Adorno Thrice Engaged

Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics by J. M. Bernstein

Erregte Gesellschaft: Philosophie der Sensation [Excited Society: Philosophy of Sensation] by Christoph Türcke

Kritik der ethischen Gewalt [Critique of Ethical Violence] by Judith Butler

Time is a constitutive factor in the unfolding of any strong form of thought. The idea, so dear to Adorno, that the history outside an artwork, responsible for its aging, is also part of its own truth content should be adopted in the evaluation of his philosophy as well. Its actuality depends on the confrontation with two attitudes, at bottom complementary. For were it to be relegated to the hall of cultural monuments, newly encouraged in his centennial by the ideological representation of Adorno as wunderkind, or unreflectively dismissed as outdated, as in the perennial reproaches of elitism or pessimism, it would surely be fated to be eventually forgotten. The three books discussed below prove otherwise; though different in their relationship with Adorno's work, they engage with it, generating fruitful areas of tension and disagreement. Their involvement with Adorno's texts is here presented in decreasing levels of intensity—starting with an academic adaptation, through creative appropriation, and ending with an institutional dialogue—yet, in all of them, strong moments are to be found intertwined with frustrating limitations. These, their shortcomings, hesitations, or blind spots, must not be taken as sheer deficiencies but rather, in an Adornean fashion, as negatives shaped by their own success. They should be considered, in other words, as invitations to future works.

Negative Morality Minus Praxis,or Adorno American Style

The reception of Adorno's work in the United States has taken the most varied forms. Leaving aside the now perhaps hegemonic position in German studies, which in the wake of Habermas and Wellmer approaches Adorno as a mere straw man against which the project of a communicative theory of action can be spelled out, one can mention the valuable work of such authors as Martin Jay, Susan Buck-Morss, Fredric Jameson, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Thomas Huhn, Lambert Zuidervaart, and Robert Hullot-Kentor, who have developed Adornean concepts, themes, and articulations in a number of rhetorical modes that range from sheer "objective" explanations and paraphrases to innovative creative appropriations. J. M. Bernstein's Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics starts a new and important chapter in the ongoing history of the reception of the Frankfurt School at the center of capitalism. For the first time Adorno's work isinterpreted as a coherent whole from the point of view of Anglo-American "hard" philosophy, and on thoroughly sympathetic terms.In its fascinating work of faithful systematic reconstitution, Bernstein's text is best approached as a unique instance of geographical-intellectual translation.

Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics can be described as a sustained and breathtakingly structured argument that, starting from Weber's theory of the disenchantment of the world, slowly lays the foundations for the definition of the concept of "ethical modernism," Bernstein's own positive contribution to the contemporary debate on ethics. The path leading to such a concept engages Adornean arguments in dialogues with an astonishing number of philosophical stances, including Kant and Kantians, Hegel and Hegelians, Heidegger, analytical philosophers, Habermas, and diverse contemporary theories of morality and ethics. This kind of comprehensiveness and breadth is already in and by itself a characteristic feature of the American academy, which in its best moments manages to conciliate very delimited fields of inquiry with a dizzying work of footnoting and cross-referencing. The amazing bibliographical scope, however, is not enough to shun a certain Anglophonic provincialism, another trait of much of American philosophy, as expressed in Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics by the virtual absence of any reference to nontranslated foreign works, especially those dealing with Adorno's ethics.¹ Finally, it is worth pointing out another apparently typical trademark of Anglo-American philosophical practice, namely the quasi-obsessive argumentative nature of Bernstein's method of exposition, which interestingly enough involves, apart from a certain stylistic sloppiness, strategies in sharp contrast to Adorno's expressive writing...