Adorno’s complicitous-critique stance explains his intellectual persistence over Marcuse

Evidence

I would argue that it is this difference between the two—Adorno’s complex skepticism, and his acknowledgment of the always-already coopted status of all art in bourgeois culture, formulations very close to postmodernism’s ”complicitous critique” and ”resistance from within,” as opposed to Marcuse’s fitful but passionate hopefulness concerning total, utopian revolution achieved through avant-garde art and its changed consciousness—that has been responsible for Adorno’s persistence and growing cachet in intellectual discourse, despite his ostensible ”elitism,” and for Marcuse’s neardisappearance. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 157

Categorization

• SHARE: This genealogical claim about why Adorno’s cachet outlasted Marcuse is the kind of point to send any critical-theory friend.