Reviews and Comments

This is a long and thorough biography of Adorno that works well as an introduction to his philosophy. I feel like I learned a lot. The more theoretical passages went over my head, but I think the mind still retains something even of texts that are several levels too difficult. It's not a waste of time to read them, more or less attentively. I'm side-eyeing the biographer for conservative intuitions and misogyny. I'm especially surprised at his seeming lack of curiosity towards Gretel Adorno, who by his own account played a major part in TWA's writing process. Why does the biographer feel the need to tell us all about TWA's grandfather, several of his intellectual friends, etc, but next to nothing about who his wife was? Before reading this biography I felt unequipped to read any work of Adorno on my own - now I feel equipped for a few of them. Besides that, I also learned some German history, especially the post-war period. That's an excellent outcome, so I am glad I read this book. One issue I had is with the translation. I would have much rather read this in German. The translation is subpar - just a head's up for people who have the choice I didn't get.

Each chapter is a paper by a different historian, so there's a lot of variation in the quality of the writing. The book is divided by geographic area, which makes sense: the conditions and forms of Jewish resistance did vary by area quite a lot, it turns out. The subject matter of Jewish life during national socialism is pretty grim, so it was a tough read at times, still the fact that the book is about resistance gives it a relatively optimistic focus. I especially liked the chapters that were about individual figures or groups. The chapters that focused more on the broader history were a little boring to me. The contextualization of the book in the discourse among historians (first two chapters) was very interesting. The art history and literary studies chapters in the last part were boring to me personally. The collection of yiddish resistance songs at the end, on the other hand, was a great, non-dry way to close the book.

I learned a lot from this book. It is an academic work that is exactly about what the title says - very straightforward. I knew what I was getting into, and got what I expected.

Good: the structure (a life in five ideas) makes sense and is easy to follow. Bad: the biographer makes himself way too visible. I do not care about his judgments on the practicability of Weil's ideas, even less about his strange downplaying of French and British colonialism, and less still about his bizarre asides about Donald Trump or smartphones. Those are the worst! Did his editor tell him he can only write about Weil if he ties her to contemporary issues somehow? It's so bad.

Simone Weil is a great figure to write a biography about. I think less of her now, than I did before reading this. My commie brain is telling me that she was just a bourgeois reactionary who only got more openly right-wing with age. In a way, she was the traditional stereotype of what commies imagine all anarchists are like. Fortunately I don't just think with my commie brain and am able to see her as a complex and nuanced figure. I do feel like many intellectuals are probably sympathetic to Weil out of class solidarity. They regard her as a uniquely strong willed and uncompromising figure because she was also a bourgeois intellectual, and disregard all the other militants who have done far better work than her while leading lives just as raw and uncompromising - if not more so, since she could, and did, always go back to her rich parents after any of her failed life experiments (e.g. trying to work in a factory or to fight in the Spanish civil war). But I've been following this train of thought while reading and have decided to not come down too harshly on Weil for being, well, privileged. That would be a simplistic lens to view her life through.

This book made me want to learn more about other militant figures of Weil's time.

Had a hard time for the first few chapters because I was on my guard on whether or not I was reading Mao apologia - but the more I got into the book, the more I understood the author's points and was able to follow his way of thinking. From then on, this felt like a necessary corrective approach to the field of sinology. The book is written for academics and that's fine. It's still fairly engaging, with exceptions. The last chapter is exceptionally hard to understand, it's too heavy with Marxist theory for my tiny brain. The chapter about the death count of the Great Leap Forward started off like something I would hate (it just feels like the "holocaust denier" kind of argument about numbers not adding up), but somehow managed to make an excellent point about the disregard for Chinese lives that Sinologists show in handling the history of the GLF. This book confronted me with my own unconscious racisms and essentialisms. It made me aware of some rotten things in sinology. I hope to reread the last chapter once I have a more solid grasp on Marxist concepts. I guess maybe I should read Said's Orientalism too, since it is the framework that this book is based on. Maybe someday. I also think it's interesting that the author isn't a Sinologist but actually considers his external perspective to be an epistemological strength. After all the book is mostly about epistemology (it does have "knowledge production" in the subtitle) and I find that very interesting.