Adorno

50 Part I: Origins

meaning.’^84 Kracauer’s essay barely even hints at the personal pleasure
felt by anyone reading such trivial writings. From the very first page, his
discourse moved into the abstract realms of the philosophy of religion

• no less a thinker than Søren Kierkegaard is invoked. Kierkegaard’s
  polemical writings, such as The Concept of Dread, Fear and Trembling
  and Either/Or, were destined to be the source of many headaches for
  Adorno in the years to come. In fact, Kierkegaard’s ideas on aesthetics
  were to become a central theme for him up to the start of his academic
  career as a lecturer. He may have been encouraged in the choice of
  subject for his second doctorate by ideas like the following from
  Kracauer’s essay:

Sin, which is a determinate of being in a higher sphere, danger,

which threatens symbolically from outside, mystery, which inter-

venes from above – everything that explodes our provisional

sense of security is uniformly represented in the lower regions by

characters drawn from realms beyond the law. Such characters

dominate a space empty of mind and meaning but infinitely ex-

panded by rationality [ratio], and play their games in amongst the

atoms with their regular movements.... The characters represent-

ing the law fail to recognize that the same ethical acts that have

taken fright can manifest themselves in infringements of the moral

code, that murder may be not just murder, but also the negation

of a definitive human constitution by a superior mystery.^85

Adorno’s first book publication was his second doctoral dissertation.
Its subject was Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existence. When it was pub-
lished in 1933 by J. C. B. Mohr (Siebeck) under the title Konstruktion
des Ästhetischen (The Construction of the Aesthetic), Adorno took the
opportunity to repay the compliment Kracauer had paid him six years
previously, and dedicated his book to ‘My friend Siegfried Kracauer’.
Thematically, too, there were links. Thus Adorno talks of Kierkegaard’s
doctrine of different spheres and his idea of man as an ‘intermediate
being’. Man’s precarious situation lies in the fact that he is equidistant
from a state of nature and from the uniqueness of God, while possess-
ing a conscious relation to his own existence.
When Kracauer wrote his Detective Novel he too profited from his
reading of Kierkegaard. But he could not have guessed at the extent to
which it would inspire his diligent pupil. Kracauer was able to publish
only a fragment of his book-length study in his collection of essays The
Mass Ornament: the part entitled ‘The Hotel Lobby’, perhaps its most
original section. In Kracauer’s eyes, the hotel lobby was the antithesis
of the House of God, and the favourite place of the detective – who as
the representative of a higher reason was himself a godlike figure. The
final section of The Detective Novel contains some remarkable ideas
which reappear in Adorno’s critique of popular culture. Kracauer pointed