Adorno

460 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

The futility of defending a theory as practice

Theory, precisely because it is looked at in isolation, is something like

a substitute for happiness. The happiness that should be created by prac-

tical action finds no other reflex than the behaviour of the man who sits

on a chair and thinks.^59

In Frankfurt Adorno witnessed the escalation of the student movement,
which saw itself as the avant-garde of a global revolutionary movement.
After the May revolt in Paris, the street fighting in Berkeley, after
the great march on Bonn in protest against the emergency laws, the
conviction grew that an objective revolutionary situation had arisen. In
the universities the activists introduced strikes so as to set an example
to the working class whom they thought of as their allies. Thus there
were strikes in Frankfurt University at the end of May 1968, complete
with pickets, the blockade of the entrances to the main building, the
violent occupation of the rector’s office, the renaming of the Johann
Wolfgang Goethe University as Karl Marx University, and so forth.
Adorno continued to refuse the students’ request that, as the leading
representative of critical theory, he should declare his solidarity with
their political goals. It was clear to him that he ran the risk of being
used, and he made desperate efforts to preserve his independence as
a theoretician. In a letter to Gabriele Henkel on 17 May, he wrote that
he was ‘really very taken up with student affairs, particularly since the
children are rebelling against authority but then come running to me in
a way that is almost touching. The responsibility is great if you are as
aware as I am of the contradictions between the students’ movement
and their actual situation.’^60
Having more or less survived the excitements of the sociology
conference in April 1968 on ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’,
and the summer semester with its recurrent strikes, Adorno found that
he was still held in respect by the responsible part of the student move-
ment as the man who stood for the public criticism of society and a left-
wing intellectual opposition. At the end of September, following the
Frankfurt Book Fair and the disturbances occasioned by the award of
the Peace Prize of the German book trade to the Senegalese president,
Léopold Sédar Senghor, he found himself in a public discussion on the
topic ‘Authority and Revolution’. This discussion had been organized
by Luchterhand Verlag in order to provide a forum for a debatebetween
the leading figures of the student movement, such as Hans-Jürgen Krahl,
and prominent left-wing intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas,
Ludwig von Friedeburg and Günter Grass. On this occasion, too, at-
tention was focused on people’s expectations of the representatives of
critical theory: ‘Six months ago’, Krahl said, ‘when we were besieging
the council of Frankfurt University, the only professor who came to
the students’ sit-in was Professor Adorno. He was overwhelmed with