Can One Live after Auschwitz?

A Philosophical Reader

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by Theodor Adorno,

Edited by Rolf Tiedemann,

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Stanford University Press

Due/Published June 2003, 560 pages, paper

ISBN 0804731446

What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the "Western legacy of positivity," the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from "metaphysical experience."

In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled an introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: "Toward a New Categorical Imperative," "Damaged Life," "Administered World, Reified Thought," "Art, Memory of Suffering," and "A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive."

A substantial number of Adorno's writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno's work.

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

"An important collection, which gives us a significant cross-section of his social thought. In the case of so rich and multiple a thinker as Adorno, every thoughtful new selection like this one teaches us something new about him."--Fredric Jameson, Duke University

"Despite his conviction that no philosophy could presume to approach an event like Auschwitz, this collection of Adorno's essays and aphorisms attests to his extraordinary effort to regard human suffering as the precondition of thought and as the undoing of all claims to totality. Adorno's cultural criticism emerges here as a moral philosophy for a 'world that has outlived its own demise.'"--Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

Review

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” is perhaps Adorno’s best-known saying; it is also his most misunderstood. In his introduction to this collection, Tiedemann argues that Adorno was not calling for poets to stop writing altogether, but recognizing that poetry before and after Auschwitz were separated by an unbridgeable gulf. Adorno struggled with writing about Auschwitz, never quite sure how philosophy, theory, and literature could properly respond to the holocaust. Yet his profound ambivalence did not paralyze him, and much of his postwar writing considers how society allowed the holocaust to happen, the proper forms of remembrance, and the roots of oppression. Adorno harbored no illusions that philosophy or culture could prevent evil, yet he insisted on their necessity. Thus Adorno’s work, while highly critical of modern capitalist society, its brutality, and its reification of its citizens, also works within and even extolls the traditions of Western thought. Separated into five parts (“Toward a New Categorical Imperative,” “Damaged Life,” “Administered World, Reified Thought,” “Art, Memory of Suffering,” and “A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive”), Tiedemann’s intelligent selection offers Adorno as philosopher, cultural critic, and social theorist. The collection also retains a remarkable coherence in its investigation of the cultural, political, and philosophical implications of the holocaust.