548 Notes to pp. 257–259
but Benjamin produced two essays, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire’ and ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. The latter appeared in the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1940. See Tiedemann and Schweppen-
häuser, ‘Anmerkungen der Herausgeber’, in Benjamin, GS, vol. 1.3,
p. 509ff.; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 49ff and 177ff.
79 See Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. VI, pp. 164ff., 162f. and 168ff.
80 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 277f.
81 Ibid., p. 282.
82 Ibid., p. 283.
83 Ibid., p. 284.
84 Ibid., p. 282.
85 Ibid., p. 284.
86 Ibid., p. 283.
87 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. VI, p. 217.
88 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 294.
89 Ibid., p. 291.
90 Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listen-
ing’, Essays on Music, p. 295f.
91 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 295f.
92 Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listen-
ing’, Essays on Music, p. 314.
93 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 296.
94 Adorno, ‘Interimsbescheid’, GS, vol. 20.1, p. 185.
95 These suggestions referred inter alia to the historical interpretations of
the arcades and the flâneur, the subterranean relations between Poe,
Balzac and Daumier, and the decline of the bourgeois type in mass society
which has its complement in the caricatures of typical characters. For
the first version, see Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in
Charles Baudelaire’, in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of
High Capitalism, pp. 9–106.
96 See Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940,
p. 299ff.; see also Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Charles
Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, pp. 107–54. The
editor’s note points out that ‘Adorno’s incisive criticism was immensely
productive for the further development of Benjamin’s Baudelaire project’
(Benjamin, GS, vol. 1.3, p. 1064).
97 In Minima Moralia, Adorno described this mode of theory construction
as specific to a dialectical form of presentation: ‘In a philosophical text
all the propositions ought to be equally close to the centre’ (Minima
Moralia, p. 71). Adorno uses analogous formulations to describe the style
of modern music (see Philosophie der modernen Musik, GS, vol. 12,
p. 73). The letter to Benjamin contains another passage used later on by
Adorno in his book of aphorisms: ‘I am convinced that our own best
thoughts are invariably those that we cannot entirely think through’
(Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 321).
In Minima Moralia he writes: ‘True thoughts are those alone which do not
understand themselves’ (Minima Moralia, p. 192).
98 This essay consisted essentially of a contrast between ‘two modes of
cognition’ which led to two contrasting ‘types of knowledge’. ‘On the one
hand stood “traditional” [theory], i.e., bourgeois science, which according