Adorno taught by applying Marx and Freud as if they were contemporaries.

Evidence

7 And Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929, coming to Frankfurt from Bonn as a philosopher with a doctoral thesis behind him, and familiar with the contemporary philosophical scene, took the view in retrospect that it would have been impossible at the time to have had any sense of a coherent doctrine, a Critical Theory'. Adorno wrote essays on the critique of culture and gave seminars on Hegel. He presented a certain Marxist backgroundand that was it.’ But then: `When I first met Adorno, and saw how breathtakingly he suddenly started to talk about commodity fetishism, how he applied the concept to cultural and everyday phenomena, it was a shock at first. But then I thought: try to behave as if Marx and Freud (about whom Adorno spoke in the same orthodox way) were contemporaries.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 537

Categorization

• SHARE: A nerdy, precise anecdote about Adorno’s pedagogy — worth sending to one person who studies the Frankfurt School’s teaching style.
• XREF: Echoes the book’s recurring claim that Adorno read Marx and Freud together, unlike orthodox Marxists or analysts.