[FRA:] Adorno viz. religion

[Ralph Dumain]

Adorno is not a Jewish Thinker
By James Gordon Finlayson, on 07-12-2008
http://jamesgordonfinlayson.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53:adorno-the-jew&catid=42:thoughts&Itemid=58

Finlayson makes short shrift of Terry Eagleton especially, but others 
who grossly inflate Adorno's alleged Jewishness. One could but 
generally neglects to similarly inflate Adorno's Catholicism.  Adorno 
never had any interest in being Jewish until the Nazis came after 
him. Ad for religion . . .

"The truth is that Adorno was not born, nor did he become, Jewish. 
Rather, history made it hard for him to forget his Jewish origins, 
which, according to one biographer, even for his father, Oscar, were 
'no more than a memory'. Oscar Wiesengrund converted to Catholicism, 
married a Catholic, Maria Calvelli-Adorno, and had their son, 
Theodor, baptized a Catholic. Theodor was raised a Catholic by his 
mother and her sister. The only people whom he knew regarded him as 
Jewish, according to him, were some of his anti-semitic school 
fellows. Even the National Socialist authorities classified him as 
being only of "half-Jewish descent." As Adorno told his teacher Alban 
Berg, his being half Jewish (on his Father's side) alienated him from 
the League of Jewish Culture in Frankfurt, and from some other Jews. 
[ . . . . . ] In a letter to the composer, Ernst Krenek, written in 
his early 30s, Adorno claims that Krenek's Catholic ideas were "very 
familiar" to him and that he himself "was on the point of converting 
to Catholicism" ten years ago, but "was not able to go through with 
it", a remark that shows how estranged the Adorno had become from the 
Catholicism of his early years.   I wonder what exactly Adorno 
thought he was converting from? Not Judaism, at any rate. More 
probably some form of secular humanism or atheism."

Finlayson continues:

"Adorno was, it seems, an unbeliever. Josef Siebert is right about 
that. At any rate, he was anything but devout. When Soma Morgenstern 
asked him if he had been brought up in a God-fearing house, "Adorno 
answered 'with a deep breath': 'Yes, my father is a Socialist.'" And 
Habermas, who worked with Adorno, and knew him well, unlike most of 
the people who write about Adorno's Judaism, refers to him as an 
"undeviating atheist". In my view not only is the Judaic dimension of 
Adorno's thought grossly overemphasized, but so is the religious or 
theological dimension. Of course I don't deny that the motif of 
imagelessness and the Bilderverbot play a significant role in his 
thinking. It's just that iI think that motif is not explained at all 
by appeal to the supposed Judaic dimension of his thought. Rather the 
Judaic residues in Adorno's thought are borrowed from other thinkers, 
Krakauer, Benjamin, Bloch, Fromm, and Horkheimer, who were more 
deeply influenced by Judaism than he was, or from ideas that were 
simply in the intellectual ether. However, Adorno appropriates them 
and presses them fully into the service of his theoretical agenda 
without regard to their religious content or origins. So in 
conclusion, not only was Adorno not a Jew, he was not a Jewish 
thinker, and not a religious thinker either. "

On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno's Singular Apophaticism
Written by James Gordon Finlayson
Friday, 05 December 2008
http://jamesgordonfinlayson.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=57:on-not-being-silent-in-the-darkness-adornos-singular-apophaticism&catid=34:jornal-articles&Itemid=54

One: Adorno and Negative Theology
1.         The Silence about Negative Theology
2.         The Deprecative Comparison and Four Objections
3.         The Paradox of the Ineffable
Two: Adorno and Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite
4.         The One Hiding in the Darkness
5.         Cataphatic Tropes with Apophatic Intent
6.         The Negation of the Negation or the Denial of All Beings
Three: Adorno and Meister Eckhart
7.         Eckhart's Wesensmystik
8.         Bilderlosigkeit in Eckhart and Adorno
9.         Eckhart's Critique of Attachment and Adorno's Critique of 
False Living.
Four: Unconcluding Conclusion

Finlayson doesn't short-shrift the commonalities between Adorno and 
negative theology, but . . .

 From the conclusion:

<quote>
. . . there is no specific religious dimension to Adorno's 
philosophy, by which I mean that one can make coherent sense of his 
project without putting God in the picture. For example, though 
Adorno advocates an ascetic aesthetic, based on the deferral of 
satisfaction or pleasure, he nevertheless defends a kind of ethical 
hedonism. To be sure it is a hedged and qualified hedonism. There is 
value in pleasure, albeit counterfactual pleasure, pleasure not 
warped by the culture industry, by the tendency of late capitalism to 
fabricate false needs, and not distorted by the depredations of 
productivism and consumerism.[1] Similarly, Adorno's 'no right 
living' dictum counsels against a "loveless disregard for things" as 
well as an overattachment to them. There is no equivalent in Denys or 
in Eckhart for Adorno's somatic hedonism and his worldly materialism.

   More fundamentally, Adorno's preoccupation with transcendence is 
motivated by a concern to break out of an Immanenzzusammenhang that 
has, he thinks regressed to a Verblendungszusammenhang that blinds us 
to the depredations of a totally administered and universally 
fungible society. It is entirely for the sake of the social world, 
and the lives of its inhabitants that Adorno seeks to transcend the 
social world. This is in contrast to the apophatic theologians, Denys 
and Eckhart, who share with Neo-Platonism the yearning of the lower 
for the higher, for the sake of the higher.
<end quote>

Finlayson concludes that Adorno's thought is neither irrationalist 
nor mystical nor incoherent nor empty.