Theodor W.

Adorno: Theoretician through Negations

Author(s): Devra Lee Davis
Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 389-400
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656780
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 389

Review Article

THEODOR W. ADORNO: THEORETICIAN THROUGH

NEGATIONS1

DEVRA LEE DAVIS

Among academic writers, arrogance encompasses a continuum spanned at one

end by meticulous footnoting, which takes the reader for a fool, and marked
at the other end by the vaguest allusions to a panopoly of academic ideas,
which also takes the reader for a fool, albeit a highly erudite fool whose
major activity consists in reading other erudites. The burdens of the pub-
lishing marketplace currently exert considerable pressure against the former
arrogance. Cost effectiveness demands that footnotes be cut and placed at
the end of books, at worst, or the end of chapters at best. Despite writers'
insistence that footnotes are only of value if available with their immediate
text, this economic determinism gives a new value to footnotes, which can
now more easily be measured, if not as to their quality, then for their
quantity. Aspiring academics can now boast, "the book was at least a third
footnotes." Writers like Christopher Jencks have the additional benefits with
such a system of footnoting of being able to take back in the footnotes, what
they assert in the text; thus, Jencks' popularly-oriented text on Inequality2
echoes radical sympathies with this tiptoeing around the genetics and intel-
ligence issues, while his footnotes place him more squarely on the liberal
fence.

The arrogance of having no footnotes and many allusions to profound

predecessors, might have its heyday in the current publishing marketplace,
except that it runs counter to the more revered tradition of anti-intellec-
tualism and anti-history. In a country which is perpetually re-discovering
"Adam," as R. W. B. Lewis describes it,3 writing that demands vast academic
reservoirs is not destined for public acclaim. Despite all this, Seabury Press
manages to publish English translations (which break even) of Theodor
W. Adorno, who is perhaps the most difficult member of the so-called
Frankfurt School to read in any language. Largely due to the media celebra-

Queens College of the City University of New York

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390

tions of Herbert Marcuse as the guru of the student movement of the sixties,
attention has turned to other members of the Institut fur Socialforschung,
founded in Frankfurt in 1923.

Adorno did not formally join the Institut until 1938, when it existed in
American exile in New York City, with branch offices in as many countries as
its members inhabited. As a European scholar, Adorno had studied musi-
cology with Alban Berg in Vienna, Kantkritik with Sigfried Kracauer in
Frankfurt, and became a Privatdozent at Frankfurt with Tillich's support in
1931. As a political refugee in New York, Adorno worked half-time with Paul
Lazarsfeld at the Princeton Radio Research Project when it was still housed in
an old brewery in Newark, New Jersey ... In an abortive attempt to draw on
his musicological expertise, Adorno ostensibly directed a music project
analyzing popular radio content.

According to their own recollections, Lazarsfeld and Adorno did not work
well together. Martin Jay reports the following memorandum from Lazarsfeld
to Adorno:

You and I agree upon the superiority of some parts of your intellectual
work, but you think because you are basically right somewhere, you
overlook the fact that you are terrible in other respects, and that the final
reader will think that because you are outrageous in some part of your
work where he can easily catch you, you are impossible altogether. So I
am sure that what I have done in this letter will be finally beneficial for
yourself.4

For his part, Adorno recounted his dismay at being thrust into the role of
constructor of questionnaires. He claimed to be particularly disturbed by a
methodological paradox: "that in order to grasp the phenomenon of cultural
reification according to prevalent norms of empirical sociology one would
have to use reified methods.

Adorno puzzled that "culture might be precisely that condition that pre-
cludes a mental capacity capable of measuring it." In addition to this
apparent divergence on sociological protocols, a difference of style appears to
have entered this non-productive exchange between Lazarsfeld and Adorno,
as one additional comment of Adorno's implies:

Time and time again I have observed that native Americans were more
open-minded, above all, more willing help, than European immigrants. The
latter, under the pressure of prejudice and rivalry, often showed the
tendency to be more American than the Americans and were also quick to

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 391

consider every newly arrived fellow European as a kind of threat to their

own "adjustment."5

With the collaboration of George Simpson, a native American, whom he

effusively thanked in print, Adorno published by 1941 some articles6 for the
Princeton Radio Project before moving on to Los Angeles, where he worked
with Max Horkheimer on the Dialektik der Aufklarung until 1944. A chapter
from this, "Elemente des Anti-semitismus," placed racial prejudice in the
context of a critical theory of society, foreshadowing the extensive work on
The Autoritarian Personality, in which Adorno participated with Nevitt
Stanford, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel Levinson and others from the
Berkley Public Opinion Study Group. He returned to the University of
Frankfurt and the newly reconstituted Institut for Socialforschung, as a
professor of sociology and philosophy in 1954. At the peak of the student
movement in Germany, Adorno fell victim to the very anti-authoritarianism
that his work stimulated. As a distinguished professor at Frankfurt, he was a
startled target for various student disruptions, including bare-breasted lecture
hall protests of Aktionskunstlerinnen. Adorno died shortly after these disrup-
tions in 1969. No matter how radical his theoretical critiques of bourgeois
culture, he was probably as unprepared for some of its blinder practical
consequences as was Lenin in 1917.

In most of his scholarly work Adorno was unconcerned about his necessarily
limited public, as befits a person who once wrote a little essay on the mass
media, entitled, "Can the Public Want?" Adorno's reply to this question
consisted of another question, namely: "What is the public supposed to
want?" All this gives a fair indication that a writer who does not believe that
he can claim a large well-informed audience will blithely create works for a
presumably elite scholarly group. Anybody who objects to this does not
appreciate the oppressive nature of conventionally limited discourse.

Of course, Adorno himself appreciated the vagaries of different publics in his

American and European experiences. For his European public, Adorno wrote
colums in Speigel, Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Rundschau, on a variety of
topics. His American experiences were less expansive and more constrained in
this regard, given the rather different nature of the American public. In his
intellectual autobiography, aptly sub-titled "A European Scholar in
America," Adorno reports on his experience of presenting a musical analysis
to a group of American radio listeners:

To begin with something familiar and corresponding to the popular taste, I

chose the famous melody that forms the second main theme of the first
movement of Schubert's B minor Symphony, and demonstrated the chain-

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392

like, interwoven nature of the theme.,. One of the participants in the

meeting, a very young man whom I had noticed because of his extra-
vagantly colorful dress, raised his hand and said roughly the following:
what I had said was all very well and convincing. But it would have been
more effective if I had put on a mask and costume of Schubert's. As if the
composer himself was giving information about his intentions and
developing these throughts.8

In this experience, Adorno sensed the opposition between the expert tech-
nician and the European "intellectual," the gebildete Mensch. Most of
Adorno's work addressed the gebildete Stdnde, or educated estate, a group
presumed to exist in Germany but long given up in America, as Weber
diagnosed in the prolegomena to his theory of bureaucracy.9

In the Negative Dialectics,10 Adorno wrote a book which few persons will
read and even fewer will ever fully comprehend, partly because it presumes
thorough familiarity with the original works of Hegel, Kant, Marx, Engels,
and partly because its author "means to put his cards on the table-which is
by no means the same as playing the game."' 1 Within this prefatory remark
Adorno reveals both the ironic and arrogant style of Negative Dialectics, a
work whose very title constitutes a thorn in the side of traditional philoso-
phy. Adorno immodestly seeks to free philosophy from its affirmative
tendencies by rendering dialectics, with its conventional positive connota-
tions, negative. This search requires some elaboration which Adorno
insinuates without directly providing: the traditional conception of dialectics
as the negation of the negation is often taken to imply the positive, as in
simple mathematics, where two minuses are equivalent to a plus. Adorno
would insist that in the negation of the negation two minuses are not
equivalent to a plus, that is, an affirmation. Additionally, of course, negative
dialectics opposes positivistic philosophies of identity and non-contradic-
toriness, along with much of contemporary neo-Marxism, systems theory and
Heideggerian phenomenolggy, to name but a few of Adorno's more in-
teresting betes-noires.

With such a group of antagonists, Adorno guarantees himself a certain

incomprehensibility on sectarian grounds alone. These various philosophies
tend to remain in a holy state of cerebral hygiene vis a vis dissenting
approaches. It is thus likely that neo-Marxists would glean much from Marxist
textual allusions while remaining impervious to the systems theory glosses, and
vice versa. To be fully comprehended would be a capitulation to dominant
rationality in Adorno's terms. Critical theory betrays a Nietzchean aversion to
all systemic thought, as Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia:

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 393

In the face of totalitarian unity, which cries out for the elimination of
differences directly as meaning, something of the liberating social forces
may even have converged in the sphere in the individual. Critical theory
lingers there without a bad conscience.12

Despite such elegant aphoristic defenses of the incomplete fragmentary

nature of his work, Adorno never tackles the contradictions of his own
perspective, which hopes for a new totality while rejecting totalitarian ones.
In this respect it might almost be said that for Adorno's critical theory, the
unrelenting critique of bourgeois theory constitutes praxis.

This problem of the relationship of theory and praxis, long embraced as the
central concern of revolutionary Marxism had not yet provided any clear
directions, despite the prolonged passion of its focus throughout the crises of
Marxism dating from the 1920's. The first sentence of Negative Dialectic
alludes both to the pre-eminence of this concern and to the failure to achieve
any breakthroughs. "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on
because the moment to realize it was missed." To appreciate this unfootnoted
assertion, it is necessary to know that Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach
criticized philosophers for having merely analyzed or interpreted the
hypostatized. The point, Marx says, is to change the world. As construed by
Marx, philosophy offers itself as the means for realizing this union of theory
and praxis. Yet, philosophy lives on, Adorno maintains, as purely descriptive,
analytical philosophy, because, "the attempt to change the world miscar-
ried." Herein lies an indictment of all contemporary Marxist efforts at
revolutionary change-they have not been revolutionary efforts but miscar-
riages. Given this judgment, Adorno does not abandon the philosophical
enterprise, but gives philosophy a new responsibiltiy-"to criticize itself
ruthlessly,'13 "to inquire whether and how there can still be a philosophy at
all."'4

Adorno's critique of philosophy is not only a philosophical critique, but one

of historical, economic, political, aesthetic and social dimensions. "No idea
escapes the marketplace." Borrowed from Vico, and from Adorno's own
work with Max Horkheimer, the Dialectics of Enlightenment,'5 this phrase
attests to the material bases of ideas. The ideas of slavery and democracy, the
roles of women and men, all originated in the marketplace of Athens. The filrst
part of Negative Dialectics takes on the work of Martin Heidegger, as
particularly representative of effective philosophy in Germany, and as having
originated in the marketplace of Auschwitz civilization. "Ontology seems the
more numinous (a reference to Rudolph Otto's numen, or holy, as that which
is unique to religion) the less it can be located in definite contents that would

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394

give the meddlesome intellect something to latch on to. Intangibility comes

to be unassailability."'16

Adorno criticizes Heideggerian ontology for ignoring time, space, history and
people, and for celebrating being as an apology for misery and starvation.
"The ambiguity of the Greek word for "being"-an ambiguity that dates back
to the lonians' failure to distinguish between materials, principles and the
pure essence-is not listed as a defect but as original superiority (by Heideg-
ger),"'7 The logical absolutism of Heideggerian phenomenology perpetuates
resignation, with the illusions of change in being:

As the Fiihrer rises above an atomized nation, as he thunders against social

prejudice and, to perpetuate himself, will change the guard on occasion, so
will the hierarchic leanings from the early days of the ontological renais-
sance fade out in the omnipotence and solitute of Being.18

Adorno finally condems Heidegger's existentialism, accusing it of "crawling

into the cave of a long-past mimesis." In Plato's cave chained people could
not know the real world but saw only shadows on the wall; they were
doomed to mimetic visions: "In the process it is nonetheless accommodating
the most fatal prejudice from the philosophical which it has laid off like a
superfluous employee: the Platonic prejudice that the imperishable must be
the good ."19

Unfortunately, Adorno's criticism of Heidegger adds nothing to his earlier

Jargon der Eigentlichkeit,20 but simply repeats his very efficient and un-
systematic attack on Heideggerian philosophy, which had effectively removed
Heidegger from serious philosophical discussions. Ignoring Heidegger's
attempted systematization of hermeneutic approaches, Adorno criticizes
instead both the very attempt to construct such a system and the social role it
lays. Refusing to criticize the system on its own terms, Adorno questions the
presuppositions of the system itself. Adorno's treatments of Kierkegaard,
Husserl and Karl Popper all reflect his antipathy to closed and completed
philosophical systems.2'

Following this indictment of Heidegger the second part of Negative Dialectic

promises categories and concepts. Not surprisingly, Adorno declines to offer a
superior ontology to replace what he has just rejected, nor does he offer one
of non-ontology, which would be the obvious positivist reversal. Rather,
Adorno explains that universal or general concepts "dissolve in the face of the
distinct entity; a total philosophy is no longer to be hoped for."22 He
criticizes absolutist, totalizing expectations, indirectly indicting most so-
called socialist revolutions: "On the threadbare pretext of a dictatorship (now

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 395

half a century old) of the proletariat (long bureaucratically administered),

governmental terror machines entrench themselves as permanent institutions,
mocking the theory they carry on their lips."23 Yet Adorno indicts not only
the leaders of these unrevolutionary repressive experiences. He expressly
accuses the very theory with which they monopolize culture: "Materialist
theory became not only aesthetically defective, as against the vacuous
sublimity of bourgeois consciousness; it became untrue."24 "The unity of
theory and practice was not meant as a concession to weakness of
thought . . ." "Without reflection there is no theory."25 This last fragment
sardonically paraphrases Marx's statement, "ohne Theorie keine Revolution,"
encapsulating Adorno's critique of unreflective undialectical thinking.

In the introduction to Negative Dialectics Adorno uses an uncharacteristically

simple formulation: he says "negative dialectics is an ensemble of analyses of
models."26 The third and last part of the book contains three such thought
models, or "binding statements without a system." Perhaps the most extra-
ordinary includes Adorno's Kantkritik, where the paradox of freedom is
unraveled. Kant had held, following Rousseau's Contrat Social that people in
society are free to act in accordance with a universally valid will according to
the laws of nature, such that their actions correspond with the summum
bonum. Adorno pinpoints the Kantian paradoxes required by this reasoning,
singling out both the separation of noumenal and phenomenal and the
mundis intelligibilis and mundus sensibilis:

Kant's cognitive critique does not permit him to summon freedom into
existence; he helps himself by conjuring a sphere of existence that would
indeed be exempt from that critique, but also from any judgment as to
what it might be.27

Kant is forced to rely on empirical support for his supposedly a priori laws of
ethics, introducing sociological reflections from outside his system. This
opens freedom to the real world, and thus restricts it.

The passages of Kant that Adorno cites here are not the well-known sections
of the Kantian critiques; they include selections from Kant's Kleine Schriften,
writings which mostly appeared in popular journals and by which Kant was,
interestingly enough, widely known throughout the Europe of his day.28
Adorno's interpretation of them is at once ingenious and inventive. He shows
how Kant in the Kleine Schriften relies on the very empirical, sense data
which his formal system cannot employ. It is in this section in particular that
the genius of Adorno's translator, E. B. Ashton, is most apparent. Ashton has
not relied on the standard English translations of Kant, or Hegel or Marx-
Engels; Ashton "would take Adorno's terminology, constructions, and

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396

meaning as the base on which to synthesize" these texts.29 This is the hard,
demanding work of a dedicated scholar, which has led some German Adorno
readers to comment that this English version reads more fluently than the
German.

The second thought model includes "excursions" into Hegel. Displaying

Hegel's philosophy of law, Adorno argues that "the law is the medium in
which evil wins out on account of its objectivity and acquires the appearance
of good." Adorno contrasts Hegel's dialectic of time with Kant's universality
of time. "The moment in which nature and history become commensurable
with each other is the moment of passing."30 Not posessed of any logical
requirements such as clarity, consistency or cogency, this thought model
makes no points, which may be one of Adorno's only points. His models are
not duplicable, system-bound expressions: they are moments, expressions,
and sketches.

The last model, meditations of metaphysics, most clearly conveys Adorno's

modelling as mood betraying. Replete with more musicological references
than the rest of the book, Lulu, Wozzeck, the Protestant Hymn books, Bach's
Ordo, Schoberg's rendition of Stefan George's Rapture, it is a cacophony of
orchestrated outrage. After Auschwitz, Adorno had written, there can be
orly barbaric poetry;31 here he adds, "our feelings resist any claim of the
positivity of experience as sanctimonious." Just as Voltaire rejected Leibniz's
theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake, so we must reject metaphysical specu-
lation because it must have links to the recent horrors. "It may have been
wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is
not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can
go on living . . .,,32

The paradox for us all entails what Adorno calls the new categorical im-
perative: to arrange thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not be
repeated. Consistent with his disinterest in consistency, false clarity, and
programmatic statements doomed by their programs to succeed and thence to
fail, Adorno labels all culture: garbage, including its urgent critique.
"Whoever pleads for the maintenance of theradically culpable and shabby
culture becomes its accomplice, while the person who says no to culture is
directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be."33

In this context Kant's question of how is metaphysical knowledge a priori

possible, becomes "is it still possible to have a metaphysical experience?"34
For this, the promise of death and theology becomes important as a means of
possibly transcending this wretched, scarred life of mass murder.

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 397

The Totum is the totem. 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. The traces come from the
past, and our hopes come from their counterpart, from that which was or
is doomed, such an interpretation may very well fit the last line of
Benjamin's text on Elective Affinities: "For the sake of the hopeless only
are we given hope."35

With such negatively theological expressions, Adorno consciously abandons

the sterile realm of conventional philosophical discourse, approaching in some
sense the realm of his old mentor Tillich. Like Bloch36 and like Benjamin,37
who influenced both Adorno and Bloch, Adorno displays a decidedly theo-
logical twist in his last thought model. Unlike Bloch, Adorno claims no
theological attention from the various death-of-god writers. Adorno is no
more a theologian manque than Bloch is a Christian manque.38 However, a
peculiar similarity in their writing is undeniable. The following passage from a
1918 essay by Bloch could as well come from a posthumous Adorno thought
model:

We do paint images of what lies ahead, and insinuate ourselves into what
may come after us. But no upward glance can fail to brush against death
which makes all things pale. In our being and experience, nothing seems to
take us beyond the caesura and let us vibrate beyond it.39

In the preface to Negative Dialectics Adorno sardonically describes his work

as moving from concrete philosophizing to abstraction, effecting a kind of
"anti-system:" "it attempts by means of logical consistency to substitute for
the unity principle, and for the paramountcy of the supra-ordinated concept,
the idea of what would be outside the sway of such unity."40 Anticipating
attacks against Negative Dialectics, Adorno notes (in the third person
singular) that "he feels no rancor and does not begrudge the joy of those in
either camp who will proclaim that they knew it all the time and now he was
confessing."'I Understanding that Negative Dialectics would be little under-
stood and even less approved; moreover, that it would provide the positive
uncritics with joyous evidence of his true nature, Adorno removes himself
from vulnerability with his paternal tolerance of filial intolerance.

Negative Dialectics is one of the last works of a rich, concatenated mind; it is

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398

also, most emphatically, a book that could only find an audience at the end
of an unusual career in philosophy and sociology, for it presumes a wide
readership of sympathizers and critics. Its superb translation now is to be
welcomed, with all the problems it poses, because, as Adorno notes: "Yet the
need in thinking is what makes us think. It asks to be negated by thinking; it
must disappear in thought if it is to be really satisfied; and in this negation it
survives."42

NOTES

1. For their immeasurable assistance, I would like to thank Eike Gebhardt, Wieland
Schulz-Keil, Tracy Strong, Friedrich Sixel, Anthony Wilden, Karl Hondrich, Elsa
Felber and Franco Ferraroti.
2. Christopher Jencks et al. (1972), Inequality: An Assessment of the Effect of
Family and Schooling in America, New York: Basic Books.
3. R. W. B. Lewis (1955), The American Adam, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
4. Cited in Martin Jay (1973), The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frank-
furt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950, Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, p. 223. In his own recollection, Lazarsfeld admits to a
"troublesome question" in his mind, given his failure to induce Adorno to "link his
ideas with empirical research." Paul Lazarsfeld, "An Episode in the History of
Social Research: A Memoir," in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (eds.), (1969),
The Intellectual Migration, Europe and America 1930-1960, Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 322, 325.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, "A European Scholar in America," ibid., p. 347. Based on this
statement alone, Adorno's difficulties with the Princeton Radio Project appear to
be primarily epistemological and methodological. However, in this same essay, an
extraordinary statement is also contained, which could easily have been made by
Lazarsfeld in any of his writings on the need for varied techniques in social
research: viz., "The deadlock that purely quantitative determinations seldom arrive
at the genetical depth mechanisms, whereas qualitative results can easily be accused
of being incapable of generalizations and thereby lose their objective sociological
value, we sought to surmount by employing a series of different techniques, which
we only related to one another in terms of the underlying categories." (Ibid.,
p. 359.) The preceding refers to Adorno's work on The Authoritarian Personality
and not to the radio project. It suggests that the problems of Adorno's and
Lazarsfeld's collaboration were not as narrowly theoretical as their own statements
imply.
6. One final note that he published on the Adorno-Lazarsfeld association: Adorno
(1969), mentions four treatises on the Princeton Radio Project, pp. 351-353;
Lazarsfeld (1969) refers to two publications by Adorno, p. 325;
7. Anne Rose Katz (1963), Vierzehn Mutmassungen uber das Fernsehen, Theodor
W. Adorno, "Kann das Publikum Wollen?" p. 55.
8. Adorno (1969), p. 350.
9. Max Weber (1972), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tubingen: Mohr, pp. 576 ff.
10. Negative Dialectics (1973), tr. by E. B. Ashton, New York: Seabury Press; original-
ly published as Negative Dialektik (1966), Frankfurt: Suhrkampf.
11. Ibid., preface, xix.

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 399

12. Theodor W. Adorno (1951), Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschadigten
Leben, Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, p. 13.
13. Op. cit., Negative Dialectics, p. 3.
14. Ibid., p. 4.
15. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1944), Dialektik der Aufklarung.
16. Ibid., p. 61.
17. Ibid., p. 70.
18. Ibid., p. 90.
19. Ibid., p. 131.
20. Theodor W. Adorno (1964), Jargon der Eigenlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkampf.
21. For interesting discussions of this, see, Jay (1973), pp. 68-70; and David Frisby
(1972), "The Popper-Adorno Controversy: the Methodological Dispute in Germa
Sociology," Philosophy of Social Science, 2, pp. 105-1 19.
22. Op. cit., Negative Dialectics, p. 136.
23. Ibid., p. 204.
24. Ibid., p. 205.
25. Ibid., p. 207.
26. Ibid, p. 29.
27. Ibid., p. 254.
28. Several of these writings did not appear in English until 1958, when Lewis Whi
Beck edited and translated them as Kant, On History, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
They have received little serious scholarly attention in England and the United
States.
29. Op. cit., Negative Dialectics, p. xiv.
30. Ibid., p. 359.
31. "Even the most acute awareness of imminent doom threatens to degenerate into
gibberish. Cultural criticism finds itself confronted with the last stage of the
dialectic of culture and barbarism; to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, an
this also corrodes the awareness why it has become impossible to write poems
today." (Theodor W. Adorno (1955), "Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft," Prismen
Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, cited and translated by Michael Roloff, postscript to Hans
Magnus Enzensberger (1974), The Consciousness Industry, New York: Seabury
Press.)
32. Op. cit., Negative Dialectics, p. 362-3.
33. Ibid., p. 367.
34. Ibid., p. 372.
35. Ibid., p. 377-8. Herbert Marcuse (1969), invokes this same sentiment in his
on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press.
36. A sometime member of the Frankfurt school, Ernst Bloch formulated his magnum
opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (first published in East Berlin in 1955, later published
in Frankfurt in 1959), in a self-consciously post-Auschwitz Weltschmerz. Although
associated with the spirit of utopia, Bloch's work reverberates with the negativism
of an atheist. Vide, Jurgen Moltmann, foreward to Ernst Bloch (1971), Man on His
Own, New York: Herder and Herder.
37. Walter Benjamin (1966), Angelus Novus, Frankfurt: Suhrkampf; and Walter
Benjamin (1968), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, tr. by Harry Zohn, New
York: 1968, contain some of Benjamin's explicitly theological writings. Jay (1973),
reports that Adorno disapproved of the Jewish residues in Benjamin's work, p. 201,
337. Hildegaard Brenner claims that Adorno encouraged Benjamin's theological
interests, viz., (1968). "Die Lesbarkeit der Bilder: Skizzen zuin Passagenentwurf,"
Alternative, 59/60, p. 56.
38. Vide, Harvey Cox, foreword to Bloch (1971), for a comment on Bloch's signifi-
cance for such contemporary theologians as Thomas Altizer, Leslie Dewart and
Gabriel Marcel.

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400

39. Bloch (1971), p. 43; also, "But now Zion's daughter stands facing no one but
herself in her very own jeopardy in the very gravest de te tes agitur, which is
precisely how death challenges the soul to meta-psychical and meta-physical praba-
tion in the world, and in supra-mundane horrors." (p. 47) This English translation is
from the Geist der Utopie (1918), Frankfurt. While regarded by some as a system of
theoretical messianism it also conveys the impossibilities of utopia.
40. Op. cit., Negative Dialectics, p. xx.
41. Ibid., p. xxi.
42. Ibid., p. 408..

Theory and Society, 2 (1975) 398400

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