Review of:
Adorno, T.W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. Ed. Rolf
Tiedemann. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
---. Letters to His Parents: 1939-1951. Ed. Christoph
Gödde
and Henri Lonitz. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
---, and Thomas Mann. Correspondence 1943-1955. Ed. Christoph
Gödde and Thomas Sprecher. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Polity,
2006.
Gerhardt, Christina, ed. "Adorno and Ethics." Special issue of New
German Critique 97 (Winter 2006).
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When students excited by "The Culture Industry" or some other Adorno
reading ask how to get a larger grip on Adorno overall, I finally have a
good answer: History and Freedom, Adorno's previously
unpublished 1964-1965 lectures at Frankfurt. There are now several of
these collections: in the 1960s, tape recorders were usually running when
Adorno was speaking; and these lectures, addressed (from notes but
without script) to undergraduates, are far more accessible than the
self-consciously "difficult" writings addressed to fellow-adepts. Buzz
on these lectures always mentions that they were given while Adorno was
composing Negative Dialectics; History and Freedom
is among the collections that can be read as a collateral draft of parts of
that "late" work. Actually History and Freedom reprises
Adorno's whole career: the lectures continue the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the opening lecture is called
"Progress or Regression?"); along the way, two lectures elaborate the crucial
early essay, "The Idea of Natural History," and no fewer than four extend the
hints in "The Actuality of Philosophy" on "the transition from
philosophy to
interpretation." All of Adorno's major career investments are here
except "the aesthetic": there are, indeed, many asides on art especially in the
lectures on interpretation, but "the aesthetic" connects with the main theme
mostly via Hegel's "end of art."
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Oh, yes: Hegel. Hegel's ubiquity in Adorno and Adorno's conflictedness
about him are evident even to beginners, but hitherto it needed hard-won
expertise to discriminate Adorno's near-idolatry of Hegel from his often
angry critique of him. By contrast, History and Freedom compels
Adorno to engage systematically with the major Hegelian
themes: the [historicized] dialectic, universal and particular, identity and
non-identity, objectivity and subjectivity, self-consciousness (both
individual and collective), the World Spirit, the Absolute, conscience and
law, race and nation. (Short version of the critique: Hegel too often
ontologizes or absolutizes one term of a binary pair, thus reifying what he,
of all people, should have kept fluid and "dialectical"; worse, Hegel's lapse
into this error is always in favor of the "universal"
and against the "particular," for the master and against the
slave.) When Adorno mentions (without quoting) some "famous" remark from
Hegel (or whomever), Rolf Tiedemann's expert notes quote generously from
the relevant sources, with invariably helpful comment--and, often,
instructive pointers to dissonances with Adorno's other writings. (Adorno
here also gives his most straightforward evaluation of Kant.)
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Advanced students, too, will find this collection
(more than any of Adorno's other lecture collections) a thrilling read,
because even improvising for undergraduates, Adorno's thinking aloud produces
a Niagara of insight and provocation that overloads the most diligent
attention. Adorno's power to "ram every rift with ore" is as striking here
as anywhere in his oeuvre. I have said this book is more accessible than
Adorno's "finished" prose; it is often more stirring as well, because more
spontaneous and digressive, as well as more passionate in venting Adorno's
vibrant indignation at the course of the world, reprising and updating his
chronic anxieties "after Auschwitz" and after Hiroshima.
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Here as in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno diagnoses the
devolution of "spirit" from Hegel's dialectical joining of spirit and matter
"objectively" (anticipating dialectical materialism) to positivism's
dichotomizing of the two, which renders "spirit" merely "subjective," the
disvalued term of an antithesis. In the problem of universal and particular
Adorno elicits the agon of history and the individual. "Philosophy of
History" in the West has presupposed "universal history"--an idealist and
reifying concept that Adorno of course historicizes to yield the heuristic of a "technological rationality" which
may usefully be staged as a single story, that of the "progress" from
slingshot to atom bomb--with "progress" pointedly in scare-quotes.
Technology promises universal mastery over nature even as it reduces millions
of particular suffering individuals to servitude. "Domination"
(Herrschaft) as universal "master" produces the "dominated" as
particular "slave." History promises universal freedom, but delivers instead
universal compulsion, unfreedom.
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In the final third of the course, Adorno pursues "Antinomies of Freedom" not
anticipated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, often eliciting
psychoanalytic overtones. "Enlightenment" since Spinoza has held that
happiness is living "in accordance with Reason," but even apart from the
"dialectic of Enlightenment" sketched above, some obdurately bodily "impulse"
intuits freedom as archaic and primordial, and thus irreconcilably at odds
with administered modernity. Reason becomes the opposite of happiness, that
chancy state that ratio can never "rationalize." (Both German
Glück and English "hap"-piness connect etymologically to chance or
[good] luck.) The body experiences happiness as freedom from
reason, freedom of and for "impulse" itself--a word whose
connotations of irrationality Adorno charges with utopian voltages. Oddly,
Adorno doesn't cite the distinction, posited by his erstwhile Oxford
colleague Isaiah Berlin, of "positive freedom" (freedom to
participate in political life), as against "negative freedom" (freedom
from unnecessary social constraints). But here as elsewhere
Adorno's thematic of "ego weakness" converts Nietzsche's warnings about "the
last man" from a portent for the future to a present condition, and in
ways that resonate richly with Lacan and Zizek on the ways we learn to love
our
unhappiness. Adorno himself almost yields at moments to the premise that
consciousness enlarges fruitfully only under the sting of unhappiness, though
obviously the lectures as a whole assimilate freedom to happiness, however
"broken" this "promise." But in the closing lectures, a critique of Kant's
coercive categorical imperative, another universal master by which the
individual is condemned (in Sartre's phrase) to freedom, the "somatic
impulse" of happiness has its analogue in morality as well, thus opening at
least the possibility of a happy and moral futurity, a "not yet" worthy to be
called "history."
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In his "Foreword " to History and Freedom, Rolf Tiedemann
observes that for Adorno, "freedom" is a problem "in the philosophy of
history, rather than in moral philosophy where it has traditionally been
found" (xvi). I cite the point by way of an introduction of the Winter
2006 New German Critique special issue on "Adorno and
Ethics." Adorno's acid comment that "ethics" is "the bad conscience of
morality" is a slam at ethics and morality both--he goes on to speak of
"the blunt incompatibility of our experience with the term 'morality'"
(Problems 10)--and in History and Freedom, he
asks whether good and evil can still mean anything for us, living as we do
"[in] a kind of infernal reflection of the utopia of which Nietzsche had
dreamt" in Beyond Good and Evil (History and
Freedom 207). Almost half the New German Critique
articles don't address ethics at all; those that do mostly project
ethics as a high ideal that "we" continually fail, especially "after
Auschwitz," to live up to. ("We"
professionals? "We" practitioners of critique? "We" whose professional
ethic should be to gag at the very phrase "professional ethics"?) The
New German Critique ethicists fret over "the very possibility
of an ethics," finding (of course) for impossibility, and duly lamenting
it. The problematizations are subtle and scrupulous, but they skirt the
problem Adorno rubs raw, the corruption and illegitimacy of "ethics" at
large. After Auschwitz?--no; since long before Auschwitz, and as cause,
not as effect: after "administration," doing ethics has become barbaric.
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The "ethics" essays are led off by J.M. Bernstein's "Intact and Fragmented
Bodies: Versions of Ethics 'After Auschwitz'." Bernstein identifies four
"lacunae" in Adorno's attempt at a "philosophical" response to the Shoah, and
finds these deficits supplied by Agamben's Remnants of
Auschwitz, "almost as if Agamben's book were designed to fill in the
missing arguments in Adorno's account" (33). Besides Agamben, Bernstein
takes bearings from Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt (a footnote explains that
the essay is part of a larger attempt to reconcile Arendt and Adorno [35n7]);
another waypoint is Foucault's "modernity as biopolitics"--the claim not
merely to power over subject populations, but of "administrative" sovereignty
over biological process as such. Hence the "administrative" drive, in the
camps, to reduce the inmates to "living dead": to kill individuality and
moral agency in advance of killing the "mere" physical bodies. Bernstein
rewrites a famous sentence in the Dialectic of Enlightenment,
putting "biopower" where the original had "enlightenment": "biopower is
mythical fear radicalized" (40, adapting the Jephcott trans. 11). Hence if
Agamben's account of "domination" is more philosophically coherent than
Adorno's, this achievement proves to be self-discrediting. "Biopolitics"
requires a constitutive distinction of reason from bios, and
in deconstructing this binary Bernstein shows that Agamben's critique of it
actually preserves its kernel of domination (reason as master,
bios as slave). Thus does Agamben's ethical argument compromise
the very possibility of an ethics. Adorno partisans will think this a
satisfying result, but it raises the question, Why adduce Agamben at
all?--since the terms in which Bernstein sets up his argument are drawn
rather from Arendt. Presumably Agamben is a foil for Arendt, setting the
terms for Bernstein's projected Arendt/Adorno rapprochement. Bernstein
defaults to the Adorno premise that a properly philosophical response to the
Shoah must resist the "dialectic of enlightenment" dynamic of domination.
In Adorno, that means (at minimum) a response that owns affect, and on that
ground, surely, Arendt is closer to Adorno than to Agamben. I can't guess
whether Bernstein's pursuit of his theme will traverse the question of
"philosophy and literature," but his evocation of Primo Levi (in a moving
passage from The Drowned and the Saved) seems a promising, if
oblique nod toward "the aesthetic."
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Bernstein's article is followed by Michael Marder's "Minima
Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering," an eloquent
inquiry, in implicit dialogue with Bernstein, into how, if at all, "we," the
living, can witness for the six million dead--questions that generate
discussion of "ethics" and/as memory. Christina Gerhardt's "The Ethics of
Animals in Adorno and Kafka" reviews Adorno's treatment of cruelty to
animals, the relevant contexts from Kantian "Reason" (in which animals figure
simply as the not-rational) to Freud's account of totemism (which
uncovers telling cathexes of animals in the unconscious), and
Schopenhauer. The essay is more a survey than a critical discussion: the account of
Kafka, for instance, makes nothing of the affective distance between the
stories functioning within the "animal fable" paradigm (the ape of "Report to
an Academy," the dog of the "Investigations") and that wholly original ordeal
of guilty revulsion, "The Metamorphosis." Alexander Garcia Düttmann, in
"Adorno's Rabbits; or, Against Being in the Right," mounts impressive
indignation on Adorno's behalf against recent culture-wars detractors in the
German press, and re-enacts Adorno's protest against "domination" in all its
forms (cognitive, affective, material, economic), in the proposition that
"Being right . . . is not an ethical category": insofar as philosophy is
invested in being right, so much the worse, ethically, for philosophy.
The richest of the "ethics" essays is Robert Kaufman's "Poetry's
Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and
Sociopolitical Delusion." Kaufman floats free of the straitening scruples of
"philosophy" to demonstrate that "Poetry's ethics"--the aesthetic at
large--dramatizes the conflicting claims of is and
ought "rather than, as might seem to be required in philosophy
itself, abstractly deciding between them" (77). Kaufman is a professor of
literature, with joint appointments in English and German; he
offers close readings of key passages, almost always citing (and discussing)
the German text as well as the translation, beginning with the first "after
Auschwitz" quote and Adorno's many variant restatements of it throughout the
ensuing controversy. "Lyric" is a focus for Kaufman--references to his other
articles suggest a book in progress--because lyric, untrammeled by the
burdens of narrative and character, epitomizes one extreme of aesthetic
"semblance," a mimesis that maintains a dialectical non-identity with what
it ostensibly offers a semblance of. A "semblance," in short, that
refuses "adaequatio" conceptions of representation, can "keep the
difference" between (the terms of Kaufman's title) "aesthetic illusion,"
which "keeps determination and ethical possibility open for exploration,"
and the "sociopolitical delusion" that "the poem itself is already an
ethical or political act" (118). -
Kaufman writes and argues with a daring that accepts the challenge of
Adorno's dictum (which he quotes [92]) that "The prudence that restrains us
from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of
social control, and so of stupefaction" (Minima Moralia 86). He
pursues, for example, the "poetry is barbaric" meme via the "homeopathic"
twists of "immanent critique," to the point of turning Adorno's initial scorn
of a certain genteel denial of twentieth-century barbarism into a
justification of an unflinching poetry of
shock, of "semblance"-barbarism like Paul Celan's. (A two-page coda
features
Duncan's poem, "A Song From the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul
Celan Sings.") Most daringly of all, Kaufman shares a story told him by his
father, an Auschwitz survivor--and then interprets it, in just the
way Agamben et al. would insist that "we," whose witness can never be
"authentic," mustn't do. On Kaufman's (as on Adorno's) showing, poetry's
ethics prove more flexible, more open, more ethical indeed, than
philosophy's; but Kaufman makes explicit the "ultimate [ethical] concern" (to
recall Adorno's under-acknowledged early mentor, Paul Tillich) that Adorno
refused to declare in so many words. (As in the famous Hemingway passage
about the words we don't use anymore, refusal of the word attests commitment
to the thing.)
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Kaufman's emphasis on Adorno's language segues conveniently to two
articles that touch on Adorno's implicit "philosophy of language."
Gerhard Richter, in "Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content
in Adorno,"
replies to Rüdiger Bubner's indignant refusal of Adorno's ethicizing (so
to speak) of the aesthetic. Richter argues the case by reading the
last section of Minima Moralia with close attention to
the German and with many instructive dissents from the standard
translation by
Edmund Jephcott. As in Kaufman, Adorno's "non-propositional" truth-claim
refuses "adaequatio" in favor of a Messianically-tinted "mimesis of
what does not yet exist, the negative traces of a futurity that can be
neither predicted nor programmed in advance but that nevertheless inscribe
themselves into the artwork and into the philosophy that enters a relation
with that artwork, as a nonidentical and negatively charged otherness"
(Richter 129).
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Samir Gandesha defends Adorno in "The 'Aesthetic Dignity of Words':
Adorno's Philosophy of
Language" against Habermas's charge that Adorno remains stuck
in a "philosophy of consciousness" by appealing to what he considers
Adorno's implicit
philosophy of language. The argument is based on Adorno's early "Theses on
the Language of the Philosopher," which Gandesha and Michael Palamarek have
translated for the first time, in a forthcoming University of Toronto volume,
Adorno and the Need in Philosophy.
(The translation is not included here.) Adorno writes that "all
philosophical critique today is possible as the critique of language," a
dictum that Gandesha calls "programmatic for his philosophy as a whole"
(139) and that he
connects with the early Wittgenstein's adviso that "all philosophy is
critique of language" (Tractatus 4.0031). He likewise
assimilates Horkheimer and Adorno's diagnosis of the "entwinement of myth
and enlightenment" to
the later Wittgenstein's campaign against the "bewitchment" of thought by
language. Gandesha's effort (in which the defense against Habermas recedes)
is to situate Adorno vis-à-vis not only Wittgenstein early and late
but also vis-à-vis Heidegger, by the light (mostly) of the
contemporaneous "Idea of Natural
History" (in which Heidegger is the implicit adversary) and "Actuality of
Philosophy" (in which it's the Vienna-circle Wittgenstein). As for the later
Wittgenstein, Gandesha finds unacknowledged rapprochement in "The Essay as
Form" and in "Words from Abroad." But Gandesha passes over Adorno's
dissents
from Wittgenstein on clarity and on remaining silent, and from
Wittgenstein's
adherence, early and late, to the "adaequatio" ideal, which would
rule out critical negation (Kaufman's "semblance," Richter's "mimesis").
Adorno does not share Wittgenstein's aspiration to "leave everything
as it was."
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I come at last to the two essays that come first in the New German Critique special
issue. Detlev Claussen, in "Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno's American Experience," wants
to overturn the received view of the "mandarin" Adorno holding his nose through his forced exile in
vulgar America. This meme is in the air, as witness David Jenemann's Adorno in America
(U of Minnesota P, 2007)--but whereas the American Jenemann stays modest in his claims, to avoid any
appearance of grabby over-reach, Claussen, a German, stages the "American Adorno" as an affront to
his countrymen, who take their proprietary title to Adorno too complacently for granted. "Simply
put: without America, Adorno would never have become the person we recognize by that name" (6).
Indeed, he might not have adopted that name; Claussen's freshest suggestion is that Adorno dropped
"Wiesengrund" (in 1942 in California) not to minimize his Jewishness (the usual conjecture) but to
downplay his Germanness. (But see below.) Claussen overstates his case regarding Adorno's
absorption of American social-science research methods: Adorno's indictments of positivism and
empiricism, early and late, attest that his work on Paul Lazarsfeld's Radio Project and
The Authoritarian Personality only intensified his disdain of quantitative
"research." Perhaps Claussen argues the point more persuasively in his recent (as yet untranslated)
2003 biography, but as a short essay, the case seems more a provocative "exaggeration" than a
worked-out attempt to convince.
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Martin Jay's "Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno's Critique of
Genuineness" is less concerned to rehearse (again) Adorno's critique of
Heidegger, Jaspers, et al., than to pursue subtle contrasts between Adorno
and Walter Benjamin on, e.g., "aura." The famous peroration of Benjamin's
"Mechanical Reproduction" essay--where fascism aestheticizes politics,
communism politicizes art--is usually taken proscriptively; hence
Adorno's differences with Benjamin on "aura" (etc.) have been extensively
discussed, but almost always on political grounds. Jay is alert to
the politics, most interestingly with the suggestion that "authenticity" as
a subtext of fascist racism prompted Adorno and Benjamin to valorize "the
stigma of inauthenticity" (Jay adapts his title from Minima
Moralia 154) on behalf of those condemned in Nazi-speak as "rootless
cosmopolitans." But by coming at these issues via "authenticity," Jay
illuminates the aestheticization sustaining that fetish. Especially
illuminating is Jay's articulation of "authenticity" with "mimesis." As a
conformity-imperative on behalf of authenticity, mimesis simply is
ideology; but Jay also discerns along lines similar to Richter's and
Kaufman's (above) a critical and negative mimesis that foregrounds its
dissonance from "what is," thus (in Jay's words) "resisting identity thinking
and the preponderance of the subject over the object," and promoting a
"passive receptivity that avoided domination of otherness" (21). To that
extent mimesis has the potential to function not as the repetition but as the
critique of "what is," and not despite its "inauthenticity" but because of
it. Hence the stakes in "taking on the stigma of inauthenticity." (Jay also
confronts a contradiction most commentators ignore: for all his sneers at
"authenticity," Adorno can evoke it honorifically in praise of artworks that
realize these critical potentials. Jay deftly explains the terminological
aspects of the question--i.e., the range of terms that English translates as
"authenticity": Authentizität, Eigentlichkeit,
Echtheit--without reducing it to them.)
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I picked up the Adorno-Mann correspondence expecting light on the
Doctor Faustus collaboration, and I salivated over the early
letter in which Mann woos Adorno, explaining what kind of novel he has in
mind, and what kind of help he wants, but the actual work took place in
real time when Mann and Adorno lived within easy reach of each other in Los
Angeles, and by page 18 Doctor Faustus is already in print.
(There are appendices reprinting Adorno's two memos on how to characterize
particular works by "Adrian Leverkuhn," Mann's composer-protagonist; these
are apparently the principal documentary remains of the collaboration.) The
reviews and controversies following Faustus's publication prompt
some interesting exchanges, but the interest of these letters lies elsewhere.
(I place Schoenberg's pique at Mann's novel, whose protagonist is credited
with the dodecaphonic system Schoenberg himself invented, among the
"elsewhere.") Mann and Adorno exchange worries about the emerging Cold War;
about Germany's "recovery" from the war, especially its numbed and, both
agreed, morally deficient posture toward (or away from) the genocide; about
the German future and the question of their own return (or not) to Germany.
Mann swore never to return; when he finally left California, it was to end
his days in Switzerland. Adorno's 1949 Frankfurt University stint as
visiting lecturer was intended as a reconnaissance, but receptive students, a
sense of duty as a public intellectual, and his unforeseen home-coming
emotions
(not to mention the rise of HUAC and McCarthy in America) started him
thinking of returning for good. His first letter from Frankfurt to Mann
makes a rich complement to the one he wrote his mother (see below).
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Throughout, Mann and Adorno are exchanging current work: on Adorno's side,
Philosophy of New Music (Mann had read the Schoenberg sections
in draft while writing Faustus, but the Stravinsky sections were
new to him), Against Epistemology, In Search of Wagner, and
numerous essays, reviews, radio talks, etc. Mann sent along The Holy
Sinner, The Black Swan, and drafts of Felix Krull, as
well as various essays and lectures. The back-and-forth, as each comments
on the other's latest work, is intellectual exchange of a very high caliber.
(The extensive discussion of Wagner [92-7] is particularly rich.) There is,
however, almost no disagreement between these two, and such differences as
there are, they express in the mildest possible terms. Mann was ever the
canny literary diplomat, but an Adorno who pulls his punches is something
new.
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Here is the largest interest (or guiltiest pleasure?) of these
letters, the keyhole they open onto the personal relations of these two.
For
Mann, Adorno is (initially) an intellectual whose musical expertise he needs
and whose continuing allegiance he wants; his praises of Adorno's works can
feel more than a little overdone. It helps, of course, that Adorno is an
admirer from the beginning. Adorno, for his part, finds himself dealing for
once with more than an equal: with a great and politically committed
literary artist and cultural icon. (Mann's Nobel came in 1929, when Adorno
was 26.) Mann clearly had, and kept, the upper hand. Adorno saw
that association with Mann could greatly boost his own prestige. Doesn't
Adorno compromise principle (not to say, make his own Faustian bargain) in
agreeing to serve Mann's basic premise--Schoenberg as the proto-Nazi
Faust?--for Adorno thought Schoenberg the preeminent modernist good guy;
wouldn't he have preferred a Wagner-like protagonist for Mann's
Faustus? or a Stravinskian "reactionary" (see Philosophy
of New Music)? Mann's view of Wagner was aesthetic (à la early
Nietzsche) rather than political; insofar as Mann and Adorno both took
bearings from Freud, Mann sees Wagner as aesthetically potent in ways Freud
helps confirm, Adorno as ideologically symptomatic in ways Freud helps
diagnose. In any case, when Mann announces that he is writing a memoir about
the composition of Faustus, Adorno is thrilled that his
backstage role will get a curtain call, a prospect Mann played up while the
book (Story of a Novel) was in progress. In the event, Adorno
would be disappointed: Mann's praise was fulsome, but (Adorno thought)
understated his contribution. And of course Adorno had to swallow his
spleen; he could never confess to Mann how slighted he felt.[1]
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Mann, as accredited culture-hero, can address Adorno with magisterial
aplomb; Adorno, by contrast, is as usual (indeed, more than usual) anxious to
dazzle. Story of a Novel isn't the only case
in which Mann seems almost to toy with the feelings of his admirer;
consider also the issue of Mann's "modernism." Mann was a
touchstone of modernism for Adorno; of anti-modernism for Adorno's adversary
in debate, Lukács--so of course Adorno sought to win the protean,
shape-shifting Mann to the "modernist" side, away from the Lukácsean
"demand for realism" (103). This push-pull is the subtext of a late exchange
that begins when Mann confides his despair over Felix Krull,
a comical picaresque of horny youth he had left unfinished decades earlier;
resuming it now, at age 77, alas! he can't find the right style, is
uncertain of his genre, can't reconcile the conflicts.... The letter is
clearly fishing for encouragement, and Adorno is positively
gallant in response: Mann's past accomplishment has brilliantly reinvented
genres, evaded the old-fashioned "will to style," drawn power from
dramatizing, not reconciling, tensions--assurances, of course, encoding an
undeclared manifesto for (Mann's) modernism. You can't help imagining Mann's
Mona Lisa smile when, in a later letter, he shakes his head over
Waiting for Godot in terms Lukács would applaud ("I
cannot help feeling some anxiety for the society that finds acclaimed
expression in such a work," etc. [107]).
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The head-games are of an altogether different kind in Adorno's Letters
to His Parents. To his public, Adorno was a virtuoso of unhappy
consciousness; en famille, he's a virtuoso of cheery
exuberance--allowing that "virtuoso" connotes a certain willfulness. To his
parents Adorno ever remained the adored only child, the star family performer and perpetual center of attention--but in
these letters, Adorno must keep everyone's spirits up during a maximally
anxious period: the flight from Nazism and adjustment to a new and exigent
life in a strange land. There is almost too much to discuss here, so let me
simply list some principal interests of these letters. First, the candor and
Gemütlichkeit of the family atmosphere: the abundant
endearments and pet-names; gossip about family and fellow exiles; health
complaints; and anxieties about the fate of dear ones (and property) left in
Europe. Adorno's parents devotedly read all their son's work, and when (just
once), the assiduousness falls short, Adorno's protest is plaintive and
loud--"Though . . . I can also understand that your weary old heads want to have
some peace . . . Even the simplest things in life are just so damned
dialectical"
(165). Adorno's father was the intellectual parent, and intellectual
interest falls off after his death (8 July 1946), to which Adorno reacts
with a classic, and eloquent, spasm of survivor guilt (258-59) well worth
comparison to his published meditations on the Shoah.
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To his mother, Adorno confesses his erotic turmoils--three of them: one, the
disquieting reappearance of an old flame; one a heady but harmless
infatuation with a charismatic beauty; and one a full-blown (but unserious)
infidelity. If you only browse this book, don't miss letter #83, a comic
masterpiece in which Adorno boasts of his smitten-ness and of the charms of
the sublime object, which are such as to arouse the cloddish hoi
polloi to envy and hatred--"just like our theoretical writings" (139)!
(Greta's reaction to these adventures is not recorded here.)
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Another fascination is Adorno's running commentary on war news--e.g., the
first letter after 1 Sept. 1939 swings between foreboding and sarcasm, in
anxious hope that the whole thing may prove a drôle de guerre and
end quickly. There is no reaction at all to Pearl Harbor, though America's
entry into the war had been a consummation devoutly to be wished. By late
1943 Adorno has become unrealistically optimistic about victory, consistently
underestimating how long it would take, even as he remains apprehensive about
fascist currents in America. We glimpse the effects of "enemy alien"
restrictions: curfew (monitored by unannounced drop-ins from police);
miles-from-home limits; travel permits from the FBI; worries about possible
"evacuation" (i.e., internment). To his father Adorno
blames his name-change (the loss of the patronymic Wiesengrund) on a stupid
bureaucratic error.
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These letters also give a vivid sense of the collaborative relationship with
Horkheimer, especially of the degree to which
Adorno was the one who set the words on paper, not only in their co-authored
work but in much that is credited to Horkheimer alone, which Adorno edited,
revised, rewrote--ghost-wrote, to put it no more strongly. Adorno briefs his
parents on the inception and progress of what would eventually become Dialectic of Enlightenment. He also fumes about the research
projects (especially the "Studies in Prejudice" reported in The
Authoritarian Personality) whose quantitative method he disdains, but
whose reputation-making power he is determined to make the most of.
-
I'd always assumed Adorno's 1941 move from Manhattan to Los Angeles galled
him; not so: he disliked New York, and raved about the Riviera-like
beauties of Southern California. Most touching is his recurrent wonder,
despite the provincialism and vulgarity, at the fundamentally democratic
culture of America: bureaucratic encounters are friendly as they would never
be in Europe, and even the police who showed up unannounced to check curfew
compliance were amiable and courteous. (That was then, this is now.) In
November 1949, Adorno's triumphant return to the family's war-ravaged
home-town (Frankfurt) generates poignant accounts of the ruins, both
architectural and human.
-
We've been in something of an Adorno boom for some time now. Books,
articles, and special issues of journals (like New German
Critique's) continue to appear; even more auspiciously, important works
like History and Freedom are being translated and
published. (What I want next is Adorno's first Habilitationschrift,
a neo-Kantian reading of Freud that Adorno withdrew when it lost the support of
Hans Cornelius, his advisor. In later years Adorno would veto its
publication.)[2]
Some of Adorno's "canonical" works are even being re-translated: just in
the last few years, we've had Dialectic of Enlightenment
translated anew by Edmund Jephcott, and Philosophy of New Music
by Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Hullot-Kentor is reportedly at work on a
retranslation (long overdue) of Negative Dialectics. There is
also a loosening of the strictures against interest in
Adorno's personal life. High-minded disdain of "the personal" is widespread
in our highbrow culture; it has been consistent, however diversely motivated,
from the New Criticism to la nouvelle critique and beyond; and it's
a disdain that Adorno, virtuoso of the hairshirt, might seem to epitomize.
But predictably enough, Adorno's centenary year (2003) announced the arrival of
what we
might call the moment of biography. In Germany, three of them have appeared. Detlev Claussen's Der Letzte Genie remains
untranslated, but as for the two now available in English, Lorenz
Jäger's Adorno: A Political Biography is a culture-wars
screed; Stephan Müller-Doohm's Adorno: A Biography is a
reverential academic monument; neither gives any sense whatever of Adorno as
a personality. Nor have the hitherto available letters: Adorno's
correspondence with Benjamin, despite the mutual affection between them,
stays on a remarkably stratospheric plane of high-minded intellectualism. I
would expect the correspondence with Horkheimer to be warmer and more
personal, but it remains untranslated. Only the just-published letters to
Berg have hitherto given us any flavor of Adorno's humor, lustig
very much in the Viennese manner. The letters reviewed here give us a more
lively sense than any we've had so far (in English, at least) of what the
private Adorno was like as a social being and as a family man. Of course the
"personal" isn't the only interest of these letters: as we've seen, Adorno's
commitment to his work was of an intensity to fuse public preoccupations with
the personal ones. But "the
personal" as such in Adorno proves to hold surprising fascinations of its
own. If the letters to Mann suggest something of the degree to which the
public Adorno's hairshirt mortifications, all the guilt of history and the
agonies of "after Auschwitz" granted, also had their springs in predictable personal ambitions and vanities, the letters to his parents
disclose a real, and attractively "happy" surprise that I, at least, never
anticipated: how lively and mercurial a sprite capered under the hairshirt.
University of Delaware
English Department
helmling@UDel.Edu
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Notes
1.
For a strongly pro-Adorno account of further details--side-by-side comparisons of
Adorno's memos with Mann's published text, anti-Adorno invective from Mann's
family after the great man's death, Adorno's reaction to slighting remarks about
him that Mann had written in letters to others--see Müller-Doohm 314-20.
2. Der Begriff des
Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre [The Concept of the
Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche] (Philosophische
Früschriften 79-322); for details of the episode and a brief account
of the dissertation, see Müller-Doohm 103-6.
Works Cited
Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
---. Minima Moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso,
1974.
---. Philosophische Frühschriften. Theodor W. Adorno.
Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1996.
---. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Ed. Thomas Schröder. Trans.
Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
Müller-Doohm, Stephan. Adorno: A Biography. Trans. Rodney
Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F.
Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
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