Adorno’s notion of fetishism derived from popular speech, not from Marx or Freud

Evidence

Tellingly, even when Adorno professes what Schmid Noerr describes as a ‘pronounced libidinal relationship’ to his own texts in a letter to Horkheimer concerning potential changes to summary of ‘On Jazz’, it is still apparent that his concept of fetishism owes far less to Marx and psychoanalysis than to popular discourse: when Adorno writes to Horkheimer that ‘[m]y fetishism only applies to the grand German text, not the summaries’, it is difficult to interpret him as referencing Marx’s fetish-character of the commodity-form or wanting to diagnose himself with a psychopathology. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 413

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the debate over whether Adorno’s cultural criticism is a genuine ‘critique of political economy’ or a vulgarization — central to the book’s revisionist thesis against the ‘pessimistic cul-de-sac’ reading. — connects to: Adorno repurposed Marx’s commodity fetish concept toward art reception rather than production relations. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 433; Adorno used fetishism to mediate Marx and Freud into synthesis — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 405; Lazarsfeld accused Adorno of fetishistic Latin usage — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 401
• SEED: Angle: the gap between how theory-adjacent terms circulate in intellectual correspondence versus how they are deployed in published work — a case study in scholarly reception distorting a thinker’s actual usage.