514 Notes to pp. 122–127
9 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 864; see also Rolf Tiedemann,
‘Einleitung des Herausgebers’, ibid., p. 24; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics
of Seeing, p. 59ff.
10 Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, p. 88.
11 Kracauer to Löwenthal, 8 December 1923, Löwenthal’s Literary Estate,
Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main.
12 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 105.
13 See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 62, for a different translation.
14 It has not been possible to clarify the extent to which, when writing his
Kierkegaard book, Adorno was already fully conversant with Benjamin’s
essay on Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (see Benjamin, Selected Writ-
ings, vol. 1, pp. 297–360), which the latter wrote in 1921–2 but did not
publish until 1925. However, there are obvious parallels between the two
works.
15 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 83.
16 Adorno to Kracauer, 6 August 1930, quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The
Frankfurt School, p. 92.
17 Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, p. 250.
18 Ernst Schoen (1894–1960) was a musician and a poet. Since 1929, he
had been in charge of programming in the South-West German Radio in
Frankfurt am Main, in succession to Ernst Flesch. He and Benjamin had
been friends since their schooldays. Early in the 1920s, he had a brief affair
with Benjamin’s wife Dora. As the programme director, he pursued a policy
of encouraging modern music as well as using radio for experimental art
forms. Adorno recalled Schoen’s ‘indescribable distinction and exquisite
sensibility’. See Adorno, ‘Benjamin, der Briefschreiber’, GS, vol. 11, p. 588;
see also Marbacher Magazin, ‘Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940’, p. 77; Wolfgang
Schivelbusch, Intellektuellendämmerung, p. 62ff.
19 See Adorno, GS, vol. 20.2, p. 555ff.
20 This is not the place to decide whether Adorno’s critique of what he calls
the ‘logic of the spheres’ does justice to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard distin-
guishes between three modes of existence or attitudes to life which Adorno
calls ‘spheres’. The aesthetic stage consists of pleasure, the pure enjoyment
of the senses. The ethical stage is characterized by a sense of responsibility.
This stage stands in opposition to the aesthetic stage. The religious mode
of existence envisages a self that relates to itself through the relationship
with God. This stage in its turn negates the preceding two. In order
to reach the religious stage, the ‘existential leap of faith’ is needed. See S.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or; Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve, Materialien
zur Philosophie Sören Kierkegaards; Hermann Deuser, Dialektische
Theologie: Studien zu Adornos Metaphysik und zum Spätwerk Kierkegaards.
21 Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 3.
22 Ibid., p. 13.
23 Ibid., p. 29.
24 This dismissal of identity philosophy is important for Adorno’s own think-
ing because it is the starting-point for his own concept of the non-identical.
See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 135ff.
25 Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 32.
26 Ibid., p. 33.
27 Ibid., p. 39.