Language meets its catastrophe not merely in its individual words and syntactical structure. Many words clump together in the pull of communication, prior and contrary to all meaning. Karl Kraus recognized this phenomenon and persecuted it almost tenderly in such turns of phrase as “fully developed and consolidated.”1
One such clump is the illegal intervention, which typically ensues when relations turn out not to have been without consequence.2 Presumably the abuse of language is so much a part of objective spirit’s flesh and blood that it could never be made to give it up. But perhaps what has happened to words should be taken at its word. If prohibition was already once associated with interventions, then considerations that propose to intervene should at least metaphorically recall it and transgress taboo and consent.
Thematically, the articles extend from so-called grand philosophical subjects to political topics and on to relatively ephemeral, occasional pieces, from professional-academic experiences to very nonacademic questions. The presentation follows suit: its rigor and density vary according to the subject being presented. An autonomous language that ignores the requirements entailed by successive changes in subject matter is no style. Everywhere, however, where topically relevant material is treated, the adversary is the same malfeasance upon which every particular depends and which nevertheless only appears in the particular.3
Thus a catchword that unintentionally recurs in many of the articles suggests itself: reified consciousness, into which the essays seek to intervene, whether it be in the work of the human sciences or in the attitude of teachers toward philosophy, in the cliché of the twenties or the evil survival of sexual taboos, in the prefabricated world of television or in unfettered opinion. This unity at the same time prescribes the limit: consciousness is criticized where it is merely the reflection of the reality that sustains it.
The practical prospects therefore are limited. Whoever puts forward proposals easily makes himself into an accomplice. Talk of a “we” one identifies with already implies complicity with what is wrong and the illusion that goodwill and a readiness to engage in communal action can achieve something where every will is powerless and where the identification with hommes de bonne volonté is a disguised form of evil. A purist attitude, however, that refrains from intervening likewise reinforces that from which it timorously recoils. Such a contradiction cannot be settled by reflection; it is the constitution of reality that dictates the contradiction. At a historical moment, however, where a praxis that would refer to the totality appears to be blocked everywhere, even paltry reforms may presume more right than they in fact are due.
December 1962