Adorno rejected idealist reconciliation of class antagonism as evading objective social causes

Evidence

As the ‘subject of the collective dream’, the class-antagonism of soberly alert reality gets lost among the masses. Therefore, Adorno wants Benjamin to treat the dialectical image more dialectically in order to avoid prematurely reconciling the class-antagonism of existing society. Such a reconciliation would portraytheoppositionbetweentheclasses,inspiteof itssocial–thatis,objective– causes, as a mere idealist construct. In turn, this would give the impression that this opposition could be overcome idealistically, through recourse to a kind of ultimate intersubjective inwardness not requiring a confrontation with empirical social reality. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Adorno-vs-Benjamin debate over the dialectical image and to the historical-materialist critique of idealist resolution — echoes the book’s revisionist thesis that Adorno’s aesthetic theory is grounded in political economy. — connects to: Adorno faulted Hegel for treating the bourgeois individual as an irreducible reality — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 834; Adorno developed an independent theory of class beyond Marx’s — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1468; Adorno rejected Hegel’s rationality thesis as a capitulation to unreason — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 185 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno developed an independent theory of class beyond Marx’s #expands (0.78) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1468