Thinking in Times of Danger: Adorno on Stupidity

Abstract

This contribution reconstructs the multilayered and scattered reflections on stupidity in prose pieces and letters by Theodor W. Adorno, especially in the years 1934–1944. The figure of mutilation, around which Adorno's writings on stupidity are organized, proceeds through various epistemological and historical constellations. The vanishing point is to be located in thinking and theoretical language no longer able to withstand the violence of actual facts. Futurity inscribes itself in various ways into these reflections: in Adorno's gestures of addressing his own thinking in exile, in the notion of survival of what is thought, but also in Adorno's insistence on a way of thinking that does not concede anything to “being in the know” or to the repression entailed in the convention of received thought (“Convenu des Vorgedachten”).