Lifelong death penalty: Adorno, Beckett’s drama, sociology

Abstract

The article examines the sociological dimension of Adorno’s analyses of Beckett’s dramatic work. It unearths intersections between Adorno’s literary-critical writings on Beckett, on the one hand, and his sociological investigations of contemporary social life and methodological writings on nineteenth- and twentieth-century social science, on the other. The article demonstrates how Adorno’s sociological and methodological thought informed his reading of Beckett and how his engagement with Beckett helped him deepen his critical inquiries into capitalist society. Adorno deciphers Beckett’s dramas as expressions of a damaged individual existence and as articulations of underlying social conditions: their functional exchange context, the mechanism of social reproduction, reification, and estrangement. These diagnoses of injured individual and social life draw attention to Beckett’s problematization of death. Adorno’s comments on death in Beckett elucidate an important connection between the emancipatory dimensions of his Beckett interpretation and his sociology.