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El origen de la dialéctica negativa: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin y el Instituto de Frankfurt
Origen de la Dialectica Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin y el Instituto de Frankfurt
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
About the author
Susan Buck-Morss
33 books87 followersSusan Buck-Morss is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. She is currently Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 25, 2019
Utterly unbelievable how thorough this volume is
April 27, 2008
Crucial, keen, and a stellar program for brow-furrowing exercises.
July 30, 2015
Very smart, very helpful, beautifully written, full of fascinating material.
September 5, 2026
Thankfully, the world today bears little resemblance to Hitler’s Germany of 1933. And yet there are many indicators that some democracies are in danger of slipping into totalitarianism. Almost daily in the American media, for example, we are pummeled by state-sponsored narcissism, and we have become acclimated to the irrationalism of an anti-Enlightenment leader. Worse still, the USA is seeing a resurgence in what the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research labeled as the authoritarian personality. For in cowering to those above them in the social hierarchy while treating those below them as scum, the authoritarian personalities feel right at home in our reactionary, exceptionalist, and anti-DEI republic.
Susan Buck-Morss’ “The Origin of Negative Dialectics” projects historical images to represent how a small group of liberal German intellectuals in the 1930’s opposed totalitarianism through philosophical creativity together with incisive critique. But while the Frankfurt Institute’s insights on twentieth century ideology and political economy were often truly profound, its members ultimately found themselves in too marginal of a position to stem the tide of German fascism. They were forced to the political margins because they neither wrote propaganda for the masses, nor were they tolerated by the Nazis in power. Yet even in their failure to stop European fascism, the Frankfurt intellectuals embodied a progressive spirit of liberalism and democracy, things well worth lifting up and praising today.
Buck-Morss briefly surveys the private lives of individual researchers of the Frankfurt Institute, thereby attributing human faces to these often disembodied brains. But far more of her attention is directed towards the Institute’s intellectual projects, including their dialectical methods and their ideological struggles against totalitarianism. The book succeeds magnificently in bringing some rather heady, and sometimes nearly opaque, critical theory back down to earth. By collecting apt quotations while blocking together seemingly disparate thoughts and images, Buck-Morss uses her mimetic faculties to illuminate the Institute’s strangely consistent philosophy.
So who were these intellectuals who were forced into exile for so many years? They were pilgrims and critics in search of truth, mostly. And while they each had their own writing style, and each concentrated on a particular aspect of culture or history or philosophy, there were similarities besides common cause which united them all. First off, they were all more or less assimilated German Jews of the petty bourgeoisie. They were all academics by training, although each had his own critical methods. Their writings tended to be esoteric and eclectic. They were Marxists, but not religiously so. They actually bore a greater resemblance to liberals, placing faith in democratic progress while refusing to accept a disciplinarian Communist Party’s imminent revolution followed by unavoidable proletarian dictatorship. Most important, they were faithful friends to one other, exchanging criticism and extending encouragement after reading one another’s published and unpublished work. Moreover, after these scholars were scattered by Hitler and fascism, they all sought freedom and refuge in their adopted homelands. Whether in New York, Los Angeles, or Paris, they continued to conduct qualitative research and to write profound pieces of criticism.
In their critical social research, the Frankfurt Institute favored a pragmatic approach to the theories of Marx and Freud. From Marx, they learned to think about OBJECTIVE reality as the outcome of dialectical materialism. Marx also supplied the key to understanding capitalism’s chief malignancy, the commodity fetish. For Marx, the secret to the fetishism of commodities was simple: objects are on the one hand divorced from the social conditions of their production, while on the other hand, the same objects appear at markets, as if by magic. Through the impersonal dynamics of commodity and labor markets, the worker is left alienated, and so too is the consumer. The Frankfurt Institute delved deeper than perhaps anybody at that time into the nature of this alienation. From Freud, the Institute learned to interpret SUBJECTIVE reality. A critical tool like ‘the subconscious’ could be used to explain how a subject’s incorporated (or habituated, or imprinted) ‘second nature’ makes the once strange and arbitrary traits of a civilization seem after a time like good (‘natural’) common sense. Both Marx and Freud ended up granting to liberalism some of their most powerful analytical tools. But significantly, the teleological dogmas of Marx and Freud were dispensed with; one is left with a Marx minus the revolution and a Freud minus the cure. And because the endpoints of analysis (whether dialectical or psychiatric) are now so much less certain, no temptation arises to forestall freedom in the name of either Marxist or Freudian dogmas.
Max Horkheimer was arguably the most stable scholar of the Institute. Horkheimer directed the Institute in both Germany and the United States for most of its existence. He was often regarded as the most scientific of the group, or the most methodical, and the frequent dryness of his writings bears testimony to that fact. He shared with his peers at the Institute the desire to banish idealism and positivism from their social research. Still, in comparison with other scholars of the Institute, Horkheimer was the consummate social scientist. Horkheimer furnished an attractive, qualitative alternative to standard quantitative social research methods.
In works like “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Horkheimer showed his talent for criticism. There, he questioned mankind’s assumed birthright to take, to consume, and ultimately to destroy all that the natural world has to offer. Horkheimer also took an interest in the interpretation of what were called ‘concrete particulars.’ These are phenomena observed without any mediation by Platonic ideas or Hegelian concepts. In wresting method (as the path to truth) from theory (as constrained and focused vision), Horkheimer uncovered a roadmap of possibilities, licensing a renewed freedom of understanding, unfettered by prior judgements or prejudices. His attempt to perceive directly the Kantian thing-in-itself by arresting the cognitive application of pre-fab categories seems today rather mystical. (It is in fact a key aspect to what would later be called Transcendental Meditation.) But Horkheimer, despite both his conceptual creativity and his questioning of authority, always made sure not to cross the line separating a healthy respect for the limits of reason from the temptation to give one’s thinking over to the mystical or irrational.
Of all the Frankfurt intellectuals, Walter Benjamin was the least troubled by the mystical. Benjamin came to understand philosophy from two opposed directions: from the writings of transcendental phenomenologists; and from the Kabbalah, the medieval text of Jewish mysticism. Both paths lead apparently to the same place—an imminent critique of phenomena offered up as a history of the now. Benjamin sought to read from the text of the world by contemplating how the ‘surface’ perception of things (not the ‘deep’ understanding of things) provides a novel path to critique. Like Adorno, Benjamin was interested in making hidden ‘constellations’ manifest. These constellations are the thought ligatures which unite dissimilars serendipitously, animating new thoughts which emerge from the chance connections between ideas. Benjamin’s essay about the both random and structured connections he felt rise to consciousness when unpacking the books of his library demonstrates this method clearly. But a better example is his “Arcades Project,” a book full of hundreds of juxtaposed photos, drawings, and quotations of various lengths which tell a story, without narrative continuity, about the growth and flowering of Paris in the nineteenth century. Most of the images in Benjamin’s magnum opus relate in some way to steel and glass, but plenty of deeper insights resonate for its readers, who are lured into defamiliarizing themselves from the everyday surfaces of everyday things in order to see the banal, the boring, and even the beautiful in a new light.
Benjamin applied some of his best criticism to the theater, and he dedicated his earliest critical efforts to understanding German tragedy. His love for the theater (and his admiration of Marx) led to his friendship with Brecht. Surrealism, both on and off stage, suited Benjamin just fine, as did the prospect of shocking people with an avant-garde philosophy. And as it was for Shakespeare, all of Benjamin's world was a stage. This stage is then animated by a process of ‘mimesis,’ or ‘exact fantasy,’ whereby a world and a time are replicated in the isolated imaginations of an entire audience. For Benjamin, routine communication takes place in pretty much the same way, as if we were always on stage in the time-space of mimesis. We must, in line with Benjamin, put forward this notion of fantasy, along with suspension of disbelief, in order to account for how we might believe ourselves to understand one another exactly. In making communication between distinct minds possible, mimesis then does much of the work left behind by banished ideas and concepts. Hence, people do not understand one other by sharing universal Platonic forms. Instead, they do so by desiring to understand one other, by wanting to understand and to be understood.
Theodor Adorno might be the most widely respected author and philosopher of the Frankfurt Institute. He did not invent jargon, nor did he develop abstract systems. His aim was cultural criticism, not theoretical development. For example, in his deconstruction of Kierkegaard, Adorno turned Kierkegaard’s own words against him. So while Kierkegaard made the bourgeois ‘intérieur’ into a metaphor for the mind in his existential philosophy, Adorno shows that this metaphor of the intérieur is not a metaphor at all but the literal truth. With its privacy, signs of wealth, autonomy, safety, comfort, etc. this site of privileged conformity is the whole point and goal of Kierkegaard’s intellectual endeavors, and is not a mere poetic aside.
Many of Adorno’s most lasting ideas derive from Hegel. Adorno would often play with the unity of opposites to illuminate an insight. Take ‘natural’ ‘history.’ For Adorno, there is a clash here, since what is natural is timelessly so and so is not historical, and what is historical is precisely what changes, and so is no part of timeless nature. We conclude that if there is a way to study natural history, it must be sensitive to this paradox, that the eternal might presuppose the ephemeral, and vice versa. Another gift from Hegel is the notion of dialectic itself. Hegel saw dialectic as resulting in ever broader and ever fewer concepts through synthesis. However, Adorno favored a ‘negative dialectic,’ in which two terms transform one another without collapsing into a synthesis. Think of the Cold War. The end of the Berlin Wall was not the end of history, as some believed at the time. Since a bunch of nations now hold nuclear weapons like guns to each other’s temples, we can’t really say that the nuclear fear is over. Thus, rather than synthesizing into the Geist, or global spirit, as Hegel would fantasize, the two terms, USA and USSR/Russia, are still in a powerful, if now ideologically different, dialectical opposition. Negative dialectics can also be used to offset some of the excesses of Marx. For example, the class struggle need not resolve itself in a killing off of the privileged. We can instead easily imagine a more just and equitable society, one where the working poor and the bourgeois elite are not at each other’s throats.
/Musical Interlude. I’m enjoying listening to Mingus right now, something Adorno would never do. A one-time disciple of Shönberg in 1920’s Vienna, Adorno was ironically quite a snob about music. Failing to realize that the ‘shock of the new’ necessarily yields diminishing returns, Adorno jumped in with both feet into the quagmire of modern classical music. Adorno considered atonal music to be the height of aesthetic progress, apparently without regard for how god-awfully bad it sounds. But all progress requires change, and eventually you run out of aesthetically satisfying options when you need to shock and impress all the time. Modern jazz in the late 1960’s suffered the same fate as modern classical. The exaggerated freedoms necessary for newness regressed the whole project into ugliness. People didn’t like it; they wouldn’t support it; and eventually it just went away. Orchestras today still play Beethoven, and jazz clubs still ring out as though Miles or Dizzy were still alive. But as art forms capable of new self-transformations, classical and jazz are equally dead./
Benjamin and Adorno disagreed on how best to interpret a work of art in what Benjamin called “the age of mechanical reproduction.” On the one hand, Adorno aptly pointed out how a sound recording, once completely removed from the event of its production, becomes impersonal and loses its aesthetic aura. But if the song is popular, it then takes on an entirely new aura, that of the commodity fetish. Benjamin however was more optimistic, seeing the mass production of records as bringing culture to the masses, precisely because the performer need not be physically present all the time. Adorno was also troubled by how films or records could (and did) provide robust scaffolds for propaganda. As with the advent of writing, the mechanical reproduction of art fosters the dissemination of ideology through an aestheticized medium.
I found “The Origin of Negative Dialectics” to be an enlightening, although difficult, read. I had read previously many of the Frankfurt Institute works the author references, and I imagine I would have missed quite a bit if I had not done so. The book also feels somewhat troubled by a pessimism and negativity, and at times seems almost paranoid. But these are once again troubling, schizoid times, and we need writers like Buck-Morss to help see us through them. As a guide to critical theory, Buck-Morss’ book is far superior to Martin Jay’s “The Dialectical Imagination,” which dwells on biographical details while leaving the substance of Frankfurt Institute ideas to the reader’s imagination. I recommend “The Origin of Negative Dialectics” to anyone who seeks a leftist theory which does not dismiss the free individual as a bourgeois pawn. In sum, Buck-Morss has triumphed in giving the new, new left a way to talk about fascism in the 21st century. If you are looking for an ideological apparatus which provides options and permits choices, then you might do no better than to read this book. It asks all the right questions without dogmatically closing off much needed debate.
Susan Buck-Morss’ “The Origin of Negative Dialectics” projects historical images to represent how a small group of liberal German intellectuals in the 1930’s opposed totalitarianism through philosophical creativity together with incisive critique. But while the Frankfurt Institute’s insights on twentieth century ideology and political economy were often truly profound, its members ultimately found themselves in too marginal of a position to stem the tide of German fascism. They were forced to the political margins because they neither wrote propaganda for the masses, nor were they tolerated by the Nazis in power. Yet even in their failure to stop European fascism, the Frankfurt intellectuals embodied a progressive spirit of liberalism and democracy, things well worth lifting up and praising today.
Buck-Morss briefly surveys the private lives of individual researchers of the Frankfurt Institute, thereby attributing human faces to these often disembodied brains. But far more of her attention is directed towards the Institute’s intellectual projects, including their dialectical methods and their ideological struggles against totalitarianism. The book succeeds magnificently in bringing some rather heady, and sometimes nearly opaque, critical theory back down to earth. By collecting apt quotations while blocking together seemingly disparate thoughts and images, Buck-Morss uses her mimetic faculties to illuminate the Institute’s strangely consistent philosophy.
So who were these intellectuals who were forced into exile for so many years? They were pilgrims and critics in search of truth, mostly. And while they each had their own writing style, and each concentrated on a particular aspect of culture or history or philosophy, there were similarities besides common cause which united them all. First off, they were all more or less assimilated German Jews of the petty bourgeoisie. They were all academics by training, although each had his own critical methods. Their writings tended to be esoteric and eclectic. They were Marxists, but not religiously so. They actually bore a greater resemblance to liberals, placing faith in democratic progress while refusing to accept a disciplinarian Communist Party’s imminent revolution followed by unavoidable proletarian dictatorship. Most important, they were faithful friends to one other, exchanging criticism and extending encouragement after reading one another’s published and unpublished work. Moreover, after these scholars were scattered by Hitler and fascism, they all sought freedom and refuge in their adopted homelands. Whether in New York, Los Angeles, or Paris, they continued to conduct qualitative research and to write profound pieces of criticism.
In their critical social research, the Frankfurt Institute favored a pragmatic approach to the theories of Marx and Freud. From Marx, they learned to think about OBJECTIVE reality as the outcome of dialectical materialism. Marx also supplied the key to understanding capitalism’s chief malignancy, the commodity fetish. For Marx, the secret to the fetishism of commodities was simple: objects are on the one hand divorced from the social conditions of their production, while on the other hand, the same objects appear at markets, as if by magic. Through the impersonal dynamics of commodity and labor markets, the worker is left alienated, and so too is the consumer. The Frankfurt Institute delved deeper than perhaps anybody at that time into the nature of this alienation. From Freud, the Institute learned to interpret SUBJECTIVE reality. A critical tool like ‘the subconscious’ could be used to explain how a subject’s incorporated (or habituated, or imprinted) ‘second nature’ makes the once strange and arbitrary traits of a civilization seem after a time like good (‘natural’) common sense. Both Marx and Freud ended up granting to liberalism some of their most powerful analytical tools. But significantly, the teleological dogmas of Marx and Freud were dispensed with; one is left with a Marx minus the revolution and a Freud minus the cure. And because the endpoints of analysis (whether dialectical or psychiatric) are now so much less certain, no temptation arises to forestall freedom in the name of either Marxist or Freudian dogmas.
Max Horkheimer was arguably the most stable scholar of the Institute. Horkheimer directed the Institute in both Germany and the United States for most of its existence. He was often regarded as the most scientific of the group, or the most methodical, and the frequent dryness of his writings bears testimony to that fact. He shared with his peers at the Institute the desire to banish idealism and positivism from their social research. Still, in comparison with other scholars of the Institute, Horkheimer was the consummate social scientist. Horkheimer furnished an attractive, qualitative alternative to standard quantitative social research methods.
In works like “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Horkheimer showed his talent for criticism. There, he questioned mankind’s assumed birthright to take, to consume, and ultimately to destroy all that the natural world has to offer. Horkheimer also took an interest in the interpretation of what were called ‘concrete particulars.’ These are phenomena observed without any mediation by Platonic ideas or Hegelian concepts. In wresting method (as the path to truth) from theory (as constrained and focused vision), Horkheimer uncovered a roadmap of possibilities, licensing a renewed freedom of understanding, unfettered by prior judgements or prejudices. His attempt to perceive directly the Kantian thing-in-itself by arresting the cognitive application of pre-fab categories seems today rather mystical. (It is in fact a key aspect to what would later be called Transcendental Meditation.) But Horkheimer, despite both his conceptual creativity and his questioning of authority, always made sure not to cross the line separating a healthy respect for the limits of reason from the temptation to give one’s thinking over to the mystical or irrational.
Of all the Frankfurt intellectuals, Walter Benjamin was the least troubled by the mystical. Benjamin came to understand philosophy from two opposed directions: from the writings of transcendental phenomenologists; and from the Kabbalah, the medieval text of Jewish mysticism. Both paths lead apparently to the same place—an imminent critique of phenomena offered up as a history of the now. Benjamin sought to read from the text of the world by contemplating how the ‘surface’ perception of things (not the ‘deep’ understanding of things) provides a novel path to critique. Like Adorno, Benjamin was interested in making hidden ‘constellations’ manifest. These constellations are the thought ligatures which unite dissimilars serendipitously, animating new thoughts which emerge from the chance connections between ideas. Benjamin’s essay about the both random and structured connections he felt rise to consciousness when unpacking the books of his library demonstrates this method clearly. But a better example is his “Arcades Project,” a book full of hundreds of juxtaposed photos, drawings, and quotations of various lengths which tell a story, without narrative continuity, about the growth and flowering of Paris in the nineteenth century. Most of the images in Benjamin’s magnum opus relate in some way to steel and glass, but plenty of deeper insights resonate for its readers, who are lured into defamiliarizing themselves from the everyday surfaces of everyday things in order to see the banal, the boring, and even the beautiful in a new light.
Benjamin applied some of his best criticism to the theater, and he dedicated his earliest critical efforts to understanding German tragedy. His love for the theater (and his admiration of Marx) led to his friendship with Brecht. Surrealism, both on and off stage, suited Benjamin just fine, as did the prospect of shocking people with an avant-garde philosophy. And as it was for Shakespeare, all of Benjamin's world was a stage. This stage is then animated by a process of ‘mimesis,’ or ‘exact fantasy,’ whereby a world and a time are replicated in the isolated imaginations of an entire audience. For Benjamin, routine communication takes place in pretty much the same way, as if we were always on stage in the time-space of mimesis. We must, in line with Benjamin, put forward this notion of fantasy, along with suspension of disbelief, in order to account for how we might believe ourselves to understand one another exactly. In making communication between distinct minds possible, mimesis then does much of the work left behind by banished ideas and concepts. Hence, people do not understand one other by sharing universal Platonic forms. Instead, they do so by desiring to understand one other, by wanting to understand and to be understood.
Theodor Adorno might be the most widely respected author and philosopher of the Frankfurt Institute. He did not invent jargon, nor did he develop abstract systems. His aim was cultural criticism, not theoretical development. For example, in his deconstruction of Kierkegaard, Adorno turned Kierkegaard’s own words against him. So while Kierkegaard made the bourgeois ‘intérieur’ into a metaphor for the mind in his existential philosophy, Adorno shows that this metaphor of the intérieur is not a metaphor at all but the literal truth. With its privacy, signs of wealth, autonomy, safety, comfort, etc. this site of privileged conformity is the whole point and goal of Kierkegaard’s intellectual endeavors, and is not a mere poetic aside.
Many of Adorno’s most lasting ideas derive from Hegel. Adorno would often play with the unity of opposites to illuminate an insight. Take ‘natural’ ‘history.’ For Adorno, there is a clash here, since what is natural is timelessly so and so is not historical, and what is historical is precisely what changes, and so is no part of timeless nature. We conclude that if there is a way to study natural history, it must be sensitive to this paradox, that the eternal might presuppose the ephemeral, and vice versa. Another gift from Hegel is the notion of dialectic itself. Hegel saw dialectic as resulting in ever broader and ever fewer concepts through synthesis. However, Adorno favored a ‘negative dialectic,’ in which two terms transform one another without collapsing into a synthesis. Think of the Cold War. The end of the Berlin Wall was not the end of history, as some believed at the time. Since a bunch of nations now hold nuclear weapons like guns to each other’s temples, we can’t really say that the nuclear fear is over. Thus, rather than synthesizing into the Geist, or global spirit, as Hegel would fantasize, the two terms, USA and USSR/Russia, are still in a powerful, if now ideologically different, dialectical opposition. Negative dialectics can also be used to offset some of the excesses of Marx. For example, the class struggle need not resolve itself in a killing off of the privileged. We can instead easily imagine a more just and equitable society, one where the working poor and the bourgeois elite are not at each other’s throats.
/Musical Interlude. I’m enjoying listening to Mingus right now, something Adorno would never do. A one-time disciple of Shönberg in 1920’s Vienna, Adorno was ironically quite a snob about music. Failing to realize that the ‘shock of the new’ necessarily yields diminishing returns, Adorno jumped in with both feet into the quagmire of modern classical music. Adorno considered atonal music to be the height of aesthetic progress, apparently without regard for how god-awfully bad it sounds. But all progress requires change, and eventually you run out of aesthetically satisfying options when you need to shock and impress all the time. Modern jazz in the late 1960’s suffered the same fate as modern classical. The exaggerated freedoms necessary for newness regressed the whole project into ugliness. People didn’t like it; they wouldn’t support it; and eventually it just went away. Orchestras today still play Beethoven, and jazz clubs still ring out as though Miles or Dizzy were still alive. But as art forms capable of new self-transformations, classical and jazz are equally dead./
Benjamin and Adorno disagreed on how best to interpret a work of art in what Benjamin called “the age of mechanical reproduction.” On the one hand, Adorno aptly pointed out how a sound recording, once completely removed from the event of its production, becomes impersonal and loses its aesthetic aura. But if the song is popular, it then takes on an entirely new aura, that of the commodity fetish. Benjamin however was more optimistic, seeing the mass production of records as bringing culture to the masses, precisely because the performer need not be physically present all the time. Adorno was also troubled by how films or records could (and did) provide robust scaffolds for propaganda. As with the advent of writing, the mechanical reproduction of art fosters the dissemination of ideology through an aestheticized medium.
I found “The Origin of Negative Dialectics” to be an enlightening, although difficult, read. I had read previously many of the Frankfurt Institute works the author references, and I imagine I would have missed quite a bit if I had not done so. The book also feels somewhat troubled by a pessimism and negativity, and at times seems almost paranoid. But these are once again troubling, schizoid times, and we need writers like Buck-Morss to help see us through them. As a guide to critical theory, Buck-Morss’ book is far superior to Martin Jay’s “The Dialectical Imagination,” which dwells on biographical details while leaving the substance of Frankfurt Institute ideas to the reader’s imagination. I recommend “The Origin of Negative Dialectics” to anyone who seeks a leftist theory which does not dismiss the free individual as a bourgeois pawn. In sum, Buck-Morss has triumphed in giving the new, new left a way to talk about fascism in the 21st century. If you are looking for an ideological apparatus which provides options and permits choices, then you might do no better than to read this book. It asks all the right questions without dogmatically closing off much needed debate.
November 13, 2011
Just started. I don't think anything quite yet. I do like her description of what Adorno/Benjamin picked up from Lukacs' dialectical method while rejecting the Proletariat as the univeral subject of history.
Having finished this, it is perhaps one of the best books I have read on Adorno and Benjamin. Buck Morss clearly and concisely describes and incredibly difficult set of theoretical arguments in a way that makes these two difficult thinkers approachable.
Having finished this, it is perhaps one of the best books I have read on Adorno and Benjamin. Buck Morss clearly and concisely describes and incredibly difficult set of theoretical arguments in a way that makes these two difficult thinkers approachable.
August 6, 2023
Mezclando los registros del ensayo teórico y la biografía intelectual, el libro logra ser un gran punto de entrada a los pensamientos tanto de Adorno como de Benjamin. Se propone dar un panorama general y unificado de los casi 50 años de actividad intelectual de Adorno. Para ello, Buck-Morss lee en el corpus adorniano una recurrencia motívica, una rotación en torno a un centro móvil, que es resultado de una continua reflexión sobre las dos grandes pasiones intelectuales de Adorno: Schönberg y Benjamin. A través de sus acercamientos y distancias vemos adquirir en este pensamiento la fisionomía cuya forma final se observa en Dialéctica Negativa, de 1966. No obstante, para cuando llegamos a esa fecha, la autora se exime de explicar la temática de dicho libro. No hace falta. La genealogía que traza hasta ese momento culmina por sí misma en la cristalización del concepto de la dialéctica negativa. El libro realiza lo que su título promete: traza el origen de Dialéctica Negativa, sin explicarlo. Se trata de una estrategia que realiza una verdadera invitación a la lectura, en cuanto que la autora se retira en el punto exacto en el que comienza el deseo de leer a Adorno.
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September 6, 2024Výstižný, pečlivý a hlavně přístupný popis komplikovaných filozofických argumentů Theodora Adorna ve vztahu s Waltrem Benjaminem.
Čtenář, který se jako já i chtěl více dozvědět o založení či fungování frankfurtské školy, může být trochu zklamán, na tohle se autorka nezaměřila. Ale pro toho kdo má touhu číst a studovat samotného Adorna, bude velice užitečné ne-li nezbytné, mít tuto knihu po ruce.
Čtenář, který se jako já i chtěl více dozvědět o založení či fungování frankfurtské školy, může být trochu zklamán, na tohle se autorka nezaměřila. Ale pro toho kdo má touhu číst a studovat samotného Adorna, bude velice užitečné ne-li nezbytné, mít tuto knihu po ruce.
May 13, 2026
Is it the nerdiest thing ever that I really could not put this down as soon as I picked it up? I think this is my favorite ever work of intellectual history. Genuinely synthesized so many things for me over the course of a semester-long class on the Frankfurt School
June 14, 2026
is quite dense and demands slow reading. The footnotes enriches the text, the sources are important to read through.
I came to this work by studying Walter Benjamin and sooner or later you arrive at Adorno.
Adorno can only truly be understood through Benjamin as I see it now: they influenced each other, but the mystical background that is secularized by Adorno needs to be understood first.
After wrestling through chapter 2 (Lukacs, Reification ==> boring, tedious) , the real insight for me came at chapter 3-4-5, where the gold is.
Yet throughout the book I repeatedly found myself returning to Benjamin as the key that unlocked Adorno. That is in the (Messianic, liberating the past) Dialectic Images that is secularized by Adorno into Negative Dialectics. The Messianic (liberating the surpressed past) is the key and returning common ground that links them together in their complex thoughts that goes in all directions.
Adorno can only truly be understood through Benjamin.
Buck-Morss demonstrates that Adorno's negative dialectics emerged from a secularization and transformation of Benjamin's philosophy of historical truth
I came to this work by studying Walter Benjamin and sooner or later you arrive at Adorno.
Adorno can only truly be understood through Benjamin as I see it now: they influenced each other, but the mystical background that is secularized by Adorno needs to be understood first.
After wrestling through chapter 2 (Lukacs, Reification ==> boring, tedious) , the real insight for me came at chapter 3-4-5, where the gold is.
Yet throughout the book I repeatedly found myself returning to Benjamin as the key that unlocked Adorno. That is in the (Messianic, liberating the past) Dialectic Images that is secularized by Adorno into Negative Dialectics. The Messianic (liberating the surpressed past) is the key and returning common ground that links them together in their complex thoughts that goes in all directions.
Adorno can only truly be understood through Benjamin.
Buck-Morss demonstrates that Adorno's negative dialectics emerged from a secularization and transformation of Benjamin's philosophy of historical truth
March 15, 2025
Al principio me atasqué, pero en cuanto vas hilando el pensamiento de Adorno lo explica con mucha profundidad y fluidez
to-keep-reference
July 13, 2017La investigación de Susan Buck-Morss en su libro Origen de la dialéctica negativa, obró como un punto de inflexión en la interpretación de la problemática relación entre Adorno y Benjamin.
Discutido en Clase de Arte, Estética y Política.
Discutido en Clase de Arte, Estética y Política.
January 4, 2009
Amazingly lucid and interesting explanatory work. All other books on Adorno have been laborious and lacked the clarity of understanding that Susan Buck-Morss brings to bear on her subject.
December 6, 2023
Muy amena la lectura y una buena introducción a los problemas dialécticos de la Escuela de Frankfurt y su articulación ideológica a lo largo de los años.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews