Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 219phenomenology, his renewed study of Hegel and, later on, his reading
of some of Marx’s writings.^31 His critique of some major ideas of
Benjamin’s, both in conversation and in his letters, had a number of
purposes, not least that of preserving his idea of an antithetical dialectic
from contamination with theological and political categories or messianic
and eschatological motifs of the kind met with in Benjamin. These were
the key topics discussed at their meetings in Paris in 1936–7. The two
friends met either in Adorno’s favourite hotel, the Littré, or in one of
the famous cafés in St Germain. Adorno loved Paris, and since Benjamin
knew it intimately it was not hard to find congenial meeting places both
for their personal conversations and for the culinary delights that Paris
had to offer. Apart from that, Adorno enjoyed going to the museums.
He especially liked the Jeu de Paume. This is where he learnt to dis-
tinguish between the conciliatory German variant of impressionism and
the shocks delivered by the French version. He was fascinated both
by Sisley’s snow landscapes and Monet’s and Cézanne’s still lifes. He
was alert to the impact of van Gogh’s paintings, while his dislike of
Toulouse-Lautrec was confirmed and even strengthened.^32 Adorno’s
criticism of Benjamin did not prevent him from responding enthusiast-
ically when he saw German Men and Women, the book Benjamin had
published under the pseudonym of Detlef Holz in Switzerland in 1936.^33
Nevertheless, his hostility to immediacy of every sort became increas-
ingly clear. His criticism aimed to break down false mediations.^34 The
stumbling block was the ‘mystificatory element’ in Benjamin’s thinking.^35
In 1936 this referred above all to his mystificatory view of the workers’
movement and the proletarian revolution. Thus Adorno observed in
a letter to Horkheimer that Benjamin had a tendency – and here he
once again detected the pernicious influence of Brecht – ‘to believe
in the proletariat as if it were the blind world-spirit’. Such hopes were
undialectical. Benjamin had ‘some of the qualities of a Wandervogel
gone mad’.^36 With comments like these Adorno evidently wished to
distance himself from some of Benjamin’s ideas. At the same time, he
was at pains to measure himself against Benjamin’s intellectual power
and so he sought intellectual confrontation. This ambivalence was doubt-
less strengthened by the fact that Adorno was well aware how quickly
he was able to assimilate original philosophical ideas and that he had
constantly to take care that his productive elaboration of other people’s
ideas did not endanger the independence of his own thought.^37
This problem presented itself in the case of the highly speculative
ideas of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom Adorno was corresponding at
the same time. Initially, he was enthralled by the voluminous proposals
for a materialist epistemology that Sohn-Rethel had sent him from
Switzerland, where he had temporarily emigrated to escape the Gestapo.
The fundamental idea of the theoretical study he had written in a period
of some eight months was an attempt to explain the abstract forms of
knowledge as derivatives of the ‘real abstraction’ of the ‘commodity