Thinking in Times of Danger: Adorno on Stupidity

Abstract

This contribution reconstructs the multilayered and scattered reflections on stupidity in prose pieces and letters by Theodor W. Adorno, especially in the years 1934–1944. The figure of mutilation, around which Adorno's writings on stupidity are organized, proceeds through various epistemological and historical constellations. The vanishing point is to be located in thinking and theoretical language no longer able to withstand the violence of actual facts. Futurity inscribes itself in various ways into these reflections: in Adorno's gestures of addressing his own thinking in exile, in the notion of survival of what is thought, but also in Adorno's insistence on a way of thinking that does not concede anything to “being in the know” or to the repression entailed in the convention of received thought (“Convenu des Vorgedachten”).

Keywords:

• Adorno
• exile
• Freud
• Horkheimer
• language
• National Socialism
• stupidity
• thinking

Notes

This article was translated from German by Gabriele Rahaman.

Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to His Parents 1939–1951, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 54; hereafter cited in the text with page numbers.

Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 17, Briefwechsel 1941–1948, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 153. English translations throughout this essay are by Gabriele Rahaman, unless otherwise indicated.

Ibid., 153.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 256; hereafter cited in the text with page numbers.

Ibid., 256, in Cumming's abbreviated translation from the German: “ein eingebildeter Zeuge, dem wir es hinterlassen, damit es doch nicht ganz mit uns untergeht.”

Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 16, Briefwechsel 1937–1940, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), 736.

Ibid., 736.

Birgit R. Erdle, “‘Sticking to our language’ / ‘an unserer Sprache festhalten’: Adorno in NYC,” “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile After 1933, eds. Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), 9–26.

Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1937–1940 736.

Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 150.

Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 37. The text “Zur Genese der Dummheit” most probably originated with Max Horkheimer, but it is likely that the topic was discussed not only by Horkheimer and Adorno but also by Gretel Adorno. In Ronell's reading, the text seems to appear as a cipher for self-restricted philosophical thinking on stupidity. Stupidity, Ronell argues, “is not so stupid as to oppose thought”—”if stupidity is seen to yield to thought, to surrender and annex itself to philosophy's strength, this peculiar circumstance must be derived from the way stupidity resists subsumption or substancialization into an entity that would be opposable to thought” (23). The fear of stupidity is present in Adorno's texts as well, as I will show, but my argument focuses on the genealogy of Adorno's thinking on stupidity in relation to historical experience.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C. J. M. Hubback (London, Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922), The International Psycho-Analytical Library 4, ed. Ernest Jones, 30.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 32.

The beginning of the text reads as follows: “The true symbol of intelligence is the snail's horn with which it feels” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 256), or in German: “Das Wahrzeichen der Intelligenz ist das Fühlhorn der Schnecke ‘mit dem tastenden Gesicht.’”

Theodor W. Adorno, “Wishful Thinking,” Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 198. The shades of meaning in the discourse about stupidity in Minima Moralia as something that is “socially produced and reinforced” (106) demand a separate study. Regarding “Hitler's stupidity” (106), see Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 184–186.

Theodor W. Adorno, “Notiz, Sommer 1939,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter IV (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 1995), 7: “Daß die Gewalt der Fakten so zum Entsetzen geworden ist, daß alle Theorie, und noch die wahre, sich wie Spott darauf ausnimmt—das ist dem Organ der Theorie selber, der Sprache, als Mal eingebrannt.”

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 7.

Adorno, Minima Moralia 57.

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 19.

Walter Benjamin, “Die Waffen von morgen,” Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV.1, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 475.

Ronell, Stupidity 64.

Theodor W. Adorno, August 5, 1940. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1927–1969, Vol. 2: 1938–1944, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 84.

Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie 150.

Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 292.

Ibid., 293.

Ibid., 293.

Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 132.

Ibid., 132.

Walter Benjamin, One Way Street: One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Amit Chaudhuri (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 98.