Book Review: DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT, Horkheimer and Adorno, Stanford University Press Edition, 2007.

Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, the editor of the Stanford edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment, took a dense, difficult book and made it more work to read. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's "philosophical fragments" reward the reader with sustained analyses of capitalist culture and with pithy one-liners worthy of the authors' role as the philosophical Statler and Waldorf heckling modernity. However, Noerr's pedantry constantly gets in their way and yours. This edition has two problems: insufficient translation and bad endnotes.

First, the translation. Edmund Jephcott does what I can only assume is a solid job translating (nearly) all of the original German into English. However, he does not translate the French, the Latin, or the Greek. (Jephcott renders the Greek quotations in the Roman alphabet. So we can… what, sound them out?) The translation would be fine if I read French, Latin, Greek, English, just not German, but that’s not the case for me or most other Anglophone readers of this book. (Classicists aren't the major audience for Frankfurt School culture criticism.) You might think that Noerr would have done us a favor and found somebody to translate the dead languages with the living. Nein. When Horkheimer and Adorno quote Seneca, you're on your own.

Not this Seneca. The other one.

Second, the endnotes. Never have so many endnotes been of so little use. Noerr preserves Horkheimer and Adorno’s original endnotes, but puts them at the end of the book, rather than at the end of each fragment. However, interlarded among these, we find Noerr's much more numerous endnotes about the book’s publication history, which have their own, independent numbering system. What percentage of readers wants this information? Ten? Five? Anybody doing scholarship on this book is probably reading it in German anyway, and has the different editions ready to hand. To most of the book’s readers, these notes are clutter. Putting them in a different location within the book would at least have spared readers the labor of sorting through them to find the few endnotes that actually help you understand the book.

And Noerr does provide such explanatory notes. For example, one defines the the idiom "white trash" as a "derogatory expression for white workers" (267). So all that Latin, all that Greek, and all that French, you got to puzzle out on your own, but when a familiar American English idiom appears, in a book published by an American university press, Noerr opens the lantern shutter and dazzles us.

A second example should convey the football-bat uselessness of Noerr's endnotes. On page 102 of Dialectic of Enlightenment appears this sentence: "Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette gleamed in the eye of her writer as an advert aimed at all the relevant consortia." This is the first time either name, Bernadette or Zanuck, appears in the book.

Who could this be? In the spirit of Noerr, I'm not going to tell you.

Now, a great many readers of Dialectic of Enlightenment are students of mass culture who will at least recognize producer Darryl F. Zanuck's last name as connected to Hollywood, if not to 20th Century Fox. Just in case we don't recognize it, Noerr supplies an endnote saying as much. But Saint Bernadette? No endnote. Noerr does not tell us that she was 1) a 19th century Frenchwoman canonized for her visions of the Virgin Mary, or that she was 2) the subject of a now-forgotten 1942 bestseller, or that 3) 20th Century Fox produced a film adaptation of the novel in 1943, a film that netted four academy awards, despite being forgotten in subsequent decades.

Who is so steeped in Hollywood lore that he or she can follow Horkheimer and Adorno's oblique, dated reference here--to a 1940s hagiography, exploited by a big-five studio into a successful but forgotten biopic--yet at the same time needs a footnote to decrypt the name of Zanuck? Nobody. Endnote both names, endnote neither, or endnote the more obscure of the two, but don't endnote only the less obscure.

The only way an editor could provide worse endnotes than this is simply to make them up. Example: “Zanuck: Emperor Horth Zanuck IV, Martian conqueror of the thirty-ninth century, CE. Author of History and Class Consciousness and The Catcher in the Rye.”

Emperor Horth Zanuck IV (Yellow, Pink, and Lavender on Rose). Mark Rothko, 1950.

 

So be warned: this edition is labor-intensive. You'll have to look up a lot of dead words, and internet-search a lot of names, because Noerr's unfinished-vanity-project endnotes are worse than useless. Let's hope Stanford puts out a better edition as an apology.