Theodore Adorno, Greta Karplus, & a Late-Capitalist Frankfurt-School Marriage; or, why what Theodore Adorno needed was not respect and attention from philosophers, but treatment by psychiatrists for a tremendously dire case of patriarchal misogynistic self-oblivious delusion. Or, bluntly, for being a callow a**hole egomaniac (which is, admittedly, a common failure mode for boys whom too many authority figures told them they were very special when young, but even so)…
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How did I get there? By chasing links due to an insufficient ability to keep myself on-task.
Let me start with a little throat-clearing: Back in the Day, when I was a college senior, I had the extraordinary privilege of taking a seminar on “Deconstruction” from the truly brilliant Stanley Cavell.
I ended it thinking that much of “Continental Philosophy” was an intellectual power game, in which sometimes the—very true—argument that “the map is not the territory” was decisive and led to the rejection of a group of authors positions, sometimes it did not, and that the only intelligible reasons for why it was sometimes one and the other were reasons of social-network allegiance and academic-positional power.
In short, bad “Continental Philosophy” was a series of the following intellectual moves:
Viewpoint X is bad because it is a map.
The map is not the territory.
Therefore we reject viewpoint X.
Here is my map: viewpoint Y.
My map is good.
FULL STOP.
Now there are good “Continental Philosophers”! I was and am wowed by Keith Tribe’s deployment of Foucaultian theory to understand the British classical economists: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-e-archives-two-months>
But there are a very great many bad Continental Philosophers.
And so I find myself agreeing with Matthew Adelstein here:
Matthew Adelstein: How Continental Philosophers “Argue” <https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue>: ‘On the unseriousness of the discipline…. One way [bad] continental philosophers argue is by brazenly asserting “A is not B… but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense… [and so] A is C and anyone who thinks it’s B is naive…. An example… from Butler…. “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of ‘sex’ as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of Lévi Strauss and structuralism in chapter 2…”. Got that?…
And I see a protest:
Nathan Witkin: Continental Philosophy Needs Better Critics—and Defenders <https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/continental-philosophy-needs-better>: ‘Regardless of what you think of this passage’s substance, we should be able to agree it does not contain an inference…. There is a series of positive claims that are related…. They do not, however, entail one another, nor is there any evidence that Butler thinks they do. Adelstein is conflating a common rhetorical pattern (“A is not B, but C”) with a “rule of inference,” and suggesting that it is continental philosophers, rather than he who have confused the two…
But what, then, is the reason that Butler claims that we ought to view A as not B but C?
Why should we of that A (the relationship of gender to culture) as not B (as sex is to nature, i.e., a fitting of a conceptual frame to the patterns of mammalian reproduction that exist out there in the real world), but instead as C (gender is the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ is produced)?
I mean: certainly B is there: There are processes of meiosis and fertilization, there are animals in which flipped genetic switches make some providers of ova and a substantially disjoint set providers of sperm, there are all kinds of other biological structures and patterns that usually but not always cohere with those flipped switches (but not always! seahorse fathers carry the young, after all!). And we call this “sex” and we call highly correlated cultural labels of biological bodies “gender”. But we all agree that this is a map, not the territory: There are no platonic ideals of ♂ and ♀out there. There is no “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them…”. (This is so, even though most human cultures assume that there are such platonic ideals of ♂ and ♀out there and the assumption is so strong that it seriously and badly misled Platon as to the inner structure of the universe.)
But while you can truly say that gender is not congruent to biological sex in nature, Butler provides us with no good reasons, anywhere, to take “gender… [to be] the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced…”
Our homines habilenses ancestors had a sexed nature before there was any human culture, after all.
So I went down the rabbit hole. And, today, chasing links leads me to see another protest, this time about Matthew on Theodore Adorno:
James: Arguing for Continental Philosophy <https://enrichedjamsham.substack.com/p/arguing-for-continental-philosophy>: ‘Continental philosophy…. aims to describe experience, often with a focus on “problematizing,” and questioning received wisdom, and… critiquing dominant power structures… to help you to see your existence, your culture, and the world, in a new, more critical light. A representative quote [from Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia:
“Marriage, living on as an abject parody in a time that has removed the basis of its human justification, usually serves today as a trick of self-preservation: the two conspirators deflect outward responsibility for their respective ill-doing to the other while in reality existing together in a murky swamp. The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interests, both freely accepted mutual responsibility. Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world’s arrangements that no-one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege…”
Okay. That was Adorno.
What does James have to say to explain it? This:
This passage… [is] aiming to cast marriage in a new light, forcing the reader to reconsider what marriage means…. What if marriage were simply a cultural arrangement enabling you to deflect responsibility, and an economic arrangement forcing you to remain tied to each other[?]… You might not agree with this reframing… but reframing is the goal… not careful argumentation…. Use words… to avoid any connotations or implications… [engage in] a degree of purposeful obfuscation… [to] serve the goal of problematizing. They also like to keep themselves from being pinned down to any one interpretation…
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My response is: No. Simply Not. Bulls***. The rhetorical moves of bad Continental Philosophy—1. Viewpoint X is bad because it is a map. 2. The map is not the territory. 3. Therefore we reject viewpoint X. 4. Here is my map: viewpoint Y. 5. My map is good. 6. FULL STOP—are best understood not as intellectual arguments but rather as deployments of social-network power and as products of human psychology.
And so I have once again come back up the same rabbit hole I came back up back in 1982, with much the same conclusion: that looking inside the texts of the bad “Continental Philosophers” (NOT ALL CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHERS!) is the very worst place to seek for any valid insights.
Thus one had to look very much outside the text at the psychological life-experiences and socio-cultural-institutional settings of the bad “Continental Philosophers” to understand why they were at the rhetorical level, spending so much energy and time doing nothing but wasting their own and their students’ brains—and trying to waste mine. (Admittedly, I had been predisposed to think this by having read, the year before, E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory critique of Continental Philosopher Louis Althusser the year before; which reading had been followed a month later by Althusser’s descent into deadly madness and his murder of his wife Hélène Rytmann.)
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Let me stick to Adorno. Contrary to what James claims, Adorno, after all, is not saying “the standard map is not the territory: here are some other ‘what-if’perspectives on it that give us a broader and less constricted view”. There is no “what if…?” in Adorno’s passage.
There are, instead, declarations:
THIS IS HOW IT IS:
Marriage… abject parody… [no] human justification… conspirators deflect[ing]… responsibility for their respective ill-doing… an enforced community of economic interests… degradation of the interested parties…
What happens when I take the black marks on the pages of the codexes of Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment, when from it I spin-up a subTuring instantiation of the mind of Theodore Adorno, run it on its separate partition in my wetware, and then ask SubTuringAdorno why his map is to be preferred? In what sense is his view less “not the territory” than, say, Archbishop Cranmer’s view: that marriage is for the sake of the “children… [as] a remedy against sin and to avoid fornication… [and] for the mutual society help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity”?
I get no intelligible answer at all.
What I get, simply, is a declaration that under Late Capitalism:
Theodore Adorno: Minima Moralia <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm>: ‘Life has turned into the sphere of the private… merely of consumption… dragged along… [by] the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance…. The relationship of life and production, which the latter degrades… into an ephemeral [mere] appearance of the former, is completely absurd. Means and ends are interchanged….. The reduced and degraded essence bristles tenaciously against its ensorcelment in the façade.… Social analysis can garner incomparably more from individual experience...
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But why is this a better map to the territory? How does this happen? How has life been degraded by the relationship that the sphere of production under Late Capitalism imposes on it?
Might one perhaps gain some insight here by consulting <http://wikipedia.org> on Adorno’s experience with the institution of “marriage”?:
Wikipedia: Gretel Karplus <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretel_Adorno>: ‘She obtained her doctoral degree in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin…. She was just 23 at the time she received her promotion to Doctor of Philosophy…. The Adornos wed in 1937, after more than fourteen years of courtship. That courtship was for a significant amount of time conducted over long-distance; Karplus confided in their close mutual friend, Walter Benjamin, that this separation was the cause of much long-term emotional strain upon her….
Adorno had at least two affairs with other women during more than forty years of marriage to Gretel, including a long-term affair with Charlotte Alexander during their years in Los Angeles, as well as an encounter with a woman known as “Carol” which is detailed in a diary entry. Adorno’s biographer, Stefan Müller-Doohm, cites several additional affairs, including an extramarital relationship with Reneé Nell during their years in L.A….
After obtaining her doctorate, Karplus became a business woman and continued to reside in Berlin with financial independence up until she and Adorno emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1937…. Karplus… in 1934… became responsible for the factory and its more than 200 employees…. Her approximate income was cited at 8000dm per annum in 1933–4….
Gretel Adorno assisted her husband Adorno and his intellectual partner Max Horkheimer in developing the manuscript for Dialectic of Enlightenment…. Her assistance in recording and editing the verbal and written drafts of Dialectic of Enlightenment was neither the first nor the last time she worked alongside Adorno and Horkheimer…. From 1937… she assisted on almost all initial drafts of Adorno’s works, which were dictated to her and taken down in shorthand…. Whilst the couple were living in the United States… Adorno for the most part refused to write in English, which meant that Gretel was required to translate his works into English…
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8000DM per year in the mid-1930s was very solidly upper-middle class for Germany if not higher, the equivalent then of $3000 per year at a time when the average German worker earned $0.25 an hour—six times average income for Germany in the day (and according to standard intertemporal comparisons the equivalent of $30,000 of today’s dollars in purchasing power). This was roughly twice what Adorno would have gotten had he succeeded in gaining an appointment as a Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.
Perhaps also relevant is that Theodore Adorno’s birth name was Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund. But his mother, Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana from Corsica, wanted -Adorno added to his name, and he became Wisengrund-Adorno, and then dropped the “Wiesengrund” when he applied for U.S. citizenship, perhaps to appear less German.
The picture I get from this is is of both Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana and Gretel Karplus as strong, powerful, confident, strongly feminist women for their day. The picture I get from this is one of Gretel Karplus as falling in love with Theodore Adorno, and then deciding that the best thing for her would be to devote all of her talent and her support to assist him in his life and in his very important cultural-criticism work.
For does this, to you, seem like:
“parody”,
“deflect[tion of] outward responsibility”,
“ill-doing”,
“existing together in a murky swamp’”,
“enforced community of economic interests… [which] unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties”,
“no-one… can escape such degradation”, “marriage without ignominy is a… possibility… purely formal [even] for the privileged [who] are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second nature…”
?
No.
It seems that Theodore Adorno, somehow, has a pearl of great price indeed. Somehow he got an immensely talented, energetic, hard-working lady to fall in love with him and become an extraordinary example of what J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to one of his sons termed “women as they are, as companions in shipwreck” and then going on to warn that callow men do not see this and so:
forget [women’s] desires, needs and temptations… [see] ‘true love’, as a fire from without, a permanent exaltation, unrelated to age, childbearing, and plain life, and unrelated to will and purpose… [something to] keep them always nice and warm in a cold world, without any effort of theirs…
I look at this situation, and I find myself wondering to what degree her and their friends and families found themselves shaking their heads and ruefully thinking that one does not choose with whom one falls in love, and so cannot choose wisely.
So I look at Adorno’s reaction to “marriage”. And I think that the stuff about marriage under production-focused Late Capitalism is total bulls***. I see Adorno believing, in the core of his being, that he has been degraded. Why? Because he is in a “community of interests” with Greta Karplus. Instead, he thinks, he ought to—but cannot—have been able to lead a completely “independent life” exactly as he wished without having had to take any account of her desires, needs and temptations, or having been forced to feel guilty when he did not do so.
Thus I see Adorno as in need, badly, not of respect and attention from philosophers, but from psychiatrists.
This is a truly virulent case of patriarchal misogynistic self-oblivious delusion with respect to what is actually going on in his marriage.
Or, to but it more bluntly, he needed treatment for being a callow a**hole egomaniac (which is, admittedly, a common failure mode for boys whom too many authority figures told them they were very special when young, but even so).
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Adelstein, Matthew. 2025. “How Continental Philosophers Argue”. Bentham’s Newsletter. November 11 <https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue>
Adorno, Theodore. 1951 [1974]. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm>.
Anderson, Perry. 1980. Arguments within English Marxism. New York: Verson. <https://archive.org/details/argumentswithine0000ande/page/n1/mode/1up>.
Bearn, Gordon C. F. 1998. “Sounding Serious: Cavell & Derrida.” Representations. 63, pp. 65–92, <https://doi.org/10.2307/2902918>. How Continental Philosophers “Argue”.
Cranmer, Thomas. 1552. The Book of Common Prayer. London: Edward Whitchurch <http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1559/Marriage_1559.htm>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2005. “Two Months Before the Mast of Post-Modernism”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-e-archives-two-months>.
James. 2025. “Arguing for Continental Philosophy”. Enriched Jam Sham. November 11. <https://enrichedjamsham.substack.com/p/arguing-for-continental-philosophy>.
Thompson, E.P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory; or, An Orrery of Errors. New York: Monthly Review Press. <https://archive.org/details/povertyoftheoryo00thom>.
Tolkien, J.R.R. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Tribe, Keith. 1978. Land, Labour, & Economic Discourse. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. <https://archive.org/details/landlaboureconom0000trib>.
Wikipedia. 2025. “Greta Karplus”. Accessed <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretel_Adorno>
Witkin, Nathan. 2025. “Continental Philosophy Needs Better Critics—and Defenders”. Arachne. December 17. <https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/continental-philosophy-needs-better>.
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Thomas Cranmer: The Book of Common Prayer <http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1559/Marriage_1559.htm>: ‘Holy matrimony… is an honorable state, instituted… in the time of man’s innocency… which holy state Christ adourned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galile, and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men, and therefore is not to be enterprised, nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly… but reverently, discretely, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for the which matrimony was ordained:
One was the procreation of children, to be brought up in the feare and nurture of the Lord, and praise of God.
Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin and to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.
Thirdly, for the mutual society help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.
Into the which holy state these two persons present, come now to be joined…
Adorno is saying “the standard map is not the territory. Instead, this is the territory”. And when one asks Adorno why his map is to be preferred—in what sense it is less “not the territory” than Archbishop Cranmer’s—we get no intelligible answer at all:
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