benjamin equates with Adamic language.
Benjamin thus reads the Genesis stories of exile from Eden and the scattering of human
languages in Babel together. Language is removed from its perfect connection to nature
and thus doomed to become multiple. “The language of things can pass into the language
of knowledge and name only through translation – so many translations, so many lan-
guages” (1996–2003, vol. 1, 71).
But this “language of name” is only one aspect of human language for Benjamin. Real
human language refers to nature in a way that ideal, immediate Adamic language does
not. The Fall is read by Benjamin as an allegory for humankind’s exile from the immanent
language of nature. This gives language a designative aspect in addition to the aesthetic
and mimetic one represented by the name. In the Fall, Benjamin writes:
The knowledge of good and evil leaves behind the name; it is a knowledge from outside, the
uncreated imitation of the creative word. The name steps outside of itself in this knowledge:
the Fall is the birth‐hour of the human word, in which the name no longer lives uninjured,
and which steps out of naming‐language, out of its own knowing, immanent magic, in order
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to become explicitly [ausdrücklich], from the outside as it were, magic. The word must now
communicate something (outside of itself). (1996–2003, vol. 1, 71)8
The designative character of language – its ability to stand for objects rather than translate
them in the way sketched here – is thus characterized as dependent on a prior naming lan-
guage. This semantic structure is externalized in human language, which rends the name
from its immanent connection to nature and makes it into an arbitrary sign for its object.
But language, on Benjamin’s view, depends on and never completely departs from this
immanence. What’s more, the apparent externality or transcendence of human language
is a vanity. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil provides no actual knowledge to
Adam and Eve when they consume its fruit. The transgression and the knowledge it is
meant to provide are one (1996–2003, vol. 1, 71). This represents the vanity and error
that is, for Benjamin, part of the very constitution of human language, which takes its
concepts to capture the meanings of objects, though they offer only a limited translation
of them.
Benjamin’s theory of language is often read as though the pure language from which
human languages are fallen is something that existed or could exist and can be recovered.
But it’s better understood – as perhaps the Fall is itself best understood – as a way of trans-
lating an enduring and repeating structure into narrative form. Human language always
exists on the continuum, narrativized in the Fall, between name and sign. It is always char-
acterized by, on the one hand, its limitations as immanent translation and, on the other, by
its unfulfillable ambition as external, designative expression – by, in Friedrich Schlegel’s
words, “the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication” (1991, 13).
Benjamin’s theory sets the terms for his philosophical project, as it is described in
the “Epistemo‐Critical Preface” to his Trauerspiel book. There, the theory of language is,
in Benjamin’s words, “dressed up as a theory of ideas” (1994, 261). The goal is to find a
method that can militate against the leveling, reductive character of designative,
conceptual language that purports to capture its objects, and, to the extent possible, move
toward genuinely complete communication by articulating given phenomena and raising
them into the sphere of pure language – to reverse the Fall from name to sign. Benjamin
purports to achieve the goal, not through mystical or intuitive means, but through
the construction of what he calls constellations or ideas: interpretations that group
phenomenon not according to what is average in them, as concepts do, but according to
the extremes that are closed off by concepts.
2. Letting the Object Speak
While Adorno is indebted to Benjamin’s philosophy of language, he shifts the register of

Benjamin’s analysis in crucial ways and resists its mystical and Romantic background.
Benjamin’s philosophy is certainly not dependent on the literal truth of scripture, but his
work, as Benjamin puts it, “follows [the Bible] in presupposing language as an ultimate
reality, perceptible only in its manifestation, inexplicable and mystical” (1996–2003, vol.
1, 67). This leads Benjamin to understand the discrepancy between human language
and reality in linguistic or expressive terms only. His philosophy of language is part of a
project, outlined in other early essays (“On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” and
“On Perception”), of overcoming an epistemological bias he finds present in modern
philosophy – especially Kant and neo‐Kantianism – one that construes knowledge in terms
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of a subject’s possession of an object. For Benjamin, this bias is based on a misleading

analogy between knowing and experiencing. For Benjamin, we don’t have knowledge of
experience in the same way we have experience of objects. Knowledge must instead,
Benjamin argues, be defined according to the medium of its expression, language. In a
1918 essay, Benjamin writes, presaging the Trauerspiel Preface:
The task of future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regard
to the concepts of both subject and object; in other words, it is to discover the autonomous,
primeval [ureigene] sphere of knowledge in which this concept in no way continues to desig-
nate the relation between two metaphysical entities. (Benjamin 1996–2003 1:104)
This sphere is language. Truth – that is, genuine philosophical truth – as it is detailed in the
Preface is a relationship between human language and language as such. It is the articula-
tion and redemption of phenomena in the philosopher’s ideas or constellations, rather than
the kind of possession or graspable experience implied by conceptual or scientific knowledge.
Rather than extracting something from phenomena, truth gives expression to them.
Adorno follows Benjamin in much: his worries about the self‐interpretation of scientis-
tic and Enlightenment thought, his critique of conceptual language, his view of the impor-
tance of mimesis to human language, and, most of all, the importance of what Adorno
termed a “microscopic” attention to the particular that escapes the concept. But he does
not follow Benjamin in adopting the linguistic ontology inspired by Hamann, nor in seek-
ing out a primeval sphere where the metaphysical relationship between subject and object
can be overcome. Adorno agrees that prior epistemology has put too much stock in the
subject, but is not willing to therefore leave behind the sphere of the subject–object relation
entirely. Part of his project, then, involves adapting Benjamin’s insights into language to a
reformulated dialectic between subject and object. Adorno thus treads a middle path bet-
ween Benjamin’s translational theory of language and Hegelian dialectic. In Benjamin, he
finds a corrective to Hegel’s overly abstracted theory, which purports to give the object
say – to give it a negating power against our concepts – but fails to live up to its promise
(1973, 159). “If thought really yielded to the object,” Adorno writes of Hegel’s failures, “if
its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking
under the lingering eye.”9 In Hegel, on the other hand, he finds a corrective to an episte-
mology in Benjamin too willing to entirely transcend the dialectical process of mediation
between thought and its object.
Where Benjamin theorized non‐conceptual particularity using the idea of a name,
Adorno refers to it with the term “nonidentity.” Nonidentity in Adorno becomes an
essential component of a never settled dialectic between subject and object. It is the gap in
Benjamin’s philosophy of language between names and signs – the particularity names
capture and the sign does not. “Identity thinking,” which Adorno was at pains to critique,
involves taking conceptual language for truth, allowing it to completely determine the
character of the object it designates. The concept, Adorno writes, “cuts short what the
particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named and replaces this with iden-
tity” (1973, 173). In Benjamin’s philosophy, this failure takes place against the background
of an expressive ontology, where meaning in human language always falls short of the
ideal of full expressivity. For Adorno, by contrast, what is crucial about the nonidentical is
the negative pressure it exerts on concepts and conceptual thought as it is carried out by
the subject. This identity forced upon objects by concepts is “negative, wrong, and yet
simultaneously necessary moment”; it is “a stage of dialectics” (1973, 173).
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Whereas Benjamin dismisses the question of the involvement of consciousness in com-

munication in “On Language as Such,” Adorno’s philosophy can with merit be called a
“philosophy of consciousness”, as Habermas (1984, 366) described it. Adorno saw in
Benjamin’s philosophy of language a way to address internally, rather than to overcome or
sidestep, the problems of the relationship between subject and object characteristic of
German philosophy. In a 1969 essay, “Subject and Object,” Adorno rejects Romantic
approaches of the kind he locates in Benjamin, which puts its faith in a “undifferentiated
state before the subject’s formation” (1978, 499).10 Although he agrees with Benjamin
that subject and object are stultifying metaphysical concepts, which, when thought of as
cleanly separated from one another – into passive, receptive subject and independent, self‐
subsisting object – express and perpetuate ideology, they are for Adorno indispensable for
philosophical and critical analysis. The crucial thing is to always keep their interdependent
and dynamic mediation before oneself, and to resist the identarian thinking that fixes them
in place. “Both [subject and object] are and are not” (1978, 510).
Identitarian thought proceeds by absolutizing the subject pole, either in the constituting
or self‐positing of idealism or the instrumental rationality of positivism, the former of
which mimics the self‐possession and interiority of bourgeois private life and the latter of
which replicates the domination and appropriation of instrumental reason. Nonidentity
shows that these philosophical efforts to place the object under the control of the subject
are doomed to end in failure. Identitarian philosophy attempts to make the object conform
to the concepts forced on it by the subject, but the object resists in its nonidentity. What was
a weakness of human language for Benjamin – its inability to live up to the particularity of
the name after the Fall, despite the vanity of signs that purport to capture objects
completely – becomes in Adorno primarily a weakness of the human subject (whether
conceived of collectively or individually). The subject believes, implicitly or explicitly, that
its concepts wholly determine the character of objects. This shift allows Adorno to bring
Benjamin’s philosophy of language into the domain of Hegel’s dialectic.
On Benjamin’s view, despite human language’s shortcomings, its goal of capturing the
way things are – calling things by their proper names – is legitimate and its delusion in
thinking it has captured them is unavoidable. It could not be otherwise. The kind of expres-
sion human language does capably achieve would be impossible without the overreaches
and failures of self‐understanding it necessarily makes. In an analogous way, Adorno
understands the subject’s drive toward identity as necessary. Adorno’s subject is doomed to
seek identity in the same way Benjamin’s language is doomed to strive after complete com-
munication. As Adorno puts it in Negative Dialectics, “The appearance of identity is inherent
in thought itself. To think is to identify” (1973, 5).
One central consequence of Adorno’s adaptation of Benjamin, his movement from a
translational to a dialectical analysis, is that a contradiction emerges in the failure of the
subject to understand the object. No such contradiction is present in the failure of human
language to translate language as such, since there is no conscious agent imposing con-
cepts onto objects. Conceptual thought fails in a similar way in Benjamin as it does in
Adorno, and conceptual understanding, too, conditions and truncates experience. But the
character of this failure is fundamentally different. For Benjamin, the failure is one of
articulation, a mistranslation rather than a dialectical contradiction in the experience of a
subject. This leads to fundamental differences in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s prescriptions
for how to respond to and redeem the failure.
Hegel’s dialectic is ultimately false for Adorno because like all idealists Hegel stacks the
deck in favor of the subject. Hegel is convinced that reason unfolds progressively through
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history and, therefore, despite Hegel’s insights into the logic of the relation between subject
and object, his system collapses into its own form of subjectivist, identitarian thinking.
Hegel’s system purports to give the object impetus: the object is meant to negate the fixed
interpretation imposed on it by conceptual thought. This determinate negation is more
than a mere “no”; it has a particular content, namely the particularity in the object that
outruns its concept. In Hegel this determinate negation triggers on reason’s part a new
attempt to grasp the object, one that bears the trace of and amends the previous failure,
and is therefore progressive.11
In Adorno, this negation remains determinate – it has content – but there is nothing in
the structure of negation that triggers the new progressive standpoint central to Hegel’s
philosophy of history. “The negation is not an affirmation itself as it is to Hegel” (Adorno
1973, 65). “This positivity springs from the method – not from the thing, as in Hegel’s view
it should” (1973, 159). Hegel purports to let the object contradict the identitarian
conceptual frameworks that force nature to fit their mold, but he only finds in his dialectic
what he’s already put there: a series of transitions leading to an endpoint wherein the
rational and the real coincide. Under these conditions the object is not really allowed to
speak for itself; it only repeats what the method has told it to say. “To use identity,” Adorno
writes, “as a palliative for dialectical contradiction, for the expression of the insolubly non-
identical, is to ignore what the contradiction means” (1973, 160).
Adorno marshals Benjamin’s philosophy to diagnose Hegel’s failure to truly let the
object speak and to determine what contradiction really means. “Contradiction,” he writes
“is nonidentity under the aspect of identity” (1973, 5). That is, nonidentity is the nega-
tivity experienced when identitarian concepts fail to fully determine their objects. But no
positive result is triggered by this negation; no process is set into motion by the concrete
experience of contradiction; no new standpoint is necessitated that will be better able to
bring the real under the conceptual determination of the rational. The world need not fall
in line.
In Adorno, the failures of human concepts in relation to the particular and the experi-
ence of contradiction they trigger lead to a feeling of guilt. As a subject experiencing the
negativity of nonidentity, I feel guilty that I have been imposing my will on objects, and I
may feel responsible to make good on my debt to the nonidentical (O’Connor 2004, 42).
Dialectics properly understood “is the consistent sense of non‐identity. It does not begin by
taking a stand‐point. My thought is driven to it by its own inevitable insufficiency, by my
guilt of what I am thinking” (Adorno 1973, 5).
Benjamin, on the other hand, tends to express these failures of human language more
elegiacally. The original sin of externalized language implies guilt of a kind, but Benjamin
places the lack in language and nature rather than in the subject. Whereas the animals
named by Adam in the Garden of Eden “leap away” with “nobility,” as Friedrich Müller
puts it, in the knowledge that they have been properly named, nature in the fallen world
“mourns” (1996–2003, vol. 1, 72–73). Things are “overnamed” by human language. The
proliferation of fallen human languages leaves things with a multitude of different names,
which have “withered” – lost any connection to the thing – and can now be substituted
arbitrarily for one another, since they all transmit the same content. There is thus an “over-
precision that obtains in the tragic relationship between the languages of human speakers”
(Benjamin 1996–2003, vol. 1, 73). Languages appear equivalent to one another and
nature is buried under the weight of a thousand names. It mourns its own reduction to
silence beneath concepts. For Benjamin, philosophical redemption involves producing a
vision of things that puts them in the right perspective so their lament can be heard – turning
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them into “ruins,” as he puts it. Philosophical insight brings what has been silenced to
expression. For Adorno, on the other hand, the object directly contradicts the subject.
Philosophy therefore involves responding to the subjective feeling of guilt produced by
this contradiction and making good by reforming subjective thought in light of the
nonidentical.
3. Redeeming the Phenomena
For both philosophers, the project of redemption involves, in some fashion, reversing the
damage done by concepts, rescuing the phenomena from their reductive interpretations by
drawing attention to the way they are received and what escapes the remit of the concept,
the nonidentical. Adorno follows aspects of Benjamin’s procedure as it is laid out in the
“Epistemo‐Critical Preface” – but again with crucial modifications. In the Trauerspiel book,
Benjamin draws attention to those extreme elements of baroque Trauerspiele that outpace
the classical concept of tragic drama, to which the plays had been subjected by literary
critics (Benjamin1998, 51–53). The constellation formed out of all these extreme ele-
ments produces for Benjamin a kind of inductive truth that makes clear – or, at least,
clearer – the expressive relations obtaining between these works of art, the social world in
which they were produced, and the politics and expressionist art of Benjamin’s own time.
This method, Benjamin writes, requires something in between the analytical skill of the
scientist, with whom the philosopher shares “an interest in the extinguishing of the merely
empirical,” and the ingenuity of the artist, with whom he shares “the task of presentation”
(1998, 32). The philosopher’s creation – variously called by Benjamin an idea, a constella-
tion, or a dialectical image – must be at once extra‐phenomenal, immanent, and non‐
conceptual. Like the astral constellation, Benjamin’s constellation is more than the
individual empirical phenomena that make it up. Both kinds of constellation remain
immanent in the phenomena: the stars are not a symbol referring to something transcen-
dent but compose the constellation, which, though more than the individual stars, is not
above or outside them. And finally, the constellation cannot be understood as a concept
under which a group of individuals fall. The constellation preserves, and redeems, the indi-
viduality of its constituent parts. Whereas the individual is averaged down in the concept
and forced to sacrifice the extremes that set it apart from other individuals, in the constel-
lation it is prized for precisely those extremes that set it apart.
This does not mean that the philosopher’s presentation of ideas takes place indepen-
dently of concepts. As “On Language as Such” makes clear, the leveling of phenomena by
concepts is inherent to the human language in which the presentation of ideas takes place.
In the constellation, however, concepts are deployed against their own tendency. As
Adorno puts it, “Concepts alone can achieve what the concept prevents” (1973, 53). The
philosopher dislocates concepts, removing them from the self‐evident, everyday context in
which their narrow interpretations hold sway, and grouping them together in new con-
nections so that the idea can be developed or articulated out of them. The redemption of
the phenomena consists precisely in their placement and configuration in this new induc-
tive sphere. Unlike the ideality of concepts, Platonic ideas, or Hegelian forms of conscious-
ness, the ideality of Benjaminian ideas is constructed from the bottom up. In the
construction of ideas, the phenomenality of the empirical phenomena is extinguished or
“burned up” like a meteor entering the atmosphere (Benjamin 1998, 32). This requires an
authenticity not found in top‐down philosophical theories, which force phenomena to fit
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their strictures and ignore those that don’t. The constellation does not cover the phe-
nomena like a concept, but since it defines the extremes of a given idea, the constellation
“absorbs” the phenomena; their history must be able to be “read off of ” the idea (Benjamin
1998, 46–47).
The idea of Trauerspiel is therefore an essence that represents all of its historical possibil-
ities, not just the average of all of them. Even though the phenomena that make up an idea
are empirically real, in the idea they become something virtual, absorbed into the idea. In
the Trauerspiel book, these were the extreme examples in baroque tragic dramas that could
not be fitted beneath the concept of tragedy. In the Arcades Project, they were to be the com-
modities and cultural objects of eighteenth‐century French capitalism out of which
Benjamin proposed to construct the idea of modernity.
The result of Benjamin’s method is not precisely a return to Adamic names and the per-
fect relationship between human language and the natural world, but a return to what
Benjamin calls a primordial way of seeing or apprehending (ein Urvernehmen). It is a way
of using concepts to see non‐conceptually. “In this renewal the original mode of appre-
hending words is restored” (Benjamin 1998, 37). As with translation, where grouping all
the words for an object in different languages allow us to remediate the conceptual
reduction carried out by our own language (while at the same time using concepts to do it),
ideas elevate phenomena into the purer linguistic air of the name. This recovery involves a
return to something of the mimetic relationship with the natural world represented for
Benjamin by Eden. In the idea, as Benjamin puts it in a letter to Adorno, “everything that
was mythically paralyzed as textual evidence comes alive” (1994, 588). The presentation
of the constellation produces the very vision that is required to see it. It thus also fulfills
Benjamin’s desire for an epistemology that finds a sphere for knowledge neutral with
respect to subject and object, since the philosopher presents truth out of objects rather
than extracting it from them. The truth is neither something he finds in the object nor puts
into it. It is, as Benjamin puts it, the “death of intention” (Benjamin 1998, 36).
Finally, the idea is also a monad, Benjamin says, invoking Leibniz’s concept of a world
made up of microscopic atoms, each separate and distinct but at the same time reflecting
or expressing its relation to all the others – expressing, that is, the whole. Redemption in
the idea is also a way of making things whole, a restoration of a living, mimetic world from
out of a fragmented conceptual one. “Every idea,” Benjamin writes, “contains the image of
the world. The purpose of the presentation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated
outline of this image of the world” (1998, 48). The idea reveals a world that hangs together
in terms of expressive relations – as a medium of communication – rather than isolated
conceptual and causal ones. Benjamin’s holism strives to restore individual phenomena to
their place in the whole.
Already during the composition of the Trauerspiel book Benjamin began to see affinities
between his own method and Marx’s analysis of the relationship between the superstruc-
ture and the base, at least as it was characterized in Lukács’ writing (1994, 247–248).
Benjamin would eventually conclude that Marx’s contention that the base causally deter-
mined the character of the cultural superstructure had to be reformulated. The super-
structure is not the effect but the “expression” of the economic base (Benjamin 1999, 392,
854–855). A significant goal of the Arcades Project was to demonstrate through the pre-
sentation of ideas the manner in which superstructural phenomena expressed the condi-
tions of the base and “reacted upon” them (1999, 470). Benjamin’s book intended to deal
with the “expressive character” not just of the “earliest department stores, advertisements,
and so on” but also “the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, […]
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architecture, [and] machines” themselves (1999, 460). It is this expressive understanding

of materialism that Adorno found insufficiently dialectical in Benjamin’s writing. But it
should be immediately clear how far this places Benjamin from an orthodox Marxist
position, since the cultural products of the bourgeoisie will not appear to his gaze as
simple ideology offering cover and justification for its economic position, but as an
expression – what he calls a “dream image” – of those conditions.12 Moreover, the products
under expressive investigation included, for Benjamin, Marx’s writings themselves.
Adorno’s understanding of the constellation retains much of Benjamin’s sense: the
constellation is a means for recovering a fuller, mimetic, and particular relationship to the
object; it requires, rather than any sort of deductive logic, an aesthetically minded and
essayistic pursuit of the object that is always prepared to start anew and approach the
object from a different angle – “method is detour” as Benjamin puts it (1998, 28); and,
finally, constellations give expression or present the non‐conceptual that was “cut away”
by the concept – they “inherit some hope of the name” (1973, 53). However, as with the
nonidentical, Adorno rejects the subject–object neutrality of the constellation and places
it within the context of a dialectic between subject and object. It offers Adorno a replacement
for Hegel’s ultimately subjectivist and overly optimistic “negation of the negation.” These
differences ultimately drive Adorno’s critique of Benjamin.
Of the relationship between constellations and Hegelian dialectic, Adorno writes:
There is no step‐by‐step progression from the concepts to a more general cover concept.
Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. The constellation illuminates the specific side
of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a
burden. (1973, 162)
Instead of the failures of conceptual thought progressing step by step toward identity in
which we finally reach a concept adequate to the object, the failed concepts, as Adorno
conceives of them, gather around the object they cannot capture in a constellation that
more accurately represents it. The constellation is thus for Adorno a moment or a discovery
in the mediation between subject and object. In the constellation the philosopher finds the
proper approach toward conceptual thought, one according to which he approaches the
nonidentical not by capturing it under a single concept as Hegel purports to, but by
“circl[ing] the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open […] not to a single
key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers” (Adorno 1973, 163). The use of
the metaphor – the kind Benjamin was at pains to critique in the “Epistemo‐Critical Preface”
(1998, 28) – makes evident that truth for Adorno remains – at least from Benjamin’s
perspective – in something of an intentional relationship between subject and object.13
Because we remain ineluctably within the mediated relationship between subject and
object, the constellation does not imply as radical a revision of the philosophical project for
Adorno as it does for Benjamin. It does not abrogate the subject–object structure of knowledge
but is assimilated by Adorno to a nuanced, mediated version of it, one that refuses the com-
pleteness of Hegel’s system. Thus, Adorno writes, “We need no epistemological critique [of
Benjamin’s kind] to make us pursue constellations” (1973, 166). Moreover, “we need not
start out from a work’s own content,” as Benjamin did, nor need we go so far as to “take the
very concept of truth for a constellation” (1973, 164).14 The constellation is rather another
means of pursuing the truth we are driven to once we experience the contradictions
that identitarian thought engenders and learn their lesson. They are a penance for the
guilt subjects feel amidst the slew of our repeated misinterpretations, rather than a way of
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ournfully recollecting and reconstructing the phenomena. They do not represent the
m
fundamental epistemological reorientation that Benjamin pursues. Finally, whereas for
Adorno “the search for [constellations] is forced upon us by the real course of history”
(Adorno 1973, 166) – it is a necessary response to the contradictions generated by conceptual
thought – for Benjamin, by contrast, constellations are “not progression but image, suddenly
emergent” (Benjamin 1999, 462). The constellation lights up in a flash of insight once it has
been constructed. It is not methodically pursued by the philosopher cornering the object.
The constellation as Adorno conceives of it plays a role not just in the mediation bet-
ween subject and object but also in that between individual and society as a whole, which
reciprocally produce and reproduce one another. Here, Benjamin’s use of Leibniz’s monad-
ology also gets a new gloss from Adorno. In Benjamin, as we saw, the flash of insight pro-
duced by the constellation shows the idea to be a monad, lifting it into the air of pure
language where it is seen as an “abbreviated outline” of the “image of the world” as a
whole. In Adorno, to consider a phenomenon or consciousness itself as a monad is to con-
sider it in relation to – that is, as reproducing – society as a whole (2005, Section 97).
Adorno conceives of this relation dialectically – in terms of mediation rather than in terms
of expression. Adorno’s monadology, too, drives a reconstruction of the relationship bet-
ween base and superstructure in Marx. It is not to be understood causally (or expressively),
but dialectically as an ongoing process where the social whole produces subjects and sub-
jects reproduce the social whole. This requires a far more robust Marxist and Freudian
theoretical structure than Benjamin’s expressive model. Superstructural phenomena and
the consciousness of the bourgeois subject are to be shown to be internalizations of the
structure of society that produce false consciousness.
4. Guilt or Mourning
Adorno’s project is ultimately irreconcilable with the one sketched in Benjamin’s Arcades
Project. Benjamin was interested in how different phenomena in nineteenth‐century
France – Fourier’s phalansteries, Baudelaire’s poems, the Paris arcades themselves – give
expression to certain social conditions and even take on the expressive character of the
new means of production. In the process of presenting these phenomena in a constella-
tion, Benjamin hoped to produce the flashes of recognition that would reveal their histor-
ical and social significance for the present – in particular to show how ill‐interpreted they
are by progressive, historicist theories of history that narrow them down into mere steps
on the way to the present. Benjamin writes of his procedure:
Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. the rags, the
refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own:
by making use of them. (1998, 460)
Adorno takes him to task for this abdication of theoretical interpretation in letters responding
to material from the Arcades Project, including in 1935 an outline for the project published as
“Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century,” and in 1938 Benjamin’s study “The Paris of the
Second Empire in Baudelaire.”15 Of the methodology exhibited in the latter, Adorno writes:
[…] I consider it methodologically unfortunate to give conspicuous individual characteristics

from the realm of the superstructure a “materialistic” turn by relating them to corresponding
62
Guilt and Mourning
characteristics of the substructure in an unmediated and even causal manner. The material-
istic determination of cultural characteristics is possible only when mediated by the total
process. (Benjamin 1994, 581–582, italics original)
Adorno goes on to object to Benjamin’s characterization of a tax on wine and its relation-
ship to certain poems of Baudelaire’s: “the recurrence of these motifs in Baudelaire’s
oeuvre cannot be explained other than by the overall social and economic tendency of the
age” (Benjamin 1994, 582). The result in Benjamin’s writing is an abnegation of the work
of theory that tracks the mediation between cultural production and economic conditions.
Benjamin’s “theological motif of calling things by their proper name tends toward a wide‐
eyed presentation of the bare facts” (Benjamin 1994, 582).
In his response, Benjamin defends his method by reiterating the understanding of the
relationship between theory and the practice of interpretation developed in the Trauerspiel
book. He described that investigation in a letter to Scholem as “mobiliz[ing] its own theory
of knowledge,” and he expected the same from the Arcades Project (1994, 482). To Adorno
he writes of an “antagonism” between his own philosophical inclinations and dialectical
materialism, but construes the tension as productive, rather than requiring a choice.
The problem posed by this work consists in overcoming this antagonism and has to do with the
work’s construction. What I mean is that speculation will enter upon its necessarily bold flight
with some prospect of success only if it seeks its source of strength purely in construction
instead of donning the waxen wings of esotericism alone. (Benjamin 1994, 587)
Thus, what appears to Adorno as the “wide‐eyed presentation of the bare facts” is, for
Benjamin, the necessary micrological and philological investigation and reconstruction of
the material that will itself engender the theory that Adorno wants applied to it from the
first. “The direct inference” from the wine duty to Baudelaire’s poetry (which Adorno
admits might have a basis in Baudelaire’s genuine motivations) thus does not imply a
causal connection between base and superstructure but is a “juncture […] legitimately
established in the philological context” (Benjamin 1994, 588). It involves an attention to
detail that allows the poem “to come into its own” so that the work can subsequently “be
touched, or perhaps even shaken, by interpretation.” This, for Benjamin, is letting the
object speak, not in order to correct a misbegotten philosophical methodology, but to see
what it has to say, what affinities it will engender once freed from the rigid facticity of
everyday interpretation.
This, again, shows that the feeling of guilt, for Adorno, that is forced on the subject
by the experience of the nonidentical is for Benjamin something – a mournful way of
seeing – that can only be produced by the examination and construction of the phenomena
themselves. In his letter, Benjamin returns to a formulation from Adorno’s 1930
Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard, the first of Adorno’s works written under Benjamin’s
influence. There, Adorno writes of an astonishment that indicates “the most profound
insight into the relationship of dialectic, myth, and image” (1994, 588). The experience of
astonishment in the face of nonidentity dialectically reveals the constraints of mythical
thinking and sets the stage for the philosopher’s constellating response. But Benjamin
proposes that the sentence be amended to read “astonishment is the preeminent object of
such an insight.” In a way, Benjamin here takes Adorno’s critique of Hegel even further.
Not only does our negative interaction with the object not guarantee the progressive
development of our understandings of it, but we cannot count on the object to contradict
our understanding at all. The object only speaks to the kind of philosophical attention that
63
Alexander Stern
refuses the self‐evident conceptual interpretations of it and places it in the constellations in

which it can finally speak. The object does not induce guilt, but rather requires mourning.
Adorno demonstrates that Benjamin’s insights could be severed from their foundation in his
idiosyncratic expressive ontology and made to play a significant role in unraveling the riddles
of traditional epistemology and philosophy. Benjamin himself, however, remained unwilling.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Negative Dialectics (trans. E. B. Ashton). New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T.W. (1977). The actuality of philosophy. Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 31: 120–
133. https://doi.org/10.3817/0377031120.
Adorno, T.W. (1978). Subject and object. In: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (trans. A. Arato and
E. Gebhardt), 497–511. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Adorno, T.W. (1981). Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society (trans. Samuel and S. Weber). Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2005). Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Ephcott). London:
Verso.
Benjamin, W. (1994). The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–40 (eds. G. Scholem and T.W.
Adorno). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Benjamin, W. (1996–2003). Selected Writings. 4 vols. (eds. M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings).
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
Benjamin, W. (1998). The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. J. Osborne). London: Verso.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project (trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin). Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press.
Buck‐Morss, S. (1977). The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the
Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free Press.
Eiland, H. and Jennings, M.W. (2014). Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Friedlander, E. (2012). Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, Reason and the Rationalization of
Society (trans. T. McCarthy). Boston: Beacon Press.
Hamann, J.G. (1967). Socratic Memorabilia (trans. J.C. O’Flaherty). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Hamann, J.G. (2007). Writings on Philosophy and Language (trans. K. Heynes). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lonitz, H. (ed.) (2001). Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence 1928–
1940 (trans. N. Walker). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Menninghaus, W. (1980). Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
Muller‐Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A Biography (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge: Polity Press.
O’Connor, B. (2004). Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Rosen, M. (1982). Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schlegel, F. (1991). Philosophical Fragments (trans. P. Firchow). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Taylor, C. (2016). The Language Animal. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press.
Terezakis, K. (2007). The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759–1801.
Oxon, UK: Routledge.
Tiedemann, R. (1999). Dialectics at a standstill. In: The Arcades Project (trans. H. Eiland and
K. McLaughlin). Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
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Further Reading
Buck‐Morss, S. (1977). The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the
Foster, R. (2007). Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Friedlander, E. (2012). Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Hanssen, B. and Benjamin, A. (eds.) (2002). Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. New York: Continuum.
Jay, M. (1984). Adorno. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Steiner, U. (2010). Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought (trans. M. Winkler).
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Notes
1 Adorno was maligned undeservedly in 1968 for allegedly trying to underplay the Marxist
dimension of Benjamin’s work. See Muller‐Doohm (2005, 457–459). If anything, as I’ll argue in
what follows, Adorno gave – at least in his own interpretation of Benjamin’s writings – the
supposedly orthodox Marxist elements of Benjamin’s work too much weight. On Adorno’s
worries about Benjamin’s relationship with Brecht, see Muller‐Doohm (2005, 218–219) and
Buck‐Morss (1977, esp. 140–146).
2 As will become clear, I am at odds with a common interpretation of Benjamin’s writing career
that periodizes it into an early, mystical stage and a later, Marxist one. In this respect, my inter-
pretation shares an orientation with Eli Friedlander’s (2012), which sees in Benjamin’s writings
a continuous, sustained intellectual development despite their occasional nature necessitated by
his circumstances.
3 The book was submitted for Habilitation without the entire Preface (which was included in the
1928 published version). The committee at Frankfurt found it incomprehensible, including Max
Horkheimer, then an assistant professor. See Eiland and Jennings (2014, 231–232).
4 Hamann’s work, similarly manifold in its sources, is also a partial influence on Benjamin’s inter-
pretations of Kant and the Kabbalah. See Menninghaus (1980, 192). Hamann’s work is often
cited at the origins of a loose tradition in German philosophy of language that Charles Taylor and
others have called “expressivism,” which includes works of J.G. Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt,
and Friedrich Schlegel among others, and has an ongoing, if somewhat subterranean, influence
in nineteenth‐century and twentieth‐century German philosophy, including on Benjamin and
Wittgenstein. See Taylor (2016) and Terezakis (2007).
5 See esp. Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia (Hamann 1967), Aesthetic in Nuce (Hamann 2007), and
his essays responding to Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language: namely, The Last Will and
Testament of the Knight of the Rose‐Cross, Philological Ideas and Doubts, and To the Solomon of
Prussia, all translated in Hamann (2007). See also Terezakis (2007, 29–31).
6 The kind of immanence implied by Hamann’s understanding of condescension is difficult, if not
impossible, to conceive of. A remark of Wittgenstein’s – made in a different, but not unrelated
context – I think nicely encapsulates the problem. “The great difficulty,” he writes, “is not to pre-
sent the matter as if there were something one couldn’t do.”
7 When necessary for clarity, I have modified translations of Benjamin’s writings.
8 As he notes in a letter to Martin Buber, Benjamin means the word “magical” in the sense of
“unmediated” (Benjamin 1994, 80). This magical or unmediated understanding of linguistic
movement is at the crux of his later disagreements with Adorno.
9 Although Negative Dialectics was written long after Benjamin’s death, it contains the most
complete and perspicuous evidence for how Adorno understood and adapted Benjamin’s ideas,
and the best evidence for understanding his confrontation with Benjamin.
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10 See also Adorno’s discussion of the “evaporation” of the subject before Benjamin’s “Medusan
glance” in his essay on Benjamin (Adorno 1981, 235–236).
11 For criticism of Adorno’s interpretations of determinate negation, Hegel’s positive dialectic, and
the standpoint of absolute knowledge, see Rosen (1982, esp. 155 and 160–69).
12 For discussion of this passage, see Tiedemann (1999, 939–940).
13 This despite Adorno’s use of Benjamin’s notion of unintentional truth. See Adorno (1977) and
Buck‐Morss (1977, 78–81).
14 Adorno’s model for the construction of constellations in Negative Dialectics is not Benjamin but
Max Weber, for whom, sociological concepts are “gradually composed” from “individual parts to
be taken from historical reality. The place of definitive conceptual comprehension cannot, there-
fore, be the beginning of the inquiry, only the end” (quoted in Adorno 1973, 163).
15 The central issue in the former letter is Benjamin’s understanding of the “dream image,” which
Adorno interprets, dubiously, as a psychologizing of the dialectical image that fetishizes bourgeois
consciousness rather than critiquing it as false consciousness. Adorno writes, “The intérieur
must be made transparent as social function and its self‐containedness must be exposed as
illusion” (Benjamin 1994, 502). Benjamin’s response makes clear that dream images are not
conventionally psychological, but extreme expressions of dawning modernity: the “stars” or
material he was to construct into constellations (Benjamin 1994, 508). See also Friedlander
(2012, 100–103).
66
5
Adorno and the Second Viennese School

SHERRY D. LEE
Music looms large in the philosophical, aesthetic, and sociological writings of Theodor W.
Adorno, and in the musical sphere he is best known as a critical champion of the so‐called
Second Viennese School, that trio of composers that included Arnold Schoenberg and his
pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. The concept of this School has stood as a kind
of metonym for music’s historical “progress” into modernism – a break from traditional
tonal musical language into atonality, followed by the imposition of Schoenberg’s twelve‐
tone system – and the Philosophy of New Music (Adorno 2006 [1949], Adorno’s most
famous book on music, positions this radical brand of musical modernism as aesthetically
reflecting the truths of modern society. But though he was always a strong proponent of
the avant‐garde, the familiar, synoptic view of Adorno as a committed Second Viennese
School apologist is partial: his musical background and his own creative activity as a com-
poser, his intellectual influences, personal experiences, and the developments in his critical
thought all combined to forge a less‐than‐straightforward path toward a complex philos-
ophy of the New Music and its socio‐historical position. And that path, which was no less
divergent than Adorno’s sometimes‐conflicted relationship to the Schoenberg School
itself, took new turns even after the Philosophy had been written.
1. The Path: Modernity, Music, and the New (Adorno and Berg)
One narrative of Adorno’s relationship to the Second Viennese School, a particularly

imaginative account, could begin, as so many lifelong passions do, with a summer
vacation:
In the guest room of the Post [Hotel] next to the upright piano with the Mozart medallion
hung a guitar. It was missing one or two strings and the rest were badly out of tune. I could not
play the guitar, but I grasped the strings all at once and let them vibrate, intoxicated by the
dark dissonance, probably the first I had ever heard with so many tones, years before I heard a
note of Schoenberg. I felt that music should be composed to sound like that guitar. Later, when
I read [Georg] Trakl’s verse “traurige Gitarren rinnen,” it reminded me of that broken guitar
in Amorbach. (Adorno 1977, 306)
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SHERRY D. LEE
Could this fragmentary travelog, blending memory, nostalgia, and self‐historicizing at a

distance of some 40 years, be a sort of point of origin for Adorno’s unflagging investment
in the musical avant‐garde? After all, the engagement must have begun relatively early.
About a third of Adorno’s vast output, according to Richard Leppert (2002, 13), is devoted
to musical subjects, and while these range across a wide historical span, it is clear that from
his very first published writings on music – which date to his late teens, over a decade prior
to his first philosophical publication – there is a notable focus on the new. He attended con-
certs constantly, but the contemporary offerings occupied his attention. Bernhard Sekles,
Adorno’s own Frankfurt composition teacher, and the revolutionary Béla Bartók were
among the subjects of his earliest critiques to make it into print in 1921; already in
February of 1922 he was reviewing Schoenberg’s radical Pierrot lunaire as performed in
Frankfurt, and by the mid‐1920s he had published articles on each member of that trio of
composers whose works would command most of his musical attention from then on:
Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Amidst the wealth of newly‐composed music to be
heard – and Adorno was highly knowledgeable about it – theirs became “the New Music.”
Contrived speculations about primal scenes of dissonance aside, it is not entirely clear
just when this predilection developed. Certainly there were many ingredients in place to
predispose him to what could be considered most new, modern, and advanced in the sphere
of his youth – various surrounding conditions that shaped the young Adorno’s perspec-
tives on society and culture of which music was a part. Stefan Müller‐Doohm notes that “a
revolutionary mood was widespread” around that time, and that Adorno’s teenaged pre-
occupation with “the theory of the decay of bourgeois culture” was in the air, to the point
that it was “impossible to overlook” (2005, 37). Less generally, Müller‐Doohm gives appro-
priate weight to the potent influence of Siegfried Kracauer, begun when Adorno was about
15 years old. Kracauer’s role of philosophical mentor, guiding the young Adorno’s reading
of Kant and other thinkers, was vital in shaping Adorno’s intellectual orientation. Also
clearly decisive was his reading of György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, and perhaps espe-
cially his encounter at age 17 with Ernst Bloch’s valorization, in The Spirit of Utopia, of the
revolutionary attitude of artistic expressionism, its utopianism and its effects of cultural
“demolition” – the latter a term that Adorno used later to discuss modernist music, such as
the effect of radical music‐dramatic works on the status of the ultra‐traditional genre of
opera (Adorno 1976, 73). Bloch provided not only an example of the championship of the
expressionism with which the early‐atonal Schoenberg especially was associated but also
a model of philosophical writing that assimilated itself to its object and was thus revolu-
tionary in its thought and expression as well as its content (Adorno 1991a, 1991b, 1992;
Edwards 2013; Lee 2017). Max Paddison unerringly highlights, too, the sociology of Max
Weber as having fundamentally shaped Adorno’s music‐aesthetic thought (Paddison
1993, 2, 13), though the die seems already to have been cast before Weber’s writings
directly influenced Adorno’s developing sociology of music.
Still, amidst all this intellectual predisposition toward cultural and artistic progress as
against traditionalism, there apparently lacks any surviving anecdote of either a systematic
indoctrination by a musical mentor or a thunderbolt listening experience of conversion to
the new – from the historical, classical tonality to the radical, the dissonant, the atonal
bouleversement that Schoenberg’s name connoted. Music had always been there, to be sure,
but the music that abounded in Adorno’s early years was, unsurprisingly, that of the
canonic eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was always surrounded by an abun-
dance of it. Most of the biographical record gives an impression of a steady youthful diet of
Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven – sometimes retrospectively (and precariously) alluded to
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ADORNO AND THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL
as “the First Viennese School” – as the constants among other classics, both in life at home
or out at concerts. Adorno’s brief but evocative essay of 1933 entitled “Four Hands, Once
Again” gives prominent place to Schubert, and testifies more generally to the centrality of
the music of the common practice era in his childhood and his musical upbringing at the
piano, playing duets with his mother and his aunt. “That music we are accustomed to call
classical I came to know as a child through four‐hand playing,” he asserts. “Four‐hand
playing was the gift the geniuses of the bourgeois nineteenth century placed at my cradle
at the beginning of the twentieth” (Adorno 2005, 1). But how his tastes traveled from the
“First” Vienna School, so to speak, to the Second is never explicitly recounted. It is almost
as though, in the wake of the First World War, Adorno suddenly emerged fully formed as a
devoted expert and critic of that avant‐garde whose assault on musical convention had
begun a little over a decade prior. His first personal encounter with Alban Berg, at the
Frankfurt première of Berg’s Three Fragments from Wozzeck that Hermann Scherchen
conducted in the summer of 1924, was clearly momentous, and ultimately decisive in
terms of Adorno’s direct relationship to the Second Viennese School. He followed up by
moving to Vienna a few months later to study composition with Berg, but really, by that
time, his dedication to the New Music was already fixed: it was indeed the motivator for
that decisive meeting, for Scherchen, who Adorno already knew, made the introduction to
Berg after the concert at Adorno’s request (Müller‐Doohm 2005, 84).
Accounts of Adorno’s music‐filled life, then, apparently flow nearly seamlessly from his
childhood attachment to established repertoires from Johann Sebastian Bach to Johannes
Brahms, to his teenaged critical involvement, and a highly‐informed one at that, with the
likes of Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, and Schoenberg. The logical directness of
such a musical path would probably have appeared most evident to Schoenberg himself,
who always insisted that his own music’s historical position was the culmination of the
great Austro–German tradition, though it would only be fair to acknowledge that
Schoenberg, who disliked Adorno, would surely have been less than delighted by this
notion of the latter’s own path as so perfect an exemplar of the musical‐historical inevita-
bility to which the Second Viennese School laid claim (Auner 2004). However, the work of
music historians of recent decades has increasingly enabled us to recognize that musical
modernism, even the Viennese sort, was not a monolith, was never really circumscribed by
the longstanding doctrinaire narrative of atonal and serial revolutions that once domi-
nated, to the virtual exclusion of most other aesthetic directions from the accepted histo-
riographical record (Hailey 2010, ix). In that light we might also imagine how Adorno
could have been distinctly inclined toward the musically new in his era and yet have
followed that inclination in a different musical direction – if, for instance, he had studied
with someone who never took the “atonal path,” like Franz Schreker, teacher of Adorno’s
close contemporary Ernst Krenek. Along similar lines, it may be worth recalling that Berg
himself had considered studying with the more conservative Hans Pfitzner before
beginning with Schoenberg instead. The point is that, pace Webern’s The Path to the New
Music (1975), an impassioned and visionary account of a long, inexorable march through
Western music history directly toward the Second Viennese moment, even Adorno’s path
to a particular brand of the musically new can scarcely be considered audible, let alone
necessary, from within his traditional musical beginnings.
Joseph Auner (1999) has compellingly demonstrated how the twentieth century’s most
enduring and dominant narrative of musical modernism effectively turned the notion of
the Second Viennese School from a description of a composerly grouping into a historical
concept. The question of Adorno’s relationship to that School, then, needs to be considered
69
SHERRY D. LEE
on multiple levels: in terms of music certainly, but also in terms of the members of that
group as at once connected to and distinct from this overarching idea – not least because,
as Leppert has noted of Adorno’s arrival to study with Berg in Vienna, “the Schoenberg
‘circle,’ which he hoped to join, turned out to be not much of one” (2002, 4). And perhaps
now that this particular Schoenberg‐specific formulation of the Viennese trio’s moniker
has appeared here, it is worth noting the frequency of the kind of metonymic slippage that
occurs in the rough equation of the so‐called “School” or “circle” with Schoenberg, its
leader or principal. The senses in which this is both a true and an untrue representation
seem nearly equally important. Perhaps it is not merely obvious, on the one hand, nor
wilfully missing the point of the very idea of a “circle,” on the other, to suggest that
Adorno’s relationship to each of the three principal, or first‐generation, members of the
Second Viennese School was distinct, and was important for different reasons and at
different historical moments.
According to Berg, at least, Adorno was one of a very few who not only could be
thought of as musically associated with the Vienna set, but who in fact must be under-
stood as belonging there: “worthy of being grouped with the Schönberg school (and
nowhere else!)” (Berg and Schoenberg 1987, 355). Alongside this possibly controversial
assertion – made to Schoenberg and thus almost surely received with ambivalence at
best – is the indisputable fact that Adorno himself bears no small responsibility for the
lasting association between the very idea of “New Music” and the concept of an avant‐
garde as specifically linked with this given group of composers. They had actually been
called a (“young”) Vienna School (Wellesz 1912) for at least a decade before Adorno pub-
licly wrote about their music, let alone joined them in the metropolis toward which he,
and they all, felt so equivocal; but he is unquestionably responsible for the most influen-
tial account of the group and its historical significance. However, Adorno’s own
philosophical resistance to the concept and identity thinking – toward the reductiveness
of conceptual thought in philosophy, toward the restricted capacity for the language of
conceptual thinking to express experience – throws into relief the problem that his cham-
pionship of the School and his propagation of their historical self‐positioning has caused
for so many of his critics in turn. His own philosophical agenda ought arguably to have
been the very instrument for dismantling – perhaps demolishing, in Blochian terms – that
master narrative of twentieth‐century musical modernism. Occasionally such opposing
gestures are to be found, as in the case of his relatively later thoughts on “other” modern
Viennese composers such as Schoenberg’s onetime teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, or the
aforementioned Franz Schreker, whose still‐tonal music “teach[es] us that changes in
material and consciousness do not necessarily move in a straight line along the same
track as the New Music” (Adorno 1992, 135). Similarly, his essay “Vienna,” about the
state of post‐Second World War serialist music, highlights how historical contingencies
affect artists’ reputations and levels sharp critical remarks at the idea of forming compo-
serly “cliques” (1992, 201, 222). Even in these instances, his gestures that recognize fig-
ures and aesthetic options outside the modernist mainstream and point away from the
single, modernism‐bound track of Austro–German music history sit uncomfortably
beside his more expected reassertions and reaffirmations of the same: the “track [of] the
New Music,” “the great historical trend,” and “the Schoenberg tradition” are all still
there. Of the 24 pages of the “Vienna” essay in English translation, the name of
Schoenberg appears on all but five, and three of those contain direct reference either to
one of his works or to the Second Viennese School – this as late as 1960. Adorno’s dedi-
cation was nothing if not enduring.
70
As the many sources cited here, and indeed far many more, will readily attest, the topic
of Adorno and the Schoenberg circle has been dealt with often before, and sometimes in
depth. But what can still be productively emphasized are the ongoing complexities and
indeed the conflicted aspects of Adorno’s relationships to the Viennese triumvirate as
such, dissonances and contradictions that remain even when his own thought, itself not
monolithic despite its weighty appearance and at times near‐overwhelming assertiveness,
is thoroughly historicized. In other words, even while he remained a clearly audible and
utterly committed voice for the aesthetic of the Vienna School right through the 1960s,
his “take” on the nature of the School’s musical innovations is variegated, and not merely
according to the dates of his diverse critical assessments and revisitations as offered over
the course of decades, but nearly always at once, within any given moment. “It would be a
gross oversimplification to reduce Adorno to a mere mouthpiece for Schoenberg and his
circle,” note Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, “for the same technical expertise that
afforded him insight into their works provided him with the criteria necessary for an
independent aesthetic judgment” (Adorno 1994, xii). That the pervasiveness of critical
variances and divergences does not translate to mere equivocation or ambivalence is prin-
cipally owed, of course, to the resilience and robust adaptability of dialectics. But if the
striation of his critique of the New Music makes visible the effective workings of his philos-
ophy, it also surely reflects his own creative experience as a composer attempting to employ
and adapt Schoenberg’s methods, as Brand and Hailey’s reference to technique implies.
For Adorno was deeply invested in composition during the years between his first reloca-
tion to Vienna for study with Berg and the latter’s death, years also especially formative for
his philosophy – involved with writing music to the point where, according to Müller‐
Doohm, he rather neglected the work on his (first, ultimately withdrawn) philosophical
Habilitationsschrift in favor of composing (2005, 103). He completed two sets of four Lieder,
published respectively as Op.1 (all on poems of Stefan George) and Op.3 (dedicated to Berg
“in loving worship”), and three of the six Lieder from his Op.6 (one other predated his time
with Berg and the final two were not finished until 1942); also his two pieces for string
quartet Op.2 and, significantly, his set of six short orchestral pieces Op.4 – frequently
beautiful and sometimes dramatically evocative aphorisms that are redolent of a Bergian
orchestral sound, as Adorno noted to Berg in a letter of 1931 (Adorno and Berg 2005,
175). It was during this period too that Adorno embarked on the project of composing an
opera, his efforts overlapping with the years of Berg’s prolonged work on his famous Lulu
based on Wedekind’s plays. As it turned out, both those projects remained unfinished,
Adorno’s far more so (Tiedemann 2004; Goehr 2008; Lee 2015).
Yet Berg’s influence as teacher extended through Adorno’s musical‐compositional
activity to shape, on less technical and more philosophical and personal levels, his stance
as a champion and critic of Schoenberg and the Viennese School. This broader influence is
sometimes slightly more difficult to spot, though it is explicit as early as Adorno’s 1931
essay “Why Is the New Art So Difficult to Understand?” – clearly titled in direct imitation
of, and partly in response to, Berg’s own prior essay “Why Is Schoenberg’s Music So Difficult
to Understand?” (Berg 1924). Berg’s study of his teacher’s music is an analytical one, and
sets out to answer its titular query by “testing the intelligibility of Schoenberg’s means
of compositional expression” through musical content alone – rather than through intel-
lectual content or philosophical approaches, as Berg makes clear right from the opening
paragraph – and drawing that content from a single work, namely Schoenberg’s first
String Quartet Op.7 (1904–1905). It is admittedly difficult to take at face value Berg’s
insistence that he chose this example “at random,” though it is probably true that, as he
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suggests, there are other examples among Schoenberg’s works that would also have suited
his purpose. But it seems more likely that he made in fact a careful and deliberate selection,
in 1924, of a work composed 20 years prior: one predating not only Schoenberg’s turn to
twelve‐tone serialism of the early 1920s but also all the previous works typically associ-
ated with the crucial 1908 “rupture” between tonal and free‐atonal composition: these
could have included the subsequent, more radical String Quartet No.2, Op.10 (1907–
1908), with its inclusion of soprano voice in the final movement; the three piano pieces
Op.11 (1909); the two songs of Op.14 setting texts of Stefan George and Georg Henckel
(1907–1908), which Schoenberg himself identified with “the first step;” or the next
George song cycle Das Buch der hangenden Gärten, Op.15 (1907–1909). It is true enough
that even the earlier Op.7 String Quartet was not accorded public success at its première,
which was punctuated by hissing and the abrupt departures of several audience members,
so Berg was not merely making an easy choice by electing to demonstrate “intelligibility”
in a piece already approved by those otherwise‐reluctant listeners to Schoenberg, whom he
hoped to convince with his analytical exegesis.
The strategy of Berg’s selection, however, could be viewed through the lens of Adorno’s
own consideration of the difficulty of new art, penned just a few years after Berg’s apologia
for Schoenberg via the Op.7 quartet. Even though Adorno’s “Why Is the New Art So
Difficult to Understand?” very openly takes its titular lead from his teacher’s example, it
adopts an opposite tack to Berg’s direct eschewal of philosophy. Its effort is rather to explain
the challenge to comprehensibility of modern art virtually exclusively in socio‐historical
terms. The element of “shock” is clearly important, in fact definitive of what is “specifically
modern in the sense that [the experience of] it is accompanied by the shock of its
strangeness” (Adorno 2002, 131). This sense of shock is early evidence of Adorno’s
career‐long concern, starting from his reading of Bloch, with what Roger Foster defines as
“the recovery of experience” (Foster 2008; Lee 2017). In Adorno’s 1931 essay, shock reg-
isters the distance between contemporary apperceptions of new twentieth‐century art
movements such as expressionism and the relatively lesser newness of historical innova-
tions in art, like Wagnerian advanced‐chromatic harmony or impressionist painting,
when “the lines connecting producers and consumers had not yet been cut, as it were, but
merely wired in a more complicated way” (2002, 131). This remnant of audible connec-
tivity amidst complexity would arguably characterize Schoenberg’s Op.7 too, composed
before the expressionist “atonal rupture” and thus stopping short of outright shock in its
challenge to listeners. Tellingly, Adorno’s essay maintains an anti‐elitist stance and avoids
any suggestion that the uncomprehending audience is either stupid or Philistine, high-
lighting, rather, the societal structure that precipitates the consciousness of the public as
“consumers” of cultural products that are dumbed down. In its sociological emphasis as
well as some of its particular concerns – the “disposition of work and leisure time,” the
pairing of “advertising and anesthetization,” the insistence that “the argument that
the public wants kitsch is dishonest [and] the argument that it needs relaxation is
incomplete” – it anticipates his infamous essay “On the Fetish‐Character in Music and
the Regression in Listening” of 1938, though not its stringent tone. It’s a matter of specu-
lation whether this relative absence of severity is more or less traceable to the influence of
Berg’s overall politeness of tone in the midst of polemic. Much of Adorno’s essay addresses
the situation of modern art in general, but he does turn to music partway through as an
example of the larger situation of art under discussion, an example drawn from the sphere
he has particular experience with. And the musical example happens to be that of atonal
harmony: chords that are “built in many layers and do not have a given function within a
72
given key” and thus “cannot be repeated as arbitrarily as the old ones” (2002, 129). Thus,
even apart from any explicit mention of Schoenberg, the Viennese School constitutes the
baseline for the philosopher‐composer’s effort at a sociology of the new aesthetic, although
this takeaway is far less straightforward than Berg’s concluding gesture, which reasserts
Schoenberg’s “difficulty” as a product of “bring[ing] together all the resources inherited
from the classicists” from Bach through Brahms, and points ahead to the promise of a long
Schoenbergian future in which “the supremacy of his own art seems assured – as well as
that of German music for the next fifty years” (Simms 2014, 192, 195).
Such apparent confidence! Nevertheless, Hailey describes Berg’s own fit within “the
narrative of the ‘Second Viennese School’” as always uncomfortable, and his devotion to
Schoenberg as a “problem” for discerning his real position vis‐à‐vis Viennese musical
modernism (2010, ix). Much of the written record transmits little other than Berg’s
faithfulness to the master of the School of which he was a steadfast member, but the
divergences of his own idiosyncratic compositional style from Schoenberg’s methods are
audible testaments to what Hailey describes as his “passive resistance” to his overbearing
teacher. There is no question that Adorno was aware of these elements of Berg’s reserve
that were otherwise concealed by unstinting personal loyalty even when Schoenberg was
critical, unsupportive, petty. Such awareness allowed Adorno a growing freedom to
express in his letters to Berg his own reservations about Schoenberg, whether in passing,
on a personal front – “Where is Schönberg? I spoke to him at the end of March, and it was
not particularly enjoyable” (2005, 195) – or more seriously, expressing musical concerns
over his compositional method. In Adorno’s experience, Schoenberg had always been
personally prickly anyway, but the second unease only grew over time, until it developed
into Adorno’s stringent wartime dissidence against the twelve‐tone technique. In sum,
the initial shift from traditional tonal musical rules and structures to free atonality had
been a historically valid marker of authentic expressivity, but Schoenberg’s subsequent
move to the twelve‐tone method, wherein the organization of those previously emanci-
pated dissonant tones became systematized and controlled by an externally imposed
numerical series, was equally historically appropriate and at once troubling, because its
rational domination of the musical material mirrored dominating social forces. “Each
tone of the entire composition is determined by the ‘row’ [the fixed order of the 12 tones]:
There is no longer any ‘free’ note … A system of the domination of nature in music results”
(Adorno 2006, 51, 52).
Earlier, however, in the mid‐1930s, Adorno had defended the serial compositional
method of the Second Viennese School. In a short, uncharacteristically accessible, and
somewhat tongue‐in‐cheek piece entitled “Why Twelve‐Tone Music?” he compared the
row of 12 tones to the palette of a painter (a comparison that later reappeared in the
Philosophy of New Music [2006, 50]). He was at pains to dispel misunderstandings and flip
judgments about the method by emphasizing that the row itself was no more the composi-
tion than the palette itself was the painting; but his discussion went further in considering
the difference in audience expectations that pertained to the two arts, applying a sociolog-
ical bent. No‐one would look askance at a painter for having a palette, or indeed for
arranging the colors to be used thereon in some way that made sense for the means in
which they were to be employed. But because the prevailing, romanticized view of musical
composition was that it could only be truly artistic – rather than mere craft or mechanical
work – if it was entirely “inspired” and characterized exclusively by inwardness, the
structural equivalent of the planned palette in the musical‐compositional sphere was
considered suspect. Yet unjustly so. “The twelve‐note technique is not merely a recipe for
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composition,” Adorno insisted; “one should not fear that it will transform ‘the man in the
street’ into a Beethoven with the aid of a slide rule or a logarithmic table” (2009, 369). He
continued on to assert his argument of the historical necessity of the material: the histor-
ical reason why tonality is no longer sufficient for the time, and what the twelve‐tone
method affords the composer as a means of working in the absence of those structures that
tonality had previously offered up ready‐made.
“Why Twelve‐Tone Music?” appears to date from 1935. It was only published posthu-
mously, but when it was written Berg was still alive, and at work on his twelve‐tone opera.
Earnest as Adorno was in his efforts to promote his beloved teacher’s music, he may well
have seen every reason to offer a clearly legible defense of the twelve‐tone segment of the
Second Viennese path. But this is too ready an explanation, and even a straightforward
statement to the effect that Adorno’s later views on the technique were vastly more critical
misses the important point that Schoenberg’s system was already openly in question bet-
ween Adorno and Berg. As early as 1926 Adorno was commenting on what he considered
to be “the danger in dodecaphony,” which, he felt, “cannot and should not dictate a positive
compositional canon” (Adorno and Berg 2005, 71). Berg’s reply was circumspect and
somewhat laconic, but telling: “As far as the 12‐tone technique is concerned: The most
conspicuous thing about it, I would say, is the fact that it does not exclude tonality (inten-
tional tonality – not simply chance tonality, which would be very fishy) at all” (Adorno and
Berg 2005, 74). In February of the same year that Adorno penned “Why Twelve‐Tone
Music?” he wrote to Berg to ask, with perhaps surprising directness, about Berg’s own use
of the Schoenbergian method in the ongoing composition of Lulu:
Let me close by asking you about another matter extraordinarily close to my heart: you had
said at one point that the whole of Lulu was to be developed from a single twelve‐tone row. But
Reich’s analysis now seems to suggest that the Paris scene, at least, is not consistently twelve‐
tone music. So this means that you have departed from the twelve‐tone principle in a
fundamental respect, and I need hardly explain what this essentially means. Are you prepared
to tell me about it? (Adorno and Berg 2005, 215)
What it “essentially meant,” of course, was a transgression of Schoenberg’s rules for the
use of his serial method, arguably a rebellion against the authority of the teacher. These
are readily‐cited instances when Adorno’s growing critical and compositional reserva-
tions appear at least in part to result from an impulse shared with Berg, who, in Hailey’s
colorful formulation, “slipped out the backdoor of the Second Viennese School to take his
place among the truants milling around the schoolyard” (2010, x). That Adorno’s under-
standing of Berg is qualitatively different from his assessment of either the authoritative
Schoenberg or the rigorously systematic Webern (who is known for having extended the
structural implications of the method to an even greater degree than his teacher) is obvi-
ously accountable in terms of the nature of their personal relationship, in addition to the
distinctive formal‐technical implications Adorno recognized in the features of Berg’s
music – music with unique sonorous qualities that set it apart unmistakably from
Schoenberg’s. These implications Adorno characterized, if only much later, as constituting
“a process of permanent dissolution [permanente Auflösung],” though it is worth noting that
he had been using the latter term to discuss the dealings of the avant‐garde with musical
form since his very earliest music publications. Such dissolution its accomplished “within
itself … rather than achieving a ‘synthesis’” (Adorno 1982, 184) and as such it stands for-
mally in opposition to the later tendencies toward increasing integration of Schoenberg’s
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and Webern’s twelve‐tone serialisms, even while Berg, too, was employing Schoenberg’s
twelve‐tone method in his own idiosyncratic way. And ultimately it must be this perception
that constituted the most vital distinction, for Adorno, between Berg’s use of dodecaphony,
which Adorno could accept, and Schoenberg’s ultimately more troubling move to the
twelve‐tone compositional system.
2. The Philosophy: A Dialectical Theory of the

New Music (Adorno and Schoenberg)
This is only music; how must a world be made in which even questions of counterpoint bear
witness to irreconcilable conflicts? How fundamentally disturbed is life today if its trembling
and its rigidity are reflected even where no empirical need reaches, in a sphere that people
suppose provides sanctuary from the pressures of the harrowing norm, and that indeed only
redeems its promise by refusing what they expect of it. (Adorno 2006, 5)
An essay on the present subject of “Adorno and The Second Viennese School” could very
well have turned out to be one on “Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music,” period. The book,
from whose Preface the above quotation is drawn, was written between 1940 and 1948
while he was in exile in California, and published in German in 1949. Its two large sections
deal respectively with the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky – both also
emigrés living in close proximity in Los Angeles – the two important composers of the era
whose works, Adorno felt, best encapsulated the social position and critical potential of
new music at that historical moment. Adorno effectively positions the two compositional
figures in opposition: he hears Schoenberg’s atonal and twelve‐tone music as “representa-
tive of the most advanced aesthetic consciousness” of its age (2006, 94), and thus capable
of constituting an authentic aesthetic opposition to the dominating forces of modern
culture, while Stravinsky’s neoclassical musical idiom is heard as ahistorical and reac-
tionary, an ideological manifestation of cultural regression. Unquestionably his best‐
known work on music, the Philosophy firmly established Adorno in its moment and into
the future as “a veteran defender and supreme connoisseur of the Schoenberg School,” in
case his years of prior publications had not done so already (Wiggershaus 1995, 508). It is
a difficult and antagonistic book, both dialectical and polemical. Admittedly, a truly impres-
sive volume of ink has already been expended on the rich elucidation and critical
interrogation of this pithy volume (Paddison 1993; Wiggershaus 1995; Leppert 2002;
Chua 2006; Hullot‐Kentor 2006a, 2006b, etc.), frequently and typically illuminatingly in
relation to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to which the Philosophy
was, in Adorno’s own terms, “a detailed excursus” (Adorno 2006, 5). This is an interesting
designation since, as Rebecca Comay notes, Adorno’s reading of Homer’s Odyssey within
the Dialectic is also a lengthy excursus on that volume (Comay 2000, 21). A great deal of
work was being accomplished, it would seem, under the guise of such apparent digres-
sions. “What if,” Comay wonders of the Sirens episode in the Dialectic of Enlightenment,
“the ‘appendage’ or ‘excursus’ in fact absorbs the book?” (2002, 22). In the case of the
Philosophy of New Music that has already happened, the excursus has indeed become the
whole book; and its reception has always made it clear that it is no Viennese modernist
marginalia, rather a lodestone.
As though in response to Adorno’s “Why Is the New Art So Difficult to Understand?”, we
could perhaps ask why his Philosophy of New Music must be so difficult to read, though of
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course in doing so we would already be suggesting much of the answer (Chua 2006, 16–17).
As others such as Martin Jay (1997) and Fredric Jameson (1990) have already highlighted,
Adorno’s writing exemplifies the importance of mimesis within his thought, the assimilation
of the self to the other, and the thorniness of the Philosophy of New Music surely bears a
mimetic affinity to its object; in this light, reading Adorno’s text should properly be as chal-
lenging, and in similar ways, as listening to Schoenberg’s music. “Philosophy of New Music is
a defense of Schoenberg’s work that presents New Music’s own philosophy,” asserts Robert
Hullot‐Kentor; “the study aims to carry out conceptually the historical reflection implicit in
the music and to raise this reflection to the point of the music’s self‐criticism” (2006b, 70).
Schoenberg himself did not consider the book an appropriate “defense” of his music or his
ideas, and his reaction to it was extremely negative. Its dialectical approach entailed a vital
distance that enabled a critical perspective Schoenberg simply could not tolerate, even less so
in the sunny environs of the new world than in the troubled enclaves of the old one. Leonard
Bernstein called it a “fascinating, nasty, turgid book” (1976, 270), which made at least part
of his assessment kinder than Schoenberg’s. The Philosophy of New Music really does show
Adorno at his most adamant; its implacable tone, which similarly characterizes “On the
Fetish‐Character in Music and the Regression in Listening,” is obdurate and flinty (little sur-
prise then that the author references that prior essay in his Preface to the book). Anyone who
has read either of these two works as a first exposure to Adorno’s thought would scarcely
recognize the author of his later monograph on Berg, uncharacteristic in its highly personal
warmth, let alone the abovementioned “Four Hands” essay with its poetic turns and overt
nostalgia. Granted, alienating inflections of the “Fetish‐Character” and the Philosophy of
New Music obviously relay, at least in part, Adorno’s own sense of alienation in his exile; and
then, in the calamitous decade from 1938 to 1948 when both were written, there was an
awful lot at stake. Perhaps it does not go without saying that a project seeking to offer a
response to the listening public’s hatred of dissonant modernism, what Adorno referred to as
“the fury toward the avant‐garde” in music, could hardly have seemed more urgent at that
time. Adorno himself noted that it might have appeared eccentric, at least, to dwell on “the
deciphering of esoteric questions on the technique of modern composition,” indeed, on
almost any matters other than life and the immediate threat of its loss, under such circum-
stances (2006, 4–5). But from years before Adorno settled in Schoenberg’s Los Angeles
neighborhood, their shared experience of exile from the regime that had branded as “degen-
erate” the music of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School – a compositional identity
that after all included Adorno, too, though his own departure from Germany was precipi-
tated by official action against his academic position rather than his position as an artist – was
a clear enough indicator that even music was far from irrelevant to the dire situation of the
times, a situation in which a meaningful connection between culture and politics was not
merely assumed but made explicit by the regime itself.
It is already well known that this shared experience in the 1940s did not bring the two
any closer together in exile than they had been in the 1920s when Adorno, as one of the
School’s satellites, was drawn into old Central Vienna with Berg, while Schoenberg, as the
circle’s ostensible center, was voluntarily displaced out to the suburb of Mödling. A
particular affinity between their individual characters is suggested by Hullot‐Kentor’s
description of them as “two of the most uncompromising figures of the twentieth century”
(2006b, 67), a commonality unlikely to attract them to each other; although arguably,
and ironically, when it came to the music of the Second Viennese School, Adorno was
actually the more flexible. While Hullot‐Kentor characterizes the Philosophy of New Music
as a “defense of Schoenberg,” and many continue to view it as only that (including a good
76
number who have never in fact read it), the book’s ultimate critique of the twelve‐tone
path effectively reified the older composer’s already‐existent antipathy toward the younger
philosopher. For, just as in the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s episode of the Sirens Adorno
“reckons sharply just what the costs of Odysseus’s enlightenment might be” (Comay 2000,
21), in the Philosophy of New Music he “did not deceive himself,” as Clytus Gottwald (1999)
puts it, “about the price that New Music had to pay for its consolidation into dodecaphony.”
That price was, in sum, the relinquishment of the freedom of Expressionism’s atonal
moment. “To be sure,” continues Gottwald, “Schoenberg’s ingenuity had again and again
elicited from the dodecaphonically‐organized material that eloquence which in [his earlier
atonal opera] Erwartung [1908] had accrued by itself. But dodecaphony, with all its dili-
gent immersion in technical process, was, for Adorno, fogged with resignation. That
utopian window, which had opened up with free atonality, closed again” (1999, 113), in
favor of a systematic domination of musical material that resonated all too well for the
likes of that other School – the Frankfurt one – with more devastating models of domina-
tion in the social sphere.
Based on the assessment of Schoenberg’s oeuvre offered in the Philosophy of New Music,
then, in which the emancipatory language of the free‐atonal, expressionist compositional
phase is valorized and the turn to the twelve‐tone technique characterized as a “Reversal
into Unfreedom” (54–57), it would be reasonable for a newcomer to Adorno’s own compo-
sitional output to assume that he himself adhered solely to the atonal compositional
approach and steered clear of the dodecaphonic. Accordingly, Paddison asserts that “the
idiom of most of his pieces is firmly based in the heyday of Second Viennese School free
atonality pre‐1914” (1993, 5). But in fact a number of the works Adorno essayed employed
the twelve‐tone method in some form – the twelve‐tone melodies for the only two c ompleted
numbers of his would‐be opera are instances of this – even if they only formulate and pre-
sent a row as a basic idea without necessarily treating it strictly thereafter. “In my quartet
I admittedly resort, in order to avoid leading‐note cadences, to using rows,” he wrote to
Berg in 1926, “but I permit myself the acoustic liberty of choice – interruption of the row;
freely following the harmonic tendency …” (Adorno and Berg 2005, 72). “Permission,”
“liberty,” and “freedom” all arise here in one breath. The excerpt of correspondence with
Berg already cited also showed that in Adorno’s attempts at, and struggles with, the use of
the technique, he recognized its promise while deploring its strictures and their greater
implications. By 1935, his complaint along these lines became more direct: he wrote to
Berg that “non‐dodecaphony lacks constructive rigour and constraint; but dodecaphony
severely restricts all construction coming from the imagination, and constantly invokes
the danger of rigidity” (218). Here the idea of “danger” surfaces again alongside the fear of
confinement. Ultimately, “[n]o rule is more repressive than one that is self‐promulgated,”
he wrote a few years later in the Philosophy of New Music (Adorno 2006, 55), and as a
composer he opted, in the end, against the enforcement of the law that his philosophy
criticized. If Schoenberg’s twelve‐tone technique revoked the emancipation won by atonal
expressionism, the desire to retain that freedom, despite its high cost of isolation, is one
Adorno never lost sight of.
This motif of isolation is of course the one he famously returns to when the end of
the Philosophy’s essay on “Schoenberg and Progress” invokes the unforgettable image
of the Flaschenpost, of new music cast adrift like a message in a bottle (Adorno 2006, 102).
Hullot‐Kentor stresses this condition of isolation as the means through which modern
music became “a singular repository of critical historical experience,” and insists that
“Adorno does not deduce this position. On the contrary, his thinking originates in this
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musical experience, and he devoted his life to its elucidation” (2006b, 70). Something vital
is implied by this emphasis on experience over deduction, a reminder of music prior to phi-
losophizing about it. And yet more than this. For if the experience of Schoenberg’s music
as Adorno argued for it is typically thought of as one of listening (with difficulty) by those
to whom the music and the argument are being offered – important as that sphere of
aesthetic experience undoubtedly is – that conception occludes Adorno’s own experience
of the New Music that comprises listening, performance, and original composition under
the influence of Schoenberg’s innovations of both expression and technique. True, a pre-
sumed focus on listening per se could be understandable here: Adorno himself connected
the ideas in the Philosophy with those of his 1938 polemic on “regressive listening”
(Adorno 2006, 3); and he did, after all, focus the book on the music of other composers, not
his own music. In fact, it is easy enough to forget about the latter altogether because
Adorno had – nearly – stopped composing by this time, philosophy having finally com-
mandeered his full attention as Berg had feared it eventually would (Adorno and Berg
2005, 44). His catalog of works does actually show some entries from the 1940s after
all; but what if he relinquished composition not out of sheer busyness, not merely
because philosophy had taken over his time or his mental energy? What if he simply lost,
or relinquished, his struggle with the technique, if the dialectic of harmonic freedom
and structural unfreedom brought his composition to a standstill? In the face of the seem-
ing historical inevitability of Schoenberg’s compositional method, returning to the
emancipatory capacities of the prior expressive breakthrough would have meant turning
back, which may, after all, have been Adorno’s wish:
Dieter Schnebel once elaborated on the nostalgia of Adorno’s magnificent Orchesterstücke

Op.4. In fact, the overarching moment of all Adorno’s compositions is that of homesick-
ness for homelessness, a moment that probably brought him to composition in the first
place. Adorno was a conservative composer; but what he was trying to preserve was not
what was already fossilized, about which there were still a few subjective memories, but
that youthful effervescence [Aufgärende], the exit into freedom. Adorno’s composition is
reactionary against reaction: compositionally, he reacted to the course of New Music after
the First World War, and New Music was called Schoenberg, Berg, also Webern …. (Gottwald
1989, 113)
Almost as if against the dialectic of progress Adorno had highlighted in the Philosophy of
New Music, his own idea of what constituted New Music after the Second World War was
still Schoenberg, Berg – and also, notably, Webern.
3. The Legacy: A Philosophy’s Aesthetic Aftermath

(Adorno and Webern)
Twelve‐tone technique has its justification only in the presentation of complex musical
contents, which cannot otherwise be organized. Separated from this function, it degenerates
into a deluded system. While New Music, and particularly Schoenberg’s achievement, is
stamped as twelve‐tone composition, and thus handily pigeonholed, the fact that a very large
and perhaps, qualitatively, the decisive part of this production was composed prior to the
invention of this technique or independently of it, should give reason to pause. Schoenberg
himself consistently refused to teach what the music marketplace had falsified into a system.
(Adorno 2002, 184–185)
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The actual musical impact of the Philosophy of New Music in the wake of the Second World
War was at once both greater and different than Adorno could have expected. Max
Paddison explains how the Philosophy “found a ready audience among the generation of
composers and musicians that was emerging in the immediate post‐war years and which
was centred on Darmstadt;” in this environment the book, like a manifesto, “seemed to
provide the theoretical and philosophical legitimation for the experiments with mul-
tiple serialism … in the work of Boulez and Stockhausen in the early 1950s” (1993, 265).
These two were central among the avant‐garde composers who attended the Darmstadt
International Summer Courses on New Music in the 1950s and 1960s: effectively a “Third
School” within the context of the present essay. Adorno himself – not merely his writings –
played an active role at Darmstadt. In fact, as Leppert has noted, Adorno’s own composi-
tions, most of them dating from before the war, were performed not infrequently during
those years (Adorno 2002, 15–16). He attended in person during nine of the summers
between 1950 and 1966, to give lectures or composition lessons or to otherwise partici-
pate as discussant. And paradoxically even for a dialectician, Adorno found himself
required to correct for the Philosophy’s impact factor in a way that must sometimes have
felt like overcompensating – unfairly enough, for the misunderstandings of others – if not
outright backpedaling on the effects of his prior vehemence. Chua has wryly suggested
that the Darmstadt group “simply didn’t get the drift … they heard the rhetoric and not the
message, mistaking a philosophy for merely a polemic” (2006, 2).
Despite the near‐exclusive focus on Schoenberg throughout The Philosophy of New
Music’s most influential section (“Schoenberg and Progress”), it was not ultimately
Schoenberg who furnished the most decisive example of the new for the postwar genera-
tion: this is well known. The iconoclastic Pierre Boulez, having learned well from Adorno’s
polemic aspect, famously decried Schoenberg’s failure in 1952, irreverently proclaiming
the death of his legacy within months of his literal passing (Boulez 1952). Boulez and
Adorno agreed at least on the presence of what the former saw as Schoenberg’s romantic
flaw and the latter heard as a vestige of hope: the lingering formal and gestural features of
subjective expression, indeed that sonic trace of the surviving, if devastated and shattered,
subject whose voice could just be heard through the cracks in the newly objectified struc-
ture of the New Music in its serial formation. That remnant constituted an audible testa-
ment to the existence of a history that the postwar generation would have liked to deny, to
wipe clean with the grim optimism of a new present and a future over which they would
be able to exert total systematic control. But arguably, this perception was no more occluded
than that which thought to recognize a path to newer new‐ness in what Adorno had
already described as historically predictable – and indeed, as an outcome whose historical
moment had arrived before the war had begun.
It was, of course, Anton von Webern whose oeuvre suggested the path forward into a
newer New Music for the serialist composers of the postwar generation. If Webern has
scarcely been mentioned here so far that is largely because, for Adorno, Webern’s signifi-
cance was only really felt in the wake of 1945, and others felt the same. The crucial difference
lies in the sense of what that significance was. For the Darmstadt generation, Webern’s
insight was to have shed Schoenberg’s residue of romantic subjectivity and overcome it
through an objectivity of method, one that successfully augmented the structural potential
of the twelve‐tone row. Schoenberg’s discovery was only partial, for he failed to recognize the
fuller implications of the series, but Webern tapped its capacity for a more thorough
integration of compositional parameters beyond pitch. For a group of young composers in
an age that sought to emerge from the horrors of the recent past by r econstructing newness
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SHERRY D. LEE
from the recently developed technological means of both futuristic advance and prior
destruction, the concept of total integration via the technology of the series proved an intox-
ication. But for Adorno, Webern’s most significant inheritance from Schoenberg was not the
twelve‐tone method, which he refined and simultaneously expanded into an encompassing
system. No, it was expressivity, of all things: Webern’s unique manner of having seized the
expressive powers that “free atonality had expanded … to an unprecedented degree” (Adorno
1999, 93). Adorno had not failed to recognize Webern’s developments in technique, but for
him those largely amounted to resignation, a surrender of music to the serial program to the
point where Webern practically “ceases to compose” at all; “the [twelve‐tone] rows are sup-
posed virtually to do the work themselves” (1999, 101). Nor does Adorno deny the lure of
apparent progress, or the temptation posed by the aura of the absolute promised by the serial
system’s capacity for complete predetermination.
Thus Adorno’s 1959 essay on Webern, once the quietest member of the Second Viennese
School before his postwar amplification as the prophet of the new “New,” is largely con-
ceived as remediation. It is mostly devoted to the composer’s earlier works, the freely atonal
ones; fully the first 70% of the essay is over before it even gets to the integral shift of Webern’s
decisive twelve‐tone Symphony Op.21 (1927–1928), celebrated for its intricate, tightly
integrative structures and its formal symmetries. If the Darmstadt group had managed to
miss the Philosophy of New Music’s message that the twelve‐tone path represented a regres-
sion into unfreedom, reading the book instead as a prophecy of a Second Viennese trajec-
tory from a twelve‐tone pitch row to a dizzying numerically governed totality, they seemed
also to have missed hearing the remnant of subjective expressivity in Webern that at the
very least equaled Schoenberg’s, if only through its concentrated intensity. Adorno’s task
looked a bit like defending the Second Viennese School against its own legacy, which, ironi-
cally, seemed at that moment to be promising it the future reach its original members had
envisioned; but actually the task was to correct the very idea of what that legacy was, or
ought to have been. “Wrong number,” he might have said wryly:
Webern’s posthumous reputation was really technical and stylistic and, above all, strategic,
rather than dependent on his nature as a composer specifically … Of course, in contrast to the
serial composers who chose him as their patron, he never completely renounced the musical
methods he had inherited from Schoenberg, which incorporated traditional elements in subli-
mated form. With all the talk about Webern’s technical innovations and their application,
however, the composer’s central idea was neglected. (Adorno 1999, 92)
This central idea, Adorno averred, was one of “absolute lyricism.” In other words, there is
a conceptual ideal of an absolute here, but it is not a dream of numeric‐structural totality,
rather one of resolving “all musical materiality” into “the pure sonority of the subject …
After all,” he reflected, “what survives is the music itself, rather than its methods, however
admirable” (1999, 93).
4. Difficulties
Anyone of my age and experience who is both a musician and who thinks about music finds
himself in a difficult quandary. One side of it consists in the attitude “so far and no further.” In
other words, it consists in clinging to one’s youth as if modernity were one’s own private
monopoly. This means resisting at all costs everything which remains inaccessible to one’s
own experience … [but] the speculative artist above all ought to cling to the vestiges of common
80
sense which would remind him that music is not necessarily more advanced just because he
has failed to comprehend it … the judge’s own intellectual pedigree, [is not] decisive here,
although that is undoubtedly an important factor in the formation of his thought. I would not
wish to claim that my membership of Schoenberg’s Viennese school confers any particular
authority on me or to assert that as an initiate I had easy answers to these questions. (Adorno
1992, 269–270)
In considering from a historical perspective the very possibility for still reading, taking seri-
ously, and critically re‐employing the insights of Adorno’s work after his death, through
the closing decades of the twentieth century and beyond, Berthold Hoeckner has rightly
noted that “the essence of his critical thought – not to think with the status quo, but to
think otherwise – need not necessarily be tied to the repertory from which it sprang in the
first place” (2006, xii). Much fine recent work on Adorno and all kinds of music he did not
grapple with explicitly, whether from during his lifetime or after, shows this to be mani-
festly true. But the fact that Adorno himself did adhere to that repertory as a model even as
it receded historically can hardly be ignored. In this light his above‐cited claim, made in
1961, that his own membership in the Second Viennese School did not “confer any
particular authority” is perhaps uncharacteristic. However, his work in developing a socio-
logical approach to the elucidation of modern music during his years of closest connection
with Berg and the Vienna circle did equip him with a capacity for insight into the social
status of the New Music in what might be called a post‐Viennese era. Thus Adorno recog-
nized that the serialist adherence to a system he so sharply criticized could also fairly be
recognized as arising from a kind of social necessity: “In the administered world,” he
acknowledged, “anything which is other than administrative by nature can only survive
the winter [überwintern], can indeed only make its voice heard, by using administrative
methods” (1992, 222, translation modified). And at the same time, even if he was tempted
to adopt a “so far and no further” attitude toward other newnesses, such as chance‐
governed or aleatoric compositional approaches whose surrender to randomness seemed
merely the flip side of the capitulation to the total system, he could see that they also con-
stituted critiques of total serialist integration: “Composers who incorporate chance into
the law are now sorely tempted to break the spell of the law yet again” (1992, 224).
It is may be unsurprising, then, that Adorno should return, after nearly 35 years, to the
subject of difficulty, in both listening and in composition. In his essay “Difficulties,” dating
from 1966, he considers the lasting pull of tonality for both listeners and composers – even
the avant‐garde ones – as a kind of retreat to the comfort of the past in the face of prevailing
conditions of technological domination. As he revisits his sociology of modern listening,
he explicitly points back to his essay on the difficulties of new art from 1931, though he
recalls it only as “before 1933” – a date momentous enough that it isn’t surprising he
remembers it as the dividing point. The expressionist shock, he allowed, may have abated
somewhat in the intervening decades, but New Music was still met with resistance.
Apparently it remained difficult to understand.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1976). Introduction to the Sociology of Music (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York: Seabury Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1977). Amorbach. In: Gesammelte Schriften 10.1 (ed. R. Tiedemann), 302–309.
Frankfurt: Surhkamp Verlag.
Adorno, T.W. (1981). Prisms (trans. S. Weber and S.W. Nicholsen). Cambridge: MIT Press.
81
SHERRY D. LEE
Adorno, T.W. (1982). On the problem of musical analysis (trans. M. Paddison). Music Analysis 1 (2):
169–187.
Adorno, T.W. (1991a). Bloch’s Spuren: on the revised edition of 1959. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 1
(ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. S.W. Nicholsen), 200–215. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1991b). The handle, the pot, and early experience. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 2 (ed.
R. Tiedemann and trans. S.W. Nicholsen), 211–219. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1992). Quasi una Fantasia (trans. R. Livingstone). London and New York: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1994). Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (ed. and trans. Juliane J. Brand and
C. Hailey). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1999). Anton von Webern. In: Sound Figures (trans. R. Livingstone), 91–105. Stanford:
Adorno, T.W. (2002). Essays on Music (ed. R.D. Leppert). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2005). Four hands, once again (trans. J. Wipplinger). Cultural Critique 60: 1–4.
Adorno, T.W. (2006 (1949)). Philosophy of New Music (ed. and trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2009). Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 (ed. R. Tiedemann and trans.
W. Hoban). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Berg, A. (2005). Correspondence 1925–1935 (ed. Henri Lonitz and trans.
W. Hoban). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Auner, J. (1999). The Second Viennese School as historical concept. In: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern,
A Companion to the Second Viennese School (ed. B. Simms), 1–36. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Auner, J. (2004). Proclaiming a mainstream. In: The Cambridge History of Twentieth‐Century Music
(eds. N. Cook and A. Pople), 228–259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berg, A. (1924). Warum ist Schönbergs Musik so schwer verständlich? Musikblätter des Anbruch 6:
329–341.
Berg, A. and Schoenberg, A. (1987). The Berg‐Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters (eds.
J. Brand, C. Hailey and D. Harris). New York: Norton.
Bernstein, L. (1976). The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Boulez, P. (1952). Schoenberg is dead. The Score and IMA Magazine 6: 18–21.
Brand, J. and Hailey, C. (1994). Translators’ introduction. In: Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link,
vii–xiv. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chua, D. (2006). Drifting: the dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. In: Apparitions: New
Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth‐Century Music (ed. B. Hoeckner), 1–17. New York and London:
Routledge.
Comay, R. (2000). Adorno’s siren song. New German Critique 81: 21–48.
Edwards, C. (2013). Uncovering the ‘gold‐bearing rubble’: Ernst Bloch’s literary criticism. In:
Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century (eds. A. Reeve‐Tucker and
N. Waddell), 182–203. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Foster, R. (2008). Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. New York: SUNY Press.
Goehr, L. (2008). Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Gottwald, C. (1989). Der Ketzer der Wiener Schule: Über die Frauenchöre von Theodor W. Adorno.
In: Theodor W. Adorno, der Komponist (eds. H.‐K. Metzger and R. Riehn), 111–120. Münich: Edition
Text + Kritik.
Hailey, C. (ed.) (2010). Alban Berg and His World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hoeckner, B. (ed.) (2006). Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth Century Music. New
York: Routledge.
Hullot‐Kentor, R. (2006a). Translator’s introduction: things beyond resemblance. In: Philosophy of
New Music, ix–xxx. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Hullot‐Kentor, R. (2006b). Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New
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Jameson, F. (1990). Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. London and New York:
Verso.
Jay, M. (1997). Mimesis and mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue‐Labarthe. In: The Semblance of
Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (eds. T. Huhn and L. Zuidervaart), 29–53.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kolleritsch, O. (ed.) (1979). Adorno und die Musik. Graz: Universal Edition für Institut für
Wertforschung.
Lee, S. (2015). Dissonant opera, dissident fragments. The Germanic Review 90 (4): 273–284.
Lee, S. (2017). Narrative traces. Journal of the American Musicological Society 70 (3): 835–840.
Leppert, R. (2002). Introduction. In: Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert), 1–82.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Leppert, R. (2005a). ‘Four hands, three hearts’: a commentary. Cultural Critique 60: 5–22.
Metzger, H.‐K. and Riehn, R. (eds.) (1989). Theodor W. Adorno, der Komponist. Münich: Edition Text +
Kritik.
Müller‐Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A Biography (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Paddison, M. (1993). Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwarz, M. (2015). Über Anton von Webern: Theodor W. Adorno bei den Darmstädter Ferienkursen
1951. Musik & Ästhetik 19: 5–20.
Simms, B. (ed.) (2014). Pro Mundo––Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Tiedemann, R. (2004). Adorno’s Tom Sawyer opera singspiel. In: The Cambridge Companion to Adorno
(ed. T. Huhn; trans. S. Bird‐Pollan), 376–394. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Webern, A. (1975). The Path to the New Music (trans. W. Reich and L. Black). Vienna: Universal
Edition.
Wellesz, E. (1912). Schoenberg et la jeune école Viennoise. Bulletin français de la Sammelbände der
Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 8 (3): 21–26.
Wiggershaus, R. (1995). The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (trans.
M. Robertson). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Further Reading
Borio, G. (2007). Work structure and musical representation: reflections on Adorno’s analyses for
interpretation (trans. M. Iddon). Contemporary Music Review 26 (1): 53–75.
Calico, J.H. (2015). Old‐age style: the case of Arnold Schoenberg. New German Critique 42 (2):
65–80.
Frisch, W. (ed.) (1999). Schoenberg and His World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Geuss, R. (1997). Berg and Adorno. In: The Cambridge Companion to Berg (ed. A. Pople), 38–50. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Goehr, L. (2003). Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien – in thirteen steps. Journal
of the American Musicological Society 56 (3): 595–636.
Shaw, J. and Auner, J. (eds.) (2010). The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
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Part II
Cultural Analysis
6
The Culture Industry

FRED RUSH
“‘Emigration is the best school for dialectics’” declares Ziffel in Brecht’s Fluchtlingsgespräche.
He expands on the theme:
The most acute dialecticians are refugees. Refugees, on account of change, study nothing but
change. They infer the greatest incidence from the least indication – that is, if they are being
reasonable. If their adversaries are victorious, they calculate the cost of victory. They do have
a fine eye for contradiction. Long live dialectic! (Brecht 1961, 112).
Ziffel’s point: exile and dialectical reasoning both consist in reconciling “opposites,” where
reconciliation is temporary, in time revealing new, more subtle forms of opposition. The
more opposition there is – the starker the apparent imbalance in one’s situation – the more
force given to the process. Discomfiture is both a precondition for and result of the process.
No Tomis, no Tristia.
Development of the conception and critique of what Horkheimer and Adorno in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment call the “culture industry” coincides historically with Critical
Theory’s expatriation. The near‐decade Adorno spent in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s
impacted him mightily, so much so that one might think quite reasonably that the omni-
present film industry in Southern California and the culture it secreted around itself were
more than enough impetus for his critical reckoning with the culture industry. Hollywood
could not be ignored from Brentwood, after all. But Critical Theory’s discussion of the com-
modification of culture begins with Adorno’s first mature essays, written before his
Aufenthalt on the West Coast.
1. Music and its Transmission
Two early essays in the philosophy of music stand out: “On the Social Situation of Music”
(1932) and “On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression in Listening” (1938). Both
essays investigate the social status of advanced art‐music in modern Europe. Such music is
“autonomous” to the extent that it is reasonably independent from everyday social
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demands. It follows from the fact that such demands in modern European society are
bourgeois demands that autonomous art be relatively free from bourgeois requirements.
To the extent that such requirements would operate to standardize music, as Adorno holds
they would, one might think that such autonomy is a very good thing. But it is only a very
good thing for music, and only then qualifiedly. Modern society is riven by contradiction
and art‐music’s capacity to stand outside the demands of the ordinary in such a society
depends on just that social fragmentation. Moreover, for Adorno “autonomy” is a concept
that admits of degrees and has no pristine instantiation. It always makes sense to ask how
autonomous a is from b or reflect on which of a or c is less or more autonomous from b. It
never makes sense to assert that a is autonomous full stop, that is, is fully and irrevocably
free. Given this, Adorno holds that art‐music at even its most avant‐garde reflects the sun-
dered nature of modern society. To be sure, it does so at a remove, but being at a remove
does not invest the music with a transcendent, post‐social character. Adorno is here devel-
oping in the domain of music a conception of dialectical rationality and critique: art‐music
detaches from society in general such that one may regard that music as constituting a
separate “world” in which it answers to its own demands. Yet, since that world and its sep-
arateness is a product of the antagonisms of society generally, it will carry within its auton-
omous form a content reflecting its having‐been‐separated and therefore the antagonisms
(Adorno 1984a, 729, 2002, 391–392). Five years earlier Benjamin had ascribed similar
structural principles to Trauerspiele.
This means that even art‐music can only have commodity value for society in general.
As far as society is concerned it has value, like all else, in terms of its ability to exchange for
other goods, that is, its ability to play a role in markets. We shall discuss Adorno’s under-
standing of the cognitive import of commodity form and relations later; for now, it is
enough to note that commodities have no inherent worth. They are abstract fungibles,
items whose nature consists precisely in their ability to function systematically with a
great deal of substitution. Of course any commodity will have its use and use‐value, and it
is a mistake to think that a broadly Marxian approach to capitalist markets asserts that use
plays no role in commodity. The point is, rather, that use‐value is “overwritten” by
exchange‐value, that is, that markets function by means of abstract equivalences between
radically different kinds of goods so that those goods may trade without essential regard for
their uses. Money marks equivalences between such goods. (Of course money or various
indices of monetary worth, can themselves be commodities, as it were “at second order.”)
Music exists at a point of tension between commodity and autonomy and, at that point,
finds itself alienated. For, modern art‐music must attempt to retain its unique form of
expression in the teeth of the ever‐expanding scope of the sphere of commodity. At
advanced stages of this encroachment, music is forced to become reflexive; its freedom is
indexed to an explicit awareness of its alienation and to a coordinately explicit investiga-
tion of the resources still available to it, with which it might resist the encroachment. This
accounts for the acceleration in late‐modern musical composition of formal innovation.
As propulsive as this is for the music, the music itself can do nothing to mend general
society. All it can do is bear witness through an ever‐contracting lens.
Adorno is also concerned by what he takes to be the diminution of aesthetic experience
by means of music’s technological reproduction. Primary here are radio broadcasts and
phonograph records. In terms of mere sonic quality of course Adorno is quite right to
insist that radio and, less invidiously, records are no match for live performance. There is
simply no comparison. If one extrapolates to media unknown to Adorno – for example,
cassette tapes, compact discs, mp3s, etc. – one may feel the point to be dire. Listening to
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Gurrelieder on one’s iPhone through earbuds is at best a faint remnant of the performance.
To come to be able to accept this gnat‐buzz as the default way music sounds is surely a very
bad thing. But psychoacoustics is not Adorno’s main worry; the way mass media shape
musical form, performance, and intellectual reception is suspect. Radio parses out the
intervals in which it will play the music, a symphony must be distributed across many sides
of 78 rpm records, and these sorts of constraints – all extra‐musical – in turn affect
listening and performance. Tempi will increase (or decrease), the attempt to communicate
“as‐if‐there” vivacity will impact timbre and volume, and many details will simply be lost.
Over the long run, listening will “regress” such that, were one in the audience at a live
performance, one would experience the music through the implied filter that radio and
records provide; that is, one would experience the live music under the aspect of “what‐is‐
to‐be‐transmitted.” Moreover, albums, radio broadcasts, and, now ubiquitously, internet
recordings of music can be repeated ad libitum. Such repetition dulls primary responsive-
ness, that is, it places a precondition on first hearing music that it conforms to type, since
repetitive listen is constructive of types and type‐listening. Adorno does leave room for
records as a form of musical recollection, not as of live, but as of a “petrified” (erstarrtet)
music (Adorno 1984b, 532, 2002, 279). This is a testamentary phenomenon. The
deadness of the music presents its life as evanescent, that is, under the aspect of having
lived. Its eternal life (as recorded) is also its eternal death (as having been played live). One
finds here a musical correlate to still‐life painting. Adorno writes that the phonograph’s
reification of the music is no objection to this; one cannot have a memorial without a
corpse. But, in the end, one might consider this only a slight concession. On the other side
of the ledger, art‐music becomes a “fetish,” an inanimate object invested with animate
qualities, tokening a magical form of experience (Adorno 1969, 9–45, 2002, 288–317).
An inanimate object imbued with spirit is spirit withdrawn from the realm of the human.
Music’s autonomy becomes increasingly socially marginalized; accordingly, it is treated as
a rarefaction with no essential social connection. Adorno deploys the concept of “fetish”
intending that it be placed alongside both Lukács’s conception of reification (Lukács 1967,
1971) and Benjamin’s developing notion of aura (Benjamin 1968, 1977).
2. Dialectic, Form, Concept
Adorno’s most sustained discussion of the relation of art to culture is the section of Dialectic
of Enlightenment (1944/7) called “The Culture Industry.” Adorno co‐authored the book
with Horkheimer, but took the lead in the composition of the culture industry section.
Before turning to the text, there are three preliminary conceptual matters to discuss. The
first has to do with what one might call the proper unit of analysis. Adorno’s early work in
the philosophy of music provides the key point, that is, that autonomous art, on the one
side, and cultural commodities, on the other, are not independent, opposed phenomena.
They are two elements of a single structure. Within that structure they relate to one another,
in one way of looking at things, in opposition; yet, from another perspective, the elements
are mutually supporting. Autonomous art and commodity art oppose one another in that
in the former there is singularity and detail of approach, whereas in the latter the work’s
generic integration controls the relation of all its elements. Nevertheless, autonomous and
commodity art reinforce one another in that the effect of the former as a stand‐out in-
stance of singular art depends on a contrast established between it and the generic.
Likewise, the lability of generic works, their ability to satisfy audiences across the board,
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rests on their taking on aspects of distinctiveness. That is, it is part of the developing generic
nature of cultural commodities to adapt singularity to their purposes and seem more differ-
entiated than they are. If one does not keep this interrelation of autonomous art and
cultural commodity firmly in view, one has no hope of tracking Horkheimer and Adorno’s
discussion of the culture industry.
A second preliminary matter has to do with the philosophical form of the chapter on
the culture industry. Dialectic of Enlightenment bears a subtitle that reads: “Philosophical
Fragments.” This is no casual designation; it has both historical and conceptual purchase.
Historically the subtitle resonates with aphoristic practice in French and German letters
dating from the Eighteenth Century. Dialectic of Enlightenment offers very little in the way
of explicit argumentation. For most philosophers, this will be disappointing. But by
Horkheimer and Adorno’s lights it is an entirely principled way to proceed. Arguments are
only as good as their premises. Successful intellectual exchange by means of argument
depends on at least some shared premises on at least some level. But the premises apt to be
accepted by one’s conversant are products of the stifling and self‐enclosed structure that
Dialectic of Enlightenment is set to challenge. Under such conditions, it is much more pow-
erful to show, not prove, one’s point. One does this by presenting the phenomenon one
wishes to draw attention to so that it is seen unmistakably. The best aphorisms are evi-
dence‐free, but fix attention. They stand by and for themselves. Horkheimer and Adorno
write that this fragmentary approach is especially evident in the chapter on the culture
industry (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 6, 2002, xix).
The third prerequisite is to take stock of the theory of concepts that informs Horkheimer
and Adorno’s understanding of the social ramifications of commodity form. A commodity
must be generic enough to trade efficiently in a system of diverse items. One might think
that the term “generic” expresses over‐generality and, thus, lack of needed specificity. That
is, there is often a negative normative dimension to the term. Horkheimer and Adorno do
not dissent from this judgment, but they also do not think that rejecting something as blasé
goes far enough. Being generic is an especially robust form of being general. Now, the
capacity to represent the world in general terms is widespread among higher‐order ani-
mals. One might equate conceptuality with this capacity if conjoined with a certain dispo-
sitional regularity. But Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern with the generic nature of
concept is directed at a more restricted notion of conception. They are concerned with
Kantian specifications of conceptuality. Kant allows that concepts proper might be
unstructured by transcendental apperception, but his main interest has to do with laws
and universal structure, and thus with concepts that figure in what he calls “cognition”
(Erkenntnis). Being conceptually general in this sense is the result of categorization.
Categorization in turn presupposes reduction, by means of judgment, of difference in favor
of sameness. That is, concepts organize specificity under generality by eliminating from
consideration differences between things so that two or more items can be grouped by a
rule in terms of what they have in common. The concept “string quartet” includes within
it Haydn’s op. 51, Beethoven’s op. 131, and Bartók’s Fourth, but only does so in virtue of
abstracting from their great variation. Of course humans must think, if not always at least
very often, in just this way. Adorno especially can seem as if he holds that there is something
inherently pathological about everyday conception or, if one shifts the thought a bit toward
language, about predication. For, any description of a thing that is general must be
selective, sacrifice detail, and display the thing in less than its complete form. Adorno in
other of his works draws dire consequences from the requirements of generality or, more
precisely, from a lack of circumspection that general, rule‐like thought must obscure
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articularity. But perception of the case borders on the mundane and the consequence he
p
envisions is hyperbolic. One wants to say: of course categorizing things in a certain way
puts to the side both other ways that they might be categorized and that they have a certain
dignity prior to their categorization. But it does not push such matters to the side forever,
nor is there any danger that one reduces even for now things to the way they are catego-
rized. Something must be added to the picture in order to generate the concern Adorno
expresses. A more plausible version of the claim detaches it from what Adorno takes to be
the methodological constraints of negative dialectics and advances it against a more socio-
logical background. Adorno and Horkheimer are convinced that modern society achieves
its structural integrity and scope by so tightly concatenating generalities in rigid systematic
hierarchies. The conceptual systems in question develop more and more in terms of an
internal prescription to increase scope and tighten conceptual and inferential relations
that hold between their constituent parts at the expense of the plasticity and non‐
systematic role of those parts. This is to be sure not the only notion of a system or of
systematic power, but it is one that Horkheimer and Adorno think is dominant in science
and one that is exported from that context into other sectors of social life. Under such con-
ditions, it is very difficult to think of things in manners that significantly depart from
convention.
Commodities are forms of thought, in the following sense. Economic structures are
human constructs, that is, are, broadly, intentional structures. If this is allowed, it is open
to treat commodities as special cases of the predominance of generality over specificity in
thought. Consider the phrase “forms of thought” used at the beginning of this paragraph.
One may understand it in two distinct ways. The first, stressed earlier, is that forms of
thought are the results of ways of thinking. But one might also take the phrase to indicate
that commodities form thought. Horkheimer and Adorno treat these two dimensions as
complementary and discuss commodity art in terms of both. Art that has the form of com-
modity is art that is produced by a structure to which commodity form is native and
necessary. Likewise, art that is commodity fosters interactions with it as of a commodity.
It is important not to overplay Adorno and Horkheimer’s Marxism here. Dialectic of
Enlightenment contains no explicit mention of Marx (excepting the Marx Brothers). In part
that was for “existential reasons” – the expatriated critical theorists to varying degrees
were anxious not to seem communist, for reasons having to do with their political freedom
and with securing research. (Mention of Marxian economics was systematically redacted
from Dialectic of Enlightenment prior to its 1947 publication. The editor of the most depend-
able English translation [Horkheimer and Adorno 2002] very helpfully marks these
excisions.) But that is not the whole story. Adorno, for one, was a Marxist sotto voce at
best. So, while Horkheimer and Adorno’s excoriation of commodity thinking may put
one in mind of Marx, the theoretical motivation has more to do with the twin pillars of
Lukács’ concept of reification and Weber’s of rationalization as they give rise to what
Horkheimer called “instrumental reason” (see Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 137, 173,
176, 2002, 102, 133, 136).
Dialectic of Enlightenment addresses its topics with a fair degree of philosophical specu-
lation. Not very much of the presentation invokes a priori generalization in its usual
philosophical forms. Horkheimer and Adorno take themselves to be dealing with social
facts and their dialectical extrapolation. But the “ground rules” of dialectic, while perhaps
in some sense immanent to the subject matter, do have non‐empirical bases. It is important
therefore to note that the culture industry chapter does not stand alone in its attention to
the ideological impacts of mass communication, automation, and technology. It is of a
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piece with other, more empirical work of the Institute for Social Research that was pub-
lished before and after its exile in the United States (see Adorno, Frenkel‐Brunswik,
Levinson et al. 1969; Horkheimer 1988a; Kirchheimer 1939; Löwenthal and Guterman
1949; Neumann 1944; Pollock 1957). Adorno in particular was wary of the way empirical
research was carried out in the United States, a phenomenon he knew (or thought he
knew) from his time in New Jersey working on the Princeton radio project. But, at least
officially, he did not conceive his work in isolation from the empirical tout court.
3. The Silver Screen and Beyond
Film is the primary art form considered in Dialectic of Enlightenment. As “enemy nationals,”
Adorno and Horkheimer were subject to travel restrictions that prevented them from a
more first‐hand perusal of Hollywood; nevertheless, film culture in Los Angeles was
ubiquitous. The term “mass art” was common enough among early twentieth-century
cultural critics; Benjamin (1968, 1977), Kracauer (1976, 1994, 2003, 2005), Horkheimer
(1988b), and Löwenthal (1984, 1990) all used it. Horkheimer and Adorno open “The
Culture Industry” by deploying several variants of the concept (1962, 129, 130, 131,
2002, 95, 96, 97). Later, Adorno became unhappy with the term, which he felt could be
misleading in its implication – as he took it – that such art was art that is made by and for
“the masses” (Adorno 1967, 60–61, 1991, 98–99). Notwithstanding this, Adorno uti-
lizes the term occasionally in his postwar work. Film is “mass art” in at least three senses.
First, it is mass produced; it is by its very nature replicable without significant alternation
after printing the edited camera negative (or interpositive). While there are print stages
closer to the original negative than the release print, any number of prints can be made.
(Adjusting for digitalization, this is true for DVD and Blu‐ray discs as well.) Second, because
any number of prints can be made, the distribution of a film to its audience depends not on
some limit of the number of available copies, but rather on the provisioning of apparatus
to view the film, for example, projectors, screens, theaters, etc. Films are made to be seen by
as many people who have a desire to see them, which viewing is provided for in theaters
located so as to maximize viewership. This is still the era of the great Los Angeles and New
York movie palaces, opulent “destination venues” where going to the films was sold as
spectacle. Third, these facilities are constructed to seat several hundred or even a thousand
audience members, who see the film en masse. One doesn’t want to strain credulity and
posit on this basis a collective oceanic experience on the part of audiences. But to contend
that audience members are “alone amongst others in the dark,” as one sometimes sees
written, is even more improbable as a description of audience experience in the 1940s. It
makes sense, in a moderate way, to allow that seeing a film is a “mass experience” both in
that films are calibrated to be seen by a group of people who at least are together for the
purpose of seeing that film and in that one’s responsiveness to the film takes into account
the responsiveness of others. In any case, mass‐appeal is a matter of degree. Some films
intend more individuated responses; some do not. It is useless to attempt to argue away the
fact that an important part of the experience of the first run of Psycho was the added chill
given to one’s screams by everyone else’s.
Being technological – being mass art in the first sense – is not itself what makes works
articles of the culture industry. It is rather the way technology subtends their domination
and deception. Technology does so when it “monopolizes” social expectation and respon-
siveness (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 130, 2002, 95–96). While it is true that
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c ommodity form is the form of the art product, it is crucial to mark the contention that
commodity form is the form of experience, the form in which the artist makes and the audi-
ence encounters the work. Horkheimer and Adorno rate this commodity effect on works
more powerful than anything the arch‐progenitor of mass art, Wagner, could have dreamt
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 132, 2002, 97). This is accomplished not, as one might
think, by dulling sensibility but by attuning it. Products of the culture industry do not pre-
sent themselves as bland and inconsequential; rather, they mimic the onrush of commercial
activity to which they belong. Schematization for Kant was the process by which pure con-
cepts are modeled a priori as rules for the organization of specific intuitions. Kant wrote
that this process, required for experience to be even so much as possible, is a “hidden art in
the depths of the human soul” (Kant 1990, A141/B180–181). Hidden no longer, say
Horkheimer and Adorno: the culture industry has penetrated those depths and installed
commodity form as the crux of possible artistic representation and thus of possible self‐
knowledge attendant to the experience of artworks (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 132–
133, 2002, 98–99). This creates a trifurcate pre‐established harmony between the order
of economy, of object, and of reception. Such art delivers (i.e. makes good) in that it delivers
(i.e. transports) the audience back into the world of everyday work (Horkheimer and
Adorno 1962, 145, 2002, 109). It is an engine of false reconciliation, a reified form of
cultural self‐harm (Adorno 1978, 146–148 [Section 96], 1993, 193–195).
Horkheimer and Adorno advance this thesis along many tangents, and one might pick
any one of them (or group of them) to chart their presentation. I would like to emphasize
two concepts that have received less attention than others, but I do not in any way wish to
suggest that this is the only path through the presentation. The first is diversion (Zerstreuung)
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 143, 2002, 107). “Zerstreuen,” the verb in which the
noun is rooted, has three slightly different shades of meaning, all of which are implicated
in their use of the term: “scatter,”, “dissipate,” and “offer diversion.” The latter meaning is
most prominent. A Hollywood film sets the task of being a diversion from the everyday by
replicating the everyday in a slightly different form. But the degree of difference is under
strict control; the work cannot be so discontinuous from the workaday world that experi-
ence of it would be too laborious. Such art is duplicitous in its effect, both offering respite
and denying it (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 150, 2002, 113). The satisfaction of the
experience is a reinforcement of standard modes of reacting to the world at large: “to be
pleased is to be in agreement” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 153, 2002, 115). But such
“amusements” also dissipate possible aesthetic reaction, this also in the service of insuring
predictable reintegration into society. When Adorno writes in Minima Moralia that “every
visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse” (Adorno 1993,
21, 1978, 25 [Section 5]) he is reporting, so to speak, from the trenches.
And, last, the works themselves scatter their elements in order to achieve their optimal
reintegrating effects. Horkheimer and Adorno stress here the kind of variability that such
works exhibit. Even audiences under what critical theorists take to be the lockdown con-
straints of ideology are not automata; they must be presented with something they think is
special. The paradigm is something like franchise films – there were plenty in Hollywood at
the time, especially in the mystery and horror genres: for example, The Thin Man, Charlie
Chan, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, The Mummy, etc. When one reads that “every film is a
preview for the next” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 172, 2002, 132), one might be put
in mind of such franchises: star‐driven sets of films calibrated to provide one more of the
same, with just enough variation in plot and special effects to be fun. If there is a point
where an enhanced effect can be had by departing from the overall plan of the work, that
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is just the minor difference sought. It is characteristic of such works, then, that they are
not strongly unified by their overall aesthetic conception: rather, they have what integrity
they do in virtue of the role they play in rendering audiences pliable. In a memorable
disowning of the “Lubitsch touch,” one sees the central claim: the wry detail is only the
wry detail to the extent that “showing the wry detail” is generalizable as style (Horkheimer
and Adorno 1962, 163, 2002, 125). This point made, as it were, in miniature spells
the culmination of a development in modern European self‐understanding. Adorno
and Horkheimer endeavor to show that the “official story,” according to which modern
subjectivity develops through bourgeois individuality, inverts matters. The development
of bourgeois sensibility is not the result of a “principle of individuality” (Prinzip der
Individualität) (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 164, 2002, 125 [a coy adaptation of
Schopenhauer’s principium individuationis]). The opposite is true; bourgeois self‐under-
standing develops only by suppressing individuality (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 148,
2002, 111; cf. Marcuse 1965, 1968). If by “heroic” one means “standing out in terms of
highest, definitive qualities,” in the modern world it is the Average Joe who becomes heroic
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 165, 2002, 126). Horkheimer and Adorno are making
the same point from the other extreme when they write that the culture industry has raised
“species being” to an epitome. Gattungswesen is of course a concept from Marx, specifically
from his early work prized by critical theorists. The extension of the term is not entirely
clear, but in general it denotes a proper object of productive activity, the sundering from
which causes alienation. Here this is not the meaning intended. It is rather that the very
conception of what it is generally to be human has been perverted into an order of “second
nature.” Against this conceptual backdrop, stereotypes constructed from averaged human
activities are the fundamental objects that one takes to be individual (Horkheimer and
Adorno 1962, 154, 2002, 116).
The second concept that orders the analysis is style (Stil). The function Adorno and
Horkheimer assign to this concept is informed by the centrality it enjoyed in Hegel‐inspired
late nineteenth‐century European history of the visual arts. Heinrich Wölfflin is represen-
tative. Wölfflin sets himself the problem of discovering the “double root of style.” One of
the roots has to do with the question of what makes possible a unified artistic sensibility.
The answer: temperament, school, country, and race – considered historically – all unify
artistic sensibility in both artist and period. The second root is Hegelian, and constitutes
what is novel in approach. Driving the various forms of contextualized unified sensibility is
a reciprocating rational process of developing representational schemata. It is this
foundation in Hegel that would have recommended style to Horkheimer and Adorno as a
concept with which to attempt to come to grips with the culture industry as one such
“schema” (cf. the aforementioned remark concerning schematism in Kant). In order to
adequately grasp the nature of this underpinning, one must take a historical step back
from Wölfflin to Alois Riegl. Stilfragen – the title given to Riegl’s first important book – arose
as questions in the first place when idealist art historians in central Europe reconceived the
importance of ornament to the plastic arts. The given view was that ornament was ines-
sential, an additive feature to art the formal nature of which was bounded by the possibil-
ities offered by the artistic materials. Riegl instead argued that one could chart an unbroken
history of ornament in European art on account of the continuity of mutating modes of
visual schemata that artists deploy. Art is not based in neutral imitation of nature and
rated in terms of its verisimilitude on that measure; rather, art is a primary way in which
humans express their desire that the world answer to their visions of it for them. Riegl
called this impulse to make over the world, and not merely copy it, the Kunstwollen.
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This too is recognizably Hegelian. If one wants to understand the primary forces deter-
mining artistic modalities and their uses at a given time in history, one will have to discuss
the human desire to find the world to be satisfactory at that given time. The artwork
expresses that historically situated demand; and style is the manner in which the demand is
rendered coherent and communicable. Style is thus tied to general forms of visualization at
given points in history; one may use the concept to understand the aesthetic unification of
a work in terms of its individual maker and its period. One practical implication of this view
of the relative priority of vision to what is envisioned was a reconsideration of periods of art
that had been branded devoid of style (e.g. late‐Imperial art of Rome, the Baroque, etc.)
Wölfflin’s “history of seeing” was immensely important to Ernst Gombrich, who despite
this criticized the Hegelian universalism of the view. Benjamin did likewise in a 1933
review of a collection of essays from the followers of Riegl (Benjamin 1985), but there
are traces of the positive effect of the Riegl–Wölfflin line on him (see Schwartz 2005).
One bit of evidence is Benjamin’s appropriation of Riegl’s term for how style integrates
works, “crystallization.” Riegl writes that he took the idea from Burckhardt, but it
descends ultimately from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, where it denotes a reciprocating
and self‐reproducing part‐whole form prior to organic structure proper. Adorno uses this
term several times, often in his approving discussion of Benjamin’s view about how pri-
mordial names are refracted semantically into concepts (see Adorno 1976, 240, 1982,
234; cf. Adorno 1970, 201, 1978, 195, 1993, 148 [Section 97], 1997, 133,).
There is a tendency in thinking about artistic style to see it as a marker of “high” culture
and, coordinately, to view periods of cultural diminution as lacking style. These are degen-
erate periods where, at best, style is equivalent to what is stylish. In a word: the concern is
decadence. For Horkheimer and Adorno the touchstone of such a view of the relation of
style to culture is Nietzsche (see Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 136n.1, 2002, 101n.1).
Horkheimer and Adorno endorse the proposition that the art of the culture industry is
debased. And one might think that, if the art is debased, it stands to reason that it lacks
style. But it does not follow from the fact that lack of style implies debased culture that a
debased culture implies lack of style. This is precisely what Adorno and Horkheimer point
out as against the Burckhardt–Nietzsche line of Kulturkritik. The culture industry has a
style, perhaps several. More than that, the particular style or styles that it deploys are every
bit or even more powerful than prior forms of style. As Weber might have added, the culture
industry outfits itself with a “steel‐hard shell” (stahlhartes Gehäuse) of style. This dialectic
move is typical of early Critical Theory and of Dialectic of Enlightenment especially. When
one is presented with a phenomenon that seems extremely negative, say, a destitute form
of culture, there is a tendency to see it as extraordinary, even monstrous. Thereby one
exempts the phenomenon from analysis, on the assumption that analysis must operate
with what is suitable to rational understanding. Adorno and Horkheimer reject this
exemption. The treatment of the relation of myth to enlightenment rejects it, the treatment
of the relation of Sade to Kant rejects it, the treatment of the kinship of capitalism and fas-
cism rejects it, and it is rejected here as well. What is truly horrible about “mass deception”
is that it is a product of structures that seem benign and ordinary.
The prospects for autonomous art in the era of the culture industry are dim. Whether
art forms that have emerged in the period and have been all but identified with mass art
can be liberated from the culture industry is an issue treated later. Music, literature, the
visual arts, architecture, and dance preexisted the advent of the culture industry and,
while any of those forms is by and large open to the incursions of the culture industry,
their native means to resist commodification might be rated somewhat greater than those
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of photography or film if only because of their longer histories. Following Lukács, one
might say that artworks that focus meaning through stylistic integration aspire to
“totality.” Non‐autonomous works exhibit uncritical totality. That is, their integrating
styles harmonize the work into a self‐sealing whole, which represents the world external to
it as in good order (Horkheimer and Adorno 1962, 138–139, 2002, 103–104). Artworks
are integrated entities; each is unified in some way around the ideas and sensibility that
guide its making and reception. But harmony and unity are not the same thing; a work
may have unity without that unity being harmonious. Autonomous art unifies without
harmonizing, pitting totality against totality. Its integrative force consists in style that
cannot be wholly comprehended within the antecedent possibilities of form. Adorno some-
times speaks of artworks that are dissonant; they reject harmony from within. This does
not mean a rejection of all conventional devices, but autonomous style exceeds such
devices, recasting them as present in the work yet as not controlling it (see Adorno 1964,
13–17, 2002, 564–567). Often it is the case that such “belated style” is only qualifiedly
within the intentional competence of the artist.
Style in this sense enforces a principle of non‐closure of works; any totality at hand is
deferred. Horkheimer and Adorno write that style is only a “promise” (Horkheimer and
Adorno 1962, 138, 2002, 103). The reference is to Stendhal’s bon mot that “beauty is but
the promise of happiness” (la beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur) (Stendhal 1965, 64n.; see
also Adorno 1970, 461, 1997, 331). Works that present unproblematic totalities are, as far
as promises go, false. But style as such need not be rejected on that basis, as autonomous
works promise truth by their refusal to harmonize themselves and their relation to the world.
The condition they state, however, is negative and indeterminate, that is, not this harmony
but another not‐yet‐realizable one. The most resistive work, then, will present disrupted
formal harmonies, that is, harmony as disrupted. This of course recalls the conception of the
fragmentary that sustains the compositional form of much of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
4. Afterlife of an Idea
On his return to Germany, Adorno continued to reflect on the issues raised in “The Culture
Industry.” He never retracted the core views stated there, but he did branch out from the
Hollywood context to consider the prospects of mass art as autonomous. Again the focus
is primarily on film, but Adorno also considers television.
Television comes into its own as mass media in the United States and Germany in
the period of the late‐1940s to the early‐1950s (regular commercial broadcasts began in
the United States in 1947, in the BRD in 1952, and in the GDR in 1956). It is perhaps a
surprise that Adorno is not completely opposed to the medium, writing that any analysis
of television must provide both a critique of what is nefarious about it and a way forward
to improve the medium (Adorno 1954, 213). The key to this approach is to do justice to
what Adorno calls the “stratification” of mass media generally. Television is positioned
between film and radio; they constitute an unavoidable continuity in which they are thor-
oughly intermeshed, lending powers and effects to one another (Adorno 1966, 69–71,
2005, 49–50). The effects that most concern Adorno are experiential. Any mass art object
operates on several levels at once, where the strata involved are not “fused” but “rigidly
superimposed” (Adorno 1954, 221). Unlike autonomous art, in which the many layers of
meaning thoroughly combine due to their deep interdependence, mass art fires experience
by simultaneously hitting any number of social‐psychological targets separately. Such
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cultural artifacts are planned to do so, and Adorno is especially struck by advertising’s
capacity to coopt both conscious and unconscious desire by means of stratification, “psy-
choanalysis in reverse” (Adorno 1954, 223; Löwenthal 1987, 186). Adorno does not
mean “unconscious” in a strict sense – although he does not rule out such incursions.
Rather, the “hidden messages” are, as he puts it, “inconspicuous,” permitting television to
maintain the subliminal qua subliminal (Adorno 1954, 224). Because there is no release
of the implicit into the explicit, the mere disposition to take what one is provided in its own
terms is reinforced by every viewing (Adorno 1966, 79, 2005, 55–56). The main culprits
are genres, which embed in the viewer responses that are themselves stereotypical, and
because they are so, are preadapted for further standardization. There may be a feeling of
ersatz freedom in having a “cinema in one’s home,” a form of entertainment that is small
and seemingly controllable, but the increased repetitiveness and commercialism of the
medium outweigh such superficialities, revealing its power to dominate choice (Adorno
1966, 74–75, 2005, 52–53).
Much of this follows the treatment already given to film genre in “The Culture Industry.”
What is different is the interesting further claim that stereotypes in television programs
operate to relativize ideas to personality types (one of Adorno’s examples is a show about a
dictator, where totalitarianism is reduced to a conjunction of personal ambition and general
maliciousness) to deliver moral bromides, or to reinforce nationalism. But perhaps the most
significant aspect of the postwar essays is the shift they presage from consideration of the
content of mass art to more basic questions having to do with the formal nature of media. It
is possible, in part at least, to see Adorno’s outlook in “The Culture Industry” to be a lengthy
answer to Benjamin’s less guarded views on the critical potential of film. Likewise, one might
say that Adorno’s thought on film after his repatriation has its impetus in responding to
Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960). The main work here is “Transparencies on Film.” This essay
benefits from Adorno’s improved understanding of film structure. Adorno had co‐written a
book on musical composition in film (Eisler 1947; Adorno and Eisler 1969) and developed a
script for an unproduced film called Below the Surface (see Jenemann 2007, 105–47); never-
theless, he had little technical understanding of filmmaking and even less of photographic art
more generally. Given the pervasiveness of photography in modern Europe and the United
States, this constitutes a significant gap in his theory of mass art.
Specifically, Adorno had not thought sufficiently about the photographic basis of film,
shot construction, or cutting technique. “Transparencies” takes up this first matter, that is,
the inherent realism of film due to its basis in photography. Photography is ontologically real,
that is, what it represents has to have existed at the time of its representation. Photography is
inherently and unerringly referential. Corollary to this, the photographic image in the first
instance is not rendered, but recorded. The contrast with painting has impressed many, but
it is important not to draw too strong a conclusion from it. Nothing appears on the canvas
unless a painter puts it there; he or she marks the surface with intention and craft. The pho-
tographic impression results from a mechanical process; there is no fashioning of the image
in the process of its creation. But it is a mistake to reduce the craft that has as its result the
photographic image to the recording of the initial impression for the simple reason that the
image that one sees on the print is also the result of many other stages of preparation. So if
the idea that photography, and with it film, is real is supposed to show that it is limited to its
referential function, that is clearly wrong. If the inherent reality of photography and film is
meant to imply that the referential function must always be a proper part of their meaning,
that seems much more tenable. One might say that film amplifies this inherent realism
by showing what it represents as moving (or potentially moving). Painting, sculpture, and
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hotography can represent moving objects, but they cannot represent objects in movement.
p
(Adorno does not make a more telling point, i.e. that movies “move” in that the camera can
move, moving the visual frame of reference within diegetic space.) Adorno holds that film’s
realism tends the medium to realize its core potentialities by achieving greater and greater
grasp on the world as it is. There are two conclusions to be drawn from this. First, in virtue of
its base formal characteristics, film’s aims are satisfied when it represents faithfully, where
“faithfully” means to capture as much of the world as can be seen (and heard). Adorno does
not make this point, but one might even say – as Kracauer and Bazin do – that film sees better
than the eye (nothing escapes it) and, because it presents this hyper‐sight to audiences, it
invites them to attend even more deeply to what is visible on the screen than they would in
everyday life. Some films, for example, Béla Tarr’s Turin Horse, exploit this by extra‐long takes
and ultra‐gradual shifts in focus. Second, when inserted into an artistic culture dominated by
the culture industry, the world that is the norm for gauging satisfaction of the realist aim is
especially conformist. This means that films are made in order to serve up a reality whose
antecedent integrity is required and unquestioned. Otherwise, the vocation film sets for itself
to be as real as possible is problematic.
So much the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment might have said. Adorno wishes to
challenge, however, the presupposition that film’s integrity as an art depends on this
mimetic function; but he holds that it would be undialectical to think that this is made pos-
sible by a simple denial of the realism of film. Instead, realism has to work against itself to
break down the idea that film must subserve current states of the world. The gloss of film’s
realism as “referential” is no throwaway. “Transparencies” suggests that a film can detach
itself sufficiently from its realism by nominalist means to count as autonomous art. It will
decompose the world represented, by renouncing “professional” technique, arresting
motion, or radical editing. This seems reasonable enough, if vague. But the specific way
that Adorno makes the point may seem arcane in the extreme. He does not analogize film
to spoken language or to language as an abstract system, as one sometimes finds film the-
orists doing; rather, experiencing film images is similar to reading writing (Schrift) (Adorno
1967, 82, 1991, 180). It is difficult to make Adorno’s intentions entirely precise; what
follows is an attempted reconstruction.
Adorno is focusing on the graphic element of written language, the nature of writing as
marking. The analogy he pursues runs from the film image as graven, that is, as imprinted,
to the letters in words as marks. At this base level, both film images and letters are inscrip-
tions. Adorno’s guiding idea is that, if one can track imparting meaning back to such rudi-
ments, change in rudimentary structure will cause change in meaning, in both cases
visual meaning. Moreover, if one does this on the model of récit, as is Adorno’s normal
compositional practice, one increases the awareness that one is deriving meaning from the
marks. Adorno holds that such derivation itself is an active, pre‐syntactic compositional
process (at least in the first instance). In themselves these marks are non‐iconic. One must
read in order to glean, and reading, as automatic as it may seem, is a matter of making
marks mean something. Concern with the graphic elements of writing is not standard fare
in mainstream philosophy of language or linguistics. One can make a great deal about this
inattention, as Derrida does, and one may even find some common ground between decon-
structive theory in that vein and Adorno in terms of the Bilderverbot, the prohibition on
representing the transcendent. As Gertud Koch (1993) emphasizes, this concept is at work
in Adorno, again through the influence of Benjamin.
Lest this seem wild speculation, consider a further analog. Sütterlin is a German form of
handwriting that was taught in school from the early Twentieth Century until the Second
98
World War. It exhibits angular continuity between the letters of single words, several liga-
tures, and strong verticality of stroke. Nowadays, it can be challenging for even a native
speaker of German to read, and is harder than that to write (its lower‐case “d” has migrated
into standard proofreading symbols, standing for deleatur). The Swiss novelist Robert
Walser’s Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet is written in an almost microscopic variant of this script,
made even more difficult to decipher by the use of several invented abbreviations and con-
tractions. Only pencil was used in the initial writing. The reason Walser chose to work this
way is a subject of some controversy. Here is a possibility, or more accurately, a set of pos-
sibilities. Walser wrote to correspondents that he was unable to use pen and ink to write.
“Write” here does not mean “write down” – Walser apparently used pens for other
tasks – but rather to compose. He sometimes put the point in terms of disability. The few
photographs we have of Walser late in his life, when Bleistiftgebiet was written, show his
hands balled into fists, but his medical records disclose no physical malady (he was living
for years in a mental hospital). It might be that Walser was stymied by the idea that pen
and ink is too assertive, that is, once it is there, one has an indelible mark that must be lined
through if it is to be changed, whereas pencil is less permanent. Indeed, Walser seems to
have thought this of himself, that is, that living for him was a matter of willed diminish-
ment or self‐erasure. And to the degree one thinks one’s writing expresses oneself graph-
ically, that might matter a great deal to him. The use of extreme miniscule might be
thought to express this self‐withdrawal as well. But he also seems to have thought that only
in the rhythm of writing in this script could he reflect the flow of his thoughts. The idea,
presumably, is that the script and its size tempered the physical action of marking the
paper, as would the drag of the pencil lead. One might think that the basis for Walser’s
insistence tracks the conception of marking that Adorno trades on here: that human
thought realizes itself (sometimes) in marking things and in marking them in certain
ways. Perhaps the relation of thinking and marking is such that a change in marks would
entail a change in thought or a change in the latter a change in the former.
If this is plausible, it is a short step to claim that the way a film strikes one is a matter of
its visual marks, which marks are apprehended by a mark‐sensitive capacity of mind.
Recall that film has a non‐reflective, near‐compulsory effect on its audience: to immerse
oneself seamlessly in the film world. This is possible because the film world is a better,
more‐than‐real duplication of the world it is about. In order to disrupt this effect, one must
structure film to defeat easy inference and expectation. In what one might call its “subjective
dimension,” one can introduce the necessary discontinuity by taking advantage of a
general feature of depth psychology. Human visual experience, Adorno avers, does not
merely get recorded straightaway in the mind. Rather, the mind “snaps up” certain images
and holds them side‐by‐side. Such image‐aggregates do not then recur in memory as
moving images (they lack the represented causal connection); rather, they are stored and
experienced sub‐reflectively as static afterimages of the moving (cf. the aforementioned
purported value of phonograph records). Adorno compares this to the “magic lantern
slides of childhood” (Adorno 1967, 82, 1991, 180). Writing is fixed in text. Yet the marks
move under one’s eyes, movement imparted by the action of reading. A contestable phe-
nomenology of reading, but let it stand for the purposes of explication. If this is so, one
might exploit the way visual memory reconstructs the filmic image by providing images for
viewing that accentuate the reconstructive activity of mind in gleaning meaning. Such
images will do so by being difficult to process mentally, but not so difficult that the process
abates. Such films would not replicate a given world and, moreover, they would engage the
reconstructive imaginative agency of the viewer to institute the world of the film. Along its
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Fred Rush
“objective dimension,” film must decontextualize the images it presents, eschewing sty-
listic realism by playing the meaning of realistic images against critical counterparts.
What Adorno primarily has in mind here is montage, but one might imagine less mosaic
forms of cutting and more emphasis given on shot construction and camera movement. In
any event, the images must allow multiple forms of legibility; they should be set in “con-
stellations,” not systems (Adorno 1967, 84, 1991, 182).
5. Concluding Thoughts
We owe the slogan ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (loosely: “worth naught, want not”) to the
seventeenth‐century Flemish occasionalist Arnold Geulincx. Beckett never tired of saying
this to his intimates; its astringency especially suits him. Geulincx also happened to be a
favorite of Horkheimer’s. The tag stands well as the moral of Horkheimer and Adorno’s
tale of art in the land of the commodity.
The truth of the proposition is uncontestable: vast swaths of contemporary culture are
permeated by updated forms of the malaise, duplicity, and stupidity that exercised
Horkheimer and Adorno. If radio, Hollywood films, the funny papers, TV, and records are
to blame, what is one to say about the internet? Even if one does not accept every particular
of Horkheimer and Adorno’s complaint against the culture industry, one might feel a
certain solidarity with them. The “falsifiers” consigned to Inferno’s Pits of Woe – the eighth,
to be exact – might well be cultural industrialists and those who appreciate their depreda-
tions. Recall that contrapassi become more precise as one descends, so the cohort would be
condemned to very specific and symbolically fitting punishments, say, reification visited on
them in especially brutal physical forms. No one who is attentive at all to the world in
which we now live can miss its debasement by cellphones, click tracks, Auto‐Tune,
Facebook, Twitter, Rotten Tomatoes, emojis, call‐in radio, Googling, posting “likes,” selfies,
and the like. Mediocrity puffed into prestige through “networking,” decisively sealing off
any connection to intellectual substance, is now a mainstay of academic life, all but
controlling hiring, promotion, and access to research fellowships.
Adorno’s views on the culture industry are often the object of parody. He can seem to over-
react, his sensitivity getting the better of his sensibility. Moreover, his prescriptions for mass
art of distinction have not been productive. There is perhaps a way to consider early Godard to
be clunky in the way Adorno thinks, and there is a certain truth to his assessment of
Antonioni’s La notte. But the idea of balkanization of filmic material, in both film proper and
TV, has not proven very useful. This is not because film as an art form has stagnated. Mizoguchi,
Tarkovsky, Bresson, and Bergman are resolute narrative artists whom no one would rate as
commodifiers. Kieślowski’s Dekalog, surely the very summit of television, carries no Adornian
pennant. Still, in times where many are oblivious to the deadening arrangement of their lives
by means of culture, a loud voice can be productive, especially if it is also strident.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1954). How to look at television. The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 8:
213–235.
Adorno, T.W. (1964). Moments Musicaux. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1966). Eingriffe: Neun Kritische Modelle. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1967). Ohne Leitbild/Parva Aesthetica. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
100
Adorno, T.W. (1969). Dissonanzen, 4e. Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht.

Adorno, T.W. (1970). Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1976). Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1978). Minima Moralia (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). London: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1982). Prisms (trans. S.W. Nicholson and S. Weber). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1984a). Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 18 (ed. R.
Tiedemann), 729–777. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1984b). Die Form der Schallplatte. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19, 530–534.
Adorno, T.W. (1991). The Culture Industry (ed. J.M. Bernstein). London: Routledge.
Adorno, T.W. (1993). Minima Moralia, 21e. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2002). Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans. S. Gillespie). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2005). Critical Models (trans. H. Pickford). New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Eisler, H. (1969). Komposition für den Film. München: Rogner and Bernhard.
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel‐Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. et al. (1969). The Authoritarian Personality. New
York: Norton.
Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In: Illuminations (ed.
H. Arendt; trans. H. Zohn), 217–252. New York: Schocken.
Benjamin, W. (1977). Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. In:
Illuminationen, 136–169. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Benjamin, W. (1985). Strenge Kunstwissenschaft: Zum ersten Bande der Kunstwissenschaftliche
Forschungen. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (eds. R. Tiedemann and S. Hermann), 363–374.
Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Brecht, B. (1961). Fluchtlingsgespräche. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Eisler, H. (1947). Composing for the Films. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horkheimer, M. (1988a). Authorität und Familie. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (eds. A. Schmidt
and G. Schmid Noerr), 336–417. Frankfurt/M: Fischer.
Horkheimer, M. (1988b). Neue Kunst und Massenkultur. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, (ed.
A. Schmidt and G. Schmid Noerr), 419–438.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1962). Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Stuttgart:
Fischer.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (ed.
G. S. Noerr; trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Jenemann, D. (2007). Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kant, I. (1990). Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 3e (ed. R. Schmidt). Hamburg: Meiner.
Kirchheimer, O. (1939). Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Columbia University Press.
Koch, G. (1993). Mimesis and Bilderverbot. Screen 34: 211–222.
Kracauer, S. (1976). Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Kracauer, S. (1994). Das Ornament der Masse, 6e. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Kracauer, S. (2003). Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (trans. G. David and E. Mosbacher).
New York: Zone.
Kracauer, S. (2005). The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (ed. and trans. T. Levin). Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Löwenthal, L. (1984). Literature and Mass Culture. London: Transaction.
Löwenthal, L. (1987). Theodor Adorno: an intellectual memoir. In: An Unmastered Past:
Autobiographical Reflections (ed. M. Jay), 183–200. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Löwenthal, L. (1990). Literatur und Massenkultur. In: Schriften, vol. 1 (ed. D. Helmut). Frankfurt/M:
Suhrkamp.
Löwenthal, L. and Guterman, N. (1949). Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American
Agitator. New York: Harper & Bros.
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Lukács, G. (1967). Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein. Amsterdam: de Munter.

Lukács, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Marcuse, H. (1965). Über den affirmative Charakter der Kultur. In: Kultur und Gesellschaft, 56–101.
Zürich: Ex Libris.
Marcuse, H. (1968). The affirmative character of culture. In: Negations: Essays in Critical Theory
(trans. J. Shapiro), 88–133. Boston: Beacon.
Neumann, F. (1944). Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944, 2nd rev.
ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pollock, F. (1957). Automation: A Study of Its Economic and Social Consequences (trans. W.O. Henderson
and W.H. Caloner). New York: Praeger.
Schwartz, F. (2005). Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth‐Century Germany.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stendhal (Beyle, Marie‐Henri) (1965). De l’amour. Paris: Flammarion.
Further Reading
Auerbach, E. (1946). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Balázs, B. Der sichbare Mensch, oder die Kultur des Films. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Bürger, P. (1974). Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp / 1984. Theory of the Avant‐Garde,
translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Debord, G. (1967). La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet Castel / 1994. Society of the Spectacle, trans-
lated by Donald Nicholson‐Smith. New York: Zone.
Friedeburg, L. and Habermas, J. (eds.) (1983). Adorno‐Konferenz 1983, 131–197. Frankfurt/M:
Suhrkamp.
Greenberg, C. (1961). Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hansen, M.B. (2011). Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kracauer, S. (1968). Theory of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lindner, B. and Lüdke, W.M. (eds.) (1979). Materialen zur ästhetischen Theorie Th. W. Adornos
Konstruktion der Moderne. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Lukács, G. (1971). Die Theorie des Romans. Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand / 1974. The Theory
of the Novel, translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Menke, C. (1991). Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida.
Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp / 1999. The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida,
translated by Neil Solomon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Podro, M. (1982). The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Seel, M. (2004). Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
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7
Adorno and Horkheimer on Anti‐Semitism

FABIAN FREYENHAGEN
The literature on Adorno and anti‐Semitism presents a somewhat curious state of affairs.
On the one hand, concern with anti‐Semitism, at least post-1940, and in particular “the
administrative murder of millions of innocent people” (MWP, 557/90) at Auschwitz and
other extermination sites, is presented as pivotal to his views and major works (see
notably Tiedemann 2003). On the other hand, the account of anti‐Semitism offered by
Adorno – and Horkheimer, with whom he co‐authored key texts (such as notably “Elements
of Anti‐Semitism” in their Dialectic of Enlightenment) – faces trenchant criticisms for failing
to do justice to the complex phenomena at issue. According to dominant story in the
secondary literature, Adorno had a welcome influence on Horkheimer and other members
of the Institute of Social Research in placing more emphasis on anti‐Semitism and eschew-
ing purely economic explanations of it (see Jacobs 2014, 53ff). However, the resulting
position he and Horkheimer adopted from about 1943 still contained fundamental prob-
lems (see Bahr 1978; Jay 1980; Diner 1993; Rabinbach 2002; Benhabib 2009; Rensman
2017).
It is not formally inconsistent to say that a certain issue is of pivotal importance to a
thinker despite his or her misconceptualizing it fundamentally. Still, one would hope that
things are otherwise, and not just curiosity but also charity demand that the matter ought
to be re‐examined and possibly re‐evaluated. Such a re‐examination and re‐evaluation is
what I undertake in this chapter. In particular, I aim to show that the account of anti‐
Semitism developed by Adorno – and Horkheimer – has more merit than is normally
accepted. I argue that they navigate well two central dilemmas intrinsic to any endeavor of
making sense of anti‐Semitism and the events for which the name “Auschwitz” stands.
While I emphasize neglected elements from a wider corpus than is often consulted, the
focus is squarely on the 1940s writings on anti‐Semitism (many of them co‐authored with
Horkheimer). Related issues – like Adorno’s “new categorical imperative” or his views on
education after Auschwitz – are addressed in other contributions to this volume or the
existing literature.
This chapter is structured as follows. I begin by cataloging three main objections, and
outlining two general dilemmas to which they are related. Then, I address each of the
objections in turn, presenting Adorno and Horkheimer’s views in a new way.
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Fabian Freyenhagen
1. Objections and Dilemmas
Adorno’s views on anti‐Semitism have been subject to a number of criticisms. At its most
trenchant, the purported failure to account adequately for anti‐Semitism is judged to show
the failure of critical theory as a whole (Bahr 1978). It is not possible here to discuss each
individual criticism. I concentrate on the three most important criticisms:
(1) Incoherence: Adorno and Horkheimer’s account has been criticized for presenting an
“unsystematic juxtaposition” of perspectives and components, which are “not
entirely compatible” with each other (Rabinbach 2002, 135–136; see also Jay 1980,
144; Rensman 2017, 398f; and, for a more implicit version of this criticism, Diner
1993).
(2) Too general: their account is “too general to do justice to the concrete Jewish historical
experiences throughout different centuries and across countries” (Benhabib 2009,
306; drawing on Jay 1980 and Rabinbach 2002; see also Bahr 1978; Rensman
2017).
(3) Blaming the victims and/or entrenching their negative image: Adorno and Horkheimer
“hold the Jews accountable for their own fate” (Rabinbach 2002, 145); or, at least,
they “entered the dangerous territory in which the contribution of the Jews was also
open for discussion” (Jay 1980, 144). In accepting that some of the negative charac-
teristics attributed to Jewish people were real, they are “repeating the negative
construction of Jews that facilitated their destruction” (Judaken 2008, 39).
At least the final two of the abovementioned criticisms are related insofar as they pertain
to a general dilemma, which is captured by Benhabib as follows:
In Adorno and Horkheimer’s various attempts to explain anti‐Semitism, we witness a dilemma

…: not only in the case of the explanation of anti‐Semitism, but with prejudice and racism
generally, if one’s explanatory scheme is too general it will miss the specific constellation of
experiences, images, and metaphors, which define the others as “the Other”; if, on the other
hand, one attempts to account for the “othering” of groups in terms of the specific qualities of
these groups themselves, one can be accused of blaming the victim. Attaining the right
balance between the standpoint of the victim and that of the victimizer, between the agent of
racism and the object of it, is a difficult task. (2009, 306–307)
This is not the only explanatory (and ethical) challenge that accounting for anti‐Semitism
and specifically the destruction of the European Jews poses. Indeed, for our purposes here
it is helpful to consider also a second, which similarly requires a delicate navigating bet-
ween Scylla and Charybdis. In a nutshell, the two are:
(A) It is problematic both to fail to explain why the specific victims were targeted, and to
explain it in a way that blames them for being so targeted.
(B) It is problematic to ignore that anti‐Semitism has a long history, but also problematic
to miss the particularities of anti‐Semitism in different contexts.
Neither might be a strict dilemma in the final analysis – perhaps, there is a way to navigate
between the two horns on each occasion. But, I submit, they present prima facie dilemmas.
Dilemma A basically restates Benhabib’s point and can be seen at work in Rabinbach’s
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Adorno and Horkheimer on Anti-Semitism
ersion of criticisms 2 and 3, notably when he writes that it is unclear whether Adorno
v
and Horkheimer’s account “has anything to do with the Jews at all” and that it arguably
“holds the Jews accountable for their fate” (2009, 145) – effectively accusing them of
sitting on both horns. In relation to dilemma B, critics of Adorno (and Horkheimer) tend
to focus on the second horn, that is, they concentrate on the objection that particularities
of anti‐Semitism in different contexts are missed (see criticism 2). But, while it is important
to include the right level of specificity, we should not neglect the more general level
altogether – or so I suggest in what follows.
I use the three main criticisms and the two (prima facie) dilemmas listed earlier as a
standard for re‐examining and re‐evaluating the account of anti‐Semitism offered by
Adorno (and Horkheimer). What is at issue is how this account fares compared to that
standard – not a defense of it against all possible objections. Among other things, I leave
aside here criticisms of the work that Horkheimer and other first‐generation members of
the Institute of Social Research were doing in the late 1930s (and early 1940s), in which
Adorno did not play a major role. Bahr (1978) also leads the charge when it comes to these
criticisms, accusing the Institute of reacting too late to anti‐Semitism, failing to notice the
distinctive danger it posed (see also Rabinbach 2002; Benhabib 2009). For a partial
defense – in terms of inconceivability of what was to happen during the war years – see
Diner (1993). There is a general consensus that Horkheimer’s 1939 “The Jews and Europe”
was problematic in being reductively economistic and not making it clear enough that
what anti‐Semites attributed to Jews was – at least to a large extent (as will be explored
further) – a product of their imagination. For detailed discussion, see Bahr (1978), Jay
(1980), Diner (1993), Rabinbach (2002), and Jacobs (2014). Adorno is, normally,
exempted from these further criticisms and tends to be credited for moving the Institute to
a subtler, less economistic account, bringing in psychoanalytic elements (Jacobs 2014,
53ff). He also seems to have had a more realistic view of how widespread, important, and
virulent anti‐Semitism was in Nazi Germany than other members of the Institute of Social
Research at the time (notable Neumann).
2. Complex Coherence
In this section, I address the first criticism (and speak to dilemma B). As a start, it will be
helpful to make a brief comment on the textual basis.
The most discussed text by Adorno on anti‐Semitism is “Elements of Anti‐Semitism.
Limits of Enlightenment” (henceforth “Elements”). It was co‐authored with Horkheimer
(and, in part, Löwenthal), and appeared as the final longer piece in what became known as
the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, 1947). “Elements” consists of seven sections; the first
six of which were completed in 1943. Löwenthal is credited with having contributed to the
first three of these six sections. For the 1947 edition, the seventh section was added.
In many ways it is understandable and appropriate that “Elements” has received the
biggest attention – it is the most sustained discussion of anti‐Semitism at the theoretical
level, and has a pride of place in the influential Dialectic of Enlightenment. Still, it is impor-
tant to see the text in the context of the whole corpus of works either completed or planned,
particularly those from the same period. “Elements” is a difficult text, prone to be misun-
derstood. Among other things, it is not always easy to decipher who is speaking. By this I
do not mean so much who of the co‐authors is speaking (although there is that difficulty
too). Rather, my point is that sometimes Adorno and Horkheimer (and Löwenthal) are
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Fabian Freyenhagen
reporting what anti‐Semites (or someone else) are saying or committed to; and sometimes
they are commenting on, explaining, or criticizing this, presenting their own views. But
they do not tend to designate clearly when they are doing what. It is thus easy to misunder-
stand a report of what someone else thinks about “Jews” and their characteristics as a
(problematic) commitment of the authors. One example is the opening line of the 1947‐
added section VII: “But there are no longer any anti‐Semites” (“Elements,” 230/165). My
suggestion would be that this is best read as a provocatively expressed report of the prevail-
ing post‐Second World War view about anti‐Semitism in the United States, not as an
expression of what Horkheimer and Adorno held true. Their point in section VII is that
even if the prevailing view that explicit hatred of “Jews” was in decline after 1947 were
true, anti‐Semitism still exists – for there can be, according to them, anti‐Semitism without
hatred of “Jews” (I will come back to this).
This is not the place to provide detailed commentary on “Elements.” The literature
already contains a number of detailed summaries (see Bahr 1978, 129–133; Jay 1980,
144–148; Ziege 2009, 123–133; Jacobs 2014, 75–78; Rensman 2017, Ch. 6). Instead,
I provide a more systematic picture of the account Adorno (and Horkheimer) offered than
the chronological expositions typical in the literature, by also drawing on other texts in the
corpus.
Of particular importance for a more systematic picture is a text published in 1941 by the
Institute of Social Research as its research program for an envisaged project on anti‐Semitism
(henceforth “Research Project”). Adorno is said to have completed the first two drafts of it,
with Neumann completing the final version (Jacobs 2014, 58, 59, 67f). Its ambitious
research agenda was never fully implemented, but two components were funded – one on
anti‐Semitism among the US working class, the results of which were never published (but
see Ziege 2009 for a reconstruction and analysis); and the multi‐volume Studies in Prejudice,
to which Adorno contributed as co‐author of The Authoritarian Personality. “Research
Project” is important because it gives us a glimpse of what the wider project would have been,
had sufficient funding been available. There is a danger that because some elements were not
funded and others completed but not published we get a distorted picture of the overall
account. While this text is often mentioned in the literature – typically as evidence that the
early Frankfurt School finally started to take anti‐Semitism seriously (Jay 1980, 139) – there
is little engagement with its contents. This strikes me as an oversight, for it contains a number
of insights that complement other texts, including “Elements,” and correct some of the mis-
leading impressions one otherwise can get from these other texts.
One of the most interesting components of “Research Project” is that it contains a
typology of anti‐Semites. This includes both a (mostly implicit) distinction between followers
and agitators, and a suggestive differentiation between anti‐Semitic agitators. An example of
the latter is that Streicher is presented as a “‘Jew‐baiter’, [whose] anti‐Semitism is a relatively
thin pretext for repressed fury,” while Goebbels is characterized as “fascist‐political anti‐
Semite,” who is pursuing anti‐Semitism mainly because of its power for manipulation, and
plans annihilation without necessarily feeling any hatred, but no less effectively for that
(“Research Project,” 398f/203). This typology did not make it into “Elements,” in which the
co‐authors differentiate instead between types of anti‐Semitism (such as (i) bourgeois anti‐
Semitism encouraged by capitalists, (ii) the form anti‐Semitism takes within modern mass
movements, (iii) the version peddled by political elites, (iv) liberalism’s ambivalent attitude to
“Jews”, and (v) religious anti‐Judaism). The difference between distinguishing anti‐Semites
and anti‐Semitisms should not be overstated. The key point is that Adorno and his co‐authors
do not treat anti‐Semitism as a uniform phenomenon.
106
This, I submit, is a welcome, even required level of complexity. Consider the events for
which “Auschwitz” stands in Adorno’s work. While it is important not to forget that large
segments of the population contributed to this administrative murder, their motives and
actions were different – indeed, even their anti‐Semitism, insofar as it was present, was dif-
ferent. We need to account for the different ways anti‐Semitism was conceived and opera-
tive in different segments of the German population (such as the Nazi elite that was setting
the policy and made high‐level decisions, the administrative apparatus that implemented
them, members of the execution squads, SS guards and others working in the camps, party
members, the general population) and in different populations across occupied and allied
Europe. And this is just to look at one period in relation to one specific set of events in
Europe. Accounting for anti‐Semitism across history and geographical sites will require an
even more complex typology.
One danger in advocating this complexity is that the overall account may seem to be less
coherent than it is (and hence it can (and did) give rise to criticism 1 noted earlier). By dis-
tinguishing between different types of anti‐Semites or anti‐Semitisms, one can give the
impression that one says inconsistent things – such as that “Jews” are persecuted because
they are (seen as) driving progress and because they refuse progress – when in fact the
thesis is that there is a difference between religious anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites (who tend
to construe “Jews” as refusing to join the progress that Christianity purportedly brought)
and other types of anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites (who tend to construe them as the repre-
sentation of capitalist domination mediated by the circulation sphere and thereby as
driving the global progress of capitalism).
However, it seems to me a price worth paying: as noted, it is this complexity that we
need to make sense of the multifaceted way in which anti‐Semitism operated in varied
populations during the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s (and also beyond). Something
similar holds not just at the level of content, but also method. Instead of thinking of the
use of different disciplines and tools of explanation used by Adorno and Horkheimer as
an eclectic juxtaposition, it might well be apt to bring different methods and insights to
bear on the different types of anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites. For example, psychoanalysis
might work better in relation to the type of anti‐Semites represented by Streicher than
those for whom Goebbels was paradigmatic; and Marxist class theory might work better
in relation to the industrialists which sided with the NSDAP than with either the party
elite or its followers.
Moreover, it is also important to note that anti‐Semitisms, while at least sometimes
involving some level of internal consistency, are not logically tight, carefully constructed
belief systems (and possibly do not involve, strictly speaking, beliefs at all, but are rather
constituted solely by repressed desires and feelings). In other words, we need to keep in
mind that anti‐Semitic worldviews tend to lack coherence (notably when ascribing to
“Jews” mutually excluding characteristics) and that reporting this does not imply that the
account of anti‐Semitism is incoherent. Adorno and the other members of the Institute of
Social Research were clearly aware of the “contradictory accusations” made against
“Jews” (“Research Project,” 403/208; see also Wiggershaus 1994, 364), and tried to do
justice to this phenomenon, by understanding it as “a multifaceted, mutating, essentially
amorphous social ideology,” as “an almost free‐floating matrix where all kinds of problems
can be projected and ‘unloaded’,” and as “intrinsically contradictory” (Rensman 2017,
160, 161, 163; see also 164–165, 400).
Finally, it is not the case that complexity need come at the expense of coherence also in
a different sense. If we peruse the corpus of 1940s writings by Adorno and other members
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of the Institute for Social Research, we can see that there is not just an insistence on differ-
ent types of anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites, but also a requirement that they are “different
aspects of one basic phenomenon” (HGS 5: 367/Simmel [ed.] 1946, 5; emphasis added). In
one of Horkheimer’s (1943) talks, he makes this explicit. After introducing parts of the
typology from “Research Project,” the typescript for the talk continues:
There exist still many other types, and in reality anti‐Semitism will mostly appear in form of
combinations of or intermediate stages between the mentioned types. They all share one thing
in common: secret hate of civilization, [hatred directed] against all that is encapsulated in the
ten commandments. (HGS 12: 180; my translation; see also 178)
The idea of anti‐Semitism as united in hatred of civilization fits well with “Elements,”
where anti‐Semitism is repeatedly linked to a repressed “rage” against civilization – a rage
that “is vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected” and “sanctioned by
the collective” within anti‐Semitic popular movements (“Elements,” 199, 200/140,
139). What is distinctive – and controversial – about this diagnosis is not just that anti‐
Semitism is connected with negative responses to civilization, but that these responses
are not seen as having occurred despite civilization, but as its own result. Once again,
Horkheimer is most explicit about this position shared with Adorno, when he states
earlier in the 1943 talk:
Civilization, as we know it, has trigged through its own mercilessness exactly those tendencies
that have proven to be hostile to it … Civilization cannot be released of responsibility for bring-
ing about its opposite: barbarism. Historically, taming human beings succeeded only at the
cost of incessant suffering. (HGS 12: 174f; my translation)
Here we see in which way anti‐Semitism crystallizes the dialectic of enlightenment: civili-
zation and its hatred are dialectically intertwined. Specifically, Adorno and Horkheimer
claim that civilization “as we know it” has always been entangled with domination – notably
repression of inner nature (but also social coercion and domination of external nature).
This is connected to anti‐Semitism because such repression can only be maintained by
finding an outlet for the rage it (rightly) generates, and “Jews” – for more specific reasons
we consider later – have tended to be construed as the objects of hate against which this
rage has been directed. In this sense, “Anti‐Semitism is … a ritual of civilization” (“Elements,”
200/140). (Adorno and Horkheimer do not address which group[s] were the objects of
hatred in areas of the world where no “Jews” had ever been present prior to the initial glob-
alization waves of capitalist modernity, like the Far East or the Americas. Still, their account
of civilization requires that the repression happening there must also have found an outlet
for managing the libidinal economy of those subjected to it.)
One way in which to understand this thesis better is to consider what is being said
here in connection and partial contrast with another trope of Frankfurt School Critical
Theory: the idea of social pathology (see Freyenhagen 2018). It is striking how explicitly
Horkheimer uses social pathology language in relation to anti‐Semitism during this
period: in the aforementioned talk, he speaks about it as an “illness” and how it should
be countered by analogy with fighting “cancer” (HGS 12: 181, 180; see also 167f,
5: 406, 17: 572). He also presents totalitarianism as a “bacillus” that we need to prevent
from spreading in our country “like a virus” (HGS, 12: 183); elsewhere of the need to
“immunize” ourselves against anti‐Semitism and other prejudices (HGS, 5: 410; see also
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MWP, 571/102). And it is not just Horkheimer; the Institute of Social Research’s initial
work on anti‐Semitism in the early 1940s resulted in a conference and an accompa-
nying volume with the telling title Anti‐Semitism: a Social Disease (1946). Typically, the
idea of social pathology is restricted to one society or type of society – thus, social critics
might say that capitalist societies are pathological in their runaway growth that is
destroying the planet, and imply that non‐capitalist societies would not be pathological.
However, in the case of anti‐Semitism, Adorno and Horkheimer seem to make a stronger
claim: not just a particular society at a particular time, but civilization as we know it is
pathological (see Wiggershaus 1994, 338–341, 417, 421). (There is a parallel here to
Freud’s Civilization and its Discontent [1930].) This is most explicit in a memo Adorno
wrote in 1948, where he writes (in English): “Our hypothesis of what causes anti‐
Semitism is the following: It is due to the total structure of our society or, to put it more
sweepingly, to every basically coercive society” (quoted in Ziege 2009, 277) – and
thereby, given his (and Horkheimer’s) views about the entwinement of civilization with
coercion, due to civilization as we know it. Still, the pathological civilization claim oper-
ates with a pattern recognizable from social pathology claims: ascribing some inner telos
(or teloi) to what is being criticized (here civilization) and then claiming that it fails to
realize its telos (or teloi). This comes out in the opening of Dialectic of Enlightenment,
which puts it succinctly: “Enlightenment … was always aimed at liberating human
beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened world is
radiant with triumphant calamity” (25/1, see also 15/xiv). Similarly, the above quoted
passage from Horkheimer’s (1943) talk suggests that civilization has aims – avoiding
barbarism, taming human beings, and ending suffering – that it has failed to achieve,
and it thereby presents a pathological case of civilization.
To say that “civilization, as we know it” is pathological, and that this finds expression
in, and can be seen from, the hatred of it that is anti‐Semitism, is controversial and con-
testable. But we do not do Adorno and Horkheimer a service if we overlook or downplay
that this is their view. For example, Diner’s strategy of defending the Institute of Social
Research for having engaged only in 1939 with anti‐Semitism combines valid points
with what is, ultimately, a denial of their distinctive approach. Diner argues that the
mass annihilation pursued by German National Socialism was “unimaginable” before
its occurrence (1993, 335, see also 337, 338, 343, 356, 360n6). This might well
be true – indeed, some have suggested that it is inconceivable even after its occurrence,
including possibly Adorno (see AGS 20.1: 652). But Diner’s reasons for thinking that it
was inconceivable are such that they could not defend Adorno and Horkheimer’s posi-
tion: his reason is that the mass annihilation was “a rupture in civilization,” a “caesura”
(1993, 343, 338). Rightly or wrongly, Adorno and Horkheimer want to make a different
claim: that this annihilation is not a rupture or break in the path of civilization, but tied
up with that path as its continuation – in a certain sense, its culmination. This is not to
say that there was not something unprecedented about the total annihilation pursued by
the Nazis, but to insist that it stands in a continuity with what came before. It is also not
to say that it could have been imagined before. In a certain sense, the true character of
“civilization, as we know it” only revealed itself in Auschwitz, and it might not have been
conceivable in advance that it would take this form. Moreover, the thesis is not that civili-
zation simply is its opposite, but rather that it contains, even produces, its opposite within
itself. In that sense, the radical departure from its aims (such as in Auschwitz) is not a
rupture interrupting it, but a sign of its being broken in its inner constitution – a sign of
its being pathological.
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3. Long History and Levels of Specificity
From what I have said so far, one might get the impression that the second criticism of
Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) account of anti‐Semitism has been vindicated, rather than
rebutted. Understanding anti‐Semitism as a symptom of pathological civilization would
seem to be “too general to do justice to the concrete Jewish historical experiences
throughout different centuries and across countries” (Benhabib 2009, 306). It would also
seem that Adorno and Horkheimer have got shipwrecked in navigating the abovemen-
tioned dilemma B – it would appear that they have provided a sense of long history of anti‐
Semitism at the expense of the particularities of different contexts.
However, this impression is misleading. Even in the most explicit passages about the link
of anti‐Semitism to pathological civilization, Horkheimer insists that this long historical
view “does not imply that enmity towards Jews doesn’t have specific characteristics” (HGS
12: 175). It turns out – as we will see – that there are, actually, several levels of specificity
within the account. In “Research Project” – and that is another important aspect of it – the
co‐authors trace different historical forms of anti‐Semitism prior to the twentieth century,
thereby acknowledging not just specificity of the enmity compared to other phenomena but
also within it. In a 1944 talk, Horkheimer takes this up again, including differentiating
between the anti‐Judaism of the Middle Ages and modern anti‐Semitism (HGS 5: 369–371/
Simmel [ed.] 1946, 6–9). In other words, the first‐generation members of the Institute of
Social Research advanced a complex (one is tempted to say “dialectical”) thesis: that anti‐
Semitism is both something specific and general. It is specific in differing both across and within
historical periods – as (partly) traced in the typology of anti‐Semitisms and anti‐Semites – and
in being distinguishable from other phenomena (such as sexism). And it is general in express-
ing hatred of civilization that is generated by “civilization, as we know it.”
Before I say more about the specificity, it is helpful to note three points. First, one upshot
of the pathological civilization thesis is that Adorno and Horkheimer do not tie anti‐
Semitism in Nazi Germany to something merely about Germany, such as a national
character. Indeed, for them, even “totalitarian anti‐Semitism” is not “a specifically German
phenomenon” and they reject the notion of “national character” (AGS 20.2: 652; see also
Jacobs 2014, 58f). Instead, they hold once again a complex thesis with two key compo-
nents. One component is that, due to civilization’s unfolding pathologically, anti‐Semitism
is a latent danger not just in Germany but elsewhere (“Research Project,” 377, 382/182,
186). This danger consists in psychological dispositions to hate and destroy that are
remarkably similar across countries (HGS 5: 368/Simmel [ed.] 1946, 5f). Depending on
the social, political, and economic context, these dispositions manifest themselves differ-
ently. In Germany’s case – and this is the second component – a specific social and economic
constellation arose, which explains why it was – as Horkheimer writes in 1946 – “not mere
accident that the great explosion of anti‐Semitism first occurred in Germany” (HGS 5: 368/
Simmel [ed.] 1946, 5; see also AGS 20.1: 382f). One problem about the incomplete nature
of the research program sketched in “Research Project” is that Adorno, Horkheimer, and
the other members of the Institute did not undertake a detailed historical study of this con-
stellation. “Research Project” contains some pointers as to what the study would have
included. The closest to this is a book by Paul Massing (a lesser‐known member of the
Institute, who was not part of its core set of theorists) on anti‐Semitism in imperial
Germany, which was meant to cover also the Weimar Republic and Nazi period but was
scaled back and published as part of the multi‐volume Studies in Prejudice. It might strike
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one as odd, or even problematic, that the members of the Institute concentrated on the US
context rather than the German one during the 1940s peak period of researching anti‐
Semitism (see Bahr 1978). But not only were they worried about the rise of anti‐Semitism
and fascist propaganda in their supposedly safe haven of the United States, they also could
not have the kind of access to research subjects required to carry out studies like
Authoritarian Personality in Germany during the Second World War and its immediate
aftermath. Moreover, despite repeated attempts, they did not succeed in securing funding
for studies on Germany during these financially precarious years of the 1940s (see Ziege
2009, 159; and also Wiggershaus 1994, Ch. 4).
Second, one can read the final two sections of “Elements” as a discussion of the general
structure of anti‐Semitism, as what is common despite its variety (while this variety is dis-
cussed in presenting different types of anti‐Semitism in the first five sections). Section six
focuses on the idea that anti‐Semitism involves something like paranoid projection: while
all experience involves projection, such projection can become so cognitively and socially
rigid that it blinds itself to experiences and interactions that could call the projections into
question. There is a structural parallel here between anti‐Semitism and certain forms of
mental illness, despite their other difference: in their totalized projections, they are both
pathological ways of experiencing the world (pathological compared to the reflective pro-
jection that we are capable of as part of our basic human functioning). Section seven adds
a second common element: “ticket mentality” – in a nutshell, stereotypical thinking held
together in ideological blocs, which its adherents mechanically apply to the world. The
expression “ticket mentality” comes here from electoral politics: the practice of having
party lists (such that candidates are on “the ticket” or not) and giving voters merely the
choice of whole lists, denying them the use of judgment in differentiating between differ-
ent candidates. Adorno and Horkheimer take this as a launch pad and label to capture the
idea of the kind of stereotypical thinking that – combined with paranoid projection – yields
a loss of genuine experience. All ticket mentality includes a drive structure with a ten-
dency toward persecution, and depending on the ticket, this tendency is then directed at
different objects (“Elements,” 236/171). Often, this involves a stark friend–enemy distinc-
tion, and those persecuted are sometimes not even seen as fellow human beings (MM,
Sections 68, 85). Crucially, “It is not just the anti‐Semitic ticket which is anti‐Semitic, but
the ticket mentality itself ” (“Elements,” 238/172). It is this mentality that Adorno and his
colleagues investigated further in Authoritarian Personality and Gruppenexperiment (a later
study in Germany).
By identifying these two elements – paranoid projection and ticket mentality – as
common to all forms of anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites, Adorno and Horkheimer allow for the
possibility that there could be anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites without hatred of “Jews.”
Indeed, they do not merely allow for this possibility, but propose that it has been reality. In
section seven of “Elements,” the authors are discussing this in relation to post‐1945 US
society. Similarly, the historical part of “Research Project” presents the persecution of
Aristocrats during the 1789 French Revolution as an example of anti‐Semitism without
hatred of “Jews” insofar as it involves stereotypical thinking and certain tropes associated
elsewhere with hatred of “Jews” (that they are parasites, achieving happiness without
work). The authors also mention a similar style of thinking and tropes in authors who
explicitly rejected hatred of “Jews” (including Zola); and they include Philosemites among
the typology of anti‐Semites, presumably again because of the stereotypes it involves,
albeit that those stereotypes are in this case positively evaluated, rather than negatively
(see “Research Project,” 386, 387–94, 399/190, 191–198, 204).
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Fabian Freyenhagen
Adorno and Horkheimer never offer a justification of why it is still apt to speak of anti‐
Semitism in those cases where ticket mentality, paranoid projection, and psychological
dispositions to hate and destroy occur without hatred of “Jews” (or what makes ticket
mentality itself anti‐Semitic). Perhaps, their thought is that – at least within Western
civilization – this symptom of pathological civilization typically or paradigmatically

involved Jew‐hatred, in part because it offered a readily available pattern once it had con-
tingently arisen in the first place. Or perhaps they wanted to capture the phenomenon
without any reference to “Jews” in order to avoid the risks involved in construing a notion
of “Jewishness” at the general level at all (more on this follows).
Third, Horkheimer – and I suggest also Adorno – is impressed that despite the historical
variety and specificity there is a surprising – even “strange” – constant that seems to run
through the diverse history of humanity and anti‐Semitism within it. While an important
aspect of anti‐Semitism is its historical character, one should not emphasize the historical
differences too much because, as Horkheimer puts it in his 1944 talk:
It is a strange thing that the Jews have always been attacked – even before the rise of
Christianity. The attacks have been so stereotyped, they have always followed the same pattern
so closely that one is tempted to say though the Jews, who have changed much in the course
of history, are certainly no race, the anti‐Semites in a way are a race, because they always use
the same slogans, display the same attitudes, indeed almost look alike. This idea sounds like a
joke, but really is not so much of a joke. (HGS 5: 368‐9/Simmel (ed.) 1946, 6, emphasis in the
original)
Horkheimer might well overstate his case in saying that the slogans and attitudes of the
anti‐Semites have always been the same. Indeed, my sense is that he realizes that he
exaggerates – the intricate formulation about the temptation to speak of anti‐Semites as
forming a race and his reference to this sounding like a joke suggest that he was consciously
hyperbolic. But among the hyperbole familiar from Horkheimer and Adorno’s writings,
there is a serious thesis: that there is a surprising continuity of tropes when it comes to
anti‐Semitism, and that despite important differences among anti‐Semites there are also
common characteristics. Horkheimer backs this up with two pieces of evidence. First, pre-
sumably referring to the work done by the Institute at the time (some of which was pub-
lished as the Studies in Prejudice, including Authoritarian Personality), he writes: “Some
preliminary psychological studies reveal that the character structures of the anti‐Semites
are much more alike than the character structures of the Jews” (HGS 5: 369/Simmel (ed.)
1946, 6). Then, he provides an example of anti‐Semitism predating the spread of
Christianity:
When the Greeks attacked the Jews in old Alexandria, they used the slogan that the Jews were
strangers in order to infuriate the Egyptians. That was a lie: the Jews were no more strangers
than the Egyptians. Alexandria was not Egyptian; when it was founded both Jews and
Egyptians were imported and both were strangers. Nevertheless, the slogan caught on; the
Jews were strangers. (HGS 5: 368–9/Simmel (ed.) 1946, 6)
Horkheimer is, presumably, referring here to the 38 CE attack under Roman rule or per-
haps to the bloodier one in 66 CE.
What we should take away is that Horkheimer (and Adorno) held that one common
characteristic of anti‐Semitism throughout the ages and despite its variety is certain
repeated tropes of how “Jews” were construed – notably always as strangers, but also as
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parasites, as those engaged in conspiracy, and as performing ritual murders and other
(lesser) aggressive acts. While neither Horkheimer nor his colleagues say this explicitly, the
complex thesis of anti‐Semitism as both specific and general could be understood to imply
more complexity here too: while there is continuity in one sense in relation to these tropes,
there is also specificity – what it meant to be a foreigner in Ancient Alexandria was differ-
ent from being a non‐Christian in Europe during the Middle Ages, and both, in turn, are
different from what it was not to be part of a racially understood German people. In other
words, to do justice to the complex thesis, we probably do best to understand even the talk
of a common core to all forms of anti‐Semitism more along the lines of Wittgensteinian
family resemblance than in terms of an unchanging core with clear boundaries (and
necessary and sufficient conditions). In this way, the use of “foreign” would be both ade-
quately similar and sufficiently open to apply it across different contexts (both cultural and
historical). There would be some paradigmatic cases (including Roman Alexandria), and
because of them it makes, arguably, sense to speak of the common pattern as one of anti‐
Semitism, even if not all cases involve hatred of “Jews.” The importance of this general
level in the overall account is that it allows us to speak of a long history of anti‐Semitism,
rather than think of each outpouring of hatred as completely unrelated to what came
before (and after). Those critics of Adorno (and Horkheimer) who insist on specificity risk
make such general perspective impossible, when it is key – as per dilemma B – to give both
generality and specificity its due.
What, then, about specificity in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account? On my reading,
their wider research program contains different levels of increasing specificity. Apart from
the most general level (the claim about pathological civilization, of which anti‐Semitism is
a key “symptom”) and the common characteristics of all forms of anti‐Semitism (intro-
duced in the preceding paragraphs), we get several mid‐level explanations about epochs or
specific strands of anti‐Semitism. These remain still fairly general and speculative, but are
meant to be supplemented by yet‐more specific accounts, which Horkheimer and Adorno
did not offer in their own writings, but those inspired by them did (such as Claussen
1987a). These focus on the genesis of particular historical events or, like the Massing study
mentioned earlier, a specific country during a pivotal period. Unsurprisingly, particular
importance here has been attached to Nazi Germany and the lead‐up to it and its program
of annihilation, whereby “Jews” were not just treated as a hated “minority, but the anti-
race, the negative principle as such” (“Elements,” 197/137). Finally, envisaged as part of
the wider research program were also case studies of individual anti‐Semites, drilling
down to identify what in their biographies and historical context explains why they became
anti‐Semites (and what type).
In Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, we find some of the mid‐level explanations, with
which they also seek to address the question of why “Jews” in particular were targeted. Let
me indicate three key lines:
(1) “The Jews” are targeted for reasons to do with Christianity:

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, a tendency toward hatred of the Jewish faith
has been present from the beginning of and remains constitutive for Christianity.
Their explanation invokes psychoanalytic themes, albeit not (so much) at the level of
individuals, but religions: Christianity is tied up with Judaism in a way that it is not
with other religions, and this intimate link means that the aggressions the former
generates will be targeted at the latter. One first element in this falls under the head-
ing of patricide: having emerged from Judaism, Christianity, in order to both establish
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Fabian Freyenhagen
and maintain itself, has to prove its (purported) superior status vis‐à‐vis the father
religion, presenting itself as having sublated it (in the Hegelian sense of both over-
coming a preceding stage and preserving what was good about it at the higher stage).
In a certain sense, people of Jewish faith are hated for not having become Christians
when they purportedly should have become so, dropping their “outdated” faith rather
than deliberately excluding themselves from the Christian community (“Research
Project”, 395/200).
Adorno and Horkheimer specify this schema further by adding the following
element to it (inspired by Freud’s Moses and Monotheism [1939]). Judaism is presented
as more rational, as more enlightened, than previous religious orientations insofar as it
banishes – through its ban on images and world‐transcending idea of god – any mag-
ical elements. Christianity maintains many of the elements of Judaism, but – through
the figure of Christ, who “is the deified sorcerer” (“Elements”, 207/145) – reneges on
the other‐worldliness and banishment of magic. Instead of faith, a quest for certainty
returns, but only by reintroducing magical rituals and sacrificial logic (with the more
blatant example’s being the appeal to saints). However, all this comes with a bad
conscience, which – at least if unreflected – leads Christians to attack those who are
seen as holding out and thus having avoided this guilt (“Elements”, 209/147).
While this may account for the long history of anti‐Jewish sentiment and action in
Christian Europe, modern anti‐Semitism is different from this religious hatred.
Indeed, the racist anti‐Semitism of the Nazis sought “to disregard religion”
(“Elements”, 205/144). However, even such anti‐religious anti‐Semitism feeds off its
religious predecessor. Notably, the latter provides the former with a “treasure trove of
anti‐Jewish imagery” (Benhabib 2009, 306). In other words, historical precedent
was an enabling condition for modern anti‐Semitism to emerge and take hold, and in
that sense one specific explanation of why “the Jews” were targeted by the Nazis and
other forms of modern ticket mentality is the historical hatred of “Jews” within
Christianity. There is even a kind of structural analog to the guilty conscience
Christianity had vis‐à‐vis Judaism. Specifically, it is no accident that modern nation-
alism has come together with anti‐Semitism (not just in Germany, but also notably in
France). Members of the Jewish faith are held together as a community, despite hav-
ing no state – they are the “nation” par excellence, which in its ideal constitution (as
constituted by an idea of a transcendent god) will always seem superior to the
empirical lineage claimed by “late nations” like Germany, reminding the latter of the
arbitrariness of their boundary‐setting. (For a more historical account of this specu-
lative thought, albeit inspired by it, see Claussen 1987a, 1987b.)
(2) “The Jews” are targeted as symbolizing the circulation sphere:
A separate specific explanation of why “the Jews” are targeted (in modern forms of
anti‐Semitism) relates to their role as “symbols” of the circulation sphere (“Research
Project,” 400/205). There is one link to the previous explanation: members of the
Jewish faith were forced into certain professions – in trade and banking – because of
the restrictions placed on them within Christian Europe. But beyond this contribu-
tion to the etiology, the two explanations are separate.
An important role further down in the etiology is played here – if Adorno and
Horkheimer are correct – not by religion but class domination and the use of ideology
to conceal it. Following Marx, Adorno and Horkheimer hold that exploitation of
workers continues as part of the production process under capitalism, but this is
masked. Compared to earlier societies, workers are not directly forced to work for an
114
individual (or institution) extracting surplus value. Instead, the force they experience
is impersonal: it is due to the capitalist system of ownership of the means of produc-
tion that they have to sell their labor power in order to survive. Formally free to
contract, it appears as if they are not exploited at all. They still are, but this exploita-
tion only becomes visible to them when they see what they can buy for their wages,
making it seem as if exploitation originates at that point. As a result, the merchant
appears as “the bailiff for the whole system, taking upon himself the odium due to
others” (“Elements,” 204/143).
“Jews,” as symbols of the circulation sphere, are also associated – notably in the
figure of the banker (but also the figure of the intellectual) – with the idea of “reward
without work” (“Elements,” 229/165) and thereby with what people long for but are
denied by civilization’s failure to live up to its promise: “The banker and the intellec-
tual, money and mind, the exponents of circulation, are the disowned wishful image
of those mutilated by power, an image which power uses to perpetuate itself ”
(“Elements,” 202/144).
Given that it is not only “Jewish” people who are part of the circulation sphere
(and not all “Jews” work in it), the scapegoating of them in particular (rather than
merchants in general) calls for further explanation. Adorno and Horkheimer suggest
that the long historical association and active propaganda by non‐“Jewish” members
of the capitalist class provides this further explanation. As to the historical association,
there is, first, the fact that restrictions or outright repressions made trade the “fate” of
“Jews”; and, second, this meant that they became unwittingly “the colonizers of
[capitalist] progress,” “earn[ing] the hatred of those who suffered under the system”
(“Elements,” 204/143). This historical association is then exploited by active propa-
ganda. Not the whole merchant class is accused of being thieves, but “people shout:
‘stop the thief!’ – and point at the Jew” (“Elements,” 203/142; my emphasis). Adorno
and Horkheimer do, however, not go into detail about who these “people” engaged in
pointing are and how their scapegoating functions (but see Postone 1986). They
merely suggest that the culprits tend to come from the owners of the means of pro-
duction, from among which “Jews” were historically excluded. Among the distrac-
tion techniques employed is the alleged distinction between productive and
unproductive capital (“Research Project,” 401/206). The idea of a bad conscience
also plays a role here: capitalist owners of production (“the knights of industry”)
sense that they benefit from exploitation, and cope with it by blaming “Jews,” such
that “their anti‐Semitism is self‐hate, the bad conscience of the parasite” (“Elements,”
205/144).
Finally, the association with the circulation sphere is also invoked to explain the
particular vulnerability of “the Jews” in the 1930s. Following Horkheimer’s “Jews in
Europe” and Pollock’s work on state capitalism, Adorno and Horkheimer adopt the
idea that the circulation sphere is declining in importance in the particular phase
capitalism entered, with massive state intervention not just in the Soviet Union, but
also fascist Europe and New Deal United States. This thesis of decline is contested (see
Diner 1993, who ignores the economic data cited in “Research Project” [407/212],
which shows a dramatic decline of the banking sector in 1930s Germany). A corol-
lary of the decline‐of‐the‐circulation‐sphere thesis is that the protection capitalist
modernity had increasingly provided to economic actors – including “the Jews” as
symbols of the circulation sphere – is no longer functionally required. It promptly
becomes one of first casualties of totalitarian systems, particularly in Nazi Germany,
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Fabian Freyenhagen
where industrial elites ally themselves with the regime. While “the Jews” remain
“conspicuous” because of their historical association with and propaganda against
them as symbols of the circulation sphere, its decline also means that they are left
“unprotected” – and it is against those who are “both conspicuous and unprotected”
that the rage against civilization is vented (“Elements,” 200/140).
(3) “The Jews” are targeted as symbolizing unassimilated and repressed nature:
The third specific explanation connects directly with the thesis of pathological civili-
zation. Here the thought is that “Jews” were targeted not because they were symbols
of capitalist expansion and thus modernity, but because they became associated with
what had to be repressed in the course of the history of civilization (and has to be
repeated, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, in each childhood). Crucial for this
are the repression of particularity and mimetic impulses. Adorno and Horkheimer
construe civilization as a problematic siding with universality over particularity,
such that:
[anything] which has not been absorbed into utility by passing through the cleansing
channels of conceptual order – … the sweat which appears on the bow of the diligent –
whatever is not quite assimilated, or infringes the commands in which the progress of
centuries has been sedimented, is felt as intrusive and arouses a compulsive aversion.
(“Elements,” 209/147f)
In particular, this aversion arises because civilization depended on the repression of

humans’ “submerging themselves … in the ebb and flow of surrounding nature” – in
short, the repression of mimicry (“Elements,” 210/148). As the promise of fulfillment
in return for this has never really materialized, there is a rage against this repression.
Unacknowledged, however, this rage turns against the “shameful residues” of peo-
ple’s “own tabooed mimetic traits,” of which they become aware “only through
certain gestures and forms of behavior they encounter in others,” such that “What
repels them as alien is all too familiar” (“Elements,” 211/149). But what makes peo-
ple aware of this unwanted repression then incurs the wrath they feel about it. Such
projection is most often associated with those who particularly bear the marks of the
repression (be it external or internal, such as self‐imposed codes regarding behavior,
including the Jewish dietary regulations of Kashrut) – which, for aforementioned his-
torical reasons, include “the Jews” (see Diner 1993, 351).
Moreover, political movements – most notably the Nazi movement – can then use
this anti‐Semitic sentiment as a pretext to allow its members to give in to the tempta-
tion of mimicry – albeit now as mere “mimesis of mimesis” (“Elements,” 214/152).
This, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, explains both the ritualistic element of
these movements and the particular clownery of the leaders, Hitler’s “ham‐actor’s
facial expressions and the hysterical charisma turned on with a switch,” the
performance of which “acts out by proxy and in effigy what is denied to everyone else
in reality” (“Elements,” 214f/152).
In this way, “The Jews are the predestined target,” because in their image as that
which has been overcome in the process of (pathological) civilization they symbolize
what people yearn for but lack and so end up hating when encountering it (“Elements,”
229/164f). In the case of Germany, this hate was fueled by the activities of the Nazi
party. While it is ultimately chance as to where guilt is projected, this made the
difference as to its being directed at “Jews.”
116
These three lines of explanation are fairly abstract and also speculative – especially as pre-
sented here in a high‐altitude sketch (although I indicated in two cases how they have been
taken up in more concrete historical enquiries). Further discussion would be required in
each case, and also in relation to how exactly they are meant to work together. Here, I can
only offer a reminder of what I have said so far in relation to criticism 1 (alleging incoher-
ence of Adorno’s account of anti‐Semitism): not all three are meant to be relevant to each
type of anti‐Semitism (or anti‐Semite). For example, the second line of explanation is – at
least in “Elements” – associated particularly with “bourgeois anti‐Semitism” of certain
elites (and perhaps also the working class), while the third line is more relevant to other
population groups. Moreover, the three mid‐level explanations would have to be supple-
mented with more micro‐level ones. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer say surprisingly
little about how “Jews” were associated with communism and targeted in virtue of this in
Nazi Germany and elsewhere. Here differences across (i) history, (ii) national or cultural
contexts, (iii) sub‐groups of society, and (iv) individuals would have to be attended to.
4. The Image of “the Jews”
One crucial point in all of this is that for anti‐Semitism what matters is the image of “the
Jews,” not the actual makeup of those who self‐identify as Jewish or are categorized as
“Jewish” (“Elements,” 229/164; see also 215/153; MM, 125/110). This point is impor-
tant, not least in order to navigate dilemma A and avoid criticism 3, that is, to avoid blam-
ing the victims. For if it is an image that is the object of anti‐Semitic hate and if, moreover,
this image is a false projection constructed or at least fueled by agitators, then whatever
those who become victims are like or do is not actually related to what they become victim-
ized for. Perhaps the strongest formulation of this point can be found in Adorno’s “The
Meaning of Working through the Past.” There he expresses skepticism that face‐to‐face
encounters – and similar measures – can work for counteracting anti‐Semitism. He states:
All too often the presupposition is that anti‐Semitism in some essential way involves the Jews
and could be countered through concrete experiences with Jews, whereas the genuine anti‐
Semite is defined far more by his incapacity for any experience whatsoever, by his unrespon-
siveness. If anti‐Semitism primarily has its foundations in objective society, and only
derivatively in anti‐Semites, then – as the National Socialist joke has it – if the Jews had not
existed, the anti‐Semites would have to invent them. As far as wanting to combat anti‐Semitism
in individual subjects is concerned, one should not expect too much from the recourse to facts,
which anti‐Semites most often will either not admit or will neutralize by treating them as
exceptions. Instead one should apply the argumentation directly to the subjects whom one is
addressing. (MWP, 571/101f; see also AGS 20.1: 385; “Elements,” 236238/170172)
This is a rich passage, and I leave aside here that what Adorno says in it about anti‐Semites
seems topical and apt to capture the trends connected with buzzwords like “alternative
facts” at the time of writing this chapter (early 2018). Pertinent to our context here is the
claim that anti‐Semitism has nothing essentially to do with “Jews,” but with certain prob-
lematic aspects of anti‐Semites – notably, their inability to make experiences in the sense of
an openness to the world, which would include that one’s encounter with it could falsify,
change, and/or dislodge one’s projective patterns with which one perceives the world. (To
be clear, the thesis is not that anti‐Semites are unable to experience medium‐sized dry
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objects like tables and chairs; rather, the point is that they are unable to not experience
people construed as “Jews” as foreign in a threatening kind of way.)
Often the only truth content of the “image of the Jew” is one about not the object of anti‐
Semitism but the anti‐Semite: in case of the Nazis, “Their craving is for exclusive ownership,
appropriation, unlimited power, and at any price” and they burden “The Jews” with their
own guilt (“Elements,” 197f/137f; see also Adorno’s comments about fascist agitators and
followers in “Psychological Technique,” 14, 117, 77, 131). Anti‐Semites project their
wishes and fears onto “the Jews” – for example, representing them as aggressor, against
which one needs to defend oneself to survive, making various means permissible that oth-
erwise would be ruled out and thereby (in one’s mind) transforming one’s aggression into
something that is noble rather than base. What is attacked are “projections of psychological
drives,” such that “anti‐Semitism is based less upon Jewish peculiarities than upon the men-
tality of the anti‐Semite” (“Psychological Technique,” 117; see also “Elements,” 215/153).
Given these views, it is unsurprising that Adorno and Horkheimer think that, ultimately,
the victims of anti‐Semitism are “interchangeable: vagrants, Jews, Protestants, Catholics”
(“Elements,” 201/140) and there can be anti‐Semitism without hatred of “Jews.”
One might think that Adorno and his fellow first‐generation members of the Institute of
Social Research did not go far enough in relation to this crucial point. In particular, they
still use expressions like “the Jews” in a way that does not sufficiently problematize this
as a construction. One of the complications in discussing anti‐Semitism is that whom
anti‐Semites include among the objects of their hatred does not necessarily track the self‐
understanding of the victims regarding the membership in the group in question. It does
not even track the self‐understanding of such Orthodox interpreters of the Jewish faith,
who understand membership in the faith community in terms of descent (specifically
maternal descent). Notoriously, the Nazis understood descent more broadly and intro-
duced grades of Jewishness, such that Adorno, for example, counted as Half‐Jew for the
Nazis, but as not Jewish at all on Orthodox interpretations of the Jewish faith. In talking
about anti‐Semitism, it is difficult to avoid adopting the anti‐Semitic characterization of
the object of hatred (see also Ziege 2009, 16). This problem is illustrated further by Améry’s
essay “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” in which the Auschwitz survivor
discusses how his upbringing and identity – particularly the significance of Christmas
trees for him – means that he cannot be a (self‐identifying) Jew, while the attack on him by
the Nazis means that he has to be one in order to reassert his dignity against the real denial
of it because he was understood and treated by them (including legally) as “a Jew” (reprinted
in Améry 1980). Another related complication is that various types of anti‐Semites/
anti‐Semitism construe the notion of “the Jews” differently – this can, for example, be seen
in relation to the question of whether or not one can stop being a member of this group and
if so, how (such as by being baptized as Christian). This complexity makes it difficult even to
express the issue. In this chapter, I follow Lyotard (1990, 4) in using quotation marks when
I indicate the varying constructed group identities to which particular individuals, not all
self‐identifying as Jewish (be it religiously or culturally construed), were subjected.
On the other hand, one might think that Adorno (and the other members of the Institute
of Social Research) went too far in relation to this crucial point. One could argue – in line
with the first horn of dilemma A – that it is problematic (i) to understand anti‐Semitism as
having nothing to do with actual people of Jewish faith or cultural identity; and/or (ii) to
say that the group subjected to prejudice or even annihilation could have just as been dif-
ferent ones and are, ultimately, “interchangeable”; and/or (iii) to claim that there could be
and has been anti‐Semitism even when the objects of hatred were not “Jews.”
118
There are two moves that we can unearth from the work of Adorno (and the Institute)
to answer this criticism. First, it is important again to recall the complexity of the position –
of its combining specificity and generality. Thus, what is said about the common core of
anti‐Semitism – specifically, the idea of ticket mentality and the re‐use of certain images
and tropes – is meant to be compatible with, and no substitute for, specific historical and
contextualist explanations of how different types of anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites function
and change over time, and why they target “Jews.”.
The second move to respond to a criticism that stresses the first horn of dilemma A – that
is, failing to explain why specifically “Jews” were targeted – is to argue it is actually the
right thing to enter “the dangerous territory” (Jay 1980, 144) of talking about actual (not
just perceived) characteristics of “Jews” and thereby accepting that there is not merely pro-
jection going on. While, as already noted, Adorno is generally adamant that what anti‐
Semitism is about is the image of “the Jews,” rather than any actual properties of people,
he and Horkheimer do accept that this is so only for the most part, and that, to some extent,
actual properties come into it. Some of these passages should probably be discounted as
reporting the views they are criticizing, rather than as expressing their own views. Still,
some passages cannot be interpreted away like this. For example, Adorno wrote in a memo
in October 1944:
not all ever recurring objections against the Jews are of an entirely spurious, projective,
paranoid character. There are a number among then which, though distorted within the
framework of general aggressiveness, have their basis in certain Jewish traits which either
really are objectionable or at least likely to evince actual hostile reactions. (Quoted in Jacobs
2014, 201n313)
Adorno even proposed to produce a manual for how “Jews” could be overcoming such
traits, although it is disputed how serious he was about that (Jacobs 2014: 201n313). The
important point here is that even insofar as Adorno and Horkheimer accepted that there
was some basis in reality for some of the assertions of anti‐Semites about “Jews,” there was
one crucial difference between how the former thought about it compared to the latter. For
Adorno and Horkheimer, any objectionable traits were not innate, but the consequence of
socialization, particularly in early years (“Research Project,” 403f/208f) – indeed, in many
ways the consequence of socialization that itself was shaped by (some forms) of anti‐
Semitism. Thus, in “Elements,” they write:
The Jews had not been the only people active in the circulation sphere. But they had been
locked up in it for too long not to reflect in their makeup something of the hatred so long
directed at this sphere. … But they always had to justify this with redoubled devotion and
diligence, and stubborn self‐denial. They were only admitted if, through their behavior, they
tacitly adopted and confirmed the verdict on the other Jews. (“Elements,” 204/143)
In other words, whatever actual traits of “Jews” anti‐Semitism latched onto were the outcome
of oppressive circumstances people of Jewish faith found themselves in already (such that they
were “locked up” in the circulation sphere, and “Trade was not [their] vocation, but [their] fate”
[“Elements,” 204/144]). As such, those traits could disappear along with these oppressive cir-
cumstances, at least after several cycles of socialization. We know from trauma research that it
can take one or two generations for traumas to no longer be passed on. Similarly, “it happens
that inclinations, skills, anxieties which have long lost their real meaning leave their mark on
the faces and behavior of later generations” (“Research Project,” 404/209).
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Fabian Freyenhagen
One might still worry that in accepting that some of the negative characteristics attrib-
uted to Jewish people were real, one is “repeating the negative construction of Jews that
facilitated their destruction” (Judaken 2008, 39). Still, at least in some contexts, we do
better to insist on the real effects the prejudices have, which include creating reality in the
projected image. The mechanisms for making “ticket mentality,” in a certain sense, self‐
validating and thereby entrenching it, need to be revealed and then combated, not
ignored.
Moreover, what is revealed here is nothing for which the victims can be blamed – if
anything, it reveals an additional harm that anti‐Semitism imposes on its victims: they are
made by way of social pressures to conform to its image, having traits foisted onto them
that are – to return to the earlier passage from Adorno’s 1944 memo – “objectionable or at
least likely to evince actual hostile reactions.”
In sum, Adorno and Horkheimer once again adopt a complex position, which combines
a clear rejection of race theory and an insistence on the importance of projections in anti‐
Semitism with the acceptance of the “historical phenomena” of “Jewish traits” as a
consequence of character formation under severely restrictive circumstances and their
after‐effects on later generations (“Research Project”, 403f/208f; on the rejection of race
theory, see also HGS 5: 373, 374f). With this move – together with the abovementioned
first move concerning specific explanations for why “Jews” became targets of ticket
mentality – they navigate dilemma A much better than is normally asserted.
In all of this, it is crucial to recognize that the complexity of their position is called for to
do justice to the inherently multifaceted nature of anti‐Semitism. This is not to say that
what I have presented in this chapter shows that they do full justice to it. For example, one
might still maintain that their general level explanations are unfalsifiable or simply unnec-
essary and potentially distorting insofar as what we need is not “sophisticated specula-
tions” (Améry 1980, viii) about the course of human history but witnessing from the
standpoint of the victims. This raises issues going beyond the confines of this occasion,
including about whether we need a theory of anti‐Semitism at all, such as for combating it
(as Adorno and Horkheimer thought). My purpose here has merely been to suggest that
Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of anti‐Semitism can be re‐positioned as a more
coherent and richer contribution to navigating this inherently fraught domain than has
been recognized so far in the literature.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1951. Minima Moralia. Reprinted in AGS 4. English translation by E.F.N.
Jephcott. London/New York: Verso, 2005. [Abbreviated as “MM”; references to AGS and the
English translation, separated by a “/”].
Adorno, Theodor W. 1959. “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit”. Reprinted in AGS
10.2: 555–72. English translation as “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” in his Critical
Models (trans. Henry Pickford). New York: Columbia Press, 89–103. [Abbreviated as “MWP”; ref-
erences to AGS and the English translation, separated by a “/”]
Adorno, T.W. (1973ff). Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20 (ed. R. Tiedemann)). Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.
[Abbreviated as “AGS” in the text, followed by volume and page number.].
Adorno, Theodor W. 1975. “The Psychological Technique of the Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio
Addresses” in AGS 9.1: 7–141. [Abbreviated “Psychological Technique”; references to AGS.]
Adorno, T.W., Brunswik, E.F., Levinson, D.J., and Sanford, R.N. (eds.) (1950). The Authoritarian
Personality. New York, Evanston & London: Harper & Row.
120
Améry, J. (1980). At the Mind’s Limits. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bahr, E. (1978). The anti‐Semitism studies of the Frankfurt school: the failure of critical theory.
German Studies Review 1 (2): 125–138.
Benhabib, S. (2009). From ‘the dialectic of enlightenment’ to ‘the origins of totalitarianism’ and the
genocide convention: Adorno and Horkheimer in the company of Arendt and Lemkin. In: The
Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory (eds. W. Breckman, P.E. Gordon, A.D.
Moses, et al.), 299–330. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books.
Claussen, D. (1987a). Grenzen der Aufklärung. Zur gesellschaftlichen Geschichte des modernen
Antisemitismus. Frankfurt a/M: Fischer.
Claussen, D. (ed.) (1987b). Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus. Materialien einer verleugneten
Geschichte. Darmstadt: Luchterhand.
Crook, S. (ed.) (1994). Theodor W. Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in
Culture. London (etc.): Routledge.
Diner, D. (1993). Reason and the ‘other’: Horkheimer’s reflection on anti‐Semitism and mass anni-
hilation. In: On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives (eds. S. Benhabib, W. Bonß and J. McCole)), 335–
363. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freyenhagen, F. (2018). Social pathology and critical theory. In: Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt
School (eds. E. Hammer, A. Honneth and P. Gordon). London: Routledge.
Horkheimer, M. (1989 [1939]). The Jews and Europe”. Reprinted in. In: Critical Theory and Society. A
Reader (eds. S.E. Bronner and D.M.K. Kellner), 77–94. New York/London: Routledge.
Horkheimer, Max. 1943. “Zur Psychologie des Antisemitismus [On the psychology of Anti‐
Semitism].” Reprinted in HGS 12, 173–83.
Horkheimer, M. (1985ff). Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19 (eds. A. Schmidt and G.S. Noerr). Frankfurt
a/M: Fischer. [Abbreviated as “HGS” in the text, followed by volume and page number.].
Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W. 1947a. “Elemente des Antisemitismus” in Horkheimer,
Max and Adorno, Theodor W. (1947b). [Abbreviated as “Elements”; references to HGS and the
English translation, separated by a “/”]
Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor W. 1947b. “Dialektik der Aufklärung” (Amsterdam:
Querido). Reprinted in HGS 5, 11–290. English translation as Dialectic of Enlightenment by Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press). [References to HGS and the English translation,
separated by a “/”]
Institute for Social Research. 1941. “Research Project on Anti‐Semitism: Idea of the Project”.
Reprinted in Crook (ed.) 1994, 181–217. German translation in HGS 4: 377–411. [Abbreviated
as “Research Project”; references to HGS and the English original, separated by a “/”]
Jacobs, J. (2014). The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Jay, M. (1980). The Jews and the Frankfurt school: critical Theory’s analysis of anti‐Semitism. New
German Critique 19: 137–149.
Judaken, J. (2008). Between Philosemitism and antisemitism: the Frankfurt School’s anti‐antisemi-
tism. In: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty‐First Centuries. Representing
Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture (eds. P. Lassner and L. Trubowitz)), 23–46. Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press.
Lyotard, J.‐F. (1990). Heidegger and “the Jews.”. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Massing, P. (1949). Rehearsal for Destruction. A Study of Political Anti‐Semitism in Imperial Germany.
New York: Harper and Brothers.
Postone, M. (1986). Anti‐Semitism and National Socialism. In: Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust
(eds. A. Rabinbach and J. Zipes)), 302–314. New York: Holmes and Meier.
Rabinbach, A. (2002). ‘Why were the Jews sacrificed?’: The place of antisemitism in Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In: Adorno: Critical Reader (eds. N. Gibson and A. Rubin)
Ch. 5. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rensman, L. (2017). The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern
Antisemitism. Albany, NY: SUNY.
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Tiedemann, R. (2003). Introduction. In: Theodor W. Adorno: Can One Live After Auschwitz? A
Philosophical Reader (ed. T. Rolf). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wiggershaus, R. (1994). The Frankfurt School. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ziege, E.‐M. (2009). Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen
Exil. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.
Further Reading
Institute for Social Research 1941. “Research Project on Anti‐Semitism: Idea of the Project.” This co‐
authored text gives a good sense of the overall account of anti‐Semitism Adorno (and Horkheimer)
aimed for, although it is marred in places by the problematic views Neumann and Horkheimer
held at the time (regarding the virulence of Anti‐Semitism in Nazi Germany and the role of anti‐
Semitic propaganda and pogroms there).
Adorno, Theodor. W. “Anti‐Semitism and Fascist Propaganda” (in Crook 1994). Summary of
Adorno’s longer work on fascist propaganda, with insights into propaganda techniques that are
still relevant today.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno, “Elements of Anti‐Semitism.” Their most influential text
on the topic.
Wiggershaus, Rolf 1994. The Frankfurt School. Chapters 4–5 provide a summary and detailed
account of the production of and context for the 1940s works on anti‐Semitism.
Postone, Moishe 1986. “Anti‐Semitism and National Socialism.” An influential, albeit not uncontro-
versial, account of anti‐Semitism in Nazi Germany that is inspired by Adorno and Horkheimer,
foregrounding the link between Nazi propaganda and “Jews” as symbols of the circulation sphere.
122
8
Adorno and Jazz
ANDREW BOWIE
1. “That’s Not Jazz”
“Adorno? He’s the guy that hated jazz, isn’t he?” is the response I sometimes get from fellow
musicians in the jazz scene when I mention that I work on Adorno. The fact that one of the
most significant twentieth‐century writers on music and philosophy is almost exclusively
known in some musical circles for his highly critical assessment of jazz might be seen as a
symptom of precisely what concerned Adorno about the “culture industry.” The tendency
for complex cultural phenomena to be reduced to only one of their aspects, so obviating
the need to engage with the challenges they present, could be construed as a symptom of
how the world has come to be dominated by the reductive forms of labeling characteristic
of the commodity form. However, if one looks at what Adorno says about jazz, it is argu-
able that he is equally guilty of such thinking in relation to jazz itself. The verdict on
Adorno’s direct responses to jazz seems to me to have to be pretty damning. However, I also
want to use this particular aspect of Adorno’s work to touch on broader questions about
how we might approach music in philosophical terms. This will lead to important ques-
tions for research into relationships between the production and reception of art, where
Adorno still has much to offer.
What, then, decides whether something is jazz or not? The problem in the case of
Adorno is that he offers few defensible criteria for distinguishing jazz from music that does
not merit the title. Music referred to as “jazz” has a fairly specific historical point of origin,
in New Orleans, and is a result of mixing musical sources such as spirituals, marches,
blues songs, popular songs, and ragtime. From the very beginning, then, jazz was a hybrid
music, and remains so today, which helps explain why identifying something as jazz can be
controversial: “that’s not jazz” is heard virtually every time a new form of the music
emerges. In the 1910s a break seems to have been made from ragtime and other popular
small band and piano music, which was either written out or based on musicians learning
fixed parts by heart if they could not read music. If one considers recordings of early jazz,
which begin in 1917 with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, certain features become
apparent that were lacking in the music that preceded it (though the three‐minute time
limitation means we don’t know for sure how this music was played live). The rhythm of
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ANDREW BOWIE
ragtime, for example, involved syncopation, but lacked a strong element of “swing,”1 and
there was little improvisation. As we shall see, Adorno maintains that very little of jazz is
really improvised, but there is evidence that in live performance the King Oliver band
already played long versions of tunes they recorded in the three‐minute format in the early
1920s, particularly when playing for dancers, where a greater measure of improvisation
would be necessary.
Any concept of jazz that relies on specifying identifying musical features is likely to
exclude music that does not involve those particular features, but may still justifiably be
termed jazz for other reasons. Adorno quite often refers to the Duke Ellington orchestra,
and they illustrate the issue: throughout its long history, some of the solos of the Ellington
band were often repeated largely note for note in live performance, but soloists would also
improvise at length.2 (The recordings cited in this chapter can easily be found on
YouTube – it is important to note the dates of the recordings, as some artists recorded the
same tunes more than once – and form a key part of what I want to say.) A central aspect
of the development of jazz is that features that are characteristic of one style, such as a
choice of particular notes against certain chords, or trick instrumental effects, come to be
regarded as “corny,” “cheesy,” and so on in another. Part of what happens here can be
regarded, as Adorno does, as being akin to changes in fashion. However, the dynamic of
these changes also relates precisely to what Adorno demands of new music, where failure
to go beyond established techniques leads to aesthetic failure.
The term “jazz” needs to be understood, then, as being both descriptive and normative.
A historical account can describe the musical features of each style that is designated as
“jazz” at a particular time: the designation “jazz” may be disputed, the characterization of
musical features need not be. The real dynamic of such musical changes is, however, more
complex, relating to social and political tensions that gain expression in the adoption, and
rejection, of aesthetic and technical resources, and in the establishing of new musical
demands. These factors inevitably change the content of the term “jazz.” A normative
approach leads to “jazz” becoming a dynamic notion, which precisely depends on its not
being a “definition” that would enable the classification of something as jazz. Indeed, it is
a feature of jazz that music that was considered to be jazz is sometimes seen by those bring-
ing about innovations as ceasing to be jazz, because it no longer “says” anything significant.
Trumpeter Nicholas Payton has recently suggested dropping the word “jazz,” and now
referring to Black American Music.3
2. Adorno’s Jazz Essay
Adorno’s essay “On Jazz” of 1936 is a complex reflection on jazz as a social and cultural
phenomenon. It is based on many of Adorno’s assumptions about how music can tell us
about the state of a society, and suffers from some of the problems in those assumptions.
The essay gives musicological analysis of putative jazz music, but is notable for the fact that
it does not analyze specific features of recordings, let alone live performances, to illustrate
the analysis, using sheet music and other sources instead. Adorno often refers to this essay
even in his late work, but pays scant attention to the fact that, particularly with the bebop
revolution, jazz moves in very new directions that could not have been predicted in 1936,
and which in some respects parallel developments in modern classical music.
The two main theoretical frameworks Adorno employs in the essay are the Marxist
theory of commodity, and a version of psychoanalysis based on something like Weberian
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ideal types, notably what Adorno terms “the jazz subject,” a composite of what he sees as
the psychological attributes of those enthused by jazz. With respect to the former he claims:
“in any case, this much is certain, that the serviceability of jazz does not negate alienation,
but amplifies it. Jazz is a commodity in the strict sense, it is subject to the laws, and the
contingency of the market” (GS 17: 78).4 With respect to the latter, he maintains that
comic, grotesque, and anal traits are characteristic of jazz: “They characterise a subjectivity
which protests against a collective power which it itself ‘is’; for this reason its protest appears
ridiculous and is beaten down by the drum like syncopation is by the beat” (GS 17: 100).
Rather than the ways in which jazz deviates from musical norms being a real expression of
protest, they are supposedly a kind of identification with the oppressor. In both cases his
concern is to deny jazz a critical status with respect both to the “culture industry,” in which
the importance of art as a means of criticizing the existing state of society is negated by
being beholden to the market, and to social forces which he sees as leading to fascism.
Adorno’s analysis is not based on field work within the communities in which jazz
played a significant cultural role – for example, in New Orleans, New York, or Chicago – but,
in line with assumptions we will consider later, on analysis of what he sees as the internal
features of the music, such as rhythm: “Old and repressed drives are not emancipated in
the regularised rhythms and regularised outbursts: new, repressed, mutilated drives freeze
into masks of those which have long been in existence” (GS 17: 83). The supposedly
spontaneous elements of jazz he sees as mere appearance: “the much cited improvisations,
those hot‐passages and breaks have merely ornamental significance, never constructive
and form‐establishing significance” (GS 17: 82). Adorno here uses criteria from his evalu-
ation of the tradition from Bach to Schoenberg, which, for him, represents the ongoing
possibility of creating new musical sense that criticizes the social given, to claim that jazz
cannot establish emancipatory new sense. In line with this view, the essay concludes with
a claim that recurs in his work, namely that jazz is actually a thing of the past.
3. Adorno’s Empirical Limitations
The idea that jazz is a thing of the past is clearly mistaken, and seeing why can take us into
important issues concerning philosophically based criticism of art. One obvious reason for
Adorno’s failure here is that his familiarity with jazz was limited.5 The names he cites
include Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Benny Goodman, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, in
the earlier writings, and Count Basie and some others in the later texts. He also includes
some novelty musicians, like Ted Lewis, whom nobody would now seriously regard as jazz
musicians. Marithé van der Aa makes some useful remarks about how Adorno’s early view
of jazz was actually shaped by the particular way jazz developed in Germany in the 1920s,
where only a few records by authentic black jazz artists were available, rather than by
American jazz.6 The fact that Adorno, later in life, as far as I can ascertain, never mentions
Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, or John Coltrane, whose recordings were available and
widely listened to in Germany (in the 1960s Frankfurt was a center for modern jazz), also
raises questions about how much attention he paid to the specifics of the music that he
uses throughout his life as a target for criticisms of the “culture industry.” He mentions
ragtime, swing, and bebop, but makes few extended differentiations between them, and
also includes a much broader range of popular music in the category than any jazz
historian would. The latter fact helps explain why much that he says about jazz now seems
very appropriate to the worst end of the pop and rock music industries.
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To underline the empirical problems with Adorno’s position it is worth taking the case
of Louis Armstrong. In later life Armstrong was to some extent coopted into the culture
industry, but it was the young Armstrong, above all, who, from the mid‐1920s onwards,
initiated the central role of the jazz soloist in contrast to the more collective styles of
previous jazz. When Adorno writes about composers from the European tradition he high-
lights and analyses specific musical examples, but nothing of the kind happens in relation
to Armstrong (or any other jazz recordings).7 In a review of two American books on jazz
Adorno remarks: “It is really of interest that Hobson associates the moment of the eccen-
tric with that of the castrato. He cites a remark by Virgil Thompson, who describes
Armstrong, the eccentric‐trumpeter par excellence, as a ‘master of musical art comparable
only … to the great castrati of the eighteenth century’” (GS 19: 396). Adorno repeats this
characterization elsewhere. What is specifically meant by an “eccentric” is unclear, beyond
it being someone who appears not to conform to established social norms. More instructive
is Adorno’s readiness to assimilate Armstrong to a peculiar aspect of European musical
history, in order to be able to classify him in the terms of the music on which he usually
focuses.
Thompson is presumably referring to Armstrong’s use of vibrato, and capacity for
playing “operatically” in the trumpet’s high register. In one of the greatest early jazz
recordings, in 1929, Armstrong demonstrated these qualities in the popular song “Some
of These Days,” which can suggest how Adorno misses the mark. The record’s opening
palais de dance style orchestral introduction exemplifies a tension in the period, which
Adorno mentions more than once, between mere commercial “sweet” dance band music,
and “hot” playing. As soon as Armstrong sings, paraphrasing and altering the written
vocal part in a way he largely invented, something starts to happen that is actually height-
ened by the banality of the accompanying orchestra. A slightly melancholy, rather good,
popular song played in a stodgy, sickly‐sweet manner begins, when Armstrong starts his
trumpet solo, to be transformed into something which combines tragic intensity with great
elation. The opening break of Armstrong’s final climactic solo is phrased in a quite remark-
able rhythmic fashion, and the way he builds tension in the very short space of the solo is
breathtaking. Nothing had been heard in Western music like this up to that time, and
nobody had made a trumpet sound that way before.8
Had Adorno actually heard this recording it seems hard to believe he would have just
stuck to concurring with Thompson. If he did hear it, it seems that he was unable to listen
beyond the frame of his own musical culture. The way Armstrong combines the expression
of suffering and elation exemplifies a black culture whose responses to the racial repres-
sion that continues to this day have a nobility and wit that Adorno did not appreciate,
despite his opposition to racism in the United States. Indeed, Adorno did not see jazz as
essentially related to black experience at all, looking at it largely through the prism of
white European music.
One further example of Armstrong from 1929, this time with a band of excellent jazz
soloists who were very suited to his playing, the Luis Russell Orchestra, underlines a further
point. Adorno frequently criticizes the supposedly mechanical keeping of a basic tempo
and the rigidity of the rhythm of jazz. In “St Louis Blues” the bassist, Pops Foster, does
indeed just play a straight four in a bar slapped bass in the swing parts of the tune, but
hearing swing like this as mechanical and rigid is surely impossible. Armstrong here pro-
duces a climax that seems in each chorus as though it can’t get any more intense, and then
does. His playing underlines how much jazz depends on creation and release of rhythmic
and other tension, which Adorno shows little sign of appreciating. For most of its history
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jazz has been closely linked to dance, and the somatic, dance‐related effect of the climax of
this recording is hard to miss. One source of Adorno’s misunderstandings is that, despite
his focus on the importance of the somatic aspect in human well‐being in other contexts,
he often reduces rhythm to being something merely coercive when he criticizes jazz
(though we will come to his more positive assessment).
Adorno comments that “The thought that a solo chorus by Armstrong cannot be
graphically encompassed, whereas a quartet by Webern can be written down, is rather too
bold – even apart from the question of where and when in the real practice of jazz there is
any improvisation at all” (GS 19: 384). A mere correct rendering of pitches and note
values by a string quartet playing a work by any significant composer will indeed not do
justice to it. However, getting a trumpet player who had never heard any of Armstrong’s
work to play a transcription of what Armstrong plays on either of the recordings cited
above would result in them playing something that also did very little justice to the original.
When Adorno wrote this remark, transcriptions were rare. Transcriptions of solos by
major artists are, though, now an important pedagogic tool in jazz, but playing them
without listening to the recording being transcribed misses most of what matters in the
music (and there are frequent disagreements about how to notate more complex rhythmic
passages). Many of the features of timbre, variations of timing, phrasing, and so on, that
are essential to jazz, which Armstrong perfectly exemplifies, do elude useable notation.9
With respect to Adorno’s claim about improvisation, recordings in the era of three‐
minute 78 RPM records are not, as we saw, a reliable guide to how much was improvised.
Furthermore, the role of jam sessions, where improvisation is essential to the session,
makes it clear that there was a lot of improvisation, at least from some time in the 1920s
onwards, and such sessions are particularly crucial in the development of new forms of
jazz from the later 1930s to the present day. Jam sessions also make clear how jazz is an
active social practice in which communication between musicians and with the audience
is an ineliminable aspect of the music’s significance. Adorno seems not to appreciate that
the culture of jam sessions is the antithesis of consumer culture: as any jazz musician will
tell you, a good audience becomes part of the band, enabling it to improvise things that
would not be possible without the stimulus they provide.10
4. “Interpretation Has a Lot to Learn from Jazz”

Adorno’s criticism of jazz is, then, rarely empirically adequate to what is being criticized,
and it tends to be pretty relentless. However, his general tendency to very emphatic criti-
cism often also involves him making it clear that he sees some aesthetic value in the thing
criticized, but regards it as of lesser importance in relation to the social and philosophical
significance of what he criticizes. This is the case for his response to all kinds of music.
Having, for example, in the manuscripts on Musical Reproduction from the 1940s and
1950s, criticized almost everything about a performance, conducted by Herbert von
Karajan, of the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Adorno adds: “This
great (grossartige) conductor has not understood the Hegel in Beethoven” (Adorno 2001,
104), and wonders how he himself is to make people understand it. Similarly, he quite fre-
quently praises the skill, particularly of “hot” (i.e. less commercially oriented) jazz musi-
cians, in dealing with rhythm, and admires the virtuosity of the best players.
In a lecture on “Light Music,” published in 1962 in Introduction to the Sociology of Music,
he states: “Within light music jazz unquestionably has its merits. In relation to the idiocy
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of the operetta after Johann Strauss, it taught technical skill, quick‐wittedness, the
concentration which had otherwise been degraded by light music, also tonal and rhythmic
capacity for differentiation” (GS 14: 212–213). Elsewhere he discusses how to sustain
rhythmic differentiation in music performance, and remarks: “A light falls from here on a
real function of jazz: namely to sustain such differentiations, which otherwise are disap-
pearing. As, by the way, interpretation has a lot to learn from jazz” (Adorno 2001, 172).
Discussing the relationship between notation and its effects on musical memory, he states:
“whenever music was made traditionally, without being bound to fixed writing, memory
reveals itself as strong: the rhythmic models which are retained by primitive peoples are so
complex that no civilised person, except perhaps the trained musician, could achieve the
same thing (there is still something of this in jazz)” (Adorno 2001, 70). These last two
remarks contrast sharply with much that he says elsewhere about jazz rhythm, and sug-
gest that Adorno too often conflated jazz‐related commercial music with the jazz that is a
central part of modern musical culture. Given the ambivalent relationship of jazz to the
commercial music market, especially in the swing era, when as fine a jazz musician as
Goodman was in some ways treated like a pop star, this is perhaps understandable.11
5. “What Jazz Is Really Saying in Social Terms”
As the US Civil Rights movement showed, jazz can be critical of modern societies in
something akin to the way Adorno demands of “serious music,” so why does he not appre-
ciate this possibility? Although his view of jazz probably became somewhat less stringent
in later years, the overall framework for his criticisms, set out in the 1936 essay, did not
change a great deal. Just how problematic some aspects of that essay were is evident in the
following passage:
To the extent to which in the beginnings of jazz one can speak of negro‐elements, it is less a
matter of archaic‐primitive expressions than of the music of slaves; even in the autochtho-
nous music of Inner‐Africa syncopation along with the sustaining of the beat seems to belong
only to the lower social class. Psychologically it may be that the structure of ur‐jazz is most
reminiscent of the singing to themselves of servant girls. (GS 17: 83)
Leaving aside the inane condescension of the final remark, the association of jazz with
primitivism was indeed characteristic of the commercial (and often racist) exploitation of
jazz in the 1920s, so Adorno can justifiably suggest that the idea of jazz as evoking something
archaic and primitive, rather than something new, is questionable. However, the Ellington
band’s “jungle music” of the 1920s introduced a whole range of sophisticated instrumental
techniques and timbres, and harmonic innovations that belie the supposed primitivism.
These innovations are apparent in Ellington’s 1927 recording of “East St Louis Toodle‐Oo,”
from the very early days of the band, well before its heyday from the late 1930s onwards.
Despite some of the idiom of the music now appearing as very much of its time, its expres-
sive power endures. This has not least to do with the fact that the black culture that gives rise
to the music is today still confronted with the sort of repression the music is reacting against.
In “Black and Tan Fantasy” (also 1927), the dark tone, the plaintive use of muted brass, not
as a novelty effect, but as a means of bringing the sound closer to speaking, and the
quotation of Chopin’s Funeral March at the end are indications of racial repression in a
society where direct criticism of this repression could have been dangerous.
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Adorno’s lack of attention to details of actual jazz and its relation to the socio‐political
situation has a specific theoretical basis which lead to questions for his work on music as a
whole. In the Introduction to the Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, he summarizes a
key aspect of “On Jazz” as follows:
In “On Jazz” of 1936, reprinted in Moments Musicaux, the concept of a “jazz subject” was used,
of an ego‐image which generally represented itself in that type of music; jazz was through and
through a symbolic process in which this jazz subject fails in the face of collective demands
represented by the basic‐rhythm, stumbles, “drops out”, but, as what drops out, reveals itself
in a kind of ritual as the same as all other powerless subjects, and, at the price of deleting itself,
is integrated into the collective. (GS 8: 333)
He seeks to justify the lack of empirical detail, as opposed to setting up such ideal types, by
suggesting that social research based on the use of observation statements from different
areas of society involved with jazz would not get to “what jazz is really saying in social
terms” (GS 8: 333). Construction of the ideal type of the “jazz subject” from analysis of the
internal constitution of the music, in the form of syncopated deviation from the basic
rhythm, in contrast, is supposed to be able to decode the hidden significance of jazz:
“subjective reactions do not need at all to accord with the determinable content of the
cultural [geistige] phenomena that are being reacted to” (GS 8: 333).
This may well be true in some cases, and it points to a real danger of inquiry into music
that just looks at how listeners respond, without first critically engaging with what it is
that they are responding to. However, it is doubtful whether this is the case for what he says
here about jazz, not least because he doesn’t engage with the detail of the music. Elsewhere,
in the same vein as the “jazz subject” remarks, he contends: “soap operas generally follow
the formula ‘getting into trouble and out again’, a device which incidentally seems also to
be valid for jazz” (GS 9.2: 42), in order again to explain how jazz rhythm functions as a
symptom of what he thinks is only pseudo‐resistance to social pressures. Adorno main-
tains that in his writings on jazz: “the attempt is made to interpret technical‐musical mat-
ters as a system of formulae which predetermine certain schemata of social identification”
(GS 10.2: 814). For jazz this involves “Treating a sustained basic metre so that it appar-
ently constitutes itself without in the least sacrificing anything of its rigid authority: this is
how one could define the technical idea of jazz” (GS 13: 466–467). The bottom line is that
technical aspects of jazz rhythm are supposed to be encoded results of the pressure of a
repressive social world, which the analyst is to decode in the manner of a therapist inter-
preting a psychological symptom.
6. Art and Objectivity
If one considers specific jazz, Adorno’s framework here, which has some traction with
respect to more commercial music, proves to be inadequate. He repeatedly cites Ellington
as saying his favorite composers are Debussy and Delius (the influence of Debussy may
actually have come after the early recordings discussed earlier), and uses this to suggest
that Ellington’s music, and other jazz, is essentially derivative of European impressionism.
However, he thereby omits most of the specific character of Ellington’s music, with its root-
edness in the blues, its unique orchestration, and harmonically sophisticated tunes that
still form a staple of the jazz repertoire, even for some of the most innovative soloists today.
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ANDREW BOWIE
By 1940 the Ellington band could produce recordings like “Harlem Air Shaft,” which are
on a par with or outdo not a few of the influences to which Adorno tries to reduce Ellington:
Delius never produced anything remotely as original. The combination of a rapidly shift-
ing, montage‐like orchestral score with characterful improvised solos, and swinging
rhythm section achieves more as a musical evocation of the rhythms of modern city life in
three‐minute time format than many pieces of what Adorno calls “serious music.” Adorno
asserts that jazz “subjects itself to the measure of art music, but reveals itself before it as
being left far behind” (Adorno GS 17: 90), but the question is on what basis such a judg-
ment is founded, if one takes recordings like “Harlem Airshaft” into account.
It might be contended that my judgments on these Ellington pieces are just subjective
preference, but the same objection could be made to Adorno, as it can in many contexts to
any aesthetic judgment. Demanding objectivity in relation to art is very often seen as
questionable in a culture that tends to assume that aesthetic judgment is irredeemably
subjective. However, one of Adorno’s most important achievements is to show how dubious
this view is, both because individual subjective preference is itself greatly influenced by
objective social factors, which opens it up to critical analysis, and because art is part of the
“space of reasons,” discussion of its value not being merely arbitrary.12 In the late essay,
“Vers une musique informelle,” Adorno insists on an idea that informs many of his judg-
ments on music: “art cannot absolve itself of the discipline of science, from which it bor-
rows, with whatever right it does so, its ideal of objectivity” (GS 16: 528). Adorno’s sense
of objectivity here relates to two conceptions. On the one hand, a Kantian conception
maintains that claims about art have to aim at an objectivity based on their commanding
universal assent – this is also seen, in some versions of pragmatism, for example, as a way
to think about cognitive forms of objectivity. On the other hand, subjective command in art
is, for Adorno, a manifestation of resistance to the subjection and objectification of internal
and external nature characteristic of modern technology and bureaucracy, enabling what
is repressed to speak in a way that is not distorted by the mechanisms it is subjected to.
Adorno’s justification of this latter conception depends on the idea that modern art’s
capacity for revealing truth depends on its not falling behind the historical development of
the artistic “material” – in music this is the development of forms of harmony, rhythm,
melody, and so on. In Philosophy of New Music Adorno explains it like this:
The demands which go from the material to the subject derive […] from the fact that the
“material” is itself sedimented spirit, something social, which has been preformed by the con-
sciousness of people. As former subjectivity which has forgotten itself this objective spirit of
the material has its own laws of motion. What seems to be merely the autonomous movement
of the material, which is of the same origin as the social process and is always once more infil-
trated with its traces, still takes place in the same sense as the real society when both know
nothing of each other and mutually oppose each other. (GS 12: 39–40)
Why, though, should the “movement of the material” have the same origin as “the social
process,” and share a development with it, even if there is no awareness of this on the part
of those involved? Adorno relies rather too heavily here on a Hegelian conception of the
development of “objective spirit” in relation to art, as well as on Marx’s ideas about
economic developments taking place in ways that those producing them are not aware of:
talk of “laws of motion” suggests this.
At the same time, ideology, which can similarly be seen as “former subjectivity which
has forgotten itself,” is indeed effective in objective ways that can elude those subject to it.
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Language is also “sedimented spirit,” generated in social interaction and modified by “the
consciousness of people,” though usually not in a manner directly intended by individuals,
and it is part of “the social process.” Because language users are always already engaged
in it, language cannot be fully objectified from an external perspective, and something
analogous applies to music.13 Adorno’s idea that modern music is a kind of seismograph of
social developments that registers things which the drive for ever greater cognitive
command may obscure can be defended from this perspective, but he fails to see how jazz
fits into this idea.
Adorno construes the history of modern classical music from Bach to Schoenberg and
beyond in terms of the following:
All progress in cultural domains is progress in the command of the material, of technique. The
truth‐content of Geist is not indifferent to this. A quartet by Mozart is not just better made
than a symphony of the Mannheim School, but also ranks, as better made, more right, higher
in the emphatic sense. (GS 10.2: 634)
This raises a problem that Adorno quite often underplays, even though the example he
cites points to something important. The command of the material evident, say, in the use
of fugal elements in the last movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, number 41, can
put much of the rest of the symphonic music of that period in the shade, and creates
demands for subsequent composers, which they ignore at the peril of becoming derivative
or trite. Much the same can be said in jazz about the playing of Charlie Parker or John
Coltrane, for example. But does Mozart get put in the shade when, in the Missa Solemnis,
the Ninth Symphony, and elsewhere, Beethoven takes such symphonic use of counterpoint
to an even higher level, in terms of complexity, emotional range, and expressive force?
There is indeed no way of just going back to a preceding “state of the material” if a musi-
cian wants to say something significant – even a brilliant contemporary pastiche in the
manner of a movement like the finale of the “Jupiter” would not now produce a great work
of art – nor would a perfectly executed contemporary solo in the precise manner of Parker
or Coltrane. However, Mozart’s symphony still makes the kind of demand on performers
suggested by pianist Artur Schnabel’s remark about music that is better than it can ever be
played, and this does not fit easily with Adorno’s tendency to aesthetic progressivism.14
7. The “State of the Material”
Adorno’s concern is predominantly with Rimbaud’s insistence that “Il faut être absolu-
ment moderne,” if art is to articulate its own kind of truth rather than reproduce the
given. He is therefore confronted with something analogous to Marx’s puzzlement at
why Greek art still appeals to the modern world when the conditions of its production no
longer obtain. The upshot of Adorno’s problem becomes apparent in relation to what he
sees as the most advanced “state of the material,” exemplified by the music of the Second
Viennese School, against which he measures what he sees as the failure of jazz. Important
as free atonality and serialism undoubtedly are, their impact as part of what has become
world music culture is still relatively restricted. In his own terms Adorno admittedly
can’t lose here: if the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern has not become a central
factor in wider music culture, this can be seen as confirming his view that the culture
industry has so come to dominate that the inability of listeners to see through the
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“context of delusion” of commodified popular culture is now ubiquitous. The problem is

that one can cite plenty of other reasons explaining why this music has not always taken
a central cultural role.
Much of Adorno’s criticism of jazz derives, as we saw, from his rejection of claims made
for its oppositional, avant‐garde status, the status he grants to the Second Viennese School.
The way jazz was bound up with the US entertainment industry, and so was often just com-
mercially exploited, is part of what led Adorno to contest its oppositional status, but he
thereby neglects the fact that jazz has also demonstrably played an oppositional role in
certain social contexts, and continues to be part of black culture’s resistance to oppression.
In the contemporary world much of the most important and innovative jazz has, signifi-
cantly, become detached from the corporate domination that is the norm for much of the
most commercially successful popular music. In the United States jazz now struggles as a
commercial enterprise and has trouble sustaining itself for a dearth of venues and audi-
ences, despite there being no lack at all of truly outstanding jazz musicians. In Europe,
however, where jazz was less coopted by commercial exploitation, things are generally
healthier.
Adorno’s later conception of the future of serious music is summed up in his idea of
“musique informelle,” which would develop what was made possible by Schoenberg et al.:
“the progress of the command of the material cannot be reversed, even if the result, what
is composed, did not progress: that is one of the paradoxes of the philosophy of history of
art” (GS 16: 499). The music aimed at would involve the following: “It is about a truth
content which represents itself and a true [richtig] consciousness, not an accommodation
with the false” (GS 16: 538). He maintains, in a formulation that could apply to the best
improvised modern jazz, of the kind exemplified by Coltrane’s startling changes of
approach, that “Experimental music should no longer just be music that budgets with
already minted coins, but one which cannot be predicted in the process of production
itself ” (GS 16: 523).
At some point, however, the truth content of new music has to be socially effective,
rather than remaining a “message in a bottle,” and the question is how it is to do so. Adorno
is right to suggest that such truth content may not become immediately apparent, and this
can justify his role as philosophical interpreter of the message. However, when he approv-
ingly cites Berg’s remark that “the time of Anton Webern would only come in a hundred
years; then his music will be played in the way poems by Novalis and Hölderlin are read
today” (GS 17: 204), he makes a key problem clear.
As Stephen Toulmin argues (Toulmin 2003, 13), a socially influential reception of this
music on a par with that afforded some other kinds of music has not occurred. The esoteric
construction of “new music,” and the fact that some of it is beyond the technique of all but
highly specialized players make a wider social effect unlikely, even if the music’s less direct
effects on the development of all kinds of other music (including jazz and film music) are
very significant. If any modern classical music seems to have articulated a truth content
that only really became manifest to a wider public quite a lot later, it is, Toulmin suggests,
that of Bruckner and Mahler. The revival of their music from the 1970s onwards can be
seen as resulting at least in part from its articulation of the complexity and anxiety inherent
in the experience of technologically developed societies. In Adorno’s terms, though,
Bruckner and Mahler cease to exemplify the most advanced “state of the material” once
the Second Viennese School moves toward atonality. That fact suggests precisely what is
problematic about Adorno’s account of music and society. In the natural sciences, there
are unambiguous advances that render previous theories redundant, especially when a
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theory makes possible the solution to a previously intractable practical problem. In music,
in contrast, what counts as an advance is inherently contested, and depends a great deal
on musical and social contexts. The use of mid‐European modernism as a yardstick gives
some important insights in Adorno, but also leads to him being blind to other ways of
assessing music like jazz.
8. Music, Philosophy, and Social Theory
Adorno’s general aim is “social theory by dint of the explication of aesthetic right and
wrong in the heart of the [musical] objects” (GS 12: 33). The philosophical interpretation
of the music itself is the primary concern, not the actual reception of it in society, of the
kind that would be investigated with the means of empirical social research. He sees recep-
tion as conditioned by so many objective social factors that it has limited use in under-
standing music’s significance. The kind of interpretation he intends is possible, he thinks,
because “All forms of music […] are sedimented contents. In them survives what is other-
wise forgotten and can no longer speak in a direct manner […] The forms of art draw the
history of humankind more justly than documents” (GS 12: 33). In “On the Present
Relationship between Philosophy and Music” of 1953 he elucidates one sense in which
music may enable what “can no longer speak in a direct manner … In music it is not a
question of meaning but of gestures. To the extent to which it is language it is, like notation
in its history, a language sedimented from gestures” (GS 18: 154). He is concerned, then,
with a kind of truth that cannot be articulated in propositions, and so has to be expressed
in “mimetic” fashion: “The need to give a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For
suffering is objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective
to it, its expression, is objectively mediated” (GS 6: 29). In music the objective mediation
relates to the technical demands that Adorno thinks must be fulfilled if music is to retain
its capacity for expression. In “On the Social Situation of Music” of 1932 he already
claimed that music will be “all the better” the more it “expresses in the antinomies of its
own language of forms the misery of the state of society, and demands change in the
coded‐language of suffering” (GS 18: 731).
Much of what Adorno says here really is germane to issues in modern music and its
problematic relationship to its audiences. The “antinomies” of music’s “own language”
suggest that modern production of music inherently involves contradictions, for example,
between the need for music to make sense to its listeners, and the possibility that this will
lead to a loss of expressivity through adherence to established conventions and a failure to
challenge its listeners. This situation evidently plays a role in the development of “new
music,” but is just as much a major factor in jazz. The development of bebop, for instance,
was precisely a reaction against the conventions of commercialized 1930s swing. It
involved new technical demands that excluded musicians who adhered to the older con-
ventions, and had a more explicit critical dimension. This is reflected in its uneasy recep-
tion by musicians schooled in earlier traditions, and something analogous subsequently
occurs with respect to Coltrane, and then Ornette Coleman’s and others’ free jazz. Adorno,
though, never investigates how bebop’s innovations in harmony, rhythm, and melody,
which are epitomized by the remarkable ramifications of the use of the flattened 5th/sharp
11th substitution (e.g. f# dominant seventh chord for c dominant seventh), begin a
development in jazz that parallels how music from Wagner to Schoenberg and beyond
seeks to find ways of, in Schoenberg’s phrase, “emancipating dissonance.”
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Bebop and the music it makes possible by emancipating dissonance establish possibil-
ities for a jazz language that are both in opposition to much of the commercial music of its
time, and, significantly, given the need to get beyond being a message in a bottle, can also
reach a very wide audience. Sales of Miles Davis’ groundbreaking modal album, Kind of
Blue, have now reached over four million since its release in 1959, for example. It seems
invidious to see this success, which was not predominantly based on advertising‐driven
massive initial sales of the kind familiar in pop music but rather on continuing sales over
the years, just in terms of the culture industry. Moreover, the album established a new
dimension to jazz improvisation, so creating new ways of making sense through music.
There are ways of linking this music to developments in “serious music,”15 but doing so
can risk obscuring the specific social and other dimensions involved in the production and
reception of jazz that do not appear in analysis of the parallels in musical techniques.
I have elsewhere (Bowie 2007, chapter 9) analyzed the underlying issue here in terms
of Adorno proposing a notion of “philosophical music,” which he sees as doing something
analogous to what philosophy should achieve in Hegelian terms, that is, “grasping its age
in thought.” The problem with this can be suggested by the reasons Adorno gives for
objecting to triumphant resolutions like the conclusion of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
where he talks of “Beethoven’s coerced tribute to the ideological nature of music, under
whose spell even the most elevated music falls that aims at freedom in a state of persistent
unfreedom” (GS 14: 412–413). What is appropriate in Adorno’s most stringent terms is,
in contrast, the refusal to compromise that is present in avant‐garde music, whose truth
“seems rather to be contained in the fact that it denies the meaning of organised society, of
which it wishes to know nothing, by organised emptiness of meaning, rather than being
capable of producing meaning of its own accord” (GS 12: 28).
This version of his extreme position lands one, however, in a kind of Gnosticism, where
only that which is free of any taint of positive meaning is true. In the light of Auschwitz, the
idea that there are some things that destroy the possibility of making sense even in art has
to be taken seriously. However, Adorno adheres to such a view of the attempt of art to make
sense in the modern world well before the Holocaust, as the remark from “On the Social
Situation of Music” quoted earlier suggests. He seems to pronounce a quasi‐theological
verdict on the whole of the modern world as irredeemably lacking in hope, which preempts
alternative responses in art to making new kinds of sense, of the kind present in jazz. It is
not that jazz that expresses anger and despair at injustice and suffering tries just to beautify
it, and so falls prey to “the ideological nature of music,” but neither does it involve “organ-
ised emptiness of meaning.” The music of Albert Ayler and others (including Coltrane
toward the end of his life) often rejects conventional musical beauty, but its expressiveness
is not empty of meaning: it also speaks of resistance and hope. Had it not done so it would
have remained culturally ineffective, when it in fact became part of the formation of an
oppositional black culture whose significance continues to grow today. It also opened up
new dimensions for jazz that transcend the immediate socio‐political context in which it
emerged. Elements of free jazz have been incorporated into tonal improvisation in ways
that are not best understood as compromising the radicality of free jazz, because the results
of this incorporation have in turn opened up new expressive possibilities.
Adorno’s “Gnostic” stance relies on an approach to music that he later sometimes came
to see was flawed, as suggested in this remark about the failings of his earlier writings on
Schoenberg: “The decisive thing, the interpretation of the compositions of Schoenberg,
was always inadequate. In consequence it appeared that music was supposed to be com-
pletely dissolved into cognition” (GS 18: 165). The central tension here in Adorno’s work
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can be illustrated by two passages, the first from 1962, the second from 1968. In the first
he refers to the following principle:
comprehending and analysing subjective responses towards music in relation to the thing
itself (“zur Sache selbst”) and its determinable content, rather than ignoring the quality of
the object, treating it as a mere stimulus of projections and limiting oneself to the
identification, measuring and ordering of subjective reactions or of sedimented responses to
music. (GS 14: 176–177)
This corresponds to his aim in the criticisms of jazz, but, as we have seen, his lack of ade-
quate empirical engagement with the music means that the inferences from the musical
“thing itself ” to the truth about the subjective responses is deficient. The problem with this
approach is summed up by the second passage: “It is an open question, which can indeed
only be answered empirically, whether, to what extent, in what dimensions the social impli-
cations revealed in musical content analysis are also grasped by the listeners” (quoted in
Dahms 1994, 252–253). This assertion can derail a lot of what Adorno says, and not just
about jazz. If these implications are not grasped in any way by the listeners, the music
remains an esoteric code supposedly accessible only to the philosophical interpreter, with
no grip on the actual socio‐political world. Perhaps most significantly, Adorno largely
neglects the way that jazz is a participatory practice, which relies for its success on forms of
communication and expression that can (but, admittedly, by no means always do) run
counter to the social (and aesthetic) conformism that he rightly regards as a source of
many of the social ills of modernity.
Adorno’s failure in relation to jazz is characteristic of his era’s failure in relation to the
understanding of the history of black oppression, the effects of which are really only now
becoming better understood. Fumi Okiji has recently explored “the idea that jazz – the music
Adorno considered archetypically affirmative of the failed Enlightenment project and insuf-
ficiently autonomous to mount effective critique of it – is capable of contributing to a ‘model
of a possible praxis’” (Okiji 2018, 6). She develops an interpretation of black music, using
aspects of Adorno, that challenges his model of content analysis by suggesting that “jazz is
also capable of reflecting critically on the contradictions from which it arises – indeed, […] it
is compelled to do so” (Okiji 2018, 4). At the time of Trump’s fascist rule, the contemporary
United States reveals how little progress has really been made in many areas in overcoming
the racist heritage of slavery and segregation, the significance of jazz as an oppositional
practice that continually seeks to transcend cultural boundaries – while recognizing the
particularity of the cultural forms it incorporates – offers a model of expressive sociality that
has few parallels in modern culture.
Jazz’s very restlessness and contested status, that result not least from its continuing assim-
ilation of and dialog with other musics, are a powerful counter to the return of forms of
oppression and exclusion that are an ever more dismaying aspect of the contemporary world.
Adorno identifies some of the dangers facing music that walks a line between commercialism
and aesthetic integrity, and offers some important conceptual tools that enable us to under-
stand how serious music can function as an expression of and a response to what society
represses and oppresses. But his evaluation of jazz has proved to be very wide of the mark.
Indeed, contemporary jazz continues to evolve and innovate, while sustaining a diverse world-
wide audience for that innovation. Contemporary classical music, in contrast, is faced with
the dilemma that, to judge from the response of audiences in much of the world, its past, in the
form of the great tradition from Bach to Mahler, puts too much of its present in the shade.
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References
Adorno, T.W. (1997). Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (2001). Zur Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (2006). Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Bowie, A. (2007). Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowie, A. (2013). Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cassirer, E. (1994). Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Cavell, S. (1976). Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dahms, H.‐J. (1994). Positivismusstreit: die Auseinandersetzung der Frankfurter Schule mit dem logischen
Positivismus, dem amerikanischen Pragmatismus, und dem kritischen Rationalismus. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Okiji, F. (2018). Jazz as Critique. Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Toulmin, S. (2003). Return to Reason. Cambridge Mass., and London: Harvard University Press.
Further Reading
Berliner, P. (1994). Thinking in Jazz. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Bowie, A. (2007). Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowie, A. (2013). Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gioia, T. (2011). The History of Jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Okiji, F. (2018). Jazz as Critique. Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Notes
1 Characterizing “swing” (referring to the attribute of rhythm, rather than to the jazz style that
dominated the 1930s and early 1940s) is very difficult. Adorno himself deals with the first sense
in a quite restricted way, and uses “swing” mainly to refer to the jazz style. What matters most, in
the context of discussing Adorno, is that the rhythm involved is not metronomic or mechanical,
and involves shifting of the emphasis of the beat in a way which can have a strong somatic effect
on the listener. In many forms of jazz, saying an otherwise competent jazz musician doesn’t
swing is a damning verdict on their playing.
2 As on the justly famous occasion of their playing “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” at the
Newport Jazz Festival in 1956, when tenor sax player Paul Gonsalves changed the course of the
band’s history in a solo that ran to 27 choruses. I cite this one to highlight Adorno’s failure to
understand the differing aspects that can be emphasized in jazz improvisation: Gonsalves’ solo is
not particularly virtuosic, because he is most concerned with the effect of his interaction with
the rhythm section and the crowd, but it is also harmonically highly sophisticated.
3 http://www.offbeat.com/articles/nicholas‐payton‐jazz‐fest‐simple‐truth.
4 References to Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften will be to GS with the volume number.
5 Compounding this, one of the defenses of Adorno on jazz, “Th. W. Adorno Defended against His
Critics, and Admirers: A Defense of the Critique of Jazz”, (IRASM 41 (2010) 1: 37–49), Michael
J. Thompson does not cite a single actual jazz recording or performance.
6 http://marithevanderaa.com/2017/05/20/according‐to‐adorno‐a‐portrait‐of‐jazzs‐harshest‐critic.
7 In the Current of Music, a detailed experiment, based on reactions of people listening to, among
others, Benny Goodman’s Quartet on a 1937 record of “Avalon,” still does not detail anything
about the melodic line and the harmonic basis of the improvisations, which are just noted as
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involving “rhythmical difficulties” (Adorno 2006, 585). To underline the issue of improvisation,
the live version of this tune at the famous Carnegie Hall concert in 1938 involves quite different
solos, though some elements are retained from the earlier version.
8 The shape of Armstrong’s solo was demonstrably worked out in advance, because there is
another recorded version of this tune, without a vocal, from the same session. However,
Armstrong does improvise to some extent, as the solos do differ.
9 Adorno differentiates the position in the quoted passage in a letter to Ingolf Dahl in 1949
(Adorno 2001, 345–347), but does not see the issue I suggest. He does, though, concede that less
commercialized forms of “hot jazz” use techniques of expression, which he is critical of in com-
mercialized jazz, in a more musically effective way.
10 The recording of Gonsalves with Ellington cited earlier gives a flavor of just how remarkable this
collective process can be.
11 Goodman was also the first to break the color bar in a nationally known jazz ensemble, when he
formed a quartet with black musicians Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and he
gave the first true jazz concert that did not try to mimic a symphony concert at Carnegie Hall in
1938, including a jam session with members of the Ellington and Basie bands.
12 Stanley Cavell suggests the specific nature of this space in aesthetic matters when he says: “It is
essential in making an aesthetic judgement that at some point we be prepared to say in its
support: don’t you see, don’t you hear, don’t you dig? […] Because if you do not see something,
without explanation, then there is nothing further to discuss” (Cavell 1976, 93). Without a
moment of as yet unconceptualized immediacy in aesthetic experience, it loses its specific
character: see Bowie (2013), chapter 6 for a discussion of Cavell in relation to Adorno.
13 On the proximity of language and art, see Cassirer (1994), who sees them as “symbolic forms.”
14 The analogy with jazz, which often does not exist in notation prior to its performance, breaks
down here, though the point with respect to the continuing aesthetic significance of music from
the past still stands.
15 Other developments in this area of jazz, like the “Coltrane [chord] changes,” are motivated by
something partially analogous to what motivated twelve‐tone music’s incorporation of all the
notes of the chromatic scale, namely a desire to extend the scope of melody by changing
harmonic norms to avoid repeating notes too often. In contrast to classical music, where twelve‐
tone music is a response to free atonality, one key movement from the quite strict form of the
Coltrane changes is toward free jazz.
This essay was written with the support of a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme
Foundation.
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9
Adorno’s Democratic Modernism in America:

Leaders and Educators as Political Artists
Shannon Mariotti
If Adorno’s status as a proponent and practitioner of artistic modernism has long been
established, we are only now beginning to appreciate how the theory and practice of
democracy fits into his work. Recent scholarship has moved beyond proving that Adorno
has a politics, to more deeply exploring the terrain of his political theory (Hammer 2005;
Mariotti 2016). Adorno’s writings on American political culture are especially rich for
understanding him not just as a political theorist, but as a democratic theorist. Examining
a set of largely neglected texts, composed in English and directed toward an American
audience, we can see how Adorno outlines – and enacts – a democratic theory to inform
the everyday practice of democracy (Mariotti 2016). His American writings help us see the
connections between his work on democracy and his larger critical theory: the problems
that Adorno is concerned with throughout his writings – the culture industry, idealism,
capitalism, alienation – are also central problems for democracy. Making this case requires
reconsidering the traditional view of Adorno as apolitical and elitist while also revising the
conventional narrative of his time in the United States as simply one of exile. But there is
an additional consideration that helps illuminate Adorno’s democratic theory and practice
that this essay explores: his aesthetic modernism.
If, in the past, we have missed or misunderstood Adorno’s relationship with democracy
because of partial readings of his American writings, today our assessment seems limited
by disciplinary divisions. The discourses of modernism that are familiar to those in the
arts and the humanities have not generally carried over to those who study politics and
democracy in the social sciences. Through the lenses of the traditional parameters of
politics, even when we recognize how Adorno engages with the discourse of democracy,
his contributions look incomplete, unsatisfactory, or even apolitical. His work does not
conform to the conventions of democratic theory and political theory, much less political
science. Here, democracy tends to be studied in terms of institutions, structures, orga-
nized groups, and social movements and progress is charted through the accumulation of
durable gains that overcome obstacles and problems on an overtly political and public
level and in a linear and sustained fashion. But Adorno’s democratic modernism ruptures
these categories. The work of democratic leadership and democratic pedagogy unfolds
outside of institutions and official positions and is not based on credentials, groups, or
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measurable markers of progress. “Democratic enlightenment” is an experience at the

level of everyday life that is, at once, personal, cognitive, and corporeal. As we will see, for
Adorno, democratic leaders and democratic teachers attune us to and draw out the inter-
ruptive agencies of the flow of everyday experiences, to make space for moments of rup-
ture that unsettle the default modes of perception that govern us in late modern capitalism.
Democratic enlightenment is about attending to, illuminating, pausing in, and drawing
out the potential of the fleeting moments where what Adorno calls “pseudo‐democracy”
pushes back against itself.
Adorno’s understanding of “democratic enlightenment” resonates with the exemplary
modernist moment as a “framing” and “interspatial” epiphany that unfolds on the surface
of ordinary life (Taylor 1989). This essay shows how, for Adorno, those who do the work
of democratic leadership and democratic pedagogy are like modern artists who frame a
space for the experience of democratic enlightenment. These political artists engage in
personal dialogue to identify what Adorno calls the “countertendencies” and contradic-
tory antagonisms that course through individual lived experience in American pseudo‐
democracy. As we will see, the democratic leader, as political modernist, leans on these
countertendencies, pushing on what Adorno calls “nerve centers” and “levers,” and
working with the individual to draw out the implications of their own thoughts and
feelings. The leader and educator frames a space for a momentary epiphany that takes
place on the horizontal field of ordinary life in a retrograde modern landscape but provides
a glimpse of meaningful democracy even if it cannot be fully named. Fleeting flashes
emerge that push against the inevitability of hollow pseudo‐democracy and point toward
something more meaningfully democratic: more autonomous, more empowering, more
critical, less lonely, less isolating, less impotent. Democratic leaders and educators, these
artists of political modernism, frame a space for experiences that are prompted by encoun-
ters with the objects of the modern world, but then move inward to foster personal self‐
reflection, to ultimately move the self beyond the self, beyond narrow and egoistic
subjectivism, beyond instrumental reason, beyond coldness and hardness, gesturing and
glimpsing toward a kind of community and solidarity that would be part of meaningful
democracy. But we may not recognize the unique contributions of this democratic theory
and practice unless we can appreciate how Adorno translates artistic modernism to the
political realm.
In what follows, I draw from Adorno’s writings on democracy in America to articulate
his theory of democratic leadership as democratic pedagogy, situating it within his larger
critical theory. The second section shows how Adorno’s understanding of democratic
enlightenment borrows the modernist concept of epiphany from the realm of art. The
work of the artist, for Adorno, translates to the work of the democratic leader or teacher.
Finally, I consider what this new understanding of Adorno’s democratic modernism means
for us today, both as scholars and as political actors.
1. Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy
In 1950, the social scientist Alvin Gouldner published an edited volume titled Studies in
Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action. The volume aims to analyze leadership in
ways that, as the editor says, “promise some help to people engaged in democratic action”
(Gouldner 1965, xiii). It includes essays by social scientists such as Robert Merton, Paul
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Adorno’s Democratic Modernism in America
Lazarsfeld, Daniel Bell, Seymour M. Lipset, and David Riesman. It also contains an essay,
originally composed in English and written for an American audience, by Theodor Adorno
titled “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation.” This little essay, overlooked and
neglected, is surprising and surprisingly important, for a number of reasons. Here,
Adorno does several things that push against conventional interpretations of him. First,
he speaks overtly about politics, leadership, and democracy in direct terms and in ways
that are meant to be prescriptive and useful on the ground, to strengthen the meaningful
practice of American democracy. Second, Adorno’s tone is markedly accessible and he is
clearly working to translate his theory to a broader audience of American citizens. His
style itself is more democratic. Third, the piece is also surprising because of its positive
and hopeful tone.
He starts, though, in a more familiar place, by outlining the pathological landscape of
what he calls “pseudo‐democracy.” In the United States, he says, the empty rhetoric of
democracy is deployed in ways that undermine the sense that people have power, solidarity,
autonomy, and a capacity for self‐determination. Institutional factors undermine citizens’
everyday practices of democracy. For example, democracy is increasingly equated with
voting and elections, but modern parties are controlled by established leadership and are
subservient to the world of finance and vested interests (Adorno 1965, 418). This makes a
bad situation worse: “today, democracy breeds antidemocratic forces and movements”
(Adorno 1965, 419). When “the people feel that they are unable actually to determine
their own fate” and are “disillusioned about the authenticity and effectiveness of
democratic political processes, they are tempted to surrender the substance of democratic
self‐determination and to cast their lot with those whom they consider at least powerful:
their leaders” (Adorno 1965, 419). Adorno makes connections between Hitler and
American demagogues who also take on fascist methods, appealing to people’s sense of
powerlessness, manipulating them, and also stirring up anti‐Semitism. He is concerned
with how an ostensibly democratic American landscape actually bears strong resemblance
to Hitler’s Germany, populated with “hollow” and “inflated” leaders who demonstrate a
“phony charisma” and prey on the powerlessness and impotence of citizens to cultivate
obedience and irrationality.
But Adorno quickly notes that “grass‐roots democracy, as opposed to official public
opinion, shows amazing vitality” (Adorno 1965, 418). He also says “those who prate
about the immaturity of the masses” overlook “the mass potential of autonomy and spon-
taneity which is very much alive” (Adorno 1965, 423). There are “strong counterten-
dencies” in American citizens that “work against the all‐pervasive ideological patterns of
our cultural climate” (Adorno 1965, 420). Democratic leadership should “lean on these
countertendencies” to cultivate what he calls “democratic enlightenment.” As he puts it:
Today perhaps more than ever, it is the function of democratic leadership to make the subjects
of democracy, the people, conscious of their own wants and needs as against the ideologies which
are hammered into their heads by the innumerable communication of vested interests. They must
come to understand those tenets of democracy which, if violated, logically impede the exercise
of their own rights and reduce them from self‐determining subjects to objects of opaque
political maneuvers. (Adorno 1965, 420)
Democratic leaders work with people to cultivate what Adorno calls the “Truth
Principle.” “Truth” is attained by drawing out the countertendencies that are generated by
pseudo‐democracy but also, at the same time, push against it. The truly democratic leader
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Shannon Mariotti
would take the whole self into account. Adorno knows that antidemocratic movements
gain traction by playing on people’s fears and passions rather than just appealing to the
rational and cognitive self. Consequently, the irrational element has to be “fully consid-
ered” and “attacked by enlightenment” (Adorno 1965, 424). Democratic leaders should
try to “promote insight into the irrational dispositions which make it hard for people to
judge rationally and autonomously” (Adorno 1965, 424). They should seek to “emanci-
pate people” from the “grip of all‐powerful conditioning” and the Truth that they will
spread “pertains to facts which are clouded by arbitrary distortions and in many cases by
the very spirit of our culture” (Adorno 1965, 424). The democratic leader would
create space for an uncomfortable and unsettling – but ultimately productive and

illuminating – experience of rupture. Finally, the democratic leader or educator would
meet people where they are, and locate the countertendencies that are meaningful to their
own lived experience, pushing on these “nerve centers” and “levers” to generate an
awakening “shock” (Adorno 1965, 431).
Adorno highlights some countertendencies that are generally rooted in American
culture. Here, the levers or nerve centers exist as part of a national identity, as part of the
feeling of what it means to be “American.” For example, the “American tradition of
common sense, of sales resistance” and of not wanting to be “treated like a sucker” is a
valuable countertendency that can be redirected against the fascist agitator. If the author-
itarian leader takes advantage of this susceptibility with specific stimuli – by telling
Americans that they are being made into suckers by “Jews, bankers, bureaucrats, and
other ‘sinister forces’” – the democratic leader can also make use of this susceptibility.
Leaning on these countertendencies, the democratic leader can highlight how, in fact, the
fascist agitator is himself “nothing but a glorified barker” (Adorno 1965, 434). People
don’t like to be taken advantage of, so highlighting their manipulation can foster the real-
ization of a productive antagonism.
A second example that highlights valuable countertendencies drawn from American
culture concerns the idea of neighborliness. Adorno describes how the fascist agitator
poses as a man of the people, someone just like you. He exploits people’s desire for “warmth
and companionship,” and this “cold‐blooded promoter of the inhuman” exploits and seizes
upon Americans’ “truly human motive,” their “longing for spontaneous, genuine relation-
ships, for love” (Adorno 1965, 435). The agitator “shrewdly attempts to enroll their
support by posing as their neighbor,” just like one of them. In an era of mass culture where
people suffer from alienation, they are especially ripe for this kind of exploitation. But this
desire for relationships is a countertendency that can also swing against the antidemo-
cratic leader. People will turn on the leader when it is revealed that their “sincerest feelings
are being perverted and gratified by swindle” (Adorno 1965, 435). All of the emotional
desires and yearnings that made people fall for the fascist leader can be used to bring him
down, once his own hypocrisy is revealed and it becomes clear that he is not one of the
people, not one of the simple folk. Then, “the energy inherent in their longing may finally
turn against its exploitation” (Adorno 1965, 435).
A section from another book of Adorno’s also composed in English and directed toward
an American audience contains more examples of the kinds of countertendencies the
democratic leader might lean on and draw out. The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther
Thomas’s Radio Addresses analyzes a Christian right radio personality – Martin Luther
Thomas – who was on the air in the 1930s and employed the rhetoric of democracy to cloak
authoritarian ends. The American form of authoritarianism, Adorno says, is unique in that
it must always disingenuously root itself in the language of freedom, liberty, and democracy.
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The American tradition is “ideologically bound up with democratic ideas and institutions” in

a way that has “tended to give some elements of democracy a quasi‐magical halo, an
irrational weight of their own” (Adorno 2000, 52). In America, democracy is attacked
“in the name of democracy” even with an aim to “overthrow democracy in the name of
democracy.” Hitler and his henchmen could “openly attack democracy as such,” but the
“strength of democratic tradition in America makes this impossible” and every kind of pro-
paganda must advance itself with democratic rhetoric: “The famous saying of Huey Long’s,
that if there ever should be fascism in America, it would be called antifascism, goes for all of
his kin. The American attack on democracy usually takes place in the name of democracy”
(Adorno 2000, 50). The fascist agitator Martin Luther Thomas constantly referred to the
American Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, and invoked “democratic personalities”
such as Jackson or Lincoln: Thomas claimed his goal was to preserve and protect the values
of the framers and these original liberties. Ultimately, this all “shows that the fascist agitator
still has to reckon with democratic ideas as living forces and that he has a chance for success
only by perverting them for his own purposes” (Adorno 2000, 51).
Meaningful democracy would cultivate feelings of empowerment, autonomy, reason,
critical thinking, solidarity, and hopefulness about the possibility of change. These are things,
though, that are only present in their absence and they become tools of manipulation by the
propagandist. People are ripe for emotional manipulation because they feel that they are
“somehow at the mercy of society” and no one “but the very rich feels himself as the master
of his economic fate any longer” but instead feels like the “object of huge blind economic
forces working upon him” (Adorno 2000, 20). Thomas draws upon the outrage, anger,
impotence, dependency, helplessness, futility, loneliness, and isolation that people experi-
ence, as a way of cultivating greater obedience to him. He assumes a “veneer of democratic
equality.” Thomas is “affable,” no better than anyone else, aggressively “anti‐highbrow,”
projecting a “carefully calculated image of the common man with sound instincts and little
sophistication” (Adorno 2000, 52). This folksy intimacy is a tactic that only further under-
mines true solidarity among people: “the very immediateness and warmth of his approach”
ultimately only helps him “to get a firmer grip” over people (Adorno 2000, 27).
But manipulating the concept of democracy is also a dangerous game because of the
countertendencies contained even by this retrograde pseudo‐democracy. The fascist agi-
tator can only be successful by deforming democratic ideas to his own purposes, but in
doing so he still has to appeal to and negotiate them as “living forces,” given the prevailing
culture. But by “perverting” democratic ideas, he is “always bound to hurt the very feel-
ings which he wants to utilize” (Adorno 2000, 51). If democracy actually is important to
Americans, pointing out the manipulations that take place in its name could open space
for democratic enlightenment. Adorno says that democratic leaders “should point out as
concretely as possible in every case the distortions of democratic ideas which take place in
the name of democracy. The proof of such distortions would be one of the most efficient
weapons for defending democracy” (Adorno 2000, 51).
In his essay on leadership, Adorno translates these dialectical moves through the lan-
guage of a “boomerang” and a “vaccine.” The image of the boomerang captures the
dialectical work of redirecting, inverting, turning things around, inside out and upside
down, and throwing something back against itself in a transformative way. And Adorno’s
use of the metaphor of a “vaccine” in this essay on leadership is similarly appropriate
and illuminating. A vaccine is a prophylactic that improves one’s immunity to a particular
disease. A vaccine is prepared with a weakened form of the disease‐causing microbe or
toxin itself. The vaccine works because the weakened form of the disease‐causing agent is
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administered to the body, which stimulates the immune response. Then in the future, when
confronted with the real toxin, the immune system recognizes and remembers the disease‐
causing microorganism and destroys it. In his writings on democracy, Adorno exposes the
pathological qualities, the “disease‐causing” toxins, of pseudo‐democracy because within
them also lies the “cure,” so to speak. Democratic leaders would work to turn discontent
against itself, to generate its other. Indeed, in the essay on Martin Luther Thomas, Adorno
notes that the same sense of discontent that drew people to Thomas could turn them
against him and his kind: illuminating people’s “objective situation might possibly convert
them into radical revolutionaries” (Adorno 2000, 66).
Adorno’s writings on democratic pedagogy help complete this picture of what the
practice of meaningful democracy looks like. In a series of essays on education written after
his return to Germany, Adorno again speaks about democracy in the kind of positive and
prescriptive tone that characterizes his writings on leadership. Adorno emphasizes the
themes of autonomy and self‐determination again and outlines the overall tasks of a truly
democratic form of pedagogy. First, democratic pedagogy must cultivate a sense of possi-
bility, a sense that change is possible, that the conditions we are given are not necessary and
inevitable but contingent and mutable. Toward this end, Adorno says that education should
foster the recognition that we are all both subjects and objects, who are neither wholly con-
structed nor wholly free, but can – at least in small ways – think against and resist the forces
that would control and contain us. The world makes us but we also make up the world, and
in this “doubleness” lays “the possibility of perhaps changing it” (Adorno 2005b, 298). As
he says, “We are neither simply spectators of world history, free to frolic more or less at will
within its grand chambers, nor does world history, whose rhythm increasingly approaches
that of the catastrophe, appear to allow its subjects the time in which everything would
improve on its own. This bears directly on democratic pedagogy” (Adorno 2005d, 99).
Second, a democratic form of pedagogy would cultivate people’s autonomy. Adorno
notes that “Democracy is founded on the education of each individual in political, social
and moral awareness” (Adorno and Becker 1999, 21). The “prerequisite” for democracy,
he states, is this kind of awareness, “the capacity and courage of each individual to make
full use of his reasoning power” (Adorno and Becker 1999, 21). The kind of transforma-
tive education that Adorno has in mind, however, requires working against a society that
cultivates not autonomy but rather “heteronomy,” which means that “no individual in
today’s society can, on their own, determine the nature of their own existence” (Adorno
and Becker 1999, 30). Modern society works to preshape, preform, predigest our experi-
ence for us, to “mould people through a vast number of different structures and processes”
so that “they swallow and accept everything, without its true nature even being available
to their consciousnesses” (Adorno and Becker 1999, 30). So democratic pedagogy works
to highlight the contrasts between autonomy and authoritarianism. This form of educa-
tion unfolds “in the spirit of an immanent critique, because there can be no normal democ-
racy which could afford to be explicitly against an enlightenment of this kind” (Adorno
and Becker 1999, 31).
Third, Adorno thinks education also needs to teach us to attend to suffering, to be com-
passionate, and to try to overcome modern society’s tendency to make us hard and cold in
ways that can cause us to turn away from the pain of others. Unfortunately, much of tra-
ditional education is still governed by “the ideal of being hard”:
This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is
utterly wrong. The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago
144
became a screen‐image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all
too easily with sadism. Being hard, the vaunted quality education should inculcate, means
absolute indifference toward pain as such. (Adorno 2005c, 198)
So an educational program that works to make us “hard” is dangerous because it

encourages us to close ourselves off to the elements of the world that may be represented
in terms of pain and suffering, encouraging us to become atomistic, imperial selves who
cannot feel, cannot really think, and cannot be receptive to the critical impulses that are
key to democratic enlightenment.
Meaningful democracy, for Adorno, is not defined in a “merely formalistic way,” in
terms of institutions, representation, or the will of the majority (Adorno 1965, 420).
Rather, democracy is about “the dialectics of lived experience” and unfolds at the level of
everyday life (Adorno 1965, 432). By this he means that democracy is a practice, a doing,
rather than a being. Politics “is not a self‐enclosed, isolated sphere, as it manifests itself in
political institutions, processes, and procedural rules, but rather can be conceived only in
its relationship to the societal play of forces making up the substance of everything political
and veiled by political surface phenomena” (Adorno 2005a, 281). Politics is about the
dynamic interaction between humans and elements of the world that prompt people to
think and feel against, and to resist, to rebel.
And indeed, since meaningful democracy is a dynamic enactment, Adorno does not
define the democratic leader or the democratic teacher in terms of institutions, creden-
tials, official positions, or official organizations. The moves he associates with both
practices map onto each other. Leadership is about education and education is a form of
leadership. And neither unfold in the kinds of spaces we typically associate with political
leadership or education, like the halls of Congress or the school. Both are defined in
terms of how you act and what you do and Adorno thinks anyone with the attentive-
ness, will, and energy can be a democratic leader and engage in this kind of democratic
pedagogy. Democratic leadership becomes a form of democratic pedagogy where “peo-
ple who are of a mind to do so [work] with all their energies towards making education
an education for protest and for resistance” (Adorno and Becker 1999, 31). For would‐
be leaders and educators, Adorno says: “What we can do is give people contents, give
them categories, give them forms of consciousness, by means of which they can
approach self‐reflection” (Adorno 2005b, 300). This means working with people, as we
have seen, to draw out the countertendencies in their own lived experience, to culti-
vate critical self‐reflection broadly understood that encompasses both critical and
corporeal impulses.
But how does the work of democratic leadership and pedagogy relate to Adorno’s larger
body of work? How does his essay on leadership represent a translation of his critical
theory into more accessible terms? In the essay on democratic leadership, Adorno’s lan-
guage of “countertendencies” resonates with his idea of the “nonidentical.” The noniden-
tical are dissonant particular qualities of our material and ideological world that resist
categories, push against containers, and rebel against smooth logics and harmonious
equations. Nonidentical countertendencies push back against the logics of late modern
capitalism: they are the remainders that resist the overall system that presents itself as
natural, inevitable, and just the way things are. There is a utopian quality encapsulated is
this resistance. Nonidentical countertendencies tell us that things are not as they should
be, that something is wrong, in ways that dislocate what is given and point toward
alternative possibilities.
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Ultimately, for Adorno, democratic leadership and democratic pedagogy connect to the
practice of critique where we draw out and respond to the nonidentical elements of our
material and ideological world. In his essay “Critique,” Adorno says that “Critique is
essential to all democracy. Not only does democracy require the freedom to criticize and
need critical impulses. Democracy is nothing less than defined by critique” (Adorno 2005a,
281). Critique is a practice of thinking and feeling that unfolds through encounters with
“critical impulses” that are generated by the contradictory antagonisms of late modern
capitalism. These impulses represent forms of interruptive agency. For Adorno, autonomy
is a dialectics of lived experience where we do not harden ourselves against – but instead
respond to – the critical impulses coming from the world around us. But this is not a liberal
sense of autonomy as possessive individualism, to use C.B. MacPherson’s term: this is not a
sovereign, independent, atomistic individual based on self‐ownership and self‐mastery.
Democratic autonomy is not about closing off the self, but about opening the thinking and
feeling self – opening this expanded sense of reason more widely – to the world in a way that
includes deeper attentiveness to pain and suffering. As Adorno puts it, “Using the language
of philosophy, one indeed could say that the people’s alienation from democracy reflects the
self‐alienation of society” (Adorno 2005d, 93). If we are alienated from our own experi-
ences and from the critical impulses of the world around us, we cannot be truly autono-
mous or truly democratic. The work of the democratic leader is to draw out the determinate
negations of democracy to frame spaces for moments of democratic enlightenment. If else-
where Adorno says that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” then we might say that wrong
democracy cannot be lived rightly either (Adorno 1974, 39). But “wrong democracy” can
lead to dislocating and disruptive moments of enlightenment where the hollowness of actu-
ally existing democracy is revealed in ways that also contain alternative possibilities.
2. Epiphanies and Enlightenment: Adorno’s Democratic Modernism
In his writings on democracy in the United States, we see Adorno translating his aesthetic
principles to the political realm and associating the experience of democratic enlighten-
ment with the kind of decentering epiphanic experiences that are characteristically mod-
ernist. Adorno’s modernism is central to understanding the unconventional form of his
democratic theory and practice. Adorno casts backward to Romantic expressivism in
certain ways despite his predominantly modernist sensibility.
The relationship between Romanticism and modernism is complicated and these move-
ments interconnect and overlap in different ways, but scholars have also tended to identify
salient differences. Charles Taylor captures these differentiating features in discussing the
forms that epiphanies can take for Romantics and modernists, as they play out in response
to modernity. For the Romantics, “The epiphany which will free us from the debased,
mechanistic world brings to light the spiritual reality behind nature and uncorrupted
human feeling” (Taylor 1989, 457). For these artists, there was still a way to access a
deeper, direct, unified, and immediate experience of reality, of spiritual self‐realization, of
oneness and wholeness, of the good, the true, the beautiful. Romantic enlightenment takes
the form of what Taylor calls “epiphanies of being” (Taylor 1989, 459). This kind of epi-
phanic experience, turning us away from the shallowness and instrumental reason of
modernity, is motivated by sublime and transcending experiences in nature, by subjective
passion and expressive feelings, by the spiritual. The Romantic epiphany seeks the true self,
authenticity, against and apart from the modern world.
146
The modernist epiphany, however, places emphasis on different kinds of experiences

and is motivated by different encounters and engagements with modernity. There is a skep-
ticism about transcending movement and the idea that there is a deeper, immediate,
concrete reality that we can encounter. Modernist epiphanies unfold not through surface
and depth metaphors, but on a horizontal field, on the surfaces of everyday life, in juxtapo-
sitions, interruptions, and spaces in between. In contrast to the Romantic “epiphanies of
being,” Taylor categorizes modernist epiphanies as “epiphanies of interspaces” or “fram-
ing epiphanies.” Here, there is less faith in the expression of a deeper, more true reality, but
there is still an epiphanic experience where a new appearance is brought into our presence,
brought near, and where a mode of experience is momentarily recovered. Modernist epiph-
anies “frame a space, and bring something close which would otherwise be remote” (Taylor
1989, 479, 478).
Modernism also complicates the Romantic expressivist turn inward to the subjective, to
the unitary self, and there is instead an urge to get outside of the self. If the Romantic
expressivists idealized unitary integration, oneness, and holism, the negative quality of
modernist epiphanies also entails an awareness that “human life is irreducibly multi‐
levelled” (Taylor 1989, 480). We live on multiple levels and modernist epiphanies are often
prompted by transpersonal encounters with the objects of ordinary life that “decenter” the
self. But inwardness, reflexivity, and personal experience are still key parts of the mod-
ernist sensibility: epiphanic experiences may unfold on a transpersonal level and “may
take us beyond the subjective, but the road to them passes inescapably through a height-
ened awareness of personal experience” (Taylor 1989, 481).
Taylor’s delineations of artistic Romanticism and modernism help us better under-
stand Adorno’s mode of political theorizing, in several ways. First, Adorno’s writings on
democracy reflect a Romantic yearning for a more meaningful experience of democracy
that is also ultimately impossible to fulfill in any whole or integrated sense. There is a
sense of loss and a yearning for redemption of a lost mode of experience and expression
that resonates with Romantic expressivism. But his approach to democratic politics is still
resolutely modernist: instead of emancipation, lasting enlightenment, reconciliation,
truth, or deeper reality in a vertical sense, for Adorno interruptive spaces open up on a
horizontal field through negations of our reified capitalist society, through rupturing
rebellions against existing categories of meaning and repressive totalities – including
the idea of a unitary self – and through dislocations of instrumental reason and the
instrumental ego. Determinate negations and attention to the nonidentical particular-
ities that push against systems and totalizing categories open up utopian moments,
flashes of enlightenment. There are ultimately only glimpses of what has been lost, seen
in the countertendencies of the retrograde modern landscape of pseudo‐democracy.
Adorno’s modernism is evident in how he arranges a constellation of concepts to point
toward the meaningful democracy, the “true” democracy that can no longer itself be
named in full or directly but only briefly illuminated by the nonidentical sparks that fly
out from the grinding machinery of pseudo‐democracy. If “democracy” cannot be named
directly or immediately, its particular elements can be glimpsed in the constellations
Adorno arranges.
Second, these epiphanic experiences of “democratic enlightenment” take place in
unexpected places and spaces. If Adorno valued modern art because of how it could
offer an encounter with the nonidentical by resisting expected forms and being unassim-
ilable into existing categories, his understanding of democracy also resists conven-
tional political parameters. Democratic leadership and democratic pedagogy are not
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understood in terms of organized public institutions led by credentialed leaders in offi-

cial positions. Moments of democratic enlightenment unfold, instead, through fractures,
fissures, and dislocations that are encountered and experienced in various contexts on
the surface of everyday life.
Third, Adorno understands democratic enlightenment as a personal experience that
also takes us beyond subjectivity. The work of democratic leadership and democratic peda-
gogy, where nerve centers are stimulated, levers are pressed, and countertendencies are
leaned on, is deeply personal work that calls forth self‐reflection. The objects of the outer
world and the landscape of pseudo‐democracy generate countertendencies. These contra-
dictory and antagonistic feelings or thoughts are drawn out through democratic leader-
ship and education that prompts a necessarily personal introspection and reflexivity. So
democratic leadership and pedagogy frame a space for the disrupting and dislocating expe-
rience of democratic enlightenment that ultimately also momentarily moves us beyond
the subjective ego, instrumental reason, and the cold, hard, imperial self. Critique starts
with an encounter with the world that then moves inward to motivate self‐reflection but
ultimately also moves outward to decenter the self.
Finally, of course, Adorno’s understanding of democratic enlightenment is an epi-
phanic experience that unfolds in what Taylor calls “interspaces” in a horizontal field on
the surface of ordinary life. The epiphanies of artistic modernism translate to the political
realm. We look at a Picasso painting and it is valuably disruptive, defies convention, and
make us see differently. Or we listen to the atonal music of the modernist composer Arnold
Schoenberg and it is dissonant, it is not harmonious: we may not find it enjoyable or com-
forting but it valuably makes us sit up straight and listen hard, opens our ears in a new
way, shocks us and makes us think. We watch Samuel Beckett’s dramas and we are forced
to become attuned to particularities without comfortable recourse to existing categories.
Or we feel anxiety, restlessness, and a sense of unease. If modern artists frame spaces for
these interspatial epiphanies that productively shock us into recognition of our own dehu-
manization and temporarily recover and redeem a lost mode of experience, democratic
leaders and educators do similar work: these political artists frame spaces that wake us up
to pseudo‐democracy as a pale imitation of something more meaningfully democratic that
we can briefly glimpse.
Adorno’s democratic modernism is evident in the modest and momentary nature of
these particular moments of encountering the nonidentical that throw some kind of grit
in the gears of our conventional modes of perception, dislocating, however temporarily
and fleetingly, the smooth operations of pseudo‐democracy. This shuddering realization,
this wrench in the machinery, this pang of feeling, causes us to come up against a blockage
and we perceive anew and perceive new things, we think anew and we think new things.
Regarding democracy, these nonidentical moments of interruptive agency cause disloca-
tions in the constellation of concepts that give meaning to democracy itself and we stop
and think. If the United States is democratic, then is anything the country does by defini-
tion democratic? What does it really mean to be democratic? Can I really pull myself up by
my own bootstraps? Does my vote really count? If I’m supposed to feel power and authority
in a democracy, why do I feel so helpless and impotent? Is our system of government really
representative? Are we really equal as citizens and is there equality under the law? Does my
life have equal value to the lives of other citizens? What does freedom mean in a liberal
democracy? Or we stop and feel: loneliness, anxiety, isolation, angry, fright, perhaps.
But also glimpses of empowerment, strength, community, solidarity, a fleeting genuine
experience of autonomy or spontaneity.
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But this may all seem partial, incomplete, just a beginning to democratic politics unless
we appreciate Adorno’s modernist approach. There is no total awakening, no ultimate
enlightenment, no final claims of authenticity. There are only moments. But we can all try
to create these spaces for democratic enlightenment. For Adorno, we can all take on the
work of democratic leadership and education by engaging others in dialogue that meets
them where they are, in the dialectics of their own lived experience, to frame spaces for
democratic enlightenment. We can all do the work of democratic modernism and work
with others in informal and dialogic ways to frame spaces for moments of epiphanic
enlightenment, drawn out from the surfaces of a retrograde political landscape but never-
theless orienting our compass beyond it.
3. Conclusion
What does all this mean for us today, as scholars of Adorno’s work and in terms of our own
everyday practice of democracy? Recognition of the deep connections between Adorno’s
writings on democracy and his larger critical theory should finally put to rest any asser-
tions that he is apolitical or that his work has a democratic deficit. Adorno is not just a criti-
cal theorist, but a political theorist, and not just a political theorist but a democratic
theorist. What needs to happen now is a deeper analysis of the connections between
Adorno’s democratic theory and his aesthetic theory, as well as an appreciation for how, at
different points, he is translating back and forth between the language of politics and the
language of art and aesthetics. Adorno’s attention to experience unfolds in distinct but
linked ways in his work as a political theorist and an aesthetic theorist.
But Adorno’s analysis of post‐Second World War democracy in the United States also
speaks powerfully, even eerily and hauntingly, to the same country decades later, where the
hollow and empty language of democracy masks what is increasingly revealed in overt
ways as a neoliberal oligarchy. Adorno presciently articulated how the language of democ-
racy could mask authoritarianism. He appreciated the complex libidinal ways that frustra-
tion, anger, and impotence could generate support for demagogues.
There are obvious connections between the manipulations Adorno identifies in Martin
Luther Thomas and what we have seen more recently in the campaign and presidency of
Donald Trump. Like Thomas, Trump exploits people’s feelings of impotence and powerless-
ness, directing these energies toward veneration of a new charismatic authority figure and
leader who promises to solve all their problems. Like Thomas, Trump channels fear and
alienation in racist and sexist directions. Like Thomas, Trump manipulates a desire for
greater community and solidarity into an us versus them mentality that pits those who
wear red “Make America Great Again” hats against those who are framed as America’s
enemies. Like Thomas, Trump presents himself as the friend of the common man, as anti‐
establishment, as someone who is opposed to the concentration of power in the hands of
the wealthy elite. Like Thomas, Trump ultimately uses hollow democratic rhetoric to
further undermine democracy, by giving common people less actual power and authority
and less of a share in shaping the powers that govern their lives.
But beyond these parallels, and beyond the uncanny experience of reading Adorno’s
book The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses in the era of
Trumpism, Adorno may be most instructive in educating our response. Adorno is particu-
larly valuable today in helping us see the dangers of intensifying what is already a polar-
ized political climate in the United States by hardening the divisions between the left and
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the right. Today, people on the left and the right, people in red states and blue states, feel like
they are living in different worlds and often cannot understand each other’s positions.
There is a tendency to vilify the other, the supposed opposition. People on the left who iden-
tify as progressives, for example, may see anyone who voted for Trump as simply ignorant,
crazy, cruel, or racist. But, as Adorno’s diagnosis of the Martin Luther Thomas phenomenon
indicates, many apparently voted for Trump because of a misplaced desire for things that
point toward meaningful democracy, out of a misdirected sense of alienation, disempower-
ment, and frustration. These are energies that can be turned in a different direction.
Indeed, the forces that generated support for Trump – powerlessness, frustration, impo-
tence, a desire to have a voice, a desire for change, a desire to unseat elite and established
powers, to “shake things up” in Washington – can be read as substantive democratic forms
in the United States that indicate how democratic ideas still have a living vitality. People do
not want to feel left out and left behind. People want to have a voice. People are suspicious
of concentrated power. Trump exploited impulses that could be turned in more substan-
tively democratic directions. These are the countertendencies produced by our contempo-
rary pseudo‐democratic landscape.
On the most basic level, Adorno helps us appreciate the complexity of the psychological,
social, and economic dimensions that gave rise to and sustain the Trump phenomenon.
Adorno cautions us against easy categorizations. And since democratic leadership and
democratic pedagogy is work that falls to us all, Adorno’s work pushes us to try to under-
stand, on a more personal level, the various and complex ways that people act out their
pain, suffering, and feelings of frustration and impotence. The practice of democracy is
about meeting people where they are, at the level of their own lived experience, and
engaging them in dialogue about the things that matter to them, to draw out the critical
impulses and contradictory antagonisms that animate their lives, to push on the levers and
stimulate the nerve centers that are meaningful to them. Creating these moments of
unsettling insight, through dialogue and an expanded understanding of critical reason as
cognitive and corporeal attentiveness to suffering, frames an open space for democratic
enlightenment, in Adorno’s view. The work of democracy, of course, also requires us to
attend to our own complexity, to resist hardening in ourselves. We are all works in progress.
This requires anyone and everyone who would be a democratic leader or educator to be
continually self‐reflective about drawing out the nonidentical energies of their own lives
even and especially as they work to engage others in dialogues that are dislocating, uproot-
ing, and interruptive, but also potentially enlightening. Artistic modernism translates to
the realm of politics as democratic leadership and pedagogy, and Adorno’s writing on
American democracy helps us see deep connections between his aesthetics and his politics.
But democratizing Adorno, so to speak, also reconfigures our traditional understanding of
him in another way. It shows us how this supposedly elitist and inaccessible thinker sees
how ordinary people can do important democratic work with each other, to frame space
for illumination and insight, to frame space for change.
References
Adorno, T. (1965). Democratic leadership and mass manipulation. In: Studies in Leadership: Leadership
and Democratic Action (ed. A. Gouldner), 418–438. New York, NY: Russell and Russell.
Adorno, T. (1974). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). New York:
Verso.
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Adorno, T. (2000). The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas: Radio Addresses. Palo Alto:
Adorno, T. (2005a). Critique. In: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. H. Pickford).
New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T. (2005b). Discussion to lecture ‘the meaning of working through the past’. In: Critical
Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. H. Pickford). New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T. (2005c). Education after Auschwitz. In: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
(trans. H. Pickford). New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T. (2005d). The meaning of ’working through the past. In: Critical Models: Interventions and
Catchwords (trans. H. Pickford). New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T. and Becker, H. (1999). Education for maturity and responsibility (trans. R. French,
J. Thomas, and D. Wymann). History of the Human Sciences 12 (3): 21–34.
Gouldner, A.W. (1965). Introduction. In: Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action (ed.
A.W. Gouldner). New York: Russell and Russell.
Hammer, E. (2005). Adorno & the Political. London: Routledge.
Mariotti, S. (2016). Adorno and Democracy: The American Years. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Further Reading
Adorno, T. (1993). The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice. New York: W.W. Norton.
Adorno, T. (2009). Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Malden, Mass: Polity.
Adorno, T. (2001). The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture. New York:
Routledge.
Apostolidis, P. (2000). Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Berman, R. (2002). Adorno’s politics. In: Adorno: A Critical Reader (eds. N. Gibson and A. Rubin).
Malden, Mass: Blackwell: 110–131.
Mariotti, S. (2014). Adorno on the radio: democratic leadership as democratic pedagogy. Political
Theory 42 (4): 415–442.
Mariotti, S. (2009). Damaged life as exuberant vitality in America: Adorno, alienation, and the psy-
chic economy. Telos 149 (Winter): 169–190.
Berman, Russell, Ulrich Plass, and Joshua Rayman, eds. 2009. “Adorno and America.” Telos 149,
Winter: 3–5.
Claussen, D. (2008). Adorno: One Last Genius. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Claussen, D. (2006). Intellectual transfer: Theodor W. Adorno’s American experience. New German
Critique 33 (Winter (97)): 5–14.
Hammer, E. (2006). Adorno & The Political. New York: Routledge.
Hammer, E. (2018). Adorno’s Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jay, M. (1986). Adorno in America. In: Permanent Exile: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from
Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press: 120–140.
Jenemann, D. (2007). Adorno in America. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press.
Mullen, G. (2015). Adorno on Politics After Auschwitz. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Müller‐Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A Biography (trans. R. Livingstone). Malden, Mass: Polity.
Offe, C. (2005). Theodor W. Adorno: ‘culture industry’ and other views of the ‘American century’.
In: Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber, and Adorno in the United States. Malden, MMA: Polity:
69–92.
M. Robertson). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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10
Inhuman Methods for an Inhumane World:

Adorno’s Empirical Social Research, 1938–1950
CHARLES CLAVEY
1. Introduction
Theodor Adorno has a reputation as an implacable critic – if not outright opponent – of

empirical research. “The method,” he wrote in 1957, “is likely to both fetishize the object
and, in turn, to denigrate into a fetish.” Empirical research, Adorno continued, demon-
strated “the arrogance of the uninstructed” in adjudicating what did and did not count as
an object and means of social research (Adorno 2000, 179). A decade later, Adorno put
the normative implications of this methodological circle plainly: empirical research, he
told students in an introductory course on sociology, elevated instrumental reason and
subtended technocratic administration; it suborned reification and alienation. Students
“who are trying to discover a new form for their autonomy in a reified world, and are rebel-
ling against the reification of the world and of consciousness, ought also to direct their
rebellion intellectually against the reified forms of consciousness which are imposed on
them by current scholarship, especially by the social sciences” (Adorno 2002, 77).
Simultaneously, Adorno disclaimed any real involvement with empirical research.
Recalling his work at the Princeton Radio Project, a multifaceted study of radio programs
and audiences, Adorno wrote that when “confronted with the demand to ‘measure
culture,’ I reflected that culture might be precisely the condition that excludes a mentality
capable of measurement” (Adorno 1969, 347).
Despite his repeated insistence to the contrary, however, Adorno contributed to dozens
of empirical research projects conducted by the Institute for Social Research from the
1930s through the 1950s. First in the United States and then in Germany, Adorno pro-
posed and conducted studies that ranged from evaluating the degree and kind of American
workers’ anti‐Semitic prejudices to cataloging the form, content, and quantity of radio
listeners’ fan mail. As Detlev Claussen (2008, 181) has observed, Adorno in fact had little
professional experience of any kind prior to his work as an empirical researcher. Likewise,
Martin Jay (1985, 41) has pointed out that Adorno’s reputation among Americans as a
scholar and intellectual followed not from the now‐famous Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1947) but from his ambitious empirical project, The Authoritarian Personality (1950).1
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CHARLES CLAVEY
Given the Institute’s commitment to theoretically inflected dialectical materialism, it is

only fitting that its members combined methods from across the social and human sci-
ences to study the society and culture of late capitalism. Why, then, does Adorno’s empirical
research continue to surprise scholars of his Critical Theory? As some historians have
recently argued, early popularizers of the Frankfurt School were politically, temperamen-
tally, and methodologically opposed to the functionalism and empiricism then dominating
American social science (Wheatland 2005, 170; Worrell 2006; cf. Jay 1984). For some
scholars, Adorno’s empirical research – conducted mostly during his exile in the United
States between 1938 and 1949 – appeared as an aberration, a concession to the institu-
tions that supported and funded the Institute émigrés. Even those scholars who have
examined this material often relegate it to second‐class status, depicting it as mere prepa-
ration for Critical Theory.2 But minimizing the role of Adorno’s empirical research within
his larger corpus produces a decidedly undialectical representation of his thought – a rep-
resentation that no critical theorist could countenance.
This chapter takes a step toward a comprehensive history of Adorno’s empirical
research by examining three key studies: “The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of
Listeners” (1938–1941), “Anti‐Semitism among American Labor” (1944–1945), and
“The Function of Anti‐Semitism in the Personality” (1944–1950). Although he began his
career as a researcher enthusiastically, Adorno became disillusioned by his colleagues’
adherence to the illusions of choice, preference, experience, and individuality. To avoid
these ideologies, Adorno argued, empirical research must be connected continuously
to social theory. This connection would not rescue empirical research but reveal its
insufficiencies – and, further, link these to the privations of capitalism. The Institute’s
empirical projects of the 1940s enabled Adorno to transform this critique of existing
methods into a positive program of research. Adorno used techniques from sociology,
statistics, psychoanalysis, and behavioral psychology to study prejudice and authoritari-
anism. But he did not synthesize these approaches. Rather, Adorno subjected both these
methods and their results to theoretical interpretation and critique, revealing inevitable
and insuperable contradictions. These contradictions, Adorno argued, followed from and
illuminated the incongruities of capitalist society itself.
2. Using the European Approach

In 1936, the Rockefeller Foundation established an interdisciplinary Communications
Group to coordinate research in the nascent field of media research. Interwar American
thinkers were divided over the psychological power and social significance of the radio.
Some, inspired by the likes of John Dewey, believed radio could cultivate the elusive “public”;
others, following Walter Lippmann, argued that radio would exert effective “social con-
trol” in an era of massification and fragmentation.3 The Communications Group, the
Foundation hoped, would provide “an opportunity for relatively free experimentation” so
that this debate might be settled scientifically (quoted in Gary 1999, 86). Among the
studies the Rockefeller Foundation funded was “The Essential Value of Radio to All Types
of Listeners,” better known as the Princeton Radio Research Project. Directed by Hadley
Cantril and overseen by John Marshall, the Princeton Radio Project aimed to examine the
psychological impact and social consequences of the new medium by “quantifying the
influence of radio listening” on its audiences (Cantril 1937, 5).
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INHUMAN METHODS FOR AN INHUMANE WORLD
Paul F. Lazarsfeld, an émigré who had crafted a research method that abstracted, quan-
tified, and typologized subjective attitudes, was recruited to lead the Princeton Radio
Project.4 In his earliest memorandum for Cantril and Marshall, Lazarsfeld argued that
understanding the influence of radio required deeper knowledge of how the “nucleus of
personality” developed within the “total context” of society (Lazarsfeld 1938a, 1–2, 6,
10–12). Lazarsfeld turned to Max Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research,
looking for a scholar versed in the “European approach,” to assist in this task; Horkheimer,
in turn, recommended Adorno.5 Lazarsfeld and Adorno had known one another – by rep-
utation, at least – since 1936, when Adorno complained to both Horkheimer and Walter
Benjamin about the intellectual merit of Lazarsfeld’s work (Adorno 1994a, 179–191,
350–360, 389–396; Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 180, 209). Lazarsfeld, by contrast, held
Adorno in high regard, praising his “On the Social Situation of Music” (Adorno 1932) in
a letter from November 1937. Indeed, this article convinced Lazarsfeld to offer Adorno a
job researching music for the Princeton Radio Project:
Our project definitely deals with empirical research. But I am convinced, the same as you are,
that fact‐finding can be extremely improved by extensive preliminary theoretical thinking.
Taking, for instance, the papers that you wrote in the Institute’s magazine, I might put the
situation to you in the following terms: It is exactly this kind of thing which we shall expect
from you, but it has to be driven two steps further: (1) Toward an empirical research problem;
(2) Toward an actual execution of the field work. (Quoted in Wiggershaus 1994, 238, fn. 246)
Although conflicted – torn between his family and friends in Europe and the prospect of
collaboration with Horkheimer in New York City – Adorno ultimately accepted Lazarsfeld’s
offer (Adorno 1994a, 440–443, 468, 480–482, 497; Adorno and Benjamin 1999,
227–232).
Historians have thoroughly documented Adorno’s tenure at the Princeton Radio
Project. Upon arriving in the United States in February 1938, Adorno was surprised and
confused about the direction of the Princeton Radio Project’s ongoing research, but he
remained optimistic that he could use his position to continue his studies of music, aes-
thetics, and social theory (Adorno 1994b, 12–18). Over the ensuing months, Adorno
composed two memoranda on the theory and practice of studying radio music (Adorno
1938b, 2009d). The document, “Music in Radio,” directly criticized Lazarsfeld’s
quantitative research as methodologically shallow and the Princeton Radio Project’s
reformist aims as “cheap utopianism” (Adorno 1938b, 4–5, 64–66, 102, 125, 135–136).
Unsurprisingly, “Music in Radio” elicited a hostile response. Lazarsfeld excoriated
Adorno as so “uninformed about empirical research work […] that the reader is forced to
doubt your authority in your own musical field” (Lazarsfeld 1938b, 1). “Never visit
Institut [sic],” Lazarsfeld scrawled in the margin of one page (Adorno 1938b, 114a).
Despite his growing concern about Adorno’s role at the Princeton Radio Project,
Lazarsfeld asked him to revise “Music in Radio” (Lazarsfeld 1969, 323–324). Adorno
duly spent much of 1939 drafting shorter memoranda and delivering presentations on
the subject. Lazarsfeld hoped that Adorno would moderate his position; instead, he
amplified his critiques. By so doing, Adorno foreclosed any possibility of continuing at
the Princeton Radio Project: when renewed in October 1939, the Princeton Radio
Project allocated no monies for Adorno’s musical study. Adorno seemed relieved, writing
to Benjamin in February 1940, “I am now finally free of the Radio Project” (Adorno and
Benjamin 1999, 322).
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CHARLES CLAVEY
How does existing scholarship explain the brief duration and troubled nature of
Adorno’s work for the Princeton Radio Project? For some historians, irreconcilable differ-
ences between Critical Theory and market research doomed Adorno’s collaboration with
Lazarsfeld. Because they frequently rely on autobiographical texts, these scholars often
become somewhat partisan, blaming either Adorno or Lazarsfeld for the outcome for the
Princeton Radio Project.6 Other historians situate Adorno’s music studies within his
career, asking how this work affected his Critical Theory of modern society and its culture
industry.7 Few, however, examine “Music in Radio” and its accompanying texts for
themselves – as ledgers documenting Adorno’s critiques of existing research techniques
and attempts to formulate new empirical methods. What were his critiques? What alterna-
tives did he propose?
3. Adorno’s Most Dangerous Thesis
From his earliest writings for the Musikblätter des Anbruch, Adorno framed the study of
music ambitiously. At Anbruch – where he became an editor in 1925 – Adorno expanded
criticism to include developments of light entertainment, musical technology, and cultural
consumption (Levin and Linn 1994). By 1932 Adorno had further enlarged this remit,
analyzing music as an embodiment of the alienation inherent in late capitalist society. In
1941, Adorno described the study of music as a “model settlement” established in the
“remote terrain” of uncharted social and psychological research (Adorno 2009c, 467, cf.
1938b, 99). Across its 150 pages, Adorno’s memorandum for the Princeton Radio Project
did not did not produce a map of this territory but described the cartographic methods by
which one might be drawn.
Adorno deployed two complementary methods in his examination of radio music. Using
“physiognomics” to study the technological and musicological aspects of “serious music”
broadcasts, Adorno found that transmissions necessarily distorted the totality of composi-
tions, breaking them down into their component parts. Audiences accustomed to listening
to works in their intended setting – the concert hall – might apperceive the symphonic
structure, but a new “radio generation” would hear nothing but “musical atoms” (Adorno
1938b, 69–71, 93–95, cf. 1938a). Connecting this formal analysis to a social examina-
tion, Adorno argued that capitalism turned this “regression of hearing” to its advantage,
using its monopoly of the airwaves to “plug” hits made of recycled musical atoms, simul-
taneously satisfying listeners’ desires for immediate gratification and further dulling their
faculties (Adorno 1938b, 93–95, 125–126, cf. 1936, 1941). Adorno further claimed that
just as nineteenth‐century serious music had birthed the bourgeois individual of industrial
capitalism, so had twentieth‐century “elevated entertainment” engendered the alienated
subject of late capitalism. “Perhaps what matters most in radio is not so much what
influence it exercises upon people,” Adorno wrote “as it is how the general mechanism of
society which affects people everywhere shows itself in a new tool in a very distinct and
definite way” (Adorno 1938b, 99).
While these arguments had many implications, of particular importance to the present
discussion were their consequences for Adorno’s view of empirical social research. Under
Lazarsfeld’s direction, the Princeton Radio Project had focused on the development of tools
and metrics for the accurate measurement of audiences’ preferences. Together with Frank
Stanton, Lazarsfeld developed the “Program Analyzer,” a tool for recording audiences’
“likes” and “dislikes” in real time (Jenemann 2007, 25–26). Adorno’s memorandum
156
uestioned Lazarsfeld’s invention – which Adorno dismissively called “that machine” – and

q
the paradigm behind it. Researchers, “Music in Radio” claimed, could not measure, record,
or analyze audiences’ likes and dislikes for the simple reason that the radio generation had
no such preferences. By focusing on rigorous methods for determining individuals’ prefer-
ences, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues had neglected changes in material reality and lived
experience that undermined both individuals and their preferences.
Most simply, this critique originated in Adorno’s argument that musical atomization
and broadcast monopolies effectively eliminated individuals’ choices. Whether listening to
CBS or NBC to hear the latest performances of Irving Berlin or Guy Lombardo, audiences
were sure to hear the same tunes over and over again, their essential sameness masked by
a veneer of difference. “The standardization of production in this field, as in most others
goes so far that the listener has virtually no choice,” Adorno later wrote. “Products are
forced upon him. His freedom has ceased to exist” (Adorno 1945, 216, 2009a, 141).
Without recognizing the present state of composition and broadcast, studies of radio music
could not be truly empirical. Rather, they chased ghosts of a bygone economic system and
its cultural artifacts.
More broadly, this critique followed from Adorno’s claim about the disappearance of the
individual. Adorno was not alone in developing this position: Horkheimer and other
members of the Institute had traced the fading bourgeois individual – the introspecting,
discerning subject shaped by the dynamics of the private sphere and market
economy – throughout the 1930s (see, e.g. Horkheimer 1936; Horkheimer and Adorno
1985b). Whatever claims subjects made about their preferences, Adorno argued, were
efforts to kindle individuality either through the empty gestures of “pseudo‐activity” or the
nihilistic violence of “self‐mutilation” (Adorno 1938b, 15–18, 80–81, 122–124, cf.
1936). In its current form, the Princeton Radio Project was a kind of pseudo‐activity,
insisting on the existence of individuality despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Although he showed existing methods to be misconceived and misapplied, Adorno did
not countenance the abandonment of empirical research altogether. In addition to insisting
that “Music in Radio” was itself a work of empirical research – a characterization Lazarsfeld
contested in his marginal comments – Adorno proposed studies that would reveal atomiza-
tion and alienation rather than perpetuate illusions of choice and individuality (Adorno
1938b, 23, 111–113, 124–129). To better understand the fetishization and commodifica-
tion of music, for instance, Adorno outlined an empirical study of subjects’ abilities to recall
both serious and popular music (Adorno 1938b, 128–130). Alienation could be assessed,
Adorno further suggested, by studying listeners “pseudo‐activities” in response to radio
broadcasts – by, for example, examining the form, content, and volume of fan mail (Adorno
1938b, 111–113). Establishing a position that became increasingly important to his under-
standing of empirical research, Adorno emphasized that such studies would not generate
evidence to prove or disprove a particular hypothesis but, as “experiments in theory,” would
“contribute to our stock of interpretation” (Adorno 1938b, 103).
In contrast to the research conducted by the Princeton Radio Project, Adorno’s studies
would be motivated by Critical Theory, unmasking the “pre‐established harmony” bet-
ween social dynamics, economic forces, cultural products, and individuality. Forgoing the
ideologies of late capitalism and bourgeois individuality, these studies would adhere to the
realities of the material world and social order. Unlike the Princeton Radio Project, this
empirical research would not instantiate “affirmative consciousness” by “bewitching” lis-
teners with hollow satisfaction but would cultivate instead “consciousness,” “intelligence,”
and the “power of discrimination” that allowed subjects to see the world as it actually
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CHARLES CLAVEY
existed (Adorno 1938b, 139, 146–148, 161). Adorno called this thought and its implica-
tions his “most dangerous thesis.” Rather than try to rescue serious music or the bourgeois
individual through empirical studies, researchers must confront the deterioration of these
artifacts. Moreover, they must accept as their duty the obligation to “shove something
which is already falling, in order to make room for something new” (Adorno 1938b, 158).
This thesis held for sclerotic empirical research, too: if it could not be salvaged, it must be
discarded in favor of methods apposite to the material world and social order.
4. Empirical Research Contra Empirical Verification
In March 1939, Adorno explained to psychologists at Princeton University that their

research techniques were inimical to their scientific ends. In order to measure exactly
psychological responses to sensory stimuli, researchers isolated subjects in controlled envi-
ronments free from external influence or interference. But, Adorno argued, because music
was not a mere “acoustic event” but a “social entity,” removing subjects from the context
of listening invalidated experimental results. “Our experimental setting,” Adorno told the
audience, “where people state their preferences on sheets of paper or by pressing a button
offers no opportunity to make any statement about different ‘layers’ of their conscious or
unconscious life” (435). Paradoxically, this is to say, the more psychologists strove to create
perfect conditions for obtaining “empirical security,” the further removed their findings
would be from “objective knowledge.” As Adorno pointedly put it, “empirical verification
may become the enemy of empirical knowledge” (Adorno 2009b, 440). Implicit in this
argument was a rhetorical gesture familiar from the Horkheimer’s formulation of Critical
Theory: in order to fulfill itself, empirical research must transform itself into its opposite,
abandoning the pursuit of objectivity and neutrality and embracing instead the tasks of
interpretation and critique.8
During his last months at the Princeton Radio Project, Adorno outlined this process of
transformation. Because radio music and listeners’ responses could only be studied within
the total social field, Adorno insisted, researchers must first leave the isolation of the labo-
ratory. To properly comprehend the standardization of the jazz‐listening masses, for
example, researchers must “witness the tremor which goes through a nightclub crowd
when the band plays something which everyone knows after some lesser‐known composi-
tion” (Adorno 2009b, 438). Adorno recognized that psychologists would be hesitant to
conduct research of this kind, believing that it would “presuppose a large degree of
subjective spontaneity, of life observation, and of thinking on the part of the researcher”
(Adorno 2009b, 440). In keeping with the intentions and methods of Critical Theory,
Adorno argued that empirical research required such subjectivity. As he explained to his
colleagues in October 1939, Adorno held that researchers must abandon the pretense of
neutrality and adopt four axioms: the unchecked spread of commodification, the heavy
concentration of capital, the inexorable ossification of power relations, and the indelible
contradiction of social and economic antagonisms (Adorno 2009b, 136). Adhering to
these axioms would decenter the individual subject sacrosanct to naïve empirical research:
If we regard listener reactions mainly as a function of the existing system and not as final data
upon which interpretation should be based, the social processes working on the listeners are
then susceptible to a socio‐scientific analysis – as distinct from a natural‐scientific analysis which
accepts the world as given, because it can find no other way to take it. (Adorno 2009b, 142)
158
By contrast, true empirical research must “question what everybody knows and accepts as
given and inescapable – that is, to challenge the given” (Adorno 2009a, 135–136).
These arguments failed to raise Adorno’s standing with Lazarsfeld, Cantril, or Marshall.
Radio and the Printed Page, a collection of the Princeton Radio Project’s findings completed
in June 1939, contained almost no mention of Adorno.9 Marshall’s decision not to renew
funding for the music study may have disappointed Adorno, but it was likely unsurprising.
Adorno continued to seek funds from the Rockefeller Foundation into 1941, submitting
proposals for the Princeton Radio Project’s study of educational broadcasts.10
In one such proposal, “The Problem of the New Type of Human Being,” Adorno took
his earlier critiques to their logical conclusions. Following the Institute’s Authority and the
Family, Adorno argued that late capitalism had dissolved the boundary delimiting private
existence and enabled economic, social, and cultural forces to shape subjects without
mediation. Although the “individual as a biological unit naturally continues to exist,”
Adorno wrote, “in large sectors of society there is no longer an ‘ego’ in the traditional sense”
(Adorno 2009c, 462, emphasis original).11 Concurrently with this strong statement that
the individual presupposed by the Princeton Radio Project no longer existed, Adorno rede-
ployed his critique of naïve empirical research: “A single path leads from the conveyor belt
via the office machine to the ‘capturing’ of spontaneous intellectual acts through reified,
quantified processes” (Adorno 2009c, 464). Bound by its obligation to examine the
material world, truly empirical research would act on Adorno’s most dangerous thesis: rec-
ognizing that the modern individual was already falling, it would give her another push.
Continually rebuffed by the Rockefeller Foundation, Adorno left New York City for Los
Angeles in November 1941. While the integration of the “European approach” and
American methods Lazarsfeld had hoped for may not have been accomplished, it would be
incorrect to regard Adorno’s work between 1938 and 1941 as either unsuccessful or
unimportant. To be sure, much of Adorno’s writing about empirical research was thor-
oughly negative and explicitly critical; the studies he proposed and methods he described
were tentative and fragmentary. But some of Adorno’s colleagues – Charles Siepmann
(1941), Herta Herzog (1941), and even Lazarsfeld (1941) – undertook research in accor-
dance with Adorno’s critiques. During the following decade, Adorno himself conducted
empirical studies – not in the field of radio but in characterology. Understood as prepara-
tion for these later projects, Adorno’s work for the Princeton Radio Project revealed that
empirical research was not only compatible with but central to his “European approach.”
5. A Highly Promising Method
Although Adorno relocated to California to begin his long‐anticipated collaboration with

Horkheimer on a study of dialectical logic, he did not abandon his interest in the theory and
method of empirical research. Rather, from the summer of 1943 onwards, Adorno was at
the center of the Institute’s research into anti‐Semitism – and, later, authoritarianism –
first for the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) and, subsequently, for the American Jewish
Committee (AJC).12 Historians have thoroughly described Adorno’s work in this period,
often characterizing it as a concession to American funders and, consequently, a distrac-
tion from the real work of Critical Theory.13 Even those scholars who have adopted a more
nuanced view still position Adorno’s empirical projects as supplementary and therefore
subordinate to his Critical Theory.14
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CHARLES CLAVEY
But resituating Adorno’s contributions to the JLC and AJC studies in the context of his
work at the Princeton Radio Project reveals them to be part of his developing theory and
practice of empirical social research. Specifically, this chapter will now show, Adorno’s
leading role in these studies enabled him to transform his critiques of existing techniques
into a set of practicable methods. Adorno deployed tools from psychoanalysis, statistics,
sociology, and behavioral psychology in these studies and – simultaneously – submitted
the results obtained and the methods themselves to theoretical interpretation and critique.
This “combination of the highly developed American empirical methods with the more
established European methods,” Horkheimer informed the Institute’s AJC sponsors in
1942, “will constitute an approach which many scholars regard as highly promising”
(Institute of Social Research 1942, 30–32, cf. 1941).
6. Outflanking the Research Racket
Motivated by the manifest failure to counteract National Socialist “mass psychology” with
“educational” counter‐propaganda, the JLC commissioned an empirical study “to ascer-
tain how prevalent anti‐Semitism is in the ranks of American labor” in 1943 (Sherman
1943, 2). After this initial effort failed, A.R.L. Gurland, a sometime‐affiliate of the Institute,
suggested that the JLC consider hiring the Institute to conduct the study. In February
1944, the Institute submitted a proposal that would determine the number and distribu-
tion of prejudiced workers and discern the particular character of working‐class anti‐
Semitism (Institute of Social Research 1944, 1–2). In May, the JLC approved funding for a
six‐month project.
From the outset, the Institute researchers insisted that existing methods used in public
opinion polling and market research surveys were inadequate to the “highly complex
psychological phenomenon” of anti‐Semitism, which was “hidden and devious in both its
individual and group expression” (Institute of Social Research 1944, 4). Gurland, Paul
Massing, and Leo Lowenthal derived an ingenious method to discover “what being antise-
mitic means for these workers” (Massing et al. 1945, 13). Institute‐affiliated social workers
recruited volunteers to learn questions, “interview” their coworkers during ordinary con-
versations, memorize their answers, and, finally, debrief with the researchers. Questions
included: “Do Jewish people act and feel different from others?” and “How do you feel
about what the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe?” (Massing et al. 1945, 1259). These
“screened” interviews exceeded the bounds of scholarly neutrality used by social scien-
tists, the Institute researchers argued, but this did not invalidate them. Instead – and in
keeping with Adorno’s admonitions to his Princeton Radio Project colleagues – they held
that such methods would recover the “texture” of anti‐Semitism (Massing et al. 1945,
1254–1258).
Fieldwork began in June and lasted until September. Quantification and categorization
of the interview material occupied the Institute researchers for a month. In November
1944, they began the interpretation and analysis of these results (Massing et al. 1945,
1264–1266). The Institute researchers’ central task was categorizing experimental sub-
jects according to the degree and character of their prejudice (or lack thereof). Using both
fine‐grained statistical analysis and representative interview material, the researchers
fashioned a typology that ranged from those evincing “extreme hostility aiming at the
extermination of Jews” (Type A) to “non‐discriminatory, friendly attitude excluding cri-
tique” (Type H) (Massing et al. 1945, 73–151). This typologization painted a disturbing
160
picture. Fully half of American workers were susceptible to some form of fascist agitation.
Of these, 11% were in the “fascist vanguard,” ready and willing to fight for totalitarianism
in the United States. Only a small percentage of the remainder could be counted on to take
an active stand against anti‐Semitism (Massing et al. 1945, 14).
After a vitriolic debate between Gurland, Massing, Lowenthal, and Horkheimer over the
proper interpretation of these results and the course of Critical Theory more generally
imperiled the completion of the JLC project, Adorno took charge of the Labor Study, as he
called it, guiding it to completion.15 In November and December 1944, Adorno drafted a
series of memoranda focused not on the findings themselves but on the methods used in
their discovery (Adorno 1944a, b, c). Across these memoranda, Adorno strove to position
the Labor Study between quantitative sociological and qualitative psychological research.16
Adorno’s characterization of the Labor Study as a work of quantitative sociology can be
understood in two ways. On the one hand, the memoranda straightforwardly proposed
strategies for defending the project against charges leveled by the “research racket” who
would think the study technique unscientific, biased, and limited (Adorno 1944c, 2).
Adorno suggested, for example, explaining away criticism of the small sample size by
emphasizing the “pioneer character” of the study and justifying the necessity of partici-
pant interviews by highlighting the sensitive nature of the topic (Adorno 1944c, 1–3). On
the other hand, the memoranda subtly elaborated Adorno’s critiques of the Princeton
Radio Project. Rather than sequester themselves in laboratories like Lazarsfeld and his col-
leagues, the Institute researchers went out into the field – or, at least, trained others to do
so – to study phenomena in social contexts. Likewise, the researchers did not insist upon
an inflated norm of scholarly neutrality but instead approached their topic “through
particular reference to a theory of society” (Adorno 1944c, 1–3).
Further, Adorno insisted that the Labor Study did not perform a “naïve statistical
breakdown of the results” because it recognized that this “material is not an ultimate source
of knowledge but needs incessant critique and correction” (Adorno 1944c, 4, 7 emphasis
original). Adorno, this is to say, reiterated his earlier claim that empirical research must be
continuously and consciously subjected to theoretical interpretation and critique.
Returning to ideas developed in a discussion among Institute members in 1941, Adorno
held that research of this kind – properly, fully empirical research – would replace a vicious
circle in which findings merely proved or disproved a hypothesis with a virtuous circle in
which the reciprocal interaction between research and theory generated new insights and
further questions (Adorno 1944c; cf. Horkheimer 1985).
Contemporary readers of Adorno’s work might well be surprised by his defense of the
Labor Study as an empirical research project – one opposed to the sorts of studies con-
ducted by the research racket, to be sure, but empirical nonetheless. But Adorno was
demonstrably more anxious to distinguish the Labor Study from recent works of social
psychology. Once again, the memoranda can be read in two ways. First, Adorno empha-
sized the need for methodological clarity. When studies “à la [Erich] Fromm” combined
concepts, arguments, and insights from sociology and psychology, Adorno wrote, they
confused “motivating ideas” acting on the conscious mind with “compulsory psychological
forces” operating below the surface, leading to imprecise analysis (Adorno 1944a, 44; cf.
Adorno et al. 1950, 94, fn. 10). Second, Adorno followed the Institute’s developing cri-
tique of Fromm, implying that, because it came at the expense of Freud’s most tendentious
theories – of instincts, drives, and sexuality – this reconciliation vitiated psychoanalysis’
radical critique of contemporary society.17 The Institute researchers, by contrast, would
keep sociology and psychology distinct. Moreover, by “following up to the extreme the
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CHARLES CLAVEY
inherent categories of each discipline involved,” they would force both methods to
confront their limitations and incongruities. In this way, the researchers would “redis-
cover the social element at the very bottom of psychological categories” (Adorno 1944a,
44). Specifically, the Institute would uncover the disappearance of the individual as a
psychological entity and social category.
As Adorno acknowledged, these were “unconventional and apparently paradoxical
statements” that might well “shock” the Institute’s supporters in the JLC and AJC (Adorno
1944a, 44). But framed against the background of Adorno’s earlier critiques of the
Princeton Radio Project, these claims reveal their sense: as he had done in the late 1930s,
Adorno argued that empirical research necessarily resulted in contradictions; maintaining
the connection between research and theoretical interpretation and critique, however,
these contradictions became productive sources of insight and argument. Going beyond his
earlier critiques, Adorno now included quantitative sociology and depth psychology among
the empirical methods that could be reformulated in this way. Because Adorno joined the
Labor Study so close to its conclusion, his influence on its methods, results, and conclusions
was, at best, peripheral. When he assumed a leading role in the Institute’s ambitious study
of the anti‐Semitic and fascistic personality, Adorno finally implemented his reformulated
research methods, demonstrating their ability to illuminate the inhuman world.
7. The Rigidity of Constructing Types
The Institute’s Labor Study was concurrent with – and, in some sense, a component of – its
much larger project on anti‐Semitism, prejudice, and authoritarianism for the AJC.18
Although research had begun in the spring of 1943, it accelerated and expanded after the
AJC renewed its support and created its own Scientific Research Division in the fall of
1944. By the spring of 1945, the project had swelled to include nine subsidiary studies,
conducted by researchers spread across the United States. Of these, Horkheimer placed
particular importance on an empirical investigation of the ideology and psychology of the
anti‐Semitic – and, later, authoritarian – character conducted by the Berkeley Public
Opinion Study Group. Impressed by the contribution of the Berkeley Group’s leader, R.
Nevitt Sanford, to a study of the “psychosocial origins of morale,” Horkheimer recruited
the researchers to the AJC project in the spring of 1943. While drafting his memoranda on
the Labor Study during the fall of 1944, Adorno began collaborating closely with the
Berkeley Group on a study variously called “The Berkeley Project on the Nature and Extent
of Anti‐Semitism” and “The Function of Anti‐Semitism in the Personality.”19
For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Berkeley Group offered several opportunities.
Because these researchers used methods from personality, developmental, and behavioral
psychology – a diverse array but also an idiom more familiar to American scholars – they
were more likely to produce results that both the AJC and the “research racket” would
find satisfactory. Moreover, because one member of the Berkeley Group – Else Frenkel‐
Brunswik – was also an accomplished depth‐psychological theorist, Horkheimer hoped
that collaboration with the organization would provide openings for the Institute to
realize its longstanding goal: the “bringing together of certain European concepts with
American methods” (quoted in Wiggershaus 1994, 360).20 For both these reasons,
Adorno and Horkheimer thought, the Berkeley Group could conduct the necessary
“relentless study” of the “nerve centers where social and psychological causation merge”
(Horkheimer 1946, 9–10). Although this description may suggest an affinity between
162
the Berkeley Group and Fromm, the organization’s methods and intentions were decid-
edly distinct from those of the social psychologist. Specifically, the Berkeley Group’s pre-
sentation and interpretation of results from its preliminary studies of anti‐Semitism
suggested that these researchers pursued empirical psychology to the point at which it
revealed its own contradictions and, more important, illuminated those of contempo-
rary society.
Prior to 1944, the Berkeley Group had aimed to construct a reliable description and
scale of the anti‐Semitic personality. First, they designed questionnaires to assess subjects’
manifest and latent prejudices; then, they used psychographic methods to rank responses
on a scale from strong agreement to strong disagreement; finally, the researchers
invited high‐scoring subjects in for further examination through clinical interviews and
projective tests.21 The Berkeley study was, Adorno later wrote, “a first, preliminary attempt
to integrate depth‐psychology and statistical generalization” (Adorno 1948, 8). Frenkel‐
Brunswik and Sanford emphasized the interconnection between psychoanalysis and
statistics: the “insights or hunches gained from” psychoanalytic interpretations “were
used in revising the three parts of the questionnaire […], in establishing categories for the
evaluation of the ‘projective’ part of the questionnaire, and in devising a new section of
the questionnaire” (Frenkel‐Brunswik and Sanford 1945, 272).
When Adorno began collaborating closely with Sanford, Frenkel‐Brunswik, and
Levinson, he discovered that the Berkeley Group’s research method met the requirements
for truly empirical research he had been developing since his tenure at the Princeton Radio
Project. As Frenkel‐Brunswik later wrote, the Berkeley study “was guided by a theoretical
orientation that was present at the start” (Adorno et al. 1950, 225). Adorno contributed
to the Berkeley study by supplementing its existing psychoanalytic theory with the
Institute’s critical‐social theory.22
In December 1944, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that he had completed a question-
naire derived from the “Elements of Anti‐Semitism” fragment of Dialectic of Enlightenment
(Adorno 1994b, 345–349; cf. 623–624). This advance enabled the researchers to formu-
late a scale for measuring the fascistic personality directly, without the need for further
testing and interviews. As Adorno described it to Horkheimer, he had translated their
dialectical account of modernity into “operational terms” suitable for the analysis of
quantitative data gathered from empirical research (Adorno 1994c, 146–151).
Throughout 1945, the Berkeley study researchers both used this questionnaire to
survey subjects’ manifest ideologies, latent attitudes, and underlying personalities and,
simultaneously, subjected it to theoretical refinement and critique (Adorno et al. 1950,
18–19). Through this process, the researchers ultimately formulated the “Fascist scale” or
“F‐scale,” which combined nine variables – conventionalism, authoritarian submission,
anti‐intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and “toughness,” destructiveness
and cynicism, projectivity, and sex – to assess the degree to which the superego had been
integrated into the personality and the strength of the ego itself (Adorno et al. 1950, 228).
Put simply, Adorno and the Berkeley Group had successfully realized Adorno’s long‐devel-
oping plans to bring together quantitative techniques, theoretical critique, and interpreta-
tion to create a superior form of empirical research.
How did Adorno and the Berkeley Group use this revised research method? Like the
Labor Study, the Berkeley project sorted subjects into categories according to the virulence
and content of their prejudices. As Adorno reported to Horkheimer in September 1945,
the study’s typology was – once again – drawn from their anti‐Semitism fragment (Adorno
1994c, 146–151). At one extreme were the “psychopath,” “rebel,” “manipulative,” and
163
CHARLES CLAVEY
“authoritarian” types; at the other were the “protesting,” “impulsive,” and “easy‐going”
types. Unlike the Labor Study, however, this project used the Berkeley Group’s facility with
psychometrics to score responses – and therefore to sort respondents – according to judi-
ciously weighted and carefully calculated composite scores.23 For Horkheimer, this typology
represented not only “one of the most important steps in the Berkeley study” but also an
advance “in our general theory” itself (Adorno 1994c, 3: 154–161). Collaboration bet-
ween Adorno and the Berkeley Group, this is to say, had yielded the hoped‐for union of
European concepts and American methods.
Adorno argued that these types were not distinct conditions but different presentations
of a single “high‐scoring syndrome” (Adorno et al. 1950, 744–786). Both the calculation
of composite scores and the interpretation of interview material revealed that prejudiced
subjects thought according to ossified categories and reified concepts (Adorno et al. 1950,
468–486). Returning to an argument originating in both the Princeton Radio Project
and the Labor Study, Adorno claimed that stereotypes undercut high‐scoring subjects’
“capacity for having experiences” at all (Adorno et al. 1950, 617, emphasis original). Those
who suffered from this condition of “stereopathy” had a dim prognosis: after entering the
individual’s mind, stereotypes developed out of themselves according to an “archaic logic”
of “associational transitions” that allowed them to defeat normative reservations, rational
objections, and unconscious defenses, ultimately inducing a “paranoid ‘system’ which
always tends to include everything, to tolerate nothing which cannot be identified with the
subject’s formula” (Adorno et al. 1950, 632–633).
As Peter Gordon (2017) has recently argued, Adorno’s description and diagnosis of
stereopathy raised the possibility that the Berkeley project suffered from a potentially fatal
contradiction. According to Adorno and the Berkeley Group, high‐scoring subjects’ stere-
opathy prevented them from recognizing the particular or unique; instead, it forced them
to mechanically categorize and rationalistically classify true individuals as mere instances
of a general type. For Adorno and the Berkeley Group, this was not an abstract point. “To
express it pointedly,” Adorno wrote in The Authoritarian Personality, “the rigidity of con-
structing types is itself indicative of that ‘stereopathic’ mentality which belongs to the
basic constituents of a potentially fascist character.” “It cannot be doubted,” he empha-
sized, “that the critique of psychological types expresses a truly human impulse, directed
against that kind of subsumption of individuals under pre‐established classes which has
been consummated in Nazi Germany, where the labeling of live human beings indepen-
dently of their specific qualities, resulted in decisions about their life or death” (Adorno
et al. 1950, 746). Adorno and the Berkley Group recognized that they were caught in
what Gordon describes as a “vicious circle or self‐referential paradox where the principle
that animates the study becomes trapped in its own diagnostic” (Gordon 2017, 40).
Empirical research uncovered endemic stereopathy and, alongside it, stereopaths’ inhu-
mane typologization – but this research itself consisted in typologizing. Could Adorno and
the Berkeley Group conduct typological research without falling prey to stereopathy?
8. Empirical Research Presupposing its Own End
To be sure, Adorno justified the use of typologies on pragmatic grounds, likening the study
of authoritarianism to the treatment of disease and arguing that the categorization of
symptoms must always precede treatment of the underlying conditions (Adorno et al.
1950, 745–746). More important for the present discussion, however, were his theoretical
164
explanations of typologies. Adorno’s initial defense of the Berkeley study’s use of typol-
ogies in The Authoritarian Personality and the claims that later followed from this defense
were the culmination of his reflections on the theory and method of empirical research.
Returning to ideas first developed in his critiques of the Princeton Radio Project, sharp-
ened in his contributions to the Labor Study, and made explicit in the Berkeley project,
Adorno argued that empirical researchers had “reason to look for psychological types
because the world in which we live is typed and ‘produces’ different ‘types’ of persons”
(Adorno et al. 1950, 747). Reviving themes familiar to not only Adorno’s colleagues at the
Institute but also his contemporaries conversant in the work of American public intellec-
tuals, Adorno argued that individuals as such no longer existed. Late capitalism, Adorno
wrote in an unpublished introduction to The Authoritarian Personality, produces subjects
“stamped by variegated social processes,” formed into instances of “psychological ‘classes’”
as uniformly standardized as the material and cultural commodities they consumed
(Adorno et al. 1950, 747). Adorno did not deny that typologizing individuals would deny
their humanity, but he insisted that there were no true individuals to be reified in this way.
Empirical research, if it hoped to faithfully document material reality, must recognize that
“individualism, opposed to human pigeonholing, may ultimately become a mere ideolog-
ical veil in a society which actually is inhuman and whose intrinsic tendency towards the
‘subsumption’ of everything shows itself by the classification of people themselves”
(Adorno et al. 1950, 747, emphasis original).
Having solved the problem of inhumane typological research by describing the inhu-
manity of the world itself, Adorno immediately encountered another problematic contra-
diction. From the Berkeley Group’s preliminary reports to the published text of The
Authoritarian Personality, the Berkeley study was saturated with psychoanalytic concepts,
arguments, and insights. Even Adorno acknowledged that depth psychology “structurally
predetermined” the project’s conclusions (Adorno et al. 1950, 750–751, cf. 316–317).
Given Adorno’s argument – evident as early as 1939 and refined through his work for the
Princeton Radio Project and Labor Study – that psychoanalysis subtended the ideology of
individuality, how could the Berkeley study avoid becoming apologetics for late capitalism?
Moreover, in The Authoritarian Personality and in other contemporaneous texts Adorno
insisted that psychoanalysis was not merely the vestigial remains of now‐surpassed
research but an actually valuable means of documenting how “objective social forces […]
work upon the individual not only from the outside but actually from within” the subject
(Adorno 1948, 18, 24). Put simply, Adorno seemed to readmit precisely the kind of
research he had just disallowed: one founded on and directed toward the individual.
Adorno resolved this second contradiction by returning – once more – to the theory of
empirical research he had been developing since his arrival in the United States. As in his
memorandum for the Labor Study, Adorno’s unpublished introduction to The Authoritarian
Personality emphasized that researchers must not “sociologize psychology” but instead
carry it “to the extreme” (Adorno 1948, 26–27). Such a psychology in extremis would not
borrow the concepts and hypotheses of psychoanalysis without accepting its conclusions,
as Fromm was accused of doing, but instead accept the whole Freudian framework.
Analyzing a subject according to depth‐psychological orthodoxy would show him not to be
an individual – molded through reflection upon and interpretation of experience – at all
but a “bundle of conditioned reflexes” responding to social stimuli (Adorno 1948, 29).
When carried to its conclusion, this is to say, psychology led away from the ideology of the
individual and toward the reality of the human type. Or, as Adorno put it, this psychology
“in a way presupposes its own end” (Adorno 1948, 28).
165
CHARLES CLAVEY
For Adorno, researchers’ recognition of this contradiction was the first step toward
rehabilitating psychology as a means of empirical research. Consider the changed role
of Freud’s notion of Oedipal conflict. During the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the concept of Oedipal conflict had aptly described the structure of father–son
competition within the nuclear family and, thus, usefully illustrated the adult subject’s
psychical state – his adherence to the reality principle, his latent unconscious desires,
and so on. But as the economic conditions of late capitalism eroded the father’s position
within the nuclear family and, eventually, the nuclear family itself, the son was exposed
to social forces directly; he was socialized into a human type rather than a true individual.
Adorno – along with Horkheimer, Marcuse, and even the early Fromm – insisted that the
idea of Oedipal conflict remained useful as a “pattern of translation” between society
and the subject (Adorno et al. 1950, 759). Just as the concept had once explained the
young individual’s internalization of fatherly authority, it now explained the developing
type’s acquiescence to social authority. Specifically, the sadomasochistic resolution of
Oedipal conflict described the “transformation of hate into love” that enabled social
control (Adorno et al. 1950, 753–771). Again, Adorno’s empirical research did not
arrive at such conclusions by applying psychoanalytic methods to social problems but
by pursuing psychoanalysis to its own end. Only by entering into contradiction could
psychology reveal that “modern society is a mass society” (Adorno 1948, 30).
9. Conclusion
Adorno’s empirical research was not – and should not be understood as – separate from
his corpus of critical‐theoretical, aesthetic, and philosophical works. As this chapter
shows, Adorno considered empirical research among the means by which he sought “to
use the strength of the subject to break through the deception of subjectivity” (Adorno
1973, xx). Studying Adorno’s empirical research does more than merely complete the cat-
alog of such means. Recovering this work opens connections between Critical Theory and
other intellectual discourses. American social scientists and public intellectuals – including
Harold Lasswell, C.H. Cooley, Walter Lippmann, Robert Merton, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel
Bell – both influenced and were influenced by Adorno’s empirical research. Through this
work, Adorno engaged with ideas and arguments drawn from fields often considered
anathema to Critical Theory: behaviorism, scientism, and positivism. A broader reintegra-
tion of Adorno’s and his Institute colleagues’ empirical research into Critical Theory
would go further still, productively connecting their thought to the transatlantic circulation
of social research methods and theories in the mid‐twentieth century.
Adorno himself recognized this potential in his empirical research. With no small
amount of surprise, Adorno wrote in his unpublished introduction to The Authoritarian
Personality that the study of anti‐Semitism most proximate to his own was Jean‐Paul
Sartre’s Anti‐Semite and Jew (1946) (Adorno 1948, 22–25). Sartre, like Adorno and
the Berkeley Group, had concluded that prejudice, hatred, and stereotypy followed
from the fact that “the anti‐Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is badly made”
(Adorno 1948, 22; Sartre 1948, 40). What, given the well‐established differences
between Critical Theory and existentialism, could account for this similarity?24 Adorno
proposed a number of solutions but ultimately concluded that the alignment arose “from
the kinds of details, which, as a rule, can be expected only from empirical investigations”
(Adorno 1948, 22).
166
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Wheatland, T. (2005). Not‐such‐odd couples: Paul Lazarsfeld and the Horkheimer circle on morn-
ingside heights. In: Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals
(eds. D. Kettler and G. Lauer), 169–184. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wheatland, T. (2009). The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wiggershaus, R. (1994). The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Worrell, M.P. (2006). The other Frankfurt School. Fast Capitalism 2 (1) http://www.uta.edu/huma/
agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/worrell.html.
Further Reading
Adorno, T.W. (1976a). Introduction. In: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (eds. T.W. Adorno,
H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, et al.; trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby), 1–67. London: Heinemann.
Adorno, T.W. (1976b). Sociology and empirical research. In: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology
(ed. T.W. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, et al.; trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby), 68–86. London:
Heinemann.
Adorno, T.W. (2002). Introduction to Sociology (ed. C. Gödde; trans. E. Jephcott), 1e. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2010). Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany (ed.
and trans. J.K. Olick and A.J. Perrin). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Adorno, T.W., Albert, H., Dahrendorf, R. et al. (1976). The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology
(trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby). London: Heinemann.
Amidon, K.S. and Worrell, M.P. (2008). A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the critical
theory of antisemitism. Telos (144 (Fall)): 129–147.
Bonss, W. (1982). Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks: zur Struktur und Veränderung empirischer
Sozialforschung. Suhrkamp.
Bonss, W. (1984). Critical theory and empirical social research: some observations. In: The Working
Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (eds. E. Fromm and W. Bonss),
1–38. Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers.
Brunner, J. (1994). Looking into the hearts of the workers, or: how Erich Fromm turned critical
theory into empirical research. Political Psychology 15 (4): 631–654. https://doi.org/10.2307/
3791624.
170
Coser, L.A. (1984). Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Drake, R. (2000). Objectivity and insecurity: Adorno and empirical social research. Philosophy Today
44 (2): 99–107.
Frisby, D. (1976). Introduction to English translation. In: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology
(eds. T.W. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, et al.; trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby), ix–xliv. London:
Heinemann.
Fromm, E. (1980). Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches: eine sozialpsychologische
Untersuchung. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags‐Anstalt.
Jay, M. (1984). Adorno in America. New German Critique 31: 157–182. https://doi.org/
10.2307/487894.
Jay, M. (1985). Positive and negative totalities: implicit tensions in critical theory’s vision of interdis-
ciplinary research. In: Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to
America, 107–119. New York: Columbia University Press.
Olick, J.K. and Perrin, A.J. (2010). Introduction. Guilt and defense: Theodor Adorno and the legacies
of national socialism in Postwar German Society. In: Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National
Socialism in Postwar Germany (eds. J.K. Olick and A.J. Perrin), 3–44. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Pollock, F. and Adorno, T.W. (2011). Group Experiment and Other Writings. The Frankfurt School on
Public Opinion in Postwar Germany (ed. and trans. J.K. Olick and A.J. Perrin). Cambridge, MA:
Smith, D.N. (1998). The ambivalent worker. Max Weber, critical theory, and the antinomies of
authority. Social Thought & Research 21 (1–2): 35–83.
Wheatland, T. (2004). Critical theory on morningside heights: from Frankfurt Mandarins to
Columbia sociologists. German Politics and Society 22 (4): 57–87.
Worrell, M.P. (2009). Es Kommt Die Nacht: Paul Massing, the Frankfurt School, and the question of
labor authoritarianism during World War II. Critical Sociology 35 (5): 629–635.
Notes
1 On the impact of The Authoritarian Personality on midcentury social researchers, see Meloen
(1991) and Samelson (1993).
2 Recent overviews of this historiography can be found in Wheatland (2005) and Olick and Perrin
(2011).
3 On intellectuals’ varying reactions to the radio, see Steele (1985, 17–21), Craig (2000, 215–
233), and Goodman (2011, 65–115). For an overview of these debates, see Brantlinger (1983),
Alpers (2003, 59–86, 94–128), and, especially, Gary (1999).
4 For an overview of Lazarsfeld’s early career, see Morrison (1978b), Barton (1979, 5–10), Pelinka
(1998), Morrison (1998, 16–60).
5 On the connection between Lazarsfeld and the Institute, see Wheatland (2005, 2009) and
Claussen (2006).
6 For apt illustrations of such approaches, see Morrison (1978a) and Jenemann (2007).
7 See, e.g. Levin and von der Linn (1994), Claussen (2006), Müller‐Doohm (2009), Hullot‐Kentor
(2009), and Parkinson (2014).
8 See, e.g. Horkheimer (1972a, b, c) and Horkheimer and Adorno (1985a).
9 For the only mention of Adorno in the text, see Lazarsfeld (1940, 182, fn. 31).
10 For an overview of this work, see Jenemann (2007, 47–104), Wheatland (2009, 215–226), and
Parkinson (2014).
11 For a subtle interpretation of this argument, see Hullot‐Kentor (2006).
12 The Institute members and their interlocutors were unsystematic in their capitalization of “anti‐
Semitism” and its derivatives. When citing these sources, I have followed the authors’ usages
without indicating each instance of variation.
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CHARLES CLAVEY
13 See, e.g. Coser (1984), Dubiel (1985), Wiggershaus (1994), and Wheatland (2009).
14 Stefan Müller‐Doohm (2009, 292) aptly summarized this view when he wrote that The
Authoritarian Personality was “a continuation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment by other
means.”
15 For the precipitating texts and resulting responses in this debate, see Lowenthal (1943), Gurland
and Massing (1944a, b), Massing and Gurland (1944), and Horkheimer (1945).
16 For an overview of the Institute’s arguments about the relation between psychology and soci-
ology, see Jay (1985).
17 On the Institute’s changing position on Fromm, see Jay (1973, 86–112). On the significance of
Fromm’s dismissal for the Institute’s social research, see Wheatland (2009, 109–214,
224–226).
18 Martin Jay (1973, 224–226), for instance, has characterized the Labor Study as “an important
testing ground for the Institute’s more ambitious work for the AJC.”
19 For an overview of the Institute’s work for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), see Jay (1973,
226–250), Wiggershaus (1994, 350–380), and Wheatland (2009, 227–257).
20 See Frenkel‐Brunswik (1940) for an example of her integration of psychoanalysis and person-
ality psychology.
21 For descriptions of this method, see Levinson and Sanford (1944), Else Frenkel‐Brunswik and
Sanford (1945, 1946).
22 On Adorno’s role in the Berkeley study, see Adorno (1969) and Sanford (1986). Martin Jay
(1973, 86–112) has documented the integration of psychoanalysis into the Institute’s Critical
Theory. In what follows, this chapter shows that the Institute took a more skeptical stance on
psychology in and through its empirical research projects of the mid‐1940s. By so doing, the
chapter qualifies arguments such as those made by Peter Uwe Hohendahl (1995, 41–52) that
Adorno shifted from sociological to psychological approaches in this period.
23 For an example, see Institute of Social Research (1946, 3).
24 See Marcuse (1948) and Adorno (2013).
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Part III
History and Domination
11
Adorno and Blumenberg: Nonconceptuality

and the Bilderverbot
Martin Jay
In 1967, only one year after Theodor W. Adorno published Negative Dialectics, a seminar
was devoted to it at the University of Bochum. The class was led by the philosopher Hans
Blumenberg (1920–1996), who had himself just published his first major work, The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Nicholls 2015, 197).1 We have no record of the seminar dis-
cussions, nor did Blumenberg ever write a sustained evaluation of Adorno’s book. But
much in it was likely to have pleased him, as it echoed many arguments he himself had
recently advanced. In particular, Negative Dialectics mounted a sustained and nuanced
defense of “nonconceptuality” (Unbegrifflichkeit),2 which bore a remarkable resemblance
to the critique of the privileged role of concepts Blumenberg had previously leveled in the
service of a new philosophical discipline he called “metaphorology” (See Adams 1991;
Savage 2008; Haverkamp 2012; Ifergan 2015). Adorno never publically expressed any
awareness of these similarities, nor did he live long enough to respond to Blumenberg’s
later Work on Myth, which in many ways was in conversation with Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Although he did contact Blumenberg in September 1967 to convey his positive first impres-
sions of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, he seems to have been entirely ignorant of
Blumenberg’s earlier work on metaphor as an alternative to concepts.3
For his own part, Blumenberg came to signal a certain solidarity with Adorno by
employing the term “nonconceptuality” in his lectures of the mid‐1970s, published
posthumously in 2007 as Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit (Blumenberg 2007). Its first acknowl-
edgment in print came in 1979, when Blumenberg appended an essay entitled “Prospect
for a Theory of Nonconceptuality” to his little book on Shipwreck with Spectator, the title of
which referred to one of the many paradigmatic metaphors whose histories he was to trace
with astounding erudition over his long career (Blumenberg 1997). Although their
political investments were very different and Blumenberg, unlike Adorno, did not play
a role in the public debate over the legacy of Nazism, on this one issue they shared a
common enthusiasm.
Blumenberg had in fact already begun exploring nonconceptuality avant la lettre in
1957 in his path‐breaking essay on “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary
Stage of Concept Formation” (Blumenberg 1993). As his subtitle reveals, however, he had
then believed that metaphors should be primarily considered as inchoate anticipations of
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Martin Jay
concepts. “In constantly having to confront the unconceptualized and preconceptualized,”

he wrote, “philosophy encounters the means of articulation found in this nonconceptual-
izing and preconceptualizing, adopts them, and develops them further in separation from
their origin.” But he then added: “The notion that the philosophical logos has ‘overcome’
prephilosophical mythos has narrowed our view of the scope of philosophical terminology;
besides concepts in the strict sense, which are measured off by definition and fulfilled
intuition [Anschauung], there is a broad range of mythical transformations, bordering on
metaphysical conjectures, which find expression in a metaphorics with diverse forms”
(Blumenberg 1993, 30; translation emended). We can discern here not only a plea for
attending to the non‐ and preconceptual sources of philosophical concepts in their own
right, but also an anticipation of Blumenberg’s later interest in the abiding importance of
myth, which he came to include with metaphor as a nonconceptual alternative to the
hegemony of logos and conceptualization (Blumenberg 1985).4
These prefigurations of his later positon were made even more manifest in 1960, when
Blumenberg was asked to contribute to the emerging field of “conceptual history”
(Begriffsgeschichte) then being developed by Erich Rothacker, Otto Brunner, and Reinhart
Koselleck. Although he accepted the invitation, the result was a slyly subversive text entitled
Paradigms for a Metaphorology, published in 1960 both in the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte
and as a separate book (translated as Blumenberg 2010a). In it, Blumenberg challenged the
still powerful assumption, which he identified with the Cartesian stress on clarity and dis-
tinctness, that philosophical concepts should be demarcated by definitions that overcame
their polysemic play and effaced their sedimented history. Blumenberg argued instead that
Nietzsche had been right in The Genealogy of Morals to point out that “only that which has
no history is definable” (Nietzsche 1989, 80). In echoing this position, Blumenberg was, to
be sure, embracing the newly formulated program of conceptual history, which also stressed
the value of tracing a concept’s development over time with no teleological favoritism
showed to its current usage or archaic privileging of its alleged origin.
But – and this is where the subversion took place – unlike Rothacker, Brunner, Koselleck,
and their colleagues, he now explicitly rejected the idea, still operative in his earlier essay on
light as a metaphor of truth, that all metaphors were merely primitive elements left over in
the transition from mythos to logos. From Edmund Husserl, or more precisely the later
Husserl who had authored The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
Blumenberg had learned that the discursive world of concepts is rooted in a still vibrant,
prereflective “lifeworld,” the realm of everyday experience, in which the roles of rhetoric in
general and metaphor in particular are key. But rather than trying to transcend these
origins in the name of cultural progress and conceptual clarification, it was important, he
came to believe, to acknowledge that some lifeworld metaphors remained “foundational
elements of philosophical language, ‘translations’ that resist being converted back into
authenticity and logicality” (Blumenberg 2010a, 3). As such, they can be called “absolute”
metaphors, which although vulnerable to historical change nonetheless “prove resistant to
terminological claims and cannot be dissolved into conceptuality” (Blumenberg 2010a, 5).
There is much in Blumenberg’s defense of metaphoric nonconceptuality that will be
familiar to readers of Adorno. In the opening entry in his 1958 Notes to Literature, “The
Essay as Form,” he also endorsed Nietzsche’s critique of Descartes: “just as the essay rejects
primordial givens, so it rejects definition of its concepts” and “gently challenges the ideal of
clara et distincta perceptio and indubitable certainty” (Adorno 1991, 13, 14). His 1963
essay “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” reiterated his critique of the Cartesian fetish of
clarity and distinctness, noting, albeit without citing Blumenberg, its origins in religious
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Nonconceptuality and the Bilderverbot
notions of divine light (Adorno 1993, 96–111). In Jargon of Authenticity, which appeared
in the following year, Adorno expatiated on the dangers of adhering to a dubious model of
authenticity in language, philosophical or otherwise, which foreclosed the ambiguous
play of terms that were in healthy excess of their mandated definitions or alleged original
meanings (Adorno 1973a). And most significant of all, in Negative Dialectics, he advanced
a complicated argument against the potential tyranny of concepts and the importance of
valuing what was irreducible to their domination, a tyranny against which he and Max
Horkheimer had already warned in the early sections of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
In what follows, I want to examine the overlap between Blumenberg’s and Adorno’s
appreciations of nonconceptuality as a counterweight – although never a fully self‐
sufficient alternative – to the traditional philosophical preference for rigorous conceptual-
ization. Although I want to show the ways in which their positions overlapped, in for
example their embrace of the non‐sublatable dialectic of concepts and their negations, I
will also argue they diverged in important ways. Perhaps, to anticipate my conclusion,
they differed most of all over the relative roles subjects and objects play in generating the
nonconceptual other of concepts. There is, it turns out appropriately enough, a noniden-
tity in their understanding of the alternatives to conceptual hegemony and in the tasks
they assign to them. By playing one off against the other, we may reach a more nuanced
understanding of the stakes involved in their respective projects.
It might seem prudent to begin such a comparison by defining the relevant terms and
clarifying what each of our protagonists meant both by a concept and by nonconceptual-
ity. But once we start to do so, we are confronted immediately with a dilemma that both
Blumenberg and Adorno themselves fully appreciated. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno
acknowledged it head on in considering the implications of providing an alternative
positive ontology to the one he disdained in other thinkers such as Hegel and Heidegger:
In criticizing ontology we do not aim at another ontology, not even one of being nononotologi-
cal. If that were our purpose we would be merely positing another downright “first” – not
absolute identity, this time, not the concept, not Being, but nonidentity, facticity, entity. We
would be hypostasizing the concept of nonconceptuality and thus acting counter to its
meaning. (Adorno 1973b)
Although “nonconceptuality,” Adorno conceded, might not be able to avoid being turned
into a weak “concept,” we should at least resist a nondialectical assertion of it as a strong
one, thus effacing and neutralizing its internal tensions, historical variations, and critical
potential. It must be employed instead like an apophatic term in negative theology, which
can only indirectly gesture toward what it cannot positively express.
Blumenberg was no less sensitive than Adorno to the dangers in the hypostasizing
reconceptualization of the nonconceptual, the turning of what was irreducibly singular
into merely an example of an abstract generality and nothing more. Although he was per-
haps not fully successful – how, after all can we see metaphor and myth as instances of
“nonconceptuality” unless we acknowledge at least some generalizing abstraction in that
term? – he performatively sought to undermine it, especially when he came to developing
his argument about the role of metaphor. “It is remarkable,” Anselm Haverkamp writes,
“that Metaphorology does not contain even the slightest hint of a definition of the term
metaphor itself, and retrospectively it can only be doubly striking that Blumenberg makes
no attempt … to deduce a definition of metaphor in terms of its conceptual history, almost
as if metaphor – possibly it alone – had no history” (Haverkamp 2012, 40). That is, not
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Martin Jay
only does he try to deny “metaphor” the status of an ahistorical concept in the manner of
traditional philosophy, but he also denies it the status of one even in the antidefinitional,
historical terms of Begriffsgeschichte. Thus in his programmatic introduction of metapho-
rology in the already mentioned 1960 text he contributed to the Archiv der Begriffsgeschichte,
he was careful to present only a series of exemplary “paradigms” of the approach he was
proposing. Among them were the figures of “mighty truth,” “naked truth,” and “proba-
bility” (in German Wahrscheinlichkeit, which contained Schein, implying both a shining
forth and a deceptive semblance). In the spirit of what Kant had called reflective rather
than determinant judgments in The Critique of Judgment, he sought to avoid positing a
general rule and subsuming examples under it as mere illustrations. Instead, he contended
that nonconceptuality must be evoked ostensively – by pointing at instances – or demon-
strated performatively rather than categorically defined. For there was no fully external
observer position from which the scholar of nonconceptuality could examine it, as it were,
from the outside or above, employing a meta‐language itself entirely free of metaphoric
indeterminancy and play.5 Although not as insistent on the aporetic tensions of an implic-
itly metaphysical “ology” of metaphor as, say, Jacques Derrida was to be in his seminal
essay of 1971, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Blumenberg, like
Adorno, appreciated the performative contradiction entailed by conceptualizing the
nonconceptual.6 He understood that metaphors abetted what Husserl had called “resis-
tance to harmony” because as inherently transpositional figures – metaphor comes from
the Greek for “carrying over” – they introduce a heterogeneous element into the differentia
homogenized by concepts (Blumenberg 1997, 83).
But, it should quickly be added, both Blumenberg and Adorno were also at one in resist-
ing the temptation, call it either radical nominalist or romantic, to valorize nonconceptu-
ality as a straightforward and self‐sufficient antidote to the domination of concepts tout
court. They acknowledged instead the necessity of conceptualization as a valuable tool in
the human struggle to make sense of and survive in a world that provided no intrinsic
signposts. In Blumenberg’s case, this necessity was given an explicitly anthropological
foundation, which he largely derived from Arnold Gehlen’s notion of humans as
Mängelwesen (creatures of deficiency) (Gehlen 1940).7 From Gehlen, he learned that,
despite the poverty of our instincts, our fecund cultural imagination allows “world‐open”
humans to compensate as best they can for the relative lack of the biological preprogram-
ming that allows other animals to orient themselves automatically in the world. Rather
than a fixed human nature, there is only a human condition that requires the ad hoc
development of technologies, cultural and otherwise, to cope with the challenges faced
when hominids left behind the unreflective patterns of instinctual behavior. Often drawing
on delay and indirection, they allow us to stave off the dire challenges of an unforgiving
environment.
To meet those challenges, both concepts and nonconcepts, most notably among the
latter metaphor and myth,8 have consoled humankind for the opaque contingency of a
world bereft of inherent meaning, as well as providing practical guidance to survive its
dangers. What Blumenberg called the resistance of “absolute reality” to full mastery or
comprehensibility could only be met with such temporary expedients, some pragmatically
more successful than others, but none providing permanent solutions. Myths offer a
limited sense of security and purpose by personifying forces of nature and narrativizing
events whose underlying causes were occluded. Metaphors lessen anxiety by guiding us
through the unfamiliar and distant via a healthy detour through the familiar and proxi-
mate.9 And concepts make sense of the seemingly inscrutable particularities of the here
178
and now through broader spatial and temporal categories that permit some predictive
control over a future that is not entirely random and haphazard. But even if they can
temporarily compensate us for our vulnerabilities in an unforgiving world, none of these
expedients brings us really closer to a truthful understanding of reality. If one answer fal-
ters, another fills the space left behind, but there is no unidirectional progress from mythos
to logos or metaphor to concepts. “Demythicization,” Blumenberg insisted, “is in large
measure nothing more than remetaphorization” (Blumenberg 1997, 94).
Another way to formulate Blumenberg’s position is to say that he was critical of both
ontological universalism, in for example the conceptual realism of Scholastic philosophy,
and the ontological particularism of its nominalist critics, which culminated in the modern
positivist fetish of individual facts and entities. Against the competing impulses to synthe-
size and to analyze, he defended the value of relationality, which maintained the difference
of particulars while also avoiding the isolation of what was not identical. “Analogy,” he
claimed “is the realism of metaphor.” In fact metaphors and concepts are alike in their
ability to represent what is not present, to introduce a productive gap between what the
senses register and what language can say. “The animal symbolicum masters the reality
that is originally lethal for him by letting it be represented; he looks away from what is
uncanny or uncomfortable for him and towards what is familiar” (Blumenberg 1987,
440). Not only is this tactic evident in the rhetorical realm, where metaphor plays a key
role, but also in the practical one, where ritualized sacrifice draws on the power of repre-
sentational substitution.10
Not surprisingly, Blumenberg was allergic to efforts, most notably those of Heidegger, to
undo entirely the distinction between conceptuality and nonconceptuality by recovering
an equiprimordial unity prior to the split. His engagement with Heidegger began with
his unpublished Habilitationschrift Die ontologische Distanz in 1950 and continued
throughout his life (Blumenberg 1950). In Work on Myth, Blumenberg analyzed
Heidegger’s dispute with Ernst Cassirer at Davos, resisting the widespread conclusion that
Cassirer had lost.11 The latter’s functionalist interpretation of myth, even if in the service
of a questionable progressivist belief in the victory of logos over mythos, was superior to
attempts to rescue myth as a repository of the eternal wisdom of the species. Moreover,
insofar as Heidegger’s insistence on the priority of Being over human beings meant a den-
igration of philosophical anthropology and its implications for nonconceptuality,
Blumenberg remained wary of it. Already in Paradigms for a Metaphorology, he noted iron-
ically that “the perfection and comprehensiveness with which one can deal with ‘Being’ is
quite unattainable in this field” (Blumenberg 2010a, 17). In “Prospect for a Theory of
Nonconceptuality,” he expanded his critique, noting that Heidegger’s ruminations on the
“meaning of being” failed to credit the logic of substitution that always informed meta-
phoric displacement (Blumenberg 1997, 101).12 In an essay of 1987, he playfully enlisted
Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated notion of a “MacGuffin,” a gimmick in a movie that claims
to possess meaning but is utterly bereft of it, which thus generates unfulfillable curiosity, as
a surrogate for Heidegger’s Being itself. In so doing, he ironically metaphorized precisely
the numinous word Heidegger had claimed pointed to something beyond both concepts
and metaphors (Blumenberg 1991).
Blumenberg’s argument can be spun out still further on its own, but I want to compare
it now to that in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, where the unsublatable dialectic of concepts
and nonconceptuality was also a major concern. Perhaps the first point to make is that
Adorno was even more relentless than Blumenberg in his condemnation of Heidegger’s
bid to return to an equiprimordial moment prior to the distinction. The dangerous mission
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Martin Jay
of Heidegger’s archaicism, he charged, is to “heal the concept ‘Being’ of the wound of its
conceptuality, of the split between thought and its concept … In this ontology, Being must
be defined by itself alone because it is held to be neither comprehensible in concepts – in
other words, neither ‘transmitted’ – nor immediately demonstrable after the model of
sensory ascertainment. In lieu of any critical authority for Being we get a reiteration of the
mere name” (Adorno 1973b, 70–71). The result is to isolate Heidegger’s thought from any
possible critique: “that Being is neither a fact nor a concept exempts it from any criticism”
(Adorno 1973b, 76).
Secondly, while both Adorno and Blumenberg resisted Heidegger’s attempt to overcome
the inevitable tension between conceptuality and nonconceptuality and suture the wounds
of Being, they nonetheless shared his concern that concepts can easily devolve into rigid
and static categories abstractly homogenizing the differences they claim to subsume.
Correctly applied, dialectics should serve as a protest against the reification of concepts:
“The concept in itself, previous to any content, hypostatizes its own form against the
content. With that, however, it is already hypostatizing the identity principle” (Adorno
1973b, 154). Even Hegel had mistakenly sought to sublate harmoniously what a negative
dialectics kept apart. Although right in noting that particular entities are always mediated
by the whole and cannot, pace nominalists and positivists, be grasped in their isolation, he
failed, Adorno charged, to valorize the resistance of those entities to being smoothly
absorbed by those mediations: “the triumphant finding that immediacy is wholly indirect
rides roughshod over indirectness and blithely ends up with the totality of the concept,
which nothing conceptual can stop any more. It ends up with the absolute rule of the sub-
ject” (Adorno 1973b, 172).
Finally, both Blumenberg and Adorno were suspicious of what is often considered as the
most obvious alternative to the potential domination of the concept: direct perceptual
experience. Along with subpersonal representational states and the behavior of other
animals and preconceptual infants, perception has emerged as the favorite exemplar of
nonconceptuality for analytic philosophers (See Anon. n.d.). Perceptual experience, they
argue, cannot be adequately expressed in the propositional terms that are a necessary
element of conceptual thought. Unlike concepts, perception can experience states of
affairs that are contradictory, such as Escher staircases, or are irreducible to discrete units,
such as distances that are experienced without precise measurement, or are more fine‐
grained than propositional or generic concepts can accommodate (for example, the infinite
gradations of colors). They are also developmentally prior in children to the concepts that
are acquired with language.
Although agreeing on the limits of propositional thought, Blumenberg, and Adorno were
nonetheless uneasy with calling perceptual experience the primary “other” of conceptu-
ality.13 This unease was manifest in their refusal to elevate one perceptual experience in
particular, which was traditionally understood to come through the noblest of the senses,
vision. Before I turn to the differences separating them, I want to linger for a while with their
reluctance to identify visual perception as the quintessential vehicle of nonconceptuality.
Whatever the actual influence of their half‐Jewish backgrounds, which may have been more
of a post facto justification than actual cause, both appreciated the abiding power of the so‐
called religious Bilderverbot, the iconoclastic prohibition first enunciated in the Second
Commandment as recorded in Exodus, 20:4: “Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven
image.” The secular philosophical implications of this prohibition have, of course, been
widely recognized, ever since Kant invoked it in his exploration of the idea of the sublime.14
Its role in modern interpretations of the Mosaic legacy by figures as diverse as Freud and
180
Schoenberg has also been the object of endless discussion, as has its ethical import in the
work of postmodernists such as Jean‐François Lyotard.15 But both Blumenberg and Adorno
made a special use of it in explaining their ideas about the role of nonconceptuality.
In “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality,” Blumenberg argued that concepts
often generalize from what is experienced sensually. In contrast, symbols, and especially
metaphors, move away from what is directly experienced to something absent. “What is
decisive,” Blumenberg insisted, “is that this elementary organ of the relation to the world
makes possible a turning away from perception and visualization, a free control over what
is present. The symbol’s operability is what distinguishes it from representation [Vorstellung]
and from depiction [Abbildung]” (Blumenberg 1997, 97). What Derrida would call “the
metaphysics of presence” – the term is not used by Blumenberg, but it is apposite – is thus
avoided by the introduction of metaphoric heterogeneity, which resists the lure of percep-
tual or intuitive immediacy.
An even more explicit observance of the Bilderverbot is apparent in Adorno’s negative
dialectics. In the literature on the Frankfurt School in general, it has often been associated
with two related taboos: one aimed at imagining future utopia in worked out form, the
other at attempts to represent what is unrepresentable, most notably the Holocaust. The
first paralleled the comparable Jewish taboo on directly pronouncing God’s name, an
example of that apophatic theology mentioned above, which can only gesture to what it
cannot positively know or express.16 It reinforced a more pragmatic reluctance to provide a
blueprint, to borrow the familiar Marxist opposition, of the future realm of freedom from
the limited vantage point of the current realm of necessity. Although Adorno maintained
his own adherence to the utopian impulse in Critical Theory, he insisted, as he put it in a
dialog with Ernst Bloch, that “one may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner …
What is meant here is the prohibition of casting a picture of utopia actually for the sake of
utopia, and that has a deep connection to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make a
graven image!’” (Adorno 1988, 10–11).
Reversing the valence of its target, the Bilderverbot also informed Adorno’s celebrated
warning against writing poetry after Auschwitz, where the inadequacies of representation
are now applied to what is demonic rather than divine, dystopian rather than utopian.
It has often been noted, to be sure, that in Negative Dialectics, he nuanced his position some-
what by conceding that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured
man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could
no longer write poems” (Adorno 1973b, 362). But he did not suspend his skepticism
concerning the positive visual representation of that suffering.
Of particular importance for the question of nonconceptuality, however, was an addi-
tional reason for honoring the taboo that Adorno introduced in Negative Dialectics. In a
critique of the simplistic reflection theory of orthodox Dialectical Materialism, exemplified
by Lenin’s diatribe against the alleged solipsism and subjective idealism of Ernst Mach and
Richard Avenarius in his Materialism and Empirio‐Criticism, Adorno denied that passive
visual imitation was the way to reveal the object whose predominance he hoped to restore.
As Gerhard Richter has noted in connection with Aesthetic Theory, “what he wishes for in
the work of art as well as in philosophy is in fact a different kind of mimesis: a mimesis of
what does not yet exist” (Richter 2011, 64). Rather than treating images in the mind as
second‐order representations of external reality, as had Lenin, “the materialist longing to
grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object
could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images” (Adorno
1973b, 207).
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Martin Jay
Honoring the ban, Adorno suggested, meant the materialist embrace of a frankly
theological yearning: “its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire utterly
foreign to idealism, the realm of the absolute spirit” (Adorno 1973b).17 The literal realiza-
tion of this yearning after death was less important than what it symbolically signified: the
restoration of the rights of the corporeal against the ideal, the suffering, desiring body
against the subjective consciousness of the mind or spirit. “The somatic moment as the not
purely cognitive part of cognition is irreducible,” Adorno wrote, “and thus the subjective
claim collapses at the very point where radical empiricism had conserved it” (Adorno,1973b,
193). In this sense, nonconceptuality implied not merely acknowledging the preponder-
ance of the object outside of the constitutive subject, but also valorizing the object within
the subject, the soma in the psyche. It was moreover, the embodied subject understood
individually, which idealist philosophies of Geist as well as Dialectical Materialist theories
of collective meta‐subjectivity had wrongly ignored or even denigrated. It honored, in
other words, the animal in the animal rationale, whose instinctual demands Freud had
helped us to appreciate. But significantly, it did so without depending on the uniqueness of
the individual human face, which had been Emmanuel Lévinas’ favored instance of non-
conceptuality, because it too privileged visual experience.18
It is this condensed and cryptic argument that allows us now to turn in conclusion to
the salient differences between Adorno’s position and that of Blumenberg. For despite the
similarities in their critique of Heidegger’s equiprimodial notion of Being, their shared
warning against the potential domination of subsumptive concepts, and their common
reluctance to identify nonconceptuality with perception in general and visual images in
particular, their ultimate understanding of nonconceptuality was not the same. Unlike
Blumenberg, Adorno was suspicious of the ultimate privileging of the constitutive subject
that he discerned in the assumption that concepts, metaphors, myths, and the like were
only cultural strategies to deal with the opacity of an unknowable “absolute reality.”
His reluctance to grant such a privilege to constitutive subjectivity did not, however,
mean that Adorno was suspicious of concepts tout court. It is important to realize that in
addition to his stress on the preponderance of the nonconceptual object, both in the world
and in the subject, he also took more seriously than Blumenberg the claims of concepts
over metaphors. In fact there are indications that he still respected, as Blumenberg explic-
itly did not, the Hegelian legacy of what might be called ontological conceptual realism,
which contends that concepts are more than just conventional linguistic expedients foisted
on a contingent world in order to help us cope with its threatening meaninglessness. “The
concept of nonconceptuality cannot stay with itself, with epistemology;” he wrote, “epis-
temology obliges philosophy to be substantive” (Adorno 1973b, 137). It may well be that
because of his residual Hegelian belief in the ontological reality of the concept that he
could conclude Negative Dialectics by acknowledging “there is solidarity between such
thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall” (Adorno 1973b, 408). In a letter to
Gershom Scholem, on March 14, 1967, he in fact proudly admitted that “the intention to
save metaphysics is actually the central point of Negative Dialectics” (Adorno and Scholem
2015, 413). In contrast, the final sentence of Paradigms for a Metaphorology reads: “meta-
physics has often revealed itself to us to be metaphorics taken at its word; the demise of
metaphysics calls metaphorics back to its place” (Blumenberg 2010a, 132).
Another way to make the same point is as follows. Blumenberg believed that one should
begin with the nonconceptuality of the prereflective lifeworld with its often metaphoric
language and then move on to concepts, without, as we have noted, valorizing the
transition as inherently progressive or denying the persistence of absolute metaphors that
182
resisted any transition at all. Adorno, indebted as he was to Hegel, argued instead that
“because entity is not immediate, because it is only through the concept, we should begin
with the concept, not with the mere datum” (Adorno 1973b, 153). And that means taking
seriously the ontological status of concepts, not merely their epistemological function as
subjectively created expedients making sense of an opaque world.19 Placing too much of
an emphasis on the cultural inventiveness of humans as “creatures of deficiencies” in fact
is what leads to an exaggerated role for the constitutive, self‐asserting subject, understood
transcendentally or historically. It leads to the exaggerated critique of reification typical of
the humanist Marxism of a Lukács, which was more idealist than materialist in inspira-
tion.20 In addition to the ontological status of natural kinds, which were more than just
human conventions, history, he argued, often functions as if it were what Hegel would
have called “second nature.” That is, some concepts, such as the commodity form or the
exchange principle, reflected institutional reifications that exist objectively in the real
social world, even if others, such as “industrial society,” do not (Adorno 1973b, 152).
In addition to its descriptive validity, conceptual realism also had a critical potential, a
normative force that would be lost if it were jettisoned in favor of an undialectical celebra-
tion of pure nonconceptuality. Even the identitarian exchange principle, Adorno argued,
can be rescued as a norm to be realized in a transformed reality:
To define identity as the correspondence of the thing‐in‐itself to its concept is hubris; but the
ideal of identity must not simply be discarded. Living in the rebuke that the thing is not iden-
tical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how
the sense of nonidentity contains identity. The supposition of identity is indeed the ideological
element of pure thought, all the way down to formal logic; but hidden in it is also the
truth moment of ideology, the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism.
(Adorno 1973b, 149)
If, in some future utopia, that pledge would be honored and the “longing” of the concept to
become identical with its nonconceptual instantiations was fulfilled, it would not, how-
ever, mean a hierarchical domination of the former over the latter. Instead, the relation-
ship would be one of mutual respect akin to the mimesis of objects by subjects, a mimesis,
however, in which similarity rather than absolute equivalence would be the rule.21 The
longing for identity would only be realized in a healthy sense if some nonidentity were pre-
served and the subsumptive logic of traditional conceptual realism were thwarted. Nor is
there ultimately a meta‐concept under which specific concepts might be subsumed, but
rather the arrangement Benjamin identified with a dialectical image. “Instead, the con-
cepts enter into a constellation. The constellation illuminates the specific side of the object,
the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden”
(Adorno 1973b, 162).
But it was through Adorno’s insistence on the legitimate demands of the nonconceptual
object, as we have noted, that he most clearly differed from Blumenberg. Here what has
been called his Kantian rather than Hegelian sympathies came to the fore, at least to the
extent that he warned against reducing the unmediated object to nothing but an expression
of subjective constitution.22 Whereas Blumenberg focused on metaphor and myth as rhetor-
ical alternatives to concepts – that is, on purely linguistic or cultural expedients – designed to
deal with the incomprehensibility of “absolute reality,” Adorno understood nonconceptual-
ity in terms of the material and corporeal limits to cultural constructivism of any kind.
Although he too valued the ability of language to go beyond the homogenizing abstractions
183
Martin Jay
of discursive concepts, especially as expressed in works of art, and defended rhetoric against
its philosophical detractors, he never singled out metaphor as a privileged medium.23
Instead, and here without any debt to Kant, he preferred – albeit with some reserva-
tions – Benjamin’s Adamic theory of proper names, which communicated nothing but
themselves, somehow unifying signifier and signified.24 He thus valued music above the
other arts because “what is at stake is not meaning, but gestures … as language, music tends
towards pure naming, the absolute unity of object and sign, which in its immediacy is lost
to all human knowledge” (Adorno 2002, 139–140).25
Blumenberg, in contrast, was impatient with the belief that names could serve as an
effective antidote to the definitional imperatives of conceptualization. In his collection of
aphorisms, Care Crosses the River, he recalled the Adamic power to name in the Garden of
Eden with explicit suspicion:
Whoever can call things by their names doesn’t need to comprehend them. The strength of
names has thereby remained greater in magic than in every type of comprehending. The tyr-
anny of names is grounded in names having maintained an air of magic: to promise contact
with what hasn’t been comprehended. (Blumenberg 2010b, 63)
There was, in other words, nothing in Blumenberg of what I have called elsewhere the
“magical nominalist” impulse in Adorno’s negative dialectics (Jay 2016).
That impulse was clearly behind Adorno’s yearning, to cite the evocative title of Robert
Hullot‐Kentor’s collection of trenchant essays on him, somehow to reach “things beyond
resemblance” (Hullot‐Kentor 2006). At its best, art moved toward this unattainable limit
through a refusal of meaning, or as he put it in Aesthetic Theory: “the true language of art
is mute, and its muteness takes priority over poetry’s significative element, which in music
too is not altogether lacking” (Adorno 1997, 112). Although not utterly absent, the signif-
icative or metaphoric moment in music should not be allowed to block out its more
fundamental search for an acoustic equivalent to the unity of object and sign, that utopia
of non‐communicative immediacy for which Benjamin had yearned in his ruminations on
Adamic language.
There may well have been an unresolved tension in his work between what we have
been calling its Hegelian conceptual realist moment and its Benjaminian magical nomi-
nalist moment, which were never fully reconciled. This is not the place to decide if the
tension was productive or disabling. What is important to register is that both impulses can
be understood as opposing Blumenberg’s identification of nonconceptuality with the
cultural expedients contrived to fend off the incomprehensibility of a hostile environment.
For if Adorno declined to privilege metaphor with its comforting transposition of threat-
ening distance into familiar proximity and infinite deferral of utopian unity, he was even
less disposed to consider myth as a viable nonconceptual alternative to conceptual domi-
nation. “Dialectics,” he insisted, “is a protest against mythology” (Adorno 1997, 56),
because of the latter’s tacit acceptance of the status quo. Rather than adopting
Blumenberg’s defense of myth as an enduring alternative to the domination of concepts,
he argued that both can serve the same function in canceling out the claims of the domi-
nated object, which, as we have stressed, included the vulnerable bodies of people: “The
smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all the identitarian
philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering: ‘While there is a beggar, there is a
myth,’ as Benjamin put it. This is why the philosophy of identity is the mythological form
of thought” (Adorno 1997, 203).
184
Thus, although he shared Blumenberg’s general defense of rhetoric against the

reduction of philosophy to science, Adorno nonetheless could argue that “in dialectics,
contrary to popular opinion, the rhetorical element is on the side of content,” not the con-
stitutive subject (Adorno 1997, 203).26 For, as we have noted, even the subjects for Adorno
had within them a residue of nonidentical otherness, a block to the constitutive power of
the transcendental subject, epistemological, or practical, bequeathed to Idealism by Kant
with his attempt to banish psychology from an account of the mind (See Adorno 2001, lec-
ture 18).27 Thus, whereas Blumenberg argued that there is no substratum within man, no
entirely inner experience that isn’t already a function of metaphorical “self‐externality,”28
Adorno remained, as we have seen, enough of a Freudian to accept the ineradicable
presence of instinctively motivated drives in even the most culturally mediated of psyches.
One could, in other words, exaggerate the “poverty of instincts” in the human condition,
leading to the one‐dimensional conclusion that it was incorporated culture and subjective
constitution all the way down. And so it is not surprising to find in Negative Dialectics
Adorno explicitly protesting against Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology of utter defi-
ciency: “that man is ‘open’ is an empty thesis, advanced – rarely without an invidious side
glance at the animal – by an anthropology that has ‘arrived.’ It is a thesis that would
pass off its own indefiniteness, its fallissement, as its definite and positive side” (Adorno
1973b, 124).29
Perhaps the best way to summarize in conclusion the differences in their deployment
of nonconceptuality is to foreground the critical potential in each. For Blumenberg, met-
aphor, and myth are expressions of the eternal and unrelenting struggle to orient our-
selves in a world forever beyond our ken, a world in which the real, both outside us and in
our own bodies, remains elusive and potentially dangerous. Nonconceptual efforts to
familiarize the unfamiliar are cultural strategies that blunt the terror of the unknown
and orient us in a world lacking in natural signposts. As such, they function in the service
of self‐preservation, a claim that has allowed some critics to argue that Blumenberg’s
metaphorology reintroduces precisely the reductive version of reason as instrumental
that the Frankfurt School was at such pains to discredit (Recki 2011).
Be that as it may, Blumenberg argued that when such strategies lose their magic and
become useless, we invent new ones, which will themselves be replaced in turn. But never
will there be an adequate fit between conceptual knowledge and the world concepts seek to
describe. Never will that “longing” of the concepts themselves, understood in ontological
rather than solely epistemological terms, to realize their potential in existence be satisfied.
We should remain thankful instead for the insufficient reason of rhetoric and metaphor
and myth and can never hope for a more satisfactory alternative. Perhaps, if we follow
Robert Savage’s reading of Blumenberg, laughter, exemplified by the reaction of the
Thracian maid to Thales’ famous tumble into the well as he looked up at the stars, may be
the quintessential variant of nonconceptuality: “it acts as a reality check to theory when-
ever it loses sight of the lifeworld, which is to say, whenever it takes its claim to totality
seriously” (Savage 2008, 127). If there is a politics in all this, it would be essentially one of
small expectations and limited goals, a politics of accommodation to an unknowable
reality that remains forever absolute and unforgiving. If it implies a critique of ideology, it
is only directed at the problematic use of language and not the social conditions that might
underpin it (see Tränkle 2016).
Adorno in contrast doggedly maintained a utopian hope, despite the failure of all efforts
to realize it, that the domination of the constitutive subject can be ended, allowing access
to a reality that is no longer utterly impenetrable and requiring the flawed and temporary
185
Martin Jay
compensations of cultural invention. By eschewing the comforting stratagems of

metaphoric familiarization and mythic consolation, we can gesture toward a nonconcep-
tuality that points in this direction, thus preparing the appearance of “things beyond
resemblance.” Against the familiarizing function of metaphor assumed by Blumenberg’s
metaphorology, Adorno expressed a tacit solidarity with the defamiliarization techniques
of modern art, as famously described by the Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists,
and Brecht’s alienation effect.30
Rather than a nonconceptuality of mirth, which can draw on laughter to mock the
foibles of theoretical over‐reaching, Adorno’s variant is grounded in a self‐denying ascesis
that refuses to see the joke. However sardonic his irony in such works as Minima Moralia or
playful he might have been in his private relations with, for example, his parents, Adorno’s
“science” remained resolutely “melancholy.” Robert Savage is right to compare our two
protagonists on precisely this issue, when he notes that “Plutarch reports that even, as a
child, Cato the Younger never laughed and was rarely seen to smile. Among Blumenberg’s
contemporaries, the theorist who came closest to matching this antique standard of
humourlessness, at least in his ex cathedra pronouncements, was Adorno” (Savage 2008,
130). Like Thales, he was intent on keeping his gaze fixed on the stars, oblivious to the
mockery of those who focus only on the abyss into which we can so easily fall. Whether or
not this was a privilege of living above the fray in a Grand Hotel, as Lukács famously
sneered, or an attitude that allowed Adorno to fill his mind with ever new and increasing
awe and admiration for the stars the more frequently and continuously he reflected on
them, to paraphrase Kant’s famous conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason, is not for
us to decide now. What is clear is that along with Blumenberg, he allowed us to appreciate
the value of Unbegrifflichkeit in all of its motley variety, indeed precisely because of it, as a
vital star in the constellation of any critical theory worthy of that name.
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Notes
1 Blumenberg had been alerted to the work by Jacob Taubes, who noted similarities in their philoso-
phies. The first edition of Die Legitimität der Neuzeit was published by Suhrkamp, Adorno’s publisher,
in 1966. Its English version (Blumenberg 1983) was a translation of the second edition, which
appeared in 1973 and contains a passing, obliquely critical reference to Adorno’s reliance in Negative
Dialectics on the concept of a “societal delusional system.” Blumenberg lumped it with other overly
general explanations of contemporary problems, which included the secularization thesis his book
sought to debunk. For an analysis of their undeveloped relationship, see Voller (2013).
2 To be precise, although “das Unbegriffliche” or “unbegrifflich” does appear in Negative Dialectics,
more often Adorno uses “das Nichtbegriffliche” or “nichtbegrifflich.” It might be possible to dis-
cern the distinction addressed later in this paper between his position and Blumenberg’s in this
terminological slippage, but it is not explicitly developed by either author. I am indebted to
Sebastian Tränkle for alerting me to this ambiguity.
188
3 Adorno to Blumenberg, September 25, 1967, in the Blumenberg archive, Schiller Nationalmuseum,
Marbach am Neckar. I am grateful to Ari Edmundson for drawing my attention to this letter, which
read as follows:
Vielleicht wissen Sie, daß ich zu dem unter den Namen “Soziologie und Philosophie” bei
Suhrkamp in der Reihe Theorie erscheinenden Band von Durkheim eine längere Einleitung
geschrieben habe. Diese Vorrede enthält eine Theorie der Pedanterie. Als ich das Korrektur
las, wurde ich von einer Mitarbeiterin darauf aufmerksam gemacht, daß Ihr Buch an
einer Stelle etwas Verwandtes enthält.
Ich habe es mir deshalb gestattet, noch nachträglich eine Fußnote einzufügen, die auf
die Beziehung hinweist, und habe Unseld gebeten, daß diese Fußnote, obwohl sie den hei-
ligen Umbruch in Unordnung bringt, noch aufgenommen wird. Er hat mir das auch zug-
esagt. Einen Durchschlag der Fußnote füge ich Ihnen bei. Es ist wirklich eine höchst
merkwürdige Koinzidenz.
Die Sache hatte ihr Gutes, insofern, als ich mich nun endlich daraufhin, mit Ihrem Buch ein
wenig näher befaßt habe. Daß das nicht schon vorher geschah, hat lediglich den Grund, daß
ich, im Bestreben, meine großen Entwürfe noch einigermaßen unter Dach und Fach zu brin-
gen, solange ich mir die Kraft zutraue (die “Negative Dialektik” ist das erste Produkt dieser
Anstrengungen), wirklich das Lesen über dem Schreiben verlerne, und ich möchte Sie um
Verständnis dafür bitten und um Geduld. Aber nach dem Eindruck, den ich nun immerhin von
Ihrem Buch gewonnen habe, das ja fast gleichseitig mit meinem erschien, glaube ich doch mir
gestatten zu dürfen, diesem Buch eine wahrhaft bedeutende Zukunft zu prophezien.
4 In addition to metaphor and myth, rhetoric in general and laughter were examples of noncon-
ceptuality. For a discussion of the last of these, see Savage (2008).
5 Blumenberg’s struggle to deal with this challenge is discussed in Adams (1991).
6 Derrida (1982, 219) writes: “metaphor remains, in all its characteristics, a classical philoso-
pheme, a metaphysical concept. It is therefore enveloped in the field that a general metaphorol-
ogy of philosophy would seek to dominate.”
7 For accounts of what is sometimes called Blumenberg’s “negative anthropology,” see Adams
(1991), Savage (2008), Haverkamp (2012), Ifergan (2015), Wetz and Timm (1999), Müller
(2005), Pavesich (2008), Wetz (2009), and Bajohr (2015). Blumenberg’s debt to Gehlen seems,
however, to have been tempered by his greater appreciation of the positive as well as compensatory
character of cultural creation, as well as his wariness about the conservative implications of
Gehlen’s faith in institutions.
8 Another example would be the anecdote that Blumenberg often used in his reconstructing of
philosophical issues, a resource on which Adorno rarely drew.
9 Blumenberg (2010b, 96) defended the value of detours: “Culture consists in detours – finding
and cultivating them, describing and recommending them, revaluing and bestowing them.
Culture therefore seems inadequately rational, because strictly speaking only the shortest route
receives reason’s seal of approval. Everything right and left along the way is superfluous and can
justify its existence only with difficulty. It is, however, the detours that give culture the function
of humanizing life.” For a discussion of the importance of detour in his work, see Tränkle (2015).
10 In Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002), Horkheimer and Adorno had a less
benign reading of sacrifice as a primitive version of the exchange principle, but they too acknowl-
edged its importance as a human way to enable self‐preservation in a hostile world.
11 For accounts, see Nicholls (2015, 93–103), and Gordon (2010, 349–351). In Legitimacy of the
Modern Age, Blumenberg explicitly took exception to Heidegger’s “negative idealization of the
modern age in the ‘history of Being’” (Blumenberg 1983, 192).
12 Derrida also noted Heidegger’s hostility to metaphor, because he saw it as expressing a perni-
ciously metaphysical separation of sensory and the nonsensory, the physical and the nonphysical.
See Derrida (1982, 226).
189
Martin Jay
Blumenberg, it should be noted, analyzed the way meaning worked metaphorically, suggest-
ing several major models: simultaneity, in which meaning was derived from another event hap-
pening at the same time; meaning as the revelation of a latent identity; meaning as the temporal
return of the same, and meaning as a spatial home‐coming. See the discussion in Heidenreich
(2009, 18).
13 For a discussion of Adorno’s critique of the sufficiency of propositional thought, see Richter
(2010).
14 For a recent overview, see Alloa (2015). See also Nordhofen (2001). For a discussion of its impor-
tance for Blumenberg, see Heidenreich (2009). He ponders the importance of Blumenberg’s own
collection of portraits of various thinkers, concluding that it was consonant with his skepticism
about the use of images to illustrate concepts and metaphors.
15 For a discussion of its role in the larger context of the twentieth‐century suspicion of the primacy
of vision, see Jay (1993).
16 All forms of positive revelation, Adorno argued, must be rejected. As he put it in the final sen-
tence of “Reason and Revelation,” “I see no other possibility than an extreme ascesis toward any
type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images far beyond what this once
originally meant” (Adorno 1998, 142).
17 The motif of the resurrection of the flesh is, of course, a powerful image in Christianity, but is also
present in Jewish lore as well. See in particular the “Valley of Dry Bones” prophecy in Ezekiel 37.
18 For a comparison of Adorno and Levinas, see de Vries (2005).
19 According to Adorno, it was Aristotle who first taught “the immanence of the concept in the
object, by which he appears to dissolve the abstractness of the concept in relation to what it sub-
sumes, for him this immanence of the concept is ontological; that is, the concept is in itself in the
object, without reference to the abstracting subject.” But then he added: “True, it is connected to
the nonconceptual element within the object in a matter which Aristotle never clearly elabo-
rated; and I would even say that it is inseparable from that element.” (Adorno 2000, 56).
20 Adorno’s extended critique of reification as a fundamental category of Marxist humanism is
developed in Adorno (1973b, 189–192).
21 For a discussion of the role of mimesis in Adorno, see Jay (1998). It might also be noted that
Adorno’s attribution of the human emotion of “longing” [Sehnsucht] to a concept shows how
persistent the metaphoric moment in conceptualization can be.
22 For a thorough analysis, see O’Connor (2004), chapter 2.
23 Adorno, to be sure, was not himself averse to drawing on its rhetorical power in his own writing.
For insightful discussions of Adorno’s views of language, see Hohendahl (1995), chapter 9; and
Helmling (2009).
24 In Negative Dialectics, he acknowledges the impossibility of getting beyond the conceptual
moment in language and chastises Benjamin’s own concepts for “an authoritarian concealment
of their conceptuality.” But the only way to approach the name, he concedes, is indirectly
through a constellation of concepts: “the determinable flaw in every concept makes it necessary
to cite others; this is the font of the only constellations which inherited some of the hope of the
name. The language of philosophy approaches that name by denying it” (Adorno 1973b, 53).
The Jewish prohibition on the name of God, a variation on the Bilderverbot, is the model for this
idea. See Kaufmann (1996).
25 It should be noted, however, that the claim that music tends toward pure naming is itself very
much of a metaphor. It would be highly instructive to contrast Adorno’s writings on music with
Blumenberg’s, most notably Blumenberg (1988), but that is a task for another day.
26 See also his linkage of the non‐scientific essay to rhetoric in Adorno (1991, 20).
27 For an analysis of Adorno’s critique of Kant, see O’Connor (2004, chapter 4).
28 Blumenberg (1987, 456) argues that “man comprehends himself only by way of what he is not.
It is not only his situation that is potentially metaphorical; his constitution already is.”
29 The Frankfurt School was wary of Gehlen in part because of his prior Nazi sympathies. For a
discussion of Adorno’s attempt to block his appointment to a chair in Heidelberg in 1958 and
190
their subsequent public debates on German television, see Müller‐Doohm (2005, 378–379).
Apparently, they remained on personally cordial terms despite their political differences. Jürgen
Habermas also criticized Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology. See the discussion in Nicholls
(2015, 190–194). It should be noted that a primary source of the critical theorists’ distance from
Gehlen was his authoritarian institutionalism, which Blumenberg also rejected.
The Frankfurt School, to be sure, also favored a negative over a positive philosophical
anthropology. See Johannßen (2013).
30 There are, to be sure, ways to mobilize metaphor for more critical, de‐familiarizing purposes, as
Richard Rorty has argued in distinguishing between hermeneutic and poetic uses. See the
discussion in Reynolds (2000). In fact it could be argued that whereas metaphor may have famil-
iarized, metaphorology, as a self‐conscious reflection on that function, was inherently defamiliar-
izing, and thus potentially critical.
191
12
Philosophy of History
IAIN MACDONALD
1. Liberation and Its Caricatures
Adorno mentions a satirical sketch by Gustave Doré dating from the time of the Paris
Commune. It depicts a conservative member of the French National Assembly smugly
asking his fellow deputies for their honesty and good faith in acknowledging Louis XVI as
the real author of the French Revolution and the freedoms that were established in its
wake (Doré 1907, 44). In one of his references to the sketch, Adorno acknowledges its
cutting humor, suggesting that its true value lies in the light that the fictional figure sheds
on the philosophy of history: “there might be more truth in [the deputy’s] unintentional
joke than sound common sense admits; Hegel’s philosophy of history would have a lot to
say in his defense” (Adorno 1991, 42). Adorno no doubt has in mind the way in which
individuals are said by Hegel to serve reason in history, often unwittingly and at the cost of
their lives. But this aspect, to which we shall return, represents only one side of the issue.
In another reference to the sketch, Adorno adds something to his claim:
Dialectical thought includes not only the Marxian doctrine that the proletariat, as the absolute
object of history, should be capable of becoming its first social subject – thereby realizing the
conscious self‐determination of humanity – but also the joke that Gustave Doré attributes to a
parliamentary representative of the Ancien Régime: that without Louis XVI there would never
have been a revolution, and so he is to be thanked for the Rights of Man. Negative philosophy,
dissolving everything, dissolves even the dissolvent. (Adorno 1978, 245)
Adorno does not mean this as praise for “negative philosophy” – Hegel and Marx – and its
understanding of history. He is rather calling attention to a problem with how it was prac-
ticed in the past. Thus, while Marx announces in 1843 that the proletariat is “the de facto
dissolution of the existing order of things” (Marx 1970, 142), Adorno reminds us that the
critical, dissolving power of Marx’s materialist philosophy of history dissolved even itself
insofar as it led to totalitarian socialism, whose irrationality included self‐invalidating tyr-
anny and an effective prohibition on any renewal of theory, often on penalty of censure,
exile, or death. In other words, negative philosophy – as represented by Marxism in this
example – miscarried, not because its hopes for humanity were unfounded, but because its
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IAIN MACDONALD
totalitarian form deprived it of the very dissolving power that once rightly informed its
attempt to actualize a non‐illusory, true, and universal happiness.
This failure was no accidental turn of events, according to Adorno. The restoration of
domination is a danger inherent to liberation. Accordingly, his philosophy of history
includes the demand that history liberate itself from forms of liberation that allow for – or
indeed depend upon – the restoration of domination. The role of the philosophy of history
in this process is thereby twofold: to understand liberation in relation to this inherent defect
and to attempt to correct it. Its true starting point is the realization that we will continue to
fail in our attempts at founding a better society so long as we remain indebted to an Ancien
Régime (whatever its historically specific referent) for the idea of some final victory over it.
As Walter Benjamin puts it in a text that Adorno cites approvingly: “To this very day, all
those who emerge victorious participate in the triumphal procession in which the rulers of
the day step over those who are lying prostrate” (Benjamin 2003, 391). In other words, so
long as the guillotine – or its surrogates – is the condition of freedom from domination, then
we have not yet freed ourselves from the yoke of domination, even in cases where some form
of tyranny has been successfully challenged. The cycle of apparent liberation and the resto-
ration of domination must be broken. But history seems constantly to remind us: “every-
thing you are, everything you have, you owe, we owe to this odious totality, even though we
cannot deny that it is an odious and abhorrent totality” (Adorno 2006a, 47).
Viewed from this perspective, the joke at the heart of Doré’s caricature is in fact the
faithful portrait of the historical dynamic. To the extent that history’s victors continue to
participate in this triumphal procession, they acknowledge the debt owed to the odious
totality: “all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors” (Benjamin 2003, 391). By contrast,
for a rightly conceived negative philosophy, true freedom would consist in the renewable
negation of unfreedom, not in the victory of some new idea or purported ultimate incar-
nation of freedom over its competitors. Moreover, it is also a question of freedom under-
stood independently of the various forms of “reason” that have attempted to justify
suffering and unhappiness as the inevitable cost of freedom.
In this regard, Adorno is as indebted to Marx as he is critical of “the dreadful state of
affairs … that passes for communism in the East,” as he says in 1958 (Schopf 2003, 297–
298). On the one hand, like Marx, Adorno wants to break free of the “prehistory” of partial
liberation and renewed domination. But on the other hand, this break must not be under-
stood as a final victory. These two currents, which must be separated, are present, for
example, in Marx’s well‐known remark that
bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of pro-
duction – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but in the sense of an antag-
onism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence. However, at the
same time, the forces of production developing within bourgeois society itself create the
material conditions for the solution to this antagonism. The prehistory of human society
accordingly comes to an end with this social formation. (Marx 1987, 263–264)
We shall see how Adorno understands such statements, and how he attempts to break free
of prehistory by separating liberation and finality. But one thing at least should be under-
scored from the outset: Marx was no doubt too quick to announce the end of social
antagonism.
In view of these concerns, Adorno’s philosophy of history involves criticisms of Hegel’s
and Marx’s versions of negative philosophy, which provide only partial solutions to the
194
problem of the entwinement of liberation and domination. One might say that until we
can resolve the tension between Marx and Doré, between liberation and the restoration of
domination that it cannot avoid so long as it remains in debt to the triumphal procession
of history, negative philosophy and the liberation it promises will come to naught. Adorno
calls for negative philosophy to live up to its promise of dissolving social antagonism. To do
so, however, means dissolving its own limitations.
2. Kant: Antagonism and Peace
The reference to antagonistic society is frequent in Adorno, involving a number of

philosophical, social, and anthropological considerations. However, in relation to negative
philosophies of history, one of the most important lines of approach is to be found in
Adorno’s reading of Kant on history and progress. Kant himself was of course not a nega-
tive philosopher in the Hegelian‐Marxian sense of dialectical negation, but his philosophy
of history nevertheless introduces many of the themes and problems that will be impor-
tant for subsequent philosophical treatments of history.
Kant’s theory of history is fundamentally idealist and progressive, turning on the
necessary presupposition of an idea of humanity that, while never yet realized in history,
nevertheless informs the unfolding of our natural capacities “until they are developed
completely and in conformity with their end” (Kant 1970a, 42). More specifically, the gen-
eral movement of history is from a limited and self‐serving “brutish freedom” toward the
full self‐actualization of a socially mediated freedom. This takes the form of a republican
constitution and ultimately a “universal cosmopolitan state of affairs … as the matrix within
which all the original capacities of the human species may develop” (Kant 1970a, 47–48,
51; 1979, 153). This progression, in all its guises, is considered to be the expression of
“nature’s highest purpose” (Kant 1970a, 51).
The motor of this development is what Kant calls antagonism, that is, the “unsocial
sociability of human beings” (Kant 1970a, 44–45). Social conflict and mutual resistance
are the very means by which humanity and society move toward their natural end or to
what Kant also calls “perpetual peace” (Kant 1970b). This may strike us as an odd thing
to say. However, the apparent paradox between antagonism and peace is removed,
according to Kant, insofar as the self‐serving “desire for honor, power, or property” is
merely the transient, subjective side of the species’ drive to actualize a latent objective
freedom, which corresponds, in history, to the establishment of a just civil constitution.
As such,
nature should be thanked for fostering social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity,
and insatiable desires for possession or even domination. Without these desires, all of
humanity’s excellent natural capacities would remain undeveloped in eternal slumber.
(Kant 1970a, 45)
One might think that Adorno would simply refer us here to Doré’s deputy. Is Kant not
merely praising social antagonism and even domination as the conditions of their oppo-
sites? Is war to be thanked for peace? Adorno’s answer to these questions, which under-
scores a crucial nuance within the notion of antagonism, is twofold.
On the one hand, he refuses to describe social antagonism as inherent to nature’s design
or purpose, as though conflict were part of humanity’s irreducible and eternal essence.
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IAIN MACDONALD
To do so would be to freeze historical conditions into place, while simultaneously and
unconvincingly assuring us that nature will nevertheless guide us toward perpetual peace:
To respond to today’s torn, antagonistic society by way of social struggle does not authorize us
to posit, in the absolute, conflict itself as a constant of human nature. I find that such anthro-
pological games come at all too high a price. (Adorno 1970–1986, 8:584)
On the other hand, Adorno does not deny that liberation can only take root in “social
struggle” or antagonism. On the contrary, he asserts that Kant’s doctrine of antagonism is
“the most sublime passage in his philosophy of history” insofar as
it means nothing less than that the conditions of possibility of reconciliation inhere in its con-
tradiction, that the condition of freedom is the unfreedom that precedes it. Kant’s doctrine
stands at a watershed. It conceptualizes the idea of reconciliation as immanent to antagonistic
“development.” (Adorno 1998a, 149; 2006a, 150)
There is no tension between these two approaches to antagonism in Kant – at least not if
we take up the right perspective on them. What Adorno rejects is Kant’s view of social
antagonism as natural and as the very principle of humanity’s gradual and unstoppable
ascent to peace and freedom. In fact we have every reason to believe that this notion of
gradual ascent or progress as underpinned by nature is entirely fictitious, yet another in-
stance of the reversion of reason to myth (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xviii). More
concretely, Adorno sees no reason for Kant’s optimistic dismissal of “barbaric devastation”
as a possible end of social antagonism, as though nature could guarantee that things will
end well for humanity (Kant 1970a, 48). Indeed, for Adorno, the reference to antagonism
as the means by which nature will come to fulfill its “highest purpose” of achieving
universal peace becomes absurd in an era in which the consequences of this so‐called
natural antagonism make a mockery of progress:
The forms of conflict that are real and actually relevant are precisely those which quite liter-
ally threaten to snuff out human life … In view of the destructive potential of contemporary
technology – but also in view of a foreseeable, radically peaceful state of affairs – I do not
believe that this notion of the inspiring power of [social] conflict has any validity at all.
(Adorno 1970–1986, 8:584–585)
It should be emphasized that Adorno here retains the reference to a possible peaceful state
of affairs. But this clearly rests upon the separation of antagonism from “nature’s highest
purpose.” As we shall now see, it is the dialectical transience of social conflict that interests
Adorno, not its naturality.
3. Hegel: Determinate Negation and World History
If Adorno rejects social antagonism as natural or essential to human existence, how then
does it contribute to progress in history? His view, as it has been presented thus far, is that
the persistence of antagonism is a threat to humanity, not its salvation. It has historically
and concretely become a condition of impossibility of peace. Yet he does not thereby place
us in a historical impasse. He clearly sees antagonism as part of the riddle of history – a
riddle that must be solved if we are to make good on the sublimity of Kant’s idea of a
196
peaceful humanity that has never yet existed. The key to seeing antagonism as such a
condition of possibility (rather than impossibility) of peace lies with Adorno’s reading of
Hegel. Here again, as with Kant, it is a question of retaining something from Hegel’s
thought while discarding its more problematic aspects. Dialectically understood, freedom
from social antagonism does not depend upon any intrinsic positive quality of human
nature, but upon a socially mediated capacity to experience, diagnose, and surmount
particular contradictions and conflicts. This is what Hegel calls determinate negation,
which Adorno takes over from him and develops on the basis of targetted criticism.
The basic outline of determinate negation is sketched by Hegel in the introduction
to the Phenomenology of Spirit. It consists in an archetypal tension that characterizes
consciousness – one might call it a productive inward antagonism that may or may not take
the form of an outward social antagonism. What Hegel has in mind is the possibility of con-
sciousness undergoing the shock of learning that what it took to be true (i.e. “in itself ”) it
had only taken to be true (i.e. “for itself ”). As a result, it must alter not only its defective
knowledge of its object, but the object itself insofar as consciousness, admittedly fallible in
the formulation of its judgments, is nevertheless responsible for saying what the object is, in
truth. Knowledge thereby comes to depend upon self‐correction understood as the diag-
nosis of error: the “new [true] object contains the invalidity of the first, it is what experience
has made of it” (Hegel 1977, 55). In other words, progress within knowledge is made pos-
sible by making the shock or negativity of error (in the sense of “things are not what they
appeared to be”) determinate. Making explicit precisely why a given claim is false is already
to give content to what must be true. The sweetness of what I took to be salt is not just proof
that it was not salt that I tasted, it is also a positive indication that it was rather sugar.
Hegel then goes on, in the Phenomenology and elsewhere, to show how the basic form of
determinate negation plays itself out on all levels of human development, including world
history. We everywhere encounter the same inner tension that animates the progression of
spirit toward not just truth in the sphere of knowledge, but also freedom in the sphere of his-
tory. In history too, then, “spirit is opposed to itself; it has to overcome itself as a truly hostile
obstacle to the actualization of its end” (Hegel 1975, 126–127). This self‐opposition animates
“the transition from one shape of spirit to another [but only] insofar as an earlier universal is
sublated and recognized in its particularity through the activity of thinking” (Hegel 1975,
82). For example: “Caesar knew that the republic was a lie and that Cicero’s words were
empty” (Hegel 1975, 89). It was Caesar’s ability to determine this lie concretely that gave sub-
stance and content to his actions. Alternatively, in literary form, Antigone’s death in Sophocles’
tragedy is for Hegel not just the result of a latent contradiction within Greek society, it is also
the expression of a specific social lack (i.e. the possibility of forgiveness) to which other, later
social forms positively respond, whether or not they explicitly refer to the fate of Antigone. This
is determinate negation at work in social and intellectual – that is, spiritual – history.
Adorno’s recovery of Hegelian determinate negation is made clear in any number of
passages, for example, “it is only in the determinacy and concreteness of [knowing that
something is wrong] that something other, something positive opens up to us” (Adorno
1970–1986, 8:456). Nevertheless, Adorno refuses to frame determinate negation exactly
as Hegel does – that is, as participating in the claim that “reason governs the world [and]
world history unfolds rationally” (Hegel 1975, 27). There are essentially two related rea-
sons for this refusal.
First, Adorno denies the rational teleology that Hegel ascribes to history or – what
amounts to the same – the idealist form taken by determinate negation in history. Hegel’s
view is that in spite of undeniable moments of loss and destruction in history, there is a
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IAIN MACDONALD
necessary, unifying script that it follows in its progressive unfolding: “philosophy is con-
vinced that the events will adapt themselves to the concept” (Hegel 1975, 30). As such,
Hegel affirms that a “single spirit” guides history, forming it into a “single enterprise,” leading
up to the modern state as the guarantor of the reality of freedom (Hegel 1964, 145; 1975,
33, 93). For Adorno, however, these are the hallmarks of a “mythical totality” (Adorno
2006a, 158) and the vestiges of the rational‐providential view that held sway in Kant. The
problem is thus essentially that Hegel thinks that all individual instances of determinate
negation are subordinated to the progressive process that binds them together teleologically
into a unified system and self‐actualization of spirit. To this, Adorno will say that “Hegel was
not dialectical enough” insofar as “negativity does not have the last word” (Adorno 2003,
12; 2008, 14). We shall return to the question of giving negativity the last word below.
The second, more practical reason that Adorno refuses Hegel’s idealist version of deter-
minate negation is that its unified, teleological structure involves a problematic indiffer-
ence to lived suffering – and not merely to contingent individual suffering (e.g. a stubbed
toe), but to the endemic suffering caused by the structural social tensions and contradic-
tions of spiritual life. For example, Antigone’s suffering is seen as inevitable to the extent
that she is in the wrong in relation to the self‐development of spirit. In fact her suffering
serves spirit by unintentionally exposing a fundamental contradiction that will later fuel
its own determinate negation. Spirit is therefore characterized by its “sovereign ingrati-
tude” (Hegel 1971, 14). That is, suffering is simply the individual symptom of the necessary
expression of a legitimate universal principle, under which the particular vainly resists
being subsumed. Its service to spirit is suffering’s justification, the allegory of a victory of
spirit that first appears in the form of a defeat. As Hegel puts it: “the individual may well be
treated unjustly, but this is a matter of indifference to world history, which uses individuals
only as instruments to further its own progress” (Hegel 1975, 65). It is the so‐called “cun-
ning of reason that it sets the passions to work in its service, so that the agents by which it
gives itself existence must pay the penalty and suffer the loss” (Hegel 1975, 89).We see
here the sense of Adorno’s remark about Hegel’s philosophy of history having a lot to say
in defense of Doré’s reactionary deputy: individuals serve reason in history, whether they
are in the right or in the wrong – and perhaps especially those who must go to their deaths
in order for spiritual progress to happen. Yet one may wonder whether such progress has
to come at the cost of a philosophical indifference to suffering.
4. Marx: Misery and Happiness
The trouble with the philosophy of history as it was developed by Hegel is that it regards
suffering as metaphysically justified in the context of the progressive historical actualization
of freedom (although it may, of course, be entirely unjustifiable in other ways). The individu-
al’s participation in historical progress toward the universal or concept that ultimately
defines their situation is what matters. In Hegel’s case, Adorno has the following to say:
Objectively, Hegel takes over [from Kant] the idea of working one’s way forward through conflict
but, by adding the idea of the cunning of reason, he intensifies it into a metaphysics, a doctrine
of progress in the consciousness of freedom. History becomes a radical movement in the
direction of freedom. “Consciousness of freedom” does not refer to individual, subjective con-
sciousness, but to spirit that objectively actualizes itself through history – and freedom thereby.
This doctrine of progress, as a progress of freedom, is highly vulnerable. (Adorno 2006a, 5)
198
This vulnerability can be expressed in various ways, but perhaps most succinctly in the
claim that freedom is merely posited as the end of history, while its actualization is in reality
deferred or rendered impossible by the very social structures and institutions that are
meant to serve as its guarantee. The template for this very Adornian criticism is to be found
in Marxian materialism, as Adorno himself acknowledges: “Hegel himself had conceptu-
alized universal history as unified merely by virtue of its contradictions. The materialist
reversal of dialectic put the weightiest accent on insight into the discontinuity of what is
not comfortingly held together by any unity of spirit and concept” (Adorno 1973, 319). Or
to phrase the issue in simpler terms, the events have not adapted themselves to the concept
(of freedom) and this non‐adaptation – this material and social negativity – is what should
concern us.
This is the theoretical point of departure for Marx’s philosophy of history. Rather than
fully participating in the modern state, which is supposed to guarantee their freedom,
“workers become all the poorer the more wealth they produce, the more production
increases in power and size” (Marx 1988, 71). In respect of this fact, it will simply not do
to affirm, as Hegel does, that “the state is the actuality within which the individual has and
enjoys their freedom, but only in so far as they know, believe in, and will the universal”
(Hegel 1975, 93). In this regard, according to Marx, Hegel’s philosophy of history fails to
meet its own criterion. It culminates not in universal freedom, but in a state‐sanctioned
economic system that perpetuates needless suffering. As the young Marx puts it:
since even the wealthiest state of society leads to [the] suffering of the majority – and since the
national economic system (and in general a society based on private interest) leads to this
wealthiest condition, it follows that the goal of the economic system is the unhappiness of
society. (Marx 1988, 24–25)
Elsewhere, this unhappiness is explained by way of an “antagonism between modern

industry and science, on the one hand, and modern misery and decay, on the other hand.
This antagonism between the forces of production and the social relations of our epoch is
a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and incontrovertible” (Marx 1980, 655–656).
Against the background of this factual – rather than natural or metaphysical –
antagonism, Marx’s philosophy of history makes a first stand against Hegel’s vision of con-
temporary society. In essence, Marx thinks that the suffering and unhappiness of capitalist
society are socially mediated in such a way as to cover up their non‐inevitability. And the spell
of this “socially necessary semblance,” of this false inevitability, will remain unbroken so
long as the Hegelian idea of justified suffering holds sway (Adorno 1973, 323). Nevertheless,
Hegel was correct in holding that the only way forward in history is through society’s contra-
dictions, which must be determinately negated (Marx 1976, 102–103, 929).
Adorno acknowledges the dialectical character of Marx’s attempt to resuscitate nega-
tivity beyond the confines of Hegel’s vision of history. Indeed, he thinks that Marx pin-
points the critical truth of Hegel’s thought. It contains a fundamentally paradoxical claim:
it provides us with the means by which social progress can be generated – that is determi-
nate negation – but then deprives us of this progress by identifying the latter with a society
in which antagonistic powers and institutions are shockingly “left standing” in the name
of an “imaginary organic unity” (Marx 1970, 59; 1988, 160). Consequently, “Hegel does
not achieve what he wants, i.e., the ‘actuality of [social] agreement’ and the ‘impossibility
of hostile opposition’; rather, the whole thing remains at the level of the ‘[mere] possibility
of agreement’” (Hegel 1991, 344; Marx 1970, 93). In other words, Hegel’s philosophy of
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history ends precisely where it should begin – namely, with the persistent social antago-
nism inherent to nineteenth‐century society. Moreover, the presumed victory of the prole-
tariat is to be seen as the overcoming, at long last, of the end stage of the prehistory of
social antagonism.
There is, however, a pressing problem with Marx’s corrective, according to Adorno. In
spite of its legitimate dialectical criticism of the closed character of the Hegelian system,
“the historical writings of Marx and Engels and their successors, [are] very much within
the tradition of universal history that descends from Hegel” (Adorno 2006a, 90). This is so
because, in spite of certain precautions, Marx still ascribes to historical existence an end to
which it must ultimately conform. He thereby perpetuates an all too Hegelian “single‐
stranded view” of history as informed by a single spirit informing a single enterprise
(Adorno 2006a, 67). This becomes especially clear in later developments in Marxism, in
which universal history takes on the status of a dogma asserting “the unilinear, necessary,
uninterrupted, and progressive development of a macro‐subject” (Habermas 1979, 139).
Needless to say, for Adorno any such simultaneously schematic and necessary
identification of existence and essence constitutes an “idealist moment” that burdens
Marx’s otherwise monumental dialectical achievement of giving suffering and happiness
their philosophical due (Adorno 2006a, 49). Thus, while Marx himself was right to envi-
sion the abolition of social antagonism at the level of the species (because the proletariat
was supposed to be the representative of a universal human emancipation), totalitarian
Marxism came to fetishize the purported path to victory, in spite of emergent contradic-
tions and continued – indeed, increasing – suffering. For Adorno, however, the dream of
emerging victorious at the end of a rationally unfolding history is simply a return to the
central myth of universal history: that history culminates in the full actualization of some
latent essence, whether the latter is understood as belonging to nature’s design (as in
Kant), to an all‐encompassing world spirit (as in Hegel), or to society (as in Marx).
5. History, Possibility, and Nonidentity
So long as we remain caught within the view of history as single‐stranded, that is, as pro-
gressing rationally and linearly toward peace and reconciliation standing at the end of
history (albeit not without detours), we will forever fall into the idealist trap. And for
Adorno, even Marxism, with its redemptive vision of breaking definitively with the prehis-
tory of antagonism, is still at risk of stumbling back into the idealism it had fought so hard
to overcome. The point, however, is not to criticize Marx’s hope of leaving this prehistory
behind. The point is rather that the relation of liberation to suffering should in no way rely
upon the latter’s justification by way of reference to a singular animating vision of history.
In this respect, Marx’s philosophy of history still exacts too high a price from past genera-
tions: “even the representation of a completely classless society [is no consolation] for the
fate of all those who suffered to no purpose and fell by the wayside” (Adorno 2006a, 44).
The problem is that Marxism too believes that once the idea, the essence, is actualized, then
all will be well: “The driving motif of the socialist way of thinking about history was the
idea that the revolution is just around the corner, that it can break out at any moment and
that therefore everything, the entire construction of history included, should be inter-
preted retrospectively in terms of the requirements of the impending revolutionary
situation” (Adorno 2006a, 54).
200
Thus, the notion that social progress in history is developmental and guided by a logic
of culmination and increasing actualization and freedom is idealistic and risible. The con-
trary would be rather more true, as Adorno sometimes remarks: “no universal history
leads from savagery to true humanity, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the
megaton bomb” (Adorno 1973, 320; 1998a, 153; 2006a, 12). But from such observa-
tions he does not draw the conclusion that real progress – breaking free of the prehistory
of antagonism – is metaphysically impossible. Rather, “universal history must be con-
structed and denied” (Adorno 1973, 320; 2006a, 93). That is, reading against the grain
of the myth of constant progress toward a point of culmination, there is nevertheless
something about universal history’s forward‐looking respect for human potentialities that
must be retained, while yet jettisoning the subordination of these potentialities to a
singular idea of their full and complete actualization. In other words, history should rather
be viewed from the standpoint of its multiple “surplus” possibilities – that is, those possibil-
ities of eliminating senseless suffering that have been glimpsed and lost in the process of
the expression of a “single spirit” and “singular enterprise.” If we put the emphasis on
such possibilities, then we need not trust that any one idea (or “truth” or “culture,” for that
matter) will save us – and therefore need not run the risk of disappointment and disarray
when that idea fails to come about, backfires, or becomes obsolete. This provides a bulwark
against any “defeatism of reason” that might result after the miscarriage of attempts to
change the world (Adorno 1973, 3).
In spite of Marxism’s theoretical tendency to fall back on the trope of unilinear progress
and its practical failure to change the world, it nevertheless provides the template for what
Adorno has in mind. What Marx correctly grasps is the problem of the fettering of the
forces of production or – what amounts to the same for Adorno – the fact that society con-
tains real possibilities of social transformation for the better that are structurally sup-
pressed by the way it is currently organized. As Adorno puts it: “The forces of production,
the material forces of production, have been developed to such a point today that in a ratio-
nally organized society material need would no longer be necessary” – and yet it is socially
perpetuated (Adorno 1970–1986, 5:85). It is such suppressed real possibilities of change
that should be the focus of the philosophy of history, wherever and whenever they become
legible in events, not the single‐stranded dream of proceeding stepwise toward the final
actualization of freedom.
The alternative to the single‐stranded view is thus to release redemptive social possibil-
ities from their enthrallment to an idea of actualized freedom standing at the end of his-
tory. Adorno articulates this in a number of different ways, perhaps most vividly in the
following passage:
Emancipation from this single‐stranded view will only come when we refuse to accept the
dictum that [universal human emancipation from ancestral antagonisms] has only now
become possible … The critical yardstick that allows reason, and indeed compels and obliges
reason, to oppose the superior strength of the course of the world is always the fact that in
every situation there is a concrete possibility of doing things differently. This possibility is pre-
sent and sufficiently developed and does not need to be inflated into an abstract utopia that can
be instantly scotched by the automatic retort that it will not work, it will never work. What one
can see here is one of the most disastrous consequences of idealist historical constructions. By
identifying all actuality and spirit, one conflates possibility and actuality. Not only is actuality
identified with spirit, but spirit is identified with actuality; the tension between the two is elim-
inated, thus quashing the function of spirit as a critical authority. (Adorno 2006a, 67–68)
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At least two aspects of this claim should be underscored. In the first instance, Adorno
clearly does not think that the Industrial Revolution, for example, as Engels explicitly
claims, was the singular sine qua non for breaking out of the continuum of social antago-
nism (Engels 1988, 324–325). It was not the highest rung on a ladder leading to freedom.
On the contrary, once we free ourselves from the unilinear view of history, we can see that
the fettered emancipatory potential of the forces of production is merely one example – no
matter how exemplary it may remain – of the blocked possibilities on which the philosophy
of history should concentrate its efforts. (This is a point that was also made by Walter
Benjamin, to whom Adorno refers in this context.) It is thereby not the forward march of
the dialectic toward its presumed end that matters, but rather those moments in history
when the historical dialectic suddenly comes to a standstill (Benjamin 1999, 462–463,
475) because the “moment of its actualization was missed” (Adorno 1973, 3). Examples
of such turning points in which such possibilities were objectively present but remained
unactualized might include the first secessio plebis, peasant uprisings, Lutheran melan-
choly, the Reign of Terror, nineteenth‐century technological advancements, and historical
Marxism, among many others, as well as literary representations of repressed possibilities
of reconciliation, such as Sophocles’ Antigone.
A second, more general point concerns the relation of these moments of tension to the
individual who registers them, not on their own behalf but on behalf of a peaceful
humanity to come. So while Adorno, once again recalling Benjamin, asks us to consider
the moments in history when a different way of doing things was blocked, the more impor-
tant aspect lies with our ability to perceive and conceptualize, here and now, the discovery
or invention of possibilities of doing things differently. The point is therefore not merely to
think of past examples of blocked possibilities of doing things differently, but to understand
that if we want things to change, then we must ask to what extent we respect the individ-
uals who register and express such moments of resistance to the practical or theoretical
status quo and to the single‐stranded theory of history and its consequences (e.g. disap-
pointment, disarray, defeatism, dogmatism).
Generically speaking, this resistance is that of the “nonidentical,” as Adorno often puts it,
that is, the expression of that which does not fit into the concept that is otherwise meant to
incorporate it. By calling attention to such an unacknowledged surplus content, the non-
identical invalidates its concept and, correspondingly, expresses a real need: to understand
and interpret actuality differently. In the present context, the nonidentical resides within
that which does not readily adapt itself to the fixed rational ideas and ends that we project
onto history. Or to put it the other way around, what has to be criticized and overcome is,
first, the notion of the reductive identification of what is possible with what happens to be
actual and, second, the subordination of possibility to a presumed emergent actuality that
anticipatorily encompasses and justifies all of history. Orthodox Marxism was capable of
making the first of these anti‐Hegelian gestures, but not the second. Its subordination of the
promise of ending social antagonism to its single‐stranded view of history is its moment of
nonidentity. What concrete, historical form does this nonidentity take?
6. Suffering and Expression
In one of his pedagogical plays, Brecht writes that while “the individual has two eyes, the
Party has a thousand” (Brecht 1997, 83). These words come as part of the legal ratifica-
tion of a decision taken by militants to execute a young comrade for being too sensitive to
202
cases of individual suffering, which they see as a refusal to bow to the Communist Party as
the true arbiter of actuality and human suffering. But for Adorno, it is precisely the
individual, not the Party, who is best placed to express that suffering. However, the expres-
sion at issue is not that of the individual qua individual, but qua subject of a shared, socially
unnecessary suffering that, demonstrably, has not been given an adequate hearing by the
powers that be. For it is only the individual who, having a voice, can lend a voice to the pain
that belies received opinion, custom, party discipline, or the law, that is, the social institu-
tions that incarnate the so‐called universal in which the individual is purported to be at
home. If it were otherwise, the individual who speaks truth to power would no doubt be at
home in society, but only under conditions of house arrest – as in fact often happens in
such cases. Solidarity should bind us to those who fall under the wheels of history, not to
those who ask of them this sacrifice (Adorno 1978, 51–52).
The social nonidentity of particular and universal, then, is what the suffering individual
registers when the shared quality of the suffering is extenuated, dismissed, justified, or
indeed exacerbated in the name of existing practices and institutions. Freedom, for Adorno,
does not depend upon the progressive actualization of its idea. Rather, it
follows the subject’s urge to express itself. The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of
all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; what is experienced by the
subject as its most subjective moment, its expression, is mediated objectively. (Adorno 1973,
17–18)
Or as Adorno also puts it, referring directly to Brecht:
In the face of the collective powers that are at present usurping world spirit, the universal and
the rational can better hibernate in the isolated individual than in the “big guns” [e.g., political
parties] that have abandoned the universality of the rational. The claim that a thousand eyes
see better than two is both a lie and the precise expression of the fetishization of collectivity
and organization. It is the highest obligation of social cognition today to break through this
fetishization. (Adorno 1970–1986, 8:455)
Or, finally, to phrase the issue in more general terms:
However isolated an individual may be, if they criticize a historical trend which they are factu-
ally powerless to change, this cannot simply be dismissed as the grumbling of the disaffected
or the irrational protest of someone who feels pangs of emotion. The protest, if it has any sub-
stance at all, will contain an element of reason. (Adorno 2006a, 63)
This “element of reason” resides, ultimately, in the fact that the protest in question calls
attention to the fettering of real emancipatory possibilities in the name of social arrange-
ments that deny these possibilities. Or more concretely, the protest is a plea for the abolition
of shared suffering to the highest degree currently possible. This abolition is the only valid
response to this protest, but it is a response “which no theory can anticipate, and on which
theory can set no limit” (Adorno 1973, 203). This is because the true lesson of dialectical
thinking, beyond Hegel’s initial formulation of it, is that “there is no category, no concept,
no theory even, however true, that is immune to the danger of becoming false and even
ideological in the constellation that it enters into in practice” (Adorno 2006a, 57).
Thus, it is not the universal or the idea but the negativity of the nonidentical that must
be given the last word in the historical process. It is this nonidentity, the expression of
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socially unnecessary suffering, that fuels a renewed form of determinate negation, freed
from serving a single‐stranded view of history. Of course, Hegelians – and Marxists for that
matter – may simply retort that there is, in any event, only one world, only one totality of
actualized and actualizable possibilities. But to this Adorno replies that
the possibility of happiness, and indeed even the possibility of a differently constituted world,
would be inconceivable without all the things that can be urged by way of objection to [the
world as it currently exists] – its insufficiency in relation to the fate of individual, and all its
senseless suffering and cruelty. (Adorno 2006a, 47–48)
To summarize, “freedom can only be grasped in determinate negation, as corresponding to

the concrete shape taken by unfreedom” (Adorno 1973, 231; 2006a, 243), which may
well take the form of what we took to be the animating idea of this one world. It is this
thought that provides us with the key to understanding the substantive social content of
Doré’s satirical sketch, with which we began. If, as Benjamin says, “all rulers are the heirs
of prior conquerors” (as quoted above), then Robespierre indeed owed a shameful debt to
Louis XVI, and such debts will keep us bound to the “odious totality” so long as the present
is seen as the inalienable legacy of past suffering. Doré’s deputy is in the right, so long as all
that matters is the idea under which antagonism and suffering is subsumed and rational-
ized. However, freedom lies not in the actualization of such apologetic ideas, but in the
rational refusal of any final actuality. As such, what we owe to the odious totality is not a
debt of thanks but an ongoing obligation to redeem its wrongs, to give negativity the last
word, rather than rallying ourselves around some new positivity or principle of the whole.
The truth of the social totality lies not in its continuity as viewed from the standpoint of any
principle, but in the possibility it contains, in spite of itself, of convicting such principles of
untruth. In other words, we owe something not to the odious totality itself but to that which
it cannot think without collapsing from within, although its violence may stay its fall.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1970–1986). Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). London: Routledge.
Adorno, T.W. (1978). Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). London:
Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1991). On lyric poetry and society. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 1. (trans. S. Weber
Nicholsen). New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1998a). Progress. In: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. H.W.
Pickford), 143–160. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1998b). The meaning of working through the past. In: Critical Models: Interventions
and Catchwords (trans. H.W. Pickford), 89–103. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2003). Graeculus (II): Notizen zu Philosophie und Gesellschaft, 1943–1969. In:
Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, vol. VIII (ed. R. Tiedemann), 9–41. München: edition text + kritik.
Adorno, T.W. (2006a). History and Freedom (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2006b). The idea of natural‐history. In: Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on
Theodor W. Adorno (ed. R. Hullot‐Kentor; trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor), 252–269. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2008). Lectures on Negative Dialectics (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project (trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin). Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
204
Benjamin, W. (2003). On the concept of history. In: Selected Writings, vol. 4. (trans H. Zohn).
Brecht, B. (1997). The decision. In: Collected Plays, vol. 3.2, 61–91. (trans. J. Willett). London:
Methuen.
Doré, G. (1907). Versailles et Paris en 1871, d’après les dessins originaux de Gustave Doré. Paris: Plon.
Engels, F. (1988). The housing question. In: Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 23 (ed. L. Golman),
317–391. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Habermas, J. (1979). Toward a reconstruction of historical materalism. In: Communication and the
Evolution of Society, 130–177. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1964). The German constitution. In: Hegel’s Political Writings (trans. T.M. Knox), 143–
242. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1971). Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1975). Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction (trans. H.B. Nisbet).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1991). Elements of the Philosophy of Right (trans. H.B. Nisbet). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (trans.
Kant, I. (1970a). Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose. In: Kant’s Political Writings
(ed. H. Reiss; trans. H.B. Nisbet). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1970b). Perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch. In: Kant’s Political Writings. (ed. H. Reiss;
trans. H.B. Nisbet), 93–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1979). The Conflict of the Faculties (trans. M.J. Gregor). Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Marx, K. (1970). Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (ed. J. O’Malley; trans. A. Jolin and
J. O’Malley). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital: Volume 1 (trans. B. Fowkes). Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with
New Left Review.
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vol. 14 (ed. L. Golamn), 655–656. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (1987). A contribution to the critique of political economy, part one. In: Marx–Engels
Collected Works, vol. 29 (ed. L. Golman; trans. V. Schnittke), 257–417. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
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Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (trans. M. Milligan), 13–168. Amherst:
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Schopf, W. (ed.) (2003). So müßte ich ein Engel und kein Autor sein: Adorno und seine Frankurter Verleger.
Der Briefwechsel mit Peter Suhrkamp und Siegfried Unseld. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Further Reading
Geulen, E. (1997). Theodor Adorno on tradition. In: The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno
and the Postmodern (ed. M. Pensky), 182–193. Albany: State University of New York Press. On his-
tory, modernity, tradition, and dialectic.
Hohendahl, P.U. (2013). Progress revisited: Adorno’s dialogue with Augustine, Kant, and Benjamin.
Critical Inquiry 40 (1): 242–260. On the context and evolution of Adorno’s concept of progress in
history.
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O’Connor, B. (2010). Adorno on the destruction of memory. In: Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates
(eds. S. Radstone and B. Schwarz), 136–149. New York: Fordham University Press. On memory,
forgetting, and the idea of working through the past.
Pickford, H.W. (2002). The dialectic of theory and praxis: on late Adorno. In: Adorno: A Critical
Reader (eds. N. Gibson and A. Rubin), 312–340. Oxford: Blackwell. On Adorno’s critical philos-
ophy in the shifting historical context of the twentieth century.
Sandkaulen, B. (2006). Modell 2: Weltgeist und Naturgeschichte. Exkurs zu Hegel. Adornos
Geschichtsphilosophie mit und gegen Hegel. In: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (eds. A.
Honneth and C. Menke), 169–177. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. On Adorno’s philosophy of history
in the context of Negative Dialectics.
Schnädelbach, H. (2004). Adorno und die Geschichte. In: Analytische und postanalytische Philosophie,
150–178. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. A critical reading of Adorno’s understanding
of history.
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13
The Anthropology in Dialectic of Enlightenment

PIERRE‐FRANÇOIS NOPPEN
The question of whether and to what extent Horkheimer and Adorno rely on a philosophical
anthropology has long been a source of worry and puzzlement in the scholarship. In this
regard, three aspects of the book seem of particular concern. The first one is what appears
to be their stress on origins. In the foreword, they introduce the text at the focus of the first
excursus, Homer’s Odyssey, “as one of the earliest representative attestations [Zeugnisse] of
bourgeois Western civilization” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xviii, amended). As we
soon discover, the unusual sort of scrutiny they submit Homer’s work to tracks the “proto-
history of subjectivity [Urgeschichte der Subjektivität]” (2002, 43, amended). In this in-
stance, two worrisome features of their exposé are closely connected: what we take their
findings to mean directly relies on the type of critical investigation we take them to engage
in. In other words, what their investigation means to reveal about the bourgeois subject
relies on how they mean to take Odysseus, a mythical hero, as the prototype (Urbild) of the
bourgeois individual in the first place. So the question boils down to: what exactly do they
refer to as a protohistory of subjectivity (see Brunkhorst 2000)?
The second troubling aspect of the book is what has often been referred to as Horkheimer
and Adorno’s negativism. In the book, they insist that rationality’s regressive tendencies,
which, as they see it, are present “from the first” (2002, xix), reach their full expression in
late modernity, following a logic they outline. Now the obvious question is: if the tendency
to regress is constitutive of enlightenment itself as “thought in progress,” how, if at all, can
we hope to escape it? What can be viewed as a way out of the regression depends on what
we take the logic they make explicit to mean and, in particular, on what we take to be ines-
capable about this logic, in their view. The fact that they mobilize Nietzsche and de Sade, in
particular, only seems to aggravate things (see Habermas 1982). So the real question con-
cerns the point of their critical approach: why put such emphasis on the negative? In other
words, how is that supposed to help correct the course of the enlightenment?
Finally, their stress on anthropology, albeit on a critical one, has itself been viewed as a
source of concern. The concern has been raised from two sides. On the one hand, their
criticism of enlightenment would appeal to a view on the history of the species that sets
clear and unsurmountable limits to the emancipatory potential of reason. This interpreta-
tive line assimilates their critical enterprise to certain forms of conservatism – Freud who
207
traces the malaise of western civilization back to the economy of the human psyche (see
Freud 2010) or Gehlen who views in the dispositions that make human sociality possible
the very factors that limits social progress (see Adorno and Gehlen 1974). On the other
hand, they would seek resources to counter rationality’s regressive tendencies in our
mimetic capacity, that is, a capacity of the human mind that is shielded from regression
because it isn’t itself rational – a piece of human nature unaffected by civilization, or what
Habermas calls “uncomprehended nature” (Habermas 1984, 382).
So the real issue concerns the specific kind of treatment Horkheimer and Adorno
reserve to anthropological views. The question is: How can their critical anthropology
avoid the pitfalls of a philosophical anthropology? More specifically, how can it avoid either
relying on a view of human nature that acts as a sort of overarching principle commanding
the history of the human species – human nature as defining civilization – or on a view of
human nature as what is unaffected by civilization and what by definition only a
metaphysical theory can claim to rely on – untapped or untouched human nature? Simply
put, how can a critical anthropology be critical at all?
In what follows, I will address these three sets of concern through a close examination
of the first excursus of the book, on Homer’s Odyssey. Before I do so, I want to clarify a few
points concerning, first, what anthropological views they are targeting and, second, the
type of critical examination they wish to submit these views to.
1. The Point of Their Critical Anthropology
In a basic sense, to say that philosophical views (critical or otherwise) rely on a specific
view of what human beings are doesn’t need to mean anything more than that to work
out any view whatsoever pertaining to human affairs, one ought to take humans to be
beings of some sort rather than of another. So the very fact that a view or project would
rely on such anthropological views isn’t problematic in the least. Rather, it is a precondi-
tion for any such investigation whatsoever. What these views might be is an entirely
different story altogether. One could be completely wrong about the extent of human
capacities and not wrong at all in assuming that humans have capacities and that short of
taking this fact into consideration, one can’t make any sense of human practices and insti-
tutions. It is one thing to rely on anthropological views, another thing entirely to work out
a philosophical anthropology whose aim is to lay out something like the essence of human
nature.
Moreover, it makes sense that, as we work out the bulk of a philosophical views about
any aspect of the social and political landscape, a large portion of whatever anthropolog-
ical views we rely on would remain implicit, that is, that they wouldn’t themselves be
thematized in any thorough way. In a trivial sense, there is no need for them to be explicitly
formulated to be effective as assumptions, that is, as what one must rely on to carry out a
specific investigation into human affairs. So it isn’t either the fact that a set of assumptions
would be left unexamined as such that poses problem for Horkheimer and Adorno.
The anthropological views they are targeting in Dialectic of Enlightenment are problem-
atic in another sense. Insofar as their critical anthropology serves the dual purpose of
making sense of enlightenment’s self‐destruction and of “prepar[ing] a positive concept
of enlightenment that liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination” (2002,
xviii), whatever views they target must at the very least, on their account, have played an
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i mportant, if not decisive, role in the elaboration of key features of enlightenment thinking.
This holds true whether or not the views in question have been explicitly worked out to
play this role. Moreover, as Horkheimer and Adorno see it, the main hurdle they face is
precisely the prima facie inability to account for the self‐destruction of the enlightenment
given what enlightenment has been taken to mean; that is, to make sense not only of the fact
that enlightenment as the advance of thought could regress, but also, and more importantly,
of how it would be responsible for its own regression. The question, then, is this: what
anthropological views have shaped the way the enlightenment has been understood such
that in holding to this understanding, we have somehow strayed off course? So while we
are committed to these views, we are oblivious to their full meaning. This means that while
the meaning of these views might be explicitly tied to the prevailing views about modern
enlightenment, their full meaning isn’t explicit, that is, it isn’t part of the explicit self‐
understanding of modern enlightenment. Instead, their full meaning lies somewhere in
the gap between the views modern enlightenment entertains about itself and what in
holding to these views it proves to have been committed to.
So the question is: what drives the advance of thought, according to modern enlighten-
ment thinking? Horkheimer and Adorno’s long answer to this question is “the unfettering
of forces, universal freedom, self‐determination” (2002, 73). Their short answer is: the
rational self. As they put it: “The self which after the methodological extirpation of all
natural traces as mythological, was no longer supposed to be either a body or blood or a
soul or even a natural ego but was sublimated into a transcendental or logical subject,
formed the reference point of reason, the legislating authority of action” (2002, 22). In
their view, the self‐determining self is something like the purified conceptual expression of
the drive for mastery over nature (within and without) and drive for the liquidation of
myth, which they view as the two keys to the modern project of emancipation.
This seems like a straightforward condemnation of the whole enlightenment project,
unless one takes a closer look at why they stress the negative in this way and how exactly
they mean to critically examine the makeup of the modern self. If we tie this to Kant’s take
on anthropology, we can perhaps start seeing what Horkheimer and Adorno have in view.
Kant famously proposes a distinction between an investigation into “what nature makes of
the human being,” and an investigation into “what he as free‐acting being makes of him-
self ” (Kant 2006, 3). The latter sort of investigation is what Kant refers to as an anthropology
from a pragmatic point of view. Imagine that Horkheimer and Adorno are implicitly asking
Kant the following question: is there any real way of (and sense to) separating the two
kinds of anthropological investigations? In other words, how can we inquire into what
humans can make of themselves without asking the question of what nature enables them
to make of themselves or, more precisely, of how in making something of themselves they
relate to the way nature has made them? The point of such questions might be to point out
that the stress on self‐determination and on how we make something of ourselves risks
making us oblivious, first, to the way rationality is embodied and, second, to how the
exercise of our self‐determining capacities (and therefore the understanding we have of
what these capacities are) is tied to the broad social context in which we evolve.
The book, I take it, tirelessly asks this one question: what exactly in the prevailing pic-
ture of the enlightened self might be responsible for enlightenment’s self‐destructive ten-
dencies? The bulk of their answer, I argue, is that the prevailing picture of the self induces
blindness as regards decisive aspects of what it means to be a rational being, an agent
capable of self‐determination. So the paradox that they track throughout the book is that
this picture of self makes us, humans, into beings, subjects, rational selves, who control
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nature and yet who aren’t defined by nature. In doing so, it conceals the way we, humans,
and so human rationality itself, are inextricably tied to nature.
In short, the point of their critical anthropology is to make us “mindful of the nature in
the subject [Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt]” (2002, 32, amended), that is, to make us
aware of how in denying our ties to nature, we have grown oblivious to the way these ties
intimately define us.
2. Investigating the Prototype of the Self
A good deal of confusion still surrounds Horkheimer and Adorno’s sketch of a protohistory
of subjectivity. Although the various renderings of the term Urgeschichte – “prehistory”
(2002, 60), “earliest prehistory” (2002, 50), “earliest history” (2002, 43), “primal age”
(2002, 50) – are in part responsible for this confusion, the main issue lies with the subject
matter itself. No doubt, the concept of protohistory belongs to a set of opaque concepts
that Adorno in particular appropriates from Benjamin, who coins the term to characterize
the singular enterprise of his Arcades Project. Taking a cue from Jules Michelet’s phrase:
“each epoch dreams the one to follow” (“chaque époque rêve la suivante”; Benjamin 1999,
893), Benjamin proposes, in a characteristically paradoxical way, to track how the
nineteenth century dreamt up the following century. So Benjamin isn’t merely proposing
a history of the nineteenth century of a certain kind. His aim rather is to trace the outlines
of the “dream” (or dream‐like image) formed in the nineteenth century and from which his
contemporaries have yet to wake up. So the point of his endeavor is to access some of the
deeper recesses of the collective imaginary that defines for his contemporaries the horizon
of meaning. (One can appreciate the complexity of Benjamin’s insight through three sets
of question: First, how do such dreams or visions of the future form? What stuff are they
made of exactly [intuitions, images, concepts, etc.]? What motivates them? Second, how do
they materialize, if unlike any rational plan? How do the visions of one epoch affect the
next epoch? Third, how can we assess all of this?) This supposes a sophisticated view on
image, meaning, and history that I can’t detail here. Instead, my focus will be on how
Horkheimer and Adorno use the concept of Urgeschichte.
In keeping with the translation of Urbild as prototype (or model), I have translated
Urgeschichte as protohistory, which I view as an investigation into such prototypes. Now,
the kind of prototypes, or models, that Horkheimer and Adorno have in view aren’t, how-
ever, like the more familiar nomological models, that is, they aren’t models formed of an
explicitly articulated set of rules. What they have in view might be best understood as
more or less tightly‐threaded, mimetically generated patterns of meaning.
The view is complex and would require a treatment that far exceeds what I can pro-
vide here. Fortunately, a host of recent works have shed considerable light on the matter
(see, in particular, Bellah 2011; Donald 1991, 2001; Schaeffer 2010). For the sake of
brevity, I will focus here on the work of Merlin Donald, who develops a comprehensive
account of the origin of the modern (theoretical) mind from an evolutionary standpoint,
which, I believe, can provide a simple access to some of Horkheimer and Adorno’s core
insights. The key to Donald’s account is a “culture‐first approach to language evolution”
(2001, 279). On this view, what we call meaning in the broad sense – Sinn as German
philosophers would put it – first emerges with the “ability to produce conscious, self‐
initiated representational acts that are intentional but not linguistic,” or the “mimetic
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ability” (1991, 168). Mimesis differs from imitation in that it adds a representational
dimension to straightforward imitative processes. For example, one can imitate any
gesture involved in the making of a tool yet be incapable of making a tool on one’s own.
The reason for this is that to learn a tool‐making skill one needs to form a representation
of the sequence of gestures involved in that skill. This representation is what Donald
refers to as a mimetic model.
The same ability can be used to model all kinds of behaviors, skills, events, and so on. It
thus enables the creation of complex social patterns (games, rituals, learning practices).
There results what Donald refers to as a mimetic culture. The point is of significance since,
from an evolutionary perspective, the mimetically generated layer of meaning that shapes
behaviors and attitudes provides the condition for the emergence of language. Simply put:
without mimetic culture, Donald claims, the ability to speak (or “modern rapid language”)
wouldn’t be evolutionarily motivated. His rationale is threefold. First, the development of
the modern vocal apparatus wouldn’t be motivated if the new ability did not provide
obvious fitness benefits, that is, if the new representational ability didn’t confer an undeni-
able advantage on whoever possessed them in a primitive context. Short of there being a
need to express only what language can express, the modern vocal apparatus is useless.
Second, as he puts it, “[s]ymbolic invention is a creative act,” which “requires a capacity
for thought” (1991, 219). It is the emergence of new representational capacity and of a
new kind of representational model that “cries out for the perfect symbol, the appropriate
device” (1991, 219), to express it. Third, if it is true that evolution is a tinkerer and not a
creator, then this new modeling ability must itself be motivated. Here, Donald proposes
mimetic culture as the missing link. The development of the symbolic modeling capacity
solves a representational problem that can only arise when already dealing with represen-
tations. Although our mimetic abilities already provide what is necessary to elaborate
complex social patterns, the greater this complexity becomes, the harder it is to track.
What Donald proposes is simply that symbolic modeling brings mimetic models under
symbolic control. In so doing, it extends our ability to map out an environment already
shaped by the mimetic models that tie together a cultural setting.
For my purpose, the point here is twofold. First, on this account, purely mimetic models
aren’t yet linguistically structured, or explicitly articulated. This doesn’t mean that they
can’t be made explicit in one way or another. It simply means that to work as cohesive,
meaningful representational models, they don’t need to be explicitly articulated. Second,
as Donald points out, referring back to Auerbach’s now classic Mimesis (1953),
words are also used mimetically, in the broad sense of formulating the shape of a myth or story
or its attitude. In such cases, it is as though the mythic theme was, at a deeper level, driven not
strictly by verbal rules and ideas but rather by an underlying mimetic form in which language
in embedded. (Donald 1991, 170)
This is the nuance that I want to exploit to unpack Horkheimer and Adorno’s take on
Odysseus as the prototype of the modern self.
Here’s how I see it: On Donald’s account, it makes sense that in a primitive environment
an individual’s most basic sense of self would be built out of a set of densely‐threaded
mimetic models (comprising cognitive maps of their body, their skills and abilities, their
environment, events forming a timeline, etc.). Our culture, however, is no longer a mimetic
one. It has long been shaped, and is constantly being reshaped, by highly sophisticated
conceptual models. This doesn’t mean, in Donald’s view, that we no longer rely on mimetic
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modeling to navigate the world and to maintain our sense of self. It rather means that even
our most intimate sense of self isn’t purely shaped by mimetic models, as it keeps being
informed by the myriad discourses that define the ever‐increasingly complex social
landscape in which we evolve. As regards Odysseus, I propose to distinguish three levels of
mimetic modeling. Odysseus isn’t a first‐degree, purely mimetic model. If I understand
Horkheimer and Adorno correctly, their claim rather is that Odysseus is something like a
narratively‐threaded mimetic model. His identity is shaped by his travels through the
mythical universe of Ancient Greece: “At the Homeric stage, the identity of the self is so
much a function of the nonidentical, of dissociated, unarticulated myths, that it must
derive from them” (2002, 39). There is a third level. The Homeric tale itself works like a
narrative articulation of a linguistically‐threaded mimetic model. Of course, the distinc-
tion between the second and third levels is a purely rhetorical one, insofar as Odysseus is,
as this unified mimetic model, a Homeric creation. But my point here is that the reason
Horkheimer and Adorno focus on The Odyssey is precisely because Homer’s narrative artic-
ulation of the mimetic model that Odysseus is has a way of making available for scrutiny
what might otherwise remain locked in the deepest recesses of our self‐understanding –
precisely the part of this self‐understanding that is mimetically threaded.
So more than a straightforward break from the modern ethos of the blank slate (and of
the rational instauration of the self), I want to argue that we can see in this excursus
Horkheimer and Adorno’s attempt at unlocking the mimetic underpinnings of the self‐
understanding that defines modern selfhood. On this interpretation, Horkheimer and
Adorno’s point isn’t to rehearse the trope on how the classics have informed modern
western culture, although there is something to be said about the singular place that the
Greek hero has occupied in the western imaginary. More important still is the story line
itself: Homer’s story is about is an individual confronted with the natural powers, which has
been and remains one of the most dominant narratives of the modern world – all the way
from Bacon’s vision of a humanity liberated from fear through its mastery of nature (both
within and without), to Kant’s view about self‐determining subjects, who act out of purely
rational grounds (moral law) and not natural ones (inclinations).
3. The Logic of Sacrifice

I now to turn to Horkheimer and Adorno’s take on the logic of sacrifice, as they work it out
in the first excursus. The point of this examination is that Horkheimer and Adorno’s char-
acterization of reason as cunning, which is key to their understanding of Odysseus, relies
on their interpretation of the logic of the mythical universe and, more specifically, of the
practice of sacrifice, which exploits this logic. As we saw, meaning in the broad sense (Sinn)
is first tied to mimetic modeling. At this level, the boundaries of meaning are still more or
less unstable and porous. Mythical invention gives definition and consistency to meaning:
as the symbolic articulation of meaning opens a whole new horizon for meaning it also
sets clearer bounds for it. It creates what in later works Adorno refers to as a context of
immanence (Immanenzzusammenhang). Horkheimer and Adorno insist on the idea that the
principle of immanence defines the universe of myth. One can understand the creation of
immanence in the following way: as the mythical expansion of meaning (Sinn) creates a
context of immanence defined by meaning‐bounds, it also creates the need to keep
this context meaning‐tight, as it were, that is, to preserve the bounds of this context of
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immanence. This means that any disruption to the universe of myth – any tear in the
bounds of meaning – compels attempts at restoring the equilibrium of this uni-
verse – attempts at patching up the tears. Sacrifice exploits this need for equilibrium in that
it institutes a process of substitution aimed at patching up the tears in the meaning‐bounds
and restoring the balance after significant disruptions.
In Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, this substitution is made possible by one simple fea-
ture of language: the difference between word and thing. In the case of the mimetic mod-
eling, the individual creates the model through immersion into whatever is to be modeled.
So the resulting model stands in a relation of more or less seamless adherence to whatever
is modeled. For example, the successful mimetic modeling of a tool‐making practice implies
that the individual makes themselves into a tool‐maker. Of course, deficiency or failure in
the model might prompt the individual to refine their model (or to create a new one), but
this new model would be characterized by the same adherence. By contrast, linguistic
meaning introduces a distance between linguistic symbols and whatever they represent.
This distance can be understood in terms of the articulation of two components of
linguistic meaning: intentionality and symbolic creation. On the one hand, the intention-
ality that structures the relation of word to thing is what binds the word to the thing. On
the other hand, the symbolic articulation of this relation of intentionality creates a dis-
tance between word and thing. As a result, even if under certain rhetorical conditions the
experience of symbolic meaning can be one of immersion (as when reading a novel), it
doesn’t need to be. And while the word stands for the thing, it is not that thing itself. As a
consequence, “an identical word can mean different things” (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002, 47), much like two words can mean the same thing.
For my purpose, what matters is that this basic feature of language is what provides the
condition for sacrificial practices to emerge: out of the differentiation of the word’s
standing‐in‐for‐the-thing emerges a possible (but in no way necessary) equivalence bet-
ween word and thing. In other words, for there to be a possible equivalence, there first
needs to be a difference. It is this possible equivalence that makes substitution (Stellvertretung)
possible. The point matters, since, to anticipate, one can read Horkheimer and Adorno’s
examination of sacrifice as carefully tracking the progressive differentiation of the ele-
ments of linguistic meaning that make sacrifice possible and provide the conditions for
Odysseus’ cunning. As they put it, “cunning lives from the process governing the relation
between word and thing [von jenem zwischen Wort und Sache waltenden Prozeß]” (2002, 47,
amended; GS 3, 79).
On their account, sacrifice involves a twofold deception. First deception: they hold that
“all sacrificial acts, deliberately planned by humans, deceive the god for whom they are
performed” (2002, 40). The victim stands in for the community, what should befall the
community befalls the victim, and the community is saved. From this vantage point, the
substitution works and the god is tricked. As this process enables humans to impose their
will on gods, it frees them from their yoke. But a second, deeper deception is involved: the
divine power is neither convened nor appeased. Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest
that participants to sacrificial practices must have been aware of the fact that “symbolic
communication” “does not reinstate immediate communication” (2002, 41) from the ear-
liest point on. This is why, on their account, the institutionalization of sacrifice might be
best understood in terms of a coping mechanism. While at the symbolic level the sacrifice
is instituted to cope with the initial disruption in the bounds of the mythical universe, the
failure of the sacrificial act itself (and the self‐inflicted loss it constitutes) is what truly com-
pels the repetition of the sacrifice over and again. For if the sacrificial act succeeded, the
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equilibrium would be restored and the repetition of this act wouldn’t be motivated. On this
logic, since the initial sacrificial act is prompted by a disruption – a traumatic event such as
natural catastrophe – the institution of ritual sacrifice amounts to replacing an accidental
trauma by a trauma that humans have control over and that, for this reason, can be
integrated into the order of things. At the cognitive level, the practice thus becomes a
means of regulating the balance of the mythical universe. At the social level, it becomes a
mechanism of control. Whoever controls the ritual controls those subjected to it.
The paradox here is that Horkheimer and Adorno see in this the blueprint for the
cognitive economy of the hero, insofar as he is the cunning one. They express this in the
following string of claims: first, “the moment of deception in sacrifice is the prototype of
Odyssean cunning” (2002, 40); second, cunning is Odysseus’ “organ [Organ]” (2002, 39);
third, Odysseus is the “prototype of the bourgeois individual” (2002, 35).
One should not fail to notice that, on their reading, cunning expresses both rationality’s
emancipatory potential and its regressive tendencies. This tension is captured in the claim
that “Odysseus himself acts as both victim and priest” (2002, 40). This combination of
priesthood and victimhood, of subjugator and subjugated, raises two concerns. First, mod-
eling rationality on cunning, understood as a capacity to deceive, seems to limit dramati-
cally the scope of its emancipatory promise. It makes enlightenment into an ambivalent
process, now emancipating, now deceiving – or worse: doing both at the same time. From
this vantage point, the tension between emancipation and domination appears to be what
drives enlightenment forward. The second point is more troubling still: this reading casts
Odysseus as the agent of his own deception. If emancipation is always paid for with some
level of self‐deception, aren’t enlightenment’s ideals doomed, because unachievable? This
is perhaps, more than anything else, what has left many a reader deeply perplexed by
Horkheimer and Adorno’s account (compare Raulet 2017). I will now examine each of
the two concerns in turn to see how Horkheimer and Adorno deal with this tension.
4. Cunning as Protoreflexivity
As they see it, the earliest myths already “sought to report, to name, to tell of origins – but
therefore also to narrate, record, explain” (2002, 5). They were stories that reported
unusual natural events (meteor showers, red moons, solar eclipses, etc.), explained cata-
strophic natural events (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, droughts, storms of all
sorts), narrated the natural cycles (the passing of seasons, animal migrations, celestial
cycles, etc.), or mapped out the natural environment (sea routes, hunting grounds, the
night sky). As they were recorded and collected, “they soon became a teaching [Lehre]”
(2002, 5). For my purpose, the point is that this teaching evolves into a set of institution-
alized and codified practices for the transmission of symbolic culture, or as they put it, a
“mythically objectifying tradition [mytisch vergegenstandliche Übertragung]” (2002, 45,
amended), which progressively consolidates the mythical imaginary into an ever‐tighter
context of immanence. Horkheimer and Adorno articulate the consequences of this pro-
cess in two claims, which I want to use to unpack their understanding of cunning.
The first claim is that the mythical figures depicted in myths “become figures of abstract
fate, of a necessity remote from the senses [sinnfernen Notwendigkeit]” (2002, 45, amended).
This is particularly important to understand how the immersion in the universe of myth
provides the epistemic conditions for the success of Odysseus’ cunning. Recall that, as
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Donald explains, from the beginning, language piggybacks on mimetic culture. For this
reason, it makes sense, in his view, that early storytelling would be experienced as expand-
ing the horizon of meaning first shot open by mimetic representation. In a similar vein,
Horkheimer and Adorno propose that words must have first worked as symbolic imitations
of things (see 2002, 47). So whereas, as we have seen, symbolic meaning introduces a dis-
tance between word and thing, the experience of symbolic meaning must have first been
one of immersion. But there is more: as myths are passed down from one generation to the
next and are increasingly objectified, the storytelling is formalized and the stories lose their
vividness. So their claim that mythical figures become expressions of abstract fate is a
claim about the way in which, with passing generations, the content of the stories grows
unavailable. One can summarize the logic of this process in the following way: The more
the stories that thread the mythical context of immanence are objectified, the more they
consolidate this context of immanence, the more they become an expression of the way
things are, the more their meaning is experienced as “remote from the senses,” unavailable
and abstract. As the hero navigates through a world made intelligible by myth, the words
he uses capture seamlessly what they mean, while their meaning is marked by opacity. In
short, to Odysseus and his companions, things are, as it were, merely what words have
made them into – their understanding is like spellbound by mythical meaning.
At face value, Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that Odysseus discovers and exploits the
difference between the word and the thing appears simplistic or trivial, as though it had all
along been lying in plain sight. So their claim takes on an altogether different sense when
we appreciate how he and his companions are spellbound. What breaking the spell in fact
amounts to is nothing short of rewriting the mythical stories. To succeed, Odysseus must
first access the meaning of those stories, that is, he must pierce through the layers of tra-
dition that make up the hard shell of words. The key, I propose, is this: Odysseus is the one
who lingers just a little too long on the meaning of words. Under his insistent gaze, the
abstract fate, the opacity of meaning becomes a puzzle. He asks a simple question: what
could this word, that story really mean? Who is Scylla exactly? What makes up the elusive,
but irresistible appeal of the Sirens’ song? This sends Odysseus down the unexplored
threads of the mythical web in search for answers. What he discovers is a gap. On this
reading, it’s not that Odysseus sees the gap, then exploits it. Instead, he discovers the gap as
he puzzles over the meaning of the stories, and tries to understand them, their implication,
the extent of the law, what awaits him and his companions. And what triggers the puzzle
is the opacity of the stories. This is where the process of substitution becomes relevant: the
fact that words and meaning are different implies that words perhaps don’t fully capture
what the thing is. Seeing the gap stirs the hero’s imaginative play and sends him searching
for possible equivalences. As they put it: “in this way arises the consciousness of intention
[so entspringt das Bewußtsein der Intention]” (2002, 47) – the very consciousness that forms
the basis of our reflective ability: “By inserting his own intention into the name, Odysseus
has withdrawn it from the magical sphere” (2002, 53). The hero’s cunning introduces
reflectivity in the universe of myth.
This leads me to their second claim regarding the consequences of the objectifying pro-
cess of tradition: the natural relationship between the powerless humans and the natural
powers embodied as mythical figures takes on the “character of a legal relationship”
(2002, 45). As “[u]nchangeable words remain the formulae for the implacable continu-
ities of nature” (2002, 47), Odysseus and his companions are bound by the laws of the
mythical universe as so many contracts tying them to mythical powers. As mentioned, on
Horkheimer and Adorno’s account, the characterization of reason as cunning arises out
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of the differentiation of the moment of deceit in sacrifice. More precisely, the substitution
that takes place in sacrifice – which the individual was a witness to (and at the same time
the object of) – is appropriated by the hero as a capacity for substitution. Odysseus relies on
his reflective abilities to find possible equivalences between the symbolic elements that
thread the mythical web – possible substitutes, broadly speaking, for the terms of the
contract. As they put it, he combs through these contracts so as to find “loopholes in the
agreement,” through which he can elude the agreement “while fulfilling its terms” (2002,
46). So his success depends on his ability to find those substitutes, and thus to deceive the
mythical powers to which he is bound.
Key to Odysseus’ deception is the semblance of identity in the substitution process. As
we have seen, the “objective untruth of sacrifice” (or its inherent moment of deception) lies
in the way the victim is made to stand in for the community. Here the claim that Odysseus
“supersedes” the objective untruth of sacrifice (2002, 41) paradoxically means that, as he
deceives mythical powers, Odysseus reveals the truth about the contract that binds him to
them. So what from the vantage point of immanence appears as the organ of deception –
cunning – is from Odysseus’ own vantage point rather the organ of truth: it enables
Odysseus to think through the limitations of mythical law. As he reflects on the legal
agreement, Odysseus discovers that the letter of the law is false and uses this discovery to
his advantage; he reveals this untruth in the moment he cheats the gods. So understood,
cunning is the organ of truth – or the model of reflective rationality – and truth is, as
Adorno puts it in a discussion with Horkheimer, the “quintessence of the dissolution of
what is false” (Horkheimer 1988, 490). Whoever remains spellbound by myth is deceived;
whoever follows the thread of Odysseus’ reflective breakthrough sees the spell lifted.
What’s more, from the vantage of mythical immanence, Odysseus’ cunning, so under-
stood, enables him to do what is, strictly speaking, impossible: “It is impossible to hear the
Sirens and not to succumb to them” (2002, 46). Cunning then is a force of disruption. It
first disrupts the balance of the mythical universe itself. As Horkheimer and Adorno note,
the story doesn’t say “what happens to the singers once the ship has passed” (2002, 47).
However, as they suggest, “the right of the mythical figures, being that of the stronger,
purely depends on the impossibility of fulfilling their ordinance. If it is fulfilled, then the
myths are finished, down to their most distant successor” (2002, 47, amended; Adorno
1986, 79). Once the mythical figures have been cheated, their power is neutralized. Sirens
to which sailors don’t succumb aren’t Sirens any longer; they belong to an already bygone,
enchanted world.
By the same token, the disruption directly affects Odysseus himself. They insist that he
“throws himself away, so to speak, in order to win himself ” (2002, 38; see also 39). This
statement first means, of course, that by defying mythical powers he risks his life – no one
has lived to tell of the Sirens’ song. That said, the point really is that as his cunning disrupts
the mythical universe, and strips the mythical figures of their power, it disrupts his own
identity. We move from myth being the subject to the cunning one being so; from Odysseus
obeying the will of gods (as per mythical law) to him bending them to his will; from
Odysseus being a character in a mythical story to him being the narrator of new kind of
story. This is, I take it, a decisive take away from Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis: by dis-
mantling the universe of myth in this way, cunning is a force of emancipation. Cunning
opens a still mythical, yet irremediably new world defined by a new power and a new rela-
tionship to mythical powers. It opens a new perspective, new possibles. Which possibles
exactly stand open as result of Odysseus’ actions? That is a question that remains to be
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answered. But if Odysseus’ character gives any indication on this matter, it would be a
world in which individuals – at least so far as they are, like Odysseus, reflective – endeavor
to act in accordance with their own will.
5. Cunning as Self‐Deception
The trouble is, this is not the whole story, far from it. We still need to account for how, in
Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, Odysseus deceives himself and explain why they take this
self‐deception to be a constitutive feature of the prototypical self. The question is: how is
cunning a sacrifice exactly and what must Odysseus sacrifice? On the face of it, what he
sacrifices are the impulses, drives, passions that animate him. The way the sacrifice
operates is slightly more complicated. This is a sacrifice unlike any other in that what
Odysseus does is to bargain his way out of sacrifice. He throws himself away, sacrifices
himself, that is, what he sacrifices, specifically, is what the Greek myths make him into, that
is, a being who is animated by impulses and so on, and who for this reason is under the
spell of mythical figures. How does the bargain work more specifically? Quite simply: in
satisfying the terms of the agreement, he does what is impossible, reveals the deception
inherent in the communication with the gods, and neutralizes the myths themselves, thus
finding a way out of the sacrificial practice altogether.
In a more prosaic sense, Odysseus, as the prototypical subject, acknowledges the hold
his passions have over him, but he does so in order to make himself into what isn’t con-
trolled by his passions. That is, simply put: by renouncing his drives, impulses, and passions,
he makes himself into a being that is no longer dominated by them, that is no longer
defined by this domination. He makes himself into a being that is, instead, defined by the
fact the he pursues his own goals – in this case, the return to Ithaca and the enjoyment of
life as master. So he is not merely denying his inclinations; instead, he renounces them to
achieve a greater satisfaction. Deferment of satisfaction is what the bargain is about. As
they put it, the sacrifice is “of the present moment to the future” (2002, 40). This is how,
in their view, the sacrificial victim transforms itself, by way of cunning, into subjectivity.
So far, so good. A shadow remains: so how does the deception work exactly? If the prac-
tice of sacrifice provides the blueprint of Odysseus’ cunning, then perhaps it can guide us
here to understand this point as well. In the case of the ritual of sacrifice, the deception, as
we saw, is twofold: first, the gods are tricked by the substitution process; second, the gods
don’t show at all. The sacrifice works and it really doesn’t. Undeniably, the second decep-
tion is the more troubling one. As we also saw, it is by a strange reversal that the sacrificial
act derives its real efficiency precisely from the fact that its symbolic efficiency is deceptive.
The question now is: is there an equivalent to this second deception in Odysseus’ cunning?
In sacrificing his impulses, passions, and so on, the hero claims that they don’t define
him. Of course, the problem is that the sacrifice doesn’t work in the sense that the hero’s
impulses aren’t really sacrificed at all. The fact that the hero feels compelled to renounce
them in order to impose his will rather means that he acknowledges the claim they have on
him. Engaging in the sacrifice is only possible for him if he acknowledges this claim in the
first place. The episode of the Sirens – Odysseus begs and pleads his companions to unbind
him, to no avail – provides the clearest indication of this. The episode where Odysseus
reclaims his identity only to unleash a blind and terrifying vengeance on all of Penelope’s
suitors (see Homer 1967, 328–329) is also revealing in that regard.
217
Two consequences follow. First, on this reading, the sacrifice doesn’t work and that
is why the subject feels compelled to repeat it over and again. Because it doesn’t work,
the sacrifice of his impulses and so on is instituted as practice. It becomes a sort of
coping mechanism through which the subject maintains the bounds of its symbolic
integrity. This echoes, of course, a host a modern proverbial wisdoms stressing how our
sacrifices will not have been in vain. At the subjective level, renunciation is the mechanism
through which the subject symbolically achieves a satisfying self‐relation. At the social
level, the constitution of the self (achieved through renunciation) appears as a kind of
ritual, practiced in the bourgeois world – the cornerstone of the bourgeois world – whose
entire point is to preserve the bourgeois order. A sacrifice practiced by each and all –
a very specific type of social institution. This institution conceals, in their view, a pain-
ful truth: “All who renounce give away more of their life than is given back to them,
more than the life they preserve” (2002, 43) through the sacrifice, that is, their life as
subjects. The perversity of it is that the institution works because it really doesn’t, as
a mechanism that enables subjects to cope with the fact that they are likely to lose at
the very moment they enter the bargain, that nothing in the bargain guarantees a
favorable outcome.
The second consequence is where the real puzzle lies: for the subject, the trouble is that
this sacrifice is something that no subject, qua subject, can believe in. As they phrase it:
“The formation of the self severs the fluctuating connection with nature which the
sacrifice of the self is supposed to establish” (2002, 41). The self constitutes itself into that
being which isn’t defined by its inclinations; but to renounce its inclinations, the self has to
acknowledge their claim on it. So the sacrifice through which the subject wrests itself from
blind nature asserts what the subject denies, namely that it “remains trapped in the con-
text of the natural” (2002, 42).
6. Concluding Remarks
On the reading I propose, the self‐deceptive nature of Odysseus’ cunning remains puzzling
as long as one doesn’t see what role mimetic modeling plays in their account of the
formation of the self. But I believe we can begin to unpack what is at issue here when we
take seriously Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that what underlies and structures the
formation of the modern self at its core is a mimesis “of what is dead [ans Tote]” (2002, 44,
amended). Here’s, in rough outlines, how I read this claim (compare Noppen 2017a, b): As
the individual renounces their drives, they have to make themselves into what they aren’t
and for what no model is provided: no human subject exists in the natural continuum prior
to its institution. Since individuals do have drives, and experience themselves as such, what
it would mean for them not to have such drives can only be a puzzle for them. What
Horkheimer and Adorno mean by a mimesis of what is dead is simply that instead of
mimetically threading a representation of one’s impulses, body, abilities, and so on into a
coherent model – as individuals in a more primitive setting might be led to do –the protoself
cannot but be the mimetic model of a negative: of what wouldn’t have any of that
(impulses, etc.), but would solely be defined by the ability to determine oneself, to set goals
for oneself. That is, it would be defined by this sort of cognitive process. As we saw,
Horkheimer and Adorno claim that at the Homeric stage the identity of the self is still
defined by the myths that provide the frame of intelligibility in which Odysseus’ bargains
can unfold. But once this protoself is achieved and a new sense of self emerges, one can
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begin to consolidate it. A narrative articulation like the Homeric tale offers one way of
doing this; a conceptual articulation offers another way. That said, what Donald’s distinc-
tion between mimetic model and symbolic or conceptual model suggests is that the latter is
no substitute for the former, as they simply don’t mobilize the same representational
abilities and, more importantly, they don’t operate in the same way. As I have insisted, the
former is immersive, while the latter institutes a symbolic distance vis‐à‐vis its object. To
make a long story short, on my reading, the reason why, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s
view, it is possible for the subject to engage in renunciation without sacrificing its concep-
tually worked out self‐understanding is because the sacrifice unfolds at the underlying,
immersive, and conceptually never‐quite‐explicit, level of the mimetic modeling of the self.
Since mimetic modeling is, once more, immersive and not symbolic, the resulting model
never challenges the symbolic, or conceptual, articulation of selfhood. The real cunning,
perhaps, is this: the self preserves the integrity of its identity as a rational self by relying,
for its very self‐constitution, on a mimetic type of modeling that, as a rational self that
understands itself exclusively as such, it for the most part remains oblivious to and that it
otherwise never needs to acknowledge as such.
This explains how, in their view, the self can constantly reassert its dependency on the
context of the natural while overtly denying any significant tie to it. Horkheimer and
Adorno’s insistence that we should strive to become mindful of nature in the subject isn’t
some clever way of reintroducing a metaphysical view of human nature. It is in fact
nothing else than their way of promoting a greater self‐awareness of how our very
constitution as rational selves invariably ties us to the nature we strive, with such energy,
ingenuity, and fervor, to bring under our control. Now the stress on the negative (our
blindness) isn’t meant to fill us with despair. It might instead be best understood as their
forceful and rhetorically‐loaded way of making us aware of the blind spots that distort
our self‐understanding. It might also lead us to not settle so easily for the promise of an
ever‐deferred satisfaction, however great the promise might seem, and to start actively
and consciously looking for ways of reaching real and sustainable forms of satisfaction –
in this world.
So while it is difficult to deny that Horkheimer and Adorno’s book invites the kinds of
concern that I have outlined at the beginning, it should be clear that, on my reading, these
concerns, at least as I have outlined them, prove, for the most part, ill‐founded.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1986). Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (ed. R. Tiedemann), with the collaboration of
Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck‐Morss and Klaus Schultz. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. and Gehlen, A. (1974). Ist die Soziologie eine Wissenschaft vom Menschen? Ein
Streitgespräch. In: Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen: Auflösung einiger Deutungsprobleme (ed.
F. Grenz)), 225–261. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Auerbach, E. (2013). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, New and Expanded
Edition (trans. Willard R. Trask). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bellah, R. (2011). Religion in Human Evolution: From the Neolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project (trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin). Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press.
Brunkhorst, H. (2000). The enlightenment of rationality: remarks on Horkheimer and Adorno’s
dialectic of enlightenment. Constellations 7 (1): 133–139.
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Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition.
Donald, M. (2001). A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton.
Freud, S. (2010). Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. J. Strachey). New York: W.W. Norton & Cie.
Habermas, J. (1982). The entwinement of myth and enlightenment: Re‐reading dialectic of enlight-
enment. New German Critique (26): 13–30.
Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: The Critique of Instrumental Reason
(trans. T. McCarthy). Boston: Beacon Press.
Homer (1967). The Odyssey of Homer (trans. R. Lattimore). New York: Harper & Row.
Horkheimer, M. (1988). Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12: Nachgelassene Schriften: 1931–1949 (ed.
A. Schmidt). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (trans.
Kant, I. (2006). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (trans. R.B. Louden). Cambridge:
Noppen, P.‐F. (2017a). Adorno on mimetic rationality: three puzzles. Adorno Studies 1 (1): 79–100.
Noppen, P.‐F. (2017b). L’idée d’une rationalité mimétique. L’argument de dialectique de la raison. In:
Dialectique de la raison: sous bénéfice d’inventaire (ed. K. Genel), 227–248. Paris: Éditions de la
Maison des sciences de l’homme.
Raulet, G. (2017). Ulysse, victime ou prêtre? La part de duperie inhérente au sacrifice. In: Dialectique
de la raison: sous bénéfice d’inventaire (ed. K. Genel), 153–170. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sci-
ences de l’homme.
Schaeffer, J.‐M. (2010). Why Fiction? (trans. D. Cohn). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Further Reading
Bernstein, J. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freyenhagen, F. (2013). Living Less Wrongly: Adorno’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hulatt, O. (2016). Reason, mimesis, and self‐preservation in Adorno. The Journal of the History of
Philosophy 54 (1): 135–151.
Shuster, M. (2014). Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. Chicago: The
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14
Adorno’s Reception of Weber and Lukács

MICHAEL J. THOMPSON
1. Introduction
One of the most distinctive problems to be investigated by the Frankfurt School was the
way that modern forms of reason and rationality had been transformed into vehicles for a
highly efficient and totalizing form of social domination. What they saw as particularly
important was the different ways that modern rationality was braided with new institu-
tional forms of life that had come to pervade mass society. Capitalism was shifting from a
social form that emphasized a crude, nineteenth‐century form of industrial production to
one of relative affluence based on mass consumption. Even more, as bureaucratic forms of
control and efficiency began to spread, so too did the consciousness of subjects begin to
reify and new forms of detachment from ethical agency rooted in the eighteenth‐century
model of rational self‐reflection and autonomy were taking root. There is perhaps little
question that today we can only see this problem increasing in its effects and consequences.
The extent to which mass, consumer society is capable of inflicting a moral atrophy on its
members is stunning. The collapse of critical autonomy as a fulcrum for critical democratic
politics is a central pathology of such societies, and because of this, Adorno’s diagnosis of
this problem remains salient for us as well.
For Adorno, the task of addressing this problem of the total reification of self and
society would be one of the most persistent themes in his development as a critical theorist.
Perhaps one of the richest strains of Adorno’s thought concerns the relationship between
rationality, consciousness, and power. He reworked in creative and important ways the
problematic of rationalization and social power that was laid out by Max Weber and Georg
Lukács, both of whom were deeply influential on him in his youth. He advanced the thesis
that the only real way to escape the iron cage of modernity and the reificatory powers of
capitalism is through a new style of cognition that will be able to resist the pressures and
absorption of the individual and consciousness into the false forms of thought and reality
that capitalism exudes. I think what makes Adorno’s ideas distinctive can be explained
by the way that he reworks the powerful theoretical ideas of both Weber and Lukács –
specifically their theories of the rationalization of society and the ways that this shapes and
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MICHAEL J. THOMPSON
affects individual consciousness. Adorno’s solution to this problem is unique, even as it

operates within the Hegelian–Marxist framework that makes Critical Theory distinctive.
What I would like to do in this essay is trace Adorno’s reception of these ideas about
modern rationality as they were impressed on him by the work of Weber and Lukács. Adorno
develops his own distinctive understanding of western rationalism and reification – the
two core ideas that those two thinkers developed respectively. But in so doing, he also
shaped a diagnostic theory about the nature of late capitalist society as well as the kinds of
resistance that were necessary to contest it. The thesis I will present here is that Adorno is
able to provide a sophisticated diagnosis of the effects of administrative, consumer
capitalism on the practical rationality of modern subjects. Adorno is right to point to the
ways that capitalist modernity fragments, alienates, and reifies modern subjectivity and
co‐opts agency for broader systemic imperatives. But even though this is the case, his own
solution lies in a new theory of critical subjectivity that undermines the social and praxi-
ological dimensions of political action and reflection. Adorno’s latent Kantianism ends up
returning to structure his ideas despite his deep commitment to Hegelianism. In the end,
although Adorno’s ideas are deeply informed by the problematic of subjective practical
agency that Weber and Lukács saw as definitive of the modern age, his response is closer to
Weber than Lukács.
2. Weber and Lukács on Instrumental Rationality and Reification
Both Weber and Lukács share a sense that modern rationality has deformative effects on
the personality of subjects as well as their capacities for moral reflection and agency. For
Weber, modernity contained within it the potential for the emergence of an authentic kind
of modernity where each individual would be able to articulate their own sense of meaning.
In this sense, the self‐reliant ethical personality (Persönlichkeit) was “an individual who
acted on purely individual values transcending sensuous existence” (Liebersohn 1988,
79). This was occurring within the context of a distinctive shift in western rationalism that
Weber saw as effecting change in three different spheres of rationality. First was the emer-
gence of “formal rationality,” which was a move away from substantive communal values
and toward a system of rules and law that was impersonal. Law, economy, and state now
operated under conditions that that were based on universally applicable rules, irrespec-
tive of the person concerned. Next was “practical rationality” where individuals now bring
to bear forms of means‐ends rationality to solve the problems they face in the modern
world. Last is “theoretical rationality” based on a move in modern science toward rigorous
experiment, the search for explanatory mechanisms, and an exclusive focus on empirical
reality for evidence.
All three of these ideal types of modern western rationalism identify a shift away from
substantive values and toward a more formalized conception of reason. Modernity was
therefore also evincing a series of developmental trends toward a new form of social cohe-
sion that was based on an increasingly rationalized form of power and legitimacy. Modern
forms of power were no longer based on force or coercion (Macht) but on the premise of
legal‐rational forms of authority or domination (Herrschaft) where members of a “struc-
ture of domination” or legal order see its validity as a means to fostering expedient means
to achieve some end. Hence, we see the emergence of what critical theorists would term
instrumental rationality (instrumentelle Vernunft), or what Weber called “goal‐oriented
rationality” (Zweckrationalität), where attempts by individuals to utilize their own forms of
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ADORNO’S RECEPTION OF WEBER AND LUKÁCS
rational reflection that do not incorporate the system of legal‐rational rules become
marginalized. As Darrow Schecter has argued, Weber “suggests that the rationalization
process in the West culminates in strategically rational religion, contractually rational
exchange and hierarchically rational command. It is a form of rationalization that man-
ages to decouple reason from critique to such an extent that the ideal of substantively
rational legitimacy becomes increasingly chimerical” (Schecter 2010, 31).
Modern forms of law therefore constitute a nexus of rules and regulations that are
abstract and established intentionally by persons (cf. Weber 1972a [1922], 122ff). But this
system of abstract rules is in tension with the individual’s search for substantive values
that can ground their autonomy as the system becomes increasingly permeated by stra-
tegic rationality (see Schluchter 1981, 107ff). An “iron cage” of modern society begins to
emerge when, although liberated from the traditional forms of belief, morality, and political
domination, individuals are thrown into a heteronomous sphere of action and rules
toward which rational obedience is expected and is in many ways internalized as legiti-
mate in nature. Weber’s view is ultimately tragic in that his own ethical aspirations for an
authentic modernity wither as the narrowing of the individual’s powers of practical
reason and a new form of conformism – of what he refers to as “stereotyping” – sets in. As
a result, the scope of the subject’s powers to shape its own life diminishes as the social
nexus of formal rules and norms increases in its formal‐rational powers (cf. Weber 1972a
[1922], 439ff). Weber’s tragic vision of the “iron cage” of modernity is itself reflected in
the concern that critical theorists had in the problem of the “administered world” of
modern capitalism (see Greisman and Ritzer 1981 as well as Mitzman 1984).
The young Lukács was also deeply impacted by this tragic vision of modernity. As a stu-
dent of both Weber and Georg Simmel, his youthful writings are replete with a tragic vision
of modern culture where the individual confronts a world that has lost cohesive forms of
meaning and purpose. After his turn to Marxism, Lukács takes the problem of instru-
mental reason and the deformation of individual consciousness to a different level in his
theory of reification. Weber had recognized the problem of the spread of formal rationality
throughout modern society and its negative effects on the individual’s practical reason.
Simmel, too, had seen the impact of the separation between what he termed “subjective”
and “objective” culture. Where the former represented the capacities and products that
any given individual possessed or could cultivate, the latter concept referred to the shared
communal products of the society as a whole. As societies modernized, however, objective
culture begins to expand and to overwhelm the individual. Objective culture now begins to
grow at the expense of subjective culture and the result is a kind of alienation of the
modern self from its own powers.
Lukács’ thesis is that the commodity form under capitalism needs to be seen as the
central concept that both Weber and Simmel had missed. For Lukács, the commodity form
begins to shape the consciousness of individuals and they begin to take on thing‐like char-
acteristics. This he derives from Marx’s theory of the commodity form and its capacity to
impinge its logic onto human activities. For Marx, the commodity form under capitalism
hides from consciousness the practical activities and relations that constitute it from con-
sciousness. Lukács took from Weber, even after his turn to Marxism, the idea that a formal
rationality was being imposed on subjects (see Dannemann 1987, 83ff). But he sees it his-
torically as the product of a totalizing system of commodity production and consumption,
as situated by the logic of the productive forces of capitalist society. The problem that reifi-
cation diagnoses is a defective form of consciousness and cognition that is unable to recon-
cile subject and object. It is a mode of consciousness that is blocked from conceiving the
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MICHAEL J. THOMPSON
true nature of the social world: one where collective human praxis (labor) is the funda-
mentally constitutive process of all social life. Reification hides this from view by saturating
consciousness with the fetish character of the commodity form. We see the social world in
immediate terms – in terms based on means‐ends rationality rather than in terms of the
totality. Reification renders the object of consciousness as a mere “thing” (Ding), which in
Kantian terms implies that consciousness is no longer able to render it as a proper object of
cognition. Instrumental reason, quantification of the lifeworld through regimentation of
time structured by the work day, and the fetish character of the world of commodity pro-
duction all have the collective impact of reifying consciousness and undermining the
potential for radical political agency.
Unlike Weber and Simmel, however, the Lukács of (1923) argues that the problem of
reification can be overcome. Indeed, for Lukács, the central problem for Weber and Simmel,
what disabled them from being able to solve the problem of the tragic vision of modernity,
was that they were unable to locate an agent of transformation. For Lukács, this falls to the
proletariat: that force within modern society that remains the creative, reproductive
energy that creates and maintains the modern world. Once workers were able to grasp
their historical role in consciousness, then they would see themselves as the “subject‐object
of history”; they would, in short, come to see themselves as the active agents of society
and of history and leave behind their defective view of themselves as mere aspects of the
system of the capitalist production process. The social whole would thereby be un‐inverted,
and a new sociality established. Reification therefore undermines the capacity of partici-
pants within the capitalist system to know the system of which they are constitutive
members. Reification was therefore a product of the kind of formal rationality that was
impressed on subjective consciousness, but a formal rationality that was embedded in the
nature of commodity production. The quantification of time, the rational mechanization,
the isolation of workers from their product, and so on, all entail a reflex in consciousness
that turns our self‐understanding from being active, cooperative social beings, to atom-
ized, reified beings: “This atomization of the individual is therefore only the reflex of
consciousness of this: that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended
to cover every manifestation of life in society” (Lukács 1923, 103).
Reification therefore emerges, for Lukács, as a critical category insofar as it “becomes
the basis for a critique of capitalist rationality as a worldview and a system logic threatened
by its inability to grasp the material substratum of its own formalistic categories and insti-
tutional structures” (Feenberg 2014, 69). The formal rationality of Weber is now turned
into the “rational objectification” (rationell Objektivierung) of all things. The commodity
form therefore hides the use‐value of things beneath the cover of exchange‐value –
commodities therefore acquire a “new objectivity” (cf. Lukács 1923, 104ff). Lukács’ thesis
is therefore that the commodity form not only hides its practical constitution from view, it
also generates false categories for the apprehension of society and social phenomena as a
whole. In this sense, the radicalness of his thesis of reification is that it shows itself to be
the result of a conceptual scheme that is generated by the commodity form and its power
to subjugate use‐values by exchange‐values and thereby push the cognition of subjects
from a dialectical to an analytical mode of thought and consciousness. Capitalism there-
fore generates categories that allow it to persist as an objective entity or “thing” that
operates external to its participants.
In many ways, Adorno’s most provocative ideas really stem from a reaction to both of
these ideas by Weber and Lukács. From Weber, he holds to the thesis of rationalization of
society and the permeation of all domains of life by a means‐ends rationality. From Lukács,
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he takes the thesis of reification seriously, but departs significantly from Lukács’ own
argument by seeing the process of reification as too totalizing to allow for a collective sub-
ject to emerge to overcome capitalism (cf. Dahms 1997). For Adorno, the process of reifi-
cation is far too extensive and far too embracing to be overcome through an “expressive
totality.” A new, more pernicious theory about the totality now emerges as one that is an
almost total process. The only way out will become a reconstruction of critical subjectivity,
and this will require a critical rethinking of the properties and powers of reason itself.
3. Adorno’s Critique of the Enlightenment
As I have said, many of Adorno’s critical ideas about modernity and the regress of modern
culture develop within the context of the theories put forward by Weber and Lukács. He
sees as one of the great pathologies of the modern age the dilemma of the individual.
Adorno shares a similar concern with the problem of instrumental reason with Weber and
Lukács, but his differences with both thinkers makes his own ideas distinct. For Adorno,
the problem with modern forms of rationality was their embeddedness in the social
formation of capitalism, which consists of the emergence of false forms of life generated by
the production of exchange‐value. This is an important point since, for Adorno, the origins
of his critique of Enlightenment reason should be read in the context of his reading of
Marx’s critical theory of society more generally and his theory of value more specifically.
Marx’s theory of value holds that under capitalism, the use‐values of objects take on a new
form, that of exchange‐value generated by the logic of market exchange. As capitalism as
a mode of production widens its influence, people come to see the world around them con-
stituted by exchange‐values, by the quantified values that market exchanges place on
them rather than their use for human life. In this sense, Adorno sees a crucial overlap bet-
ween Weber’s thesis about the rationalization of society, on the one hand, and the spread
of exchange‐value on the other. Both are two faces of the self‐same process of Enlightenment
rationalization.
Adorno and Horkheimer therefore seek, as Weber had before them, an enlightened,
rational confrontation with this kind of modernity. But what they insightfully point
to – and what Adorno will continue to develop as one of his core critiques of modernity – is
the way that modern reason has taken the form of a technical, instrumental kind of ratio-
nality. What the Enlightenment sought and was successful in providing was a form of
knowledge where “technology” (Technik) is central. This has roots in Adorno’s own reading
of Weberian and Marxian ideas. From Weber the idea of a formal rationality that empha-
sized goal‐oriented activity or goal‐oriented rationality (Zweckrationalität) is turned into a
more insidious form of social rationality that serves increasingly as the basis of all other
forms of social rationality. One reason for this is the spread of technology, but also the dis-
placement of use‐value by that of exchange‐value and its capacity to radiate a “means‐
ends rationality” (Zweck‐Mittel‐Denken) that permeates all aspects of society, culture, and
the self. From Marx’s distinction between use‐value and exchange‐value Adorno and
Horkheimer take up the thesis that all forms of value – not only economic, but aesthetic,
moral, and so on – embody the logic of exchange‐value. The idea here is that all that was
once substantive, qualitative, different, and human is becoming formal, quantitative, stan-
dardized, and inhumane. Enlightenment reason was responsible for a shift in reason itself,
and the standardization of instrumental reason (instrumentelle Vernunft) enables a new
form of administrative society where power over nature and objects is equally power over
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MICHAEL J. THOMPSON
people. In this sense, “technology is equally available, useful, and manipulable by busi-
nessmen and politicians, by all those in positions of power” (Kracauer 1998, 21 and
passim).
In this sense, Adorno and Horkheimer are extending the ideas of Weber into a much
broader domain than Marx or Lukács. They posit that this form of rationality is such that
it is not only formal and not only used for the purposes of economic exploitation. It is a
form of rationality that penetrates all forms of life, that reorders the social totality into a
totally administered world. They do not therefore cynically fold enlightened reason into
instrumental reason, as Jürgen Habermas has suggested (Habermas 1987). Rather, the
project now becomes, for Adorno particularly, to chart a form of critical consciousness
that will negate the formal rationality of this world. A form of critical reason that will
enable the subject to dissolve the universalizing rationality of technical reason is now the
aim of critical subjectivity. An emphasis on the qualitative over the quantitative; of the dis-
sonant over the harmonious; of what is different as opposed to that which conforms – all
of this will now become the field for Adorno’s critical theory. This attempt to construct a
theory of subjectivity that will be resistant to the totalizing forces of the administered
society represents a different response than Lukács insofar as it is circumscribed by subjec-
tivity itself. For Adorno, there is no praxiological way out of this dilemma, what must serve
as the prius to any such political consideration is the formulation of a resistant subjectivity
that can stave off the condition of total reification.
4. Consciousness and Reification: The Negative Dialectic
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a dramatic expression of a more totalizing, administered form

of society, culture, and consciousness that Adorno would seek to confront both in terms of
a negative form of cognition as well as a new theory of aesthetics and aesthetic experience.
Adorno seems to have had a penchant for Kant and his emphasis on the subject’s capacity
to critique and in many ways, to resist metaphysical ideas. Kant’s project was, in large part,
a critical response to the weighty tradition of western metaphysics and its attempts to serve
as a foundation for knowledge. Kant’s essential move toward epistemic concerns and the
nature of subjectivity serves as a kind of distant mirror for Adorno’s twentieth‐century
philosophical project. As Hauke Brunkhorst points out: “Adorno’s step away from Hegel’s
speculative understanding of dialectics is a step back to Kant; just a step, not a return to
some sort of neo‐Kantianism” (Brunkhorst 1999, 23). Essentially, Adorno is convinced
that reification has penetrated so deeply into the structures of capitalist society that the
culture and the framework for modern forms of agency have been corrupted. The fear now
is not a theory of reification as Lukács had theorized. Whereas for Lukács reification was a
kind of blockage that could be removed by an actual historical agent (the proletariat) once
the subject and object of class struggle had been reconciled, Adorno’s view of reification is
much more extensive and totalizing. For him, reification is not something we can over-
come via proletarian agency, but had to be combated from within – from within the con-
sciousness and cognition of the subject itself.
Indeed, the basic idea that Adorno shares with Weber is this antithesis between the
modern subject and the “administered world” of late capitalism. Whereas Weber saw
the problem of an “iron cage” and a withering of the individual, Adorno, too, sees that the
administered world absorbs the subject into its conceptual schemes, thereby colonizing
critical reflection and reason. This begins with the impact that administered forms of
226
r ationalism have had on consciousness. The central principle here seems to be Kantian
rather than Hegelian: that a kind of heteronomous relation exists between the adminis-
tered world and subjective consciousness. This cannot be overcome through a reconcilia-
tion of subject and object, but rather can only be combated by a new way of relating subject
and object. Since the subject is so deeply socialized by the formal rationality of the admin-
istered world, any attempt to cognize that world by using the conceptual schemes of that
world will necessarily lead us to reaffirm it rather than critique it.
For Adorno, reification is more total than it is for Lukács – it is perhaps as total as formal
rationality was for Weber. Adorno sticks to a Marxian understanding of this totalization as
the all-encompassing force of exchange and the commodity form. This has the effect, in
modern society, of serving as the foundation for our self‐ and other‐conceptions. It has the
power to constitute the very form and content of all thought as he argues in his essay “On
Subject and Object”: “Since the prevailing structure of society is the exchange‐form, its
rationality constitutes people; what they are for themselves, what they seem to be to them-
selves, is secondary. They are transformed by a mechanism that has been philosophically
transformed as transcendental” (Adorno 1997a, 745). Here Adorno brings his concern
with the dominance of formal rationality and its capacity to conform consciousness to its
own logic to the front of his concern. The philosophical dilemma is that – as Lukács had
pointed out in the second section of his essay on reification – the very categories generated
by bourgeois philosophy are the categories that merely reflect back to consciousness the
logic of the prevailing reality.
Consciousness is therefore reified in Adorno’s sense once the system of the administered
world has been able to restructure itself as the categorial reflex of consciousness. Hence,
as Gillian Rose has observed: “To say that consciousness is ‘completely reified’ is to say that
it is capable only of knowing the appearance of society, of describing institutions and
behavior as if their current mode of functioning were an inherent and invariant
characteristic or property, as if they, as objects, ‘fulfill their concepts’” (Rose 1978, 48).
Indeed, Adorno makes this clear in Prisms when he writes: “Absolute reification which
presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the
mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines
itself to self‐satisfied contemplation” (Adorno 1997b, 30). What is crucial here is that we
see Adorno moving beyond Weber and Lukács even as he is using their root ideas. What
now becomes the central project is the rejection of the “false totality” that is increasingly
consuming the subject and its powers of resistance. Hegel’s thesis about the dialectic of
universal and particular now needs to be rethought. This is because the totality of a moder-
nity shaped by instrumental reason and exchange relations is decidedly irrational, repres-
sive and “evil” and, as a result Hegel’s philosophy of the universal cannot work in such a
context. As Adorno insightfully quips in his Three Studies on Hegel: “Totality becomes rad-
ical evil in the total society” (Adorno 1971, 303).
Adorno therefore seeks to outline a new role for dialectics. At the core of this argument
is the thesis that the relation between subject and object must be recast as one where the
subject resists cognition from being absorbed by its reconciliation with the object. For
Hegel, this was the final phase of his basic theory of cognition. Dialectical thinking, for
Hegel, was supposed to end up with the “negation of the negation,” of the realization on
behalf of consciousness that what was true and rational was system, process. This was the
speculative dimension of the concept where thought would be able to participate in the
rational structure that was constitutive of reality. But Adorno’s thesis is that the social
totality, the totality of the administered world, is a false truth that poses as truth as well as
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MICHAEL J. THOMPSON
generates its own categories for its own justification. The key problem here is more social‐
theoretical than philosophical. In fact philosophy – as it has come down to us at least – is
unable to take into consideration this false totality; it even has the penchant toward giving
itself over to this false totality: “Philosophy retains so much respect for systems that even
that which confronts it does so as a system. The administered world moves in this way.
System is negative objectivity, not the positive subject” (Adorno 1966, 29).
Rather than allow cognition to move to its speculative phase, pace Hegel, and thereby
become folded into the false universal of the instrumentalized world, consciousness must
stay suspended in the negative and resist the temptation toward reconciling thought with
reality or the identity of the concept with the object. To think in terms of negation entails
that we resist the totalizing forces that the administered, instrumentally rational world
impinges on us and our thinking. Philosophy is not immune to such forces: “In its inalien-
ably general elements all philosophy carries, even that which intends freedom, the
unfreedom in which society sustains itself ” (Adorno 1966, 54). Again, it is important to
keep in mind that Adorno’s thesis is just as much sociological as it is philosophical: he is
arguing, as Lukács had before him, that the conceptual schemes that we use are them-
selves produced by the social system itself. Hence, Adorno urges, at the beginning of his
Negative Dialectics, for us to see through the falseness of the social reality present to us:
“The power of the existing reality erects façades off of which consciousness bounces. It
must strive to beat its way through them. This alone would liberate the postulate of depth
from ideology” (Adorno 1966, 27).
But what would this look like, this kind of thinking that would enable us to crack
through the edifice or façade of total reification? Adorno proposes that negative dialectics
will allow us to free concepts from the reified manifold of the administered totality. This
must be done not via a retreat into metaphysics, but a synthesis of metaphysics and mate-
rialism (cf. Bozzetti 2002; Bronner 1994). What is required is a confrontation with the
object‐domain that can grant us some metaphysical experience of that domain that is not
already determined by the prevailing conceptual manifold of a defective social totality.
What is required is immanent critique. We can overcome the totality of reification only by
asking how the relation between particular and universal do not fit together, how neither
does justice to the other. To resist identity‐thinking is therefore the key. This means
exploding the quantifying tendency of formal rationality that has the capacity to cover all
particulars with a false universal: “The opposition of thought to what is heterogeneous
reproduces itself in thought as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal critique of universal
and particular, identifying acts, judging them as to whether the concept does justice to
what it deals with, and whether the particular fulfills its concept, are the media of thinking
about the non‐identity of particular and concept” (Adorno 1966, 147).
What needs to be looked for is not an attack on reason, but rather a conception of ratio-
nality that brings into view what the quantifying force of scientific reason has hidden. The
qualitative therefore emerges as a layer of our concepts that needs to be retrieved. As he
argues in Negative Dialectics: “To give oneself over to the object (Objekt) means to do justice
to its qualitative moments. Scientific objectification tends, at one with the quantifying
tendency of all science since Descartes, to negate qualities and to transform them into
measureable determinations” (Adorno 1966, 51). The qualitative, which has been robbed
from the world by formal rationality and become reified, can only be emancipated from
those reifying powers by retrieving those aspects of the object that escape the formal
universalizing of the socially‐generated concept. But this does not mean doing away with
concepts, it means to do away with the kind of concepts that are embedded in the formal
228
rationality that pervades the administered world. Since this world also administers to us
the conceptual manifold within which we experience and “cognize” objects, it essentially
fools us into thinking that what is particular is universal. Hence, the concepts we use are
really not rational in the proper sense, they instead express and justify the particular inter-
ests of those in power, those that regulate and administer the world (cf. Cook 2007, 163ff).
Now Adorno’s project for a negative dialectics can be seen as an original solution to the
problems posed by Weber and Lukács. For now, Adorno proposes a dual solution both to
Weber’s dilemma of the loss of Persönlichkeit, or the possibility for autonomy within the
“iron cage” of modernity as well as an alternative to Lukács’ thesis of the expressive
totality of the collective agency of the proletariat. A new, critical form of agency is there-
fore retrieved to satisfy the Weberian challenge, and reification can be countered without
the need for a collective subject. Adorno’s solution is therefore to employ the negative dia-
lectic to negate the capacity of formalized concepts to cover what should otherwise be seen
correctly as a world of difference, quality, and use‐value, a world that is essentially human,
produced and valued by us. “Adornian critical theory,” writes Espen Hammer, “seeks to
criticize claims to immediacy or objectivity that in effect screen their actual social and his-
torical mediation” (Hammer 2006, 36). The negative dialectic poses for us the capacity to
peer into the intrinsic potential within objects that is ignored or concealed from view by the
prevailing conceptual field. Reified objects can disclose their potential for us once we adopt
“an orientation towards the unrealized, emphatic possibilities that inhere in damaged life”
(Cook 2007, 171).
The negative is therefore related to the potential for emancipation. Hegel is seen as the
thinker who begins philosophy’s capacity to turn against the bias of the Enlightenment,
but not as an anti‐Enlightenment thinker, but rather as professing a form of reason that is
critical of reason’s own cooptation by formal, quantifying, dominating reason. With Hegel,
Adorno argues:
philosophy turns with its whole armature of self‐reflection on the theory of science, to the task
of giving cogent expression to something that is perceived as central in reality but slips through
the meshes of the individual disciplines …[R]ather than restrict himself to a propaedeutic
examination of the possibilities of epistemology, he led philosophy to essential insights through
critical self‐reflection of critical‐Enlightenment philosophy and the scientific method. Trained
in science and using its methods, Hegel went beyond the limits of a science that merely discov-
ered an arranged data, a science that aimed at the processing of materials, the kind of science
that predominated before Hegel and then again after him, when thought lost the inordinate
span of its self‐reflection. His philosophy is at the same time a philosophy of reason and an
antipositivist philosophy. (Adorno 1971, 305)
Adorno now shows that he is not railing against reason per se, but rather the form of
reason that Weber had feared was conquering western thought: formal, instrumental
rationality. Critical reason now must engender the ability to undermine the conceptual
manifold generated by the false totality, that is, by the administered world that reifies the
subject and the concepts used by that subject to move through the world. Cognition must
be empowered by the dialectic, but not to undermine reason itself. The true aim is to enable
a critical reason that can erode the powers of the false forms of reason that allows for the
domination of man and of nature. In this sense Adorno’s differences with Weber and
Lukács seem to fade for a moment, and he is in line with a general project to ward off the
defective forms of rationality that sanction social domination.
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MICHAEL J. THOMPSON
5. Aesthetic Experience as Subjective Force‐Field
The negative dialectic is therefore one means by which a critical form of subjectivity can be
cultivated and maintained. The danger, again, was that the totalizing forces of modernity
would be able to absorb and control the individual; that reification would become total and
suppress any capacity for emancipation. But a critical subjectivity can be shaped that is
oriented against this administered world. Adorno employs the concept of the “force‐field”
(Kraftfeld) in order to express this idea where the formalism of the quantified ratio is resisted
from absorbing consciousness and its experience of the object‐domain. In critical cogni-
tion, by following the negative dialectic, one would be able to critique and resist the ten-
dency of being reconciled to the formal rationality of the administered world (Tar 1977,
153ff). But Adorno also argues that aesthetic experience is one place where the relation of
the concept, of the universal to the particular, that is to be staved off in negative dialectical
thinking can be maintained:
If anywhere Hegel’s theory of the movement of the concept is correct, it is in aesthetics; it has
to do with the reciprocal relation of universal and particular, which does not impute the
universal to the particular externally but seeks it in the force fields (Kraftzentren) of the
particular itself. (Adorno 1972, 521)
Adorno, not unlike Weber and Lukács as well, saw aesthetic experience as one of the core
means by which the rationalizing pressures of modernity could be resisted. Adorno is
much more in agreement with Weber’s views on aesthetics, however, than those of Lukács.
Where Lukács saw realism as the antidote to reification through its capacity to allow the
subject to perceive the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, thereby shattering the illu-
sions of bourgeois culture (cf. Thompson 2014), Adorno saw aesthetic experience as an
expression of the spontaneous subject. “Indifference to shaping one’s life aesthetically,”
Gerhard Schweppenhäuser writes, “indicates only an inability to grasp things with libid-
inal spontaneity” (Schweppenhäuser 2009, 69). This shares more with the concerns of
Weber than those of Lukács. For Lukács, the aesthetic of realism was to serve as a means
by which a political aesthetics could inform social cognition about the mechanisms behind
the reified world of capitalist social forms. The thesis was that nonrealist art would only
push aesthetic experience away from where the subject’s attention ought to be focused: on
the social forms that hide from view the causes and processes of reified life.
Weber, on the other hand, saw the power of aesthetic experience as having the capacity
to link with the ecstatic feelings of love, of eros, which could thereby serve to undermine
the preponderance of formal rationality. What Weber calls the “dullness of routine”
(Stumpfheit des Alltags) that emerges from the rationalized society could be combated with
the power of the erotic and its irrational and ecstatic tendencies (Weber 1972b [1920],
536ff). This implies a correlative argument to what Adorno would later come to see as the
standardization of the experience of the administered world. What Weber and Adorno
have in common here is a belief in the capacity of aesthetic experience to undermine the
cohesiveness of exchange relations and to put the subject back into connection with
aspects of his nature that have been repressed (cf. Müller‐Jentsch 2017). But even more,
for Adorno it must serve a function that is more Marxian: it must reveal the social processes
that generate art’s experience; it must, in other words, possess “social content” and under-
mine the fetish character of a commodified world that conceals its human content
(Hohendahl 1995, 149ff). Both Weber and Adorno saw that the production of artworks
230
was becoming increasingly shaped by the impulse of rationalization, particularly in

musical production (Paddison 1993, 135ff). Hence Adorno’s insistence that the culture
industry can steal from us one of the last vestiges of the capacity of art to mediate the
social world since it replaces true art’s function of mediation with an immediate experi-
ence of the standardized and commodified world. Hence Adorno’s insistence on his cri-
tique of jazz, which he sees as a highly standardized form of musical production masking
as spontaneous expression (Thompson 2010). What ultimately matters here is that, in the
end, Adorno sees art as possessing a cognitive function: its capacity to mediate reality is
contained in its formal structure, and this formal structure determines its status as either
critical or affirmative of the prevailing social reality. True art, good art, has, as Kurt Lenk
has argued, a “capacity to generate experiences not yet regulated by the system of the
administered world and to give them language. Art’s task, as it were, is to rescue once
again what is totally lacking in the standardizing, conceptually fixed social thinking that
endlessly reproduces things as they are” (Lenk 1978, 64).
But what is lost here is a link between the aesthetic and the practical. Indeed, Adorno’s
Hegelianism notwithstanding, there is a strong Kantian remnant in his thinking and ori-
entation. Lukács’ insistence on an aesthetic of realism was never meant as an advocacy of
some crude socialist realism, despite Adorno’s own criticism to that effect (Adorno 1997c).
Rather, it was meant to highlight a political‐educative function of art. Lukács’ difference
with Adorno is a crucial one since it brings to the fore the question of the purpose of
Critical Theory more generally. Lukács argues that the purpose of art is to serve a moral‐
and politically‐educative function by showing how the mechanisms of society function.
The more realist a work of art is, the more it is able to possess a cognitive function in terms
of its capacity to elucidate for the subject a rational comprehension of the forces operating
behind the reified world of appearance. Realism achieves this aim because of its ability to
force the subject out of its own experience, which has been racked by reification, and into
an objective domain where judgment can be presented. This is because Lukács’ theory of
reification possesses within it the possibility for a situated form of knowledge to shatter it
given its latent phenomenological dimensions (cf. Westerman 2010). For Lukács this is a
form of judgment that is ultimately political in that it constantly seeks to bring us to some
political consciousness, some form of cognitive awareness that can generate political
agency (Thompson 2014).
Since Adorno, as we have seen, believes that the problem of reification is more general-
ized that Lukács does, he insists that it is only aesthetics that can highlight the purposeless-
ness of art that a critical subjectivity can be shaped and sustained. The more it can shatter
the means‐ends form of rationality – the very substance of reification itself – the more it
will be able to provide “truth‐content” (Warheitsgehalt) that is socially relevant. Beauty is
now seen as the ability of the artwork to counter the world of function: “Beauty is the
exodus of what has objectified itself in the instrumentalized world (Reich der Zwecke) …
Speaking dialectically, the purposefulness of artworks is a critique of the practical positing
of ends” (Adorno 1972, 428). It holds out for us not an anticipatory experience that pre-
figures a free world, as it does for Ernst Bloch, but rather an exercise of that capacity that
stands outside the exchange‐form as well as instrumentality: “Artworks are the place-
holders of things no longer disfigured by the barter process, of that which is not injured
by the profit motive and the false needs of a devalued humanity” (Adorno 1972, 338).
But the artwork retains its political potential only if it is able to organize its content in a
form that is able to withstand and especially transgress formalism and instrumentality:
“An emancipated society would be beyond the irrationality of its faux frais and beyond the
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MICHAEL J. THOMPSON
means‐ends rationality of usefulness. That is encoded in art and is its social warhead”
(Adorno 1972, 338). Hence, the question raised in Negative Dialectics as to whether an
experience outside of instrumental rationality is still possible is given its definitive answer
in Adorno’s aesthetics (cf. Bronner 1994, 180ff).
6. The Transformation of Critique
But is the answer at which Adorno arrives a sufficient one? The relevant question that
must now be posed is how successful Adorno’s critical project actually has been or can be
to reconstitute a critical‐political subjectivity. There is little doubt that Adorno’s ideas
possess deep power in cognitive and aesthetic terms. But the fear remains, when we step
back just for a moment, that we may be recreating the very kind of solipsism that Weber
feared and that Lukács so passionately resisted. In many ways, Martin Jay’s summary view
of Adorno’s mature philosophical position is a good starting point: “Because Adorno so
fundamentally opposed the apotheosis of labor and so persistently questioned a hyposta-
tized collective subjectivity, his notorious inability to find a real link between theory and
practice must be understood as more than merely a reflection of historical failures; it was,
rather, built into his negative dialectics at its most fundamental level” (Jay 1984, 271).
I think this indicates a real problem for Adorno’s transformation of critique since it pro-
vides us with a path to a contemplative rather than praxis‐oriented critical theory. In short,
I want to suggest that Adorno’s philosophical project can be made salient only if it is in fact
merged with what he opposed: with the kind of practical‐ontological dialectic that Lukács
espoused.
Adorno’s contribution toward a theory of critical subjectivity is powerful insofar as we
consider it from a contemplative point of view. That is to say, his theory lacks a core feature
that Lukács is able to retain: namely that the overcoming of reification is not merely
cognitive, but is embedded in practices themselves. The theory of reification and the solu-
tion that Lukács gives in 1923 is not the same theory he holds to in his later work. Indeed,
he says this explicitly in his 1967 preface. But what is shared by the young and old Lukács
alike is that the status of the object‐domain is a function of human praxis. That is to say, it
is not only a cognitive constitution of the object that is at issue, but a social‐ontological
constitution of the object‐domain that requires our attention. Adorno’s limit here, as I see
it, is his collapse into a cognitive and aesthetic solipsism, one where one may indeed rage
against the reified world, but without a reach mechanism for social transformation. Only
by merging Adorno’s and Lukács ideas about “beating through” the horizon of reification
can we glimpse a more praxis‐oriented form of critique.
What Lukács offers in his social‐ontological thesis – one that is inherent even in
1923 – is the Hegelian–Marxist idea that idealism and materialism must be sublated into a
critical social‐ontology. But from Adorno, we must also take the thesis that the aesthetic
contemplation of objects as well as an immanent critique of the object‐domain that seeks
metaphysical dimensions of objects that are repressed by reified cognition serves as the
moment where consciousness itself becomes an act – but an act that is fleeting. This must
not, however, stop at the negation, it must proceed to what Lukács later sees as the social‐
ontological potential of human praxis to mediate and alter the status of the object‐domain.
This cannot be done only contemplatively. The realization must also be there that
any qualitative meaning that the object possesses and that is lost by the process of
reification – something we can discern via the negative dialectic – is only retrievable
232
through a transformation of our practices. These practices, in turn, can themselves only be
transformed once the social‐relational form that constitutes and orders those practices are
themselves transformed and altered (cf. my argument here with Feenberg 2014, 203ff).
Linking the cognitive‐aesthetic with the practical and then the social‐ontological levels of
social reality therefore can provide us with a critical theory that can link an immanent cri-
tique of consciousness with a critique of the social forms that generate the damaged life of
capitalist modernity.
Both Lukács and Adorno therefore possess elements of a critical theory of society
that can diagnose and overcome the pathologies of culture that Weber had pointed to
and was himself, ultimately, unable to solve. Adorno is right to emphasize the subject’s
immanent critique of received concepts as well as the power of art to encode within it
the capacity to experience the non‐reified, alienated world. Adorno’s Hegelianism
remains curiously contemplative. But from Lukács we have the more Hegelian idea of
a social metaphysics that seeks to root both the diagnosis and overcoming of reified
society with the need to transform the social‐relational nexus that constitutes social
being. If we hold on too closely to Adorno’s position we run the risk of falling into a
passive, even inert form of negative thinking. But once the negative dialectic that
Adorno espouses comes to its moment of opening up new dimensions of the object,
then where are we?
It seems to me that Lukács’ emphasis on a critical social‐ontology is one place to
begin. The reason for this is that the kind of opening that negative thinking creates can
be supplemented with a form of praxis that sees the social‐relational organization of
social life as the only means by which reality can be transformed. The social‐ontological
moment unites the agentic and structural domains once it is grasped that the social‐
structural reality that generates the defective conceptual manifold that negative
thinking needs to explode is only maintained and granted its ontological weight (i.e. its
existence) by the preponderance of that very conceptual manifold. Once we seek to
reorganize the ontology of social relations, we can begin to grasp the field of practice
necessary for self‐ and social transformation. Indeed, what Andrew Feenberg has
insightfully called “transforming practice” (Feenberg 2014) can now be seen in a more
textured and political register: only subjects that have been able to dislodge themselves
from the powerful apparatus of the totally administered society can make the first step
toward a transformation of self and society that is, in the end, the ultimate aim of
Critical Theory.
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Müller‐Jentsch, W. (2017). Eine bemerkenswerte übereinstimmung: Max Weber und Theodor W.
Adorno zu gesellchaftlicher vs. ästhetischer Rationalität. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 27 (2):
293–301.
Schecter, D. (2010). The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas. London:
Continuum.
Schluchter, W. (1981). The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History. Berkeley:
Schweppenhäuser, G. (2009). Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Tar, Z. (1977). The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
New York: Schocken Books.
Thompson, M.J. (2010). T.W. Adorno defended against his critics, and admirers: a defense of the cri-
tique of jazz. International Journal of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 41 (1): 37–49.
Thompson, M.J. (2014). Realism as anti‐reification: a defense of Lukács’ aesthetic of realism.
Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg‐Lukács‐Geselleschaft 14: 177–196.
Weber, M. (1972a [1922]). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen:
J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Weber, M. (1972b [1920]). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr
(Paul Siebeck).
Westerman, R. (2010). The reification of consciousness: Husserl’s phenomenology in Lukács’s iden-
tical subject‐object. New German Critique 37 (3): 97–130.
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Further Reading
Benzer, M. (2011). The Sociology of Theodor Adorno. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Buck‐Morss, S. (1979). The Origins of Negative Dialectics. New York: The Free Press.
Cook, D. (1996). The Culture Industry Revisited. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Foster, R. (2007). Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Hullot‐Kentor, R. (2008). Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New
O’Connor, B. (2012). Adorno. New York: Routledge.
O’Connor, B. (2005). Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibilty of Critical Rationality.
Sherrat, Y. (2002). Adorno’s Positive Dialectic. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Thomson, A. (2006). Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum.
Witkin, R. (2003). Adorno on Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
Zuidervaart, L. (2007). Social Philosophy After Adorno. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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15
Adorno’s Aesthetic Model of Social Critique

ANDREW HUDDLESTON
1. Introduction
Aesthetics, in many ways, is at the center of Adorno’s philosophical enterprise. He devotes

monographs to Mahler, Berg, and Wagner, and he writes a multitude of essays on litera-
ture and especially music, with his coverage ranging from high modernism to mass market
Hollywood cinema. Politics and social critique are, in turn, very much at the fore in his
aesthetics. Through his close readings of canonical as well as newer works, Adorno ana-
lyzes the way society and its ideologies are – so he takes it – in evidence in the works he
discusses. His art criticism is thereby bound up with cultural criticism. That much is of
course a truism about Adorno. In this essay, I shall suggest that Adorno’s social criticism
(in one of its main manifestations) is related to his art criticism in another interesting way
as well. Specifically, their form is similar.
The familiar dichotomy in Marxist‐inspired work in social critique is between “theory”
and “praxis,” with Adorno typically classified as someone suspicious about overtly (and, in
his view, overhasty) revolutionary attempts to turn theory into praxis – and sometimes
(often unfairly) classified as someone who repairs to the ivory tower of theory, with strains
of high modernist music playing in the background. The centrality of aesthetics to
Adorno’s philosophical concerns has further entrenched this impression. My claim that
Adorno has an “aesthetic” model of social critique may seem to play right into this
caricature. But I intend for it instead to show how Adorno is using this aesthetic approach,
not simply to retreat to art, but instead to expand and enrich the resources available for the
critique of society.
To this end, I want to explore a divide that is, as it were, within the theory side of theory
versus praxis, but ultimately with implications for what the route to praxis might be. If
praxis is about what we do practically once we uncover an ideology in order to make the
world better and escape its grip, theory, by contrast, concerns an account of that ideology
itself. Our question in the present chapter will primarily be at the meta‐level of that theory:
What is the nature and method of such a critical account, and of the ideology it purports
to uncover? What mode of diagnostic analysis is necessary to identify the ideology in the
first place? On these issues, I suggest, Adorno offers a distinctive philosophical perspective.
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ANDREW HUDDLESTON
I develop and contrast two modes of cultural critique – causal critique and intrinsic
critique – and go on to classify much of what Adorno is doing in the latter camp.
Criticism, for him, is not just a matter of charting something’s bad social effects and
leveling criticism on account of these. Criticism is instead about what close “micrological”
analysis reveals about the ideology manifested in these phenomena themselves. It thus
involves the hermeneutical unraveling of something, where the goal is to uncover, and
then to criticize, these pernicious ideologies. The object of analysis, whether an artwork or
other social phenomenon, is thus objectionable not (simply or mainly) because it causally
promotes or fosters problematic things – authoritarianism, anti‐Semitism, and the like.
Rather, it is objectionable because it contains – often in a way difficult immediately to
detect – such problematic ideologies covertly embedded within it. In this respect, I suggest,
Adorno’s model of social critique is in debt to his aesthetics, not because it reposes its hopes
in the aesthetic sphere alone but, rather, because it employs a hermeneutical, non‐causal,
non‐reductive model of ideology critique familiar from art criticism and extends this model
to social and cultural criticism more broadly.
After describing these two forms of cultural critique, I will go through some key mani-
festations in Adorno’s work. I will begin with his application of it in conventionally “high”
aesthetic domains, and then look at how he applies this model to thinking about the culture
industry and popular culture. Finally, I will discuss his treatment of a broader range of
social phenomena in Minima Moralia in particular.
My goal here is both exegetical and philosophical: I want to understand what Adorno is
up to in his critical enterprise, as well as what its philosophical import is. But I am not
aiming to vindicate Adorno’s particular interpretations, accusations, and the like. These
are contentious at best, often highly one‐sided. I do, however, want to explore the method of
cultural critique he uses and its ongoing applicability in social and political philosophy.
2. Causal Critique and Intrinsic Critique
Before I turn to the exegesis of Adorno, I would like to set out and illustrate these two broad
styles of criticism in more general terms. One style of cultural critique, as already men-
tioned, takes a broadly causal form. We look to some cultural phenomenon and then we see
what effects it has in relation to some ethical, social, or political good (e.g. individual
flourishing, freedom, and the like). Insofar as the phenomenon in question negatively
affects some things we care about, we then criticize it. We might thus, for example, criticize
“fake news” propagated by social media, insofar it leads to a poorly informed citizenry. This
causal critique is a central and indispensable kind of social critique.
Another style of critique looks not to what objectionable things a cultural phenomenon
causes, but to the intrinsically objectionable nature of the ideological content it contains.
Let us call this intrinsic critique. One interprets the phenomenon in question, and gives a
“reading” of the ideology embedded in it, and then critiques the phenomenon on account
of this embedded ideology. This approach takes a page from the way in which one might
interpret and criticize a work of art on ethical or political grounds. In doing so in the art
case, one needn’t be concerned with the artwork’s ethical or political effects, or likely
effects, but rather with, for example, its viewpoint and the ideological content thereof. That
viewpoint needn’t be the viewpoint of its creator necessarily (Adorno 1991 [1954], 168),
and needn’t (and typically won’t) be explicitly stated. It can, for Adorno, instead be borne
out in other, more subtle ways, such as the relation between its formal elements and what
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this relation analogically suggests. Adorno, I maintain, interprets not just art but also
other social phenomena in this art‐inflected, hermeneutical way.
The comparison to art interpretation can be misleading, however. It might make us think
that it is just a narrowly aesthetic complaint being made, that the target of criticism is
simply aesthetically defective (e.g. disordered, inharmonious, hackneyed, etc.). But that is
not in general true with this sort of art criticism, and certainly not true of Adorno’s art criti-
cism or his social criticism. Often, it is at core an ethical or political and not a (purely)
aesthetic charge that’s being leveled. By way of example: Adorno purports to uncover
authoritarianism and other noxious content in the music of Stravinsky. This is a controver-
sial interpretation on his part, which we will turn to shortly, but its particular merits needn’t
be our concern. Notice, irrespective of whether this is a fair criticism of Stravinsky, that this
is not just an aesthetic objection, in any narrow sense; although Adorno has aesthetic com-
plaints about the music, he is also finding this music objectionable on ethical and political
grounds. Admittedly, these kinds of charges (aesthetic–ethical–political) are very difficult,
maybe impossible, to disentangle, but the point is the continual foregrounding of ethical
and political concerns, not a sidelining of them for the sake of an allegedly “pure” aesthetic
criticism. Something further is important to see, in order to get this style of criticism into
view: Adorno’s charge isn’t grounded in a causal sociological claim that this music has the
social effect of propagating or promoting authoritarianism or other social deformations. It
may, but Adorno is not (here, at least) making the kind of charge that would be settled by,
for example, an empirical study. His claim is also not the intentionalist one that Stravinsky
deliberately composed his music to give voice to this ideology. Nor is it grounded in a
psychological claim that the music gives voice to Stravinsky’s own unconscious atti-
tudes, though Adorno may well think there is an affinity there. Adorno’s charge isn’t
even – straightforwardly anyway – the claim that the music inherits this ideological content
directly from the social world in which it is produced, if that is meant to be a reductive justi-
fication of why it should be seen as having this tainted content (i.e. the facts about the social
world become our evidence for holding that the music is thereby thus‐and‐so). It is rather
that, in its immanent musical materials, the music is, as we might say, “expressive” of
authoritarianism (and other such things) and is problematic on this account as well. This
intrinsic criticism is of course compatible with thinking it is also problematic in downstream
causal ways. The point is that those downstream causal effects do not exhaust the respects
in which it is problematic, and they do not serve as the sole grounds for potential criticism.
In light of the above, I use the word “expressive” with a caveat, familiar from aesthetics.
When we say something is “expressive,” we needn’t construe that reductively either: that
is, we shouldn’t think something has its expressive properties simply in virtue of being in a
relationship to the correlative mental or psychological states of individuals or groups
(however, exactly those are understood). To use the stock example from aesthetics: The
sonata could be “expressive” of sadness, even if it’s not the composer’s or performer’s
sadness, and the novel can be expressive of misogyny, even if the author has no such atti-
tudes, even unconsciously. That sadness is a property of the music, and the misogyny of the
novel. Now, there may well often be a genetic story, including for the cultural phenomena
of interest to Adorno. The point is that there needn’t be, and that the interpretive justifica-
tion needn’t look to such a story. In this discussion, I use various terms, including “express,”
in order to pick out the embeddedness of these ideologies, present in a work of art or social
phenomenon, that stand in need of being uncovered and criticized. Determining what
something is expressive of will be a matter of interpreting it, not of what genetically
precipitates it or otherwise underlies it.
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ANDREW HUDDLESTON
This independence is reflected in the wonderful image, to which Adorno repeatedly

returns, of the “windowless monad.” The whole point of the monad is its causal and epi-
stemic isolation from other things.1 Now this, in Adorno’s case, is a metaphor, certainly
not literal metaphysics, and not a denial of actual causal interconnectedness. But one of
the key points of this metaphor is to signal resistance to a kind of crude view – cartoon
Marxism, we might say – about the relation between so‐called “superstructure” and so‐
called “base,” maintaining that facts about the base determine facts about the superstruc-
ture. There is, for Adorno, no doubt a sense in which everything, including art, bears
indelibly the mark of the social world around it. But there is also a sense in which these
kinds of things have a measure of autonomy, at least in the sense that the methods of the
hermeneutical Geisteswissenschaften will be essential for unearthing their content and
serving as the tribunal of justification relating to possession of such content. The recogni-
tion of this degree of autonomy is in keeping with Adorno’s praise for the “non‐identical”
and rejection of identity thinking, in its resistance to reductive social analyses, in which
the phenomenon (whether social or artistic) simply becomes a cipher of various outside
forces. My contention in this chapter is that this outlook, and the approach it informs, per-
meates Adorno’s social critique as well as his aesthetics.
Adorno’s adoption of this style of social critique is part and parcel of his more general
complaints about such things as identity thinking, instrumentalist rationality, and posi-
tivism. When it comes to social critique, the instrumentalist will be keen to evaluate social
phenomena in terms of downstream effects. The only way, he or she says, something can
be bad is if it has instrumental effects that are bad. This is typically allied with a kind of
positivism, which will hold that these effects need somehow to be quantifiable and subject
to empirical validation of some kind. To think everything is to be measured and criticized
in terms of its effects is to capitulate to the hegemony of “exchange” value over “use” value
(in the extremely broad way Adorno allies the latter notion with that which resists “iden-
tity” thinking). Adorno’s recurring theme is that these narrow and blinkered ways of
thinking have blinded us to the possibility of a genuinely “reflective” critical rationality
that will be hermeneutically sophisticated, normatively committal, and untethered to
these positivistic‐instrumentalist assumptions. Yet – of course – one of the main ambitions
of the Frankfurt School was to marry social critique with empirical sociology. Many of
Adorno’s reflections, for example, on music‐listening habits, are undergirded by careful
research. His doesn’t reject criticism grounded in such results; far from it. The point is that
this is not, for Adorno, all social critique can be.
To get a grip on the structure of causal versus intrinsic critique as applied to social insti-
tutions, consider the charges one might level against, say, the Nuremberg race laws, insti-
tuted under the National Socialists in Germany. These without a doubt have tremendously
bad effects on the overall flourishing of those stigmatized by them. Those targeted by these
laws get stripped of fundamental rights, deprived of social goods, and barred access to jobs
and opportunities. The laws serve to solidify and perpetuate nefarious anti‐Semitic atti-
tudes in the populace – attitudes that in turn have further terrible effects. But these laws
are also objectionable because they (and the social formations in which they operate)
express a certain offensive idea about Aryan superiority and Semitic inferiority. In addition
to objecting to their manifold bad effects, we can object to things of this sort too. Now, this
is, as it were, an “easy” case, since this ideological content is virtually on the face of the
laws themselves. As we shall see, Adorno’s distinctive philosophical move will be to locate
ideology in far less obvious places, by looking to relatively unnoticed and seemingly
innocuous phenomena as the bearers of such ideology as well.
240
Casual critique and intrinsic critique are both important kinds of social criticism. But
there is a danger, by Adorno’s lights, that causal criticism will, aided by positivistic soci-
ology, arrogate for itself the claim of being the only legitimate or respectable form of social
criticism. Although Adorno doesn’t use this particular terminology of “intrinsic” versus
“causal,” or explicitly reflect on his critical methodology of social critique in the way I am
doing here, these distinctions help us to see what is going on in his work. I’d now like to
turn to see how he puts this sort of intrinsic critique into practice.
3. Aesthetic Applications: “High” Art
I shall begin by looking at how Adorno applies this critical method to unearthing the ideo-
logical content of artworks. Such ideological criticism is a staple of his approach. Of
course, moral and political approaches to aesthetic criticism have been around since at
least Plato’s Republic. Certain types of poetry and certain musical modes get banned, on
account of the alleged danger they pose to the citizenry. This type of critique is causal in
form, as is much that follows in its wake. But many other types of art criticism, Adorno’s
being a prime example, follow what I am calling the more intrinsic route. This involves
showing that the work of art is somehow approvingly giving voice to a viewpoint that is
morally or politically suspect. The classic example used in this domain is Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will. The objection to this film is based not just on what the film causes,
socially or politically speaking (no doubt bad!) but also on the content it itself expresses, a
stance glorifying National Socialism. Such approaches to moral and political criticism of
artworks are familiar from elsewhere in aesthetics from outside Adorno’s work, including
in Anglophone aesthetics and in artistic criticism of different stripes.2
Adorno’s critique is in this style. He offers interpretations of works that seek to locate
problematic ideologies within the immanent content of these works themselves. Few could
seriously dispute the attribution of a National Socialist ideology to Triumph of the Will,
since that work wears its ideology on its sleeve. Adorno wants to probe artworks that do
not wear their ideology so clearly on their sleeve, and his claims are thus more interpre-
tively controversial. Wagner and Stravinsky are two central targets of his criticism.
Independently of Adorno’s criticisms, Wagner of course often appears in a suspect
light, on account of his own repellent anti‐Semitic attitudes, and his later admiration by
Hitler in particular. Adorno’s criticism will not focus on these dimensions primarily, how-
ever. It will instead aim to show us that the ideological content is already there, present in
the musical form of Wagner’s works:
Wagner’s music simulates the unity of the internal and external, of subject and object, instead
of giving shape to the rupture between them. In this way the process of composition becomes
the agent of ideology even before the latter is imported into the music dramas via literature.
(Adorno 2005 [1952], 27–28)
The actual state of the world, Adorno holds, is one of a cleft between subject and object,
internal and external. Serious art will “give shape” to this rupture in an analogical fashion,
representing the state of the world through the state of the musical materials (Subotnik
1990; Paddison 1993; Geuss 2006). But Wagner’s music pretends that this gaping social
and metaphysical rift does not exist, disguising it in an illusory sonic oneness. The interpre-
tation is not about what Wagner’s music leads to downstream or causally promotes.
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ANDREW HUDDLESTON
The issue is with the musical content of his works themselves (at least as interpreted by
Adorno, and against the backdrop of Adorno’s own theory, of the state of society and how
works of art should respond to this).
Adorno’s views about the way that the relations between individual and society, subject
and object, and so on, can be presented analogically in music are extraordinarily complex.
But one key issue for Adorno is the relation between part and whole in the musical
composition:
In Wagner’s case what predominates is already the totalitarian and seigneurial aspect of
atomization; that devaluation of the individual vis‐à‐vis the totality, which excludes all
authentic dialectical interaction … In Wagner’s music, we can catch a glimpse of that ten-
dency of the late‐bourgeois consciousness under the compulsion of which the individual
insists the more emphatically on his own importance, the more specious and impotent he has
become in reality. (Adorno 2005 [1952], 40)
What we have in Wagner’s music is a symbolic mirroring of a more general social

(indeed also metaphysical) pathology. Adorno continues in this register when he discusses
the fate of subjectivity in Wagner’s music:
The “subjectivization” of orchestral sound, the transformation of the unruly body of instru-
ments to the docile palette of the composer, is at the same time a de‐subjectivization, since its
tendency is to render inaudible whatever might give a clue to the origins of a particular sound.
(Adorno 2005 [1952], 70)
Adorno here adds an interesting twist: What might seem like the emergence of subjectivity
from Wagner’s music is actually not giving voice to it. Subjectivity gets effaced in being
merged into the totality (Steinberg 2004). We may find Adorno’s interpretations rather
far‐fetched and questionable. What, we might ask, licenses his particular interpretation
over one that puts a more positive spin on the very same features of the music? It indeed
might seem as though there is something worryingly ad hoc about Adorno’s entire
approach, as if he is just itching to indict Wagner and to couch the music in such a light as
to do that. Our focus is not on the merits of Adorno’s charges against Wagner, but on the
style of ideological criticism he is employing.
Let us now turn to Stravinsky, who, at first glance anyway, is a less suspect personality
than Wagner. The central conceit of Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music is a contrast bet-
ween Schoenberg the valorized progressive and Stravinsky the nefarious reactionary.
Juxtaposing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, Adorno writes:
The texture of the composition designs the image of hope beyond hopelessness with the expres-
sion of shelter and security in desolation. Such pathos is totally alien to Stravinsky’s Petrouchka
… the music tends to take the part of those who ridicule the maltreated hero, rather than come
to his defense … In Stravinsky’s case, subjectivity assumes the character of sacrifice, but – and
this is where he sneers at the tradition of humanistic art – the music does not identify with the
victim but rather with the destructive element. (Adorno 2002 [1958], 142–143)
“Liquidation of the individual” is something “celebrated by Stravinsky’s music” (Adorno

2002 [1958], 190). Nothing in Adorno’s critique hangs on the claim that Stravinsky’s
music promotes authoritarianism, as a downstream causal effect. The point instead is that
this collectivist ideology is found in the work itself.
242
Consider another remark of Adorno’s about the musical materials Stravinsky adopts.
Adorno uses a Freudian vocabulary here. The musical elements are characterized by
“infantilism” and “regression” in their archaism (Adorno 2002 [1958], 160–167).
According to Adorno, they are thus lacking in “immanent musical validity”: “the [musical]
structure,” he continues, “is externally superimposed by the composer’s will which deter-
mines the nature of his formulations” (Adorno 2002 [1958], 167). By Adorno’s lights,
composers are faced with certain musical materials at their particular period in musical
history. To turn one’s back on these is a kind of abnegation of responsibility: One should be
working in such a way as to keep with the demands of these materials, but in Stravinsky’s
case, we have a notable retreat to an earlier (and now no‐longer‐appropriate) musical
vocabulary. On one level, this can seem as though it is a personal charge against Stravinsky’s
exercise of compositional will. But Adorno’s point is also about the resultant music itself
and what its lack of “immanent musical validity” ideologically reflects. Not just Stravinsky
the man but Stravinsky’s music is reactionary in its musical vocabulary. This reactionary
quality is something to be located on a symbolic level: that we get, for instance, a neo‐
classical idiom in place of a steely atonal one is an indication that the work is fleeing from
an honest representation of reality rather than facing up to it.
The basic model of Adorno’s art interpretation, illustrated through these brief exam-
ples, involves locating an embedded ideology through close reading of the formal texture
of the work itself. This method is not confined to “high” art. The culture industry and
popular culture, the topic of Section 15.4, often involve this method as well. Then we will
move on to look at other social phenomena in Section 15.5 and see how Adorno extends
the model of criticism to works outside the usual domain of art, broadly‐construed.
4. The Culture Industry and Popular Culture
Adorno’s approach to the culture industry is often empirical. Research of a psychological

and sociological nature can tell us about the effects of culture on its consumers, and the
mechanisms that explain its ongoing appeal and its design to ensure that appeal. For
example, in his discussion of popular songs, Adorno sees their market appeal as relying on
a balance of standardization and variation. This music needs to be as familiar as possible
(so as to be reassuring and unchallenging) while nonetheless having some minimal differ-
ences (so one can justify selling the new song, album, etc.) (Adorno 2002 [1941]). Yet
Adorno’s approach is not confined to this sort of explanatory model, illuminating though
it is. As with his criticism of “high” art, he is also interested in an explanation of what is
conveyed through the immanent content of these works, and he subjects them to close
hermeneutical scrutiny to unveil this content.
We get a programmatic statement of this approach in remarks on the (at the time) new
medium of television. Adorno notes that the “treatment of the formal characteristics of
television within the system of the culture industry should be supplemented by closer
consideration of the specific contents of programs … Abstracting from the form would be
philistine vis‐à‐vis any work of art; it would amount to measuring by its own standard a
sphere that ignores aesthetic autonomy and replaces form with function and packaging”
(Adorno 1998 [1963], 59). About the script of one now‐forgotten show, Adorno writes:
“Within the psychological routine and the ‘psychodrama’ there still lurks the old pernicious
idea of the taming of the shrew: that a sensitive and strong man overcomes the capricious
unpredictability of an immature woman. The gesture toward psychological depth serves
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ANDREW HUDDLESTON
only to make stale patriarchal conceptions palatable to spectators” (Adorno 1998 [1963],
65). Now, this may have the effect of stabilizing the patriarchy. But there is an additional,
intrinsic objection to the ideology present in show itself, and that ideology needs to be
uncovered through close reading.
A similar sort of approach is at work in Adorno’s treatment of popular music. Noting
the tendency of popular music (evident in titles and lyrics of countless pieces) to regress
into “baby talk,” Adorno traces this into the musical form as well:
The music, as well as the lyrics, tends to affect such a children’s language. Some of its principal
characteristics are: unabating repetition of some particular musical formula comparable to
the attitude of the child incessantly uttering the same demand… the limitation of many mel-
odies to very few tones, comparable to the way in which a small child speaks before he has a
full alphabet at his disposal; purposely wrong harmonization resembling the way in which
small children express themselves in incorrect grammar; also certain over‐sweet sound colors,
functioning like musical cookies and candies. (Adorno 2002 [1941], 450)
The music may well cause people to be more infantilistic. But Adorno’s point does not rest
just on this possible effect or related ones. It is that the objectionable infantilism is also in
the music, analogically mirrored in its formal elements.
So too with Adorno’s notorious remarks about jazz. (“On Jazz” is an essay from 1936,
so Adorno’s point of reference is music in, for instance, Weimar Berlin, not American
jazz of later decades.) As with his criticisms of Wagner and Stravinsky, the point is not to
vindicate his controversial take. But I want to show that he uses the same kind of micro-
logical analysis, looking to the musical character of the jazz piece itself, not to its effects
on the social world. As with Adorno’s other sorts of remarks about art, his main point
is going to turn on analogies among the formal musical elements, on the one hand,
and individuals and society, on the other. Take, for example, what he says about jazz
improvisation:
Even the much‐invoked improvisations, the “hot” passages and breaks, are merely ornamental
in their significance, and never part of the overall construction or determinant of the form.
Not only is their placement, right down to the number of beats, assigned stereotypically; not
only is their duration and harmonic structure as a dominant effect completely predetermined;
even its melodic form and its potential for simultaneous combinations rely on a minimum
number of basic forms. (Adorno 2002 [1936], 477)
The improvisation gives the impression of being free, but actually it is not. This mirrors the
fate of the subject in the modern world, who isn’t truly free under the reigning ideology,
but has the illusion of ostensible freedom. The line that Adorno is pressing, again, is not
just about effects, but what we find when we do “close” readings of certain cultural phe-
nomena. As we shall in the next section, Adorno applies this same approach to other social
phenomena as well.
5. Micrological Analysis in Minima Moralia
We see this aesthetic form of social critique especially in evidence in Adorno’s Minima
Moralia. The book comprises a collection of aphorisms, modeled after Nietzsche’s Gay
Science.
244
Yet, for Adorno, the relevant form of science will be a “melancholy” one, subtitled
Reflections on a Damaged Life. Whereas Nietzsche will be a celebrant of vivacious life, Adorno
will quip, quoting Ferdinand Kürnberger in the epigraph to the book, that “life does not
live.” Adorno’s approach in this book is “micrological”: “He who wishes to know the truth
about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that
determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses” (Adorno 2005 [1951],
15). The point is to look closely at various social phenomenon, undertake a certain sort of
hermeneutical unearthing, and reveal what these social phenomena indicate about the
world around us. “The splinter in your eye,” he notes, “is the best magnifying glass”
(Adorno 2005 [1951], 50). This is a rich metaphor, alluding to the famous dictum from
the Gospels.3 The Biblical reference is about hypocrisy – criticizing others, without real-
izing that there are similar faults of one’s own. Ideology, it might be comfortable and
reassuring to think, is not about nice, ordinary everyday life; it is about those nasty things
that happen in the political sphere at the hands of other people, the nefarious malefactors.
Yet Adorno wants to indicate that everyday life is also shot through with ideology as well.
Adorno is going to be looking at small, familiar things, and uncovering the ideology
embedded in them. He traverses an impressive range of phenomena, which might seem as
though they are beyond suspicion.
Take, for example, what he says about these mundane phenomena:
What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only
sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep
before the street, no wall around the garden? And which driver is not tempted, merely by the
power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children, and cyclists?
The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard‐hitting,
unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. (Adorno 2005 [1951], 40)
The point is analogical. It’s not that windows and cars encourage Fascism, as a political
movement. It is that in this mode of interaction with the world, there is a kind of mirroring
of such violence already. But this dimension would pass beneath regular notice. Ordinary
life would seem all right. But, actually, something darker is present. Compare this with the
aesthetic cases. Yes, Stravinsky’s music may sound lively and rich, the Hollywood movie
may have a charming plot, and a sweepingly beautiful, lushly orchestrated score. But this
can serve to mask worrying forms of ideology. So too in social life itself.
Or consider his remarks on the dress of hotel doormen:
The culture industry’s budget runs to the billions, but the formal law of its performances is
that of the tip. The excessively glossy, hygienic quality of industrialized culture is the sole rudi-
ment of primal shame, an exorcising image, comparable to the tail‐coats of the highest hotel
managers, who, in their eagerness not to look like head‐waiters, outdo aristocrats in elegance,
so thereby giving themselves away as headwaiters. (Adorno 2005 [1951], 196)
The seemingly innocuous gets interpreted in such a way that it no longer seems ideologi-
cally innocent. Note also what Adorno says about small talk:
In the form of a few sentences about the health of one’s wife that prelude the business
discussion over lunch, the utilitarian order has taken over and assimilated even its opposite.
The taboo on talking shop and the inability to talk to each other are in reality the same thing.
Because everything is business, the latter is unmentionable like rope in a hanged man’s home.
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Behind the pseudo‐democratic dismantling of ceremony, of old‐fashioned courtesy, of the use-

less conversation suspected, not even unjustly, of being idle gossip, behind the seeming clarifi-
cation and transparency of human relations that no longer admit anything undefined, naked
brutality has been ushered in. The direct statement without divagations, hesitations, or reflec-
tions, that gives the other the full facts in the face, already has the full timbre of the command
issued under Fascism by the dumb to the silent. Matter‐of‐factness between people, doing away
with all ideological ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology for
treating people as things. (Adorno 2005 [1951], 41–42)
Thanks to Adorno’s interpretation, we come to see something in this that might otherwise
have been lost on us. The architecture of homes (Section 18), practices of gift‐giving
(Section 21), and many more all fall under Adorno’s withering gaze. To many, Adorno’s
interpretations will seem hyperbolic and paranoid. My point, as it was in my discussion of
his aesthetics, is not to vindicate his interpretations, but rather to try to understand the
nature of the charge.
Now, in the case of all of these things, they are products of a certain ideological system.
On some level then, they can be explained as arising due to this system. But Adorno doesn’t
rest content with that sort of explanatory approach. As I’ve indicated already, he finds a
kind of ideological content embedded, analogically or metaphorically, within these prac-
tices themselves, and he seeks to unpack that content for further investigation and
criticism. What is important is that these phenomena somehow inscribe or mirror the ide-
ology themselves. Once again, we return to that image of the monad. The point is not that
there is literal causal isolation between the larger capitalist system and, say, small talk.
Obviously, the interrelations are going to be rich. But it is rather that when we look to the
practice and interpret it, we uncover the traces of the ideology lodged there.
6. Pushing Back Against Adorno’s Methods
Now that we’ve had an illustration of Adorno’s aesthetic mode of criticism, and its appli-
cation to social phenomena, I would like to consider some philosophical issues about its
merits as a method.
As already suggested, there is a strong similarity to Adorno’s art criticism here. But
might we accuse Adorno of relying too much on this analogy? Social phenomena are not
works of art, after all. The latter are intentionally created by a person or relatively circum-
scribed group (as in the collective creation of a film). Because these are created through
design, and bear a closer relation to the minds of their creators, it is easier to think of
them as bearers of content that might be extracted through interpretation. But not so, it
might seem, when it comes to social phenomena. How then can they have this sort of
content in them to be unpacked? Is this any more intellectually legitimate than reading
tea leaves?
It might seem that it is easier to locate these kinds of “meanings” in works of art. But
notice that even when it comes to art, these meanings are not explicitly stated, not even
in a work involving language. Such content will have to be recovered through interpre-
tation. So, there is actually less of a disanalogy here, by Adorno’s lights, than it first
seems. As we have seen, having the content in question is a matter of a structural
analogy between the formal artistic materials and the individual and society. The sort of
mirroring in question happens in a variety of different phenomena, not simply in those
246
that are conventionally mimetic. Here the monad metaphor again proves useful. A
Leibnizian monad will contain within it a representation of the whole world. Adorno of
course does not accept that metaphysics, but the point of the metaphor is that a social
phenomenon is monadic insofar as it inscribes the character the society around it.
Adorno doesn’t think this mirroring is limited to art, but that it is a feature of other sorts
of social phenomena as well.
Suppose we agree on the broadly speaking metaphysical point that there can, in prin-
ciple anyway, be content of this sort. An epistemic worry still lurks in the vicinity: Who’s
to say that the content is really there? When Adorno makes charges against Stravinsky’s
music, what is to say he’s right? What justification can he have for this interpretation? One
answer here – a somewhat unsatisfying one – is that the justification is of the same form as
it is for interpretations in general. Do they weave together sufficient features of the thing in
a persuasive way? Do they shed useful light on the thing being interpreted? Such is the test
of an interpretive account. There will not be hard‐and‐fast rules, nor, when it comes to
anything reasonably complex, will there be interpretations brooking no debate. Even if we
think these interpretations of social phenomena will be the site of continual contestation,
it does not follow that any interpretation is as good as any other. Ultimately, these kinds
of epistemic worries cannot be fully allayed, but their force can at least be somewhat
lessened.
Another final kind of objection I want to consider is a more political objection. It is that
Adorno’s focus on these sorts of things is ultimately frivolous and insufficiently revolu-
tionary. It is the reaction of an aesthete at core. It is, the objection continues, the least of
our problems what cultural phenomena express. In the face of actual murder, and other
grave harms, who could possibly care about this sort of thing? These may of course be cor-
related with bad effects. But the effects are ultimately what matter. Focus on this sort of
seemingly irrelevant content might give further sustenance to the charge that Adorno is
an out‐of‐touch aesthete mandarin, resident of the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (Lukács 1971; cf.
Geuss 2006).
Yet Adorno could reply that his sort of approach is not as pointless as it may seem.
This remark from Minima Moralia serves as a methodological statement of sorts:
Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its
rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light. To
gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects – this
alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls out
imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced,
delineates the mirror‐image of its opposite. (Adorno 2005 [1951], 247.)
Criticism can give us this, even when it cannot give us a well‐worked out plan for amelio-
rating the status quo. Social criticism is similar to aesthetic criticism in this way. Adorno is
opposed to art with its eye always on praxis (such as that of Brecht), which he thinks risks
degenerating into crass propaganda. From one way of looking at things, the charge that
social criticism is insufficiently effective is virtually a backhanded compliment. For him,
one of the great potential merits of art is its autonomy, which means also its autonomy
from immediate praxis. So too with social criticism. Of course, this defense may just serve
to further confirm the charge. In any event, we needn’t think that there is a kind of either/
or in operation here: Intrinsic critique can coexist alongside causal critique. As we see,
Adorno himself engages in both.
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ANDREW HUDDLESTON
7. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have outlined a certain form of social and cultural criticism that we get in
Adorno’s work. While it is not the exclusive form of critique in Adorno’s oeuvre, it is par-
ticularly notable there. Since it is philosophically distinctive and interesting, it bears further
methodological scrutiny. As a form of criticism, it is not unique to Adorno. It has impor-
tant anticipations in Nietzsche (see Huddleston (2019)) and arguably in Hegel as well, in
his analyses of Geist’s self‐understandings and misunderstandings in various of its forms
of life. With Nietzsche, we begin to see more of the turn to a hermeneutics of the covert,
finding hidden meanings beneath the apparently simple surface: what seems like a world-
view of love is actually one of hate, one of ascetic renunciation actually one of world‐
hatred, and so forth. With Adorno, this probing interpretation of cultural phenomena
reaches a particularly rich and sophisticated expression.
It is a familiar idea in Anglophone social and political philosophy that practices or insti-
tutions might express ideals or values (e.g. equality) in their organizing principles (e.g.
Anderson 1999). The issue then is not just whether the institution causally promotes a
good outcome, but rather what it expresses. In the terms I have used in this chapter so far,
a critique organized along these lines would be an intrinsic critique as opposed to a causal
critique. As employed by Adorno, the style of critique is different in two main ways from
what we typically see in analytic work today. First, for him, it is not just large‐scale political
institutions (e.g. democratic government) that have such expressive content, but rather
the mundanities of everyday life, which are not sealed off from the influence of ideology.
“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” [There is no right living/ genuine life in the false]
(Adorno 2005 [1951], 39). Second, interpretation becomes a considerably more conten-
tious matter. The ideological content allegedly located in a social phenomenon will prove
far more controversial. This, again, is in keeping with the aesthetic analogy, with the idea
being that the same work of art can be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways. This doesn’t
necessarily collapse into the idea that “anything goes.” So too with social phenomena.
Adorno is sometimes accused of abandoning actual politics for art. But this analogy
between aesthetic criticism and social criticism should serve to remind us that art, society,
and politics prove impossible to disentangle. This lesson, I have suggested, informs not just
Adorno’s aesthetics, but his social criticism as well. His model of social criticism is not a
way of giving up real social critique for occupation with purely aesthetic matters, but
rather a way of rethinking what social critique might amount to.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1991 [1954]). How to look at television. In: The Culture Industry (ed. J.M. Bernstein),
155–177. London: Routledge.
Adorno, T.W. (1997 [1970]). Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1998 [1963]). Television as ideology. In: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
(trans. H. Pickford). New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2002 [1958]). Philosophy of Modern Music (trans. A.G. Mitchell and W.V. Blomster).
New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T.W. (2002 [1936]). On jazz. In: Essays of Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans. S. Gillespie), 470–
495. Berkeley: University of California Press.
248
Adorno, T.W. (2002 [1941]). Popular music. In: Essays of Music (ed. Richard Leppert; trans.
S. Gillespie), 237–469. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2005 [1952]). In Search of Wagner (trans. R. Livingstone),. London: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (2005 [1951]). Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott).
London: Verso.
Anderson, E.S. (1999). What is the point of equality? Ethics 109 (2): 287–337.
Gaut, B. (2007). Art, Emotion, and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geuss, R. (ed.) (2006). Adorno’s gaps. In: Outside Ethics, 234–248. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Huddleston, A. (2019). Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lukács, G. (1971[1920, Rev. 1968]). The Theory of the Novel: A Historico‐Philosophical Essay on the
Forms of Great Epic Literature (trans. Anna Bostock). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Steinberg, M. (2004). Listening to Subjectivity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Subotnik, R.R. (1990). Developing Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Further Reading
Finlayson, J.G. (2002). Adorno on the ethical and the ineffable. European Journal of Philosophy 10 (1):
1–25.
Freyenhagen, F. (2013). Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Geuss, R. (ed.) (2006). Art and criticism in Adorno’s aesthetics. In: Outside Ethics, 161–183.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goehr, L. (2003). Art and politics. In: Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (ed. J. Levinson), 471–488.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hammer, E. (2005). Adorno and the Political. London: Routledge.
Kellner, D. (2002). Theodor W. Adorno and the dialectics of mass culture. In: Adorno: A Critical
Reader (eds. N. Gibson and A. Rubin), 86–109. Oxford: Blackwell.
Menke, C. (1998). The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (trans.
N. Solomon). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rush, F. (2004). Conceptual foundations of early critical theory. In: Cambridge Companion to Critical
Theory (ed. F. Rush), 6–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Witkin, R. (2003). Adorno on Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Notes
1 Adorno (1997 [1970], 5): “That artworks as windowless monads ‘represent’ what they them-
selves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent
historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dia-
lectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it.”
2 See, for example, the discussion in Gaut (2007) of “ethical” criticism. The problem for Gaut is
with the attitude or stance put forward by the work, particularly if this is one where it invites our
agreement.
3 Matthew 7, 3–5.
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16
The Critique of the Enlightenment

MARTIN SHUSTER
1. Introduction
This chapter is about Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlight
enment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002), first published in 1944 and then revised in
1947.1 The book is a classic example of the Frankfurt School approach to Critical
Theory, synthesizing radical social critique with a keen knowledge of philosophy, his-
tory, and culture. Its target is the enlightenment, and its chapters are oriented around
elements of the modern world that Horkheimer and Adorno examine and critique in
later works, notably society (capitalism, Nazism, fascism, anti‐Semitism, and so forth),
morality (Kantian morality, instrumental thinking, sadism, and so forth), and culture
(music, art, cinema, and so forth). My procedure in what follows will be to focus on the
first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” as it forms the basis of the rest of the book,
and is thereby the most significant. I will first review the dominant strands of interpre-
tation around the book’s alleged core insight(s), and then propose a new interpretation,
one that especially orients itself around two recent arguments about the text (Hulatt
2016a; Shuster 2014a).
Most prominently, I argue that the central aims of the book are not to present any sort
of critique of any sort of historical account of a period called the “enlightenment”
(regardless of how that term is understood). Instead, Horkheimer and Adorno’s aims are
to comment on the structure of human agency, a structure that certainly reaches strong
philosophical elaboration in the historical period of the enlightenment (especially the
German – Kantian – enlightenment), but that nonetheless begins significantly before this
period (this is one way to understand the breathtaking scope of the book, reaching as far
back as the ancient world). In short, it is apt to call the text a sort of commentary on “the
prehistory of subjectivity” (Thyen 1989, 109).
To further signpost the structure of this chapter, let me note that my central argument
will be that the chief interlocutor for Horkheimer and Adorno is Immanuel Kant, and that
the chief issue for them is the same cluster of issues that animates Kantian and post‐Kantian
philosophy more broadly: the parameters, operations, and limits of self‐consciousness.
My account concludes by suggesting that because of this stress, the emergence of
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MARTIN SHUSTER
self‐consciousness arises as a crucial issue, one that can be addressed by putting the entire
argument into conversation with the work of Sigmund Freud in this area – a task I under-
take in the chapter’s conclusion. The ontogenetic elements of Freud’s account have been
almost entirely absent from the literature connecting Freud and Adorno, and I show that
this is a mistake, as Freud offers an essential piece to the story that Horkheimer and Adorno
presuppose in constructing the dialectic of enlightenment. Furthermore, Freud emerges as
central in this context exactly because Freud himself is engaged in dialog with Kant on
these issues.
2. Dialectic of Enlightenment and History
Jürgen Habermas has presented perhaps the most enduring reading of the text, arguing
that “Horkheimer and Adorno play a variation on the well known theme of Max Weber”
(Habermas 1991, 110), where a process of disenchantment leads to emergence of a
modernity delineated chiefly by “intellectual and practical operations” oriented around
“demytholigising, secularising, or disenchanting some mythical, religious or magical rep-
resentation of the world” (Jarvis 1998, 24). In order to conquer and overcome fear,
enlightenment uses its capacity for knowledge chiefly as a capacity for power (power over
nature). As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, “the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule
over disenchanted nature” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 2). In overcoming mythology,
though, enlightenment eventually also itself reverts into myth, in the form of a positiv-
istic conception of the world, where – like the operations of fate in mythological
worldviews – the world is now governed according to abstract forces, where “the pure
immanence of positivism … is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is
allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear”
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 11; Josephson‐Storm 2017, 244). Everything boils down
to power over nature (and thereby also to self‐preservation): myth attempts to master
nature by means of its mythological worldview, while enlightenment does the same by
means of a disenchantment process: each is equally instrumental, and “just as myths
already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply
in mythology” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 8). And this just is the famous “dialectic
of enlightenment.”
Habermas stresses two related aspects of this story. First, he highlights the extent to
which the entire account – both myth and enlightenment – have their origins in power, in
the desire to master nature. Second, Habermas stresses the extent to which everything –
the entire process of myth or enlightenment – boils down to power relations, and that
enlightenment reason just is another expression of power. Here are two representative
passages:
Reason itself destroys the humanity it first made possible – this far reaching thesis, as we have
seen, is grounded in … the fact that from the very start the process of enlightenment is the result
of a drive to self‐preservation that mutilates reason, because it lays claim to it only in the form
of a purposive‐rational mastery of nature and instinct – precisely an instrumental reason.
(Habermas 1983, 100)
So what enlightenment has perpetrated on myth, they apply to the process of enlighten-
ment as a whole. Inasmuch as it turns against reason as the foundation of its own validity,
critique becomes total. (Habermas 1991, 118–119)
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THE CRITIQUE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The range of readings of Dialectic of Enlightenment that operate essentially according to

this rubric are too vast to cite, but, in many ways, Habermas’ reading sets the standard.
The point that Habermas and others agree on is the fact of a particular regressive under-
standing of history, a philosophy of history that is ultimately and entirely opposed to any
progressive reading of the historical record (Brunkhorst 2000; Schnädelbach 1989;
Schoolman 2001). Furthermore, it is a reading that stresses the origins of the enlighten-
ment and its problems out of a basic natural fact about humans: that they pursue self‐
preservation, that is, that “human beings have sought to control nature in the hope that this
control will enhance their ability to preserve themselves. The whole enlightenment effort to
distance human beings from nature is fueled by a natural desire for self‐preservation” (Stone
2008, 51). I will question elements of this reading shortly, but before that, let me finish
Habermas’ story, all in order to set up an alternative reading.
Habermas accuses Horkheimer and Adorno of presenting an account that is ultimately
self‐defeating and self‐liquidating: if reason is merely instrumental, always somehow in
the service of fear and self‐preservation, then it is difficult to see what possibilities reasoned
critique offers (Vogel 1996, 66ff). As Habermas notes, Horkheimer and Adorno ultimately
“surrendered themselves to an uninhibited scepticism regarding reason” (Habermas
1991, 129). This is problematic on its own terms, but also on the terms that Horkheimer
and Adorno set for themselves when they stress in the preface to the book that their cri-
tique was “intended to prepare a positive concept of enlightenment which liberates it from
its entanglement in blind domination” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xviii). Habermas
takes such a dead‐end exactly to point toward his own conception of communicative ratio-
nality, with its transformation – for the better – of the lifeworld (Habermas 1979, 1984).
Of course, there are problems with Habermas’ theory, even for those sympathetic to it,
chief among them that it too is unable to entirely do away with the residue of something
beyond reason as somehow essential to it (de Vries 2005, 108–167). More pressingly, there
is also the fact that framing this as a dead‐end or a performative contradiction is itself dis-
putable. It may be the case that what we have here is instead an aporia (Allen 2014;
Noppen 2015), and that what such an aporia suggests is not a “dead‐end,” but rather the
opening for new conceptual moves that locate such an aporia as its origin, that is, one that
aims to stress a distinct sort of reflection on the fact that such an aporia operates here, and
thereby only to “prepare a positive concept of enlightenment and not to lay it all out”
(Noppen 2015, 311), where ultimately we are “as mindful of the dangers of enlighten-
ment rationality as we are of our commitment to it” (Allen 2014, 22).
3. Dialectic of Enlightenment and Agency
More pressing, there are two particular problems for this “standard” reading. The first
problem is simply that the range of references within Dialectic of Enlightenment far exceeds
anything like a historical allusion to the enlightenment (and this is true no matter how one
casts “The Enlightenment,” or where one locates it origins). Strikingly, Horkheimer and
Adorno refer back even to ancient Greece and Israel in elements of their account. This has
led to claims that essentially suggest that Dialectic of Enlightenment “is not a historical trea-
tise but a collection of haphazardly chosen and unexplained examples to illustrate various
forms of the debasement of ‘enlightened’ ideals” (Kolakowski 1978, 3:373). A more char-
itable reading might suggest that these ought to be read as Weberian “ideal‐types,” but this
then threatens to make the text too positivistic, eliding the way in which history – actual
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MARTIN SHUSTER
history – is invoked (Rose 1978, 103). The second problem is that it is hard how to under-
stand the necessity involved: is it the case that whatever regression is happening according
to the Dialectic of Enlightenment is merely historically contingent? That is, could things
have possibly turned out differently if the enlightenment had unfolded differently? Say, if
the Atlantic slave trade had never taken hold or if imperialism or colonialism had never
taken off as a strategy within the West? Or is it the case that there is some stronger sense of
necessity involved here? But if it is the latter, then how do we account for the allegedly his-
torical nature of the account?
This has led interpreters to recognize that one can – indeed ought to – give a different
reading of the text, acknowledging that it is not a historical account of anything like a
period known as the Enlightenment, but is instead an argument about “enlightening
thought,” and indeed, this seems, in fact, to be exactly what Horkheimer and Adorno pro-
pose in the first line of the text, when they note that, “Enlightenment understood in the
widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from
fear and installing them as masters” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 1). On such a view,
the argument of the text is fundamentally about human agency, about what it means to
make decisions and to enact them in the world. Adorno himself confirms such a view
when he writes, years later, in Negative Dialectics that, “as far back as we can trace it, the
history of thought has been a dialectic of enlightenment” (Adorno 1973, 118).
While the parameters of how to unpack the view show some variance, a guiding thread
seems to be that reason is somehow deformed, so that ultimately “our modern aspiration
to eliminate all ‘myth’ from reason … to let reason rule autonomously, is what generates
the antagonistic space of reason that is neutral, impersonal, without subjective accompa-
niment” (Bernstein 2001, 133). In other words, both “bureaucratic rationalization” and
“the rationalization of reason” (felt most acutely as the skepticism that reason comes to
feel even toward itself) leads to a reason that is fundamentally divorced from and, indeed,
actively “disavows and destroys” something “intrinsic to it” (Bernstein 2001, 134, 135).
The “intrinsic” element here is of course Adorno’s famous notion of the nonidentical,
but how to unpack that term has ranged from everything from an “embodied ‘thing‐
experience’” (Finke 2008, 89) to “auratic particularity” (Bernstein 2001) to capturing
“what is left out in the subsumption of the particular under a concept” (Freyenhagen
2013, 48) to “a logical space where there is nothing to be known” (Shuster 2015, 12) to
“the particularity of the object that is not subjected to universalizing concepts or categori-
zation” (O’Connor 2004, 48). What appears to hold these conceptions together is the idea
that the dialectic of enlightenment somehow deforms reason because it forces reason to
miss or to abandon something essential. We might call this an “objective” view of the
dialectic of enlightenment, where this term signifies only the idea that the construction of
an object of reason (whatever that object may be) leaves something out, in Adorno’s words,
that “the name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into
their concepts without leaving a remainder” (Adorno 1973, 5).
It is important to note that while such a view avoids some of the pitfalls that the histor-
ical view raises about necessity and contingency, it raises other related issues. When the
dialectic of enlightenment is tied strictly to an argument about agency, it is no longer pos-
sible to link the dialectic explicitly to the barbarism of Auschwitz, and what it signifies
(Adorno 2000, 101; Freyenhagen 2013, 28–29), but rather only to stress that “nothing
within instrumental reason provides rational resources to resist such atrocities” or that
“more directly, [that] the atrocities themselves radically depended on rationalized social
practices” (Bernstein 2017, 209). It is not thereby the case that “Auschwitz or its like …
254
was, somehow … inevitable” (Bernstein 2017, 209), and that, ultimately, “the ‘problem’ of
the dialectic of enlightenment is not reducible to worries” about such material conditions
of suffering (Shuster 2014a, 34). To be sure, there is a link, but it is certainly not causal:
the dialectic of enlightenment instead makes human agency such that agents become
more susceptible to political and/or social deformities of the sort exemplified by Auschwitz.
The analogy here is to someone like Hannah Arendt (Auer et al. 2003; Rensmann and
Gandesha 2012; Villa 2007), who thinks that the creation of a certain sort of thoughtless-
ness, creates an agent who is essentially a “nobody” and that totalitarianism is a distinct
evil that is orchestrated by a mass of such nobodies (Shuster 2018).
I have wanted to stress this point in order to note that there is a way, proposed recently
(Hulatt 2016a; Shuster 2014a), to understand the dialectic of enlightenment as an
argument solely about agency or reason, as opposed to the object of reason; that is, that the
dialectic of enlightenment is fundamentally an argument about human subjectivity as
opposed to how such subjectivity constructs its objects. Such a view might be termed a
“subjective” view of the dialectic of enlightenment. What is striking about both versions of
this view is the extent to which they orient the dialectic of enlightenment around the
thought of Immanuel Kant, with each view stressing an element of the basic Kantian pic-
ture in order to present a reading of Horkheimer and Adorno’s project.
In what follows I sketch these two arguments, showing how they surprisingly rest on a
common thread in Kant’s thought, but how they also thereby present a distinct problem
that neither author has thus far recognized. I conclude by presenting a sketch of how this
problem might be addressed by means of the work of Sigmund Freud. The remainder of
this essay is thereby heavily invested in the thought of Kant and Freud (and, importantly,
how the latter himself engages with the former), assuming that bringing to the fore core
issues for each of these thinkers is the best way both to sharpen and understand Horkheimer
and Adorno’s dialectic.
4. Dialectic of Enlightenment and Kant
There are many interlocutors for Dialectic of Enlightenment and increasingly even obscure
ones such as James Frazer (Hulatt 2016a, 7ff) and Roger Callois (Hammer 2015, 59;
Hulatt 2016b) are being recognized. The evidence for Kant being a central interlocutor – at
least for the first essay of Dialectic of Enlightenment – is initially circumstantial. Note, for
example, the references to Francis Bacon in the opening pages of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment and to the B edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Similarly, in a May 23,
1942 letter to Leo Löwenthal, Horkheimer explains the Dialectic of Enlightenment as
follows: “Enlightenment here is identical with bourgeois thought, nay, thought in general”
(Wiggerhaus 1994, 314).2 Framing the project as applying to “thought in general” should
immediately call to mind Kant’s stress, in his famous letter to Marcus Herz of 1772, on
delineating “what is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call ‘representation’
to the object” (Kant 1999, 71), that is, that we need to explore “the synthesis of conditions
of a thought in general” (Kant 1998, A397). Linking Kant’s project and bourgeois thought
is a move that can readily be understood in the context of György Lukács’ procedure in
History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács sees Kant’s thought essentially as an expres-
sion of bourgeois alienation (Lukács 1972, 110ff). My aims are not to validate this picture,
or even to claim that Horkheimer and Adorno take it up wholesale in Dialectic of
Enlightenment (it is obvious, for example, from, say, both Adorno’s writings on Kant and on
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Lukács, that his views of Kant are somewhat more nuanced). My aim instead is only to
make more plausible the idea that Dialectic of Enlightenment is, at bottom, fundamentally
engaged with Kant.
To bring this claim into sharper focus, let me rehearse one way in which this has been
unpacked in my Autonomy after Auschwitz, and in subsequent responses to engagements
with the book (Shuster 2017). Early in the first – and most important essay – of Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno claim that: “the teachings of the priests were
symbolic in the sense that in them sign (Zeichen) and image (Bild) coincide” (Horkheimer
and Adorno 2002, 12). This line unlocks the door to Horkheimer and Adorno’s text.
According to their story, “signs” calculate and categorize the world, while “images”
resemble it; each orients a different possibility of relation to the world, for parsing the
fundamental relationship between subject and object. In relating to the world by means
of signs, one gives up the possibility of being akin to it – one solely classifies objects in
the world, allowing such classifications, themselves always general, to “stand for” the
particular. In relating to the world by means of images, one becomes like the world and
thereby gives up the possibility of knowing it on such general terms – one “knows” it solely
through imitation (a knowledge, thereby, that is really no knowledge because it cannot be
generalized beyond this relation). Broadly speaking, these two orientations toward the
world share formal features with the two worldviews that have been recognized to be at the
center of Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely the mythological and enlightening. Horkheimer
and Adorno stress, however, that at some point – which they designate as “magical” – these
two coincided. In short, and crucially, there is in Dialectic of Enlightenment a tripartite peri-
odization (Shuster 2014a, 18–20, Vogel 1996, 52–53). The significance to this tripartite
periodization is that this magical period is allegedly prior to both the mythological and the
enlightening worldview, and it is also entirely unconsciously mimetic (Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002, 12–13). As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, “neither the unity of nature nor
the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation” (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002, 6). When a mythological orientation to the world enters the scene, it is a funda-
mentally conscious orientation between a subject and an object, and even though it oper-
ates symbolically – in other words, mimetically – it does so in order for a subject to
consciously do something to nature as an object for consciousness (Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002, 12).
I take all of this to suggest that the story that Horkheimer and Adorno are really
concerned with is a story about self‐consciousness – apperception – about what it means
to be a cognitive and practical agent. If this is the case, then Dialectic of Enlightenment fits
squarely into a distinct German philosophical tradition that finds its sharpest expression
initially in Kant and culminates in German Idealism. This is one way to understand
Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that “the separation of sign and image is inevitable”
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 13). In other words, once self‐consciousness is on the
scene, then such a separation is unavoidable, that is, inevitable – a requirement of and for
self‐consciousness. Again, as Horkheimer and Adorno themselves put it, “philosophy has
perceived the abyss opened by this separation as the relationship between intuition and
concept and ever vainly tries to close it; indeed, philosophy is defined by this attempt”
(Horkheimer 1987, 5:40; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 13, translation modified).
Horkheimer and Adorno are themselves stressing this Kantian pedigree, arguing that the
core philosophical issue is how we ought to understand self‐conscious activity, and thereby
the relationship between subject and object. This issue underwrites whatever else is going
on in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
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Bringing this orientation into focus makes accessible certain cryptic remarks in the first
essay of Dialectic of Enlightenment. For example, Horkheimer and Adorno write:
[According to Kant,] there is no being in the world that knowledge cannot penetrate, but what
can be penetrated by knowledge is not being. Philosophical judgment, after Kant, aims at the
new yet recognizes nothing new, since it always merely repeats what reason has placed into
objects beforehand … both subject and object are nullified. The abstract self, which alone con-
fers the legal right to record and systematize, is confronted by nothing but abstract material,
which has no other property than to be the substrate of that right. The equation of mind and
world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that the two sides cancel out. (Horkheimer
1987, 5:48–49; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 19–20, translation modified)
There are two important claims here. The first claim is about the operations of conscious-
ness and of what that means for the relationship between subject and object. The second
claim is about what happens more broadly in light of this relationship.
To get a grip on the first claim, let me sketch some of the Kantian background here,
especially the way in which Kant conceives his project when developing the 1st Critique. In
the aforementioned 1772 letter to Herz, where Kant initially outlines what he intends to
pursue in the 1st Critique, he notes his guiding question as: “what is the ground of the
relation of that in us which we call ‘representation’ to the object?” (Kant 1999, 71) The 1st
Critique, then, is explicitly concerned with the problem of reference: how can there be an
object for consciousness in the first place? One way to understand both the difficulty that
Kant encounters (it is not by accident that there is a nine‐year gap between the Herz letter
and the appearance of the 1st Critique) and the radical nature of his proposal is to acknowl-
edge that Kant realizes that properly unpacking the role of self‐consciousness in the
construction of representation and objectivity is key. Famously, in the A edition of the
transcendental deduction of the 1st Critique, Kant introduces three synthetic acts (Kant
1998, A97; Longuenesse 1998, 35ff), which might be understood as follows. Every intui-
tion contains a manifold (Kant 1998, A99), but such a manifold is possible only if at any
particular moment there is synthetic activity that allows for such unity: the unity of the
manifold requires that it have a spatiotemporal character, that is, the unity of space and
time is what allows for the unity of a manifold, variations of which are always situated
spatially and temporally (the synthesis of apprehension). Because of this spatiotemporal
character and because the inputs that make up the manifold come in discretely, from
moment to moment, an element from the last moment must be apprehended and then
reproduced in order to be connected to the next apprehension (synthesis of reproduction).
And all of this is possible only if the elements that make up a manifold are recognized in a
concept that requires us to understand them as belonging to one manifold (synthesis of
recognition in a concept). How is this possible? Only if there is one consciousness in and by
which everything is unified: I could not even so much have the idea of a unified manifold
if there was not synthetic activity, which itself presupposes apperceptive activity. As Kant
notes, “for the mind could not possibly think of the identity of itself in the manifoldness of
its representations, and indeed think this a priori, if it did not have before its eye the identity
of its action, which subjects all synthesis of apprehension … to a transcendental unity, and
first makes possible their connection in accordance with a priori rules” (Kant 1998, A108).
Kant stresses, though, that because such experience is mine – unified, self‐conscious – then
I also know, a priori, that my consciousness, for it to be mine, will always be unitary and
numerical across time, even into the future (else it would not be mine). And this is only
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ossible through the categories of judgment, through the synthetic activity of self‐con-
p
sciousness, and through the conceptualization of an “object in general,” which is the very
thing that allows self‐consciousness to apperceptively stretch across time; that is, the man-
ifold can only achieve unity with and through such a concept, which, in turn, requires the
synthetic activity of consciousness (Kant 1998, A108ff). Kant’s descriptions of the inno-
vations of his transcendental philosophy are striking: “Transcendental knowledge … is
occupied not so much with objects as with our a priori concepts of objects in general”
(Kant 1998, A11–12). Apperception, thereby, grounds both the experience of self‐con-
sciousness and of objectivity. And Adorno himself is keenly aware of this point as he notes
in his own commentary on the 1st Critique, apperception is “not just something in me, but
is always and at the same time present in the experiences concerned, because the experi-
ences, the appearances, are in truth always only mine, they are mediated through me”
(Adorno 2001, 140).
The omnipresence of apperceptive activity, however, is exactly the issue that animates
the argument of the dialectic of enlightenment. When Horkheimer and Adorno claim that
“there is no being in the world that knowledge cannot penetrate, but what can be pene-
trated by knowledge is not being” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 19), they are comment-
ing on this aspect: that seeing all of experience as conditioned by apperception is actually
to make a problem of both objectivity (at bottom really only somehow subjectivity) and of
subjectivity (itself only possible by means of objectivity, which has been undermined).
I take Horkheimer and Adorno to be explicitly commenting on this state of affairs, when
they note that
the abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize, is confronted by
nothing but abstract material, which has no other property than to be the substrate of that
right. The equation of mind and world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that the two
sides cancel out. (Horkheimer 1987, 5:49, Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 20, translation
modified)
Similarly, when they claim that, “the identity of everything with everything is bought at
the cost that nothing can be identical to itself ” (Horkheimer 1987, 5:35; Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002, 8), I take them to be stressing that since apperceptive activity is “behind”
the possibility of any objective experience, then apperceptive identity is itself ultimately
compromised. The charge is that if the subject is active on both sides of the equation – in
the construction of subjective experience and in the construction of the object of that
experience – then everything is “reduced to a single common denominator … the subject”
(Horkheimer 1987, 5:29; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 4).3 Horkheimer and Adorno
stress the extent to which Kant’s procedure – with its stress on apperception – is exactly to
understand the subject as perpetually (importantly, into every future moment as well as
the present one) involved in the production of the object: in the origination of subjectivity
as well as the production – construction – of objectivity. For Horkheimer and Adorno, such
a procedure fundamentally reintroduces fate and myth, since the very objectivity that
would lay claim to service as a counterbalance to human subjectivity, is itself only con-
structible by means of the activity of subjectivity. Furthermore, there emerges here an
additional threat, which is that the subject itself tends toward rigidity, since its governing
principle is always self‐identity.
In the remainder of this section, I want to take up another recent argument, one pro-
posed by Owen Hulatt in Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth (Hulatt
258
2016a). Hulatt’s argument unfolds from a similar assumption about the alleged Kantian
foundations of the dialectic of enlightenment, but reaches a quite different conclusion and
attempts to countenance more of the traditional reading. Thus, he notes that, for Kant “(1)
the application of concepts is necessary for continuous unified experience, and (2) experi-
ence of an object that is not conceptually mediated is impossible” (Hulatt 2016a, 5).
Allegedly, “Adorno mirrors the general structure of Kant’s account” but ultimately jetti-
sons “claim (2)” (Hulatt 2016a, 5). The basic idea driving the account is the thought that
“conceptuality originated in a primal experience of terror, caused by mankind’s [sic]
inability to comprehend its immediate surroundings” (Hulatt 2016a, 6). Concepts – and,
it seems, thereby, self‐consciousness – originates fundamentally for pragmatic reasons:
because early humans needed these to master nature and to deal with its threats (Hulatt
2016a, 7, 8, 19, 23ff), ultimately, “concepts are ‘tools’ that work in service of an extracon-
ceptual project – namely, the project of mastering and manipulating the individual’s envi-
ronment” (Hulatt 2016a, 8). In unpacking these claims, Hulatt also stresses a relatively
uncited passage in the first essay of the Dialectic of Enlightenment:
The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain
specific places, arises from [the] pre‐animism [inculcated by man’s [sic] original terror]. Even
the division of subject and object is prefigured in it. If the tree is addressed no longer as simply
a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradic-
tion that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not iden-
tical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept,
usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a
product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is
not. This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing
became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and
trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic remains powerless as
long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror
itself. (Hulatt 2016a, 11; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 11)
The idea is that at some point, concept and object were unified, with each specific object
having its own distinct concept (Hulatt 2016a, 11–12); the analogy might be to a proper
name (Hulatt 2016a, 14). The “tautology” here just is the tautology of the proper name:
any such “concept” is necessarily true. Of course, one may get the wrong name, but that is
a categorically different mistake than applying the wrong concept, that is, we are dealing
with a problem of reference, not description (Kripke 1980).
In response, one might pursue two distinct stories here. One might claim that proper
names eventually become available to language, something that admits of a publicity that
permits manipulation by pragmatic interests, here exemplified best and most prominently
by the possibility – and diversity – of the control sought by agents. Language, in fact, might
be said to emerge from this state of affairs; there are interesting parallels here to Benjamin
(2002b). With language are also born universals, and thereby all of the problems with
respect to conceptualization that Adorno’s oeuvre is so adept at exhibiting (Bernstein
2001, 188–235). The cry of terror just is the recognition of the failure of control. Hulatt,
however, does not pursue this story. Hulatt alternatively suggests that before the emergence
of universals as a conceptual apparatus, there were “no generizable criteria that could be
ground for a unifying judgment” and that thereby “experience at this stage was discontin-
uous” (Hulatt 2016a, 20). Hulatt’s claim is that “it is just this discontinuity that occasioned
the ‘cry of terror’” (Hulatt 2016a, 20).
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This is a striking and innovative reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and surely its
diagnosis of the Kantian roots to Horkheimer and Adorno’s approach profitably matches
up to elements of the account sketched in Autonomy after Auschwitz. At the same time,
there is here a conceptual problem that cuts to the heart of Kantian philosophy. Hulatt
stresses that in the state of affairs he takes Horkheimer and Adorno to describe: “objects
would have appeared as radically particular, completely unanalyzable into properties,
parts, or relations. This implies that experience across time of these objects could not be
synthesized into a continuous form” (Hulatt 2016a, 21). He claims that, “consciousness
lived in a world entirely without an ontology of persistent objects” (Hulatt 2016a, 22).
Such claims, however, are in tension with the very Kantian background that Hulatt is
explicitly invoking: without persistent objects, there could be no self‐consciousness. As
Kant himself notes:
Substances (in appearance) are the substrata of all time‐determinations [and thereby essential
for the achievement of self‐consciousness]. The arising of some of them and the perishing of
others would itself remove the sole condition of the empirical unity of time, and the appear-
ances would then be related to two different times, in which existence flowed side by side,
which is absurd. (Kant 1998, B232, editorial gloss added, Shuster 2017)
The suggestion that there was a conscious but discontinuous experience of impermanent
objects is impossible on Kantian grounds. Perhaps there are other ways of presenting an
account of self‐consciousness, but given the argument of either Kant’s transcendental
deduction or the Refutation of Idealism (Förster 1989; Shuster 2014b), as well as the 1st
and 2nd analogies, I am unsure how such an account might operate. In this way, with ref-
erence to the neglected passage that Hulatt highlights, my suggestion would be instead to
opt for the first reading suggested earlier.
5. On the Importance of Freud
Nonetheless, Hulatt’s account raises a crucial issue: how can we account for the emergence
of self‐consciousness on the Kantian reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment? Importantly,
this is not a question merely tacked on as a bit of philosophical curiosity, but is rather a
question that cuts to the heart of what sort of account Horkheimer and Adorno propose
with the dialectic of enlightenment, and of how exactly to frame and situate their larger
aims and claims, and most importantly, of how to frame the relationship between the
natural and the normative (Pippin 2009; Sellars 1963; Shuster 2014a).
Freud is an important interlocutor for getting some traction on this question, and espe-
cially for how we might understand Horkheimer and Adorno’s implicit commitments. The
influence of Freud on Dialectic of Enlightenment – especially on how mimesis (Rabinbach
2000, 55ff) and repression (Whitebook 2004, 77ff) are actualized in that text – has been
well‐noted, as has the influence of Freud on the Frankfurt School more broadly (Allen
2015; Fong 2016; Jay 1973; Whitebook 1996), and on Adorno more specifically (Bloch
2019; Lee 2014; Sherratt 1999; Stone et al. 2012). The Freud that is most salient to this
question, about the origins of consciousness, however, is a Freud relatively undiscussed by
Adorno (or his interpreters), namely the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (a 1920 text
that Adorno cites only sporadically). Yet, Horkheimer and Adorno do engage frequently
with Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) and the way in which it deploys the
260
notion of a “death instinct,” which has its origins in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It should
not be surprising, then, that elements of Beyond the Pleasure Principle might be taken to
animate some of the core assumptions of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a notoriously difficult and controversial text (Fong
2016, 28) that likely has its origins in a response to the work of Sabina Spielrein (Sells
2017, 119ff; Spielrein 1994). I mention this not because I can in the space here provide
any comprehensive account of Freud’s relationship to Spielrein, but rather to highlight
the sort of intellectual pursuit that orients these texts: following Spielrein, Freud
attempts to understand death as a structural feature of life. All of this might sound, at
best, peculiar, and at worst, ridiculous, but, I think if the speculative impulses of Freud’s
text are highlighted, then such an approach becomes significantly less mysterious. Let
me sketch how.
Note that Freud himself is here concerned with certain Kantian themes – explicitly
(Freud 2001, 18:28) and implicitly – as when he initiates the theoretical aspect of his
discussion by noting that “becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory‐trace are
processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system” (Freud 2001,
18:25). Freud is himself here stressing the significance of apperception, and distinguish-
ing it fundamentally from mere sensory stimulation or impingement. More might be said
about Freud’s relationship to Kant (Longuenesse 2017; Tauber 2009), but I instead want
to focus on how Freud envisions the origins of consciousness. After speculating that within
a living organism, the outer layer (the layer exposed to the world of external stimuli) would
undergo some sort of change, in his words, would be so “baked through” (durchgebrannt),
that it would admit of no further modification, achieving something that admits of no
further modification (i.e. perceptive consciousness), Freud also stresses the extent to which
such a layer is so saturated with perceptive capacities that it thereby presents the “most
favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli.” Recognizing the speculative
nature of such a train of thought, Freud notes that “none the less, this speculation will
have enabled us to bring the origin of consciousness into some sort of connection with the
situation of the system Cs. and with the peculiarities that must be ascribed to the excit-
atory processes taking place in it” (Freud 2001, 18:27). In “The Unconscious,” Freud con-
ceives of “the system Cs.” as what he terms “preconscious,” which ought to be understood
exactly as the (apperception‐laced) construction of a manifold in the Kantian sense (Freud
2001, 14:173), that is, something constructed by a subject and available for uptake into
consciousness. Whatever it is may never consciously be taken up – as when I perceive the
red light in front of me, but do not ever become conscious of having done so, even though
I am capable of doing so (e.g. if someone were to say, “Did you see that red light?,” my
response would be, “yes,” even if I may never explicitly and consciously concern myself
with having seen it). Freud is thus suggesting that something about the workings of
apperception and stimulation are important to the understanding the origins of con-
sciousness. Of course, this is all still quite cryptic and mysterious.
At this point Freud proceeds to tell a quite peculiar and speculative story about the ori-
gins of life and of the death instinct. It goes roughly as follows (Fong 2016, 29ff). First,
allegedly “inanimate things existed before living ones” (Freud 2001, 18:38). At some point
life arises – it is impossible to say how or why (Freud 2001, 18:38). With the emergence of
life, there arises an initial tension, wherein “what had hitherto been an animate substance
endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct
to return to the inanimate state” (Freud 2001, 18:38). Thus, the introduction of the death
instinct (Fong 2016, 30). During such an early stage, returning to an inanimate state
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must have been relatively simple, so the speculative puzzle that Freud is then led to is how
this process might have become more complicated. He notes:
For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily
dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance
to diverse ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours
before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conser-
vative instincts, would thus present us to‐day with the picture of the phenomena of life. (Freud
2001, 18:38–39, emphasis added)
Yet, Freud also seems to claim that, trapped in “the middle of an external world charged
with the most powerful energies” (Freud 2001, 18:27), such an organism developed a sort
of protective, outer shield that prevents its complete destruction. Such a shield forms its
“outermost surface” and “ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to
some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane
resistant to stimuli” (Freud 2001, 18:27). Even on this rubric, if the organism aims at
death, it is not obvious why it would go through the trouble of forming such a protective
shell in order to defend itself against overstimulation (Fong 2016, 31).
We can begin to answer this question if we note how Freud himself continues the story.
He writes:
The organism acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the struc-
ture proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions
as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the
external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living,
with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers can devote themselves,
behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus which have been
allowed through it. By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar
fate. (Freud 2001, 18:27)
Freud’s suggestion seems to be that the organism does seek death, but – once an organism
gets organically sophisticated enough – it does so essentially piecemeal, where its outer
layer radically changes and that this process of change is what inadvertently allows it to
develop further. Life, paradoxically, may end up being preserved in an organism that actu-
ally is not aiming to prolong its life. Nonetheless, such an approach itself raises a
fundamental question: why would an organism so much as be able to distinguish between
inside and outside? Why wouldn’t the entire organism tend toward death? Here, again,
Freud adds an interesting genetic speculation when he notes:
First, the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure (which are an index to what is happening in the
interior of the apparatus) predominate over all external stimuli. And secondly, a particular
way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase
of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the
inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into
operation as a means of defence against them. This is the origin of projection, which is destined
to play such a large part in the causation of pathological processes. (Freud 2001, 18: 29)
Note that Freud makes sense of this suggestion by prefacing it with an invocation of Kant.
Immediately prior to this paragraph, he claims that in light of certain psychoanalytic dis-
coveries (presumably, the bit of abovementioned speculation), “we are today in a position
262
to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary
forms of thought’” (ibid. 28). Freud continues noting that, “We have learnt that uncon-
scious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’ … On the other hand, our abstract idea
of time seems to be wholly derived from the method of working of the system Pcpt.‐Cs. and
to correspond to a perception on its own part of that method of working” (ibid.). What
Freud is signaling here is that he is himself engaged with the problem that governs Kant’s
philosophy and the dialectic of enlightenment, namely, that all of Freud’s talk of “inside
and outside” ties into how the poles of subjectivity and objectivity emerge and are
established; in short, Freud is also a post‐Kantian philosopher.
Importantly, though, Freud’s suggestion is entirely impossible on Kantian grounds.
Instead, Freud is repeating the mistake that Kant diagnoses in John Locke and other empir-
icists. As Kant notes, already in the Inaugural Dissertation:
Thus the concept of time (regarded as if it had been acquired through experience) is very badly
defined, if defined in terms of the series of actual things existing one after the other. For I only
understand the meaning of the little word after, by means of the antecedent concept of time.
For those things come after one another which exist at different times, just as those things are
simultaneous which exist at the same time. (Kant 1912, 2:399, 1929, 55, translation modified)
Nonetheless, Freud’s proposal is important for understanding the origins of self‐consciousness

and elements of Kant’s own project. Kant stresses – in differing ways, both in the A edition
of the 1st Critique and in the B edition’s Refutation of Idealism – that there can be no
temporal determination without spatial determination (Förster 1983), that is, no self‐con-
sciousness without a distinction between inside and outside. In a deep way, this is a problem
that orients Kant’s thinking from the publication of the A edition of the 1st Critique
(Förster 2012, 66ff). Without rehearsing the complex story that winds its way through the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science all the way to the so‐called Opus Postumum
(Förster 2000; Shuster 2014b), I only want to note that, taken in this context, Freud
can be understood to be making an argument that exactly aims also to explain the
origin of the distinction between inside and outside, and thereby of temporal and spatial
determination.
I take a plausible reconstruction of Freud’s story to be as follows. An organism is such
that it is naturally endowed with and capable of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. Such
an organism is confronted with a world full of stimulation. The organism is also naturally
equipped with a storehouse of such impressions. Every stimulation leaves behind an
impression that remains after the stimulation has passed (this need not imply that there is
any awareness of such a fact – think of how the treads on a tire become worn down). In “A
Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (Freud 2001, 19:230), Freud compares the entire
process to a device where a thin sheet of plastic is placed over a wax surface: one may write
on the plastic and have it stick to the wax, leaving indentations there; yet one can always
remove the plastic, essentially making the plastic blank (even as the impressions remain in
the wax); thus, its “mystical” character.
Freud seems to think that somehow the “discontinuous method of functioning” of this
entire system lies at the “bottom of the origin of the concept of time” (Freud 2001,
19:231). His wording is interesting here, and perhaps this may be how the origin of the
concept of time comes about, but it could not explain the origin of temporal determination
(i.e. the synthetic activity required to have the formal determination of time and space).
Yet Freud’s basic model can be useful here. If, for whatever reason, certain stimuli, whether
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immediate or housed in impression banks, are taken as pleasurable or unpleasurable,

then a nascent distinction between inside and outside might be understood simply as
the distinction between pleasure and unpleasure: certain things are located as “outside”
(as distinct from the inside, from the “real” organism) because they displease, while others
are brought close – inside – because they please. When Freud speaks of an “outermost sur-
face” ceasing “to have the structure proper to living matter,” he ought to be understood not
as tendering some mysterious claim about the origins of matter, but rather simply a claim
about the activity of positing and organizing one’s body, of taking something as funda-
mentally expressive of who or what one is (a thinking being, a subject) and of taking
something as external or outside – albeit still necessary – to it. As Kant himself puts it in his
last work, the so‐called Opus Postumum, “Space and time in intuition are not things but the
acts of the power of representation positing itself, through which the subject makes itself
into an object” (Kant 1993, 193). Compare that also to Kant’s suggestion that, “The sub-
ject which makes the sensible representation of space and time for itself, is likewise an object
to itself in this act. Self‐intuition. For, without this, there would be no self‐consciousness of
a substance” (Kant 1993, 163).
The picture that is emerging here is one where the basic act of self‐consciousness is a
fundamentally normative one (Pippin 2000, 2009): it just is the case that the distinction
between inside/outside requires my activity (and this is another way to understand how
such activity may take a variety of paths, including ones that Freud terms “pathological,”
but which we might gloss less pejoratively as instead simply falling on a continuum of
inside and outside, and of what, for any particular form of life, it “makes sense” to put
where on such a continuum [Pinkard 2004]). At the same time, such activity is itself
prompted by – and thereby made possible through – feelings of pleasure and unpleasure.
But ultimately, subject and object emerge simultaneously. As Hans Loewald puts it, “the
psychological constitution of ego and outer world go hand in hand” (Loewald 1989, 5).
One might imagine such feelings as nudging the organism toward activity, in the same
way, say, that waves might nudge a jellyfish in a direction.
6. Conclusion
Much more might be said here (Fong 2016, 41–58; Loewald 1989, 3ff), but due to limita-
tions of space, I want to turn instead to a different worry: we may seem to be quite far afield
of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Quite the contrary. Take the importance of mimesis to
Horkheimer and Adorno’s story. There is a way in which we might understand mimesis as
having a central role to play in the constitution of self‐consciousness. Horkheimer and
Adorno gloss mimetic activity as “organic adaption to otherness” (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002, 148). Such a stance importantly maps onto the story told thus far. The nascent
organism – by means of the pull of pleasure and unpleasure – adapts to otherness (here,
primarily actualized by its caretaker and provider) through a sort of seesaw effect: first, by
identification with this other and, second, by a concomitant reassertion of self, that is,
through internalization of the other in the midst of the other’s disappearance (Loewald
1989, 83). Pleasure and displeasure allow the organism to identify with the pleasurable
while excluding the unpleasurable, and such a movement establishes inside and
outside – subjectivity and objectivity – in embryonic form. Any such establishment is
immediately threated by dissolution through absolute identification with pleasure, until
the organism realizes the possibility of internalizing such pleasure by means of the stored
264
impressions. As Horkheimer and Adorno (and Freud) frame it, the self “hardens itself ”
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 148) in light of such movement. The formation of self
and world proceeds along a mimetic register. Walter Benjamin proposes a wonderful
thought to capture the process: “what the state of the stars – millennia ago, at the moment
of their birth – wrought with one human existence was woven there on the basis of simi-
larity” (Benjamin 2002a, 698). Everything potentially serves as fodder for self and world
formation.
Over time, however, “bodily adaption to nature is replaced by ‘recognition in a concept’,
the subsuming of difference under sameness” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 148). Note
here again, the explicit reference to Kant’s 1st Critique: “recognition in a concept” (B103).
Once self‐consciousness and full‐blown conceptual activity and practice emerges, then the
dialectic of enlightenment threatens to destroy everything from the inside out. Nothing in
this account is thereby meant to deny the standard account of reason and self‐preservation
(found in one way or another in Habermas and Hulatt, and others, as mentioned earlier).
Instead, this story of self‐preservation must be properly contextualized and understood as
emerging in a distinct context, one that prioritizes human agency – self‐consciousness – as a
distinct issue with its own series of philosophical problems. The only hope that the Dialectic
of Enlightenment presents – aspirational in nature here, but that is developed by Adorno in
more detail in his later work – is to critically approach and assess the contribution of the
subject, which is, as noted earlier, total in nature, but need not thereby be totalizing, that
is, the subject can nonetheless realize that what’s on the outside exceeds our conceptual
capacities, even if what it is will only appear “in the materials and categories of [what is]
inside” (Adorno 1973, 149 translation modified, 1984, 6:143). Or, in Adorno’s words,
“the corrective to the subjective reduction” is not “the denial of subjective share” (Adorno
1998, 250).
Importantly, then, at the heart of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account is a reprioritization
of human subjectivity, albeit in an ethical register, one that acknowledges the contribution
of the subject as well as its inherent limitations. Filling in, by means of Freud, a speculative
story about the origins of consciousness allows us to both fill in the details of this story and
to make plausible one of Horkheimer and Adorno’s deepest aspirations, which is to see the
dialectic of enlightenment as a critique implying total – totalitarian – implications
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 3). It just is the case that, in the words of William James,
“the trail of the human serpent is over everything” (James 1979, 37). Recognizing this
point – that the dialectic of enlightenment is deployed to critique a particular, philosophical
conceptualization of self‐consciousness – allows us in fact to put ourselves in a position to
actualize Horkheimer and Adorno’s deepest desire, which is the construction of “a positive
concept of enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xviii).
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Further Reading
Bernstein, J.M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Powerful reading of the dialectic of enlightenment as well as an elaboration of Adorno’s response
to it.
Jürgen, H. (1991). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Classic text on
critiques of reason, presents the classic reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Hulatt, O. (2016). Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth. New York: Columbia University
Press. Powerful new reading of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and of Adorno’s philosophy.
Pippin, R.B. (1991). Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. London: Wiley Blackwell. Powerful con-
ceptualization of how modernity became a problem within post‐Kantian philosophy. Does not
focus on Adorno, but offers an important opportunity for historical contextualization.
York: Columbia University Press. Classic introduction to Adorno.
Shuster, M. (2014). Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press. Novel reading of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, connecting it to Kant
on the problem of autonomy. The rest pursues how Adorno’s thought might respond, especially in
dialog with Kant and Hegel.
268
Notes
1 Thanks to Henry Pickford and Owen Hulatt for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
2 This is a letter from Max Horkheimer to Leo Löwenthal from May 23, 1942. It is unfortunately
not reprinted in Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften, which according to John Abromeit, only
published 1/20 of Horkheimer’s complete correspondence. Likely Wiggershaus had access to the
original letter from the archive.
3 At the risk of explaining the already obscure with the more obscure, one finds an analogous sen-
timent expressed in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, especially when he notes that:
The synthesis accomplished by the unity of the I think, behind experience, constitutes
the act of presence, or presence as an act, or presence in action … The psychic life of con-
sciousness is this emphasis of being, this presence of presence; an overbidding of
presence with no way out, with no subterfuge, with no possible forgetting in the folds of
some sort of implication that could not be unfolded … Through consciousness the past is
but a modification of the present. Nothing can, or could, come to pass without present-
ing itself … Consequently the process of the present unfolds through consciousness like
a ‘held note’ in its forever, in its identity as the same, in the simultaneity of its moments.
(Levinas 1998, 60)
For an argument stressing the commonalities between Adorno and Levinas, see de Vries (2005).
269
Part IV
Social Theory and Empirical Inquiry

17
“Nothing is True Except the Exaggerations”:

The Legacy of The Authoritarian Personality
DAVID JENEMANN
At first many found comfort in the thought that the victory of the authoritarian system was due to the
madness of a few individuals and that their madness would lead to their downfall in due time.
—Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
[The Authoritarian Personality] is worth renewed attention, for the exaggerated nature of its inter-
pretive flaws makes it an ideal site to identify standard forms of distortion that enter into political
psychology…
—John Levi Martin, “The Authoritarian Personality 50 Years Later”
Of all of Adorno’s major works, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950 – henceforth
AP) is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, and as such it is worth getting one thing out of the
way at the outset: as a book and as a work of scholarship, The Authoritarian Personality is a
hot mess. How could it be anything but? Nearly 1000 pages; four primary and three
secondary authors, each signing their chapters individually, except for a jointly written
Introduction; 122 tables and figures. The book is sprawling in its scope, ambitious in its
aims, and wildly variable in its tone, methods, and disciplinary emphasis. It is also, despite
its failings, one of the most important works of sociology and political psychology to be
published in the twentieth century. Writing in 1954, the sociologist C. Wright Mills claimed
that The Authoritarian Personality was, in its field, “perhaps the most influential book of the
last decade.” This influence, Mills believed, came despite how deeply problematic The
Authoritarian Personality was as a scholarly work. “Although not well organized and subject
to quite damaging criticisms of method,” he insisted, Adorno and his colleague’s effort
“still remains of outstanding importance” (Mills 2008, 84).
At the heart of The Authoritarian Personality is an impossible question: how does one
empirically account for something everyone knows but no one will admit? The book that
tries to answer this question is an unholy marriage of quantitative and qualitative social
science, psychoanalysis, Marxian cultural theory, US administrative research, and the
European philosophical tradition. That The Authoritarian Personality exists at all is
something of a wonder. That – despite its fatal flaws – it manages to presciently anticipate
the United States’ enduring romance with demagoguery, irrationality, and despotism is its
tragic miracle.
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DAVID JENEMANN
First published in 1950, the book was the culmination and most significant achieve-
ment of the Studies in Prejudice project, a series of studies sponsored by the American
Jewish Committee (AJC) and edited by the Institute for Social Research’s Max Horkheimer
and the AJC’s research director, Samuel “Sandy” Flowerman. The five books in the series,
released in 1949 and 1950 are each significant contributions to the sociology and psy-
chology of anti‐Semitism and racial prejudice. In addition to The Authoritarian Personality,
whose four primary authors (often called “the Berkeley Group” in internal AJC memo-
randa) were Adorno, Else Frenkel‐Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford,
the other volumes in the series were Dynamics in Prejudice, by Bruno Bettelheim and Morris
Janowitz (1950); Anti‐Semitism and Emotional Disorder, by Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie
Jahoda (1950), Rehearsal for Destruction, by Paul Massing (1949) and Prophets of Deceit, by
Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman (1949). Collectively, these studies represent both a
high point in mid‐century social science research and the uneasy collaboration between
European and US scholars in the wake of the intellectual migration to the United States
precipitated by the rise of European fascism and the Second World War.
Each of the volumes in the series had as its lofty aim what the AJC touted as the “scientific
marshalling in our day of the forces of good against the forces of evil” in order “to wipe out
prejudice and bigotry and to strengthen intergroup harmony among Americans of every
race and creed” (AJC Archives 1950). As John Slawson, executive vice president of the AJC
explained, with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, the AJC and their research
partners claimed for social science research a leadership role in the defense against racial
and ethnic intolerance. “With the new insights afforded us by psychology, psychiatry, and
the other social sciences,” Slawson declared at a reception celebrating the publication of
The Authoritarian Personality, “we hope that we shall be able to help build a social climate
unreceptive to racial and religious tensions between neighbor and neighbor” (AJC Archives
1950).
The Authoritarian Personality drew inspiration from a variety of sources. Among them
were the speculative studies conducted by the Institute for Social Research such as Autorität
und Familie (Institut für Sozialforschung 1937), an extensive analysis of the psychosexual
dynamics of authoritarian tendencies and how they were bred in the patriarchal family
unit. Likewise, a salient description of the authoritarian manipulation of the masses by the
Nazi regime could be found in the writings of Paul Massing, the sole Institute member
to have been imprisoned in a concentration camp before ultimately immigrating to the
United States. Massing famously described the techniques of the National Socialist
firebrands – especially their outrageous mendacity – in Hitler is No Fool (written under the
pseudonym Karl Billinger). “In the choice of his means the demagogue is absolutely
unscrupulous,” Billinger/Massing claims:
Lying becomes a science in his system. He considers it a very correct principle that in the size
of the lie there is always a certain factor which will make it credible, since the broad masses of
the people are more easily corrupted in the very depth of their souls, than they are consciously
and deliberately bad. Therefore, with the primitive simplicity of their souls, they more easily
fall prey to a big lie than to a small one, because they themselves tell many small lies but would
be ashamed to tell big ones. (Billinger 1939, 105)
Perhaps the biggest theoretical influence for the Berkeley Group, however, was Erich
Fromm’s seminal description of “the authoritarian character” in Escape from Freedom, a
work Adorno and his peers cite extensively in The Authoritarian Personality. Fromm saw,
274
THE LEGACY OF THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
in the irrational capitulation to fascist ideology, the fulfillment of certain atavistic
psychological needs, chief among them, a “simultaneous love for authority and the hatred
against those who are powerless.” In a passage cited nearly verbatim by Adorno and his
colleagues, Fromm describes the appeal of authoritarianism to the individual as follows:
His love, admiration and readiness for submission are automatically aroused by power,
whether of a person or of an institution. Power fascinates him not for any values for which a
specific power may stand, but just because it is power. Just as his “love” is automatically
aroused by power, so powerless people or institutions automatically arouse his contempt. The
very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, humiliate him. Whereas
a different kind of character is appalled by the idea of attacking one who is helpless, the
authoritarian character feels the more aroused the more helpless his object has become.
(Fromm 1942 [1994], 166)
On the part of the so‐called Frankfurt School, members affiliated with the Studies in
Prejudice project were often focused on how authoritarianism manifested itself in the mass
media. A sizable number of their projects undertaken in the United States dealt with the
increasing influence of radio on the subjectivity of its listeners and countenanced the
effect of right‐wing agitators, rabble rousers, and radio demagogues on a US listening
public that was nominally committed to the principles of Jeffersonian/Madisonian democ-
racy yet liable to be seduced by the siren song of fascism. Among these studies were
Löwenthal and Guterman’s contribution to the Studies in Prejudice project, Prophets of
Deceit, and Adorno’s own analyses of the techniques of right‐wing radio demagogues in
The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (2000) and in his
massive, at‐the‐time unpublished Current of Music (2006).
The impetus behind many of these propaganda studies was a desire to focus attention
on the ways that US democratic traditions were under threat even at the heart of one of US
democracy’s most cherished principles, the guarantee of free speech and freedom of the
press. Because we are such willing consumers of free‐flowing information, members of
the Institute argued, we also run the risk of consuming the means of our own destruction.
Leo Löwenthal puts this point most forcefully in his 1949 book Prophets of Deceit:
The themes [of the radio agitator] point to the disintegration of existing institutions, the perver-
sion and destruction of democracy, the rejection of Western values, the exaltation of the leader,
the reduction of the people to regimented robots, and the solution of social problems by terroristic
violence […] It is as though the American agitator had evolved a method of directly converting the
poisons generated by contemporary society into the quack remedies of totalitarianism – he does
not need to resort to pseudo‐feudal or pseudo‐socialist labels (135–136).
Throughout the exile period and into the postwar years, members of the Institute would
return to the issue of radio propaganda in both its antidemocratic and prodemocratic
manifestations. Notably, Löwenthal was the Research Director for Voice of America, and in
a 1951 post‐repatriation meeting with the Rockefeller Foundation, which had sponsored
many of the Institute‐affiliated research projects, Horkheimer and Adorno insist that in
addition to a “[High Commission on Germany]‐supported study of political attitudes in
Germany,” they would also be embarking on a project in which “in cooperation with the
Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia, the Institute is making a pilot study of
reactions in Germany to the Voice of America, BBC, and the major Russian Broadcasting”
(Rockefeller Foundation Archives 1951).
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For his part, Adorno was committed to developing a comprehensive theory of how radio
worked on its listeners. The most thoroughgoing of these ideas concerned the “radio voice”
and the way it insinuated itself into the consciousness of the listener. In Current of Music
Adorno took “the radio” to be not simply a broadcast, an industry, a technology, or an
audience, but a cultural network that incorporated each of these elements in a contradic-
tory ever‐changing whole. This uneasy body, which Adorno termed radio’s “physiog-
nomy,” had many corporal members – its listeners, radio producers, network owners, and
so on. but it tended to speak with one voice – the voice that came out of the radio box. The
one‐way nature of mass communications, coupled with the way that the radio uniquely
entered the head space of the listener, made radio communication uniquely useful for
authoritarian ends. “The very fact that they are confronted by ‘voices’ without being able
to argue with the person who is speaking, or even may feel somewhat in the dark about
who is speaking – the machine or the man – may help to establish the authority of the tool”
(Adorno 2006, 19).
In the case of The Authoritarian Personality, the emphasis was less on the techniques of
authoritarianism than it was on the susceptibility of individuals to those techniques and
the appeal of antidemocratic impulses, especially – given the participation and financial
support of the AJC – as regarded the potential for anti‐Semitic and ethnocentric sentiment
in the United States. As Espen Hammer writes in Adorno and the Political, “the two
fundamental tasks allotted to the project [were]: (1) to chart the personality structure of
persons susceptible to anti‐Semitism, and (2) to develop a set of indicators capable of
measuring anti‐Semitism” (2013, 62). In designing the project, Adorno and his Berkeley
Group colleagues set for themselves the difficult task of measuring individuals’ tendency
toward fascist ideas and of developing a typology of potentially fascist individuals in the
absence of a critical mass of fascist sentiment in the United States. “Since we do not have
fascism, and since overt antidemocratic actions are officially frowned upon,” the authors
collectively admit in their Introduction, “surveys of what people actually do at the present
time are likely to underestimate the danger. The question asked here is what is the degree
of readiness to behave anti‐democratically should social conditions change in such a way
as to remove or reduce the restraint upon this kind of behavior?” (AP 18).
In order to get at the potential for fascist and anti‐Semitic attitudes and activities, given
the lack of an acknowledged espousal of fascism, the Berkeley Group sought to merge a
wide variety of quantitative research methods with a heterogeneous theoretical analysis,
leaving it to Adorno to integrate the material and methods into what the authors called “a
unified theoretical system,” or what today we would call a holistic approach to the subject:
“Though designed to approach different aspects of the person,” the authors explain, “the
several techniques actually were closely related conceptually one to another. All of them
permitted quantification and interpretation in terms of variables which fall within a
unified theoretical system.” However, given the varied and at times contradictory evidence
the Berkeley Group researchers were encountering from their research subjects, they were
inevitably challenged to account for incongruous and conflicting results. “Sometimes,”
they explain, “two techniques yielded measures of the same variables, and sometimes dif-
ferent techniques were focused upon different variables. In the former case the one tech-
nique gave some indication of the validity of the other; in the latter case the adequacy of a
technique could be gauged by its ability to produce measures that were meaningfully
related to all the others” (AP 18).
At times, there is something of a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach to
the research conducted by Adorno and his colleagues, and even the authors admit that
276
they were essentially making it up as they went along while developing the now infamous
indirect measurement of potential fascism, the F‐Scale questionnaire, and its predecessors,
the Anti‐Semitism (AS), Ethnocentrism (E), and Political and Economic Conservatism
(PEC) scales. The authors essentially admit to this iterative methodological strategy in the
Introduction. “The theoretical approach required in each case either that a new technique
be designed from the ground up or that an existing one be modified to suit the particular
purpose,” the authors explain. Hence, “each technique then evolved as the study pro-
gressed” (AP 18).
The scattershot approach to the problem reveals itself both in the development of the
F‐Scale as well as in some of the methods the Berkeley Group experimented with while
compiling their research. Some of these approaches appear in the final published manu-
script. The chapter written by Betty Aron, for example, describes the researchers’ efforts to
use the thematic apperception test (TAT) to correlate some of the high and low scorers on
the F‐Scale questionnaire. The TAT, a psychological test similar to the Rorschach test,
developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and psychoanalyst Christiana D.
Morgan (Murray 1943), consisted of a series of illustrations presented to a subject and
functioned as a “projective technique in which the subject is presented with a series of
dramatic pictures and asked to tell a story about each of them” (AP 17). The idea of using
the TAT was both that it functioned as another indirect measure of a subject’s attitudes
and that it could affirm the tendencies to antidemocratic beliefs measured by the F‐Scale.
As the authors write of the TAT analysis, “The material [the subject] produces can, when
interpreted, reveal a great deal about his underlying wishes, conflicts, and mechanisms of
defense” (AP 17).
Although the TAT was at the time an established – if since disproven – personality mea-
sure (Lilienfeld et al. 2000), behind the scenes of the Berkeley Group, researchers at the
AJC affiliated with the Studies in Prejudice project were experimenting with a variety of
new methods to indirectly assess subjects’ responses to images and audiovisual material.
In the 1940s, the AJC had briefly tried to distribute a series of cartoons featuring a
character named “Mr. Biggott” to national newspapers in order to satirize the xenophobic
attitudes of “white, native‐born, Americans” (AJC Archives, 1946). However, after con-
ducting focus‐group surveys, their research team discovered that a sizable portion didn’t
understand that the pointy‐headed Mr. Biggott was meant to be a joke (Jenemann 2007).
Similarly, during the years that the research for The Authoritarian Personality was being
conducted, Horkheimer, Adorno, and their collaborators in the AJC were busy developing
a variety of tests to provoke an anticipated prejudiced response. For a number of years,
Adorno and Horkheimer tried to leverage their connections in Hollywood to produce an
experimental film in which an accident on a subway car resulting in an injury to an elderly
woman would prompt viewers to guess who caused the accident. In successive versions of
the film, a Jewish man, an African American, and a left‐wing radical would be featured,
with the assumption being that, even in the absence of visual evidence, the stereotypical
“other” featured in each version would be picked as the guilty party (Jenemann 2007).
Although it appears that the film was never produced, other visual apperception exper-
iments proceeded a little further. In Max Horkheimer’s papers, for example, there is a folder
of photographs featuring business people standing in an elevator. In each photograph, the
passengers in the background make faces of disgust at the two passengers in the fore-
ground. In each photograph, one of the two foreground figures is clearly a racial or ethnic
minority and the other is a Caucasian man, who happens to be the only man in the elevator
not wearing a hat. Although there is no description of the intent of these photos, one can
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only assume that subjects were asked to narrate whether the other passengers were
expressing disgust at the racial minority or the man committing the fashion blunder.
As these experiments reveal, the fundamental problem confronting Adorno and his col-
leagues in the Berkeley Group was how to question an individual about something they
were unwilling to admit – their own prejudices. Beliefs expressed openly could be measured
and tallied. “Opinions, attitudes, and values, as we conceive of them, are expressed more or
less openly in words,” the members of the Berkeley Group write in their jointly written
Introduction. “Psychologically they are ‘on the surface’” (AP 3). On the other hand, the
authors of The Authoritarian Personality understood that there was a potentially wide
chasm between publicly stated opinions and privately held beliefs. “It must be recognized,”
they continue, “that when it comes to such affect‐laden questions as those concerning
minority groups and current political issues, the degree of openness with which a person
speaks will depend upon the situation in which he finds himself. There may be a discrep-
ancy between what he says on a particular occasion and what he ‘really thinks’” (AP 3).
Indeed, in some cases ideas were so toxic or inchoate that individuals would struggle to
express them to themselves. Such an individual, they claim, may have “secret thoughts
which he will under no circumstances reveal to anyone else if he can help it; he may have
thoughts which he cannot admit to himself, and he may have thoughts which he does not
express because they are so vague and ill‐formed that he cannot put them into words.” The
crux of the Berkeley Group’s project was to solve the dilemma of how to develop a tool for
measuring nascent unformed ideas that could, under the right conditions coalesce as fas-
cist and antidemocratic beliefs: “To gain access to these deeper trends is particularly impor-
tant, for precisely here may lie the individual’s potential for democratic or antidemocratic
thought and action in crucial situations” (AP 4).
The F‐Scale was their solution, a survey designed in fits and starts as an indirect method
of gauging the underlying beliefs subjects held regarding racial, ethnic, and sexual minor-
ities as well as their tendency toward irrationality and blind obedience to authority. Its 30
statements, ranked on a Likert scale, ranged from “every person should have complete
faith in some supernatural power whose decisions he obeys without question,” to “the true
American way of life is disappearing so fast that force may be necessary to preserve it.”
Depending on their answers to the survey questions, respondents were slotted as “high” or
“low” on nine personality dimensions:
(1) Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle‐class values.

(2) Authoritarian submission. Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral
authorities of the ingroup.
(3) Authoritarian aggression. Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject,
and punish people who violate conventional values.
(4) Anti‐intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tenderminded.
(5) Superstition and stereotypy. The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s
fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
(6) Power and “toughness.” Preoccupation with the dominance–submission, strong–weak,
leader–follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the
conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
(7) Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
(8) Projectivity. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the
world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
(9) Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings‐on.” (AP 228).
278
Taken together, these nine personality traits (many of them derived from Fromm) painted
the portrait of the potential fascist. Not every high scorer would display each of the char-
acteristics equally, but taken together, the authors believed a fair picture of the authori-
tarian type emerged:
These variables were thought of as going together to form a single syndrome, a more or less
enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda.
One might say, therefore, that the F scale attempts to measure the potentially antidemocratic
personality. This does not imply that all the features of this personality pattern are touched
upon in the scale, but only that the scale embraces a fair sample of the ways in which this
pattern characteristically expresses itself. (AP 228)
Almost immediately after its publication, The Authoritarian Personality and its conclusions
began to attract notice – and to deeply divide its readers. By 1954, it had amassed its share
of defenders. In addition to Mills calling it “the most influential book of the last decade,”
the social psychologists and Richard Christie had produced an edited collection responding
to the Berkeley Group’s findings (Christie and Jahoda 1954), and perhaps most notably, the
historian Richard Hofstadter had cited Adorno and his colleagues as the inspiration for
helping him understand the “pseudo‐conservative” appeal of McCarthyist demagoguery
“in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private
purposes,” and where a “highly organized, vocal, active and well‐financed minority could
create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well‐being and safety would
become impossible” (Hofstadter 2007). However, while much of the early response to The
Authoritarian Personality was laudatory, Adorno and his colleagues also drew a large
measure of criticism for their reliance on psychoanalysis as an interpretive model

(Glazer 1954), a tendency to pathologize conservatism with terms such as “psychosis” and
“neurosis” (Cohen‐Cole, 2014), and the general sloppiness of their method (Hyman and
Sheatsley 1954). Indeed, from the 1950s onwards, the overall tendency of the responses
to The Authoritarian Personality has been either to dismiss it as “intrinsically biased,” and
“fatally flawed” (Martin 2001), or, perhaps more alarmingly, to dismiss the appeal of
authoritarianism and the very idea that US democracy could contain the seeds of fascism
(on this trend, see Roiser and Willig 2002).
Without wanting to dismiss these reservations out of hand – or to delve deeply into the
more than 2000 essays and books that have tried to take on The Authoritarian Personality
over the last 70 years, from the perspective of Adorno’s approach to the project and his
response to US research methods, two issues are worth noting. First, the fact that the
empirical research conducted for The Authoritarian Personality is flawed is not surprising
given the complexity of the project, the variety of resource methods deployed, and the dis-
ciplinary and philosophical differences that plagued the relationships between the authors,
the series editors, and the AJC sponsors. Adorno especially had a notoriously prickly rela-
tionship with empirical social science research. It could well be said that Adorno held the
belief in the old insult that sociology was the “science of stating the obvious,” and
throughout his career he clashed with social scientists such as Paul Lazarsfeld who prac-
ticed “administrative” social science research that he felt was essentially “guided by the
desire to induce as large a layer of the population as possible to buy a certain commodity”
(Adorno 1939, 2). From his disagreements with Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio
Research Project during his early days in the United States to his post‐exile “dispute” with
the representatives of positivist social science such as Karl Popper, Adorno had little
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DAVID JENEMANN
t olerance or patience for empirical methodologies that sought to quantify discrete cultural
phenomena apart from the larger totality of social relations. Such a data‐driven sociology,
he believed, could only reproduce the systems it sought to critique. “The procedure of the
official social sciences,” he writes in an unpublished aphorism, “is little more now than a
parody of the businesses that keep such sciences afloat while really needing it only as an
advertisement.”
Second, throughout his career, Adorno would return to certain fundamental questions:
how – and under what conditions – could citizens in a democracy be seduced by the appeals
of fascism, and more pertinently, given his ambivalent yet genuinely grateful feelings
toward his adopted home in the United States, how could US democracy itself be the
breeding ground for authoritarian ideology? Hence, his 1945 lecture “What National
Socialism Has Done to the Arts” is as much as much a cautionary note about the potential
of nascent fascism in the United States as it is an examination of how Nazism resonated
with and permeated the German aesthetic tradition. “Our attention is focused,” he claims
at the outset of the essay, “on those traces of the Nazi spirit which threaten to survive or to
resurrect at a given opportunity. In order to understand these traces we have to cope with
what might be called the spirit of Fascism” (Adorno 2002, 373).
Fascism survives, Adorno claims, at the intersection of anti‐intellectualism and the
individual’s willingness to blindly obey the crowd. “The perseverance of the Nazi frame
of mind,” he argues, lives in “hatred of thinking, hostility against the development of
independent thought.” That popular entertainment and mass culture embody this
combination of mindlessness and mass appeal and that Adorno is willing to call them on
those tendencies is why a generation of scholars after Adorno labeled him with the epi-
taph, “elitist,” but here, as in many cases throughout his career, Adorno’s take on the indi-
vidual’s response to “the spirit of fascism” as embodied in culture is more nuanced than
that reflexive dismissal would acknowledge. Adorno believes that the masses are more
than capable of recognizing how they are being packaged and sold as “the common peo-
ple,” and therefore need to arm themselves against such appeals lest a belief in “the masses”
gets volatilized as a tyranny of the popular. “We must project ourselves against the repres-
sive implications of such a call for subordination and obedience of the individual to the
demands of the majority and the so‐called plain people, if we should not experience a
revival of Nazi tendencies under an entirely different political label” (ibid. 385).
This fear that fascism could re‐emerge even within the context of a stable democracy
continued with Adorno until his death. Late in his life, in the essay “The Meaning of
Working Through the Past,” Adorno expresses wariness at the possibility that Germany
has forgotten the conditions that led to the rise of fascism and could well see its return in
the absence of an understanding of the historical conditions of possibility in which fas-
cism emerges. “I do not wish to go into the question of neo‐Nazi organizations,” he insists,
dismissing here, as he did nearly two decades earlier in “What National Socialism Has
Done to the Arts,” the idea that a fascism that called itself by name could thrive. Instead,
he continues, “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be poten-
tially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy. Infiltration
indicates something objective; ambiguous figures make their comeback and occupy posi-
tions of power for the sole reason that conditions favor them” (2005, 89).
It is in the spirit of guarding against the rise of fascism within the context of the US
political system that Adorno and his colleagues in the Berkeley Group proceeded. This is
articulated in R. Nevitt Sanford’s introduction of the two representative US male college
students who the authors of The Authoritarian Personality will follow throughout the
280
volume, “Mack” (who is highly ethnocentric and displays potentially fascist tendencies)
and “Larry” (who is decidedly more liberal and tolerant): “It has frequently been remarked
that should fascism become a powerful force in this country, it would parade under the
banners of traditional US democracy. Thus, the slogan ‘rugged individualism’ which
apparently expresses the liberal concept of free competition among independent and dar-
ing entrepreneurs, actually refers more often to the uncontrolled and arbitrary politics of
the strongest” (AP 50).
In some ways, the real significance of The Authoritarian Personality was that it gave
Adorno the opportunity to say what he felt needed to be said about his adopted US home:
that it could, under the right set of circumstances, abandon its democratic principles and
slide into fascism. It is fair to say that the evidence for this finding was not the answers of
the F‐Scale questionnaire or the psychoanalytically interpreted response to the follow‐up
focus interviews. Instead the evidence for Adorno’s argument was the holistic entirety of
his decade in the United States prior to the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. To
a great extent, Adorno understood that the truth of the underlying idea behind The
Authoritarian Personality essentially stood apart from the research used to measure it. At
best, the accumulation of data, interview transcripts, questionnaires, and responses to
apperception images could only ever prove what Adorno and his colleagues already
knew – wherever there was a tendency toward group‐think, a reduction in critical thinking,
and a willingness to capitulate to authority and the will of the majority, there was a
corresponding tendency to descend into fascism. “[W]e never regarded the theory simply
as a set of hypotheses,” he would claim later in life, “but as in some sense standing on its
own feet, and therefore did not intend to prove or disprove the theory through our findings
but only to derive from it concrete questions for investigation, which must then be judged
on their own merit and demonstrate certain prevalent socio‐psychological structures”
(Adorno 1998, 235).
I tend to think that the focus on the methodological inconsistencies of The Authoritarian
Personality is – to a great extent – missing the forest for the trees. While it is true that some
latterday researchers (Altemeyer 1981, 1998; Hetherington and Weiler 2009) have tried
to develop alternatives to the F‐Scale to measure authoritarian tendencies, for Adorno and
his Berkeley Group colleagues, the F‐Scale was never an end in itself. As Adorno claimed,
after returning to Germany, the various techniques developed by the Berkeley Group were
designed to creatively – even playfully – get at the issue of nascent fascism in society as a
whole rather than to stand up under rigorous methodological scrutiny:
In Berkeley then we developed the F scale in a free and relaxed environment deviating consid-
erably from the conception of a pedantic science that must account for its every step …
[W]hatever The Authoritarian Personality exhibits in originality, unconventionality, imagina-
tion and interest in important themes is due precisely to that freedom. We spent hours thinking
up whole dimensions, variables, and syndromes as well as particular questionnaire items of
which we were all the prouder the less apparent their relation to the main themes was, whereas
theoretical reasons led us to expect correlations with ethnocentrism, anti‐Semitism and reac-
tionary political‐economic views. (Adorno 1998, 234)
Given these pronouncements and Adorno’s admission that the findings of The Authoritarian
Personality were essentially a foregone conclusion, it is worth acknowledging the centrality
of Adorno to the project as the figure responsible for taking the mass of data generated and
giving it some sort of theoretical shape. For the most part, the Berkeley Group was trying
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to see evidence of authoritarian beliefs “through a glass darkly.” The various theoretical
and empirical tools the Berkeley Group deployed – particularly psychoanalysis – were
merely techniques to render the messy yet indistinct cultural conditions of possibility for a
descent into fascism hermeneutically legible. I would argue therefore that the title of The
Authoritarian Personality is part of the book’s problem. It would be fair to say that Adorno
and his colleagues were generally less interested in individual personalities than they were
in an overall schema of a culture in which such a personality could find purchase.
Individuals were, after all, strongly conditioned to express their cultural Zeitgeist: “[I]t is
just the area with which we are now concerned that most strongly forbids any simple
reduction to terms of personality,” Adorno writes when analyzing the political and
economic implications of the research data.
[O]n a deeper level, probably for all ideological issues, there appears to be at work another
determinant which, in numerous issues, blurs the distinction between high and low scorers
and refuses to be stated unequivocally in terms of personality. This determinant may be called
our general cultural climate, and particularly the ideological influence upon the people of
most media for moulding public opinion. If our cultural climate has been standardized under
the impact of social control and technological concentration to an extent never known before,
we may expect that the thinking habits of individuals reflect this standardization as well as the
dynamics of their own personalities. These personalities may, indeed, be the product of this
very same standardization to a much higher degree than a naive observer is led to believe. In
other words, we have to expect a kind of ideological “over‐all pattern” in our interviewees
which, though by no means indifferent to the dichotomy of high and low scorers, transcends
its boundaries. Our data afford ample evidence that such an ideological over‐all pattern exists
in fact. (AP 655)
In Minima Moralia Adorno famously writes, “In psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the
exaggerations” (1974, 49). Of course it should go without saying (which is why it abso-
lutely needs to be said) how eerily prescient The Authoritarian Personality has been in
describing the authoritarian type in extremis as it has emerged in the US political and
media landscape in the years since the book’s publication. From Joseph McCarthy and
George Wallace in the 1950s and 1960s to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck in the 1990s
and 2000s, there has never been a shortage of figures who have embodied the antidemo-
cratic pseudo‐conservatism that “in the name of upholding traditional US values and insti-
tutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or
unconsciously aims at their abolition” (AP 676).
To be sure, these figures, while at times achieving national prominence, were marginal-
ized by virtue of their extreme views and relegated to a sideshow in the circus of US democ-
racy. But today, at our present moment, a figure has managed to volatilize the generally
inert authoritarian tendencies of the United States to such an extent that democracy now
threatens to morph into its antithesis. I refer, of course, to Donald Trump, who embodies
all of the F‐Scale’s personality traits at their most extreme. The exaggerated toughness, the
insistence on loyalty to authority, the incapacity for subjective empathy. With every tweet
and public statement, he checks one of the Berkeley Group’s boxes. Add to this Paul
Massing’s insistence that one of the most salient traits of the authoritarian is his shameless
mendacity, and you have a shockingly accurate portrait of the president who made over
2000 false or misleading claims in his first year in office alone (Kessler and Kelly 2018).
Despite the many reasons to criticize the Berkeley Group’s empirical methods and Adorno’s
theoretical analysis, in the election of Donald Trump, we can see the genuine brilliance of
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The Authoritarian Personality and appreciate its legacy: given the right historical conditions,
the book is tragically true.
In the wake of the 2016 election cycle, the rise of virulent xenophobia, the coded and
not‐so‐coded appeals to the “forgotten” white, working‐class American, and the promise
to “make America great again,” many writers, journalists, and pundits are belatedly redis-
covering Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality, the book that was supposed to have
died (Roiser and Willig 2002). Noted Adorno Scholars such as Martin Jay (2011), Peter
Gordon (2018) and Jay Bernstein (2017) have recently written to remind us what those of
us who study Adorno should already have already known, that in terms of the possibility
for a pseudo‐conservative revolt to lay the groundwork for a home‐grown variant of fas-
cism, to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, it very much can happen here.
But perhaps the most interesting new research into the relevance of The Authoritarian
Personality is not in cultural theory and intellectual history, but in the fields that have most
forcefully dismissed the Berkeley Group’s methods and conclusions: sociology and political
psychology. The sociologist Andrew Perrin has productively and provocatively used some
of the Berkeley Group’s research methods to measure the United States’ anti‐Muslim
sentiments in post 9/11 newspaper editorials (Perrin 2005), and the cultural beliefs of
members of the Tea Party Movement (Perrin et al. 2011). Central to his conclusions is the
notion that, in the wake of catastrophes such as the terrorist attacks of 2001 or the
economic downturn of 2008, “individuals with authoritarian tendencies retreat into
political authoritarianism in the context of threat‐induced anxiety” (Perrin 2005).
More recently, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams has used methods similar to
that of the Berkeley Group to measure the attitudes of Trump’s South Carolina primary
voters, and what he found, while not surprising, nevertheless serves to confirm some of
fundamental insights of The Authoritarian Personality: “A voter’s gender, education, age,
ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on
whether someone supported Trump.” Neither, MacWilliams explains “despite predictions
to the contrary, did evangelicalism. Here is what did: authoritarianism, by which I mean
Americans’ inclination to authoritarian behavior.” MacWilliams conclusions echo those
of Perrin: “People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order,
protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened,
they support aggressive leaders and policies” (MacWilliams 2016a).
MacWilliams’ study of Trump voters is part of a longer effort to describe the United
States’ political flirtation with authoritarianism, and in his analysis, he, too, traces the
literature of the authoritarian character from Fromm’s Escape from Freedom to The
Authoritarian Personality to the exaggerated authoritarian posturing of Trump and his sup-
porters today. The implications of this historical evolution for the democratic experiment,
he argues, are dire: “Trump supporters kick the fundamental tenets of Madisonian democ-
racy to the curb, asserting that the rights of minorities need not be protected from the
power of the majority. And they are statistically more likely than Trump opponents to
agree the president should curtail the voice and vote of the opposition when it is necessary
to protect the country” (MacWilliams 2016b, 30–31).
The individual Trump voter might not be the exaggerated “high scorer” of the F‐Scale
questionnaire, but taken collectively, these individuals certainly elected him. Hence, per-
haps the most damning statement on the way that Trump has actualized and embodied
the explosive mix of authoritarianism, prejudice, and jingoism that has always been
swirling in the background of US political and cultural life bypasses Adorno and his peers
altogether and gets right at the heart of the issue: “Certainly not every Trump voter is a
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DAVID JENEMANN
white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white
supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over
to one” (Coates 2017).
In their Introduction to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his collaborators offer
up their faith that Americans, armed with a knowledge of fascist ideology and an under-
standing of the individual tendencies that lead down the path to authoritarianism, would
have the wisdom to arm themselves against straying down the antidemocratic path. “The
present writers believe that it is up to the people to decide whether or not this country goes
fascist,” they write, in a gesture that is itself beautifully democratic. “It is assumed,” they
continue, “that knowledge of the nature and extent of antidemocratic potentials will indi-
cate programs for democratic action.” These programs, they conclude “should be devoted
to increasing the kind of self‐awareness and self‐determination that makes any kind of
manipulation impossible” (AP 11). Time and again over the years since The Authoritarian
Personality’s publication, that faith in the capacity of Americans to withstand the allure of
demagoguery has been tested. Today, however, that faith may well be broken. To steal an
epigram from Francis Bradley that Adorno deploys in Minima Moralia, “when everything
is bad, it must be good to know the worst.” The exaggerated image of the authoritarian
bogey man that Adorno and his colleagues conjured as a cautionary tale for their US
readers has now taken flesh. This is why, now more than ever, The Authoritarian Personality
may help us see our way through so that it gets no worse than this.
References
Ackerman, N.W. and Jahoda, M. (1950). Anti‐Semitism and Emotional Disorder, Studies in Prejudice
Series, vol. 3. New York: Harper & Brothers, Copyright American Jewish Committee.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1939. “On a Social Critique of Radio Music: Paper Read at the Princeton Radio
Research Project.” October 26, 1939, 19pp. Folder 3274, Box 273, Series 200, Record Group (RG)
1.1. Sleepy Hollow, New York: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center.
Adorno, T.W. (1974). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). London: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1998). Scientific experiences of a European scholar in America. In: Critical Models:
Interventions and Catchwords (trans. H.W. Pickford), 215–242. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2000). The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses. Stanford,
Calif: Stanford University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2002). What National Socialism has done to the arts. In: Essays on Music (ed.
R. Leppert), 373–390. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2005). The meaning of working through the past. In: Critical Models: Interventions and
Catchwords (trans. H.W. Pickford), 89–103. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2006). Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (ed. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel‐Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J., and Sanford, R.N. (1950). The Authoritarian
Personality. Oxford, England: Harpers.
Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right‐wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press.
Altemeyer, B. (1998). The other ‘authoritarian personality.’. In: Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology (ed. M. Zanna), 47–92. San Diego: Academic Press.
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Biggott and the Minister, June 1946, YIVO Center for Jewish Research Archives.
284
Anti‐Semitism and Emotional Disorder (1950), Studies in Prejudice Series, vol. 3. New York: Harper
& Brothers, Copyright American Jewish Committee.
Bernstein, Jay M. 2017. “Adorno’s Uncanny Analysis of Trump’s Authoritarian Personality.” Public
Seminar, October 5, 2017. http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/10/adornos‐uncanny‐analysis‐
of‐trumps‐authoritarian‐personality
Bettelheim, B. and Janowitz, M. (1950). Dynamics of Prejudice, Studies in Prejudice Series, vol. 2. New
York: Harper & Brothers, American Jewish Committee.
Billinger, K. (Paul W. Massing). (1939). Hitler Is No Fool. New York: Modern Age Books.
Christie, R. and Jahoda, M. (eds.) (1954). Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian
Personality”: Continuities in Social Research. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.
Coates, Ta‐Nehisi. 2017. “The First White President” The Atlantic, October 2017. https://www.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the‐first‐white‐president‐ta‐nehisi‐coates/537909
Cohen‐Cole, J. (2014). The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. University
of Chicago Press.
DeVinney, Leland C. Diary entry. May 11, 1951. Rockefeller Archive Center. Record Group 1.2, Series
7175, Box 15, Folder 155.
Fromm, E. (1994 [1942). Escape from Freedom. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Glazer, Nathan. 1954 “The Study of Man: New Light on ‘The Authoritarian Personality.’”
Commentary. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the‐study‐of‐man‐new‐light‐on‐
the‐authoritarian‐personality
Gordon, P. (2018). The authoritarian personality revisited: reading Adorno in the age of Trump. In:
Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hammer, E. (2013). Adorno and the Political. London: Taylor & Francis.
Hetherington, M.J. and Weiler, J.D. (2009). Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hofstadter, Richard. 2007 [1954–1955] “The Pseudo‐Conservative Revolt.” The American Scholar.
http://theamericanscholar.org/the‐pseudo‐conservative‐revolt.
Hyman, H.H. and Sheatsley, P.B. (1954). ‘The authoritarian personality’: a methodological critique.
In: Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality.” (eds. R. Christie and M.
Jahoda), 50–122. Glencoe, Il: Free Press.
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Department of Social Welfare.
Jay, Martin. 2011. “Dialectic of Counter‐Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of
the Lunatic Fringe,” Salmagundi Magazine, nos. 169–189 (Fall 2010‐Winter 2011) http://
cms.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/backissues/168‐169/martin‐jay‐frankfurt‐school‐as‐
scapegoat.cfm
Kessler, Greg and Kelly, Meg. 2018. “President Trump Made 2,140 False or Misleading Claims in His
First Year.” Washington Post, January 20, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact‐
checker/wp/2018/01/20/president‐trump‐made‐2140‐false‐or‐misleading‐claims‐in‐his‐first‐
year/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c8bf08acef66
Lilienfeld, S.O., Wood, J.M., and Garb, H.N. (2000). The scientific status of projective techniques.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 1 (2): 27–66.
Löwenthal, L. and Guterman, N. (1949). Prophets of Deceit, Studies in Prejudice Series, vol. 5. New
MacWilliams, Matthew. 2016a. “The Best Predictor of Trump Support Isn’t Income, Education, or
Age. It’s Authoritarianism.” Vox, February 23, 2016 https://www.vox.com/2016/2/23/11099644/
trump‐support‐authoritarianism
MacWilliams, M. (2016b). The Rise of Trump America’s Authoritarian Spring. Amherst, MA: Amherst
College Press.
Martin, J.L. (2001). The authoritarian personality, 50 years later: What lessons are there for political
psychology? Political Psychology 22 (1): 1–26.
285
DAVID JENEMANN
Massing, P. (1949). Rehearsal for Destruction, Studies in Prejudice Series, vol. 4. New York and Harper
& Brothers, Copyright American Jewish Committee.
Mills, C.W. (2008). The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills. United States: Oxford
University Press.
Murray, H.A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Perrin, Andrew J., Tepper, Steven J., Caren, Neal and Morris, Sally. 2011 “Cultures of the Tea Party,”
Conference Presentation, American Sociological Association, Las Vegas, August, 2011. Accessed
via http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu/9/22/11.
Perrin, Andrew J. “National Threat and Political Culture: Authoritarianism, Anti-
Authoritarianism,and the September 11 Attacks.” Political Psychology 26:2 (April, 2005),
167–194.
Roiser, M. and Willig, C. (2002). The strange death of the authoritarian personality: 50 years of
psychological and political debate. History of the Human Sciences 15 (4): 71–96.
Further Reading
Christie, R. and Jahoda, M. (eds.) (1954). Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian
Personality”: Continuities in Social Research. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.
Gordon, Peter. 2016. “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of
Trump.” boundary2, June 15, 2016. https://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter‐gordon‐the‐
authoritarian‐personality‐revisited‐reading‐adorno‐in‐the‐age‐of‐trump
Hofstadter, Richard. 2007 [1954–1955] “The Pseudo‐Conservative Revolt.” The American Scholar.
http://theamericanscholar.org/the‐pseudo‐conservative‐revolt.
Löwenthal, L. and Guterman, N. (1949). Prophets of Deceit, Studies in Prejudice Series, vol. 5. New
MacWilliams, M. (2016b). The Rise of Trump America’s Authoritarian Spring. Amherst, MA: Amherst
College Press.
Perrin, A.J., Tepper, S.J., Caren, N., and Morris, S. (2014). Political and cultural dimensions of tea
party support, 2009–2012. The Sociological Quarterly 55 (4): 625–652.
286
18
Exposing Antagonisms: Adorno on the

Possibilities of Sociology
MATTHIAS BENZER AND JULJAN KRAUSE
1. Introduction
For Adorno, the adequacy of sociology depends to a considerable extent on how it addresses
tensions, conflict, and contradictions in society. In this regard, his sociological writings are
intensely critical of other sociological works of his time. They articulate his rejection of
many assertions about the social world made by fellow sociologists as well as his misgivings
about the approaches that supported them in reaching their conclusions. This is strikingly
demonstrated by two of his comparatively seldom examined, perhaps less prominent
pieces: “New value‐free sociology,” completed in 1937 but published posthumously in
Miscellanea (1986a, 13–45), of which a well‐known much shorter, revised version
appeared as a journal article and in Prisms in the 1950s (1983, 35–49);1 and his 1968
“Remarks on social conflict today” (2003, 177–195), co‐authored with Ursula Jaerisch,2
based on sociology seminars he had taught.3 Although some 30 years lie between the two
essays, their critiques of sociology resonate strongly. Moreover, exploring them together
can help further elucidate Adorno’s own perspective of the antagonistic capitalist social
condition and his ideas for a sociological approach more conducive to acquiring insight
into that condition.
2. Disappearing Contradictions
In the 1930s, Adorno composed a detailed critique of Karl Mannheim’s (1935) Man and
Society in an Age of Reconstruction. Adorno’s essay, entitled “New value‐free sociology,”
which also contains critical comments on Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, charges
Mannheim with “a levelling [orig. Nivellierung, also evening out] of the social processes
towards … static and closed [general] concepts” (1986a, 18, see also 1983, 37–38). This
leveling, crucially, “makes contradictions and tensions of class society largely disappear”
(1986a, 18). From Adorno’s point of view, Mannheim’s leveling is explicable: it is the
“decisive consequence … of the positivism which accepts the phenomena ‘as such’ and then
distributes them in a classificatory manner according to general concepts” (1986a, 18, see
287
also 1983, 37–38; Jay 1974, 83). For clarifying Adorno’s complex critique of this approach,
it will be helpful to consider his engagement with the substance of Mannheim’s book first.
Mannheim regards the epoch in which Man and Society has been written as one “of
reconstruction.” This period is marked by conflicts. “The ultimate root of all conflicts in the
present age …,” Mannheim asserts, “can be seized in a single formula. All down the line
tensions arise from the uncontrolled interaction of the ‘laisser‐faire principle’ and the new
principle of regulation” (1935, 2, cited in Adorno 1983, 37, 1986a, 18). Mannheim
treats “the principles of competition and of regulation” as “general sociological principles”
(1935, 5). They shape life in every domain of “sociation [orig. Vergesellschaftung]” (1935, 6).
A prominent aim of Mannheim’s book is the investigation of their impact on culture
(1935, 5). He seeks to highlight “the same tensions” that are besetting the political and
economic spheres in the cultural realm (1935, 3, see also 58).
Before examining this “crisis of culture” (1935, 57–92), Mannheim stresses further
defining properties of his age. One component of this discussion significant for Adorno’s
reception of Man and Society is the notion of fundamental democratization. For some time,
notes Mannheim, democracy amounted to no more than “a pseudo‐democracy.” It involved
in politics exclusively “small groups of property and of education and, gradually, of the
proletariat” (1935, 20). Present‐day “industrial society,” by contrast, “is increasingly acti-
vating also … strata and groups that previously participated in the political life only pas-
sively” (1935, 18). This process constitutes a “fundamental democratisation of society”
(1935, 18, see also 52). More and more “social strata” are now seeking to influence “com-
munities” and “states” and to have their “interests” represented (1935, 19). Mannheim
appraises the outlook that this development will continue as “not necessarily hopeless.”
For the “forces” propelling it are ingrained in “industrial society” (1935, 23). However,
fundamental democratization is currently being countervailed by several strands of “the
monopolisation of social positions of power” (1935, 21). For instance, “rationalisation”
lends ever greater import to the specialist “trained according to a division of labour.” This
means that “social insight and the social ability to plan” are being “concentrated … in the
heads of few politicians, captains of industry, administrative technicians, and legal special-
ists” (1935, 22).
A central concern of Man and Society is what Mannheim calls the “crisis of culture” of
his time. In the “tremors” within present‐day culture, he holds, “the symptoms of the pre-
sent dissolution of society and of transformation are becoming readable” (1935, 57).
Concretely, Mannheim once more spotlights the friction between the “principles” at the
center of his attention, that of “liberal laissez‐faire” and that of “regulation.” Moreover, he
reiterates his diagnosis that the masses need increasingly to be reckoned with in politics.
Contemporary culture, he warns, is in danger both while “democratic mass society” is “left
to its own devices in the sense of liberalism” and – and more severely so – “if in this mass
society the dictatorial forms supplant the liberal [forms]” (1935, 58). Actually, much of
the second chapter of Mannheim’s book is dedicated to examining culture within a
“liberal” society (1935, 60, see also 85). A sociological project of this kind, he argues,
must first of all turn to “the intelligentsia,” “the producers of culture,” and their social
“position” (1935, 60). Mannheim identifies several “main types of elites.” Among them
are those “political and organising elites” who “effect an integration of the numerous
impulses of wills” (1935, 61).
On Adorno’s reading, it is the “terror and horror” of Mannheim’s time that his work
“sublimate[s]” to a crisis of culture (1983, 38). Mannheim, Adorno remarks, equates this
crisis with a “growing impossibility of ‘integration’” and sees it as due to problems with
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EXPOSING ANTAGONISMS
“the formation of elites in the allegedly ‘fundamentally democratic’ society” (1986a,

20–21). Focusing on a set of “processes” linked to those problems in “liberal” conditions
(Mannheim 1935, 63–64; see also Adorno 1983, 38, 1986a, 21), Mannheim seeks to
outline “symptoms” – with damaging consequences – “of liberalism and of cultural
democracy at the stage of mass society” (1935, 63).
To cast light on Mannheim’s conception of the present problem of elite formation, it will
suffice to pick out one of the processes he details – the obliteration of the exclusivity of the
elites. Mannheim underscores “the openness … of democratic mass society … with the
growth of its size and the tendency to publicness” (1935, 64). This, he argues, entails that
elite groups are less and less closed off (1935, 64–65, see also 79). Supposedly, paraphrases
Adorno with undisguised indignation, “it has become increasingly easy for anyone to gain
entrance into any sphere of social influence” (1983, 39, 1986a, 22). Problematically,
according to Mannheim, without a modicum of “exclusiveness” elites cannot accomplish
the thoroughgoing development of “intellectual‐psychological impulses,” for example a
“taste” or guiding “stylistic principle” (1935, 65; see also Adorno 1983, 39, 1986a, 22).
Thus the masses receive “new impulses” in the shape of “mere stimulations” rather than
as fully formed impulses. Each new impulse is received as “one of … many stimuli” and
soon dissolves. From Mannheim’s perspective, a shortage of “counsel and guidance” is
befalling several cultural domains, including those of “the philosophical interpretation of
the world” and “the formation of the political will” (1935, 65).
Adorno rejects this analysis of contemporary society almost entirely. A persistent con-
cern of his is how it ends up treating the conflicts society is experiencing. “The tensions”
Mannheim mentions at the outset of his book, Adorno counters for instance, “are not the
real ones.” Instead, with those tensions the real ones “are neutralised into the opposition
of ‘principles’” (1986a, 18). They are turned into a disagreement between principles, and
they are made neutral, that is, removed or canceled as tensions or force. That such dis-
agreement of principles is not what is decisive in society is unwittingly suggested by “the
fascists” of the time, who, Adorno points out, “are pretending to settle” the “opposition …
without touching the social base [orig. Basis]” (1986a, 18).
Adorno’s (1983, 37–38, 1986a, 18–20) critique also targets Mannheim’s categories
of, inter alia, society, integration, and the elites. His notion of what the real tensions in
the social base are begins to emerge in sharper contours from his engagement with
Mannheim’s contention that the elites “effect an integration of the numerous wills”
(1986a, 20, orig. English).4 Mannheim’s “concept of the elite,” Adorno observes,
“avoids theoretical statements about the concrete historical production of the so‐called
elites” (1986a, 20). Adorno’s own view, as he subsequently clarifies, is that these
groups are created by the ruling class (1986a, 21, see also later in this chapter). What
Adorno argues here is that “precisely because” Mannheim’s concept keeps away from
such statements, it comprises “certain theories about society.” Mannheim’s “claim that
the political‐organisational elites integrate the social formation of wills,” charges
Adorno, “is harmonistic.” It rests on the assumption that “class society” is one which
renders it “possible ... to integrate, disregarding the class relations, ‘the’ will of society.”
Adorno does not share this assumption. He does, in turn, accept that “class society”
requires “minimal ‘integrations’” to survive. Yet he holds that “such integrations … prevail
without or against the consciousness of the leaders.” Mannheim’s above‐mentioned claim
is harmonistic also in that it, by contrast, rests on the further assumption that class society
is a society in which “integrations are achieved in the consciousness … of leading intelli-
gentsia” (1986a, 20).
289
The most elaborate part of Adorno’s critique of the substance of Man and Society, how-
ever, concerns Mannheim’s assertions about the current problems of elite formation.
Adorno harbors doubts about the “claim” that “the formation of elites” is in trouble.
Mannheim’s claim, he notes, seeks “to draw … its positivistic legitimacy against class
theory from its overarching generality.” In response, Adorno points to the “clubs, circles,
cultural federations of the most diverse nuances” that can be observed in contemporary
social life. These phenomena, he suggests, are better understood in the terms of class
theory than in those of Mannheim’s claim. Concretely, they constitute entities in which
the “grande bourgeoisie … groups … together organisationally” those “‘elites’” that it in
fact “incessantly produces.” What is more, their different shades notwithstanding, these
organizations are profoundly in “agreement”: their concordance consists in their “fear of
advances of consciousness which could endanger the status quo”; and it pushes them
“towards the ideologies of the irrationalism hostile to culture.” Thus not only are elites
constantly formed in class society, their creation has the potential to “‘function negatively’,”
as Mannheim might put it, in respect of culture (1986a, 21). Indicating that the phe-
nomena he refers to cannot be classed with the fault in elite formation identified by
Mannheim, need to be considered differently, and can be placed into the social conditions
conceptualized in class theory, Adorno’s response has at least two consequences. Firstly, he
decides that Mannheim’s “claim … in its generality is not right [orig. nicht zutrifft]” (1986a,
21). Its endeavor to maintain legitimacy against class theory in the aforementioned
manner is weakened. Secondly, though this remains implicit in this passage, the conten-
tion that such a fault is characteristic of social life today tends, similarly to others in
Mannheim’s book Adorno discusses, to level social conditions. What is tendentially veiled
here is the prevalence of class relations, the ruling class’ creation of elites with an aversion
to progressive ideas potentially challenging present social conditions, and the support from
the elites’ resulting reluctance to produce a politically progressive culture for the mainte-
nance of class relations and the ruling class’ position.
Adorno also presents a multifaceted critique of Mannheim’s conceptions of the specific
processes linked to the problem of elite formation (1986a, 21–27, and, severely condensed,
1983, 38–40). In his response to Mannheim’s proposition that the elites’ exclusivity is
waning, Adorno points, for instance, to “the filling of decisive posts through ‘connections’”
and to “social intercourse under the selection of ‘nice’ people according to financial capa-
bility or conformism” – phenomena that are still observable in his day (1986a, 22). These,
too, he suggests, can be deciphered in the terms of class theory rather than in those that
form Mannheim’s framework. What Adorno makes out in them are “small groups …
separating themselves from the rest of society through power.” Surely, he notes, they can
also be designated as “‘elites.’” So the elites have never been more closed off. It is, clarifies
Adorno, “[t]he exclusiveness of the ruling stratum” that is safeguarded – even “in liberal
[countries].” In all the phenomena referred to, “the strictest ‘principles of selection’ of the
dominant class consciousness are adopted” (1986a, 22). Adorno thus indicates that there
are observable phenomena that cannot be classed with the loosening of the elites’ exclu-
siveness Mannheim speaks of, must be thought of in a different way, and can be placed into
the social conditions class theory outlines. Once more, his response has ramifications.
Firstly, when making his claim about the current destruction of the closedness of elite
groups, Mannheim, alleges Adorno, “comes into conflict with the facts” (1986a, 22, see
also 1983, 39). Secondly, Adorno implies that the assertion that nowadays the elites’
exclusiveness is dwindling is, again, leveling present social conditions. It conceals that the
dominant class both holds power and has class consciousness, and that, on this basis, the
290
ruling stratum maintains scarcely permeable defenses of its realm – behind which the
socially influential decisions are made – against the rest of society.
It is difficult to do justice to this assessment of Mannheim’s analysis without keeping an
eye on what Adorno simultaneously conveys about the approach to the study of social life
sociologists should and should not take.5 This becomes palpable in pursuing Adorno’s
discussion of exclusiveness, which he continues by asserting: “Society in the sense of
English society [orig. Gesellschaft im Sinne englischer Society] endures undiminished.” The
primary purpose of this statement is probably to accentuate the ongoing existence of
closed elites in the “liberal” – rather than only in the “fascist” (1986a, 22) – states of the
1930s. Additionally, Adorno’s assertion insinuates that the phenomena he points to in
response to Mannheim, and in which he has detected small groups separating themselves
from society he would call precisely elites, are – or are similar to – phenomena observable
also in England. It is not irrelevant in this context that, when launching his Mannheim
critique, Adorno was an “advanced student” at Oxford University. There, he was reportedly
“an outsider” never invited “to speak at … intellectual clubs” (Jeffries 2016, 194), although
on Müller‐Doohm’s (2009, 193–194) account Adorno certainly had access to the
philosophical and musical societies, and when Adorno described Merton College as “‘one
of the most exclusive here’,” he did so from the inside (cited in Müller‐Doohm 2009, 193).
Either way, Adorno’s statement may be suspected to suggest that the phenomena referred
to are – or are similar to – phenomena he himself encountered in English exile. This raises
questions about the role he ascribes to personal observations in sociological research.
Moreover, as mentioned, Adorno alleges that, in stating that today’s elites are ever less
exclusive, Mannheim “comes into conflict with the facts” (1986a, 22). The merely slightly
reformulated charge in the Prisms version of his essay (which, however, contains no
mention of englischer Society) is that, in making that statement, Mannheim “is contra-
dicted by the most humble pre‐scientific experience” (1983, 39). Since in the Miscellanea
version Adorno’s allegation is fueled by his argument that it is possible to observe phe-
nomena that resist being classed with the loosening of the elites’ exclusiveness, one may
see in the passage from the Prisms text a specification of those phenomena as of the hum-
blest pre‐scientific experience. Certainly, questions about the concept of experience in
Adorno’s sociologico‐methodological thinking and about the part he thinks pre‐scientific
experience can play in social science emerge here.
Finally, in “New value‐free sociology,” Adorno, still focusing on the elites’ exclusivity,
adds that “the economic crisis” causes some “who belong” to “fall out.” From a certain
point onwards, their “number … grows so glaringly that, out of conformist decency, one
believes one must hold on to them” (1986a, 23). This is one of those circumstances in
which the elite relaxes its exclusiveness. It does so only to an extent, Adorno appears to say,
opening itself up only to people who belong and are falling out. Nonetheless, here “[s]oci-
ety in the sense of English society … feigns to be dead” (1986a, 22). As soon as “power” is
consolidated, Adorno hastens to add, “the society [orig. die Society] … becomes more closed
and more visible again” (1986a, 23). Not least for this reason, a sociology that finds in the
phenomena in which that society plays dead cause to write its obituary notice is, Adorno
suggests, deeply dubious. What reverberates in this brief argument is his problematization
of sociology’s response to social semblance.6
This problem, the issue of experience, and that of personal encounters with the social
world, all of which are in turn connected to the problem of theory in sociology, constitute
persistent focal points for Adorno’s inquiries into sociological methodology. Addressed in
his 1930s’ Mannheim critique, they are also, from a different angle, discussed in “Remarks
291
on social conflict today” published a year before his death. Before these interventions in the
debate on sociological methodology can be examined, Adorno’s critique of the substance
of conflict theories in the later piece must be outlined.
3. Taming Conflict
“New value‐free sociology” and “Remarks,” authored some three decades apart, are quite
dissimilar sociological essays. Yet they share critical concerns. The latter proceeds from
comments on the conflict theories in the works of Georg Simmel, Lewis Coser, and Ralf
Dahrendorf. All three sociologists are alleged to obscure the constitutive role of the class
antagonism and economic disparities in the formation of social conflict. “The concept of
social conflict” itself, writes Adorno, “levels out [orig. ebnet … ein] … the Marxian doctrine
of class struggle.” It does this “in a positivistic manner” (2003, 177; see also Cook 2001b,
95). Two components of those conflict theories are important to Adorno’s assessment of
their propositions: the notion that conflict is unavoidable and inescapable; and the notion
that it performs a unifying and stabilizing function in society.
Simmel finds it hard to imagine a “social unity in which the converging tendencies of
the elements are not incessantly shot through with elements of divergence” (1904, 491).7
No society, no matter how peaceful and well organized, will be able to eradicate social fric-
tions entirely. Coser, too, identifies ceaseless tension in society. “Each social system con-
tains sources of realistic conflict insofar as people raise conflicting claims to scarce status,
power and resources, and adhere to conflicting values” (1956, 54). For Coser, this is an
unavoidable, essential part of the social structure. “The allocation of status, power and
resources, though governed by norms and role allocation systems, will continue to be an
object of contention to some degree” (1956, 54). Dahrendorf sees conflict as the product
of asymmetric power structures and the unwillingness to submit to socially indispensable
political authority. Society is a large “imperatively co‐ordinated group,” in which “two
aggregates can be distinguished: those which have only general (‘civil’) basic rights and
those which have authority rights over the former” (1958, 177). Such inequity is para-
mount to ensure society’s basic stability but will necessarily generate conflict.
Conflict, holds Simmel, is unifying, a “way to remove the dualism and to arrive at some
form of unity, even if through annihilation of one of the parties” (1904, 490). As well as
being inescapable, conflict drives the reproduction of a healthy society. “A group which
was entirely centripetal and harmonious … is … impossible empirically” and “would …
display no essential life‐process and no stable structure” (1904, 491). Conflict emerges as
society’s élan vital and as a prerequisite for its stability. Conflict, Simmel insists, is necessary
for society’s obtaining form:
As the cosmos requires … attraction and repulsion … to have a form, society … requires some
quantitative relation of harmony and disharmony, association and dissociation, liking and
disliking, … to attain to a definite formation. (1904, 491)
Drawing on Simmel’s writings on “the functions of social conflict,” Coser’s (1956, 31)
studies of social discord seek to complement Talcott Parsons’s sociology. Parsons “considers
conflict primarily a ‘disease’” (Coser 1956, 21), which prevents him from grasping “its
positive functions” (1956, 23). For Coser, “social systems” that allow for “rival claims” to be
articulated can “readjust their structures by eliminating the sources of dissatisfaction”
292
(1956, 154). Conflict can keep tensions from intensifying, stimulate adjustments, and lend
society stability. In “tolerati[ng] and institutionaliz[ing] … conflict,” social “systems avail
themselves … of an important stabilizing mechanism” (1956, 154).
Dahrendorf deems conflict the flipside of an ordered society in which some groups
hold authority rights over others. He, too, construes it “as … necessary … in all processes
of change.” Dahrendorf rejects the idea “of the ‘classless society,’ of ‘paradise on earth’,”
which distracts from the “historicity, explosiveness, dysfunctionality, and constraining
character of human societies” (1961, 212). Society is constraint, which makes conflict a
social fact. “Social conflicts arise out of the structure of societies insofar as they are asso-
ciations of authority” (1961, 220). Social transformation and tensions are interlinked.
“All social life is conflict, because it is change.” According to Dahrendorf, “conflict” con-
tains society’s “creative core … and the opportunity for liberty” (1961, 235). In these
conceptions, conflict is socially essential and socially advantageous, even vital. One is
reminded of “[w]hat doesn’t kill me,” which Nietzsche already thought “makes me
stronger” (2005, 157).
Adorno’s critique of conflict theories, though much more concise, strongly resonates
with his assessment of Mannheim’s work. The very term “social conflict,” he argues for
instance, diverts attention from social conflict’s “deadly terror” and “its objective base
[orig. Basis] in economic antagonisms” (2003, 182). Clashes, violence, suffering, killing
are softened to conflict. The underlying economic contradictions “are neutralised,” namely
“into modes of behaviour of … individuals … or into quarrels between groups” or “organi-
sations” (2003, 182).
For Adorno, a skeptical stance, like Coser’s, toward “harmonistic analyses” of current
social reality is definitely justified (2003, 178). In fact “conflict [orig. Streit] is necessary and
legitimate,” but, Adorno emphasizes in critical response to Simmel, specifically for over-
coming “a bad antagonistic condition,” that is to say, when it operates “as a means of radical
peace, in which the antagonisms would be materially sublated [orig. aufgehoben]” (2003,
178). After all, writes Adorno in sharp contrast to Dahrendorf, “the world … could be para-
dise here and now” (2012, 14). Indeed, Adorno’s critique of Dahrendorf corresponds with
these interventions. Dahrendorf, he notes, expressly acknowledges society’s “antagonistic
character ..., which produces social conflict” (2003, 179). However, Dahrendorf ’s
conflict theory makes “an invariant” out of this antagonistic character (2003, 179).
This, Adorno claims, is meant to ensure “that the matter remain a tamed social change” – a
transformation short precisely of abolishing the class antagonism, let alone of creating pro-
found peace and paradise – and a change whose “legitimacy” escapes scrutiny (2003, 179).
In objecting to their proneness to level and neutralize, Adorno’s commentary on conflict
theories echoes his evaluation of Mannheim’s sociology. Moreover, Adorno’s critique here,
too, must be discussed in conjunction with what he has to say about methodology in this
context. Adorno’s remarks on the term “social conflict,” for instance, continue with the
assertion that the “displacement” he has pinpointed in the neutralization ensuing from its
use is consistent with “tendencies of present sociology.” Adorno concedes that certain
“social phenomena … present themselves without further ado [orig. umstandslos, lit.
without circumstance] to the grasp of empirical research” (2003, 182). What is problem-
atic is that their self‐presentation meets with acceptance. Thanks to their presenting them-
selves in this way, these “classifiable” phenomena “are … mistaken for [the] ultimate
substrate” of society (2003, 182). Nothing of importance is thought to lie beyond or
beneath them. Sociologists see no need for further explanation, and sociological analysis
stops, just as a deeper inquiry becomes necessary. In particular, the phenomena’s
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“mediation by the class structure” is not interrogated. For Adorno, this is truly a mistake.
Referring to Aristotle’s “ontology,” he warns: “that which is closest to the observer, which
appears to [the observer] as a first, is, socially too, nowise in itself that which is first” (2003,
182). Adorno’s thematization of the basic terminology of conflict theories thus already
raises questions about his perspectives on the problems of sociology’s response to social
semblance and of the relationship between empirical and theoretical social research.
4. Sociological Approaches
Adorno takes issue not only with other sociologists’ assertions about contemporary social
reality that he finds questionable, but also with the approaches he thinks have supported
them in making such assertions. Correspondingly, he seeks to offer not only deeper insights
into the antagonistic character of capitalism, but also ideas for a sociological mode of
procedure capable of supporting the development of such insights. The Mannheim cri-
tique displays this attribute of Adorno’s sociological work.
Mannheim, Adorno argues, envisages the way he forms concepts “as a generalising
procedure.”This procedure inductively “ascends to determinations as general and c omprehensive
as possible.” Thus “abstract and historically largely invariant categories” are produced (1986a,
16). Adorno sheds a particularly harsh light on one element of this procedure. He does not deny
that the social world appears a certain way from what can be observed. Nor does he castigate
sociologists for paying attention to appearance. What Adorno criticizes is the “acceptance as
‘fact’ and ‘experience’ of that which respectively appears.” He sees such acceptance as “the core
principle of Mannheimian as of every positivism” (1986a, 17).
In particular, Adorno criticizes Mannheim for “believ[ing]” he can count on “facts”
that are “objectively given” yet “‘unarticulated,’” that is, unstructured or unordered.
Unarticulated, the facts, Mannheim is said to suppose, “can be ‘processed’ by the sociolog-
ical thought‐mechanism and elevated to general concepts” (1983, 42, translation modi-
fied, see also 1986a, 33). All Adorno is prepared to concede is that “the facts” – putatively
“immediately given” – “appear to the naïve first glance” as if one could peel them off “their
concrete context” without major difficulties (1983, 42–43, see also 1986a, 17, 33).
Adorno names Mannheim’s notion of “fundamental democratisation,” citing
Mannheim’s aforementioned judgment that sections of society formerly only passively
involved in politics are being made active (1986a, 17, see Mannheim 1935, 18). Adorno
does not demand that sociology disavow “the ‘Auftretens’ of the masses” in social life
(1986a, 17–18). But besides entrance, taking the floor, occurrence, and presence,
Auftreten also means performance and appearance. From Adorno’s perspective,
Mannheim’s “acceptance … of the ‘Auftretens’ of the masses” involves precisely accepting
“that which appears,” and it is this that he deems problematic (1986a, 17–18). Here, what
“appears … is accepted unquestioned” and, ultimately, “overestimat[ed]” (1986a, 17).
Adorno seeks to draw support for his critique from highlighting that responding to appear-
ance differently, counter to positivism’s central principle, is desirable and, crucially, possible.
Especially, sociologists can turn to “the theory of society.” Within this theory, Adorno insists,
the conception of the objectively given, unarticulated “‘fact’” is insupportable (1986a, 33). The
“data,” he argues, “belong into a … condition of society” that is “determining” (1986a, 34):
the data[,] … presumably given[,] … are moulded by the social whole and thus “structured” in
themselves … [T]he material of [the social scientist’s] experience is the social order, … a “system” ...
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With the “analysis” progressing, the power of “the initial ‘facts’” to hold out as “descrip-
tive, self‐contained data” diminishes (1983, 43, see also 1986a, 33–34).
Adorno’s brief comments on Mannheim’s statements regarding fundamental democra-
tization cohere with these points. Sociologists can consult “a theory proceeding from the
structure of capitalist society.” To a theory thus oriented, Adorno maintains, “that which
appears … would have to reveal itself as … semblance” (1986a, 17). Here, specifically, such
a theory leads the sociologist to conceive of social reality as different to what appears and
of semblance as a product of these social conditions.8 A passage cited earlier begins to illus-
trate this. Maintaining that “[s]ociety in the sense of English society” persists (1986a, 22)
chimes with class theory, but jars with the notion that a mass actively participates in
politics. Sometimes, that society, Adorno has been shown to admit in turn, pretends to be
no more. Importantly here, one of the circumstances in which it feigns this is “the mass
democratic façade[’s] mak[ing] it necessary” (1986a, 22). Accordingly, in playing dead,
that society fulfills what is, occasionally, a precondition of keeping up the appearance of
wide‐ranging political activation.
But in fact, adds Adorno expeditiously, any recourse to no matter which theoretical
framework aside, even “experience, if only it does not comport [orig. hält] itself completely
naively, could already indicate” that “semblance” (1986a, 17). Sociologists thus need not
respond to what appears by accepting it. “It should not,” in Adorno’s terms, “remain
hidden from the sociologist that this ‘democratization’ is precisely not one of the funda-
ment but a phenomenon of the façade” (1986a, 17). “It should not” designates not just “It
would be better if it did not.” Sociologists can employ theoretical conceptions of the
capitalist social order; to these conceptions what appears here could not but disclose itself
as semblance. Indeed, the sociologist’s experience would reasonably likely – what is
required is only that it not comport itself totally naively, that it not, Adorno seems to plead,
go out of its way to do so – be able to indicate such semblance as semblance.
Adorno extends this critique to include Mannheim’s treatment of the elites. “The posi-
tivist who registers the facts sine ira et studio,” he snipes in the Prisms version of his essay,
“is ready to accept, together with them, the phrases which conceal the facts” (1983, 38,
translation modified). In other words, much of Adorno’s scrutiny of this dimension of
Mannheim’s work concerns “the categories” Mannheim avails himself of. The phrases
concerned include “the concept of the elite itself ” (1983, 38), which Mannheim is said to
have taken from Vilfredo Pareto (Adorno 1986a, 20). Mannheim, Adorno emphasizes,
frames “the privileges of particular groups … teleologically as the result of some kind of
objective process of selection” (1983, 38). When using that concept, Mannheim “over-
looks social power” (1983, 38, see also 42, 1986a, 22, 32–33). Thanks to the manner in
which Mannheim uses it, moreover, “the present emergency can be deduced … from some
equally ‘neutral’ malfunctioning of the elite‐mechanism, without regard to … political
economy” (1983, 39).
Prominent in Adorno’s critique here is the unequivocal diagnosis that Mannheim
thereby slithers “into open conflict with the facts”: “experience” – in its humblest “pre‐
scientific” form – “contradict[s]” Mannheim, when he worries, for instance, that the elites’
exclusivity is waning (1983, 39). It is a handful of observable phenomena that have led
Adorno to argue that “small groups” cutting themselves off from everyone else as an
exclusive elite, which can be further analyzed in class theory’s terms, notably with a view
to “power” and “class consciousness,” continue to exist (1986a, 22).
Both, then, the acceptance of what appears as real and the acceptance of conceptions
that veil facts strike Adorno as not just unsatisfactory but also, at times at least, quite
295
unnecessary. The question of avoiding both, of achieving insight into contemporary social
conditions instead is, Adorno’s Mannheim critique suggests, to no small measure a
question simultaneously of theory and of experience in sociology. The 1968 essay on
social conflict contains one of Adorno’s subsequent attempts to progress his pursuit of
these very questions. It, too, thematizes the problem of sociology’s response to social
appearance. “[C]onsiderations … on the relationship between theory and experience” are
central to it (2003, 177). Regarding these issues, the piece must count as a pivotal moment
in Adorno’s sociological, especially sociologico‐methodological, work.
Adorno, to repeat, sees its drawing attention away from “economic antagonisms” as a
major shortcoming of conflict theory (2003, 182). He strongly denies that “the objective
antagonism” has dissolved. “The fundamental economic processes of society, which gen-
erate classes, have not changed” (2003, 184). Still, Adorno does not chastise sociologists
for failing to grasp the antagonism immediately. For it is not immediately obvious.
Nowadays, it is even fairly difficult to discern. Notably, “class struggle in the sense of the
Marxian manifesto has become, following a dictum of Brecht’s, virtually invisible” (2003,
183).9 Many of Adorno’s arguments concerning these developments are well‐known
(Cook 2001a, 38–42, 2001b, 93–95; Petrucciani 2015; Rose 1978, 86–89; see also
Hohendahl 1995, 66–68, 154–159; Müller‐Doohm 2009, 444). In “Remarks,” to point to
only one dimension of his arguments in this piece, he notes that, not least “with a view to
the visibly lower living standard” beyond the Iron Curtain, “class consciousness” in the
West has decreased. However, “class struggle … postulates consciousness,” namely among
both classes; or else the “concept” of class struggle turns into “an abstraction of class
opposites” which remain merely “objective” without being “seen through,” which, because
they “do not become subject,” become “indifferent for action.” In contemporary capitalism,
“subjectively, class struggle is forgotten,” and this, Adorno admits, “affects,” certainly
“temporarily,” the “objective meaning” of class struggle as well. Current conflict sociology
can draw some support from this development. Yet Adorno refuses to accept that sociolo-
gists need not reckon with “the objective antagonism” anymore (2003, 184).
Again, Adorno insists that an alternative sociological engagement with contemporary
social conditions is not only desirable but also possible. His discussion of what he deems
the vital elements of such an engagement is intertwined with striking illustrations of how
it can concretely unfold. Society’s “fundamental structures,” Adorno argues, no longer
“drastically appear on a large scale.” Let alone do “the structure and its changes” readily
lend themselves to being captured as wholes (2003, 185).10 They are, though, “the law of
every concretion.” It should be possible for sociologists to discern them “in the single
moment” (2003, 185). For sociological examinations of the class antagonism, special
significance attaches to “the private sphere” (2003, 184–185). Adorno characterizes this
domain simultaneously “as something socially … mediated” and as the realm where
“stirrings against the pressure of the social totality,” which are not, of course, free of
“marks” of the totality, can still occur. From the frictions within the private sphere, any
“consciousness of the class relation” is usually absent. Adorno, for his part, suspects pre-
cisely those among them that are furthest removed from the “quasi‐official opposition”
between “capital” and “labour” to “indicate” the most “socially.” It is in the private realm,
he surmises, that sociologists can explore the ways in which the “class opposites manifest
themselves” (2003, 184–185).
Adorno’s discussion of this endeavor makes explicit what the Mannheim essay hints at,
that personal “observations” of everyday life – here especially of interpersonal hostilities – are
relevant for sociological research (2003, 177; Schörle 2003, 101–102, 106–107).11
296
The “seminar protocols” that informed “Remarks” contained, for example, a description of a

“kind of physical violence … as a component of the cordial, but rough tone of present‐day
driving practices” (2003, 189). While the observer’s identity is not revealed, Adorno occa-
sionally alludes to his own observations of the Germans’ “driving practices” when interro-
gating contemporary social conditions (2012, 83, see also, e.g. 108).12
Adorno’s comments on methodology in the conflict piece are instructive because they
pinpoint key components of the sociological approach he envisages, and even though,
alongside problems bound up with those components, the problems involved in detailing
them remain equally in view throughout. Adorno strongly stresses the role of “unsteered
subjective experience” (2003, 185; see also Müller‐Doohm 2009, 427–428; Schörle
2003, 100–102, 106–108). While he recognizes the importance of “[s]cientific responsi-
bility,” he also underscores that of “irresponsible élan.” Indeed, the way they interrelate
has become problematic. Scientific responsibility, Adorno holds, “would … need to be
exacted from” that élan. Yet instead the former “seems to have repressed” the latter.
Scientific responsibility “would prove its worth” exclusively in connection with “impulses”
that have been “intimidated” (2003, 185; see also Schörle 2003, 107–108). For Adorno,
the elements of sociological practice often labeled “excess” are actually beginning to
play the part of “the corrective” in respect of the overemphasized “method” (2003, 185).
Specifying what he understands by “experience,” Adorno asserts that nothing but “a
combination … of imagination [orig. Phantasie] and flair for the facts reaches up to” its
“ideal” (2003, 185–186). However, rather than in turn determining that combination in
detail, Adorno describes it as “difficult to anticipate theoretically” (2003, 185). Part of
what he finds difficult, it seems, is theorizing sociology’s experiential element, which oper-
ates in a relationship with its theoretical element, but is irreducible to it.
Addressing this latter relationship, Adorno encourages sociologists to aim for “the
reciprocal effect [orig. Wechselwirkung] of theory and experience.” Once more, rather than
determining this reciprocity in detail,13 he immediately proceeds to highlight a problem
associated with it. Here Adorno highlights a “circle.” Every “experience” is already “medi-
ated by … theoretical conception.” Conversely, every “conception” that “is good for
anything” will be “grounded in experience and always again measured against it” (2003,
186; see also Rose 1978, 101; Schörle 2003, 106–107).
“Remarks” thus certainly pinpoints vital elements of a sociological approach Adorno
seems to find more conducive to the exposition of antagonisms. Detailed instructions are
not offered, however. One way of gaining a better understanding of the procedure Adorno
envisages is to attend to his and his students’ substantive considerations in the social
conflict seminar that helped inspire his essay (2003, 177). What Adorno means by the
élan that sociology requires can be illustrated straightaway with reference to one partici-
pant’s observation of the following ostensibly trivial everyday incident and the subsequent
reflections. An elderly woman “barks at” a group of kids at play “for being noisy.” They are
“in an already noisy street.” The children eventually leave, but the woman “keeps ranting”
a good while longer. According to Adorno, her “scolding replaces,” and is “ready” to
become, “physical violence.” She harbors “pent‐up rage at her own miserable existence
and the general [rage] at the traffic noise”; in the “defenseless” group she is provided with
a target for venting it. Her continuing to rant after the children have gone demonstrates
“how irrelevant [the occasion],” the children’s noisy play per se, “is for her social character.”
Nonetheless, she would probably not speak out “against the brutality of motorists”; she
loathes “the racket [orig. Radau],” which, “as unbridled first [nature],” “reminds her of
what she had to repress in herself ” (2003, 190; see also Schörle 2003, 105).
297
These considerations open up several avenues for further inquiry. To illustrate how
Adorno envisages actuating the aforementioned interplay between experience and theory
in sociological research, it may suffice briefly to pursue the points about violence and rage.
Since the time of Marx’s theorizing capitalism, the economic sphere, Adorno argues, has
undergone changes. Today’s workers “scarcely feel” like they are “proletarians,” and there
is no more “factory owner” like in Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers, as a “palpable adver-
sary” perceptible to them. Conflict in this domain is now mostly confined to quarrels bet-
ween “workers” and role‐bearers like “foremen” (2003, 187; see also, e.g. Cook 2001a,
38–42, 2001b, 93–95; Petrucciani 2015; Rose 1978, 89). As regards the political realm,
[t]he institutionalised conflicts between capital and labour remain ideological as long as they
are clamped into predetermined power relations … If every wage conflict is latently still ever
class struggle, then the latter is nonetheless suspended by the integral organisations partici-
pating in the disposition. (2003, 188)
However, a seamless suspension is impossible. “The conflict,” Adorno maintains, makes

itself felt also today. It is just that presently it does so chiefly “in marginal social phe-
nomena” (2003, 188; see also Petrucciani 2015, 29; Rose 1978, 89; Schörle 2003,
105) – marginal precisely like the incident in that noisy street in Frankfurt.
Adorno describes clashes like this incident as “pseudo‐private.” For in the linguistic layers
of such conflicts, “historical and social relations and tensions have sedimented.” The former
can consequently be “interpret[ed]” with a view to the latter (2003, 190; see also Schörle
2003, 104–105). Indeed, while Adorno does not make the connections explicit here, that
specific incident, especially the woman’s rant, as he was shown to begin to consider it, can be
associated with at least one type of the phenomena he has located at the margins of capitalism.
Her eruption of anger may be seen as one of those “irrational outbursts” of people who are
not, “neither as labour force nor as consumers,” entirely within “society” (2003, 188; see also
Cook 2001b, 99; Petrucciani 2015, 29; Schörle 2003, 105). From this vantage point, that is,
one can understand her harboring dammed up anger at her own wretched existence in the
sense of what Adorno, probably referring to John Kenneth Galbraith’s (1998) famous book,
claims pertains to the so‐called “affluent society [orig. English]”: that “privation and hard-
ship,” though not “the fate of the employed workers” anymore, are the fate of groups like
“small pensioners”; and that these sectors at society’s periphery will remain most prone to
“envy, squabbling, swallowed and misdirected aggression” (2003, 188; see also Cook 2001b,
94; Schörle 2003, 105). Correspondingly, the readiness to turn into physical violence that
Adorno ascribes to the woman’s shouting at the children may be seen to indicate the
“dangerous potential” he sees such envy, squabbling and aggression “form.” This potential is
less dangerous for the existing social “order” than it is for “unpopular minorities,” among
others. At issue – Adorno’s terms could hardly be clearer – is “class struggle energy estranged
from its primary target,” which “in the event of a crisis … may be made usable against” such
populations instead (2003, 188; see also Cook 2001b, 99; Petrucciani 2015, 29).
5. Conclusion
According to Schörle (2003, 108), in his 1960s’ sociology seminars Adorno sought “to
encourage … students … to think autonomously,” envisioning “experience” and “imagi-
nation … as … prerequisites for theoretical thinking.” In fact “Remarks,” but also other
298
sociological writings of Adorno’s, including “New value‐free sociology,” aim to give

encouragement to his fellow sociologists, too. Adorno attempts to instigate the
development of an approach that helps sharpen sociology’s insights into the antago-
nistic capitalist condition. As his engagements with Mannheim and conflict theory
show, his efforts certainly involve piercing criticisms of other sociologists’ assertions
about the social world and intense scrutiny of their sociological procedures. Yet his
endeavors also involve demonstrating that an alternative sociological approach is pos-
sible. Adorno seeks to accomplish this by not only conceptualizing the decisive compo-
nents of such an approach but also illustrating their operation in his ongoing pursuit of
deeper insights into social reality. Crucially, what the social conflict essay strongly
emphasizes – and what the Mannheim critique also already, albeit much less explicitly,
conveys – is that an important part of such a sociology can take place in the streets, as it
were, in everyday life namely (see also Schütte 2003, 293), and in the private sphere.
Thus Adorno’s invitation to think critically about what small‐scale quotidian frictions
and tensions indicate of the social condition beyond their immediate contexts ultimately
extends to anyone who is prepared to observe them closely and experience them imagi-
natively in their own daily lives.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1983). Prisms. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1986a). Vermischte Schriften I. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 20.1. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1986b). Vermischte Schriften II. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 20.2. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (2003). Soziologische Schriften I. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 8. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (2012). Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (2003). Briefwechsel 1927–1969. Band I: 1927–1937. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (2004). Briefwechsel 1927–1969. Band II: 1938–1944. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
Benzer, M. (2011). The Sociology of Theodor Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brecht, B. (1967). Gesammelte Werke. Band VIII. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Cook, D. (2001a). Adorno on mass societies. Journal of Social Philosophy 32: 35–52.
Cook, D. (2001b). Critical perspectives on solidarity. Rethinking Marxism 13(2): 92–108.
Coser, L.A. (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict. Toronto: Free Press.
Dahrendorf, R. (1958). Toward a theory of social conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2:
170–183.
Dahrendorf, R. (1961). Gesellschaft und Freiheit. München: Piper.
Frisby, D. (2002). Georg Simmel, 2e. London: Routledge.
Galbraith, J.K. (1998). The Affluent Society, 40th anniversary ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hohendahl, P.U. (1995). Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. London: University of Nebraska
Press.
Jay, M. (1974). The Frankfurt School’s critique of Karl Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge.
Telos 20: 72–89.
Jeffries, S. (2016). Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. London: Verso.
Mannheim, K. (1935). Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus. Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff.
299
Müller‐Doohm, S. (2009). Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nietzsche, F. (2005). The Anti‐Christ. Ecce Homo. Twilight of the Idols. And Other Writings. Cambridge:
Petrucciani, S. (2015). Adorno’s criticism of Marx’s social theory. In: Critical Theory and the Challenge
of Praxis: Beyond Reification (ed. S.G. Ludovisi), 19–32. Farnham: Ashgate.
Rose, G. (1978). The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London:
Macmillan.
Schörle, E. (2003). Das Lach‐Seminar: Anmerkungen zu Theorie und Praxis bei Adorno. Werkstatt
Geschichte 35: 99–108.
Schütte, W. (ed.) (2003). Adorno in Frankfurt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, G. (1904). The sociology of conflict. I. American Journal of Sociology 9: 490–525.
Further Reading
Adorno, T.W. (2000). Introduction to Sociology. Cambridge: Polity. A comprehensive lecture series in
which Adorno accessibly presents his critical analyses of major conceptual, substantive, method-
ological, and political problems in sociology.
Adorno, T.W. (2010). Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Adorno’s major contribution to one of the most pro-
vocative social research projects of the Institute for Social Research.
Cavalletto, G. (2007). Crossing the Psycho‐Social Divide: Freud, Weber, Adorno and Elias. Aldershot:
Ashgate. Contains an instructive and engaging discussion of important substantive and method-
ological issues in Adorno’s sociological work.
Cook, D. (2004). Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. London: Routledge. Comprises
excellent discussions of Adorno’s conception and critique of society in the context of his wider
socio‐theoretical and philosophical oeuvre.
Notes
1 On its development and fate, see Adorno and Horkheimer (2003, 2004, 12–16, 19–24) and
Müller‐Doohm (2009, 154–159, 203–204).
2 “[S]tylistically,” it “unmistakably bear[s] Adorno’s handwriting” (Schütte 2003, 293).
3 On these mid‐1960s’ seminars, see Schörle (2003).
4 Adorno (1986a, 20) associates this contention with Mannheim’s (1935, 22) aforementioned
conception of the concentration of insight and the capacity to plan in a small number of
people.
5 Following an exchange with Mannheim, Adorno articulated his suspicion of “distinguish[ing]
between method and substance” in a 1937 letter to Horkheimer (Adorno and Horkheimer 2003,
302, cited in Müller‐Doohm 2009, 158). According to Müller‐Doohm, Adorno’s 1937
Mannheim essay “initiated an attempt to clarify a problem of method,” notably how one could
“establish a sociology … concerned to explain the social nature of the contents of the social
world, and to track down their origins and validity” (2009, 159).
6 One of the meanings Adorno attributes to “‘[a]ppearance’”, notes Rose, is “institutions …
aris[ing] on the basis of the underlying process of society and … misunderstood by people”
(1978, 101–102).
7 On Simmel’s sociology, see Frisby (2002).
8 “Adorno’s procedure,” writes Rose, “involves the elucidation of the relation between the under-
lying process of society and the forms in which the process appears” (1978, 102).
300
9 Adorno probably means Brecht’s statement that “[a]ctual reality has slipped into the functional.
The reification of human relationships, e.g. the factory, won’t ever release [these relationships]
again” (1967, 161).
10 This contention, too, is well‐known (e.g. Rose 1978, 98).
11 For further details, see Benzer (2011).
12 See also his letter to a Frankfurt newspaper (1986b, 740–741; Schütte 2003, 236).
13 For further details, see Benzer (2011).
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19
Adorno and Marx
PETER OSBORNE
The question of the relationship of Adorno’s thought to that of Marx and to Marxism is a
vexed one. In the first case, the relation to Marx, this is in large part due to the lack of a
sustained textual and conceptual engagement with Marx’s writings by Adorno of the kind
to be found in his books on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Hegel (Adorno 1989b, 1984a,
1993), his lectures on Kant (Adorno 2000; 2001), or his polemics against Heidegger
(Adorno 1973, Pt 1; 2002d). Nonetheless, significant references and constant allusions to
Marx appear throughout Adorno’s writings, which are structured in various ways by
Marx’s concepts, from his 1931 inaugural lecture (Adorno 1977) to the posthumously
published Aesthetic Theory (Adorno 1997b) on which he worked up until his death in
1969. There are also some important lectures from the early 1960s: “Marx and the Basic
Concepts of Sociological Theory,” from the summer of 1962 (Adorno 1997a; 2018), to
which the so‐called neue Marx‐Lektüre (new reading of Marx) by Hans‐Georg Backaus,
Hans‐Jürgen Krahl, Helmut Reichelt, and others may be traced (see Backhaus 1980;
Eldred and Roth 1980; Bellofiore and Redolfi 2015); and two lectures on “Marxist materi-
alism” in the Philosophical Terminology series from early 1963 (Adorno 1974, 255–279).
In the second case, of Marxism, on the other hand, the difficulty has as much to do with
the problematic character of that category (see Hobsbawn 1982) as with Adorno’s orien-
tation toward it. Or at least, the two things are intricately linked. Adorno’s dialectical cri-
tique of tradition (Adorno 1992) is one of the things that distances his thought from any
simple identification with “Marxism,” while nonetheless retaining an ongoing relation to
it. Equally important is Adorno’s historical judgment about the passing of the possibility of
revolutionary class politics in advanced capitalist societies (Adorno 2003b), dating back to
the late 1930s, which has been sufficient for the more orthodox to exclude him from the
tradition (Frolov 1984, 9).1 On the other hand, though, his unrelenting critique of
capitalist societies from a philosophical standpoint aligned with Marx’s critique of political
economy has been enough, for others, to make his writings central to its political renewal
(Holloway et al. 2009). In fact Adorno’s thought is at once radically heterodox and surpris-
ingly orthodox, in different ways. This makes the question of his “essential” Marxism
somewhat otiose (Jameson 1990, 230; see Osborne 1992). There are categories and struc-
tures of thought and argument from Marx’s works without which Adorno’s thought
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simply cannot be comprehended. But this does not make him a “Marxist” in the sense in
which, historically, the term has referred to a political tradition of interpretation in which
the authority of its founding figure has been used to impose what Walter Benjamin called
“the unpractical, unproductive form of the credo” (Benjamin 1994, 439). Adorno rarely,
if ever, thought of himself as a “Marxist,” even in his moments of greatest theoretical
orthodoxy – be they about the commodity‐form, the historical primacy of the forces of pro-
duction, or the concept of capitalism; although he did think of some of his texts as such.
(See, for example, his letters to Walter Benjamin of November 6, 1934 and November 10,
1938 [Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 55 and 280–287].) Yet this does nothing to diminish
the centrality of Marx’s work to Adorno’s thought, or its significance for his critical under-
standing of capitalist societies.
In what follows, I consider Adorno’s relationship to Marx’s work in three areas: the cri-
tique and transformation of philosophy; the sociology of commodification of art; and the
social ontology of the actuality of illusions derived from the critique of political economy.
In the first case, one can see Adorno negotiating his mutual relations to Walter Benjamin
and Max Horkheimer, with their very different relations to Marx’s work. In the second,
Lukács’ sociological generalization of Marx’s concept of the commodity became the basis
for a neo‐Marxist theory of culture. In the third, the fundamental philosophical impor-
tance for Adorno of Marx’s Capital comes to the fore.
1. Philosophy and/or Sociology?
It is a striking feature of the role of Marx in Adorno’s work that he appears in two main,
problematically related disciplinary guises: as a critic of philosophy/critical philosopher
(the devil is in the virgule) and as a sociologist, respectively; only rarely as an economist or
political thinker, almost never as a historian, and only belatedly as a proponent of the cri-
tique of political economy as a distinctively anti‐disciplinary intellectual formation. Marx’s
critique of philosophy was received in the triple form of empirical‐materialist, praxis‐based,
and historical critiques of idealism; while “sociology” was the name used by Horkheimer
and Adorno for positive knowledge of the social, that “real, positive science, the expound-
ing of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of human beings” to
which Marx and Engels had referred in The German Ideology, in their first formulation of
the materialist conception of history (Marx and Engels 1976, 37; trans. amended).
Retrospectively and ambiguously applied to Marx, for reasons of academic context and
hence with an element of political disguise, the designation “sociology” was not without
theoretical effects.
Both the University of Frankfurt (est. 1914) and the Institute for Social Research (est.
1923) had a special relationship to sociology as a discipline. The chair of the Sociology
Department in the University – held first by Franz Oppenheimer and then, from 1930, by
Karl Mannheim – was the first to be established in Germany, in 1919. (Müller‐Doom
2005, 73; Abromeit 2011, 143) When Horkheimer took up the directorship of the
Institute in 1930, the chair that was held by its director as part of its statutes was con-
verted from a professorship in Political Economy (Wirtschaftliche Staatswissenschaft) to one
in Social Philosophy, with the promise of a contribution to an additional chair in
Economics to compensate (Jay 1973, 25). However, “social philosophy” was very much a
compromise formation, a post‐Hegelian place‐holder for Horkheimer’s actual project of
interdisciplinary materialism (his academic appropriation of historical materialism), as
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laid out in his inaugural lecture of January 1931, “The Present Situation of Social
Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute of Social Research.” “The current situation of
social philosophy,” he declared there, “can be understood in principle in terms of its disso-
lution, and of the impossibility of reconstructing it in thought without falling behind the
current level of knowledge.” In the face of this impossibility, its role of mediating
knowledge of the social whole with experience was to be replaced by “the idea of contin-
uous, dialectical penetration and development of philosophical theory and specialized
scientific praxis” (Horkheimer 1993a, 3, 9). Sociology, along with psychology and eco-
nomics, was to be one of the three specialized empirical disciplines privileged by the
Institute under Horkheimer’s directorship. Subsequently, after the Second World War,
Horkheimer, Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, all held joint chairs of Philosophy and
Sociology at Frankfurt.
Horkheimer’s lecture raised two main issues, the first of which it failed to mention
explicitly: namely, what was the relationship of the sociology of the Institute to the soci-
ology of the Sociology Department? The second was how this project stood in relation to
the orthodox Marxism that had dominated the Institute’s founding period, under the
directorship of Carl Grünberg, “the first avowed Marxist to hold a chair at a Germany
University,” according to Martin Jay (1973, 10). Indeed, “Institute for Marxism” had been
the initial (1923) proposal for the Institute’s name, before being abandoned as too
provocative, although it was known as “Café Marx” among the students in the 1920s
(Jay 1973, 8, 12).
The sociology of the Institute distinguished itself from the sociology of the Sociology
Department at Frankfurt in three ways: first, in its acceptance of the partiality of its results
relative to the epistemological ideal of interdisciplinary materialism; second, in its ground-
ing on the basic concepts of historical materialism; and third in the critique of “bourgeois
sociology” as an ideological form – for which Mannheim’s sociology acted as something of
a paradigm.2 The notion of bourgeois sociology, or “bourgeois sociologism” in Adorno’s
1934 formulation, produces “Marxist sociology” as its silent other, just as later, in the
1960s, “positivist sociology” would produce “critical sociology” and “dialectical sociology”
as its counterparts (Adorno et al. 1976). Yet at this point neither Horkheimer nor Adorno
had recourse to the phrase “Marxist sociology.”3 Rather, for Horkheimer, rhetorically at
least, sociology itself was primarily conceived as a discipline and domain of empirical
research, in relation to which the critical tasks of the theoretical organization of investiga-
tions and the integration of results were to be driven by “contemporary philosophical
problems”: “the philosophical questions themselves become integrated into the empirical
research process; their answers lie in the advance of objective knowledge, which itself
affects the form of the questions,” he argued, in an iterative development, in which “a large
empirical research apparatus” is put “in the service of socio‐philosophical problems”
(Horkheimer 1993b, 9–10).
The emphasis on sociology as primarily a discipline of empirical research – a collective
and fallibilistic enterprise – along with the use of questionnaire‐ and interview‐based
empirical methods – was innovative in Germany at the time, as was the central mediating
role with regard to experience assigned to social psychology of a primarily psychoanalyt-
ical variety within what was still broadly conceived as a Marxist undertaking (Abromeit
2011, 211–226) – albeit one that polemicized against the dogmatism of “badly under-
stood Marx” (Horkheimer 1993b, 12). Yet despite the insistence on the empirical openness
of the research process that this opposition to dogmatism involved, philosophy retained its
directing role, embodied in the famous “dictatorial” organizational role of the director
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himself (Jay 1973, 11), with the crucial moments of problem‐formulation and the presen-
tation of results remaining grounded in the historical formation of European philosophy:
Not just within social philosophy in the narrower sense, but in sociology as well as in general
philosophy, discussions concerning society have slowly but ever more clearly crystalized
around one question which is not just of current relevance, but which is indeed the present
version of the oldest and most important set of philosophical problems: namely, the question
of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individ-
uals, and the changes in the realm of culture in the narrower sense (to which belong not only
the so‐called intellectual elements, such as science, art and religion, but also law, customs,
fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle, etc.). The project of investigating the
relations between these three processes is nothing but a reformulation … of the old question
concerning the connection of particular existence to universal reason, of reality and idea, of
life and spirit. (Horkheimer 1993b, 11–12; trans. amended).
Thus was the research field opened up by the “general conclusion” of Marx’s investigations
into political economy, described in the retrospective reflections of the 1859 Preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, at once disciplinarily “updated” and rein-
scribed within the framework of the philosophical tradition with which Marx (naively per-
haps) in 1859 considered himself to have definitively “settled accounts” (Marx 2010,
262–263).4
This was the context at the Institute into which Adorno’s inaugural lecture as a
Pivatdozent at Frankfurt, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” proposed its own conception of phi-
losophy (and the philosophy–sociology relation), just three months after Horkheimer’s
“Present Situation.” Adorno’s lecture may be read as a Benjaminian reply to Horkheimer,
which takes up and contests many of its central tenets, while nonetheless situating itself on
the same ground, as a diagnosis of the present state of philosophy as a discipline under-
taken from the standpoint of a materialist critique of its historically established idealism.5
“Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today,” it famously begins, “must first reject
the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is
sufficient to grasp the totality of the actual” (Adorno 1977, 120; GS, 1, 325; trans.
amended). Here, philosophy is distinguished from empirical science neither by its role in
problem‐formation, nor its historical relationship to knowledge of the social whole, but by
the singular character of the privileged relationship to truth that it is said to construct, out
of its reconfiguration of the scattered material elements of positive knowledge: “the idea of
science is research (Forschung)” Adorno declared, “that of philosophy is interpretation
(Deutung).” Furthermore, this was a distinctively Benjaminian idea of interpretation, which
“in no way coincides with the problem of ‘meaning’ (Sinnes)” and with what is “mean-
ingful” (sinnvoll), due to “the brokenness in being itself ” (die Brüchigkeit im Sein selbst).
Rather, it has the character of the interpretation of a riddle (Rätsel). “Nothing more is given”
to philosophy, Adorno argued, than “fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures
of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings” (Adorno 1977, 126; GS, 1, 334;
trans. amended).6 The problem of positivity or givenness is thus approached here not as one
concerning the epistemological status of scientific data, but rather via Benjamin’s Romantic
model of the artwork, in which the “brokenness” of the world is to be grasped in the
philosophical significance of the artistic form of the fragment (Benjamin 1996a).
Adorno’s lecture falls into three parts: a critical survey of the current tendencies in
German philosophy; a resultant consideration of the question whether – and if, in
what manner – “philosophy is itself at all actual”; and a final part on the relationship of
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philosophy to science, taking “its specific scientific material predominantly from soci-
ology.” Marx crops up toward the end of the middle section in relation to the claim that
“praxis is granted” to the answer to the riddle (the interpretation), since the answer
“destroys the riddle” itself. It does this by reconfiguring its elements into a new “figure of
the actual,” from which “the demand for its real change” (realen Veränderung), it is said,
always “follows promptly.” Adorno claims, somewhat awkwardly, that this movement is
“carried out by materialism,” which names it “dialectic,” such that “[o]nly dialectically …
is philosophical interpretation possible.” He then somewhat tendentiously presents this
position as a reading of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach – “The philosophers have
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx and Engels 1976,
5) – which “receives its legitimacy not only out of political praxis, but also out of
philosophical theory”: “Only in the annihilation of the question is the authenticity
(Echtheit) of philosophical interpretation first successfully proven, and mere thought by
itself cannot accomplish this; therefore the annihilation of the question compels praxis.”
(Adorno 1977, 124, 130, 129; GS, 1, 331, 338–9; trans. amended.)
The reasoning is highly abstract and seriously strained. If praxis lies in the destruction
of the riddle/annihilation of the question, in what material (sensuously active) sense is this
a “changing of the world”? But if the annihilation of the question only “demands” a
change in actuality in what sense does it “compel” a praxis of change? Clearly there is an
element of apologetics here, as Adorno struggles to render his Benjaminian position con-
sistent with the praxis‐based Marxism of his Institute audience. Unsurprisingly, they
(including Horkheimer [Müller‐Doom 2005, 139]) were not impressed – a reception
Adorno anticipated within the lecture itself (Adorno 1977, 132). Adorno would not
return to the theory–praxis relation until the late 1960s, in the very different context of
his critique of the “pseudo‐activity” of the “actionism” of the student movement (Adorno
1988b, 1988c). By then, however, he had exchanged what he had himself by the mid‐
1930s diagnosed as the magical positivism of Benjamin’s position (Adorno and Benjamin
1999, 283) for the strict epistemological negativity of the idea of negative dialectics as the
modality in which – following the logic of Marx’s position in the 1844 “Contribution to the
Critique of the Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction” – philosophy “lives on” after and as
its own critique, since “the moment of its actualization (Verwirklichung) was missed”
(Adorno 1973, 3; GS, 6, 15; translation amended). Or at least, he restricted the positive,
Benjaminian aspect of his metaphysics of experience to the domain of art, from whence it
had originated.
There has been a tendency to read the Introduction to Negative Dialectics as a rewriting
of “The Actuality of Philosophy,” in line with Negative Dialectics’ revisiting of Adorno’s
1932 essay, “The Idea of Natural‐History,” in the second of the three “models” that make
up the book’s third part, “World Spirit and Nature‐History” (see Adorno 1973, 354–360;
1984b; Susan Buck‐Morss 1977, 24–25, 43–69). However, as its famous opening sen-
tences show, it stems from a different political judgment on history (the definitively “missed
moment” of the possibility of communism) and a greater reflexivity about the conse-
quences of that judgment for Marx’s critique of philosophy than the 1931 text contains.
In his 1942 “Reflections on Class Theory,” Adorno referred to Marx’s “Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,” with regard to the proletariat, by
then (and in the United States especially) having much more to lose than their “chains,” in
a revolution against capitalism (Adorno 2003b, 103). But he ignored the implications of
this for the conception of philosophy, to be drawn from Marx’s famous conclusion:
“Philosophy cannot be actualized without the supersession of the proletariat, the
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roletariat cannot be superseded without the actualization of philosophy” (Marx 1971,

p
224; Marx and Engels 1975, 187; trans. amended). Indeed, Adorno had made no refer-
ence to this text of Marx’s in “The Actuality of Philosophy.” From Marx’s standpoint, how-
ever, without the actualization of philosophy (as communism), philosophy (in its
historically inherited, inherently idealist form) must “live on” despite and within the terms of
the critique of its alienated universality – rather than as an interpretation of “the riddle
figures” of the existent. Hence the relentless negativity or negative‐dialectical approach
required toward all philosophical categories, through which the world must nonetheless
continue to be thought, which Adorno subsequently adopted.7
If Adorno’s use of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in “The Actuality of Philosophy”
was weakly opportunistic, his use of the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Law. Introduction” in Negative Dialectics is of deep structural significance for his thought.
Moreover, its intelligibility depends upon the social interpretation (or sociological metacri-
tique) of Hegel’s philosophy as the rationalized expression of abstractly mental labor, or
the alienated expression of labor in general, to be found in the 1844 Manuscripts – which
also informs Adorno’s philosophical interpretation of the social ontology of the value‐
form. Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, it should be recalled, had not yet been published in 1931
when Adorno delivered his inaugural lecture. In fact the most important western Marxist
interpretations of the relationship of Marxism to philosophy – by Karl Korsch (2013) and
Georg Lukács (1971), both published in 1923 – which played a formative role in both
Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s thought (and indeed, in the formation of the Institute itself),
also preceded the availability of the critique of “self‐sufficient” philosophy to be found in
the “Feuerbach” chapter of The German Ideology.8
The opening claim in “The Actuality of Philosophy” that the power of thought is
insufficient to grasp the totality of the actual combines a quasi‐metaphysical materi-
alism with a Romantic historical judgment about the irrationality of existing society:
“No justifying reason could rediscover itself in an actuality whose order and shape sup-
presses every claim to reason,” Adorno writes. But the specifically capitalistic character
of this prevalent irrationality is not registered there, despite a glancing reference to “the
commodity‐form” as the example of a “figure,” the production of which might make
certain philosophical problems “disappear” (such as that of the thing‐in‐itself, he
claims). Rather, the social is presented there, more abstractly (following the early
Benjamin), as broken into bits (Bruchstücken). The Lukácsian problematic of reification
lurks beneath the surface of Adorno’s discourse, but it never emerges. Indeed, despite
sociology being selected as the example of scientific material – an ambiguous nod to
Horkheimer, no doubt – its treatment is primarily dismissive. In a rare affirmative allu-
sion to Heidegger, sociology appears imagistically, as a “cat burglar” rescuing posses-
sions from the collapsing house of philosophy, which are “for him only of scant worth.”
(Adorno 1977, 120, 128, 130; GS, 1325, 338, 340; trans. amended). Yet Adorno’s first
publication in the Institute’s Zeitschrift, the very next year was what he would retrospec-
tively describe, in 1967, as “the outline of a completed sociology of music” (Adorno
1989a, 233; GS, 14, 425n; trans. amended) – the Institute’s sociology, that is, rather
than that of a Sociology Department. And it was resolutely – indeed, seemingly
reductively – Marxist in its theoretical orientation. The commodity‐form was no longer
just an interpretative “figure” dissolving a particular riddle (the antinomies of bourgeois
thought), as an example of a general interpretative procedure; it was the basic form of
the social as such.
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Adorno and Marx
2. Sociology of the Commodity‐Form
In his early years writing for the Institute journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Adorno pro-
duced two landmark essays on the Marxist sociology of music: “On the Social Situation of
Music” (1932) and “On the Fetish‐Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”
(1938). Gone were the Romantic vagaries of a broken being and in their place was a Marxist
sociology of total commodification in which all social relations are exchange relations.
The role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value is that of
the market. Music no longer serves direct needs nor benefits from direct application, but rather
adjusts to the pressures of the exchange of abstract units. Its value – wherever such value still
exists at all – is determined by use: it subordinates itself to the process of exchange. The islands
of pre‐capitalist “music‐making” … have been washed away: the technique of radio and sound
film, in the hands of powerful monopolies and in unlimited control over the total capitalistic
propaganda machine, have taken possession of even the innermost cell of musical practices of
domestic music making … Through the total absorption of both musical production and con-
sumption by the capitalistic process, the alienation of music from humanity has become
complete. (Adorno 2002b, 391; GS 18, 729; trans. amended)
The temporal proximity of this essay to “The Actuality of Philosophy” reveals just how
strategic a process writing was for Adorno, in which intervening into a field involved tak-
ing up a position at its limit that would throw a harsh critical light upon the rest of the
field. This involved extrapolating to its completion the diagnosis of an essential tendency,
and declaring such a situation to have already come about. An abbreviated image of the
universally actualized tendency then becomes the standpoint from which the present is
presented. (This is basically a dystopian version of the temporal mode of pre‐emptive actu-
alization that is characteristic of the performativity of the manifesto as a literary form.)
The procedure is designed to grasp the “truth” of the present, rather than to produce (a
necessarily partial) “knowledge” of it.9 From this standpoint, as Adorno wrote of psycho-
analysis in Minima Moralia: “nothing is true except the exaggerations” (Adorno 1978, 49.
For a discussion of this aspect of Adorno’s style, see Rose 2014, 11–26). Mistaking a truth
claim for a claim to knowledge lies at the basis of numerous over‐simplified readings of
Adorno. This complicates Adorno’s relationship to Marxism, making the latter more true
but less significant as knowledge than its self‐understanding would have it. Moreover,
while one might be tempted to treat this mode of presentation solely at the rhetorical level
(as Adorno’s apologists are wont to do), it nonetheless functions as a “sociologization” of
Marx’s critique of political economy – mapping the systemic totality of the categorial
structure of Capital onto the false whole of actual “society.” This is problematic, even when
understood negatively from a philosophical standpoint that considers “society” “impos-
sible” (Adorno 1970). (“Society” is impossible, not only as an object of knowledge but also
in actuality, because it names as an idea, and hence presents as a reified totality, what is in
fact a process: a historical process that currently, qua capitalism, presents itself to its partic-
ipants as a reified totality. “Society” thus exists at the level of illusory appearance only.
Indeed, Capital is primarily read as a theory of the production of appearances; a social‐
ontological version of ideology‐critique.)
It is here that the influence of Max Weber’s and Lukács’ writings become apparent. For
“commodification” is applied as a general sociological category, subsumed within a broader
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historical process of rationalization, with the concept of “reification” functioning ambigu-

ously to bridge the two levels of analysis.10 The rhetorical positivization of the capitalistic
“truth” or “essence” of such societies takes on the appearance a form of sociological
knowledge. The point of this presentation in “On the Social Situation of Music,” however,
is less sociological “knowledge,” as such, than the demonstration of the social ground of
the “immanent development” of music. Here, Adorno is not simply following Lukács in his
recourse to Weber’s account of rationalization, but drawing directly on Weber’s 1921 The
Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music, which allowed him to present Schoenberg’s
musical development as a critical radicalization of the general principle of rationalization
that defines musical modernity. The concept of rationalization thus performs a dual
function (social and musical), allowing music to appear as containing “social problems …
within itself in the innermost cells of its technique.” (Adorno 2002b, 393; GS 18, 731. Cf.
Marx’s reference to the commodity‐form as the “economic cell‐form” [Zellenform] of
bourgeois society. Marx 1990, 90.) This analysis of rationalization is combined with an
orthodox Marxist reference to the “music industry” being “developed by monopoly
capitalism” and a picture of the then‐current (reified) “class consciousness of the prole-
tariat,” robbed of its cognitive ability to comprehend its own situation, as extending “the
wounds of mutilation by means of the class mechanism.” “Music which has achieved self‐
consciousness of its social function” thus becomes a kind of substitute for authentic
working‐class consciousness: “reach[ing] out beyond the current consciousness of the
masses … to enter into a dialectic relation to praxis … by developing within music itself …
all those elements whose objective is the overcoming of class domination.” (Adorno 2002b,
392–4; GS 18, 731.)
As a culturalist act of political substitutionism – exchanging class‐political practice for
a critical musical one – this is fairly breathtaking. Marx’s analysis is incorporated into
Adorno’s mono‐musical world, but it has no political purchase outside it. What follows is
less a “sociology of music,” in any causally explanatory sense, than a political interpreta-
tion of the social meaning of the five main types of music that characterize the “serious”
musical conjuncture, in jointly Weberian and Marxist terms. Reification functions within
this general framework not only in its Marxist sense, as the source of a social illusion about
value, but as a Simmelian aspect of Weberian rationalization, as the “force … which con-
stituted music as art” by separating it off from its social functions, to produce the famous
“torn halves” of cultural production in capitalist societies:
[T]he distinction between light and serious music is to be replaced by a different distinction
which views both halves of the musical globe equally from the perspective of alienation
[Entfremdung]: as halves of a totality which to be sure could never be reconstituted through
the addition of the two halves. (Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 130; Adorno 2002b, 392; 395;
cf. 2002c, 293)
And just as reification (experienced here as a form of alienation) constitutes each side of
the musical divide in its separation from the other, so its counterpart in Marx, fetishism, is
taken to structure musical listening, on each side of the divide. The movement within the
concept of reification from Simmel to Marx is seamless. And just as Adorno’s famous
account of the “dual character” of the artwork, as at once autonomous and a social fact,
in Aesthetic Theory (Adorno 1997b, 225–228) is modeled on “The Dual Character of the
Labor Embodied in Commodities” of Capital, Volume 1, chapter 1, section 2, so here the title
of “On the Fetish‐Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” mimics the heading
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Adorno and Marx
of Capital, Volume 1, chapter 1, section 4, “The Fetish‐Character of the Commodity and its
Secret.” The regression of listening is the consequence of the fetish‐character of the
musical commodity. The attribution of super‐sensible powers to the musical commodity
robs listeners of their autonomy of reception (Schmidt 1971).11
“On the Fetish‐Character in Music” introduces three further theoretical features Adorno
associates with the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism: (i) a psychosocial
dimension to the operation of fetishism in commodity consumption, under the conditions
of the “technification and rationalization” of musical reproduction (performance), ana-
lyzed in “On the Social Situation”; (ii) the thesis of “the liquidation of the individual”; and
(iii) the thesis of a new fetishistic use‐value of exchange‐value itself. The first two may be
read as an exemplification of the mediating role that Horkheimer had sought for social
psychology in his interdisciplinary materialism: a social psychology of commodity
fetishism in which the liberal individual is dissolved into its social ground by new forms of
social determination. The third, the reduction of the use‐value of cultural commodities to
their exchange‐value (about which he was particularly eager to hear Benjamin’s response
[Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 286]) is the most original:
If the commodity in general combines exchange‐value and use‐value, then the pure use‐value,
whose illusion the cultural goods must preserve in completely capitalist society (der durchkapi-
talisierten Gesellschaft), must be replaced by pure exchange‐value, which precisely in its
capacity as exchange‐value deceptively takes over the function of use‐value. The specific fetish
of music lies in this quid pro quo … Every “psychological” aspect, every ersatz satisfaction,
depends on such social substitution. (Adorno 2002c, 293, 296; GS 14, 25)
Psychological aspects are grounded in social relations, yet nonetheless, in the analysis of
such listening as “regressive,” Adorno deploys not only the problematically “progressivist”
aspect of Marx’s Enlightenment discourse of the primitivism of the fetish, but also a psycho-
analytical discourse of development that has clear normative overtones, whereby such
listening is “arrested at the infantile stage” (Adorno 1997c, 303). The moralistic projection
of a psychic ideal of “maturity,” psychoanalytically associated with sublimation, sits uneasily
beside the thesis of “liquidation of the individual” as a historical fact. Hence the characteris-
tically paradoxical conclusion: “In music too, collective powers are liquidating an individu-
ality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing
the aims of collectivity.” (Adorno 1997c, 315) This historically contradictory liberalism
would become the baseline of Adorno’s political thought, and the political rationale for his
enduring defense of the philosophy of the subject as a philosophy of consciousness, despite
an increasing emphasis on the structural constitution of social experience – with value
acting as a kind of transcendental social subject‐function (Adorno 1988d) – in his reading
of Marx’s critique of political economy in the early 1960s.
3. Marx’s Social Ontology: “Facticity of the Conceptuality

of Exchange”
Adorno’s enduring philosophical and political antipathy to Heidegger made him allergic to
the terminology of “ontology” (the theory or doctrine of being), which Heidegger’s philos-
ophy had hegemonized – and in Adorno’s view, rendered mythological – within German
philosophy from the end of the 1920s onwards. Polemic against Heidegger is the most
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c onsistent feature of Adorno’s writings from his 1931 inaugural onwards, reaching its
apex in the 1964 Jargon of Authenticity – an out‐take from Negative Dialectics, which out-
grew its place in that book’s original plan (Adorno 2002d; see also Adorno 1973, Pt 1;
2019). Yet, at the same time – and in relation to his reception of Marx’s writings in
particular – it is difficult to give philosophical consistency to Adorno’s thought without
some conception of social ontology as part of a broader, materialist “historical ontology,” or
negative‐dialectical reflection on the relationship between the categories of nature and
history, in their own natural‐historical development (see Adorno 1973, 354–360; 1984b;
2006, 115–129).
The basic problem with Heidegger’s “ontology,” for Adorno, was its conception of the
“ontological difference,” or its hypostatization of “being” (Sein) in its difference from
beings/entities (Seindes), in the distinction between the (“fundamentally”) “ontological”
and the (merely) “ontical.” For Adorno, this undialectically separates being from actual
history, while “ontologizing history as totality in the form of mere ‘historicity’
(Geschichtlichkeit), whereby every specific tension between interpretation and the object
would be lost, and merely a masked historicism would remain,” as he put it as early as
1931. In contrast, Adorno argued, “the function which traditional philosophical inquiry
expected from meta‐historical, symbolically meaningful ideas” should be accomplished by
“inner‐historically constituted, non‐symbolic ones.” “With this,” he continued, “the rela-
tionship between ontology and history would also be differently posited” (Adorno 1977,
128; GS 1337). This fundamental question of a new conception of the relationship bet-
ween ontology and history remained suspended, hovering over Adorno’s work for the next
38 years – rendered mute, unspeakable, by the revival of Heideggerianism in German phi-
losophy in the postwar period. It is answered in a practical form – yet to be theoretically
recovered – in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. In the meantime, the closest
that Adorno came to addressing it was in his reflections on the peculiar social realism of
Marx’s nominalism, in his critique of political economy, within which a newly and differ-
ently Hegelian Marx begins to emerge.
For Adorno, for whom “ontology” was by‐and‐large the ontology that emerged in
German philosophy in the 1920s out of Max Scheler’s critique of the subjectivism of
Husserlian phenomenology, dialectics was a critique of ontology (see Adorno 2019). But
this leaves the question of Hegel’s explicitly dialectical ontology unaddressed. Adorno
treats Hegel’s philosophy as a contradictory amalgam of dialectical negativity and systemic
closure (ontology) – movement and ultimate stasis (time and eternity) – from which the
project of negative dialectic as “freeing dialectics from its affirmative traits without
reducing its determinacy” was consequently derived (Adorno 1973, xix). Yet this nega-
tive‐epistemological approach still leaves in suspension the content of Hegel’s logic, from
which – dialectically speaking – its form cannot be completely sundered, even when we
refuse to affirm the “standpoint of the absolute” as that of ontological fulfillment. Marx’s
use of Hegel’s logic in Capital offered Adorno a displaced solution to this problem: the
movement of the logic as the self‐actualization of the idea could be viewed, allegorically, as
an idealization of the abstract structure of the self‐actualizing movement of a historically
particular social form, the value‐form. The material constitution of the value‐form, on the
other hand, (the ‘content’ of this dialectic) was reconstructed by Marx, in its own right,
through the critique of political economy.
In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx read the dialectic of consciousness in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit as an idealist inversion of the productivity of social labor. In his
1962 lecture “Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory,” Adorno reads the
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self‐actualizing process of Hegel’s logic as an idealist inversion of the self‐actualization of

the value‐form. This “self‐actualization” (driven by capital as “self‐expanding” value) is the
illusorily self‐sufficient yet socially actual expression of the relationship between the alien-
ated products of social labor, as forms of value. It is the ground of the “social objectivity”
of this idealizing illusion in the commodification of labor power that is the key to what we
may call, with all due caution, Adorno’s account of Marx’s social ontology of capitalism.
This account has three main framing features: (i) the situation of Marx’s critique of
political economy within the framework of the “constitution‐problem” of post‐Kantian
philosophy; (ii) a new acknowledgment of the class character of exchange relations; and
(iii) a shift in the locus of the politics of economics from “need” to “domination” and
“freedom.”
Kant formulated the problem of “the constitution of experience” as that of the
constitution of objectivity by the synthetic acts of a transcendental subject. German ide-
alism extended that formulation to the problem of the constitution of the constituting sub-
ject itself. Hegel dialecticized the problem as that of the movement of the mutual
constitution of subject and object. Here, Marx is read as having “sociologized” the Hegelian
formulation – and approach – through his critique of the categories of political economy,
resuming Hegel’s problematic of “the objectivity of the concept.” This allowed Adorno to
move beyond a focus on the illusory effects of generalized commodification, to the material
basis of “the becoming independent of conceptual relations”:
Is it really the case that the concept is something that the knowing subject adds to the material,
or is there something like a concept in the object with which we are dealing? I raise here the
central problem. Our answer on this issue distinguishes the Frankfurt School from all other
traditions of sociology. Exchange itself is a process of abstraction. Whether human beings
know it or not, by entering into a relationship of exchange and reducing different use‐values
to labor‐value they actualize a real conceptual operation socially. This is the objectivity
[Objektivität] of the concept in practice …
This kind of objectivity of the concept is something else entirely than the kind of objectivity
that is taught by mythological conceptual realism, instead containing nominalism as a whole.
The conceptuality in the relationship of exchange is itself a kind of facticity. (Adorno 2018,
155, 157)
Thus far Adorno remains, as previously, within the domain of exchange, and hence the
circulation of commodities. However, he then switches in a more orthodox direction to
ground generalized exchange in the commodification of labor power:
The exchange‐relation is, in reality, preformed by class relations: that there is an unequal con-
trol of the means of production: this is the heart of the theory … One exchanges the same for
the same and simultaneously the same for the not‐same. Behind this lies the entirety of class
relations. Only because the worker has nothing else but his labor‐power does he accepts these
conditions. Behind this strange exchange lies the question of class relations. (Adorno 2018,
158, 162)
The abstract generality of exchange relations conceals “the moment of social power and
impotence”: “This is why Marx does not start with consumption but with production,”
Adorno argues, “production understood as dominance of the proprietors.” This class dom-
inance of the proprietors, functioning as personifications of capital (“the role is imposed
on the subject by the structure” [Adorno 2018, 161]) expresses itself, through the
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Peter Osborne
bjectivity of the social illusion of the independence of value, as domination by abstrac-

o
tions. This is the main political lesson that some of Adorno’s students would take from this
seminar (see, for example, Postone 1993).
This restoration of the concept of class through a more Hegelian understanding of
capitalist relations of exchange switches the focus of the politics of economics from
“need” (which the system effectively ignores) to social domination (powerlessness)
through exchange relations. The working class is politically redefined by its lack of free-
dom. Hence the emphasis on freedom in Adorno’s lectures and writings of the mid‐
1960s (Adorno 2006). At the same time, Adorno sharpened the opposition between his
Critical Theory (readily adopting a label with which he had never previously seemed
comfortable) and “all other traditions of sociology,” not just epistemologically and
methodologically, but in his explicit retention of the concept of capitalism, in his 1968
address to the Congress of the German Society for Sociology, “Late Capitalism or
Industrial Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society”
(Adorno 2003c. For a comparative analysis of this text with the 1942 “Reflections on
Class Theory,” see Petrucciani 2015.) Despite the political catastrophe of his relations
with the German Student Movement, then, but at the level of theory, we might say that
not only did Adorno end his academic life significantly more of a Marxist than he had
entered it, but he left a legacy that was distinctive both for its dialectical appropriation
of Marx’s critique – and suspended supersession – of philosophy and for its philosophical
interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy as a social ontology of objective
illusions.
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Further Reading
Bonefeld, W. (2014). Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative
Reason. New York‐London‐New Delhi‐Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic A recent work in the
Adornian tradition of the late 1960s “new reading of Marx.”.
Petrucciani, S. (2015). Adorno’s criticism of Marx’s social theory. In: Critical Theory and the Challenge
of Praxis: Beyond Reification (ed. S.G. Ludovisi), 19–32. Farnham, UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate
This provides an excellent critical comparison of two of Adorno’s essays on contemporary
capitalism from 1942 and 1968.
Rose, G. (2014). The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978).
London and New York: Verso This is still the best general “sociological” introduction to Adorno’s
thought.
Vincent, J. (2007). Adorno and Marx. In: Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (eds. J. Bidet
and S. Kouvelakis), 293–300. Leiden and Boston: Brill A useful general overview.
Notes
1 The convergence of the Soviet view (“popular in the West during the sway of “left” extremist,
vulgar sociological and nihilist views,” Frolov 1984, 9) with Habermas’ liberal‐democratic ratio-
nalist critique (Habermas 1987) is intriguing.
2 Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia was published in 1929, immediately prior to his arrival in
Frankfurt. Horkheimer published a critique of its concept of ideology prior to his inaugural, in
Grünberg’s Archive in 1930 (Horkheimer 1993b). Adorno took up the same battle, obliquely,
toward the end of his own inaugural lecture, and again more directly in 1934 in a piece he
described to Benjamin as “the most explicitly Marxist piece” he had “ever undertaken” (Adorno
and Benjamin 1999, 55). However, it was rejected by Horkheimer for the Institute’s Zeitschrift
and did not appear until 1953 (Adorno 1967).
3 The antagonistic conceptual pairing dates back to Lukács’ reading of Capital, for his 1911 book on
The Development of Modern Drama, which he later described as adopting the standpoint of “Marx
the ‘sociologist’… through spectacles tinged by Simmel and Max Weber” (Lukács 1971, ix).
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4 Compare Marx and Engel’s account of the structure of the totalization of knowledge in the
“Feuerbach” chapter of The German Ideology (1845–1846):
With the presentation of actuality a self‐sufficient philosophy loses its medium of existence.
At the best its place can only be taken by a summing‐up of the most general results,
abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical development of
human beings (der Menschen). These abstractions in themselves, divorced from actual his-
tory, have no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the ordering of historical
material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a
recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming historical epochs. On the con-
trary, the difficulties begin only when one sets about the examination and ordering of the
material, whether of a past epoch or of the present, and its actual presentation. The
removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which certainly cannot be stated here,
but which only the study of the actual life‐process and the activity of the individuals of
each epoch will make evident. (Marx 1971, 550; Marx and Engels 1976, 37; trans.
amended)
It is this empiricism that would later lead Adorno to describe Marx as “the heir of nominalistic
theory” (Adorno 1974, 255).
5 Just as Benjamin’s attempt to submit The Origin of German Tragic Drama as an Habilitation thesis
at Frankfurt was rejected by Hans Cornelius in 1925, so Cornelius also rejected Adorno’s first
attempt, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Soul, in 1927. Adorno’s
presentation of a Benjaminian position in his inaugural, after having finally achieved his
Habilitation (on Kierkegaard’s construction of the esthetic, with Paul Tillich) was significantly
overdetermined by this academic history.
6 Cf. both Marx’s and Freud’s use of the terminology of the riddle (Rätsel) in Capital, Volume 1
(Marx 2008a, 86: “der rätselhafte Charakter des Arbeitsprodukts”), and The Interpretation of Dreams
(Freud 1991a, 284: “Ich habe etwas ein Bilderätsel (Rebus) vor mir”) and Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality (Freud 1991b, 95: “das Rätsel: Woher kommen die Kinder?… das Rätsel, welches die the-
baische Sphinx aufzugeben hat.”) (Freud 2001b, 194–195), respectively. In the first two cases, the
English translations conceal the links (Marx 1990, 164; Freud 2001a, 277). I am grateful to
Stella Sandford for pointing out the connection to Freud.
7 The false continuity between Negative Dialectics and the 1931 inaugural is reinforced if one mis-
takenly takes the first sentence of the “Introduction” to the former to be “a direct reference to
Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach” (Hammer 2006, 98). Rather, the language is explicitly that of
the “actualization of philosophy” (die Verwirklichung der Philosophie) of Marx’s “Contribution to
the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right. Introduction” (Marx, 1975), not the mere
“change” (Veränderung) of the 11th thesis. The difference between Marx’s two early texts is
marked: the former is messianic philosophy of history (opening onto the possibility of a negative
messianism), the latter is general moral‐political exhortation.
8 The first, “Feuerbach” chapter of The German Ideology, containing Marx and Engel’s empiricist cri-
tique of philosophy, appeared in German in 1926, from the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow;
although Engels had used the manuscript when writing his 1888 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy, in which Marx’s so‐called “theses,” “On Feuerbach” (1845), was pub-
lished for the first time, as an Appendix. The 1844 Manuscripts first appeared in German in 1932,
along with the full text of The German Ideology, in the famous MEGA from the Marx‐Engels Institute in
Moscow. (The Grundrisse followed in 1939.) The two of the early texts on the critique of philosophy
available in 1923 were thus “On Feuerbach” and the “Contribution to the Critique of the Hegelian
Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” published at the timing of its writing, in 1844.
9 For Benjamin’s non‐Hegelian version of the categorial distinction between truth and knowledge,
adopted by Adorno at this point (later, to be replaced by its negative‐Hegelian equivalent), see
Benjamin (1977, 29–38; 1996b).
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10 The centrality of reification to History and Class Consciousness makes it more of a Simmelian than
a Weberian text: the normative inflection of the concept is a product of Simmel’s vitalism. Since
the word does not occur in the “Fetish‐Character of the Commodity” section of chapter 1 of
Capital, Volume 1 – where the concept is clearly at work – it is often claimed that Marx never used
the term “reification” (Verdinglichung). However, this is not so. It appears in a corresponding
passage in Capital, Volume 3 regarding “the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the
reification (Verdinglichung) of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material
(stofflichen) relations of production with their historical and social specificity.” As does its syn-
onym, Versachlichung: “this personification of things (der Sachen) and reification (Versachlichung)
of the relations of production”; “the reification (Versachlichung) of relations of production and
the autonomy (Verselbständigung) they acquire vis‐à‐vis the agents of production” (Marx 1991,
969; 2008b, 838–839). Earlier in Volume 3, in chapter 24, on interest‐bearing capital, the
discourse of fetishism also recurs in explicit relationship to multiple uses of the term “thing” (das
Ding) (Marx 1991, 515–518; 2008b, 404–407).
11 One can see here just how fundamental the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1, “The Commodity,”
was to Adorno’s thought, from the outset, albeit largely without relation to the rest of the book.
Later, in the early 1960s, his range of reference expanded to the rest of Volume 1. However,
Adorno is said to have “never studied the Grundrisse,” despite the quotations to that work in
Negative Dialectics, which were apparently “given to him by [his then‐assistant – PO] Alfred
Schmidt” (Eldred and Roth 1980, 96, n2). Schmidt’s 1962 book, Concept of Nature in Marx, is
often the main citation in Adorno’s later published references to Marx.
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20
Adorno’s Three Contributions to a Theory

of Mass Psychology and Why They Matter
ELI ZARETSKY
1. Mass Psychology and Critical Theory
The confluence of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and psychoanalysis is one of the signal
events of twentieth‐century intellectual history. The two currents had much in common
before immigrating separately to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Both were
composed of mostly young, mostly Jewish, mostly male, German‐speaking intellectuals
whose formative years had been darkened by Germany’s defeat in the First World War.
Both were radicalized by the Depression and by the struggle against fascism. Both devel-
oped interdisciplinary and critical approaches that were not generally welcomed in the
academy. Both were transformed by their US exile. After the Second World War and during
the Cold War, both evolved more conservative and conventional approaches.
Mass psychology – the use of psychoanalysis to understand large‐scale group events or
processes, especially fascism – was one of the main themes that held the two currents
together. The Frankfurt School had turned to Freudian mass psychology before the emi-
gration. Although Wilhelm Reich was not a member of the School, his pioneering applica-
tions of Freud to politics and social theory inspired its efforts (Reich 1980). After the
surprising Nazi strength in the 1930 elections, Erich Fromm led the School in a series of
psychoanalytic surveys of German family life (Fromm 1984; Wiggershaus 1995, 54–60,
251). In the United States, Leo Löwenthal became co‐author of the 1949 Prophets of Deceit,
an early study of homegrown US fascists (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949). Theodor
Adorno was co‐author of The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and author of “Freudian
Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” (1951), the subject of this essay (Adorno
in Arato and Gebhardt 1978). Herbert Marcuse’s reading of psychoanalysis, especially
Eros and Civilization (1955), was one of the key texts of the New Left. Some key works of US
social thought, notably Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1954)
and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978), though not technically part of
the Frankfurt School, continued its tradition of mass psychological analysis.1
Adorno’s essay stands at the center of this tradition, in the sense that it mediates bet-
ween two key moments just mentioned: the anti‐fascism of the 1930s as reflected in
Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and the progressive neo‐liberalism of the 1970s,
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prefigured in Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978). While at first reading the essay
seems almost a summary of Freud’s lapidary and complex 1921 Mass Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego, upon reflection one realizes that it is a restatement of Freud’s group
theory in light of the main dynamics of twentieth‐century history. The essay supplements
and in some ways supplants Adorno’s better‐known treatment of “the culture industry”
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2007). Its central theme is that with the rise of mass society,
which found both fascist and democratic expression, capitalist elites sought, in effect, to
mobilize the unconscious and weaken the drive for emancipation.
Born in 1903, Adorno immigrated to the United States in 1938, returned to Germany
in 1949, and died in 1968. He was, according to Robert Hullot‐Kentor, “involved with
Freud in every thought he ever had. No Freud, no Adorno” (personal communication). At
first, the reason for this involvement seems apparent. The guiding thread in Adorno’s work
was his effort to locate and protect subjectivity in the context of an administered society.
For him Freud was the great theorist of a fractured subjectivity. Upon further reflection,
however, it becomes clear that the question of mass psychology played a special role in
Adorno’s interest in Freud.
The main context for understanding Adorno’s thought is the universalization of the
commodity form, which occurred under US leadership during and after the First World
War. The spread of the market was tied up with rationalization, commodity fetishism, and
the culture industry. However, the market did not turn individual subjects into passive
objects. On the contrary, commodification was accompanied by the mobilization of the
masses, not just in the form of consumerism and mass culture but also around such non‐
rational, communal identities as nation, religion, and ethnicity. In general, the Frankfurt
School relied exclusively on such concepts as reification, commodification, and one‐
dimensional or administered society. But such efforts ended in unresolvable antinomies,
including the famous dead‐end of Critical Theory that led Habermas and his followers into
stand‐alone liberalism in the 1970s. This was not the case with Freudian mass psychology,
which rested on a complex theory of motivation involving instinctual forces such as
narcissism, masochism, and sadism – facets of the human condition that could never be
fully administered or reified.
The rise of fascism brought to the fore the differences between the Marxist theory of
commodity fetishism and Freudian mass psychology. From the Marxist perspective fascism
was an irrational episode, which resisted explanations centered on political economy.
Ironically, such explanations reinforced the liberal view of fascism as an irrational
“Sonderweg” or unique path. From the point of view of Freudian mass psychology, by con-
trast, rationality and irrationality were not so easily separated. Although in fascism the
preponderance had shifted toward the irrational, fascism could not be hived off as an out-
lier. Rather, fascism illuminated the irrational undercurrents of all twentieth‐century
development, just as a seemingly incidental symptom, such as a nervous cough or tic, illu-
minates the pathological structure of an unconscious mind.
There was a further difference between the Marxist and the Freudian approaches. In
both, the residues of an administered society, avant‐garde art and music, pointed to vast
currents of subjectivity running beneath the surface. But in the Marxist case the avant‐
gardes represented marginal and specialized byways without democratic potential, while
mass psychological thought brought out their wide‐ranging, democratic resonances.
The heart of the difference between Marxism and Freudian mass psychology was this:
the central concept for the Marxist tradition was social class, while the central concept for
mass psychology was the group. The locus classicus for the Frankfurt School approach to
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ADORNO’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO A THEORY OF MASS PSYCHOLOGY
the group was Sigmund Freud’s 1921 Massenpsychologie, a book that departed from a pre-
existing group psychology.2 The “crowd” – as the group was originally called – had been
one of the signal discoveries of the French Revolution. While crowds existed prior to the
Revolution, they did not challenge the existing system of authority. Rather, they affirmed
it by seeking to restore traditional values; often, indeed, traditional crowds were led by
elites. The crowd of the French Revolution, by contrast, was revolutionary and, in some
eyes, irrational. As a result, the crowd became identified with unconscious forces, espe-
cially Mesmerism (animal magnetism) and with the power of “suggestion.” The Paris
Commune (1871) reinforced the identification of the revolutionary crowd and the uncon-
scious when it gave birth to the first systematic crowd psychology in the work of Hippolyte
Taine. The resulting psychology of groups, identified with Gustave Le Bon, was deeply
conservative.
By Freud’s time, the study of the crowd or group was considered by many social theo-
rists to provide “a surer portrait of natural man than any other human condition” (Nye
1973). In a sense Freud agreed – he described a group as ultimately a recurrence of the
primal horde. But unlike his predecessors, he did not see the effects of groups as exclusively
negative. True, groups lifted inhibitions and stifled critical thought, but they also inspired
new ideals, such as altruism, and new creations, notably language. Freud’s main objection
to the prevailing group psychologies, however, was that they failed to explain how groups
affected their members. To explain this required a conceptual link between individual and
group psychology.
His approach was developmental. As our egos develop, he argued, we relinquish the pri-
mary narcissism or oneness of the early mother/infant relationship. At the same time, we
also strive to recover that state. The result is the creation of an ego ideal that is both
projective and regressive: “what man projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for
the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (Freud 1914). The ego
ideal is the conceptual link between individual and group psychology; individuals enter
group life to advance ego ideals in both their projective and regressive aspects. This occurs
through the creation of new libidinal ties among the members of a group, as well as bet-
ween each member and the leader. Groups are therefore repositories of illusion; they play
the same role for the human species that the dream plays for the individual.
While Freud illustrated this theory with examples from history and prehistory, his book
was not itself historical. Adorno’s essay historicized Freud’s theory. Freud, Adorno wrote,
clearly “foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in psychological terms.”
Fascist agitation deploys a systematic set of “devices,” such as repetition, personalization,
and the denigration of the outsider, aimed at creating ties that compensate for individual
wounds. In Germany these were the wounds of the First World War, but Germany was not
unique. The problem of mass psychology, Adorno explained, “is closely related to the
psychological afflictions characteristic of an era which for socio‐economic reasons wit-
nesses the decline of the individual and his subsequent weakness.” By historicizing Freud
in this way, Adorno also politicized him, criticizing Freud for not distinguishing between
socialism, which is a rational response to internal conflicts caused by socio‐economic
change, and fascism, which mobilizes and manipulates these conflicts.
All told, Adorno’s essay made three important contributions to Critical Theory. First, it
restored the idea of the group or, rather, of the relation of the individual to the group, which
Adorno’s predecessors had lost. Second, the essay distinguished the mass psychology of
authoritarian societies from that of democratic societies and related this distinction to the
pre‐Oedipal and Oedipal phases of individual psychology. Third, the essay anticipated the
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new phase of history that opened in the 1960s, in that it predicted the obsolescence of the
ego and the triumph of the self. The first contribution is trans‐historical; the second applies
to the conflict between fascism and the Popular Front of the Second World War period, and
the third applies to the era initiated in the 1960s. Before turning to Adorno’s essay, however,
we need to consider the elements in his prior work that led him to the problem of mass
psychology.
2. Freud and the Kantian Subject
The starting point for Adorno was the idea of the individual subject. Formulated in the era
of the democratic revolutions, Adorno’s key point of reference was Kant’s “Copernican
Revolution”: Kant’s refusal of the idea that the knowing subject was a passive recipient of
sensations and ideas, and insistence on seeing the world as the subject’s own product. To be
sure, the subject for Kant was formal, a transcendental ego that was the necessary condition
for the possibility of perception, reason, and moral freedom. Almost immediately, however,
the idea of the subject was socialized and historicized by Hegel as well as Marx.
By Freud’s time – Freud was born in 1856 – it was usual to describe the subject in a
social context, especially that of evolution. Majoring in philosophy as well as zoology,
Freud had a “highly sophisticated grasp of the Kantian framework” (McGrath 1987). He
took five courses with Franz Brentano, a founder of phenomenology, and his other profes-
sors were redefining Kant’s innate or a priori categories and “forms of intuition” as evolu-
tionary products, outcomes of adaptation and of struggle within nature (Toews 1991).
Freud took up this view, seeing such psychological functions as perception, reason, and
memory as taking shape through evolutionary upheavals. Later he likened the uncon-
scious to the Kantian “thing in itself ” and the superego to the categorical imperative.
If the Kantian subject was the product of an era of revolution, the Freudian subject was
the product of an era of war. Whereas the Kantian idea stressed the individual, rationality,
and linear progress, the Freudian stressed tribal loyalties, irrationality, and regression, all
on display in the huge mobilizations of the First World War era, taking such forms as
nationalism, racism, and jingoism, and in new institutional forms, such as armies and the
state. The war demonstrated, Zeev Sternhell has written, the “facility with which all strata
of society could be mobilized in the service of collectivity … [it] showed the importance of
unity of command, of authority, of leadership, of moral mobilization, of the education of
the masses, and of propaganda as an instrument of power” (Sternhell 1994, 31). The war
inspired Freud’s group psychology as well as his theory of the ego.
The war was also fundamental in forming Adorno’s ideas, especially his experience as a
teenager, seeing his parent’s generation submit to irrational authority. As he later remi-
nisced, Siegfried Kracauer taught him Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on Saturday after-
noons: “Under his guidance I experienced the work … not as mere epistemology … but as a
kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read” (Adorno 1991,
161). This was not, however, the reading of Kant that Adorno encountered at Goethe
University in Frankfurt, which he entered in 1921. There, Adorno was trained in a neo‐
Kantian “philosophy of consciousness,” which aimed at uncovering the transcendental
preconditions for scientific knowledge, a precursor of Husserlian phenomenology, as well as
of today’s philosophy of mind. However, Max Horkheimer, his teacher, introduced Freud’s
thought into the philosophy curriculum in 1923 to expand Kant’s notion of the subject
to include non‐rational experiences. Adorno wrote a paper for Horkheimer’s seminar
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raising Kant for making unconscious materials available for rational exploration. In his
p
1927 Habilitation, “The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the
Psyche,” Adorno argued that psychoanalysis was compatible with Kant’s philosophy.3
In 1924 Adorno read György Lukács’ Hegelian‐Marxist History and Class Consciousness,
which drew on Hegel’s critique of Kant, as well as on Marx’s critique of Hegel. According
to Lukács, the global organization of capitalism during and after the First World War had
generalized commodity production, intensifying what Max Weber called rationalization
and Lukács redefined as reification. Reification, for Lukács, meant the creation of institu-
tions, philosophies, and behavioral sciences that worked according to the same automatic,
instrumental “thing‐like” interactions as the market. To transform a reified world would
require abandoning the Kantian individual subject for the Marxist collective subject – the
proletariat. Adorno rejected the idea of a collective subject but accepted the Lukácsian
theory of reification or fetishism. He later applied it to such new media as film, commercial
music, radio, advertising, and news.
Where Adorno differed from Lukács therefore was in insisting on the possibilities for
individual subjectivity within capitalist society, restricted though they might be. Lukács
was right, Adorno believed, in maintaining that capitalism reduced reason (Vernunft) to
instrumental rationality (Verstand) but this characterization applied only to the market,
which turned infantile longings into “wants” or “needs.” It missed the deeper currents
of capitalist society where narcissism and the ego ideal still proliferated in such collective
forms as crowds, nations, races, and religions. In his 1951 essay Adorno therefore
rejected Lukács’ view of the individual as a member of a social class, and substituted a
view of the individual as a member of a group. His experience of two great arts devoted
to subjectivity prepared him for this shift. The first was the study of literature, especially
the influence of Walter Benjamin – whom Hannah Arendt called Adorno’s only teacher.
The second was music, especially the piano, in whose harmonies Adorno had been
immersed from infancy on.
Trained in literature, Benjamin left the university in 1925–1926 for journalism.
Through that route he entered the world of the avant‐gardes, such as constructivism,
Bauhaus, and surrealism, for whom engagement with mass culture was central. In con-
trast to Lukács’ vision of a fetishized society, Benjamin wrote that commodities give us “an
immense labor to perform.” “Warmth,” he wrote, “is ebbing from things.” We have to com-
pensate for their coldness with our warmth. “We have to “handle their spines with infinite
dexterity, if we are not to perish by bleeding.” Benjamin’s orientation to the aspects of
society that escaped rationalization made for a post‐Lukácsian theory of mass society.
Whereas Lukács viewed all the fissures in the system as related to a singular, totalizing
contradiction – capital vs. labor – Benjamin developed the idea that contradictions
expressed themselves through slippages and idiosyncrasies that arose at concrete,
particular levels. There was an affinity between Benjamin’s thought and psychoanalysis.
In both cases, internal conflicts revealed themselves through small, involuntary acts – street
placards, leaflets, and advertisements in the case of commodity culture, nervous coughs or
slips of the tongue in the case of the Freudian individual. In the former case, though, the
involuntary act is meaning‐saturated, whereas in the latter it is instinct‐saturated as well.
Both Benjamin and Adorno were struggling to understand the connections between
irrational depth psychology and capitalism, but Adorno increasingly relied on Freud. One
can see this in their different approaches to surrealism. Benjamin praised the surrealists
for exposing the fetishized character of capitalism through such means as the counterposing
of irreconcilable images, found objects, and “indexical” media such as photography. But
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ELI ZARETSKY
for Adorno, the surrealists’ abdication of subjectivity, their refusal to mediate the compo-
nent elements of a montage, contributed to the process of fetishization that they claimed
to expose (Wolin 1994, 108). Adorno, then, was still in the grip of the idea of the active
subject, now in search of a subjective element of narration and mediation, as he approached
both US‐style populist culture and European, especially German, fascism.
Adorno’s developing conception of mass psychology also reflected his study of avant‐
garde music, which, like the visual arts, was wholly involved with modern commercial life,
especially the city. For Lukács the commodity structure froze and objectified qualitative,
variable, flowing relations, forcing temporality into a delimited, quantifiable, linear form.
Music, by contrast, was nothing if not subjective. Once a piece of music commences,
Adorno wrote, “it is obliged to go further, to become something new, to develop itself ”
(Buck‐Morss 1979). Avant‐garde music especially, freed from religion, work, and dance,
followed its own inner logic, which could not be reduced to a social function. Dissonance,
counterpoint, harmony, theme, and variation, and return of the theme, synchronicity, and
polyrhythms are all twists in a multi‐temporal order that evoke not only Einsteinian physics
but also the nachträglicher character of the unconscious mind.
But if anything drove home to Adorno the extent to which Lukács had underestimated
the subjective depths that lay beneath capitalism’s fetishized surface, it was fascism. In
1933 Adorno was relieved of his teaching position because his father was Jewish; he was
driven into exile for the next 15 years. While Lukács fled fascism by going Eastward to
Moscow, Adorno fled to London and the United States of the New Deal. In his 1926 One
Way Street Benjamin had had an intuitive flash: “A curious paradox: people have only the
narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than
ever determined by the instincts of the mass … [In] this society, each of whose members
cares only for his own abject well‐being … the diversity of individual goals is immaterial in
face of the identity of the determining forces [of mass or group psychology]” (Benjamin
2016, 34). It was Adorno who followed up this insight.
3. The Group
The first contribution of Adorno’s article was to introduce the idea of the group to Critical
Theory. This idea may have been facilitated by his move to the United States in 1937. In the
late 1930s many Americans entertained the idea that their country was not only a class
society, subject to exploitation, but also a mass society, subject to manipulation through
“suggestion.” This intuition rested on the longing for a “strong man” who could gather
and control a crowd. In the 1920s Mussolini’s muscular frame and sexual prowess adorned
US magazine articles. Studebaker named a car Dictator. In the course of the 1930s, how-
ever, the dictator became an increasingly negative figure, as Americans became uneasy
about their tendencies toward regimentation and groupthink. In 1937 Fortune magazine
explained, “The [fascist] mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the
individual, who is becoming an adherent of a new movement, feels lonely, and is easily
seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater
community. [This shows] the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion” (Alpers
2003, 108).
The rise of mass media, such as advertising, radio, and film, was especially important in
creating the idea of the mass. Siegfried Kracauer noted “the attraction which masses
exerted on still and motion cameras from the outset” and quoted a cameraman who stated
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“the true domain of the cinema [is] the crowd and its eddies” (Brill 2006, 2). Film, Vachel
Lindsay added, was “shallow in showing private passion [but] powerful in conveying the
passions of masses of men” (Lindsey 2015 [1922], 68). Adorno came to the United States
to work on a sociological study, directed by Paul Lazarsfeld, of radio, a “post‐democratic”
phenomenon based on mass participation (Speier and Kris 1944). Adorno also worked in
film, and co‐wrote a book on film music with Hanns Eisler (Adorno and Eisler 1944). These
experiences led to the well‐known chapter on “The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of
Enlightenment (1941), The Authoritarian Personality, launched by the American Jewish
Committee in 1944 and published in 1950, and “Freudian Theory and Patterns of Fascist
propaganda,” published in 1951 and based on studies of right‐wing US demagogues such
as Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Gerald Smith.
Adorno’s essay departed from the European tradition of mass psychology, which largely
derived from Wilhelm Reich. For the most part, the European tradition was not a theory of
groups at all. It was primarily a theory of how individual pathologies, arising in the family,
manifested themselves sociologically. For example Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism
(1933) explained fascism as a response to sexual repression. Rejecting socialism’s “sexual
abstinence” literature, Reich maintained that sexual repression gave rise to fascism. But he
gave no account of the group dynamics among sexually repressed individuals. Similarly, for
Fromm the individual prone to fascism was characterized by a strict superego and a sub-
missive attitude toward authority. This describes an epidemiological pattern, not a group.
Even The Authoritarian Personality (1951) traced the vulnerability of Americans to author-
itarian and especially anti‐Semitic propaganda to individual resentment at the “weakness”
of an admired father, displaced onto a substitute such as the Jew or Negro. In his essay,
Adorno called such pathographies “arbitrary and haphazard” (Adorno 1951 in Arato and
Gebhardt 1978, 118f.) They described demographically recognizable patterns but not
groups, which exist only when its members recognize each other subjectively, not because
their behaviors conform to objective criteria but because they share a common set of
dreams and anxieties. “Psychological dispositions,” Adorno elaborated, do not cause fas-
cism. Fascism, rather is a “structural unit” – a group psychology – that combines “a
political conception with a psychological essence” (Adorno 1951 in Arato and Gebhardt
1978, 118f.).
According to Adorno, the focus on the crowd or group was not unique to fascism.
Rather, as Freud wrote, “the psychology of groups is the oldest human psychology; what
we have isolated as individual psychology, by neglecting all traces of the group, has only
come into prominence out of the old group psychology, by a gradual process which may
still, perhaps, be described as incomplete” (Freud, Standard Edition, XVIII, 123). The older
psychology is reflected in the fact that the ego is porous. At first it includes everything but
then it separates off, creating a boundary with the external world. Only after that does it
appear “autonomous and unitary,” “marked off distinctly from everything else,” but the
appearance is deceptive. The ego continues inward, into the unconscious mind (Freud,
Standard Edition, XXI, 66). Group identifications are based in the unconscious; they bypass
the ego, just as dreams do. Group ties can even be transmitted by bodily means (what would
later be recognized as projective identification) including forms of telepathy and hypno-
tism. This is reflected socially in that many cultural messages, notably those of religion,
exceed the limits of reason and are transmitted through group means such as ritual.
What distinguishes fascism is not the mere presence of a group but rather the group’s
role in weakening or eliminating critical thought. Liberalism, Adorno wrote, is based on the
idea of a rational individual pursuing material interests. Fascism does not advance people’s
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material interests but offers group participation instead. Freud’s main contribution, Adorno
explained, lay in exposing the “psychological forces [that] result in the transformation of
individuals into a mass.” Well‐honed devices – compulsive repetition of a few crafted
claims and slogans, personalization, the “unity trick,” the “sheep and goat” device, that is,
in‐groups and out‐groups, the “great little man,” exemplified in the famous Eintopfgericht
image of Hitler enjoying stew, and the “bicyclist” effect, that is, deference to those above,
while “kicking” those below – all have the same purpose, the transformation of a nation
into a crowd. What we see in the fascist crowd is “not a spontaneous expression of atavistic
urges but an artificial regression provoked by organized interests” (Adorno 1951 in Arato
and Gebhardt 1978, 118f.).
Adorno’s focus on the ability of fascist collectivities to produce “post‐psychological,
de‐individualized social atoms” rested on the link Freud forged between ego psychology
and group psychology. For many liberals and leftists of the Popular Front era, it was no
longer property that defined individual autonomy but rather the capacity to resist group
pressure. To understand that capacity requires the distinction between the self and the
ego. To be sure, there is always an ambiguity between the two, as signaled in Freud’s
German, which uses the term Ich for both. Still, group identifications are ultimately rooted
in narcissism; they are part of the self, whereas the ego is the locus of reason, more or less
as Kant defined it. The way that a strong ego resists group pressure can be observed in
films of Adorno’s era such as Spartacus, in which the individual confronts the tyrant‐led
mob, The Ox‐Bow Incident (a lynch‐mob) and Twelve Angry Men (an out‐of‐control jury.)
The idea that the future of democracy depended on autonomous citizens socialized to
oppose authoritarian group pressures inspired an enormous literature on family, educa-
tion, culture, and politics.
4. Authoritarian vs. Democratic Psychology
Adorno’s second contribution lay in distinguishing the mass psychology of authoritarian

societies from that of democratic societies. To do this he went beyond the theory of the
Oedipus complex and emphasized the mother/infant or pre‐Oedipal stage, something Freud
was not fully able to do in 1921 because he had not yet formulated the pre‐Oedipal/Oedipal
distinction. Regression to the mother/infant relationship, Adorno argued, occurred not
only in hierarchical or fascist contexts but in liberal/democratic contexts as well.
Group psychology, Adorno saw, unfolded along two axes: vertically (or centripetally)
aimed toward the leader and horizontally, comparing oneself to the other members of the
group. Freud suggested this duality in his formula: “the members of a group stand in need
of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leaders; but the leader himself
need love no one else, he [must] be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self‐confi-
dent and independent” (Freud, Standard Edition, XVIII, 123–124). Adorno not only made
this vertical/horizontal distinction explicit; he added a comparative perspective, contrast-
ing hierarchical and democratic societies. In hierarchical societies, he claimed, individuals
seek a powerful leader or authority, because their ego ideal enjoins obedience. In mass‐
democratic societies, by contrast, individuals seek leaders with whom they identify in order
to emphasize the equality of all members of society.
This was original. Before Adorno wrote, mass psychology stressed the need for a
leader or father figure. Freud set the tone for this when he likened the leader to the hyp-
notist who awakens “the idea of a paramount and dangerous personality” – ultimately
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the primal father – “towards whom only a passive, masochistic attitude is possible”
(Freud, Standard Edition, XVIII, 123–124). The earliest application of Freud’s group
theory to politics, Paul Federn’s 1919 “The Fatherless Society,” followed suit. It argued
that the Spartacist‐led uprising in Vienna would fail because the Social Democrats were
“tied to the basic attitude of the son,” meaning that they sought protection and favors
from militarist father substitutes. The same idea informed Reich’s The Mass Psychology of
Fascism, which was written after the Nazis became the second largest party in Germany.
Describing the middle class as an intermediate and dependent class, Reich likened the
white‐collar worker to an eldest son with a powerful father: “While subordinate to the
top, he is to those below him a representative of … authority and enjoys, as such, a
privileged moral (not material) position. The arch personification of this type … is to be
found in the army sergeant” (Reich 1980, 47). On this basis Reich predicted that the
middle class would support the Nazis.
The father complex interpretation of the dictator might apply to Mussolini, Atatü rk, or
Putin. But it was already a stretch for Hitler, a short, sexless vegetarian with a squeaky
voice. And it certainly did not describe US demagogues and would‐be fascists, such as Huey
Long, Father Coughlin, and Gerald Smith, who were essentially everyday Americans writ
large. Based on his experience in the United States, Adorno shifted the emphasis of mass
psychology from the search for a strong man to the wish to bolster narcissism. To be sure, he
noted, there is a connection between the two. The soldier satisfies his ego ideal through obe-
dience to his general. But he also derives narcissistic satisfaction through participation in a
common ethic of obedience, shared with his fellow soldiers and reflected in group morale.
In democratic societies, Adorno argued, leaders may be chosen not because they convey
authority but because they resemble their followers. On this point, Adorno quoted Freud:
[T]he [leader] object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own. We love
it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which we
should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism.
Often, too,
the ego may have preserved its earlier narcissistic self‐complacency … The selection of the
leader is very much facilitated by this circumstance. He need often only possess the typical
qualities of the individuals concerned in a particularly clearly marked and pure form, and
need only give an impression of greater force and of more freedom of libido; and in that case
the need for a strong chief will often meet him half‐way and invest him with a predominance
to which he would otherwise perhaps have had no claim. The other members of the group,
whose ego ideal would not, apart from this, have become embodied in his person without some
correction, are then carried away with the rest by “suggestion,” that is to say, by means of
identification. (Adorno 1951 in Arato and Gebhardt 1978, 118f.)
In more authoritarian societies leaders cultivate an air of mystery and remoteness, as De

Gaulle for example did. Alternatively they rely on a masculinist, military association as
was the case with Atatü rk. In a democratic society, however, Adorno wrote, “the fascist
leader’s startling symptoms of inferiority, his resemblance to ham actors and asocial psy-
chopaths,” can serve as an advantage. “The superman has to resemble the follower and
appear as his ‘enlargement.’” Seeking to explain the phenomenon of the “great little man,”
the “Aw shucks,” “just folks,” Huey Long type of demagogue, Adorno writes: “Psychological
ambivalence helps to work a social miracle. The leader image gratifies the follower’s
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ELI ZARETSKY
twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself … This fits into a world
[modern liberal democracies] in which irrational control is exercised though it has lost its
inner conviction” (Adorno 1951 in Arato and Gebhardt 1978, 118f.). Often, Adorno
added, “the modern leader image … seems to be the enlargement of the subject’s own per-
sonality, a collective projection of himself, rather than an image of the father” (Adorno
1951 in Arato and Gebhardt 1978, 118f.).
The close identity between the leader and the follower in democratic contexts explains
how the agitator or demagogue gains command of techniques of mass manipulation.
According to Adorno, “the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those
susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distin-
guished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them,
rather than by any intrinsic superiority.” Recalling Freud’s claim that the regression is to
“the primitively narcissistic aspect of identification … an act of devouring, of making the
beloved object part of oneself,” Adorno wrote:
The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to
befool the others. The famous spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend
on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a magical way
and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds. Since
this very quality of uninhibited but largely associative speech presupposes at least a temporary
lack of ego control, it may well indicate weakness rather than strength. The fascist agitators’
boasting of strength is indeed frequently accompanied by hints at such weakness, particularly
when begging for monetary contributions – hints which, to be sure, are skillfully merged with
the idea of strength itself. In order successfully to meet the unconscious dispositions of his
audience, the agitator so to speak simply turns his own unconscious outward … [E]xperience
has taught him consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use of his irrationality, sim-
ilarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist who knows how to sell their innervations and
sensitivity … All he has to do in order to make the psychology of his audience click is shrewdly
to exploit his own psychology. (Adorno 1951 in Arato and Gebhardt 1978, 118f.)
For Adorno, agitation of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well‐tested methods. The
appeals have been standardized, like the advertising slogans that proved most valuable in the
promotion of business. Even when considered “phony” such appeals continue to be deployed,
especially in contexts in which it is recognized that power alone – “power unhampered by
rational objectivity” – decides one’s fate (Adorno 1951 in Arato and Gebhardt 1978, 118f.).
As with his reintroduction of the concept of the group, Adorno’s recognition of the role
of narcissism and of the inner connections between narcissism and authority was a major
advance. We generally think of authoritarian leaders as inspiring fear but the deeper truth
is that they make their followers feel exalted and powerful. This point highlights the weak-
ness that liberalism has in confronting authoritarianism. Insofar as the extolling of such
liberal values as tolerance, the scientific spirit, or rationality is linked to a sense of moral
superiority it will backfire, serving only to strengthen the bonds between the authoritarian
leader and his followers. The leader’s ignorance, crudeness, and lack of self‐control gives
him a point of connection to his followers, rather than leading them to reject him. We
can also see here the power of the concept of identification as opposed to imitation.
Identification, for Freud, is a motivated assimilation or incorporation on the basis of an
unconsciously perceived resemblance, not a mere preference for likeness. The idealization
of the leader and the complementary identification of the members of the group with one
another are motivated; this is missing from alternative accounts.
330
5. The 1960s
Adorno’s third contribution was to historicize psychoanalysis. In his conception, the

bourgeois revolutions created the idea of the autonomous individual, and with it the idea
of psychology as an introspective, subjective, self‐reflective discipline. For him, moreover,
Freud marked the highpoint in the exploration of bourgeois subjectivity. But like the owl of
Minerva, Freud was able to grasp the psychology of the independent individual just as
bourgeois society was giving way to mass society. In mass societies, Adorno claimed, the
ruling elites appropriated psychological techniques to buttress their hegemony. The result
was “a growing tendency toward the abolition of psychological motivation in the old
liberalistic sense.” With perfect consistency, Adorno expected that psychoanalysis would
disappear along with the older ideal of the autonomous – bourgeois, liberal – subject. Ours
was an age, he claimed, in which “psychology abdicates” (Adorno 1951 in Arato and
Gebhardt 1978, 118f.).
The key to psychology’s “abdication,” for Adorno, lay in the secular sapping of “ego
strength,” which was tantamount to an epochal historical regression. Counter‐tendencies
in his thought notwithstanding, he would have agreed with Fred Weinstein and Gerald
Platt’s claim that “the important development historically has been the strengthening of
the ego.” It was this development and not the growth of the productive forces, or of ratio-
nality as such, that had enabled bourgeois society’s radical break with traditional
authority in religion, politics, economics, and the family. What strengthened the ego,
moreover, was not primarily recognition from others, as later thinkers would claim, but
rather postponement of gratification, which Freud termed Geistigkeit. Therein lay the rub,
in Adorno’s view. Whereas bourgeois society depended on the postponement of gratifica-
tion, mass society works through immediate gratification, especially the bolstering of
narcissism – the inflation of the self. As the self puffs itself up, Adorno claimed, the ego
becomes impoverished; it “surrenders itself to the object,” that is, the leader or leader‐
substitute, or to a group based on identity. At the end, the ego “seems no longer capable of
sustaining itself … in distinction from id and superego” (Adorno 1951 in Arato and
Gebhardt 1978, 118f.).
Adorno’s 1951 essay appeared on the eve of a new, explosive phase in the history of
mass society: the 1960s. This era witnessed an exponential expansion in the techniques of
mass psychology. These included new forms of advertising and display; demotic music; art
forms such as happenings that stressed participation; new “life‐styles” such as communes,
which blurred sexual boundaries and property‐ownership, and an activist political culture,
marked by huge crowd formations for civil rights and peace. Contrary to Adorno’s predic-
tions, the new mass experiences were not primarily created by elites to manipulate the
masses, but rather were generated by the masses themselves. The implications were ambig-
uous. If one result, foretold by Adorno but never developed by him, was the decline of the
ego, another, unanticipated by him, was the appearance of new forms of participation.
These forms gave political movements their power and creative potential, including the
potential to transform individual identity. Without the suspension of the ego that charac-
terized the new experiences, we never would have had Black Power, second‐wave femi-
nism, or gay liberation.
The Frankfurt School divided over the 1960s. On the one hand, Herbert Marcuse was
enthusiastically pro. His Eros and Civilization (1955) purported to discover a hidden,
revolutionary strand in Freud in the idea of primary narcissism, the “oceanic feeling” that
exists before the ego emerges. The ego, Marcuse now held, was the outcome of the
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ELI ZARETSKY
i nstitution of the reality principle against the fluid, integrative background of the mother/
infant relationship. It was an “aggressive, offensive subject … a subject against an object,”
productivist, and soon‐to‐be‐termed “masculinist.” The regression to primary narcissism
that occurred in crowds turned an antagonistic relation to reality into a harmonious one:
“the very opposite of the Promethean dynamic”; “not the incessant activity of conquest,
but its coming to rest in the transparent knowledge and gratification of being.” Marcuse’s
celebration of the return to primary narcissism, the original oneness with the mother, res-
onated with radical and socialist feminism, eco‐socialism, and gay liberation – movements
that he enthusiastically endorsed.
Adorno, by contrast, was largely opposed. Unlike Marcuse, he was in Germany during
the 1960s and did not write on the US experience, but his focus on the ego primed him to
be critical of New Left antinomianism. In his essay he distinguished repressive from gen-
uine egalitarianism. Genuine egalitarianism was based on collective processes of self‐
reflection, only possible through the involvement of a critical intelligentsia. Repressive
egalitarianism was a spontaneous expression of the group, which could be compared to
the reaction‐formation felt by an only child against his or her jealousy for younger siblings.
“The first demand made by this reaction‐formation is for justice, for equal treatment for all.
We all know how loudly and implacably this claim is put forward at school. If one cannot
be the favorite oneself, at all events nobody else shall be the favorite,” as Freud wrote (Freud,
Standard Edition, XVIII, 120). The insight that the demand for equality can be psycholog-
ically regressive buttressed Adorno’s view that the social movements of the 1960s tended
to foster a spurious equality based not on reflection but on membership in a group.
Adorno’s thought was developed in a series of US works of which the most important
were Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American History (1954) and Christopher
Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978). These authors focused on the irrational strain
of authority bred by democracy’s antinomian weakening of the ego. Prompted by
McCarthyism, Hofstadter portrayed the United States as a country with a powerful
paranoid streak visible in the colonial persecution of the witches; the Alien and Sedition
Acts of the 1790s; vigilante outbursts, such as lynching; the 1919 Red Scare; the Ku Klux
Klans of the 1860s–1870s and of the 1920s; anti‐Masonic, anti‐Catholic anti‐Chinese
and other nativist movements; anti‐Semitism; isolationism; and other versions of xeno-
phobia. Influenced by Adorno, Hofstadter, in turn, became the dominant influence on
Christopher Lasch, who applied mass psychology to the 1960s (Blake and Phelps 1994,
1315–1319).
Viewing the 1960s as a general revolt against authority, Lasch insisted that the
individual needs “the inhibiting, controlling and guiding function of the superego, which
largely merges with the ego.” Without a strong ego, internal values or principles lose their
efficacy and are replaced by the management of personal impressions or “networking.” At
the same time, the primitive, irrational, punishing superego of early childhood lives on.
Political correctness, an expression of repressive egalitarianism that surfaced on the wave
of the 1960s, is one example of this. Another, from the other end of the political spectrum,
is the 1968 election of a law and order president who claimed to represent the “silent
majority,” and who mobilized large majorities against “rioters,” “draft‐dodgers,” and “rich,
white kids.”
Viewed from the point of view of Freud’s group theory, Marcuse and Adorno each cap-
tured one side of the upheavals of the 1960s. Marcuse captured the utopianism, the exhil-
aration of crowd participation, the Dionysian moment, which Freud called primary
narcissism, and which remains basic to all progressive movements. Adorno, and Lasch
332
after him, insisted that the mere overthrow of authority was not enough; a new
authority – a societal ego – had to be created. As the fervor of the 1960s gave way to the
constraints of the 1970s, the Dionysian crowds turned into Thermidorean scolds.
That trajectory holds lessons for the present. Building a progressive movement today
entails turning the repressive egalitarianism of the crowd into a self‐reflective movement
for structural change. The movements of the 1960s absorbed and generalized many
Frankfurt School ideas including the critique of the Enlightenment as a source of domina-
tion; the idea that the forces of domination precede, even if they also include, capitalism;
and the rejection of spurious totalities or universals in favor of alterity, otherness, and
difference. Yet they rejected the Freudian heritage, including mass psychology, which is
one reason we have not yet been able to truly move beyond the 1960s.
Since the 1960s the world has been swept with innumerable mass upsurges including
those of ethno‐nationalism, identity politics (racial and ethnic, as well as that of women and
gays), populism and that provoked by charismatic individuals, such as Trump, Putin, or Le
Pen. These upsurges have varied relations to capitalism. In some cases, the connections are
obvious, for example the quasi‐causal links between the economic breakdown of 2007–
2008 and both Brexit and the Trump victory. Others are subtler and more difficult to define,
such as the ties between capitalism, slavery and anti‐slavery, or between feminism and neo-
liberalism. While we have many post‐Marxist theories of nationalism, such as those of
Benedict Anderson or Ernest Gellner, we do not have a general theory that relates mass psy-
chology and behavior to the capitalist structure of society. Freud’s theory, which Adorno
restricted mostly to the analysis of fascism, has the potential to serve as such a theory. It gives
us a way of talking about the relations between instrumental and economic rationality, on
the one hand, and narcissism, or the wishes of early childhood, on the other.
Finally, let me add a postscript. Kant viewed the French Revolution as a turning point in
history: release from self‐incurred tutelage. Hegel, however, grasped the contradictions
that lurked behind revolutionary optimism. In his view the Terror was already implicit in
the idea of a reason completely open to the future and unaware of the difficulties in its rift
with the past. Hegel’s was an early insight into mass psychology. Later termed “the dia-
lectic of enlightenment,” it was also the real beginning of the Frankfurt School project,
including Adorno’s deep encounter with Freud’s work. We have noted the enormous gains
made by that encounter, but are nonetheless left with a question. What if Horkheimer and
Adorno had drawn on Freud for their The Dialectic of Enlightenment instead of on Nietzsche’s
one‐sided idea of a will to power implicit in reason – an idea that opened the way to post-
modernism, Heideggereanism, and the end of Critical Theory?
References
Adorno, T.W. (1978). Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda. In: The Frankfurt School
Reader (eds. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt), 118–137. New York: Urizen Books.
Adorno, T.W. and Eisler, H. (1944). Composing for the Films. London: England, A & C Black.
Alpers, B. (2003). Democracy, Dictatorship and American Public Culture. Chapel Hill, N. Car: University
of North Carolina Press.
Arato, A. and Gebhart, E. (1978). The Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Urizen Books.
Blake, C. and Phelps, C. (1994). History as social criticism: conversations with Christopher Lasch.
The Journal of American History 80 (4): 1310–1332.
Brill, L. (2006). Crowds, Power and Transformation in Cinema. Detroit, Mi: Wayne State University
Press.
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Buck-Morss, S. (1979). The Origin of Negative Dialectics. New York: Free Press.
Freud, S. (1976). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. New York:
Norton.
Fromm, E. (1984). The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study.
Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (2007). The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, Ca: Stanford
University Press.
Lindsey, V. (2015 [1922]). The Art of the Moving Picture. Createspace Independent Publishing.
Löwenthal, L. and Guterman, N. (1949). Prophets of Deceit. New York: Harper and Brothers.
McGrath, W. (1987). Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press.
Nye, R. (1973). Two paths to a psychology of social action: Gustave LeBon and Georges Sorel. The
Journal of Modern History 45 (3): 411–438.
Reich, W. (1980). The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Speier, H. and Kris, E. (1944). German Radio Propaganda. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Toews, J. (1991). Historicizing psychoanalysis: Freud in his time and for our time. Journal of Modern
History 63: 504–555.
Wiggershaus, R. (1995). The Frankfurt School. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press.
Further Reading
Ekstein, R. (1971). Reflections on and translation of Paul Federn’s ‘The Fatherless Society,’. Reiss‐
Davis Clinic Bulletin 8 (1): 3–33.
Gordon, P.E. (2017). The authoritarian personality revisited: reading Adorno in the age of Trump.
Boundary 2 44 (2 May): 31–56.
Zaretsky, E. (2014). Political Freud. Berkeley, Ca: UC Press.
Notes
1 Two other traditions of Freudian mass psychology, which I will not treat here, lie in the works of
Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell, Slavoj Žižek, and Ernesto Laclau, as well as within the analytic
profession, centering on such figures as Wilfred Bion and Otto Kernberg.
2 We don’t have a good translation for the book’s title. In English, “mass psychology” generally
connotes irrationality, with tendentious overtones, alien to Freud. “Social psychology” elides all
sense of the unconscious, and “crowd psychology” refers to what Freud called “noisy and ephem-
eral” crowds, also sometimes termed mobs. “Group psychology” generally refers to small groups,
whereas Freud also meant large groups such as nations. “Group” is the term used in the Standard
Edition of Freud’s work.
3 Hans Cornelius, his main advisor, had Adorno withdraw the manuscript on the grounds that it
was too close to his own way of thinking.
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21
Adorno and Postwar German Society

JAKOB NORBERG
1. Professor, Expert, Critic, Counselor: Adorno

in the Federal Republic
After 15 years away from Germany, Adorno returned from the United States to Frankfurt am
Main via Paris in October 1949. About 20 years later, in early August 1969, he passed away
unexpectedly while on vacation in Switzerland. These two last decades of his life coincided
with the first two decades of the Federal Republic of Germany – the larger, democratic, and
more prosperous part of a postfascist Germany. He became one of the country’s must
prominent public intellectuals, perhaps its most prominent. This is partly a claim about his
media presence. Adorno published articles in a number of culturally ambitious postwar
journals and occasionally contributed to widely circulating newspapers; he published books
with West Germany’s most prestigious high‐brow publisher, the Frankfurt‐based Suhrkamp;
he appeared in televised roundtables and discussions; and, above all, he was a frequent guest
on the radio, commenting on music, literature, and socio‐political matters over a hundred
times, especially on the Hessian station. Among allied and rival thinkers, nobody achieved a
similar broadcasting ubiquity, not his friend and colleague Max Horkheimer or the psycho-
analyst Alexander Mitscherlich, not the more technocratic sociologist Helmut Schelsky or
the historian Golo Mann, son of Thomas Mann, not the Heideggerian philosopher Hans‐
Georg Gadamer or the existentialist Karl Jaspers (Albrecht et al. 1999, 203–246).
Adorno coupled media savvy with an impressive thematic range; he could discuss the
high arts and especially music but also pronounce on popular culture; he was a contempo-
rary bearer of the venerable German philosophical tradition as well as an exponent of the
modern discipline of sociology. In the 1950s, a decade not known for a frank discussion of
the Nazi past, Adorno appeared as a practitioner of modern research methods with US
experience, and once the silence about the past gave way to debate about Nazi Germany
and the dangers of fascist recidivism in the early 1960s, he emerged as its most persistent
and scrupulous voice, an expert on the psychological mechanisms behind, and possible
therapies for, authoritarianism, fascism, and anti‐Semitism. As the most prolific and
public representative of the Frankfurt School, Adorno offered progressives in the early
Federal Republic an attractive politico‐ethical habitus: radicalism without dogmatic Soviet
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JAKOB NORBERG
c ommunism, critique without militancy, moral seriousness without religion (Strote 2017,
243–267). He invented a manner of living peacefully with the Federal Republic of
Germany, namely in the mode of constant negativity, and thereby became a sort of father
figure for aspiring intellectuals, but only by projecting an entirely un‐fatherlike appear-
ance (Schneider 2011).
Adorno emerged as West Germany’s exemplary public intellectual and yet the phrase
“public intellectual” does not quite capture the various roles he played or audiences he
targeted and also leaves out many of his reflections on his own engagement with society.
Adorno was, to begin with, a professor. Professorships were an explicit goal of Horkheimer
and Adorno, for the status and stability it granted its occupants; scholars can lead precar-
ious lives, especially if they belong to an historically marginalized minority, and both
friends strove for “security” (Claussen 2008, 204). For Adorno, the road to a full professor-
ship was long – he was granted a tenured chair a decade after his arrival – but toward the
end of his career, he would lecture in front of hundreds of students, direct the Frankfurt
Institute of Social Research, and preside over the German Association of Sociologists. In
other words, Adorno spoke from a well‐established institutional position that he himself
equated with a certain degree of power (Müller-Doohm 2003, 507). Ironically, it was pre-
cisely as a professor, an embodiment of theoretical learning and academic hierarchy, that
he became a target for the happening‐like disruptions of a politicized phalanx of the larg-
est student generation in the history of Germany, a generation he had helped inspire (Judt
2005, 394).
As a professor, Adorno mostly taught philosophy, but he chose to identify himself with
the rapidly rising discipline of sociology. In 1960, there were 13 chairs in sociology;
10 years later, the number was 200 (Albrecht et al. 1999, 278). The demand for Adorno
was related to a demand for a new kind of expertise, largely rejected by the racially oriented
Nazis but embraced in West Germany, where empirically based analysis and careful reform
of the social system were part of the republic’s self‐image. Adorno continuously contrib-
uted to the redefinition of Germany as a society of interacting individuals and institutions
rather than a community of blood and race. And yet he also acknowledged sociology’s
history of entanglement with a vision of a centralized and bureaucratic total administration,
which became a primary target of his critical theorizing.
Adorno would probably not have achieved his ubiquity on the basis of a disciplinary spe-
cialization alone but also appeared as a polymathic and aesthetically sensitive critic of
cultural artifacts and trends. His first books to appear in West Germany, apart from Minima
Moralia, were collections of essays on culture and music such as Prismen (1955) and
Dissonanzen (1956). This role, too, was a kind of retrospective resistance to fascist ide-
ology – Adorno himself pointed to the Nazi hatred of supposedly corrosive criticism and
helped reintroduce Jewish thinkers and modernist artists as members of a cultural tradition
suppressed under National Socialism (Habermas 2003). But as with the sociologist, Adorno
saw the critic as an ambiguous figure. The semi‐professional reviewer had appeared in
bourgeois society to discriminate among its abundance of goods, but ultimately turned
against the capitalist dynamic of commodification that required the development of con-
noisseurship in the first place. And yet even at his most critical and dismissive, Adorno
continued to provide a kind of guidance in an economically booming and “Americanized”
West Germany a little overwhelmed by the proliferation of gadgets and stimuli (Schildt and
Siegfried 2009, 181–203). He rejected broadcasted soccer games, paperback books, and
simplistic music appreciation records, but by doing so still brought them into his work, pub-
licly modeling an informed but ascetic stance toward consumer society.
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ADORNO AND POSTWAR GERMAN SOCIETY
But Adorno did not solely write about art; he addressed modes of living. In Minima
Moralia, published in West Germany in 1951 to wide acclaim, Adorno discussed situations
of domesticity, hospitality, and sociability, emerging as something of a sage or counselor
who dispensed advice on how to negotiate everyday situations and even lead a dignified
life. Letters from readers in the Adorno archive testify to his peculiar role as an authority
on modern existence: people wrote to Adorno for a helpful word or two about their
dilemmas and difficulties (Felsch 2015, 37–42). And yet Adorno became famous for deliv-
ering bleak statements on the unavailability of any unequivocally ethical position in a
compromised world. He was not exactly a success‐oriented life coach but rather used the
format of advice to remind his readers of the stifling grip of a totally administered world.
Adorno, then, was not a free‐floating intellectual, but a professor, expert, critic, and
counselor. He did not simply comment on postwar Germany, but spoke from and reflected
upon his various positions within this society. He knew that he was embedded in hierar-
chies, attached to disciplinary programs, active on a cultural market, and that his inter-
ventions were both enabled and constrained by the particular functions and limits of a
series of societal roles. But the postwar Frankfurt School objective was precisely to con-
struct an institutional place for non‐conformism in West Germany (Demirović 1999).
Indeed, Adorno’s interventions often took the form of critical performances of established
scripts: he was a professorial authority who argued for dismantling authoritarian educa-
tion, a sociologist who voiced skepticism of the discipline’s mission, a critic who indicted
the commodification of art, and a counselor who refused to give easily usable advice.
2. Society – Germany – Postwar: The Components

of Adorno’s Analysis
Adorno was a diagnostician of the Federal Republic of Germany in its first two decades; he
studied and suggested reforms for postwar German society. But “postwar German society”
constitutes a complex concept; it consists of three components that Adorno often discussed
as a bundle but also did analyze separately. It included a type of human order (society), a
particular national‐cultural formation (Germany), and an historical condition (postwar),
and each part received its own critical treatment in a fairly distinct cluster of Adorno’s
texts published after 1949.
As a sociologist and public thinker, Adorno spoke of the concept of society in a wide
range of contexts, such as university lecture series, specialized contributions to research‐
oriented anthologies, a textbook, an encyclopedia entry, a televised debate, and an address
to the association of German sociologists; society was a key term in his oeuvre (Benzer
2011, 15). Focused treatments of Germany as a particular nation with its own and trou-
bled history are much rarer, but there are a couple, which at points seem to tilt toward the
confessional mode: when Adorno talked about Germany, he also justified his own decision
to return to the country after the years in the United States. Finally, there are texts that deal
explicitly with social, cultural, and moral life after war and genocide – about society in the
postwar condition. There is first of all the large 1955 study of disavowal of German guilt in
the population with its detailed analysis of various defense mechanisms, but also a series of
interventions in debates about culture and pedagogy “after Auschwitz,” particularly in the
1960s (Adorno 1970, 88). To understand how Adorno viewed postwar German society, we
must pay attention to each of the components and appreciate their interconnections.
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JAKOB NORBERG
Adorno conceived of society as a complex and distinctly modern configuration of

functions that typically escapes the cognition of individuals and yet structures their lives
by compelling them to assume roles and tasks in the whole, or else face social ruin in the
form of unemployment, downward mobility, and ostracism. In the classical bourgeois
era, Adorno argued, society had typically been imagined as an association of equals free
to pursue their own interest in a market economy and cultivate their independence of
mind and individual talents. However, the volatility of the market, the unequal distribu-
tion of resources but above all the emergence of a large exploited class, the proletariat,
undermined the validity of this liberal imagination. When Adorno then turned to the
contemporary moment and the western nations, he saw a society that had neither made
good on the liberal promise to promote individual autonomy, nor one that had been trans-
formed by a revolutionary working class. Instead, he spoke of a totally administered
society, in which economic power had been concentrated in a few corporations and con-
glomerates that planned their every activity and cooperated with large state bureau-
cracies. This new societal arrangement had raised the consumption opportunities of the
population and eliminated immediate immiseration and yet was still a rigid class society
without a fair distribution of goods, and most members felt caught and caged by a highly
structured context they could neither understand nor escape. Exploitation and class
conflict, Adorno asserted toward the end of the 1960s, had not vanished from modern
society, although they had receded from view. But he also believed that the Soviet bloc had
not improved the lot of humans and instead emerged as a brutally repressive regime of
dictatorial economic administration, maniacally focused on system competition with the
West and hence on production for production’s sake, without a commitment to mean-
ingful human ends: “in a satanic fashion, the bourgeois concept of societally useful labor
is parodied under both systems” (GS 8, 366).
In Adorno’s analysis, the mid‐twentieth century was the age of the impersonal yet over-
bearing organization in which people’s felt impotence made them frustrated or frightened,
until they were forced to accept their powerlessness and indulge in escapist immersion in
the products of the culture industry or authoritarian identification with existing powers.
Society precluded autonomy and also erased individuality, because the managed, profit‐
driven process of production ultimately rendered human beings completely fungible and
hence disposable, a fact that struck them with terror.
With this extended definition of society in place, we can move to Adorno’s thoughts on
Germany, for “Germany,” it turns out, is defined by a particular historical relationship to
the advance of modern capitalist society. Adorno viewed the nation not as an ontologically
robust cultural substance but as a fairly recent postfeudal administrative form. And for
him, the German case was particular. Germany was not, Adorno held, much more than a
name for a certain belated introduction of society into a traditionalist context, where the
belatedness explained both Germany’s specific cultural virtues and its disastrous pathol-
ogies. As an answer to the question “What is German?” (GS 10.2, 691), Adorno claimed
that the commercialization of cultural production had not developed as fully in German
lands as in the Anglosphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the famed
German earnestness, loyalty, and devotion to things for their own sake were not essential
traits but symptoms of economic backwardness. A particular German way of doing things
did exist, although national peculiarity was due to the uneven development of capitalism
rather than some permanent national character. German virtues amounted to a socio‐
historically localizable resistance to a capitalist economy of exchange spreading out from a
core area in Western Europe; norms and practices were not somehow tribally rooted, but
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could be sociologically explained. Yet in an increasingly homogenized world of profit‐oriented

industrialized production, the nation appeared as the medium of particularity, and Adorno
noted that Germany afforded more space for individuality because of an incomplete process
of societal integration; the state of total administration had not yet been achieved.
With this qualified recognition of German‐ness, Adorno offered something of a Marxist
reinscription of a Romantic vision of the world as a tapestry of cultural particularities; he
was not necessarily on the side of global‐capitalist erasure of cultural difference. Nor did
he allow for a celebration of nationality in terms of shared ethnic or cultural traits, which
for him constituted stereotypes typical of collective narcissism. And he did identify pathol-
ogies peculiar to the belated German development. Due to the late modernization often
marked by reluctance and resentment, Germans had been significantly less comfortable
in their interaction with the market and also the modern state, and remained alien to
them. But they had all too often sought to overcome this alienation from centralized,
bureaucratized state power by identifying with it even more ardently. Pained resistance to
concentrated state power tipped over into belief in the state’s infallibility and rightful bel-
ligerence. Germans “deified the state in order not to hate it” (GS 20.1, 291).
For Adorno, a pernicious German tradition of state idolatry was a consequence of a
harsh confrontation with modernity. Similarly on the micro‐level of the family, Germans
had become known for being marked by authoritarian family structures, and yet this
authoritarianism, which Adorno did not deny, was according to him an outcome of a
destabilized patriarchal structure that triggered a frantic search for surrogate authorities.
Germans fanatically worshiped Hitler, and yet his image possessed no particularly “fatherly
traits” (GS 9.2, 377); the popular adulation for the fascist leader was not an extension of
conservative authoritarianism at the level of politics but a symptom of destabilized family
relationships in a country that experienced modernity as a shock.
It is against the backdrop of Adorno’s conception of modern society and the delayed
crystallization of market and statehood in Germany that one can understand his writings
on the postwar situation in the Federal Republic. For Adorno, West Germans lived in the
shadow of total war and organized, industrial‐scale mass murder. The symptoms of dis-
avowed complicity with an unspeakable historical event infected almost every conversation.
And Adorno himself worked to facilitate and maintain the public recognition of German
guilt, vigilant attention to antidemocratic and latent fascist dispositions, and struggle
against widespread xenophobic and anti‐minority sentiments. The central imperative of
the postwar period ought to be, Adorno believed, to prevent the reoccurrence of genocide;
all societal institutions and efforts should be organized toward this end.
And yet Adorno also asserted repeatedly that the socio‐economic conditions conducive
to a collective turn to fascism had not in fact changed. The “basic structure of society,” he
stated in 1966, “is the same as 25 years ago” (GS 10.2, 675). In conditions of advanced
capitalism, individual autonomy was necessarily constrained and attenuated, and people
continued to face their helplessness and even dispensability, which inevitably triggered
fear, dissatisfaction, and anger, affective states susceptible to exploitation by authoritarian
groups. Mass identification with an aggressive regime and vicious targeting of minorities
therefore remained possibilities. Adorno believed that he must work to avert the threat of
fascist recidivism in a situation where the root causes of fascism had not and could not be
eliminated. Postwar society was in a fundamental sense not different from prewar society
and hence haunted by the same problems.
This explains Adorno’s turn to socialization and education. Since postwar and prewar
society were similar with respect to the relations of production, and since fascist dispositions
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JAKOB NORBERG
lingered on, Adorno joined an ongoing West German discussion of democratic education,
democratic child‐rearing, and even “democratic fatherhood” and called for a new, postwar
educational system and a postwar moral culture meant to prevent authoritarianism (van
Rahden 2010). In a series of essays and addresses, Adorno focused on the significance and
design of pedagogical and therapeutic institutions as the principal component of postwar
reform. Among his writings, one finds an address on adult education (1956), a theory of
far from innocuous semi‐Bildung (1959), pragmatic guidelines for the neutralization of
anti‐Semitism delivered to pedagogues (1962), a radio essay on philosophy and teacher
training (1962), a lecture on the status of the profession of the teacher (1965), and an
essay that encapsulates his effort at de‐barbarization and prevention through pedagogy:
“Education After Auschwitz” (1966). The collection of essays and interviews entitled
Erziehung zur Mündigkeit [Education for Autonomy], published in 1970, became one of his
bestselling books, alongside the considerably more famous Dialectic of Enlightenment and
Minima Moralia (Albrecht et al. 1999, 388). Adorno’s postwar anti‐fascist program read:
educate the educators. And yet judging by the logic of his statements on society, this
persistent focus on education still represented a compensatory program, implemented
instead of a reorganization of material relations. According to Adorno’s own standards,
educational reform was a second‐best option.
3. The Psychobiography and Therapy of Germany: “Working

Through the Past”
One particular essay of Adorno’s combines and orders his consistent themes – capitalism
as a form of organized heteronomy, the resulting curtailed independence and sabotaged
self‐worth of individuals, the virulent response to this predicament in modern German his-
tory, the subsequent denial and disavowal of the population after the fall of National
Socialism, and finally the set of educational and therapeutic devices that might mitigate
but not dissolve the socially rooted pathology. Presented as a lecture in early December
1959, at an event organized by the German Coordinating Council of the Societies for
Christian‐Jewish Cooperation, its focus on the afterlife of National Socialism within an
ostensible democracy seemed immediately relevant as a wave of anti‐Semitic vandalism,
including the desecration of synagogues, took place later that very month (Olick and
Perrin 2010, 6). The essay has since emerged as a paradigmatic analysis of an uncannily
quiet post‐totalitarian and post‐genocidal society and the effort required to confront the
past. Its title has become famous and now circulates as a phrase: “The Meaning of Working
through the Past [Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?]” (GS 10.2, 555–572).
The address, which Adorno went on to give a number of times, provides first a diagnosis
of German behaviors, then a narrative of the psychosocial trajectory of Germany since the
Weimar period, and finally a reflection on the ensemble of therapeutic measures and their
different levels of efficacy. To begin with the historical account, Adorno argued that
German nationalism had served as a refuge for deeply anxious individuals who sought to
recover their eroded sense of agency. Interwar Germans made insecure by a succession of
severe economic crises, including runaway inflation and high levels of unemployment,
were attracted by the National Socialist promise of a Volksgemeinschaft in which no mem-
bers of the racially defined German people would sink into destitution. This manipulative
evocation of warm togetherness in the form of a national socialism that would neutralize
class differences possessed a strong appeal in times of vulnerability. By broadcasting stories
340
of German superiority, the Nazi regime provided an antidote to perceived helplessness, but
in the form of an organized collective narcissism. The consciousness of social impotence
would be remedied but only through willing subordination to a higher community – the
German Volk as led by the Führer – that would secure the strength previously denied to the
humiliated individual. Self‐esteem would be restored through servility.
The end of the Third Reich and its promises of perpetual victoriousness should have
dealt a massive psychological blow to regime supporters and nationalists, and yet the
absence of a process of reckoning suggested, Adorno thought, that the identification with
the supposedly superior German collective endured and searched for other outlets. One
such outlet was the immediate postwar economic boom, which put German productivity
on display for the world but did not inspire much confidence in stability among a
shaken population, haunted by the terror of imminent unemployment as raw evidence of
individual superfluity.
In his compressed retelling of the German twentieth century, Adorno also argued that
nationalist‐racist belligerence reproduced the logic of the subject made insecure and
suffering from damaged agency. Nationalism becomes sadistic, he suggested, once the
nation confronts signs of its own weakness, sees its sovereignty undermined, and is exposed
as an anachronism in an age of greater power blocks and global economic crises. Adorno
viewed the modern history of German aggression as composed of a series of interlinked
moments of wounded self‐confidence. Individual Germans embraced the Nazi party state
in an effort to escape the insecurities of the interwar period and enjoy the pleasure of
fraudulent collective invincibility, and the German nation sought to prove itself to itself by
ramping up the level of destructiveness. Millions of fearful and angered Germans sought
protection and reassurance in a German nation with its own episodes of fearfulness and
deadly rage; the nation did not quite take care of wounded subjects, but constituted a
macro‐version of such a wounded subjectivity.
In Adorno’s account, early twentieth‐century German history was a narrative of serial
humiliation that ended in the sudden collapse of Nazi‐organized narcissism. No wonder,
then, that Germans in the postwar period did not want to speak of the preceding decades
and that many tended to understand the phrase “mastering the past” (as opposed to
“working through” it) as an injunction to forget and just move on. Such a quick departure
from the past was not really possible or psychologically beneficial, however, since the weak
ego that had once identified with the Hitler regime lingered on, still suffered from heter-
onomy, and sought relief in hollow collective triumphs. And such a break with the past
was also, of course, morally inadmissible, since Germans had committed unspeakable
crimes. In this context, Adorno articulated his objection to a superficially conceived psy-
chology that encouraged people to relieve themselves of the burden of history and cease to
feel guilty about past actions. The problem in postwar Germany was precisely the disavowal
of actual responsibility for a crime on an unprecedented scale. A sustained preoccupation
with a troubled past rather than a happy and productive absorption in the present was not
a pathology in Germany; it was an obligation.
The German failure to admit the crimes and commemorate the murdered was Adorno’s
most central moral postwar concern. The essay features a catalog of defensive gestures
employed by Germans who wished not to contemplate the genocide perpetrated in and by
means of their society. When Nazi crimes came up in conversation, many Germans went
mute, denied knowledge about the systematic disappearance of Jews, disputed the official
count of victims, argued that the bombings of German cities balanced out the administrative
murder, put the blame on those who tolerated Hitler’s rise to power rather than those who
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actually voted for him, and so on. Relativizations, minimizations, and other techniques
were, to be sure, something different from outright endorsements of Nazi genocidal pol-
icies or open celebrations of horrific crimes. Adorno’s concern was not primarily neo‐Nazi
organizations but the authenticity and robustness of democracy in the Federal Republic: “I
consider,” Adorno wrote, “the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be
potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy” (GS
10.2, 555–556).
Adorno focused, then, on the repertoire of disavowal, one with which he had become
intimately familiar. He had encountered it repeatedly in person, but it was also the subject
of the first large‐scale study conducted by the Institute of Social Research in the winter of
1950–1951, shortly after his return. The resulting work on guilt and defense turned into
a veritable archive or “museum” of techniques of disavowal (GS 9.2, 127). The 1959 state-
ment constitutes a condensed account of morally scandalous German defensiveness that
built on the earlier scientific study published in 1955 (Olick and Perrin 2010, 11), which
targeted a more specialized audience, carried the more neutral title Group Experiment. A
Study Report, and came carefully wrapped in introductions on methodology.
But if Adorno analyzed the layered problem of a long and ongoing history of societally
determined dependence, an escape into a catastrophic collective subordination under a
totalitarian regime, and finally a predictable disavowal of responsibility, what was his sug-
gestion for the Federal Republic? To insist on public avowals of culpability may have been
too simple, since such insistence would be predicated on moral autonomy, the deficient
achievement of which had been the major problem all along. But Adorno did end the
1959 address by sketching out a program of civic education meant to stabilize democracy
in Germany and contain narcissistic nationalism, authoritarian tendencies, and anti‐
Semitism. As an exponent of social research, he called for a large‐scale import of
behavioral sciences from the United States combined with a greater role for Freudian
theory in society. Both were meant to prepare the thorough education of the German edu-
cators, who in turn would be able to influence the young population and hence help shape
the future of the country. Adorno conceded that civic pedagogy might resonate only with
those who were already receptive to its practice and was unlikely to reprogram authori-
tarians, but he sought to turn this limited reach into a potential strength: civic education
informed by social sciences and psychoanalysis could produce dedicated “cadres” of
Enlightenment, ready to descend on Germany and do battle with denial, delusion, and
prejudice (GS 10.2, 569).
This oddly Leninist‐sounding talk of cadres hints at a paternalistic vision for postwar
West Germany, but Adorno did not exactly believe that some science‐based campaign of
mental reengineering would work smoothly, or even work at all. He recognized the
argument that too vigorous an effort to raise public awareness may backfire and provoke
defiant resistance; Enlightenment would be a question of dosage. But even if such strategic
considerations feel like a betrayal of the earnest moral purpose of facing the Nazi past,
Adorno clearly believed that the stunted character of many Germans complicated the pro-
cess of working through history. The weak ego must first be built up and fortified before it
could be asked to admit the full extent of its own complicity. Adorno understood the
impulse behind organizing meetings between Germans and Israelis in order to reduce anti‐
Semitism, but a rigid and hateful ideology, he claimed, could not be corrected by means of
concrete experiences, since the problem was the complete lack of openness and receptivity
to begin with. The only measure that might prevent the resurgence of fascism, Adorno
finally acknowledged, was the appeal to the narrow self‐interest of those who did not wish
342
the return of an aggressive regime that would send them into future Stalingrad battles.
The argument that fascism would entail suffering for Germans would “impress people more
profoundly than the invocation of ideals” (GS 8, 572). A pragmatic interaction with an
unreconstructed population’s urge to hold on to their present comfort might in the end
present the most effective postwar strategy. In a 1962 program for how to combat anti‐
Semitism, Adorno argued that people who lashed out at minorities should be firmly shown
that their previous leaders no longer controlled the resources of coercion: “You impress a
vicious dog by showing him that you are not afraid of him” (GS 20.1, 379). Those who still
glorified power could at least be compelled to realize that power was no longer on their side.
Militant nationalism, fascism, and anti‐Semitism, Adorno believed, must be policed.
4. The Intellectual as Pedagogue in the Administered Society:

Adorno’s Postwar Enlightenment
As a philosopher, Adorno did much to complicate our conception of the Enlightenment, its
purposes and outcomes. Enlightenment, he argued with Max Horkheimer, turned into a
process in which liberation was entwined with domination. As an invited speaker at public
events, discussant in radio conversations on current issues, and a writer for ambitious
general‐audience magazines in West Germany, however, Adorno consistently and without
reservations called for a vigorous defense of Enlightenment principles, chief among them
the idea of maturity, or Mündigkeit. In a 1956 address at the annual conference of German
adult education programs, Adorno declared that the objective of adult education must be
Enlightenment, defined as the struggle against entrenched irrationalities such as incul-
cated norms, unjustified principles, routinized and prejudiced assessments, traditionalist
behaviors, and superstitions. In the same brief address, he approvingly invoked the liberal
Prussian Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideal of a personality capable of independently forming
judgments, developing individual faculties, and resisting commands from external sources
that lack any connection to inner motivations or reasons. Adorno was no stranger to cer-
emonial rhetoric, when the occasion required it.
But Adorno really did champion Enlightenment, as defined by Immanuel Kant, who he
believed had delivered the unsurpassed encapsulation of Enlightenment as man’s emer-
gence from self‐incurred immaturity. In a series of three broadcasted conversations with
Hellmut Becker, the director of the Max‐Planck Institute for Educational Research, held in
1966, 1968, and 1969, Adorno repeatedly returned to Kant’s dictum as the loadstar of all
pedagogical efforts, especially in the final interview, held only six days before his untimely
death. The motto’s importance and contemporary relevance lay, Adorno repeatedly
claimed, in its significance for a well‐functioning, authentic democracy. The democratic
rule to which West Germany aspired of course meant the rule of the people. But if the indi-
viduals who constituted the citizenry willingly submitted to authorities rather than make
informed and independent judgments, especially during election time, the rule of the peo-
ple would be devoid of substance. The political system of democracy in West Germany and
elsewhere required the autonomy of its members.
Kant discussed the ever‐present obstacles to the exit out of self‐incurred immaturity.
Humans, Kant noted, are all too willing to accept the commands and counsels of author-
ities out of fear or complacency – we are frequently too timid or too comfortable to make
judgments and decisions for ourselves, to make the cognitive effort or take the risk of
making independent judgments and live with the consequences. But the key message in
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Adorno’s public interventions was, as detailed earlier, that advanced capitalist society puts
pressure on individuals to adapt to its arrangements and induces acceptance of such
dependency by means of the culture industry’s modulation of everyone’s internal lives.
Modern individuals are compelled to be “well‐adjusted” – Adorno uses the English word
here – to the point where they no longer emerge as specific, unique individuals but only
function smoothly and flexibly in teams, groups, and organizations (Adorno 1970, 109);
oversocialization leads to perennial immaturity.
Adorno argued that the conditions for a process of Enlightenment had worsened since
the time of Kant and Humboldt, because heteronomy was enforced by a gigantic complex
of interlocking corporations, organizations, and state bureaucracies. The hindrances to
genuine self‐determination were no longer primarily the Kantian ones of timorousness or
laziness, but the very conditions of possibility for a human existence in the society of total
administration. Immaturity was not self‐incurred. Or it was self‐incurred, but then at the
level of the entire of human socio‐economic order with its automatized and autonomous
functioning: “the experiences of real powerlessness are anything but irrational” (GS 8,
73). Adorno even admitted that individuals seek to rid themselves of the Enlightenment
obligation to be autonomous, because it is simply too torturous to seek to achieve an ideal
in a context in which every attempt to do so is worn down.
Adorno might have been the early Federal Republic’s most prodigious thinker, with new
texts and talks every year, and yet if one is to believe his own assessments, he was writing for
an audience who was in danger of becoming a hollowed‐out host of a “reified conscious-
ness” (GS 10.2, 457). The strenuous publication strategy was contradicted by the uncom-
promising bleakness of the diagnosis, which suggested its futility. In a sense, Adorno could
not help setting up a communicative situation in which the diagnosed stupefaction was
attributed to a population to which neither writer nor reader belonged. It was always the
others, the members of that large faceless crowd, who were barely individuated, even barely
alive. But Adorno was consistent insofar as he believed that the work of Enlightenment
could not count on engaging with already autonomous beings, but must instead begin by
promoting the “education of maturity [Erziehung zur Mündigkeit].” The contemporary
intellectual must first and foremost become a pedagogue intent on the construction of
independent selfhood, and such construction must begin early. In the series of radio conver-
sations with Becker, the theorist’s struggle against authoritarianism took the form of quite
specific suggestions for early childhood socialization. For instance, Adorno wanted to elim-
inate brutalizing violence to children, but by no means make child‐rearing indiscriminately
permissive. Compliant children, he said, typically grow up to become more questioning
adults, since they have successfully internalized authority, whereas undisciplined children
may remain in need of external, repressive measures during their later lives.
But Adorno’s pedagogical advice was supplemented by another strategy that did focus
more directly, and more harshly, on the adult reader. The problem Adorno identified was
that human beings battered by society and drugged by the culture industry would want to
relinquish the objectively unrealizable ideal of autonomy, so central to democracy and the
prevention of fascist politics. And he understood full well that knowledge of society’s work-
ings, as he conceived of them, was more or less unbearable, since this knowledge only
forced its bearers to confront their utter helplessness. The psychological preference for
ignorance was understandable. Yet Adorno’s writings were meant to extend the readers’
lucid encounter with their desperate situation. Rhetorically, his statements couple exhor-
tations to autonomy with relentless analysis of the forces that undermine efficacious
agency, a combination which partly accounts for their taxing effect. The chief example of
344
this strategy was Minima Moralia, written in exile in the mid‐to‐late 1940s but published in
West Germany in 1951. The aphorisms hold out the promise of life wisdom and good
counsel on how to think and behave in a range of contexts; its publication fell in the
beginning of a self‐help and conduct literature boom for a disoriented postwar German
population (Norberg 2011). And yet the dense texts in the collection are full of discour-
aging declarations such as “there is no way out of entanglement” (GS 4, 29). Through its
design and style, Minima Moralia addresses its readers as recipients of advice and hence as
self‐directed beings, but simultaneously negates the possibility of meaningful individual
action. Adorno does not tell his readers to exercise autonomy, but to be perpetually aware
of its impossibility, a very uncomfortable condition: “The almost insoluble task is to let nei-
ther the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us” (GS 4, 63).
The intellectual in the administered society could not quite speak to his readers, in the
Kantian fashion, as autonomous beings, but as beings who must be brought to experience
the social conditions working against the achievement of self‐determination, however
painful this might be. Taken together, Adorno’s writings proposed reforms for the pedagog-
ical cultivation of independent selves and the maintenance of those selves in the face of
insurmountable obstacles. This may seem like a package doomed to unpopularity, but few
thinkers were as successful in spreading their message, and Adorno’s scrutiny of authori-
tarianism did inspire a student generation. But it was also radicalized groups of students
who eventually expressed their dissatisfaction with Adorno’s apparent quietism, and they
protested against his message through episodes of organized rowdiness. Adorno’s univer-
sity lectures were disrupted on several occasions during the final years of the 1960s, until
he suspended his teaching. The left‐wing students wanted to break out of political pas-
sivity; Adorno thought they engaged in action for action’s sake, which tended to spill into
violence. For a moment, Adorno’s insight into the total impossibility of emancipatory
action was countered by an irregular and desperate “actionism” that it may have helped
generate (Kraushaar 1998).
5. “Why Did You Return?” Adorno and the Nation
From 1949 to 1969, Adorno helped define the Federal Republic of Germany. He saw it as
a society, a configuration of functions, an association of individuals and groups, and a
conflictual interaction between classes rather than a community of fate, blood, race, and
martial sacrifice, and he strove to encourage and structure its preoccupation with crimes
committed in the Third Reich. As Adorno noted in a 1949 essay on the so‐called “resur-
rected culture” of Germany, the muted German population had few adventures ahead of
itself (GS 20.2, 453); the days of dangerous large‐scale projects such as territorial expan-
sion or social utopias were over; the mood was cautious, quiet, somber. In the years to
come, Adorno would diagnose and suggest treatments for this condition, and in so doing
seek to provide postwar German society a much‐revised national identity. Indeed, the
phrase postwar society captures not a fact that Adorno encountered when he returned to
Frankfurt but a transformation – and a relabeling – to which he contributed. His sociolog-
ical analyses and ethical imperatives were designed to articulate the premises of a post‐
Auschwitz society.
During these two decades, Adorno naturally faced the question: “Why did you return?”
(GS 20.1, 394). In a brief text from 1962, he provided a reply. The statement explores non‐
nationalist reasons to return to a nation‐state. Adorno was a German with a partly Jewish
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family background, who had departed from Germany to escape persecution under National
Socialist rule and yet still had chosen to go back. The question “why did you return?” could
thus read: Is there a national belonging, in Germany, separate from participation in nation-
alist chauvinism or submission in an authoritarian collective?
He did not return to Germany, Adorno assured the reader, out of a feeling of nationalism,
but almost out of a certain lack thereof. Nationalists, he continued, are people who identify
with the structures of authority in their country, but they are paradoxically also more likely
to adapt to the conditions of rule in another country, for the simple reason that their willing-
ness to accept hierarchies serves them well everywhere. Regardless of context, they are eager
to volunteer their loyalty to the collective or state that demands it; “[h]ere nationalist, there
nationalist” (GS 20.1, 395). In contrast, those who never find a comfortable place in their
country of origin also tend to remain oppositional wherever they end up, persistently reluc-
tant to play along. Adorno himself, we can assume, belonged to this second category.
But why then return to one nation‐state, Germany, rather than simply stay in another,
such as the United States? Adorno’s sketch of the non‐nationalist suggests a narrative of a
person who wanted to return to the home where he did not feel at home, or perhaps to the
place where he would experience an especially intimate kind of homelessness. There is a
kind of loyalty, Adorno implied, that becomes manifest in the continuous and uncompro-
mising critical work one carries out in a particular country, efforts one would not want to
expend elsewhere. But the question is what factors or experiences explain the loyalty that
assumes the form of critique. The non‐nationalist account of why one would return to
Germany needs to be supplemented by an additional story that explains more fully the
peculiarly attached detachment of the non‐nationalist.
And in his reply, Adorno did offer one apparently straightforward answer to why he had
returned to Germany. He “simply [einfach]” wanted to return to where he grew up (GS
20.1, 395). And this return was important to him because he felt that a productive and
meaningful adult life consisted in little else than the attempt to “catch up with” or transfor-
matively reintegrate one’s childhood (GS 20.1, 395). Adorno thus told two linked stories
of national belonging. The first was about him returning to Germany precisely not be a
nationalist, but to settle into a special kind of homelessness that is the precondition for a
critical and questioning attitude, which in turn enacts resistance to reified collective iden-
tities. To explain why the permanent outsider would still be loyally critical to one country
over another, he then inserted the narrative of adult life given purpose by the attempted
recuperation of one’s formative years. Childhood is what tethers even the outsiders to one
particular nation, without making them nationalists: it just determines where they will
later feel not‐quite‐at‐home more acutely than elsewhere. Adorno’s reply does not hinge
on love for the nation, or a form of self‐love amplified by the nation‐state, for he did not
return to feel how harmoniously his personality fit with the German national character,
enjoy compliance with a structure of authority, or be enveloped by the coziness of an eth-
nically homogeneous community. He returned for the sake of the integrity of his (intellec-
tual) life, which began to be nourished during an early formative period and remained
inextricably bound to the German language and the German philosophical tradition, how-
ever critical his engagement with it was.
Why, one could ask Adorno, does childhood blend with nationhood, fidelity to the one
entail some form of loyalty to the other? The alliance between childhood and nation is,
I would submit, oddly taken for granted in Adorno’s text. Slipping from talk of Germany
to talk of his childhood, he seems to assume that the reader will accept without queries
the unstated premise that the nation – rather than a village, landscape, city block, or
346
region – serves as the vessel of one’s formative years. Still, the position that Adorno sketched
in the reply – the returning non‐conformist, the loyal critic, the outsider within – forms an
important part of his legacy. For Adorno’s approach to West Germany involved publicly
performing a way of being. In brief homages to the future Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll and
the first president of the Federal Republic Theodor Heuss, Adorno lauded the two men for
constructing new and distinctly un‐German templates for how to behave in postwar
Germany. Böll was the unpretentious writer anchored in a Catholic region who could appear
as a credible spokesperson for the people only because he retreated from the ambition to ful-
fill such a task; Heuss served in the nation’s highest office and yet projected a demonstra-
tively civilian demeanor, free from any trace of the “habitus of violence,” in a culture that
equated legitimate leadership with military trappings (GS 20.2, 709). In a similar way,
Adorno himself contributed to the cultural disarmament of Germany, in his case by mod-
eling an attitude of ceaseless critique. His harsh sayings, such as “wrong life cannot be lived
rightly” (GS 4, 43), may even be plausible candidates for a retrospective national motto of
the Federal Republic, a now‐gone postwar society that lived on only awkwardly with itself.
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Benzer, M. (2011). The Sociology of Theodor Adorno. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Claussen, D. (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge MA:
Demirović, A. (1999). Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle: Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur
Frankfurter Schule. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Felsch, P. (2015). Der lange Sommer der Theorie: Geschichte einer Revolte. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. “Dual Layered Time: Reflections on T.W. Adorno in the 1950s.” Translated
by Kai Artur Diers. Logos 2.4. http://www.logosjournal.com/habermas.htm
Judt, T. (2005). Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Press.
Kraushaar, W. (1998). Autoritärer Staat und antiautoritärer Bewegung. In: Frankfurter Schule und
Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946–1995, vol. 3 (ed. W. Kraushaar),
15–33. Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard.
Müller-Doohm, S. (2003). Adorno: Eine Biographie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Norberg, J. (2011). Adorno’s advice: Minima Moralia and the critique of liberalism. PMLA 162 (2):
398–411.
Olick, J. and Perrin, A. (eds.) (2010). Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar
Germany. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
van Rahden, T. (2010). Fatherhood, rechristianization, and the quest for democracy in postwar West
Germany. In: Raising Citizens in the ‘Century of the Child’: The United Stated and German Central
Europe in Comparative Perspective (ed. D. Schumann), 141–164. New York: Berghahn.
Schildt, A. and Siegfried, D. (2009). Deutsche Kulturgeschichte: Die Bundesrepublik – 1945 bis zur
Gegenwart. Munich: Carl Hanser.
Schneider, C. (2011). Der exemplarische Intellektuelle der Bundesrepublik. In: Adorno‐Handbuch:
Leben – Werk – Wirkung (eds. R. Klein, J. Kreuzer and S. Müller‐Doohm), 431–435. Stuttgart: J. B.
Metzler.
Strote, N. (2017). Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post‐Nazi Germany. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
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Further Reading
Freyenhagen, F. (2014). Adorno’s politics: theory and practice in Germany’s 1960s. Philosophy &
Social Criticism 40 (9): 867–893.
Hammer, E. (2005). Adorno & the Political. London: Routledge.
Jäger, L. (2004). Adorno: A Political Biography (trans. S. Spencer). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Müller-Doohm, S. (2009). Adorno: A Biography (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge UK: Polity.
Olick, J. and Perrin, A. (eds.) (2010). Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar
Germany. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Parkinson, A. (2014). Adorno on the airwaves: feeling reason, educating emotions. German Politics
and Society 32 (1): 43–59.
Pickford, H. (2002). The dialectic of theory and praxis: on late Adorno. In: Adorno: A Critical Reader
(eds. N. Gibson and A. Rubin), 312–339. London: Blackwell.
M. Robertson). Cambridge US: MIT Press.
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Part V
Aesthetics
22
Aesthetic Autonomy
OWEN HULATT
Adorno was an aesthetician capable of piercing insight into the contemporary condition
of art. He also – as the notoriously amphibolous title of Aesthetic Theory shows – accorded
art and aesthetic experience a central place in his philosophy in general. This is one of the
enduring successes and appeals of his work. Adorno did much to connect modernism and
its antecedents with contemporaneous crises in reason, social organization, and philos-
ophy. As always with Adorno, there are complications and issues of detail. For art, perhaps
chief of these is Adorno’s thorough emphasis on artworks being “hermetically sealed”
(Adorno 2004, 169) against the world external to them. The process of artistic creation is
(for itself, as a process) blind to events and issues occurring external to its own artistic
materials (Adorno 2004, 237, 251). It is “intentionless” (Adorno 2004, 242). However,
the result of this self‐same process is held to be socially critical, and revelatory of social
pathologies. In other words, artworks are produced by processes that are functionally inca-
pable of being sensitive to extra‐aesthetic content directly; but the finished artworks none-
theless bear a critical and insightful relationship to that extra‐aesthetic content (Adorno
2004, 237).
This feature of Adorno’s account introduces no end of puzzles. But these puzzles are to
do with artistic autonomy; how the resolute autonomy of artistic creation nonetheless
generates critical contact with that which is external to that autonomy. This question of
artistic autonomy and its connection to extra‐artistic content has formed the central pillar
of many responses to Adorno on art. What I will do in this chapter is consider the issue
from a converse angle. Suppose we accept Adorno’s account of artistic autonomy whole-
sale. Suppose, further, we take it for granted that the artwork is, or can be meaningfully
read as, in critical negotiation with the world external to it. Having made these stipula-
tions, let us now consider whether these facts are relevant to the aesthetic experience of
appreciating these artworks.
Here is an elementary distinction. Criticism of artworks is a multifarious and discur-
sive practice that collects relevant information about the artwork, its context, and its
author, and provides interpretations of the same. I will call appreciation of artworks, by
contrast, the immediate experience of those artworks. What this “immediate” experience
comprises will not only alter per medium, but often per artwork. Within literature, the
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immediate experience of Zola’s The Earth is reading it; the immediate experience of B.S.
Johnson’s The Unfortunates – a book consisting of 27 unbound and largely unordered
chapters in a box – consists not merely in reading it, but also being faced with the need to
give the chapters an order of your own choosing. In general, immediate experience is
limited to an experience of the artwork that is contemporaneous with being in a concrete
relation to that artwork. This involves the physical presence of that artwork, or of its
physical parts.
Conventionally understood, some criticism (but not all) will augment or improve
the appreciation of its respective artwork. To learn via criticism that the twelve‐tone
row of Berg’s Violin Concerto incorporates the opening four notes of the melody of
Bach’s Es ist Genug, and later quotes the piece directly, is germane to our appreciation
of that artwork. It can clearly be woven into, and deepen, our experience of the piece.
Our experience of the artwork reveals a responsivity to changes in our knowledge,
these changes being disclosed by criticism of that artwork. But elsewhere this is not so.
Should I learn Berg did not compose the Concerto in 1935 but in fact 1936, such
information in this case would leave my experience unaltered. Much criticism is deeply
rewarding, but not germane to immediate aesthetic experience. This is either because
the information is not relevant, or because it might be too complex and fine‐grained to
be experientially attended to. Some matters of musical detail can be revealed by anal-
ysis of the score, for example, but might be difficult if not impossible to make salient in
the act of listening to that music. Such information belongs resolutely to criticism,
rather than immediate experience.
Adorno does not thematize this distinction between appreciation and criticism. In his
writings on art Adorno is not at pains to discriminate between the kinds of facts and
information that are the proper province of the critic, and those that are plausibly (or even
possibly) able to be integrated into the act of experiencing the artwork at first‐hand.
Adorno makes confident and strident assertions about the connections that artworks have
to extra‐artistic content. For example, Adorno writes concerning Beethoven:
The motive kernels, the particulars to which each movement is tied, are themselves identical
with the universal; they are formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness as things of their
own and preshaped by the totality as much as the individual is in individualistic society. The
developing variation, an image of social labour, is definite negation: from what has once been
posited it ceaselessly brings forth the new and enhanced by destroying it in its immediacy, its
quasi‐natural form. (Adorno 1998, 14)
Adorno goes on to claim that this feature of Beethoven’s work is purely Hegelian, and
indeed in advance of Hegel in some respects (Adorno 1998, 13–14). This account incor-
porates elements that seem germane to one’s experiential appreciation of the artwork; and
others that seem plausibly too recondite to be included in that experiential appreciation.
This is due not least to the ambitious assertions about the connection between the artwork’s
closed, formal features and radically distinct domains of fact. Such assertions can be
contested on ontological and epistemic grounds, and this is precisely how they have largely
been critiqued. For example, Dahlhaus writes:
The contrast between … the formal‐analytically individualizing and the sociological general-
izing procedure … returns as a flaw in the individual analyses, though Adorno was able
at times, by dint of great effort, to reconcile the opposing views by force. And the verbal
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AESTHETIC AUTONOMY
nalogies perform the function of hiding a gap which the arguments could not close.
a
(Dahlhaus 1987, 244)
All manner of questions can be asked about how this gap can be bridged. And frequently,
this issue is pursued by enquiring how and in what way the domains Adorno connects are
in fact allowably connected. But such an ontological and epistemic mode of enquiry
bypasses a more central problem for Adorno. Even if this gap can be closed in theory, it does
not follow that it can be closed in experience. Adorno can certainly contest that artworks
have the kind of explanatory connections that they do; but if these assertions cannot be
grounded in the aesthetic experience of those artworks, then his Aesthetic Theory ceases to
be aesthetic at all. Artworks would rather become bearers of social symptoms like any other
object; and it would then be the task of the critical theorist to penetrate their symptomology
and diagnose their ultimate cause. Such a procedure would be divested of any central
preoccupation with the proper experience of the artwork qua artwork; their aesthetic appre-
ciation. Rather, artworks would be unriddled through criticism, which largely adverts to
non‐aesthetic properties (on which aesthetic properties may well supervene in turn).
A suppression of the difference between criticism and appreciation serves to de‐aesthet-
icize the artwork. If artworks have no especial experiential character, but simply bear
symptoms that the critical theorist reduces to crises in reason and social organization, just
as they might when critiquing any other object, then such art is not dealt with as art. It
rather simply becomes grist to the mill. Adorno himself criticized this kind of de‐aestheti-
cization. The late Lukács, who was by this time hemmed in by official Soviet policy, advo-
cated Soviet Realist art, which prioritized political commitment and verisimilitude over
artistic autonomy. Against such “committed” advocacy of art with an intentional political
character, Adorno writes:
For autonomous works of art, however, such considerations, and the conception of art which
underlies them, are themselves the spiritual catastrophe of which the committed keep
warning. Once the life of the mind renounces the duty and liberty of its own pure objectifica-
tion, it has abdicated. Thereafter, works of art merely assimilate themselves sedulously to the
brute existence against which they protest, in forms so ephemeral (the very charge made vice
versa by committed against autonomous works) that from their first day they belong to the
seminars in which they inevitably end. (Adorno 1974, 76)
The very instrumentalization of art by the “committed” (read: those who desired that art
become explicitly political or moral) amounts to the evacuation of art’s aesthetic character.
And this aesthetic character is the only true means for art to resist the world external to it.
(This is one of the enjoyable paradoxes in Adorno’s account of art; art can only achieve its
critical function by disavowing any intentional attempt to exercise that function.)
If Adorno were to construct a theory of art that could not be cashed‐out in appreciation –
could not be connected to the experience of art – a similar instrumentalization would take
place. Art would be yoked to Critical Theory; the artwork would become an interchange-
able vehicle for the diagnosis of social pathologies. From his critique of “committed” art it
is clear that Adorno would find this to be an unhappy result.
Quite apart from Adorno’s own opinion, we can further see why such a de‐aestheticization
of art would be deeply damaging to Adorno’s work, as it would serve to remove the experi-
ence of art from Adorno’s account. This would be in stark contradiction not only to
Adorno’s general approach to art, but also to Adorno’s own conception of the justification
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OWEN HULATT
of the statements that emerge from that general approach. Adorno says that our theoret-
ical conclusions must always be responsive to and reflective of our aesthetic experience:
The demand of artworks that they be understood, that their content be grasped, is bound to
their specific experience; but it can only be fulfilled by way of the theory that reflects this expe-
rience. (Adorno 2004, 162)
This is of a piece with Adorno’s account of justification more generally – for example,
philosophical claims are not justified merely by deductive validity or inferential soundness, but
by the production of a particular kind of experience in the reader.1 It is a general feature of
Adorno’s theory of justification (within and outside of aesthetics) that it has an intrinsically
experiential character. This parallel between art and philosophy will go on to be significant.
1. Experience as Primary
We can see, then, that the experience of the artwork is intended to be primary. Indeed,
Adorno directly states that analysis must retain the “processual” and hence dynamic and
experiential character of art if it is not to be inadequate (Adorno 2004, 232). Given this
central emphasis on the importance of experience, it seems clear that Adorno requires
something like a distinction between criticism and appreciation. Appreciation comes from
immediate contact with the object; criticism directs our attention “outside” it to an extent,
or toward those properties that cannot be fully explored from within close experiential
contact with the artwork in question. It now becomes clear that it is crucially important
that Adorno can ground the deliverances of his criticism in some way within aesthetic
experience itself. If Adorno’s pronouncements about art cannot be grounded in aesthetic
experience, he will fail just according to his own critical standards.
How and to what extent this can be accomplished will be one of our governing questions.
But in order to broach this subject, we need to get a firmer grasp on what aesthetic experi-
ence is, for Adorno. What is excluded from aesthetic experience, and what included? The
more expansive the potential objects of aesthetic experience are, the less of a burden it will
be to demonstrate that Adorno’s criticism can be grounded in aesthetic appreciation.
In mainstream analytic aesthetics, discussion of the bounds and norms of aesthetic
response often collect around (even if negatively) contentions about the bounds of value.
Autonomism insists that aesthetic response is properly directed at the aesthetic properties of
artworks exclusively; moralism contends that an artwork’s moral merits interact positively,
and its moral flaws interact negatively, with aesthetic value (where those moral features are
aesthetically relevant); and immoralism argues that in certain cases moral flaws (where aes-
thetically relevant) can, but need not, redound to the benefit of the artwork’s aesthetic value.
Each of these positions comes in a number of variants, from the moderate to the extreme. But
what is curious is that Adorno’s account of aesthetic response exhibits features that suggest
congruity with each, but ultimately does not belong clearly to any of them. To invert their
order, we might see the following examples. Concerning immoralism, we have Adorno’s
appraisal of the aesthetic value and truth content of the work of de Sade.2 Conversely, in the
moralist connection, we are told that Stefan George’s reactionary views “mar the purity” of
his poetry – and that he is a “great poet despite everything” (Adorno 2004, 323–324).
About autonomism more can and will be said presently. But it suffices to say that
Adorno’s remarks fall most often into some alignment with this view. The task of the
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AESTHETIC AUTONOMY
art‐appreciator is to participate in and (to some degree of explicitness) recognize the formal
complexes that the artwork comprises. This participation is one of co‐performance, in
which the formal complexity of the artwork and its movement through and execution of
its formal problematic is internalized and re‐performed by the appreciator:
Whoever refuses to reenact the work under the discipline it imposes falls under the empty gaze
cast by a painting or poem, the same empty gaze that, in a sense, the art‐alien encounter in
music. (Adorno 2004, 160)
The recognition of the structure and force of the compositional materials, then, is the pri-
mary task of the appreciator. They must “reenact” the work’s dynamic handling of these
materials in their experience of the artwork. At no point are we informed that one must
confront the artwork with a primary eye for its moral content (whether positive or nega-
tive). But, by the same token, these formal features resolve into (such is the claim) artworks
that are critical of the world external to them.
Attempting to locate Adorno within autonomism, moralism, and immoralism is more
perplexing than informative. His work does not clearly sit within any of these positions;
correlatively, we can have no particularly firm confidence about what Adorno takes the
evaluative nature of aesthetic appreciation to be, nor of its limits. Accordingly, we might
restate the question at a lower level. Simply – is the aesthetic faculty a discrete and auton-
omous form of judgment for Adorno, or not?
The most basic familiarity with Adorno’s broader position concerning judgments in gen-
eral will lead us to respond – almost certainly not. For Adorno, conceptual judgments are
partially autonomous (have their own “official” logic that governs then) and are partially
funded by heteronomous processes (most notably certain drives, including but not limited to
self‐preservation) to which they remain porous. This porousness also extends to other heter-
onomous features of the judging agent – for example, ethical concepts are porous to, and
obliged to properly be open and responsive to, brute experiences of somatic injury (Adorno
2006, 202–203). As Adorno’s conception of judgments in general is that their autonomy
remains embedded in, and partially responsive to, heteronomous conditions we should
expect that this must also be true of aesthetic judgments. While this is informative, it only
serves to accentuate our problem – we have no clear view on what the proper objects of
aesthetic experience are, or the limits on what aesthetic experience might be responsive to.
At this juncture we can have no confidence in the precise limits of aesthetic judgment.
Accordingly, we might take a different approach. Much of Adorno’s claims about artworks
involve their disclosure of truths, both moral and philosophical. But with our lack of
clarity about his conception of aesthetic experience and its bounds, we are presently not in
a good situation to understand how they disclose them in experience. Rather than seeking
to fix the proper domain of aesthetic judgments, let us instead look at the issue of truth,
and how it can be grounded in aesthetic appreciation.
2. Truth
We might at this juncture consider again that for Adorno a frequent term of appreciation
for artworks is that they are, in a variety of ways, true. They are true by virtue of showing
something that can in turn be philosophically explicated,3 by virtue of showing something
that can in turn be recognized as encapsulating something,4 true by virtue of encapsu-
lating and critiquing something,5 and so on.
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OWEN HULATT
It is exceedingly rare to see Adorno praise an artwork merely for how it looks, or sounds.
Even formal innovations are not appraised merely as artistic achievements, but rather are
seen as speaking further to the world external to the artwork. For example, Beckett’s nov-
elistic innovations are not merely that; they
touch on fundamental layers of experiences hic et nunc, which are brought together into a
paradoxical dynamic at a standstill … in Beckett [reality] is pushed to the point of the manifest
annihilation of reality. The more total society becomes, the more completely it contracts to a
unanimous system, and all the more do the artworks in which this experience is sedimented
become the other of this society. (Adorno 2004, 39)
Likewise, Berg’s masterful harmonization of atonality with romanticism is not merely

that:
Berg may not have fused the elements of his style seamlessly, but that in itself bears witness to
truth: the renunciation of an aesthetically seamless unity in a world that tolerates continuity
and totality only as a farce while crushing anyone attuned to the spirit. (Adorno 1994, 20)
Note that these are claims about artworks – not obviously about their appreciation. One
might say again that they are instances of criticism, which belong more securely in the phi-
losophy of art, rather than aesthetics. But what they do demonstrate is that Adorno sees
truth as a proper and central component of his response to art. Mindful of this, our original
question reoccurs like this – is this transmission from appreciation of the artwork’s fea-
tures to appreciation of its ability to show extra‐aesthetic truths part of the ideal apprecia-
tion of these artworks? Or is it brought to bear afterwards in criticism?
As Adorno sees aesthetic experience and appreciation as primary, he requires an
account that can show that such experience and appreciation naturally turns over and
extends into criticism. I believe that this can be supported. Up to this point, I have been
holding apart criticism and appreciation, by claiming that appreciation is grounded in
“immediate experience.” I will now try to show that “immediate experience” necessarily
transfers into criticism‐style enquiry, before examining whether it must necessarily so
transfer to the extent that Adorno claims.
My initial statement of the problem of the relationship between criticism and apprecia-
tion had a suppressed commitment. Namely, a commitment to the idea that the subject of
close textured experiential attention is entirely localized in the immediate work of art with
which we are confronted. Likewise, it also carried the suppressed premise that the aesthetic
properties to which we should be hewing in experience are also fairly local; which is to say
exclusively anchored in the object that is ready‐to‐hand.
Now, in analytic aesthetics this latter contention has already been dispatched, to a
degree. Walton, in the classic essay, “Categories of Art,” shows that perceptible aesthetic
properties require comprehension of governing categories, which serve to fix these prop-
erties; accordingly, a full textured experiential engagement speaks beyond the localized art-
work itself:
Suppose that the first movement of a sonata in G major modulates to C‐sharp major by the end
of the development section. A rule of sonata form decrees that it must return to G for the reca-
pitulation. But the keys of G and C‐sharp are as unrelated as any two keys can be; it is difficult
to modulate smoothly and quickly from one to the other. Suppose also that while the sonata is
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AESTHETIC AUTONOMY
in C‐sharp there are signs that, given other rules of sonata form, indicate that the recapitula-
tion is imminent (for example, motivic hints of the return, an emotional climax, or a cadenza).
Listeners who hear it as a work in sonata form are likely to have a distinct feeling of unease,
tension, uncertainty, as the time for the recapitulation approaches. If the composer with a
stroke of ingenuity accomplishes the necessary modulation quickly, efficiently, and naturally,
this will give them a feeling of relief—one might say of deliverance … Thus the effect that the
sonata has on us depends on which of its properties are dictated by “rules,” which ones are
standard relative to the category of sonatas and hence standard for us. (Walton 1970,
351–352)
We require a broad amount of preparatory information in order to discern and fix these
aesthetic properties. In the example offered here, proper grasp of the aesthetic properties
of a given sonata require not merely immediate experience, but also a broader facility with
the rules and nature of the sonata‐form itself (which Walton’s imaginary piece is toying
with). And so a commitment to allow experience to be the prime motivator in fixing our
aesthetic judgments does not entail that criticism is entirely separate from appreciation;
rather critical expertise seems to form an enabling condition for, and be part of the very act
of, appreciation itself.
For Walton, aesthetic properties – despite these broader art‐historical relations – are in
the final analysis perceptible.6 And so our broader critical education is a means of making
perceptible – and so eligible for experience – the aesthetic properties that artworks bear on
their face. For Walton further critical work is necessary only in order to get at certain
typing concepts, which serve to articulate how the aesthetic properties should be situated
and categorized. Outside of these art‐centered categories, further reflection on facts about
artworks devolve straightforwardly into criticism, which might be informative but does not
form a core part of the nature of appreciation in itself. Walton serves to loosen the boundary
between criticism and appreciation, then, but does not serve to render these boundaries as
porous and open as Adorno.
This core move on Walton’s part, however, seems a promising means of under-
standing how Adorno can reconcile the autonomy of aesthetic response with the idea
that such response demands cognizance of features that are resolutely heteronomous
(namely, social or even philosophical problematics). Put simply, Adorno has a far more
developed and open conception of the responsivity of aesthetic properties to non‐
aesthetic properties. Once we develop this, we should be better able to see why the
distinction between criticism and appreciation can hardly be sustained, and also why
Adorno is so difficult to place against autonomist, moralist, and immoralist conceptions
of the limits of aesthetic response.
For Walton, the artwork’s germane properties extend beyond the simply visible aspect
and physical locus of the artwork; rather, they are historically extended, and in part con-
stituted by their historical relationships to all other artworks that can be meaningfully
connected with them. But while these aesthetic properties are constituted in part by non‐
aesthetic properties (the physical composition of the artwork; and the historical relation-
ship of such a physical constitution to other artworks relatedly so constituted, the practices
underwriting them both, and so on), these non‐aesthetic properties remain art‐centered
properties. Adorno’s innovation is to deny that such a constriction is necessary.
While Walton’s artworks ontologically relate to and extend into broader collections of
artworks, Adorno’s artworks are far more broadly spread, ontologically speaking. Their
aesthetic properties are constituted by a very broad set of determiners (and again, his
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OWEN HULATT
particular application of the notion of determination is also an innovation). While art-

works busy themselves with formal complexes, these complexes emerge from a broad set of
determining relations, which include the nature of reason and the structure of society.7
This begins to get us to an idea of why comprehension of aesthetic properties – from within
an autonomous stance of appreciation – sends us out to engage in the kind of extra‐
aesthetic investigation usually allotted to criticism.
However, an immediate objection to this is that Adorno uses the concept of determination –
of determiners that affect, but do not show up in, the construction and reception of the
artwork. For Walton, the need to know broader non‐aesthetic facts is clear – they do not
determine (in the sense we have chosen here) the aesthetic make‐up of the artwork, but
constitute it. There is a sense in which Walton’s imagined sonata is, for itself, about sonata‐
form, and the history of the development of that form; and indeed the surface meaning of
its various features is impossible to properly grasp without cognizance of this. For Adorno,
by contrast, this cannot be appealed to. Beethoven’s music is not, for itself, about Hegel, and
nor is ignorance of Hegel an obvious impediment to grasping its surface‐level aesthetic
properties. Rather, Adorno takes Beethoven to be determined by the same complex of
determiners as Hegel’s philosophy – the relationship between universality and particu-
larity in reason and society. To grasp this we must penetrate and go beneath the surface‐
level aesthetic properties of Beethoven.
It is here that the innovations that Adorno’s account of the nature of aesthetic
autonomy involves begin to show signs of strain. So long as aesthetic properties can be
shown to be constituted by non‐aesthetic properties, a criticism‐style need for familiarity
with the non‐aesthetic properties as a condition for proper reception of the aesthetic prop-
erties makes sense. In such a case, the non‐aesthetic properties serve to fix and are contin-
uous with (as part of a broader gestalt) the aesthetic properties.
While Walton’s categories, and the broader art‐historical knowledge on which they
rest, have an appreciable intermingling with the aesthetic properties they help us to fix,
this is not evidently so in Adorno’s case. In Adorno’s case, aesthetic properties are not con-
stituted but determined by broader sets of non‐aesthetic properties. The aesthetic prop-
erties are in a sense a symptom of broader non‐aesthetic properties. Just as symptoms can
be correlated with illnesses without a firm understanding of the nature of that illness and
its connection to them, so too Adorno gives us to understand that artworks evidence, cri-
tique, or demonstrate broader features of the non‐aesthetic without clarifying how and
why such a connection should be found. Just this was Dahlhaus’ complaint.
On one way of understanding this problem, it is simply another rehearsal of an issue
that stands at the center of Adorno’s work, and that in the context of his epistemology has
been worried over multiple times. Namely, the problem of the irreducible interpretive
dimension to Adorno’s epistemology, and the circularity of his justificatory resources in
backing up the interpretations on which his philosophy rests. This problem is especially
acute in Adorno’s case, just insofar as his interpretations put into connection apparently
disconnected domains of phenomena.
This is not, however, quite the problem I am trying to raise here. The problem currently
being broached is experiential rather than epistemic. How, credibly, can an appreciator of
Beethoven’s music – in the course of that aesthetic appreciation – see it as connected to
social or philosophical problems and so on? How would such background knowledge –
critical knowledge – translate itself into aesthetic experience? Does the autonomy of the
aesthetic appreciator include, or preclude, social, political, and philosophical content from
playing a role in the experience?
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AESTHETIC AUTONOMY
We must advert again to Adorno’s interesting conception of justification. While

Adorno’s theory of justification is exceedingly complex, we can say, in short, that it is expe-
rience, at base, which determines the truth of a given claim in philosophy, or of a judgment
of a given artwork. This experiential contribution is accomplished dynamically – through
the invitation and sustenance of a given kind of conceptual movement, which brings about
certain kinds of negative insight.8 Correlatively, criticism – that is static and discursive – is not
sufficient to bring about these experiential effects. Criticism would require the paraphrase
of the content of such a justifying experience; but such a paraphrase would lose the
experiential texture that is just the justification and proof that the paraphrase was
designed to capture.
As such, the truth content of the artwork must not be even partially located in criticism,
but always in principle able to be revealed through aesthetic experience. Bearing this in
mind, for Adorno aesthetic experience must have a very significant function indeed. It is in
aesthetic experience that the deeper truth content of the artwork is revealed and effected.
But we might now wonder whether this is possible. It is not clear how aesthetic appreci-
ation could serve to convey truths to us – especially truths of the sort that Adorno is inter-
ested in. Indeed, Adorno’s emphasis on determination will prove problematic again shortly,
but first we should consider whether the idea of aesthetic appreciation as a vehicle for
truth content is workable. How can the artwork’s ability to encapsulate or critique extra‐
aesthetic conditions become part of aesthetic appreciation?
If I am told that an artwork demonstrates the truth of X, can I yoke this to my aesthetic
experience of that artwork? Or is this only accessible from within discursive criticism?
Perhaps more sharply, why need I care about the artwork’s truth content at all from within
the aesthetic attitude?
For example, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace we are told at length that “great men” are in fact
merely the crest of waves of complex causes; and that history is formed of these complex,
and inexhaustible, congeries of causes, rather than the product of the volition and
command of famous figures. War and Peace is quite explicitly about this theme (among
others). Now, suppose that in the course of pursuing this theme Tolstoy accidentally
performed an implicit reductio of the view (in much the same way that for Adorno George’s
poetry inadvertently effected a critique of a certain kind of bourgeois conservatism).
Tolstoy’s novel would demonstrate – in a fashion not clearly paraphrasable – the falsity of
a given position. Why would this be of aesthetic interest? The function of Tolstoy’s theory of
history in the text is to serve to organize and color the events of the novel – a function it is
perfectly well able to serve while being false, or even obviously false. Its truth status does
not seem part of its aesthetic function. It is clearly relevant and important that it is true for
the narrator; this is what enables it to serve as a kind of lens that is offered to us as a means
of viewing events from an aesthetically beguiling angle. But its truth‐conditionality
relative to the external world does not seem to be part of its aesthetic function, or value. For
the novel, then, the truth of its claims and features – the extent to which they hook into the
outside world, even in the view of the artist or narrator – does not seem to be of primary
aesthetic relevance.
All of which is to say that if we take our criterion to be one of hewing closely to the
aesthetic object, this object does not seem to demand we transfer our attention beyond its
aesthetic properties, even if the content on which these aesthetic properties supervenes
makes truth claims. The aesthetic object itself, even when making truth claims, does not
seem to compel us to contemplate the connection between these truth claims and the
external world.
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If the art‐object does not demand or support an intrinsic concern with truth – as part of
its constitutive aesthetic functioning – we must instead consider whether this concern
with truth is an intrinsic feature of the act of appreciation. This leads us to consider
whether Adorno might in fact have a very curious notion of aesthetic appreciation.
Namely, that he might take a desire for truth – under some description – to be internal to
our appreciation of artworks. While the artwork in and of itself does not compel us to
connect it to the external world, the particular aesthetic stance that we take up might.
What would be the appeal of such a reading?
If we understand aesthetic appreciation as truth‐seeking in some fashion, the
problem outlined earlier retreats; while the object might not demand a transfer of
attention beyond the artwork itself, our stance in appreciating it might demand and
facilitate such a transfer. Likewise, the external truths that the art connects us to might
be moral, immoral, or amoral. And this would explain our difficulty in relating Adorno
to moralism, immoralism, and autonomism. Adorno gives some suggestion that such a
conception of aesthetic response as autonomous, and autonomously truth‐seeking, is
at issue:
Whoever seeks to understand artworks exclusively through the immanence of consciousness

within them by this very measure fails to understand them and as such understanding grows,
so does the feeling of its insufficiency caught blindly in the spell of art, to which art’s own
truth content is opposed… It only emerges demonstratively in the profoundest experience of
art. If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection[.]
(Adorno 2004, 161)
Is this sufficient reason to see Adorno as a cognitivist about aesthetic experience? With
qualification, yes.
3. Cognitivism, Reference, and Determination
Aesthetic cognitivism, broadly understood, entails the claim that aesthetic experience has
a cognitive dimension (that the artwork invites and demands various kinds of cognition),
and the claim that this cognitive stimulation has an effect on the aesthetic value of the art-
work. Adorno clearly belongs to this broad family of thought. For Adorno, aesthetic expe-
rience is irreducibly judgmental, and hence irreducibly cognitive:
Every artwork, if it is to be fully experienced, requires thought and therefore stands in need of
philosophy, which is nothing but the thought that refuses all restrictions … Emphatically, art is
knowledge, though not the knowledge of objects … Artworks thus demand an adequate rela-
tion to themselves. (Adorno 2004, 341)
What we are interested in is whether Adorno’s claims about art can be grounded in
aesthetic experience. And this has lead us to consider what aesthetic experience is for
Adorno – the nature and limit of its autonomy. Now, it is clear that Adorno takes artworks
to be true and, per our discussion earlier, must hold that this truth is communicated by our
experience of them. But what is interesting is that Adorno is in a complex position. This
complex position relates to the nature of cognition that art seems to necessarily occasion,
in Adorno’s view.
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Let us restate Adorno’s core premises. First, artworks are constructed through inten-
tionless and hermetically sealed procedures of composition that respond to the formal
demands of their compositional material. In this respect, form (understood broadly) is the
primary means of artistic construction, and the preeminent means of comprehending the
origins and explanation of artistic achievement. Secondly, aesthetic experience is primarily
if not exclusively the procedure of co‐performing these formal complexes. Following from
these premises, certain versions of cognitivism – which might seem appealing – cannot
operate. To take an example, Goodman’s sophisticated cognitivist theory sees artworks as
referential, achieving this reference through a number of symbolic means of achieving
reference to matters external to the artwork. These means include exemplification, expres-
sion, and metaphor. As Goodman puts it, these means of achieving reference accomplish
(in instances of metaphor, and the various varieties of metaphor) the “reassignment” of
certain tokens from having one meaning, to having another (Goodman 1976, 70). And
this is underwritten by conventionalized systems of symbolic signification that, as it were,
stand external to the artwork and order its reception (Goodman 1976, 53). Accordingly,
artworks can be true because the nature of their construction, and the conventions
surrounding them, afford a means of advancing truth‐apt claims via reference.
Now, for Adorno just such a view seems unavailable. This is because proper aesthetic
experience co‐performs the dynamic construction of the artwork. And this is a co‐
performance of a hermetically sealed system of aesthetic construction that excludes direct
reference to the external world; and thereby also excludes reference to external semantic
systems of symbolic reference. Rather, the artwork must via its autonomous, formal
aesthetic properties generate a transition toward comprehension of those facts that stand
external to the artwork, and that are germane to those aesthetic properties. The problem is
that the artwork would appear to be unable to achieve this, on Adorno’s account. For
Adorno, what artworks are characteristically about, or make us perceive, are facts about
determination – about concealed structures:
Provided [the experiences of art] go deeply enough, they touch on historical constellations
back of the facades of reality and psychology … The spirit of artworks is not their meaning and
not their intention, but rather their truth content, or, in other words, the truth that is revealed
through them. (Adorno 2004, 364–365)
Much of the truths that Adorno sees as important with relation to art, then, are truths
about how structures of concealed determination exist, and in what way they exist.
These structures of determination have a speculative structure; namely, apparently dis-
connected domains of facts are in fact connected, and have a determinative influence on
their constitution, and how they are experienced. We can see this feature of determina-
tion most easily in an epistemic context. Adorno claims of logic that the “exclusivity of
logical laws stems […] ultimately from the compulsive character of self‐preservation …
the choice between survival and doom … which is reflected even in the principle that, of
two contradictory propositions, only one can be true and the other false” (2002, 23).
What is crucial about this claim, and why I have quoted it so frequently in other work, is
that it throws into stark relief the problems of determination. The facts of logical priority
have for themselves no connection to self‐preservation; and facts about self‐preservation
have no evident connection to the domain of autonomous logical cognition. If we agree
with Adorno that they are so connected, we can only get at this connection via speculative
reasoning.
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Aesthetic experience for Adorno, as we have presently described it, cannot support such
speculative reasoning. Artworks are incapable of referring or gesturing to specific struc-
tures of determination because their mechanisms of representation and appearance are
hermetically sealed, and concern only themselves. Artworks generate appearances and
representations; and yet determiners necessarily fail to show up in the appearances and
representations that they influence.
What this shows is that our survey of the nature of aesthetic experience, and the
autonomy of aesthetic judgment, is necessarily incomplete. We need to add a third core
premise. This is the claim that aesthetic experience is, in Adorno’s view, irreducibly inter-
pretive. Aesthetic experience is not merely cognitive – in co‐performing and comprehending
the structure of artworks – but speculatively cognitive. Aesthetic experience constitutively
seeks to move outside the artwork; aesthetic judgments of their nature bleed outside the
aesthetic, and seek to conjoin these experiences to their determining ground. Aesthetic
judgments are not merely interpretive, then, but speculative (speculative reasoning being a
specific form of interpretative practice). They constitutively seek to interpret the content of
artworks in a speculative fashion, connecting them to phenomena with which they are
prima facie disconnected.
And so aesthetic judgment, and aesthetic experience, are not merely truth‐seeking, but
intrinsically speculatively truth‐seeking. The aesthetic stance continually invites the
formation of speculative connections between formal complexes and extra‐formal facts;
namely, the determining relations that are supposed to exist in the world external to the
artwork. Speculative reasoning is not something that artworks can invite; and nor is it
something that aesthetic experience might on occasion turn over into. Rather, aesthetic
experience is always a form of speculative judgment. We can find evidence of this position
in Adorno’s own work. He writes of musical analysis that
Analysis has to do with the surplus [das Mehr] in art; it is concerned with that abundance
which unfolds itself only by means of analysis. It aims at that which – as has been said of
poetry (if I may be permitted a poetic analogy) – is the truly “poetic” in poetry, and the truly
poetic in poetry is that which defies translation. Now it is precisely this moment which analysis
must grasp if it is not to remain subordinate. Analysis is more than merely “the facts” [was bloß
der Fall ist], but is so only and solely by virtue of going beyond the simple facts [die einfachen
Tatbestände] by absorbing itself into them. Every analysis that is of any value, therefore – and
anyone who analyses seriously will soon realize this for himself – is a squaring of the circle …
Now, the ultimate “surplus” over and beyond the factual level is the truth content, and natu-
rally it is only critique that can discover the truth content. (Adorno 1982, 177)
Here, comprehension of aesthetic properties leads one out of those properties into the
external world – into truth content. But what is crucial is Adorno’s following remark:
At the moment, I wish only to put forward these thoughts in their theoretical generality,
however – although with the immediate further qualification that the work of art insists that
one put this question of truth or untruth immanently and not arbitrarily bring some yardstick
or other of the cultural‐philosophical or cultural‐critical varieties to the work from outside.
(Adorno 1982, 177)
There is, then, an immanent movement that takes us outside of the artwork. Adorno
appears to place this in the artwork itself; and I have already argued that in a certain strict
sense this is false. But if we understand Adorno to here be talking about the artwork as it
shows up from within aesthetic experience, this seems to be correct if, as we have argued,
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aesthetic experience is a species of what is for Adorno the fundamental type of judgment – a
speculative search for truth.
Just this demonstrates Adorno’s syncopation of aesthetic and epistemic claims, and his
blending of them. The experience of art is the paradigmatic instance of the epistemic
behavior that Adorno holds to be truth‐apt; not empirical verification, or reference, but the
speculative identification of determiners and determined. In the context of philosophy,
Adorno writes,
Even after breaking with idealism, philosophy cannot do without speculation … The power of
the status quo puts up facades into which our consciousness crashes. It must seek to crash
through them … Surviving in such resistance is the speculative moment: what will not have its
law prescribed for it by given facts transcends them even in the closest contact with the objects,
and in repudiating a sacrosanct transcendence. (Adorno 2006, 15–17)
The fundamental nature of aesthetic judgment is not different from the fundamental form
of philosophical cognition. In either case, one must speculatively connect apparently
orthogonal domains of facts, and do so in an attempt to discover the true nature of their
interrelation.
The claim that judgment is irreducibly speculative, and irreducibly truth‐seeking, is
exercised not only in Adorno’s work on art, but across all of his work. This allows us fully
to cash out the amphiboly of Aesthetic Theory. The aesthetic is theoretic, in that it involves
speculative theorizing, grounded in experience, about the determiners that stand behind
the aesthetic properties of an artwork. And conversely, for Adorno philosophical theory is
always aesthetic as it employs the same characteristic interpretive movement, which
begins in immediate experience and transitions outwards to speculatively interpret and
unriddle the determiners that stand behind that experience.
4. Conclusion
For Adorno, aesthetic experience is produced by a judgmental faculty that is connected to

other kinds of non‐aesthetic factors, both due to Adorno’s theory of judgment more
broadly, and due to a kind of expanded Waltonian account of the determiners of aesthetic
properties. Adorno goes further than this, in seeing an intrinsic truth‐seeking component
to aesthetic experience. This leads us to see Adorno as a cognitivist about aesthetic experi-
ence. Due to Adorno’s use of determination, a wrinkle is added to the cognitivist position
insofar as the cognition stimulated is irreducibly speculative, rather than referential. If we
grant these moves, Adorno is able to overcome the apparent misuse of the distinction bet-
ween criticism and appreciation, as it turns out there is no such distinction at all. Rather,
each of these poles leads to the other.
References
Adorno, T. (1974). Commitment. New Left Review I (87–88): 75–89.
Adorno, T.W. (1982). On the problem of musical analysis” (trans. M. Paddison). Music Analysis 1 (2):
169–187.
Adorno, T.W. (1994). Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
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OWEN HULATT
Adorno, T.W. (1998). Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (ed. R. Tiedemann; trans. E. Jephcott).
Cambridge: Polity.
Adorno, T.W. (2004). Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). London, New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T.W. (2006). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). Abingdon: Routledge.
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. (ed.
G.S. Noerr; trans. E. Jephcott). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Dahlhaus, C. (1987). The musical work of art as a subject of sociology. In: Schoenberg and the New
Music (trans. D. Puffett and A. Clayton 234–247). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indiana: Hackett
Publishing Company, Inc.
Press.
Walton, K.L. (1970). Categories of art. Philosophical Review 79 (3): 334–367.
Further Reading
University Press.
Huhn, T. and Zuidervaart, L. (eds.) (1997). The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Menke, C. (1999). The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida. Cambridge Mass.:
MIT Press.
Zuidervaart, L. (1991). Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Notes
1 For further examination of this aspect of Adorno’s thought, see Hulatt (2016).
2 For a discussion of de Sade, see Adorno and Horkheimer (2002, 63–94).
3 As in Adorno’s discussion of Proust’s novels and his connecting it to the idea of “metaphysical
experience” that was of great importance in Adorno’s own work (Adorno 2006, 373–374).
4 As seen in the case of Beethoven mentioned earlier.
5 For an example, see Adorno’s discussion of Kafka (Adorno 2004, 301–302).
6 “I do not deny that paintings and sonatas are to be judged solely on what can be seen or heard in
them – when they are perceived correctly. But examining a work with the senses can by itself
reveal neither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to perceive it that way.” Walton (1970,
367).
7 “What is socially untrue, flawed, and ideological is communicated to the structure of artworks as
flawed, indeterminate and inadequate. For the manner in which artworks react, their objective
‘attitude toward objectivity,’ remains an attitude toward reality.” Adorno (2004, 363).
8 See further Hulatt (2016).
364
23
Adorno and Literary Criticism

HENRY W. PICKFORD
“Criticism has power only to the extent to which every successful or unsuccessful sentence has
something to do with the fate of humankind”
Adorno, “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism”
1. Culture and Literary Criticism in Post-War Germany
The arts, principally music but also literature, animated Adorno’s life and writings from an
early age. His Minima Moralia, suffused with reminiscences from his Wilhelmine childhood
and Weimar adolescence in Frankfurt, as well as his wartime exile in the United States,
scintillates with allusions to writers ranging from Homer to Goethe and Hölderlin,
Fennimore Cooper, Dickens, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust to contemporaries such as
Brecht. During his life Adorno engaged with some of the most important and innovative
writers of the day, most famously advising Thomas Mann on the composition of Doktor
Faustus, but also meeting with Samuel Beckett, and corresponding with Paul Celan,
Helmut Heißenbüttel, Günter Grass, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and others; and his
academic assistant, Alexander Kluge, went on to become a leading avant‐garde writer,
filmmaker and critical theorist in his own right (Müller‐Doohm 2005).
Adorno had thought, spoken, and written about literature since the 1920s, for instance
in correspondence with Benjamin about Kafka in 1934 (Adorno/Benjamin 1999: 66–71),
or discussions about the sociology of literature with other members of the Institut für
Sozialforschung in 1941 (Adorno et al. 1985). However, he only published literary‐critical
essays after he returned to Germany in 1949, and while they represent only about a tenth
of his published writings, they constitute a significant contribution to the philosophy of
literature: indeed, to examine these essays under conventional viewpoints of philology or
literary hermeneutics is to overlook from the outset their philosophical substance.
These essays often started as occasional speeches or regional radio broadcasts to a broad
educated public, and were then reworked into essays published in mainstream cultural
journals, such as Die Neue Rundschau, Akzente, Merkur, and Der Monat, before eventually
being republished by Suhrkamp in the volume Prismen (Prisms) in 1955 or collected into
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HENRY W. PICKFORD
the attractive small volumes entitled Noten zur Literatur (Notes to Literature), volumes I–IV
(1958, 1961, 1965, 1974 posthumously). The provenance of several of the published essays,
however, attests to their conditions of production: the essay on Huxley began as a mimeo-
graphed typescript from a seminar of the Institut für Sozialforschung held in exile in Los
Angeles in 1941 along with Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse; the essay on Kafka was
written during the years 1942–1953, in the wake of Benjamin’s suicide in 1940. In fact, in a
1955 letter to his friend Siegfried Kracauer Adorno attributed his postwar prodigious publica-
tion rate to the fact that most of the work had been written in emigration (2008, 481).
Yet in a sense Adorno’s return to postwar Germany was an uncanny homecoming, for the
artistic, avant‐garde cultural formation (Bildung) within which he had come of age in Frankfurt
and Vienna before the war was gone, largely replaced by mass‐produced commercialized enter-
tainment that he and Max Horkheimer had earlier termed the “culture industry” (Adorno and
Horkheimer 2002). Its commodities followed the general laws of production, distribution, and
consumption characteristic of late capitalism (“what might be called use value in the reception
of cultural assets is being replaced by exchange value,” Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 128),
and as part of the ideological superstructure, affirmatively reproduced the economic relations
(and their correlate psychological conditions) so comprehensively that prospects for critically
discerning differences between appearance and essence, façade and reality, an essential cognitive
step in continuing the project of enlightenment toward producing a more rational societal orga-
nization, grew vanishingly small: “The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti‐enlight-
enment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive
technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fetter-
ing consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who
judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be the precondition for a
democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and
develop” (Adorno 1991a, 92). Under “late capitalism,” the increasing integration of the arts
and culture into the dominant mode of production entails that “there are no more ideologies
in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its
duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence … The more
total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort
to escape reification on its own” (Adorno 1981a, 34; on the concept of reification, see Lukács
1971). In the collapse of appearance and reality under late capitalism thus culminates the dia-
lectic of enlightenment that Adorno and Horkheimer had traced as far back as Homer’s
Odysseus. Self‐preservation induces reason to dominate nature by means of subsuming qualita-
tively unique particulars under universal concepts by which the world can be more effectively
categorized and controlled via what Adorno calls “identity thinking.” But this also requires the
mind to make itself more self‐identical, thing‐like, to dominate and repress the sensuous,
affective, non‐identical, mutable aspects of its own nature. As a central trait of the authoritarian
personality, reified consciousness entails that “barbarism itself is inscribed within the principle
of civilization … people of such a nature have, as it were, assimilated themselves to things. And
then, when possible, they assimilate others to things” (Adorno 2005, 199).
The second respect in which Adorno’s homecoming was uncanny lies not in what
changed, but in what remained all too unchanged. During the early 1950s the Institut
conducted a large‐scale qualitative empirical study of West German political awareness,
which it published in 1955 as Group Experiment (Pollock et al. 2011; cf. Wiggershaus
1994, 466–479). It reported that two thirds of those interviewed expressed profound
ambivalence regarding democracy, half denied any feelings of guilt about the Third Reich,
and anti‐Semitic attitudes continued unabated. Adorno thus confronted the demonstrable
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persistence of the “anthropological conditions” – reified consciousness, the authoritarian

personality, and prejudice – that had made the rise of fascism and the Holocaust possible.
For Adorno, the present historical situation is in no small part due to the degradation of
the nineteenth‐century ideal of culture (Bildung) – understood as the cultivation of the
human being’s critical faculties in conjunction with liberal political institutions and auton-
omous artistic activities – into the twentieth‐century form of symbolic capital (Kultur) that
tacitly affirms the reigning political‐economic reality:
If culture is understood emphatically enough as the debarbarization of human beings, which

elevates them from their raw conditions, and certainly without perpetuating those conditions
through violent oppression, then culture has failed entirely. It was not able to migrate into
people as long as they lack the presuppositions for a humane existence … Culture has long
become its own contradiction, the congealed contents of a privileged education; that is why
culture now inserts itself into the material process of production as its administered append-
age”. (Adorno 1991b, 109, translation modified)
Hence Adorno identifies the “emphatic” or normative concept of culture as “debarbariza-

tion” and invokes it as a necessary deepening and corrective to the Allies’ often expediently
shallow program of “denazification.” His writings on literature, first broadcast as radio
essays to the West German public, should be understood as endeavoring to redeem and
reinvigorate that emphatic concept of culture, and hence to subvert reified consciousness
by contributing to the “production of a correct consciousness [that is,] politically mature and
responsible people [mündige Menschen]” (Adorno 1971, 107; cf. Hohendahl 1995, 77f.).
If the postwar westernized capitalist culture Adorno confronted in West Germany
upon his return failed its normative concept, he had to confront the equally calamitous
disjunction between contemporary cultural and literary criticism, on the one hand, and
the normative concept of criticism on the other. Under the rubric of the “neutralization of
culture” Adorno diagnosed the current situation: under the German fascists criticism
had devolved into merely affirmative “art appreciation” [Kunstbetrachtung] devoid of the
critical negativity embodied in thinkers such as Karl Kraus, Siegfried Kracauer, or indeed
Walter Benjamin. The tendency continued in postwar Germany as part of the increasing
reification of society and mind: culture and tradition became hypostasized, fixed as
“cultural goods” or “eternal values.” But this idea of a reified culture “asserts its distance
in order, as it were, to offer universal security in the middle of a universal dynamic,” for
“only when neutralized and reified, does culture allow itself to be idolized” (Adorno
1981a, 22, 24; on tradition cf. Geulen 1997). In one of the first essays he wrote upon his
return, “The Resurrected Culture,” he declared: “the culture was reduced to rubble
[Trümmern], but the rubble has been cleared away, − and where one still sees its traces, it
takes the form of venerable ruins [ehrwürdige Ruinen]” (Adorno 1986a, 461, my transla-
tion). The societal function of such venerated and hypostasized cultural goods in postwar
Germany was clear:
The neutralization of culture that is being promoted, in that people blindly preserve it, has
been called “culture as alibi” by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. Culture [Bildung] today has not
least the function to enable one to forget and to repress the horror that occurred and one’s
own responsibility. As an isolated sphere of existence, without any other relation to societal
reality than as it were the abstract relation of a universal need of the age or of the nationalistic
hardening, culture serves to camouflage the relapse into barbarism. Therein the custom of
National Socialism is continued of deceiving about the rigor mortis of domination. It exalts
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HENRY W. PICKFORD
the already established cultural products of the past without examining their substantive
content [Gehalt]. (Adorno 1986a, 460, my translation)
In his 1952 essay “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism,” Adorno attributed the sterility and
inconsequentiality of contemporary criticism to this same “neutralization of culture,
which points ahead like houses accidentally spared by the bombs and in whose substanti-
ality no one really believes anymore” (Adorno 1992d, 307–308); at that time one needed
only look out the window of the bomb‐damaged Institut building to see the rubble that
such an ideology of art appreciation had produced.
Against this view of commodified or museum‐like culture Adorno asserted that “culture is
true only when implicitly critical”: “only the mind which, in the delusion of being absolute,
removes itself entirely from the merely existent, truly defines the existent in its negativity”
(Adorno 1981a, 22, 26). Culture is antinomian to its core: having originated in the radical
social separation of intellectual and physical labor, it bears both the materialist guilt resulting
from, and utopian promise of overcoming, that division of labor: “The anti‐philistinism of
Athens was both the most arrogant contempt of the man who need not soil his hands for the
man from whose work he lives, and the preservation of an image of existence beyond the con-
straint which underlies all work” (Adorno 1981a, 27). The normative concept of criticism
thus requires of the critic that he attend both to the societal antagonisms and the “promesse du
bonheur” that can be deciphered from the artwork, but he can do that successfully “only if he
simultaneously immersed himself, in full freedom and responsibility, in the objects that came
to him” (Adorno 1992d, 308; cf. Finlayson 2012). Thus the literary critic performs both
immanent and transcendent critiques. Immanently they must attend to the subtlest nuances
of language and form, revealing and developing their internal inconsistencies, thereby uncov-
ering their “social physiognomy”; on the other hand, “criticism retains its mobility in regard
to culture by recognizing the latter’s position within the whole.” Hence, although Adorno in
his writings often emphasizes the internal relation of immanent critique to its object, in fact he
maintains the necessity of what Albrecht Wellmer aptly terms “stereoscopic reading”
(Wellmer 1991): “the dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not par-
ticipate. Only then does he do justice to his object and to himself ” (Adorno 1981a, 33).
2. Adorno’s Philosophical Aesthetics
Adorno’s postwar literary criticism adheres to general principles that he first adumbrated in
his musical criticism in prewar Vienna, and that he subsequently developed further in pub-
lished studies throughout his life, ultimately providing their full historical and conceptual
explication in his great posthumous opus Aesthetic Theory (Adorno 1997). His approach to
artworks, including literature, is sociological and neo‐Marxist, on the one hand, in that he
interprets artworks in relation to the historical and societal conditions from which they
emerge, and formalist on the other, in that he interprets artworks non‐reductively in relation
to their aesthetic complexity and the unique aesthetic experience intrinsic to their reception.
According to orthodox Marxism, the arts belong to the ideological superstructure of society
where ideology is understood as the widespread beliefs by which the society’s given relations
of production are justified or legitimized; orthodox Marxist criticism unmasked these beliefs
as serving the interests of the dominant class in perpetuating the status quo. However, under
late capitalism as more and more regions of society become integrated into a unified totality,
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ideology tended to become comprehensive and universal, and grounded in the

overwhelming power of society vis‐à‐vis the individual, who – as Adorno argued from a
Freudian perspective – unconsciously relinquished his autonomy and individuality for the
sake of self‐preservation. Conformism, consumerism, and the culture industry fulfilled
ideological functions no longer tethered to class interests. Adorno concluded that under
present conditions only high modernist artworks (which, by maintaining their aesthetic
autonomy – at least for a time – avoided mass standardized reproduction and equally stan-
dardized passive consumption) could possibly provide insight into and resistance to late
capitalist social reality. Underlying this approach is a central Hegelian‐Marxist opposition
between essence and appearance: the essential ways in which socio‐economic reality is con-
stituted and organized are not readily apparent and yet nevertheless inform the whole. So,
according to Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, wares in the marketplace appear to
be independent bearers of intrinsic value, whereas they are in fact the way in which the
value‐form appears under capitalist commodity production; and according to Lukács’ con-
cept of reification, such social processes of production and exchange appear as independent
things under those same conditions.
Transposed into philosophical aesthetics, this opposition entails the rejection of any
simple realist aesthetics, understood as the mimetic representation of everyday reality
by an artwork. Such works might reproduce the appearance of capitalist society, but will
not disclose its essence. Rather, for Adorno it is the form or style of an artwork that can
disrupt the false appearance of a harmonious totality and reveal the antagonisms and
contradictions that determine its essence (Wesen) to be a catastrophe (Unwesen): “The
unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.
This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society”
(Adorno 1997, 6). This understanding of art immediately entails a normative standard
for the successful artwork: “In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they
succeed in integrating thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and
in this integration at the same time maintain what resists it and the fissures that occur
in the process of integration” (Adorno 1997, 7). “Beauty today has no other measure
than the depth to which the artworks carry out the contradictions that they furrow and
that they master only by following them out, not by concealing them … Beauty exists
either as a result of a parallelogram of forces or not at all” (Adorno 1977, 395, my
translation).
By contrast, Georg Lukács’ postwar concept of “critical realism” called for looking to
just those “objective elements” and “thematic strata and details” from empirical reality to
determine the relationship of the work to society, whereby modernist authors who
eschewed such representational verisimilitude at the level of content, such as Joyce, Kafka,
and Beckett, were castigated as pathologically subjectivist or “decadent.” In response
Adorno sharpened his normative conception of the artwork in an uncompromising polem-
ical essay, excoriating Lukács for neglecting the essential role of aesthetic semblance
(Schein), the concept from Idealist philosophical aesthetics to indicate the ontological cate-
gory that distinguishes artworks from mere things, on the one hand, and pragmatic arti-
facts and tools on the other, and which includes “style, form and technique,” claiming that
only by attending to these aspects of a literary work “and not by gazing at mere immediacy,
does art become knowledge, does it, that is, do justice to reality that conceals its own
essence and suppresses what the essence expresses for the sake of a merely classificatory
order of things” and only thereby “does the work of art become both work of art and
correct consciousness” (Adorno 1991c, 224, 225).
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HENRY W. PICKFORD
Adorno’s theoretical elaboration provides additional conceptual resources for under-

standing “the dialectic of the relationship between the aesthetic sphere and reality”:
Since the work of art does not have something immediately real as its subject matter, it never
says, as knowledge usually does: “this is so” [“es ist so”]. Instead, it says, “this is how it is” [“so
ist es”]. Its logicity is not that of a statement with subject and predicate but that of immanent
coherence: only in and through that coherence, through the relationship in which it places its
elements, does it take a stance [Stellung]. Its antithetical relationship to empirical reality,
which falls within it and into which it itself falls, consists precisely of the fact that, unlike intel-
lectual forms that deal directly with reality, it never defines reality unequivocally as being one
thing or another. It passes no judgments; it becomes a judgment when taken as a whole. The
moment of untruth contained, as Hegel showed, in every individual judgment, because
nothing is completely what the individual judgment says it to be, is corrected by art in that the
work of art synthesizes its elements without any one of those elements being stated by any
other: the notion of Aussage [message] currently in vogue has no relation to art. What art, as
synthesis without judgment, loses in specificity regarding detail it regains through its greater
justice to what judgment usually eliminates. The work of art becomes knowledge only as a
totality, only in and through all its mediations, not in its individual intentions. Individual
intentions cannot be abstracted from it, nor can it be judged by them. (Adorno 1991c, 232)
It is helpful to work through some of these claims, although to do so adequately would

require adverting extensively to his philosophical aesthetics in Aesthetic Theory. According
to Adorno, successful artworks provide a kind of insight or knowledge that categorically
differs from conventional scientific knowledge. The latter kind of knowledge is paradigmat-
ically formed by the mind in judgments that combine or – to speak with Kant – “synthesize”
a substance and a property and are expressed logico‐linguistically in judgments that
combine a subject with a predicate via the copula (the “is” of predication): “es ist so.” By
contrast, artworks are a “synthesis without judgment”: a process of unification or
combination of various (empirical, intentional, formal, material) elements via mediation,
whereby the specific mediation is conceived in terms of “style, form and technique,” what
Adorno sometimes calls the work’s specific “immanent law of form.” This complex, intra-
mediated totality constitutes a kind of knowledge, but not as to be expressed in a predicative
judgment, the categorical form of scientific knowledge. Its categorical mode of expression is
rather that of “immanent coherence”: “so ist es,” which we might understand as concate-
nating a place‐holder subject (“es”), the “is” of existence, and an adverb. “Reality exists
thusly,” or more colloquially, “It is what it is,” or (with Kurt Vonnegut) “So it goes,” with the
implication that reality could exist in a different manner. Recalling the Hegelian distinction
between appearance and essence, this categorical form of judgment expresses the way
essence is, rather than predicating a property of a substance, and this categorical judgment‐
form expresses the kind of knowledge of society’s essence that the successful artwork can
provide. While the content (Inhalt), subject matter (Sache), and material (Stoff) of a literary
work are logically expressed in the categorical form of predicative judgment, the work’s
“metaphysical import” or “substantive content” (Gehalt) is expressed in the categorical form
of what could be called existential manifestation, which would ideally be indicated by a
logically proper name rather than by a predicative judgment. Returning to the quoted
passage, we note further precepts that follow from Adorno’s normative theory of art.
Because the successful artwork is a “synthesis without judgment,” it follows directly that
the substantive content (Gehalt) of the artwork cannot be interpreted either as an author’s
intention or equated to any “message” (Aussage). For example, of Kafka he writes:
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The artist is not obliged to understand his own art, and there is particular reason to doubt
Kafka was capable of such understanding … Kafka’s works protected themselves against the
deadly aesthetic error of equating the philosophy that an author pumps into a work with its
metaphysical substance [metaphysischer Gehalt]. Were this so, the work of art would be still-
born; it would exhaust itself in what it says and would not unfold itself in time…. Kafka’s
authority is textual. Only fidelity to the letter, not oriented understanding, can be of help.
(Adorno 1981b, 247)
Adorno argues from the same principles against Sartre’s realist aesthetics of political
engagement, Brecht’s theater of unmediated didacticism (Adorno 1992a), and Heidegger’s
imputation of a poeticized account of Seinsgeschichte to Hölderlin’s verse (Adorno 1992b).
In the passage on Kafka quoted earlier Adorno claims that an artwork will “unfold itself
in time,” and elsewhere he speaks of an artwork’s “temporal core” (Zeitkern, borrowed from
Benjamin; Adorno 1991d, 10). Since the essence of society – in Marxist terms, the dominant
mode of production, including relations and forces of production – is historical, the imma-
nent law or form of each artwork is itself historically indexed; hence Adorno often asserts
that the “truth content” (Wahrheitsgehalt) or “metaphysical substance” of the successful art-
work is historical and revelatory of society’s essential structure and constitutive dynamic, its
basic antagonistic forces, or its “metaphysics” (Wussow 2013; Robinson 2018). Moreover,
because the artistic techniques that shape new avant‐garde artworks – in explicit analogy to
the concept of forces of production – are progressively advancing, the full significance of an
artwork’s style and techniques may well be recognizable only from a chronologically later
vantage point, when those features are recognized as belonging to and reworking the tradi-
tion that leads to the present moment in artistic capacities; hence Adorno will speak of the
“life” and “afterlife” (Nachleben) of an artwork, in that layers of significance will become
accessible as the artwork “ages” (Wilson 2018). This also entails that, although Adorno’s
philosophical aesthetics, as exemplified in his essays on Kafka, Beckett and others (he was
working on Celan’s poetry when he died), illuminates high modernist works (see Hammer
2015), it is not limited to the modern period, as works from earlier periods may become dis-
cernible in light of the contemporary historical and artistic situation, such that “older works
too are drawn into the crisis of intelligibility” (Adorno 1992c, 97). Adorno’s brilliance as a
literary critic is in part to identify and trace out antagonisms and fissures within the imma-
nent form of completely non‐modernist works by Goethe, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Mörike,
Heine, and others. That is, literary works from earlier periods can reveal to later readers the
tensions and “force fields” that more readily characterize modernist works and that attest to
socio‐economic antagonisms of those earlier periods.
Adorno’s philosophy of art, and his philosophy generally, in many ways can be viewed
itself as the “afterlife” of writings by Walter Benjamin. For Hannah Arendt Adorno was the
“one true disciple of Benjamin” (Arendt 1983, 154), and though Adorno often discussed
literature in his correspondence with Benjamin, he did not publish any essays in literary
criticism until after Benjamin’s suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Benjamin’s 1928 The Origin
of the German Mourning Play (Benjamin 1994, with alternative title translation), about
which Adorno taught his first seminar at the University of Frankfurt in 1932 (Theodor W.
Adorno Archiv 1992), informed Adorno’s thinking throughout his life (Buck‐Morss 1977;
Jennings 1987). In the prologue to his study Benjamin outlines his theory of interpretation,
which eschews knowledge as subsumptive categorization (e.g. motifs, genres, and periodiza-
tions) in favor of truth understood as the manifestation of a society’s or a historical period’s
overarching metaphysical attitude or “idea.” Empirical phenomena are incorporated or
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HENRY W. PICKFORD
“redeemed” into an artwork or an historical interpretation where, mediated by concepts, they

partially partake in the idea, in that the interpreter’s constructed “constellation” of phe-
nomena, deftly arranged to render legible the conceptual mediations between them, produces
a revelatory recognition of the idea (Benjamin 1994). The idea, like Hegelian essence, is “inten-
tionless,” wholly distinct from actual or imputed authorial intention, as Adorno endorsed: “in
poetics Benjamin’s study of the German Baroque [is motivated by] the rejection of the confu-
sion of subjective intentions with aesthetic content [Gehalt] … The elements bound up with
content [Inhalt] undergird the substantive content [Gehalt] in opposition to the pressure of
subjective intention” (Adorno 1997, 145–146, translation modified; cf. Macdonald 2018). In
the body of the study Benjamin then argues that the dominant mode of expression in the
German mourning play – its immanent law of form – is allegory, whose temporal and ontological
disjunction between image, script and signification expresses the age’s metaphysical “idea”:
the juxtaposition of political stagnation and creaturely mortality, on the one hand, and a disen-
chanted hope for redemption on the other. Adorno incorporated key concepts from Benjamin’s
theory of literary interpretation into his own programmatic text that opens his Notes to
Literature, “The Essay as Form” (Adorno 1991d; Nicholsen 1997; Plass 2007, chapter 1).
3. Heine: Coming Home
Many of the features of Adorno’s philosophical approach to literature are exemplified in his
remarkable short essay “Heine the Wound,” a speech given in 1956 on the centennial of the
death of Heinrich Heine, which developed a text Adorno wrote in English on Heine in 1949,
the year of his return to Germany (Adorno 1986b). The subject of the essay is the German‐
Jewish journalist and lyric poet, whose politically liberal yet also patriotic writings during the
period before the 1848 failed revolutions brought censorship and eventual life‐long exile in
Paris; whose rhythmically infectious short lyrics from works such as the Book of Songs (Buch
der Lieder) dallied with already hackneyed romantic and sentimental themes before undercut-
ting them with concluding sudden, cruelly realistic irony; whose poems were set to music by
Schumann and Schubert but vilified by the aesthetic conservative Stefan George and the
liberal journalist Karl Kraus; and whose writings were subsequently banned, burned, or ano-
nymized by the National Socialist regime. Adorno equates the wound with “what in him
causes pain, and his relationship to the German tradition, and especially what has been
repressed in Germany since the Second World War” (1991e, 80, translation modified). The
English translation (“what in Heine … causes us pain,” my emphasis) unfortunately suggests
that Adorno identifies himself with the community of postwar Germans pained by Heine, but
such attributions of community undergo critical variation in the course of the essay, perhaps
unsurprising given Adorno’s own biography, including the anti‐Semitism he experienced
both before and after his exile from his homeland (Wiggershaus 1994, 466).
Yet Adorno ultimately relates Heine’s German‐Jewish identity to the immanent form of
Heine’s literary works to diagnose the perpetual unease he induces. After first highlighting the
enlightenment, utopian impulse within Heine’s prose works (“His idea of sensuous fulfillment
encompasses fulfillment in external things, a society without coercion and deprivation,” Adorno
1991e, 81), Adorno locates the wound in Heine’s poems, which reveal the rupture of late
Romantic poetic autonomy confronting the industrialization of production, commercialization
of cultural products, and reification of spirit: “In Heine commodity and exchange seized control
of sound and tone, whose very nature had previously consisted in the negation of the hustle and
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bustle of everyday life … he took a poetic technique of reproduction, as it were, that corresponded
to the industrial age and applied it to the conventional romantic archetypes” (1991e, 82). By
collapsing the language of poetry into the language of cliché and commerce, Heine debunked
the ideology of the “beautiful soul,” the pure autonomous spirit whose creations are equally
autonomous in their laws of form independent of the laws of market exchange. Actually, art-
works had always been dependent on the exchange relation, but veiled by a distinctly aestheti-
cized form of commodity fetishism: “Heine the advocate of enlightenment unmasked Heine the
Romantic, who had been living off the good fortune of autonomy, and brought the commodity
character of his art, previously latent, to the fore. He has not been forgiven for that.” (1991e,
82). As Adorno makes clear in the earlier 1949 version, he identifies in Heine’s lyrics the
extension of the neutralization of culture over poetry itself, an irrevocable development that
leads to the culture industry including its concomitant “anthropological condition”: as the lyr-
ical persona at the farthest development of autonomous subjectivity ever more deftly manipu-
lates the clichés of romantic inwardness for the growing audience of consumers, inwardness
itself becomes manipulable, fungible, reified, exhibitable in the marketplace (Adorno 1986b,
449–450): poetic self‐expression under the law of exchange becomes self‐reification on display.
Rehearsing a psychological argument deployed in Dialectic of Enlightenment’s chapter on
anti‐Semitism, Adorno claims that the German reader’s rage at Heine hinges on the shame
felt by the reader’s recognizing his own self‐reification in that displayed by Heine’s lyrical
persona’s use of hackneyed Romantic imagery and language. This rage is then racialized
and projected against Heine by attacking his perceived weakness, his supposed lack of
native German (the rumor that his mother did not fully command the German language),
testament to the failure of Jewish emancipation. Here the very ease with which Heine
manipulates threadbare Romantic images “like a sold‐out commodity” (wie ein vergriffenes
Ding) for the sake of limpid communication (itself a kind of exchange) shows that he bears
an external, instrumental relation to the language rather than inhabiting it and experi-
encing the dialectical tension between collective tradition and individual spontaneity.
A fundamental feature of Adorno’s philosophical interpretation of society and of artworks
that he learned from Benjamin is the notion of “redemptive critique” (rettende Kritik): that the
critical revelation of the metaphysical substance of the artwork, the historical essence of the
society from which it emerged and to which it relates, brings with it the utopian possibility of
altering that social essence, for modern artworks the principle of exchange, the law of capitalist
commodity production. In the essay on Heine, Adorno attributes the possibility of redemption
to the normatively successful expression of the alienation wrought by failed emancipation:
If all expression is the trace left by suffering, then Heine was able to recast his own insuffi-
ciency, the languagelessness of his language [Sprachlosigkeit seiner Sprache], as an expression
of rupture [Bruch]. So great was the virtuosity of this man, who imitated language as if he
were playing it on a keyboard, that he raised even the inadequacy of his language to the
medium of one to whom it was granted to say what he suffered. Failure dialectically inverts
into success. (1991e, 83, translation modified)
However, Adorno continues, the realization of this aesthetic success was not recognized
until its immanent form – the rupture between the colloquial, intimate, overfamiliar
language, on the one hand, and its alien, non‐native, instrumental use on the
other – was recognized as immanent form, when it was repeated as an artistic technique
decades later by Gustav Mahler (cf. also Adorno 1992e, 31). In this sense Mahler’s
songs – the content [Inhalt] of which is unrelated to Heine’s texts – constitute the
“afterlife” of Heine’s poetry.
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HENRY W. PICKFORD
The essay’s magisterial final section begins by reciting a poem from Heine’s cycle The
Return Home [Der Heimkehr] on his “stereotypical theme, unrequited love,” which Adorno
characterizes as a “simile of lacking a homeland” [Gleichnis der Heimatlosigkeit]. Returning
the reader to the narrative present, Adorno concludes the essay:
Now that the destiny that Heine sensed has been fulfilled literally, however, the lack of home-
land has become everyone’s; everyone is so damaged [beschädigt] in their being and their lan-
guage, as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words: there is no longer any
homeland other than a world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of a
really emancipated humanity. The wound Heine will close only in a society that has achieved
reconciliation. (Adorno 1991e, 85, translation modified)
In the passage Adorno tacitly signals his elective affinity with Heine through an allusion to his
1951 book written in exile, Minima Moralia, which bears the subtitle “Reflections from
Damaged [beschädigt] Life” (cf. Garloff 2002). But he also resurrects another exiled German‐
Jew by covertly reproducing the rhetorical argument Karl Marx wielded in the final pages of
“On the Jewish Question” against Bruno Bauer’s restricted, merely religious conception of
Jewish emancipation. Invoking the anti‐Semitic stereotype of “Judaism” as the practical,
egoistic spirit of commerce to characterize the nature of civil society tout court, Marx wrote
with unmatched irony: “The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish way not only by
acquiring financial power but also because through him and apart from him money has
become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the
Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have
become Jews,” to then conclude that “the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of
society from Judaism” (Marx 1975, 237, 241). Mutatis mutandis, Adorno suggests, after one
hundred years Heine as the image of the Jew has achieved emancipation in so far as all human
beings existing under the depredations of capitalism, war, and genocide have become as
estranged, homeless, and damaged as he, whose poetic virtuosity in expressing this condition
vouchsafes his readers a negative image of what genuinely emancipated humanity would be.
4. Hölderlin: Hearkening to Nature
For Adorno the interpretation of an artwork can reveal a utopian dimension through the rec-
ognition of the pernicious essence of society, whereby that recognition provides a negative
image of what reconciliation would be. There is, however, another way in which for Adorno
artworks can provide a utopian possibility for societal change, a possibility that lies within
the recipient of the artwork, rather than within the objective conditions of society, and may
be termed “aesthetic subjectivity.” As was outlined earlier, Adorno and Horkheimer in
Dialectic of Enlightenment provide a historico‐philosophical account of the emergence of
modern rationalization, in which the subject emancipates itself from mythic identification
with its environment in virtue of dominating nature by subsuming its particular richness
under universal concepts and laws. However, a dialectical reversal ensues, as the domination
of nature requires the self‐domination of the subject: it must make itself as stable and
unchanging – mythlike – as the rational categories by which nature is rendered stable and
mythlike. In his later Negative Dialectics, Adorno explicitly connects this account to late
capitalist political economy. Marx had demonstrated how commodity capitalism relies on the
principle of exchangeability of unlike commodities in the marketplace, as expressed by their
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supposed “exchange‐value,” which he identifies with the abstract labor time required for the
production of such commodities. Adorno in turn derives the principle of exchangeability
from the cognitive operation of “identity thinking” that imposes abstract identity onto non‐
identical particulars: “One cannot arrive at relationships of exchange without a moment of
conceptuality … The conceptuality in the relationship of exchange is itself a kind of facticity”
(Adorno 2018, 3–4). The principles of abstraction and exchangeability, the essence of
capitalist society, are correlative with and reproduced by the conceptual operations of “iden-
tity thinking” in society’s subjects: “exchange would be nothing without identification … The
spread of the principle [of identity thinking] imposes on the whole world an obligation to
become identical, to become total” (Adorno 1973, 152; Pickford forthcoming).
In virtue of her aesthetic experience, however, the epistemic subject becomes aware of
the possibility of relinquishing her own self-reification. Adorno describes his model of the
active receptivity of a literary artwork in an essay devoted to an experimental text by the
contemporary avant‐garde author Hans G. Helms. Adorno first rejects the premise that
understanding an artwork means limning the authorial intention, which presupposes a
stable meaning lying prior to or “behind” the artwork, whereby the interpreter “exchanges”
text for intention. Such a model of understanding subtends merely the significative or
communicational moment in a literary work’s language, plot, image, and so on, which
“plays a secondary role” in the modernist works Adorno champions. For such works
Adorno outlines an alternative, quasi‐performative model of interpretive understanding:
a kind of following along [Nachfahren] … the co‐performance of an ongoing process [Mitvollzug]

of the tensions sedimented in the work, the processes that have congealed and become objec-
tified in it. One does not understand a work of art when one translates it into concepts … but
rather when one is immersed in its immanent movement; I should almost say, when it is
recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the
linguistic sensorium speaks along with it. If the work is not to be disfigured rationalistically,
understanding [Verstehen] in the specific conceptual meaning of the word will emerge only in
an extremely mediated way; namely, in that the substantive content [Gehalt] grasped in the
experiential performance [im Vollzug der Erfahrung] is reflected upon and named in its relation-
ship to the work’s materials [Stoffen] and the language of its forms [Formensprache]. (Adorno
1992c, 97, translation modified)
According to Adorno then, the experience of a suitable artwork is characterized by the

aesthetic subject, in our case, the reader of the literary text, actualizing a kind of agency in
co‐performing the work, their “linguistic sensorium speaking along with it.” This is both
an active and passive experience, in that the aesthetic subject engages their cognitive and
non‐cognitive abilities in responding to, recollecting, and anticipating the work as it
unfolds during its experience, similar to how a musical performer responds to but also
actively inflects a piece of music in actualizing the musical score, animating and performing
it, they reveal new layers of the work’s meaning. Adorno insists that this kind of responsive
engagement with the work is unlike the subsumptive categorizing of “identity thinking”;
on the contrary, it is the mind’s attentive attunement to the artwork’s particulars and par-
ticularities, what he elsewhere calls “emphatic” and “full, unreduced experience.” This
kind of engagement with an appropriate artwork experientially demonstrates a kind of
subjectivity other or prior to the fixed, self‐dominated subjectivity that underlies the epi-
stemic subject of modern rationalization. Moreover, as Adorno outlines in the quoted
passage, since the immanent movement of such works is in turn characterized by tensions,
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HENRY W. PICKFORD
conflicts, contradictions, and ruptures, not only does the recipient experience the sedi-
mented societal antagonisms that constitute the substantive content (Gehalt) of the art-
work, the subject also adopts a distanced stance of reflection upon that experience, by
which they can then recognize and possibly name that substantive content. Adorno thus
conceives aesthetic experience as stereoscopic, as Wellmer indicates, juxtaposing without
uniting an internal, immanent standpoint that recreates the internal structure and
movement of the work, and an external, transcendent standpoint that reflects upon that
action and, drawing on the conceptual resources of philosophy, names the substantive
content of the work, the societal essence that is thereby both conjured and criticized.
In the same essay, Adorno notes that “unquestionably, the exertions involved in this
kind of emphatic understanding of even traditional works of art equal those an avant‐
garde text imposes on the reader who co‐performs it” (Adorno 1992c, 97, translation
modified), a view he elevates into an anti‐historicist method in his Aesthetic Theory: “The
principle of method here is that light should be cast on all art from the vantage point of the
most recent artworks, rather than the reverse, following the custom of historicism and
philology, which, bourgeois at heart, prefers that nothing ever change” (Adorno 1997,
359). Thus for Adorno the term “modernist” (from Latin “modo,” “just now”) does not des-
ignate an historical period, but rather a principle of philosophical aesthetics, a claim he
vindicates in his essay on the enigmatic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Philological
method that aims at reconstructing authorial intention, such as Wilhelm Dilthey’s herme-
neutics of empathetic understanding, ignores the multidimensionality of the work, which
includes subjective intention, subject matter, objective linguistic form, the immanent law,
and ultimately the historical substantive content (Gehalt): “what unfolds and becomes
visible in the works, the source of their authority, is none other than the truth manifested
objectively in them, the truth that consumes the subjective intention and leaves it behind
as irrelevant” (Adorno 1992b, 110).
For Adorno the substantive content of the literary work is to be found in its objective form,
which expresses its own immanent law. With Hölderlin he speaks of the “agency of form”
(das Agens der Form), claiming “one must ask what the form itself, as sedimented [historical]
content, does” (Adorno 1992c, 114, 128). For literary texts in general, linguistic form can be
philosophically approached through the posited dichotomy of a significative, communica-
tional pole, and a mimetic‐expressive pole, which alludes to Marx’s distinction between
exchange‐value and use‐value. The significative element underpins the discursive, commu-
nicational function of language, to subsume particulars under concepts that – echoing
Kant’s epistemology – can yield a “synthetic unity” of the judging subject, on the one hand,
and the epistemic judgment on the other, by which the world is rendered recognizable and
tractable. Such cognitive operations underwrite principles of abstraction and identification,
but they do so by repressing or forgetting the mimetic‐expressive element: the immediate,
qualitative relation between body and world from which the concept and discursive judg-
ment prescind. According to Adorno, the remembrance of this forgotten element, and the
unresolved tension between these countervailing linguistic forms – predicative judgment
and nominalistic proper name – is enacted in the characteristic form of Hölderlin’s late
poetry, which evokes “an abandoned, flowing nature that transcends itself precisely
through having escaped from the spell of the domination of nature.” The form achieves
“aconceptual synthesis”: “But by virtue of its significative element, the opposite pole of its
mimetic‐expressive element, language is chained to the form of judgment and proposition
and thereby to the synthetic form of the concept. In poetry, unlike music, aconceptual syn-
thesis turns against its medium; it becomes a constitutive dissociation. Hence Hölderlin
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merely gently suspends the traditional logic of synthesis” (Adorno 1992c, 130). Aconcpetual
synthesis is achieved, Adorno argues, through Hölderlin’s incorporation of paratactical
phrases that disrupt the hypotactic syntactic order by which phrases are rigorously subordi-
nated; the paratactical structures are “artificial disturbances that evade the logical hierarchy of
a subordinating syntax … [so that] the transformation of language into a serial order whose
elements are linked differently than in the judgment is musiclike” (Adorno 1992c, 131).
Likening the serial ordering to the concatenation of episodes in the epic form, Adorno claims
“the narrative tendency in the poem strives downward into the prelogical medium and wants
to drift along with the flow of time” (134). In several essays on literary texts, ancient and
modern, including Homer, post‐Romantic lyric poetry, Eichendorff, Borchardt, and others,
Adorno returns to the re‐emergence of a non‐subsumptive narrative or epic moment, or the
passive, flowing “rustling” (Rauschen) of language to indicate this prelogical mimetic relation to
the world (Plass 2007; Porter 2018; Reemtsma 2005). These texts stage a conflict between the
tendency in language toward conceptual synthesis that fixes (reifies) subjectivity and objec-
tivity, enabling abstraction, identification, exchangeability, and significative communication,
and the tendency in language toward prelogical forms of resemblance and interaction between
the objective and subjective. In aesthetic experience the recipient co‐performs this conflict
immanently and, through self‐reflection recognizes transcendently what such acts of
conceptual synthesis forget in both nature and the subject. “The paratactic revolt against syn-
thesis attains its limit in the synthetic function of language as such. What is envisioned is a
synthesis of a different kind, language’s critical self‐reflection, while language retains synthesis
… Hölderlin delineates for the first time what culture would be: received nature” (Adorno
1992c: 135, 136; Flodin 2018). While for Adorno all poetry protests the domination of nature,
in Hölderlin’s late poems “the protest awakens to self‐consciousness” and opens the prospect of
what a realized state of freedom would be: “metaphysical passivity as the substantive content
[Gehalt] of Hölderlin’s poetry is allied … with the hope for a reality in which humanity would be
free of the spell of its own entanglement of nature” (149, translation modified).
5. An Ethical Criticism
By way of conclusion to this brief and selective conspectus, Adorno’s philosophy and prac-
tice of literary criticism can be set into stark relief by considering it in the context of
current debates about literature and moral philosophy (for critical overviews of the ethical
criticism of art in general, see Carroll 2000; Giovannelli 2007). Perhaps the most influen-
tial approach – held by thinkers including Wayne Booth (1988), Iris Murdoch (1970,
1992) and Martha Nussbaum (1990, 1998), and discussed under the name “ethical
criticism,” – understands the general premise that literature can afford one insights into
morality and how to live one’s life from a broadly neo‐Aristotelian perspective.
This view favors narrative literature in general, and psychological realism in
particular (cf. Giovannelli 2013, 336 and passim), as for instance Nussbaum’s essays
on Henry James. When she does consider modernist narrative, for example in an essay
on Beckett, Nussbaum tacitly presupposes realist commitments of intelligibility (in
line with Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics of Verstehen), and so describes Beckett’s nar-
rative as one of “progressive disintegration” (Nussbaum 1990, 297) and “the collaps-
ing of the emotional structure itself ” (Nussbaum 1990, 301). Although she sometimes
gestures toward questions more suggestive of Adorno (“we must look to social
377
HENRY W. PICKFORD
istory, and not without a critical eye … we must ask what content the literary
h
forms themselves express, what structures of desire they represent and evoke,” 310),
she ultimately concludes that Beckett’s “narrative as a whole is an expression of a
religious view of life” (309). Her analysis, which unwittingly echoes Lukács’

psychological pathologization of modernist literature, does not attend sufficiently to
literary form and hence does not reach beyond the appearances to the antagonistic
forces that constitute the essence of late capitalist society. In this regard the arguments
Adorno deployed against Lukács’ postwar advocacy of realism could be leveled against
today’s adherents of “ethical criticism.”
However, a second point of comparison casts light on Adorno’s literary criticism in the
context of his postwar return to Germany. Aligned with a restricted focus on realist litera-
ture, the advocates of “ethical criticism” adopt the neo‐Aristotelian attitude that literature
can “cultivate” one’s moral sensibilities and virtues. On this view, perhaps most rigorously
argued in Nussbaum (1990), literature provides a moral education beyond illustrating
general ethical propositions and rules, through “the honing of ethically relevant skills and
powers (such as the capacity for finer perceptual discrimination, the imagination, the emo-
tions, and the overall ability to conduct moral reflection) as well as the exercise and refine-
ment of moral understanding (that is, the improvement and sometimes the expansion of
our understanding of the moral precepts and concepts we already possess) … the educative
value of art resides in its potential to cultivate our moral talents” (Carroll 2000, 366). It is
here where a comparison is most telling, for I would suggest that in part Adorno also pur-
sues a “cultivation approach” to the relationship between philosophical knowledge and
literature. However, Nussbaum, invoking Aristotle and James, understands the capacities
to be cultivated as “the [ethical] ability to discern, acutely and responsively, the salient fea-
tures of one’s particular situation” (Nussbaum 1990, 37). That is, attending to the real-
istic imitation of morally salient situations depicted in literature can improve one’s practical
wisdom (phronesis): “the ability to read a situation, singling out what is relevant for thought
and action” (Nussbaum 1990, 44). As one commentator astutely notes, “Nussbaum’s
project of taking her evidence from ‘the experience of life’ is in fact essentially phenomeno-
logical” (Kalin 1992, 141), attending to the morally laden details of the realistically
depicted appearances of modern life but passing over the objective socio‐economic forces
informing, and indeed the subjective historico‐philosophical modes of thinking, that
reproduce those appearances of modern life, not to mention the possibilities of resisting
such structures and forces. Adorno’s literary criticism leads the reader from the material
(Stoff) and content (Inhalt) of the literary work comprising such appearances to the
substantive content (Gehalt) that manifests the social essence of the work’s truth content,
while also showing how the immanent aesthetic experience can intimate occluded possi-
bilities that warrant critical self‐reflection and hopefully eventual resistance. In this way
Adorno’s literary criticism also cultivates ethical capacities, but his aim is to cultivate criti-
cal self‐reflective abilities that interrogate the production of the appearances of our
particular moral situations that Nussbaum and other advocates of “ethical criticism” are
satisfied to describe more precisely. And the cultivation of these critical abilities, Adorno
argues, is crucial to the cultural formation (Bildung) of the political subjectivity and agency
required by democracy.
Thus, for Adorno “literary criticism” means not only the criticism of literature in the
objective sense, but also in the subjective sense of the genitive: literature, the experience of
literature, can be a privileged activity of critique and resistance to the way of the world
under late capitalism.1
378
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117–127.
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Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71: 335–348.
Hammer, E. (2015). Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience and Catastrophe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hohendahl, P. (1995). Prismatic Thought. Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Jennings, M. (1987). Dialectical Images. Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell
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Kalin, J. (1992). Knowing novels: Nussbaum on fiction and moral theory. Ethics 103 (1992):
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P.E. Gordon and E. Hammer), 365–379. New York: Routledge.
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The MIT Press.
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Nussbaum, M. (1998). Exactly and responsibly: a defense of ethical criticism. Philosophy and
Literature 22: 343–365.
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A. Callinicos, S. Kouvelaki and L. Pradella). London: Routledge.
Plass, U. (2007). Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature. New York: Routledge.
Pollock, F., Adorno, T.W. et al. (2011). Group Experiment and Other Writings (ed., trans. and introduced
A.J. Perrin and J.K. Olick). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Porter, J.I. (2018). ‘On epic naiveté’: Adorno’s allegory of philology. In: Pataphilology: An Irreader
(eds. S. Gurd and V.W.J. van Gerven Oei), 93–115. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books.
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Reemtsma, J.P. (2005). Der Traum von der Ich‐ferne. Adornos literarische Aufsätze. In: Dialektik der
Freiheit. Frankfurter Adorno‐Konferenz 2003 (ed. A. Honneth), 318–362. Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp.
Robinson, J. (2018). Adorno’s Poetics of Form. Albany: SUNY Press.
Wellmer, A. (1991). Truth, semblance, reconciliation: Adorno’s aesthetic redemption of modernity.
In: The Persistence of Modernity (trans. D. Midgley), 1–35. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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M. Robertson). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Wilson, R. (2018). The hidden seeds of survival: Adorno and the life of art. New Literary History 49:
149–163.
Wussow, Philipp von, (2013). Adorno über literarische Erkenntnis. In: Textgelehrte. Literaturwis
senschaft und literarisches Wissen im Umkreis der Kritischen Theorie (eds. N. Berg and D. Burdorf),
159–183. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.
Further Reading
Bloch, E., Lukács, G., Brecht, B. et al. (1977). Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso Anthology of
central texts in the debates on Marxism and literature in the early twentieth century, including the
evaluation of realism, expressionism and modernism.
Bolz, N.W. (1979). Geschichtsphilosophie des Ästhetischen. Hermeneutische Rekonstruktion der “Noten
zur Literatur” Th. W. Adornos. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag. Systematic reconstruction of Notes
to Literature within Adorno’s philosophy of history.
Cuningham, D. and Mapp, N. (eds.) (2006). Adorno and Literature. London: Continuum. Collection of
essays.
Hammer, E. (2015). Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience and Catastrophe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Comprehensive interpretation of Adorno’s philosophical aesthetics within the
post‐Kantian framework of theorizing individual and social freedom, on the one hand, and
aesthetic modernism on the other; includes an illuminating chapter on Adorno and Beckett.
Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. General introduction to
Adorno’s thought, with considerable attention to his aesthetics and criticism.
Nicholsen, S.W. (1997). Exact Imagination, Late Work. On Adorno’s Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press. Interpretations of Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience, language, constel-
lation of form, and his relationship to Walter Benjamin, by the English translator of Notes to
Literature.
Plass, U. (2007). Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature. New York: Routledge.
Nuanced close readings of selected essays.
Note
1 For helpful comments on an earlier version my thanks to Iain Macdonald, Martin Shuster, and the
editors of this volume.
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24
Adorno as a Modernist Writer

RICHARD ELDRIDGE
1. Modern Life and Modernism
“In or about December, 1910, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf famously
wrote in 1924 (Woolf 1984, 194). Having failed to see this change, the principal novelists
of the preceding Edwardian, generation – Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy –,
she argues, focused so much on institutions and social reform, along predictable utili-
tarian‐ameliorist lines, that they failed to “get in touch with [their] reader[s] by putting
before [them] something which [they recognize], which therefore stimulates [their] imag-
ination, and makes [them] willing to cooperate in the far more difficult business of inti-
macy” (Woolf 1984, 206). Instead of either smooth, Edwardian plots of happy marriages,
successful careers, and the social good or their fatefully doomed inverses, what is needed,
Woolf claims, is a form of writing that focuses more closely on the real inner lives of ordi-
nary people, as those inner lives complexly register surprising but often unacknowledged
and suppressed traumas and ecstasies. This will require a prose in which “grammar is
violated, syntax disintegrated” (Woolf 1984, 21). Frequently the writing that attempts
this task will be “spasmodic … obscure … fragmentary, [and a] failure” (Woolf 1984,
212). But only if this task is attempted will we have any hope of genuine honesty of
attention to both our actual inner lives and our troubled social circumstances, embodied
in fully appropriate prose.
Woolf ’s argument is grounded in her sense of the hollow, complacent, and pale character
of Victorian and Edwardian life, coupled with the sense that both the reading public and its
popular writers participate in and reinforce this unhappy state. For a serious writer who in
contrast pursues troubling intensities in the name of honesty, a natural worry is that no one
may be listening, caught up as many are in their stultifying circumstances of life and habits
of reading. This anxiety surfaces in European letters as early as Schiller’s 1795 worries
about “the stupid savant and the exhausted businessman … indulg[ing] themselves in the
blissful pleasure of nothingness, on a soft pillow of platitudes, [sunk] in [the] ample bosom …
of the beloved goddess … in the temple of Thalia and Melpomene” (Schiller 1993, 246), or
Wordsworth’s 1800 perception that his urban countryman have mostly succumbed
383
RICHARD ELDRIDGE
inattentively in their entertainments to “a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation”

(Wordsworth 1965, 449). In the face of such complacencies and inattentiveness, what is
needed is shock: an abrupt reversal of perceptions that might in turn put pressure on ordi-
nary life grown stale. In general, modernist art seeks, in Charles Taylor’s apt formulation,
“to retrieve experience from the deadening, routinized, conventional forms of instrumental
civilization” (Taylor 1992, 469).
2. Cavell on Modernism in Philosophy
One might well wonder what any of these thoughts about society and modernist art have
to do with philosophy, which one might initially think of as neutral and argumentative
rather than artistic and transfigurative in its procedures. Yet philosophy is – perhaps cen-
trally, at least in certain of its value‐related precincts – in the end as much or more a matter
of perception, articulation, and imaginative response to cultural conditions than it is a
matter only of deductive or inductive argument. Stanley Cavell has embraced both this
thought about philosophy and a modernist sense of the sterility of major reaches of inher-
ited culture, both artistic and political. He undertakes in his writing to address
our cultural situation – in which each major form of expression (say painting and music and
philosophy) has, where serious, taken upon itself the characteristic cultural responsibility of
preserving itself against its culture, against its own past accomplishments, which have helped
to inform, and to distort, present culture … I believe that philosophy shares the modernist dif-
ficulty now everywhere evident in the major arts, the difficulty of making one’s present effort
become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one’s mind,
such as it is. (Cavell 1969a, xx, xxii)
From within the grip of this perception, one can, in philosophy too, no longer go on in the
standard ways: “The essential fact of … the modern lies in the relation between the p resent
practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that this relation
has become problematic” (Cavell 1969a, xix), and one must somehow begin one’s work
out of “a hatred of the falseness in one’s character and of the needless and unnatural
compromises in one’s institutions” (Cavell 1969a, xxv). Unsurprisingly, work thus begun
will have difficulty in finding a reception, as long as many live more happily within the
institutions, habits, and modes of life that have been perceived as wanting. Cavell describes
what he calls “the burden of modernism” in musical composition as the fact that “the
procedures and problems it now seems necessary to composers to employ and confront to
make a work of art at all themselves insure that their work will not be comprehensible to
an audience” (Cavell 1969b, 187), and he sees the practice of philosophy as freighted
with a similar burden: “I take the experience of momentary or extended irrelevance, and
sudden relevance, to be characteristic of philosophy” (Cavell 1969c, 214). Under this
burden, hating the falseness in oneself and in prevailing joint social life, and hoping for
change, “all the philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is to express, as fully as he
can, his world, and attract our undivided attention to our own” (Cavell 1969d, 96).
Cavell’s own philosophical prose is distinctively marked by its foregrounding of the stren-
uousness of his exertions in aiming at honest and fullness of complex attention.
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3. Modernism and Epiphanic Form
Writing on Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno and their various versions of a transfigurative
task for both art and philosophy under modern social conditions, J.M. Bernstein identifies
what he calls “the constitutive aporia of aesthetic modernism: in remaining fully discur-
sive [according to normal standards, modernist art] betrays what reason and truth could
be, what art and aesthetic discourse remain a promise of; but if it abandons the rigours of
full discursivity it necessarily falls silent, an inmate in the refuge and prison of art,” as it is
either simply ignored or reduced to mere entertainment by prevailing habits of reception
(Bernstein 1992, 10). Echoing Bernstein, Espen Hammer argues that those pursuing mod-
ernist ambitions in general and Adorno in particular must either find artistic value within
more or less commercially available and accessible art, thereby abandoning the modernist
project, or insist on the unique importance of only formally dense, difficult, all but uninter-
pretable and unreceivable work, thereby becoming “historically irrelevant” (Hammer
2015, 191–192). Speak and present meaning in regnant argumentative terms, without
challenge to the status quo, or turn away from normal argument and toward formal
density and difficulty, but lose any audience. These seem to be the only possibilities for art
and writing that aim at the transfiguration of personal and cultural habits and interests,
and neither is a happy one.
Bernstein emphasizes that this dilemma confronts ambitious modernist philosophy as
well as modernist art. Modernist philosophy must face “the question of how philosophy is
to comport itself when its terms of analysis are always already elements of a deformation
of reason … Aesthetic modernism in philosophy … is the attempt by philosophy to liken
itself to an aesthetic object in order that it can both discursively analyze the fate of art and
truth while simultaneously being works to be judged (the way poems are works to be
judged)” (Bernstein 1992, 11, 9; emphasis added). Modernist philosophical writing begins
from a sense of unacknowledged social fallenness, in which the achievement of mean-
ingful life is not easy “either practically (because of the fundamental mechanisms under-
lying the reproduction of the major institutions of modern society) – the world cannot be
re‐enchanted by philosophical fiat – or reflectively – what we need to restore reason is not
platitudinous” (Bernstein 2001, 134). Neither theoretical doctrines detached from prac-
tice nor self‐help nostrums will avail.
Like art, philosophy (at least in its reaches of transfigurative ambition) must begin from
and address experience. But given the desiccation of experience, this produces the standing
risk that philosophical thought and writing themselves may, as Roger S. Foster worries,
become dominated by the typical “blind, aggressive, and indifferent manner in which we
[normally] extract sense or meaning from the material bearer of that meaning,” with
meaningful experience reduced to “the identification of items of experience as the bearers
of a detachable, measurable, and iterable value” qua members of recognizable classes
(Foster 2016, 2). Epiphanic experience is all too likely to be simply missed or unregistered,
with claims to it dismissed as empty and potentially tyrannizing fantasies. “The essential
task for modernist philosophical writing” must then be “the discovery of a form of compo-
sition that will be able to rescue and embody the full force of the demand of the philosophical
concept” – that is, that will be able to disclose currently unrecognized possibilities of lived,
meaningful, sensuous, expressive freedom and to make those possibilities matter for us
(Foster 2016, 19).
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RICHARD ELDRIDGE
4. Adorno on Modernism
Adorno addresses this essential task for both modernist art and modernist philosophy con-
sistently throughout his career, sometimes most clearly and accessibly in occasional essays.
In his 1945 “Theses on Art and Religion Today,” he observes, elegiacally, that “the lost
unity between art and religion, be it regarded as wholesome or hampering, cannot be
regained at will” (Adorno 1992a, 292). This implies that something about that lost
unity – the interanimation of political, religious, and artistic life that was (it is assumed)
present in Greek religious rituals, architecture, sculpture, athletic festivals, and literature,
as the Greeks reflectively celebrated and maintained their way of life – is somehow valuable.
Modernity’s formal, legal freedoms, economic opportunities, and radically increased
productivity are all goods, but modernity fails to afford the sense of lived, meaningful,
sensuous orientation that was available to the Greeks. Or possibly, Adorno concedes, that
sense of lived unity was always unreal or “always highly problematic in itself ”; nonethe-
less, art, both classical and contemporary, “always was, and is, a force of protest of the
humane against the pressure of domineering institutions” (Adorno 1992a, 293).
Something in us wants active, felt, and meaningful enjoyment within activities and rela-
tionships, over and above the blandishments of commodity consumption. “Only a true
humanity emerging from typical experience can be the goal” (Adorno 1992b, 258).
Yet the question remains how this goal might be achieved or even approached. What
technical devices in writing (as well as in painting, musical composition, and other forms
of art) might specifically promote a heightened sense of felt, meaningful orientation in
activity? Adorno praises Benjamin’s thought‐images (Denkbilder) in One‐Way Street as
images that “do not want to stop conceptual thought so much as to shock through their
enigmatic form and thereby get thought moving because thought in its traditional
conceptual form seems rigid, conventional, and outmoded … [They] strike sparks through
a kind of intellectual short‐circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps
sets it on fire” (Adorno 1992c, 323). While this is a start in suggesting that a dense, for-
mally intricate image that is suffused with mutually reinforcing perception, thought, and
feeling might solicit readers to enter into its point of view and resonate with its content, it
does not yet say much about how such an image might be constructed.
Further advice comes in Adorno’s thinking about the complementary powers and dan-
gers of expressionism and lyrical control of the material. Both irrationalist expressionism
and academic‐rationalist universalism are to be avoided in favor of a more authentic
expressiveness (see Adorno 1991a, 3). Emphatic expressionism on its own – Adorno is
thinking of the early, pre‐serial Schönberg of Erwartung, the highly gestural‐Fauvist paint-
ings of Otto Dix, and the erotic lyrics of Richard Dehmel – is a protest by individual subjec-
tivity against the status quo, but it threatens to collapse into merely subjective iconoclasm:
“hurling its strength against countless resistances, it never finds its orientation in the self;
it directs the self outward against the world … [and] it uses cleverness only to tear the
opposing forms to shreds,” when it should also seek fuller subjective‐impersonal control of
the material (Adorno 1992b, 258). In contrast, Adorno identifies genuine lyricism with
the mastery of technique. In the greatest lyrics, “pure subjectivity … bears witness to its
opposite” by enacting shared “suffering in an existence alien to the subject and to love for
it as well” in and through its control of the material, in as much as resonant, impersonal
voicing is achieved (Adorno 1991b, 41).
But exactly how, beyond whatever might be gleaned from examples (such as Goethe’s
“Wanderers Nachtlied II,” a principal subject of “On Lyric Poetry and Society”), might
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assionate, subjective resistance and objective, lyrical control be blended? Adorno’s “The
p
Essay as Form” (written between 1954 and 1958, but unpublished in his lifetime) is often
read, rightly, as a sketch of the ambitions and direction of his own philosophical writing.
Unlike the treatise, Adorno argues, the essay is responsive to a singular experience,
beginning from a particular occasioning circumstance: “Luck and play are essential to it …
It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about” (Adorno 1991a, 4).
It tries to decipher its initially rich but perplexing occasioning circumstances, and in doing
so it takes particular experience seriously, thus working against the Platonic conceit of the
transcendence of experience. “It rebels against the doctrine, deeply rooted since Plato, that
what is transient and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy” (Adorno 1991a, 10). Though
its medium is concepts, not “aesthetic semblance” or imitation, it is also not simply a
recording instrument; instead it achieves “something like aesthetic autonomy” in virtue of
how it juxtaposes and modulates its perceptions, in the hope of moving toward a clarifica-
tory cadencing (Adorno 1991a, 3). Its juxtapositions and movements matter; its elements
“crystallize as a configuration” – a constellation, or constructed, virtual figure, in which
something can be seen – “through their motion” (Adorno 1991a, 13). Both the mind that
constructs the figure and the attentive reader that follows the motions of its elements are
animated – freed from cliché and liberated into a fuller attentiveness to the flow of experi-
ence. In this way, it achieves its “measure of … objectivity … [not as] the verification of
assertions through repeated testing but [as] rather individual human experience, main-
tained through hope and disillusionment” rather than shirked (Adorno 1991a, 8). As a
result, “under the essay’s gaze second nature” – mindedness as the power of reflection and
judgment – “recognizes itself as first nature” (nature as life) in displaying and enacting its
embeddedness in and attentiveness to experience of its natural and social worlds; “the
mind, once emancipated, is mobile” in being lifted out of frozenness within sterile conven-
tions of judgment and logical argumentation (Adorno 1991a, 20).
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno extends the lines of his thinking about modernist art and
the essay to describe further the ambitions and strategies of his own philosophical writing.
As in “The Essay as Form,” “to philosophy, expression and stringency are not two
dichotomous possibilities. They need each other; neither can be without the other.
Expression is relieved of its accidental character by thought, on which it toils as thought
toils on expression” (Adorno 1973, 18). Likewise, movement and the animation of both
thought and perception are prioritized over the positing and defense of discrete assertions.
Philosophy’s “course must be a ceaseless self‐renewal … The crux is what happens in it, not
a thesis or a position – the texture, not the deductive or inductive course of one‐track
minds” (Adorno 1973, 33). Modulations of elements composed of interfused thoughts,
perceptions, and feelings displace logical method. Such modulations are “the font of the
only constellations which [inherit] something of the hope of the name” for fullness of
attention to concrete, singular experience (Adorno 1973, 53).
Throughout these stretches of thought about modernist art and philosophy, Adorno, as
Foster puts it, “outlines a practice of thinking and writing that offers us a glimpse of the possi-
bility of non‐regimented experience,” insofar as he describes writerly stances and strategies
through which attentive readers might be solicited into heightened, more animated forms of
simultaneously reflective, imaginative, and emotional involvement with the text and its topics
(Foster 2016, 14). “It is impossible to use concepts directly to identify the nonidentical,” Foster
adds (Foster 2016, 19). That is, heightened attentiveness to and involvement in singular, all
but fugitive concrete experience involving traumas or epiphanies cannot be a matter cen-
trally of assertion. No reader’s perceptions will be transfigured only by the straightforward
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j udgment that such‐and‐such is horrific or ecstasy‐inducing. “But it may be possible nonethe-

less,” Foster goes on, “to deploy concepts in relation to each other such that … [the noniden-
tical] is nonetheless present as a kind of figure formed by the arrangement of concepts” (Foster
2016, 19). That is, formulations of perceptions, thoughts, and emotional stances may be suc-
cessively arranged not primarily argumentatively, but instead more or less narratively, in order
to present a human subject in its motions of attention, working through its perplexities, as a
figure with whom a reader might imaginatively identify. Achievement here will be a matter of
tone, figuration, and concreteness that support honesty and fullness of attention in which
readers can share more than of reason‐giving and assertion.
5. Modernist Style in Minima Moralia
A natural question is then to what extent Adorno manages this achievement in his
philosophical writing. What strategies of tone, figuration, and structure does he use, and
do they succeed in soliciting readers into transfigured perceptions of singular, concrete,
meaningful experiences? The natural place to look for Adorno’s most distinctively mod-
ernist writing is Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. The text consists of 153
numbered sections, divided into three roughly equal parts, headed, successively, “1944,”
“1945,” and “1946–47” (Adorno 1974). The average length of each section is roughly
450 words: longer than an aphorism (though aphorisms appear within some sections),
but shorter than a typical essay. The overall structure somewhat resembles that of a
journal, though the topics are more matters of general culture on which Adorno reflects
than they are straightforward records of individual incidents in Adorno’s life.
The title and the subtitle of the book importantly comment on and reinforce one
another. “Minima Moralia,” with its implied contrast “Magna Moralia,” suggests that the
stance cannot be that of a general normative theory for the conduct of life. Any putatively
universal generalizations about how one ought to live, comparable, say, to Plato’s defense
of justice as the rule of reason in the soul or Kant’s defense of life led from good will, would
be ahistorical and all too likely to function as props to administrative‐bureaucratic ratio-
nality. “Reflections from Damaged Life” implies a deliberate refusal, typical for a modernist
sensibility, both of the thought that all is in order and of any reflective stance putatively
untouched by the course of life.
The book is dedicated to Max Horkheimer, and in the opening section, entitled
“Dedication” and preceding the numbered sections, Adorno describes it as an “offering”
from a “melancholy science” [“Die traurige Wissenschaft, aus der ich meinem Freund einiges
darbiete”], thus, again, contrasting it with a report or treatise and emphasizing its small-
ness and lack of pretension (Adorno 1974, 15; 1980, 13). This melancholy science, we
are told, “relates to … the teaching of the good life,” a topic that “has lapsed into intellec-
tual neglect … since [philosophy’s] conversion into method” (Adorno 1974, 15). (For an
excellent survey of the displacement of the Ancient and Hellenistic Schools of philosophy,
concerned with the cultivation of the whole person and direction into a good life, in favor
of philosophy as a method and body of theory, see Hadot 1995.) In what amounts to the
modernist basic motif and theme of the book, Adorno writes that “what the philosophers
once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consump-
tion, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without
autonomy or substance of its own” (Adorno 1974, 15). This implies that life ought to have
an autonomy and sphere of its own; human beings are, as it were, made for self‐consciously
388
chosen, active enjoyments within practices and relationships, rather than for wage‐labor
and compensatory, escapist, private satisfactions. Yet the social system of commodity pro-
duction and exchange has enforced a strong public‐economic/private‐domestic distinction
and forced the vast majority of humanity into the wage‐labor, commodity production
system. “He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its
estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most
hidden recesses” (Adorno 1974, 15). Minima Moralia is the document of this reflective
scrutiny of systems of estrangement as well as of moments of punctual resistance and
experienced pain. It is a matter, as Adorno puts it, citing Hegel, of “looking the negative in
the face, dwelling upon it,” in the absence of any sense of a superintending Hegelian logic
that might resolve negativity into fully meaningful life (Adorno 1974, 15). The starting
point of this scrutiny is “the intellectual in emigration” (Adorno 1974, 18), as Adorno
adopts and develops the authorial persona of someone who retains a vague sense of the
possibility and value of life otherwise, as achieved freedom in being “bei sich selbst in einem
anderen” [“with oneself in another”], in the Hegelian formula, but who lacks any definite
sense of how to move toward it from within present socioeconomic institutional plights
(Hegel 1971, 15; 1991, 42). We ought to live otherwise, in fullness of cathexis to activities
and relationships, but we are blocked from this cathexis by the way things mostly are
socially, economically, and institutionally.
Yet resistance on the part of an individual alone is bootless: “Subjective reflection, even if
critically alerted to itself, has something sentimental and anachronistic about it: something
of a lament over the course of the world, a lament to be rejected not for its good faith, but
because the lamenting subject threatens to become arrested in its condition and so to fulfill
in its turn the law of the world’s course” (Adorno 1974, 18). Nor will “isolated … aphorisms
as such” serve (Adorno 1974, 18). Instead, a socially formed individual subject must
somehow present itself all at once as (i) socially formed, (ii) marked by traumatic or
epiphanic experiences, (iii) capable of registering them, and (iv) thence open to further
re‐formation of stance and direction of interest and activity. And all this can count for
something only insofar as (v) the subject (blending expressive resistance with the control
of the material) can find or set up resonances with the traumatic or epiphanic experiences
of others that point toward new possibilities of practice, while also (vi) avoiding both empty
utopianism and triumphalism by acknowledging standing defeat, in the forms of unrecon-
ciled opposition and the persistence of damaged life. Small wonder then that the prose that
would bear these burdens is difficult.
Each of the 153 sections begins with a short title, printed in italics, and frequently a
single noun (“Mammoth,” “Deviation,” “Diagnosis,” “Blackmail”) or short phrase that is
either a textual allusion, an idiom, or a more or less cryptic, oracular pronouncement
(“Since I set eyes on him,” “People are looking at you,” “Over the hills,” “Keeping one’s distance,”
“Simple Simon,” “Unmeasure for unmeasure,” “All the world’s not a stage”). These titles are
then typically followed by (i) short explications that focus the title and, variously ordered, (ii)
generalizations over the phenomenon that has been noticed, (iii) comparisons and
intermediate reflections, and (iv) further perceptions, until (v) a concluding, somewhat
aphoristic generalization is reached (“[The bourgeois’] love of people as they are stems from
his hatred of what they might be” [Adorno 1974, 25]; “It is the sufferings of men that
should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of
their pains” [Adorno 1974, 26]). The arrival at the concluding generalization has the feel
of a cadencing of thought, as though what had initially been noticed and has prompted
thought, signaled in the title, has now been processed or worked through, in order to arrive
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not at a doctrinal result, but instead at a kind of breaking off of the thought or a willingness
to let it go or to leave it for others, who must themselves imaginatively recapitulate the pro-
cess of movement from prompted thought to aphoristic generalization. The overall
movement from (i) to (v) resembles the structure of a Romantic lyric, which typically begins
in a moment of looking outward, as a surprising or troubling or entrancing perception is
registered, moves inward into reflection on the significance of one’s attention having been
thus captured, and then concludes by moving outward into a generalizing address to an
audience. Yet Adorno’s prose is theoretically denser, more explicitly oriented toward social
and urban formations and topics, and more explicitly political‐philosophical than the typ-
ical Romantic lyric. (“No emancipation without that of society” [Adorno 1974, 173].)
The overall effort, beginning from what has prompted thought (as signaled in the section
titles) is to uncover and gesture toward a way out of stultifications or petrifactions of both
the subject and the social and into movement toward freer life “by self‐conscious reflection
on the element of wish that antithetically constitutes thinking as thinking” (Adorno 1974,
199). That is, in a line of thought that Adorno develops more fully in Negative Dialectics,
thinking, in the sense of using concepts to make judgments, is itself a process or event that
takes place within the course of life of a living, biological subject who is capable of reflec-
tion, as opposed to being bound wholly by instinct. Thinking and judgment take place both
primordially for the sake of survival, as they turn toward anticipating dangers and finding
necessary food and shelter, and for the sake of the self‐conscious, shared actualization of
distinctively human powers. (In this latter thought, Adorno is at one with the German
philosophical tradition of concern with self‐actualization that runs from Kant and Schiller
up into contemporary Critical Theory.) Yet full self‐actualization and joint actualization of
shared human powers – full Hegelian freedom as at‐homeness in the world and with
others – is typically blocked by the overall hostility of nature, the comparative scarcity of
material, social, and sexual goods, and consequent social competitiveness over what goods
there are. Hence a wish for life otherwise persists within the life of the thinking, living sub-
ject, even if it is often, even typically, suppressed by the necessities of local action and coop-
eration in the business as usual of survival. In order to liberate this suppressed wish and to
further its expression, so far as possible, what is needed is “the unrestricted openness to
experience amounting to self‐abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself ”
(Adorno 1974, 200) – that is, precisely the working through of prompted thought that
each section individually aims at and proleptically offers to its readers.
Within each section, the progress from the title and its initial explication, (i), to the
conclusion, (v), of generalizing outward address is strongly marked by the use of literary
devices, so that this progress is generally more imaginative‐accumulative than deductive or
inductive. Aphorisms and quotations appear in six languages: German, English, French,
Italian, Latin, and Greek. Metaphors are prominent: the way in which “the private domain
is being engulfed by a mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life
without there actually being any business to transact” is cast as the life of “fish in water,”
hence as something that appears natural and inevitable, and is not taken as an object of
reflection (Adorno 1974, 23). In contrast, intimacy requires that people “abstain from
importuning one another with giving and taking, discussion and implementation, control
and function,” so that there is “space enough between them for the delicate connecting
filigree of external forms in which alone the internal can crystallize” (Adorno 1974, 41).
Busily active life‐in‐death within commodity society resembles “the reflex‐movements of
beings whose hearts have stopped beating,” as in the twitching of the leg of a dead frog
subjected to electric shock (Adorno 1974, 59). “Admonitions to be happy” from the health
390
and entertainment industries “have about them the fury of the father berating his children
for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from the office” (Adorno
1974, 62–63). Perhaps most pointedly and memorably: “that the steps of railway carriages
have to be retracted intimates to the passenger of even the most expensive express that he
must obey the company’s terse regulations like a prisoner” (Adorno 1974, 119). In each
case, the central point is the claim that life within commodity society is subject to pervasive
control by regnant institutions, so that human actions resemble those of automata, rather
than being expressively meaningful. But the images presented in metaphors crystallize and
focus the thought, as we see the general phenomenon through the lens of the image.
Allusion functions similarly to present images that focus imaginative attention. “Grassy
seat” is the title of the second entry. It alludes, the translator’s notes tell us, “to the lines of
a well‐known German song: ‘the dearest spot I have on earth/ is the grassy seat by my
parents’ grave’” (Adorno 1974, 22). But this somewhat cloying sentiment is presented
ironically, as the entry develops the thought that we no longer genuinely rebel against par-
ents with “their insistence on the reality principle,” but instead too readily forfeit libidinal
impulses and instead accept “the sobriety forever prone to become wrath against those less
ready to renounce” (Adorno 1974, 22). The result is that the contemporary family is cast
as a servile and regressive institution for manufacturing “the slick stupidity of Junior” and
“pathic health, infantilism raised to the norm” (Adorno 1974, 22). Melancholically, this
indictment of the bourgeois family is balanced against an equally forceful rejection of
collectivism that likewise fails to produce distinctive, creative individuals: collectivism “liq-
uidates the Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love” (Adorno 1974, 23).
The fact that this overall case against bourgeois child‐rearing is introduced by an allusion
to a popular song suggests just how insidiously and pervasively, like an earworm, child‐
rearing practices have been colonized by the requirements of commodity society. Similarly,
“How nice of you, Doctor,” – an allusion to Goethe’s Faust, where an old peasant thanks
Faust for attending a country party, despite Faust’s social status as a highly educated
scholar – introduces a set of thoughts on the impossibility of innocent forthrightness
within commodity society: “There is nothing innocuous left … Mistrust is called for in the
face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the
superior might of the existent … Sociability itself connives at injustice in pretending that in
this chill world we can still talk to each other” (Adorno 1974, 25–26). Here the introduc-
tory illusion condenses and focuses the thoughts that follow, while also suggesting that
processes that have led to this state of affairs have been in place at least since Goethe and
perhaps since the life of the actual sixteenth‐century Faust. Entry number 52, titled
“Where the stork brings babies from,” consists of successive allusions to Grimm’s Fairy Tales:
Snow‐White, “the goat which repeats the verse ‘I’ve had enough,’” “the little bent old lady
gathering wood,” Little Red Riding Hood, the Bremen musicians, and the Frog King, among
others (Adorno 1974, 87–88). In each case, Adorno claims, the fairy‐tale figure functions
as an archetype for a contemporary social type: “she who is fretful and fastidious even unto
death,” “a care‐worn but embittered man,” “an incorrigible snob,” and so on (Adorno
1974, 87–88). Here the effect is to eternalize the social processes that produce these types,
suggesting that there is no way out of falling into the various types into which we are cast
by self‐recurring commodity society since the advent of modernity.
In numbers of entries, Adorno uses what might be called a figure of typifying general-
ization of the form “He who Fs Gs.” “He who is not malign does not live serenely but with
a peculiarly chaste hardness and intolerance” (Adorno 1974, 25). “He who through con-
sequential logic becomes incapable of [a gift], makes himself into a thing and freezes”
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RICHARD ELDRIDGE
(Adorno 1974, 43). “He who matures early lives in anticipation” (Adorno 1974, 161). As
in the working of enthymeme as a rhetorical device, according to Aristotle, in which the
auditor or reader is required to imagine a missing premise, the effect of this construction is
to lead the reader to ask, “Am I an F, and do I G?” and “Is it true that Fs in general G?” “Do
I live with a chaste hardness and tolerance?” “Is it true in general that those who cannot
participate in gift‐giving freely insofar as they see it as a matter necessarily of exchange of
equivalents themselves become thing‐like and frozen?” The very activity of imaginatively
posing and answering these questions may make a perception click into place. A closely
related typifying construction is the form “The F does G,” as in “The blackguard presents
himself as victim of injustice” (Adorno 1974, 25). Strings of rhetorical questions function
similarly to solicit readerly imaginative activity and assent: “Is not memory inseparable
from love, which seeks to preserve what yet must pass away? Is not each stirring of fantasy
engendered by desire which, in displacing the elements of what exists, transcends it
without betrayal? Is not indeed the simplest perception shaped by fear of the thing per-
ceived, or desire for it?” (Adorno 1974, 122).
Tying together thematically the uses of these literary devices is Adorno’s repeated ham-
mering on how sheerly awful things are. Within a space of 25 pages in Part I, we find
repeated condemnatory punchlines such as “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (Adorno
1974, 39), “the whole is the false” (Adorno 1974, 50), “whatever was once good and
decent in bourgeois values … has been corrupted utterly” (Adorno 1974, 34), “how impos-
sible it has become for people to co‐exist under present conditions” (Adorno 1974, 37),
“the withering of experience” (Adorno 1974, 55), and “the sickness proper to our time”
(Adorno 1974, 58).
From within the hollowed out, deadening character of social reality, as Adorno as a typ-
ical modernist understands it, there is only the bare possibility of a momentary, punctual
way out via the having of epiphanic experiences. This is the import of Adorno’s famous
thesis of the primacy of the object (Adorno 1997, 71, 145, 323): escape from the domina-
tion‐reinscribing stance of instrumental control and generalizing judgment and accession
into meaningfulness might be found, at least momentarily, only through submissive
attention to the demands of a densely formed, disclosive particular: “One might almost say
that the truth itself depends on the tempo, the patience and perseverance of lingering with
the particular: what passes beyond it without having first entirely lost itself, what proceeds
to judge without having first been guilty of the injustice of contemplation, loses itself at last
in emptiness” (Adorno 1974, 77). What is needed instead is, again, “the unrestricted open-
ness to experience amounting to self‐abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers
himself ” as capable of fuller, value‐ and emotion‐suffused attention, as in the reception that
Adorno hopes his entries in Minima Moralia might win (Adorno 1974, 200). “To gain such
perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects – this alone
is the task of thought” (Adorno 1974, 247). If this is, as Adorno claims, “the simplest of
things,” it is also made impossible by the fact that “any possible knowledge … is also marked
by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape” (Adorno 1974, 247).
6. Some Weaknesses in Adorno’s Style: Constanze
The 153 entries that compose Minima Moralia as a whole are unified both thematically in
their modernist opposition to damaged life in commodity society, understood as a kind of
living death without meaning, and structurally in their fairly consistent lengths and uses
392
of literary devices. In both respects, each entry taken individually and the book as a whole
are parallel to major modern literary achievements such as the short stories of Kafka and
Hemingway, the lyrics of Bishop, Brecht, and Bachmann, and the novels of Woolf and
Joyce. Yet it is also undeniable that these entries frequently lack the force and capacity to
absorb the reader that those major modernist achievements possess; for many readers,
they even lapse often enough into tediousness. It is worthwhile to consider why this is so.
One way to do this is to pay close attention to a single entry. Entry number 110 suggests
itself as being in many respects typical of the whole. Here it is in its entirety:
Constanze. – Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed
to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensa-
tion from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth
directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter. It is not merely that
pure feeling, so far as it is still possible within the determinate system of the economy, becomes
precisely thereby society’s alibi for the domination of interests and bears witness to a humanity
that does not exist. The very involuntariness of love itself, even where it has not found a prac-
tical accommodation beforehand, contributes to that whole as soon as it is established as a
principle. If love in society is supposed to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful
enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however demands precisely the element of
voluntariness, that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it.
Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and
economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter‐pressure. He
alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love. Even though social advantage, subli-
mated, preforms the sexual impulse, using a thousand nuances sanctioned by the order to
make now this, now that person seem spontaneously attractive, an attachment once formed
opposes this by persisting where the force of social pressure, in advance of all the intrigues
that the latter invariably takes into its service, does not want it. It is the test of feeling whether
it goes beyond feeling through permanence, even though it be as obsession. The love, however,
which, in the guise of unreflecting spontaneity and proud of its alleged integrity, relies exclu-
sively on what it takes to be the voice of the heart, and runs away, as soon as it no longer thinks
it can hear that voice, is in this supreme independence precisely the tool of society. Passive
without knowing it, it registers whatever numbers come out in the roulette wheel of interests.
In betraying the loved one it betrays itself. The fidelity exacted by society is a means to
unfreedom, but only through fidelity can freedom achieve insubordination to society’s
command. (Adorno 1974, 172)
At 385 words, this entry is slightly shorter than the median. It begins with the proper name,
Constanze, that alludes both to the heroine of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio and to
Mozart’s wife, the soprano Constanze Weber, while also sounding the theme of fidelity that is
the chief topic of the entry. It indicts bourgeois society for failing to understand and
further either love or constancy, and it poses genuine love and constancy as an inevitably
unsuccessful counterweight to social pressures. It includes metaphorical images – the
responsiveness of the heart as a ball on a roulette wheel, landing where it may; love as
something quasi‐biological that may wither – as well as the formula “He who Fs Gs.” It
includes perceptions that are initially challenging but that readers may well share upon
reflection: the presumed availability of love within bourgeois society as a cover and alibi for
social domination, hence the conversion of the meaningfulness or truth of love into mean-
inglessness; the preformation by social pressures of shifting criteria for attractiveness. Yet it is
also too unqualified in its pronouncements, and its shifts of thought come closer to inconsis-
tency than to well‐modulated development of complexities. Does involuntary, passionately
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felt love in fact contribute to the reinforcement of the institutions and patterns of work of
commodity society, always and inevitably? Does bourgeois love forbid voluntariness as an
element of love, in failing to see that genuine love includes willed commitment as well as raw
feeling? Is it Adorno’s view or the view of bourgeois society or both that genuine feeling is
feeling that achieves permanence, even when in the form of obsessiveness? Bourgeois society
treats love as spontaneous and involuntary, but it also demands fidelity. Is that an inconsis-
tency on its part? – Only if the dubitable point that will and feeling can have no share in each
other is accepted. Is ordinary, bourgeois fidelity simply a fetter (“a means to unfreedom”) that
the heart, like a roulette ball falling into a new slot, will passively somehow fall away from?
What kind of non‐bourgeois fidelity could there be that might achieve “insubordination to
society’s command”? Overall, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Adorno has not quite
thought the issues through in his rush to condemn bourgeois society and the shapes of love
and fidelity within it full stop, without qualification. More important, unlike major modernist
short stories and lyrics, Adorno’s rush to pronouncement and generalization in this entry
and frequently in Minima Moralia as a whole trumps whatever concreteness, imagery, and
emplotment are present, leaving the whole more in the register of opinion than of poetic art.
It verges on falling into an aspect of the second horn of the dilemma posed by Bernstein and
Hammer for modernist art: unreceivability.
7. Modernist Philosophy as a Continuing Task
All this is not to deny, however, the intermittent perceptual insights, thematic consistency,
or overall theoretical interest of Minima Moralia. If Adorno is in the end more successful in
his major systematic philosophical works (Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory) and in his
direct interpretive criticism of modernist art (Notes to Literature) than in his own efforts at
a modernist minimalism of epiphanies, it is nonetheless instructive to follow his efforts in
Minima Moralia to blend philosophical tropes and social criticism with modernist literary
techniques. The philosophical tropes and social criticism, as worked out in the major
works, retain something of their power, too, in Minima Moralia, and Adorno’s taking on
board of the techniques and ambitions of literary modernism remains heroic. Minima
Moralia, the major philosophical works, and Adorno’s criticism of literature and music
should continue to be read in relation to each other as articulating the most powerful
philosophical understanding of modernism and its importance that is available to us.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T.W. (1974). Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott). London:
Verso.
Adorno, T. (1980). Minima Moralia, Collected Writings, vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1991a). The essay as form. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 1, (trans. S.W. Nicholsen), 3–23.
New York: Columbia.
Adorno, T.W. (1991b). On lyric poetry and society. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 1, (trans.
S.W. Nicholsen), 37–54. New York: Columbia.
Adorno, T.W. (1992a). Theses on art and religion today. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 2, (trans.
394
Adorno, T.W. (1992b). Expressionism and artistic truthfulness: toward a critique of recent literature.
In: Notes to Literature, vol. 2, (trans. S.W. Nicholsen), 257–259. New York: Columbia.
Adorno, T.W. (1992c). Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 2, (trans.
Minnesota Press.
Bernstein, J.M. (1992). The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. University
Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Bernstein, J.M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge.
Cavell, S. (1969a). Foreword: an audience for philosophy. In: Must We Mean What We Say? xvii–xxix.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Cavell, S. (1969b). Music discomposed. In: Must We Mean What We Say? 180–212. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
Cavell, S. (1969c). A matter of meaning it. In: Must We Mean What We Say? 213–237. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Cavell, S. (1969d). Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy. In: Must We Mean What We Say?
73–96. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Foster, R.S. (2016). Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Thinking. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books.
Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life. In: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from
Socrates to Foucault (ed. A. Davidson; trans. M. Chase), 264–276. Oxford: Blackwell.
University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1971). Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1991). Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. A. Wood; trans. H.B. Nisbet). Cambridge:
Schiller, F. (1993). On naïve and sentimental poetry. In: Essays (ed. W. Hinderer and D.O. Dahlstrom;
trans. D.O. Dahlstrom), 179–260. New York: Continuum.
Taylor, C. (1992). Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Woolf, V. (1984). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In: The Virginia Woolf Reader (ed. M. Leaska), 192–
212. London: Harcourt.
Wordsworth, W. (1965). Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. In: Selected Poems and
Prefaces (ed. J. Stillinger), 445–464. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Further Reading
Bernard, A. and Raulff, U. (eds.) (2003). “Minima Moralia” neu gelesen. Stuttgart: Frankfurt am Main.
Bernstein, J.M. (2014). Blind intuitions: modernism’s critique of idealism. British Journal for the
History of Philosophy 22 ((6)): 1069–1094. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2014.993304.
Foster, R. (2011). Lingering with the particular: Minima Moralia’s critical modernism. Telos 155:
83–103. https://doi.org/10.3817/0611155083.
Jaeggi, R. (2005). ‘No individual can resist’: Minima Moralia as critique of forms of Life. Constellations
12 (1): 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1351‐0487.2005.00403.x.
Lunn, E. (1982). Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Richter, G. (2009). Aesthetic theory and nonpropositional truth content in Adorno. In: Language
Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity (ed. G. Richter), 131–146. New York:
Fordham University Press.
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25
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

EVA GEULEN
1. Aesthetic Theory: Threat or Menace?
“There is no point in making threats” (Adorno 2013 [AT], 205) is one of the few colloquial
idioms that survived from the generally more accessible and often surprisingly personal lec-
ture course Adorno held on aesthetics in 1958–1959 (Adorno 2018). By comparison, the
version eventually published posthumously under the title Aesthetic Theory is as dark and
difficult as Adorno believed modern art was and had to be (cf. AT 53). There are virtually no
paragraph breaks, no table of contents, and no reliable or even recognizable principle of
organization. (The existing section titles have been added by the editors.) To infer from this
state and the indeed ambivalent title, “Aesthetic Theory,” that Adorno meant to suggest affin-
ities between his book and an artwork is not illegitimate,1 but cannot fully account for the
text’s forbidding state, since its author died before he could carry out the significant revisions
he had planned. Whether current philological efforts will shed more light on the lasting
enigmas of Aesthetic Theory remains to be seen (cf. Endres et al. 2013).
To this day, the ever expanding body of scholarship on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory does
not seem to include an introduction or something like a sustained commentary.2 Tilo
Wesche’s slim Reclam‐volume (Wesche 2018) may be considered an exception, but it is
available in German only and even he fashions his own Adorno, albeit with Aesthetic
Theory at the heart of his arguments, which is admittedly rare. Perhaps fashioning one’s
own Adorno is all one can do in the case of this unfinished work. The author of the entry
on “Aesthetic Theory” in the German handbook on Adorno (Sonderegger 2011) recom-
mends consulting his other and shorter writings on art, especially the Notes to Literature as
they are often more illuminating and accessible than the dense block of Aesthetic Theory
(cf. Cunningham and Mapp 2006). This is perhaps good advice, but it does not much help
the reader of Aesthetic Theory.
Milestones of Aesthetic Theory’s reception history are useful in charting the changing
fate of Adorno in the last 50 years, but their decidedly engaged readings also only high-
light certain aspects of the book while eclipsing others. One important milestone is the
Suhrkamp‐volume with “materials on aesthetic theory” (Lindner and Lüdke 1980). Here
representatives of the second generation of the Frankfurt School sought to salvage what
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they believed to be the book’s continued import and to jettison what they deemed to have
become untenable in the decade since its publication. The different voices are virtually
united in their suspicion of what they perceive to be the later Adorno’s problematic turn
to aesthetics (as well as ethics),3 and his turn away from the political agenda of social
critique. The strong connection between suffering and art raised eyebrows (cf. Sections
25.5.2 and 25.6). In particular, Adorno’s strong emphasis on the dignity of the individual
“great work of art” (“Great artworks are unable to lie” [AT 178]) came under scrutiny and
attack. Back then, and once more in 2003 in the context of the conference held on the
occasion of Adorno’s 100th birthday at which the third generation of the Frankfurt
School found its voice (cf. Honneth 2003), several authors championed the idea of an
object‐independent “aesthetic experience” that dominated aesthetic discussions for quite
some time (cf. Kern and Sonderegger 2002). All of this is interesting in its own right and as
historical documentation, but it is not necessarily helpful in accessing the dark and dense
universe of the Aesthetic Theory.
There is one surprising exception. A few years after Jürgen Habermas had published
his rather devastating account of Adorno’s aesthetic theory in The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (cf. Habermas 1990, 106–130, originally published in 1985,
translated into English in 1987), Fredric Jameson’s Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The
Persistence of the Dialectic appeared and granted much maligned Aesthetic Theory a
remarkably prominent place. Its preface is dated August 1989, as the world began to
change. When the book came out in print in 1990, the world had definitively changed.
Mobilizing Adorno against the significant successes of poststructuralism, deconstruc-
tion and, above all, postmodernism, Jameson’s Late Marxism amounted to a strategic
intervention at a very particular historical and theory‐historical moment. In the age of
Derridean “différance,” the enigmatic idea of the “nonidentical” had been virtually the
sole locus of interest in Adorno. By contrast, Jameson shifts attention to other, for
Aesthetic Theory far more significant and more developed concepts such as “nomi-
nalism” (cf. Jameson 1990, 157–164), or the artwork as monad (cf. Jameson 1990,
182–188). Perhaps most importantly, Jameson makes methodological sense of the
seemingly meandering and often redundant style of presentation by casting it as a
function of Adorno’s ceaseless dialecticization or dramatization of concepts and topoi
inherited from traditional aesthetic discourse. In these respects, and his particular
strategy and motives aside, Jameson is still a very good guide through the maze of the
unfinished Aesthetic Theory. He demonstrates convincingly that this book is neither a
ruin nor a quarry but a fluid, mobile, perhaps one may even say a living work in
progress. This extends to and affects its dialectical operations on all levels of the text.
Unhinged from its traditional moorings, Adorno’s dialectic develops an auto‐dynamic
that is capable of dissolving the very concepts and oppositions at issue: “aesthetics can
speak a variety of speculative languages, none of which ever finally freezes over into
Adorno’s “method,” which might then be laid out in the theoretical handbooks with a
convenient tag” (Jameson 1990, 182).
As an example, Jameson points to the vexing relationship of parts and whole in an
artwork. It is
“as exhaustively rehearsed as anything in contemporary bourgeois theory, (…) but that
dynamic is never codified as a doctrine, about whose formulations endless philosophical
argument might be generated: at the last moment before codification the problem is always
398
enlarged, its terminology transformed, and we turn out also to have been talking about
something else, which needs a different kind of development”; one topic or concept is “like a
modulation of the other.” (Jameson 1990, 183)
Adorno’s truly “protean intelligence” does indeed require “tireless effort” (Jameson
1990, 183). Unfortunately, such efforts quickly resemble Sisyphos’ tasks and Tantalos’
tortures. This is why much scholarship on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory tends to be even
more unreadable than the book itself, especially and precisely when critics try to live up
to the high demands of their subject matter. The following remarks attempt to do justice
to this situation. While bearing in mind the vicissitudes of Aesthetic Theory, its key
notions, or primary elements,4 are introduced individually in accordance with what I
believe to be their approximate place and relevance in the book. By necessity this is a
subjective reconstruction and hence speculative. By contrast, the final section concerned
with expression, semblance, and mimesis will offer a close reading of a single relevant
passage from Aesthetic Theory, so as to remind readers of how complexities increase the
closer one looks.
As for Jameson, while his Late Marxism is still a useful point of access for Aesthetic
Theory today, its concerns and motives also testify to the more than 25 years that
have since passed. Compared to the fresh verve with which Jameson engaged Adorno,
our time seems to be marked by general exhaustion: a waning of the culture wars
and the disappearance of what was known in the United States as “French Theory”
into the “white cube” of the art scene. This is the story Philipp Felsch’s enormously
successful short history of theory from the 1960s to the late 1990s tells (from a very
narrowly German perspective with the publishing house Merve at the center) in The
Long Summer of Theory (Felsch 2015), which was turned into a movie in 2017. Given
the succession of crises in the past decade, the banking crisis of 2007–2008 that
came and went, Brexit, Trump, worldwide migration, the rise of a populist right, fake
news, and climate change, all of which are here to stay, the theory wars of earlier
“late capitalism” that Jameson’s book sought to intervene in, do indeed appear some-
what trivial and passé. While there are some signs that a revival of Marxism might
be in the offing, much of current scholarship on Adorno tends to drift toward those
very ideas and notions that were anathema back then: the prerogative Adorno
accords to form, including the individual work, or, more generally, the primacy of
the object (cf. Robinson 2018), 5 and the idea of (negative) totality, the urgent return
to the question of how the dispersed and ever more pluralized modernities cohere as
a whole.6 It is easy (and cheap) to pass both sets of questions off as an escapist reac-
tionary formation. To be sure, after decades of enlarging the field of aesthetic objects
(and given the success of immersive and participatory art that Adorno certainly
would have abhorred), the attempt of many humanists to reassure themselves of the
possibility and validity of formal categories is understandable and probably valid.
The same can be said of the return to varieties of the whole, be it as (Hegelian)
totality or (Latourian) Gaia (cf. Latour 2017). Globalization and its varied effects do
indeed demand the reevaluation of those concepts, the deconstruction of which had
been an international pastime for many years. Their previous rigorous critique,
including Adorno’s own, is thereby not annulled; it is, rather, a question of the need
to think totality otherwise. Regarding form and regarding the whole, Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory remains a viable and rewarding source.
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2. Kant and Hegel
With the exception of the nonidentical (cf. Silberbusch 2018), all of Adorno’s operative
concepts (or quasi‐concepts) have been handed down from the tradition of thinking about
art since Plato and Aristotle. They tend to come in convenient oppositional pairs such as
form and content, or mimesis and expression. Much of the dialectical labor Adorno per-
forms in Aesthetic Theory consists in rewriting (Jameson would say “dialecticizing”) such
pairs. Among them, two proper names figure prominently. The lecture course from 1958–
1959 makes it particularly clear, but numerous references in Aesthetic Theory also under-
score that the large field of traditional aesthetics can be organized and divided in accordance
with the radical alternative posed by Kant’s subjective approach to aesthetic judgment in
his third Critique and Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics as they were recorded by his students in
the late 1820s. Kant foregrounds the effects of art on the subject and its ability to make
judgments on the beautiful (or the sublime) in analogy to teleological judgments on phe-
nomena in nature. Kant’s aesthetics is formal in the sense that he is interested in the formal
structure of the judgment, including the condition of disinterestedness (cf. AT 12), the
harmonious play of otherwise separated faculties and the sensus communis (reconfigured
by Adorno’s insistence on art’s utopian dimension). Actual artifacts or artworks hardly
play a role in Kant, neither descriptively nor prescriptively (Cf. Gasché 2002; Lehman
2017; Geulen 2019). Hegel’s objective or content‐aesthetics understood and offers itself as
the counterpart and alternative to Kant’s subjective formal aesthetics. Hegel deals exclu-
sively with fine arts (rather than the beautiful, for much of what he calls Romantic art is
certainly not beautiful) in both a historical and systematic fashion. Therefore his lectures
read like an exhaustive encyclopedia of all art forms from the beginnings in what Hegel
calls symbolic art, through its glorious (and long gone) zenith in the classical art of Greece
into its decline in Romantic art (which begins with the rise of Christianity). According to
Hegel, art, defined as the “sensuous appearance of the Idea,” articulates a certain stage in
the overall development of spirit, which was eventually superseded by and sublated into
the concept, science, and philosophy. The long shadows of this double Hegelian “end of
art” (in Greece and in philosophy) loom large in Aesthetic Theory.
From Kant, Adorno inherits the norm of disinterestedness or, put positively, contempla-
tion as the only appropriate response to art (cf. AT 14–15), as well as the concern for
beautiful nature (Section 25.5.2), which had been banned from aesthetic reflection since
Hegel defined the artwork as a product of spirit alone (cf. Cook 2011). From Hegel, Adorno
inherits the end of art in various forms but also the dignity of the individual art object and,
paradoxically so, the supremacy of the philosophical concept that says what art says by
not saying it (Section 25.4).7 Vis‐à‐vis Kant, Adorno rejects the attempt to found aesthetic
theory on the pole of the subject. Vis‐à‐vis Hegel, Adorno rejects the idea to found aes-
thetics on the pole of the object. The pattern should be clear by now: Much of Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory unfolds with and between Kant and Hegel, as Adorno forges his own
pathway through constant (and more often than not negative) encounters with the two
dominant models. Moreover, formalistic Kant and content‐oriented Hegel also function as
sites (or, in Jameson’s terminology, stages) to unfold and rewrite the intra‐aesthetic problem
of form and content, which, Adorno claims, constitutes what remained virtually
unthought in all of aesthetic theory (cf. AT 193; Section 25.3).
Since this is as far as the Kant‐Hegel‐connection carries, the subsequent set of sections
reviews art in relation to its most important others, namely society in general and the
evil twins of hedonism and culture industry in particular (Section 25.5.1), and nature,
400
e specially beautiful nature (Section 25.5.2). The remaining problem of mimesis vs. expres-
sion and the eminent role suffering plays for Adorno’s empowerment of art as a culmina-
tion of social critique is then subject to a close reading (Section 25.6).
3. Form and Content: Mastery Over Material
Among the most helpful texts to have appeared in the wake of the recent hype around
form, new, and old formalisms, is a concept‐historical sketch by David Wellbery in which
he distinguishes between different paradigms of understanding form (Wellbery 2010): the
older notion of form as eidos or morphe in Plato (and in a different version in Aristotle),
according to which contingent materials receive their imprint from a transcendent timeless
form, gives way to what Wellbery calls endogenous form. According to this understanding
of form, initiated by Kant and exemplified by Goethe, form and matter interpenetrate in
temporal processes such as growth, education (Bildung), and transformation. Around
1900, constructivist notions of form in the wake of Saussure, Spencer‐Brown and others
up to and including Luhmann understand form as a result of drawing a distinction (cf.
Baecker 1993).
Any attempt to map Adorno’s notion of form, which does indeed determine any art-
work’s “aesthetic unity” (AT 193), onto this typology is bound to fail, for elements of each
do indeed surface, but it does not fully coincide with any of them. While one might think
that the dialectician would privilege the interpenetration of form and matter in an endog-
enous form that renders the difference between form and matter irrelevant by means of
temporalization and processualization, Adorno insists equally rigorously on the need to
distinguish form and content: “the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped
without their differentiation” (AT 6). But what form and content are, respectively, in any
given artwork is subject to historical changes. The famous formula according to which
form is “sedimented content” (AT 6) suggests that what once was content taken from the
empirical world changes over time into forms of which we have forgotten that they were
once content (cf. AT 202). Conversely, what once seemed form can deteriorate into content
over time. Form and content are thus volatile, shapeshifting dimensions of any artwork as
it endures through time. In some respects, this recalls Walter Benjamin’s suggestions
regarding truth content and material content (Sachgehalt) in his essay on Goethe’s “Elective
Affinities” (cf. Benjamin 2004, 297–300). Only when certain material contents have
withered away and become irrelevant, as, for example, the political goals informing much
of Frank Wedekind’s dramatic production, can contents emerge as formal elements or
truth content (cf. Adorno 1977, 317).
Two additional reasons keep Adorno from amalgamating form and content into an
endogenous form in Wellbery’s sense. On the one hand, content is the lifeline that connects
the artwork with the empirical and social world from which it detaches itself: “it is precisely
as artifacts, as products of social labor, that they also communicate with the empirical
experience that they reject and from which they draw their content” (AT 6). On the other
hand, a perfectly endogenous form (modeled, for example, on the organism) is inconceiv-
able for Adorno, since the artwork’s resistance to and turn away from empirical and social
reality is also its lasting stigma. No true form will ever be able to cover up antagonisms of
the reality it resisted and that persist in the artwork, forever calling its aesthetic unity into
doubt: “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of
form” (AT 7).
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The constructivist type of form also plays a role in Aesthetic Theory where construction
(particularly prominent in Schönberg’s serial twelve‐tone music) is both a key
characteristic of all modern art and a formal element that competes intrinsically with
what Adorno calls the “mimetic impulses” at work in every art work (cf. Section 25.2). The
strict logicity and rationality of constructivist form enters into a precarious balance but
also competition with those archaic impulses of lust, play, and imitation that find an, albeit
problematic, exile in art when enlightened, rational society has rendered them taboo.
In light of Adorno reconfiguring both endogenous and constructivist form, one might
suspect that the older idea of form as that which imprints matter would play no role beyond
the formal opposition of form and content. However, the very word “material,” in Adorno’s
central notion of “mastery over material” (AT 255, 288–289),8 suggests otherwise. While
“material” is Adorno’s preferred term for what aestheticians have called métier, technique,
or craft (cf. AT 295), it receives its importance from essentially leaving the distinction of
form and content theoretically intact but operatively irrelevant. That mastery over material
amounts to a historical standard is one side of the surprisingly strict logic (at times remi-
niscent of Lukács), the other side of which is the problematic imperative of the new.
According to Adorno, no artwork worth its name will pass muster below the threshold
indicated by any given standard of “mastery over material.” Moreover, ideally, each art-
work has to bring something new into the world, so as to advance the standard of mate-
rials. Since postmodernism, such a rigorously progressivist logic has fallen into disrepute.
Hence, Adorno has been criticized for his adherence to the imperative “il faut être absolu-
ment moderne” (AT 262). But he was well aware of the problematic underpinnings of this
imperative, including his critique of art’s enslavement to the new.
Other counter‐currents in Aesthetic Theory interrupt the logic of mastery over material.
For one, just as form and content in artworks are subject to change over time, what was
once the newest can become outdated very quickly. Even though, generally speaking,
Adorno’s reflections proceed from his encounters with the most advanced modern art of his
time (predominantly music), he regularly returns to works that have fallen into a state of
anachronicity or were never modern to begin with. One of the very few literary works ana-
lyzed in some detail in Aesthetic Theory is a nursery rhyme‐poem by Mörike (cf. AT 170),
whom nobody can possibly consider a modernist author. Adorno tends to be drawn toward
the outmoded, precisely because it has escaped, as it were, the logic of mastery over material
(cf. Geulen 2001). In his Notes to Literature, striking interest in conservative poets such as
Eichendorff, Stefan George, or Rudolph Borchardt seem to object to his demands for mastery
over material. Late in life, Adorno gave some attention to what he called the “Verfransung der
Künste” (cf. Eichel 1993), a phenomenon that also runs counter to the progressivist logic of
mastery over material. And, finally, the rapid succession of “isms” (cf. AT 34–35), the sense
of a “disintegration of the materials” (AT 23), and an overall exhaustion brought about by
the very logic of radically advancing art (exemplified, for Adorno, by Schönberg, whose
thoroughly constructivist music prompted him to significant criticisms) point to an end of
art brought about by the very demands of mastery over material.
4. End of Art: Good, Bad, and Forever
That an end of art is the very imminent horizon of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is evi-
dent from its opening sentence: “It is self‐evident that nothing concerning art is self‐
evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to
402
exist” (AT 1). The end of art had been a recurrent theme of the historical avant‐gardes,
especially Surrealism, in their attempt to explode or supersede the bourgeois concept
of art, and was once more debated intensely while Adorno was working on his book.
In 1968, Hans Magnus Enzensberger published the famous issue of the journal
Kursbuch, announcing an end of (bourgeois) art (Enzensberger 1968). In the same
year, the research group “Poetics and Hermeneutics” published its volume on “The no
longer beautiful arts” (Jauß 1968). Hegel’s famous verdict on the end of art in his
Lectures on Aesthetics and in the Phenomenology of Spirit resounds through all of these
instances.
One way Adorno deals with the legacy of the end of art is, once more, its liquification
and pluralization. To begin with, he splits the end of art into what one may call a good
(utopian) and a problematic (apocalyptic) end of art. Whatever else Adorno has to say
about the end of art unfolds between these two poles: the perspective of a disappear-
ance of art into just another “thing among things” (AT 25), for example in the culture
industry, and the idea that a truly liberated society would no longer need art which for
Adorno remains, in the words of Hegel, “if the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be
art’s temporal end” (AT 44).9 The apocalyptic and the utopian end of art coalesce in a
third notion of art’s ending that can be said to be immanent to the artwork as its pro-
cessuality, meaning both its formal dynamics and its historicity. Adorno sometimes
refers to this processual logic of an intrinsic and continuous ending as “deaestheticiza-
tion” (AT 60) (cf. García Düttmann 2000, 14–128). It can resemble the disappearance
of art in the culture industry, as when an artwork becomes a “slogan” (AT 60), but it is
primarily a (dialectical) process inherent to individual artworks. In this regard, deaes-
theticization is not the historical disappearance of art, but, rather, disappearing is the
very seal of every individual artwork by which it remains true to its utopian aspiration:
“The historical perspective that envisions the end of art is every work’s idea. There is no
artwork that does not promise that its truth content (…) realizes itself and leaves the
artwork behind simply as a husk” (AT 180). In supremely condensed and abbreviated
fashion: “Ultimately their (that is, artworks’) development is the same as their process of
collapse” (AT 245).
However, despite repeated disclaimers and various dialectical operations, Adorno
remains, in at least one respect, true heir to the Hegelian legacy. According to Hegel, art is
no longer spirit’s privileged form of self‐articulation, but has been superseded by philos-
ophy and the primacy of the concept. Even though he did not call his book “philosophical
aesthetics”, in the idealist tradition, but, rather, “aesthetic theory,” the supremacy of phi-
losophy that says (discursively) what art says by not saying it (cf. AT 99) appears to be fully
intact in Adorno. The individual disciplines, including art and music history, literary criti-
cism, and the philologies, that claimed art as territory of the Humanities, after Hegel’s idea
of an end of art had released art from the philosophical grip of Idealism (cf. Marquard
1981), are given their due by Adorno in the form of “commentary and critique.” But in the
final instance, they too must culminate in and become philosophy. To be sure, Adorno’s
sense of both philosophy and the concept are not the same as Hegel’s. The main task of his
Negative Dialectics is to prove precisely this. But in Aesthetic Theory, philosophy remains the
unquestioned telos of all engagement of art. The reflective process has to begin with
aesthetic experience: “There is no other path to this objectivity than to immerse oneself in
the works themselves” (Adorno 2018, 4). This can amount to overwhelming experiences
that virtually annul or even extinguish the subject that momentarily “lives” in a particular
artwork (cf. Adorno 2018, 122ff.).10 But this experience does not live up to theoretical
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demands. Hence, ecstatic experience of art has to become something else in rational
reflection. “Commentary and critique” are the first forms in which subjective experi-
ence assumes a first degree of objectivity. But alone, commentary and critique can
never suffice: “Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philos-
ophy” (AT 179). The tensions, even the contradictions, between the demands of the
individual artwork and the demands of philosophy are obvious and probably as irre-
solvable as the related questions how any artwork relates to the idea or concept of art
as such. Both remain deeply aporetic and, at least in the unfinished Aesthetic Theory,
also enigmatic. Perhaps Adorno sensed what his later critics were quick to point out:
that surrendering art’s link to philosophy would run the risk of severing the very link
that guaranteed art as a form of social critique within a relatively coherent Marxist
framework. In any case, philosophy remains here the name of a hoped‐for discursive
coherence in dealing with artworks and art that Adorno denied just as often as he
insisted on it.
5. Art and Its Other Others
5.1. Society, Culture Industry, Hedonism, and Art Appreciation

All art is determined “by its relation to what it is not” (AT 3). Above all, this is nature (cf.
Section 25.5.2), on the one hand, and society on the other. Both, art’s critical import and
its ultimate powerlessness that renders all art “mournful” (cf. AT 39), stem from its dual
existence as “autonomous and fait social” (AT 7). Even and precisely where art renounces
the social world by seeking distance from it and establishing its own autonomy, both art
and its autonomy remain negatively bound to society. Yet, in this negative relation, art
cannot be deduced from or reduced to its social origins: “Art is the social antithesis of
society, not directly deducible from it” (AT 10).
While the antagonisms governing capitalist society (that are contemporaneous with
art’s emancipation from cult and religion and thus with the emergence of aesthetic
autonomy) persist in the artwork, a priori, as it were, art and artworks come increasingly
under stress from two social formations particular to the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies: the culture industry and hedonism or bourgeois art appreciation. Adorno’s disdain
for what came to be known as popular culture, including his remarks on jazz, is infamous.
However, he went to great lengths to distinguish the culture industry from art as enter-
tainment, which has followed high art like a shadow from time immemorial. Elements of
lust and play, clownishness, and folly are characteristic of archaic forms of entertainment,
such as the circus. Accordingly, they receive remarkably generous attention. Modernist
“high artworks” are also shot through with such elements (which is one reason for
Adorno’s critique of Schönberg, whose constructivist music seems to be devoid of such a
dimension). In Adorno’s eyes, however, at issue is that the culture industry has no room for
individual artists but is a capitalist industry that fabricates and sells deviously ideological
perversions of harmless forms of archaic entertainment and of so‐called high art. The
culture industry is archaic entertainment deprived of its archaic idiosyncrasies and high
art deprived of its mastery over material. Both are standardized and hollowed out in mass
production. Whether is its possible, and if so, how, to adjust this diagnosis to our age, in
which a few global companies own diversified and “personalized” social media and the
new currency of “personal data”, is for others to figure out.
404
When Adorno was trying to complete Aesthetic Theory, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams,
and others began to discover the potential of subcultural formations and pop culture. For
Adorno, by contrast, culture designated an industry modeled on Hollywood and its star
system. The demise of art in the culture industry was essentially a threat. However, a
necessary threat and an inevitable correlative of modern arts’ vexed situation. The dialec-
tician knew very well that the culture industry was not only art’s other but also, by the law
of dialectics, its truth:
The archetypes of our time, synthetically concocted by film and hit‐song for the bleak contem-
plation of the late industrial era, do not merely liquidate art but, by their blatant feeble‐
mindedness, blast into daylight the delusion that was always immured in the oldest works of
art and which still gives the maturest their power. Luridly the horror of the ending lights up
the deception of the origin. (Adorno 2005, 226)
The demise of art in the culture industry is nothing new or original.

The other (social) formation that has been threatening art is its hedonistic bourgeois
reception, correlate of art’s aspiration to autonomy. Bourgeois faith in classics (or, in the
parlance of the culture industry: evergreens) such as Mozart or Goethe as archives of true
humanity resulted, among other things, in instinctive reactions against “incomprehen-
sible,” dark, difficult, and modern art. Among the reasons why Adorno insists so emphat-
ically on mastery over material is to justify and protect advanced art from the demands of
bourgeois hedonism. His disdain for what he perceived as either blatant hedonism or
uncultured “philistinism” (cf. AT 245) has its dialectical truth after all. Among other
things, Adorno’s resistance accounts for rejection of the ecstatic experience of losing one-
self in an artwork as an alternative and, perhaps, better world (cf. ibid.). Forsaking
reflection in favor of remaining stuck in a realm of pre‐enlightened magic is not an option.
By the same token, Adorno is the philosopher who persistently likened the encounter with
an artwork to the experience of liaisons dangereuses in the erotic sense (cf. Geulen 2006a).
Both the archaic and the erotic dimensions already reach over into that other Other of art
and of society: nature. According to Adorno, art is a placeholder (not substitute nor
compensation, solace at best) for nature lost not only to capitalism or industrialization but
to civilization and enlightenment in a more structural and less historicist sense. To put it
crudely, art represents, stands in for, and speaks for the oppressed: “animal, landscape,
woman” (AT 87).
5.2. Nature and Natural Beauty

In the opening sections of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno juxtaposes Kant, not with Hegel, as he
does so frequently, but with Freud’s theories of art regarding the functions of desire and its
repression. The privilege accorded to Freud might be said to point to an anthropological sub-
stratum of Adorno’s overall more historically oriented theorization of art. However, against
the background of the earlier Dialectic of Enlightenment, this opposition between histori-
cizing accounts and quasi‐anthropological underpinnings must fail to do justice to his
thought. Freud provides Adorno with the dimension reserved for an archaic, which is not
historical but structural. Psychoanalysis brings that in art to light that is not exhausted in
the concept of art but without which art is inconceivable for Adorno: mimetic impulses,
play, sensuous desire and, perhaps above all, happiness, all of which amount to ineradicable
remnants of a desire for a better life that sustain art’s utopian dimension (cf. AT 15).
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Eva Geulen
However elusive and exclusive, the allusion to “animal, landscape, woman” does point to a
layer in aesthetic experience that is constitutive for Adorno, but not sufficient.11 The fact
that desire and lust in their unmediated forms have been categorically banned from art both
in Kant (by the prerogative of disinterestedness) and, in another way, in Hegel (by excluding
the experience of nature from art) lends this ensemble the common name of natural beauty:
“genuine experience of art is not possible without the experience of that elusive dimension
whose name – natural beauty – had faded” (AT 87). In the context of natural beauty, the
enigmatic formula of the nonidentical has its proper place: “Natural beauty is the trace of
the nonidentical in the things under the spell of universal identity” (AT 100). Contemplative
and desire‐free reception is modeled on the experience of natural beauty, here reminiscent
of Benjamin’s remark on what aura is in his The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility: “In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure self‐abandonment – that
moment of free exhalation in nature – survives” (AT 100). But the dimension of somatic
desire, archaic impulses of mimetic play and being someone else (perverted by the culture
industry) also adhere to the notion of natural beauty. Finally, the enigmatic claim that all
artworks, including painting and music, resemble language, has its source in the negative
relations between art and its doubly conflicted relationship to nature as that which is beyond
the force and violence that inhibits any artwork as a product of social labor:
If the language of nature is mute, art seeks to make this muteness eloquent; art thus exposes
itself to failure through the insurmountable contradiction between the idea of making the
mute eloquent, which demands a desperate effort, and the idea of what this effort would
amount to, the idea of what cannot in any way be willed. (AT 106)
Hence, Adorno can say: “The element that in art resembles language is its mimetic element”
(AT 280–281), for mimetical impulses belong to the prerational realm of archaic lust and
play that has all but vanished in society and finds a last refuge in art (cf. AT 73) where they
must continue to fight against seductive regressions (which is the reason why “living” in an
artwork alone is considered an insufficient response). The experience of the beautiful in
nature (and, by continuation, in art) draws on the magical heritage that it must deny and
suppress both in production and reception: Once we have suffered, it is not necessarily good,12
but, under certain circumstances, it is art. This overdetermined importance of suffering for
art in general is the reason why Adorno speaks of the sadness of all art (cf. AT 145).
Adorno has been much criticized for this emphasis and its latent theological remnants. As
Norbert Bolz once put it: Adorno’s is a philosophy of the cross (cf. Bolz 1986, 15–16).
Sloterdijk, in his Critique of Cynical Reason, called pain and suffering the apriori of Adorno (cf.
Sloterdijk 1988, xxxvi). But how the overall motif of suffering fits into Adorno’s “Aesthetic
Theory” depends on how one determines the relations between two concepts not mentioned
so far, namely “expression” and the familiar aesthetic notion of “semblance.” Both involve
mimesis in a sense not reducible to what is known as “mimetic impulses.” But since Adorno
failed (or refused) to articulate this fully, a more detailed reading is required.
6. Expression, Semblance, and Mimesis
“Expression is the suffering countenance of artworks” (AT 153), and as such in strict
opposition to their beautiful semblance. For Adorno, both play a part in any (successful)
artwork. Since expression and semblance are strictly “antithetical” (AT 152), they are, as
one might expect, so thoroughly dialecticized that in the end one seems to be able to replace
406
the other. Dissonant expression reveals the fissures in any given semblance, that is to say, it
undermines the (beautiful and deceptive) appearance of unity and wholeness in any given
artwork. Semblance in turn originates in primeval mimetic impulses. Since the moment in
the history of civilization when the “mimetic taboo” appeared on the scene, semblance has
served as the executor and proper heir to mimesis’ estate, as Adorno repeatedly asserts (cf.
AT 152). According to Adorno, the lineaments of expression draw “demarcation lines
against semblance” (ibid.). One should bear in mind here that Adorno understands sem-
blance and mimesis as “form in the broadest sense” (ibid.). Thus, mimesis here designates
not that aspect of the artwork that imitates, nor that which is imitated, but rather art’s
ability “to make itself like” (cf. ibid.) something else in the medium of form. However, the
subsequent sentence radically transforms and displaces the antithetical relationship bet-
ween (immediate) expression (of suffering) and beautiful semblance. The sentence in
question is a rather complicated one:
The unfolding of art is that of a quid pro quo: Expression, through which nonaesthetic expe-
rience [that is to say, life] reaches most deeply into the work, becomes the archetype of every-
thing fictive in art, as if at the juncture where art is most permeable to real experience culture
most rigorously stood guard that the border not be violated. (Ibid.)
Quid pro quo denotes a substitution: in this logic of substitution, expression, which runs
counter to semblance, becomes an example, a prototype, the model of the fictive, which is
to say, the model of semblance itself. Expression (of life outside of aesthetic experience,
which here, as elsewhere in Adorno, is identical with suffering) lends its features, in a
manner of speaking, to dubious appearance (the inner aesthetic harmony of the work’s
formal structure). So far, so good. It is the afterthought here that is elusive, to say the least:
“as if at the juncture where art is most permeable to real experience culture most rigor-
ously stood guard that the border not be violated” (ibid.). The border guarded by culture,
and not, say, by art, can only be the border that separates the private sphere of external life
that penetrates into the artwork as expression – that is, suffering – from the mimetic
moment of semblance within the artwork. Briefly put: it is culture that insists on the
difference between life and art. Against this difference, Adorno places not art’s longing for
identity, which is either already presupposed in secret or openly longed for as utopia, but
the primeval logic of the quid pro quo. Expression slips itself into mimesis and semblance as
form and in this way holds their common problematic in check. Adorno goes one step
further: “That quid pro quo not only neutralizes mimesis, it also derives from it” (ibid.). The
quid pro quo is not only the trick, the cunning of expression, by which expression asserts
itself against mimesis and elevates itself over mimesis as it puts itself in mimesis’ place.
Now the quid pro quo reveals itself not as the proprium of expression but as a consequence
of the mimetic: “If mimetic comportment does not imitate something but rather makes
itself like itself, this is precisely what artworks take it upon themselves to fulfill” (ibid.). It is
in this fulfillment that the fallibility of mimesis necessarily emerges, albeit a different
fallibility than the one for which culture holds the primeval semblance in contempt. The
judgment that falls on mimesis is that “that what makes itself like itself does not become
truly alike, that mimetic intervention failed” (ibid.). The mimetic “making itself like” is
condemned to failure. But it is precisely the fact that all mimetic impulses fall short that
provides the quid pro quo with its vital opportunity. Only where effort and desire are needed
to be like and to imitate can the substitution succeed, does the complex dialectical machine
serviced by Adorno get into gear.
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Eva Geulen
In summary, one might say that as the inheritor of the Sirens’ song, art governs the
desire to rescue the past as a living present. Philosophy and theology are also inspired by
this desire, but the only way that it can find unconditionally positive fulfillment is in art,
which may be understood as extra‐aesthetic experience – especially pain – rescued in
expression through art. This privilege ultimately originates in art’s affinity with the
mimetic impulses, which precariously survive as semblance. However, the aesthetic expe-
rience of mimesis is always a failed one. Time and again, experience shows that semblance
deceives, that it is mere appearance. But perhaps Adorno is not concerned with conveying
the untruth of mimetic comportment and the experience that attends it but rather with
the retention of the mimetic impulse in the quid pro quo. After all, the experience of a decep-
tive semblance is only possible if semblance first attempts “to make itself like.” This
impulse – and not the claim of pain to authentic expression – is the motive of the dynamic
of mimesis and expression within aesthetics.
In the end, what is this quid pro quo other than the inexhaustibly productive logic of
substitution made objective, stripped of its magic dimension? That against all reason one
thing can be put in place of another, quid pro quo – this is the logic of exchange that rules
in art. The only thing that distinguishes this substitution from the capitalist logic of
exchange, notoriously demonized by Adorno, is the failure of mimesis. Its opposite would
be total identification, which the culture industry or bourgeois art appreciation traffic in.
In this perspective, the difference between art and the culture industry, which Adorno
insists upon so frequently, is not the dignity of an individual work itself but only its function
in the logic of the quid pro quo: We are dealing with a successful artwork when we experi-
ence that things are not like they seem via semblance. This failure of mimesis and the
ensuing misrecognition does not authenticate nor privilege the expression of suffering
over mimesis and semblance; quite on the contrary and technically speaking, mimesis
(and its failure) is the trick by which art, the descendant of the Sirens’ song, which knew
all of the past, achieves remembrance.
The interrelation between the quid pro quo and mimesis is essential for Adorno’s aesthetic
theory, and perhaps not only for Adorno’s because with it disappears forever the possibility
of drawing a rigorous border between the abhorred logic of exchange in the “universal
web of delusion” that constitutes the culture industry, on the one hand, and the autono-
mous and singular artwork on the other. Both work according to a quid pro quo.
Perhaps there are reasons to follow Adorno in his privileging of the mimetic relation-
ship and mimetic impulses, a privileging that is, if not singular, then at least exceptional in
aesthetic theory since the late eighteenth century. We might, for example, investigate the
possible significance of this concept of (failed) mimesis for the various projects of Bildung
and education, which since the eighteenth century have had to do without models or
examples to be imitated and since then we have been deprived of the chance of experi-
encing the failure of mimesis and mimetic desire.
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Notes
1 Bräutigam (1975) was the first to make that argument. The most recent is James Hellings in the
“Anti‐Introduction” in Hellings (2014). On the competition between Critical Theory and aes-
thetics cf. Ross (2015).
2 There is, of course, no shortage of general overviews such as, among others: Weber Nicholsen
(1997), Jarvis (1998), Hammer (2006), Cook (2008), Hohendahl (2013) or essay collections
such as Cunningham and Mapp (2006), Huhn and Zuidervaart (1997), and Hammer (2015);
many volumes on Adorno’s theory of music, but no sustained engagement with Aesthetic Theory
alone.
3 Adorno had plans for a book on ethics upon completing Aesthetic Theory, cf. Bernstein (2001),
Gerhardt (2006), as well as Morgan (2007).
4 For a similar attempt in a different vein, cf. Cook (2008).
5 It should be added that other important inroads in Adorno scholarship have been made. Thus,
his relationship to the public and the role of media (including radio and television) have been
examined. While this work is important in many respects, it is more a result of a changing
academic landscape than a response to Adorno’s thought.
6 If I may illustrate the shift autobiographically. In 1991, fresh out of graduate school, I wrote a
lengthy review of Jameson’s Late Marxism for TELOS (Geulen 1991). It was an exercise in suspi-
cion: that Jameson’s impressive readings in the final instance served to sell us concepts such as
410
“the whole” and “totality” and that his persistent dialectics was, in the final instance, not
dialectical enough. Today, I am not the only one asking what the whole is. Caroline Levine’s
study on forms that lists (anti‐hierarchical) networks and the (supposedly hierarchical) whole,
which is more than the sum of its parts, in one sequence is an important sign both of renewed
interest in questions of the whole and the accompanying emptying out of many concepts.
7 The good news for philologists and literary critics is that “commentary and critique” are given
credit as ways of accessing a work. The bad news is that in the final instance they too have to
yield to the philosophical concept (cf. AT 264). And precisely the strict adherence to the dualism
of Kant and Hegel makes doubtful Ruth Sonderegger’s suggestion that it would be legitimate to
identify the rigors of the “philosophical concept” with “thought in general” (cf. Sonderegger
2011, 421). On the prerogative Adorno accords philosophy cf. Hulatt (2016). Earlier, Hohendahl
argued that the “failure of philosophy” was the premise from which Adorno proceeded and sub-
sequently veered toward a theological dimension previously absent from his work (cf. Hohendahl
2013).
8 For an intense discussion cf. Rebentisch and Menke (2006).
9 On the ambivalence of the end of art in Adorno cf. Geulen (2006b), 90–111.
10 On the concept of life in Adorno, cf. Gordon (2016) and Morgan (2007).
11 On animals cf. Scholze (2000).
12 “Wenn wir gelitten haben, ist es dann gut?” (Benn 1986, 170).
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26
Aesthetic Theory as Social Theory

PETER UWE HOHENDAHL
1. Introduction: Sociology of Art as a Challenge
Confronted with the question whether he was a sociologist of art, most likely Adorno
would have rejected this attribution as a serious misunderstanding of his theoretical work.
While Adorno is frequently concerned with the relationship between artworks and society,
he does not see himself as a social scientist who specializes in the analysis of art. In his
mind, professional sociologists focus their attention on phenomena that are external to the
artwork, for instance on the character of the reading public, the social background of the
artist, and the political impact of literary works. For Adorno only an aesthetic theory can
do justice to art – to its nature and history. However, while this focus seems to exclude the
possibility of sociological investigations, Adorno insists that it is precisely the complete
immersion of the critic in the artwork that raises those questions, transcending the horizon
of a formal aesthetic assessment. Paradoxically, the stricter the aesthetic analysis is the
more it leads to questions that cannot be answered in exclusively formal aesthetic terms.
Therefore Adorno strongly believes that social aspects of artworks cannot be excluded
from a rigorous examination. Using the opposition of intrinsic and extrinsic moments,
Adorno maintains that the most meaningful social aspects are immanent to the work of
art. They reveal themselves only by way of a rigorous formal examination of the art-
work itself, and they are precisely those elements that the professional sociologist, who
approaches the artwork from the outside, must miss. Thus Adorno understands his
writings as focused primarily on the aesthetic character of art, however, with the
expectation that this approach will include its social aspects as emerging from the very
core of the artwork. This clearly separates him from the methodology of empirical soci-
ology, especially from quantitative research, and those forms of social and cultural history
that dogmatically impose their categories on the artwork from the outside.
Yet this claim challenges other aspects of Adorno’s own thinking. His sustained interest
in the thought of Hegel and Marx, clearly noticeable even in his late writings, includes the
use of ideas and concepts that undoubtedly stand outside the sphere of art. This engage-
ment leaves Adorno with the task of mediating aesthetic and historical as well as social
categories. Of course, Adorno is aware that there is a social world outside the artwork,
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Peter Uwe Hohendahl
which can and should be examined on the basis of its own concepts. Yet this plausible
assumption creates difficulties for Adorno’s more radical demand for rigorous methodo-
logical immanence. Adorno addresses this tension by suggesting either that intrinsic and
extrinsic approaches are ultimately identical, or that at least they can be connected. In the
first instance, the critic has to prove that the fundamental social concepts are applicable to
the structure of the artwork as well. In second instance, the critic settles with the lesser
claim that the two approaches can be combined; the analysis of the external historical
material throws additional light on the artwork. In this situation the critic has to be equally
familiar with the social world and the structure of the work of art.
In his early work Adorno claims that music criticism and the history of music can make
use of basic and broad Marxist categories because they are understood as equally valid for
the interpretation of modern social history and the understanding of modern music. He
imports these categories primarily from the writings of the early Georg Lukács and to a
lesser degree from Max Weber (2015) and Walter Benjamin. It is a Weberian reading of
Marx in History and Class Consciousness (Lukacs 1986) that Adorno appropriates for his
early conception of a rigorous sociology of art. However, in Adorno’s reception of Lukács,
the earlier, pre‐Marxist Theory of the Novel (Lukács 1971) plays an important role as well.
For Adorno it proves the possibility of a legitimate synthesis of literary criticism and phi-
losophy of history. Lukács suggests that the novel, through its formal characteristics,
expresses the state of the modern world. Put differently, compared with the ancient epic,
the novel form has its own unique historical legitimacy, since it corresponds to the state of
the modern world. Specifically, the ironic quality of the modern novel (from Cervantes to
Dostoyevsky) confirms the forlorn quality of the modern world in which the immanent
totality of the epos is no longer given. In sum, it is Lukács’ notion of a totality, bringing
together the social and the aesthetic sphere that Adorno adopts for his own work. However,
he adds to this philosophical category the conceptual tools he found in History and Class
Consciousness, especially the concepts of commodity and reification (Verdinglichung).
Lukács’ claim that under the regime of advanced capitalism the social world is completely
determined by the commodity form strongly resonates in Adorno’s thinking. It allows him
to extend his formal analysis of artworks to the social sphere by invoking the concept of
reification as the universal condition of the modern world. In Adorno’s thinking reifica-
tion touches equally on the formal structure of contemporary music and the organization
of social classes. The estrangement of music from the public becomes significant as the
equivalence of a reified social reality. Especially in Aesthetic Theory reification as Adorno’s
central theoretical concept is given a broad function. It addresses the basic condition of art
under the premises of advanced capitalism – as well as state socialism (Stalinism).
In his late work Adorno likes to make use of the Leibnizian concept of the monad as a
model for this equivalence. He borrowed this concept from Walter Benjamin, who had
introduced it in his book on the German Baroque tragedy (Benjamin 1977). Strategically,
the concept is introduced to solve the problem of mediation at the center of Adorno’s dia-
lectic. In the case of the monad the interior resonates with the exterior, although there are
no windows. Focusing on the interior structure is therefore sufficient for the understanding
of the social structure outside. But the origin of the concept in Leibniz’ metaphysical ide-
alism resists a dialectical use. The crucial question therefore is: How can Adorno adjust the
concept in such a way that it becomes compatible with the Hegel‐Marx tradition to which
Adorno is committed? In Aesthetic Theory he wants to limit the use of the concept to
describe the character and function of the artwork, focusing on the crystallizing of a pro-
cess: “The interpretation of an artwork as an immanent, crystallized process at a standstill
414
approximates the concept of the monad.” And Adorno continues: “The thesis of the
monadological character of artworks is as true as it is problematic” (Adorno 1997, 180).
Adorno’s keen interest in the monad is its uniqueness as well as its closed character, which
forces the observer to remain immanent. At the same time, Adorno insists on the broader,
universal significance of the artwork: “The monadological constitution of artworks in
themselves points beyond itself ” (Adorno 1997, 180). Used as a metaphor, the monad cap-
tures the moment of connection. Its inside resonates with the outside, that is, the world
around it. This means that Adorno treats the monad as a special instance of the relation-
ship between the concrete formal structure and the social meaning of the artwork, thereby
avoiding the concept of reflection. The dialectic moment articulated in the transformation
of the concrete aesthetic elements into their broader social meaning is preserved in the
structure of the monad. It is seen as a moment of participation.
2. The Early Model
The fact that Adorno’s essay “On the Social Situation of Music” (Zur gesellschaftlichen
Lage der Musik) was published as part of the first year of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
testifies both to the importance of the topic for the editors of the new journal and their
confidence in Adorno’s expertise in the field of music criticism. As a former student of
the composer Alban Berg, the young author had proven himself already as a composer
and public commentator on contemporary music. Adorno was known for his passionate
plea for the significance of Schoenberg and the Vienna School. The topic of this essay,
however, confronted him with a much wider and more basic question: What is the place
of music in (modern) society? Although the title suggests a broader understanding of
the question, Adorno’s response leaves no doubt that he is primarily interested in the
social condition of modern music. From the outset he states his position in strong terms:
Modern music is determined by the capitalist market. In this context music – and Adorno
does not differentiate between serious and popular music – is seen as a commodity: “The
role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value is deter-
mined by the market” (Adorno 2002, 391). We have to note that Adorno by using the
word exclusively (ausschließlich) does not only treat the sphere of popular music but also
the arena of advanced compositions as part of the market ruled by the law of exchange.
In the context of contemporary society the emphasis is placed on the exchange value
rather than use value. Differentiating between the use of music in a pre‐capitalist age
and the present, Adorno insists that the days of freies Musizieren (free and spontaneous
playing) are part of a bygone era. This rigorous definition – and this has to be under-
scored – extends not only to the sphere of consumption, that is, the organization of the
Musikbetrieb (music industry), but also to the sphere of production. As Adorno notes,
“through the total absorption of both musical production and consumption by the capi-
talistic process, the alienation of music from man has become complete” (Adorno 2002,
391). The thorough commodification of music that Adorno detects as the mark of the
present results in alienation, a loss of immediacy in the use of music, a loss that cannot
be reversed by individual composers or critics. In fact, the essay speaks of complete alien-
ation. It is important to note that for the early Adorno there are no spaces to which the
production or the consumption of music can retreat in order to escape the capitalist
market. This means that for Adorno the structure of modern society is fundamentally
and completely determined by the capitalist market, reaching all classes and groups.
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Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Therefore any attempt to define the task of music sociology in terms of individual classes
must ultimately fail, since it overlooks the power of the social totality and its close rela-
tionship to the development of capitalism.
Clearly, the early Adorno perceives the task of art sociology ultimately as a synthesis of
aesthetic and economic thought. The economic structure is the ground on which the
social classes and institutions are built and by which their historical development is deter-
mined. It is the development of capitalism itself, especially its advance to the phase of
monopoly capitalism, which defines all human relations, including those of the aesthetic
sphere. The specific character of these relations is described as reified (verdinglicht); the
moment of reification, Adorno tells us, touches all social spheres and activities. Again, this
state is seen as without exception (restlos); it determines not only the relations between
classes and social groups but also the status of music, both its production and reception.
The hope therefore that music, perceived as an aesthetic institution, could free itself from
the conditions of alienation is, as Adorno underscores, an illusion. Max Weber’s iron cage
applies also to art. Its fate is that of the socio‐economic structure as well, that is, all its
moments stand under the sign of alienation and reification.
There can be little doubt that Adorno borrowed his conceptual framework from Georg
Lukács, specifically from History and Class Consciousness. This paradigm has the advantage
for the study of art that it overcomes conventional approaches and their emphases on
partial aspects, for instance the situation of the artist or the role of aesthetic criticism. The
social determination of music and art in general can be conceptualized from a central
point, allowing therefore the deduction of partial aspects from this point. For the early
Adorno this is an advantage because it enables him to tackle two critical problems of the
sociology of art, namely the question of artistic production and the problem of aesthetic
autonomy. The aesthetic argument against sociological approaches to music or literature
was (and remains) that they disregard the autonomy of modern art. Adorno, however,
strongly insists on the autonomous status of modern art precisely because of its location
within a modern capitalist society. Already in 1932 he argues against a reflection model by
noting: “If the immanent development of music were established as an absolute – as the
mere reflection of the social process – the only result would be a sanction of the fetish
character of music which is the major difficulty and the most basic problem to be repre-
sented by music today” (Adorno 2002, 393). Instead, he argues in favor of deducing the
situation of modern music, both its structure and its reception, from the fundamental cat-
egories provided by a Lukácsian interpretation of Marx, which allows to establish the link
between the concepts of commodity exchange, resulting in reification in the spheres of
aesthetic production and distribution. While not explicitly stated, this means that he shifts
the interpretation of the social element of art from the level of the relations of production
(classes and social actors) to the basic level of the forces of production. This becomes
apparent when Adorno talks about the “innermost cells of its [music] technique” (Adorno
2002, 393) that have to be scrutinized. It is the “material” that is the object of interpreta-
tion, not the artist.
Therefore for Adorno the appropriate focus of a true sociology of music is the artwork,
specifically the gestalt of the text. Yet it is a text that is part of the larger socio‐economic
framework, a text that is part of the dialectic of the historical material process. For instance,
the moment of increased rationality that has defined this process in general has also deter-
mined the fate of music. For this reason, Adorno vigorously defends the inaccessible
character of modern music, its lack of romantic immediacy that conventional listeners
expect as a desirable element of its structure, a material complexity in tune with the state
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of production in advanced capitalism. It is the consciousness of the contemporary audi-

ence that lags behind the objective. As Adorno argues:
It might be possible for the most advanced compositional production of the present – solely
under the pressure of the immanent development of its problems – to invalidate basic
bourgeois categories such as the creative personality and expression of the soul of this person-
ality, the world of private feelings and its transfigured inwardness, setting in their place highly
rational transparent principles of construction. Even this music, however, would remain
dependent upon bourgeois production processes and could not, consequently be viewed as
“classless” or the actual music of the future, but rather as music which fulfills its dialectic
cognitive function most exactly. (Adorno 2002, 394)
We have to note Adorno’s contrast between a bourgeois world of feeling and soulful expres-
sion and a modern reality defined by rational and transparent principles of production.
This is not only a question of historical change but at the same time a matter of knowledge.
Adorno explicitly attributes an Erkenntnisfunktion (cognitive function) to music, which
brings it in touch with other fields of knowledge, among them science and philosophy.
This emphatic insight brings two strands of Adorno’s argument together: On the one
hand, he underscores the immanent process of production in which the composition of
music is exposed to increasingly complex rationality, on the other, this very process is also
part of the larger social dynamic that results in reification. Thus the production of music,
Adorno underlines, is as much exposed to reification as social reality. Modern music, follow-
ing its immanent logic, cannot escape reification and thereby increased alienation from its
audience. The fact that music has become a commodity creates a definite split between
serious and popular music both in terms of its production and its consumption. Yet in most
instances the audience fails to understand the common cause of this development, treating
the difference as natural. Hence the advocates of serious music turn against the depravation
of popular music without the awareness that their own form of consumption, organized by
a capitalist Musikbetrieb, is no less commodified and therefore alienated than the distribution
and consumption of popular music. The critique of popular art as Kitsch, used as a weapon
by the guardians of high culture, fails to understand the deeper cause of the problem. Their
verdict only confirms the split without recognizing the common elements, since their percep-
tion recognizes the commodification of popular music, but overlooks the compromised state
of serious music. As Adorno argues: “For this reason, the distinction between light and
serious music is to be replaced by a different distinction which views both halves of the
musical globe equally from the perspective of alienation” (Adorno 2002, 395). The alien-
ation of music can be overcome only if production, distribution, and consumption in its
totality can be altered, which is possible only in the context of the economic and social struc-
ture as a whole. Put differently, there can be no change in the aesthetic sphere without
change in the economic and social sphere. Moreover, there is no room for aesthetic education
(Schiller) as a tool of fundamental social change. This means that for Adorno the idealist
appreciation of art as a path to social and cultural improvement is blocked.
Adorno’s assessment of contemporary music takes this insight into account. Musical
production as part of general production, Adorno tells us, is seeking a solution to its own
problems, either by focusing on the internal aspect of composition or by looking for a
different relationship to its audience and the larger social environment. Creating an ad hoc
typology, Adorno differentiates four ways of approaching the basic problem. The first type
concentrates exclusively on the intrinsic questions of composition without awareness of
and attention to the larger social issues on the outside. This is the case of modern music
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Peter Uwe Hohendahl
(Schoenberg and his school). The second type is very much aware of the moment of alien-
ation and tries to overcome it by going back to older forms and modes of composition. By
reproducing familiar forms of music it seeks to overcome the alienation without engaging
with the social structure. Musical neoclassicism and the celebration of musical folklore are
the examples of the second type. The third type, called the surrealist type of music, starts
out with the awareness not only of alienation but also with the insight that the neoclas-
sical or folkloristic solutions are bound to fail because they remain at the level of aesthetic
appearance. This type calls into question the false solution without striving for a new
answer. It is the music of Kurt Weill and Brecht that Adorno has in mind. Finally, the forth
type focuses on the social use of music, seeking to undercut alienation by anchoring music
in the actual social practices of classes, for example in the music of Hindemith (bourgeoisie)
and Kurt Eisler (working class). In this instance the social problematic is foregrounded at
the expense of the internal side, which means that the compositional technique stands in
the service of the social and political solution.
As one would expect, Adorno favors the first type as the most radical solution and is
most critical of the second type as a reactionary form of music that is aesthetically false,
trying to cover up the discrepancy between the social question and the aesthetic solution.
While he shows no deeper interest in Kurt Weill’s response, he tries to accommodate
certain forms of Gebrauchsmusik (utility music), for instance the works of Kurt Eisler. Given
the extreme social and political conditions of 1932 in Germany, that is, the immediate
threat to the survival of the Weimar Republic, Adorno’s emphasis tells us much about his
evaluation of the role of art. He appears to be less interested in a political approach to the
problem of alienation, favoring instead a solution that restricts itself to the intrinsic issue
of musical composition, namely the rigorous unfolding of the material in the artwork. At
the same time, he leaves no doubt that this approach cannot solve the problem of social
alienation. A lasting solution has to be brought about by other means.
It is common to blame Adorno’s aestheticism for this choice, but it is more apt to blame
his attachment to an economic model (complete domination of all forms of production by
the market) for this outcome. It is the logic of total reification, which he took over from
Lukács, that defines his response in 1932 and will influence his response after the Second
World War as well. Adorno remains a skeptic when it comes to the political impact of art.
However, he insists on and underscores the social relevance of the artwork as a moment of
social critique through its internal structure alone. With respect to Schoenberg he states:
That Schoenberg’s solutions to technical problems are socially relevant in spite of their isola-
tion is proven by his replacement within all his works, in spite of and because of his own
expressive origins, of any private fortuitousness which might have been viewed quite correctly
as a type of anarchic musical production with an objective principle of order which is never
imposed on the material from the exterior, but rather extracted from the material itself and
brought into relationship with it by means of an historical process of rational transparence.
(Adorno 2002, 399)
It is Adorno’s own objectivism that moves him toward a sociological rather than a political
interpretation of art. The question of agency is left open, since neither the artist nor the
listener or reader is expected to confront the political crisis of 1932 directly. Unlike Weill or
Eisner, Adorno’s preferred paradigm, that is, Schoenberg, is exclusively concerned with
the demands of the musical material. This means that Adorno’s sociology of music has
primarily a critical function, its task is to lay open those pathways that are no longer avail-
able, including the belief in the possibility of a proletarian breakthrough, since here,
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according to Adorno, the proximity of the music to the audience, its function as a tool for
the production of a proletarian Gemeinschaft (community), inhibits the radical development
of the material that an advanced consciousness of the social conditions demands. As
Adorno argues, the results of the immanent aesthetic evolution of the last 50 years cannot
simply be disregarded in order to find a suitable musical language for the political struggle.
On the other hand, Adorno is realistic enough to admit that the experiments of the Vienna
School are not suitable for a political project.
What Adorno presents in 1932 is a bold statement that outlines a new model of a soci-
ology of music. It borrows its conceptual framework from History and Class Consciousness,
focusing primarily on the aspect of reification and alienation under the condition of
monopoly capitalism. It is Adorno’s conviction that all significant aspects of the musical
artwork can be developed out of a small set of fundamental economic and social cate-
gories. It depends on the thorough grasp of a socio‐economic process that guides the
understanding of the aesthetic process, that is, the internal development of the musical
material. They are only two sides of the same whole. In Adorno’s theory the two strands of
the argument, namely the logic of modern capitalism and the immanent process of
aesthetic production, are intertwined without being identical. This is the reason why
Adorno can insist on the autonomy of the authentic artwork and simultaneously under-
scores the social determination of music in general. The abstract character of this model is
obvious. Whether it leads to fruitful interpretations of concrete situations and individual
artworks is another question. Adorno’s critical interest in the music of Richard Wagner for
instance, first made public in an essay in 1939 (Adorno 1939), significantly deviates from
the 1932 model by focusing, among other things, on the social and psychological situation
of the artist, using these insights as a tool for the critique of Wagner’s music.
3. Postwar Revisions
When Adorno returned to the question of a sociologically informed theory of art in the late
1950s the political and social landscape had significantly changed. Adorno found himself in
the role of a faculty member at the University of Frankfurt, that is, as part of the social and
intellectual establishment of the early Federal Republic. The fast and powerful economic
recovery of West Germany had resulted in a stable and liberal political regime, far removed
from the crisis of the early 1930s. Now Adorno is confronted with a rather conservative
intellectual and cultural environment in which radical theories, among them Marxism, are
pushed to the margins. Under these circumstances, the task of theorizing the relationship
between art and society calls for a different rhetoric and strategy. Adorno’s much quoted
essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft) takes up this task by
using the example of lyrical poetry, that is, a genre that seems to negate the very possibility
of a sociological approach. Adorno deliberately addresses a conservative audience that,
under the influence of a critic such as Emil Staiger, is inclined to treat the mere question of a
sociological approach to poetry as a violation of proper literary criticism. Of course, Adorno
is aware that the so‐called werkimmanente Methode (work‐immanent procedure) that domi-
nated postwar academic criticism rejected the very notion of a social impact on the artwork.
Taking this position into account, he reintroduces the old question in a new key. Instead of
establishing a set of social categories as a frame for a sociological theory, Adorno begins by
offering tentative thoughts about the kind of theory that would be required in order to do
justice to the task at hand. Such a theory would have to move from the artwork out instead
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of framing the poem from the outside. Moreover, it would be expected to deal with the
intricate individual moments of the poem instead of using abstract concepts. In short,
Adorno insists on a hermeneutic approach; therefore a close reading of the poem is the only
acceptable path to a sociological theory. In keeping with this approach, he introduces three
individual poems in order to make his case. By explicating poems of Goethe, Eduard Mörike,
and Stefan George, paying attention to the details of the text, Adorno seeks to overcome the
resistance of his audience toward sociological concepts. The close readings are used strategi-
cally to demonstrate the proximity of Adorno’s own method to that of the conservative
critics of the time. However, there is more involved than adaptation. In 1957 Adorno is ready
to confront a crucial question: How can we perform sociological studies that remain truthful
to the aesthetic aspect of the artwork? Put differently, how can we overcome the gap between
the concrete work/text and the abstract conceptual frame? As Adorno states: “The lyric work
hopes to attain universality through unrestrained individuation. The danger peculiar to the
lyric, however, lies in the fact that its principle of individuation never guarantees something
binding and authentic will be produced” (Adorno 1991, 38).
Still, the essay does not withdraw from strong theoretical claims. Thus Adorno states:
“The universality of lyric’s substance, however, is social in nature. Only one who hears the
voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what the poem is saying”
(Adorno 1991, 38). The claim that the social content of the poem is a fortiori socially
determined presupposes a universally valid relationship between poems and society. At the
same time, Adorno acknowledges the need for a more concrete inquiry and demands, “to
inquire concretely into its social content and not content itself with a vague feeling of
something universal and inclusive” (Adorno 1991, 38). He shifts the mode of thinking
from the abstract concept to the level of method, specifically to the level of procedure:
Sociology of literature can succeed only when it avoids the pitfalls of abstract extrinsic
thinking, namely the imposition of concepts on the artwork.
A comparison with the 1932 essay makes the shift very clear. Instead of beginning with
an explicit and firm conceptual framework, now Adorno suggests a tentative framework,
although posited in abstract terms – it is in fact more vague than 1932 – that can be filled
and modified through close readings of individual poems. Nonetheless, before he ever gets
to a close reading, Adorno proceeds to make basic methodological statements. He requires
immanence. Social concepts are not to be imposed on the artworks from the outside. He
insists on familiarity with both aspects: the structure of society as well as the structure of
the artwork. Moreover, he cautions the reader against a generalized concept of ideology
that has lost the distinction between truth and falsehood. Furthermore, before he ever gets
to a close reading, he emphasizes the rupture (Bruch) between the lyrical voice and the
world as a defining moment of poetry tout court. For Adorno the core of poetry is the artic-
ulation of alienation. However, the poem expresses this moment of alienation indirectly,
precisely by suggesting a wholeness that the social reality denies. “Their pure subjectivity,
the aspect of them that appears seamless and harmonious, bears witness to its opposite, to
suffering in an existence alien to the subject and to love for it as well” (Adorno 1991, 41).
He can do this because the language of the essay remains tentative, even when individual
formulations seem to claim universal validity. The form of the essay modifies the nature of
arguments, they become suggestive rather than definitive. This of course is especially true
when it comes to the interpretation of the poems. Completeness is not expected. The read-
ings are there to show what a genuine sociological approach has to offer.
The most extensive of the three interpretations is the reading of Mӧrike’s poem “On a
Walking Tour” (Auf einer Wanderung). What surprises is the fact that the reading initially
420
emphasizes the content rather than the formal elements. Adorno focuses the attention on
the utopian element contained in the image of the small town that the wanderer enters and
leaves again. By the standards of contemporary academic criticism Adorno’s approach
lacks formal rigor. He points to the choice of words and the free rhythm without carrying
out a systematic analysis, as Emil Staiger or Wolfgang Kayser would have done. Turning to
the question of an appropriate sociological interpretation of the poem, Adorno uses familiar
categories. He points to the impact of the market that mediates all human relations and
contrasts the significance of the social facts with the response of German idealism, which
stipulates the universal rule of humanism without regard to the power of the capitalist
market and counts on the reconciliation of the existing contradiction in the sphere of the
spirit. According to Adorno, Mörike’s poem owes its authenticity to an idealist position,
although gently modified to accommodate the altered social conditions of a post‐Hegelian
generation. “The social force of Mörike’s genius, however, consists in the fact that he
combined the two experiences – that of the classicistic elevated style and that of the romantic
private miniature – and that in doing so he recognized the limits of both possibilities and
balanced them against one another with incomparable tact” (Adorno 1991, 49f.).
Obviously, Adorno’s reading of the Mörike poem owes its force to its historico‐
philosophical perspective rather than a purely formal analysis. The latter is more suggested
than carried out in earnest. While Adorno makes good on his demand that the artwork
rather than the author should be at the center of the reading, there is a noticeable shift
between 1932 and 1957. Now the key concepts are borrowed from the sphere of philos-
ophy, while the economic language, although still present, is less central. In other words,
the later Adorno is closer to The Theory of the Novel than to History and Class Consciousness.
In this context the task of an advanced sociology of literature is best described by Adorno’s
metaphor of the sundial of history. The artwork is seen as a sundial that marks historical
time with greater precision than empirical historiography. Differently put, the authentic
poem has a deeper and more lasting meaning than historical facts. Adorno is very much
aware of the boldness of this position, which might well infuriate historians and sociolo-
gists. Theoretically he relies on the identity of the lyrical voice (das lyrische Ich) with the
historical subject, which is more than the individual subject of the author or the reader. It
is this critical difference that Adorno stresses in his commentary on George’s poem “In the
Winds‐Weaving” (In windes weben). Assuming a state of almost complete social reification
around 1900, Adorno claims an extreme situation for the subject: “Instead, the subject
has to step outside itself by keeping quiet about itself ” (Adorno 1991, 52) and turns into
pure language, a language that stands in sharp contrast to the depraved language of com-
modified communication. Thus poetic language stands in for a state of being that should
have been but was never realized.
Taken as a whole, the essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” continues some of Adorno’s
theoretical preoccupations, among them the emphasis on the immanence of the procedure,
the focus on the artwork rather than the author or the audience. At the same time, it is char-
acterized by significant shifts. The most obvious and important concerns the theoretical
model. In 1957 Adorno presents a more tentative approach, dropping the dogmatic
conceptual framework of 1932 in favor of individual readings while retaining the notion of
deeper relationship between the individual artwork and the socio‐historical process. However,
the idea of an economic determination has morphed into a more Hegelian language without
openly rejecting the earlier Marxist commitment. In this respect the 1958 essay “Some Ideas
on the Sociology of Music” (Ideen zur Musiksoziologie) presents a similar outlook. It aims at
outlining a form of sociology of music that transcends the empiricist agenda.
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Unlike the “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” “Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music” addresses
a professional audience, articulating from the outset a theoretical position in strong terms.
Adorno sees himself in sharp conceptual and methodological opposition to the mainstream
of contemporary sociology of music. Thus he insists on the special character of his own posi-
tion in terms of approach and goal. He rejects the idea that sociology of music can be treated
as an invariant discipline and opposes the notion that the social aspect of music is something
that can be separated from the work and therefore examined by specialized disciplines dealing
with questions of listening or problems of the social composition of the audience. Both of
these topics are important to Adorno as well but he insists that they have to be understood as
part of a larger and more complex task. The sociology of music, he tells us, examines the rela-
tionship between music and the totality of the social world. Moreover, this relationship is
perceived as historically in flux, demanding therefore a flexible methodology that does justice
to the historical process, a process that defines both the production of music and musicolog-
ical analysis. And with great force he restates that this agenda aims at the truth content of
the music. This means: “The social theory of music implies its critique” (Adorno 1999, 2). In
brief, Adorno denies the very possibility of a purely descriptive procedure that attaches itself
to commercial musical activities. Instead, he calls for a refinement of the formal‐analytical
method, since only the close examination of the technical categories will open up the spiritual
content (geistiger Gehalt) of the artwork. This call deemphasizes questions of distribution and
consumption as less relevant, foregrounding production instead as the critical aspect that
determines the aesthetic and historical significance of a composition. However, the concept
of production, borrowed from the economic sphere, comes under critical scrutiny. We can
use the concept of production, Adorno tells us, with regard to music only for the modern age,
that is, music composed after 1600 when the moment of production was separated from
other moments of music. More specifically, Adorno insists that the act of musical composi-
tion has to be seen in the context of the general production of commodities for the market,
but at the same time as clearly distinguished from the economic sphere. Invoking the logic of
die Sache (Adorno 1999, 8), Adorno highlights the moment of autonomy that sets the pro-
duction of music apart from the mere production of commodities. At the same time, the
production of music is never quite exempt from the expectations of the market, creating a
tension that “is one of the most fundamental features of musical production” (Adorno 1999,
8). While Adorno argued in 1932 that the state of complete commodification and reification
caused the fundamental crisis of music production, in 1958 he blames the administrative
forces as the cause of the crisis. Administrative culture undermines the freedom of expres-
sion, which was still preserved under the condition of a liberal or even late capitalist market:
“Only in our day, when the entire culture of music appears increasingly to have been taken
over by administration, does that freedom seem to have been abrogated” (Adorno 1999, 8).
In the postwar years under the rule of administered culture even the music of the 1920s has
aged and lost its former expressive radicalism.
Still, these general insights are clearly insufficient for a definition of a future sociology
of music. Restating that authentic music transcends the social conditions (die Gesellschaft)
of its time by expressing the very social contradictions, thereby anticipating future recon-
ciliation, remains at a highly abstract level without much needed concrete suggestions for
a viable practice. As one would expect, studies that seek to connect musical compositions
with specific classes or individual interests are initially rejected out of hand. Yet admitting
the complexity of the task, Adorno later distinguishes between several aspects. He allows a
broad assessment of music in terms of class affiliation, for instance the proximity of
Mendelssohn and the early liberal bourgeoisie or Richard Strauss and the later more
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owerful industrial bourgeoisie. However, greater emphasis is placed on the process of the
p
immanent musical development. This aspect calls, in Adorno’s words, for a kind of
Geistesgeschichte of music, comparable to the history of philosophy (Adorno 1999, 11).
Here he obviously returns to ideas articulated already in 1932. The social moment is to be
found in the structure of the work itself. The proposed critical concept is that of “the
integrated mode of composition” (kompositorische Stimmigkeit) (Adorno 1999, 11), a con-
cept that speaks equally to the aesthetic value and the social status of the artwork. Invoking
the Leibnizian concept of the monad, Adorno suggests that there is a correspondence
between musical form and social structure, independent of influences.
This argument leaves two open questions. First, how can we determine the exact corre-
lation between the internal technical side of a composition and its external social aspect?
Put differently, how can a specific technical moment of the artwork be interpreted in socio-
logical terms? Second, how can we be certain that the two strands, the musical and the
social, are in sync? With respect to the second question, Adorno is aware that there are
musical styles that are the result of consumer interest rather than the outcome of an
internal logic. In his opinion, the so‐called galante music of the eighteenth century was not
the result of an internal musical development but the response to a specific bourgeois
consumer interest. This answer opens up additional questions: What are the social reasons
for the tension between the taste of the early bourgeoisie and the logical development of the
musical material? Moreover, in order to interpret the social history of eighteenth‐century
music, Adorno is forced to introduce the category of taste (Geschmack), which he meant to
eliminate from a rigorous methodology. Similarly, the rise of light music in the twentieth
century in the context of what Adorno calls the culture industry complicates the task of a
rigorous sociology of music, since it undermines the logic of the intrinsic development of
the musical material. This kind of music can be analyzed and judged only in terms of its
immediate social function, that is, the entertainment of the masses. As much as Adorno
would like to limit the scope of sociological analysis to the production of advanced music,
the reality of highly diverse musical phenomena actually calls for a broader approach.
When we look at Adorno’s practice, we realize that he did respond to this heterogeneous
complexity. His sociological essays cover topics as diverse as the public status of music, the
role of public opinion and public criticism, the relationship between music and nationalism,
and the function of popular music (Adorno 1976). Thus Adorno, when focused on specific
problems, disregards his own methodological demand for a strictly immanent procedure. In
these instances the intrinsic procedure is replaced by a commodity‐based analysis within
the context of administered culture. Even in the case of his 1952 Richard Wagner study
(Adorno 1981) Adorno moves back and forth between different methodological approaches,
a fact that exposed him to criticism, not only from the Wagner community but also from
musicologists who questioned the consistency of Adorno’s interpretation (Klein 2011).
4. Adorno’s Late Work: Aesthetic Theory
In Aesthetic Theory (1970) Adorno returns to his core issues; he raises familiar questions,
for instance the status of autonomous art in the twentieth century, the mediation of art
and society, and the connection between production and reception of art. While the impact
of the culture industry on the production and reception of popular art is mentioned, these
issues do not stand at the center of Adorno’s discussion. Instead, the late work emphasizes
the fate of modern art in advanced capitalist societies, the moment of production as well as
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Peter Uwe Hohendahl
the aspect of reception and consumption. However, in this instance the discourse moves
to a highly abstract theoretical level, clearly excluding a broader audience. Adorno’s
language pushes the articulation of the aesthetic and social dialectic to its limits.
In Aesthetic Theory the concept of reification is used broadly to define the human situation
under the conditions of corporate capitalism. But it is also applied to define the conditions of
aesthetic production and consumption. Producers and consumers alike are confronted with a
fundamental transformation of the creative process and the aesthetic experience. The idea of
natural beauty, for instance, once the cherished opposition to the artificial Baroque garden, has
morphed into the perfect picture of nature offered by the tourist industry, which makes natural
beauty available as part of a commodity exchange (Adorno 1997, 68). As Adorno points out,
the model of industrial production and consumption has deeply influenced the aesthetic sphere
as well. This process is by no means limited to mass‐produced popular art, it equally concerns
the fate of high culture and the specific character of the avant‐garde. The subversive force of
radical aesthetic experiments, Adorno argues, responds to the impact of reification that has
changed the nature of artistic traditions. The avant‐garde of the early twentieth century still
believed that it could ultimately overcome social reification by aesthetic and political means,
only to find out at a later stage that these hopes could be neutralized by the system: “The shadow
of art’s autarchic radicalism is its harmlessness: Absolute color compositions verge on wall-
paper patterns” (Adorno 1997, 29). Thus Adorno, examining the present situation of radical
aesthetic experiments, comes to the conclusion that they cannot escape reification. It occurs,
against the intentions of the artist, precisely in the radical move of unmasking the semblance
of beauty that the traditional artwork offers. As Adorno notes, the refusal to accommodate
beauty also implies a moment of regression, the reduction of the artwork to crude materiality,
that is, a moment of reification that the artist seeks to overcome (Adorno 1997, 103). In short,
in the late work reification is the inescapable fate of modern art, despite the fact that radical art
movements have sought to escape the conditions of their own existence.
While the centrality of the capitalist market for the determination of all social relations is
upheld in Aesthetic Theory, in the last chapter the powerful argument of a general reification
of modern art is less evident. Instead, we observe a conceptual shift. Now Adorno foregrounds
the extreme situation of the artwork under conditions of advanced capitalism, he emphasizes
the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy. As Adorno notes, “Artworks are able to appro-
priate their heterogeneous element … Nevertheless, art’s autonomy, wrestled painfully from
society as well as socially derived from in itself, has the potential of reversing into heteronomy”
(Adorno 1997, 238). The autonomy of art, which idealist aesthetic theory defines as an a
priori status of the authentic artwork, is for Adorno, under the conditions of capitalism,
always a struggle against the pressure of adverse social forces that potentially threaten its
autonomous status. Therefore art is always in danger of falling below the level of its own
standard. As Adorno points out, the very claim that art must not serve extrinsic functions,
propagated in the slogan l’art pour l’art, becomes an element of marketing already around
1900. It stands for a false reconciliation that Adorno’s theory rejects. In fact, Adorno’s belief
in the revolutionary potential of the autonomous, radical artwork has become weaker
because he recognizes the growing impact of a system of cultural administration that
neutralizes the radical artwork by celebrating its aesthetic value and praising its benevolent
social function. Although Adorno occasionally still attacks the stubborn ignorance of the
bourgeois audience when faced with radical modern art, after the Second World War the
more serious danger is the smooth incorporation of advanced art into a society that has
developed social institutions capable of easily absorbing the negativity of the radical artwork.
Adorno’s irritation turns against seemingly positive forms of reception in which a completely
424
administered world can effortlessly absorb even the most advanced artwork by giving it a
safe place. The “topographical eye” (Adorno 1997, 250) of the trained administrator
examines not only the aesthetic quality of art but also decides its social function by turning
the aesthetic resistance of the artwork into its useful social contribution. At the same time,
Adorno disagrees with those, like the radical students of the 1960s, who believe that only
the complete abolition of art can solve the problem of politically unreliable art.
Nonetheless, Adorno holds on to fundamental concepts of his theoretical model when
he underscores the correspondence between social and aesthetic processes, external and
internal developments, articulated in the Leibnizian concept of the windowless monad.
This allows him to conceive of mediation between the artwork and its social environment
without relying on a more traditional reflection model. In Marxist terms, the mediation
takes place both at the level of the forces of production and the relations of production
(social classes). “Social forces of production, as well as relations of production, return in
artworks as mere form divested of their facticity because artistic labor is social labor, more-
over, they are always the product of this labor” (Adorno 1997, 236). For Adorno the
impact of the relations of production can be seen primarily in the exposure of the artwork
to the inescapable commodification on the market rather than in the impact of a particular
class ideology, although he does not exclude this possibility. No artwork is considered as
entirely free of class‐based ideological elements. Adorno uses the example of Beethoven’s
symphonies to demonstrate this phenomenon (Adorno 1997, 241).
But for Adorno it is ultimately commodification that determines modern aesthetic pro-
duction and reception tout court. This is especially the case in the twentieth century under
the conditions of advanced corporate capitalism. As we have seen, according to Adorno,
even art’s protest through negation of the existing relations of production can be incorpo-
rated and thereby neutralized. Especially when examining popular culture, Adorno intro-
duces the concept of the culture industry to account for the almost complete commodification
of distribution and consumption. The submission of aesthetic production, notably in the
arena of music, results in what Adorno terms the Entkunstung of art (Adorno 1997, 16),
that is, the direct imposition of the methods of industrial production on the aesthetic sphere.
Hence Adorno anticipates the complete assimilation and calculability of aesthetic produc-
tion, distribution, and consumption in the context of corporate business. This mode of
Entkunstung (de‐aesthetization) implies not only the loss of aesthetic autonomy but also the
loss of the authentic artwork. It becomes a final stage where the (isolated and weak)
individual takes its cues from the norms and practices of the culture industry. In short,
under the conditions of late corporate capitalism the aesthetic sphere has lost its former
progressive potential; in Adorno’s eyes it has become a nightmare. This sense of doom
extends into the sphere of high culture, since the structure of administered culture imposes
itself with equal force on the aesthetic tradition and the avant‐garde.
Not surprisingly therefore, Adorno’s assessment of the political use and impact of art
becomes more skeptical. As he points out, while during the early part of the twentieth
century, radical aesthetic and radical political movements were linked and reenforced each
other, already during the 1930s, under Stalinism and fascism, the aesthetic avant‐garde
was cut off from the political sphere. In fact radical aesthetic doctrines in their fierce
opposition to common‐sense middle class values can also be placed into a conservative or
even far‐right and fascist context. In Aesthetic Theory the names of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
stand in for this trend (Adorno 1997, 254). But unlike Lukács, Adorno never withdraws
his support from the avant‐garde. Rather, in his late work he questions the link between art
and politics in more general terms. In the later 1960s, when Adorno was challenged by the
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student movement, this position led to a cautious alignment with more conservative
political groups that the early Adorno had attacked. As a result, in the early reception of
Aesthetic Theory during the 1970s moderate conservative voices, underscoring the notion
of autonomous art and questioning its politicization, played an important role, while the
radical Left invoked Benjamin as a revolutionary counterpoint.
References
Adorno, T.W. Rede über Lyrik du Gesellschaft, in Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, vol. 1, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp. 73–104.
Adorno, T.W. (1939/1940). Fragmente über Wagner. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8 ((1/2)): 1–47.
Adorno, T.W. (1976). Introduction to the Sociology of Music (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York: Seabury
Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1981). In Search of Wagner (trans. R. Livingston). London: National Library Board.
Adorno, T.W. (ed. R. Tiedemann) (1991). On lyric poetry and society. In: Notes to Literature, vol. 1
(trans. S.W. Nicholson), 37–54. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1997). Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Holub‐Kentor). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Adorno, T.W. (ed.) (1999). Some ideas on the sociology of music. In: Sound Figures (trans. R.
Livingston), 1–14. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2002). On the social situation of music. In: Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert), 391–433.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
Benjamin, W. (1977). The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. J. Osborne). London: National
Library Boardo.
Lukács, G. (1971). Theory of the Novel. A Historico‐Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic
Literature (trans. A. Bostock). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lukács, G. (1986). History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics (trans. R. Livingston).
Weber, M. (2015). Rational and social foundations of music. In: The Routledge Reader of the Sociology
of Music (eds. J. Shepherd and K. Devine). New York: Routledge.
Further Reading
Menke, C. (1998). The Sovereignty of Art. Negativity in Adorno and Derrida. Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press.
Pensky, M. (ed.) (1997). The Actuality of Adorno. Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Benzer, M. (2011). The Sociology of Theodor Adorno. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Gordon, Peter E. and Rehding, Alexander. 2016. Adorno and Music. Critical Variations. Special Issue
of New German Critique 129.
DeNora, T. (2003). After Adorno. Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Fuller, B.W. (2016). Adorno reading and writing sociology. European Journal of Social Theory 19 (3):
431–448.
Hammer, E. (2015). Adorno’s Modernism. Art, Experience, and Catastrophe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hohendahl, P.U. (2013). The Fleeting Promise of Art. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press.
Klein, R. (2011). Soziale vs. musikalische Kritik. Der Fall Wagner. In: Adorno Handbuch. Leben Werk
Wirkung (eds. R. Klein, J. Kreuzer and S. Müller‐Dohm), 96–109. Stuttgart: Metzler.
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27
Adorno, Music, and the Ineffable

MICHAEL GALLOPE
Adorno’s aesthetics turns on the ethical capacity of various works to resist the alienated
character of modern life. Among all the arts, for Adorno, music stands as exemplary. This
chapter has two aims: one will be to first explain how Adorno’s pronounced interest in
music was in part due to music’s perennial associations with ineffability; the second aim
will be to show how music’s ineffability comes to bear on the particulars of Adorno’s
writings on various composers and musical genres. The chapter’s ultimate goal will be to
reconstruct what I take to be the most instructive dimensions of Adorno as a listener of
music. In staging such a reconstruction, the chapter focuses particular attention on the
philosopher’s account of music’s ineffability in order to show how it is intimately linked to
his broader views of art, philosophy, and social change.
Adorno’s methods of listening range widely. In the central sections of this chapter, I
contend that Adorno develops two somewhat distinct dialectical modes. The first mode is
that of an attentive and knowledgeable listener who seeks to determine listening in a his-
torically exacting way. In this mode, Adorno projects a strong sense of confidence about
which musical techniques ought to be heard, and how one should hear them. Such an
exacting mode of listening tends to polarize music into the ethical techniques of resistant
modernists and the regressive tendencies of many others. This occurs most famously in
books like Philosophy of New Music (1946), in which Adorno relies on a Manichean dis-
tinction between the ethical (Schoenberg) and the regressive (Stravinsky), but it extends to
his writings on Beethoven, Wagner, popular music, jazz, and film music as well. Whether
the music at issue is ultimately judged to be ethical or regressive, the key attribute here is
Adorno’s formalist confidence about what the music is or is not doing.
I then explore in greater depth what I call “inconsistent listening,” an approach Adorno
demonstrates in his writings on Mahler and Berg. In these texts, Adorno maintains an
underlying conviction that something in the music resists the status quo, but he comes
across as a more sensitive listener, who is less sure about the exact techniques at hand and
is more responsive to the material inconsistency of musical sound. In this mode, Adorno is
at his most imaginative and open‐ended. He ventures rhapsodic prose about narratives,
characters, figures, imagery, affects, and music’s capacity to mysteriously “speak,” with
the aim of expressing an obscure utopian truth. In the process, he brings to life moments
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MICHAEL GALLOPE
of almost psychedelic uncertainty as to what exactly music presents to us with its sounding
forms. As a result, in this prose one can discern a multitude of listening strategies: plays of
recognition, non‐recognition, and even hallucination, surprising appeals to a subject’s
biography, physiognomy, or to vernacular dialects, and affirmations of the ephemerality of
music’s appearance. I would contend that this open‐ended mode of Adorno’s listening –
particularly exemplified in his stylized approach to writing about Mahler – might best fit
his claim that a critical philosophy, after Hegel, should think musically. After all, a measure
of indecision is arguably fuel for his dialectic, insofar as it facilitates a moment of reflection
that eludes the determining power of concepts.
1. Ineffable Utopias
In proceeding, it may be helpful to first summarize some basics of Adorno’s views of art.
Following Hegel and Marx, Adorno considers history an escapable temporal horizon for
human experience; likewise, all artworks must, first and foremost, be taken as inseparable
from this history. Adorno’s writings on art focus ethical and meditative energy on modern
works of art that are capable of resisting the reified, alienated, and terminally disastrous
trajectory of history. For Adorno, an ethically resistant artwork needs to exemplify its his-
torical position by nesting within its own forms fractured variants of past conventions in a
way that exhibits significant historical awareness. In doing so, an artwork can critique the
social and historical landscape of what exists. Its resultant critique is negative; it conveys a
resistant truth, a qualitative, non‐identical, and utopian disclosure. The work of the histor-
ically minded critic helps unearth this utopian truth, which can at best say “no” to the
existing state of the world, thus obliquely and obscurely pointing beyond it. This social and
technical dialectic provides a material grounding for Adorno’s critical interpretation of
artworks.
Ineffability is central to the way Adorno conceptualizes the negative potential of art. In
the face of social catastrophe, art’s power is nameless, non‐communicative, and without
instrumental purpose; by comparison, for Adorno, concepts and their intimate linkage
with language have been corrupted by a history of industry and instrumentality. In this
context, art’s power to resist works best when pressing at the limits of the referential and
conceptual orders of language. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno articulates the ineffability of
art’s utopian truth with an array of expressions. He says “The true language of art is
mute,” (Adorno 1997, 112) and that artworks in the modern world “are falling silent,”
(Adorno 1997, 286) and with something of a grand telos in mind, that “modern art … is
transformed into the expression of what no significative language can achieve” (Adorno
1997, 60). These formulations are paradoxical: They suggest language is necessary to art,
even as the utopian content of the artwork remains ineffable. But a perpetual tension bet-
ween the inescapability of language and the refusal of instrumental communication is key
to Adorno’s aesthetics. In his view, language is simultaneously “constituent of art and
its mortal enemy” (Adorno 1997, 112). In other words, the utopian content that art ulti-
mately conveys is inexpressible through language at the same time that language,
convention, and tradition are required for its existence.
This paradox – what I have described elsewhere as “a paradox of the ineffable” – is not
immediately legible when one looks up a dictionary definition of the word “ineffable”
(Gallope 2017, 42). In modern English, the ineffable simply denotes all that is “incapable
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ADORNO, MUSIC, AND THE INEFFABLE
of being expressed in words” (Merriam‐Webster 2018). Yet, in insisting that language is

constitutive of one’s effort to speak the unspeakable, Adorno stands in the company of a
group of modern philosophers (that includes Bloch and Jankélévitch) for whom ineffability
does not preclude or prohibit linguistic expression. For Adorno, a surplus of potential
meaning is central to the artwork, and thus, ineffability inspires a loquacious practice of
reflection and critique that bears affinities with apophatic reasoning. Along these lines,
Adorno writes that, the job of modern art is “making the mute eloquent” (Adorno 1997,
78) insofar as, paradoxically, its “muteness itself speaks” (Adorno 1997, 286).
For Adorno, this opaque, mute speech, an eloquent blankness, carries a specific social
and ethical meaning. A modern, ethical artwork can become a “cryptogram of the new” if
it negates the existing world by breaking from the alienated orders of language, concepts,
and Enlightenment reason. As he puts it: “A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse;
only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable:
Utopia” (Adorno 1997, 32). Such a dialectical and dynamic conception of the ineffable
comes alive in the form of an immanent critique, in which Adorno enjoins viewers, readers,
or listeners to understand way the “desperate effort” of an artwork fractures – and negates,
or makes mute – artistic conventions that are specific to various historical forms (Adorno
1997, 78). In instances when historical conventions are fractured, the artwork can be
understood to communicate something incommunicable, or express, with the remnants of
language‐like conventions, something that is itself non‐signifying. (Thus, in key writings
like Aesthetic Theory, Adorno tends to use the terms mute, non‐signifying, and non‐com-
munication in ways that overlap.)
Philosophically speaking, the ineffability of the artwork is thus not defined by the work’s
strict incapacity to express content, nor does he claim that the activity of speaking about
the work of art is impossible or futile. Adorno’s method cannot be squarely assigned to
either the capacities of the perceiving subject or the properties of the object. Rather, he
dialectically tacks back and forth between the subjective lens of listening, viewing, and
reading and the properties of historical objects or artworks. Neither should Adorno’s neg-
ative conception of art’s utopian truth be taken to exist in any transcendent sense, such
that its content would simply remain inaccessible to language and expression. While there
is to be sure some meaning in the artwork, thinking about this meaning as specific and
positive, yet simply beyond expression or description, assigns too much authority and
autonomy to the artwork and risks circumventing the centrality of negative reasoning in
Adorno’s method.
In fact, the way the ineffable content of artworks is revealed to listeners, viewers, and
readers is in practice quite obscure. Since the foundation of artworks is still language‐like
and conventional, utopian truth, can, for example, appear to us as a paradox or enigma
that unfolds temporally. Quite evocatively, Adorno describes the processual appearance of
this enigma in terms of living breath: “That artworks say something and in the same
breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language” (Adorno
1997, 120). By thinking of this paradox as a temporal experience, one can see more readily
how and why music has such exceptional status for Adorno. Exemplifying muteness, the
medium of musical sound is, most obviously, non‐semantic. But music is also an art form
that activates and even dramatizes the dimension of time; its appearance is difficult to
grasp because of the medium’s ephemerality. In both ways, it thus epitomizes the contra-
diction of a mute disclosure. Adorno writes, toying with the paradox: “What music says is
a proposition at once distinct and concealed …. Time and again it points to the fact that it
signifies something, something definite. Only the intention is always veiled” (Adorno
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MICHAEL GALLOPE
2002a, 114). As an elusive and ephemeral form devoid of explicit signs and recoverable
intentions, music is thus the most non‐communicative of the arts, which in turn makes it
an exceptionally powerful conveyor of utopian truth.
By comparison with language, as a medium, music is also less burdened by semantic
exactitude and its attendant capacity for social alienation. It has a non‐representational
looseness, a flexibility, or an inconsistency that gives it unique philosophical and ethical
affordances at the limits of conceptual reasoning. For Adorno, this difference is legible as a
question of social power. He elaborates:
In spoken language, social coercion and the sclerotic nature of convention have become so
powerful that they inexorably shackle even the insubordinate utterances of the individual. In
contrast, the language of music can at least draw strength from its own weakness – its lack of
precise definition. In other words, it can derive comfort from the idea that, unlike the language
of concepts, it can be meaningful without having either to obey blind dictates or to impose
them on others. (Adorno 1999, 176)
In another context, Adorno explores the philosophical significance of music’s fluidity. He

claims that music appears immediate in relationship to the unbounded qualities of the
absolute. In this instance, music appears immediate, but this appearance immediately
darkens and becomes inaccessible. Mediation is always there, even in music. In a distant
echo of Schopenhauer’s contention that music is an immediate copy of the will
(Schopenhauer 1969, 257), by comparison with words and images, for Adorno music
appears most immediate. In his essay, “Music, Language, and Composition,” Adorno
writes: “Signifying language would say the absolute in a mediated way, yet the absolute
escapes it in each of its intentions, which, in the end, are left behind, as finite. Music
reaches the absolute immediately, but in the same instant it darkens, as when a strong light
blinds the eye, which can no longer see things that are quite visible” (Adorno 2002a, 116).
And in Aesthetic Theory he describes this aporetic encounter similarly: “If one seeks to get
a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears. Of all the arts, music is the prototypical example
of this: It is at once completely enigmatic and totally evident” (Adorno 1997, 122).
The appearance of music’s immediacy is perplexing in a way that is comparable to the
mysteriously immaterial and ephemeral image of a rainbow. If a sign does its work by
pointing to its referent, thus disclosing meaning, in music, one finds, at the core of its
sounding forms, an empty hallucination, strangely evasive to the work of comprehension
and instrumental reason. In “On the Relationship of Philosophy and Music” Adorno
writes: “Music gazes at its listener with empty eyes, and the more deeply one immerses one-
self in it, the more incomprehensible its ultimate purpose becomes, until one learns that
the answer, if such is possible, does not lie in contemplation, but in interpretation …”
(Adorno 2002b, 139). At the end of this passage, in placing an emphasis on interpreta-
tion, Adorno actually pivots away from language yet again. For by interpretation, Adorno
does not mean to suggest the production of meaning. If literary interpretation is founda-
tionally imaginative and linguistic, by contrast, musical interpretation is foundationally
physical. To interpret a piece of music is to stage an action, to physically play it. This has
definitional weight for what music is. In this essay, Adorno continues: “In music, what is at
stake is not meaning, but gestures. To the extent that music is language, it is, like notation
in music history, a language sedimented from gestures. It is not possible to ask music what
it conveys as its meaning; rather, music has as its theme the question, How can gestures be
made eternal?” (Adorno 2002b, 139).
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2. Exact Listening
Music’s physical gestures need to be sculpted into forms that endure. Yet how, in Adorno’s
view, does a work of music endure? This is where the intellect plays a crucial mediating
role, and the paradox of language serving as the basis of a nonlinguistic medium returns.
In order for us to grasp the utopian significance of a piece of music, one must apprehend
its clarity of form with the appropriate kind of knowledge. The composition of Western
concert music is itself highly disciplined by a history of such knowledge: Of strict, rule‐
bound, rationalized procedures, particularly in the domains of counterpoint, harmonic
syntax, and large‐scale musical form. In his exacting immanent critiques, Adorno priori-
tizes listening to these cognitively organized aspects of musical composition, even as he
still, at a more general level, prizes the medium for its non‐signifying, non‐communicative
character. In his view, without the formal cognition of historical tradition, one risks pro-
ducing (or listening to) a dangerously inconsistent form of the ineffable.
At the same time, Adorno’s dialectical and historicist conception of the ineffability of
music should be carefully distinguished from the formalist principle of absolute music, which
states that music has no content or that it is a pure form devoid of meaning, context, or emo-
tional significance, a notion associated in Western concert music with instrumental music
lacking text (Bonds 2014). Adorno is a formalist of sorts, but he is a formalist precisely
insofar as he understands the forms of art to retain social meaning as historically sedimented
conventions. Thus, though Adorno recognizes the emergence of absolute music as a fact of
music history, his strong emphasis on the historicity of musical form would place him at a
remove from, say, Eduard Hanslick’s conservative and normative conception of music’s “ton-
ally moving forms” (Hanslick 2018). Adorno would consider absolute music as merely one,
albeit influential, development among many in the history of musical techniques.
Thus, far from a partisan of absolute music, Adorno’s formalism preserves a certain
kind of meaning precisely insofar as a musical work bears intellectual, structural, and
formal traces of its history. In “The Criteria of New Music,” Adorno explains:
To cut the connecting thread [with tradition] completely would signal the end of any meaning.
So what is needed is the most extreme sublimation of those categories, the most absolute
clarity about the changes they undergo in the course of the composition. They should no more
be conserved than thrown overboard, but instead should be transformed to the point where
they come into agreement with the new language of music in the force field of the works.
(Adorno 1999, 160)
This kind of “clarity” is exemplified by an exacting listening strategy: Attending to a

temporality where one’s mind is effectively in the structure of a piece; the listener needs to
master the temporal extension of a musical work in its totality. Exact listening does not do
away with sensory immediacy, but such apprehension of a work must be mediated by
thought. This is listening at its most structural. As Adorno puts it in Aesthetic Theory: “In
all its genres, art is pervaded by intellective elements” (Adorno 1997, 89). Grasping such
elements requires a vigilant cognition of the whole. In emphasizing so strongly the way a
listener ought to attend to the immanent forms of the musical work, Adorno reveals that
his conception of music’s ineffability is far more complex than a simple claim that the
work’s meaning cannot be exhausted. The historical forms in the work bear their own con-
straints. Thus, because of its dependence on specific historical conventions (“the force field
of the works”), the Adornian artwork in fact reins in the proliferation of meanings.
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MICHAEL GALLOPE
In his study of Hegel, Adorno writes that, in listening to Beethoven: “One has to know a
whole movement and be aware retrospectively at every moment of what has come before”
(Adorno 1993, 136). This mode of listening reflects knowledge of the artwork as a monad
that contains a certain Erkenntnischarakter, or character‐as‐knowledge, and forms the
backbone of many of Adorno’s best‐known musical writings. It lies behind his interest in
the large‐scale deformation of sonata form in late Beethoven, the fracturing of tonal har-
mony in Wagner, Mahler, and Schoenberg, and Berg, and the return of counterpoint in the
twelve‐tone method.
Adorno’s fragmentary writings on Beethoven stand as exemplary of this mode of
listening. For Adorno, Beethoven’s oeuvre represents some of the strongest and most
developed correlations between music, language, and philosophy; Adorno in fact consid-
ered bestowing his unfinished study with the grand title “The Philosophy of Music,” while
proposing that the book would “establish the relation of music to conceptual logic”
(Adorno 1998a, 11). Paralleling key elements of Hegel’s dialectic, Adorno contends that,
in his exemplary development of tonal language, Beethoven’s musical forms unfold with
their own logic through which “seemingly antithetical motifs” ultimately “contradict and
cancel one another, yet are preserved on a higher level within the whole” (Adorno 1998a,
13). For example, Beethoven’s contrasting sonata themes culminate in a recapitulation, a
synthesis that comes to represent in somewhat ideological form “the identity of the non‐
identical” (Adorno 1998a, 17). Such formal workings have developed social significance
for Adorno precisely insofar they become independent from social function, and attain the
status of autonomous, language‐like forms. (As many have noted, the purported autonomy
of art is a salient conceit in European concert music around 1800 [Attali 1985; Goehr
1992].) The composer’s minimal motifs unfold through a “dynamically unfolding totality”
(Adorno 1998a, 43) that exemplifies both the newfound autonomy of the bourgeois sub-
ject and the “bustle” of alienated labor at the dawn of the industrial revolution (Adorno
1998a, 41). If these meanings exemplify key dimensions of modern bourgeois society, in
Beethoven’s late period, the composer’s language – as well as its social meaning – fore-
shadows a certain crisis of subjective expression, or a “late style.” Adorno writes, with
respect to late Beethoven: “in it nothing is immediate, everything is refracted, significant,
withdrawn from appearance and in a sense antithetical to it …” (Adorno 1998a, 136).
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer give exact listening an allegorical
genesis through an interpretation of Odysseus’s dramatic ordeal of sailing past the Sirens.
The Sirens represent an alluring, mythical, and primitive sensuality; they promise Odysseus
pleasure in a way that reminds him of an idyllic past while threatening his cultivated sense
of self‐discipline. Knowing the lethal threat presented by their allure (a shipwreck on
jagged rocks at their shores), Odysseus decides to have himself tied to the mast of the ship
so he can hear their song while his crewmates continue to row the ship, with earplugs in.
In Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading, Odysseus’ solution of bondage, masochism, and
earplugs exemplifies a leitmotif of modern human history: the social discipline of the sub-
ject and their reliance on alienated labor. He and his crew are bound by the fetters of the
mast and rope, and deafened by the beeswax in their ears. Through discipline, Odysseus
manages to conquer and enjoy pleasure while avoiding death.
The hero, in this way, exemplifies the modern listener, subject, or viewer of a work of
art. The physical devices are allegorical stand‐ins for the developed cognitive techniques of
the intellect. Such discipline extends to all human beings on the ship, and it is distributed
hierarchically; Odysseus’ comrades row in deaf ignorance, beneath the cloak of ideology,
as alienated cogs in the machine. Meanwhile, Odysseus, the philosopher king or
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“landowner,” stands tall and experiences the contradictions of disciplined aesthetics in all
their glory. And with a brilliant dialectical twist, the authors describe Odysseus’ desperate
cry for sensuous satisfaction (release me!) as reborn into a domesticated gesture of concert
life: “[The Sirens’] lure is neutralized as a mere object of contemplation, as art. The fettered
man listens to a concert, as immobilized as audiences later, and his enthusiastic call for
liberation goes unheard as applause. In this way the enjoyment of art and manual work
diverge as the primeval world is left behind” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 27). This
complex dialectical scene is paradigmatic of Adorno’s conception of a modern listener. In
Adorno’s writings on aesthetics, no claim is more common than the one stating that all
subjective expression must be mediated by the objectivity of some kind of technique. From
late Beethoven through the formally integrated atonality ushered in by Schoenberg, Berg,
and Webern, the use and cognition of historical techniques becomes necessary for a
utopian fracture in music. Adorno incessantly reminds readers, listeners, viewers, and
thinkers of the ethical value of listening to music through an intertwined conception of
formalism and historicism. The reading of the Sirens serves as a reminder that these medi-
ators are predicated upon a foundational alienation, a material substrate of bondage, of
dispossessed human labor.
To eschew these mediations is to surrender to the regressive power of capitalism and
fascism. Such surrender is exemplified by musical genres that are fatally structured by a
de‐historicized fetishism, an administered sensuality, or a vulgarized mimesis driven by
the roaring business of the cultural industry. This music is disciplined, but by the wrong
system – the profit‐motive – which effectively short‐circuits the work of the historically
conscious intellect. Popular genres are subject to “pseudo‐individuation” by exploiting
what Adorno calls “secondary” musical techniques, as when producers refine elements
of songs with the primary aim of selling records (Adorno 2005a). In jazz, Adorno hears
syncopations as fake problems in search of phony solutions, still dominated by clichéd
forms and overarching 8‐bar phrases (Adorno 2002e, 430). Associated listening strat-
egies are similarly regressive; they are built upon the consumption of merely “culinary”
delights that remain irreconcilable with Adorno’s formalism. He writes that such “isolated
moments of enjoyment prove incompatible with the immanent constitution of the work
of art” (Adorno 2002c, 291). With respect to jazz and race, Adorno categorically rejects
any sense that Afro‐diasporic musical innovation embodies social resistance; in his view,
black musical forms are heard as merely regressive products of histories of slavery and
servitude (Adorno 2002d, 477). Listeners are in turn subject to a dangerous dose of dis-
traction, a “mass deception” in which, following Marx’s analysis of the commodity fetish,
consumers worship their musical purchases principally for their exchange‐value. The
popularization of Western concert music is a case in point. As Adorno puts it, with respect
to Toscanini’s commercially successful popularization of orchestral music: “The consumer
is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini
concert” (Adorno 2002c, 296). In all cases, the freedom to choose becomes false; the
subject’s destiny is fatal; it leads “to the liquidation of the individual” (Adorno 2002c,
293) or at best, one individual’s freedom is preserved while the menu of choices is stan-
dardized (Adorno 2005a).
There are also corollaries to such regressive listening within the composition of Western
concert music. In In Search of Wagner, Adorno describes Wagner’s music dramas as indulging
in vulgar phantasmagorias, a theater of reified images and impressions. In attempting to
unify the disparate elements of opera as a genre, Wagner transformed opera into a closed
spectacle that overpowered any utopian potential of the musical material. In the course of
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his critique, Adorno relates many of the composer’s innovative compositional techniques to
aspects of Marx’s commodity fetish. Wagner’s invisible orchestra conceals the underlying
division of labor. The composer’s leitmotifs become akin to commodities. Adorno describes
dissonant sonorities as saturating his work to the point of becoming “somehow bland and
static” (Adorno 2005b, 54). In other passages he shows how continuous melodies dissolve
one’s ability to focus on motives as language‐like units, how a spectrum of orchestral tim-
bres presage the profit‐driven techniques of the culture industry, and argues at length that
Wagner’s conceit of a Gesamtkunstwerk is little more than a proto‐cinematic technology
that robs music of anything beyond crude symbolisms.
Similarly, Stravinsky shares with Wagner an interest in making “the aconceptual lan-
guage of music an organ of the preindividual” (Adorno 2006, 123–124). But, unlike
Wagner, Stravinsky is a high modern primitivist with a cynical view of human history and
a penchant for fascism. In the first half of Philosophy of New Music, Adorno extolls
Schoenberg’s early work in atonality, and credits him for fracturing the human subject
dialectically, thus preserving the expressive conceits of Romanticism, while at the same
time revealing the exhausted nature of conventional musical techniques. In the second
half, he turns to a critique of Stravinsky largely through the prism of three early works:
Petrushka (1910–1911), Rite of Spring (1913), and A Soldier’s Tale (1918). In Adorno’s
view, Stravinsky’s music venerates the aimless instincts of the collective in a way that
annihilates the coordinates of the human subject altogether. The composer wants “to
master regression through discipline,” but it is a false discipline that offers listeners compo-
sitions in which various rhythmic asymmetries and jarring atonal chords show little
organic linkage to any kind of formal totality of themes and motives. The result may super-
ficially appear to be critical of modernity insofar as it shocks us with the savagery of
ancient, pre‐modern rituals, but the shock is little more than a vulgar, infantile realism;
the music ultimately repudiates the powers of the subject. It is an affirmation of tribalism;
its social meaning is “that of progress toward a negative absence of history, toward a new
hierarchically rigid order” (Adorno 2006, 144).
All of the above music that he critiques is in effect a thought‐out refusal – a foil – of all
that he considers to be ethical, resistant, or utopian. Or we might say, the way Adorno lis-
tens to Stravinsky, Wagner, jazz, and popular music is exact in its uncompromising nega-
tivity. In this way, intellectually-minded listening to late Beethoven and blanket
condemnation of the jitterbug are two facets of Adorno’s exacting method. To be sure,
when accounting for listening in the third person, particularly in works such as Introduction
to the Sociology of Music (1976), Adorno opposes structural and fetishistic approaches to
listening. But when one considers Adorno himself as a listener, the positive and negative
judgments are in many ways mutually dependent; an “exacting” version of Adorno deter-
mines with confidence the forms (or lack thereof) in the music at hand.
3. Inconsistent Listening
In Adorno’s writings on Mahler and Berg, we find another path forward, one in which
compositional techniques are not given such rigorous isolation, insistence, and elabora-
tion. In this mode – what I call “inconsistent listening” – Adorno is considerably less
categorical in his judgments; in fact he often expresses what I take to be an instructive form
of uncertainty. At the opening of his study of Mahler, Adorno describes the composer’s
music as “particularly resistant to theorizing” (Adorno 1992, 3) adding that his musical
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language “can be entirely understood and understands itself, but eludes the hand that
would grasp what has been understood” (Adorno 1992, 25). This is a paradoxical
suggestion. Mahler could prove both elusive and resistant to our comprehension and anal-
ysis, and yet, at the same time, his music appears both coherent and magnetic for the pur-
poses of interpretation and critique. It exemplifies a central paradox in Adorno’s strategy
of “inconsistent listening,” which runs as follows: Adorno’s broad conviction concerning
music’s powers of resistance consistently runs up against a lack of a formal and technical
method capable of recovering criteria for the resistance. Without a clear toolbox for anal-
ysis, in his study of Mahler, Adorno pivots to imaginative routes of interpretation: he per-
sonalizes, turns sentimental, waxes poetic about a composer’s suffering, hallucinates what
the music projects, affirms the supposedly debased conventions of tonality and an array of
vernacular musical borrowings, and refers to the ephemerality of the art form or the
vagueness of its total assembly. In prose that is by turns playfully associative and rhetori-
cally non‐linear, Adorno demonstrates a mode of listening that is deliberately inexact.
The first clue that there is something unusual about Mahler’s resistance is the simple
fact that his music is traditionally tonal. We might recall that the standard Adornian view
of tonality holds that modern composers have an ethical responsibility to recognize that its
language, its impact, and its meaning are historically exhausted. Popular music and jazz
received biting critique in part because of their outmoded use of tonal harmony. By con-
trast, the modernism of the Second Viennese School makes the historical exhaustion of
tonality explicit by fracturing tonal languages into thematically and contrapuntally artful
atonality. Mahler scrambles this dichotomy, however; he is a modernist who works with
tonality. Instead, he manages to change the intentions that animate the techniques. His
music does not say: “Let’s feel the emotional weight of these harmonies so I can convey
some deep ineffable expression to you.” Instead, it says something like: “Here are har-
monies, I’m not sure why they are here, but here they are.” The result has a childlike inno-
cence to it. In Adorno’s words: “Mahler’s gesture is epic, and naïve: Listen, I am going to
play something such as you have never heard” (Adorno 1992, 61). In another instance,
Adorno describes this naïve use of tonality as akin to a vernacular uprising insofar as the
composer “sabotages the established language of music with dialect” (Adorno 1992, 23).
It is a local creativity that strains comprehension.
It is not as if Mahler is ignorant of the history of music. One can still hear his home-
spun use of tonality as the refraction of an exhausted history, but it is one with meanings
that have become unauthorized, or imprecise. Describing Mahler’s chords as “undomes-
ticated” or as “archaic, outdated” (Adorno 1992, 17), Adorno contends that the com-
poser manages to show us how the efficacy of tonality is broken, even as he continues to
use it. Thus, we might say, paradoxically, that Mahler’s tonality is historically aware in its
naïveté. He knows the tonal language is fading, but it is still there, a bit vacantly, somehow
expressing social pain. This results in a resistant music that Adorno heard as “inimical to
compromise” (Adorno 1992, 19) and that was “felt to give offense” (Adorno 1992, 17) or
even “to be hated today” (Adorno 1992, 5). Since such an experience of social pain is
foundational to Adorno’s conception of modernism, we may not be surprised to hear
that, when conceptualizing Mahler’s place in the grand sweep of music history, Adorno
proposes stronger alliances between the composer and the high modernists. In a few
points, he even refers to Mahler’s tonal chords as “guardians of the absolute dissonance,”
adding that they serve as historically conscious “cryptograms of modernism,” (Adorno
1998b, 85–86) while having “already been shaken by the demands of autonomous
composition” (Adorno 1992, 19).
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MICHAEL GALLOPE
Textbooks can teach the syntax of common practice tonality, but for Adorno, no for-
malism explains Mahler’s unique rendering of the idiom. If for late Beethoven and
Schoenberg, a relatively common knowledge base was required both for the composition,
performance, and act of listening – one’s cognition should coincide with the historical
techniques at hand in the composition – with Mahler, Adorno encounters something of a
disjunction with the tools of analysis. In fact we as listeners are instructed to in some sense
ignore our formal training, and all its a prioris. He writes: “To understand Mahler means
to cast off, as far as is possible, the listening crutches afforded by the traditional patterns”
(87). Even more directly, Adorno claims to hear in Mahler’s music “the struggle with the
expert” (Adorno 1992, 35), adding that his music plainly “resists academic formalism”
(Adorno 1992, 50) insofar as it “sensitively thaws the frozen groupings of accepted formal
types” (Adorno 1992, 35).
To be sure, modern scholars like Seth Monahan (2015) have challenged Adorno on this
assertion about the efficacy of analysis for Mahler’s symphonies. But what strikes me as
philosophically significant is the simple fact that Adorno asks us to listen to conventions
unconventionally. He asks us to hear something else in them that is not really in them, or
to find something loose and alchemical – to hear something Adorno refers to with contra-
dictory locutions such as “hazy designations” or a “specific atmosphere” (Adorno 1992, 3,
31). For Adorno, it seems essential that this approach to listening remain relatively undo-
mesticated by the tools of musical analysis. It requires a precise kind of comprehension,
but a comprehension with an ear for inconsistency, sensitive to Mahler’s inimitable curvi-
linear scripts. As he puts it: “The curves [of Mahler’s script] so enjoined are to be traced by
contemplation, rather than by ratiocination” (Adorno 1992, 4). We might say there is a
certain empiricism to this approach. It is not clear how Mahler staged the apparitions that
he staged, but one just has to go back to the music, go back to that experience, listen again,
and embrace uncertainty. As Adorno says: “the music has been composed from the bottom
up, it must be heard from the bottom up. The listener must abandon himself to the flow of
the work, from one chapter to the next, as with a story when you do not know how it is
going to end” (Adorno 1992, 87).
In order to explain such a logic immanently – tracking the contours of specific
works – the eight chapters of Adorno’s Mahler study (1992) shift from merely technical
and formalist details into imaginative dialectical prose that recounts an array of extramu-
sical appearances: narratives, plots, epics, characters, figures, plays of light, shadow, var-
ious illusions – even scents. Stylistically, Adorno’s language in these chapters employs
parataxis, as if to perform a disjunction or uncertainty and show us the difficulty of iso-
lating what makes Mahler’s music resistant. In some passages, he describes the way
Mahler’s symphonies develop resistance through large‐scale rhapsodic and encyclopedic
genres like novels. Or how they run wild with an emergent quality of narrative, an assembly
that appears on a larger scale, one can in turn “become aware of a second and superior
logic” (Adorno 1998b, 87). In other instances, he recounts the ways Mahler’s works
project pathos, colors, shadows, and can even fabricate a sense of visual perspective. From
within a universe of sounds, his epic movements are rhapsodic, emitting a potpourri of
multi‐sensory polyphonies.
In the process, the music becomes saturated with social meaning; Adorno describes
Mahler’s symphonies as “images of the world’s course” (Adorno 1992, 6). Specifically, his
music conveys a sense of social collectivity, but one that is inhabited by a fractured late
style, of dissenting intoxication, that prevents a listener from espousing it – or naïvely iden-
tifying with it – as a convincing form of social reconciliation. In Adorno’s view, Mahler
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shows us how “the system and its seamless unity, its appearance of reconciliation, is dis-
honest.” Or that his music represented “a totality without an outline, a synthesis of the
open and the closed” (Adorno 1992, 83). With respect to Mahler’s tonality, Adorno’s
discussion eschews analytical concerns over how to listen to harmonic forms in favor of
questions about how to listen to the expressive subject himself. This shift in Adorno’s
approach reveals a certain pathos: “Mahler’s tonal chords, plain and unadorned, are the
explosive expressions of the pain felt by the individual subject imprisoned in an alienated
society” (Adorno 1998b, 85–86). If readers find such linkages to social meaning frustrat-
ingly vague, for Adorno that is precisely the point. Mahler is a valued composer for Adorno
because he conveys social alienation in a way that is devoid of specific content, thus
making exceptionally productive use of music’s ineffability. In Adorno’s words: “Mahler
tracks down meaning in its absence, its absence in meaning” (Adorno 1992, 32); his
musical material harbors “a content that is both non‐conceptual and yet incapable of
being understood” (Adorno 1992, 125). More broadly, we may recall, Adorno is attracted
to the ineffable blankness of music, since, in his view, art’s utopian truth is always nega-
tive. It cannot be proposed or positively conceptualized. To Adorno’s ears, that Mahler’s
musical techniques themselves resist analysis as well only enhances the philosophical sig-
nificance of the composer’s work.
Adorno’s writings on Berg present us with another case of inconsistent listening. By
contrast with Mahler, Berg is obviously more of a modernist, but his music generates sim-
ilar questions regarding the use of formalism to apprehend the fractured life of individual
materials. In the face of analysis, Berg was something of a liquid composer: “Under an
analytic gaze this music completely dissolves, as if it contained no solid components
(Adorno 1991, 2). In the sphere of melody, there are themes in Berg’s music, but the com-
poser has a way of dissolving them into a dark and nihilistic curve that stretches into
obscurity. Adorno describes it as follows: “Berg possesses a special technique for taking
defined thematic shapes and, in the course of developing them, calling them back to
nothingness” (Adorno 1991, 3). At a more general level, sound’s inconsistency, or non‐
discreteness – something that firmly marks its difference from the segmented phonemes of
language – facilitates the nearly imperceptible fading of one theme into another, an allu-
sion to the Wagnerian technique he calls “continuous transition.” This blurred negativity
inheres in Berg’s capacity for expression. His themes are not utterances, they are almost
themes in reverse, themes with voids at the center: “Not only does Berg’s music never actu-
ally affirm themes; it absolutely never affirms itself. Any kind of insistence is foreign to it”
(Adorno 1991, 5). In other instances, Adorno simply describes a strange kind of non‐
expressive passivity, or an obscure quality of tone to the composer’s musical idiom that
remains elusive to the exacting discipline of language‐like mediation (Adorno 1991, 2, 5).
In its harmonic dimension, we might note that Berg’s music is dissonant and atonal.
Thus, at a basic level, Adorno is interested in its ethical value because it reflects the
exhaustion of tonal materials. But in some instructive passages Adorno casts the use of
dissonance in a naïve light, as sonorities that can be heard without much in the way of
historical consciousness. Adorno explains:
What a child feels when it leaves a footprint in freshly fallen snow is one of the most powerful
aesthetic impulses. Anyone who has not experienced the yearning, as Berg did, one day to
hear a chord consisting of eight different notes on eight brass instruments playing fortissimo,
at a time when Die glückliche Hand had not yet been performed, knows as little of the riddle of
new music as the person who shudders at the din. And its truth is that it states these elements
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in a synthesis of its own, one truer to experience than the harsh, unambiguous language of
concepts, with its decrees. (Adorno 1999, 195–196)
This strikes me as a kind of sensuous modernism in Adorno, one that operates somewhat
independently from an exacting strategy of listening. In this passage, Adorno affirms the
childlike, intuitive impact of dissonance that requires no schooling – the child’s footprint
in snow – and taps back into the inescapably mimetic character in all art. In his reading,
the medium’s semantic blankness exemplifies the broader power of all art: A nameless,
non‐communicative, sensory impact that nonetheless contains certain language‐like
characteristics. It is a moment when formalism and exactitude seem to be called
into question.
Other aspects of Adorno’s writings on Berg more explicitly resonate with the themes in
his study of Mahler. In an echo of Mahler’s resistance to formal analysis, Adorno says of
Berg that the composer’s resistant potential stems from a distinct uniqueness or local
“dialect” that cannot be taught (Adorno 1991, 2). Similarly, remnants of tonality in Berg
are saved from the fate of clichés; they are instead given unusual emphasis as enigmas.
When accounting for the way Berg quotes a Bach chorale in the course of his otherwise
atonal Violin Concerto, Adorno recapitulates his paradoxical arguments about Mahler’s
tonality. Adorno hears the chorale’s pastness “as if [Berg] had wearied of all the rounded
forms and aesthetic internalization on which he had lavished his life” (Adorno 1991, 2).
He then translates this into a meditation on what music uniquely can convey as an inef-
fable medium. The baroque chorale is an apparition of a past vehicle, a nameless reference.
Its historically distant efficacy exemplifies the mute quality of music itself “as if, directly,
impatiently, he wanted to make sure to say in the last minute, indeed, to call by name – as
a protest against art itself – that nameless thing around which his art was organized.”
(Adorno 1991, 2).
In sum, the writings on Mahler and Berg are an exceptionally responsive and illustrative
instance of Adorno’s method of immanent critique. In his mode of inconsistent listening,
Adorno recognizes that his kind of interpretive work cannot be taught or guided by a rule‐
book, in the way that counterpoint exercises, voice‑leading, or twelve‐tone writing can
have determinate mistakes. Instead, it requires a strange amalgam of historical conscious-
ness and childlike innocence, of sensuous sensitivity, empathy for suffering, and respon-
sive intuition. At the same time, inconsistent listening continues to require hearing the
work as paradigmatic of its own system, history, and idiom, as making and breaking its
own rules. No aesthetic position of Adorno makes sense if one decides the rules of art in
advance of the task of listening itself. As Adorno argues in Aesthetic Theory, artworks
themselves – not our theories of them – are what guide our critical response, our knowledge,
our capacity to listen, and our capacity to assess the social meaning of future works
(Adorno 1997, 37).
4. Philosophy and the Ineffable
The Adornian artwork fractures convention to deliver utopian truth, but can only do so by
virtue of an “absolute negativity of collapse” (Adorno 1997, 32). Amid this profoundly
alienated world, the social imagination of art cannot convey its desires positively. It must
arrive negatively, built out abstractly in a way that is formally determined through its nega-
tions of past languages and traditions. In this way, its utopian significance eschews positive
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determinations, espousing a “wordless syntax, even in linguistic works. What these works
say is not what their words say” (Adorno 1997, 184). In its capacity to engender forms of
critical and dialectical listening that are by turns formally exacting and imaginatively
inconsistent, music, through Adorno’s ears, can be heard as an exemplary carrier of such
a promise.
Philosophy, to Adorno’s ears, follows a parallel structure that similarly holds music up
as a model. For even though philosophy is built upon language, Adorno views its norma-
tive categories, positions, arguments, and scientific aspirations as in effect constitutive
obstacles. A genuinely critical and dialectical approach to philosophy must simultaneously
think with them and against them. In Adorno’s writings, the ethical solution is a method
mediated by responsive critique, poetic and essayistic forms of composition, vigilant
attention to historical and social context, and change over time. So follows his adherence
to Hegelian dialectics. In Negative Dialectics (1973) Adorno expresses it as follows:
Analogously, instead of reducing philosophy to categories, one would in a sense have to

compose it first. Its course must be a ceaseless self‐renewal, by its own strength as well as in
friction with whatever standard it may have. The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or
a position – the texture, not the deductive or inductive course of one‐track minds. (Adorno
1973, 33)
Paralleling his insights in his Beethoven Nachlass, Adorno draws the link between the
artwork and the work of dialectical philosophy by comparing aesthetic construction to
philosophical argument. Both are necessary formal infrastructures that exist in incessant
tension with expressive elements: “Just as there is a tension between expression and
construction in works of art, so in Hegel there is a tension between the expressive and the
argumentative elements” (Adorno 1993, 137). But in Hegel, the philosopher’s expressive
style is temporally extended through his method. No individuated item of thought in
Hegel’s philosophy can be considered apart from historical and temporal change. In other
words, Hegel’s method of philosophy has a stylistic life, one that is distinctly akin to music’s
non‐signifying, ineffable character. At one point, in his study of Hegel, he describes this
attribute of Hegel’s philosophy as a “suspended quality.” He writes: “There is a sort of
suspended quality associated with [Hegel’s] philosophy, in accordance with the idea that
truth cannot be grasped in any individual thesis or any delimited positive statement. Form
in Hegel follows this intention. Nothing can be understood in isolation, everything is to be
understood only in the context of the whole, with the awkward qualification that the
whole in turn lives only in the individual moments” (Adorno 1993, 91). And in Negative
Dialectics, Adorno explicitly connects this “suspended” quality to music: “[Philosophy’s]
suspended state is nothing but the expression of its inexpressibility. In this respect it is a
true sister of music” (Adorno 1973, 109).
And finally, Adorno describes Hegel’s rhapsodic processual style as sort of unfinished or
provisional, as refusing a kind of rational, coherent form. Thus, for readers, it typically
required a score or a user’s guide, which Adorno compared to a score for a musical work:
[Hegel’s] texts are not fully worked out – which necessarily means individuated – because their
intellectual medium is also not fully worked out in the way we have come to take for granted
in the hundred and fifty years since then. At that time one provided key words for the reader,
entrances, as it were, such as occur in music. In the Science of Logic, this kind of aprioristic
communication then becomes the ferment of a noncommunicative text and makes it hermetic.
(Adorno 1993, 110)
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MICHAEL GALLOPE
The internal energy of such a philosophical style is something that produces a “ferment
of a noncommunicative text,” something with a power that has obvious alliances with
music’s ineffability, and lends itself to a “hermetic” mode of meditation and critical reflec-
tion. Such a philosophical method, does not of course, entail entirely abandoning the
rigor of thought and reason. In Adorno’s view, pure immediacy is a perpetual danger;
immediacy carries the risks of thoughtless affirmations, fantasies about one’s access to
direct experience, a fetish for authenticity, escapes to nature, the primitive, or silence, to
vulgar forms of indication or closure (Adorno 1973, 110). Mediation by the cognition of
history is a necessity. In the realm of musical praxis, the “evanescence and transitoriness”
of musical time, compounded by the formalism and historicism that insures music
remains mediated by attention to technique, keeps alive the vitality of critical reflection
on the ineffable.
It is strangely compelling that a philosopher who, in his strategy of exact listening, so
often professes categorical judgments about artworks would also be obscurely attracted to
a medium known for its tremendously fluid sensory impact. But it illustrates beautifully
the apophatic approach to the ineffability of Adorno’s utopia. Gorgeously – or
hideously – formal, determined, and yet semantically blank. For Adorno, a compelling
emptiness, refusal, or enigma might be the only way forward from within the despair of
modernity.
References
Adorno, T. (1973). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York, NY: Routledge.
Adorno, T. (1976). Introduction to the Sociology of Music (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York, NY: The
Seabury Press.
Adorno, T. (1991). Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (trans. with Introduction and Annotation
by J. Brand and C. Hailey). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Adorno, T. (1992). Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (trans. E. Jephcott). Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Adorno, T. (1993). Hegel: Three Studies (trans. S.W. Nicholson with an Introduction by S.W. Nicholsen
and J. J. Schapiro). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adorno, T. (1997). Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T. (1998a). Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (Fragments and Texts ed. R. Tiedemann;
trans. E. Jephcott). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Adorno, T. (1998b). Mahler. In: Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (trans. R. Livingstone),
81–110. New York, NY: Verso.
Adorno, T. (1999). Criteria of new music. In: Sound Figures (trans. R. Livingstone), 145–196. Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Adorno, T. (2002a). Music, language, and composition. In: Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans.
S.H. Gillespie), 113–126. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Adorno, T. (2002b). On the contemporary relationship of philosophy and music. In: Essays on Music
(ed. R. Leppert; trans. S.H. Gillespie)., 135–161. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Adorno, T. (2002c). On the fetish‐character in music and the regression in listening. In: Essays on
Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans S.H. Gillespie)., 288–317. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Adorno, T. (2002d). On jazz. In: Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans. S.H. Gillespie)., 470–495.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Adorno, T. (2002e). On the social situation of music. In: Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans. S.H.
Gillespie)., 391–436. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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Adorno, T. (2005a). Culture industry reconsidered. In: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture (ed. and with an Introduction by J.M. Bernstein)., 98–106. New York, NY: Routledge.
Adorno, T. (2005b). In Search of Wagner (trans. R. Livingston with a new Foreword by S. Zizek). New
York, NY: Verso.
Adorno, T. (2006). Philosophy of New Music (trans. and ed. with an Introduction by R. Hullot‐
Kentor). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment (ed. S. S. Noerr; trans. E. Jephcott).
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music (trans. B. Massumi with a Foreword by
F. Jameson and an Afterword by S. McClary). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Bonds, M.E. (2014). Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Gallope, M. (2017). Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Goehr, L. (1992). The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hanslick, E. (2018). On the Musically Beautiful (trans. Lee Rothfarb and Christoph Landerer). New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Merriam‐Webster’s Dictionary. 2018. Springfield, MA: Merriam‐Webster. Online edition: https://
www.merriam‐webster.com/dictionary/ineffable, accessed December 30, 2018.
Monahan, S. (2015). Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (1969). World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, (trans. E.F.J. Payne). New York, NY:
Dover Publications.
Further Reading
Bowie, A. (2009). Music, Philosophy, and Modernity, 2009. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brodsky, S. (2017). From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious. Berkeley, CA:
Chua, D. (2005). The promise of nothing: the dialectic of freedom in Adorno’s Beethoven. Beethoven
Forum 12 (1): 13–35.
Currie, J. (2012). Music and the Politics of Negation. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.
DeNora, T. (2009). After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gallope, M. (2017). Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Goehr, L. (2011). Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. New York, NY:
Gordon, Peter and Alexander Rehding, eds. 2016. “Adorno and music: critical variations.” New
German Critique, 43/3.
Gracyk, T. (1992). Adorno, jazz, and the aesthetics of popular music. The Musical Quarterly 76 (4):
526–542.
Hoeckner, B. (ed.) (2006). Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth Century Music. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Johnson, J. (2015). Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Jonas, S. (2016). Ineffability and Its Metaphysics. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lee, S. (2005). A minstrel in a world without minstrels: Adorno and the case of Schreker. Journal of
the American Musicological Society 58 (3): 639–696.
Leppert, R. (2015). Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra,
Phonograph, Film. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Moten, F. (2004). The phonographic mise‐en‐scène. Cambridge Opera Journal 16 (3): 269–281.
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Smith, S.D. (2013). ‘Even money decays’: transience and hope in Adorno, Benjamin and Wozzeck.
The Opera Quarterly 29 (3–4): 212–243.
Scherzinger, M. (2005). Music, corporate power, and unending war. Cultural Critique 60: 23–67.
Spitzer, M. (2006). Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Subotnik, R.R. (1976). Adorno’s diagnosis of Beethoven’s late style: early symptom of a fatal
condition. Journal of the American Musicological Society 29 (2): 242–275.
Williams, A. (1995). New Music and the Claims of Modernity. New York, NY: Routledge.
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28
Adorno and Opera
RICHARD LEPPERT
1. Opera, Critical Theory, and Sociological Musicology
Adorno was the only member of the Frankfurt School, at least during its “classic” phase
from the 1920s into the immediate postwar years, much interested in aesthetics, and the
only one to address music. Adorno’s musical writings number thousands of pages of his
altogether staggering output (Adorno 2002a, 8–18). Adorno’s mature writing on music is
invariably informed by the outlines of Critical Theory, but even his earliest published
pieces – opera reviews from Frankfurt performances, for example, written throughout the
decade of his twenties (Adorno 1970–1986a, vol. 19) – make clear his investment in a
sophisticated and socially committed aesthetic and cultural critique. His opera analyses
address the sociology of musical theater in particular (and opera’s institutionality more
generally), performance hermeneutics, and a direct consideration of music itself, though
in his characteristic mode perhaps best characterized as criticism rather than analysis, as
the latter term is commonly employed within musicology. Adorno’s interests principally
revolve around modern opera (Schoenberg, Berg, Strauss, Weill, especially) but also, if to a
lesser extent, canonic works from Mozart to Verdi; Wagner, Wagnerian music drama, and
cultural Wagnerism more generally were together special cases for Adorno, and subjects
he returned to repeatedly throughout his adult life, which coincided with the rise and fall
of National Socialism and the fascist Wagner cult. It’s clear that Adorno’s “special
handling” of Wagner from the early 1930s to 1969, the year of his death, reflects this
traumatic historical reality, for him a textbook case of the role of music in the aestheticiza-
tion of regressive politics.
Adorno recognized the socio‐cultural agency of opera as a still‐prestigious cultural left-
over of nineteenth‐century bourgeois triumphalism, which he vigorously opposed. In its
place, he labored to promote what he regarded as a more socially responsible musico‐oper-
atic practice to supplant both the aesthetic and social complacency of the established
order – ideas that after his death have found considerable currency and nowhere more
evident than in late‐modern opera productions in Europe, the United States, and else-
where, as well as a significant body of recent musicological scholarship. To cite the lon-
gevity of these concerns for Adorno, already in 1930, while still in his twenties, he
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published a short piece of critical sociology called “Neue Oper und Publikum” (Adorno
1970–1986b), returning to the subject at the end of his life, “Zu einer Umfrage: Neue
Opera und Publikum” (Adorno 1970–1986c).
As was the case with most, if hardly all, of Adorno’s writing, the discussions of opera
are in the form of short essays – his sole opera monograph, In Search of Wagner (Adorno
1981a), first published in 1952, is organized as a series of 10 brief chapters in a book of
only 156 pages in English translation. Typical of his sociological writings on opera, and
well reflecting his commitment to Critical Theory, are his 1955 essay, “Bourgeois Opera”
(Adorno 1999), and the chapter, “Opera,” in the 1962 Introduction to the Sociology of Music
(Adorno 1988, 71–84).
Introduction to the Sociology of Music began as a series of university lectures during the
academic year 1961–1962, parts of which were broadcast on North German Radio (over
the years, Adorno gave 160 radio lectures, many on musical subjects). As he points out in
the foreword to the 1968 edition, his tendency in the volume is “not so much to say what
he is doing and how, but to do it”; Adorno, in the next sentence references Critical Theory:
“This is the consequence of a theory which does not adopt the accepted separation of
matter and method and is suspicious of abstract methodology” (Adorno 1988, vii). Adorno
here alludes to what he elsewhere termed “immanent criticism,” reflecting his insistence
that the critical agency of negative dialectics did not result from applying philosophical
categories from the outside, so to speak, but from developing a critique of facts and con-
cepts on the very basis of their own terminology and established processes. This principle,
expressed in terms of philosophical practice, held true as well for Adorno’s critical‐theoret-
ical writings about music, which were at once anti‐positivistic, dialectical, relentlessly her-
meneutical, and fundamentally qualitative – hence set against a resolutely established
quantitative disciplinary practice in sociology and, for that matter, musicology (especially
the US varieties of both) at the time.
Adorno’s sociology worked from both the outside and the inside of musical works: “A
sociology of music has a dual relationship to its object: an internal and an external
dimension. Any social meaning inherent in music is not identical with that music’s place
and function in society” (Adorno 1999a, 2). “Outside” musical texts, he looked at (chang-
ing) social practices, but here he upset sociological and musicological convention by his
relative lack of interest in empirical research, though Adorno knew well the basic “facts”
of music history. But he insisted on the inadequacy of musical facts tout court to an under-
standing of music – precisely the argument in musicology that emerged in full‐blown form
only in the mid‐1980s, but was nonetheless foreshadowed during the last decade of
Adorno’s life in his critique of positivism, especially as represented by British philosopher
Karl Popper (Wiggershaus 1995, 566–582).
Adorno pursued music’s meaning through the complicated interplay of the work’s own
specificity, which developed in response to the demands of its musical material, itself the
outgrowth of society and history. Meaning results from the social‐historical site that music
occupies both in the time of its making and also in the ever‐changing present (meanings
thus change). Regarding the “inside” of a musical text, Adorno assessed objective musical
details in relation to one another, that is, to musically‐specific compositional procedures,
and he also interrogated them as objectively subjective engagements with external
reality – a kind of musical hermeneutics that the discipline of musicology accepted as legit-
imate only slowly, and not without controversy.
The opening lines of the opera chapter reinforce Adorno’s insistence on Critical Theory’s
stance against established sociological practice:
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Adorno and Opera
What I say here about opera is not intended as a draft, however rudimentary, of a sociology of
opera. Instead, I would like this model to jolt us out of a habit of thought that is the exemplary
embodiment of the dubiousness of unreflected observations on musical sociology: the assump-
tion that the aesthetic state of musical forms and structures will always harmonize with their
social function. (Adorno 1988, 71)
Adorno points to music’s invariably dialectical involvement in society and social

formation. Not least, he insists on the responsibility to look not only at what lies in the
bright sunshine of aesthetic triumphalism but also at what is hidden in the shadows of
culture writ large. No clearer statement is necessary as to what he regarded as the stakes
of Critical Theory:
We cannot, as the community‐loving cliché of popular sociology would have it, judge the
quality of certain music according to whether or not it is widely accepted here and now, or
accepted at all; neither should we moralize about the social function even of lesser music as
long as people have that music forced on them by powerful authorities and by the nature of
society itself, so as long as they live under conditions in which they need that music for their
so‐called relaxation. The position of opera in present‐day musical life allows divergences bet-
ween the aesthetic substance and its social fate to be studied concretely. (Adorno 1988, 71)
Immediately thereafter, Adorno pronounces the operatic form “obsolete” and even “petri-
fied.” He draws his insight from the Great Depression and the necessary pullback resulting
from economic crisis; but he does not leave it there. The cogent sociological issue for Adorno
was that opera now, “in style, in substance, and in attitude” was no longer connected to the
lives of the people to whom it had to appeal in order to justify its staggering costs, all the
more given opera’s “outwardly pretentious form” (Adorno 1988, 71–72). In Aesthetic
Theory, Adorno repeats this point:
To the extent that art corresponds to manifest social need it is primarily a profit‐driven industry
that carries on for as long as it pays, and by its smooth functioning it obscures the fact that it
is already dead. There are flourishing genres and subgenres of art, traditional opera for one,
that are totally eviscerated without this being in the slightest apparent in official culture; in
the difficulties however of just approximating its own standard of perfection, opera’s spiritual
insufficiency presents insurmountable practical problems; its actual demise is imminent.
(Adorno 1997, 18)
Adorno, in effect, offers a broad polemic against the institution of opera and opera music,
as well as the consumption of opera, the last read through the actuality of audience antip-
athy to modern music (including opera) and its love affair with endlessly restaged war-
horses comprising the standard repertory. The readily apparent rhetorical gesture of
throwing down the gauntlet is common to Adorno’s writing; the gesture functions less to
clear the air of established ways of thinking and more, as dramatically as possible, to make
visible what has been ignored or repressed, and in the end to hold up an alternative insight
more responsible to the demands of social justice.
What follows, and again this is characteristic for Adorno’s writing, is a walk‐through of
twentieth‐century opera composition in an effort to address opera music’s relation to its
audience and the musical reasons for its successes and failures to find listeners, as well as
the degrees of social responsibility toward the audience in the truth‐telling of the music.
Thus Adorno opens with an (in)famously harsh assessment of Richard Strauss whose
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tendency, following Salome and Elektra, as evident especially in Rosenkavalier but also in
what followed thereafter, was, as Adorno maintained to “give in,” in effect to “surrender.”
After the good fortune of audience approval marking Ariadne, Strauss’s compulsion was to
write operas “subjected to the compulsion to make decent copies of that one and final
instant of success” (Adorno 1988, 72–73). Adorno quickly works his way through
Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Berg, his composition teacher and sometime mentor.
Adorno focuses on Wozzeck, for which he had almost limitless admiration – indeed he wrote
about this opera repeatedly from the year of its premiere in 1925 to the end of his life.
What interests Adorno is why musically the opera was both an immediate and long‐
standing success. What was it that audiences, typically unschooled in new music and often
hostile toward it, experienced with Wozzeck that earned their admiration?
Adorno hazards a guess that the opera’s success results from what the audience sensed
as its social‐aesthetic truth‐content. In part, its story rang true in the interwar years and
beyond on account of the actuality of lived history as captured in Büchner’s early
nineteenth‐century narrative fragment. But that alone could not explain the opera’s suc-
cessful reception. Adorno maintained the answer resided in a constellation, at once audible
and visible, involving the story, text, and music: Never mind – perhaps better, specifically
because of – the relative foreignness of the musical sound and tight formal structure. What
the audiences experienced, one might say, was what seemed the truth of a brave new world
whose reality was at once its familiarity and its alarming strangeness; precisely what Berg
had annunciated: “The phenomenon fashioned by the compositional force conveyed that
force to an audience whose ears would have been unable to account for it in the particular.
This opens a perspective in which the primarily undeniable divergence of new music and
society no longer appears as an absolute” (Adorno 1988, 74).
In this regard, Adorno’s philosophical practice was organized around a sustained cri-
tique of the reductive instrumental principles of “either one or the other” and “true or
false.” Whether applied to society, human subjects, or art works, Adorno’s position was
more akin to “one and the other” and “true and false.” That is, his negative dialectics does not
seek to stage the resolution of contradictions into any form of grand – or triumphant –
resolution but instead to highlight contradiction itself as a fundamental truth of moder-
nity and its social and aesthetic byproducts. As he succinctly (and by now famously) put it
in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, “The whole is the untrue” (Adorno 1978,
50, translation modified), upending Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807: “Das
Wahre is das Ganze”). This principle is fundamental to Adorno’s writing on music, both
the sociological work and the more musicological. Thus, he explained a “successful” art
work – by which he meant one that had claim to being socially true – not as one that
“resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one that expresses the idea of
harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its
innermost structure” (Adorno 1981, 32); prime examples of which for him included
Berg’s two operas (Smith 2013).
The academic half‐life – if you will, the credit cycle – of Adorno’s musical writing has
been considerably extended by what drives Critical Theory in the first place, namely, a
pursuit of the social truth of music and musical practices, what one might reasonably
judge to be a high calling for any intellectual pursuit. The subjectivity that mediates
Adorno’s most objective commentary is at once self‐reflexive and outwardly directed.
What matters to Adorno, and what organizes the agenda of Critical Theory, is a reaction
to the horrendous dystopian history of late modernity, and the resultant demand that, as
Adorno expressed it in Negative Dialectics, “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a
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Adorno and Opera
condition of all truth” (Adorno 1983, 17–18); and again in Aesthetic Theory, “But then
what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated
suffering” (Adorno 1997, 261).
It is suffering that drew Adorno repeatedly to Wozzeck, perhaps the single piece of music
he most admired (Adorno 2002b). Berg insists on drawing attention to the artifice of the
artwork, to aesthetics, as unnatural, and by that means to direct his listeners to the very
nature of musical expression in opera. The centrality of this effort is organized around
what the audience (bourgeois and otherwise), in Adorno’s view, commonly sought from
opera, namely, a musico‐institutional diversion from stark, dystopian reality whether
experienced directly or virtually. If so much of modern life encapsulated suffering – a
favorite opera trope, after all – in the opera house such suffering could be experienced as a
kind of sonic treat and, at its worst, transformed into an experience rendered aesthetically
(perversely) desirable on account of the beautiful music – it’s no accident that hundreds of
nineteenth‐century operas conclude with a musically delicious Liebestod confection
(Clément 1997), hardly what Wozzeck dishes up. “The creation [Wozzeck] is so complete
that nothing is required of the listener beyond a taut readiness to receive what is given with
such prodigality. No one should shrink from a love that unreservedly searches out humanity
where it is neediest” (Adorno 1991, 88).
The final pages of Adorno’s opera sociology essay turn to modern opera production in
the face of the tacit absurdity of sung narratives, to say nothing of the plots of pre‐modern
operas; characters now bearing no recognizable relation to audiences; problems with
musicians’ training; theater architecture; and finally why, despite its obsolescence, it lives
on and for whom. “Why the young do not all flee from opera takes more explaining than it
would if they did” (Adorno 1988, 78). He then sets to work explaining.
The opera is one of the stopgaps in the world of resurrected culture, a filler of holes blasted by
the mind. That operatic activities rattle on unchanged even though literally nothing in them fits
any more, this fact is drastic testimony to the noncommittal, somehow accidental character
assumed by the cultural superstructure. The official life of opera can teach us more about society
than about a species of art that is outliving itself and will hardly survive the next blow. … The
sociology of music has its proper object only when it focuses on the antagonisms which today
are really crucial for the relationships of music and society. (Adorno 1988, 83–84)
Adorno is consistently on firm ground so far as his factual knowledge of musical works is
concerned, and the results show. His essays’ insights develop from an uncompromising
assessment of musical works set against the philosophical‐social principles of Critical
Theory. That said, his judgment of music’s “outside” – the sociology of audiences, atti-
tudes, and reception in general – is far more anecdotal, the result of personal assessment
and projection rather than any form of quantitative sociological research, the limitations
of which are as obvious as the explanations he offers are reasonable though “unproven.”
Adorno links the chasm separating old opera from today’s audiences to the difference bet-
ween the modern subject and the subject represented on stage. Gary Tomlinson points out
the limitations of this rather undialectical formula: “It appears to rely on an almost pop‐
psychological notion of identification as a straightforward, empathic bond entered into by
an integral subject on the basis of perceived affinities with some object” (Tomlinson 1999,
129). But to give Adorno his due, he is also getting at something larger, and in two parts:
first, he regards the opera house (as avatar of opera’s institutionality) as a museum that
long ago ceased acquiring new works while fetishizing the old by, as it were, newly
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c ostuming the mummies and rearranging the display rooms; second, his position is consis-
tent with his larger argument, concerning the aging of all art works (Adorno 2002).
Adorno insisted that sociological concepts “imposed on music from the outside, without
being able to demonstrate their credentials in strictly musical terms, remain devoid of
force” (Adorno 1999a, 2). The “inside” of music is specific and specific to music; yet that
inside is part and parcel of society, yet not coterminous with society. Put differently, and
borrowing from his Aesthetic Theory, music (and art in general) is constituted within the
fact of its paradoxical, invariably dialectical relationship to society itself. That is, music’s
autonomy – its independence of and difference from society – is relative, never absolute. In
this regard, the importance that Adorno ascribed to music’s internal processes is what
drove his concern with what he termed structural listening, concerning which a great deal
of controversy has been expended and ink spilled (Dell’Antonio 2004; Leppert 2005, 115–
121; Subotnik 1996a).
Societies have structure; music has structure. Music’s structure acts as both a mirror
and (if somewhat weakly) as an agent of society. “Music develops in accordance with its
own internal laws, which are secretly those of society” (Adorno 1999a, 11). The relation
between the two is manifest through a complex reciprocity ultimately rendered audible.
(The extraordinarily self‐reflexive formal organization of Wozzeck, which Adorno regarded
as fundamental to its social truth‐content, to no small degree accounts for his admiration
of this opera.)
“Toward a Characterization of Wozzeck” is typical of Adorno’s opera criticism. He is
concerned to establish how Berg’s music, written a century after Büchner’s fragmen-
tary drama, engages the history between the two events: “Wozzeck the opera is intent
upon an historical revision in which history is simultaneously relived; the music’s
modernity accentuates the modernity of the libretto, precisely because the latter is old
and had been denied its own time” (Adorno 1991, 84). What Adorno has in mind is less
a matter of giving Büchner his due and more something weightier in social‐aesthetic
terms. Taking seriously the continued urgency of Büchner’s critique of his character’s
suffering, the result of myriad dehumanizing forms of injustice, Adorno looks to the
opera as a sonic means through which, as he puts it, “everything held back in
[Büchner’s] words insures a gain in content” and more: “To make manifest this gain in
content, this unspoken component—that is the function of music in Wozzeck” (Adorno
1991, 84). Looking to the music’s inside, Adorno invokes the opera’s formal structures,
its sonoric economy and dense texture, orchestration, free atonality, leitmotifs, and
dynamics; but in all instances fleetingly, and all of it serving as bolster to one insight:
“No one should shrink from a love that unreservedly searches out humanity where it is
neediest” (Adorno 1991, 88).
Anyone looking for a measure‐by‐measure account of how all this works will be frus-
trated, the explanation for which is not difficult to parse. Adorno is not concerned with
musicology as a practice; he is instead invested in what for him was a more urgent task,
namely, to assist understanding of a whole. For anyone who knows Wozzeck well, Adorno’s
commentaries (Adorno 1992a, 2002b) will be recognized as extremely well anchored to
the music – notably including an account of Berg’s compositional techniques and
gestures – which to be sure is not the same as necessarily agreeing with his account. For
someone potentially interested in Wozzeck, but neither a musicological expert or a well‐
versed amateur, Adorno at once renders the opera’s significance apparent and opens
some doors to a hearing that can recognize what the opera has to offer, both socially and
aesthetically.
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Adorno and Opera
2. The [Special] Case of Wagner
Adorno’s purpose for In Search of Wagner (Adorno 1991) was rightly recognized by
Benjamin: “The fundamental conception behind your Wagner, which God knows is quite
a powerful one, is essentially polemical” (Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 257–258). What
strikes readers as polemical – Benjamin was hardly alone on this score – is the outgrowth
of Adorno’s antipathy toward the long‐lived Wagner cult that reached an especially regres-
sive developmental stage under National Socialism. That said, Benjamin was clearly
searching for a more nuanced account of Wagner, for he points to the inadequacy of
Adorno’s somewhat rigid separation of the progressive elements in the music from the
regressive ones. The point is that such separation renders invisible the tension between the
two that by necessity informs the whole. Both Benjamin (no musician) and Adorno (very
much one) fully appreciate Wagner’s genius, which in Benjamin’s view must add up to
more than Adorno ultimately allows, in regard to which he asks Adorno whether, in his
critique, he hasn’t compromised fundamental parts of his own (dialectical) philosophy of
music, in particular the idea of music as protest and opera as consolation. Benjamin, in
short, calls for Wagner’s redemption, which in fact Adorno in due course took somewhat
to heart.
Wagner presents a topic of staggering proportion, given the number, length, and com-
plexity of his operas and music dramas, as well as his voluminous writings, not to mention
the secondary literature, well sufficient to fill a modest‐sized library. Yet Adorno “dis-
penses” with Wagner with astounding economy. The book’s brevity, together with the
often strident tone, is part and parcel of Adorno’s strategic rhetorical purpose, mobilized to
respond to Wagner – and Wagnerism – in the face of contemporary German history. In
Search of Wagner is a political tract no less than a sociological and aesthetic critique. Adorno
is responding to historical necessity of the most urgent variety, abundantly evident in the
opening chapter, “Social Character,” whose subject is the anti‐Semitism attached to
Wagner’s personal behavior, writings, and compositions, and, in this regard, Wagner’s
relation to the history of the emergent catastrophe.
Adorno explains Wagner’s music as an aestheticization of market production: The ever‐
same promoting itself as the ever new, as advertising for the corruption of the subject, but
of a particularly sinister kind. In Wagner musical logic is replaced by compositional tech-
nique described as “a sort of gesticulation [as opposed to an expressive gesture], rather in
the way that agitators substitute linguistic gestures for the discursive exposition of their
thoughts” (Adorno 1981a, 34). Under these conditions, art doesn’t reveal; it obfuscates
and regresses to the status of fetish, what Adorno calls “Phantasmagoria,” borrowing
from Marx, and the subject of an entire chapter of the monograph (Adorno 1981a, 85–96,
2002a, 528–535).
However, in a later essay, “Wagner’s Relevance for Today,” Adorno is clearer about the
positive side of the Wagner equation – his progressiveness – via an account of the com-
poser’s modernity argued on the basis of what Adorno terms his “uncompromising
musical nominalism.” In particular, Adorno admires Wagner’s attention to the primacy of
the specific work and its internal workings‐out above any demands or “requirements” of
any externally imposed form. Wagner, he acknowledges, “was the first to draw the conse-
quences from the contradiction between traditional forms, indeed the traditional formal
language of music as a whole, and the concrete artistic tasks at hand” (Adorno 2002c,
588). Here Adorno comes very close to crediting Wagnerian opera with an autonomy oth-
erwise ascribed only to instrumental music of the nineteenth century: A music that, before
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anything else, responds to the demands of its material. (Wagner’s abandonment of con-
ventional operatic forms – forms within the form – of recitative, aria, and ensemble, raises
the stakes of the matter and also further highlights his modernity.) It is precisely this factor
in Wagner that establishes for Adorno the crucial link to Schoenberg. The Ring music
dramas especially, “thoroughly modern works,” exceed the ahistorical mythology of their
libretti – “cheap and phony… a romanticism of false beards and bull’s‐eye windows”
(Adorno 2002c, 589). In their mythic world modern violence breaks through and shatters
the complacency of the bourgeois façade.
Progressivism aside, Adorno closes his essay with a cogent and insistent reminder of
Wagner and regression, in effect, reasserting the points stressed earlier: Wagner’s contra-
dictions are forgotten at peril to the historically future. And so to end, he returns to the
ending: The final act of Götterdämmerung, where he recognizes a kind of regressive tri-
umph. The music of the end of the world is not up to the task; in essence it remains conven-
tionally aesthetic, as it were, too beautiful; as such the music fatalistically affirms as
inevitable the myth’s narrative, as though it could not be otherwise. As a result, Adorno
suggests, myth itself triumphs – in death. And yet everything about the Ring mythology is
historical. The “challenge” today revolves around the need, which must fail, to negotiate
successfully the work’s contradictions, which constitute nevertheless its real truth. This is
of course precisely the challenge facing Wagnerian productions since the postwar reopen-
ing of Bayreuth to the 1970s Chéreau‐Boulez Ring cycle, and the more recent Lepage stag-
ings at the Metropolitan Opera, variously addressed, and variously successful (and not) as
regards precisely the issues Adorno framed. It’s fair to say that Adorno’s brief Wagner
screed continues to shape much of the thinking about how to deal with Wagner today. He
states the problem nicely: “If it is true about Wagner that no matter what ones does, it is
wrong, the thing that is still most likely to help is to force what is false, flawed, antinomical
out into the open, rather than glossing over it and generating a kind of harmony to which
the most profound element in Wagner is antithetical” (Adorno 2002c, 600). This matters,
to belabor the obvious, not least on account of the deserved aesthetic status and cultural
impact of both the composer himself and his music. Were he and it (his music) of lesser
circumstance, the issue of what to do with and about opera today would quite likely be
more than a little less fraught.
This slim, often over‐the‐top volume perhaps most perfectly typifies what for Adorno
matters most about both Critical Theory and music, namely, the responsibility both bear to
history: To speak for the forgotten and the silenced, and by that means to address a differ-
ent future. The minutiae of formal musical analysis barely interests Adorno as an exercise
in scholarly writing; the minute understanding of how music works, even (or especially) in
its smallest details, as an engagement alike with history and those subjected to history,
matters to him a great deal. It is above all Adorno’s thinking about history, manifested in a
variety of ways and via no single roadmap, that principally informs the commitments of
much recent musicological scholarship indebted to the principles of Critical Theory.
“Wagner’s Relevance for Today” is at a minimum an Adornian dialectical hat trick, a
language‐act by means of which suppressed details are made visible, palimpsests read, and
otherness articulated, but never subsumed. Dialectics retrieves leftovers – particulars –
from the universalizing tendencies of concepts that conventionally determine philosophical
practice. “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not
go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to c ontradict the
traditional norm of adequacy” (Adorno 1983, 5). Adorno’s concept of “remainder” is
coterminous with what he often termed the “non‐identical” (the internal contradiction)
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that resided within the concept – and actuality – of the seemingly unrelenting identical-
ness which he associated with a dystopian principal of late modernity: Cookie‐cutter life,
cookie‐cutter subjects, cookie‐cutter society, cookie‐cutter art; the astounding “successes”
of social engineering, political domination, the culture industry, and so on.
The goal of dialectics was utopian, reflecting the effort to preserve the promesse du bon-
heur, a phrase adapted from Stendahl, through self‐reflexive thought that confronted social
contradiction (Stendahl 1972, 347). Dialectics’ “agony is the world’s agony raised to a
concept… Dialectics serves the end of reconcilation” (Adorno 1983, 6). Adorno’s rescue
attempt of Wagner, in reality an attempted rescue of opera itself, depends upon the articu-
lation of and confrontation with the dystopian in the utopian and vice versa. That dialectic
isn’t going away anytime soon – most likely never: For Adorno, opera is a principal site for
the immanent staging of what was precisely for him the fundamental truth of the social
order, a truth that must be confronted and indeed understood if one might dare to write
the phrase promesse du bonheur with any degree of good conscience.
Adorno’s sometime Frankfurt colleague Herbert Marcuse, echoing his friend’s posi-
tion, argued for the responsibility to connect objective fact to social‐subjective value, to
insist on the defining impact of one on its other, and not least to foreground the historicity
of the relationship. In sum, dialectical thought begins with a social concern, namely, “the
experience that the world is unfree; that is to say, man and nature exist in conditions of
alienation, exist as ‘other than as they are,’” – to which he appended a corollary: “Any
mode of thought which excludes this contradiction from its logic is a faulty logic”
(Marcuse 1982, 446).
For the most part, Adorno regarded opera, as both a medium and an institution, to be
“obsolete” existing in a state of “petrification” (Adorno 1988, 71–72). Nonetheless, in his
aphoristic essay “Bourgeois Opera,” principally a bitter critique of the socially regressive
utility of opera in late modernity, Adorno incorporates a sharp dialectical turn, by attempt-
ing to salvage what he regards as opera’s echo of utopian promise: It’s explicitly a‐rational
(or even anti‐rational) as an aesthetic stopgap against a modernity defined by instru-
mental rationality. What opera clings to, and in the best sense why its obsolescence falls
short of delivering its own coup de grâce, is what Adorno – however surprisingly – names
its “magic,” for him a key element to aesthetic comportment and a defining principle of
art’s critique of reality. He sees in magic the inexplicable, the thrill of what exceeds our
ability to control and explain; magic in this sense is coterminous with what he elsewhere
terms the “non‐identical” in a world dominated by the identicalness of identity: “It would
be appropriate to think of opera as the specifically bourgeois genre that, in the midst of,
and with the methods appropriate to, a world bereft of magic, paradoxically endeavors to
preserve the magical element of art” (he has in mind Die Zauberflöte, Der Freischütz and
Fidelio) (Adorno 1997, 119, 1999, 18). In magic he sees, and in music hears, the sem-
blance of innocence, which is why this section of his essay engages issues surrounding
certain operas’ appeal to children while embarrassing adults, given the silliness of their
world of incantations. Whereas for Adorno disillusionment is a byproduct of central
planning, of regulation, of the goal of predictability, opera’s sometime magic (its aesthetic‐
dialectical sleight of hand) preserves at least a hint of the price paid in the form of the
general loss of spontaneity as a component part of the possibility for a general emancipa-
tion. In sum, Adorno acknowledges magic as possessing a socially progressive element
ascribable to (some) opera – a kind of wished‐for remembrance of things past, and a protest
against the anti‐reason of modernity. Opera, he noted, is “the surrogate of the happiness
which is refused to people, and the promise of true happiness” (Adorno 1999, 25). On that
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Richard Leppert
score, the apparent social need of magic (broadly defined) lives on, if one is to judge from a
great deal of late‐modern popular literature (science fiction, especially), film, and not least,
video games. The modern world is disillusioned (Adorno cites Prospero laying aside his
wand), and its human subjects sense the lack. No accident that in “Bourgeois Opera”
Adorno draws numerous parallels between opera history and the modern history of film,
incorporating in the process consideration of each medium’s technologies.
Regarding magic (and the magical), Adorno’s insight derives from a particular – and
strictly musical – event, the fateful horn call announcing rescue at the end of Beethoven’s
opera, a small sonic detail within a far larger whole: Offstage brass, distant but approach-
ing, an acoustic advance notice of historical change; pre‐linguistic but – or better, perhaps,
and – thrilling and unquestionably magical in the multiple senses of the word. He hears
this history, simply put, as a micrological, historically sedimented moment that magically
imposes itself to announce the promise of a last‐minute (and logically inexplicable) rescue
and the freeing of the prisoners: Again, a general emancipation. Beethoven’s Fidelio horn
call embeds the hope for an end to despair.
This interlocking of myth and Enlightenment defines the bourgeois essence of opera: namely,
the combination of imprisonment in a blind and unself‐conscious system with the idea of
freedom, which arises in its midst. The metaphysics of opera cannot be simply separated from
this social dimension. (Adorno 1999, 21–22)
Then follows the key sentence, reiterating at once the dialectical turns fundamental to
Critical Theory together with the potential social stakes that emerge from its exercise:
Metaphysics is absolutely not an unchanging realm to be grasped by looking out through the
barred windows of the historical; it is the glimmer – albeit a powerless glimmer – of light
which falls into the prison itself. The more powerful it becomes, the deeper its ideas embed
themselves in history; the more ideological it becomes, the more abstractly it stands opposed to
history. (Adorno 1999, 21–22)
Adorno’s general assessment of opera compliments what he heard in Mahler: A digging in

the sonic garbage heap of history to discover a broken piece of acoustic glass, of turning
the shard variously to the light, bringing it from the shadows, of recognizing what it once
was or what it might have been, while treasuring the truths it might contain in its current
state, and taking to heart the fragmented and fragmentary aesthetics of its actuality, mani-
fested in the truth‐content of the whole within the particular: “It is precisely because
opera, as a bourgeois vacation spot, allowed itself so little involvement in the social con-
flicts of the nineteenth century that it was able to mirror so crassly the developing ten-
dencies of bourgeois society itself ” (Adorno 1999, 23). Beyond opera music, Adorno
likewise takes up this trope in terms of the opera house architecture and audience arrange-
ment in the theater: gallery, stalls, boxes, upper circle (first row, middle), foyer, and “dome
as finale” (Adorno 1992b). In sum, one understands opera, whether as an aesthetic event,
an object, or a practice fit for sociology, only when the centrality of this contradiction lies
at the heart of the hermeneutic exercise.1
Salvage efforts, if I may call them that, on behalf of opera in the postmodernity of the
young twentieth‐first century connect forthrightly to the ghosts of the nineteenth century
that the twentieth never quite came to terms with. We might say that opera – specifically
its quotient of “magic” (however small, however seldom) to which Adorno somewhat
loosely refers – lives on because the moment to realize it beyond the confines of the theater
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was lost. I’m of course borrowing from the opening line of Negative Dialectics, to wit:
“Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it
was missed” (Adorno 1983, 3). And from this follows the explanation for the as‐yet
un‐discernable half‐life of Adorno’s thought about music in general but – for sure – opera
in particular.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1970–1986a). Gesammelte Schriften 20 vols. (eds. R. Tiedemann, G. Adorno, S. Buck‐
Morss, et al.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1970–1986b). Neue Opera und Publikum. In: Gesammelte Schriften 20 vols., vol. 19
(eds. R. Tiedemann, G. Adorno, S. Buck‐Morss, et al.), 476–480. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1970–1986c). Zu einer Umfrage: Neue Opera und Publikum. In: Gesammelte Schriften
20 vols., vol. 19 (eds. R. Tiedemann, G. Adorno, S. Buck‐Morss, et al.), 494–495. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1981). Cultural criticism and society. In: Prisms (trans. S. Weber and S. Weber),
17–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1981a). In Search of Wagner (trans. R. Livingstone). London: NLB.
Adorno, T.W. (1983). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T.W. (1988). Introduction to the Sociology of Music (trans. E.B. Ashton). New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T.W. (1991). Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (trans. J. Brand and C. Hailey). Cambridge:
Adorno, T.W. (1992a). Berg’s discoveries in compositional technique. In: Quasi una Fantasia: Essays
on Modern Music (trans. R. Livingstone), 179–200. London: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1992b). The natural history of the theatre. In: Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern
Music (trans. R. Livingstone), 65–78. London: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1997). Aesthetic Theory (ed. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann; trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor).
Adorno, T.W. (1999). Bourgeois Opera. In: Sound Figures (trans. D.J. Levin), 15–28. Stanford:
Adorno, T.W. (1999a). Some ideas on the sociology of music. In: Sound Figures, 1–14. Stanford:
Adorno, T.W. (2002). Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2002a). The aging of the new music. In: Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans.
R. Hullot‐Kentor and F. Will), 181–202. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2002b). The opera Wozzeck. In: Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans. S.H. Gillespie),
619–626. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2002c). Wagner’s relevance for today. In: Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert; trans. S.H.
Gillespie), 584–602. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Benjamin, W. (1999). The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940 [of Theodor W.
Adorno and Walter Benjamin] (ed. H. Lonitz; trans. N. Walker). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Baricco, A. (1999). Constellations: Mozart, Rossini, Benjamin, Adorno. Paris: Gallimard.
Berry, M. (2014). Adorno’s Essay on Wagner: rescuing an inverted panegyric. Opera Quarterly 30
(2/3): 205–227. https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbu020.
Calico, J.H. (2008). Brecht at the Opera. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chua, D. (2005). Untimely reflections on operatic echoes. Opera Quarterly 21 (4): 573–596. https://
doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbi093.
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Clément, C. (1997). Opera, or the Undoing of Women (tran. B. Wing), 1999. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Corse, S. (2000). Operatic Subjects: The Evolution of Self in Modern Opera. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press.
Currie, J.R. (2012). Music and the Politics of Negation (Musical Meaning and Interpretation).
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Deathridge, J. (2008). Wagner Beyond Good and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dell’Antonio, A. (ed.) (2004). Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley:
Desideri, F. (2002). Il fantasma dell’opera: Benjamin, Adorno e le aporie dell’arte contemporanea. Genoa:
Il Melangolo.
Goehr, L. (1998). The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Berkeley:
Goehr, L. (2009). Aida and the empire of emotions (Theodor W. Adorno, Edward Said, and Alexander
Kluge). Current Musicology 87: 133–159.
Hinton, S. (2008). Kurt Weill: The Three Penny Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoeckner, B. (2002). Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth‐Century German Music and the Hermeneutics
of the Moment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hoeckner, B. (ed.) (2006). Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth‐Century Music. New
York: Routledge.
Kramer, L. (2007). Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Lee, Sherry D. 2003. “Opera, Narrative, and the Modernist Crisis of Historical Subjectivity.” Ph.D.
diss., University of British Columbia.
Lee, S.D. (2010). ‘Alles, was ist, endet’: on dramatic text, absolute music, Adorno, and Wagner’s Ring.
University of Toronto Quarterly 79 (3): 922–940. https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.79.3.922.
Lee, S.D. (2015). Dissonant Opera, dissident fragments. Germanic Review 90 (4): 273–284. https://
doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2015.1096166.
Leppert, R. (2005). Music ‘pushed to the edge of existence’ (Adorno, listening, and the question of
hope). Cultural Critique 60: 92–133. https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2005.0022.
Levin, D. (ed.) (1994). Opera Through Other Eyes. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lindenberger, H. (1998). Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Marcuse, H. (1982). A note on dialectic. In: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (eds. A. Arato and E.
Gebhardt), 444–451. New York: Continuum.
McClary, S. (2002). Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Said, E. (2006). On Late Style. London: Bloomsbury.
Smith, S.D. (2013). ‘Even money decays’: transience and hope in Adorno, Benjamin and Wozzeck.
Opera Quarterly 29 (3/4): 212–243. https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbt035.
Stendahl [Henri Beyle] (1972). Life of Rossini (trans. R.N. Coe). Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Subotnik, R.R. (1991). Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis:
Subotnik, R.R. (1996). Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis:
Subotnik, R.R. (1996a). Toward a deconstruction of structural listening: a critique of Schoenberg,
Adorno, and Stravinsky. In: Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society, 148–
176. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Tomlinson, G. (1999). Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
M. Robertson). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Zizek, S. and Dolar, M. (2002). Opera’s Second Death. New York: Routledge.
Further Reading
Barry, M. (2014). Adorno’s essay on Wagner: rescuing an inverted panegyric. Opera Quarterly 30
(2/3): 205–227.
Gallope, M. (2017). Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Wounded modernism: Adorno on Wagner. New German Critique 129 (3):
155–173.
Smith, S.D. (2013). Even money decays: transience and hope in Adorno, Benjamin, and Wozzeck.
Opera Quarterly 29 (3/4): 212–243.
Subotnik, R.R. (1991). Why is Adorno’s music criticism the way it is? Some reflections on twentieth‐
century criticism of nineteenth‐century music. In: Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in
Western Music, 42–56. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Note
1 The impact of Critical Theory as practiced by Adorno has had a considerable influence on musi-
cology in the decades following his death, prior to which the impact was all but non‐extant in the
English‐speaking world, though hardly the same can be said for the German‐speaking world in
particular. Nowadays, it’s fair to say that critical musicology has absorbed Adornian thought
indirectly, if rather less so by means of thorough engagement with Adorno’s writings. With
specific regard to Adorno’s musical writings in general as well as his work on opera, pride of place
belongs to the path‐breaking, intellectually challenging and insistently nuanced work of Rose
Rosengard Subotnik who, all but single‐handedly introduced Adorno’s work to the English‐
reading musicological world (Subotnik 1991, 1996). Other scholars, besides those already cited
above, and whose work on opera is very directly inflected by Critical Theory, and commonly by
Adorno, include Alessandro Baricco (1999), Joy Calico (2008), Daniel Chua (2005), Sandra
Corse (2000), James R. Currie (2012), John Deathridge (2008), Fabrizio Desideri (2002), Lydia
Goehr (1998, 2008), Stephen Hinton (2008), Berthold Hoeckner (2002; Hoeckner, ed. 2006),
Lawrence Kramer (2007), Sherry D. Lee (2003, 2015), David Levin (1994), Herbert Lindenberger
(1998), Susan McClary (2002), Edward Said (2006), Gary Tomlinson (1999), and Slavoj Žižek
and Mladen Dolar (2002). Were one to include scholarly essays and book chapters, the list by
these authors and many others would be considerably expanded. Opera research by German
scholars well versed in Adornian thought is extensive; too little of this work is well known in the
English‐speaking world (very little of it is available in translation).
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Part VI
Negative Dialectics
29
What Is Negative Dialectics?: Adorno’s

Reevaluation of Hegel
Terry Pinkard
The enormous power of Hegel – that is the power which impresses us so hugely today and, God
knows, it is a power that impresses me today to the point where am fully aware that, of the
ideas that I am presenting to you, there is not a single one that is not contained, in tendency at
least, in Hegel’s philosophy.
Theodor Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics
—(Adorno and Tiedemann 2008, 21).
Adorno’s thought on the whole is determined by what may look like a massive struggle or
even potential contradiction at its heart. Adorno is some sort of holist, so he believes that one
cannot understand social life – or even more generally, knowledge and subjectivity – without
understanding how the distinct elements function in the whole. Yet he also seems to think
that any attempt to be systematic in philosophy necessarily ends up falsifying what it studies
since it necessarily must try to cram too many individualities into a premade system. So it
seems, for Adorno, we must be systematic and anti‐systematic, holist and anti‐holist, at the
same time. Like any good dialectician, he wants to mitigate those contradictions without
opting for only one side of them, and that much at least sounds vaguely, even if still very
abstractly, Hegelian. However, if nothing else, what he calls his “negative dialectic” is sup-
posed to stand in contrast with Hegel’s own proclaimed “affirmative” dialectic. Now, with
selective citation, we could draw Adorno close to Hegelian dialectic and with selective cita-
tion could show there to be a huge break between them. The issue will have to be interpretive.
How do we make sense of what Adorno says about dialectic?
What is the question to which dialectic is the answer? Adorno’s general proposal as
given in his 1958 lectures, An Introduction to Dialectics, was that “dialectical thought … is
precisely thought’s attempt to recognize its limitations by recourse to the matter at issue
(die Sache) itself. How does thought succeed within its own thought determination in doing
justice to the matter at issue [die Sache]?” (Adorno 2017, 3). The issue is a perennial in the
tradition following Kant that takes on Kant’s basic argument to the effect that reason
(thought) has its limits beyond which it cannot go without ending up in a set of basic con-
tradictions (antinomies). These limits are the limits of sense‐making itself since to speak in
contradictions is not to make sense at all.
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Terry Pinkard
Part of what fuels Adorno’s interest, as we might put it, is in distinguishing the limits of
thought from the limitations of thought (although Adorno himself does not make the dis-
tinction as clearly). The limits of thought are those places in life where we stop making
sense to ourselves. Logic, for example, forms the limits of thought in that whatever violates
the rules of logic (or so the story goes) has not so much violated a norm (or committed a
foul in the language game) as it has stopped playing the game altogether. Illogical thought
is on that picture not really genuine thought at all, at least in any really meaningful sense.
Limitations, on the other hand, express contingent barriers to thought. One may be limited
in one’s thought simply because one lacks the imagination to think otherwise, or has not
had the right education, but not because what one is trying to think simply cannot be
thought. Limitations can be overcome. Limits cannot.
When we bang up against the limits of thought, it is easy to be enticed into the illusion
that the limit really is only a limitation and that there really is something on the other side
of the barrier – if only one could get to it or invent some new method to maneuver around
the impediment. One conclusion to draw from this is the kind of quietism often attributed
to Wittgenstein. On that picture, once we have recognized the limits of thought, we have
done all that philosophy can do, and the best one can do at that point is to give up on
uncovering any substantive philosophical or metaphysical point beyond that. Adorno
describes that as just saying “Halt, if you venture beyond this point, you will be talking
nonsense”(Adorno 2017, 62). That was something like Wittgenstein’s conclusion, at least
in the Tractatus. We reach the limits of thought when we find that we stop making sense if
we transgress them, and it is better to acknowledge one’s limits than continuing to bang
one’s head against the metaphorical metaphysical wall.
This is part of the picture of mind and world that Hegel summarized under the heading of
“consciousness”: On the one side is the world and all its determinacies (the facts of the world),
and on the other side is thought or “consciousness” of that world which may or may not
match up with the way the world is. Once that picture is in place, the natural worry is to move
from ordinary concerns with whether one is getting it right in the things one says about the
natural and the social world to the more rarified philosophical concern with whether one’s
“consciousness” is in any way at all getting it right about those things – to worry, that is, about
whether there might be an insurmountable gap between thought and being, consciousness
and reality, that cannot be overcome and which shows up to thought when it tries to think
about itself and think about what evidence it has for thinking it is not so condemned.
In the Hegelian system, opposed to the picture of “consciousness” is that of “thought” as
expressing the way the world really is in expressing what it is to think rationally at all. The
limits of thought are the limits of the world, and beyond the limits of the world there is no
unworldly beyond. There is only nothing. Meaningful thought is always this‐worldly (dies-
seits), not other‐worldly (jenseits). Moreover, these are not simply two opposing pictures (or
“frameworks”) between which one might choose, arbitrarily or otherwise. Hegel gives an
extended argument for the conclusion that the first picture (that of “consciousness”) must
break down on its own terms and that it thus finds itself pushed into the other view, that of
“thought” but more particularly that of “self‐consciousness.”1 That is, in trying to think
through the a priori limits of thought and therefore of the world itself, thought is pushed
into thinking about itself and how it can give an account of these limits and therefore its
thinking these limits itself. This is, as Adorno says, dialectic itself. Contrasting dialectical
thought with other ways of thinking, Adorno says: “dialectical thought … is expressly self‐
reflective in character. In other words, dialectical thought is thought that sheds light on
itself … rather than proceeding in a rigid and purblind fashion”(Adorno 2017, 124).
460
What Is Negative Dialectics?
Yet, although Adorno clearly acknowledges his attachment to Hegelian dialectic, he

also departs from it in crucial ways. As Peter Gordon has convincingly argued, the ways in
which Adorno registers his non‐Hegelian approach concern have to do with how he
meshes Hegel’s dialectic with the criticisms of it coming from existentialist philosophies,
most importantly those of Kierkegaard and those of Heidegger and (to a lesser extent) that
of Sartre (Gordon 2016). They concern his criticism of Hegel’s dialectic as a philosophy of
“identity” as opposed to his own “non‐identity” philosophy, his concept of “mimesis,” and
what he came to call “the priority of the object.” Ultimately, Adorno seems to affirm what
themselves seem to be two opposed points of view: One is the Hegelian conception of the
absolute, the other is the Kierkegaardian‐Heideggerian‐Sartrean view that holds that the
reality of free subjectivity is in a non‐trivial sense always more than conceptual thought
can accommodate. Adorno is in many ways the attempted synthesis of Hegel and existential
philosophy, of Hegel’s encyclopedic view of philosophy and the “existential” idea that free-
dom means that life is always richer than any philosophical theory and that “spontaneity”
always escapes systematization.
If we are to contrast Hegel’s so‐called affirmative dialectic with Adorno’s negative dia-
lectic, we have to begin, as Adorno himself does in his lectures, with the Hegelian version.
Hegel’s Logic describes itself as delineating the basics of intelligibility itself, or, to put it in
more colloquial terms than Hegel does, of making sense of things and making sense of
making sense.2 Whereas older philosophies had by and large distinguished metaphysics (as
making sense of things) from logic (as making sense of making sense), Hegel thought that
both metaphysics and formal logic were together themselves part of logic as a whole.
Simplifying Hegel’s discussion quite a bit, we could say that in order to make sense of
things, we must make judgments about them that fall into, roughly, three categories, the
first two of which Hegel called, for better or worse, those of “Being” and those of “Essence.”
In judgments of “Being” (in which we are concerned with individual existing items), we
make assertions about such items by pointing them out (“That one over there”), classifying
them (“This is blue”), making generalizations about them (“American Robins live on
average 1.7 years”) or counting them. Those kinds of judgments of “Being” must be distin-
guished from judgments like “The tie only looks green in the store but is blue in normal
sunlight” and “Deficiency in vitamin D may cause cognitive impairment in older adults,”
in which we explain things by appeal to some underlying condition that is not immediately
apparent in the mere observation of them. The underlying condition explains how the
appearance is the way it is. Hegel calls these judgments of “Essence.” If judgments of
“Being” are responses to questions such as “What’s that?” or “How many are there of
them?”,” judgments of “Essence” are responses to questions like “Why did that happen?”
or “Why does it seem like that?”
Not only do we engage in these types of judging activities, we also make judgments
about whether we have really made sense at all when we do so. We typically do that in
judgments such as “What you just said does not follow from your premises,” or “This
makes no sense within the current standards of physics.” These judgments represent what
Hegel calls “the Concept.” “What is this and how many of them are there?” is typically
answered in one way that makes sense of things, whereas “Why does it look that way?” or
“Why did that happen?” are typically answered in another way. “How does that follow?” is
typically answered in neither of those two ways.
Now, Hegel does not represent these three ways of talking about things in the rather
loose way in which they have just been presented here. He takes himself to be speaking
of the matter at issue, the Sache, not just ways of talking, and when we make true judgments,
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the matter at issue, the Sache, is as we say it is. Thus, Hegel begins his Logic with the cate-
gory of being – and not even that of something or another. What we say of “being” is that
it is “what is,” that is, not nothing. Or rather, when we think most abstractly of what is,
beyond that “is” is … nothing. That is the limit of thought. Hegel calls this, with all irony, a
“pure knowing” which takes itself not to be representing objects (it has, so he says, “sub-
lated all relation to an other and to mediation”). What happens is that this kind of alleged
pure knowing, which seems at first to make sense, turns out to be a mirage, to not be really
a knowing at all.3 It does not, cannot, distinguish its “pure” thought of “being” from
nothing. At the outset are the two putative thoughts of being and nothing, but that
thought itself is not really a logical thought. It looks like a thought, but it is in fact itself a
contradiction.4 It is a thought of the world as a whole in terms of the empty concepts of
being and nothing which is a thought from a standpoint that cannot be a standpoint, since
it would be a thought occupying a conceptual place outside of being and nothing.5 Mystics
may indeed claim to have such a thought, but they cannot make it intelligible, and an
unintelligible thought is a thought that cannot be thought. (Adorno scathingly calls such
views “Om‐philosophies,” which substitute “om, om, om” for any thought, (see Adorno
(2017, 112–113).)
If logic is the paradigmatic way of making sense of making sense by delivering the ways
in which the limits of thought are revealed as the limits of making sense in general, then
Hegel’s Logic can indeed claim to be a logic. As a logic, Hegel’s Logic is concerned with the
form of thought, not with what things in particular there are (which is a matter of fact, not
of form), but it is also the form of the world, the substance of the world.6 Hegel himself
calls his Logic a matter of the form‐determinations, the Formbestimmungen, of thought
when it is genuine, true thought, that is, the thought of what is.
One way of thinking of this would be the familiar form often attributed to Hegel of starting
with a unity, then having the unity fall apart, then restoring the unity in some kind of
“higher” or “more developed” form. (Something like this picture underlies the still common
but false attribution to Hegel of the triad of “thesis/antithesis/synthesis.”) The problem is, as
Hegel tries to make clear, that at the very outset, thought is fractured. What seems clear and
sensible at the first, that being, just on its own apart from what particular things there are, is
to be distinguished from nothing, turns out itself not to be clear, and in fact to be a form of
nonsense until it is integrated into a larger whole, that of coming‐to‐be: “This motionless
simplicity is being, yet no longer for itself but rather it is as determination of the whole”(Hegel
1969b, 113). What we have is a whole, grasped in thought, of coming to be and passing
away, of some being going into nothing and nothing coming to be something, or just
“becoming” in general. The world as a whole is that of things coming to be and vanishing.
That this is a conception of existing objects with qualitative and quantitative features follows
from the attempt to state the very idea of the world as a whole, which seems to require a
standpoint outside of the whole, which is itself nonsensical on its own terms. (Adorno even
lightheartedly compares the beginning of Hegel’s Logic to Beethoven’s music.7)
At the end of the story the “concept” itself (as “Idea,” the “unity of objectivity and sub-
jectivity”) is required to give an account of how it makes sense of itself as having made
sense of things and of itself. In thinking about things and in thinking about thinking,
thinking – more concretely, thinking agents occupying a particular place in social
space – gives an account of itself as giving that type of account. It is thought’s capacity to
make these judgments by being just the kind of activity that exercises those powers, that is,
by being what it is by bringing itself under the concept of itself. Hegel called that the “abso-
lute Idea,” which expresses the “true infinity” of concepts inasmuch as it expresses the
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self‐bounding nature of the conceptual.8 It is affirmative in that the dialectic ends with its
own account of how it gives all those accounts and why that shape of accounts was
necessary. The concept of “thought thinking of the world” turns out to be bedrock, the
point at which when we avoid falling into the illusion that if we tried, we could dig deeper,
only to find that our spade is turned since, if we try to dig deeper, we find not something
new and deeper but only that we have gone beyond the limits of sense itself.9
Adorno thinks this conception of dialectic is both inviting and misleading. At the end of
such a dialectic, in Adorno’s view, the system closes itself off (into thought thinking
thought), whereas Adorno thinks that any dialectic that took its own “negative” activity
seriously would have to be open, not closed.10 Adorno famously identifies this turn in
Hegel’s thought as lying in what he diagnoses as “identity thinking.”
The concept of “identity thought” itself has an obvious and long history in the
development of and reaction to German idealism, and Adorno’s ideas have their place
there.11 Schelling called his first system that of absolute identity. One of Schelling’s core
ideas was that if we were to find a place for human subjectivity in nature, then our concept
of nature would have to be redrawn away from the concept of nature that was at home in
post‐Newtonian physics. To that end, Schelling argued that all analysis of knowledge must
come to a stopping point where the basic matters at issue – the Sachen – could no longer be
grasped discursively, in fact‐stating sentences, but only be grasped as they were in their
internal relations with other such basic matters. Moreover, Schelling argued that such
basic matters had to be unavailable to empirical observation, and the world itself, including
self‐consciousness, would be built out of them, or, as he put it, “If there were not an abso-
lute limit to knowledge … something that fetters and binds us in knowledge, and that, in
the course of knowing never once becomes an object precisely because it is the principle of
all knowledge … there is an ultimate of some sort, from which all knowledge begins, and
beyond which there is no knowledge”(von Schelling and Heath 1978, 16). That ultimate
would be the “absolute” itself in its identity with itself.
For Schelling, the starting point of all reflection has to be that of the identity of mind
and world, that is, the thought that being is intelligible, that the most basic thought (that
of the absolute) is one with the content of the absolute. However, this basic identity shat-
ters immediately on reflection.12 In studying the form of the world as manifested in the
ultimate components of the world, philosophy on Schelling’s construction seeks to build
back up to the original identity by way of an a priori study of subjectivity and of nature.
This amounts to making philosophy into “nothing other than the natural history of our
mind,” see von Schelling (1988, 30) (although “nature” here is taken in Schelling’s
romantic sense, not in the sense in which any contemporary naturalist would take it).
In a nutshell, Schelling developed his schema along these lines: The original being of
things is itself an infinite ideality (an “identity”) that destabilizes itself (into “non‐identity”)
and then pushes itself back into a restabilization of itself (an “indifference point”) by virtue
of generating new structures out of itself. From the original forces, for example, of heat and
combustion, the original “identity” then pushes itself further apart into energy and matter,
which then stabilizes around the idea of a cosmos of things held together by universal grav-
itation. The dynamic involved in the original identity of the world seeking to re‐establish
that identity by stabilizing around an indifference point (for example, of energy and matter)
pushes itself ever onward to a world of magnetism and electricity, then to chemical related-
ness and the creation of new substances, and then to life and finally to that of reflective
subjectivity itself. In such reflective subjectivity, the universe comes to be conscious of its
own activities, and the final “indifference point” is reached. This final indifference point is
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the divine itself thinking about its own creation from out of its nature, and with it, the story
ends in an intellectual intuition of the absolute – the form of the world – in which thought
and being are united, and the world is intelligible (although not discursively).
In the “Preface” to his Phenomenology, Hegel famously and sarcastically referred to this
conception of an intellectually intuited absolute identity as the “night in which all cows
are black,” or, in other words, something that in effect says nothing and thus is a form of
nonsense. There are of course lots of things that can be said of Schelling’s philosophy of
absolute identity, but what is crucial here is Adorno’s surprising assertion that something
like it underlies much, if not all, of modern thought.13 Schelling’s point was that the
activity on the part of representing the world – the representing itself – had to be distin-
guished from the representations that were made. Ultimately, the identity of content bet-
ween thought and reality was to be found in the representing activity itself which was in
turn the form of the world, the natural order. Although the representing activity may suc-
ceed or fail in its attempts to represent the empirical world, the activity itself cannot repre-
sent itself in any straightforward way. All modern philosophy is driven back, so Adorno
seems to think, to something like this view, namely, to the idea that at the end of the day,
the original identity of representing activity and being has set the terms of the debate.
On Adorno’s view, Hegel’s sarcasm about Schelling’s identity‐philosophy was on target,
but Hegel ended up in much the same boat himself. Hegel’s system also rested on the con-
ception that to be is to be intelligible, but Adorno objects that at best this is only partly true,
and mostly it is self‐deceptive. What drives identity‐thinking is the philosophical view that
one requires a comprehensive conception of the world – the world as a whole, as a
totality – which on the representationalist view requires one to have a standpoint outside
of the world in order to judge the world as a whole. This is clearly impossible, but it remains
a temptation to indulge in some sort of thinking like that.14 On Adorno’s account, Hegel
simply drew the proper conclusion from identity‐thinking, namely, to see that one had to
develop a point of view from within the world that nonetheless would adequately grasp the
world as a whole, and that doing just that required all the conceptual acrobatics of Hegel’s
dialectic. What it did not do, however, is question the status of identity‐thinking itself. That
questioning is one of the main points of a negative dialectic.15
Hegel’s affirmative dialectic is the expression of the idea that to be is to be intelligible.16
Adorno’s negative dialectic denies that being is fully intelligible. A negative dialectic would
thus never really end at all but would always find itself confronted with something that is
necessary for it but not graspable by thought. The system of thought thus determines itself
“negatively” against what limits its own account of itself. But what would that be?
Adorno tries several ways to make this point. At first, he tries to make a point that
puts his negative dialectic on the side of Kant versus Hegel vis‐à‐vis the concept of the
infinite.17 The very concept of the infinite contains some very familiar paradoxes: Series
that have no beginnings but must have beginnings, things that are infinitely divisible
yet have to be built out of ultimate simples, the infinite hotel which is always fully
booked but always has one more room in it, etc.18 The infinite of course can never be
given in a sensible intuition; the infinite is that which can never be traversed. Hegel’s
response to those problems was to agree but also to point out that the infinite could
indeed be comprehended but only in thought and never in finite experience. Hegel
thought we could coherently think of the infinite, but it was a sad joke to think we could
intuit it.19 Adorno picks up on this theme (siding with Kant), but he does not pursue it,
and it seems unlikely that this rather abstract suggestion is his main criticism of the
Hegelian dialectic.20
464
The second and deeper reason lies, so Peter Gordon has argued, in his confrontation of
Hegelian thought with that of the existentialist philosophers. Adorno’s point is not irratio-
nalist, as if Hegel were saying that to be is to be intelligible, and the irrationalist retorts
with “to be is to be unintelligible.” Adorno’s point is that we are always enmeshed in the
“view from here,” an account from where we are at this time, this place, which changes
as the temporal horizon in it moves and changes. That much would be admitted by
everybody. Nor is Adorno’s point equivalent to the now often repeated bromide about
being on Neurath’s boat where we have to make repairs while at sea. (Isn’t there a port
somewhere? Who is giving the orders on the boat? Where is it going?) Nor should it be
reduced to Hamlet’s familiar admonition, “There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” None of those would be dialectical.
The negative dialectic, like Hegel’s dialectic, must move in terms of “determinate nega-
tion” and, put more ambitiously, philosophy, as negative dialectic, must, as Adorno says,
thereby use the concept to go beyond the concept, to affirm the “priority of the object.”21
Now, in its more global use in Hegel’s system, a determinate negation involves the way that
some basic way of thinking or some important social shape of human life itself breaks
down such that what succeeds the breakdown has the determinate shape it does by virtue
of the way the breakdown occurred and how in those very determinate circumstances
only certain possibilities opened up. The authority of the successor is what it is by virtue of
the determinate way it is required by the breakdown of the authority it succeeds. This
occurs abstractly in the Logic (as one shape of thought generates its own paradoxes and
requires another determinate shape to make it good), and it occurs more concretely in the
history of human social and political life.
On the one hand, it would be tempting for some to take Adorno’s point in a somewhat
pedestrian way, as a restatement of something like Frege’s dictum that at the basis of any
account of thought, there must be a distinction between thought and its object, for other-
wise there could not be any possible truth to thought. If taken in that way, Adorno’s
speaking of thought and its “other” would simply look like obfuscatory language to char-
acterize a far more humdrum thought. The pedestrian sense, however, is not Adorno’s
aim. The “other” of the concept is not just the “object” that would make the thought true.
It is the other that the thought encounters of what it is that would undermine thought’s
claim to truth, and this encounter proceeds out of some form of necessity even though it is
not in the more narrow sense a logical necessity. How does that work?
The quick answer requires some unpacking. For Hegel, the various stages of his dia-
lectic in the Logic have to do with, as we noted, “being,” “essence,” and “concept.”22 It is
crucial for Hegel’s treatment that what propels us from one stage to another (from being,
to essence, to concept) is some type of incoherence or contradiction found in an earlier
stage which requires the formation of a more adequate way of stating the matter (such as
the way in which the initial concepts of “being” and “nothing” only make sense in a larger
whole of “becoming”). The kind of self‐reflexive concept of the concept at the end of the
Logic then gives us an account (if Hegel is right) of how we can make judgments about the
world as a whole without having to assume a viewpoint that stands outside of the world.
Adorno’s alternative is crucially indebted to Heidegger (and to Kierkegaard).23 For
Heidegger, Dasein (“existence,” his name for the kind of being that is a problem for itself) is, by
virtue of having its being a problem to itself, committed to understanding the meaning of
being as a whole and not just the meaning of the particular beings it encounters in its world.
However, it cannot uncover the meaning of being as a whole since, as finite existence, it cannot
comprehend the infinite (the meaning of being as a whole), and as being‐toward‐death, it
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understands (in its not fully conceptualized moods such as anxiety) that the meaning of its
being is “nothing.” Since Dasein cannot comprehend the meaning of being (the “totality”), it
thus necessarily fails in its most basic task. Yet, in what might seem paradoxical, as Katherine
Withy has put it, it is exactly in coming to understand its necessary failure to uncover the
meaning of being that Dasein succeeds in achieving its genuine meaning, so that its own suc-
cess can only consist in the eminent (or “excellent,” “singled out,” ausgezeichnet) mode of
failure that is “authentic existence.”24 When Dasein succeeds in comprehending itself, it fails,
and its “singled out” failure just is its success in grasping what Dasein is.
The “negative” in the negative dialectic is thus at first based on this Heideggerian idea of
the impossibility of comprehending the whole. For Adorno, subjectivity is always defined
on all sides by its contrast with other ways of thinking and living. It is “finite” in the
Hegelian sense in that its own intelligibility depends on its contrast with something other
than it. All modes of thinking are constrained by the thinker’s past, the thinkers are
absorbed in the requirements of thought in their day, and they project themselves into a
future that will stand in contrast to them (as their “negation”). Any and all attempts at
understanding the whole from within the whole are doomed to failure because of this fini-
tude. Moreover, this Heideggerian way of posing the issue also frees Adorno, or so he
claims, from any and all charges of the kind of self‐contradiction found in those who claim
everything is relative. For Hegel, the conceptual is boundless, infinite, whereas for Adorno
it is fully bounded by the contingencies of human existence in time.
However, that can only be the negative dialectic in its most general form. Adorno is no
committed Heideggerian, even when he admits that “Heidegger arrived at the limits of the
dialectical insight into the non‐identity in identity.”25 For Heidegger, the limits were just
the limits, beyond which no real sense‐making was possible, whereas for Adorno, the
negative dialectician, arriving at those limits was an invitation to see the limits as only
limitations and to go further to devise new ways of making sense, with no guarantee that
what seemed like only a limitation would not turn out in fact to be a limit. That
movement – reaching the limits, coming to understand them as limitations, making sense
of them in a new way – was unending, not susceptible in principle to any kind of “final”
reflection (to thought making sense of itself as thought), and in particular to the kind of
finality claimed by Hegel and which governs, implicitly, all modern philosophy.
Adorno’s third reason for a negative as opposed to a more purely Hegelian dialectic is itself,
interestingly, partly Hegelian. In the Phenomenology and then later in the series of lectures on
the philosophy of history, religion, art and on the history of philosophy itself, Hegel displayed
the inherent tensions in the ways in which any given form of human life shapes itself around
a certain conception of the absolute not merely abstractly but concretely in all its various
ways of embodying those thoughts (in family life, politics, religion, art, economies and the
like). Those shapings embody tensions and contradictions within themselves that, however
pressure‐laden they are, do not appear to be fatal until practice has shown them to be in fact
unbearable. At that point, those people can no longer be those people, the shape of life falls
apart in various ways (and sometimes collapses altogether), and it is succeeded by some other
shape that has gathered itself out of the ruins of the old life and made something new with
whatever it was that still worked in it. Adorno thought that this is in fact was what had hap-
pened to Hegel’s own nineteenth‐century bourgeois society. The horrors of the twentieth
century were the direct developments of the failures of the nineteenth, but none of which
were really visible in Hegel’s own day (or which became visible only with the twenty‐twenty
hindsight of the twenty‐first century). Those failures show how Hegel’s conceptual system
466
was thus confronted not with a new concept internal to its own development but with social
realities that showed its falsity as an account of the whole. Hegel’s representative,
constitutional, civil state gave way ultimately to Hitler’s Nazism, not as a logical consequence
but as the way in which the kind of industrialized bourgeois society that was the first proxi-
mate realization of the Hegelian conception was “negated” by the various totalitarian, dicta-
torial, and administered bureaucracies of the twentieth century. This, more than anything
else, seemed to be what Adorno meant by the “priority of the object”: The openness of the
dialectic to new developments that outstrip the powers of a priori thought to encompass the
whole. And that opens up a practical dimension of the dialectic that Adorno thinks is
effectively excluded by the (merely) affirmative dialectic.
More needs to be said. But maybe that was what Hegel meant by the dialectic all along.
Near the end of his life, Hegel received a note from a student, Christian Weisse, which
contained the following remark:
You yourself, honored teacher, once orally indicated to me that you were totally convinced of
the necessity of further progress and newer embodiments of the world‐spirit, which would go
further than the completed embodiment of science that you yourself had brought about. But
you were not able to give me any further account of this. ((Hegel and Hoffmeister 1961), vol. 3,
p. 261, #603, Weisse to Hegel, July 11, 1829)
We do not have Hegel’s own reply to this student’s request for a clarification. (It was prob-
ably given in person.)
Adorno, however, seems to think Hegel could have had no real reply, and that is the final
part of his argument for the negative dialectic.
Hegelians are not completely unconvinced.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1966). Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (2017). An Introduction to Dialectics (1958). English edition. Cambridge, UK; Malden,
MA: Polity Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Tiedemann, R. (1998). Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts.
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Tiedemann, R. (2008). Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course
1965/1966. Cambridge: Polity.
Adorno, T.W., Adorno, G., and Tiedeman, R. (1997). Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis, Minn: University
of Minnesota Press.
Demmerling, C. (1994). Sprache und Verdinglichung: Wittgenstein, Adorno und das Projekt einer kri-
tischen Theorie. 1. Aufl. ed, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Foot, P. (2001). Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon.
Gordon, P.E. (2013). The artwork beyond itself: Adorno, Beethoven, and late style. In: Weimar
Thought: A Contested Legacy (eds. P.E. Gordon and J.P. McCormick), 77–98. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Hammer, E. (2006). Adorno and the Political. London; New York, NY: Routledge.
University Press.
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Hegel, G.W.F. (1969a). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. In: Theorie‐Werkausgabe, vol.
8 (eds. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel) 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1969b). Wissenschaft der Logik I. In: Theorie‐Werkausgabe, vol. 5 (eds. E. Moldenhauer
and K.M. Michel) 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1969c). Wissenschaft der Logik II. In: Theorie‐Werkausgabe, vol. 6 (eds. E. Moldenhauer
and K.M. Michel) 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G.W.F. and Hoffmeister, J. (1961). Briefe von und an Hegel. [2. unveränderte Aufl.] ed. 4 vols.
Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Moore, A.W. (2002). The Infinite, 2e. London; New York: Routledge.
Moore, A.W. (2012). The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things, the Evolution of
Modern Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
O’Connor, B. (2013). Adorno. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge.
Pinkard, T. (2012). Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Pinkard, T.P. (2017a). Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge,
Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.
Pinkard, T.P. (2017b). Hegel’s phenomenology and logic: an overview. In: The Cambridge Companion
to German Idealism (ed. K. Ameriks), 227–247. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Pinkard, T. (2019). Forms of thought, forms of life. In: Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of
Difference (eds. J. Mácha and A. Berg). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Pippin, R.B. (2005). The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pippin, R. (2018). Hegel’s “Realm of Shadows”: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic. Chicago:
von Schelling, F.W.J. (1988). Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science,
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von Schelling, F.W.J. and Heath, P.L. (1978). System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia.
Thompson, M. (2008). Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought.
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Thompson, M. (2013). Forms of nature: ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘living’, ‘rational’ and ‘phronetic’. In:
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am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Withy, K. (2015). Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations = Philosophische Untersuchungen. New York:
Macmillan.
Further Reading
Bernstein, J.M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Geuss, R. (2005). Outside Ethics. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Honneth, A. (1991). The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press.
Menke, C. (1998). The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida. Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press.
Ng, K. (2017). Hegel and Adorno on negative universal history: the dialectics of species‐life. In:
Creolizing Hegel (ed. M. Monahan), 113–133. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Notes
1 A short version of my own version of how that argument goes is in Pinkard (2017b).
2 This way of putting the matter in terms of “making sense” is lifted from Moore (2012).
3 Hegel (1969b, 68): Pure knowing, thus joined up with this unity, has sublated every relation to an
other and to mediation; it is without distinction and as thus without distinction it ceases to be
knowing; what is present is only simple immediacy.
4 Hegel (1969b, 75): “It contradicts itself in itself, because it unites in itself what is opposed. Such
a unification destroys itself./ This result is a having‐vanished (Verschwundensein), but not as
nothing; if it were so, it would be only a relapse into one of the already sublated determinations
and not the result of nothing and of being. It is the unity of being and nothing that has become
motionless simplicity. But this motionless simplicity is being, yet no longer for itself but as [the]
determination of the whole”(this is different from Adorno’s disparagement of “standpoint phi-
losophies” in Adorno and Tiedemann (2008, 10).
5 Hegel (1969c, 550): “More exactly, the absolute idea itself has only this for its content, namely
that the form‐determination is its own completed totality, the pure concept.”
6 For example: “With no less stringency the paradox of the tour de force in Beethoven’s work could
be presented: that out of nothing something develops, the aesthetically incarnate test of the first
steps of Hegel’s logic.” Adorno et al. (1997, 107); or, in Adorno and Tiedemann (1998, 14),
where he says that Beethoven’s music is Hegelian philosophy but is more true.
7 For example, see Hegel (1969a, §214): “The Idea may be grasped as reason; (and this is the gen-
uine philosophical meaning of reason), further as subject‐object … because the Idea contains
all the relations of the intellect, but contains them in their infinite self‐return and
identity‐within‐themselves.”
8 Another way is to think of this is to see it as another version of what Wittgenstein was trying
to argue about rule‐following, namely, that any genuine conception of rule‐following already
operates with an idea of our understanding things behind which we cannot go any further,
and thus all attempts at explaining it in terms that do not make reference to understanding,
such as dispositions, are beside the point, since they will be employing the conception of
understanding itself in trying to make that point. The “activity” of understanding – or, in
Hegelian terms, of subjectivity – is basic to our other concepts. “Thought comprehending
itself ” would be the Hegelian equivalent (more or less) to the Wittgensteinian “understanding”
here. There is nothing deeper than that by which we could explain the sense that thought
carries. Hegel takes that to push us into a conception of “pure being” to get the Logic going;
Wittgenstein thinks that we have to concede something like the activity of understanding
itself as basic, for example when he says (in an often cited remark) that “If language is to be a
means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as
this may sound) in judgments” (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶242). The equally often cited remark
about our spade being turned is at ¶217. The metaphor of the spade is slightly misleading,
since it leads us to think that maybe we just need better tools for digging through the bedrock,
as if there was something deeper to be found.
9 For example: “The ensuing movement is itself so determined out of the matter that it possesses
the character of truth even if the absolute, as an all‐embracing totality, can never be given to us.
This would be the concept of an open dialectic – in contrast to the closed dialectic of idealism”
(Adorno 2017, 21).
10 It is sometimes attributed to Adorno that identity‐thinking consists in believing that in charac-
terizing an object, one thinks one has exhaustively characterized it, but since the object is always
“more” than its characterizations, identity‐thinking necessarily mischaracterizes objects. That
would attribute too lean a thesis to Adorno (which at its limits would also reduce to triviality, as
if one were saying that in asserting that a ball is white, one thought one had asserted everything
that could be said of the ball, which is clearly false). Brian O’Connor claims the following about
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Terry Pinkard
it: “It is, rather, identity thinking which attempts to control experience by the deployment of
rules that have authority in advance of what we contingently face in reality” (O’Connor 2013,
144); and: “The category of nonidentity seems to be another name for the notion of excluded
otherness, the retrieval of which is an essential feature of post‐structuralist theory” (O’Connor
2013, 194). In his glossary for the book, O’Connor also characterizes “identity” for Adorno in
the following way: “A misunderstanding of the relationship between subject and object in which
the concepts or systems of concepts of a subject (person, philosopher, scientist, etc.) are taken to
be identical with the object.” Espen Hammer sees it in the following way: “According to Adorno,
the most fundamental form of ideology, serving perhaps as a kind of meta‐theory of ideology, is
identity itself, the mindless and objectified repetition of sameness without any reflection or
attempt at authorization. Inscribed in the concept itself is the primal illusion of the identity bet-
ween it and the thing itself in the absence of the subject’s individual experience” (Hammer 2006,
87). In another place, Hammer expresses some exasperation over the slipperiness of Adorno’s
conception of identity: “On other interpretations, it is ‘identity thinking,’ which rather puzzlingly
seems to suggest that identification, or the creation or ascertaining of identities (whether
numerical or qualitative), including perhaps even predication and synthesis, is not only ‘wrong’
or ‘inadequate’ but destructive in some insidious sense to be referred to in accounting for such
phenomena as corporate capitalism or even the Holocaust” (Hammer 2015, 33).
11 See von Schelling (1988, 10–11): “As soon as man sets himself in opposition to the external
world, then … reflection first begins; he separates from now on what nature had always united,
separates the object from the intuition” and thus philosophy “proceeds from that original divorce
to unite once more, through freedom, what was originally and necessarily united in the human
mind, i.e., forever to cancel out that separation.”
12 “Substantial (inhaltliches) philosophizing since Schelling was grounded in the thesis of identity”
(Adorno 1966, 83).
13 This kind of affinity between Adorno’s and some parts of Wittgenstein’s thought has been drawn
out in Demmerling (1994). For a way of seeing Wittgenstein in light of Hegelian thought (and
vice versa), see Pinkard (2019).
14 Adorno and Tiedemann (2008, 6): “A rather meagre, formal definition is that it sets out to be a
dialectics not of identity but of non‐identity. We are concerned here with a philosophical project
that does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in that identity.
Instead it will attempt to articulate the very opposite, namely the divergence of concept and
thing, subject and object, and their unreconciled state.”
15 For an elaboration and defense of the Hegelian version of the claim that to be is to be intelligible,
see Pippin (2018).
16 See the discussion of the infinite in Adorno and Tiedemann (2008), 77–78): Adorno says that
we can see “… the difference between my project and traditional philosophy by reflecting on the
concept of the infinite.”
17 See the discussion in Moore (2002, 198, 191): Moore’s own conclusion is more Wittgensteinian
to the effect that speaking of the infinite leads to nonsense of a sort. He notes “we are shown that
the truly infinite exists, though in fact (as we are bound to say) it does not,” which is not quite
Wittgenstein’s own view in that “we have not tried to put into words anything that is shown.
What we have tried to put into words is what it is for somebody to be shown it.”
18 Hegel thought that other ways of dealing with thinking about the absolute, such as art and reli-
gion, also do indeed seek the infinite, but they fail more or less for the simple reason that the infi-
nite can only be conceptually, and not aesthetically or ritualistically, grasped.
19 Adorno says: “You cannot rely upon the thought that the whole is the true because the infinite
whole is not something which is ever given, at least to the finite subject, or in other words,
because not everything which is can be resolved into the pure determinations of thought”
(Adorno 2017, 20–21). Robert Pippin conjectures that this way of putting things is, for Adorno,
the typical “bourgeois” or Kantian way of seeking freedom and self‐sufficiency. He has also
argued that Adorno’s interpretation of Kant is very flawed – he conflates causal and practical
470
necessity, and he remains nonetheless strangely committed to a Kantian picture without fully
realizing how that picture itself drives one more toward a Hegelian conception. See Robert
Pippin, “Negative Ethics: Adorno on the Falseness of Bourgeois Life” (Pippin 2005, 98–120).
20 Adorno (1966, 25).
21 This matter of the concept’s reflection on what it means to judge and infer correctly also extends,
controversially to say the least, to the concept of life as going better or worse in ways that are
relative to the various species in question. The unity of concept and reality, which Hegel, follow-
ing the terms of his day, calls the “Idea” (Idee) is that of fact‐stating evaluations, a way in which
“is” and “ought” come together in judgments about life, thought, and action. (This way of taking
“fact‐stating” evaluations is drawn from Foot (2001)). The relation between Hegel’s dialectical
logic and his concept of life is also covered in Pinkard (2012; 2017a). For related discussions, see
Thompson (2008); Thompson (2013); Pippin (2018).
22 Peter Gordon’s argument is to the effect that in the last analysis, Kierkegaard is playing the star-
ring role in the development, which lands Adorno in his theology‐which‐isn’t‐a‐theology
(Gordon 2016).
23 Withy (2015) Peter Gordon argues for a similar point vis‐à‐vis Adorno in (Gordon 2013).
24 Adorno (1966), 198). (Heidegger gelangt bis an die Grenze der dialektischen Einsicht in die
Nichtidentität in der Identität.)
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30
Adorno’s Critique of Heidegger

ESPEN HAMMER
No contemporary philosopher’s work seems to have preoccupied Theodor W. Adorno more

than that of Martin Heidegger. From his very first philosophical essays in the early 1930s
to his late 1960s reflections in the Negative Dialectics and the Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno
read and critiqued the great Freiburg thinker of Being (Sein). Adorno pioneered the now
widespread approach to Heidegger’s writings as politically motivated and ideologically
compromised. Unlike far too many German thinkers of the mid‐twentieth century, who
refrained from situating the philosophy of Being in its social context, he was aware not
only of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism but also of the complex ways in
which his thinking was informed, and indeed determined, by the rise of fascism in the
1930s. The political dimension notwithstanding, he also took Heidegger extremely seri-
ously as a philosopher, reading him not only as a symptom of a decaying German
philosophical tradition, unable to withstand the allure of fascist irrationalism, but as a
philosopher worthy of being compared with such luminaries of Western philosophy as
Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.1
Some accounts of Adorno’s assessment of Heidegger focus on his meta‐critical and
ideology‐critical approach, the attribution of an allegedly false and, for Adorno, mytholog-
ical yearning for authenticity, essentiality, and originality (Ursprünglichkeit). According to
Adorno, Heidegger “ontologizes the ontic,” thereby representing real historical development
and regression, including human suffering, in problematic terms such as fate (Geschick)
and people (Volk). Others have dealt with the striking similarities between certain of
Adorno’s and Heidegger’s commitments. As many readers have observed, they both claim
to identify a deep crisis of modernity whose roots must be traced to the very constitution of
reason itself. For both Adorno and Heidegger, Western civilization has become in thrall to
instrumental, calculative, and objectivizing modes of relating to, and engaging with, the
world. Both thinkers thus search for modes of sense‐making and evaluation that stand
opposed to the dominant modes of thinking and acting.
Given Adorno’s complicated and life‐long engagement with Heidegger, it is somewhat
disheartening to note that the involvement was never reciprocated. Apart from one or two
occasions on which Heidegger (Wisser 1977, 284) summarily dismissed Adorno with
some brief, derogatory remarks (asking, for example, with whom Adorno studied, perhaps
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ESPEN HAMMER
implying that he might not have had the requisite authority or skill to conduct
philosophical criticism at a high level), there exists no evidence of any real acquaintance
with Adorno’s philosophy.
The paper is divided into three separate parts. I first critically discuss Adorno’s interpre-
tation of Heidegger’s concern with the question of Being (Sein). Central to this interpreta-
tion is Adorno’s claim that Being, for Heidegger, resonates with metaphysical accounts of
the highest or most general being – that of Plato’s ideas or Aristotle’s substance. In various
steps, looking at several key claims of Heidegger, I argue that this approach is misguided.
Heidegger draws a clear and well justified distinction between his own conception of Being
and metaphysical visions of essence.
The second part of the essay identifies a strand of Adorno’s critique that does not depend
on the metaphysically oriented reading. This is the critique of fetishization and reifica-
tion – Adorno’s view that Heidegger falsely seeks to imbue his thinking and diagnosis of
modernity with a veneer of the timeless and transcendental. Adorno, I suggest, justifiably
introduces his dialectical procedure as a means to correct this tendency. Concepts, he
claims, should be viewed and analyzed in terms of the non‐identity between themselves
and the characteristics to which they purport to refer. In contrast to the Heideggerian call
for some kind of essential or necessary reference – words that magically yet “necessarily”
pick out their object, and that thereby aspire to overcome the fateful split between word
and object (or subject and object) – Adorno insists on difference and the need for ongoing
self‐reflection.
In the final part of the essay I propose a reading of Heidegger that takes heed of Adorno’s
warnings against fetishization and reification. While far from trying to efface the decisive
differences between the two thinkers, I highlight moments in Heidegger that lend them-
selves to a dialectical interpretation. I argue that these are moments of remembrance in
which human practice anticipates a more reconciled relation between subject and object.
1. Adorno’s Philosophical Criticisms of Heidegger
Adorno’s most extensive discussion of Heidegger takes place not in the Negative Dialectics
(although two chapters of that book are devoted to him) but, rather, in the 1960/61
lecture course entitled Ontologie und Dialektik. This lecture course is interesting in multiple
ways. It interprets Heidegger in the context of wide‐ranging reflections on Plato, Aristotle,
Kant, and German Idealism. Just as importantly, key parts of the lecture course were pre-
sented at the Collège de France before a very distinguished audience, which included the
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Jean Wahl, a highly recognized scholar of
Hegel and existentialism. We may therefore assume that Adorno did his utmost both to do
justice to Heidegger and to present his criticisms in as favorable and compelling light as
possible. In general, since the lecture course provides a very systematic account, it will be
the central source of my discussion in this section.
In the 1960/61 lecture course, Adorno refers to Heidegger with great respect.
Unsurprisingly, he commences his presentation by identifying the task of the Freiburg
thinker as that of investigating the nature of Being. Heidegger wants to know what really
is, what it is for a real being to be, and how its purported originality (Ursprünglichkeit) or
essentiality (Wesenhaftigkeit), and therefore universality, may be distinguished from that
which is derived, inessential, and particular – in short how the order of true or real being
is set against the order of appearance. The thinking of Being, then, is for Adorno a Platonic
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ADORNO’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER
undertaking. Historically, it emerges with Parmenides’ and Plato’s positing of the tempo-
rally and spatially non‐individuated idea (εἶδος), which, at least on Adorno’s account, qua
universal and unifying reality and principle stands opposed to the material world of sense.
The pursuit of being qua being is continued in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (especially books six
and seven) and in its fundamental nature and aspiration remains more or less unchanged
in the early modern thinking about substance, including that of John Locke.
Kant, to be sure, is for Adorno an ambivalent figure. With his distinction between the
incognizable order of the thing in itself and the cognizable order of appearance he deals a
death‐blow to rationalist metaphysics while seeking to ground objectivity in the formal
structuring capacities of the transcendental subject. He breaks, in other words, with the
long trajectory of metaphysical realism. At the same time, however, he sides with the tra-
dition in searching for an a priori account of objective (or, for him, synthetic a priori)
knowledge. In Hegel, however, Adorno sees a grandiose return to Platonic themes. In his
vigorous Auseinandersetzung with Kant, Hegel situates the subject in a wider context of
intelligibility, variously referred to as spirit (Geist) or the absolute, while seeking to ground
the subject/object distinction in higher and unifying modes of dialectically mediated iden-
tity. The point throughout Adorno’s interpretation is that Heidegger, rather than breaking
with this grand tradition of metaphysics and onto‐theology, continues it. Heidegger’s
ontology is a prima philosophia. It is metaphysical; it sees in its concept of Being a form of
essence; and it persistently calls for a return to the most archaic and most fundamental
source of intelligibility and comprehension.
As justification for this line of reconstruction, Adorno cites various claims in Heidegger.
There is, first, the “ontological difference” according to which one must distinguish bet-
ween Being and entities – Sein and Seiendes. A fundamental ontology – as opposed to
regional, material ontologies, the fundamental principles, say, of the various sciences and
fields of human inquiry – asks precisely about “the meaning of Being,” and even though
Being needs to be investigated via an existential analysis of Dasein, and Being always is the
Being of an entity, there seems to be a clear sense in which Heidegger aims at some form of
ascent. His investigation, according to Adorno, takes its lead from what is essentially a
Platonic opposition of Being and entities.
Adorno admits, secondly, that Heidegger’s conception of Being is phenomenological
and derived, at least to some extent, from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. (He
also notes that, in Being and Time, Heidegger resists the simple equation of Being with a
general concept.) However, even when he searches for the real in apodictically and ade-
quately presented evidence (according to the phenomenological principle of “letting the
way in which things show themselves originarily” function as a criterion of truth), Husserl
remains, according to Adorno, in thrall to the Platonic quest for essence. In this, Heidegger
was Husserl’s faithful student. The only truly important difference between Husserl and
Heidegger is that, in the latter, and especially with the thinking after “the turn” (die Kehre),
the subject (or, rather, Dasein) plays less and less a role for the constitution of intelligibility.
Instead, Being becomes radically historicized, paving the way for Heidegger’s History of
Being (Seinsgeschichte).
The third set of considerations that, for Adorno, speaks in favor of the metaphysical
approach to Heidegger focuses on the “ontologization of the ontic.” Like idealist philoso-
phies in general, which view empirical reality through the lens of the universal and the con-
cept, Heidegger disregards concrete history in favor of an abstract “history of Being.” Rather
than “dialectically” accepting their non‐identity with reality, he hypostatizes certain words
and expressions, treating them as place‐holders for an immediate c omprehension of Being.
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ESPEN HAMMER
Much if not everything in Adorno hinges on the idea of false identification (or “identity
thinking”). To “ontologize the ontic” does not deviate from this formula. Rather, it exem-
plifies the prioritization of the universal and general over the particular, fragmentary, or
singular that, throughout his career, Adorno sought to reflect upon and criticize.
Yet Adorno’s Platonic reading is simply not correct. In numerous writings, ranging from
Being and Time to the late, important essay, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of
Thinking,” Heidegger rigorously distinguishes between his own fundamental ontology, or
thinking of Being, and metaphysics, the study of being qua being. Metaphysics, which for
Heidegger spans the entirety of the Western tradition from Plato to Nietzsche, hinges on
notions of presence, representation, and, especially in modernity, makeability. As we have
seen, it attempts to locate an essential, universal, and fundamentally real order of being in
contrast to which all other orders of being are derivative, transient, and illusory. On
Heidegger’s account, the history in which such metaphysical philosophies have held
sway – in short the “history of metaphysics” – is one of forgetfulness. As Being is thematized
in its “essential nature,” as a higher‐order object of some kind, and, in modernity, with
Descartes, as an object of representation, and, finally, with Nietzsche, as one of will and
makeability, there occurs, Heidegger argues, an occlusion of Being (Seinsvergessenheit). The
question of Being, and the meaning of Being, is not even understood, let alone thematized.
In Being and Time, Heidegger (1992, 47) characterizes metaphysics in terms of the pursuit
of presence or givenness: being qua being (or being qua absolute reality) is precisely repre-
sented as exempt from the structure of interpretation, action, speech, and temporality that
makes up Dasein’s existence; it is, according to a fundamentally Platonic ideal, construed as
an object of a pure, noetic gaze. Adorno never considers the more plausible line of interpre-
tation, widely accepted in contemporary scholarship (see, for example, Crowell 2013),
namely that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s care‐structure is focused on structures of intel-
ligibility, arising for Dasein in its engaged involvement with the world. On this approach,
rather than being concerned with the representation of some form of givenness or object-
hood, distinguishing between the object and its representation and imbuing the object with
an aura of universality, Dasein generates the intelligibility it needs in order to make the world
cognitively accessible via its practical comportment. Being temporal, Dasein understands
itself and its actions in light of its most fundamental possibilities of Being; it interprets itself,
in other words, in light of self‐determined projects. However, in existing understandingly it
also returns to its own sense of itself as “having‐been.” The present, rather than disclosing
for a subject some object qua presence, opens up a complex event of disclosure and truth
(aletheia) in which things, events, and others are made intelligible in terms of their signifi-
cance (Bedeutsamkeit). Adorno correctly notes that Heidegger draws on Husserl’s “analyses
of meaning” – Bedeutungsanalysen. However, he fails to take this observation properly into
account when explicating the ontological difference between Being and entities.
Adorno repeatedly calls Heidegger to task for displaying a Platonic disregard for the
ontic, viewing it as contingent, belonging to a lower ontological order, being less real than
Being itself, etc. The ontic, as Adorno sees it, in order to carry any significance, thus calls
for some kind of re‐attribution or determination by the ontological level. However, this is
not Heidegger’s approach. For him, the ontic refers to inquiries concerned with knowledge
of entities – what their true nature amounts to, and how they relate to other entities and
are constituted. The positive sciences typically study ontic questions. The reason why the
later Heidegger displays a strong anti‐scientistic sentiment is not because the sciences are
ontic but, rather, because of their ontological significance and the ways in which they
represent the world in terms that allegedly fail to do full justice to the object. The famous
476
language of the Gestell is ontological and not ontic. There is nothing inherently deficient
about the ontic as such.
Adorno also appeals to Hegel’s dialectic of pure being, in which the concept of being as
such – being devoid of any determination – is characterized as empty, leading Hegel (2015,
68) to postulate its equivalence with “nothing” (das Nichts). Commencing the long and
arduous journey of the dialectic being traced in the Science of Logic, being, for Hegel, far
from being the supreme or privileged concept to which Heidegger supposedly referred, is
located at the lowest stage of philosophical development. Heidegger, Adorno infers, while
searching for a purity untouched by historical contingency, grounds his thinking in a con-
tentless abstraction. Like Fichte’s or Schelling’s A = A, the supposed absolute identity pre-
ceding judgment and determination, which Hegel thinks of as offering no more than a
false form of immediacy, Heidegger starts with a tautology according to which “Being just
is.” Having done that, however, he refuses to realize both that Being cannot be thought
without determination (and Heidegger does indeed introduce determinations), and that
the subject (Dasein) cannot avoid viewing itself as being responsible for whatever determi-
nations are attributed to Being. Behind the seemingly innocuous call for pure Being,
detached from any subjective involvement, one indeed finds all sorts of determinations
that, rather than reflecting Being itself conceived realistically, are brought forward by a
thinker deeply in thrall to the conservative radicalism of the late Weimar Republic.
Yet the emptiness‐objection does not withstand scrutiny. Since Heidegger thinks of
Being neither as a concept nor as an object of thought, the point of subjecting his proce-
dures to a Hegelian critique of this sort simply falls away. He is not assuming the view of
Being attributed to him by Adorno.
Hermann Mörchen (1981, 292), author of two influential studies of Adorno’s relation-
ship to Heidegger, sides with my conclusion yet refuses to see Adorno’s attribution of a
Platonic ontology to Heidegger as a mere misunderstanding. In his view, Adorno simply
did not believe that Heidegger, despite all his efforts, had managed to extricate himself from
such a heritage. The task of a critical reader such as himself is thus to call Heidegger out
and expose his failure to live up to his own standards.
Mörchen’s reading cannot be faulted for a lack of generosity. However, the fact that
Adorno displays no real awareness of Heidegger’s actual ambition is striking. Adorno does
not hold Heidegger to his own standards. He simply misunderstands the nature of his
project. Given Adorno’s unquestionable abilities as a philosopher, this is both surprising
and puzzling. It could be that Adorno does not reveal the true nature of his interpretation.
Given his hostility and aversion to Heidegger and the Heideggerians, it could be that, for
strategic reasons, he simply isn’t as generous a reader as Mörchen thinks he is. Perhaps, as
Mörchen speculates, the competitive instinct gets the better of him. Although the relation
was not reciprocal, Adorno no doubt viewed himself as Heidegger’s philosophical rival.
Speculations of this kind are probably in vain. Even if we could figure out what it is that
might have motivated Adorno to misread Heidegger, which seems improbable, the fact of
the interpretation remains.
2. Concepts and Hypostatization
Although Adorno’s most fundamental objections to Heidegger – the Platonic and idealist

interpretation of Being and the thesis regarding the “ontologization of the ontic” – do not
withstand scrutiny, other complaints, while perhaps less far‐reaching, also demand our
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ESPEN HAMMER
attention. One of them, emerging in numerous contexts, including Adorno’s essay

“Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” and Jargon of Authenticity, focuses on language and
its use in philosophical, poetic, and political contexts. I will call this the hypostatization‐
objection. The gist of this objection is that Heidegger falsely ascribes to certain words – Being
or Sein, in particular – a form of privileged substantiality: rather than being superimposed
on the world as semantic elements of historically contingent human practices, they are
believed to be in essential unity with their referent and directly expressive of it.
According to Adorno, Heidegger was motivated to hypostatize language in this way for
at least two reasons. One is the so‐called “ontological need,” which for Adorno is largely to
be accounted for in compensatory terms. Modern agents, facing the consequences of
aggressive secularization and rationalization of all traditional sources of meaning, find
themselves without safeguards against the existential challenges related to the facts of
death, separation, dependency, and reification. On reflection, what they desire in response
to this sense of uncertainty is security; hence the attraction of the new ontology, which in
its appeal to the over‐arching authority of Being purports to restore a reservoir of meaning
and offer “comfort.” (For Adorno, a particularly telling expression of this call to restore
meaning arises in connection with Heidegger’s attempt to relate authenticity to the reali-
zation of one’s own mortality. In “being‐towards‐death,” anxious Dasein is supposed to
experience its own possible non‐being. From this experience emerges a sense of unground-
edness, itself making possible the radical kind of resolution and self‐determination that
Heidegger associates with authenticity.)
Heidegger’s second motivation to hypostatize words hinges on a significant issue in the
philosophy of language. In Ontologie und Dialektik, Adorno sides with the Kantian orienta-
tion of modern thinking, according to which concept and intuition are fundamentally
opposed. Not only are they opposed, however, springing from different abilities of the mind
(the spontaneous capacity for discursive thinking versus the passive capacity for intuition),
but, as Max Horkheimer and Adorno, drawing on the early Nietzsche, argue in the anthro-
pological sections of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the human conceptual capacity, and
concepts in general, can be traced genealogically to the instinct for self‐preservation and
the need to create order in chaotic, unruly surroundings. Thus, concepts, rather than
uniquely and necessarily picking out features of objects, are tools, enabling human agents
to structure and dominate the environment. Dialectical thinking, Adorno argues, typically
serves to remind us of the non‐identity of concepts and reality. Criticizing the false ambi-
tion of conceptual thinking to fully exhaust the object, dialectical thinking paves the way
for alternative, non‐identifying ways of cognizing the world.
Fundamental ontology, however, ignores both the concept/reality opposition and the
genealogical dimension. Instead it postulates an identity‐relation between concept and
object. As in magical thinking, to use the concept thus becomes tantamount to invoking
the object itself; indeed, the concept is considered the object’s own immediate self‐
identification and self‐expression. Attempting to make this point as evident as possible,
Adorno brings up a number of considerations. One is that Heidegger privileges the
“mimetic” moment of language (its expressive nature) over the semantic moment. Another
is that Heidegger gets uncomfortably close to a metaphysics of naming whereby concepts
are treated as though as they are names, having a singular reference. A third and more
directly important consideration is that Heidegger dissociates the use of language from the
human capacity for autonomy. In the Kantian tradition, conceptual thinking is interpreted
as an autonomous activity: In thinking, agents freely (and rationally) reflect on whether or
not to apply particular concepts to particular circumstances. It is the force of reason, and
478
of reason‐giving (constraining us only qua free and rational agents), that at least ideally
motivates predication. Heidegger, on the contrary, substitutes heteronomy for autonomy.
With regard to the concepts that philosophically and existentially matter, we are encour-
aged to remain passive recipients; words like Sein have an authority independently of
human reason. While Heidegger views this move as part of his effort to rethink and
critique the role of reason in human life, for Adorno, it amounts to irrationalism.
Thus, in his rejoinder to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s hymns, Adorno (1992,
109–149) sees philosophically self‐conscious and responsible use of language as containing
markers of its own separation from the object. Unlike Heidegger (2000), who interprets
Hölderlin as a poet of the German Vaterland, anxiously situating Germany’s destiny (Geschick)
in the larger context of the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte) while weaving large, organic
unities out of disparate historical elements, Adorno views his poetry as paratactic, using
coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions, and introducing alienating and
“foreign” words and tropes in order to encourage reflection on the part of the reader. The
difference between the two thinkers is stark. Refusing to countenance the real history of
mankind with its divisions and violence, Heidegger constructs a unified, exclusionary narra-
tive, carried forth by means of words endowed with inscrutable, m ystical authority, suppos-
edly untouched by actual historical circumstance. For Adorno, this is myth, the creation of
false continuity and meaning; and myth is ideological. While illusory, it is nevertheless
capable of structuring and (falsely) legitimating human practice.
According to Adorno, employing concepts that are both vague and indeterminate,
Heidegger claims to achieve a concreteness otherwise missing in rationalized, modern
culture. Writing about death, fate, and authenticity, Heidegger seems to reach a plateau of
genuine existential meaning. However, the effect is to renounce rational accountability and
appeal primarily to the emotions. This is particularly true, Adorno maintains, of Heidegger’s
tendency to wed such conceptions to quasi‐fascistic appeals to “the ground” (Boden), the
elemental, and to free‐standing forces of various kinds. Rather than counting as ontological,
they are ontic – kitschy invocations of the origin – yet dressed up as ontological (and there-
fore endowed with a pre‐given, supposedly unquestionable authority).
Much of Heidegger’s “jargon of authenticity” was prepared for in the sections of Being
and Time dealing with “talk” (Gerede) and, more generally, Dasein’s everyday fallenness
(Gefallenheit). In these sections, entitled “The everyday Being of the ‘there,’ and the falling
of Dasein,” Heidegger analyzes the supposedly deficient yet largely unavoidable ways in
which the world gets disclosed and understood. For fallen, everyday Dasein, language
(Sprache) becomes a matter of passing along already shared and established interpretations:
One reiterates that which “everyone” says, and that is also how things are believed to stand.
Speech has been torn loose from the “the ground” and become “groundless” (bodenlos).
Rather than authentically disclosing the world, it covers up everything in a fog of average-
ness. In Adorno’s reading, this is a thinly veiled critique of the liberal public sphere. However,
it also betrays Heidegger’s desire to tie language to some deeper, heteronomous source of
authority, existing outside the range of everyday horizons of intelligibility.
In several writings, Adorno elaborates on Heidegger’s discourse and its ideological
dimension. For one thing, Heidegger’s language is not as ahistorical as he sometimes seems
to believe. On the contrary, Adorno (2008, 241) finds deep structural similarities between
Heidegger’s rhetoric and that of the National Socialist Party. In one particularly polemical
passage in Ontologie und Dialektik, he (Adorno 2008, 241) even goes so far as to suggest
that Hitler’s infamous ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, could be viewed as a key to under-
standing Being and Time. Of course, as Pierre Bourdieu (1991) has shown, Heidegger did in
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fact belong to, and philosophically sublimated, the habitus of the German right‐wing intel-
ligentsia of the 1920s and 1930s, calling for a dismantling of liberal Weimar culture in
favor of a return to the authentic, collective reality of the Volk, to be expressed in the
discourse of blood and soil, unconditional duty toward the Führer, existential resolve, and
national destiny. In Bourdieu’s (1991, 54) formulation, “Heidegger is close to the spokes-
men of the ‘conservative revolution,’ many of whose words and theses he consecrates
philosophically, but he distances himself from it by imposing a form which sublimates the
crudest ‘borrowings’ by inserting them in the network of phonetic and semantic reso-
nance which characterizes the Hölderlin‐style Begriffsdichtung of the academic prophet.”
In opposition to the more urban language of capital and modern culture (including, of
course, the culture of intellectuals and Jews), this discourse was supposed to contain
reference to rural and to some extent quasi‐feudal life; hence Heidegger’s well‐known pre-
dilection for the peasant and for “silence.” Part of the message implied by the jargon of
authenticity is precisely that meaningful silence is more authentic than the endless talk of
the urban bourgeoisie.
For another thing, rather than actually rescuing some layer of authentic language from
a dying German culture, Heidegger artificially invents words, assigning to them by fiat the
authenticity otherwise missing. Terms like Ge‐Stell or In‐der‐Welt‐Sein are, according to
Adorno, strange and ultimately hollow neologisms that, rather than serving to invoke a
lost immediacy, function as kitsch. Like sentimental song, their role is to influence and reg-
ulate the recipient’s emotions by false yet insidious means. Something similar, according to
Adorno, applies to Heidegger’s frequent exercises in etymology. While claiming to trace
both German and Greek words to their origins, and insisting that the original meaning is
the true and essential one from which philosophical insight can exclusively be gleaned,
Heidegger, deliberately ignoring the actual methods of philological research, which he
views as objectivistic and positivistic, too often just makes up a connection that simply isn’t
there. Moreover, by attempting to draw such connections he betrays his unfounded com-
mitment to the idea, heavily criticized by Adorno, that the oldest and most archaic is also
the most authentic and real.
Does Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s hypostatizations mean that he dismisses the very
value of authenticity? Looking for a moment at the complex issue of Adorno’s theory of
the modernist work of art, it seems evident that he in fact does support a conception of
authenticity, albeit one very different from that of Heidegger. In Heidegger’s essay “The
Origin of the Work of Art,” the jargon of authenticity works to situate the genuine work of
art at the origin of a particular historical people’s self‐understanding. The work of art,
Heidegger argues, discloses to a people its fundamental commitments, including those of
its identity and destiny. It sets up a form, in other words, of cultural totality and foundation,
meant to inform every significant practice and decision. Ultimately, this form is associated
with the value of truth, the “setting of the truth into the work” (Ins‐Werk‐Setzen der
Wahrheit). For Adorno, however, while the authentic work of art is supposed to offer
guidance and privileged cognitive insight, the attempt to ground that in the work’s appear-
ance (Schein) as a unified whole cannot be but illusory. Aesthetic truth, he submits, arises
out of the art‐work’s internal challenging of itself as a unified, appearing whole. It follows
that truth in art can never be conventionally beautiful. On the contrary, according to
Adorno (1998), truly valuable works of art – Beckett’s plays or Schönberg’s atonal compo-
sitions – accept and incorporate dissonance and even ugliness. Authenticity arises not
from the work’s foundational, totalizing qualities but, rather, from the acknowledgment of
non‐identity and its subsequent defense of the vulnerable particular.
480
The difference between Heidegger’s foundational and Adorno’s negativistic view of art
points to wider differences between their accounts of authenticity. While Adorno, as we
have seen, does not reject the value of authenticity, he attaches it to acts of reflection and
negation that challenge the “untrue totality.” Since authenticity opposes the everyday as
we currently know it, the challenge is supposed to open a space of futurity and opportu-
nity. For Heidegger, while authenticity, since it is tied to resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) and
therefore a self‐projecting of one’s ownmost possibilities for Being, reconstitutes Dasein’s
futurity, it ultimately, as the projection repeats privileged potentialities for Being, refers
Dasein to its past. Moving forward, for Heidegger, and embracing a “new beginning,” is
about authentically reappropriating the past.
Adorno can be thought of as a strategic nominalist. Although he does not accept the
classical nominalist view according to which only particulars exist, his aim is always to
unravel whatever false continuities and totalities he detects. Heidegger, by contrast, invokes
larger unities, structures, and paradigms of sense‐making by means of which he chal-
lenges a purportedly nihilistic modernity.
3. Parallels
Adorno’s and Heidegger’s assessments of modernity deviate in several crucial ways. While
Adorno seeks to rethink the conditions of autonomous judgment and action, Heidegger
orients thinking toward the archaic. Adorno criticizes all forms of organic, holistic
thinking, while Heidegger, especially in his late phase, aims, with his anticipation of a
“new beginning” (neue Anfang), to reconstitute a conception of totality. Politically, Adorno
takes a deeply critical position, defending in various ways the particular against all forms
of domination, whether conceptual, ideological, or directly power‐based. Heidegger, by
contrast, pleads for authentic self‐resolution not only at the individual level but also at the
collective. Against Adorno’s extremely qualified progressivism and liberal left‐wing agenda
stands Heidegger’s revolutionary conservatism. Where Adorno searches for the new,
capable of challenging the supposedly universal Verblendungszusammenhang, Heidegger
believes that only the oldest and most original can have the power to disclose new histor-
ical possibilities. Adorno approaches philosophy dialectically, arguing that all concepts are
mediated and that any appeal to the foundational must be ideological. Heidegger, as we
have seen, ties conceptuality to the capacity for privileged disclosure and holds that
dialectical thinking is ultimately in thrall to the kind of idealism that the philosophy of
Being claims to have surpassed.
The list could be made much longer. As several commentators have noted, however,
their accounts of modernity seem nevertheless to be aligned in certain important ways.
Both Heidegger and Adorno direct their critique not primarily at particular human institu-
tions and practices but, rather, at reason itself and the way reason is embedded in human
activity. Accompanied by that gesture, moreover, there is in both thinkers a sense of deep
and virtually impenetrable crisis, culminating in modernity yet with roots stretching far
back in human history. In both, the crisis (of reason) relates intimately to three deep‐seated
processes: (i) objectification; (ii) the loss of subjective presence in a world considered in
terms of abstract categories; and (iii) instrumentalization (and with that domination). In
the Dialectic of Enlightenment and elsewhere, Adorno traces these processes to the self‐
formation of the human species and the origins of human subjectivity. Heidegger, on the
other hand, finds the tendency toward objectification, and with that a “forgetfulness of
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Being,” in Plato’s metaphysics of presence. With early modern thinking and especially
Descartes, however, the subject is interpreted as disengaged and disembodied, an abstract,
objectifying power with no real standing in the world. While Descartes’ analysis ends up
with a gap between subject and object (according to which the object is the abstract item
of mathematical physics, the res extensa), Nietzsche radicalizes the modern sense of alien-
ation by reducing all engagements with the world, including cognitive ones, to exercises of
the will. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche thus discloses the truth of the world of techno‐
science, in which every existent gets viewed in terms of its resourcefulness, makeability,
and abstract categorization.
In their battles against idealism, both Adorno and Heidegger anticipate, and indeed
idealize, a form of release of the experienced object from the subject’s grip. Adorno
thinks of this release, in which the non‐identity of objects can be acknowledged, in terms
of utopian exceptions to the operations of the instinct for self‐preservation. Art, in
particular, but also encounters with what Adorno, following Kant and the German ide-
alists, refers to as the beauty of nature, present the subject with occasions on which no
interest is supposed to structure the subject/object relationship. Echoing and radical-
izing Kant’s conception of disinterested spectatorship, they permit features of the object
to be experienced that in our everyday cognitive grasp, being predicated upon
identification and instrumentalization, remain unacknowledged. In Being and Time,
Heidegger’s emphasis on practical comportment – the equipmentality of entities met
with – prevents him from thematizing this issue. The Dasein of this early work comes
across as active and even industrious. As he (1992, 95) puts it, “The kind of dealing
which is closest to us is […] not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of con-
cern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of
‘knowledge’.” However, in work subsequent to the die Kehre, he increasingly highlights
other and often more passive modes of engagement. A brilliant example of this can be
found in his 1950 lecture entitled “The Thing.”
Heidegger commences the lecture by reflecting on the difference between abolishing
distance and bringing real “nearness.” Drawing on his earlier thinking of technology and
“enframing” (Gestell), he points to how radio, film, and air travel put everything before our-
selves “at the shortest range.” Man seeks presence. However, the technological modes of
achieving presence only serve to present the object in terms that actually make it more
distant. The terms according to which technology presents the world, rather than letting
the object emerge as it itself is, are those of the instruments utilized to generate presence.
Although it brings the distant object in front of the viewer, television, for example, offers
an image whose content belongs to an ontological order inaccessible to the subject.
Technology, in other words, while providing a form of cognitive access, transforms not
only the object into a modality of representation but prevents the very possibility of gen-
uine engagement. As Heidegger has argued persistently, however, truth in the primordial
sense (aletheia) involves a disclosure based on Dasein’s own transcendental care‐structure.
As both a situated (thrown) and self‐interpreting (projecting) being, Dasein engages with
the world from its own historically unique yet essentially free and undetermined point of
view. In “The Thing,” the notion of such an involvement translates into a rigorous
accounting of the terms under which an entity may be allowed to reveal itself as what it is
in truth. Essentially, this accounting is of a phenomenological nature: Heidegger explicates
the conditions under which a jug may be experienced with adequate evidence. Those con-
ditions – or terms – include the jug’s positioning in a meaningful space, as well as its use
not only as a mere container but as an object of ritual. In explicit opposition to Adorno’s
482
attribution of some sort of Platonic view to Heidegger, we are being told (Heidegger 1971,
168) that “what and how the jug is as this jug‐thing is something we can never learn – let
alone think properly – by looking at the outward appearance, the idea. That is why Plato,
who conceives of the presence of what is present in terms of the outward appearance, had
no more understanding of the nature of the thing than did Aristotle and all subsequent
thinkers.” Rather, the jug comes into presence – it “things.” The jug needs to be compre-
hended and approached in its full and unrestricted context of human involvement.
From an Adornian point of view, it may appear that Heidegger, in “The Thing,” ends up
rehearsing the kind of rhetoric of the origin that one so often finds elsewhere, especially in
the later writings. For example, the relatively obscure notion of the “fourfold” (das Geviert)
enters toward the end of the essay, suggesting that the jug comes fully into its own only
when placed within the existential correlates of “earth, sky, mortals, and gods.” For
Adorno, this can be viewed as an instance of Heidegger’s general tendency to posit anach-
ronistic visions of lived totality as an ideological substitute for modern disenchantment.
The idea of the “fourfold” may seem eminently mythological – an archaizing myth, Adorno
would argue, designed for the ontologically needy yet nihilistic inhabitants of the twen-
tieth century. However, the phenomenology of the jug shows up other aspects that point in
a less compromising direction. These include Heidegger’s painstaking attempt to set this
phenomenology up as a critical alternative to the ever‐present fungibility of objects in late
modernity. For the jug to come into its own and be revealed as what it is in truth (the event
of aletheia), Dasein needs to behold it not on its own terms but on terms that, rather than
being immediately present, can only be approached via forms of involvement that involve
receptive capacities. In somewhat more Adornian language, the jug has a worth that can
only be revealed if its exchange‐value (whatever it can be used for, how it allows us to
achieve some external end from which we may profit) is bracketed in favor of attending
exclusively to the way it actualizes value on its own.
It is worth mentioning that in a 1965 laudatio to Ernst Bloch, Adorno offers his own
discussion of jugs – or rather pitchers or pots (Krug). The context, more specifically, is
Bloch’s opening meditation, in The Spirit of Utopia, on “an old pitcher.” In Bloch’s expres-
sionistic account, an old pitcher contains, for its loving users, a “weak sign,” coming to us
from the past, of what happiness or redemption would or could involve. From out of histor-
ical depth, and only insofar as we let it “participate in us,” it speaks to us, Bloch puts it, of
“a strange, new territory, and returns with us formed as we could not be in life, adorned
with a certain, however weak, sign, the seal of our self ” (Bloch 2000, 9). Clearly aware of
Heidegger’s essay, toward the end of his tribute to Bloch, Adorno (1992, 219) assures the
reader that “no ontology is to be extracted from the belly of the pot.” Instead of accepting
Heidegger’s ontologization of the pot, he agrees with Bloch’s related assessment of its his-
torically constituted “thing‐language.” While a perfectly mundane object, the pot seems to
recover, express, and also anticipate horizons of social‐historical experience ordinarily left
unattainable by the practices of subsumption and instrumentalization:
It is no longer the proportions of the pot that are beautiful but rather what has been accumu-
lated within it, its process of becoming and its history, what has disappeared into it and what
the thinker’s gaze, which is both tender and aggressive, arouses in it. (Adorno 1992, 217)
Like a work of art, the pot tells a story of “what could have been” – the latent anticipation
of a different practice, a different relation between subject and object, than the one that
has actually become hegemonic.
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Unlike Adorno, Heidegger stresses aspects of the jug that, in his view, approximate the
timeless and universal. While a historically situated object, there is a truth to what the jug
is that transcends immediate cultural expectations and practices. Unsurprisingly, Adorno
is skeptical of this yearning for the timeless. It is, as we have seen, one of Adorno’s objec-
tions to Heidegger that he withdraws beings from the actual exchanges of historically
specific agents while hypostatizing them in an allegedly non‐historical sphere of Sein itself.
For Adorno, the object in its “truth,” while exceeding its cultural determination, is far from
timeless. It is, rather, eminently temporal in the way nature itself is temporal: Ephemeral,
dynamic, and non‐identical to human practices of identification. Truth, for Adorno, thus
relates to nature and not Sein. However, when approached along these lines, he would
agree with Heidegger that full self‐revelation – the coming into full disclosure or truth of a
particular entity – presupposes an act of self‐relinquishment on the part of the active,
objectivating subject. He would also agree with Heidegger that the experience of the release
of the object involves a shift to a different order of experience altogether. While Heidegger
ontologizes this shift, Adorno invokes a history/nature distinction, suggesting that true
non‐identity can only be experienced insofar as the subject steps out of, as it were, regular
historical time.
More generally, the gesture of radical critique unites the two approaches and might
explain why their philosophies occasionally have been seen as converging. An example of
this can be found in deep ecology and environmental ethics, in which Adorno’s and
Heidegger’s views inspire what is often taken to be common projects of seeking to dis-
mantle the traditional, religious, and metaphysical, distinction between man and nature.
For both thinkers (although Heidegger, as mentioned, prefers to approach nature in
ontological terms), humans are closely related to, and dependent upon, nature. Thus, the
very notion of the subject as harboring essentially coordinating and instrumentalizing
capacities, setting it against nature, needs to be both uncovered and criticized. Are
alternative modes of habituating the earth available? Is perhaps the enlightenment under-
pinning of Western civilization itself – the emphasis on autonomy and activity as markers
of human dignity and well‐being – in need of scrutiny and perhaps some sort of qualified
or even wholesale rejection? These are questions that many Adorno and Heidegger scholars
are likely to keep raising.
4. Conclusion
While in many ways powerful, Adorno’s critique of Heidegger has turned out not to be
entirely adequate. Adorno’s interpretation of Heidegger’s ontological differentiation bet-
ween Being and entities (Sein and Seiendes) as involving a species of Platonic dualism is unac-
ceptable. Adorno fails to account for Heidegger’s opposition to Platonism, and he
misrepresents the implications of his phenomenological procedure. Rather than postulating
metaphysical entities supposed to serve as the Platonic originals or ideas, Heidegger searches
for the most fundamental conditions under which we make experience intelligible.
However, there are reasons to sympathize with a related but ultimately different objec-
tion put forward by Adorno. This is the claim that Heidegger, although he may not proceed
Platonically and metaphysically, tends to hypostatize many of his most important con-
cepts, turning them by fiat into notions of origin supposed to possess conceptually unjus-
tifiable authority. The ideological analysis delivered under the rubric of a “jargon of
authenticity” convincingly describes how Heidegger, in tune with a number of affiliated
484
intellectuals and writers of the National Socialist era, creates a rhetoric in which certain
words are imbued with a seductive aura of the archaic, authoritative, and authentic.
Behind this analysis stands the now widely shared worry that Heidegger disregarded not
only democratic culture, with its commitment to enlightened and critical dialogue, but
dismissed ordinary speech and life in such democratic settings.
I finally discussed similarities between the two thinkers. While far from underestimating
the deep and pervasive differences between them, I suggested that a rapprochement could be
conceivable. Both Adorno and Heidegger are searching for alternatives to the standard,
essentially instrumental and identifying, ways in which objects are approached and pos-
sessed. While proceeding differently, with Adorno putting forward his modal utopianism
and Heidegger seeking to rescue a purportedly archaic bond (having been effaced or sup-
pressed by the rise to dominance of metaphysics), both thinkers strive to rearticulate the
terms according to which we behold objects. They both seek to suspend the operations of
what Adorno calls the principle of self‐preservation.
The relationship between Adorno and Heidegger is a classical topos of twentieth‐
century European philosophy, pointing to tectonic differences between a liberal Marxist
progressivism, on the one hand, and a religiously inspired, reactionary (and revolutionary)
conservatism, on the other. As I have tried to show in this chapter, of particular interest in
the Adorno/Heidegger relationship is the deep, unacknowledged parallel existing between
their respective assessments of modernity. In both cases, the sense of crisis runs deeper
than any democratic politics can make up for. However, while Adorno insisted on the
continued relevance of traditional progressive values such as reason, critique, and intellec-
tual debate, Heidegger called for a complete debunking of modernity. Their debate (if one
can call it that) deserves, and, most likely, rewards further attention.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Gesammelte Schriften Band 6. Negative Dialektik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit.
Adorno, T.W. (1992). Notes to Literature, vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press.
Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2008). Ontologie und Dialektik (1960/61). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (2007). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (trans.
Bloch, E. (2000). The Spirit of Utopia (trans. A.A. Nassar). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (trans. P. Collier). Oxford: Polity Press.
Crowell, S. (2013). Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Düttmann, A.G. (2002). The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno. London and New
York: Continuum.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (2015). The Science of Logic (trans. G. Di Giovanni). New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. A. Hofstadter). New York, Evanston, San
Francisco, London: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, M. (1992). Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). Oxford: Blackwell.
Heidegger, M. (2000). Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (trans. K. Hoeller). New York: Humanity
Books.
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Macdonald, I. and Ziarek, K. (eds.) (2008). Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions. Stanford:
Mörchen, H. (1981). Adorno und Heidegger. Untersuchung einer philosophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung.
Stuttgart: Klett‐Cotta.
Wisser, R. (1977). Das Fernseh‐interview. In: Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (ed. G. Neske), 257–
287. Pfullingen: Neske.
Note
1 The literature on the Adorno/Heidegger relation is extensive. Important recent contributions

include Düttmann (2002), Gordon (2016), and Macdonald and Ziarek (2008).
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31
Concept and Object: Adorno’s Critique of Kant

J. M. Bernstein
1. Saturday Afternoons with Kant
In an essay from 1964, Adorno records how as a young man, still at the Gymnasium, he
met Siegfried Kracauer. Despite Kracauer being 14 years his senior, they became firm
friends, with Kracauer mentoring the intellectually ambitious young Adorno. For years
they would regularly meet on Saturday afternoons to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It
would be a mistake to underestimate how formative these Saturday afternoon meetings
were since Kracauer’s approach to Kant was heterodox in the extreme.
Under his guidance, I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not
as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text
from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in
doing so one could acquire something of truth itself. (Adorno 1992, 58–59)
The Critique of Pure Reason was then as now the pivot and axis of modern German philos-
ophy. In adopting an interpretive approach to Kant’s dense text in which its central ideas
are provided with a double reading, as both epistemology and as a “coded text” in which
“the situation of spirit could be read,” Kracauer was reading Kant against the grain. This
interpretive approach to philosophical texts would become Adorno’s own: Each
philosophical concept or stretch of argument would need to be analyzed, in some dialectical
to‐and‐fro of mutual dependence, in terms of conceptual stringency and expressive
spiritual significance.1
In the case of Kant, Kracauer showed the young Adorno that Kant’s critical philosophy
was something more and other than a system of transcendental idealism. In his classic
work History and Class Consciousness (1923), Georg Lukács argued that Kant’s philosophy
was the philosophical articulation and expression of bourgeois modernity. As a
consequence, Lukács argued, the fundamental dualisms, antinomies, and contradictions
that flood Kant’s masterwork should be interpreted as the antinomies of bourgeois thought
(Lukács 1971a, 110–149).2 For example, Lukács argues that the abyss separating nou-
menal freedom from empirical causal determinism, an abyss as disturbing to Kant as it was
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J. M. Bernstein
to his earliest readers, is best construed not in terms of the exigencies of making sense of
human freedom in a Newtonian universe, but rather as expressing the ideology of
bourgeois individualism of capitalist market relations that simultaneously hid and fostered
the “mechanisms” of the capitalist system: “man in capitalist society confronts a reality
‘made’ by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to
himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its ‘laws’” (Lukács 1971a, 135); or, later, “In every
aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his
own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence”
(Lukács 1971a, 165). For Lukács to think through the contradictions of Kant’s philosophy
was to critically think through the antinomies of capitalist modernity.
In Adorno’s remembering, Kracauer had effectively achieved this insight some half
dozen years earlier. Kracauer showed Adorno how
…the objective‐ontological and the subjective‐idealist moments warred within it [Kant’s

system], how the more eloquent passages in the work are the wounds this conflict has left in
the theory. From a certain point of view, the fissures and flaws in a philosophy are more
essential to it than the continuity of its meaning. (Adorno 1992, 59)
There is no evidence that Adorno ever departed from either the Lukács‐Kracauer posi-
tioning of Kant’s system of transcendental idealism as the philosophical execution of
modern self‐consciousness or from the consequent requirement that one read Kant’s phi-
losophy as “force field” in which the conflict of concepts with one another “stand in for
actual living forces” (Adorno 2001a, 4). Nonetheless, adequately gauging the role of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in Adorno’s mature thought must remain oblique since,
apart from a 1959 lecture course that he never intended to be published (Adorno 2001a,
283) and the dense essay “On Subject and Object” (Adorno 1998), which continually
resounds with but is not directly on the First Critique, reference to Kant’s theoretical philos-
ophy is highly localized, fragmentary, interstitial, and implied. What nonetheless requires
that Adorno’s relation to Kant be addressed is that Adorno’s central work of theoretical
philosophy, Negative Dialectics, is obsessed by the idealist concept. The concept of the con-
cept that opens the account of Negative Dialectics, that governs the conceptions of subject
and unity that are the primary objects of Adorno’s critique, and hence the concept that
orients the book as a whole, is the concept of the concept Kant introduced. And while the
Lukács‐Kracauer positioning of Kant provides some guidance as to why Adorno should
follow suit, the role that the Kantian concept of the concept plays in Adorno’s philosophy
is his alone. All of which can seem deeply puzzling.
2. The Concept of the Concept and Constitutive Subjectivity

Beyond the magic circle of identity philosophy, the transcendental subject can be deciphered
as a society unaware of itself. (Adorno 1973, 177)
At a moment in which critique must become the leading edge of Marxist endeavor in the
light of its revolutionary praxis having been provisionally disabled and perhaps dissolved,
that a book intending to transform the radical Marxist tradition of critique should define
itself in terms of the problem of the concept is, again, puzzling. Yet this is just what Adorno
states as early as the Preface to Negative Dialectics. The ambition of the text is, with logically
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consistent means, to put in place of “the principle of unity and the hegemony of the supra‐
ordinated concept, the idea of that which would be outside the spell [des Banns: the bane or
the curse] of such unity” (Adorno 1973, xx, 1975, 10).3 By the phrase “the hegemony of
the supra‐ordinated concept” Adorno has in mind both that formation of the concept that
rules over, subordinates other forms of the concept; and the thesis that it is this highest
ranking concept that rules over everything; it is what comes first in the continuation of
capital domination. For it to make sense that the practice of critique should be governed by
the notions concept, contradiction, and negation, Adorno must argue that the wrong
world of capital is not only an unjust system of domination, exploitation, reification, waste,
and unnecessary human suffering, but it could not be unjust in this manner unless it is
afflicted by a deficit of reason such that we will not be able to achieve a better and different
world without a change in reason and rationality that involves a different concept of the
concept. This is why Adorno says what is at stake in radical critique is the exposition of the
very idea of what might escape the spell of unity dictated by the reigning concept, what
could rationally count as other than what is dictated by the supra‐ordinated concept. The
spell, which is in part how hegemony works, is the conception of unity that the supra‐
ordinated concept dictates and that appears rationally irresistible because it claims to define
what rationality and intelligible must be überhaupt.
And now, if one were to ask what the principle of unity and the hegemony of the supra‐
ordinated concept have to do with Kant, the next sentence begins to spell out the connec-
tion. Adorno says that from the very moment when he first trusted his intuitive intellectual
judgments, perhaps sometime during the Saturday afternoon sessions with Kracauer, “he
felt it to be his task to use the power of the subject to break through the delusion of constitutive
subjectivity” (Adorno 1973, xx; 1975, 10; italics JMB). The grand philosophical work that
Adorno thought his most fundamental philosophical task and that is now to be pursued as
the overall goal of Negative Dialectics is to critically overcome the spellbinding and hege-
monic authority of constitutive subjectivity. For Adorno, then, something of the idea of
constitutive subjectivity is constitutive of the rationality deficit of capitalist modernity. By
“constitutive subjectivity” Adorno plainly means to be referring to Kant’s transcendental
unity of apperception and its successors in Fichte and Hegel. So the first task must be to put
together how Kant’s concept of the concept and his concept of constitutive subjectivity fit
together; and then explicate the code whereby constitutive subjectivity provides the histor-
ical situation of spirit.
Prior to Kant, the model for cognitive awareness was immediate intuition; knowing was
modeled upon the familiar experience visual perception, immediately seeing X. Whether it
concerned objects themselves, or impressions and ideas, or Platonic universals, cognitive
awareness in each case involved an immediate mental grasping, a seeing with the mind’s
eye. Kant’s great reversal of the tradition was to make knowing and cognition active rather
than passive, where the pulse of cognitive activity became conceptual synthesis. Concepts,
Kant claims, are always something universal that serve as a rule (Kant 1965, A106).
Kant’s concepts come in two varieties: (i) empirical concepts serve as rules of sensible syn-
thesis, that is, they guide the mind’s activity in putting together what sensibly appears to it
into structures corresponding to objects or events: the sensible appearing of what is red,
round, hard, edible, etc. are synthesized, unified, into the representation of an apple, or we
synthesize the sequence of bat meeting ball into the event of the bat causing the ball to fly
over the left field wall. (ii) Higher level concepts are rules for coordinating lower level,
empirical concepts; that is, what gives empirical concepts their cognitive significance, what
allows them to represent the world at all, is wholly dependent on the role they play in
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judgments because the only use that the understanding can make of empirical concepts
“is to judge by means of them” (Kant 1965, A68/B93).4 Here too unity is the guiding idea:
“Whereas all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affections, concepts rest on functions. By
‘function’ I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one
common representation” (Kant 1965, A68/B93). Or again, “all judgments are functions
of unity among our representations, instead of an immediate representation” (Kant 1965,
A69/B93‐4). So the higher order concepts are the concepts producing the unity of judg-
ment, the very idea of putting together a concept referring to an object with a concept
referring to a property of that object into a judgment that states that the property holds of
that object: “The apple is red.” Because these higher order concepts governing ordinary
empirical concepts, giving them their significance, are not empirical, then they must come
from the mind alone; they must be the rules of cognitive mindedness that the mind gives to
itself (or are simply the givens of mindedness) in order to function at all. Because they are
necessary for sensible experience to be meaningful, and because they come before empirical
experience but shape it and form it, they are pure a priori concepts. Hence, on Kant’s
new regime the mind is no longer permitted to speculate on what there is, but rather the
mind legislates the structure and meaning of experience: “objects must conform to our
knowledge” (Kant 1965, Bxvi).
Empirical concepts unify sensible intuitions, and categories unify empirical concepts
into judgments. What unifies the categories that make up the judgment? If concepts are
rules, what unity deploys the rules of the judgment to unify empirical concepts in their
unifying of sensible intuitions? The answer is: Constitutive subjectivity, the “I think” that
must be able to accompany all “my” representations. It is the spontaneity and activity of
the self that judges and synthesizes, that uses empirical concepts and categories in order to
unify its sensible givens. This higher order self or subject, the transcendental subject, is
thus, with respect to cognitive significance, the world legislator. Think of this as involving
two thoughts; first, the unity requirement in relation to the self: “only in so far as I can
grasp the manifold of the [sensible] representations in one consciousness, do I call them
one and all mine. For otherwise, I would have as many‐colored and diverse a self as I have
representations of which I am conscious to myself ” (Kant 1965, B134). This is Kant’s anti‐
Hume argument: There cannot just be free‐floating representations without a self for
whom they are representations; but in order to represent they must be unified, they must
be essentially for the self. But second, and, again, to underline the exigent Kantian thought,
the kind of unity necessary in order for significant representation does not come from the
objects but from the subject:
Combination does not, however, lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them… On the
contrary, it is an affair of the understanding alone, which itself is nothing but the faculty of
combining a priori, and of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of
apperception. (Kant 1965, B164)
The principle of idealism a priori binds the unity of the concept to the unity of the self; to
allow an outside to the unity of the concept would decimate the self that is its source and
foundation. This is the notion of constitutive subjectivity that is the target of Adorno’s cri-
tique, indeed the critical object of Negative Dialectics. On this account the very idea of an
empirical object, a material object in the world, is one in which its form of unity and the
kinds of significances it can have for a self are derived wholly and solely from the rules of
unification legislated by the self that enable the self to be at one with itself. Because the
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unifying work of empirical concepts that gives unity to object follows from the unity of the
self for itself, it follows that the unity and meaning of the material world is a projection
from the unity of the transcendental self or subject.
What is going to allow us to begin to interpret the hyperbole of constitutive subjectivity
as somehow programmatic for capitalist modernity is the thought that wherever one is
faced with the idea of transcendental constitution, some idea of a non‐empirical self a priori
legislating the meaning of an object world in general, it can be further elaborated in terms
of social institution.5 The transition from Kantian transcendental constitution to rule‐
governed social practices that institute a world is Hegel’s; it is the Hegelian decoding of
Kantian philosophy as a world‐instituting social practice that enables the further decoding
of it in Marxist terms. “The human being,” Adorno elaborates, “is a result, not an εɩ̓͂δος;
the insights of Hegel and Marx penetrate all the way into the utmost aspects of the
so‐called questions of constitution” (Adorno 1998, 258). We have already seen a hint of
the Marxist decoding in the subject‐object double‐take in Lukács: The worker first taking
himself to be an autonomous subject (the Kantian ideology) only to discover that he is a
determined object at the mercy of the laws of the capitalist market place (the Marxist
decoding).
What then are the social practices that convene the principle of identity as required by
the idea of constitutive subjectivity such that nothing that does not conform to it can
emerge? The two domains where the claim to totality are emphatic are, first, natural sci-
ence, on the model of mathematical physics, and its proliferating technological extensions
and applications, which jointly comprise what Adorno calls “the spiritual domination of
nature” (Adorno 1973, 19, 1975, 30); and second, the capitalist market where ideally
every object, including human labor, is quantifiable and exchangeable – the two domains
becoming irrevocably wed in the late nineteenth century (Bernstein 2018). Capitalist
totality, that to which there is now no outside, is produced by the universalization of the
exchange principle: “The exchange principle … is ur‐related to the identification principle.
It has its social model in exchange, and it would not be without the latter, through which
non‐identical particular essences and achievements become commensurable, identical.
The spread of the principle constrains the entire world to become identical, to totality”
(Adorno 1973, 146, 1975, 149).6 If ever there were an apt moment to critique capitalist
domination as such in Negative Dialectics, this would be it; but Adorno does not.
After glancing at this possibility, Adorno redirects our attention to hegemonic concep-
tuality itself, only now for the sake of highlighting its intimate normativity and authority.
The copula of standard predicative judgment says it is so and not otherwise; hence, the
absorption of object by concept is the achievement of every judgment. In this respect “the
will to identity labors in every synthesis; as an a priori task of thinking, immanent to it, it
appears positive and desirable” (Adorno 1973, 148, 1975, 151). This leads the judging
subject to form the further moral desiderata that all objects ought to devolve before the
demands of conceptual synthesis. It is thus that identity becomes
the ur‐form of ideology … After the unspeakable effort it must have cost our species to produce
the primacy of identity even against itself, it rejoices and basks in its victory by turning it into
the definition of the conquered thing: what has happened to it must be presented by the thing
as its “in‐itself.” (Adorno 1973, 148, 1975, 151)
This is one version of the identity of subject and object (Adorno 1973, 142). If identity is
the ur‐form of ideology, then twisting free of capitalist modernity must mean before
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anything else twisting free of the principle of identity; or as Adorno concludes the section
we have been examining, the “critique of ideology is not something peripheral and intra‐
scientific, something limited to objective Geist and its subjectively restricted products, but
philosophically central: the critique of constitutive consciousness itself.”
3. “To Break Through the Appearance of Total Identity”
Assume that what Marxist practice was to achieve was the realization of the ideals of free-
dom and equality underwriting bourgeois life but unrealizable within it. The inference
Adorno draws from the failure of Marxist revolutionary practice – its belief in laws of his-
tory that would lead with rational inevitability to the overcoming of capitalism in socialism
or communism – is that we have yet to discover what would count as being outside capitalist
modernity. Marxism too is under the spell of the principle of identity. Said differently, the
philosophy that was to be realized in communism was itself a wrong philosophy; hence
only by critiquing that philosophy can the claim for Marxist revolutionary practice be re‐
opened. And, once more, what makes the modern world close in on itself is the principle of
identity, now understood as the compulsion of constitutive subjectivity.
The opening sections of the Introduction of Negative Dialectics expound its critical
project as one of locating an outside to Kantian hegemonic conceptuality (as I will call the
regime of the supra‐ordinated concept). Adorno argues that Hegel’s philosophy had,
against Kant, the correct project of asking after how philosophical concepts could cope
with what was heterogeneous to them; his attempt failed because, despite repudiating
Kantian formalism and conceptuality, he nonetheless deployed it. Hence, we must consider
the meaning of dialectics again. Adorno now narrows or re‐orients the notion of dialectics
so that it narrowly addresses the claim of hegemonic conceptuality and what resists that
claim: The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than “objects do not vanish into
their concept, that these come to contradict the traditional norm of adaequatio” (Adorno
1973, 5, 1975, 16–17). The insipid blandness of this announcement is its point:
Hegemonic conceptuality indicts itself if its mere insistence generates a contradiction
between what is and what it demands. And this will occur, Adorno contends, because the
hegemonic concept requires that each object fit with the universalist demands of the con-
cept, that is, sheer qualitative difference and sheer sensuous particularity will come to fall
outside the requirements of the hegemonic concept: “That which is differentiated will
appear divergent, dissonant, negative just so long as consciousness must press towards
unity; so long was what is not identical with itself, with its claim to totality” (Adorno 1973,
5, 1975, 17). What is differentiated only appears dissonant and negative – ugly, exiled,
broken, useless, strange, alien, disgusting, dangerous, jarring, shrill, discordant, anoma-
lous, raucous, other: nonidentical – because the hegemonic concept screens out what in‐
itself fails to agree with the demands of unification. Hence the claim that “dialectics is the
consistent consciousness of non‐identity;” however, does Adorno go too far when he urges
the other side of this thesis: “contradiction is non‐identity under the spell of the law, which
also affects the non‐identical”? (Adorno 1973, 6, 1975, 18) Even if we concede the effects
on the nonidentical in its appearing other than it is, it cannot be the case that every contra-
diction with the law of identity in its various guises points to the non‐identical.
While Adorno would champion the cause of use‐values beyond the sway of exchange
value, of lives having intrinsic worth outside the labor market, of sensitive ecological hab-
itats, of the moral terribleness of useless suffering, and on, it is not these contradictions
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that orient his project; it is rather what categorically these phenomena stand for or point to
philosophically that is his target. If the spell of the principle of identity works through the
hegemonic concept, then what is required first is to disenchant the concept (Adorno 1973,
11–12). And for this purpose it is the concept of the nonconceptual that requires vindica-
tion without regressing to a pre‐Kantian standpoint. Drawing on a dualist contrast
between mind and sense, sapience and sentience, activity and passivity, the lamp and the
mirror, the conceptualist contends that knowing nature should be conceived “as p roducing
a second nature” (Brandom 2000, 8). Adorno’s disenchantment begins with an opposing
reflective naturalist reminder: “In truth, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, move
toward non‐conceptualities, because they are, on their part moments of reality, which
necessitated their formation primarily for the purpose of controlling nature” (Adorno
1973, 11, 1975, 23). While sounding as if he is about to press a point about the relation
between sense and reference, Adorno’s inaugural gesture is to place concepts in and as a
part of the reality to which they ordinarily refer, and, having done so, to then set them in a
natural relation to that reality: Concepts are not just epistemic functions, but natural
functions; they are for the sake of aiding humans in controlling reality for survival pur-
poses. Seen under this head, this form of conceptual rationality is a species of instrumental
rationality. Further, because satisfying the ends of species’ survival is necessary, then
Adorno deflates what appears in Kant as an a priori necessity into a natural necessity:
“The definition of the transcendental as that which is necessary, a definition added to func-
tionality and generality, expresses the principle of the self‐preservation of the species”
(Adorno 1973, 179, 1975, 180). Under this regime, it is illusory to believe that freedom
and reason mutually implicate one another; if hegemonic conceptuality is the vehicle of
instrumental reason, then its demands are natural demands, causal demands in conceptual
and rational form. In what now appears an almost too mild reminder, Adorno asserts that
the desperate self‐exaltation of the human is a reaction to the experience of powerlessness,
and our terrible ferocity a function of being imprisoned in our apparatus of survival, not
unlike the ferocity of the rhinoceros who carries the armor that protects it around like an
ingrown prison, and to the anthropomorphic eye seems desperate to shake itself free of it
(Adorno 1973, 180).
Reflectively, we cannot avoid seeing conceptuality as part of evolution and natural his-
tory; but this is sufficient to bracket hegemonic conceptuality since it raises a perspective
that emerges internally that poses a question of an insistent outside by showing hege-
monic conceptuality to have origins that are intrinsically interested, functional, and therefore
parochial.7 Call this Adorno’s naturalist frame. Within Adorno’s philosophy, the naturalist
frame means to provide a permanent reflective check on the claims of conceptualism by
disallowing the perspective of constitutive subjectivity to become total: There is always the
perspective, the question, the claim, and the significance of a nature that comes before and
exceeds the second nature we have created even if, as Adorno always concedes, we have no
direct, unmediated relation to first nature.
4. Non‐conceptuality: Mimesis, Expression, Presentation
When Kant states that “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts
are blind” (Kant 1965, A51/B75) the philosophical emphasis falls on the second clause,
on the blindness of intuitions without concepts, since even a modest empiricism will
validate the first clause. Hegemonic conceptuality hangs on the inclusiveness of the
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c onceptuality requirement. While, formally, intuitions are immediate representations of

singular objects, this definition is inadequate as it stands because intuitions only acquire
their representational function through being subsumed under a concept in a judgment.
Apart from a minority school of Kantian non‐conceptualists,8 the orthodox view is that all
cognition comes through conceptualization, hence only by being brought under concepts
can intuitions represent; attempting to square the circle, this generates the embarrassed
Kantian wriggle, “their capacity to function in this way is sufficient to justify their logical
classification” (Allison 2004, 82; italics JMB). In supporting this Kantian thought, John
McDowell for example, has argued that intuition does not make an even notionally sepa-
rable contribution to cognition (McDowell 1996, 9). And pressing this thought one step
further, intuition will disappear altogether from view if one argues, as Robert Brandom
has, that conceptual significance depends on concepts’ role in reasoning, their roles in judg-
ments that can themselves form the premise or conclusion of an inference; grasping a
concept is mastering its inferential uses; hence all significance is inferential significance
(Brandom 2000, 1–44).
Even in narrow terms, one might argue that intuitions must be capable of playing a
notionally separable cognitive role prior to being subsumed under a concept if (i) concept
formation (and extension), (ii) concept application, and (iii) concept learning are to be pos-
sible, otherwise there would be nothing there in the world calling for a new concept,
nothing there in the world guiding and constraining concept application, nothing actual
having significances facing the neophyte that would bear fulfillment in conceptualization.
In these respects, concepts must in some manner depend on intuitions, on the sensuous
particulars they are about. In a dense passage, Adorno presents this thought in the first
instance as a component of a consideration of the naturalist frame.
That the concept is a concept even when it deals with existing things [Seiendem] does not
change the fact that on its part it is intertwined in a nonconceptual whole against which it
seals itself off solely through its reification, which created it as a concept. The concept is a
moment in dialectical logic, like any other. Its mediated nature through the nonconceptual
survives in it by means of its meaning [Bedeutung], which in turn founds [justifies] its concep-
tuality. It is characterized as much by its relation to the nonconceptual – as in keeping with
traditional epistemology, where every definition of concepts ultimately requires nonconcep-
tual, deitic moments… (Adorno 1973, 12, 1975, 23–24)
Adorno is here offering a series of reminders about how concepts are immersed in and
bound to the nonconceptual entities they are about. Two opposing pressures are connected:
Concepts could not exist unless they were separated off from things in order to be about
them; but this work of separation and sealing off, reification, occurs as part of reality. This
again is the naturalist frame. But the sealing off, say by concepts increasingly receiving
their meanings and significances through their inferential powers, hence their relation to
other concepts, does not entail that meaning is nothing but inferential powers since if that
were so conceptual meaning would have only a tangential relation to existing things in the
world. But this tension, between concepts’ role of conveying the meaning of existing things
and having their meaning determined by relation to other concepts, is real, social, and his-
torical, and not merely formal. That one axis of the concept has come to dominate the
other axis of the concept to the point of disappearance is the agony of the world raised to
the level of the concept (Adorno 1973, 6). Hegemonic conceptuality is the situation in which
inferential significance dissolves the authority of referential‐mimetic significance, a dissolution
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that, again, has as its real counterpart the dissolution of use‐value under exchange value,
of living labor under capitalist exchange relations, and of living nature under the onslaught
of capitalist exploitation, the capitalist marshaling of techno‐science.
Adorno does not think what has been dissolved can be resurrected by fiat; apart from criti-
cal reflection, something more difficult is required: “To represent the mimesis it repressed, the
concept has no other means than appropriating something of this latter mode of conduct,
without losing itself in it” (Adorno 1973, 14, 1975, 26). Conceptual and mimetic conduct
operate in opposing directions: Conceptual synthesis actively absorbs what is into its general-
izing, normative legislation, exiling what does not fit; mimetic conduct aims to liken itself to
the object, taking the particular before it as authoritative, thus relinquishing any claim
to generality. While mimetic conduct – growling like a lion, swaying your body like a tree in
the wind – is in the service of the object, it is not flatly passive. Adorno identifies the recovery
of the mimetic moment with the aesthetic moment of philosophy.
Coordinated with mimetic conduct is expression. Even if one were to concede that
grasping a concept is grasping its inferential commitments – a version of the doctrine that
meaning is use – nothing of the value of those inferences would thereby be captured.
Although scientific rationality is ideally affect free, if identity thinking is for the sake of
controlling nature and a product of the drive for self‐preservation, then even truth‐only
cognition is interested and desiring. Adorno offers a hyperbolic genealogy of idealism in
this respect, tracing it back to the animal’s rage at its soon‐to‐be victim: “The system is the
Spirit turned belly, rage the signature of each and every idealism; it distorts even Kant’s
humanity… The sublime mercilessness [Die erhabene Unerbittlichkeit] of the moral law was
of a piece with such rationalized rage at the nonidentical” (Adorno 1973, 23, 1975, 34).
The rationalist and idealist systems are rigorous sets of inferential relations among foun-
dational premises and remote conclusions about things – matter is nothing but res extensa
or atoms or force fields composed of positive and negative forces – that express the concept
of a totality in which thought is set in opposition to each content, evaporating the content
in the thought of it (Adorno 1973, 24, 1975, 35). What matters in this is Adorno’s con-
tention that inferential relations always express something more and other than their sheer
logicality; truth‐only cognition sublimates desire, fear, and rage into chilling indifference,
into a coldness that colors rationalized reason’s approach to every living thing.9 Adorno’s
skepticism about the neutrality of truth‐only cognition explains one of the singular ambi-
tions of Negative Dialectics, namely, to find a mode of argument that could achieve binding-
ness without system, that is, a form of rigor that could be both rationally and cognitively
compelling in a manner that while not crossing the limits of logic, derived its authority
from a distinct mode of writing and presentation. This is what the thought models of
Part Three – “Freedom,” “World Spirit and Natural History,” and “Meditations on
Metaphysics” – are intended to exemplify (Adorno 1973, 29, 213).
If the satisfaction of truth‐only cognition is not the normative guide for critique, what is?
What is the expressive impulse of negative dialectics? Adorno’s answer is direct and blunt:
“The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objec-
tivity that weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is
objectively mediated” (Adorno 1973, 17–18, 1975, 29). If rationalized reason is indiffer-
ence, it is above all indifferent to suffering, the most deeply subjective experience a living
being can undergo since it is the immediate experience of the negation of particular life;
giving voice to suffering is providing the vanquished transient dimensions of human life
with the conceptual presentation that modern reason has deprived them of. For here and
now, this is what being true to human living comes to, hence the condition for all truth.
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J. M. Bernstein
Kant’s blind intuitions, the sensory side of the ideal of truth‐only cognition that is given
expression in idealism, are, thus, subjective responses to the nonconceptual that have been
scrubbed clean of their mimetic and expressive dimensions. Presentation, Darstellung, is
essential to a critical philosophy that means to break through the block separating subject
and object, concept and the nonconceptual.
[Philosophy’s] integral moment of expression, nonconceptually mimetic, becomes objectified

through presentation – language…To philosophy, expression and stringency are not two
dichotomous possibilities. They need each other; neither is without the other. The expression is
relieved of its contingency by thought, on which it works just as thought works on it…Through
expression stringency is compelled from what is expressed. (Adorno 1973, 18, 1975, 29)10
Stringency and expression are the logical and value‐saturated dimensions of conceptual
presentation. Presentation that self‐consciously embraces the demand that stringency is
for the sake of expressivity is the successor form to truth‐only logical argument. What
makes expressive presentation possible is language. Following the mimetic impulse, a criti-
cal philosophy would yield to the diversity of things before it: “An idiosyncratic precision in
the choice of words, as if they were to name the things, is not the least of the reasons pre-
sentation is essential to philosophy” (Adorno 1973, 52, 1975, 61). In order to express the
expressive potentiality of language, Adorno considers the metaphor of a name that itself,
in its linguistic density, in the sometimes apparent match between the sound of the word
and what it represents – “thunder” or “delicacy” or “bravura” – itself becomes a model for
how presentation is to function, as if thought were naming. But it is not. Rather, Adorno
argues, from the perspective of a turn toward the object, of giving priority to the object, the
determinate flaw of every concept makes it necessary to cite others; from this necessity
there develops those thought “constellations,” those stringently presented conceptual‐
expressive gatherings, “into which something of the hope of the Name has passed”
(Adorno 1973, 53, 1975, 62).
5. Transcendental and Empirical, Subject and Object
In his lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason, Adorno inaugurates the idea of the residual
theory of truth; although just a conceptual heuristic, it can serve as a bridge between cri-
tique of the hegemonic concept and that of constitutive subjectivity more generally.
Roughly, the reductive method is to take everything that can be regarded as “ephemeral,
transitory, deceptive, and illusory” and place it to one side; what remains, the residue of
the process of stripping object and experience of all qualitative and contingent features,
the residue of removing the subject from the truth, is “what is supposed to be indispens-
able, absolutely secure, something I can hold permanently in my hands” (Adorno 2001a,
25). If you strip from the object all qualitative determinations, then you can simulta-
neously strip from the living subject its sensory relation to that object; the pure or
transcendental subject can cognize the pure, quantifiable object without the distorting
medium of living subjectivity interfering. If in Descartes, this fit between bodiless subject
and dematerialized object occurs through mathematics, in Kant the fit is constructed by
the forms of transcendental subjectivity, the intricate connecting of the functions of judg-
ment to the categories that Kant first exhibits in the Metaphysical Deduction (Kant 1965,
A79/B104‐5).
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In “On Subject and Object,” Adorno argues that the separation between transcendental
and empirical is both real and illusory. The transcendental subject is more real than
empirical, psychological subjects to the extent that it stands for the abstract structures of
social practices that determine the real conduct of living individuals; empirical subjects are
“appendages of the social machinery,” making the idea of a real living subject, for now, a
piece of ideology. Hence the doctrine of the transcendental subject “discloses the prece-
dence of the abstract, rational relations that are abstracted from the individual and their
conditions and of which exchange is the model.” To the extent this is so, Adorno continues,
“the empirical subject would have to be considered as something not yet existing” (Adorno
1998, 248); more formally: “…nothing particular is true; no particular is as particularity
claims it to be” (Adorno 1973, 152, 1975, 155). How broadly we interpret this thesis will
depend, first, on the judgment as to whether any life in capitalist modernity counts as suf-
ficiently free to be one’s own; and second, if one answers the first charge in the affirmative,
then on the judgment of what threshold must be passed within the capitalist form of life in
order for an individual to be regarded as fashioning her own life.
The evidence of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the interrogation of the meaning of the good
life as it migrated into private existence and now “mere consumption,” is skeptical: “Our
perspective of life has passed into ideology which conceals the fact there is life no longer”
(Adorno 1974, 15). While that statement was intended as an exaggeration, at least this
seems irrefutable: No authoritative discourse, no form of human knowing and cognition, no
regime of conceptuality showing how an individual life could be intrinsically meaningful,
a form of life pinned to individual self‐realization, has yet emerged since the Protestant
Reformation helped engineer the terms of liberal capitalism. The only whisper of a form of
conceptual practice and sense‐making that aims to encompass individual existence has
been the novel. The novel (and its cinematic corollary) wagered, wagers still, on sexual love
among the haute bourgeoisie as exemplary of what a life beyond self‐preservation and
functionality might be (Adorno 1973, 191). One shame among many: Only one philoso-
pher to my knowledge has thought it worthwhile to interrogate the novel in these terms,
viz., Lukács in his The Theory of the Novel. However, even if the argument of the novel were
conceded, and the internal evidence is massively equivocal, this would make living a
human life an intermittent class privilege, not yet an open human possibility.
Refusing the claim that the good life is a privilege, Adorno consistently expresses the
alternative to hegemonic conceptuality, not in ethical or political terms, but solely in formal
conceptual terms; what we know of utopia appears solely in the adumbrations of the
transformed conceptuality necessary for its actuality. Adorno first presses for a discourse
beyond truth‐only cognition, including its avatars in formal morality; following Schiller,
he calls this new normative form that would end the subject‐object dichotomy, the idea of
the subject as standing outside and opposed to the world that structures epistemology as
first philosophy, reconciliation [Versöhnung].
[Reconciliation] would release the nonidentical, relieving it of even its spiritualized [vergeistig-
ten] coercion, opening for the first time the multiplicity of different things, over which dialec-
tics would have no more power. Reconciliation would be the thought of the many as no longer
inimical, something which is anathema to subjective reason. (Adorno 1973, 6, 1975, 18)
Second, Adorno argues that in order to get individuals into view, philosophy would have to
cede the current foundational conception of authority: If something must be first, then all
else is inferior and heterogenous to it: First philosophy and subject‐object dualism go
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J. M. Bernstein
together. The synthetic unity of apperception makes conceptual unity first, intuitions
second and lesser; the sovereign subject dominates what it has already emptied of signifi-
cance. This in turn dilutes the subject to the point of mere universality. Only if we cancel
the subject’s claim to be first – a move already implicit in the naturalist frame – then what
traditional philosophy dismisses as secondary is no longer secondary either (Adorno 1973,
138–139). Third, underlining the thought that it is hegemonic conceptuality that entails
dialectics, that dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things, Adorno says flatly,
“Utopia would be above identity and above contradiction; a togetherness of the different”
(Adorno 1973, 150, 1975, 153), an ideal at once aesthetic and political.
Because there is no present alternative to constitutive subjectivity, the most important
task must be demonstrating that the transcendental subject is also illusory. In the Kant
lectures, Adorno is more emphatic about this than elsewhere. The “I think” depends on the
factual existence of the empirical subject; synthetic acts must be psychologically real as a
condition for their having universal validity; the unity of the transcendental subject derives
its sustenance from the personal consciousness of the individual, that is, transcendental
unity lives off the unity of a particular living being having its own singular route through
objective space and time; and, generally, Adorno argues, the which is constitutive, the
constituens, “cannot even be imagined without the constitutum [what is constituted] being
imagined simultaneously” (Adorno 2001a, 147). While the dependence of transcendental
on empirical consciousness is mentioned in the published writings – “Without any relation
to an empirical consciousness, to that of the living I, there would be no transcendental,
purely intellectual one… Consciousness is a function of the living subject, its concept is
formed in its image” (Adorno 1973, 185, 1975, 186)11 – Adorno’s preferred path is
epistemic, demonstrating the primacy of empirical subjectivity by arguing for the inelim-
inability of the qualitative dimensions of experience: “The qualitative subject awaits the
potential of its qualities in the thing, not the transcendental residue of this potential”
(Adorno 1973, 44, 1975, 54). If knowing in some fundamental way requires embodied
subjectivity for its possibility, then the transcendental subject can be systematically
demoted. As it turns out, for all the reasons that lend hegemonic conceptuality plausibility,
the line of argument here is thinner than might have been expected.
Adorno runs two versions of the epistemological argument for the equality of
transcendental and empirical subjectivity. In an early argument in Negative Dialectics, he
commences with the ideal of discrimination [Differenzieren]; although the science of exact
measurement has inherited and rationalized this, it does not eliminate it: “Discrimination
means one is capable of discerning in the matter and its concept even that which is small-
est that escapes the concept; discrimination alone reaches the smallest” (Adorno 1973,
45, 1975, 55). Discrimination occurs in distinguishing original from forgery, of hearing a
nuance, of knowing what would be hurtful or helpful in a context, making a medical
diagnosis – taste, reflective judgment, phronesis, tacit knowledge – all speak to a capacity
for judgment not itself governable by or reducible to rule following. In this capacity for
subjective reaction “the mimetic moment of cognition finds refuge, that of the elective
affinity of the cognizer and that which is to be cognized” (Adorno 1973, 45, 1975, 55).
Emphasizing an affinity, the likeness of knower with known, always has a naturalist edge
in Adorno. Discrimination’s reminder of mimesis qualifies what occurs in the process of
enlightenment that turns mimetic reaction into intuition: To conceive of mimetic respon-
siveness disappearing altogether, the claim of the hegemonic concept, would make incom-
prehensible the very idea of a subject knowing an object, that is, an object truly distinct
from the subject.
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Concept and Object
In Section 4 of “On Subject and Object,” Adorno pursues this argument from the
thought that an object is only fully determinate on the basis of just those qualities that have
their basis in the subject’s capacity for sensuous responsiveness to them. Adorno presses
the point in paradoxical terms: “If one wants to attain the object…then its subjective deter-
minations or qualities are not to be eliminated: precisely that would be contrary to the
primacy of the object. If subject has a core of object, then the subjective qualities in the
object are all the more an objective moment” (Adorno 1998, 250). It is not as transcendental
subject that the subject is also an object among objects; what places the subject in an
objective field are solely those features and capacities that have been denigrated as merely
subjective. Objective determinacy is qualitative. Even if there is a rule for discriminating
between the male and female of the Indian spot‐billed duck, those rules live off qualitative
differences, and hence the capacity for response to them. In this respect, the so‐called
merely subjective is all the more objective: “The qualities the traditional critique of episte-
mology eradicated from the object and credited to the subject are due in subjective
experience to the primacy of the object” (Adorno 1998, 250). Adorno is not here returning
us to ordinary knowing, but critiquing the transcendental critique of ordinary knowing to
open the horizon of another formation of knowing and reasoning apart from the scientific
and instrumental one, that is, apart from identity thinking.
6. The Thing‐in‐itself
Adorno always defended the now widely dismissed two‐worlds version of Kant’s idealism
in which we know appearances only and not things‐in‐themselves. Adorno, more surpris-
ingly perhaps, construed the idea of things‐in‐themselves as the saving grace of Kant’s
philosophy, its advance against later idealisms: “The construction of thing‐in‐itself and
intelligible character is that of a nonidentity as the condition of possible identification; but
it is also the construction of that which eludes categorical identification” (Adorno 1973,
291, 1975, 286). That what is regarded as the deepest contradiction in Kant’s philosophy
should be the sign of its integrity aligns with Adorno’s interpretive practice of fixing places
of conceptual antagonism, contradiction, and difficulty as locales where social truth might
surface. The thought of the thing‐in‐itself marks a moment of anxiety in Kant that the
conditions of human knowing in fact block humans from the world to be known. The mar-
shaling of the thing‐in‐itself stands opposed to the very categorical abstractions that make
its knowing impossible; but it remains. That Adorno should construct his idea of a secular
metaphysics on an aesthetic reconstruction of Kant’s intelligible world is not the least of
the intrigues of Negative Dialectics.
Although Negative Dialectics is premised on a conversation with Hegel over dialectics,
both its critical object, constitutive subjectivity, and its metaphysical promise, aesthetic
semblance, derive fundamentally from a dialog with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Getting
this in plain view is the first task for a reading of Adorno’s philosophy.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). London: Routledge.
New Left Books.
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J. M. Bernstein
Adorno, T.W. (1975). Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Adorno, T.W. (1992). The curious realist: on Siegfried Kracauer. In: Notes to Literature: Volume Two
(ed. T.W. Adorno; trans. S.W. Nicholsen), 58–75. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1998). Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. H.W. Pickford). New York:
Adorno, T.W. (2001a). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1959) (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. (2001b). Negative Dialectics (trans. D. Redmond). https://libcom.org/library/
negative-dialectics-i-theodor-adorno
Allais, L. (2017). Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and his Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Allison, H. (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Bernstein, J.M. (2018). The idea of instrumental reason. In: The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt
School (eds. P.E. Gordon, E. Hammer and A. Honneth). 3-18. London: Routledge.
Brandom, R. (2000). Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Haugeland, J. (1982). Heidegger on being a person. Noûs 16 (1) https://doi.org/10.2307/2215406.
Kant, I. (1965). Critique of Pure Reason (trans. N.K. Smith). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lukács, G. (1971a). History and Class Consciousness (trans. R. Livingstone). London: Merlin Press.
Lukács, G. (1971b). The Theory of the Novel: An Historico‐Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic
Literature (trans. A. Bostock). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
McDowell, J. (1996). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Further Reading
For an incisive advanced introduction to Adorno’s philosophy, seeRose, G. (2014). The Melancholy
Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London: Verso.
For a detailing of Adorno’s theory of the concept, seeBernstein, J.M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment
and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
For thoughtful and detailed accounting of concept and language in Adorno, including its relation to
contemporary idealism, seeHogh, P. (2017). Communication and Expression: Adorno’s Philosophy of
Language (trans. A. Hofstätter). New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
For an austere reading of Adorno’s negative dialectical procedure, including the relation to Kant,
seeO’Connor, B. (2004). Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical
Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
For a contemporary two‐worlds reading of Kant, seeLangton, R. (1998). Kantian Humility. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, which oddly seems almost to bracket the Copernican Turn.
For a broad defense of love as freedom, including the role of the novel in forging the discourse on love,
seeKottman, P.A. (2017). Love as Human Freeedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
For a skeptical inquiry into the meaning of the novel as itself Kantian in structure, following Lukács,
seeBernstein, J.M. (1984). The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of Form.
Notes
1 “Spiritual” here signifies the wholly secular, socially, and historically self‐conscious form of
humanist discourse.
2 Only slightly more contentiously, this reading of Kant as, effectively, expressing his own time in
thought, was already the approach of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
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3 In my references to Negative Dialectics although my first page reference is to the Ashton transla-
tion, I have also provided a page reference to the German edition since I have modified Ashton in
most cases. I have benefitted from Dennis Redmond’s 2001 translation (Adorno 2001b).
4 Of course, judgments themselves can be made further use of as the premises or conclusions of a
sequence of inferences.
5 Brandom (2000) works through the Hegelian thesis that normative statuses are social statuses
in accordance with the idea that “all transcendental constitution is social institution” (34), a
phrasing he half borrows from Haugeland (1982, 18).
6 The translation here is Redmond’s.
7 As Adorno consistently urges, when the concepts forming instrumental rationality are further
elaborated under capital, what appears universal as reason is demonstrably particular.
8 See, for example, Allais (2017).
9 On morality and coldness see “Education after Auschwitz” in Adorno (1998, 191–204).
10 The translation here is mostly Redmond’s.
11 I have reversed the order of these sentences. NB, in the latter, the second clause, arguing that our
concept of consciousness is formed in the image of the living thing, has unaccountably been
excised from Ashton’s translation. Also relevant here is the following: “Once humanized, the
activity of mind/Spirit can be attributed to no one and nothing but living beings. This infiltrates
even the concept which overshoots naturalism the furthest, that of subjectivity as the synthetic
unity of apperception, with a moment of nature” (Adorno 1973, 201, 1975, 201).
501
32
Critique and Disappointment:
Negative Dialectics as Late Philosophy
MAX PENSKY
Why did Adorno write Negative Dialectics? Stated this baldly, this question can appear
flippant or insincere, since like any other philosophical masterwork that has stood the test
of time and continues to engage readers, the book has taken on an aura of inevitability in
the 50 years since its publication. Yet to a degree greater than all of Adorno’s thorny, self‐
conflicting, and multiply determined works of philosophy, Negative Dialectics was meant to
raise questions about its own legitimacy in the medium of philosophical reflection; even its
own possibility. It is a great philosophical work whose core message implies the impossi-
bility of great philosophical works. It is a comprehensive reconstruction of the history of
modern western philosophy, arguing for the end of philosophy, and it is an attempt to
rescue the possibility of metaphysics after the era in which metaphysical thought was pos-
sible has ended. Negative Dialectics develops an innovating and distinctive conceptual
methodology, and at the same time uses just that method to call for the end of philosophy’s
incessant, inherently violent project of the conceptual mastery of all that lies outside of it.
It is, in short, a philosophical work premised on, elaborating, and indeed performing the
central claim that philosophy is, in a crucial sense, over.
This manifestly self‐contradictory status of the book is of fundamental importance for
its ambitions and purposes. In a deeply Hegelian way, the contingencies of Negative
Dialectics – Adorno’s idiosyncratic appropriation of Kant and Hegel, his detestation of
Heidegger’s thought, or his status as a postwar philosophy professor in a German univer-
sity, even the fact of the book’s existence “after Auschwitz” – are to be “sublated,” both
negated and transcended, transformed into something essential. Adorno manages to make
this contradictory status of the book’s very possibility – its status as both necessary and
impossible by its own internal criteria – into its most essential philosophical commitment.
It also adds yet another dimension of difficulty (as if one were needed) to the book’s trans-
mission, inheritance, intelligibility, and comprehension. The tensions between the work
and its historical enabling and constraining conditions, between the subjective intention
of the author and the objective social circumstances in which the author thinks and writes,
the status of a work as both self‐contained monad encapsulating the social totality and as
fragment, torso or ruin – all of these negations, in Negative Dialectics, become productive
elements of the philosophical approach.
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This chapter offers one path (there are surely others) to explore this multiply negated
status as necessary‐but‐not‐possible, as philosophy written within, and expressing, an age
in which philosophy may no longer be permissible, or even possible.
Negative Dialectics begins, famously, with a kind of self‐disavowal consciously putting
the coherence and legitimacy of the book as a whole in question:
Philosophy, which once seemed to have been overcome, lives on [erhält sich am Leben] because
the moment for its realization was missed. The brusque judgment that it had merely inter-
preted the world, that it had crumpled in resignation in the face of reality, becomes the
defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world went awry. It preserves no place from
which theory as such could be convicted of the anachronisms it has always been suspected of.
[…] Once philosophy broke the pledge that it was one with reality, or stood directly before
its creation, it must subject itself to ruthless self‐criticism. (Adorno 1975, 15. Author’s
translation.)
Nothing in this opening sentence offers itself to simple interpretation. Like so many other
memorable passages in Adorno’s writing, it tempts us to be taken as a kind heraldic motto
affixed to the opening of the book; as a kind of mission statement, though on reflection it
is better characterized (again, like so many other all‐too‐quotable moments in Adorno) as
a kind of trap, a double or triple entendre inviting something quite other than a sloganistic
version of the book that follows it.
Declaring a philosophy book to occupy the space after philosophy’s own missed histor-
ical moment of self‐realization clearly evokes the Hegelian‐Marxist tradition that Adorno
sees himself following, though of course that tradition is itself one of the negations of the
philosophical enterprise through the culmination, or liquidation, of the socio‐political
world of capitalist modernity in which alone this enterprise was coherent as a mode of
modernity’s self‐expression. The most intuitively inviting referent for what Adorno means
by the missed moment for philosophy’s realization (whatever else that might mean) is
Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, and Marx’s claim that ending philosophy as a social
practice and a distinctive mode of thinking could itself only be thought in relation to
ending, by revolutionary means, the social totality that it expressed, and that sustained it.
In the long tradition running from Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to Georg
Lukács’ evocation of the “antinomies of bourgeois philosophy” in History and Class
Consciousness, this double liquidation/realization is to be figured as a last dialectical nega-
tion of the relation between subject and object. In its most fully developed form – the course
of idealism from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel – philosophy depended for its
cogency and relevance on the endurance of unresolved or uncompleted negations between
subjectivity and the material world, in capitalist modernity. Resolving those oppositions –
setting what appeared as frozen antinomies into motion, playing out their internally con-
tradictory aspects in objective conditions rather than in the medium of conceptual
thinking – would “realize” philosophical idealism precisely by depriving philosophy of its
objective social basis. Philosophy’s realization is also its end.
But this revolutionary liquidation and realization of the social practice of philosophy
was neither inevitable nor preordained: It depended on the consciousness and agency of
intellectuals with the training and aptitude to perceive the advent of the requisite objective
conditions (economic crisis) and their corresponding subjective dispositions (revolutionary
class consciousness). This training and aptitude entailed a mastery of philosophical idealism
as well, since, as the ideological self‐expression of the dominant bourgeoisie, its very falseness,
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CRITIQUE AND DISAPPOINTMENT
and its function as a mask or veil of objective forms of domination, contained a crucial
aspect of philosophical truth as well. Idealism sought to show that the tension between the
internal world of conceptually mediated subjective experience and the independent external
world of nature could be resolved – in the form of truth – by means of concepts alone.
Commentators usually take Adorno’s reference to the missed “moment” of philoso-
phy’s realization as an expression of this broadly Marxist‐critical tradition. Axel Honneth
(2009) for instance sees the allusion to Marx’s Eleventh Thesis as “obvious”: “the context
makes it clear that [Adorno] means the nonoccurrence of a social revolution that could
have transformed social reality into the idea of a society free of domination described by
Marx” (74). This concrete historical argument is that philosophy “lives on” in a crisis‐
structured capitalist world whose unresolved contradictions have been effectively defused
by socio‐economic means.
For Honneth, this obvious interpretation begs the question of why, precisely, the failure
of a communist revolution (presumably in the period, say, between 1880 and 1930), and
hence also the failure of left‐Hegelianism, would have any direct relevance for philosophy,
as a social practice dating back over two millennia.
Like Honneth, Fabian Freyenhagen (2014) sees the primary candidate for what was
“missed” in Negative Dialectic’s opening as a proletarian revolution to upend the European
capitalist order – and registers a degree of surprise that Adorno himself would have seen
that revolution as objectively possible in the historical window between the Russian
Revolution and the advent of fascism (869).1
But we should also think through this moment of self‐reflexivity in relation not just to
Marx’s Eleventh Thesis, but further upstream, in the preface of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
There, Hegel famously defines philosophy as “its own time comprehended in thoughts;” its
total social reality brought into full, rational self‐reflexivity by means of philosophical
concepts (Hegel 1991, 21).
For Hegel, philosophy for this very reason also always arrives too late to serve as a guide
for practical activity meant to change that reality to more fully align with the rational stan-
dards of philosophical reflection, which can only take as its subject matter and purpose
what is actual, what has been realized (Hegel 1991, 23). But this is dialectics: The very
lateness for practice is of course for Hegel just what is meant by philosophy’s own realiza-
tion. Philosophy as absolute Spirit manages by its very lateness for practice to always and
only arrive precisely on time, since its appointment with the real is, after all, just what
philosophy is. The relation to Adorno’s announcement is therefore in an elegant sense one
of determinate negation.
Taking Hegel, Marx, and Adorno as three points on this line, we see each announcing
different modalities of the same idealized relation between philosophy and its social and
political reality. Where Hegel announces presence and reconciliation and Marx announces
delay and expectation, Adorno announces lateness and a missed appointment. In each
case, the announcement in question also serves explicitly as a definition of philosophy: of
its possibility as a privileged mode of rational reflection, but also as itself a determinate
social practice with concrete historical and institutional conditions, both living from while
also standing in critical opposition to its social context, with its own internal history and
its own internally generated diagnoses for its future, or lack of it.
For Adorno, in other words, philosophy’s lateness – its missed appointment – defines its
current status of “living on” or keeping itself alive. This status, as a mode of self‐identification
for philosophy and philosophers, is central in deciding how philosophy can continue as a
relevant social practice.
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Max Pensky
Certainly “lateness” or disappointment in a general sense is a quite familiar trope in the

discussion of the content of cultural modernity and of modernist art and literature. In
particular the claim of Adorno as a “late philosopher,” or Negative Dialectics as late philos-
ophy, is itself now part of something like a tradition of Adorno’s form of modernism.2 In
Adorno’s case, at any rate, the biographical dimension of lateness – growing older and
seeing the end of life emerge on the horizon – is surely present, but is not definitive. In fact
many of the themes of Adorno’s late philosophy are already fully present at the very
beginning of his own philosophical‐biographical path, when, in the early 1930s, he begins
to explore this very theme in “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Lateness then is in the end
neither style nor personality for Adorno. It is axiomatic for his ambition to reappropriate
philosophical concepts precisely to express the transformations of the world, one of whose
consequences is the mismatch between the world and its philosophical comprehensibility.
Lateness can be initially taken as a distinctive productive attitude or comportment with
both cognitive and affective elements, best summed up as an awareness of one’s own position
at the end, or indeed after the end, of what in retrospect appears as a process with discreet
developmental stages, whether one’s own discipline or era or indeed one’s own life. The
awareness of lateness operates as an epistemic gain, of insight into the process as a whole.
But in doing so, lateness also implies that one’s own role in that process, the announcement
of its end, is threatened with being at least in part desultory, inessential, even otiose.
In Hegel’s case, as Adorno described frequently, the triumphalism of Spirit moving on is
part of a larger decision that Hegel made in favor of the universal and the subjective.
Hegel’s disdain for the objective and particular flows directly from this decision, which for
Adorno required that Hegel arbitrarily and prematurely arrest dialectics itself. Adorno
defines Negative Dialectics as the project of reversing just this decision. In this sense, Adorno
still shares with Hegel a deep conviction that definitive products of culture embody and
express much broader developmental histories, and that these products (such as philos-
ophy or art) dynamically interact with these broader social and economic histories in ways
that are highly complex but in principle intelligible. This is especially true when it comes to
the aging or even the afterlife of a cultural product, as its own internal potentialities have
been used up, made out of date in relation to its times, and shift from vibrant and more or
less concrete mediations with its social context, to more internal, self‐reflexive, and
formally restricted iterations.
Unlike Hegel, Adorno was never willing to see such an afterlife of a cultural form as a
mere period of decadence and decline. For the same reason, he opposed viewing the partic-
ulars of such a form’s productivity as merely material in which the universal no longer
“shines through” perspicaciously, that is as “lazy existence” (see Baumann 2011). In this
Adorno was guided far more powerfully by Benjamin, and in particular Benjamin’s reading
of the art historian Alois Riegl (see Levin 1988). Instead, forms of productivity – again, the
paradigm is the shift to aesthetic modernism – produce particular works whose mediation
with their social whole shifts to a reiterated performance of negativity and withheld
reconciliation – a process that Adorno understands as “nominalism” (Roberts 1991, 133,
Jay 2016). In terms of art, this can also serve as a functional definition of lateness – with
the added proviso that announcing or discerning just this nominalist or late aspect of the
artwork is part of that very aspect.
In other words, announcing the end is also announcing one’s own lateness, of having
missed precisely that end and hence acting in, indeed comprising, the aftermath. This
places the announcement itself in a peculiarly self‐reflexive, multiply‐determined, even
paradoxical relationship with what is ending, and may help explain the characteristic
506
f eature of Adornian lateness in which temporal complexity, what Benjamin had called the
“telescoping of past and future,” (Benjamin 1999, 471) emerges as a structural feature of
criticism, rather than a stylistic choice.
If philosophy has ended or is ending, then a philosophical announcement of this end is at
least at first blush either otiose or paradoxical. For if philosophy is not ending – if it is under
pressure or in the process of adaptation to changed conditions that oblige the practice to
transform itself – then the announcement of philosophy’s lateness is premature hence
false. Alternatively, if part of philosophy’s internal history is to incorporate reiterated
announcements of its end, then those announcements – Hegel’s and Adorno’s implicit
ones, and Marx’s explicit demand – must be both true and false; perlocutionary successes
and failures at one and the same time, even in the extreme sense that the iteration of
philosophy’s end may itself be the only way that philosophy preserves its life.
If philosophy is no longer the “highest determination” of European bourgeois
culture – and I suspect that Adorno takes entirely seriously the claim that it once was – it
is still philosophy itself that asserts the priority to make just this judgment. Adorno
thereby negates and reverses the Hegelian diagnosis that philosophy ends itself in its own
realization – that Spirit oversees the pre‐established harmony between the rational prac-
tice of conceptual thinking and the rational essence of the human world it thinks about,
hence that philosophy always arrives precisely on time.
Moreover, philosophy’s realization is not deferred, as if, according to a strain of thought
running from Nietzsche through Derrida, its realization is not missed but avenir, “to come,”
whether by fate or messianic waiting. Adorno quite deliberately (and in a way very coldly)
drains the “living on” of philosophy as a cultural practice of any anticipatory energy, if by
that we mean a sort of futurity of the kind Derrida always associated with the messianic,
or justice, or deconstruction (Derrida 1994). While Nietzsche, who influenced Adorno as
much, and perhaps more, than even Hegel, saturates his writing with tensed temporal
markers like runway lights blinking toward a remote future (“bisher,” “until now” being
perhaps Nietzsche’s most important technical‐temporal term), Adorno’s lateness is of a
quite different kind. Nietzsche wanted to learn to hate exhaustion and lateness from the
inside. Adorno wants to understand it as the motivating situation for what he often refers
to as “das Denken heute,” “thinking today.”
As both an institutionalized social practice and in the broader sense of “thinking today,”
Adorno sees philosophy as a late practice whose lateness is both a source of the remaining
epistemic ingress into the structure of the social whole and a diagnosis of the lost relation
between that ingress and that whole. In what follows, I want now to try to lend this con-
cept of lateness more determinacy and content in Adorno’s late work, Negative Dialectics.
To borrow a distinction from a remote source, Dworkin (1988) and Rawls (1999), if we
take lateness as a concept, then it can be articulated and determined through a number of
distinct, non‐exclusive conceptions. The conception of Adornian lateness I will develop here
is that of “lateness‐as‐disappointment,” and I will try to make this conception more
concrete by describing disappointment in three different moments or aspects.
As a first aspect of the conception, disappointment is an affect – a kind of Strawsonian
reactive attitude (Strawson 1962), an overlooked but vital dimension of the critical a ttitude
toward a structurally unjust social whole.
The second aspect discusses the idea of the loss of philosophy’s appointment as the most
privileged mode of conceptual self‐knowledge of bourgeois society; that is, of philosophy’s
loss of its status as a distinctively elevated and exalted institution, as a mode of collective
self‐understanding, and, more narrowly, within the modern research university.
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A third aspect describes disappointment in cognitive terms, as an epistemic accomplish-

ment, a critical insight into a social totality, one now so internally opaque that no single
view of the totality is any longer possible (as Adorno had already claimed at the very
opening of the early essay on “The Actuality of Philosophy”). In this third moment, disap-
pointment becomes the necessary prolegomena to social critique. This aspect of Adorno’s
conception of philosophical lateness‐as‐disappointment transcends the bleak picture of a
wrung‐out and running‐on social practice of philosophy merely clinging to life. It hints,
negatively, at another possibility of philosophy living on, living differently, and living better.
Without disappointment, there would be no way to register the utopian demands that are
always embedded in the processes of discursive thinking.
Initially, disappointment is an affect, a feeling, though perhaps not the most philosoph-
ically promising one. It is the emotional response to a reality that does not meet prior
expectations. We are disappointed when we don’t get what we had reason – though maybe
not good reason – to expect. Disappointment entails a normative claim.
This implication of a thwarted expectation or entitlement probably explains the slight
tinge of childishness that the disappointed affect carries. What is perhaps distinctive about
disappointment as an affect, though, is that it manages to combine this aspect of unseemly
childishness with its complement, the premature and un‐earned resignation of the mid‐
life crisis. The combination of these two senses – being too old and too young at the same
time – also attaches in a certain sense to the person of Adorno himself (see Müller‐Doohm
2005, 31). This aspect underlies some of the more stinging rebukes that Adorno’s late
version of Critical Theory received, most famously of course Lukacs’ sneering dismissal of
Adorno’s philosophy as having been written in miserable bourgeois opulence in the “Grand
Hotel Abyss,” (Lukacs 1962, see also Jeffries 2017), or Peter Sloterdijk’s (1988, xxxiii–
xxxiiiv) caricature of Adorno’s “a priori pain.”
On the other hand, however, no small part of the distinctiveness and acuity of his c ritical
approach is in the conscious mobilization of just these affects in the service of critique. As
multiple passages of Minima Moralia confirm (see Adorno 1978, 21, 112, 177), Adorno was
quite aware of this tension in his own character between the Herr Doktor Professor on one
side and precocious Teddie on the other (see Claussen 2008, 321). He wanted to find ways to
make that tension productive, and one of these ways was to refashion a childish disappoint-
ment with things as they were into a way of seeing that would prove resistant to the global
positivity or the ontic upbeatness that he diagnosed as the distinctly modern (US) medium of
social domination. Hence we may take disappointment as a relative of Strawsonian reactive
attitudes, especially apt in cases where injustice is so pervasive and structural that no deter-
minate agent can be the appropriate target of resentment or indignation.
The social whole is delusional, irrational, violent, wholly integrated, cleansed of
meaning. In other words, it is disappointing. Philosophy must register this.3 Given what we
know about our species’ capacities, our world ought to have turned out better. Humans
have come close to ruining a perfectly lovely planet, and there is no special reason to think
we will not do so. The capacity for discursive thinking, sapience in general, whose proper
use entails the internal demand of reason for a collective life of abundance and gentleness,
consistently ends up weaponized, a directive for repeated frustrations of just that rational
demand. This is a major disappointment, but perhaps can only be now registered in its
appropriate scale by a form of thinking that, in relation to the prevailing standards of
socially embodied reason, inevitably appears just as oddly constituted, limping, and eccen-
tric as the pre‐modern forms of life it paved over in the pursuit of global pacification of
nature, both inner and outer.
508
Contrasted to the central Strawsonian reactive attitude of indignation, disappointment

retains a tinge of resigned elitism‐ Grand Hotel Abyss – an element that Adorno was aware
of, and whose apologetics, in a range of late claims, remain a bit less than entirely con-
vincing. On the other hand, there is something to the claim that all utopias are negative.
The affective form of philosophical disappointment is a last remaining holdout from the
hegemonic forms of positivity that Adorno saw clearly in the 1960s, and which are cer-
tainly no less hegemonic a half century later. Having missed its own appointment with its
realization, then, philosophy clings to its own social reality as a way of organizing and
articulating in concepts the pervasive affect of failed expectations with the actuality of
modern forms of life. In this sense at least, disappointment is a morally tolerable, that is a
negative, form of hope.
This is a negative space for a form of concrete hoping that would otherwise appear as
part of a bad positivity. It is one of Adorno’s most persistent conceptions of the special
characteristics of dialectical thinking, and the capacity of the thinking subject to trans-
figure the affect of wretched disappointment into a form of consolation. Far from being a
detail at the edge of Adorno’s readings of major figures of modernism, this negativity is on
the contrary often their hidden heart. From the early reading of Kierkegaard (Adorno
1989), whose transfiguration of religious disappointment (mourning) to purity of
subjective spirit Adorno thinks is exactly wrong, to the late Adorno’s piercing reading of
Proust (Adorno 1982), who Adorno thinks gets it exactly right, a worthwhile form of
consolation for disappointment can only be derived from the micrological, selfless
absorption in the detail, the hem and the edge. In the short essay on “Resignation,” Adorno
reverses a two‐thousand‐year‐old tradition associating contemplation with sorrow, and
ultimately claims that dialectical thinking itself, precisely because of its negativity, is
perhaps the sole remaining repository of human happiness:
Prior to all particular content, thinking is actually the force of resistance, from which it has
been alienated only with great effort. Such an emphatic concept of thinking admittedly is not
secured, not by the existing conditions, nor by ends yet to be achieved, nor by any kind of bat-
talions. ... For thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently
must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and
powerless thought. Whoever thinks is not enraged in all his critique: thinking has sublimated
the rage. Because the thinking person does not need to inflict rage upon himself, he does not
wish to inflict it on others. The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the
happiness of humanity. The universal tendency of oppression is opposed to thought as such.
Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness; by enunciating it. By this alone, happiness
reaches into universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned. (Adorno
2005, 293)
Adorno tends frequently to conflate “dialectical thinking” or even merely “thinking” with
philosophy itself, a peculiar habit but one that certainly “puts his cards on the table,” as
with typical guile he half‐promises in the preface to Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1990, 10).
This claim shows the extent to which Adorno, even in the 1960s, was prepared to defend
a startlingly emphatic conception of the practice of philosophy; in this sense he was (and
knew himself to be) in uncomfortable proximity to Heidegger.
At the same time, Adorno’s philosophy of disappointment also encompasses a more
specific and historically concrete problem: The status of the academic discipline of philos-
ophy in the social reality in which Adorno wrote it and wrote about it, above all in the
decades of the 1950s and 1960s in West Germany.
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Max Pensky
If philosophical procedure cannot be divorced from its subject‐matter (another of

Adorno’s most consequential Hegelian postulates) then the question of how philosophy
preserves its life “heute” is not just a question of the possibility of das Denken heute, but a
question of the social and economic enabling and constraining conditions for a once‐
privileged academic discipline, once the cultural assumptions for that privilege had been
blasted to smithereens.
This question of the contemporary status of philosophy as an academic discipline adds
a second moment to disappointed philosophy. This one requires some etymological bur-
rowing. In its earliest recorded usages in Late Middle English, which continues through the
end of the eighteenth century, “disappointment” referred to the condition of having lost,
either by misfortune or misconduct, an appointed office or position. A disappointed cleric
has been defrocked; a disappointed judge unseated; and Jehovah, driving Adam and Eve
naked and ashamed out of paradise, decisively disappointed them both.
Seeing Negative Dialectics as disappointed philosophy in this second sense – as a docu-
ment of the postwar disappointment of philosophy from its elite status in the modern
university system – is clarifying but not without some additional complications. From its
beginning in “The Actuality of Philosophy” in the early 1930s to its end in Negative
Dialectics in the mid‐1960s, Adorno’s philosophical trajectory always insisted on a substantial
component of meta‐philosophy as part of philosophy, taking the question of its own
possibility as part of its most central tasks. This trajectory has a striking thematic unity as
a prolonged analysis of the intrinsic and social‐historical possibility of the persistent and
organized application of rational concepts and categories to their own times.
Pace Honneth, Freyenhagen, Bowie, and others, then, the question of “the” historical
appointment, the moment when philosophy missed its scheduled meeting with those
times, doesn’t consist in a discrete historical date or conjuncture, a specific alignment of
historical possibilities. In a deeply Benjaminian sense, for Adorno every moment consti-
tutes such a missed appointment. There is no one thing that philosophy comes after; even
the post‐Auschwitz post‐ness of philosophical metaphysics in Negative Dialectics is compat-
ible with other calculations of lateness. But as an academic practice, certainly, Negative
Dialectics is also largely a reflection on how one can, or even if one ought to, continue to
“do” philosophy in the transformed circumstances of a post‐catastrophe society, still‐
smoldering West Germany in the decades immediately following the end of the Second
World War.
In 1949, shortly after he returned to Germany and resumed his teaching duties at Goethe
University in Frankfurt, Adorno wrote to Leo Löwenthal that “[m]y seminar is like a Talmud
school ….it was as if the ghosts of the murdered Jewish intellectuals had entered the German
students. Slightly unheimlisch [uncanny]. But for that very reason it was also slightly
heimisch, in the genuine Freudian meaning of the word” (quoted in Claussen 2008, 10).
This anachronism and transposition, the sense of temporal weirdness in the ranks of
faces at those early philosophy lectures, is also a recurring theme for Adorno. It’s remark-
able on several registers, and hints at a deeper sense of disappointment and lateness – the
anachronistic aspect of philosophizing hic et nunc. Like other early returning émigrés,
Adorno had to cope with a university system in both physical and moral ruin, and an
academic discipline that was thoroughly morally compromised, not only by the willing-
ness of so many German philosophy professors to participate in the Nazi regime, but
indeed by the embrace of deep cultural and political conservatism that had marked
German academic philosophy for generations (Muller 1988; Di Liberto 2009; Moses
2009).
510
Though less so in Frankfurt than elsewhere, academic philosophers returning from

wartime exile had to reintegrate into, and collaborate with, the faculty who had stayed,
and who had survived together experiences of absolute destruction. Of the latter, much
remained undisclosed about the nature and degree of their cooperation with the National
Socialist transformation of the national university system. Many of course were impli-
cated in the Nazi regime to one degree or another, and had been or were still under a variety
of de‐Nazification processes by the Allied authorities. For the returning émigré – especially
one who, like Adorno, had just begun to see some considerable professional success as he
was driven from his position – the kind of adaptation necessary under those circumstances
is difficult to imagine (see Demirovic 1999, 603–632, Kraushaar 2003).
Many Ordinarius philosophy professors who had not emigrated and were not directly
implicated in the Nazi regime saw philosophy as a crucial pathway toward political and
cultural recovery, and saw a distinctly German take on the curricular structure of
philosophical instruction – heavy on the history of philosophy, heavy on metaphysics,
and very light indeed on ethics and political philosophy – as an important resource, a
kind of lifeline, for returning war veterans who like their peers in all European countries
flooded the universities in the late 1940s and on into the 1950s (Di Liberto 2009,
90–125).
That small but deeply influential cadre of Ordinarius professors – one thinks of really
influential figures such as Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Joachim Ritter, Ludwig Landgrebe, and
in a qualified sense also Karl Löwith and Karl Jaspers – were in their different ways all
devoted to the idea that German philosophy had to live on as a way of keeping open the
access to the traditions of German thought and culture, of a distinctively German
humanism of Dichter and Denker; a resource of “positive” national traditions and continu-
ities that returning veterans and the younger generations would need to adapt and
integrate into a newly democratized West German political culture. In their midst, of
course, were also those professors who were politically and ethically compromised: not
only the most obvious ones such as Heidegger, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Freyer, but also
those like Ernst Rothacker who managed to conceal their pasts from their own students
for years.
And then there are the students themselves, whose presence in his seminars reminded
Adorno uncannily of Talmudic classrooms (that Adorno himself would never have seen)
that were gone for good in the Germany he’d returned to. Surely one aspect of the uncanny
in those students was that there would have been few if any Jews among them. In fact the
seminars and lectures would have been filled with a mix of young students and older war
veterans, many of whom would have had war experiences directly or indirectly related to
all those missing Jews.
Adorno’s unbidden glimpses of the ghosts of their victims is a perception of a genera-
tional feature so distinctive that virtually all professors in the late 1940s and throughout
the 1950s could not fail to notice it. Members of what Helmut Schelsky (1957) later
famously dubbed “die skeptische Generation” shared with other returning veterans a deep
sense of seriousness and purpose, impatience with wasted time in the face of the years they
had lost, and urgency to return to a deeply private life. They were not inclined to indulge in
discussions of political or ethical responsibility. They did not want to talk about it. They
demanded – and the Ordinarius professors were all too eager to provide them – a reactivated
traditional philosophical curriculum conspicuously missing what we would call today
value theory – no political philosophy, no ethics – and consciously abstaining from social
critique. That practice, always foreign to philosophizing in Germany, would be moved to
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Max Pensky
other disciplines, such as sociology, against which philosophy, then as now, would anxiously
protect itself, and into the muted political public sphere of the West Germany of the 1950s
(see Demirovic 1990, 741–855).
And what of Adorno himself? Here I think it’s enough to indicate the exceptional
ambivalences that characterized his eventual status as an Ordinarius of philosophy, and
hence as a representative of that most exalted happy few of Germany’s Geister, the full
professor in the university philosophy faculty. Unlike the mainline professorate, and their
project of resuscitating the national tradition of philosophy instruction, Adorno obviously
had a far more complex and contradictory relationship to the tradition of the Dichter and
Denker. For one thing, his dual status as philosopher and sociologist (now as before) placed
him at or indeed outside of the acceptable margins of proper academic philosophy. The
blurring of disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and any of the empirical social
sciences, and sociology in particular, was for most of them one of the primary threats to its
postwar survival that German academic philosophy had to cope with – the other being the
largely extramural popularity of Modenphilosophie: existentialism, whether in its
Heideggerian form or as a sleek French import.
Moreover, Adorno unlike his peers never hesitated from expressing his own deep ambiv-
alence regarding his status as a salaried civil servant, his comfortable wages drawn from
the taxation of the totaler Verblendungszusammenhang, including of course the staggering
wealth generated by West Germany’s economic miracle, a phenomenon Adorno himself
regarded as an aspect of a repression so profound as to count as a collective mental illness.
His role as part of that bureaucratic system, even in so mediated a fashion, was never lost
on Adorno. His often‐expressed scorn for what he termed beamtete Tiefsinn – “tenured
profundity” – was always tempered by his understanding that however philosophy

managed to preserve its life, it was also a living.
That said, it also bears mentioning that while Adorno found rapid popularity, even
fame, following his return to West Germany in 1950, it was not as a philosopher. In fact
Adorno never counted among the prominent and influential academic philosophers of the
early Federal Republic: certainly not by his philosophical colleagues. His reputation rested
on his status both as a public intellectual and author of more popular collections like
Minima Moralia and Prisms, and as a sociologist and critic of mass culture (Müller‐Doohm
2005, 366–380; Claussen 2008, 264–288). It hardly needs to be added that these were
also works in which Adorno was frequently at pains to distinguish himself sharply from
the mere “salaried professors” whose opposition to dialectical thought he ascribed to the
inherent conservatism of their institutional thinking (Adorno 1974, 73–75).
This relevant context helps explain the way that Adorno concludes the announcement
of philosophy’s disappointed self‐preservation at the opening of Negative Dialectics. It’s a
sentiment that Adorno expressed frequently, beyond the confines of the book, most notably
in the short essay Wozu noch Philosophie (“Why Still Philosophy?” in Adorno 2005, 8–16),
an essay whose title Adorno explains is a question not likely to be asked by a proper
philosopher – then as now. Part of the answer to that question, in that short essay as well
as in Negative Dialectics, is that philosophy’s preservation – its keeping itself alive – rests on
whether the discipline itself is capable of a reorientation so profound that “self‐criticism”
becomes the definitive contemporary task of academic philosophy, and not just the more
diffuse idea of das Denken as a social practice.
“Ruthless self‐criticism” – “rücksichtslose Selbstkritik” – is thus the condition for the
possibility of philosophy’s survival. It’s an awful formulation, sounding more like a catch-
phrase from the Cultural Revolution than the sensitive musings of a master dialectician.
512
Moreover, given what I’ve tried to describe as the overdetermined relation to its
own past that Adorno’s late philosophy lives from, the idea of such auto‐critique being
rücksichtslose – literally, never looking back – seems particularly rich in irony. What could
he have meant?
This leads to the third of the three aspects of moments of lateness‐as‐disappointment
described earlier. To get at this final moment, in which disappointment is more of a cognitive
gain than a reactive attitude, we can experiment with a bit of Heideggerian‐style etymological
reflection. The German Enttäuschung (disappointment) retains the sense that the disappointed
person is also the one who is no longer fooled, getäuscht, whose eyes have been opened and can
no longer abide in an illusion. To be disappointed in this sense is not to have one’s expectations
rise further than their corresponding reality. It is to be able to see that corresponding reality
now for what it is – to make oneself proof against further predictive errors.
As Enttäuschung, philosophy retains the critical sense of the pursuit of the objectively
true concerning the rational foundation of society’s most definitive practices and institu-
tions, a distant echo of Hegel’s vision of the times captured in the medium of concepts.
In a society where that rational foundation has been so deeply degraded, and which has
mastered a remarkably effective mode of symbolic productivity to conceal just that absence,
philosophical truth must take the form of the immanent critique of socially reproduced
ideologies. But Adorno also held that bourgeois ideologies could not maintain their power
to entrance and confound if they did not contain within themselves some considerable
truth‐content. The critical revelation that the promissory notes of one’s own culture are
all unredeemable, that the conceptual treasures of modern forms of thought all practically
demand their opposites – this is disappointing. It is an epistemic gain, but one that comes at
a high cost if the life in question, now exposed as a lie, was at least superficially worth
living. As immanent critique, philosophy is the organized practice of constructing true
accounts of formations of modern social existence, in whose wake no alternative to those
debunked formations is evident. The question for this third formulation of philosophical
disappointment, of being dis‐fooled by one’s own times, thus raises the same question of
philosophy’s potential future beyond merely clinging to life, except now in an even more
sharpened form. For if philosophy has to live on only in a liminal, demoted, and humbled
(albeit “ruthless”) way, then what is it actually good for?
Philosophy’s “ruthless self‐criticism” demands a consistently negative philosophical
practice. That is a standard demand for Adorno, coming close to the kind of Archimedean
first principle of systematic philosophy that he spent much of the first sections of Negative
Dialectics rejecting. Negativity draws on the inherent force of philosophical idealism while
negating the latter’s relation with its own times – a relation that permitted idealists to
believe that philosophy could still affirm a totality, think an absolute, in ways that the
natural sciences never could. In the wake of that disappointment, philosophy for Adorno
lives on in negative form, as critique, as he puts it in a characteristic formulation from
“Why Still Philosophy?” in 1962:
If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as cri-
tique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to
remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated
mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence on the other of untruth. (Adorno 2005, 11)
This is a programmatic statement of disappointed philosophy or at any rate as close to a

non‐elusive motto as we are likely to get. Adorno defines philosophy now, in these times,
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Max Pensky
precisely by resisting those times, which is a function of its lateness, its missed appoint-
ment. Only in this way can philosophy remain critical – which in this context means, resis-
tant to the given, the posited, such that one can still lodge a cogent protest against the
disappointing nature of social reality itself. Things ought to have gone better. The sole
respectable remaining purpose of philosophical thinking
is to rethink how to put a society on the right path when, on the one hand, it threatens to stag-
nate owing to the ossified relations of production and the attitudes resulting from that
situation, while, on the other hand, it ceaselessly produces the forces that initially promote
destruction but that tomorrow or the day after, if I may put it crassly, could actually make
possible a paradise on earth. (Adorno 2008, 48)
If it is to live differently, and not merely keep itself alive as a poisoned ornament of the
bourgeoisie, philosophy must rescue the motivating insights of the tradition of idealism,
the emphatic concept of truth, by negating those insights so completely that they are pre-
served as a negative image of what in the nineteenth century still could be a positive claim
about philosophy’s duty to “capture its own time in thought.” Arriving too late for the
realization in social reality of the freedom it maintains in the medium of concepts, philos-
ophy remains with a purpose, a goal, precisely insofar as it becomes truly useless, fulfilling
deliberately the old accusation that philosophy makes no positive contribution, and thus
turning what Adorno, recalling Kant, called the “defeatism of reason” into its other.
This hints toward an answer to the question that ended this paper’s last section – what
is late philosophy still good for? Philosophy’s uselessness – its disappointing tendency to
make things harder rather than easier – may also bear some distant, admittedly speculative
connection to the idea of its Enttäuschung, in the sense that value theory must shed its last
bit of exchange‐value or Tauschwert, be expelled from the commodity economy, in order to
disappoint properly:
Only a thinking that has no mental sanctuary, no illusion of an inner realm, and that acknowl-
edges its lack of function and power can perhaps catch a glimpse of an order of the possible
and the nonexistent, where human beings and things each would be in their rightful place.
Because philosophy is good for nothing, it is not yet obsolete. (Adorno 2005, 15)
Philosophy is the praxis of registering and preserving the elements of those times that
resist the general trend of complete integration, what Adorno in Minima Moralia described
as “irrelevant, eccentric, derisory” (Adorno 1978, 75). In its inward‐turned gaze, its turn
of concept upon concept, philosophy too continues to resist its partnership with empirical
sociology. That is philosophy’s loneliness, which is part of its desultory and abashed,
demoted status. But for Adorno that very abasement of philosophical thinking reveals its
persistent, uneffaceable dimension of something different and something more.
Why, after all, did Adorno write Negative Dialectics? By which I do not mean only or even
primarily why did Adorno write the philosophy that he did, but rather why he wrote philos-
ophy at all – why, that is, he made the personal and professional decision to devote so much
of his energies and so much of his time in the late 1950s and through the 1960s to a phi-
losophy book. And not only that, but a philosophy book that for all its formidable structural
innovations and despite the coherence and originality of its generating vision, is still also a
book “about” Kant and “about” Hegel; a book “about” the disappointment of metaphysics.
It is a book whose dimension of immanent social critique is often deeply implicit or lack-
ing altogether; a book without any clear empirical referents, a book largely devoted to the
514
interpretation of the same canon of Germanic Denken that the Ordinarius professors were
also working so hard to reclaim and reacquaint to their younger students.
This certainly grants philosophical thinking its character as both guilty, desultory, and
furtive and frölich‐heimisch: it cannot finally say all it knows about its own social context,
and cannot ultimately know all it has an obligation to know about it either. In that sense,
philosophy is a form of stringent or consistent disappointment. But as a kind of late
thinking, philosophy (like its companion, high modernist art) also is an exercise in the
human capacity to register, and bring to conceptual articulation, our own disappointment
in ourselves, in what we have done with and to ourselves when other, gentler and fuller
possibilities were open to us.
The undiminished persistence of suffering, fear, and menace necessitates that the thought
that cannot be realized should not be discarded. After having missed its opportunity, philos-
ophy must come to know, without any mitigation, why the world – which could be paradise
here and now – can become hell itself tomorrow. Such knowledge would indeed truly be phi-
losophy. (Adorno 2005, 14)
What is remarkable about this sentiment is not only the frank claim of the utopian moment
lodged within negative thinking, but the confidence that such thinking counts as knowledge;
as a form, however micrological and self‐critical, of Wissenschaft. The immanence of a neg-
ative utopia within stringent thinking is for Adorno what connects philosophy “today,” in
however mediated a manner, with its own history and its own “concept,” to put it Hegel’s
way: the possibility of a metaphysical experience without idealism. That is equivalent to
the possibility of affirming life, and hope, without lapsing into an affirmative philosophy.
Negative Dialectics is a negation of the omnipresence of death, in the way that death became
a new form of omnipresence as a consequence of the transformation of death in the Shoah
(Pensky 2017).
In this sense at the very least, philosophy can without shame be declared as living on, or
forward, rather than merely preserving its life. And that in itself would be a disappoint-
ment worth wanting.
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Roberts, D. (1991). Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory After Adorno. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Said, E. (2008). On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Random House.
Schelsky, H. (1957). Die skeptische Generation. In: Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend. Erfurt: Eugen
Diederichs.
Sloterdijk, P. (1988). Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Strawson, P.F. (1962). Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25.
Further Reading
University Press.
O’Connor, B. (2004). Adorno’s Negative Dialectic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Notes
1 “During this period,” Freyenhagen writes, “class conflict was often openly fought, with a number
of failed revolutionary attempts in Germany and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union was strug-
gling to survive and establish a socialist society. The factors that explain the failure of the revolu-
tion in Germany and elsewhere are manifold … The crucial point is that the missed opportunity
had world‐historical significance for Adorno. Indeed, it presents the foundational problem for
(what was later known as) the Frankfurt School. Its members asked: why and how was this
opportunity missed?” (p. 870.)
516
2 Edward Saïd (2008), to take only one albeit the most interesting example, in his own late work,
Late Style, describes Adorno’s lateness as aligning in a range of significant senses with the
consistent object of Adorno’s criticism of lateness: The late Beethoven. Without attempting to
summarize Saïd’s intricate argument, I think it’s fair to say that for Saïd, late style has grown
exhausted with the implicit demand for reconciliation and so goes beyond a mere disinclination
for tidy endings. It seeks out, foregrounds, bases itself rather on the aesthetic refusal of reconcil-
iation and makes this refusal itself – jagged, dissonant, and unassimilated – into its own content.
Hence late style for Saïd “… abjures mere bourgeois aging and […] insists on the increasing sense
of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses and, more important, uses
formally to sustain itself ” (Saïd 2008, 17). I think Saïd was entirely correct to see lateness as a
stylistic and substantive commitment in Adorno, one reaching well beyond the latter’s aesthetic
criticism and extending to encompass his philosophy as a whole. However, for just this reason I
do not think Saïd was correct in his assertion that what we have to understand is the lateness of
style. Though the question of style in Adorno is a deep topic that I cannot do justice to here, it’s
certainly safe to say that Adorno’s own position on, say, the relation between style and method-
ology, or the relation between methodology and the objects of philosophical thinking, are them-
selves matters of such sustained reflection that the concept of style loses whatever specificity it
bears in the context of literature, the figurative arts, or above all musical composition. It’s not
really stylistic considerations that concern us, in other words, but something beyond the distinc-
tion between style and content. Lateness, I think, is that something. Lateness is more, and deeper,
than the productive transformations of creative purpose and manner characteristic of the end,
or the approach of the end, of an arc of genius.
3 On the meaninglessness of the social whole, Adorno insists that “philosophy that blinds itself to
this fact and that in its overweening arrogance fails to absorb this reality and continues to insist
that there is a meaning despite everything – this seems to me more than we can reasonably
expect anyone who has not been made stupid by philosophy to tolerate (since as a matter of fact,
alongside its other functions, philosophy is capable of making people stupid)” (Adorno 2008, 19).
(The reference is of course to Heidegger.)
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33
Negative Dialectics and Philosophical Truth

BRIAN O’CONNOR
The question of what the book Negative Dialectics is about is at one level challenging yet
answerable. We might begin by itemizing some of the concepts it has added to the
philosophical lexicon. It would also be informative to explain the various ways in which
Adorno critically examines a range of important philosophers – Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger
primarily – and manages to leave some of us with worries about the overall coherence of
those positions. We would certainly want to say that Negative Dialectics, through those
critical readings, makes challenging claims about the sub‐rational nature of moral moti-
vation, about the limits of our direct conceptual grasp of objects and about our capacities
for rational self‐determination within an allegedly irrational social reality. Much more in
terms of what Negative Dialectics is about could obviously be said, though it would, I think,
involve inventorizing it along those lines. That is what the question requires.
When we look to the scholarship on Negative Dialectics – this author’s included – we find
a great deal of it dedicated to sympathetic reconstruction, perhaps even of defense, of what
are taken to be Adorno’s most valuable arguments. And it is most likely on the basis of
Adorno’s many critical accomplishments that we remain interested in speaking about
Negative Dialectics more than half a century after its first publication. Yet the very enterprise
of drawing attention to what is valuable among Adorno’s claims might be problematic.
And this is because its celebrated contributions to philosophy do not appear to operate
within the conditions of what Adorno sets out as an urgently needed “changed” (veränderte)
philosophy (GS 6, 25/ND 13). By changed, Adorno means, as we shall see, a philosophy
which is not constrained by academic systematicity, but remains open to the object of its
enquiries, regardless of where those enquiries take us. There is, then, a powerful conflict
between what we might want to make of the book and what the book itself wants to do.
The book is neither an instruction on procedure, a new method, nor an implicit system. All
of these preclude what Adorno considers genuine philosophical work. Yet it is full of bold
claims we might be expected to find convincing.
Can there be a philosophy without a procedure, method, or system, that is, some kind of
structured thinking which allows others to follow the path of the author toward some
intended conclusion? It might seem that the absence of any one of these prevents us from
knowing when we have reached a conclusion: An Adornian conclusion is not indexed to a
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procedure and nor does it sit comfortably within a network of supporting claims. It is for
that reason that work on Adorno’s philosophy often involves adducing an implied but
never stated set of connections that iron out “apparent” inconsistencies. The question we
might have to take seriously is whether those inconsistencies are neither “apparent” nor
the product of confusion, but inevitable in light of doing philosophy in this changed way.
Without a recognizable procedure our conclusions will appear to be ungrounded in
reasoning, if not, as Kant put it, “disgracefully rhapsodic.” And yet, as Adorno will argue,
the constraints of a method limit what can be discovered.
In the 53rd fragment from the Athenaeum Friedrich Schlegel identifies an analogous
problem and proposes a solution: “It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to
have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two” (Schlegel 1991, 24). One way
of thinking about what Schlegel’s recommendation involves is that thinking is not thinking
as such when it reaches for capricious conclusions. Here systematicity means non‐
capriciousness. At the same time, no procedure can generate a philosophical truth. A
claim that is neither capricious nor procedurally manufactured earns the quality of
philosophical insight if it is recognized as such by others as philosophically insightful.
Schlegel’s approach, then, in principle combines reconstructable philosophical claims – we
can make sense of the insights we find by formulating them in more discursive or alternative
terms – with the freedom to think without pre‐determined limits. To some extent the
Schlegelian solution can help us to accommodate Adorno’s notion of a changed philos-
ophy with the scholarly interest in reconstructing the work. However, it too has a limit, as
we shall see, given that Adorno wants to draw attention not only to the limits of systematic
thinking but also to the unique processes of thinking and experiencing which involve the
individual philosopher with their philosophical claims and conclusions.
The purposes of this chapter are the following. First, the notion of philosophical truth,
that Adorno believes becomes possible through his changed conception of philosophy, will
be examined. I will suggest that truth in this form is realized by way of “singular”
philosophical experiences. Second, I want to explore how the truths that are conveyed
through “singularity” can be understood to have persuasive force over us, Adorno’s
readers. I will eventually try to show that “singularity” and critical philosophy are in
tension. Another way of putting this latter objective is to say that Negative Dialectics in the
main deviates from the program for philosophy that Adorno, in the book’s introduction,
advises us we need to adopt. That introduction is a reflection on genuine philosophical
thinking, while much of the rest of the text is dedicated to textual critique.
1. A Changed Philosophy
The Introduction to Negative Dialectics sets out a complex range of claims about how phi-
losophy can hope to have something to do with truth. That is, Adorno is interested essen-
tially in addressing what it means for philosophers to offer truthful accounts of the
phenomena that concern them. He believes that historical developments demand that phi-
losophy must now attempt to express truth or be truthful in quite new ways. Overarching
systems which promised to offer comprehensive interpretations of the world flew too high,
missing the detail and complexity of actions and experiences. Philosophy “lives on” (GS 6,
15/ND 3), if at all, only if it is fundamentally reformed. Adorno asks whether and how
philosophy is to continue now that the great systems we seemingly once relied upon have
been seen to fail. The “whether” is dependent on the “how” (GS 6, 16/ND 4). Philosophy in
520
its usual forms, Adorno claims, contributes to the destruction of experience in two ways.
First, its methods do not accommodate particularity. Particularity is, we might say, the
locus of real life: Individuals with their distinctive interests and commitments, who can
suffer in relation to those interests and commitments. General concepts, again, neglect
that tier in favor of general schemas. Second, philosophy takes everyday social experience
in its diminished state as a natural condition – that is the “positivist” approach – and there-
fore tacitly normalizes that state. For Adorno a changed philosophy will enter reflective
activity without closed preconceptions of what things are, of what counts as a good
description, of what an effective argumentative form might be. A philosophy which
succeeds in these ways will have helped us toward the objective truth of things.
It is on the basis of those broad concerns that Adorno champions dialectical thinking as
the “how.” It, unlike other models of philosophical reflection, is responsive to the particu-
larity – rather than generality – of things. As he explains: “Dialectics is the consistent sense
of nonidentity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint. My thought is driven to it by its
own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking” (GS 6, 17/ND 5). The term
guilt (Schuld) expresses some sense of what we owe to the object we are thinking about. In
this way, dialectical thinking is object led. This form of thought enables contradictions to
appear within our determinations of what we might have assumed was the relevantly
exhaustive conceptualization of the thing in question. Importantly, we understand that
one dimension of this newly experienced incoherence is attributable to our response to the
particularity of the thing we are thinking about. With this style of thinking there will be
no further violence done to the world around us – the violence of conceptual
imposition – and the cause of reconciliation (GS 6, 18/ND 6) is served: Particulars begin to
emerge from under the cover of concepts, released from the “coercive” character (GS 6,
18/ND 6) of the usual philosophical logics. The non‐identical – that feature of things that
is not exhausted by our concepts – is allowed at last to breathe.
It is notable that Adorno is promoting a notion of dialectical experience that focuses on
our reaction to objects. It might seem equally compatible with this account of experience
to conclude that we sometimes come up against the limits of our thinking without having
to say anything about the nature of those objects which are unattainable thanks to those
limits. That conclusion is one where what is of interest is the structure of thought. Adorno’s
preferred approach, in contrast, rests on the intentional character of experience: Our
essential orientation toward objects. In that context we need to look more analytically at
the various ways in which Adorno uses the ideas of truth, true, and objectivity. Ordinarily
there are, of course, some ways in which these concepts can be definitively separated. It
seems, though, that Adorno uses these concepts virtually interchangeably. The process of
thinking and the outcome of thinking have the qualities of truth and objectivity when
thinking conducts itself with openness and commitment to the object of enquiry. In this
respect, Adorno closely follows the logic of Hegel’s Phenomenology in connecting the notion
of “the true” with objects which make a demand on our thinking and “concept” with the
statements of knowledge we reach through responding to that demand. (This point is
elaborated in O’Connor 2004, 35–37 and 142–143.)
One of Adorno’s most ingenious proposals is that this new philosophical process
involves more rather than less participation by the thinker. The traditional philosopher,
supposedly, relies on pre‐validated categories to map out some new region of enquiry.
This is how “objectivity” is guaranteed. The Adornian philosopher, by contrast, is con-
sciously involved in the process of establishing or accomplishing truth. And, vitally, this
approach has no plan or antecedent criterion of success. Adorno thinks that this
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BRIAN O’CONNOR
procedure alone can lead us away from the objectivity destroying approaches at work in
“constitutive subjectivity” (GS 6, 10/ND xx). A mistaken notion of “objectivity” demands
a restricted form of subjective involvement – constitutive subjectivity – in establishing
what is true. That objectivity is, supposedly, channeled through licensed methods and
procedural rules. This latter way of thinking seems to be friendly to the democratic spirit
of the age: That the game is open to everyone and the rules are transparent. A rejection of
that game looks like a disinterest in epistemic democracy, understood in a particular way.
Adorno is not diverted from his distinctive idea of thinking by that antidemocratic implica-
tion. Rather since, as Hulatt puts it, “the agent’s cognitive engagement is an element in
the truth‐conditionality of the assertions with which the agent is engaged” we cannot
understand philosophical truth without recognizing the “performativity” of the subject
who thinks (Hulatt 2016, 103).
The philosophical process, Adorno notes, takes place within language: The philosopher
uses language to express the truth. But language does not have, he claims, exhaustive
exactitude. It is sometimes unavoidably ambiguous; it is often associative rather than deno-
tative. It gives us approximations to the thing we are trying to grasp, any one of which
might be revised (GS 6, 66/ND 56). The more the philosopher is committed to the dialectic
of thought, so to speak, the more they must think through the words they use. The process
may be motivated by a response to the object in its particularity, but it becomes the philoso-
pher’s process and responsibility to the degree to which they are committed to articulating
the object by their own means. No word is causally obligated by the object, and hence
designation is, Adorno claims, in some sense arbitrary (GS 6, 62/ND 53). The words
selected have, what Adorno calls, an “idiosyncratic precision (Genauigkeit)” (GS 6, 61/ND
52). (It is interesting to note that Adorno maintains this unusual view of exactitude while
also enlisting that line from Plato about joint‐carving which, as we all know, has become
the wellworn thesis of natural kinds realists (GS 6, 54/ND 43).)
Adorno likens this arbitrariness of linguistic expression – or perhaps absence of
necessity – to that of play. Play, as Schiller had first noted, opposes the seriousness which,
Adorno seems to say, demarcates the institution of philosophy. Play brings to mind the
aesthetic process: It is the pursuit of some end whose movement is determined solely
within the process itself. This activity is irreducible to rules. Adorno resists any hint that
he is engaged in something along the lines of art, maintaining that a philosophical work
which tried to be an artwork would be “postulating the demand for identity” (postulierte
den Identitätsanspruch), driving out, by virtue of its claim to wholeness, “the heteroge-
neous” (GS 6, 26/ND 15). The wholeness of the artwork is not dependent on its power of
representation, that is, it is not evaluated in terms of whether it has included all that
needs to be included from the real world. Philosophy, by contrast, tries to make sense of
the world in a way that allows us to measure the familiar through an unfamiliar theory
or conception.
What this separation of philosophy and art does not exclude, though, is the possibility
that there may be an aesthetic attitude in place even when there is no aesthetic project.
Adorno sees this playful philosophical process as “mimetic,” in that sense that he uniquely
describes (GS 6, 55‐6/ND 45). The “concept” – though he really means conceptual
work – tries to imitate as it follows the object. Hence his aphoristic description of philos-
ophy as “full unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection” (GS 6, 25/ND
13). Philosophical experience should be a dizzying experience: Nothing stays still. That
experience is an “index veri” (GS 6, 43/ND 33), evidence that the philosopher is genuinely
engaging with the elusive thing itself.
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2. Philosophy and Singularity
We can already see that Adorno’s account of philosophical practice diverges quite sharply
from the usual methods of textual philosophical criticism. The content of his recom-
mended philosophical practice is particularity, gained as we respond to the contradictions
between our concepts and the resistant properties of what we are thinking about. Genuine
philosophy should liberate thinking from systematic requirements. Subjectivity is to be
released in order to ensure that no limits are placed on how an object may be conceived
and articulated. Philosophical criticism, by contrast, works within the institution of phi-
losophy where there is a sense of agreement about what the topic is and there is force to the
idea of what will count as a good argument, a coherent system, a consistent position, a
relevant objection. To make the contrast most sharply: Genuine philosophy should lead us
toward singular outcomes, whereas philosophical criticism gives us publicly contestable
interpretations where the book of evidence, so to speak, is open to all. I need now to show
why I think the former leads us toward singularity.
As we have seen, the increased involvement of the individual’s subjectivity in the
philosophical process is supposed to enhance the possibility of arriving at a truthful expres-
sion of the object. The Adornian philosopher adopts no fixed positions as they think about
and experience the thing they wish to grasp. The ways in which the philosopher plays, so
to speak, selects words and so on generate their individual philosophical production. This,
it seems to me, is a singular process. Gordon – although interested in a different
conclusion – captures this feature of Negative Dialectics aptly, observing that the book is “a
very personal and even idiosyncratic work, in which on each and every page it was Adorno
himself who appeared as the antihero” (Gordon 2016, 123). That appearance cannot
simply be style, self‐reference, or quirkiness. Singularity is the outcome of a process which,
to be clear, involves the full resources, distinctive responsiveness, and expressive prefer-
ences of our individual subjectivity. What is achieved when all of these elements are at
work is an outcome whose truth – if that is what we want to say – is a truth for the philos-
opher involved. On that basis I take a different direction to Foster’s powerful framing of
Adorno’s approach to philosophical writing in Proustean terms. He rightly notes that
“philosophical language” does not end up, in Adorno, as having “exclusively personal
resonance” (Foster 2007, 142). We can, we think, understand the language used. It does
not disappear into privacy. At the same time the process through which the Adornian
philosopher selects words and determines the appropriateness of their usage belongs
to that p hilosopher. There is no implied replicability. It is this feature of a genuine
philosophical accomplishment that cannot be translated into another person’s
philosophical experience without loss.
It is perhaps useful to think of this, for a moment, through the lens of Bernard Williams’
criteria of proper philosophy. Williams complains about the gratuitousness he finds at the
center of Rorty’s notion of truth. But he does not respond to Rorty by setting out rules
which would put some order on how business is to be conducted. Rather he selects a kind
of virtue – or perhaps two virtues – as the mark of good philosophy. He claims that although
“there is no one style in philosophy that displays the need to get it right … some acknowl-
edgement of the need is required, some concern for truthfulness that goes beyond the
disposition to put next what occurs next” (Williams 2014, 296). Rorty fails, it appears,
because he “has seemingly lost the sense of a difficulty, of anything that needs to be got
right” (Williams 2014, 297). Williams seems to believe that the sense of a difficulty is a
consequence of the activity of getting it right, of achieving some kind of objectivity or
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BRIAN O’CONNOR
erhaps truth. Adorno’s idea of how philosophy should be done certainly foregrounds the
p
effort, the sense of a difficulty, that Williams thinks is enough to save a philosophy from
arbitrariness and hence to save it as philosophy. There is also, for the Adornian philoso-
pher, a determination to get it right. What, though, are we to make of the latter
criterion – that of getting it right – when it is entwined in an activity specific to the philos-
opher who is doing the work? We look on, sense the strain, but how do we know that the
philosopher has got it right if we stand outside that process?
Adorno’s explanation of the philosophical procedure is challenging. It is about objectivity
that can only be expressed by a subject drawing on all their linguistic and personal resources
in negotiation with the object of their enquiry. There is certainly every appearance of a good
effort, one in which the philosopher is open and willing to be led – as they see it – by the
object. But that effort and that openness are not objectivity in the specific sense of being a
description of a shared reality. Nor obviously do we find here that objectivity that is suppos-
edly protected when we follow a sure method. It meets another s tandard notion of objectivity
in being open minded, willing to relinquish prejudices, and free of any set procedure which
governs knowledge. Construing a position as a singular one should not mean that that
position is voided in principle as philosophy. That is certainly not the argument here. Indeed,
this may be what philosophy must be. The consequences of that idea, though, need to be
discussed. The question therefore is how we justify any claims we might make to being
persuaded or carried along by Adorno when he offers philosophy in that singular mode.
Another way of trying to frame the singularity thesis is to say that Adorno relativizes
thought to the distinctive mimetic actions – to put it slightly polemically – of the philosopher.
This relativization is not relativism as such. Adorno himself, we should note, understands
and rejects relativism in ways that are consistent with his own relativization move. First of
all, he takes relativism to have been wrongly justified by the “bourgeois” view of the equal
value of each individual opinion, “as if there were no criterion of their truth” (GS 6, 46/
ND 36). This thesis is based on the notion that everyone’s “thought is conditioned” (GS 6,
46/ND 36), a thesis which is itself contradicted as a fulcrum point by the fact it too must be
conditioned. Second, he holds that what is identified as a purely subjectivist position is
pushed beyond itself once it makes truth or falsity claims. As other philosophers might say,
validity claims cannot be settled by purely private criteria and hence they stand within a
space of some degree of commensurability. Adorno’s relativization move does not mean
that singular positions are hermetically sealed, and that no outsider is ever in a position to
take a view of them or that their truths are not possible conclusions for others. Shuster
argues that the Adornian philosopher makes expressive efforts that are not only about the
philosopher themselves – “who I am and what registers for me and why” – but also about
others – “whom I am claiming to speak for and to and why” (Shuster 2014, 114). This
seems to be right: The motivations of the philosopher include, perhaps primarily, a concern
for a world of others. We must then differentiate between what motivates the philosopher
and the form their work eventually takes. The latter leaves us with the puzzle of how the
philosophical truths of the singular philosophical effort persuade. Adorno’s relativization
seems to exclude that we readers of Adorno enter into those truths in the ways in which
Adorno himself has. We cannot constitute what truths we find in Adorno in the way they
are constituted as truths for Adorno.
We might further highlight what is at stake in this feature of the singularity question by
considering Adorno’s primary criticism of Hegel’s dialectic. Hegel, he famously alleges,
appreciates the open and dynamic nature of the dialectic but ultimately destroys it by
turning each step into a formal or systematic one (see O’Connor 2011). Now, this may very
524
well be correct but what is important to state on Hegel’s side is that he does not appear to
think that the dialectic is the work of any one mind or a singular accomplishment: It is
repeatable and proceeds by reasons with shared validity. The path of the dialectic is itself,
in that sense, an objective one in principle, rather than one caught up in the capacities and
reasons of any particular individual.
3. Persuasion and Reportability
If philosophical positions are – at least for the Adornian philosopher – singular accom-

plishments, how are we to understand whatever persuasive power we think we find in
them? It is not clear, as I have been suggesting, why they should resonate with us, the
outsiders, even if they seem to. And how are we to report them, given that they exist within
a complex of commitments and idiosyncrasies that cannot be transposed?
There is something approaching the beginning of an answer to the first of these
questions in Adorno’s revealing alignment of philosophical expressions of the truth with
“rhetoric,” an “irremovable feature” (Hulatt 2016, 115) of a changed philosophy. He
believes that rhetoric must be separated from its disreputable use: Its “persuasive purposes”
(a surprising thought in view of its very ancient function as a tool of effective argument).
The linguistic exercise of authentic philosophical thought is, Adorno thinks, rhetorical. It
contrasts with the technical‐ization of philosophy where expressive possibilities have been
narrowed. Philosophy has become, allegedly, a matter of mapping reality through fixed
categories. But a philosophy which takes expression seriously – a rhetorical one, in
Adorno’s sense – is oriented toward the very object it expresses: “In dialectics … the rhetor-
ical element is on the side of content” (GS 6, 65/ND 55). The rhetorically minded thinker
is indeed attentive to words, to tone, to structure, to pathos as well as logos. And those qual-
ities are evident in Adorno’s own style of writing. They coalesce in the pursuit of objective
truth rather than mere plausibility (GS 6, 51/ND 41). (The basis of this distinction between
objectivity and plausibility is not set out. At one extreme, plausibility might be thought of
as untruthful, for example, where devious lawyers concoct “plausible” scenarios in defense
of their guilty clients. It may be something like this that Adorno has in mind. But there is
also a sense of plausibility that is close to a common view of objectivity: Namely that our
claims about reality are the best we can do and are defensible within the resources and
capacities we happen to have.)
Consistent with his notion of a changed philosophy Adorno denies that truth can be
gained through pre‐validated categories or methods. Hence objectivity, he writes, “is its
own index” (GS 6, 52/ND 42). It might really be the case that individuals who arrive at
objectivity in this way may sense that they have grasped something that is faithful to the
object and is free of their starting assumptions. Their conclusions are perhaps justified by
their experiences. A different matter, though, is that of how we who are offered those con-
clusions can experience their truth given our external relation to the process that has
brought them about. But it is here that the notion of rhetoric might narrow the gap bet-
ween a singularity and us. The philosopher must be committed to the object but their
efforts to express it through language place their experience in a space that is not private,
that is, within a linguistic community. The significance of the words used, for example, is
not decided by the philosopher alone. What is conveyed by those words gives us some sense
of what the philosopher experienced. That does not go so far as to mean, though, that
shared vocabularies can allow us to replicate the author’s experience.
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BRIAN O’CONNOR
The second issue stemming from the singularity thesis is that of reportability. And here
whatever distance is in theory closed between Adorno’s truths and his readers, by reflec-
tion on language and rhetoric, seems to widen. Adorno himself speaks about the non‐
reportability of philosophy, though he does not see it as a terminal problem. One of the
most remarkable claims he makes in Negative Dialectics is that philosophy is not in essence
reportable (referierbar) (GS 6, 44/ND 33). Those philosophies that can be reported are in
some sense “superfluous.” Adorno insists that each philosophical act must therefore be
unique. This is underlined by the maxim: “Only thoughts which cannot understand them-
selves are true” (GS 6, 57/ND 48). This presumably does not mean that we can take it as a
sign of truth when an individual is confused about something within their own minds. We
might say that one component of non‐reportability is that the very thoughts that comprise
a philosophical engagement with things cannot themselves be translated into other terms
simply because they are singular. Understanding a statement, perhaps, involves manipu-
lating its components and restating and substituting some of them without semantic loss.
Genuine philosophy is singular precisely because it is not amenable to that kind of
understanding.
If non‐reportability is a criterion of good philosophy, however, it may seem to follow that
philosophical conclusions are not accessible to discussion, never mind contestability. We
need to understand the conditions of a non‐reportable yet nevertheless meaningful
philosophical statement. First of all non‐reportability does not entail for Adorno the absence
of communication. Now, communication might be said to mean some transfer of ideas in
which the meaning received is not very different to the meaning intentionally conveyed.
The recipient will understand those ideas in their own terms, through their own internal
processes of reasoning, without fundamentally altering the meaning. Any other notion of
successful communication would imply a direct unmediated transfer of meaning. These
alternatives, it seems to me, correspond with reportable and non‐reportable communica-
tion respectively. Since Adorno maintains that philosophy is non‐reportable – a thesis that
is consistent with singularity – there is a struggle in explaining how we are to acknowledge
its intelligibility if we do not want to take on the burden of an unmediated transfer theory.
Adorno declares “Direct communicability to everyone is not a criterion of truth” (GS 6, 51/
ND 41). This idea is reasonable enough. And it also implies that such truths will be commu-
nicable with someone. We want to know, though, whether that someone might be us. Do we
have that talent for philosophy, the right “mental composition” – a piece of “undeserved
luck” (GS 6, 51/ND 41) – that could bring us closer to Adorno’s singular philosophical
truths? In that way we might intuitively recognize the truths he places in front of us. But
even shared dispositions do not entail shared experiences. Philosophical truth is not a
matter of receptivity, but of objective invention. The process of that invention, again, is
found in the singular decisions of the philosopher who does the work.
4. From Philosophy to Textual Criticism
Negative Dialectics itself, as noted earlier, contains reports of other philosophical texts, and
we might assume that that fact by itself amounts to some kind of evidence against the
philosophical qualities of those texts. Their authors have not entered into any singular
form of expression of their subject matter, their ideas are all too transparent, and hence the
texts may be faithfully reduced in reportage to their core commitments. I have suggested
that Adorno’s conception of philosophical truth precludes much of what we might expect
526
in a critical work of philosophy. But, as we know, a great deal of the legacy of Negative
Dialectics lies in its intriguing and provocative series of readings of other philosophers.
It is not obvious from the general conception of a changed philosophy why or how we
should end up dealing with texts, as major sections of Negative Dialectics do. Adorno does
in fact attempt to pave an avenue toward those texts. He notes, conventionally enough,
that philosophy stands in the middle of the tradition of thought. Every criticism of philos-
ophy itself brings forward some “unconscious remembrance” of the tradition manifest in
texts (ND 6, 63/ND 54). His objective is made clear in the statement that philosophy “rests
on the texts it criticizes” (GS 6, 64/ND 55). As an institutional practice philosophy is indeed
significantly marked by the texts that have contributed to its range of interests and its style
of enquiry. Adorno exploits that thought to prepare us for what we are about to find in the
remainder of the book. Philosophy’s situatedness within tradition “justifies the move from
philosophy to interpretation (Deutung)” (GS 6, 64/ND 55). It does not follow, though, that
philosophical work must always in some respect deal with philosophical texts. Indeed, it is
evident that much of philosophy does not, even unconsciously. By contrast, Negative
Dialectics is strongly text oriented.
Within the general framework of Adorno’s Critical Theory this bland and familiar
hermeneutic invocation of tradition is, arguably, underwhelming. Whilst it does not –
communitarian style – bind philosophical truth within the limits of its tradition; tradition,
nevertheless, is expected to do some work here. But why? Adorno’s criticisms of social free-
dom in Negative Dialectics, for example, draw our attention to sources of motivation that
cannot be encompassed within tradition or the social totality: The sheer particularity of
resistance. Yet Adorno is anxious to situate his own philosophical practice within tradi-
tion. This makes sense, perhaps, only as a way to anticipate the approaching tension in the
very design of the book. That is, that ultimately the main work of Negative Dialectics is not
an example of changed philosophy but is instead a series of textual critiques or, perhaps
better, a set of creative responses to texts.
One suggestion might be that there is no tension between the general commitments
that make up the changed philosophy and the immanent critique of philosophical texts,
Adorno’s most devastating style of “interpretation.” Immanent critique involves assessing
the coherence of a philosophical system by using its own standards as the measure.
Identification of a system’s internal contradictions, as Adorno puts it elsewhere, pushes a
system to where “it cannot afford to go” (GS 5, 14/AE 5). Some conclusions about why
those standards are operative to begin with or why they fail may be drawn. However, the
important thing is that the criticism is not based on presuppositions, brought in from
outside, about what a philosophical system must say. Is this, then, consistent after all with
Adorno’s changed philosophy? The answer seems to be no because the two approaches
depend on two quite differing senses of presuppositionlessness. The first is simply that of
thinking without a plan or criterion of success. The second is to think in terms of the target
of criticism, that is, to assess it without presupposing a better theory. This second rests on
a much favored procedure in philosophy: That incoherence within a system is fatal to it
and that therefore a good argument against something is provided when such a contradic-
tion is brought to the surface.
Now one possible “Leitmotif ” which could unify the different parts of Negative Dialectics
is particularity. Adorno famously writes: “The matters of true philosophical interest at this
point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest.
They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity …” (GS 6, 19‐20/ND 8). The
Introduction, with its recommendations for a changed philosophy, draws our attention to
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BRIAN O’CONNOR
the genuine objectivity or truth that can be achieved once we direct our thinking toward
objects. If we are open to objects we will have to find new ways of approaching them,
pushing our linguistic resources to the point of exhaustion. This will inevitably produce
singular philosophical outcomes, but they can, at the same time, claim to be justified
because they never lose sight of the particularity of objects. Textual criticism also has a
place. We can broadly see that Adorno reveals the aporia of philosophical systems where
there is no acknowledgement of particularity, that is, where identity thinking guides
those systems. It becomes important to expose the limitations of the philosophical tradi-
tion since, perhaps, it exerts such influence over our views of the relationship between
mind and world, concept and object. The conclusions of Adorno’s criticisms of
philosophical systems are, we might say, truths for us: We can and do evaluate them using
the shared criteria of good philosophical analysis. Hence we can see that there are, in
Negative Dialectics, two quite different yet somehow inter‐connected approaches to partic-
ularity. It is quite likely that Adorno’s own understanding of what he is trying to achieve
in the book would be something along the lines that it is a free ranging and methodologi-
cally uninhibited interest in particularity. In that case, Adorno offers us two notions of
philosophical truth: The singular one and the critical one. These are evidently quite differ-
ent approaches to particularity. They do not necessarily contradict one another, but nor
do they belong to a common philosophical process. Philosophical criticism cannot
amount to truth in the sense required by a changed philosophy. And changed philosophy,
for its part, departs from those public objects – philosophical texts – which orient our
shared philosophical labors. The particularity that is gained through singularity is expe-
rienced, whereas the particularity we discover through reading Adorno’s philosophical
criticisms is a matter of inference.
5. Conclusion
I have set out what I think Adorno means by the terms of a “changed philosophy” and
have contended that philosophy in that form produces singular philosophical outcomes.
The question of singularity gives rise to the two quite separate questions explored here. Of
less significance was the limited justification offered by Adorno for adopting familiar forms
of philosophical critique, as much of Negative Dialectics does, in view of the quite different
tasks for philosophical thinking that are demanded by a changed philosophy. Enormous
advances are made in Negative Dialectics in how we understand the motivations and the
basis of the incoherence of a number of important philosophers. That interpretative work,
however, is a combination of a classic critically oriented philosophical critical strategy
(coherence evaluation) and the special focus of critical theory: To expose the social basis of
all proclaimed rationality (identifying motivating assumptions).
The more central question in this chapter was that of how are we to receive the truths
that are offered through singularity? It appears that the uniquely committed philosophical
actor reaches claims and conclusions that are saturated with that actor’s specific capacity
for response. It is not a universal capacity, nor even a communal one accessible by all
philosophers. If we take Adorno’s idea of what a changed philosophy must be then we are
left with philosophies that are relative to their philosophers. This conclusion is not a criti-
cism of Adorno. He gives us reason to distrust the idea of an implicit system or general
logic that can sustain philosophy and allow it to write out – in objective terms – the struc-
ture of the world. There is, though, some reticence on Adorno’s part in spelling out the
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implications of philosophy whose rigors push it into singular experiential engagements

with its object. It may not lead to the loss of a common space, but the terms of its survival
as a shared enterprise, if that is what Adorno wants, remain unclear. We might suggest
that here Adorno entertains, without quite insisting, on the impossibility of philosophy
understood as the business of collective truth making, forged through contestation, and
disciplined by its own need for communication.
References
Gordon, P. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Press.
O’Connor, B. (2011). Adorno’s reconception of the dialectic. In: Blackwell Companion to Hegel (eds.
S. Houlgate and M. Baur), 537–555. Oxford/Malden, MA: Wiley.
Schlegel, F. (1991). Philosophical Fragments (trans. P. Firchow). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Shuster, M. (2014). Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. Chicago:
Williams, B. (2014). Essays and Reviews 1959–2002. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Further Reading
Buck‐Morss, S. (1977). The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and The
Press.
Sherratt, Y. (2002). Adorno’s Positive Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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34
Adorno and Scholem: The Heretical

Redemption of Metaphysics
Asaf Angermann
1. Introduction
At first glance, Theodor W. Adorno’s Critical Theory and Gershom Scholem’s scholarship
of religious mysticism could not seem farther removed from one another. Adorno’s mate-
rialist critique of irrational tendencies in modern societies and their destructive impact on
the individual’s agency may appear largely at odds with Scholem’s emphasis on the signif-
icance of mysticism, symbolic myth, and messianic revelation for human life, precisely in
its social and political contexts. These thematic differences initially corresponded to
personal discrepancies, if not hostility, between the two – despite their close friendships
with Walter Benjamin, whose work conjoined elements from both Marxist social theory
and Jewish religious mysticism. Following their first meaningful encounters, however, the
antagonisms shifted into an intellectual friendship and the scholarly exchange between
the two left meaningful traces in their thought and in their writings.
This chapter explores and examines these traces: The conceptual and argumentative
interrelations between Adorno’s and Scholem’s projects. Reconstructing both the extant
and the conceivable exchange between these two German‐Jewish intellectuals, the chapter
shows that Scholem’s investigations into the subterranean dimensions of Jewish mysti-
cism left their mark on Adorno’s dialectical philosophy, while the questions raised by
Adorno’s Critical Theory echoed – directly and indirectly – in Scholem’s scholarship.
Although Scholem never rescinded his theological standpoint, dialectical and even mate-
rialist elements conspicuously pervade his work. Adorno, despite the critical stance toward
religious transcendence per se, not to mention the overt rejection of all things mystical and
occult, increasingly integrated into his work theological concepts and ideas the signifi-
cance of which for his overall philosophy remains the subject of various debates and inter-
pretations.1 Accordingly, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of such philosophical,
theological, and intellectual‐historical questions, but also to intervene in the debates by
employing those elements from Adorno’s and Scholem’s work about which they did not
correspond directly, but which add certain dimensions that are necessary for a complete
picture of the relationship between them.
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Asaf Angermann
The chapter begins with a brief biographical account of the personal relationship
etween the two. Adorno and Scholem kept an intellectual friendship and met almost
b
regularly during Scholem’s numerous visits to postwar Europe. They maintained an
intensive and extensive correspondence of over 200 letters that persisted with hardly any
interruptions from 1939 until Adorno’s death 30 years later (see Adorno and Scholem
2015). The recently published correspondence sheds light on their intellectual friendship,
but also reveals the affinities and the differences between their concepts and arguments.
Drawing on the correspondence, alongside Adorno’s and Scholem’s published work, I will
concentrate in this chapter on three main intersections between their thought. The first
examines the interrelation of myth and enlightenment in Scholem’s scholarship of Jewish
mysticism and in Adorno’s early writings, in particular in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The
second assesses the meaning of negativity, critique, and heresy in Adorno’s writings on
ethics and life, and in Scholem’s work on heretical mysticism, focusing on a remarkable
text on the topic which he dedicated to Adorno. Finally, the chapter explores the complex
dialectics between theological and materialist aspects in their thought. Reconstructing the
debates on the theological dimensions of Adorno’s work – whether it may be described as
negative or inverse theology – I will argue that, viewed from the perspective of the dialog
with Scholem, Adorno’s late work may rather be considered heretical materialist meta-
physics – which, as he himself concedes in a letter to Scholem, might almost be called
theology, that is: Heretical materialist theology.
2. Religious Mysticism and Material Life: Historical

Background and the Early Conversations
“Several restrained remarks I heard you make about Wiesengrund won’t deter me from
drawing your attention to his newly published Kierkegaard,” wrote the mutual friend
Benjamin to Scholem on January 15, 1933 (Benjamin and Scholem 1989, 26). Although
Scholem’s exact “restrained remarks” have not been fully documented, his initial aversion
to Adorno – and to the entire circle of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research – was
unequivocal. Beyond his general distaste for Marxist social theory, Scholem was particu-
larly skeptical about the merit of Adorno’s scholarship. Eventually persuaded by Benjamin
to read Adorno’s first book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, Scholem reported
that “to my mind, the book combines a sublime plagiarism of your [Benjamin’s] thought
with an uncommon chutzpah, and it will ultimately not mean much for a future, objective
appraisal of Kierkegaard” (Benjamin and Scholem 1989, 84). Such combination of
personal and intellectual aversion was the backdrop of their first encounter.
In mid‐February 1938, Scholem traveled to New York to deliver his now preeminent
lectures on Jewish mysticism – the lectures that were published in 1941 as the ground-
breaking book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Scholem 1995a). It was the theologian
Paul Tillich, Adorno’s advisor on the habilitation on Kierkegaard at the University of
Frankfurt, who arranged a meeting between Scholem and his former advisee, who had
arrived in New York at the same time, to join Max Horkheimer at the newly relocated
Institute of Social Research and to participate at the Princeton Radio Research Project (see
Müller‐Doohm 2005, 242–267). Before too long, the skeptical aversion was supplanted by
cautious affection and the discovery of mutual interests. Only two months later, Scholem
reported to Benjamin from New York,
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The Heretical Redemption of Metaphysics
In the meantime, I saw Wiesengrund on three occasions and was able to establish a very
sympathetic relationship [with him]. I like him immensely, and we found quite a lot to say to
one another. I intend to cultivate relations with him and his wife quite vigorously. Talking with
him is pleasant and engaging, and I find it possible to reach agreement on many things.
(Benjamin and Scholem 1989, 218–219)
The transition from reticent skepsis to amiable enthusiasm was mirrored from Adorno’s
side. Responding to Benjamin’s announcement of Scholem’s imminent visit to New York
in 1938, Adorno timidly expressed his willingness “to reckon with Scholem’s arrival and
with whatever Cabbalistic signs his stay in Manhattan will have to be interpreted under”
(Adorno and Benjamin 2001, 241).
Having made the acquaintance two months later, Adorno extensively conveyed:
You may find this hard to believe, but the first time we got to meet him was at the Tillichs,
together with Goldstein and his new wife. Not exactly the best atmosphere in which to be
introduced to the Sohar; and especially since Frau Tillich’s relationship to the Kabbala seems
to resemble that of a terrified teenager [Backfisch] to pornography. The antinomian Maggid
was extremely reserved towards me at first, and clearly regarded me as some sort of dangerous
arch‐seducer: I had the strange feeling of finding myself identified with Brecht. Needless to
say, nothing of the kind was actually said, and Scholem contrived to sustain the fiction, with
considerable brash grace, that he knew nothing at all about me except that a book of mine had
been published by the blessed Siebeck [Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard – AA]. Nevertheless,
I somehow succeeded in breaking the spell and he began to show some kind of trust in me,
something which I think will continue to grow.
We have spent a couple of evenings together, as the ringing in your ears has presumably
already told you by now; once on our own, in a discussion which touched in part upon our own
last conversation in San Remo concerning theology, and in part upon my Husserl piece, which
Scholem read with great care, as if it were some intelligence test. We spent the second evening in
the company of Max, and Scholem, who was in great form, regaled us in detail with the most
astonishing things in connection with Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism – a number of which,
however, sounded so clearly reminiscent of some of Rosenberg’s notions about ‘our people’, that
Max was seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print.
It is not altogether easy for me to convey my own impression of Scholem. This is indeed a classic
case of the conflict between duty and inclination. My personal inclination comes into play most
strongly when he makes himself the advocate [Anwalt] of the theological moment of your, and
perhaps I might also say of my own, philosophy (Adorno and Benjamin 2001, 248–249).
During their meetings in New York, Scholem depicted his work on Jewish mysticism to
Adorno and Horkheimer, focusing on two specific projects he was particularly invested in at
that time: The first was his translation, from Aramaic into German, of the Zohar, the
Kabbalistic Book of Splendor, first published in 13th century Spain. Scholem’s edition,
published in 1935 (with a second, bibliophile edition in 1936), included his own afterword
on the Zohar’s historical and theological context, in which he presented his method of inter-
pretation (Scholem 1936). The second project was Scholem’s research of the heretical
mysticism practiced by the messianic Jewish sects that followed the two infamous “false
messiahs” of modern Jewish history: Sabbatai Tsvi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–
1791). It is the latter project about which Horkheimer was particularly disconcerted: it
involved elements of heresy and antinomianism in their most concrete sense - from immoral,
criminal behavior among the exiled Jewish communities to religious rituals that included
what was then considered sexual deviations (Scholem 1995b).
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Asaf Angermann
In Adorno’s view, first relayed in the letters to Benjamin, Scholem’s project of uncovering
the “truth‐content” of Jewish mysticism traces back the process in which theological concepts
and ideas cross over to the realm of the profane: Of intramundane, historical, material earthly
life. He complains that Scholem nonetheless “explains the ‘explosions’ of Jewish mysticism in
exclusively internal theological terms” (Adorno and Benjamin 2001, 250). For Adorno, such
refusal to venture beyond the mere theological into the realm of material life amounts to a
“violent repudiat[ion]” of the social and historical significance of these very theological ideas.
To be sure, Adorno expressed no doubts concerning the value, merit, or importance of
Scholem’s scholarship of religious mysticism; it is rather Scholem’s concept of theology, in
particular the relationship of theology and materialism, of the sacred and the profane, of the
“internal” and the “external” – that is, the intramundane and the transcendental – dimen-
sions of theology that troubled him. This was to become the center point – both explicitly and
implicitly – of the dialog between Adorno and Scholem in the years to come.
3. The Context of Blindness: Mysticism, Myth, and Reason
After his return from New York to Jerusalem, Scholem sent to Adorno a copy of his Zohar
translation. Adorno expressed his deep gratitude for the book in an extensive letter that
begins their multifaceted, multidecade correspondence. In the letter, Adorno expresses his
fascination by the book, which he views as providing revelatory insight into an
unknown – and as Adorno illustrates, for him virtually imperceptible – terrain. He then
raises two substantial questions on the text’s significance, concerning its historical and
epistemological dimensions. First, Adorno reflects on the Zohar’s meaning from the
perspective of the philosophy of history. He asks whether one can interpret the Zohar’s
mysticism as an expression of the historical decay, or disintegration, of religious ideas and
mystical concepts into mythical, symbolic representation: “the transformation [Umschlag]
of spiritualism … into mythology” (Adorno and Scholem 2015, 10 – all English transla-
tions from this correspondence are mine – AA). Second, he enquires about the Zohar’s
epistemology. According to Scholem, the Zohar consists of symbolic interpretations of the
Torah – every word and every sentence in it are regarded as symbolic expressions of another,
higher reality: The reality of the divine. Adorno poses the question therefore whether such
symbolic structure [Stufenbau der Symbole] can have any ground at all, whether the chain
of symbolic interpretations eventually reaches an end point, or “whether it represents a
bottomless plunge [bodenloser Sturz],” in which case “the question of myth’s context of
blindness [Verblendungszusammenhang] imposes itself in view of the Zohar text” (Adorno
and Scholem 2015, 11), since such structure would not permit any perspective outside its
own “bottomless” totality.
Notably, in this early letter from 1939 Adorno seamlessly connects his own thesis on
spiritualism’s disintegration into mythology from the 1933 book on Kierkegaard with
Scholem’s presentation of the Zohar, while at the same time laying the argumentative
foundations for the diagnosis of the entanglement of myth and enlightenment which will
be the central thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment just a few years later. Moreover, this letter
to Scholem employs for the first time – as far as hitherto documented – the concept of
Verblendungszusammenhang, the “context of blindness,” or the “context of delusion,” which
denotes the impossibility to see beyond the hermetically closed structure of representa-
tions, of instrumental subjectivity, and ideology. This concept will gain importance and
centrality in Dialectic of Enlightenment and in Adorno’s later writings.
534
In his reply, Scholem attends to both concerns. Addressing the first question, he empha-
sizes that Kabbalah means tradition: A tradition of mystical interpretations that seeks
neither to revive primordial experience nor to rescue it from historical decay, but rather to
preserve the inexpressible and hence “spiritual” element of experience. But it is Scholem’s
answer to the second concern that is more significant. While Scholem concedes that the
question concerning the symbolic structure would “tolerate,” as he writes, “commentary
from both sides,” in his own opinion the Kabbalists conceived of no ground beneath the
layered structure of symbolic interpretations. Scholem’s position on Kabbalistic mysticism
largely resonates, hence, with what he elsewhere considers “religious nihilism”: The belief
that it is impossible to discern an absolute foundation or absolute authority for ascertain-
ing divine transcendence. For him, precisely such void, such endless and absolute openness
at the core of religious experience, is the setting point for – and the driving force behind – the
mystic’s work. Since there can be no absolute foundations, no absolute authority according
to which mystical experience should be perceived and made intelligible, it is left to the
mystic to rely on her own experience in interpreting the shape of divine transcendence and
the metaphysical structure of the universe. In other words, it is not religious authority but
rather its absence, the impossibility to determine absolute religious authority, that is the basis
for mysticism, for the formation of Kabbalah’s gnostic myth (see Biale 1979, 128–147).
The exchange on the nature of myth and the impossibility of grounding illuminates not
only the authors’ mutual interests in examining the interrelations of myth and reason, but
also their shared premise: Namely, that myth is already a form of knowledge, even a form
of rationality. Viewed from this perspective, Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) central thesis in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts
to mythology” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, xviii) shall be read as a response to the
argument raised by Scholem in the early Zohar translation, and then expanded in Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism – a book which Adorno, as he himself attests, has studied with
great care (Adorno and Scholem 2015, 60–64).
Mystical experience, Scholem maintains, remains accessible to the individual mystic
alone, and her only way of communicating it is through transformation of its inexpressible
contents into the language of symbolic representation, of myth. “Failing this mythical
element, the ancient Jewish mystics would have been unable to compress into language
the substance of their inner experience” (Scholem 1995a, 35). It is hence precisely myth
that can give expression to the inner experience of the mystic, which Scholem describes as
the attempt to conceptualize and explain transcendental, divine reality. Scholem considers
this “the revenge of myth upon its conqueror” (Scholem 1995a). It is myth’s reprisal
against reason which remarkably corresponds to the idea of cunning in Adorno’s Hegelian
vocabulary (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 39–53). It is a central element of Scholem’s
critique of reified, ossified reason – the form of reason he associates with rationalistic
Jewish philosophy.2 Whereas rationalistic philosophy failed at preserving the living ele-
ments of Jewish life, “Kabbalism succeeded in establishing a connection between its own
world and certain elemental impulses operative in every human mind. […] Philosophy
ignored these fears, out of whose substance man wove myths, and in turning its back upon
the primitive side of man’s existence, it paid a high price in losing touch with him alto-
gether” (similar formulations also in Scholem 1965, 99, 1995a, 35). Scholem reproaches
rationalist Jewish philosophy for removing all elements of the non‐rational, non‐
conceptual, and inexpressible from the discursive realm of knowledge. In doing so, he
argues, philosophy alienates itself from concrete life – it eliminates natural life and human
experience from its conceptual undertakings. Myth, according to Scholem, expresses
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Asaf Angermann
e lements that may not be compatible with reason, elements that rational thinking
overlooks and seeks to eliminate.
At the same time, Scholem argues that myth is already a stage in the formation of
reason and enlightenment. For him, too, myth and enlightenment are intrinsically entan-
gled: Myth, based on the non‐rational but vital elements of human experience, gives rise to
the historical process that leads to enlightenment as autonomous thinking that challenges
unquestioned authorities in thought and action; while the enlightenment, although itself
a product of mythical thinking, partially fails to provide answers to the very questions
which, in order to be able to answer, it sought to overcome myth.
Despite their disparate social and political motivations, the argumentative driving forces
behind Adorno’s and Scholem’s work from the 1930s remarkably resonate with one
another. Adorno was by no means an advocate of mysticism. His struggle, both epistemo-
logically and politically, aimed simultaneously in two directions: Against mythical thinking
that ossifies natural life and against enlightenment rationality that seems to be over-
coming mythical thinking but merely falls prey to its violent structures. Already in his
early writings from the early 1930s – the paper on “The Idea of Natural‐History” from
1932 (Adorno 2006) and the first book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic from
1933 – Adorno closely examined the historical‐epistemological process that leads to
the destructive fixation of historical natural life in lifeless spirit, in myth. “The Idea of
Natural‐History” argued precisely against such reificatory ontologies that eliminate the
social‐historical dimensions of natural life and fixate experience in the conceptual, for
Adorno: Mythical, categories.
Drawing on this argument, the penultimate chapter of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard –
which can hence be seen as a precursor of the Dialectic of Enlightenment – examines the
precarious relationship of reason and what he calls “mythical sacrifice.” In the book as a
whole, Adorno formulates a critique of Kierkegaard’s concept of subjectivity as inwardness,
explaining it to be nothing but alienated self‐relation: It is alienated because it seeks to
detach itself from nature, from the historical and material, while at the same time remain-
ing utterly reliant, as any human subjectivity, on the objective, material dimensions of life.
The “mythical sacrifice” is a central moment in this process of alienation, in which the
subject seeks to free itself from its historical and material contingencies in which it is
grounded (grounded in the very sense of which Adorno wrote in his letter to Scholem on
symbolic representation in myth), to achieve “true subjectivity” by elevating itself into the
realm of spirit.3 Such spirit, for Adorno, is “annihilated natural life and bound to mythology”
(Adorno 1989, 109). The myth of the subject, of pure and true subjectivity, is formed at the
cost of tangible natural life. Therefore Adorno considers it “mythical sacrifice […] It is the
sacrifice of mere spirit into which all reality has been transformed” (Adorno 1989, 113).
Although Scholem refused to acknowledge the merit of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book, it
seems evident that the two shared both the sense of urgency in analyzing the significance
of myth for modernity and the diagnosis of the dialectical interrelations of myth and
reason. For Scholem, however, myth entails the spiritual‐rationalistic annihilation of
natural life, but also its preservation; this is the driving force behind his scholarship of mys-
ticism. Like Scholem, Adorno sought to redeem damaged, annihilated natural life, but
myth (rather than mysticism) signified for him rather a prototype of enlightenment
thinking as a deficient form of cognition.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment sets to indicate the insufficiencies of rational, rationalistic
thought and to recover the dimensions of incommensurable experience, of non‐conceptual
natural life that is systematically removed from it. The critique of the enlightenment
536
presented in the first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” largely resonates with
Scholem’s critique of rationalistic philosophy: The misguided intention to attend to – to
use Scholem’s words – “that all‐important region where mortals are afraid of life and in
fear of death” (Scholem 1995a, 35). “Enlightenment,” Adorno and Horkheimer famously
contend, “has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as
masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (Adorno
and Horkheimer 2002, 1). They later conclude that “Enlightenment is mythical fear radi-
calized. […] Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the
real source of fear” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 11). With the aim to eliminate all
sources of fear of the unknown, enlightenment sought to provide intelligible, rational
explanation of the entire reality. For that purpose, it fought myth, attempting to dismantle
its authority and demolish its content. “But the myths which fell victim to the enlighten-
ment were themselves its product,” Adorno and Horkheimer insist. “Myth sought to
report, to name, to tell of origins – but therefore also to narrate, record, explain” (Adorno
and Horkheimer 2002, 5). Myth, they argue, is an attempt to explain reality, to lend it a
comprehensible meaning, form, and shape, without excluding those elements that defy
explanation. For the enlightenment, precisely these elements are the source of fear and
hence must be annulled. Failing its own goal of overcoming human fear of the unknown
by the attempt to render it intelligible through rational explanation, enlightenment ratio-
nality is responsible for even greater fear: The fear of that which transcends the realm of
the intelligible, the fear of the incommensurable and inexpressible.
Adorno’s critique of the enlightenment and Scholem’s critique of rationalist Jewish
philosophy take a similar step at uncovering such deficiencies. Both see in the efforts to
purify conceivable reality from any elements of unsystematizable natural life an expres-
sion of social and political exclusionary powers. For Scholem, however, it is the unique
strength of myth to contain within it such incommensurability, to “express the inexpress-
ible” (see also Scholem 1965, 1995a, 27). For Scholem, as opposed to Adorno, myth
presents not just a viable but also a necessary alternative to enlightenment, since it can
express what the latter cannot. Enlightenment’s relapse into myth does not mean for him
an unfortunate but a necessary dialectic – it is necessary for protecting and preserving the
unyielding elements of historical natural life. Adorno, despite the defense of myth’s
necessity for the formation of enlightenment reason, as an attempt to narrate and explain
reality, to render it intelligible, by no means seeks to embrace myth as viable and construc-
tive. “By sacrificing thought,” he and Horkheimer write, “enlightenment forfeited its own
realization” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 33). Enlightenment thinking, for Adorno, is
not the opposite of mythical thinking, but its complement. Both imply the impossibility to
see and perceive beyond the limited realm of pre‐given, conceptual, formal reason.
“The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what
has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped;
it is the new form of blindness [Verblendung] which supersedes that of vanquished myth”
(Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 28). The social diagnosis of the outcomes of enlightenment
thinking is the rationally induced blindness. This is the result of the “context of blindness”
[“Verblendungszusammenhang”; here translated as “a social context which induces blindness”
(Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 33)] – the very “context of blindness” about which Adorno
inquired in his first letter to Scholem: The concern that a purely mythical perception of
reality might be blind to those elements that transcend it. Despite the proximities in their
sense of urgency and dialectical analyses, here lies a crucial epistemological difference
between Adorno’s and Scholem’s views: While Scholem insists that myth is capable of
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“expressing the inexpressible,” of attending to natural life that is eliminated from rational-
istic view, Adorno is rather concerned by an enlightenment that regresses to myth and
thereby eliminates precisely these inexpressible, incommensurable elements of natural life.
4. Antinomianism and Resistance: Damaged Life and the

Critique of Normativity
Within the vast scope of Scholem’s scholarship of mysticism, a most central prominence is
given to the mystical theories of heretical messianic sects that preached transgression and
antinomianism: The Sabbatian movement that followed Sabbatai Tsvi (1626–1676) in
Turkey and the Frankist movement that followed Jacob Frank (1726–1791) in Poland and
Germany. Beyond the historical and theological aspects of these sects, the philosophical – to
be exact: the critical‐ethical – argument at the core of the theories Scholem presents, reso-
nates with central ideas in Adorno’s ethics and social philosophy: The ethical response to
what he considers “damaged life,” the critique of repressive normativity, and the demand
to challenge and resist social and legal injustice. Against the backdrop of Scholem’s
accounts of heretical messianism and their ethical‐critical objectives, Adorno’s philosophy
might indeed be considered antinomian. In fact Scholem himself was inclined to view
Adorno’s philosophy as heretical, while Adorno was deeply interested in Scholem’s work
on the topic.
Antinomianism means a rejection of prevalent laws and their subversion by transgres-
sion. According to both Gnostic antinomianism and its Jewish versions in Sabbatianism
and Frankism, true believers must not obey the prevailing religious, social, or moral law,
but are rather commanded to break it, to commit acts strictly opposed to the law. Scholem
views antinomianism, specifically in its modern Jewish manifestations, as a result of
Kabbalistic mysticism: Of the tension between the religious and moral authorities, on the
one hand, and the growing preponderance and impact of mystics, in particular following
the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Mysticism poses a challenge to the rationalistic
teachings of predominant traditions and authorities due to the mystic’s perception of her
own experience as immediately and irrefutably valid. It therefore undermines the authority
of traditional religious and moral institutions. Antinomianism takes this crisis of authority
a radical step further: It does not only challenge traditional authority, but it subverts and
violates it.
Scholem’s seminal essay from 1937, initially only published in Hebrew as “Mitzvah
ha’ba‐ah ba’averah” (“A Commandment Fulfilled by Transgression”; translated as
“Redemption through Sin” as late as 1971) explores the history and the doctrines of
Sabbatianism and Frankism (Scholem 1995b). It was this work which Scholem has most
likely described to Adorno and Horkheimer during their early New York conversations –
and which deeply troubled Horkheimer, who was anxious by the mere prospect of it ever
appearing in print.
The scholarly (but politically motivated) comprehensive account of the Sabbatian and
Frankist heretical doctrines was only published in Hebrew – in the belief that it deals with
an internal Jewish matter and meant to be read by Hebrew readers alone – but Scholem
prepared a shortened, and in many aspects expurgated, German version. It was published
the same year under the title “Zum Verständnis des Sabbatianismus. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte der Aufklärung” [“Toward an Understanding of Sabbatianism: A Contribution to
the History of the Enlightenment”]. This text, too, presents the antinomian doctrine of
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Jewish heretical messianism, according to which redemption may only be achieved by

transgression, by the violation of social norms and divine commands. Here, too, Scholem
explains such antinomianism as a prototype of enlightenment (Scholem 1937, 32). It is
unknown whether Adorno – or, for that matter, the deeply concerned Horkheimer – received
and read the text, but it is beyond doubt that Scholem discussed the matter in his various
conversations with both Adorno and Horkheimer. In the following years, Scholem
intensified his research of the topic, which culminated in 1956, with the publication
of the expansive two‐volume, 842‐page‐long study “Sabbatai Tsvi and the Sabbatian
Movement during His Lifetime,” which was, too, initially only published in Hebrew
(Scholem 1956 [1973]).
A most likely sign of the topic’s central relevance to the dialogue – and probable resonance –
between Adorno and Scholem on the matter, is Scholem’s decision to contribute a substan-
tial study of Frankism, this time in German, to Zeugnisse, the Festschrift for Adorno’s 60th
birthday in 1963. This text, “Die Metamorphose des häretischen Messianismus der Sabbatianer
in religiösen Nihilismus im 18. Jahrhundert” [“The Metamorphosis of the Sabbatians’
Heretical Messianism into Religious Nihilism in the 18th Century”], reconnects questions
concerning mysticism and the recovery of natural life with the practice of antinomianism
and transgression (Scholem 1963). Whereas the early texts on the topic presented the his-
tory and the beliefs of the Sabbatian and Frankist sects, the later text, dedicated to Adorno,
explored the relationship between the Frankist heretical theology and its antinomian
practice from a philosophical perspective. Scholem’s decision to provide the essay to the
Festschrift for Adorno is highly meaningful and certainly not accidental. It marks the
intersection between Adorno and Scholem’s thoughts on matters of ethics and its critique,
authority and disobedience, and individual autonomy.4
In what may be considered, against Scholem’s own view, an historical‐materialist inter-
pretation, Scholem explains the heretical antinomianism of the Sabbatian and Frankist
sects as an anarchic and nihilistic response to the historical reality of exile and oppression.
Since the traditional religious, moral, and social authorities were incapable of providing a
remedy to the reality of continual suffering, the impact of Sabbatai Tsvi and Jacob Frank,
presenting themselves as the new messiahs marking the new age of redemption, was
immense and wide‐spread. “One of the strongest factors in the development of a nihilistic
mentality among the ‘radicals’ was their desire to negate an objective historical order in
which the exile continued in full force and the beginning of redemption went unnoticed by
all but the ‘believers’ themselves” (Scholem 1995b, 121). Believing that redemption is on
its way and must be fully unfolded, the heretical believers (the Sabbatians and Frankists
were anything but atheists) held that in messianic times all laws and prohibitions that
applied prior to redemption must be overthrown. Accordingly, all religious command-
ments and social norms pertaining to a non‐redeemed world must not just be suspended
and repealed, they must rather be actively rejected, violated, and transgressed. Only by
such active, vital resistance to outdated normativity can redemption – understood in the
most concrete sense as social liberation and political emancipation – be achieved.
Such practical critique of normativity echoes to some extent in Adorno’s negative con-
ception of ethics and in his critique of coercive social normativity. To be sure, elements of
nihilism and anarchism such as those Scholem attributes to Sabbatian antinomianism are
far removed from Adorno’s ethical and social theory, but the idea of a necessary opposition
to prevailing normativity is a crucial element in it. A close look at the core of Adorno’s
ethics – which has often been described as negative ethics, or a critique of ethics – reveals
conceptual affinities with Scholem’s account of Sabbatian and Frankist ethics. The first
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concerns the concept of life as damaged and petrified, the second concerns the transformative,
emancipatory, and redemptive responsibility in light of the destruction of life.
Adorno’s account of the socio‐historical situation of the individual in the middle of
the twentieth century structurally resembles the condition Scholem describes as the
outset for the Sabbatian and Frankist doctrines: The destruction of life and of individual
agency as an outcome of disastrous historical events. “What the philosophers once knew
as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged
along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or sub-
stance of its own,” Adorno writes at the beginning of Minima Moralia: Reflections from
Damaged Life (Adorno 2005a). The destruction of life as immediate, spontaneous human
experience implies the annihilation of individual autonomy and the impossibility, or
futility, of ethics. In damaged life – under the conditions of persecution, oppression, and
domination; in late capitalism and in the shadow of the holocaust – ethical principles
ultimately turn violent and immoral (Adorno 2001). The moral imperative then becomes
the commitment and responsibility to challenge ethical violence, to resist, disobey, trans-
gress – and transform it.
Against this backdrop of Adorno’s concepts of damaged life and moral resistance,
Scholem’s decision to include the text on Frank’s antinomianism in the Festschrift for
Adorno becomes unsurprising, reasonable, and meaningful. According to Frank, as
Scholem portrays him, the world we live in is a damaged, evil world: “Our world is a prod-
uct of lowly powers, forces of evil that have brought death to this world” (Scholem 1963,
205 – all translations from this German text are mine – AA). This world is ruled by “worth-
less,” or “derogatory” laws [“unwürdige Gesetze”], laws that should be negated by the action
of the individual. It is, accordingly, a moral act to oppose, resist, and transgress them: “The
task is therefore to bring an end to the rule of these laws” (ibid.). Scholem emphasizes the
moral aspects of Frank’s antinomianism: Although, measured on predominant normativ-
ity, Frank’s deeds may be considered immoral (notably, Scholem underscores the radicality
of Frankism’s sexual practices, particularly promiscuity), for Frank himself such trans-
gressions mean disobedience to the oppressive character of the laws of this world, aiming
at establishing a different, alternative – one could say: utopian – society. Furthermore,
Scholem highlights the historical relations of Frank and his followers to the French
Revolution. He argues that Frank’s mythical, messianic nihilism is a harbinger of the
enlightenment and its ideas of freedom and liberation from heteronomous, oppressive laws
and authorities.
There is an unmissable Nietzschean overtone to Scholem’s account of Frankism, which
was perceptible in “Redemption through Sin,” but is conspicuous in the text dedicated to
Adorno. Here Scholem explicitly describes Frank’s moral nihilism, in a conspicuous allu-
sion to Nietzsche, as a “transvaluation of all Jewish values” (Scholem 1963, 206).
“Through a revolution of values,” he explains further, “what was formerly sacred has
become profane and what was formerly profane has become sacred” (ibid., 110).
Moreover, Scholem addresses the centrality of the concept of life – likewise, in its
Nietzschean sense – to Frank’s doctrine. He explains: “The concept of ‘life’ is a keyword for
Frank. Life does not mean for him the harmonic order of nature and its gentle laws, it is
rather the freedom from commitment and law. The anarchic life, subject to no law is the
subject and the content of his utopia, in which a primitive pursuit of lawless concept of
freedom and the promiscuity of all things are heralded” (ibid., 206). This account of
Frankism presents a concept of life as a radical expression of freedom, it is life that tran-
scends and resists all limitations, curbs, and controls. Here, too, Scholem is indebted to the
540
project of redeeming natural life from its rationalistic petrification. Frank’s negative ethics
is therefore described as a response to the destruction of life by oppressive laws, which
requires a disobedient, transgressive practice.
Formulated this way, Scholem’s decision to dedicate this text to Adorno also illuminates
the heretical, disobedient, and anti‐authoritarian aspect of the intersection between their
thoughts. In a sense, Adorno’s concept of life is equally twofold: On the one hand, it denotes
“damaged life,” the destruction of incommensurable human experience by the mecha-
nisms of mass society, radicalized by mass destruction. On the other hand, it implies the
necessity, responsibility, and moral obligation to redeem natural life, spontaneity, and non‐
conceptuality through a critique of ethics and disobedient practice. Here Adorno is equally
indebted to Nietzsche’s concept of life.5 “Nothing is more degenerate,” Adorno contends in
a manner that resembles Scholem’s account of Frank’s ethics as resistance to oppressive
normativity, “than the kind of ethics or morality that survives in the shape of collective
ideas even after the World Spirit has ceased to inhabit them […] Once the state of human
consciousness and the state of the social forces of production have abandoned these
collective ideas, these ideas acquire repressive and violent qualities” (Adorno 2001, 17).
5. Heretical Redemption: Theology, Metaphysics, and Materialism
The negative, critical standpoint from which Adorno observes the damage, the suffering,
and the violence prevalent in given social reality seems external, transcendental to the
intramundane reality he scrutinizes. Such a transcendental standpoint has often been
considered theological. Although Adorno himself has never considered his philosophy to
be theological, such interpretations proliferate in recent scholarship of his work. The
relatively comprehensive debate on the topic is divided between positions that read the
ubiquitous theological concepts and connotations in Adorno’s writings as literally express-
ing a theological, religious element (Pritchard 2002; Brittain 2010; Finlayson 2012) and
positions that insist on their metaphorical, mere figurative function (Kaufmann 2001;
Gordon 2016). Although theological elements were indubitably central to the exchange
between Adorno and Scholem, the philosophical dialogue between them allows to neither
endorse nor dispute any of these positions. Rather, it sheds light on the centrality of the
heretical – both in its theological‐metaphysical and in its profane‐intramundane
dimension – not only to Scholem’s but also to Adorno’s thought. In this final section, I will
briefly sketch the debate on the purported theological element of Adorno’s thought, be it
either a negative theology, or, as is often suggested “inverse theology” and then explain the
significance of the heretical element, as illuminated by the dialogue with Scholem.
Positions that consider Adorno’s thought, in particular his late work, as upholding an
apparent theological dimension, describe it as negative theology. Drawing mainly on
Negative Dialectics and the concept of non‐identity, they argue that this concept “can be con-
strued as the figure of something wholly beyond reason and completely other to discursive
thought, and hence unknowable and ineffable” (Finlayson 2012, 4). Understanding
Adorno’s philosophy as negative theology means that his work addresses a reality in which
transcendence is expressed by means of negation. The negativity at work in his writings –
the accounts of a broken world permeated by suffering, injustice, and loss – is understood as
relating to divine transcendence by saying what it is not. Such was, historically, the method
of negative theology: Since God is incomprehensible, inexpressible, ineffable, one can only
speak of God in negative terms, saying what God is not. Adorno often refers to the Jewish
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Bilderverbot, the Biblical ban on graven images, as exemplifying the significance of nega-
tivity in his philosophy: The impossibility to positively define the good, just, ideal reality.6
While comparisons with the philosophical argument at the core of various traditions of
negative theology are illuminating,7 it remains uncertain to what extent the negativity of
Adorno’s thought might indeed be deemed theological. “I see no other possibility,” Adorno
said in a radio conversation, published under the title “reason and revelation,” “than an
extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition on
images, far beyond what this once originally meant” (Adorno 2005b, 142). In this
conversation, Adorno essentially rejects any theological reading of his work, stressing that
his use of the concept of the ban on images was meant to rather subvert or invert it.
Such inversion certainly corresponds to the notion of “inverse theology,” suggested
by other commentators (Pritchard 2002; Gordon 2016; Cook 2017). An “inverse the-
ology” is not theology per se. Reading Adorno’s philosophy along the lines of “inverse
theology” explains the theological motives in his work as providing a view of non‐
theological, concrete, intramundane reality from an external, transcendental perspec-
tive, which is decidedly materialistic. This concept draws on Adorno’s letter to Benjamin
from December 1934. “It seems to me doubly important,” Adorno writes in this letter,
“that the image of theology, into which I would gladly see our thoughts dissolve, is none
other than the very one which sustains your thought here – it could indeed be called an
‘inverse’ theology” (Adorno and Benjamin 2001, 66). Here one should keep in mind
Adorno’s other comment on theology with regard to Scholem, namely that the latter
makes himself the “advocate of the theological moment” of Benjamin and Adorno’s
philosophy – I shall return to this shortly. In the letter, Adorno does not further elaborate
his notion of “inverse theology,” but merely adds that it is “directed against natural and
supernatural interpretation alike.” “Inverse theology” is anything but theological: As
opposed to negative theology, the negativity at play in inverse theology is the mirror‐
image of earthly life, of existing society. However, rather than affirming a “transcendent
other beyond nature,” as the reading of Adorno in terms of negative theology would
imply, it instigates “the imperative of this‐worldly redemption” (Gordon 2016, 195;
emphases in original).
The eminent concluding aphorism of Minima Moralia, entitled “Finale” [“Zum Ende”]
has notably merited most credentials for the interpretation of Adorno’s work as theological.
It suggests a perspective on damaged – that is: Destructed, broken, deficient – earthly life
from an external, transcendental standpoint, which Adorno describes as the “standpoint
of redemption.” This seemingly theological “standpoint” serves as a corrective mirror‐
image of the intramundane reality of destruction and suffering.
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to
contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.
Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction,
mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it
to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in messianic
light. (Adorno 2005a, 247)
The aphorism’s theological vocabulary, set in the context of “reflections from damaged
life,” undoubtedly invokes a reading of the book, and of Adorno’s philosophy altogether, as
negative or “inverse” theology, as a view of this world from the perspective of a potentially
redeemed, liberated society.
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Scholem, having read the book, was simultaneously fascinated and perplexed. “I do not
know,” he wrote to Adorno after reading the book, “whether I have overall comprehended
your intentions, which lie hidden within the dialectic, keeping with the great esoteric
tradition”, but I believe I perceive your tractate as one of the most remarkable documents
of negative theology” (Adorno and Scholem 2015, 83). Adorno’s reply is indicative:
“I have no objections, provided that this reading remains as esoteric as the subject itself.
If, however, one translates the book traightforwardly into theological categories [...] then
neither the book, nor, presumably, the categories feel quite at ease” (ibid., 84). Adorno, so
it seems, would not categorically reject a reading of the book in a negative‐theological
fashion, as long as such a reading remains “external” to the book, that is, as long as no
theological intention would be attributed to the book’s content itself.
In this interpretation, Scholem seems to once again take the role of the advocate of
Adorno’s theological moment, presumably against the latter’s own intentions. But a closer
look at Scholem’s own understanding of theology, in particular his understanding of
redemption, must show precisely this messianic light in a different light: Theological, even
soteriological, in an intramundane, profane, and even materialistic sense. “Judaism, in all
of its forms and manifestations,” Scholem writes, “has always maintained a concept of
redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the
community. It is an occurrence which takes places in the visible world and which cannot
be conceived apart from such visible appearance” (Scholem 1995c, 1). Understood this
way, Minima Moralia’s concept of redemption must not necessarily be conceived as extra‐
mundane, but as a form of transcendence within immanence, within reality. Contemplating
all things “as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption,” is thus
not a theological, but a social, materialist argument. It does not provide an account of
divine transcendence, but seeks to bring about redemption within immanence, in this
world. Such redemption, however, is inseparable from inversion, subversion, from a nega-
tivity in a different sense – it is therefore a negative theology of a different kind: A trans-
gressive, heretical theology. According to it, one must resist and challenge the violent laws
and oppressive norms of this world in order to bring about redemption in the concrete,
materialist, social sense. Viewed from the perspective of Adorno’s dialog with Scholem, in
particular in light of the traces that this dialog left in Adorno’s own writings, it is the heret-
ical element that shall be considered the “theological moment” of Adorno’s philosophy.
Scholem’s influence on Adorno’s thought is most discernible in the final “model” of
Negative Dialectics, the “Meditations on Metaphysics.” In it, Adorno calls for a complete
transformation, a heretical subversion of the entire concept of metaphysics. “After
Auschwitz,” he contends, “there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological
one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation” (Adorno 1973, 367). The
radical change in concrete, historical reality demands a corresponding transformation of
metaphysics and theology. This is a further hint of Adorno’s understanding of theology,
but, most importantly, it reveals the significance of transcendence in his project of nega-
tive dialectics, namely, not as addressing a realm beyond, external to this world, but as
intrinsic to historic, material reality. At the beginning of the first “meditation” Adorno
writes: “One of the mystical impulses secularized in dialectics was the doctrine that the
intramundane and historic is relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished as
transcendence” (ibid, 361). Drawing on mysticism – in what seems to be a gesture to
Scholem, whose reading of mysticism emphasizes precisely this element – Adorno here
transgressively inverts the entire history of philosophical metaphysics: Metaphysics, or
theology, is not transcendent to concrete material reality, to the intramundane and historic,
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but rather the intramundane and historic are pertinent to any understanding of
metaphysics, and, indeed, theology. “The course of history,” Adorno emphasizes, “forces
materialism upon metaphysics” (ibid, 365). This emphasis reaffirms the notion of “inverse
theology” as materialist metaphysics.
Such materialist metaphysics, however, implies that transcendence is not external to
immanence, to intramundane reality, but rather intrinsic to it. Transcendence, for Adorno, is
not the “wholly other,” as divine transcendence, but rather a mirror‐image of material
suffering; metaphysics, accordingly, is an expression of social and historical reality. Here
Adorno once again draws on Scholem’s understanding of mysticism: “It has been observed
that mysticism – whose very name expresses the hope that institutionalization may save the
immediacy of metaphysical experience from being lost altogether – establishes social tradi-
tions and comes from tradition, across the lines of demarcation drawn by religions that regard
each other as heretical. Cabbala, the name of the body of Jewish mysticism, means tradition.
In its farthest ventures, metaphysical immediacy did not deny how much of it is not immediate”
(Adorno 1973, 372). Echoing Scholem’s concept of mysticism, Adorno’s concept of meta-
physics seeks to preserve the “not immediate,” that is, the materially, socially, and historically
mediated experience. The task of his metaphysics is precisely – heretically, transgressively – to
break through the cunning, the mischievous delusion of a metaphysics that denies its intra-
mundane origins, for such metaphysics would merely maintain and prolong suffering. Such
metaphysics is nothing but “the context of blindness [Verblendungszusammenhang] in which
all human beings are caught, [and] which affects even the way in which they deem them-
selves capable of tearing the veil” (Adorno 1973, 372; translation corrected). This is the very
“context of blindness” of which Adorno wrote in his first letter to Scholem from 1939, which
plays a crucial role in his later concept of metaphysics. The tasks and responsibilities of
Adorno’s intramundane, materialist, and heretical metaphysics – which could be equally
described as a heretical, profane theology – are, accordingly, to break through the “context of
blindness” and reveal the suffering, oppression, and obliviousness in concrete, historical
reality. These are precisely the tasks and responsibilities that Scholem attributed to the
heretical messiahs Sabbatai Tsvi and Jacob Frank – and perhaps the reason he saw Adorno’s
negative dialectics as continuing the heretical redemptive tradition.
Having read Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Scholem replied with an enthusiastic, albeit
somewhat critical response. “If you would allow me to summarize my opinion in one single
sentence,” Scholem wrote, “I would say that I have never read a more chaste and cautious
defense of metaphysics” (Adorno and Scholem 2015, 407). Although Scholem starkly
dissociates himself from any materialist thinking, he praises Adorno’s attempt of rescuing
metaphysics with recourse to Marxism, to historical materialism: A recourse Scholem
deems commendable because its approach to materialism is heretical. It is heretical, for
Scholem, in its refusal to accept materialism as an all‐consuming metaphysical theory, as a
total explanation of all being, of teleology and, as Scholem emphasizes, as the “foundation
of belief ” [Glaubensgrundlage], that is: of theology. “One could not formulate the historical
materialism more heretically, and the heretical moment of your materialist philosophy will
justifiably be the one that the readers would find most striking” (ibid., 408). For Scholem, it
is predominantly the heretical moment of Adorno’s philosophy that characterizes his
Critical Theory and negative dialectics: The impetus of challenging and transgressing pre-
dominant beliefs and dispositions. Remarkably, while in his early letter to Benjamin about
Scholem, Adorno decries the latter’s inclination to make himself “the advocate of the
theological moment” of his – that is, of Adorno’s own philosophy, here it is Scholem himself
who commends the “heretical moment” of Adorno’s materialist philosophy. For Scholem,
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who dedicated the lion’s share of his work to questions of heretical theology, the value of
such “heretical moment” cannot be overestimated. Within the context of his reading of
Negative Dialectics, such “heretical moment” implies precisely the interdependency of mate-
rialism and metaphysics, presumably as a unique form of “inverse theology.”
Deeply moved by Scholem’s sympathetic letter, Adorno rejoiced at finding his position
confirmed. “The rescue [‘Rettung’ – also: salvation, redemption] of metaphysics is indeed the
central intention of Negative Dialectics,” he wrote to Scholem. “The difference lies naturally in
the relation to materialism” (ibid., 413). But Adorno emphasizes that he does not presuppose
materialism, neither does he take it for granted as a teleological or theological doctrine.
Rather, by arguing for the “primacy of the object,” the epistemological priority of non‐
subjective, natural reality over subjective consciousness, he seeks to achieve a different
understanding of materialism. “This path to materialism, which is totally different from any
dogma, seems to me to warrant affinity to metaphysics, I might have almost said, to theology,
which you rightly recognized to be the central motive. […] I thus mean materialism opposed
to the official one, heretical by all means” (ibid., 414; see also Gordon 2016, 158–159). This
passage is highly remarkable, since Adorno “almost” admits in it that his concept of meta-
physics perplexingly resembles that of theology. In fact Adorno’s sentence here is equivocal:
The book’s central motive, as recognized by Scholem, may be metaphysics and it may be the-
ology. This equivocality is perhaps no coincidence, since Adorno’s metaphysics, which may
as well – as shown above – be considered theological, is inconceivable without the materialist
element. Adorno’s salvation of metaphysics by means of materialism is therefore precisely a
heretical salvation, a redemption by means of transgression, in line with the heretical rescue
of natural life which g overns his critique of normativity and his critique of reason; and pos-
sibly, indeed, comparable to such heretical messiahs as those Scholem aligns him with. “This
should really be the topic of our conversation,” Adorno concludes the discussion of Negative
Dialectics in the letter to Scholem. “Until then, I cannot but rejoice in our unio in haeresia. You
may concede to the heretic that he has no materialistic faith” (ibid., 415).
References
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). London and New York: Continuum.
Adorno, T.W. (1989). Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (trans. R. Hullot‐Kentor). Minneapolis:
Adorno, T.W. (1992). Sacred fragment: on Schoenberg’s Moses and Aron. In: Quasi una fantasia (trans.
R. Livingstone), 225–248. London: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (2001). Problems of Moral Philosophy (ed. T. Schröder; trans. R. Livingstone). Stanford:
Adorno, T.W. (2005a). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N Jephcott). London
and New York: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (ed.) (2005b). Reason and revelation. In: Critical Models (trans. H.W. Pickford), 135–
142. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2006). The idea of natural‐history. In: Things Beyond Resemblance. Collected Essays on
Theodor W. Adorno (ed. R. Hullot‐Kentor), 252–269. New York and Chichester, UK: Columbia
University Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Benjamin, W. (2001). The Complete Correspondence (ed. H. Lonitz; trans. N. Walker).
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment (ed. G.S. Noerr; trans.
545
Asaf Angermann
Adorno, T.W. and Scholem, G. (2015). Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail: Briefwechsel 1939–1969 (ed.
A. Angermann). Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Angermann, A. (2013). Beschädigte Ironie: Kierkegaard, Adorno und die negative Dialetik kritischer
Subjektivität. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Bauer, K. (1999). Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives. Albany: SUNY Press.
Benjamin, W. and Scholem, G. (1989). The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem
1932–1940 (ed. G. Scholem; trans. G. Smith and A. Lefevre). New York: Schocken Books.
Biale, D. (1979). Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter‐History. Cambridge, MA and London, UK.
Brittain, C.C. (2010). Adorno and Theology. London and New York: T&T Clark.
Buck‐Morss, S. (1979). The Origin of Negative Dialectics. Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the
Frankfurt Institute. London and New York: Macmillan.
Cook, D. (2017). Through a glass darkly. Adorno’s inverse theology. Adorno Studies 1 (1): 67–78.
Finlayson, J.G. (2012). On not being silent in the darkness: Adorno’s singular apophaticism. Harvard
Theological Review 105 (1): 1–32.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1987). Theodor W. Adorno: the primal history of subjectivity – self‐affirmation gone
wild. In: Philosophical‐Political Profiles (trans. F.G. Lawrence), 99–110. Cambridge, MA and London,
UK: MIT Press.
Kaufmann, D. (2001). Beyond use, within reason. Adorno, Benjamin, and the question of theology.
New German Critique 83: 151–173.
Morgan, A. (2007). Adorno’s Concept of Life. London and New York: Continuum.
Müller‐Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A Biography (trans. R. Livingstone). Cambridge, UK and Malden,
MA: Polity.
Pritchard, E.A. (2002). Bilderverbot meets body in Theodor W. Adorno’s inverse theology. Harvard
Theological Review 95 (3): 291–318.
Scholem, G. (1936). Die Geheiminisse der Schöpfung: Ein Kapitel aus dem Sohar. Berlin: Schocken.
Scholem, Gershom. 1937. “Zum Verständnis des Sabbatianismus. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
der Aufklärung.” In Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5697. 30–42.
Scholem, G. (1956). Shabbtai Tsvi ve‐ha’tenuah ma‐shabta’it biymei hayav. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. [English
translation: Scholem, Gershom. 1973. Sabbatai Sevi. The Mystical Messiah 1626‐1676. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.].
Scholem G. (1963). Die Metamorphose des haretischen Messianismus der Sabbatianer in religiosen
Nihilismus im 18. Jahrhundert. In: Zeugnisse. Theodor W. Adorno zum 60. Geburtstag. Frankfurt am
Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Later published in: Scholem. G (1970), Judaica III, 198–217.
Scholem, G. (1965). Kabbalah and myth. In: On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (trans. R. Mannheim),
87–117. New York: Schocken Books.
Scholem, G. (1995a). Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books.
Scholem, G. (1995b). Redemption through sin. In: The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on
Jewish Spirituality, 78–141. New York: Schocken Books.
Scholem, G. (1995c). The science of Judaism: then and now. In: The Messianic Idea in Judaism and
Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 304–313. New York: Schocken Books.
Scholem, G. (1995d). Toward and understanding of the messianic idea in Judaism. In: The Messianic
Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 1–36. New York: Schocken Books.
Further Reading
Adorno, T.W. and Scholem, G. (2015). Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail: Briefwechsel 1939–1969 (ed. A.
Angermann). Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Biale, D. (1979). Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter‐History. Cambridge, MA and London, UK:
546
Brittain, C.C. (2010). Adorno and Theology. London and New York: T&T Clark.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Jacobs, J. (2015). The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Plessner, M. (1995). Die Argonauten auf Long Island: Begegnungen mit Hannah Arendt, Theodor
W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem und Anderen. Berlin: Rowohlt.
Scholem, G. (1980). From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (trans. H. Zohn). New York:
Schocken Books.
Notes
1 In recent years, the debates on the theological dimensions of Adorno’s work increasingly prolif-
erate, in particular in the Anglo‐American reception. See Pritchard (2002), Brittain (2010),
Finlayson (2012), Gordon (2016), Cook (2017). Earlier references to this dimension can be
found in the Buck‐Morss (1977) as well as in Habermas (1987).
2 The philosophy that serves here as the main object of Scholem’s attacks is the rationalistic, his-
toriographical approach to Judaism by the philosophers and scholars associated with the
“Science of Judaism” – “Wissenschaft des Judentums.” According to them, as Scholem viewed their
position, the study of Judaism should consider its object only from a historical perspective,
removing from it any element of life, vitality, and most importantly: of irrationality and mysti-
cism. See Scholem (1995c, 304–313).
3 On Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard see Angermann (2013), Gordon (2016).
4 Adorno himself dedicated to Scholem – the same year – his essay on Arnold Schönberg’s unfin-
ished opera Moses and Aron (Adorno 1992).
5 On Adorno’s indebtedness to Nietzsche see Bauer (1999). On Adorno’s concept of life see Morgan
(2007).
6 Pritchard argues that “Adorno deploys the Bilderverbot for the purposes of constructive materi-
alist critique” (Pritchard 2002, 294).
7 Finlayson (2012) extensively discusses such comparisons with Saint Augustine, Dionysius the
Areopagite, and Meister Eckhart.
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35
Adorno’s Concept of Metaphysical Experience

PETER E. GORDON
[I]t is only at a particular place that the experience of happiness can be had, of something that
is not exchangeable, even if it later proves to be less than unique.
—Adorno, “On Amorbach”
In the entirety of Adorno’s philosophical oeuvre, there is perhaps no concept more

perplexing and caught in apparent self‐contradiction than that of “metaphysical experi-
ence.”1 Its difficulty arises not least from the fact that in much of his work Adorno assumes
a deeply critical if not outright hostile stance toward “metaphysics” understood in the tra-
ditional sense, namely, as an inquiry into a supersensible or purely intelligible reality.
Metaphysics when used in this admittedly capacious sense is Adorno’s name for an idealist
tendency that spans the history of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle all the way down to
Hegel and Heidegger. But it is well known that toward the end of Negative Dialectics Adorno
offers some rather speculative remarks on the enduring possibility of metaphysical experi-
ence in the late‐modern world. This may strike us as paradoxical. In what follows, I would
like to examine more closely just what Adorno means by metaphysical experience – a term
that, as I shall explain, has a strongly aesthetic significance but also bears on Adorno’s
conception of modern politics. Before I turn to Adorno’s own philosophical claims, it may
prove helpful to begin with some provisional thoughts about the ambivalent meaning of
the term “metaphysics” in modern philosophical discourse.
1. Metaphysics and Ambivalence in Modern Philosophy
With little risk of exaggeration one might say that ever since the publication of Kant’s first
Critique, the European philosophical canon has situated itself at the dialectical meeting
point between two distinct but conjoined tasks. On the one hand, it has waged an unending
assault on the traditional concept of metaphysics; on the other hand, it has sought to
salvage whatever could be salvaged from the ruins of the metaphysical tradition. The first
task has been broadly conceived in accordance with the Enlightenment’s ideal of whole-
sale secularization: if metaphysics was the name for the mind’s captivity to otherworldly
illusions (as typified by the traditional concept of God as an all‐powerful authority) then
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Peter E. Gordon
liberation from such illusions was the sine qua non of Enlightenment criticism. It was
assumed – not only by Kant but also by Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx – that this
intellectual emancipation was only one component in the political project of freeing the
human subject from its heteronomous submission to opaque power. The second task, how-
ever, adopted what we might call a rueful or melancholy mood regarding the consequences
of enlightenment: it expressed the concern that with the fall of metaphysics all the depth
or meaning in human experience had also collapsed, and that the death of God had intro-
duced pathologies that could only be redressed by trying somehow to claim new modes of
transcendence that could only partly compensate for what had been lost.
Before turning to Adorno, I want to lend some precision to the contrast I have just
drawn – between the heroic and the melancholic modes in modern philosophy – between the
destruction of metaphysics and its partial resurrection. These two tasks have rarely appeared
in isolation. Kant, for example, understood his critical project as both dismantling the tradi-
tional claims to metaphysical knowledge (about God, the soul, and the free will) and setting
metaphysics on the new and more secure foundations. On the one hand, he condemned
knowledge of those objects as metaphysical illusion. On the other hand, the transcendental
unity of apperception became the organizing principle for all worldly intelligibility; in his
practical philosophy he even allowed for God’s return as a postulate of purely practical reason.
With Heidegger, too, we see once again how the task of destruction is combined with
restoration: Heidegger dismantled both the Platonist legacy of a transmundane meta-
physics and the modern attempt by Descartes and Kant to elevate human subjectivity as a
new metaphysical ground. But his so‐called “destruction” only served as a preparatory
step so that he could turn back to the forgotten wellsprings of Being. The history of
Heidegger’s career might be described as an oscillation between the poles of self‐assertion
and melancholy. If in his early work he still betrayed the revolutionary ambition that we
might regain a sense of authenticity by embracing a radically temporal ontology, in his
later years he lapsed into a kind of mystical Gnosticism, ruminating on modernity’s
Seinsverlassenheit without permitting himself to imagine anything more definite than the
arrival of an unnamed God. Whether Heidegger actually succeeded in his project of a so‐
called “overcoming” of metaphysics is a matter of some debate (Derrida 1982, 1989;
Gordon 2012). When Heidegger in 1964 announced the “end of philosophy” and the
“task of thinking,” this was not only a way of distinguishing between the two poles of his
own career; it was also a way of redefining philosophy as a self‐reflexive meditation on its
own “end.” The “end” of metaphysics was what thinking would have to think about.
These admittedly very general remarks should serve as a reminder that ambivalence
about metaphysics is one of the cardinal features of the modern philosophical canon. Even
a thinker such as Jürgen Habermas has tried to grapple with such problems under the name
of what he calls “post‐metaphysical thinking,” where the qualifier, “post,” does not mark an
absolute prohibition on metaphysics but only a philosophical attempt to determine how
metaphysics might still survive today without surrendering the genuine cognitive and
political gains that we have inherited from the Enlightenment (Habermas 1992).
2. Adorno on Classical Metaphysics
There is no more dramatic illustration of such ambivalence than the critical philosophy of
Theodor W. Adorno, in whose works we witness a poignant and unresolved meditation on
the survival of metaphysics in a post‐metaphysical age. Now, on Adorno’s view, it was
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ADORNO’S CONCEPT OF METAPHYSICAL EXPERIENCE
indisputable that metaphysics in the traditional sense had grown obsolete. The philosophical
tradition had once conceived of metaphysics as an inquiry into the absolute structure of
reality, where this structure was understood to be as the invariant essence or changeless
ground for that which appears. The repeated and successive movements of philosophical
idealism – from Plato to Kant – may have differed on many points of detail, but they were
united in the belief that it was possible to grasp this invariant structure by conceptual
means. In the Phaedrus we are told that the Forms are to be found in a “place beyond
heaven,” and that gazing upon this intangible essence, visible only to the mind, the philos-
opher experiences a kind of happiness:
For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand upon the
outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries them round, and they behold the
things beyond … There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colorless,
formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence, being
nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul […] rejoices at
beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad. (Plato
1892, 391)
And in the Republic, we learn that the Forms dwell in the noēton topon, the intelligible realm.
Human reason, as the faculty of concepts, was supposed to serve as the conduit to this
intelligible realm and promised access to metaphysical knowledge.
Now, it was Adorno’s view that in the modern era all such appeals to the invariant or
essential grounding to reality could no longer retain their validity. As a thinker steeped in
the patterns of Marxist materialism, Adorno rejected the consoling illusion that human
reason enjoys access to a transcendent realm of categorial forms or pure concepts that
remain undamaged by human history. The catastrophes of the modern age also touch
upon our conception of philosophical possibility: they expose the very idea of the invariant
as a cruel fantasy, as if philosophy were indifferent to human suffering. Adorno remained
enough of a materialist to believe that the destruction of metaphysics was a necessary step
in human emancipation: to overcome the thought of a transmundane realm is to refocus
our energies upon the mundane realm as the only space in which freedom can have any
meaning. The overcoming of metaphysics would thus appear as a philosophical correlative
to the overcoming of ideology, a prerequisite to genuine Enlightenment.
At the same time, however, Adorno could no longer share the historical confidence that
had once inspired earlier theorists in the left‐Hegelian tradition. The rational subject that
was supposed to secure its freedom with the unfolding of history survived only as a dis-
torted and unreflective being whose rationality was little more than an instrument for
domination. The self‐sabotage in reason’s own history that Adorno and his colleague Max
Horkheimer called the “dialectic of enlightenment” meant that even the overcoming of
metaphysics was not an unambiguous sign of liberation as modern philosophers imag-
ined. After all, the assault on metaphysics ultimately meant an assault on any standards
that tried to resist the universal solvent of capitalist exchange. The reduction of all of
reality to a substrate for domination thus entailed the dissolution of all metaphysical stan-
dards; paradoxically, it even compromised the more substantive ideal of reason itself.
Finally, if our conception of ultimate reality had been compromised by history, so too was
our conception of everyday experience. What Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer
called the “culture industry” was not only the realm of commercial advertising and mass
media; it served as a name for the wholesale distortion and reification of human life. Not
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Peter E. Gordon
only mass culture but all facets of personal conduct and consciousness were succumbing to the
logic of exchange, taking on the stereotyped features of the commodity form. In a 1944
passage from Minima Moralia that catalogs the traumas of the war, Adorno described this
process in catastrophic terms:
The total obliteration of the war by information, propaganda, commentaries, with camera‐
men in the first tanks and war reporters dying heroic deaths, the mish‐mash of enlightened
manipulation of public opinion and oblivious activity: all this is another name for the withering
of experience, the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real fate lies. It is as if the
reified, hardened plaster‐cast of events is taking the place of events themselves. (Adorno
1974, 55)
What Adorno called the “withering of experience” was merely the subjective moment in the
paradoxical decay of the modern individual subjectivity. Elsewhere Adorno claimed that the
very category of the bourgeois self was in sharp decline, and that the strong ego‐centered
model of the self, as explored in the great novels of the nineteenth‐century bourgeois realism
and theorized in tandem by psychoanalysis, was also withering away as the culture industry
compromised the structures of individual consciousness. All of this clearly made it difficult
for Adorno to believe that under the catastrophic conditions of late modernity there could be
anything like “experience” at all. And this nightmare scenario left Adorno with a deeply
puzzling question: despite this catastrophe, despite the collapse of metaphysical categories
and the withering away of subjective consciousness, was it nonetheless still possible to
identify something in modern life that represented the persistence of metaphysics? The
question itself should already strike us as surprising, and Adorno’s answer no less so:
somehow, in a leap of secular faith no less paradoxical than Kierkegaard’s leap into theism,
Adorno entertained the unlikely category that he called “metaphysical experience.”
In the opening lecture of his 1965 course at Frankfurt, “Metaphysics: Concepts and
Problems,” Adorno admits that “Today metaphysics is used in almost the entire non‐
German speaking world as a term of abuse, a synonym for idle‐speculation, mere nonsense,
and heaven knows what other intellectual vices” (Adorno 2000, 1). But the hostility
toward metaphysics, he remind us, is also one of the defining features of positivism,
for example, as illustrated in Rudolf Carnap’s famous attack on Heideggerian “pseudo‐
sentences” (such as “The nothing itself nothings [Das Nichts selbst nichtet]” from
Heidegger’s 1929 lecture, “Was ist Metaphysik?”) in “The Overcoming of Metaphysics
Though a Logical Analysis of Language” (Carnap 1959; Heidegger 1929).
Clearly Adorno did not wish to associate himself with the uncritical prejudice against
metaphysics that was nourished by positivism. But this hardly suggests that he longed
for the resurrection of metaphysics in the traditional sense. On the contrary, we might
say that metaphysics serves as a name for the idealist attitude in philosophy that he
most wished to overcome. Metaphysics, he declares, “is the form of philosophy which
takes concepts as its objects,” and assigns these concepts a certain “preponderance
[Vorrang] over, and are assigned to a higher order of being [Wesenhaftigkeit] than, exist-
ing things [das Seiende]” (Adorno 2000, 4). This basic definition already runs directly
counter to the stated ambition of Negative Dialectics, where Adorno aims to expose the
radical insufficiency of the concept and to assert what he calls the “preponderance
[Vorrang] of the object” (Adorno 1966, 193). The chief perplexity, however, is that
toward the conclusion of Negative Dialectics, and notwithstanding his great efforts in
criticizing metaphysics in the traditional sense, Adorno nonetheless entertains the
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question as to whether there might be some enduring merit in the category of meta-
physical experience (metaphysische Erfahrung).
Especially to those whose ears have developed a hypersensitivity to the lexical reso-
nances of the German idealism in general and Kant’s transcendental idealism in particular,
the affirmation of anything like “metaphysical experience,” must strike a discordant note.
After all, the central task of the Critique of Pure Reason is to demonstrate that the world of
possible experience is limited only to cognition of appearances, namely, to a world that
conforms to the pure categories of the understanding and the pure forms of space and
time. Any attempt to claim knowledge of metaphysical entities, namely, objects that tran-
scend the constraints of human cognition, is thereby seen as trespassing the limits by
which objective knowledge of the world is possible. For Kant, the cherished objects of
metaphysical inquiry – God, the soul, and the free will – were ruled out as legitimate objects
of possible experience. Erfahrung, experience, is always categorial experience; it is experi-
ence as constituted in and through the conditions of human sensibility and discursivity.
It follows that the conventional objects of metaphysical speculation cannot be objects of
possible experience. But if this is the case then Adorno’s discussion of “metaphysical
experience” may strike us as an unfortunate lapse into a pre‐Kantian mode of speculative
metaphysics. Or, it’s simply a contradictio in terminis, no more coherent than the phrase,
“wooden iron.” Adorno, of course, fully appreciated this problem. When he introduced the
concept of “metaphysical experience” in his 1966 book Negative Dialectics, he admitted
with reference to Kant that it was “antinomical.” And yet, notwithstanding this conceptual
embarrassment, Adorno still felt moved to explore its possibility. The question I would like
to pose here is just what he imagined such an experience to be like, and what implications
it has not only within the parameters of his own philosophy but for our own thinking
about the prospects of metaphysical experience today.
First, it may prove helpful to examine more precisely just what Adorno understands by
metaphysics in the traditional sense. In his 1965 lectures, Adorno devotes much of his
attention to a reconstruction of tradition of metaphysics as it was defined by Aristotle. In
developing these lectures it’s quite apparent that Adorno leaned on the revered multi-
volume study from a century before him, Eduard Zeller’s Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer
geschichtlichen Entwicklung (first published between 1844 and 1852; revised for a second
edition in 1856–1868). On other words, Adorno had what we might consider a rather
antiquated sense of antiquity. Given my own limited understanding of classical philos-
ophy, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his reconstruction. But here I am chiefly inter-
ested in how his survey prepares the way for his own philosophical claims.
Adorno opens with the suggestion that “metaphysics began with Aristotle” (Adorno
2000, 15). Adorno grants that this claim may strike his auditors as surprising, not least
because metaphysical themes arguably originated with Plato and the Platonic doctrine of
ideas. For Plato “only the forms of things have true and original being,” whereas the world
of the senses are lacking in being and owe their existence and qualities to their methexis, or
participation (μέθεξις) in the forms (Adorno 2000, 17). This strong emphasis on the tran-
scendent and purely conceptual realm of the forms or ideas as the ground of all reality
may tempt us to regard Plato as “the arch‐metaphysician” (Adorno 2000, 16). But Adorno
argues that even while Plato may have emphasized the strong distinction between the
transcendent and mundane realms, he did not make the “tension” between them the
explicit subject of his philosophy. In Plato’s doctrine of ideas, the distinction between
the transcendent and the mundane realms appears “objectively,” but it is not “reflected
thematically in his philosophy” (Adorno 2000, 18).
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Peter E. Gordon
To clarify this point, Adorno suggests that we might think of the Platonic doctrine of
ideas as “a secularization of theology” (Adorno 2000, 18). There is some warrant for this
suggestion. In the Republic (509b) Plato writes in the voice of Socrates about the idea of
the “good” (τὸ ἀγαθόν) not only as “beyond all being” (epekeina tés ousias); he also charac-
terizes it elsewhere (Republic 379b) as “god” (θεός). Adorno thus confirms the commonplace
view that the Platonic ideas might be understood as “the gods turned into concepts”
(Adorno 2000, 18). According to Adorno, the religious aetiology of the doctrine of ideas
introduces a certain difficulty for Plato’s metaphysics: for “once the gods are turned into
concepts, that is, entities of appearance, their relationship to appearances becomes
something quite other than if the gods were simply located in a Beyond, on their Olympus.”
Plato clearly wrestled with the question as to how the Ideas are related to worldly appear-
ances. But his proposed solution, the theory of μέθεξις or participation, did not so much
succeed in answering the question as it dramatized the hierarchical relation between ideas
and appearance and called attention to the gulf between them. The doctrine of the ideas
did not succeed in “saving the appearances,” or σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα.
According to Adorno it was left to Aristotle to grapple with this problem and to devise
some means of saving the appearances. Adorno describes Aristotle’s Metaphysics as “the
first truly metaphysical work of literature,” precisely because it “criticizes the Platonic
attempt to oppose essence to the world of the senses, as something separate and abso-
lutely different from it” (Adorno 2000, 20). Specifically, Aristotle faults Plato for hypos-
tatizing universal concepts as duplicates of the mundane realm: the essential features of
the ideas, after all, seem to be “derived from the empirical world, on which they live,
rather as the rulers live on the work of their servants or slaves” (Adorno 2000, 20). The
fundamental disagreement between Plato and Aristotle on this score may leave us with
the impression that Aristotle fundamentally rejects the distinction between idea and
appearance that underwrites Plato’s thinking and that we should credit Aristotle alone
with “saving the appearances.” But this impression cannot be entirely accurate, since
Aristotle himself, once he has dismantled the Platonic doctrine, ultimately reconfirms
the distinction in a new way with his metaphysical reflections on the difference between
form and matter. For Adorno, what distinguishes Aristotle’s work as the original and
most definitive specimen of metaphysics is the way in which it combines in one philos-
ophy the twofold gesture of criticism and rescue. Aristotle “seeks in his turn to extract an
essential being from the sensible, empirical world, and thereby to save it” (Adorno 2000,
20):
The polarity between critical rationality, on the one hand, and the pathos of rescue, on the
other, points to the essence of traditional metaphysics, or at least has done so throughout its
history. Metaphysics can thus be defined as the exertion of thought to save what it at the same
time destroys. (Adorno 2000, 20)
Adorno sees this twofold gesture of criticism and rescue as the defining tension of tradi-
tional metaphysics from Aristotle to Kant. The tension is already evident in the first sen-
tence of the Metaphysics where Aristotle posits the “need” for knowledge, and for “absolute
truth” as a natural urge for all human beings. Aristotle “starts out from an everyday,
rational, sensible consciousness and attempts, by reflecting on what is given directly by the
senses, to attain insight into true being – instead of presupposing this essential realm, as
was the case in archaic thought” (Adorno 2000, 20). This tension survives even in Kant’s
philosophy, where it shows up in the method of a transcendental argument that begins
554
with empirical knowledge and then pulls away from the appearances to inquire into the
rational grounds in virtue of which these appearances are possible.
Aristotle tried to reconcile the tension between true being and appearance with his the-
oretical account of the relation between “form” (μορφή) and “matter” (ὕλη) (Adorno 2000,
35). Unlike Plato, who sustained a strong distinction between idea and appearance and
insisted on the idea’s transcendence, Aristotle saw form as immanent to matter; and he saw
form and matter as “reciprocal” and “interrelated” terms. In this sense Adorno suggests
that Aristotelian metaphysics is an “an essentially mediating theory” (Adorno 2000, 36).
This difference is decisive. In Plato’s philosophy the two realms of idea and appearance
“simply diverge,” whereas in Aristotle we witness an attempt to bring these realms together
(Adorno 2000, 37). All the same, Adorno notes, Aristotle did not really succeed in sus-
taining their mediation without once again affirming a strongly hierarchical relationship
between them. Matter for Aristotle is ultimately “demoted” to “mere possibility” (δύναμις),
whereas form, understood as the idea that is immanent to matter, becomes the power that
moves matter; it becomes energy (ἐνέργεια). It follows that energy is assigned a greater
prestige in Aristotle’s metaphysics, since ἐνέργεια “confers a higher order of reality” than
δύναμις (Adorno 2000, 37).
Now, according to Adorno, traditional metaphysics is always afflicted by the risk that it
will end by conferring higher reality and normative prestige on something that it identifies as
transmundane, “immutable,” “incorporeal,” invariant, and “absolutely perfect” (Adorno
2000, 87–89). Aristotle’s metaphysics exemplifies this risk, especially in its attempt to arrive
at the principle of a perfect and immobile reality behind all things: the “unmoved mover”
(Adorno 2000, 88–89). With this attempt Aristotle effects a transition from metaphysics to
theology. For Adorno this transition reflects “the immanently monotheistic tendency” of all
traditional philosophy, insofar as it is driven to identify a single principle as the invariant or
eternal ground (Adorno 2000, 90). Notwithstanding its promising attempt to theorize the
mediation between matter and form, Aristotle’s metaphysics concludes by reinstating
thought as the highest reality. This thought is the divine that contemplates only itself:
The ultimate ground of all movement […] is the divinity itself as pure and perfect mind or spirit
(Geist). Its activity—so Aristotle’s argumentation runs – can only consist in thought. […] This
pure activity of the mind, which has no purpose outside itself, is equated by Aristotle with
θεωρία – pure, purposeless thinking related to no real praxis. And the apotheosis of pure
thought, pure contemplation regarded as an end in itself without any relation to anything
existing outside it – that is, the absolute status granted to pure mental activity, which is the
foundation of everything which has later in a precise sense been called western culture,
against which the fiercest criticism of idealism has been directed – that apotheosis had its
origin in this theoretical concept of Aristotle’s. (Adorno 2000, 91)
This theological principle also informs Aristotle’s ethics and reinforces the “dianoetic” or
intellectual virtues, namely, the virtues of pure contemplation and self‐reflection. Adorno
sees the Aristotelian emphasis on pure contemplation as a “metaphysicizing of theory,”
which withdraws the mind from political praxis and construes the mind’s self‐reflection as
not only the highest virtue but the very principle of divinity: “the object of divine thought
could only be divine thought itself ” (Adorno 2000, 92).
According to Adorno this fundamental emphasis on self‐contemplation in Aristotle’s
metaphysics was to remain a cornerstone of the philosophical tradition all the way down
to the modern era, when it reappeared in a new guise in German idealism. In the final
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lecture devoted specifically to Aristotle in the 1965 course on metaphysics, Adorno raises
a pointed question: “[W]hat does mind, or thinking, or knowledge really amount to, if it
only thinks itself? Does this not make thought itself, and thus the absolute which thought
is supposed to be, one single, immense tautology?” (Adorno 2000, 94).
To illustrate his concerns he pauses in the lecture to alert his auditors to a granite statue
of the pre‐Socratic philosopher Empedocles, by the modernist sculptor Gerhard Marcks
(1889–1981), which at that time stood in the entrance‐hall of the main building at the
Goethe‐Universität, Frankfurt, just in front of the rector’s office.2 The statue was first
installed in that location in 1954, and it remained there until August 2013, when it was
moved to the entrance‐hall of the IG‐Farben Haus in the Westend campus of the univer-
sity. It is a sobering specimen of modernist sculpture, crafted from what would seem to be
a single piece of massive granite. Cloaked in a long robe, his hands folded over his knees in
a gesture of simplicity, the lonely philosopher appears to be seated on a high stool and he
leans back, his head gazing skyward at the heavens. Here is Adorno’s description, in which
he plays upon an old joke by Hegel:
[T]he god who actually thinks nothing but himself is not wholly unlike the navel‐gazer we can
see downstairs in this building, in the form of the statue of the so‐called sage, who gives us the
feeling that he represents being and reflects on being; and that what being says to him is only:
being, being, being. […] I don’t wish to be disrespectful towards Aristotle, but if for a moment
one steps outside the intellectual edifice – I almost said, the cathedral – which is his thought,
such ideas do enter one’s mind. (Adorno 2000, 94)
Adorno sees this motif of self‐contemplation as a governing theme – not only in Aristotle’s

metaphysics but in the entire history of western philosophy, and it remains in place from the
medieval era down to modern times. For Aristotle it is expressed in the “idealist” formulation
as “the thinking of god,” or, in Hegel’s terminology, “the thinking of the world spirit.” It
received its “supreme formulation” with Aristotle in the principle of the νοήσεως νόησις,
that is, “the thinking of thinking,” and it reappeared in the medieval theology in the striking
notion that “the beatitude of god lay in his self‐contemplation” (Adorno 2000, 94). Adorno
does not refrain from adding a wry comment (with reference to Feuerbach) that this prin-
ciple of self‐contemplation reveals the “narcissistic tendency” that animates religion. Divine
love is diverted from creation and redirected only toward the divine: “[O]ne might ask what
sort of a divinity it is which, instead of loving its creatures, loves only itself. But great minds
have not been much troubled by this for the past few thousand years” (Adorno 2000, 95).
From this excursus on Adorno’s concept of traditional metaphysics we can draw out
three crucial points. Metaphysics in the traditional sense posits (i) a higher realm of reality
understood as pure and perfect intelligibility; (ii) as therefore in some sense invariant or
undamaged by the vagaries of time and contingent, sensual existence; and (iii) by seizing
upon this realm the mind thereby partakes in this invariant perfection and can even be said
to experience a certain beatitude, analogous to the beatitude of a divinity that “loves itself ”
or contemplates its own perfection.
3. The Enduring Possibility of Metaphysical Experience
Adorno’s concept of traditional metaphysics provides us with a crucial point of departure

for understanding the way in which Adorno wishes to revise metaphysics in the modern
era. Such revision, he believes, is an absolute necessity if one grasps the implications for
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humanity of the catastrophic shift that is marked by the name “Auschwitz.” Adorno uses
this name as a sign not only for the appalling historical events of the Nazi genocide but in
a more capacious way for other events that continued after the historical era of the Third
Reich, such as the possibility of nuclear conflict or what he calls “the horrifying reports
from Vietnam” (Adorno 2000, 101). He insists that this sign indicates the way in which
“the concept of metaphysics has been changed to its innermost core.” It is of course
possible for philosophers to continue on with “old‐style metaphysics” as it was practiced
since Aristotle, “without concerning themselves with what has happened, keeping it at
arm’s length and regarding it as beneath metaphysics, like everything merely earthly and
human.” But in doing so these philosophers “thereby prove themselves inhuman” (Adorno
2000, 101). Adorno insists that “historical compassion” must restrain us from endorsing
metaphysics in the traditional manner as a contemplation of the invariant. In fact we must
recognize the basic point that persisting in our old esteem for the invariant as the highest
of philosophical values would already betray our inhumanity. Instead we must embrace
what Adorno calls “the infinite relevance of the intra‐mundane” to any modern concept
of metaphysics (Adorno 2000, 100).
On this point Adorno is most emphatic in a well‐known passage from Negative Dialectics:
One of the mystical impulses secularized in dialectics, was the doctrine of the relevance of the
innerworldly, the historical, to what traditional metaphysics delineated as transcendence […]
The feeling which after Auschwitz resists every assertion of positivity of existence as sancti-
monious prattle, as injustice to the victims; which is reluctant to squeeze any meaning, be it
ever so washed‐out, out of their fate, has its objective moment after events which condemn the
construction of a meaning of immanence, which radiates from an affirmatively posited tran-
scendence, to a mockery. (Adorno 1966, 354)
Adorno, in other words, insists that the esteem for the otherworldy and the invariant that
once motivated traditional metaphysics must now yield to a conception of metaphysical
experience that turns away from the invariant. If the traditional concept of metaphysics
implied a kind of beatitude in the mind’s grasp of timeless perfection, the horrors visited
upon humanity in our present world now demand what Plato called a metanoia, or turning
of the mind, from the fantasy of invariance and toward the mundane. The very thought of
perfection must be scored by imperfection; the beatitude of transcendence must open itself
to the claims of immanence, and whatever happiness we once attached to the promise of
eternity must become responsive to our unhappiness and suffering if such thoughts are
not to be condemned in toto as empty apologetics. These are the considerations that guide
Adorno in his attempt to work out what he calls “metaphysical experience today” (Adorno
2000, 100).
To understand what such an experience would be like, consider this passage from
Negative Dialectics, where Adorno recalls the experience of village names as described by
Proust’s narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu:
What metaphysical experience would be, to those who eschew the reduction of this to presum-
ably religious primal experiences, is closest to how Proust imagined it, in the happiness
promised by the names of villages like Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, Monbrunn. You
think that if you go there, you would be in what is fulfilled, as if it really existed. If you really
go there, that which is promised recedes like a rainbow. Nevertheless you aren’t disappointed;
rather, you feel that you are too close, and that’s why you don’t see it. […] To the child it is
obvious that what delights it about its favorite little town is to be found there and only there,
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and nowhere else; it errs, but its error constitutes the model of experience, that of a concept,
which ultimately would be that of the thing itself, not the poverty of that which is shorn away
from things. (Adorno 1966, 366–368)
For Adorno, our conception of metaphysical experience in the secular and intramundane
sense is the conception of an experience that resists generalization. To grasp such an expe-
rience is to find oneself in a particular place; one finds oneself “enraptured at that one spot,
without squinting at the generality” (Adorno 1966, 366–368). Metaphysical experience
in this sense is the experience of the nonrepeatable, of the absolutely particular, the hic et
nunc of sensuous reality. This particularity always defeats the conceptual structures that
constitute our experience of the well‐ordered world, which is why Adorno imagines this
experience as an impossible encounter with the Ding an sich that lies behind any possible
appearances:
Solely in view of what is absolutely, indissolubly individualized [it] is to be hoped, that this is
how it already was and would be; only by approaching this, would the concept of the concept
be fulfilled. It clings however to the promise of happiness, while the world which denies it,
which is that of the dominating universality, is what Proust’s reconstruction of experience
opposes entêtiert [French: obstinately]. Happiness, the only aspect of metaphysical experience
which is more than powerless needing, grants the interior of objects as what is simultaneously
removed from such. (Adorno 1966, 366–368)
Now, in entertaining this prospect, Adorno recognizes that he has exposed himself to
philosophical ridicule. There is something symptomatic about his appeal to the experiences
of childhood as narrated by Proust, as if Adorno knows that the jaded intellect of so‐called
“adults” will not permit them to open themselves to the uncontaminated happiness of a
singular moment. The fact that such happiness is preserved in a work of fiction only
enhances the suspicion that Adorno is desperately clinging to an aesthetic category that
social reality disallows. If all of us today when faced with endless suffering have become
hostile to naïve sentiment, the obvious and ready‐made verdict would be that Adorno
himself has fallen prey to romanticism and fails to recognize how the category of
metaphysical experience betrays the infantile wish for regression, for uncontaminated
perfection. A skeptic might claim that in permitting himself this fantasy of perfection
Adorno came dangerously close to affirming a “jargon of authenticity” not unlike the
kitsch discourses of metaphysical depth he associated with popularized discourses of
Heideggerei (Adorno 1973; Gordon 2016).
Even more worrisome, however, would be the suspicion that Adorno may have lapsed,
despite himself, into an affirmation of rampant subjectivism. The central task of his nega-
tive dialectics, after all, is to contest the all‐consuming power of the rational subject and to
redeem what he calls the “nonidentical” from the idealist logic of identity. But in appealing
to “experience,” it may seem as if Adorno has permitted himself to celebrate the primacy
of the subject. Adorno understands this risk:
Whoever … naïvely enjoys this sort of [metaphysical] experience, as if they held what it sug-
gests in their hands, succumbs to the conditions of the empirical world, which they wanted
to escape from, and which nevertheless grants them the only possibility thereof. The concept
of metaphysical experience is still antinomic, in other ways than the transcendental dialectic
of Kant taught. What is announced in what is metaphysical without recourse to the experi-
ence of the subject, without its immediate being‐present [Dabeisein], is helpless before the
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desire of the autonomous subject, to permit nothing to be foisted on it, which would not be
comprehensible to it. (Adorno 1966, 366)
If all experience is experience by a subject, then all experience bears the stigma of idealism.
Experience cannot escape the gravity well of the rational subject who stamps everything
as its possession. For Adorno, then, the very dream of metaphysical experience would seem
impossible.
At this point an uncharitable reader may conclude that Adorno should not have per-
mitted himself to speak of metaphysical experience at all. The modifier “metaphysical”
only invites misunderstanding insofar as it recalls an elevated mode of philosophical
inquiry that Adorno himself no longer found legitimate: it appeals to a realm of invariant
perfection and ascribes to the rational subject a capacity for beatitude that suggests ideo-
logical complacency, since it turns away in narcissistic self‐affirmation from the mundane
realm of human suffering.
Can Adorno be rescued from this verdict? Adorno himself was ready to admit that
metaphysical experience was the name for a category that under modern conditions was
now losing its validity. “In the course of advancing enlightenment,” he wrote, “the possi-
bility of metaphysical experience is tending to become paler and more desultory.”
Metaphysical experience survives not as a category of fulfillment but “only negatively”
(Adorno 2000, 143). Such experiences, in other words, are torn by an inner antagonism,
by their failure to manifest the reality they promise. In a remarkable passage from the
concluding lecture of his 1965 course on metaphysics, Adorno refers to the Proustian
experience of place‐names and offers a confessional remark:
I myself have had a similar experience with such names. When one is on holiday as a child and
reads or hear names such as Monbrunn, Reuenthal, Hambrunn, one has the feeling: “if only
one were there, at that place, that would be it. This ‘it’ – what the ‘it’ is – is extraordinarily dif-
ficult to say; one will probably have to say, following Proust’s tracks … that it is happiness.
When one later reaches such places, it is not there either, one does not find ‘it.’ Often they are
just foolish villages. If there is a single stable door open in them and a smell of a real live cow
and dung and such things, to which this experience is no doubt attached, one must be very
thankful today. […] At such moments one has the curious feeling that something is receding
[…] I would say, therefore, that happiness – and there is an extremely deep constellation bet-
ween metaphysical experience and happiness – is something within objects and, at the same
time, remote from them.” (Adorno 2000, 140)
Adorno seems unable to decide upon the question of whether the “metaphysical experi-
ence” that attaches to a particular place will offer a genuine sense of satisfaction. The
person who travels to Monbrunn, for example, may find that the longed‐for experience of
ultimacy is lacking. Yet this very disappointment is somehow part of the experience:
But the curious thing is that, even if “it” is not there, if one does not find in Monbrunn any of
the fulfillment which is stored up in its name, nevertheless one is not disappointed. The reason,
if I am interpreting it correctly, is that […] one is, as it were, too close, one is inside the
phenomenon, and has the feeling that, being completely inside it, one cannot catch sight of it.
(Adorno 2000, 140)
It may surprise us that Adorno omits from his personal list of favorite places the one village
he most cherished, Amorbach, where he summered with his family as a child, and about
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which he wrote a loving essay in 1966. But his own sentiments did not prevent him from
recognizing that nostalgia is a function of loss. The category of metaphysical experience is
therefore an antinomy, though not quite in the Kantian sense: it holds out a promise that
it can’t fulfill, and only gives itself to us in a condition that is as damaged and imperfect as
the world itself:
As a result, one will have to pursue metaphysical experience into a stratum which originally
was extremely alien to it. For in reality it now survives only negatively. […] that the form in which
metaphysical experience still manifests itself with any compelling force today is not that which
has made itself suspect as a sphere of Romantic wishing, but is the experience which leads to
the question: Is that all? (Adorno 2000, 144)
Having traveled with Adorno thus far, permit me now to offer some interpretations of his
claims. The embattled quality of human life in the modern era is that it no longer allows for
the satisfactions that were recorded in the metaphysical tradition. This is why metaphysi-
cal experience can only ever be partial, and what it promises is only a momentarily glimpse
of a happiness that recedes just as one believes it within one’s grasp. If there is an aesthetic
quality to this metaphysical experience, this should not surprise us since for Adorno the
aesthetic stands as one of the last redoubts of happiness from the instrumentalism that is
swiftly colonizing all precincts of life. The aesthetic is not only art; it is the formal name for
the sensuous aspect of our own nature that we try to preserve from the ravages of instru-
mental reason. But aesthetic experience is no less vulnerable to history than the other
domains. This is why Adorno says that art itself conveys a sadness that is heightened by
the wistful feeling, “Oh were it is only so” (Adorno 1998, 105). This is the case not just for
modernist art – it is true even for music like Mozart’s, about which Adorno writes that the
reconciliation it evokes is “painfully sweet” because social reality has failed its promise
(Adorno 1998, 177).
Melancholy, then, is the shadow in aesthetic form of what is heterogenous to form, the
mere existence that art on its own is unable to change. Metaphysical experience, however,
is not confined to the sphere of formal aesthetics. It expresses the mutual contestation
between the invariant and the evanescent, between eternity and time. At the beginning of
this chapter I quoted Adorno’s remark that traditional metaphysics “saves what it
destroys.” As a rejoinder to this, Adorno portrays metaphysical experience as a negative
dialectic: it destroys what it saves.
4. The Politics of Metaphysical Experience
I would like to conclude this essay by drawing out what I take to be some of the political
implications of Adorno’s concept of metaphysical experience. In 1931 Walter Benjamin,
in one of his more Brechtian moods, attacked the contemporary writer Erich Kästner for
indulging in what he called “left‐wing melancholia.” Although one might be surprised to
learn that a thinker so intimately shackled to melancholy himself could fault another
writer for the same affliction, the term has been revived in recent years as a diagnostic for
the failures of the political left. For the political theorist Wendy Brown, Benjamin was
correct in criticizing Kästner because melancholy remains pathologically fixed on the lost
object of a past utopia and turns into a species of political conservatism (Brown 1999).
A politics that strives for genuine transformation must overcome this pathological
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elancholy and move through the process of mourning to embrace new political possibilities.
m
The historian Enzo Traverso, meanwhile, in his book Left‐Wing Melancholia, has urged us to
see that melancholy may have a critical rather than merely conservative aspect. He urges us
to “depathologize” melancholy rather than leaving it behind. Melancholy, he suggests, would
not disable action, but subtend it by interlacing irony with resistance (Traverso 2017).3
It should come as no surprise that Adorno anticipated this defense of melancholy and
mobilized its critical energies against modern forms of total integration. If melancholy is the
affect of incompleteness, then it offers the only suitable temperament for a late‐modern politics
that sustains our awareness of human finitude and holds open the memory of suffering both
past and present. Here Adorno was faithful to Benjamin’s own melancholic mood and the
famous angel who, in Benjamin’s memorable image, surveys the ruins of history.
At the opening of this essay, I suggested that the history of metaphysical thinking has
oscillated between triumphalism and melancholy – between the dream of transcendence
and a reckoning with its failure. The concept of metaphysical experience, I would suggest,
was Adorno’s attempt to provide a conceptual epitaph for this history. It compresses into
one concept both the promise and disappointment of the modern philosophical tradition. It
registers both the ambition to arrive at last at a plateau of ultimate satisfaction and the
frustration of this ambition as we confront the damage that our efforts have wrought. But
the feeling “Is that all?” is not only a feeling, and it is also something more than a verdict
on history. It is relevant, I believe, for our conception of politics. By this I do not mean the
pessimistic truism that all utopian striving is somehow in vain. That kind of pessimism is
truly conservative: it feeds on the old idea of original sin and sabotages the emancipatory
potentials of the enlightenment before they even have a chance. Instead I mean that the
incompleteness of metaphysical experience was Adorno’s way of thinking about the incom-
pleteness that is constitutive of being human. Adorno urged us to see the Risse und
Schründe, the “rifts and crevices” of the world that for Adorno became legible in the “mes-
sianic light.” These are the phrases from the Minima Moralia, which offers an ironic
rejoinder to the Magna Moralia, a classical text that scholars once ascribed to Aristotle. The
conventional way to understand this Adornian theme is to read these imperfections as
wounds inflicted on the social body in the course of time. And this is no doubt correct. But
I want to close by suggesting that these wounds also have what we might call a transhistor-
ical meaning. Christological and Kabbalistic motifs were of special interest to Adorno for
their emphasis on the mundane as the scene of bodily suffering and redemption.
“Metaphysical experience” seems to have been his way of turning even Christ’s passion
into a philosopheme, reading it not as metaphysics triumphant but instead as a kind of
metaphysics nailed to the cross.
To explain this final point, I must invoke what we might call Adorno’s philosophical
anthropology – the conception of the human being that correlates to his negative dialectic.
The key thematic of Adorno’s philosophy – “the preponderance of the object,” expresses the
way in which the object “weighs upon” the subject and calls into question the autarky of
the conceptual self. Inspired by materialism, Adorno based his ethics on the concrete and
nonmetaphorical fact that the human being is astonishingly fragile, that our very skin
exhibits a hypersensitivity, to light, to heat, to pain. When he speaks of wounds and rifts this
is not merely the recommendation of a certain poetics. It is also a politics that is responsive
to this woundedness, a politics of exposure that sustains our nondiscursive and mimetic
bond with nature. This emphasis on our animal fragility may also help to explain Adorno’s
fondness for animal names that were lavished upon family and friends: “Hippo Cow, Giraffe‐
Gazelle, Wild Boar King,” and many others. Names such as these, or variations thereof, are
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not uncommon in the most intimate spheres of our lives; and they are, of course, forms of
affection. But they are also political. Where fascism reduces the human to the animal, love
responds to the animal in the human, the nature within human nature.
Fascism too, after all, is not only an historical category. It is the name for any repertoire
of social styles and practices that indulge the fantasy of invariance or invulnerability. In
Minima Moralia Adorno writes of “those irreplaceable capacities which cannot bloom in
the isolated cell of pure interiority, but only in contact with the warmth of things” (Adorno
1974, 42–43). What Adorno calls Kälte, or “coldness,” is just this withdrawal into the fan-
tasy of a galvanized self that shuts down all responsiveness to the nonidentical and narcis-
sistically contemplates its own perfection like Aristotle’s God. But the skin is not an armor;
it is a sensorium through which the object impinges on the self from the outside. The subject
that declares itself immune from damage denies its responsiveness to the nonidentical,
loses touch with the world, and exhibits that “withering of experience” that Adorno saw
as a symptom of modern domination. To keep alive our capacity for experience is also to
sustain our awareness of human fragility. Such awareness would seem to be the precondi-
tion, the minimal morality for any politics that wishes to combat the emergent trends of
domination – not only in Adorno’s time, but also in ours.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1966). Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Adorno, T.W. (1973). The Jargon of Authenticity (trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will). Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1974). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, (trans. E. F. N. Jephcott). London:
New Left Books.
Adorno, T.W. (1998). Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Hulot‐Kentor). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2000). Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. (ed. R. Tiedemann; trans. E. Jephcott.).
Brown, Wendy (1999). Resisting Left Melancholy. boundary 2 26 (3, Fall), 19–27.
Carnap, R. (1959). The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language.”
[“Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache,” Erkenntnis II. 1932]. In:
Logical Positivism (ed. A. J. Ayer; trans. Arthur Pap), 60–81. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.
Derrida, J. (1982). Ousia and Gramme: note on a note from Being and Time. In: Margins of Philosophy
(trans. A. Bass)., 29–67l. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1989). Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (trans.G. Bennington and R. Bowlby). Chicago:
Gordon, P.E. (2012). German existentialism and the persistence of metaphysics. In: Situating
Existentialism: Key Texts in Context (eds. J. Judaken and R. Bernasconi), 65–88. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, J. (1992). Themes in postmetaphysical thinking. In: Postmetaphysical Thinking.
Philosophical Essays (trans. W.M. Hohengarten), 28–56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heidegger, M. (1929). Was ist Metaphysik? In: Wegmarken: 1919–1961, Gesamtausgabe, Band 9 (ed.
F.‐W. von Hermann), 103–122. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Plato (1892). Phaedrus. In: The Dialogues of Plato (trans. Benjamin Jowett). The Online Library of
Liberty. Oxford: Liberty Fund, Inc.
Traverso, E. (2017). Left‐Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia
University Press.
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Further Reading
Adorno, T.W. (2017). An Introduction to Dialectics (trans. C. Ziermann). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Buck‐Morss, S. (1977). The Origin of Negative Dialectics; Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the
Gillespie, S.H. (2016). Commentary: Adorno on Amorbach. New German Critique 43 (1): 215–219.
Habermas, J. (1983). Theodor Adorno: the primal history of subjectivity – self‐affirmation gone wild.
In: Philosophical Political Profiles (ed. J. Habermas; trans F.G. Lawrence), 99–110. London:
Heinmann.
Jay, M. (1984). Adorno. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Jay, M. (2005). Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Macdonald, I. (2011). Cold, cold, warm: autonomy, intimacy, and maturity in Adorno. Philosophy
and Social Criticism 37 (6): 669–689.
Müller‐Doohm, S. (2005). Adorno: A Biography (trans. R. Livingstone). Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Notes
1 This paper was first presented at The School of Criticism and Theory (Summer 2018) at Cornell
University. I would like to thank Hent de Vries for the invitation to deliver the paper. For helpful
comments and suggestions on the paper, I owe a special debt to Jill Frank, and also to Espen
Hammer and Max Pensky.
2 For information on the statue see http://sammlungen.uni‐frankfurt.de/objekt/316/empedokles.
3 For a review of Traverso’s book, see Peter E. Gordon, “Mourning in America,” online at the
Boston Review. http://bostonreview.net/politics/peter‐e‐gordon‐mourning‐america
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Part VII
Ethics and Politics
36
After Auschwitz
CHRISTIAN SKIRKE
1. Introduction
The phrase “after Auschwitz” plays a prominent role in Adorno’s theoretical work, his art
criticism, and his public engagements from the late 1940s onwards. What his phrase
entails in the different contexts in which he uses it is not always obvious, yet some aspects
of what he means with “after Auschwitz” are beyond dispute. It is clear, for example, that
Adorno thinks of the era after Auschwitz as defined by actual historical fact. This fact is the
genocide of Jewish, Romani, and Slavic people on racist grounds, the systematic mass
murder of those suffering from mental illnesses and disabilities, of homosexuals, and of
others whom the perpetrators of these atrocities deemed “life unworthy of life.” These
crimes were committed by Nazi Germany right up to its military defeat in 1945. During
this period, death camps like Auschwitz were established for the specific purpose of killing
vast numbers of people by industrialized means, by forced labor, by random violence and
systematic torture, by starvation, by cruel medical experiments, and by purposely
overcrowded and disease‐ridden living conditions. In Adorno’s writings, Auschwitz often
stands for all the unspeakable atrocities of the Nazi regime and arguably also for contempt
of humanity prior to the Nazis and after them. The wide scope of the phrase “after
Auschwitz” is evident where Adorno discusses central moral demands after Auschwitz – that
torture must stop (Adorno 1970–86, 6:281) or that hunger must cease (1970–86,
4:§100). It is in this context that he mentions ongoing violations of these moral demands,
such as the devastating aftereffects of colonial rule in Africa and Asia (1970–86, 6:281)
or the global threat of nuclear warfare (1970–86, 10.2:675/1998, 192). These events are
explicitly included in his reflections on our moral and intellectual situation after Auschwitz.
Philosophical controversies about Adorno’s phrase “after Auschwitz” are mostly
concerned with the status and content of Adorno’s various impossibility claims about art,
morality, and philosophy after Auschwitz. His impossibility claims can be treated on the
familiar model of transcendental claims, that is, claims that articulate necessary condi-
tions for the possibility of knowledge, meaning, experience, agency, morality, or culture.
Adorno’s impossibility claims state the inverse of conventional transcendental claims.
Instead of saying what enables certain cultural and social practices or certain intellectual
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pursuits, they assert that these practices or pursuits have been disabled due to the occur-
rence of Auschwitz.
This contribution is going to examine Adorno’s phrase “after Auschwitz” through his
three most important impossibility claims. These are, starting with the most famous of
them, (36.2.) Adorno’s statement that writing poetry has become impossible after
Auschwitz (1970–86, 10.1:30/1981, 34); (36.3.) Adorno’s contention that life after
Auschwitz is morally unlivable (1970–86, 4:§18, 6:354) because morality after Auschwitz
stands under an imperative that resembles a curse – an imperative that is a heteronomous
imposition and not the product of self‐legislation (6:358); and (36.4.) an unbridgeable
metaphysical rupture between experience and concept that stifles philosophy after
Auschwitz (6:354). To round off the discussion, we are going to have a look at (36.5.)
Adorno’s perspective on education, which illuminates how he understood his role as a
public intellectual after Auschwitz. The conclusion (36.6.) is an attempt to position
Adorno’s reflections on life and thought after Auschwitz in our contemporary context.
2. Poetry
Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949, after having spent 15 years in exile. Round about
this time, he wrote the essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” first published in 1951
and included as the opening essay in the 1955 essay collection Prisms. “Cultural
Criticism and Society” discusses the deep and contradictory entanglement of cultural
criticism with its subject matter: fine art, music, and poetry; and it cautions repeatedly
against the cultural critic’s complicity with the socio‐economic status quo. Adorno’s
discussion culminates in his famous statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric; and this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write
poetry today” (Adorno 1970–86, 10.1:30/ 1981, 34). This section examines Adorno’s
statement on poetry and some reactions to it.
Two fundamental points need to be highlighted so that we can understand the full force
of Adorno’s statement. First, artistic practices like writing poetry, painting, or composing
music are practices that, as we commonly understand them, maintain and promote culture
or civilization; Adorno denies that they are still capable of fulfilling this purpose after
Auschwitz. Second, barbarism customarily belongs to life‐forms other than one’s own;
however, Adorno insists that, after Auschwitz, barbarism has become an attribute of one’s
own life‐form.1 As Horkheimer and Adorno outline in Dialectic of Enlightenment, one’s own
barbarism is a consequence of regressive tendencies within one’s own culture (Adorno &
Horkheimer 1969, 3/2002, xiv). For Adorno, the catastrophe of Auschwitz is the
cumulative result of these regressive tendencies in western culture.
In the first part of his statement – “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – Adorno
applies his observations on civilization and barbarism to poetry. He asserts that poetry after
Auschwitz has been overpowered by the inherent barbarism of our own culture and due to
its resulting complicity with barbarism can no longer claim to be a civilizing practice. The
second part of Adorno’s statement – “this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has
become impossible to write poetry today” – extends his complicity charge against poetry
after Auschwitz to the concurrent cultural criticism. At the same time, the charge is radi-
calized: poetry after Auschwitz, Adorno claims, is not possible any more. While poetry, fine
art, or music have been possible in other historical settings, enabling conditions for poetry,
fine art, or music have lapsed after Auschwitz.
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After Auschwitz
These shifting nuances leave some scope for interpretation. Adorno’s statement can be
understood as (i) an authoritative prohibition to practice art after Auschwitz, (ii) a dismissal
of existing art after Auschwitz in the sense that art after Auschwitz is a failure, despite the
artists’ best efforts, (iii) a reprimand against those who produce or discuss art after Auschwitz
for their complicity in barbarism, (iv) or a reminder for artists, their public, and their critics
that art after Auschwitz has lost its poetic powers of redemption.
His brash entrance in the cultural patchwork of postwar Germany guaranteed Adorno
a hostile reception. The prevalent interpretation of his statement at the time was exceed-
ingly literalistic: he was perceived as (i) censuring writers authoritatively for writing poetry.
A widespread reaction was to point to repression against progressive literature and art in
Nazi Germany and to defend German postwar literature as part of this anti‐fascist
tradition – this is a line taken by progressive writers like Andersch, Jens, and Rühmkorf
(see Stein 1996; Zilcosky 2005). This defensive reaction is worryingly myopic, however, in
that it mistakes German literature for literature as such; and it is morally problematic
because it equalizes Nazi repression against artists with the calculated inhumanity of the
Nazi death camps. Artists have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed by the Nazis in
concentration camps for their artistic and political convictions – Andersch suffered a
six‐month ordeal in Dachau. However, their persecution as artists did not have the geno-
cidal or eugenic character of the mass murder of those who fell under the Nazi category
“life unworthy of life.”
A more nuanced treatment of Adorno’s statement on poetry after Auschwitz can be
found in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1959 essay “Die Steine der Freiheit” (“The Stones of
Freedom”). By contrast with other reactions, Enzensberger acknowledges the full force of
Adorno’s statement. Although he also does not agree with it, he accepts it as a valid
challenge: the onus to prove it wrong is on the poets:
The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno has pronounced a sentence which belongs to the harsh-
est judgements about our times: after Auschwitz, writing a poem is not possible any longer. If
we want to continue to live, this sentence has to be refuted. Not many are capable of this.
(Enzensberger 1959, 772, my translation)2
Enzensberger appears to interpret Adorno’s challenge as (ii) a dismissal of existing poetry

after Auschwitz: poems written after Auschwitz are lifeless poems. To refute this dismissal,
it would have to be shown that some works of poetry after Auschwitz are not crushed by
their legacy. Enzensberger attempts this refutation by pointing to the “untouchable” or
“sacrosanct” (unantastbar) work of Nelly Sachs, a poet and later Nobel Prize laureate who
narrowly escaped the Holocaust (Enzensberger 1959, 773).
In his 1962 essay “Commitment,” Adorno accepts Enzensberger’s intervention as a
dialectical counterpart of his original statement from “Cultural Critique and Society”:
“Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that poetry [die Dichtung] must withstand this
very verdict, must be in such a way that it does not by its very existence after Auschwitz
give itself up into the hands of cynicism” (Adorno 1970–86, 11:423/1992, 88). Adorno
thus clarifies that his statement is not meant (i) to prohibit or (ii) to dismiss the existence of
poetry after Auschwitz; nor is it meant (iii) as a reprimand: poets after Auschwitz cannot
extract themselves from the barbarism that is ingrained in their culture. Rather, his state-
ment speaks out against indifference and carelessness about the place of poetry after
Auschwitz. This is clear from Adorno’s rebuttal of the notion, described earlier, that
postwar art continues the progressive traditions before the Nazis and against the Nazis:
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The concept of a cultural resurrection after Auschwitz is illusory and absurd, and every work
created since then has to pay the bitter price for this. But because the world has outlived its
own downfall, it nevertheless needs art to write its unconscious history. (Adorno 1970–86,
10.2:506/1998, 48)
According to this passage from another 1962 essay, “Those Twenties,” it is a cardinal
mistake to think one can return to an artistic, intellectual, or moral routine after Auschwitz,
as if the Nazi regime and the Nazi atrocities had been some historical anomaly. But Adorno
also leaves no doubt – against the prohibitive, dismissive, and reprimanding interpreta-
tions of the original remark – that art after Auschwitz is necessary as a repository for expe-
riences that cannot be articulated otherwise. In light of this, Adorno’s statement that
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric has been intended as (iv) a reminder: writing poetry
after Auschwitz is possible and even necessary; but it cannot be blind to its compromised
situation. Therefore Adorno disagrees with Enzensberger: no poetry after Auschwitz can
claim that history has left its redemptive powers intact.
A few authors of this period, for example Paul Celan and Peter Weiss, understood their
literary practice in a spirit very close to Adorno. In his 1965 “Laokoon” speech, Weiss
speaks of poetry after Auschwitz as art in a “situation where the events cannot be covered
by any image, any word” (Weiss 1968, 181). Despite the collapse of word and image, he
insists that artists have to cultivate these conventional means, “keeping in mind that
putting these hardly adequate means to use is better than remaining silent and being
stunned” (Weiss 1968, 181). Weiss may be read as giving an emphatic version of Adorno’s
exhortative claim (iv): like Adorno, he asserts that poetic means of expression have been
damaged by the horrors of the death camps; yet withdrawal in silence is not a viable option
for the poet after Auschwitz. Weiss’ play The Investigation, which dramatizes the Frankfurt
Auschwitz trials of 1963–1965, and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance exemplify this
attitude. Especially The Investigation is an extraordinary literary attempt to lend a voice to
those who have been brutally silenced by their Nazi torturers and struggle to make them-
selves heard even decades after having survived the horrors of the camps.
Whereas Adorno never commented on Weiss, he thought of Celan’s lyrical oeuvre as an
eminent example for poetry after Auschwitz. Conversely, Celan’s philosophical thoughts about
poetry after Auschwitz parallel those of Adorno. This is evident from Celan’s 1960 “Meridian”
speech, delivered when he received the prestigious Büchner Prize. Celan turns to the topic of
poetry after Auschwitz by expanding on the laconic opening sentence of Büchner’s biograph-
ical novella Lenz (“On the 20th of January, Lenz went through the mountains”):3
Perhaps we can say that every poem is marked by its own 20th of January? Perhaps the new-
ness of poems written today is that they try most plainly to be mindful of this kind of date? But
do we not all write from and toward some such date? What else could we claim as our origin?
(Celan 2003, 47)
Celan suggests that poetry has an affinity with fateful dates, whether of merely biographical
significance or at a world‐historical scale (see Geuss 2006). All poetry may thus be said to
be poetry after X. Celan’s concluding question suggests that contemporary poetry, without
doubt his own oeuvre, is poetry after Auschwitz. He anticipates Weiss’ remark about the
poetic relevance of silence, observing that poetry today “clearly shows a strong tendency
towards muteness” (Celan 2003, 48), because it tries to articulate its own impossibility after
X. Adorno takes up Celan’s diagnosis in Aesthetic Theory where he characterizes Celan’s
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After Auschwitz
works as follows: “His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that
escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan’s poems want to speak of the most extreme
horror through silence” (Adorno 1970–86, 7:477/1997, 422–3). Both Celan and Adorno
believe that, by staying mute, poetry after Auschwitz concedes and reflects its own impossi-
bility in light of the horrors the Nazis inflicted on their victims.
It has been suggested that Adorno revised his judgment from “Cultural Criticism and
Society” after having encountered Celan’s oeuvre (see Domin 1968). What seems to indi-
cate a change of mind is the following passage from Negative Dialectics: “Perennial suffering
has as much right to express itself as the tortured to scream; this is why it may have been
wrong to say that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz” (Adorno 1970–86, 6:355).4
However, as the idiom of rights makes clear, Adorno only rules out (i) prohibitive, (ii) dis-
missive, and (iii) reprimanding interpretations of his statement on poetry after Auschwitz.
This is also obvious if the original statement from Prisms is read in context:
The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical
its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom
threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage
of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this
corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute
reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to
absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it con-
fines itself to self‐satisfied contemplation. (Adorno 1970–86, 10.1:30/1981, 34)
Adorno’s statement on poetry after Auschwitz is framed by reflections on the reification of

consciousness and the failures of critique that this reification entails. The resolution on the
side of barbarism of the dialectic between civilization and barbarism from Dialectic of
Enlightenment is a direct consequence of this reification. This resolution is painfully manifest
in poetry after Auschwitz and its compromised standing as a civilizing, redemptive practice.
Adorno agrees with Celan’s and Weiss’ observations: poetry has lost its voice because it has
been brutalized by history. Critical Theory is not entitled to a bird’s‐eye view on poetry either.
It is subject to the same dialectic as poetry in that the same forces that render poetry mute
threaten to turn criticism into hot air. Adorno’s statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz
has become impossible is thus an elliptical reprise of his initial claim: no poetry after
Auschwitz is unaffected by the barbarism that culminated in Auschwitz. He does not suggest
that poets should stop their work or that their work is futile. Adorno reminds poets and their
audience that (iv) poetry after Auschwitz must face up to the fact that artistic practices are
embroiled in the inherent barbarism of the culture to which they inextricably belong.
3. Morality
Aesthetic experiences and moral experiences are intimately related in Adorno’s work. How
much they overlap can be gleaned from his characterization of art after Auschwitz as a
broken promise of happiness (Adorno 1970–86, 7:205/1997, 189). It is important to note
that Adorno departs from Stendhal’s aestheticist original by using the concepts “promise”
and “happiness” in a moral‐utopian sense (see Finlayson 2015). His moral utopia pivots on
the promise of a fulfilled life that, contrary to life after Auschwitz, is a life without suffering.
There are various instances in Adorno’s work where he points to this kind of life: our
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CHRISTIAN SKIRKE
r epulsion at the violence that characterizes life after Auschwitz “registers the cognition that
suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. ‘Woe speaks: go away’” (1970–86,
6:203); certain repositories of experience that promise us that “if you go there, you would
be in what is fulfilled, as if it really existed” (6:366); or his famous utopia of a fulfilled life
beyond the strictures of productivity, “Rien faire comme une bête, lying on the water and look
peacefully into the heavens” (4:§100).
Adorno’s reflections on ethics after Auschwitz are concerned with an inverted moral
world, with “the wrong life” that “cannot be lived rightly” (4:§18). All life after Auschwitz
may be said to be overshadowed by the Nazi category of “life unworthy of living.” This
category is especially tangible in Adorno’s remarks about survivor’s guilt. He asks “whether
it is even permissible for someone who accidentally escaped and by all rights ought to have
been murdered, to go on living after Auschwitz” (6:355). Moral culpability in the wrong
life is assigned, one might say, as if the inhumanity of the Nazis were to determine what is
right and what is wrong. The moral constraints on life after Auschwitz are brought into
sharp relief by Adorno’s New Categorical Imperative:
Hitler has imposed a new categorical imperative upon humanity in the state of their
unfreedom: to arrange their thinking and conduct, so that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so
that nothing similar ever happens again. (Adorno 1970–86, 6:358)
The New Categorical Imperative has a number of striking features that set it apart from
common moral principles and precepts. The first of these features is its strict heteronomy: the
New Categorical Imperative is enforced by personified evil, Hitler, and is a reflection of
unfreedom. Therefore after Auschwitz, there is no longer any credible and practicable claim to
moral autonomy. Further, the New Categorical Imperative has no justification and thus cannot
be treated discursively. There is simply no room for moral agents to dispute the immorality of
Auschwitz, of violence and torture. Whoever asks to be shown that or why Auschwitz was evil,
has forfeited their moral agency by that very request. Finally, the immorality of Auschwitz is
self‐evident in “the abhorrence, become practical, of the unbearable physical pain inflicted on
individuals” (6:358). Note that Adorno speaks of an abhorrence that has become practical or
moral in this context rather than being practical or moral from the start. His New Categorical
Imperative shares with Kant’s original that mere feelings or drives, the constituents of one’s
moral psychology, are not moral on their own. Abhorrence has to be honed in order to serve as
a moral compass. Contrary to Kantian moral universalism, however, Adorno envisages a moral
sensitivity to the suffering of others that is contentful and specific rather than formal and prin-
cipled (see Freyenhagen 2013, 135–136). He writes: “Moral questions are stringent […] in
sentences like: torture ought to be abolished; concentration camps ought not to exist” (Adorno
1970–86, 6:281). Rather than being validated by universalization tests, one’s action‐guiding
thoughts “are true as impulse upon reports of torture somewhere. They must not be rational-
ized; if they were treated as an abstract principle, they would end up immediately in the bad
infinity of derivation and validity” (6:281). What imposes constraints on moral agency after
Auschwitz is the overpowering actuality of human suffering and the fact that moral agents are
always already implicated in the suffering of others.
How these constraints are interpreted depends on which aspects of Adorno’s moral
thought are given priority. Some commentators stress the minimalistic aspects of
Adorno’s ethics of resistance (Finlayson 2002; Freyenhagen 2013). Others empha-
size Adorno’s historical‐materialist critique of bourgeois morality (Claussen 1988;
Schweppenhäuser 1993).
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After Auschwitz
The historical‐materialist approach interprets the philosophical core of Adorno’s cri-

tique as a combined rejection of Kant’s ethics and his philosophy of history. For Kant,
morality according to the Categorical Imperative will not be actualized before the advent of
true human history. The bourgeois age and bourgeois morality are merely a prelude to it.
Kant’s optimism that humanity will achieve this stage is based on his trust in bourgeois
morality. After Auschwitz, however, we can be certain that history did not take this course.
From the historical‐materialist perspective, this fact has profound implications for
bourgeois morality and the philosophy that underpins it. It implies that the moral c ategories
of Kantian universalism are indifferent to the self‐evident evil of the Nazi concentration
camps; they did not impel moral agents to prevent Auschwitz (Schweppenhäuser 1993,
186). Adorno’s observations on post‐hoc moral rationalization, “the bad infinity of deriva-
tion and validity” (Adorno 1970–86, 6:281), or “bourgeois coldness” (6:356) thus iden-
tify catastrophic blind spots of Kant’s ethics. In the last instance, these blind spots are
deficiencies of Kant’s moral agent, the autonomous subject, who on Adorno’s view became
an accessory to torture and murder at Auschwitz: “The coldness of the societal monad, the
isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact
that only very few people reacted” (1970–86, 10.2:687/1998, 201). Consequently, Kant’s
conception of rational moral self‐determination is inadequate after Auschwitz (Claussen
1988, 57). Therefore the historical‐materialist approach interprets Adorno’s ethics as a
determinate negation of bourgeois ethics.
However, this interpretation does not explain certain features of Adorno’s New
Categorical Imperative, which merely demands that moral agents after Auschwitz act so
that Auschwitz does not repeat itself (Adorno 1970–86, 358), or to act so that life after
Auschwitz is not life before another moral catastrophe. Hence Adorno’s notion, prominent
in his 1963 lecture course “Problems of Moral Philosophy,” that ethics after Auschwitz
must take the form of an ethics of resistance (1993–, IV.10:18–9/1999, 7). For an ethics of
resistance, there are no positive moral values or standards, no conception of goodness or
justice to which it could appeal. If we were to follow the historical‐materialist line and were
to understand their absence as the result of determinate negation, this negation would have
to comprise all given moral values or standards. However, bourgeois morality does not com-
prise all given moral values and standards; it is only a partial set of them. Therefore ethics
after Auschwitz is more encompassing than a determinate negation of bourgeois morality.
This brings us back to the notion of the “wrong life” that “cannot be lived rightly”
(1970–86, 4:§18). The wrong life characteristically exposes agents to situations with
overwhelming moral salience, situations where it is self‐evident that people suffer grave
wrongdoings. Yet, due to the specific historical circumstances of the wrong life and the
entanglement of moral agents in these circumstances, moral agents do wrong even if they
try their best to alleviate suffering. To take a contemporary example, modern mass media
confront people lucky enough to live comfortably with real‐time images of hunger and vio-
lence elsewhere on the globe. However, even if those living comfortably have a moral reac-
tion to these instances of hunger and violence, they have to temper their outrage by
acknowledging the fact that their comforts are often bought at the expense of those who
suffer hunger and violence. So the wrong life could be described as a comprehensive moral
situation with a dilemmatic structure (Skirke 2008). It has been suggested that such a
dilemmatic construal of moral agency entails defeatism (Habermas 1987). This does not
follow, however. Moral dilemmas may frustrate moral agents; but this psychological effect
is not the conceptual point of a dilemmatic construal of moral agency. The point of this
construal is that moral dilemmas challenge moral agents to act morally even if they cannot
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live up to this challenge. For moral agents still have a moral standing in the wrong life.
Adorno’s 1963 lectures on ethics are unambiguous in this respect:
I believe that one has to bring this predicament [Zwangssituation] to consciousness in the first
place – and not paper it over – in order to create the conditions under which it can appropri-
ately be asked how one should lead one’s life today. The only thing that can perhaps be said is
that the right life [das richtige Leben] today would consist in the shape of resistance against the
forms of a wrong life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most advanced
consciousness. Other than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged.
(Adorno 1993–, IV.10:248–9/1999, 167–8)
Awareness of moral dilemmas thus reflects a moral self‐understanding and, rather than
stifling moral agency, provides agents with further motivations to act morally.
In terms of Adorno’s New Categorical Imperative, moral resistance against the way of
the world means to resist the possibility of renewed mass suffering, genocidal violence,
systematic torture, and other manifestations of barbarism. In order to act morally after
Auschwitz, at least in outline, we have to acknowledge the extent to which we are impli-
cated in the inherent brutality of our societies, maybe against our will, but beyond any
doubt. What an ethics of resistance asks of us as moral agents first of all is that we act
against whatever makes us complicit with the wrong life.
As an ethics after Auschwitz is not in a position to appeal to positive values or moral prin-
ciples, there is a significant body of literature that debates whether Adorno’s negative ethics
can be made consistent (Schweppenhäuser 1993; Kohlmann 1997; Bernstein 2001;
Finlayson 2002; Freyenhagen 2011, 2013). Freyenhagen (2013) argues in detail that an
ethics of resistance does not require positive moral standards because moral agency after
Auschwitz is motivated by self‐evident wrongs. Even if the direction in which moral agents
are guided by their moral reactions remains indeterminate, self‐evident wrongs guide moral
agents away from their source. Torture and hunger are self‐evident sources of suffering. On
Adorno’s view, the appropriate moral reaction to torture or hunger is not to relieve its
victims in the name of greater utility, to foster their individual well‐being, or to act on one’s
moral duties toward them; the appropriate moral reaction is to stop the suffering caused by
torture and hunger. Whether we act in anybody’s best interest when we act morally is beside
the point for Adorno. What would be immoral of us is not to engage with self‐evident
wrongs. Even pointing to the dilemmatic structure of the situation would not exonerate us
from inaction: our lack of engagement would show that we lack the impulse to stop self‐
evident wrongs and thus lack moral standing in the wrong life. We do not have to say that
hunger and violence are evils because it is good for people to flourish. We can say with
sufficient moral force that hunger and violence are evils because it is bad that people p erish.5
On this interpretation, the core idea of Adorno’s ethics after Auschwitz is that we are moved
to resist these evils by virtue of their salience: even if we cannot help people to flourish, it is
imperative that we end or prevent conditions under which they perish.
4. Goodness, Meaning, Truth
For Adorno, Auschwitz does not only have consequences for culture and morality but also
has metaphysical implications. In line with his negative ethics, he argues that philosophy
after Auschwitz is neither entitled to, nor capable of making, positive pronouncements
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After Auschwitz
about goodness, meaning, and truth. Whether this impossibility claim is borne out exclu-
sively by his materialism or whether it involves more or less hidden theologemes in addition
to this is a matter of controversy (Bernstein 2001; Finlayson 2002; Freyenhagen 2011).
Philosophers who adopt an affirmative post‐metaphysical standpoint tend to believe
that metaphysics has become obsolete in light of common sense, of pragmatism, or of
revolutionary new paradigms like the linguistic turn or quantum physics. Adorno does not
share these reasons for abandoning metaphysics. This is obvious from his various objec-
tions to Logical Positivism, a prime example of an affirmative post‐metaphysical perspec-
tive.6 His reason for abandoning metaphysics is not that we have found better ways of
articulating our concerns with goodness, meaning, and truth. To the contrary, he believes
that, after Auschwitz, we have lost our capacity for making these central philosophical
issues intelligible. He states this point forcefully in a key passage from Negative Dialectics:
The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the Leibnizean theodicy, and the visible
catastrophe of first nature was insignificant, compared with the second, social one, which
defies the human imagination by preparing a real hell out of human evil. The capacity for
metaphysics is crippled, because what occurred, smashed the basis of the compatibility of
speculative metaphysical thought with experience. (Adorno 1970–86, 6:354)
While the destructiveness of blind natural forces may be said to have reduced the opti-
mistic metaphysical doctrine of the best possible world to absurdity, the catastrophe of
second nature, Auschwitz, may be said to have undermined the intelligibility of any
substantive reflection about the true and the good.
The quoted passage is of particular relevance for the suggestion that Auschwitz has the
status of a negative theodicy for Adorno (see Bernstein 2001). A negative theodicy, in the
sense relevant to this discussion, does not simply deny what an actual theodicy affirms,
namely the coexistence of good and evil.7 It also states that goodness has ceased to exist
due to the catastrophic triumph of evil. In this perspective, Auschwitz is not just an
emblematic historical event but has a logical function: it provides material proof for the
domination of evil in this world. According to Bernstein, Adorno understood Auschwitz in
precisely this sense, namely as an event that “refutes” hopes for social and intellectual
progress and thus hopes for the good life (Bernstein 2001, 376). On his view, Adorno
believes that metaphysics after Auschwitz is impossible, because “no savagery on that scale
could fit into an affirmative metaphysical narrative” (Bernstein 2001, 379). The horrific
ordeal of millions of victims at the hands of their Nazi torturers and murderers defies
conventional metaphysical intelligibility. Therefore, so the argument goes, Auschwitz is
material proof for the triumph of evil in this world.
On Bernstein’s view, Adorno’s phrase “‘after Auschwitz’ flags a caesura in reason itself
since in the light of Auschwitz what is to count as a reason and as a philosophical claim
must change” (Bernstein 2001, 376). However, Adorno is concerned with the impossi-
bility of deploying genuine philosophical conceptions of goodness, meaning, and truth
after Auschwitz, precisely because no better ways for comprehending our situation in the
world are available to us: giving up metaphysical concepts would mean giving up intelligi-
bility itself. This is the main reason for which Adorno declares his negative dialectics
“solidaristic with metaphysics in the moment of the latter’s fall” (Adorno 1970–86,
6:400). Bernstein’s contention that Adorno intended for our philosophical claims and rea-
sons to change after Auschwitz, entails that philosophy after Auschwitz is possible on new
terms; but this contradicts Adorno’s impossibility claim about philosophy after Auschwitz.
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A deeper difficulty arises if we follow Bernstein’s interpretation of Auschwitz as the

focal event of a negative theodicy. Such an event has to provide ontological proof against
the coexistence of good and evil by marking the point at which evil is installed in reality
and goodness is rendered ontologically impossible. To provide this proof, the triumph of evil
has to be an ontologically singular event: it cannot have a predecessor because there was
goodness prior to the triumph of evil; and it cannot have a successor because goodness is
barred after the triumph of evil unless a different ontology comes into existence. However,
Adorno’s impossibility claims about poetry, life, and philosophy after Auschwitz do not
seem to aim at establishing the ontological singularity of Auschwitz. What is decisive for
him are certainties that frame our perspective after Auschwitz – after Auschwitz, nobody
can ignore that culture is capable of reverting to its opposite, that civilization can lapse, that
human beings can inflict unimaginable pain and cruelty on others. These certainties have
epistemic and phenomenal force: they strike us in such a way that our reassurances about
progress, civilization, moral rectitude, meaning, truth, and so on collapse.8 This point
seems indifferent to ontological singularity. If we take Auschwitz to be the first full realiza-
tion of social evil, as Adorno seems to suggest in his analogy between Auschwitz and the
Lisbon earthquake, our moral and philosophical obligation after Auschwitz is to ensure in
accordance with the New Categorical Imperative that it only happened once. It is important
to see that this imperative has force because Auschwitz could be repeated. This entails that,
at least in principle, multiple historical events can be related to Auschwitz by family resem-
blance.9 In one sense, Auschwitz has a unique place in history so that no other historical
event is like Auschwitz: while a future event may count as a repetition of Auschwitz,
Auschwitz is not a repetition of any other event. In another sense, Auschwitz shares its
salience as a human catastrophe with other historical events. There is an entire history of
unimaginable inhumanity and moral barbarism that precedes and includes Auschwitz.
This inhumanity and barbarism is instantiated, for example, by the Conquista of South
America, the African slave trade, the Indian famines of the late nineteenth century, the
Herero and Nama genocide in German South‐West Africa, the Armenian genocide during
the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Turkish Republic,10 and the
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we look at history in this way, our moral and
philosophical obligation after Auschwitz is to ensure in accordance with the New
Categorical Imperative that Auschwitz is the last catastrophe of this kind.
Finlayson (2002) pays close attention to the epistemic aspects of Adorno’s impossibility claim
about goodness, meaning, and truth. He is especially interested in affinities between negative
theology and Adorno’s negative dialectics. The point of contact between negative theology and
negative dialectics is the motive of a ban on graven images. Adorno employs this motive when
he describes his materialism and openly acknowledges the theological origin of this motive:
The materialistic longing, to comprehend the thing, wishes the opposite; the full object could
only be thought devoid of images. Such imagelessness converges with the theological ban on
the graven image. Materialism secularized it, by not permitting utopia to be positively pictured;
that is the content of its negativity. It comes to agree with theology there, where it is most
materialistic. (Adorno 1970–86, 6:207)
In accordance with this passage, after Auschwitz, goodness, meaning, and truth may be
said to have become utopian ideas that cannot be represented in concepts any longer.
Therefore philosophy has to shift its perspective away from conceptualization and toward
a peculiar range of experiences. As Finlayson puts it, “philosophy’s concern is to reflect on
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After Auschwitz
its inevitable failure to say what cannot be said and to describe the experience of being
shown something that arises from that failure” (Finlayson 2002, 15). To comprehend the
matter in question, in place of having a conceptual representation of it, we have to expose
ourselves to an experience that includes the ostensive demonstration that our concepts
with respect to this matter are insufficient. If we want to understand why we cannot appeal
to goodness, meaning, or truth after Auschwitz, we have to confront the evil of Auschwitz.
This confrontation is to show us why the catastrophe of Auschwitz separates us from
goodness, meaning, and truth. It is to show us why we struggle to make our situation after
Auschwitz intelligible, but also, as Finlayson emphasizes, why we ought to resist social
evils by continuing to discriminate between right and wrong, by being just and sympathetic
toward others (2002, 6–7). Crucially, he argues, our resistance to evil is intelligible only if
we understand our agency as directed at something positive – the good, the meaningful,
the true – that is withdrawn or ineffable (11).
Ineffability, Finlayson proposes, is the concept that connects Adorno’s negative dialectics
with negative theology. Negative theology argues that our concepts are too limited to repre-
sent God’s transcendent attributes – infinity and ubiquity, omnipotence, all‐goodness, omni-
science. Therefore God’s attributes can only be shown to us, which makes us realize our
cognitive limits in the very medium of cognition and thus gives us knowledge of our ignorance.
Finlayson argues that something similar is true of Adorno’s negative dialectics: although
goodness, meaning, and truth cannot be represented after Auschwitz, in experiencing our
situation after Auschwitz openly, we also come to understand why we cannot comprehend
goodness, meaning, and truth and in this way educate ourselves about our ignorance of them.
Learned ignorance is intrinsically valuable for negative theology because it reinforces
faith in what is ineffable – God. But it is difficult to accept on the terms of Adorno’s critical
theory that, to make our situation after Auschwitz intelligible, goodness, meaning, and
truth have to be retained as ineffable articles of faith. As Finlayson concedes, what is
evoked by ineffable goodness – unease at moral wrongdoing, outrage at injustices, horror
at the mistreatment of others – is not the same as trying to prevent torture, violence, and
hunger in accordance with the New Categorical Imperative (2002, 19). It is not the same
because we possess certainties rather than learned ignorance about the possibility that
civilization can collapse into barbarism. Even if we fail to conceptualize the enormity of
this collapse adequately, we cannot ignore it. It seems reasonable to assume that what
motivates us to think and act after Auschwitz and what makes our compromised agency
after Auschwitz intelligible for us has to do with these certainties, with what we cannot
ignore, rather than with the ineffable good.
What speaks in favor of this assumption is that, according to Adorno, metaphysical
concepts fail for a material reason, namely for their denigration of the somatic. While this
denigration has its roots in traditional ideas about the cultivation of the intellect, which
might have had their legitimate historical place in the past, after Auschwitz, this t raditional
emphasis on the intellect separates us further from meaning and truth:
The somatic layer of living beings, distant from meaning, is the staging ground of suffering,
which burned everything assuaging about the Spirit and its objectification, culture, without
consolation in the camps. The process by which metaphysics is irresistibly borne to what it was
once conceived against, has reached its vanishing‐point. (Adorno 1970–86, 6:358)
Metaphysics was intended to reflect things of ultimate significance (6:354). After

Auschwitz, Adorno insists, we cannot ignore the destructive side of this intention. Ultimate
577
CHRISTIAN SKIRKE
significance is reflected in universal concepts under which particular contents are sub-
sumed. This logic, identity‐thinking, turns the particular into an aberrance from the norm.
In the last instance, Adorno argues, identity‐thinking also licenses torture and violence in
the service of universality and normality: just as universal concepts make the particular
disappear by equalizing particulars with each other, torture and violence brutalize and
destroy what is aberrant. Therefore philosophy after Auschwitz has to recover traces of
significance by prioritizing the aberrant and particular, the nonidentical, over the general
and categorial.
This attention to significance in the particular explains Adorno’s claim that his materi-
alism holds on to metaphysical concerns with goodness, meaning, and truth in the
qualified way that he calls solidarity with metaphysics:
The feeling which after Auschwitz baulks at every assertion of positivity of existence as sanc-
timonious prattle, as injustice to the victims; at squeezing any meaning, be it ever so washed‐
out, out of their fate, has its objective moment after events which condemn the construction
of a meaning of immanence, which radiates from an affirmatively posited transcendence, to a
mockery. (Adorno 1970–86, 6:354)
Consequently, in rejecting conventional metaphysics, Adorno does not speak of the

conceptual refutation of dogmatism or the negation of fixed partial truths – these were
Kant’s and Hegel’s projects respectively –, but of a negative impulse. To philosophy after
Auschwitz, affirmative ontological talk or appeals to transcendent sources of meaning are
mere hypocritical sermonizing and false solace. As another passage from Negative Dialectics
has it, “after Auschwitz, no word intoned from on high, nor any theological one, has any
right in its original form” (6:360). Paradigmatic instances of human destructiveness like
Auschwitz undermine all absolutes – the good, the true, the beautiful – because they defy
all comprehension sub specie aeternitatis. This includes their comprehension in terms of
negative absolutes, for example in terms of evil or untruth. To take seriously Adorno’s
claim that traditional philosophy has become impossible after Auschwitz means to pay
close attention to recalcitrant phenomena that elude conventional categorization. To
inhabit a critical attitude, including one’s repulsion by affirmative ontological talk or
appeals to transcendent sources, means to look for goodness, meaning, and truth in the
thick of experience, especially in places where our preconceptions about goodness,
meaning, and truth lose their grip.
5. Education
After his return to Frankfurt, Adorno made it his purpose to challenge the quietist and
conciliatory discourse of postwar Western Germany. A significant portion of his public
interventions in the 1950s and 1960s was concerned with pedagogical questions: how to
educate future generations so that they make it their moral purpose that Auschwitz must
not be repeated.
To contextualize Adorno’s views on education after Auschwitz, his public presence in
newspapers, radio broadcasts, or on television may be understood as a dialectical response
to another famous philosophical intervention in German public discourse, Fichte’s 1808
Addresses to the German Nation. Fichte has a similar starting point, education, and, not
578
After Auschwitz
entirely unlike Adorno, expects education to promote a deep moral reorientation by exer-
cising “an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action” (Fichte 1979,
14). However, Fichte takes central ideas of his “new education” to ends that are diametri-
cally opposed to those of Adorno 150 years later: a political and cultural reassertion of
Germany in the name of the special and superior mission of the German people. The sig-
nificance of Fichte’s Addresses for German nationalism throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, especially in pedagogical circles, is well known (see Wood 2016,
26–27).11 In his public addresses about education after Auschwitz, Adorno takes on this
whole tangled tradition.
As the opening sentences of Adorno’s 1966 radio lecture “Education After Auschwitz”
state, his foremost demand on education is that it abide by the New Categorical Imperative
(1970–86, 10.2:674/1998, 191). He deplores that this demand has not yet resonated
with the educational practice of his times; and he explains this lack of resonance with the
dialectical embroilment of education, a civilizing activity, with barbarism (see also his
1965 lecture “Taboos on the Teaching Vocation,” 10.2:656–73/177–90. On the one
hand, traditional education sensitizes pupils to the world, to its complexity and beauty; on
the other hand, it dulls their intellect and character by subjecting them to drill and disci-
pline. Adorno argues that education after Auschwitz has to counter the barbarism of con-
temporary society by countering the barbarism of educational practices. In particular, it
has to contribute to a general culture of critical reflection (10.2:676/194); and it has to
find means to circumvent the development of manipulative and sadistic personalities as
well as that of personalities that are happy to subordinate themselves to the collective
(10.2 683–6/198–200).
The main target of Adorno’s proposal is the Mitläufer phenomenon that played a
major role in the catastrophe of Auschwitz, where the silent majority of Germans turned
a blind eye to the deportation of their Jewish neighbors. Mitläufer quietly went along
with Nazi violence against Jews and others targeted by racist and discriminatory Nazi
policies although they did not have much ideological rapport with these measures;
rather, they acted out of opportunism or cowardice. Education after Auschwitz is to
foster just and sympathetic attitudes that would allow people to resist pernicious
tendencies of the collective instead of becoming Mitläufer: “If the entire cultural con-
sciousness really became permeated with the idea of the pathogenic character of the
tendencies that came into their own at Auschwitz, then perhaps people would better
control those tendencies” (Adorno 1970–86, 10.2:689/1998, 203). On Adorno’s account,
the generation after Auschwitz ought to learn to take the side of the victim against societal
pressures instead of just giving in to them.
How sudden opportunistic and conformist traits show when national cultures and
characters get glorified can be gleaned again from Fichte’s Addresses. His eulogy of what he
took to be German exploits in arts and crafts culminates in the revealing statement “that
the German burghers were the civilized people, and the others the barbarians” (Fichte
1979, 104). In light of what happened about one century and a half after Fichte’s eulogy,
we might say that the pathos of Fichte’s statement anticipates unintentionally what
becomes a certainty after Auschwitz: the louder our claims to civilization and erudition,
the weaker our empathy for others and the stronger our propensity for transgressions
against them. Adorno’s efforts as a public intellectual after Auschwitz were directed against
this dialectic and devoted to creating a cultural climate that would encourage self‐critique,
modesty, and empathy.
579
CHRISTIAN SKIRKE
6. A Perspective
Adorno’s reflections on art, life, and thought after Auschwitz denounce indifference in
action and in thought as the origin of discrimination and violence. In denouncing indiffer-
ence, Adorno addresses actual and potential perpetrators, especially actual and potential
Mitläufer, on behalf of those marginalized, excluded, persecuted, tortured, starved, or
murdered.
His insights are relevant for understanding discrimination, torture, starvation, and
displacement today. It is a persistent phenomenon that victims of discrimination and vio-
lence have to make themselves heard against a prevailing discourse that, out of neglect,
disinterest, or injustice, is reluctant to listen to their voices and does not even allow them
to articulate the horrors they underwent. Those of us who are not victims of discrimination
and violence are immediately implicated in their misery because it is on account of our
neglect, disinterest, or injustice that victims of discrimination and violence are left to
struggle on their own. This holds today for countless people who are marginalized within
our affluent societies for reasons of culture, race, or gender, who are forcefully displaced
and mistreated wherever they come from and wherever they arrive, whose ancestors have
been abducted, enslaved, and tortured, who suffer from mass economic violence through
a combination of hunger and deprivation, prison‐like labor regimes, squalid living condi-
tions, and high‐risk working environments.
Adorno’s reflections on life after Auschwitz strike a chord with these urgent concerns of
our times. The least his reflections can do for us is to train us to see the dehumanizing logic of
those practices. His reflections can forewarn those who are on the safe side of these practices
that not to resist this logic amounts to passing over in silence the worst transgressions against
others. Especially our attitudes toward people from those parts of the world that were brutal-
ized and exploited for centuries under the pretext of the civilizing mission of the West testify
to this specific inhumanity, as Adorno notes in 1966, over half a century ago:
Moral questions are stringent […] in sentences like: torture ought to be abolished; concentration
camps ought not to exist, while all this continues in Africa and Asia and is only repressed
because civilized humanity is as inhuman as ever against those which it shamelessly brands as
uncivilized. (Adorno 1970–86, 6:281)
It is not unlikely that Adorno’s diagnosis would be exactly the same today.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1970–86). Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1981). Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1992). Notes to Literature, vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1993–). Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung IV: Vorlesungen. Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T.W. (1997). Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1998). Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1999). Problems of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity.
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1969). Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente.
Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer.
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After Auschwitz
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.

Bernstein, J. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Celan, P. (2003). Collected Prose. Manchester: Carcanet.
Claussen, D. (1988). Nach Auschwitz. Ein Essay über die Aktualität Adornos. In: Zivilisationsbruch:
Denken nach Auschwitz (ed. D. Diner), 54–68. Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer.
Domin, H. (1968). Wozu Lyrik Heute? Dichtung und Leser in der gesteuerten Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/
Main: S. Fischer.
Enzensberger, H.M. (1959). Die Steine der Freiheit. Merkur 13: 770–775.
Fichte, J.G. (1979). Addresses to the German Nation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Finlayson, J.G. (2002). Adorno on the ethical and the ineffable. European Journal of Philosophy 10:
1–25.
Finlayson, J.G. (2015). The artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno. European Journal of
Philosophy 23: 392–419.
Freyenhagen, F. (2011). Adorno’s ethics without the ineffable. Telos 155: 127–149.
University Press.
Geuss, R. (2006). Celan’s Meridian. Boundary 2 33: 201–226.
Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kohlmann, U. (1997). Dialektik der Moral: Untersuchungen zur Moralphilosophie Adornos. Lüneburg:
Zu Klampen.
Schweppenhäuser, G. (1993). Ethik nach Auschwitz: Adornos negative Moralphilosophie. Hamburg:
Argument.
Skirke, C. (2008). Do our actions make any difference in the wrong life? Adorno on moral facts and
moral dilemmas. Philosophy and Social Criticism 34: 737–758.
Stein, P. (1996). “Darum mag falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz ließe kein Gedicht mehr sich
schreiben.” (Adorno): Widerruf eines Verdikts? Ein Zitat und seine Verkürzung. Weimarer Beiträge
4: 485–508.
Weiss, P. (1968). Rapporte. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Wood, A.W. (2016). Fichte’s Ethical Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zilcosky, J. (2005). Poetry after Auschwitz? Celan and Adorno revisited. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift
für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 79: 670–691.
Further Reading
Agamben, G. (2000). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive Translated by D. Heller‐
Roazen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neiman, S. (2004). Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Chapter 4).
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rubenstein, R.L. (1992). After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2e. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wellmer, A. (1998). Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity: Essays and Lectures Translated
by D. Midgley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Essays 6 and 7.
Notes
1 I owe this point to a discussion with Stefan Niklas.

2 The German original says: “Der Philosoph Theodor W. Adorno hat einen Satz ausgesprochen,
der zu den härtesten Urteilen gehört, die über unsere Zeit gefällt werden können: Nach Auschwitz
581
CHRISTIAN SKIRKE
sei es nicht mehr möglich, ein Gedicht zu schreiben. Wenn wir weiterleben wollen, muß dieser
Satz widerlegt werden. Wenige vermögen es” (Enzensberger 1959, 772).
3 “Den 20. Jänner ging Lenz durchs Gebirg.” Celan uses the motive of Lenz’ journey through the
mountains before his Meridian speech, in his fictional dialog “Gespräch im Gebirg,” written in
1959. In this piece, he imagines a conversation between Adorno and himself after their planned
meeting in the Swiss Alps had to be postponed. The title does not just allude to the intended
setting of their meeting but also, evident from the archaism “Gebirg” instead of “Gebirge,” to the
opening sentence of Büchner’s Lenz, which uses the same archaism.
4 English translations from Negative Dialektik are adopted from Dennis Redmond’s online resource
(www.efn.org/~dredmond/nd.html).
5 My remarks largely follow Freyenhagen’s negative Aristotelian interpretation of Adorno (see
especially Freyenhagen 2013, 246–247). I have benefited greatly from Josef Früchtl’s comments
on, and detailed disagreements with, this line of interpretation.
6 Examples are Carnap’s famous paper “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis
of Language” and Neurath’s “Radical Physicalism and the ‘Real World.’”
7 In the philosophy of religion, the concept of a negative theodicy is used very differently. Whereas
a regular theodicy takes the existence of supreme goodness as its premise and argues for its com-
patibility with manifest evil, a negative theodicy argues for the existence of supreme goodness
from the premise that evil is manifest. The negative theodicy thus relates to its affirmative coun-
terpart like modus tollens to modus ponens. Neither kind of theodicy puts the compatibility of
manifest evil and supreme goodness in question.
8 I am much indebted to Sidra Shahid for her insightful and meticulous comments on the meta-
physical, epistemological, and phenomenological aspects of this article.
9 Wittgenstein’s conception of family resemblance seems appropriate in this context, because
thinking of Auschwitz as one catastrophe among others in terms of conceptual inclusion or
nominalist resemblance is incoherent with Adorno’s philosophical aims.
10 Adorno mentions the Armenian genocide specifically in “Education after Auschwitz,” among
other reasons because the German military was informed about it and condoned it (1970–86,
10.2:675/1998, 192).
11 The full picture of Fichte’s Addresses is complex, especially because the German nation he envis-
ages is not totalitarian but republican. However, the relevant point in the context of the present
article is that Fichte’s Addresses pioneer arguments for German exceptionalism that have been
taken up by later German nationalists and by the Nazis.
582
37
Forever Resistant? Adorno and Radical

Transformation of Society
MAEVE COOKE
Adorno is first and foremost a critical theorist of society. Critical social theories seek
radically to change existing social reality in ways that enable freedom, justice, happiness,
or some other good, for every human individual in equal measure. By “radical change” is
meant change “from the roots up”: transformation of the fundamental structures of
society. Furthermore, they offer a critical analysis of the contemporary world that is
supposed to motivate human agents to engage in praxis – transformative activity of an
emancipatory kind. In the Frankfurt School tradition, the importance of connecting
theory to praxis has been of central concern. Thus, Max Horkheimer, in the Postscript to
his programmatic essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” published in 1937, highlights
the practical orientation of Critical Theory. Whereas traditional theory is concerned solely
with increase in knowledge, Critical Theory seeks the emancipation of humans from
enslaving social conditions (Horkheimer 1972, 246). Moreover, Horkheimer emphasizes
that Critical Theory does not just provide research hypotheses that have to be tested
through human action; it is itself a force for emancipation: It is an essential element in the
historical effort to create forms of societal life that satisfy the needs and powers of humans
in all their potentialities (Horkheimer 1972, 245–246).
For the early Marx in his writings with Engels, theory contributes to the emancipatory
struggle in two main ways. First, communist theory articulates in generally accessible
terms what the suffering working classes know already; it is the theoretical expression of
an “already existing class struggle.” Second, it provides leadership in planning and
organizing the actual revolution. The communists are the “most advanced and resolute”
section of the working‐class parties and push forward all the other sections; this is because
theoretically “they have the advantage over the great mass of the proletariat of clearly
understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the
proletarian movement” (Marx and Engels 1848).
In his 1937 essay Horkheimer takes a somewhat different view. As for Marx and Engels,
theory is seen as a force for societal transformation but its primary functions, now, are not
articulation and active leadership. In the changed historical situation of the mid‐1930s,
Horkheimer sees the primary task of Critical Theory as disclosive. It must open people’s eyes
to the reality of the current societal conditions and to the need to revolt against them: it
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MAEVE COOKE
must become “a critical, promotive factor in the development of the masses” (Horkheimer
1972, 214). For, as capitalism has developed it has produced societal conditions in which
the proletariat is no longer able to recognize the socio‐economic and political causes of its
enslavement. Though Critical Theory’s emancipatory concerns are those of “most men,”
they are not recognized by them as such (Horkheimer 1972, 218). This entails an enhanced
role for Critical Theory as an agent of societal transformation. Now, its tasks are not simply
to give voice to the struggles and wishes of the age, and to provide leadership, but also to
enlighten the masses as to the need for emancipatory struggle and what they should
struggle and wish for. However, its enlightening tasks are severely impeded by propaganda
machines, which close most people’s ears and eyes to its message. In consequence, the
prospects of theory motivating the masses to engage in radically transformative action are
slim. Theory goes underground, its truth kept alive by “small groups of men,” pending
more favorable historical circumstances (Horkheimer 1972, 241).
By the 1940s, Horkheimer’s view of the relation between theory and praxis was
different again. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, jointly written with Adorno, Critical Theory’s
task continues to be primarily a disclosing critique, but critique and praxis are effectively
uncoupled. The primary purpose of disclosure is no longer motivation toward radically
transformative societal action, but rather the self‐critique of reason that, at best, may help
to prevent further disaster. Indeed, Critical Theory should not even attempt to motivate
action, for any emancipatory message it could offer the general masses would be corrupted
by the societal processes that have led to domination in the first place (Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002).
Following his return to Frankfurt with the Institute for Social Research in 1951,
Horkheimer’s writings consisted mainly of essays and lectures; these do not present a clear
theoretical stance on the theory–praxis relationship. There is some evidence, however, that
he upheld the view adopted in Dialectic of Enlightenment, whereby the main function of
theory, in the given historical circumstances, is to reflect upon, and give expression to, “the
self‐surrender by reason of its status as a spiritual substance” (Horkheimer 1974, viii).
Adorno, too, returned with the institute to Frankfurt, producing some of his most
important theoretical work in this period. He explicitly addresses the question of theory
and praxis and modifies his view of their relationship. He now offers an account of critical
thinking in general, and Critical Theory in particular, as active forces for changing
social reality.
Moreover, on his return to Frankfurt Adorno became politically engaged as a critical
public intellectual in the new Federal Republic of Germany (Müller‐Doohm 2005; Delanty
2007). He delivered numerous radio talks and academic lectures, in which he consistently
emphasized the importance of “ruthless criticism” of the existing societal order.1 He was
also deeply concerned with political education and teacher training (Adorno 2005b,
2005c, 2005d). Vocal in his opinion that National Socialism was still alive in Germany, he
warned against the temptation to close the book on the past and to erase it completely from
memory (Adorno 2005c). He publicly voiced his commitment to democracy, contributed
to public policy‐making in the area of criminal law reform and participated actively in
public rallies again the emergency laws (Adorno 1969a; 2005c). Nonetheless, in the
1960s, a time of active protest against established norms and the underlying socio‐
economic and political conditions, he was widely perceived by his activist contemporaries
as adopting an attitude of resignation that stood in blatant contradiction to the aims of his
critical social theory. This led increasingly to hostile and sometimes aggressive attacks.
Many of these came from his own students.2
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Forever Resistant? Adorno and Radical Transformation of Society
Adorno summarizes their objections as follows:

The person who doubts the possibility of radical transformation of society, and who
therefore neither participates in spectacular, violent actions nor recommends them, has
succumbed to resignation. He does not believe that his vision could be realized; in fact, he
doesn’t even want to realize it. By leaving social conditions as they are, he condones them
without admitting it (Adorno 2005g, 289, translation modified).
In recent years, much has been written in defense of Adorno, helping to counter sim-
plistic accusations of resignation (Müller‐Dohm 2005; Cook 2004; Hammer 2005;
Freyenhagen 2014). Adorno himself took the accusations seriously, responding to them
carefully and in many respects persuasively (Adorno 2005f, 2005g). However, like some of
his more sympathetic critics (Zuidervaart 2009), I am not entirely persuaded by his
response. My concerns in this chapter are twofold. First, I seek to ascertain where exactly
Adorno stands with regard to the relationship between theory and praxis from the 1950s
onwards. I pay special attention to his claim that critical thinking and Critical Theory are
active forces for changing society for the better and, as such, forms of praxis. My question
here is: are they radically transformative? Since Adorno himself consistently underscores
the need for radical societal transformation, this question is of central importance. Second,
I consider the adequacy of his position from the point of view of Critical Theory’s
fundamental concern with radical societal transformation. I draw attention to three
troubling elements in his account of the theory–praxis relationship, suggesting that
Adorno could dispense with them at no cost to his theory.
1. Theory and Praxis
In the 1950s and 1960s, Adorno defines the tasks of Critical Theory in negative terms: its
main concern must be preventing further catastrophe, not progressing toward an eman-
cipated society. National Socialism and Stalinism are specific manifestations of the con-
temporary catastrophe. On a more general level, the catastrophe is the all‐pervasive
technologization of human life that has led to its thorough‐going instrumentalization.
However, it is not technology that is the catastrophe but its imbrication with the social
relations that enable it (Adorno 2003, 119).
The salient characteristics of the contemporary catastrophe include:
• The reduction of the world to mere material for processing, entirely devoid of quality,
with a consequent loss of qualitative life‐experience.
• The prioritization of usefulness and efficiency over qualitative experiences between
human subjects and with their nonhuman others.
• The all‐pervasiveness of the principle of exchange, leading to complete fungibility.
• The subjection of human individuals to the power of the totality, reducing them to
appendages of a societal machine, compelled even in their most intimate impulses to
subordinate themselves to its mechanisms and to accept certain social roles.
• The imprisonment of human thought and action within a system of pure immanence;
with a resulting loss of spontaneity and paralysis of ability to imagine the world in
concrete terms as anything other than it appears to be, leading in turn to fixed and
manipulated minds that themselves become a force for repression.
• Hollowed‐out subjects, separated from others by an abyss and thrown back upon their
empty selves.
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An emancipated society, by contrast, would be a social and spiritual cosmos with sub-
stance (in a Hegelian sense); it would be perceived by the individual human subjects who
inhabit it as unquestionably binding, but in contrast to the allegedly socially cohesive
bonds of the collectives invoked by many of his German contemporaries in the 1950s and
1960s (Adorno 2005d, 194–195), its bonds would be free of force and inclusive, rather
than repressive and exclusionary (Adorno 1993a, 24). In line with this, it would foster
particularity and singularity, preserving “its societalized human subjects according to
their potentialities” (Adorno 2005f, 272–273). Furthermore, it would be a condition of
reconciliation, envisioned as both a radical transfiguration of the historical subject–object
dyad and a “dark romantic union with nature” (Hammer 2005, 105–106). This vision of
reconciliation is one of peace and genuine communication between human subjects and
with their nonhuman others, in which each human subject freely and unreservedly gives
itself over to the object; in doing so, it recognizes its own origins in nature and acknowl-
edges itself as part object, thereby “soothing nature’s terror” (Adorno 1973, 397, 2005e,
148, cf. 2005g, 743).
Preventing catastrophe calls for resistance in the form of theoretically guided critical
reflection. Adorno vehemently rejects calls by his contemporaries for radical change by
way of direct interventions, in which theory provides motivational leadership that
translates immediately into action. Critical Theory’s task at this time is not to motivate
emancipatory action but to interpret existing social reality and to identify the societal
causes of its catastrophic tendencies. Furthermore, aided by philosophy, theory should
foster autonomous reflection and self‐reflection, which helps human individuals to gain
affective detachment from the established societal order and facilitates the development of
an intellectual attitude of ruthless criticism toward it. Aided by art, it should keep alive the
importance of momentary metaphysical experiences, which intimate the possibility of
transcendence of the current, catastrophic, societal system and permit hope that there
could be something more than these conditions.
Adorno consistently emphasizes the contextual, pragmatic basis for his position. His
claim is not that resistance is in principle the only defensible mode of societal transforma-
tion. Rather, he views it as the only one that could have any transformative impact in the
given historical conjuncture; furthermore, as the one least likely to have counterproductive
consequences.
Adorno’s view that, in the given historical circumstances, the task of theory is primarily
interpretive can be extrapolated from the famous, aphoristic, opening lines of Negative Dialectics:
Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.
The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that it was crippled by resig-
nation in the face of reality, becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the
world failed (Adorno 1973, 3, translation amended).
Here Adorno obliquely references Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers
have only interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 1845).
Marx in turn is referring to Hegel’s view that philosophy, as the owl of Minerva, always
comes too late to actually change the world; instead it interprets it retrospectively (Hegel
1967). In the passage Adorno appears to be reaffirming Hegel against Marx. Hegel’s view
is deemed to have a renewed relevance, because in the historical moment discerned by
Marx, when direct intervention (revolution) might indeed have changed the world, the
change did not in fact happen.3
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Explaining why it did not happen calls for the interpretative powers of Critical Theory in
two respects. First, Critical Theory must probe possible shortcomings in Marxist theory in
order to understand its failure to translate into a praxis that succeeded in radically chang-
ing the world. Second, it must provide a correct interpretation of the subjective and
objective factors that have produced, and continue to produce, the existing, catastrophic
societal order.
Adorno discerns in Marx’s work tendencies toward a forced prioritization of action over
theory (Adorno 2005f, 278, 2005g, 290). Moreover, he considers Marx’s mature critique
of capitalism theoretically impoverished, accusing the Critique of Political Economy of
lacking all concrete transitions to actually, societally transformative praxis: “It lacks a
program for action, it does not tell us how to start a revolution. Marx hardly moves beyond
the philosopheme that only the proletariat are the cause of an emancipated state” (Marx
1859; Adorno 2005f, 277). It is similarly reticent with regard to a positive description of a
classless society. His Capital contains numerous invectives, most often against economists
and philosophers, but no program for action (Marx 1867; Adorno 2005f, 277).
Even if Adorno’s criticisms of Marxist theory are convincing, his reaffirmation of Hegel
against Marx, with its emphasis on interpretation rather than action, makes him vulner-
able to the accusation of resignation in the case of his own theory’s powers to contribute
substantively and concretely to radical societal transformation. Is this accusation justified?
My answer is a qualified yes.
Certainly, Adorno does not endorse “resignation in the face of reality.” Instead, he
argues for an understanding of Critical Theory as inseparable from praxis; and, as
mentioned, as itself an active force for transformation (here, my distinction between
transformation and radical transformation is crucial). In his writings and public contri-
butions from the early 1960s onward, he leaves no doubt that his main objection to
demands by his contemporaries for radical societal transformation is to activity of the
kind he calls actionism (Aktionismus) (Adorno 2005g). Actionism has its home in the
dehumanizing pseudo‐reality generated by contemporary societal conditions. The
subjective side of this pseudo‐reality is pseudo‐activity (Adorno 2005f, 269–270). He
characterizes such activity as the attempt to rescue enclaves of immediacy in the midst
of a thoroughly mediated and rigidified society. These attempts are futile, but are ratio-
nalized as transformative by the activists themselves, who claim that every small change
is a step on the long path toward radical change of the whole system. Adorno considers
their endeavors not just futile but likely to be counterproductive. Actionism distracts
from the only kind of genuinely transformative praxis possible in the societal conditions
of the time. Genuinely transformative praxis is resistance to the power of the totality in
the form of unrelenting, unsparing self‐reflection and reflection based on a theoretically
guided interpretation of the causes of the current catastrophe. Actionism works against
the required societal transformation, since it generates the false belief that resistance of
this kind is not necessary; it thereby not only serves the power of the totality, it strengthens
it. The distraction is all the more effective because it is not intentional. Rather, it is based
on self‐delusion on the part of the activists, who are convinced that their actions are
societally transformative. They are not. Instead, they are the actions of unfree individ-
uals, paralyzed in their spontaneity, who through supposedly transformative interven-
tions, delude themselves that everything depends on them (Adorno 2005g, 291).
Adorno holds that progressive praxis has a genuine immediacy that presupposes free
and autonomous agents;4 however, such agency is seriously under threat in the given his-
torical situation – on occasion, Adorno proclaims dramatically that it no longer exists
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(Adorno 2005f, 270). Indeed, he asserts that free and autonomous agency is fully possible
only for saints, who are able to escape the pressure to conform to the norms imposed by the
all‐pervasive technologization of late capitalist societies – but “even a saint’s existence is
precarious today” (Adorno 2000, 168). For ordinary mortals, in the contemporary
situation, freedom and autonomy are available at best only in compromised form. The
same holds for resistance to the norms of the prevailing rationality, for opting‐out, not
joining‐in, not conforming (nicht mitspielen): it too is inevitably compromised. Even the
subject’s ruthless critical reflection on its own not joining‐in or opting‐out may not in the
end make any difference to its conformity: to think it could may be self‐delusion (Adorno
2000, 168). Furthermore, given the pressure to conform, even subjects who have grasped
the importance of freedom and autonomy (and the vast majority have not) must maintain
the utmost critical detachment from all positive ideas and concrete images of an alternative,
better form of life, for such ideas and images are themselves inevitably infected by the very
norms to which they purport to represent an alternative.
Freedom and autonomy are seriously compromised under the catastrophic societal con-
ditions in large part due to a standardized mass culture (Adorno 1991, 133–134). In
addition, the weight of the totality presses down on individuals, producing a widespread,
multifaceted impotency: spontaneity dries up under the pressure of the given, the imagi-
nation is paralyzed, minds become fixed and manipulated (Adorno 2003, 120; Freyenhagen
2014, 871). In short, pseudo‐activity is the deceptive façade of a debilitated praxis on the
part of diminished and petrified individuals.
Furthermore, no collective subject has emerged to replace the proletariat as the agent of
radical societal transformation and, in the given historical conjuncture, is highly unlikely
to do so (Freyenhagen 2014, 871). Drawing on Freud’s diagnosis of a crisis of the individual
in the wake of the First World War, and a new willingness to yield unquestioningly to pow-
erful outside societal agencies (Adorno 1991, 119), Adorno views the forms of collective
agency that have emerged with the development of capitalism as opiates (Adorno 2005f,
276). Such collectives offer security at the cost of autonomous thinking. The individual is
enjoined to cede himself to the collective: “as recompense … he is promised the grace of
being chosen, of belonging” (Adorno 2005f, 276). Thus, they not only attest to the perva-
siveness of fearful and weak agency; they promote such agency through demanding
allegiance, often requiring proof of unconditional support from their members through
signatures (he frequently refers disparagingly to the injunction “sign here!” [Adorno
2005f, 276, 2005g, 292]).
In addition, Adorno objects that actionism encourages violence, thereby reinforcing the
violence of the existing societal conditions. As the National Socialist and Stalinist atroc-
ities and the longevity of totalitarian repression show, violence is inextricably imbricated
in what needs to be transformed (Adorno 2005f, 268).5
Finally, Adorno objects to the activist view that small changes are steps toward radical
transformation of the whole system. This objection has at least two components. One is his
mistrust of isolated reforms, for example, educational ones, and of piecemeal political
interventions by activists. He considers such isolated and piecemeal efforts at radical
societal change ineffective and, indeed, possibly counterproductive, since they are likely to
reinforce the factors causing the contemporary catastrophe (Adorno 1993a, 15, 37,
clearer in 1959, 93, 119, 2005f, 268; Freyenhagen 2014, 872). They are ineffective
because they lack a theoretical grasp of the objective historical situation; in consequence,
the agents involved fail to see how the objective circumstances structure the societal
totality in ways that renders consciousness generally impotent. He holds that only a
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theoretical stance that considers society as an all‐encompassing system would be able c orrectly
to identify these objective factors, as a first step toward changing the general c onsciousness.
This in turn is the precondition for r adically transforming the objective conditions. A view of
this kind is implicit in his criticisms of the privileging of tactics by contemporary activists; they
are concerned only with what “has to be done” in the immediate situation,6 blind to the need
to grasp theoretically what is wrong with the very system; as a result, the means of societal
transformation serve ends on which there is no reflection (Adorno 2005f, 268–269).
Adorno does not only warn against isolated, piecemeal, supposedly transformative,
direct interventions; in addition, he is hostile to hopes for gradual or incremental societal
change. This appears to be connected with his view that “history is discontinuous in the
sense that it represents life perennially disrupted” (Adorno 2006, 91). The thesis of histor-
ical discontinuity can be understood both as the claim that the movement of history is not
a linear progression and as the claim that historical progress depends on disruptive events,
for example on intermittent revolutionary interventions. Adorno appears to hold both
theses (Adorno 2005e). We may assume that the first thesis is directed against Hegel (and
Lukács) (Jay 1977; O’Connor 2008; 2011). The second thesis attests to the influence of
Walter Benjamin on Adorno’s view of genuinely progressive history, despite his rejection
of Benjamin’s idea of messianic redemption (O’Connor 2008, 186).
Adorno breaks decisively with the Hegelian idea of universal history, in which history is
a continuous, though agonistic, process of development (Adorno 1973). However, he also
distances himself from Walter Benjamin’s view that genuine progress would require a
messianic transformation of time (Pensky 2004, 193). In his correspondence with
Benjamin in the 1930s, Adorno criticizes his view of discontinuous history as insuffi-
ciently dialectical in a Marxist sense: as inattentive to how experiences of class‐based
oppression can generate a collective will for resistance, and, more generally, as disregarding
the connection between redemption and human agency (Adorno and Benjamin 1999).
Despite his own later reservations regarding both the possibility of qualitatively rich expe-
rience and the emergence of a collective subject under the societal conditions of late
capitalism, Adorno never embraces the messianic element in Benjamin’s view of history.
There are strong indications, however, that he remains influenced by his idea of history as
disruption. In his essay “Progress” he writes that history, although not organized unequiv-
ocally toward reconciliation, allows the possibility of redemption to flash up in the course
of its movement (Adorno 2005e, 148); similarly, he makes progress dependent on the very
establishment of humanity (Adorno 2005e, 144). In other words, progress breaks the flow
of history; it constitutes a new beginning. In the same vein, he writes that the current
forms of humanity’s global constitution threaten its life, if a self‐conscious global subject
does not develop and intervene; once more, redemption disrupts the historical process,
although this time disruption is an intentional act.
Adorno does not dispute the intimate unity of theory and praxis. Far from it. He calls
them “a polar couple” (Adorno 2005g, 277), indicating a tension between the two (Adorno
2000, 6). One source of tension is that praxis has a moment of spontaneity lacking in
theory. We have encountered this moment already: it is the genuine immediacy
characteristic of genuine praxis as opposed to the false immediacy of pseudo‐activity. For
Adorno, the assassination attack against Hitler on 20 July 1944 serves as an example. He
draws attention to what he sees as the spontaneous, immediate aspect of the conspirators’
protest: Ultimately, in the face of an unbearable moral situation they felt impelled to act,
irrespective of what terrible consequences their actions would have for themselves and
for those close to them (Adorno 2000, 8, 2005g, 274–275). But he also consistently
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underscores the interdependency of theory and praxis: they are mutually dependent on
each other, each pole necessary for the purposes of societal transformation. When split
apart, theory becomes powerless and praxis arbitrary (Adorno 2005f, 261). Theory split
off from praxis becomes empty and self‐complacent, a dead science or inconsequential
game (Adorno 2000, 6). Praxis split off from theory becomes activity for its own sake, be it
a hustling, bustling busyness (Betriebsamkeit) or actionism (Adorno 2000, 6). As we have
seen, praxis divorced from theory also serves the existing system and may even reinforce its
catastrophic tendencies. Indeed, praxis without theory is not only blind to its own purely
reactive character; it becomes, in addition, oppressive and violent (Adorno 2000). This is
because theory is necessary for insight into the existing societal conditions – in order to see
through and critically dissolve false forms of life and the system that generates them.
Adorno does not merely assert the unity of theory and praxis. His stronger thesis, as
mentioned, is that Critical Theory, and philosophy as a vital component of this, is itself
transformative: “Thinking is a doing, theory a form of praxis” (Adorno 2005f, 261), Indeed,
“theory is the guarantor of freedom in the midst of unfreedom” (Adorno 2005f, 263). In
the given historical conjuncture, its transformative power is negative: it is an active force for
resistance to the existing social conditions. Its guiding principle is the new genuinely binding
categorical imperative: “Never again Auschwitz” (Adorno 1973, 365; 2005c, 2005d).
Theory that is a genuine force for resistance, and hence truly transformative and progres-
sive, is distinguished from other kinds of theorizing by a range of features. These include:
• Ruthless questioning of concepts, norms, principles, institutions, practices, and tradi-

tions (Rücksichtslosigkeit).7
• A noninstrumentalizing approach to its object, in the sense of attentiveness to the
object’s particular qualities and a “bodily relation to ideas” (leibhafte Einfühlung mit
Ideen).8
• Disregard for its own instrumental value.9
• A nontotalizing approach, in the sense of dispensing with any limiting principle, in
contrast to Hegelian logic, which imprisons transcendence in immanence and chains
the absolute to its finite human modes.10
• Rejection of narratives of continuous historical progress.11
• Alertness to concrete possibilities for transformation within actual societies, in the
sense of attentiveness to the real in a Hegelian sense (1993a).12
• Attentiveness to subjective experiences of negativity within existing social reality,
which intimate the possibility of a qualitatively new and better form of human life.
None of these features dictates a view of the transformative power of theory as negative, in
the sense of restricted to resistance to the existing societal conditions. Nor does Adorno
propose such a view. As we know, his thesis has a specific historical index: the exclusively
interpretative and critical role he ascribes to theory is a result of the given conditions. As
already indicated, there are two aspects to these conditions, a subjective and an objective
one. The subjective side refers to the psychology and emotional make‐up of human subjects
(Adorno 2005d, 192). The objective side refers to the socio‐economic and political
conditions (Adorno 2005d). On a general level, the objective conditions with which he is
concerned are those of late capitalist societies.13 On many occasions, for instance, when
addressing the need for Germans to confront their National Socialist past, he is referring
specifically to the objective conditions of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s
and 1960s.
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Adorno offers some hope with regard to change on the subjective side. This accounts
for his “turn toward the subject” (Wendung aufs Subjekt) (Adorno 2005c, 102; 2005d,
193). Public education, aided by psychology and philosophy, can help to change self‐
consciousness and encourage critical thinking, thereby enabling human subjects to gain
insight into the all‐pervasive technologization of existing societal reality, and into their
own unacknowledged complicity with the societal processes that produce and reproduce it
(Adorno 2005c, 102; 2005d, 193).14 Psychology is important, too, for explanatory
purposes; Critical Theory draws productively on psychology to explain why people pas-
sively accept a state of destructive irrationality and integrate themselves into movements
obviously contradictory to their purposes (Adorno 2005f, 271). Nonetheless, Adorno
makes clear that it is ultimately the objective side that matters: “the danger is objective, not
primarily located in the individual” (Adorno 2005c, 99). Accordingly, the objective theory
of society has priority over psychology, which cannot address the decisive factors (Adorno
2005f, 270). (The same presumably holds for education.) In order to address the decisive
factors, sociology – of the right kind – is required: a critical theory of society that does not
fall victim to the universal fetishism of facts or objective laws, immobilizing things that
must be conceived of as in motion. Instead, social theory (of the right kind) helps to break
the spell by uncovering the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of
political and cultural forms (Adorno 2003, 125; cf. 2005d, 203).
As should now be clear, Adorno is considerably more pessimistic with regard to change
on the objective side. Since the objective side is ultimately decisive, his “turn to the sub-
ject” is a second‐best option: it may help to prevent the worst manifestations of technolo-
gization, but does little or nothing to change the fundamental structural conditions that
produce it. It seems safe to conclude therefore that theory for Adorno is an active force for
change, but it is not radically transformative: it does not change the fundamental struc-
ture of society. This helps to explain why he attributes to resistance an “element of
despair” arising from consciousness by the resisting individuals of their powerlessness to
change what really matters: the objective socio‐economic and political conditions
(Adorno 2000, 7, 168). It also accounts for his pessimism regarding the possibility of any
kind of “right politics,” and of any kind of “right life,” in the given historical conjuncture
(Adorno 2000, 176). Admittedly, on rare occasions, at odds with his usual rejection of
piecemeal change, he seems to recognize the possible incremental effects of the psychoan-
alytically informed, educational programs he proposes as a way for Germans to confront
their Nationalist Socialist past. He tentatively offers hope that they might lead to the
formation of “cadres” of enlightened men and women, who would work with their fellow
citizens to develop the powers of reflection demanded by the new categorical imperative:
“Never again Auschwitz” (Adorno 2005c, 100). But he almost immediately retracts his
offer of hope, by observing that such educational programs remain on the level of
subjective enlightenment, which is under great pressure from the objective power of the
prevailing societal conditions (Adorno 2005c, 102).
Our discussion has shown that there is some truth in the accusation that Adorno’s criti-
cal theory succumbs to resignation. Can he defuse this objection through his insistence on
the contextual, pragmatic status of his politics of resistance? I think he cannot. Certainly,
by repeatedly reminding us that his view of the theory–praxis relationship refers to the
current historical conjuncture, he suggests that a different view would be appropriate in a
fundamentally different one. However, his emphatic statements on the virtual impossi-
bility of change on the objective level and, hence, of establishing a fundamental different
societal condition, imply that his view will hold good for the foreseeable future.
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2. Resignation versus Radical Societal Transformation
Would the objection be defused if Adorno could demonstrate the virtual immutability
through human praxis of what he calls the objective societal conditions? If Adorno’s thesis
is correct, the objection does indeed lose much of its force. While it is beyond the scope of
this chapter adequately to assess the validity of the immutability claim, I now offer some
reasons to challenge it. I identify three questionable elements within Adorno’s theory push-
ing him toward the view that the objective conditions are virtually immutable and, hence,
toward a stance of resignation: first, a tacit dismissal of the possibility of radical societal
transformation through gradual or incremental changes; second, a privileging of (Adorno’s
version of ) theory as catalyst for the fundamental changes in individual and collective
consciousness required for radical societal transformation; and third, a privileging of the
critical theorist’s interpretations of social reality over subjective experiences of societally
produced suffering.
Concerning the first element, we have seen that, for Adorno, radical societal transforma-
tion is a matter of disruption. We will recall his remark on the need for a self‐conscious,
global subject to intervene and break the flow of history; also, that he sees no prospect of the
required intervention, since the objective societal conditions affect the constitution of sub-
jectivity in ways that prevent such a subject’s development. I do not dispute his claim that
the conditions for developing a self‐conscious global subject are unfavorable. I question,
rather, his claim that radical societal transformation depends on that subject’s intervention.
For one thing, the claim is coupled with a debatable yet unsubstantiated view of historical
progress as disruption. While he substantiates his view of discontinuous history primarily
through critical engagement with Hegel’s idea of continuous history (Adorno 1973,
1993b), his view of history as disruption receives scarce attention in his later work.15 For
another, the claim seems to rely on a debatable yet unsubstantiated view of radical change
as revolutionary change. Indeed, here he appears to conflate two distinct propositions,
running together a proposition about the need for radical societal transformation and a
proposition about revolution as the means for such transformation. However, there is no
necessary connection between radical societal transformation and revolution: one might
call for the former while rejecting the latter as a means of achieving it. This is the position
adopted by Michel Foucault, for example, who voices his antipathy to revolutions in a
number of writings. It is noteworthy that throughout his writings Foucault, like Adorno,
emphasizes the manifold ways in which society can dominate subjectivity. Moreover, like
Adorno, he sees the need for fundamental societal transformation. Unlike Adorno, however,
he advocates such societal transformation by way of gradual, incremental changes
(Foucault 1984, 2005). Rejecting revolutions as pernicious programs for a “new man”
accompanied by dreams of a rational and continuous history, he prefers the very specific
transformations that have taken place in a number of areas that concern relations to
authority, relations between the sexes, and the way in which we perceive insanity or illness
(Foucault 1984, 46–47). By contrast Adorno’s attitude toward revolution is ambiguous. As
we have seen, he finds Marx’s theory of revolutionary change impoverished and also dis-
cerns in it a forced prioritization of action over theory. Nonetheless, he seems indebted to a
broadly Marxist revolutionary paradigm, in which only revolution will bring about the
required fundamental change in consciousness. This may be why he fails to take seriously
alternative positions, such as the incrementalist views adopted by Foucault (and others, e.g.
Solnit 2016). This would help to explain his stance of resignation vis-a-vis the objective
societal conditions. For, if radical societal transformation depends on revolutionary change,
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if the existing societal conditions are hostile to revolutionary change, and if Critical Theory
lacks an adequate theory of revolutionary change, then any efforts at radical s ocietal trans-
formation will be futile or counterproductive.
A second element in Adorno’s theory contributing to his stance of resignation is an over-
inflation of the role of theory in bringing about changes in consciousness. At issue is not his
claim that praxis and theory are intimately entwined: his critique of actionism is well‐taken.
Nor is his claim that theory itself is a form of praxis in dispute. In question, rather, is the
privileged role he ascribes to theory in instigating the fundamental changes in conscious-
ness deemed necessary for radical societal transformation in the given historical conjunc-
ture. He does not consider the catalyzing effects of public performances of civil disobedience
and other kinds of protest actions, for example, and is in general insufficiently attentive to
the multiple, complex, and contingent ways in which fundamental changes in conscious-
ness occur, both at individual and collective levels. The campaign of nonviolent direct action
(civil disobedience) conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by Martin Luther King in the United
States as part of the Civil Rights movement illustrates this objection to Adorno’s position.
While Adorno was speaking and writing about resistance in Germany, King was
engaged in a campaign of nonviolent direct action in the United States. Nonviolent direct
action as understood by King shares in common at least three important features with
Adorno’s understanding of resistance. First, both are motivated by a perceived need to
radically overhaul the existing societal system, as opposed merely to reform it. Adorno’s
writings leave no doubt as to that intention. By comparison King’s aims may look reformist
at first glance; however, careful reading of his many speeches and writings makes clear
that he views the existing societal order as morally corrupt to its very roots – a corruption
that could be eradicated only by far‐reaching, fundamental, social, economic, and political
change (King 1963, 1991; Scheuerman 2018). Second, both Adorno and King see the
need for radical change that extends beyond the level of legal, political, and other social
institutions to the level of culturally entrenched ideas, values, and habits of thinking and
behavior, which are formative of individual and collective consciousness; accordingly, both
insist on the need to bring about fundamental changes in consciousness. Third, both hold
that the required consciousness‐change is not a matter of immediate experience, but
requires mediation, be it by the emancipatory vision of the social activist (King) or by the
emancipatory societal interpretations of the critical social theorist (Adorno). However,
there are also some significant differences. Especially noteworthy for present purposes is
King’s broader and more open view of the ways in which the required changes in con-
sciousness may occur. By contrast with Adorno, he attributes transformative power to
publicly staged performances of protest and other consciousness‐changing actions and
experiences. Importantly, despite King’s focus on the transformative power of dramatic
public protest actions, his campaign of nonviolent direct action is not open to the objec-
tions Adorno levels against actionism.
By contrast with the actionism to which Adorno objects so vehemently, King insists that
the dramatization of protest serves the goal of negotiation between the conflicting social
groups. He stresses that it should be undertaken only when efforts at negotiation are
repeatedly blocked. Accordingly, the main purpose of nonviolent direct action is to estab-
lish creative tension, so that a social group, in this case the non‐African‐American majority,
that has consistently refused to negotiate, is forced to confront the perceived injustice (King
1991). Furthermore, though this is more evident in King’s practice than in his explicit
writings, he recognizes that public performances of protest must be mediated by narra-
tives. The narratives establish semantic connections between the conflicting groups,
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enabling each side to recognize the other as capable in principle of understanding its point
of view and, hence, as a potential partner in mutual deliberation and negotiation. In his
discussion of King and the Civil Rights movement, the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander high-
lights King’s ability to create a compelling drama by “reweaving cultural contents, stitch-
ing together tactics of Gandhian nonviolence, Christian narratives of sacrifice and exodus,
and the justice rhetorics of American civil society” (Alexander 2006, 295). He describes
this as a talent for “civil translation.”
Civil translation involves making use of the semantic codes dominant in the existing
societal order in order to elaborate a narrative that makes it possible for the societally
dominant groups to identify with the grievances of the protestors and to hear their criti-
cal message. It is a creative enterprise, in which a story is unfolded that is at once familiar
and unfamiliar to those who hear it. The unfamiliarity of the story means that it must be
backed up by carefully staged public performances if it is to be accepted by those who as
yet do not support the protestors, and if it is to inspire active engagement with its cause
(Ku 2019).
King’s awareness of the need for the mediation of transformative action by way of civil
translation shows that his campaign of direct action is not open to the objection of false
immediacy that Adorno directs against actionism. Nor is it evidently vulnerable to his
other main objections: a false belief by activists in their own freedom and autonomy; a
relinquishing of freedom and autonomy to the false solidarity of the collective; a false
belief that the violence of the existing societal system can be countered only through the
use of violence; and a disregard for the need for fundamental changes in individual and
collective consciousness as a precondition for transformation of the objective societal
conditions.
King identifies four steps in direct action: collection of the facts to determine whether
injustices are alive, negotiation, self‐purification, and direct action (King 1991). He relates
how the campaign’s preparations for direct action involved self‐purification workshops in
which activists were encouraged to explore their motives and to consider their ability non-
violently to resist violence. This testifies to his awareness that freedom and autonomy
cannot be taken for granted, but are modes of subjectivity that call for ongoing work on the
self; thus, he does not share the self‐deluded belief in their own free, autonomous agency
that is characteristic of activists in actionism. In addition, the self‐reflective collective agency
fostered by King with the help of preparatory workshops is qualitatively different to the fear-
ful and weak collective agency promoted within the collectives criticized by Adorno.
Furthermore, since King’s campaign of direct action is resolutely nonviolent, it does
not stand accused of reproducing and reinforcing the violence of the existing societal
conditions through its appeal to violence. Finally, direct action seeks to be consciousness‐
changing, thereby avoiding Adorno’s objections to the futility and counterproductiveness
of actionism.
The last point is crucial, for it marks a key difference between Adorno’s and King’s views
of societal transformation. For Adorno, it is ultimately theory that changes consciousness.
King, by contrast, does not specify any ultimate or single cause. He draws attention to sev-
eral ways in which the required consciousness‐change can come about. Publicly staged
dramatic protest performances, accompanied by the mediating work of civil translation, is
an important catalyst for such change, but it is not the only one.
For example, King clearly believes in the consciousness‐changing power of the “Negro”
Church and, presumably, also of holy texts in the broadly Judeo‐Christian tradition (King
1991). We see this when he writes:
594
[S]omething happened to the Negro. The Negro masses began to re‐evaluate themselves. They came
to feel that they were somebody. Their religion revealed to them that God loves all of his children, and
that the important thing about a man “is not his specificity but his fundamentum,” not the texture
of his hair or the color of his skin, but the texture and quality of his soul. (King 1956, 286)
With this broader view of what catalyzes consciousness‐change, King opens the door for
the multiple, complex, and contingent ways in which profound changes in consciousness
may occur. This helps to counter Adorno’s pessimism with regard to possibilities for radical
societal transformation. As we shall now see it also helps to avoid Adorno’s privileging of
the perspective of the social critic over the subjective experiences of those who lack the
critic’s insights into the societal causes of the false lives within which they are entrapped.
As we know, Adorno views the possibilities for genuine, in the sense of qualitatively rich,
experiences as severely curtailed under conditions of late capitalism. Genuine e xperiences
are still possible, but primarily in the domain of art. Genuine experiences are experiences of
determinate negation.16 Determinate negation refers to the subject’s experience of contra-
diction (nonidentity) between concept and reality. There is a moment of transcendence in
this experience, in which “experience leaps beyond the false totality of modern life” (Hammer
2008, 63), intimating to the experiencing subject the possibility of something other than
the false life it leads. Adorno holds that experiences do not automatically generate insight.
Even the most immediate subjective experiences are always h istorically and contextually
mediated (Adorno 1973, 372). I take this to mean that they are epistemically unreliable,
offering no guaranteed access to a transcendent truth. In order to ascertain their truth
content, critical reflection is necessary. Critical reflection depends on free and autonomous
agency, which is gravely impaired under the catastrophic societal conditions of late
capitalism. Thus, Adorno is faced with a problem: Subjective experience alone is not enough
for consciousness‐change, and without changes in consciousness, there can be no motiva-
tion to engage in praxis that is radically societally transformative. Consciousness‐change
requires critical reflection, but this is inescapably infected by the very norms it seeks to crit-
icize. How then should Critical Theory achieve the changes in consciousness required for
radical societal transformation? Adorno’s answer is to enhance the role of the critical social
theorist.
For Adorno, the significance of the experience of determinate negation is not available
to the experiencing subjects, at least under the given catastrophic societal conditions. He
rules out by fiat their abilities to correctly explain the societal causes of their troubling
experiences; doing so is the privilege of the critical social theorist (Cooke 2014).
There is a danger here of what I call epistemological authoritarianism, whereby the criti-
cal social theorist sets himself or herself up as the epistemic expert on the qualitatively good
life for human subjects (Cooke 2006). Adorno tells us that, in moments of genuine experi-
ence, experiencing subjects inchoately glimpse the possibility of a life other than their pre-
sent false one. However, the epistemic unreliability of their experiences, heightened to the
extreme under conditions of late capitalism, means that they must rely on the description of
its falseness, and on the diagnosis of the causes of the falseness, offered by the critical theo-
rist. They have no way themselves of rationally assessing the truth or falsity of the theorist’s
critical analysis. This gap between subjective experiences and the rational perspective of the
critical theorist is reminiscent of the gap that we encountered earlier in Horkheimer’s essay
between the suffering masses and “small groups of men,” who “may become leaders
because of their greater insight.” The gap intensifies the problem of motivation and further
helps to explain Adorno’s stance of resignation vis-a-vis the objective societal conditions.
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For, if the experiencing subjects have no way themselves of rationally assessing the truth or
falsity of the critical theorist’s analysis of the objective societal conditions, they can have no
rationally defensible motivation for accepting the analysis.
The gap in Adorno’s theory between subjective experiences and the critical theorist’s
perspective does not only give rise to problems of authoritarianism and resignation. It also
leads to an unsatisfactory account of the self‐transformation that is part of radical societal
transformation.
Adorno’s awareness of the imbrication of radical societal transformation and self‐
transformation is implicit in his criticisms of actionists for failing to realize that radical soci-
etal transformation depends on a fundamental change in general consciousness. Such
changes are always changes not just in self‐perception but in ways of everyday living in the
world: they give rise to new habits, new practices, and new directions for action. A similar
awareness of the imbrication of societal transformation and self‐transformation can be
found in the writings and practice of Martin Luther King, for example in the passage where
he writes about the “New Negro.” In that passage, self‐transformation is attributed to reli-
gious experiences, as mediated through the teachings of the “Negro” Church. By contrast
with Adorno, however, King describes how the Negro masses began to reevaluate themselves:
to come to feel that they were somebody. King’s account of a self‐affirmed change in conscious-
ness implies that the Negro masses were able to reflect critically on the societal significance
of their religious experiences. Certainly, this critical reflection was guided by the teachings of
the Negro Church; it was subsequently reinforced and further developed by the political
activism of King and other leaders in the Civil Rights movement. But guiding the critical
reflection of the Negro masses is not the same as imposing a particular view of the world on
the suffering masses, who are deemed incapable of explaining the causes of their own
suffering. From the point of view of epistemological authoritarianism, there is an important
difference. In the case of guidance, the guiding and the guided are engaged in a two‐way rela-
tionship between human subjects. There is, as a matter of real possibility, a dialectical rela-
tionship between those offering guidance and the experiencing subjects who receive it. Both
sides enter into in a relationship of potential mutual learning concerning the self in its rela-
tion to society. This is akin to, but different from, civil translation, which at its best mediates
between the diverging perceptions of conflicting social groups by establishing connections
between subjective experiences on both sides, and the interpretations of the world that
emerge from such experiences. At its best, the relationship between the guiding and the
guided involves the same kind of receptivity to the experiences of others and allows for pos-
sible change in interpretations of the self and of social reality on both sides. In this sense, it too
is a relationship of potential mutual learning. In Adorno’s account, by contrast, learning is
not mutual but a one‐way, indeed top‐down, activity. Only the suffering subjects have the
possibility of learning; the critical social theorist cannot learn from the critical reflections of
the suffering subjects, for these are too deeply infected by the prevailing technologizing ratio-
nality for their interpretations of self and social reality to have genuine epistemic power.
3. Conclusion
I have drawn attention to three elements within Adorno’s critical social theory that push
him toward a stance of effective resignation with regard to radical societal transformation.
All are questionable and none is an indispensable part of his theory. Indeed, his theory
would be enhanced without them.
596
Nothing would be lost, and much would be gained, were he to allow for radical soci-
etal transformation through gradual or incremental changes, for this does not rule out
the possibility of radical societal transformation through revolution. Nothing would be
lost, and much would be gained, were he to allow for multiple ways in which profound
changes in consciousness may occur, for this does not rule out the possibility that the
illuminating and disclosing powers of Critical Theory constitute one of these ways.
Finally, nothing would be lost, and much would be gained, were Adorno to conceive of
the relationship between the experiencing subjects and the critical theorist as one of
mutual learning. This would not oblige Critical Theory to relinquish its claims to possess
consciousness‐changing and motivational powers. It would mean, however, that
Adorno’s critical theory would have to confront its own epistemologically authoritarian
moment, in which it simply imposes its analysis of existing social reality on the human
subjects it addresses. Rather than imposing its interpretations, it could make the validity
of its analyses of society, and of its emancipatory projections, dependent on individual
and collective reflection by human subjects on their own experiences under conditions
of late capitalism, without, however, giving them the final word. There is no final word.
Rather, ascertaining the validity of Critical Theory’s analyses is an ongoing dynamic
movement in which the experiencing subjects learn from the theory, and the theory, in
turn, learns from them.
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Further Reading
University Press.
Jay, M. (2004). Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Zuidervaart, L. (2007). Social Philosophy After Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Notes
1 Here, Adorno echoes Marx in his 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge (Marx 1844).
2 His students reportedly distributed flyers in his lectures with the inscription “Adorno als
Institution ist tot” (“Adorno is dead as an institution”).
3 Adorno concedes that Marx’s call to revolution had some credibility due to his “presentiment
that it could be too late, that it was now or never” (Adorno 2005f, 277, 2005h, 290).
4 Adorno usually distinguishes between freedom and autonomy. Loosely defined, freedom means
absence of constraint (negative liberty in Isaiah Berlin’s sense, Berlin 1969) and autonomy
means self‐determination (positive liberty in Berlin’s sense).
5 Adorno is not opposed to violence in all instances. Rather he sees it as a weapon of last resort,
which may be necessary in the fight against fascist dictatorships (Adorno 1969a).
6 Lenin famously described the question “What is to be Done?” as one of the burning questions
for the Social‐Democratic movement at the start of the twentieth century (Lenin 1901/1902).
7 Adorno (2000, 4, 1973, 365, 2005c, 100, 2005d, 195). Adorno does not reject tradition out of
hand but rather false tradition – for example, the bourgeois attempt to replace the loss of tradition
aesthetically—calling instead for a “critical approach to tradition” (Adorno 1993–1994, 78–79).
8 In his essay on Halbbildung (Pseudo‐culture) Adorno describes one of the qualitatively valuable
components of Bildung in these terms (Adorno 1993, 25, translation amended).
9 Adorno attributed the influence of his written works to their evident disregard for monetary
profit (Adorno 2005f, 277).
10 Adorno (2005e). Another way of saying this is that the Hegelian dialectics dissolves noniden-
tity into pure identity (Adorno 1973, 402).
11 Adorno (1993b).
12 In this respect, Adorno sides with Hegel against Nietzsche. He acknowledges that Nietzsche
has been a major influence on his thinking, but criticizes him for abstractly as opposed to
dialectically positing his new values (Adorno 1993a, 24, 2000, 172–174).
13 Adorno refers to capitalism as it had developed in the United States and Europe up until his own
time as “late capitalism”. He holds that the signature of the age of late capitalism is the predom-
inance of the relations of production over the forces of production. (Adorno 2003, 119).
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14 Adorno did not just call for the institutionalization of such educational practices; he exempli-
fied them in his own lectures to students in Frankfurt in the 1950s and 1960s.
15 However, in his correspondence with Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, Adorno engages critically
with his view of history as messianic disruption (Adorno and Benjamin 1999).
16 My discussion in these pages is indebted to Brian O’Connor’s reading of Hegel and Adorno
(O’Connor 2011). For a succinct account of Hegel’s idea of determinate negation as interpreted
by Adorno, see O’Connor (2011, 539–540). I share his view that Adorno’s negative dialectics
is premised on a distinction between the perspective of the social critic and that of the experi-
encing subject.
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38
Adorno’s Materialist Ethic of Love

KATHY J. KILOH
Mimesis is a central, perhaps the essential, component of Adorno’s thought. Adorno’s

philosophical project hinges on two claims about the mimetic impulse. First, it is a universal
impulse, from which we cannot be liberated. Second, it is historically mediated, which
means that it takes different forms and is enlisted in different processes of adaptation over
time. For example, Adorno maintains that mimesis makes possible pagan magic, concept
formation, and the social conformity necessitated by capitalist and fascist societies. That
we can trace this plasticity of mimesis through historical time highlights its adaptability
and shows us how the mimetic impulse could be manipulated by humans. Transforming
mimesis in this way, Adorno theorizes, may bring about our liberation from coercive social
relations, which are themselves perpetuated by the mimetic impulse. The history of w estern
philosophy, according to Adorno, is a story of repression and denial; the role of mimesis in
human life has been suppressed. Adorno develops a materialist ethic to expose and counter
the Idealist narratives involved in this suppression.
Mimesis is a complex concept, which Adorno borrows from Walter Benjamin’s theoret-
ical and critical writings. It might best be described as an impulse toward imitation revealing
a desire to become different from the self, and like the other. Adorno suggests that there can
be no comparison between objects in the world, no conceptualization, no subjectivity, no
trade, and no love without it. Mimesis, when it is unacknowledged and repressed, can lead
to dangerous identifications (with the aggressor, with the needs of capitalist society) in
order to secure the individual’s survival in a hostile environment. But it is Adorno’s hope
that in focusing our critical attention on the ways in which mimesis operates as a regulator
of human life, we might learn to transform society itself, so that the subject’s identifications
with destructive tendencies are no longer necessary.
I argue that Adorno’s materialist ethic is an ethic of love: more specifically, an ethic of a
love toward things. Unlike Agape (the nondiscriminating universalizing Christian concep-
tion of love), a love toward things involves a subject who practices a respectful restraint
toward the object. Both Agape and the love toward things are rooted in mimesis, but the
love toward things establishes a different kind of relationship between subject and object.
There, the individual is able to engage in a mimetic relationship with the object, while
resisting the urge to enter into a seamless unity with it. As a love toward things, mimesis
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KATHY J. KILOH
becomes the motor of dialectical mediation between the separate entities of subject and
object and consequently contributes to their reconciliation. Freed from the need to domi-
nate or be dominated, the subject is then able to exist peacefully with the object even in its
utter difference from the subject. Mimesis, transformed into the love toward things, thereby
contributes to the liberation from coercive social relations between both humans and
nonhumans, and the suffering that these social relations entail.
1. Reification Is an Epiphenomenon
Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, first published in 1923, was an important text
for Theodor W. Adorno’s development as a thinker. Drawing on Marx’s theory of commodity
fetishism, the book explains how capitalism comes to appear as “second nature,” and how
social relations become reified (rendered thing‐like: from the Latin res) under the conditions
of that manufactured and administered “nature” (Lukács 1973). The theory of commodity
fetishism, as articulated by Marx, holds that social relations under capitalism are mediated
through market exchange, that is, that social relations between people are manifest as rela-
tions between things (Marx 1977). This means that the relations between individuals in a
market society, that is, distinctions between workers and owners of the means of production,
are obscured by what Adorno will later refer to as the exchange principle.
The exchange principle subjects everything in society – including the human individ-
uals who belong to that society – to the process of barter and trade. Through the process of
reification, Lukács explains, the subject becomes object, and object becomes subject as
social relations take on the character of concrete things in the world and individuals seem
mere effects of “natural” social relations. Reification renders the subject passive and deter-
mined from without by market relations. Human impulses are conceived as the mechanical
playing‐out of a predetermined system beyond the control of the individual. Reification
also refers to the way in which historical events and human creations, such as capitalism,
take on the appearance of a “second nature” or an eternal order that cannot be changed
by human action (Lukács 1973).
Building upon Lukács’ work, Adorno’s philosophy describes the loss of experience and
the ethical poverty of the reified subject, while challenging the assumption that history
and nature can be divided and opposed to one another (Adorno 1984). In other words,
Adorno found much of Lukács’ analysis of the situation to be correct and generative of
new ways of thinking about life under capitalism. However, he was not at all satisfied with
the solution to second nature and reified subjectivity that Lukács proposed. Reification will
come to an end, Lukács argued, when the proletariat awakens to consciousness of its dual
role as both the subject and the object of its own history. The proletariat will then slough
off the second nature of capitalism, recognizing it to be a mere stage in the development of
human nature (Lukács 1973). For Adorno, this commitment to the fused identity of sub-
ject and object constitutes a regression to idealism. But he is further concerned about
Lukács’ tendency to think of capitalism’s second nature as a mere mask that obscures a
more authentic form of subjectivity existing underneath, a more authentic form to which
we might return once reification has been transcended (Lukács 1973). From Adorno’s
perspective, subjectivity is socially‐mediated; therefore there is no inner core of authen-
ticity to which we might return and which could save us from ourselves.
Adorno argues that Lukács, in his desire to “dynamize everything into pure actuality” is
guilty of being, like all idealists, violently “hostile to otherness, to the alien thing.” His hostility
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ADORNO’S MATERIALIST ETHIC OF LOVE
to otherness makes it impossible for him to recognize the desire for freedom negatively
expressed in the suffering of that which is not identical to consciousness. Rather than lending
an ear to this suffering, Lukács forcibly transforms the potential for life repressed within the
reified into actuality. The feeling of triumph expressed in Lukács’ depiction of the proletariat
as the subject/object of history is not a response to the salvation of the reified. It is, rather, a
perverse pleasure derived from the violent suppression of that which differs from reified con-
sciousness itself. Adorno concludes that Lukács falls into a long line of Idealist philosophers
whose ideas are widely embraced because they pose no real threat to the reified bourgeois
subject and to the world as it is (Adorno 1997a, 191).
Adorno accuses Lukács of raising the reification of consciousness itself to the level of
the key social problem to be resolved. For Adorno, the subject’s reification is an “epiphe-
nomenon”: a symptom or secondary effect of the problem’s cause. The real trouble, he
suggests, lies not with this effect of material conditions, but within the institutionalized
social inequality instituted and supported through the domination of one class, race, or
individual by another. These conditions “condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and
would yet be changeable by human action” (190). Relations of domination, in other words,
are not insurmountable, but they will continue to shape human society if they are not
acknowledged and transformed by human beings themselves. By training our attention on
reification, and developing an understanding of the primal impulse of mimesis that moti-
vates reification – as conformity to capitalist society – we might heal the rift between the
modern individual and their world. This healing would not come (à la Lukács) by way of a
return to a “first nature,” but rather via a further transformation of the mimetic impulse,
through which life would be reshaped beyond the domain of domination.
For Adorno, Lukács fails to critically assess both the positive value he accords to activity
and productivity and the purely negative (and passive) value he ascribes to the mental act of
contemplation (Adorno 1997b, 156). Adorno agrees with Lukács’ assertion that bourgeois
contemplation may contribute to the adoption of a facile and passive attitude toward life,
but he also emphasizes critical self‐reflection as a key element of the mediated and
transformational experience that is all too rare in modern life. Ultimately, Adorno’s criticism
shows Lukács’ theory to be dangerously undialectical, in that the latter fails to recognize the
liberatory potential within the very structures he wishes to destroy. In his haste to present a
way to overcome the problem of reification, Lukács fails to recognize the utopian moment
within reification itself: its conformity to the mimetic impulse that animates the exchange
principle. This utopian moment might be characterized as the mimetic desire to be like
others, to exist in a relation of equality with others (Adorno 1997a, 147). Whereas Lukács
can only see in reification an adaptation to the “second nature” of capitalism, Adorno sees
in the reified something “which would be the deliverance, not of consciousness alone, but
of reconciled mankind” (191).
Adorno proposes that the comparability of like and unlike that is secured by the
exchange principle contains the promise of freedom from ancient and inherited injus-
tice and inequality. But this promise is unfulfilled under the rule of capitalism, because
the exchange principle is bound to the profit motive. In the name of profit, the promise
of equality is repressed in favor of the differentiation of objects based on subjectively
ascribed values. Neither the use‐value of a good nor the alienated labor‐time of the
worker determines the commodity’s market value. Adorno suggests that if this were
not the case – if human labor were not alienated in the name of the profit margin – then
the promise of equal social relations embedded within the exchange principle could be
realized (147).
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In Negative Dialectics, Adorno suggests, puzzlingly, that the “rescue” (Errettung) of that
which has entered into this reified state is dependent upon “the love toward things” (die
Liebe zu den Dingen, 2015, 191, translation altered). Adorno’ s point here is not terribly
clear, and is in fact further obfuscated in Ashton’s translation, which renders the phrase as
“to love things” (1997a, 191). Why does Adorno refer specifically to love in the middle of
a critique of Lukács’ theory of reification? And what is meant by this odd phrase, “the love
toward things”? In the larger passage in which this phrase appears, Adorno writes:
Things form as the hardened fragments of the subjugated – its rescue means the love toward
things. We cannot separate from the dialectic of the existent what is foreign to consciousness:
in the negative, coercion and heteronomy, but also the deformed figure of what we could love,
if love were not under the spell of the endogamy of consciousness. (191)
Love itself is reified, disfigured by the in‐breeding and self‐pollination producing modern
consciousness. The word “love,” in the phrase “love toward things,” appears as a noun
rather than as a verb; this indicates that Adorno is not thinking of love here as a transitive
verb with a dominant subject acting upon a passive object. This provides a clue about the
phrase’s meaning. The origin and the aim of this love are ambiguous, although the
direction it takes, “towards things” (191) is quite clear. But we must look further afield in
Adorno’s writings to make sense of it.
Elsewhere, Adorno identifies the problem of reification as intertwined with a danger-
ously weakened ego, self‐preservation deformed into bourgeois coldness, and a society of
domination and lovelessness. Drawing on Freud’s theories about the narcissistic ego and
group psychology (Freud 1975, 1986), Adorno argues that this combination often results
in a pathological investment in collective narcissism. Reading several of Adorno’s texts
together, a solution to this problem begins to emerge that is grounded in a materialist
ethics of love. I argue that we can read this as an ethic dedicated to the healing of social
relations, and that it involves a strengthening of the ego, and the conversion of narcissistic
love into the love toward things. This love toward things would be materialist, in that it
would not succumb to idealism by shaping reality into a fantasy that suits the narcissistic
and weak ego; instead, it would take note of the material condition of things as things, and
would orient the subject toward the object’s suffering. This love, then, would take the form
of self‐restraint: a relinquishment of power in a movement that resists subjective domina-
tion of the object. In substituting a materialist ethic of love for Lukács’ idealism, Adorno
aims to rescue both the reified and mimesis, freeing the latter from its involvement in the
scheme of reification.
2. Situation: Modern Love
The word “love” evokes feelings normally foreign to philosophical arguments about reifica-
tion. It commands our attention, and redirects it to that which we are normally blind when
reading about conceptual matters. This produces something like a Brechtian
Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), in which conventional and familiar philosophical
discourse is made strange: the reader’s attention is then drawn to the reification of the con-
cept (in this case, “love”). In this process, we are made aware of the concept’s refusal to
engage with the emotive and the sensual. Love (the word on the page and the experience
that the term recollects) both interrupts the progress of the concept and reveals its poverty.
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But it is not only our concepts that have undergone reification. The practice of love has
also suffered; modern love fails to live up to the fullness of the concept of love. Adorno pres-
ents love as a social relation that is – like all social relations – subject to reification because
it is formed in a process of mediation with society. In Minima Moralia, it becomes clear how
the context of reification impacts the conception and the practice of modern love:
The exchange relationship that love partially withstood throughout the bourgeois age has
completely absorbed it; the last immediacy falls victim to the distance of all the contracting
parties from all the others. Love is chilled by the value that the ego places on itself. Loving at all
seems to it like loving more, and he who loves more puts himself in the wrong. (1997b, 167)
The weakened ego has forgotten how to love, overcome with the need to survive within a
competitive society hostile to the individual. In a situation defined by the precarity of the
weak ego under the influence of the profit margin, to give a part of oneself away is already
a step too far, a “loving more [than I am loved]” that contravenes the goal of self‐preserva-
tion. In this sense, to experience “love” (insofar as one can claim to have had such an expe-
rience, given the ubiquity of reified social relations) is to have been a chump.
As a consequence of our adaptation to the conditions of the exchange economy, love
itself appears as a contract, the terms of which the individual negotiates to his or her best
advantage. A generalized condition of lovelessness is both the effect and the compound-
ing source of a weak and withered form of subjectivity that conceives of otherness as a
threat. Love “under the spell of the endogamy of consciousness” does not permit us to
love that which differs from us (Adorno 1997a, 191). In contrast, a strong ego developed
through critical self‐reflection would be able to resist this standardization of thought and
feeling. It would be able to move from conformity to the exchange principle as it is config-
ured under the relations of capitalism, to the establishment of equal social relations
among individuals. A strong ego would be able to engage with the materiality of the thing
and the suffering it undergoes as a result of its reification. An engagement of this kind
would open the individual to the promise of equality embedded (but hidden) within the
exchange principle.
But because the weak ego experiences anxiety in the face of that which is other, alien,
strange, love is withheld by the subject and held in reserve for the safely familiar. This
hoarding of love results in a world in which people feel unloved. In his 1969 essay
“Education after Auschwitz,” Adorno writes that “every person today, without exception,
feels too little loved, because every person cannot love enough” (1998a, 201). This is the
effect of the bourgeois coldness that capitalist society requires of its individual members.
Bourgeois coldness, typified by emotional, intellectual, political, and financial investments
in the self as private property (and investments in the state structure that guarantees all
private property), is a defense mechanism of the weak ego. This mechanism is activated in
response to objects, such as the asylum seeker (1997b, 34), that challenge the weak sub-
ject’s adaptation to the status quo: encountering the homeless exile, the individual must
reckon with the precarity and fictional nature of self‐possession.
In its adaptation to the self‐interest required by bourgeois “business,” the impulse
toward self‐preservation forms a technology of oppression. The global process of reifica-
tion, Adorno concedes, is apparently contested by the development of a more‐or‐less
common mass society. But, in “Education after Auschwitz,” he contends that the “lonely
crowd” is in fact a “banding together of people completely cold who cannot endure their
own coldness and yet cannot change it” (1998a, 201). Conformity to mass culture and
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collective subgroups is a “last‐ditch” and futile attempt to soften the pain of the unbearable
coldness that seems necessary if the individual is to survive in such a society. Mass society
and mass culture are empty consolations for the bourgeois subject: there is no fellow
feeling between members of such a collective, and in adapting to the needs of the group,
the individual forfeits their ability to resist bourgeois coldness.
Earlier, in his 1961 essay “Opinion, Delusion, Society,” Adorno claimed that individual
narcissism (as opposed to collective narcissism) has fallen under a strongly policed social
taboo and must therefore be repressed. The blockage of individual narcissism, combined
with the general coldness of bourgeois society, means that our pathological need to feel
loved receives no immediate satisfaction. The weakened subject, withholding love from
others and feeling too little loved, seeks what Adorno calls “compensatory identification
with the power and glory of the collective” in an effort to stave off its narcissistic pain
(1998b, 111). Adorno argues that collective narcissism as the only path left for the weak
and unloved ego to attain any sense of belonging or agency. Ultimately, the assurance
thereby secured proves to be false and self‐destructive, but this is often not apparent to the
individual. The weak ego, incapable of independence and lacking substantial support from
others, clings to opinions (however irrational) as though they were a precious possession
invested with the power to confirm one’s existence as an independent agent in the world.1
According to Adorno, objective truth, unlike opinion, is derived from a dialectical medi-
ation between the separate entities of subject and object, which itself is preceded by the
subject’s movement toward the object (114). The more the ego weakens, the less capable it
is of self‐reflection and thoughtful mediation of subject and object. The result is that the
distinction between truth and opinion no longer holds at a societal level, and conformity
to majority opinion takes the place of objective truth. Love, disfigured into collective
narcissism and possessive acquisitiveness, upholds this conflation of delusional opinion
with truth.
The weak ego jealously protects the collective opinion that binds the group together.
Opinions growing out of and supporting nationalism and anti‐Semitism are the touch-
stones for Adorno here, but from our historical vantage point we could maintain his list
while adding to it: violent and antisocial misogyny and anti‐trans attitudes; anti‐black and
anti‐indigenous racism; anti‐immigrant sentiments. All are products of this narcissistic
identification with the collective, defined by an allergy to otherness. An emergency infu-
sion of bourgeois politesse cannot save us from this situation; the narcissistic individual,
perhaps perceptively, perceives the imposition of bourgeois norms of behavior as a repres-
sion of individual freedom. This freedom is guarded like a prized object; the intensity of this
defensive grip seems directly correlated to the illusory nature of freedom itself. The more
dependent upon collective opinion is the narcissistic individual, the more vitriolic their
defense of liberty becomes. Under these conditions, fantasies of oppression and persecu-
tion are bolstered, while hatred of difference is strengthened and opinion becomes increas-
ingly pathological (118).
Importantly, Adorno holds that it is critical thought alone, “not thought’s complacent
agreement with itself ” (110), that will bring about the necessary social change that would
protect us from collective narcissism and reified consciousness. The subject must do the
difficult work of reflecting upon the reality of its own reification, its own hardening of
opinion; only then will the promise and the possibility of equality contained within the
exchange principle be unlocked. Adorno’s phrase “the love toward things” (Adorno 1997a,
191) communicates that we would come closer to the goal of upending the process of reifi-
cation, if we were capable of loving what is most foreign [fremd] to us (Adorno 2015, 191).
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Opinion “removes the otherness” between the subject and their reality, whereas the
subject’s access to truth, for Adorno, requires the otherness of the object as a source of
contestation and challenge (Adorno 1998b, 110). The antidote to pathological opinion,
Adorno claims, is a movement of thought toward its object – not a movement character-
ized by fusion, but one in which subject and object dialectically mediate one another. The
subject’s separation from the object, and its orientation toward the object, makes possible
a transformative mediation between the two poles of subject and object. Sparking a
rigorous self‐reflection of reason upon itself, this mediation prevents a regression to “mere
opinion” (113). What is necessary is a “freedom toward the object” conceived as “the freedom
of thought to lose and transform itself in its encounter with the subject matter” (110).
Freedom toward the object allows the subject to move closer to the object without devour-
ing it, and this opens the individual to the freedom to become other, to grow and to change.
Adorno’s phrase “the love toward things” seems to echo this formulation of a “freedom
toward the object;” which Adorno attributes to Hegel (110). Henry Pickford identifies a passage
from the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit as the source of this idea. According to Pickford,
Hegel contrasts “material thinking” (which stays immersed in the object and finds it difficult to
obtain a position transcendent to it) to “argumentation,” which exists in a condition of
“freedom from content.” Hegel claims that his philosophy requires that this freedom from
content be relinquished and “instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content”
thought must “sink this freedom into the content and let it move by its own nature.” Hegel
refers to this relinquishment of freedom as a “restraint” (quoted in Adorno 1998b, fn5, 344).
In order to engage in this kind of mediation between subject and object, the individual
must be strong enough to resist the urge to assimilate the other and enter into a fused rela-
tion with it. Beyond the strength required to dominate the object, what is required is an ego
strong enough to practice this self‐restraint. Freedom toward the object requires a subject
that is able to curtail its own immediate sense of unlimited freedom, in the name of a
greater and richer freedom for itself and for the other. The opposition between freedom and
restraint breaks down as we explore the necessity of each for the other. The thingly cannot
attain freedom if it is dominated by the subject, and the subject cannot obtain its own free-
dom without the contestation offered by a material entity that exists independently of it.
Self‐restraint lets the object be, and allows the subject to engage in “material thinking”
(Hegel quoted in Adorno 1998b, fn5, 344). Adorno’s materialism commits him to relin-
quish thought’s freedom from content, in order to attend to the material reality of the
reified. Once thought’s freedom from content has been relinquished, material thinking
illuminates the suffering of the reified as a negative image of the desire for freedom. Lending
an ear to suffering as a negative expression of the desire for freedom, is to enter into the
love toward things that rescues the reified. Furthermore, in hearing this call for freedom,
our own presumed social freedoms come under question. We learn to recognize the deeply
dialectical nature of freedom and coercion.
3. Coercion and Freedom: Redemption of the Reified
In the 1940 essay “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” Adorno argues that Kierkegaard’s
exploration of the tension between nondiscriminatory love (Christian Agape) and what he
refers to as “preferential love” (Kierkegaard 1995, 56) marks him as a social critic whose
thought inhabits the contested ground between reality and possibility. This reading hinges
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upon the fact that Kierkegaard must modify the concept of “the neighbor” he borrows
from the Gospels, in order for it to apply to his contemporary society. The practice of neigh-
borly love as it is described in the Bible has no direct equivalent practice in nineteenth‐
century Europe. This highlights the historical difference between the two eras, and hence,
the historical nature of concepts themselves, but most importantly for Adorno, it also
alerts us to the fact that divine command can no longer, in modern life, compel human
beings to act in an ethical manner. The modern subject is no longer governed by divine
providence (Adorno 1940, 421). Living under the spell of capitalism, the modern
individual imagines itself to be free of such compulsion (as Martin Jay has noted [2006,
16]), the anxiety provoked by this freedom marks nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century
European philosophy. But Adorno credits Kierkegaard with the realization that compul-
sion and coercion remain central to modern life, even if God does not.
Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is a book of Christian ethics. It explores the practical appli-
cability of Agape, selfless and nonpreferential Christian love. In it, Kierkegaard contrasts
eternal Christian love (Agape) to erotic love and Philia, both of which he describes as inferior
to Agape due to their temporal nature (50). Reading Kierkegaard at face value, the ethic of
love he presents seems to dissolve the apparent contradiction between the command to
love thy neighbor and the freedom to choose one’s own objects of love or hate.2 If we read
Kierkegaard as an apologist of Agape, then he appears to endorse the claim that it is in our
nature to love and to obey God, and it is out of his natural love for us that God commands
us to love our neighbors. It seems that Kierkegaard characterizes love as a common force
inhabiting our very nature and God’s as well. It becomes difficult and perhaps, unneces-
sary, to distinguish between freedom and compulsion in this context, given that any
apparent exercise of free will is undergirded by our oneness with God, fused as we are
through Agape as universal love.
Kierkegaard is most often characterized as the philosopher of serious commitment to
inward contemplation and authentic life, even to the point of forsaking the company of
others in his everyday life. Martin Heidegger clearly viewed Kierkegaard in this way, and
carried this commitment forward in his own early philosophy, devoted to authentic Dasein
as a site of resistance to the idle talk of “das Man,” or the “One” (Heidegger 1996). But
Adorno, who obliquely criticizes Heidegger in his critical engagement with Kierkegaard,
would maintain that Heidegger’s sense of authenticity as Being‐toward‐Death is not dis-
connected from or opposed to the bourgeois seriousness that Kierkegaard mocks and
rejects. Adorno attempts to rescue Kierkegaard from Heidegger by reading Kierkegaard’s
turn inward against the grain; he conceives of this move less as a spiritual transcendence
of a morally compromised reality, and more as a productive critical distancing from that
reality. For Adorno, authenticity is a fantasy of the weak ego conforming to the social order
determined by capitalism. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s inward turn would be read as a
devotion to the possibility of a better, transformed reality. The difference between these two
formulations may seem slight, but it is decisive: the first bears the character of a retreat
from reality, while the second is a resistance to that particular formation of reality.
Adorno praises Kierkegaard’s cold “eye of love” (1940, 425), suggesting that there are
“situations where hatred contains more of love than the latter’s immediate manifestations”
(426). This love within hatred is a love that exposes acts of charity as forms of domination
that conform to, and uphold, unequal class divisions. Kierkegaard’s keen “eye of love”
demonstrates how supposedly Christian acts support inequality between classes, and
mobilize paternalism and dependency. In light of this, Adorno argues that Kierkegaard
denounces “worldly happiness” not as a mere capitulation to his own faith in a Christian
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afterlife, but in the name of the “possibility” denied by the “typical character” (425) who
cannot conceive of social transformation as anything other than mere utopian fantasy.
While the bourgeoisie see no other reality beyond the eternal order of capitalism (Lukács’
“second nature”), Kierkegaard sees the possibility of social transformation, in the guise of
Christian resurrection and redemption. Adorno concludes his essay with this sentence:
“The hope that Kierkegaard puts against ‘the seriousness of the eternal’ is nothing but the
hope of the reality of redemption” (429). Adorno interprets this as a hope for another,
better reality, in which the reified stands redeemed.
Later, in Minima Moralia, Adorno argues that if we do not wish to “wither” (via the reifi-
cation of our consciousness, the capitulation to systems of capitalist exchange) then we
should rather “take on the stigma of the inauthentic” (1997b, 153). Like the assertion
that rescuing the reified must involve a love toward things, this claim that we should accept
our inauthenticity seems, at first glance, rather counterintuitive. But given that, for
Adorno, “the human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings”
(154), it would seem that inauthenticity is an aspect of what it is to be human. Adorno
points out that the modern moral standard of genuineness – the expectation that one
always be one’s self – is itself inauthentic. The self is constructed not in pure isolation from
its environment, but in childish play‐acting: the imitation of others. This play‐acting is
motivated by the mimetic impulse, an inherent and involuntary urge, expressed as the
desire “to be different” (153). If individuation proceeds by way of imitation, then even the
“authentic” subject mistaken as a potential counter to reified subjectivity (by Heidegger
and Lukács, for example) is also product of the primal mimetic impulse operating in con-
formity with capitalist society. Thus, any attempt to resist reification by getting to an
original identity that precedes this mimicry would fail. A turn inward would not resist reifi-
cation because, in cutting itself off from the influence of others, the inwardly directed self
loses its content and becomes a hollowed‐out and lifeless husk. “Creative mimicry” (Jay
2006, 21), as an integral aspect of the human, cannot be denied or avoided. Thus, Adorno’s
materialist ethics proposes that we must instead look closely at mimetic practices, to see
what possibilities they hold for social transformation.
Adorno compares authenticity, understood as a bulwark against reification, to the
fetishization of the genuine original article in the age of industrial mass‐production. Drawing
on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the death of the auratic work of art in the age of its
mechanical reproducibility, (Benjamin, 2002) Adorno suggests that it is only with the advent
of mass commodity production that the nonreproducible becomes equated with genuine-
ness (i.e. the fetish of authenticity) (1997b, 153). Likewise, as Martin Jay notes (22), it is only
with the advent of mass reification under capitalism that the ideal of the authentic individual
arises. Adorno asserts that individuation is a process steeped in imitation, and to deny this is
itself an inauthentic, untruthful act that compounds reification. Citing Schopenhauer’s
claim that the self is ultimately “an insubstantial ghost” (quoted in Adorno 1997b, 153),
Adorno calls the pure self a “mythical deception” and “an abstraction.” He notes that the
individual “presents itself as an original entity, a monad,” but it “is only the result of a social
division of the social process. Precisely as an absolute, the individual is a mere reflection of
property relations” (153). The model of subjectivity required by capitalist society is centered
on property relations, just as capitalism is itself; the authentic self‐identical and self‐possessed
being is an ideological fantasy projected by that social order.
In Adorno’s view, Lukács’ identification of reification as the problem to be solved, and his
solution to that problem, belong to a history of coercion that refuses to recognize itself as such.
Adorno argues, in Negative Dialectics, that “identity is the universal coercive mechanism
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which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from universal coercion” (1997a, 147). When
we determine the identity of a thing through the process of conceptualizing it, we do so in
reference to the principle of exchange and equivalence. We attribute identity to an object
by recognizing its likeness with other things of its kind. This quality of likeness determines
which covering category will be deployed to lend identity to the object. In this process, the
suffering nonidentical (that which cannot be brought into this relation of likeness) is
ejected from the concept. Under the influence of Enlightenment thought and capitalist
social relations, our concepts become increasingly reified. The suffering of the noniden-
tical, expressing a desire for freedom from this domination, increases at the same rate. To
free ourselves from universal coercion would require us to liberate ourselves from the
exchange principle as it is configured by capitalist relations, which value profit through the
exchangeability of goods over social equality. Freedom does not consist in a freedom from
identity, but rather a transformation of the exchange principle that regulates identity.
Adorno suggests that identity itself would be transformed from an abhorrence of
“qualitative difference” into “rational identity” (147) if these conditions of capitalism were
transcended. Rational identity would not presume a total relation between a single concept
and the object it references. It would recognize the poverty of the concept and the richness of
the world. If identification were thought of as a cumulative process rather than as a goal
easily accomplished by the invention of language, then the hatred of the alien and the dom-
ination of the concept over the material would both be defused. But perhaps most impor-
tantly, the “material thinking” (Hegel quoted in Adorno 1998b, fn5, 344) resulting in
rational identity would respect the qualitative difference of the object, and recognize that just
as the concept cannot always cover the entirety of the object, reality also often fails to live up
to the concept. This poverty of reality in relation to the concept, touched on earlier as it
relates to the concept and practice of modern love, is most obviously developed in Adorno’s
critique, in Negative Dialectics, of the liberal model of freedom. There, he notes that
Enlightenment philosophers never fail to celebrate and describe in great detail the human
capacity to exist in freedom, yet this capacity has not been borne out in the actuality of free-
dom in the world. Deborah Cook describes the rational form of identification as a critical
confrontation of “an irrational reality with its better potential.” Reified social conditions
shape themselves to the needs of the exchange principle as it is actualized within the capitalist
system, as a system geared for profit. Freed from this profit motive, the exchange principle
might develop its “better potential” (Cook 2001, 7). This better potential is embedded within
the exchange principle as the assertion that parity, as opposed to “ancient injustice,” could be
“the ideal rule” according to which we organize society (Adorno 1997a, 146).
In the antisocial perspective of Søren Kierkegaard, Adorno finds a model for a subject
strong enough to engage in both material thinking and the love toward the object.
Kierkegaard’s turn away from the intersubjective relations of life in community with
others to embrace a personal relation to God seems, on the face of it, like the pinnacle of
bourgeois coldness. However, in Kierkegaard’s Sermon on our love for the dead, collected
in his Works of Love, Adorno finds a position of strong and independent subjectivity that is
capable of identifying and rejecting bourgeois coldness, in favor of a hope for the possibility
of redemption. Kierkegaard’s independence meets bourgeois coldness with a discerning
and restrained attitude. This restraint is like the love we feel for the dead, who surely cannot
love us back. Our love for the dead is thus a love that we feel and express in isolation, in
solitude. In this way, Kierkegaard’s description of our love for the dead provides Adorno
with a model for the attitude of restraint that connects subject and object while protecting
each from their dissolution into the other.
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Adorno also notes that Kierkegaard’s misanthropy allows him to “perceive decisive
character features of the typical individual of modern society.” We can learn a lot from
Kierkegaard, Adorno suggests, if we choose to interpret his texts as social critique – that is,
if we read his philosophy not as merely descriptive, but as descriptive of the wrong organi-
zation of life, from the point of view of “a right society.” Adorno reads Kierkegaard against
the grain as a prophet of redemption and a critic of reification in the emerging mass society
of the mid‐nineteenth century, in which a mimetic identification with mass media and
mass society has been substituted for “spontaneous thinking” (Adorno 1940, 424).3
Kierkegaard’s strength as a critic, according to Adorno, lies in that he was able to grasp
the “instant” (423) of this own historical situation. Adorno observes that precisely at the
moment when “the world no longer permits an immediate realization of love” (420)
because of our mimetic adaptation to mass society, Kierkegaard theorizes a turn inward.
Kierkegaard’s transformation of love into inwardness (what he calls its “death‐like aspect,”
416) is what Adorno takes to be “the best and worst of his philosophy” (417). It is the
worst for two reasons: because it marks the extreme coldness that m otivates the turn away
from others, and because this religious (Christian) doctrine of love converts love as a pro-
test against the law of “ancient [pagan] justice” into a formal law itself (“Thou shalt love
thy neighbor”). There are also two reasons why it is the best. First, because this coldness
enables Kierkegaard to see and to express the ways in which the typical (reified) bourgeois
subject is prevented from loving others by social constraints. And second because it
acknowledges and preserves, at the same time, the possibility of there being a position
exterior to and transcendent of that cold and unloving bourgeois society. Most importantly,
the “death‐like aspect of Kierkegaard’s love” leaves the lover powerless over the beloved.
Kierkegaard’s radically inward‐directed love, its powerlessness to exert influence over the
beloved, allows it to break free of the desire to participate in “the reification of man” (424).
When Kierkegaard writes about our love for the dead at the conclusion of Works of Love,
Adorno sees this as a protest against reification: against, in Adorno’s words, “a world
which is determined by barter and gives nothing without an equivalent” (427). We know
that the love that we give to the dead can never be reciprocated, and this makes it appear to
be the most reified and fetishized of loves. But this also makes it a “love absolutely void of
any barter, of any ‘requital,’ and therefore, the only unmutilated love permitted by our
society” (427). Kierkegaard claims that the seriousness of death contains a “deep‐thinking
jesting overtone.” And its jesting is directed at that from which it is “radically different”:
bourgeois seriousness (Kierkegaard 1995, 353, translation altered; Adorno 1940, 428–
429). The seriousness of the bourgeois subject consists in its obsession with its own
survival in a world taken to be eternally held within the grips of capitalism, its only survival
tactic making money at any cost. Our love for the dead is beyond this self‐preserving nar-
cissism, because it lacks the power to manipulate and coerce its object; it is a selfless giving
in the absence of reciprocation, in the absence of profit. It is the “most unselfish love”
(Kierkegaard 1995, 349) and for this reason, it is also “the freest” (351).
4. Conclusion
In Minima Moralia, Adorno calls imitative behavior “the primal form of love” (1997a, 154).
In this behavior, he claims, “the priests of authenticity scent traces of the utopia which
could shake the structure of domination.” Philosophers like Heidegger who value authen-
ticity as a resistance to reification, are regarded by Adorno as apologists or ideologues for the
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KATHY J. KILOH
society of domination. Mimesis, as the “primal form of love,” is feared by those “priests of
authenticity,” because in imitating that which is strange or unlike what the reified
(authentic, self‐identifying, self‐possessing) constitutive subject takes itself to be, the subject
moves away from its adaptation to the exchange principle as it is configured within capitalist
society (154). Reification cannot be resisted by a subject turned inward to an isolated,
authentic self. Nor can it be countered by Lukács’ return to “nature” or a premodern golden
age of freedom (1997a, 191). It is only by acknowledging the overarching influence of
mimesis, and transforming it into the love toward things, that we can free ourselves
of reification.
Adorno’s ethic of love is materialist because it rejects Christian Agape as the form of love
that binds all individuals to an eternal and common nature. Agape returns us to a natural
connection in love that unites humanity and God into one substance. This fusion, Adorno
suggests, prevents us from recognizing the contradiction between the divine command to
love the neighbor and our own resistance to this command as an expression of individual
freedom. The fusion of subject and object that Lukács proposes as a solution to the problem
of reified consciousness similarly represses the contradiction and contestation between
subject and object: their material and sensual difference from one another. The potential
for freedom lies, instead, within that tension that Lukács aims to de‐escalate. Rather than
dissolving freedom and compulsion into a common nature, Adorno suggests that we must
identify the historical and social differences between compulsion, coercion, and freedom.
In doing so, we also recognize the role that the mimetic impulse plays in the formation of
identity. Identity is a coercive mechanism when it is fueled by the mimetic impulse operating
in the service of a system that appears to be beyond our control. Reification will remain
unchallenged, and we will remain unfree, so long as we refuse to acknowledge this point.
If we continue to allow the mimetic impulse to operate on and over us, Adorno suggests,
our experience will continue to be determined and limited from without by identity
thinking – the only form of thought reified consciousness is capable of producing. What
mimesis transformed into the love toward things affords us is the capacity to physically
engage the suffering of the nonidentical – to listen to it, feel it – with self‐restraint. This
would mean that we could come to experience the lack of freedom in the world, without
increasing that suffering. By thus rejecting the fusion of subject and object, we express
hope for the possibility of redemption and for a better world.
References
Adorno, T.W. (1940). On Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love. Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung / Studies in
Philosophy and Social Science 8 (3): 413–429.
Adorno, T.W. (1984). The Idea of Natural History. Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary June 20,
1984 (60): 111–124.
Adorno, T.W. (1997a). Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: The Continuum
Publishing Company.
Adorno, T.W. (1997b). Minima Moralia. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso.
Adorno, T.W. (1998a). Education after Auschwitz. In: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
Translated by H.W. Pickford, 191–204. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (1998b). Opinion delusion society. In: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords.
Translated by H.W. Pickford, 105–122. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T.W. (2015). Negative Dialektik: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
612
Benjamin, W. (2002). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility. In: Selected Writings,
Volume 3 1935–1938. Edited by H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings: Translated by E. Jephcott, H. Eiland,
et al, 101–133. Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Cook, D. (2001). Adorno, ideology and ideology critique. Philosophy and Social Criticism 27 (1): 1–20.
Freud, S. (1975). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Translated by J. Strachey. New York:
W.W. Norton and Company.
Freud, S. (1986). On narcissism: an introduction. In: Essential Papers on Narcissism (Edited by A.P.
Morrison), 17–43. New York: New York University Press.
Gordon, P.E. (2016). Adorno and Existence, 12–36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit Translated by J. Stambaugh.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Jay, M. (2006). Taking on the stigma of inauthenticity: adorno’s critique of genuineness. New
German Critique 97: 15–30.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1995. “You Shall Love the Neighbour” and “The Work of Love in Recollecting One
Who Is Dead” in Works of Love. Edited and translated by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (44–60, 345–258).
Princeton: Princeton University Press.”
Lukács, G. (1973). History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Edited and translated
by R. Livingstone. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Marx, K. (1977). Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by B. Fowkes. New York:
Vintage Books.
Further Reading
Brittain, C.C. (2017). Love as power and powerlessness: Kierkegaard and Adorno revisited. Toronto
Journal of Theology https://doi.org/10.3138/tjt.2016‐0014.
Cook, D. (2011). Critical materialism. In: Adorno On Nature, 7–33. Durham: Acumen Publishing.
Evans, C.S. (2004). Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Foster, R. (2016). Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things. New York; London:
Lexington Books.
Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Either/Or. Edited and translated by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
O’Connor, B. (2013). “Experience,” and “freedom and morality.”. In: Adorno, 54–85, 110–146. New
York: Routledge.
Shuster, M. (2014). Nothing to know: the epistemology of moral perfectionism in Adorno and Cavell.
Idealistic Studies 44 (1): 1–29.
Notes
1 A contemporary example: CNN’s footage of a woman in Arizona attempting to explain her

support for the Trump administration’s tough‐on‐immigration stance. She acknowledges that
the government’s actions have resulted in the separation of families and the detention of more
than 3000 children in summer 2018. After attempting to state her reasons for her emphatic
and unconditional support of the US government, she says “I don’t know how to explain …” Her
position lies beyond her capacity to support it reasonably, yet she holds fast to it. She is left
speechless, but unwavering in her opinion. www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/us/trump‐voters‐
family‐separation/index.html accessed June 20, 2018.
2 This is the reading of Kierkegaard offered in Evans (2004)
3 For more on Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard, see Gordon (2016), especially chapter 1, “Starting
out with Kierkegaard,” 12–36.
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39
Adorno’s Metaphysics of Moral Solidarity

in the Moment of its Fall
JAMES GORDON FINLAYSON
I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. Terence cited by Feuerbach
[M]an is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal or a
best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. Kropotkin
My mottos concern a particular notion of solidarity, namely of human solidarity with

other humans. It is a broadly speaking moral notion, but is, I argue, qualitatively different
from Humean sympathy and Rousseauan pity, both of which are at bottom extensions of
self‐love.1 In this essay, I will attribute such a notion to Adorno. Although he seldom
addresses the idea of solidarity directly, such an idea is consistent with and implied by
much of what Adorno says for and against morality, and is also compatible with his con-
ception of philosophical negativism. More importantly, the idea is apt to provide Adorno’s
critical theory and his minimal deontological ethics with the moral content and the
normative force they call for.
1. Metaphysics, Materialism, and Humanism in Adorno
I shall begin by setting out, in three steps, a line of thought concerning the ideas expressed in
the concluding line of Negative Dialectics, where Adorno writes that negative dialectical
thought is “solidary with metaphysics in the moment of its fall” (ND 408/GS6 400).
1.1. Adorno’s Metaphysics

The first step concerns Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as metaphysics. The book Adorno
dubbed his “fat child” is a highly qualified defense of metaphysics, as well as a criticism of
metaphysics. Gershom Scholem once remarked that Negative Dialectics contained a chaste,
and self‐restrained defense of metaphysics. It is a perceptive judgment and an implicitly
critical one. Adorno replies concessively that the “central intention” of his book is “einer
Rettung der Metaphysik” (Adorno and Scholem, 2015, 413).
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JAMES Gordon Finlayson
The term Rettung means “saving” or “salvaging.” It has a theological resonance of

redeeming/redemption that Adorno explicitly plays on.2 No doubt Adorno’s idea of a
“Rettung der Metaphysik” was influenced by Benjamin’s idea of a “rettende Kritik,” which
is a complex idea. One mundane aspect of a “saving critique” in this sense is to make fruit-
ful for the present a meaning that is in danger of being lost to the past (Benjamin 1991,
290). Benjamin’s idea can also be seen as a virtuoso attempt to unite the theological
meaning of redemption with the historical materialist notion of ideology criticism.3 That
said, while he borrows liberally from others, particularly Benjamin – usually without
acknowledgment – Adorno always makes the borrowed ideas his own. So we need to make
the notion of a “Rettung der Metaphysik” make sense in terms of Adorno’s own project.
The theological idea of redemption, and the secular notion of rescuing have something
important in common. One can only redeem or rescue what is either in danger, or has
already succumbed to disaster.4 This is indeed the case, in Adorno’s view, with metaphysics,
with which dialectics shows solidarity. In what sense, though, has metaphysics fallen?
Adorno tells us in the first “Meditation on Metaphysics.” Auschwitz, he writes, “makes a
mockery of the construction of an immanent meaning that radiates from an affirmatively
posited transcendence” (ND 361/GS6 354). More so even than the Lisbon earthquake,
which caused Voltaire to doubt Leibniz’s theodicy, Auschwitz bankrupts the idea that there
is immutable truth beneath the transitory appearance. It exposes the Hegelian lie that the
actual is rational. As a result, Adorno claims, “our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed” (ND
361/GS6 354). Auschwitz shatters our faith in the moral ideals of Enlightenment, in the
idea that there is social progress and meaning in history.
By contrast with traditional metaphysics, dialectics, Adorno claims, “is the ontology of
the wrong (false) state of things” [des falschen Zustandes] (ND 11/GS6 22). No doubt an
ontology “of a wrong state of things” sounds odd to modern ears, used to a metaphysics
that is descriptive and normatively neutral. But Adorno’s metaphysics is, as we will see,
normative, though not straightforwardly moral.
1.2. Adorno’s Materialism

The second step is the claim that Adorno’s is a materialist metaphysics. But as is often the
case with Adorno, his materialism is not materialist in any conventional sense. It is not like
the physicalism of Neurath or Carnap; and certainly not like orthodox dialectical materi-
alism, which he likes to dismiss as “Diamat.” It is even hard to credit Adorno with a version
of historical materialism given his misgivings about Marx’s productivism, and philosophy
of history, which is why Scholem, for one, thinks his approach not materialist at all (Adorno
and Scholem 2015, 408). Adorno’s cryptic response that his philosophy attempts “to
attain to materialism – in a very particular sense – and not to presuppose it” doesn’t offer
much by way of clarification (Adorno and Scholem 414). Materialism is the aim or the
end, presumably to be achieved by the overcoming of “idealism.”
1.3. Adorno’s Humanism

To see how materialism can be the aim or end, we need to know that the materialism
Adorno aims at is a kind of humanism. At first blush, this sounds implausible since Adorno
rejects as bourgeois humanism all versions of humanism that take humans as they are.
“The bourgeois … is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred towards
the good people [den richtigen Menschen]” (MM 25/GS4 26).5 For example, he dismisses
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ADORNO’S METAPHYSICS OF MORAL SOLIDARITY IN THE MOMENT OF ITS FALL
Sartre’s existentialist humanism as a voluntarist Fichtean self‐positing that assumes that

social conditions are merely “tacked‐on … additions” rather than reifying and commodi-
fying determinants.6 Indeed, Adorno argues that the attempt to read off the essence of
humanity from our present condition is misconceived because it “would abstract from
the dehumanization that has made the subjects what they are and that continues to be
tolerated under the name of a qualitas humana” (ND 124/GS6 130).
Just as Adorno’s materialism in Negative Dialectics is proleptic, or anticipatory, so also is
his humanism proleptic. Alfred Schmidt offers the best account of this relation. He inter-
prets Adorno in the light of the early Marx as “a philosopher of real humanism” where
“real humanism” implies a human potential actualized under transformed social condi-
tions.”7 Schmidt argues that for Adorno materialism means the “remembrance of nature
in the subject as a sensuous bodily being, and its nature, which – qua something
non‐identical – forms the material substrate of its labor” (Schmidt 1983, 24). Schmidt
unfolds Adorno’s materialism idea in four steps:
(1) Human sensuous nature has been repressed in the course of the dialectic of enlight-
enment, namely the project of the domination of internal and internal nature (DE
40/ GS358). This point is sharpened when set against the context of rationalist meta-
physics, namely the view that the social (and scientific natural world) are constructs,
in part constituted by the categories, and hence thoroughly determinable. Such a
view, Adorno claims, forgets that “der Mensch as ein empfindendes, erlebendes,
erfahrendes Wesen, selber auch Wesentlich Leib ist” (PT II 177).
(2) But human sensuous nature has not been eliminated, just expelled from the world of
exchange.8 As nonidentical to that world, it retains a utopian power. It points beyond
it, and thus provides a perspective from which to criticize it.
(3) The third crucial point is that human nature is not something fixed and immutable
that unfolds wholly under its own steam. For human beings, through their labor, can
affect, and to an extent create, the conditions under which their nature is formed and
reformed, and thus influence the process by which they become the humanity that
they potentially are. Human nature both is, in one sense, and is yet to be, in another.9
(4) Adorno finds in Marx’s real humanism the material basis of Kant’s idea of humanity.
Adorno insists on the significance of the fact that the idea of humanity in the third for-
mulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, is only a regulative idea, and that “humanity
as the principle of being human, not as the ‘sum of all humans’ is still unrealized” GS6
254/ND 257). But the basis of its future realization is historical and material.
2. Negativism in Adorno
Adorno’s materialist metaphysics is in this sense normative and not descriptive. It is not
only normative in virtue of Adorno’s proleptic humanism, but also because it is inflected
with Adorno’s negativism. What Adorno’s negativism amounts to is a difficult and dis-
puted issue.10 It has metaphysical, epistemological, and moral dimensions. It encompasses
both the “an ontology of the wrong state of things” and the doctrine Adorno construes as
the philosophical significance of the ban on images, namely philosophy’s response to “a
world which is false to its innermost reaches [sie reagiert auf die bis ins Innerste falsche
Welt]” (ND 31/GS6 41). Adorno’s negativism finds its classical expression in his famous,
lapidary lines of Minima Moralia:
617
The whole is the untrue (GS 45/MM 50)
There is no right living in the false life (GS4 MM 39).
It is helpful to distinguish between two different forms of negativism:
(1) Austere or absolute negativism is the view that not only can human beings not live
good lives or do right actions, they cannot know or even so much as conceive of what
the good or the right is.
(2) The contrasting view is partial negativism, according to which human beings can
come to know or conceive of the good and the right, albeit through a glass darkly,
such that the access that they have is unreliable and diffuse, and the good or right
they know, partial and fragmented. Partial negativism is the idea that one can at least
come to know the good or the right, insofar as one can gain an understanding of
them through our comparatively reliable access to and knowledge of the existing, but
bad (or false) social world. This is how, according to Michael Theunissen – still the
most insightful exponent and critic of Adorno’s negativism – the Dedication to
Minima Moralia should be understood: “Whoever wants to experience the truth of
immediate life, must scrutinize in its estranged form, the objective powers that deter-
mine individual existence right into its hidden recesses” (MM 15/GS4 13). That is,
insofar as the estranged form of actual life vouchsafes the “truth of immediate life” it
is not wholly negative, because even to understand the bad as bad, one has to judge it
in the light of something better (Theunissen 1983).
The textual evidence for Theunissen’s interpretation is compelling. There are some cru-
cial passages in Adorno that are only compatible with partial negativism. For example, in
“The Essay as Form” he writes that “still lilacs and nightingales, where the universal nexus
has permitted them to survive, make us believe through their mere existence that life still
lives” (GS11 119). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno notes that the idea of a free and just
exchange inheres as an unrealized potential in the very notion of exchange (ND 147/GS6
150). And one of the guiding metaphors of Negative Dialectics makes best sense as an
expression of partial negativism. “Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did
not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from
the negative whole” (ND 378/GS6 370).
No doubt, taken alone these compressed and enigmatic sentences do not settle the
question of whether Adorno, all things considered, is an absolute or partial negativist.
However, there is a broader context that tilts the balance in favor of interpreting Adorno as
a partial negativist. In conversation and in his letters, Adorno makes a concerted effort to
make his position clear for the sake of his interlocutor. For example, in a letter to Mann
Adorno confides that his positive experiences of teaching students in Germany have taught
him to temper his pessimistic outlook: “[T]he regression to barbarism is not entirely what
we are often tempted to believe it is. Even the thesis of the demise of culture has weakened
its hold for me through contact with the younger people with whom we are now able to
work” (Adorno‐Mann, 98). And, later in the same letter Adorno becomes quite explicit: “if
it is true that power of the positive has now passed over to the negative, it is no less true that
negation draws its rights solely from the power of the positive” (Adorno and Mann 98).11
Decades later, in a telephone interview with Peter Langer, he admits that the students’
protests have led him to believe that “for the first time in Germany, which is a country
618
without a Left, something like a potential for a left politics is being expressed” (FAB VI 170).
So while there is textual evidence for both interpretations, taken in the round, Adorno is
best interpreted as espousing partial negativism.12
3. Theunissen’s Challenge
We have established that Adorno is best interpreted as a partial negativist. Theunissen, as

we will see, takes this as a criticism, since it shows that, in spite of his best attempts,
Adorno fails to grasp the nettle of absolute (austere) negativism, and because his partial
negativist strategy of reading the truth of social life from its alienated form is ultimately,
Theunissen contends, a cryptic version of the Hegelian thesis about the rational in the
actual, with hidden “optimistic implications” (Theunissen 1983, 53). Such an implica-
tion would flatly contradict Adorno’s thesis of the fall of metaphysics, and the paralysis of
our metaphysical faculty.
Part of the brilliance of Theunissen’s interpretation is that it throws light on a curious
feature of Adorno’s negativism, namely that it does not count out the negativity of the
social world – that is, the “bis Innerste falsche Welt” and the ontology “des falschen
Zustandes” – straightforwardly in terms of moral wrongness.13 Adorno’s use of language
is peculiar, but very deliberate: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” he writes, not that
there is no “gutes Leben im schlechten” (GS4 43/MM 39). “The whole” Adorno writes, by
which he means the social totality, “is the untrue [das Unwahre]” (GS4 55/MM 50).
Theunissen explains Adorno’s use of the terms “richtig/falsch,” and “wahr/unwahr”
rather than the more obvious moral terms “gut/schlecht,” or “gut/böse” as follows.
Adorno’s theme is not the classical negativity of nonbeing but “the ontic negativity of
what ought not to be, the bad.” Accordingly, Adorno judges the social world as “false” in
the light of a concept of untruth “that takes aim at bad actuality” (Theunissen 1983, 42).
This is not a moral badness. Rather Adorno’s negativism is a post‐Hegelian social concep-
tion of negativity qua pathology, modeled on the idea of sickness or madness. And the
crucial point about this is that such negative notions are derivative from prior positive
notions of health, sanity, integrity and so forth (Theunissen 1983, 47).
The latter point is pivotal to a proper understanding of Adorno and also the ground of
Theunissen’s challenge to partial negativism. In Adorno’s view, the negative can be
known as such only because it contains the positive (Theunissen 1983, 49). Therefore
Theunissen contends, the “positive premise” is essential to Adorno’s philosophy, and
stands in need of justification. I would put the point slightly differently: Adorno’s nega-
tivism is essentially contrastive, because it presupposes contrasting positive notions of
wholeness, health, or sanity.14 Adorno has to justify his positive premise, but in
Theunissen’s eyes, fails to do so in a consistently – and that means for Theunissen aus-
terely – negativist manner. All Adorno’s failed attempts to do so are at bottom “pre‐ and
even anti‐negativistic” (Theunissen 1983, 53).
As I understand it there are two components to Theunissen’s challenge. First, how can
Adorno explain the availability of the conceptions of the good (or the right) on which his
critical theory depends? This puzzle is most acute for the austere negativist – namely how
does one avail oneself of any conception of the good or the right at all, in a world where
there is “no right living.”15 It is, though, also a puzzle for the partial negativist – how does
one reliably identify the good (especially a good that is fragmented, and diffused) from
among the predominantly bad?
619
The second puzzle, to which Theunissen pays less attention, is this. How can a concep-
tion of negativity modeled on notions of illness and pathology justify normative claims
that are unmistakably deontological? Premises about social malfunction and pathology
don’t license conclusions about what individual agents ought not to do. We should be in no
doubt that Adorno, even though on occasions he appears to eschew normative ethics – to
avoid asking the questions of what one ought to do and why – is happy to make moral
judgments and moral demands. Take one obvious example:
Hitler has forced upon humanity in the state of its unfreedom a new categorical imperative: to
arrange its thinking and acting such that Auschwitz does not happen again; and nothing
similar ever happen. (ND 358/ GS6365)
Adorno explicitly invokes categorical imperatives. He also repudiates Kant’s view that the
moral law is pure reason’s way of being practical.16 In other words Adorno endorses a
Kantian deontological morality, while rejecting a Kantian theory of practical reason. So it
is not just that Adorno has to justify the positive premise of his philosophical negativism. It
is that Adorno needs to bridge the logical the gap between his premises, which contain
quasi-medical ideas of social pathology as well as positive correlating ideas of health and
wholeness, and the moral normativity of his conclusions. The reconstruction of Adorno
I offer solves both puzzles. It allays Theunissen’s critique of partial negativism by justifying
the positive premise of Adorno’s critical theory. And it shows how Adorno can justify the
deontological demands of his minimal ethics in a way that makes best sense of his critique
of Kant, on the one hand, and his negativism, on the other.
4. Adorno’s Moral Metaphysics of Solidarity Reconstructed
The philosophical reconstruction of Adorno I offer here, in order to resolve these problems,
reaches beyond Adorno’s texts. It makes use of two different contributions to contempo-
rary moral philosophy with some shared influences. Reconstructing a position that Adorno
can reasonably endorse from two distinct sources is a bit like kitting him out in off the rack
garments from two different tailors. Not only must they fit Adorno, and suit him, they also
have to match each other.
4.1. Michael Thompson on the Human Life‐Form

In a series of articles and in his book Life and Action, Michael Thompson has explored the
significance for moral philosophy of the concept of the human “life‐form” understood as a
kind of natural historical judgment of goodness and badness. Consider the following kind
of argument (Thompson 2004 and 2008):
(1) S does F. (A horse gallops.)

(2) This S does F. (This horse gallops.)
(3) This S cannot do F, and is therefore defective as an S. (This horse is lame and
cannot gallop.)
Such judgments, he claims, are made in the light of “natural standards” that are
relative to a life‐form, and that serve to “transpose our natural historical judgments into an
620
evaluative key” (Thompson 2004, 55).17 I’m not able here to rehearse, let alone assess,
Thompson’s arguments for this view. Let me instead lay out certain features of it that are
relevant to my argument that this way of thinking about humanity in certain perhaps
surprising ways fits Adorno’s philosophy and social criticism.
First, the concept “human” on Thompson’s view has the right kind of normative status.
It is normative, but not in virtue of some “secret normative infrastructure” (Thompson
2008, 81) That is, it does not contain any moral “oughts.” But it does license inferences of
natural historical judgments of good, bad, defect, and pathology.18 Indeed Thompson goes
so far as to claim that a “true judgment of natural defect thus supplies an ‘immanent
critique’ of its subject” (Thompson 2008, 81).19
Second, the “concept” of the human life‐form has the right balance of transcendence
and immanence to serve as the standard of criticism of defect or pathology. On the one
hand, the concept has a modest kind of transcendence in relation to its object in that it
“reaches beyond the ‘facts’ about an individual” toward its kind or species (Thompson
2008, 81). For example, a particular individual umbrella jellyfish may not have the full
complement of tentacles it should have. Maybe no individual specimen has the full
complement of 144, but nonetheless it is true that ‘the umbrella jellyfish’ has 144. The con-
cept of the life‐form is a universal, but one that is relative to the life‐form that bears it, and
its natural history. The individual human bears the life‐form “human” just as the individual
umbrella jellyfish bears its life‐form. To that extent, as Thompson puts it, recalling Hegel,
“What merely ‘ought to be’ in the individual … really ‘is’ in its form.” And so every thought
of the individual organism is “mediated by the thought of the life‐form it bears” whether we
are speaking of a man, or a horse, or an umbrella jellyfish (Thompson 2008, 81).
Third, the concept of the human life‐form, like every other life‐form concept, is weakly
a priori: pure and not empirical. Anything we can think about an individual organism
already involves an “at least implicit thought of its form” (Thompson 2004, 64). In
particular the concept of the “human” is an a priori concept attaching to a particular
life‐form. Having the concept “human” and some general substantive knowledge that goes
with it, is characteristic of individuals who bear that form. Being human, means, at some
level, knowing what it is to be human.
This last point is important for meeting the first part of Theunissen’s challenge, which
is to explain why it is that, even under present social conditions, the concept of the “human”
is available. Not that this is a problem for Thompson. He merely notes that humans
characteristically have the concept “human” and know what it is to be human.

Furthermore, Thompson suggests that merely by acts of self‐consciousness, and reflecting
on the life‐form they are, human beings can avail themselves of the concept “human.” The
first‐personal concept, I, is an a priori representation of the human life‐form. Human
beings, in a manner that is characteristic of the species, avail themselves first personally of
the concept ‘human’ through the concept I, which is presupposed in speech and action.
“In the self‐conscious representation of myself as thinking … I implicitly represent myself
as alive, as falling under life‐manifesting types. And in bringing myself under such types I
bring myself under a life form” (Thompson 2004, 68).
For Adorno, unlike for Thompson, things are rather more difficult, because of his nega-
tivism. But we are allowing that the knowledge of the concept “human” and what it is to
be one, as well as first‐personal knowledge of who and what I am, in each case, may fall
well short of knowing what it is to be fully human, and what it is to lead a good human life
in all its perfection. We do not know in full what a perfected humanity would be like and
how humans would live under transformed and ameliorated historical conditions. So the
621
view I’m proposing is not obviously inconsistent with the interpretation of Adorno’s
partial negativism. The point is that we know something, even under present adverse ideo-
logically stamped conditions, of what it is to be human. We can make a start in thinking
what a fully realized humanity would demand. And this is sufficient to provide the relevant
point of contrast to the inhuman that, as we saw earlier, Adorno claims we know very well,
and thus helps explain how we can reliably recognize the inhuman as inhuman.
One very obvious problem that besets any natural theory of normativity à la Thompson,
which sees ethics as somehow grounded in human nature, is the so‐called Pollyanna
problem, namely that it is far too optimistic about human nature, which, as Tennyson once
put it, and as Hobbes and Freud might have agreed, is “red in tooth and claw.” Or as Millgram
puts it, “it is polyannish (sic) to assume that justice is part of the human species‐form”
because, for example, some empirical research has shown that male humans are “fine‐
tuned by nature to rape women in a suitable range of circumstance” (Millgram 2009, 562).
The trouble with that view, as Micah Lott shows, is that it is based on an empirical account
of what humans do in abnormal circumstances (Lott 2012). Anyway, no such merely
empirical account can give a grounding for a normatively rich account of human nature,
unless it already contains an account of the virtues and practical reason, and to the extent
that it does, the Pollyanna problem won’t arise. Furthermore, we should recall that Adorno’s
materialist account of human nature is proleptic. It is, or it at least includes, an account of
what human beings can become under altered social and cultural conditions.
That said, I’m not as sanguine as Thompson, who claims that in spite of the fact that human
being has a second nature, which is realized under social conditions mediated by Bildung and
culture, “no special difficulties” arise from the moralist’s appeal to the life‐form named “human”
(Thompson 2008, 82). This makes natural historical judgments of the human life‐form quali-
tatively distinct from that of a lame horse or an etiolated geranium. Moreover, as Marx pointed
out, human beings do not make history (or culture and institutions for that matter) under con-
ditions of their own choosing. And these conditions stand in the way of any effect that practical
reason and the virtues can have on the realization of human second nature.
Thompson contends that an entire theory of the human good should fall out of the idea
of the human life‐form. Adorno, and we on behalf of him, are after much less. All we need
are some contrasting positive notions in virtue of which he can judge existing forms of life
as pathological, and normative notions sufficient to justify the normative demands of a
minimal morality.
4.2. Wiggins on Solidarity

I believe that all this can be achieved if we fortify what we have so far, namely the interpre-
tation of Adorno’s humanism in the light of Thompson’s idea of the human life‐form, with
a different notion, a proto‐moral idea of human solidarity as expounded by David Wiggins.
Wiggins finds in Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad and one of Philippa Foot’s essay on con-
sequentialism, an idea of moral solidarity that emerges from the face‐to‐face relation
between human beings. Weil speaks of an “indefinable influence that the presence of
another human being has on us,” while Foot talks of “a kind of solidarity between human
beings, as if there is some sense that no‐one is to come out against his fellow men.”20
Wiggins takes both thinkers to be gesturing toward a notion of inter‐human solidarity,
rooted in a phenomenology of “primitive pre‐reflective recognition” (Wiggins 2009,
249).21 Wiggins refines this idea of solidarity of the human with the human, and presses
it into the service of a renewed genealogy of morality aimed at unearthing the rootedness
622
in human nature (even if second rather than first nature) of deontological morality.22
For, in Wiggins’ view the sense of solidarity that is keyed to human recognition is bound up
affectively with the “prohibitive aversions” against killing or harming another human
being, and thus impose categorical prohibitions, that are “nothing less than structural or
constitutive” of the moral (Wiggins 2009, 259).23
Much needs to be said about this suggestion. First, it is important that the notion of soli-
darity here is a moral notion, though one that is properly located in the “proto‐ethical” domain,
as the root of the moral, rather than in the moral domain itself (Wiggins 2009, 257).24
Second, the notion of solidarity is neither merely cognitive, although as the human rec-
ognition of another human it is recognitive, nor is it merely affective, although as a feeling
of kinship with another human being consonant with one human’s recognition of another
as human, it is also affective.25 The affect in question takes the form of a “prohibitive”
aversion against harm or killing another human being (Wiggins 2009, 247).
Third, Wiggins makes it clear that the notion of solidarity thus described can of course
be suspended or overridden in certain situations, but the fact that, for example, soldiers
need repeated training to learn how to effectively bayonet another human being shows
that it is under normal conditions for most people a “psychic and visceral obstacle” to the
perpetration of egregious acts of harm or violence on other humans (Wiggins 2009, 251).
The roots of morality in solidarity are deep, albeit frail and capable of being repressed and
overridden.
Fourth, the idea of human solidarity is not just a feeling, not even merely a fellow
feeling, or feeling of generalized benevolence toward others.26 This means that the feeling
of solidarity cannot be reduced to first‐personal experience, like early conceptions of
“empathy” that saw it as a kind of emotional mirroring and projection from one’s own
case to others. That is why solidarity is qualitatively different from Humean sympathy and
Rousseauan pity.27 Human solidarity is not an other‐directed construction cantilevered
out of mental and emotional particles of first‐personal experience.
Interpretations of Adorno’s conception of morality that ground it solely on the somatic
basis of pain‐experience are thus mistaken.28 The operative idea in Adorno is not that
knowing what pain is in my own case, I can understand what pain is in another human
being, such that my reason to avoid my pain becomes a reason to refrain from inflicting
pain on others. The model of human solidarity in play is more like Husserl’s concept of
empathy, according to which, in empathizing with another, I attend to their experiences
and to the object of those experiences as theirs and as lived by them.29 Like empathy, soli-
darity is a primitive affective response to a face‐to‐face encounter with another physical
human being, in which the other’s claim not to be harmed, or killed, is given to me directly
along with my apprehension of them as human. My solidarity is other‐directed from the
start. The deontological requirements of solidarity that arise in response to the recognition
of another human are also other‐directed from the start. Correlatively, the deontological
requirement on me to refrain from harming or killing flows from the other’s humanity,
rather than from the humanity in my own person.
4.3. The Compatibility of Thompson on the Human Life‐Form

and Wiggins on Human Solidarity
It might be objected that I am just forcing two different theories together in an arbitrary
and ad hoc way. I don’t think so. Both Wiggins and Thompson are offering accounts of
normativity rooted in human nature, rather than grounded on pure reason. And on two
623
central points, Thompson and Wiggins are one: part of what it is to be human is to recognize
other human beings (along with oneself) as human; and this recognition has normative
implications. The normative implications according to Thompson, flow from our appre-
hension of human form primarily in our own person, and our knowledge of what it is to be
human, toward a notion of the human good. The normative consequences of our soli-
darity with the human according to Wiggins, flow from our recognition of another
concrete being as human to the minimal, proto‐ethical, and fundamental deontological
demand that I not do the other in, a demand that constitutes the very root of the moral.
One works from humanity in my own case, the other works from the other’s humanity.
And what each work toward is different yet complementary: a conception of the human
good, in the one case, and a proto‐moral idea of the root of the morally right in the other.
If I’m right, we can justify Adorno’s positive premise by way of his humanism, and the
closely connected idea of moral solidarity of the human with the human. My reconstruc-
tion helps solve both puzzles contained in Theunissen’s challenge. It gives an account of
why the idea of the human, with all it entails, is the appropriate normative standard of
judgment that Adorno’s critical social theory puts to work, in leveling evaluative judgments
of social and individual pathology. It is the idea in the light of which Adorno’s theory can
reliably expose and condemn inhuman features of our social world as inhuman. At the
same time, the moral idea of human solidarity that is keyed to the recognition of the human
is sufficient to justify the moral claims that inflect the whole of Adorno’s philosophy, namely
categorical imperatives and minimal but fundamental deontological requirements that are
not based on pure practical reason and imposed externally on a recalcitrant nature.
5. Four Tests of Adequacy of my Reconstruction
Suppose this outline of a reconstruction can meet Theunissen’s challenge and solve the
underlying problems of Adorno’s critical theory and moral philosophy. What recommends
my reconstruction as an interpretation of Adorno’s, rather than as a sketch of a separate
theory confected out of the work of two contemporary moral philosophers? There are four
tests of adequacy that it has to pass arising from our initial exposition of Adorno.
To begin with, my reconstruction makes sense of Adorno’s complex of reflections on
humanity. Schmidt showed us that Adorno’s materialist metaphysics is a kind of
humanism, centering on the proleptic idea of “the human” and of “human nature,”
namely the promise of a new humanity that would be realized in a reconciled world.
Second, my reconstruction is compatible with Adorno’s positive remarks on solidarity,
which are all the more important for being infrequent. In Negative Dialectics the idea of the
human nature implies a notion of human solidarity: “It is the self‐reflection of nature in human
subjects, through sympathy with the human, that means not everything is vain” (ND 369/
GS 6 390). Hope lies in the promise of human nature. Adorno claims that moral solidarity is an
affect, arising in response to the recognition of the vulnerability of other human beings, which
provides a weak but visceral obstacle to the will to harm: “The impulse, the naked physical fear
and the feeling of solidarity with, in Brecht’s words, tormentable bodies, is immanent to moral
action, would be denied by attempts at ruthless rationalization” (GS6 256/ND280).
Furthermore, in Adorno’s radio broadcast on the question of what is German he says:
If there is still anything profound … then it is the denunciation of every clandestine agreement
with the necessity of suffering. Solidarity prohibits its justification. It is in the faithfulness to
624
the idea that the way things are should not be the final word – rather than in the hopeless
attempt to determine finally what is German that the sense this concept may still assert is to be
surmised: in the transition to humanity. (CM 214/GS 10.2 70)
Moreover, one can make out the contours of Adorno’s idea of humanity and moral soli-
darity in his determinately negative reflections on what he calls “the culture that failed”
(ND 368/GS6 361), namely German culture, which included a Kantian morality at its
heart. The morality that failed is a quintessentially bourgeois morality, in which moral sub-
jectivity takes refuge in interiority, as a flight from the external world and “its trend toward
total functionality” (PMP 151–2) The Kantian moral subject severs himself from his bodily
sensuous nature, and acts out of impersonal duty, not out of any interest, and does not aim
at happiness, one’s own or that of others (PMP 108). As a result he becomes hardened,
rule‐bound, and indifferent to the suffering of others. This is what Adorno means when he
writes the telling line that the fate of those who survived the events is that they are marked by
“the coldness of bourgeois subjectivity without which Auschwitz could not have happened”
(ND 363/GS6 356).
Adorno makes similar claims about the idea of the legal person, and the social rela-
tions of possessive individuals. Adorno specifically picks out what he calls “the coldness
of the societal monad, the isolated competitor” as the cause of “the indifference to the fate
of others” which was the precondition for the moral failure under the Nazis (CM 201).
This is not to defend all aspects of Adorno’s critique of Kantian morality, and legal per-
sonhood, but to point out that in their determinate negation is an incipient moral idea of
solidarity with the human that is simultaneously affective and cognitive. It forms the
point of contrast with Kantian (i.e. purely rational) morality and with the liberal morality
of possessive individualism.
Third, my reconstruction is compatible with Adorno’s repudiation of Kant’s idea that
moral imperatives are the practical requirements of pure reason. Although Adorno does
not condemn every aspect of Kant’s theory and even singles out some aspects for praise, he
nonetheless insists that the requirements of morality consist in the affective response to
the recognition of a concrete human individual being:30 “
One ought not to torture; there should be no concentration camps … These sentences are only
true as impulses … They should not be rationalized.” (ND 280/GS6 281)
And he claims that it would be an outrage (Frevel) to justify the new categorical imperative
“discursively” (ND 365/GS6 358). My reconstruction rescues deontology for Adorno, and
yet makes it safe. For on my view, Adorno’s categorical imperatives, unlike Kant’s, are not
based on the requirements that pure reason imposes on sensuous human nature, but are
rooted in human nature, and thus not in need of rationalization or justification by reason.
Fourth and finally, the view I have offered here is compatible with Adorno’s partial nega-
tivism. For human solidarity reveals itself not in compliance with it, but in the violation of it:
as Wiggins puts it – in the “visceral horror” we feel and “the indignation to which we are
moved on behalf of certain sorts of victims” (Wiggins 2009, 227, 241). This is the chief
point of, and the truth in, Adorno’s crucial statement in the lectures on the Problems of
Moral Philosophy:
“We may not know what absolute good is, or the absolute norm, we may not even know what
man is or the human or humanity – but what the inhuman is we know very well indeed.”
(PMP 175/PDM 261)
625
Earlier we noted that Adorno’s approach to critical theory is to seek the truth of immediate
life in its estranged form (GS4 13/MM 15). Adorno displays the same approach in respect
of morality. “The question of the right and wrong of the conscience admits to no conclu-
sive reply, because right and wrong dwells within it and no abstract judgment could sepa-
rate them: only in its repressive form does the solidaristic one grow, that sublates the
former” (ND 282/GS6 278). In this respect Adorno’s minimal morality is an epistemic
negativism that responds to metaphysical negativism, the “Ontologie des falschen
Zustandes”: we discover what solidarity is when its demands are violated. Adorno’s nega-
tive ethics recalls a famous insight of the French sociologist of science Georges Canguilhem,
that biological normalcy … “is revealed only through transgression of the norm, and so
concrete and scientific knowledge of life only arises through (knowledge of) disease”
(Canguilhem 1951, 72). Similarly, Adorno’s idea of truly human solidarity is, as an
implied contrast, inherent in its alienated form, in the Kantian morality of duty based on
pure reason, and in the “contract of mutual indifference” between persons, and makes
itself felt most keenly, in the moment of its fall, the moral catastrophe of Auschwitz, for
which, in Adorno’s eyes, bourgeois coldness was a necessary condition (Geras 1998).
I have elsewhere argued that the central theme in Negative Dialectics is the audacious,
but ultimately failed attempt to think what is unthinkable, to “say what cannot be said”
(GS6 21/ND 9).31 That attempt fails because, as Theunissen notes, in spite of designating
the nonidentical as “conceptless” (GS6 21/ND 9) and hence ineffable and unthinkable,
Adorno illicitly laces the nonidentical with the redemptive power of the absolute and the
Messianic power of utopia. It is for these somewhat unconvincing reasons that he con-
cludes Negative Dialectics with the thought that negative dialectics shows “solidarity with
metaphysics in the moment of its fall” (ND 400/GS6 400). But when one asks, what
exactly Adorno’s idea of thought’s solidarity with a fallen metaphysics of absolute tran-
scendence amounts to, practically and concretely: the answer is very little, almost nothing,
and certainly not enough. Fortunately, for Adorno, Negative Dialectics also contains
something less audacious, which I call a “metaphysics of moral solidarity in the moment
of its fall.” When one asks, by contrast, what does that amount to practically and con-
cretely, the answer is: “Everything Adorno needs for his minimal morality of resistance
and his critical social theory.”
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to Asaf Angermann, Henry W. Pickford, Andrew Chitty, Espen Hammer,
Brian O’Connor, Peter E. Gordon, Axel Honneth, and Koshka Duff.
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Bayertz, K. (1999). Solidarity. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468‐0378.00147.
Freyenhagen, F. (2013). Adorno’s Practical Philosophy. Living Less Wrongly. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
Schmidt, A. 1981. Kritische Theorie. Humanismus. Aufklärung. Philosophische Arbeiten, 1969–79.
Schmidt, A. (1983) Begriff des Materialismus bei Adorno. In: Adorno‐Konferenz 1983 (eds. L. von
Friedeburg and J. Habermas), 14–35. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Wiggins, D. (2009). Solidarity and the root of the ethical. Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 71 (2): 239–269.
Theunissen, M. (1983). Negativität bei Adorno. In: Adorno‐Konferenz 1983 (eds. L. von Friedeburg
and J. Habermas), 41–66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Notes
1 In the Second Discourse Rousseau talks of “the force of natural pity, which the most dissolute
manners have as yet found it so difficult to extinguish […] from this quality alone flow all the
social virtues” (Rousseau 1964, 154). In the Enquiry Hume asks: “Would any man, who is
walking along, tread as willingly on another’s gouty toes, whom he has no quarrel with, as on
the hard flint and pavement?” (Hume 1963, 226).
2 Consider the motif of “redemption” at the end of Minima Moralia (GS4 283/MM 247).
3 See Habermas (1983, 129).
4 Hence Adorno and Horkheimer quote Hölderlin’s “Patmos”: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das ret-
tende auch” (DE 38/GS3 53).
5 Translation amended. See also MM 89: “In the innermost recesses of humanism, at its very soul,
there rages a frantic prisoner, who, as Fascist, turns the world into a prison.”
6 The translation is by Redmond. The original has it that in Sartre’s plays social relations and con-
ditions become “allenfalls aktueller Zusatz” (GS6 58). Ashton writes “topical adjuncts,” which is
needlessly obscure (ND 50).
7 In 1845 Marx described his own materialism as “real humanism” and the basis of communism
in “The Holy Family” (Marx and Engels 1962). See also Dunayevskaya (1965) and Bloch (2018).
628
8 “The idea that human beings are the products of society down to their innermost core is an idea
that he would have rejected as a milieu theory. Lenin was the first person to assert this” (Claussen
2008, 233n.)
9 As a partial negativist, Adorno does not have to commit to the implausible and arguably inco-
herent view that we can know nothing whatsoever about what our future human nature will be
like. See Brian O’Connor’s critique of Freyenhagen (O’Connor 2017, 856–857).
10 See Freyenhagen (2013) and Finlayson (2002).
11 For example, Adorno claims that the good life today consists in a life of critical resistance (PDM
168). Equally, Adorno considered the universities to be relatively sheltered from prevailing
relations of domination (FAB VI 172).
12 The fact that Adorno appears to espouse now partial, now austere negativism, and that these are
logically incompatible, is what obliges philosophical commentators to go beyond what Adorno’s
texts say, and offer a reconstruction of his view that is internally coherent as well as textually
warranted.
13 This is why I dislike the translation “the ontology of the wrong state of things” for “des falschen
Zustandes” (ND11/GS622) and Jephcot’s rendering “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” for “es
gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (GS4 43/MM 39). Redmond’s translation “There is no
right life in the wrong one” is a marginal improvement (http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/
MM1.html). But all of these impute a notion of moral wrongness to Adorno that he deliberately
eschews. I have the same reservation about Freyenhagen’s in many respects excellent book on
Adorno’s practical philosophy Living Less Wrongly.
14 Occasionally Adorno makes just such a claim, as in his letter to Thomas Mann, December 1, 1952:
“if it is true that power of the positive has now passed over to the negative, it is no less true that
negation draws its rights solely from the power of the positive (Adorno and Mann, 2006, 98).”
15 I suggest how Adorno might solve this puzzle, while remaining an austere negativist in Finlayson
2002.
16 See also ND 285–286.
17 Freyenhagen also makes use of Thompson in his reconstruction of Adorno (Freyenhagen 2013,
239–240).
18 Recall Theunissen’s discussion of Adorno’s conception of negativity earlier. This, not the secret
infrastructure of an underlying moral “ought,” is what Adorno needs.
19 I take issue with Thompson’s claim that a “true judgment of natural defect … supplies an ‘imma-
nent critique’ of its subject” (Thompson 2008, 81). In my view one cannot call any old judgment
of natural defect a “criticism,” because what distinguishes a criticism is that it is a mainly nega-
tive evaluation of certain objects, which have the appropriate relation to some kind of agency
(Finlayson 2014). So to criticize is to hold (or to want to hold) some agent responsible for the said
defect. This does not apply to judgments about jellyfish that lack tentacles, or etiolated geraniums
(though it might for the person who forgets to water them!)
20 Weil and Foot cited in Wiggins (2009, 250 and 243).
21 This is not the place to give a detailed history of the idea of solidarity. The idea originates in
Roman law, where the solidum represented each debtor’s individual and joint liability to their
creditors for the whole sum. By the end of the nineteenth century, in the hands of the Fourierists,
it develops into a notion of universal solidarity among humans. See Andreas Wildt (1999) and
(1996); and Wiggins (2008, 2009).
22 Wiggins’ project is to redescribe “the things that Hume characterized only in terms of practices
and dispositions grounded in sympathy, self‐love, and natural benevolence and to place them in
relation to what flows from the phenomenology of primitive pre‐reflective recognition” (Wiggins
2009, 249).
23 See also Wiggins (2008 and 2006, 229–269).
24 The specific idea of human solidarity in play here first emerged as the idea of solidarity as a
humanist religion, based on the “moral” idea that all human beings form a fundamental unity‐
in‐solidarity with one another (Wildt 1996).
629
25 See also Putnam (2002, 132): “But what is, what could be, more irreducible than my knowledge,
face to face with a needy human being, that I am obliged to help that human being? … As long as
one treats that obligation as a mere ‘feeling,’ one will wander in a place … far outside the ethical
world.”
26 In talks at Harvard and again at Kingston, Brian O’Connor, Espen Hammer, and Peter Hallward
criticized the view I am attributing to Adorno, and endorsing myself, as being like Rousseauan
pity or Humean sympathy. However, the view I am putting forward is distinct in that it is not just
a feeling or affect, but an affect that is one with the recognition of an other human being, and
thus in part recognitive. I agree with Putnam (see previous note) and Habermas that mere
“[f]eelings … offer too narrow a basis for the solidarity between members of an impersonal
community of moral beings” (Habermas 1998, 14). It follows that Hume’s sympathy and
Rousseau’s pity are unsuitable candidates for the root of solidarity.
27 Schweppenhäuser (2004, 335), also (in my view correctly) distances Adorno’s account of
morality from Rousseau’s.
28 Freyenhagen (2013, 144–145) and Menke (2004, 320), both claim that Adorno’s ethics is
rooted in pain experience.
29 See Zahavi (2014, 137).
30 See for example PDM, 214.
31 Finlayson (2002).
630
Index
Page references to Notes are indicated by the letter ‘n’ and note number following the page number
Abduction from the Seraglio, 393 aesthetic theory, 397–411

aconceptual synthesis, 376–7 art appreciation, 404–405
actionism, 15, 307, 345, 587 culture industry, 404
theory and praxis, 588, 590, 593, 594 early model, 415–19
“Actuality of Philosophy, The,” 5, 28–32 end of art, 402–404
critique, 506, 508, 510 evaluating, 397–9
and Marx, 306–309 expression, 406–408
Adorno, Gretel (née Karplus, wife of form and content, 401–402
Adorno), 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17 hedonism, 405
Adorno, Maria Calvelli (née della Piana, mother Kant and Hegel, 400–401
of Adorno), 3, 6, 7, 11–12, 13 mastery over material, 401–402
Adorno, Oscar Wiesengrund (father of mimesis, 407, 408
Adorno), 1, 11–12 postwar revisions, 419–23
Jewish identity, 5, 6, 7 quid pro quo, 408
Adorno, Theodor Ludwig (“Teddie”) semblance, 369, 387, 406–408, 499
see also Adorno, Gretel (née Karplus, wife of as social theory, 413–26
Adorno); Adorno, Maria Calvelli (née society, 404
della Piana, mother of Adorno); Aesthetic Theory, 7, 18, 376, 397–400,
Adorno, Oscar Wiesengrund (father 402–406, 414
of Adorno) and aesthetic autonomy, 351, 353, 363
birth and childhood, 3, 13 artworks, 353, 424
character, 6 and Auschwitz, 570–1
death (1969), 17 and Blumenberg, 181, 184
education, 3–4 commodity‐form, sociology of, 310
Enlightenment of 343–5 literary criticism, 368, 370
intellectual legacy, 18 and Marx, 303, 312
marriage, 3 and music, 428–31, 438, 445, 447, 448
aesthetic autonomy, 7, 351–64 and social theory, 423–6
cognitivism, reference and aestheticization, 353, 443, 449
determination, 360–3 deastheticization, 403
experience as primary, 354–5 aesthetics
truth, 355–60 aesthetic experience, 230–2
aesthetic modernism, 28–32 analytic, 354, 356
631
INDEX
aesthetics (cont’d) allusion, 406, 437

Anglophone, 241 conspicuous, 540
appearance, 45, 231, 362, 407, 418 historical, 253
art/artworks, 46, 149, 351, 354–7, 360, literary criticism, 365
362, 363, 385, 401, 420 and Marx, 303, 308
cognition, 44–5 modernism, 389, 391
consciousness, 75 American culture, 142
content, 400 American Jewish Committee (AJC), 159,
and Critical Theory, 410n1 172n19, 274
education, 417 affiliation with Studies in Prejudice
and expression, 239, 406–408 project, 277
formal, 400, 560 The Authoritarian Personality, 12, 273–86, 327
fragmentary, 452 and Institute for Social Research, 162,
and Frankfurt School, 443 172n18
high art, 241 and JLC, 162
instrumental rationality, 232 “research racket,” 162
interpretation, 246 sponsors, 274, 279
justification, 354 analytic aesthetics, 354, 356
of Kant, 400 Anderson, Benedict, 333
language, 149, 398, 428 annihilation of the question, 31–2
lectures on, 397 anthropology, critical, 208–210
mimesis, 47, 50, 181, 399, 408 Anti‐Semite and Jew (Sartre), 166
Aesthetic Theory, 406, 407 anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites, 103–122,
modernism, 385, 506 105–109, 117, 160
and music, 427, 433 see also Judaism
Old Testament, 47 action against, 117, 161, 342, 343
philosophical, 237, 238, 368–72, Adorno on, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112,
376, 403 117, 141, 166, 343
and politics, 150, 230, 237 anti‐religious, 107, 114
realist, 369, 371 and Authoritarian Personality, 112, 164, 166,
social critique, 237–49 274, 276, 277
and social critique, 240, 248 character of anti‐Semites, 112, 117,
traditional, 400 162, 163
Agape (Christian concept of love), 601, 607, and Christianity, 112
608, 612 in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 12, 105, 108,
agency, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 253–5 115, 119
Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, 4, 67, dialectical thinking, 108, 110
69, 415 experiences of Adorno, 6, 372
alienation, 29, 76, 339, 373 fascist‐political anti‐Semites, 106
bourgeois, 255 forms, 106, 113, 119
conditions, 451 diversity of, 106, 107, 108, 112
from democracy, 146 function, 10
effect, 186, 604 history, 110–17, 120
film, 94 Horkheimer on, 104, 105, 109–112
labor, 308, 432, 433, 603 image of “the Jews,” 111, 117–20, 374
modern, 149, 150, 223, 482 Institute for Social Research on, 109, 159,
music, 156, 157, 309, 310, 415–19 162, 171n12
poetry, 420 literature, 103
process, 536 measuring, 276
social, 430, 437 and mental illness, 111
and United States, 149, 150 modern, 110, 114, 366
632
INDEX
Nazi Party/Nazism, 5–7, 105, 110, 114, and metaphysics, 549, 553–7, 561

116, 118, 240, 335 ontology, 294
neutralization of, 340 Armstrong, Louis, 125–7, 137n8
objections/dilemmas, 104–105 Aroose, Jamie, 46
prior to the twentieth‐century, 110 art, 7, 73, 123, 130, 140, 181, 353
propaganda, 111, 327 Adorno’s accounts of, 337, 351–354, 361,
as a rage against civilization, 108, 109, 113 363, 369, 371, 375, 397, 401
religious versus other‐types, 107 and aesthetics, 149, 351, 360, 385
research studies, 12, 111, 113, 163 appearance, 11
specific and general, 110, 113 appreciating, 355, 367, 368, 404–405
ticket mentality, 111, 112 art‐history, 3, 72, 132, 133, 357, 358
totalitarianism, 110 and Auschwitz, 42, 134
in United States, 153, 154, 160, 276 autonomous see autonomous art
universal danger of, 110 bourgeois, 403, 404
vandalism, 340 committed advocacy of, 353
victims, 118, 120 commodification of, xvi, 89, 91, 93, 100,
of Wagner, 241, 449 304, 337
without hatred of the Jews, 111, 113, 118 concept, 404, 405
working classes, 117, 153, 160 culture industry, 95, 403, 404, 405
Anti‐Semitism: Social Disease (Institute of Social debasing, 95
Research), 109 education, 378
antinomianism, 538–41 encoding in, 232, 233
appearance end of, 402–404
aesthetic, 45, 231, 362, 407, 418 European, 94
art/artworks, 11, 362, 429, 480 expression, 44, 59, 94
capitalist society, 369 forms, 133, 331, 386, 400, 406
deceptive, 327 Freud on, 405
entities of, 554 Greek, 131, 400
versus essence, 5, 366, 369, 370, 461 Hegelian, 94, 95, 130
existence, 40 hidden, 93
false, 369 high art, 51, 241–3, 404
and ideas, 554, 555 humanistic, 242
identity, 57 idealistic historians of, 94
illusory, 309 interpretation, 239, 243, 248
jazz, 125 Kant on, 400
music, 428, 429, 430 knowledge of, 358, 360, 369, 370, 432
new, 147 language of, 137n13, 149, 184, 428
outward, 483 liquidation of, 405
and reality, 366 mass‐produced, 7, 92, 93, 95–7, 100, 404
and society, 227 modern, xvi, 7, 72, 81, 147, 186, 402, 405
and sociology, 294, 310 modernist, 384, 385, 386, 387, 394
substances in, 260 mournful, 404
“things beyond resemblance,” 186 musical art/art‐music, 87–9, 126, 130, 310
transitory, 616 mute language of, 406, 428
and truth, 29, 40, 555 and nature, 406
visible, 543 nonrealist, 230
Arendt, Hannah, 255, 325, 371 and objectivity, 129–31
Aristotle, 190n19, 378, 392 objects of, 400
and Adorno’s critique of Heidegger, 473, participatory, 399
474, 483 and philosophy, 41, 354, 356, 385
and aesthetic theory, 400, 401 photographic, 97
633
INDEX
art (cont’d) “as if,” 47

and praxis, 247 individual, 403, 404, 421
purpose/function, 231 interpretation, 374, 375, 414, 423, 428
quality, 231 judging, 359
Realist, 231, 353 literary, 375
Roman, 95 localized, 356–7
Romantic, 400 losing oneself in, 405
sense‐making, 134 mastery over material, 401–402
sociology of, 413–15 meaning, 415, 429
style, 95 versus mere things, 369
symbolic, 400 modern, 373, 428
twentieth‐century, 72 modernist, 369, 388–92, 404
art criticism, 125, 237–9, 241, 243, 246, 377 monads, as, 249n1, 398, 415
artworks, 44, 59, 181, 184, 242, 243, 246, music, 416, 419
248, 362, 369, 370, 371, 375, 384, newness, 47
398, 439, 480 part and whole relationship, 398–9, 407
Adorno on, 47, 230–1, 241, 249n1, 352, political aspects, 231, 238, 241
353, 421, 431 postwar society, 419
Aesthetic Theory, 353, 424 purpose/function, 231
advanced, 425 radical, 424
aesthetics, 46, 351, 354, 355, 357, 360, rationalization and production of, 230–1
362, 363, 401, 420 reality, representing, 369
aging of, 371 redemptive critique, 373
appearance, 362, 429, 480 referential, 361
appreciation, 351–2, 355, 356, 360 Romantic model (Benjamin), 306
versus criticism, 353 social critique, 238
attunement to, 375 social environment, 425, 428
authenticity, 419, 424, 425 social status, 423
autonomous, 353 and sociology of art, 413
avant‐garde, 371 structure, 362, 364n7, 414
beauty, 231, 369, 424 style, 95, 369, 371
and capitalism, 424 successful, 369, 370, 371, 408
composition, 361 temporal core, 371
content, 401 traditional, 376
ideological, 241 understanding, 360, 375
substantive, 376 unfolding in, 371, 418
truth‐content, 44, 359, 360, 362, 398 universal significance, 415
utopian, 428 atonality, 4, 67, 132, 356, 434, 435
criticism, 351–2, 355, 356, 360 formally integrated, 433
versus appreciation, 353 free, 11, 73, 77, 80, 131, 137n15, 448
demand of, 354 aura, 7, 80, 89, 406, 476, 485, 503
dissonant, 96 Auschwitz, 15, 567–82
dual character, 310 see also Holocaust; Judaism; Nazi Party/
ethical resistance, 428 Nazism
experiences of, 352, 354, 355, 356, 359, and art, 42, 134
362, 405 barbarism of, 254, 576
and expression, 406, 407 and cognition, 572
form, 369, 370, 371, 401, 402 education following, 13, 103, 578–9
high, 404 goodness, meaning and trust, 574–8
history, 428 injustice, 557, 577, 578
hope in, 46 and meaning, 547–8
ideology, 241, 368 and morality, 571–4
634
INDEX
poetry after , 181, 568–71 autonomism (analytic aesthetics), 354,

public intellectual following, 568, 579 355, 360
and trust, 574–8 autonomous art, 18, 88, 89, 90, 95–6,
Außerparlamentarische Opposition (extra‐ 98, 404
parliamentary opposition, APO), 15 autonomy
authenticity aesthetic, 6, 7, 351–64
artworks, 419, 424, 425 and bourgeois society, 23
democracy, modern, 343 of discipline of philosophy, 24
dialectical thinking, 242 and freedom, 588, 594, 599n4
experience, 29 Kantian notion, 23
The Jargon of Authenticity, 14 music, 6
and jazz, 7 Ayer, A.J, 6
and mass production, 609
and modernity, 223 Bach, J.S., 69, 73, 125, 131, 135, 438
Authoritarian Personality, The xvi, 12, 106, 111, Balz, Norbert, 406
153, 273–86, 327, 366, 367 barbarism, 10, 12, 108, 109, 366, 367, 569,
see also American Jewish Committee (AJC); 574, 577, 579
anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites; of Auschwitz, 254, 576
authoritarianism; Berkeley Public of educational practices, 579
Opinion Study Group; Judaism inherent, 568, 571
and anti‐Semitism, 112, 164, 166, 274, regression to, 618
276, 277 Barrett, Lee, 37, 41
publicly stated versus privately‐held Bartok, Bela, 68, 69
beliefs, 278 Basic Law (German), 15
research studies, 277, 279 Baudelaire, Charles, 51, 365
responses to, 279 beauty, 10, 96
significance, 279, 281, 283 artworks, 231, 369, 424
susceptibility of individuals to authoritarian education, 579
techniques, 276 musical, 134
and United States, 280–4, 327 natural, 405–406, 424, 482, 483
authoritarianism, 12, 154, 344 regression, 424
see also domination; Authoritarian Beck, Elke, 36
Personality, The Beck, Glenn, 282
Adorno on, 339, 345 Beckett, Samuel, xvi, 18, 100, 377
appeal of, 275, 279 aesthetic autonomy, 356, 365
confronting, 330, 335 Endgame, 13
conservative, 339 literary criticism, 369, 371
and democratic modernism (US), 142, 144 Beethoven, Ludwig van, xvi, 4, 11, 68, 74, 127,
education, 337 131, 352, 358, 364n4, 427, 439
epistemological, 595, 596 late style, xvi, 11, 432–4, 517n2
family structures, 339 Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 432
ideology, 280 Being, 177, 461, 473, 474–5, 478, 481, 482,
Institute for Social Research on, 159 484, 550
masking, 149 Being‐toward‐Death, 608
Nazi‐era, 15 everyday, 479
political, 283 and nonconceptuality, 179, 180, 182, 189
psychology, authoritarian versus ontology, 180
democratic, 328–30 pure, 477
social critique, 238, 239, 242 Being and Time, 475, 476, 479
susceptibility to techniques, 276 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 8, 304, 306
typologies, 164 ‘On the Concept of History,’ 10
in United States, 283 epistemology, 56, 60, 62
635
INDEX
Benjamin, Walter (cont’d) Blumenberg, Hans, 175–91, 188n1, 188n2,

on Kierkegaard, 41, 43 189n3, 189n5, 189n9, 189n11,
on knowledge, 56 190n12, 190n14, 190n25, 190n28,
and language, 54, 57, 58, 60, 259 191n29
and Marx, 60, 61 and Aesthetic Theory, 181, 184
and mimesis, 53, 54 Böll, Heinrich, 347
nonconceptuality, 183, 184 Boulez, Pierre, 79, 450
and philosophical redemption, 58–9 “Bourgeois Opera,” 444, 447, 451
relationship with Adorno, 4, 5, 7, 9, 22, 35, bourgeois society, 21, 22, 23–5, 27
42, 51–66, 98, 155, 194, 210, 304, and anti‐Semitism, 106, 117
310, 311, 325, 589 Bowie, Andrew, 41–2, 134, 510
correspondence, 365, 371, 542, Bradley, Francis, 284
544, 589 Brahms, Johannes, 69, 73
suicide of, 9, 10, 15 Braverman, H., 32
works of, 52, 54–63, 88, 326 Brecht, Bertolt, 7, 9, 52, 65n1, 87, 186,
Arcades Project, The 52, 60, 62, 63 202–203, 247, 296, 301n9, 365,
Bilderverbot, 47, 98 371, 393, 418, 533, 560, 624
“On Language as Such,” 52, 53, 57, 59 Fluchtlingsgespräche, 87
One Way Street, 326 Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), 604
Origin of German Tragic Drama, 4, 52, Brentano, Franz, 324
318n5 Brown, Wendy, 560
“On Perception,” 55 Bruckner, Anton, 132
“On the Program of the Coming Buber, Martin, 65n8
Philosophy,” 55 Buck‐Morss, Susan, 35, 51, 65n1, 66n13, 307,
translation, 54, 60 326, 547n1
Trauerspiel, 5, 55, 56, 59, 60–1, 88
“Work of Art” essay, 7 capitalism
“The Work of Art in the Age of its see also commodification; labor; Marx, Karl;
Mechanical Reproducibility,” 7 Marxism; mass production; social class
Berg, Alban, xvi, 4, 14, 237, 415 accumulation, 30
aesthetic autonomy, 352, 356 appearance, 369
and music, 427, 432, 434, 437, 438 and artworks, 424
opera, 446, 447 bourgeois society, 22, 23–5, 27
Second Viennese School, 67–78, 81 bourgeois spirit, 22
Bergson, Henri, 31 commodification, 336
Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group, 12, culture, 28
280–1 German, 25, 32
Authoritarian Personality, 166, 274, 276 labor process, 24
empirical methods, 276, 277, 281, 282, 283 late, 45, 154, 156, 157, 165, 166, 366, 368,
psychoanalytic concepts, 165 378, 399, 540, 589, 595, 597, 600n13
typologies, 165 modernity, 60, 80, 108, 115, 116, 221, 222,
Bernstein, J.M., 254, 255, 259, 283, 385, 394, 434, 446, 488, 489, 491, 492, 497, 504
491, 574–6 and music, 8
Bernstein, Leonard, 76 production process, 27
Bernstein, Richard, 40 rationalized, 26
Biceaga, V., 27 and reality, 609
Bilderverbot (biblical ban on graven images), 47, structure of society, 21–2
98, 541–2 caricatures, 193–5
Bion, Wilfred, 334n1 Cassirer, Ernst, 137n13, 179
Bloch, Ernst, 3, 4, 70, 72, 181, 231, 260, 429, categorical imperative, 103, 324
483, 628n7 new categorical imperative, 572–4, 576,
The Spirit of Utopia, 68, 483 577, 579, 590, 620, 625
636
INDEX
categorization, knowledge as, 371 political, 353

Catholicism, 3, 5, 118, 347 substantive, 517n2
see also Adorno, Maria Calvelli (née della suppressed, 356
Piana, mother of Adorno) willed, 394
Cato the Younger, 186 commodification, 158, 309–310, 425
causal critique, 238–41 see also capitalism
Cavell, Stanley, 137n12, 384 of art, xvi, 89, 91, 93, 100, 304, 337
Celan, Paul, 365, 371, 570–1, 582n3 capitalism, 336
“Meridian,” 570 complete, 309, 425
Chandler, A., 24 culture, 10, 87
character‐as‐knowledge, 432 generalized, 313
Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 15 inescapable, 425
Christianity and mass mobilization, 322
Agape (Christian concept of love), 601, 607, of music, 8, 415, 417
608, 612 resisting, 95–6
and anti‐Semitism, 112 commodity fetishism, 8, 11, 73, 311, 322,
Chua, Daniel, 75–6, 455n1 369, 602
citizenship, in Nazi Germany, 6 and music, 433, 434
class see social class commodity‐form, sociology of, 309–311
class conflict, 26, 338, 516n1 “Concept of the Unconscious in the
see also social class Transcendental Doctrine of the Soul,
subject and object relation, 223, 226 The,” 3–4
classical metaphysics, 550–6 concepts
classicism, 18 aconceptual synthesis, 376–7
coercion, and freedom, 607–611 art, 404, 405
cognition, 90, 134, 182, 221, 223, 224, conceptual history, 176, 177
226–9, 338, 436, 577 conceptual rationality, 493
see also consciousness; knowledge consciousness, 501n11
active, 489 and constitutive subjectivity, 14, 488–92,
aesthetics, 44–5 498, 499, 522
of appearance, 553 democracy, 143
Auschwitz, 572 domination, conceptual, 178, 180, 182,
conceptualization, 494 184, 610
and consciousness, 223, 226 instrumental rationality, 493, 501n7
constraints, 553 non‐identity, 474, 475, 478, 541
critical, 230 nonconceptuality, 493–6
formal, 431 and Being, 179, 180, 182, 189
historical techniques, 433, 440 ontological conceptual realism, 182
logical, 361 subsumptive, 182
mimesis, 498 conceptuality, 39, 40, 90, 259, 313, 375, 481
nature of, 360 Adorno and Blumenberg, 176, 179, 180,
perceptual, 482 190n24
philosophical, 363 exchange relationship, 375
reified, 232 hegemonic, 491–4, 497, 498
social, 203, 230 transformed, 497
truth‐only, 495, 496, 497 condescension (theological), 52–3, 65n6
types, 360, 536 conflict, taming, 292–4
Coltrane, John, 125, 131, 133, 134, 137 conformism, Adorno accused of, 16
“Commitment,” 569 consciousness
commitment absorbing, 230
Marxist, 421 as an act, 232
philosophical, 503 advanced, 574
637
INDEX
consciousness (cont’d) pseudo‐conservatism, 282

aesthetic, 75 revolutionary, 481, 485
affirmative, 157 constitutive subjectivity, 14, 182, 185, 488–92,
bourgeois, 66n15, 242 498, 499, 522, 592
changes in, 70, 592–7 see also Kantian idealism
class, 27, 290, 295, 296, 310, 504 Cornelius, Hans, 4
and cognition, 223, 226 craft knowledge, traditional, 24, 26
collective, 592–4 critical anthropology, 208–210
concept, 501n11 critical autonomy, collapse of, 221
constitutive, 492 critical knowledge, 358
correct, 367, 369 critical rationality, 240, 554
critical, 226 critical reason, 150, 226, 229
critique, 233 Critical Theory
dialectic of, 312 and aesthetics, 410n1
empirical, 498 mass production, 28–9
endogamy of, 604, 605 and mass psychology, 321–4
false, 62, 66n15, 366 shift from traditional theory to, 29
flow of, 27 “Critique,” 146
forms, 145, 153 critique
of freedom, 198 “The Actuality of Philosophy,” 506,
general, 589, 596 508, 510
Hegel on, 59 causal and intrinsic, 238–41
Hegelian forms, 59, 460 consciousness, 233
immanence of, 360 and disappointment, 503–517
impotence, 588 of Enlightenment, 225–6, 251–69, 333
individual, 222, 223, 498, 552 by Adorno, 225–6
of intention, 215 self‐consciousness, 251, 252, 256–60,
in itself, 232 263–5
of leaders, 289 existentialism, 13
of listeners, 276 ideology, 185, 238, 309
modern, 604 immanent, 4, 144, 228, 232–3, 241,
objects of, 224, 256 342, 368, 429, 431, 438, 444, 514,
operations of, 257 527, 621,
origins, 260, 261 micrological, 244–6
perceptual, 261 normativity, 539–40
and philosophy, 57, 311, 324 and reason, 44, 223, 545
political, 231 saving, 616
psychic life, 269n3 social, aesthetic model, 237–49
rationalism, 226–7 transformation of, 232–3
and reification, 223–4, 226–9, 344 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 186
literary criticism, 366, 367, 571 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 3, 25, 257, 258,
love, materialistic ethic of, 603, 606, 263, 265
609, 612 cultural criticism, 237, 238, 248, 568
self‐consciousness see self‐consciousness “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 568, 571
socio‐historical material, 29 culture
suspension of, 228 see also culture industry
working‐class, 27, 310 black, 128
conservatism, 207–208, 279 capitalist, 28
bourgeois, 359 crisis of, 288
cultural, 510 Edwardian, 383
institutional thinking, 512 emphatic, 367
political, 510, 560 German, 23
638
INDEX
and literary criticism, 365–8 Derrida, Jacques, 98, 178, 181, 189n6,

mass culture, 142, 280, 322, 325, 512, 552, 189n12, 385, 507
588, 605–606 determinate negation, 465, 505, 625, 6611
popular, 243–4 see also Hegel, dialectic,
scientific, 24–5 democratic modernism, 146, 147
culture industry, 87–102 philosophy of history, 199, 204
see also culture; jazz radical transformation of society, 595,
aesthetic theory, 404 600n16
afterlife of an idea, 96–100 Deuser, Hermann, 36–7
art, 95, 403, 404, 405 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10, 89–92, 95, 96 Horkheimer), 207–220
dialectical thinking, 87, 91 and agency, 253–5
film, 92–6 critical anthropology, 208–210
and popular culture, 243–4 critical social history, 33
cunning culture industry, 10, 89–92, 95, 96
and myth, 216 cunning
as protoreflexivity, 214–17 as protoreflexivity, 214–17
and rationality, 214 self‐deception, 217–18
reason as, 198, 212, 215–16 “Elements of Anti‐Semitism,” 12, 105, 108,
as self‐deception, 217–18 115, 119
and Freud, 260, 333
Dahlhaus, Carl, 352–3, 358 and history, 252–3
Dahrendorf, Ralf, 292, 293 and Kant, 10, 255–60
Darmstadt School, 79, 80 music, transmission of, 89–92, 95, 96
demagoguery, 141, 149, 273, 274, 284, 330 origins, 10
McCarthyist, 279 prototypes of the self, investigating, 210–12
in United States, 279, 327 reason, 252
democracy, modern sacrifice, logic of, 212–14
of Adorno, 139–40, 146–9, 584 dialectical logic, 8, 9, 159, 494
attacking in the name of, 143 dialectical materialism, 5, 63, 154, 181,
authenticity, 343 182, 616
authoritarianism, masking, 149, 332 dialectical thinking, 5, 7, 14, 62, 231, 314,
concept, 143 374, 487, 602, 603
critique, 146 Adorno and Heidegger, 474, 481
cultural, 289 aesthetic theory, 398, 403, 407, 411n6
democratic leadership, as pedagogy, 140–6 and analytical thinking, 224
everyday practice, 139, 141, 149 anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites, 108, 110
and fascism, 279, 280, 281, 288 Auschwitz, 569, 578
and Germany, 340, 342, 343, 366 authenticity, 242
Jeffersonian/Madisonian, 275, 283 characteristics, 509
lived experience, 145 contradiction, 57, 58
meaningful, 143, 144, 145, 147, 150 culture industry, 87, 91
optimistic, 522 dialectical critique, philosophy conceived
post‐war, 149 as, 29
pseudo‐democracy, 140, 141, 143, 144, dialectical turn, 451, 452
147, 148, 288 education, 579
requirements for, 378 Hegelian, 14, 51, 56, 57, 61, 66n11, 180,
rhetoric, 141, 142 227, 471n21
in the United States, 139–51 identity, 466, 475, 478
“Democratic Leadership and Mass image, 52, 59, 66n15, 183
Manipulation,” 141 Kierkegaard, reading, 18, 40, 46, 56
Denkbild (thought‐image), 41, 42, 43 labor, 400
639
INDEX
dialectical thinking (cont’d) spiritual, 491

Marxism, 589 structure, 611
mediation, 606, 607 subjective, 604
metaphysics, 531, 536, 537, 549 systematic, 77
modernity, 163 technological, 81, 92
music, 11, 427, 429, 431, 433, 439 dualism, 11
opera, 445, 447, 448, 449, 450, 452 Durst, David, 25
negation, 195, 504 Dutschke, Rudi, 15
negative, 43, 230, 308, 312, 615
non‐identity, 58, 228, 466, 470n14, Eden, 54, 58, 60, 184
492, 521 education
ontology, 312, 498 of Adorno, 3
versus other types of thinking, 224, 460, 465 adult, 340, 343
“philistinism,” 405 aesthetic, 417
philosophy, 25, 29, 197, 200 authoritarian, 337
positive, 45 barbarism of educational practices, 579
radical transformation of society, 596, civic, 342
600n12 critical, 357
rationality, 88 democratic, 340
Second Viennese School, 75, 76 dialectical thinking, 579
social conflict, 196 following Auschwitz, 13, 103, 578–9
sociology, 305 ideals of, 144–5
theology, 37–8, 41 for the masses, 324
traditional, 303 new, 579
disabled thought, 224, 488, 568 political, 584
domination, 31, 38, 57, 217, 367, 540, 551, privileged, 357
603, 629n11 public, 591
see also authoritarianism and socialization, 339–40
by abstractions, 314 traditional, 579
“blind,” 10, 208, 253 “Education after Auschwitz,” 13, 340
capitalist, 107, 489, 491 Edwardian culture, 383
and civilization, 108 egoism, 23
class, 114, 310 Ellington, Duke, 124, 125, 128–30, 137n10
conceptual, 178, 180, 182, 184, 610 emergency powers laws (Notstandgesetze) 15
constitutive subjectivity, 185 émigré experience, xv, 8, 9, 12, 13, 55, 75,
corporate, 132 154, 510, 511
and emancipation/liberation, 194, 195, 214, emphatic concept, 557, 570, 591
313, 343, 505, 610 classical music, 131
Enlightenment critique, 333 criticism, 127
forms, 481, 505 culture, 367
forms of production, 418 experience, 375
freedom from, 194 expressionism, 386
hierarchical, 183 philosophy, 509
legal‐rational forms, 222 traditional works of art, 376
and love, 608 and truth, 514
of nature, 10, 73, 229, 249n1, 314, 366, empirical social research (1938–50), 153–72
374, 376, 377 contracting types, rigidity, 162–4
political, 223, 451 versus empirical verification, 158–9
rational, 73 European approach, 154–6
restoration, 194, 195 method, 159–60
self‐domination of the subject, 374 presupposing its own end, 164–6
social, xvi, 77, 221, 229, 377, 393, 508, 584 research racket, 160–2
640
INDEX
empiricism materialist, 609

see also empirical social research (1938–50) minimal, 620
Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group, 276, and human nature, 622
277, 281, 282, 283 negative, 539, 574, 626
consciousness, 498 evangelicalism, 283
empirical sociology, 12, 240, 413, 514 exchange principle, non‐identicality, 491
empirical subject, 497, 498 exchange‐value, 8, 30
Institute for Social Research, 92 combining with use‐value, 311
jazz, empirical limitations, 125–7 commodity form, 224
naïve, 157, 158, 159 compared to use‐value, 88, 224, 225, 240,
psychology, 163 311, 366, 376
radical, 182 Enlightenment critique, 225
reality, 47, 60, 401, 475 and labor‐time, 375
transcendental and empirical, 496–9 market exchange, 225
verification versus research, 158–9 pure, 311
Enlightenment existential ontology see Heidegger, Martin;
see also Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno Jargon of Authenticity;
and Horkheimer) existentialism; see Heidegger, Martin; Sartre,
of Adorno, 343–5 Jean‐Paul
critique of, 225, 251–69, 333 critique by Adorno, 13
by Adorno, 225–6 and epistemology, 22
self‐consciousness, 251, 252, 256–60, freedom, 461
263–5 proto‐existentialism, 4
and myth, 95, 252, 452, 532, 534–7 Exodus, 180
entrepreneurial capitalism, 22 experience, 31
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 365, 403, aesthetic, 230–2
570, 581n2 artworks see artworks
“Stories of Freedom, The,” 569 authenticity, 29
epiphany, modernist, 385 emphatic, 375
epistemology, 56, 60, 182, 229, 358, 487, 534 immediacy of, 31, 245, 389
see also knowledge; ontology lived, 145
authoritarianism, 595, 596 metaphysical see metaphysical experience
and Benjamin, 56, 60 of nature, 406
and existentialism, 22 social, 25–6
as first philosophy, 497 expression
of Kant, 376 and aesthetics, 239, 406–408
and mass production, 22, 27, 29 artworks, 406, 407
traditional, 64, 494, 499 freedom of, 422, 540
“Essay as Form, The,” 176, 372, 387, 618 musical, 11
essence, versus appearance, 5, 366, 369, nonconceptuality, 495
370, 461 ontology, 53, 56, 64
“Essential Value of Radio to All Types of reality, 53
Listeners” (Princeton Radio Project), 8 self‐expression, 7
establishment politics, 17, 169 and suffering, 202–204
ethics, 377–8, 398, 511, 532, 538–41,
555, 561 F‐scale, 163, 278, 279, 282; also see
after Auschwitz, 572–4 Authoritarian Personality, The
Christian, 608 questionnaire, 277, 281, 283
deontological, 615 faith
environmental, 484 of Adorno family, 3, 5, 45
and Kant, 573 articles of, 577
of love, 604 bourgeois, 405
641
INDEX
faith (cont’d) future of, 181

Christian, 38, 608–609 harmonic, 78
in God, 577 historical, 197, 198, 199
Jewish, 113, 114, 118, 119 idealistic, 201
materialistic, 545 from identity, 610
in morality, 616 illusion of, 6, 606
revealed, 190n16, 542 individual, 433, 606, 612
secular, 552 meaning, 599n4
fascism, 12, 15; see also Nazi Party/Nazism and metaphysics, 540, 551
ideology, 275, 284, 336 music, 134
Felsch, Philippa, 337 political, 91
The Long Summer of Theory, 399 and regression, 7, 8
Fenves, Peter, 39, 40 and restraint, 607
fetishism see commodity fetishism socially mediated, 195
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 9 of thought, 607
feudalism, 23 unfreedom, 11, 77, 78, 80, 134, 194, 196,
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 31, 307, 308, 318, 504, 393, 394, 590, 620
550, 556, 586, 598, 615 universal, 199
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 489, 504, 550, unlimited, 607
578, 579 French Revolution, 111, 193, 323, 333, 540
film, 92–6 Frenkel‐Brunswick, Else, 92, 162, 163,
First World War, ending of, 23, 25 172n20, 274
Flowerman, Samuel H., 274 Freud, Sigmund, 36, 62, 161, 165, 180, 182,
Fohlin, C., 24 185, 207–208, 243, 252, 261–5,
Foot, Philippa, 471n21, 622, 629n30 318n6, 322, 325, 328–30, 342, 369,
formalism, 18 405, 510, 588, 622; see also
Foster, Roger, 72, 385, 387, 388, 523 psychoanalysis
Foucault, Michel, 592 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 260
Frankfurt, Germany Civilization and its Discontent, 109, 260
Central Cemetery (funeral of Adorno and consciousness, 261
held in), 17 and Dialectic of Enlightenment, 260, 333
Hoch Conservatory, 3 and Frankfurt School, 260
Kant Society, 5 Geistigkeit, 331
University of see University of Frankfurt on group psychology, 324, 332, 334n2
Frankfurt School, 16–17, 443 importance, 260–4
see also University of Frankfurt and Kant, 261, 324–6
and Freud, Sigmund, 260 Massenpsychologie, 323
freedom, 10, 38, 73, 157, 452, 487, 488, Moses and Monotheism, 114
492, 540 Oedipal conflict, 166
see also liberation primary narcissism theory, 331, 332, 604
art‐music, 88 “The Unconscious,” 261
and autonomy, 588, 594, 599n4 Frisch, Max, 367
of choice, 433 Fromm, Erich, 161, 163, 165, 166, 273–5,
and coercion, 607–611 279, 283, 321, 327, 17217
from content, 607
and democracy, 146, 148 Gadamer, Hans‐Georg, 335, 511
desire for, 603, 607, 610 Gehlen, Arnold, 178, 185, 189n7, 190n29,
from domination, 194 208, 511
existential, 461 Geist (spirit), 5, 38, 131, 182, 475,
of expression, 422, 540 492, 555
film, 97 Gellner, Ernest, 333
French Revolution, 193 Genesis, 54
642
INDEX
George, Stefan, 71, 72, 372, 402, 420 Habermas, Jürgen, xv, 15, 36, 57, 191n29,
German Association of Sociologists, 336 200, 207, 208, 226
Germany Hall, Stuart, 405
academic philosophic, 23 Hallstein, Walter, 12
capitalism, 25, 32 Hamann, Johann Georg, 51–3, 56, 65n4,
culture, 23 65n5, 65n6
Federal Republic, Adorno in, 335–7 Hammer, Espen, 18, 139, 276, 470n10
Nazi‐era see anti‐Semitism; Auschwitz; happiness
Judaism; Nazi Party/Nazism and misery (Marx), 198–200
philosophy and romanticism, 7 promise of, 96, 451, 558, 571
postwar society, 335–48 hedonism (aesthetic theory), 405
Adorno’s analysis, 337–433 Hegel, G. W. F., 40, 619, 621
culture and literary criticism, 365–8 on art, 94, 95, 130
Enlightenment, of, 343–5 collapse of Hegelianism, 22
Weimar, social experience and industrial on consciousness, 59
society, 25–8 dialectical thinking, 14, 51, 56, 57, 61,
goal‐oriented rationality, 222, 225 66n11, 180, 227, 471n21
God, and film, 94, 95
and Agape, 612 idealism, 22, 57–8
and Aristotle, 556, 562 on Judaism, 114
death of, 550 Lectures on Aesthetics, 400, 403
Judaism and, 114, 181, logic, 58, 389, 590
Kant and, 553 and Negative Dialectics, 14
Kierkegaard’s concept of, 44, 45, 46, ontology, 177, 183, 187
608, 610 Phenomenology of Spirit, 197, 312, 403, 446,
and Martin Luther King, 595 464, 466, 475, 521, 607
Luther’s concept of, 52, 53 philosophy, 14, 58, 134, 193
and negative theology, 541, 577 of history, 193, 198, 199
Plato’s concept of, 554 speculative, 21
traditional concept of, 549 reason, 57–8
and sacrifice, 213 subjectivity, 38
gods, 213, 216, 217, 554 universalism of, 95
Heidegger’s concept of, 483 Heidegger, Martin
goddess, 383, Adorno’s critique of, 473–86
Goebbels, Joseph, 106, 107 concepts, 477–81
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 365, 371, dialectical thinking, 474, 481
386–7, 391, 405, 420 “Heideggerism,” 14
“Elective Affinities,” 401 hypostatization, 477–81
good and evil, 54, 55, 575, 574–8 jargon, 14
Goodman, Benny, 125, 128, 136n7, and Negative Dialectics, 14
137n11, 361 ontology of, 5, 29, 312, 475
Gordon, Peter E., 41, 43, 45, 164, 283, 461, parallels, 481–4
465, 471 phenomenology of, 482, 484
Gouldner, Alvin, 140 philosophical criticisms, 474–7
Grass, Günther, 16 public support for the Third Reich, 14
Great War see First World War Heine, Heinrich, 13
Grimm, Brothers, 391 “Heine the Wound,” 13, 372
Group Experiment, xvi, 342, 366 Heißenbüttel, Helmut, 365
group identification, 327, 328 heretical, 541–5
guilt, 62–4 materialism, 544–5
“Guilt and Defense,” xvi metaphysics, 543–4
Gurland, Henny, 9 theology, 541–3
643
INDEX
Heuss, Theodore, 347 human life‐form, Thompson on, 620–2

hierarchy, bureaucratic, 24 compatibility with human solidarity
Hindemith, Paul, 69, 418 (Wiggins), 623–4
Hirsch, Emmanuel, 42 humanism, 616–17
history Husserl, Edmund, 33
anti‐Semitism/anti‐Semites, 110–17, 120 Adorno on, 32–3
art‐history, 3, 72, 132, 133, 357, 358 “Concept of the Unconscious in the
artworks, 428 Transcendental Doctrine of the Soul,
conceptual, 176, 177 The,” 3–4
and Dialectic of Enlightenment, 33, 252–3 phenomenology of, 4, 13, 27, 312, 324
mysticism, 532–4 social experience and industrial society, 27–8
philosophy of, 193–206
and Hegel, 196–8 “Idea of Natural History, The,” 5
Kant on antagonism and peace, 195–6 idealism
Marx, 198–200 see also Hegel, G. W. F.
possibility and non‐identity, 200–202 and bourgeois society, 23–5
suffering and expression, 202–204 collapse of Hegelianism, 22
reality, 21, 66n14, 443, 539, 544 crisis of, 5, 28
reason in, 193, 198 Hegelian, 22, 57–8
regression, historical, 331, 473 inaugural period, 21
world history, and negation, 196–8 Kantian, 23, 27
Hoch Conservatory, Frankfurt, 3 post‐Kantian, 27, 28
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 230, 296, 367, 411n7 idealization, 27
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 13 identity, 33, 60, 61, 118, 297, 326, 480
Holocaust, 134, 181, 367, 470n10, 569 see also non‐identity, nonidentical
see also Auschwitz; Judaism; Nazi Party/ absolute, 177, 463, 464, 477
Nazism abstract, 375
Homer, 10 appearance, 57
Honneth, Axel, 398, 505, 510 apperceptive, 258
hope, 43, 47, 61, 79, 387, 496, 509, 515 compositional, 76
artworks, 46 concept, 228
“hope beyond hope,” 46 crisis of, 23
“hope beyond hopelessness,” 242 cultural, 118
lack of, 134 forms, 31
for possibility of redemption, 610, 612 fused, 602
utopian, 185 identicalness, 432, 451
Horkheimer, Maidon (wife of Max), 9 identity thinking, 56, 70, 228, 240, 366,
Horkheimer, Max 375, 463, 464, 469n10, 470n10, 476,
see also Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno 495, 499, 528, 578, 612
and Horkheimer) and ideology, 491–2
American Jewish Committee, discussions Jewish, 5, 372
with, 12 latent, 190n12
on anti‐Semitism, 104, 105, 109–112 leader and follower, 330
director of Institute for Social Research, lyrical, 421
4–5, 7, 12 mediated, 475
retirement (1959), 14 of mind, 257, 463
relationship with Adorno, 4–5, 8, 9–10, national, 142, 345
12, 13 non‐identity/nonidentical, , 63, 145, 177,
“Traditional and Critical Theory,” 28 183, 202, 228, 400, 461, 463, 466,
Hulatt, Owen, 258–9, 260, 265, 269n1, 470n10, 470n14, 474, 475, 478,
411n7, 522 480, 482, 484, 492, 499, 521, 541,
Hullot‐Kentor, Robert, 39, 43, 76, 77 595, 626
644
INDEX
Adorno’s early concept of, 5, 15, immanent critique, 4, 144, 228, 232–3,
and Auschwitz, 578 241, 342, 368, 429, 431, 438, 444,
beauty and, 406 514, 527, 621
Benjamin and, 81, 81 see also critique
Blumenberg as compared to Adorno, 185 immediacy
democracy and, 146–148, 150 access to, 440
Derrida and, 398 claims to, 229
dialectics and 58, 78, 254 communicative, 184
identitarian thinking, 56, 57, 58, 492 enclaves, 587
guilt and, 79 of experience, 31, 245, 389
Homer and, 212 false, 477, 589, 594
and history, 203 genuine, 587–9
Kierkegaard and, 60 improvisatory, 6
modernism, 387 indirect, 180
nature, 617 intuitive, 181
original, 463, 464, 609 loss of, 415, 480
personal, 6 metaphysical, 544
philosophy, 21, 22, 184, 461 music, 430
primacy of, 558 pure, 393, 440
principle, 180, 491, 492, 493 romantic, 416
pure, 599n10 sensory, 431
rage at, 495 unity of object and sign, 184
reconcilation as release of, 497, 558 In Search of Wagner, 13, 433, 444, 449
regional, 23 inaugural address of Adorno (Frankfurt,
religious, 3, 5, 372 1931), xv, 5, 21, 24, 27, 28, 493
resistance to the concept, 202 and Marx, Adorno’s relationship with, 303,
responsiveness to, 562 305, 306, 308, 312, 317n2, 318n
self, 212, 218, 219, 258 individual
semblance of, 216 consciousness, 222, 223, 498, 552
suffering and, 610, 612 freedom, 433, 606, 612
totality, 492–3 liquidation of the individual, 242,
will of, 491 311, 433
ideology, 4, 57, 61, 93, 114, 130–1, 162, 183, subjectivity, 523, 552
237, 239–41, 244, 246, 248, 317n2, individualism, 165, 281
369, 497, 534, 551 bourgeois, 488
artworks, 241, 368 ideology, 165, 488
authoritarian, 280 isolated, 35
“beautiful soul,” 373 possessive, 146, 625
class, 425 industrial revolution, second, 24
collectivist, 242 ineffable, the/ineffability
critique, 185, 238, 309, 473, 492 of Adorno’s utopia, 428–30, 440
embedded, 238, 243, 245 art/artworks, 428, 429–30
fascist, 275, 284, 336 music, 427, 428–30, 431, 437, 440
fundamental, 470n10 inexpressible truth, 428, 535, 537,
generalized concept, 420 538, 541
hateful, 342 injustice, 31, 134, 391, 392, 508, 541,
and identity, 491–2 580, 593
individualism, 165, 488 see also justice
Kantian, 491 ancient, 610
social, 107 Auschwitz, 557, 577, 578
socialist, 241 dehumanization, 448
ur‐form, 491–2 inherited, 603
645
INDEX
Institute for Social Research American, 125

see also Frankfurt School; Zeitschrift fur black artists/culture, 125, 126, 128
Sozialforschung (journal of Institute for controversy over, 6–7, 123, 124
Social Research) criticism, 6, 132
administration by Adorno, 14 determining existence of, 123–4
and AJC, 162, 172n18 empirical limitations, 125–7
on anti‐Semitism, 109, 159, 162, 171n12 free, 133
Anti‐Semitism: Social Disease, 109 function, 128
on authoritarianism, 159 improvisatory, 124, 127, 134, 136n2
empiricism, 92 innovative, 132
Horkheimer as director, 4–5, 7, 12 interpretation, 127–8
retirement (1959), 14 modern, 125, 132, 135
membership by Adorno, 8 music, philosophy and social theory, 133–5
reopening in postwar Germany (1951), 12 musicians, 126, 128, 132, 136, 136n1
Studies in Prejudice, 12 objectivity and art, 129–31
instrumental rationality, 33, 45, 222–5, 229, Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 123, 125
232, 325, 451 rhythm, 127–9
concepts, 493, 501n7 and the social, 128–9
and goal‐oriented rationality, 222 “state of the material,” 131
positivism, 57 style, 136n1
instrumental reason see reason subject, 129
interpretation terminology, 124
of art/artworks, 239, 243, 248, 374, 375, Johann von Goethe‐University, Frankfurt see
414, 423, 428 University of Frankfurt
current reality, 31 Judaism
future of philosophy, 5 see also American Jewish Committee (AJC);
jazz, 127–8 anti‐Semitism; Auschwitz
materialistic, 5, 62, 63, 542, 543, 545, 576 anti‐Semitism without hatred of the Jewish
myth, 179 people, 111, 113, 118
Negative Dialectics, 32 half‐Jewish identity of Adorno, 5–6
theology, 37 image of “the Jews,” 111, 117–20, 374
Introduction to Dialectics, 459 Jewish identity of Oscar Adorno, 5, 6, 7
Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 13, 127, Jewish mysticism, 531, 532, 534, 535, 544
434, 444 justice, 573, 594, 622
irony, 13, 37, 38, 40, 42, 186, 462, 513, 561 see also injustice
and Heine, 372 ancient, 111
and Marx , 374 Derrida on, 507
irrationality, 35, 141, 193, 231, 308, 322, legal, 538
334n2, 547n2, 591 social, 445, 538
see also rationality
and authoritarianism, 273, 278 Kabbalah, 52, 65n4, 535, 538
Book of Splendor, 533
Jameson, Fredric, 398–9, 400 motifs, 561
Late Marxism, 398, 399, 410n6 Kafka, Franz, 13
Jankélévitch, Viktor, 429 Kaiser‐Wilhelm Gymnasium, 3
Jargon of Authenticity, The, 14 Kant, Immanuel, 14
Jaspers, Karl, 511 aesthetics, 400
Jay, Martin, 76, 153, 172n18, 172n22, 232, on antagonism and peace, 195–6
283, 305, 608, 609 on art, 400
jazz, 123–37 Critique of Practical Reason, 186
see also “On Jazz” (essay) Critique of Pure Reason (1st Critique), 3, 25,
Adorno’s attitude to, 7, 38, 123, 125, 127 257, 258, 263, 265
646
INDEX
and Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10, 255–60 philosophical, 44, 251, 378, 515

epistemology, 376 positive, 306
and Freud, 261, 324–6 pure, 531
Freud and Kantian subject, 324–6 ratioid and non‐ratioid distinction, 31
idealism, 23, 27 and redemption, 542
ideology, 491 reification theory, 231
morality, 251, 573, 625, 626 scientific or technical, 22, 24, 30, 56, 225,
Kant Society, Frankfurt, 5 324, 370, 626
Kästner, Erich, 560 self‐knowledge, 37, 44, 507
Kernberg, Otto, 334n1 of social/society, 30, 304–306, 344,
Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 4 370, 618
Kierkegaard, Søren, 35–50 sociological, 310
Benjamin on, 41, 43 subjectivity, 28, 459
dialectical thinking, 18, 40, 46, 56 tacit, 498
negative meaning, sustenance, 43–7 theoretical, 32
reading by Adorno, 4, 37–43 thinking/thought, 463, 515, 556
subjectivism, 4 totalization of, 318n4, 370
theology of, 4, 37–9, 43–7 transcendental, 258
thought‐image, 37–43 and truth, 318n9
“Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” 9 Kodalle, Klaus‐Michael, 36
Kiesinger, Kurt‐Georg, 15 Kolisch Quartet, 4
King, Martin Luther, 593, 596 Korsch, Karl, 308
Kirchheimer, Otto, 92 Kracauer, Siegfried, 3, 25, 32
Kluge, Alexander, 16 Krahl, Hans‐Jürgen, 15–17
knowledge, 27, 257, 417, 431, 463, 476, 490, Kraus, Karl, 13
524, 535, 567, 583 Krenek, Ernst, 9, 69
see also cognition; concepts Kropotkin, Peter, 615
absolute, 66n11
abstract, 44 labor
analysis of, 463 see also capitalism; exchange‐value; social
of art, 358, 360, 369, 370, 432 class; use‐value
Benjamin on, 56 abstract labor time, 375
as categorization, 371 alienated, 308, 432, 433, 603
character‐as‐knowledge, 432 American, 160
communicable, 31 artistic, 425
conceptual, 185 versus capital, 325
craft (traditional), 24, 26 capitalist process, 24, 491, 495
critical, 358 as collective human praxis, 224
empirical, 158, 555 dialectical thinking, 400
Enlightenment critique, 256 dispossessed, 433
epistemology, 56, 60 division of, 368, 434
expert, 32 exchange‐value and use‐value, 492
hierarchy of, 28 forced, 567
human, 621, 624 free, 22
of ignorance, 577 intellectual, 32, 368
instrumentalization of, 33 labor‐time, 375, 400
language, 54, 55 labor‐value, 313
metaphysics, 226, 550, 551, 553 mass production, 24, 26, 27, 32
musical, 447 mechanized work process, 26
need for, 554 mental, 308
object of, 55–6, 61, 197, 309, 360, 550 physical, 368
objective, 158, 305, 475, 553 prison‐like regimes, 580
647
INDEX
labor (cont’d) literary criticism, 365–81

social, 312, 313, 401, 406, 415, 425 and culture, in post‐war Germany, 365–8
wage‐labor, 389 ethical criticism, 377–8
white‐collar workers, 27 of Heine, 372–4
Laclau, Ernesto, 334n1 of Hölderlin, 376–7
Landgrebe, Ludwig, 511 philosophical aesthetics, 368–72
language literature, 13, 30, 31, 37, 42, 237, 241, 345,
aesthetics, 149, 398, 428 351–2, 365, 371
of art, 137n13, 149, 184, 428 Adorno on, 368, 372, 377
knowledge, 54, 55 criticism, 378
metaphysics of, 52–5 modernist, 30, 378
and nature, 54, 55, 58, 406 narrative, 377
and reality, 55 philosophy, 365, 372
Lappano, David, 46 progressive, 569
Lasch, Christopher, 321 realist, 378
Culture of Narcissism, 322, 332 sociology of, 365
late capitalism see capitalism logic
“Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? dialectical thinking, 159, 494
The Fundamental Question Hegelian, 58, 389, 590
of the Present Structure of Los Angeles, US, 9, 11, 12
Society,” 314 love
late style, 436, 517n2 Christian concept, 601, 607, 608, 612
of Beethoven, xvi, 11, 432–4, 517n2 materialistic ethic of, 601–613
“Law for the Restoration of the German Civil preferential, 607
Service” (1933), 5 towards objects, 601, 602, 604, 606, 607,
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 7, 8 609, 610, 612
Le Bon, Gustave, 323 Löwenthal, Leo, 92, 105–106, 160, 161, 274,
Le Pen, Jean‐Marie, 333 275, 321
leadership, democratic, 140–6 correspondence, 255, 269n2, 510
Leibniz, Gottfried, 60 Löwith, Karl, 511
on monads, 62, 247, 414, 423, 425 Lukács, Georg
theodicy, 575, 616 Adorno’s reception of, 221–35
Leninism, 181, 342 on instrumental rationality and
Leppert, Richard, 70, 79 reification, 222–5
Lévinas, Emmanuel, 182, 269n3, 629n8 on rationalized mass production,
Levinson, Daniel J, 163, 274 26–7, 32
liberation, 25, 26, 193–5, 196, 200, “Reification and the Consciousness of the
433, 540 Proletariat,” 26, 30
see also freedom Lutheran melancholy, 202
and domination, 194, 195, 214, 313, 343, lyricism, absolute, 80
505, 610
gay, 331, 332 MacWilliams, Matthew, 283
social, 539 magic, 54–5, 99, 114, 184
libido, 329 of opera, 451, 452
life philosophy (vitalism), 21, 22, 25, 31 Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, 13, 436
limits of thought, 460, 462 Mahler, Gustav, xvi, 132, 135, 237, 373,
Lippmann, Walter, 154, 166 427, 435
liquidation of the individual, 242, 311, 433 Adorno’s writings, 427, 428, 434–8
listening and Berg, 427, 434, 438
commodity listening, on the radio, 8 managerial revolution, 24
exact, 431–4 Mann, Heinrich, 9
inconsistent, 434–8 Mann, Thomas, 9, 11
648
INDEX
Mannheim, Karl, and sociology, 287–92 meaning, 550, 551

Marcuse, Herbert, 17, 35, 36, 166, 331, 332, artworks, 429
366, 451 and Auschwitz, 574–8
Marsh, J. L., 36 Being, 465–6, 475, 476, 478
Martin, John Levi, 273 broad sense, 212
Marx, Karl, 303–319 conceptual, 494
and Benjamin, 60, 61 ethical, 429
misery and happiness, 198–200 existential, 479
philosophy and/or sociology, 304–308 history, 616
social ontology of, 311–14 immanent, 616
Marxism, 223, 240, 419, 492, 544, 589 meaning, goodness and truth, 575, 576,
Adorno on, 303, 307, 309 577, 578
and Freudian mass psychology, 322–3 meaningful life, 385
orthodox, 305, 368 music, 430, 431, 435, 436, 444
and philosophy, 308 negative, 43–7
praxis‐based, 307 philosophical discovery, 29
revival, 399 philosophy, 469n7
mass culture, 142, 280, 322, 325, 512, 552, qualitative, 232
588, 605–606 social, 415, 431, 432, 434, 436, 437,
mass ornament, 25–6 438, 444
mass production sources, 478
art, 7, 92, 93, 95–7, 100 Meaning of Working Through the Past,
and art, 404 The,” 13
art, 404 means‐end rationality, 222, 224, 225, 231, 232
and authenticity, 609 mechanized work process, 26
capitalist process, 27 Messianism, 318n7, 530, 538
dominance of, 22 Metacritique of Epistemology, 6, 13
labor, 24, 26, 27, 32 metanoia (turning of the mind), 557
philosophy in the age of, 21–34 metaphor, and myth, 177, 178, 183, 185,
rationalized, 26–7 189n4
social experience and industrial society, metaphysical experience, 549–63
25–6 see also metaphysics
standardized, 32–3 classical metaphysics, Adorno on, 550–6
mass psychology, 321–34, 334n2 enduring possibility of, 556–60
see also psychology metaphysics and ambivalence, in modern
in the 1960s, 331–3 philosophy, 549–50
and critical theory, 321–4 politics, 560–2
Freud and Kantian subject, 324–6 metaphysics
the group, 326–8 see also metaphysical experience
and Marxism, 322–3 of Adorno, 615–16
mass society, 8 and Aristotle, 549, 553–7, 561
material life, 532–4 classical, Adorno on, 550–6
materialism, 22 dialectical thinking, 531, 536, 537, 549
of Adorno, 5, 616 heretical redemption, 543–4
heretical redemption, 544–5 knowledge, 226, 550, 551, 553
love, materialistic ethic of, 601–613 of language, 52–5
neo‐Kantianism, 23 moral, of solidarity, 620–4
non‐identicality, 617 Plato, 482, 554
reality, 607 method
theology, 45, 532 empirical social research
materialistic interpretation, 62, 63, 542, 543, (1938–50), 159–60
545, 576 pushing back against, 246–7
649
INDEX
micrological critique, Minima Moralia, 244–6 reason, 146

middle classes, 278, 329, 425 social ills, 135
mimesis, 116, 218, 260, 498 tragic vision of, 223, 224
aesthetic, 47, 50, 181, 399, 408 moral resistance, 540, 574
Aesthetic Theory, 406, 407 morality, 223, 377, 541, 615
and Benjamin, 53, 54 Auschwitz, 571–4
concept, 461 bourgeois, 572, 573, 625
failure of, 408 formal, 497
versus imitation, 211 Kantian, 251, 573, 625, 626
importance, 56, 76, 264 liberal, 625
love, materialistic ethic of, 601–604, 612 minimal, 562, 622, 626
nonconceptuality, 183, 190n21, 495 moral metaphysics of solidarity, 620–4
and self‐consciousness, 264 solidarity, 623
vulgarized, 433 Mörchen, Hermann, 477
Minima Moralia mourning, 62–4
actuality of philosophy, 30 Mozart, Wolfgang A., 67, 68, 131, 393, 405, 560
dislocation theme, 8–9 Müller‐Doohm, Stefan, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11–17,
micrological analysis, 244–6 68, 291
modernist style, 388–92 music, 427–42
publication of, 13 see also Bach, J.S.; Beethoven, Ludwig van;
universities and research programs, portrayal Brahms, Johannes; jazz; Mahler, Gustav;
of, 12 Mozart, Wolfgang A.; Philosophy of New
Mitchell, Juliet, 334n1 Music; Schoenberg, Arnold; Strauss,
modernism, 383–95 Richard; Stravinsky, Igor; twelve‐tone
see also modernity composition; Wagner, Richard
Adorno on, 386–8 and aesthetics, 427, 433
weaknesses in style, 392–4 alienation, 156, 157, 309, 310, 415–19
aesthetic, 28–32, 385, 506 autonomy claims, 6
cryptograms, 435 commodification of, 8
democratic, in the US, 139–51 and commodity fetishism, 433, 434
epiphanic form, 385 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 89–92, 95, 96
high, 18, 237 dialectical thinking, 11
literary, 394 emphatic concept, classical music, 131
major figures, 509 exact listening, 431–4
Minima Moralia, modernist style, 388–92 exchange‐value, 8
and modern life, 383–4 expression, 11
in philosophy, 384, 394 immediacy, 430
postmodernism, 398, 402 inconsistent listening, 434–8
Second Viennese School, 435 ineffable utopias, 428–30
sensuous, 438 and modernity, 67–75
modernity, 4, 60, 446 modernity, 67–75, 449, 450
anti‐reason of, 451 musical art/art‐music, 87–9, 126, 130, 310
authenticity, 223 musical form, 6, 74, 89, 241, 244, 423, 431
bourgeois, 487 new, 75, 77, 78
capitalist, xvi, 60, 80, 108, 115, 116, 221, opera see opera
222, 434, 446, 488, 489, 491, 492, philosophy of, 87, 89, 449
497, 504 philosophy and the ineffable, 438–40
crisis of, 473 Pieces for String Quartet, 4
cultural, 506 sociology of, 68, 308–310, 416–18, 421–3,
dialectical thinking, 163 444, 447
musical, 67–75, 449, 450 String Quartet, 4
postmodernity, 452 transmission of, 87–9
650
INDEX
musicology, 6, 443, 444, 448, 455n1 meaning in, 54

Musil, Robert, 31 and myth, 252
mysticism, religious negation, 58
blindness, context of, 534–8 pacification of, 508
historical background, 532–4 phenomena, 400
and material life, 532–4 and rationality, 210
versus myth, 536 and reality, 146, 545
myth, 10, 200, 201, 216, 479, 483, 537–8 and reason, 366
and cunning, 216 remembrance of, 617
and Enlightenment, 95, 252, 452, 532, 534–7 repression, 116
and fate, 258 Romanticism, 146
gnostic, 535 theory and praxis, 586
interpretation, 179 transcendence in, 146
knowledge, 535 uncomprehended, 208
liquidation of, 209 unity of, 256
and metaphor, 177, 178, 183, 185, 189n4 Nazi Party/Nazism, 12, 13
versus mysticism, 536 anti‐Jewish policies, 5–7
and nature, 252 anti‐Semitism, 105, 110, 114, 116, 118,
overcoming, 536 240, 335
and reality, 537 authoritarianism, 15
and reason, 39, 196, 254, 535, 536 and democracy, 342, 366
and regression, 450 emergency powers law, 15
of subject, 536 Heidegger’s public support for the Third
symbolic, 531 Reich, 14
universe of, 212–16 repression, 569
seizure of power (1933), 5
nationalism, 97, 114, 341, 346, 423 necessary‐but‐not‐possible, 504
ethno‐nationalism, 333 negation
German, 340, 579 determinate see determinate negation
militant, 343 dialectical thinking, 195, 504
narcissistic, 342 nature, 58
supporting, 606 reason, 197
nature, 196, 312 and world history, 196–8
and art, 406 Negative Dialectics, 228
beauty, 405–406, 483 changed philosophy, 520–2
concept, 463 diverse themes, 14
contingencies of, 26 and interpretation, 32
continuities of, 215 persuasion and reportability, 525–6
dialectic of, 249n1 philosophical truth, 519–29
divine, 52–3 rationality, 14–15
domination of, 10, 73, 229, 249n1, 314, significance, 14–15
366, 374, 376, 377 singularity and philosophy, 523–5
experience of, 406 textual criticism and philosophy, 526–8
external world, 505 negative dialectics (method), 5, 43, 230, 308,
forces of, 178 312, 615
harmonic order, 540 see also dialectical thinking
hostility of, 390 negative ethics, 539, 541, 574, 626
human, 178, 196, 197, 208 negative impulse, 578
ideal of, 424 negativity, in Adorno, 617–19
imitation of, 94 neo‐Kantianism, 21, 22
and language, 54, 55, 58, 406 idealism and bourgeois society, 23–4
mastery over, 10, 209–210, 212, 252 and science, 24–5
651
INDEX
neo‐ontology, 21 of consciousness, 224, 256

neo‐Platonism, 52 freedom towards, 607
see also Plato knowledge, 55–6, 61, 197, 309, 360, 550
New Categorical Imperative, 572–4, 576, 577, letting speak, 55–9
579, 590, 620, 625 love towards, 601, 602, 604, 606, 607, 609,
New Left, xv, 321, 332 610, 612
“New Value‐Free Sociology,” 287, 291, non‐identicality, 484
292, 299 non‐identity, 482, 484
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 primacy of, 45, 46, 392, 499, 545
nominalism, 312, 313, 398, 449, 506 reason, 254, 255
non‐identicality, 5, 240, 400, 428, 484, 491 and subjects see subject and object relation
and Auschwitz, 15 Ohnesorg, Benno, 15
dialectics, 492, 521 Old Testament, 47
materialism, 617 “On Jazz” (essay), 6, 124–5, 129
opera, 450–1 see also jazz
non‐identity, 461, 463, 480 “On Lyric, Poetry and Society,” 419, 421, 422
concepts, 474, 475, 478, 541 “On Subject and Object,” 57, 227, 488, 496–9
dialectics, 58, 228, 466, 470n14, 492 ‘On the Concept of History’ (Benjamin), 10
objects, 482, 484 “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism,” 365, 368
and possibility, 200–202 “On the Fetish‐Character in Music and the
reality, 475 Regression in Hearing,” 8, 309
nonconceptuality “On the Social Situation of Music,” 6, 309
see also concepts ontology, 28, 352, 353, 357–8, 372, 576
and Being, 179, 180, 182, 189 see also epistemology
expression, 495 Aristotle, 294
mimesis, 495 Being, 180
presentation, 496 concepts, 183, 185, 190n19
normativity, critique, 539–40 deontology, 625
Notes to Literature, 176 dialectical, 312, 498
difference, 312, 475, 476
objectification, 130, 481, 577 existential, 14
pure, 353 expressive, 53, 56, 64
rational, 224 fundamental, 41, 42, 475, 476, 478–9
scientific, 228 global, 52
objective knowledge, 158, 305, 475, 553 of Hegel, 177, 182, 183
objective spirit, 130 of Heidegger, 5, 29, 312, 475
objectivity, 203, 229, 314, 364n7, 387, historical, 312
433, 475 linguistic, 56
aesthetic theory, 403, 404 material, 475
conceptual, 313 need, 478
Enlightenment critique, 257, 258, 263, 264 neo‐ontology, 21
genuine, 528 new, 478
negative, 228 “of the ontic,” 475, 476, 477, 479
negative dialectics (method), 521–5 ontological conceptual realism, 182
new, 224 order, 476, 482
rational, 330 paradoxical, 52
social, 313 particularism, 179
and subjectivity, 377, 462, 495 Platonic, 477
and truth, 521 positive, 177
object(s) practical‐ontological dialectic, 232
art, 400 and reality, 53, 97, 182
and concepts, 487–501 social, 304, 308, 311–14
652
INDEX
socio‐ontological thesis, 232–3, 309 philosophy

systemic closure, 312 see also dialectical thinking
temporal, 550 academic, 22, 23
terminology, 311 actuality of, 25–32
universalism, 179 aesthetics, 237, 238, 368–72, 376, 403
wrong state of things, 498, 616, 617, and art, 41, 354, 356, 385
629n13 autonomy of discipline, 24
opera, 443–55 and consciousness, 57, 311, 324
see also music dialectical thinking, 25, 29, 197, 200
Adorno’s writing, 444, 445, 447, 448, 455n1 displacement by new science, 24
of Beethoven, 452 failure of, 21–2
critical theory and sociological musicology, of history see history
443–8 idealism, 21
criticism, 448 identity, 21, 22, 184, 461
magic of, 451, 452 and the ineffable, 438–40
modern, 443, 447, 450, 451 and jazz, 133–5
non‐identicality, 450–1 knowledge, 44, 251, 378, 515
opera house, 447, 452 life philosophy (vitalism), 21, 22, 25, 31
perceived obsolescence, 447, 451 “liquidation” of, 24
reviews, 7, 443 literature, 364, 372
and sociology, 433–4, 445 and Marxism, 304–308
spectacle, 433–4 and mass production, 21–34
traditional, 68, 445, 447 modernism in, 384, 394
twelve‐tone composition, 74 of music, 87, 89, 449
twentieth‐century composition, 445 philosophy and the ineffable, 438–40
Wagner, special case of, 449–53 positivist see positivism
oppression, 132, 509, 539, 605, 606 religious, 22
black, 135 and romanticism, 7
class, 589 versus science, 28–9
violent, 367 and singularity, 523–5
Origin of German Tragic Drama, The speculative, 22
(Benjamin), 4 subjectivism, 4
Oxford University, Adorno’s studies at, 6 texts, as force‐fields, 25
and textual criticism, 526–8
Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, 9, 11, 12 and theology, 408
Paddison, Max, 4, 68, 77, 79 Philosophy of New Music, 11, 13, 67, 73,
“Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” 478 75–80
Paris commune, 193, 323 Pinkard, Terry, 23
Parsons, Talcott, 292 Pippin, Robert, 264, 470n15, 470n19
pedagogy, democratic leadership as, 140–6 Plato, 29, 59, 387, 388, 400–401, 474–7,
persuasion and reportability, 525–6 483, 489, 522, 549–51, 553
pessimism, 23 see also Aristotle; Socrates
Pfeiffer‐Belli, Erich, 5–6 doctrine of ideas, 553, 554, 555
phenomenology, 231, 378, 475, 483, 582n8 dualism, 484
see also Hegel, G. W. F. metaphysics, 482, 554
of Heidegger, 482, 484 Republic, 241
of Husserl, 4, 13, 27, 312, 324 Podmore, Simon, 37, 38, 43–4, 45
primitive pre‐reflective recognition, 622, poetry, 13, 184, 241, 354, 359, 362, 371, 373,
629n22 376, 420, 576
redeeming the phenomena, 59–62 alienation, 420
transcendental, 176, 475 of Baudelaire, 63
Philosophical Terminology, 303 contemporary, 570
653
INDEX
poetry (cont’d) racism, 6

following Auschwitz, 181, 568–71 racism, of Nazi Party, 6
lyric, 377, 419 radical transformation of society, 583–600
paratactic, 479 theory and praxis, 585–96
political repression, xv, 23 radio, 8, 309, 325–7, 335, 340
politics broadcasts, 365, 624–5
and aesthetics, 150, 230, 237 conversations, 343, 344, 542, 584
and artworks, 231, 238, 241 essays, 367
Pollock, Friedrich, 10, 13 German, 444
Popper, Karl, 14 lectures, 444, 579
positivism, 14, 21, 57, 166, 240, 252, radio voice, 276
307, 552 ratioid and non‐ratioid distinction, 31
actuality of philosophy, 21, 25, 28–30 rationality, 209, 214, 330, 331, 402, 416,
critique, 29–30, 444 489, 528, 535, 588
and rationality, 29–30 see also reason
and sociology, 287, 294 bureaucratic, 388
praxis capitalist, 224
annihilation of the question, 31 communicative, 253
radical transformation of society, 585–96 complex, 417
transformative, 17 conceptual, 493
Pre‐Socratics, 33, 556 conventional, 31
preferential love, 607 critical, 240, 554
primacy and cunning, 214
of identity, 558 dialectical thinking, 88
of the object, 45, 46, 392, 499, 545 economic, 333
of the subject, 558 enlightenment, 536, 537
Princeton Radio Project, US, 7, 8 formal, 31, 222–30
Prisms, 13 instrumental see instrumental rationality
proletariat, 7 and irrationality, 35, 141, 193, 231, 273,
proto‐capitalism, 24 278, 308, 322, 334n2, 547n2, 591
protoreflexivity, cunning as, 214–17 means‐end, 222, 224, 225, 231, 232
Proust, Marcel, 31 modern, 221, 222, 225
pseudo‐activity, 17 and nature, 210
pseudo‐democracy, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, and positivism, 29–30
148, 288 practical, 222
psychoanalysis, 97, 105, 113, 342, 552, 591 reflective, 216
see also Freud, Sigmund regressive tendencies, 207, 208
authoritarianism, 279, 281, 282 scientific, 495
Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group, 165 social, 225
empirical social research (1938–50), 160, and social domination, 221
161, 163, 165–6, 172n22 strategic, 223
and jazz, 124–5 technical/technologizing, 32, 596
and Marx, 305, 309, 311 theoretical, 222
mass psychology, 321, 325, 331 western, 29–30
The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther rationalization, mass production, 26–7, 32
Thomas’ Radio Addresses, 142, 149, 275 realist aesthetics, 369, 371
psychology reality, 494, 504, 508, 517n3, 525, 551,
see also mass psychology 553, 555
authoritarian versus democratic, 328–30 absolute, 476
public intellectual, 336, 512, 568, 579, 584 antagonistic, 30, 401
following Auschwitz, 568, 579 and appearance, 366
Putin, Vladimir, 329, 333 art’s critique of, 451
654
INDEX
artworks representing, 369 formal, 53, 222, 537

brokenness of, 32, 306 Hegelian, 57–8
capitalist, 609 in history, 193, 198
collective, 480 instrumental, 17, 33, 57, 91, 153, 185,
compromised, 608 223–7, 430, 493, 560
and consciousness/thought, 14, 25, and democratic modernism (US), 140,
460, 464 146–8
divine, 53, 534, 535 Enlightenment, critique of, 253, 254
dystopian, 447 modern, 221, 495
empirical, 47, 60, 401, 475 and myth, 39, 196, 254, 535, 536
explaining, 537 and nature, 366
expression of, 53 negation, 197
external, 444 objects of, 254, 255
fragmented, 21 powers of, 225
of freedom, 198 practical, 223, 550, 620, 622, 624
future of, 22 pure, 623, 625, 626
higher form of, 555, 556 rationalization of, 254, 495
historical, 21, 66n14, 443, 539, 544 reality inaccessible to, 25
ideal, 542 reason itself, 473, 481, 551, 575, 607
imitating, 47 rule of, 388
irrational, 610 scientific, 228
and language, 55 and subjectivity, 497
material, 157, 165, 607 technical, 226
and myth, 537 and thought, 440, 508
and nature, 146, 545 universal, 306
non‐identity with, 475 western, 33
and ontology, 53, 97, 182 redemption, 147, 372, 449, 483, 539, 545,
principle of, 166, 332, 391, 475 561, 616, 628n2
and pseudo‐reality, 587 see also salvation
reason, inaccessible to, 25 heretical see heretical redemption
and redemption, 609 and knowledge, 542
and reification, 606 messianic, 589
resignation in the face of, 587 of phenomena, 56, 59–62
retreat from, 608 philosophical, 58
sensuous, 558 poetic powers of, 569
social see social reality possibility of, 373, 589, 610, 612
subjects, 607 of reified reality, 607–611
of suffering, 539 standpoint of, 542, 543
transforming, 30, 536, 608 worldly, 45, 542
ultimate, 551 “Reflections on Class Theory,” 307, 314
reason, 10, 22, 229, 265, 325–8, 333, 358, regression, 7, 11, 209, 243, 254, 324, 406,
473, 489, 535 434, 450, 558
see also rationality archaic, 330
anti‐reason of modernity, 451 artificial, 328
critical, 150, 226, 229 to barbarism, 618
and critique, 44, 223, 545 and beauty, 424
as cunning, 198, 212, 215–16 and freedom, 7, 8
defeatism of, 201 historical, 331, 473
deformation of, 254, 385 of listening, 311
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 252 love, materialistic ethic of, 602, 607
emancipatory potential of, 207 of the masses, 537
false, 229 mother‐infant relationship, 328
655
INDEX
regression (cont’d) Schoenberg, Arnold, 9, 74–80, 125, 131–4,

and myth, 450 148, 181, 310, 434, 436, 443, 446, 450
to primary narcissism, 330, 332 “circle,” 70, 71
rationality, regressive tendencies, Pierrot lunaire, 68, 242
207, 208 relationship with Adorno, 4, 75–8
Reich, Wilhelm, 321, 327, 329 and Stravinsky, 11, 69, 75, 427
reification twelve‐tone composition, 11, 72, 73, 74, 75,
and consciousness, 223–4, 226–9, 344 77, 78, 79, 80
literary criticism, 366, 367, 571 Vienna School, 67, 71, 73, 75, 81, 415, 418
Husserl on, 27 Scholem, Gershom, 531–47
instrumental, 222–5 science
knowledge, 231 and culture, 24–5
Lukács on, 26, 27 knowledge, 22, 24, 30, 56, 225, 324,
reality, 606 370, 626
redemption of, 607–611 versus philosophy, 28–9
subjectivity, 602, 609 professionalization of, 23
“Reification and the Consciousness of the scientific attitude, 24
Proletariat” (Lukács), 26, 30 scientific revolution, 23, 24
relativism, 524 scientism, 22
“Remarks,” 287, 291–2, 296, 297, 298 Second Viennese School, 67–83
repression, 116, 260, 512, 567, 601, 606 see also music
erotic, 17 Adorno and Schoenberg, 75–8
of inner nature, 108 Adorno and Webern, 4, 78–80
musical, 128 dialectical thinking, 75, 76
Nazi Party/Nazism, 569 modernity and music, 67–75
political, xv, 23 twelve‐tone composition, 72–5, 77–80
racial, 126, 128 secularization, 46, 188n1, 478, 549, 554
sexual, 327, 405 self‐actualization, 195, 198, 312, 313
totalitarian, 588 full, 195, 390
“Resignation,” 16, 509 self‐consciousness, 377, 591, 621
resistance, and antinomianism, 538–41 Enlightenment critique, 251, 252, 256–60,
Richter, Gerhard, 42–3, 181 263–5
Rimbaud, Arthur, 131 and Kant, 488
Ritter, Joachim, 511 and mimesis, 264
romanticism, 7 negative dialectics (method), 460, 463
Ryle, Gilbert, 6 self‐deception, cunning as, 217–18
self‐expression, and jazz, 7
sacrifice, logic of, 212–14 self‐knowledge, 37, 44, 507
Sade, Marquis de, 10 self‐reflection, 10, 148, 221, 377, 474, 555,
Saïd, Edward, 455n1, 517n2 586, 587, 606, 607, 624
Salaried Masses, The (Kracauer), 27 critical, 145, 229, 377, 378, 603, 605
salvation, 46, 196, 545, 603 semblance
see also redemption aesthetics, 369, 387, 406–408, 499
heretical, 545 deceptive, 178
Sanford, R, Nevitt, 162, 163, 172n22, 274 of identity, 216
Sartre, Jean‐Paul, 166 of innocence, 451
Scheler, Max, 312 necessary, 199
von Schelling, F. W. J., 95, 463, 464, 470n11, primeval, 407
477, 504 Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin), 16
Schelsky, Helmut, 335, 511 serialism, 72, 75, 79, 131
Schlegel, Friedrich, 55, 65n4, 520 sexuality, repression of, 327, 405
Schnädelbach, Herbert, 29 Simmel, Georg, 223–4, 292, 293
656
INDEX
singularity, and philosophy, 523–5 solitude, 420, 610

social class, 128, 322, 325 Sonderweg (German Special Path), 322
see also capitalism; labor standardization, 32–3
and class conflict, 26, 338, 516n1 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 79
and class consciousness, 27, 290, 295, 296, Strauss, Richard, 422, 445–6
310, 504 Stravinsky, Igor, 4, 11, 38, 239, 241–4,
ideology, 425 434, 446
middle classes, 278, 329, 425 and Schoenberg, 11, 69, 75, 427
oppression, 589 student activism, 15–17
white‐collar workers, 27 Students for a Democratic Society, 17
social critique Studies in Prejudice (Institute for Social
see also critique Research), 12, 277
aesthetic model, 237–49 subject and object relation, 28, 313, 470n10,
applications, 241–3 496, 504
authoritarianism, 238, 239, 242 see also “On Subject and Object”
causal and intrinsic critique, 238–41 antagonism of, 30–1
“Social Critique of Radio Music, A,” 8 and class struggle, 223, 226
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 15 dialectic of, 56, 61
social psychology, xvi, 161, 305, 311, 334n2 and Enlightenment critique, 256, 257, 264
social reality, xvi, 28, 228, 231, 233, 293–5, forced unity of, 31
299, 392, 401, 514, 560, 583 fusion of, 612
capitalist, 369 Hegel on, 52
denial of wholeness, 420 and identity relation, 60
existing, 586, 590, 591, 597 interaction between, 27, 29
external, 541 and mediation, 52, 61, 62, 607
interpretation, 592, 596 separation of, 31
irrational, 519 subject, Kantian, 324–6
philosophy, 509 subjectivism, of Kierkegaard, 4
reification, 414, 417 subjectivity
transforming, 505, 584 and aesthetic experience, 230–2
social theory, and jazz, 133–5 bourgeois, 625
sociology, 287–302 and concepts, 488–92
and appearance, 294, 310 constitutive see constitutive subjectivity
approaches to, 294–8 empirical, 498
of art, 413–15 Hegelian, 38
of commodity form, 309–311 independent, 610
and conflict, 292–4 individual, 523, 552
of crisis of culture, 288 instrumental, 534
and dialectical thinking, 305 and knowledge, 28, 459
disappearing contradictions, 287–92 modes of, 594
empirical, 12, 240, 413, 514 moral, 625
of literature, 365 and reason, 497
and Mannheim, 287–92 reified, 602, 609
and Marx, 304–308 true, 536
of music, 68, 308–310, 416–18, 421–3, sublation, 114, 180, 197, 232, 293, 400, 462,
444, 447 469n3, 503, 626
and positivism, 287, 294 suffering, and expression, 202–204
Socrates, 554 Switzerland, 17
solidarity, human systematization, 461, 537
adequacy, four tests of, 624–6
moral metaphysics of, 620–4 Taine, Hippolyte, 323
Wiggins on, 623–4 Taylor, Charles, 65n4, 146, 147, 148
657
INDEX
technology inaccessibility of, 26

industrial, 24 total reality, 25
and knowledge, 22, 24, 30, 56, 225, 324, “Traditional and Critical Theory”
370, 626 (Horkheimer), 28
teleology, 197–8, 544 transcendence, 45, 46, 53, 55, 543, 557, 561,
textual criticism, and philosophy, 526–8 578, 590
theology aesthetic, 18
see also Kierkegaard, Søren divine, 52, 535, 541, 544
anthropology, 44 of experience, 387, 595
apophatic, 181 and imminence, 52, 543
cataphatic, 37, 45 religious, 531
concepts of, 531, 534, 541 sacrosanct, 363
dialectical, 37–8, 41 transcendental ego, 324
and heretical redemption, 541–3 transcendental subject, 185, 313, 475, 488,
and interpretation, 37 490, 496–9
inverse, 532 Traverso, Enzo, 561
Kierkegaard’s reading of, 4, 37–9, 43–7 Troeltsch, Ernst, 287
Lutheran, 52 Trump, Donald, 150, 282–3, 284, 333,
and materialism, 45, 532 399, 613n1
medieval, 556 truth
negative, 37, 45, 46, 177, 576, 577 aesthetic autonomy, 355–60
and onto‐theology, 475 versus appearance, 29
and philosophy, 408 and appearance, 29, 40, 555
positive, 37, 44, 45 inexpressible, 428, 535, 537, 538, 541
and secularization, 46, 188n1, 478, and knowledge, 318n9
549, 554 and reality, 147
standpoint of, 531 truth‐content, 44, 359, 360, 362, 398
theological dimensions of Adorno, 15, 47, unintentional, 5
411, 532, 541, 547 “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 13
traditional, 52–3 twelve‐tone composition, 11, 137n15, 352,
western, 37 402, 432, 438
and yearning, 182 opera, 74
“Theses on Art and Religion Today,” 386 Second Viennese School, 72–5, 77–80
Theunissen, Michael, 619–20
thing‐in‐itself, 30, 499 unconscious, 261, 322, 323, 324, 326,
thinking/thought, 17, 18, 21–2 327, 334n2
disabled, 224, 488, 568 unilateral solidarity principle, 16
freedom of, 607 United States
and knowledge, 463, 515, 556 Adorno family in, 7–8
limits of thought, 460, 462 and alienation, 149, 150
and reason, 440, 508 anti‐Semitism in, 153, 154, 160, 276
social experience and industrial society, 28 The Authoritarian Personality, 280–4, 327
thought‐image, 37–43 and authoritarianism, 283
Thomas, Martin Luther, 143, 144, 149, 150 Berkeley, 12
Thompson, Michael, 620–2 demagoguery in, 279, 327
Three Studies of Hegel, 14 and fascism, 12
Tillich, Paul, 4, 532 feelings of Theodore Adorno to life in,
Tohuwabohu (primordial chaos), 17 8–9
Tolstoy, Leo, 359 Los Angeles, 9, 11, 12
totalitarianism, 97, 108, 161, 255, 275 New World, 8
totality Princeton Radio Project, 7, 8
and identity, 492–3 working classes, 106, 283
658
INDEX
University of Frankfurt, 3, 13–14, 324, will

510, 556 of gods, 216
see also Frankfurt School to harm, 624
inaugural address of Adorno at (1931) of identity, 491
see inaugural address of Adorno of majority, 145
(1931) to power, 333
“Karl Marx University,” 15 of society, 289
use‐value, 229, 366 Williams, Bernard, 523
combining with exchange‐value, 311 Williams, Raymond, 405
and cultural commodities, 311 Woolf, Virginia, 31
displacement by exchange‐value, 88, 224, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
225, 240, 311, 366 Reproducibility” (Benjamin), 7
distinguished from exchange‐value, working classes
225, 376 and anti‐Semitism, 117, 153, 160
of exchange‐value, 311 consciousness of, 27, 310
and labor‐value, 313, 603 defining, 314
pure, 311 and Marx, 583
utopia, 17, 428–30 revolutionary, 338
in United States, 106, 283
Veblen, Thorsten, 24, 32 “World Spirit and Natural‐History,” 307, 495
Vietnam War, 15 World War I see First World War
vitalism ( philosophy of life), 21, 22, 25, 31 writings of Adorno
Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, 4, 67,
Wagner, Richard, xv8, 13, 72, 93, 133, 237, 69, 415
244, 423, 427, 432, 434, 451 Authoritarian Personality see Authoritarian
anti‐Semitism of, 241, 449 Personality, The (Berkeley Study Group)
continuous transition technique, 437 “Bourgeois Opera,” 447, 451, 494
contradictions of, 450 “Commitment,” 569
cult of, 404, 443, 449 “Critique,” 146
cultural Wagnerism, 443 “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 468,
genius of, 449 568, 571
music of, 241–2, 419, 433, 449 “Democratic Leadership and Mass
opera, 433, 449, 450 Manipulation,” 141
and regression, 450 Dialectic of Enlightenment see Dialectic of
special case of, 449–53 Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer)
“Wagner’s Relevance for Today,” 449, 450 “Education after Auschwitz,” 13, 340
Weber, Constanze, 392–4 “The Essay as Form,” 176, 372, 387, 618
Weber, Max “On the Fetish‐Character in Music and the
Adorno’s reception of, 221–35 Regression in Hearing,” 8, 309
on capitalism, 22 Hegel: Three Studies, 14
Weber, Samuel, 39 Introduction to Dialectics, 459
Webern, Anton, relationship with Adorno, 4, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 13,
78–80 127, 434, 444
Weimar Republic, 25–8 The Jargon of Authenticity, 14
Westphal, Merrold, 35, 36 “On Lyric, Poetry and Society,” 419,
“What National Socialism Has Done to the 421, 422
Arts,” 280 Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, 13, 436
Whiteman, Paul, 7 Metacritique of Epistemology, 6, 13
“Why is the New Art so Difficult to Minima Moralia see Minima Moralia
Understand?” 71, 72, 75 Negative Dialectics see Negative Dialectics
“Why Twelve‐Tone Music?” 73, 74 Notes to Literature, 176
Wiggins, David, 622–3 “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” 478
659
INDEX
writings of Adorno (cont’d) “What National Socialism Has Done to the

Philosophy of New Music see Philosophy of Arts,” 280
New Music “Why is the New Art so Difficult to
Prisms, 13 Understand?” 71, 72, 75
“Reflections on Class Theory,” 307, 314 “Why Twelve‐Tone Music?” 73, 74
“Remarks,” 287, 291–2, 296, 297, 298 “World Spirit and Natural‐History,”
In Search of Wagner, 13, 433, 444, 449 307, 495
“On the Social Situation of Music,” 6, 309
“On Subject and Object,” 57, 227, 488, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (journal of
496–9 Institute for Social Research), 6, 8, 24,
“Trying to Understand Endgame,” 13 308, 309, 317n2, 415
“Wagner’s Relevance for Today,” 449, 450 Žižek, Slavoj, 334n1, 455n1
660

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A Companion to Adorno

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

Already published in the series:

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Set in 10/12pt Photina by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

Part I Intellectual Foundations 1

Part II Cultural Analysis  85

Part III History and Domination 173

Part IV Social Theory and Empirical Inquiry 271

Part V Aesthetics 349

27 Adorno, Music, and the Ineffable 427

Part VI Negative Dialectics 457

Part VII Ethics and Politics 565

Asaf Angermann is Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar in Humanities, Philosophy,

Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at

Transcendentalism, twentieth‐century Critical Social Theory, and the emerging area of

Adorno: A Biographical Sketch

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund‐Adorno was born in Frankfurt am Main on Friday

Noematic in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” A critical study of Husserl’s phenomenology, the

Adorno’s Inaugural Lecture: The Actuality

2. Idealism and Bourgeois Society

3. Weimar: Social Experience and Industrial Society

notes the proletarianization of the work of white‐collar workers, which resembles

4. The Actuality of Philosophy and Aesthetic Modernism

be mounted within philosophical discourse. The pincer movement of a burgeoning and

t­ransformation? Adorno appears to be saying that in the work of interpretation, since

repeatable afterwards by any other arbitrary individual. Understanding must practically

In passages like these, Adorno gives voice to the comprehensive instrumentalization of

Adorno’s 1933 Habilitationsshrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, has proven to

2. Part I How and Why Adorno Reads Kierkegaard: Letting

apostolic authority to “a valorization of fideism” or an “exposé of the fatal instability of

of ever‐evolving characters, Kierkegaard has facilitated a philosophical happening for

Reflecting on Bernstein’s insights, the question arises whether Kierkegaard provides an

3. Part II What we Learn from Adorno’s Kierkegaard:

Specific sociological reasons, as well as philosophical insights related to the socio‐economic

In one sense, Kierkegaard’s works could be read as developing an apophatic or negative

Kierkegaard situates the human in an “infinite qualitative difference” before God, as

In the context of Gordon’s argument, I do want to emphasize nonetheless the immanent

Guilt and Mourning: Adorno’s Debt

A relationship between intellectuals is always something more than an intellectual rela-

1. A Metaphysics of Language

2. Letting the Object Speak

While Adorno is indebted to Benjamin’s philosophy of language, he shifts the register of

of a subject’s possession of an object. For Benjamin, this bias is based on a misleading

Whereas Benjamin dismisses the question of the involvement of consciousness in com-

architecture, [and] machines” themselves (1999, 460). It is this expressive understanding

4. Guilt or Mourning

[…] I consider it methodologically unfortunate to give conspicuous individual characteristics

refuses the self‐evident conceptual interpretations of it and places it in the constellations in

Adorno and the Second Viennese School

1. The Path: Modernity, Music, and the New (Adorno and Berg)

One narrative of Adorno’s relationship to the Second Viennese School, a particularly

Could this fragmentary travelog, blending memory, nostalgia, and self‐historicizing at a

2. The Philosophy: A Dialectical Theory of the

Dieter Schnebel once elaborated on the nostalgia of Adorno’s magnificent Orchesterstücke

3. The Legacy: A Philosophy’s Aesthetic Aftermath

The Culture Industry

1. Music and its Transmission

2. Dialectic, Form, Concept

3. The Silver Screen and Beyond

4. Afterlife of an Idea

5. Concluding Thoughts

Part I Intellectual Foundations 1

Part II Cultural Analysis 85

transformation? Adorno appears to be saying that in the work of interpretation, since

“context of delusion” of commodified popular culture is now ubiquitous. The problem is

uestioned Lazarsfeld’s invention – which Adorno dismissively called “that machine” – and