Abstract
Antisemitism is certainly among the great problems that Adorno never ceased to reflect upon. He discussed this theme on several occasions: it is addressed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer), in the great collective study published in 1950 under the title The Authoritarian Personality, and in other writings dating back to his American period (as, for example, the essay Antisemitism and Fascist Propaganda), and to the time of his return to Germany.
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Notes
- 1.
Preparatory reflections to the chapter on antisemitism can be read in Horkheimer 1985: 587–592.
- 2.
Antisemitism and Fascist Propaganda was written as a presentation for the conference on antisemitism that took place in San Francisco in the June of 1944.
- 3.
It is worth mentioning, as observed by Wiggershaus (1995: 417), the reference to the Sartrian reflection found in The Authoritarian Personality: «There is marked similarity between the syndrome which we have labeled the authoritarian personality and the ‘portrait of the antisemite’ by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s brilliant paper became available to us after all our data had been collected and analyzed. That his phenomenological ‘portrait’ should resemble so closely, both in general structure and in numerous details, the syndrome which slowly emerged from our empirical observations and quantitative analysis, seems to us remarkable». The comparison with Sartre is developed more extensively in Adorno 2016, a text on which we will dwell briefly in the continuation of the present essay.
References
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Petrucciani, S. (2021). Adorno’s Interpretation of Antisemitism and the Dialectics of Civilization. In: Tarquini, A. (eds) The European Left and the Jewish Question, 1848-1992. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56662-3_10
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