Notes to pp. 286–288 557renders harmless the incomprehensible thing that we are trying to
comprehend’ (‘On the German edition of Paul Massing’s Rehearsal for
Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany’, GS,
vol. 20.2, p. 652).
76 See Adorno, ‘Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America’,
in Critical Models, p. 230.
77 Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, p. 130ff.
78 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 74.
79 Later, Adorno explicitly discussed the rhetorical aspect of his philosophy:
‘In philosophy, rhetoric represents that which cannot be thought except in
language.... Dialectic – literally: language as the organon of thought,
would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual
approximation of thing and expression, to the point where difference fades’
(Negative Dialectics, p. 55f.).
80 Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘Rettung der Aufklärung’, Horkheimer, GS,
vol. 12, p. 294.
81 Ibid., p. 596f.
82 Ibid., p. 601.
83 Adorno, ‘Einleitung zum “Positivismusstreit” in der deutschen Soziologie’,
GS, vol. 8, p. 318.
84 This is evident from Adorno’s letters to his parents, as well as from a
letter from Horkheimer to Paul Tillich in August 1942 and one from
Adorno to Horkheimer in September 1942. Horkheimer, Briefwechsel,
GS, vol. 17, pp. 313ff. and 328ff.
85 The project was coordinated by the Department of Scientific Research
that was specially set up in New York and directed by Horkheimer and
Samuel H. Flowerman. The anti-Semitism studies were subdivided into
nine separate projects. The research was staffed by a dozen social
researchers who, over a period of five years, explored such complex ques-
tions as attitudes of the population towards Jews, the conditions required
for racist propaganda to have an effect, the contents of anti-Semitic cari-
catures in the print media, the links between fear and social aggression,
and early childhood experiences as a factor predisposing people towards
anti-Semitic views in adulthood.
86 This special study was planned as a representative survey, based not on
questionnaires but on oral interviews. ‘The interviewers consisted...of
270 workers who were recruited via the JLC and who had to learn by
heart a complex of twenty-five open questions with which to interrogate
their workmates.... The final report presented to the JLC... came to
four volumes of over 1300 pages altogether, and, despite attempts to shorten
it, the authors never managed to reduce it to a publishable size’ (Wolfgang
Bonß, Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks, p. 209).
87 See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, p. 359ff.; Martin Jay,
The Dialectical Imagination, p. 239ff. Sanford (1911–1995) had made his
name as an empirical social psychologist who introduced psycho-dynamic
ideas into American academic psychology. Levinson (born 1920) was
a psychologist and psychiatrist. Frenkel-Brunswik (1908–1958) worked
as a social psychologist with a strong leaning towards psychoanalysis;
she had been born in Vienna and had studied with Charlotte and Karl
Bühler.