Adorno

486 Epilogue

the genius who confronts us like a natural force.’ The authors of the

statement expressed their fears that the inflation of Adorno into a hero

of the intellect would turn critical theory into a museum piece.^35

The same newspaper contained an obituary of Adorno by Hans-Jürgen

Krahl, his doctoral student whom he had testified against a few

weeks before in a trial for trespass. The student leader now reproved

Adorno by alleging that, despite his critique of the bourgeois individual,

he was ‘irresistibly imprisoned within the ruins of the bourgeois subject’

and accusing him of having proved unable ‘to translate the organized

partisanship of theory into the emancipation of the oppressed’. Thus

Adorno’s ‘negation of late capitalist society remained abstract.’^36 Both

the students’ statement and Krahl’s obituary were deeply indebted

to Adorno’s thinking, right down to their turns of phrase. The validity

of his ideas seemed to be beyond question. The students, of course, had

no idea how Adorno’s philosophy might be developed substantively

following his death. The same may be said of Marcuse, who gave his

first public reaction in a magazine programme on German television.

He confined his comments to calling on people ‘to think radically and

impart this radicality to others’. He also remarked that he thought the

future would bring a debate about the substance of Adorno’s important

work.^37 Thus Horkheimer’s pessimistic review of a past beyond recall

was counterbalanced by Marcuse’s hope that Adorno’s death would

not mean the extinction of the revolutionary spark that he saw glowing

at the heart of his ruthless critique.

In contrast, the obituary penned by Jürgen Habermas in Die Zeit

was one of the few that attempted to provide a proper assessment of

both Adorno’s history of philosophy and his highly individual form of

thinking. His portrait of the philosopher captured a number of crucial

features: his spontaneity and his refusal to identify fully with the role

of ‘the fully fledged adult’.^38 But Habermas was also the only person to

raise the question of Adorno’s ‘philosophical legacy’. He foregrounded

in particular the concept of self-reflection.^39 He emphasized that Adorno

had defined the concept of reflection as the movement of critical thought,

a ‘finite energy’ that drew its strength from what was false in its object.

And in fact, in the last essay he wrote before his death, Adorno stressed

the importance of the way in which reality is interpreted, both for

philosophy and sociology, defining this critical reflection as ‘resistance

to... everything that is merely posited and that regards its own mere

existence as justification enough’.^40 Criticism as determinate negation

is tied to the historical conditions of the negativity of existence. Critical

reflection calls for the contrary reality of a society in which human

beings experience real suffering. Habermas, who tried to follow on

from Adorno with the ‘negative idea of abolishing discrimination and

suffering’,^41 nevertheless posed the central question ‘How can critical

thinking be justified?’.^42 The problem then was to provide a rationale

of criticism against the background of the total web of delusion. The

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