Adorno

474 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

which the individual arts were growing together. This showed itself, for
example, in the way in which quasi-musical structures found their way
into pictures, or even into literary texts, especially lyrical texts. By draw-
ing attention to the fact that ‘the individual arts were aspiring to their
concrete generalization’,^130 Adorno inaugurated a new conception of
avant-garde art, while at the same time revising the concepts specific to
each of the arts.
Adorno did not live to see the publication of the book and its recep-
tion. He thought of it as an instance of his idea of thinking in constella-
tions. In this late text he achieved what he had posited as a crucial
task in Negative Dialectics: a philosophy that did not exhaust itself in
categories, but was to be a composition. For ‘the crux is what happens
in it, not a thesis or a position; the texture. ..not the course of one-
track minds.’^131

Death

The woods are lovely dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

While on Sabbatical leave in the winter semester 1968–9, Adorno was
able to limit his duties to the not exactly simple business of institute
director, and otherwise to devote himself entirely to finishing the Aes-
thetic Theory. Although he tried to put as great a distance as possible
between himself and the conflicts that were raging in the university, he
could not fail to be affected by the increasingly militant attacks, partly
aimed at him. In March, when he learnt that one of his doctoral stu-
dents, who had been working on Hegel’s philosophy, had committed
suicide by jumping to his death from the Goethe Tower in the City
Forest in Frankfurt, he made this note: ‘Once again Rolland Pelzer.
He had bequeathed his body to the anatomical institute in order to
spare his extremely impoverished family the costs of the funeral but
the institute rejected it because it was so damaged that it could no
longer be of use. – And then the students who think themselves revolu-
tionary hold discussions on equal representation [Drittelparität] in the
committees.’^132
Another death in this year affected Adorno particularly keenly. He
learnt in March of the death of Carl Dreyfus, whom he had known well
since the 1920s. Dreyfus had emigrated to Argentina, but had returned
to Germany with his wife Tilly in 1962 and had been living in Munich.
Adorno wrote to his widow: ‘Carl was one of the people who played a
central role in my life, and today I incline to the view that his life was