We have come a long way, traversing a good segment of what Benjamin termed Adorno’s “ice-desert of abstraction.” Along the way, we have made stops at critical signposts that helped to orient us in the midst of the uncharted terrain, from Adorno’s reconceptualization of the concept of tradition to his self-conscious inheritance of Hegelian thought, from questions of judgment and of orientation in the work of art to the irreducible difference between literal and figurative dimensions of a literary text as exemplified by Kafka, from the rethinking of political resistance on the basis of a negative dialectics to the problem of how to live a right life within a damaged one, and beyond. By pausing at these outposts in Adorno’s ice-desert and by allowing him to be in meaningful dialogue with other writers and thinkers, we have comprehended that this terrain is neither inhospitable nor ossified; on the contrary, it has proven, precisely in the uncoercive gaze, to be very much alive. We have come to appreciate the ways in which Adorno’s texts resist systematic appropriation in the name of this or that preestablished agenda, and we experienced, I hope, some of their singular and intractable beauty. In other words, we have begun to learn to think with Adorno, not following him pedantically or accepting his thought piously and uncritically, but rather allowing him, through the practice of the uncoercive gaze, to set the stage for a rigorous, transformative, and critically vigilant thinking to come.
Thinking with Adorno and through the uncoercive gaze requires us to confront seminal questions of our experience anew, even—and especially—if that experience is threatened by deformation and destruction. It is thus perhaps no accident that in the 1950s and 1960s, after Adorno had returned to Germany from his American exile, readers from all walks of life felt compelled to write to him to share their concerns and to seek his advice. These readers may have read one of his widely circulated books such as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, or they may have listened to him during one of the many radio appearances, in which he addressed highbrow topics—such as how to read Hegel, the notion of “culture,” education after Auschwitz, the contradictions inherent in utopian longing, or the challenge of Proust—in a way that sought to make them accessible and teachable to a large postwar audience of German listeners eager for education, reflection, and cultural redefinition. Adorno received, and often answered at length, intensive and searching correspondence from despondent graduate students, isolated teachers in small German towns, a perplexed baroness, music lovers desirous of his views on Mahler, an entrepreneur-turned-monk, former grade-school classmates, and a young Austrian art student struggling with his homosexuality, among many others.1 These readers felt that for all the apparent icy-ness that they, too, must have encountered in Adorno’s abstractions, there persisted in his writing and thinking something profoundly pertinent to life as we experience it, something affirmative even in the manifold diagnoses of hopelessness, something forward-looking and liberatory even in the seemingly most exasperatingly abstract turns of the dialectical screw.
If, in our encounters with the Adornean ice-desert, we have focused—at times explicitly, at others implicitly—on the figure of the uncoercive gaze that fastens upon an object and enters a relation of critical intimacy with it, we have foregrounded a certain “snuggling up to the object,” a certain “Anschmiegen” that causes critical thought to cling to, and nestle against, the object, concept, or phenomenon. Yet no method, no manual, no recipe can teach the critic how to employ this uncoercive gaze or how, exactly, to snuggle up to an object and enter a relation of critical intimacy with it. As the experience of our readings has shown, only the singular and each-time unique demands of the particular object, concept, or phenomenon under investigation can teach us how to cast this critical gaze upon it. What the critical acts demand is that the uncoercive gaze be recalibrated each time it fastens upon a new object of reflection. If critical intimacy is to emerge, it must, as we have seen in the course of the preceding chapters, grow out of a felt contact with the singularity of the object’s unique materials.
It may now seem as though the critical intimacy that the uncoercive gaze fosters had determined the position that Adorno’s texts ultimately work to construct. Yet we would do well to heed the dialectical flip side of this critical intimacy as well: the insurmountable distance that is retained in the critical act despite any achieved proximity. Adorno makes vivid the experience of this irreducible divide—inscribed in the heart of any critical intimacy—in the melancholic language of a certain leave-taking or Abschiednehmen. In a letter to the philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner on February 11, 1958, Adorno confides: “But it is evidently my fate to have to coax my entire production from my life by a gradual process, and that may well be far from the worst way to work. I could imagine that this is connected with another peculiarity that I have observed in what I cobble together—that in truth every text of mine is a kind of leave-taking [daß eigentlich jeder Text von mir eine Art von Abschiednehmen ist].”2 What could Adorno have meant by this remarkable statement? If it seems to him as though each of his texts were somehow wrenched or wrested from life through a kind of ruse or special cunning (“meinem Leben abzulisten”)—as if life in truth did not want him to have or to create these texts, somehow conspiring against his creative production of works—then the peculiar process by which his texts came into being deserves reflection. What is it that connects the practice of textual creation to the idea of a leave-taking?
With every text he wrote—whether explicitly philosophical, musicological, literary, sociological, political, or autobiographical—Adorno experienced a kind of leave-taking or departure, “eine Art von Abschiednehmen.” One might suggest that this experience of leave-taking is operative on several levels: on a most basic level, a finished text signals the end, preliminary or actual, of a period of intense preoccupation with a certain object, concept, or phenomenon. Yet the leave-taking that a text calls into being also may be tied to the idea that, in the wake of this newly composed text, a previously held idea or assumption no longer can be upheld, because it has been refuted or significantly altered by the new text and its arguments. In this sense the completion of the text requires that the critic, along with his readers, now take leave of an old idea or assumption. A further requirement for the composition of a text, especially one of the level of density and complexity of Adorno’s, is that the writer take leave of the quotidian world for a substantial amount of time, living, as one says, in his own head for the duration of its composition, largely saying goodbye to the things that surround him in his lifeworld and that normally lay claim to his concern and attention. In that case, the text acts as a double marker: it embodies the record of a former leave-taking even as it augurs the end of that leave-taking and the beginning of a reentry into the world that, during the creation of a text, has simply raged on.
Yet something else is at stake in Adorno’s assertion “that in truth every text of mine is a kind of leave-taking,” “daß jeder Text von mir eine Art von Abschiednehmen ist,” as well. What if this phrase also conjured a more existential leave-taking, such as the primordial Abschiednehmen that normally accompanies the thought of death? Is the leave-taking that all of Adorno’s texts perform not also a way of marking the transition from presence to absence, from life to death? To be sure, a writer sometimes is thought to “live on” in his texts even after death—so that “thy eternal summer shall not fade,” as Shakespeare has it in Sonnet 18. Yet could we not also conclude that the leave-taking or Abschiednehmen of which Adorno speaks pertains to the moment in which the writer releases his text into the world, where it will be interpreted, in separation from its author’s intentions, in this way or that, where it will be understood or misunderstood, read or ignored, celebrated or maligned, kept alive or forgotten, archived or destroyed? These structural possibilities obtain even before the writer’s actual death; in fact, one might say that they prepare their author for his death, prior to his actual passing. One’s texts, already during one’s lifetime, will come to stand in for oneself, even when one is still alive, the way they will when one has passed on. They are on the order of what the Austrian writer Robert Musil might call a Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten, the posthumous papers of a living author. One relinquishes control of one’s creations, takes leave of them in order, ultimately, to take leave of oneself—that is, to become the mournful object of one’s own Abschiednehmen.
If Adorno is to be believed that “in truth every text of mine is a kind of leave-taking,” that “jeder Text von mir eine Art von Abschiednehmen ist,” then the leave-taking of which he speaks is not limited to the production of this or that text; rather, it bespeaks the critical act itself. Even the uncoercive gaze—and the critical intimacy that the critic entertains with the objects to which he snuggles up—are touched by the double movements of its welcoming attraction and its leave-taking. Such a movement of “Willkommen und Abschied,” a “Welcome and Leave-Taking,” as the title of Goethe’s well-known early poem has it, structures the critical act. This genuinely critical act is characterized by a passionately affirmative, even ecstatic engagement with its object—and, by extension, with the setting in which it dwells—coincident with a melancholic leave-taking from that object and its setting, a double gesture that acknowledges, tacitly or explicitly, the critic’s physical and temporal limitations—in a word, his radical finitude.
Is the practice of critical theory itself not always also a kind of leave-taking, an Adornean Abschiednehmen? As we ourselves take leave of and with this book, we are mindful of the idiosyncratic ways in which Adorno’s uncoercive gaze holds open a transformative perspective on the manifold consequences of that very possibility. No afterlife, no heirs, no other-directedness, no welcoming, no futurity without this leave-taking.