Adorno supervised Benjamin’s attempt to fuse theology with historical materialism

Evidence

What Adorno did not consider either Bloch or Kracauer to be capable of (Kracauer’s book on Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time, written in exile in France, was devastatingly criticized by Adorno in a letter to his former mentor as a sorry effort aimed at sales success), he expected Benjamin to produce: a philosophy embodying a way out of the dream state of bourgeois immanence by being concrete and transcendent at once, by combining the density of experience with the rigour of thought. Adorno functioned as a kind of supervisor during the 1930s, trying to commit Benjamin to confronting theology with historical materialism, a confrontation which Adorno thought Horkheimer was showing more and more appreciation for. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 773 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Adorno saw an agreement between him and Benjamin in central philosophical points'. These consisted, in his eyes, of the fact that both of them were carrying out a dialectical self-dissolution of myth by putting a dialectical construction on the relation between myth and history; and they were both doing this in the light of an inverse’ theology, which saw earthly life from the point of view of those already redeemed, and which decoded the elements of a materially distorted life as symbols of hope. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 868 (#expands, via linked claim)

Above all, Adorno alleges ‘a lack of mediation between pragmatic substance and Marxian theory leading to a “materialistic-historiographical evocation” of socio-historical motifs’. The missing mediation of which Adorno writes is mediation between ‘conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure’ and the ‘corresponding features of the substructure’ – a mediation that can only be achieved theoretically, however, ‘through the total social process’. … This means unpacking ‘the overall social and economic tendencies of the age’ rather than ‘imput[ing] to phenomena precisely the kind of spontaneity, tangibility and density which they have lost under capitalism’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 280 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Adorno expected Benjamin specifically to fuse concreteness with transcendence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 773; Adorno and Benjamin jointly pursued a dialectical dissolution of myth through inverse theology — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 868; Adorno demanded theoretical mediation between superstructure and substructure in historical materialism. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 280 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno expected Benjamin specifically to fuse concreteness with transcendence #qualifies (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 773
• Adorno and Benjamin jointly pursued a dialectical dissolution of myth through inverse theology #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 868
• Adorno demanded theoretical mediation between superstructure and substructure in historical materialism. #expands (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 280
• Theology-Marxism mediation hindered rather than helped Benjamin’s originality #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 890
• Adorno demanded Benjamin ground his commodity-soul thesis in Marx’s Capital chapter on fetishism. #expands (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 290