The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno

by Gillian Rose

Book by Rose, Gillian

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Theory, Unfinished, Germany

212 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Gillian Rose (20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British scholar who worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Notable facets of this social philosopher's work include criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought."

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know that I would call this an 'introduction' to Adorno. Or at least, it's an introduction on the condition that your philosophical chops are already somewhat up to scratch, and you can slog it through some fairly dense writing on its own accord. If they are, and if you can, well, this is very good. As for what it in fact is, I'd say it's more along the lines of a 'comprehensive reading'. Rose's goal seems to lie less in introducing Adorno than in bringing out a few key unifying themes that underlie Adorno's otherwise sprawling oeuvre. And gosh is it really sprawling: Adorno wrote on philosophy, on sociology, on art - in fact it'd be better to say that he simply practiced all three, given that he really did undertake empirical work, alongside composing (and teaching) music, to say nothing of his standing as a philosopher in his own right.

All this and more is covered in the 150 tightly-packed pages (or 190 in the newer Verso edition) of Rose's The Melancholy Science. The 'and more' here speaks to the way in which Rose is equally conversant with Adorno's interlocutors, be it Benjamin, Lukács, Brecht, Habermas, and a host of others, all of whom make appearances as living catalysts with and against whom Adorno defined himself. At the heart of Rose's reading though, is Adorno's engagement with Marx, and more specifically, Marx's characterization of 'commodity fetishism'. As the often quoted idea goes, the fetish relates to the way in which, under capitalism, the relations between people find expression - and thus get mistaken for - relations between things. According to Rose, it's this mechanism - which Adorno reconfigures and generalises as 'reification' (literally: 'thingification', from the Latin 'res' or 'rei' meaning 'thing') - that underpins the many diverse investigations that Adorno undertakes.

Indeed while 'reification' is one of those fancy philosophical words that so often gets thrown around with small measure of caution, it's to Rose's credit that she not only pinpoints and sheds it of its many ambiguities, but also demonstrates its indispensability to Adorno's work more generally. Thus it is that reification functions as the Adoronian hammer to which practically everything else looks like a nail. Hegel? Reifies identity. Kierkegaard? Reifies the individual. Husserl? Reifies the subject. Sartre? Also does a reify. All of culture and art under capitalism? Reified! Much of the book is given over to showing the different shapes in which reification takes on in the many authors that Adorno engages, as well as tracing Adorno's own struggles in developing a mode of thought adequate to the challenge posed by the inescapable spectre of reification. Inescapable? Yes, insofar as capitalism remains the horizon and ground out of which all thought can proceed.

In fact it's this connection - that between social conditions and thought, everywhere thematized by Adorno - that Rose, I think, finds most valuable in the venerable German thinker. For Adorno, as told by Rose, insofar as there is something profoundly 'false' about contemporary reality itself (that is, insofar as capitalism engenders 'objective' illusions like commodity fetishism), so too does the 'falsity' of a philosophy or sociology in fact come closer to capturing truth than one which would aim directly at a reality disrobed of illusion. It's in charting just these twists and turns - Adorno's 'dialectics' - that Rose excels, bringing into synoptic view the peaks and valleys of a thinker who still remains an extraordinary one for our times. It's not all sympathetic though, and peppered throughout are Rose's pointed criticisms and frank assessments, marking this clearly as a book by one luminous philosopher writing about another. Taken together, it makes The Melancholy Science much more than the simple 'introduction' than its title names.

[Spoust1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gillian Rose was a British philosopher whose work (most notably Hegel contra Sociology) tries to resuscitate properly Hegelian dialectical thinking for the purpose of social critique. Her knowledge of Kant, German Idealism, and its aftermath is accompanied by a truly unrivaled grasp of the roots of sociology (in the work of Durkheim and Weber and, most importantly, in the work of their Neo-Kantian forefathers) and a serious engagement with more recent developments in continental philosophy. This, Rose’s dissertation, makes good use of this background in presenting a general overview of the thought of Theodor Adorno, whose voluminous and scattered writings, which are typically in essay form, Rose manages to bring into unity. Rose seems to have mastered Adorno’s entire corpus — an impressive feat, as it is a complex synthesis of Marx, Freud, and others that ranges over philosophy, sociology, literature, music, and psychology. In less than 200 pages, one gets an impressive overview of a many-sided figure. The book is also notable for its focus on the concept of reification, Adorno’s views on style, Adorno’s aesthetics, and the relation between Adorno and his predecessors and contemporaries.

Rose’s is a sympathetic but critical reading. She is a close reader, so she avoids many of the criticisms of Adorno that are based on simple misreadings. However, in the course of her close reading of Adorno, she does turn up some lacunae and inconsistencies in his thought—all of which she takes to indicate where one might take Adorno’s thought further and where one might leave Adorno behind.

Though a little dry, this is not nearly as dense as some of Rose’s other writings, which, while brilliant, can be exceedingly difficult. I recommend this highly as an introduction to Adorno’s thought, but those familiar with Adorno’s writings will benefit from her critical perspective and her command of Adorno’s texts. For an introduction to Adorno, this would serve much better than either Frederic Jameson’s book (Adorno; or The Persistence of the Dialectic) or Susan Buck-Morss’s (The Origin of Negative Dialectics); unlike these texts, Rose’s book can both educate the expert and initiate the novice.

[Greg Florez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rose has written an extremely patient and deliberative reading of Adorno’s works, revealing the deeply paradoxical theoretical career he had. Great writing and a great read.

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

best criticism i've ever read of adorno, up there with some of the best criticism i've ever read of anyone

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps Rose's most accessible work, and yet still incredibly difficult at point. Nevertheless, a fine, fine piece of criticism.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adorno's thought is so useful now, in 2018. I find his writings often to be really fun to wrestle with, a real workout. But it's also nice sometimes to relax a bit and read someone else's interpretation of what he was up to, and this is a very readable, engaging version of that. Rose also performs a nice service here by tying lots of threads of Adorno's work together and also explaining clearly why his difficult style was *required* for him to be true to his project. It isn't willful obscurity, it isn't lack of skill, the density of his prose is required for his purpose. (Short distorted version why: our own relationship with society/culture is part of the problem, and one of the ways that problem manifests is in our language and our belief that we understand it unproblematically, and the way our encrusted mind runs on ahead of the words dropping into the same old mental ruts as always. Thus, have the sentences change direction, keep structures strange, force the mind to work at comprehension, force *thought*.)

Which of course turns around on me and means, hm, should I be reading this overview? Well, yes, as long as it sends me back to Adorno's own work, right?

And it does.

[Calm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading much of this was like beating my head against a wall. Adorno did, from what I can see in this intro, have a few interesting ideas, mainly: his negative dialectic with his thoughts on concepts, and his view of how music changes over time.

[Alana · Rating 3 out of 5]

just a hunch but i think adorno would of LOVED draingang

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since tearing through Rose’s Marxist Modernism lectures in 2024, I have been rather eager to spend more time with this extraordinary trailblazer. Fittingly, then, I have ended up picking up precisely where I left off with the Frankfurt School, trading panoramic introductions to its members for the granular, disciplined study of, to my mind, its most fascinating, theoretically sophisticated figure: Theodor Adorno. I’ve spent an ungodly amount of time with ol' Teddy lately, so reading such a meticulous and far-reaching analysis of his thought has been a truly unique pleasure.

Whilst Rose clearly possessed a deep admiration for Adorno, The Melancholy Science is far from anything even approximating hagiography. From the outset, not only does Rose charge the Frankfurt School writ large with academ-ising politics rather than politicising academia (which is, unfortunately, very much the case), she also—quite unfairly, by my lights—accuses both Adorno and Benjamin of failing to present “any notion of human activity or praxis”, something she herself goes on to contradict later in the book when she explicitly describes Adorno as specifically concerned with “recasting theory as a form of praxis without overstating its claims to be a revolutionary weapon”, via close analysis of the subject/object relation in the social process. Nevertheless, she pulls no punches when it comes to the consequences of Adorno's, shall we say, rather idiosyncratic adoption of Marxism, a half-measure that obstructs his ability to think both class and inequality.

Rose pays painstaking attention to not just the content but the style of Adorno’s writing, picking up on how his rampant employment of chiasmus develops not from mere aesthetic whim, but rather embodies his imperishable determination to combat reification in both thought and its presentation. Rose rightly centres reification as Adorno’s primary, animating conceptual framework; indeed, probably this text’s most lasting and important contribution is the way it untangles Adorno’s theory of reification and opposes it to alternative ways of thinking through the problem of commodity fetishism.

If anything is disproportionately responsible for reification falling out of vogue as an analytic lens/tool, it’s just how carelessly and loosely it has been deployed, often simply generalising commodity fetishism without requisite attention paid to Marx’s theory of value. Whilst I take issue with Rose’s reductive taxonomy of reification, bifurcating it into two supposedly distinct forms which, to me, presuppose and interpenetrate each other (“the difference between these two uses of reification is the difference between the view that something abstract is wrongly though of as real or immutably true, and the view that something concrete is wrongly thought of as abstract”), it does enable her to better delineate how Adorno’s theory of reification differs from previous examples.

“If Lukacs has turned Marxism into method, Adorno has turned it into the search for style”

For instance, Lukacs repeatedly pops up as, according to Adorno, the prime example of an idealist way of thinking through reification, postulating the reconcilement of subject and object and largely situating the rise of reification as directly synchronous with the rise of capitalism, which entails the romantic deification of pre-capitalist society as mystically unreified and self-identical. Following Zizek, I would agree that this is a serious error on Lukacs’ part, arguing that, with regards to fetishism, the key difference between pre-capitalist society and now is that the former was structured by a pervasive and murky reification of human relations (e.g. the King is the divinely endorsed, unassailable authority, not the singularity where the nexus of contingent power relations between subjects condenses), whereas the latter transposes this reification into the commodity form, demystifying human relations as it fetishises things (e.g. the other is an individual subject seeking satisfaction in the marketplace - an impartial and necessary network of real value).

“to say that something is reified is not to emphasise that a relation between men appears as a relation between things. It is to emphasise that a relation between men appears in the form of a property of a thing. To be non-reified, then, is really to be a property of a thing, or, by analogy, to be a use-value”

Compelling though History and Class Consciousness is, I must say that, at least on Rose’s reading, Adorno’s theory of reification is notably more rigorous and explanatory than Lukacs’. This is, primarily, down to his starting point: Marx’s theory of value, which was, for Adorno, the Urmodell of reification. At its very inception, the commodity form elevates exchange-value over and above use-value, smothering the latter by inscribing itself upon the commodity in such a way that it appears as its intrinsic property rather than an index of social relations, of congealed, abstract human labour. The reified intentionality thereby takes the commodity (object) to be equal to, or exhausted by, its exchange value (concept); in other words, the error consists in what Adorno calls identity thinking, or the presumption that the concept is identical with its object.

Much of Adorno’s work is defined by his critique of identity thinking, but this does not mean that he supposes it totally irredeemable; like any good dialectician, he also sees the positive upshot: that, subject to the discerning eye, identity thinking unfolds its “utopian aspect” in its aspiration towards the “rational identity” of concept and object. Identity thinking presupposes that the object already exists in its ideal, “utopian” state, a false rational identity foreclosing any motivation for praxis, yet it is through immanent critique of this postulate that the possibility of actually working towards the realisation of this utopia is disclosed. Only when such a truly concrete rational identity is attained can we meaningfully speak of the non-reified at all.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helpful synoptic overview of Adorno’s project. Her readings of Adorno’s relation to the philosophical tradition (especially concerning Nietzsche) and his polemical sparring with the 3 h’s (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) are exemplary in their lucidity. The way she approaches the problem of reification is equally important, adding clarity to a concept that is rarely understood consistently. Most exceptional, however, is Rose’s courage in questioning Adorno’s conclusions, and her criticisms regularly hit their target, cutting through Adorno’s air of self-cultivated difficulty. The Adorno that emerges is one with multiple fruitful threads (the stakes of the exchange with Benjamin and his tantalizing indications on the opacity of socially mediated conceptuality) that remain unresolved, which Rose invites the reader to develop.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better standard books on Adorno, though also one of the books that contributes to the general misunderstanding of Adorno. At least Rose doesn't turn him into a French-style post-structuralist.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adorno is interesting enough a mind as he was, and all the better when presented by another sagacious mind like Rose.

[William West · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be a very rich encapsulation of Adorno’s thought. It does as good a job as any slim volume could of touching on the many different aspects of this thinker’s work. The subtitle, “An Introduction to the Work of Theodore Adorno” may imply that the book is at more of a “beginner’s level” than it actually is. Indeed, this “introduction” is itself imposingly dense, but no more so than it would have to be to adequately wrestle with its subject.

Gillian Rose is, herself, a fascinating and rewarding thinker and writer. She was British and educated in England and thus was reared in a environment dominated by the tradition of analytic philosophy. Her no-nonsense, direct yet dense prose style reflects this background.

Rose was rather groundbreaking, within the Anglo-intellectual world, in even considering that strange continental phenomenon we know as “western Marxism”. Not only did she write about this tradition, but did so from a perspective of respect. These weird continentals were, Rose shockingly asserted, asking legitimate questions! This acknowledgment did not stop Rose from interrogating the ideas and thinkers she wrote about in an analytic manner. This makes her take on western Marxism refreshingly unique, if at times problematic. Rose argues, perhaps, a bit strenuously at times, that despite its idiosyncratic, often fragmentary nature, Adorno’s oeuvre is ultimately characterized by an intellectual unity. (The following attempt at a synopsis reflects the original’s at times forced attempts to see in Adorno’s various projects a cornel of a continuous mission.)

Throughout the many methodologies and genres in which he worked, Adorno consistently sough to undermine the totalizing claims of philosophy, or really any field of thought, and to disrupt and problematize all static perspectives. This was not, however, to create intellectual chaos. Indeed, Adorno was motivated to shatter univocal and universal claims exactly because he did not think such dialogs could ever adequately convey a reality. What might seem like intellectual usurpations on the part of Adorno were really more correctives. He maintained a firm belief in the paramount importance of an attempt at a critical, intellectual critique of the world.

Indeed, as will see, Adorno was a Marxist in the sense that he wanted to effect a change in the actual lived world by way of critical thinking. But this was, to put it mildly, a highly idiosyncratic Marxism that would be off-putting to many more traditional and conservative practitioners of the Marxist tradition. Rose argues persuasively that what Adorno sought to achieve was a “revolution in style”, a new way of thinking and expressing such thinking. He was thus, while Marxist in intent, ultimately an aesthete.

Adorno and his piers in the Frankfurt School for Social Research (founded in 1923), started out as “cosmopolitan” Marxists. They was aware of other discourses, and not just in philosophy and politics, and the School sought to bring these different discourses and sciences into contact with one another. However the primary guiding light for the work of the young Adorno and the Frankfurt School remained Marxism.

Marx held that under capitalism humanity’s conception of value is systematically distorted. People use and create objects, of course, and have done so in some form throughout humanity’s history. Objects, both natural and human-made, thus have a “natural” use-value to humans. (Such recourses to a transcendental category like “nature” provide some of the most vulnerable aspects of Marx’s thought to his insightful critics, and I’m not sure Adorno ever divorces himself from this recourse on Marx’s part to make his own thinking wholly invulnerable to the same criticisms.) But under the system of capitalism, all objects are made exchangeable on the market. Instead of an object having a use-value in and of itself, the object becomes valued first and foremost for what it can sell for. The money earned in selling the object will itself be used to purchase a different object. The “natural” use-value of all objects is effaced by its exchange value, a concept that exists only under capitalism. Humanity thus becomes more and more estranged from its “natural conditions” in relation to the world it lives in.

The term “reification” came to be used to generalize the effects of the alienation that arises according to Marx’s theory of value under capitalism. It became most associated with the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, whose work was very popular and influential amongst the thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Rose offers a genealogy of “reification” which reveals the word to barely have a stable meaning at all. It had generally been used to refer to the fragmentation of modern society- “modern” in many cases having a meaning so broad as to include all western society after the “Classical” Greek Age. The fact that the word itself has no fully stable application, however, does not make it meaningless in the work of those writers who employ it.

Rose identifies the “reifications” of three central thinkers who attached themselves to the term. For Lukacs, reification refers to the way that humanity becomes alienated from its own labor under capitalism and thus the objects of its life-world become similarly alien and alienating. Adorno’s friend Walter Benjamin focused on reification in the context of the ways that commodities, as works of exchange-value, become emblematic, indeed undifferentiable from, one’s personal history such that the “personal” comes to seem like a phantasmagoria of social (exchange) “objects”. Adorno, for his part, focused on the ways that the supposedly natural properties of a commodity (which is reified by definition) shapes, in turn, the appearance of human relations.

If attracted to Lukac’s writings on reification, Adorno and his Frankfurt cohorts became disenchanted with the Hungarian thinker’s writings on the proletariat as a “universal class” that had the potential to become the “subject/object of history”. According to Marx and Lukacs, every epoch is characterized by the class consciousness of its ruling class. Lukacs proposed that when the proletariat became the dominant class under a socialist state and eventually a communist society, it would achieve a class-consciousness that pierced through the veil of reification and saw the world in its “true” state. The proletariat would be the first class in human history to understand the world in its “totality”.

The idea that a self-empowering class could transcend the language of power struck Adorno, especially, as naive. It also struck him as counter-productive to what he understood as the mission of Marxist thought. Marx famously wrote that, “philosophy has sought to explain the world, but the point is to change it.” This statement implies (against Marx’s own appeals to the “natural” truth of use-value) that “truth” is constantly in flux and can be reshaped by human thought. Marx thus calls into question all attempts by philosophy to arrive at an absolute, final, “total” truth. Lukacs seemed to be, through Marxist language, reannointing a fully transcendent philosophical consciousness in the form of the proletariat-to-be that could again make absolute, eternal truth claims.

The Frankfurt thinkers, and Adorno especially, started to look at social subordination less in the language of class and more in terms of generic power without (Rose critically highlights) developing a theory of the state. They then turned more towards Nietzsche (who also had nothing to say about the state) than Lukacs.

Like Nietzsche, Adorno understood morality to simply be a disguise for and tool of power. Concepts like “good” and “evil” make certain kinds of social hierarchies seem acceptable and attempts to subvert those hierarchies unacceptable. (Whether Nietzsche admitted or even fully understood it, he was following Marx’s lead on this point. In describing the history of society as that of evolving class domination, Marx showed that all cultural formations, particularly religious “morality”, are ultimately used to justify and maintain hierarchies of power.)

Also like Nietzsche, Adorno thought it was imperative to show that all forms of morality and social order had a history. If something can be shown to have developed historically then it cannot be absolute and unchangeable. Power will always try to hide its own historically contingent origins to make itself seem the result of an unquestionable, unchanging “nature”. In a 1932 lecture called “The Idea of History and Nature” Adorno redefined “nature” as what human experience in a given epoch presents as a pre-given. “History” was redefined in the lecture as the production of “nature”- those transitional periods in human experience when what is perceived as “pre-given” and “changeless” in fact changes.

The problem for thinkers such as Nietzsche and Adorno who sought to use philosophy to question “transcendental truths” is that philosophy has traditionally trafficked in exactly these kind of “transcendentals”. Both thinkers were profoundly aware of this paradox and constantly sought to find a style to attack metaphysical absolutes without erecting new ones.

Adorno ultimately broke with Nietzsche, however. He pointed out that in Nietzsche’s book “The Anti-Christ”, he calls on his readers to affirm each instant of life. This implies a momentary vitalism that can be acknowledged outside of “life”’s cultural articulation (and suppression). This, for Adorno, was a retreat to metaphysical absolutism on Nietzsche’s part. (The cruel irony, it seems to me, of Adorno’s criticism of Nietzsche is that Adorno never fully divorced himself from the metaphysical kernel remaining in Marx’s thought- the “natural truth” of use-value.)

Adorno held that no notion of “natural life” could be articulated apart from its social-historical interpretation. This was most definitely not a turn towards the subjectivism of the Kierkegaardian (and to a lesser degree Nietzschean) sort. Indeed, Adorno even criticized Benjamin for focusing too much on subjective experience and the way commodities come to seem manifestations of a “personal” history.

Rather, Adorno was saying that no consciousness exists outside its social-historical conditions. But if the object of consciousness is determined by consciousness’s conditions then one cannot entirely separate subject and object. Subjectivity is always a part of the very being of a social object. Again, this is not to say that the object is constructed by the subject, but that the subject must be treated as part of the object that is to be understood. Philosophy had generally treated subject/object as a binary, one Adorno rejects. On top of that , philosophy traditionally prioritized the subject over the object. If anything, this priority should be reversed. The object presupposes the subject. Indeed, all subjects are objects (or part of the constellation of an object) but not all objects are subjects.

Adorno offers an Aristotelian interpretation of “concept”. “Concept” refers to a property that characterizes the subject (which is always part of its object). Instead of an object belonging to a category because it resembles an ideal (as with Plato), it is the object/subject that strives to fulfill its concept. Contemporary society, that of capitalism, was an object that did not fulfill its concept. Indeed, it radically failed to do so.

It is here that we encounter Adorno’s highly problematic mandarinism. While Adorno did not think life could ever be divorced from ideology he thought that pre-capitalist ideologies were “less false” than capitalist ones in the way they articulated humanity’s relations to the objects of its world. Older subject/objects came much closer to fulfilling their concepts. (“Less false” and “more true” while not identifying an absolute “natural truth” still imply an absolute to which to compare different ideologies. Again, we run into problematic notions of transcendental, natural “truth”.)

Adorno identified three fundamental ways of thinking. The first and most common he refers to as “identity thinking”. This is a utopian mode of thought that presumes that objects equate with their concepts. When an identity-thinker uses the term “rock” to denote a particular object they unwittingly assume that the object display all the characteristics that we associate with the concept “rock”. Because of the dominance of exchange value in our epoch, objects are never fully identifiable by their concepts. In the capitalist era, then, “identity thinking” is that characterized by reification- things that are not the same are thought of as the same.

The other two modes of thinking are “non-identity thinking” which recognizes that the concepts available to thought do not correspond to their objects. The rarest form of thought is termed “rational-identity thinking” which is able to compare the concept with its object and dwell within their non-identity.

If one could just teach oneself to be a “rational-identity thinker” than things could be seen as they really are not (though not necessarily how they “actually are”). Unfortunately, Adorno thinks our culture has reached a level of “complete reification”, at least in some major areas of thought in which the exchange process has come to so dominate society that it prevents any independent criticism of the dominant (mis-applied) concepts. In other words, in many areas of our society, “identity thinking” is the only form available to us. Even when Adorno talks about reification, Adorno fully admits, he is not fully conscious of the ways it acts on and affects him and his thinking.

The closest Adorno comes to a solution to this predicament is a kind of mission statement: “universal history must be construed and denied”. It must be construed because it is the only perspective from which an identity thinker (which we at times have no choice but to be) can perceive the historical formation of social concepts. Universal history must be denied because this very perspective can only be one of domination (both by and of the subject-object).

“Immanent Method” is the name Adorno applies to his attempt to both spot and negate universal narratives. All such histories (including even “Marxist” ones) must be revealed as distorting and controlling when isolated as “total” histories. Rather, such histories must be seen as incomplete in themselves, existing only in a non-static constellation. This method is the only one that could correspond to Adorno’s notion of authentic Marxism (which is not “Marxist”). It attempts to dissolve all philosophical/ historical absolutes and reveal the contingent, yet inter-related nature of concepts, subjects, and objects. Non-reified concepts are always in flux.

One can see why some critics have seen strong affiliations between Adorno’s “Immanent Method” and Derrida’s deconstruction. Both systems reimagine the mission of philosophy from being the erecting of metaphysical absolutes to their toppling, reading philosophy not to find a “workable totality” in any one system, but to show such a totalizing effort to be necessarily futile, even counter-productive.

There is, however, an important difference between the Adornoean and Derridean projects. Deconstruction, a continuation of the project of Heidegger’s late thought, operates within a metaphysics of absence in which that which is known can only be so through the textuality of an unreachable past. With deconstruction, experience of the world can be reinterpreted but never reconstructed. Adorno’s rejection of metaphysical totalities rests on the notion that they inherently misrepresent reality. Adorno demolishes such totalities in order to see the world more accurately and thereby act upon it more affectively. He is still a Marxist- he is trying to change the world, not just understand it.

Adorno’s work within the “traditional” philosophical realm consists in trying to correct the philosophical subject of its illusions of “completeness”. He wants to make the subject of capitalism aware that, exactly because it is part of the reified object it contemplates, it can not accurately know the totality of the object or its own subjectivity. What the subject can be made aware of is the limitations of its own judgements. To accomplish this, Adorno looks at the thought-systems of “canonical” western philosophers to discover what he believes are the inherent antinomies in all such systems.

“Construction of the Aesthetic” is the name of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard. Adorno finds the work of the Danish thinker as especially illustrative of the way reified philosophy has operated under capitalism. He believes Kierkegaard’s antinomies reflect those in the thought of contemporary culture generally.

Adorno thinks the most foundational insight of Kierkegaardian thought is radically brilliant and (not surprisingly) similar to his own. Kierkegaard looks at his own thought as a subject of early capitalism and realizes that his concepts do not correspond to their intended objects. The objective here is understood as that which would exist prior to/ absent of the subject. But, Adorno claims, Kierkegaard then makes the paradigmatic error of reified thought. Kierkegaard claims that the only objectivity is subjectivity. In other words, he tries to liquidate the object into the subject. The Dane, like Adorno, recognizes the inseparability of the subject and the object, but prioritizes, in the most radical way, the subject over the object. (Perhaps Kierkegaard so intrigued Adorno because he read the Dane’s as an inversion of Adorno’s project.)

Adorno identifies the key antimony in Kierkegaard’s thought as that between the universal and the personal. There is a universal element to human experience in that each individual exists, objectively, as a member of the human race which is, according to Kierkegaard’s Christianity, characterized by Original Sin. Yet each individual subjectivity is considered the foundation of all objectivity and their entirely personal relation to their own unique experience is what leads them to the Truth. Foundational subjectivity, then, rests on the foundation of objective “human nature”.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Introduction" is accurate, for this serves more as a primer than a particularly novel reading, establishing background context for situating Adorno's project within the larger theoretical field of the time. Rose reads the fragmentary nature of Minima Moralia as akin to Nietzsche, though simultaneously as still forming a system. She notes that Lukács and Marcuse misattribute the concept of reification to Marx and Hegel, respectively, and questions the usefulness of its generalization, before moving to Adorno's usage of the term. She covers Adorno and Horkheimer's turn to sociology as a way to split the difference between empiricism and theory, and reads Adorno as forging a dialectic between Marxism and its Other(s), taking each crystallized ideology as itself a reification. This is all... true, if mostly well-known (other than the misattribution bit), and slightly disappointing given just how strong Hegel Contra Sociology is as a work.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brings Adorno's thought to the foegeound

Gillian Rose has an amazing ability to bring Adorno's ideas to the surface without trivialising or simplifying them at all.

[Holden Rasmussen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted and dense thought. The summary of debates around Expressionism in Europe are especially helpful and enlightening.

[ajna]

good introductory on Adorno and other Frankfurt Critical Theorists

[Gram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greatly enjoyed

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

used specifically to understand / appreciate his writings on music and popular culture. I skimmed or skipped entirely much of the stylistic analysis of his writings regarding other philosophers etc.