The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk

by Theodor W. Adorno, Elisabeth Lenk, Susan H. Gillespie (Editor, translator)

The correspondence between the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and his politically active graduate student Elisabeth Lenk offers fresh insights into both Adorno’s view of surrealism and its relation to the student uprisings of 1960s France and Germany. Written between 1962, when Lenk moved to Paris and persuaded an initially reluctant Adorno to supervise her sociology dissertation on the surrealists, and Adorno’s death in 1969, these letters reveal a surprisingly tender side of the distinguished professor. The correspondence is accompanied by a selection of documents that bring additional depth and context to the letters and their engagement with the art and politics of the period. Filling in the background of Adorno and Lenk’s lively exchange, the volume includes new translations of classic essays by Walter Benjamin (“ Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”) and Adorno (“Surrealism Reconsidered”), along with a collection of short prose readings by Adorno and the writer-scholar Carl Dreyfus and three original essays by her afterword to Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon, her Introduction to the German edition of Charles Fourier’s The Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies , and her incisive essay “Critical Theory and Surreal Practice.” An Introduction by Lenk’s student, the contemporary writer and critic Rita Bischof, points to the continuing challenge of surrealist politics. This remarkable body of correspondence appears here in English for the first time, as do Adorno and Dreyfus’s surrealist readings and the essays by Lenk. Together, they provide a rich mine of critical material for reassessing the significance of the surrealist movement and its successors.

Genres: Philosophy

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[Mehrnaz]

Civilization is a perverted world, because in it freedom can only be realized in a destructive way, against the existing order of things. While actually productive work is founded on need and coercion, only the negative work called theft is pursued with a passion. The state, as an apparatus for imposing force, can disappear. "Every use of power is only the complement of justice, and if justice could be realized otherwise, all that would be superfluous." The dynamics of Fourier’s anti-ascetic system will—he is convinced— gradually undermine all political/state institutions, because the order they are attempting to impose through the use of violence will appear all by itself through attraction.

[Raoul]

Essential reading for understanding the relations between T.W.A Adorno and surrealism.