Teaser: The Rapid Deactivation of the Subject (1944/45)
From the Horkheimer-Adorno correspondence. (+ a speculative 'Memo')
Teaser for a series on Adorno and Horkheimer’s preliminary sketches, mostly composed between 1945 and 1949, for their long-planned, but unwritten sequel to the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Contents.
I. Letters: The Rapid Deactivation of the Subject (Nov. 1944-Jan. 1945).
II. Memorandum To: Dr. T.W.A., N.I.L.P.F. From: Dr. M.H., M.A.M.U., 1/11/1945.1
I. Letters: The Rapid Deactivation of the Subject (Nov. 1944-Jan. 1945).
Horkheimer: The Rapid Deactivation of the Subject.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adorno, 11/24/1944.]2
The most overwhelming theoretical impression I have had so far here, both in and outside the [American Jewish] Committee, is of the rapid deactivation of the subject.3 I will hastily give two examples here, one from reality and one from the science in which it is reflected.
The point of view propagated by the left that one must distinguish between Nazis and Germans belongs to the open transition from the class phase to the racket phase of society. The meaning of this slogan is nothing other than that peoples are simply herds of cattle that follow every bellwether as a matter of course—or, expressed in more modern terms, can be led to do anything one might wish, provided they have experience in psychological methods of administration. The Russians, who of course have every reason to, post advertisements to this effect by marching into Romanian cities with regiments comprised of Romanian prisoners of war. A Volk in arms need only be exposed to a few months of scientifically sponsored propaganda to go to their death for the opposing clique. This is basically valid for France as well, which switched from Heriot-Weygand to Laval-Pétain, Laval-Pétain to de Gaulle, each time shedding revolutionary blood in the name of la grande France.4 From the same spirit springs the propaganda of the Free Germans and their unavoidable Dorothy Thompson.5 Why would anyone hold the Germans responsible for the Nazis? We know well enough they would fall in line behind Stalin or General Motors with the same enthusiasm. (And this, they will say, is just what we need.)
From what I’ve glimpsed in discussions with Lewin, Merton, and the others, modern psychology corresponds precisely with development.6 It has decisively turned its back on the ideology that the individual subject plays any historical role. Psychoanalysis as a whole is a thing of the past. The founding experiment was motivated by a few Fleischermeister (master butchers). They asked some agency for food consumption to investigate whether the consumption of less desirable brands of meat, such as the kidneys, could be vigorously boosted. So-called mass media, radio and pamphlets, proved inadequate. The people tuning in on the receiving end never paid enough attention to the kidneys shoved between Traviata and Bohème,7 both of which have more to do with the lungs anyway. The curve of kidney consumption just wouldn’t rise. This was the moment when the more ingenious psychologists resorted to Gestalt theory. Radio and pamphlets had been addressed to people as individuals—in their atomized, even chaotic form. But in reality, people live in structured, organized, integrated, and Gestalt-like groups. They don’t make decisions as individuals, nor do they accept kidneys as individuals. They consume as the group consumes. Therefore, the group is what must be influenced, the “group atmosphere”8 must be changed, the conditions under which the group makes its decisions must be manufactured. The way to do this is neither by accessing single individuals from without, nor by appeal to the masses. Such an approach belongs more to mechanistic, summative, abstract thinking. Rather, the change in atmosphere is achieved by training their leaders, who then train their sub-leaders, who then train their members. This ‘concrete’ thinking drove up kidney consumption and thereby conquered all branches of progressive social psychology; this is what we have to work with whether OSS, OWI, AMGOT, or UNRRA,9 the last of which is after all mostly concerned with food consumption in a literal sense. Why shouldn’t we use this psychology to stuff all the mouths that say evil things about the Jews until they’re too full to speak? Simply experiment with some intercultural groups for starters, training leaders, sub-leaders, and members, and ultimately ensure that the less desirable brand of human being is consumed with greater satisfaction too—that is the dark path for humanity. Forgive me, I must now turn back to the statistical data on the most recent elections. Quand même...!10
Adorno: A Truly Satanic Dialectic.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 12/2/1944.]11
As you can imagine, I fully agree with your thoughts on the deactivation of the subject. In fact, I wrote a prose piece, something you wouldn’t be familiar with, back in 1936, in Oxford, about war without hatred,12 and in which I pointed out the same mobility of states in subscribing to foreign policy combinations which you have just showed with the transition from Pétain to de Gaulle and the corresponding domestic phenomena. The ticket principle is truly universal, extending far beyond anti-Semitism. And as far as “dark paths of humanity” go, we are dealing with a truly satanic dialectic. Since today the world is just what the Fleischermeister imagine it to be, just imagine how easily one could increase the consumption of “less desirable brands of human beings”13 with the help of Gestalt theory and the schooling of its own sub-leaders! Huxley foresaw this too when he had all the castes of his rationally enclosed society be instructed “that even an Epsilon,”14 i.e. one of the Untermenschen, had a necessary and useful function to fulfill. Just think: one would have to yeah-say even this if it only prevented their eradication.
Adorno: Group Psychology and Formal Sociology.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 12/21/1944.]15
You really weren’t exaggerating. The lecture by Dr. Marrow,16 a gentleman who never stops talking about ‘results’ and ‘action’ and whose every word is believed, was, in all seriousness, identical to the parody you wrote me. He even told a story about kidneys and sweetbread and left the matter of its uses and applications to the Jews up to the audience. There even seems to be a direct connection between the Department of Agriculture and the greater Anti-Discrimination racket—namely, through Mr. Likert,17 who also attended the New York conference and, to distinguish himself, had everyone call him by his first name, “Rens.” In any event, group psychology amounts to a reheating of all the most stale leftover theorems of formal sociology, Durkheim, Le Bon.18 The trick is selecting conceptual formations that you can grasp a few determinate, manipulable factors, but, Lord willing, not any of the actually determinative, socially concrete moments. An idea such as “an individual behaves differently towards Jews depending on whether he acts as a member of a group or acts as an individual” promises enough work and bread for generations of researchers—especially if one considers: the same individual can belong to different groups! (Such as a church, a country club, an association for the improvement of public morality, etc.) The whole affair is pathetic. I prophesy that [Kurt] Lewin will associate himself with Mannheim. However positive their demeanor, I am nevertheless convinced they will never win anything serious against anti-Semitism, precisely because they cling so anxiously to their formal-sociological phenomena. The examples given from the pilot operation on Coney Island seemed totally childish to me: the idea that anti-Semitism can be remedied by inviting anti-Semites to swim in the pool of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association flies in the face of what anyone endowed with the least bit of human reason can realize for themselves. Nevertheless—I assured Mr. Marrow of our collegial interest and I will support him in counsel, though of course under no circumstances in deed. The meeting was chaired by Mr. Nussbaum, who declared, among other things, that Lewin was the Einstein of the social sciences.
An idea came to me during that meeting which might be useful. The Berkeley study has shown that college students are more anti-Semitic the richer their parents are. On the reverse, the laboratory interviews seem to indicate that workers are more anti-Semitic the worse off they are, or at the very least the more they have to worry about their futures. The economic factor seems therefore to vary according to class. Perhaps something could be made out of this for Mr. Lloyd Warner, inventor of “the upper lower middle class.”19
Horkheimer: Mental Illness and Manifest History.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adorno, 12/27/1944.]20
I have no time nor strength left for any theoretical thoughts. I just want you to know that I would like to elaborate on the following idea. The negative tendencies which are conceived under general categories like hatred, aggressiveness, spite, a.s.o. or, more concretely, Sadism, Chauvinism, anti-intellectualism, are created as antagonistic equivalents to the civilisatory virtues which education in its broadest sense tries to instil in man. The negative drives correspond to the positive ones as precisely as a negative ocular spectrum corresponds to the positive impression or a complementary color to its complement. Therefore, the particular shade of such negative trends in a given historical period reflects exactly the shades of the efforts of the preceding historical stage. This correlation is naturally complicated by the fact that the virtues of the upper class become only gradually virtues of the lower classes. The main point is the fact that we can read the positive ideologies of history even better in the idiosyncrasies, injustices and crimes than in their positive expressions. I would not have made this remark if it referred only to such embracing topics as antisemitism and Christian love, a relation which we dealt with in the “Elements.” My reason is that the intricacies of mental illnesses may once again serve as keys to manifest history.
Adorno: The Destructive Tendency of Civilization.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/10/1945.]21
Your thought on the destructive tendency precisely as a function, or rather as the negative of civilization itself, is unconditionally correct, and I will cherish and care for it well.22 Considerations on the problem of projection as a whole compel us in this direction: the virtues into which the destructive tendencies have been rationalized are—without exception, and immediately—the “values” of civilization. There seems to be a special connection between the objective depersonalization of the world and the delusional tendency towards personalization,23 in the way this culminates in the ideology of Führercharismas. One could trace the entirety of the dialectic of the individual through this.
As I read Measure for Measure alongside Brecht’s “Roundheads” (which was based on the former),24 I was struck by its close connection to The Merchant of Venice; I then found this had often been pointed out in the literature. This seems not unimportant to me for the Urgeschichte of modern anti-Semitism. Through Angelo, just as through Shylock, Shakespeare turns against the same principle: of universal exchange of equivalents. Shylock falls on the grounds of his own principle “measure for measure” just as Angelo; the law which makes a mockery of justice;25 and Isabella’s great speech to Angelo is of the same spirit as Portia’s famous speech to Shylock. Modern anti-Semites shout “the merchant” [Händler] and mean ‘the Jew”; Shakespeare says “the Jew” and means “the bourgeois” [Bürger]. His position towards the bourgeoisie is on the whole extremely dialectical, and their understanding is necessarily that of “the merchant” [Kaufmann]. Shakespeare is not only the representative of the rising bourgeoisie, but at the same time lagged far behind it—and it is precisely to this extent that he is still ahead of bourgeois society. He has nothing to do with Bacon, but all the more with [Thomas] More. And, as if he already foresaw all the calamity which lies in Antonio’s perception of Shylock, he adds one final dovetail which gives the whole a completely different meaning.26 At the beginning of Act 2, Scene 1, the Prince of Morocco courts Portia, entreaties her: “Mislike me not for my complexion, …” —Portia, later the judge of the Jew, replies she is not free to choose, but, were things otherwise, “Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fair / As any comer I have look’d on yet / for my affection.”27 This is the a priori refusal of race-nonsense.28 It would be well worthy pursuing this further, and doing so in connection with the storm.
Horkheimer: The Identity of Backwardness and Progressiveness.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adorno, 1/17/1945.]29
Your thought about the identity of Shakespeare’s backwardness and his progressiveness coincides exactly with something which has often preoccupied me recently. What was true for the feudal lords at the beginning of the bourgeois era is true for the last bourgeois individuals before the advance of group society—with, of course, a great distinction in content: the feudal lords represent a different principle than the bourgeoisie. Where the former represented domination in the famous age of bourgeois flourishing, the latter, the last subjects, point beyond the group-function entirely. The masses are imbued with the overcoming of egoism in their groups by the Weltgeist; the last subjects stand in solidarity with their humanity by mediation of concepts and reflection. That is a kind of Hegelian construction, but I can’t pursue this further now because, unfortunately, I must stop and do something totally different than thinking.
Adorno: On Death-Conditioning and Classless Society.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/25/1945.]30
The ‘Interview with a Skeleton’ is a masterpiece, and one must compliment Huxley for having foreseen this in that truly magnificent scene in Brave New World where he describes the death-conditioning of children, as they’re paraded around dying, fed sweets, and encouraged to play raucous games so that no consciousness of death ever arises for them.31 The greatest shame of our age is it ends up resembling those waste products for which the Jaspers of our age denounce it. Particularly frightening is the calculability of everything, that in a certain sense all the atrocities this society has in store for us can be predicted well in advance.
Let me just say how much I agree with the idea you developed in connection with my words about Shakespeare. I remember a conversation with Pollock many years ago in which he imagined the citizen of a classless society as a sort of “synthesis” of the subject and the reflective character. I remember vehemently contradicting him, and just as vehemently advancing the opinion that, in the world as it is today, only the individual at his most extreme is an advocate for the concerns of society against it. The last sentences of the Fetish-essay have a similar formulation,32 but I hope to work this out in detail with you soon.
II. Memorandum To: Dr. T.W.A., N.I.L.P.F. From: Dr. M.H., M.A.M.U., 1/11/1945.
“N.I.L.P.F.”: “Nilpferd,” or “Hippopotamus.” — Nickname for Adorno.
“M.A.M.U.”: “Mammut,” or “Mammoth.” — Nickname for Horkheimer.
Adorno writes enthusiastically in a 1939 letter to his parents from New York:
It is only since being here that I have discovered the magical powers of memoranda. New techniques and specialized economic competence are valued to an almost superstitious extent here…33
Throughout the 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno would ironically repurpose the administrative form of the ‘memorandum’—economy of language and experimental technique—for some of their least restrained philosophical-historical speculations as a strategem in their ongoing confrontation with ‘problems of scientific style’ in the United States.
Re: Dialectics.
Today they would remove the names for all trees, rivers, cities, and human beings and assign them numbers instead.
Hill 77,586,233m; Source 783,216,112c; Man 297,116,317b
Of course, this is not practical enough. The numbers are too long and the expressions like “source” and “man” are badly defined. Proper mathematicians and administrators would certainly have the know-how to set up much simpler and clearer symbols, such that with the help of a single, all-encompassing sign-system, you could distinguish every scumbag from every lily of the field without possibility of confusion. Determinability is driven to the extreme by means of mathematics.
Simultaneously, however, everyone is called by their first name, and every first name so confusingly similar to every other, like ‘Bob’ to ‘Jim’ and ‘Peggy’ to ‘Emmy.’ In a manner of speaking, everyone is called by the same name: GI Joe. Human beings and things both become indistinguishable and indeterminable. This is the opposite of the logarithmic tendency.
In the Fragments, we have already said: both processes are the same. Les extrêmes se touchent. I think this is a foundation from which logical laws are particularly easy to develop. They are immediately negative and critical. Les extrêmes se touchent—so far as both are the bad.
Re: Architecture.
Opposite my office is a building of approximately 22 stories. It bears the address ‘432’ on stone ornamentation above the roof. The script itself is larger than life, but no passer-by on the street can see it. It’s not there to be seen by anyone. The builder probably had hovering over him that same personified Administration which occasionally hovers above the cities on gigantic wings. The numbers on rooftops of skyscrapers are meant for them. It must be twenty or thirty years since this block was first built, otherwise there wouldn’t be the same text under the number that reads: “Space for 2176 employees and 1512 office desks, a greater number is dangerous and unlawful.”
From my window, I look out at the Empire State Building, the tallest in the world. At the very top, it bears a difficult-to-interpret apparatus and a cross. Since the structure dates more recently than No. 432, I take it that the total number of all human beings and all office desks in the world can be found on the cross. From here, however, I can’t quite make it out. Yet the Empire State occasions further considerations. In the evening, when the lights come on, one discovers that the highest stories, despite the housing shortage, are not illuminated. When I investigated the matter, I was told that climatic conditions were simply too bad. The winds were disruptive, and the birds that pestled their heads against the windows impaired job performance. Thus the less-than-illuminated Empire State Building serves as a warning to passers-by of the barriers to progress.
Re: Commerce.
Do you know what a Pavlov ‘Pouch Dog’ is? I quote from “The Medical Brief”:
“Each dog has a stomach fistula (an artificial opening into the stomach) and the esophagus has an opening cut out at about the middle of the neck. The dogs swallow with avidity pieces of meat placed before them in basins, but the esophagus being cut, the meat falls back into the basin to be swallowed over and over again. Simultaneously the fistula in the stomach yields abundant quantities of an acid, limpid, gastric juice, of which these dogs produce three quarters to one litre each in the course of one forenoon. This juice is conducted through a Chamberland filter, and now forms a regular article of commerce under the caption of ‘Natural Gastric Juice.’”
I received an elegant, authentic pigskin tobacco pouch as a gift this Christmas. Pavlov has not a few monuments in Russia. I believe he was even awarded the ‘Order of Lenin’ during his lifetime. You can purchase Pavlov ‘Pouch Dogs’ at the market. Mrs. Meyer, née Julia Feinberg, wife of our former colleague Gerhard Meyer, works at such a laboratory in Chicago. When I met with her while I was passing through, she said: “That’s all very true, but how would you ever get by without it?”
Text for an Illustration from La femme 100 têtes.
At three in the morning at night, truth without fear sits atop the roof of 432 Fourth Avenue in New York and waits for the first rays of sun to reflect off the tip of the Empire State.34
Adorno: An Allegory of Rationalization.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/19/1945.]35
Many thanks for the wonderful letters with the aphorisms, which I will happily accept as a sound basis for future memoranda. The Pavlov case is fantastic, and the numeric cipher for the God of statistics has something incredibly compelling to it. Should it not in the end be an allegory of rationalization itself? Rationalization which one knows not who, ‘in the end,’ will be there to benefit from at all…
Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 12. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 306-308. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Adorno, 11/24/1944. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 606-609. And—In: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927-1969: Band II: 1938-1944. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004), 368-371. Author’s translation.
“the rapid deactivation of the subject”: [die rapide Ausschaltung des Subjekts]
[MHGS Ed Fn. Nos. 1-5:] Edouard Herriot (1872-1957), politician of the Radical Socialist Party, President of the Chamber from 1936 to 1940, opponent of Pétain and National Socialism. Maxime Weygand (1867-1965), general, commander-in-chief of the French troops from 1940 until the capitulation, then Minister of Defense of the Vichy government. Pierre Laval (1883-1945), politician, first deputy minister and prime minister of the Vichy government from 1940 to 1944. Henri Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), marshal, French prime minister from 1940 to 1944, signatory of the armistice agreement with Germany. Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), general and politician, head of the French government in exile from 1943, prime minister and head of state from 1945 to 1946 and 1958 to 1969.
[MHGS Ed Fn. No. 6:] “This refers to the "American Friends of German Freedom”: its chairman was the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who worked with Tillich and the "Council for a Democratic Germany.”
[BW Bd. II Ed. Fn.:] “‘the Free Germans’: “Horkheimer was thinking primarily of the “American Friends of German Freedom” association, founded in 1936 by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the “Council for a Democratic Germany,” headed by Tillich, which was founded on May 3, 1944. He was also likely thinking of the “Free Germany” movement, founded in the USSR in July 1943, which included German communists and prisoners of war. They shared the goal of overthrowing the Hitler regime and thus ending the war. It cannot be ascertained whether Horkheimer was also familiar with the “Free Germans” in London, trade unionists who had emigrated to England and who were deployed in Germany by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) for espionage purposes after the landing in Normandy.”
See also: Horkheimer to Tillich, 2/11/1942: “In the name of Brecht, Feuchtwanger, Kortner and Heinrich Mann, I ask you to do us the favor of entering our Radio Committee. The purpose is to take part in the propagandistic efforts of the United Nations to make the [German] people realize that their government is leading them into a catastrophe. I have accepted myself the invitation of Feuchtwanger to join the group because I felt that this group could make a real contribution. The institute will provide it with economic and sociological data, but there will be a great need for material on the ecclesiastical situation. Dorothy Thompson has approached the Columbia Broadcasting System and it is very probable that we will have a regular 15 minutes every week for information and sketches in the german language over their shortwave sender. As soon as the definite answer of the C.B.S. is received, we shall send you our proposals for the first transmissions and ask you for your own suggestions. Among the speakers whose voices we intend to use is Thomas Mann, Chaplin, and other personalities well known in both the United States and Germany. If the project with the C.B.S. should not work out, we intend to take steps in order to be incorporated in the government propaganda work. A particular reason why I personally wish your participation, not only as a contributor, but as a member of the committee, is that science is better represented than it would be by only one member. We are also thinking of having some more members in New York, but nobody will be invited without your approval.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 271. [English in original]
[MHGS Ed Fn. No. 7:] “Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), psychologist, 1926 Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, 1932 emigrated to the USA; after 1933, Professor in Stanford, California, and Ithaca, New York; after 1935 in Iowa.”
[MHGS Ed Fn. Nos. 8-9:] “La Iraviata, Oper von Giuseppe Verdi (1853). La Bohème, Oper von Giacomo Puccini (1896).”
English in original.
[MHGS Ed Fn. Nos. 10-13:] OSS: Office of Strategic Services; OWI: Office of War Information; AMGOT: Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory; UNRRA: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Adorno and Horkheimer, “Quand Même.” From: “Notes and Sketches,” Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947); Philosophische Fragmente (1944):
Quand Même. External pressure has forced human beings to overcome their own inertia, to produce material and intellectual works. Thinkers from Democritus to Freud are not wrong in believing this. The resistance of external nature, to which the pressure can finally be traced back, propagates itself in society through the classes, acting on all human beings from childhood onward as the callousness of their fellows. People are gentle when they want something from those who are stronger, and harsh when the weaker want something from them. That has been the key to the nature of the person in society up to now.
The conclusion drawn by conservatives, that terror and civilization are inseparable, is well founded. What could enable human beings to develop the ability to master complex stimuli, if not their own developmental exertions, which have to be spurred on by external resistance? The resistance which drives them is first embodied in the father; later it grows a thousand heads: teachers, superiors, customers, competitors, the representatives of social and state powers. Their brutality stimulates individual spontaneity.
That this harshness might be moderated in the future, that the bloody punishments by which humanity has been tamed in the course of centuries could be replaced by the establishment of sanatoria, seems no more than a dream. Simulated compulsion is powerless. Culture has evolved under the shadow of the executioner; Genesis, which tells of the expulsion from Paradise, and the Soirées de Petersbourg are in agreement on this. Work and pleasure take place under the shadow of the executioner. To contradict this is to fly in the face of all science, all logic. One cannot abolish terror and retain civilization. Even to relax the former means the beginning of disintegration. The most diverse conclusions can be drawn from this: from the worship of fascist barbarism to a flight into the circles of Hell. There is one other possibility: to scorn logic, if it is against humanity.
In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. [1947] Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 179-180.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 12/2/1944. In: Briefwechsel, Bd. II (2004), 373-374. Author’s translation.
[BW Ed. Note.] “A prose piece” [Prosastück]: It bears the title “Ohne Haß,” see: Adorno. Eine Bildmonographie, edited by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a.M. 2003, S. 145f.
English in original.
English in original.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 12/21/1944. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 610-613. Author’s translation.
[MHGS Ed Fn. No. 1:] “Alfred J. Marrow (1905-78), psychologist, since 1944 employee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1944, lecturer at the New School for Social Research, New York, after 1947.”
[MHGS Ed Fn. No. 3:] “Rensis Likert (born 1903), psychologist and sociologist who occupied various government offices, professor in Ann Arbor, Michigan after 1949, in Chicago after 1955.”
[MHGS Ed Fn. No. 4:] “Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), originally a physician, also wrote on archaeology, ethnology, politics and psychology (Psychology of the Masses, 1895).”
[MHGS Ed Fn. No. 6:] “William Lloyd Warner (1898-1979), sociologist and anthropologist, 1935 professor in Chicago, 1959-70 in East Lansing, Michigan; for a time, the ISR planned a collaboration with him on the anti-Semitism project.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 612.
See also: Horkheimer’s fragment “Sociological Distinctions” (1945)
Horkheimer to Adorno, 12/27/1944. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 614. English in original.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/10/1945. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 615-616. Author’s translation.
“destructive tendency”: [Destruktionstendenz]
“tendency towards personalization”: [Personalisierungstendenz]
Brecht’s play—translated as “Roundheads and Pointed Heads” by Kuhn and Willett—was an explicit adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (composed ~1934; premiered in 1936).
“of the law which makes a mockery of justice”: [des Rechts das der Gerechtigkeit Hohn spricht]
“dovetail”: [Verzahnung]
For the full stanzas:
MOROCCO
Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun,
To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.
Bring me the fairest creature northward born,
Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the icicles,
And let us make incision for your love,
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
I tell thee, lady, this aspect of mine
Hath fear'd the valiant: by my love I swear
The best-regarded virgins of our clime
Have loved it too: I would not change this hue,
Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen.
PORTIA
In terms of choice I am not solely led
By nice direction of a maiden's eyes;
Besides, the lottery of my destiny
Bars me the right of voluntary choosing:
But if my father had not scanted me
And hedged me by his wit, to yield myself
His wife who wins me by that means I told you,
Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fair
As any comer I have look'd on yet
For my affection.
In: William Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.), accessed: 4/30/2025. Link: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-merchant-of-venice/read/2/1/
“race-nonsense”: [Rasse-Unwesen]
Horkheimer to Adorno, 1/17/1945. In: Adorno, Horkheimer. BW Bd. III: 1945-1949. (2005), 23-24.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/25/1945. In: Adorno, Horkheimer. BW Bd. III (2005), 39-40.
The letter opens with an amusing remark from Adorno, where he invokes Karl Liebknecht as inoculation against everyday stupidity (in this case his own):
It was probably dumb of me to send you that confused material, which really does not represent the questionnaire in any way, but only the rawest raw material from which it is to be formed. In fact, it is a bit like what K.L. [Karl Liebnkecht] said about politics: you have to make very far-reaching demands (in this case of sophistication) if you want to achieve anything that is not completely stupid.
In: Ibid., 38.
At the very end of the first chapter of Eclipse of Reason (1947), Horkheimer will develop this insight into the connection between Huxley’s death-conditioning and the ‘Interview with a Skeleton’ that commends the correctness of Huxley’s descriptions of the symptoms of monopoly capitalist society while criticizing the reactionary basis and conclusion of Huxley’s thought:
Huxley attacks a monopolistic state-capitalist world organization that is under the aegis of a self-dissolving subjective reason conceived as an absolute. But at the same time this novel seems to oppose to the ideal of this stultifying system a heroic metaphysical individualism that indiscriminately condemns fascism and enlightenment, psychoanalysis and moving pictures, de-mythologization and crude mythologies, and extols above all the cultured man, untainted by total civilization and sure of his instincts, or perhaps the skeptic. Thus Huxley unwittingly allies himself with the reactionary cultural conservatism that everywhere—and especially in Germany—has paved the way to the same monopolistic collectivism that he criticizes in the name of the soul as opposed to the intellect. In other words, while the naive assertion of subjective reason has actually produced symptoms not unlike those described by Huxley,(*) the naive rejection of that reason in the name of a historically obsolete and illusory concept of culture and individuality leads to contempt of the masses, cynicism, reliance on blind force; these in turn serve the rejected tendency. Philosophy today must face the question whether thought can remain master of itself in this dilemma and thus prepare its theoretical resolution, or whether it is to content itself with playing the part of empty methodology, deluded apologetics, or a guaranteed prescription like Huxley’s newest popular mysticism, which fits as well in the Brave New World as any ready-made ideology.
(*) An extreme example may be cited. Huxley invented ‘death-conditioning’—i.e. children are brought into the presence of dying persons and are fed sweets and stimulated to play games while they watch the process of death. Thus they are made to associate pleasant ideas with death and to lose their terror of it. Parents’ Magazine for October 1944 contains an article entitled ‘Interview with a Skeleton.’ It describes how five-year-old children played with a skeleton ‘in order to make their first acquaintance with the inside working of the human body.
“You need bones to hold your skin up,” said Johnny, examining this skeleton.
“He does not know he is dead,” Martudi said.’
In: Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (Continuum, 1974 [Oxford University Press, 1947]), 56-57.
Adorno’s reference is to “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens.” In: ZfS vol. 7, no. 3 (1938).
The final sentence reads:
In music, too, collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity.
In: “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” [1938]. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart. (Continuum, 1977), 298-299.
Adorno to his Parents, 12/19/1939. In: Theodor W. Adorno. Letters to his Parents: 1939-1951. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2006), 27.
Max Ernst’s “Hundred Headless Woman” (1929) [link].
“Dans la nuit, à trois heures du matin, la vérité sans peur vient s'asseoir sur le toit du numéro 432 de la quatrième Avenue à New York et attend les premiers rayons du soleil se refléter de la pointe de l'Empire State.”
Cf. Horkheimer to Adorno, 1/22/1936: “Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen an exceptional new work by Max Ernst: “La Semaine de Bonté.” [A Week of Kindness (1934)] Ernst uses figures from certain parts of Doré’s illustrations of the Bible, such as the angel from Jacob’s fight against the Lord’s messenger attempting to tame a madwoman in an elegant parlour. Some of it is, admittedly, more fleeting than “Rêve d'une jeune fille” [A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil (1930)], but some of it is even stronger.” In: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927-1969. Band I: 1927-1937. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp, 2003), 109. Author’s translation.
In a letter dated 8/13/1941, Horkheimer wrote to Adorno from California that he’d recently met with Max Ernst, who told him that André Breton—who’d left Marseille with his family on March 24th aboard the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, the same ship as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Serge, and Wifredo Lam—had arrived in New York, but was in very ill health and even worse spirits. Horkheimer promised to go and see Breton, who he’d heard was a very upstanding man, when he returned to New York in September. In a reply dated 10/7/1941, Adorno wrote Horkheimer, “A word about Breton. He’s a friendly, pleasant, and probably very upstanding man; a little too absorbed in his coteries and cliques for my taste.” Adorno goes on to say that Breton’s cliquishness had come in handy—securing for him a network of wealthy associates in New York before he even landed. Adorno remarks that Breton apparently managed to save a considerable part of his collection of modern paintings, concluding: “He doesn’t seem to be doing too badly at all.” Having fulfilled his mission of checking up on Breton’s well being, Adorno relates that he recommended Breton actually put his skills to use and make a book of surrealist montage about New York City with Max Ernst. Adorno reports that Breton responded very positively to the idea. In: BW, Bd. II (2004), 189-190; 260-262, respectively.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/19/1945. In: Adorno, Horkheimer. BW Bd. III (2005), 28.