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| https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.88974/mode/2up |
Monday, April 11, 2022
Craft Talk
IN DEFENSE OF WITCHES: THE LEGACY OF THE WITCH HUNTS AND WHY WOMEN ARE STILL ON TRIAL BY MONA CHOLLET, TRANSLATED BY SOPHIE R. LEWIS. NEW YORK: ST. MARTIN'S PRESS. 320 PAGES. $29.
It is a misconception that witch hunts only occurred during the Middle Ages—many took place during the alleged lucidity of the Renaissance. Men exploited the climate of suspicion to dispose of women they didn’t want around. Whole family lines were wiped out. Nonconforming women were denounced, humiliated, and killed. Centuries later, this kind of persecution continues in insidious ways, underpinned by relentless misogyny and victim blaming. The same female figures are still considered dangerous: the single woman, the childless woman, the aging woman—all dismissed with fear, pity, or horror.
This is the premise of Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial (translated by Sophie R. Lewis): the indictment of modern women is tethered to archaic conceptions formulated in the fifteenth century. Swiss-French author Chollet has spent fifteen years as an editor at the monthly French newspaper Le Monde diplomatique, covering international politics and economics. In 2017, she took a sabbatical to write In Defense of Witches, drawing from writers, sociologists, philosophers, pop culture, and conversations with friends: prismatic ways by which to examine the witch as a timeless symbol of female insolence, independence, and perpetual subjugation. I recently met with Chollet, who discussed overturning the witch’s symbolism, the commodification of despised women, and her own reluctant feminism.
SARAH MOROZ: What was your starting point for this book?
MONA CHOLLET: I wanted to write about child-free women and aging women. I couldn’t decide between the two subjects, and neither was satisfying on its own. Then I thought, I could write a book about women who are not socially accepted. I realized that both these kinds of women are, in their own way, witches. Single women are perceived as a threat to society. I started to read about witch hunts, which really continue today. They don’t take the same form, but there is still a feeling of suspicion—single women worry people. It’s a relief when a woman is tied to a man. I went back and forth between the witch hunts of yesteryear and the circumstances of today, showing how certain “types” of women—definitions forged in the fifteenth century—are still considered dangerous. I wanted to write about all the situations in which the figure of the witch is embodied, maybe not even on a conscious level. A woman who’s aging, who’s single, who doesn’t have kids—she awakens something threatening, or is disapproved of. She’s not explicitly treated like a witch, but the past gave us an interpretive framework for this figure that still applies. We see an old woman and automatically reject her. I think there’s a historically informed dimension to that, and these definitions still shape the ways in which women are detested.
In her foreword to your book, Carmen Maria Machado writes, “like so many things capitalism touches, [the witch] is in danger of dissociating from her radical roots. What could have once gotten a woman killed is now available for purchase at Urban Outfitters.” This is something you allude to in your text, too: “witchcraft is also an aesthetic, a fashion . . . and a lucrative money-spinner.” How do you wrestle with this misappropriation of such a charged historical figure?
There’s an interesting movement of salvaging the figure of the witch—overturning the stigma and the pejorative associations. There’s this twisting of her into a powerful figure when, in fact, she was very vulnerable, targeted as weak and incapable of defending herself. She was tortured and killed. There was no victory at the time—witches were powerful only in the imaginations of the people persecuting them. She has been recast and valorized: that’s a good thing but, of course, there’s the spiral into commercialism. As women, we still need to be reminded of our strength, so it’s not surprising that there is a market for merchandise.
Did you hope to reach a particular audience with this work? And did the book’s reception in France surprise you?
I had no precise intention, but I was really struck by the fact that we haven’t granted the proper weight to this period. I think there’s an enormous heritage that explains a lot about the way women feel about womanhood and about how we’re treated. Doing this work helped me realize an ultimately simple thing: even when we talk about the single lady with her cat today, there’s an obvious trace of the witch with her familiar, the chat diabolique.
I was also writing about topics that were very personal. When you work on something close to who you are and your own needs, people are touched by that. Things in which you felt really alone suddenly become shared. As for the reception, based on events in bookstores, it was always young women who were attending and who told me the book had changed things for them.
Did you get a response from men too?
I know a few men who read it, but when I was doing book signings, men were asking me to sign the book for their girlfriend/sister/mother/daughter. They weren’t going to read it. It’s not new or surprising that men don’t read many books written by women—even less so when they’re focused on women-specific subjects—but it’s frustrating. Because men live with women, they should be interested in their experiences.
You draw clear parallels between an antiquated culture of suspicion and modern-day considerations of nonconforming women. Given this stubborn persistence of certain gendered attitudes, how do we change the narrative?
I’m almost fifty, and over the course of my adult life, the evolution has already been amazing. I grew up in a world where feminists were just a few strange women, always mad, and not to be trusted. Feminism was so unpopular. Now, it’s extraordinary the way young women behave—they don’t want to please men at all costs—and I admire that very much. I was raised to please men and be an “acceptable” woman, to not be angry, or too demanding. I see how young women push that, and push men to evolve and understand things about them. This social blackmail—that if you’re not a “nice” girl, you’ll never be loved—today, they don’t care! My hope is that men will be forced to evolve and be interested in women’s experiences. But it’s a big struggle. In France, I’m really struck by the violent reaction against this. Many men are resisting this evolution with all their strength, because they’ve been living in a world that is so comfortable. It’s really about including your experience of the other in your vision of the world. And many men are not willing to do that.
In the book, you admit to your own timidity with feminism. You call it poule mouillée feminism or the “‘scaredy-cat’ branch of feminism.” You write: “I stick my head above the parapet solely when I can do nothing else, when my convictions and aspirations force me to. I write books like this one to boost my courage.” Can you expand on this?
I was raised in the 1980s and it was such a conservative time. Women were not supposed to be bold. But I became a feminist anyway because I needed to. It’s mostly related to the fact that I wanted to write. And when you write, you become very threatening to men. You feel you are transgressing. As a young journalist, too, it was not easy to work at newspapers because men were always outnumbering us and were always in positions of power. There was a future where women weren’t welcome. And then there’s the fact that I never wanted to be a mother. So, I had no choice. I had to embrace feminism. Of course, it’s a good thing. I wanted to insist on the fact, though, that I was afraid, and I’m still afraid. I think it’s good to be honest about it. We can’t always be strong and confident. It’s not easy—it has a social cost. But not being a feminist also has a social cost.
Is there a specific threat underpinning the fear?
There are a lot of consequences: harassment online and even among family. It’s very violent to be called ugly or crazy or both, to be threatened with rape or murder. But maybe it’s also a fear of not being the “nice girl” that I was raised to be. There’s a great French philosopher, Manon Garcia, who wrote We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives. She talks about submission and the advantages it has had—and that’s a good analysis. There are women who defend the social order as it is. For them, it’s a better bet. You saw what we call the tribune Deneuve? [In January 2018, one hundred high-profile French women, including actress Catherine Deneuve, denounced #MeToo as “going too far” in the French newspapers, including Le Monde and the left-leaning Libération.]
Yeah, ugh, I saw that.
Of course, I was sorry to read that. But I think it translates an attitude. It’s like what Andrea Dworkin wrote about right-wing women—some women chose to be on the side of patriarchy, because they feel they gain from it. They don’t want to fight all the time, to go against the tide.
If you were always a “nice girl,” who or what helped you transition into being less “nice”?
It was cumulative experience that brought me out of it. The injustice of being a woman moved me. I read Susan Faludi’s Backlash at a young age, right when it was published—it wowed me. I was helped along by reading.
Sarah Moroz is an arts and culture journalist who has written for The Cut, the New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications.
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Why 1840?
Weekend Reader – This Storm is What We Call Progress: From 1840 to Today
January 14, 2021
By Yehuda Fogel
DOWNLOAD PDF
Weekend Reader – This Storm is What We Call Progress: From 1840 to Today
January 14, 2021
By Yehuda Fogel
DOWNLOAD PDF
PAUL KLEE ANGELUS NOVUS
Coll IMJ, photo (c) IMJ
How do we find ourselves in a time of rapid change?
This is a question that haunted Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940), one of the tragic figures of Jewish modernity. Born in Germany, Benjamin was a close friend of the foundational scholar of Kabbalah, Gerschom Scholem. The two German Jews were both deeply invested in the question of tradition, revelation, and identity, albeit in very different ways. Their friendship is famous and fruitful; their epistolary correspondence is one of the most philosophically intriguing and perplexing correspondences we have. Benjamin died by his own hand, fleeing the Nazis at the border of Spain. Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno, major figures in 20th century thought, championed Benjamin’s work after his passing, paying tribute to their lost friend.
Scholem was mainly a scholar of Kabbalah and mysticism (not necessarily the same, as readers of his know!), and Benjamin a less explicitly Jewishly oriented scholar, who thought about the world more broadly. Robert Alter, in his masterful reading of their work, points out that Benjamin and Scholem operate through opposing frameworks. Scholem systematized fragments, and Benjamin fragmentized systems.
“Scholem devoted his life to expounding a body of lore that was intrinsically fragmentary, or at the very least anti-systematic. The power of his work is his success in conceptually defining a system from this welter of literary scraps, though some of his critics have accused him of imposing system where it may not exist. Benjamin’s aim was the converse: to preserve the fragmentariness of his materials through the mobility of montage, combining constant quotation with aphoristic observation, and thus allowing systematic thought to emerge from juxtaposition itself. Perhaps the task was in the end undoable.”
Both of these urges speak to us today. Our world is marked by a deep fragmentation, an alienation that manifests theologically, sociologically, and psychologically. In our age of screens and solitude, it is far too easy to feel removed, afar, outside of the system. Theologically, we often feel alienated from God. Sociologically, we feel alienated from our society or surroundings. Psychologically, we feel alienated from ourselves. We strive to find systems in the fragments of our lives, integrating the entirety of our lives into a holistic totality. Sometimes it works.
This isn’t to blame the screens for our alienation – it is as much an outgrowth of our attempt at holding on to ourselves in a rapidly changing world. The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has deemed the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” that the rate of growth of a variety of systems – including technology – progresses at an exponential rate with time. Basically, this means that the world changes at a faster pace as time goes on. Major paradigm shifts in science have led to the time between generations shortening, as children reared in the Palm Pilot generation barely recognize those of the Snapchat generation. How does humanity find itself in a world of rapid change?
The Vilna Gaon, R. Elijah of Vilna, foresaw this idea of the rate of change speeding up in a commentary about an enigmatic Talmudic passage about the Messianic process. A verse in Yeshaya (60:22) seems paradoxical, as God indicates that the Messianic age will come both “in its time,” as well as when God “hastens it.” Here’s what the Talmud (Sanhedrin 98a) says:
אמר רבי אלכסנדרי רבי יהושע בן לוי רמי כתיב (ישעיהו ס, כב) בעתה וכתיב אחישנה זכו אחישנה לא זכו בעתה
Rabbi Alexandri says: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi raises a contradiction in a verse addressing God’s commitment to redeem the Jewish people. In the verse: “I the Lord in its time I will hasten it” (Isaiah 60:22), it is written: “In its time,” indicating that there is a designated time for the redemption, and it is written: “I will hasten it,” indicating that there is no set time for the redemption.
Dealing with this contradiction, one sage offers that “if they merit, “I will hasten it,” and if they do not merit, it will come “in its time.” The Vilna Gaon turns this passage on its head, suggesting that there will be a time in which the very sense of time unfolds, our very rate of change speeds up so that is paradoxically both “in its time” and “hastened.” This is the time we live in – a storm of rapid change, as time feels like it speeds up around us. How do we find ourselves in this storm of progress?
One place to turn to is 1840. A year of intense messianic expectations for some, 1840 marked the beginning of an efflorescence of scientific and mystical thought, and mirrors many of the same dynamics of our world today. Scientific advances made international communication and connection newly possible, the rate of change and progress rapidly exploded. A curious vision of the Zohar sees the year 1840 as a year in which the ‘upper waters’ and ‘lower waters’ would both erupt, which some saw as a statement about the advances in science (lower waters) and mysticism (upper waters). The Vilna Gaon and the Leshem, two very different Kabbalistically-minded thinkers, both saw 1840, or 5600, as a year marked by profound possibility.
As David Bashevkin, in his article in Tablet Magazine on this topic, points out that the Hassidic Rabbi of Izhbitz saw the possibilities of profound spiritual change as rooted in the changes in technology:
Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner, for example, started his Hasidic court, the Hasidut of Izhbitz, in 1840, seeing the moment of turmoil and upheaval as a joyous rapture in which “the words of Torah can become more accessible and attainable to the minds of mankind.”
Izhbitz modeled a rare fusion of modern sensibilities with traditional Hasidic sensitivities, meeting the uncertainties brought about by the year’s technological, political, and economic changes with optimism and resilience. Where others saw a period where traditional religion was simply obsolete and others just saw anxiety over its demise, Rabbi Leiner and others saw opportunity: Previous generations, they argued, were pressed by physical hardships to think of little more than survival. Now that technology has freed so much of our time and our space, it was time to reconsider the essential questions of humanity.
Perhaps we need not be fatalistic or dystopian about the fears and anxieties of our age. Perhaps this storm of progress marks a time of powerful possibility, our anxieties reflecting a new vulnerability that we feel as our past modes of living are now changing.
God communicates this same paradox. On the one hand: “I, God, am unchanged.” (Malakhi, 3:6.) On the other, “I will be that which I will be.” (Shemot 3:14). Perhaps God is unchanged in constant change, static in His dynamic quality. Like our time – changing, yet unchanged.
Walter Benjamin was particularly obsessed with a monoprint by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee called Angelus Novelus, which now resides in the Israel Museum, after stints with Adorno and Scholem. The painting has a complicated history, in what itself makes for a powerful meta-commentary on the ideas of history. Benjamin’s idea of the ‘angel of history’ was inspired by Angelus Novelus, and it refers to this sense that humanity experiences amidst the constant change of our world. We look towards the past, towards our roots, and are blown ever more towards the future. Read his fascinating words:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Our world is changing, for better and for worse. We want to find truth and meaning in the possibilities of today, facing the storm of progress with hope and curiosity, instead of fear and anxiety. We want to learn Torah in the gaps that we feel in our lives, and use this time for what it can be. We rely on tradition in times of rapid change, and we sanctify the old and the new together. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook said this:
הישן יתחדש
והחדש יתקדש
The old shall be made new
And the new shall be made holy
This is the spirit that 18Forty attempts to embody. We hope to confront some of those challenges and present a new vision for the value of religion in the modern age. We hope to look at the many domains of alienation – theological, sociological, psychological – and approach the pressing questions of today in a way that provides meaning and comfort. We call ourselves 18Forty to remember that humanity has undergone rapid change before and emerged for the better. If we ask the right questions, maybe we can too.
How do we find ourselves in a time of rapid change?
This is a question that haunted Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940), one of the tragic figures of Jewish modernity. Born in Germany, Benjamin was a close friend of the foundational scholar of Kabbalah, Gerschom Scholem. The two German Jews were both deeply invested in the question of tradition, revelation, and identity, albeit in very different ways. Their friendship is famous and fruitful; their epistolary correspondence is one of the most philosophically intriguing and perplexing correspondences we have. Benjamin died by his own hand, fleeing the Nazis at the border of Spain. Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno, major figures in 20th century thought, championed Benjamin’s work after his passing, paying tribute to their lost friend.
Scholem was mainly a scholar of Kabbalah and mysticism (not necessarily the same, as readers of his know!), and Benjamin a less explicitly Jewishly oriented scholar, who thought about the world more broadly. Robert Alter, in his masterful reading of their work, points out that Benjamin and Scholem operate through opposing frameworks. Scholem systematized fragments, and Benjamin fragmentized systems.
“Scholem devoted his life to expounding a body of lore that was intrinsically fragmentary, or at the very least anti-systematic. The power of his work is his success in conceptually defining a system from this welter of literary scraps, though some of his critics have accused him of imposing system where it may not exist. Benjamin’s aim was the converse: to preserve the fragmentariness of his materials through the mobility of montage, combining constant quotation with aphoristic observation, and thus allowing systematic thought to emerge from juxtaposition itself. Perhaps the task was in the end undoable.”
Both of these urges speak to us today. Our world is marked by a deep fragmentation, an alienation that manifests theologically, sociologically, and psychologically. In our age of screens and solitude, it is far too easy to feel removed, afar, outside of the system. Theologically, we often feel alienated from God. Sociologically, we feel alienated from our society or surroundings. Psychologically, we feel alienated from ourselves. We strive to find systems in the fragments of our lives, integrating the entirety of our lives into a holistic totality. Sometimes it works.
This isn’t to blame the screens for our alienation – it is as much an outgrowth of our attempt at holding on to ourselves in a rapidly changing world. The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has deemed the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” that the rate of growth of a variety of systems – including technology – progresses at an exponential rate with time. Basically, this means that the world changes at a faster pace as time goes on. Major paradigm shifts in science have led to the time between generations shortening, as children reared in the Palm Pilot generation barely recognize those of the Snapchat generation. How does humanity find itself in a world of rapid change?
The Vilna Gaon, R. Elijah of Vilna, foresaw this idea of the rate of change speeding up in a commentary about an enigmatic Talmudic passage about the Messianic process. A verse in Yeshaya (60:22) seems paradoxical, as God indicates that the Messianic age will come both “in its time,” as well as when God “hastens it.” Here’s what the Talmud (Sanhedrin 98a) says:
אמר רבי אלכסנדרי רבי יהושע בן לוי רמי כתיב (ישעיהו ס, כב) בעתה וכתיב אחישנה זכו אחישנה לא זכו בעתה
Rabbi Alexandri says: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi raises a contradiction in a verse addressing God’s commitment to redeem the Jewish people. In the verse: “I the Lord in its time I will hasten it” (Isaiah 60:22), it is written: “In its time,” indicating that there is a designated time for the redemption, and it is written: “I will hasten it,” indicating that there is no set time for the redemption.
Dealing with this contradiction, one sage offers that “if they merit, “I will hasten it,” and if they do not merit, it will come “in its time.” The Vilna Gaon turns this passage on its head, suggesting that there will be a time in which the very sense of time unfolds, our very rate of change speeds up so that is paradoxically both “in its time” and “hastened.” This is the time we live in – a storm of rapid change, as time feels like it speeds up around us. How do we find ourselves in this storm of progress?
One place to turn to is 1840. A year of intense messianic expectations for some, 1840 marked the beginning of an efflorescence of scientific and mystical thought, and mirrors many of the same dynamics of our world today. Scientific advances made international communication and connection newly possible, the rate of change and progress rapidly exploded. A curious vision of the Zohar sees the year 1840 as a year in which the ‘upper waters’ and ‘lower waters’ would both erupt, which some saw as a statement about the advances in science (lower waters) and mysticism (upper waters). The Vilna Gaon and the Leshem, two very different Kabbalistically-minded thinkers, both saw 1840, or 5600, as a year marked by profound possibility.
As David Bashevkin, in his article in Tablet Magazine on this topic, points out that the Hassidic Rabbi of Izhbitz saw the possibilities of profound spiritual change as rooted in the changes in technology:
Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner, for example, started his Hasidic court, the Hasidut of Izhbitz, in 1840, seeing the moment of turmoil and upheaval as a joyous rapture in which “the words of Torah can become more accessible and attainable to the minds of mankind.”
Izhbitz modeled a rare fusion of modern sensibilities with traditional Hasidic sensitivities, meeting the uncertainties brought about by the year’s technological, political, and economic changes with optimism and resilience. Where others saw a period where traditional religion was simply obsolete and others just saw anxiety over its demise, Rabbi Leiner and others saw opportunity: Previous generations, they argued, were pressed by physical hardships to think of little more than survival. Now that technology has freed so much of our time and our space, it was time to reconsider the essential questions of humanity.
Perhaps we need not be fatalistic or dystopian about the fears and anxieties of our age. Perhaps this storm of progress marks a time of powerful possibility, our anxieties reflecting a new vulnerability that we feel as our past modes of living are now changing.
God communicates this same paradox. On the one hand: “I, God, am unchanged.” (Malakhi, 3:6.) On the other, “I will be that which I will be.” (Shemot 3:14). Perhaps God is unchanged in constant change, static in His dynamic quality. Like our time – changing, yet unchanged.
Walter Benjamin was particularly obsessed with a monoprint by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee called Angelus Novelus, which now resides in the Israel Museum, after stints with Adorno and Scholem. The painting has a complicated history, in what itself makes for a powerful meta-commentary on the ideas of history. Benjamin’s idea of the ‘angel of history’ was inspired by Angelus Novelus, and it refers to this sense that humanity experiences amidst the constant change of our world. We look towards the past, towards our roots, and are blown ever more towards the future. Read his fascinating words:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Our world is changing, for better and for worse. We want to find truth and meaning in the possibilities of today, facing the storm of progress with hope and curiosity, instead of fear and anxiety. We want to learn Torah in the gaps that we feel in our lives, and use this time for what it can be. We rely on tradition in times of rapid change, and we sanctify the old and the new together. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook said this:
הישן יתחדש
והחדש יתקדש
The old shall be made new
And the new shall be made holy
This is the spirit that 18Forty attempts to embody. We hope to confront some of those challenges and present a new vision for the value of religion in the modern age. We hope to look at the many domains of alienation – theological, sociological, psychological – and approach the pressing questions of today in a way that provides meaning and comfort. We call ourselves 18Forty to remember that humanity has undergone rapid change before and emerged for the better. If we ask the right questions, maybe we can too.
Polemical encounters esoteric discourse and its others / edited by Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad.
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Theodor W. Adorno’s Critical Theory of Society
On September 11, 1903, German philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno was born. Adorno is known for his critical theory of society. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy in the 20th century.
“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft [Cultural Criticism and Society] (1951)
Youth and First Philosophic Studies
Adorno was born in 1903 in Frankfurt as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund. He was the only child of the wine wholesaler Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870-1946) and the singer Maria Calvelli-Adorno (1865-1952). After skipping two classes, the “privileged high-flyer” passed the Abitur at the age of 17 in 1921 at the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gymnasium (today Freiherr-vom-Stein-Schule) in Frankfurt as the best pupil in his class. He was trained in philosophy by his 14 years older friend Siegfried Kracauer, whom he had met at a friend of his parents. Kracauer was an important feature editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Together they regularly read Immanuel Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason on Saturday afternoons over the years, an experience that, according to Adorno’s self-testimony, was formative for him.[1]
University Studies in Frankfurt and Vienna
From 1921 he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology and sociology at the University of Frankfurt; at the same time he began his career as a music critic. He heard philosophy from Hans Cornelius, sociology from Gottfried Salomon-Delatour and Franz Oppenheimer. In 1922 he met Max Horkheimer in a seminar at the university, with whom he shared theoretical views and made friends. He also maintained a close and lasting friendship with Walter Benjamin, whom he had met as a student through Kracauer’s mediation. At the end of 1924 he completed his dissertation on Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology with summa cum laude.[2]
In March 1925 Adorno moved to Vienna, the birthplace of twelve-tone music. He began postgraduate studies in composition with Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg‘s pupil, and simultaneously took piano lessons with Eduard Steuermann. Later (1949), he praised Schönberg’s twelve-tone compositions in the Philosophy of New Music. For Adorno, the years of his stay in Vienna were the most intense in terms of composition. Among his compositions, a series of piano song cycles make up the most extensive and weighty part. He also wrote orchestral pieces, chamber music for strings and a cappella choirs and arranged French folk songs.
Music Publishing and Composing in Frankfurt
Back in Frankfurt, he devoted himself to music publishing and composing. Adorno also began work on a habilitation thesis. He processed the results of an extensive study of psychoanalysis in an extensive philosophical-psychological treatise entitled Concept of the Unconscious in Transcendental Psychology, which he presented to his doctoral supervisor Cornelius. After the latter had expressed reservations, which his assistant Horkheimer joined, Adorno withdrew his habilitation application in 1928. Cornelius had complained that the work was too little original and paraphrased his own, Cornelius’ thinking.
Successful Habilitation on Kierkegaard
The years 1928-1930 were years of professional uncertainty for Adorno. He tried in vain to find a permanent position as a music critic for Ullstein in Berlin. Adorno also concentrated on writing a second habilitation thesis. He had accepted the offer of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, newly appointed to a philosophical chair in 1929, to habilitate with him. After writing down the work on the Danish existential philosopher and Hegel critic Kierkegaard within a year, he submitted it under the title Kierkegaard – Construction of the Aesthetic and was thus habilitated at Frankfurt University in February 1931.
After Adorno had been awarded the Venia legendi, he gave his inaugural lecture as a private lecturer in philosophy in May 1931; its title: “The topicality of philosophy“, which contained many thoughts that went into his later complete works. Before his emigration to the USA, Adorno was not yet one of the official collaborators of the Institute for Social Research, but he already published the essay Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik (On the social situation of music) in the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung published by Horkheimer since 1932. In it, he critically examined the production and consumption of music in contemporary capitalist society.
Emigration to Oxford
Adorno’s teaching activities ended in the winter semester of 1933, when the National Socialist regime withdrew his authority to teach academically from his father’s side because of his Jewish ancestry. Like many other intellectuals of his time, he did not expect the new regime to last long and, in retrospect, admitted that he had completely misjudged the political situation in 1933. He went to Great Britain, retaining his officially registered residence in Frankfurt, where, although he was already a German philosophy lecturer, he was accepted only as an advanced student in philosophy at Merton College in Oxford. He planned to earn a Ph.D. with a thesis on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl.
Adorno used the Oxford years not only for his Husserl studies. He wrote a critical treatise on Karl Mannheim‘s sociology of knowledge and articles on music theory for the Viennese music journal 23, which was committed to the avant-garde, as well as the essay Über Jazz, which appeared in 1936 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler and caused the most fierce reactions even after Adorno’s death. During this time Adorno maintained an intensive exchange of letters with Max Horkheimer, who was already living in American exile, whom he had met in Paris in December 1935 and visited in New York for two weeks in June 1937. Horkheimer finally made him an offer to take up a scientific activity in the USA that would secure his existence and to become an official member of his Institute for Social Research.
“Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)
Emigration to the U.S.
Following Horkheimer’s invitation, Adorno and his wife moved to the USA in February 1938 and thus emigrated from Nazi Germany. Upon his arrival, Adorno joined the Princeton Radio Research Project, a major research project led by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. At the beginning of 1942 Adorno and Horkheimer began to work on the book, which would later bear the title Dialectic of the Enlightenment. With the help of Adorno’s wife Gretel, the main work of Critical Theory was created as a joint effort of the two. It was first published in 1944 by the New York Institute of Social Research in the production process of mimeography under the title Philosophische Fragmente (Philosophical Fragments) and was published in its final form in 1947 by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam.
During these years he also collaborated with Thomas Mann, who for his novel Doctor Faustus received numerous suggestions from Adorno’s manuscript on the philosophy of new music, especially from the first part on Schönberg.[3] After the manuscript of the Dialectic Book – initially titled Philosophical Fragments – had been completed at the beginning of 1944, Adorno entered the large-scale research project on anti-Semitism jointly conducted by the University of Berkeley and the Institute of Social Research. His last position in the USA was as research director of the Hacker Psychiatric Foundation in October 1952, where he conducted content analysis studies on newspaper horoscopes and television series. After getting into conflict with the aggression researcher Friedrich Hacker, he resigned his position and returned to Germany in August 1953.
“Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (1944)
Back in Frankfurt
According to Adorno, his motivation to return to Germany was subjectively determined by homesickness and objectively by language. He was dependent on the German language, which for him had a “special relationship to philosophy“. He had returned to Frankfurt as a scientist in order to follow up his private lectureship in philosophy at his home university, which he had withdrawn in 1933. Adorno was jointly responsible for the reopening of the Institute for Social Research in the new building in 1951 as deputy director from the very beginning. The Institute was the first academic institution to enable sociology studies in post-war Germany.
After Horkheimer’s retreat to Montagnola in Switzerland, the main work rested on Adorno’s shoulders. In 1958 he officially took over the management of the institute. The scientific productivity that Adorno had developed in the USA in the field of social research contributed to his recognition in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the most important representatives of German sociology. In addition to his work as a university lecturer and director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Adorno has written important philosophical writings. As early as 1951, the collection of aphorisms: Minima Moralia, which he had dedicated to Max Horkheimer and which had been brought back from emigration and expanded, had appeared.
Later Life and the 1968 Student’s Protest
The last years of Adorno’s life have been marked by conflicts with his students. It was Adorno’s students who represented the spirit of revolt and tried to draw “practical consequences” from critical theory. Adorno’s lectures were repeatedly blown up by student activists, a particularly spectacular action was in April 1969, when Hannah Weitemeier and two other students pressed Adorno on the podium with bare breasts and sprinkled him with rose and tulip blossoms.
“When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, quoted in The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973)
In 1969 Adorno was forced to stop his lectures. On 31 January, when students had invaded the Institute for Social Research in order to categorically impose an immediate discussion on the political situation, the directors of the Institute – Adorno and Ludwig von Friedeburg – called the police and reported the occupiers. Adorno, who had always been an opponent of the police and surveillance state, suffered from this breach of his self-image. In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength. On August 6, 1969 Theodor W. Adorno died of a heart attack at age 65.
References and Further Reading:
- [1] Immanuel Kant – Philosopher of the Enlightenment, SciHi Blog
- [2] Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, SciHi Blog
- [3] Thomas Mann and the illustrious Mann Family, SciHi Blog
- [4] “Theodor Adorno”. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- [5] The Adorno Reference Archive at Marxists.org
- [6] Theodor W. Adorno at Wikidata
- [7] Timeline for Theodor W. Adorno, via Wikidata
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