Adorno's Critique Research Articles

You Can't Spell Opinion without I: Toward a Hegelian Critical Theory of Opinion

Abstract We naturally tend to think of our own opinions as akin to the coins we carry around in our pockets, transferable and yet inalienable. We may share or alter them, yet in form they remain fundamentally our own, sacrosanct as registers of our very sense of self. Hegel was aware of this relationship between opinion and subjectivity, and regarded such a bond as one of the great accomplishments of modernity itself. Yet for Hegel, excessive estimation of inwardness comes at a dangerous price. Truth reducible to subjective and arbitrary will, to caprice and without philosophical reflection, sets, in his view, a corrosive standard for ethics, politics and thinking itself. This essay will excavate from Hegel's corpus the conceptual groundwork for a critical theory of opinion relevant for the twenty-first century. The overall aim is to offer a holistic reading of Hegel's critique of opinion by drawing on both his early and late writings, tracking its appearance as an initial critique of subjectivism but subsequently developed in his political philosophy. We begin with Hegel's polemics during the Jena years and unearth opinion as an index for self-certitude. Second, we proceed to a focused analysis of Elements of the Philosophy of Right, paying particular attention to what Hegel describes as the contradiction of public opinion. Thirdly, Hegel's epistemological critique of opinion will be synthesized with his political critique of public opinion by returning to the category of certainty, not as a certainty found in an individual opinion, but a certainty in one's own subjective standpoint, while employing elements from Adorno's critique of epistemology. We will conclude by examining the contradiction of public opinion specifically in accordance with the historical conditions of civil society and therewith begin to situate the socio-epistemological problem of opinion as historically specific to capitalist society.

Being a master of metaphors

Being a master of metaphors

The Dialectic of the Non-identity of Freedom—Based on Adorno's Critique of Kant's Third Dichotomy

The Dialectic of the Non-identity of Freedom—Based on Adorno's Critique of Kant's Third Dichotomy

Governing through conflict: On Adorno's critique of postwar sociology

Governing through conflict: On Adorno's critique of postwar sociology

Governing through conflict on Adorno's critique of postwar sociology

Governing through conflict on Adorno's critique of postwar sociology

La crítica a la causalidad en T. W. Adorno: un propuesta filosófico-musical a través de Atmosphères, de Ligeti

This article has two parts: on the one hand, it attempts to outline the fundamental points of T. W. Adorno's critique of causality and, in particular, in reference to Aristotle and Kant. On the other hand, it made explicit the drift of this criticism in his own philosophical project, which pays special attention, in his late thoughts, to the music of the young composers of Darmstadt. Ligeti’s Atmospheres is one of the fundamental works to account for the crossover between philosophy and music in Adornian thought and, in particular, witheregard to the problem of causality

Reading Adorno by the Pool; or, Critical Theory in a Postcritical Era

Reading Adorno by the Pool; or, Critical Theory in a Postcritical Era Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio) As a contributor to this special section on "Selling Out Theory," I hope that the title of this article won't be viewed as false advertising. However, I suspect that those hoping for a detailed discussion of the work of Adorno may be a bit disappointed; those who hope to learn anything about swimming pools will definitely be disappointed. So maybe it would be best to begin by explaining that title. I take the image from Fredric Jameson's 1990 study of the Frankfurt School philosopher, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. Those familiar with this book will recall Jameson's extraordinary thesis, which was that Adorno of all theorists, in Jameson's words, may turn out to have been the analyst of our own period, which he did not live to see, and in which late capitalism has all but succeeded in eliminating the final loopholes of nature and the Unconscious, of subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike, and, with a final fillip, in eliminating any memory trace of what thereby no longer existed in the henceforth postmodern landscape. (Jameson 1990, 5) Jameson, here indulging in the decade-ification of modern history that he had analyzed previously in "Periodizing the Sixties" (among other places), had just observed that "Adorno was surely not the philosopher of the thirties (who has to be identified in retrospect, I'm afraid, as Heidegger)," nor was the thinker of the forties and fifties, or the sixties ("those are called Sartre and Marcuse, respectively"); and, as Jameson concedes, the seventies "were essentially French," at least in the United States. But with the arrival of the 1980s and at the threshold of the 1990s, at the advent of a postmodern condition and a post-Cold War era of globalization in which "Adorno's prophecies of the 'total system' finally came true, in wholly unexpected forms," Jameson suggests, and the whole book will be his argument in favor of this hypothesis, "Adorno's Marxism, which was no great help in the previous periods, may turn out to be just what we need today" (Jameson 1990, 5). Although Jameson wrote this nearly 30 years ago, a good case can be made to support [End Page 281] the enduring truth of this proposition, because what might be called the "late postmodernism" of our twenty-first-century condition has, if anything, only exacerbated and extended the "total system" to which Jameson refers (Wegner 2009, 5-6).1 But my title comes from the conclusion to Jameson's study, where Jameson most explicitly looks at the relationship between Adorno's critical theory and the postmodern condition. There he notes that Adorno's polemics may hold the key to uncovering the theorist's special relevance, and "the persistence of the dialectic" more generally, as Jameson's subtitle would have it, in the then-present situation. Specifically, Jameson compares Adorno's critique of positivism to our own era's (i.e., 1990's) critique of postmodernism. Jameson underscores what he calls the momentous shift that this transcoding of positivism onto postmodernism must entail, pointing out that it would have to involve the ways that, as he puts it in his inimitable Jamesonian manner, a stuffy petty-bourgeois republican nineteenth-century philosophy of science emerges from the cocoon of its time capsule as the iridescent sheen of consumerist daily life in the Indian summer of the superstate and multinational capitalism. From truth to state-of-the-art merchandise, from bourgeois respectability and "distinction" to the superhighways and the beaches, from the old-fashioned authoritarian families and bearded professors to permissiveness and loss of respect for authority (which, however, still governs). (Jameson 1990, 248) Jameson concludes that paragraph with a reference to Adorno's famous (or infamous) assertion that there can be poetry after Auschwitz: "The question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool" (248). Hence, my title. Reading Adorno today may be a bit like this. True, in 2019 we are no longer basking...

The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History by Asko Nivala

Reviewed by: The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History by Asko Nivala Thomas L. Cooksey, emeritus Asko Nivala. The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History. New York: Routledge, 2017. viii + 273 pp. Friedrich Schlegel is commonly identified as a writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. Though much of his work focused on Greek and Latin classics, Schlegel thought of himself as a historian, engaged in what he characterized as Kulturgeschichte (though admittedly not in the modern sense of the term). Inspired by Hesiod and the book of Genesis, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models of history followed a triadic pattern, positing a problematic present as a fallen or undesirable age, between an idyllic primitive Golden Age in the past, and the possibility of a utopian Golden Age in the future. Asko Nivala challenges the commonly held reading that Schlegel and the Romantics believed that a Golden Age had any basis in history. He further proposes to complicate the view that Romanticism be understood in terms of a nostalgic yearning for such a lost Golden Age. Rather it is a fluid trope that allowed Schlegel to critique the cultural present. Schlegel's "Romanticism" here refers to the historical period in German cultural history at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intertwined with the final stages of the Enlightenment. Its early proponents include the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, Dorothea Veit and Caroline Schlegel. This book focuses on Schlegel's early writings, literary fragments, and letters until his conservative turn and conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1808. Nivala, a cultural historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, teases out and drills down into Schlegel's complex and shifting treatment of the conception of a Golden Age, proposing to reconstruct his philosophy [End Page 333] of history. For Schlegel, the Golden Age is often deployed ironically. He rejected claims that it represented an age of greater authenticity, a position Nivala compares to Adorno's critique of fetishizing the genuine. Noting the complexity of Schlegel's conception of the Golden Age, Nivala suggests that he is ripe for various contemporary readings, including the postmodernist, the transhumanist, and the ecocriticial. Deploying a broadly chronological and biographical organization, Nivala first examines Schlegel's writings on classical poetry, arguing that he distinguishes between the myth of the Golden Age and primitivist myth, too often conflated in the critical literature. Primitivism is understood as the idea of a past epoch based on a rural way of life, closer to the rhythms of nature, a way of life more authentic than the modern, an "original" related to concepts resonating with Schiller's naive or Rousseau's "noble savage." In contrast, Schlegel sees the Golden Age in Hesiod or Genesis as an ancient trope or narrative pattern that challenged the notion of primitivism. He turns to the antiprimitivist myths of Prometheus and Orpheus, to explore a harmony between nature and technology. Schlegel also treats the myth of Atlantis as the embodiment of an anti–Golden Age. Rejecting the notion of a Golden Age as period of authentic harmony with nature, Schlegel instead posits an age of "blossoming" (Blütezeit), shifting from the mathematical metaphors of the Enlightenment to biological and chemical ones, to suggest a creative and organic relationship between the polis and the rural environment. For Schlegel, the culture of Athens—especially that expressed in Attic theater—exemplified an age of blossoming, while that of Alexandria, a culture of decline. The notion of a blossoming culture challenges the idea that humans represent something fixed and autonomous, opening the possibility of the transhuman. Nivala next explores Schlegel's studies of various cultural attempts to recreate a "national Golden Age," especially those of Augustus's Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Louis XIV's France. This in turn informs Schlegel's political thinking about the cultural prospects for the still fragmented German-speaking regions of Europe, and his sympathies for the Athenian model. Underlying this is what Nivala terms a Chiliastic reading of history, a millenarian and messianic vision of the Golden Age as the Kingdom of God. Responding to dramatic historical changes, especially in...

프로파간다에 의해 조작된 집단의식에 대한 아도르노의 비판

프로파간다에 의해 조작된 집단의식에 대한 아도르노의 비판

Theodor W. Adorno. Actuality of philosophy (Translation from German)

A young philosopher neo-marxist Theodor Adorno read his work «Actuality of Philosophy» in the summer of 1931 as a іnaugural lecture of privatdozent of the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main. In this lecture young Adorno critically analyzed to the philosophy of positivism, neo-kantianism, the philosophy of life and the phenomenological learning of Edmund Husserl, theoretically influential currents and schools of German philosophy, which had the status of dominant theoretical knowledge in society. Adorno also carried out the neo-marxist critique of the ontological projects of such German philosophers as Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger, who were subjected to the theoretically influence of the Husserl’s learning. According to Adorno these ontological projects through the primary presence in itself an irrational elements of human existence, form the kind of subjective thinking that can not effectively combine its subject with external reality. Another object of Adorno's critique was the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, which, in his conviction, although he was concerned with the consideration of man as the subject of empirical knowledge, but she did not notice the true essence of his existence as a historical creature. Neo-marxist Adorno proposed to see the joint scientism of phenomenology, the philosophy of empirio criticism and the Vienna circle such a theoretical tendency that could not provide apodictic answers to the basic and substantive questions of human existence as historically fluid. So this theory proves its ideological imperfection and historical untopicality. After this critique, Adorno proposed his neo-marxist vision of a theory that should replace the previous theory as dominant in society. This new materialist philosophy has a being-dialectic relationship with social practice and should facilitate to independent interpretation by the subject to being senses and historical images. This philosophy forms with the help of concepts the understanding of social reality as a historical and to abolish the claims of any philosophy to the status of official theory. In this lecture Adorno also presented the ideological conception of his learning of human being, whose essence in a modified form was later explored in the Negative Dialectics (1966), in his main philosophical work.

A atualidade da crítica de Adorno para as pesquisas qualitativas com bases empíricas em educação

Neste artigo, serão apresentados dados e argumentos sobre a atualidade da crítica de Theodor W. Adorno para as pesquisas qualitativas com bases empíricas em educação, com especial ênfase à hermenêutica objetiva, desenvolvida por Ulrich Oevermann e aplicada por Andreas Gruschka às pesquisas em educação. O tema será abordado da seguinte maneira: (a) serão apontados elementos históricos e teóricos do desenvolvimento de um método de pesquisa próprio pela Teoria Crítica; (b) serão apresentados elementos caracterizadores da hermenêutica objetiva; (c) para, por fim, apresentar algumas das contribuições de Gruschka na aplicabilidade do referido método às pesquisas educacionais na Alemanha, além de algumas experiências no Brasil a partir da referida abordagem de pesquisa.

Critique and resistance: Ethical, social‐theoretical, political? On Fabian Freyenhagen's Adorno's Practical Philosophy

AbstractFabian Freyenhagen's impressive reconstruction of Adorno's ‘practical philosophy’ provides a convincing defence of the possibility of making normative claims about the social world we live in without justifying these claims in terms of the right, the good, or human nature. More specifically, and more controversially, Freyenhagen argues that the normative resources Adorno's critique relies on are provided by a negative Aristotelianism. In this paper, I argue that this approach underestimates the extent to which Adorno follows the model of immanent critique, I highlight the socio‐theoretical underpinnings of what Freyenhagen calls Adorno's ‘ethics of resistance’, and I discuss the risk of overstating the danger of co‐optation that collective political action faces.

Love as Power and Powerlessness: Kierkegaard and Adorno Revisited

This article defends the ongoing relevance of Adorno's criticism of Kierkegaard's Works of Love, despite the fact that many Kierkegaard scholars dismiss it. To support this claim, the discussion shows how issues at the heart of Adorno's critique resurface in contemporary debates over Kierkegaard's distinction between preferential and non-preferential love. This is particularly evident in Krishek's debate with Ferreira. The article argues that the repair Krishek proposes to Kierkegaard's account falls short of Adorno's insistence on the significance of social context. This issue is drawn out by contrasting Krishek's emphasis on caring compassion with Adorno's preference for concepts such as reconciliation and justice. The discussion subsequently acknowledges that Adorno's own account of subjectivity remains inadequate in ways that recall issues he criticizes in Kierkegaard's philosophy. Potential resources in Adorno's thought are drawn out from some of his aphorisms on the power of love.

Daughters of the Enlightenment: Reconstructing Adorno on Gender and Feminist Praxis

This article offers a reconstruction of Theodor Adorno's work as it concerns sex/gender and feminist praxis. Although the prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work conceptualizes its relationship to women as one of either exclusion or essentialism, I argue that both the reading of Sade's Juliette inDialectic of Enlightenment, as well as a number of Adorno's aphorisms inMinima Moralia, present complex feminist claims and commitments. Max Horkheimer and Adorno position Juliette as a subject of the Enlightenment, forestalling the possibility that womenquawomen are potentially utopian figures. I utilize Adorno's work inMinima Moraliato show that he—far from excluding or essentializing women—was interested in metaphorically capturing the subjective conditions developed by a system of binary sex/gender within a heteropatriarchal society. Indeed, one can find an iteration of queer theoretical commitments inMinima Moralia. As a result, I argue that he displays a number of straightforwardly feminist commitments: that a liberated society requires the disambiguation of sex from gender, affirming the nonnaturalness of our social sex/gender regime, and claiming that all subjects as gendered subjects are damaged by living within a heteropatriarchal society. Lastly, I provide preliminary evidence of Adorno's critique of (neo)liberal feminist praxis.

Adorno's Negative Dialectics

AbstractThe concept of negative dialectics constitutes the philosophical core of Adorno's wide‐ranging thought. It reflects his attempt both to consider the status of dialectics in the face of a history that has failed to actualize its prognostications and to rework dialectics to make it adequate to his own time. Among the themes considered are Adorno's critique of conceptuality in the German idealist tradition, his critique of enlightenment reason and its relationship to capitalist society, his qualified rejection of universal history, his concern with revitalizing experience, and his concept of the constellation, which he offers as an alternative to existing epistemological paradigms.

National Sovereigntism and Global Constitutionalism: An Adornian Cosmopolitan Critique

There are two dominant schools of thought addressing problems of cosmopolitanism and (international) conflict: democratic national sovereigntism, inspired by Hegel, and global constitutionalism, inspired by Kant and reformulated by Habermas. This paper develops a third position by reading Adorno's critique of both theoretical traditions. Rather than compromising between these camps, Adorno triangulates between them. Critically illuminating their respective deficiencies in view of the changing conditions of a globalized modern world has critical implications for cosmopolitics. Although largely negative, Adorno's critique provides an important framework for a contestatory reformulation of cosmopolitanism, one that is better equipped to confront societal and political global conflicts insufficiently reflected in sovereigntist and global constitutionalist models.

Dissonant Opera, Dissident Fragments

According to Adorno, the very possibility of dissonant opera was historically problematic: while opera necessarily presumed a meaningful connection between music and the nonmusical—language, dramatic narrative—Western music's historical trajectory pointed in the opposite direction, toward an increasingly rationalized and autonomous music, wherein emancipated, radical dissonance is emblematic of the modernist musical condition. Even so, at a time when the operatic genre was widely understood to be in crisis, and the overtly modernizing, often openly anti-opera Zeitoper trend was in full swing, Adorno attempted to compose his own opera. It is incomplete, but its musical fragments use the Schoenbergian twelve-tone technique, despite Adorno's critique of the totalizing effects of Schoenberg's compositional system. This essay considers dissonances between Adorno's sociology of opera and his creative engagement with it, and some wider implications for contemporary efforts at composing an ideal of aesthetic dissidence on the modernist operatic stage.

JAZZ, THE WOUND: NEGATIVE IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND THE PROBLEM OF WEAK SUBJECTIVITY IN THEODOR ADORNO’S TWENTIETH CENTURY

This essay addresses the emergence of theories of “identity” in twentieth-century politics, aesthetics, and philosophy by considering Theodor Adorno's understanding of “negative identity” as a form of coercive categorization that nevertheless contains social knowledge. A historical account of the Frankfurt school's relation to questions of race, anti-Semitism, and the idea of culture, the essay analyzes Adorno's infamous jazz articles in light of the transatlantic history of Marxian political theory and its understanding of racism, subject–object relations, and models of cultural production. The result is an investigation of the history of the concept of identity, its emergence alongside the rise of cultural studies, and its relation to international cultural–aesthetic formations such as jazz. The article concludes with an examination of Adorno's critique of idealism, cultural identity, and nationalism in light of the “wounded” political subjectivity of the modern era.

Dialectics and the Transcendence of Dialectics: Adorno's Relation to Schelling

The influence of the thought of the great German Idealist philosopher G.W.F Hegel on the thought of Theodor Adorno, the leading thinker of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, is unmistakeable, and has been the subject of much commentary. Much less discussed, however, is the influence of Hegel's prominent contemporary, F.W.J. Schelling. This article investigates the influence of Schelling on Adorno, and the sometimes striking parallels between fundamental motifs in the work of both thinkers. It argues that Adorno's critique of Hegelian (and indeed of his own, negative) dialectics, his conception of the relation between nature and spirit, and his philosophy of history (amongst other aspects of this thought) owe a considerable debt to Schelling. Furthermore, when adequately explicated, Schelling's position on a range of problems which confronted German Idealist philosophy often prove intrinsically preferable to those of Hegel.

Humour and the Representation of Fascism in Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg: Adorno contra Brecht and Hanns Eisler

Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key but under-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s and early 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Brecht's satirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artistic strategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of such debates. Focusing in particular on Eisler's musical additions for the parodic ‘higher regions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West German premiere, she analyzes the play's role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht's play and Eisler's music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance to fascism than was allowed in Adorno's critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King's College London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as Associate Dramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by the Greek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly, Music and Politics, and The World of Music, and in edited scholarly volumes.