INTRODUCTION: THE ART OF READING
1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Who Is Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno,” translated, edited, and with an introduction by Gerhard Richter, in Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 227–238, here 232; “Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm. Ein ‘Spiegel’-Gespräch.” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 402–409, here 402.
Throughout this book, standard English translations of non-English texts on occasion have been adjusted to enhance their fidelity to the original or to emphasize a particular dimension of meaning present in an original text that may not be readily apparent in the existing translation. In cases in which no translator is indicated, translations are my own.
2. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage, 2012), 73.
3. Alban Berg is cited in Hartmut Scheible, Theodor W. Adorno (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993), 152.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xviii; Mahler. Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 321–494, here 324. In this context, also consider the correspondence collected in Theodor W. Adorno and Alban Berg, Correspondence 1925–1935, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); Briefwechsel 1925–1935, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997).
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 132; Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 150.
6. These include, among others, investigations of the relation between Adorno’s late modernism and the problem of painting (Bernstein); the as-yet-little-understood relays between Adorno’s negative dialectics and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology (Macdonald and Ziarek); the residual promise of Adorno’s category of the aesthetic (Hohendahl); the possible convergences of Adorno’s thought with developments in contemporary philosophy (Bowie); Adorno’s modernism in relation to the experience of catastrophe (Hammer); Adorno’s aesthetics of negativity in relation to Blanchot (Allen); the relevance of Adorno’s unweaving of “Germanness” to our contemporary political challenges (Trawny); Adorno’s complex relation to the existentialist tradition of Kierkegaard and others (Gordon); and certain strategies of “aestheticizing” theoretical thought as practiced in Adorno and Nietzsche (Endres et al.). See J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Later Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek (eds.), Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Espen Hammer, Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); William S. Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Peter Trawny, Was ist deutsch? Adornos verratenes Vermächtnis (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2016); Peter Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); and Martin Endres, Axel Pichler, and Claus Zittel (eds.), Text/Kritik: Nietzsche und Adorno (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), xix; Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 9.
8. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 219; Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, 250.
9. Theodor W. Adorno, “Aus einem Schulheft ohne Deckel. Bar Harbor, Sommer 1939,” Frankfuter Adorno Blätter 4 (1995): 7.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Ontologie und Dialektik (1960/61), ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008).
11. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 101; Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, 114.
12. Theodor W. Adorno, “Skoteinos, or, How to Read Hegel,” Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 89–148, here 94ff; “Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei,” Drei Studien zu Hegel, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 326–375, here 330.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 127–134, here 130; “Anmerkungen zum philosophischen Denken,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 599–607, here 602.
14. Adorno, “Notes,” 129; “Anmerkungen,” 602.
15. Adorno, “Notes,” 126; “Anmerkungen,” 598.
16. Adorno, “Notes,” 131; “Anmerkungen,” 604.
17. Adorno, “Notes,” 133ff; “Anmerkungen,” 607.
18. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 18; Negative Dialektik, 29.
19. Henry David Thoreau, Writings, Journal, 1837–1846, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 24.
20. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 107; Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, 121.
1. ADORNO AND THE UNCOERCIVE GAZE
1. Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, Briefwechsel 1923–1966, ed. Wolfgang Schopf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 482.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What Is German?,’ ” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 205–214, here 212; “Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 691–701, here 699ff.
3. Adorno, “What Is German,” 212ff; “Was ist deutsch,” 700ff.
4. Adorno, “What Is German,” 213; “Was ist deutsch,” 701.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), 18; Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 29. Adorno here implicitly alludes also to Walter Benjamin’s conviction, memorably expressed in the opening line of his Trauerspiel book, that it “is the peculiarity of philosophical writing to stand, with each turn or trope, in front of the question of presentation anew [Es ist dem philosophischen Schrifttum eigen, mit jeder Wendung erneut vor der Frage der Darstellung zu stehen].” Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 207.
6. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 56; Negative Dialektik, 65ff.
7. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 55; Negative Dialektik, 65.
8. Ibid. Here, as so often, the standard published English translation of Negative Dialektik gets Adorno’s meaning completely wrong. Adorno writes: “Sie [die Rhetorik] behauptet sich in den Postulaten der Darstellung, durch welche Philosophie von der Kommunikation bereits erkannter und fixierter Inhalte sich unterscheidet.” The translator, Ashton, inexplicably renders this sentence as “It holds a place among the postulates of contents already known and fixed.” The translation thus makes Adorno say the opposite of what he actually says—namely, that rhetoric holds its place by considering the problems of presentation and, as such, differs from the mere communication of known and fixed contents favored by the kind of philosophy for which language and presentation are not issues of great importance. In order to make Adorno appear to say the opposite of what he in fact says, it was necessary for the translator to repress (that is, not to include in the translation at all) several elements of Adorno’s sentence, including such key words as “Philosophie,” “Kommunikation,” “unterscheiden (to differ or differentiate).” Why?
9. Stanley Corngold, “Adorno’s ‘Notes on Kafka’: A Critical Reconstruction,” Monatshefte 94 (2002), special issue: Rereading Adorno, ed. Gerhard Richter, 24–42, here 24ff.
10. Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xi–xxi, here xv.
11. Samuel Weber, “Translating the Untranslatable,” Introduction to Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 9–15, here 11ff.
12. Rolf Tiedemann’s suggestion that the “Theses” date from the early 1930s is to be found in his “Editorische Nachbemerkung,” the editorial afterword, to volume 1 of Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 379–384, here 383. For a consideration of Adorno’s essays “The Actuality of Philosophy” and “Why Still Philosophy” in the context of programmatic and linguistic concerns, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “The Discourse of Philosophy and the Problem of Language,” Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 217–242.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 127–134, here 125; “Anmerkungen zum philosophischen Denken,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 599–607, here 597.
14. Translator’s note 1, Adorno, “Introduction” to Catchwords, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 352.
15. Adorno, “Notes,” 127.
16. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 408; Negative Dialektik, 400.
17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3; Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 10.
18. Adorno, “Anmerkungen,” 599.
19. Adorno, “What Is German,” 210; “Was ist deutsch,” 697.
20. Adorno, “Notes,” 127; “Anmerkungen,” 599.
21. Adorno, “Notes,” 127ff; “Anmerkungem,” 599.
22. Adorno, “Notes,” 128; “Anmerkungen,” 600.
23. Ibid.
24. Adorno, “Notes,” 129; “Anmerkungen,” 601.
25. Adorno, “Notes,” 133; “Anmerkungen,” 606.
26. Adorno, “Notes,” 134; “Anmerkungen,” 607.
27. The most sustained engagement with the untrackability of stupidity in its relation to cognition, in which stupidity emerges as a repressed condition of knowledge, is to be found in Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
28. Adorno, “Notes,” 132.
29. Adorno, “Anmerkungen,” 605.
30. Translator’s note, Adorno, “Notes,” 356n24.
31. Adorno, “Notes,” 132; “Anmerkungen,” 605.
32. Adorno, “Notes,” 131ff; “Anmerkungen,” 604.
33. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 192; Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 218. Compare further my analysis of this phrase in Gerhard Richter, “Nazism and Negative Dialectics: Adorno’s Hitler in Minima Moralia,” Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 147–190, here 171ff.
34. Adorno, “Notes,” 130; “Anmerkungen,” 602.
35. Adorno, “Notes,” 130; “Anmerkungen,” 602ff.
36. Adorno, “Notes,” 130; “Anmerkungen,” 603.
37. Ibid.
38. Adorno, “Notes,” 133; “Anmerkungen,” 606.
39. Readers of Derrida take heed.
40. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 25.
41. Adorno, “Notes,” 132; “Anmerkungen,” 605.
42. Ibid.
43. A far-reaching discussion of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s conceptions of experience in the context of the larger philosophical and historical problem of experience can be found in Martin Jay, “Lamenting the Crisis of Experience: Benjamin and Adorno,” in Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 312–360.
44. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 183–186; Negative Dialektik, 184–193.
45. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 247; Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, 283. For a focused reading of this thought-image, “Zum Ende,” see Gerhard Richter, “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno,” New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006): 119–135.
46. Adorno, “Notes,” 129; “Anmerkungen,” 602.
47. Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel 1939–1969, ed. Asaf Angermann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 414.
48. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 408; Negative Dialektik, 399.
49. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5.
50. Adorno, “Notes,” 130; “Anmerkungen,” 602.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1: Logic of Science, trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 127; Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Erster Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik, eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Werke, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 170.
55. Adorno, “Notes,” 131; “Anmerkungen,” 603.
56. Adorno, “Notes,” 130; “Anmerkungen,” 602.
57. Theodor W. Adorno, Ontologie und Dialektik (1960/61), ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 14.
2. BURIED POSSIBILITY: ADORNO AND ARENDT ON TRADITION
1. Only relatively recently have attempts been made to submit Arendt and Adorno to more sustained and contextualized comparative readings. See, for instance, Arendt und Adorno, eds. Dirk Auer, Lars Rensmann, and Julia Schulze Wessel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); Alfons Söllner, “Der Essay als Form politischen Denkens. Die Anfänge von Hannah Arendt und Theodor W. Adorno nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Text & Kritik 166/167 (2005): 79–91; Affinität wider Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2011); and Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, eds. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). Arendt’s and Adorno’s respective concepts of tradition have, as far as I can tell, not figured in these comparative readings.
2. Steven Aschheim, “Introduction: Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1–15, here 2. Aschheim goes on to suggest that much of Arendt’s “acuity derived from the fact that she embodied the tensions and contradictions that fueled so much of its [German culture’s] creativity, especially as they manifested themselves in the productive turbulence of the Weimar Republic, in which she spent her formative years. Her Weimar friends, lovers, and adversaries—including Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, Kurt Blumenfeld, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin—were all incarnations of its manifold, yet related sensibilities” (2). More recently, Jerome Kohn—Arendt’s former student and research assistant, now her literary executor—engages with the question of a Jewish dimension in Arendt’s thinking by suggesting that we emphasize “experience” rather than “identity” when considering intellectual and political problems related to her Jewishness: “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Experience: Thinking, Acting, Judging,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, eds. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 179–194.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), 365; Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 358.
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1985), ix.
5. This general definition of tradition is offered by the legal scholar and historian Douglas Klusmeyer in “Hannah Arendt on Authority and Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden (London: Rout-ledge, 2014), 138–152, here 138. His essay offers a circumspect reconstruction of the relationship between certain elements of Arendt’s thinking of tradition and the refractory concept of political, social, and ethical authority. Historical overviews of the contested notion of tradition in general may be found in Josef Pieper, Über den Begriff der Tradition (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1958) and Überlieferung. Begriff und Anspruch (Munich: Kösel, 1970); Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); David Gross, The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); and, more recently, Mark Salber Phillips and Gordon Schochet (eds.), Questions of Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
6. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ix.
7. Harrison, ix ff.
8. Harrison, x.
9. A useful collection of texts by Arendt and Benjamin documenting the intellectual relationship between the two has been assembled by Detlev Schöttker and Erdmut Wizisla, Arendt und Benjamin. Texte, Briefe, Dokumente (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
10. Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 201; Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht. Zwei Essays (Munich: Piper, 1971), 57.
11. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 217.
12. Arendt, Dark Times, 193; Zwei Essays, 49.
13. As Peg Birmingham points out in her discussion of Arendt’s reading of Benjamin in relation to Arendt’s theoretical and political understanding of natality, the “transcendent force of citability makes the present a moment of deflection whereby the past becomes a projective force of the unknown and the unfamiliar; that is, a projective force of the new. Citability, therefore, offers a notion of historical narrative that is not descriptive but inaugurative. Its inaugurative force is derived precisely from its decontextualization, from its break with a prior content” so that citability “in the deflected present makes graphic a moment of transformation, not merely the continuum of history.” Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 21.
14. Arendt, Dark Times, 195; Zwei Essays, 51.
15. Ibid.
16. Arendt, Dark Times, 198ff; Zwei Essays, 54ff.
17. Arendt, Dark Times, 199; Zwei Essays, 55.
18. Ibid.
19. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 53; Negative Dialektik, 63.
20. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 54; Negative Dialektik, 63.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 54ff; Negative Dialektik, 64.
25. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 55; Negative Dialektik, 64.
26. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 578.
27. Étienne Balibar, “(De)constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of Hannah Arendt’s Practical Philosophy,” in Hannah Arendt: Verborgene Tradition—Unzeitgemäße Aktualität?, ed. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 261–268, here 261.
28. Arendt later also included a German version of the essay, in the translation by her friend Charlotte Beradt, under the title “Tradition und die Neuzeit” in her German collection of essays Fragwürdige Traditionsbestände im politischen Denken der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1957), 9–45.
29. That Arendt considered Between Past and Future her best book is pointed out by her former doctoral student at the New School, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, in her biography Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 473.
30. Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1993), 13ff.
31. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 212.
32. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 3.
33. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 14.
34. See, for instance, her remarks in the 1964 German television interview with Günter Gaus, “Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus,” in Ich will verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, by Hannah Arendt, ed. Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper, 1996), 44–70, here 44ff.
35. Arendt, “Tradition,” 17.
36. Arendt, “Tradition,” 18.
37. Agnes Heller, “Hannah Arendt on Tradition and New Beginnings,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 19–32, here 20. Heller proceeds to explore the role that stories and, by extension, the notion of narrative play in Arendt’s conception of a philosophical and political beginning. However, the idea that there is, for Arendt, a “redemptive power” in narrative, as critics such as Seyla Benhabib imagine, remains debatable. Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, eds. Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 111–137.
38. Hannah Arendt, “No Longer and Not Yet,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1940, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993), 158–162. Compare chapter 11, “Afterness and Empty Space: No Longer and Not Yet,” on Arendt’s reading of Broch in this essay, in Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 199–205.
39. Arendt, “Tradition,” 19.
40. Arendt, “Tradition,” 20ff.
41. Arendt, “Tradition,” 21.
42. Arendt, “Tradition,” 21ff.
43. Arendt, “Tradition,” 23.
44. Arendt, “Tradition,” 25.
45. Ibid. Arendt’s intuition here—that one does not need to be conscious of the fundamental metaphysical impulses and assumptions that guide one’s thinking for them to have a profound impact on one’s being—can be seen as belonging to her investment in a certain post-metaphysical comportment and mode of questioning. From this perspective, Albrecht Wellmer, in his analysis of Arendt’s specific relation to political and philosophical liberalism, is certainly right to suggest that Arendt’s critique “rests on a deconstruction of the whole ‘metaphysical’ tradition of political thought starting with Plato and Aristotle” and that, by extension, “her re-reading and critique of the Western tradition of political philosophy is therefore radical in Heidegger’s sense, even as it attempts to set his deconstruction of metaphysics on its feet, and to turn it around politically.” Albrecht Wellmer, “Arendt on Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 220–241, here 225.
This view is corroborated by Arendt herself, who confesses, in the section of The Life of the Mind that revisits the question of the gap between the past and the future, “I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have know them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. Historically speaking, what actually has broken down is the Roman trinity that for thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition.” Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 212.
46. Arendt, “Tradition,” 25.
47. Ibid.
48. Jerome Kohn makes this point in “The Loss of Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt: Verborgene Tradition—Unzeitgemäße Aktualität?, ed. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 37–47, here 38.
49. For Heidegger, this transition from Greek to Roman culture was fateful because the Romans were not intellectually prepared to receive the complex Greek tradition on its own terms but rather misunderstood and misappropriated it. For instance, in the 1936 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he emphasizes that “the translation of the Greek names into the Latin language is not at all the inconsequential process it is considered to this day. Rather, beneath the seemingly literal and thus preserving translation hides a translation or carrying-across [Über-setzen] of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words with the equi-primordial experience [ohne die gleichursprüngliche Erfahrung] of what they say, without the Greek word. The groundlessness [Bodenlosigkeit] of Western thought begins with this translation or carrying-across.” Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks,” Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980), 1–72, here 7.
50. Arendt thinks in a similar direction in the course of her “thought-diary,” her Denktagebuch. There, several of the fragmentary entries concern the ways in which Roman thought and practice called the notion of tradition into presence. In March 1953, for instance, she remarks, under the heading “Ad Tradition,” that the Roman manner of “shifting authority into tradition (instead of the divine messiah, who is the idea)” meant “seeing the divine at work in the founding of the cities. The beginning [Der Anfang] received its a priori standing, which it had never had in a historical sense with the Greeks, from this political experience.” Denktagebuch 1950–1973, eds. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), vol. 1, 334.
51. Arendt, “Tradition,” 25.
52. Arendt, Dark Times, 194; Zwei Essays, 50.
53. Arendt, “Tradition,” 26.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Arendt, “Tradition,” 28.
57. Ibid.
58. Arendt, “Tradition,” 35.
59. Arendt, “Tradition,” 36.
60. Arendt, “Tradition,” 38.
61. Arendt, “Tradition,” 39.
62. Arendt, “Tradition,” 40.
63. Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 289–293, here 293; “Resignation,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 794–799, here 798.
64. Adorno, “Resignation” (Critical Models), 293.
65. Adorno, “Resignation” (Gesammelte Schriften), 798.
66. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Tradition,” no translator specified (“collaborative translation”), Telos 94 (Winter 1992–93): 75–82, here 75; “Über Tradition,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 310–320, here 310.
67. One might say that the question of the hand here also belongs to Adorno’s larger interest in the question of gesturing and in the concept of the gesture as such. For a brief discussion of Adorno’s attentiveness to the notion of the gesture in relation to the specific problem of leave-taking as it comes to pass in his essay on tradition, see Eva Geulen, “Theodor Adorno on Tradition,” in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, ed. Max Pensky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 183–193.
68. Adorno, “On Tradition,” 78.
69. Adorno, “Über Tradition,” 315.
70. Adorno, “On Tradition,” 79; “Über Tradition,” 315ff.
71. Adorno, “On Tradition,” 79; “Über Tradition,” 316.
72. On the concept of rescuing (Rettung) as it is inflected by Adorno and Benjamin more broadly, see Gerhard Richter, “Can Anything Be Rescued by Defending It? Benjamin with Adorno,” differences 31: 3 (2010): 34–35.
73. Adorno, “On Tradition,” 79; “Über Tradition,” 316.
74. Ibid.
75. The number, dates, and locations of these meetings between Adorno and Beckett are provided by Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 863.
76. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 241–275, here 259; “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen,” Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 281–321, here 303.
77. Adorno, “On Tradition,” 80; “Über Tradition,” 317.
78. Adorno, “On Tradition,” 81; “Über Tradition,” 318.
79. Adorno, “On Tradition,” 82.
80. Adorno, “Über Tradition,” 320.
3. THE INHERITANCE OF THE CONSTELLATION: ADORNO AND HEGEL
1. This chapter was translated by Kristina Mendicino.
2. See Catherine Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1996); Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012).
3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Heritage of Hegel,” trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 322–344, here 326.
4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Werke, vol. 18, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 36.
5. Gadamer, “The Heritage of Hegel,” 334.
6. Ibid.
7. Gadamer, 335.
8. Gadamer, 336.
9. Gadamer, 335.
10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. and ed. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 87.
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to His Parents, 1939–1951, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); Briefe an die Eltern 1939–1951, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).
12. Consider, for example, the image of the rat that Adorno develops in Negative Dialectics and in connection with psychoanalysis, in order to stage the dialectic of enlightenment. See Gerhard Richter, “Nazism and Negative Dialectics: Adorno’s Hitler in Minima Moralia,” in Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007), 147–190, here 176–184.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 33–34; Quasi una fanatasia. Musikalische Schriften II, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 281.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Theodor W. Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?,” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartman, trans. Timothy Bahti and Geoffrey Hartmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114–129, here 123; “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vegangenheit,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 555–572, here 566.
17. Theodor W. Adorno, “Television as Ideology,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 59–70, here 62; “Fernsehen als Ideologie,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 1997), 321–494, here 334.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: The Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8; Berg. Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 13, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 321–494, here 334.
19. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 12; Philosophie der neuen Musik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 18.
20. If one devotes oneself to a many-layered question such as that of inheritance in Adorno’s work, one would be well-advised to enter into this enterprise by facing the general horizon of interpretation, which presents itself and gives orientation by confronting readers with the irreducible aporias of Adorno’s texts. Alexander García Düttmann has emphasized this foundational aporetic structure in his critical commentary on Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “Thinking leads ultimately into aporias, not out from them. But only through the argument is the aporia discovered. And once the aporia is discovered, there remains nothing other than a ‘that’s how it is’—a confirmation of how there is no way out, which nonetheless shows the way that one wants to go, although the argument also cannot mark that way as an exit, as a tried and true practice, or a universally valid solution to the aporia. Should it be more than a mere prejudice, the ‘that’s how it is’ requires the highest and most continuous attentiveness to the world, for which there is no prescribed measure. It consequently marks the imbrication of knowledge and morality.” So ist es: Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos Minima Moralia (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), n.p. No reading of Adorno can circumvent such a simultaneously productive and interruptive aporia.
21. This is not to say that, besides his engagement with Hegel’s legacy, the process of working through the legacy of Kant does not stand at the center of Adorno’s attention, especially in the writings explicitly concerned with aesthetics. In this respect, one might share J. M. Bernstein’s assessment when he emphasizes that although “there are many possibilities for characterizing Adorno’s philosophy in relation to Kant and Hegel—as post-Nietzschean Hegelianism or as re-kantified Lukács—the least that must be said is that he situates his philosophy between Kant and Hegel, whereby the ‘between’ demarcates the space that was opened and needed in the wake of all that happened after Hegel. That is to say: after Marx, after Nietzsche, after the failure of the Revolution, after Auschwitz.” “Negative Dialektik: Begriffe und Kategorien III. Adorno zwischen Kant und Hegel,” trans. Anje Korsmeier, Klassiker Auslegen: Negative Dialektik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 89–118, here 91. Peter Uwe Hohendahl has also pursued the question of whether Adorno, in the realm of aesthetics, knows himself to be indebted to the Hegelian tradition that presupposes a tight intertwinement between concept and artwork, and thus points beyond the formalism associated with Kant. See Hohendahl, “The Ephemeral and the Absolute,” in Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 206–226.
22. See J. M. Bernstein, “Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19–50, esp. 20 and 46. Compare Simon Jarvis, “The ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ and Conscious Unhappiness: On Adorno’s Critique of Hegel and the Idea of an Hegelian Critique of Adorno,” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal, ed. Gary Browning (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 57–72.
23. Ernst Bloch, “Aussprache über Hegel,” Werkausgabe, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 420–423, here 420.
24. If the question of intellectual heritage stands in the foreground of his thought, Adorno is also thoroughly aware of the general discussion of inheritance that shaped the cultural politics of the GDR shortly after his return from exile to West Germany. For example, he writes in the text that he composed between 1954 and 1958, the “Essay as Form,” that the widely promoted “neutralization of cultural works to commodities” was a “process . . . in recent intellectual history [that] has irresistibly taken hold of what the Eastern bloc ignominiously calls ‘the heritage.’ ” “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3–23, here 6; “Der Essay als Form,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 9–33, here 12. The question of what from the so-called bourgeois tradition could still endure as an inheritance for socialism was controversially discussed. On one side stood those, such as Franz Mehring and Georg Lukács, who wanted, under the auspices of a humanistic heritage, to make way for the bourgeois tradition of classicism (especially Goethe and Schiller), Heine, as well as the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, to enter the officially promoted culture of socialism. At the same time, however, they wished to permit no entrance for the works of the Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, which they classified as too formalistic or even negative, not to mention the art of expressionism and the somber oeuvres of Proust, Joyce, or Kafka. Although there were also important counter-appeals (e.g., those of Bloch, Brecht, Anna Seghers, and Hans Meyer) against the problematic unspoken assumptions of this exclusionary mechanism, the assessments represented by Mehring and Lukács insisted upon a rigorous differentiation between a purportedly progressive heritage and a reactionary one. This differentiation, however, necessarily entailed reducing the question of meaning and understanding to something presupposed as stable and already perceived, something that needed only to be classified according to criteria based on current convictions. In his polemical essay from 1958 on the late Lukács—which not least of all engages with the latter’s understanding of Hegel—Adorno finds fault with an approach “that believes itself to be objective, as long as it merely neglects self-reflection.” This approach “only succeeds in concealing the fact that it has purified the dialectical process of its objective, as well as subjective, value. Dialectics are paid lip-service, but for such a thinker all has been decided in advance. The writing becomes undialectical.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Reconciliation under Duress: On Georg Lukács,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980), 151–176, here 154; “Erpreßte Versöhnung. Zu Georg Lukács: ‘Wider den mißverstandenen Realismus,’ ” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 251–280, here 255. The radically constellative model that Adorno attempts to think regarding Hegel’s inheritance and for inheritance per se cannot be satisfied with decisions made in advance over it. Rather, its evidence emerges first from the potentially infinite engagement with what can never be decided in advance, and from the constantly threatening fragility of stable meanings and of understanding itself.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nich-olsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 1; Drei Studien zu Hegel, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main; Suhrkamp, 1997), 247–381, here 251.
26. Ibid.
27. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 2; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 251.
28. Ibid.
29. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, vol. 1., ed. Rudolf zur Lippe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 7.
30. Adorno’s own description of his purpose points in this direction, where it is precisely a question of the positioning of something toward something else and thus shows itself to be motivated by Hegelian thinking: “What I have in mind is closer to what Hegel, in the introduction to his System of Philosophy, calls the ‘positioning of thought toward objectivity.’ ” Hegel: Three Studies, 54; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 296. This positioning toward something is—as is the relation—a question of the constellation.
31. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 203–430.
32. It would, for instance, be time to distinguish the radicality of Adorno’s negative-dialectical model of the constellation from the field that the philosopher Dieter Henrich has named “constellation-research,” which he developed in order to investigate certain currents of German Idealism via models of influence. A recent overview of this field can be found in the volume Konstellationsforschung, eds. Martin Mulsow and Marcelo Stamm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
33. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 139; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 368.
34. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 163; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 353.
35. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke, eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 65.
36. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 162; Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 164ff.
37. Recently, Jochen Hörsch has reminded us of the ways in which the productive moment of Hegelian negation doubles as affirmation: “To conceive of negation as affirmative—that means nothing other than this: it is good that there are negations, for without determinate negations there would be nothing graspable and sensually experienceable. Negations are affirmative and productive not only because speculative philosophy has, with sophistic lust, fallen in love with them, but because they are real, because they issue precisely not into ‘nothingness’ as a sort of ‘ultimum,’ but rather because mental and communicative acts of negation allow, conversely, a clever and commensurate understanding of being, existence, time and infinity.” Bedeutsamkeit: Über den Zusammenhang von Zeit, Sein und Medien (Munich: Hanser, 2009), 138. It would also be important to pursue, in another context, the question as to how Adorno’s notions of negation and the negative relate to recent attempts to grasp the restlessness of negativity in Hegel, such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s Hegel: L’inquiétude du negatif (Paris: Hachette, 1997).
38. Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,” in Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays, eds. Donald Burke et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 35–40, here 36; “Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 366–371, here 367.
39. See also the determination of “language” as the “organ of theory” in Theodor W. Adorno, “Aus einem Schulheft ohne Deckel: Bar Harbor, Sommer 1939,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 4 (1995): 7.
40. Mirko Wischke, “ ‘Keine Erkenntnis von Dingen’: Adorno über das Begrifflose am Begriff,” Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie 17 (2003): 73–88, here 79.
41. Ibid.
42. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Friedrich Nietzsche: Rhetoric and Language, ed. and trans. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 249–250.
43. On the multiply mediated relation between self and other as the problem of the possibility and the thought of history, culture, and reason, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
44. Hegel formulates it in the following way: “To the contrary, in that the result, as it is in truth, is taken up as determinate negation, a new form will have arisen immediately and made the transition in negation, through which progress yields itself, as of itself, through the full series of shapes.” Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 74.
45. In precisely this counter-striving between experience and concept, the hermeneutic problem-structure becomes visible at the same time, out of which the relation of experience and the concept of understanding itself come to expression for Hegel. On this, see Werner Hamacher’s exposition: “Hegel does not dissolve the aporia of understanding. On the contrary, for him, the aporia constitutes the resistance from which experience must rebound and turn back upon itself. By supposing that the incomprehensible has a meaning, spirit understands it as its object and understands itself as its positing.” Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7.
46. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 72.
47. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 55; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 297.
48. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 56; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 297.
49. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 83; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 320.
50. See, for example, Otto Pöggeler, “Die Komposition der Phänomenologie des Geistes,” in Materialien zu Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, eds. Hans Fulda and Dieter Henrich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 276–327; Robert B. Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 52–85; as well as Jon Stewart’s attempt to glimpse a concealed unity behind the seemingly incoherent structure of the text: The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000). On the question of the structure and composition of the text, see also Eckart Förster’s essay, “Hegels Entdeckungsreisen: Entstehung und Aufbau der Phänomenologie des Geistes,” in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes: Ein kooperativer Kommentar zu einem Schlüsselwerk der Moderne, eds. Wolfgang Welsch and Klaus Vieweg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 37–56.
51. Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here,” 78.
52. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 2; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 252.
53. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 51; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 294.
54. Walter Benjamin, “Literaturgeschichte und Literaturwissenschaft,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 283–290, here 286.
55. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, xxxv ff; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 249.
56. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, xxxvi; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 249.
57. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 89; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 326.
58. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 109; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 342.
59. Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 167.
60. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 91; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 327.
61. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies; 91; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 328.
62. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 104; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 339.
63. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 99; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 334.
64. Adorno, “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 127–134, here 131; “Anmerkungen zum philosophischen Denken,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp University Press, 1997), 599–607, here 604.
65. Ibid.
66. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Mnemosyne (Entwurf),” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Michael Knaupp (Munich: Hanser, 1992), 436–437, here 436.
4. JUDGING BY REFRAINING FROM JUDGMENT: ADORNO’S ARTWORK AND ITS EINORDNUNG
1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 17–34, here 32; “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 9–30, here 27.
2. Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence 1943–1955, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 93; Briefwechsel 1943–1955, eds. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003), 122.
3. Rüdiger Bubner, “Kann Theorie ästhetisch werden? Zum Hauptmotiv der Philosophie Adornos,” Materialien zur Ästhetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos. Konstruktionen der Moderne, eds. Burkhardt Lindner and Martin Lüdke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 108–137.
4. Norbert Bolz, “Gnosis and Systems Theory: A Conversation between Norbert Bolz and Michael Hirsch,” trans. Steven Lindberg, in Adorno: The Possibility of the Impossible, eds. Nicolaus Schafhausen, Vanessa Joan Müller, and Michael Hirsch, vol. 1. (Berlin: Sternberg, 2003), 93–108, here 105.
5. Agamben here implicitly, and in a highly mediated way, takes up aspects of his earlier interpretation of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s differences in the chapter “The Prince and the Frog: The Question of Method in Adorno and Benjamin” of his study, originally published in Italian in 1978: Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993).
6. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 38.
7. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 38ff.
8. Alexander García Düttmann, Was weiß Kunst? Für eine Ästhetik des Widerstands (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2015), 37–65.
9. Christoph Menke, Die Kraft der Kunst (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 56–81.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 187ff.
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 123ff.
12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 124; Ästhetische Theorie, 188.
13. This epistolary exchange between Heidegger and Staiger on Mörike can now be found under the title “Zu einem Vers von Mörike. Ein Briefwechsel mit Martin Heidegger von Emil Staiger (1951),” in Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1910–1976), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 93–109.
14. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 188.
15. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Being and Judgment,” in Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 37; “Seyn, Urtheil, Modalität,” Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Michael Knaupp (Munich: Hanser, 1992), 50.
16. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 87; Ästhetische Theorie, 135.
17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 126ff; Ästhetische Theorie, 192f.
18. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 128; Ästhetische Theorie, 193. Adorno here implicitly returns to a train of thought from his earlier essay on Thomas Mann, first published in “Die Neue Rundschau” in 1962. There he writes, “However rigorously Thomas Mann’s oeuvre separates itself in its linguistic form from its origins in the individual, pedagogues . . . revel in it because it encourages them to take out of it as its substance [als Gehalt herauszuholen] what the author put into it . . . . Instead, however, I believe that the substance [Gehalt] of a work of art begins precisely where the author’s intention stops; the intention is extinguished in the substance.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 12–19, here 12ff; “Zu einem Portrait Thomas Manns,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt, 1997), 335–344, here 335ff. Both this thought from Adorno’s Mann essay and the passage from Aesthetic Theory are strongly indebted to Benjamin’s anti-intentionalist conception of truth as outlined in the epistemo-critical prologue to his book on the German Trauerspiel. Adorno was very familiar with Benjamin’s text, which was first published in 1928 and became the subject of a seminar that Adorno taught at the University of Frankfurt in the early 1930s—most likely the first university seminar on Benjamin ever. In the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin argues: “Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather of total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention . . . . The structure of truth, then, demands a mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simplest existence of things, but which is superior in its permanence.” The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 36.
19. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 128; Ästhetische Theorie, 193.
20. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corn-gold, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 297–360.
21. Der Gehalt, which as a masculine noun signifies import, substance, or significance, is not be confused with the neuter version of the same noun, das Gehalt, which means “salary.”
22. This is the case even though the translator of Aesthetic Theory is aware that there is a difference between Inhalt and Gehalt and that this difference ought to have implications for the translation as a whole. But one might say that the practical conclusions the translator draws from this state of affairs are hard to accept. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 368, translator’s note.
23. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 225ff; Ästhetische Theorie, 335.
24. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 59; Ästhetische Theorie, 93.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, “Short Commentaries on Proust,” trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 174–184, here 175; “Kleine Proust-Kommentare,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 203–215, here 204.
26. Martin Walser, A Gushing Fountain, trans. David Dollenmayer (New York: Arcade, 2015), 3. In the original German, Walser’s remarkable passage reads: “Solange etwas ist, ist es nicht das, was es gewesen sein wird. Wenn etwas vorbei ist, ist man nicht mehr der, dem es passierte. Allerdings ist man dem näher als anderen. Obwohl es die Vergangenheit, als sie Gegenwart war, nicht gegeben hat, drängt sie sich jetzt auf, als habe es sie so gegeben, wie sie sich jetzt aufdrängt. Aber solange etwas ist, ist es nicht das, was es gewesen sein wird. Wenn etwas vorbei ist, ist man nicht mehr der, dem es passierte. Als das, von dem wir jetzt sagen, daß es gewesen sei, haben wir nicht gewußt, daß es ist. Jetzt sagen wir, daß es so und so gewesen sei, obwohl wir damals, als es war, nichts von dem wußten, was wir jetzt sagen.” Ein springender Brunnen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 9.
27. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 124; Ästhetische Theorie, 188.
28. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 124; Ästhetische Theorie, 189.
29. Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 98.
30. Ibid., 100.
31. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Vintage, 2011), 115.
32. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 24ff.
33. Barnes, 113.
34. Barnes, 163.
35. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 54; Briefwechel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 74.
36. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 2; Ästhetische Theorie, 11.
37. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 3; Ästhetische Theorie, 12.
38. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 10.
39. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 3.
40. Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 35.
41. Karl Kraus, Aphorismen. Schriften, vol. 8, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 283.
5. THE LITERARY ARTWORK BETWEEN WORD AND CONCEPT: ADORNO AND AGAMBEN READING KAFKA
1. W. H. Auden, “The Wandering Jew,” in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, vol. 2: Prose, 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 110–113, here 110.
2. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Mike Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3; Der Proceß, ed. Malcolm Pasley. Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 7.
3. Martin Walser, “Description of a Form,” trans. James Rolleston, in Twentieth Century Interpretation of The Trial: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James Rolleston (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 21–35, here 21.
4. Franz Kafka, Dearest Father and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1954), 87.
5. Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit. Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 75–76.
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 145n49.
7. Franz Kafka, Dearest Father and Other Writings, 40; Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, 59.
8. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken, 1973), 265; Briefe an Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983), 394.
9. I borrow the remainder of this paragraph as well as a couple of sentences of the next from my essay “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno,” New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006): 119–135.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 72; Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 113.
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 77; Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 115.
12. Theodor W. Adorno, “Words from Abroad” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 185–199, here 189; “Wörter aus der Fremde,” Noten zur Literatur. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 216–232, here 221.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 243–271, here 247; “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka.” Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 254–287, here 256. It is important to recall that Adorno’s Kafka essay stands in permanent spectral conversation with the Kafka essays of two of his most important interlocutors and friends, Siegfried Kracauer’s 1931 “Franz Kafka,” first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, and Walter Benjamin’s 1934 “Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages” (“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”), which first appeared in the Jüdische Rundschau. Equally significant in this context are Adorno’s extensive epistolary exchanges with Benjamin on the topic of Kafka from the time Benjamin’s Kafka essay appeared in 1934 to Benjamin’s death in 1940. See Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). For a reading of Benjamin’s Kafka essay from the perspective of an intellectual inheritance, compare Gerhard Richter, “Erbsünde: A Note on Paradoxical Inheritance in Benjamin’s Kafka Essay,” in Inheriting Walter Benjamin (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 15–33.
14. I will focus in my reading of Adorno’s Kafka essay almost exclusively on the significance of this distinction between literality and figurality for the theoretical or philosophical interpretation of a (literary) work of art. For an incisive reading that focuses on other key elements of Adorno’s richly textured essay, including the logic of an inverse theology that Adorno, pace Freud and Marx, observes at work in Kafka’s writing, see Stanley Corngold, “Adorno’s ‘Notes on Kafka’: A Critical Reconstruction,” Monatshefte 94 (2002), Special Issue: Rereading Adorno, ed. Gerhard Richter, 24–42. For a probing consideration of Adorno’s Kafka essay that places the question of literality in relation to Orson Welles’s film adaptation of The Trial as well as to J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, see Alexander García Düttmann, Was weiß Kunst? Für eine Ästhetik des Widerstands (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2015), 111–125.
15. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 247; “Aufzeichnungen,” 257.
16. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 247; “Aufzeichnungen,” 257.
17. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 247; “Aufzeichnungen,” 257.
18. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 247; “Aufzeichnungen,” 257.
19. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 247; “Aufzeichnungen,” 257.
20. Kafka, Der Proceß, 7.
21. To formulate it in a somewhat pointed manner, while Kafka’s German sentence literally and figuratively opens the trial, its English translation is forced to close it from the start.
22. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, trans. Joseph Kresh and ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1948), 9; Tagebücher, eds. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 9.
23. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 245; “Aufzeichnungen,” 255.
24. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 246; “Aufzeichnungen,” 256.
25. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 246; “Aufzeichnungen,” 255.
26. The premise that any interpretation of Kafka should quite literally begin on the level of the individual sentence and linger with it is pursued by the recent collection Kafkas Sätze, ed. Hubert Spiegel (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2009). In it, some seventy well-known critics and writers each present their single favorite sentence in Kafka and submit it, in short essays, to renewed interpretation. One of the questions that remains is whether or not the totality of sentences with a given Kafkan text can be said to amount to a literary form that invites inclusion of the text in a particular genre (and, by extension, that genre’s particular histories and conceptual problems). For a structural discussion of The Trial from the perspective of genre, see Gerhard Neumann, “ ‘Blinde Parabel’ oder Bildungsroman? Zur Struktur von Kafkas ‘Proceß’-Fragment,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 41 (1997): 399–427.
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 178–435, here 279.
28. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 248; “Aufzeichnungen,” 258f. For a recent analysis of how the theatrical logic of the tension between words and gestures structures the entire opening scene of The Trial, see Stanley Corngold, “Medial Interventions in The Trial; or, Res in Media,” in Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 51–66.
29. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 248; “Aufzeichnungen,” 258.
30. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–229; Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 3–19.
31. De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” 10.
32. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181–220, here 211.
33. Derrida, “Before the Law,” 213.
34. Kafka, The Trial, 155; Der Proceß, 295.
35. Kafka, The Trial, 155; Der Proceß, 295.
36. Kafka, The Trial, 157; Der Proceß, 298.
37. Kafka, The Trial, 156; Der Proceß, 297.
38. Heinz Politzer, “The Trial against the Court,” in Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 163–217.
39. Kafka, Diaries 1914–1923, 33–34; Tagebücher, 517.
40. Giorgio Agamben, “K.,” in Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefen Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 20–36, here 20. I will bracket here the discussion of Kafka in relationship to the concept of sovereignty that Agamben undertakes in his earlier work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), specifically in the chapter “Form of Law,” 49ff.
41. Agamben, “K.,” 21.
42. Agamben, “K.,” 21.
43. Kafka, The Trial, 160; Der Proceß, 304.
44. Agamben, “K.,” 21.
45. Agamben, “K.,” 24.
46. Agamben, “K.,” 25.
47. Agamben, “K.,” 21.
48. As readers who have spent a lifetime engaging with Kafka’s work—such as the late Walter H. Sokel, one of Kafka’s most circumspect interpreters—will attest, even though Kafka’s writing represents “the ever-renewed attempt to push toward . . . an explanation,” the fact remains that a “final evaluative meaning, expressing a definite and definable intentionality in his work,” is “impossible.” After all, the “fundamental ambivalence of Kafka’s writing precludes an ultimate judgment that could be called an ‘explanation.’ ” Walter H. Sokel, “Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka,” in A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, ed. James Rolleston (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 33–59, here 56. Reading Kafka’s writing from a philosophical perspective would therefore have to entail an openness to hearing a different kind of demand. Among other things, this different kind of demand as it is mediated by the Kafkan text can be named an “imperative to write,” as Jeff Fort has recently put it, an imperative that also encompasses a persistent element of textual self-reflection in which remnants of a failed or dispersed Kantian sublimity lingers on among the ruins of writing itself. Jeff Fort, The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
49. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 144f. Blanchot pursues some of the implications of this insight in his variegated essays on Kafka collected in De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
50. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914–1923, trans. Martin Greenberg, with Hannah Arendt, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1949), 200–201; Tagebücher, 875. In a different context, it would be fruitful to investigate the implications of the fact that this passage on metaphor from Kafka’s diaries also constitutes the one reference to Kafka that finds its way into Derrida’s early seminal work De la grammatologie, where it is introduced at a crucial juncture: in the discussion, contained in “Deuxieme Partie: Nature, Culture, Écriture,” of how the supplement and the source relate in the space of writing. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 383–384.
The question concerning the volatile status of metaphor as a pivotal rhetorical figure traversing Kafka’s writing has received much attention in the scholarship. For an exemplary reading of how, in the test case of The Metamorphosis, an “entire story is organized around a figure whose entire sense is to demystify and truly to deconstruct metaphor” precisely “by tampering with its normal operations” through a “chiastic movement,” see Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Vermin (The Metamorphosis),” in Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 57–73, here 73.
51. Rainer Stach, Kafka. Die Jahre der Entscheidungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004), 537.
52. One might add that the “law” of this irreducible hermeneutic lawlessness also stands in the way of any attempt to “rescue” The Trial and its doorkeeper episode from the threats of undecidability that have been assigned, in apparent moments of critical discomfort, designations such as “lawless reading [gesetzloses Lesen],” as in Hartmut Binder. Hartmut Binder, “Vor dem Gesetz”: Einführung in Kafkas Welt (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 3. And can one really speak of a redemptive “defense of writing” or a “defense of the text” if one chooses to see in The Trial primarily a ciphered “process of reflection” that merely requires hermeneutic unlocking and cultural retranslation in order to reveal its tacitly veiled, but in principle stable and accessible, meaning? This is the assumption made by studies such as Verteidigung der Schrift. Kafkas Prozeß, ed. Frank Schirrmacher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). Yet is such an alleged defense, a Verteidigung, of the novel not in reality a way of making it superfluous—precisely by showing that what it says and how it says it could have been said another way as well (that is, in the language of critical commentary and explanation), without essential loss?
6. THE ARTWORK WITHOUT CARDINAL DIRECTION: NOTES ON ORIENTATION IN ADORNO
1. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), l.
2. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 41.
3. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22–27, here 22.
4. J. Hillis Miller, “Paul de Man at Work: In These Bad Days, What Good Is an Archive?” In Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin, eds. Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller (London: Routledge, 2012), 55–88, here 55.
5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 54.
6. For a history of the concept of orientation since its entry into Western philosophy in the eighteenth century through the work of Moses Mendelsohn and Kant, see Werner Stegmaier, “Weltorientierung, Orientierung,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter et al., vol. 12 (Basel: Schwabe, 2004), columns 498–507. A representative variety of recent philosophical perspectives—from both “Continental” and “analytic” traditions of thought—on the concept of orientation can be found, for instance, in Orientierung: Philosophische Perspektiven, ed. Werner Stegmaier (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). For the most part, such perspectives on orientation tend to exclude questions of aesthetics and the work of art.
7. Herbert Schnädelbach, “Dialektik der Vernunftkritik. Zur Konstruktion des Rationalen bei Adorno,” in Adorno-Konferenz 1983, eds. Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 66–93, here 90.
8. Martin Seel, Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 19.
9. Rolf Tiedemann, “Der Philosoph vor dem Mikrophon,” Adorno und Benjamin noch einmal. Erinnerungen, Begleitworte, Polemiken (Munich: Edition Text & Kritik, 2011), 164–174, here 173.
10. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Thierry de Duve, “Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant,” Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, The Townsend Papers in the Humanities No. 3, ed. Anthony Cascardi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 249–299. Such approaches will need to be modulated by an attentiveness to the ways in which Adorno’s apparent untimeliness today, especially in the area of his philosophy of art, may almost paradoxically open up new critical possibilities, as argued most recently by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
11. Theodor W. Adorno, “Introduction,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, by Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, and Karl R. Popper, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 1–67, here 14; “Einleitung zum Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 8, 280–353, here 294.
12. Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” trans. Anson Rabinbach, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 98–106, here 103; “Résumé über Kulturindustrie,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 10, 337–345, here 342.
13. Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 164–181, here 166.
14. Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), 118.
15. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Orientation in Thinking?,” trans. H. B. Nisbet, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 237–249, here 238.
16. Kant, “Orientation,” 239.
17. Kant, “Orientation,” 240.
18. Ibid.
19. Kant, “Orientation,” 247.
20. Kant, “Orientation,” 249.
21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 144.
22. Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 1–15, here 4; Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005), 7.
23. Theodor W. Adorno, “Ohne Leitbild: Anstelle einer Vorrede,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 10, 291–301, here 297.
24. Ibid.
25. One might add that it is along the lines of this eigene Bewegung, too, that the logic of Adorno’s nonpropositional thinking in relation to the work of art would have to be traced.
26. Franz Kafka, “ ‘Ach, sagte die Maus,’ ” in Zur Frage der Gesetze und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 163.
27. Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 243–271, here 246; “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 11, 254–287, here 255.
28. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Appolo,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, bilingual English and German edition, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989), 61.
29. Reinhard Lettau, Zur Frage der Himmelsrichtungen (Munich: Hanser, 1988).
30. Theodor W. Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno,” translated, edited, and with an introduction by Gerhard Richter, in Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 227–238, here 233; “ ‘Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm’: Ein Spiegel-Gespräch,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 20, 402–409, here 403.
31. “Ivory Tower,” 238; “Elfenbeinturm,” 408.
32. Theodor W. Adorno, “Art and the Arts,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 368–387, here 385; “Die Kunst und die Künste,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 10, 432–453, here 450.
7. FALSE LIFE, LIVING ON: ADORNO WITH DERRIDA
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber, with Stephan Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 180.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 89.
3. In section 20 of the Second Essay, “ ‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like” (“ ‘Schuld,’ ‘schlechtes Gewissen’ und Verwandtes”) of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche even goes so far as to inflect his genealogical account of morality itself by a consideration of the nexus between the “consciousness of being in debt” (“Bewußtsein, . . . Schulden zu haben”) and the concept of guilt (“Schuld”) as the two appear in a “feeling of guilty indebtedness” (“Schuldgefühl”). On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Holling-dale, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1989), 90–91.
4. Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” in Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), 395–396, here 396; “Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 37–39, here 39.
5. Celan, “Speech,” 395.
6. Celan, “Ansprache,” 37.
7. A meticulous philological record of Celan’s readings of Heidegger—including the specific texts he read and the dates when he marked them as read—can be found in a volume listing the titles of the philosophical books contained in Celan’s personal library, his annotations in these books, as well as notebooks pertaining to his readings of these works. Paul Celan, La bibliothèque philosophique/Die philosophische Bibliothek: Catalogue raisonné des annotations, eds. Alexandra Richter, Patrik Alac, and Bertrand Badiou (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2004). My references to dates of Celan’s readings of specific Heidegger-ean texts are based on this edition.
8. I borrow the remaining sentences in this paragraph, in revised form, from my Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 162.
9. Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), 51.
10. See Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 2000); Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 4th edition (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971).
11. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 138ff; Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954), 91.
12. Judith Butler, “Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life? Adorno Prize Lecture,” Radical Philosophy 176 (2012): 9–18. Established in 1977, the Adorno Prize is awarded by the City of Frankfurt every three years to a scholar, writer, or artist of international significance who exemplifies the transdisciplinary orientation of Frankfurt School critical thought.
13. Butler, “Adorno Prize Lecture,” 9.
14. The other two are our own body and the external world. As Freud explains, “We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relation to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere.” Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 26.
15. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaischer Torso Apollos,” in Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2006), 483.
16. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 43.
17. For a consideration of Adorno’s text within the orbit of its thinking “after Auschwitz” that strives to take into account the impossibility of its own undertaking, see Gerhard Richter, “Nazism and Negative Dialectics: Adorno’s Hitler in Minima Moralia,” in Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 147–190.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno,” translated, edited, and with an introduction by Gerhard Richter, in Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 227–238, here 233; “Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm. Ein ‘Spiegel’-Gespräch.” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 402–409, here 403.
19. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 113.
20. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 39.
21. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Meditazione della vita offesa, trans. Renato Solmi (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), 35.
22. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexiones desde la vida dañada, trans. Joaquin Chamorro Mielke (Madrid: Akal Ediciones, 2004), 44.
23. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Réflexions sur la vie mutilée, trans. Éliane Kaufholz and Jean-René Ladmiral (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2006), 48.
24. We might say that, from the perspective offered here, the revised title under which an English publisher recently reissued Adorno’s text, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005) is no improvement over the title of the original English translation (Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life). On the contrary, the change of prepositions from “from” to “on” implies a difference from, and potential mastery of, life that are at odds with the more objective or general forms of damaged life that Adorno attempts to think. His thinking is imbricated in the life that he attempts to think; his philosophy assumes no vantage point outside a damaged life that would allow one to reflect “on” it, as if it were a discrete, separate object of inquiry. Furthermore, the introduction of the indefinite article “a” before the word “life” betrays something of a misconstrual, at least to my way of thinking, of the relation between life and thought that Adorno hopes to forge—as if Adorno had written “aus einem beschädigten Leben,” rather than “aus dem beschädigten Leben.” The difference is important because, for him, Minima Moralia, even though it also is anchored undeniably in a personal and therefore contingent form of subjective experience, is by no means “merely” an autobiography or a record of the working through of a personal trauma. The text engages not simply “a life” (say, Adorno’s) but rather—precisely through the idiomaticity of a particular life—damaged life itself under the framing conditions of a certain world-historical, political, and philosophical episteme. In it, the impersonal pull—and therefore certain general life conditions—of what Adorno would often call “die Objektivität der Sache” makes itself felt.
25. This Aristotelean possibility is one that Butler weighs in her Adorno Prize speech.
26. This performative tension is pursued in Jochen Hörisch’s extended essay, Es gibt (k)ein richtiges Leben im falschen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).
27. Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 164–181, here 176.
28. Jacques Derrida, Fichus: Discours de Francfort (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 43.
29. Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” 176; Fichus: Discours de Francfort, 43–44.
30. Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” 176; Fichus: Discours de Francfort, 44.
31. Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” 177; Fichus: Discours de Francfort, 45. In a different context, it would prove fruitful to take Derrida’s Frankfurt speech on Adorno as the occasion for a more systematic interrogation of how writers associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory were read (or not read) by French thinkers of Derrida’s generation more broadly. While the legacy of Heidegger in the French context is much better understood—see, for instance, the remarkable intellectual history by Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. François Raffoul and David Petti-grew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015)—the role played by thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School still waits to be thought in its full complexity. One thinks here, for example, of remarks made by Michel Foucault in a late interview with Gérard Raulet. There, Foucault suggests that in the France of his intellectual formation, “the Frankfurt School was practically unheard of. This, by the way, raises a minor historical problem which fascinates me and which I have not been able to resolve at all. It is common knowledge that many representatives of the Frankfurt School came to Paris in 1935, seeking refuge, and left very hastily, sickened presumably—some even said as much—but saddened anyhow not to have found more of an echo. Then came 1940, but they had already left for England and the U.S., where they were actually much better received. The understanding that might have been established between the Frankfurt School and French philosophical thought . . . never occurred. And when I was a student, I can assure you that I never once heard the name of the Frankfurt School mentioned by any of my professors.” And Foucault adds, perhaps in a slightly ironic mode but certainly with a gesture commemorating a missed opportunity for thinking and thanking, that “if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School, if I had been aware of it at the time, I would not have said a number of stupid things that I did say and I would have avoided many of the detours which I made while trying to pursue my own humble path—when, meanwhile, avenues had been opened up by the Frankfurt School. It is a strange case of non-penetration between two very similar types of thinking which is explained, perhaps, by that very similarity. Nothing hides the fact of a problem in common better than two similar ways of approaching it.” Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” trans. Jeremy Harding, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (London: Routledge, 2003), 17–46, here 26.
32. Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines,” trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller (New York: Seabury, 1979), 75–176, here 75.
33. Derrida, “Living On,” 76.
34. Derrida, “Living On,” 78.
35. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 131.
36. Ibid.
37. Just how precarious this survivance is for Derrida powerfully emerges in his last interview, conducted shortly before his death. There, he confides, implicitly taking up the question of survival from his final seminar: “When it comes to thought, the question of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable forms. At my age, I am ready to entertain the most contradictory hypotheses in this regard: I have simultaneously—I ask you to believe me on this—the double feeling that, on the one hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, one has not yet begun to read me, that even though there are, to be sure, many very good readers (a few dozen in the world perhaps, people who are also writer-thinkers, poets), in the end it is later on that all this has chance of appearing; but also, on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left. Nothing except what been copyrighted and deposited in libraries. I swear to you, I believe sincerely and simultaneously in these two hypotheses.” Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 33ff.
38. Jacques Derrida, “Negotiations,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 11–40, here 11.
39. Derrida, “Negotiations,” 12–13.
40. Derrida, “Negotiations,” 12.
41. Ibid.
42. Derrida, “Negotiations,” 13.
CONCLUSION: A KIND OF LEAVE-TAKING
1. See the account of this aspect of Adorno’s public persona in postwar Germany by Philip Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie. Geschichte einer Revolte, 1960–1990 (Munich: Beck, 2015), 37–42.
2. This as-yet-unpublished letter from Adorno to Plessner is housed in the archives of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt; the passage quoted here is cited in Alex Demirovic, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle. Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 673; and in Stefan Müller-Dohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 730; Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 481.