Friendship without Borders: Women's Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany by Phil Leask (review)

Abstract

he states that “Adorno holds that art-music even at its most avant-garde reflects the sundered nature of modern society” (88, emphasis added), this is missing Adorno’s crucial rejection of any reflection theory of art (as in Lenin’s or Lukács’ more orthodox Marxism). Terry Pritchard’s chapter skims superficially over Adorno’s relation to Hegel, while never mentioning Drei Studien zu Hegel, nor engaging with the considerable body of work on this topic in German. Adorno’s relation to Heidegger is more complicated than Pritchard’s chapter allows. Michael Gallope sets up a completely unwarranted opposition between what he thinks are two types of Adornian music writing, one more precise, and the other supposedly merely loosely metaphorical or “ineffable” (the musicologist will think of Vladimir Jankélévich here). Gallope’s opposition is, however, undermined by the fact that the works he wants to adduce as somehow deliberately imprecise, like the Mahler monograph, include more detailed score analyses and technical discussion than the Philosophy of New Music. These are unfortunate flaws in a book that aims to be, and will no doubt be treated as, a standard reference work. In Negative Dialektik Adorno noted philosophy’s dependence on culture, a major difference remaining between Continental and analytic traditions. It is the job of a handbook to try to bridge these cultural differences, as most of its authors well succeed in doing; a few, however, still inadvertently demonstrate that Adorno remains hard to digest for non-German speakers. Larson Powell, University of Missouri – Kansas City