Programm Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche 2013 - Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Fellows in residence
35
Henry W. Pickford
Adorno: A Critical Life
Both ›criticism‹ and ›life‹ are recurrent motifs in Adorno’s work.
Adorno criticizes the contemporary social world because it has been
denuded of life, that is, of the possibility of living a genuinely good life,
as for instance in his famous sentence: »Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im
falschen« (»there is no right living in the false life«). At the same time
Adorno argues that the only life rightly lived under present circumstances
is a life of criticism, a life spent exposing and resisting the tendencies
of society and culture unwittingly to co-opt subjects to prevailing
norms and ideas.
Focussing on Adorno’s home, the idea of ›being at home‹, or thematically
related ideas, e.g. homelessness, homesickness, exile, alienation,
together with Adorno’s critical reflections on linguistic, national,
ethnic, and personal identity, the fellowship-sponsored research will
elaborate and investigate critique/criticism as the unifying factor
behind Adorno’s theoretical work on the one hand, and his practical
life as a broadcaster, educator, and public intellectual in the nascent
democracy of the Federal German Republic on the other.
This specific topic of this project relates complexly and critically to
Nietzsche’s exhortation to be “multiperspektivisch und kosmopolitisch".
Examining and evaluating theory and practice of criticism as the heart
of Adorno's life-work, the project, among other things, explores the limits
of cosmopolitanism in the context of the multiple perspectives of
identity and displacement in Adorno’s life.
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