As Lukács writes, "A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the `Grand Hotel Abyss' . . . `a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.'" Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press , 1994), 22.
2.
Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 90.
3.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 183.
4.
Theodor Adorno, "Critique," in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 281.
5.
In one essay, for example, Adorno remarks that the most insightful critics of "Americanism" and its attendant "unfreedom" were, surprisingly, native sons, such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe (he cites de Tocqueville as a notable exception to his theory). Theodor Adorno, "Aldous Huxley and Utopia," in Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 97.
