[FRA:] Adorno's concept of dialectics & its historical situatedness

[simon smith]

In message <5.1.0.14.0.20060328174542.0454d0b8 at pop.igc.org>, Ralph 
Dumain <rdumain at igc.org> writes
>Adorno's concept of dialectics - a paradigm for the present?
>Frederik van Gelder
>http://www.amsterdam-adorno.org/twa_dialectics.html
>
>A fascinating essay on both scholarly production and reception 
>surrounding Adorno, and the lack of proper receptivity to his negative 
>dialectics, to his specifically philosophical works.
>  All overlooked is the context, particularly the experience of World 
>War I and the militarized state.

Stephan Muller-Doohm's biography makes it appear that World War I made 
little impression on Adorno in his early teens, but as a seventeen year 
old in 1919 he showed that he was very aware that a major break with the 
past had taken place (p32).
Then in 1920 there's his extraordinary attack on 'Platz' the play by 
Fritz von Ulrich, who was an expressionist and anti-militarist, which is 
extremely prescient of his future assaults on the philosophers of Being. 
The 'great hope' represented by the post-war expressionist dramatists is 
'shattered in a worn-out scream' exactly because of their inability to 
address the specific historical moment, "the old world that has just 
been condemned". (Notes to Literature Vol. 2 p260-266).
You probably knew that, but it does show that Adorno was aware of and 
affected by the events immediately following WWI, and of their 
philosophical significance, so much that he was able to write a review 
deeply against the grain of the time. According to Espen Hammer (Adorno 
and the Political p11) Adorno graduated from a highly critical and 
sceptical belief in the re-invention of liberalism via his encounters 
with people like Horkheimer and Benjamin to (some kind of) socialism by 
the mid-twenties.
Hammer is vague about this period in Adorno's thought, but it does seem 
to have been expressed more in 'artistic or theological terms' (Hammer) 
than political.
"The Actuality of Philosophy" in 1931 can be seen as a reaction to the 
greater concentration of capital and the loss of automy of state and 
economy. Some philosohical schools adapted to these changes, but Adorno, 
influenced by Marxist thinkers and friends like Lukacs, Benjamin and 
Marcuse, maintained a radical critical stance (Hammer p12).

I would be interested to see if Detlev Claussen can give a better 
insight into the development of Adorno's thought in this period.

-- 
Simon Smith




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