A Companion to Adorno E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1867

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Notes on Contributors

Editors' Introduction

Reference

About the Editors

Part I: Intellectual Foundations

1 Adorno

References

Further Reading

2 Adorno’s Inaugural Lecture

1. Introduction

2. Idealism and Bourgeois Society

3. Weimar: Social Experience and Industrial Society

4. The Actuality of Philosophy and Aesthetic Modernism

5. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

3 Reading Kierkegaard

1. Introduction

2. Part I How and Why Adorno Reads Kierkegaard: Letting the Thought‐Image Appear

3. Part II What we Learn from Adorno’s Kierkegaard: The Sustenance of Negative Meaning

References

Further Reading

4 Guilt and Mourning

1. A Metaphysics of Language

2. Letting the Object Speak

3. Redeeming the Phenomena

4. Guilt or Mourning

References

Further Reading

5 Adorno and the Second Viennese School

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

2. The Philosophy: A Dialectical Theory of the New Music (Adorno and Schoenberg)

3. The Legacy: A Philosophy’s Aesthetic Aftermath (Adorno and Webern)

4. Difficulties

References

Further Reading

Part II: Cultural Analysis

6 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

References

Further Reading

7 Adorno and Horkheimer on Anti‐Semitism

1. Objections and Dilemmas

2. Complex Coherence

3. Long History and Levels of Specificity

4. The Image of “the Jews”

References

Further Reading

8 Adorno and Jazz

1. “That’s Not Jazz”

2. Adorno’s Jazz Essay

3. Adorno’s Empirical Limitations

4. “Interpretation Has a Lot to Learn from Jazz”

5. “What Jazz Is Really Saying in Social Terms”

6. Art and Objectivity

7. The “State of the Material”

8. Music, Philosophy, and Social Theory

References

Further Reading

9 Adorno’s Democratic Modernism in America

1. Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy

2. Epiphanies and Enlightenment: Adorno’s Democratic Modernism

3. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

10 Inhuman Methods for an Inhumane World

1. Introduction

2. Using the European Approach

3. Adorno’s Most Dangerous Thesis

4. Empirical Research Contra Empirical Verification

5. A Highly Promising Method

6. Outflanking the Research Racket

7. The Rigidity of Constructing Types

8. Empirical Research Presupposing its Own End

9. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

Part III: History and Domination

11 Adorno and Blumenberg

References

12 Philosophy of History

1. Liberation and Its Caricatures

2. Kant: Antagonism and Peace

3. Hegel: Determinate Negation and World History

4. Marx: Misery and Happiness

5. History, Possibility, and Nonidentity

6. Suffering and Expression

References

Further Reading

13 The Anthropology in

Dialectic of Enlightenment

1. The Point of Their Critical Anthropology

2. Investigating the Prototype of the Self

3. The Logic of Sacrifice

4. Cunning as Protoreflexivity

5. Cunning as Self‐Deception

6. Concluding Remarks

References

Further Reading

14 Adorno’s Reception of Weber and Lukács

1. Introduction

2. Weber and Lukács on Instrumental Rationality and Reification

3. Adorno’s Critique of the Enlightenment

4. Consciousness and Reification: The Negative Dialectic

5. Aesthetic Experience as Subjective Force‐Field

6. The Transformation of Critique

References

Further Reading

15 Adorno’s Aesthetic Model of Social Critique

1. Introduction

2. Causal Critique and Intrinsic Critique

3. Aesthetic Applications: “High” Art

4. The Culture Industry and Popular Culture

5. Micrological Analysis in

Minima Moralia

6. Pushing Back Against Adorno’s Methods

7. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

16 The Critique of the Enlightenment

1. Introduction

2.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

and History

3.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

and Agency

4.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

and Kant

5. On the Importance of Freud

6. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

Notes

Part IV: Social Theory and Empirical Inquiry

17 “Nothing is True Except the Exaggerations”

References

Further Reading

18 Exposing Antagonisms

1. Introduction

2. Disappearing Contradictions

3. Taming Conflict

4. Sociological Approaches

5. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

19 Adorno and Marx

1. Philosophy and/or Sociology?

2. Sociology of the Commodity‐Form

3. Marx’s Social Ontology: “Facticity of the Conceptuality of Exchange”

References

Further Reading

20 Adorno’s Three Contributions to a Theory of Mass Psychology and Why They Matter

1. Mass Psychology and Critical Theory

2. Freud and the Kantian Subject

3. The Group

4. Authoritarian vs. Democratic Psychology

5. The 1960s

References

Further Reading

21 Adorno and Postwar German Society

1. Professor, Expert, Critic, Counselor: Adorno in the Federal Republic

2. Society – Germany – Postwar: The Components of Adorno’s Analysis

3. The Psychobiography and Therapy of Germany: “Working Through the Past”

4. The Intellectual as Pedagogue in the Administered Society: Adorno’s Postwar Enlightenment

5. “Why Did You Return?” Adorno and the Nation

References

Further Reading

Part V: Aesthetics

22 Aesthetic Autonomy

1. Experience as Primary

2. Truth

3. Cognitivism, Reference, and Determination

4. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

23 Adorno and Literary Criticism

1. Culture and Literary Criticism in Post-War Germany

2. Adorno’s Philosophical Aesthetics

3. Heine: Coming Home

4. Hölderlin: Hearkening to Nature

5. An Ethical Criticism

References

Further Reading

24 Adorno as a Modernist Writer

1. Modern Life and Modernism

2. Cavell on Modernism in Philosophy

3. Modernism and Epiphanic Form

4. Adorno on Modernism

5. Modernist Style in Minima Moralia

6. Some Weaknesses in Adorno’s Style: Constanze

7. Modernist Philosophy as a Continuing Task

References

Further Reading

25 Adorno’s

Aesthetic Theory

1. Aesthetic Theory: Threat or Menace?

2. Kant and Hegel

3. Form and Content: Mastery Over Material

4. End of Art: Good, Bad, and Forever

5. Art and Its Other Others

6. Expression, Semblance, and Mimesis

References

26 Aesthetic Theory as Social Theory

1. Introduction: Sociology of Art as a Challenge

3. Postwar Revisions

4. Adorno’s Late Work:

Aesthetic Theory

References

Further Reading

27 Adorno, Music, and the Ineffable

1. Ineffable Utopias

2. Exact Listening

3. Inconsistent Listening

4. Philosophy and the Ineffable

References

Further Reading

28 Adorno and Opera

1. Opera, Critical Theory, and Sociological Musicology

2. The [Special] Case of Wagner

References

Further Reading

Part VI: Negative Dialectics

29 What Is Negative Dialectics?

References

Further Reading

Notes

30 Adorno’s Critique of Heidegger

1. Adorno’s Philosophical Criticisms of Heidegger

2. Concepts and Hypostatization

3. Parallels

4. Conclusion

References

31 Concept and Object

1. Saturday Afternoons with Kant

2. The Concept of the Concept and Constitutive Subjectivity

3. “To Break Through the Appearance of Total Identity”

4. Non‐conceptuality: Mimesis, Expression, Presentation

5. Transcendental and Empirical, Subject and Object

6. The Thing‐in‐itself

References

Further Reading

32 Critique and Disappointment

References

Further Reading

33 Negative Dialectics and Philosophical Truth

1. A Changed Philosophy

2. Philosophy and Singularity

3. Persuasion and Reportability

4. From Philosophy to Textual Criticism

5. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

34 Adorno and Scholem

1. Introduction

2. Religious Mysticism and Material Life: Historical Background and the Early Conversations

3. The Context of Blindness: Mysticism, Myth, and Reason

4. Antinomianism and Resistance: Damaged Life and the Critique of Normativity

5. Heretical Redemption: Theology, Metaphysics, and Materialism

References

Further Reading

35 Adorno’s Concept of Metaphysical Experience

1. Metaphysics and Ambivalence in Modern Philosophy

2. Adorno on Classical Metaphysics

3. The Enduring Possibility of Metaphysical Experience

4. The Politics of Metaphysical Experience

References

Further Reading

Part VII: Ethics and Politics

36 After Auschwitz

1. Introduction

2. Poetry

3. Morality

4. Goodness, Meaning, Truth

5. Education

6. A Perspective

References

Further Reading

37 Forever Resistant? Adorno and Radical Transformation of Society

1. Theory and Praxis

2. Resignation versus Radical Societal Transformation

3. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

38 Adorno’s Materialist Ethic of Love

1. Reification Is an Epiphenomenon

2. Situation: Modern Love

3. Coercion and Freedom: Redemption of the Reified

4. Conclusion

References

Further Reading

39 Adorno’s Metaphysics of Moral Solidarity in the Moment of its Fall

1. Metaphysics, Materialism, and Humanism in Adorno

2. Negativism in Adorno

3. Theunissen’s Challenge

4. Adorno’s Moral Metaphysics of Solidarity Reconstructed

5. Four Tests of Adequacy of my Reconstruction

Acknowledgement

References

Further Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Pages

ii

iii

iv

ix

x

xi

xii

xiii

xv

xvi

xvii

ix

1

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

85

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

175

176

177

178

179

180

181

182

183

184

185

186

187

188

189

190

191

193

194

195

196

197

198

199

200

201

202

203

204

205

206

207

208

209

210

211

212

213

214

215

216

217

218

219

220

221

222

223

224

225

226

227

228

229

230

231

232

233

234

235

237

238

239

240

241

242

243

244

245

246

247

248

249

251

252

253

254

255

256

257

258

259

260

261

262

263

264

265

266

267

268

269

271

273

274

275

276

277

278

279

280

281

282

283

284

285

286

287

288

289

290

291

292

293

294

295

296

297

298

299

300

301

303

304

305

306

307

308

309

310

311

312

313

314

315

316

317

318

319

321

322

323

324

325

326

327

328

329

330

331

332

333

334

335

336

337

338

339

340

341

342

343

344

345

346

347

348

349

351

352

353

354

355

356

357

358

359

360

361

362

363

364

365

366

367

368

369

370

371

372

373

374

375

376

377

378

379

380

381

383

384

385

386

387

388

389

390

391

392

393

394

395

397

398

399

400

401

402

403

404

405

406

407

408

409

410

411

413

414

415

416

417

418

419

420

421

422

423

424

425

426

427

428

429

430

431

432

433

434

435

436

437

438

439

440

441

442

443

444

445

446

447

448

449

450

451

452

453

454

455

457

459

460

461

462

463

464

465

466

467

468

469

470

471

473

474

475

476

477

478

479

480

481

482

483

484

485

486

487

488

489

490

491

492

493

494

495

496

497

498

499

500

501

503

504

505

506

507

508

509

510

511

512

513

514

515

516

517

519

520

521

522

523

524

525

526

527

528

529

531

532

533

534

535

536

537

538

539

540

541

542

543

544

545

546

547

549

550

551

552

553

554

555

556

557

558

559

560

561

562

563

565

567

568

569

570

571

572

573

574

575

576

577

578

579

580

581

582

583

584

585

586

587

588

589

590

591

592

593

594

595

596

597

598

599

600

601

602

603

604

605

606

607

608

609

610

611

612

613

615

616

617

618

619

620

621

622

623

624

625

626

627

628

629

630

631

632

633

634

635

636

637

638

639

640

641

642

643

644

645

646

647

648

649

650

651

652

653

654

655

656

657

658

659

660

661

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike.

Already published in the series:

The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Second Edition

Edited by Nicholas Bunnin and Eric Tsui‐James

A Companion to Ethics

Edited by Peter Singer

A Companion to Aesthetics, Second Edition

Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper

A Companion to Epistemology, Second Edition

Edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa and Matthias Steup

A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy

(two‐volume set), Second EditionEdited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit

A Companion to Philosophy of Mind

Edited by Samuel Guttenplan

A Companion to Metaphysics, Second Edition

Edited by Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa and Gary S. Rosenkrantz

A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory,

Second EditionEdited by Dennis Patterson

A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition

Edited by Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Second Edition

(two‐volume set)Edited by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright

A Companion to World Philosophies

Edited by Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe

A Companion to Continental Philosophy

Edited by Simon Critchley and William Schroeder

A Companion to Feminist Philosophy

Edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young

A Companion to Cognitive Science

Edited by William Bechtel and George Graham

A Companion to Bioethics, Second Edition

Edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer

A Companion to the Philosophers

Edited by Robert L. Arrington

A Companion to Business Ethics

Edited by Robert E. Frederick

A Companion to the Philosophy of Science

Edited by W.H. Newton‐Smith

A Companion to Environmental Philosophy

Edited by Dale Jamieson

A Companion to Analytic Philosophy

Edited by A.P. Martinich and David Sosa

A Companion to Genethics

Edited by Justine Burley and John Harris

A Companion to Philosophical Logic

Edited by Dale Jacquette

A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy

Edited by Steven Nadler

A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages

Edited by Jorge J.E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone

A Companion to African‐American Philosophy

Edited by Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman

A Companion to Applied Ethics

Edited by R.G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman

A Companion to the Philosophy of Education

Edited by Randall Curren

A Companion to African Philosophy

Edited by Kwasi Wiredu

A Companion to Heidegger

Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall

A Companion to Rationalism

Edited by Alan Nelson

A Companion to Pragmatism

Edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy

Edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin

A Companion to Nietzsche

Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson

A Companion to Socrates

Edited by Sara Ahbel‐Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar

A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism

Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall

A Companion to Kant

Edited by Graham Bird

A Companion to Plato

Edited by Hugh H. Benson

A Companion to Descartes

Edited by Janet Broughton and John Carriero

A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology

Edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski

A Companion to Hume

Edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe

A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography

Edited by Aviezer Tucker

A Companion to Aristotle

Edited by Georgios Anagnostopoulos

A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Edited by Jan‐Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks

A Companion to Latin American Philosophy

Edited by Susana Nuccetelli, Ofelia Schutte, and Otávio Bueno

A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature

Edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost

A Companion to the Philosophy of Action

Edited by Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis

A Companion to Relativism

Edited by Steven D. Hales

A Companion to Hegel

Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur

A Companion to Schopenhauer

Edited by Bart Vandenabeele

A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy

Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel

A Companion to Foucault

Edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki

A Companion to the Philosophy of Time

Edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon

A Companion to Donald Davidson

Edited by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig

A Companion to Rawls

Edited by Jon Mandle and David Reidy

A Companion to W.V.O. Quine

Edited by Gilbert Harman and Ernest Lepore

A Companion to Derrida

Edited by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor

A Companion to David Lewis

Edited by Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer

A Companion to Kierkegaard

Edited by Jon Stewart

A Companion to Locke

Edited by Matthew Stuart

The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics

Edited by Niall Keane and Chris Lawn

A Companion to Ayn Rand

Edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri

The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism

Edited by Kelly James Clark

A Companion to Mill

Edited by Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller

A Companion to Experimental Philosophy

Edited by Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter

A Companion to Applied Philosophy

Edited by Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee, and David Coady

A Companion to Wittgenstein

Edited by Hans‐Johann Glock and John Hyman

A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir

Edited by Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer

A Concise Companion to Confucius

Edited by Paul R. Goldin

The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism

Edited by Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J.L. Menuge, and J.P. Moreland (Editor)

A Companion to Nineteenth‐Century Philosophy

Edited by John Shand

A Companion Atheism and Philosophy

Edited by Graham Oppy

A Companion to Adorno

Edited by Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky

A Companion to Adorno

Edited by

Peter E. GordonEspen HammerMax Pensky

This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

Editorial Office111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of WarrantyWhile the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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 ; 71Identifiers: 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–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024545LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024546

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Akademie der Künste, Photo: Ilse Mayer Gehrken, © T. W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt

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 appointments at universities in the United States and Europe.

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 publications 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 morphology 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 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.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (1973 and 1996); Marxism and Totality (1984); Adorno (1984); Permanent Exiles (1985); Fin-de-Siècle Socialism (1989); Force Fields (1993): Downcast Eyes (1993); Cultural Semantics (1998); Refractions of Violence (2003); La Crisis de la experiencia en la era postsubjetiva, ed. Eduardo Sabrovsky (2003); Songs of Experience (2004); The Virtues of Mendacity (2010), Essays from the Edge (2011), Kracauer: l’Exilé (2014), Reason After its Eclipse (2016), Splinters in Your Eye (2020), and Genesis and Validity (2021). His research interests are in modern European Intellectual History, Critical Theory and Visual Culture.

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 monograph 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 specialization 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 aesthetics. She takes a comparative political theory approach to nineteenth‐century American 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 contemporary 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 published by Cambridge University Press.

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).

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 partisan 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 commenced 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 concerns. 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 professor 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 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 unreconciled 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 persistence 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 sociological 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 possibly 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.

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).

Part IIntellectual Foundations

1Adorno: 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).