How Nice of You, Doctor: Adorno's Freudian Ethics

This dissertation represents an attempt to construct an account of Adorno's ethics in terms of the Freudian understanding of the human being that undergirds Adorno's thought. It thus proceeds in two directions. First, it aims to illustrate the inadequacies in current attempts to reconstruct the ethical content found in Adorno's work. This involves examining not just the content of such reconstructions but also the implicit motivation that drives them and leads them to place a greater emphasis on certain aspects of Adorno's thought over others. Second, it makes the case that such an approach leads to an increased appreciation of the implicit Freudian content of his work and attempts to bring it out further. This involves reconsidering the fate of Freud in the Frankfurt School.;These two directions are thus pursued in the following fashion. First, there is an initial examination of projects of reconstructing Adorno's ethics as a coherent whole. In contradistinction to this tendency, it is argued that a true reading of Adorno must follow the same approach as Adorno advocated of Bach -- an x-ray which would illuminate the hidden links of his work while also recognizing that such links need not form a coherent whole. The case is then made, by examining Adorno's work on the culture industry, of its centrality to his thought and, thereby, the central importance of the Freudian understanding of the human being. This results in an extended examination of the reception of Freud in the Frankfurt School from Fromm onward, and aims to show that the attempts to distance Adorno from Marcuse cannot hide the affinities between the two. This further leads to a possible reconstruction of what a Freudian ethic would be and what its relevance might be for us today. Finally, there is an extended treatment of how such insights relate to Adorno's own relation to the student movement in Germany, which shows the limitations of his own understanding of the ethical content of his work, as well as how he was unable to recognize the repressive potential in institutionalized psychoanalysis.