Introduction to the Combined Edition
1. In writing this sentence, I thought that I might be the first to coin the phrase “Adorno Industry.” But a Google Scholar search proved me wrong. See Nick Smith, “Making Adorno’s Ethics and Politics Explicit,” Social Theory and Practice 29, no. 3 (2003): 487.
2. On Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” see as a start, Bruno Berger, Der Essay. Form und Geschichte (Bern: Francke, 1964), 13; Gerhard Haas, Essay (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1969), 39–42; Wolfgang Adam, “Der Essay,” Formen der Literatur in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. Otto Knörrich (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1981), 88–98, esp. 89; Dieter Goltschnigg, “Essay,” Moderne Literatur in Grundbegriffen, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), 118–22; Sarah Pourciau, “Ambiguity Intervenes: The Strategy of Equivocation in Adorno’s Der Essay als Form,” MLN 122 (2007): 623–646. As Martin Jay pointed out in his initial review to Notes to Literature, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” “Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’s Realism in Our Time,” “Commitment,” “Trying to Understand Endgame,” and several pieces on Walter Benjamin already exist in English and have had a significant impact on the reception of Adorno’s ideas. See Martin Jay, “Boundaries,” London Review of Books 15, no. 11 (June 10, 1993): 24–26. On the history of the publication of some of the essays compiled in Notes to Literature, see Lydia Goehr, “Notes to Literature by Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann and Shierry Weber Nicholsen,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 3 (Summer, 1995): 334–36.
3. In addition to the reviews by Lydia Goehr and Martin Jay, mentioned in the previous note, the reader might begin by consulting Lee B. Brown’s review in Journal of Aesthetic Education 27, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 117–121; Peter Bürger, “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism,” Telos 86 (Winter 1990–1991); Ulrich Plass, Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s “Notes to Literature” (New York: Routledge, 2006), reviewed by Josh Robinson, “Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘Notes to Literature’” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 2 (2009): 194–196; and, David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp, editors, Adorno and Literature (New York: Continuum, 2008).
4. A recent, very thoughtful, review of Jay Bernstein’s 1992 book The Fate of Art, by Malte Rauch—shown to me by the author, and now published online—convinces me that Bernstein’s book played a large role in putting Adorno on the agenda for subsequent discussion. See Malte Rauch, “Aktualität im Vergangen: Eine Lektüre von The Fate of Art nach 25 Jahren” review of Jay M. Bernstein: The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992) Arcadia International Journal of Literary Culture / Internationale Zeitschrift für literarische Kultur, Published Online: 2017-06-20 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2017-0011.
5. Or, after the integration of “entertainment” into “culture.” Compare Hannah Arendt’s formulations to Adorno’s: “The things exchanged by the entertainment industry are not values to be used and exchanged; rather, they are objects of consumption as apt to be depleted as any other such object. Panem et circenses—these do indeed go together: both are necessary for the life-process, for its sustenance and recovery; both are also swallowed up in this process, that is to say, they both have to be produced and performed time and again if this process is not to come to an eventual halt. This is all well and good, as long as the entertainment industry produces its own objects of consumption…. If, however, the entertainment industry lays claim to products of culture—and this is exactly what happens within mass culture—the immense danger arises that the life-process of society, which, like all life-processes, insatiably incorporates everything it is offered into the biological circulation of its metabolism, begins literally to devour the products of culture.” Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 181.
6. C.f. Adorno, “Bach Defended Against his Devotees,” in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 135–146. As Lydia Goehr has shown, the “Beethoven Paradigm” only accelerates this. “Beethoven showed his contemporaries and descendants that modern, liberated composers differed from their predecessors in having a choice as to the source of their livelihood and in being able (in theory at least) to make use of or exploit those choices in whatever ways they saw fit.” Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 208.
7. Theodor Adorno, “Homage to Zerlina” in Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 (London: Seagull, 2009), 48.
8. See Paul A. Kottman, “Hegel and Shakespeare on the Pastness of Art” in The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics, eds. Paul A. Kottman and Michael Squire (Munich: Fink, 2018), 163–302. As a tonic to Adorno’s hazy view of Mozart, I am reminded of Glenn Gould’s priceless quip: “Mozart died too late, rather than too soon.” See, The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (Toronto: Lester and Orphen Dennys, 1984), 32.
9. On the relevant similarities and differences between Greenberg and Adorno on this point, see Espen Hammer, Adorno: Art, Experience and Catastrophe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 75–78.
10. See also Adorno’s references to Goethe’s “Shakespearean” views, NL 1, 65.
11. See Paul A. Kottman, “Hegel and Shakespeare on the Pastness of Art,” in The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History.
12. For a recent assessment, see ‘“Durch Wunderkraft Erschienen”: Affinities between Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” Modern Language Review 107 (2012): 198–210.
13. For a suggestive pursuit of this thought, see Eva Geulen’s reading of “genre” (Gattung) in Adorno’s account of literature. Geulen writes, “genre in Adorno turns out to have quasianthropological underpinnings…The fate of aesthetic genres [Gattungen] has subterranean links with the fate of the human species [Gattung]; links that should be heard each time the word Gattung is encountered in Adorno’s work.” Eva Geulen, “Adorno and the Poetics of Genre,” in Adorno and Literature, 56.
14. “The double character of art—something that severs itself from empirical reality and thereby from society’s functional context and yet is at the same time part of empirical reality and society’s functional context—is directly apparent in the aesthetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and fauts sociaux.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated and edited by Robert Hullnot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 252.
15. Again, Espen Hammer’s helpful survey, in Adorno: Art, Experience and Catastrophe, 6–15.
16. That said, Adorno was not alone in thematizing this very irrelevance, which he elsewhere (mostly in his discussions of music) called “lateness.” Timothy Bewes, for instance, has written intriguingly of the appropriateness of Adorno’s thoughts on lateness to V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) or, before that, Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and the broader theme of “shame” in the postcolonial novel. See Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). In a similar vein, see Neil Lazarus, “Modernism and Modernity: T. W. Adorno and Contemporary White South African Literature,” Cultural Critique (Winter, 1986–1987): 131–155; Rajeev Patke, “Adorno and the Postcolonial,” New Formations 47 (2002): 133–143; Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said and Spivak (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). David Cunningham has tried to show the relevance of Adorno to the contemporary novel, in “After Adorno: The Narrator of the Contemporary European Novel,” in Adorno and Literature, 188–200. Jay Bernstein has attempted to demonstrate the relevance of Adorno for contemporary visual art, in Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). For a similar attempt, with respect to late modernist music, see Edward Said, “Glenn Gould: The Virtuoso as Intellectual,” in Music at the Limits (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 265–277.
17. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, trans., T. M. Knox, vols. 1–2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 194.
19. Ibid., 593. See also the fine discussion of Hegel and literature in Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 255–265.
20. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, 3: 1935–1938, Edited by Howard Eiland Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 87.
21. No matter the efforts of Joyce’s historicist critics, or “Bloomsday” participants, to “resituate” the novel in the concrete, mundane world of “real” Dublin.
22. That said, Adorno does seem to see in Mörike’s lyric poetry a positive reconstitution of epic; more on that below.
23. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 114.
24. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 186.
25. The relevance of this kind of Arendtian “narrative meaning-making” to psychoanalytic practice, and psychoanalytic accounts of subject-formation, is discussed in Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006); Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (New York: Routledge, 2000); Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
26. Perhaps Adorno also had Heidegger in mind when writing such passages. But, as Eva Geulen notes, Adorno seems to lift such imagery from the poet Rudolf Borchadt…who wrote “ ‘the German language…began to flow for me [war mir in Fluß greaten] (cited NL 2, 198)…Adorno quickly appropriates the motif of the ‘liquification of language’ [Verflüssigung der Sprache]…and adds formulations such as the ‘Wortstrom’ or ‘flow of words.’” See Eva Geulen, “Adorno and the Poetics of Genre,” in Adorno and Literature, 61.
27. See the fine discussion in Ulrich Plass, Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature (New York: Routledge, 2007), 74.
28. See Lydia Goehr’s comments on the origin of the title to Adorno’s text and its musical “genesis” in her “Notes to Literature by Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 335.
29. “In the briefest of spaces, [Mörike’s ‘Auf einer Wanderung’] succeeds in doing what the German epic attempted in vain, even in such projects as Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea” (NL 1, 48).
30. Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 213.
31. I realize that Adorno might have winced at this invocation of Heaney; if so, then my example is well chosen.
32. As Geulen states it: Adorno is “honest enough to leave open to speculation whether the collective undercurrent amounts to a regressive relapse into a pre-bourgeois, pre-enlightened mythic state of undifferentiatedness or whether it amounts indeed to a determinate negation of the bourgeois subject.” See Adorno and Literature, 65, note 13.
33. See Adorno and Literature, 62.
34. Adorno, NL 1:48. Adorno repeats the same judgment with respect to Georg: he managed to create “the folksong, something the German language had been groping for in vain in its greatest masters” (NL 1, 53).
35. Geulen notes that “Adorno was willing to grant to poetry what he denied to jazz”—but she does not pursue the matter further. See Adorno and Literature, 65, note 13.
36. Theodor Adorno, “On Jazz” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 477.
38. Adorno, “On Jazz,” 478.
40. Having just rejected “folkloric research” into the African origins of black music, Adorno nevertheless feels himself entitled to claim that “even in the indigenous music of the African interior, syncopation with the example of a maintained measured time seems only to belong to the lower [social] level.” Essays on Music, 478.
41. Fumi Okiji’s new book, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expressionism Revisited (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), offers a “rejoinder to Adorno’s European selectivity” by showing how “jazz, too, rejects ‘categorical determinations stamped on the empirical.’” See her generous discussion of Adorno, 1–10; also, Chapters One and Three. For a similarly generous view of Adorno as “postcolonial” thinker, see Robert Spencer, “Thoughts from Abroad: Theodor Adorno as Postcolonial Theorist,” Culture, Theory and Critique 51, no. 3 (2010): 207–221. For a more ambivalent, but still accommodating, discussion of Adorno on black music, see Fred Moten, “The Phonographic Mise-en-scène” in Black and Blue (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
42. I am quoting from a typical apology for Adorno’s “Jazz”: “Adorno’s perceptions of mass culture, however acute in many cases, were blurred by an ethnocentric provincialism of one reared within the traditions of European high culture and unable to see much beyond it.” Such apologies are doubly ridiculous—both because the apology itself seems to suggest that Adorno’s prejudicial response to jazz means we should not take it as a serious indictment of his judgment—when, of course, we may well need to do just that—and, second, for the implicit assertion that “European high culture” necessarily inculcates “ethnocentric provincialism.” Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: A Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 158. For evidence of the “typicalness” of such responses to Adorno, see Jamie Owen Daniel’s cataloguing of such responses in “Introduction to Adorno’s ‘On Jazz,’ Discourse 12, no. 1 (1989–1990): 39–44.
43. See Robert Pippin, “Negative Ethics: Adorno on the Falseness of Bourgeois Life,” in The Persistence of Subjectivity: The Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 98–120; see also, Pippin’s remarks on Adorno’s philosophy of art in “After Hegel: An Interview with Robert Pippin” in Platypus Review 36 (2011).
44. Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 67, my emphasis.
45. For an attempt to respond to the first side of Pippin’s critique—though not the second—see Espen Hammer, Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience and Catastrophe, 78, note 15 and passim.
47. Adorno, “On Jazz,” 54.
1. The Essay as Form
1. Georg Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” in Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), p. 13. (First published as Die Seele und die Formen, Berlin, E. Fleischel, 1911.)
2. Ibid., p. 10: “The essay is always concerned with something already formed, or at best, with something that has been; it is part of its essence that it does not draw something new out of an empty vacuum, but only gives a new order to such things as once lived. And because he only newly orders them, not forming something new out of the formless, he is bound to them; he must always speak ‘the truth’ about them, find, that is, the expression for their essence.”
5. René Descartes, A Discourse On Method, translated by John Veitch (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), p. 15.
6. Max Bense, “Über den Essay und seine Prosa,” Merkur 1:3 (1947), p. 418.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), pp. 532–33.
1. The Odyssey of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), Book XXIII, 11. 233ff. Adorno quotes Voss’ eighteenth-century translation.
2. Cf. Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion, New York: Columbia, 1925, p. 16; U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, Der Glaube der Hellenen, I, p. 9.
3. Odyssey, Book XXIV, 11. 152ff.
4. Schröder translates: “und wahrlich Odysseus blieb zuruck” [and truly Odysseus remained behind]. The literal translation of the ἧ as a particle of affirmation rather than explication does not alter the enigmatic character of the passage.
5. Friedrich Hölderlin, Gesamtausgabe, edited by Zinkernagel (Leipzig: lnsel, n.d.), p. 139; Hölderlin, his poems, translated by Michael Hamburger (New York: Pantheon, 1952), p. 129. There are literary-historical links between Voss and Hölderlin.
6. “No one would deny that…true similes have been in constant use from the beginnings of human speech…. But besides these, there are others which, as we have seen, are formally similes, but in reality are disguised identifications or transformations.” (J. A. K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey, Oxford: Clarendon, 1914, p. 7). Similes, accordingly, are traces of the historical process.
7. Cf. Friedrich Schelling, Werke, vol. 2 (Leipzig: F. Eckardt, 1907), p. 302 (System des transzendental ldealismus). Later, in his Philosophy of Art, Schelling expressly rejected the allegorical interpretation of Homer.
8. Cf. Friedrich Neitzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” in the Complete Works, edited by Oscar Levy, vol. 2, translated by Maximilian Mügge (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1911), pp. 51–62. (Original German title “Homers Wettkampf.”)
5. In Memory of Eichendorff
1. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, in Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 69.
2. Theodor A. Meyer, Das Stilgesetz der Poesie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1901), p. 2. (Now reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968.)
7. Looking Back on Surrealism
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 360.
9. The Artist as Deputy
1. The English translation of this work appears as “Degas Dance Drawing,” in volume 12 of the Collected Works of Paul Valéry: Degas, Manet, Moriscot, edited by Jackson Matthews, translated by David Paul (New York: Bollingen/Pantheon, 1960). Page numbers in parentheses hereon refer to this edition.
1. Cf. Georg Lukács, Balzac und der französische Realismus (Berlin: Aufbau, 1953), p. 59.
2. Bertolt Brecht, Brechts Dreigroschenbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1960), p. 93 f.
3. Karl Marx, Capital, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967; translation first published 1887), 1:589.
5. Friedrich Engels to Margaret Harkness, London, April 1888, in Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morowski, editors, Marx & Engels on Literature & Art (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973), pp. 114–16.
6. Engels to Laura Lafargue, Dec. 12, 1883, in ibid., p. 112.
7. Cf. Georg Lukács, Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels als Literaturhistoriker (Berlin: Auf bau, 1952), p. 65; and “Marx and Engels on Aesthetics,” in Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971), pp. 61–88.
8. Marquis de Sade, Histoire de Justine (Holland, 1797), 1: 13.
12. Valéry’s Deviations
1. Adorno quotes from Paul Valéry, Windstriche. Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1959), and Paul Valéry, Über Kunst. Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959). Here the passages are given in the English translations from the Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Mathews, Bollingen Series XLV. In this English edition the specific works to which Adorno refers are scattered through a number of volumes, as follows: the Rhumbs are included in volume 14, Analects, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970). The Pièces sur l’art are distributed among volume 7, The Art of Poetry, translated by Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon, 1958); volume 12, Degas Manet Morisot, translated by David Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1960); and volume 13, Aesthetics, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon, 1964), with “Histoire d’Amphion” in volume 3, Plays, translated by David Paul and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Pantheon, 1960), and the “Propos sur le progrès” in volume 10, History and Politics, translated by Denise Foliot and Jackson Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1962). In the text, the volume and page numbers provided in parentheses following a quotation refer to this edition. For a few passages I was unable to locate in the English edition I have provided my own translations and have given page references to the French original in the Pléiade edition: Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), along with the title of the work from which the passage was taken.
2. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Musik, Sprache und ihr Verhältnis im gegenwärtigen Komponieren,” in Jahresring 56/57. Ein Querschnitt durch die deutsche Literatur und Kunst der Gegenwart, Stuttgart 1956, p. 99. Reprinted in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), pp. 649ff.
3. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Klangfiguren (Berlin & Frankfurt am Main, 1959), p. 182ff. Reprinted in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 16, p. 126ff.
16. Extorted Reconciliation
1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 196–97.
2. Karl Marx, review of G. F. Daumer, Die Religion des neuen Weltalters (Hamburg, 1850), in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Reprinted Berlin, 1955, p. 107.
3. Georg Lukács, “Healthy or Sick Art?,” in Lukács, Writer & Critic and Other Essays, translated by Arthur Kahn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971; first published Merlin Press, 1970), p. 103.
4. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” this volume pp. 121–36.
5. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, translated by Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973), pp. 46–48.
6. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974).
7. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, pp. 48–51.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), I:593.
17. Trying to Understand Endgame
1. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 38. Page numbers in parentheses hereon refer to this edition.
2. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation,” in this volume, p. 226f., and Georg Lukács, Realism in Our Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
3. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, translated by E. G. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), vol. II, p. 177.
5. Ibid., p. 178; bracketed material omitted in the English translation.
7. Cf. Heinrich Rickert, Unmittelbarkeit und Sinndeutung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1939), pp. 133f.
8. Ernst Robert Curtius, Franzősischer Geist im neuen Europa (1925); reprinted in his Franzősischer Geist im zwanzigsten Jarhhundert (Bern: Francke, 1952), pp. 312–13; quoted in Rickert, p. 133f.
9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972), p. 234.
11. Cf. Gűnther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: Beck, 1956), p. 217.
12. Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1967; reprinted Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 262–63n.
13. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, translated by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 40.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, “Voraussetzungen,” in Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), pp. 136f, and Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 24f.
15. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Dissonanzen, 2d ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), pp. 34 and 44; reprinted Gesammelte Schriften, v. 14, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 39f. and 49f.
16. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 183–84.
17. Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Zwischen Immer und Nie. Gestalten und Themen der Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1971), p. 207.
18. Cf. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” Prisms, p. 260.
18. Titles
1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, n.d.), vol. 4, p. 435f. Page numbers in parentheses hereon refer to this edition.
22. Morals and Criminality
1. Karl Kraus, Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität, vol. 11 of the Werke (Munich and Vienna: A. Langen, George Müller, 1963), p. 66. Page numbers in parentheses hereon refer to this edition.
2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 652.
3. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1959), p. 44.
4. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Schriften, edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Adorno, with Friedrich Podszus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955), vol. 2, pp. 159–95; English translation in Reflections, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 239–73. The second section of Benjamin’s essay on Kraus is titled “Demon.”
5. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972), p. 12.
23. The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer
1. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975), p. 72 (translation altered).
2. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 281.
24. Commitment
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 4.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Parce quil est homme.” Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 51.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, in No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 47.
4. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 46.
6. “We know very well that pure art and empty art are the same thing and that aesthetic purism was a brilliant manoeuvre of the bourgeois of the last century who preferred to see themselves denounced as philistines rather than as exploiters.” Ibid., p. 17.
7. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1946), p. 105.
26. Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry
1. Walter Muschg, Die Zerstörung der deutschen Literatur (Munich: List, n.d.), p. 182.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 12: Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik I, edited by Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart: Frommans Verlag, 1964), p. 390.
4. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1953), vol. 2, p. 507.
5. Ibid., p. 120. Hereafter, citations to Beissner’s edition of Hölderlin’s Sämtliche Werke, known as the Kleine Stuttgarter Ausgabe, will be given in parentheses in the text, followed by a reference to the source of the English translation given, where a published translation is available. Sources of the English translations are Hölderlin, His Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger (New York: Pantheon, 1953), cited as Hamburger; Friedrich Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike, Selected Poems, translated by Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), cited as Middleton; and Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments, translated by Richard Sieburth (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), cited as Sieburth.
7. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1951), p. 7f.
21. Ibid. In a letter to Böhlendorf, Hölderlin praises Homer’s ability to “appropriate what is foreign,” something completely different from the ability to experience what is one’s own and to experience the foreign solely for the sake of what is one’s own. The tenor of that letter, which Heidegger may have been thinking of, is the opposite of what Heidegger claims for it: “But once again I assert, and offer for your examination and your use: with the advance of culture, the national in the specific sense will be given less and less priority.” (Friedrich Hölderlin, Gesammelte Briefe [Leipzig: Insel Verlag, n.d.], p. 389.)
22. Cf. Hölderlin, Gesammelte Briefe, p. 391.
23. Heidegger, Erläuterungen, p. 101f.
27. Ibid., p. 85f., note.
28. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, translated by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 92. Adorno quotes from G W. F. Hegel, WW 1, Aufsätze aus dem kritischen Journal der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Frommanns Verlag, 1958), p. 47.
30. Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 2, p. 388.
31. Heidegger, Erläuterungen, p. 16.
32. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 45; now Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), vol. 6, p. 446. In English as The Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
33. Heidegger, Erläuterungen, p. 86, note.
34. Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 2, p. 385.
35. The concretization of the poetic substance [das Gedichtete], a desideratum which Hölderlin too experienced as binding—his whole mature work asks mutely how it is possible for a poetry that has shaken off the illusion of the close at hand to become concrete—takes place only through language. The function of language in Hölderlin qualitatively outweighs the usual function of poetic language. If his poetry can no longer trust naively either to the poetically chosen word or to living experience, it hopes to attain bodily presence through the constellation of words, and in fact from a constellation that is not satisfied with the form of the logical judgment. As a unity, the latter levels out the multiplicity that lies within the words; Hölderlin is after connection, which allows words, which are condemned to abstractness, to sound, as it were, again. The first elegy of “Brot und Wein” is paradigmatic for this and extraordinarily effective. It does not restore the simple, general words it uses but instead links them to one another in a manner that reworks the strangeness proper to them, their simplicity, which is already an abstract quality, to make it an expression of alienation. Such constellations have moved across into the paratactic, even where parataxis does not emerge fully in the grammatical form or the construction of the poems.
36. According to Peter Szondi, Hellingrath, in his dissertation “Pindarübersetungen Hölderlins” [“Hölderlin’s Translations of Pindar”] (1910), was the first to describe the language of the late Hölderlin with the term from classical rhetoric, “harte Fügung” [literally, harsh arrangement or jointure]. The hiatus was another of his linguistic techniques.
37. Griechische Lyrik. Von den Anfängen bis zu Pindar (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1963), p. 163.
39. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 159f.; now Gesammelte Schriften 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 370f. English translation forthcoming from MIT Press (1992).
40. Cf. Marie Joachimi-Dege, “Lebensbild,” in Hölderlins Werke (Berlin and Leipzig: Bong, n d.), esp. p. xliif.
41. Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 2, p. 399.
42. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, Insel, n.d.), p. 761.
43. Walter Benjamin, Deutsche Menschen. Eine Folge von Briefen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), p. 41.
44. Rudolf Borchardt, Schriften. Prosa I (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1920), p. 143.
45. Symptomatic of the extent to which Hölderlin’s technique is the result of an objective conflict is the fact that, enticed by the gestural abundance of Greek particles, he continually works with pseudo-logical forms. As though complying with a learned duty, they offer the appearance of synthesis where the sequence disavows logic; hence the use of the word “denn” [for, then] in the elegy “Täglich geh ich heraus” [“Daily I go out”]. The wealth of forms, something that Hölderlin learned from classical antiquity and that survives in his paratactic constructions, is the counterweight to parataxis; the psychiatrists would call it a restitution phenomenon. In the poems written after he was actually mad it has disappeared. An attempt to derive Hölderlin’s insanity from his art the way Groddeck derived Beethoven’s deafness from his music might err in terms of etiology but reveal more of substance than could a servile clinical accuracy.
46. Cf. Benjamin, Deutsche Menschen, p. 41.
47. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, edited by Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 1ff.
48. Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 2, p. 378.
49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Modern Library, 1958), p. 223.
50. Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 2, p. 398.
27. On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie
1. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, paragraph 246, translated by T. M. Knox (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952; originally Oxford University Press), p. 78.
28. On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop
1. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1926), p. 128. Page numbers in parentheses in the text hereon refer to this edition.
29. Stefan George
1. Stefan George, Werke. Ausgabe in zwei Bänden, 2d ed., edited by Robert Bochringer (Dusseldorf and Munich: Helmut Kupper, formerly Georg Bondi, 1968), vol. 1, p. 196. English translation from The Works of Stefan George, 2d ed., translated by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), p. 190. Further citations will be to these editions, with the page number in the German edition first, followed by the page number in the English if the text in question has been included in the English selection. Where no source is given for the translation it is this volume’s translator’s.
30. Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt
1. Rudolf Borchardt, Dante deutsch (Munich and Berlin: Verlag der Bremer Presse, 1930), p. 501f.
2. Rudolf Borchardt, Gedichte (Stuttgart: Klett, 1957), p. 568f.
3. Borchardt, Dante deutsch, p. 517f.
4. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes III: L’art romantique (Paris, 1898), p. 65.
5. Rudolf Borchardt, Ausgewählte Gedichte, edited by Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 52.
31. The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience
1. Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais, 3d ed. (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1923), p. 127.
8. Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Munich and Leipzig: Dunker, 1918), p. 14f.
15. Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, p. 133.
16. Bloch, Geist der Utopie, p. 14.
32. Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften
1. This essay was written as the introduction to Walter Benjamin, Schriften, 2 vols., edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Adorno, with Friedrich Podszus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955).
2. Cf. ibid., vol. 2, p. 315ff.; now Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89), vol. III, pp. 315–22.
3. Benjamin, Reflections, p. 380.
4. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 188ff., 224f.
5. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 70.
6. Benjamin, Reflections, p. 63.
7. Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 2, p. 633; Gesammelte Schriften IV, p. 287.
8. Cf. Detlef Holz [Walter Benjamin], ed., Deutsche Menschen, Eine Folge von Briefen (Lucerne: Vita Nova, 1936), p. 90.
9. Benjamin, Reflections, p. 273.
33. Benjamin the Letter Writer
1. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966).
34. An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth
1. Cf. Rolf Hochhuth, “Die Rettung des Menschen,” in Frank Beseler, ed., Festschrift zum achzigsten Geburtstag von Georg Lukács (Berlin: Neuwied, 1965), p. 484.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, 3d ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1963), p. 43; now also Gesammelte Schriften 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 50.
3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 236.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 50.