18  The Ancient Egyptian Character of Art

The great era of modern aesthetics is quite short: It begins with Kant’s Critique of Judgment and ends with Hegel’s Aesthetics. After that, one must instead seek artistic enlightenment in glimpses and by indirect paths: a few lines from Baudelaire or Nietzsche, a letter by Mallarmé, aphorisms by Kraus, malicious remarks by Valéry, gibes by Benn. The chief purpose of aesthetics today seems to be to provide work for academic institutes. Adorno is one of the last links in that succession of writers who were able to speak of art after it had been proclaimed dead, as can be seen in many pages in his best works: Minima Moralia, Philosophy of Modern Music, Mahler, and some of the essays in Noten zur Literatur. A master of the art of obliqueness, Adorno dealt with aesthetic problems in an offhand way. Thus his last work, published under the title Aesthetische Theorie as a posthumous fragment of 533 pages with few paragraph breaks, seems all the more disconcerting.

One opens the book only to find oneself perpetually on the edge of quicksand—for Adorno this may be dialectics. One is drawn into a kind of transposed raving à la Samuel Beckett (and indeed, the work was to be dedicated to Beckett). Horror of the origin governs all of Adorno’s thought and also forces him not to allow his inordinate discourse to have a beginning: “It is simply a matter of this: from my theorem, according to which there is no philosophical primum, it also follows that one cannot build a structure of argument according to the usual gradual progression; on the contrary, one must put together the whole by a series of partial units, more or less of the same weight and arranged concentrically on the same level; for it is the constellation, not the sequence, that conveys the idea.” This is a perfect description of the archetypal form of Aesthetische Theorie, which is only partially, yet splendidly, manifested in the book.

But the book can also be described in the opposite way: as a system of aesthetics, vast in structure, immense in ambition, and constantly ashamed of itself. Massive main walls are continually being hidden by tangles of vegetation, wild underbrush, and carnivorous plants. One rediscovers the great Adorno by losing oneself in this ungovernable luxuriance, but whoever penetrates as far as the bare construction will be surprised to recognize there not a renovated Hegelian Escorial, heavy and majestic, but at most a timid Petit Trianon. (But think of the abyss that separates any Petit Trianon from the oppressive ministerial edifice evoked by so much recent aesthetics.) It is clear, therefore, that this is by no means a work to be recommended to anyone wishing to maintain the illusion of Adorno the rigorous philosopher: Here, as never before, it is easy to see that his dialectics is first of all a disguised rhetoric. But this is not to say that an orthodox dialectician is closer to the truth than a prodigious rhetorician. It is certain, however, that Adorno does not share the grim heaviness of the new dialecticians. His prose—formed in the school of Kraus and Benjamin and then emancipating itself—is a siren: Those who find it awkward generally find Wagner empty and Proust long-winded. Such people are consistent but a bit deaf to form. If anything, one would have to call it a contagious prose: Many who have heard it have then been afflicted by a stylistic rictus that also blocks their ability to think.

So let us overlook the theoretical premises of Aesthetische Theorie, which are its weakest part, and look at it instead as a work that, despite a certain academic allure, is desperately autobiographical. Miserably vexed by young people who in their eagerness for praxis spell out the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno turned back at the end to the secret center of his thought, unknown to his official followers, a center that is certainly not in Marx, nor even in Hegel, but close to the animal muteness of art. This was where Adorno had started, and here he closed his circle. Adorno conceived art, from the beginning, in the mirror of utopia. In his references to utopia, a recurrent fata morgana, one can often find signs of an appalling Enlightenment naïveté, even and especially in this last book. For example, he conveys the idea that the possibility of paradise on earth should correspond to an advanced stage of the forces of production. But “utopia” for Adorno is rather a zone of fantastic light, where the Hebrew tradition of the Kingdom, clandestine and all the stronger in its defenselessness, lives stripped of any doctrinal support. Many of Adorno’s marvelous passages filter into the dialectic thanks to a safe-conduct from utopia, as though making an arduous ascent among gnostic archons: the image of music as the gesture of bursting into tears; the sleep of Albertine watched over by Marcel and by Adorno, his philosophical double; the convergence of the realms of nature and grace in the last scene of Faust II; even the dazzling definition of art as “magic liberated from the lie of being truth”; or finally, in Aesthetische Theorie, the impassioned vindication of the “beauty of nature.” Adorno’s truth lies in the interstices of his philosophizing, fissures, tiny at times, opening on a no-man’s land between forms and thought. One could actually harvest from Aesthetische Theorie a rich anthology of these flights, which turn out to be so many blind alleys in the argument. The silent non confundar of the image, the pure extraneousness of the object that “opens its eyes,” motionless presence, hypnotic opacity—these are characteristics of art that find in Adorno an advocate whose words are disturbing: For him, the origin and goal of his thought lies in the chimerical sound of a “language of things”; in a radical, albeit concealed, revolt against his master Hegel, who had described and approved the domesticating aspect of art as a seal that serves to “remove from the external world its reluctant strangeness.”

For Adorno, instead, the central category of art is precisely the enigma. And this already serves to belittle aesthetics as “science”: “All works of art, and art in general, are enigmas; this has dogged the theory of art since ancient times. The fact that works of art say something, while at the same time concealing it, points to their enigmatic character in terms of language.” There exists for Adorno a secret alliance between nature and art to remove themselves furtively from the tyranny of the spirit, but on the other hand—and this makes all the knots inextricable and the twists and turns of thought that tries to unravel them fascinating—Adorno, like Benjamin, is completely immersed in the Enlightenment nightmare according to which the original face of nature is that of a “chain of guilt,” or rather, myth as blinding destiny. (I am speaking, of course, of the utopian-Judaic wing of the Enlightenment, not the Rousseauian wing.) To free itself, nature has to be dead: “It is owing only to their mortal element that works of art participate in reconciliation. But in this they remain slaves of myth. This is their ancient Egyptian character.” Splendid words, which only a slave of the Enlightenment could have written.