ADORNO FOR BEGINNERS

[Vance Bell]

According to Ralph Dumain:
> 
> >There is now a considerable body of literature on Adorno's 
> >Aesthetic Theory and on Adorno as an aesthetician in a tradition as 
> >influenced by Schlegel (Friedrich) as by Hegel.
> 
> I don't have Adorno's own work of this title, but I do have a book by MIT
> Press (?) a van Zuider-something, can't remember the name.  I guess I will
> need to learn about this one day.  It might help counterbalance my long-time
> prejudice against Adorno due to my disagreements with his aesthetic
> judgments esp. in music.

Aesthetic Theory is certain worth any time you might give it.  The new
translation by Bob Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota) is very strong (even if the
font is so tiny!).  MIT has come out with two books on AT in the last
year: Semblance of Subjectivity an anthology edited by Tom Huhn and
Lambert Zuidervaart and Exact Imagination/Late Work: On Adorno's
Aesthetics by Sherry Weber Nicholsen.  This is a promising start for
criticism on AT.

> >I came across the remark a day or so ago that Benjamin and Adorno 
> >are rather like Socrates and Plato. It makes no sense to study the 
> >one without trying to get the figure of the other into some kind of 
> >focus. 
>
> People keep telling me I should read Benjamin, esp. colleagues in the CLR
> James business.  I've read a few essays from ILLUMINATIONS, but that's it.
> I can't make heads or tails of what Benjamin is about, and nobody has been
> able to explain him to me while standing on one foot.  I know why I'm
> interested in Ernst Bloch, but I don't know what I would want to seek out in
> Benjamin.

I have to wholehearted agree with the need to concern oneself with
Benjamin if one holds and interest in Adorno.  Anyone both serious
consideration would quickly realize the deep debt Adorno owes Benjamin for
a number of his key-concepts (e.g. constellation, and Adorno's
understanding of language).  The discussion of influence was opened in
Buck-Morss's Origin of Negative Dialects, but after than the question
faded into the background.  The relationship isn't obvious from the
from the works available in English during the late 60's-70's, but becomes
so when you have translations of Benjamin's Trauerspiel text and some of
Adorno's early essays, Notes to Literature, Kierkegaard and AT available
in the late 70's-80's and after.  Adorno used to teach Benjamin's
Trauerspiel text as primary literature in his first seminars at Frankfurt
in the Weimar period and the relationship between Adorno's
habiliationschrift on Kierkegaard and the Trauerspiel text is strong.
Certainly Adorno's project cannot be understood to derive directly from
Benjamin, but here is one of the great "critical appropriations" in 20th
intellectual history.  Given the cottage industry springing up around
Benjamin, it would be wonderful if scholars would begin to give more
consideration to this relationship.  A "force-field" constructed by the
tension between Benjamin's thought and Adorno's might be a provocative way
to understand the antinomies of both cultural and economic moderity.

Vance

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Vance E. Bell, Jr.             |    Other Voices
University of Pennsylvania     |    P.O. Box 31907
vbell@dept.english.upenn.edu   |    Philadelphia, PA  19104

                http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~ov

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