For their often unbridgeable theoretical differences and personal antipathies, their mutual nonreception and their sometimes vehement struggle over the legacy of other thinkers’ intellectual enterprises (especially that of Walter Benjamin), Adorno and Hannah Arendt share an intense engagement with the concept of tradition. As German-Jewish contemporaries, Adorno and Arendt came of age in the same intellectual and cultural milieu—that of Weimar Republic Germany—and both philosophers escaped the National Socialist’s state-sponsored industrial killing by seeking exile in the United States.1 Perhaps what has been suggested with regard to Arendt, namely that her “life and thought were passionately linked to core predicaments of the modern Jewish experience” and deserve to be read as part of the “extraordinary history of post-emancipation German-Jewish intellectuals and their wider engagement with the imperatives of German culture and its later great breakdown,” is not an inappropriate way of framing Adorno’s life and thought as well.2 Although Arendt chose to remain in the United States after World War II while Adorno returned to his native Frankfurt, both thinkers accompanied the reconstruction of postwar German culture with a critical eye and a series of decisive theoretical interventions.
One might say that, for both heterogeneous thinkers, the personal and intellectual experience of the rise of German fascism, of exile, and of the Shoah marked the occasion for reflecting on the conditions of possibility for relating to a German and Western tradition within the episteme that Adorno famously termed “after Auschwitz.” If Adorno’s statement in the section of Negative Dialectics entitled “Meditations on Metaphysics”—that a “new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen”—can give rise to a new form of reflection, this new thinking cannot be considered in isolation from the concept of tradition, a tradition that has created certain high points of human achievement and at the same time failed to prevent the rupture of civilization that is marked by the Shoah.3 In the summer of 1950, Arendt writes in the final paragraph of her preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism: “We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.” To which she resolutely adds a concluding statement with which Adorno would hardly disagree: “This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion, are vain.”4 The task of thinking tradition after its fall thus embodies, for both Arendt and Adorno, one of the most urgent challenges of the present. If the inherited concept of tradition can be defined succinctly as a “discursive construct of beliefs and conventions based on the presumption of historical continuity in the transmission of inherited patterns across generations”—that is, as “a normative mode of knowledge through which an image of society’s relationship to time is understood and through which ascribed linkages to the past are conceived as sources of authority for institutions and actions in the present”—then the question as to how to relate to tradition in modernity can no longer be taken for granted.5 In this case, how to live and think in a time and space whose relation to tradition has become tenuous and elusive assumes particular urgency.
In thinking through this urgent and uneasy relation, it behooves us to recall the essential importance of the concept of tradition for all thought and experience. In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison puts it well when he reminds us of our fundamental relation to the legacy of our predecessors: “Our basic human institutions are authored, always and from the very start, by those who came before. The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from—indeed, it arises from—our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow the footsteps of the dead.”6 This “necrocratic” disposition can be articulated as follows:
Whether we are conscious of it or not we do the will of our ancestors: our commandments come to us from their realm; their precedents are our law; we submit to their dictates, even when we rebel against them. Our diligence, hardihood, rectitude, and heroism, but also our folly, spite, rancor, and pathologies, are so many signatures of the dead on the contracts that seal our identities. We inherit their obsessions; assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities, ideologies, and very often their superstitions; and often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations. Why this servitude? We have no choice. Only the dead can grant us legitimacy. Left to ourselves we are all bastards. In exchange for legitimacy, which humans need and crave more than anything else, we surrender ourselves to their dominion. We may, in our modern modes, ignore or reject their ancient authority; yet if we are to gain a margin of real freedom—if we are to become “absolutely modern,” as Rimbaud put it—we must begin by first acknowledging the traditional claims that such authority has on us.7
If Harrison proceeds to investigate what he calls the “humic foundations of our life world,” by which he means foundations “whose contents have been buried so that they can be reclaimed by the future,” he does so by focusing on the practice of burying the dead as a way both to achieve closure and to claim for oneself the place—a ground “humanized” through the corpse—in which one’s dead are interred.8 The many secular afterlives of the dead can be investigated in terms of the categories of place and dwelling, as Harrison does, but also in the less concrete and more elusive realm of an intellectual tradition that holds sway over us, even when that tradition appears remote or ruptured. There can be no thought and no experience without a visible or invisible mediation by the dead who predate us and against whose ideas, laws, practices, premises, and modes of being in the world we measure ourselves.
Adorno and Arendt, each in their own singular ways, are fully attuned to the dominion of the dead and to the fundamental thinking of tradition to which it gives rise. Although the internally variegated concept of tradition, alongside related notions such as inheritance, legacy, and transmission, is never far from the respective archives of Adorno’s and Arendt’s thinking—including, for instance, Adorno’s relation to Hegelian thought as a problem of inheriting a tradition (as we shall see in chapter 3) or Arendt’s account of totalitarianism in relation to its break with tradition as well as her frequent reflections on the question of tradition in the fragments of her Denktagebuch, the “thought-diary” she kept from 1950 until 1973—I will focus my discussion here on two specific texts in which the concept is treated with sustained focus and explicit urgency. They are the pivotal first chapter or “exercise,” as Arendt preferred to say, of her first collection of philosophical essays, Between Past and Future: “Tradition and the Modern Age,” and Adorno’s 1966 essay “On Tradition” (“Über Tradition”), later included in his essay collection Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. By placing Arendt’s and Adorno’s thinking of tradition into a constellation, my aim is to show that Arendt develops a critical concept of tradition that attends to the historical, intellectual, and experiential gap in our modern thinking of temporality, whereas Adorno’s concept of tradition pivots on a negatively dialectical gesture of thinking in which the value and potentiality of tradition are affirmed precisely by repudiating the concept of tradition itself. Taken together, these concepts of tradition work to cross-illuminate the aporetic structure of tradition and the hidden critical possibilities emerging from this very structure.
Before we turn to these two texts by Arendt and Adorno, it will be instructive first to bring the two thinkers of tradition together in the critical terrain of their shared relation to Benjamin, a writer and mutual friend whose legacy also divides them. The intense intellectual and personal friendship between Benjamin and Adorno—sometimes difficult and fraught, as their extensive correspondence amply reveals—lasted until Benjamin’s suicide in 1940. The simultaneous friendship between Benjamin and Arendt, though more indirect and mediated, was intimate enough for Benjamin personally to entrust Arendt, shortly before his death, with carrying the handwritten manuscript that would come to symbolize his intellectual legacy, the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” into safety in the United States.9 To be sure, the disparate interpretations of Benjamin’s thinking starkly demarcates a line between, on the one side, Adorno and the members of the early Frankfurt School, and, on the other, Arendt, who insisted that, without “realizing it, Benjamin actually had more in common with Heidegger’s remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones that had sea-changed into pearls and coral . . . than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends.”10 And it certainly behooves us not to underestimate or to minimize the deep tensions between Arendt and Adorno that emerged, in part, as a result of their heterogeneous relations to Benjamin, tensions that Gershom Scholem lucidly records when recalling a conversation with Arendt from as early as 1938: “Hannah Arendt had a profound aversion [tiefgehende Abneigung] to the circle around the Institute, particularly Horkheimer and Adorno,” an aversion that “was mutual” and that often centered on her uncharitable interpretation of “the Institute’s conduct toward Benjamin.”11 Yet what I wish to provide here, before we turn to Arendt’s and Adorno’s own theses on tradition, is not the staging of an arm-wrestling match between the two thinkers over Benjamin’s legacy but rather a preparatory analysis of Arendt’s and Adorno’s differently modulated and discretely accented relation to Benjamin’s mobilization of tradition that simultaneously, as we shall see, animated their own.
In section 3, entitled “The Pearl Diver,” of her capacious, if idiosyncratic, introductory essay on Benjamin—first written in German and later included, in an English version, both as the introduction to Benjamin’s essay collection Illuminations and in Arendt’s Men in Dark Times—Arendt insists on the centrality of the thinking of tradition to Benjamin’s project. She writes that insofar “as the past has been transmitted as tradition [Sofern Vergangenheit als Tradition überliefert ist], it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his life-time were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past.” To which Arendt adds: “In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency [gedankenlosen Selbstzufriedenheit].”12 She thus focuses in her interpretation of Benjamin on those aspects of his work that speak to a decisive break in the thinking of tradition, a moment in which the authority of what has been transmitted calls itself into question. As we shall see, this idea of a fundamental break in the concept and function of tradition also will be decisive for her own development of the notion of tradition. In Arendt’s understanding of Benjamin’s project, a broken tradition cannot be mended, and this very irreparability calls for a rethinking of the past that does not content itself with the precepts provided by available historical models. If a past is not merely transmissible as tradition, it now enters a realm of citability (“Zitierbarkeit”), in which it can be alluded to, or invoked, indirectly—that is to say, always in an elsewhere and at another time—but no longer relied upon as the stable gesture of a historically reliable handing-down. Those who find themselves in the postlapsarian state of a tradition in ruins must learn to become especially sensitive readers of citation.13
Arendt locates concrete examples of citability that, from the perspective of tradition, have replaced the transmissibility of the past, in such variegated Benjaminian practices as the idiomatic use of citation in his own works, his conflicted relation to the tradition of Judaism, his obsession with Kafka’s literary challenge to the tradition of handed-down truths, his interpretive engagement with the problem of translation, and his theoretical reflections on, as well as concrete habits of, collecting such seemingly marginal cultural objects as children’s books and books written by the mentally ill. Even Benjamin’s peculiar choice of scholarly subject matter—the less-than-illustrious literary period of the German Baroque—illustrates, for Arendt, his particular way of relating to a broken tradition. As she argues, “Benjamin’s choice, baroque in a double sense, has an exact counterpart in Scholem’s strange decision to approach Judaism via the Cabala—that is, that part of the Hebrew literature which is untransmitted and untransmissible in terms of Jewish tradition, in which it has always had the odor of something downright disreputable.”14 For Arendt, nothing “showed more clearly” the ways in which “there was no such thing as a ‘return’ either to the German or the European or the Jewish tradition than the choices of these fields of study” because it “was an implicit admission that the past spoke directly only through things that had not been handed down, whose seeming closeness to the present was thus due precisely to their exotic character, which ruled out all claims to a binding authority.”15 It is thus only when the end of transmissibility has made itself felt in thinking that the citability of the past emerges to structure one’s critical relation to tradition.
Arendt pays such close attention to the Benjaminian practices of citing and collecting because they stage the need to come to terms with the ways in which thinking can and must relate to a past (and, by extension, a futurity) without having any recourse to tradition available to guide it. Benjamin’s figure of the collector, for instance, does not merely follow the trajectories of a handed-down tradition but relates to the (often marginal and culturally unsanctioned) objects of his passion in unpredictable ways. Whereas tradition, Arendt argues, “puts the past in order, not just chronologically but first of all systematically in that it separates the positive from the negative, the orthodox from the heretical, that which is obligatory and relevant from the mass of irrelevant or merely interesting opinions and data,” the passion of the collector pulls thought and experience in a rather different direction. After all, the “collector’s passion . . . is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not so much because it is a passion as because it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object—something that is classifiable—but is inflamed by its ‘genuineness,’ its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification.”16 Whereas “tradition discriminates, the collector levels all differences,” even in cases in which tradition itself may be the field of collection.17 The special force field to which Arendt points in this connection is one in which the “heir and preserver unexpectedly turns into a destroyer [verwandelt sich so der Erbe und Bewahrer in einen Zerstörer],” inciting a certain rebellion against the traditional and the classifiable that makes itself felt even in the impulse to preserve and to protect for the future.18 This Benjaminian double gesture of preserving and destroying, lamenting the loss of tradition while also furthering it, is precisely what attracts Arendt to Benjamin’s thinking. Indeed, she will allow it to exert a decisive influence on her own account of the problem of tradition.
As with Arendt, Benjamin is never far from Adorno’s vigilant thinking of tradition and the uncoercive gaze he casts upon it, albeit in different terms. In 1966, the same year in which he publishes his essay “On Tradition,” Adorno includes in his Negative Dialectics a concentrated and apodictic meditation on the concept of tradition that pivots to a significant degree on Benjamin. In the section “Tradition und Erkenntnis” (“Tradition and Cognition”), Adorno criticizes certain tendencies in contemporary mainstream philosophy that exclude the thinking of tradition altogether. “The hitherto dominant philosophy of the modern age,” he points out, “wishes to eliminate the traditional moments of thinking, dehistoricize the contents and import of thought, and assign history to a special, fact-gathering branch of science.”19 This dehistoricization of thinking, which disregards the tradition in which it nevertheless stands, endorses the supposedly transhistorical and timeless nature of its logical operations, while regarding the historical and tradition-related dimensions of every thought as merely the aberrant expression of superstition. Although humans had “every reason to criticize authority” that was based on the “ecclesiastically institutional traditions,” a critique that had as its purpose the enabling of human beings to make use of their own capacity for free and nondogmatic critical thought, this repression of the historical and the traditional has assumed a sinister underbelly.20 According to Adorno, a wholesale rejection of tradition and history amounts to an ill-advised “critique” through which philosophers “misconceived that tradition is immanent in cognition itself, that it serves to mediate between its objects,” and to disregard this historical or tradition-based aspect of knowledge is to “distort the objects” by means of a “stabilizing objectification.”21 This gesture is fatal because “cognition as such, even in a form detached from substance, takes part in tradition as unconscious remembrance [unbewußte Erinnerung]; there is no question that could simply be posed in which knowing of past things is not preserved and spurred onward.”22 In other words, even when modes of cognition believe themselves to be far removed from the tradition out of which they flow—they may contest or reject it—something of their own genealogy, the contexts of their genesis, remains inscribed in them. To illustrate his argument, Adorno points to Husserl’s insistence, in his late work, on the idea of an inner historicity (“innere Historizität”) in which thinking cannot remain merely formal or self-referential but also is interwoven with content and, by extension, with the history of that content—its tradition. In other words, there can be no thinking of time without that which is actually in it. Every thought, every idea, no matter how fervently it wishes to see itself as autonomous and as removed from the contingencies of time and space, has a history. This history ineluctably binds it to a tradition with which it must struggle to come to terms.
In the undialectical striving for autonomy from tradition, Adorno sees an unwitting expression of a latently or openly bourgeois consciousness seeking to compensate for its own mortality and finitude by insisting on absolute traditionlessness, which is to say, a supposed timelessness. At this crucial point of the argument, he refers to Benjamin by suggesting: “Benjamin innervated this when he strictly foreswore the ideal of autonomy and submitted his thought to tradition [sein Denken einer Tradition unterstellte]—although to a voluntarily installed, subjectively chosen tradition that is as unauthoritative as it accuses autarkic thought of being.”23 Adorno, like Arendt, thus identifies in Benjamin a key element in the modern thinking of tradition. The specifically Adornean reading of Benjamin on tradition insists on a negatively dialectical movement, according to which Benjamin calls into question the idea of autonomy of philosophical thinking from such dimensions as tradition and rhetoric in a way that still preserves the tension between thought and tradition. For Benjamin, tradition is not something that could simply be left behind in the name of a supposed autonomy; tradition also needs to be reconfigured, reinterpreted, which is to say reread, reinstalled always one more time. Thinking unfolds in relation to a nonfixed, dynamic conception of tradition that is not based on authority or handed-down doctrine but on an active engagement with the tradition of tradition itself. This is also why, for Adorno, a critical appreciation of Benjamin’s complex relation to tradition may help us to broaden what could be seen as the “overly narrow initial questions in the Critique of Pure Reason,” namely “how a thinking obliged to relinquish tradition might preserve and transform tradition.”24 In other words, by learning to read Benjamin on tradition, we might articulate how Kantian and post-Kantian critique could begin to relate to the tradition in which it is inscribed and with which it simultaneously breaks. Such a learning how to read would bind the understanding of tradition and its breaks to the interminable question of exegesis and interpretation. Here,
philosophy’s methexis in tradition would only be a determined negation of tradition. Philosophy is founded on the texts it criticizes [Sie wird gestiftet von den Texten, die sie kritisiert]. They are brought to it by the tradition they embody, and it is in dealing with them that the conduct of philosophy becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the move from philosophy to interpretation [Übergang von Philosophie an Deutung], which exalts neither what is interpreted [das Gedeutete] nor the symbol into an absolute but seeks what is said to be true there where thought secularizes the irretrievable Ur-image of scared texts [wo der Gedanke das unwiederbringliche Urbild heiliger Texte säkularisiert].25
For Adorno, philosophical thinking thus relates to the tradition in which every act of thinking is inscribed by attending to the very texts that enable critical reflection in the first place. To show itself responsible to a tradition, or to a broken tradition in ruins, philosophical thought must realize that it is based on a restless and ever-vigilant interpretation and reinscription of the texts that make thinking what it is. With Benjamin, Adorno emphasizes the textual and linguistic nature that characterizes any close and attentive relation between critical thought and the tradition. Although the active and sensitive interpretation of texts that underlies this relation to the tradition has broken with the scene of exegetical reading that informs the biblical tradition, it also keeps alive certain elements of that tradition in a radically secularized way. Such secularized textual exegesis, however, is no longer performed in the service of some putative transcendental signified or of the absolute (from the Latin absolvere, to detach or untie), but rather in the name of rebinding the critical act into the texts that first made it possible, what Benjamin himself in his preparatory notes for the Arcades Project once called “the image that is read,” which is to say, “the image of the Now of recognizability,” which “bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, dangerous moment that lies at the ground of all reading.”26 Any negatively dialectical thinking of the tradition would have to take into account this critical and dangerous moment that calls for an act of emphatic and patient reading.
We are now in a position to examine more closely, first, Arendt’s own understanding of tradition, which, like Adorno’s, takes its point of departure in Benjamin. If Étienne Balibar’s assessment is right that Arendt belongs to those thinkers “who never wrote the same book twice,” never even composing “two successive books from the same point of view” because she allowed “herself to become transformed by the writing itself,” this does not mean that there is no continuity in her thinking or that the “permanence of certain crucial questions” do not remain “the horizon of the philosophical quest, and even account for its variations.”27 Focusing on her thinking of tradition in one particular text, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in order to query her thinking of tradition more generally, is thus an interpretive gesture that locates, in an exemplary site, the conceptual impulses of a thought that permeates, in a variety of tonalities and modulations, her oeuvre as a whole. This text on the concept of tradition in modernity, which Arendt wrote in English, had its origin in lectures for the Gauss Seminars in Criticism that she delivered at Princeton University in October and November 1953; its core concern with the thinking of tradition would never leave her.28
As Arendt sets out to specify the political and experiential determinations and overdeterminations of our being in the world, she also works to concretize our understanding of a certain “gap between past and future,” as the subtitle of the preface to Between Past and Future reads. The difficulty and provocation of thinking this gap informs, directly or indirectly, the entirety of her work, and it is no accident that she herself considered the text in which the gap is first addressed at length and in the context of a thinking of tradition, Between Past and Future, her best book.29 The gap of which Arendt speaks is not to be confused simply with the moment of the present, the contemporary situatedness of an experience, being, or act of thinking that is neither already a matter of the past nor as yet the matter of a time to come. What she has in mind, rather, is a consideration of the ways in which the Now-Time of our political and epistemological situatedness reveals a certain empty space, a space of reflection in which the tradition of a past and its relation to an unnamed futurity can no longer be taken for granted but must become the object of thinking and questioning. Following the great challenges to the notion of tradition in the movements of modernization that characterize the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the subsequent fundamental rupture of tradition in the twentieth century marked by the Shoah and its aftermath, tradition presents itself more than ever as a question mark and as a demand for sustained interpretive engagement with it. This, for Arendt, is an especially difficult demand because “we seem to be neither equipped nor prepared for this activity of thinking, of settling down in the gap between past and future.” And she continues by providing reasons for this assessment:
For a very long time in our history, actually throughout the thousands of years that followed upon the foundation of Rome and were determined by Roman concepts, this gap was bridged over by what, since the Romans, we have called tradition. That this tradition has worn thinner and thinner as the modern age progressed is a secret to nobody. When the thread of tradition finally broke, the gap between past and future ceased to be a condition peculiar only to the activity of thought and restricted as an experience to those few who made thinking their primary business. It became a tangible reality and perplexity for all; that is, it became a fact of political relevance.30
The tradition that once could be relied upon for guidance and orientation has left us in a position of vulnerability and exposedness. The modern age, what in German is called “Neuzeit” or “new time,” is a time in which not only a new thinking is required but also one in which time itself must be thought anew. Part of this rethinking requires that the gap between past and future, the gap that we inhabit and inherit, must itself be the locus that gives rise to thinking. Such thinking is, according to Arendt’s conception, not confined to philosophers and critical theorists; on the contrary, it becomes a general condition and as such emerges as a thoroughly urgent political concept. It is worth noting that this point is so salient to her that she takes it up again in her final work, The Life of the Mind, where, in volume 1—devoted to the very question of thinking—she emphasizes again that the gap between past and future has put so much pressure on our thinking and being that it is “no longer a part of the ‘history of ideas’ but of our political history, the history of the world.”31
It is thus no accident that Between Past and Future commences with a quotation from the French writer René Char: “Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament—‘our inheritance was left to us by no testament,’ ” which suggests, among many other things, that the inheritance and legacy of the tradition that is handed down to us needs to be reread and reinterpreted because no testament and no instruction manual will teach us how to understand it.32 Tradition not only hands something down to us, a stable content to be consumed or appropriated, but it also asks us to learn how to read it, to interpret it without guidance and without quite knowing how. The Western tradition itself cannot guide us in how to read it and how to become proper heirs of its legacies; it requires a new kind of thinking. Yet Arendt’s own reflections on the question of tradition are not meant as pragmatic solutions to the problem of how to bridge the gap between past and future by reconceptualizing the concept of tradition itself. In keeping with her preferred model, the “exercise” that also is encoded in the subtitle of the book in which her reflections on tradition occur, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, she provides “exercises” whose “only aim is to gain experience in how to think; they do not contain prescriptions on what to think or which truths to hold.” To which she adds: “Least of all do they intend to retie the broken thread of tradition or to invent some newfangled surrogates with which to fill the gap between past and future,” because their “concern is solely with how to move in this gap—the only region perhaps where truth will eventually appear.”33 Learning how to relate to tradition through certain exercises in thinking thus always also entails learning to move within a gap. The strategy that Arendt pursues is therefore not predicated upon the conception of a movement that pulls the one who thinks out of a predicament but rather installs him ever more firmly in it, which is to say, allows him to navigate, within the space of the gap in which he is situated, the vagaries and vicissitudes of tradition ever more vigilantly.
In order to generate a thinking of the gap that confronts tradition as such—which one could call the tradition of tradition, tradition as tradition—it may be strategically useful first to interrogate a certain strand within a tradition. The specificity of a tradition can then be placed into conceptual relation with the concept of tradition as such, and the two conceptual poles may illuminate each other reciprocally. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons why Arendt embarks on her examination of tradition by focusing on a particular tradition, the tradition of political thought. Her motivation for doing so cannot be reduced to her often-expressed wish not to be considered a philosopher but rather a political theorist; it is rather grounded in the requirements of thinking the complex tradition itself.34 This specific Western tradition, she reminds us, “had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle” and, in her view, “came to a no less definitive end in the theories of Karl Marx.”35 Although the state of human affairs in the cave allegory of The Republic is cast by Plato in terms of a need to leave behind darkness and deception so that the “clear sky of eternal ideas” may be viewed, Marx’s model, Arendt emphasizes, locates the truth of philosophical inquiry not in some space outside of human affairs but rather within them, within our particular modes of living together. Yet, according to Arendt’s account, this shift from the Greek beginning of the tradition of political thought to its supposed Marxian end necessitates a reflection on the very concepts of beginning and end within the conceptual orbit of thinking (a) tradition. She therefore avers:
The beginning and the end of the tradition have this in common: that the elementary problems of politics never come as clearly to light in their immediate and simple urgency as when they are first formulated and they receive their final challenge . . . . Only beginning and end are, so to speak, pure or unmodulated; and the fundamental chord therefore never strikes its listeners more forcefully and more beautifully than when it first sends its harmonizing sound into the world and never more irritatingly and jarringly than it still continues to be heard in a world whose sounds—and thought—it can no longer bring into harmony. A random remark which Plato made in his last work: “The beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves all things” . . . is true of our tradition; as long as its beginning was alive, it could save all things and bring them into harmony. By the same token, it became destructive as it came to its end—to say nothing of the aftermath of confusion and helplessness which came after the tradition ended and in which we live today.36
Arendt thus argues that the beginning and the end of a tradition disclose a problem or state of affairs—here, the political as such—more clearly and more palpably than does an ongoing tradition, a tradition-saturated way of being in the world in which one finds oneself and in which one is not normally on the lookout for the causes of beginnings and ends or for ways of relating to what certain beginnings and ends may have to teach one about this or that aspect of a tradition. It is thus in the moment of a certain rupture, marked precisely by the terms “beginning” and “end,” that tradition enters most forcefully into our orbit of thinking. The thought of tradition, we might say, is always dislocated in time and space, the thought of a time that, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet has it, is “out of joint.” If Plato, as Arendt enlists him here, invokes the simile of a beginning being like a divinity, and if he relates this god-likeness of the beginning to a certain redemptive quality, it is because a beginning typically harbors potentiality and promise, the salutary prospect of a world yet to be created. Yet the felt end or loss of tradition, embodied in the postlapsarian condition in which thinking finds itself today, offers no such promise. It relates to tradition after the end of tradition; its art, perhaps, is the art that is still created after Hegel’s pronouncement of the end of art; and its general perspective is one of afterness, with which it must constantly grapple. If there is no “Hegelian dialectic between continuity and discontinuity in Arendt’s work because the contradiction is not sublated,” as Agnes Heller reminds us, we could say it is because Arendt refuses to inscribe continuity and discontinuity, main modes of the concepts of tradition, into the linearity and homogeneity of any single historical narrative.37 Tradition resides, rather, as Arendt puts it in her 1946 review essay on Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Vergil, in an “empty space,” in which the continuity of historical and personal experience, the unfolding itinerary of one’s being between the “no-longer” and the “not-yet,” cannot be taken for granted anymore.38
To concretize the difference between the beginning of the tradition of political theory and its end, Arendt’s strategy is to emphasize Marx’s appropriation of these two poles under the sign of a post-Hegelian inflection. The utopian element in Marx’s political thought appears as such only if one neglects the perspective that it also works “to reproduce the political and social conditions of the same Athenian city-state which was the model of experience for Plato and Aristotle, and therefore the foundation on which our tradition rests.”39 Marx’s predictions thus break with tradition and at the same time tacitly reproduce certain assumptions and premises within it; the ending that they augur also marks the reinscription of a beginning, a silent survival, under altered conditions, of elements that obtained at the beginning of the tradition of political philosophy. Arendt’s argument in relation to Marx is that the “hold which the tradition had over him” was not fully visible to him, which unwittingly led him to an interpretation of his times “in terms and concepts having their origin in an altogether different historical period.”40 Nevertheless, the special quality of Marx’s political philosophy, which also marked the ending of the tradition, rests on the particular imbrication of two modes of relating to tradition, namely, “the perception of certain trends in the present which could no longer be understood in the framework of the tradition, and the traditional concepts and ideals by which Marx himself understood and integrated them.”41 One might say that it is through the double perspective of taking on the tradition, both in the sense of resisting it and showing oneself responsible to it, that Arendt’s Marx—even when she is critical of him, as she often can be—sheds light on the transformative aspects of thinking tradition.
These two imbricated modes of relating to the tradition illuminate, in Arendt’s account, the idea that “Marx’s own attitude to the tradition of political thought was one of conscious rebellion,” in which he “challenges the traditional God, the traditional estimate of labor, and the traditional glorification of reason.”42 What is more, the tradition of “philosophy from Plato to Hegel was ‘not of this world,’ whether it was Plato describing the philosopher as the man whose body only inhabits the city of his fellow men, or Hegel admitting that, from the point of view of common sense, philosophy is world stood on its head, a verkehrte Welt.” But Marx, by contrast, issues a “challenge to tradition” by locating the labor of conceptual analysis precisely in the “world of human affairs,” among those inhabitants of the material world seeking guidance and inspiration in their search for freedom and justice.43 One way of glossing the specificity of Arendt’s argument is to point out that, according to the logic of her narrative, Marx could have issued a challenge to tradition only by also being thoroughly informed by, and fully saturated with, the same tradition. A formidable challenge to tradition, even a rebellion against it, can be articulated only when the central features of that tradition already are so well understood and internalized by a thinker that, even by breaking with tradition, he also affirms it. That is to say, by not following in ways that already are specific and germane to it, he also issues a tacit affirmation of the very tradition he criticizes. If Arendt is right that Marx “tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools,” a productive predicament arises.44 By employing, one could say, the very tools and premises of what he criticizes precisely in order to criticize it, the critic’s gesture of departure from what is criticized also unwittingly ties him ever more closely to the most important elements in that which he criticizes. It is out of this simultaneous departure from, and affirmation of, the tradition, that the thinking of tradition itself gains innovative impulses, that is, remains alive in the first place.
Yet to identify, as Arendt does, the productive predicament of taking on the tradition should not suggest any kind of automatism, in which a critic of and in the tradition simply could employ this relation as a recipe or program to be followed in the critical act or in the service of this or that preestablished political agenda. Such an assumption would presuppose an awareness of the workings of tradition that cannot simply be taken for granted. Arendt thus reminds us that “this tradition, its hold on Western man’s thought, has never depended on his consciousness of it.”45 On the contrary, Arendt’s argument depends on the assumption that it is not necessary to presuppose conscious awareness of the forces of tradition when one wishes to analyze the ways in which tradition has worked to inflect the thinking and behavior of those who dwell in its long shadow. She suggests, however, that two specific moments can be identified as historical exceptions to this generally unconscious relation between the human being and tradition. Arendt thus points, first of all, to the moment “when the Romans adopted classical Greek thought and culture as their own spiritual tradition and thereby decided historically that tradition was to have a permanent formative influence on European civilization.”46 This moment was so decisive because prior to “the Romans such a thing as tradition was unknown; with them it became and after them it remained the guiding thread through the past and the chain to which each new generation knowingly or unknowingly was bound in its understanding of the world and its own experience.”47 As Arendt was undoubtedly aware, the Greeks had no concept, word, or mode of being that was equivalent to the Latin term used by the Romans: traditio or “handing down.”48 It is worth noting that here she implicitly follows the epistemo-genealogical conception of her teacher Heidegger, for whom the fateful transition from ancient Greek to Roman culture, and thus from the Greek tradition to a Latin context that was not prepared for it, defines some of the core tensions inherent in Western metaphysical thought.49 Arendt’s unique inflection of this general model consists in her argument that the Roman appropriation of ancient Greek tradition was not just one episode in the history of tradition, one form of taking on tradition among others; it was in fact the foundational moment and primal scene of the idea of assuming, possessing, and conforming to the perceived precepts of tradition.50 One could even go so far as to claim that, within the Western world, this Roman moment embodied the invention of the very concept of “tradition.”
The other historical point in Western culture that is particularly saturated with an intense consciousness of relating to tradition is, in Arendt’s account, the period of Romanticism. It is here, with the Romantics, that “we again encounter an exalted consciousness and glorification of tradition.”51 One should be mindful of the fact that this turn of argument also connects Arendt’s understanding of the place of Romanticism in the thinking of tradition implicitly to Benjamin’s, for it is hardly by chance that in her essay on Benjamin, Arendt quotes his statement that Romanticism functioned as the “last movement that once more saved tradition.”52 Although it could be objected at this point that the discovery or rediscovery of antiquity by the Renaissance marked an equally momentous encounter with tradition, it needs to be pointed out that for Arendt this moment rather marked an “attempt to break the fetters of tradition” precisely by returning to “the sources themselves to establish a past over which tradition would have no hold.”53 In that case, tradition was turned against tradition in an attempt to gain the possibility of a certain freedom in relation to the sway of tradition. The Romantics, by contrast, self-consciously worked to “place the discussion of tradition on the agenda of the nineteenth century,” at a time when the world was beginning to change in such fundamental ways that the very idea of a tradition, or the notion of taking recourse to the precepts and resources of a tradition as a self-evident good, no longer could be taken for granted.54 One way of conceptualizing the state of affairs that Arendt attempts to describe is to say that prior to the Romantics and the nineteenth century, the new had to justify itself vis-à-vis the old and the established in order to gain acceptance; now the epistemic situation was shifting the other way: the old had to justify its continued existence and acceptance in light of the sheer newness of the new, which, even prior to having proved itself or having demonstrated its alleged superiority over the old, lays claim to cultural and ideological dominance and preference.
But to say, as Arendt does, that the tradition has come to an end and that “the break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact” that cannot be reversed is not the same as to suggest that the tradition therefore no longer has any sway over our consciousness. On the contrary, as she is careful to argue, “it sometimes seems that this power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force and as the memory of its beginning recedes; it may even reveal its full coercive force only after its end has come and men no longer even rebel against it.”55 It is, in other words, precisely in those moments when the tradition has ceased to be seen as a force to contend with as the ultimate measuring stick against which contemporary thoughts and actions should be compared, that it silently and invisibly holds us in its grip. Among the lessons to be learned, in Arendt’s account of tradition, from the historical example of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche—the three philosophers to whom most of the second part of her text is dedicated—is thus an appreciation of their exemplary status as thinkers on the cusp of a tradition that is about to be lost irretrievably yet continues to haunt us. If Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche “are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its authority,” it is because they were great critics of a tradition who “were still held by the categorical framework of the great tradition.”56 Pointing to their immediate predecessor, Hegel, Arendt writes:
The thread of historical continuity was the first substitute for tradition; by means of it, the overwhelming mass of the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and conflicting authorities, all of which had somehow been able to function together, were reduced to a unilinear, dialectically consistent development actually designed to repudiate not tradition as such, but the authority of all traditions. Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche remained Hegelians insofar as they saw the history of past philosophy as one dialectically developed whole; their great merit was that they radicalized this new approach toward the past in the only way it could still be further developed, namely, in questioning the conceptual hierarchy which had ruled Western philosophy since Plato and which Hegel had still taken for granted.57
According to Arendt’s account, Hegel’s theoretical model of historical continuity came to occupy the place that was vacated by an absent tradition. From this perspective, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche all can be seen as both furthering and breaking with the Hegelian system that had insinuated itself, through its historicity, into the empty space of tradition. One could say that, like Hegel, they each generated what Jean-François Lyotard would much later name a “master narrative” to explain the totality of a historical development—be it a subversive transition from doubt to belief, be it a critique of political economy, be it the transvaluation of all values—while simultaneously attempting to part in decisive ways with the traditional conceptual hierarchies and premises operative in the tradition of Western metaphysics.
By the same token, Arendt locates within this very rupture a subtle yet decisive movement of “turning.” This general turning of and within the tradition is one of the names that can be bestowed on the “images and similes of leaps, inversion, and turning concepts upside down,” whether it concerns Kierkegaard’s “leap from doubt into belief,” Marx’s turning of Hegel “right side up again,” or Nietzsche’s inverted Platonism and his transvaluation of all values.58 It is important to register, however, that in Arendt’s account of tradition the turning she identifies not only allows her to place three transformative thinkers of the tradition, for all their individual distinctiveness, into special syntactical relation. After all, her argument mobilizes the figure of turning also to describe a key movement by which tradition itself operates:
The turning operations with which the tradition ends bring the beginning to light in a twofold sense. The very assertion of one side of the opposites—fides against intellectus, practice against theory, perishable life against permanent, unchanging, suprasensual truth—necessarily brings to light the repudiated opposite and shows that both have meaning and significance only in this opposition. Furthermore, to think in terms of such opposites is not a matter of course, but is grounded in a first great turning operation on which all others ultimately are based because it established the opposites in whose tension the tradition moves.59
The first or foundational turning-about that called tradition into presence was, according to Arendt’s account, the parable of the cave in Plato’s Republic, where the chains of the cave dwellers are broken through a special kind of “turning,” through which the images and the worlds of the cave dwellers are radically reinterpreted in favor of the clear sky of eternal ideas. Yet the account and function of a turning operation in tradition simultaneously emphasize the ways in which the tradition relies on an often invisible connection between two opposite poles, two opposites that condition each other and in whose simultaneous distinction and mutual dependence a thinking of tradition unfolds. For, according to Arendt’s reflections, elements in and of a tradition acquire meaning only in direct relation to their supposed other, their excluded opposite. The latter may include the supposedly nontraditional or a-traditional element, a form of thinking and acting that has been rejected as false or other, or an idea that is believed to have been contradicted and discredited by its opposite and thus no longer can lay claim to any validity. Tradition, according to this model, proceeds not through moments of affirmed identity but rather through difference, which is to say a difference that retroactively produces all effects of positive identity. It is as though Arendt’s turn of argument about the reliance of tradition on the thinking of repressed or disarticulated opposites prefigures Jacques Derrida’s later analyses of the fateful working of binary oppositions in the canonical thought pattern of Western metaphysics as well as his interpretive engagements with what he calls the “logic of supplementarity,” in which a term, concept, or idea assumes significance only in terms of its actual or implied differential comparison with its opposite, its other. For Arendt, there can be no thinking of tradition that does not strive to come to terms with the logic of repressed binary oppositions that, since The Republic, make any tradition what it is.
It is this conceptual framework that propels Arendt to argue that Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche not only serve as prime exemplars of a powerful challenge to tradition but that they each also tacitly embody particular excesses to the very challenges they issue. That is to say, the “significance of Kierkegaard’s, Marx’s, and Nietzsche’s challenges to the tradition—through none of them would have been possible without the synthesizing achievement of Hegel and his concept of history—is that they constitute a much more radical turning-about than the mere upside-down operations” of various binary oppositions would seem to suggest.60 The “turning-about” that we witness at work in these thinkers “goes to the core of the matter; they all question the traditional hierarchy of human capabilities, or, to put it another way, they ask again what the specifically human quality of man is; they do not intend to build systems or Weltanschauungen on this or that premise.”61 Instead of presupposing a model of human consciousness as the dogmatic basis for a form of ideology, Marx, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, worked to preserve the actual question mark as to what makes the human what it is at the center of his theoretical reflections and his engagement with the tradition. If Marx through his political thought participated in “turning the tradition upside down within its own framework, he did not actually get rid of Plato’s ideas, though he did record the darkening of the clear sky where those ideas, as well as many other presences, had once become visible to the eyes of men.”62 To disrupt the tradition thus always also means to reflect on the residual attachment of one’s thinking to that which it believes to have repudiated, overcome, or even brought to an end. Taking on the tradition, in the double sense of the phrase, here means not to outwit tradition or simply to supersede it with the new, but critically to record and analyze the ways in which one’s view of the genealogical fibers of the tradition has become increasingly occluded and disarticulated. Like Marx’s concerned accounts of the fateful darkening of Plato’s clear sky, our reading of tradition must thus begin with the ways in which its elements continue to exert a more or less unacknowledged influence over our thinking and being, even as its workings are the targets of an ongoing erasure by the supposedly new, which claims to have no tradition and no historico-genealogical ballast.
Let us now perform another kind of turning, as we shift our attention from Arendt to Adorno. Toward the end of his 1969 essay “Resignation,” published shortly before his death in August of that same year, Adorno makes a statement that is anything but self-evident. Responding to the charges brought against him and other members of the early Frankfurt School that, for all their revolutionary acts of thinking, they somehow seem “resigned” in the face of the status quo and the urgent need for actual political praxis, Adorno reflects on the relation among thinking, resignation, and resistance. After developing a concept of emphatic thinking that refuses to be reified by a praxis-driven precensorship or a premature utopianism, Adorno invokes an “open thinking,” a thinking that points beyond itself (“Offenes Denken weist über sich hinaus”).63 To specify this open thinking, he then writes the following:
Prior to all particular content, thinking is actually the force of resistance, from which it has been alienated only with great effort. Such an emphatic concept of thinking admittedly is not secured, not by the existing conditions, nor by ends yet to be achieved, nor by any kind of battalions. Whatever has once been thought can be suppressed, forgotten, can vanish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives. For thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and powerless thought.64
[Eigentlich ist Denken schon vor allem besonderen Inhalt die Kraft zum Widerstand und nur mühsam ihr entfremdet worden. Ein solcher emphatischer Begriff von Denken allerdings ist nicht gedeckt, weder von bestehenden Verhältnissen noch von zu erreichenden Zwecken, noch von irgendwelchen Bataillonen. Was einmal gedacht ward, kann unterdrückt, vergessen werden, verwehen. Aber es läßt sich nicht ausreden, daß etwas davon überlebt. Denn Denken hat das Moment des Allgemeinen. Was triftig gedacht wurde, muß woanders, von anderen gedacht werden: dies Vertrauen begleitet noch den einsamsten und ohnmächtigsten Gedanken.]65
Among the many questions to which this remarkable passage gives rise, the following appear especially pertinent. If what has been thought emphatically can be repressed and forgotten, if it can vanish by “blowing away” (verwehen is Adorno’s word) as if it were a mere autumn leaf in the wind, then how is it that part of it lives on? Even if a seemingly subjective thought has—to the extent that it was thought rigorously, convincingly, and compellingly (triftig)—an element of something general or universal in it, under what circumstances can it be said to survive or outlive itself (“etwas davon überlebt”)? The answer to these questions appears to lie in the concept of an intellectual handing-down, a tradition of thinking that involves others who receive it and who are called upon to make this thought the object of their own singular acts of thinking. For Adorno, compelling or empathic thinking is nonidentical in that it does not come to rest in itself but must be rethought, thought again and onward, by others, in an as-yet-unnamed elsewhere (“muß woanders, von anderen gedacht werden”). It appears that a genuine thought comes into its own precisely when it is shared by the other, when it is no longer the property merely of this or that thinking self but rather travels toward and through the other, who is called upon to think it, with and against the self from which it traveled. But, one might ask, is the thought that comes to be rethought by others in an elsewhere—the compelling thought that will not rest in and with itself as a form of ipseity—then still the same thought? To what extent does it remain what it is when it is thought by the other in an unnamed elsewhere—by an unknown other perhaps hundreds of years and many thousands of miles separated from the local scene in which the thought to be handed down first came to pass? And in what sense must genuine thought be inscribed in some sort of iterability, the ability to be cited and repeated with a difference elsewhere, in the first place? Why is such thought the object of an elsewhere, a thinking to come, something that is to be understood as a form of (actual or anticipated) survival? And, finally, how can we begin to understand the trust or confidence (“Vertrauen”) that Adorno claims attends to this perspective, a trust or confidence that harbors a certain amount of strength even for the most exposed, vulnerable, and desperate act of thinking? Is there a hidden community of thinking even for the lonely thought that is “most solitary,” the “einsamsten Gedanken”?
Although Adorno does not elaborate on his apodictic remarks in the text in which they occur, leaving them provocatively open to interpretation and debate, I wish to suggest here that Adorno’s complex concept of tradition sheds light on these questions. Indeed, one might even say that tradition becomes a privileged test case for the practice of the uncoercive gaze. After all, what is the movement by which a compelling and genuine thought becomes the object of thinking of and by others, in an unnamed elsewhere, if not the thinking of tradition, through which a thought is handed down? For, what Adorno has in mind here is presumably not merely a technical repetition or quasi-scientific mode of repeatability through which achieved results can be verified by others in another space and time. Rather, the transmissibility of what has been thought in a compelling and rigorous manner implies that others will open themselves to the challenge that this thought poses, submitting it to an ever-renewed labor of interpretation and active reflection.
When Adorno, while completing Negative Dialectics, dedicates a separate essay to the topic of tradition, he takes up a number of the concerns that occupied him with regard to tradition in Negative Dialectics while illuminating key facets of this problem in a new light. In “On Tradition,” he works to develop an emphatic concept of tradition that is tied neither to the traditionalism of an outmoded, nostalgic, or reactionary consciousness nor to the shortsighted and antihistorical impulse to relinquish all tradition to whatever announces itself as the newest and the latest. The question that imposes itself is one that precisely concerns the hands that hand something down, the manual gesture that delivers something from one hand to another, from the hand of a self to the hand of the other: “Tradition comes from tradere; to hand down [weitergeben]. It recalls the continuity of generations, what is handed down by one member to another [was von Glied zu Glied sich vererbt], even the heritage of handicraft [handwerkliche Überlieferung]. The image of handing down [Bild des Weitergebens] expresses physical proximity, immediacy—one hand should receive from another [eine Hand soll es von der anderen empfangen].”66 If Adorno, for the remainder of section I of the essay, continues to employ rhetorical figures of the hand (such as “das Von-Hand-zu-Hand,” from one hand to another; “die Technik [hat] die Hand vergessen lassen,” a form of technology that has made us forget the hand; the Handwerk, handicraft; and the “Begriff der handwerklichen Lehre,” the concept of an apprenticeship in a manual craft,” which once ensured tradition and now is but a remnant of a time that is no more), he does so in order to invite the reader to consider more carefully what it is that is now handed down from hand to hand, and to reflect on the ways in which the hand relates to all the other hands that stand to receive this or that handicraft, tradition, way of thinking, or mode of acting.67 How and what does the Über-lieferung of the hand deliver, which to say, deliver over and across?
Setting the stage for his own negatively dialectical thinking of tradition, Adorno considers various historical moments of the contested concept of tradition. Whereas for Arendt these historical moments are marked by the tradition of political philosophy that stretches from Plato’s Republic to Marx’s transformative critique of political economy, Adorno’s historical reference points include the tradition’s tense relation with feudal economies, rationalism, bourgeois society, reactionary forms of consciousness, puritanism, and modes of ideology that mobilize a false notion of tradition in order to advance their particular political and economic aims. On the one hand, it may appear that the concept of tradition, in light of all the manifold abuses that have befallen it in the course of its long history—which is to say, in the tradition of tradition—should be cast aside or at least held in strict conceptual abeyance. Yet, on the other hand, it would be just as fateful to abandon the concept of tradition altogether, as performing such a gesture would be to advance an uncritical or merely self-serving version of it. Adorno’s strategy, like Arendt’s, is thus to argue that the difficult relation between the concept of tradition and tradition-less modes of thought and being must be thought. But he inflects his demand differently:
To insist on the absolute absence of tradition is as naïve as the obstinate insistence on it. Both are ignorant of the past that persists in their allegedly pure relation to objects; both are unaware of the dust and debris which cloud their allegedly clear vision. But it is inhuman to forget because accumulated suffering will be forgotten and the historical trace on things, words, colors, and sounds is always of past suffering. Thus tradition today poses an insoluble contradiction. No tradition is present and none can be conjured, yet when every tradition is extinguished the march into inhumanity begins.68
[Wie die in sich verbissene Tradition ist das absolut Traditionslose naiv; ohne Ahnung von dem, was an Vergangenem in der vermeintlich reinen, vom Staub des Zerfallenen ungetrübten Beziehung zu den Sachen steckt. Inhuman aber ist das Vergessen, weil das akkumulierte Leiden vergessen wird; denn die geschichtliche Spur an den Dingen, Worten, Farben und Tönen ist immer die vergangenen Leidens. Darum stellt Tradition vor einen unauflöslichen Widerspruch. Keine ist gegenwärtig und zu beschwören; ist aber eine jegliche ausgelöscht, so beginnt der Einmarsch in die Unmenschlichkeit.]69
That which is without tradition—“das Traditionslose”—is just as problematic as that which clings obstinately to tradition, believing itself to live in a pure, nonmediated relationship to what is at hand. That which is without tradition relates to its objects as if this relationship were not affected by the invisible dust left behind by that which in the past has fallen into ruin and become an object of decay. But every genuine relation to an object, every “snuggling up to an object,” and every “uncoercive gaze” upon that object, to recall Adorno’s language in “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” also must be mindful of the ways in which a relation always is mediated by the “Staub des Zerfallenen,” by the dust of decay, in other words, by the historical and genealogical inscriptions, the traditions that come to affect, consciously or not, every act of thinking and relating. To attempt to repress the mediatedness caused by tradition is not simply to commit an epistemological transgression against the precepts of historically aware thinking; it is also to turn a blind eye to the sedimented layers of accumulated suffering that are faintly recognizable to the careful reader of words, objects, colors, and sounds. There is no responsible way of engaging with the history and continued relevance, the perpetual memory and commemoration, of previous suffering without becoming a careful reader of the traces (“Spuren”) of this suffering, even in a contemporary and transformed world that may believe itself to have outlived or simply overcome such concerns. Therefore, to erase the traces of tradition in the words, objects, colors, and sounds with which we engage means, tacitly or deliberately, to erase the traces of those who have suffered. Yet there is no obvious remedy for this predicament. The dialectical difficulty resides in the fact that both an obstinate, self-interested insistence on tradition and the strategic abandonment of tradition may lead to a form of barbarism and inhumanity, the “Unmenschlichkeit” that is evoked at the end of the passage. The question that Adorno’s reflections thus help us to formulate is, to refunctionalize Lenin’s words, what is to be done?
Whereas for Arendt the project of Marx (and, to a lesser extent, those of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) are the key resources for understanding the fate of tradition, for Adorno’s thinking of tradition, it is Kantian and post-Kantian critique that most deserves our attention. Here, in order to begin to think what the problem of tradition requires of us, it is necessary to see in Kant’s insistence on the “critical path” (“der kritische Weg”), as it is called in the Critique of Pure Reason, not only a designation of philosophy’s way forward through Kantian critique but also, more broadly, a call for critical reflection on the relationship between consciousness and (its) tradition. According to Adorno’s understanding of Kant’s insistence on the path of critique, it becomes crucial to locate in the Kantian turn not only a break with the tradition of Rationalism that preceded it but also, by the same token, a critical engagement with the very idea of a thinking and a consciousness that relates to a tradition, whether the tradition is rejected or affirmed, or, at times, both at once. As so often in Adorno’s singular gestures of thinking, we are enjoined to consider the possible relation between critical consciousness and the tradition in which such a consciousness finds itself situated. His strategy is thus to argue as follows: “Not to forget tradition and yet not to conform to it means to confront it with the most advanced stage of consciousness and to pose the question of what carries and what does not [was trägt und was nicht].” To which Adorno adds: “But there is a relation to the past [Beziehung zur Vergangenheit] which, though it does not conserve, facilitates the survival of so many things through its incorruptibility [doch manchem durch Unbestechlichkeit zum Überleben verhilft].” If it is writers such as Rudolf Borchardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, as well as those affiliated with the George Circle who may be said to grasp in their work something of a negatively dialectical relation to the writing of tradition, this is because they “registered the transition [Übergang] of tradition into the inconspicuous [das Unscheinbare], into a position which no longer posits itself [nicht sich selbst Setzende], preferring those formations in which the truth content is deeply embedded in the material content to those in which it hovers over them like an ideology and thus is none at all.”70 Whereas Arendt regards the tradition—at least the tradition of political philosophy—to have come to an end with Marxian critique, Adorno focuses on these writers in order to make visible certain challenges of a post-traditional thinking of tradition. The challenge of a future critical relation to tradition here would be predicated upon the capacity for maintaining felt contact with elements of the tradition without becoming conservative and for enabling the survival of something not through its transfiguration or glorification as legacy but rather through a subtle and almost imperceptible affirmation of what remains incorruptible and nonidentical within it. Such a critical relation to tradition is enabled not by an ideological imposition, mobilized by this or that will to power of a conserving and conservative enforcement of a previous status quo, but rather by an opening up to what remains relevant, indispensible, and refractory within that which has been handed down. In the case of literary texts or works of art, for instance, no conservative literary history or history of art could prescribe the open relation that a future consciousness will have with a particular work, even as certain literary and artistic traditions are preserved by being included in the archives of a given tradition and therefore also rescued from oblivion.
To Adorno’s uncoercive gaze, the tradition that is housed in an intellectual, textual, and cultural archive cannot be thought in isolation from the gesture of rescuing. Those parts of a tradition that are admitted into an archive are potentially rescued, while others, excluded from the archive through selection or chance, conscious decision or happenstance, are not. Yet even in the case of those works of tradition that are admitted into an archive and thus become the objects of a certain rescue operation, they suffer from the threat of being destroyed by thoughtlessness, an overly facile appropriation, or even manipulation and conscious misappropriation. It is therefore no surprise that Adorno not only warns of “ostensibly innocent gestures incorporated in the general manipulation of sanctioned cultural products” but also points to the mechanism by which “even significant older works or formations were destroyed through their rescue [auch bedeutende ältere Gebilde wurden durch Rettung zerstört]” because they “refused to be restored to what they once were,” instead “shedding various layers according to their own dynamics.”71 In other words, attempting to rescue elements of a tradition, such as certain texts or aesthetic objects, by inserting them into a form in which they no longer feel at home—which may include even their own previous situatedness or shape—also can be a way of unwittingly erasing them from the tradition.72 It is the way in which these elements of a tradition “shed layers” in idiosyncratic and hardly predictable ways that a critical relation to a tradition must work to confront. But this shedding of layers, which implies a dynamic flux and transformability, is not merely a threat to the tradition or a critical menace to guard against. On the contrary, it is precisely this malleability of the traditional element that is worth affirming in its nonidentity—both its nonidentity with itself and its nonidentity with any single prescribed understanding of the tradition in which it is embedded. Indeed, for Adorno, “this process alone inaugurates a tradition worth pursuing [stiftet eine Tradition, der allein noch zu folgen wäre].”73 Whereas, in Arendt’s view, tradition has come to an end, there appears to be a thinking of tradition in Adorno that is as yet unsaturated. Such a tradition is at odds with itself, resistant to ideological appropriations and self-serving manipulations, and always demanding to be kept alive in unexpected ways through renewed interpretation and creative reinscription.
But what, one might ask, would such a tradition that is at odds with itself mean for one’s critical relation to the past and the present? How would the concept and practice of a nonidentical tradition allow for a critical illumination of the past or the present? How does a nonidentical tradition relate to the uncoercive gaze? Adorno’s own answer can be found in a striking image, that of correspondence through distance. He writes of such a tradition that its
criterion is correspondance. It throws, as something that steps forward in a new way [als neu Hervortretendes], light on the present [Licht aufs Gegenwärtige] and receives its illumination from the present [und empfängt vom Gegenwärtigen ihr Licht]. Such correspondance is not one of empathy and immediate affinity but requires distance [bedarf der Distanz]. Bad traditionalism is distinguished from tradition’s element of truth in that it reduces distance and reaches for the irretrievable, which begins to speak only in the consciousness of irretrievability. Beckett’s admiration for Effie Briest is a model of genuine affinity through distance. It teaches how little tradition conceived in terms of correspondance tolerates what is traditional as a model.74
To begin with, it is instructive to note that the translators of the published English version provide, in the first line of this quotation, “and receives its illumination from the past,” as if Adorno had written “und empfängt vom Vergangenen ihr Licht,” when, it fact, he writes “and receives its illumination from the present,” “und empfängt vom Gegenwärtigen ihr Licht.” Perhaps they assumed that Adorno merely made a mistake that they could “fix” in the translation by substituting a word of his for one of its opposites or antonyms, “past” for “present.” After all, they might well have thought, how could it be that Adorno’s concept of correspondance can be said to cast light on the present but also to receive its light from that very present? Do we not have to choose one of the other directionality? But, we must insist, this is precisely the point of Adorno’s singular reading of tradition here: Correspondance is the name of that which emerges or steps forward (“hervortreten” is the German verb at the root of Adorno’s substantivized noun) in an unexpected manner in order to describe a dialectical relation in which it works to illuminate the present through what it brings to this present while in turn being illuminated—which is to say, read and interpreted—by the same present. Another way to put this is to say that, through the relational dimension named correspondance, tradition potentially allows for an active and critical penetration of the present, from which it differs, while simultaneously allowing itself to be constructed and made the object of exegetical debate by the present, without whose interpretive labors of reading no tradition could come into view in the first place.
One could now assume that, in light of the simultaneity with which the present is illuminated by tradition and which in turn illuminates tradition, a certain proximity is required. Adorno’s strategy, however, is to argue the opposite. He thus asserts that it is precisely distance, rather than proximity, that allows for a truly critical engagement with the object. If a consequential reading of tradition requires distance rather than proximity, it is because it cannot be sustained by a false empathy and sense of relatedness. For Arendt and her account of tradition, the specific question of proximity and distance does not arise, but for Adorno, it is crucial. The rigorous reading of tradition that develops under Adorno’s uncoercive gaze is distinguished from the conventions of mere traditionalism in that the former does not attempt to bridge a distance in order to retrieve something that is irretrievable but rather lets the distance stand, allowing it to remain infinitely distant and other without attempting to co-opt it into the discourse of the familiar and the merely available. It is as if Adorno’s argument wished to guard against the danger of erasing the radical otherness of tradition by forcing it to conform to what is already a form of supposed sameness within the merely available that already surrounds us. In order to preserve the “consciousness of irretrievability [Bewußtsein der Unwiederbringlichkeit],” a critical relation to tradition thus would find its particular way of confronting certain ideas, objects, and ways of being handed down by a tradition precisely in their irreducible otherness, their dignified refusal merely to play along with the leading maxims and dominant assumptions of the age in which they are received.
The brief example that Adorno provides to make this point vivid stems from the literary tradition, Samuel Beckett’s unexpected admiration for Theodor Fontane’s Effie Briest. It is unknown whether or not Adorno discussed this topic with Beckett during one of the five personal meetings they are known to have had between 1958 and 1968 in Paris, Berlin, and Frankfurt.75 Likewise, it is not obvious how Adorno’s reference to Beckett here relates to his far-reaching essay on Beckett’s Endgame, where he places the writer’s work not in the wake of Fontane but primarily in that of Kafka and Joyce. There, Adorno suggests, if “Beckett’s play is heir to [beerbt] Kafka’s novels,” it is because Beckett’s “relationship to Kafka is analogous to that of the serial composers to Schönberg: he provides Kafka with a further self-reflection and turns him upside down by totalizing his principle.”76 But in the essay on tradition, Adorno inflects Beckett’s relation to literary tradition in different terms, emphasizing the function of distance rather than that of proximity in the workings of a legacy. At first sight, Fontane’s 1896 novel of German Realism, which came to be regarded in the German literary tradition as the canonical form for the modern societal novel, could hardly appear further removed from Beckett’s own literary and theoretical concerns. Yet Beckett’s great distance from Fontane’s realist novel and his simultaneous admiration for it situates him as something of an ideal recipient of what it hands down through the tradition. Beckett takes on the tradition not by grasping for the irretrievable and thereby creating a false sense of its retrievability, which is to say, its availability as just another element of what already is operative and thinkable in the present, but rather by letting the irretrievable speak precisely as the irretrievable. By letting go of the concept of tradition as something merely at hand, by allowing it to remain distant and removed, one sets the stage for a genuine confrontation with it, which only happens when, within the proximity that also is implied by any engaged confrontation, an infinite distance is respected. One may say that this gesture amounts to thinking a tradition without traditionalism.
The distance that connects such divergent writers as Beckett and Fontane through an understanding of tradition without traditionalism is not limited to their particular formation of literary genealogy. On the contrary, what a thinking of tradition without traditionalism implies is the attempt to fashion modes of relating to the legacies of a tradition that “touch upon the true theme of rethinking tradition—that which was left along the way, neglected or overpowered, that which congeals under the name of the ‘out of date’ [unter dem Namen des Veraltens sich zusammenfaßt]. What is alive in tradition seeks refuge there rather than in the permanence of works which are said to have stood the test of time. All this escapes the sovereign perspective of historicism.” Therefore, Adorno continues, the “vitality of a work is lodged deep within, under layers concealed in earlier phases which manifest themselves only when others have withered and fallen away [absterben und abfallen].”77 A tradition without traditionalism thus would not limit its purview to putatively canonical or dominant works, ideas, or ways of being in the world. Rather, such a confrontation of tradition would also look in the margins of officially sanctioned discourses of cultural or intellectual transmission precisely in order to find forgotten or discarded elements, works, and ideas—elements of something that is felt by the current critical situation to be too late or too early, at odds with both the present and the past—that deserve to be engaged and rethought with an eye toward their future potentialities. In a gesture of remobilization from the margins that is not wholly unlike those practiced in the Weimar cultural criticism of his friends Benjamin and Kracauer, Adorno thus argues for a thinking and practice of tradition in which the untimeliness and internal self-differentiation of its contents come to play a central role in developing a counter-model to the workings of self-satisfied modes of traditionalism. In such a model of tradition, the “affirmative character of tradition collapses [affirmative Wesen des Tradition bricht zusammen]” to reveal the cracks and fissures that need to be rediscovered in order critically to take on the tradition anew.78
The emphasis on distance and marginality that the thinking of tradition thus requires—if it is not to be conflated with the historical and ideological appropriations associated with traditionalism—a markedly double relation to the legacies handed down through it. Adorno attempts to formulate this double relation in terms of a gesture of thinking that both preserves and shucks off its attunement to tradition. Taking the example of literary tradition—though, to the extent that a more general model of thought is at stake, other traditions would also have served him here—he specifies the critical comportment toward tradition that is thinkable only through a kind of paradox. Adorno renders this paradox operative in the uncoercive gaze as follows:
Literary writing redeems its truth content only when it repels tradition at the closest point of contact with it. Whoever seeks to avoid betraying the bliss which tradition still promises in some of its images and the possibility buried beneath its ruins must abandon the tradition which abuses possibility and meaning in order to lie. Tradition may return only in that which unyieldingly denies itself to it.79
[Dichtung errettet ihren Wahrheitsgehalt nur, wo sie in engstem Kontakt mit der Tradition diese von sich abstößt. Wer die Seligkeit, die sie in manchen ihrer Bilder stets noch verheißt, nicht verraten will, die verschüttete Möglichkeit, die unter ihren Trümmern sich birgt, der muß von der Tradition sich abkehren, welche Möglichkeit und Sinn zur Lüge mißbraucht. Wiederzukehren vermag Tradition einzig in dem, was unerbittlich ihr sich versagt.]80
What Adorno says of tradition with regard to literary writing could be extended to a thinking of tradition more generally, and here it would enter an orbit of reflection that is not entirely alien to Arendt’s understanding. The truth content within the work emerges at the point at which both a closely experienced contact with tradition and a simultaneous departure from that very tradition make themselves felt in the critical act. Whatever is valuable and irreducible in a work is not simply put there through an act of spontaneous inspiration, by a more or less original “idea” that is supposed to enable a relation with tradition in the first place. On the contrary, any idea in the moment of its articulation already finds itself inscribed in a tradition, even when it believes itself to be innovative. But the recognition of this inscription in a tradition by itself, as a form of emergent historical awareness, is not enough to activate the hidden possibility within the legacies of the traditional. Rather, only when the awareness of one’s saturation with tradition is thought together with a break from that same tradition can the potentiality of a tradition emerge—as a sort of determined negation. What this determined negation unearths is not this or that recipe or program for bliss or salvation, but merely the images that promise, and thereby also affirm, a certain “Seligkeit” in the moment of its disappearance.
If Adorno speaks of this critical tradition in terms of a “verschüttete Möglichkeit,” he points to a buried possibility, still to be excavated from among the ruins that surround it. But we would do well also to be mindful of another meaning of “verschüttet”: “spilled.” Whereas the first meaning of “verschüttet” designates something buried or hidden (yet in principle accessible), this other meaning of “verschüttet” brings to the fore the image of an accident, even a catastrophe in which something is forever spoiled or lost. Like milk that has been spilled, verschüttete Milch, the spilled possibility, “verschüttete Möglichkeit,” can never be rescued—it remains the marker of a disaster whose aftermath any thinking of tradition also must confront. Hovering between possible excavation and absolute irretrievability, the concept of possibility here demands to be thought without any assumed guarantees, without safety net, and without any established precepts for recovery or redemption. If there is possibility lodged in the thinking of tradition, it remains tied to pure exposedness and vulnerability. By the same token, this is the point at which a genuine thinking of tradition first comes into focus—that is, becomes a category of critical reflection in the first place. In other words, it becomes a proper object of analysis for the uncoercive gaze.
If Adorno and Arendt, each in their own distinctive way, can teach us anything about tradition, it is that no thinking of tradition can claim to be a genuine thinking of tradition if it merely affirms the structure and content of a tradition that is handed down as legible and transparently appropriable. To allow the forces of this insight to be operative in one’s critical practice is an eminently political moment—even and especially if it requires us to rethink the tradition of critique and, by extension, the realm of the political itself. Thinking tradition implies a thinking directed both against thinking and against tradition; only when it does not hand itself over to tradition, when it does not play along with the received wisdoms of a tradition, can tradition reassume a truly critical position in our intellectual horizon. To be attuned to tradition in a vigilant mode, to invite it in, and to be hospitable to it, one must also break with it. The further one moves away from tradition, the more closely one may follow it—but even then only under the aegis of a doubly verschüttete possibility.