Adorno

470 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

on his birthday. His friend Count Andreas Razumovsky wrote an affec-
tionate congratulatory article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with
the title ‘Schöne Aussicht’. In it he emphasized that Adorno could not
only recite the Frankfurt-dialect poems of Friedrich Stolze for hours on
end in the original accent and knew all of Beethoven’s compositions
by heart, but that ‘his intellectual productivity was simply incredible.
At its heart was language, something that can be said of few people
who occupy the chairs in our universities today.’^102 He also received a
cordial birthday letter from Horkheimer: ‘All your efforts to educate an
enlightened, nonconformist youth that will act to bring about a better
world. ..belong to the highest achievements of an intellectual resist-
ance to the course of the administered world.’ Horkheimer described
the influence Adorno had had upon him and stressed the great impact
of his writings. He ended by speaking of the important role Gretel
had played in his life: ‘Without her everything might have been quite
different.’^103

The divided nature of art

Art that forswears the happy brilliance that reality withholds from men

and women and thus refuses every sensual trace of meaning, is spiritualized

art; it is, in its unrelenting renunciation of childish happiness, the allegory

of the illusionless actuality of happiness while bearing the fatal proviso of

the chimerical: that this happiness does not exist.^104

The hours that Adorno spent labouring at his Aesthetic Theory were
hours of maximum strenuous concentration, but also of fulfilment. This
was a book he had begun work on intensively in October 1966.^105 He
gave two sets of lectures on the topic in the summer semester of that
year as well as in the winter semester 1967–8.^106 Lengthier typescripts
that he had dictated were already in existence and he edited and sup-
plemented these, though with long interruptions thanks to deadlines on
other sociological work.
In summer 1968, he told Hans G. Helms that his aesthetics book was
ready in draft form. He also kept Elisabeth Lenk informed of his progress
in editing the text. He was busy introducing detailed annotations into
the text and was treating himself ‘like an untalented pupil. Perhaps he
will learn something, after all.’^107 And months later he was still saying,
in a letter to Marcuse, ‘I am desperately burying myself in my aesthetics
book, and am making so much progress in my so-called research semes-
ter that I have every hope that when it is at an end I shall only have to
concern myself with the “fine cut” and the difficult questions of organiza-
tion (elimination of overlaps and the like).’ He added that he had never
tried to write a book in which ‘the arrangement of the material pre-
sented such difficulties. Obviously, as a consequence of the critique of