an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Spring
2019, ISSN 1552-5112
Jean Baudrillard on Theodor Adorno
An excerpt from the
recently released book, From
Achilles to Zarathustra: Jean Baudrillard on Theorists, Artists, Intellectuals
and Others.
Adorno, Theodor
(1903-1969, sociologist, musicologist and philosopher). Regarding Adorno,
Baudrillard wrote of a “dialectics which is also a presentment of what is no
longer dialectical” (Revenge of the Crystal: 21). Baudrillard was obsessed with
the mode of disappearance (of the real, of meaning, of the stage, of history,
of the social, of the individual). He
noted that a similar radicality of the mode of disappearance, to his own,
appears in both Adorno and Benjamin. “More deeply”, he wrote: “there is in
Benjamin and Adorno …a melancholy attached to the system itself, one that is
incurable and beyond any dialectic. It is this melancholia of systems that
today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that
surround us”. Adorno, among others, played a key role in Baudrillard’s long
term interest in melancholia working at the level of the system. Baudrillard
concluded that this melancholia is becoming “our fundamental passion” (Simulacra and Simulation: 162).
In
Cool Memories II Baudrillard quoted
Adorno: “Ecstasy prefers to abolish itself than to see its concept realized”.
This passage led Baudrillard to wonder: “Isn’t the same true of the social too
– a general all out collusion to prevent the realization of the social for fear
of damaging the concept and forever destroying the hopes that surround it?”
(85). These two inspirations from Adorno played no small role in Baudrillard’s
overall view of contemporary Western society as “trans-aestheticized”[1] –
or his own preferred term “hyperreal” given the proliferation of images that
surround us. Adorno (like Horkheimer) was among those who led Baudrillard to
develop his notion of reversibility – drawing on the understanding that
everything becomes its opposite. His final quotation of Adorno came in The Intelligence of Evil: “No universal
history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one from the
slingshot to the megaton bomb” (180; Adorno 1973: 320).
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Spring
2019, ISSN 1552-5112