After Auschwitz: Adorno’s Political Thought

Theodor Adorno is often thought of as an aloof aesthete, an inscrutable ivory-tower theorist, and a political pessimist. 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 the twentieth century. At the center of the course are Adorno’s multifaceted critiques of nationalism. Did fascism die with its military defeat in World War Two? Is the nation-state redeemable in light of the excesses that nationalism has licensed and continues to license? How can we grapple with the intractability of authoritarianism, not only in social and political structures, but within individuals themselves?

Adorno’s reputation stems in part from his dwelling on the negative. In particular, he fixated on the defeats suffered by the Left in the twentieth century, and sought to sublate Hegel with his notion of “negative dialectics.” For Adorno, the post-revolutionary turns toward repression and authoritarianism in the Soviet Union and China, and the failure of revolution and rise of soft authoritarianism in the West made necessary rethinkings of Marxism, of the elements of society, and of our dominant patterns of thought. Nationalism as one of these patterns was of special concern to him — as it will be for us.

These questions will lead us deep into major elements of Adorno’s thought: reification, identity thinking, domination, the subject/object distinction, and positivism, to name some of them. All will be discussed with an eye to their political implications. His thoughts on genocide, particularly his insistence that Auschwitz never happen again, will be interpreted with reference to current events. Pronouncements such as “nationalism is both obsolete and up-to-date” will be unpacked.

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; some time will be devoted to situating Adorno within the Frankfurt School, German intellectual history, and the twentieth-century Left. Adorno’s critical, dialectical spirit will be a guide as we seek to better understand him, his context, and the key problems of modernity as he saw them — with the ultimate goal, as Adorno himself might have insisted, of better understanding ourselves and the world we have inherited.