Adorno (review)

Reviews103 universities and colleges. There are frequent allusions to the way rhetorical studies were supplanted by departments devoted to the study of English literature. Some essays look back on this evolution with considerable disapproval while others look forward to greater collaboration between rhetoricians and teachers of composition. The villain of the piece is often the English departments which "have ignored and even disparaged" (p. 246) teachers of composition , rhetoric andjournalism while members of such departments "struggle over abstruse questions of intentionality in literary texts" (p. 48). One implicit consequence of this view, fortunately not held by all the contributors , is that rhetoric is primarily shown as applicable to all discourse except literary discourse. This is presumably the reason why there is no mention ofthe contemporary work in literary applications of rhetoric by the Liège Group (in its General Rhetoric), by Genette, or by Valesio, while Paul de Man gets only a passing nod. With one or two exceptions the contributors treat European rhetorical studies as having come to an end with Ramus. Fortunately there are a half-dozen very good, even excellent, essays here, which propose a vision of rhetoric fully open to work with literary models and texts. These include D'Angelo's study of the evolution of the analytic topoi, Larson 's proposals on classifying discourse, Stewart's comments on the Phaedrus, Raymond's study of enthymemes and examples, and Kinneavy's essay on the dieory and practice of the teaching of writing. The last is an example of an expanded view of rhetoric, integrating the classical teaching of the practice of discourse into an eclectic and interesting description of twentieth-century concern for situation (Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer). In short, this volume conveys the need for a renewal of rhetorical studies and manifests the struggle between a narrow professional and national view and a broader view that is able to include literary and literary-critical discourse. Dartmouth CollegeJohn D. Lyons Adorno, by Martin Jay; 199 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, $15.00 cloth, $5.95 paper. "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on," wrote Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics, "because the moment to realize it was missed." Adorno's own thought also lives on, but by contrast the moment to more fully understand (if not realize) it may be approaching. Martin Jay's Adorno, like his books on The Frankfurt School and Western Marxism, is clear, sympathetic, and 104Philosophy and Literature penetrating. It is a welcome addition to, and sets the standard for, recent literature in English on Adorno. Adorno would have condemned any simplifying, systematizing, or packaging of his wide-ranging and difficult writings. Accordingly, Jay applies to Adorno's work Adorno's own metaphorical notions offorce-field — the interplay of attractions and aversions that constitutes "the dynamic, trans-mutational structure of a complex phenomenon" — and constellation — "a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resists reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle" (pp. 14-15). In diis light, Jay discusses five irreducible themes and tensions: (1) Adorno's Western Marxism, articulated in his brand ofCritical Theory; (2) his "aesthetic modernism ," rooted in atonal techniques and compositional principles of Schoenberg; (3) his uneasy "mandarin cultural conservativism," expressed in antipathy for mass culture, bureaucracy, and technological reason, and in pessimism and distance from political activism; (4) his Jewish heritage, evident in his understanding of post-Auschwitz Germany and connection of all totalistic thought widi totalitarianism; and, (5) his deconstructionism and early development , via Nietzsche and Benjamin, of poststructuralist themes present in Derrida , Foucault, and others. In a brief biography, Jay traces the origins and development of these themes, and dien examines their roles in Adorno's philosophy and analyses of modern culture. By focusing on the paratactic essay, "Subject and Object," Jay explicates Adorno's project for a critical philosophy aware ofits own historical immanence, and brilliandy identifies recurring themes in Adorno's myriad criticisms of others. Adorno rejects the separation of subject and object by both positivists and idealists who pursue the domination of nature, and thus subjectify reason and hypostatize social domination. Moreover, Adorno rejects the unification of subject and object by Hegel, Lukacs, Benjamin, Heidegger, and others...