After all of this talk about psychoanalysis it seems strange to turn to someone so distant from its practice as the philosopher Theodor Adorno. He is, to my mind, the great synthesizer of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, marking the juncture between Freud’s time and ours. He takes Freud and translates his work into a critical theory that lives up to its name. Adorno is not only critical in the dynamic sense, he is so by nature— cranky, authoritarian, and discontent. Perhaps he lives out a discontent, a malaise stemming from civilization, that Freud only begins to point to.
Adorno’s thought exists on a terrain such that he always knows what is good, bad, tasteful, degraded, the right questions to ask, the ways of rigor, what is necessary, what is impossible, and never, ever, for a moment positing what is. The possible is an offense after the events of World War II. He is one of those philosophers who pointedly absorbed the trauma of the two world wars, wars that were also of major consequences for the birth of the psychoanalytic institution. We must put into perspective a modernity that Adorno sees as culminating in the events of the holocaust.
To my mind, Adorno is an important figure to wrestle with. He pushes the consequences of what he calls the fundamental disenchantment of the world that reaches its peak in the 20th century—a disenchantment that is not so distant from what Freud calls neurosis or modern nervous illness. For Adorno, the history of mankind is the history of the withdrawal of truth, authentic experience, and ethical life, and Adorno proffers to his readers the intricacy of their entanglement in this barbarism: we sanction the withdrawal. Our existence is coextensive with a fundamentally uncharitable existence. Our sentiment is always already false sentiment.
In this extreme disenchantment, of necessity pointing to the very problematic disenchantment of the world, I see in Adorno a driving hope and an unrelenting love. Adorno writes about what he loves in absolute negation. What does it mean to hold on to love through negativity? Does it not mirror the very act of disenchantment as the most powerful enchantment? As Cavell said (1979), romantics dream revolution and break their hearts. Reading Adorno is like reading the work of the heart-broken and betrayed.
I loved Adorno more than any other thinker, even Lacan. This love affair lasted almost a decade. I am not sure I can love a thinker in the same way anymore—with such slavish devotion—and I am not sure I even know why that has come to pass or whether I should be grateful for that passing. Nevertheless I know it has occurred and I fault my analysis of almost exact duration. Something in analysis changed my relation not only to Adorno, but also what I look for in relation to knowledge; what I hear in the written voice of an author. While this is certainly a chapter on the question of Adorno, it is perhaps above all a chapter on how my relation to Adorno changed during this period of time, situating the difference between his work and the question of psychoanalysis.
Adorno makes an irresistible promise to his readers one that I had for a time taken in. In his last lecture from The Problems of Moral Philosophy given in 1963, he states:
On the question of whether moral philosophy is possible today, the only thing I would be able to say is that essentially it would consist in the attempt to make conscious the critique of moral philosophy … . More than this, I believe, cannot in all decency be promised. Above all, no one can promise that the reflections that can be entertained in the realm of moral philosophy can be used to establish a canonical plan for the good life because life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfill his destiny as a human being (Adorno, 1996/2000, p. 167).
Adorno’s position is an unremitting consciousness of impotence. Reflectivity can lead to no prescription for action or redemption. Belief is always already denial. The circle is closed. I think one can love Adorno for so thoroughly closing it in the way that he does throughout his work, from one end of it to the other.
Exile is always a virtue. Hope must be shrouded in this act of errant desperation. This is the way to be nonviolent. Adorno’s philosophy as a philosophy of disenchantment is wed to the stated impossibility of transformative action or revelation. One buries the object of hope in order to bring about a fuller awareness of the world in all its contradictions. Idealism bad, materialism good, I was taught.
Psychoanalysis takes this impossibility differently. While Adorno’s philosophy positions the object as having vanished, nonexistent, and asks that one not force this object to exist (that would be to do violence to that which has already been subjugated), for psychoanalysis, this protection doesn’t necessarily reckon with the object as lost. Or, to put it another way, the object as lost is not only a source of damage. The lost object in psychoanalysis, in fact, must be irrevocably lost. Its loss is the condition of subjectivity, desire, and speech.
Adorno’s nonexistent object, while reckoning with its absence, is nonetheless given greater and greater imaginary materiality and consistency. The object becomes something nearly impossible to lose, and instead, it is posited as something to cling to. In Adorno’s because, in the quote from The Problems of Moral Philosophy, he establishes the why of its impossibility—Why? Because. No one can. There is a force of certainty that holds onto this object in a negation that ultimately negates its own quality of loss. It is the double negation of a kind of hopeless romanticism.
Why does Adorno assume here that he knows with so much certainty when he allows almost nothing the same claim? This certainty fulfills the promise of impotence. It is true that reflection cannot be used to establish a canonical plan. It is as well true that life is deformed. But the causal link is not certain, its ubiquity even less so. And who, in any case, asked for this canonical plan?
Even if instrumental reason, along with a burgeoning relativism that opposes that reason, grow absolute, Adorno’s certainty about absolutism is itself absolute. I think it is for this that I loved him without question. He promised nothing and yet in a very subtle way, I think you can see that he promises almost everything. Is this not what every hysteric loves? The object proffered to her at a distance? The distance as what purifies her demand?
What Adorno does not have is always a lament. Despair, melancholia, damage, give the lie and function as orienting signs. Adorno’s incredible gift is to think thought in contradiction, aporia, and failure, without a doubt the result of going to the heart of what he calls the damaged life. No one escapes failure, and yet, he likewise makes constant demands that one, at some point, be able to, negating the significance of this recognition. Failure is always external and too real. The memory of injury is the best of all possible objects for Adorno.
I cannot but see this as running counter to the basic affirmation of the universality of failure in Freud—an intimate ethic that I see underlying his body of work. It was through the abnormal, the aberrations, that Freud defined the space of the normal. The unconscious is our great equalizer. I think, and I hope I will show, that this is why the object is not lamented in its nonexistence but celebrated in its absence or loss. Making failure universal does not sanction violence; it is an attempt to counter it. That we may finally be able to rest on this point of emptiness is the perhaps indecent promise of the psychoanalyst.
Adorno is never master of this none, but master of one—one life, one object, one faith, one failure. Good that he’s got it under his control. Terrible that this was exactly what he wanted to avoid. When I think of this “more” of his—”more than this, I believe, cannot in all decency be promised”—it is hard for me to imagine what this more could possibly be. What more he imagined here and backed away from.
This is nowhere clearer than in Minima Moralia (1951/1974). Flashes of possibility are constantly torn asunder. Not by inevitability, but by Adorno himself. Any imagined possibility was too much for Adorno. He preferred to keep his desire mired to impossibility—a fantasy of fulfillment that is always deferred. “No poetry after Auschwitz,” as his famous declaration goes.
Adorno never really maintained a faith in language, in the possibility of speech, perhaps just silent resistance, isolated reflex-ivity, at best conscious nonparticipation. In the end, I think his only consolation was music where he cordoned off his hope and his Eros. Compartmentalization leads down the path of an impossible and impossibly virulent arrogance, born from the most desperate hope, out of an entirely sanctioned pain. This is Freud’s failed neurotic rebellion. I always forgave Adorno his essay on jazz when I would never forgive others for so much less.
Love has a certain power for Lacan as the transformative lever of the transference. Through the transference, work on what tends toward violence, repetition, narcissism, and the instrumentality of the pleasure principle, is given momentum. How? Only through an act of careful listening. It is for this reason that I find Adorno (1963/1993) at his best in a strange essay of his, Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel. His love for Hegel manifests itself in his pure desire to have you listen to his words—huge quotations without explanation. They go on for pages.
If one has read Adorno, it is uncanny to encounter these endless citations and his almost spoken words to his reader: “read, it’s good, I promise, keep reading, it’ll be worth it, wait, be patient.” Adorno’s wish is for Hegel to appear in the very formation of his sentences and the march of his thought, something more than just failure and bad equivocation as marked by Hegel’s critics. Hegel, he will say, lets go of something, akin to systematization, but Adorno is trying to understand how it is also something more than just that. Furthermore, he is beginning to ask what this has to do with language and with writing.
Adorno becomes interested in the “suspended quality associated with Hegel’s philosophy” (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 91) what is at stake in Hegel’s writing and its unfolding dialectic. This is also, of course, the moment before Hegel lapses into his greatest falsity according to Adorno: when the Phenomenology concludes on the perverse note of absolute knowledge. But here, through Hegel’s words, one is asked to make allowances. Every sentence is unsuitable to its aim. Exceeds it in fact. To allow for this excess is to read with a generosity of spirit.
Adorno is patient with Hegel. There is work to be done! There is an intention of the whole, but it is not this whole but the work done in that direction which makes up the moments of understanding. He displaces the final aim as, perhaps, a necessary fantasy. In this kind of work, the whole, this end, can become an untruth that does not thereby render the work false. If anything, it gives it its truth all the more:
Hegel makes himself inaccessible to anyone who is not familiar with his overall intention … . At every point one must bear in mind, however provisionally, what Hegel is after; one must illuminate him from behind, so to speak … . But if one stakes everything on this one can falsify him again. One then easily creates what has thus far been injurious to interpretation, namely, an empty consciousness of the system that is incompatible with the fact that the system is not intended to form an abstract higher-order concept with regard to its moment but rather to achieve its truth only in and through the concrete moments” (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 92).
To illuminate from behind is to play without injuring the possibility for interpretation, without the stakes becoming too high, too concrete, too essential, nor, too abstract, too empty, or too distant. This play with a demand that forces one to go to work in tension with false intentions is the play of reading Hegel.
He picks up a dual demand—”to float along, to let himself be borne by the current and not to force the momentary to linger,” as well as, to “develop an intellectual slow-motion procedure, to slow down the tempo at the cloudy places in such a way that they do not evaporate and their motion can be seen” (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 123). The reading, just as the content read, is split into extremes: slow/fast, concrete/ abstract. Balancing these extremes is part of the work in an encounter with another’s work.
Adorno contrasts this kind of reading with one that he calls fetishistic. The fetishistic demand is a demand that the work one is delivered be complete. This is always a kind of false consciousness. It leaves out the necessity of time articulated in the distinction between what is familiar and what is not yet familiar, what already exists and what is new—a temporal organizing in a dialectic of retroactive force and retrogressive consciousness. This is to listen with a speculative ear. In wanting to keep things freed from time’s articulation, the speculative ear runs deaf.
The work must be bound by the play of the language one hears, not the imperative of knowledge or the claim that one wants to make on another’s final or initial intent. There is a rhythm of opening and closing. He will say that Hegel’s ideal is nonargumentative thought, a philosophy “of identity stretched to the breaking point” where relaxation must be retained (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 141). In reading Hegel nonargumentatively, flashes of illumination will appear that cannot be extinguished. It’s a wonderful moment in Adorno whereby a moment has the possibility of redemption.
Adorno seems to stumble upon Hegel’s language, developing a theory of expression before he will write his final, posthumously published work, Aesthetic Theory (1969/1997). This reading of Hegel will form part of the basis of his argument on the play of forces at work in the art object. For Adorno we must try to give voice to the inexpressible—situating it as the evanescent itself, the object driven away by the violence of thought and the instrumental tension of reason.
One realizes the fragility of sensuous life. Both intellectual abstraction and brute materiality refuse this fragility, no less sensuality. The object as one that is lost resists expression. This resistance doesn’t have to be merely a source of nostalgia. It can also be a way of locating a possible place for contact with whatever sensuality is left to us, even if that is only the expression of the pain experienced at these very limits. This possibility is a very different one from the Adorno of the impossibility of moral philosophy or the good life.
But a question remains for me. How can Adorno understand the necessity to put aside demands upon language for clarity, identity stretched to the breaking point, when he will then condescend to a belief that there can be, at some point, some correspondence with actuality? Adorno will always grow argumentative. Adorno’s most stringent disciples are ruthlessly argumentative, critical, and knowing.
These moments his aesthetics theorize are eclipsed by this knowing edge. The evanescent is fundamentally contradicted. Adorno will say with consternation that Hegel, in the end, destroys his own work. He makes do with declarations: “theses that say that something is so when the work has not yet been done” (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 94). Like father, like son, Jack of all trades, master of none.
Hegel, Adorno says, does not allow something into his own language. He sides too much with objectivity: “what gives it that air [of sovereignty] is the preponderance of quasi-oral delivery over the written text. Vagueness, something that cannot be eliminated in dialectic, becomes a defect in Hegel because he did not include an antidote to it in his language” (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 100). He looms too large in his own text. Is it not the same with Adorno? Adorno who—while creating the paratactic antidote, his particular writing style—dictates to his wife his work, Aesthetic Theory, during the last years of his life back in Germany?
Such a strange scene: this philosopher and his stenographer wife. The book is almost unreadable. Adorno’s labor would also come to overshadow his work too much, bringing this movement he so carefully details to a halt. In a moment of great irony Adorno writes, “the art of reading [Hegel] should take note of where something new begins, some content, and where a machine that was not intended to be a machine is simply running and ought not to keep doing so” (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 95).
I will read to see where the machine that never should have been a machine is simply running and ought not to keep doing so, loving him as much as he continued to love Hegel, beyond false intent, for whatever he can bring of the new. It is a love that tries to stay the slide onto the side of repetition, desperate to slow down the movement to the moment between beats—near silence and with pause. Adorno’s time will soon come. From one side, I cannot slow it down enough. From yet another, it is also true that I could not have precipitated the crossing fast enough.
When I read Adorno, I see that he wanted to stay in this before, this silence, because he knew it would lapse. Adorno ends this essay saying that Hegel’s work “says, with pathos, nonidentity … . The dialectic could be consistent only in sacrificing consistency by following its own logic to the end. These, and nothing less, are the stakes in understanding Hegel” (Adorno, 1963/1993, p. 148). It is the term sacrifice that fascinates me.
Adorno declares that Hegel is inconsistent in his attempt to achieve a consistency without true sacrifice. What is true sacrifice? Adorno lays emphasis less on the nature of this sacrifice than on the situation as one of mere pathos. He doesn’t seem able to draw out his own conclusion. What we know about this sacrifice is that it concerns a sacrifice of one’s own consistency or desire for integrity. Drawing out one’s logic to its very end involves a significant risk and wager. “A subject’s nonidentity without sacrifice would be utopian” (Adorno, 1966/1973, p. 281).
Desire, as Lacan understood it, is a movement that works in and through risk and failure. Desire bears an intrinsic relation with loss, with the delicate history of one’s most intimate and frightening wishes. It is this movement of desire that the neurotic cannot bear. Paralysis, dissatisfaction, complaint, feels more secure than this work with desire. Underneath this inhibition, as with Freud, lies a greediness that knows no obstacles.
While I read this essay of Adorno’s, I hear in him as he reads Hegel the movement of analysis as I have come to understand it through Lacan. Adorno, with Hegel, out of love for Hegel, allowed himself momentarily to be a dupe. When he lapses from this position as dupe, I hear the dangers of analysis taken too far—interpretation as a knowing argument. While Adorno ends in a place that I have come to criticize, he nevertheless embodies in this essay the patience necessary in any reading and any listening taken on without any certainty.
I hear his demand. What he wants must be so in reality. His knowledge increases in proportion with this growing demand. Likewise I refuse this demand (how can I but not). While there may not be an immediate return or a future guarantee there is a promise that can be made to continue to listen. This is a promise that refuses knowledge, refuses to declare either the demand or the world on which it is turned unfit, and thereby to listen to what is beyond it.
The object will not be relegated to an elsewhere or given status in the beyond—it will be nowhere in as much as one comes to know that this object is the obstacle not the solution. It is for this reason that the analyst, for Lacan, must fall. You need the analyst to know that you do not need them any longer—you have to risk desiring them to find out that to have them is to lose them. I had to assume that Adorno knew without question in order to find my position as a subject who is allowed knowledge in her own right. I needed Adorno in order to say to you now that I do not need him any longer. Perhaps if there is anything we know it is that this is both the risk of love and the bearing-out of disenchantment.
So it stands that where I failed for all these years with Adorno was to refuse to know where Adorno disappointed me. I think I can say to you that I erred in faith not bad conscience. The place of knowledge was left open just enough—hysterical ignorance out of hysterical reverence. I never got as far as my own certainty, just an identification with his. So one has to wait, hope, for a passing, for the fall. The letter was but a dream and a wish that can be brought under question.
Adorno is the supposed subject of knowledge situated in the place of the analyst in the transference. He couldn’t resist taking up this position. For a time, face to face with his silence, his impossible desire, his certainty—I would remain utterly ignorant. So I had to find a way to read him as he read Hegel, looking for what is new out of what is old and should not continue running. It was through Lacan that I found the means of doing so.
Now there are two. I am better off with both of them, reverence split between Adorno and Lacan. Adorno who I loved without question, and the form it takes now, after Lacan. Being overpowered by Adorno’s system may be as much from my own phantasy as that which dictated his path. Don’t we always locate these points of correspondence in those we read so intimately? Be patient with me. Wait before you throw your hands up in the face of what seems like the inevitable distortions of love. We might arrive somewhere quite unexpected.
Adorno states in Minima Moralia, “if today the subject is vanishing, aphorisms take upon themselves the duty to consider the evanescent itself as essential” (Adorno, 1951/1974, p. 16). Where Adorno leaves off in raising to its apogee this question of the revolutionary character of the evanescent moment one can find Lacan in the running. The evanescent is desire. And it is always this that the hysteric chases as a question about her own being. What woman is and what does woman want collapse around this point of desire that is more her than she knows. It was Lacan’s genius to describe the evanescent in a curious equivalence between the unconscious as nonidentity, and woman as Other. This is, of course, a rather strange equivalence, but perhaps with Adorno we should admit that “in psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations” (Adorno, 1951/1974, p. 49).
Adorno never really had faith in the practice, no less the institution, of psychoanalysis. His criticisms are well founded. “Psychoanalysis itself,” he says, “is castrated by its conventionalization: sexual motives, partly disavowed and partly approved are made totally insignificant … . The last grandly conceived theorem of bourgeois self-criticism has become a means of making bourgeois self-alienation, in its final phase, absolute, and of rendering ineffectual the lingering awareness of the ancient wound in which lies hope of a better future” (Adorno, 1951/1974, p. 66). Psychoanalysis as a theory or practice is no longer critical of alienation but emblematic of it—a therapeutic celebration of reflexive individuality. The only hope is the wound itself, our last site of contact with the sensuous life of desire in its damaged form. Psychoanalysis, far from addressing this, glosses it in its utter conventionality.
Beyond what he specifically says about psychoanalysis it is more the question of this wound, for Lacan always feminine, that I find the greatest correspondence between Adorno’s thought and psychoanalysis. If Adorno is right that the authority of the analyst should return to the authority of this ancient wound, it is not however purely because of its veracity. For Lacan, the question of the wound is something like a first step—a kind of hystericization of discourse that splits it right down the middle like a massive gash. Words are given life by virtue of being able to sustain this tension. The wound is only a way station to desire.
Lacan, taking off from Hegel, points out that the hysteric cannot exit from her system of accusation, centered on this wound. The beautiful soul is she who fails to recognize the disorder in herself that she bemoans. Work with her is work with bringing her closer to this truth— one might say the truth of her split-wounded subjectivity. The hope is a hope that what may come of this contact with the wound would be a rekindling of Eros.
I was surprised to find that what Adorno says about love is not so indistinguishable from Lacan; that around this question of the wounds of love and the love of wounds, they seem to meet in fascinating ways. Lacan famously said that to love is to give what one does not have, using love as a psychoanalyst should, contextualized by loss. And the soul, Adorno says, dawns on love only in its absence. “Soul itself is the longing of the soulless for redemption” (Adorno, 1951/1974, p. 170). Love is there “only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength” (Adorno, 1951/1974, p. 192). They both play so beautifully with the loss and longing, pain and nostalgia, that is inseparable from loving.
The timbre of these reflections center on the negative sensuousness of love—its impossible yearning for what has already been bartered away or lost. What is gained is always gained too late or where it no longer counts in the way one wants. Love is the gift of this weakness. While love in Lacan forms the very center and crux of his thought, in Adorno it is only one among many passing reflections, not entirely without bearing, but quickly overridden.
Love, which takes on so many guises in psychoanalytic work, is for Lacan that which points in the direction of a potential sacrifice, the sacrifice of what he calls jouissance, or, the insular enjoyment of our symptoms. The patient transfers onto the analyst all the vicissitudes of a repeatable fantasy that sustains their jouissance and blocks access to desire. Only then can the historical truth of the analysand, embedded in their symptom, perhaps be unraveled. Through analytic work—the staging of the fantasy—jouissance potentially gives way to the unique and singular desire that sustains a patient’s relation to the world. We saw this in miniature in Leclaire’s analysis of Freud.
This relay between desire and jouissance is also the task Adorno leaves to love in Minima Moralia:
If people were no longer possessions they could no longer be exchanged. True affection would be one that speaks specifically to the other, and becomes attached to a beloved feature and not to the idol of personality, the reflected image of possession. The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration towards totality. But, in another sense it is exclusive, nevertheless; the experience indissolu-bly bound up with it does not indeed forbid replacement, but by its very essence precludes it. The protection of anything quite definite is that it cannot be repeated which is just why it tolerates what is different (Adorno, 1951/1974, p. 79).
I find this passage remarkable. Adorno knew his Freud well and seems to follow his thoughts in On Narcissism (1914) where he discerns the libidinal difference between the act of loving and the act of being loved. The more narcissistic the love the more the object exists solely as a prop for the self, a support for a fantasy. The specificity of desire, of what one loves in a beloved, is the only antidote to this utilitarian relationship to the other.
Love, for Adorno, potentially moves beyond the aspiration to totality or total possession. Love is attached to the other in their radical difference from oneself. True love, like true sacrifice in Adorno’s reading of Hegel, holds to a relationship that abandons the need for self-consistency. The fetishistic demand is overturned. These reflections on love in Adorno are not, however, a theoretical work on the question of desire, no less an insistence on what it promises. They are only a way station for his reflections on the realm of the aesthetic. This is particularly true in his late work.
Nonetheless, this movement he delineates from sentimentality, to love, to the realm of the aesthetic, seems to me close to the very path of sublimation itself. What Freud always indicated by love and work were those areas of life, at a remove from the constraints of self-preservation, that require something of a transformation of desire. Jouissance tends to treat the object as one closer to an object of need without any inherent particularity to that object beyond its quality as sating. Sublimation requires a sacrifice of jouissance, or, as Lacan put it, a renunciation of jouissance so that it can condescend to the inverted ladder of desire.
The difference between a theory of desire and an aesthetic theory is perhaps minimal. Or, to render the question more positively, what they share is important, hinging on a question of representation in relation to desire. Art for Adorno is a realm in which truth might appear precisely because it is has no real substantial value. It can engage us at our boundary points, the limit between inside and outside, the visible and invisible, individual and broader culture. Life, dragged down to the level of brute need makes the realm of aesthetic truth a necessity in its very superfluity. Aesthetics is a reawakening of truth in an act that runs counter to this thread of bare isolated and anesthetic life, providing, for Adorno, the missing cross roads.
Lacan as well, when he tries to imagine the possibility of what psychoanalysis preserves, gives an answer that I think is close to Adorno’s elevation of the realm of aesthetics in this regard. If there is no good life in the false one, psychoanalysis offers the possibility of a private life—a curious term indeed—where Lacan locates the greatest potential for creation. Private life is the place of private fictions. Not only can one see the effect they hold over us, we might, for once, not delude ourselves about the fictive, created, perhaps aesthetic, nature of our lives. We might then find some room for play and invention.
So there is something about this private sphere where private sexuality and cultural necessity irrevocably cross. Lacan says:
Private means everything that preserves on this delicate point of what is involved in the sexual act and of everything that flows from it, in the pairing of individuals, in the “you are my wife, I am your husband” and other essential devices on another register that we know well, namely that of fiction. This is what allows there to hold up in a field in which we analysts introduce an order of relativity which, as you see, is not at all easy to master; and which can be mastered on a single condition, If we are able to recognize the place we hold in it, we, as analysts, not as analysts who are a subject of knowledge but as analysts who are instruments of revelation (Lacan, 1967, Lecture XV, p. 18).
Like Freud’s act of loosening the bond between drive and object in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905a), it gives new meaning to the idea of creation—the constructed nature of the object of desire. We must recognize the place we hold in it, and only then, the further possibilities we can make of it.
Semblance, fiction, can have just as much bearing as the long sought after thing-in-itself. This is perhaps one truth that Lacan and Adorno incontestably share. This is the precarious advantage afforded the analyst who doesn’t need to play a game of knowledge or determine the reality of a given situation. The analyst plays a game of revelation— this delicate point where all that flows from the sexual defines the place of possibility. It is, to my mind, a powerful redefinition of sublimation. It is also the revolutionary potential that Adorno sees in great works of art.
Adorno’s claim then is that semblance disenchants the disenchanted world. It is not so far from Lacan for whom semblance restores the possibility of a private life, particularly through the reenchanting power of language, restoring to words their magic which has been diluted by daily life. If nonidentity is the vain pursuit of the artwork and the vain pursuit of psychoanalysis, in vain they must manage. Both are removed from the constraints of self-preservation, making room for some new possibility within the impossibility of a form of work that has no supposed value in the world of things—a work of art in a utilitarian world, a patient taking time to speak to another in an uneconomical way.
It is precisely for this reason that Lacan says the analyst has no private life with respect to his analysands—this enabling their own. This “inhumanity” of the analyst allows another face of the human to appear. In fact, against the desperate human link in the dream of the letter and the vase, Laplanche makes a similar claims in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, among other works. For Laplanche, only with the analyst in the place of the most extreme Otherness, as a provocateur, can psychoanalysis transform the economics of the drive. The drive for Laplanche is propped up on and yet incommensurate with the language of need or self-preservation—what he calls the more human side. The drive, maintaining this liminal space, produces a place of possible refuge for the subject in something entirely anonymous, something entirely Other (Laplanche, 1999).
Likewise, Rieff (1959) will call Freud’s concept of the drive dynamic and critical; and for this, he calls Freud the most populous, moral, and intimate of the modern thinkers. In the Freudian system the drive takes what is biological and inserts it into the sphere of subjectivity. It is only in this narrow and narrowly defined realm that one can find a defense against repressive culture. What is most extimate—biology—is shown as wholly intimate to subjectivity. Thus sexuality is not only a problem, indeed it is, but it contains the only solution to a subjectivity hemmed in on all sides.
In Laplanche’s and Rieff’s conceptualization, the external response to a subject can only but fail. In fact, it must fail. The object, as we said before, is lost. There is not a perfect match between this inner life of desire and the object it seeks externally. It is only through a radical conceptualization of this failure that we move away from, for Reiff, blaming society in a deluded liberal hopefulness, or maintaining a fundamentally normative, and hence moralistic, conception of a subject. Subjectivity begins with this internal failure and only within that failure locates possibility—what I think both would consider sublimation. Any other conceptualization will run straight into the aporia of diluting sexuality in order to rescue either an eternal subject (Jung) or an eternal reality construed as utopia (Adler).
Sublimation requires this failure. Perhaps the link between sublimation and the revolutionary character of the artwork has some validity after all. We escape domination through a kind of uncolonizable sexuality. It is through desire that we get as close as we can to the thing, das Ding, for Lacan—and we do so through semblance. We raise the object, as Lacan says, to the dignity of the thing. Nonidentity is subjectively held in place and given back its possibility by the Freudian drive.
For Adorno, the artwork demands nonidentity—a truth that springs from a subject—attempting to overturn the situation where the subject is the condition for the vanishing of the object. In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1969/1997) the pursuit of nonidentity means that the artwork must go beyond itself, threatening its own internal consistency. In Lacanian terms, one risks death in the liquidation of all anchoring points that shore up the subject: “the most enduring result of Hegelian logic is that the individual is not flatly for himself. In himself, he is otherness and linked with others. What is, is more than it is. This more is not imposed upon it but what remains immanent to it, as that which has been pushed out of it. In that sense, the nonidentical would be the thing’s own identity against its identifications” (Adorno, 1969/1997, p. 174). The power of the artwork is that it confronts us with the sublime as the realm that is always beyond our own narcissism. What is, as he says, is more than it is.
Thus aesthetic experience is the experience of letting the self, self-preservation, fall away. Although it does not completely succeed in realizing this potential, the potential is experienced. This movement, Adorno says, shatters conscious experience of the self as ultimate and absolute. The sublime experience contains both the primal feelings of powerlessness—in Kant, weakness before natural beauty—and, the demonic feelings of omnipotence. The first is given back its existence in consciousness (as natural experience), as the second is stripped of its existence as consciousness (as unnatural experience). This is for Adorno the sublime trembling between nature and freedom, determination and will. We should, I think, hear sublimation in this reevocation of the Kantian concept of the Sublime.
While the cure for sickness for Adorno was always the necessity that it grow worse, that the wounds inflicted by humanity continue to fester and torment our psyche—lest one escape into innocence—here we might see how the symptom builds up in tension in order to fall out. The symptom contains the very means of its own transformation. Lacan uses the word semblance as a synonym for the symptom—a fiction whose truth is more powerful than any supposed reality. The symptom literally causes one to shudder and tremble, like in so many hysterics.
Semblance has the power to heal the unhealable wound with the spear that inflicted it. I can’t think of anything else more poignantly asked for by a hysteric. Art is the ever broken promise of happiness for Adorno, and perhaps to analyze the hysteric is to make her put to use this ever-broken promise rather than give in to “the ecstasy of sacrifice where delusion recognizes its own humiliation and becomes equal to the enormity of domination that in real life it is powerless to overcome” (Adorno, 1951/1974, p. 66). Again, semblance disenchants the disenchanted world.
Nevertheless, I would say that in the end, with Adorno, this aim is ultimately submerged under a final aim, which is always aesthetic theory itself. We must, Adorno says, transform the semblance of the work of art into thought. It is, at this point, that I can follow Adorno no longer—this need for meta-interpretation, no less the must of his must transform. The play of semblance is not discontinuous from truth or thought. This play, as in clinical work, is often enough. Ask any psychoanalyst who works with children whether a child who plays doesn’t always already know the power of what he or she is in the midst of communicating. I cannot abide by this separation between thought and action.
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was left unfinished. In this strange work of sprawling dictation, it leaves you waiting on the precipice. Psychoanalysis, for my part, cannot culminate in an after-thought, in this act of recoil at the edge. What is most interesting about symptoms is that they contain their very own solution; their elucidation in analysis is their unraveling. One might say we stay with the sickness growing worse, which has resonance with Lacan’s late seminar … Ou Pire, … Or Worse (1971b).
Adorno sees with his critical edge what he has no power to overcome, like patients well aware of their own patterns they hardly but fail not to repeat. It is as hard to read, as it is to hear:
Fantasy alone, today consigned to the realm of the unconscious and proscribed from knowledge as a childish, injudicious rudiment, can establish that relation between objects which is the irrevocable source of all judgment: should fantasy be driven out, judgment too, the real act of knowledge is exorcised. But the castration of perception by a court of control that denies it any anticipatory desire, forces it thereby into a pattern of helplessly reiterating what is already known … Once this last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology (Adorno, 1966/1973, p. 123).
Adorno, despite being able to articulate the necessity of fantasy, semblance, aesthetics—where we can find this last trace of emotion— will isolate himself from its power of judgment. Fantasy and desire seem too irrational in his fear of the irrational, bound by his fear of domination. Without this, everything is tautology.
Sentimentality, fear, sadness, is a failure with respect to the life of desire. Like the hysterical fantasy that one can be loved without the risk of desire—the nostalgia for better days is never far off. “It becomes a matter of plucking the fixity and magnetism of the death drive out from recollection; of wresting from sadness its false morality, as Lacan calls it” (Miele, 2011). Desire holds on to more possibility. It allows for a different economy, a different mode of exchange. As Moustapha Safouan will say In Praise of Hysteria, the dream of a desire born of love “can only sharpen the antinomy between love and desire” (Safouan, 1980, p. 58).
The question of love and desire is a question I have been asking of Adorno from the beginning. Love in the hysteric is the “fibers of being tending toward an object” (Safouan, 1980). This object, as psychoanalysis has understood it, “brings no plentitude, no satisfaction” and love is this frustration. At its root, love “is annulment and abandonment, to say nothing of destruction by the object” (Safouan, 1980, p. 58). In On Narcissism (1914), Freud states that the ego, in the act of loving, must bear a kind of depletion. This depletion is different from narcissistic love that seeks a return from the object. The latter would be closer to Lacan’s definition of love, and the former, desire. Freud goes on to wonder if this depletion, this cost, in loving is at the root of the structure of sublimation.
This cost, dare I say sacrifice, is one that the hysteric cannot often endure. It is here where she recoils before the act. And yet, Lacan says that the hysteric knows the value of desire over love, even if in her hysteria she aims not to know it. He says that in experience love and desire are two very different things and it is always she who tells us about this difference:
She knows very well the value of desire, namely … desire has a relationship to being, even in it’s most limited, it’s most shortsighted and fetishistic, let us say the word, its most stupid form … that woman will attach the value of final proof that it is indeed to her that he addresses himself … it nevertheless remains that if a man desires another woman, and that she knows that even if what the man loves is only her slipper, the hem of her dress, or the paint that she puts on her face, it is here that the homage to being is produced (Lacan, 1958, L6.3.59, pp. 402–403).
So the hysteric’s love always borders on this lie, or rather, it is here that the hysteric lies about love. Lacan, it must be said, loves the hysteric and returns psychoanalysis to her in a way no other post-Freudian theorist has.
She teaches us, he says, about truth, that is the truth of love and desire; the truth that truth is not the opposite of semblance but continuous with it; and the truth of the value of speech when it has bearing on one’s most intimate desires. In the hysteric’s very negativity, her woundedness, she shows us the truth of the subject. Her wounds point to the powerful way that fictions function and fracture, delineating this cutting edge of rhetoric as the only instrument of revelation, as Lacan called it. Without this, we would not be able to understand the nature of symptoms.
It was for this reason that I turned to Adorno’s aesthetics for nowhere else does he come closer to this objective power of semblance, circling around a question of love and truth. Perhaps like a good hysteric, he knows not what he wields. And, it is difficult to avoid falling prey to hysterical nostalgia. The hysteric, at her worst, is always bound up with the attempt to make love essential, for semblance to be the condition of solid reality, even if that can be nothing more than her accusation against it. The desire that underwrites semblance takes on the character of a demand and stagnates there. I suppose this is the one criticism of Adorno I hold to—a criticism of his implacable romanticism. Caught in the traps of his own game, he laments the impossible.
In a moment of striking irony, Adorno says, contesting the value of poetic-theology, “if every symbol symbolizes nothing but another symbol, another conceptuality, their core remains empty” (Adorno, 1966/1973, p. 399). This emptiness, as we know, is Lacan’s fundamental affirmation; it is his theory of sublimation. The signifier, like the vase, is this radical emptiness as the possibility of creation. We cannot abandon the characteristics of the signifier for the sake of something more full, for the sake of some supposed reality. As with my dream, it is always a fantasy of mastery.
Allow me a major divergence before concluding. One of the main threads in the work of the classicist Nicole Loraux on Greek antiquity (1995, 1985/1987, 1988/1998) is to etymologically deconstruct the words used in the epic poems and ancient tragedies to understand something about their guiding ethic. In elevating this play of the sig-nifier, particularly as it approaches the themes of the body and passions, embedded in sexual or parental relations, she traces the structure of desire. Their desire is, against what many have claimed, not so far removed from our own nearly two and half thousand years later. We are, contra Adorno, just as disenchanted now as then. Or, perhaps better, it is not merely a question about enchantment then, disenchantment now. History comes to us through form, in particular the formal structures of language, as much then as now—telling us something different about this line between enchantment and disenchantment.
What Loraux demonstrates is that the imagery surrounding the feminine body provides the critical interpretive key when reading ancient Greek texts etymologically (much like Leclaire). What comes to the foreground with respect to desire, especially in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, is a kind of circling around the feminine object. Helen, Medea, Antigone, Clytaemnestra, Cassandra, Electra, Hecuba, and so many others, are the major catalysts with which Athens must contend. Perhaps they are the most highly desired objects- these women are driven mad by life, stolen and exchanged, sacrificed, or even turned into conduits for the gods. As you can imagine, this makes them anything but unambivalent figures.
For Loarux, the law of the difference between the sexes is, as with any fundamental difference, a demand made upon thought. These after-waves of thought’s encounter are read for the chains of meaning, the circulation of signifiers—similar to the way Freud conceptualizes the demand that the drive makes upon the mind for a certain amount of work. The law of difference is a frontier, difficult to maintain or transgress, and the signifiers for masculinity or femininity remain for the most part empty shifters. She tries to stay the impulse to over psychoanalyze. But this difference, in itself, is a means of reading: monuments of imagined bodies, lines of influence and distortion, the trace of enjoyment or anxiety, transitional spaces and modes of reversal. In short, a whole world of mythic arrangements and transmutations.
How else can we think about the body, she asks, as if thinking about the body immediately required us to think about something else. This is, she reminds us, the logic of metaphor. “With that,” she says, “I would wager that it is in line with the Greeks that Freud starting with the idea of “the anatomical distinction between the sexes,” created the theory of an “enlarged” sexuality extending into the realm of the psyche and a bisexuality that is at once generalized and basic to the human species, “so that the contexts of theoretical constructions of pure masculinity and pure femininity remain uncertain” (1995, p. 8). Since the feminine, like the unconscious, retains the mark of negation it becomes the richest of all possible discriminating factors.
The feminine body, acting like a negative gravitational center, poses the biggest threat to identity. Seeing this organization in the unfolding drama in the major works, Loraux defines a set of coordinates that construct a kind of Greek ethos. She notes that in tragedy men seem to die solely by the sword while women die of strangulation. Strangulation, in particular hanging, is the most loathsome of deaths for the Greeks who believed that the body must remain open. Like animal sacrifice, the good deaths are those that spill blood as a gift to the Gods. A good death comes in the form of an open wound. She says:
Greek tradition is quick to contrast the wound that opens a man’s body with the dangerous closure that in more than one way dooms the female body to strangulation. Perhaps, in fact, Greek thinking about the masculine finds it advantageous to close women’s bodies all the better to open those of men … . This can probably be seen as a way of denying the “simple” evidence that women’s bodies are inherently open-slit (Loraux, 1985/1987, p. 99).
Loraux concludes that the basic imagery that informs classical thought, even acts as its principle and most richly discriminating operator, concerns the feminine body—her body is essentially the one that is open, that sheds blood, that acts as a conduit between two necks, two mouths, the passage that essentially gives life. It is this slit/open body that supports Athenian male identity, Andres, where it is reappropriated. Harboring the feminine in the masculine ostensibly makes one all the more virile. The dream of feminine interiority becomes the outward banner of the glory of the polis. Feminine pain is transformed into the epic property of the wounded warrior hero. The politics of the city of Athens is defined by the military ideal of aner or the glory of man in his warrior virility (Loraux, 1981/2006). Identity establishes itself with the simultaneous appropriation and negation of the feminine.
Even further, Plato, the most magnanimous culprit, banishes drama and poetry from the city as a disturbing illusion in Book X of The Republic—there shall be no more mimesis. It is an act of exile that Loraux cannot decouple from the important tie she establishes between tragedy and the feminine. Reflection, thought, or logos, is defined antithetically to the dangerous (feminine) passions. Woman, she says, is entombed in philosophy as its empty center. Woman is exiled in the name of a supposedly degendered universe that is always already masculine.
It is important to understand that Loraux does not see this as a feminist reading. She does not intend this as a polemical device in the service of anything like the equality between the sexes or a wistful return to the matriarchal. Rather, strict adherence to the law of the absolute difference between the sexes, perhaps as a placeholder for a difficult concept of difference in general, only points in the direction of a potential truth. Like trying to think about the body or sex, equality, truth, and justice must remain opaque. They are not objects of knowledge. But in rendering these objects opaque one can find one’s bearings. Any a priori definition will preclude the capacity to continue reading.
It is this act of continuing, like an ethos of the open body, that Loraux foregrounds. Male dreams of interiority, pregnancy fantasies from Zeus onward, or the radical displacement of the feminine by logos, forms the nexus from which we read this feminine operator. Ane r is not only what defines the polis, but becomes the sole possibility for recognition as one of its citizens. Ane r is the equivalent of Athenian and the very principle of identity. In particular, it is a military identity whose glory will overthrow even death. Here, nonidentity finds once again its alliance with woman, the slave, desire, the body, and the unconscious, and nothing seems more dangerous to the unity of this polis.
While Adorno bemoans the violence done to all that stands outside of identity, with Loraux we locate a possibility of affirmation in reading from this empty core, even if that means only being able to read and unread a text. Like Penelope in The Odyssey, knowing the virtues of mobility, her desire is bound by an ethic of openness. Creation ex nihilo. She will weave and unweaves as she chooses. When the time comes, she will recognize her love. To the others, they die by their own sword.