Adorno and Performance is one of the first volumes in the Performance Philosophy book series published by Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Laura Cull, Alice Lagaay and Freddie Rokem. The series, which started in 2014, is a new undertaking for performance philosophy, an emerging interdisciplinary field integrating research, creative practice and scholarship. Published in association with the Performance Philosophy international research network, founded and coordinated by Cull, the series aims to investigate the relationship between philosophy and performance, establishing a field that has grown significantly in the last decade. The new research area is therefore open to retrieving currents of thought that have been marginalized by academia in order to break new ground.
Given this premise, the study on Theodor W. Adorno and performance is an interesting challenge and also an original way to revive interest in the leading Frankfurt school philosopher. The book, which includes essays by scholars and critics from different backgrounds, argues that ‘performance’ is a central category in Adorno's critical and aesthetic theory. As stated by the volume editors, the attempt to unite ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ in Adorno entails ‘the creation of a conceptual force field’ (p. 15). And, indeed, this is true not only because of the semantic polarity between the two disciplines – one conventionally devoted to the body and the other to the mind – but also because the collection of essays featured in this volume works together as a constellation, or a multiplicity, of points of view where the sense of the whole depends on the cross-referencing between the various essays. Going beyond the study of the numerous and direct references to performance that can be found throughout Adorno's work – consider, for example, his reflections on Beckett, Kafka, Klee, Schönberg and Wagner, just to name a few – these essays also have the merit of bringing out the performative nature of Adorno's thought and writing, and thus of philosophy in general. For example, Mattia Martinson's essay considers the last aphorism of Minima Moralia to investigate the notion of philosophical performance. Interestingly, aside from the significant reflections stimulated by Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, especially in the chapters by Andrea Sakoparning and Marcus Quent, even those Adornian theories not specifically dedicated to the arts are found to be fertile ground for reflections on performance, as well as the comparison with artwork or authors not directly related to him. For instance, Karoline Gritzner's analysis of Adorno's Dream Notes demonstrates the performative nature of dreams and observes some Adornian philosophical concepts in action, such as the possibility of redemption and reconciliation between subject and object world after the fracture caused by ‘identity thinking’; and the chapter by Ioana Jucan on Adorno's remark that thinking is always a ‘mode of comportment’, carried out through the study of Richard Maxwell's production Neutral Hero.
Beyond the specificity of each essay, it becomes apparent through this book how Adorno's essential notion of ‘nonidentical thinking’, as an instrument of negative dialectics, could become a pivot around which scholars think through performance. This means that performance – in which identity, power and domination are continuously challenged – can become an alternative way of representing and unveiling the reality that ‘identitarian thought’ – the dominant, universalizing representational order of late capitalism's globalized word that Adorno criticizes – is unable to understand.
