Introduction
1. “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” The president of the United States, in a speech quoted from Haaretz in Justin A. Frank, Bush on the Couch (New York: Regan, 2004), p. 72.
2. The German, Ursprung ist das Ziel, of course involves a host of ideas and associations that are not apparent in the English, “Origin Is the Goal,” and vice versa. To note just the most important, Ziel means both goal and aim. Goal and aim each also imply the other and can be used with partial synonymity, but while juggling the English alternatives against each other allows for more precise differentiation of the several meanings, the German makes it possible to better comprehend their unity. The limits to plausible translation of the epigram require the English reader to imagine aim into every occurrence here of goal.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, henceforth GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 6:158; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), p. 155.
Translations throughout this volume are exclusively for the purposes of their specific contexts; they will not necessarily conform to published editions of these same texts. This may amount to amendment, but as frequently it is a matter of developing possibilities of syntax that can be constrained by the obligations of full translation. It is a truism that, free of their own circumstance, the translation of individual lines can be improved, though they of course at the same time forfeit the informing coherence of the passage they are drawn from. Word choice in these translations is also sometimes influenced by the opportunity to accent a meaning that might not be the preferred solution in an authoritative edition.
4. Henry David Thoreau, Walking (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 1 (emphasis added).
5. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 155.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture” (1941), in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Boston: MIT Press, 1981), p. 88; GS 10.1:88.
7. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 155.
8. Adorno’s interpretation of Kraus’s epigram owes much to Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Play of Lamentation. Adorno and Benjamin’s differences, however, over the concept of origin are dauntingly complex. See “Title Essay: Baroque Allegory and ‘The Essay as Form’” (this volume).
See especially Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 44–48.
A further note on language is relevant here: Ursprung and Origin share etymologically in the images of arising and coming forth, but this is much more on the surface in the German since one can directly comprehend an Ur-, a primordial, sprung, leap or sprouting, much in the spirit of what is thought in the English “spring has sprung.” The past participial quality of Ursprung, however, while it demonstrates the activity of a verb, is a noun that does not—unlike so many German nouns—have the vernacular capacity to exist as a verb; there is no urspringen in modern German. The English noun, origin, however is matched by originate, which in German would be the infinitive entspringen. In wanting to unscramble the puzzle of Kraus’s elusive phrase, an informed English reader of the German may therefore freely speculate on how the phrase’s potential took shape out of certain asymmetries of German and then experiment with various translations beginning with something like: origination is the aim, which is revealing close to Pound’s Make it new—a phrase Adorno never quoted—or Rimbaud’s Il faut être absolument moderne—a phrase that was always on Adorno’s mind. The self-evidence of such a translation, however, obviously falls short of much that is at stake now in the Krausian phrase.
9. The theologoumenon of utopia as a smallest difference was common to Adorno and Benjamin. See Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
10. See Robert Spaemann, Die Frage Wozu? (Muenchen: Piper, 1981).
11. See Emile Meyerson, Identity and Reality (1908), authorized translation by Kate Lowenberg (New York: Dover, 1962). One way of formulating the dialectic of enlightenment—though Adorno did not develop this thesis—is specifically in terms of the development of this mechanical spatialization of nature.
12. See J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 387.
13. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre” (1927), in GS 1:79–324.
14. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Die revidierte Psychoanalyse,” in GS 8:20 ff.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz? ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 3 ff.
16. The German psychoanalytic term for “working through” is Durcharbeitung.
17. See Theodor W. Adorno, Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, in GS 10.2:552 ff.
18. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Stravinsky or Restoration,” Philosophy of New Music, ed. , trans., and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
19. For some orientation see R. Horacio Etchegoyen, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (London: Karnac, 1991).
20. Governor Jeb Bush, quoted in Frank, Bush on the Couch, p. 1.
21. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Psychology and Sociology,” trans. Irving Wohlfarth, in New Left Review, no. 46, pp. 63–80 and no. 47, pp. 79–97.
22. Sacrifice is inevitably tautological: sacrifice made for the sacrifice already made. This presents its identitarian aspect. Reporting on the president’s intention to pursue the war in Iraq, a recent headline reads: “Citing Sacrifice, President Vows to Keep Up Fight,” New York Times, Tuesday, August 23, 2005, p. A1. To date, in Mayan reminiscence, all allegiance demands the hand over the heart. See Popul Vuh, trans. Dennis Tedlock (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
23. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, in GS 7:104, and Aesthetic Theory, ed., trans., and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 66.
24. The commonplace then, of contemporary art study that preoccupies itself with the discussion of the function, e.g., of literature in “the development of national identity,” would be transformed by the consideration that if a nation fully had an identity it would no longer have one and that art, in so far as it is art, and is shaped by the same problems as national identity, can only be distinguished from other ideological mechanisms in that art’s own self-identity drives it toward exactly that identity in which nation would dissolve. What is presumed in the current discussion of the place of art in national identity has usurped the lion’s share of what was in other decades discussed in terms of political commitment. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:76–94.
Back to Adorno
1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1978).
The situation of the translation of Adorno’s work has been considerably transformed since this essay was written. In particular, an excellent new translation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment now exists, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). The remarks on the old translation, however, are presented below in note 67, in part because the old translation continues to circulate and also because these remarks may be of use to readers interested in questions of the translation of these concepts and understanding why the older translation was replaced.
2. This summary is based on G. S. Noerr, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” pp. 423–542, especially pp. 443–444, published, along with “Nachwort von Juergen Habermas,” as appendixes to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklaerung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986), and on conversations with Rolf Tiedemann in July 1987.
3. Habermas, “Nachwort,” p. 277.
4. Noerr, “Nachwort,” p. 449.
5. Juergen Habermas, “Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung des Horkheimerischen Werkes,” in Max Horkheimer heute: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Norbert Altwicker (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986), p. 171.
6. Habermas, “Nachwort,” p. 277.
7. See, for instance, Erich Kahler’s Man the Measure (1947) (Ohio: Meridian, 1967) and the last chapter and epilogue to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1945) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), which also presents a kind of dialectic of enlightenment.
8. Horkheimer, Letter to Pollock, cited by Noerr, “Nachwort,” p. 432.
9. Ibid., p. 507.
10. Ibid., p. 508.
11. Habermas, “Nachwort,” p. 278.
12. Ibid., p. 277.
13. Ibid., p. 282.
14. Ibid.
15. The Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforchung, edited by Horkheimer, was discontinued after 1941 and the move to California.
16. Habermas, “Nachwort,” p. 280.
17. There are many variants on the theme of Adorno the pessimist, and they almost always pair—as does Habermas—the charge of pessimism with an attack on modern art: “Adorno’s advocacy of modernism, it must be remembered, springs from a social pessimism that is unable to identify any contemporary agent of political change; given the prevailing technocratic logic of an administered society, the dissonant, fragmentary nature of modem art offers passive resistance to the all-pervasive commodification of experience. . . . Feminism, however, rejects such pessimism in its identification of women as an oppressed class.” Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 189. The language here draws distantly on Marx, but at the vanishing point: Marx’s interest in the proletariat was not because he could not find other oppressed groups, but because its claims, he held, were universal. In the passage quoted above, however, this universality is sloughed for a modest “Je suis la revolution,” phrased in a sociologese in which disempowerment takes shape as a Robinsonade, on which Adorno comments: “These prototypical figures of the shipwrecked make out of their weakness, the weakness of individuality separated from the collective, their social strength. Thrown to the mercy of the sea, helplessly isolated, their isolation dictates the ruthless pursuit of their self-interest.” As to shipwrecked, there is no limit today to people in this position, whereas an inability to recognize the content of modern art means an inability to know this. Adorno, the “pessimist,” wary of vanguards, though hardly obtuse to the situation of women, wrote in the last lines of the “Concept of Enlightenment”: “While bourgeois economy multiplied violence through the mediation of the market, it also multiplied its objects and forces to such an extent that for their administration not just the kings, not even the middle classes are necessary, but everyone. They learn from the power of things to dispense at last with power” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklaerung, p. 60).
18. The conversation begins with Horkheimer irritated by the metaphysical quality of Adorno’s thought. The conversation is formal; they address one another as Sie.
19. “Little drum: three rapid little beats of a single instrument awaken the feeling of a crowd marching in the distance. Thus is remembered that all music, and even the most lonely, concerns the many, whose gesture the sound of the drum preserves.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Motive,” in Gesammelte Schriften, henceforth GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 16:280.
20. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklaerung, pp. 506–8.
21. Habermas’s relation to Horkheimer is complex. The two men certainly did not see eye to eye; and Habermas’s identification with him in the context of the “Nachwort” to the Dialectic of Enlightenment is restricted to his criticism of Adorno.
22. This was Rolf Tiedemann’s assessment of the situation in Frankfurt in July 1987.
23. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xvi.
24. Habermas, “Nachwort,” p. 289.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, “Geschichtsphilosophie” (1957), unpublished lecture series, p. 19.
26. Habermas, “Nachwort.”
27. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xiv (translation modified).
28. Theodor W. Adorno, “Einleitung in die Moralphilosophie,” unpublished lecture series, p. 157.
29. George Schrader, “Hegel’s Contribution to Phenomenology,” Monist 48 (1964), p. 24.
30. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. E. Wilkinson and L. Willoughby (London: Oxford, 1982), p. 27. I have generally used this translation, but have modified it when needed.
31. Ibid., p. 19.
32. Ibid., p. 27.
33. Ibid., pp. 28–29.
34. Ibid., p. 61.
35. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, ed., trans., and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1989), p. 131.
36. Adorno reflects explicitly on this: “The myths are sedimented in the thematic layers of the Odyssey; the account given of them, however, the unity wrested from the diffuse legends, is at the same time the description of the flight of the individual from the mythic powers” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 46 [translation modified]).
37. Ibid., p. 48 (translation modified).
38. Ibid., p. 79 (translation modified).
39. “Knowledge . . . can now become the dissolution of domination,” ibid, p. 42.
40. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 461.
41. Ibid.
42. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyklopaedie, vol. 8, in Theorie Werkausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971–1978), p. 265.
43. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History, translated by Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1953), p. 41. Quoted by Shlomo Avenieri, “Consciousness and History,” in New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1971), p. 110.
44. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 50 (translation modified).
45. Ibid., p. 10 (translation modified).
46. Ibid., p. 55 (translation modified).
47. Habermas, “Nachwort,” p. 282.
48. See H. S. V. Ogdan, “The Rejection of the Antithesis of Nature and Art in Germany, 1700–1800,” Journal of English and German Philosophy, no. 38 (1939).
49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. by Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 182.
50. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, p. 147.
51. Adorno, “Moralphilosophie,” p. 168.
52. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 75 (translation modified).
53. Ibid., p. 78 (translation modified).
54. Ibid., p. 56 (translation modified).
55. Ibid., p. 51 (translation modified).
56. Adorno, “Moralphilosophie,” p. 157.
57. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 54 (translation modified).
58. Ibid. (translation modified).
59. Adorno, “Moralphilosophie,” p. 193.
60. See Adam Carse, The History of Orchestration (New York: Dover, 1964), p. 335.
61. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 44 (translation modified).
62. Ibid., p. 45 (translation modified).
63. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 90.
64. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
65. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Theodor W. Adorno, GS, 7:278.
66. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 79 (translation modified).
67. Juergen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), p. 121.
For those who grew up with the first English edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and thought they knew what was in it, it may come as hard news to learn that the words of this text are the wrong ones. Some examples from the second excursus of the volume, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” will produce a needed suspicion about the translation as a whole. There are, however, two drawbacks to this catalogue of mistranslations. The first is that it may give the impression that there is nothing right about Cumming’s translation. This is not the case. Much of it is good, and at a couple of points it even improves on the original. The second drawback to this corrigenda is that it hardly makes compelling reading. However, there is no other way to document the translation’s inadequacy other than by pushing a sort of attentiveness farther than anyone might want to read.
Focusing, then, on what is wrong with the translation, taking sentences by the handful, here is what one comes up with: The first phrase of the essay, “As we have seen”—though a seemingly convenient bridge from the lead essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment”—does not occur in the original, or for that matter, anywhere in Adorno’s writings. The book is only able to organize adequately its complexity because of its paratactical structure, which eschews all such bridges. Though this particular translator’s interpolation does not block comprehension, it implies a general misunderstanding of the text, and, in the face of the book’s intricacies, this misunderstanding consistently catches sentences going the wrong direction. Thus, for example: Adorno did write—as the translation has it—that “through laughter blind nature becomes aware of itself.” But he could not have written, as the translation continues—that, as a result of this self-consciousness, nature “thereby surrenders itself to the powers of destruction.” If reflection were the catalyst of destructiveness, the whole of Adorno’s thought would be senseless. Adorno in fact wrote the opposite: in the self-consciousness of its laughter blind nature “gives up its destructive force.” The translation is full of similar misconstruals: In the context of a discussion of marriage, Cumming has it that “the wife denotes pleasure in the fixed order of life and property.” According to the original, the wife “betrays pleasure.” In the discussion of the Circe episode, the sorceress for some reason conjures not with “wine and herbs” but “wine and cabbage.” Odysseus is not the man “for whom all reasonable things are alike,” but the man “whom all rational thinkers once resembled.” Magic does not use “the fixed order of time to attack the fixed will of the subject;” rather, “along with the fixed order of time, this power [magic] seizes the fixed will of the subject.” Polyphemous does not trust “in the power of immortality,” but in the “power of immortals,” the Olympian gods. Adorno’s essay is a study of the origin of the epic as form. The epic develops as it organizes the tribal, mythical legends into one coherent narrative of adventure; according to the existing translation, the Odyssey pulls “myth into time,” thus “concealing the abyss that separates it [myth] from homeland and reconciliation.” But this is once more a reversal of the sense of the passage: In the original the abyss is not concealed but “revealed”—a reversal of sense that threatens to unhinge the whole of Adorno’s discussion of the relation of epic to myth.
Cumming’s single most important failing, however, is his translation throughout of Vertretung and its derivatives as “representation” rather than “substitution.” Choosing between the two English terms is not simple; “representation” is correct but misleading. It is only possible to get the sense of the essay by beginning from “substitution.” This can best be shown by comparing two versions of a crucial passage which at the same time will give an idea of what even the most diligent reader is up against in the current translation: “Just as the capacity of representation is the measure of domination, and domination is the most powerful thing that can be represented in most performances, so the capacity of representation is the vehicle of progress and regression at one and the same time.” Compare this: “Just as substitutability is the measure of domination, and that person is most powerful who can have others substitute for him or her in the majority of tasks, so substitution is at once the vehicle of progress and regression.” In this passage Adorno and Horkheimer begin to reconceive the commonplace that domination is the power to have others do one’s own work; they reformulate this idea as part of the history of sacrifice in which an object of lesser value is cunningly substituted for another of greater value. The misunderstanding of this concept and the theory of sacrifice of which it is part has far-reaching consequences, producing distortions and blind spots throughout Cumming’s translation. Thus, for example, one reads that “The mythic folk religions must have been shown to be illusory long before they acquired a civilized form.” But it turns out that it is the rationality of sacrifice that “must have shown itself to be illusory long before the development of the mythical folk religions.” These mistranslations will somehow have to be sorted out before any real discussion of this pivotal text of critical theory can proceed in the English-speaking world.
Things Beyond Resemblance
1. Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie, ed. Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 190.
2. The reader is asked to tolerate the German title here until the question of its correct translation is discussed, below, in “Marginal Translation.”
3. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 148.
4. Mark Landler, “Viacom to Buy German Rival to MTV,” New York Times, June 25, 2004, p. Wi.
5. Ibid.
6. Susanne K. Langer, “Speculations on the Origins of Speech and Its Communicative Function,” in Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1962), pp. 26–53. Cf. also Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner’s, 1953) and Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, vol. 1 (Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press, 1967).
7. Sir James Jeans, Science and Music (New York: Dover, 1968; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), esp. p. 231.
8. Luftdruckmelodien: melodies composed out of atmospheric pressure.
9. An expression of Guenter Anders.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973).
11. This is the same text a copy of which Thomas Mann studied in 1943 in preparation for Doctor Faustus. Cf. Briefwechsel 1943–1955: Th. W. Adorno/Thomas Mann, ed. Christoph Goedde and Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 10; also Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961), especially pp. 42–48; and Jo-Ann Reif, “Adrian Leverkuhn, Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno: Theorists real and fictitious in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 7.1 (1983): 102–106.
12. See “Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of ‘Current of Music’ “(this volume). As Adorno wrote in a letter on July 14, 1942, to Leo Lowenthal, whom he often relied on in practical matters: “I want to bring you up to date today on the following: As you’ll remember, last spring Runes had the idea of publishing Philosophie der neuen Musik in his journal and had me do a rough translation, which I finished in December. Now he suddenly writes me, blatantly breaking a verbal and written commitment, to say that several experts have decided the work can not be published, and returned it to me. I have responded very sharply to him and held my alternatives in reserve; still haven’t heard from him. I’d be very appreciative for your advice.” Letter, Adorno to Loewenthal, August 14, 1942, unpublished; in possession of Dr. Rolf Tiedemann.
13. Quoted in A Schoenberg Reader, ed. Joseph Auner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 335.
14. Adorno to Hans Eisler, January 8, 1942, Archiv der Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin.
15. A Schoenberg Reader, p. 331.
16. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
17. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Reversal Into Unfreedom,” in Philosophy of New Music, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
18. Adorno’s comment here is perhaps not to be accepted totally at face value. Philosophy of New Music does pursue the fundamental ideas of Dialectic of Enlightenment. But it is a question why, if the musical work was meant to be an excursus to the philosophy of history, the first half on Schoenberg—written several years before the philosophy of history—and the part on Stravinsky, written some years after it, were not rewritten and unified in the actual language of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno gives his reasons, and they are consistent. Yet it is striking that the dialectic of “myth” and “enlightenment” only remotely appears in the pages of this musical study and that, in place of the concepts of myth and enlightenment, a kind of euphemism broadly predominates for them: the “ever same” and “domination.” If anything, a revision of the text employing the concepts of Dialectic of Enlightenment might have helped articulate the polarizing directions of the presentation; it certainly would not have impeded it. One might speculate, then, that Dialectic of Enlightenment stands between the two parts of the book not only as a development of thought but also as what Philosophy of New Music did not want to refer to. This would be confirmed by the fact that the moment of the publication of Philosophy of New Music, when Adorno and Horkheimer had planned to return to Germany, was the same moment at which they prudently decided—certainly with much ambivalence, most of all on Adorno’s part—to suppress the circulation and republication of Dialectic of Enlightenment on the basis of hesitations, if not toward the actual theses of their philosophy of history, then toward the dangers posed by the work’s extreme formulations of the critique of enlightenment, which might well have been exploited for irrationalist purposes by a renewed fascism in Germany, had that occurred.
19. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Twelve-Tone Melos and Rhythm,” in Philosophy of New Music.
20. A Schoenberg Reader, pp. 337–338.
21. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Break from the Material,” in Philosophy of New Music.
22. Ibid.
23. Wallace Stevens, “Prologues to What Is Possible,” in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), pp. 437–438.
24. Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being,” ibid., pp. 476–477.
25. Stevens, “Prologues to What Is Possible.”
26. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Music as Knowledge,” in Philosophy of New Music.
27. Ibid.
28. Theodor W. Adorno, “Palace of Janus,” in Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), pp. 146–148.
29. Adorno, of course, nowhere dealt with postmodernism, not in so many words. But, in spite of the fact that “Stravinsky and the Restoration” is easily the most reviled and automatically dismissed of anything he wrote—and while there is no reason to deny its deficiencies, in particular the almost corny psychoanalytic amateurishness of the musical symptomatology Adorno adduced almost straight off the page of Otto Fenichel’s Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis—all the same, Adorno’s treatment of neoclassicism amounts, avant la lettre, to what may be the most incisive critique of postmodernism written to date. The essay deserves to be recognized and studied as such. In many ways it may speak more to developments in the United States than does the compositionally more important essay on Schoenberg. What Adorno discerned in Stravinsky is an appeal to authenticity that is fundamentally a desideratum of authority, achieved by obliterating subjective intention. Adorno develops this thesis in his remarks on Stravinsky’s use of pastiche—a kind of abstract diversity—musical quotation, self-reproduction, willful fragmentation, imitation of ancient forms, and so on.
30. Adorno, “Palace of Janus,” p. 147.
31. See Theodor W. Adorno, “New Conformism,” in Philosophy of New Music.
The Philosophy of Dissonance
This essay was first presented at a conference at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, University of Southern California, in honor of Leonard Stein, entitled “Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture,” November 16, 1991.
1. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 415.
2. Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered (New York: Pendragon, 1980), p. 30.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), p. 164.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Zeitschrift fuer Social-forschung9 (1941): 28.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 5.
6. Ibid., p. 6.
7. This passage is indebted throughout to Richard Hennessy’s brilliant paper “What’s All This About Photography,” Artforum, May 1979, pp. 22–25.
8. These comments are reported from the preconcert talk by Christopher Rouse to the San Francisco Symphony’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony no. 6 in A Minor, October 11, 1991.
9. In Theorie des Expressionismus, ed. Otto F. Best (Stuttgart: Reklam, 1971), p. 86.
10. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 162.
Critique of the Organic
1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 51.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften, henceforth GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 7:84.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Aesthetischen, in GS 2:293.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 131.
5. Ibid., 118.
6. Ibid., 110.
7. Ibid., 131.
8. Leo Lowenthal, “Recollections of Adorno,” Telos 61 (1984): 160–161.
9. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung, 8, 413–429.
10. Adorno, Kierkegaard, GS 2:294–295.
11. Walter Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 3:383.
12. F.J. Brecht, Kant Studien 40 (1935): 327.
13. Helmut Kuhn, Zeitschrift fuer Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 28 (1934): 104.
14. Anonymous, Koelner Vierteljahrschrift fuer Soziologie 12 (1934): 198.
15. Karl Loewith, Deutsche Literaturzeitung 4 (1934): 28.
16. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 (1984): 141–143.
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), p. 71.
18. See Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Adorno’s Aesthetics: The Translation,” Telos 65 (1986): 143–147.
19. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 71.
20. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 29.
21. Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in GS 16:500.
22. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 71.
23. The effect in English would be like saying “He takes seriously himself.”
24. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in GS 16:528–530.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, “Der wunderliche Realist: Ueber Siegfried Kracauer,” in GS 11:388.
26. This review got as far as being typeset before it was blocked by the National Socialist censors. It is currently to be found among Kracauer’s posthumous papers at the Deutsches Literatur Archiv am Neckar, Marbach.
27. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 85.
28. How interpretation is to proceed was the question that ultimately divided Adorno from Benjamin. Benjamin wanted to present montages of images; they would speak out of their dense juxtaposition. In the vast quotations assembled in Kierkegaard, this book stands closest of all of Adorno’s writings to Benjamin’s ideal: many of its passages are expected to speak for themselves. A good part of the obscurity of the book originates here. Adorno ultimately rejected montage as a form that would only relive the dream, not interpret it, and return the work to the historicism that it was his and Benjamin’s aim to overcome. In Adorno’s later studies quotations become sparser and the weight of interpretation increasingly falls to the work of dialectical concepts.
29. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 11.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 14.
32. See Susan Buck-Morrs, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), and Carlo Pettazzi, “Studien zu Leben und Werk Adornos bis 1938,” in Text/Kritik (special Adorno issue), ed. H. L. Arnold, pp. 28–37.
33. See Fred R. Dallmayr, “Adorno and Phenomenology,” Cultural Hermeneutics 3 (1976): 367–405.
34. Adorno, “Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre,” in GS 1:156.
35. Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 77–78. As Adorno mentions in a note appended to the German edition of this volume, he was the principal author of the English edition as well, but renounced coauthorship to avoid American political entanglements, which he feared would result in legal complexities that would interfere with his desire to return to Europe.
36. Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, in GS 16:538.
37. Theodor W. Adorno, “Faellige Revision: Zu Schwepperhaeusers Buch ueber Kierkegaard und Hegel,” in GS 20.1:258.
38. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 39.
39. Ibid., 37.
40. Ibid., 48.
41. Ibid., 52.
42. Ibid., 53.
43. Ibid., 52.
44. Ibid.
45. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Play of Lamentation [title corrected], trans. John Osbourne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 180.
46. Marcel Proust, Swan’s Way, trans. C. K. Moncrieff (New York: Mondern Library), p. 100.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 101.
49. Ibid.
50. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History” (this volume).
51. Ibid.
52. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1:34–35.
53. Ibid., 1:83.
54. Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Krenek, T. W. Adorno und Ernst Krenek: Briefwechsel, ed. Wolfgang Rogge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 34–35.
55. The manuscript of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift is among his papers at the Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv in Frankfurt.
56. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 3.
57. Adorno, “Introduction to the Writings of Walter Benjamin,” trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), p. 16.
58. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 126.
59. Adorno’s effort to document hope perhaps explains the important distortion late in the book where, in a discussion of Kierkegaard’s famous revision of the story of the Merman and Agnes, Adorno mistakes the Merman for a “guardian angel,” who is, in fact, Agnes.
60. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, p. 245.
Second Salvage
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), p. 19. Also, Minima Moralia, in Gesammelte Schriften, hereafter GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 4:20.
2. Compare Evelyn Wilcock, “Adorno’s Uncle: Dr. Bernard Wingfield and the English Exile of Theodor W. Adorno 1934–8, “German Life and Letters 49, no. 3 (July 1996): 329–335.
3. Max Horkheimer to T. W. Adorno, October 20,1937, in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer Briefwechsel 1927–1969, ed. Christoph Goedde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 1:440.
4. Adorno to Horkheimer, October 21, 1937, ibid., 1:442.
5. Adorno to Benjamin, November 27, 1937, in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, trans. Nicolas Walker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 227. Also Theodor W. Adorno/Walter Benjamin Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), p. 296 (emphasis added).
6. Adorno to Lazarsfeld, January 1, 1938, Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv.
7. Adorno sketched the proposed volume in letters to several colleagues and editors. The most important of these letters, because it gives the clearest statement of Adorno’s plans for the book, is that of May 17, 1940, to Phillip Vaudrin, an editor at Oxford University Press:
Dear Mr. Vaudrin:
In addition to the three sections of my book, Current of Music, which I have already sent you, I am listing below a provisional table of contents:
In Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie, ed. Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 170.
8. Gleason Archer, History of Radio to 1926 (New York: Ayer, 1938), pp. 131–146.
9. Dickson Skinner, “Music Goes Into Mass Production,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, April 1939, p. 485.
10. James F. Evans, Prairie Farmer and WLS: The Burridge D. Butler Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), p. 155.
11. Leopold Stokowski, “New Vistas in Radio,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1935, p. 12.
12. Evans, Prairie Farmer and WLS, p. 162.
13. Barnett Newman, “On the Need for Political Action by Men of Culture,” in Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 5.
14. Joshua B. Freeman; Working-Class New York (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 67.
15. Alton Coor, “Mayor Mild in Music Talk,” World-Telegram, December I937, WNYC Scrapbook for 1937, Municipal Archive of New York City.
16. Skinner, “Music Goes Into Mass Production,” p. 487.
17. Ibid., p. 488.
18. Kathleen Ann Moran, “From a Toy to a Tool: The Emergence and Growth of WOI to 1940” (master’s thesis, State University of Iowa, Ames, 1981), p. 164.
19. Skinner, “Music Goes Into Mass Production,” p. 487.
20. Ben Hamilton, “Listen and Learn,” WNYC Scrapbook for 1938, Municipal Archive of New York City.
21. New York Panorama: Federal Writers’ Project 1938 (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 298.
22. Compare Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 325–377.
23. Hamilton, “Listen and Learn.”
24. Skinner, “Music Goes Into Mass Production,” p. 487.
25. Daily statistics on radio stations in the United States, by format, taken from 100000 Watts: U.S. Radio and TV Directory, www.100000Watts.com.
26. Gunther Schuller, “A Stranglehold on the Arts,” Keynote, May 1982, p. 25.
27. See Jacques Lautmann and Bernard-Pierre Lécuyer, Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976), La sociologie de Vienne à New York (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1998).
28. Letter by Frank Stanton to John Marshall, January 17, 1940, Rockefeller Archive Center.
29. Ibid.
30. Lazarsfeld wrote to Robert J. Havighurst at the Rockefeller Foundation, “Dr. T. W. Adorno is in charge of the conceptual analysis of this field [the Music Study section]. His qualifications for such work stem from the fact that he is a musician of rank as well as a former professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfort.” Lazarsfeld to Havighurst, October 21, 1939, Rockefeller Archive Center.
31. It is for this reason that the title of Benjamin’s most famous essay is correct as “mechanical reproduction,” contrary to the new translation of this essay as “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott et al. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003], pp. 251–283). What is at stake in this essay is specifically the concept of mechanism.
32. See note 21.
33. Lazarsfeld to Adorno, February 26, 1940, Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv.
34. Lazarsfeld to Frank Stanton, December 14, 1938, Rockefeller Archive Center.
35. Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in Critical Models, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 227.
36. This exchange of motifs, it must be noted, involved Adorno taking the side of Benjamin’s early, neo-Platonic messianism against the later Brechtian-Marxist thinking of the “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction.”
37. Adorno to Benjamin, May 4, 1938, in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, p. 251. The date of this letter (no. 103) has been mistranscribed as March 4 in the otherwise excellent translation of these letters.
38. In Thedor W. Adorno, Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, selected and with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie et al., pp. 288–317. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt, in GS 14:14–50.
39. Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv manuscript, 23 pages. Another, earlier version exists with the important title “Aesthetic Aspects of Radio,” 18 pages.
40. Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv manuscript, 157 pages, with handwritten corrections by unnamed American editor. A separate manuscript contains 91 pages of additional materials to this draft.
41. Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv manuscript, 86 pages.
42. Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv manuscript, 35 pages.
43. Adorno, “Music in Radio,” p. 151, Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv.
44. Ibid., 153.
45. Adorno, “Music and Radio,” p. 22.
46. Theodor W. Adorno und Ernst Krenek Briefwechsel, ed. Wolfgang Rogge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 126 (emphasis added).
47. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” p. 228 (emphasis added).
48. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); see also Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, in GS 12:44.
49. Ibid; also, ibid. 12:15.
50. This is the Cartesian structure that Benjamin unconsciously inherited when he thought he was invoking a messianic structure in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction” and that Adorno better understood as the model of all pretense to authenticity ever since—so to speak—the beginning.
51. Though it is implicit in his thinking, Adorno himself did not conceive the problematic of the dialectic of enlightenment in precisely these terms of the critique of space. It should be considered, in fact, that his formulation of the dialectic of enlightenment—certainly in these early radio studies—was restricted by what might be called a residual Kantianism in the presumed parameters of transcendental consciousness. If this is the case, then Adorno’s own critique of the mechanical universe—and in many regards this defines the impulse the whole of his philosophy consistently cast in an unwavering antiorganicism (see “Critique of the Organic,” this volume)—failed to discern a definitive presupposition of the process of mechanization. Here Adorno clearly knew less about the history of science than he might have. This lack of a fundamental discernment between the concepts of nature and space is the same (effectively managerial) blind spot that can vitiate the historical value of the insight sought by the contemporary vogue of studies along the lines of the “production of space,” for it consigns these investigations to the superficiality of the study of convention as social construction. It might be possible to pick up on this problem beginning with Adorno’s “The Idea of Natural-History” (this volume), where he writes in the final paragraph that “second nature” is also “first nature” and to conceive this as a dialectic of space and nature. The degree to which the neo-Thomistic framework of Yves R. Simon’s The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space (Indiana: Carthage Reprint, 2001) is at odds with Adorno’s thinking makes Simon’s diligently lucid scholarship provocatively all the more valuable in this context.
52. See “Things Beyond Resemblance” (this volume).
53. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” p. 227.
54. The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, introduction by William Gibson (New York: Grove, 1988), p. 60.
55. Adorno would have understood the degree to which he was mistaken had he studied a work that was certainly available to him, Sir James Jeans’s Science and Music, first published in 1937 (New York: Dover, 1968). Jeans there explains that even rudimentary radio speakers effectively transmit sound beyond their own frequency range because the ear itself produces the missing tones. Jeans wrote of just the kind of radios Adorno studied: “Many are designed deliberately to cut out all frequencies below about 250, the frequency of about middle C, and so transmit no bass or tenor tones at all. Yet we hear the double bass strings, the basses of the brass, and male voices with absolute clearness. The explanation is, of course, that all these sources of sound are rich in harmonics. Out of these our ears create the missing fundamental tones and lower harmonics as difference tones, and the combination of these with the higher harmonics, which come through unhindered, restores for us the tone played by the orchestra” (241).
56. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music.
57. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” p. 227.
58. All of these essays are now available in Essays on Music.
59. Theodor W. Adorno: Briefe an die Eltern 1939–1951, ed. Christoph Goedde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 484.
60. Ibid., p. 496.
61. Theodor W. Adorno, Der getreue Korrepetitor, in GS 15:163–187.
62. Ibid., pp. 369–401.
63. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1988), pp. 21–38; also Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, in GS 14:199–218.
64. After a delay of some years, Current of Music, edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor, is being published by the Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv and Suhrkamp Verlag in 2006.
Title Essay
1. This title, Metacritique of Epistemology, has been mistranslated—perhaps on the insistence of the publisher’s marketing division—as Against Epistemology, adapting it to Heidegger’s critique of epistemology and movieland’s obligatory double punch.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, henceforth GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 11:28.
3. Ibid.
4. See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 (1984): 151–171.
5. Paul Tillich, Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Schelling’s Philosophical Development, trans. Victory Buovo (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 1974), pp. 1–42.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 2:62–67.
7. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Play of Lamentation, trans. John Osbome (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 36–37.
8. Gérard Lebrun, La Patience du Concept (Paris: Gallimard. 1972), pp. 71–123. This preeminent study of Hegel’s aesthetics deserves to be better known in this country.
9. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Play of Lamentation, p. 47 (emphasis added).
10. Ibid., p. 223.
11. Ibid., p. 184.
12. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 15.
13. Ibid., p. 5.
14. Ibid., p. 33.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, in GS (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 7:363.
16. Ibid., 7:364.
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Vorlesung zur Einleitung in die Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt: Junius Druck/Hesa Druck, n.d.), p. 317.
18. This section relies on Charles Rosen, Schoenberg (New York: Viking, 1975), pp. 23–62.
19. Many of these techniques are to be found in Benjamin’s work. Yet Benjamin developed them more by way of a religious appropriation, with reference to the tractatus, than to aesthetic form. They are legitimated by their reference to the research of origin, which protects them from the charge of artificiality and “artiness” that falls on Adorno.
20. Translation amended.
21. Karl Marx, Doktordissertation, in MEGA, 1, 1/1, p. 64.
What Is Mechanical Reproduction?
1. This essay was initially solicited for a Stanford University publication, Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marinen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 293–312.
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Boston: Schocken, 1976); further page references appear in brackets in the text.
3. At the several points where the English translation reverts to the literal out of a sense of responsibility to the original, the obvious indeterminateness of “technical reproduction” compels the translation to seek modifying expressions that would give the phrase some content. But the absence of any compact adequate English phrase instead drives the translation into greater obscurities. This is what happens in the following passage in which “process reproduction” is to somehow help elucidate “technical reproduction.” “Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority: not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction [technische Reproduktion]. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction [technische Reproduktion] is more independent of the original than manual reproduction” (220).
4. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
5. Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), p. 26.
6. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 182.
7. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 595.
8. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 165–166.
9. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” from Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, New German Critique 56 (1992): 109–142.
Adorno Without Quotation
1. This essay is also published in German, as “Adorno ohne Anfuehrungszeichen,” trans. Elisabeth Lenk and Gesa Lolling, in Philologie und Scham: Texte von, ueber und fuer Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Die Buechse der Pandora, 2006).
2. The instances are too frequent to quote here. See, for example, the editorial, New York Times, September 9, 2003, p. A28.
3. See Juliet Schor, The Overworked American (New York: Basic, 1993).
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (“Das Ganze ist das Unwahre”), trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), p. 50.
5. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 277.
Popular Music and “The Aging of the New Music”
The epigraph to this essay is from David A. Sheldon. “The Philosophy of T. W. Adorno,” Current Musicology (Spring 1965), p. 90.
1. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Uber Einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei,” in Anmerkungen zur Zeit (Berlin: Akademie der Kunste, 1967), especially pp. 5–9, and “Vers une musique informelle,” in Gesammelte Schriften, henceforth GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 16:498–540.
2. See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, Telos 77 (1989): 95–116. References below are to this translation.
3. See Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “Just Who is Growing Old?” in the Reihe, no. 4 (1958): 63–82. Metzger went so far as to draw up a juxtaposition of lines from Adorno’s essay with those of another, conservative music critic known for his complete rejection of new music.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Die Philosophie der neuen Musik, in GS 12:38–39. See Theodor W. Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 32.
5. In “The Idea of Natural-History” (this volume) Adorno writes: “If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed, then it only offers any chance of solution if it is possible to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as a historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature.”
6. Adorno’s thesis of the transformation of expression in new music is a reformulation of Benjamin’s distinction between symbol and allegory in the second part of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama.
7. For a full account of this movement see Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945 (New York: Braziller, 1981), pp. 19–88.
8. Cf. Gyoergy Ligeti, “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” in the Reihe (London: Universal, 1960), p. 5.
9. Ibid. Ligeti agreed with Adorno in regard to total serialism as a movement, but thought Adorno was wrong in the case of Boulez and several other important composers.
10. Quoted in Griffiths, Modern Music, p. 98.
11. The central letters of this correspondence are in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1977). pp. 126–141.
12. Ibid., p. 129.
13. Ibid., p. 130.
14. In “The Aging of the New Music” nature is equivalently the “material” to which the compositional self is subordinated.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
16. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in GS 16:537–538.
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Composing for the Films (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 130.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis,” in GS 10. 2:764.
The Impossibility of Music
1. See “Popular Music and ‘The Aging of the New Music’” (this volume).
2. Vincent Persichetti, Twentieth-Century Harmony (New York: Norton, 1961) p. 13.
3. See “Introduction to T. W. Adorno’s ‘The Idea of Natural-History’” (this volume).
4. Adorno discusses tradition as “the presence of the forgotten” in Philosophy of New Music (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For Adorno’s discussion of the aesthetic shudder, see Aesthetische Theorie in Gesammelte Schriften, henceforth GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 7:124–125 and 489–490.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, “Klassik, Romantik, neue Musik,” in GS 16: 126–130.
6. Charles Rosen, Schoenberg (New York: Viking, 1975), pp. 28–29.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in GS 16:324.
8. Theodor W. Adorno, “Die gesellschaftliche Lage der Musik,” in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 1 (1932): 103–124, 356–378.
9. See Michael Fink, Inside the Music Business (New York: Schirmer, 1989), pp. 224–225.
10. Popular music, with its angry posturing, harmonic reversals, secret lyrics, and obscenity also lays claim to the critique of semblance, though without ever wanting to carry it out. This is, as Glenn Gould explained, one of its perfections: “Each of the songs . . . emphasizes some aspect of that discrepancy between an adolescent’s short-term need to rebel and long range readiness to conform”; Glenn Gould Reader (New York: Vintage, 1984), p. 303.
11. See the discussion with David Sylvester in the film The Brutality of Fact, BBC, November 16, 1984, which contains some material not found in the interviews published as The Brutality of Fact, ed. David Sylvester (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988).
12. Adorno discusses Kafka in this regard in “Standort des Erzahlers,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, in GS 11:41–48. Aesthetic Theory is, as a whole, devoted to the presentation of this antinomy of aesthetic semblance.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kriterien der neuen Musik,” in GS 16:184–187.
14. Gould, Glenn Gould Reader, p. 110.
15. This is the same process that occurred socially. Social integration resulted in the dissolution of conventionally binding relations and the arbitrariness of the constituents of society. See Adorno, “Kriterien der neuen Musik,” in GS 16:170–182.
16. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, p. 39.
17. Ibid.
18. Adorno, “Klassik, Romantik, neue Musik,” in GS 16:141.
19. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in GS 16:537.
Apple Criticizes Tree of Knowledge
Karl-Otto Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ Through Recourse to the Lifeworld: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to Think with Habermas Against Habermas,” in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, eds., Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being
1. David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 22.
2. Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry” in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 219.
3. Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer,” ibid., p. 324.
4. Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 429.
5. Ibid., p. 437.
6. Ibid., p. 439.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso, 1978), p. 247.
8. See Erich Kahler, Man the Measure (New York: Meridian, 1967), p. 488.
9. Wilhelm Heinrich Wachenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, trans. Edward Mornin (New York: Ungar, 1975), p. 26.
10. And, as Walter Benjamin points out, even in the film age European critics aspired to pray to these images: “Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy about the silent film with the question: ‘Do not all the bold descriptions we have given amount to the definition of prayer?’” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1969), p. 227. Benjamin quotes Arnoux from Cinema pris, 1929, p. 28.
11. Again, Tocqueville was the first to document this, and—in a chapter entitled “The Industry of Literature”—did so a full century before Adorno wrote on the “culture industry.” In that chapter Tocqueville writes, “Democracy not only gives the industrial classes a taste for letters but also brings an industrial spirit into literature” (p. 475).
12. Theodor W. Adorno, “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 20.2:419.
13. See “Second Salvage” (this volume).
14. “Problem des neuen Menschentypus,” manuscript dated June 23, 1941, Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv, Frankfurt am Main.
15. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 665. See also “Adorno Without Quotation,” this volume, section 2.
16. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 662.
17. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 75–76.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor, (Frankfurt: Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv and Suhrkamp, 2006), chapter 4.
19. Ibid.
Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recovery of the Public World
1. “Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recovery of the Public World” was first presented at a conference on “The Recovery of the Public World,” at Simon Fraser University, Spring 1995.
2. This essay draws throughout on Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture series, An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Zu einer Einleitung in die Moralphilosophie), 1957, an unauthorized transcription by Peter Tumarkin. Mimeograph.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), p. 184.
4. Erich Kahler, Man the Measure (Ohio: Meridian, 1967), pp. 79–80.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique (Paris, 1864), 2:151. Quoted in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 133.
6. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 87–90.
7. See Anthony LaBruzza and Jose Mendez-Villarrubia, Using DSM-IV: A Clinician’s Guide to Psychiatric Diagnosis (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1994), p. 303.
8. Ibid., pp. 298–303.
9. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 219–251.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 7:336.
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 300 ff.
Suggested Reading
1. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, the Persistance of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990).
2. Emphasis has been added in quotations throughout this discussion.
3. Jameson is superficial: Since the distinction of thought and language is already in language, the argument that thought and language are identical can only be made on the basis of the assumption—suppressed yet determinate—that they are different in a nonlinguistic fashion. Whether Jameson is right that the denial of the distinction is essential to poststructuralism, his own formulation amounts to a rediscovery of Watson’s behaviorism.
4. See “Critique of the Organic,” this volume.
5. Totality in Adorno’s writings means the functional context developed in various ways through the exchange relation. Totality is no more or less real than this functional order. It should not be thought that totality means a system that is simply closed. It is closed and disorganized by its principle of closure. This relation is misunderstood by the usual argument that Adorno exaggerated the idea of the totally administered society. The origin of this misunderstanding is a credulousness for administration. Those who think Adorno overestimated the functional web do so because they imagine that, if the world were so tightly organized as Adorno claims, planes would leave on the minute. Adorno’s point, rather, is that administration is a principle of disorganization.
6. See Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” trans. Bruce Mayo, in Telos (1974), pp. 56–71. Now also in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 50–53.
7. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 2.1:368 ff.
Introduction to T. W. Adorno’s “The Idea of Natural-History”
1. A hyphen distinguishes two terms in this essay: natural-history and natural history.
2. Adorno’s essay has already received substantial attention. See Susan Buck-Morrs, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), chapter 3; Fred R. Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 211–219; Friedemann Grenz, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” in X. Deutscher Kongress fuer Philosophie, ed. Kurt Huebner and Albert Menne (Hamburg: Mohr, 1973), pp. 344–350; W. Martin Luedke, Anmerkungen zu einer Logik des Zerfalls (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 69–85.
3. Kant-Studien 38 (1933): 498.
4. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno “Kritik am ontologischen Beduerfnis treibt zur immanenten der Ontologie,” Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, henceforth GS, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 6:104. How to translate this line and many others in Negative Dialectics is puzzling. E. B. Ashton’s current translation of the work is admirable for having dragged the book into English, but culpable for having half strangled it on arrival. His translation drops clauses and whole lines (e.g., pp. 35, 76, 99, 143), translates terms arbitrarily (e.g., Vermittlung as transmission), and changes hard thought into simple incomprehensibility by dividing the text into paragraphs where there are none. Altogether it is a model of conformist translation. Adorno’s sentence might be rendered: “Critique of the ontological need leads to an immanent one of ontology.” Ashton makes it both homey and pedantic. “Our critique of the ontological need brings us to an immanent critique of ontology itself.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), p. 97.
5. “Ueber die Seinsphilosophie hat keine Gewalt, was sie generell, von aussen her abwehrt, anstatt in ihren eigenen Gefuege mit ihr es aufzunehmen, nach Hegels Desiderat ihre eigene Kraft gegen sie zu wenden”; Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in GS 6:104. The “das” requisite to the first clause, which would normally correspond to the “was” of the second clause, is missing. It is perhaps not possible to translate this sentence into English and maintain the discomfiture of that first clause. A plausible translation, however, might run: “What would reject ontology, generally, from an external position, instead of taking it on in its own structure, turning its own force against itself according to Hegel’s desideratum, has no power over the philosophy of being”; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 97.
6. “Nicht reicht dabei aus, der Seinsphilosophie zu demonstrieren so etwas gebe es nicht wie das, was sie Sein nennt.” Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p.104; cf. Negative Dialectics, p. 97.
7. This discussion and examples of Adorno’s style come primarily from Hermann Deuser, Dialektische Theologie (Munich: Gruyter, 1980), pp. 118–128.
8. Cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 403.
9. Where this type of phrase does occur in English editions it usually indicates faulty translation; cf. “As we have seen” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming [New York: Continuum, 1978], p. 43). But this is not always the case. Neither is the abruptness of Adorno’s language always justified. It does not always lead into the object. The abandonment of argumentative form turns the text’s integrity over to its density, a particularly vulnerable form that magnifies any slightest loss of tension. Transitional sentences, where they do occur in Adorno’s writing, have just this diluting effect. Adorno will occasionally try to take up the slack by increasing the abruptness of the sentence. The sentence quoted in footnote 4, for example, begins a new section and actually has a transitional function. Adorno tries to cover up its function by heightening the abruptness of the rhetoric. Whereas the sentence implies some form of criticism in apposition to immanent criticism and gains its tension from this implied apposition, no apposition is actually involved.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 161.
11. Leo Strauss, “Kurt Riezler,” in Social Research, 23 (1956): 17
12. See Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History” (this volume).
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” was first published in GS 1:345–365.
14. I am particularly referring to Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. It will be a matter of dispute whether this work actually precedes or postdates Adorno’s “Idea.” The Kierkegaard manuscript was first completed in 1930. But the edition that was eventually published was the result of massive revisions undertaken during the summer and fall of the period during which Adorno presented the “Idea.” The degree to which the published edition differs from the original was something that Adorno emphasized to Ernst Krenek in a letter of September 1932: “Each sentence has been newly formulated and many and precisely central parts are being fully reworked.” Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Krenek, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 34–35. It would be necessary to compare the two versions to actually know the extent of the revisions. Unfortunately, Adorno’s estate is unable to make the only known copy available for research.
15. E.g., Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, in GS 11:400.
16. Karl Loewith, Nature, History, and Existentialism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 139.
17. Steven Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 129; and Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
18. Rudolf Eisler, Kantlexikon (Hildesheim, 1961), p. 380.
19. For further examples from an extensive repertoire, see Heidegger’s development of Ver-haeltnis and Ge-Stell in Die Technik und die Kehre (Tuebingen: Klett-Cotta, 1976), pp. 27 and 39.
20. Theodor W. Adorno, “Thesen ueber die Sprache des Philosophen,” in GS 1:368. Adorno’s view of Heidegger’s language is condensed in his admiration for Kracauer’s untranslatable parody: “Eifersucht ist the Leidenschaft die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft.”
21. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 27.
22. Adorno, “Thesen ueber die Sprache des Philosophen,” in GS 1:366.
23. Ibid., 1:368.
24. Ibid., 1:369.
25. Adorno, Stichwoerte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 178.
26. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 321.
27. Theodor W. Adorno, “Charakteristik Walter Benjamins,” in GS 10.1:242.
28. Cf. F. J. Rintelen, Contemporary German Philosophy (Bonn: Bouvier, 1970).
29. Gunter Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8:337–370. This essay is brilliantly compelling and in some regards surpasses Adorno’s commentary on Heidegger.
30. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 78.
31. Adorno, “Charakteristik Walter Benjamins,” in GS 10.1:242.
32. Second nature would, in Benjamin’s terms, simply be the natural historical carrying a sense conflicting with Adorno’s development of the term.
33. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 33.
34. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, in GS 5:47.
35. Ibid., 5:286.
36. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 9:174.
37. One of the most significant conflicts between Adorno and Benjamin is that for the latter the name is prelapsarian; for Adorno, it is postlapsarian.
38. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightment, p. 15.
39. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 27.
40. Adorno’s description of the mythical character of second nature should be read as completing Strauss’s description of the historical moment.
41. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 42; translation modified.
42. Ibid., p. 39.
43. Ibid., p. 70.
44. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, in GS 7:154 ff.
45. Theodor W. Adorno, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Boston: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 105–106.
46. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, in GS 7:122 ff.
47. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 48–49.
48. This point is hard to get from the English version of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which translates the passage in question as “through laughter blind nature becomes aware of itself as it is, and thereby surrenders itself to the power of destruction” (p. 77). This should read: “. . . and thereby forgoes its destructive power.”
49. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, in GS 7:178.
50. To choose one example of this irritation that is of particular interest for its perception of a thicket of nature, one critic wrote that Adorno came “to the conclusion that neo-classicism was intrinsically reactionary, a theme that he was to pursue through the thickets of his prose for the next forty years.” Peter Heyworth, Otto Klemperer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 263.
The Idea of Natural-History
1. There are various opinions on this reference, but none authoritative. Cf. W. Martin Luedke, Anmerkungen zu einer Logik des Zerfalls (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 74; and Hermann Moerschen, Adorno und Heidegger (Stuttgart: Klett, 1982), p. 34. (Translator’s note.)
2. Neo-Kantianism. (Translator’s note.)
3. This was a general critique of Scheler current in the late 1920s. One student put it: “Whatever happens in the real world . . . the assassination of a dictator, or the failure of such a plot . . . either can be explained by Scheler’s sociology and metaphysics. His philosophy is adapted to account for any situation; like the barber’s stool, as one of Shakespeare’s fools says, it’s designed for any ass.” Quoted in J. R. Staude, Max Scheler (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 239. (Translator’s note.)
4. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Monmouth: Merlin, 1978), p. 62, translation corrected.
5. Ibid., p. 54.
6. Title amended. (Translator’s note.)
7. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 179, translation amended. (Translator’s note.)
8. Ibid., p. 177, translation amended.
9. This line precedes the passage that Adorno actually quotes. It does not appear in either the published or in Adorno’s manuscript. From the context, however, it is clearly required. The editor of Adorno’s collected works agrees, and it will be inserted in future editions (letter from Tiedemann). It is interesting to speculate why this line is missing. Tiedemann guesses that the essay was delivered from notes. The single manuscript that exists would be the work of a stenographer who could have easily missed a line. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to check whether a stenographer was at this meeting for, according to the present editor of Kant-Studien, all of the society’s records from the period were destroyed (letter from Manfred Kleinschneider). One thing, however, makes it doubtful that the essay is solely the work of a stenographer, and that is its footnotes. Only Adorno could have plausibly put in footnote 16. He must have gone over the essay, perhaps preparing it for publication, and this makes the fact important that Adorno, not known for carelessness, passed over the passage’s discontinuity. An explanation is possible. The line contains two important elements, one a reference to the “original history of signification” and the other to natural history, in Benjamin’s sense, of course. The former was needed for the coherence of Adorno’s talk. But in that, for Benjamin, it is given as a synonym for natural history, the reference would have confused the presentation.
Readers may find that substituting “primordial” for “original” helps clarify the concepts in this essay.
10. This is not one of those Latin phrases that everyone is supposed to know. The “Hippocratic face” is the physiognomy of a person suffering from “the worst.” Francis Adams, in his introduction to The Genuine Works of Hippocrates (NewYork: William Wood, 1886), p. 195, cites the classical description of this countenance: “a sharp nose, hollow eyes, collapsed temples, the ears cold, contracted, and their lobes turned out: the skin about the forehead being rough, distended, and parched; the color of the whole face being green, black, livid, or lead colored.” For a discussion of “the face of nature” in Greek, Hebrew, and early modern traditions, see H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1:244–247. (Translator’s note.)
11. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 166, translation amended.
12. Literally, the last part of this sentence reads, “in both cases ‘transience’ and ‘transitoriness’ occur.” In fact, only the word transience appears in the cited passages. Nothing of importance seems to be at stake, and so the phrase has been dropped to avoid confusion. (Translator’s note.)
13. Although Heidegger does not use the term ontological turn (ontologische Wendung), in the context of his work it would refer to a transformation of ontology such as occurred with Descartes. (Translator’s note.)
14. Kurt Riezler, 1882–1955. Nationalist, classicist, philosopher. Once well known for his study of Parmenides and an aesthetics, more recently for his World War I diaries. Adorno is referring to his Gestalt und Gesetz (1924), a “critical metaphysics” that argues that life is characterized by a fundamental dualism of law and form, unified by fate. (Translator’s note.)
15. Apparently a references to Freud’s “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words” (1910), in Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth, 1950). (Translator’s note.)
16. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 112 ff.