After Auschwitz: Adorno’s Political Thought

Theodor Adorno is often thought of as an aloof aesthete, an ivory-tower philosopher, and a political pessimist — a thinker more at home in the concert hall or the seminar room than in the streets. This course seeks to challenge these accounts head-on, presenting Adorno instead as an intensely engaged thinker on politics, one whose work was forged in the crucible of fascism, exile, and the catastrophic failures of twentieth-century modernity.

At the center of this course are Adorno’s multifaceted critiques of nationalism — a body of thought that feels, in our present moment, less like historical analysis than like urgent diagnosis. We will examine how Adorno understood the social and psychological conditions that made fascism possible, and ask what it means that those conditions did not simply vanish with fascism’s military defeat in 1945. Did fascism die with the Third Reich, or does it persist in new and mutated forms? Is the nation-state redeemable in light of the excesses nationalism has licensed and continues to license? How do we grapple with the intractability of authoritarianism, not only in social and political structures, but within individuals themselves?

These questions will lead us deep into the major concepts of Adorno’s thought: reification, identity, domination, negation, and the damaged life. We will ask what it means to think dialectically (to refuse easy synthesis, to hold contradictions open rather than resolving them prematurely) and why Adorno believed that this mode of thinking was itself a form of political resistance. We will consider his account of the culture industry and the way mass culture administers consciousness, his reflections on education after Auschwitz, and his insistence that autonomous thought remains possible even (perhaps especially) under conditions designed to extinguish it.

Readings will be drawn primarily from Adorno’s more accessible works: texts adapted from lectures to the general public and to university students, many from the essay collection Critical Models. No prior familiarity with Adorno or the Frankfurt School is required. Adorno’s critical, dialectical spirit will serve as our guide as we seek to better understand him, his historical context, and the key problems of modernity as he diagnosed them — with the ultimate goal, as Adorno himself might have insisted, of better understanding ourselves and the world we have inherited.