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  • The Abyss Looks Back
  • Kenneth Surin (bio)
Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of The Frankfurt School
Stuart Jeffries
Verso
www.versobooks.com/books
448 Pages; Print, $16.95

By allowing themselves [i.e. philosophers] to still think at all vis-a-vis the naked reproduction of existence, they behave as the privileged; by leaving things in thought, they declare the nullity of their privilege . . . There is no exit from the entanglement. The only responsible option is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one's own existence, and as for the rest, to behave in private as modestly, inconspicuously and unpretentiously as required, not for reasons of good upbringing, but because of the shame that when one is in hell, there is still air to breathe.

—Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951).

My breath was taken away when I first read this passage in the Jephcott translation in 1974, just as it was when I read it again as a quotation in Stuart Jeffries's superb book, which animates this and other passages in the works (and lives) of the Frankfurt School in a way not hitherto seen in the extensive existing biographical literature.

Jeffries calls this a "collective biography," and it blends, beautifully, twentieth-century German and world history, personal biography, and analysis of the School's theories. It is somewhat fashionable to say that the time of the Frankfurt School has passed, that its analysis of capitalism (necessarily confined to monopoly capitalism or Fordism by the circumstances of its members' births and deaths) has been bypassed by a new economic dispensation, which some call neoliberalism or post-Fordism, all conjoined with globalization. The immediate context for the School's thinking—the Nazi horrors and the Stalinist terror—has also receded somewhat into the historical past (or so it would seem). One of this book's many virtues is that it shows this not to be the case.

Writing a "group biography" requires each of the School's key members to be approached in relation to the others, and the chapters to be organized by decade rather than thematically, since not everyone was working on the same project at the same time due to differences in interest and expertise. For example, no one had the musical training Adorno received from Alban Berg, no one had Benjamin's voracious literary tastes and interest in Jewish mysticism, and while Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm all had a deep interest in psychoanalysis, they approached it very differently, some commonalities notwithstanding. The overarching interest was of course Marxism, but here again there were significant differences: Benjamin emphasized the eschatological dimensions of Marxism in his "archaeological" project of redeeming the future by excavating the past; Adorno and Marcuse focused on alienation and the culture industry; Horkheimer was most interested in the implications of Marxist thought for a critical philosophy (though it was Adorno who wrote more extensively and rigorously about philosophy than any of his colleagues).

The Grand Hotel Abyss takes its title from Lukács's accusation that the members of the Frankfurt School had become residents of this beautiful hotel, which was "equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity." Lukács, as a revolutionary commissar, had ordered the execution of several people during the brief Hungarian Soviet, a descent into the depths of praxis no member of the Frankfurt School aspired to or attained. Lukács's first-hand experience of revolution as a bloody business almost certainly envenomed his distaste for the mere "theorists" who resided in The Grand Hotel.

Jeffries shows Lukács to be both right and wrong in this assessment. Right, because it is obvious that an abstention from a "spontaneous" praxis was a defining feature of the central figures of the Frankfurt School, with the exception of Marcuse in the heady late 1960s, when he became a darling of the soixante-huitards. Marcuse believed the 68er students were revolutionary protagonists, along with others whom Marx would have characterized as lumpens. (I was a 68er student, and although there were students in my residential hall of the English university I attended who stored guns under their...

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