and controversies because it has been claimed for different and
conflicting intellectual agendas. In this respect, the present con-
figuration in the United States differs significantly from that in
Germany, where Adorno is mostly seen as part of a Marxist tra-
dition that has been marginalized since the 1980s. In fact, one
could argue that the somewhat marginal position of the Frankfurt
School in this country encouraged interaction between Adorno's
theory and other oppositional forces and that the interpretation
of Adorno is, implicitly or explicitly, determined by conflicting
modes of appropriation. For this reason, the historical approach
that has dominated much of the recent work on Western Marxism
seems to be less appropriate. ³

The present debate is not chiefly about placing Adorno on a
historical map, although forms of mapping may well be included
in the various critical agendas. For instance, Fredric Jameson's
radical claim that Adorno's work represents the legitimate form of
Marxism for the 1990s implies a trajectory that leads from the
Lukács of the 1920s, via the work of the Frankfurt School dur-
ing the 1930s and 1940s, to Adorno's late writings, especially Nega-
tive Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Similarly, the contention that
Adorno's postwar theory anticipates the poststructuralist turn of
the 1970s reorganizes the historical map by taking Adorno out of
the history of Marxism and claiming him for the history of the
poststructuralist project. On this map he is obviously closer to
Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger than to Lukács, An-
tonio Gramsci, and Jürgen Habermas.

The following remarks are not intended to offer a survey of
Adorno's American reception during the last twenty years or so. ⁴
Instead, they focus on the interface between reading and appro-
priation. The result might be termed a tentative typology of recent
Adorno criticism in the United States. Accordingly, I emphasize
common elements within a specific approach rather than nuances
of reading and historical fluctuations within the work of individ-
ual critics. I distinguish the following positions: a strategy of
(political) distancing, the poststructuralist rereading, the post-
modernist critique, and a return to the 'authentic' Adorno. It goes
without saying that in all instances the acts of reading, as well as

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