177aligned neo-Marxism. Adorno’s Marxism is characterized by its negative opinion of
the possibility of political action and its refusal to recognize the proletariat, whether
or not represented by “the Party,” as the authentic collective subject of the revolu-
tion. His thought is, however, unquestionably materialist and dialectical (even though
his dialectics is a “negative” one), and his writings attest to a characteristically West-
ern Marxist insistence on the utopian potential of modern society.
The second of the five stars is that of aesthetic modernism. Right from his
early years Adorno was interested in modern music; he thought seriously about be-
coming a composer and studied for some time under Alban Berg in Vienna. Modern
art always had a convinced advocate in him against the accusations of orthodox
Marxists that it was decadent and “bourgeois.”
Jay identifies Adorno’s mandarin cultural conservatism as the third star in the
constellation. With this term he is alluding to the often regressively oriented roman-
tic anticapitalism that was a dominant tendency in Germany before the First World
War. Leading exponents of this tradition were authors such as Tönnies and Spengler.
While Adorno himself did not subscribe to this mandarin tradition—quite the con-
trary, in fact—he was influenced by some of its ideas. The distinction, for instance,
between “culture” and “civilization” recurs in Adorno’s work, albeit in a modified and
more balanced form. His biases that are sometimes elitist, his dislike of mass cul-
ture, and his hatred of instrumental thought can in Jay’s view also be traced back to
this tradition.
The fourth force in Adorno’s field comes from his being part Jewish. A large
number of his friends and intellectual colleagues were Jews, including Walter Ben-
jamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal, and the course of
Adorno’s own life was deeply influenced by his Jewish identity. As a non-“Aryan” he
was deprived of his right to teach at the University of Frankfurt after the Nazis came
to power, and this forced him to emigrate. The awareness of the Holocaust—as
summed up in the symbolically loaded term “Auschwitz”—was crucial to the whole
of his postwar oeuvre.^43
His Jewishness did not only influence the course of his life. Traces of some
motifs from Jewish philosophy also can be found in Adorno’s thought. Sometimes
these themes emerge due to the influence of Benjamin, whose notion of language
as mimesis, for instance, was clearly influenced by the Jewish Kabbala; sometimes,
however, their origin was more direct, as with the theme of the ban on images. In
Jewish tradition, the banning of images means that the one and only true God—
Yahweh—cannot and must not be depicted, because no image or name is capable of
doing justice to His infinity and truth. Adorno takes up this motif in his treatment of
the topic of utopia. According to him, utopia cannot directly be named, described, or
depicted. When it is given a concrete form—as in Thomas More’s book for in-
stance—it at once takes on a totalitarian and dogmatic character, so that one of its
aspects becomes the absence of freedom, which is the opposite of what the unat-
tainable ideal notion of utopia really implies.176