448 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
19 With his Back to the Wall
We literally have no one but ourselves.^1Together with composing music, writing books had always been an
essential part of Adorno’s life, and had become even more important
now. But even though writing was an inner necessity and the expression
of his greatest ambitions, his growing teaching commitments and his
responsibilities as director of the institute meant that his writing was
purchased at ever greater internal cost. ‘It is all more than I can man-
age, physically’, he wrote to his old friend Dreyfus.^2 And when he made
similar complaints to Alfred Andersch at around the same time, he
mentioned his wishes for a future life: if he were to be given a second
chance on earth, he would like next time round to be a playboy.^3
Despite his feeling overworked, he continued to accept invitations to
lecture, including the labour-intensive Paris lectures that he gave in
March 1965 in the Deutsches Haus and the Cité internationale and later
on in the Amphithéâtre Descartes of the Sorbonne. Even though he
keenly felt the honour it was to give these lectures, it nevertheless cost
him a great deal to speak in French. Despite this, a few months later, he
was in Berlin lecturing in the biggest lecture hall to an over-capacity
crowd on ‘The Concept of Society’.^4 Shortly afterwards, he was in
Brussels, where he gave four guest lectures on an ‘Introduction to the
Sociology of Music’. These appeared in book form three years later in
the celebrated series rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie. They were in fact
a revised version of a text that had been published by Suhrkamp in
1962: ‘Twelve Theoretical Lectures’, with a dedication to the members
of the Institute of Social Research.
In the light of all these activities, it was perhaps inevitable that
Adorno’s health would suffer. His letters contain constant references to
insomnia, headaches, a sore throat and the like. And it goes without
saying that he would never have been able to cope with all these
activities and demands without Gretel’s constant support. In the year in
which Negative Dialectics appeared, an aggravating factor was his grow-
ing concern about political developments in Germany. A glance at the