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Adorno in America David Jenemann, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
The dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate. Only then doe he do justice to his object and to himself. (Theodor Adorno, Prisms, 33)
Theodor W. Adorno was one of the twentieth century's most erudite and insightful, yet most maligned, Marxist cultural critics. Author of the two key texts on twentieth century aesthetics and critical thought, Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics, Adorno is perhaps most well-known as the co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with his fellow Frankfurt School colleague Max Horkheimer, a blistering indictment of the western culture industry. Adorno and Horkheimer perceived the culture industry not only as the incubator of fascism but as the culmination of a millennium long march toward barbarism ironically arising out of the very pursuit of Enlightenment itself. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was written during World War II while the authors were in exile from their native Germany, having relocated to the United States with the rise of fascism in Germany. Scholarly interest in Adorno 's scholarship has accelerated over the last several decades, as David Jenemann points out in his fascinating new book on Adorno 's years of American exile, to the extent that there is a veritable cottage industry of new Adorno scholarship especially arising in the wake of his centenary. In addition there has been an intense focus on the "culture industry" thesis within this scholarship, most of which reiterates commonly held assumptions regarding Adorno 's intellectual elitism and perceived anti-Americanism. As Jenemann notes, "Whether pro- or contra-Adorno, these efforts tend to confirm the horror Adorno felt when faced with the products of the mass media and of America in general" (xv). Even outstanding scholars, such as Martin Jay and Frederic Jameson, so central to the restoration of the Adorno and the Frankfurt School to American intellectual discourse, criticize Adorno 's cultural elitism and anti-Americanism. With the exception of Alex Thomson's recently published Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (2006), Adorno's American sojourn most...