ABSTRACT
German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. He was appointed its director in 1959. Adorno’s thought is informed by a range of German thinkers, and his work could be described as a heterodox Marxism with a strong Freudian influence. Thus commodity fetishism and the role of the unconscious form a crucial part of his thinking. From Hegel, Adorno inherited the notion of the dialectic, but appropriated it in its negative form. He opposed the Hegelian notion of ‘identity’ thinking, and championed instead a way of seeking to ‘describe’ an object negatively, by what it could not be, seeking to arrive at an approximation of the ‘truth’ through a ‘constellation’ of such negative critiques.
