Adorno read Marx’s stylistic failures as philosophical evidence against his theory
Evidence
Long have Marx’s mannerisms of speech been suspect to me. If only an incisive critique of the whole theory on the basis of language would be made. For example, the derivative rhetoric and imagery – does this not bear witness against him from the perspective of the philosophy of history? According to his and Hegel’s logic, his inability to find the words for what he meant would have to prove that the world spirit they trusted was not with him. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 973
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader Adorno-vs-Marx tension and to literary-form-as-philosophy arguments; links to Adorno’s essay on punctuation and his critique of jargon. — connects to: Adorno’s fragmented aphoristic style was itself a philosophical position against system — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 834; Marx’s revolutionary theory sometimes collapsed into overwrought polemic stylistically — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 976; Marx saw Capital as scientific while Adorno denies science’s authority — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 985 (+1 more)
- SEED: A strong essay angle: reading theoretical texts through their ‘mannerisms of speech’ — what stylistic tics reveal about a theory’s unacknowledged limits.
Broader Connections
- Adorno traces Marx’s productive-forces metaphysics back to Saint-Simon
#expands(0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1577