Adorno’s polarity of reception stems from his characteristic combination of opposing strains

Evidence

What was it that made a book by Adorno something that for one person was educative and illuminating and could hardly be put down, for someone else gave an off-putting impression of being hermetically sealed, for a third offered the exciting prospect of being able to treat Marx and Freud as contemporaries, and for others still smacked of drawing-room communism and class struggle? It was the same quality that had characterized all of Adorno’s work since the later 1920s: his way of combining bitterness and romanticism; his way of combining a social interpretation of works of art with an interpretation of society that took as its yardstick the promise of happiness that works of art themselves contained; his way of combining the happiness produced by an ability to articulate suffering with the suffering produced by a sadomasochistic denial of the demand for happiness; his way of combining catastrophe theory and the scent of freedom, esotericism and vehemence. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2180

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concise characterization of what makes Adorno’s work readable on radically divergent terms — a compressed map of his method and its interpretability.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno endorsed class-struggle theory while speculating independently of class categories — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 386

Broader Connections

• Adorno endorsed class-struggle theory while speculating independently of class categories #exemplifies (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 386