420 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
Waldhaus, nor have I read anything, and yet I still do not feel as fresh
as I should be if I am to finish writing Negative Dialectics soon.’ At the
same time, Adorno expressed his liking for the Kursbuch and suggested
that it should in future be willing to deal with musical topics. As early as
1965, he had written to Enzensberger from Sils Maria: ‘I think that it
would be necessary, as a matter of urgency, to write a really incisive
account of logical positivism, or analytical philosophy, as they call it,
as the current form of stupidity.’^35 Two weeks later, Adorno again con-
firmed his withdrawal. ‘The fact is that I am a slow worker and cannot
produce a critique of the Godesberg Programme at the drop of a hat. It
calls for reflection on the writer’s situation. ..as well as the historical
context.’^36
Precisely that, the historical context, was the theme of a discussion
that Adorno took part in with Peter von Haselberg for the literary
magazine Akzente in the summer of 1965: ‘On the Historical Appropri-
ateness of Consciousness’.^37 Admittedly, current political issues figured
only on the margins of the discussion, when they talked about regress-
ive tendencies in the present and the emergence of fascist movements,
which Adorno described as ‘the ghost of a ghost’.^38 What he focused on
instead were fashionable phenomena, such as the Beatles, since he was
keen to distinguish them from advanced modernity, whose condition
could be measured by the progress of avant-garde art. ‘What can be
urged against the Beatles.. .is simply that what these people have to
offer is. ..something that is retarded in terms of its own objective con-
tent. It can be shown that the means of expression that are employed
and preserved here are in reality no more than traditional techniques in
a degraded form.’^39 He argued that it was necessary to develop a sense
of what was appropriate to the age, both in art and in social theory, in
the light of the current stage of development. Simply to stick to what
was given in a positivistic frame of mind, however, was ‘to sabotage
thought’.^40 This was identical with the line of thought with which Adorno
took part in the dispute about positivism. However, positivism was only
one of the opponents to attract his criticism during these years. The
other main opponent was Heidegger, the ‘Master from Germany’,^41
who lived in the south German Black Forest and whom he found it
absolutely necessary to attack more or less at the same time.
Early in the 1960s there was a somewhat cautious rapprochement
with Ernst Bloch. They had avoided each other for years, and an initial
meeting took place at a Hegel conference in Frankfurt in 1958 at an
evening reception organized by Suhrkamp. According to a letter Adorno
wrote to Horkheimer, the encounter was ‘somewhat disappointing’.
There were points of contact and Bloch was likeable enough person-
ally. ‘But that is not enough. The truest insights are of no use if they
are all bluster and nothing is thought out.’^42 Nevertheless, Adorno
wrote a detailed review when Suhrkamp published a new edition of
Bloch’s volume of aphorisms, Spuren (Traces). And Bloch belatedly