WHEN SAMUEL BECKETT learned that he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he disconnected the telephone, packed up, and went south, to deepest elsewhere and foolproof incommunicado. That story is known to many. By contrast a story known almost to none—until this moment—is that, before the sun had glimmered on the first full day of a yearlong schedule of official centennial celebrations to mark the birth of Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann—the founding director of the Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv, now emeritus, and the editor of Adorno’s Collected Writings—was already driving south from Frankfurt for an extended stay, across borders, in the Dolomiti. It is worth wondering how these stories may be related. If readers could be encouraged to take sides here, some might insist—in this year of intense Frankfurt biographical research (three new biographies of Adorno were published in 2003 with more of the same forthcoming)—that these acts are so similar that causal influence must be presumed. And evidence of this kind can be adduced: Adorno so closely trusted Tiedemann that, in the late fifties and early sixties, Adorno brought him along to afternoon meetings with Beckett. Certainly the formidable Irish émigré, who would insist on speaking German, must have communicated much, along with many impulses, some perhaps unconsciously, to the still impressionable philosopher’s assistant. Yet to seek to attribute Tiedemann’s behavior on September 11th to these various afternoons, even speculatively, would logically be to presume that the origin of the human urge to flee was strictly Samuel Beckett’s. Short shrift, then, for those who would find these stories genetically concatenated. On the other hand, there might be readers who would insist that these two stories have nothing whatever in common and should not be recounted in the same breath. After all, what Tiedemann would have seen disappearing in the rearview mirror on the morning of September 11th was a looming hundredth celebration conjuring Adorno’s presence, not his own. For the stories to be truly akin, we would need to be juxtaposing Adorno with Beckett, and this is not the case. A debunking tactic determined to sunder story from story—and car from car—would only need to assert that Tiedemann is not Adorno. The force of pure tautology would take care of the rest.
I
There is no rush to establish here an early understanding of the relationship or disrelationship between these two events. On the contrary, even to be curious about it, much must be said especially for American readers of this essay, for whom—unlike its German readers1—Rolf Tiedemann has hardly been a familiar figure in intellectual life over the course of the last thirty years. For this reason, the best, though perhaps jarringly counterintuitive approach is to begin by rapidly sketching in the paradoxal recent development of substantial interest in Adorno’s work in the United States. After all, this is hardly an elective affinity that could have been presumed. The whole of Adorno’s thought concerns an idealist tradition to which, except for the peculiar moment of the St. Louis Hegelians in the mid-nineteenth century, there is nothing autochthonously comparable on the American side of the Atlantic. Up until the last two decades, in fact, even at major universities it was only possible by exception to seriously study the central works of this tradition. Likewise, the music and literature that constitute the topics of the majority of Adorno’s writings are, with only several important exclusions, unfamiliar to Americans, even among the university educated. And where Adorno does touch on American things most closely, in his critique of industrial entertainment, he antagonizes virtually everyone in a nation where the ear is certainly the most stupidified, rawly integrated and exploited of the senses. Add to this that since the world wars the German language has become a longstanding object of prejudice and generally shunned—again, even by the educated—and the conclusion would seem self-evident that Adorno’s work would never be broadly studied in American universities, the only sphere of intellectual interest in the United States.
But in spite of the deep cultural antagonisms, the crackling foreignness of a philosophy that is foremost a critique of barbarism has now become profoundly interesting to a nation whose most characteristic poet, Walt Whitman, espoused his barbaric “yawp” as a highest dignity. Why this has happened must involve many sociohistorical dimensions, including underlying continuities of thought that are crudely betrayed by claiming to add their elements together suddenly, as if they were ever ultimately estranged. English is, after all, in large part some kind of German with many French words. But if the existing antagonisms, which have historically amounted to devastating opposition, are not to be denied, part of the reason for the recent interest in Adorno’s work may be in what historians recognize in the recurrently antitraditional basis of all tradition: that it is always established in adoption from untraditional sources, and this occurs most of all in moments of crisis. And it is in such a moment where all things now stand; indeed, they now stand substantially beyond crisis and well into catastrophe.
There are two levels of reasons for describing the situation in such strong terms. The close reasons are that Americans during the Bush presidency now find themselves in the midst of experiencing what Germans themselves underwent more than half a century ago: an episode of living in a country that has been seized by a minority that has drawn it into desperate circumstances. This minority has every intention of exploiting these events to assure that the transfer of power it achieved in a dubious election can be made irreversible and on every level. The administration’s eye is especially on the judiciary and means to achieve its aims by wearing away at the division between church and state. A detail of this struggle, for instance—one completely familiar to American readers of this essay but not likely to be known by its German readers—is the crowd that recently felt encouraged by the direction of national policy to occupy the steps of an Alabama state courthouse to blow rams horns and offer to “lay down their lives” to protect a stone engraved with the ten commandments installed in the vestibule by the chief justice. In such minor as well as in major confrontations the administration consistently encourages its partisans to strike at obliterating the opposition. This is not to say that this necessarily succeeds; in a complex sense, it did not in Alabama, though that success may come in the long run. But the intention itself of wiping out opposition is unusual in the country’s long-standing bipartisanal concept of democracy and verges toward the unprecedented in intensity. One witnesses a country that has become broadly deluded. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the nation as a whole has suffered a further attack on its sense of reality by the leadership’s own drastically impoverished sense of the world. The situation now has the characteristic of the uncanny where the difference between daily life and what is actually transpiring has steeply intensified to the point that daily conversation has the feel of being unable to address, let alone comprehend, what all are now caught up in. The situations are as distinct as they are related, but to understand—as if in a laboratory—what it really meant for Germans during World War II to claim that they “did not know” it would be possible to study the United States right this moment, September 25, 2003, and find in a substantial majority the prevalence of ideas about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq that bear resemblances to the blindness in broad daylight and phantom reasonings of the earlier situation’s murderous anti-Semitism.
These are some of the close reasons—which have in fact been developing since the mid-sixties—that have combined to cause a readjustment in the relationship of the intellectual contexts of the two countries and, specifically, for a sustained interest and examination of Adorno’s writings. And though it hardly seems possible to imagine more comprising reasons than these, any discussion of the situation calls for a power of imagination that goes beyond imagination’s own capacity. It would amount to hyperbole to go from such a statement to simply talking about it, as if it could be directly faced. It is obligatory, then, to first reject and avoid the matter, in alliance with the actual incapacity to think about it, and try it this way: anyone who might have spent time this past summer in a major art museum such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, visiting any room of what can be called modern in the largest sense of post-Renaissance, perhaps the Pissaro room, could have noticed that the whole of what there is to regard on those canvases lives from the discovered sense of the cornucopia of nature, even when those canvases represent it in its variable abstract negation. This sense of the cornucopia of nature—if readers want momentarily to consult their own sensoria—is now gone. It has taken with it any implication of the utopic imaginings that accompanied what was once edifyingly called the modern rediscovery of nature. For the reality of the damage that has been done weighs too guiltily to tolerate these imaginings. It is extreme to think that in not many decades, if that, these paintings could themselves change from art to bare mementos of unfamiliar locale because the impulse that sustains them—the experience of natural beauty that the whole of Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie sought to comprehend—had long vanished. Still, however extreme this thought, what kind of extreme is there in the thought of the death of the eleven thousand people this past summer in France from the unprecedented heat? Or of the unprecedented flooding throughout Europe during the previous summer? There is a hole in the sky and 30 to 45 percent of all species are in jeopardy, a set of proportions that, even if the lower estimate is prudently preferred, necessarily deceives because it does not attempt to account for the condition of what really will be left after such vast subtraction. As every last person knows, there is nothing of this dimension in human history; nothing so irreparable could have previously occurred in human history. And for reasons that need to be understood we are not enough able to come to our wits in mutual acknowledgment of the situation even to be able to panic in its estimation as reason itself must need to. At the same time many may be finding themselves inadvertently recurring to the thought, and testing it repeatedly to see what real thinking it holds, that the disasters of the contemporary political situation—so willingly engaged by the Americans—and the antidemocratic transformation of society have begun to fill in a middle distance of one summer, or some number of summers, between where we now stand in time and cataclysmic natural events on a world scale that in fact are no longer to be avoided and may well implicate another form of society altogether.
II
An essay whose motive is its alliance with two cars traveling south—and especially with one of them—can itself move decisively in that direction by pointing out that there is only one reason to be all that interested in Adorno’s work. This reason is generally recognized by those who are familiar with the work, but it is not always stated clearly: No other contemporary philosophy is able to set its finger with such precision, so unwaveringly, on the content of this historical moment. A question worth answering then is, how is it able to do this? There is more to say on this point than can be said here. But some approach to the question is gained if this philosophy’s view of history, presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is considered. That work was itself conceived in a desperate effort in the 1940s to understand why history, instead of progressing, regresses. This speaks directly to our contemporary moment where Americans—certainly—sense themselves entering primitive times, socially, under the great velocity of that nation’s weaponry.
But even a brief presentation of the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment must be prefaced with a heavy caveat. If this work especially deserves to draw the attention of students of Adorno in the United States, its study will at many turns demonstrate that it is faulty and limited in many ways: its analysis of the ultimate convergence of domination with fascism, for instance, is undiscerning in that fascism, whatever traces it has had in the United States, has never been a substantial threat because a country that knows itself to be made up exclusively of immigrants cannot participate in an institutionalized fantasy of the nation as a primordial family. Simply compare the rebarbative idea of “homeland” in “homeland security” with the German heimat or the French patrie. Likewise, Americans cannot guess at the strictures of formal paternal authoritarianism known directly to the generations of the Kaiserreich into which Adorno was born, a tradition of authority later usurped by Nazism. Just to discover what a handshake once meant in those contexts would require from most North Americans some amount of cultural-anthropological study. And regardless of comparative national perspectives and mores, Dialectic of Enlightenment was written under such desperate pressure to comprehend the regressive force of enlightenment that in the pages of that text—as the authors were aware—enlightenment itself becomes difficult to understand as a value.
With the expectation, then, that there is much to question in the work, the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment—by its nature only partially stateable at any one point—is that history regresses because progress, as the progress of domination, is sacrificial. Sacrifice is shown to be a logic of substitution that develops as the principle of identity—the impulse of self-preservation itself—in an ever broadening web of the exchange relation. The exchange relation generically consumes the particular while the principle of identity constantly hides from view the sacrificial mayhem at the interior of the process. Reality is thus mastered while the purpose of mastery, the possible satisfaction of the particular, is squandered. In the face of resources achieved at great price, and which society could well employ to satisfy its many wants and needs, progress is instead ever more blind to its purpose and ineluctably driven to become a demand for the sacrifice of the sacrificial whole. Thus images of the Great Depression return to American minds as puzzle-visions of farmers discreating surplus, putting an end to plenty, in order to survive scarcity: destroying produce and guttering tank-loads of milk into open fields. In crisis an unreasonable reason continues to call for sacrifice as if it, most of all, were the true need, still new and unmet. And thus anyone who glances through the New York Times finds that paper—a distinguished, moderate opponent of the current administration—consistently jousting in its editorial pages with the current Republican administration for who can urge the most willed sacrifice on a deeply distressed people.2 Yet the United States now produces so much more than it did in 1950 that, if the country lived at the comfortable standards of that year, the entire population could take half the year off.3 But instead, in spite of this prosperity, Americans work fourteen months for every twelve that Europeans put in. And what Americans have made of the country, as registered in American novels at least since the sixties in such works as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, is notorious for its blandness, an “undifferentiated limbo of highways and drive-ins, garages and main streets, vandalized landscapes and faceless towns.” As George Steiner wrote of this landscape, in the voice of sharp exaggeration that by that measure alone finally succeeds at hitting on a nerve, it is the “saddest place on the wide earth.” Given what the country now tends toward, sadness may soon seem much the least of it.
III
To return then to the question: How does Adorno’s philosophy of history seek to put its finger on reality, and how does it do so with an incomparable precision, and unwaveringly? The answer is deductively evident from the major thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment as it has so far been considered: If domination sloughs off its own aim in a web of covertly sacrificial exchange relations, relations of ostensible equality in which nevertheless one side is always cheated, domination could only be brought to its senses, and what its achieved powers could serve, through a critique that is the ally of what is otherwise generically sacrificed—the particular. This philosophy, in other words, considered itself nothing if not a materialism, though plainly distinct from a long history of materialist thought that has characteristically amounted to the assertion that material is the sum of all, as if once this were acknowledged the ghosts would at last be driven out of the machine and with them, necessarily, all the demons as well. Dialectic of Enlightenment was not convinced by this logic, and its own materialism disputes it. For Adorno, materialism meant restoring to the material—nature, even as second nature—the comprehension of its content. The particular is just the material, its content restored in the sense of the comprehension of this content.
Though this materialism vies with Marx’s own, it is distinctly a form of Marxism, and most of all in the sense that the restoration of the content relies on an insight that can be followed from antiquity’s critique of lex talionis, to Rousseau, to Kant, to Fichte’s critique of capital punishment, and most of all to Marx: that there is nothing that can be traded for life that is its equal. Wage does not compensate either in maximums or minimums; the internal structure of the wage relation is necessarily life robbed and sacrificed. This insight was a given for Adorno; pushed, it could be called the meaning of his thought. And while he was completely aware that Marx’s theory of class struggle did not begin to comprehend the whole structure of domination and failed to carry through the critique of life as labor, still Adorno could not have imagined that anything could be hoped for socially that would not somehow make good on this fundamental insight into the inequality of exchange.
But in the never absolute partings between Marx and Adorno, the distinction between them that is most relevant to this essay (for understanding this essay’s preoccupation with the direction that Rolf Tiedemann was going on the morning of September 11th) is also the distinction that most bewildered the students who attacked Adorno in his last years. The issue is this: Marx’s materialism is the basis of one of the few philosophies in the history of Western thought that carries with it a program of action; it is, by that same measure, almost the only philosophy that can in this sense be directly joined. It is not surprising, then, that the students, who rightly understood Adorno’s philosophy to stand inextricably in the Marxist tradition, would suppose that here too it would be possible to join up. The expectation of joining that this implied is still painfully obvious in the photographs of the faces of those students who crammed into the lecture halls just to have a seat.
But however large the amphitheaters in which this philosophy was heard, however voluminous in page count its forty some volumes are, the thinking itself is strictly a one-man boat. Even its wide gunwales provide no sitting space for visitors to occupy. This philosophy models a stance that can be held only by one person. The thinking itself insists it is able to put its finger on the historical moment just to the degree that it succeeds at shaping the experience of the particular as it suffers and is otherwise deprived of expression. That is why a negative dialectics is necessarily an aesthetics: for this is the only possible arena in which the fate of the particular can be perceived as a particular; the only dimension in which the elements of the world can be adequately formed in such a way that it becomes possible to shudder at what is, at its truth, as otherwise prohibited by the empirical obligation of self-preservation; and the only possibility for—in Wallace Stevens’s words—turning the violence of what is against this violence, in a fashion that is potentially an act of consciousness distinct from retaliation, the tit for tat of the exchange relationship, and may even bespeak the “if it only were” of, for instance, Schumann’s “Aufschwung.” This necessity of aesthetics to materialism explains why the students who crowded Adorno’s lecture hall, with the thrill of joining up in what anyone can join by wrestling one’s way to a seat, would have had to wonder at, be bewildered by and finally hateful of, what to their minds they had been cheated into joining: what no one can march to. And while Adorno was flattered and delighted to have drawn vast audiences, the tenor of his work demonstrates that seeking them was not first on his mind. He evidently was not kidding as he repeated, throughout the whole of his writings, that to shape and comprehend the particular the artist and the social critic have no alternative but to work in isolation. Whatever the interdisciplinary claims of the institute, the message in the bottle—which is all that Adorno was ever at work on—cannot in any way be drawn up collectively and put in that bottle by many hands reaching at once. Measured by the philosophy itself, heard by the listening ear, the idea of an Adorno conference is a contradictio in adjektivum. Why else would Tiedemann have been driving south before dawn on the day of the inaugural jubilee?
IV
An essay that wanted to get lost for keeps might decide to take it on itself to elucidate Adorno’s intellectual development. For it was not a process of development in the first place. If stages of a sort can be discerned in the writings, it cannot be said that one idea followed another in any kind of sequence. Adorno seems to have been so unimpeded in his intention toward the particular that, from early on, his thinking life was a process that pulled in what it needed to materialize its own characteristic shape. It is no surprise that his colleagues could be disquieted by this. Leo Lowenthal was obliged to discover Adorno making himself so abundantly free with his own best insights that they would disappear, one day to the next, into Adorno’s own reflections and typescript without Adorno being at all concerned to write footnotes of citation. Certainly this felt predatory to Lowenthal as it did to Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Evidence of something like predation might indeed be apparent to anyone opening randomly to any page of the Collected Writings in search of quotation marks: they can be found, but the later the text, the more they are scarce, and an eye noticing this will begin to discern techniques Adorno developed for avoiding them. The most characteristic is his way of invoking large bodies of thought, or even a particular philosopheme, by means of a locution or imitated phrasal rhythm: no one needs to guess the who’s who in any mention of the retournons, or what doctrine counter-balances those starry heavens, or how many changes can be rung on a thought im Zeitalter seiner—as “in the age of” mechanical reproduction—or where Adorno stood on the matter in the philosophy of language as to whether you should say it if you can’t talk about it and also like to whistle. A philosophy that is—or is not—philosophy by its responsibility to the particular was, however, not in any sense too busy with itself to cite things properly: on the contrary, in its complete preoccupation with the particular it had nothing to do unless—rather than cite them—it could name them. Adorno worked around quotation marks and footnotes of citation because he experienced them as the ropes and posts of thought that thinks of itself as a wrestling ring where it will be decided who got there first and who owns what.
Thinking, for Adorno, as for Hegel, is how the mind is bound up in what it is at the same time separate from, and the being bound up is itself a determination of the separation as determinate negation. This is the contrary of the assertion of thinking as sitting on one’s own property. The centralmost paradox of a philosophy that has exactly enough room for one person—that is just as standoffish as it is unguarded—is that this restriction is the actual source of its capaciousness as a critique of possessive individualism. It is what intelligence can possibly do that has not spent its years getting the latch on the front gate to click shut. The work as a whole, by a man who had no children, is ultimately a critique of the transcendental unity of apperception, the claim of the final mine-ness of each and every thought. That such an effort of thought is conceivable at all is apparent where line after line, sometimes for pages at a time, seems to make itself irresistible to the desire to quote it for what it has succeeded at putting its finger on. But succumb to the impulse, take it for aphorism, and in actual quotation the phrase or passage as soon changes to dust in one’s hand and to nonsense on the wall for one’s having failed to understand what everything about it said in the first place: there is nothing like this; reproduction prohibited, not by copyright but by reality.
V
Because the fate of the particular is the actual matter of this philosophy, the rigorous formulations have an exposed quality. Adorno was aware of this. The style is a self-consciously conceptual sprechstimme and hardly separable from the fragility of its plaintive voice even in so abstract a thought as “the whole is the false.”4 This is as good an expression as any to explain why this essay, however fixed its directional compass, cannot just turn south at any point. For it would be as complete a misunderstanding to suppose that Adorno’s writings are a collection of aphoristically quotable lines as that the philosophy itself commends fragmentation. Such a philosophy would collude with what fractures the self in urging it to cooperate in all that means to invade it with commercial purposes of its own. To head off possible misunderstanding, the dialectical content of the idea that the whole is the false needs to be emphasized. For if the whole is indeed the false, driven to the point that it is aware that it is not the absolute, the whole becomes the capacity of the truth. This is the central idea of Adorno’s philosophy. It is worth restating. The idea that the whole is the false is by its own measure, by its own insight, the idea that the false is known only by the power of the whole. In this dialectic—Adorno and Horkheimer speculated—enlightenment comes to term. For if the identity of the whole is the capacity to grasp what is opposite itself, then domination is conceivably the capacity to suspend itself in self-relinquishment in the object it has always sought: it would be domination that as real mastery would no longer have any need of violence. This is the process that is perceived in Adorno’s writing at its most compelling, line by line. A picture made of this process would look like a one-man boat that is a critique of possessive individualism—a critique of possessive individualism by means of its own individuality, by its own wholeness, not by self-sacrifice. Such a philosophy does not intend to abrogate the transcendental unity of thought, but to complete it. By the measure of its own wholeness, the same measure by which it suspends its wholeness, it would win the ability to put its finger on what is most real. Wallace Stevens sketches some part of this same idea in his “Esthétique du Mal”: “Except for us, Vesuvius might consume / In solid fire the utmost earth and know / No pain.”5
VI
The best reason to quote Adorno is in the recognition that the most legitimate urge to do so is every reason not to quote him at all: For this philosophy’s best capacity for insight is in its development of an enlightenment skepticism toward self-sacrifice. By contrast, the quotation of Adorno is itself so often a sacrificial gesture of imitation. Identity that fails to come to term in what is other than itself is inevitably imitation of what is greater than itself as a power of self-assertion. What it wins, it wins as property. The many essays clotted with quotation from Adorno consign a philosophy to a neoclassicism that is its most substantial critic; the quotations are the marks left behind where the tension of the struggle for truth capitulates, seeking someone stronger in which it hopes to acquire a voice for itself. By that measure it is denied its own voice, which is all it has by virtue of which something might be pronounced other than the self. Adorno certainly did not mean to be that someone stronger who would interfere with this voice. And, incidentally, in this regard it is worth commenting here—to keep things in perspective—that Adorno is not the only person who ever recognized some relation between maturity and a power of self-relinquishment. If we were to look for another example of this capacity, Rolf Tiedemann’s edition of Adorno’s Collected Writings would come directly to mind.
VII
Certainly the most interesting idea in the whole of Adorno’s work is that identity, the power of tautology itself, can be cultivated as the capacity of its own critique. The point is one known to all musicians, and certainly it is as a musician that Adorno had occasion to consider it: the self is the only ability for differentiation by which self-relinquishment can occur. It is the capacity that an audience has every reason to envy in the human at the keyboard, even if nothing more comes of this feeling on the way home than making grimaces and gesturing large with the arms and hands held high in the air. The thesis that identity is the critique of identity works a wedge into the grip of the claim that what is mine is strictly mine. It uses the capacity of that grip to loosen the hold, but not disparagingly, as if that grip were the low contrary to brotherly love. In its awareness of the fruitlessness of sacrifice, it takes the side of the struggle for self-preservation more seriously than that struggle often can for itself. Adorno’s philosophy ultimately wants to show that the weight of the burden of self-preservation is one we have long not needed to bear to the degree we have and certainly not in such a fashion as we have for almost a century so that we are now far past verging on annihilating ourselves and all that is around us. In the thesis of an emancipated tautology as the capacity of the self to immerse itself in what is other than itself, to follow the material where it wants to go, Adorno conceived his version of the ontological proof of god, which in his lectures on philosophical terminology (Philosophische Terminologie) he named the most interesting problem in the history of philosophy. In the context of Adorno’s thinking, Anselm’s proof would become something like the proof of possibility itself. There are many ways to misconstrue this idea, but if in this essay there is now some readiness to make sense of it then a kind of progress has in fact been made here. It is what Adorno would have thought progress might be. This essay has in any case been an experiment in tautology, in wanting to be anything but tautology. From its first page it is a critique of the most obvious sorts of property relations. And by the same measure, without the same capacity of identity that would have wrenched completely apart the two stories with which we began, this essay would now be unable to find the direction that it is instead easily able to take.
South as Such
For a negative dialectics the unpardonable sin would neither be unpardonable nor a sin, but the philosophy does share in the ancient recognition that every degree of despair is failed self-assertion evinced in the claim to being beyond any kind of help, as beyond possibility. Adorno’s thinking as a whole is a materialist critique of historical despair. The puzzle it confronts is why the way out looks sealed when every door swings wide on broken hinges. It owes to its particular solution of this puzzle its many limitations of historical and aesthetic differentiation, and specifically its often remarked feeling of narrowness—a narrowness in the closely muffled clowning of the syntax and a narrowness in every dialectical reversal that limits itself to bare shifts between black and white when the frank voilà of the gesture would rather transform these many colored handkerchiefs into those many colored birds. Adorno is right that possibility wins nothing by our astounding ourselves with numbers on the relative productivity of nations decade to decade. It depends, instead, on a kind of direction, in the movement of what is certainly a paradoxical one-man boat, as of various kinds of cars and allied essays going south. For if it were possible to flee on another’s behalf, to take that person along in absentia, so to speak, as if Darwin had arranged that for us as a real potential, working perhaps in alliance with all that Lévy-Bruhl knew of selves that are more than punctually themselves, who would not seize this moment to go back to what the terrors of mid-century have left in our minds and, in instants of a contemporary Aeneid, step through the rubbled walls, the blown-apart ovens, chambers, and human kilns, to take up burden after burden on our backs and head toward an ultimate south, anywhere to escape, in lines stretching forth from all directions, in every latitude and longitude?