Reclaiming Genders : Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siècle

The works of Theodor Adorno have had a mixed reception in academic circles in Britain. His analysis of the ‘culture industry’ is often dismissed as both productivist and elitist and therefore irrelevant to the study of contemporary forms of cultural experience. This is in contrast to a largely ‘positive’evaluation of his anti-foundationalist stance on the constitution of knowledge and a renewed interest in his work on aesthetics. This volume of lectures brings together Adorno’s thoughts on metaphysics and culture in post-war Germany.Adorno regularly developed lecture courses in the 1960s to think through work in progress. These lectures provide the thought processes that contributed to the final section of Negative Dialectis, to many his finest work.As such they provide a valuable insight into the creative thought processes of this most famous of dialectical thinkers. They do more than this though. They also demonstrate the moral and intellectual dilemma that Adorno found himself in a post-Auschwitz world in which a ‘resurrected culture’, which importantly includes philosophical speculation,‘was rehashing its traditional values of truth, beauty and goodness as if nothing had happened’(p. 119). In part these lectures meditate on the meaning of Adorno’s famous claim that after Auschwitz it was impossible to write poetry. The lectures begin, somewhat dauntingly, with questioning the nature and meaning of metaphysics in culture.Adorno takes the unusual stance that it was Aristotle, and not Plato, who was the first true metaphysician. For those of us who know of Plato’s simile of the cave in which he discounts the empirical world in favour of the ‘forms’, the metaphysically real, this comes as a surprise. But Adorno’s point is that Plato divides these two realms in such a way that there is no meeting place, no mediation between them.Whereas Aristotle poses the question ‘of how one is to conceive the mediation between the world of ideas and the world of sensible objects’ (p. 33). Aristotle thus becomes the first theorist to take seriously the relation between the empirical world and the world of ideas.Adorno’s underlying interest in Aristotle is, however, guided by problems in his own thought. If philosophical thought is also social thought and if it is embedded in the transitory and the historical, then how can it develop categories that are universal? For Adorno the universal is also necessarily the ideological, yet he does not wish to throw the baby out with the bath water. Rather he argues that thought ‘is able constantly to think beyond itself and its limits, to think through the walls of its glasshouse.And this thinking beyond itself, into openness – that, precisely, is metaphysics’ (p. 68). How, then is one to think of the metaphysical in the world today without falling prey to ideology? Adorno recounts a recurring dream in which he feels he is no longer alive but merely the ‘emanation of a wish of some victim of Auschwitz’ (p. 110). To merely exist ‘one is taking away that possibility from someone else, to whom life has been denied; that one is stealing that person’s life . And if one does live on, one has, in a sense, been statistically lucky at the expense of those who have fallen victim to the mechanism of annihilation and, one must fear, will still fall victim to it’ (p. 113). Adorno poses the dilemma of a survivor, but also, to extrapolate, of the ‘haves’ rather than the ‘have nots’. The realm of culture becomes a realm of forgetting. He recounts an experience he had Sociology Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 583–596. Printed in the United Kingdom © 2001 BSA Publications Limited