The renaissance that has developed on both sides of the Atlantic around the work of philosopher, sociologist, political thinker, musician, musicologist, and cultural theorist Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) has outpaced interest in other members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in recent years.¹ Indeed, his multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. Adorno’s analyses of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives “after Auschwitz,” of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the relentless manipulation of mass consciousness by the unequal siblings...

What is the target of the critique practiced by Adorno? Adorno’s critique is targeted at what exists. But not because what exists is not as it should be, because it must be changed and instituted in some other way. In that case, critique would fall between what exists and what does not yet exist. It would be critique of what exists in the name of what does not yet exist. A critique that targets what exists sets its sights on what existsas such; and therefore also on attempts to hold fast to what exists, to insist on it, to...

“The search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times,” writes Marshall Berman in his book on Rousseau,The Politics of Authenticity, “is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are … the desire for authenticity has emerged in modern society as one of the most politically explosive of human impulses.”² Even those with less radical agendas, like Sigmund Freud, have been seen as sharing the same desire. According to Lionel Trilling in his classic studySincerity and Authenticity, Freud’s insistence on the tragic dimension of the human condition “had the intention of sustaining the...

Injustice is the medium of real justice. A just world should not be defined as one that is regulated by the norm of the equal consideration of every individual’s interest, nor as a world that is in accordance with Jürgen Habermas’s idea that justice is now “sublimated into the concept of the impartiality of a discursively attained agreement.”¹ These notions of justice, precisely, sublimate into a normative ideal thepolitical struggleof the indigent subject against a dominating, sovereign Universal or, even worse, sublimate into procedures and modes for warranting the assertibility of moral and legal norms the primary world...

The often brutal condemnation of contemporary society in Horkheimer and Adorno’sDialectic of Enlightenmentis founded at least in part on their understanding of the devastating consequences of domination, including, but not limited to, that described by the determination of the subject by the economic. Thus, while an interrogation of the status of the subject by the various approaches that have (unhappily) been grouped together under the title of “post-structuralism” is frequently accused of denying any stable ground upon which to make ethicopolitical decisions, and while a strain of contemporary theory increasingly speaks for the “social construction” of the subject...

Toward the end of the essay “The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past’”—one of his most-cited works and probably his most-cited short essay—Theodor W. Adorno offers this unexpected proposal, one that would seem to contradict his later claim that he never said anything that was “immediately aimed at practical action.”¹ It is not only the suggestion of educational cadres that moves the essay in a surprising direction, but also the optimism about “political education,” which Adorno contrasts to the skepticism of unnamed critics. Rarely remarked upon in the scholarship on “Working through the Past”—which has influenced sundry...

My argument in this essay concerns Theodor W. Adorno’s surprising critique of G. W. F. Hegel inNegative Dialectics, surprising because for a brief interval Adorno appears to side with nature against Hegel. This is not precisely the move one might have expected of Adorno, for whom nature ought to have been aligned with the material and experimental culture of knowledge that he, like Hegel, opposed to the work of what Hegel called Spirit and the work of dialectic.¹ Yet Adorno charges Hegel with a “rage against nature,” and, in the course of a long section ofNegative Dialectics, he...

“The whole is the untrue.”¹ This phrase, one of the signatures of Adorno’s most unmistakable work,Minima Moralia, points to an irony that perhaps not even its author could have discerned. Notwithstanding the truth of its bitter rebuke to the Hegelian dialectic as apology for capitalist modernity, as a philosophical dictum in its own right it would itself have to be judged false, fatal to any aspiration to dialectical thought. To that much, of course, Adorno himself also testifies, both in practice—for neitherMinima Moralianor any other of his works reflect any doubt that critical theory, as part...

Readers of Theodor W. Adorno’s texts, especially those devoted to philosophical aesthetics, can hardly fail to be struck by their chiastic structure. The aesthetic theory that Adorno develops constitutes not only a theory of the aesthetic but also a theory that is itself aesthetic, hence a theory of literature that exhibits qualities associated with literary texts, and a theory of music that harbors within itself traces of musical composition. The rhetorically self-conscious tropes of his posthumousAesthetic Theory, the stylized literary studies of hisNotes to Literature, his musically inflected meditations on musicological questions from Beethoven to Arnold Schönberg, and...

In section 50 ofMinima MoraliaAdorno states that it would be wrong to demand an author to “show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling every reader to” immerse him- or herself in the world of the writer’s imagination.¹ But why should writers refuse to give readers insight into their thoughts? What should stop them from having some degree of consideration for the reader? Do they not wish to be understood? This seemingly trivial question follows from Adorno’s criticism of the expectation that writers make their train of thought as explicit as possible—...

To mark the centennial of Theodor W. Adorno’s birth, in September 2003 the city of Frankfurt erected a monument in his honor on the university campus. Designed by the Russian artist Vadim Zakharov, the installation consists of a transparent glass cube housing a representation of Adorno’s study, including a section of wooden flooring, a chair, and a heavy wooden desk, upon which lie an early edition ofNegative Dialecticsand several corrected manuscript pages. The desk is illuminated at night by a small lamp and accompanied by the steady ticking of a metronome. Surrounded by citations fromMinima Moraliaengraved...

What does it mean to conceive of philosophy, in an essential and not merely incidental sense, as polemical? What is at stake when a philosopher polemicizes on behalf of poetry in order to salvage a polemic deemed to be proper to poetry itself? I want to explore these questions in this essay through a selective reading of “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” an address to the Hölderlin Society delivered by Adorno on 7 June 1963, the 120th anniversary of the poet’s death.¹ Polemic and rescue [Rettung], it will be argued, are the twin poles between which “Parataxis” oscillates and that...

What follows is a transcription of notes from a seminar devoted to Theodor W. Adorno’s “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry.”¹ The notes, themselves tentative, were presented tentatively at the time of the seminar, albeit in thesis form.² I have decided to preserve the somewhat anomalous thesis form here, opting for clarity of exposition, at the risk of appearing to suppress the notes’ tentative quality.

1. Adorno would love to join Walter Muschg’s condemnation of the “metaphysical” (that is to say, Heideggerian) reading of Hölderlin’s late hymns, and in fact he does join in the condemnation, does relish his revenge. At the...

Adorno’sAesthetic Theory, initially shunned or attacked when it was posthumously published in 1970, has become increasingly his most widely and carefully read work. While the interpreters are still in disagreement about the appropriate reading of the text, there is largely consensus about its significance as the culmination of Adorno’s œuvre and its importance for the contemporary aesthetic debate. More controversial, however, is the value assigned to Adorno’s contribution to the contemporary discussion. Briefly put, three positions can be distinguished. First, among the interpreters of Adorno there still exists a core of more or less orthodox readers for whom Adorno’s...