Language and History in Adorno's Notes to Literature (Studies in Philosophy)

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature

Ulrich Plass

Routledge New York & London

Excerpts from Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, newly translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor. English translation copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Original German-language edition copyright 1970 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Used by permission. Excerpts from Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Copyright (c) 1944 by Social Studies Association, NY. New edition: (c) S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1969; English trans. (c) 2002 Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Stanford University Press. Excerpts from Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vols. 1 and 2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Sherry Weber Nicholsen. English language copyright (c) 1991 and 1992 by Columbia University Press. Used by permission. Excerpts from Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, translated by Sam and Sherry Weber. English language copyright (c) 1967 by Theodor W. Adorno / The MIT Press. Used by permission. Excerpt from The Works of Stefan George, translated by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz. Copyright (c) 1949 by The University of North Carolina. Used by permission. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

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© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97837-8 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97837-8 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plass, Ulrich. Language and history in Theodor W. Adorno’s notes to literature / Ulrich Plass. p. cm. -- (Studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97837-8 (alk. paper) 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. Noten zur Literatur. 2. Literature--History and criticism. I. Title. PN514.A337 1974 809--dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Note on Translations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Preface

xv

Introduction Adorno’s Literary Criticism

xxi

Chapter One The Art of Transition

1

Chapter Two Rauschen: Eichendorff

49

Chapter Three Conjuration: Rudolf Borchardt

73

Chapter Four As If: Stefan George

89

Chapter Five The Wound: Heine

115

Chapter Six Exhaustion: Goethe

153 vii

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Contents

Conclusion

175

Notes

179

Bibliography

225

Index

243

List of Abbreviations

WORKS BY THEODOR W. ADORNO: In German: BG: GS: PT:

Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik Gesammelte Schriften Philosophische Terminologie

In English: AP: AT: BE: CM: DE: HS: JA: K: MM: ND: NH: NL:

“The Actuality of Philosophy” Aesthetic Theory Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords Dialectic of Enlightenment Hegel: Three Studies The Jargon of Authenticity Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic Minima Moralia Negative Dialectics “The Idea of Natural History” Notes to Literature

WORKS BY ADORNO AND WALTER BENJAMIN: BW: Briefwechsel 1928-1940 CC: The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940

ix

x

List of Abbreviations

WORKS BY WALTER BENJAMIN: In German: WB B: Briefe WB GS: Gesammelte Schriften In English: OGTD: The Origin of German Tragic Drama WB C: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 WB SW: Selected Writings WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS: KA:

Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe

Note on Translations

When writing about Adorno for English-speaking readers, one inevitably encounters the difficulty of rendering his convoluted German into readable English. Because Adorno’s idiosyncratic style is incompatible with the syntactical structure and vocabulary of English, all translations necessarily convey his thought inadequately. Like all works that quote Adorno in English, this one had to make more concessions to readability than I would have liked. Wherever possible I have relied on existing translations, which I have silently corrected when necessary. Some passages I have translated myself from the German. All quotations from Adorno contain page references to the German sources to make it easier for inquisitive readers to look up the quotations in their original wording. The translation of Walter Benjamin’s German poses similar difficulties, and I have therefore also added German references to quotations from his works.

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Acknowledgments

I owe gratitude to teachers, colleagues, and friends for furthering my understanding of Adorno’s aesthetics. At the University of Michigan, Tim Bahti’s masterful close readings first introduced me to the study of Adorno’s inexhaustibly rich Aesthetic Theory. At New York University, Eva Geulen and Paul Fleming were exemplary mentors and inspiring interlocutors—without them, this study would never have come into existence. Alexander García Düttmann’s NYU seminar on Adorno’s Notes to Literature and his unmatched wit and originality provided an impressive example of how to take Adorno seriously without becoming a dogmatic “Adornit.” I am also grateful to Richard Sieburth and Bernd Hüppauf for offering helpful advice when it counted, and to Jay Bernstein and his course on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory at the New School. I wish to thank especially my infinitely generous colleagues Krishna Winston and Leo Lensing for their timely suggestions and unfailing help with translations and corrections that made the publication of this book possible.

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Dire cela, sans savoir quoi. —Beckett, L’innommable1

The study of literature plays a significant role in Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of modernity. Adorno’s interpretations of literary works merit critical attention because they offer points of view not found elsewhere in his work. While the critic Jan Philipp Reemtsma may be correct in asserting that “it is inconceivable that a literary text would have directed [Adorno’s] philosophy decisively,”2 during the second half of Adorno’s career, after his return to Frankfurt from California, literary questions clearly assumed increasing significance in his thought. In his discussions of literature, one indeed finds a slightly different Adorno: a writer and thinker who productively exploits the irresolvable tension between Adorno the critical Hegelian philosopher and Adorno the superbly educated but unprofessional, passionate, and judgmental reader. It would of course be foolish to separate Adorno’s writings on literature from his writings on other subjects, especially since Adorno frequently complained about the myopia inherent in any dogmatic division of intellectual labor. Adorno’s literary criticism is intimately linked to his philosophy as a whole; but this does not mean that his essays on literature offer mechanical applications of previously formulated ideas. Even if his thought never results directly from reading literature, such reading nonetheless provides an experience that is never completely subsumed under existing aesthetic concepts. At their best, Adorno’s literary essays provide a challenge to the very philosophy they are meant to exemplify; they can thus prove productively confusing. One example of the way in which Adorno transforms the significance of certain concepts when he uses them in his literary interpretations can be found in his discussion of the political, sociological, and psychological problems brought about by the increasing weakening of the ego in consumerist xv

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mass culture. This diagnosis can be found, for instance, in an essay titled “Opinion Delusion Society” [“Meinung Wahn Gesellschaft” (1961)], in which Adorno offers a psychoanalytic and ideological critique of “pathological opinions” that “ceaselessly issue from the infantile narcissistic prejudice that only ‘I’ am good and all else is inferior and bad” (CM 111; GS 10.2: 580). Adorno’s use of the term “ego-weakness” in this essay is entirely negative, signifying both political impotence and a failure of critical introspection: The weakness of the ego nowadays, which beyond its psychological dimension also registers the effects of each individual’s real powerlessness in the face of the societalized apparatus, would be exposed to an unbearable degree of narcissistic injury if it did not seek a compensatory identification with the power and the glory of the collective. (CM 111; GS 10.2: 580)

The implications here are clear: in the worst case, the “compensatory power” can lead to destructive identification with a fascist collective. To a large extent, Adorno’s critique of modernity is thus a critique of the gradual elimination of the individual, whose subjectivity—having lapsed from the Icarian flight of Hegelian speculation—can no longer withstand the overbearing power of the existing order, or, as Adorno calls it, das Bestehende [that which exists]. Ego-weakness results from a weakening of subjectivity, from the individual’s attempt to conform to the existing order. Such conformity eliminates the possibility of change. Yet simply revolting against the existing order will not liberate the subject: “What takes itself to be utopia remains the negation of what exists [das Bestehende] and is obedient to it” (AT 32; GS 7:55). The role of art is not to liberate the individual, who has been reduced to a helplessly passive consumer, caught up in “the compulsive imitation . . . of cultural commodities” (DE 136; GS 3: 190); even critical knowledge of how the culture industry works does not liberate one from its domination. Utopia— the emancipation from consumerist conformism and its pernicious law of compulsive homogeneity—remains wedded to that which it negates, and art is therefore an experience and an expression of negativity and suffering. Yet because art is a form of expression, it contains a utopian element, which is bound, however, to remain in the realm of potentiality, for its fulfillment would be a dangerous delusion, a mere denial of the existing order, a blind flight from reality: “If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal end. Hegel was the first to realize that the end of art is implicit in its concept” (AT 32; GS 7: 55). Adorno takes from Hegel the idea of

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immanent criticism, but he refuses to adopt Hegel’s vision of dialectical progress. For Adorno, an end of art or a fulfillment of art is conceivable only as a paradoxical negative fulfillment, because artworks do not adhere to the commonsensical definitions of success and failure, and thus art’s negativity is never entirely bleak but always equivocal.3 One finds powerful examples for the paradox of fulfillment as unfufillment, or success as failure, in his interpretations of poetry. In his readings of poets such as Hölderlin, Eichendorff, and Borchardt, ego-weakness acquires an aesthetic dimension that goes unmentioned in his other writings. According to Adorno, certain kinds of poetry are capable of articulating subjectivity in a negative form that approximates the psychological and social structure of ego-weakness: the ego yields to the objectivity of language, which in itself is senseless. Surprisingly, Adorno views this loss of control, this weakening of the ego, in aesthetically positive terms, as Christoph Menke observes: “The ‘fragmentation’ and ‘depersonalization,’ which Adorno had until now described predominantly negatively, now appear as a positive aesthetic achievement.”4 What is merely negative in a social context (the ego that fails to resist the powers of the existing order) becomes positive, or, I would prefer to say, negative in a productive way in literature, because literature provides a medium for experience and reflection on modernity implicitly pitted against the instrumental rationality exemplified by what Adorno calls “identity-thinking.” It thus turns out that literature—and in particular poetry, the most private of all art-forms—is the site where the modern dissolution of meaning as identification takes shape as an observable aesthetic phenomenon. Eichendorff ’s poetry, for example, provides aesthetic access to language distanced from meaning—language that is neither full of meaning nor devoid of it, language that is neither Romantic nor modern, language that embodies a historical process, that ceases to be a mere abstraction and appears as readable semblance (see NL 1: 69; GS 11: 83). For Adorno, the experience of language in Eichendorff ’s poetry communicates as much knowledge about the aesthetic and historical structure (or truth) of language as the most perceptive philosophy of language. In related fashion, a piece of modern literature such as Beckett’s drama Endgame captures as much of the fate of the subject in modernity as any philosophy of the subject. In conceptualizing his late Aesthetic Theory, Adorno stressed that his separate essays on music and literature were not “applications but rather integral elements of aesthetic theory itself ” (AT 362; GS 7: 539). As such, Adorno’s essays on literature must be read as aesthetic works in their own right. As much as these essays, collected mostly under the title Notes to Literature, resonate with Adorno’s AT, they nevertheless remain faithful to the idea of

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immanent criticism, described by Friedrich Schlegel as the critical attempt to “search out the individual ideal in every work” (KA 16: 270), because “to subject a book, which one can only understand from within itself, to a generic concept compiled and assembled out of customs and beliefs, coincidental experiences, and arbitrary stipulations, is as if a child tried to clutch the stars and the moon in his hand and pack them in his satchel” (KA 2: 133).5 Adorno’s ability to refrain from merely applying established philosophical categories to works of literature is the strength of his essays, but this strength is not absolute. It does not preclude his conflicting desire to understand the individual work of art within a larger historical, or, rather, historico-philosophical, structure first fully outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, his most stinging critique of modernity and probably his most influential work, co-authored with Max Horkheimer. For instance, one can learn from Adorno’s essay on Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris what one could have inferred already from the sweeping argument in DE, namely that despite its claims to aesthetic autonomy, literature inevitably participates in the dialectic of myth and enlightenment, barbarism and civilization. Yet at times Adorno violates his own philosophical insights and credos and proclaims literature’s immunity from history. His essays on literature are experimental in that they do not consistently try to prove the same insight. Despite the repetitiveness of Adorno’s philosophy (and all great philosophy is repetitive), his literary interpretations demonstrate a freedom and playfulness in relation to their objects that is the prerogative of the amateur, as Adorno observed in his discussion of Proust (see P 180; GS 10.1: 188). The relative lack of restraint that one finds in Adorno’s essays on literature is reflected in almost obsessive musings on language and presentation [what he calls Darstellung]. It is as if Adorno had to make up for the lack of a systematic philosophy of language with a wealth of linguistic and stylistic observations that almost invariably issue in the formulation of paradoxical figures. The persistence of paradox in the writings of the great dialectician Adorno serves as a reminder that philosophical reflection on the medium of thought, language, will not liberate thinking from its inherent intellectual and historical (Adorno would say: objective) tensions and contradictions. The purpose of this study is not to attempt a complete and definitive interpretation of Adorno’s NL; such an interpretation would be possible only at the cost of reductive generalizations. Through selective readings and commentaries, I seek to enhance an understanding of what fascinates Adorno in specific works of literature, and what role this fascination plays within his oeuvre, as well as in the context of the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry.”6 The chapters of this study are meant to be read in sequence, but

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they can also be read separately. The introduction discusses Adorno’s critical practice within its historical and institutional setting, for Adorno’s NL are occasional works, responding to specific cultural occurrences and social and political expectations. The first chapter is divided into subsections that are essentially variations on one consistent theme: Adorno’s reflections on the conditions and the process of writing essays. The second chapter investigates Adorno’s interpretations of the Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff in relation to Adorno’s aesthetic theorem of art as enigma, arguing that his thesis about the enigmatic character of art is embodied for him in the single poetic word Rauschen. The idea of poetic conjuration [Beschwörung], discussed in the third chapter, is crucial for Adorno’s readings of Rudolf Borchardt’s poems, which Adorno views as attempts to rhetorically force language to speak on its own accord. This analysis continues in the fourth chapter, which examines the essays on Stefan George, in whose poetry Adorno seeks to discern the pure potentiality of another history and another language, irreconcilable with the poet’s conservative cultural politics, and conceivable only in a highly artificial parabolic mode of speaking. Adorno’s polemical piece on Heinrich Heine, discussed in chapter 5, stands in direct contrast to Adorno’s appreciation of unfulfilled potentiality. Adorno repeats Karl Kraus’s characterization of Heine as the first thoroughly commercial and journalistic poet, and portrays him as the personification of damaged language and life. The sixth chapter analyzes Adorno’s re-examination of the historical structure of the dialectic of enlightenment in his reading of Goethe’s drama Iphigenia in Tauris, which not only reinforces Adorno’s earlier pessimistic critique of modernity, but also hints at the possible exhaustion of historical violence. None of my chapters offers a reconstruction of Adorno’s literary theory, for the simple reason that Adorno’s readings of literature become schematic and predictable when one tries to reduce them to one underlying theory or method. I agree with Simon Jarvis’s observation that “where it has been hoped to extract a critical method from Adorno’s works, the results have in general been disappointing. Unlike some other Marxist thinkers, Adorno does not lend himself to this kind of application.”7 My own study of Adorno’s NL owes its existence to an intellectual climate in which “it has once again been possible to turn to Adorno’s literary criticism without demanding that a methodology should be extorted from it.”8 I have found it more fruitful to read Adorno’s essays as the works of a “philosophical literary critic [rather] than . . . a literary theorist.”9 The philosophical literary critic treats a literary text as if every word mattered; he overestimates the significance of literature because he lacks the professional distance of the literary theorist. As a literary critic, Adorno acts as if the separation between literature

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and philosophy were a mere formality; he seeks to acknowledge what in his view philosophy has neglected, namely the “aesthetic dignity of words” (GS 1: 370). Because literature and philosophy are both made of language, they require scrupulous textual examination, and Adorno subjects them equally to critical linguistic analysis, described by him with the term Sprachkritik [language criticism] (GS 1: 370). Alluding to Romantic aesthetics, he claims that philosophy and literature are converging because of a twofold historical tendency: while art is beginning to converge with cognition but is aesthetically coherent only “when [its language] is ‘true:’ when its words are existent according to the objective historical state of affairs,” philosophy must increasingly explore the “hitherto merely aesthetically conceived, unmediated unity of language and truth” (GS 1: 370). Adorno seeks to judge literature by the historically determined truth of its cognition, and he judges philosophy by how carefully it attends to the aesthetic properties of language, to the dignity of singular words. This complementary approach to literature and philosophy, laid out first in a short text from the early 1930s, “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher” [“Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen”], from which the quotations above are taken, comes into its own in his later essays, and will be examined in the following chapters. My readings of Adorno thus seek to contribute to what Jacques Derrida, in accepting the Adorno Price awarded to him by the city of Frankfurt in 2001, described as a task still to be undertaken: the inquiry into Adorno’s thinking on literature within the discursive context of the cultural and political institutions in postwar Germany.10

Introduction

Adorno’s Literary Criticism

The concept of a resurrected culture after Auschwitz is illusory and absurd, and every work created since then has to pay the bitter price for this. But because the world has outlived its own downfall, it nevertheless needs art to write its unconscious history. —Adorno (CM 48; GS 10.2: 506) Immanent Criticism of intellectual and artistic phenomena . . . does not stop at a general recognition of the servitude of the objective mind, but seeks rather to transform this knowledge into a heightened perception of the thing itself. Insight into the negativity of culture is binding only when it reveals the truth or untruth of a perception, the coherence or incoherence of a structure, the substantiality or emptiness of a figure of speech. —Adorno (P 32; GS 10.1: 27)

I. Adorno’s writings on literature are part of an anti-systematic tradition in criticism and philosophy that can best be described as nomadic and that is exemplified in the works of writers that have significantly influenced him, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Lukács, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Karl Kraus, and Walter Benjamin. The influence of the latter on all of Adorno’s works, and especially on his literary criticism and his concepts of language and history, cannot be overestimated. It is misleading, however, to conflate Adorno’s thought with what intellectual history has come to refer to as “The Frankfurt School.” With respect to art and literature, there is no consistent or monolithic approach that could be reasonably identified xxi

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with the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s interpretations of literature adhere to no orthodoxy of Critical Theory, and the insights and arguments they advance do not always square with the concepts and norms that intellectual historians tend to ascribe to the so-called first generation of the Frankfurt School. Assessing Adorno’s literary criticism requires far more than pointing out its position within the larger framework known as Critical Theory; it is equally important, if not more so, to contemplate the idiosyncrasies and selfconscious contradictions in Adorno’s writings on literature. An additional challenge is posed by the inconsistent use of philosophically determinate concepts. Adorno’s tendency to supplement conventional philosophical vocabulary with suggestive metaphorical terms is particularly pronounced in his literary criticism, which therefore requires bold, incisive interpretation. Paraphrasing his arguments in these essays is not sufficient to enable one to get to the substance of his writings, since his arguments cannot be neatly separated from the complicated and ironic textual operations that make his essays fascinating but also potentially uninterpretable. My intention in this study is to provide interpretations—necessarily incomplete—that go beyond what is stated directly in Adorno’s texts. Using his description of the essay as an “art of transition” as a point of departure, I seek to alert the reader not only to Adorno’s use of concepts and metaphors, but also to the larger rhetorical structures of his essays on literature. By including “history” and “language” in the title of this study, I am highlighting two terms whose significance for Adorno’s thought is evident at first glance. Yet, in typical fashion, Adorno nowhere defines these two concepts. Susan Buck-Morss has helpfully suggested that Adorno uses “history” as the dialectical opposite to “nature.”1 Perhaps Adorno’s hesitance to delineate a distinct concept of history is at least partly due to his resistance to a Marxist perspective that would ground interpretation upon dependable and predictable historical laws. His avoidance of conceptual definitions implies that his concept of language is also rather ambivalent, and in fact Adorno has no cohesive philosophy of language,2 only a deliberate strategy of refusing to engage in the language practices expected of philosophical discourse. It is one of the amusing ironies of intellectual history that the most pervasive feature of Adorno’s reception can be found in the widespread influence his own language has had, especially on German academics. Not only have some of his pithy sentences become slogans; many academics have also unwittingly taught themselves to write in “Adornoese.” But Adorno’s unwillingness to philosophize “by the book” is more than a pose (although it is that, too). His at times strikingly aphoristic thinking expresses not an accidental style, but the very essence of what he has to offer philosophically. Thus, if Adorno

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alludes specifically to “history” and “language” verbatim, he does so only in starkly exaggerating speculations such as this one: No language, not even the old vernacular language, is organic and natural—something restorationist doctrines would like to make it; but every victory of the advanced, civilizatory linguistic element contains as a precipitate something of the injustice done to the older and weaker element. . . . The Western languages have tempered that injustice in something like the way British imperialism dealt politically with its subject peoples. Compensation as consideration for those who have been subjugated may well be the general definition of culture in the emphatic sense; in Germany, however, this equilibrium was never achieved, precisely because the Roman, rational principle never achieved uncontested dominance . . . no pax romana was concluded. . . . To this extent German is both less and more than the Western languages; it is less by virtue of the brittle and unfinished quality that provides the individual writer with so little that is firm . . . and it is more because the language is not completely trapped within the net of socialization and communication. (NL 1: 188; GS 11: 219)

In this passage from his essay “Words from Abroad” [“Wörter aus der Fremde” (1959)], Adorno describes language, or, more precisely, the German language, as the result of a historical failure: Germany’s resistance to Roman civilization has left its traces in the language, which, in contrast to English or French, appears to be less finished, more clumsy and cumbersome. Yet Adorno senses the advantage—which he eagerly exploits in his own writings—that such an unfinished language can also provide untapped possibilities of expression that do not obey the requirements of communicative efficiency. Both German history and language have failed—this is the critical conviction from which Adorno’s essays draw their strength and their insights. Adorno’s writings on literature reflect a life-long concern with aesthetics (his opus magnum was to be his Aesthetic Theory, which remained unfinished); but they are also sometimes visceral expressions of literary experiences that challenge theoretical premises. Hence, one can neither deduce his critical practice from his aesthetic theory nor his aesthetic theory from his critical practice. Instead, one can analyze Adorno’s essays as attempts to articulate relevant insights into aesthetic objects in the absence of binding aesthetic norms. Beset by the experience of loss, Adorno—the reluctant and unhappy emigrant and refugee from Nazi Germany—was driven by an ethos of taking

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nothing for granted. As the title of one of his books, Ohne Leitbild, suggests, he strongly rejected the German notion of Leitbild, a term signifying the cultural and educational ideal of a society whose integrative unity derives from shared moral and aesthetic values (Leitbild literally means “guiding image;” it could be translated as “normative model”).3 Inspired by Nietzsche’s genealogical criticism, Adorno polemically pitched his essays as interventions [Eingriffe] aimed at unsettling the normative guidelines that have been interiorized and naturalized over time. Adorno was troubled by his fellow countrymen’s yearning for universal and binding Leitbilder, especially in the politically fragile society of postwar Germany, and the only norms he found in works of art were negative. Adorno repeatedly argues that art is social only where it is most removed from society,4 and thus incapable of providing any positive norms. Rather, the elements of irreducible spontaneity and fantasy essential to all works of art put them at odds with societal demands for instilling norms and values through edification, education, morality, or political awareness. Yet the conflict between individual, artistic articulation and social convention is actually inscribed into works of art themselves and can be observed there: “Only on the surface do the great works of art appear to be closed-off and identical with their own language. In truth they are force fields in which is carried out the conflict between the imposed norm and that which in them seeks expression” (GS 10.1: 294). Adorno’s essays on art and literature seek to describe and interpret this situation—they are attempts to balance that which is normative in a work of art and that which deviates from it, trying to comprehend the one in relation to the other. Therefore, Adorno’s essays frequently seek to grasp how a work of art exemplifies a specific style, and at the same time violates and undermines it: “If it is true that the great works of art were not possible without style, then they have been at the same time also always against the style” (GS 10.1: 294). Because artworks are always inherently antagonistic in themselves, their interpretation must also be a form of, as Adorno calls it, immanent critique (see P 32; GS 10.1: 27–28). The essay must, in the etymological spirit of the Greek root word krínein [to cut, to separate], identify distinctions within the artwork and in its relation to a general norm—its style, its genre, its history. The only norm that applies to artworks is the norm that is gained critically—in accordance with the idea of non-normative criticism first developed in the works of the Jena Romantics—from the artworks themselves, by critiquing the old from the perspective of the new, the past from the perspective of the most aesthetically advanced present. Aesthetic norms are thus never fixed, but always shifting with the historical development of art—a faint echo of the optimistic Romantic notion of literature as “progressive universal poetry:”5

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The principle of method here is that light should be cast on all art from the vantage point of the most recent artworks, rather than the reverse, following the custom of historicism and philology, which, bourgeois at heart, prefers that nothing ever change. If Valéry’s thesis is true that the best in the new corresponds to an old need, then the most authentic works are critiques of past works. Aesthetics becomes normative by articulating such criticism. (AT 359; GS 7: 533)

II. Upon returning to Germany in 1949, Adorno found that the prevailing literary criticism was as conformist as the country as a whole: “The spirit of critical freedom and autonomy seems to be absent” (NL 2: 305; GS 11: 661). In his short speech “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism” [“Zur Krisis der Literaturkritik,” 1952], Adorno provides a historical perspective: literary criticism has lost its audience. “The type of audience who reads the liberal press does not exist, nor do individuals so constituted that they can act as autonomous and reasonable judges of literary works” (NL 2: 306; GS 11: 662). But apart from sociological conditions, literary criticism has always had a difficult time of it in Germany: “Irony, intellectual flexibility, and skepticism about the existing order have never been highly regarded in Germany” (NL 2: 306; GS 11: 662). Without a sense for irony, “the element of productive negativity is largely absent” (NL 2: 306; GS 11: 662). Where there is little potential for skepticism, negativity, devoid of ironic playfulness and speculation, takes the form of “authoritarian decrees:” “The rejection still takes the form of what the jargon of the Third Reich called ‘abschießen,’ shooting down” (NL 2: 306; GS 11: 662). Adorno sees the use of words such as abschießen as symptoms of a general “devastation of language:” “It is as though everything is perceived through a schema of rigidified phrases” (NL 2: 307; GS 11: 663). In response to this critical diagnosis, Adorno’s own literary criticism often adopts techniques of defamiliarization (what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie), using Latin and French words that are received by his German readers and listeners as being unnecessarily difficult. Often, his contemplations on language focus on the function of foreign words. The absence of irony also implies the lack of its dialectical counterpart, seriousness. Such a lack is not due to personal incompetence, but, according to Adorno, is a sign of the disintegration “of tradition on which criticism, even if in contradiction, might form itself ” (NL 2: 307; GS 11: 663). Compared to the great critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, such as

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Lessing, Heine, or Nietzsche, today’s critics are epigones, because there is no objective spirit in which to participate. Criticism has no objective basis, and has thus been reduced to an isolated phenomenon, forced into the false dichotomy of being either academic or journalistic. Adorno’s often apodictic style can be viewed as a direct response to this diagnosis. Where there is no authority in accordance with or against which one can direct one’s criticism, writing itself must conjure up the missing authority in its critical gestures. This is no easy task, considering the stakes: “Criticism has power only to the extent to which every successful or unsuccessful sentence has something to do with the fate of humankind” (NL 2: 306; GS 11: 663–664). From this hyperbolic ethical claim Adorno draws the following conclusion: The task of the literary critic seems to have shifted to broader and deeper reflections because literature as a whole can no longer claim the dignity it had thirty years ago. The literary critic who would do justice to his task would be one who went beyond this task and registered in his ideas something of the upheaval that has shaken the foundation for his work. But he could do that successfully only if he simultaneously immersed himself, in full freedom and responsibility, in the objects that came to him, without any consideration for public acceptance and constellations of power, and at the same time used the most precise artistic-technical expertise; and if he took the claim to absoluteness that inheres, in distorted form, in even the most pitiful work of art as seriously as if the work were what it claims to be (NL 2: 308; GS 11: 664).

The only adequate response to the decline of criticism and the loss of the authority of tradition is to take each work of art “as seriously as if the work were what it claims to be.” It has to be judged not merely by what it is, but by what it aspires to be, regardless of how far it falls short of its claims. Nothing less than the absolute will do—the only applicable aesthetic norm is that the work of art, as an absolute, be completely autonomous from all norms and demands. However, the phrase “as if ” reminds us that seriousness is possible only in conjunction with the irony whose absence in Germany Adorno laments. Adorno’s criticism is serious for the sake of irony. Hence, what he noted about philosophy also holds true for his literary criticism: “Philosophy is the most serious of things, but then again it is not all that serious” (ND 14; GS 6: 26). Philosophy is the most serious of things because “the un-naïve thought knows how far it remains from the object of its thinking, and yet it must always talk as if it had it entirely” (ND 14; GS 6: 26). It is precisely the split between knowing and saying that dismantles the seriousness at the same

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time as it is constructed: “This brings [thought] to the point of clowning. It must not deny its clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give it hope for what is denied it” (ND 14; GS 6: 26). Adorno’s literary criticism is serious and ironic, clownish and full of hope. III. In a clownish spirit, Adorno once noted: “The stereotypes in late Beethoven are in the vein of ‘My grandfather used to say’” (BE 136; BG 197). This remark requires some commentary. “Late Beethoven” refers to the composer of the string quartet in C-sharp-minor opus 131 or the Hammerklavier sonata opus 106. To Adorno, “late style” means an aesthetic form in which the conventions “no longer imbued and mastered by subjectivity” are “left standing.” Beethoven’s late works are not expressions of fully matured mastery. Rather, “in late Beethoven, the conventions become expression in the naked depiction of themselves.” In a similar way, the conventions in Goethe’s Faust and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years “finally themselves become expression” (BE 125; BG183). One could say that all of Adorno’s critical and aesthetic endeavors presuppose the intention to let aesthetic conventions and stereotypes become expression once again, to let them speak for themselves, liberated “from the illusion of subjective control” (BE 125; BG 183). Edward Said describes this critical perspective as a peculiar form of modernism that has come to an end yet at the same time has survived itself: “Modernism has therefore come to seem paradoxically not so much a movement of the new but rather a movement of aging and ending. . . . But there is ending and surviving together. . . . ”6 If Said is right in depicting Adorno’s aesthetic perspective as a form of modernism in the mode of ending and surviving, then this double character also applies to the critical reception of Adorno and his works. Not infrequently Adorno does sound like the stubborn grandfather, always more prone to exhorting than to listening, always talking a bit too much and a bit too loudly. While Adorno is considered one of the most difficult thinkers in the twentieth century, he has also penned some of the more pernicious, most overused slogans of cultural criticism. Adorno sometimes appears not just late, but even outdated because he continues to be identified mostly with tired phrases such as “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (P 34; GS 10.1: 30), and “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (MM 38; GS 4: 43). It is the definition of a stereotype that it is old, that it comes late—it is a phrase that has become moribund. Is the same true for Adorno, whom Said identifies “as lateness itself ”?

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The eleventh September 2003 marked the centenary of Adorno’s birth. Most of the commemorative activities organized for this date tried to address the question “What remains?” As was perhaps to be expected, the answers were mostly dictated by party line. Adorno the private person evoked much greater interest than his work, and a number of articles exhibited a maliciously gleeful tone. Even the more open-minded commentators showed surprisingly little interest in Adorno’s thought itself. Many commemorators used the opportunity to reminisce about their own coming of age. Predominant was the attempt to portray Adorno as a prototypical Bildungsbürger [a cultured bourgeois intellectual] and Schöngeist [an aesthete] who in the end had been driven into despair and premature death by the militant political activism of his left-wing students.7 The commemorators could agree on the stereotype that Adorno, today more than ever, is untimely, an anachronism. “The child prodigy enters the hall of the past, the gallery of the giants Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger. And Adorno.” And: “Black as the night, some philosophical ruins protrude into the present. Nothing seems to be more historically obsolete than Adorno’s statements about history and the objective tendency of the age. The grinding machine of his method spreads terror. His utterances about the fate of the world have a ghostly ring.”8 The harping on anachronism and the accumulation of stereotypes in this example of contemporary journalistic criticism are grotesque. If Adorno’s thought has become so strange to us, as unfamiliar as a Baroque Trauerspiel (the specifically German play of lamentation that Walter Benjamin distinguished from Greek tragedy), then perhaps Norbert Bolz is right in his assessment that Adorno’s thinking is simply outdated and therefore irrelevant: “Nothing of what Adorno wrote counts in contemporary philosophy.”9 This dismissive judgment suggests that Adorno has become a mere pop phenomenon, assimilated into the culture and education industry, but is no longer part of the canon of serious thinking. Thematic and structural references to lateness and anachronism are impossible to miss in Adorno’s life and oeuvre. The first sentence of ND says: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (ND 3; GS 6: 15). Here Adorno formulates one of his core beliefs: living on not only means living guiltily in the shadow of crime and destruction; it also means paying a debt to the missed possibilities of the past. Precisely that which is obsolete turns out to be the timeliest. Adorno considered the very form of his thinking and writing to be antithetically anachronistic, and his entire philosophical perspective was dictated by the logic of a Nachspiel [“epilogue,” “sequel”].10 Lateness, then, is not only a historical category, but also a structural feature of Adorno’s thought. One

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can see this, for example, in his essay on a presumably anti-modern poet such as Joseph von Eichendorff, whose poetry Adorno praises for conveying a modern aesthetic quality of anti-subjective, semantically empty Rauschen, a rustling of language that interrupts and disorients the false metaphysical sense of order, security, and meaning provided by grammatically and logically organized language. It is fair to say that in Adorno’s interpretations of literature, language turns out to have its specific temporality, different from the temporality generally referred to as “historical context.” To be absolutely modern is not the same as being the most recent. Modernity, rather, is a quality that reveals itself retroactively; lateness is its essential condition. It inheres precisely in that which is considered obsolete. Central to any assessment of Adorno is an analysis of how his treatment of temporality relates to a conventional view of history as a unilinear series of events. More emphatically than any other contemporary thinker, Adorno tried to understand what it means to live “after Auschwitz.”11 His work is profoundly molded by his experience as a refugee and survivor. Survival and escape are among the most frequent experiences that Adorno detects in literary texts. Odysseus is the exemplar for the historical and literary experience of escape. Adorno’s thought differs most markedly from conventional Marxist philosophies of history in that it shifts the emphasis from a critique of capitalism to a sustained philosophical concern with what it means to reflect ceaselessly on the destruction of Western civilization, described by Adorno with the proper name Auschwitz. There is no doubt something uncomfortably absolute about this intellectual gesture.12 But the strength of Adorno’s thinking is his essayistic skill. Instead of trying to resolve contradictions and problems on a universal level, Adorno prefers to run small-scale experiments. As abstract as his formulations are, they are concerned nonetheless with the concrete and particular. Therefore, his essays never seek to answer directly the question as to whether one can live after Auschwitz—not only because this is a “hard” question, but especially because it calls the category of possibility itself into question. The essays present attempts to experiment with a number of responses to problems in the areas of culture and society. They are occasional works, intended to address concrete questions arising from a particular aesthetic, historical, or political context or object. One may recall Georg Lukács’s elegant formulation: “The title of every essay is preceded in invisible letters, by the words ‘Thoughts occasioned by. . . . ‘”13 Central to Adorno’s idea of essayistic philosophy is not only the critical interpretation of literature and other artworks, but also an unwavering commitment to carry out and reflect upon “education after Auschwitz.” His Notes to Literature and other essays are

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pedagogical in the very specific sense that they seek to address their subject matters—a specific poem or play—in an often inevitably oblique relation to the cultural and social situation in postwar Germany. IV. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Adorno decided to follow the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research back to Frankfurt am Main, his hometown. Later, Adorno will justify this decision with the desire to continue writing in his native language to which he attributes a peculiar capacity for expressing philosophical speculation.14 Another aspect was more practical: Adorno yearned to resume his educational work, both in the form of the essay on questions of culture and society and in the everyday practice of university teaching (he did not hold teaching appointments during his residencies in Oxford, New York, and Los Angeles). But the return to a German classroom immediately raises the question of how to relate to the German idea and institution of education in relation to a more encompassing understanding of culture, a relation expressed by the German term Bildung.15 Adorno must decide what to do with an essentially Idealist concept that is at the very center of German humanism in the age of Goethe and Humboldt but, from a post-Holocaust perspective, seems to serve primarily as an excuse to continue with “business as usual,” as if the breakdown of German civilization had not happened; as if one could morally and culturally rebuild by saying “Let’s just get back to reading Goethe.”16 It is important to recall that in the German context Bildung and education [Erziehung] are not the same: Bildung is derived from the words Bild [image] and bilden [to form] and is often translated as “selfcultivation” or “self-formation.” Bildung, therefore, transcends the sphere of formal education. It has less to do with academic degrees and more with the ideal of a person’s becoming fully cultivated in all areas of life. In contrast to the presumed innocence and crudeness of humans in their natural state, Bildung signifies progressive spiritual perfection according to an ideal image. The entire conception of German culture is based on Bildung as the ideal and goal of all education.17 Immediately after his return from exile, Adorno becomes almost completely absorbed in his teaching duties. He is impressed by the eagerness with which his students dedicate themselves to their studies. In a letter to Thomas Mann he praises their passionate intellectual commitment. Apparently, the students’ zeal to communicate difficult philosophical ideas is so unstoppable that they insist on continuing their already interminable

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seminar meetings through the semester break. But Adorno also observes that there is something uncanny about this otherwise commendable zeal: The students debate the most obscure questions situated at the borderline between logic and metaphysics as if they were debating politics— perhaps because in truth politics does not exist anymore. One feels compelled to compare this scene to a Talmudic School; sometimes I feel as if the spirits of the murdered Jews had taken hold of the German intellectuals—for the discussions are almost always about questions of exegesis but barely ever about the truth of a theory—it is a play of the spirit [Geist] with itself.18

His students’ intellectual fervor has a ghost-like quality, because it conceals several absences: the absence of the Jews who have been murdered and whose only presence is spiritual or ghost-like (Geist means both spirit and ghost); then the absence of political consciousness; and finally the absence of any inquiry into truth that would give the intellectual frenzy a larger purpose. Geist, the intellectual spirit, has become solely concerned with itself, taking flight from history and society. And the dark irony of the students’ spirited participation in intellectual inquiry is that it resembles the spirit in which Jewish religious scholars and exegetes conduct inquiry, but without the question that should stand at the end: Is it true? Echoing Hannah Arendt’s “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,”19 Adorno is stunned by the lack of awareness of the real political and social situation. Like Arendt, he witnesses a full-fledged “flight from reality.” In an essay written in 1949, sarcastically titled “The Resurrected Culture” [“Die auferstandene Kultur”], Adorno speaks tellingly of a “shadow culture.” According to the diagnosis he offers, the Germans have missed or repressed the fact that “culture in the traditional sense is dead—that culture in this world has become an accumulation of cultural possessions that are catalogued, distributed to the consumer and left for wear and tear. The world refuses to imbue culture with the seriousness that Germans have always bestowed upon it” (GS 20.2: 455). With the global hegemony of the culture industry—the administering, packaging, and selling of culture according to the laws of the market place—culture, in the sense of a spiritually elevating communal experience centered on the concept of Bildung, has become an anachronism. The German tendency to exaggerate the seriousness of culture is tantamount to blindness towards the present—with potentially dangerous political consequences, because it implies an isolation of culture as a value in itself, divorced from all historical and social circumstances: “Anyone who

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wanted today to appeal to the eternal values of culture would risk turning them into a new kind of blood and soil” (GS 20.2: 456). For Adorno, education cannot rely on the hope that merely teaching the cultural canon will result, somehow, in politically enlightened students. The function of Bildung has undergone a change that calls the entire enterprise of education into question: “One of the more significant functions of Bildung today is to repress and forget the horror that happened and one’s own responsibility for it” (GS 20.2: 460). Whenever Adorno tries to think about the relation between individual and collective, between subject and history, he takes recourse to psychoanalytic concepts. Here he suggests that Bildung is not a means of enlightenment, but in fact a mode of repression, a convenient way to run away from and cover up past horrors and the responsibility they imply—in typical fashion, Adorno stresses a primarily negative perspective that criticizes the ideological function of Bildung. In 1959, Adorno published his sociological essay “Theory of Half-Bildung,”20 in which he laments that Bildung has tried to posit itself as an absolute and has, therefore, degenerated to Halbbildung. Again, his perspective is negative. Yet instead of simply decrying the ideological abuse of Bildung, Adorno attempts to open up a historical perspective. He argues that the idea of Bildung incorporates two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, Bildung means overcoming through education purely natural or animal existence and adaptation [Anpassung] to human society and its rules. On the other hand, the idea of Bildung is not to lead the subject into culture and society by merely suppressing nature. Adorno emphasizes that an element of nature that resists social pressure to conform must be preserved at the same time as nature is harnessed and transcended through education. Adorno seeks to maintain a notion of Bildung that signifies precisely this tension between nature and culture. Another way of formulating this notion is to understand Bildung as an aporetic or antinomic concept—Adorno uses both terms to express the tension within Bildung. He emphasizes that Bildung is predicated upon freedom and autonomy but, at the same time, needs the opposition of an order at odds with freedom and autonomy. Therefore, the individual can realize itself as free and autonomous only in continuous opposition to a predetermined heteronomous structure that seeks to assimilate the individual completely. If Bildung is fully realized and the autonomous individual liberates itself from the constraints of the predetermined order, the tension that constitutes Bildung disappears. Hence, Adorno claims, fully realized Bildung is already no longer Bildung. This dialectical argument explains why Adorno prefers to maintain a definition of Bildung as essentially antinomic. A positive, content-oriented notion of Bildung will not suffice for him.21

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The tension with which Adorno tries to come to terms reflects a paradox that Kant stumbled across in his lecture “On Pedagogy.” Kant asks how education can simultaneously teach the student to subject himself to the force of law and to make use of his freedom—which is, in this case, not actual but only potential freedom. For Kant, the goal of education is the formation [or Bildung] of freedom. Yet, he insists “Coercion is necessary!”22 And then he asks: “How do I cultivate freedom under coercion”?23 Adorno the pedagogue answers this Kantian paradox by suggesting that the enforcement, the imposition of the canon is the very condition for intellectual autonomy, which is not the same as freedom from tradition but rather freedom in relation to tradition. The popular definition of Bildung as the intellectual appropriation of a canon of values and stories is precisely what Adorno rejects. The mere accumulation of knowledge does little to elevate the subject above the level of Halbbildung. According to Adorno’s argument, many of the typical props of education, such as reading lists, grades, and exams, are simply symptoms of “reified consciousness,” the education industry merely a division of the culture industry. Yet the fact that Adorno regularly returns to the idea of Bildung seems to indicate that he is not willing either to declare Bildung a thing of the past or to hand it over to the political forces of cultural conservatism that turn Bildung into a fetish: the canon in itself is not a positive value. It is valuable only when one experiences it as force and learns how to resist it. On the uses of tradition, Adorno remarks in MM: “One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly” (MM 52; GS 4: 58). As a public intellectual, Adorno was combating the spread of Halbbildung on two fronts. He sought to counter it by critically pointing out an array of its manifestations within consumer culture and so-called high culture. His critical, polemical approach included frequent appearances on radio and TV (Adorno participated in about 160 radio programs between 1950 and 1969),24 for the purpose of exposing his thought to a wide audience. Contrary to the pragmatic pedagogical discourses that dominate educational institutions, Adorno’s approach to pedagogy is uncompromisingly critical of the status quo: education can prevent a future lapse into barbarity, but in the past education has failed to prevent the lapse into barbarity. Adorno’s new categorical imperative is: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again” (CM 191; GS 10.2: 674). Such a demand is directed not at education as an achievement, sometimes even a privilege— this is how most people prefer to view it—but as a preventive tool: first and foremost, education must prevent a relapse into barbarity. This is why Adorno is disconcerted when he observes that his students are concerned

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primarily with questions of exegesis, but not with truth. Education after Auschwitz must aim for more than merely an intellectual understanding of the humanistic tradition. Intellectual inquiry must ask whether something is true or not precisely because the survival of the canon is not identical with its truth content. No tradition can guarantee truth, and no tradition is inherently truthful. The other front on which Adorno sought to fight Halbbildung was the arena of high culture and Bildung itself. Here, too, he sought to use the mass media to present and disseminate his interpretations of canonical literary and philosophical authors, among them Thomas Mann, Stefan George, Goethe, Hölderlin, Heine, Mörike, Kafka, Beckett, Proust, Brecht, Valéry, Kraus, Kracauer, Lukács, Balzac. In his appreciation of the literary canon and presumption of its pedagogical value, he behaved like a typical Bildungsbürger—with some important differences, however. To him, literature did not present eternal and stable values. Rather, it had to be viewed exclusively from the perspective of the current cultural and political situation. For that reason, Adorno’s radio addresses and essays on literature usually responded to demands raised by cultural politics—for example, Adorno might contribute to a literary anniversary, only to use the opportunity to raise fundamental questions concerning tradition and language. One of Adorno’s most widely read essays is titled “The Wound Heine.” But—as chapter 5 of this study explores—it is less an essay on Heinrich Heine’s work proper than an essay on the repression of Heine in postwar Germany and on the failure of the German tradition to embrace the émigré poet. Adorno’s public addresses on German and French literature and thought were quickly published by Suhrkamp under the title Noten zur Literatur [Notes to Literature]. The first volume of Notes is introduced by an essay that presents in a programmatic and somewhat schematic manner a transhistorical typology of “the essay” (Adorno uses the singular throughout). Adorno asserted that his speeches and radio addresses amounted to philosophical essays; his interpretations of literature provided him with an opportunity to find a potential mass audience for a kind of writing and thinking commonly considered to be prohibitively difficult. Adorno’s essays on literature are informed by the desire to counter the sterile play of Geist with itself and to challenge the tendency to view culture as a good per se, ignoring its complicity with barbarity. Adorno counters the self-referential and sterile tendency of Geist—noted in his letter to Thomas Mann—with an imperative. He declares that Geist must not aim at itself as its own fulfillment. Instead, Geist must be ready to lose itself to something other, something external. “True for all Geist is the sentence: ‘Throw away so

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that you gain!’” (GS 20.2: 457) With this motto (see GS 18: 694),25 Adorno formulates the ethos of his interpretations of literature. His ideal of interpretation is an immersion in the text that is the opposite of a hermeneutic appropriation of it. The ideal figure of such immersion is the rootless, diasporic Alexandrian scholar who reads profane texts as if they were sacred.26 In 1958, Adorno published an essay entitled “In Memory of Eichendorff,” the primary function of which he saw as “rescuing Eichendorff from both friends and foes” (NL 1:57; GS 11: 71). This gesture of a double rescue is emblematic of Adorno’s pedagogical intention. By going against both Eichendorff ’s admirers and his detractors, by engaging neither in affirmation nor denial, he forges a third way of critical debate that takes tradition seriously only in order to be better able to challenge it. The route of Adorno’s redemptive criticism is best described by a dialectical figure: starting from a mere duality or dichotomy, Adorno posits the necessity of a third. However, this third resists easy identification. Its positing reflects a never waning trust in the viability of plain and simple hope, justified by nothing but despair. He approvingly quotes the nineteenth-century poet Grabbe: “Nothing but despair can save us” (cited in NL 2: 75; GS 11: 407). Hope is one of the strongest impulses in Adorno’s work. But it is not, as he notes with regard to Ernst Bloch, “a principle” (NL 1: 213; GS 11: 248). Adorno’s essay on Eichendorff is a masterpiece of redemptive criticism. Instead of simply rejecting the poet’s Catholic and aristocratic conservatism, Adorno seeks to situate it vis-à-vis the problem of how to relate to tradition and, in that connection, how to commemorate a poetical oeuvre whose time has passed. “In a culture that has been resurrected on a false basis,” the essay begins, echoing Adorno’s earlier thoughts on “resurrected culture,” “one’s relation to the cultural past is poisoned. Love for the past is frequently accompanied by resentment toward the present” (NL 1: 55; GS 11: 69). Adorno dismisses two ways of relating to tradition. The first embraces the past and rejects the present, the second rejects the past and embraces the present. This “break in the continuity of historical consciousness,” Adorno warns, leads to a false polarization, either hypostatizing or denying tradition. A relation to the past that neither uncritically embraces nor outrightly dismisses it can take place only from the position of the most advanced consciousness; tradition can be saved only by achieving the utmost distance from it: An advanced consciousness that was in command of itself and did not have to worry about being negated by the most recent information would also have the freedom to love what is past. . . . Only when one no longer breaks with tradition because one no longer senses it and

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Adorno’s affinity for Eichendorff is not only a matter of choice, a Wahlverwandtschaft—it is not entirely an act of an “advanced consciousness” reaching across the abyss that separates the present from the past in order to “wrest what is contemporary away from what is transient in the past and granting no tradition authority” (NL 1: 56; GS 11: 70). Rather, freedom from tradition is predicated on the experience of the absence of freedom. Where there is no freedom from tradition, the subject continues to free itself from tradition.27 Freedom is thus identical with the act of liberating oneself by breaking with tradition—but one can break with something only if one suffers from it. Adorno’s example for this paradoxical situation is taken from the realm of pedagogy. He refers to one of the most ingrained habits of humanistic education, namely teaching the literary canon by means of rote learning. “Anyone who did not learn by heart as a child [Eichendorff ’s line] ‘Whom God would truly favor / he sends out into the world’ [Wem Gott will rechte Gunst erweisen, / Den schickt er in die weite Welt] is unfamiliar with a level of elevation of the word above everyday life . . .” (NL 1: 57; GS 11: 71). As often with Adorno, it is hard to tell how seriously one ought to take such outlandish pronouncements. Adorno seems to suggest that only by first mechanically and dispassionately memorizing poetry by heart as a child can one hope to eventually move beyond such an alienated use of language. Education and Bildung, then, are not so much matters of higher education but rather forms of linguistic and aesthetic experience encountered in childhood. Put differently, success in education lies precisely in not growing up entirely. Instead of arguing from the standpoint of the erudite philologist or the wise philosopher, Adorno anchors his argument in an aesthetic experience that seems to have some general validity but is not repeatable later in life. To drive home this point, Adorno reiterates it, this time referring to Schubert’s Lieder: “Similarly, Schubert’s song cycle ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ is truly accessible only to those who have sung the popular setting of ‘Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust’ in the school choir” (NL 1: 57; GS 11: 71–72). This quotation is striking, for the artwork, in this case: Schubert’s “Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust,” is not presented as completely other from its popular, mass-cultural incarnation. Therefore, while it is often alleged that Adorno posits a strict dichotomy between true or high art on the one hand (as in his adulation of Beethoven and Goethe), and popular or low art on the

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other hand (as in his scorn for Jazz and the Beatles),28 here he declares that a work of art may actually gain from popularization and trivialization. The school chorus is not simply part of an educational institution that blindly seeks to enforce culture and thus contributes to the “reified consciousness” of Halbbildung. Here it is precisely the mindlessness and the automatism characteristic of such mechanical performances that contain the potential for sublimation. The students’ aesthetic experience results from the tension Adorno found at the heart of Bildung: reciting Eichendorff means to suffer the heteronomy of mandatory memorization and simultaneously to be elevated to the autonomy of an expression that has nothing in common with everyday language. The rote learning of poetry represents the compulsion without which no freedom can be cultivated. Although the student has no choice in this matter, his or her experience of language as an utmost authority is analogous to the relationship between the poetic “I” and poetic language in Eichendorff: [Eichendorff ’s poetry] is genuinely anti-conservative: a renunciation of the aristocratic, a renunciation even of the dominion of one’s own ego over one’s soul. Eichendorff ’s poetry confidently lets itself be borne along by the stream of language, without fear that it will drown in it. For this generosity, the genius of language thanks him. The line ‘And I don’t care to preserve myself ’ [Und ich mag mich nicht bewahren!], which appears in one of the poems he placed at the head of his collected poems, is in fact a prelude to his whole oeuvre. (NL 1: 64; GS 11: 78)

The mechanical nature typical of performance in the school chorus turns out to have been a propaedeutic to the experience of literary modernity itself: Just as one gives oneself over to Eichendorff ’s poetry, the poems in turn give themselves over to language. To be borne along by the poem is to be borne by language, without, however, a fear of drowning. Eichendorff ’s poetry radically dissolves control and domination by sacrificing the ego to the soul, and renouncing poetry to language. The substance of his poetry lies not in the triumph of a poetic subject that masters language but in the strength to be weak. Art, Adorno recorded in one of his notebooks, is the “consciousness of weakness.”29 Adorno’s formulation that Eichendorff ’s poetry “lets itself be borne along by the stream of language” is characteristic for his treatment of language in his literary essays: Adorno cannot speak of language other than in metaphors of stream, current, and flow. The reason is that he views the

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emergence of subjectivity as bound to a process of reification during which the ego becomes rigid and hard. Adorno frequently speaks of a historical tendency towards a hardening of the ego30 but he remarks about Eichendorff ’s poetry: “In it the ego no longer becomes callous and entrenched [verhärtet] within itself ” (NL 1: 65; GS 11: 78). The poetic subject that gives itself up to language is paradoxically a strong subject; in contradistinction, the hardened subject suffers from, to use another one of Adorno’s frequent terms, egoweakness31—one of the greatest obstacles an education to political maturity [Erziehung zur Mündigkeit32] has to confront. The surrender of ego-control in Eichendorff ’s poetry runs counter to the tendency of Bildung to become an end in itself: Adorno replaces the selfformation of the ego with a trusting passivity33 that he distinguishes from the “bad, passive irrationality of consumption” that lazily reduces aesthetic experience to mere feeling and ends up “babbling along with the stream of language” (NL 2: 96; GS 11: 433). In Eichendorff, Adorno finds an understanding passivity that implies an ethos of listening to language that is at odds with the application of language as a means of communicating a predetermined message. Adorno expresses this moment of passive surrender to language with the metaphor of Rauschen, the murmuring, rustling, rushing sound of water or wind: One of Eichendorff ’s poems begins: ‘I hear the little brooks rustling / to and fro in the woods, / in the woods in the rustling / I know not where I am’ [Ich hör die Bächlein rauschen / Im Walde her und hin, / Im Walde in dem Rauschen / Ich weiß nicht, wo ich bin]; this poetry never knows where ‘I’ am, because the ego squanders itself on what it is whispering about. The metaphor of the little brooks that rustle ‘to and fro’ is brilliantly false, for brooks flow in one direction only, but the back and forth movement mirrors the agitated quality of what the sound says to the ego, which listens instead of localizing it. (NL 1: 65; GS 11: 79)

If Eichendorff ’s poetry suspends the ego and casts aside the humanist ideal of Bildung, what does it offer in its place? Nothing but language—Rauschen—in which the subject loses itself. One could say, then, that Adorno’s pedagogical efforts are directed not only at his students, at the institutions of education, or at the relationship between teacher and students—all topics about which he wrote. But within the context of his aesthetic essays, the traditional emphasis on Bildung as self-formation is replaced by an emphatic presentation of Bildung as irreducible tension between autonomy and heteronomy, freedom and coercion, self and other. Adorno’s celebration of the poetic self-sacrifice

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of the ego in the service of language must therefore be understood in analogy to this antinomic concept of Bildung. Because Eichendorff ’s poetic ego never becomes rigid as a subject, but instead opts to give itself up to language, it resembles Adorno’s antinomic ideal of Bildung in which nature—here: language as Rauschen—and culture—here: poetry as rule-dominated form— fortunately and peacefully co-exist. And the peculiar aesthetic appeal of Eichendorff ’s poetry can be found precisely in the tension between poetic form and its inherent tendency towards aural and visual dissolution—as in the “brilliantly false” image of the little brooks that rustle to and fro. Adorno’s essays—his second large pedagogical project besides his university teaching—can best be comprehended as attempts to retain an affinity to the kind of aesthetic experience whose possibilities become severely diminished by the restrictions institutionally imposed on “aesthetic education” (to use Friedrich Schiller’s famous term). For example, Adorno recalls how one of his favorite teachers in high school “pointed out how trivial the image was in Eichendorff ’s lines ‘It was as though the sky / had quietly kissed the earth’ [Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel / Die Erde still geküßt],” lines that the young Adorno had taken for granted. He “was incapable of countering the criticism even though it had not really convinced” him (NL 1: 56; GS 11: 70–71). It is this kind of irreducibly non-conceptual, albeit not irrational aesthetic experience that Adorno seeks to preserve and redeem within the larger political context of an education aimed at achieving political autonomy and maturity [Mündigkeit]. The ideal of education is to be able to name aesthetic experience while at the same time it can be experienced only if the subject remains to some extend immature [unmündig].34 “At a time when no artistic experience is accepted unquestionably any more, when, as children, no textbook authority can appropriate beauty for us any more—the beauty we understand precisely because we do not yet understand it—every act of contemplating beauty demands that we know why the object of our contemplation is called beautiful” (NL 1: 57; GS 11: 71). Here Adorno claims that all aesthetic inquiry is based on an experience that can no longer be taken for granted. It is this crisis of experience that leads us to ask why we continue to talk about aesthetic experiences, why we continue to call certain objects beautiful. This historically conditioned crisis of experience resembles the basic structure of all early aesthetic experience: we understand beauty only insofar as we do not yet understand it. It is precisely this structure of not-yet-knowing, of knowledge deferred as the condition for aesthetic experience that motivates and legitimizes Adorno to write essays. Each essay is a new beginning—like all philosophy, it starts with astonishment.35

xl

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V. Although Adorno began writing literary criticism extensively only in the second half of his career,36 after his return to Germany, and after an already notable career as a music critic, he composed a large number of literary-critical essays, of which some have become staples of academic literary criticism, informed by the intellectual and political concerns of Critical Theory. Most of his writings on literature have been collected in the four volumes of Notes to Literature (the English translation was published as two volumes), a few significant ones— most notably his essay on Kafka—are contained in his collection Prisms. Some of Adorno’s essays on literature have become very well known, while others have received less scholarly attention, perhaps because they address the works of authors not much read today or not popular with the predominantly theoretically oriented Adorno readership in Anglo-American countries and on the continent.37 It is not the purpose of this study to present a full account of all of Adorno’s essays or, to use his own terminology, notes to literature.38 The present study is guided by a selective approach attempting to understand the unique and somewhat deviant place inhabited by Adorno’s essays in his philosophical oeuvre, as well as within the larger context of literary criticism after the Second World War. I do not want to measure Adorno’s essays against a generalized and idealized form of the literary essay, nor do I view them as exemplifications of his comprehensive late work, Aesthetic Theory. Rather, my goal is to find descriptive and analytic terms that will help the reader understand, appreciate, and critique the sometimes peculiar aesthetic discourse that distinguishes the Notes to Literature not only from competing models of literary criticism, but also sheds light on the specific role of literature within Adorno’s thought. Scholarly literature on Adorno’s NL usually focuses on individual essays, frequently in conjunction with a treatment of aesthetic concepts explicated in Aesthetic Theory. Those works that attempt to consider the NL as a whole do so within the context of a general account of Adorno’s aesthetics, his philosophy of history, and his essayism.39 Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” which I consider in the next chapter, has programmatic character. Rather than attempting to reconstruct a unified theory of Adorno’s essayism, however, I comment on specific formal and rhetorical aspects of his essays insofar as they are relevant for his readings of literature and for his understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy. It is important to point out that Adorno’s essayism constitutes both theory and practice, and “The Essay as Form” resembles an avant-garde manifesto, proclaiming theoretical principles and at the same time implementing a practice of writing and thinking that both lags behind and goes beyond those principles.

Chapter One

The Art of Transition

It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke. —Friedrich Schlegel1

I. BAD WRITING Adorno’s prose is not beautiful.2 It seems to both attract and repel readers for its density, strangeness, and hermeticism, although, as the translator of ND recalls his first impression of the work, Adorno’s “sentences were clear. . . . His syntax rarely needs disentangling like that of most German philosophers since Kant; he is not as addicted to making up words as they are” (ND ix). Just like Hegel, Kant, Husserl, or Heidegger all have their unmistakable style, there is an instantly recognizable Adorno sound, and unique stylistic features characterize his writing.3 The aim of this chapter is to discuss Adorno’s style and his ideas of what an essay is, how it works, and how it relates to philosophical thought. The difficulty of Adorno’s language is due less to the use of a highly specialized vocabulary (his is not an obscure professional language; he draws his terminology from the canon of Western philosophy and everyday language) and more to the complexities of textual composition, the bewildering pseudo-logical transitions, the caesuras, the repetitions, and the rhythm of accelerating and slowing down. Adorno has a pronounced preference for apodictic statements, and despite his mostly hypotactic constructions, much of what he writes sounds oddly paratactic, because the overall structure eschews the gradual and linear development of an argument. Irritating to 1

2

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature

many readers is that while Adorno’s central philosophical—and polemical— claim is the dialectical “priority of the object”4 and the mournful recollection of “sensuous particulars,”5 his writing is for the most part frustratingly abstract,6 saturated with high-flown theoretical terms such as “reflection,” “object,” or “reification” (although a German term such as “Verdinglichung” sounds less intimidating than the Latinistic “reification”). What makes Adorno’s style so daunting is that there is a compositional, music-like quality to his abstractions. While he was working on his AT, Adorno claimed that his writing had a close affinity to Hölderlin’s late theoretical texts, and he held up Hegel as the model of a negatively productive style. I suspect that there is some validity to these claimed elective affinities. The following sentence from Adorno’s Hegel studies might also be applied to Adorno himself: Abstractly flowing, Hegel’s style, like Hölderlin’s abstractions, takes on a musical quality that is absent from the sober style of the Romantic Schelling. At times it makes itself felt in such things as the use of antithetical particles like “aber” [but] for purposes of mere connection: “Now because in the absolute, the form is only simple self-identity, the absolute does not determine itself; for determination is a form of difference which, in the first instance, counts as such. But because at the same time it contains all differences and form-determination whatever, or because it is itself the absolute form and reflection, the difference of the content must also appear in it. But, [emphasis added by Adorno] the absolute itself is absolute identity; this is its determination, for in it all manifoldness of the world-in-itself and the world of appearance, or of inner and outer totality, is sublated.” No doubt Hegel’s style goes against customary philosophical understanding, yet in his weaknesses he paves the way for a different kind of understanding; one must read Hegel by describing along with him the curves of his intellectual movement, by playing his ideas with the speculative ear as though they were musical notes. Philosophy as a whole is allied with art in wanting to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses, and here Hegel behaves like Alexander with the Gordian knot. He disempowers individual concepts, uses them as though they were the imageless images of what they intend. Hence the Goethean “residue of absurdity” in the philosophy of absolute spirit. What it wants to use to get beyond the concept always drives it back beneath the concept in the details. The only reader who does justice to Hegel is the one who does not denounce him for such indubitable weakness but instead perceives the impulse in that weakness: who

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understands why this or that must be incomprehensible and in fact thereby understands it. (HS 122; GS 5: 354)

This is no mean description of what is required when one reads Adorno. The idea that philosophical writing wants to transcend the concept, but is ultimately forced to subordinate the particulars to the concept, is articulated frequently by Adorno. It is central to his notion of the essay as form. That a paradoxical procedure aimed at transcending the concept conceptually must evoke incomprehension is not an incidental effect; it is integral to the experience of reading Hegel—and Adorno. The only understanding possible, to echo Friedrich Schlegel’s hope for a future understanding of understanding,7 is an understanding of non-understanding. Especially daunting to understand is the role of particles. If Hegel uses an antithetic particle such as “aber” to connect two thoughts where a simple “und” would do, the philosophical intention, the ubiquitous urge to proceed dialectically, supersedes the standard and “correct” use of language. The strategic and anti-normative purpose of such a style is to constantly encourage skepticism about the assumption that some uses of language are “natural” while others are “contrived.” For Adorno, thinking is primarily a matter of exposition, of presentation [Darstellung]8— only by becoming form does thought take place. This implies much more than mere verbalization. Adorno’s ruminations on matters of style and exposition repeatedly address the idea that the particular thoughts or concepts are musical notes; music—or thinking—occurs only where the single notes are put together in an appropriate sequential manner. Hence, Adorno’s thinking on style always circles about modes of connection and transition: he was enormously fond of Benjamin’s idea of constellations and configurations as forms of sudden, even aleatory cognition, underscoring an affinity between aesthetics and epistemology. It is no wonder that these two notions have become almost sacred terms in Frankfurt School criticism.9 In the citation from Hegel just quoted, Adorno italicizes Hegel’s deviant use of aber to point out that instead of serving as an antithetical conjunction, it serves as a means of transition. Similarly, Adorno’s own use of connectives is not always straightforward. To be sure, there is no lack of coordinating, subordinating, and antithetical elements. Adorno, who criticized Benjamin’s late paratactic style and thought for a lack of mediation (see CC 131; BW 173), is particularly fond of a style that accumulates words that not only signal mediation, but also separation and opposition. The cumulative effect of such elements is contradictory: they all signal a movement and process; at the same time, Adorno’s style has been criticized for being “static.”10 I might at least propose a provisional phenomenal description here: Adorno’s texts owe their static

4

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature

effect to their peculiar back-and-forth movement. His readers are likely to be discouraged by the endless oscillation of Adorno’s negative dialectic thought, which seems to exhaust itself in a circle of rephrasing and repositioning of reasoning.11 But it is unclear whether this feature is a debilitating limitation or even a serious defect of this particular post-Idealist thinking, or whether it accounts for the unmitigated and autonomous force of the form of his writing. Perhaps one must give as much weight to Adorno’s style as to his thought, conceding that one cannot consider the thought without at the same time accounting for how it is presented linguistically. Indeed, one can claim that Adorno’s exploration of the limits of philosophical thought renders his productive reconceptualization of philosophy inherently linguistic and rhetorical. As Britta Scholze persuasively demonstrates, the crux of Adorno’s philosophy, especially in his essays on art, lies in his claim that truth cannot be separated from its medium of expression.12 Consistent throughout Adorno’s writings is his dislike for all philosophical systems and his refusal to commit to a large, authoritative form, which has prompted other philosophers, like Hellmuth Plessner, to surmise that the author Adorno simply lacked the patience to pursue a long and extended argument,13 or, worse still, that his insistence on small and spontaneous forms turned itself, as Susan Buck-Morss has argued, into a self-contained and closed-off system.14 Adorno’s essays acquire authoritative force primarily by virtue of structures of repetition and inversion—their contrived, rhetorical character is usually apparent from the first sentence. Adorno is deeply suspicious of a hermeneutic attitude that believes in the cognitive power of stylistic simplicity and clarity. No wonder that he has been pitted in the culture war over “good” versus “bad” writing as a proudly “bad” writer who defies all pressure to conform to an easily consumable style.15 For Adorno, the role of the public intellectual never entailed an imperative to simplify and clarify his ideas. On the contrary, whenever Adorno addressed the non-academic general public, he spoke according to script, leaving no room for spontaneous extrapolations or simplifying summaries. Only during his university lectures did he speak completely freely, extemporizing frequently. Adorno suspects clarity to be a form of perfect deception, a mode of closing oneself off from reality. Complete clarity is not only reductive, it would also be tantamount to a system of total paranoia, since it sees itself threatened everywhere by obscurities and ambiguities that must be eliminated. “One should not allow oneself to be terrorized by the demand of clarity that every step be verifiable.”16 What is easily understood is also epistemologically worthless; most likely, the presumably easy or obvious statement will be a mere repetition of something already known, a worthless tautology. “Only what [people] do not need first

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to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar” (MM 101; GS 4:114). The immediate claim here is that everyday language is alienated language. And implied is: Philosophical and poetic language respond to this alienation. The seeming incomprehensibility of such “artificial” language responds to the real but unconscious incomprehension typical of everyday use of language.17 Adorno’s language resembles literary language in the sense that it seeks to provide the experience of something different or new by breaking up the patterns of habit and stereotype characteristic of colloquial language. False familiarity, that is, ideology, is best countered by a style geared towards unsettling the sense of security and control provided by language that merely conforms to and repeats the conventional phrases. Adorno means this not in a merely prescriptive sense; it is an insight drawn from the philosophical experience of reading Hegel’s prose. To brand the difficulty of Adorno’s style as an accidental trait, a matter of personal style, means to pass over the historical impetus of his project. It is helpful to recall how close Adorno is to Karl Kraus’s critique of language18 and the critique of the power of the phrase to constitute reality. Adorno also agrees with Heidegger’s critique of Gerede (idle talk; Adorno himself prefers to talk of Geschwätz [chatter]), which he quotes approvingly in JA: “What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider circles and takes on authoritative character. Things are so because one says so.”19 One could say that it is the authoritative character of chatter that triggers, as a desperately polemical response, the authoritative tone of Adorno’s language. Adorno confidently counters Heidegger’s view of chatter as “metaphysical invariance” by claiming the necessity of abolishing the dreadful state of affairs [Unwesen]: “This confusion [Unwesen] has arisen and can be gotten rid of; we do not need to bemoan it and leave it in peace as if it were the essence of Dasein” (JA 101; GS 6: 480). Doggedly addressing the problem of difficulty is, for Adorno, an integral part of the essay form itself. In his famous essay on the essay, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” Georg Lukács observes that “criticism and the essay generally speak of pictures, books and ideas. . . . The essay always speaks of something that has already been given form.”20 Adorno fully shares this insight: as form, the essay is not creative. Because it can only address something that precedes it, the essay is characterized by a particularly close affinity with its object, thus being especially well suited for Adorno’s overall philosophical intention of redeeming the priority of the object. “Object,” however, means more than the concrete subject matter—the narrative or the verse—that the essay interprets. Since the artworks interpreted by Adorno resist interpretation—because they are, in one of the key terms in AT,

6

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature

enigmatic—the essay itself must come to resemble its objects without imitating them. Affinity with modern art means that the essay grants priority to its resistant and withdrawing object—rather than its own subjectivist will and intention—by foregoing a teleological aesthetic narrative for the sake of an often strikingly non-linear, hyberbolical, abrupt, repetitive, and disjunctive form of representation. Adorno’s essays on literature do not provide philologically sound,21 extended, and careful close readings of literature. Instead one encounters a dense textual network of allusions, quotations, polemical asides, sudden interpretive insights, philosophical and historical contextualizing, and sometimes rapturous exaggerations. More than most other philosophers, Adorno was aware of the difficulty and complexity of his writings, even admitting on occasion that he did not understand them himself. Most of his texts contain self-reflective moments in which Adorno tries to come to terms with problems of style and exposition—at times these stylistic or poetological considerations seem to be the main content of his writings. One of the most salient features of Adorno’s philosophy is thus its meta-poetic dimension: some of Adorno’s most remarkable sentences are actually sentences about questions of language, form, representation, and rhetoric. One cannot understand Adorno’s philosophy without taking into consideration how it reflects on itself as language. II. SIGN AND IMAGE From a historical perspective, Adorno’s essayism is the result of a dominant modernist concern with a growing gulf between language and experience, eloquently but mythologically expressed in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Letter to Lord Chandos.”22 Adorno himself frequently and passionately laments the decline of language. The historical process of this decline is characterized by a growing discrepancy between language as a means of communication and as a means of subjective expression. For Adorno, language has two sides: On the one hand, it serves as an instrument for communicating something external to it. This is the semiotic and semantic dimension of language. On the other hand, language is more than a system of signs. In DE, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest a theory of language that is based on the notion of the word as both sign and image. From the perspective of the duality of the word as sign and image, enlightenment is a process of rationalization during which language becomes increasingly removed from image: “With the clean separation between science [Wissenschaft] and poetry [Dichtung], the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language” (DE 13; GS 3: 34). Language, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, is not immune

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7

to the material conditions of knowledge-processing and -production. The scientific and conceptual worldview not only pushes art and intuitive forms of knowledge aside, it also alters the form of language: “For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art” (DE 13; GS 3: 34). The duality of the word as sign and image is the result of an irrevocably lost mythic unity of the word. It cannot be the intention of art or, one must add, of critical theory and philosophy, to restore what is lost. As the allusion to Richard Wagner makes clear, such attempts would amount to a late-Romantic aestheticism with potentially dangerous political implications. “As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image, it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to be it. With advancing enlightenment, only authentic works of art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what already is” (DE 13; GS 3: 34). These speculative remarks imply the assumption that the role of art is to give voice to what has been repressed by the progress of reason and enlightenment. That which has been repressed by the dialectic of enlightenment is different from “what already is.” Art as imitation necessarily fails to capture it, because it cannot get beyond that which offers itself to perception and understanding immediately and will miss everything that has been repressed. From this critical perspective follows Adorno’s aesthetic demand that art relate only negatively to “what already is.” The word as image can truly find refuge in art only if art does not serve as image and imitation of “what already is.” If one contents oneself with the factual separation of the word into sign and image, one ends up causing precisely this separation to result in a much more pernicious kind of false identity: The prevailing antithesis between art and science, which rends the two apart as areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of culture, finally causes them, through their internal tendencies as exact opposites, to converge. Science, in its neopositivist interpretation, becomes aestheticism, a system of isolated signs devoid of any intention transcending the system; it becomes the game which mathematicians have long since proudly declared their activity to be. Meanwhile, art as integral replication has pledged itself to positivist science, even in its specific techniques. It becomes, indeed, the world over again, an ideological doubling, a compliant reproduction. The separation of sign and image is inescapable. But if, with heedless complacency, it

8

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature is hypostatized over again, then each of the isolated principles tends toward the destruction of truth. (DE 13; GS 3: 34)

Content with the management of sign on the one hand and image on the other, science and art turn out to be mere “ideological doublings” of culture, reproducing what is already there. Their separation and isolation amount to their convergence, destroying their differences and, by implication, truth itself, insofar as the latter is irreducible to a positivist sum of “true” facts. Adorno’s insistence on the split of language into sign and word and its subsequent decline is more than merely an aesthetically inspired modernist reaction. It reflects a profoundly philosophical concern with language as the medium of expression and truth. His essays are attempts to acknowledge the historical fait accompli of the separation of sign and image without hypostatizing it or pretending to reverse it. Modernist artistic attempts to restore language’s lost expressive quality are not so much acts of liberation as acts of violence against communicative language. Adorno insists that in spite of Expressionistic and Dadaistic attempts to use words “as pure expressive values” (NL 2: 98; GS 11: 434), “even a stammered sound, if it is a word and not a mere tone, retains its conceptual range . . .” (NL 2: 99; GS 11: 435). Referring to his perhaps most revered authority in matters of language, Adorno asserts that “[Karl] Kraus was proved right in that he realized—and the awareness came precisely through his unqualified devotion to what language, as objective spirit, intends, above and beyond communication—that language cannot completely dispense with its significative moment, with concepts and meanings” (NL 2: 98; GS 11: 434). The balancing act of Adorno’s essays consists in the careful avoidance of a strictly scientific as well as an exclusively aesthetic or intuitive method. “Philosophy has perceived the chasm opened by the separation between intuition and concept and repeatedly but vainly has attempted to close it; indeed, philosophy is defined by that attempt” (DE 13; GS 3: 34–35).23 Adorno’s essays remain mindful of this pitfall of philosophy. Instead of trying to force a reconciliation of sign and image, they adhere to an ideal of presentation that juxtaposes both aspects of language in a non-hierarchical way: sign and image are so fundamentally different that neither can be granted priority over the other. The essay is neither scientific nor artistic; it is somehow in between. This somehow is best captured by Adorno’s description of the essay as “the art of transition.” “Transition” signifies the transitional, linking elements in music as well as the “offensive transitions in rhetoric” (NL 1: 21; GS 11: 31). By invoking the essay’s art of transition, Adorno reminds us of its rhetorical character—and of the rhetorical element of all philosophy.

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Rhetoric, he claims in ND, “represents in philosophy that which cannot be thought except in language” (ND 55; GS 6: 65). Only by embracing rhetoric can philosophy break out of the mainstream of “traditional philosophy from Plato down to the semanticists [that] has been allergic to expression” (ND 55; GS 6: 65). It is the task of the essay as the quintessential form of transition to find an antidote to the allergy to expression prevalent in philosophical discourse. In the following sections, I will propose formulations and metaphors that help illuminate this transitional situation of the essay, its peculiar non-belonging to either science or art and its relation to philosophy. III. LANGUAGE AND HISTORY Shunning presumably traditional modes of philosophical presentation, as well as the security provided by unequivocally defined concepts, Adorno’s essays nonetheless do not fall prey to fragmentation. They are prevented from turning into mere compilations of aphorisms by a dual concern with the roles of language and history in literature. Throughout the essays, both dimensions, language and history, are intricately woven together. “History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it” (MM 219; GS 4: 250). In a slightly reductive manner, one could say that one cannot understand the essays unless one understands Adorno’s underlying (Hegelian, Marxist) philosophy of history. Thus, Norbert Bolz has tried to come to a systematic understanding of the NL as an expression of Adorno’s philosophy of history. I believe, however, that his emphasis on a consistent neo-Marxist intention grants Adorno’s theoretical pronouncements too much importance and neglects more immediately affective, spontaneous, and unregulated (one could also say: Romantic) responses to literary works; additionally, Bolz’s stress on an unswerving theoretical project underestimates the popular and political intentions of these occasional essays. The concern with history and the historico-philosophical perspective on literature should be seen as but one dimension of the NL. While Adorno tends to subsume literary texts under categories provided by his philosophy of history, he never stops at such categorical ordering. His essays repeatedly zoom in on textual evidence that resists subsumption under historical or aesthetic categories. Problems of literary wording, syntax, punctuation, or rhythm frequently receive Adorno’s attention. They are primarily matters of poetic language, not history—and even though Adorno’s proclaimed intention is to mediate aesthetic phenomena with aesthetic and historical concepts, the need for mediation recalls the difference between the categories of history and language. This difference or tension between history and language in Adorno’s thinking could also be

10

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature

described in terms of a duality of structural and historical arguments, as Alexander García Düttmann points out: It is characteristic of Adorno’s thought that a problem is often treated on two different levels, one structural and one historical, without his clearly showing the difference between the levels or providing a detailed demonstration of the mediation between history and structure. While the refusal to introduce distinctions that would unambiguously differentiate the two levels of argumentation may recall the urgency of dialectical thinking, the refusal to carry out dialectical mediations may, conversely, recall the necessity of submitting dialectics to a critique that would liberate it from its constrictions.24

With this observation in mind, one can begin to see how in Adorno’s essays literature appears both as a problem of language (or structure) and of history, but without clearly showing the differences between the two. The same is true for the category of history itself: it is often employed according to the structure of myth and enlightenment first proposed in DE, and Adorno frequently uses the phrase “structure of history.” Düttmann points out that this duality of structure and history follows a hidden dialectic that keeps its mediations under wraps. He also argues that Adorno’s refusal to distinguish clearly between the two levels and to offer intelligible dialectic mediations constitutes in itself a critique of dialectic. This is not the place to scrutinize the precise application and critique of the dialectic and its operations in Adorno’s work. It is important, however, to recall that the dialectic is Adorno’s master trope. His thinking would be impossible without Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, and all of Adorno’s critical operations take place within the horizon of dialectical thinking, whether they adhere to it or whether they deviate from it, or even negate it. In MM, Adorno all but equates dialectical thinking with his philosophical style, and in his HS he tries to show that dialectical thinking can be analyzed as a peculiar stylistic procedure.25 Most salient is perhaps the following remark from ND: “Dialectics—literally: language as the organon of thought—would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element . . .” (ND 56; GS 6: 66). Not unlike Heidegger, Adorno here alludes to the literal, the etymological meaning of dialectic as a type of speech; one is reminded much more of Socrates’s dialogical dialektike than of Hegel’s tripartite dialectic. Without expending much philological care, Adorno understands dialectic to mean, literally, “language as the organon of thought.” If Adorno’s idea of dialectic is indeed to be understood in this literal fashion, then it does not come as a surprise that dialectics must

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come to the rescue of the embattled tradition of rhetoric. Yet precisely what Adorno means with “rhetoric” he never spells out. But he clearly inverts the Platonic prejudice of rhetoric as mere persuasion or falsification. The stated intention of the critical rescue of “the rhetorical element” is “to approximate thing and expression to their point of indifference” (ND 56; GS 6: 66). And such approximation can take place only within the medium of language. The rhetorical element allows for an expression more adequate to the thing in need of expression. Rhetoric means not falsification, but, according to Adorno’s idea of dialectics, utmost precision. This is the reason why, in MM, Adorno describes the form of dialectical thinking in rhetorical terms: Dialectical thinking, from this point of view, means that an argument should take on the pungency of a thesis and contain within itself the fullness of its reasoning. All bridging concepts, all links and logical auxiliary operations that are not a part of the matter itself, all secondary developments not saturated with the experience of the object, should be discarded. (MM 71; GS 4: 79)

In his later “The Essay as Form,” Adorno returns to this thought: he reduces the dialectical operation to the thesis alone. By focusing on the thetic element of dialectical thought, Adorno implies that the essay is a form of such highly concentrated dialectics. It is a dialectic reduced to an emphatic, authoritative gesture, which allows only for a minimum of transitional elements. The art of transition entails a program that seeks to reduce all transitions to a minimum, thus enhancing its artfulness. IV. AGAINST METHOD From a limited technical point of view, one can observe that Adorno’s negative dialectic entails more than the refusal to utilize dialectical operations as mere tools for mediating and, ultimately, resolving tensions between opposing terms; it also entails a rejection of the customary division of labor. Negative dialectics are impossible without a tendency to transgressive operations. Dialectical thinking is more than a method, and no method can account for “the remnant of divergence between philosophical conception and execution” (ND 48; GS 6: 58). The philosophical text always does something slightly different than what it says it does—the same holds true for the essay. “What must be said methodically, in the form of general reflection, in order not to be defenseless against the philosopher’s philosophy, can be legitimized solely in execution, thus denying the method in turn” (ND 48; GS 6: 58). One’s

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method can be fulfilled only in the pure process of execution, which is essentially different from any set method. No method can ever be applied as such, as an easy implementation of theory into practice. The transition from methodical conception to textual execution yields a remnant of nonidentity that resists integration into method. The term “dialectic” can thus be retained only against itself. Appropriately, Adorno describes dialectics as a “logic of disintegration” (a section heading in ND). His dialectic is not aimed at overcoming contradictions; it both goes beyond Hegel’s philosophy of the absolute subject (which is said to sublate everything non-identical and objective) and falls back behind it. “Dialectics as a philosophical mode of proceeding is the attempt to untie the knot of paradoxicality by the oldest means of enlightenment: the ruse. Not by chance has the paradox been the decaying form of dialectics from Kierkegaard on” (ND 141; GS 6: 144–145). Adorno’s understanding of dialectics as “logic of disintegration” pays its dues to this process of decay. He concedes that many of his arguments and meditations cannot but “seem paradoxical” (ND 140; GS 6: 144). They seem paradoxical not because of an inherent extravagance of the thought itself, but because the subjective thought attempts to acknowledge the priority of the object over the subject. As thinking, dialectical logic respects that which is to be thought— the object—even where the object does not heed the rules of thinking. The analysis of the object is tangential to the rules of thinking. Thought need not be content with its own legality; without abandoning it, we can think against our thought, and if it were possible to define dialectics, this would be a definition worth suggesting. (ND 141; GS 6: 144)

Adorno’s insistence that thinking respect its object even if that means challenging the rules of thinking and even pits thinking against itself, resonates with Lukács’s observation that the essay must be about an object that is already given. Dialectical thinking fails if it attempts to make the objects conform to its own rules. Instead, it needs to constantly readjust itself, to go against itself where necessary, to linger with the paradoxical and the negative. In the essay, the dialectical drive towards resolution is replaced by figures and movements that do not obey the Hegelian concept of an experienced subject that progressively returns to itself. A term like “transition” is dialectical only insofar as Adorno’s dialectic goes against itself. “The essay proceeds . . . methodically unmethodically” (NL 1: 13; GS 11: 21). One might say that Adorno’s essays are the wounds of philosophy.

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Adorno is not interested in the essay’s method as something preconceived and predetermined, but rather in how the essay subverts method in the process of its execution [Durchführung]. His emphasis on the essay as Durchführung—a term with a strong musical resonance that signifies the development of a theme in the sonata form—implies the essay’s affinity for an “unreglementierte Erfahrung” (“unregulated experience” [GS 6: 129])— Adorno’s phrase for the possibility of a free, non-conforming subjectivity26— as well as its unfitness for traditional analytic categories (such as work, author, meaning, genre, etc.). V. APHORISTIC THOUGHT Essential to Adorno’s essays is the idea of form as the non-conceptual, quasimusical art of transition [Kunst des Übergangs (GS 11: 31)]. Despite the privileged role “The Essay as Form” plays as the most comprehensive statement of Adorno’s poetics, an examination of his other essays shows that most of them also contain poetological ideas. For example, when Adorno—alluding to Mallarmé—writes that the poet Rudolf Borchardt composes with language,27 his observation can also be seen as a self-observation by the essayist who does not merely write his essays, but composes them with an idiosyncratic sensitivity to form such that form gains primacy over the presumed content. It is precisely the idea of the essay as a form of self-reflection that, for Adorno, distinguishes the essay from systematic, Idealist thought, as well as from empirical and positivistic philosophy. By conceptualizing its objects only through a process of self-reflection, the essay undermines its own concepts and exposes them to the rhetorical technique of transition. Hence, the concepts of history and language are never strictly separated. It is impossible to pin down their relation in terms of a duality or a positive dialectic.28 Adorno’s NL bear some remarkable similarities to his aphoristic masterwork, the Minima Moralia, where he makes the following claim: “Knowledge comes to us through a network [Geflecht] of prejudices, intuitions and opinions [Anschauungen], innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience” (MM 80; GS 4: 90). The essay provides precisely such a network or texture [Geflecht] of—viewed from the standpoint of intellectual common sense and correctness—uncertain and even erroneous insights. Experience is an inevitably fallible medium, a texture of conflicting modes of perception and response, and the knowledge gained from experience has little to do with the ideal of clean and foolproof scientific method. The short prose pieces in MM are perhaps Adorno’s most

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successful attempts at experimenting with the texture of experience.29 Compared with the aphorisms in MM, the essays in NL are more “epically” drawn out.30 Nonetheless, the NL retain a certain aphoristic tendency—the following paragraph from the essay “On the Final Scene of Goethe’s Faust” [“Zur Schlußszene des Faust”] is an especially impressive instance of their aphoristic punch. The extremes meet. People find a line by Friederike Kempner charming: instead of “Miträupchen,” impossible even then, she says “Miteräupchen” in order to provide the missing syllable her trochees needed by means of a sovereignly inserted “e.” In the same way, an awkward boy breaks the rules and holds onto the egg in an egg-and-spoon race in order to get it to the finish line safely. But the final scene of Faust uses the same device when the Pater Seraphicus speaks of the waterfall that “abestürzt” [plunges down; Goethe has inserted an “e” into the word “abstürzt”] (line 11911); and in Pandora Goethe uses “abegewendet” [turned away; for “abgewendet.”] The philological explanation that this is the Middle High German form of the preposition does not temper the shock that the archaism, sign of a metrical predicament, might cause. What does soften that shock, however, is the immeasurable detachment of a pathos that with its very first note is already so far removed from the illusion of natural speech that no one would think of natural speech, and no one would think of laughing. The distance between the sublime and the ridiculous, which is said to be extremely short, is crucial in elevated style; only what is brought to the edge of the abyss of the ridiculous contains so much danger that the force of salvation pits itself against it and succeeds. Essential to great literature is the good fortune that preserves it from the plunge into the abyss. The archaic quality of the inserted syllable communicates not a futile romanticizing evocation of a lost stratum of language but an estrangement of the current linguistic stratum that removes it from danger. It thereby becomes the bearer of that unsociable modernity that characterizes Goethe’s late style even today. The anachronism increases the power of the passage. The passage carries the memory of something primordial, a memory which reveals the presence of passionate speech to be the presence of a world plan; as though from the very beginning it had been resolved that it would be so and not otherwise. He who wrote in this way could also, a few lines later, have the chorus of blessed boys sing: “Hände verschlinget / Freudig zum Ringverein” (lines 11926–26) [“Entwine hands / joyfully to unite in a ring”]—without what later

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happened with the word Ringverein bringing disaster to the noun here. A paradoxical immunity to history is the seal of the authenticity of this scene. (NL 1: 113–114; GS 11: 131–132)

The essay on Faust was first published in 1959 in the West German literary journal Akzente, where it was preceded by a note saying, “I once teased Walter Benjamin about his predilection for unusual and out-of-the-way material by asking him when he planned to write an interpretation of Faust, and he immediately parried by saying that he would do so if it could be serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The memory of that conversation occasioned the writing of the fragments published here” (NL 1: xiv; GS 11: 698). Adorno apparently viewed his essay on Faust as a series of critical fragments in the tradition of the Romantic Athenäum fragments. It is also, to a larger extent than the quick, witty, and declarative Romantic fragment, a speculative literary interpretation. But what is the interpretation offered in this paragraph, this fragment?31 It starts with a simple statement: “The extremes meet.” The extremes are Friederike Kempner, the unintentionally comical late nineteenth-century dilettante poet, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the most powerful symbolic embodiment of German literature and culture. Despite their extreme differences, they are both poets and they both are confronted with the historical problems posed by their material: they both obey a metrical requirement. But whereas Kempner’s trochees are irredeemably ridiculous, the lines from Faust to which Adorno refers undoubtedly achieve a serious, sublime style: “Das sind Bäume, das sind Felsen, / Wasserstrom, der abestürzt / Und mit ungeheurem Wälzen / Sich den steilen Weg verkürzt.”32 Goethe’s additional e in the verb “abestürzt” (some editors have solved the problem by replacing it with the past participle form “abgestürzt”) leaves Adorno in shock. In some sense, literature experiments with us, the readers, by administering little shocks—which the successful essay registers and seeks to conceptualize. Hence Adorno can claim that in the essay the subject does not think but becomes attentively passive, virtually “an arena for intellectual experience” (NL 1: 13; GS 11: 21) where thought happens to the subject. It is the task of philology to make sense of the shocks we, the readers, experience when we read. Adorno is quick to preempt this soothing power of philological explanation: for him, the reference to linguistic history does not mitigate the shock inflicted by the unforeseen archaic form. It cannot be the task of interpretation, Adorno implies, to replace the experience of this archaism with its philological explanation. Rather, Adorno’s interpretation views Goethe’s poetic technique as a Nietzschean “pathos of distance:” Goethe’s

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forced archaism is far removed from the illusion of natural language, it breaks so completely with the naturalistic semblance of poetry that it borders on the ridiculous. Unlike Kempner’s Miteräupchen, however, Goethe’s abestürzt only borders on the ridiculous, but manages to escape it by virtue of being so close to it.33 Goethe’s work achieves an elevated style precisely because it is not unquestionably sublime; rather, it hovers over the threshold to the ridiculous, which, in Faust II, is only the “smallest step” away from the sublime. The point is that if Goethe’s sublime did not consciously border on the ridiculous, it would surely end up looking self-important and ridiculous, thus involuntarily abandoning its elevated style as mere pretense. Goethe’s high-wire act of elevated style succeeds because it risks so much. Alluding to Hölderlin’s often abused line “Wo aber Gefahr ist wächst / das Rettende auch,”34 Adorno claims that great literature must come dangerously close to tumbling into the abyss of ridiculousness. It is nothing but sheer good luck that preserves it from doing so (see NL 1: 114; GS 11: 131).35 Goethe’s Faust is not, as nationalistic legend would have it, an organic expression of German culture or a truthful representation of the German spirit; it is not in harmony with its time. The use of “abestürzt” succeeds, Adorno suggests, precisely because it evokes the memory of something primordial, prehistoric, and precultural, “as from the very beginning it had been resolved that it would be so and not otherwise” (NL 1: 114; GS 11: 132). The good fortune of the passage is grounded in the force of its verbal gesture that signals “so be it.” This simply stating or proclaiming force of the word is what remains of the work even after it has been submitted to the philological machinations of historical and grammatical explanations. It is, Adorno claims, immune to history. After Goethe, this stubborn immunity, guarantor of the poet’s “peculiar quality of greatness” (Großheit, as Adorno puts it in GS 11: 113), will not longer be possible, and literature will rapidly lose this power of self-preservation and sublime distance from language’s ever increasing split into instrumental (or public) language on the one hand and poetic (or private) language on the other hand. For Adorno, the name Goethe designates, as Jan Philipp Reemtsma has pointed out,36 the precise historical moment at which literary greatness was still possible—what comes after Goethe is a waning of artistic immunity in which literary language becomes increasingly vulnerable to the dangers of surpassing the limits of the literary: “Greatness itself becomes experienceable in what is surpassed [überflügelt] by it” (NL 1: 115; GS 11: 133). Adorno’s fragments and aphorisms (both designations seem to be equally appropriate)—especially those in Minima Moralia—are frequently closed forms in that they tend to conclude with a hyperbolic statement that

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resists being superseded—or disproved. In typical fashion, then, the last reference in this fragment is to Goethe’s use of the word Ringverein. In Goethe’s poem, it retains its primordial, ahistorical force—its luck or good fortune [Glück]—as name. The misfortune that the word Ringverein has suffered historically—it brings to mind at least two possible historical references, the nineteenth-century nationalistic German Turnverein [gymnastics club] or, as E. F. N. Jephcott has speculated, “the criminal gangs that haunted Berlin after the First World War” (MM 133, n. 1)—does not affect the use of the word Ringverein in Goethe’s Faust. It seems that the uncanny ambiguity of Ringerein does not discredit the word; within the context of Goethe’s dramatic poem, it remains immune to history. Works of art, then, are neither expressions of history, nor does history have the last word on them. Goethe’s greatness continues to this day and can still be experienced aesthetically despite the historical impossibility of this kind of greatness today. It is the task of interpretation to call attention to those paradoxical elements in an artwork that speak or gesticulate with such authority that they cannot be subsumed under the category of history: “A paradoxical immunity to history is the seal of the authenticity of this scene” (NL 1: 114; GS 11: 132). In Adorno’s writings on literature, the term history always implies what he calls “decay of language” [Sprachzerfall; see GS 8.2: 54]. Within the logic of capitalistic production, language serves merely as a substitutable, arbitrary means of communication: one sign is exchanged for another. If language is nothing more than a sign, then all “expression,” all sensuous elements of language, such as poetic meter, have only secondary status. Insofar as literary language is not identical with communicative language, but uses communicative elements as one artistic element among others, literature is, from the perspective of capitalistic means-ends logic, useless.37 Although Adorno does not simply reject history, escaping into a radical, ahistorical aestheticism, he nonetheless gives priority to the analysis of language as an object of study, placing history second. Yet even in this respect Adorno is Hegelian: he retains the notion of history in his overarching concept of a philosophy of history. Since he sees language and literature in the context of Sprachzerfall, a historico-philosophical perspective remains in effect throughout. There is no guarantee, however, that Adorno always remains faithful to his philosophy of history. This is why a hermeneutic “reconstruction” such as Bolz’s is reductive, seeing each essay as an actualization of the monolithic theoretical program implicit in the NL, however incomplete and contradictory it may be. Bolz summarizes the problem of the essay’s form thus: “The aesthetically concrete is always only the incentive for the construction of the idea—this is the problem of the form of the essay.”38 Formally correct though as this

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observation may be, it contains an accusation ubiquitous in the literature on Adorno: the claim that in his essays the abstract philosophical idea ends up obliterating the concrete and sensuous aesthetic object, that theory gets the better of the individual interpretive insight, and that therefore the concept wins out over intuition and aesthetic experience, philosophy over reading.39 This critique tends to coincide with the seemingly opposite charge that Adorno aestheticizes philosophy. VI. THE ESSAY AND PHILOSOPHY 1 Typical for the accusation that Adorno’s thought places an unacknowledged priority of the abstract over the concrete is Rüdiger Bubner’s claim that Adorno’s philosophy of art remains blind to the fact that the exalted status of art is an expression of a philosophical desire and its power over art. According to Bubner, art becomes an object of cognition on an equal footing with philosophy only because philosophy promoted art in the first place by virtue of an unacknowledged “knightly accolade.” Thus, the seeming autonomy of art as cognition is in actuality a philosophical “act of sovereignty.” While Adorno consistently invokes the autonomy of art, he disingenuously submits art to the heteronomous force of his unacknowledged apriori philosophy. Bubner ends up accusing Adorno of blindly and tautologically repeating his own theory instead of experiencing and interpreting the artwork as such.40 However, the danger of becoming trapped in a self-referential and, consequently, totalitarian philosophical loop is reflected in Adorno’s essays themselves. Already in one of his earliest programmatic statements, Adorno anticipates criticisms such as Bubner’s when he remarks: The central objection is that my conception, too, is based on a concept of man, a blueprint of Being; only, out of blind anxiety before the power of history, I allegedly shrank from putting these invariants forth clearly and left them clouded; instead I bestowed upon historical facticity, or its arrangement, the power which actually belongs to the invariant, ontological first principles, practiced idolatry with historically produced being, destroyed in philosophy every permanent standard, sublimated it into an aesthetic picture game, and transformed prima philosophia into philosophical essayism. (AP 37; GS 1: 342–343)

Adorno’s unwillingness to state his historical premises clearly is not sufficient ground for dismissing his critical stance altogether; one must consider the motivation behind his unwillingness. By championing the genre of the

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essay, Adorno tries to introduce into philosophical inquiry the dangerous uncertainty that such inquiry has tried to eliminate. While the positing of premises is possible only as an idealist act and thus, according to Adorno, an exclusion of irreducible reality and history, the refusal to acknowledge absolute premises enables philosophy to remain open to the possibility of its own collapse. It is, one could say, precisely the failure of philosophy to enforce its own presupposed principles that keeps it alive. Adorno insists on the necessity of a philosophical experience of the interruption of thinking by “irreducible reality.” Irreducible to prima philosophia is, for Adorno, the historical: “The break-in of what is irreducible, however, occurs concrete-historically and thus it is history which retards the movement of thought to its presuppositions. The productivity of thought is able to prove itself only dialectically, in historical concretion” (AP 38; GS 1: 343). If thinking fails to return safely to its premises, the failure of philosophy is, from Adorno’s perspective, philosophy’s opportunity to regain productivity by confronting history. History stops abstract thinking in its tracks and forces it to become concrete. According to Adorno, philosophy can have a future only if it aims to achieve a communication between “productivity of thinking” and “historical concretion.” Because history is governed by chance and is entirely heteronomous to the premises posited by philosophy, thinking can not become productive unless it proceeds experimentally and on the small scale of concrete, particular interpretation: Regarding efforts to achieve a form for such communication, I gladly put up with the reproach of essayism. The English empiricists called their philosophical writings essays, as did Leibniz, because the power of freshly disclosed reality, upon which their thinking struck, continuously forced upon them the risk of experimentation. Not until the postKantian century was the risk of experimentation lost, along with the power of reality. Thus from a form of great philosophy the essay became a minor form of aesthetics, in whose semblance nonetheless took refuge a concretion of interpretation, over which philosophy proper, in the grand dimensions of its problems, had long since lost disposal. (AP 38; GS 1: 343–344)

Adorno happily accepts the reproach that he was writing essays rather than systematic treatises as a compliment and encouragement. After Locke and the English empiricists, he claims, the essay has lost much of its philosophical prestige and become a minor aesthetic form, devoted primarily to the limited undertaking of interpreting artworks (vaguely “aesthetic” in both form and

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content). But essayistic attention to the particular allows for an otherwise unachievable “concretion of interpretation.” Adorno suggests that it is the heteronomy of the essay that can save the autonomy of philosophy. If, with the disintegration of all security within great philosophy, experiment makes its entry; if it thereby ties onto the limited, contoured and unsymbolic interpretations of aesthetic essays, then that does not appear to be condemnable, provided that the objects are chosen correctly, that they are real. For the mind is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality. (AP 38; GS 1: 344)

While philosophical spirit is bound to fail when it seeks to grasp reality in its totality, it can successfully penetrate reality in its particular, minor manifestations. Adorno’s choice of violent verbs [penetrate, explode] underlines the idea that the essay is an uncompromising, risky, and almost combative experiment, the outcome of which cannot be rationally controlled or even anticipated. Once again, Adorno’s discourse employs a pathos of danger that is strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche. (There is also an element of machismo involved that invites feminist critique.) At one level, Adorno attempts to include the aesthetic essay programmatically in the large form of philosophy. Such inclusion is not the same as assimilation. It does not mean that philosophy or theory must become aesthetic or that all philosophy becomes aesthetics and that aesthetics inadvertently becomes hypostatized as a new “first philosophy.” But it does mean that philosophy’s uncertainty becomes its formal principle: the decay of security is tantamount to the emphatic re-introduction of the essay form. At another level, then, it is the historically evolved compatibility of the minor form of the essay and the major form of systematic and scientific [wissenschaftlich] philosophy that enables Adorno to pursue his essayistic projects without worrying much about violating the borderlines that separate philosophical from literary forms. If the form of the essay makes it possible for the mind to “explode that which is on a small scale,” as Adorno suggests, then the aesthetic essay turns out to be more than a supplement to philosophy; it becomes part of philosophy. Rather than philosophy’s becoming aesthetic, as Bubner and other critics of Adorno have worried, philosophy, according to Adorno’s ideal, encompasses the aesthetic essay. Famously dismissive of both an aesthetics of production and an aesthetics of reception,41 Adorno is above all concerned with abstract-

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ing the work of art from external factors. His stress on form, structure, and appearance is a concretion of the second degree, because it abstracts the aesthetic object from its immediate context of production and reception—a procedure that resembles the paradigm of immanent interpretation popular in the 1950s. Adorno conceives of history as an inner quality of the artwork, inseparable from the sensuous materiality of the work. Only the insistence on the artwork as a historical and sensuous object will prevent thinking from exhausting itself in the ultimately stale conceptual reflection on the isolated object. In short, the term “primacy of the object” signifies Adorno’s anti-nominalist attempt to link philosophical concepts through aesthetic experience to concrete objects: “Unlike the indeterminate substrate of reductionism, the object of undiminished experience is more objective than that substrate. The qualities the traditional critique of epistemology eradicated from the object and credited to the subjects are due in subjective experience to the primacy of the object . . .” (CM: 250; GS 10.2: 747). What Adorno calls “undiminished experience” is possible only in relation to a determinate object. The subject can gain experience only if it does not reduce the object to a mere42 object or a function. “Primacy of the object” means that the subject-object relation called “experience” is completely free of subjective control over the object—the object does not become detached and objectified. The “primacy of the object” cannot be actualized unless the subject reflects its own objectivity: “subject” is a form of “object.” Adorno favors the aesthetic essay because it adheres to the paradigm of a “primacy of the object,” and it is in the sphere of the beautiful that this condition applies. More precisely, the essay presents the attempt to interpret and to construct knowledge of literature and other aesthetic phenomena without replacing the object’s particularity43 (its phenomenality, its sensuousness, its materiality) with a concept.44 At the same time, the essay reflects on the relation between object and concept. It continues to employ philosophical concepts and eschews replacing the concept with the object itself by turning the essay into an artwork (in the form of a Dadaist collage or montage, for example). Unlike Lukács, Adorno does not classify the essay as an art form. The essay has a strong affinity45 with poetry as one of its objects precisely because it is not a form of literary or poetic writing. If the essay were itself a form of poetic writing, then its difference from literature would be merely gradual, a matter of quantity, not quality. The notion of affinity would be useless, since an affinity can exist only between two things that are essentially different.46 The literary essay treats literary texts, but as form it is philosophical and conceptual.

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Already in his dissertation on Kierkegaard, Adorno announced his intention to separate “Kierkegaard’s philosophy from poetry,”47 and he declared categorically and somewhat dogmatically: “Poetry in philosophy means everything that is not strictly relevant” (K 4; GS 2: 11). That Adorno puts particular emphasis on this separation is apparent from the very beginning of the work.48 Its first two sentences are: “All attempts to comprehend the writings of philosophers as poetry have missed their truth content. The law of philosophical form requires the interpretation of the real within the cohesive nexus of concepts” (K 3; GS 2: 9). If one takes this postulate seriously, one must also refrain from reading Adorno’s essays as literature [Dichtung],49 heeding instead his call for understanding philosophy and literature according to their unique, specific laws of form. The declarative statements that open Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard do not succeed in glossing over the fact, however, that ambivalence in accounting correctly for the form of the essay is as old as the essay itself. One might facetiously define the essay as precisely that literary and/or philosophical form that most resists definition, for since its inception the essay has been borne by the spirit of dissatisfaction with and rebellion against the reigning philosophical systems of the day. Montaigne repeatedly stressed the affinity of his essays with the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Similarly, Bacon pointed out his indebtedness to Seneca. In the tradition of the essay, Adorno comes very late, and his preference for essayistic thinking was no doubt strongly motivated by the flexibility and fluidity that the essay form has traditionally provided. If Adorno’s thought as a whole is characterized by a negative dialectic, i.e., an epistemological structure that does not progress steadily and logically, but dwells on the negative and fixes its gaze on moments of antinomy, aporia, and paradox, then the essay is the philosophical form most appropriate to such thought. In Adorno’s hands, the essay appears paradoxically and ironically conceptual and aconceptual at the same time, similarly to artworks, because artworks are not simply mimetic, aconceptual or “anschaulich” [intuitive], but always also conceptual, or, as Adorno argues at length in Aesthetic Theory, neither purely conceptual nor aconceptual.50 The essay is distinguished from artworks and from literature while it is structurally similar to them and therefore can correctly be called “aesthetic.” This, of course, is true for almost all kinds of writing, whether they are called literary or philosophical. Adorno’s attitude towards the essay turns out to be rather ambivalent, for the essay form enables him to conduct and justify two contradictory maneuvers: the adamant separation of conceptual thought from literature, and the Nietzschean recognition that philosophy and literature are inseparable insofar as they are both forms of writing and representation, and

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are thus both aesthetic. It is only because of a collision of these two rhetorical maneuvers that Adorno can claim a paradoxical relation between concept and intuition (or image, or metaphor). This allows him focus on certain words that resists their categorization as either exclusively concepts or aesthetic metaphors. Terms such as Rauschen, Beschwörung [invocation, conjuration], or Wunde [wound] all have some conceptual significance, but they are also clearly metaphorical, and they invite more literary and narrative approaches to reading Adorno. Beschwörung (see chapter 3), for example, is used as an absolute metaphor—it cannot be translated into another concept. Rauschen (see chapter 2) is inadequately expressed when translated as “meaningless noise,” and the clinical term trauma (the Greek word for wound) lacks the intuitive concreteness of wound (see chapter 5). VII. THE ESSAY AND PHILOSOPHY 2 The major challenge all essays must confront is how to verbalize and represent the aesthetic experience, the “undiminished experience” which they want to make possible and to which they want to bear witness. The choice of terminology is thus paramount to the success or failure of an essay. And, Adorno suggests, the same condition applies to all philosophical activity. In his first lecture on Philosophical Terminology, delivered in Frankfurt in 1962, Adorno states “that the life of the concepts (Hegel talks emphatically about the life of the concept) is, in actuality, the same as philosophy” (PT 1: 18). For Adorno, philosophy is the trace left by a historical and linguistic evolution of concepts. This is why he chooses to teach his introduction to philosophy as a discussion of its terminology. The task of philosophy, then, is to understand its concepts as more than fixed and unalterable definitions. A concept is not simply a sign that reliably designates an unchanging entity. “The task of a philosophical treatment of philosophical terminology can consist in nothing else than resurrecting the life coagulated in these termini” (PT 1:18). Such an almost religious attempt at resurrecting the life encapsulated in conceptual termini, however, threatens the Cartesian common sense of modern Western philosophy, which prefers to rely on the agreed-upon universality and stability of its concepts in order to eliminate doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity and all other intrusive, “particular” elements that would hinder the construction of communicable and reproducible knowledge. Hence, the task of philosophy is a strained paradoxical violation of the concept with the concept: “To hit the non-conceptual with the concept, to say the unsayable with language” (PT 1: 88).

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Looking back on his career, Adorno conceded that if there were any of his writings that bore programmatic character for his entire oeuvre, those would be his 1956 introduction to his second large study on Husserl, Against Epistemology, and the introductory essay to volume one of his NL, “The Essay as Form” (which he had originally planned to title “The Philosophical Essay as Form”). Vital to Adorno’s poetics of the essay and, in fact, to his entire philosophical inquiry, is the paradoxical demand that the concept must approximate the non-conceptual, that language must say that which it cannot say: “to counter Wittgenstein by uttering the unutterable” (ND 9; GS 6: 21). Similarly, Adorno’s interest in literature is characterized by a repetitive insistence on those poetic problems that refuse to be formulated as either purely problems of literary history or problems of poetic language. Adorno pursues literature as a linguistic object that cannot be reduced to a series of signs and concepts because in literature language becomes, as he puts it, emphatic: “that which is stressed in Wittgenstein’s doctrine of science is emphatic precisely in literature: language” (GS 8: 337). Adorno’s stress on the emphatic presence of language in literature leads to the observation that literature challenges philosophy’s reliance on concepts in a way that forces philosophy to turn reflection on literature into reflection on itself. The medium of such object-reflection as self-reflection is the essay, because the essay constitutes itself only through an interpretive relation to its object that must be, at the same time, a relation to itself as a relational phenomenon. The essay relates to its objects of inquiry in a fashion that disqualifies it as Wissenschaft [science, knowledge] in the strict sense. Essayistic interpretations aim at making appear more than what is given in the object (this could be taken as one manner in which the essay partakes in the object’s semblance, its aesthetic dimension): “Its interpretations are not philologically definitive and conscientious; in principle they are over-interpretations . . .” (NL 1: 4; GS 11: 10). Adorno is alluding here to an element of fantasy, or, as he frequently calls it, “exact fantasy” or “exact imagination” (exakte Phantasie, used apparently in contradistinction to a diffuse notion of rapture or rhapsody often associated with Romanticism)51 that is inherent in the essayistic practice of interpretation. The task of the essay is to give voice to what would otherwise remain silent, and this task is identical with Adorno’s demand that philosophy strive for verbal expression of otherwise forgotten or repressed experiences of suffering (thus underscoring the affinity of aesthetics to ethics). Characteristic for this concern is the following statement in ND: The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective

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experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed. This may help to explain why the presentation [Darstellung] of philosophy is not an external matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea. Its integral, nonconceptually mimetic moment of expression is objectivated only by presentation in language. The freedom of philosophy is nothing but the capacity to lend a voice to its unfreedom. (ND: 17–18; GS 6: 29)

Philosophical writing [Darstellung] is not concerned merely with suffering as an exterior phenomenon calling for representation. Rather, suffering is inherent in philosophy itself because truth is predicated on the need to express suffering, to make suffering eloquent. In Adorno’s thought, suffering signifies the lack of reconciliation between subject and object. In order to express its subjectivity, the subject must suffer the objectivity that makes its expression as subject possible in the first place. This is why Adorno claims that what appears to be most subjective, namely, expression, is mediated objectively—because, one can add, language is something objective. All presentation or expression is an objectivation. Hence the freedom of philosophy, i.e., its ability to express its subjectivity, consists precisely in the ability to express its unfreedom: its objectivity. When Adorno speaks of philosophy’s need to express conceptually what cannot be expressed conceptually, namely, the aconceptual, he is referring to an expressive or mimetic (here the two terms are used synonymously) element intrinsic to all articulations of subjectivity. It is for the sake of the aesthetic, then, that philosophy and, by implication, the essay must refrain from becoming aesthetic, and mimesis must be contained conceptually. Thus, the essay seeks to respect the double character of language: the style of the essayist must respond to both the mimetic (subjective) and conceptual (objective) aspects of language.52 It can do so only when it approaches its objects leisurely and irresponsibly, as pleasurable toys: “Instead of accomplishing something scientifically or creating something artistically, its efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him. The essay reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic. Luck [Glück] and play are essential to it” (NL 1: 4; GS 11: 10). Since the essay is neither creative (artistic) nor methodical (scientific), it observes and reflects on something that is already there—it is essentially derivative and unoriginal. It begins and it ends abruptly, bearing some resemblance to Friedrich Schlegel’s and Novalis’s Romantic fragments—it is neither complete nor conclusive, but fragmentary and infinite, because its ironic self-reflectivity resists closure. The essay’s concepts cannot serve as a safety net, and therefore luck and play are essential to

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it. Because it gambles, the essay is as prone to failure as it is to unpredictable success. But how, then, does the essay avoid a merely arbitrary and violent relation to its objects? Adorno suggests that the essay succeeds precisely where it discovers “an objective fullness of meanings” not by applying presumably objective methods, but by mobilizing a subjective fantasy otherwise prohibited by scientific inquiry: “In order to be disclosed, however, the objective wealth of meanings encapsulated in every intellectual phenomenon demands of the recipient the same spontaneity of subjective fantasy that is castigated in the name of objective discipline. Nothing can be interpreted out [herausinterpretiert] of something that is not interpreted into it [hineininterpretiert] at the same time” (NL 1: 4; GS 11: 10). The essay as form is based on the figure of a writer/author who can conceive of an object only by indulging in the spontaneity of subjective fantasy—the essay demands ironic acceptance of a paradoxical willed spontaneity. While it is misguided to call for an objectively correct relation between object and subject, the essay is not prone to merely subjective choice. It is—and with the essay as form, Adorno always wants to have it both ways—neither entirely subjective (artistic) nor entirely objective (scientific). Adorno expresses this claim with the ironic remark that one cannot interpret anything out of the essay without something’s having been interpreted into it.53 If there is no Hinausinterpretieren without a Hineininterpretieren, then there is no object to which one could relate without the essay’s interpretation—that is the subjective relation. Likewise, there is no essayistic interpretation without an object to be interpreted—that is the objective relation. However, does this not grant much more to the artistic, the performative power of the interpretation than Adorno’s insistence on the conceptual character of the essay would admit? Can aesthetic autonomy and conceptual rigor coexist? Adorno seems to think so. “In this, the essay has something like an aesthetic autonomy that is easily accused of being simply derived from art, although it is distinguished from art by its medium, concepts, and by its claim to a truth devoid of aesthetic semblance” (NL 1: 5; GS 11: 11). The essay’s affinity with art is provided by its “aesthetic autonomy,” while it is through the concepts and through its claim for truth that the essay lacks all aesthetic semblance. Hence, the essay is constitutively contradictory, impure, ironic, a mixed product or hybrid, a Mischprodukt [mixture, hybrid; see GS 11: 9]. Adorno’s terming the essay a Mischprodukt not only recalls the Romantic infatuation with writing as an alchemical mixing and fusing of genres and styles, it also carries political connotations. More specifically, Adorno depicts the essay as Jewish when he writes:

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The person who interprets instead of accepting what is given and classifying it is marked with the yellow star of one who squanders his intelligence in impotent speculation, reading things in where there is nothing to interpret. A man with his feet on the ground [Tatsachenmensch] or a man with his head in the clouds [Luftmensch]—those are the alternatives. But letting oneself be terrorized by the prohibition against saying more than was meant right then and there means complying with the false conceptions that people and things harbor concerning themselves. (NL 1: 4; GS 11: 10–11)

The unmistakably political vocabulary in this passage (yellow star, impotent, terrorize) suggests that the essay is not merely an abstract philosophical form; rather, it has attained a particular historical relevance. What Adorno suggests here is, more precisely, an analogy—however distant—between the persecution of the Jews and the essay as form. If the essay’s interpretations exceed what was “meant right then and there” (“an Ort und Stelle”), one can scarcely fail to hear an echo of one of the most persistent themes of Adorno’s essay, namely, the theme of the universal realization of homelessness beginning—mythologically—with Odysseus, and fulfilled—negatively— with the destruction and displacement brought about by administratively organized terror and destruction.54 Within the context of the essay as form, then, life and the entire historical situation—not just art, not just literature—are at stake, and Adorno’s polemics against scientific and positivistic rules and prohibitions can be read also as attacks on the principles of order and purity as tools of anti-Semitic terror.55 Yet the politically and emotionally charged terminology in this passage has another polemical dimension. Adorno also uses the expression “gelber Fleck” in a stinging attack on Heidegger’s terminology in Being and Time. In his discussion of the three constitutive modes of curiosity—Unverweilen [restlessness], Zerstreuung [distraction], and Aufenthaltslosigkeit [homelessness]—Heidegger comments on the latter phenomenon: “Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere. This mode of Being-in-the-world reveals a new kind of Being of everyday Dasein—a kind in which Dasein is constantly uprooting itself.”56 In JA, Adorno reacts sharply to this passage. He views Heidegger’s early philosophy (Sein und Zeit was published in 1927, six years before Heidegger’s enthusiastic association with National Socialism) as an expression of anti-Semitism to which he responds from the perspective of roughly forty years later: When Heidegger finally calls “homelessness” [Aufenthaltlosigkeit] the “third essential characteristic of this phenomenon [curiosity],” he

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature conjures up the Ahasuerian element. He does this by means of the demagogically proven technique of allusion, which keeps quiet about that to which it expects secret consent. The pleasure of mobility becomes a curse for the homeless. The opposite of “everyday Dasein,” which is “constantly uprooting itself,” is “observing entities and marveling at them,” though it is not yet, by any means, the contemplation of Being. In philosophy 1927 the rootless intellectual carries the yellow mark of someone who undermines the established order. [Der wurzellose Intellektuelle trägt in Philosophie 1927 den gelben Fleck des Zersetzenden.] (JA 112–113; GS 6: 488)

Heidegger’s philosophy, Adorno asserts, is complicit with anti-Semitic discourse by rhetorically and demagogically invoking “the Ahasuerian element:” not satisfied to critique “idle knowledge” (Adorno’s term for “curiosity”) and the “pleasure of mobility” (reminiscent of Adorno’s description of the mobile essay form), Heidegger resorts to inciting, through a technique of allusion, the anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic imagination. For Adorno, words such as Aufenhaltlosigkeit and entwurzelt reveal Heidegger’s intention of denouncing “idle knowledge” by branding it as Jewish. Such denunciation can only work because there is a more or less hidden anti-Semitic consent which the philosopher exploits demagogically, and which Adorno’s strident formulations “yellow star” and “undermining” or “degenerating” [Zersetzenden]—the latter an easily recognizable Nazi propaganda term—are meant to criticize. Assailing Heidegger’s terminology as pretentious, Adorno seeks to assert the historicalness of concepts and discard notions of transhistorical truth. For him, the essay’s claim to truth does not imply the actual existence or availability of truth. Rather, truth is itself temporal and historical. Concepts do not guarantee the existence of pure, atemporal meaning. Truth is relevant for the essay only as historical truth, as something evolved and saturated with temporality and experience. Adorno’s emphasis on temporality is so pronounced that it hardly comes as a surprise when he declares that the essay abandons the Platonic idea of truth as timeless,57 because it is precisely this idea that is mirrored in the erroneous metaphysical or scientific belief that a nonhistorical, eternal truth may be available—and that knowledge may somehow transcend history, thereby positing itself as an authoritarian absolute. Temporality and history are, for Adorno, total categories that cannot be transcended precisely because no transcendental standpoint from which to make a distinction between temporal and atemporal is available. In a sense, this means that the essay’s terminology is, by necessity, insufficient—not because thinking has not yet reached its final terminological formulation,

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but simply because, from Adorno’s Nietzschean point of view, foundational or final concepts are anthropomorphic fictions, products of projective and wishful thinking. Thus, Adorno seeks to distinguish the open form of the essay strictly from the teleological perspective of a final, scientific and universally valid terminology, as well as from Heidegger’s attempt to establish the actual meaning of his vocabulary by means of etymological speculation—he sees both methodological extremes as attempts to overcome temporality: The customary objection that the essay is fragmentary and contingent itself postulates that totality is given, and with it the identity of subject and object, and acts as though one were in possession of the whole. The essay, however, does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and to distill it out; it tries to render the transient eternal. Its weakness bears witness to the very nonidentity it had to express. (NL 1: 11; GS 11: 18)

The essay takes nothing for granted. It relates to eternity only as an essayistic feat. Eternity is not to be discovered; but transience is to be eternalized. The paradoxical formula for the essay is that it is forever, eternally, temporal and transitory. It is fragmentary precisely insofar as the assumption of totality would concede an identity of subject and object. The essay as Mischprodukt, however, arises from the very principle of nonidentity, from which all of its formal characteristics can be derived. Adorno characterizes the essay as overinterpretation precisely because only an interpretation that exaggerates, that surpasses and overshoots its object is immune to identifying the object as mere object. The essay bears witness to the experience that some truths can be known only in the mode of exaggeration.58 VIII. ALEXANDRIANISM The principle of nonidentity does not leave the concept of history untouched. In the essay, history cannot be taken as a continuous process that can be retraced to its origins. The epistemological desire for origins is, for Adorno, tantamount to a denial of culture. If there is a way to get past that totality that Adorno calls the vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft (i.e., a society that has erased all traces of nature, that has purged the non-identical), it does not lead back to a forgotten origin, but only onward to an unrealized utopia.59 The latter is anticipated in the element of freedom with which the essay relates to what, according to the logic of deduction, can be thought of only as disparate. Whoever refers to first principles does so under the erroneous assumption that it is possible to return to an origin that antedates society and

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culture and, therefore, must be true. Adorno rejects any such presumption by referring to the irreversible totality of mediations: history is the progressive movement away from nature and into society and “second nature” (see chapter 2). To think historically does not mean to go back to nature (such an attempt inevitably ends up blindly repeating the movement into society), but rather to seek the traces of history precisely where philosophy has been least willing to tolerate them: in the concepts themselves. [The essay] does not insist on something beyond mediations—and those are the historical mediations in which the whole society is sedimented—but seeks the truth content in its objects, itself inherently historical. It does not seek any primordial given, thus spiting a societalized [vergesellschaftete] society that, because it does not tolerate anything that does not bear its stamp, tolerates least of all anything that reminds it of its own ubiquity, and inevitably cites as its ideological complement the very nature its praxis has completely eliminated. The essay quietly [wortlos] puts an end to the illusion that thought could break out of the sphere of thesis, culture, and move into that of physis, nature. Spellbound by what is fixed and acknowledged to be derivative, by artifacts, it honors nature by confirming that it no longer exists for human beings. (NL 1: 11; GS 11: 19)

From the historico-philosophical perspective expressed in this passage, the essay is the philosophical attempt to escape philosophy’s insistence on transcendental truth. Since the essay does not pretend deduction from a “primordial given,” it can affirm its own derivative nature: always a cultural product, always dealing with culture, the essay refuses to think of nature other than as something irretrievably lost, immune to any “positive dialectic” and positive negation. Adorno describes the essay as being spellbound by what it knows to be artifactual, thus honoring nature in a melancholy manner, as something completely other. The incisive strength of essayistic thinking can be found in its rigorous pursuit of immanent critique. Nowhere does it break the law of its form. A law that is enforced silently: wortlos. Adorno’s phrase suggests that the essay is not in the business of proclaiming what is and what is not; it confirms silently that nature is no longer available to humans. This silent saying—or gesturing—is not accidental or secondary to the essay. From Adorno’s historico-philosophical point of view, the essay can be reduced to one perpetual theme: “The relationship of nature and culture is its true theme” (NL1:19; GS 11: 28). But “theme” does not mean that the essay addresses directly the relation between nature and culture. The essay’s central theme is

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uttered only silently, as a gesture that signals: “Thus it is.”60 The essay reacts to words (thesei) that erroneously evoke the existence of something that is no longer available (physei). However, and this is a concern that one will encounter everywhere in Adorno’s NL, the essay does justice to nature by contemplating cultural phenomena as if they were a “second nature:”61 Instead of ‘reducing’ cultural phenomena, the essay immerses itself in them as though in a second nature, a second immediacy, in order to negate and transcend the illusion of immediacy through its perseverance. It has no more illusions about the difference between culture and what lies beneath it than does the philosophy of origin. But for it culture is not an epiphenomenon that covers Being and should be destroyed; instead, what lies beneath culture is itself thesis, something constructed, the false society. This is why the origin has no more value for the essay than the superstructure. It owes its freedom in the choice of its objects, its sovereignty in the face of all priorities of fact or theory, to the fact that for it all objects are in a certain sense equally close to the center—equally close to the principle that casts its spell over all of them [das alle verhext]. (NL 1: 19; GS 11: 28)

The image of a false duality of thesei and physei gives way to the image of a bewitched [verhext] world in which the mind cannot rely on presumed and inherited hierarchies and priorities. What the mystical “center” mentioned here could be matters perhaps much less than the ethical and stylistic principles implied. If all objects are equally close to the center “that bewitches everything” (again, the center is not defined except as the very principle that prohibits a duality of nature and culture), the essayist is free to choose any given object as a matter for contemplation—there is no hierarchy of objects because they are all equidistant to the center. The compositional logic of the essay is guided by the idea of paratactic juxtaposition, which will also determine the style of the AT.62 The freedom that Adorno claims for the work of the essayist can easily look like arbitrariness. If all objects are equally important or unimportant, what norms can be used to decide which problems or questions are most urgently in need of an essayistic response? Or does Adorno’s concept of the essay amount to an uncritical advocacy of random choice? His allusion to the essay’s sovereignty, which raises it above the claims of scientific facts and coherent theories, could be construed as a celebration of an unprincipled eclecticism—a postmodern “Alexandrianism,” to use a term to which Adorno occasionally refers, although it is not clear whether he

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has the philosophers or the poets in mind.63 Adorno’s references to Alexandrianism are remarkable to the extent that the term—often associated with backwards-looking accumulation of (philological) knowledge rather than the development of (philosophical) wisdom—has evoked more negative than positive responses in the newer German philosophical tradition. Adorno’s contemporary master of Alexandrian essayism is without a doubt Walter Benjamin, whose exegetic fervor to “read profane texts as if they were sacred” is, for Adorno, the symbol of a successful modern Alexandrianism. “Benjamin maintained a determined Alexandrianism in the face of this trend64 and thereby provoked all fundamentalist furies [wurzelwütige Affekte]” (P 234; GS 10.1: 244). The expression “fundamentalist furies” [wurzelwütige Affekte] is, once again, a polemical aside directed at Heidegger and the jargon of authenticity. Alexandrian thinking is rootless and cosmopolitan, and it is capable of responding to what Adorno calls elsewhere a “network of deception” [Verblendungszusammenhang; see DE 33; GS 3: 59]. In “The Essay as Form” Adorno writes: “[The essay’s] Alexandrianism is a response to the fact that by their very existence, lilacs and nightingales—where the universal net has permitted them to survive— make us believe that life is still alive” (NL 1:11; GS 11: 19). In the case of the essay, Alexandrianism designates a critical stance, a point of view that does not confuse mere existence with life itself. In his essay on Goethe’s Faust, Adorno defines Alexandrianism as the “interpretive immersion in traditional texts” (NL 1: 11; GS 11: 19). To the ear of the Alexandrinian essayist, who shuns nature and immerses himself in cultural artifacts, the song of the nightingale says nothing but “Life does not live.”65 Why does Adorno use the term “Alexandrianism?” Modern readers might be most familiar with it from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, where it is used mostly disparagingly. For Nietzsche, the Alexandrian is the Socratic man, the scientific man, the modern man of culture and education, who is ultimately lifeless and excluded from tragic, Dionysian insight: “Despite all this, he remains eternally hungry, a ‘critic’ without desire or energy, Alexandrian man who is basically a librarian and proof-reader, sacrificing his sight miserably to book dust and typographical errors.”66 Adorno turns Nietzsche’s vitalistic bias upside down. Alexandrianism is not simply the curse of the theoretical, the critical, the philological mind; it is, rather, the only perspective that allows seeing life as ideology. Only the one who does not live can see life as that which it has become: mere existence, nonlife, death. From the point of view of Adorno’s philosophy of history, the essay is a necrology. Adorno’s surprisingly positive reference to the obsolete interpretive tradition of Alexandrianism is reflected in his proclamation

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that the “contemporary relevance of the essay is that of anachronism” (NL 1: 22; GS 11: 32). Adorno’s reference to Alexandrianism responds to the question whether the essay is indeed an expression of freedom—insofar as it freely chooses its objects—or whether the essay merely indulges in eclecticism. Hegel, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1805/06), arrives at an ambivalent evaluation of the alleged eclecticism of Alexandrinian philosophy. On the one hand, Alexandrianism is, according to Hegel, not to be confused with a kind of bad eclecticism that chooses more or less randomly from different schools of thought, picking up ideas here and there, without uniting them into a coherent structure—“as if a dress had been patched together from pieces of different colors and fabrics. It was previously noted that an eclecticism yields nothing more than a superficial aggregate.”67 Hegel goes on to insist that the Alexandrians were eclecticists in a positive sense, because they were eclectic for the sake of unity: The Alexandrians are eclectic philosophers in the better sense of the word. . . . [Eclecticism] unifies the preceding principles that are particular and one-sided, containing only elements of the idea; a more concrete and more profound idea unifies these elements into one. Thus Plato, too, was eclectic; he united Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides; and thus the Alexandrians, too, are eclectics, although this expression always immediately implies the idea of selectivity [Vorstellung des Herauslesens].68

Still, Hegel worries about the notion of eclecticism. For him, it suggests the idea—lost in the English translation—of arbitrarily reading something out of something: Herauslesen. Adorno is well beyond such worries when he remarks, tongue-in-cheek, that one can only read something out of something if one reads something into it at the same time (cf. NL 1: 4; GS 11: 11). In a more direct reference to Hegel, Adorno defends the essay against the accusation of eclecticism as following: When the essay is charged with having no point of view of its own and accused of relativism because it does not acknowledge any standpoint outside itself, the notion of truth as something “fixed,” a hierarchy of concepts, has come into play, the very notion that Hegel, who did not like points of view, had destroyed. Here the essay is in accord with its polar opposite, the philosophy of absolute knowledge. (NL 1:18–19; GS 11: 27)

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It seems surprising that Hegel’s philosophy is mentioned as an extreme form of the essay, especially since Adorno underscores the Alexandrinian as well as the anti-systematic and even fragmentary character of the essay. The point, then, is not that the essay is somehow, secretly, a subterranean form of Idealist philosophy. Rather, Idealist philosophy itself has a secret Alexandrinian tendency towards the essay, as Adorno’s analysis of Hegel’s style in his HS shows. There, Adorno describes Hegel’s philosophy not as a completed, finished system, but as an infinite process: “The substance of Hegel’s philosophy is process, and it wants to express itself as process, in permanent status nascendi, the negation of presentation as something congealed, something that would correspond to what was presented only if the latter were itself something congealed” (HS 121; GS 5: 353). It seems that Adorno reads Hegel’s style through the lens of Early German Romanticism. Specifically Romantic is Adorno’s notion of the essay as a discontinuous process, which cites the “Romantic conception of the fragment as a construction that is not complete but rather progresses onward into the infinite through self-reflection” (NL 1: 16; GS 11: 24). Adorno then points out the proximity between Hegel and Schlegel by calling the Romantic idea of the fragment an “antiIdealist motif in the midst of Idealism” (NL 1: 16; GS 11: 24). In a similar vein, Adorno characterizes the essay not simply as an anti-Idealist, isolated fragment; instead, he attempts to define the essay’s particularity in its relation to a totality that the essay cannot represent as such: “The essay has to cause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature, whether the feature be chosen or merely happened upon, without asserting the presence of the totality” (NL 1: 16; GS 11: 25). No totality—be it the Idealist system or society as a whole—is ever represented as such in the essay; but it lights up in relation to one of the essay’s particular traits. This formulation expresses more directly why the form of the essay contains an irreducibly aesthetic dimension: it makes appear that which it does not represent. Aesthetic appearance and representation of totality are different because the first results from the essay as process, while the second must elude the essay as process. Because the essay does not come to closure, it is not fit for representations of totality that rely on the availability of conclusive means of presentation (such as Hegel’s system): “There is both truth and untruth in . . . the feeling that it could continue on arbitrarily. Truth, because the essay does not in fact come to a conclusion and displays its own inability to do so as a parody of its own a priori” (NL 1:17; GS 11: 25). The essay’s inability to achieve closure is not mere inability; the essay does not simply fail to close, but reflects on its own incapability to reach a conclusion. Its failure is integrated into its form as parody.

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With the term parody, Adorno also alludes to the Romantic concept of the fragment as a process of infinite self-reflection. From this angle, the essay parodies its own inability to come to an end: self-reflection is the ongoing reflection on the essay’s failure to conclude. The essay as form realizes its a priori condition, and such realization can only take the form of parody or, rather, self-parody. Implied in Adorno’s use of the term parody is the idea that the Romantic concept of the fragment is itself a parody of Hegel’s system (although, of course, the latter temporally follows the former): the Romantics realized an a priori condition to which Hegel, in his drive to construct a total, conclusive system, was blind. The Romantics recognized the secret essayistic nature of Idealism. This claim is not entirely far-fetched if one recalls Friedrich Schlegel’s explication of Alexandrianism, presented in his Cologne lectures of 1804/05,69 which shares Hegel’s cautious appraisal but additionally emphasizes the particular historical situation of the Alexandrians: theirs is a philosophy of transition, molded by the struggles between Greek religion and Christianity. For Schlegel, the contemporary relevance of the Alexandrians can be found precisely in the fact that they failed to produce a coherent system, and that, because theirs was “a period of vacillation” (KA 12: 243), one can retrace the origin of contemporary ideas and institutions to the Alexandrian age, whose philosophy is defined by antagonism. (Politically speaking, Alexandrianism is the time of “philosophico-religious revolution” [KA 12: 243].) Schlegel, one could say, finds the contemporary relevance of Alexandrianism in its originary anachronism. It never came into its own as a coherent philosophical doctrine. Its eclecticism—i.e., its failure to achieve systematic closure—is thus the very element that constitutes its contemporary relevance. More precisely, Schlegel replaces Hegel’s term eclecticism with the somewhat more flattering syncretism, signifying a mixture of different, heterogeneous philosophical ideas and traditions. It is with respect to such syncretism that Adorno can point out the essay’s Alexandrianism—both the essay and Alexandrian philosophy are Mischprodukte.70 Schlegel, however, does not completely embrace Alexandrian syncretism. Because it is not organic, he sees syncretism as simply a mechanical combination [Zusammensetzung] of diverse parts. It is because of this mechanical, eclectic attempt at systembuilding that Alexandrian philosophy is bound to realize itself only as an infinite process of confusions; all the contradictions necessarily at work in all philosophical systems are only amplified and multiplied by the Alexandrians’ syncretism: The difficulties that plague other systems are increased twofold in all systems that seek to unify opposing opinions and therefore must find

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature room for the contradictions inherent in both. From the arbitrary combination new confusions arise, which in turn give rise to others, and so forth to infinity. (KA 12: 236)

The form of the essay, however, does not exhaust itself in an infinite series of confusions. Adorno detects in the essay a self-regulatory mechanism: It corrects what is contingent and isolated in its insights in that they multiply, confirm, and qualify themselves, whether in the further course [Fortgang] of the essay itself or in a mosaiclike relationship to other essays, but not by a process of abstraction that ends in characteristic features derived from them. (NL 1: 16; GS 11: 25)

The notion of a mosaic reflects Schlegel’s description of Alexandrianism as something put together [Zusammengesetztes]. Mosaic and Fortgang are metaphors intended to illustrate the essay’s specific mode of presentation [Darstellung]. Since Adorno’s essay is an essay on the essay as form, its structuring principle is a discontinuous but recurrent discussion of how the essay says what it says. It is as a problem of presentation and style that the essay’s difference to philosophical systems and to methodical, scientific treatises matters most. Again, the notion of the Romantic fragment is suggested when Adorno points out that the essay is not simply an (infinitely) open form, but is both open and closed: “The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like” (NL 1: 17; GS 11: 26). While the essay as form is open because it rejects closed-off philosophems and all “systematic residues,” it is not a completely open text, for its concern with the form of presentation limits its possibilities: “But the essay is also more closed, because it works emphatically at the form of its presentation” (NL 1:18; GS 26: 11). Such programmatic statements are more than just idle talk; the majority of Adorno’s texts address questions of form and presentation, and Adorno sometimes seems more concerned with the form of his philosophy than with its content, guided by the conviction that the what is best served by concentrating one’s powers of argumentation and expression on the how. One does justice to one’s subject matter, Adorno submits, by an inexhaustible attention to linguistic expression and presentation. Linguistic precision means abandoning the nominalistic precision promised by lexically unequivocal concepts. “The manner of expression is to salvage the precision sacrificed when definition is omitted, without betraying the subject matter to the arbitrariness of conceptual meanings decreed once and for all” (NL 1:12; GS 11: 20).

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IX. DARKNESS If the essay seeks precision through style and presentation, but not through the fixed meanings of its concepts, then one cannot understand it by only trying to define the concepts it uses. That is, one cannot understand the essay by using a dictionary that provides the necessary definitions: “The way the essay appropriates concepts can best be compared to the behavior of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak its language instead of piecing it together out of its elements according to rules learned in school. Such a person will read without a dictionary” (NL 1:13; GS 11: 21). Despite its self-reflective nature, the essay does not know what it is doing; it lacks rationalistic distance to its concepts. Instead of constructing its argument element by element, it is caught up in language as an immediate, uncontrollable, experiential process. The essay proceeds like a foreigner who does not speak correctly, who is always prone to error, occasionally overwhelmed by a richness of contextual and connotative nuance that no dictionary could ever capture. For the essay, concepts are foreign words [Fremdwörter]. If one wants to understand the essay, one must develop an ear and an eye for the peculiar process of oscillation at work in its conceptual structure: Not less but more than a definitional procedure, the essay presses for the reciprocal interaction of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience. In such experience, concepts do not form a continuum of operations. Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture [Dichte dieser Verflechtung]. The thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena [Schauplatz] for intellectual experience, without unraveling it. (NL 1: 13; GS 11: 20–21)

Unlike a procedure that aims at definitional clarity, the essay is structured by the “reciprocal interaction” of its concepts: what counts is not the concept as such, but, rather, what takes place between the concepts. Adorno is not interested in the essay as simply a straightforward hermeneutic operation, but seeks to claim the essay as the almost theatrical event (Adorno speaks of the essay as Schauplatz) of intellectual experience. Because the essay is structured like a woven carpet, because it is a texture without beginning and end and without a single direction, thoughts do not pass through the essay teleologically. They have no destination other than the process of thinking itself. In the essay, the open dynamic of process and permanent becoming is irreducible.

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It is important to understand that Adorno’s notion of the essay is not, as it may seem at first glance, entirely negative; it is not limited to a rejection of Cartesian and positivistic methodology. Rather, Adorno places the essay in close proximity to other forms of expression. He stresses the essay’s affinity with music, rhetoric, and Idealist philosophy. The echoes between Adorno’s panegyric account of Hegel’s style and “The Essay as Form” are too numerous to be listed here. Adorno reads Hegel’s philosophy from the perspective of form, of presentation; and it turns out that from this perspective Hegel is the greatest essayist in the German tradition, the Teutonic answer to Montaigne. One could say that Adorno’s emphasis on and attention to the form of Hegel’s thinking is so pronounced that it leads to insights that far surpass anything the naïve eye will behold in Hegel’s writing. When Adorno analyzes Hegel’s style, he analyzes the essay as form at the same time. This does not mean, of course, that Hegel’s philosophy and the essay are, essentially, the same. It means, rather, that, from a rhetorical point of view, the essay is philosophical and Hegel’s philosophy is essayistic. It is only through the addition of a third element, namely, rhetoric,71 that the kinship between the two becomes evident. Rhetoric is the reminder that philosophy cannot do without language—something that necessarily precedes it. Philosophy’s concepts, as Adorno likes to remind us, are not merely nominalistic determinations. They are always already configurations because they are part of language. Hegel’s famous equivocations are not subjective inventions; they are not simply posited as such, for positing always aims at unequivocal clarity. Equivocation is a rhetorical technique. Hegel’s most famous equivocation, Aufhebung [usually translated as sublation], is the cornerstone of his concept of dialectics. Adorno suggests that Hegel’s equivocations must be read rhetorically; one cannot rely on a supposed lexical understanding of the double meaning of Aufhebung as a key to Hegel’s thinking. If all language is rhetorical, prone to equivocations and contradictory turns and reversals, then one cannot rely on language to provide clarity. In “Skoteinos,” Adorno repeats the warning already sounded in “The Essay as Form:” one must read without a dictionary, and one cannot take any of Hegel’s equivocations literally: “Such linguistic figures [as Aufheben] should be taken not literally but ironically, as foolery [Eulenspiegelei]. Without batting an eye, Hegel uses language to convict language of the empty pretense of its self-satisfied meaning [Sinn]. The function of language in such passages is not apologetic but critical” (HS 116; GS 5: 348). Hegel’s irony is that he pretends to take language seriously. His feigned seriousness allows him to use language in a critical way. Instead of taking language for granted, as providing a preexisting, pre-determined meaning, Hegel’s Eulenspiegelei turns language

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against itself. Hegel’s turn against language through language—a supremely ironic procedure, echoing Schlegel’s definition of Socratic irony as selfparody72—recalls the conventional accusation leveled against rhetoric: that it manipulates and violates language in its alleged naturalness. Hegel’s critique of language is not gratuitous, for, as Adorno explicates in DE and repeats in his thoughts on Goethe, there is no such thing as natural language available to us. During the historical course of the dialectic of myth and enlightenment, language has become entirely subjected to the requirements of determinate designation, imposed by the necessity of communication and the inauguration of information technologies. Therefore, Adorno claims, the only way to relate to an idea of language as something not yet or no longer structured solely by the demands of communication (this is one of the major motifs in his philosophy and the NL) is to turn against language, like Hegel, the ironic stylist: “The researcher who resists language altogether . . . is the one who demonstrates, negatively, faithfulness to the aesthetic” (NL 1: 7; GS 11:14). Adorno implies that the aesthetic dimension of the essay is not to be found in some vague similarity to literature, but, more precisely, in the essay’s refusal to grant language priority for its own sake and to be aesthetic. In this respect, the essay pays its dues to a prohibition of language for the sake of language.73 As a universal system of signification and repetition, language will inadvertently miss the particular object it wants to express and save from forgetting: “For language is the enemy of the particular and nevertheless seeks its rescue” (AT 204; GS 7: 304). Adorno concludes that the essay can only affirm through negation. Its form is paradoxical through and through. Rejecting all doxa, it adheres to a para-doxa; instead of articulating an opinion, instead of stating a firm point of view, the essay as form is against opinion [para-doxos]. One cannot turn to the essay for well-meant guidance and orientation, because it is, essentially, a heretical enterprise: “Hence the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy. Through violations of the orthodoxy of thought, something in the object becomes visible which it is orthodoxy’s secret and objective aim to keep invisible” (NL 1: 23; GS 11: 33). The para-doxical essay violates the orthodoxy of thought, and it does so in the interest of the object itself. Because all thinking is conceptual and thus subsumptive, it violates the very object it seeks to express. Adorno views the essay as a form of heresy that, in turn, violates the violent mechanism of thinking. While the essay does not comply with the Cartesian call for clarity and distinction, it paradoxically manages to make visible what the orthodoxy of thought tried to keep invisible. The essay’s contents are those objects or remnants that failed to be subsumed by the grasp of the concept; the essay is concerned with those elements that

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elude the methodical inquiry of “organized science and scholarship” as well as the “second-order operations” of philosophy: The essay, however, is concerned with what is blind in its objects. It wants to use concepts to pry open the aspect of its objects that cannot be accommodated by concepts, the aspect that reveals, through the contradictions in which concepts become entangled, that the net of their objectivity is a merely subjective arrangement. It wants to polarize the opaque element [das Opake] and release the latent forces in it. (NL 1: 23; GS 11: 32)

If the essay itself appears dark, difficult, and full of contradictions, this appearance expresses its content; aiming at those aspects of the object that are not evident, the essay “wants to polarize the opaque.” It is not clear what Adorno’s metaphor—more precisely, his catachresis—could mean. To polarize the opaque does not mean to illuminate it (the definition of an opaque object is that it resists the penetration of light). The point is perhaps that this metaphor does not work. Adorno’s hope is that even those rhetorical elements that misfire on the level of trope will prove to be productive on the level of exact fantasy. The difficulty that one encounters so often in Adorno is that the only thing that is clear is the opaqueness of the expression. In “Skoteinos or How to Read” [“Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei” (1963)], an essay that, significantly, bears the word darkness [Greek skoteinos] in its title, Adorno verbalizes this paradox thus: “to say clearly something that is unclear, that has no firm outline, that does not accommodate to reification; to say it in such a way, that is, that the moments that elude the eye’s fixating gaze, or that are not accessible at all, are indicated with the utmost distinctness” (HS 100; GS 5: 335). The opacity of the object can be treated in a productive manner only if one does not seek to illuminate it, and thus to destroy it; rather, one must seek to see it as opacity. In his essay on Beckett’s Endgame [“Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen” (1961)], Adorno writes: “Hence interpretation of Endgame cannot pursue the chimerical aim of expressing the play’s meaning in a form mediated by philosophy. Understanding it can mean only understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning [Sinnzusammenhang] of the fact that it has no meaning” (NL 1: 243; GS 11: 283). The stress in this sentence is on the word reconstructing: in the case of Beckett, interpretation and understanding are not so much a matter of finding the correct, the fitting explanatory concept. Instead of relying on the mediating magic of the concept, interpretation must actively repeat the unintelligibility of Beckett’s play. Adorno suggests that interpretation is

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an active rehearsal, a performance, a displaying, a staging of incomprehensibility. The goal of such construction or reconstruction of incomprehensibility is to give it form in relation to conceptual thinking. Adorno’s term for such reconstruction is “parataxis:” where meaning is ordinarily produced by a stepby-step procedure of coherent and consequential arguments, the paratactic mode of presentation is independent of the notion of meaning resulting from discursive logic. Typical for the paratactic style of presentation are—in violation not only of discursive logic, but also of common sense—rough and abrupt, forced and unnatural transitions that juxtapose seemingly disparate elements. Parataxis means, as Adorno explains in his essay on Hölderlin, a music-like “transformation of language into a serial order whose elements are linked differently than in the judgment” (NL 1: 131; GS 11: 471). If one applies this description to the essay, one can begin to understand that it mixes static and dynamic elements: paratactic syntax facilitates a serialistic style, a temporality that is monotonous and strangely static, similar to the modernist music favored by Adorno. X. TRANSITION The essay does not develop its thoughts; transitions are rhetorical elements, but in the essay their function is not simply to lull or to persuade the reader, while conventional rhetoric demands that a transition be unnoticeable—the orator uses transitions precisely because she wants to avoid the noticeable use of “unnatural” leaps that would make the listener aware of rhetoric as a forceful technique. The essay employs these rhetorical devices because it has no choice but to avoid the “conclusive deductions” of discursive logic: The offensive transitions in rhetoric, in which association, verbal ambiguity, and a relaxation of logical synthesis made it easy for the listener and subjugated him, enfeebled, to the orator’s will, are fused in the essay with the truth content. Its transitions repudiate conclusive deductions in favor of cross-connections between elements, something for which discursive logic has no place. The essay uses equivocations not out of sloppiness, nor in ignorance of the scientific ban on them, but to make it clear—something the critique of equivocation, which merely separates meanings, seldom succeeds in doing—that when a word covers [deckt] different things they are not completely different; the unity of the word calls to mind a unity, however hidden, in the object itself. This unity, however, should not be mistaken for linguistic affinity, as is the

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature practice of contemporary restorationist philosophies. Here too the essay approaches [streift] the logic of music, that stringent and yet aconceptual art of transition, in order to appropriate for verbal language something it forfeited under the domination of discursive logic—although that logic cannot be set aside but only outwitted within its own forms by dint of incisive subjective expression. For the essay does not stand in simple opposition to discursive procedure. (NL 1: 21–22; GS 11: 31)

I have quoted this lengthy passage because it illuminates the notion of transition in its very presentation (this implies the question of what it means to quote a “passage” from Adorno, since his style can be described as a series of periods or passages, or as one long, discontinuous passage). Adorno’s essay here performs several “offensive passages” without, however, simply leaping from one topic to the next. The essay glides from a sentence on transitions and their relation to the essay’s truth content to a description of the essay’s technique of “cross-connections.” This rhetorical movement suggests that the possibility of truth depends on such a coordinating, paratactic stylistic technique, rather than on subordinating, hypotactic syntax (“therefore,” “if . . . then,” “so . . . that,” etc.). The third sentence suddenly introduces the notion of equivocation, thus suggesting that transitions are at work not only on the level of syntax, but also on the level of lexical meaning and definition. Adorno implies that concepts themselves are never fixed but always exposed to transitions, and that transition is to be understood as signifying a hidden unity that one does not see when one focuses exclusively on a word’s equivocal meanings. Such hidden unity is no longer conceptual and no longer accessible to discursive logic, because it is exclusively a matter of language itself:74 not of its meaning, but of its sensuous materiality. The linguistic unity of the word, however, serves as a reminder of the hidden unity of the object or subject matter. It is reminiscent of something that is itself concealed, but it does not reveal it. Adorno’s phrasing here is itself equivocal. If the equivocal term is said to cover different aspects of meaning, then the verb to cover can be understood as saying that the word accounts for all its different meanings, that its polysemy is, as it were, fully intelligible. Or to cover can be understood as saying that the unity of the word covers up, i.e., conceals the differences at the same time that it signifies them. The equivocal use of to cover enacts itself the aconceptual art of transition; the verb can be grasped only in its equivocal doubleness. Adorno’s essay switches from discursive logic to musical logic. The essay is said to have an affinity to musical logic, to music as the “aconceptual art of transition.” The function of this analogy between music and the

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language of the essay is not to somehow overcome discursive logic. Rather, if music and language can be said to coincide precisely in the art of transition, then language has in it the (musical) capacity to differentiate itself from the logic of conceptual language. Without giving up on the concept, without disavowing philosophy and turning itself over to art, the essay as form implements into its use of discursive logic a ruse against discursive logic. Adorno’s essays can be understood as the attempt to outsmart discursive logic by using concepts in a way that defies the inherited rules of discursive exposition. In Adorno’s essays, the use of traditional philosophical categories is based on a frequently and loudly acclaimed refusal to play by the four Cartesian rules on method (which, ironically, can be found in the Discours de la Methode et Essais). Adorno’s essays on art use conventional aesthetic concepts, but they also attempt to incorporate stylistically the “art of transition” at work in literature and music and thus aim at fusing the “offensive transitions” with “truth content.” The nonconceptual elements of the essay still depend on conceptual rationalization. The musical metaphor of the “art of transition” has itself conceptual validity; its function is both to provide a better understanding of the essay’s rhetorical character, and to place the essay within a historical context of modernist form. Adorno himself points out that the phrase “the art of transition” was originally coined by Richard Wagner. Defying the standard nineteenth-century understanding of musical form as “a distinct [plastisch] and readily perceived grouping of parts and periods, marked by contrast and repetition,” Wagner, in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, describes the art of transition as the attempt to mediate between contrasting extremes slowly, without abrupt changes: What I would characterize as my finest and most profound art is the art of the transition, for my entire artistry consists in such transitions: I have come to despise anything brusque and abrupt. . . . My greatest masterpiece in the art of the finest, most gradual transition is certainly the great scene in the second act of Tristan and Isolde.75

The art of transition is, as the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus specifies, “the art of mediating between extremes.” This means, from the perspective of musical analysis, that the listener has to determine the “most extreme opposites . . . in order to understand, on the other hand, the in-between parts in terms of their transitional function.”76 The modernity of Wagner’s musical form lies in the phenomenon that the listener can no longer rely on the self-evident distinction between different musical periods. Put

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differently, the art of transition does not designate the absence of form, but the transformation of static into dynamic form: In the music drama . . . form does not dissolve into an amorphous stream of musical events; rather, transition as a principle of form offers the counterpart to a periodic structure still recognizable as its precondition, a structure whose overcoming the listener is expected not to accept as a fait accompli but actively to participate in as a process.77

The art of transition can be implemented only on the basis of a prior understanding of form as a coherent set of clearly differentiated units. Analogously, the essay works precisely then when it does not depart entirely from convention but instead relates to it in such a way that the hierarchy of form falls apart. The ideal of the essay as form is to replace hierarchical difference with a “liberated” difference in transition—syntactically, to introduce coordination (Adorno’s favorites seem to have been aber [but] and doch [yet]) in the place of subordination. Adorno takes this liberating moment inherent in form as transition one step farther than Wagner. In his interpretations of Alban Berg, Adorno begins to see in the art of transition an almost utopian promise of “universal mediation:” “In Berg’s music, Wagner’s idea of composing as the art of transition has been developed universally” (GS 15: 339). Similarly, the promise of “universal mediation” affects the essay because the essay as form is, according to Adorno, incapable of closure. Adorno’s analysis of Berg’s compositional form will shed another light on the infinite openness of the essay. The difference between Wagner and Berg is that the latter succeeds in combining a smooth, mediating transition with sudden, extreme reversals: “The concepts of the imperceptible transition and the—necessarily abrupt—reversal seem to be mutually exclusive. However, just as psychology knows of an element called ‘threshold value’ that corresponds to a qualitative leap in the midst of continuity, so Berg’s compositional practice literally fuses together the concepts of transition and reversal” (GS 16: 100, n. 1). Berg’s music molds continuity and discontinuity into a paradoxical unity. Whereas Wagner intended the art of transition to lessen the contrast between extremes, Berg endeavors to drive the art of transition itself to an extreme, in which everything would be transition, in which everything would be, to use an analogical vocabulary, relation. Indeed, “universal mediation” becomes the ideal, the absolute—ironically, an absolutely relative absolute. To better understand

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this, it is helpful to consider one of Adorno’s formal descriptions of Berg’s chamber concerto: The entry of the stormy cadenza on the heels of the gently fading adagio is one of only two sharply contrasting effects in the entire piece. But it is as if Berg, in his unwavering commitment to providing reassuring linkages, could hardly bear this contrast and sought to shape it according to the principle that Richard Wagner called the art of transition. He thus faced the paradoxical task of having an extreme pianissimo followed abruptly by an extreme fortissimo, yet having these extremes of volume flow into one another. This feat somewhat resembles squaring the circle, but Berg has playfully and ingeniously made the impossible possible. At the end of the adagio, as the brass ensemble and the violin unobtrusively fade away, the piano enters just as unobtrusively before the conclusion and intensifies to mezzo forte, with the result that the piano’s great outburst remains within the continuum of this intensification. But the intensification takes place behind the scenes, as it were; the piano, which is, after all, not a solo instrument in the second movement, barely makes an appearance, and even when its rumbling in the lowest part of the register grows louder, attention remains focused on the main action in the melody, the fading-away of the piccolo and the violin. In this fashion Berg actually manages to have the adagio fade away completely before it is followed by the starkly contrasting cadenza, yet the way for the dynamic contrast has already been paved, at the level of the unconscious, as it were (GS 18: 639)

The ideal of Berg’s musical form, his art of transition, is, as Adorno concedes, virtually impossible. But in Berg, the impossible becomes event: as counterintuitive as this may appear, the squaring of the circle does work as play. Such emphatic embrace of the possibility of the impossible78 as an almost imperceptible, unconscious musical event is one of Adorno’s persuasive but also slightly tortured illustrations of the essay as form. One must be cautious when investigating Adorno’s fondness for musical analogies. It would be an exaggeration to speak of a complete incorporation of the “art of transition” into the form of the essay. The affinities between musical and verbal (essayistic) progression or movement do not extend to their respective forms as a whole; they are limited to brief and elusive aesthetic moments. Adorno is careful to point out that the essay only brushes [streift] the art of transition—but does not approach it, as Nicholsen phrases it in her translation; for such approaching would signal the essay’s

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teleological transformation into a work of art. The aim of the art of transition, however, is more modest; its task is simply to dedicate [zueignen; Nicholsen has “to appropriate,” but Adorno does not use aneignen]79 to speech what speech lacks: the language-character that has been replaced with signcharacter “under the dominion of discursive logic.”80 Not the essay itself, as a closed-off form, but rhetoric becomes more artistic and less rigidly discursive, and the art of transition is thus defined as both rhetorical and musical. This does not mean that Adorno’s notion of transition reflects the proper rhetorical definition of transition or metabasis as a “brief statement of what has been said and what will follow; a ‘linking summary.’”81 Rather, Adorno qualifies transition as offensive, thus suggesting its kinship to transgressio. Perhaps, then, the art of transition is also the art of transgression. Adorno’s style has often been chided for its transgressive qualities, most of all for its tendency to transpose small syntactical elements, such as, tellingly, the negation nicht and the reflexive pronoun sich, as in sentences such as “Nicht falsch aber ist die nicht minder kulturelle Frage, ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse . . .” (GS 6: 355).82 Here, the pronoun sich follows the adverb noch; standard German syntax would have it precede the adverb. This stylistic deviation is more than a mere idiosyncrasy. Its purpose is to delay, however briefly, the syntactical bridge between the verb lassen and its corresponding reflexive pronoun. The transposition has the effect of an ever so slight retardation: a minimal transition from Adorno’s high-speed prose to a momentary, barely noticeable delay, a halting in the Fortgang [progress; another frequent musical term in Adorno’s writings] of the essay. Commenting on Minima Moralia, Jeffrey T. Nealon has proposed reading Adorno’s technique of slowing-down—which he sees realized most compellingly in Adorno’s occasional fondness for chiastic inversions—as “one way of reintroducing . . . an ethical hesitation into the otherwise too-swift movement to a conclusion.”83 Nealon also helpfully quotes Adorno’s statement that the culture industry “expels from movements all hesitation . . .” (MM 40). But this slowing down is not only an ethical response to the mechanization and acceleration of all processes in the culture industry. Adorno’s style makes room for moments of hesitation to counter the dizzying speed of dialectical movement: “The dialectic is too ‘fast’ to be defined; in fact it is nothing other than a complex modality of speed, linkage, response.”84 Because “the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves” (MM 86; GS 4: 96), it is always too fast and, thus, elicits the slowing-down of syntax in response. In this sense, rhetoric could be seen as the aesthetic counter-force to the dialectic because it counters speed with slowness. In

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his essay “Anthropologische Annäherungen an die Aktualität der Rhetorik” [“Anthropological Approaches to the Contemporary Relevance of Rhetoric” (1971)] Hans Blumenberg observes: Dialectical theories of history stress the factors that accelerate developments because these are what drives the process to the critical point where reversal occurs, thereby unmistakably bringing closer the final stage and confirming what has been posited as axiomatic. . . . When it comes to the temporal structure of actions, rhetoric, on the other hand, is the quintessence of delay. Indirection, procedural fantasy, and ritualization all cast doubt on the contention that the shortest distance between two points is also the most humane path between them. We are quite familiar with this observation in the aesthetic realm, for instance in music. 85

Rhetoric and music are said to coincide in their temporal structure of delay, and this aestheticization is made possible, in Adorno, by the form of the essay. One could now try to see the essay as a form of performance, and Adorno’s “Essay as Form” as the attempt to determine the form of the essay entirely in terms of its performance, not of its content. And can one speak of the performance of language without employing musical metaphors? Does not the very definition of the performative dimension of language amount to imposing a musical paradigm on language? In the terms of the essay as form, performativity is something different from the speech acts proposed by Austin and Searle and their interest in doing things with words. Performativity in the essay means, simply, that the problem of style, of verbal presentation, is experienced as a temporal play of speed and slowness, marked by transitions. It is no surprise, then, that Adorno gave his monograph on Alban Berg the title “The Master of the Smallest Transition.”86 Berg’s technique of a continuous art of transition drives music to a new threshold: “ [Berg’s music] is, by its inherent nature, in a constant process of disintegration. It strives toward the individual element as its goal, that is, toward a threshold value bordering on nothingness” (GS 13: 371).87 In Berg’s music, “something” is, at the same time, “nothing.” Such a paradox can be expressed only performatively, by interpreting the musical process as one of dissolution, in which “each sound is itself a transition.”88 One could respond now that musical, performative interpretation is quite different from literary or philological interpretation, and that one should not get too playful with the equivocal term interpretation. The equivocal nature of interpretation, however, is already suggested by, the reader may recall, the title of Adorno’s collected essays on literature:

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Notes to literature. Adorno’s essays provide the musical score for an interpretation of literature. The title suggests that the interpretation is left to the reader; indeed, my claim is that Adorno’s NL are in need of interpretation. The next chapter will address how Adorno, in his interpretation of Joseph von Eichendorff ’s poetry, attempts to verbalize the enigmatic configuration of interpretation, understanding, and aesthetic experience.

Chapter Two

Rauschen: Eichendorff

“It is the shudder of meaning I interrogate, listening to the rustle of language, that language which for me, modern man, is like Nature.” —Roland Barthes1

Adorno is not usually read as one of the main theorists of hermeneutics. His great book on aesthetics does not offer any guidelines on how to develop a method for understanding works of art. In the draft introduction to Aesthetic Theory, Adorno offers this rather curt remark about the concept of understanding: “Philosophically the concept of understanding has been compromised by Dilthey and his followers and by categories such as empathy” (AT 345; GS 7: 513). Adorno thus unceremoniously rejects Dilthey’s hermeneutics (so important for German literary criticism in the early twentieth century) because of its central emphasis on subjective, lived experience [Erlebnis], which Adorno, following Walter Benjamin’s theoretical lead, distinguishes from experience in the sense of Erfahrung.2 While in Dilthey’s theory artworks are documents that allow the reader to enter into the experience of the creative subject, who authored the work by means of empathy [Einfühlung],3 Adorno presents his aesthetic theory (which can, of course, in no way be restricted to questions of understanding) as addressing the experience of the aesthetic object: the experiencing subject is eclipsed in favor of the aesthetic object [Gegenstand], the work of art itself. This structural limitation on aesthetic experience is historical. The trouble with understanding is that it presupposes a continuity of meaning [Sinnzusammenhang] that the recipient can reconstruct [mitvollziehen] by means of empathy. Yet modern artworks do not offer an unbroken Sinnzusammenhang, and empathy will leave the recipient at a loss (see NL 2: 95; GS 11: 431). Consequently, Adorno seeks to grasp aesthetic cognition as “the form of knowledge that is not knowledge of an object” (AT 347; GS 7: 516). The work of art is not an object that 49

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allows itself to be subsumed under universal categories of objective knowledge. Because an element of truth is essential to artworks, they are said to “participate in knowledge” (AT 347; GS 7: 516). Adorno’s phrase “knowledge of the artworks” [Erkenntnis der Kunstwerke (AT 347; GS 7: 516)] must be read as a double genitive: On the one hand, the artwork is something to be known (objective genitive); on the other hand, the artwork, as Adorno puts it, “participates” in knowledge (subjective genitive). Artworks are not mere objects of knowledge, things that can be known by a subject exterior to them; they are also personified “subjects” of knowledge, entities that know. This paradoxical double character is at the heart of aesthetic experience—it marks the limit of aesthetic understanding. The task of a philosophy of art is not so much to explain away the element of incomprehensibility, which speculative philosophy has almost invariably sought to do, but rather to understand the incomprehensibility itself. This incomprehensibility persists as the character of art, and it alone protects the philosophy of art from doing violence to art. (AT 347; GS 7: 516)

This passage exemplifies an essential motif of the pervasive anti-hermeneutic aspect in Adorno’s aesthetics. By its very nature as a discipline of understanding, philosophy of art runs the risk of eliminating precisely that element that called for the existence of a philosophy of art in the first place. Without an element of incomprehensibility, art would be whatever aesthetic theory wanted it to be. It is the nominalism intrinsic to all modern disciplines of knowledge that threatens the autonomy of art and that causes Adorno to issue a warning that philosophy of art threatens to do violence to art if the latter loses the protection of its essential incomprehensibility. This warning recalls a witty observation of Friedrich Schlegel that Adorno had planned to use as a motto for AT: “What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things; either the philosophy or the art” (KA 2: 148; see AT 366 and GS 7: 544). Essential to Adorno’s thinking on aesthetics is his determination to devise an approach to art that neither turns art into something else by explaining away any element that cannot be translated into non-aesthetic discourse, nor gives up on efforts to conceptualize art, lest one ends up worshipping it as some transcendentally removed, religious or irrational object. In this vein, Adorno claims in another passage in Aesthetic Theory: “The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be understood” (AT 118; GS 7: 179). If the aesthetic element of

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incomprehensibility is not accidental, if it is inherent to the character of artworks, then there can be no positive hermeneutics. This does not imply, however, that the impossibility of satisfactory understanding is a necessary characteristic of all art. Rather, the incomprehensibility Adorno has in mind is historically specific. It is a product of hermetic modernist art seeking to preserve its autonomy and to protect itself from the capitalistic mechanism of exchange and commodification. What Adorno has to say about hermeneutics must be viewed against the background of modernist art, which sets for him the unsurpassable standard for all art: the dark and truncated poetry of Paul Celan renders all authentic poetry hermetic, and the atonal and dissonant music of Arnold Schönberg renders all authentic music hermetic. This is the consistent normative argument made by Adorno. It is important to keep in mind that this historical norm is not historically limited. While it issues from twentieth-century art, it potentially applies to all works of art, for it changes the structural possibilities of aesthetic experience, thus allowing the subject to experience even non-modern forms of art in an alienated fashion, as if they were modern. Therefore, Adorno’s normative aesthetic modernism contains a questionable but productive ahistorical or counter-historical dimension. A term Adorno likes to use for the hermeticism and incomprehensibility of artworks is the word “Rätsel:” riddle or, rather, enigma.4 Rätsel is one of the key words in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, so much so that it would make an appropriate title for a comprehensive work on his aesthetics.5 Art has become essentially enigmatic. In order for art to be art, there must be something in it or about it that cannot be deciphered and that resists all conclusive interpretation: incomprehensibility itself. Adorno’s essays on literature meet this experience of art’s incomprehensibility head-on. The latter is not limited to what one customarily files under the rubric of “modernism,” in the limited sense of a specific style and period. Adorno’s repeated attempts to detect the modernity of nineteenth-century authors such as Eduard Mörike or Friedrich Hölderlin offer examples of a hermeneutic perspective that sees in art an inverted historical force at work: “In art—and not in art alone, I would like to think—history has retroactive force. Older works too are drawn into the crisis of intelligibility, which is far more acute today than it was fifty years ago” (NL 2: 96; GS 11: 432). Does this mean that an understanding of art is no longer possible? Then Adorno could dispense with his critical enterprise altogether. Instead, he formulates a hermeneutic imperative. The command to understand now includes its own impossibility. Understanding focuses on that which cannot be understood. It is thus the impossibility of understanding that makes understanding necessary and

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bestows hermeneutic legitimacy on Adorno’s essays. One could say that the command to understand incomprehensibility results not only from an experience of the retroactive force of history in art, but also from the desire to unlock something in the artworks that has become petrified. Understanding unintelligibility takes place in regard to making possible a latent, hidden otherness of aesthetic interpretation and experience, however enigmatic this “other” may be.6 Adorno suggests thinking of the “aesthetic concept of interpretive understanding” in these terms: “It needs to be imagined more as a kind of following along afterward [Nachfahren]; as the co-execution [Mitvollzug] of the tensions sedimented in the work of art, the processes that have congealed and become objectified in it” (NL 2: 97; GS 11: 433). The interpretive procedure here comes close to that involved in a musical interpretation of a score or a theatrical interpretation of a dramatic text. It differs from these artistic forms of interpretation in its emphasis on the “tensions” and “processes” that have gone into and have vanished in the finished artwork. Thus, the interpretive co-execution is simultaneously the undoing of the artwork. In the case of reading a work of literature, such undoing of the objectified character of the artwork often entails the reading of seemingly minor or redundant aspects. Before I can show how such readings work in practice, it will be helpful to briefly consider how Adorno’s hermeneutic imperative relates both to his theorem of the enigmaticalness of artworks and, implicitly, to the Kantian pair of concept and intuition.7 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory abounds with allusions to art as riddle or enigma. Among the many often baffling passages on the enigmatic character of art one finds the following: “Der Rätselcharakter ist ein Entsprungenes” (GS 7: 192). The translator of Aesthetic Theory, Robert Hullot-Kentor, is not sure what to do with this formulation and decides to play it safe: “This enigmaticalness emerged out of a historical process” (AT 127). As an interpretive rendering, this is certainly not wrong, since Adorno is arguing for the historicity of art’s enigmaticalness. But while the translation remains faithful to the text’s overall intention, it misses what the sentence actually says. A more literal translation would be: “The riddle character is something that has sprung forth.” If this sounds bizarre, it is because Adorno’s sentence is almost a direct quotation from Friedrich Hölderlin’s famous poem “Der Rhein:” “Ein Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes. Auch / Der Gesang kaum darf es enthüllen.”8 One translator, Richard Sieburth, renders these enigmatic lines not literally but in a faithful tonality: “A riddle, the pure of source. Which / Even song may scarce disclose.” If one wanted to retain the

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copula, one would have to translate it clumsily in this fashion: “A riddle is (the) purely sprung forth.”9 Why is it worth underscoring this allusion to Hölderlin in Adorno’s AT? Why this discreet intrusion of the literary into the philosophical? Adorno claims in AT that all aesthetic experience becomes true aesthetic experience only when it is conceptualized philosophically. He states, for example, “aesthetic experience is not genuine aesthetic experience unless it becomes philosophy” (AT 131; GS 7: 197). However, in his essay “Presuppositions” [“Voraussetzungen” (1961)] he goes further and claims that the aesthetic concept itself is bound to terminate in intuition [Anschauung]: If the work is not to be disfigured rationalistically, understanding [Verstehen] in the specific conceptual meaning of the word will emerge only in an extremely mediated way; namely, in that the substance [Gehalt] grasped through the completed experience [Vollzug von Erfahrung] is reflected and named in its relationship to the material of the work and the language of its forms. Works of art are understood in this sense only through the philosophy of art, which is not something external to intuition [Anschauung] of them, but something always already required by their intuition and something that terminates in intuition. (NL 2: 97; GS 11: 433)

Adorno argues that the process of understanding art does not end with the act of conceptual cognition; or, more precisely, that aesthetic experience and aesthetic concept are inseparably and circularly linked. Art therefore does not terminate in aesthetics; aesthetics returns to art, and art has, as it were, the last word: as intuition [Anschauung] or sensory experience.10 Adorno calls this process “emphatic understanding” (NL 2: 97; GS 11: 433). The original intuition is not simply replaced by conceptual understanding. Rather, intuition always implicitly calls for philosophical understanding, and the process of understanding arrives at an intuition that is not naïve; it marks the necessary limits of the concept and stands for that dimension of the artwork that can only be understood through sensory participation [Mitvollzug]. This relation between intuition and concept, between aesthetic experience and aesthetic theory, appears to constitute the basic structure of the enigmatic character of art:11 The better an artwork is understood, the more it is unpuzzled [sich enträtseln] on one level and the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness becomes. It only emerges demonstratively in the profoundest

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature experience of art. If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question “What is this?” (AT 121; GS 7: 184)

Works of art can never be fully deciphered or “unpuzzled,” and the moment of complete understanding would be, at the same time, the moment of utter non-understanding. The opening or unlocking of the work is therefore not exactly the same as the act of understanding it. The work opens itself only through a dynamic sequence of reflective understanding and experience. While understanding will shed light on certain enigmatic aspects of the work, the constitutive enigmaticalness will not appear until the work is opened by “the most powerful aesthetic experience” [Kunsterfahrung] that follows the work of understanding. When a listener or reader is convinced of having finally grasped or, at least, intuited the work completely, it will withdraw and will then overwhelm her a second time. Hence, one can never have a secure knowledge of artworks. The closer one thinks one has come to the true meaning of an artwork, the more it vanishes into the distance. The best hermeneutic effort, then, should not hope to decipher the artwork completely and thus solve the riddle, but should rather aim at what was not traditionally part of the hermeneutic project: a renewed and reinforced aesthetic experience that will always collide with the certainty a fixed conceptual understanding would promise.12 Adorno tries to incorporate his insight into the enigmaticalness of art into the form of his aesthetic discourse. The question “Was ist das?” is, on the one hand, the quintessential philosophical (i.e., ontological, epistemological, logical, ethical) question, as in a Socratic dialogue: “Ti esti—What is it?” On the other hand, it is a slightly modified quotation from Hölderlin. The poet uses the phrase “Was ist dies?” in two of his great inscrutable hymns, “Mnemosyne” and “Patmos,” where the line serves as a transitional element—an “art of transition”—to join two disparate passages. The question “Was ist dies?” calls attention through its abruptness to the irresolvable enigmaticalness of Hölderlin’s late hymns.13 And, by extension, for Adorno, this question captures precisely the aesthetic character of artworks. Artworks that can be fully unriddled; whose enigmaticalness can be resolved; that provide an answer to the question “What is this?”—such artworks are not artworks: “Artworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder [Rest] are not artworks” (AT 121; GS 7: 184). Adorno provides different names or terms for this rest or remainder that resists understanding and, because artworks are enigmatic, is constitutive

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of the work of art. Although AT is a conceptual work through and through, it contains allusions to literary works, more or less hidden, that can strike the reader as remnants of a not fully integrated nonconceptual language. Recognizing a literary allusion can help one see an otherwise imperceptible correspondence between Adorno’s text and, in this case, Hölderlin’s poetry. Adorno’s sentence “Der Rätselcharakter ist ein Entsprungenes” is a good example. In his transmutation of Hölderlin’s famous gnomic sentence, Adorno drops the letter “r” so that instead of „rein” [pure] the indefinite article “ein” remains, and Reinentsprungenes becomes “ein Entsprungenes.” The omission draws attention to the missing word rein. Phonetically, rein is identical with the name of the river Rhein, which provides the title of Hölderlin’s poem. One could say that the (pure) pun rein/Rhein constitutes the enigmaticalness of Hölderlin’s sentence.14 By alluding not only to a sentence about the enigma, but to a sentence that is itself, in its very linguistic form, enigmatic, Adorno indirectly includes a literary example in his philosophical argument. And because he refers to the example only in a disfigured, distorted way, he incorporates the very enigmaticalness of Hölderlin’s verse into his own text, thereby characterizing the enigmaticalness of artworks as literary and linguistic. The hidden allusion to the Rhine also evokes a metaphorical texture of streams and currents that occurs almost inadvertently whenever Adorno talks about language. References to language as a stream turn up most frequently in Adorno’s Notes to Literature. It is especially in the essays on the poets Eichendorff and Borchardt (who, unlike Hölderlin or George, have not figured prominently as “philosophers’ poets”15) that Adorno locates a close affinity of streams and currents with language. To be sure, Adorno did not invent the metaphorical link between speech and water, but occasionally he takes this metaphorical relationship to extremes. In his essay “In Memory of Eichendorff ” [“Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs” (1957)] he repeatedly chooses the image of the stream of language: “Eichendorff ’s poetry confidently lets itself be borne along by the stream of language, without fear that it will drown in it. For this generosity . . . the genius of language thanks him” (NL 1: 64; GS 11: 78). (Here one can already sense the outlines of a discourse on poetic language with considerable implications for Adorno’s AT precisely because this major work on aesthetics lacks a theory of language, although it is full of references to the language-character of artworks. Put differently: instead of a theory of language, the AT proposes a theory of art that is predicated on the rhetorical and cognitive value of metaphors of language.) Since streams are entities that need no guidance and follow their own route (like the river Rhine, the demi-god in Hölderlin’s poem), the imagery of

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water indicates a concept of language as an uncontrollable aesthetic object. If Eichendorff ’s seemingly naïve and folk-like poetry appears in Adorno’s essay as more enigmatic than one might suspect, this is because Adorno shows that in this poetry the subject is not in control, but is swept away by the currents of language. Contrary to received opinions about Romantic lyric poetry, Eichendorff ’s is precisely not “subjectivist,” as Adorno underscores. It is emphatically not a lyric of isolated individual experiences [Erlebnislyrik]: the poet’s language does not express or represent the experiences of an external subject, and can therefore not be approached through the logic of Diltheyan hermeneutics, as Adorno emphatically proclaims in his reading of Eichendorff ’s “brilliantly false metaphor” of the “the little brooks” that rustle “to and fro” (see NL 1: 65; GS 11:79). Like the little brooks in Eichendorff ’s catachresis, the position of the speaking I becomes uncertain, as the ego is lost in listening to the paradoxical “to and fro” of the rustling and rushing water—lost in Lauschen to Rauschen, as Adorno suggests with one of the tritest Romantic rhymes .16 Eichendorff ’s poetry loses sight of the ego. While the example of Eichendorff would suggest that Adorno derives his thoughts on language from the model of poetry, he does not propose a strict poetics of literary genres.17 More precisely, Adorno’s thoughts on Eichendorff are not exclusively based on his own aesthetic experience. Rather, he acknowledges the inspiration provided by a scholar of aesthetics. He cites Theodor Meyer, a minor figure in the history of aesthetics,18 in order to propose a concept of poetic language according to which such language does not serve merely as a vehicle for imitation of a given reality. Meyer claims that “sensory images” [Sinnenbilder] cannot be created by language—which would, for instance, distinguish language from representational painting or sculpture. And Adorno insists that Meyer developed his theory in direct opposition to the semiotic theory Lessing presented in his seminal Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Language, Meyer writes (in Adorno’s quotation), “puts its own stamp on everything that passes through it, including the sensory.” Therefore “language is not the descriptive vehicle but the presentational means [Darstellungsmittel] of poetry. For we would receive the substance [Gehalt] of poetry not in sensory images that language would suggest but in language itself and in the structures created by it and peculiar to it alone” (quoted in NL 1: 68; GS 11: 82–83). In Meyer’s account, Darstellungsmittel does not imply the representation of some already given, preexistent, and independent content, and it does not mean that language serves as a carrier for an external sensory experience. Poetry is not something that comes into being through language; rather, poetry takes place, becomes substantial, only in language itself. Adorno hastens to point

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out that Meyer’s thoughts fit Eichendorff’s poetry exactly, because the idea of language as Darstellungsmittel implies that language is, potentially, autonomous, free from subjective intention. In this context, Darstellung means more than representation. Adorno suggests that it be understood in a strong literal sense as an active and creative putting forth [dar-stellen], underscoring the idea of language as an independent, almost magical entity that can never be fully mastered or authored by the poet. Language, Adorno declares, is Eichendorff’s “Wünschelrute,” his divining rod. And probably going a large step beyond what Meyer had ever intended to say, Adorno states: “The subject’s self-extinction is in the service of language” (NL 1: 68; GS 11: 83). This indubitably strange claim of something’s being in the service of language can be found quite frequently in Adorno’s NL. What kind of language does Adorno have in mind? He concurs with the prevalent view of literary criticism that has described the language of Eichendorff’s poetry as repetitive, worn out, tired, and clichéd. As Adorno mentions, the late Romantic poet uses a language that was already obsolete in his lifetime; it is devoid of all originality and life, and is forced to derive powers of expression from fragments of used-up, dead language (lingua mortua, as Adorno puts it). Yet it is precisely through the use of clichés as clichés that Eichendorff gives his language a second allegorical life. Hence, when Adorno speaks of the self-extinction of the subject, this must indeed be understood as a sacrifice to language. Only through the process of relinquishing all power over language does the subject—reducing itself to almost nothing, extinguishing itself—grant language a second life. Adorno’s name for this self-sacrifice is Rauschen, Eichendorff’s favorite word, almost his magic formula, as Adorno notes, and also one of the philosopher’s favorites. This ubiquitous and somewhat trite Romantic word is the emblem for that which happens to poetic language and to the subject in Eichendorff’s poetry. After quoting the lines “Und so muß ich, wie im Strome dort die Welle, / Ungehört verrauschen an des Frühlings Schwelle” [“And like the wave there in the flood I must / die away, unheard, on the threshold of spring”], Adorno declares: The subject turns itself into Rauschen, the rushing, rustling, murmuring sound of nature: into language, living on only in the process of dying away [Verhallen], like language. The act in which the human being becomes language [Versprachlichung], the flesh becomes word, incorporates the expression of nature into language and transfigures the movement of language so that it becomes life again. (NL 1: 69; GS 11: 83)

Here, language is language that is heard, and, as a temporary aural phenomenon, appears only by dying away [verhallen]. The second sentence is rather

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puzzling, for it claims that the subject’s giving itself up to Rauschen is a parodistic inversion of the Gospel According to John in which the Word becomes flesh.19 The Biblical event here signifies the traditional aesthetic notion of the symbol (the figure of Christ) as configuring an intuitable unity between abstract (Word, God) and concrete (flesh, human). In other words, Adorno refers here to the instance of aesthetic semblance par excellence. The parodistic inversion of the Gospel, then, signals the inversion (and degradation) of symbol into allegory. The turning of the subject into language, the flesh’s becoming word: this inversion bestows a second life on the dead language of Romantic clichés, of obsolete literary symbols. Rauschen is the name for an allegorical process that revives a language that had been exhausted in the “stereotypical symbols of an already reified Romanticism” (NL 1: 70; GS 11: 84). While the symbols have become stereotypes, no longer providing access to immediate, “living” meaning, allegories appear as the placeholders for the abdicated symbols. Consequently, allegory is the rhetorical term that Adorno has broadened to situate his notion of enigma or riddle within the larger context of an aesthetics to which the notion of the symbol is no longer available. Adorno presents the link between enigma and allegory explicitly in AT, where he substitutes the expression Abgebrochensein for allegory, referring to the broken-off quality of art-works, their damaged, truncated character: The enigma of artworks is their fracturedness [Abgebrochensein]. If transcendence were present in them, they would be mysteries not enigmas [Rätsel]; they are enigmas because, through their fracturedness, they deny what they would actually like to be. . . . Retrospectively, all artworks are similar to those pitiful allegories in graveyards, the broken-off stelae. Whatever perfection they may lay claim to, artworks are lopped off; that what they mean is not their essence is evident in the fact that their meaning appears as if it were blocked. (AT 126; GS 7: 191–192)

The meaning of artworks is not what is essential about them. This is the lesson to be learned from the enigmatic character of works of art; their meaning does not entirely reveal itself, but, rather, withdraws as if it were blocked. Rauschen is a crucial code-word for artworks because it is—almost by definition—not subsumable into the category of meaning. Rauschen both exceeds and undercuts meaning—and thus makes it possible to consider it not only as a semantic, but also as an aesthetic category. How can one understand the significance of the enigmatic Rauschen in more general aesthetic terms? This question cannot be answered in strictly aesthetic terms, for the aesthetic is, of course, a historical category. When

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Adorno describes allegorical images as the medium of Eichendorff ’s poetry, this observation must be placed in an implicit historico-philosophical context. The notion of allegory shows up early in Adorno’s writings. Let it suffice to recall here Adorno’s 1932 lecture “The Idea of Natural History” [“Die Idee der Naturgeschichte”], from which certain motifs later found their way into the chapter “World Spirit and Natural History” [“Weltgeist und Naturgeschichte”] in ND. In his lecture, Adorno acknowledges the indebtedness of his notion of natural history to two thinkers: Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin. Both are also significant for Adorno’s essay on Eichendorff.20 Adorno’s concept of allegory is inspired by Lukács’s highly influential study Theory of the Novel [Theorie des Romans (1920)], in which Lukács attempts to write a history of literary forms based on a Hegelian philosophy of history. Adorno is particularly interested in Lukács’s notion of a “world of conventions” or, as he also calls it, “a second nature,” an idea based on Hegel’s description of the legal system as a second nature (see ND 357; GS 6: 351), and Marx’s concept of “commodity fetishism,” which is meant to capture the “petrification of living processes into dead things.”21 “Second nature,” Adorno suggests, signifies the historical condition of a universe in which human subjects have been alienated from the world of objects to such an extent that this “world of conventions” appears to them as a universe of enigmatic ciphers. It is the task of a philosophy of history to make sense of these object-ciphers (see NH 118; GS 1: 356). Yet every attempt at interpreting this allegorical second nature depends on a previous philosophical experience, consisting of amazement at the very idea of natural history itself: “If I should succeed at giving you a notion of the idea of natural history you would first of all have to experience something of the thaumázein [astonishment, marvel, shock] that this question portends. Natural history is not a synthesis of natural and historical methods, but a change of perspective” (NH 118; GS 1: 356). If natural history relies on a shift of perspective from method to sheer wonder [thaumázein], from concept to enigma, then aesthetics similarly relies on a shift of perspective from intuition to enigmaticalness, from symbol to allegory. Instead of the term allegory, Lukács uses the word “Schädelstätte” [site of skulls, charnel-house, Golgatha], a central signifier in Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory. About his concept of second nature, Lukács writes (in a passage quoted by Adorno): The second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet senseless like the first: it is a complex of senses—meanings—which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens inwardness; it is a charnel-house

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature of long-dead inwardnesses; this second nature could only be brought to life—if this were possible—by the metaphysical act of reawakening the souls which, in an early or ideal existence, created or preserved it; it can never be animated by another inwardness.22

Lukács’s “second nature” is so completely removed from subjective and spontaneous production of meaning that it resembles a graveyard of rotten inwardness: this is the ruination upon which allegory thrives. While Lukács suggests elsewhere that there is a first nature in which the lyrical subject is transformed into the “the sole carrier of meaning, the only true reality,”23 the second nature—the object of natural history—prohibits such subjective Erlebnis. It prohibits the possibility of Erlebnis as the foundation for a decipherable lyric subjectivity. This recalls precisely the situation of Eichendorff ’s poetry as described by Adorno: its allegorical enigmaticalness can now be understood as a sign of what history has done to nature. Hence, Eichendorff ’s poetry is anything but naïve. Rather, its Rauschen signifies the enigmatic transition from nature to history.24 Adorno criticizes Lukács for giving his metaphor of Schädelstätte [charnel-house] an additional theological twist: “The reference to the charnel-house includes the element of the cipher: everything must mean something, just what, however, must first be extracted. Lukács can only think this of this charnel-house in terms of theological reawakening, in an echatological context” (NH 118; GS 1: 357). Yet Lukács’s recourse to a theological figure resonates with Adorno’s view of Eichendorff ’s allegorical intention; he declares that Eichendorff ’s poetry seeks to “awake the dead [Totes].” Eichendorff ’s resurrection of the dead, however, is not eschatological; it does not reveal or even realize “last things.” Adorno detects in Eichendorff ’s poem an “Aufblitzen” [flaring-up] (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 82) that once again bestows the power of signification on “the already reified things” (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 82). Allegory repeats momentarily, and ghostlike, a life that is no longer alive. It signifies the double character of Eichendorff ’s poetic images, their non-identity. Lukács’s concept, on the other hand, aims at an eschatological overcoming of non-identity. In Benjamin’s The Origin of the German Tragic Drama [Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928)], Adorno finds the solution to the theological impasse posed by the eschatological turn in Lukács’s argument. It is now the task of philosophical interpretation to direct its gaze to the second nature of petrified objects in order to reawaken them. In Benjamin, Schädelstätte “becomes a cipher that must be read” but “for Lukács it is something simply puzzling [bloß Rätselhaftes]” (NH 121; GS 1: 360). Adorno sees the critical difference between Lukács and Benjamin in their understanding of the

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enigmaticalness of the allegorical Schädelstätte. While Lukács hopes for the theological conferral of a higher meaning, Benjamin aims at a concept of “allegory as a form of writing” (OGTD 184; WB GS 1.1: 359). With Benjamin, Adorno favors a notion of allegory as something not entirely enigmatic but rather enigmatic in a more specific sense: as a signifier of transience, allegory is meaningful. Its meaning, however, is always enigmatic, because it is constituted by an enigmatic crisscrossing of nature and history: Whenever an historical element appears it refers back to the natural element that passes away within it. Likewise the reverse: whenever “second nature” appears, when the world of convention approaches, it can be deciphered in that its meaning is shown to be precisely its transience. . . . The term ‘meaning’ [‘Bedeutung’] means that the elements of nature and history are not fused with each other, rather they break apart and interweave at the same time in such a fashion that the natural appears as a sign for history and history, where it seems to be most historical, appears as a sign for nature. (NH 120–121; GS 1: 359– 360)

The enigma of natural history is that when something historical appears or, in the case of the Trauerspiel, enters the stage, it signifies, as it were, “backwards,” pointing at something natural that passes away in the historical. Nature, seen from Benjamin’s theological perspective as something created, is transient, as Adorno underscores. The only meaning of “second nature” is, thus, transience itself. This is why poetry has no access to nature as such, or to the subjective experience of “first” (nonhistorical) nature. According to the chiasmus delineated by Adorno, history and nature are caught up in a mirror symmetry. The chiasmus does not yield a dialectic but an aporetic relationship, because nature and history are forever bound to mirror one another, to remain nonidentical with themselves. From the perspective of natural history, allegory will always mean the same, although each time singularly so:25 transience, or, more abstractly, the absolute immanence of the chiastic crossing of history and nature. In Benjamin, the allegorical view of history is the defining characteristic of the German Baroque Trauerspiel. In Adorno, allegory as the expression of transience and transition becomes a characteristic of all works of art. In this sense, Adorno’s notion of Rauschen can perhaps be read as a specific modality of language that is analogous to allegory as the expression of transience. One could reformulate this premise by saying that allegory expresses an impasse, an aporia: by forever interlocking history and nature into one another, natural history remains unfulfilled and unfulfillable—in want of reading.

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How, then, does Adorno read allegory in Eichendorff, how does he read Eichendorff allegorically? In the conservative political climate of West Germany in 1957, Adorno’s first intention in commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death was to challenge the conventional image of Eichendorff as a harmless conservative who wrote pretty but clichéd popular poetry. To this day, Adorno’s essay on Eichendorff is perhaps the single most important work on this poet. Arguing both against conservative admirers and Marxist critics, the essay also suggests a speculative idea of German literary history. In proposing the idea of Eichendorff’s non-subjectivist self-surrender to the impulses of an autonomous language, Adorno seeks to place the poet within an “undercurrent in German literature”: German literature . . . has, in complete opposition to the great classical German music and philosophy, aimed not at integration, system, a subjectively created unity in multiplicity, but at relaxation and dissociation. Eichendorff secretly participates in this undercurrent [Unterstrom] in German literature, which flows from Sturm und Drang and the young Goethe through Georg Büchner and much in Gerhart Hauptmann to Franz Wedekind, Expressionism, and Brecht. (NL 1: 65; GS 11: 79)

This grouping of writers and styles is clearly at odds with canonical histories of German literature. A poet like Eichendorff, who, as Adorno suggests, is best characterized by one of his favorite words, “wirr” [confused, chaotic], resists the rigid periodical and formal categories of conventional literary history. Yet Adorno’s reference to an “undercurrent in German literature” still situates Eichendorff in relation to literary history, although his participation occurs only “secretly.” If Eichendorff’s literary status rests on secret participation, it must be the task of the interpreter to read his poetry in such a way that the secret can move into view. The challenge in reading Eichendorff lies in his poetry’s allegorical mode of signification: “His poetry tends to abstractness. It scarcely ever obeys the criteria of intense sensuous experience of the world that have been derived from Goethe, Stifter, and Mörike” (NL 1: 66; GS 11: 80). Eichendorff’s poetic objects are reminiscent of the dead and fallen objects of the Baroque, which obtain meaning only through allegorical interpretation, about which Benjamin writes: “[The object] is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist” (OGTD 184; WB GS 1.1: 359). If, as in Benjamin’s presentation of the Trauerspiel, the objects are creaturely and fallen, Eichendorff’s lyric poetry can be described as a search for redemption in and through language itself. Not surprisingly, Adorno cites what are perhaps Eichendorff’s most well-known lines: “Schläft ein Lied in

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allen Dingen, / Die da träumen fort und fort, / Und die Welt hebt an zu singen, / Triffst du nur das Zauberwort” [“There is a song sleeping in all things / that dream on and on, / and the world begins to sing / if you only find the magic word”] (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 81). Adorno comments: “The word for which these lines . . . yearn [nachhängen] is no less than language itself” (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 67). The magic word, however, cannot be had as such. Eichendorff’s mode of speaking is characterized by indirection and even vagueness, and Adorno is more interested in how the poems signify than what they signify, as becomes apparent from his comments on the poem “Zwielicht” [“Twilight”]: The line “Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume” [“clouds move like heavy dreams”] procures for the poem the specific kind of meaning [Art des Meinens] contained in the German word Wolken, as distinguished for example from the French nuage: in this line it is the word Wolken and what accompanies it, and not merely the images [Gebilde] the words signify, that move past like heavy dreams. (NL 1: 65; GS 11: 80)

With the “kind of meaning” [Art des Meinens], Adorno alludes to the linguistic speculations in Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” [“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (1921); see WB SW 1: 253–263], suggesting that Eichendorff’s line does not merely signify or represent clouds; rather, it is the word Wolken itself that moves like a heavy dream. The unique material signifier in itself actualizes the signified. This example is hardly accidental. It is as if there were something cloudy, confused, and abstract in all of Eichendorff’s poetry. From an aesthetic perspective, this is not a poetry of appearance but, at best, of fleeting appearance, if not disappearance. Crucial for Adorno’s allegorical reading is thus a poem that stages a scene of disappearance: Es zog eine Hochzeit den Berg entlang, Ich hörte die Vögel schlagen, Da blitzten viel Reiter, das Waldhorn klang, Das war ein lustiges Jagen! Und eh’ ich’s gedacht, war alles verhallt, Die Nacht bedecket die Runde, Nur von den Bergen noch rauschet der Wald, Und mich schauert im Herzensgrunde. [A wedding party was coming along the mountain, / I heard the birds calling, / many riders flashed by, the hunting horn sounded, / that was

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature a merry hunt! // And before I knew it, / all had died out, / night fell on the group, / only the forest still rustled from the mountains, / and I trembled deep in my heart.] (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 81)

Adorno reads this vision of an immediately disappearing wedding scene as an unarticulated [unausgesprochen] allegory that aims at the “very center of the nature of allegory, transience” (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 81–82). It is the ephemerality of this celebration of a supposedly eternal bond that causes, as Adorno writes, a “shudder” that “transforms the wedding back into a spirit wedding and freezes the abruptness of life into something ghostly” (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 83). This retransforming of the poetic symbol into an apparition and thus into allegory, allows the worn-out props of Eichendorff ’s late-Romantic poetry to signify once again. Now they “point beyond themselves” (NL 1: 67; GS 11: 82), without, however, signifying transcendence. The success of allegorical signification—which occurs in the temporal mode of “once again”—remains limited to the subjunctive mood. Hence Adorno comments on a sentence from Eichendorff ’s novella Das Marmorbild [The Marble Statue]: “This again is allegorical in nature: as though nature had become a meaningful language for this melancholy man” (NL 1: 69; GS 11: 83). It is the transformative power of allegory, as opposed to the stability and sameness of the symbol,26 that creates, for the melancholy man, “the only pleasure” (OGTD 185; WB GS 1.1: 361). With this reference to allegory and melancholy,27 Adorno unambiguously recasts Eichendorff as a baroque poet (which means, within the peculiar historicophilosophical scheme of Benjamin’s book, modern, i.e., Expressionist). The peculiar difficulty in reading his poetry lies, then, in the transitiveness and instability of its signification. As Adorno claims in his reading of the word Wolken, the allegorical sign is both signifier and signified in a profoundly ambiguous way; as if the material word were its own signified. Or, as Benjamin writes: allegory is “at one and the same time a fixed image and a fixing sign” (OGTD 184; WB GS 1.1: 359). No word seems to embody this quality better than Rauschen, which, as a sign, signifies the breakdown of unequivocal signification, and, at the same time, enacts a magical transformation: “Nature has become a murmuring, rustling nature, that which murmurs [die Rauschende]” (NL 1: 69–70; GS 11: 84). The true master of this transformation of nature into something rustling and murmuring is, however, not Eichendorff, but Goethe. Adorno quotes from a poem that Eichendorff wrote to honor Goethe’s last birthday, in 1831, and interprets this poem as a sign of Eichendorff ’s dawning awareness that as a result of Goethe’s lyric nature itself has changed, just as

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after Renoir’s paintings—as Adorno points out, referring to Proust’s observation—the world itself looks different. Adorno’s interest in an allegorical mode of signification is not limited to his Eichendorff interpretation. One of the key terms in AT, apparition, shares with allegory precisely the crucial temporal quality of a sudden and ghostlike appearance and disappearance.28 Of this ghostlike and momentary character of artworks in general, Adorno remarks: The phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks, though because of its fleetingness and status as empty entertainment it has scarcely been acknowledged by theoretical consideration. . . . Fireworks are apparition kat exochen: They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes [aufblitzende und vergehende Schrift], and indeed cannot be read for its meaning. (AT 81; GS 7: 125)

Adorno’s description of apparition as a script that flashes up and vanishes is starkly reminiscent of his treatment of allegory. Although the vocabulary differs, both his essay and the AT seek to understand the particular aesthetic character of artworks—their enigmaticalness—with reference to a temporality in which, as Benjamin puts it, “the mystical instant [Nu] becomes the ‘now’ [Jetzt] of contemporary actuality; the symbolic becomes distorted into the allegorical” (OGTD 183; WB GS 1.1: 358). In this temporal schema, the subject of aesthetic appearance—the recipient, the viewer, the listener, the reader—remains outside of a symbolic temporality that would provide full access to a totality of meaning as, in Paul de Man’s formulation, “a unity between the representative and semantic function of language.”29 The “now” of allegorical temporality is always just another “now,” but in no progressive sequence, thus forever remaining inconclusive and unfulfilled. Because both allegory and apparition are incapable of a symbolic unity of the sensuous and the extra-sensuous, they resist being interpreted theologically as mystical or mysterious. Apparition and allegory are not only figures of the enigmaticalness of artworks, they also bear a striking resemblance to the task of philosophy that Adorno outlined in his inaugural lecture at Frankfurt university in 1931. In this lecture, titled “The Actuality of Philosophy” [“Die Aktualität der Philosophie”], he delineates a notion of philosophical interpretation that will retain programmatic character throughout his work. In accordance with his

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Benjaminian elaborations in “The Idea of Natural History,” Adorno defines the task of philosophical interpretation as one of reading that which is not only incomplete and contradictory (i.e., allegorical rather than symbolic), but also devoid of all metaphysical promises. Interpretation, he proposes, cannot operate on the assumption of a second, hidden, encrypted reality, a substance that can be deciphered like a riddle and therefore also represented. Such interpretation would misread the enigmatic character of the subject of philosophy (which is, in this passage, not restricted to works of art) because it would take the enigma as a mere mirror reflection of another Being behind it. He who interprets by searching behind the phenomenal world for a world-in-itself which forms its foundation and support, acts mistakenly like someone who wants to find in the enigma [Rätsel] the reflection of a being [Sein] which lies behind it, a being mirrored in the enigma, in which it is contained. Instead, the function of riddle-solving is to light up the enigma-Gestalt like lightning and to negate it [aufzuheben], not to persist behind the enigma and imitate it. Authentic philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights it up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the same time. (AP 31–32; GS 1: 335)

The enigma of philosophical interpretation is, like the enigma of fireworks or the enigma of Rauschen, bound to one fleeting moment: its appearance coincides with its disappearance, its illumination with its extinction.30 From one sentence to the next, Adorno moves from a notion of Hegelian sublation [Aufhebung] to one of consumption [Verzehrung] of the enigma. The image is that of a flame that shines by consuming itself. To return to an earlier metaphor: The enigma or riddle is, indeed, ein Entsprungenes, for its origin is, at the same time, the leap out of and away from it—entsprungen in the sense of absconded. Thus, ein Entsprungenes marks the paradoxical notion of the enigma as something that has sprung forth and, simultaneously, sprung away. Although Rauschen, like the fleeting appearance of fireworks, cannot be deciphered in a hermeneutically satisfying way, it is not identical with nonverbal, non-representative forms of expression, such as music: “To associate language with music, however, would be to miss the sense of this Rauschen. Rauschen is not a sound [Klang] but a noise [Geräusch], more closely akin to language than to sound, and Eichendorff himself presents it as similar to language” (NL 1: 69; GS 11: 83). Rauschen resembles language more than music because Eichendorff ’s poetry uses it allegorically. Allegorically,

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because the resemblance between Rauschen and language comes into being through distance—when the pure, meaningless noise of Rauschen suddenly and unexpectedly seems to whisper. Only through distance and disruption, through the loss of meaningful language can Rauschen (once again) come to resemble language: only through melancholy—the very signature of allegoric interpretation—can the natural sound of Rauschen turn into something resembling significant language. But Rauschen never coincides with meaningful language; it does not provide a key for the enigmaticalness of art. Thus, melancholy is the name for an interpretive attitude that—having lost the interpretive key31—reads what is not, or, from a theological perspective, no longer, readable, that hears what is not audible. “The key to the picture puzzles [Rätselbildern] is lost. They must, as a baroque poem about melancholy says, ‘speak themselves’” (P 234–235; GS 10.1: 245). Recall now Adorno’s observation on Eichendorfff ’s Marmorbild: “This again is allegorical in nature: as though nature had become a meaningful language for this melancholy man” (NL 1: 69). Allegory here means specifically: the noticeable semblance-character [Scheincharakter] of meaning (rather than the unnoticed semblance-character of meaning in the symbolic mode of signification) that the melancholy listener deciphers in the meaningless noise of nature—as if “Rauschen” were meaningful language. Rauschen, then, is linguistic only in a very limited sense: only through the allegorical semblance brought about by the poetic logic of the as if. In a similar vein, Adorno claims that Eichendorff’s allegorical intention (for which Rauschen provides the motif) “is borne not so much by nature . . . as by his language in its distance from meaning [Bedeutungsferne]” (NL 1: 69; GS 11: 83). Rauschen is language distanced or alienated and, as it were, purified of meaning and enriched with enigmatic confusion. By imitating Rauschen, Eichendorff ’s entire poetry expresses an estrangement [Entfremdung], “which no thought, only pure sound [der reine Laut] can bridge” (NL 1: 69; GS 11: 83)—the art of bridging, the art of transition can only take place by means of pure sound. While Adorno’s essay on Eichendorff overflows with references to the streaming quality of language and its asemantic tendency to mere sound, the peculiar word Rauschen is too enigmatic and too literary to be included in the long passages on the enigmaticalness of art in AT. The purity of sound [der reine Laut] that Adorno detects in Rauschen covers a dangerous semantic ambiguity that disqualifies the word from inclusion among aesthetic concepts proper.32 Rauschen marks a problematic transition in Adorno’s aesthetics that he is less willing to undertake in the AT than in his essays: the contamination of the aesthetic concept with, again, a form of aesthetic experience. The “art of transition” carried out in the essay takes place between these two

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poles. (It is, perhaps, in this transitional movement that Rauschen is closest to sheer Rausch.) Of course, the relation between theory and experience is so complex that it cannot be disentangled in this chapter.33 For the moment, let it suffice to say that Rauschen stands for the remainder of that which makes theory necessary in the first place (formally speaking: intuition, experience, pure language) but which, at the same time, escapes the reach of the concept. Rauschen is what remains of language when one subtracts the symbolic, significant meaning from it. Hence, Rauschen resists conceptual understanding and constitutes the enigmatic character of linguistic artworks. Again, a closer look at the allusion to Hölderlin in AT will be helpful. The sentence “Ein Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes” is not the whole line. The complete line includes another word, “auch,” which is followed by an enjambment, and the whole sentence reads: “Auch / Der Gesang kaum darf es enthüllen” [“Even song may scarce disclose it”]. In Hölderlin’s poem, the riddle is not the effect of art as song, but, rather, the riddle precedes song. In related terms, Rauschen does not precede significant language, as a chaotic mass of frequency from which the semiotic clarity of meaning arises. Rather, Rauschen is a by-product of meaningful language, surprisingly similar to the meaningless leftovers of “the poetic process . . . of wastage” that Adorno detects in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (NL 1: 243; GS 11: 283). Rauschen is what remains of language when one listens to it closely and discovers its hitherto hidden allegorical underside, and it is Adorno’s metaphor for the idea of language that has been freed from the dictates of both communication (since it communicates nothing except what the listener puts into it) and artistic expression (because it does not express anything except the breakdown of meaning). In the appendix to his Eichendorff essay, headed “Coda: Schumann’s Lieder,” Adorno analyzes Robert Schumann’s Eichendorff compositions, his Liederkreis opus 39. Adorno observes the congenial quality of Schumann’s compositions, which he explains, again, in terms of Rauschen: “They bring out a potential contained in the poems, the transcendence into song that arises [entspringt] in the movement beyond all specificity of image and concept, in the rustling and murmuring [Rauschen] of language’s flow [Wortgefälle]” (NL 1: 73; GS 11: 88). The function of music is not merely to underscore the meaning of the words or to add a touch of drama. Rather, Schumann’s songs make audible a transcendence into song that had been there only potentially, as a possibility, not as an actualized form. Because it is only potential, this transcendence is not something that can be found through a process of philological or philosophical examination. Like the riddlecharacter or enigmaticalness of artworks is something that has sprung forth, this transcendence into song springs forth from the musical movement that

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overflows everything that is image-like [bildhaft] or conceptually determined [begrifflich Bestimmtes], further increasing the poems’ remarkable quality of vagueness and abstractness. Continuing his proliferation of liquid metaphors, Adorno calls this movement from which song originates “Rauschen des Wortgefälles” (GS 11: 88). Wortgefälle is not a lexical item; it is Adorno’s own coinage, and it appears twice in this essay. The first time, Adorno uses Sprachgefälle and Gefälle der Sprache [“descending flow of language”], directly relating the metaphor to the flow of water: “The soft water with its movement: that is the descending flow of language, the direction it flows of its own accord . . .” (NL 1: 70; GS 11: 84). The poet who willingly succumbs to this flow of language renounces all original power of the poet to be a genius and creator. His weakness is “as defenseless against the accusation of triviality as the elements are; but what it succeeds in doing—washing words away from their circumscribed meanings and causing them to light up when they come in contact with one another—demonstrates the pedantic poverty of such objections” (NL 1: 70; GS 11: 84). Here, the stream-like quality of Rauschen is explicitly linked to the flaring up so characteristic of fireworks. It is Eichendorff ’s weakness as a poet, his willingness to let language take control, that is responsible for the apparent triviality of his poetic vocabulary. At the same time, this poetic weakness makes possible the softening and dissolution of set meanings. Language that flows like water allows the words to become displaced, and thus to come in contact with one another in unpredictable ways. By employing an image of floating words that light up when they touch one another, Adorno alludes to his definition of the essay as configurational form. Eichendorff ’s poetry is meaningful not for its poetic images, but, rather, as an ever-changing constellation of floating words, words being washed away from their meanings by the dynamic flow of language [Sprachgefälle]. It is important to note that this waterlike movement of language is headed downwards: Adorno does not depict a rise to metaphysical heights. What he finds in Eichendorff ’s poetry is, rather, a descent of language similar to the allegorical fallenness of meaning in Benjamin’s book on the German Trauerspiel. However, Adorno’s emphasis here is less on the result of this fall—the ruination of symbolic meaning and the turn to allegory—as on the process of the fall. Adorno tries to render the descent of language itself readable, to experience it and reflect on it as an aesthetic phenomenon. This is why he claims that the floating words illuminate when they touch one another. It is in the uncontrollable movement of descent that constellations appear momentarily. Unlike the gaze aimed at the sky to catch a glimpse of the exploding fireworks, the ear is focused on the rapid, uncontrollable downward movement of language. Its “meaning” is intelligible only in the

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fleeting moments of transition from one meaning to another. Rauschen takes place as a potentially infinite metonymic slippage of meanings, similar to the bottomless non-totalizing signification of allegory, described by the Romantic philologist Friedrich Creuzer—whom Benjamin quotes approvingly—as “progression in a series of moments” (OGTD 165; WB GS 1.1: 341). If Rauschen is a concept, then its content is this downward slippage of language. The notion of Rauschen signifies language as ‘pure’ metonymy, as a meaning that is always in the process of transition from one segment of the chain to another, but in an unpredictable way. It is as if Roman Jakobson’s horizontal axis of contiguity had been turned downward and gone out of control. If, then, the essay form allows for, or even aims at, a Rauschen of concepts, such a tendency comes at the risk of incomprehensibility. Too much metonymic logic is hard to follow for the reader. In the essay, the concept must resist the descending pull of language lest it become unintelligible and its concepts turn into mere Rauschen. But in the most formally constrained of all genres, in poetry, the freedom accorded to language is much greater. Adorno’s notion of Rauschen as the semblance of language appearing in and through music dates back to before his essay on Eichendorff. In a fragment written in 1944 and published posthumously in Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, Adorno notes: “On the ‘river’ my idea that Eichendorff ’s poetry (for example, from Schumann’s Lied cycle) seems to echo [abgelauscht scheinen] not an object but the subterranean, incessant murmur [Rauschen] of language in itself ” (BE 168; BG 242). More directly than in his later essay on Eichendorff, Adorno here describes Eichendorff ’s poetry not as the representation of particular objects, but as the result of a process of Lauschen. It is only through the attentive listening expressed by the word Lauschen that mere noise becomes audible as the subterranean Rauschen of language. Here, Rauschen designates, as it were, the mere “there-ness” of language; it is the name for the simple fact that language preexists every particular act of signification. No speech act can ever exhaust or make understood the incessant, subterranean Rauschen of language. Rauschen is, however, not restricted to language. Adorno’s ears also perceive a rustling of music, a “Rauschen der Musik.” While Rauschen in literary language becomes audible momentarily where the concept disappears, in music the reverse is true: Rauschen becomes audible where the momentary semblance of something distinct and determined wanes, and music once again asserts the pure force of its temporal progression of tones. In music, Rauschen is never the semblance of another, it is not allegorical. It is pure progression, movement, nothing but musical temporality. For example, Adorno writes about Schubert’s Ninth Symphony:

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In the first movement of Schubert’s Symphony in C major, at the beginning of the development, we feel for a few moments as if we were at a rustic wedding; an action seems to begin unfolding, but then is gone at once, swept away in the rushing music [Rauschen der Musik] which, once imbued with that image, moves onwards to a quite different measure. (BE 8; BG 27)

Rauschen functions similarly in literature and in music insofar as the incessant movement of form (Schubert’s and Eichendorff ’s Wortgefälle, for instance) makes everything distinct and determined—image, concept—disappear. Due to the overriding significance of temporality and the more accidental character of image and concept in music, the aesthetic experience of indeterminacy is much more pronounced in the latter form of art. That music provides the highest and most refined expression of an aesthetic idea comes as no surprise, considering the central significance of music in Adorno’s philosophy as a whole. Yet a nonconceptual aesthetic term such as Rauschen can also unfold its full impact outside of music. Because all music is Rauschen, in that it is predominantly sound [Geräusch] rather than meaning, Adorno is wary of associating the term with music—it might seem almost tautological and it threatens to erase the distinction between Geräusch [mere sound] and Ton [musical tone]. Rauschen gains true aesthetic import only through its contrast with fixed meaning, with determinate concepts and concrete images. It moves against the concept, and it is precisely by means of this opposition to the concept that it comes to be associated with notions of enigma, allegory, and aesthetic experience. That Rauschen is in fact a mode of non-conceptual aesthetic experience—that is, an experience that renders the subject powerless and is rather the experience of an object than of a subject—is explicitly suggested in Adorno’s essay on Borchardt, “Charmed Language” [“Die beschworene Sprache” (1968)] where Adorno observes that the poet is “rustled through” [durchrauscht] with language: “He was borne by the experience his whole literary oeuvre was striving for—the experience of language itself talking, to use a baroque expression” (NL 2: 193; GS 11: 536). Rauschen is not a marginal or accidental occurrence in Borchardt’s poetry; it is the key to his poetics. In many respects, Adorno’s analysis of Borchardt is quite similar to his analysis of Eichendorff. Yet while Adorno’s interpretation of Eichendorff is underpinned by frequent quotations and accounting of the poet’s main motifs and topoi, the essay on Borchardt rests almost exclusively on these three lines from the early poem “Pause:” “I have nothing but Rauschen, / Don’t expect anything distinct; / Be content with the pain of listening into yourself.”34 For Adorno, the “pain of listening into yourself ”

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characterizes Borchardt’s “spiritual modus operandi” [geistige Verhaltensweise]. Unlike Eichendorff, whose poetry opens itself up to Rauschen by means of the allegorical, almost baroque return to the dead props of Romanticism, Borchardt’s poetry follows a different path of “baroqueness.” His language is not language speaking, but language talking—language that “talks itself,” as if it were a character on stage. The ideal of an “epiphany of language” in his poetry is, ultimately, an epiphany of language as rhetoric. Thus, Adorno will read the line “I have nothing but Rauschen” as the paradoxical attempt to master language rhetorically in order to become its servant. Yet his reading of Borchardt will move away from the initial emphasis on Rauschen—perhaps because the word is too explicit in Borchardt—and focus on the word Beschwörung.

Chapter Three

Conjuration: Rudolf Borchardt

Every word is a word to conjure with. —Novalis1

”Language murmurs and rustles through [durchrauscht] him like a stream” (NL 2: 193; GS 11: 536). In addressing the neglected writer Rudolf Borchardt, Adorno chose a vocabulary similar to the one used in his essay on Eichendorff. Nonetheless, the differences between the two poets are considerable. Borchardt, who died under uncertain circumstances in a Tyrolean border village in 1945, was a famous German literary figure during his lifetime, who enjoys only a small but dedicated readership today. He is the antitype of the popular author. Adorno’s essay—intended to win Borchardt a wider readership—arguably remains the most profound interpretation of his poetry.2 Borchardt’s career was effectively cut short with the ascendancy of the Nazi regime. A tremendously erudite and polyglot scholar, writer, and translator (a poeta doctus), Borchardt was driven by the desire to become a charismatic celebrity, aesthetic judge, and leader like Stefan George. He also had a weakness for conservative, sometimes militaristic and elitist politics (Heinz Politzer wrote of his “Spartan imperiousness”). He came from a Jewish family; the grave of his grandparents was only recently discovered in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. Today, his name has been overshadowed by the lasting fame of his contemporaries Stefan George and, especially, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the only German poets of his time he took seriously. It seems that Walter Benjamin was right when he speculated that Borchardt “surely will leave no work behind” (WB C 128; WB B 1: 129). In 1968, Adorno sought to disprove that judgment by editing a selection of Borchardt’s poems for the prestigious Bibliothek Suhrkamp (during the same year, the poet and critic Helmut Heißenbüttel edited a selection of Borchardt’s poems, prose, 73

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and translations).3 Adorno’s decision to put out an edition of Borchardt’s selected poems during the height of the anti-authoritarian student revolt was no doubt a break with political etiquette. Adorno’s introduction to the edition, which is reprinted in the NL under the new heading “Die beschworene Sprache” (translated by Nicholsen as “Charmed Language”), is not simply an aesthetic explication of Borchardt’s lyric poetry, but also an attempt to separate his poetry from his politics. In describing Borchardt’s lyric, Adorno barely distinguishes between work and author. He focuses on Borchardt’s use of the word Rauschen (the line “Ich habe nichts als Rauschen” was one of his favorites; he also used it as the epigraph for his third study on Hegel, “Skoteinos”) and argues that Borchardt’s poetry was the result of “the experience of language itself talking” (NL 2: 193; GS 11: 536). Borchardt’s authorship was, according to Adorno, based on the loss of an authorial control over language. Only when an author renounces authorship, mastery, and intentionality does the experience of language itself talking become possible. Adorno’s word for such uncontrolled articulation of language is Rauschen—it signifies language in its “distance from meaning,” as Adorno put it in his earlier discussion of Eichendorff. The very act of renunciation, however, keeps the question of authorial control of language as Rauschen pertinent, for it requires superior poetic skill to make Rauschen audible. More precisely, what is required is an almost magical act of Beschwörung [conjuration, invocation]—Borchardt’s language is beschworene Sprache, “conjured up,” “incanted,” or “invoked” language. Not accidentally, Adorno’s style in his Borchardt essay resembles a technique of repetitive Beschwörungen, i.e., incantations, invocations, or conjurations.4 Adorno’s essay is driven by his overriding concern to understand what he calls imploringly the “primacy” of language—a variant of Adorno’s philosophical concern with a “primacy of the object”—in Borchardt’s poetic craft.5 Adorno articulates this concern with the primacy of language without much circumlocution. His entire interpretation centers on the last stanza of the poem “Pause,” each line of which he quotes separately in the first paragraph of his essay. This last stanza Adorno reads as the key to Borchardt’s poetic modus operandi.6 “In everything he wrote he made himself an organ of language” (NL 2: 193; GS 11: 536). Adorno does not claim that the author is an organ of language, but, more precisely, that he made himself into such an organ. Hence the concern with language itself—as a technical means as well as an end of technique—rather than with meaning or message. Poetic language is not something mysteriously given to the poetic genius, but something made. In other words, language, in its purest poetic form, as Rauschen, is a product of poetic craft, of poetic making. Accordingly,

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Adorno emphasizes the central significance of rhetoric for an understanding of Borchardt’s poetry. Adorno repeatedly describes Borchardt’s language as language that talks [redet], and with this emphasis on Reden and rhetoric (both are associated with human technique), Adorno distances himself from the Romantic discourse on Rauschen as nature’s speech. The rhetorical reden is closer to Borchardt’s idea of language than the presumably more natural sprechen (children learn sprechen [to speak] before they learn reden [to talk]), because reden is restricted to the self-articulation of language. It is linguistic, mechanical, non-organic, and reflective.7 In a dialectical and unusual sense, talking is more a figure of listening to language as a phenomenon than of communicating a meaning to a listener. “The talking gesture of almost every line he wrote is not so much the gesture of the person talking but rather, in its intention, the epiphany of language” (NL 2: 193; GS 11: 536). Language appears as language not in what is said, but rather in the subtleties of the mode of expression, in the gesture of talking.8 For example, the gesture can be one of lack that “talks” where communicative language turns into indistinct Rauschen. Adorno cites the line “Kein Deutliches erwarte dir” [“Don’t expect anything clear”] and comments: Everything that is meant or intended is secondary in comparison with linguistic form and is of little value without it, including the ideas to which Borchardt felt himself indebted. Substance crystallizes in language as such, as though it were the authentic language Jewish mysticism speaks of. 9 This gives his works their persistent enigmatic character, so that they continue their questioning today (NL 2: 193; GS 7: 536).

Adorno is not interested in the communicative meaning, the content, of Borchardt’s works. He finds the works’ significance rather in their questioning, enigmatic character. Adorno’s emphasis on form instead of content has, of course, an obvious strategic function, since parts of Borchardt’s oeuvre, especially his prose, unmistakably express embarrassing nationalistic politics. As a political thinker and theorist, Borchardt is probably irredeemable.10 Adorno’s allusion to Jewish mysticism, however, hints at another political intention inscribed in his essay: to recognize the affinities with a Jewish tradition of language theory in the work of the solitary German nationalist of Jewish heritage. Towards the end of his essay, Adorno tries to hear the “messianic Jewish voice” sounding from Borchardt’s German.11 At stake in Adorno’s reading of Borchardt is, then, not only the rustling of language itself, but, more specifically, the possibility of hearing the sound of another voice through the voice that is speaking. The objective of Beschwörung a desperate (almost stupid)

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ruse to make the impossible possible, a certain quixoticness,12 as Adorno calls it: While [Borchardt’s] classical conception of elevated style opposed the moodiness of Jugendstil from early on, he was in accord with it at the core in that he hoped to force the transsubjective, objectively binding quality of language, a coherence beyond subjective response, which converged with his idea of elevated style, through the quixoticness of subjective assertion. The subject transfers its own strength, as it were, to what is naively understood as the medium of subjective expression, in order to subordinate itself then to that medium. (NL 2: 195; GS 11: 538)

Beschwörung is an act of violence, because, paradoxically, it aims at taking the objectivity of language into subjective service by infusing language with the powers of the subject, which then is to subordinate itself to that which it had posited in the first place. That is, Borchardt did not accept the objectivity of language as a given, but rather as something that would gain its true objectivity only through the quixotic, hopelessly inappropriate and anachronistic act of violent subjective positing. The objectivity of language is therefore not the same as the mere existence of language as something always already given. Rather, Borchardt, aided by his enormous philological erudition, submits language to rigorously subjective historicization. His Beschwörung of language must first create the object of conjuration and imploration— language—because Borchardt found the German language insufficient. Not only is the German of his time a language “devastated by commerce and communication, by the ignominy of exchange” (NL 2: 194; GS 11: 537), but it has also failed to fulfill its potential. The German language, as it has developed historically, is a failure: “Language confronted him as something that was a failure, as though it had not fulfilled its own potential . . . . the German language does not have the substantiality he implored of it” (NL 2: 194; GS 11: 537). Thus, the occasion and precondition for Borchardt’s imploration or Beschwörung is that there is a deficiency in language as a whole—not just in literature, writing, or poetry. It is for this reason that Adorno stylizes Borchardt into a backward-looking quasi-prophet, whose missionary zeal at Beschwörung is directed at that in the German language which has remained a mere potentiality. The demands placed on language are thus immense. The peculiar mixture of linguistic objectivity and subjective positing that Adorno diagnoses in Borchardt is expressed in the latter’s hope not simply to renew poetic language (a subjective enterprise),

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but to use poetry “for the rehabilitation [Wiedergutmachung] of language” (NL 2: 195; GS 11: 538).13 Adorno demonstrates this hope by quoting from Borchardt’s postscript to his Dante translation (Dantes Commedia Deutsch [1923]), where the translator claims to be in “possession [of ] a German that had not been established arbitrarily and through the literary tradition but rather had unfolded progressively on the basis of a foundation extending back indefinitely . . .” (quoted in NL 2: 195; GS 11: 538). More than this excerpt shows, Borchardt’s rhetoric is structured by a technique of shocking exaggeration. If the romanticism expressed in Borchardt’s notes on his Dante translation is, as Adorno puts it, an “integral romanticism of language” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539), then one must specify that it is a romanticism of spoken language, as expressed in Borchardt’s statement: “Here [in Borchardt’s imaginary pre-Lutheran German] there still existed the old conciseness and clarity, the melting, eloquent roundness of the spoken period . . . the dramatic will to speech stronger than sophistical circumstantial designation . . .” (Dantes Commedia deutsch quoted in NL 2: 195; GS 11: 538 [my italics]). Adorno, slightly shifting the terminology from Borchardt’s use of the word speech to the word talk, argues that Borchardt’s rhetoric “has its origins in his primarily talk-oriented [redenden] mode of response” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539). What does this mean, however? Are not all poets talk-oriented? Adorno emphasizes the peculiar force of phonocentrism in Borchardt, and the definition of rhetoric as Rede. “It is as a talking person that he becomes an organon of language” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539). The primary concern of Borchardt’s poetics, then, is to define language as talk, and to use poetry as the medium for such a definition. And since poetry is, in Adorno’s interpretation of Borchardt, talk, rhetoric is both the means and the end of Beschwörung: “Rhetoric is concerned with is own conjuration” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539). Thus, Borchardt’s invocation of language is a paradoxical rhetoricization of already rhetorical language—as it were, an exaggeration, a redoubling of rhetoric, similar to Romantic tropes of self-reflexive potentiation in Novalis, Schlegel, or Coleridge.14 By underscoring this paradox, Adorno relates Borchardt’s poetics to his own Negative Dialectics, in which he defines rhetoric as a kind of reflexive cognition: “It is through language alone that like knows like” (ND 56; GS 6: 65). Since poetry aims at talk as the missed and hidden potential of language, it must try to imitate it as best as it can. Poetry must therefore become as rhetorical and eloquent as possible. “By imitating talk, his poetry makes itself resemble the potential of language, so that that potential can be manifested” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539). In order for the potential of language to be manifested as potential, poetry—an actuality—must comply with the demand that it resemble what

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it is not: language as potentiality. Concretely, this leads to “the return of the very long poem,” as Adorno observes. Yet this return to a long form of poetry does not amount to a return to “the breadth of epic and ballad” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539). Rather, Borchardt’s self-reflexive technique of rhetoric as the invocation of rhetoric, aiming at the unfulfilled potential of language as talk, is closely related to music. Just as there is a will to sound (Tonwille in Heinrich Schenk’s expression) in Beethoven, “a dynamic essence that is released within the language of music itself and in turn gives it the rhetorical aspect of empire” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539), there is a will to language in Borchardt:15 a will that is not so much the will of a subject as, according to Adorno, an autonomous articulation that takes place “of its own accord” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539). The technique of Borchardt’s long poems is analogical to music in that it transposes “the musical idea of form, the idea of a form immanent in the structure and not derived from anything external, to language. Borchardt literally composes, as in music, with language” (NL 2: 196; GS 11: 539). Invocation of language, then, means more than an address of language through language, for it implies a poetics that treats language not simply as the medium of poetic expression but as the form and substance of poetry. Poetry is supposed to be wholly immanent to the structure of language, and, on that premise, Adorno can claim that Borchardt composes with language as if it were music. This is a concept radically different from ideas of Erlebnislyrik [poetry of lived experience] and Gedankenlyrik [intellectual poetry], and Adorno here radicalizes the claims he made in his essay on Eichendorff, pushing them to an extreme. Adorno concludes, alluding to his essay on Hölderlin: “Borchardt’s musical constructive technique rebels against the traditional primacy of meaning in poetry and moves towards an absolute poetry which in him was still supported by traditional moments” (NL 2: 197; GS 11: 540).16 Borchardt’s “beschworene Sprache” is based on the premise of leaving the category of meaning [Sinn] in poetry behind. This implies a theory of language that is not based on the Saussurean concept of language as a semiotic system of signification. Somehow, the sheer technicalrhetorical moment of talk and of expression supercedes the conventional primacy of meaning. Such language is, of course, ideational rather than empirical. The notion of Beschwörung rests precisely on the presupposition of language as idea. It signifies the attempt to overcome empirical language, because the latter is hopelessly bound to a history, which Adorno, like Horkheimer and Benjamin, experienced (and theorized) as being permanently catastrophic. “The idea of conjuring up a nonexistent language implies the impossibility of that language” (NL 2: 197; GS 11: 540). Beschwörung does

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not aim merely at a language that no longer exists; it is not simply an expression of nostalgia, but aspires to a non-existent and impossible language. This is a surprising statement in this context, for it implies that what Adorno had described earlier as the manifestation of a linguistic potentiality must by definition remain a potentiality, for the moment of its possible realization has long since passed. The past is irretrievable, and what was missed in the past cannot be redeemed in the present. It can, however, become the subject of poetic technique. [Borchardt’s] poetry becomes productive by incorporating the irretrievability of what is historically irretrievable into its reconstruction through subjective experiences that presuppose the forces that have exploded the immanence [das Ansichsein] of language. In Borchardt, irretrievability becomes a technique [Kunstmittel] . . . . For him, detachment was a technique [Mittel] for mobilizing something long past . . . . (NL 2: 198; GS 11: 541–542)

Borchardt’s relation to the past does not entail sentimentally mourning a loss, although Adorno hesitantly places him into Schiller’s rubric of the sentimental. He does not make use of archaic linguistic elements in order to bring the past closer to the present. Instead, he turns irretrievability into a poetic technique, i.e., he uses what is irretrievable in its specific irretrievability. Instead of appropriating and amalgamating archaic elements, his poetry underscores precisely the distance between its own language and the language of the past. Adorno thus claims that, despite all appearances, Borchardt’s conservatism does not apply to his poetry, for the ostentatious distancing of the past diminishes the risk of succumbing to sentimental yearning. Or, as Adorno puts it: “This detachment protects him from brewing up an objectionable artsy-crafty stimulant from the old linguistic strata” (NL 2: 198; GS 11: 542). In his characteristic manner, Adorno provides very little extended textual evidence for his claims, and mostly restricts himself to a patchwork of extremely brief quotations. His rhetorical procedure resembles his argument in that he engages more in a conjuration of Borchardt than in systematic critical analysis. To some extent, then, Borchardt provides Adorno with a pretext for developing a theory of language that would be unacceptable if presented by itself. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of this theory is not the speculative approach to linguistic history, but rather the definition of rhetoric as Rede. It is precisely in this aspect that Adorno finds the truth of Borchardt’s poetic writings. Because Borchardt’s work is riddled with anachronisms, because

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its very modernity consists in its anachronicity, Borchardt’s insistence on a primacy of language almost amounts to an absolute anachronism, since to grant language primacy implies a devaluation of all historically evolved poetic categories that are, by definition, instrumental applications of language. In this terrifying anachronicity of an absolute language Adorno locates Borchardt’s modernity, because for Adorno modernity is the merciless historical diminishment and decay of traditional aesthetic categories, so that modern aesthetics are determined by the temporal structure of lost possibility and an ever-growing canon of prohibitions. (According to Adorno, a modern composer like Schönberg objectively could no longer use tonal harmonies). It thus turns out that Borchardt’s conservatism is not only his curse but also his redemption. By reducing poetics to the problem of language itself, Borchardt distances himself from the artistic avant-garde. At the same time, however, he also distances himself from any desire to re-enchant art and return it to a magical and auratic state (see NL 2: 205; GS 11: 204). Language as talk is anachronistic, because it implies the phonocentric ideal of language as direct, unmediated expression. In the postscript to his Dante translation, Borchardt condemns modern circumlocution. Adorno suggests, however, that Borchardt’s talk is ultimately not a form of merely asserting itself but of responding to an indeterminate other. Although Borchardt’s poetry is not dialogical, it responds to a darkness that surrounds it, and thus the extreme privacy of Borchardt’s lyrical language does not amount to complete solipsism, hermeticism, and isolationism. Imploring language as talk through talk releases in poetry a unique tonality. Adorno calls it Borchardt’s “incommensurable tone” (NL 2: 200; GS 11: 543). The enigma of Borchardt’s lyric art lies exclusively in the mode of its speaking, or, rather, its talking, entirely embedded in its rhetoric: “His timbre is compounded of the talking element and the nocturnal. Solving the riddle of Borchardt would mean deciphering the figure these two moments form in their conjunction. The fundamental stance of these poems is that of speaking into a darkness that makes them dark themselves” (NL 2: 200; GS 11: 543). Adorno charaterizes Borchardt’s tone as timbre. In poetics, timbre is a term for the coloring of tones, their synaesthetic “painterly” quality, the capacity of sounds to evoke visual sensations. This means that Borchardt’s poetry is not simply dark in a hermeneutic sense. Although it certainly is difficult to understand—Adorno insists on its riddle-like, enigmatic quality—darkness or, as Adorno calls it, das Nächtliche [“the nocturnal”], is an integral part of Borchardt’s timbre. It is only through this relation to darkness—which is constitutive of the poems’ timbre—that Borchardt’s lyric becomes hermetic. His poems darken by talking into darkness, yet they are

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affected by the directionality of their talking. By talking into the dark, by not addressing someone or something specific, the poems are “colored” by the indeterminacy of their addressee. Borchardt’s poetic talking is, according to the rhetoric of Beschwörung, directed at an unreachably distant other—without, however, the rhetorical intention of persuasion, i.e., without the intention of imposing one’s will onto the other. Adorno’s reading thus suggests a strong ethical component of Borchardt’s poetry that is certainly not immediately apparent. Such talk is not, as in traditional rhetoric, directed to others in order to convince or persuade them. It calls, as if across the abyss, to the other, who has become indistinct and is in the process of vanishing. Spun on and on indefatigably, it bears witness to the difficulty of getting through to the other, as though the impossible could be attained through repeated attempts. The heroic gesture of Borchardt’s talk responds, desperately, to absolute solitude. This is the way a child speaks to himself in order to alleviate the anxiety that silence causes him. The situation of night is that in which alienation becomes palpable. Like the gradient of dreams, Borchardt’s rhetoric is monologic. (NL 2: 200; GS 11: 543–544)

Borchardt’s rhetoric is monologic because its addressee, the other, has become vague and is disappearing. Talk has to start over and over again, for it never reaches what it aims for. And so Borchardt’s rhetoric is a kind of talking that never succeeds in reaching its addressee. But precisely because it never reaches the addressee for whom it yearns, it achieves its particular, significant timbre, and because of the loneliness and silence by which it is surrounded, it is left only with the gesture of invoking what it does not have. For Adorno, this situation of Borchardt’s rhetoric can be located historically. The idea of an I appealing to a non-I is the paradoxical idea of poetry that has been established with Baudelaire’s reflection on “un moi insatiable du non-moi . . . toujours insatiable et fugitive” (quoted in NL 2: 200/ GS 11: 544). But it is not only to be located in Baudelaire’s poetry. Rather, Borchardt’s rhetoric has its subjective-historical origins in an experience that Adorno describes as follows: “Only in the night of half-sleep does inviolable solitude encounter in itself, veiled, dimmed, that which would transcend it, without thereby overstepping the boundary of the condition historically imposed upon it” (NL 2: 200; GS 11: 544). Loneliness encounters its transcendent other neither in dreaming nor in wakefulness but only in the darkness of half-sleep. More precisely, the “nocturnal talk” takes place in the

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process of awakening, on the threshold of dream and consciousness. Adorno quotes from Borchardt’s poem “Im Erwachen”: “Atmete die Nacht so laut, / Daß ich schlief und doch nicht schlief / Schlafend so hinaus begehrte, / Daß ich so ins Dunkle rief [When the night breathed so loud / That I slept and yet did not sleep / In sleeping desired so strongly to go out / That I called into the darkness].”17 Adorno comments about these lines: “The childlike quality of nocturnal talk that has been retained here is the hidden source of Borchardt’s lyric poetry. It is from that, and not what is said, that he draws the substance of what he writes [den Gehalt des Gedichteten]” (NL 2: 200; GS 11: 544). The night preserves what is otherwise lost, a zone of indeterminacy between sleeping and waking, a sort of aural and visual Rauschen (the loud breathing of the personified night, the calling—aural—into darkness—visual) that Adorno, without further explanation, associates with the childlike quality of addressing an addressee who remains hidden in the dark. Adorno characterizes Borchardt as diametrically opposed to the type of visual and intuitive artist and scientist, the Augenmensch, typically associated with Goethe. Adorno’s Borchardt is a poet not of light and appearance, but of darkness and disappearance. By implication, I would propose, the idea of poetic saying is associated with the clarity of light and wakefulness, while the idea of poetic talking, or, prior to that, calling, is associated with the obscurity of night and half-sleep. Again, by implication, Borchardt is less a poet of the eye than a poet of the ear. Or, rather, the visual aspect of his poetry is made possible only through the acoustic, through the timbre. Hence the kinship to music that Adorno detects in Borchardt’s poetry. The origin of Borchardt’s poetry lies literally in the dark, in what is indistinct and indeterminate, in what can only be intimated as nocturnal Rauschen. Adorno’s analysis of Borchardt’s nocturnal talk, his calling into the dark, can be seen as an indirect refutation of Walter Benjamin’s judgment on Borchardt. For Benjamin, Borchardt was a poet of deception, and this aesthetic judgment had strong ethical and political connotations. Benjamin was reportedly very familiar with much of Borchardt’s work; he even mentioned to Gershom Scholem that he was “enchanted” by it.18 But an attempt at critical salvation such as Adorno’s would have hardly have been undertaken by Benjamin, who did not try to separate Borchardt’s poetry from his political writings, which he abhorred.19 In a letter to Ernst Schoen (later included in the edition of Benjamin’s correspondence co-edited by Adorno), Benjamin uses this highly critical formulation: “Today there is no better example than he [Borchardt] of the terribly deceptive nature of isolated instances of beauty, in which his work abounds” (WB C: 126; WB B 1: 189). While Adorno focuses in his essay on particular aspects of Borchardt’s works and tries out

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kaleidoscopic configurations of general observation and particular example, Benjamin rejects Borchardt precisely for the beauty he finds in particular passages. What it is that Benjamin finds deceptive about Borchardt’s “isolated instance of beauty” becomes clearer in a passage in his essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (1924/25), in which he compares the “expressionless” quality of Hölderlin’s late hymns to the semblance of beauty in Goethe’s lyric poetry. If in that lyric [in Hölderlin’s hymnic poetry] it is the expressionlessness [das Ausdrucklose], in Goethe’s it is the beautiful that comes forth to the limit of what can be grasped in the work of art. What stirs beyond this limit is, in one direction, the offspring of madness, and, in the other, the conjured [beschworene] appearance. In the latter direction, German poetry may not venture one step beyond Goethe without mercilessly falling prey to a world of semblance, whose most alluring images were evoked [hervorrief] by Rudolf Borchardt. Indeed, there is no lack of evidence that even the work of Borchardt’s master did not always escape the temptation closest to the master’s genius: that of conjuring [beschwören] the semblance [my italics]. (WB SW 1: 341; WB GS 1.1: 182)

In this passage, Borchardt stands accused of going beyond Goethe—stereotypically the German master of sober measuredness and perfected proportion—by conjuring semblance. Benjamin uses the term beschwören, as well as the related hervorrufen [“to call forth,” “to summon up”]. Whereas for Adorno, Borchardt is the master artist of language in all its obscure tonalities, for Benjamin he is the quack, presenting seductive, delusory images. Beschwören means eliciting an appearance of something that is untrue—in his correspondence with Schön, he mentions Borchardt’s “will to falsehood.” For Adorno, beschwören signifies a rhetoric powerful enough to overcome the hubris of the talking subject and to let language sound and echo as nocturnal poetic tone. Where Adorno seeks to redeem Borchardt by pointing out the affinity of his poetic procedure to rhetorical and musical technique, Benjamin focuses exclusively on what he perceives as Borchardt’s literary construction of a false world of visual deception. The important difference between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s assessments of Borchardt lies in their diverging views of aesthetic history. Benjamin rejects Borchardt as a Goethe epigone who has ventured too far and fallen prey to hubris, proclaiming himself the savior of German culture and pushing German poetry into a realm of dangerous illusion [Scheinwelt]. Adorno, by contrast, sees in Borchardt someone whose poetic achievement runs counter to his stated intentions because the force of

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the poet’s volition gives way to a dialectical other seldom heard in German letters, the messianic Jewish voice—ironically one of Benjamin’s major concerns throughout his life.20 Ultimately, the disagreement between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s views of Borchardt revolves around their different interpretations of the notion of Beschwörung. For Benjamin, Beschwörung is not simply an artistic technique, but a negative, if not nihilistic, theological concept: Conjuration intends to be the negative counterpart of creation. It, too, claims to bring forth a world from nothingness. With neither of them does the work of art have anything in common. It emerges not from nothingness but from chaos. However, the work of art will not escape from chaos, as does the created world according to the idealism of the doctrine of emanations. Artistic creation neither ‘makes’ anything out of chaos nor permeates it; and one would be just as unable to engender semblance, as conjuration [Beschwörung] truly does, from elements of that chaos. This is what the formula produces. Form, however, enchants chaos momentarily into world. Therefore, no work of art may seem wholly alive, in a manner free of spell-like enchantment [gänzlich ungebannt], without becoming mere semblance and ceasing to be a work of art. The life undulating in it must appear petrified and as if spellbound [gebannt] in a single moment. That which in it has being is mere beauty, mere harmony, which floods through the chaos (and, in truth, through this only and not the world) but, in this flooding-through, seems only to enliven it. (WB SW 1: 340; WB GS 1.1: 180–181)

This passage implies that Borchardt fell victim to semblance because he wanted to bring to presence a non-existent and impossible language, that is, in Benjamin’s theological terminology, he pretended to create a world out of nothing through the empty formula of conjuration, which can yield, however, only an impure semblance [Schein]. Artworks cannot be conjured up, because if they ever left the chaos out of which they are born they would cease to be artworks. According to Benjamin, Beschwörung is the futile attempt of the self-proclaimed artistic creator to create, while all he can do is momentarily cast a spell on an essentially uncontainable chaos. Neither art nor beauty and harmony are created, and they cannot be brought forth by the creative will. Rather, they appear only if the chaos, of which they are a part, comes to a momentary standstill. For Benjamin, the work of art can by definition be only a momentary, sudden appearance, in other words, a form of caesura.

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Adorno does not follow Benjamin in this assessment of Borchardt’s Beschwörung. One likely reason is Benjamin’s use of neo-Platonic notions of beauty and harmony, whereas Adorno is interested only in Borchardt’s conjuration of language, but not in aesthetic categories proper. Adorno was intimately familiar with Benjamin’s essay, and he adopted some of its vocabulary for his text on Borchardt. In contrast to Benjamin, however, Adorno’s idea of beschworene Sprache means precisely the rhetorical act of casting a spell on the chaotic [das Chaotische]: More than once, the man who was not unwilling to chime in with condemnations of modern chaos risks venturing into the chaotic. For him, casting a spell on the chaotic [es zu bannen] is one of the functions of language. Language is both the natura naturans and the natura naturata of his poetry. In his theory of art he paid tribute to the chaotic moment when he elevated the poet to the status of vates, the drunken prophet and seer, and contrasted him with the methods of all the other arts, which he subsumed under téchne or craft. (NL 2: 204; GS 11: 549)

Adorno’s aesthetic judgment differs from Benjamin’s in the double character he ascribes to Borchardt’s language as both creative principle [natura naturans] and that which is created [natura naturata]. In Benjamin’s view, Beschwörung is simply the “negative counter-image of creation,” while Beschwörung for Adorno is a speech act that aims at language itself. Adorno’s description of Borchardt’s elevation of the poet to prophet and seer and his rejection of téchne seem to suggest, however, that his assessment of Borchardt is not that far removed from Benjamin’s. Nonetheless, Adorno persists in his view that Borchardt’s poetic practice transcends his poetic theories and pronouncements. Nowhere did he so strongly accommodate to the prevailing currents of bourgeois thought as when he equated the poetic, and only the poetic, with a mysterium derived from religion, a mysterium he considered irreplaceable. His own work towers far above that because it realizes the very concept of téchne to which he consciously accorded lesser status and without which his works would not have achieved their own high rank. (NL 2: 205; GS 11: 549)

In the end, Borchardt’s rejection of téchne does not matter, because téchne is realized in the work itself. His poems are not attempts at creation, are not, as Benjamin feared, tempting images of an illusory world. They are enchanting only insofar as their technical virtuosity actually works to undo

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the aesthetic ideology of poetic re-enchantment. Adorno makes a terminological distinction between images [Bilder] and fabrications or constructions [Gebilde] that do not conceal their artful, technical character—Borchardt’s poems belong to the latter category.21 In the frankness with which it acknowledges itself as something made, as artifact, thései, his poetry, for all its exuberance, anticipates a functionalism of which his neoromantic contemporaries had no inkling. With all the enchantment of effect at their command, his poems work toward disenchantment. Instead of the lyric subject remaining within itself, it surrenders to what is estranged from it. Borchardt is led to this by the primacy of language. Language becomes the objective seat of judgment on poetry, something beyond the mere pronouncements of the poet. (NL 2: 205; GS 11: 549)

Adorno argues that Borchardt, through the primacy of language as technique or, as he also calls it, métier, transcends his poetic subjectivity. “Borchardt’s métier is the primacy of language” (NL 2: 207; GS 11: 552). Language is, then, for Borchardt both means and end. This emphasis on the dialectical role of technique22 is most strongly developed in Adorno’s musical writings, for example in his essays on Schönberg, in whose music technology “reveals itself ultimately indeed as the highest freedom, namely, as the freedom of man to have his music at his disposal” (GS 17: 203). In Borchardt, the primacy of language as métier leads to a musicalization of lyric poetry, to a virtuoso poetic technique. Borchardt “won a place for the virtuoso in poetry, a place he had never fully lost in music” (NL 2: 205; GS 11: 550). Adorno views Borchardt as a poet who rises above the limitations of virtuosity by giving form to what is historically impossible. He thus calls Borchardt’s work “aporetic” and states: “That it gave artistic form to its own impossibility is the seal of authenticity on his modernity” (NL 2: 208; GS 11: 553). This argument is almost identical with the one Adorno makes with respect to Heine (see chapter 5). Both authors are, for Adorno, compromised, yet both are virtuosi to such a degree that they can overcome the limitations and objective impossibilities that would have ruined lesser poets. Borchardt’s modus operandi, however, is doomed to fail (without any hope for dialectical recuperation) wherever his Beschwörung is no longer an invocation of language but turns into an invocation of the concept of nation.23 Beschwörung, Adorno explains, can work only if it is not directed at any particular conceptual content, much less a fictional national collective. That is, impossibility cannot revert to success unless it remains a strictly poetic aporia, reflected in the double character

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of language as creative and created principle. Political impossibilities such as the nation—whose historical life, Adorno suggests, has expired—are irredeemable.24 The structure of an impossibility turned—through a rhetorical art of transition and inversion—into an (impossible) possibility appears to be a guiding figure of Adorno’s notion of the relationship of the lyric to its historical situation in the prosaic world under the universal sway of the laws of commodification and exchange. One encounters this figure in slight variations in most of his writings on poetry, always with the purpose of critical rehabilitation. In the case of Borchardt, it achieves its strongest articulation as Beschwörung. By definition, invocation, conjuration, or imploration are anachronistic figurations of a speech act trying to overcome its own impossibility through sheer volition. It can succeed only against its own intention, if the force of volition is so strong that, through an enigmatic metonymic slip, it enables another voice to speak. Adorno claims that precisely this is the ethical and aesthetic gain of Borchardt’s poetry that decisively outweighs the political embarrassment presented by large parts of his oeuvre. One might surmise that a similar argument could be launched in the case of Borchardt’s contemporary—and enemy—Stefan George, for whose work Adorno felt a particular fondness. However, the situation is rather different with George, as far as Adorno is concerned. While Borchardt’s linguistic violence aims at the subordination of the subject to language, of a Beschwörung that will enable the subject to listen to nothing but the Rauschen of language, George’s self-stylization exhibits a tendency towards violent self-destruction. It is precisely in this self-destructive tendency that Adorno will detect the meaning of George’s poetry—he calls it either George’s enigmatic figure [Rätselfigur], or, critically, his empty secret.

Chapter Four

As If: Stefan George

Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis. —Goethe1

In Rudolf Borchardt’s favorite foe, Stefan George, Adorno encounters another early twentieth-century poet whose politics were defined by a proudly antithetical, reactionary and elitist stance. While George has become something of a curiosity today—it has certainly been a long time since he was considered “the most powerful man in the world,”2 and both the man and his work are as likely to elicit amusement as admiration—his name still evokes the image of the quintessentially aestheticist and exclusive poet and prophet,3 “a modern Socrates who held his disciples with a fascination at once erotic and spiritual,”4 and whose exclusive circle manifested an absolute refusal to deal with the banalities of the outside world. Adorno’s fascination with George, however, reaches far beyond an interest in the nimbus associated with the poet—which, on all accounts, is something one should refrain from trying to revive.5 Throughout his career, Adorno repeatedly turned his critical attention to George, first in the form of a now lost essay on George’s neglected prose writings, followed in 1940 by a review essay on the correspondence between George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal that played an important part in his intellectual friendship with Walter Benjamin, who credited Adorno with “having accomplished this unseasonable and thankless task, that of ‘saving’ George” (CC 339; BW 429).6 Like Schönberg and Webern, whom he admired, Adorno even ventured to set four of George’s poems to music. After Benjamin’s death, Adorno based the bulk of the argument in his 1957 “Speech On Lyric Poetry and Society” [“Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft”] on George’s poetry, placing him in a genealogical line with Goethe and Mörike. His last work on the poet bears the simple 89

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title “George.” First delivering the text as a radio address in 1967, Adorno did not find the time to turn it into a written essay. After Adorno’s death in 1969, the editors included a transcript of the radio essay in the posthumous fourth volume of the Notes to Literature, where it immediately precedes the essay on Borchardt. While the text on Borchardt serves as an introduction to an edition of the latter’s poetry, the piece on George is conceived of as a “virtual” introduction to a collection of poetry that Adorno never edited.7 If offered to him, he probably would have welcomed the opportunity. The essay on George thus stands under the sign of unrealized possibility. It is precisely the latter that structures Adorno’s argument on George, both in the essay “George” and in the “Speech On Lyric Poetry and Society.” I will here consider both essays together, since their arguments are closely related and often overlap. Where necessary, I will include references to Adorno’s essay on George’s correspondence with Hofmannsthal, reprinted in the volume Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society (1955), whose overall tenor is more critical. The figure of unfulfilled possibility appears in Adorno’s texts on George in the affective notion of yearning, the mythical-historical notion of utopia, the literary-historical notions of marginality and fleetingness, the poetological and aesthetic notions of translation and distancing, and the phantasmagorial notion of self-sacrifice. These notions serve as different yet interlocking levels of interpretation. In Adorno’s essay on lyric poetry and society, possibility is figured as latency. Psychoanalytically speaking, that which has been repressed is “there” only latently; it can become manifest only figuratively, in a distorted and usually unrecognizable way.8 Adorno is not interested in condemning George for his self-stylization as an otherworldly poet-prophet, nor is he inclined to simply identify the poet with the cultural conservatism of his circle. Rather, he finds in George’s poetry the possibility, or, more precisely, the latent possibility, of a poetic discourse that has until now remained largely unheard. Clearly, the impetus is to find a redeeming utopian trait in George’s poetry— a poetry that often succumbs to awkward archaisms. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is precisely in the more ephemeral, the less well-known, and the more marginal elements of George’s works that Adorno situates the potential for an emphatic reevaluation. He puts special emphasis on the early poems, the few prose pieces, and the translations. For him, the quality and scope of the latter actually surpass George’s achievements as an original poet. From a cursory reevaluation of George’s oeuvre, Adorno seeks to understand the true political implications of the poet’s project. These are, Adorno suggests, not to be found in its restorative (Adorno calls George’s poetry “wiederherstellend” [GS 11: 67] rather than “reactionary”), even archaic content, but, rather, in

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the unfulfilled desire to empower and renew poetic technique and poetic form to such an extreme degree that it will effectively amount to a renewal of the German language as a whole. Adorno’s emphasis on an implicit project of linguistic—not just aesthetic—renewal in George is clearly reminiscent of his view of Borchardt. George’s desire for poetic renewal, however, lacks the desperate force of Borchardt’s will to “radical reconstruction” that is “to produce for the first time the objective language that was missed” (NL 2: 194; GS 11: 538).9 To Adorno, George’s position as a poet is characterized by a contradiction: George’s self-styled aristocratic pose and his rejection of bourgeois values and conventions are made possible precisely by the social conditions of bourgeois society, which are accommodating enough to allow for the functional integration of negative, anachronistic styles and gestures. The poet is dependent on the very social organization from which he seeks to distance himself: “Despite its demeanor of hostility to society, [George’s aristocratic stance] is the product of the social dialectic that denies the lyric subject identification with what exists and its world of forms, while that subject is nevertheless allied with the status quo in its innermost core: it has no other locus from which to speak but that of a past seigniorial society” (NL 1: 51; GS 11: 65). In other words, George can distance himself from bourgeois society only because it is the poetic freedom achieved and guaranteed by this society that allows him to do so, and he can style himself aristocratically only because he is not a powerless court minstrel in a feudal society. It is George’s anachronistic infatuation with all things medieval that justifies Adorno’s literary-historical label “neoromantic.” Yet Adorno is quick to point out that George’s poem “Im windes-weben” (which will be addressed at greater length later on in this chapter) is not a recapitulation of medieval realia: “But it is not real things and not sounds that are evoked but rather a vanished condition of the soul” (NL 1: 51; GS 11: 65). The German for “vanished condition of the soul” is entsunkene Seelenlage. Adorno’s phrasing is perhaps less abstract than it pretends to be, for the rare verb entsinken, signifying a movement of slipping or sliding downward, evokes images of an Atlantis sunk into the depths of the sea.10 Consequently, Adorno speaks of the “latency of the ideal:” “The artistically effected latency of the ideal, the absence of any crude archaisms, raises the song above the hopeless fiction it nonetheless offers . . . the poem’s stylistic principle saves it from conformity” (NL 1: 52; GS 11: 65). The poem succeeds not by virtue of the imagery it offers, but rather through its frugal economy: it succeeds by not resorting to the traditional imagery and vocabulary of the lyric. It is poetry stripped down to its “purely formal patterns and schemata” (NL

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1:52; GS 11: 66). Adorno praises George’s aesthetic asceticism, his art of reduction and omission, for providing the lyrical subject with a means to step outside the reifying forces of the marketplace. The lyric subject can resist the reification of poetic language only if it surrenders its individuality, which, as such, has become marketable. “The subject has to step outside itself by keeping quiet about itself; it has to make itself a vessel, so to speak, for the idea of pure language. George’s greatest poems are aimed at rescuing that language” (NL 1: 52; GS 11: 66). The destiny of the subject in George’s lyric poetry is to give itself up to something unreal, to an idea. Adorno here calls this the idea of pure language, i.e., a form of language that is not already the language of someone or something, and is therefore a language of latency. As pure language, it cannot be actualized.11 The topos of self-sacrifice shows up repeatedly where Adorno tries to account for the particular success or “good fortune” [Gelingen] of a poem in non-subjective termsm, and the most extreme form of such self-sacrifice is perhaps Borchardt’s subject that turns itself “into an organ of language.” The guiding idea is that in order to make language speak, as Adorno puts it in “George,” the speaking subject itself must fall silent—what greater sacrifice for a poet than to fall silent? But “silence” cannot be taken in absolutely literal terms, for the poet still produces poetry. Through an artistic process of reduction, however, his utterances must approach silence. Adorno’s structural reading of self-sacrifice corresponds to the more explicit theme of self-sacrifice in George’s textual corpus. It is, as Borchardt points out in his extensive 1909 review of The Seventh Ring, the ethical substance of George’s work: And thus, some of the words in this book are more than a moral statement, namely, a moral act. Among these are above all the richly varied allusions to the self-sacrifice that underlies all poetic activity and that here is no longer understood as playfully and sentimentally vain . . . but [is] expressed as devotion to the others, even demanded as the renunciation of self-centered happiness.12

In Borchardt’s interpretation of George, self-sacrifice forms the foundation of all poetic activity. At the same time, the structure of this self-sacrifice is not formulated exclusively in literary terms. Adorno manages to avoid the anthropological overtones of Borchardt’s essay. What Borchardt vaguely calls “devotion to the others,” Adorno seeks to clarify in more unambiguous linguistic terms. He strips the politically discredited term “sacrifice” of all associations with the idea of a political collective. Instead, the only community that benefits from poetic self-sacrifice is language understood as “collective

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language.” “George’s best lines make economical use [halten sparsam haus] of the element in his work in which the ‘I’ imagines itself borne by a collective language which it contains within itself and to which it listens as though to something in the process of disappearing” (NL 2: 184; GS 11: 528–529). It seems likely that Adorno’s notion of poetic self-sacrifice does not suggest the complete disappearance of the speaking subject, but rather a twofold process of disappearance: as the economic and cultural conditions for poetic language (one of the oldest forms of cultural memory) are weakened by modern changes in the means of communication, the lyric subject can retain a certain amount of power only if it tends towards self-effacement. Self-sacrifice, then, signifies the negative power of self-withdrawal in the face of the disappearance of poetry. It should be viewed as a historically specific reaction to the increasingly encompassing rule of the marketplace. In more literary terms, self-sacrifice evidently implies a certain aesthetic asceticism. Consequently, Adorno prefers to unceremoniously dismiss George’s most significant lyrical contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke, for his poetry’s “glib decorative quality.”13 In the case of George, Adorno, himself using a language influenced by the logic of the marketplace (he speaks of “sparsam haus halten”), praises the economic nature of George’s verses, because it is precisely their lyric sparseness that allows for the latent possibility of another, non-decorative kind of richness, one that allows one once again to listen, belatedly and as if for the last time, for a collective language that is in the state of disappearance.14 Disappearance, it should be stressed, does not designate the dwindling of something that was once fully there, since that would amount to a version of the narrative cliché of historical rise and fall. Rather, disappearance has a structural aesthetic function. Because of its objective impossibility, collective language is, by definition, not something that can appear. Collective language becomes possible only in its impossibility, imagined by the poetic subject as something that is irrevocably in a state of disappearing. Poetic self-sacrifice can then be described as an artistic ruse: through self-negation, the poetic subject becomes susceptible to something that can be had only by not having it—collective language, which cannot appear, but only disappear. Since the subject can have no positive relation to any sort of collective— any form of belonging would inadvertently give way to antagonism and a hierarchy of different collectives—it is defined solely by the negativity of detachment. This is precisely the social situation that makes possible a poetics of “listening for/after” [nach-horchen], of paying attention to what is vanishing from the senses. This dialectical figure is not compatible with the reception of George as a conservative or restorative poet, or with the

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conflation of the poet and the proclaimed leader of the “Secret Germany.” Whereas the empirical George fostered a rather exclusive and, ultimately, destructive kind of collective (i.e., his circle), the poetic I of his works is carried by a collectivity that is perhaps less prone to the pitfalls of political power because it is linguistic. In the end, it is language that redeems George for Adorno—but only insofar as it is disappearing, only insofar as the poet does not have full command over it. Where George tries to utter a collective identity by mere volition, his poems fall prey to a particular German tradition of a potentially disastrous Herrschaftswille [“will to domination”].15 Poetry that is exclusively an expression of a will to domination cannot be redeemed by even the most speculative or inspired interpretive effort. For this reason, large parts of George’s oeuvre must be excluded from the canon: “What would need to be eliminated in my selection would be the aspect of the work that contributes to the sphere of catastrophe” (NL 2: 179; GS 11: 524). To this sphere, Adorno assigns all those of George’s poems that appeal to the secret and select community of his circle: “The slick ‘we’ of those poems is as fictitious, and therefore as deadly, as the kind of Volk the advocates of the völkisch envisioned. Where George descends to the praise of Führerdom, he shares in the guilt and cannot be resurrected” (NL 2: 179; GS 11: 524). However, Adorno concedes that George’s “will to domination” runs through all of his poetry; he has produced scarcely any perfect poems, “thereby also raising the question of what German poet had ever succeeded in doing so” (NL 2: 181; GS 11: 525). Therefore, it remains the task of interpretation to arrive at insights against the will and intention of the poet himself: George’s work has to be saved from the poet himself. “If anything of George survives it will be precisely the layer he repudiated after Maximin’s death with the fussiness of choral lyric and a league behind which the Volksgemeinschaft lurks” (NL 2: 184; GS 11: 528). The authentic moments in George’s works are precisely those moments that the poet himself denied: “It is the poems that appear inauthentic . . . that are authentic” (NL 2: 182; GS 11: 527). This peculiar logic of inversion can be adequately represented only by an essayistic mode of presentation that is receptive to the split between George’s spiritual bearing and the autonomous form of his poetry.16 When Adorno speaks of a collective language contained within the subject, he uses a dialectical figure that seeks to find the general embodied only in the individual, and he stays faithful to the method he announced at the beginning of his essay on George: “When forced to speak briefly about a difficult and complex subject, I usually select one limited aspect of it, in keeping with the philosophical motif of renouncing the totality and hoping for

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insight into the whole from the fragment rather than directly from the whole itself ” (NL 2, 179; GS 11: 523). The term “selection” signifies precisely the moment of essayistic transformation that the literary work must undergo before it can become subject to actual interpretive sentences. Put differently: interpretation has already taken place in the selection of the material that the essayist decides to quote in his text. Adorno’s not immodest claim is that this selection is by no means a matter of random individual choice, dictated solely by personal preference. Rather, he insists on the synecdochical character of his selection. The fragmentary representation gains significance from the expectation that it will provide a correct philosophical insight into the whole. Adorno justifies his selective approach as not only pragmatic but also determined by historico-philosophical considerations. Claiming that historical developments after George’s death have “completely shattered” any “confidence in historical continuity that would of itself reveal the truth content of an oeuvre” (NL 2: 178; GS 11: 523), Adorno instead suggests that by sharing some of the rules guiding his technique of selection, the essay can “shed some light on the historical transformation of the work in itself ” (NL 2: 178; GS 11: 523). His method can be summed up as follows: Through selective citations, Adorno invites the reader to listen to particular poems, lines in poems, and even specific words and syllables. Priority is given to the formal and material dimension of the poetry; theme and image are secondary.17 Here as everywhere else in Adorno’s essays, the role of citation is paramount. The success of the essay depends on which passages it cites and how it integrates them into a constellation. From this technique of selection and arrangement, the interpretation follows almost effortlessly. In presenting his essay as the introduction to an imaginary anthology of George’s poems, Adorno responds to Benjamin’s earlier praise of his 1940 text on the George-Hofmannsthal correspondence. Benjamin had not only praised Adorno for paving the way towards a future anthology of George’s poetry; he had also suggested that Adorno’s essay itself was, to some extent, the best context for receiving George’s poems. Benjamin’s extraordinary praise implies that the natural place for George’s poetry is in the essay, because it is only in the essentially defamiliarized and ironized setting of the essay that one can at all speak seriously and, possibly, truthfully of George. It is the essay as form that performs this crucial “rescue” (see CC 330; BW 429–430). Despite the close affinity between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s concepts of the essay, Adorno was always reluctant to follow Benjamin’s more daring and avant-garde experiments with philosophical and critical forms of presentations. Adorno’s essay on George and Hofmannsthal constitutes perhaps the moment of greatest closeness achieved in this intellectual friendship.

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At other times, Adorno’s praise of Benjamin’s techniques of representation, especially Benjamin’s penchant for collection and citation, always manifests, considerable reserve—this aspect of Benjamin’s technique is most significant for Adorno’s work on George and the idea of “saving” his poetry through selective quotation. In his essay “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin” [“Charakteristik Walter Benjamins” (1950)], Adorno notes about his friend’s great major work, the unfinished Arcades Project [Passagenwerk]: “The culmination of his anti-subjectivism, his major work was to consist solely of citations” (P 239; GS 10.1: 250). Adorno refuses, however, to acknowledge the feasibility of this last, radical step. “There is no canon to indicate how the audacious venture of a philosophy purified of argument might be carried out, or even how the citations might be meaningfully ordered. His philosophy of fragmentation remained itself fragmentary, the victim, perhaps, of a method, the feasibility of which in the medium of thought must remain an open question” (P 239; GS 10.1: 250).18 Adorno is worried that even the most heightened attention to concrete objects does not absolve the essay from the need for a discursive exposition of its argument. The fragment in itself is not philosophical; it must continue to relate to a totality, to a canon. Clearly, the “philosophy of fragmentation” mentioned by Adorno is one that does not (yet) exist. This recognition explains the predominance of the unifying historico-philosophical perspective as a centripetal force throughout Adorno’s essays. In the essay “George,” Adorno’s historico-philosophical concern is not only an interpretation of the relation between the lyrical I and a disappearing collective language. In more general terms, Adorno attempts to register the “historical innervations” implicit in George’s poems. The predicament posed by this perspective is, however, whether the desire to rescue George can actually provide a responsible basis for a recanonization. Could not the insistence on the effective negativity in George’s poems, the emphasis on collective language as “disappearing,” be understood as a simple white-washing, an obliteration of the reprehensible aspects of the poet’s oeuvre? What distinguishes a critique that rescues from a critique that hushes up, that explains and interprets away those elements that remain inexcusable? How can the essayist balance rescue and condemnation? How does a rescuing critique, a redemptive criticism, relate to a destructive critique?19 The consideration of a poem cited by Adorno will help shed more light on this conundrum; the poem is from the collection The Year of the Soul [Das Jahr der Seele (1897)], where it can be found in the section titled “Traurige Tänze” [“Sad Dances”]. Ihr tratet zu dem herde Wo alle glut verstarb·

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Is there anything in this poem that elevates it above a harmless symbolist elegy? Adorno suggests that the poem fully realizes itself sensuously; i.e., it is not simply an illustration of an underlying idea. The poem is, as it were, completely immanent to the situation depicted. It gives no sign of further allegorical or philosophical ambition. Instead, the poem is “fully and unallegorically absorbed in the sensory situation” (NL 2: 185; GS 11: 529). Yet if the poem is devoid of transcendent elements, how can it be “intertwined with historical impulses” (NL 2: 184; GS 11: 529)? Can one speak of history without transcendence? And in what form does history affect the poem? In his essay on George and Hofmannsthal, Adorno tries to place the two poets firmly within the larger European context of Symbolist, or, as he prefers to call it frequently, neoromantic poetry. Adorno’s view of George is guided not only by a specific preference for the poet, but also by a much broader and very keen interest in the poetry of Symbolism from Baudelaire onwards. His view of George is thus a direct result of his understanding of French poetry. For example, Adorno seeks to explain the “sensory situation” in one of George’s poems in terms of what Hofmannsthal in a letter to George calls a “color-theory of words” [Farbenlehre der Worte]. By metaphorically ascribing colors to sounds, neoromantic poetic theory “emancipates the poem from the concept,” and “poetry becomes the technical mastery of

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something which does not allow itself to be mastered by consciousness” (P 190; GS 10.1: 197). The more emphasis is put on the sensory character of poetry—first on color, then on tone—the more the categories of concept and meaning lose significance. This “progress,” however, can only be had alongside an increase in technical mastery, which Adorno describes, in terms borrowed from Verlaine’s “Art poétique” (1882), as “the combination of the indécis and the précis” (P 190; GS 10.1: 197): the mastery (precision) of what cannot be mastered (the uncertain), because it can be experienced only sensuously. Within these poetic parameters, the guiding critical norm for the “correctness” or “accuracy” of a poem becomes not the truthfulness or realism of its allegorical statement, but rather the “technical coherence . . . of the nuances themselves, as the correctly or falsely chosen tone” (P 191; GS 10.1: 197). The tacit procedure of George and Hofmannsthal appeals to nothing other than Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s manifesto—to the incommensurable. This is not the metaphysical absolute that formed the core of German Romanticism and its philosophy. It is no accident that the tone is bearer of the incommensurable, since it is not intelligible but sensuous. Poetry inherits those sensual moments of the object—one could almost say of the object of the natural sciences—which elude exact measurement. (P 191; GS 10.1: 197)

George’s and Hofmannsthal’s poetic works take seriously the poetics proclaimed by Rimbaud and Verlaine. They strive for an incommensurable element that is not metaphysical, that is not subject to philosophical speculation. The incommensurable can be grasped only through the uncertain bodily senses, not through intellectual labor or calculation. Hence, poetry is responsible not for the object in its totality (the vaguely theological Rilkean “Ding” and its situation within the cosmos), but, more precisely, for that dimension of the object that cannot be calculated and consequently eludes conceptual categorization. The poet is thus a master of the smallest, immeasurable, unintelligible difference, evoking the musical technique Adorno finds exemplified in the works of his teacher Alban Berg, whom he calls “the master of the smallest transition.” Adorno’s emphasis on tone as a technical category is echoed in his reading of the poem “Ihr tratet zu dem herde.” The poem’s tone does not resemble the “supra-individual poems in George” (NL 2: 185; GS 11: 529), but rather it is weak, spoken or, to follow Adorno’s Hölderlinian vocabulary, sung in the face of the impossibility of poetic song, as if about to fall silent.

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With typical pithiness, Adorno evokes the historical impulses to which this tone testifies: “The line ‘Es ist worden spät,’ compressed almost to the point of silence, encapsulates [speichert] the feeling of an era that prohibits the song [Gesang] that still sings of it” (NL 2: 185; GS 11: 529). George’s line does not so much represent history as, in Nicholsen’s translation, “encapsulates,” or, more literally, “stores it up” [speichern] it. However, Adorno reduces history to a perhaps too imprecise “feeling of an era.” George’s poetry, in its laconic use of the perfect tense, speaks very precisely about something that is itself intrinsically imprecise. But the conceptual definition of such an imprecise object would hardly be more precise, than, for instance, the literary-historical term “Weltschmerz” applied to a particular historical affective disposition in the nineteenth century. In his remarks on the poem, Adorno shows little interest in conceptual history. His reading focuses exclusively on history as feeling or affect. (One could even call his essays on George less a conceptual critique and more an affective response. There is certainly no surer way of establishing the historical importance of a literary work than to provide evidence of an affective correspondence with its time and place.) The only transcendent quality of the poem resides in the feeling or sentiment expressed in the line “Es ist worden spät.” The feeling of an era can be expressed only because the line—devoid of all unnecessary ornament or loquacity—is characterized by the utmost economy: the participle “geworden” has been contracted to the pseudo-archaic “worden,” and the word order has been inverted in such a way that “spät” is, literally, the last word of the poem. It is as if silence were inscribed into the line, which therefore speaks as if about to fall silent for good. Rather than merely describing or proclaiming a diffuse feeling of lateness, the line demonstrates lateness in its very form. It renders affective the paradoxical situation of lyrical song singing about nothing more than its own impossibility. While Adorno particularly appreciated such self-referential, aporetic situations, the poem is certainly more than a conventional swan song. The pathos of an aesthetic “once again,” expressed in the line “Wird es noch einmal schein!,” is so strong that Adorno does not even bother to point out the temporality of an aesthetic semblance that appears, ghost-like, only after its disappearance. Does Adorno’s very brief, somewhat sketchy interpretation provide a rescuing critique? I believe the answer is yes. Adorno refrains here from any approach resembling a critique of ideology. Instead of condemning the poem for its sentimental tone, its lack of intellectual substance, or its mystification of time and place, Adorno chooses to preserve the sensory, pre-intellectual dimension of the poem. He is interested in the poem only as a linguistic

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storage house or reservoir,22 a container, as it were, of history as the feeling of lateness. For Adorno, this is poetry on the brink of falling silent, and it deserves preservation and canonization precisely as a threshold-phenomenon. (Adorno’s reading suggests that he is here and elsewhere in his writings on literature much closer to Benjamin’s ideal of a rescuing critique than in his musical writings. For example, Adorno seeks to rescue George, while his great essay on Wagner (1939 and 1964) or his chapters on Stravinsky in the Philosophy of Modern Music [1949] contain scathing ideological critiques.) George’s—or, perhaps, one should say Adorno’s—particular temporal situation, his sentimental yearning and his mournful contemplation of lateness are summarized by Adorno in the phrase “as if one last time.” This temporal situation is formulated most succinctly in “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” where Adorno finds in George’s poems more than just the feeling of an era encapsulated. Decisive in this context is the previously mentioned Lied from George’s The Seventh Ring (1907): Im windes-weben War meine frage Nur träumerei. Nur lächeln war Was du gegeben. Aus nasser nacht Ein glanz entfacht— Nun drängt der mai· Nun muss ich gar Um dein aug und haar Alle tage In sehnen leben.23 [In the winds-weaving / My question was / Only daydreaming. / Only a smile was / What you gave. / From a moist night / A gleam ignites—/ Now May urges. / Now I must / For your eyes and hair / Every day / Live in yearning.] (NL 1: 51)

For Adorno, this Lied illustrates in nuce the peculiar social and historical situation of George as a latecomer who, by imitating an impossible feudal state of affairs, speaks as if he were living in a medieval society. For George’s poetry to succeed, everything depends on how successfully it executes the mad ruse, or, in Adorno’s vocabulary, the quixotism of the “as if.” According to Adorno, it is crucial not to take the thematic, the manifest dimension of

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George’s poems literally. In a section in ND titled, with a quotation from the finale of Faust II, “Nur ein Gleichnis” (“Only a Parable”), Adorno compares the parabolic mode required for reading George’s poem “Transfiguration” [“Entrückung”] to the parabolic mode required to interpret the promise made by theology: “Taking literally what theology promises would be as barbarian as that interpretation” (ND 399; GS 6: 391). To read George in a parabolic mode does not mean to go against the grain of meaning. Rather, just as a religious text demands to be read in a spiritual sense, George’s poems must also be read as if they were sacred texts. But one can of course arrive at the theological spiritual meaning only after a long process of immersion in the text. In accordance with Alexandrian exegesis, one must start one’s interpretation with the minutest textual details. Hence, Adorno’s reading circles around one particle. George’s success depends not on the historical correctness of the poetic idea, but on the implementation of tiny syntactical awkwardnesses. More specifically, Adorno speculates that the success of the poem “Im windes-weben” rests primarily on the inclusion of the semantically superfluous particle “gar.” 24 Just as great music can transcend itself by the inclusion of a few superfluous measures, so the poem succeeds by including this innocuous particle. “It is probably this very ‘gar’ that establishes the poem’s status with the force of a déjà vu: through it the melody of the poem extends beyond mere signification” (NL 1: 53; GS 11: 67). The oddly familiar particle makes all the difference because it colors the melody of the poem in a way that transcends its semantic dimension. Surprisingly, the transcendent powers of the poem are encapsulated exclusively in this particle, because only on its account does the poem extend beyond the prison-house of meaning, beyond, as Adorno calls it, “mere signification.” Like the poem “Ihr tratet zu dem herde,” these verses also succeed through frugal use of poetic means. “Gar” may be semantically redundant, but it is also a fragment of the longer, rather worn out and unpoetic conversational phrase “ganz und gar (nicht).”25 It triggers an extension that reaches backward into a past that is not, strictly speaking, historical: “In the age of its decline George sees in language the idea that the course of history has denied it and constructs lines that sound as though they were not written by him but had been there from the beginning of time and would remain as they were forever” (NL 1: 53; GS 11: 67). The historical impulse driving the poem is negative, and the poem is merely an expression of a superpoetic ideal contained in language. Although the poem seems, if anything, medieval and, indeed, neoromantic, it is completely devoid of anything manifestly medieval or otherwise archaic. But the reduction goes further

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than this: poetry is possible only on the condition of a radical refus. Rejecting all conventional modes of expression, George reduces lyric poetry to its bare skeleton, thus allowing language itself to become articulate, liberated from any restraints imposed by exigencies of content, message, or communication. Whereas in the case of Eichendorff Adorno addressed the pure appearance of language in terms of Rauschen, in the case of George he attempts to listen to language itself in its most minute morphological appearances, as a single, non-semantic and thus untranslatable syllable. In accordance with his obsession with the non-semantic articulation of language itself, Adorno reads the poem not as the straightforward expression of longing for a concrete historical situation, but, rather, as longing for something that is—to use a seemingly paradoxical formulation—essentially and constitutively latent. The affective force of “Im windes-weben” lies not in a longing attached to a particular lost object; rather, longing is possible only as quixotic invocation [Beschwörung], recalling again Adorno’s interpretation of George’s rival Borchardt. It is now possible to take a second look at a sentence quoted at the beginning of this chapter (this time using my own italics): “But it is not real things and not sounds that are evoked [beschworen] but rather a vanished [entsunkene] condition of the soul. The artistically effected latency [erzwungene Latenz] of the ideal, the absence of any crude archaism, raises the song above the desperate fiction it nonetheless offers” (NL 1: 51–52; GS 11: 65). The poet George discovers in language a hidden, latent ideal that runs counter to the course of history. But this is an “unhappy” discovery, because the latency of the ideal is not a given, but something that “is” only through willing, through an act of force. For this reason, the poem’s yearning has little in common with innocent longing (if there is such a thing), but is, in fact, a form of violent invocation—although somewhat less violent than Borchardt’s, whose entire oeuvre was driven, as Adorno claims, by violent invocation. Nonetheless, the two rival poets were prone to a similarly violent poetic mode of operation. And almost exactly as in his essay on Borchardt, Adorno once again burdens language with the power and pathos of containing another, latent history, an aconceptual counter-history that can be intimated only by listening to the uneven melody of George’s poem. Because such an endeavor cannot make use of discursive language, it has to gain its strength from the affective force of violent yearning. Without the driving element of such yearning, the latent ideal of language would remain an empty neoromantic cliché. It is important to note that the authorial mastery exhibited in the poem “Im windes-weben” undercuts the danger of pride that often goes

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along with it. For Adorno, the irresistible quality of the poem consists exclusively in the alien quality of the verses: The four lines “Nun muss ich gar / Um dein aug und haar / Alle tage / In sehnen leben,” which I consider some of the most irresistible lines in German poetry, are like a quotation, but a quotation not from another poet but from something language has irrevocably failed to achieve: the medieval poetry of the Minnesang would have succeeded in achieving it if it, if a tradition of the German language—if the German language itself, one is tempted to say—had succeeded. (NL 1: 53; GS 11: 66)

The lines are so irresistible because they do not sound like a George poem, because they do not sound like themselves. They sound like a quotation, striking a familiar chord in the listener’s ear. At the same time, they evoke the presence of an irrevocable absence. Paradoxically, they cite what cannot be cited because it was never actualized. This rather excessive interpretation of four lines by George provides one of the strongest moments of an—albeit fragmentary—theory of language in the NL: language, Adorno suggests, does not simply provide the semiotic material for poetry. Rather, the fate of poetry itself is bound to the fate of language. A historical entity, language, like other historical subjects, thrives and falters, succeeds26 and fails. Language—like nature—never transcends history. Its power is, it seems, limited to the utopian: even where it failed, it might still evoke the memory of another history, although only in the form of a ruse: as if. George’s lines sound as if they were quotations from something that never was. And precisely because they evoke the idea of something that never was, George is not simply a backward-looking and nostalgic poet, since one cannot base reactionary politics on a non-existent, and thus incommensurable and nonidentical past. Moreover, the déjà vu effect of the lines becomes possible precisely because language itself is doomed to become replaced entirely by the logic of communication: “In the age of its decline George sees in language the idea that the course of history has denied it and constructs lines that sound as though they were not written by him but had been there from the beginning of time and would remain as they were forever” (NL 1: 53; GS 11: 67). Yet there clearly is a risk of becoming infatuated with the idea of a non-existing, inaccessible past, and of subscribing exclusively to the parabolic mode of the as if. George, Adorno claims, has alienated the German language “until it becomes the alienation of a language no longer actually spoken, even an imaginary language, and in that imaginary language he perceives what would be possible, but never took place, in its composition” (NL 1: 52–53; GS 11: 66). This is reminiscent

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of Borchardt’s obsession with reconstructing an imaginary pre-Lutheran spoken German. Adorno addresses this danger of complete enthrallment with the hypothetical, the subjunctive mode (as if) as follows: The quixotism of this enterprise, however, the impossibility of this kind of restorative writing, the danger of falling into arts and craft, enriches the poem’s substance: language’s chimerical yearning for the impossible becomes an expression of the subject’s insatiable erotic longing, which finds relief from the self in the other. This transformation of an individuality intensified to an extreme into self-annihilation—and what was the Maximin cult of the late George but a desperate renunciation of individuality construing itself as something positive—was necessary in creating the phantasmagoria of the folksong, something the German language had been groping for in vain in its greatest masters. (NL 1: 53; GS 11: 67)

The model for attributing to language a subjective yearning is provided by the erotic longing of the subject that seeks to give itself up [sich entledigt] to the other in sexual intercourse. But the extremely monological modus operandi of George’s poetry shuns any harmonious I-Thou relation. It can conceive of the other either as someone to be mastered or as someone to whom the I must surrender. Adorno’s rescuing critique focuses on the second relation, the relation of relinquishing to the other in an act of violent self-sacrifice. Adorno wants to show that George’s affirmative and ideologically dubious rhetoric of sacrifice is at odds with the poetical tendency to sacrifice the control-seeking, violent ego in favor not of the nation or any other historically fateful entity, but in favor of language itself, or, in another formulation, collective language. While in his essay “George” Adorno speaks of a collective language that carries the lyrical ego, a similar model is suggested in the essay on lyric and society: language in poetry and the subject experiencing physical yearning are related by a structural analogy. Thus, the self-sacrifice of the poetic subject is a metaphor grounded in the sexual act. More precisely, however, Adorno insists on an erotic longing in which ultimately the death-drive wins out: George’s enormously stylized, stubborn individuality signifies in actuality the annihilation of subjectivity, as enacted in the Maximin cult. It is at this point that Adorno’s talk of sacrifice appears to be less metaphorical than suggested by the model of a lyrical ego giving itself up to language. The self-annihilation of the subject—which is poetically signaled by the waning of signification and the waxing of melody in the poem—enables the phantasmagoria, i.e., the deceptive image of the folksong to appear like a déjà vu. One could conclude: the subject must die for

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the collective to rise. Adorno is careful enough, however, to speak of a mere phantasmagoria of the folksong. The speculative listening enabled by the poem results not in the evocation of a social collective, but, rather, in the appearance of another literary form. George’s poem thus brings about a peculiar kind of differentiation not otherwise available: if poetic language takes the step towards an extreme lyrical formalism as exhibited in George’s poetry, it performs an extreme degree of literary differentiation that, by virtue of being an extreme, undoes itself momentarily to evoke, like a citation, a much earlier, much less differentiated literary form, namely the folksong. The extremes meet. But then Adorno takes another step away from literary history and now reduces literature to the medium and the representative of language. Only by virtue of a differentiation taken so far that it can no longer bear its own difference, can no longer bear anything but the universal, freed from the humiliation of isolation, in the particular does lyrical language represent language’s being-in-itself as opposed to its service in the realm of ends. But it thereby represents the idea of a free humankind, even if the George School concealed this idea from itself through a base cult of the heights. (NL 1: 53–54; GS 11: 67)

At stake is, in the final analysis, not the folksong (which imposes itself as a phantasmagoria since it is, in essence, a product of Romantic longing and, thus, perhaps the most phantasmagorical of all genres in German letters), but the being-in-itself of language becoming tangible poetically. Yet once again Adorno’s breathless interpretation rushes on to another step, claiming that language is not a mere purpose in itself. Abandoning aesthetics for ethics, Adorno wants to see language in itself as the image of freedom. Adorno’s sustained obsession with a language freed from the logic of exchange and communication, his frequent invocation of “pure language” or of “language itself,” are motivated by the ethical quest for the possibility of thinking (about) freedom. Language in itself serves as the placeholder for the idea of a liberated humankind. One may argue now that such a step leaves behind all specificity of language. If, ultimately, language is relevant only because it carries, by virtue of its possible distance from the realm of means and ends, an abstract idea, then Adorno has taken language and, by association, literature, to the dead-end street of philosophical formalism. Language in itself is devoid of meaning;27 only as a quasi-idea does it attain philosophical significance. Yet there is another side to this extreme formalism. Simply put, the very fact that Adorno needs literature to talk about language, and language to talk about

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freedom, provides evidence that once literature is included in the endeavors of moral philosophy, it can no longer be excluded from the domain of philosophy. Once one has invoked literature and conjured up language, one can no longer rid oneself of the spirits one has released. The last two sentences of “On Lyric Poetry and Society” are these: The truth of George lies in the fact that his poetry breaks down the walls of individuality through its consummation of the particular, through its sensitive opposition both to the banal and ultimately also to the select. The expression of his poetry may have been condensed into an individual expression which his lyrics saturate with substance and with the experience of its own solitude; but this very lyric talk [Rede] becomes the voice of human beings between whom the barriers have fallen. (NL 1: 54; GS 11: 67–68)

Lyrical language saturated by loneliness expresses not only an extreme individuality; it also talks. Adorno’s essay, tellingly titled “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” concludes with the image of poetry as not merely individual expression, but also as a kind of talking. And only as talk does poetry rise to become something else; only as talk does lyric poetry enact an art of transition and attain a human voice. This is a humanistic pathos rarely found in Adorno. But if one shifts the emphasis slightly from human to voice, one can grasp that, perhaps, the utopian strain that Adorno detects in George’s poetry lies in the qualitative shift from talk to voice. In a recent article on Adorno’s treatment of George, Paul Fleming notes that “George breaks with tradition and uncovers against his will shards of another tradition, that of a failed, utopic language.”28 I would like to emphasize the formulation “against his will:” whatever George achieves he achieves inadvertently, by mistake, by overshooting his goal. Rescuing critique zooms in on those moments where an impossible poetic project suddenly gains an unexpected utopian dimension. George’s uncovering of another, irretrievably lost tradition happens not only against his will, but also despite his own violent attempt to turn everything into history and to petrify that which is transient [das Vergängliche], thus elevating it to a secret of which the poet will become the sole keeper. The success of a rescuing critique must therefore be based on dismantling those aspects that are hopelessly wrong-headed. What is beyond rescue must be criticized without restraint. Adorno’s critique is strongest and most destructive where he turns against George’s politics and poetics of secrecy. In his essay on George and Hofmannsthal, Adorno rejects George’s secrecy by drawing an analogy to Ernst Mach’s empirio-criticism:

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What is given to the senses cannot be held and preserved as secret. To proclaim a secret amounts to covering up an intuitive as well as conceptual void. Adorno argues that it is the very form of George’s poetry that resists its installation into a secret: George’s poetry is constitutively fleeting and ephemeral— recall the semantically superfluous particle “gar.” In order for there to be a secret, one needs a stable, distinct, transmissible message that can be shared by those initiated into the secret. George sought to ward off all transience, and he “is intent on preserving Being from the stream of oblivion on whose banks he erects his works. The esoteric serves as a shield; that which otherwise would elude control is held fast as mystery” (P 193; GS 10.1: 199). The cult of secrecy that characterized George’s circle was not built around something that was actually secret. In the context of secular mass culture, no cultural artifact or its means of production are ever truly exempted from egalitarian accessibility. In George’s circle, secrecy served to keep poetic technique—the very means of poetic production—hidden and exclusive. The circle did not share any secrets other than a certain technical competence—something one is not born with, but something that can be learned.29 Adorno concludes: “The question whether technique as arcanum, treated sacramentally, does not necessarily turn into technical inadequacy, into that routine which vulgar criticism has in mind when it prattles about formalism—this question remains unanswered” (P 193; GS 10.1: 200). These passages on George are more devastatingly critical than the later essays in Adorno’s NL. The reason for this is probably dictated by historical circumstances: Adorno’s first essay on George was written in exile, while the poet’s legacy had been partially appropriated by the Nazis. The two essays in the Notes to Literature respond to a vastly different postwar environment that had largely repressed George and his work, precisely because it posed an awkward reminder of the fatal German complicity of Geist with power and, ultimately, destruction. Still, the lack of elaboration on George’s “will to domination” in the later essays

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compels the reader to return to Adorno’s earlier essay for the most sustained and articulate critique of George offered by Adorno. In “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Adorno is especially keen on underscoring how George’s poetry succeeds by virtue of the quixotism of the as if. Yet he also has a much less optimistic reading of the relationship between George’s poetry and “language in the period of its decay.” To the crisis of language, George reacts with desperate violence. Adorno responds sharply to the violent demeanor with which George proceeds. In the context of a critique of violence, George’s poetic technique turns out to be little more than a means of mortifying language—already suffering from communicative instrumentalization—a second time: [George] strangles words until they can no longer elude him; dead, he feels them safely in his grasp, whereas they are as lost to him as when they were evanescent. Thus George’s heroism turns into its opposite. Its mythical features are diametrically opposed to the heritage in whose name they were appropriated by political apologists. They are features of defiance. ‘It has grown late.’ There is no trace of the archaic in George’s work which is not directly related to this ‘late’ as its contrary. He scrutinizes words, so close and so alien, as though he hoped thus to see them as they were the day they were made. (P 207; GS 10.1: 215–216)

The lateness signaled in the line “Es ist worden spät” is related not only to a hermetic realm that “became fully accessible only long after George’s death” (NL 2: 185; GS 11: 529), but also, as an expression of the poet’s stubborn defiance, to an archaism that is, as it were, beyond rescue. George’s lateness, his melancholy, which Adorno will read in the later essays as the dialectical flipside of utopian hope, would be impossible without the corresponding desire of reverting to an original state of language. However, such desire only corroborates the irretrievable loss of an original, uncorrupted language— hence George’s violent obstinacy. Adorno suggests that George’s linguistic violence is an attempt to approach words “as on the day they were made” (P 207; GS 10.1: 216) by a process or technique of alienation—an alienation that is without redemptive intention. In response to the ambivalence, the perceived “rootlessness” of the world, “George appealed to the unequivocal character of nature” (P 208; GS 10.1: 216). However, such appeal is based on the alienation from nature constitutive of the modern subject: “But this modern nature became equivocal only through its domination by man” (P 208; GS 10.1: 216). George appears to be hopelessly entangled in the allencompassing dialectic of enlightenment. From this perspective, it does not

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appear that there is anything redemptive to say about George’s violent mode of operation. The early essay on George thus reaches an impasse: in comparison to the resourceful, even cunning Hofmannsthal, a true man of letters, George appears not just obstinate, but almost primitive. Adorno is therefore left only with the option of reading George in terms of an inversion from failure to success. This is what happens in the two later essays. There Adorno reevaluates the alienation of George’s language from the perspective of the poet’s Francophone schooling: instead of trying to overcome alienation violently and thereby merely cementing it, George puts everything under the sign of alienation. The alienation of language can be made productive only by treating one’s own language as if it were another language, thus further alienating it, alienating it from alienation, as it were. George’s poetry exaggerates the alienation of the German language to such an extent that alienation infects a German language no longer spoken, perhaps never been spoken at all. The dialectical figure used here is, as often in Adorno, the figure of trosas iasetai: what wounds, heals.30 In other words, George’s poetry can only be redeemed immanently, by reading its violence doubly, as an exaggeration that brings about the inversion of failure to success. The medium of such inversion is poetry as language: George is saved where his lyric poetry fades and language itself appears. But how does this dialectical fiat become possible? Only through the figure of translation. For Adorno, translation is the linguistic other to mere alienation. Adorno’s interest in translation is most clearly, albeit only briefly, articulated in the early essay, while the interpretive rewards of this interest are reaped only in the later essays. Towards the end of his essay on the George-Hofmannsthal correspondence, Adorno notes: “Defiance of society includes defiance of its language” (P 225; GS 10.1: 236). This sentence contains the later reading of the double nature of George’s conservatism. His refus of society takes the form of a refusal of everyday language. Thus, George is forced away from the German language of his time. Rather than taking up writing in French entirely, as he had once planned, George chose to estrange and, thus, change the German language by transforming it through translation, by making it not only look (as in the peculiar typography and punctuation he used), but, more importantly, sound other. In a footnote, Adorno mentions his idea according to which George’s poetry follows an ideal of translation. (Adorno was very fond of this idea. He mentions it in a letter to Benjamin dated 28 May 1936, referring to his work on Berg, in which the same idea is formulated).31 Hence the priority of translation from Rossetti and Baudelaire to George and Borchardt. They all seek to save their own language from the curse

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What could it possibly mean to judge a poem “solely against the ideal of translation?” Apparently, translation, or, rather, the ideal of translation, has normative force. And what is the core of this ideal of translation? Translation must freeze, i.e., ossify the banal everydayness of one’s own language. Adorno sees the beneficial powers of translation not in its ability to refresh and make more vivid one’s own language. Instead, the viewpoint of the foreign language serves as a poison that paralyzes one’s own language. The ideal of translation is based on the power of translation as pharmakon.32 To judge poetry against this ideal means to test whether this poison has cured it of all traces of everyday banality. The less German a German poem is, the better. And George succeeds as a poet because his ear has been exposed sufficiently to the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé to be able to hear German as if it were another language. Translation is thus not to be taken in a strictly literal sense. Although many of George’s actual translations are, as Adorno concedes, superior to his own lyrical productions, translation is, indeed, an ideal. The more a poem sounds like a translation, the stronger the force of déjà entendu, the better. Both Adorno’s account of the ideal of translation and his reading of George (and, one should add, his readings of Borchardt and Eichendorff as well) are based on a priority ceded to the organ of hearing. Poetry must be judged by the ear.33 Adorno sees George’s inestimable merit as a poet in his introducing an entirely new, foreign, i.e., French dimension to German lyric poetry. George helped rectify the widespread misperception of poetry as an immediate, naïve expression of inwardness by immersing himself word by word in the other language. He thus offered evidence that poetry is the result not of inspiration, but of meticulous technical labor. Contrary to his own intention, poetry is less a matter of genius than a matter of skill in responding to language. In George’s poetry, “technical work . . . is almost always work on language as such at the same time” (NL 2: 187; GS 11: 531). The poet matters because he fuses, mediated by the technical work as well as the ideal of translation, particular poetry with language as such. “For George, labeled as a l’art pour l’art artist, not the individual work but language, in and through the work of art, was the highest ideal; he wanted nothing less than to change language” (NL 2: 187; GS 11: 531). Such hubris, Adorno readily admits, cannot help

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doing without serious damage to the work of art. Many of George’s poems are “damaged;” moreover, “George’s genius . . . even sacrificed its own works for the sake of the work of language” (NL 2: 187; GS 11: 531). Translation is thus not only the work of transferring the foreign into one’s own; it also bears the risk of losing, of sacrificing one’s own language. Translation is, as Adorno suggests with an affirmative quotation from George’s introduction to his translation (or, as the poet calls it, Nachdichtung: “poetical re-enactment”) of Baudelaire, not the attempt to introduce a foreign poet, but rather “original pure joy in forming” (quoted in NL 2: 187; GS 11: 531). Translation thus provides the model for the original act of pure poetic form going beyond or before all intellectual and semantic considerations. Moreover, it provides the model for the self-transcendence of lyric poetry: George’s Baudelaire translations did not aim at imitating the original, but rather at creating a paradoxical second original in the image of the first. Such a quixotic feat is possible only through “unlimited self-denial, akin to the erotic” (NL 2: 187–188; GS 11: 531). Adorno’s word for self-denial is the loaded philosophical term Entäußerung [self-relinquishment, self-alienation, exteriorization], whose connotations are theological, economic, legal, Idealist, dialectical. In Adorno’s usage, the word retains strong Hegelian overtones, but with a heavy emphasis on the unsublatable negative aspect of exteriorization as self-effacement. Once again, the model for translation as exteriorization is sexual. But it is an elective affinity—not pure drive—as if the translator George chose the textual body as a sexual body to which to give himself. The thrust of Adorno’s stress on the ideal of translation as the guiding model for all of George’s poetry is, then, to be found in a privileging of language itself: translation counts so much because it is not concerned with imitation or repetition, but, rather, with the expansion of the German language by unrestrained submission to the other language, as when George translates Verlaine’s line “Mon cœur a tant de peine” as “Mein Herz hat solche peinen.” Adorno comments: “That is truly no longer an imitation. By using the loan word peinen [rather than the customary Schmerzen] for peine George has, as Benjamin demanded that the translator do, extended his own language through the other” (NL 2: 188; GS 11: 532). If the function of Adorno’s heavy emphasis on translation is to shift the focus from George’s lyrical production proper to his translations and, ultimately, his effort to renew language as such, then it appears perhaps less surprising that Adorno’s sustained dealings with George begin and end not with his lyric poetry but his prose poems. Adorno’s first essay on George treated the poet’s small collection of prose pieces called Days and Deeds [Tage und Taten (1903)] (echoing Hesiod’s Works

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and Days). Unfortunately, no copies of this essay, to which Adorno ascribed great importance, have survived. Adorno’s last essay on George, published in the last volume of NL, implicitly refers to this first essay; it ends with several citations from Days and Deeds, suggesting that if Adorno’s imaginary selection of George’s poems had ever materialized, it would have concluded with various prose poems. Adorno indicates that these prose pieces articulate “George’s Rätselgestalt.” Whereas he invests considerable energy in critiquing, defending, and elucidating George’s lyric poetry, he falls silent in face of these “obscure” prose poems, “dream protocols given poetic form.”34 Not only do they sound like citations, they are, in Adorno’s essay, nothing but citations. It is as if there were a taboo on interpreting these passages; of the last one, titled “The Talking Head,” Adorno remarks: “No one will be able to make a definitive statement about George until this enigma is resolved” (NL 2: 192; GS 11: 535). The last word on George must wait until his Rätselgestalt has been interpreted. This can happen, however, only if the essayist turns his attention away from the poetry to focus on George’s prose, the most marginal aspect of his oeuvre. This surprising turn of argument recalls, no doubt, Walter Benjamin’s dissertation on “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” [“Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik” (1920)], in which he quotes from a letter by Novalis to Friedrich Schlegel: “If poetry wishes to extend itself, it can do so only by limiting itself, by contracting itself, by abandoning its caloric matter and congealing. It will acquire a prosaic look . . .” (quoted in WB SW 1: 174; WB GS 1.1: 101). According to Benjamin, “prose may be called the idea of poetry” because it is closer to philosophy, to reflection: “The reflective medium of poetic forms appears in prose” (WB SW 1: 174; WB GS 1.1: 102) It is possible that Adorno shifts his attention from George’s famous lyric to his more unfamiliar prose in mimicking the Romantic move toward the prosaic reflection of poetry, thereby suggesting a more direct kinship between Jena Romanticism and George’s neoromanticism than the latter would have admitted. Benjamin himself saw “the idea of poetry as that of prose” reflected not only in Friedrich Hölderlin’s notion of the sobriety of art (see WB SW 1: 175; WB GS 1.1: 103)—Benjamin knew Hölderlin’s works primarily through the pioneering philological efforts of Norbert von Hellingrath, a member of George’s circle—but also in “the philosophical foundations” of “French Romanticism . . . and German neoromanticism” (WB SW 1: 175, WB GS 1.1: 103). One could add that similar speculations on prose as the idea of poetry constitute part of Adorno’s own philosophical foundations. In discussing Hölderlin’s free-form late hymns in his essay “Parataxis,” Adorno states rather enigmatically, echoing Benjamin: “Pure language, the idea of which they configure, would be prose, like sacred

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texts” (NL 2: 130; GS 11: 470). Since Adorno calls pure language an idea configured by poetry, he is alluding to a form of prose that is not there as such, but is signified by poetry only in an indirect manner, structured like an essayistic configuration or constellation. In a similar vein, Adorno does not read George’s dream protocols as the prosaic overcoming of poetry—prose is not the telos of poetry. Perhaps pure language would be prose; but George’s prose is impure, a proto-Surrealist constellation of myth and modernity, a Dionysian vision of decline. Here is the piece called “Der Redende Kopf ” [“The Talking Head”], as quoted by Adorno: I had been given a clay mask and hung it on the wall of my room. I invited my friends to see how I had gotten the head to speak. I commanded it audibly to say the name of the person I pointed to and when it was silent I tried to force its lips open with my finger. It made a face and bit my finger. I repeated the command loudly and with the utmost intensity, pointing to a different person. Then it said the name. We all left the room horrified and I knew I would never enter it again.35

Adorno only supplies a scant commentary: “The force that compels . . . to speak again, its victory, and the immeasurable horror this victory, as a selfdestructive one, arouses—that is the enigmatic figure of George” (NL 2: 192; GS 11: 535). Adorno seems to suggest that George himself provides in this prose piece an insight into the structure of the enigma or riddle [Rätsel] that characterizes his oeuvre. George’s language is given to violence, it is not pure language—although “at times . . . language really speaks from George, as if for the last time” (NL 2: 185; GS 11: 529)—but language that has been excessively forced, coerced. Thus all of George’s works are shot through with “immeasurable horror.” Horror, because in the prose poem “The Talking Head” even the most “pure,” most “giving” linguistic act—the uttering of the name—is enforced, an act of violence. George’s dream suggests that this triumph through sheer force will remain the last one: the room that houses the talking head is from now on off-limits. The enigma is, then, how George, who is so profoundly a relict of a time gone by, can still have any significance today. In the end, Adorno suggests, this riddle remains to be solved. And its solution is to be found not in lyric poetry but in prose. Perhaps the most puzzling suggestion as to where a future reading of “The Talking Head” should go is given by Adorno himself. In the last footnote to his essay “The Schema of Mass Culture,” Adorno suggest that George’s prose writings are the only texts in his oeuvre that allow insight into the workings of technical civilization, the experience of which is registered as “the utmost horror.”

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Adorno quotes the complete prose piece and comments mysteriously: “This is the prophecy of sound-film.”36

Chapter Five

The Wound: Heine

Like for like! —Nietzsche1

Adorno’s thinking is structured by inversions.2 One example is this comment on Stefan George from his “Speech on Lyric Poetry and Society:” George “overcomes [language’s] alienation, which is an alienation of use, by intensifying it until it becomes the alienation of a language no longer actually spoken, even an imaginary language, and in that imaginary language he perceives what would be possible in its composition [Zusammensetzung], but never took place” (NL 1: 52–53; GS 11: 66). Adorno’s inversions turn up within the syntactic frame of audacious (and well-nigh untranslatable) hypotactic constructions such as this one. The inversion is also an exaggeration, for it includes as its decisive mechanism an “excessive intensification” or “outdoing.” George’s language “outdoes” [übersteigert] its alienation. What is at first mere alienation is inverted, by virtue of exaggeration,3 into a qualitatively new degree of alienation that now suddenly allows for insight into something obsolete, even something imaginary. The impossibility connoted by mere alienation is thus inverted into a new form of possibility, and the inversion leads from an initial state of alienated distance to a new, otherwise unavailable form of (literary) knowledge. The inversion seems to signal nothing less than a fortunate reversal, indeed, a reversal of fortune. Hence, it appears almost as a deus ex machina: welcomed by the reader/spectator, but certainly not entirely unexpected. Adorno’s play of inversion works because we know that it is precisely such a play of inversion, nothing more, nothing less. One would certainly belittle the stakes of Adorno’s critical project, however, if one reduced the role of inversions to a well-rehearsed ritual, pitting the author’s rhetorical skill against the reader’s expectations and 115

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anticipations. As I tried to show in the preceding chapter, there are certain limits on the redemptive capacity of inversion, even in the case of George, who seems to benefit most emphatically from Adorno’s excessive inversions. Inversion is not simply the master figure of a redemptive literary historical exercise. If one contrasts Adorno’s arguments on George with his arguments on Heinrich Heine,4 one notices how the structure of inversion stretches over larger contexts as well. At times, there is an almost symmetrical opposition between what Adorno writes on George and what he writes on Heine. George, then, appears as the reverse image of Heine; by implication, their historical relation is one that can be understood only as a discontinuous line, structured by inversions. Adorno observes about George’s oeuvre that it has been almost completely repressed in the decades since the poet’s death. In the case of Heine, no repression of the work is at stake—unlike George, he continues to be one of the most popular German authors, his place in the canon firmly secured—but rather the relation of this work to the German cultural tradition as a whole. This relation has been repressed because it is—to use a psychoanalytic term—traumatic. One is compelled to address Heine as a wound: “Anyone who wants to make a serious contribution to remembering Heine on the centennial of his death and not merely deliver a formal speech will have to speak about a wound: about what in Heine and his relationship to the German tradition causes us pain and what has been repressed, especially in Germany since the Second World War” (NL 1: 80; GS 11: 95). The relation between Heine’s oeuvre and the German tradition has been wounded by repression; it has never had an opportunity to be worked through. In this sense, Heine, like George, is ripe for redemption, but in a far more circuitous manner. One cannot help noticing that the structure of symmetrical opposition between George and Heine is anything but innocent. For one thing, the George circle’s rejection of Heine contributed, as Adorno recognizes, to the general disrepute into which Heine fell around 1900—and which, as Adorno suggests, continued into the 1950s. Adorno adds, however, that Heine’s condemnation by Karl Kraus weighed more heavily than Friedrich Gundolf ’s. Moreover, the opposition between George and Heine is—and this is probably the first aspect that comes to mind—political. If one thinks of an aestheticist, elitist, exclusionary, and secretive poet, the name George comes immediately to mind. Heine, on the other hand, has been perceived as a poet who always wore his sentiments on his sleeve, knew little restraint, enjoyed his large popular success, subscribed to antiauthoritarian, sometimes socialist, politics, and was certainly not one to inspire the formation of an

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exclusive circle. Even today, Heine, although certainly more canonical than George, remains the emblem of the poet as émigré and outcast—a misfit. Thus, to put it very schematically, he would naturally elicit leftist sympathies, while George has been perceived primarily as an authoritarian and conservative author. The list of symmetrical oppositions put into play in Adorno’s essay “Heine the Wound,” however, can be extended beyond these all too obvious political oppositions: 1.) In his rereading of George’s poetry, Adorno observes that much in it remains “unwilted,” fresh, despite the “stigmata” he also detects in it (NL 2: 184; GS 11: 528). More problematic, however, is George’s sparse prose production, for in it the violence that turns out to be fruitful in the poetry reigns as unmitigated, self-destructive horror. Heine’s rich, courageous, and uncompromising prose production, on the other hand, is undoubtedly of the highest rank, Adorno declares, while his poetry “is the wound” (NL 1: 81; GS 11: 96). In George, prose is a marginal phenomenon, and is thus worthy of more extensive critical consideration. Adorno praises Heine’s prose in the highest tones, but only in passing. It has proven to be beyond reproach and does not require the attention of redemptive criticism 2.) Heine’s lyric poetry is “the wound” because it is predicated on the false idea of a lyric immediacy of experience. It is, as it were, oblivious to the traumatic structure of the modern experience, which can be translated into poetry only by an act of violence: by forcefully transfiguring the “loss of all images, transforming that loss itself into an image” (NL 1: 82; GS 11: 97), as Baudelaire did. In contrast to Baudelaire and his translator George, Heine appears to lack the force necessary to resist the growing onslaught of the capitalist mode of production; he all too readily surrenders. (Ironically, it is precisely this ability to surrender that Adorno views as the highest lyrical achievement in Eichendorff, Borchardt, and Hölderlin.) 3.) The opposition between Heine and George is perhaps most poignantly formulated in Adorno’s presentation of their differing relations to language. George distances his language ascetically from the language of commerce and exchange; this distance includes distance from the self. In order to resist linguistic reification, the subject must fall silent about itself, thus making “itself a vessel . . . for the idea of a pure language” (NL 1: 52; GS 11: 66). This is possible only if the subject resists all temptation “to withdraw into what is its own as though that were its property” (NL 1: 52; GS 11: 66). In Heine’s case, such withdrawal into a proper self [das Eigene] understood as property [das Eigentum] is impossible from the outset, because Heine, the Jewish pariah and schlemiel (as Hannah Arendt calls him) yearning for recognition and assimilation,5 is, by definition, barred from having a proper

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self. Here, Adorno turns the failure of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Germany into a potentially very pernicious argument: Heine is defined as someone who, by virtue of his Jewish birth, essentially stands outside of German society and language, and it is this experience of being excluded that makes his poetic mastery, his ability to “manipulate [language] like an instrument” (NL 1: 83; GS 11: 98) possible. Whereas George overcomes the alienation of language through a further alienation by virtue of translation, by, as it were, estranging the estranged German language, Heine simply perpetuates the commercial and communicative alienation of language, remaining forever—and here Adorno subtly shifts his argument from the German language to a universal idea of language—outside of language as such. These three points of comparison show how a logic of inversion is at work not only within the essays, but also between them: the essays on Heine and George are related to one another by macrostructural correspondence. In what follows, I will pursue further the logic of inversion at work in “Die Wunde Heine,” showing how the notion of “wound” affects the logic of inversion in a peculiar manner, different from the usage of the same figure in the essays on George. The idea of woundedness serves as the leitmotif in Adorno’s text on Heine, originally a radio essay commemorating the centennial of the poet’s death in 1956. Heine is the mark of something sore, “bleeding,” “embarrassing,” “guilt-laden” (NL 1: 80; GS 11: 95) in the German cultural tradition (Heine’s significance exceeds the realm of the literary). Today, Adorno claims, Heine still evokes shame.6 Moreover, though, Adorno’s essay is itself an embarrassment, for it makes ample use of exactly the same stereotypes that turned Heine into a problem in the first place. And since these stereotypes are, at least by the logic of inversion, linked to the notions of language and (literary) history at work elsewhere in Adorno’s NL, they can shed new light on some of the underlying assumptions and concerns driving Adorno’s literary essays. What, then, are these stereotypes, how does he use them, and why does he use them? Adorno’s main critique of Heine hinges on a concept of the lyric as the paradigm of modernity.7 The notion of poetry that provides the charges of which Heine is indicted and convicted is directly linked to Adorno’s Marxist understanding of modernity as industrialization and reification of all spheres of life. In his criticism of Heine the lyric poet, Adorno dispenses with his often cited principle of immanent critique. Instead, the lyric is shown to be, in a rather mechanical sociological sense, determined by the economic base structure. The critique launched against Heine relies on the familiar cliché of language falling victim to commodity and exchange: “In Heine commodity

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and exchange seized control of sound and tone, whose very essence [Wesen] had previously consisted in the hustle and bustle of the negation of daily life” (NL 1: 82; GS 11: 97). Echoing Karl Kraus, Adorno implies that the sound of language has, or rather, had an essence. The essence of sound was to negate commerce, business, and busyness [Treiben]—until Heine’s poetry cut down the distance that separated poetic language from the realm of commodity and exchange. In this starkly overdrawn description (more a caricature than an analysis), lyric poetry becomes the paradigm of modernity because it is traditionally seen as the most purely aesthetic of all literary forms, and its historicization, i.e., its “contamination” with external criteria, demonstrates negatively just how forceful and unavoidable the dynamic of commodification had become by the early to mid-nineteenth century. Although traditionally defined as the aesthetically most autonomous of all literary genres because it is arguably least bound to demands of mimetic representation, poetry cannot help being part of this suddenly dizzyingly accelerated history. But it can find different means of response: So great had the power of a mature capitalist society become at that time that lyric poetry could no longer ignore it without descending into provincial folksiness. In this respect, Heine, like Baudelaire, looms large in the modernism of the nineteenth century. But Baudelaire, the younger of the two, heroically wrests dream and image from modernity itself, from the experience of implacable destruction and dissolution, which by then was further advanced. . . . The forces of this kind of resistance increased along with those of capitalism. (NL 1: 83; GS 11: 97)

While Heine fails to resist the powers of modernity, whereas Baudelaire does not, this failure alone cannot sufficiently explain “the wound.” To be certain, Heine appears here as the victim of an overwhelming historical force; the disenfranchised stepchild of German Romanticism, he has not been exposed to the forces of destruction and dissolution as fully as Baudelaire. Thus, his capacity to resist is less strongly developed, and he falls victim to the dynamics of modernity without quite becoming a modern lyric poet himself. Yet, as a true figure of transition, he also does not remain a Romantic lyric poet; for his language has been violated and confiscated, as it were, by the form of commodity exchange. Adorno’s critique of Heine’s poems as too glib, too “fungible,” deviated little from the often disapproving West German reception of Heine in the 1950s. In his Streitobjekt Heine: Ein Forschungsbericht, Jost Hermand points out that the undisputed majority of German literary scholars in the

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early1950s viewed Heine as a poet lacking in lyrical profundity. Walther Killy, for example, criticized Heine’s verbal fluency [Sprachgeläufigkeit] and “therefore acceded to Heine only a middle position between classicism and kitsch.”8 Adorno adopts the conservative judgment on Heine’s verbal fluency but gives different reasons. Instead of simply reversing the conservative view of Heine by declaring his perceived weaknesses to be genuinely modernist traits, Adorno sees Heine as a poet of transition who is no longer Romantic but not yet modern.9 His notion of Heine as a poet is cast in completely negative terms. With Heine, poetic language cannot be understood with the tools of formalist poetics or aesthetics. His poetic language is no longer formally or functionally different from everyday language, and aesthetic categories therefore do not suffice to describe it. In Adorno’s view, this loss of differentiation is not a modern achievement worthy of celebration. Instead, he chooses to lament it as a loss; for only a loss can at least hold the promise of a lyrical achievement regained. One can say, then, that Adorno’s appraisals of poets such as Mörike, Eichendorff, Borchardt, or George benefit from his redemptive historico-philosophical perspective precisely because they are anachronistic late-comers who hold onto an already obsolete poetic tradition. The same perspective makes Heine appear as a poet who is too much in tune with the technological and economic progress of history. Heine is a wound because he is too thoroughly historical, too timely: “[Heine] surrendered more willingly [than Baudelaire] to the flow of things; he took a poetic technique of reproduction, as it were, that corresponded to the industrial age and applied it to the conventional Romantic archetypes, but he did not find archetypes of modernity” (NL 1: 82; GS 11: 97). Heine takes from modernity the industrial technique of reproduction, but he applies this technique only to the obsolete images of Romanticism. There is a contradiction between Heine’s sujets and his technique: Heine’s archetypes are romantic, but his language is modern. Adorno does not criticize this contradiction so much as Heine’s failure to express the contradiction as contradiction. Referring to Baudelaire, Adorno defines modernity as a “loss of images.” Unlike Baudelaire, Heine does not find “archetypes of modernity.” Adorno plays Heine off against Baudelaire:10 the former lacks the heroism characteristic of the younger poet. Baudelaire’s poetry is one of transfiguration; Adorno’s reference to Baudelaire’s “resistance” hints at the notion of a poetic language that is modern because it is at odds with its time. Heine’s language, on the other hand, lacks the transfigurative function of Baudelaire’s.11 The credit that Adorno gives Baudelaire’s but not Heine’s language rests on the idea of poetic modernism as the articulation of an indissoluble paradox or aporia.

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An example for this notion is the following passage on Eduard Mörike, a contemporary of Heine’s: [Mörike] already shares in the paradox of lyric poetry in the ascending industrial age. As indeterminate and fragile as his solutions are the solutions of all great lyric poets who come afterwards, even those who seem to be separated from him by an abyss—like Baudelaire, of whom Claudel said that his style was a mixture of Racine’s and that of the journalists of his time. In industrial society the lyric idea of a self-restoring immediacy becomes—where it does not impotently evoke a romantic past—more and more something that flashes out abruptly, something in which what is possible transcends its own impossibility. (NL 1: 50; GS 11: 63–64)

If lyric immediacy—and Heine’s lyric immediacy was, as Adorno remarks, at one time “enchanting”—has become impossible and can transcend its own impossibility only as a momentary “flare-up,” then Adorno’s verdict on Heine follows directly from this thought: Since Heine had a poetic response to everything, since his poetry stood exclusively under the sign of subjective possibility in the face of growing objective impossibility, and since it appeared to be unreflectively spontaneous (“Heine’s poems were prompt mediators between art and an everyday life bereft of meaning” [NL 1: 81; GS 11: 96]), there is something disconcertingly light and easy about Heine’s entire lyrical oeuvre—especially the earlier, commercially successful poems (Adorno appears to ignore Heine’s later lyrical works). Because Heine’s poetry can appear as if detached from the “ascending industrial age” and so smoothly in line with a clichéd idea of popular Romanticism, it must somehow be complicit with the very forces it pretends to abjure. It is, in Karl Kraus’s verdict, popular kitsch, giving rise to a ridiculous, petty-bourgeois cult of sentimentality, and, according to Adorno’s verdict, it is an early incarnation of the culture industry. To Adorno, Heine is the first poet who successfully incorporates means of mechanical, industrial reproduction. It is, of course, the mass market appeal that helped Heine attain an immense popularity that not even the Nazis could suppress. Yet even the fascist enmity does not, for Adorno, absolve Heine of his guilt. But of what precisely is he guilty? Can the poetic shortcomings on which Adorno puts his finger be equated with guilt? What is the source of Heine’s “own guilt” that Adorno evokes so ominously? The question is not pertinent and vexing only because Adorno considers Heine guilty. It is also pertinent because Adorno, in an earlier American lecture on Heine, did not use the word “guilt” expressis verbis.

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Instead, he offered a much more cautious and balanced understanding of Heine.12 What is at stake in Adorno’s “Heine the Wound” is less the argument presented—because it is much weaker than the more nuanced arguments Adorno presented to his American academic audience in 1949—but, rather, the framing of the argument. It can be examined by looking at Adorno’s references to his main witness, Karl Kraus. Adorno refers to Heine’s guilt in connection with Karl Kraus’s verdict, which “cannot be erased” (NL 1: 80; GS 11: 95). What is the essence of Kraus’s verdict? What is the accusation on which it is based? Kraus repeatedly and notoriously polemized against Heine for corrupting German style and, by extension, the German language itself through the introduction of a journalistic style adopted from the French feuilleton.13 The unspoken assumption is, then, that the culture of mass consumption is something originally foreign to German culture, a corrupting import from the left side of the Rhine. This absurd but hardly unusual paranoid fantasy is clothed in the language of sexual disease and moral corruption, as the following well-known sentences from Kraus’s polemical essay “Heine und die Folgen” [“Heine and the Consequences” (1910)] show: “Without Heine no feuilleton. That is the French disease that he has introduced to us. How easily one falls ill in Paris! How the morality of the German feeling for language is becoming lax!”14 The German language is presented not only as possessing an intrinsically higher—although nonetheless corruptible—morality than French; German is also a matter of the right feeling of language: “Sprachgefühl.” And the clichéd assumption is, of course, that the market destroys all genuine feeling and turns it into a commodity. Hence, the French language is gendered as an amoral woman, as a prostitute, who offers popular pleasures at a price: syphilis. Kraus stigmatizes Heine as a contagious wound that threatens to spread its disease to the innocent, pure body of the German language. It will thus be the task of Kraus as judge and policeman to contain the danger posed by Heine. The Parisian poet, Kraus suggests repeatedly, has the corruptible morality of a prostitute—a character deficiency that is akin, in Kraus’s sexist personification, to the very deficiency that distinguishes French, the language of the feuilleton, from German, the language of Goethe and Schiller. The French language “abandons herself [language is feminine in German] to every filou. The German language requires that someone be a real man in order to get her into bed, and then she gives him hell. With the French language, however, everything goes smoothly, with that perfect lack of inhibition that is the perfection of a woman but the lack of a language.”15 Using a polemical attack not entirely unlike Heine’s own prose, Kraus’s suggests that

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Heine was not man enough to overcome the resistance posed by the resilient, incorruptible, but also, as Kraus’s witty phrase “she gives him hell” implies, tyrannical character of the German language. Because the French language is so easily appropriated, it provides the example for a completely feminine language that can be utilized easily and seemingly at will: “Heine has turned the miracle of linguistic creation into a magic trick. He has created the highest that can be created with language; still higher is that which is created from language [my italics].”16 Kraus’s rejection of Heine uses, as scholars like Paul Peters and others have shown exhaustively, imagery and clichés borrowed from the virulently anti-Semitic anti-Heine tradition that reached its sorry climax with the burnings of Heine’s books in 1933 (it is not necessary to recall these stereotypes here).17 In 1956, when Adorno gave his speech on Heine, the injuries inflicted by this tradition were still very recent, and the poet remained a highly controversial figure, especially in the West. Why would Adorno find it necessary to grant Kraus’s harsh polemics such a prominent place? For one, in acknowledging Kraus’s verdict, Adorno concedes the continued force of the anti-Heine tradition; to deny it would have been a historically naïve attempt at white-washing. Moreover, from the point of view of intellectual history, one may recall that Kraus’s Vienna lectures left their imprint on a whole generation of intellectuals who often would not even touch a book the master had condemned.18 By condemning Heine, Kraus had caused a large number of intellectuals to ignore Heine at best, or, at worst, also condemn him.19 Yet the emphasis on Kraus’s polemic as a verdict introduces a juridical vocabulary whose aim is, perhaps, to suppress the anti-Semitic overtones of Kraus’s text. If tradition is a matter that can be negotiated in a quasi-juridical manner, then it may be possible to neutralize the anti-Semitic sting. But why would this be desirable? Why does Adorno not point out the anti-Semitic reception the poet received in Germany over the decades? It seems that Adorno wants to retain Kraus’s verdict to some extent. By calling it a verdict—not a vicious attack fueled by a tradition of rejecting Heine as a corruptor of language—Adorno grants it some validity. On what aspect of Kraus’s judgment could such validity be based? At the very least, one could say, Adorno’s argument concerning Heine does not challenge Kraus’s contention that Heine was a master at using language as an instrument to produce popular poetry, but was incapable of creating anything out of language as such. Adorno similarly suggests that Heine’s virtuoso use of language is due to the fact that German was in a sense a foreign language for him. What Adorno shares with Kraus, then, is a stereotypical image of Heine as a poet not at home in the German language

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because he grew up in a Jewish household where no “pure” German was spoken (Heine’s mother spoke Yiddish). Thus, Adorno’s discourse resonates with overtones coded as anti-Semitic.20 Since, from the perspective of anti-Semitic prejudice, the Jewish poet is seen an outsider to German culture by nature, or, to use Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s term, by race,21 his writing in the German language must amount to an external appropriation of it. While such prejudice is not entirely unrelated to later theoretical notions such as the idea of a deterritorialized, minor literature developed by Guattari and Deleuze,22 it reaches a destructive extreme in Kraus’s discourse. The only redeeming aspect of Kraus’s attacks on Heine is their exaggerated, often comically alarmist nature. Just as Heine’s poetry often performs an eloquent parody of the cult of feeling and longing cultivated in German Romanticism, so Kraus’s polemics perform a (probably unintentional) parody of the anti-Semitic anti-Heine tradition typical of the age of increasingly violent German nationalism. By blatantly exaggerating his attacks, Kraus undermines the validity of his criticism: what he says about Heine reveals itself as inherently prejudiced and obstinate. The effect of this parodistic dimension of Kraus’s criticism is thus a weakening of the text and a strengthening of its author. If the textual evidence and the arguments provided lack authority and persuasive power, the only authority remaining must be located in the author himself. It is, perhaps, the defining paradox of Kraus’s literary charisma and impact that it was founded not on the correctness of the argument but on the zeal with which it was pursued and on the persuasiveness with which it was presented. Kraus’s authority, then, does not result from his being right about something, but exclusively from the unmatched prosecutorial obsession with which he pursues perceived crimes against language. In an essay from 1931, Walter Benjamin analyzed Kraus’s authority as the grim determination to remain true to itself, no matter whether the arguments put forth are right or wrong. Karl Kraus’s authority, one may say, draws the objective force that fascinated so many from the phantasmagoria of absolute subjectivity. For this reason, authority must be distinguished from opinion, which is determined by the abstract logic of an exchange of argument that disfigures its source and becomes assimilated—as mere fungible object or commodity—to the sphere of impersonal circulation. Opinion is false subjectivity that can be separated from the person and incorporated into the circulation of commodities. Kraus has never offered an authority that did not engage his whole person. . . . [His] is the language of true authority. Insight into its operations can reveal only one thing: that it is binding, mercilessly binding, toward itself in

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the same degree as toward others . . . that it never does enough to satisfy itself, to fulfill its responsibility toward itself; and that this sense of responsibility never allows him to accept an argument derived from his private constitution or even from the limits of human capacity, but always only from the matter at hand, however unjust it may be from a private point of view. (WB SW 2: 439; WB GS 2.1: 343)

This passage underscores the paradoxical structure of Kraus’s authority: the less Kraus is right, the more this strengthens his authority. “His existence demands that at most the self-righteousness [Rechthaberei] of others is opposed to his wrongness, and how right he then is to cling to this” (WB SW 2: 439; WB GS 2.1: 343). Kraus draws his authority solely from his confrontational, negative relation to the objects of his judgments, regardless of whether his judgments are just or unjust. Being wrong about something does not diminish the authority of the critic, as Kraus himself asserts in one of his aphorisms in Pro domo et mundo (1919): “Many will be right one day. But it will be rightness resulting from my wrongness today” (quoted in WB SW 2: 439; WB GS 2.1: 343). The authority of Kraus’s judgment does not depend so much on what he said about Heine, but rather on the simple fact that he said it. The figure of Kraus himself has formed a literary-critical tradition so powerful that it cannot be denied. What counts for Adorno, too, is less the content of Kraus’s verdict, but rather the verdict as such: that Kraus condemned and defamed Heine is what causes the wound to remain unhealed. The entire complicated and shameful history of Heine’s reception in Germany, his success and his rejection, finds its culmination and definition in Kraus’s verdict. It cannot be understood as the mere outcome of Heine’s troubled reception. Rather, Kraus’s verdict is the essence of Heine’s reception. Consequently, Adorno states that since Kraus’s verdict “Heine’s aura has been painful and guilt-laden, as though it were bleeding” (NL 1: 80; GS 11: 95). If Heine the wound is still bleeding because of Kraus’s condemnation, then, to follow Adorno’s frequent use of the notion of language and knowledge as pharmakon (or, in an arcane Greek phrase that he uses in ND, trosas iasetai [what wounds, heals]), only the hurtful power of Kraus’s verdict can close the bleeding wound.23 If the anti-Heine tradition finds its definition in the irreplaceable authority of Kraus’s judgment, then the verdict on Heine can be repealed only if one remains mindful of that judgment. One cannot fail to take it most seriously, no matter how ridiculous and prejudice-ridden its content appears to be. Adorno, therefore, cannot manage without Kraus’s verdict. It must be repeated, and the best one can do is to shift the focus on Heine just slightly, to shed a different light on

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the verdict that will, ultimately, help overcome it. The only hope for healing a painful, injurious, wounding tradition is to attend closely to its wounds and to the agents that caused them. I would claim, then, that Adorno does not simply fall victim to a discourse he cannot control, as Hohendahl suggests. Rather, Adorno shows—perhaps unintentionally—that one cannot not fall victim to an uncontrollable discourse when one talks about Heine, for Heine serves as a case study in how to deal with tradition immanently. Unlike Kraus, Adorno does not launch his criticism from a position of absolute subjectivity. Rather, his approach operates from within the dominant discourse on Heine in order to reveal its mechanism and to attempt to unhinge it from within. To put this in starker terms: with Heine, the entire German tradition (as well as the critique thereof ) is on trial. For that reason, Adorno locates the wound in Heine’s relation to the German tradition. One must, he says, speak of a wound. In “Towards a Reappraisal of Heine,” Adorno proposes the following method of speaking about Heine: “The ultimate aim should be . . . to save those aspects of Heine which lay him open to attack and which are identical with the trauma represented by Heine throughout the history of the modern mind” (GS 20.1: 450). While this sentence already hints at a dialectical inversion that promises to save Heine, it also cements the idea of Heine’s representing a trauma. In the later essay, Adorno, with one significant exception, substitutes the German word Wunde for the Greek trauma; this substitution is more than merely a terminological detail, because it allows Adorno to keep the discourse of psychoanalysis under wraps.24 Adorno’s insistence on wound instead of trauma suggests, perhaps, that his terminology provides a counterweight to the danger of being “caught up in conflicting discourses that [Adorno] is unable to control.”25 If Kraus is the prosecutor of Heine and of the literary modernism and commercialism symbolized by the poet (or “journalist,” as Kraus calls him condescendingly), this quasi-legal trial enacted in Viennese auditoriums and in Kraus’s periodical Die Fackel [The Torch] is not an entirely unambiguous affair. In his essay on Kraus, Benjamin repeatedly refers to the demonic ambiguity he sees embodied in Kraus.26 In an earlier short piece on Kraus, he refers to Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas,” a story about a merciless and violent personal quest for justice: “[Kraus] provides an unprecedented, ambiguous, genuinely demonic spectacle of the accuser eternally calling for justice, the public prosecutor who becomes a Michael Kohlhaas because no justice can satisfy his accusation and none of his accusations can satisfy him” (WB SW 2: 194; WB GS 2.2: 625). Kraus viewed language as taking place exclusively “within the sphere of law” (WB SW 2: 443; WB GS

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2.1: 349), and in doing so resembles a modern-day Michael Kohlhaas who tirelessly puts public language on trial: “It is to misunderstand his theory of language to see it as other than a contribution to the linguistic rules of court [Sprachprozeßordnung], the word of someone else in his mouth as other than a corpus delicti, and his own as other than a judging word” (WB SW 2: 443; WB GS 2.1: 349). In Benjamin’s view, however, Kraus does more than sit in judgment of language rendered guilty through journalistic abuse. Judging language is not only a matter of law, but, more importantly, a matter of justice; ultimately, Benjamin claims, Kraus judges language only for the sake of a justice that transcends the demonic, ambiguous realm of law. Benjamin identifies this desire for a transcendent justice with Kraus’s Jewishness: “To worship the image of divine justice in language—even in the German language—this is the genuinely Jewish salto mortale by which he tries to break the spell of the demon. For this is the last official act of this zealot; to place the legal system itself under accusation” (WB SW 2: 443–444; WB GS 2.1: 349). Kraus’s zealous prosecution of misuses of language—which does not stop at the smallest misplaced or missing punctuation mark—not only proceeds like a legal trial; it also turns against the institution of law itself. The persecution of the legal system itself rests on a peculiar salto mortale, namely Kraus’s rather serious—and, as Benjamin specifies: Jewish—attempt to locate the image of divine justice not only in language, but, more concretely, in the German language.27 But Kraus’s work does not have justice as its goal or ideal. Not justice but its destructive power, if not destruction itself, is ultimately at stake in Kraus. In contradistinction to Nietzsche’s notion of the “overman” [Übermensch], Benjamin concludes with a characterization of the “inhuman human” [Unmensch] as Kraus’s true ideal. In a pathos-laden tone, Benjamin portrays Kraus as a destructive “monster, a new angel” (WB SW 2: 457; WB GS 2.1: 367); Kraus’s humanity, he claims, “proves itself by destruction. Justice, therefore, is destructive in opposing the constructive ambiguities of law, and Kraus destructively did justice to his own work” (WB SW 2: 456; WB GS 2.1: 367). Benjamin’s judgment on Kraus remains ambiguous. If it is through destruction that Kraus does justice to his own work, does this justice extend to the works Kraus puts on trial? According to Benjamin’s logic of a selfdestructive sphere of law, the answer must be no. The image of justice in Kraus’s work—cast by Benjamin in the image of the destructive “Angelus Novus” famously depicted by Paul Klee—comes at a high price: the virtual destruction of the helpless defendant. Heine has not only been injured by Kraus’s guilty verdict, he has been turned into an open wound. Implied in

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Benjamin’s essay on Kraus is the suggestion that this wound is not confined to Heine alone: rather, the wounding includes the one who has struck it. One cannot speak of “Heine the wound” without also speaking of “Kraus the wound.” Adorno himself seems to suggest as much. In a long review-essay on Kraus’s Morals and Criminality [Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität], which had been reissued in 1964 as part of Kraus’s collected works, Adorno followed in Benjamin’s footsteps in emphasizing the juridical aspect of Kraus’s criticism. This aspect is not restricted to Kraus’s writings on matters of law and morality, although Adorno simply adopts Kraus’s pair Morals and Criminality as the title for his own essay. Like Benjamin, Adorno stresses the close dialectical relation between destruction and justice. However, Adorno’s terminology is less theologically inflected than Benjamin’s (despite words such as “das Böse” [evil] and “die Unschuld” [innocence]), and is directed more at an immanent, almost mimetic understanding of Kraus’s discourse. Yet despite Adorno’s more secular appraisal of Kraus, he cannot resist referring to Kraus’s Judaism: [Kraus] was guided by the profound, if unconscious, insight that when they are no longer rationalized, evil and destructiveness stop being wholly bad and may attain something like a second innocence through self-knowledge. Kraus’s morality is disputatiousness [Rechthaberei] carried to the point at which it becomes an attack on law itself, the lawyer’s gesture that makes the lawyer’s word choke in his throat. Kraus incorporates juristic thought so rigorously into his casuistry that the injustice of the law becomes visible in the process; the legacy of the persecuted and litigious Jews has become sublimated in him in this form, and through this sublimation the disputatiousness has broken through its walls at the same time. Kraus is a Shylock who pours forth his own heart’s blood, where Shakespeare’s Shylock wanted to cut the guarantor’s heart out. (NL 2: 43–44; GS 11: 371)

In Kraus’s hands, law turns against the prosecutor, turns against itself: law destroys itself. Much like Benjamin, Adorno describes Kraus as a self-destructive character. More than Benjamin, Adorno stresses the parodistic dimension of Kraus’s juristic discourse. In Kraus, guilt and innocence are not so much subject to a legal verdict as to a verdict of excessive opinionatedness and cantankerousness. He sees in Kraus the desire to always be right, to always be in the right. A lawyer who is dogmatic and imperious is a bad lawyer, who will ultimately carry the idea of law ad absurdum. By overemphasizing the desire

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to be right, Kraus’s “lawyerly” gesture makes visible the injustice inherent in the law.28 Unlike Benjamin, Adorno does not dwell on the image or the latent ideal of justice in Kraus. His appraisal is restricted to the (self-)negation of law that sheds light on the injustice it harbors. One arrives at such determinate negation only by taking legal argumentation and procedure so seriously that they revert to parody. Adorno understands the sudden appearance of a hitherto hidden injustice brought about by Kraus’s harsh casuistry as a belated, displaced product of the latter’s Jewish heritage. In short, Adorno explains Kraus’s obsession with being right as an effect of his Jewishness. No one has been more persecuted than the Jews, who always had to plead and negotiate to secure their survival. This rhetorical tradition of pleading has left its traces in Kraus’s juristic thinking. Kraus, then, is not only the prosecutor or the persecutor who has left the Jewish poet Heine wounded. As an heir to the bloody legacy of the persecution of Jews, Kraus is also wounded himself, and his disputatious legal rhetoric and his destructive polemics are, in the final analysis, self-destructive attempts at bringing about a cathartic “second innocence” (Adorno) or “justice” (Benjamin): to heal the wound by re-opening it. The motif of a wound that cannot be healed without a repetition of the wounding is tentatively formulated in the essay on Kraus and applied, as a principle of cognition and redemption, in the essay on Heine. Adorno’s essay on Kraus suggests that a historical bond exists between Heine and Kraus insofar as they are both victims of the same history of anti-Semitic persecution. Both are heirs to a tradition that forced them to develop techniques of pleading in order to survive. From this perspective, Kraus’s destructive verdict on Heine cannot leave the prosecutor unharmed. But with this shared heritage of woundedness the similarities between the two end, for they have perfected conflicting rhetorical techniques of pleading. And it is only in this regard that Adorno seems to take sides with Kraus: he agrees with the latter’s attempt to bring charges in the name of language itself. For Adorno, Kraus’s subjectivity embodies the pathos of speaking in the voice of an (impossible) objectivity: “He pleads the case of language against those who speak it, with the pathos of truth opposing subjective reason” (NL 2: 44; GS 11: 372). And: “Since Kierkegaard’s campaign against Christendom, no individual has so incisively safeguarded the interest of the whole against the whole” (NL 2: 44; GS 11: 372). These categories are strikingly anti-modern and ahistorical in that they emphasize seemingly eternal and universal categories such as “language,” “truth,” and “the whole.” This, of course, does not mean that these categories are (still) possible. But they continue to provide everything Kraus needs for his juridical criticism.

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Adorno occasionally comes very close to precisely such categories even when he uses a Marxist vocabulary, for example when he claims that Heine’s language fell prey to “commodity and exchange” (NL 1: 82; GS 11: 372). Adorno’s discourse on Heine is, of course, fundamentally different from Kraus’s in that Adorno insists on the unsurpassed quality of Heine’s prose writings. It is precisely the contradiction between the political prose writer and the romanticist poet that has redemptive quality: “Heine the advocate of enlightenment unmasked Heine the Romantic, who had been living off the good fortune of autonomy, and brought the commodity character of his art, previously latent, to the fore. He has not been forgiven for that” (NL 1: 82; GS 11: 97). Here Adorno attempts, somewhat feebly, to locate the wound in the difference between Heine the prose writer and Heine the poet. Adorno remains blind, however, to the tradition that saw Heine not just as a contradictory figure between Romantic poetry and political enlightenment, but also as a “Dichterjude,” defining him ethnically or racially and marking him as a pariah. Anti-Semitism is not directly a topic in Adorno’s speech. Yet Adorno’s essay ultimately hinges on the cliché of Heine’s Jewishness. Adorno explicitly connects Heine’s vulnerability to the demands of the emerging market place with his Jewishness, and he tries to link Heine’s alleged poetic failure to the failure of Jewish political emancipation. Because the Jews remained pariahs in Germany (despite the introduction of the Code Napoleon), they were bound to fall short no matter how hard they tried—in comparison to the upwardly-mobile gentiles who occupied all the powerful positions in politics, the civil service, the military, and the universities. This somewhat deterministic argument leads Adorno to conclude that Heine was an outsider not only in social and political terms, but also linguistically. (That this point is a very problematic, if not specious analogy is clear.) Calling “the failure of Jewish emancipation” Heine’s “weakest point,” Adorno claims: For Heine’s fluency and self-evidence, which is derived from the language of communications, is the opposite of a native sense of being at home in language. Only someone who is not actually inside language can manipulate it like an instrument. If the language were really his own, he would allow the dialectic between his own words and words that are pregiven to take place, and the smooth linguistic structure would disintegrate. But for the person who uses language like a book that is out of print, language itself is alien. (NL 1: 82–83; GS 11: 98)

It must be emphasized that this passage does not present an original scholarly insight; Adorno is simply rehashing common opinions, specifically the

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stereotype of a linguistic difference that marks Jews as somehow not fully German. Kraus liked to poke fun at an erroneous grammatical case in one of Heine’s early letters. Jews were said to mauscheln. The more they integrated into bourgeois society, the more one sought to mark their difference linguistically.29 And if no traces of Yiddish could be detected in their speech, it was precisely the flawlessness with which they spoke and wrote German that served as evidence that they were not at home in the language (and, by extension, in the culture), that they used German only as an artificially acquired tool that did not organically belong to them. Adorno repeats such stereotypes and even rests his own arguments on their structural illogic. Adorno’s risky attempt, it appears, is to find the element of truth contained in such anti-Semitic stereotypes. Defending Karl Kraus against the accusation of anti-Semitism, Adorno claims that Kraus did not pick on “Jewish judges, lawyers, and experts . . . because they are Jews,” but rather because out of assimilatory zeal those whom Kraus incriminates have made themselves equivalent to those for whom German has the generic name Pachulke, boor. . . . What Kraus did not forgive the Jews for, against whom he wrote, was that they had ceded spirit to the sphere of circulation capital; the betrayal that they committed—they who were burdened by opprobrium and secretly selected to be the victims—by acting in accordance with a principle that intended injustice to them as a general principle and ultimately led to their extermination. (NL 2: 46; GS 11: 375)

These are strong words. What they suggest is that the Jewish striving for assimilation into bourgeois society and, by extension, into the capitalistic mode of production, is self-defeating and will lead, in the end, to extermination. Implied in this statement is a theory of anti-Semitism guided by a Marxist critique of fascism as the ultimate form, the almost necessary outcome of capitalism. While this theory was articulated more strongly by Horkheimer than by Adorno himself,30 it is still reflected in the far-reaching argument about Jews being “closely associated with the process of civilization itself,”31 delineated in DE, and the passage from the essay on Kraus, composed in the mid-sixties, testifies to the staying power of Adorno’s—and Horkheimer’s, since they collaborated extensively—theoretical speculations on anti-Semitism that took place twenty years earlier under the existential shock of having been forced into emigration by fascist violence. What must strike every reader as a dangerous ambiguity in Adorno’s defense of Kraus is that, on the one hand, everyone identified as a Jew is at risk of being sacrificed

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as a scapegoat, while, on the other hand, Adorno justifies Kraus’s attack on particular people identified as Jewish because they act “in accordance with a principle that intended injustice to them as a general principle.” Kraus’s attacks are justified to the extent that they are—at least implicitly—aimed at a lack of resistance to the very historical dynamic that threatens to sacrifice them. It is against this theoretical background that one must read the essay on Heine. A closer look at the difficult theory of anti-Semitism developed in the DE, with an emphasis on the problems of mimesis and projection, will shed a clearer light on the relation between the earlier theoretical work and the later NL. Kraus’s verdict on Heine is not, for Adorno, motivated by antiSemitism. To call Kraus an anti-Semite is a case of anti-Semitic projection. About the continuing anti-Semitic climate in the postwar German Federal Republic, Adorno remarks scathingly: “For those who want both to reintroduce the death penalty and exonerate the torturers of Auschwitz, it would be only too welcome if they, anti-Semitic at heart, could render Kraus harmless by making him an anti-Semite” (NL 2: 47; GS 11: 375). Adorno’s critique of Heine—perhaps the quintessential German poet— is based on the fact that he, as a Jew, was, and still is, frequently identified as somehow other to German culture. In this light, Heine’s attempt to be a German poet must inevitably be viewed as an attempt at assimilatory identification. Adorno understands Kraus’s verdict on Heine as a condemnation of the poet’s over-identification with the culture that seeks to keep him at bay and resists all his attempts to fit in. Heine’s is a case of “mimetic zeal” so strong that, at least in the case of poetry, it lacks critical distance from the object at which the mimesis aims. Yet, curiously, Adorno is not concerned with Heine’s failed civic assimilation, 32 his failure to obtain a position and to make a living in Germany, nor with the unbearable censorship that forced him to take up exile in Paris. Adorno pays no attention to the fact that Heine is not merely a German but rather a European poet, popular in France and widely translated. The reason for Adorno’s very limited focus is his stress on mimesis as a linguistic device; his interest in Heine is limited to language. Decisive for Adorno is that Heine’s native tongue was not German but Yiddish. Heine’s guilt can be traced to his Jewish mother,33 who did not have a full command of the German language and thus set the stage for Heine’s lifelong zeal to assimilate himself completely to the “foreign” language, German. No doubt, Adorno’s discourse here is not entirely devoid of the antiSemitic paranoid notion that a Jew who masters German perfectly does so only because he is not at home in the language. But clearly Adorno’s critique of Heine’s excessive mimesis rests on this basic biographical assumption: that Heine spoke Yiddish before he learned to speak German.

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In his analysis of Adorno’s Heine essay, Peter Uwe Hohendahl points out that the philosopher’s claim that the poet did not have a native command of German is dubious, since there hardly existed a standard high German, an “authentic language,” 34 free of the inflections of dialect and jargon. One of the greatest poets in the German language, Friedrich Hölderlin, spoke Swabian dialect, Goethe spoke Hessian dialect. From an empirical socio-historical perspective, Adorno’s contention does not make much sense. This means, effectively, that the language to which Heine supposedly tried to assimilate himself never existed as a well-ordered, clearly defined entity. How and from what critical position could one ever decide whether a poet is inside or outside the German language, whether he wants in or out? Like Hohendahl, Katja Garloff points out that Adorno’s statements about Heine must be read as a reflection of Adorno’s own difficult position as an exile who had returned “home.” But I believe that Adorno’s argument on Heine is not limited to an exemplification of “textual strategies associated with exile and diaspora.”35 Adorno places strong emphasis on the observation that the wound Heine is still not healed today. His analysis is not strictly historical, but, one may say, typological: Heine’s name attests to a historical dynamic that cannot be restricted to the empirical author Heinrich Heine. “This continues to be the trauma of Heine’s name today, and it can be healed only if it is recognized rather than left to go on leading an obscure, preconscious existence” (NL 1: 83; GS 11: 98). With this sentence, Adorno’s vocabulary becomes explicitly psychoanalytic. Wound is here—apparently linked to the problem of Heine’s name—translated into the Greek trauma, a clinical term. Adorno’s shift in terminology suggests that this trauma can only be healed if it is recognized or, to use a psychoanalytic term often suggested by readers of this essay, worked through.36 Such healing is not merely a matter of rectifying everything that has gone awry in Heine’s reception. The expression “the wound Heine” is replaced by “the trauma of Heine’s name:” the individual, symbolized by its name, stands in for a traumatic structure that is not confined to the individual, but rather becomes attached to a universally reproducible and distributable symbol. How can we understand this sudden leap from the individual to the universal? How do we get from Heine the empirical author of the Book of Songs [Buch der Lieder] to the abstract “Heine’s name”? In psychoanalytic accounts the relation between individual and universal is usually depicted in the form of representative case studies. While Adorno’s essay is, of course, not a psychoanalytic case study, it is not free of arguments that are, in essence, psychological and biographical, such as Adorno’s references to Heine’s mother and to the poet’s self-proclaimed shyness. Adorno does not, however, arbitrarily impose psychoanalytic elements. Heine’s own work includes accounts of wounding experiences suffered in

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childhood. His Memoirs [Memoiren (1854)], for instance, seem to anticipate a twentieth-century desire for psychoanalytically valorized childhood memories. When Adorno mentions the “trauma of Heine’s name,” he is referring not only to Heine as a symbol for the failed emancipation of German Jews and to the failure of the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis; he is also alluding to a childhood experience concerning Heine’s given name, Harry, reported in the poet’s Memoirs. Heine’s father preferred to call his son by the anglicized version of his first name in honor of an English friend and business partner (Heinrich was only Heine’s nom de plume).37 Heine’s relation to his anglicized given name was rather ambivalent, as the poet confessed, speaking from the safe distance of his last exile, his sickbed, which he called his “mattress grave:” Even now it gives me great pleasure to be called by that name, although I owe to it much mortification and perhaps the most grievous of my childhood. Only now that I no longer live among the living and all social vanity is blotted out from my soul am I able to speak of it without reservation.38

Heine relates the painful resonance that the name “Harry” evokes to the following childhood experience: I can therefore speak unreservedly of the mishap which was bound up with my name of Harry, and embittered and empoisoned the fairest years of the springtime of my life. The facts of the case are these. In my native town there lived a man who was called the Scavenger because every morning he drove through the streets of the town with a cart to which a donkey was harnessed, and stopped before every house to take up the refuse which the servants gathered together in orderly heaps, and carried it out to the dumping-ground. The man looked like his trade, and the donkey, who resembled his master, stood still in front of the houses or moved on according to the tone of voice in which the scavenger cried the word Haarüh! Was that his real name or only a catchword? I know not, but this much is certain that I had to endure an extraordinary amount of suffering at the hands of my schoolmates, and the children of our neighbors because of the resemblance of the word to my name Harry.39

Suffering is in the name. The non-German form of Heine’s first name— either Harry or Chaim—not only marks the child as an outsider; it also adds insult to injury by inviting punning on the homonymy of “Harry”

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and “Haarüh.” Heine’s difference is marked by a homonymic identification: because the name is not unique, because it sounds like something else, the bearer of the name can be identified with something completely other—an animal—and thus be excluded. To Heine, his name signifies suffering. This suffering does not allow for an ironically detached case of mistaken identity, as in a slap-stick comedy—Heine does not speak of the homonymy of his name, but, rather, of his homonymy that continues to be his nightmare: “But my homonymy with the despised long ears remained my bugbear [Alp].”40 Heine’s nightmarish homonymy even follows him into his Parisian exile, where his name is not only misunderstood and misidentified, but becomes subject to an existential rewriting: Here in France immediately on my arrival in Paris my German name ‘Heinrich’ was translated into ‘Henri,’ and I had to adapt myself to it and had even so to style myself here in this country, for the word Heinrich is not pleasing to Frenchmen and the French do make everything in the world pleasant for themselves. Even the name ‘Henri Heine’ they were unable to pronounce, and most of them called me M. Enri Enn: many contracted this to Enrienne and some called my M. Un Rien.41

In his French exile, Heine’s new German name, Heinrich, does not guarantee his correct identification: the French modify the name according to their own convenience and, through a series of paronomasic slips, Heinrich Heine, Henri Heine, ends up a nobody, a nothing: “un rien.” The foreign name does not bring about greater visibility. On the contrary, it leads to the writer’s nominal disappearance, which he, bound to his mattress grave by his ever worsening physical decay, is destined to experience as his real fate: his physical annihilation. I suffer by it in many of my literary relations, but I do gain certain advantages. For instance among my noble fellow countrymen who come to Paris there are many who would gladly slander me, but as they always pronounce my name in German it does not occur to the French that the villain, the poisoner of the wells of innocence, who is so roundly abused, is no other than their friend, M. Enrienne, and these noble souls in vain give rein to their virtuous zeal: the French do not know that they are speaking of me, and transrhenish virtue has in vain shot the bolts of its calumny.42

The nominal disappearance brought about by the French mispronunciation of the name serves as camouflage. The appellation “un rien” not only erases

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Heine’s identity, it also protects the individual, the carrier of the name, from persecution—similar to the protective function of mimicry so common in the animal kingdom, and to the archaic mimicry at the origin of the Frankfurt School’s narrative of the dialectic of enlightenment. In the case of Heine, such involuntary mimesis is experienced as a double-edged sword, on the one hand as a threat to Heine’s identity, on the other hand as protection from threats to his identity. Through the figure of mimesis Heine’s subjectivity is defined and undone at the same time. This paradox brings to mind a similar form of misnaming analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer in “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” in DE. Adorno and Horkheimer seek to interpret Homer’s Odyssey as the first story of the genealogy of proto-bourgeois subjectivity. A comparison with some of the motifs presented in this excursus can further illuminate Adorno’s essay on Heine. Adorno concludes “Heine the Wound” with an apparently sentimental outlook: the homelessness he encounters in Heine has become universal; the poet’s “homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness” (NL 1: 85; GS 11: 100). And Adorno adds: “There is no longer any homeland [Heimat]” (NL 1: 85; GS 11: 100). These statements are not reflective merely of Adorno’s own experience of loss and exile; they are presented as a universal condition. Their mournful tone, however, is indicative of a philosophical intention articulated clearly in the DE. What Adorno and Horkheimer observe circa 1944 about the figure of Odysseus is consistent with Adorno’s more elliptical remarks in the Heine essay: The celebration of the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Odysseus is already a nostalgic stylization of what can no longer be celebrated; and the hero of the adventures turns out to be the prototype of the bourgeois individual, whose concept originates in the unwavering selfassertion of which the protagonist driven to wander the earth is the primeval model [my italics]. (DE 36; GS 3: 61)

Already and no longer: in interpreting Odysseus as the prototype of the bourgeois individual, Adorno and Horkheimer replace a historical argument with a structural one. The word already is crucial, because it underscores that a structure of transition is prototypical of bourgeois subjectivity. Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of the Odyssey is structured by the temporality of loss and nostalgia: Homer’s account of Odysseus’s adventures is already nostalgic, the celebration of a heroic past long gone that can, for this very reason, no longer be celebrated. The experience of irretrievable loss is the basis of bourgeois individuality. Constitutive of the possibility of bourgeois

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subjectivity is the impossibility of regaining that which preceded it. The subject is marked, as it were, by an irreparable rupture that leaves its traces on the individual in the form of the affects of yearning and nostalgia. These affects continue to remind us that the bourgeois individual is not part of a historical continuum, or, more precisely, is only part of a negative dialectical continuum characterized by rupture and by the reversal of enlightenment to pre-enlightenment myth and violence. The bourgeois individual is, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s theoretical construction, constituted by the step out of the deadly cycle of nature—to which it, nonetheless, inevitably reverts. There is no progress without its negative dialectical reverse, regression to myth. As a poetic form, the Homeric epic documents the step out of archaic nature into bourgeois enlightenment. While the epic would not be possible without being preceded by myth, it submits, “organizes,” and destroys the very mythical order on which it is based. Without the epic, we would know nothing about myth. Yet at the same time, the epic is proof of the loss of myth. Since the epic is related negatively to myth—i.e., it can tell about myth only by negating it—it conveys nostalgia. And it must fail to provide its hero with a continuous, uninterrupted, peaceful genealogy. Just as the epic had to separate itself from myth, so Odysseus must separate himself from the mythic forces he encounters. His individuality is gained in and through confrontation with the mythic figures and situations narrated in the epic—but only in a mode of self-assertion. The bourgeois individual is not, as one might assume, the result of a straightforward progression from myth to enlightenment. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the figure of Odysseus has no ontological foundation from which his subjectivity would arise. Instead, he gains individuality through what one might describe as an “empty” and purely performative act of self-assertion, devoid of substance. Since he has no homeland that would provide him with the substratum of his individuality and identity, he is driven. He is the prototype of the homeless Umgetriebene: the aimless wanderer or vagabond; the exile; the Wandering Jew. The exiled poet Heinrich Heine’s experience of being both threatened and protected by the French mispronunciation of his name that turns him into a nobody (“un rien”), is echoed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s interpretation of the ruse employed by Odysseus in his confrontation with the mythical cyclops, Polyphemus. In order to protect the life of his men and himself, Odysseus calls himself Udeus (probably a dialectal homonym of Odysseus), which, as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, can be understood to mean “nobody.” Odysseus renames himself Nobody, thus simultaneously effacing and saving his identity. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Odysseus succeeds because he turns his mere name into more than only a

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name. Rather than simply designating its carrier, the name becomes a strategic, instrumental word: “In a single word the name—Odysseus—and the intention—nobody—diverge” (DE 53; GS 3: 86). Odysseus does not just stumble upon a fortunate homonymy. His cunning use of his name amounts to an instrumentalization of language that signals not only the rationalistic triumph of subjectivity but also its death. In reality, Odysseus, the subject, denies his own identity, which makes him a subject and preserves his life by mimicking the amorphous realm. . . . For by inserting his own intention into the name, Odysseus has withdrawn it from the magical sphere. But his self-assertion, as in the entire epic, as in all civilization, is self-repudiation. Thereby the self is drawn back into the same compulsive circle of natural connections from which it sought through adaptation to escape. (DE 53; GS 3: 86–87)

Subjectivity is gained at the cost of denying one’s identity. It is through language, through speech that this double act of (mis)identification and mimetic adaptation to nothingness—Adorno and Horkheimer call it “das Amorphe”—takes place. Odysseus’s subjectivity is not only an effect of language, of the symbolic. He cunningly manipulates language, and by doing so asserts himself and at the same time sets the stage for his own undoing. Language as technology, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, provides not only the precondition for subjectivity, but also effects the disintegration of subjectivity.43 When the name loses its magical power, when it becomes manipulable, the original magical unity of thing and name dissolves. The symbolic asserts itself as designating, signifying language, and myth gives way to the symbolic order of signs and designations. That is the realm of the bourgeois subject and, one might add, of the poet. But this technological progress comes at a cost. Language as signification is necessarily arbitrary, thus enabling the epistemological technologies of formalism and nominalism to become the technological prototypes of bourgeois thinking and perception. According to this structure delineated by Adorno and Horkheimer, the language of designation corresponds to the split between word and object that allows Odysseus’s strategy of ruse and cunning—which is based on the possibility of an ambiguous dualism—to emerge triumphant: Cunning, however, consists in exploiting the difference [between word and object]. One clings to the word in order to change the thing. In this way consciousness arises out of intention: in his extremity Odysseus becomes aware of dualism, as he discovers that an identical word can mean different things. Since the name Udeis can mean either “hero” or “nobody,” the

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hero is able to break the spell of the name. . . . Odysseus discovered in words what in fully developed bourgeois society is called formalism: their perennial ability to designate is bought at the cost of distancing themselves from any particular content which fulfills them, so that they refer from a distance to all possible contents, both to nobody and to Odysseus himself. From the formalism of mythical names and statutes, which, indifferent like nature, seek to rule over human beings and history, emerges nominalism, the prototype of bourgeois thinking. Self-preserving guile lives on in the argument between word and thing. Odysseus’s two contradictory actions in his meeting with Polyphemos, his obedience to his name and his repudiation of it, are really the same thing, He declares allegiance to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he saves his life by making himself disappear. (DE 49–50; GS 3: 78–79)

The two contradictory actions that Adorno and Horkheimer refer to are Odysseus’s ruse of hiding behind the other meaning of his name, Udeus, Nobody, and then, having reached the presumed safety of the ship and the open sea, the revelation of the true meaning of his name: an act of hubris that immediately puts him and his men in mortal danger. Adorno and Horkheimer present the contradictory duplicity of Odysseus’s action, his deception and his premature revelation of his identity, as an integral part of the dialectic that does and undoes the bourgeois subject. As a structure that leaves little if any place for conventional historical narratives and provides only the stark outlines of a genealogy of subjectivity, Adorno and Horkheimer’s account remains necessarily abstract. The emphasis on language and speech is pivotal in Adorno and Horkheimer’s schematic dialectical narrative. Odysseus gets in trouble and almost undoes the success of his ruse because he cannot refrain from boasting of his heroic identity to Polyphemus. As soon as he has gained some distance from the island, as soon as he is, once again, the homesick traveler out on the sea, Odysseus feels compelled to talk. His cunning reverts to stupidity, which manifests itself as garrulousness: Adorno and Horkheimer repeatedly underscore that Odysseus acts like a real chatterbox. Since it is through the innovation of formalist or nominalist language that the subject “performs” itself and, at the same time, negates itself through mimesis to amorphous nature, it counters the threat of its own disappearance by producing an excess of speech. Speech provides the necessary “presence” to counteract the threat of disappearance; one might describe this presence of speech as the lyrical aspect in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of this epic structure. The garrulousness of Odysseus’s speech seems similar to the smooth flow of Heine’s lyrical language. And like Odysseus, Heine tries to bridge distance (even if it is only the distance to the

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quasi-mythical Dichterfürst Goethe) through impertinence—a testament to the exclusion from which he suffered and which he desperately tried to overcome, Adorno argues, precisely through brazenness and provocation.44 In the following passage from DE one could, perhaps, substitute Heine’s name for Odysseus’s, one Nobody for another. The speech which gets the better of physical strength is unable to curb itself. Its spate accompanies the stream of consciousness, thought itself, like a parody: thought’s unwavering autonomy takes on a moment of folly when it enters reality as speech, as if thought and reality were synonymous, whereas the former has power over the latter only through distance. Such distance, however, is also suffering. For this reason the astute hero is always tempted to ignore the proverbial wisdom that silence is golden. He is driven objectively by the fear that, if he does not constantly uphold the fragile advantage the word has over violence, this advantage will be withdrawn by violence. (DE 54; GS 3: 87–88)

This analysis is not only reminiscent of Adorno’s anecdotal description of Heine’s impudence and his failure to meet the old Goethe (and not just him, of course) with respectful, quiet politeness; it also recalls Adorno’s analysis of pleading and similar juridical techniques as a means of survival in the face of anti-Semitic persecution. Odysseus, the prototypical figure of the bourgeois individual, is described as Jewish: he talks too much, but out of fear. The words work to his advantage, but they also attract (anti-Semitic) violence: “By talking too much he gives away the principle of violence and injustice underlying discourse and provokes in the feared adversary the very action he fears” (DE 54; GS 3: 88). The defense mechanism of talking is double-edged because it provokes the very violence it seeks to deter. Mythic violence seems to be structured like anti-Semitic violence—and vice versa. One wonders whether the persecuted Jew is the prototype of the bourgeois individual, or whether the bourgeois individual is the prototype of the persecuted Jew. What one can say, at the very least, is that this dialectic of enlightenment does not follow a linear, progressive trajectory. If Odysseus is already the bourgeois individual and if he is already the fearful, persecuted Jew, then the structural logic outlined by Adorno and Horkheimer follows—I have alluded to this earlier—the temporal structure of an always already: the proto-history of the intertwining of myth and enlightenment is not simply an abstract, detached model for all history. Rather, it is all history: the absolute immanence of the always already structure becomes totalized to history as such. History does not provide the way out of the fateful entanglements of prehistory, but only perpetuates the prehistorical

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structure. Structurally, prehistory is already history, myth is already enlightenment: The mythical compulsion acting on language in prehistory is perpetuated in the calamity which enlightened language brings on itself. “Udeis,” who compulsively proclaims himself to be Odysseus, already bears features of the Jew who, in fear of death, continues to boast of a superiority which itself stems from the fear of death; revenge on the middleman stands not only at the end of bourgeois society but at its beginning, as the negative utopia toward which coercive violence tends in all its forms. (DE 54; GS 3: 88)

The only exit from the destructive, violent immanence of bourgeois society is to be found in the fact that it has a beginning and an end. But the end is no happy ending; it is—and this is perhaps the theological dimension of Adorno and Horkheimer’s DE—the revelation of history as proto-history. In this respect, the DE is an apocalyptic text. Written from the perspective of the destructive end of bourgeois society signaled by the excess of violence in the twentieth century, it attempts to read the beginning through the lens of the present historical situation, which is experienced as catastrophic and apocalyptic.45 At work in this theory is the expectation that the structure of history will reveal itself when one studies and analyzes its extremes: the apocalyptic signs of the present and the earliest available text from the past. Odysseus and Heine are related because they are presented allegorically as two extreme figures. Odysseus is the prototype of the bourgeois individual, and Heine is the prototype of the modern poet whose works fully embody the economic laws of bourgeois society for the first time. The symmetrical relation between Odysseus and Heine is summed up in their portrayal as Jewish “middlemen.”46 Middleman refers, of course, to the topos of Ahasverus, the Jewish tradesman, the Wandering Jew. Adorno refers to this topos of the Jew as middleman when he writes: “His [Heine’s] guilt became an alibi for those of his enemies whose hatred for the Jewish middleman ultimately paved the way for the unspeakable horror” (NL 1: 80; GS 11: 95). It appears that Adorno’s argument here works on two contradictory levels. On the one hand, Heine is equated with the Jewish middleman and, by extension, with Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of anti-Semitism delineated in DE. On the other hand, the ascription of personal “guilt” to Heine seems to fall behind the insights of this theory of anti-Semitism. Before I pursue this contradiction, however, a few further explanations about Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of anti-Semitism are required. This

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theory is based entirely, as Anson Rabinbach has lucidly argued,47 on a unique interpretation of mimesis that mixes semiotics with anthropology and philosophy. Whereas Judaic law with its taboo on graven images prohibits mimesis and thus makes possible, for the first time, an abstraction and sublimation of the primordial mimetic impulses, anti-Semitism is an expression of the return of repressed archaic mimesis. More precisely, it is a return of archaic mimesis as projection: the anti-Semite sees mimesis at work not in himself, but only in the Jew. The more the Jew resembles the non-Jew, the harder the Jew is to identify as other, the more the antiSemite interprets this lack of difference as a sign of the Jew’s mimetic perfection. And in order to mark mimesis as such, the anti-Semite imagines a pronounced mimicking behavior on the part of the Jew, for example, a special melodiousness of his voice or an exaggerated gesture. To the antiSemite, the Jew is overly zealous to mimic that which is essentially foreign to him. Today, Adorno and Horkheimer claim, mimetic traits and gestures have been subjected to a taboo imposed by a completely “technologized,” “distanced” and, thus, mediated form of enlightenment. The anti-Semitic hatred of “Jewish” mimicking indicates, in reality, the archaic mimetic heritage that has been repressed.48 One could say, then, that the antiSemite acts as the agent of repression, of the blind triumph of technology over nature, and hence of the return of the mythic violence of nature: the anti-Semite represents false mimesis, of which the Jew is the victim. The anti-Semite engages in a mimesis of mimesis: Adorno and Horkheimer underscore repeatedly the excessive theatrical nature of National Socialism.49 While the most basic form of mimesis, mimicry, is at the primordial heart of civilization because it is the first reaction against the violence imposed by nature, civilization is based on the qualitative transformation of such mimicry into playful mimesis. In MM, Adorno pointedly claims that it is a particularly regressive modern trait to apply the labels “authenticity” or “genuineness” to the metaphysical ideal of self-sameness, thereby mistaking them for truth. The equation of the genuine and the true is untenable. It is precisely undeviating self-reflection—the practice of which Nietzsche called psychology, that is, insistence on the truth about oneself, that shows again and again, even in the first conscious experiences of childhood, that the impulses reflected upon are not quite ‘genuine.’ They always contain an element of imitation, play, wanting to be different. (MM 153; GS 4: 174)

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Adorno argues that the insistence on authenticity or genuineness indicates blindness to the fact that there can be no “pure self,” because the self is constituted only in relation to what is different from it: Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense. All its content comes from society, or at any rate from its relation to the object. It grows richer the more freely it develops and reflects this relation, while it is limited, impoverished and reduced by the separation and hardening that it lays claim to as an origin. (MM 154; GS 4: 175)

The aphorism that contains these sentences presents a strong critique of how the ideology of authenticity amounts to the “sacrifice of the individual” (GS 4: 175).50 In the realm of aesthetics, the cult of authenticity favors the jargon of profundity, incapable of understanding the historically evolved forms of “lyrical smoothness” and irony exemplified by Heine. Similarly, the cult of authenticity must remain unperceptive, even hostile to the form of the essay constituted by “inauthentic” devices such as play, parody, and exaggeration. In short, the proponents of inwardness and authenticity (Kierkegaard, and especially Heidegger) fail to see both the humane dimension of mimesis and—akin to this—the playful, transitional, and essayistic dimension of mimetic thought: “The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.” (MM 154; GS 4: 176) There can be no enlightenment without the transition from mimicry to mimesis. At the end of this development Adorno and Horkheimer locate the preserving renunciation—not the repression—of mimesis accomplished by Judaic law. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, it is precisely because the Jews have successfully integrated mimesis into their law—unlike Christianity’s stubborn continuation of mythical pagan idolatry51—that the Jews become identified with mimetic or mimicking behavior. And it is this identification of the Jew with mimetic behavior that triggers violent resentment— which in turn is itself expressed as extreme mimetic behavior: They detest the Jews and imitate them constantly. There is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness. The same mimetic codes are constantly used; the argumentative jerking of the hands, the singing tone of voice, which vividly animates a situation or a feeling independently of judgment. . . . (DE 151; GS 3: 208)

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Anti-Semitism is a kind of deadly theatrical performance. Mimetic behavior is projected onto the Jew, and this projection is then imitated. Adorno and Horkheimer call this mechanism “false projection.” Because Judaism has most successfully mastered the primordial magic rites, because it has put the archaic impulse to become like nature into the service of civilization, because it has thus rationalized mimesis, it is most susceptible to the fatal return of repressed irrational violence—and is held responsible for that of which it is most innocent. Anti-Semitism is the revenge exacted by mythic violence. It is aimed at the Jews because the Jews above all represent a form of enlightenment that is more than blind technological repression of nature, namely, its mindful preservation in the practice of ritual. Remembrance, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, is Jewish; forgetting is anti-Semitic. Against this theoretical background of situating anti-Semitism firmly within the dialectic of enlightenment, or, more precisely, making anti-Semitism the very center of the structure of the dialectic of enlightenment, it must come as a surprise that, in his Heine essay, Adorno mentions Heine’s “own guilt,” thereby suggesting that the anti-Semitic reaction against the poet is not entirely a projection; at the very least, Heine’s “own guilt” provides the anti-Semites with an alibi—which will, in Adorno’s unmistakable words, pave the way “for the unspeakable horror.” This, then, is the contradiction, the disconcerting paradox of Adorno identifying Heine with the cliché of the Jewish middleman: Adorno cites his own theory of anti-Semitism, thus situating Heine’s wound within a larger historical context of fear and persecution, only to undermine this situating immediately by employing stereotypes of the negative Heine reception that clearly imply that the poet personally bears responsibility for the hatred he has provoked. In other words, Adorno suggests that there is a moment of truth in the reaction against Heine; that Heine really is to blame for giving in too willingly to the temptations of the marketplace; that Heine, to put it differently, too willingly succumbs to the mimetic impulse of becoming one with the dominant sphere of commercial exchange. In Heine, Adorno suggests, enlightenment reverts to myth. His language falls victim to reification and thus signals the failure of enlightenment, its imminent collapse, and the rise of annihilating violence in the twentieth century. While—another cliché of his reception history—Heine has often been read as a prophetic voice predicting disaster, Adorno views him not as a poetic observer, but as an agent in the fatal dynamic of a global capitalist system headed towards complete commodification. The painful irony of such a reading lies in the fact that it mobilizes precisely the same false projection that Adorno and Horkheimer analyze in DE.

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With excruciating, excessive stringency, Adorno not only analyzes the wounding of Heine committed by tradition, but actively adds to this wounding. While this seems like a rather tasteless contradiction, it also provides Adorno with the educational platform for attempting a healing of the wound to whose further injury his essay contributes. Adorno’s speech commemorating the centenary of Heine’s death is itself, as a performance, traumatic (I referred to this strategy earlier in connection with the term pharmakon). Not only does the philosopher speak of Heine as a wound and as someone wounded, but his speech participates in this very wounding, which, as Adorno underscores, continues to this day—Heine’s aura “is still bleeding.” To talk about Heine as if the wound had been healed, as if the trauma were now a thing of the past, would not contribute to the truthful memory of Heine. Rather, it would suggest that Heine and his painful anti-Semitic reception have been overcome, reinforcing the ideology of “overcoming the past” prevalent in postwar Germany. In order for Heine the wound/Heine’s wound to heal, he/it must first be commemorated as a wound, through the performance of a public act of wounding. Adorno’s speech on Heine enacts a mythical theorem—well-known from Wagner’s Parsifal—according to which a wound can be healed by only the very weapon that caused it. Adorno’s speech suggests that the remembrance of Heine cannot succeed against tradition, but only within it. One must continue to take Kraus’s verdict seriously, no matter whether it was right or wrong. Adorno’s perspective here is, for lack of a better word, didactic or pedagogical. Considering his premise that all education after Auschwitz must follow one imperative, namely, that Auschwitz must never be repeated,52 one could read Adorno’s repetition of Kraus’s attack on Heine as a paradoxical means to prevent the worst repetition from happening. Still, one might reply, how can a renewed attack on Heine, especially one that does not shy away from pronouncing the poet’s “own guilt,” be reconciled with the project of “education after Auschwitz”? The glaring weakness in Adorno’s essay, his apparent inability to come to a conclusive, original judgment on Heine, is, from a pedagogical perspective, its strength. The essay dutifully reflects not only the pitfalls of tradition, but also the contradictions operating in Heine’s own work. It is precisely by underscoring the predicament of its subject matter both thematically and formally that Adorno’s essay succeeds. The trauma of Heine’s name can be recognized, as Adorno demands, only in a form that is itself traumatic, i.e., wounding. Adorno, it seems, wants precisely this dimension of the essay—the traumatic treatment of a traumatic predicament—to mobilize the possibility of such pedagogically beneficial recognition. He suggests that this possibility “is contained, as a potential for rescue, within Heine’s poetry itself. For

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the power of the one who mocks impotently transcends his impotence” (NL 1: 83; GS 10.2: 674). This is truly a redemptive sentence. Not only does it come late in the essay, after a long build-up of scathing critique; it also turns Adorno’s earlier argument upside down by admitting that Heine’s rhetorical strategy of mockery, of impertinence—which Adorno had identified with Heine’s “own guilt”—does succeed. Because Heine’s hyperbolic impertinence is an expression of real powerlessness, it is more than just embarrassing exaggeration. It succeeds as an expression of Heine’s real suffering.53 Adorno calls it an “expression of rupture” (NL 1: 83; GS 11: 98). This valorization of rupture is wholly in accord with the overall rhetorical strategy of Adorno’s essay. Since the essay seeks to deepen and intensify the wound Heine/Heine’s wound, suffering must be the calculated outcome of such a strategy. So, Adorno first sacrifices Heine to the verdict of tradition, but only in order to gain the ability to rescue him. Accusing Heine of giving in too willingly to the mimetic impulse, Adorno himself mimes the tradition that has condemned Heine. Such an excess of mimetic zealousness can be brought to a halt only by another rhetorical technique: the implementation of inversion. Heine, Adorno suggests, was such a virtuoso of mimesis that mimesis was inverted into something else—the expression of suffering. It is helpful to recall that according to the logic of the dialectic of enlightenment, mimesis is triggered by the fear of suffering; seen from an anthropological point of view, mimesis aims at the overcoming of suffering. But suffering, and this is perhaps the major ethical axiom of Adorno’s aesthetics, is the precondition for authentic aesthetic expression. Without suffering, there is no experience that can be communicated and sublimated aesthetically. Suffering [Leid] must find expression as song [Lied]. It is this inversion from Leid to Lied and from Lied to Leid that is characteristic of Heine’s virtuoso lyrical poetry: If all expression is the trace left by suffering, then Heine was able to recast his own inadequacy, the muteness of his language, as an expression of rupture. So great was the virtuosity of this man, who imitated language as if he were playing it on a keyboard, that he raised even the inadequacy of his language to the medium of one to whom it was granted to say what he suffered. Failure, reversing itself, is transformed into success. (NL 1: 83; GS 11: 98)

Inherent in Heine’s virtuoso mimetic skill is the potential of a reversal from failure to success. Adorno tries to read Heine’s language as dialectical. Not only was Heine the first entirely commercial poet, the first poet who was also

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a journalist; but since he was also deprived of a language of his own, Heine had, paradoxically, nothing but language. His life centered exclusively on linguistic expression. Heine, defamed and exiled, politically powerless, had nothing but language, even, or because, he did not have it (i.e., the language of his poetry) in a native sense: according to Adorno, he was not born into it, and his foreignness to German became the source of his virtuosity. This dialectical reversal, however, is not immediately obvious in Heine’s language. It is not something that can be detected from a mere reading of his poetry. Rather, it becomes apparent only from the perspective of the artistic tradition: Heine’s essence is fully revealed not in the music composed to his poems but only in the songs of Gustav Mahler in which the brittleness of the banal and the derivative is used to express what is most real, in the form of a wild, unleashed lament. It was not until Mahler’s songs about the soldier who flew the flag out of homesickness, not until the convulsive gestures of the Mahlerian orchestra . . . that the music in Heine’s verses was released. In the mouth of a stranger, what is old and familiar takes on an extravagant quality, and precisely that is the truth. The figures of this truth are the aesthetic breaks. (NL 1: 83; GS 11: 98)

The time of Heine’s poetry has come only now—after the full unfolding of aesthetic modernism, and after Auschwitz. What for Adorno is true about Heine is what can be found elsewhere as well. The truth of Heine lies in his capacity to anticipate and to foreshadow. In effect, Adorno does not deviate from the common reception of Heine as a prophet of impending doom. His essay turns out to be an attempt to justify and celebrate those elements in Heine that recur as general features of aesthetic modernism. By referring to Mahler’s songs, Adorno has already left the historical figure Heine behind, for Mahler never set any Heine poems to music. The relation of Heine’s poetry to Mahler’s music can be found only in a shared mimetic technique of gestural expression.54 Yet by underscoring the belated fulfillment that “the essence of Heine” has found in Mahler’s music, Adorno once again turns Heine into a Nobody, replacing his name with another. Adorno’s Heine is, indeed, nothing but a figure. Since one can no longer separate Heine from the stereotype into which tradition has turned him, one is forced to treat him as such: as a mere figure, resembling a synecdoche standing for a much larger whole. The question for Adorno is: What precisely does the figure Heine signify? Is there more to this figure than the mere journalist, the category to which Kraus has consigned him? By calling Heine a wound, Adorno situates

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Heine as a figure within a larger temporality. A wound always implies two moments, the time of its infliction and the time of its healing. The time of the wound’s infliction, Adorno suggests, is the time of history itself. Thus Heine, like Odysseus, becomes an exemplary figure of the all-consuming dialectic of enlightenment. The time of the wound’s healing, Adorno suggests, is the redemptive possibility contained in the expressive repertoire of aesthetic modernism. Heine’s poetry serves as a prefiguration of Mahler’s music, and in order to understand Heine, one must read him through the experience of aesthetic modernism. He cannot be understood otherwise—as a Romantic poet, he is irredeemable. Yet to read Heine’s poetry as a prefiguration of Mahler’s music does not solve the dilemma of Adorno’s unwillingness to acknowledge Heine’s poetry as such; for Adorno, “the wound . . . is Heine’s lyric poetry.” Even Adorno’s citing in its entirety Heine’s third (untitled) poem from his cycle “The Homecoming” [“Die Heimkehr”] cannot undo Adorno’s refusal to acknowledge any immanent value of Heine’s poetry. For Adorno it counts only as the figure of something else, such as Mahler’s music, or, and this is the final image in Adorno’s essay, as the figure of the epic. Here is Adorno’s comment on Heine’s poem: It has taken a hundred years for this intentionally false folksong to become a great poem, a vision of sacrifice. Heine’s stereotypical theme, unrequited love, is an image for homelessness, and the poetry devoted to it is an attempt to draw estrangement itself into the sphere of intimate experience. Now that the destiny which Heine sensed has been fulfilled literally, however, the homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their beings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words: there is no longer any homeland other than the world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of genuinely emancipated humanity. The wound that is Heine will heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation. (NL 1: 85; GS 11: 100)

With this conclusion, Adorno’s judgment on Heine comes full circle as the fulfillment of a prefigural logic. First, Heine’s poetry succumbs too eagerly to the commercialization of language as typified by the advent of journalism. Unlike Baudelaire, Heine, the brilliant but cynical late-Romantic, fails to find an original poetic imagery (“archetypes of modernity”) to respond adequately to this historical shift. The only way to redeem Heine from Kraus’s verdict that he contaminated the authentic language of poetry with

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the reified language of exchange is to turn Heine into an impersonal figure symbolizing the failure of enlightenment. Only as the embodiment of failure can he be said to have succeeded. And then, from the perspective of postwar Germany, Heine becomes the traumatic figure of a condition that one could call “universal homelessness.” It is, of course, again a figure that could be explained only by means of a complex philosophical diagnosis of a society that has not “achieved reconciliation.” While “homelessness” is not a philosophical concept, it is a notion taken, as I showed in my remarks on Adorno and Horkheimer’s excursus on Odysseus, from a theory of the epic. Adorno, in the final analysis, is interested in Heine not as a lyrical poet but as an epical figure. Adorno’s inversion of Heine’s failure into success comes at the price of turning the poet into a mere figure for a universal condition. What does it mean when the lyric reverts to the epic? It implies that Heine’s poetry becomes readable only from a historical point of view, only by means of sweeping contextualization. Adorno does not spend any interpretive effort on Heine’s poem. His attention does not go beyond the thematic—i.e., his identification of Heine’s “stereotypical theme, unrequited love,” as “an image for homelessness”—and as a result his understanding is limited to the symptomatic. By reducing the poem to a mere symptom, he allows the context to win out over the text. In particular, Adorno—unlike the meticulous language-critic Kraus—offers no evidence for the alleged reification of Heine’s language. His calling the poem an “intentionally false folksong” hardly qualifies as an interpretive insight. Adorno, it seems, does not quote Heine’s poem in order to interpret it; rather, he assumes that it will speak for itself. The poem is treated as the culture industry is treated in DE: as a self-revealing apocalypse, which—unlike the authentic work of art—provides no hermeneutic riddle that resists interpretive solution. Once one knows what the signs of the culture industry mean, they no longer pose a riddle. In a similar vein, Heine’s lyric poetry can be read as an apocalyptic sign. As Romantic poetry, it rings false, but its false, artificial tone (which is not the same as modernist dissonance à la Baudelaire) reveals itself as more than it first appeared. Viewed in retrospective after more than one hundred years, the stereotypical theme of Heine’s poetry, hopeless love, becomes, for Adorno, “a simile [Gleichnis] of homelessness.” It is precisely because Heine’s poetry failed from the beginning to supersede the stereotypes of Romanticism that it will reveal itself a century later as a simile of a universal condition. To put this more succinctly (and polemically): the claim that Heine has failed as a lyric poet is Adorno’s way of bestowing a secondary, reflective significance on his poetry that suddenly puts Heine, who failed where Baudelaire succeeded,

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in the proximity of Beckett, the hero of Adorno’s modernist aesthetics, to whom he wanted to dedicate the AT. Because Adorno reconstructs Heine’s career as a poet in historico-philosophical terms, he can describe his initial failure as the figural anticipation of a later fulfillment. This fulfillment, as we have seen, is entirely negative: Heine’s poetry provides a simile of painful displacement, of injury to all. By reading Heine as a wound, Adorno turns the individual lyrical artwork into a totalizing sign of a negative universal condition. In terms of literary history, Adorno insists on the fungibility, the reproductive character of Heine’s lyrical poetry in order to reveal it as another form of totality. Heine’s poetry, he suggests, bears traces of the epic. And he sees the epic as the artistic form of life in its lost, premodern totality. Adorno does not claim that Heine’s poetry resurrects the lost totality of life that informed Homer’s epic. Rather, he suggests that Heine’s poetry provides the simile or image of a second, post-epical, modern, negative totality. The traits of such totality are the injuries inflicted on everyone’s “being and language.” Adorno’s reading of Heine’s poetry as having been fulfilled negatively through and within the catastrophic history of the twentieth century is, for lack of a better word, ironic. Because the model of interpretation is historical/ figural, the possibility of fulfillment rests on the necessity of Heine’s failure as a lyric poet. It is this failure—persuasively formulated, as Adorno suggests, in Kraus’s verdict—that makes up the truth content of Heine’s poetry within the dialectic of enlightenment. If Heine had not failed as a poet, he would not have become the simile of a universal injury—he would not have become an apocalyptic sign. However, because Heine’s poetry conforms to the logic of the culture industry, it succeeds, as it were, negatively. This is the historical irony that Adorno tries to unfold. It is an irony that indicates that Adorno’s concept of history follows the literary structure of parody. It is through Heine that Adorno reminds us of the ironic relation between the culture industry and the Greek epic. While the classic epic is, according to Hegel and Lukács, the expression of a seamless, uninterrupted totality, Heine’s poetry signifies nothing but rupture. It is an expression of rupture to such an extent that one must speak of a second degree of (negative) totality. It is as an ironic inversion and a negative fulfillment of the epic that Heine’s poetry becomes true. But this truth is identical with the truth of the culture industry, an apocalyptic and parodistic order of signs; it is parodistic because its rule has become so total that one cannot distinguish it any longer from “true” culture—there is no place for Adorno’s often alleged “cultural elitism” here. The culture industry has rendered the epistemological foundation of all interpretation problematic, if not impossible. Already Heine’s poetry indicates the impossibility of distinguishing between true and false, between authentic

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and inauthentic. This impossibility to distinguish has become complete. If the rule of sameness has become universal, as Adorno and Horkheimer proclaim in an apocalyptic tone, then the only way to reintroduce distinction is through the rhetorical practice of parody. This rhetorical strategy is mimetic insofar as it tries to make readable what seems selfsame. The situation of such mimesis is aporetic. If it succeeds in making itself identical to the object, it fails because no further distinction is possible. If it fails as mimesis, it might end up a mere rhetorical effect, an imposed distinction. Such is the aporetic and, thus, ironic situation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s parodistic writing in the DE. In the essay on Heine, this aporetic structure is much less rigid. More than in DE, it is imbedded in a larger historical narrative of figuration. It is, one could say, the use of figures of literary history that provides the Heine essay with a historicity that not only suggests its structural analogy to the chapter on the culture industry in DE, but also points beyond the aporetic logic of the earlier text by maintaining a context of literary history: it is by means of the allusion to a literary-historical category like the epic that Adorno prevents his essay from succumbing to the shrill apocalyptic tone of the culture industry chapter in DE. Like all manifestations of the culture industry, Heine’s poetry is at once unreadable and too readable. (Perhaps this has become the curse of modernism in general; already in Adorno, modernism becomes a cliché. For this reason, his essay on Beckett seems to do little more than name the obvious, a futile exercise in repetition and aporia, and might leave the reader puzzled and baffled, but probably also exhausted and possibly bored.) It is not the task of the essayist to make the poetry more readable. The opposite condition, however, is true for the poetry of Stefan George: because it does not correspond to the standards of the culture industry, because it resists history, because it is elitist and exclusionary, because it is, in a certain sense, outside of history, one can attempt to decipher it anew, ignoring the constraints of history. George’s poems—alongside those of other conservative poets such as Borchardt or Valéry—have failed history from the outset, as it were. Unlike Heine, these poets never had an “undiluted concept of enlightenment” (NL 1: 81; GS: 96). More precisely, one might specify: they had no concept of enlightenment at all. Of their own volition, these poets were outside of history—at least insofar as one can define, for example, Borchardt’s restorative politics as an astonishing denial of history and an aestheticization of politics carried ad absurdum—and exclusively inside of language. Their will to power manifested itself solely as a will to language. One can, therefore, not judge them by their politics. One must, however, judge them by their language and by nothing but their language. But, one should object, how can one view

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language independently of history? And can one have a linguistic analysis that is not automatically a historical analysis? A consistent feature of Adorno’s essays on literature is the faithful recurrence of a limited number of historicophilosophical tropes that structure even the best of his interpretations. But the particular quality of Adorno’s interpretations can be found in his skill at employing his historico-philosophical tropes only as an additional level of reflection—a second-order ironic operation—added to a preceding analysis of language and form. Adorno the essayist is both a formalist and a historical determinist. In cases where the deterministic approach outweighs attention to linguistic details, Adorno needs to implement rhetorical strategies that foreground the polemical trajectory of his essay. This is the case with “Heine the Wound.” A rather different case can be found in his lecture on Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, which successfully combines linguistic analysis with his historico-philosophical speculation.

Chapter Six

Exhaustion: Goethe

Exhausted is a whole lot more than tired. —Gilles Deleuze1

By the mid-1960s Adorno had become an omnipresent media personality and a star professor, attracting students from all over the world. Against his will, he found himself playing a central role in the increasingly militant student movement, which began gathering steam in Frankfurt in 1966. Adorno rejected the students’ urging that he provide practical guidance and engage in radical protest against what they saw as the oppressive and authoritarian West German society. His analysis of their political behavior was devastating. He saw it as pseudo-activity, a hopeless and conformist waste of energy: “Barricades are ridiculous against those who administer the bomb; that is why the barricades are a game, and the lords of the manor let the gamesters go on playing for the time being. . . . Nothing in the administered world functions wholly without disruption” (CM 269; GS 10.2: 771). Against the conformist blindness of political activism and against the attack on theory, Adorno—whose mental and physical fatigue was steadily approaching the state of exhaustion that would end with a fatal heart attack on 6 August 19692—sought to maintain the ethos that “thinking is a doing, theory a form of praxis” (CM 261; GS 10.2: 761) by devoting what little time he could spare to his monograph on Alban Berg, a variety of essays and lectures, and, most importantly, his grand Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s political perspective at that time—variously mediated and reflected in his aesthetic thought--was expressed in a new preface to the 1969 edition of DE. In 1969 as in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer articulated the perspective of the critical theorist through the experience of the émigré and survivor:

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature The conflicts in the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere historical interludes any more than, according to the Dialectic, fascism was at that time. Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of the great historical trend (DE xi; GS 3: 9).

The pathos of continuing to engage in critical thought against all odds, against “the great historical trend,” replaced a differently worded draft in which Adorno’s view of the “development toward total integration” (DE xi; GS 3: 9) is a shade less pessimistic and more politically specific than in the published version: One experience is not anticipated in the book, although it is has been alluded to in other texts of ours: at least the youth is putting up resistance against the transition to the totally administered world, which does not take place uninterruptedly, but by means of dictatorships and wars. The protest movement in all countries, in both blocks as well as in the Third World, attests that integration does not happen so smoothly. This book could attain a real function if it helped the impulses to resist to develop a consciousness that illuminates them and prevents them from desperately submitting to blind praxis and collective narcissism.3

This passage shows that Adorno’s position did not constitute a withdrawal from politics and praxis. Rather, the challenge he saw was to achieve an increasingly more refined, more truthful kind of theoretical reflection that would offer a meaningful alternative to the trap of pseudo-activity. More than ever, Adorno’s philosophical project relied on the capacity of art to give undiminished experience a voice. Put differently, it is precisely the otherness of artworks that sparks philosophical thought. It is not by means of political commitment, but only otherwise, negatively, that art can promise the happiness that cannot be achieved by practical action: “Art’s promesse du bonheur means not only that hitherto praxis has blocked happiness but that happiness is above praxis [my italics]” (AT 12; GS 7: 26). Many passages in Adorno’s late work can be read as indirect responses to his students’ demand that he commit himself to political praxis.4 One literary figure repeatedly invoked by Adorno as an allegorical other was Goethe, whom he revered. Adorno responded to the students’ rejection of theory by referring to Goethe’s devil, Mephistopheles, who proclaims: “Gray, my dear friend, is every theory, / And green alone life’s golden tree.”5

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“All theory is gray,” Goethe has Mephistopheles preach to the student he is leading around by the nose; the sentence is already ideology from the very beginning, fraud about the fact that the tree of life the practicians planted and the devil in the same breath compares to gold is hardly green at all; the grayness of theory is for its part a function of the life that has been de-qualified. (CM 260; GS 10.2: 759-760)

Theory is gray only because life’s tree is not green. Whoever chooses to follow Mephistopheles’s advice, Adorno suggests, falls prey to the narcissism of the individual who mistakenly equates dismissal of theory with a fulfilling life. With astonishing tenacity, Adorno sought to challenge his students’ Mephistophelian temptations and continued to search for definitive formulations of his aesthetic thoughts and convictions. Not only his AT, but also the essays on Borchardt and George are late works. Other aesthetic writings he was planning were not realized, among them essays on Paul Celan’s Sprachgitter [Speech-Grill] and Samuel Beckett’s L’innommable [The Nameless]. His lecture “On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie” was his last great utterance on a single canonical literary text. In addressing Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris (1799)], Adorno made a point of choosing not only an essential drama of Weimar humanism, but also one of the most often taught yet least popular texts of the German pedagogical canon.6 Adorno offered a highly theoretical and political reading of Iphigenie, seeking to avoid both a “progressive” position that dismisses the drama for its presumed lack of contemporary relevance and a conservative position that views the contemporary lack of interest in the play as a symptom of cultural decline. Adorno argued for Goethe’s modernity by offering a reinterpretation of the concepts of classicism and Humanität, or “humanity,” “humaneness.” Goethe, whose “sublime irony” Adorno had characterized earlier as quintessentially bourgeois,7 strongly disliked the pathos of heroism and showmanship prevalent during the age of bourgeois revolution. Unusually sensitive to the reversal of Humanität into repression that occurred in the course of the French revolution, Adorno’s Goethe developed a stance of tactful reserve. However, as Adorno saw it, this left him nowhere to go but backwards: “Goethe deserted for an aristocratic society; he feared the barbarian in the bourgeois and hoped to find humanness in the object of the bourgeois spirit’s resentment. Good manners, considerateness, and renunciation of the aggressiveness of what calls itself the unvarnished truth are among the ingredients of a need for humanness” (NL 2: 161; GS 11: 504). Goethe was thus responding to a situation in which humanity first “emerged and was cut off in the same moment.” In other words, Goethe’s

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reaction is historically appropriate in that the gesture of detachment does not simply create distance but rather points to a dim recognition of the origins of bourgeois society, its perpetual entanglement in mythic violence and guilt. It is in this alleged movement toward an Ur-history of the bourgeois subject that Adorno discovers a secret Goethe, a critic of the dialectic of enlightenment, a dialectician in spite of his hostility toward Idealist philosophy, an antiFaustian, passive poet who leaves his Olympian heights to speak out against classicism. Adorno’s claim is that, in the words of an astute critic, “in the end, classicism is on the side of myth. . . . Goethe is a romantic, passive poet, whose very passivity resists or opposes the classicist complicity with myth.”8 Adorno first gave his lecture at the Hamburg chapter of the Goethe Society in January 1967, and later that same year in Braunschweig and, most significantly, in Berlin. After delivering the lecture for the first time, he happily judged the work “especially well done.”9 The most obvious critical intention of the essay on Iphigenie is to dismantle the cliché of Goethe’s classicism as the mature (i.e., post-Storm and Stress) achievement of harmony of form and content, intention and product, subject and object, culture and nature. In opposition to these clichés, Adorno argues for a more tension-fraught notion of classicism as the reflection of its own antinomy. In a by now almost routine dialectical manner—Adorno and his “Adornoese” had, at least superficially, become an integral part of the social and cultural discourse in the Federal Republic—Adorno sought to redeem the concept of classicism by turning it against itself. Yet his presentation of the talk at the Free University in Berlin on 6 June 1967 turned out to be anything but routine. Many students expected him to condemn the police killing of the student Benno Ohnesorg, which had taken place only four days earlier, and the tabloids’ campaign against the protesting students, and to demonstrate thereby the practical relevance of his theoretical insights. But Adorno did not yield to calls by the SDS [Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund] for him to cancel his lecture and instead engage in a political discussion with the students. Nor did he acquiesce to the students’ request that he write an expert opinion in favor of Kommune I activists like Fritz Teufel who had been charged with plotting terrorist acts.10 There are no documents that suggest that anything Adorno said in his lecture resonated with his audience. Peter Szondi, who had invited Adorno to Berlin, introduced the lecture with remarks that suggested the political significance of Adorno’s interpretation of Iphigenie. In a book on the role of literature during the period of the student revolt, Klaus Briegleb observes that Adorno’s text includes a “subversive series of sentences . . . that address the contemporary situation and ‘refracts’ the principle of humanity in . . . Iphigenie from the perspective of the languages of

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law and order and the dialectic of enlightenment.”11 Briegleb’s summary of this “subversive series of sentences” concludes with the claim that Adorno interprets Goethe’s play as a prophecy of the enlightenment’s reversal into myth.12 It was not Adorno’s intention to comment directly on the events in Berlin, or to present his interpretation of Iphigenie as a political commentary. The political role of art resided for him less in any specific content or message than in art’s very existence as something autonomous and politically useless. In AT he suggested that those students who wanted art to become politically useful misunderstood the essence of art, acting more or less unwittingly in accordance with the historical trend that wants to abolish all art by “realizing its truth content, which is facilely equated with art’s social content” (AT 251; GS 7: 373): “For contemporary consciousness, and especially for student activists, the immanent difficulties of art, no less than its social isolation, amount to its condemnation” (AT 251; GS 7: 372). Adorno, for his part, found nothing more socially and politically illuminating than the immanent difficulties and contradictions of artworks. If his interpretation of Iphigenie yields nothing more than a reassertion of his long-held historico-philosophical insight that enlightenment reverts to myth, then the lecture simply situates Goethe within the largest, most general historical context imaginable. Insofar as there is nothing in Adorno’s essay on Iphigenie that relates directly to the political situation the students wanted him to address, their disappointment was certainly justified. The crux of Adorno’s engagement with Goethe’s drama lies, rather, in the passion with which he confronts the legacy of a literary work that forms a crucial part of the literary canon studied in the institution of the German university. His essay on Goethe is politically significant because, in taking on Iphigenie, Adorno takes on one of the central documents of the very institution the students were invested in changing. They had dubbed the “Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität,” where Adorno taught, “Karl-Marx-Universität,” and one rebellious slogan called for replacing the literary canon with a political one: “Schlagt die Germanistik tot, färbt die blaue Blume rot” (“Kill Germanistik and dye the blue flower [the symbol of German Romanticism] red”). Rather than substituting Marx for Goethe, Adorno set out to show the precise relevance of Iphigenie within the context of the dialectic of enlightenment, by dissecting and disassembling the notions of “classicism” and “humanity.” He aspired to redefine not only the position of Iphigenie within the context of Weimar Classicism, but also the political import of classicism. The notion of classicism is derived from the idea of a classical literature. German classicism entailed the imitation of idealized literary forms

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from Greek and Roman antiquity, and it is the result of an eighteenth-century construction of aesthetic history. As a genuine product of progressive Enlightenment thought, it cannot simply be dismissed as an ideological remnant of an aristocratic past. In a more narrow technical sense, classicism is the result of a philological reconstruction of antiquity, and, in a circular logic, philology gains privilege as the premier route of access to classical artworks.13 At one level, “the classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie” means nothing more than that the drama is a classical, a profoundly canonical work of art. It gains this status because “the classical” is thought of as a model. At another level, to speak of the classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie could also mean to point out its obsoleteness, if one understands classicism in a historical or chronological sense. As a work of Weimar Classicism, it is historically dated. Adorno’s intention in interpreting Iphigenie is to show that the play is neither dated nor simply the successful exemplification of a formal ideal. To him, it presents an attempt to work through the split identity of classicism—its being simultaneously a historical and an ideal form—by emphasizing its inherently antinomic structure rather than trying to play it down.14 The foremost classicist characteristic of Iphigenie auf Tauris is its classical sujet, which draws on Greek mythology and Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris; its dramatic form is likewise classical, that of a play [Schauspiel] in five acts. It is not, however, an imitation of Greek tragedy. Adorno underscores that Goethe did not call it a tragedy. Some of the phrasing and vocabulary sounds decidedly bourgeois, an anachronistic violation of the high style of ancient Greek tragedy. Adorno begins his interpretation of Iphigenie’s classicism by focusing on its content rather than its form: Contrary to the accepted view and to the unconsidered use of the word “form,” Goethean classicism is to be deduced from its content. Invoking Goethe’s own words and the contemporaneous ones of Schiller, it is customary to call that content Humanität or das Humane, in accordance with the unmistakable intention of elevating respect for human freedom, for the self-determination of every individual, to the status of a universal standing above particularistic customs and nationalistic narrowmindedness. (NL 2: 157; GS 11: 499)

Adorno’s reading focuses on introducing distinctions that defy the idea of classicism as a wholesome unity of form and content. In order to understand precisely what Adorno has in mind when he speaks of Goethe’s classicism, it is necessary to consider these distinctions. Not only does he seek to separate the content of Iphigenie from its form, he also distinguishes content [Inhalt]

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from substance [Gehalt]:15 “Humanity is the content of the play rather than its substance” (NL 157;GS 11: 499). Somewhat schematically, one could say that Adorno’s analysis starts with the content (identified as humanity or the human), moves on to the form (he speaks emphatically of a “primacy of form”), and ends up considering the problem of Gehalt [substance, import]. The latter resides primarily in Goethe’s language (the mode of representation), and is not to be confused with the content (the represented). Adorno’s first significant observation is that the presumed humanity of Goethe’s play cannot be located in Attic Greece. “The pragmatic premise of Iphigenie is barbarism” (NL 2: 156; GS 11: 499). In relation to classical Greece, Iphigenie is extraterritorial, taking place in a “zone of trouble or disaster . . . in harmony with mythic fate” (NL 2: 156; GS 11: 499). It is, like Torquato Tasso, a “drama of civilization.” Faithful to the overall pattern of the dialectic of enlightenment, Adorno does not understand civilization as a triumphant overcoming of mythic fate, as inherently emancipatory. “Once emancipated, the subject, which did not emancipate itself in the civilizing process so much as emerge [entsprang] from it, comes into conflict with civilization and its rules” (NL 2: 157; GS 11: 500). The liberation of the subject from mythic fatefulness is not identical with its emancipation from the heteronomy of civilized society. For Adorno, this antinomy manifests itself forcefully in Torquato Tasso: “Tasso’s tragic end . . . reveals that the emancipated subject cannot live freely in the bourgeois society that dangles freedom before it. The subject’s right is confirmed only in its demise” (NL 2: 158; GS 11: 500). Adorno notes that it is misleading to view classicism as the realization of the emancipated, fully human subject, because such a subject exist only in the realm of representation, as aesthetic semblance, by virtue of stylization: aesthetics and history diverge. Stylization is an expression of the failure to reconcile subject and civilization; it is “a residue of unfused objectivity, something not reconciled with the subject and in contradiction to the claims of civilization” (NL 2: 157-158; GS 11: 500). Stylization is, to use another of Adorno’s provocative phrases, a form of “coerced reconciliation;” it becomes necessary where the literary work does not do what it says it does. By refusing to identify classicism with a specific style, Adorno rejects an easy normative classification of classicism. Because his idea of classicism resists the norms of literary historical and stylistic analysis, he attempts to link it to the dialectic of enlightenment that he sees at work in Iphigenie: Civilization, the stage of the mature [mündig] subject, outstrips mythic immaturity [Unmündigkeit], thereby becoming guilty toward it and entangled in the mythic web of guilt. It comes into its own and attains

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Civilization does not intrinsically contain and realize Humanität. Departing from the conventional association of classical Greece with the foundation of humane values, Adorno dubs the Scythian ruler Thoas a “humane barbarian king,” and he proposes a dialectical reading of Humanität: without the immanent ability for self-sacrifice and self-negation, Humanität would not be possible. What claims to be humane becomes so only if it does not seek any prerogative over barbarism. Humanität, which Adorno sees as the content of the play, is constituted by this dialectic of civilization and barbarity, self-preservation and self-sacrifice. Dialectic, however, is a formal operation; accordingly, Adorno’s discussion soon shifts from an explication of content to a more formal analysis: “In that dialectic, form moves to the center: both as construction of the whole and the parts and in linguistic heights wholly new to German literature” (NL 2: 158; GS 11: 500-501). Since it is constructed, form does not merely give expression to the content, but gains primacy over it. As a structure, form is constitutive of the substance [Gehalt] of the play. In Iphigenie, form develops a dynamic that succeeds in neutralizing the mythic aspect of civilization. “The raw” [das Rohe] is mitigated17 by the “all-penetrating ether” (NL 2: 158; GS 11: 500) of the play’s style. The primacy of form brings the civilizing moment, the thematic material, into the substance of the work [das Gedichtete]. The progressive refinement and ultimate disappearance of what is crude are not the aim of the heroine alone. The form of every sentence is accomplished with a well-considered and crafted mesotes [just proportion] of formulation. It is oddly [wunderlich] coupled with a warm, encompassing streaming. (NL 2: 158; GS 11: 500-501)

Referring to the stereotypically classic “just proportion” would miss the substance of Goethe’s play, that which is generated by poetic technique alone and which Adorno calls, with a term coined by Walter Benjamin, “das Gedichtete” [the poetized].18 Adorno is especially fascinated by the “liquid,” streaming quality of the play’s speech. At the end of the essay, he mentions the

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nonverbal, musical quality hidden in “the murmuring [Rauschen] of Goethe’s objective and conceptual language” (NL 2: 170; GS 11: 514). This prominent appearance (in the last sentence) of Adorno’s favorite word, Rauschen, amounts to more than a coded attempt to stress the anti-classical elements within Goethe’s classicism; it also points to a hidden quality of Goethe’s language beyond the expressiveness and articulateness of dramatic speech. Adorno finds those moments most irresistible when speech is on the brink of falling silent. Thoas’s laconic interjections reveal a richness of language not available to the presumably civilized speakers: When, antithetically, the Scythian king is silent or uses few words, his terseness no longer seems that of someone who is not fully able to express himself; his silence works toward civilization in its own right, negotiated down from a raging outburst. Thoas’s laconic interjections in the final lines, the transition from the pragmatic “So geht”—“Go, then”--(line 2151) to his celebrated “Lebt wohl” (line 2174)—“Fare thee well”--the unconventionality of which contains, in that context, an unprecedented weight of substance, owe their irresistible charm to this hidden abundance. . . . Goethe’s language has to emerge [sich erzeugen] along with the substance [Gehalt] of the drama; this is what gives it the freshness of forest and hollow. (NL 2: 159; GS 11: 501)

This is Adorno at his most exalted. He finds Goethe’s language so irresistible because it captures the antinomy at the heart of civilization. The overcoming of myth is not merely imagined as a process of—echoing Kant’s famous “What is Enlightenment?”—mündig werden, of being mature and emancipated enough to voice oneself politically; silence, too, is no longer just mythic dumbness. Thoas’s silence is zivilisatorisch: it partakes in civilization, and it civilizes myth. Language’s approach to silence leads to its rebirth. Adorno’s formulation here is rather curious: he claims that “Goethe’s Sprache muß mit dem Gehalt sich erzeugen.” This peculiar formulation—which can be fully appreciated only in its original wording—seems to suggest a sexual pairing and a twin birth of language and substance [Gehalt]. Adorno thus attributes to Goethe’s poetic craft the natural capacity for self-generation, for natural creation within artistic creation. The artwork takes on the quality of nature, “the freshness of forest and hollow,” invoking the idea of nature unharmed by the forces of technological civilization and instrumental rationality. Once again, Adorno seeks to find in the work of art a passage from history to natural history, but this time the latter is not reduced to transience.

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To be precise, Thoas’s silence is not an expression of speechlessness; it is, rather, a form of emancipation and maturity [Mündigkeit], an antithetical kind of speech, or, as one might call it, “contra-speech.” Rather than simply identifying speech with civilization, Adorno credits Goethe with producing a form of poetry that is unusually sensitive to language as a process, as something emerging. Adorno suggests that Goethe’s “linguistic turn” is to be seen in relation to the peculiar literary-historical situation in which he found himself. In the wake of the predominant aesthetics of genius, Goethe had to deal with the problem peculiar to a literature thrown back on subjective experience: that of objectivating itself without participating in any objectivity that would serve as its foundation. In language he found the possibility of a balance, as though in spite of everything language were somehow still prior to the subject in a subjectivistic age, and capable of receiving every subjective impulse and accommodating it. (NL 2: 159; GS 11: 501)

Goethe uses language as if it still had recourse to a pre-subjective objectivity that no longer exists. Refusing to conceive of language as a mere expressive instrument available to the subject liberated from the force of objectivity, Goethe’s poetry resists its historical situation by virtue of an—quixotic—objectivation without objectivity. In the age of Romantic infatuation with subjective expressivity, Goethe’s language serves as the placeholder for increasingly diminished objectivity. Operating according to the logic implied by the grammatical mode of the subjunctive (“as if”), Goethe’s language acts as if it were still prior to the subject, yet also receptive and responsive to it. For Adorno, this kind of language anticipates the language of Flaubert’s realism. Invoking the monuments of literary history allows him to propose a philosophical history of language: With Iphigenie begins language’s development into an objectivating element, a development that culminates in Flaubert und Baudelaire. The reconciliation of the subject with something that evades it, a reconciliation with which language is burdened, the substitution of form for a content antagonistic to it, is already fully visible in Iphigenie. It was able to succeed because the tensions in the content are precipitated in something that is aesthetic in the strict sense, that is, in the autonomy of form. Language becomes the representative of order, and at the same time produces order out of freedom, out of subjectivity, in a manner not so very different from that envisioned by the Idealist philosophy Goethe could not stand. (NL 2: 159; GS 11: 501-502)

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Language’s tendency toward objectivation alienates it from the subject, and reconciliation of the two diverging elements succeeds only in the aesthetic realm. Goethe’s language serves as a figure of reconciliation. On the one hand, it represents the autonomy of form that frees the artwork from the control of the subject; within the context of the autonomy of form, language represents order. On the other hand, Adorno claims (and this claim is speculative, it seems) that such order is itself the product of freedom, and that freedom can only be the freedom of a subject. Thus, Goethe’s drama includes the objective tendency of language and accommodates its subjective element. The historically conditioned tensions between unfreedom and freedom, norm and spontaneity, universal and particular are not covered up; instead they are exposed within the dramatic language, the very form of the play. It is through such dialectical speculation that Adorno seeks to reread the notion of Goethe’s classicism. Because the “bedeviled humaneness” of Iphigenie represents an irresolvable conflict, Goethe’s classicism is not triumphant. “In its fragile quality, Goethe’s classicism proves its worth as correct consciousness, as a figure of something that cannot be arbitrated but which its idea consists of arbitrating” (NL 2: 159; GS 11: 502). Referring once again to the dialectic of enlightenment, Adorno situates the fragility of Goethe’s classicism not only in the antinomic humanity of Iphigenie, but also in the writer’s oeuvre as a whole. Rather than representing a revulsion against his earlier involvement in the dynamics of Storm and Stress, Goethe’s classicism is the dialectical outcome of that involvement. The historical premise of Goethe’s entire literary production was, according to Adorno, the growing supremacy of the individual over the universal, in short, aesthetic nominalism. In the age of bourgeois individuality, artworks lose their seemingly self-evident authority. Aesthetic meaning is not something conferred by the authority of the work. It must be infused into it by the creative subject or genius, who acts as if he could give life to aesthetic meaning by a mere act of volition. But the Storm and Stress hope and desire for the creation of a universally relevant aesthetic meaning only highlight the classical antimony generated by the historical emergence of bourgeois nominalism. The latter “requires the foregoing of any unity that would be established prior to the parts and would hold them together; unity is to crystallize out of the individual parts” (NL 2: 160; GS 11: 502-503). But the individual particulars have become just that: particulars that exist only for themselves, without intrinsic relation to a larger or higher totality that could be reconstructed by putting them back together. “Not only do they not retain the certainty of their meaning within the whole but they lose even the orienting constants through which the details move forward and

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rise above their particular existence” (NL 2: 160; GS 11: 503). For Adorno, classicism must be understood as part of an irreversible historical process that is neither inherently lawful nor determinate, and hence inevitably fails to confer meaning to the now contingent particulars: “Classicism is the fragile response to this; its practice of keeping to a precarious mean and distancing itself from the extremes is concretized through its avoidance of aphoristic constructions . . . on the one hand and its avoidance on the other hand of aconceptual detail that threatens to sink from the aesthetic continuum down into preaesthetic empirical reality” (NL 2: 160; GS 11: 503). Yet this classical response to the historical change in the artwork’s ontology is “fragile” because it is not only a compromise, or, as Adorno calls it, a “precarious mean,” but also an avoidance of the real historical and aesthetic contradictions that no artist can avoid: “The classicist solution is fragile because it is in fact prohibited by the nominalist antinomy, and it balances where no reconciliation is possible. It becomes something achieved by means of tact” (NL 2: 160; GS 11: 503). Adorno sees the tactful achievement of Goethe’s classicism in a “semblance of naturalness.” Naturalness is the result of a careful concealing that allows aesthetic semblance to appear: “It conceals the hand that does the staging, the hand that gives meaning; through careful polishing it smooths off the unruliness of the now outlying details” (NL 2: 160; GS 11: 503). Just as Thoas, the betrayed barbarian king, expresses himself only laconically, classicism carefully avoids exhibiting the antinomies of which it is, in actuality, an expression. Where no reconciliation is possible, the best solution is a precarious, ever-so-careful balancing act. For such utmost discretion Adorno often reserves the word tact. He first mentions Goethe’s tact in an aphorism in MM titled, appropriately, “On the Dialectic of Tact.” Not only Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, but also “Beethoven’s regular recapitulations following dynamic expositions, Kant’s deduction of scholastic categories from the unity of consciousness, are eminently ‘tactful’” (MM 36; GS 4: 39). The examples suggest that tact “has its precise historical hour,” both in social history—“It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid himself of absolutist power” (MM 36; GS 4: 39)—and in the history of aesthetic forms. More precisely, tact is effective precisely at a point of transition when disintegrating universals are still permitted to retain a semblance of authority. “The precondition of tact is convention no longer intact yet still present. Now fallen into irreparable ruin, it lives on only in the parody of forms . . .” (MM 36; GS 4: 39). As tempting as it would be to read Goethe’s Iphigenie as a parody of forms, Adorno insists on identifying the era of Weimar and Vienna Classicism as the precise historical hour when at least tact—the careful concealment of

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the antimonies underlying classicism—is still intact. Tact works in Goethe, but it fails to succeed in twentieth-century everyday social interactions: “In the end emancipated, purely individual tact becomes mere lying” (MM 37; GS 4: 40). Tact is inherently classicist: The exercise of tact was as paradoxical as its historical location. It demanded the reconciliation—actually impossible—between the unauthorized claims of convention and the unruly ones of the individual. Other than convention there was nothing by which tact could be measured. Convention represented, in however etiolated a form, the universal which made up the very substance of the individual claim. Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations. (MM 36-37; GS 4: 39-40)

Goethe’s tactfulness allows for the fragile classical solutions, but it is at best a paradoxical solution: Tact is ur-bourgeois, possible only within the context of an aristocracy just deprived of power, impossible without vestiges of feudalism. Adorno emphasizes that tact works for the individual only if it remains related to something universal; only so long as the social force of conventions retains some authority. In the hands of the fully individualized subject, tact becomes a mere formality, eliciting suspicion and antagonism. In the case of Goethe’s Iphigenie, the function of tact is to avoid any appearance of artifice and construction, resembling classicism’s “semblance of naturalness.” Yet the tactful art of concealing perfected by Goethe has its flipside: “In that act of hiding, or staging [Veranstaltung], the a priori of form, which though dismantled by nominalism does not yield to it, is nevertheless preserved. This gives classicism its inconstant quality” (NL 2: 160; GS 11: 503). The inconstant quality of classicism is perhaps most visible in Goethe’s attempt to convey a sense of “natural speech.” Such ideal is itself a convention, which can be staged only with great tact, lest it provoke the audience’s ire. Goethe’s classical fascination with antiquity is inspired by a (sentimental) desire for natural speech. For Adorno, Goethe’s classical style works because it is modeled on the ideal of “complete lack of constraint, désinvolture. The naturedominating gesture relaxes, and language loses its cramped quality. Language now finds its autonomy not in self-assertion but through renunciation in favor of the subject matter, to which it clings fervently” (NL 2: 161; GS 11: 504). Lack of self-assertion and renunciation in favor of the subject matter are eminently tactful qualities. But the ideal of désinvolture19 is already incomplete in Iphigenie; at times, even the most precise tact loses its measure. Some speeches in Iphigenie betray the intended distancing style of the play.

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For example, Goethe’s Pylades “sounds bourgeois.” Adorno observes that the sociable and prosaic speech of Pylades and other “second violins” deviates from the style of the drama and violates the rule of tact: “The reason why such passages are slightly discordant with the tenor of the whole is that the sociable tone is to be incorporated into the whole but is not to approach communicative speech, speech which would in any way relax the objectivity of the linguistic form” (NL 2: 163; GS 11: 506). Incorporated into Goethe’s classical form is a style inconsistent with the whole—the classical form is dissolved from within. “In Iphigenie the objectivity of language in itself is not maintained in a clear and unmuddied form because that objectivity postulates an essence that establishes meaning a priori, and by the criterion of naturalness it is precisely such an essence that should not be postulated” (NL 2: 163; GS 11: 506). The ideal of naturalness and the logic of postulation are at odds with one another. “In classicism’s sore spots pure expressive language slides off into communicative language. Artful arrangements are not adequate to restrain divergence” (NL 2: 163; GS 11: 506). The moments of divergence and dissonance that surface in the language of classicism testify to an antinomy in the ideal of Humanität. Insofar as this ideal is based on the privilege of a particular interest, it follows a logic of excluding those that are not yet humane. Because the content of Humanität rests on proto-mythical privilege (it is not for nothing that Goethe was called an Olympian), it requires the sacrifice of victims in the interest of the ideal. This is the objective content [Sachgehalt] on which the truth content [Wahrheitsgehalt] of the drama is predicated; hence Iphigenie’s Humanität is diabolical. In the name of civilization and humaneness, Goethe’s play sacrifices those who are excluded from civilization. Adorno points out that “in Iphigenie injustice is done to those who are literally, in the Greek use of the term, barbarians” (NL 2: 164; GS 11: 507). While the drama claims that justice is being done, injustice is inflicted precisely by the proponents of Humanität. The sense of injustice being done, which is damaging to the drama because the drama claims, objectively, in its idea, that justice will be realized along with Humanität, stems from the fact that Thoas, the barbarian, gives more than the Greeks, who, in complicity with the drama itself, consider themselves humanly superior to him. (NL 2: 162; GS 11: 508-509)

The injustice implied by Humanität is built into the structure of the dialectic of enlightenment: “Civilization, which, historically, leads out of barbarism, has also promoted barbarism, and continues to promote it by virtue of

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the repressive force exerted by the principle of civilization, the domination of nature” (NL 2: 164; GS 11: 507). Vis-à-vis this dialectic, Goethe was trying his utmost to defend his drama from the accusation of promoting injustice and inhumanity. Thus, “in its later acts the course of the drama is Humanität’s apology for its immanent inhumanity. Goethe takes a great risk [wagt ein Äußerstes] for the sake of this defense” (NL 2: 165; GS 11: 509). In the course of the play, the presumptive universal humaneness of Humanität becomes increasingly questionable. Goethe seeks to rescue Humanität by having Iphigenie disavow her self-interest out of freedom and autonomy—that is “the utmost”proclaimed by Adorno. Because self-interest, Adorno argues, is predicated on deception and fraud, it becomes entangled in the mythical web of guilt. By betraying herself and her brother, Iphigenie allows herself to be rescued by the humanity of the barbarian. But this tactful deviation from the presupposed unjust structure of Humanität continues to exclude Thoas, the barbarian king and true agent of Humanität: With a tact modeled on the social version, the great concluding scene with Thoas attempts to weaken what happens and make it unrecognizable through the ritual of hospitality--namely, that the Scythian king, who in reality behaves far more nobly than his noble guests, is left and abandoned. There is little likelihood that he will act on the invitation given him. To use one of Goethe’s turns of phrase, he is not permitted to participate in the highest Humanität but is condemned to remain its object, while in fact he acts as its subject. (NL 2: 166; GS 11: 509)

Goethe’s solution is in actuality a non-solution. Thoas remains duped by the inhumanity of Humanität, and it “manifests itself aesthetically” (NL 2: 166). The application of tact cannot make one forget the limitations of the bourgeois Humanität of Goethe’s age, and the poet’s classicism is exposed as a desperate artistic construction, a far cry from the presumably “natural” form of the classic, which, in turn, is revealed as mere ideology. “The poet’s desperate efforts are excessive; the wires become visible and violate the rules of naturalness the drama sets for itself. . . . The masterpiece creaks . . .” (NL 2: 166; GS 11: 509). This does not mean, however, that Goethe’s classicism is a fraud, an attempt to obfuscate violence and repression. Adorno’s critique is not accusatory. It is in the great, mad monologue of Orestes that he finds the self-reflective moment in which Humanität “becomes aware” of its own “limitations” (NL 2: 166): “That monologue gives rise to an image of unrestricted reconciliation beyond the conception of Humanität, a middle way between the unconditional and blind enthrallment to nature. Here, truly, Goethe leaves classicism

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as far behind him as his meter, in a reprise of the free verse of his early period, leaves iambs” (NL 2: 166; GS 11: 509-510). For Adorno, the figure of Orestes, shaking off the constraints of iambic meter, represents “the stance of the work itself” (NL 2: 167). Orestes’s mad vision of the underworld pacifies myth, but only through an exterritorialization, an escape from the immediate world of Greek antiquity: We hear echoes of the doctrine of the apocatastasis: of the redemption of even radical evil, utter sinfulness. Paradoxically, and certainly without Goethe’s knowledge, the central religious conception of the Russians, a conception expressed in their own literature only much later, is put into the mouth of this Greek man cast into Russian territory. It is, however, this vision that demolishes the special preserve Goethe had elsewhere, for the sake of Iphigenie’s Humanität, established for culture. (NL 2: 166-167; GS 11: 510)

The notion of apocatastasis suggests that the stakes are high. Adorno sees in the drama a utopian vision that aims to realize a concept of Humanität that knows no hierarchical distinction between good and evil, own and other, culture and barbarism: “At its highest peak, Goethe’s work attains the null point between enlightenment and a heterodox theology in which enlightenment reflects upon itself, a theology which is rescued by vanishing within enlightenment” (NL 2: 170; GS 11: 514). Yet it is only in the form of a madman’s vision that Goethe dares to espouse an all-encompassing concept of Humanität in which nature and the mythic realm are pacified. At the same moment that this vision is articulated, it is already discredited. By presenting Orestes’s protest against the universal rule of myth as speech inspired by madness, Goethe contains and disarms the anti-mythic impulse. Reconciliation with myth remains a mere underworldly vision; as a whole, the drama seeks to defend the privilege of culture, which requires that the mythic violence on which culture is based be forgotten. Adorno, however, stubbornly pursues the possibility of another reading, a reading that allows one to break away momentarily from the constraints of the dialectic of enlightenment in which mythic guilt is perpetuated by means of the rational victory over myth. At the end of the essay, Adorno sketches the portrait of an anti-classicist Goethe under “the star of hope that beckons us” (Iphinegie line 925). This poetic image inspires Adorno to invoke hope, “one of Goethe’s Orphic ur-words and one of the watchwords from Iphigenie,” as the possibility of another history, a way out of the vicious circle of the dialectic of myth and enlightenment. Yet hope does not contain the possibility of something, but only the potential for nothing: “It would be hope . . . that the ele-

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ment of violence contained in progress, the point where enlightenment mimics myth, would fade away; that it would diminish [kleiner wird], or, in the words of the line from Iphigenie, ‘become exhausted’[‘ermattet’]” (NL 2: 169; GS 11: 513). The hope for an exhaustion of violence means that the dialectic of enlightenment will have exhausted itself, that it will have gone through all its possible incarnations.20 Within the logic of the classical play, such exhaustion can be figured only proleptically, as hope. Decisive for Adorno’s interpretation is the following speech by Iphigenie: “Is / This house then never to arise again / With a fresh blessing?—All things else decline / The best of happiness, life’s fairest strength / Will slacken finally: why not this curse?” [1694-1698].21 If everything is subject to the temporal law of diminution, then, according to the logic of hope, even the seemingly unending, the mythic curse weighing on the House of Atreus must exhaust itself. Realizing that his stress on this utterance of hope must seem exaggerated, Adorno rushes to link it to Goethe’s tale “The New Melusine,” narrated in the poet’s late novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (1828): During the periods when she withdraws from the impetuous and virtually barbaric lover, Melusine disappears into a kingdom within a little chest. It is a phantasmagoria of blissful smallness . . . . The little chest in the Melusine story, one of the most enigmatic works Goethe produced, is the counterauthority to myth; it does not defeat myth but rather undercuts it through nonviolence. (NL 2: 169; GS 11: 513)

Mythical power will fade away only if not confronted head-on.22 Hope, Adorno underscores, is not a human feeling. It is a utopian figure, based on the experience that the universal law of exhaustion will eventually also wear down human domination of nature and its dialectical flipside, the perpetuation of myth. As a figure, hope is embodied not by great ideas or loud pathos. “It is invoked only desultorily” (NL 2: 169; GS 11: 513) because it is incompatible with classicism. Instead, Adorno finds it in the enigmatic “phantasmagoria of blissful smallness.” The mention of smallness is hardly accidental, for it is precisely in the response of least resistance, the retreat to extreme smallness, that hope is possible. “Iphigenie’s metaphor of exhaustion . . . refers to a gesture that yields instead of insisting on its rights, but without self-denial [ohne zu entsagen]” (NL 2: 170; GS 11: 514). It is this idea of yielding without renunciation or self-denial that allows Adorno to detect a different kind of Goethe, a poet who does not fit the clichés of the classical author, but rather begins to resemble a Romantic poet like Eichendorff:

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Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature It is not the optical, objective Goethe, an accomplice in the domination of nature up to the very end of Faust, who stands beyond myth, but a passive [passivischer] Goethe who is no longer willing to engage in the deed that was supposed to have been there in the beginning, as what came first rather than what comes last. It is only this Goethe who embodies the protest against classicism which . . . takes the side of myth nevertheless. (NL 2: 170; GS 11: 514)

Adorno’s Goethe is Romantic because he passively yields to nature instead of seeking to colonize it like his hero Faust. Adorno’s Goethe is also a classical author in conflict with himself who protests against his own classicism by means of his passivity (NL 2: 170; GS 11: 514). Is the figure of a yielding but nonetheless vocal and mature [mündig] passivity suitable for a political allegory? Is Adorno trying to tell his students to leave the Faustian ideology of “In the beginning was the deed” behind? What can be learned from this surreptitiously anti-classicist and passive Goethe? The direct political context of the Iphigenie speech presented Adorno with the dilemma of having to refute the accusation of being politically passive and resigned. Even today, the image of Adorno as an elitist, as an aesthetic mandarin, is predominant. By developing the notion of a passive, un-Faustian Goethe, Adorno tried to mount a political challenge to the ideological primacy ascribed to action— the fetishization of action so prevalent in the late 1960s. Only thought, he believed, could preserve a residue of hope against what he called “pseudoactivity.” In his short text “Resignation,” Adorno identifies thought with possibility. Thought sublimates rage and brings happiness. “Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned” (CM 293; GS 10.2: 799). The thoughtful and tactful pursuit of literary interpretation is emphatically a sign of not having resigned. Against the pressures to politicize literary criticism, Adorno continues to verbalize an autonomous aesthetic experience. But doing so means increasing the pathos of distance, for Adorno makes clear that there can be no positive negation, no elimination of detachment. In the final analysis, Adorno’s art of transition is the art of inversion. Perhaps Thomas Mann was intuitively right about Adorno and postwar aesthetics when he gave his devil Adornoian features,23 because Mephistopheles is the master of the art of negation and inversion. In his essay “On the Final Scene of Faust (1959),” Adorno claims that, at the end of Goethe’s Faust, the account does not balance (see NL 1: 119; GS 11: 137). This could also be the motto of Adorno’s essays on literature, if not

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his entire oeuvre. And because the balance does not come out even, the art of transition remains in effect. Clearly, Adorno insists, Faust has lost his bet, and is redeemed only through an act of redemption that suspends the law of equal exchange. No amount of philological hair-splitting will prove that Faust, somehow, was never part of the plot and therefore cannot lose his bet. No, the only salvation must come from the higher authority of grace itself. But the twist in Adorno’s interpretation is that the devil himself is the agent of grace, against himself. The apparent act of denial is actually an act of self-denial. Adorno finds it the “most daring stroke in [Goethe’s] construction” that the devil, who in Goethe was already a devil of coldness, is taken in by his own love, the negation of negation. In the sphere of illusion, of the “farbige Abglanz” [colorful reflection], truth itself appears as untruth; in the light of reconciliation, however, this reversal reverses itself again. Even the natural condition of desire, which belongs to the complex of entanglement, reveals itself to be something that helps the entangled man escape. The metaphysics of Faust is not the effortful striving to which a neo-Kantian reward beckons somewhere in infinity but the disappearance of the natural order in a different order. (NL 1: 119; GS 11: 137)

Despite its eloquence, Adorno’s interpretation of Faust remains elliptic. The reader does not learn anything specific about the “different order” into which the natural is said to disappear. Perhaps the different order is the order of essayistic interpretation, which, in this passage, attempts to juxtapose the Frankfurt School’s concept of a dialectic of enlightenment with Adorno’s notion of aesthetic semblance. It is only through the productive power of negation, the love of negation, personified by the devil, that this juxtaposition becomes possible. But dialectics is not calculated evil, not the proverbial “devil’s work.” Instead, it is the dizzying dynamic, the movement of inversion that dupes even its most skillful and masterly proponent. If Mephistopheles is indeed the spirit who always denies, than negation itself must be denied. This is one of the few moments in which Adorno seems to concede the possibility of positive negation. But he immediately qualifies the concession: the work of the devil is entirely artistic, his realm is the realm of art and semblance, in which everything, even truth, is merely semblance—untruth. The mechanism of semblance is inversion. Yet the final inversion remains unmotivated, a dialectical move apparently inspired more by messianic hope than by any stringent aesthetic logic. From where is the “the light of reconciliation” supposed to radiate? From somewhere within the text? Adorno

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seems to affirm this question by invoking the “metaphysics of Faust,” which, however, turns out to be a historical, i. e., unmetaphysical, metaphysics: it is a metaphysics of disappearance. In this passage, as in many of his essays, Adorno is trying to integrate the historico-philosophical structure of a dialectic of enlightenment with concrete literary exegesis. The rhetorical and logical figures provided by this philosophical structure are by definition radical, if not totalitarian: they aim at universals. Such magnitude—in his essay on Faust, Adorno’s tries to come to terms with Goethe’s Großheit—is incompatible with the aphoristic and fragmentary form of the essay, which, by Adorno’s own definition, is antithetical to totalizing theoretical projects. In his essay on Goethe’s Iphigenie he is aware of this problem, despite the thematic predominance of dialectical structures in it. Adorno’s mention of the little chest in Goethe’s tale “The New Melusine” provides a much more successful model for essayistic thought than the overpowering rhetoric of dialectics. Adorno’s utopianism, his fascination with theological tropes and themes, his sometimes almost eschatological tone—these are all outgrowths of the historico-philosophical schema, at odds with the essayistic ideal of smallness. That Adorno’s own stance toward his infatuation with dialectical formulations is ambivalent can be seen in the way he repeatedly introduces figures of marginality and smallness (such as Melusine) that fall through the grid of dialectics and promise a wearing down, a fatiguing, and an ultimate exhaustion of the dialectic: a complete exhaustion of all possible interpretations. Commenting on the second part of Faust, Adorno observes that the links between part one and two of the tragedy are so few that “the connection becomes looser to the point where the interpreters have nothing to hold onto . . . .” Nothing? Not quite, for there always remains at least one possibility that keeps the interpretation going: “. . . nothing . . . but the meager idea of progressive purification” (NL 1: 120; GS 11: 138). Just as the end of Faust II is inconclusive and open to endless interpretation, so Adorno himself had a hard time finding a conclusion to his essay on Faust. After seemingly having concluded, he changes his mind and adds: “Or perhaps it is not that yet either” (NL 1: 119; GS 11: 137). The story continues, there is always another “or,” another twist, another turn. If the law of non-identity—central to the essay as form—applies, then the figures of the play are not self-identical. The late Faust is not the same as the early Faust, the human being is not “identical to himself,” and the play itself “is a play in pieces, a ‘Stück in Stücken’” (NL 1: 119; GS 11: 137). Hence, one would have to read it piece by piece, as a collection of small essayistic vignettes, more radically committed to the ideal of smallness, aconceptual

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transition, and rhetorical delay than Adorno’s reading, which almost seems to rush towards redemption, only to recoil from its own haste. It is a formal law of Adorno’s essays that they are never quite essayistic enough, not negative enough, still too engaged and committed, and the essayist is only too aware of this shortcoming. The reflection on these flaws is also part of the essay as form, constitutive of its subtle but incisive irony. The ironic self-reflection of inevitable fragmentation in Goethe’s Faust applies to Adorno’s essays as well: You have a piece, give it in pieces then! Write a ragout, you have a pen; It’s easy to invent, and easy to unroll. What good is it, if you construct a whole? The public takes it all apart again.24

In Goethe’s “Prelude in the Theatre,” this is the advice the poet receives from the director. In Adorno’s essays on literature, the literary critic often ends up unpicking the grand dialectic scheme of history offered by the philosopher. Whoever sees in Adorno’s essays on literature merely an exemplification of his a priori dialectical philosophy misses the unruly and contingent elements that manifest themselves fragmentarily in the “the aesthetic dignity of words” (GS 1: 370), the “dignity of chance” (NL 1: 140; GS 11: 172), or the “anarchy of history” (NL 1: 148; GS 11: 172).

Conclusion

Figuren des Nichts. —Adorno

If one were to read the four volumes of Adorno’s Notes to Literature from beginning to end, one would first read “The Essay as Form” and conclude with an essay comprising eight fragmentary meditations on the changing social and aesthetic significance of the two archetypal modes of literature, comedy and tragedy. This last essay was published under two different titles, “Is Art Cheerful?” [“Ist die Kunst heiter?” (1967)], and “Dialectics of Cheerfulness” [“Dialektik der Heiterkeit” (1968)]. While the first text in Adorno’s NL, “The Essay as Form,” addresses the possibility of non-systematic and playful philosophical expression, the last essay presents two related but slightly different perspectives on the famous dictum from Schiller’s drama Wallenstein: “Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst” [“Life is serious, art is cheerful”]. Adorno’s first response to Schiller’s version of the Hippocratic aphorism “ars longa, vita brevis” is dialectical, his second response is deconstructive. Although Schiller’s often quoted phrase is a platitude, reassuring the bourgeois consumer that life and art, work and play can and must be separated cleanly, it nonetheless contains a grain of truth. The pleasure provided by art’s cheerfulness is not accidental; it is a historically evolved, essential component of what art is. Citing Kant’s formula that the beautiful is “purposiveness without a purpose” [“Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck;” see Critique of the Power of Judgment §15], Adorno claims that artistic semblance “embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom,” and the bleakest cases of modernist art still provide the joy and expectation of aesthetic illusion: “Even in Beckett’s plays the curtain rises the way it rises on the room with the Christmas presents” (NL 2: 248; GS 11: 600). The fleeting moment of aesthetic appearance signified

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by the rising curtain is cheerful before this moment can be processed critically and conceptually. It is not so much the play on the stage itself or the impact art has on its audience that is cheerful, but the raising of the curtain with which the artwork points to itself as artwork. Cheerfulness, then, is not a question of an aesthetics of content [Inhaltsästhetik] or of effect or reception [Wirkungs- or Rezeptionsästhetik], but rather a question of aesthetic existence. Although, as Adorno points out, it has become increasingly impossible to conceive of art as cheerful, especially “after Auschwitz,”1 it is precisely the existence of art that constitutes its cheerfulness. No individual work of art is cheerful, but art itself is cheerful because it has escaped mythic violence. Art, one could say, is less than entirely serious because it has managed to survive the endless destruction wreaked by history. Art’s cheerfulness is thus not the same as humor or the comic in an individual work of art. Its cheerfulness is grounded not in any specific formal or historical characteristic, but in the existential fact that it is art: “A priori, prior to its works, art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes upon human beings” (NL 2: 248; GS 11: 600–601). By simply naming the fateful state of affairs [Verhängnis] that shapes human reality, art lightheartedly calls attention to the irresolvable contradiction between real suffering and art’s enduring promise of happiness. To be sure, the mere linguistic act of naming the grim fatefulness of reality does not redeem it. Yet by virtue of being art, by expressing even what is most horrible, art asserts itself—every such self-assertion as art is intrinsically cheerful, Adorno argues— and challenges our existing mode of consciousness. In art, language expresses and challenges historically determined reality. This lightheartedness of art is, Adorno suggests, dialectical, because in challenging our existing consciousness, art reveals its cheerfulness as a mode of seriousness. Adorno’s ruminations on the dialectic of cheerfulness and seriousness in art reflect his dialectical and ironic concept of philosophy as the most serious unserious human endeavor, as he suggests in ND (see my introduction and ND 14; GS 6: 26).2 Similar to the inevitable irony in the self-reflective language of modern philosophy (i.e., philosophy that has survived its own demise, as Adorno suggests in ND), art’s cheerfulness is not a matter of choice but of historical necessity. Cheerfulness in art is, Adorno writes, “ein Entsprungenes” (GS 11: 602), a historically evolved sign of aesthetic modernity that is absent in archaic art. Cheerfulness is a means of selfreflection, of art’s becoming aware of itself as art, as something different from social and political reality. Cheerfulness is art’s self-realization that it is more than mere existence, that it is, by means of its formal and expressive capabilities, by means of its language, elevated—if ever so slightly; Adorno’s prime example for this elevation is Goethe’s “sublime irony”—above the social

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and political realities, that it has escaped from history’s entanglement in the cycle of progression and regression, civilization and barbarism, enlightenment and myth. Despite history’s increasingly disastrous course, cheerfulness in art survives precisely in the most desperate forms of artistic expression (Adorno names Beckett and Kafka): “It survives in [the artwork’s] self-critique, as the comic of the comic [Komik der Komik]” (NL 2: 252; GS 11: 605). The selfreflective and self-critical redoubling of the comic element in art observed by Adorno (inspired here again by the Romantic obsession with figures of self-reflection) signals a transition from a dialectical to a deconstructive argument. Adorno concludes his essay—and his Notes to Literature—by suggesting that the alternative between the comic and the tragic, between cheerfulness and seriousness, is no longer valid. He even suggests, alluding to his “Meditations on Metaphysics” in ND, that the alternative between life and death has almost disappeared. (Such moments in Adorno’s literary criticism underscore that his aesthetic and ethical thinking cannot be separated into two independent disciplines. To read and to think about literature is no more or less significant than any other philosophical reflection on life and death.) Where the most fundamental metaphysical differences, the very cornerstones of Western thought, threaten to collapse, Adorno’s dialectical thought begins to deconstruct itself. His essay on the cheerfulness of art is also a reflection on his Notes to Literature and on his philosophy as a whole, its clownish traits indicating the hope for what has been denied it, the fulfillment of thought (see ND 14; GS 6: 26). At the end, Adorno arrives in a gray zone, a sphere of increasing indifference and complexity, where art (and the philosophical discourse on art) is neither cheerful nor serious and now lacks recourse to the seemingly well-established oppositional pair. The only possible form of art, Adorno claims, moves forward into a sphere of historical indeterminacy, into the unknown: “The third [das Dritte], however, is veiled, as if it were embedded in nothingness [Nichts] the figures of which are traced by the most advanced works of art” (NL 2: 253; GS 11: 606). By invoking the image of a mysteriously veiled third—an art that is neither cheerful nor serious— Adorno is not only alluding to the myth of the veiled image at Saïs and Novalis’s arch-Romantic story The Novices of Saïs (1798); he also unwittingly reminds his readers that his own literary criticism is an unfinished project that yearns to trace the figure of a third possibility but fails to do so. One can speculate that Adorno would have found this third, signified by the most artistic figures of nothingness, in Paul Celan’s poetry, which he wanted to discuss in an essay that he never managed to write. In his sparse remarks on Celan, Adorno describes the poet’s language as an entirely different form of mimesis, one that does not represent human life and history but

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the non-life or nothingness of inorganic existence, imitating a language “of the dead of stone and star” [“des Toten von Stein und Stern”] (AT 322; GS 7: 477). Adorno’s unwritten essay, which he wanted to dedicate to Celan’s collection Sprachgitter [Speech-Grill (1959)] and which the poet was eagerly anticipating,3 would have pushed his literary criticism a step farther, beyond the dialectic, into the unknown.

Notes

NOTES TO THE PREFACE 1. Quoted by Adorno in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingston (London: Verso, 2002) 269; GS 16: 493. 2. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, “Der Traum von der Ich-Ferne: Adornos literarische Aufsätze,” Dialektik der Freiheit: Frankfurter Adorno-Konferenz 2003, ed. Axel Honneth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005) 346. 3. For a deconstructive reading of the end of art in Adorno, see Alexander García Düttmann, Kunstende: Drei ästhetische Studien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). For more historically oriented analyses, see Eva Geulen, Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002) 117–42, and Carsten Strathausen, “Adorno; or, The End of Aesthetics,” Globalizing Critical Theory, ed. Max Pensky (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) 221–40. 4. Christoph Menke, “Adorno’s Dialectic of Appearance,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford UP, 1998) 22. 5. “On Goethe’s Meister,” German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen M. Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 64. 6. The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991) 290. 7. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998) 137. On Marxist aspects of Adorno’s literary criticism, see Robert Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 354–75. 8. Jarvis 138. 9. Jarvis 138.

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10. “La question de la littérature, là où elle est indissociable de la question de la langue et de ses institutions, jouerait un rôle décisif dans cette histoire.” (Jacques Derrida, Fichus: Discours de Francfort [Paris: Galilée, 2002] 52)

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. “Both history and nature as its dialectical opposite were for Adorno cognitive concepts, not unlike Kant’s ‘regulative ideas’” (Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics [New York: The Free Press, 1977] 49). (I discuss the notion of “natural history” in chapter 2.) 2. The most useful discussions of the manifold guises of a philosophy of language in Adorno to date are Martin Puder’s “Adorno als Sprachphilosoph,” Spiegel und Gleichnis: Festschrift für Jacob Taubes, ed. Norbert Bolz and Wolfgang Hübner (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1983) 331–41, and Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995) 217–42. 3. The conservative cultural politics of Leitbild [orientation] and Bindung [attachment, bond] are still prevalent in Germany and other parts of “old Europe,” where a frequent response to the experience of an increasingly pluralistic and fragmented society is to call for the adoption of universally or at least nationally valid moral and cultural role models. One recent example is the popularity of the German conservative slogan Leitkultur [leading culture], a neologism meant to describe a binding set of regulative Western and Christian values to which everyone living within German borders should subscribe. 4. See “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” NL 1: 37–54; GS 11: 48–68. 5. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1991) 31. 6. Edward W. Said, “Adorno as Lateness Itself,” Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995) 267. 7. Unlike many of the journalistic pieces, Detlev Claussen’s biography Theodor W. Adorno: Ein letztes Genie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003) uses the idea of Adorno as Bildungsbürger productively by focusing on the philosopher’s experience of being one of the last representatives of a bourgeoisie in the mold of a nineteenth-century cultural elite, who is confronted with the objective paradox of how to live freely and autonomously after the “breakdown of civilization” (to use historian Dan Diner’s famous phrase). Claussen’s work serves as a reminder that “lateness” is not only an aesthetic term. It also captures Adorno’s life experience and his own reflection on himself as someone who embodies the demise of the bourgeois individual at the end of the “long nineteenth century” (to use the phrase coined by historian Eric Hobsbawm), facing—in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the midst of the Cold War—the very real possibility of the

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end of the world. Adorno’s 1955 essay on Spengler’s Decline of the West contains the following poignant passage: “I can recall that during the first months of Hitler’s dictatorship I once dreamt the world had come to an end. I had been hiding in a cellar and then, after the end of the world, had crawled out of the cellar. I suppose that this was not actually dreamt by me but by the collective unconscious. One really has a chance of surviving the experiences of the last decades only if one does not forget for a moment the paradox that one goes on living at all” (GS 20.1: 142). Thomas Assheuser, “Der wahre Konservative,” Die Zeit 4 September 2003. Norbert W. Bolz, “Der Pyrrhus-Sieger: Warum vom Meisterdenker Theodor W. Adorno wenig blieb außer einer Ahnung vom Glück des Philosophierens,” Literaturen 6 (2003): 35. Eva Geulen, “Endgames: Reconstructing Adorno’s ‘End of Art,’” New German Critique 81 (2000): 153–68. See also the observation Geulen makes elsewhere: “With surprising consistency all of Adorno’s major texts therefore begin by articulating their position beyond and yet not beyond an end. . . . Philosophy’s afterlife is not a life after the end nor is it the uninterrupted resumption of a previous life. Since philosophy survived its own apocalypse it has become untimely—it comes, from now on, always too late, it will always be philosophy post festum, a postmodern philosophy, as it were.” Geulen then points out that the anachronistic nature of thought not only signifies a “no longer” but also holds open the possibility of a “not yet:” “The negative telos sustains the positive,” thus providing a “reversed eschatological model” (“Theodor Adorno on Tradition,” The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, ed. Max Pensky [Albany: SUNY Press, 1997] 186). “But it is not wrong to raise the . . . question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living” (ND 363; GS 6: 355). For a philosophical discussion of this figure of thought, see Alexander García Düttmann, Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition (London: Verso, 2000) 3–45. On the characteristic “gestural” nature of Adorno’s thought, see Düttmann, “Thinking as Gesture: A Note on the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 81 (2000): 143–52. Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT P, 1974) 15. “The decision to return to Germany was hardly motivated simply by a subjective need, or homesickness, as little as I deny having had such sentiments. An objective factor also made itself felt. It is the language. . . . The German language also apparently has a special elective affinity with philosophy and particularly with its speculative element that

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17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

Notes to the Introduction in the West is so easily suspected of being dangerously unclear, and by no means without justification” (CM 212; GS 10.2: 699–700). On Adorno’s return to Germany, see Detlev Claussen, “Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno zwischen Amerika und Frankfurt am Main,” Theodor W. Adorno: Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens, ed. Moshe Zuckermann (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004) 205–14. On Bildung, see Raymond Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 29–50. One of the most eminent German historians, Friedrich Meinecke, closes his account of “the German catastrophe” with the suggestion that German culture be resurrected through a network of communities in which poetry is to be recited communally. “In every German city and larger village . . . we should like to see in the future a community of like-minded friends of culture which I should like best to call Goethe Communities. . . . [To them] would fall the task of conveying into the heart of the listeners through sound the most vital evidences of the great German spirit, always offering the noblest music and poetry together” (Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, trans. Sidney B. Fay [Boston: Beacon, 1950] 120). On the diverse facets of the term Bildung and their historical evolution, see Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 171–207. Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Briefwechsel 1943–1955, eds. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002) 46. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2005). An English translation with a somewhat misleading title appeared in Telos: “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” Telos 95 (1993): 15–38. For a comparison of Adorno’s concept of Bildung with Nietzsche’s, see Karin Bauer, Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology, Readings of Wagner (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999) 173–87. “Denn Zwang ist nötig!” (Immanuel Kant, “Über Pädagogik,” Werkausgabe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 12 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968] 711). On the relation between freedom and coercion in the conceptual history of education, see Eva Geulen, “Erziehung ist Formsache: Erziehung als blinder Fleck bei Giorgio Agamben,” Texte zur Kunst 53 (2004): 104–13, and “Erziehungsakte,” Rhetorik: Figuration und Performanz: DFG-Symposium 2002, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann (Weimar: Metzler, 2004) 629–52. Kant, “Über Pädagogik” 711 See Henry Pickford’s preface in CM vii.

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25. Adorno might have adopted this slogan from Lukács Theory of the Novel: “This is the paradox of the subjectivity of the great epic, its ‘throwing away in order to win’: creative subjectivity becomes lyrical, but, exceptionally, the subjectivity which simply accepts, which humbly transforms itself into a purely receptive organ of the world, can partake of the grace of having the whole revealed to it” (Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel 53). 26. Adorno uses the image of the Alexandrian in order to draw a sharp polemical line between Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. See GS 10.1: 244 and chapter 1 of this study. 27. If one believes oneself to be free of tradition, one is not. On the contrary, “The assumption that one may now speak plainly and without constraint is entirely traditional” (Theodor W. Adorno, “On Tradition,” Telos 94 [1992/93]: 73; GS 10.2: 320). 28. For example, critics argue that Adorno consistently turns a blind eye to the politically progressive or utopian dimension provided by the pleasures of trivial and pop culture. See Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Gebrauchswerte der Literatur: Eine Kritik der ästhetischen Kategorien ‘Identifikation’ und ‘Reflexivität,’ vor allem im Hinblick auf Adorno,” Zur Dichotomisierung von hoher und niederer Literatur, eds. Christa Bürger, Peter Bürger, and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982) 62–107. 29. Theodor W. Adorno, “Graeculus (I): Musikalische Notizen,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 7 (2001): 21. 30. An entire study could be devoted to the relation between the problematically gendered metaphorical field of streaming and the metaphorical field of hardening in Adorno. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer use the word hardening to describe the emergence of subjectivity as increasing control over nature and the loss of the ability to let oneself go peacefully: “All distraction, indeed, all devotion has an element of mimicry. The ego has been forged by hardening itself against such behavior” (DE 148; GS 3: 205). 31. Adorno used this term in a psychoanalytic manner to describe a modern subjectivity that suffers from an increasing diminution of consciousness and individuality. In MM, Adorno proclaims: “In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’ (MM 50; GS 4: 55). 32. Theodor W. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit: Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959-1969, ed. Gerd Kadelbach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). 33. Adorno gives his strongest reading of such passivity in his essay on Hölderlin, distinguishing the obedience to social relations from passivity as a relation to language: “The sublimation of primary docility to become autonomy, however, is that supreme passivity that found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation [Technik des Reihens]. The authority

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35.

36.

37.

Notes to the Introduction to which Hölderlin now accommodates is language” (NL 2: 135; GS 11: 475). It must be pointed out that Adorno consistently attempts to link experience to a mode of cognition that does not appropriate the object violently; rather, the object appears if the subject trusts its own experience with fearless passivity. While Adorno repeatedly bemoans the loss of experience, he also places his highest hopes on it. One could say that for Adorno experience marks the aesthetic moment without which no true subjectivity would ever come into its own, and he insists that “subject is the agent, not the constituent of object” (CM 254; GS 10.2: 752). In his remarks “On Subject and Object,” Adorno writes: “The objective contents [Gehalt] of individual experience are produced not through the method of comparative generalization, but rather through the dissolution of what prevents that experience—as itself biased—from giving itself to the object without reservation, as Hegel said, with the freedom that would relax the cognitive subject until it fades [erlischt] into the object with which it is akin by virtue of its own objective being. The key position of the subject in cognition is experience, not form; what for Kant is formation is essentially deformation. The exertion of cognition is predominantly the destruction of its usual exertion, of its using violence against the object. Knowledge of the object is brought closer by the act of the subject rending the veil it weaves about the object. It can do this only when, passive, without anxiety, it entrusts itself to its own experience.” (CM 253–254; GS 10.2: 752) In AT, Adorno leaves no doubt that astonishment is an aesthetic mode of response: “Aesthetic feeling is not the feeling that is aroused: It is astonishment vis-à-vis what is beheld rather than vis-à-vis what it is about; it is a being overwhelmed by what is aconceptual and yet determinate, not the subjective affect released, that in the case of aesthetic experience may be called feeling” (AT 164; GS 7: 246). For a critical perspective on the obsoleteness of astonishment as a philosophical figure of thought, see Sigrid Weigel, “‘Kein Philosophisches Staunen’—’Schreiben im Staunen:’ Zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Literatur nach 1945: Benjamin, Adorno, Bachmann,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 70.1 (1996): 120–37. A philosophical apology of thaumázein is offered in Gerhard Richter’s “Crude Thinking Rethought: Reflections on a Brechtian Concept,” Angelaki 10.3 (2005): 3–13. It is perhaps not insignificant that Adorno’s literary criticism became prolific only after the death of his deeply admired older friend Walter Benjamin, whose career had been driven by the ambition to be Europe’s foremost literary critic. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the most advanced contemporary theoretical accounts of Adorno’s thinking pay little attention

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to his essays on literature. Even among the many publications released on occasion of Adorno’s centennial, the number of essays addressing his NL is relatively scant. In the recent Adorno: A Critical Reader, a collection of often excellent philosophical and historical accounts of Adorno, only four of Adorno’s essays on literature find any mention. See Nigel C. Gibson and Andrew Rubin, Adorno: A Critical Reader (Malden: Blackwell, 2001). The announcement of a forthcoming volume on Adorno and Literature to be published by Continuum promises to rectify this relative neglect. 38. Adorno understood his writings on literature as essays—this will be discussed in chapter 1. Yet Adorno’s strong theoretical plea in favor of the essay as form does not exclude a fascination with aesthetic and philosophical form as essentially open and dynamic. This is not surprising, considering that throughout Adorno’s career he continued to regard music as the most refined and accomplished form of art. The model of music informs Adorno’s entire philosophical habitus, and the decision to name his essays on literature Notes to Literature suits his musical habitus perfectly. Within the context of its German usage, Note signifies primarily a musical note, so the first meaning that comes to mind when one encounters the title Noten zur Literatur is, literally, musical notes to literature. Note can also be understood to mean footnote or annotation, signaling to the reader that what the author has to say about literature will amount to nothing more than minor observations and corrections. In a similar way, Noten can be interpreted as preliminary and incomplete Notizen or Notate. In either case, the title of Adorno’s collection of literary essays signals primarily modesty and the associated notions of smallness or chance that have accompanied the genre of the essay since its inception. However, the essayistic topos of modesty often implies a not-so-modest ironic wink. The most pronounced example of this gesture of hyperbolic modesty is provided by the title of Adorno’s aphoristic book Minima Moralia: the claim to smallness also refers to Aristotle’s Magna Moralia. In the case of Noten zur Literatur, the title suggests, as Adorno himself points out in his essay “Titles,” Goethe’s notes to the Divan [“Noten zum Diwan”] (see NL 2: 6; GS 11: 329). While Goethe’s notes address only one particular work and its context, Adorno’s notes treat, so the title suggests, literature as such. Adorno’s original intention had been to call his volume of literary essays Worte ohne Lieder [Words Without Songs], an inversion of Mendelssohn’s romantic Lieder ohne Worte [Songs Without Words] and, more obliquely, Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles. In 1931, Adorno had published a series of aphorisms titled “Lieder ohne Worte” in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Later, he disqualified the title as a “somewhat stupid bonmot” (NL 2: 6; GS 11: 328) and happily accepted Peter Suhrkamp’s suggestion, “Noten zur Literatur.” The allusion to music in both titles has another subtext in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. In “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche laments the failure of thought to rise above language to song: “It ought to have sung, this ‘new soul,’ and not talked!” (The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999] 6). Adorno

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echoes this yearning of prose for song in MM: “Prose isolates itself so ascetically from poetry for the sake of invoking song” (MM 222; GS 4: 253). Finally, Note also means a mark given by a teacher or a score given by a judge in a sporting contest. Noten zur Literatur are, then, critical marks given by a relentless judge who, like Karl Kraus, sees himself as the deputy of language itself. 39. The most comprehensive work on the NL is Norbert W. Bolz, Geschichtsphilosophie des Ästhetischen: Hermeneutische Rekonstruktion der “Noten Zur Literatur” Th. W. Adornos (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1979). Regrettably, this work is overtly methodological and shows no inclination to read against the grain of what the author perceives as the all-penetrating rule of a few historico-philosophical articles of faith. Michael Taylor Jones’s Constellations of Modernity: The Literary Essays of Theodor W. Adorno (Diss. Yale U, 1978) helpfully situates the essays within the larger context of Adorno’s thought, tracing a fairly straightforward genealogy from “symbolic totality in Goethean Classicism to its allegorical fragmentation and demise in Beckett” (abstract). In a similar vein, but with more attention to the political context and, especially, to the central role of music in Adorno’s aesthetics, is Nels Jeff Rogers’s dissertation, Theodor W. Adorno’s Poetics of Dissonance: Music, Language and Literary Modernism, (Diss. U of Pennsylvania, 2001). Although it is a work that extends far beyond the NL, Jan Rosiek’s thorough study of the theory of the sublime implicit in Heidegger and Adorno offers, as far as I can tell, the most philologically attentive and exhaustive interpretations of Adorno’s essays on Hölderlin, Goethe, and Eichendorff. See Jan Rosiek, Maintaining the Sublime: Heidegger and Adorno (Bern: Lang, 2000). Robert Kaufman’s dissertation offers an excellent critical study of Adorno’s poetics of the essay in comparison to Lukács, Benjamin, and post-structuralist writing. Unfortunately, its theoretical strength is not matched by any close reading of an individual essay from the NL. See Robert Kaufman, The Theory of the Essay: Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin (Diss. UC San Diego, 1981). Andreas Lehr’s dissertation transcends the notion of the essay and entertainingly explores different “minor forms” in Adorno’s thought. See Andreas Lehr, Kleine Formen. Adornos Kombinationen: Konstellation/Konfiguration, Montage und Essay (Diss. U Freiburg i. B., 2000). 7 July 2003 .

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Philosophical Fragments 13. 2. In his translation of Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, Robert Hullot-Kentor comments about a passage that invokes an image of hope: “This is beautiful” (K xxii). In a review of Hullot-Kentor’s translation, Peter Fenves coolly responds to this exalted claim: “The passage is hardly

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beautiful; it is bombastic” (“Image and Chatter: Adorno’s Construction of Kierkegaard,” Diacritics 22.1 [1992]: 114). Christina Gerhardt lists some of these features in her article on Adorno in the Johns Hopkins Online Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., 8 April 2006 . Adorno’s translators tend to be the most insightful experts on his style. See, for example, Samuel Weber’s introduction to P, and Robert Hullot-Kentor’s introduction to his retranslation of AT. See also Susan Gillespie, “Translating Adorno: Language, Music, and Performance,” Musical Quarterly 79.1 (1995) 55– 65. On the notion of “primacy of the object,” see especially part two of ND, and Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge: MIT P, 2004) 45–69. See Jay Bernstein, “The Death of Sensuous Particulars: Adorno and Abstract Expressionism,” Radical Philosophy 76 (March/April 1996): 7– 18. One encounters complaints about the abstractness of Adorno’s writing in Kaufman, The Theory of the Essay: Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin. Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility,” Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. Jochen SchulteSasse, et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 127. See Walter Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue:” “It is characteristic of philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of representation [Darstellung]” (OGTD 27; WB GS 207). On the problem of presentation in Adorno, see Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990) 49–62, and especially Britta Scholze, Kunst als Kritik: Adornos Weg aus der Dialektik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000) 288–357. See also HansJost Frey, “On Presentation in Benjamin,” Walter Benjamin—Theoretical Questions, ed. David Ferris (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 139–64. Perhaps the best discussion of the figure of constellation can be found in Alexander García Düttmann, Das Gedächtnis des Denkens: Versuch über Heidegger und Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) 93–142. For a recent example, see Steven Helmling, “Constellation and Critique: Adorno’s Constellation, Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,” Postmodern Culture 14.1 (2003). With regard to Adorno’s aesthetics, see Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997) 103–35. Robert Kaufman, arguing from the perspective of an aesthetics of reception, describes Adorno’s style not only as static, but, worse, as tiresomely repetitive and monotonous: “And as the reader ‘learns’ the underlying structure of Adorno’s thought and rhetorical strategy, that structure becomes a source of closure, in that the reader feels his own

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12. 13.

14.

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16. 17.

Notes to Chapter One cognitive responses to be predetermined in familiar and predictable ways” (Kaufman, The Theory of the Essay: Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin 299–300). One example from one of Adorno’s most patient and meticulous philosophical readers: “Adorno’s model appears . . . as a repetitive tilting mechanism [Kippmechanismus] that manages to salvage pretty much everything by means of the dialectical transvaluation and reinterpretation of almost everything into its opposite” (Scholze 94). See Scholze 287. “The representation of a thought process requires patience to explicate. Adorno does not muster this patience. His inclination to aphoristic brevity keeps disturbing the flow of representation . . . ” (Helmuth Plessner, “Adornos Negative Dialektik: Ihr Thema mit Variationen,” Kant-Studien 61.4 [1970]: 508). “The real issue is whether Adorno’s attempt at a revolution within philosophy, modeled self-consciously after Schönberg, in fact succumbed to the same fate, whether his principle of antisystem became a system.” (Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute [New York: Free Press, 1977] 189) Some years ago, Adorno figured as a prime example in the debates over “bad writing” and “left conservatism.” One often cited article is James Miller’s, “Is Bad Writing Necessary? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Language,” Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life 9.9 (2000): 33–44. A prominent example of the bad writing argument is Martha Nussbaum’s criticism of Judith Butler, followed by an oped piece by Butler in the New York Times. See Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” The New Republic 22 February 1999, and Judith Butler, “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back,” The New York Times 20 March 1999. For an extended exposition of Butler’s arguments on difficulty, see her “Values of Difficulty,” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, eds. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003) 199–215. For a useful contemporary critique of Adorno’s style, specifically the proclivity of dialectical thought to fall prey to jargon (as can be witnessed in many of Adorno’s students), see Jean Améry, “Jargon der Dialektik [1967],” Bundesrepublikanisches Lesebuch: Drei Jahrzehnte geistiger Auseinandersetzung, ed. Hermann Glaser (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer) 595–607. Theodor W. Adorno, “Der Begriff der Philosophie: Vorlesung Wintersemester 1951/52: Mitschrift von Kraft Bretschneider,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 2 (1993): 34. On the relation between poetic and philosophical language, see Robert Kaufman, “Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena 139–56.

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18. For an examination of the affinities between Kraus and Adorno, see Irina Djassemy, Der ‘Productivgehalt kritischer Zerstörerarbeit:’ Kulturkritik bei Karl Kraus und Theodor W. Adorno (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002). See also Dietmar Goltschnigg, “Theorie und Praxis des Essays bei Theodor W. Adorno (Der Essay als Form) und Karl Kraus (Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität),” Karl Kraus: Diener der Sprache, Meister des Ethos, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (Tübingen: Francke, 1990) 87–108. Fredric Jameson claims that “the truest precursor” of Adorno’s style “would seem to be not Benjamin, and certainly not Nietzsche, but the extraordinary Austrian rhetorician Karl Kraus” (Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic 63). 19. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 212. In Heidegger’s German: “Das Geredete als solches zieht weitere Kreise und übernimmt authoritativen Charakter. Die Sache ist so, weil man es sagt.” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993) 168. Quoted in JA 101; GS 6: 480. 20. Lukács Soul and Form (Cambridge: The MIT P, 1974) 10. 21. Despite the lack of philological meticulousness that results in some of his over-interpretations, Adorno does not denigrate the work of philology. Perhaps one could even claim that Adorno’s most successful, most convincing interpretations are all based on philological insights. In a review of the first three volumes of NL, Peter Demetz praises Adorno’s reading of Mörike’s poem “Auf einer Wanderung” [“On a Journey”] for its philological precision and faithfulness to the exact wording of the text: “Nothing is more convincing than Adorno’s interpretation of Mörike in which the philosopher proves how exactly and philologically pointedly he can read” (Peter Demetz, “Der Rabe Entfremdung: Theodor W. Adornos 3 Bände ‘Noten Zur Literatur,’” Merkur 19.12 [1965]: 1195). 22. In Hofmannsthal’s poetic description, the writer striving to find the right expression resembles the mythical Tantalus: “How shall I describe these strange spiritual torments, the boughs of fruit snatched from my outstretched hands, the murmuring water shrinking from my parched lips? In brief, this is the case: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all” (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings [New York: New York Review of Books, 2005] 121). In a speech about Gustav Mahler, Adorno refers to Lord Chandos whose “words disintegrate because they no longer say what they are supposed to say” (GS 16: 327). 23. On the relation of concept and intuition in Adorno’s aesthetics, see Ulrich Plass, “Zum Verhältnis von Begriff und Anschauung in Adornos Ästhetik,” ‘Intellektuelle Anschauung:’ Figurationen von Evidenz zwischen Kunst und Wissen, eds. Sibylle Peters and Martin Jörg Schäfer (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006) 134–48.

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24. Alexander García Düttmann, So ist es: Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos Minima Moralia (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004) 91–92. 25. Jameson observes that “what strikes one as radically original in Adorno . . . is his deployment of the dialectical sentence itself, to which even the energy of Marx’s great chiasmatic syntactical acts offers but a distant family likeness” (Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic 63). The claim here is that Adorno’s very particular and original Marxism is not only a matter of pure thought, but is actualized in his style, and can thus be identified on the level of syntax and construction. In his first essay on Adorno, Jameson already proposed the same idea: “Thinking dialectically means nothing more or less than the writing of dialectical sentences” (Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972] 53). The question that has remained open is how precisely Adorno’s use of dialectical inversion or chiasmus differs from his Marxist precursors. More helpful is Gillian Rose’s observation that in Adorno the figure of chiasmus “can be seen to inform the whole structure of a piece” (The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno [New York: Columbia UP, 1978] 13). 26. See GS 6: 129 and GS 8: 342. Rolf Wiggershaus tries to sum up Adorno’s “overall understanding of philosophy”: “It can be summed up as follows: to philosophize means to be capable of unrestricted, strictly speaking, objectivated experience” (Wittgenstein und Adorno: Zwei Spielarten modernen Philosophierens [Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000] 62). 27. The musicologist Dieter Schnebel approaches Adorno not only as a philosopher, but also as a composer and musical performer. For Schnebel, Adorno’s speech is less characterized by “strong rhetoric” and more by his tactful sense of timing. One of Adorno’s greatest skills both as a speaker and a writer was that he never missed a beat. Here is an example of Schnebel’s observations: “When Adorno premiered his essay on Rudolf Borchardt in Zurich, I arrived at the theater thirty minutes late. The auditorium was locked from inside so that one could listen only from outside in the hallway. . . . One noticed how musically the lecture proceeded. There were clearly marked main movements, melodic minor movements of great gentleness, and passages in which characters changed quickly, as in thematic developments. . . . The status nascendi that is constitutive of thought thus appeared in its quasi-musical realization (“Komposition von Sprache—Sprachliche Gestaltung von Musik in Adornos Werk,” Theodor W. Adorno zum Gedächtnis, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971] 144–45). Schnebel here touches on one of the main features of Adorno’s approach: in order to keep thought agile and mobile, the static text should be modeled on the ideal of a dynamic musical form. This also explains Adorno’s frequent use of terms such as Durchführung, Fortgang or Übergang (all roughly synonyms of Darstellung;

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29. 30.

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the dynamic–gang replaces the static -stellung) and also his passion for public speaking. However, if one takes into careful consideration the utopian yearning of Adorno’s philosophy, one can give the word “positive” a different twist. See Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). On the complex of experiment, experience, and the essay, see Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Erfahrung und Experiment: Studien zu Theorie und Geschichte des Essayismus (Berlin: Akademie, 1995). Max Bense discovers in the essay form an epic remnant: “This does not point toward a kinship with the aphorism. Both are entirely different in their fullness, density, style and intention; the aphorism is ruled by poignancy, the essay is still rather epic” ( “Der Essay und seine Prosa,” Plakatwelt: Vier Essays [Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1952] 32–33). Adorno apparently did not make a precise distinction, if any, between fragment and aphorism. One of Adorno’s students, Heinz Krüger, wrote a dissertation on the aphorism as philosophical form in which he strictly differentiated between fragment and aphorism. In his introduction to Krüger’s book, Adorno emphasizes the affinity of aphorism and fragment—which applies to the essay as well. But he also agrees with Krüger’s distinction, which appears to be crucial for any attempt to understand the philosophical form of the essay: “Fragmentary and truly aphoristic thought is both ‘thinking in fragments;’ however, the Romantic fragment lives in agreement with language, through which it seeks to conjure up the infinite, while in the aphorism language itself is subjected to criticism” (Adorno, introduction to Krüger, Über den Aphorismus als philosophische Form [Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1988] 7). Karl Heinz Bohrer criticizes Adorno’s failure to fully appreciate the Romantic idea of the fragment: “Adorno’s essays and his idea of the essay form ignored the ‘fragmentary’ composition of the romantic essay,” thus evincing “a desire to sidestep conflict by smoothing it over” (Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance [New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 10 and 11). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 3 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998) 358. “Trees behold, cliffs, rocks, and yonder / Spate of stream in mighty flow / Leaps the shortest way, with thunder / Plunging to the vale below” (Goethe, Faust: Part II, trans. Philip Wayne [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959] 281). Adorno’s reading follows the intention of redemptive criticism. In contrast to this, see for example Vischer’s parody of Faust, which utilizes “abestürzt” precisely because it is so comical: “Über Steine, über Wurzeln / Muß geprüfter Kömmling purzeln, / Wund vom Haufwerk rauher Felsen,

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38. 39. 40.

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Notes to Chapter One / Naß vom Strom, der abestürzt, / Wund von Schrund, weil keine Stelzen / Ihm den steilen Weg verkürzt!” (Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Dichterische Werke, vol. 4 [Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher, 1917] 180). “Yet where danger lies, / Grows that which saves.” (Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984] 89) Adorno was aware that the rhetoric of danger could put him in the unwanted company of those proponents of inwardness who are always engaged in some sort of inner conflict, in a spiritual, pseudo-Faustian wrestling match. Mockingly, Adorno referred to these people as a Ringverein [“wrestling club”]. See the aphorism under that same title in MM: “There is a type of intellectual who is to be the more deeply distrusted the more appealing his honest endeavour, his ‘intellectual seriousness’ and often his modest objectivity may seem. These are the wrestlers with difficulties, permanently locked in a struggle with themselves, living amid decisions demanding the commitment of their whole person” (MM 133; GS 4: 151). Reemtsma 338. Philosophy, of course, partakes in this “decay of language.” Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment’s project of demythologizing formulates this drastically: “The overall development of enlightenment intended to withdraw itself from mythologization as much as possible. This demand would in the end lead to the abolition of language and its replacement by the pure sign” (PT 1: 68). Bolz, Geschichtsphilosophie des Ästhetischen: Hermeneutische Rekonstruktion der “Noten zur Literatur” Th. W. Adornos 4. In a related vein, Adorno, in his essay “Parataxis,” accuses Heidegger of making Hölderlin say what he wants him to say. See Rüdiger Bubner, “Kann Theorie ästhetisch werden? Zum Hauptmotiv der Philosophie Adornos,” Materialien zur Ästhetischen Theorie: Th. W. Adornos Konstruktion der Moderne, ed. Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Lüdke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980) 133. Bubner’s accusation is not uncommon: “Despite all seeming proximity to its object [Gegenstandsnähe], this thought is strangely without an object [gegenstandslos]” (Gerhard Kaiser, Benjamin. Adorno: Zwei Studien [Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Fischer, 1974] 166). “With regard to the aesthetic object, the thesis of the primacy of the object means the primacy of the object itself, the artwork, over its maker as well as over its recipients.” (AT: 323; GS 7: 479) An entire study could be devoted to the function of the tiny word bloß [mere] in Adorno’s thought. In the short text “The Essay as Form” alone it appears more than thirty times. On the essay’s relation to aesthetic particularity, see Tom Huhn, “Lukács and the Essay Form,” New German Critique 78 (1999): 183–92.

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44. For Adorno, the experience of natural beauty is a primary example for the persistent cognitive possibility of the “primacy of the object:” “natural beauty points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience” (AT 71; GS 7: 111). 45. On the notion of affinity in Adorno and its relation to Kant’s “transcendental schematism,” see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction 179–181. 46. In ND, Adorno claims, alluding to a formulation attributed to Empedocles, hê gnôsis tou homoiou tô homoiô, and revived in the nineteenth century by Goethe, Schleiermacher, and Nietzsche: “It is in language alone that like knows like” (ND 56; GS 6: 66). One can become aware of affinity only through language—affinity is thus always mediated linguistically. 47. “The first concern of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s philosophy is to distinguish it from poetry.” (K 5; GS 2: 11) 48. Adorno argues that philosophy’s law of form forbids all aestheticization. Only by remaining faithful to its law of form can philosophy gain artistic validity: “Even with respect to an ultimate convergence of art and philosophy, all attempts to aestheticize philosophical method [Verfahren] are to be rebuffed. On the contrary, the more exclusively philosophical form is crystallized as such, the more firmly it excludes all metaphor that externally approximates it to art, so much the better is art able to survive as art by the strength of its own law of form” (K 14, GS 2: 23–24). 49. I do not intend to resume the debate as to whether philosophy is a form of literature. It is questionable whether a rhetorical reading of philosophical texts is the same as turning philosophy into “mere” literature. Jürgen Habermas’s anxiety about the “leveling of the genre distinctions” is probably due to a misreading of French post-structuralism. See his “Philosophie und Wissenschaft als Literatur?,” Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988) 242–47. However, Habermas’s insistence on an irrevocable difference of genre [Gattungsunterschied] between literature and philosophy might, in the end, amount to the same as Derrida’s non-definition of literature as that which “has no definition” and therefore “will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational” (Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge [London: Routledge, 1992] 47). Also on this topic, see Gottfried Gabriel, “Literarische Form und nichtpropositionale Erkenntnis in der Philosophie,” Literarische Formen der Philosophie, ed. Gottfried Gabriel and Christiane Schildknecht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990) 1–25, and Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). 50. “In the aesthetic domain the mimetic impulse affects even the mediation, the concept, that which is not present. The concept is as indispensably intermixed in art as it is in language, though in art the concept becomes qualitatively other than collections of characteristics shared by empirical

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52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

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Notes to Chapter One objects. The intermixture of concepts is not identical with asserting the conceptuality of art; art is no more concept than it is pure intuition, and it is precisely thereby that art protests against their separation. . . . Art is the intuition of what is not intuitable; it is akin to the conceptual without the concept.” (AT 96; GS 7: 148) Adorno uses this expression in “The Actuality of Philosophy” (AP 37; GS 1: 341). For more on this subject, see Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute 86. The term “exact imagination” also stands at the center of Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s study on Adorno’s aesthetics. See her Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997) 1–9. “For language is itself something double. Through its configurations it assimilates itself completely into subjective impulses; one would almost think it had produced them. But at the same time language remains the medium of concepts, remains that which establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society.” (NL 1: 43; GS 11: 56) Similarly, Adorno says about Hegel: “No one can read any more out of Hegel than he puts in” [“Keiner kann aus Hegel mehr herauslesen, als er hineinlegt”] (HS 139; GS 5: 368). Hineinlegen sounds of course like hereinlegen: “to cheat, to trick someone.” The theme of homelessness echoes Adorno’s experiences as a very reluctant emigrant. It also alludes to Lukács’s term “transcendental homelessness.” See The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. (Cambridge: MIT P, 1971) 41. In the obliviously forward striving social climate of West Germany during the period of the “economic miracle,” such a heightened idiosyncratic awareness of the immediate historical past and its traces and continuities was shared by only a few other prominent intellectuals and writers, such as the writer Jean Améry or the poet Paul Celan, whose most famous poem, “Die Todesfuge,” alludes to the same cliché of the Jew as rootless Luftmensch that Adorno uses here in his “Der Essay as Form.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 217. Towards the end of the essay, Adorno’s quotes from Plato’s Symposium: The essay “eludes the dictates of the attributes that have been ascribed to ideas since Plato’s definition in the Symposium, ‘existing eternally and neither coming into being nor passing away, neither changing nor diminishing,’ ‘a being in and for itself eternally uniform,’ and yet it remains idea in that it does not capitulate before the burden what exists, does not submit to what merely is” (NL 1: 23; GS 11: 32–33). Düttmann argues that Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s concept of a dialectic of enlightenment is structured hyperbolically, thus demonstrating the inseparable, even mutually constitutive relation of thought and exaggeration in Adorno’s philosophy. Because thought can never account for its hyperbolic

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60.

61. 62.

63.

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dimension without losing precisely the excess gained by exaggeration, it remains caught in a circle, in a dialectic of enlightenment: “The circle that surrounds thought, or, more precisely, the circle in whose movement thought has been caught, can be described as a peculiar dialectic of enlightenment. Enlightenment seeks a way out of exaggeration as the overpowering force that Adorno and Horkheimer call myth; but the more the dialectic of enlightenment progresses toward destroying the mythical, the more it falls prey to it, generates it itself, because the completely enlightened thought, the thought that encounters no more resistance and has, as it were, become identical with itself, is, like exaggeration, no thought” (Alexander García Düttmann, Philosophie der Übertreibung [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004] 33). The precise operation of the utopian in Adorno’s thought is enigmatic. “It appears that the last thinkable view of utopia lies here, in the essay as form. . . . Adorno understands the essayist’s will to form not only within the horizon of literary writing, but as a philosophical attitude within the empty space where once the utopian was at home” (Christian Scharf, Geschichte des Essays: Von Montaigne bis Adorno [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999] 275). In his book So ist es, Düttmann argues that the essayistic objects critiqued in Adorno’s MM have been completely absorbed by the (wordless) gesture of the “So ist es.” With Düttmann, one could claim that Adorno’s essays refrain from naming and identifying objects directly, only to state and confirm them silently, through an essayistic gesture. “The essay as from consists in the ability to regard historical moments, manifestations of the objective spirit, ‘culture,’ as though they were natural.” (P 233; GS 10.1: 242) Writing about the intended composition of AT, Adorno noted: “The book must, so to speak, be written in equally weighed, paratactic parts that are arranged around a midpoint that they express through their constellation.” (AT 365; GS 7: 541) The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics cites number of poets that can be labeled as “Alexandrians,” starting with Callimachus of Cyrene (ca. 305–240 BCE), including Vergil, and concluding with Mallarmé and Valéry (two of Adorno’s favorite poets). In the “Alexandrian code,” the topoi of alluding “to the need for brevity” and “to irony and play as legitimate poetic ideals, yet paradoxically to poetry itself as hard and ultimately unfinishable work,” are reminiscent of Adorno’s poetics of the essay (Alexander Preminger, Clive Scott and T.V.F. Brogan, “Alexandrianism,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Alexander Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993] 29). More prominent in Adorno’s mind were possibly the Jewish-Greek philosophers of Alexandria who combined Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology,

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68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

Notes to Chapter One thus incurring accusations of being syncretistic. Names in this tradition are Aristobulos (ca. 160 BCE) and Philon of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE to 45 CE). Adorno here refers to philosophy’s fervor to go back to the beginning, to deduce everything from first principles. Adorno’s epigraph to the first part of Minima Moralia is “Life does not live,” from Ferdinand Kürnberger’s novel Der Amerikamüde [The One Who Grew Tired of America (1855)]. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 88. Werke, eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 19 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969) 431. For an English translation, see . Hegel, Werke 19: 432–33. Norbert Bolz was the first to point out a hidden link between Adorno and Schlegel, although Adorno was most certainly not familiar with Schlegel’s less well-known works on which Bolz draws. See Bolz, Geschichtsphilosophie des Ästhetischen 120. On the relationship between Schlegel and Adorno, see Klaus Peter, “Friedrich Schlegel und Adorno: Die Dialektik der Aufklärung in der Romantik und heute,” Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, eds. Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1987) 219–235. “So one cannot find in the writings of the Alexandrians original ideas and elaboration of the fundamental principles of philosophy; their philosophy is mere syncretism.” (KA 12: 236) Whenever Adorno uses rhetoric in a positive sense, he implicitly distinguishes it from persuasion. With rhetoric, he simply means the—often excessive, disorienting, even shock-like—use of figures of speech. Hegel’s style draws attention to itself, and his language is rhetorical in the sense of a tropology, while Heidegger’s language is persuasive in the worst sense: it is a form of demagoguery. It is questionable, however, whether Adorno’s embrace of Hegel’s language and his rejection of Heidegger’s is at all consistent with Adorno’s notion of rhetoric, for Heidegger’s language is as ostentatiously artificial as Hegel’s (and Adorno’s), even if (or because) Heidegger’s claim is to use words in their purported original sense. Friedrich Schlegel Philosophical Fragments 13. This concern is structurally similar to the function of the “prohibition on images” discussed in DE: “The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition” (DE 18; GS 3: 40). The notion of language itself or pure language occurs frequently in Adorno. I take it to signify not something like an idealized form of purity, but rather simply the abstract obverse of everyday, means-oriented, communicative language. It does not refer to an actual, empirically possible

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79.

80.

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entity; it provides merely a regulative idea. This is why Adorno, unlike Heidegger, shuns the promise of truth that lies in certain words that stand completely outside the canon of common discourse. Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonk: Tagebuchblätter und Briefe (Berlin: Duncker, 1904) 189. Carl Dahlhaus, “Wagners dramatisch-musikalischer Formbegriff,” Analecta Musicologica: Veröffentlichungen der Musikgeschichtlichen Abteilung des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom (Cologne: Böhlau, 1972) 296. Carl Dahlhaus, “Wagners ‘Kunst des Übergangs:’ Der Zwiegesang in Tristan und Isolde,” Zur musikalischen Analyse, ed. Gerhard Schuhmacher (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974) 476. The Heideggerian figure of impossible possibility is also central to Adorno’s idea of lyric modernity: “In industrial society the lyric idea of a self-restoring immediacy becomes—where it does not impotently evoke a Romantic past—more and more something that flares up abruptly, something in which what is possible transcends its own impossibility” (NL 1: 50; GS 11: 63–64). This figure of thought is discussed in chapters 2–5. The word is reminiscent of the Zueignung that introduces Goethe’s Faust I. Adorno himself used the word as the title for his preface to MM. In Goethe’s language, however, zueignen also has the meaning of aneignen [to appropriate]. In his last letter, Goethe writes to Wilhelm von Humboldt: “The best form of genius is that which absorbs everything, is able to make everything its own” [“Das beste Genie ist das, welches alles in sich aufnimmt, sich alles zuzueignen weiß. . .”] (Goethes Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 49 [Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1912] 281). On the poetic dimension of zueignen in Goethe’s Faust, see Peter Brandes, Goethes Faust: Poetik der Gabe und Selbstreflexion der Dichtung (Munich: Fink, 2003). The split of language into different functions is an integral and irreversible component of enlightenment. Nowhere does Adorno advocate the idea of art as restitution of a pre-historical, mythical unity of language. Although he takes the expression “the art of transition” from Wagner’s compositional technique, he has no sympathy for the notion of total art, or for the idea that music or poetry [Dichtung] could be, somehow, art itself. Rather, Adorno’s critical concern is with the process of a post-modern intermedialization [Verfransung] of the arts (see “Die Kunst und die Künste,” GS 10.1: 432–453). Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) 99. A translation faithful to Adorno’s syntax—although it cannot render the reflexive sich—would look like this: “Not wrong, however, is the no less cultural question of whether after Auschwitz still to live is possible.” Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Maxima Immoralia? Speed and Slowness in Adorno’s Minima Moralia,” Theory and Event 4.3 (2000) §2.

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84. Nealon §8. 85. Hans Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001) 420. 86. “The smallest transition” is also one of the ideals of the essay, which has been, since its inauguration by Montaigne, proudly a minor form. 87. Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 37. 88. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 286.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989) 79. 2. The notion of “experience” in Adorno is exceptionally complex and equivocal. I take aesthetic experience in the simplest (and necessarily circular) sense as that which is the precondition of theory and, simultaneously, the other of theory—the inexplicable fascination that entices one to confront works of art and to write about them. Adorno described his own fragments on Beethoven to his editor as “a diary of his experiences of Beethoven’s music” (BE ix; BG12): the theoretical, philosophical text is a diary, a reflective, conceptual record of experience. In contrast to Dilthey, whose notion of re-experiencing is based on the assumption that there is continuity and similarity between prior and present lived experiences [Erlebnis] and that meaning emerges “out of the life process,” viewed as “self-actualization and objectification” (David Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996] 405, n. 5), Adorno’s notion of experience rests on the negativity of disruption, destruction, loss, and shock. One of Adorno’s main topoi is, in agreement with Benjamin, the decay of experience. What follows from this idea is, to put it very briefly, a notion of aesthetic experience that is, ideally, true Erfahrung rather than mere Erlebnis, because it is structured by a primacy of the object (which is, in AT, modernist art— Adorno’s model for all art) over the subject (which has otherwise lost access to experience). The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis (in WB SW, the latter term is translated as “isolated experience”) is primarily developed in Benjamin’s 1940 essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” [“Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (WB SW 4: 313–55; WB GS 1.2 605–53)], which takes its cue from Baudelaire, Proust, and Freud. Concerning Benjamin’s concept of experience, see Thomas Weber, “Erfahrung,” Benjamins Begriffe, eds. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000) 230–59, and Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP) 82–120. For further

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helpful accounts of the notion of experience in Adorno and Benjamin, see J. M. Bernstein’s Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 111–20. See also Martin Jay’s comprehensive Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), especially the chapter “Lamenting the Crisis of Experience: Benjamin and Adorno” (312–60). For a far-ranging meditation initiated by Benjamin’s notion of a “poverty of experience,” see Giorgio Agamben’s Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (London and New York: Verso, 1993). On the notion of poetry as a form of experience [Erfahrung] of something absent or missing, distinguished from the fullness of experience suggested by the term Erlebnislyrik, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 18–20. For a discussion of the concept of aesthetic experience in Adorno, see Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998). Menke defines aesthetic experience as a process resulting from and negating the immediate experience of an object: “It is not the direct experience of an object and its qualities that we term aesthetic, but rather the aesthetically experienced fate of diverse, nonaesthetic, automatic acts of recognition. Initially, every process of aesthetic experience is defined by experiential acts that are not genuinely aesthetic. Aesthetic difference can thus only be defined as the result of that event or happening which takes up these initially nonaesthetic qualities and negatively transforms them. The enactment or carrying out of this event is what we term aesthetic experience” (13–14). According to Menke’s structural definition, aesthetic experience is a kind of mediated, reflective experience. It cannot be defined in itself, but only negatively, through differentiation from another, presupposed experience. Although Menke provides the clearest and most comprehensive notion of aesthetic experience in Adorno, he does not account for the historicity of experience and for the problematic notion of a decay of experience. Put differently, if we are to follow Menke’s theoretical model of aesthetic experience, the notion of the decay of experience and the distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis turn out to be irrelevant. (The historicity of experience is theorized in Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode; see Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck (UTB) 1990] especially 352–68.) 3. Throughout Adorno’s work, one encounters strong criticism of Dilthey’s hermeneutic method of intellectual history [Geistesgeschichte]. It is unfortunate that Adorno does not take Dilthey’s hermeneutics into further account—especially since Dilthey’s thinking left important traces in Lukács’s pre-Marxist essays, which had a strong intellectual impact on Adorno. It is questionable whether the term Erfahrung can be unequivocally separated from the term Erlebnis, as Adorno’s polemical aside seems to imply. Benjamin’s works at least do not suggest the possibility of such

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4.

5.

6.

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seemingly easy conceptual separation. For an introduction to Dilthey and to the German hermeneutic tradition in general, see Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1985). On Dilthey’s notion of empathy, see page 159: “This state of mind involved in the task of understanding we call empathy, be it with a man or a work. Thus every line of a poem is re-transformed into life through the inner context of lived experience from which the poem arose.” Hullot-Kentor translates Rätselcharakter as “enigmaticalness,” thereby underscoring that Rätsel is not something that can be (dis)solved, but, rather, something that retains its riddle-character and is thus enigmatic. On the terminological distinction between riddle, enigma, and mystery, see Paul de Man’s essay “The Riddle of Hölderlin,” in Critical Writings 1953– 1978 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 205–10. “Enigmaticalness” is not only an aesthetic but also a quasi-empirical term in Adorno. His essay “Warum ist die neue Kunst so schwer verständlich?” [“Why is the new art so difficult to understand?”] (GS 18: 824–31) explains the incomprehensibility of modern art in exclusively socio-historical terms. Rätsel is one of the few terms Adorno’s shares with Heidegger: “The present considerations approach the enigma [Rätsel] of art, the enigma that is art itself. There is no pretense to solve the enigma. The task is to see the enigma” (Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960] 83). This idea is structurally the same as Adorno’s demand to understand incomprehensibility as incomprehensibility. Commenting on Adorno’s claims about “the crisis of comprehensibility,” Werner Hamacher senses the possibility of “an understanding that would have leaped clear of the categories of rational construction and leaped into another understanding—not an understanding that is somehow ‘irrational’ but one that consists in the freeing of the ratio, the emancipation of an altered ratio” (Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996] 40). No doubt Hamacher’s emphasis on “freeing” and “emancipation” describes correctly both the philosophical intention and the underlying thrust of Adorno’s hermeneutic imperative. Kant famously states: “Thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind. It is thus just as necessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible (i.e., to add an object to them in intuition) as it is to make its intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts)” (The Critique of Pure Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998] 193–194; Werkausgabe 3: 98). I do not explicitly address the underlying Kantian structures of Adorno’s thinking on aesthetics. Kant’s influence on Adorno has been treated by, for example, J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park:

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Pennsylvania State UP, 1992); Tom Huhn, “Kant, Adorno, and the Social Opacity of Art,” The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, eds. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997) 237–57; Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third ‘Critique’ in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000): 682–724; Menke, The Sovereignty of Art; Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, “As If: Kant, Adorno, and the Politics of Poetry,” MLN 121 (2006): 757–73; and Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984) 71. On the question of how to translate this verse, see Paul de Man’s “The Riddle of Hölderlin.” De Man points out that subject and predicate in the sentence are reversible (this is its syntactic and semantic riddle): “The sentence means not only that ‘pure origin’ is a riddle but that the riddle itself is one of the entities that can lay claim to pure origin” (Critical Writings 210). Intuition here means the irreducible sensory and spontaneous aspect of aesthetic experience. One could restate this relation as one between an intuitive and a reflective understanding of artworks. If all intuition of an object is, in the final analysis, an act of subjective projection, as Adorno and Horkheimer suggest in DE, the understanding provided by intuition eclipses, as Britta Scholze claims, the “thing-ness” of the object. “In this process, the object becomes increasingly more intelligible [erkenntlicher] as object, but increasingly more incomprehensible and unknown [unerkannter]” (Scholze 221). Therefore the spectator, reader, or listener must overcome the cognitive limits of intuitive immediacy through the conceptual work of reflective mediation. Modern art, Scholze points out, defends itself against false projections (or intuitions) by becoming less intuitable [unanschaulicher] and more abstract. Similarly, Adorno’s AT “itself executes [vollzieht] the movement of reflection by constantly isolating conceptual elements of the artworks and creating new degrees of immediacy in order to reveal these as conceptually mediated projections. As it critically passes through aesthetic theories, the work of art becomes increasingly more abstract” (Scholze 221). If aesthetic modernity is characterized by the growing abstractness necessitated by a threat of false subjective projection, then the enigmaticalness of art must also increase in proportion to the progress of critical reflection about the artwork. The uncertain relation between knowledge and experience that Adorno develops in terms of enigmaticalness is not restricted to the sphere of aesthetics. In Adorno, the enterprise of philosophy itself cannot avoid an experience of the enigma. For a precise analysis of the function of the term

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Notes to Chapter Two “Rätsel” in Adorno’s philosophy as a whole, see Düttmann, Das Gedächtnis des Denkens: Versuch über Heidegger und Adorno 105–108. “Mnemosyne” begins by stating the poem’s own enigmatic, incomprehensible character: “A sign we are, without interpretation” [“Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos”] (Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments 116). For a brilliant reading of the pun rein/Rhein, see Aris Fioretos, “Nothing: History and Materiality in Celan,” Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994) 306–11. Fioretos also very briefly refers to Adorno’s Entsprungenes which, in his translation, “is something that has originated but also absconded” (311). For a collection of essays on philosophical interpretations of literature, see David Wood (ed.), Philosophers’ Poets (London: Routledge, 1990). A note on translating Rauschen: the meanings of this word are plentiful. In the most general sense, Rauschen designates a sound that is, to use an optical metaphor, so blurry, so indistinct and fuzzy, that it can be read as either a meaningless sound that eludes signification and understanding, or, conversely, as a diffuse plurality of meanings that need to be individually separated in order to be decoded. As a standard prop in German poetry from Klopstock to Grünbein, the word usually signifies the rushing of a river or of wind, the murmuring of flowing water, the rustling of leaves or of clothes, the roaring of a waterfall, or, once one leaves the realm of nature poetry proper, the hustle and bustle of urban traffic. In Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, Rauschen is the diffuse apparition of divine signs: Rauschen is a natural sound that is interpreted as divine communication (see Werke 14: 50). In a nonpoetic context, it can simply be the name for the breakdown of all intelligible communication or the phenomenon of a non-intelligible signal: such as white noise—and there are several other noise colors that could all be called Rauschen. The closely related word Rausch means intoxication or emotional transport—an important component, for example, of Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian. It remains to be seen if Adorno’s notion of Rauschen in the Eichendorff essay bears any similarities to Nietzsche’s Dionysian Rausch: the two notions certainly overlap insofar as they signify a resistance to semiotic differentiation. Both mark a zone of indistinction in which the laws of semiotic binary oppositions (form/content, signifier/signified) do not apply. Adorno’s Rauschen is certainly to be distinguished from Benjamin’s notion of Rausch as the signature of surrealistic experience that is emphatically real, worldly, and not aesthetic. See Benjamin’s essay “Surrealism” [“Der Sürrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz” (WB SW 2: 207–21; WB GS 2.1: 295–310)]. Alexander García Düttmann uses the felicitous expression “Rausch der Begriffe” in So ist es 65. For an account of Rauschen in the scholarly literature on Adorno, see Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work 59–66. In recent years, Rauschen has been discovered not only as a phenomenon, but also as one of the key terms for an

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18. 19.

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understanding of the structure of art and aesthetic experience. It appears that the word is gaining appreciation as a crucial metaphor that fills a conceptual void. See Ruth Sonderegger, “Ist Kunst, was rauscht? Zum Rauschen als poetologischer und ästhetischer Kategorie,” Rauschen: Seine Phänomenologie und Semantik zwischen Sinn und Störung, eds. Andreas Hiepko and Katja Stopka (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001) 29–42, and Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005). The latter uses Rauschen—translated as “resonating”—to designate “an occurrence without occurring,” i.e., a sound that does not convey any particular, individuated information (143). Rauschen can also be understood as a form of deviation from the dominant Cartesian desire that thought be clare et distincte, an alternative closely related to the visual metaphor of blurriness. See Bernd Hüppauf, “Die Wiederkehr der Unschärfe,” Merkur 58.659 (2004): 211– 19. Adorno also finds Rauschen in other genres, for instance in the early epic, where he detects the rustling of speech: “Such Rauschen is the sound of epic speech” [“Solches Rauschen ist der Laut der epischen Rede”] (NL 1: 24; GS 11: 34). Despite Adorno’s recurrent emphasis on the autonomy of aesthetic form, he grants literary genres little more than heuristic value. What counts is not only what a genre is, but, in a personification typical for Adorno, what it ideally wants to be: “There are poems by Mörike that are the way folksongs [Volkslieder] should be in order to be folksongs—formed, as it were, according to the Platonic idea of the folksong in the bourgeois age— while the ‘authentic’ [‘echten’] weakly and dimly fall short of this idea” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Graeculus (I): Musikalische Notizen,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 7 [2001]: 21). The attraction of the Volkslied is that, as an idea of the Romantic era, it is a genre without genre, more an expression of yearning than of philological analysis. It does not conform to any norm, but is always different, withdraws from the grasp of classification, is never there as such. It is true only as an idea. See also Adorno’s brief “Volksliedersammlungen,” GS 19: 287–90, and chapter 4 of this study. Theodor Alexander Meyer, Das Stilgesetz der Poesie (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1901). Jan Rosiek reads this as “the redemption of fallen language by the poetic gesture of simultaneously verbalizing man and naturalizing language. . . . The figure of transfiguration suggests a theological perspective in which the fall of pure language, brought about by the need for subjective expression, is redeemed by the poet’s Christ-like self-sacrifice” (Maintaining the Sublime—Heidegger and Adorno, 444). Adorno’s use of “natural history” has received renewed scholarly interest in recent years. See Max Pensky, “Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno,” Critical Horizons 5.1 (2004): 227–58, and David Roberts, “Art and Myth: Adorno and Heidegger,” Thesis Eleven 58 (1999): 19–34.

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21. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 109. 22. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel 64, quoted in NH 118 and GS 1: 356–57. 23. Lukács, Theory of the Novel 63. 24. In his work on the Baroque mourning play, Benjamin writes: “The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience” (OGTD 177; WB GS 1.1: 353). The movement of allegorical reading is one of chiastic transition from nature to history (Benjamin) and history to (second) nature (Lukács). Adorno likes to combine Benjamin’s notion of allegory and Lukács’s notion of “second nature:” “Philosophical nature has to be regarded as history, and history as nature” (JA 98–99; GS 6: 479), and: “Thought should therefore regard all nature . . . as history, and all history as nature” (Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001] 179). For a close reading of the relation between allegory and history and its rhetorical enactment in Benjamin’s work on the Trauerspiel, see Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) 255–93. 25. According to Adorno, essayistic presentation depends on a unique and unrepeatable constellation of concepts—the concept of allegory itself issues from such a constellation. Thus, it is singular: allegory is always the expression of a specific historical moment, configured by the essay. 26. “The symbol . . . remains persistently the same” (OGTD 183; WB GS 1.1: 359). 27. On melancholy in Benjamin, see Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001). 28. On temporal structures in Adorno’s aesthetics, see Wolfhart Henckmann, “‘Jedes Kunstwerk ist ein Augenblick:’ Versuch, eine These Adornos zu verstehen,” Augenblick und Zeitpunkt: Studien zur Zeitstruktur und Zeitmetaphorik in Kunst und Wissenschaften, eds. Hans Holländer and Christian W. Thomsen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984) 77–92, and Norbert Zimmermann, Der ästhetische Augenblick: Theodor W. Adornos Theorie der Zeitstruktur von Kunst und ästhetischer Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1989). 29. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995) 89. 30. One can extend this aesthetic structure and say that in Adorno’s philosophy, the answer coincides with the question, the riddle with the answer: “In philosophy the authentic question will somehow almost always include its answer. Unlike science [Forschung], philosophy knows no fixed sequence [ein Erst-danach] of answer and question” (ND 63; GS 6: 71). See also Dütt-mann, Das Gedächtnis des Denkens: Versuch über Heidegger und Adorno 105–08.

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31. Adorno sees the allegoric and the parabolic modes of signification (“as though”) as closely related not only in Eichendorff but also in Kafka: “The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart and out of the abyss between them blinds the glittering ray of fascination. Here too, in its striving not for symbol but for allegory, Kafka’s prose sides with the outcasts. . . . Walter Benjamin rightly defined it as parable. It expresses itself not through expression but its repudiation, by breaking off. It is a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen” (P 246; GS 10.1: 255). 32. Because Rauschen cannot be integrated into a system of aesthetic concepts, it remains the task of the essay to explore it. Not unlike Adorno, Roland Barthes had a persistent interest in phenomena of Rauschen [bruissement], in which he took great enjoyment. For him, the rustle of language presented the utopia of a “music of meaning.” Like Adorno, he understood Rauschen—clearly marked as a signifying effect—as a distancing of meaning: “Rustling, entrusted to the signifier by an unprecedented movement unknown to our rational discourses, language would not thereby abandon a horizon of meaning: meaning, undivided, impenetrable, would however be posited in the distance like a mirage, making the vocal exercise into a double landscape, furnished with a ‘background’; but instead of the music of the phonemes being the ‘background’ of our messages (as happens in our poetry), meaning would now be the vanishing point of delectation” (Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language 77–78). 33. For a good discussion of this problem, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno 185–215, and also Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work 60. 34. Rudolf Borchardt, Ausgewählte Gedichte, ed. Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968) 42. For a full quotation of the poem, see chapter 3.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State U of New York P, 1997) 48. 2. For one of the few essays on Borchardt in English, see Heinz Politzer, “Rudolf Borchardt: Poet of Assimilation,” Commentary 9 (1950): 57–65. 3. Helmut Heißenbüttel, ed., Rudolf Borchardt: Auswahl aus dem Werk (Stuttgart: Klett, 1968); Theodor W Adorno, ed., Rudolf Borchardt: Ausgewählte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968). 4. Shierry Weber Nicholsen translates the verb beschwören as “to charm,” which covers only one facet of its meaning. Beschwören is derived from schwören, “to swear (under oath),” which originally meant “to speak in court.” This juridical connotation—which could be expressed by the

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

English “to adjure,” “to attest,” or “to entreat”—is lost in Nicholsen’s translation. Additionally, the word’s magical connotations (“to conjure up,” “to invoke,” “to invocate,” “to evoke,” “to enchant,” “to summon up,” “to put a spell on”) are hard to separate from its possible religious import in the sense of “to incant,” but also “to exorcize.” In order to do justice to the polysemy of beschwören, I will in most instances use the German word. I do not fully engage the notions of craft, technique, and technology here. For more, see the section headed “Technique” in AT. For a comprehensive exploration of the relation between technology and language in Adorno, see Eric L. Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998). The complete wording of the poem Pause is: “Hinter den tiefsten Erinnerungen / Verwächst die Zeit; / Die alten Wege waren frei und breit, / Nun hat die Welt sie überdrungen. // ‘O Rauschen tief in mir, / Was aber hast du, / das ich gerne hörte? / Ist denn ein Ton in dir, / Der mich nicht störte?’ // ‘Ich habe nichts als Rauschen, / Kein Deutliches erwarte dir; / Sei dir am Schmerz genug, in dich zu lauschen.’” (Borchardt, Jugendgedichte [Berlin: Rowohlt, 1920] 36) Paul Celan’s prose poem “Conversation in the Mountains” [“Gespräch im Gebirge” (1959)], written after, as Celan called it, “a missed encounter” with Adorno in the Swiss Alps, plays with the slight semantic differences between sprechen and reden: “To whom, sibling child, should he talk? He does not talk, he speaks and whoever speaks, sibling child, talks to nobody, he speaks because nobody hears him, nobody and Nobody . . . [Zu wem, Geschwisterkind, soll er reden? Er redet nicht, er spricht, und wer spricht, Geschwisterkind, der redet zu niemand, der spricht, weil niemand ihn hört, niemand und Niemand . . . ]” (Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, eds. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert, vol. 3 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986] 171). On “Conversation in the Mountains” as Celan’s literary response to Adorno’s reflections about poetry after Auschwitz, see Joachim Seng, “‘Die wahre Flaschenpost:’ Zur Beziehung zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Paul Celan,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 8 (2003): 153–57. Adorno’s most incisive remarks on gesture can be found in his essay on Kafka in Prisms (P 243–71; GS 10.1: 254–87) and in his monograph on Gustav Mahler (Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991] 60–80; GS 13: 209–29). Also on the topic of gesture, see Giorgio Agamben, “Kommerell, or on Gesture,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 77–85, and “Notes on Gesture,” Infancy and History 135–40. With the word “crystallization,” Adorno alludes to a letter Walter Benjamin wrote to Martin Buber about his ideal of style as the “crystal-pure

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

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elimination of the unutterable in language” (quoted in AT 204; GS 7: 304). Adorno did, however, value certain theoretical aspects of Borchardt’s work highly, especially the latter’s work on the Italian villa, in which Adorno saw the outline of a materialist program of cultural critique (see CC 129; BW 170). It should be added, however, that Adorno’s allusion to the messianic Jewish voice is based on a model of active language’s becoming passive, which is problematic because it seems to associate Jewish with passive and German with active. Borchardt’s relation to his Jewish ancestry was, to say the least, ambivalent. “Whatever is ethnically Jewish in the Jew is entirely alien to me” (Quoted in Gustav Seibt, “Nachwort,” Rudolf Borchardts Leben von ihm selbst erzählt [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001] 163). Adorno usually cites Don Quixote as a symbol of art itself “after its end,” i.e., after the pinnacle of bourgeois art during the age of Goethe. In Sound Figures, Adorno writes: “The more reality hardens against possibility, the more urgent and real the idea of art becomes. Art now finds itself, at the end of the bourgeois era, forced to play the role played by Don Quixote at its beginning: a role that is at once impossible and necessary” (Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingston [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999] 142; GS 16: 167). This is the inversion of Hofmannsthal’s intention “to emancipate literature from language” (P 205; GS 10.1: 213). “I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983] 287) In his unfinished book on Beethoven, Adorno defines Beschwörung as a secularized form of prayer, and music as a rhetorical incarnation of prayer: “It is the pure language of prayer as devoted entreaty [Beschwörung]. Beethoven is deeply connected to this through the element of rhetoric” (BE 163; BG 235). According to Adorno’s model of literary and linguistic history, “it is in Hölderlin . . . that the poetic movement unsettles the category of meaning for the first time” (NL 2: 136; GS 11: 477). Borchardt, Ausgewählte Gedichte 19, quoted in NL 2: 200; GS 11: 544. In 1918, Benjamin wrote to Scholem: “I share your distrust of Borchardt, in spite of all my appreciation for, and even enchantment with, parts of his work” (WB C: 111; WB B 1: 168). Adorno’s wife Gretel Karplus comments on Borchardt’s impact on Benjamin in a letter dated 14 June 1936: “In your last letter you write that with Karl Kraus the last person to have influenced you has died. I believe we have never talked about this, but did you not forget to name Rudolf Borchardt? I believe there are very strong relations between you and him . . . ” (Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel

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Notes to Chapter Three 1930–1940, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005] 272). For a study of Benjamin’s relation to Borchardt, see Ernst Osterkamp, “Näherungen: Rudolf Borchardt im Werk Walter Benjamins,” GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift 31.2 (1981): 203–33. With the emphasis on the dialectical nature of Borchardt’s will, Adorno credits him with an achievement that eluded his colleague Hofmannsthal. According to Adorno, Hofmannsthal’s verses talk and listen only to themselves, and his language is one of false invocation that pretentiously empowers itself, even though it is powerless, hopelessly self-positing and without substance. See P 202–207; GS 10.1: 211–215. While Borchardt’s poems do not deny their technical, artistic character, the essayist Borchardt reveals in his lecture “Über den Dichter und das Dichterische” [“On the Poet and the Poetical” (1923)] a quasi-theological view of poetry [Dichtung] as an arcanum completely separate from the other, “mechanical” arts. In a piece on modern intermediality in art, “Die Kunst und die Künste” [“Art and the Arts” (1967)], Adorno calls Borchardt’s theory of poetry an “unmetaphorical apotheosis” of poetry at the expense of an understanding of the artificial and artistic character of all art. “Borchardt’s antithesis between art and techné is unconvincing, because the medium of fine arts is also that from which Borchardt wants to distance it, language” (GS 10.1: 445). There is no art without the medium of language; likewise, there is no poetry without artful devices. In order to refute Borchardt’s nondialectical view of poetry as something that is absolutely or ontologically different from the non-verbal arts, Adorno refers to Heidegger’s appreciation of téchne. It is to Heidegger’s “merit to soberly point out the thingly character of the object [das Dinghafte des Objekts] that even the often cited aesthetic experience [ästhetische Erlebnis] cannot circumvent, as Heidegger says with appropriate irony” (GS 10.1: 446). When it comes to matters of aesthetics, Borchardt the essayist turns out to be quite unreliable, and Adorno finds himself suddenly drawn close to his old philosophical foe. Adorno faulted Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility” (1936) for failing to present a dialectical account of the autonomous work of art in its relation to technology. Here as elsewhere Adorno suggests that téchne implies freedom, because it makes the aesthetic material available to subjectivity and thus also implies a materialistic (i.e., progressive) aesthetic program. Along with Mallarmé and Valéry, he mentions Borchardt in this context: “Dialectical though your essay is, it is less than this in the case of the autonomous work of art itself; for it neglects a fundamental experience which daily becomes increasingly evident to me in my musical work, that precisely the uttermost consistency in the pursuit of technical laws of autonomous art actually transforms this art itself, and, instead of turning it into a fetish or a taboo, brings it that much closer to a

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state of freedom, to something that can be consciously produced and made. I know of no better materialist programme than that remark of Mallarmé’s, where he defines a work of literature as something that is not inspired but rather is made out of words; and the greatest of the reactionary figures, like Valéry und Borchardt . . . also harbour this explosive power within the innermost cells of their work” (CC 128–29; BW 170). 23. See also Elisabeth Lenk’s comment which is, perhaps, a little too facile in its nominalistic clarity: “Borchardt and Hofmannsthal had replaced the tired concept of culture with the emphatic one of language, differing from Adorno only in that they placed the concept of the nation there where Adorno says ‘society.’ For them, nation was not a mere skeleton, but something substantial by virtue of language.” Lenk thus reveals Borchardt as the second coming of Herder (“In die Sprache verwickelt: Versuch über Rudolf Borchardts Jamben via Adorno,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 8 [2003]: 234). On Borchardt’s construction of history and the self, see Kai Kauffmann, Rudolf Borchardt und der ‘Untergang der deutschen Nation:’ Selbstinszenierung und Geschichtskonstruktion im essayistischen Werk (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003). 24. Critics seem to reject (and/or misunderstand) this Hegelian argument. For example, see Ernst A. Schmidt, “Sprache und Liebe: Adorno über Borchardt,” Adorno im Widerstreit: Zur Präsenz seines Denkens, ed. Wolfram Ette et al. (Freiburg: Alber, 2004) 423–25.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. “All things corruptible / Are but a parable.” (Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Philip Wayne [Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1959] 288.) 2. Quoted in Robert Edward Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002) ix. 3. “We recognize [George’s voice] as the voice of a prophet.” (WB SW 2: 706; GS 3: 392) 4. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton, 2001) 47. 5. That there continues to be a discourse that casts the figure of the poet in mystical terms, seeking to revive the poet’s exclusive pre- or anti-modern nimbus, can be witnessed in the case of one of Adorno’s students, Botho Strauss, who sought to claim the superiority of poetic vision over a “profane” political point of view in his essay “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” published a dozen years ago in, of all places, the popular weekly Der Spiegel. 6. For secondary literature on Adorno’s treatment of George, see especially Paul Fleming, “The Secret Adorno,” Qui Parle 15.1 (2004): 97–114, and also Dieter Heimböckel, “Anspruch und Wirklichkeit: Theodor W. Adornos Beitrag zur ‘Rettung’ Stefan Georges,” Castrum Peregrini 40 (1991): 70–79,

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Notes to Chapter Four and Bernhard Böschenstein, “Theodor W. Adorno über Stefan George,” Adorno im Widerstreit 394–406. Adorno’s works on George are also discussed in Karla Schultz, “In Praise of Illusion: ‘Das Jahr der Seele’ and ‘Der Teppich des Lebens:’ Analysis and Historical Perspective,” A Companion to the Works of Stefan George, ed. Jens Rieckmann (Rochester: Camden House, 2005) 79–98. 7. Benjamin understood Adorno’s essay on George and Hofmannsthal as a setting that provided a better context for certain verses by George than the original books in which they were first published: “Your work has rendered conceivable what was previously quite inconceivable, something which could well initiate a renewal of interest in George: namely, an anthology of his poetry. Some of them sound better in your text than they do where you originally found them” (CC 330; BW 430). Perhaps Benjamin is correct and Adorno deserves recognition for significantly contributing to canonizing George as a writer—regardless of his image as a quasi-mythological Dichter. The case of George has recently been brought up by Russell Berman in a defense of the role played by the literary canon within the context of cultural studies. Berman’s endorsement of Adorno’s attempt at re-canonizing George, however, is rather lukewarm. Berman quotes the following statement from Adorno’s “George:” “The official canonization that befell George more than thirty years ago, prohibiting free criticism of his work, no longer intimidates us. Since then his work has been almost completely repressed [verdrängt], not only from official consciousness but from literary awareness as well” (NL 2: 178; GS 11: 523), then comments: “Note the lose-lose polarity so characteristic of Adorno: either the erstwhile official canonization that trivializes and thereby denies critical freedom or, alternatively, repression that loses the object altogether” (Russell Berman, “Cultural Studies and the Canon: Some Thoughts on Stefan George,” Profession [1999]: 174). Even if one disapproves of Adorno’s characteristic aporetic formulations, his “lose-lose polarity,” Adorno’s description of George’s trajectory from official canonization to almost complete repression is certainly correct. It is important to note, however, that Adorno uses the psychoanalytic term “repression.” Thus, Adorno’s historical perspective is informed by an approach that seeks to diagnose George’s writings from the perspective of their contemporary repression. In other words, if the subject matter at stake has been repressed, the critical diagnosis must proceed by means of a symptomatic reading that seeks to reconstruct the history of this particular case. 8. The notion of latency is primarily based on Freud’s terminology in his Interpretation of Dreams, which introduces the distinction between manifest and latent dream content. 9. In a more recent but similar vein of poetic renewal of forgotten layers of language, the poets Raoul Schrott andThomas Kling have both presented ambitious poetry anthologies that seek to redefine the canon by replacing

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10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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quantitative notions with qualitative ones, emphasizing especially the formal and artistic nature of poetry, which allows them to view German poetry in a comparative global literary context often neglected by business-as-usual Germanistik. Instead of the Germanic word Dichtung, Schrott uses the more internationally recognizable term Poesie, with its etymological resonance of “making” and “producing” (Die Erfindung der Poesie: Gedichte aus den ersten viertausend Jahren [The Invention of Poetry: Poems from the First Four-Thousand Years] (2003)), and Kling simply uses the word “Sprache” (Sprachspeicher [Language Storage] (2001)). In his essay “Situation des Liedes,” Adorno’s speaks of George’s poetry as having sunk from contemporary understanding: “George’s poetry has sunk [entsunken] from contemporary relevance” (GS 18: 351). Adorno’s references to “pure language” allude to Walter Benjamin’s early theory of language (see WB SW 1: 62–74 and 253–63) and to Karl Kraus’s “reconstruction of a pure language” (GS 18: 739). On Benjamin’s theory of language, see Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), Peter Fenves, “The Genesis of Judgment: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphor in Benjamin’s ‘On Language as such and on Human Language,’” Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 75–93, and Rodolphe Gasché, “Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language,” Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988) 83–104. Rudolf Borchardt, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden: Prosa 1, ed. Marie Luise Borchardt (Stuttgart: Klett, 1957) 290–91. “The glib decorative quality that is so irritating in Rilke, the tendency to surrender to verse and rhyme without resistance, is for the most part restrained by reflection in George.” (NL 2: 184; GS 11: 528) “Collective language” must be defined in terms of a negative temporality in order to safeguard it from nationalist appropriations. George’s “will to domination links him with a significant German tradition, to which Richard Wagner belongs as do Heidegger and Brecht; with Hitler it underwent a gruesome transformation into politics” (NL 2: 179; GS 11: 524). “In [George’s poems] the material, the poetic substance, the experience that has been sublimated into form, on the one hand, and George’s socalled spiritual stance on the other, diverge from on another.” (NL 2: 182–83; GS 11: 527) Adorno’s concept of the essay and of the essay’s interpretation of poetry is, at times, not far removed from George’s pronouncements on art, such as the famous line: “In poetry—as in all artistic activity—anyone who is still afflicted by the addiction of wanting to ‘say’ something or ‘change’

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

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Notes to Chapter Four something, is not worthy of entering even the forecourt of art” (George, Werke, vol. 1 [Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 2000] 530). In one of his greatest polemical pieces, “Bloch’s Traces” [“Blochs Spuren;” first published under the title “Große Blochmusik” (1960)], Adorno includes a harsh critique of the aphoristic style in Benjamin’s One-Way Street [Einbahnstraße (1928)]. He accuses Benjamin of getting lost in details and the fragmentary. Instead of arriving at philosophical concepts, Benjamin refuses to engage in interpretation and distorts ideas to enigmatic images. “Philosophy cannot move within the medium of thought, of abstraction, and then practice asceticism when it comes to the interpretation in which such movement terminates. If it does, its ideas become enigmas. This was the path Benjamin took in his One-Way Street, a work which has many affinities with Bloch’s Spuren. Like One-Way Street, Bloch’s traces—even in their title—sympathize with what is small. In contrast to Benjamin, however, Bloch does not give himself over to the miniature but instead uses it expressly as a category” (NL 1: 213; GS 11: 248). On the notion of “rescuing critique” in Benjamin and its political and theoretical implications, see Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge: MIT P, 1983) 129–63. Stefan George, Werke 1: 165; quoted in GS 11: 529. Stefan George, Works (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1949) 115; quoted in NL 2: 185. I am alluding here to Thomas Kling’s neologism Sprachspeicher. Stefan George, Werke 1: 309; quoted in GS 11: 64. I am touching here on an axiom that has programmatic significance for Adorno and warrants a full quotation: “But great works of art are the ones that succeed precisely where they are most problematic. Just as the greatest works of music may not be completely reduced to their structure but shoot out beyond it with a few superfluous notes or measures, so it is with ‘gar,’ a Goethean ‘residue of the absurd’ in which language escapes the subjective intention that occasioned the use of the word” (NL 1: 53; GS 11: 67). The phrase is usually used in the negative, as in a sentence like: “Das glaube ich ganz und gar nicht.” This usage makes the strong affirmative in the poem even more powerful: Adorno even calls the last four lines “irresistible.” Gerhard Kaiser dismisses this as “pseudo-profound nonsense” and suggests that gar is nothing more than a contraction of sogar [“even”], dictated by the requirements of poetic meter (“Philosophie als Literaturkritik: Zum 100. Geburtstag von Theodor W. Adorno,” Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-LudwigsUniversität Freiburg [2004]: 47). One must qualify that within the logic of Adorno’s philosophy of history, “successful” utterances are limited to particular, momentary, and fleeting aesthetic instances. Language as such is not an entity that can succeed, simply because it cannot be actualized as such—but these are ultimately

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27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

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theological questions that touch the limits of Adorno’s ability or willingness to think historically. It is important to note that Adorno’s use of the expressions “language (in) itself” or “pure language” is ideal and indeterminate. One can only insufficiently point out a possible analogy to Saussure’s pair langue/parole or Benveniste’s pair langue/discours, because Adorno’s “language itself” is not a system of signs, not even potentially so. Still, it appears that “language itself” is the underlying possibility of all language and speech. Perhaps, then, it bears some unintentional similarity to Heidegger’s distinction between Sein [Being] and Seiendes [beings]. Fleming 108. In contradistinction to Adorno’s judgment, Rudolf Borchardt, both an admirer and fierce rival of George, wrote a long and influential review of George’s Seventh Ring in which he denounced George’s technical deficiencies; for him, the poems succeed in spite of the master’s deficient technique. This figure of thought is especially important for Adorno’s treatment of Heine, discussed in the next chapter. “My Berg monograph contains a chapter on Baudelaire . . . which defends the claim that all neo-romantic poetry, from Baudelaire through George and Borchardt, can be understood exclusively in terms of the idea of translation.” (CC 136; BW 180) On the notion of pharmakon, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 61–172. Paul Fleming suggests reading “déjà entendu” where Adorno writes “déjà vu” (106). Adorno himself preferred to think “with his ears” (see P 19; GS 10.1: 11). Inspired by George’s dream texts, Adorno habitually recorded his own dreams. See Adorno, Traumprotokolle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). “Man hatte mir eine thönerne maske gegeben und an meiner zimmerwand aufgehängt. Ich lud meine freunde ein damit sie sähen wie ich den kopf zum reden brächte. Vernehmlich hiess ich ihn den namen dessen zu sagen auf den ich deutete und als er schwieg versuchte ich mit dem finger seine lippen zu spalten. Darauf verzog er sein gesicht und biss in meinen finger. Laut und mit äusserster anspannung wiederholte ich den befehl indem ich auf einen anderen deutete. Da nannte er den namen. Wir verliessen alle entsezt das zimmer und ich wusste dass ich es nie mehr betreten würde.” (Stefan George, Werke 1: 490– 491; quoted in NL 2: 192 and GS 11: 535) Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) 97, n. 11; GS 3: 334, n. 11.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Unfashionable Observations (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 129. 2. On inversion and chiasm in Adorno, see chapter 1, n. 25.

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Notes to Chapter Five 3. On the philosophical, not merely rhetorical structure of exaggeration in Adorno, see Düttmann, “Thinking as Gesture: A Note on the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 81 (2000): 143–152. 4. It should be noted that to speak of Adorno’s arguments is not without risk. Since Adorno nowhere presents a hierarchically structured argument, but usually develops a theme musically, by means of inversion and repetition, one can never do him justice if one reduces his ideas to arguments alone. One might summarize the overall argument in “Heine the Wound” like this: Adorno argues that Heine’s poetry at first fails, but, from a larger historical perspective, eventually succeeds in responding to the objective impossibility of lyric poetry in a highly developed capitalist society. Such a summary cannot account for the form of the essay, which focuses on Heine’s lyrical failures, only to add a redemptive perspective almost as an afterthought. For this reason, I will concentrate largely on Adorno’s attack on Heine—and less on his critical rescue. 5. Adorno’s description of Heine as an outsider eager to fit in reflects an antiSemitic defense reaction that persists even today and has been applied to Adorno himself. In an article in the influential weekly Der Spiegel on the occasion of Adorno’s one-hundredth birthday, the author suggests that Adorno—characterized as hyper-sexualized and overly zealous and industrious, as someone who has something to say about everything, a “all-around intellectual”—lacked originality and creativity, that his abilities were derivative, secondary, and artificial: “Soon Kracauer saw how the young student appropriated his perceptive social criticism down to its smallest details—a little later, young Wiesengrund treated his Ph.D. advisor and then, in 1925 in Vienna, his teacher Alban Berg in a similar way . . . He even absorbed the obscure Marxist ideas of Walter Benjamin, who, like Teddie, had failed to get his habilitation thesis accepted in Frankfurt—a desire to learn and a chameleon-like lust for imitation seemed to coincide” (Johannes Saltzwedel, “Narziss und Nilpferdkönig,” Der Spiegel, 10 August 2003 ). 6. On the phenomenon of shame in Adorno, especially in his Minima Moralia, see Eva Geulen, “Mega Melancholia: Adorno’s Minima Moralia,” Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects, eds. Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Jaimey Fischer (New York: Berghahn, 2001) 49–68. 7. See Wolfgang Iser, ed., Immanente Ästhetik, ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 1966). 8. Jost Hermand, Streitobjekt Heine: Ein Forschungsbericht 1945–1975 (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Fischer, 1975) 148. 9. This appraisal is not particularly original, but it reflects Heine’s selfdescription as a “romantique défroqué.” See Franz Finke, “Heinrich Heine als Lyriker des Übergangs,” Heine Jahrbuch (1963): 33–42.

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10. The ploy of playing off Heine against another poet is frequent in the history of his reception. In the nineteenth century, for example, Heine was often negatively compared to Mörike or Eichendorff. See Martin Hollender, “‘Eichendorff und Heine sind typische Gegensätze:’ Wie man den guten Deutschen gegen den bösen Deutschen ausspielt,” Ich Narr des Glücks: Heinrich Heine 1797–1856: Bilder einer Ausstellung, eds. Joseph A. Kruse, Ulrike Reuter, and Martin Hollender (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997) 86–95. Adorno’s reference to Baudelaire is hardly accidental. One can say without exaggeration that Baudelaire has become—partly as a result of the works of Benjamin and Adorno—the epitome of literary modernity. The reason for this seems to be that Baudelaire receives credit for the authenticity of his poetic experience, or, to quote from a recent study, for his “presenting unresolved experiences,” “experience[s] that register as unresolved, shocking, and traumatic,” “without letting these experiences overwhelm and ruin the possibility of communication and address” (Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000] 1 and 21). On Adorno’s playing Heine off against Baudelaire, see Gerhard Hohn, “Adorno face à Heine ou le couteau dans la plaie,” Révue d’Esthetique 8 (1985): 137–44. 11. From a philological point of view, this judgment is certainly wrong. If, as Adorno writes, quoting Claudel, Baudelaire’s style was a “mixture of Racine’s and the journalists of his time,” i.e, both anachronistic and contemporary, then one would expect a more careful evaluation of Heine’s style—both in his lyrical and in his prose writings. Ten years after Adorno’s speech, Wolfgang Preisendanz presented his work on Heine’s style as a transitional form between poetry/literature and journalism. See Wolfgang Preisendanz, “Bridging the Gap Between Heine the Poet and Heine the Journalist,” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979) 225–59. Adorno himself, however, offers a philologically much more cautious comparison of Heine and Baudelaire in his 1949 essay “Towards a Reappraisal of Heine.” This posthumously published lecture, presented with great success at the UCLA English Department, reads rather as if it had been written by a more mature Adorno, for it lacks the shrill emphasis on Heine’s poetic failures. In the lecture, Adorno underscores emphatically “Heine’s affinity to the Baudelairian romanticism of disillusionment,” and then goes on to define Heine’s poetic response to modernity as the exact opposite of Baudelaire’s heroism and his “extreme emphasis on poetic form and on the distance between poetry and everyday life” (GS 20.2: 445–46). Adorno describes Heine’s poetic response as a radical narrowing of the “distance between poetry and the empirical world, between language and the ordinary spoken word” (GS 20.2: 446). Unlike in “Heine the Wound,” Adorno does not portray Heine here as a victim of overpowering historical forces. Instead

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13.

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Notes to Chapter Five of calling Heine’s introduction of “triteness, banality, the hackneyed, and the conventionalized” a failure, he describes it as an “artistic principle.” This comparison does not play Heine off against Baudelaire. Adorno even grants Heine what he denies him in the later essay: the discovery of modern archetypes. “His verses preserve an almost archaic freshness in as much as they summon authentically and for the first time archetypes of the modern world” (GS 20.2: 451). In his UCLA lecture, “Towards a Reappraisal of Heine,” Adorno claims that “Heine has betrayed poetry to the market” (GS 20.2: 450). He also writes, however: “The malaise that emanates from his verses, their somewhat shocklike and scandalous effect is that of an art heralding its own impossibility. And it may well be that his greatness consists in his being the first who registered such historical experiences through the essence of his production. It is just this abandon to the ephemeral which gives him the ring of authenticity. To find the first words for essential historical experiences is more than a merely historical merit: Heine may well claim for himself that he is able to do what his posthumous arch enemy Karl Kraus once postulated: ‘to listen to the noises of the day as though they were the chords of eternity.’ Heine was a great poet not in spite of his journalism but through conserving, in snapshots, as it were, the moment when poetry was transformed into journalism” (GS 20.2: 451). This portrayal is decisively different from the one in “Heine the Wound.” Heine, eminently modern, is even presented as the executor of Kraus’s (satirical) imperative to treat the everyday as if it were the eternal. No mention is made of his guilt. Here Adorno’s argument against Kraus is, it seems, that to accuse Heine is tantamount to killing the messenger. Heine’s poetry presents merely a witness’s account of poetry’s transformation into journalism. On the relation of German identity and the perceived threat of the French feuilleton, see Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), and “Journalism and German Identity: Communiques from Heine, Wagner, and Adorno,” New German Critique 66 (1995): 65–93. Karl Kraus, Schriften, ed. Christian Wagenknecht, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989) 186. For a reading closely attentive to Kraus’s peculiar sexual and corporeal terminology, see Leo Lensing, “Heine’s Body, Heine’s Corpus: Sexuality and Jewish Identity in Karl Kraus’s Literary Polemics against Heinrich Heine,” The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine, ed. Mark H. Gelber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992) 95–112. Kraus, Schriften 4: 186. Kraus, Schriften 4: 209 For an account of Heine’s anti-Semitic reception that judges both Kraus’s and Adorno’s essays very harshly, see Paul Peters, Heinrich Heine ‘Dichterjude:’ Die Geschichte einer Schmähung (Frankfurt am Main: Hain, 1990).

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Instructive is Sander Gilman’s study Jewish Self-Hatred, which elaborates on the dichotomy of good (German) and corrupted and corrupting language (connotated as being somehow Jewish); see Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986). Kraus directly related Heine’s linguistic shortcomings not only to his journalistic style, but also to his Jewishness: “Heine was a Moses who struck with the rod upon the rock of the German language” (Kraus, Schriften 4: 209). This ambivalent depiction would be worthy of further investigation, especially compared to Kraus’s portrayal of himself as a Jewish language mystic and a Christ figure in his 1913 essay “He’s a Jew After All” [“Er ist doch e Jud”]. See Paul B. Reitter’s “Mimesis, Modernism, and Karl Kraus’s ‘Jewish Question,’” Karl Kraus und ‘Die Fackel:’ Aufsätze zur Rezeptionsgesc hichte=Reading Karl Kraus: Essays on the Reception of ‘Die Fackel,’ eds. Gilbert J. Carr and Edward Timms (Munich: Iudicium, 2001) 55–73, and his “Germans and Jews Beyond Journalism: Essayism and Jewish Identity in the Writings of Karl Kraus,” The German Quarterly 72.3 (1999): 232–51. See also Leo Lensing, “1913: Karl Kraus Writes ‘He’s a Jew after All,’ One of the Few Texts in Which He Directly Confronts His Jewish Identity and Suggests How It Has Affected His Satirical Writing,” Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997) 313–21. 18. Elias Canetti depicts the enormous impact of Kraus in his autobiography, Die Fackel im Ohr [The Torch in My Ear] (1980). 19. Verdicts like that issued by the George circle stand, as Adorno points out, in the shadow of Kraus’s verdict. Most ambivalent is Rudolf Borchardt’s stance in this matter. In his 1926 anthology of German poetry, Ewiger Vorrat deutscher Poesie [Eternal Reservoir of German Poesy], Borchardt twice refuses to print the complete wording of Heine poems (Adorno proceeds similarly in his imaginary edition of George poems). He omits whole lines and calls the poems thus censored “fragments.” Yet one of Heine’s contemporaries suffers an even worse fate: “It has not been possible to draw from the popular and lovely works of Chamisso even the tiniest bit; nor has it been possible to salvage more than debris from Heine’s works, the most popular and famous work of the century” (Rudolf Borchardt, ed., Ewiger Vorrat deutscher Poesie [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977]). Borchardt then declares that both Chamisso, the French emigrant in Germany, and Heine, the German emigrant in France, have authored their poetry by taking into account only the immediate effect, the superficial impression of the poems. Thus, Borchardt calls them “effect pieces” [Effektstücke] (457). Unlike Chamisso, Heine does at least find a place in Borchardt’s anthology, although this place is rather unpleasant—the most unusual example of redemptive criticism I can think of, formulated in Borchardt’s tortured prose style: “Confronted with Heine’s crumbled nature, the editor has adopted something similar

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Notes to Chapter Five to the justice of history. He has edited Heine in the manner of the greatest Greek lyric poets, who have been given to us by the (albeit not complete) randomness of tradition—quotations that have been preserved while the works have disappeared, beginnings that do not continue—and that only seem to continue in Heine’s work and form or conclude a poem, transforming the jewel of invention with fake stones and tarnished gold to the semblance of an old gem” (457). Borchardt here “solves” the nuisance of Heine by relegating his work to an ancient past. By claiming that Heine’s work did not enter tradition, but remained outside, he assigns it a place so marginal that it appears as foreign and anachronistic as ancient Greek poetry. Thus, Borchardt can treat it as a fragment, a remote citation from a different time and place. While Heine cannot be excluded from the canon, he is nonetheless pushed into the most marginal position possible. This certainly looks like a decisive condemnation. Borchardt’s point, however, is shrewder: he tries to present Heine not as one of the most popular writers, but as an unknown, undiscovered poet. In a note on Heine from 1906, recently published for the first time, Borchardt wrote: “The most contested and, against all odds, most widely read German poet, Heinrich Heine, is the most unknown, most impenetrable phenomenon in Germany’s recent intellectual history, the most untouched by judgment and historiography. The literature on him, not even considerable in terms of quantity, is worth nothing at best. . . . One opens these volumes and has the feeling to be the very first person to read them. No tradition, no predecessors, no firmly established types, no catch phrases. Writing about Heine is like reviewing something hot off the press, directing the reader’s attention to a young, promising talent” (“Versuch über Heine [1906],” Akzente 49.2 [2002]: 152). Leo Lensing suggests that Kraus, not unlike Borchardt, also views Heine’s work as essentially fragmentary, but he links this aspect to the ascription of Jewish attributes. Crucial is Kraus’s sentence: “Each of Heine’s successors takes a little stone from the mosaic of this work until not one remains” (Schriften 4: 193; quoted in Lensing, “Heine’s Body, Heine’s Corpus” 110). Although it would be wrong to say that Adorno’s essay is anti-Semitic, it does evoke a tradition of anti-Semitic slander without naming it as such. In an ambiguous way, the essay seems to be both aware of and oblivious to the tradition to which it responds. One could even assert that everything Adorno says about Heine’s biography enters the essay as rumor: “Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews” (MM 110; GS 4: 125). See “Language, Poetry, and Race: The Example of Heinrich Heine,” Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno 105–18. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986). In ND, Adorno writes: “Cognition is a trosas iasetai” (ND 53; GS 6: 62). This is a rephrasing of a remark in Hegel’s Enzyklopädie der philosophischen

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29. 30.

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Wissenschaften: “It is thinking that both inflicts the wound and heals it again” (Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991] 62; Werke 8: 88). Eric Krakauer implements the topos in his notion of “dialectical reading.” See Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology 172–79. Norbert Bolz also addresses this figure. Unfortunately, his account is full of misquotations and misspellings of crucial terms. See Norbert W. Bolz, “Das Selbst und sein Preis,” Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost: ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’ 1947–1987, eds. Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987) 124. For a psychoanalytic interpretation of trosas iasetai, see Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 165–99. In a somewhat similar fashion, Kraus’s polemics against Heine conceal, as Leo Lensing argues, a hidden attack on Freud and reductive psychoanalytic interpretations of culture. See “Heine’s Body, Heine’s Corpus.” Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno 115. In one of his numerous notes on Kraus, Benjamin compares him to Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust: “‘I am the spirit who always negates.’ Kraus and Mephisto” (WB GS 2.3: 1091). As futile as such an undertaking is bound to be, it is nonetheless grounded in a strong tradition of language mysticism, pointed out by contemporaries like the Viennese writer Bertold Viertel, who tries to make his case by referring to Hassidic writings on the power of words. “Kraus’s philosophy of language was not a theory but rather a religious cult” (Karl Kraus: Ein Charakter und die Zeit [Dresden: Kämmerer, 1921] 61). On Karl Kraus’s indebtedness to language mysticism and the “Second Cabbala,” see Volker Dürr, “Sprachmystik, Kabbala und die deutsche Sprache als ‘Haus des Seins:’ Zum Essay ‘Heine und die Folgen,’” ‘Die in dem alten Haus der Sprache wohnen:’ Beiträge zum Sprachdenken in der Literaturgeschichte: Helmut Arntzen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Eckehard Czucka (Münster: Aschendorff, 1991) 375–90. Adorno alludes to the “injustice of law” when he quotes Kraus’s aphoristic sentence: “Characteristic of the administration of the Austrian penal law is that it makes one uncertain which to deplore more, the correct or the incorrect application of the law” (quoted in NL 2: 44; GS 11: 372). The fantasy of the “hidden language of the Jews” is the main subject in Sander Gilman’s Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Max Horkheimer’s 1939 essay, “The Jews and Europe,” contained the claim that “he who does not wish to speak of capitalism should also remain silent about fascism” (Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Norr, vol. 4 [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988] 308–09).

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31. Jay, Permanent Exiles 97. 32. Not surprisingly, Hannah Arendt’s essay on Heine, “Heinrich Heine: The Schlemihl and Lord of Dreams,” written a few years before Adorno’s speech, represents in many aspects an exact opposite to Adorno’s, arguing that Heine is the exception to an otherwise failed Jewish assimilation: “Heine is the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew. He is the only outstanding example of a really happy assimilation in the entire history of that process” (Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age [New York: Grove, 1978] 74). 33. I have benefited from Klaus Briegleb’s speculative-psychoanalytical reading of what he calls Heine’s “maternal guilt;” see his Opfer Heine? Versuch über Schriftzüge der Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) 27–44. Briegleb suggests—neither in agreement with nor in contradiction to Adorno—that Yiddish is, for Heine, the language of “unbroken expression of his identity” (Briegleb 39). In Heine’s writings, it is the father whose Yiddish is identified as “natural sound.” Such language, Briegleb suggests, remained for Heine, the professional poet, a life-long ideal and dream, embodied by the paternal voice that sounded to him childlike and reminded him of “forest tones” and “sounds of a robin” (Opfer Heine? 39). 34. Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno 117. 35. Garloff reads “Heine the Wound” with an illuminating emphasis on the formal dimension of Adorno’s speech, suggesting, for example, “that the essay translates Adorno’s philosophical valorization of diaspora into a textual deployment of figures of diaspora” (Katja Garloff, “Essay, Exile, Efficacy: Adorno’s Literary Criticism,” Monatshefte 94.1 [2002]: 85). 36. For a good example of the application of this Freudian term, see Garloff 85–92. 37. Robert Holub points out that, strictly speaking, “Heinrich Heine” is an invention of literary criticism, since Heine’s works were all published under the name “H. Heine.” See “Deutscher Dichter jüdischer Herkunft,” Ich Narr des Glücks: Heinrich Heine 1797–1856: Bilder einer Ausstellung, eds. Joseph A. Kruse, Ulrike Reuter and Martin Hollender (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997) 44. 38. Heinrich Heine’s Memoirs, ed. Gustav Karpels, trans. Gilbert Cannan (New York: John Lane, 1910) 40; Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden, ed. Klaus Briegleb, vol. 7 (Munich: Hanser, 1976) 588. 39. Heine’s Memoirs 42; Heine, Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden 7: 589–90. 40. Heine’s Memoirs 42; Heine, Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden 7: 590. 41. Heine’s Memoirs 40; Heine, Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden 7: 588. 42. Heine’s Memoirs 40; Heine, Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden 7: 588–89. 43. For a thorough discussion of the DE within an instructive context of “Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology,” see Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology.

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221

44. As an example of Heine’s “impertinence,” Adorno mentions the “well-known anecdote according to which the youthful Heine, when asked by the elderly Goethe what he was working on, replied ‘a Faust’ and was thereupon ungraciously dismissed” (NL 1: 83; GS 11: 98). Impertinent hyperbole was, as Klaus Briegleb argues, Heine’s most effective rhetorical tool in countering the constant experience of defamation and censorship. The more Heine experienced himself as “small,” the “larger” his words became. See Opfer Heine? 62. 45. On the apocalyptic and parodistic aspects of DE, see Eva Geulen’s Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel and “Endgames: Reconstructing Adorno’s ‘End of Art’” 153–68. 46. In an early draft version of the Odysseus excursus, the references to the Jewishness not only of the protagonist, but also of Homer are especially striking. “Attached to the coat of the epic poet is the yellow mark” [An den Mantel des Epikers ist der gelbe Fleck geheftet]” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Geschichtsphilosophischer Exkurs zur Odyssee,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 5 [1998]: 39). 47. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997) 166–98. 48. Traces of this repressed heritage can be detected in certain mimetic behavior that shows itself, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, in minor “gestures of touching, nestling, soothing, coaxing,” which stand in for “an immediacy suppressed by civilization” (DE 149; GS 3: 206). 49. “The Führer, with his ham-actor’s facial expressions and the hysterical charisma turned on with a switch, leads the dance. In his performance he acts out by proxy and in effigy what is denied to everyone else in reality.” (DE 152; GS 3: 209–10) 50. “Authenticity itself becomes a lie the moment it becomes authentic, that is, in reflecting on itself, in postulating itself as genuine, in which it already oversteps the identity that it lays claim to in the same breath.” (MM 154; GS 4: 176) 51. The Jews “converted taboos into maxims of civilization while the others were still enmeshed in magic. The Jews appeared to have successfully achieved what Christianity had attempted in vain: the disempowerment of magic by means of its own strength, which, as worship of God, is turned against itself.” (DE 153; GS 3: 211) 52. “Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz.” (CM 191; GS 10.2: 674) 53. Adorno always seems to favor suffering as an indicator of the real. See also Raymond Geuss, “Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno,” Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005) 111–30. 54. Both Mahler’s and Heine’s relation to language is characterized by the experience or idea of an irreparable rupture, expressed by a simultaneity of extreme proximity and extreme distance to language: “[Mahler’s language] is at once colloquial and that of a stranger. Its strangeness is heightened by the overfamiliar element, absent from compositions so deeply at one with their language

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Notes to Chapter Six that it changes dialectically with them. In Mahler, fluent and thing-like elements form a constellation recalling the German of Heine” (Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy 31; GS 13: 180)

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX 1. “The Exhausted,” SubStance 78. 3 (1995): 3. 2. In his last letter to Herbert Marcuse, Adorno described himself as “a badly battered Teddie,” the result of years of little rest and an overwhelming volume of work. See Stephan Müller-Dohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) 478. 3. Quoted in Detlev Claussen, Adorno 399. 4. For more on Adorno’s reflections about political practice, see Henry Pickford, “The Dialectic of Theory and Praxis: On Late Adorno,” Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Gibson and Rubin (Malden: Blackwell, 2002) 312-40, Russell Berman, “Adorno’s Politics,” Adorno: A Critical Reader 110-31, and Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (London: Routledge, 2006) 1825. 5. Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1963) 207 [2038-2039]. 6. “A recent poll of German first-year university students confirmed again that Goethe’s Iphigenie belongs to a group of required readings that high school students reject.” (Hans Robert Jauss, “Racines und Goethes Iphigenie,” Rezeptionsästhetik: Theorie und Praxis, ed. Rainer Warning [Munich: Fink, 1975] 353) 7. “After Goethe, the sublime irony became a debased and spiteful irony. But it was always bourgeois . . . .” (NL 1: 42; GS 11: 54) 8. Rosiek 470. Although at times somewhat too pious, Rosiek’s book nonetheless provides the most comprehensive, detailed, and reliable account of Adorno’s writings on Goethe. 9. Theodor W. Adorno and Lotte Tobisch, Der private Briefwechsel, eds. Bernhard Kraller and Heinz Steinert (Graz: Droschl, 2003) 172. 10. In one flyer issued by the SDS, Adorno was criticized in the following way: “Herr Prof. Adorno is always willing to demonstrate to West German society its latent tendency to inhumanity. Confronted with the inhumanity contained in the abstruse indictment against [Fritz] Teufel [a Kommune I activist], he refuses to make a statement. He prefers to suffer silently from the contradictions which he had previously construed and for which exists, of course, no solution. Fellow students! We want to talk with Professor Adorno about his refusal” (Rolf Tiedemann, “Iphigenie bei den Berliner Studenten: Notiz zu dem Vortrag Adornos am 7. Juli 1967 in der Freien Universität,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI [2000]: 122-23). The best documentation of Adorno’s role in the student movement can be found in

Notes to Chapter Six

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

223

Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995 (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, 1998). Klaus Briegleb, 1968: Literatur in der antiautoritären Bewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993) 114. Briegleb, 1968: Literatur in der antiautoritären Bewegung 115. See Wilhelm Voßkamp, “Klassisch/Klassik/Klassizismus,” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, eds. Karlheinz Barck and Martin Fontius, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000) 289-305. Comparing Adorno’s to Jauss’s reading of Iphigenie, Waltraud Naumann-Beyer underscores how Adorno insists on the play’s immanent tensions. See Naumann-Beyer, “Negative versus positive Dialektik: Goethes Iphigenie, gelesen von Adorno und Hans Robert Jauss,” Adorno im Widerstreit: Zur Präsenz seines Denkens 439-51. Adorno and Benjamin inherited the distinction between Inhalt and Gehalt from Goethe and Schiller. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby explain the semantics of Gehalt as follows: “If we are capable of responding to the totality of the form the artist has made, then we have access to the ‘meaning’ inherent in it, a meaning which is different from any or all of the meanings of the various materials which have gone to its making. For this ‘meaning,’ which is implicit in the form of a work of art, and never to be explicated out of it by formulation in any other terms, Goethe and Schiller usually reserved the term Gehalt . . . . Whereas Gehalt is the unitary import of a unitary form, Inhalt has something of the multiplicity of the materials out of which this latter was made . . . . Inhalt is that which, unlike Gehalt, can be abstracted from any representational work of art, and expressed in other terms” (“Glossary,” Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967] 319). In a letter to Schiller, Goethe calls the drama “verteufelt human.” Adorno refers twice to Arthur Henkel, “Die ‘verteufelt humane’ Iphigenie,” Goethe-Erfahrungen: Studien und Vorträge (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982) 85-101. In AT, Adorno considers the mitigation of ‘the raw’ one of the foremost tasks of art: “The raw—the subjective nucleus of evil—is a priori negated by art, from which the ideal of being fully formed is indispensable: This, and not the pronouncement of moral theses or the striving after moral effects, is art’s participation in the moral and makes it part of a humanly worthy society” (AT 232; GS 7: 344). On the notion of das Gedichtete in Benjamin’s early essay on Hölderlin, see David E. Wellbery, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of the Lyric,” Benjamin’s Ground 39-60. By désinvolture, Adorno apparently means the controlled but relaxed ability to let go. It means style without stylization, exhausted “natural speech” that no longer insists on the obsolete and now ridiculous ideal of naturalness. In AT,

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

Adorno characterizes désinvolture as the skill of subordinating subjective rationality to the lawfulness of lyrical form: “Rather, the lyric poet’s désinvolture, his dispensation from the strictures of logic . . . grants him the possibility of following the immanent lawfulness of his works” (AT 55; GS 7: 88). “The tired has only exhausted realization, while the exhausted exhausts all of the possible.” (Deleuze, “The Exhausted” 3) Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris 70. Karla Schultz emphasizes the non-violent ethos of Adorno’s language criticism: “Throughout his writings he emphatically criticizes the battle cry to meet violence with violence, and not just in regard to student revolt.” Karla L. Schultz, “The Insufficient as Event: Goethe Lesson at the Frankfurt School,” Goethe in German-Jewish Culture, eds. Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Rochester: Camden House, 2001) 167. Chapter 5 discusses the limits of this ethos. Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990) 319-20. See also Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Adorno as the Devil,” Telos 19 (1974): 127-37. Goethe’s Faust 73 [99-103].

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION 1. Adorno writes: “It is certain that after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible for the foreseeable future, lighthearted art is no longer conceivable” (NL 2: 251; GS 11: 603). This means, in effect, that the attempt to come to terms with the meaning of Auschwitz disrupts Adorno’s dialectical concept of history. Not only is Auschwitz the defining moment in history; it also sets the limit for a historical model of dialectics. Adorno’s sentence therefore signifies the integration of a historical into a predominantly structural pattern of explanation. The structural explanation is this: the Holocaust was not only a historical event that, as the casual expression goes, came and went. Rather, Auschwitz stands for the continuing possibility that it can be repeated, that it was not unique, and that the survival of the Jews and everyone marked as “other” will remain threatened. In other words, the cheerfulness of art is not problematic simply because Auschwitz took place, but also because it remains, and will remain, a possibility embedded in Adorno’s structural concept of history. In this structural sense, there is no longer history before Auschwitz. 2. It is his awareness of this dialectic that distinguishes Adorno’s grimness and anger from Heidegger’s relentless will to philosophical seriousness. On the latter, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Heideggers Ernstfall,” Sprachen der Ironie—Sprachen des Ernstes, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000) 366–85. 3. See Joachim Seng, “‘Die wahre Flaschenpost:’ Zur Beziehung zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Paul Celan,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 8 (2003): 152.

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Index

A Adorno, Gretel, see Karplus, Gretel Adorno, Theodor W., see also Allegory, Adorno’s concept of; Anachronism, in Adorno; Benjamin, influence on Adorno; Gesture, Adorno’s essays; Heidegger, similarities with Adorno; Kraus, Adorno on; Parataxis, Adorno; works: Aesthetic Theory; Complete Correspondence; Negative Dialectics; Notes to Literature; Prisms centenary of, xxviii concept of history , xxii–xxiii, 9–10, 13, 17–19, 21, 28–30, 102–103 and literature, xviii, 62, 97, 118–119, 150–152, 162 and myth, 140–141, 156, 168, 177 and concept of natural history in, 59–61, 161 and philosophy of history , xviii, xl, 9, 17, 30, 32, 59, 95–96, 120, 150, 152, 157, 172, 212n26 style in, xxii, 1–6, 10, 41–42, 74 musical quality of, 2, 12, 46–48 terminology, 1–2, 23, 27, 69, 77, psychoanalytic, xvi, 126, 133 theological, 128, 168 theory/philosophy of language, xviii, xxii, 46, 55, 78–79, 103 works: “Art and the Arts,” 208n21;

“The Actuality of Philosophy,” 18–20, 65–66, 194n51 Against Epistemology, 24 Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, xxvii, 70–71, 207n15 “On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie,” 155–170 “The Concept of Philosophy,” 4 Critical Models, xvi, xxi, xxxii, 21, 153–155, 170, 181n14, 182n24, 184n34, 221n52 Hegel: Three Studies, 2–3, 10, 34, 38, 40, 194n53 “The Idea of Natural History,” 58–61 Jargon of Authenticity, 5, 27–28, 204n24 Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 22 Minima Moralia, xxvii, xxxiii, 5, 9–11, 13–14, 17, 46, 142–143, 164–165, 183n31, 186n38, 192n35, 218n20, 221n50 Ohne Leitbild, xxiv Philosophical Terminology, 23, 192n37 “Towards a Reappraisal of Heine,” 126, 215n11–216n12 “The Resurrected Culture,” xxxixxxii “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 113–114

243

244 “Theory of Half-Bildung,” xxxii “Theses on the Work of the Philosopher,” xx Aesthetic experience, 23, 49, 56, 71, 170 and astonishment, xxxix, 184n35 and conceptual understanding, xxxix, 18, 21, 50, 53–54, 67, 199n2 and education, xxxvi–xxxvii, xxxix Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), xxiii, 150, 155, 157 on allegorical character of art, 58 allusions to Hölderlin in, 52–55, 68 art and utopia in, xvi–xvii, 154, concept of understanding in, 49–54 and literature, xvii, xl, 54–55, 67, 178 on method of aesthetic criticism, xxv notion of apparition in, 65 style in, 31, 195n62 Aesthetics, xx, xxii, xl, 3, 67, 80, 159, 170, 176 and ethics, 24, 105, 146, 177; and hermeneutics, 49–54, 58–59 and philosophy, 19–20 Agamben, Giorgio, 199n2, 206n8 Ahasuerus/Ahasverus, 28; 141, see also Wandering Jew, figure of the Alexandrianism, xxxv, 31–36, 101, see also Schlegel, on Alexandrianism eclecticism of, 31, 33, 35 and Idealist philosophy, 34 Alienation, 51, 59, 81, 95, 108, see also Language, alienated Allegory, 97–98, 141, 154, 170 Adorno’s concept of, 59–67, 204n24– 25 and meaning, 61, 69–71 and symbol, 58, 69, 205n31 Améry, Jean, 188n15 Anachronism and lateness, xxix, 33, 35, 99–101, 215n11, 218n19 in Adorno, xxviii-xxix in Borchardt, 76, 79–80, 120 in George, 91, 99–100, 108, 113, 120 in Goethe, 14, 158 Anti-Semitism, 27–28, 131–132, see also Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theory of anti-Semitism in,

Index in Heine’s reception, 123–124, 130–131, 145 and mimetic behavior, 142–144 and persecution, 129, 140 Anti-systematic thought, xxi, 34 Aphorism, xxii, 9, 13–17, 164, 172 Apocatastasis, 168 Appearance, 34, 40, 82–83; 102, 105, 165, see also Disappearance fleetingness of, 63, 65–66, 84, 129, 175–176, Arendt, Hannah, xxxi, 117, 220n32 Artworks, see Works of art Ashton, E. B., 1 Assheuser, Thomas, xxviii Athenäum, 15 Auschwitz, xxi, 132 education after, xxxiii–xxxiv, 145 living after, xxix, 46, poetry and art after, xxvii, 147, 176 Authenticity, 15, 17, 215n10, 216n12, see also Adorno, “Jargon of Authenticity” of art, xxv, 7, 51, 86, 94, 148–151 ideology of, 142–143 jargon of, 32, 143

B Bacon, Francis, 22 Baer, Ulrich, 215n10 Bahti, Timonthy, 204n24 Barthes, Roland, 205n32 Baudelaire, Charles, 81, 97, 109–111, 162, 198n2 and Heine, 117, 119–121, 148–149 Bauer, Karin, 182n21 Beauty, xxxix, 1, 21, 82–85, 193n44 Beckett, Samuel, xv, xvii, 40, 68, 150–151, 155, 175, 177 Beethoven, Ludwig van, xxvii, 70, 78, 164, 198n2, 207n15 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 59, 100, 160, 183n26, 184n86, see also Parataxis, in Benjamin on Borchardt, 73, 82–85 on decay of experience, 49, 198n2 as essayist, 32

Index on George, 89, 95 influence on Adorno, xxi, 59 on Kraus, 124–129 philosophy/theory of language, 211n11 style in, 3, 95–96 dialectics as, 10 works: “Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 112 The Correspondence 1910–1940, 73, 82, 206n18 “Goethe’s Elective Affinites,” 83–84 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 198n2 Origin of German Tragic Drama, xxviii, 60–65, 69–70 “Surrealism,” 202n16 “The Task of the Translator,” 63, 111 “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” 208n22 Benveniste, Émile, 213n27 Berg, Alban, 44–47, 98, 109, 153 Berman, Russel, 210n7, 222n4 Bernstein, J.M., 47, 187n5, 199n2, 200n7 Bernstein, Susan, 216n13 Beschwörung, 23, 73–78, 81, 84–87, 102 Bildung, xxx–xxxix Bloch, Ernst, xxxv, 212n18 Blumenberg, Hans, 47 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 224n2 Bolz, Norbert, xxviii, 9, 17, 196n69, 219n23 Borchardt, Rudolf, 190n27, see also; Anachronism, in Borchardt; Benjamin, on Borchardt; Conservatism, in Borchardt; Disappearance, in Borchardt; Enigma, in Borchardt; Gesture, in Borchardt; Language, and history, in Borchardt; Paradox, in Borchardt; Rhetoric, in Borchardt; Romanticism, in Borchardt and George, 90–92, 102, 151 on Heine, 217n19 Jewish voice in, 75, 84 musical form in, 13, 78, 82

245 nocturnal quality in, 80–83 reconstruction of language in, 76–77, 91, 104 works: Dantes commedia deutsch, 77 “Im Erwachen,” 82 “Pause,” 71–71, 74 Böschenstein, Bernhard, 210n6 Brecht, Bertolt, 62, 211n15 Briegleb, Klaus, 156–157, 220n33 Buber, Martin, 206n9 Bubner, Rüdiger, 18, 20 Büchner, Georg, 62 Buck-Morss, Susan, xxii, 4, Butler, Judith, 188n15

C Canetti, Elias, 217n18 Capitalism, xxix, 17, 51, 131, 219n30 and Heine, 117, 119, 144, 214n4 Cartesian rules, 39, 43 Catachresis, 40; 56, see also Metaphor Celan, Paul, 51, 155, 177–178, 206n7 Chamisso, Adalbert von, 217n19 Chaos, 82–83 Cheerfulness, 175–177 Chiasmus, 46, 61, 190n25 Citation, 95–96, 103 Classicism, 120, 155–170 Claussen, Detlev, 180n7, 182n14 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 77 Collective, 94, 154, 181n7 language, 92–94, 96, 104 political/social, xvi, xxxii, 86, 92, 105 Comic, 176–177 Commodity Fetishism, 59 The Complete Correspondence (Adorno and Benjamin), 3, 89, 95, 207n10, 208n22, 213n31 Configuration, 3, 38, 48, 69, 83, 113, 194n52 Conservatism, xxxv, xxxvii, 62, 120, 155, 180n3 in Borchardt, 73, 79, 80, 151 in George, 90, 93, 109, 117, 151 Constellation, xxvi, 3, 69 Creuzer, Friedrich, 70 Critical Theory, see Frankfurt School

246 D Dahlhaus, Carl, 43 Darstellung, see (Re)presentation Deleuze, Gilles, 124 de Man, Paul, 65, 200n4, 201n9 Derrida, Jacques, xx, 193n49, 213n32 Désinvolture, 165 Determinism, 152 Devil, 154–155, 160, 163, 170–171 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), xvi, xviii, 10, 32, 39 antithesis of art and science, 6–8 as apocalyptic text, 141, 149 theory of anti-Semitism in, 131–132, 136–144 t theory of language in, 6–8, 137 Difficulty in philosophical prose, 1, 5–6, 40, 188n15 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 49, 56 Disappearance, 66, 135, 139, 160, 171–172 in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 65 in Borchardt, 82, in Eichendorff, 63 in George, 93 Dream, 63, 81–82, 112–113, 181n7 Dürr, Volker, 219n27 Düttmann, Alexander García, 179n3, 181n11–12, 187n9, 195n60, 202n16 on exaggeration in Adorno, 194– 195n58, 214n3 on riddle in Adorno, 202n12, 204n30 on structure and history in Adorno, 10

E Education, see Bildung Ego hardening of, xxxviii–xxxix loss of ego in poetry, xxxvii–xxxix, 56, 104 weakening of, xv-xvii Eichendorff, Joseph von, xxxv–xxxix, 55–72, see also Disappearance, in Eichendorff; Passivity, in Eichendorff allegory in, 63–65

Index and ego-weakness, xvii poetry as Rauschen in, xvii, xxix, xxxviii, 55–58, 64, 66–72. 202n16 works: Das Marmorbild, 64, 67 “Im Walde,” 63–64“ “Wem Gott will rechte Gunst erweisen,” xxxvi “Zwielicht,” 63 Emigration, xxiii, 131, 194n54, 217n19, see also Exile Empathy, 49 Enigma/Enigmaticalness, 61, 149 of art, 51–55, 58–59 in Borchardt, 80 in George, 112–113 in Heidegger, 200n5 in philosophical interpretation, 66 Entäußerung, 111 Epic, 137–139, 148–151 Essay, see also Failure, in the essay; Fragment; Gesture, in the essay; Genre, of the essay; Lukács, on the essay; Nature/culture duality, in the essay; Paradox, in the philosophical essay; Particularity, in the essay; (Re)presentation, in the essay; Truth, and the essay affinity with art, 6, 19–20, 26, 34 as “art of transition,” xxii, 8, 11, 13, 42–46, 67, 87 chance in, 25–26, 31 equivocation in, 41–42 as experiment, xxix, 19, 20 method in, 11–13 as occasional work, xxxiii–xxxiv philosophy as, xxxiv, 18 self-reflection in, 6, 13, 24, 34–35, 37 Ethics see Aesthetics, and ethics; Suffering Euripides, 158 Exaggeration, xxiii, 6, 29, 109, 124, 142, 169 in Heine, 221n44 and intensification, 115 Exhaustion, 169 Exile, xxx, 107, 132–137, see also Emigration

Index Experience, concept of, 198n2, see also Aesthetic experience; Benjamin, decay of experience in; Passivity crisis of, xxxix and scientific method, 13–14 undiminished experience, 13, 21, 190n26 Expressionism, 8, 62, 64,

F Failure, see also Work of art, success in and art, xvii in the essay, 26, 34–35 in George, 94, 106, 109 of German language, xviii, 76, 103 in Heine, 119–120, 130, 140, 146, 149–150, 215n11 of Jewish assimilation and emancipation in Germany, 118, 130, 134, 220n32 of philosophy, 17, 19, 23 Fascism, xvi, 121, 131, 154 Fenves, Peter, 186n2, 211n11 Feuilleton, 122 Finke, Frank, 214n9 Fioretos, Aris, 202n14 Flaubert, Gustave, 162 Fleming, Paul, 106, 209n6, 213n33 Foreign words [Fremdwörter], xxiii, xxv, 37, Formalism, 105, 107, 120, 138–139, 152 Fragment, 94–96, 191n31 Romantic, 15, 34–36 Frankfurt School, xxi–xxii, xl, 3, 136, 171 Freedom, xviii, xxv–xxviii, xxxv–xxxviii, 86, 154, 175 in the essay, 25, 29, 31, 33, in Goethe’s Iphigenie, 158–159, 162– 163, 167 and language, 70, 91, 105–106 Freud, Sigmund, 198n2, 210n8 Frey, Hans-Jost, 187n8

G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 199n2 Garloff, Katja, 133, 220n35–36 Garrulousness, 139 Gasché, Rodolphe, 211n11

247 Gay, Peter, 209n4 Gehalt, concept of, 159, 223n15 Geist, xxxi, xxxiv, 107 Gender, 122, 183n30 Genius, 69, 74, 110–111, 162–163, 197n79 Genre, 56, 70, 105, 203n17 of the essay, xxiv, 13, 18–19, 185n38, mixing of, 26, 193n49 George, Stefan, see also Anachronism, in George; Benjamin, on George; Borchardt, and George; Conservatism, in George; Disappearance, in George; Enigma, in George; Failure, in George; Heine, and George; Hofmannsthal, and George; Language, and history, in George; Paradox, in George; Rhetoric, in George on art, 211n17 phantasmagoria of folksong in, 105 renewal of poetry in , 90–91, 210n9 self-destruction in, 87, 117 and translation, 90, 109–111 violence in, 102, 104, 108–109, 113, 117 works: “Ihr tratet zu dem Herde” 96– 100, 108 “Der redende kopf,” 113 “Im windes-weben,” 100–103 Gerhardt, Christina, 187n3 Gesture, xxix, xxxv, 17, 142 in Adorno’s essays, 11, 31 in Borchardt, 75, 81, in Goethe, 16, 156, 165, 169 in Kraus, 129 Geulen, Eva, 179n3, 181n10, 182n22, 214n6, 221n45 Geuss, Raymond, 182n15 Ghostliness, xxviii, 60, 64–65, 99 Gillespie, Susan, 188n3 Gilman, Sander, 217n17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, see also Anachronism and lateness, in Goethe; Language, and history, in Goethe; Modernity, Goethe’s; Paradox, in Goethe; Romanticism, in Goethe; Shock, in Goethe; Sublime, in Goethe

248 greatness/magnitude [Großheit] in, 16–17, 172 Natural language/speech in, 14–16, 39, 165 style in, 16, 165–166 works: Faust, xxvii, 14–17, 101, 154– 156, 170–173 Iphigenia in Tauris, xviii,155–169 myth in, 156–179 Orestes, figure of, 167–168 Torquato Tasso, 159 Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, xxvii, 169 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, xxxv Guattari, Felix, 124

H Habermas, Jürgen, 212n19 Hamacher, Werner, 200n6 Hammer, Espen, 222n4 Happiness, 92, 169, 170 art’s promise of, 154, 176 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 62 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 23, 59, 66, 74, 111 and Adorno as Hegelian thinker, xv, xvi–xvii, 2, 10, 12, 17 equivocation in, 38 particles in, 2–3 style in, 2–3, 34–35, 38–39 works: The Encyclopaedia Logic, 219n23 Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 33 Hegel: Three Studies (Adorno), 2–3, 10, 34, 38, 40, 194n53 Heidegger, Martin, 143, 183n26, 186n39, 192n39 anti-Semitic insinuation in, 27–28 on chatter, 5 similarities with Adorno, 10, 200n5, 208n21, 213n27 and terminology, 6, 27–29, 32, 196n71 works, Being and Time, 5, 27 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 200n5 Heimböckel, Dieter, 209n6 Heine, Heinrich, 115–152, see also AntiSemitism, in Heine’s reception;

Index Baudelaire, and Heine; Borchardt, on Heine; Capitalism, and Heine; Exaggeration, in Heine; Failure, in Heine; Irony, Heine’s; Kraus, verdict on Heine; Language, and history, in Heine; Paradox, in Heine; Romanticism, and Heine; Suffering, in Heine; Transition, Heine as poet of; Trauma, of Heine’s name; Victim, Heine as and George, 115–118 guilt of, 118, 121–122, 125, 127, 132, 141, 144–146 and Odysseus, 136–141, 148 as outsider, 130, 132–133, as prophet, 144, 147 works: Book of Songs, 133, 148 Memoirs, 134–136 Heißenbüttel, Helmut, 73 Hellingrath, Norbert von, 112 Helmling, Steven, 187n9 Henkel, Arthur, 223n16 Hermand, Jost, 119 Hermeneutics, see Interpretation History, see also Adorno, concept of history; Benjamin, concept of history; literary history and literature, 16–17, 97–100, 147–152, 157–158 and structure, 10, 140–141, 224n1 Hitler, Adolf, 211n15, 221n49 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 73, and George, 89–90, 95, 97–98, 109 works: “Lord Chandos Letter,” 6 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 124, 126, 180n2, 205n33 Hohn, Gerhard, 215n10 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 2, 16, 51–55, 133, see also Aesthetic Theory, allusions to Hölderlin in; Passivity, in Hölderlin works: “Mnemosyne,” 54, 202n13 “Der Rhein,” 52–53, 55 Hollender, Martin, 215n10 Holub, Robert, 220n37 Homelessness, universal, 27, 136, 148–149

Index Horkheimer, Max, 219n30, see also Dialectic of Enlightenment Horror, xxxii, 113–114, 117, 141, 144 Huhn, Tom, 192n43, 201n7, Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 187n2, 188n3 Humanität (humanity, humaneness), 155– 160, 163, 166–168 diabolical/devilish, 160, 166

I Idealism, xxx, 4, 13, 34–35, 38, 111 Immanent Critique/criticism, xvii–xviii, xxi, xxiv, 30, 118 Immediacy, 31, 107 lyric, 117, 121 Indifference, 11, 177 Interpretation and citation, 71, 95 figural, 147–150 and hermeneutics, xxxv, 37, 51–52, 54 immanent, xxiv, 21 and immersion, xxxv, speed of, 46–47, 105 Intuition, 13, 59, 68, and concept, 8, 18, 23, 52–53, 107 Irony, xxxi, 155, see also Seriousness, and irony, dialectic of Hegel’s, 38 Heine’s, 143 and literary criticism, xxv–xxvi and parody, 39, 150 and self-reflection, 173, 176 Iser, Wolfgang, 214n7

J Jacobs, Carol, 211n11 Jakobson, Roman, 70 Jameson, Fredric, 187n8, 189n18, 190n25 Jarvis, Simon, xix Jauss, Hans Robert, 222n6 Jay, Martin, 59, 199n2, 220n31 Jennings, Michael, 198n2 Jones, Michael Taylor, 186n39 Journalism, xxviii, 121–122, 126–127, 147–148 Justice and injustice, xxiii, 126–132, 140, 166–167

249 K Kafka, Franz, xl, 177, 205n31 Kaiser, Gerhard, 192n40, 212n25 Kant, Immanuel, xxxiii, 164, 180n1 works: Critique of the Power of Judgment, 175 “On Pedagogy,” xxxiii “What is Enlightenment?,” 161 Karplus, Gretel, 207n18 Kaufman, Robert, 179n7, 186n39, 187n6, 187n10, 188n17, 201n7 Kaufmann, Kai, 209n23 Kempner, Friederike, 14–16 Kierkegaard, Søren, 12, 22, 129, 143 Killy, Walther, 120 Kitsch, 120–121 Kleist, Heinrich von, 126 Kling, Thomas, 210n9 Kommune 1, 156 Kracauer, Siegfried, xxi, xxxiv, 214n5 Krakauer, Eric, 206n5, 219n23, 220n43 Kraus, Karl, see also Benjamin, on Kraus; Gesture, in Kraus; Paradox, of Kraus’s authority; Parody, in Kraus; Victim, Kraus as Adorno on, 128–132 authority of, 124–125, 128–129 critique and theory of language, 5, 8, 119 demonic ambiguity of, 126–128 and Judaism, 127 juridical discourse in, 126–129 verdict on Heine, 116, 121–123, 125, 145, 148 Kraushaar, Wolfgang, 223n10

L Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 199n2 Language, 39, 137, see also Adorno, philosophy/theory of language; Benjamin, philosophy/theory of language; Collective language; Dialectic of Enlightenment, theory of language in; Failure, of German language; Freedom, and language; Sensuousness, of language; Truth, and language

250

Index

alienated, xxxvi, 5, 67, 103, 108–109, 115, 118 decay of, 17, 76, 103 crisis of, 108 distanced from meaning, xvii, 67, 74 double character of, 6–8, 16, 25, 86 everyday, xxxvii, 1, 4–5, 109–110, 120 French, xxii, 63, 109, 122-123, 135 German, xxiii, xxx, 76, 91, 103–104, 109, 111, 118, 122–124, 127, 132–133 and history, xxii–xxiii, 9–11, 13 in Borchardt, 78–80 in George, 97–103 in Goethe, 15–17, 162–164 in Heine, 118–120, 150–152, as medium of thought, xviii, 4, 8 in poetry, 56–57, 146–147 pure, 92, 102, 105, 112–113, 196n74, 211n11, 213n27 Yiddish, 131 Latency, 40, 52, 90–93, 102, 130 Lateness, see Anachronism Late style, xxvii, 14 Law, xxxiii, 126–129, 171 of form, 22, 33, 39, 173 Judaic, 142–143 Lehr, Andreas, 186n39 Lenk, Elisabeth, 209n23 Lensing, Leo, 216n14, 218n19, 219n24 Lessing, G. E., 56 Lied, 100, 146 Listening, poetics of, xxxviii, 49, 56, 70–71, 93, 102, 105, 110 Literary history, 24, 62, 105, 118, 150–151, 162 Luck, 16–17, 25, Lukács, Georg, 150, 183n25, 194n54, 199n3 on the essay, xxix, 5, 12, 21 works: Theory of the Novel, 59–61 Lyotard, Jean-Fracois, 224n23

Mann, Thomas, xxx, 170 Marxism, xxii, xxix, 62, 118, 130–131, 179n7 Marx, Karl, 59, 157 Mass culture, xvi, 107, 113, see also Popular art Maturity [Mündigkeit], xxxviii–xxxix, 159–162 Meaning, see also Allegory; Interpretation; Language; Rauschen dissolution, xvii, 78 metonymic slippage of, 70 and music, 71 in poetry, 78 Meinecke, Friedrich, 182n16 Melancholy, 30, 64, 67, 100, 108 Melusine, figure of, 169 Menke, Christoph, xvii, 199n2, 201n7 Metaphor, xxxviii, 23, 40 of stream, 55–56, 68–69 Meyer, Theodor, 56–57 Miller, James, 188n15 Mimesis, 128, 132, 136, 139, 142–144, 146, 151, 177–178 and conceptuality, 2, 25 and mimicry, 136, 142–143 Modernism, 126, 147–148, 151 normative, 51 as paradox, xxvii, 120, Modernity, xxxvii, 113, 119–120 of art, 43, 80, 176 critique of, xv–xvi, xviii–xix Goethe’s, 14, 155 lateness of, xxix, 51, 80, 86 Montaigne, Michel de, 22 Mörike, Eduard, 51, 89, 121, 189n21, 203n17 Müller-Dohm, Stephan, 222n2 Myth, see Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris, myth in

M

Narcissism, xvi, 154–155 Nation, 86–87, 104 Nature, xxii, 7, 108, 139, 161 domination of, 29, 108, 142, 167, 169–170

Madness, 168 Mahler, Gustav, 147–148 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 13, 110, 195n63, 208n22

N

Index regression to, 137 second, 30–31, 59–61 transformation of, 60, 64, 67 Nature/culture duality, xxxii, xxxix, 156 in the essay, 30–32 Naumann-Beyer, Waltraud, 223n14 Nealon, Jeffrey T., 46 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 59, 77, 101 on dialectics, 10–12 on philosophy, xxvi–xxviii, 24–25, 176 on style, 1, 9, 11 Neoromanticism, 86, 91, 97, 101–102, 112 Nicholsen, Sherry Weber, 205n6, Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxiv, 20, 29, 32, 127 Nominalism, 21, 36, 38, 50, 164–165 and bourgeois thinking, 138–139, 163 Norms, 3, 110 aesthetic, xxiii–xxvi, 51, 159 social, xxiv, Norton, Robert, 209n2 Nostalgia, 79, 103, 136–137 Notes to Literature (Adorno), xvi, xxxiv, 185n38 “Charmed language,” 71–86 “On the Classicism in Goethe’s Iphigenie,” 155–169 “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism,” xxv–xxvi “The Essay as Form,” 12, 24–26, 29–37, 39–42 “On the Final Scene of Goethe’s Faust,” 14–17, 170–173 “George,” 90–99, 108, 110–114, 117 “Heine the Wound,” 116–122, 125, 130, 132–134, 136, 139–141, 145–152 “Is Art Cheerful?,” 175–177 “In Memory of Eichendorff,” xxxv–xxxix, 55–58, 60, 62–69 “Morals and Criminality,” 128–129, 131–132 “Parataxis,” 41, 112–113, 183n33, 207n16 “Presuppositions,” 51–53 “Speech on Lyrik Poetry and Society,” 89–92, 100–106, 108, 115, 117, 121

251 “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 40, 68 “Words from Abroad,” xxiii Nothingness, 177 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 25, 73, 77, 122, 177 Nussbaum, Martha, 188n15

O Object, 5–6, 21, 24, 39, see also Sensuousness, of the object dialectic of subject and, 21, 25, 29, 156, 184n34 opacity of, 40 priority/primacy of, 2, 5, 12, 17, 21, 74 O’Connor, Brian, 187n4 Odysseus, figure of, xxvix, see also Heine, and Odysseus as Jewish, 140 Ohnesorg, Benno, 156 Opinion, xvi, 13, 39, 124, 128 Osterkamp, Ernst, 208n19

P Parable, 205n31, 209n1 parabolic mode of speech (“as if ”), xxvi, 67, 101, 103, Paradox, 180n7, 183n25 in artworks, 50, 56, 66, in Berg’s music, 44–45, 47 in Borchardt, 72, 76–77, 81 in dialectics, xviii, 12 in education, xxxiii, xxxvi, xxxviii in George, 99, 102–103, 111 in Goethe, 168, in Heine, 136, 147, of Kraus’s authority, 124–125 of mimesis, 136 in modern poetry, 120–121 of negative fulfillment, xvii in the philosophical essay, 3, 17, 22–24, 26, 29, 39–40 of tact, 165 Paranoia, 4, 122, 132 Parataxis, 1, in Adorno, 3, 31, 41–42, 195n62 in Benjamin, 3 Parody, 34–35, 129, 140, 143, 164

252 Adorno’s concept of history as, 150–151 in Kraus, 124 self-, 1, 35, 39 Particularity, xxix, 23, 39, 70, 163–164 in the essay, 2–3,19–21, 34 and poetry, 105–106 Passivity, 184n34 in Eichendorff, xxxviii in Goethe, 156, 170 in Hölderlin, 183n33 Pensky, Max, 203n20, 204n27 Performative, 26, 47, 137 Peters, Paul, 123 Pharmakon, 110, 125, 145 Phonocentrism, 77, 80 Pickford, Henry, 222n4 Plass, Ulrich, 189n23 Plato, xviii, 22 Play, xxxi, xxxiv, 25, 47, 115, 143 Plessner, Helmuth, 4 Poetry, as commodity, 118–119 and conceptuality, 97–98 and creation, 84 impossibility of, 86–87, 93, 98–99, 104, 115, 121 as téchne, 85, 208n21 Politzer, Heinz, 73 Popular art, xxxvi, see also Mass culture Potentiality, 51, 68, 79 Praxis, 153–154 Preisendanz, Wolfgang, 215n11 Prisms (Adorno), xviii, xxi, xxiv, xxvii, “The George-Hofmannsthal Correspondence, 1891–1906,” 89, 98, 107–110 “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” 32, 67, 96 Prose, idea of, 111–113 Proust, Marcel, xviii, 198n2 Psychoanalysis, xxxii, 90, 116, 126, 133–134

Q

Index Rausch, 202n16 Rauschen, metaphor of, xxix, 61, 66, 70–75 161, 202n16, see also Listening, poetics of in Eichendorff, xxxviii, xxxix, 56–58, 64, 67–68 Redemptive criticism, xxxv, 96, 99–100, 104, 106, 116–117, 120, 145–148 Reemtsma, Jan Phillip, xv, 16 Reitter, Paul B., 217m17 Remainder, see Remnant Remnant, 39, 54, 67–68 Renunciation, 74, 92, 143, 155 of the self, xxxvii, 104, 165 (Re)presentation, 3, 96, 159 in the essay, xviii, 6, 8, 9, 25, 36–41 in poetry, 56–57, 119 Rescuing critique, see Redemptive criticism Resistance, 119–120, 123, 132, 154, 169, see also Surrender Rhetoric, 129, 146, 151–152, 172–173 in Borchardt, 72, 75, 77–81, 83, 85, 87 in the essay, 4, 8–11, 13, 38, 40–43, 46–47 in George, 104, 115 in philosophy, 4, 23, 28, 38–39 Richter, Gerhard, 184n35 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 93, 98 Rimbaud, Arthur, 98 Roberts, David, 203n20 Rogers, Nels Jeff, 186n39 Romanticism, 7, 24, 75, 105, 177, see also Fragment, Romantic; Neoromanticism in Borchardt, 77 in Goethe, 156, 162, 169–170 Jena/Early German, xxiv, 15, 25–26, 34–35, 77, 112 and Heine, 119–121, 124, 130, 148–149 Rosieck, Jan, 156, 186n39 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 109

Quotation, see Citation

S

R

Sacrifice, 131–132, 143, 148, 160, 166 of self, xxxviii–xxxix, 57, 90, 92–93, 104–105, 111

Rabinbach, Anson, 221n47

Index Said, Edward, xxvii Saltzwedel, Johannes, 214n5 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 78, 213n27 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 34 Schiller, Friedrich, xxxix, 79, 175 Schlegel, Friedrich, 1, 25, 34, 39, 50, 77, 112 on Alexandrianism, 35–36 on criticism, xviii on understanding, 3 Schmidt, Ernst, 209n24 Schoen, Ernst, 82 Scholem, Gershom, 82 Scholze, Britta, 4, 187n8, 188n11, 201n11 Schönberg, Arnold, 51, 80, 86, 89, 188n14 Schrott, Raoul, 210n9 Schubert, Franz, xxxvi, 36, 70–71 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 183n28 Schultz, Karla, 210n6 Schumann, Robert, 68, 70 SDS [Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund], 156 Secret, 106–107 Seel, Martin, 203n16 Seng, Joachim, 224n3 Sensuousness, 62, 65 of language, 17, 42, 97–98 of the object, 18, 21 Seriousness, of artworks and culture, xxvi, xxxi and irony, dialectic of, xxv–xxvii, xxxv, 129, 175–177 Hegel’s feigned, 38 and philosophy, xxvi, 176, 224n2. Shock, 59, 77, 131, 196n71, 198n2 in Goethe, 14–16 Sieburth, Richard, 52 Silence, 81, 92, 98–99, 117, 112–113 Thoas’s, 161 Smallness, 169 Sonderegger, Ruth, 203n16 Song, 52, 68, 98–99, see also Lied Stifter, Adalbert, 62 Strathausen, Carsten, 179n3 Student activism, xxviii, 74, 153–157 Sturm und Drang [Storm and Stress], 62 Sublime, 186n39,

253 in Goethe, 15–16, 155, 176 Submission, 111 Suffering, and art, xvi, 176 in Heine, 134–135, 146 and philosophy, 24–25 Surrender, xxxviii, 62, 104, 117, 120 Szondi, Peter, 156

T Tact, 164-167 Technology, 138, 142 Temporality, xxix, 28–29, 41, 99, 136, 148, see also Anachronism and lateness of aesthetic critique, xxiv-xxv, of “always already,” 140 of “not yet,” xxxix, 39, 120, 166, 181n10 of works of art, 65, 69–71 Teufel, Fritz, 156 Texture, 13–14, 37, 55 Tiedemann, Rolf, 222n10 Totality, 20, 29–30, 34, 65, 94–96, 98, 150, 163 Tradition, 106, 120, 123, 145–147 loss of authority of, xxxv–xxvi resistance to, xxxiii–xxxvi Transgression, 11 Translation, ideal of, 109–111 Trauma, 116, 117, 126, 149, see also Wound of Heine’s name, 133–134, 145 Trosas iasetai, structural logic of, 109, 125, 145 Truth, and the essay, 24–26, 28–30, 33, 34, 41–43 and Geist, xxxi–xxxiv and language/expression, xx–xxi, 4, 8, 24–25 and semblance, 171 as temporal, 28

U Understanding, 2–5, 40–41, 49–52

V Valéry, Paul, xxv, 151, 195n63, 208n22

254 Verlaine, Paul, 98, 111, 185n38 Victim, Heine as, 129, 215n11 Kraus as, 129 Viertel, Bertold, 219n27 Voßkamp, Wilhelm, 223n13

W Wagner, Richard, 7 Wandering Jew, figure of the, 137, 141, see also Ahasuerus/Ahasverus Weber, Samuel, 187n3 Weber, Thomas, 198n2 Wedekind, Frank, 62 Weigel, Sigrid, 184n35 Wellbery, David, 198n2, 223n18 Wilkinson, Elizabeth, 223n15 Willoughby, L. A., 223n15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 24

Index Works of art, see also Temporality, of works of art and cognition, 49–55, 58 essential enigmaticalness of, 54–55 historical aspects of, 21, 51–52 success of, xvii, 101, 109, 146 Wound, 109, 116–120, 122, 125–130, 13, 144–148, 150, see also Trauma

X Xenophon, 22

Y Yearning, 63, 79, 81, 90, 100–102, 104, 137 Yielding, xvii, 169–170

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 219n23