To Read Together

In the prefatory dedication of his 1951 Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno explains that the "immediate occasion" for the book was the fiftieth birthday of his friend and collaborator Max Horkheimer.The aphoristic fragments were written between 1944 and 1947, Adorno writes, "in a phase when, bowing to outward circumstances, we had to interrupt our work together."But their publication in book form "wishes to demonstrate gratitude and loyalty by refusing to acknowledge the interruption.It bears witness to a dialogue intrieur: there is not a motif in it that does not belong as much to Horkheimer as to him who found the time to formulate it" (18).It is a striking gesture, framing the book as a testament to the fact that even when the two men were separated and out of touch, the intimacy of their collaboration was nonetheless sustained at a distance, in the interior dialogue Adorno continued to hear in his head.There is a similar lesson at the heart of Politically Red, the remarkable book written by Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsi that is the focus of a rich discussion in the Theories and Methodologies dossier in this issue."The beauty of this collaboration," note Cadava and Nadal-Melsi in the final pages, "is that it has confirmed in rather extraordinary ways that we never read, write, think, let alone publish, alone-even when we find ourselves in forced isolation or simply imagine ourselves alone" (336).A pandemic book, an "unexpected" and "totally unplanned" volume that started out as a book review (Cadava), Politically Red is also, in its form as well as in the virtuosic readings of a "plural coalition" or "red common-wealth" of texts by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Fredric Jameson, among others (Cadava and Nadal-Melsi 27), a provocative exploration of the modalities and stakes of collaboration in the broadest sense.The reminder that "when we read, we never read alone" is not only a refrain in the book (see 9, 12