Adorno Public and Private

Adorno Public and Private Steven Helmling Review of: Adorno, T.W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. —-. Letters to His Parents: 1939–1951. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. —-, and Thomas Mann. Correspondence 1943–1955. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Gerhardt, Christina, ed. “Adorno and Ethics.” Special issue of New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006). When students excited by “The Culture Industry” or some other Adorno reading ask how to get a larger grip on Adorno overall, I finally have a good answer: History and Freedom, Adorno’s previously unpublished 1964–1965 lectures at Frankfurt. There are now several of these collections: in the 1960s, tape recorders were usually running when Adorno was speaking; and these lectures, addressed (from notes but without script) to undergraduates, are far more accessible than the self-consciously “difficult” writings addressed to fellow-adepts. Buzz on these lectures always mentions that they were given while Adorno was composing Negative Dialectics; History and Freedom is among the collections that can be read as a collateral draft of parts of that “late” work. Actually History and Freedom reprises Adorno’s whole career: the lectures continue the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the opening lecture is called “Progress or Regression?”); along the way, two lectures elaborate the crucial early essay, “The Idea of Natural History,” and no fewer than four extend the hints in “The Actuality of Philosophy” on “the transition from philosophy to interpretation.” All of Adorno’s major career investments are here except “the aesthetic”: there are, indeed, many asides on art especially in the lectures on interpretation, but “the aesthetic” connects with the main theme mostly via Hegel’s “end of art.” Oh, yes: Hegel. Hegel’s ubiquity in Adorno and Adorno’s conflictedness about him are evident even to beginners, but hitherto it needed hard-won expertise to discriminate Adorno’s near-idolatry of Hegel from his often angry critique of him. By contrast, History and Freedom compels Adorno to engage systematically with the major Hegelian themes: the [historicized] dialectic, universal and particular, identity and non-identity, objectivity and subjectivity, self-consciousness (both individual and collective), the World Spirit, the Absolute, conscience and law, race and nation. (Short version of the critique: Hegel too often ontologizes or absolutizes one term of a binary pair, thus reifying what he, of all people, should have kept fluid and “dialectical”; worse, Hegel’s lapse into this error is always in favor of the “universal” and against the “particular,” for the master and against the slave.) When Adorno mentions (without quoting) some “famous” remark from Hegel (or whomever), Rolf Tiedemann’s expert notes quote generously from the relevant sources, with invariably helpful comment—and, often, instructive pointers to dissonances with Adorno’s other writings. (Adorno here also gives his most straightforward evaluation of Kant.) Advanced students, too, will find this collection (more than any of Adorno’s other lecture collections) a thrilling read, because even improvising for undergraduates, Adorno’s thinking aloud produces a Niagara of insight and provocation that overloads the most diligent attention. Adorno’s power to “ram every rift with ore” is as striking here as anywhere in his oeuvre. I have said this book is more accessible than Adorno’s “finished” prose; it is often more stirring as well, because more spontaneous and digressive, as well as more passionate in venting Adorno’s vibrant indignation at the course of the world, reprising and updating his chronic anxieties “after Auschwitz” and after Hiroshima. Here as in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno diagnoses the devolution of “spirit” from Hegel’s dialectical joining of spirit and matter “objectively” (anticipating dialectical materialism) to positivism’s dichotomizing of the two, which renders “spirit” merely “subjective,” the disvalued term of an antithesis. In the problem of universal and particular Adorno elicits the agon of history and the individual. “Philosophy of History” in the West has presupposed “universal history”—an idealist and reifying concept that Adorno of course historicizes to yield the heuristic of a “technological rationality” which may usefully be staged as a single story, that of

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