Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (review)

In 1992, New German Critique published a special issue devoted to the work of Theodor W. Adorno in which scholars proposed a critical reassessment of his philosophy. Since its appearance, studies of Adorno’s oeuvre have not failed to remark upon his untimeliness: much like philosophy in the wake of Marxism, Adorno lives on as a missed opportunity, an unfulfilled promise. In his introduction to that issue, Peter Hohendahl observes four historical trends in Adorno criticism.1 In the heyday of New Left social movements which, in Germany especially, held firm to Marxist orthodoxy, Adorno was accused of being a pessimistic anti-revolutionary, resigned to pursuing theory without praxis and eschewing any vision of social transformation. With the advent of poststructuralism, however, Adorno’s thought was appropriated in new ways. Because he critiqued idealism, constitutive subjectivity, the hegemony of reason, and history as teleology, Adorno was seen as a proto-deconstructionist in whose negative dialectics an affinity with deconstruction could be detected. Yet Adorno’s cultural elitism, his criticism of mass culture, and his defense of the relative autonomy of the aesthetic soon placed him in the cross-hairs of postmodernists, who identified him as a mandarin cultural critic yearning nostalgically for a return to nineteenth-century bourgeois high culture. According to Hohendahl, “authentic” Adorno criticism, thus far sorely lacking, only began emerging in the early 1990s. Its aims were to re-read Adorno’s oeuvre in light of recent English translations, to release it from its embrace by poststructuralist and postmodernist critique, and, most importantly, to discredit the view that had developed in second-generation critical theory—most notably, Jurgen Habermas’s—that Adorno had sworn off the Enlightenment by disowning reason.