Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (review)

In 2003, Adorno’s centenary year, three biographies of him appeared in Germany. I awaited the translations, hoping to review the three together, but only two were quick to appear in English, Lorenz Jäger’s “political biography” and Stephan Müller-Doohm’s blandly reverential eight-hundred-page academic monument. The former was a culture-wars brickbat, not worth reviewing. The latter laid out the personal facts disjoined from Adorno’s turbulent historical period. Untranslated till now was Detlev Claussen’s Ein Letztes Genie. Claussen had been a student and protégé of Adorno’s in the 60s, and the pre-translation buzz was highly favorable. This was the biography that most promised to be worth the wait.

While I was waiting, New German Critique put out a special Adorno number (Winter 2006); the lead article, by Claussen, was called “Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno’s American Experience,” and it advanced a strong claim: “without America, Adorno would never have become the person we recognize by that name.”¹ Within a year, David Jenemann’s Adorno in America appeared, and I wondered if an “American Adorno” meme was in the air, not only in America but in Adorno’s homeland. Jenemann was careful to put his claim modestly; Claussen’s article put his confrontationally, as if to affront his countrymen for taking “their” Adorno too much for granted. I assumed that “Intellectual Transfer” was excerpted or adapted from Ein Letztes Genie, and looked forward all the more keenly to the translation.

But with One Last Genius finally in hand, “Intellectual Transfer” proves to be not an excerpt from the book, but a new and unrelated spin-off or afterthought. In the book, Adorno’s American years are staged in the familiar terms of the exile as permanent outsider, but “American Adorno”? No: what Claussen’s NGC article announced as a thesis, the book nowhere entertains even as a question—a disconnect worth belaboring because it symptomatizes what’s disappointing about the book. It has no—I don’t want to say “thesis,” but it lacks even a premise. Or alternatively, it has too many of them: the disconnect between article and book recurs within the book between one chapter and the next, often within a given chapter. “Disconnect,” reframed (forced) as contradiction, can be critically useful—such is the very nut of what Adorno means by “dialectical”—but Claussen (mostly) passes on the opportunity. Read with the “American Adorno” question in mind, the book feels like an answer in the negative. But it is rather a question begged—or the opposite of begged: refused, not asked.

“Negative” is, of course, a word supercharged in the Adorno force field. The relevant question for biography we may shorthand via Keats, to the extent that Adorno’s ethic of “the subject” idealizes something like a “negative capability” in the face of experience, especially the experience of identity/subjectivity. A biography of Adorno could usefully exploit this tension; and Claussen’s book seems, initially, to propose just that: to subscribe itself to Adorno’s own renunciations and taboos, answer to Adorno’s own self-transcending ambitions, with an answerably scrupulous textual asperity or askesis. The opening chapter frets lengthily over the book’s putative genre, biography, as well as the category or concept or culture-fetish “genius” claimed in its title. Which seems promising: the implication of both motifs in ideologies of “the [bourgeois] subject” was a Frankfurt School indictment long before a later generation sloganeered against “the author-function.” But in the event, both biography and genius function here less as critical questions than as tokens whose potential and problems are barely tapped: in speech-act terms, they are rather mentioned than used.

As you might surmise—as Claussen’s title effectively admits—”biography” is under much deeper erasure than “genius.” The book all but poses itself as not a biography. (It’s too modest—too anti-programmatic—for any pretense to being to...