A Companion to Adorno

Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, Max Pensky, Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, Max Pensky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119147015, 9781119146919
• eBook ISBN: 9781119146933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

A definitive contribution to scholarship on Adorno, bringing together the foremost experts in the field

As one of the leading continental philosophers of the last century, and one of the pioneering members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno is the author of numerous influential—and at times quite radical—works on diverse topics in aesthetics, social theory, moral philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, all of which concern the contradictions of modern society and its relation to human suffering and the human condition. Having authored substantial contributions to critical theory which contain searching critiques of the 'culture industry' and the 'identity thinking' of modern Western society, Adorno helped establish an interdisciplinary but philosophically rigorous study of culture and provided some of the most startling and revolutionary critiques of Western society to date. 

The Blackwell Companion to Adorno is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, this important contribution to the field explores Adorno's lasting impact on many sub-fields of philosophy. Seven sections, encompassing a diverse range of topics and perspectives, explore Adorno's intellectual foundations, his critiques of culture, his views on ethics and politics, and his analyses of history and domination.

• Provides new research and fresh perspectives on Adorno's views and writings
• Offers an authoritative, single-volume resource for Adorno scholarship
• Addresses renewed interest in Adorno's significance to contemporary questions in philosophy
• Presents over 40 essays written by international-recognized experts in the field

A singular advancement in Adorno scholarship, the Companion to Adorno is an indispensable resource for Adorno specialists and anyone working in modern European philosophy, contemporary cultural criticism, social theory, German history, and aesthetics.

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 merchant, 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 conservatory 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 specialist 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 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 himself 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 composition; 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 subjectivist 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 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 lecture, “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 indifference 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 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 fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Editors' Introduction
• About the Editors
• Part I: Intellectual Foundations
• Part II: Cultural Analysis
• Part III: History and Domination
• Part IV: Social Theory and Empirical Inquiry
• Part V: Aesthetics
• Part VI: Negative Dialectics
• Part VII: Ethics and Politics
• Index
• End User License Agreement