Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz: Two Visions of Modernity

Abstract

2003 was the hundredth anniversary of Theodor W. Adorno’s birth. In Germany – and elsewhere – there was clearly a desire to show that critical theory was still alive. Although this article affirms the return to one of the classics of critical theory, it criticises the hagiographic ways in which this was done. If one of the most important challenges facing ‘global modernity’ is our ability to connect to the ‘concrete other’, Adorno’s critical theory is insufficient, and needs to be complemented by other intellectual articulations. This article proposes a comparison between Octavio Paz and Adorno. Both men located their intellectual commitment in a critique of modernity. But, so runs the argument here, Paz knew much better than Adorno that a critique of modernity needs to take into account the multiplicity of modern cultures.

Notes

¹ Adorno was aware of the fact that he, the former ‘non‐conformist’ intellectual, became a protagonist in the ‘intellectual founding of the Federal Republic’ of Germany (see Albrecht et al. 1999). Horkheimer reflects about this in a letter he wrote to Adorno:

It would create a unique situation in which two persons, who act with so much resistance to reality, and who precisely for this reason seem to be determined to powerlessness, are offered a possibility of influence which can hardly be calculated. (Kraushaar, 1998: 54)

² I appreciate a commentary by Stefan Müller‐Doohm that Adorno’s thinking is situated in a European context. I would not discuss this observation, which is definitely true. However, here I am trying to make the point that his idea of ‘critique’ is probably the result of a particularly German cultural situation. I will develop this argument later.

³ The most spectacular was probably when he resigned from his post as Mexican ambassador to India in protest against the slain of students in Mexico City in 1968.

⁴ For a more sophisticated view on Paz’s liberalism, see Grenier 2001.

⁵ One of the most severe crises in the relationship between intellectuals and government had been triggered by the crackdown on the Mexican students movement in 1968 (see Volpi 1998).

⁶ Some of which even sacrificed their lives, working as government officials instead of producing an intellectual oeuvre. This can be said for the ‘generación de 1915’ (see Krauze 2000).

⁷ Just as if he would announce an awareness of the plurality of modernities – which marks the debate about ‘multiple modernities’ in contemporary sociological theory – ahead of time.

⁸ ‘Critique is an indispensable element of the culture which is contradictory in itself […]’ (GS 10.1: 15).

⁹ ‘Narrowness’ (Enge) and ‘mustiness’ (Muff) are words that accompany Adorno’s thought at least from very early 1930s to the last decade of his life. They always seem to refer to a typical German attitude for which Adorno finds the most striking evidence in the ‘jargon of authenticity’, that is, a language that he encounters above all in Heidegger’s philosophy (see GS 6).