Adorno held that inwardness serves reification by denying real history.

Evidence

Moreover, the ontology posited by Kierkegaard was that of hell, not heaven; despair rather than hope was at the center of his vision. The withdrawal into inwardness that Kierkegaard advocated was really a retreat into a mythical, demonic repetition that denied historical change. “Inwardness,” Adorno wrote, “is the historical prison of prehistorical humanity.” 112 By rejecting the historical world, Kierkegaard had become an accomplice of the reification he so often denounced; his dialectics were without a material object and were thus a return to the idealism he claimed to have left behind. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 260

Categorization

• SEED: A usable essay angle: how the Frankfurt School’s critique of Kierkegaard anticipates 20th-century critiques of interiority and self-work as depoliticization.
• XREF: Connects to the tradition’s later critique of the ‘administered soul’ and to Adorno’s broader thesis that retreat into subjectivity collaborates with objective reification. — connects to: Adorno posited a subterranean history of suppressed possibilities beside manifest history. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1388