ADORNO FOR BEGINNERS

[Ralph Dumain]

At 11:35 PM 3/20/98 -0500, Vance Bell wrote:
>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.

Thanks for the info, but I don't have the background to decipher all of
this.  Are you referring to Benjamin's impact on Adorno's entire philosophy
and its methodology, or are you referring strictly to Adorno's aesthetics?


BTW, I just ran across a discount copy of Susan Buck-Morss' THE DIALECTICS
OF SEEING.  Should I get this?