Benjamin, Adorno, and the

Experience of Literature

This book examines Benjamin’s and Adorno’s essays and correspondence

on literature. Taken together, the essays present the view that these two
monumental figures of 20th-century philosophy were not simply philosophers
who wrote about literature, but that they developed their philosophies in and
through their encounters with literature. The book explores the themes that
are recognized to be central to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s thinking through
their readings of authors such as Baudlaire, Beckett, Kafka, and Proust,
among other lesser known figures.

Corey McCall is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College, USA.

Nathan Ross is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma City University,

USA.
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Chon Tejedor

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Benjamin, Adorno, and the
Experience of Literature

Edited by Corey McCall

and Nathan Ross
First published 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCall, Corey, editor. | Ross, Nathan, 1977– editor.
Title: Benjamin, Adorno, and the experience of literature / edited by
Corey McCall and Nathan Ross.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies
in twentieth-century philosophy ; 43 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019671 | ISBN 9781138103429 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315102733 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Knowledge—
Literature. | Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969—Knowledge—
Literature. | Literature—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC PT2603.E455 Z57325 2018 | DDC
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Contents

List of Abbreviations viii

Introduction: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience

of Literature 1
C O R E Y M c CA LL A N D N ATH A N RO SS

PART I
Benjamin and Adorno: Literary Themes and
Philosophical Debates 17

1 Against the Reification of History: Benjamin and Adorno

on Baudelaire 19
C O R E Y M c CA LL

2 Theatrum Philosophicum: Thinking Literature and Politics

With Walter Benjamin 37
O S CA R G UA R DIO L A - RIVE RA

3 Adorno and Beckett: Aesthetic Mimêsis and the Language

of “The New” 57
M A RC I A M O R GA N

4 Abysmal Humanity: Anthropological Materialism in Georg

Büchner and Walter Benjamin 76
CAT M O I R
vi Contents
PART II
Kafka: “Fairy Tales for Dialecticians” 91

5 Breaking Through the Mythic Organization of Life:

On the Critique of Capitalism in Benjamin and Kafka 93
N ATH A N RO S S

6 The Virtue or Power of the Useless: Benjamin and Adorno

on Kafka 111
I D I T D O B B S - WE IN STE IN

7 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza: The Meaning of

Comedy in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s Divergent Readings
of Don Quixote 126
M E N AC H E M F E UE R

PART III
Proust: Recovering Experience 141

8 Adorno and Proust: Memory, Childhood, and the

Experiential Grounds of Social Criticism 143
RO G E R F O S TE R

9 Seeing In, Seeing Through: Adorno and Proust 159

OW E N H U L ATT

PART IV
From Hölderlin to Walser: Poetic Afterlives 179

10 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 181

M I C H A E L J. THO MP SO N

11 Walter Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 201

H Y U N H Ö C H S MAN N

12 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! Sobriety and Poetic

Determinability in Hölderlin and Walser 221
S TÉ P H A N E SY MO N S
 Contents vii
13 Ramble On: Robert Walser at the Limits of Critical Theory 235
J E F F R E Y A . B E RN STE IN

List of Contributors 252

Index 255
Abbreviations

Walter Benjamin
AP The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999.
CWB The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. Ed. Gershom
Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and
Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
GS Gesammelte Schriften. eds. Rolf Tiedemann & Hermann
Schweppenhauser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, Bd. I–VII,
1972–1989.
SW Selected Writings. 4 vols. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Trans.
Rodney Livingstone, Edmund Jephcott, H. Eiland, et al.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003.

Theodor Adorno
AT Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997.
CC Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Complete
Correspondence, 1928–1940. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999.
CM Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. Henry W.
Pickford. NY: Columbia University Press, 2005.
DE Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid
Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002.
ND Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. NY: Continuum, 1973.
NL Notes to Literature, 2 vols. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholson. NY: Columbia University Press, 1991–1992.
P Prisms. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.
Introduction
Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience
of Literature
Corey McCall and Nathan Ross

The first generation of Frankfurt school critical theory, represented fore-

most by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, is characterized by intense
debates over philosophical method, politics, society, and art. Literature is
one of the areas where their conversations particularly converged: while
Adorno cultivated a deep interest in musical analysis and Benjamin increas-
ingly branched out into areas such as media studies and film, they both
spoke a common language when it came to reading literature, both the new-
est modern literature, as well as the literature of the prior century. Many of
the key texts of Benjamin and Adorno are essays on specific literary figures;
indeed, some of their most important correspondence also concerns these
figures. A few literary figures recur with special frequency and importance
in both Adorno and Benjamin: each of them wrote essays on Kafka, Proust,
and Hölderlin, among others. They also engaged in deep discussions on
the meaning of Surrealism, Modernism, Social Realism, and other schools
of literature. Additionally, more than merely passing discussions of these
authors occur in the key philosophical works of Adorno, such as Dialectic
of Enlightenment and Aesthetic Theory, while Benjamin develops some of
his most important philosophical discussions in texts that seem to bear the
titles of works on purely literary themes, such as “The Image of Proust”
and the Prologue to The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Any effort to
isolate their philosophical contributions from their readings of literature
would result in ignoring much of what is deepest in their philosophies as
well as what is truly distinctive in their way of practicing philosophy. Our
view is that they were not simply philosophers who sometimes wrote about
literature, but that they developed their philosophies in and through the
encounter with literature. What Benjamin and Adorno have in common, in
terms of generating new philosophical methods in dialogue, as well as what
divides them in their debates on how to understand experience, modernity,
and politics, are both developed in large measure through the way that they
read certain authors and translate their encounter with these authors into
philosophical themes.
It is precisely this integral relationship between their engagement with
literature, as well as other arts, that can make their work hard to digest into
2 Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
the terminology of contemporary academic philosophy. They come from a
standpoint that did not believe so unconditionally in the kind of academic
division of labor that is often used by scholars to digest their works, a stand-
point that does not believe that thinking can be cleanly and completely sepa-
rated from the kind of objects, experiences, and historical phenomena that
give an impetus to thought. Even in their own times, they had doubts about
how much of their thinking could fit into the categories of academic and
professional specialization. In an essay on the concept of free time, Adorno
sheds light on his occupation with literature and music:

I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of
my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be
shocked if they had anything to do with hobbies .  .  . Making music,
listening to music, reading [literature] with concentration constitute an
integral element in my existence; the word hobby would be a mockery
of them.
(CM, 168)

This essay criticizes not only the rigidity with which modern society sepa-
rates our work from our leisure activities, but also a central feature of the
modern academic division of labor: the idea that having a rich encounter
with works of music or literature is something wholly unrelated to those
academic disciplines that produce knowledge, such as philosophy or soci-
ology. Indeed, in reading Adorno, it becomes hard to separate his attempt
to develop an aesthetic theory from his discussion of musical and literary
works. But for Benjamin, the focus on literature is even more essential to his
conception of his overall project.

The goal I set for myself has not yet been realized, but I am finally get-
ting close. The goal is that I be considered the foremost critic of German
literature. The problem is that literary criticism is hardly considered a
serious genre anymore in Germany and has not been for more than fifty
years.
(CWB, 359)

Benjamin regards criticizing literature as the focal point of his rich variety of
pursuits up to this point, and yet he regards literary criticism as a virtually
non-existent genre, despite the rich literary culture of the Weimar Republic.
This is because of the deeply nuanced sense in which he understands critique
as a mode of experience and knowledge that surpasses the object in the pur-
suit of its truth content. At around the time when Benjamin seems to turn
from academic philosophy to literary critique, he gives us the metaphor of
the literary work as a kind of monad (GS 1.1, 226), in which the problems
of philosophy are realized in unresolved form.
 Introduction 3
American philosopher Stanley Cavell concludes The Claim of Reason,
his massive study of skepticism and ordinary language philosophy, with
the question of whether “philosophy can become literature and still know
itself.”1 This question betrays an anxiety concerning the origins and purity
of philosophy that might itself serve as an obstacle to philosophy in gaining
an understanding of itself. Although Benjamin and Adorno would not sug-
gest that philosophy simply pass over into literature, they constantly scruti-
nize the boundary by asking what the two pursuits have in common and can
learn from each other. Benjamin and Adorno conceive of philosophy as an
endeavor conditioned by literature, particularly modern literature, therefore
making it impossible to understand modern philosophy without considering
it in terms of literature and the literary. Similarly, we gain a fuller under-
standing of modern literary production once we consider it in philosophical
terms. In ways profoundly contrary to Cavell’s later disciplinary anxiety
over philosophy possibly losing itself in literature, Benjamin and Adorno
explore the porous borders between literature and philosophy, but they do
more than that. Each in their own way, as well as in collaboration, seek to
gain self-knowledge of the prosaic and critical nature of philosophy by plac-
ing it into dialogue with literature, modernist literature in particular.
These remarkable intersections between literature and philosophy that
extend over the careers of both thinkers help to explain why the writ-
ings of Adorno and Benjamin have continued to inspire interest not only
in philosophy and social theory, but also in literary studies. Their writ-
ings on literature seem to establish a Frankfurt School canon of authors,
and suggest a way of reading literature as a basis for philosophical and
political interpretation. Unlike the Marxist school of literary critics, with
whom they shared some political sympathies, they paid greater attention
to literary form and to modernist methods of writing, understanding these
innovations as both aesthetically and politically significant. But they were
not merely readers of certain canonical authors from the European tra-
dition, as much as they were coming to terms with some of the latest
undigested phenomena: even a nineteenth-century author like Hölderlin
was still undergoing a renaissance and discovery during the 1920s, and
Benjamin belongs among the first serious readers of Kafka, decades before
the general trend of reading him as an absurdist or existentialist. Indeed,
a large part of their approach to literature consists in confronting what
has not yet been digested (to use a phrase from one of the contributors),2
that is, discovering authors that give birth to a particularly prescient and
fresh vision of modern society, and then taking advantage of these fresh
literary visions to devise a new philosophy. Indeed, it is hard to imag-
ine that a staggeringly original text such as Dialectic of Enlightenment
would be the same without its references to literature, just as Adorno’s
thought in general would not follow the same course without Benjamin’s
influence. This book takes this impact as a problem that deserves deeper
scholarly investigation: what did Benjamin and Adorno learn by reading
4 Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
literature? How did they discover fresh themes and experiences of the
world in literary authors? How did these experiences impact their philoso-
phies? More generally, what is the meeting place between literature and
philosophy? What is the philosophy of language, of expression, of expe-
rience, of thought that underlies the imperative for philosophy to learn
from literature in the ways that they do? Each of the essays in this book is
dedicated to exploring a specific literary experience of this kind, a specific
encounter between literature and philosophy. But first, it will be helpful to
offer a few reflections on the general philosophy of literature that under-
lies the very possibility of such an encounter.
What defines the literary as a mode of writing and as a subject for philo-
sophical investigation? To begin with, it is worth noting that for those think-
ing in German, the word for poetry (Dichtung) often refers to literature in
general. That is, even works by prose authors such as Thomas Mann, Mar-
cel Proust, or Franz Kafka would be called “Dichtung” or “dichterisch” in
the German use of the term. What this deep connection between the poetic
and the literary seems to emphasize is that with literature, we are dealing
with a mode of writing where the form of expression is irreducibly bound
up with the content of the writing. It is precisely this connection between
form and content that represents the paradigmatic importance of literature
for both Adorno and Benjamin. While both philosophy and literature take
place in language, philosophy has something to learn from literature pre-
cisely because of the way in which the latter explicitly organizes itself in
relation to the expressive side of language. In one of his most important
methodological texts Benjamin uses the term Darstellung (presentation or
representation) to describe the problem that is shared by both philosophy
and literature.

It is particular to philosophical writing that it must constantly stand

before the problem of presentation . . . If philosophy does not want to
be a mediating guide to knowledge, but preserve the law of its form as
the presentation of truth, then emphasis must be put on the practice of
this form, not on its anticipation in a system.
(GS 1.1, 208)

Benjamin argues that philosophical writing and speech must constantly

pause and “catch its breath,” because what it is after, truth, must constantly
be confronted from a variety of angles and approached indirectly through a
series of fragmentary formulations.

Truth, bodied forth in the dance of represented ideas, eludes any effort
to project it into the realm of knowledge. Knowledge is a possession . . .
As a possession, its mode of presentation remains secondary. It precisely
this aspect of presentation that characterizes the truth.
(GS 1.1, 209)
 Introduction 5
Precisely because in philosophy language is not merely a means to promote
or describe the results of scientific knowledge, but concerned with “present-
ing” or embodying intangible ideas that have resisted complete knowledge
since the dialogues of Plato, Benjamin argues that philosophy has to worry
about its relation to language, about the fact that it relies on words and
sentence, traditional terms and forms of writing, in order to achieve its own
irreplaceable form of activity. The notion of truth that Benjamin formulates
here remains elusive, but it clearly points to the intersection between phi-
losophy and literature. If the truth cannot be known, but only indirectly
presented through a kind of thinking that pauses to concern itself with its
mode of presentation, then philosophy has deep affinities with literature,
since literature is that particular aspect of language in which the content
cannot be detached from the form.
In his final great work, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno takes up this particular
problem of truth and presentation that he inherits from Benjamin by devel-
oping the claim that art in general has to be understood as fundamentally
defined by its truth content.3 Adorno’s entire confrontation with modern art
is motivated by the idea that if art matters anymore as a problem for philos-
ophy, it is because art sometimes has the potential to accomplish something
that philosophy has long tried but failed to accomplish. While philosophy
has always sought to know the world through concepts, it has been blocked
from fulfilling this aim because its concepts do as much to conceal as to
reveal the world. Precisely where artworks are enigmatic because they with-
draw from the kind of understanding that they seem to demand, they give
us an experience of this deeper telos of philosophy. In this most challenging
late work, Adorno seeks to present a philosophy of art concerned with the
potential of artworks to make us care about what is difficult and enigmatic
in our relation to the world. Many commenters have noted that in this work
Adorno is wrestling with the problem of how to write a philosophical work
that “presents” itself in a manner that mimics the truth content of the art-
work.4 Although the present volume cannot provide a solution to the riddle
of aesthetic truth that Benjamin and Adorno each make a central term in
their works, it seems clear from the above citations that it will not be possi-
ble to understand the way in which philosophy or art entail truth without a
deeper examination of the many ways in which they saw their philosophies
enriched by reading literature.
In a sense, this study of the role of literature in the works of Benjamin
and Adorno belongs to the larger discussion of how they thought about
art and the aesthetic in general. Many scholars, particularly in the German
tradition, have understood Adorno and Benjamin as philosophers of aes-
thetic experience.5 Art as such is to be defined by the distinctive mode of
experience that it engenders. Following Kant, we could call an experience
aesthetic when it does not apply a concept or aim to the object, but allows
the experience to unfold according to its own form. Art is thus defined as
much by what it is not, by its negation of ordinary cognitive or practical
6 Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
ways of coming to terms with the world, as it is defined by the enjoyment of
this particular kind of autonomy. According to this philosophy of aesthetic
experience developed by Menke and others, this event cannot ever be fully
given to consciousness: there remains something about the experience of art
and literature that ultimately thwarts our attempts to fully grasp it. While
this notion of the aesthetic as a different mode of experience might help
us to determine what makes art different in its overall purpose than other
kinds of objects, Benjamin and Adorno seem far more concerned with the
ways in which art embodies something definitive of experience in general. I
would argue that rather than being philosophers of aesthetic experience in
the sense described above, they are philosophers for whom the very notion
of experience itself has become a problem to investigate: to have an experi-
ence (Erfahrung) means not merely to take in sense data, but to engage with
some object or event that transforms one’s very mode consciousness. Art
and literature in particular represent a way into the more general problem
of what experience is and why true experience is lacking in so much of what
we do. If the very capacity for experience is lost or threatened by the condi-
tions of modern life, then art represents a back door that allows us to look
at the problem of experience from a different vantage point. They use the
notion of mimêsis as one key term for understanding this mode of experi-
ence that is mostly lost but still pertinent to the structure of art. If we are
going to work through the loss of experience, and in some sense “recover”
experience, to borrow a phrase from one of the contributors,6 then describ-
ing what we learn from artworks in philosophical terms becomes a crucial
exercise. Benjamin argues in his early philosophy that the discipline of phi-
losophy has since Kant operated with a highly truncated or reductive notion
of what it means to have an experience. He turns increasingly towards art
and especially literature as one way of confronting philosophy with a field
of inquiry that will open it up to the problem of experience in general.
The political significance of literary works is never far removed from the
way in which Benjamin and Adorno discuss literature, and yet they have
a somewhat idiosyncratic way of finding political meaning in the kinds
of literary texts that do not seem overtly political in their subject matter
or message. Benjamin argues in “The Author as Producer” that a work of
literature is only politically progressive if it is also progressive in its literary
tendency, in terms of its literary style and form (SW2, 269). Adorno argues
in his “Discourse on Lyric Poetry and Society” that poetry offers an expres-
sion of the social relationship between subject and object (NL1, 37). They
thus invent a way of reading literature in terms of its inherently literary and
aesthetic qualities, while translating these qualities into a basis for social
critique and innovations in philosophical method. While more orthodox
Marxist literary critics such as Georgy Luckács look to literature for its
social realism, and Sartre calls on literature to be “engaged” by taking a
clear side in social struggles, Adorno and Benjamin find social and political
significance in the very ways in which a literary text creates meaning, the
 Introduction 7
ways in which it challenges ordinary uses of language that have become
conventional, or the ways in which it might offer models of experience
that reveal and challenge conventional modes of experience. This is the
reason why they were able to read authors such as Proust, Kafka, and
Beckett, among others, as authors who are politically radical in their own
unique ways. Even though these kinds of authors do not necessarily take
the side of the oppressed in an overt way or give a realistic depiction of the
social structures that lead to oppression, they challenge the deeper assump-
tions on which much of capitalist modernity rests by offering forms of
experience that undermine the predominating attitudes towards utility,
knowledge or thinking. Proust, for example, depicts a world that seems
completely removed from the imperatives of productivity, and in doing so,
he depicts a falsified, second world. He not only gives us a potent mimêsis
of what Benjamin calls the bourgeois intérieur, but also provides a model
for how we can recollect an idyllic childlike mode of experience, in which
we are free from “the curse of being useful.”
It is impossible to understand the meaning of literature for Benjamin
and Adorno without confronting the problem of translation as one that
defines the very essence of literature. That is, in trying to understand what
language is, and what literary language is, Benjamin pays special attention
to the fact that we have to move between different languages. Benjamin
translated Proust and Baudelaire into German, and wrote a piece called
“The Task of the Translator,” which develops a challenging account of how
our language and our understanding of the world gets enriched by reading
literature in a foreign language. Although we have all heard the cliché that
“poetry is what can’t be translated,” this sentiment seems to make the very
gap between languages into something that is definitive for poetry. What
separates the literary as such from the mere communication of thoughts
through prose is that it seems rooted in its own language in a way that
resists simple equivalency. Benjamin argues against this cliché that the
poetic cannot be translated: in a sense, he argues, poetry (or literature) is
precisely what demands to be translated the most. If we could simply con-
vert a text into a series of propositions or a set of information that could
be easily converted into any different language, then translation would not
itself be much more than a mechanical task, governed by correctness. But
in translation, Benjamin argues that two languages, that is, two different
modes or media of historical and cultural experience, come into an unset-
tling encounter. A truly great translation, he argues, is not one that converts
what is foreign into what is our own comprehensible way of speaking, but
rather it serves to challenge and unsettle our own language’s conventions
through the encounter with a foreign language. The model for Benjamin
of such a translation is Hölderlin’s highly original translation of Sopho-
cles into German, which was not accepted at the time because it seemed
to follow the Greek too closely. But Benjamin’s argument concerning the
true task of the translator has implications that go beyond the practice
8 Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
of translation to reveal a deeper philosophy of what it means to have an
experience of literature: literature is the kind of language, or the aspect
of language, that takes us out of the realm of communication and into an
encounter with the deeper stratum of language that Benjamin calls silence.
It is the kind of language that makes us feel that our words and concepts
do not converge with the world in any sense. And we need the experience of
foreign languages, of translating what comes to us in a different language,
in order to see what is mobile and imperfect in our own language.7 Adorno
follows up on Benjamin’s philosophy of translation in his own way in the
piece “On the Use of Foreign Words,” where he argues for the irreducible
value of integrating foreign words into writing.

Foreign words become the bearers of subjective contents: the nuances.

The meaning in one’s own language may correspond to those in the for-
eign language in every case, but they cannot be arbitrarily replaced by
them, because the expression of subjectivity cannot simply be dissolved
in meaning.
(NL2, 287)

Even if the meaning of words can almost always be translated with a

word or a circumlocution, there is something in the foreign words rela-
tion to other words that gets lost. While literature is based on precisely this
nuance in expression, philosophy also has need of this kind of nuance in
thinking. “Foreign words are the point at which a knowing consciousness
and an illuminated truth break into the undifferentiated aspect of language
that is mere nature: the incursion of freedom” (NL2, 289). As our language
grows increasingly functional and reductive in its tendency to reflect the
pervasive culture of instrumental rationality, it is precisely the foreign word,
with its nuance, its promise to say more than what it means, that allows
thinking to go beyond such a literalness.
In Benjamin’s approach to translation and Adorno’s urge to cite for-
eign words in thought, we can make out a philosophy of language that
seeks to transcend the model of communication in order to recover the
expressive dimension. In Benjamin’s early, mystical phase, he argues
that language consists of the medium through which the true nature of
things expresses itself. The naming of a thing is the translation of its own,
internal language into the medium of human language. He derides the
bourgeois notion of language, which sees words merely as conventional
tokens arbitrarily chosen and agreed upon to communicate our thoughts
to each other. While this early thought experiment seems tinged with a
kind of mystical worldview that does not survive completely throughout
the work of Benjamin, let alone Adorno, their work nevertheless main-
tains something of this view of linguistic expression, at least as a goal for
true thinking.
 Introduction 9
The Essays
While these reflections on language, experience, translation, and expression
provide the frame through which we can understand the essays in this vol-
ume, it is what is in the frame that counts. The essays assembled here do
not aim at a philosophy of literature in general, or even at interpretations
of general themes in Adorno and Benjamin, but rather seek to highlight the
richness of the encounter that these thinkers had with specific literary works
or authors. They pose the question: how does critical theory read literature
and how is it transformed through this encounter with it? And just as impor-
tantly, what does critical theory learn from literature? Each essay seeks to
crystalize a certain metabolism between the literary and the philosophical,
an encounter in which literary themes get translated into philosophical con-
tent, and in which philosophical problems guide literary interpretation.
The first part is not unified by any single author, but looks at how themes
that are recognized to be central to critical theory (mimêsis, the critique
of philosophy of history, the loss and recovery of experience) gain much
greater concreteness and clarity when looked at through their readings of
literary authors such as Baudelaire, Beckett, and others. Rather than simply
applying a philosophical schema to the literary work, these essays demon-
strate the way in which sensitivity to the literary content gives nuance to the
philosophical understanding of the theme. Not all of the essays deal with
Benjamin and Adorno together, but they all focus on concepts and problems
that originate from the concerns shared by both thinkers, and thus lay the
groundwork for the more specific studies that follow.
One of the key crises in the intellectual friendship between Benjamin and
Adorno came when Benjamin sent Adorno his essay on Baudelaire. Corey
McCall’s essay “Against the Reification of History: Benjamin and Adorno
on Baudelaire” reexamines the exchange of letters between Benjamin and
Adorno in November–December 1938 concerning Benjamin’s work on
Baudelaire. Focusing in particular on this critical exchange, this essay seeks
to use their opposed assessments of the value of Baudelaire’s work for criti-
cal theory as a lens through which to reconsider their accounts of historical
meaning. In particular, Adorno’s worry that Benjamin fails to adequately
account for the dialectical movement of history in his essay “Paris, Capital
of the Nineteenth Century” prompts an examination of the various con-
texts for this claim in both thinkers. While Adorno correctly notes the lack
of dialectical movement in the essay, Benjamin’ development of the notion
of phantasmagoria potentially provides him with a way out of Adorno’s
dialectical impasse.
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera’s essay “Theatrum Philosophicum: Thinking Liter-
ature and Politics with Walter Benjamin” also begins with Benjamin’s encoun-
ter with the work of Baudelaire, as well as that of Fourier among others, but
rather than seeing this encounter as an opportunity to rethink the relation-
ship between the work of Benjamin and Adorno, his essay offers a reading
10 Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
that shows how Benjamin rethinks utopia and utopian writing in terms of
uchrony: a present in which something happens to disrupt the standard rou-
tine of time passing. Guardiola-Rivera’s essay employs Baudelaire as a way to
think against the standardization of capitalism and empire in order to renew
and decolonize the critical impulse present in the Frankfurt School thinkers.
Marcia Morgan’s chapter “Adorno and Beckett: Aesthetic Mimêsis and
the Language of ‘The New’” demonstrates Adorno’s philosophical reasons
for having an affinity to Samuel Beckett’s way of writing before going on
to tackle the philosophical significance of Adorno’s reading of Beckett.
Adorno’s philosophy offers a radical critique of many of the norms and
categories of how we use language and how we construe philosophy as a
practice of knowledge. Morgan interprets Adorno’s late masterpiece Aes-
thetic Theory as a challenge to the paradigm that language exists merely in
order to communicate information and as a challenge to the dominant prac-
tice of philosophy as a guardian of scientific rationality. Beckett’s dramas
perform something like Adorno’s critique of communication and rationality
in the very way that they construe the effort of subjects to gain understand-
ing of one another. Rather than focusing on Adorno’s well known essay
on Beckett, Morgan explores the impact of Beckett on Aesthetic Theory,
particularly through sections that deal with theme of mimêsis. Mimêsis is
one of the densest and most central themes in the text, and one that ties
Adorno to Benjamin. Using Beckett as a model of aesthetic mimêsis, Adorno
comes to see the mimêsis of modern art not as a mere imitation of the soci-
ety around it, but as an expression of the “dissolution of meaning.” Beck-
ett offers Adorno an exemplary case of an artist whose works constantly
demands to be understood, by presenting us with enigmas, and yet refuse to
offer any solution to their own riddles.
In “Abysmal Humanity: Anthropological Materialism in Georg Büchner
and Walter Benjamin,” Cat Moir employs the parallels between Benjamin
and the politically radical nineteenth-century playwright in order to call
our attention to an aspect of Benjamin’s thinking that has not gained much
recognition, his anthropological materialism. In their late correspondence,
Adorno coined this very term, anthropological materialism, in order to
highlight what he found increasingly unacceptable in Benjamin’s thinking,
what Moir terms his “undialectical ontologization of the body.” Resisting
the tendency to favor Adorno over Benjamin and read the latter through
themes that survive in Adorno, Moir reflects on the positive value that this
aspect of Benjamin’s late thinking can have for us. Büchner is one of the
foremost of several French and German writers from the late nineteenth
century who saw the need to join a materialist critique of capitalism with an
increasing attention to the physical and corporeal dimension of experience.
Moir demonstrates the deep significance of this subterranean tradition of
social critique for the late work of Benjamin, particularly The Arcades Proj-
ect, while at the same time offering an account of Büchner as an exemplary
literary case of this constellation of thinking.
 Introduction 11
The second part deals with an author who offered equally powerful inspi-
ration to early critical theory, Franz Kafka. At the time when Benjamin first
began writing on Kafka in the 1920s, many of his major works were just
starting to appear thanks to the posthumous decision of his friend Max
Brod to publish them. Benjamin’s pioneering reading of Kafka delves into his
rich and startling world of images with the sense of an explorer walking on
uncharted territory. Kafka appealed to Benjamin because he gives us a reflec-
tion of the modern world that is deeply distorted by guilt, despair, and anxi-
ety, but also fueled by hope for an elusive redemption from these structures.
We are now quite familiar with readings of Kafka that come from either an
existentialist or a psychoanalytic point of view, but Benjamin’s approach to
Kafka seems grounded in a deeply personal affinity that he felt for Kafka’s
way of seeing the social world. Adorno did not write about Kafka until much
later, but his own approach seems to reinforce much of Benjamin’s pioneer-
ing study. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno repeatedly cites Kafka as an example
of the kind of social critique of modernity that only art can deliver.
In his chapter “Breaking Through the Mythic Organization of Life: On the
Critique of Capitalism in Benjamin and Kafka,” Nathan Ross demonstrates
how reading Kafka helps Benjamin to develop his own, distinctive philosoph-
ical critique of capitalism. Kafka is often read as an author who describes or
diagnoses the absurd features of modern life, but this essay emphasizes the
way that Benjamin turns to Kafka for a solution to an impasse that he had
already recognized in his own early thought. While still a student, Benjamin
formulates a critique of capitalism as a religion organized around a particu-
larly pervasive and hopeless sense of guilt or indebtedness (Schuld). Many
of Kafka’s works offer images of characters enmeshed in just such a sense of
guilt by the circumstances around them, but Benjamin also finds in them a
method for defeating the hold of this guilt. In particular, Benjamin’s reading
of Kafka highlights the way in which the very method of Kafka’s writings
serves to outwit or challenge the guilt that plays a central role in them.
In her essay “The Virtue or Power of the Useless: Benjamin and Adorno
on Kafka,” Idit Dobbs-Weinstein expands the view to look at the role of
Kafka in the works of both Adorno and Benjamin. Like Guardiola-Rivera,
Dobbs-Weinstein seeks to investigate how the two thinkers’ reflections on
Kafka’s thought articulates a new relationship with things, one that would
not be determined by considerations of use. Arguing that the question of use
is a question of history or tradition, and that the dialectical problem of his-
tory forms the background to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s discussions of art,
in general, Kafka’s work, in particular, Dobbs-Weinstein situates Benjamin’s
and Adorno’s readings of Kafka in a dialectic of extremes with respect to
the history of salvation. It is only the useless, the historical detritus, things
rejected or never governed by the economy of salvation, for which there
may be hope or possibility of freedom.
“Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza: The Meaning of Comedy in
Adorno’s and Benjamin’s Divergent Readings of Don Quixote” focuses on
12 Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
a neglected topic in the scholarly literature on Benjamin and Adorno, that
of the comic. Indeed, their work is typically, and with justification, read in a
tragic register, but Menachem Feuer convincingly argues that Benjamin and
Adorno do not write exclusively in a tragic mode. Returning to the place that
Don Quixote plays in their writings, first in Benjamin’s Kafka essay and then
in Adorno’s late work (in particular his 1965 Metaphysics lectures and Aes-
thetic Theory), Feuer argues that the work of comedy is the work of freedom.
The third part deals with one of the major authors who influenced both
Benjamin and Adorno, Marcel Proust. Proust’s great autobiographical mas-
terpiece, In Search of Lost Time, dwells on the complex task of trying to
recover one’s own life through writing about it in a web of recollections,
called involuntary memory. What emerges is a work that lays out the life of
a privileged, upper-middle-class young man, not through a realistic frame-
work of linear narrative, but through a network of resemblances that hint
at the deeper significance of each experience in a fleeting manner. Both Ben-
jamin and Adorno were deeply concerned on a philosophical level with the
way in which modern society distorts our frame of experience by making
us focus on the meaning of each thing or event in a purely instrumental or
cognitive manner, a mode of experience that Benjamin calls Erlebnis. They
both regard Proust as the author who engages in a deep literary pursuit to
recover experience from this reductive context. Although Benjamin wrote
a masterful essay, “The Image of Proust,” on the significance of Proustian
recollection, both essays focus on Adorno’s relation to Proust.
In “Adorno and Proust: Memory, Childhood, and the Experiential Grounds
of Social Criticism,” Roger Foster demonstrates in particular the way in
which Adorno reads Proust as offering a vision of a lost, childhood mode of
experience. The essay offers a wonderful illustration of Foster’s larger study
The Recovery of Experience, a book which examines Adorno’s thesis on the
loss of experience in modern culture as well as his effort to regain it through
art and various other modes of spiritual experience. As Foster points out in
this essay, Adorno’s own happy childhood served as a reminder of a mode
of life not yet marked by the great historical trauma that so often inflects his
view of culture, and more generally as a symbol of a mode of experience not
disfigured by the kind of one-sided rationality and subjective domination
that characterize modern life according to Adorno. Adorno sees great paral-
lels between his own childhood and the one that Proust reconstructs in the
early volumes of his masterpiece, and thus takes Proust’s mode of writing
and literary construction of events as a model for how to recover experience
in the face of trauma and the general decline of experience.
Although Adorno wrote relatively little on Proust, Owen Hulatt’s essay,
“Seeing In, Seeing Through: Adorno and Proust,” convincingly argues that
nevertheless Adorno’s encounter with Proust was vital for the development
of his own philosophy, particularly his conception of negative dialectic. Spe-
cifically, Adorno finds in Proust an account of metaphysical experience in
which the particular is never subsumed by the universal, an account of the
 Introduction 13
syncopation between particular and universal in which the former is never
wholly determined by the latter.
The final part contains four essays on readings of Hölderlin and Walser, two
authors who seemed particularly hard to categorize or “digest” as Benjamin
and Adorno encountered them. We find that these essays on the roles of these
two figures in critical theory contain so many unexpected parallels that they
can be read as a suite. Walter Benjamin’s first major literary study centers on
a close reading of two poems by Hölderlin. After a century of neglect, Hölder-
lin’s poetic work was just starting to gain traction and interest as Benjamin
took it up during his student years, in the 1910s. Through a close reading of
the two related poems, “Poet’s Courage” and “Timidity,” Benjamin explores
the evolution of Hölderlin’s conception of the task of the poet through his
careful substation of one word for another through each poem. In the latter
poem, Benjamin finds the careful poetic expression of an exemplary passivity
that leaves the poem open to a certain dimension of the universe. Rather than
the victorious subjectivity of the modern age, Benjamin finds in Hölderlin’s
language an elusive openness to the unintended, an openness that is both dan-
gerous and inviting of deeper felicity. The latter two essays in the fourth part,
and particularly the one by Symons, will reveal that Benjamin turned work of
Robert Walser of a search for just such a stance towards experience.
The essay by Michael J. Thompson, “Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of
Modernity,” helps to situate the work of Hölderlin within the greater frame-
work of early critical theory. Thompson shows the extent to which the poet-
philosopher Hölderlin shared many of the political and epistemic stances
that define critical theory. Although Hölderlin has sometimes gained a repu-
tation as an apolitical and purely aesthetic type of poet, Hölderlin under-
stood himself as a progressive critic of the enlightenment. He critiqued the
one-sided notion of progress in the enlightenment as leading to the domina-
tion of sense and nature by reason, and sought a notion of aesthetic freedom
as a remedy to this domination. Thompson’s essay draws parallels between
this progressive critique of the enlightenment and the better known “dialec-
tic of enlightenment,” before it further traces this affinity between Adorno
and Hölderlin into Adorno’s thesis on Hölderlin’s “paratactical poetry.”
While Thompson’s essay gives a compelling argument for why critical the-
orists should find much that is of interest in Hölderlin, Hyun Höchsmann’s
essay “Walter Benjamin on Hölderlin’s ‘Poetic Cosmos’,” delves deeper into
the very rich textual relationship between Benjamin and Hölderlin, while
also noting the influence of this study on Adorno. Benjamin attributed the
utmost significance to his early study of Hölderlin. As Höchsmann incisively
demonstrates, the text is decisive for Benjamin not only because of the way
it opens up a fresh reading of Hölderlin, but even more because of how
Benjamin sets the most profound philosophical concepts at play in his close
reading of two poems. Benjamin draws philosophical implications of the
utmost significance from the subtle choices that Hölderlin made in revising
“Poet’s Courage” into “Timidity.” Benjamin writes:
14 Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
Timidity has now become the authentic stance of the poet. Since he has
been transposed into the middle of life, nothing awaits him but motion-
less existence, complete passivity, which is the essence of the courageous
man—nothing except to surrender himself wholly to the relation.
(SW1, 34)

The essay thus culminates in evoking an attitude or stance towards nature

and suffering that somehow lies outside of the modern tendency to domi-
nate and reify thing. What is the greater philosophical significance of this
“authentic stance”?
Stéphane Symons’ essay, “Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! Sobriety and Poetic
Determinability in Hölderlin and Walser,” commences from this stance by
following it from his reading of Hölderlin to his encounter with Robert
Walser. In Hölderlin’s poetry, Benjamin had discovered an exemplary atti-
tude towards thought, which he calls sobriety. Rather than reading Hölderlin
and the Romantics in terms of sublimity, surging indeterminacy and murky
origins, Benjamin finds in them a sobriety that carefully contemplates the
indeterminacies in the universe so as to find space for further determina-
tion. Symons’ essay juxtaposes the terminological and poetic fastidious-
ness of Hölderlin with Benjamin’s gift for character study in order to create
a novel constellation: Symons notes that the almost passive, but deeply
engaged and creative attitude that he found in Hölderlin marks an essential
theme across Benjamin’s writings, appearing in altered form in his studies
of Mickey Mouse, Dostoyevsky’s “Idiot,” and Charlie Chaplin. But Symons
study focuses most of all on Benjamin’s reading of Robert Walser as a way
to unfold this theme further. Walser’s novels center around characters who
are submissive and loyal to an extreme that allows them to disclose new rela-
tions in the world. Symons focuses on the odd dialectical contradictions in
Walser’s anti-heroes, which disclose new potentials for action and resistance.
The final essay, Jeffrey A. Bernstein’s “Ramble On: Robert Walser at the
Limits of Critical Theory,” takes a more expansive view of the philosophi-
cal significance of Robert Walser’s work for both Benjamin and Adorno.
Although hardly a major figure in their writings, Bernstein argues that
Walser can serve as a compelling test case for how critical theory approaches
literature. The essay focuses on the madness or delusion with which Walser
imbues his characters, as well as on the social and literary significance that
Adorno and Benjamin ascribe to Walser’s approach to his subject. While
Adorno sees Kafka, for example, as an author who writes of the madness
of society in a cool manner that allows us to recognize it, he sees Walser as
an author whose very writing seems infected by this madness. According to
Bernstein, Adorno and Benjamin see Walser as significant because of the way
in which the very form of his writing embodies or mimics certain patholo-
gies that are particular to modern society. Bernstein’s essay concludes with a
note of ambivalence on whether Adorno and Benjamin are simply troubled
 Introduction 15
by what they found in Walser, or whether they are able to glean some critical
value from the various lacks and negations that they find in his work.

Notes
1. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 485.
2. See Jeffrey A. Bernstein’s “Ramble On: Robert Walser at the Limits of Critical
Theory,” Chapter 13 in this volume.
3. Adorno sets the program of Aesthetic Theory: “All aesthetic questions terminate
in those of the truth content of the works: is the spirit that a specific work objec-
tively bears in its form true?” (AT, 335) And:
Art is directed toward truth, it is not itself immediate truth; to this extent truth
is its content. By its relation to truth, art is knowledge; art itself knows truth in
that truth emerges through it. As knowledge, however, art is neither discursive
nor is its truth the reflection of an object.
(AT, 282)
4. See inter alia Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to
Adorno and Derrida (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1992), esp. Chapter
Four, “Constellations of Concept and Intuition: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory”;
Thomas Huhn, The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Lambert Zuidervaart, Ador-
no’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993).
5. See, for example, Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity
in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999); and Albrecht Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985).
6. See Roger Foster, The Recovery of Experience (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). Fos-
ter’s study of Proust in this volume builds on the approach he developed in this
book.
7. See the study of Eduardo Mendieta, “The Jargon of Modernity: Benjamin,
Adorno and Philosophy’s Motherless Tongue,” in: Nathan Ross ed., The Aes-
thetic Ground of Critical Theory (London: Rowman and Littlefield International,
2015), 47–67.
Part I

Benjamin and Adorno

Literary Themes and Philosophical
Debates
1 Against the Reification of History
Benjamin and Adorno on Baudelaire
Corey McCall

History, time, temporality: these have become Heidegger’s terms, or at least

these are terms that acquire a strongly Heideggerian resonance, especially
during the height of his fame in Germany shortly after the publication of
Sein und Zeit in 1927. Reification, of course, is a term one finds in Adorno’s
work, though less frequently than one might find it in, say, the work of
Lukács, who made this term the central concept of his History and Class
Consciousness (1923).1 Although he does not specifically employ the term
“reification,” one finds in Benjamin’s work evidence of related notions such
as “self-alienation” and “phantasmagoria.”2 Memory, experience, history—
these are among the key concepts that Adorno and Benjamin share during
the 1930s, when Benjamin was at his most productive and Adorno still con-
sidered Benjamin his mentor. It is during this fraught period that Benjamin
conducts his most sustained work on the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire,
one of the touchstones, along with figures such as Proust and Kafka, for his
mature work.
While it is clear that Baudelaire’s work provides a touchstone for Ben-
jamin, we cannot say the same for Adorno. One finds scattered references
to the poet’s work throughout Adorno’s writings, but not the same sort of
sustained attention to Baudelaire one finds in Benjamin’s work. However,
Adorno carefully reads Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire during the 1930s,
and he critically responds to Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire during Ben-
jamin’s final decade. It is in this critical response to Benjamin’s writings
on Baudelaire that one finds Adorno’s most considered response to Baude-
laire’s work as well as a critical response to his friend’s interpretation of
Baudelaire as the poet of modern life. Furthermore, these exchanges reveal
important things about the later trajectory of Adorno’s work as well, for
during the 1930s Adorno delivers his lecture “The Idea of Natural-History”
and publishes his study of Kierkegaard, key texts that both display his debt
to Benjamin’s work (his Ursprung des deutschen Traurspiels in particular)
and set the stage for his later work. My essay begins with a reconsideration
of the debate between Benjamin and Adorno over how one ought to read
Baudelaire. Specifically, the exchange of letters in November and December
1938 provides a matrix for understanding their work in the early 1930s.
20 Corey McCall
This exchanges points us back to the philosophical context of their work
in general and to questions related to the meaning of history in particular.
In order to understand Adorno’s critique of Benjamin, we must return to
Adorno’s dialectical account of the relationship between nature and history
in “The Idea of Natural-History” and the Kierkegaard book. Indeed, Robert
Hullot-Kentor claims that we can read the Kierkegaard study as a rehearsal
of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which construes “sacrifice as the dialec-
tical truth of domination.”3 A careful reconsideration of their exchange of
letters in November–December 1938 shows that what is at stake for Adorno
in Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire as the poet of modernity is the question
of dialectic, which he believes that Benjamin neglects. In other words, Ador-
no’s main worry is that Benjamin reifies history by neglecting the dialectical
relationship between history and nature in his Baudelaire writings.4 As I
show in the first section, this concern about the lack of dialectical movement
in Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire in “The Paris of the Second Empire” is
in part a function of the work that Adorno had been doing in New York,
both with Max Horkheimer and Paul Lazarsfeld in 1938. I argue that Ador-
no’s criticism of Benjamin during this exchange can be better understood
if we recall Horkheimer’s critique of Positivism as well as Adorno’s later
criticisms of Lazarsfeld’s empirical approach to sociology exemplified in the
Radio Research Project, to which Adorno contributed from 1938 to 1941.
While I will not be able to comprehensively analyze the intertextuality
one finds in the Benjamin-Adorno relationship here, one important dimen-
sion of the manifold relationships between the two men’s work can be found
in the claim, advanced by Robert Hullot-Kentor among others, that we read
Adorno’s 1933 Habilitationsschrift published as Kierkegaard: Construction
of the Aesthetic as a work indebted to Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic
Drama and, in addition, that we read Benjamin’s extended engagement with
Baudelaire in terms of the Trauerspiel book.5 In his recent reading of Benja-
min’s late work in terms of political philosophy, James Martel also suggests
that we ought to read Benjamin’s Baudelaire in terms of the Trauerspiel
book. So, if the touchstone for both Benjamin and Adorno had been Ben-
jamin’s earlier work on the German mourning-play, then why is Adorno so
harshly critical of his friend’s work on the nineteenth century French poet?
In other words, why does he believe that Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire
in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” falls into the same trap as
Heidegger and Kierkegaard?
This essay attempts to answer this question in three parts. The first sec-
tion re-examines the debate during the last years of Benjamin’s life over
the significance of Baudelaire’s work for critical theory. The second sec-
tion traces this late dispute between Benjamin and Adorno back to one of
its sources: Adorno’s attempt in the 1930s to work out the dialectics of
nature and history and focuses first on his lecture “The Idea of Natural-
History” and subsequently on his critique of idealism in his Kierkegaard
book. Finally, I return to Benjamin in the final section, which focuses on
 Against the Reification of History 21
Benjamin’s attempts to overcome the reification of history. In Adorno’s writ-
ings on Baudelaire and in The Arcades Project more generally, reification
is typically couched in terms of the phantasmagoria of modern capitalism.
Accordingly, the final section focuses on Benjamin’s development of this
term out of his reading of Baudelaire as the poet of high capitalism. I do not
attempt to adjudicate the dispute between Benjamin and Adorno. Rather, I
argue that if we look carefully at how the question of history manifests itself
in Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire and in Adorno’s criticisms of these
texts, we can begin to see how this key concept operates in the writings of
both men during this period.

The Baudelaire Debate of 1938

The Benjamin–Adorno correspondence includes fascinating and often con-
tentious discussions of Benjamin’s late work on Baudelaire composed dur-
ing the 1930s. In these exchanges, we can see Adorno become increasingly
critical of what he sees as a lack of consideration for dialectic in Benjamin’s
treatment of Baudelaire. But what is the significance of this criticism? What
does this debate over dialectic (or its lack) in Benjamin’s analysis of Baude-
laire’s writings tell us about the work of the two thinkers?
In a letter dated November 10, 1938, Adorno responds to Benjamin’s
essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” He worries that Ben-
jamin’s presentation, both in this essay and in The Arcades Project mores
generally, presents a series of phantasmagoria without theoretical explica-
tion.6 In other words, Benjamin’s text consists of a series of isolated images
without dialectical mediation.7 After noting that he has carefully discussed
the dialectical question of the “Paris of the Second Empire” with Max Hork-
heimer, Adorno states his objection plainly:

If I am not much mistaken, this dialectic lacks one thing: mediation.

There is a persistent tendency to relate the pragmatic content of Baude-
laire’s work directly to adjacent features of the social history of his time,
especially economic ones. I’m thinking, for example, of the passage on
the wine tax, some reflections on the barricades, or the aforementioned
remark about the arcades. This seems to me particularly problematic,
since the transition from an inherently theoretical consideration of phys-
iologies to the “concrete” portrayal of the flâneur is especially tenuous.
(SW4: 101)

In other words, Adorno’s critique here amounts to the complaint that

the relationship between Baudelaire’s literary production and the socio-
economic conditions to which it relates is simply assumed rather than devel-
oped. He finds especially problematic the “[substitution] of a metaphorical
statement for a bindingly literal one” (SW4:101). Indeed, these substitutions
give Adorno a “sense of artificiality.” Most egregious in Adorno’s view is
22 Corey McCall
when Benjamin claims that the city transforms into “an intérieur for the
flâneur” (SW4:101). As we shall see in the next section, one of Adorno’s
worries is that Benjamin is here falling prey to the same temptation that
befell Kierkegaard. Indeed, both the distinction between nature and artifice
and the reference to the bourgeois intérieur figure prominently in Adorno’s
1933 critical reading of Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic, as we shall see
in the following section.
Adorno further charges that Benjamin’s project leaves the distinction
between the subjective experience of the artist and its objective conditions
intact, for it does not adequately account for the manifold connections
between them. In other words, subject and object are reified in Benjamin’s
analysis. In leaving these terms intact and unmediated, Benjamin’s work
fails to do justice to the totalizing effort embodied in Marxism.8 In other
words, Adorno charges in effect that Benjamin only pays lip service to Marx
because he feels that this is what Horkheimer and the other members of the
Institute want to hear, but that Benjamin’s turn to Marx is an artificial one.
If we set aside Adorno’s charge of pandering, there is an important philo-
sophical point here which receives its elaboration in Adorno’s “The Idea of
Natural-History.” As we shall see subsequently, in this lecture Adorno pro-
poses to articulate the dialectical relationship between history and nature,
so as to avoid the reduction of history to natural fate. Adorno charges that
Benjamin’s inattention to the dialectical relationship between history and
nature in his account of Baudelaire and the nineteenth century has reified
history into something akin to objective fate that remains utterly distinct
from subjective experience, and the relationship between subject and object
unquestioned. The relationship between nature and artifice and its role in
Adorno’s work of the 1930s will be my focus in the next section; in the
remainder of this section I shall consider Adorno’s claim that Benjamin’s
text as both pragmatic and positivist before turning to Benjamin’s rejoinder.
In his letter dated November 10, Adorno repeatedly characterizes Ben-
jamin’s analysis as pragmatic, and praises “the ascetic discipline to which
you’ve subjected yourself in omitting all the crucial theoretical answers and
even in making the questions invisible to all but initiates” (SW4:99–100).
He wonders whether “the pragmatic content of these subjects . . . conspire
almost demonically against the possibility of its interpretation” (SW4:100).
This question provides a key to my reading, for it both distills Adorno’s
criticisms of Benjamin’s methodology and shows what’s at stake in their dis-
pute. We get a better sense of what Adorno means by this characterization
of Benjamin’s work as “pragmatic” if we consider Max Horkheimer’s use of
the term during this period. By 1938 Horkheimer and Adorno had already
begun working out the preliminary ideas for The Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment, so we can surmise that Adorno is using the term in much the same
way that he and his collaborator will subsequently use it in their published
work. Furthermore, he had begun working with Paul Lazarsfeld in January
1938, following Horkheimer’s invitation to work with him at the Institute
 Against the Reification of History 23
part-time and on Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio Research Project. It was
Lazarsfeld who introduced him to empirical social research, and Adorno’s
many reservations about this research program are likely informing his res-
ervations about Benjamin’s Baudelaire as well.
Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason provides an account of the hegemony
of subjective or instrumental reason.9 The eclipse of reason to which the
title refers is the eclipse of objective reason, which “aimed at evolving a
comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his
aims.”10 Objective reason gets eclipsed by the rise of modern instrumental
reason, which “proves to be the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby
to co-ordinate the right means with a given end.”11 Horkheimer traces the
origin of instrumental reason back to Empiricism, in particular to the work
of John Locke.12 Horkheimer even indirectly references Baudelaire when
he claims that the French Symbolists embraced the absurdity of subjective
reason:

The French Symbolists had a special term to express their love for the
things which had lost their objective significance, namely, “spleen.” The
conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its “absur-
dity,” “perverseness,” as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of
utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate
its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it
conscious, by this shock, that it forgets the subject, the gesture simulta-
neously expresses the subject’s sorrow over his inability to achieve an
objective order.13

The Symbolists, like their Romantic forbears, saw themselves as alienated

subjects among a world of objects devoid of mediation, without a hierarchi-
cal, objective moral and ontological order that would permit them to make
sense of themselves in terms of these objects.14 On Horkheimer’s account
Positivists are simply French Symbolists without the sorrow. Of course this
modern alienation can be said to begin with Descartes’ founding gesture of
modernity that sunders subjects from the world of objects.15 And certainly
this is precisely the worry Adorno expresses in his letter to Benjamin. It is
not simply that Benjamin makes Baudelaire the object of his study that wor-
ries Adorno, but how he does so (or fails to do so) that unsettles him.
Adorno’s reference to the demonic in this letter helps us to see why, for it
refers us back to his Kierkegaard book while also capturing the conspirato-
rial dimension of Benjamin’s project, a dimension that we shall see is also
pivotal for Benjamin’s attempts to deal with the reification of subject and
object.16 Adorno objects most strongly to the second section of Paris, Capi-
tal of the Nineteenth Century, concerned with the figure of the flâneur. In
Adorno’s estimation, this section remains too broadly empirical and positiv-
istic, situated “at the crossroads of magic and positivism” (SW4:102). Ador-
no’s suspicions on this score were longstanding. Martin Jay has pointed
24 Corey McCall
out that Adorno felt that Benjamin’s “quasi-positivist” method of constel-
lation deployed in The Origin of German Tragic Drama did not adequately
account for the dialectical relationship of objectivity within the subject, but
instead conceived of them as polar opposites.

There were, to be sure, elements in Benjamin’s approach that Adorno

found questionable. For example, he warned that its extreme anti-
subjectivism turned Benjamin’s philosophy into “no less a source of ter-
ror than of happiness.” And he found much to criticize in Benjamin’s
quasi-positivist rejection of mediation and his Platonizing, ahistorical
search for “eternal constellations.”17

Benjamin’s response to Adorno’s November 10 letter is dated December 9.

By this time, his situation in Paris had become increasingly precarious, but
he still held out hope for an escape to New York. He chides Adorno for
what he sees as his impatient reading, and claims that his critique rests on a
misunderstanding of his use of the term “trace”:

You write “Panorama and ‘trace,’ flâneur and arcades, modernity and
the ever-same without theoretical interpretation—is this ‘material’ that
can wait patiently for interpretation?” The understandable impatience
with which you scanned the manuscript for a specific statement has
caused you, in my view, to miss the point in some important respects. In
particular, you were bound to be disappointed by the third section when
you failed to notice that it contains not a single reference to modernity
as the “ever-same,” or that this key concept is not dealt with at all in the
part of the work already written.
(SW4:106)

Benjamin claims that he cannot adequately deal with a concept such as the
trace at the empirical level of the second section, thus implicitly ratifying
Adorno’s assessment of the “Flâneur” section of the text, but he counters
that, while the concept is presented casually in the empirical account, it can
only be philosophically understood in opposition to the aura. Benjamin next
considers Adorno’s objections in terms of three concepts: the flâneur, the
arcade, and modernity. He plans to complete the Baudelaire study “in the
dialectic of the new and the ever-same” (SW4:107).
I conclude this section with a brief consideration of the trace, both
because it is an important concept in its own right and because it helps to
crystallize the debate over history and its reification in a way that will lead
us to further considerations of Adorno and Benjamin separately. Benjamin
notes that the trace “finds its philosophical determination in opposition to
the concept of the aura,” that term which had been so important to his
analysis of modern art in the various versions of “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” versions of which were composed from
 Against the Reification of History 25
1936 to 1938 (SW4:106). Mechanical reproduction, of course, signals the
gradual decline of the aura expressed by pre-modern artworks, which were
conceived as unique works situated in a particular social context. Beginning
with the graphic arts, artworks were reproducible on a mass scale. Mariam
Brantu Hansen notes that the term “aura” first occurs in Benjamin’s writ-
ings in 1930, in one of his hashish protocols; indeed, the term initially had
a much broader scope than is typically thought: due to the overwhelming
influence of the “Work of Art” essay, readers tend to associate it solely with
artworks.18 At least in 1930, Benjamin had intended the aura as a potential
feature of all objects. Certainly in his Baudelaire texts, the concept has this
broader scope.
Aura names the qualitative uniqueness of objects that, especially in pre-
modern contexts, gives them a sense of the sacred, an unapproachable
awesomeness that demands reverence. This is the quality of distance that
Benjamin attributes to sacred relics and works of art in pre-modern con-
texts. The claustrophobic closeness of modern urban life demands the ano-
nymity of mass art. The counterpart of the object’s aura is the person’s trace.
“Since the Days of Louis-Phillipe,” Benjamin writes,

the bourgeoisie has endeavored to compensate itself for the fact that
private life leaves no traces in the big city. It seeks such compensation
within its four walls—as if it were striving, as a matter of honor, to pre-
vent the traces, if not of its days on earth then at least of its possessions
and requisites of daily life, from disappearing forever.
(SW4:25–26)

Modernity simultaneously marks the decline of an object’s aura and a sub-

ject’s traces in the stifling closeness of the urban crowd. Benjamin’s stark
distinction between the subject’s trace and the object’s aura reinforces
Adorno’s suspicions that his friend has reified the subject and object rather
than setting them into dialectical motion. In other words, Adorno fears
that Benjamin has repeated the mistake he diagnosed several years ear-
lier in the writings of Kierkegaard, who on his reading trapped the bour-
geois subject within the four walls of the interior like an insect in amber.
The basis for these suspicions can be found first in “The Idea of Natural-
History” and then in Adorno’s Kierkegaard book. It is to the prehistory of
the November/December 1938 epistolary dispute between Benjamin and
Adorno that we now turn.

Toward a Dialectics of History and Nature, or Diagnosing

Heidegger and Kierkegaard (Adorno)
Adorno presented “The Idea of Natural-History” on July 15, 1932, before
the Frankfurt chapter of the Kant Society.19 “The Idea of Natural-History”
begins by posing the question of the relationship between nature and history
26 Corey McCall
in terms of the link between tradition and modernity in history. Adorno
probes this connection between tradition and modernity in the hopes of pro-
viding an account of the dialectical relationship between history and nature.
Indeed, Adorno notes at the outset that he wishes “to dialectically overcome
the usual antithesis of nature and history,” and the hyphen in the lecture’s
title signifies that the dialectical relationship between nature and history is
at issue in Adorno’s lecture.20 Nature has traditionally been conceived as the
realm of mythic fate, but it is this concept that must be “dissolved” through
a reconsideration of history.21 The dialectical movement of history undoes
this fated nature by introducing something “qualitatively new”:

The question that arises is that of the relationship of this nature [i.e.,
nature as mythic fate] to what we understand by history, where history
means that mode of conduct established by tradition that is character-
ized primarily by the occurrence of the qualitatively new; it is a move-
ment that does not play itself out in mere identity, mere reproduction
of what has always been, but rather one in which the new occurs, it is a
movement that gains its true character through what appears as new.22

The dialectic of history and nature, or natural-history, accounts for nov-

elty within the fated mechanical repetition of nature. We can get a better
sense of what Adorno is doing here when we consider his lecture alongside
his Kierkegaard book, for one of Adorno’s recurring refrains in that book
concerns how Kierkegaard’s persistent attempts to think against Hegel’s
dialectic force Kierkegaard into a logic of sacrifice that alternatively either
forgets history or recasts it as fate or the ever-same.23 This, in turn, will help
us to more adequately grasp the basis for Adorno’s reservations in his 1938
exchange with Benjamin, for he sees Benjamin’s Baudelaire falling into the
same traps he had previously diagnosed in Kierkegaard. In both of these
earlier texts and in his subsequent letters, Adorno is convinced that only
dialectic can unstick the reified, frozen relations between subject and object,
between history and nature.
“The Idea of Natural-History” presents Adorno’s attempt to overcome
the dialectical opposition between nature and history.24 The only way to
dialectically overcome the opposition between nature and history is by
showing that nature is always already historically mediated and that history
is in turn natural. Nature must be translated into myth.25 Nature, then, is
the realm of fate and therefore cyclical repetition of the ever-same. History,
by contrast, would constitute the realm of the unique and the new, but this
would mean instituting a gulf between historical novelty and natural fate.26
Adorno’s target in this essay is Heidegger’s ontology, specifically what
Adorno sees as Heidegger’s Neo-Kantian (which he dubs “Neo-Ontological)
distinction between the ontic and ontological realms, i.e., between the realm
of beings and the realm of being in order to “secure transsubjective being by
means of autonomous language since other means and other languages are
 Against the Reification of History 27
not available.”27 However, we can get a better grasp of the dispute between
Benjamin and Adorno in 1938 if we focus on various ways that this lecture
anticipates both his reservations concerning Benjamin’s project in 1938 and
his Kierkegaard book. The main problem is that Heideggerian ontology can
only attempt to grasp the novel (the contingent, the accidental) in categori-
cal terms:

I mean nothing else than the attempt of neo-ontological thought to

come to terms with the unreachability of the empirical continually oper-
ates according to one schema: precisely where an element fails to dis-
solve into determinations of thought and cannot be made transparent
but rather retains its pure thereness, precisely at this point the resis-
tance of the phenomenon is transformed into a universal concept and
its resistance as such is endowed with ontological value. It is the same
with Heidegger’s concept of being-toward-death as well as the concept
of historicity itself.28

In other words, Heidegger’s thought reifies the concrete particular by sac-

rificing it to a conceptual determination (“Dasein,” “Sein-zum-Tode,”
“Geschichtlichkeit”). Here, Heidegger repeats the mistake of his predecessor
Kierkegaard by reifying historical relations as conceptual determinations:
the unique particular is sacrificed to the universal determination. History
reifies the particular. Adorno cites the French Revolution as an example to
show how historical contingency becomes subsumed by general categories
of historicity.

One can set up a general structural category of life, but if one tries to
interpret a particular phenomenon, for example, the French Revolu-
tion, though one can indeed find in it every possible element of this
structure of life, as for instance that the past returns and is taken up and
one can verify the meaning of the spontaneity that originates in man,
discover causal context, etc., it is nevertheless impossible to relate the
facticity of the French Revolution in its most extreme factual being to
such categories.29

Neo-ontology loses the concrete particular at the same time that it col-
lapses back into idealism. The proof that Adorno adduces for this claim
is that Heidegger’s philosophical project prioritizes the project (Entwurf)
over “subsumed facticity.” The possibility of Dasein’s authenticity lies in its
self-assertion in the face of one’s everyday facticity, but this assertion can
only originate in a self-assertion which Adorno claims is a “subjectivistic
idealism.”30
Despite this eventual lapse into subjectistic idealism, Adorno acknowledges
that neo-ontology “has radically demonstrated the insuperable interwovenness
of natural and historical elements.”31 Nevertheless, Heidegger’s intertwining
28 Corey McCall
of nature and history still fails to think their relationship in a truly dialectical
fashion, because it replaces a particular with a conceptual construct, in much
the same way, as we shall see, Kierkegaard does. Drawing on Lukács, Adorno
claims that his constructed history replaces the first nature of immediacy with
a second nature of convention, and then forgets this substitution:

This fact of a world of convention as it is historically produced, this

world of estranged things that cannot be decoded but encounters us as
ciphers, is the starting point of the question with which I am concerned
here. From the perspective of the philosophy of history the problem of
natural-history presents itself in the first place as the question of how
it is possible to know and interpret this alienated, reified, dead world.32

History transforms nature into petrified, dead second nature, and then we
forget that this transformation has occurred. Adorno claims that Benjamin
sees nature in terms of transience at the same time that he sees the possible
petrification of nature into history, and this is fundamentally different from
those (such as Heidegger) who would see history in terms of a project. A proj-
ect, after all, must be judged in terms of fulfillment, whether what agent who
initiates the project seeks to accomplish. Natural-history, on the other hand,
finds itself in the ruins and seeks to make meaning from this ruinous state.

For radical natural-historical thought, however, everything existing trans-

forms into ruins and fragments, into just such a charnel house where
signification is discovered, in which nature and history interweave
and the philosophy of history is assigned the task of their intentional
interpretation.33

If Heidegger presents us with one failed strategy for asserting meaning among
nature’s ruins, Kierkegaard presents us with another, one that remains equally
reifying. On Adorno’s reading, Kierkegaard’s attempt to escape Idealism fails:
it leaves him with a subject that makes a world of its own interiority and a
nature that is little more than fate. Whereas Heidegger’s Dasein seeks to
gather itself out of the fragments of facticity and reconstitute itself, Kierkeg-
aard’s subject makes a home for herself out of the bourgeois intérieur.
Adorno claims that the interior lies at the center of Kierkegaard’s philoso-
phy, for Kierkegaard’s individual remains isolated from her reality. “In his
philosophy the knowing subject can no more reach its objective correlate
than, in a society dominated by exchange-value, thing are “immediately”
accessible to the person.”34 Although Kierkegaard does not employ the con-
cept of reification, Adorno avers that he nevertheless was an astute theorist
of it. Adorno cites a passage from Training in Christianity in which Kierkeg-
aard relates the experience of reflectively forgetting oneself and consequently
completely identifying with various objects. Of course, for Kierkegaard it is
Christianity that saves the individual from losing herself. “Truth does not
 Against the Reification of History 29
have the character of a thing. It is the divine glance, which falls like the intel-
lectus archetypes on alienated things and releases them from their enchant-
ment.”35 Stated in terms of “The Idea of Natural-History,” God might save
us from the wretched fate of second nature. Alas, Adorno tells us, it’s not to
be: no deus ex machina will save us from reification’s machinery. Instead, it
is “a shallow idealism” that “comfortably divides up its objects into internal
and external, spirit and nature, freedom and necessity.”36 The metaphor for
the consolation offered by this shallow idealism is the bourgeois intérieur.
The figure who inhabits this apartment is none other than the flâneur, who
“promenades in his room; the world only appears to him reflected by pure
inwardness.”37 Benjamin sometimes seems to present the promenading flâ-
neur as the hero of his arcades, and this is likely another source of the mis-
givings Adorno expresses in their 1938 exchange over Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century. I shall conclude by returning to Benjamin and show-
ing that Benjamin does not unreflectively make a hero out of the flâneur.
Instead, he is just as worried as Adorno about this issue of reification, but
for Benjamin reification takes the form of phantasmagoria.

Conspiracies: Crowds, Phantasmagoria, and Revolt

(Benjamin)
For Benjamin, the city is the realm of second nature in which the individual
becomes reified through various techniques such as surveillance and the
census that seek to fix her identity and thereby control her.38 “In times of
terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in
the position of having to play detective” (SW4:21). The detective story, Ben-
jamin claims, originates from the fact that the masses had been the source
of revolutionary terror and could serve that function once more. More
likely, though, is that this revolutionary potential will remain unfulfilled.
The crowd also “appear[s] as the asylum that shields an asocial person from
his persecutors” (SW4:21). A perceptive individual who knows the nature
of the crowd is needed to ferret out these asocial types, and the detective is
born from this need. The detective originates from the flâneur, as a way of
justifying his idleness (SW4:22). Dumas, in his Mohicans de Paris, rewrites
Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and transposes Cooper’s setting from the
wilds of upstate New York to the wilds of the Parisian metropole (SW4:22).

The most interesting thing about Cooper’s influence is that it is not con-
cealed but displayed. In . . . Mohicans de Paris, this display is in the very
title; the author promises readers that he will open a primeval forest and
a prairie for them in Paris.
(SW4:22)

But it’s Balzac who takes Cooper to heart, such that his “intrigue is rich
in forms that fall somewhere between tales of Indians and detective stories”
30 Corey McCall
(SW4:23). Although both Dumas and Balzac anticipate the detective story
in various ways, Baudelaire’s translations of Poe’s detective stories intro-
duce the French public to detective stories for the first time, which can be
distinguished from their predecessors by their logical structure. Whereas
Dumas and Balzac sought to transpose Cooper’s tales of the wilderness
onto the Parisian scene and thereby transform nature into second nature,
Baudelaire’s translations of Poe present the true figure of the detective.
Baudelaire does not simply serve as Poe’s translator, however. In addition,
he appropriates three of the detective story’s essential elements for his own
poetry: the victim, the murderer, and the masses. Missing, of course, is the
figure of the detective. “In him, the calculating, constructive element was
on the side of the asocial and had become an integral part of cruelty. Baude-
laire was too good a reader of the Marquis de Sade to be able to compete
with Poe” (SW4:23).
Urban technologies and techniques of control conspire to constitute the
urban subject. Benjamin cites the practice of numbering houses, the Ber-
tillon method of handwriting analysis, and the invention of photography
as techniques developed to capture the unique identity of the individual.
“Photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and
unmistakable traces of a human being. The detective story came into being
when this most decisive of all conquests of a person’s incognito had been
accomplished” (SW4:27). Members of the bourgeoisie resisted such control
technologies by making their interiors their own and hiding themselves and
their possessions away from the curious gaze of both officials and anony-
mous city dwellers, thereby attempting to reinstitute the aura that mass soci-
ety and its mass-produced objects had forsaken.
The second section of “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” con-
sists primarily of a series of juxtaposed scenes of crowded city life, in urban
centers such as Paris and London. Benjamin will claim that the theoreti-
cal sparks are generated from the juxtaposition of such scenes but Adorno
clearly finds this insufficient, as we saw in the first section. For Benjamin,
these scenes present the phantasmagoric life of the city as a surrealist second
nature that has forgotten its origins in nature. We can see this, for example,
in his characterization of the various responses to the transition from gas-
light to electric illumination. Robert Louis Stevenson writes, in his “A Plea
for Gas Light,” about the loss of the rhythmic lighting of the gas lights, gone
forever now that the electric lamps do not need to be lit. Indeed, Stevenson
finds electric light horrifying, but it became the norm once urban dwell-
ers became accustomed to its glow. While Stevenson characterized electric
light as the kind that “should shine only on murders and public crime, or
along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror,” Poe had
previously characterized gas light as the sort that “threw over every thing
a fitful and garish lustre” (SW4: 29). Gas light, like all urban technologies,
quickly becomes normalized as people become accustomed to it.
 Against the Reification of History 31
Benjamin sees a similar dynamic at work in various meanings attached to
the crowd. Victor Hugo conceives of the crowd in natural terms.

In Hugo, the crowd enters literature as an object of contemplation. The

surging ocean is its model, and the thinker who reflects on this eternal
spectacle is the true explorer of the crowd, in which he loses himself in
the roaring of the sea
(SW4:35)

The crowd, in other words, is akin to “natural forces.” For Hugo, the crowd
becomes another name for fate (SW4:37). “He recognized the urban crowds
and wanted to be flesh of their flesh. Secularism, Progress, and Democracy
were inscribed on the banner which he waved over their heads.” It is clear
that Baudelaire rejects this strange modern mystique of the crowd that so
enchanted his predecessor, but he replaced it with a model that was equally
as “uncritical” as Hugo’s.

While Victor Hugo was celebrating the crowd as the hero of a modern
epic, Baudelaire was seeking a refuge for the hero among the masses of
the big city. Hugo placed himself in the crowd as a citoyen; Baudelaire
divorced himself from the crowd as a hero.
(SW4:39)

The crowd is a creature of this urban landscape and the uncanniness of

Poe’s tales derive, at least in part, from his ability to show this.

The people in his story behave as if they can no longer express them-
selves through anything but reflex actions. These goings-on seem even
more dehumanized because Poe talks only about people. If the crowd
becomes jammed up, this is not because it is being impeded by vehicu-
lar traffic—there is no mention of vehicles anywhere—but because it is
being blocked by other crowds.
(SW4:30)

The crowd itself has become a kind of urban machine in which the trace
of individuality sought both by the flâneur and the bourgeoisie has been
rendered inoperative (SW4:30–31). Indeed, the flâneur has become akin to
a commodity, a “commodity-soul” for whom every individual is “a poten-
tial buyer.” Perhaps here we can see another source for Adorno’s disquiet,
for this “commodity-soul” bears a striking resemblance to Kierkegaard’s
individual. It may be more accurate to think of the flâneur as the inverse of
Kierkegaard’s individual. Recall that Kierkegaard’s individual walls herself
into the interior and spins a world from within it. Baudelaire’s flâneur, by
contrast, opens himself out into the world and imbibes the crowd like a
32 Corey McCall
drug, thereby losing himself within the crowd. Indeed, it becomes difficult
to see how self-commodification, which is even more prevalent now than
it was when Benjamin and Adorno wrote, could serve as a critical concept.
Political theorist James Martel provides a clue. First, he argues that Benja-
min conceptualizes reification in terms of phantasmagoria. That is, modern
urban dwellers are held spellbound by the cotemporary idols. Martel reads
Benjamin’s project as thoroughly anti-idolatrous:

The term “phantasmagoria,” as Margaret Cohen tells us, comes from

a kind of “magic-lantern show” that dated from the era of the French
Revolution and its aftermath. This show was meant to produce ghostly
images of the dead (i.e. phantoms). By analogy, Marx used the term to
describe commodity fetishism as well; the link he makes illuminates
the ghostly afterlife that is given to objects when they are imbued with
strange and phantasmal qualities. Like Marx, Benjamin uses the term
“phantasmagoria” to refer specifically to the practices of commodity
fetishism, to the ghostly and fantastic “reality” that is produced via such
widespread idolatry.39

Contemporary life is characterized by profound collective delusion that

makes it a ruinous second nature. This ruinous present can only be redeemed
if we connect it with history into a constellation of meaning. Our task in
“moments of danger” is to connect our present with others into a constel-
lation of meaning. “On the Concept of History” reminds us of this. Our
historical task is not to reconstruct the past as it actually was. Rather, the
meaning of the past must be grasped as it “flashes up”: “The past can only
be seized as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability,
and is never seen again” (SW4:390). Thus, as Benjamin famously writes,
we must brush history against the grain. This means reconceiving history
against the ideology of progress that prevails both in Benjamin’s time and in
ours. Instead, we have to attend to the meaning in history that universal his-
tory misses as it reconstructs the past positively. “The concept of mankind’s
historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression
through a homogenous, empty time” (SW4:395). Empty paeans to progress
are but another way of reifying history, of missing the concrete Jetztzeit as it
flashes before us, provided we are paying attention.

History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogenous,

empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robe-
spierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he
blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed
itself as Rome reincarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fash-
ion cites a bygone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical, no
matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into
the past. Such a leap, however, takes place in the arena where the ruling
 Against the Reification of History 33
class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the
dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.
(SW4:395)

Revolutions explode the smooth, mechanical functioning of history that

typically goes by the name of progress (SW4:395).
And Baudelaire might provide a model for this revolutionary constellation
composed out disparate moments from the past, but not in the way that he
intended. Benjamin concludes “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”
with the melancholy thought that the modern hero is not himself a hero but is
rather a portrayer of heroes. A protean creature, Baudelaire is, at the end of the
day, not a hero but instead one who “conspires with language itself” (SW4:61).
Martel evaluates Baudelaire’s significance for Benjamin in the following way:

For Benjamin, Baudelaire does not pretend to have some “outside” per-
spective on what was happening in Paris during his lifetime; he is a full
and enthusiastic participant in the development of commodity fetish-
ism, but in his art, his poetry, and his style, he also manages to subvert
and conspire against that which so deeply involves him.40

If revolution remains a possibility, either for Benjamin in his time or for

us today, then it will happen as a conspiracy, behind the backs and against
the intentions of those, like Baudelaire (and, following Adorno, Heidegger),
who conspired with their time but also provided us with hints of how to
think otherwise than the terms that have been dictated to us by the appar-
ently ironclad laws of history.

Notes
1. Recently Axel Honneth has attempted to rejuvenate this term by offering a cri-
tique of Lukács’ original conception of reification and supplementing it with a
variety of recent approaches, including those derived from thinkers such as John
Dewey and Stanley Cavell, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Berkeley
Tanner Lectures) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
2. Most evidently in Benjamin’s most well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Rolf Tiedemann claims that the Marxist
dimension of Benjamin’s work initially derived from his reading of History and
Class Consciousness when it appeared in 1923, and he seems to have seriously
read Marx much later. Nevertheless, Lukács concept of reification and Marx’s
commodity fetish are both ancestors of Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria.
3. Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Critique of the Organic: Kierkegaard and the Construc-
tion of the Aesthetic,” in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on
Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 77. Hullot-
Kentor develops this claim:
Domination does contingently imply sacrifice, but is structurally sacrificial:
the ego “owes its existence to the sacrifice of the present moment to the
future”; abstraction, the modus operandi of scientific control, is nothing
other than the sacrifice of the particular to the universal.
34 Corey McCall
The violence that abstraction does to particulars is key to Adorno’s account of
Kierkegaard, but it is also key to Adorno’s conception of philosophy, whose aim
he subsequently characterizes as “[the translation of] pain into the concept”
(cited by Hullot-Kentor, 90).
4. Benjamin sent Horkheimer and Adorno three versions of texts related to Baude-
laire and the Paris arcades that were meant to introduce The Arcades Project.
The first, written in 1935, was “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century”
(SW3: 32–49). The second, which provided my focus here, was “The Paris of the
Second Empire in Baudelaire” dates from 1937 when Horkheimer requested an
extract from The Arcades Project, while the third “On Some Motifs in Baude-
laire” was completed in 1940. I focus on the 1937 essay because Adorno and
Horkheimer found “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” much more satisfactory.
The controversy over “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” is conse-
quently much more apparent and it thus provides a better basis for my analysis
of the prehistory of this controversy in the work of both thinkers.
5. Hullot-Kentor, “Critique of the Organic,” esp. 88–92.
6. I will return to the issue of phantasmagoria in the third section below.
7. Adorno’s student Rolf Tiedemann develops this critique in his influential edi-
tor’s introduction to Das Passegen-Werk, “Dialectics at a Standstill” collected in
On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections. Ed. Gary Smith (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). Tiedemann points out the influence of Surreal-
ism on the structure of The Arcades Project, and shows how Benjamin sought
to apply his critical insights to modern capitalism.
8. Martin Jay’s account of the fate of this concept in Western Marxism has yet to
be surpassed. See Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Con-
cept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Although the book does not focus on Benjamin, the discussion of Adorno and
Lukács is especially relevant to my purposes in this essay. See Chapter 8, “The-
odor Adorno and the Collapse of the Lakácsian Concept of Totality,” 241–275.
9. Susan Buck-Morss argues that, despite the fact that The Eclipse of Reason bears
only Horkheimer’s name as author, that the book as a collaborative work:
Horkheimer’s theoretical essays reflected Adorno’s thinking as well as his
own, for in California during the war their work was intimately collabora-
tive. Not only Dialektik der Aufklärung, but also a book-length work on
the same theme in English, Eclipse of Reason (1947), although appearing
under Horkheimer’s name alone, was clearly by them both.
The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and
the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 173.
10. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Continuum, 1974 [1947]), 4.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 4–5.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. This, of course, is the point of Hegel’s figure of the “Beautiful Soul.” See The
Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977 [1807]), 126–138. The classic text on this idea is Arthur O. Lovejoy, The
Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). More
recently, Charles Taylor has developed this insight. See, for example, A Secular
Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. Part 1 and his sum-
mary of this project published as Modern Social Imaginairies (Durham, NC:
Duke University Presss, 2004).
15. Jay Bernstein develops this brilliantly in his essay “Wax, Brick, and Bread: Apo-
theoses of Matter and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Paint-
ing: Descartes and Pieter de Hooch,” in Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late
 Against the Reification of History 35
Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2006). He contrasts the material abstraction of Descartes’ wax with the vibrant
materiality found in Dutch painting at the same time:
What makes Descartes’ dissolution of the sensible world even more dis-
turbing is that in the very next decade the attempt was made to offer to the
material world of the senses an authenticity, and so an authority, beyond
anything previously achieved. It was an attempt to transform the material
world from a forever surpassed vehicle for spiritual—ultimately, “other”
worldly—activity and meaning into the perfected corollary of being our-
selves wholly embodied, sensuous, and finite beings.
Bernstein’s Dutch painters present us with a path not taken in modernity, an
alternative to Horkheimer’s instrumental reason.
16. Thus Adorno’s question both anticipates my reading of the context of Adorno’s
critique in section two and Benjamin’s own articulation of his projects aims
detailed in section three. My reconstruction of Benjamin’s conspiracy with
Baudelaire is indebted to James R. Martel’s marvelous interpretation of the
political stakes of Benjamin’s project in his book Textual Conspiracies: Walter
Benjamin, Idolatry, and Political Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2013). The specific terms of this debt will be made plain in the third sec-
tion of this essay.
17. Jay, Marxism and Totality, 251. The Adorno citation comes from his essay on
Benjamin in Prisms.
18. Mariam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Seigfried Kracauer, Walter
Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2012), 104.
19. Robert Hullot-Kentnor provides the context for the talk in his essay “Introduc-
tion to T.W. Adorno’s ‘The Idea of Natural-History’,” in Things Beyond Resem-
blance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
20. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” (1932) in Robert Hullot-
Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 252.
21. Ibid., 253.
22. Ibid.
23. Adorno’s Kierkegaard book has received renewed critical interest recently. In
addition to Rober Hullot-Kentor’s translation of Kierkegaard: Construction of
the Aesthetic in 1989 and his editor’s foreward “Critique of the Oranic” (which
can also be found in his 2006 collection Things Beyond Resemblance), Robyn
Marasco, The Highway of Despair (New York: Columbia University Press,
2015) devotes the second chapter of her recent study of critical theory’s Hegelian
roots to a study of Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Peter E. Gor-
don’s, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)
reconsiders Adorno’s critical engagement with existentialist thinkers including
Kierkegaard. I am indebted to these engagements with Kierkegaard: Construc-
tion of the Aesthetic in my own reading of the text: Gordon’s book uses Adorno’s
engagements with Kierkegaard at the beginning and the end of his career to frame
his re-evaluation of the place of existentialism in Adorno’s work, while Marasco
reads Hegel and Kierkegaard (and Kierkegaard’s reading of Hegel) as important
precursors to critical theory, though my interests differ from both Marasco and
Gordon in that I am interested in how Adorno’s 1933 philosophical critique of
Kierkegaard informs his reading of Benjamin’s Baudelaire rather than an intel-
lectual history or an examination of the place of despair in critical theory.
24. Adorno prefaces his lecture by saying that his remarks are not “a lecture in
the usual sense of communicating results or presenting a systematic statement.”
36 Corey McCall
Rather it is an “essay . . . an attempt to take up and further develop the problems
of the so-called Frankfurt discussion,” Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,”
252. In German, the word Versuch can mean both “essay” and “attempt,” and
Adorno’s prefatory remarks highlight how his anxiety regarding formal aca-
demic research is already present in this relatively early stage of his career.
25. Ibid., 253.
26. Cf. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” 253.
27. Ibid., 254.
28. Ibid., 257.
29. Ibid., 256–257. Adorno’s argument here is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s claim in
his early fragment “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” that concepts
seek hegemony over particulars.
Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-
equivalent. Just as it is certain that no leaf is exactly the same as any other leaf,
it equally certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by dropping these differ-
ences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one feature
from another, so that the concept that gives rise to the notion that something
other than leaves exists in nature, something which would be “leaf,” a primal
form, say, from which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, dyed, curled,
painted—but by a clumsy pair of hands, so that no single example turned out
to be a faithful, correct, and reliable copy of the primal form.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The
Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 145. This early essay becomes
the basis of the postmodern interpretation of Nietzsche, but Nietzsche is clearly
drawing upon Goethe’s conception of Urphänomen, those natural regulari-
ties that lack the determinativeness of conceptual regularities, a conception of
regularity that will be important for Benjamin as he develops his idea of the
dialectical image. Richard Eldridge helpfully traces Benjamin’s elaboration of
this idea from his early writings on German Romanticism through The Arcades
Project in Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, and the Human Subject (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016). See especially Chapter 4, “Benjamin’s Modern-
ism,” 102–149.
30. Of course, this lapse into subjectivistic idealism eventually led Heidegger to
argue for the self-assertion of the German university through a complete identi-
fication with the Nazi Party.
31. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” 260.
32. Ibid., 261.
33. Ibid., 265.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 39.
35. Ibid., 40.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 41.
38. Benjamin’s insight will be developed subsequently in the work of Michel Fou-
cault and Ian Hacking. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Modern Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995
[1975]); Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–
1978. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007); and Ian Hacking,
The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
39. James Martel, Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, and Political
Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 12.
40. Ibid., 7.
2 Theatrum Philosophicum
Thinking Literature and Politics
With Walter Benjamin
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

Theatrum Philosophicum: Reintroducing the Play of Chance

Before the apotheosis of war happened in the lands of our childhood, experi-
ence was passed down through the generations in the form of tales, images,
and stories. These also conveyed a sense of the inter-temporality of justice,
of intergenerational justice as a secret pact made between our ancestors and
the younger generations, which provides the latter with the power to sur-
vive the most violent onslaughts and through play, role-play, and tech-tools
crack the world open.
After the apotheosis of war, however, the fragile human bodies that
emerged from the killing fields where coffins with no remains piled up as if
an artwork of the future, seemed invisible and mute. They may want to be
seen, but have been spirited away; they may speak, but nobody wants to lis-
ten. Like the ghost in Hamlet, we’ve been rendered unable to commune with
and communicate the “forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions” to
those who should listen.1
Instead, all we get is the repetitive news cycle and the poor jargon of
Twitter. These feed no one; being “poor in noteworthy stories,” they can
neither catalyze the movement found in the experience of a land in anguish,
nor de-form the given world beyond imagination the way dreams and fan-
tasy play can and do. Instead, they feed obedience by mythologizing history
and social forces into fate as well as the illusion of the juridical-psychic
unity of individuals: for example, the imagery of self-propelling markets
and the declarative language of states of emergency and crisis. And yet, pre-
cisely because of this the apparently redundant forms of literature, imagery,
and textuality—play—become full of pathos, highly charged with electric
energy, and their seeming obsolescence or untimeliness becomes the condi-
tion of their critical power.2
Walter Benjamin, never given to the trappings of nostalgia wishing to revive
the traditions of the past, saw in this light the lyric poetry of Baudelaire, the
detective-fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and the utopian fantasies of Fourier,
Saint-Simon and others. He wasn’t the only one to connect the untimeliness
of these literary forms with the possibility of communicating experience in
38 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
spite of the experience of catastrophe and the catastrophe of experience in
the wake of war, capitalism, and spectacle. But he was unique in emphasizing
the power of the play of words and images to lure and magnetize affections
speculatively, cracking not just the world but also time open.3
Children and actors invest radically in the sort of performances that take
place in play, insofar as what they get out of their living experiences in their
respective milieus and practices isn’t related to having some certainty about
winning or losing. Their radical investment in events accelerating or slow-
ing down time generates dimensions and milieus, intensifying life in what
seems inert or devitalizing animated beings and fostering in them a regres-
sion towards instinct, and therefore traveling back and forth between logi-
cal and actual possibility.
In general terms, we call “rituals” the kinds of empirical events that have
the status of both actualizing a possibility and in doing so acting in a way
that moves from maintaining and preserving a fragile promise to its actu-
alization in the future. They involve dramatizations (often, of violence)
that produce a kind of textuality, which the audience participates in and
experiences as a sticky interface between actual performance and poetic
inscription, scene or staging, thereby recasting from then onwards social or
cosmological situations experienced before as uncertain or traumatic.
Ritual has its most powerful effect by bringing into effect a change of state
in its prime actors “as well as in the cosmology that is its frame” by realizing
as new a space and time presumed as its pre-condition “through a sequence
of actions in which effects create causes or conditions of possibility that take
shape only in retrospect,” but are carried into the present and the future.
In general, philosophers and anthropologists call the creative force of text,
language, and of speech acts uttered in rituals “performative.” After J. L.
Austin’s analysis of the performative and Jacques Derrida’s, Drucilla Cor-
nell’s and Judith Butler’s work on performativity and the symbolic, also in
the wake of theories of ritual as communication in archeology and anthro-
pology with implications on personhood and the creation of options and
leverages, it would be best to speak, as I do, of the “retro-futuristic perfor-
mative” as central to a renewed understanding of the play of promises and
their failure or actualization.4
Such philosophical understanding of play, which I’ve termed here textual-
ity or, in a wider sense, philosophical theater, finds its conceptual persona in
“the sentry of dreams.” Miguel Abensour borrows him from Victor Hugo’s
L’Homme qui rit apropos of Benjamin. Benjamin’s philosophical heteronym
is a character named Ursus, who plays the role of the paradigmatic beggar
philosopher, the discomforter, with regard to his pupil Gwynplaine whose
utopian fantasies of social justice the master knows will be seen as danger-
ous by the rulers. “A philosopher is a spy or a detective, and Ursus, sentry
of dreams, kept a close eye on his pupil.” Making Abensour’s words ours,
“Walter Benjamin is a sentry of dreams,” a philosopher-detective searching
for what can be salvaged from the interrupted collective dreams of the last
 Theatrum Philosophicum 39
two centuries, all the while keeping a close eye on the way dreams and fan-
tasies still fascinate us (fascination of abomination, after Conrad). To awake
ourselves from what had been the existence of our parents, fascination of
abomination, we need to reintroduce a sense of absolute risk and the play of
chance in existence and social life.5
One could say about play what Benjamin says about the perennial player,
the gambler: “Life has only one real charm—the charm of gambling. But
what if we do not care whether we win or lose?”6 Quoting Baudelaire in this
text, Benjamin would know for he was a gambler himself. The gambler, the
Cynic beggar philosopher, slaves and monsters, the ragpicker, the refusing
clerk, the Amazon, the prostitute, the man of the crowd, the detective, the
cleaner; all of them are figures of poverty and poor images themselves; what
if they gathered and acted politically without care for wins or losses? This
line of questioning ties in with Baudelaire’s interest in E. A. Poe’s “analysis
of the eccentrics and the pariahs of this world,” a phrase that according to
Benjamin corresponds also to the self-portrait introduced by Auguste Blan-
qui in his L’Eternité par les astres: the image of the discomforter, she/he/it
who interrupts the finitude of given time, the metrics of the horizontal and
the vertical (also the vertical gaze of apotheosis and violence) in the direc-
tion of the infinite, the speculative and the absolute—risking his life in the
fire this time, in now-time, danger time.
Crucially, the point of invoking these images of poverty has nothing to
do with the virtue and morality of gamblers and the poor, or their supposed
lack thereof. Rather, it concerns both the kind of risk involved in their action
and the effervescent quality of the time of risk and action. This includes the
capacity of images, utterances, and performances to produce a dramatic
intensification of the affects they lure as well as their insistence on another
course (of history, of possibility) at the heart of the event.
To be more precise, it concerns the coproductive and mutually catalytic
relation between security or certainty and risk or uncertainty. Or, in other
words, the sense in which speculative images and propositions both require
and retro-futuristically produce a milieu that gives them their consistency
and justification: whereas some particular certainty could be produced by
lifelong ritual performance and practice (for instance, the methodical prac-
tice of profit-making) in this case uncertainty would remain a generic exis-
tential condition that couldn’t be resolved in this life, despite one’s ethical
efforts. Such a life would then constitute a continuing effort “to reset the
relation between certainty and uncertainty, with profit-making in business
as a constant effort and salvational uncertainty as background reality” as
well as the imaginary framework given by the civic “theological model” (as
Max Weber taught us).7
Something else is required: the co-staging of certainty and uncertainty
that recasts the latter and changes the perspective of participants, who
wake up to the possibility of another course of history and its actualization,
come what may. The question of another course of action, for either event
40 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
or history, isn’t postponed or deferred to the space of utopia but becomes
an urgent one posited every time in each act as a lightning-like image that
makes up the battle at all levels of existence, without certainty as to victory
or defeat. This image, flashing forth in the Now (neither the Old nor the
New) of performativity, running through the hesitations attached to each
act as it plays out, is what must be seized in order to both hold on to and
let go of the world of dreams of Yesteryear or the bliss of the Everafter.
The operation of salvage that is effected in this way, and only in this way,
can ever be accomplished solely “for the sake of what in the next moment
will be irretrievably lost,” without hope of salvation, without reservation
or hope of restoration and return, Benjamin says. Isn’t this technology of
awakening what Benjamin terms, precisely, the dialectical image?8
In other words, two kinds of technologies of anticipation can be distin-
guished in our understanding of play, image recognizability, and the time of
risk and action. First, ritual and practice appear as part of a nearly universal
apparatus for hedging, producing routine and regularity (standards, norms,
metrics) as well as the kind of predictability associated with the mythical
notion of eternal return. As is the case in the methodical ritual practice of
profit-making, which Weber theorized as “the spirit” of capitalism and writ-
ers from the Jesuit jurist-theologians of early modernity to Sade and Fourier
in the nineteenth century explored and experimented with in their texts,
technologies of hedging are also subjugating of time and nature, absorbing
all that is unexpected or unfamiliar about the latter within grasped regulari-
ties elevated to the condition of law-like repetitive patterns.
Second, once pushed to the background, uncertainty returns as the real-
ity to be dealt with via rituals of redemption that would recover a sense of
the harmonious play between technology and nature in the projection of a
Golden Age, either as a past in need of restoration or the bliss of the ever
after. If the first technology produces the One (in contrast to nature, thus
as a super-natural being that demands full investment from persons), the
second technology aims to produce the Many or the Crowd in sync or “har-
mony” with nature; that is, as a connected-natural being that demands little
investment from the collective by engaging in repeated experimentation via
three operations—isolation, articulation (the obligation of speaking or con-
fessing, passing through language), and ordering or classification (producing
sequences that aren’t of the order of syntax but that of metrics) —thereby
delivering the Individual, the man in the crowd, out of play.
Benjamin alluded to these two technologies early on, in a fundamental
text from 1936: note 1 of the French version of “The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” which he translated together with
Pierre Klossowski. The first technology originates in social ritual, he says,
“the first technology excluded the autonomous experience of the individual.
Every magical experience was collective” and involved full investment from
persons, up to sacrifice. And while the first comprises a project of subjuga-
tion and colonization of nature,
 Theatrum Philosophicum 41
the origin of the second technology is to be found in the moment when,
guided by an unconscious scheme, man learns for the first time to dis-
tance himself from nature.

In other words, the second technology is born in play, engendering a new

relationship to nature, aiming to find “a harmony between nature and
humanity.”9
In this context, modernity isn’t so much a progression from the first “hedg-
ing” ritual-technologies to the second “play” individual-making metric-
ritual technologies, but the theater of a battle between the two. Liberal and
social-democrat reformists take their cue from the subjugation of nature
that informs their belief in progress, in an “infinite perfectibility—an infinite
ethical task” that, Benjamin declares, is but the other side of “the representa-
tion of the eternal return.” Proper to the first technology and its concept of
subjugated nature, these two illusions—progress and repetition—are com-
plementary. “They are the indissoluble antinomies in the face of which the
dialectical conception of history must be developed.”10 This is modernity as
dream and phantasmagoria, as our centuries prove to be the time of repeti-
tions in which the Old wins out through the very experience of the New.
Thus, the problem with the New is that it turns out to be the very negation
of movement: it “engenders the return of myth which, wearing the mask
of the New, reveals itself to be the terror and catastrophe of repetition,” as
Abensour explains apropos of Benjamin’s contrasting invocation of Baude-
laire, Fourier, and Blanqui (also Sade) as founders of textuality.11
Therefore, reintroducing the play of chance in existence and social life
isn’t a matter of novelty, let alone fashion or the certainty of return (nei-
ther as restoration of the past nor as profit, secured through the deferral
of a different, unexpected future), but to unleash the lightning-like power
of ritual to articulate events differently and to lure, capture, and recast the
real concerns (hatred and struggle, or “combinatory play,” as in Fourier’s
utopia) within a machinery of the passions. This conception of the act and
the justifications for action envisages a move beyond morality—destructive
of the history of ethics, or moral history. Rather than appealing to the virtue
of the poor, for instance, the point is to lure and intensify the hesitation and
concern in their action, the worry felt at that moment, the forks in the road
that come to be in this action or lack thereof.
It can be said of all actions and their justifications, in this respect, that
they’re mixtures of possibilities and actualities. If so, speculative perfor-
mances and propositions aren’t choices or judgments, and they don’t make
decisions for the world; rather, they recast uncertain conditionals and events
differently, so that for the possibility of another course of history to acquire
consistency and actuality it must lure and intensify the real worries that
predict them at least in part (one could speak of a “prophetic gaze” in this
precise sense). Such affects of hatred and combat develop in the memories of
the participants, in texts and literary or historical-philosophical works and
42 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
images or ritual refusals as they both depict and enact the combat’s explo-
sive unfolding. An “art of war,” one might call it, but not so much “a new
art of war” as a lightning-like art of battle that emerges suddenly in the Now
and, exploding time from within, as a spark or a bomb, situates or institutes
a milieu of consistency—a new dimension.
Ultimately, the relevance of a speculative (dialectical) image or proposi-
tion has to do with making sense and the constitution of our actual and
near-future world as a world-in-the-making: what it inherits as a result of
its secret pact with the past, and the power of the possibilities that continue
to have a latent or weak presence, its futures and tendencies, which raise the
question of inter-temporal justice.

The Uses of Force: Inter-Temporal Justice and the

Maximal Intensification of Experience
Rather than to conceive of justification in the normal sense of judgment
(the judgment of God, or the command/demand of love and obedience by
a super-human being—a King or President, a result of first technology) it
would be better to speak of the maximal intensification of our lived expe-
rience (giving value to all existence, the importance assumed by ways of
seeing and feeling that are specific play combinations of each existent, affir-
mative of what matters here and now and thus constitutive of nature itself).
And instead of situating the aims of our actions in the space of utopia, it
would be better to situate or recast utopia in the time-dimensionality of play
cleared by second technology, which renews childhood and lets go of nature.
It may be best to speak of uchronies rather than utopias, and of a technol-
ogy that “appears as the spark” or the bomb that “ignites the powder of
nature” instead of absorbing it, as Benjamin says.12
Also, the power of ritual shouldn’t be understood here reductively, as
mere hedging against danger through metaphorical standardization, but
rather, as opening up an interval, a time-gap between the present and the
future, in which the effervescence of collective retro-futuristic performance
produces, forcefully and with electricity (as Durkheim taught us) a sort of
conviction that is performative (as J. L. Austin and Judith Butler taught us)
but also constitutive and metaphorically transformative of the force of all
social institutions and conventions in ordinary social life.
We’re speaking of action as a ritualized encounter that produces its own
conditions of possibility. The collective effervescence of the interval, which
can be technologically mediated, is the moment when certainty is produced
out of uncertainty because social uncertainty is recast in the ritual process by
the very participation of all actors and players who accept to take part in and
collaborate in the ritual process. Ritual actors and brothers/sisters-in-arms
are restless and compulsive collectors and archivists. They appropriate
through incorporation (rather than plunder and property), rescuing the tone
of inaudible voices and the forensic traits of disappeared bodies issued forth
 Theatrum Philosophicum 43
from images, analogous to films that reappropriate “found” poor images
turning them into engrams, frames, and montages of attractions. This opera-
tional procedure, bringing forth the interval, is a matter of survival. It’s nei-
ther love (as both Critchley and Žižek believe, oblivious to its entanglement
with myth) nor fascination (of abomination). Action is extemporaneous,
uchronistic, or unexpected (rather than predictable or anachronistic) inven-
tion. The best example here is interlocution with ghosts and ancestors, in
the fashion of Hamlet’s Marcellus or Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush
of Ghosts.13
This means the true risk of an action lies not in the space of standards and
probabilistic calculation but is the risk of arriving at an agreement in any
sort of contingent claim in the absence of any reliable (stochastic, proba-
bilistic, or rational-managerial) model of prior instances. This is absolute
risk, or as I prefer “gratuitous” risk, the kind of which is involved in action
taken irrespective of whether one cares for safety or knows beforehand with
any certainty whether the outcome would be a win or lose. In true (Hege-
lian) speculative mood, this means radically investing all one’s life in taking
action without reservation.
What looms in the background of this most important of Benjamin’s
thoughts is a certain conception of time as the unquantifiable unknown—
the open future; and following from that, a concept of historical change
as the result of contingent claims advanced by the various ghostly figures
of the poor when they fall on the side of objects without reservation, and
having fallen, they and their seemingly dead objects speak to the living,
coming from the depths, in a voice that the latter cannot recognize (for
instance, as filmed subjects or radio-theatrical events) and in doing so
question the foreclosure of the future.
The techno-human principle derived from Benjamin’s conception of time
and transformative action can be distilled into one word: interruption. The
task isn’t only to interpret history but to dive into and invest in it, in its radi-
cal transformation, from the perspective of the effervescent moments that
interrupt the continuity of time foreclosed. In such moments of dramatic
experimentation, the action transmutes “a technical operation into a human
event.” Benjamin speaks in this sense of a “laboratory of the dramatic.”14
The Paulinian concept of time as kairós, which the Jewish founder of
Christianism uses at least eight times in his Letter to the Romans to refer
to “now-time,” also lurks behind these photo-electric reflections on time,
risk, and action.15 Let’s also consider in this context the messianic notion
of the return of the ghostly and the dead (advent, parousía), which imme-
diately evokes images of final judgment and the interruption of history
from the perspective of the poor and the fallen as both denunciation and
utopia: the times and things to come. In this context the notion of the “to
come” acquires the meaning and sense of physical presentation, of bring-
ing spirits (such as the disembodied voices of the fallen of history coming
from radio and cinema, poor and lost images to be found in the archive of
44 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
history, in the dream-like slumber of capitalist culture) back to their bod-
ies. The latter, says Benjamin, is the power of (experimental) theater in alli-
ance with radio and cinema: to immobilize the image in motion, the course
of the action, obliging spectators to take position in relation to the process
and actors in relation to their role, interrupting the flow of the normal and
the legal. “The exposition of a physical presence,” as Benjamin observes.
Now the point moves away from the civic-theological closer to the theatri-
cal and to combat, the ritual and the political: to construct the people and
their cause in the image of absolute risk and performative force, radical
investment, and time-creating action as per Baudelaire’s dramatic play of
rags and tatters. In the latter, having taken a step into the abyss, there’s no
going back.16
The point resonates also with Adorno’s idea that the only act of thinking
likely to bear cognitive fruit is one that takes place in free fall, a fonds perdu,
without reservation.17 “The vertigo which this causes is an index veri; the
shock of inclusiveness,” or, the open.18 Adorno’s take on (living, intellectual)
experience in this passage posits that a concept that is to pass into a moral-
political image of freedom will throw itself to the objects, onto the side of
all that has been turned into a thing,

embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stabil-
ity and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying,
utterly deterritorializing and always already unknown. Falling means
ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender,
decline and catastrophe,

corruption or destruction as well as liberation or a transformative condition—

from things into people and vice versa.19
Liberation-destruction takes place in the open and as the opening of what
I’ve called the interval, as the stage for metaphorical transformation and
philosophical theater. It doesn’t necessarily entail ultimate (social) death or
utter power over life and death just as falling does not entail falling apart.
It can also mean that arbitrary power (the kind that’s often identified with
all-powerful rulers who make themselves the equivalent of gods through
the use of violence that Benjamin calls “mythic”) can be and has been lim-
ited through the (performative) creation of institutions that not only head
off the danger of utter violence but uses its force to bind (as the giver and
receiver are bound by a gift), thereby bringing into effect a change of state
in the prime actors of the instituting performance as well as in the cosmol-
ogy that’s its frame. Thus, also, bringing about a world presumed as the
precondition of both institutions and performances through the sequence
of actions in which effects create causes or conditions of possibility that
take shape only retroactively. Such use of force, constitutive of a people,
of their actions beyond any justification through God’s judgment or com-
mand, as “pure” means opposed to ends-oriented morality, taking on full
 Theatrum Philosophicum 45
responsibility as ourselves or as members of a community (as individuals
or dividuals), anthropologists call “sacred” and Benjamin terms “divine.”20
This retro-creativity has been identified primarily as a linguistic effect, but
there’s no reason why it cannot be extended to the concrete effects of the politi-
cal imagination, the combination between the utopian and protest or critique,
the prophetic vision and voice. The force that binds in any institutionalizing
ritual process reveals a logic of reciprocity and alterity, gift and countergift that
may be said to precede any actual exchange. The interval emerges in between
gift and countergift, denunciation and the time to come, the historical and
ahistorical strata within utopia considered as a form of the collective dream.
Put otherwise, objects and gifts in the ritual process don’t create ties
between monadic individuals but between parts thereof, violent and vola-
tile. If my ritual gesture of reciprocity and alterity (an extended hand, which
both indexes a contingent claim and hands it over) meets no receiving ges-
ture (a receiving hand), war follows.21 Thus, violence operates here in a dual
register: first, for simplification, drawing lines where otherwise one might
see only complex networks of human relations, bringing asymmetries in to
the open, and then, second, against simplification, in the sense that if it’s
true that the quality of sovereign power is to define its subjects as a single
people then, prior to any war between different peoples, is the war between
the people subjected and the sovereign-ruler that subjects them. Isn’t this in
fact what Marx called living labor?22

The Gratuity of Risk: On the Relation Between Armed

Struggle and Finance
In other words, the model of action invoked here after Benjamin is the gra-
tuity of risk. This means, on the one side, breaking up with the tendency to
manipulate nature or reality and ultimately subject it to domination, control,
and subsumption. Such act of rupture must take place first in the hearts of
militants and their political desire. Put otherwise, the correct answer to the
question raised by critical philosophy at least since Kant, “what can we know,
hope or believe and do?,” which arguably boil down to the practical question
of belief and action, is “nothing.” However, it’s because of that inconstancy
of will or lack of ultimate ground that we act, taking real risks. This can be
understood as an existential demand to live our lives in the most meaning-
ful sense of the term “option,” rather than simply manage it. In this respect,
liberation and freedom are the opposite of a well-calculated hedged financial
operation; perhaps is better to say that the meaning of liberation/freedom
comes closer to that of an expanded understanding of leverage.
On the other side, this involves a kind of realism about the time dimen-
sion: if there’s nothing we can know, hope, or believe, no ultimate ground,
ends-oriented morality, or end-of-history projected into the future or scrip-
ture as the bliss of the ever after, then the force and legitimacy of an action
emerges radically, here and now, from the denunciation of present and
46 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
concrete situations. This is what in their reflections on the concreteness of
the dream of justice Latin American Liberation philosophers call “propheti-
cism,” different from but related to “utopia.”23 They refer, simply, to enact-
ing vision and spirit—which renews all things—as opposed to the legalizing
of ritual performance as habit, and to protest as well as forward-looking
project in opposition to the countable verification of results and the calcula-
tion of inputs and outputs.
In this respect, Liberation thinkers are the true successors of Benjamin,
and Latin America the place and time where his intuitions become realiz-
able. To make or change history is to create here and now those possible
times and things to come. If and when it comes (advent, the arrival of “the
man of lawlessness” or the antinomian attitude, living corporality, a pres-
ence revealed in action), it will arrive in history not as the result of will or
a managed project, but in surprising and contradictory ways. This is to say
that the advent-event may be considered imminent, and yet, the timing is
uncertain since it’s unknown. If such is the case, then historical ruptures are
violent and “catastrophic,” i.e., analytically unpredictable yet utopian.
The alternative or “new world will be a landscape,” or a dreamscape, and
“not paradise. The only freedom of action for humans, the only possibil-
ity to stop being the spectator of one’s own life is to engage in actions of
resistance and creation that correspond to the situation.” This is so because,
if the advent of historical ruptures isn’t dependent on mere will, the key to
unleash transformative action is “to discern what is concretely realizable
among logically possible things” or options, or “to recognize what is ‘com-
possible’ in relation to the situation.” Certain things are impossible (e.g., a
square circle) but other things, such as perpetual peace or that the day will
come when wealth could be equally repartitioned among us all, aren’t. They
may not be realizable in given time for this or that reason, and neither our
strongest will nor our best wishes and intentions would suffice to realize
them. Only an external element, often a technological limitation or its subla-
tion, might change categorically the state of the situation, intensifying it and
magnetizing our affections. An example would be the way in which the fab-
rication and availability of effective contraceptives impacted upon feminist
demands for liberation that were always possible but not historically suf-
ficient. What was both desirable and possible became also concretely com-
possible and realizable. This has nothing to do with “objective conditions,”
but rather with the fact that in their absence militants can always engage in
destructive-resistant action and create techniques of liberation that are just
and necessary, which in time can work as part of the effective architecture
of the free landscape that would emerge, arrive, at an illuminating point in
time and space (a landscape’s address, as John Berger would say).24
What arrives? In Benjamin’s words,

the image of an earth in which every place has become an inn. The
double meaning of the word Wirtschaft blossoms here: all places are
 Theatrum Philosophicum 47
worked by human hands, made useful and beautiful thereby; all, how-
ever, stand like a roadside inn, open to all. An earth that was cultivated
according to such an image would cease to be part of “a world where
action is never the sister of dream.” On that earth the act would be kin
to the dream.

On the other hand, we aim to grasp the importance of “the forms that reveal
the collective dream” of our times.25
We can better appreciate the originality of such an approach, pioneered
by Benjamin and others in the periphery of the Surrealist movement such
as Aimé Césaire, in that they are “on guard against the seduction of the
myths and their inexorable drift toward nothingness,” being just as careful
to neglect neither the forms of the dream nor the fetish-forms that popu-
late our pathetic digital and audiovisual late-capitalist dreamscapes, “those
oneiric visions of the collective through which the drift toward death can be
overcome.” In other words, normative and politically speaking, the invita-
tion is to renew our focus on prophecy and denunciation, or protest, and
utopia.26
As Walter Benjamin suggested in a manner that connects his conceptu-
alizations and the admiration he felt for the methods and concepts of art
historian Aby Warburg, quoted above, this is the way to get to the every-
day material traces of our collective memory “guided by the objects them-
selves,” in contrast with the tendency of museum and gallery exhibitions
“to show culture in lavish Sunday dress, only rarely in its poor everyday
clothes.”27 The conceptual figure of such method, combining without ever
fusing together the opposites of a sudden or overpowering force and a stable
pattern that can be replicated or iterated in time, is the poor ragpicker, the
beggar philosopher, and the sampler. He’s neither the highbrow aesthete in
search for the sublime nor the wealthy and assiduous visitor of private gal-
leries, art fairs, and biennials, but le chiffonier who appears in Baudelaire’s
poetry as well as in Aimé Césaire’s unclassifiable writings.
To critique the tendency to show culture “in lavish dress” is of paramount
practical as well as theoretical importance, especially in our societies of pre-
dominant audiovisual production and digital economies of valorization,
spatial-temporal displacement, and standardization. According to Benjamin
the tendency is characteristic of mainstream culture, and of a certain rela-
tion to nature or object-relation. For Benjamin, this mode of object-relation
is the “technological exploitation of nature by man,” an idea, moreover,
“that became widespread in the following period,” our period.28
Arguably, Benjamin introduces this concept of exploitation prompted by
Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of his idea of a “machinery made of men”
whose institutional “highly complicated organization” would facilitate a
“meshing of the passions,” posited in relation to Fourier’s utopian vision of
socio-economic reproductive and productive urban organization (Fourier’s
Phalanstery), which Benjamin saw as analogous to the modern “city of
48 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
arcades.” As is known, Adorno thought the analogy between Fourier’s Pha-
lanstery and the city of arcades, Paris, wasn’t “really clear.”29
Further, it can be argued that Benjamin not only introduced and retooled
a notion of nature exploited by man’s technology in response to Adorno’s
criticism, but also developed a related but different notion of nature and
technology, as shown above in relation to second technology, in which
“technology appears as the spark that ignites the powder of nature.”30 This
was based on Marx’s seemingly odd defense of Fourier’s utopian “colos-
sal conception of man” as somewhat akin to Hegel’s (and Marx’s own)
unmasking of the average petty-bourgeois subject behind the grand rhetoric
of Man’s rights.
Put otherwise, Benjamin’s argument is that the notion of nature that
corresponds to the mode of object-relation termed by Adorno, “identity
thinking,” entailing the objects’ subsumption as tokens absorbed by funda-
mentally invariant “types,” is absent from Fourier’s socialist utopia. This is
because, according to Benjamin, in Fourier, technology and nature interact
explosively—technology being the spark to nature’s powder—which means
that a second and alternative mode of object-relation can be posited: one
in which nature’s forces or impulses aren’t reduced to invariant “types” or
standards but rather act as “bombs,” in the analogy of the shamanic vision-
quest, the free play of the passions, and the band of brothers and sisters
in struggle—the ancient or indigenous and ritualistic formulas of intensi-
fied physical and psychic expression evoked above in relation to Aby War-
burg’s and Césaire’s (Baudelaireian) genealogy of art and artifices, as well as
Ernesto Guevara’s gratuity of risk.
The incorporation-ingestion of Benjamin’s thought that has occupied a
great deal of this paper, is possible on the basis of a joint reading of some of
the texts he composed between 1930 and 1939 on the separation of objects
from instituting rituals (that functioned as “useless” simulacra in theatrical
and theological rites) and the “revolutionary negation” of the law (the latter
including his early 1920 review fragment on the right to use force); spe-
cifically, a negation of the fundamental aspect of the law regulating human
groups’ exchange of objects and bodies’ reproduction. In the “Paris Diary,”
Benjamin referred to “the ancient law of Genesis” in order to highlight this
normative aspect as the point cutting across the literary work of Baudelaire
and Sade (also Fourier).31
The point is both cosmological and political. Speaking in cosmological
terms, the fabrication of objects was first inspired by the gods: accord-
ing to the Judeo-Christian cosmology, for instance, while in paradise Eve
and Adam had a direct relationship to the objects of nature in the garden.
Adam and Eve would acknowledge the objects present to him or her by
naming them, speaking to them. The performative force of this utterance
would make the objects of use themselves inseparable from the creative,
constitutive, or instituting act. With the Fall that relationship changed so
that “knowledge of good and evil abandons name; it is . . . the uncreated
 Theatrum Philosophicum 49
imitation of the creative word,” as Benjamin says.32 Put otherwise, tools,
utensils, and other objects of use lose their “aura” as they can be distin-
guished from “useless” objects or simulacra. If before the latter were full of
creative performative force, phantasm, or spirit, with the advent of technol-
ogies of (capitalist) reproduction these supposedly “useless” objects survive
only by being reduced to quantifiable commodities in the so-called art mar-
ket, thus in fact becoming as reproducible and exchangeable as the seem-
ingly distinct tools and utensils.
If this is the case, then art objects and objects of use, or fabricated objects,
aren’t so distinct from each other insofar as they both incarnate an impulse
or force directed towards creation and procreation—what can be called the
procreative instinct of the species and the voluptuous passion or affection
that precedes the act of creation taking place in sex, work, or ritual—which
is “suspended” under the industrial regime and diverted elsewhere, into the
simulated imitations that populate our world of perverse consumerist phan-
tasmagoria, as Benjamin would say.
This is precisely what makes us all fetishists under the normativity of
the industrial regime. On the one hand, there’s idolatry, which might in
fact predate the industrial regime of production as the form of a broader
metaphysics of inter-subjective and inter-temporal being. The latter
should be understood as a modality of the constraint of the One over the
Many, and conversely, of the Many (as unified, native, or original, and
residually sovereign-divine people) recognizing, confining, limiting, and
constraining in struggle the (seemingly super-human or divine-mythical)
power of the One.
This also means that cosmo-political relations may very well extend beyond
subject-object relations of production typically defined along Cartesian or
Kantian lines—what the latter called “original acquisition,” or the use of
force as conquest, with a heroic individual imposing form upon inert mat-
ter and absorbing it within his own plan. If so, it may be better to speak of
intersubjective and inter-temporal relations between people, their ancestors,
and the rest of the nonhuman cosmos, none of which are inert. In that case,
as contemporary anthropologists would say on the basis of widespread eth-
nographic evidence, our average notion of “production” fails to adequately
describe human praxis in a wider cosmos: for instance, women gardeners
don’t produce the plants they cultivate, they have a personal relation with
them, name them, and speak to them so as to nurture them and help them
grow and survive just as Eve and Adam would’ve done in the garden of
Eden according to Benjamin’s reading of Genesis cosmology. Similarly, it can
be said that people don’t create the crops but receive them from ancestral
sources.33
Certain obsessive constraints follow from recognizing such relation, which
we could term “law,” in the sense of universal negative rules that predicate
positive structures and at the same time uphold them. These pertain to a
counter-force, a use of force counter to the mythical violence (conquest,
50 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
original acquisition) that appeals to God’s commands in establishing sover-
eignty and the sovereign’s law. As we’ve seen, Benjamin speaks in this regard
of “law-destroying” or göttliche Gewalt, a force that could also be termed
god-destroying if not because those opposing the absolute violence and legal-
ity of the sovereign (kingship) do so as prophets (rather than chiefs) “from
the desire to find a ‘law without evil’ and under death; it is in this sense that
Christ (the Redeemer) was a king.” Here is the prophetic embryo of what one
could call the utopian element of the state. Violence, or more precisely com-
bat or struggle, plays a crucial role here. Ditto, its peculiarity is to simplify,
draw lines, and classify (civility from barbarism, as first technology) where
otherwise one might see only complexity; but at the same time, conversely,
one’s ability to constitute oneself as a single people emerges between the pos-
sibility and actualization of a relationship of combat between the people and
the sovereign.34

In Defense of Armed Struggle

In their ethnographic fieldwork on the absolute violence and other acts of
transgression performed by kings and chieftains, acting like gods and get-
ting away with it, contemporary anthropologists have in fact recognized
the dilemma echoed in the modern law-state that Benjamin captured in his
distinction between “law-making” and “law-maintaining” (as well as “law-
destroying”) violence. David Graeber writes:

Really it is exactly the same paradox, cast in the new language that is
necessary once the power of kings (“sovereignty”) had been transferred,
at least in principle, to an entity referred to as “the people”—even
though the exact way in which “the people” were to exercise sover-
eignty was never clear. No constitutional order can constitute itself . . .
The legitimacy of any legal order therefore ultimately rests on illegal
acts-usually, acts of illegal violence.

Indeed, as Graeber observes, the writers of the U.S. Constitution were guilty
of treason in accordance to the legal regime under which they were born.
Further, whatever solution we were to embrace (leftist periodical peoples’
revolutions, or rightist states of emergency or exception) the paradox
remains.35
Furthermore, it seems to me this is the profound challenge Benjamin left
us with when he urged us to introduce, enact, and institute “a real state of
emergency.” On the one hand, this means that as we now know full well,
successful thugs and businessmen can indeed become sovereigns, even create
new laws and morals, and of course genuine sovereignty does always carry
the potential for absolute violence. But on the other, people have always
known that kings need to be tamed—kings and chiefs of state can not only
become scapegoats, they can also be dramatically set against warriors,
 Theatrum Philosophicum 51
enemies, prophets rising their voices in the desert against kings or dragging
societies towards self-dissolution in war and so on. The chief can be seen as
a kind of enemy and the prophet as a kind of warrior and so forth and back
again in a cycle.36
But central to such theatrical, performative, combat-like dynamic (pre-
cisely because it is eccentric) is the political ally, the stranger or the immi-
grant, neither local nor enemy. Combat, the peoples’ war, or “armed”
struggle thus understood has never been about two positions and their stra-
tegic calculus, and never about simple binaries: everything turns around
the political ally, this half-local group or volatile yet indispensable groups,
which form a guerrilla band of uncertainty around each local group recast-
ing such uncertainty into certainty, turning internal indivision/individuality
into external fragmentation and potential affinity, thereby impeding both
collective fusion under the One and the dispersal of the Many in generalized
warfare. It’s in this respect that it makes sense to speak of perpetual peace,
pace Kant, as the never-ending search for political allies.
This is also the truth of peacemaking: against Girard, the way out of vio-
lence isn’t scapegoating but alliance, as in the example given by Achilles and
Kalchas in the famous “oath by scepter” scene of refusal in Book I of The
Iliad. As we know, Achilles’ first oath is performed in response to the request
made to him by Kalchas, the seer and sentry of dreams, who fears to say
what he knows because of the likely violent reaction of King Agamemnon.
In his dream-quest, the prophet Kalchas has seen that the reason why the
god Apollo unleashed a plague upon the Achaeans was the latter’s treatment
of the Trojan women as a bounty of war, specially the daughter of Apollo’s
priest, their bodies turned into living currency. Achilles then vows to defend
Kalchas against the King’s wrath and all those who would prohibit his
prophecy. His second oath entails a refusal of authority and, furthermore,
the threat of using deadly force against the King.
Crucially, he swears by the scepter “which no longer bears leaves nor
shoots,” against a life spent and turned into an artifact of culture, a machine
lending its once-living spirit to support human institutions. Now the dead
tree has become a victim or an ancestor, a symbol for the promises and
legal dispensations that in the eyes of Kalchas and his ally Achilles have
become perverted, stripped of their spirit and legitimacy by the King’s and
his clique’s abuse of the authority invested in him by the people.37
The hurling of the scepter by Achilles is symbolic partly in its perfor-
mative gesture of refusal of the dead-perpetrating culture the scepter now
indexes, and partly because it indicates our inability to conceal or absorb
the terror present, not elsewhere, in u-topos (“terror as the other”), but in
the most proximate immediacy. The scepter’s hurling in the oath by scepter
episode of The Iliad operates as zig-zagging between “wanting to conceal
and wanting to reveal,” reminding us that it’s “terror as usual.”38
At the bottom of this most crucial episode of myth and war lies the recog-
nition that there could be only one form of universal communication: “the
52 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
exchange of bodies through the secret language of corporeal signs,” in which
the lure, arousal, and the living object of the affect are one and the same. In
this respect, Homer’s story isn’t that far from the body of texts invented by
Baudelaire, Sade, and Fourier. What sets the latter apart form the former is
the same element that separates first and second technology, the essential
function that money would play as an abstract equivalent in the kind of “uni-
versal whorehouse” they envisioned as the truth of modern capitalist society
(which Baudelaire literally saw in one of his dreams).39
Arguably, however, that element was already present as the (constrained)
potential of first technology subjugating nature—specifically, in this case,
the bodies of women—and their absorption as tokens of invariant types. But
what sets Fourier apart from Sade, and in a sense closer to Homer’s account
of alliance in refusal, is the idea of a ritual gesture of denunciation and refusal
which is also an anticipatory device, a uchronistic/utopian device based on
the notion that a “direct exchange between individuals could take place at
the level of the passions” or affects, and that this alliance/exchange could
be realized through a principle of play—through a dérive of the “spectacles,
ritual ceremonies and contests” similar to those that Benjamin’s translator
and collaborator Pierre Klossowski found in the theologia theatrica of the
ancients. In other words, whereas the Baudelaire-Sadean text indexes and
archives the onset of modern commercialization of voluptuous affection,
within the tradition that goes from Homer to Fourier and the collaboration
between Benjamin and Klossowski the archive reveals how “even in eco-
nomics, perversion itself is the ground of value.” Or as Benjamin would put
it, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in
which we live is not the exception but the rule.”40
We must indeed attain to a conception of history that is in keeping
with such insight: that voluptuous affection always includes an element of
aggression, which necessarily presupposes value, importance, and appraisal.
If this is the case, if a price has to be paid, after realizing that it’s “terror as
usual” we must also accept that even if importance is everywhere it’s up to
us to intensify it. To do so, to overcome the external perversion of finance-
commercial economy (the hypertrophy of “needs”) an act of refusal must
take place that indexes and forces the dissolution of the fictive unity of
human individuals, forcing kings and the super-rich to overcome the bias of
endowments. Perhaps this is what Benjamin meant when he said that “it is
our task to bring about a real state of emergency.” In other words, such is
the truth of popular revolutionary justice.
Thus, in the case of the Benjaminian reading of Genesis cosmology, Eve
and Adam didn’t so much cause the law (the injunction to do daily work,
produce, and so on) to be imposed upon them and their successors because
of their disobedience. Rather, they endured such constraints and invested in
the God or gods thus instituted by ritually participating in a sort of interspe-
cies kinship or alliance with them as well as the rest of creation. The Fall
happens every time such a (cosmo)political economy, which fully recognizes
 Theatrum Philosophicum 53
the inter-temporal dimension of the relation between living agents and their
dead ancestors or “spirits” (the latter being the real “owners” of the means
of production), gives place to a different political economy: one that freezes
time and operating under the assumption that time has frozen, as if it were
a still photograph, proceeds to establish the illusion of the unity of individu-
als (which is an external perversion, as Klossowski says) and separate them
from their predecessors and other nonhumans by declaring the latter inert
“things” (nature or environment). Thereafter, nature and things come to be
only as a consequence of the labor force or symbolic form instilled into them
by possessive individuals (internally united in the possession of their bodies,
beginning with the bodies of women) with exclusive agency. In turn, civili-
zation and subjects (or civil-subjects and “civil society”) appear as distinct
from nature and natural peoples under the sign of the sovereign One.
An inversion takes place here, which turns living historical labor (and liv-
ing, thinking things) from its intensifying and multiplying operation (being
in motion, like cinema) into dead or frozen labor externally imposed over
an otherwise inert nature that thereafter exists solely for the satisfaction of
an ever-expanding set of needs or “rights” (perversion). It’s the latter politi-
cal economy (dead labor, external perversion) that is fetishistic, and not the
former. For it’s the latter that posits human (civil) society as the center of
an inert space-time universe (nature) onto which it projects its own will and
symbolic forms with absolute force. In such a hostile universe there’re no
allies, only enemies, “them,” upon whose dark skins “we” (a fictive unity)
must supposedly write the greatness of our History.
In that sense at least, we’re all fetishists, regardless of whether we’re Dur-
kheimian sociologists, Friedmanite quantitative economists, or structural-
functionalist Marxists; and indeed, let me say in this respect (as have others)
that we need something like a Copernican Revolution in the social sciences,
law, literature, and political philosophy.
Notice that, on the one hand, this doesn’t mean we must abandon the
critical position allowed by historical materialism or put Hegel right-side
up again, as Marshall Sahlins says, for in the cosmopolitical orders of inter-
temporal dimensions and inter-subjective relations with nonhumans, as well
as in their antinomian ways and obsessive constraints, their combat and per-
petual search for peace and political allies, “one may still speak of economic
determinism—provided that the determinism is not economic.”41
On the other hand, such obsessive antinomian attitude and constraint,
which I have provocatively termed “armed” struggle in the way to (rather
than as the opposite of) peace, present as spirit, collective effervescence,
combat, or phantasm in institutionalizing or constitutive rituals (exempli-
fied by the oath by scepter episode in classical literature, and often imag-
ined as an original “contract” authorized by a generic “will” that legitimates
law in modern literature), is represented under the political economy of
the industrial-colonial regime in a state of suspension or “emergency.” In
this respect, as suggested above, the “state of emergency” that, according
54 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
to Benjamin, has become the rule isn’t the consequence of violence. On the
contrary, it’s the attempt to suspend combat, to externally impose upon peo-
ples a fictive unity (the unity of their “needs”) and to extract from peoples
their ability to use force as well as do battle against the sovereign.
The state of emergency in which we live is thus a state of non-spirit and
non-battle; it’s “business as usual.” The example that illustrates the state of
emergency, which emerges as a rule in the stage set by second technology,
is the unmanned vehicle of war; the drone driven from a remote location
whose vertical vision identifies one as a risky individual. And that unmanned
drone, turned at once judge, jury, and executioner, rains fire on us from afar
in order to secure “business as usual” at home.

Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in SW II 2, 731–735 and 732, the
latter also in “The Storyteller: Observations on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in
SW III 144.
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in SW III 147 and “Karl Kraus,” in SW II 1,
433–458. There’s a reference in the paragraph to Caetano Veloso, “Anguish,” in
Tropicália and Beyond: Dialogues in Brazilian Film History, edited by S. Solo-
mon (Berlin: Archive Books, 2017) 35–46 at 35.
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-
ibility” (Second version), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by M. W. Jennings, B.
Doherty & T. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) 45–46
for my reading of the play with words and images aiming to establish a real
state of suspension. See Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, and Sebastian Truskolaski,
“Introduction: Walter Benjamin and the Magnetic Play of Words,” in Walter
Benjamin, The Storyteller: Short Stories (London & New York City: Verso,
2016) xxvi. Also, Drucilla Cornell, “Derrida’s Negotiations as a Technique of
Liberation,” Discourse. Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
39.2 (Spring 2017), co-edited by O. Guardiola-Rivera, 195–215.
4. See Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age
of Derivative Finance (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016) 86,
113–118, for quotes and paraphrases as well as the idea of a political future.
Also, Margo Kitts, Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society: Oath-Making Ritu-
als and Narratives in The Iliad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
11–49; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994) 59; and
Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2000 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002) 22 ff.; Drucilla Cornell, Moral Images of Freedom: A
Future for Critical Theory (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) 75–104
and 137–149.
5. Miguel Abensour, Utopia: From Thomas More to Walter Benjamin (Minne-
apolis: Univocal, 2017) 62–63. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What
Is Philosophy? (London & New York: Verso, 1994) 64–66 on everyday life
speech-acts referring back to psychosocial types: “‘I decree mobilization as Pres-
ident of the Republic’ . . . and so on . . . the philosophical shifter is a speech-act
in the third person where it is always a conceptual persona who says ‘I’ . . . hence
Captain Ahab or Bartleby” for Melville or Penthesilea for Kleist.
6. Walter Benjamin, AP 376, J85, 5.
 Theatrum Philosophicum 55
7. Appadurai, Banking on Words, 74, for quotes and his reading of Weber with
Durkheim and Marx; also 70–100.
8. Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1989) 407–408 and
491; for the English version, see AP 473, N9,7, also 462, N2a,3 citing Blanqui
by way of Geoffrey in 470, N7,3.
9. Walter Benjamin, Écrits français, edited by Jean-Marie Monnoyer (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1991) 148–149 and 182, also cited by Abensour, Utopia, 88–91, quoting
Bruno Tackels, Histoire d’aura: Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Heidegger, a thesis
presented for the PhD in Philosophy, University of Strasbourg, 1994, Chapter 3
“Benjamin et les deux techniques”, 39–101.
10. Walter Benjamin, AP 119 [D10a, 5].
11. Walter Benjamin, AP 119, also 15, 21, and Abensour, Utopia, 97.
12. Walter Benjamin, Paris, 49–50, and AP. The reference is also to William James’s
praise of Charles Renouvier’s “phenomenism” in note 18 of his essay The Place
of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience, and Gerhard Schweppen-
häuser, “The Project of Renewing Childhood by Transforming One’s Life,” in
Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction (Durham & London: Duke University
Press, 2009) 1–10.
13. Aby Warburg spoke of “interval iconology,” and Jacques Derrida talked about
spectrality (the structure of the archive, what it cannot unveil, the open future)
in this sense. See Walter Benjamin, AP 462, and Georges Didi-Huberman, A
imagen sobrevivente: historia da arte e tempo dos fantasmas segundo Aby War-
burg (Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2013) 424–426, citing Arendt on Benja-
min; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1996) 69–70, 84; and Phillips-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg e a imagem em
movimento (Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2013) 240, all cited by Carlos Adri-
ano, “Found Footage and the Magnetization of Affection,” in Tropicália and
Beyond: Dialogues in Brazilian Film History, 170–175.
14. Walter Benjamin, “Théorie fragmentaire de la radio: Théâtre et radio. Sur le
contrôle mutual de leur travail éducatif,” in Écrits Radiophoniques, 175–178, at
177; and Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (Minneapolis: Univocal,
2014) 56–57, for my use of speaking ghosts, filmed subjects, and the notion of
photo-electric analysis.
15. Enrique Dussel, “Walter Benjamin y la Política de la Liberación,” keynote at
Universidad de Murcia, Spain, 27 February 2012, available at www.youtube.
com/watch?v=JuGyjGosmR4.
16. Walter Benjamin, AP 380, J88 and J88a, 1, quoting Félix Piyat’s preface for the
1884 edition of Le Chiffonier de Paris.
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, edited by Rolf Tiede-
mann, trans. by R. Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008) 145–147, 27, I, 66.
Also, ND, 43.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, ND 43.
19. Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,”
in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012) 28, referencing
Adorno.
20. Walter Benjamin, SW I 242, and 250. See also James Martel, “Walter Benjamin,”
in Histories of Violence: Post-War Critical Thought, edited by B. Evans & T.
Carver (London: Zed Books, 2017) 14–30.
21. Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (London: Pen-
guin Poetry, 2017) 130–131.
The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and
handing over (here) a self to another .  .  . Or one meaning of here is “In
this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the
56 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something
to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes
and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for
something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive.
22. Walter Benjamin, AP 383, J89a, 4, calling for a comparison “on the subject of
the ragpicker,” with Marx in the section “Die moderne Manufaktur” in Das
Kapital, vol. 1, 438.
23. Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ, “Utopia and Propheticism from Latin America: A Concrete
Essay in Historical Soteriology,” in A Grammar of Justice: The Legacy of Igna-
cio Ellacuría (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014) 7–56, citing Karl Marx’s, A
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, at 39 ff.
24. Miguel Benasayag, Che Guevara. La Gratuidad del Riesgo (Buenos Aires:
Quadrata/Cono Sue, 2012) 81–85, for all quotations and paraphrases in this
paragraph. The author refers to Che Guevara’s conception of risk in action as
a Benjaminian “constellation.” See also, John Berger, Portraits (London: Verso,
2015) 123.
25. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, 407–408. See AP 361 for the English
version.
26. Ibid. Also, Walter Benjamin, “Eduardo Fuchs, coleccionista e historiador,” in
Obras II 2 (Madrid: Abada, 2009) 106. See SW II for the English version, and
Corrado Bologna, El teatro de la mente. De Giulio Camillo a Aby Warburg
(Barcelona: Siruela, 2017) 230–277.
27. Benjamin, “Eduardo Fuchs, coleccionista e historiador,” 106. See SW II for the
English version.
28. Walter Benjamin, AP 17 and 940.
29. Walter Benjamin, SW III 34, 50–67 at 57.
30. Walter Benjamin, AP 17. See the section “The Uses of Force” above.
31. Walter Benjamin, “Paris Diary,” 18 January section, in SW II 342.
32. Walter Benjamin, SW I 72.
33. Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Political Society,” in On Kings, edited by
D. Graeber & M. Sahlins (Chicago: Hau Books, 2017) 23–64, at 38 and 54,
citing Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Deborah Danowski, and Phillipe Descola,
among others.
34. David Graeber, in On Kings, 81–82.
35. Ibid, 76.
36. Graeber says that “in this, at least, the Girardians are right” (ibid.). In everything
else, I fear, they’re wrong.
37. Homer, The Iliad, I, 73–83 and I, 233–244, also cited by Kitts, Sanctified Vio-
lence in Homeric Society, 102–108.
38. Michael Taussig, “Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of History as State
of Siege,” in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, edited by Nancy Scheper-
Hughes & Philippe Bourgois (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) 269–271 at 270.
39. Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency, 69 and 90.
40. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, edited
by H. Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968–9) 253–264. Also Klossowski, Living
Currency, 53–54, 65–68, for other quotes and paraphrasing in the paragraph.
41. Marshall Sahlins, in On Kings, 57.
3 Adorno and Beckett
Aesthetic Mimêsis and the Language
of “The New”
Marcia Morgan

Theodor W. Adorno’s 1970 Aesthetic Theory—his magnum opus in aesthetics—

bears a complicated relationship to mimêsis, the concept of aesthetic imita-
tion or representation. One of the central literary influences on Adorno’s
theory of aesthetic mimêsis is Samuel Beckett. Adorno repeatedly upholds
Beckett’s literary constructions as productively mimicking the absurdity of
the social situation (or Ortsbestimmung, as Adorno calls it in the original
German). When constructed successfully, the mimetic process creates that
which has never been grasped before—what Adorno classifies as “the new.”
Adorno’s entire aesthetic theory is built on the attempt to facilitate “the
new,” and he regards Beckett as the author who provided some of the most
powerful literary means to achieve this. My chapter will first outline Ador-
no’s relationship to Beckett through parallels between their respective collected
writings and the influence of Beckett on Adorno, broadly construed. Next,
I will elaborate Adorno’s theory of aesthetic mimêsis in Aesthetic Theory
and then demonstrate his philosophy of language through the example of
music, as the latter illuminates Adorno’s striving for a language of “the new”
aesthetically. In conclusion, I will engage with Adorno’s analyses of Beck-
ett in Aesthetic Theory in order to show the intricate relationship between
Adorno’s reading of mimêsis in Beckett and his notion of a language of the
new in his magnum opus.

Adorno’s Relationship to Beckett: “One Can Be

Saved by a Laughter That Spares Nothing”1
The role that Beckett played for Adorno’s literary, aesthetic, and philo-
sophic thought constellations cannot be overstated. There are many
important parallels between their respective corpora. First, Adorno is one
of the most challenging philosophers to try to understand. The rewards
significantly outweigh the interpretive demands, but many philosophers
have bemoaned Adorno’s atonal literary constructions and disavowed
any productivity in his theory because of allegedly evasive or obscurantist
methods and outcomes. In fact, Jürgen Habermas ushered in an entirely
new generation of critical theory as a response to the linguistic cul-de-sac
58 Marcia Morgan
that Habermas diagnoses in the thought constellations of his teacher. As
a theorist who describes communicative discourse as “consecrated abra-
cadabra,” Adorno emphasizes the necessity of a language that does not
accommodate the status quo, which he regarded as the wrong state of
things. In the essay, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” published in Notes to
Literature, Adorno writes:

language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the
subject but as the subject’s own voice. When the “I” becomes oblivi-
ous to itself in language, it is fully present nonetheless; if it were not,
language would become a consecrated abracadabra and succumb to
reification, as it does in communicative discourse.2

The meaning in language is only non-oppressive, that is, non-reifying, and

therefore only genuinely meaningful, when it speaks “as the subject’s own
voice.” But a speaking in “the subject’s own voice” can only take place imma-
nent to the aesthetic experience constructed through mimetic resemblance.
Adorno’s thought constellations are intended to facilitate the subject to artic-
ulate a position in a manner that also always submits the empty subjectivity
of late capitalist modernity to the necessity of the societal object. Accordingly,
following Adorno’s strictures for successful art, Albrecht Wellmer clarifies
what the “meaning” Adorno sought in artworks can evoke for the subject:

For where art succeeds in articulating the negation of meaning in an

aesthetically meaningful way—for Adorno, the most important exam-
ples of such success in the field of literature are the works of Beckett—it
transpires that art which is capable of surviving as art, i.e., art which
has taken upon itself the darkness and guilt of the world, cannot escape
the antinomy; the token by which it remains art is also the mark of its
untruth; its aesthetic success, which is to say its truth and authenticity, is
inseparable from a remnant of aesthetic semblance, and thus of untruth.
Art is illusion [semblance] in that it cannot escape the hypnotic sug-
gestions of meaning amid a general loss of meaning.
For the sake of the hope of reconciliation, however, art must take this
guilt, too, upon itself: this is what the “defense of semblance” means as
Adorno understands it.3

Citing a statement on the semblance character of art from Adorno’s Aes-

thetic Theory in the above passage, Wellmer makes clear that Adorno’s
“defense of semblance” actively and affectively realizes art’s untruth; this
act of recognition through the aesthetic experience constitutes an aware-
ness of what is wrong in the societal status quo. The semblance character
of art shows thus what ought not to be, as Michael Kelly has elucidated so
well in his monograph The Hunger for Aesthetics, following an Adornian
 Adorno and Beckett 59
impetus.4 Wellmer continues this line of argument, with specific reference to
the example that Beckett played for Adorno:

What Adorno saw in great works of art, in theory as well as in his inter-
pretation of modern art (such as his brilliant interpretation of Beckett’s
Endgame), was a faithful reflection of the disintegration of meaning and
the subject in reality . . . But the “path of progressive negativity” that
art follows also encompasses that other moment expressed in the “nega-
tion of objectively binding meaning,” namely, the growing capacity for
aesthetically processing those aspects of reality which, by virtue of their
aesthetic articulation, are no longer merely negated, i.e., excluded from
the realm of symbolic communication.5

Wellmer concludes that art therefore makes manifest non-communicative

forms of expression. He argues that works of art for Adorno “point towards
an expansion of the boundaries of communication by virtue of their effect
and not their being.”6 For this reason, Adorno staunchly rejects attempts to
ascertain ontologies of art. The experience of artworks, furthermore, does
not constitute

a cognitive function at the level of philosophical knowledge, but on

that of the subjects’ relationship to themselves and to the world where
works of art intervene in a complex network of attitudes, feelings,
interpretations and evaluations. . . . The fact that the cognition that is
achieved through art cannot be expressed in words is not attributable
to the inadequacy of the concept, but to the fact that the enlightenment
of consciousness signified by the term “cognition” here encompasses
cognitive, affective, and moral and practical aspects in equal measure.7

At this juncture, Wellmer concludes that “cognition” in Adorno’s aesthetic

theory means something “closer to a capability rather than abstract knowl-
edge, something more like an ability to speak, to judge, to feel or perceive
than the result of cognitive effort.”8
In a similar way, Beckett has proven to be among the most difficult literary
figures to decipher in the past century because of an alternative productivity
of language in his literary works that does not accommodate any normative,
abstract knowledge. And yet, the non-directive constitution in the thwarting
mechanisms of his creations has likewise provoked avowedly positive reac-
tions, not only from Adorno. For substantiation on this point, I turn to Jean-
Michel Rabaté’s scholarship, where he writes: “[Beckett] was both a humble
man and a domineering author who would never relinquish control over his
texts.” Harold Pinter appreciated this duality when he evoked Beckett in 1954:

I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways outs, truths,

answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous,
60 Marcia Morgan
remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the
more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading
me up any garden, . . . he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy,
he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not, he hasn’t got his hand
over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he
leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body
of beauty.9

Rabaté concludes: “Pinter’s earthly and pithy encomium captures what phi-
losophers have admired in Beckett: the paradox of someone who provides
all the more a model of ethical behavior as he refuses to be a model.”10 At
the heart of Beckett’s and Adorno’s affective thought constellations lies an
ethical core. The difficulty of interpreting Beckett and Adorno bespeaks the
seriousness with which both writers reflect on the artistic experience of lan-
guage, and strenuously attempt to create the experience of “the new” out of
the ashes of ethical and political destructiveness in the twentieth century—
aesthetically, philosophically, but most of all, humanely.
The latter point raises an additional, prominent connection between
Beckett and Adorno described by Rabaté. Both figures sought to create life
among the walking dead by using philosophy against itself in an aesthetic
manner. A most famous epigram on the first page of Adorno’s Minima Mora-
lia reiterates Ferdinand Kürnbergers’s dictum that “Life does not live.”11 In
Beckett’s dramas, described by Rabaté: “Instead of rigor mortis, we glimpse
a life already dead, stiff, stultified. Hence good art and good writing have
the power to kill a death we mistake for life.”12 Adorno writes in the first
line of Negative Dialectics that “philosophy, which once seemed obsolete,
lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.” Auschwitz proved the
failure of philosophy in the twentieth century.13 What it means to be ethical,
and hence philosophical, in the era “after Auschwitz” for both Adorno and
Beckett comprises an aesthetic response. But the solution for both authors is
more philosophical through their aesthetic recasting of philosophy. Adorno
and Beckett, each in their respectively irreplaceable and idiosyncratic ways,
rely on an alternative modality of language to yield a robust form of expres-
sion about that which cannot be adequately represented cognitively: the
horrors of twentieth-century genocide.14
It is instructive to turn to Andrew Bowie’s recent scholarship on Adorno
in the above context. Bowie argues in an extremely insightful manner that
Adorno’s rehabilitation of philosophy of art and aesthetics is more philo-
sophical than aesthetic. Bowie comments that Adorno’s works have gained
much more recognition in modern art, aesthetic theory, and cultural stud-
ies than in contemporary philosophy, and Bowie contends that it should
be the other way around.15 Adorno saw it as his project to create liter-
ary constructions that inextricably intertwine philosophy and art in a way
that redefines philosophical truth. Consider the fragment from Schiller that
Adorno planned to include as the motto of Aesthetic Theory: “In what one
calls philosophy of art, there is usually one of two things missing: either
 Adorno and Beckett 61
philosophy or art.”16 Bowie frames the manner in which Adorno’s construc-
tions, in their aestheticism, are more philosophical than philosophy in terms
of their inherent contradictoriness. Building on the previous explication by
Wellmer—for Wellmer is in agreement with Bowie’s recent scholarship on
this theme17—we can think seriously about Adorno’s means to counteract
the reification of the subject in late modernity with the tools of contra-
diction in philosophy as an aesthetic form. In explaining this method in
Adorno, in a chapter titled “Contradiction as Truth-Content,” Bowie writes:
“What determines us can, therefore, function as a form of reification, but
this can itself lead to the possibility of overcoming reification, if we can
become aware of the objective factors which had become part of ourselves
as subjects.”18 Adorno thus attempts to break down the subject to create
anew out of the rubble.19 Bowie proceeds by pointing out the error of mod-
ern philosophy as it relates to Adorno’s alternative approach:

Taking the stance required for scientific objectivity as the founding phil-
osophical assumption is a mistake, because our primary relation to the
world is not cognitive at all, but rather . . . practical, mimetic, or affective.
Modern philosophy oriented toward the scheme of subject and object
produces contradictions precisely because it seeks to ground our relation
to the world in a derivative mode of access to the world, in which the
subject takes a neutral stance toward the object. This stance can, in the
hermeneutic view, only develop from a prior non-objectifying stance.20

For this reason, Adorno contorts philosophic forms into aesthetic experi-
ences of contradiction as a way of grasping for such a “prior non-objectifying
stance,” which can only be experienced mimetically, practically, and affec-
tively, and he regards Beckett as an exemplar in such contortions.
The above discussion raises yet another important commonality between
Adorno and Beckett: the fatigue of the subject. Rabaté writes: “Adorno
was the thinker who understood best the source of Beckett’s dark comedy,
its constant self-renewal, its inexhaustible resources playing with exhaus-
tion.”21 As Rabaté interprets Adorno’s notes on the latter’s first meeting
with Beckett in 1958, Adorno regards Beckett’s method of ‘subtraction’ as

directly opposed to the fake ‘abstraction’ of those who negate concrete

life and its historical determination in the name of a reified concept of
existence. Beckett’s process of subtraction works with a reduced subject.
This subject then reduces even more the abstractions of existentialism
and gives them an utterly laughable quality. Beckett derides philosophi-
cal abstraction and what remains of late modernism by showing us a
dead end. One can be saved by a laughter that spares nothing.22

The linguistic cul-de-sac in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, inspired by Beck-

ett, is then most redeeming in its contradistinction to the abstract absur-
dity of modern philosophy, not only its cognitive-rationalistic failures, but
62 Marcia Morgan
also its existential ones. Adorno had already begun such a project with one
of his earliest works, his second Habilitationsschrift written between the
years 1929 and 1933 on Kierkegaard.23 But the 1969 Aesthetic Theory was
to prove the culmination of the consequences of the early 1933 book on
Kierkegaard.
Most of the literature on Adorno’s relationship to Beckett has focused on
Adorno’s essay, “Towards an Understanding of Endgame” [Versuch das End-
spiel zu Verstehen]. I will not repeat here what other scholars have already
argued convincingly about Adorno’s Endgame interpretation; I defer to the
compelling and insightful readings provided by W. Martin Lüdke, Lambert
Zuidevaart, and, if briefly, Albrecht Wellmer’s Endgames.24 In the present
chapter, I focus on the specific role that Beckett played in the Aesthetic The-
ory. Martin Jay has written that Beckett “hovered” over Adorno’s aesthetic
magnum opus as “the most uncompromisingly modernist writer of the post-
war era.”25 Although Adorno wrote shorter pieces on Beckett,26 his “most
systematic confrontation with Beckett was to remain posthumous,” as Jean-
Michel Rabaté has pointed out.27 In fact, as the editors of the German original
of the Aesthetic Theory have noted in an “Editorial Postscript” of July 1970,
Adorno planned to dedicate the book to Beckett.28 I now turn to that text.

Mimêsis in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and the

Musical Language of “The New”
Successful artworks in Adorno’s aesthetics are imbued with enigmaticalness.
As Shierry Weber Nicholsen wites, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory “the enig-
matic quality” in works of art as well as “the experience of it, seem to be
characterized by the kind of resemblance that is the hallmark of mimêsis,
a resemblance that implies continuity and affinity, as well as discontinuity,
between subject and object.”29 What is this continuity and affinity, on one
hand, and discontinuity, on the other hand, between “subject and object”
that comprises mimetic resemblance in art? The answer provides additional
substantiation of the philosophical importance of his work, not only the
aesthetic value, further substantiating Andrew Bowie’s argument. For, as
Nicholsen asserts rightfully, in Adorno “(m)imetic aesthetic experience must
be supplemented by philosophical reflection . . . It is the enigmatic face of
the work of art, the enigmatic gaze it directs at us, that incites this philo-
sophical reflection.”30 Wellmer argues similarly, while emphasizing that the
relationship between art and philosophy becomes altered through the pro-
ductive non-reconciliation comprised by aesthetic experience:

If the work of art is no longer related to “reconciliation” in a substantial

sense [as Wellmer argues in the passages cited in the previous section of
this chapter], but in a functional one, then the relationship between art
and philosophy is also changed. Under these circumstances, aesthetic
experience still needs to be illuminated by interpretation and criticism,
 Adorno and Beckett 63
but it no longer stands in need of a philosophical enlightenment which
tells is what the “semblance” of beauty is really about.31

But what comprises the enigmatic gaze in Adorno’s theory? Nicholsen

writes: “Enigma is, as it were, the difference between what is experienced
from completely outside the work of art and what is experienced from com-
pletely inside it.”32 When one is ‘inside’ the musical piece, for example,
completely absorbed by it, the enigma becomes visible. So, the enigmatic
quality of the artwork is a necessary entrance point, ironically through its
lack of transparency, for those not trained for interpretation of the work at
hand. Instead of viewing the enigmatic quality as a barrier, Adorno regards
it an ineliminable opening to a relationship with successful new artworks.
Nicholsen elaborates further:

Thus, when Adorno says that artworks’ demand to be understood in

terms of their substance “is tied to specific experience of the works but
can be fulfilled only in and through theory that actively reflects experi-
ence,” he is not talking about two separate mental activities, experience
and theoretical reflection. Rather, he is attempting to specify a reflection
that takes place on and perhaps within that enigmatic zone of differ-
ence, a zone of experience in which the enactment and assimilation of
the other that constitute mimêsis are inseparable from—but also distinct
from—the rationality of philosophical reflection. This is not a zone or
kind of reflection in which “subject” (the one reflecting) knows “object”
(the work of art, or the mimetic experience of it). Rather, the enigmatic
quality, too, and the experience of it, seem to be characterized by the
kind of resemblance that is the hallmark of mimêsis, a resemblance that
implies continuity and affinity, as well as discontinuity, between subject
an object.33

Nicholsen’s explication brings us to the following preliminary conclusions

about the mimetic structure of resemblance in successful artworks for
Adorno: they deny immediate transparency, and only those individuals who
have submitted to extensive training in the idiosyncratic means employed by
the artwork can become immersed in them. But, regardless of whether one
can become immersed in them, the enigmatic quality of the work remains
a key characteristic to the initial experience of any given successful work.
Transparency, then, belongs to the communicative “abracadabra” Adorno
vitiates in his aesthetic theory. There are, according to Adorno, two levels of
aesthetic experience: one internal to the work itself and one external. If the
work is successful, the external relation to the artwork will be defined by
enigmaticalness and non-reconciliation of the incongruity between subject
and object. If the work is a failure, it will be transparent to the recipient as
an external relation. A position internal to the work, when successful, con-
stitutes enigmaticalness that subsequently requires philosophical reflection.
64 Marcia Morgan
In Nicholsen’s description, this reflection “takes place on and perhaps within
that enigmatic zone of difference, a zone of experience in which the enact-
ment and assimilation of the other that constitute mimêsis are inseparable
from—but also distinct from—the rationality of philosophical reflection.”34
The continuity and affinity between subject and object is therefore inter-
nal to the aesthetic experience of absorption by the work, an experience
in which the enigmaticalness becomes invisible. The enigmaticalness then
resurfaces once one exterior to the work in a normatively rational frame-
work, in which there becomes a renewed discontinuity between subject and
object. But the enimatic quality of the artwork contributes to philosophical
understanding in a way that is not exclusively cognitive, but rather, in a
manner that supports and facilitates an expansion of cognitive, moral, and
emotional-affective capacities. This point recalls Wellmer’s insight.35 Hence
the tension between affinity and discontinuity can never be resolved in
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory; the tension must be upheld in a negatively dia-
lectical relationship. Otherwise, art becomes either propaganda or simplistic
entertainment, and in Adorno’s estimation both are utter failures that sup-
port the totalitarian tendencies of late modernity and bespeak the downfall
of modern philosophy that results from its commitment to the resolution of
contradiction.
Nicholsen helpfully turns to the mimetic resemblance of nature in Ador-
no’s Aesthetic Theory, which necessarily connects to language.36 Let us
think about this in relationship to Adorno’s philosophy of music, as Nich-
olsen also urges. If it is true that Adorno constructed Aesthetic Theory itself
as an artwork, as Wellmer has claimed and as I agree, and if Adorno regards
music as the exemplar of “the new” language in art, then it is most illumi-
nating to turn to Adorno’s theory of “the new” in language in relation to his
philosophy of the language of music. Nicholsen writes:

In many of the essays in Notes to Literature, music seems to stand in for

this impossible ideal for which language strives. Reading these essays,
one comes to expect that, at some point in each one, Adorno will com-
pare the literary work with music as a kind of seal of its authenticity . . .
One obvious way to conceive what happens when language itself speaks
is that it becomes, or comes close to being, music.

It is therefore most instructive to turn to Adorno’s writing on music, specifi-

cally, on his philosophy of the language of music, to evoke what he means
by “the new” in his Aesthetic Theory.37
In a fragment on music and language from Quasi Una Fantasia, Adorno
offers the following analysis:38

Music resembles a language. Expressions such as musical idiom, musi-

cal intonation, are not simply metaphors. But music is not identical with
 Adorno and Beckett 65
language. The resemblance points to something essential, but vague.
Anyone who takes it literally will be seriously misled. Music resembles
language in the sense that it is a temporal sequence of articulated sounds
which are more than just sounds. They say something, often something
human [my emphasis]. The better the music, the more forcefully they
say it. The succession of sounds is like logic: it can be right or wrong.
But what has been said cannot be detached from the music. Music cre-
ates no semiotic system.39

Music is the exemplar for Adorno of a speaking that offers something

human, a speaking that transcends written language. While Adorno regards
music to have a quasi-conceptual constitution, he is careful to delimit the
language of music from conceptual language itself. Music entails what he
calls “ciphers,” which are “always capable of entering into a particular con-
text.” He claims that music “does contain things that come very close to
the ‘primitive concepts’ found in epistemology. It makes use of recurring
ciphers.” Not to regard this as a positive statement, it serves as the beginning
of Adorno’s critique of sedimented and reified musical elements founda-
tional to harmony and voice leading, which he opposes through his celebra-
tion of works such as Schoenberg’s. So, when Adorno contends that music’s
ciphers “come close” to primitive concepts in epistemology, he means this as
what is culturally to be overcome.
The repeating ciphers in music make it difficult for those trained in tonal-
ity to let go of it. The ciphers:

become sedimented like a second nature . . . But the new music [such as
that of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, to name just three examples] rises
up in rebellion against the illusion implicit in second nature. It dismisses
as mechanical these congealed formula and their function. However, it
does not dissociate itself entirely from the analogy with language, but
only from its reified version which degrades the particular into a token,
into the superannuated signifier of fossilized subjective meanings. Sub-
jectivism and reification go together in the sphere of music as elsewhere.
But their correlation does not define music’s similarity to language once
and for all. In our day the relationship between music and language has
become critical.40

The language of music is different for Adorno because of its distance from
the language of intentionality. Music embodies ambiguity and vagueness
for Adorno, hence the enigmaticalness at the heart of successful artworks
elaborated by Nicholsen. Furthermore, Adorno rejects a semiotic dimen-
sion in music but attributes “incipient intentions” to musical meaning, to be
distinguished from the unambiguous constructions of intentional language.
Music need not be consoled for its curse of ambiguity, according to Adorno,
66 Marcia Morgan
because, through its mythic aspect, “intentions are poured into it,” however,
in a way that keeps the intentions “hidden.” What kind of intentions does
music then perform? They are not conceptually grounded; they are linked to
what he calls a theological dimension. And they imply mythic content and
are, perhaps most importantly, human. Music’s intentions are hidden and yet
manifestly experienced through the continued generative capacity of musi-
cal performance and listening. Music is interpreted by playing more music;
hence, meaning lies in its performance, not in its correspondence with inten-
tional language. Adorno creates an intimate sphere of musical expression that
cannot be reduced to mere “elusive individual intentions” or “intentionless
content.”41 He is striving for linguistic objectivity and made his first move
in this direction by turning against Kierkegaard’s alleged “objectless inten-
tions.”42 Adorno rejects “transitory and adventitious meanings in music.”43
But this is also no mere formalism. He is careful to define this:

Every musical phenomenon points to something beyond itself by

reminding us of something, contrasting itself with something or arous-
ing our expectations. The summation of such a transcendence of par-
ticulars constitutes the “content”; it is what happens in music. But if
musical structure or form is to be more than a set of didactic systems,
it does not just embrace the content from outside; it is the thought pro-
cess by which content is defined. Music becomes meaningful the more
perfectly it defines itself in this sense—and not because its particular
elements express something symbolically. It is by distancing itself from
language that its resemblance to language finds its fulfillment.44

What Adorno calls “the new music” invites our expectation by grasping
language as a thinking that hears the delimitation from language. The new
music provokes our assumed intentions in a way that is not itself linguistic,
but rather affective. New music thwarts our presumptions as it relies on
sedimented ciphers. In this way, music is a speaking that transcends the
written sign by absorbing it. This can only be felt in the phenomenon of the
affect by listening to and performing musical innovation.
For Adorno, “the new music” makes explicit as a sensuous experience
what is already taking place as the self-alienating process within language
itself, indeed within the language we hold to be most dear and closest to
our native conceptions of our selves: our mother tongue. In a chapter in
the 2012 publication Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual
Condition, Yasemin Yildiz recapitulates Adorno’s argument that language is
neither natural nor arbitrarily constructed as a relationship between signi-
fier and signified.45 I agree in this context with both Yildiz and with Peter
Hohendahl’s claim in Prismatic Thought that for Adorno the semantic and
semiotic are not separated and arbitrary, but related. This places Adorno’s
philosophy of language well into conversation with an understanding of a
meaning that arises in between a process of grasping thought and manifested
 Adorno and Beckett 67
truth, as a battling interplay between the mutually reliant semiotic and
semantic domains. Yildiz demonstrates forcefully that: “Words partake of
truth and therefore are not arbitrary signs, but also .  .  . are nevertheless
not organic.”46 Adorno therefore positions his notion of language against
a monolingual paradigm according to which the mother tongue would be
the site of pure origin. He relies rather on the notion of the Fremdwort
(foreign-derived word, not “foreign word” as it has been translated) in the
mother tongue so that homogeneous and fully familiar language becomes
impossible.47 Yildiz argues:

In an unexpected way, then, this philosopher, who has been criticized

for his privileging of German over other languages, reveals the differ-
ent dimension of that which is fremd (foreign, alien, strange) within the
“mother tongue” and participates in a critically postmonolingual move
beyond that linguistic family romance of maternal origin and purity.48

Adorno is certainly in agreement against a “prison house” of everyday

language and facile forms of communication that foster administrative
forms of rationality, hence his rejection of communicative discourse as
“abracadabra.”
Adorno references the Fremdwort in the mother tongue to articulate lan-
guage as both produced (rather than naturally unfolding) and meaningful
(rather than arbitrary). In his essay “Über den Gebrauch von Fremdwörten
[On the Use of Foreign-Derived Words]” Adorno claims:

This is why the life of language is not lived with the teleological rhythm
of creaturely life with birth, growth, and death, but rather with nam-
ing as the enigmatic ur-phenomenon in between grasping thought and
manifested truth, with crystallization as well as disintegration.49

For Adorno, foreign-derived words openly display their man-made nature.

They therefore “serve as reminders of the origin of language in the acts
of naming. In this manner, not the “native” words, but these categorically
strange words relate back to the moment of emergence of originary lan-
guage.” Adorno tries to capture the dynamic of language that exposes the rift
in social relations and the irruption of freedom into cognitive consciousness
through the aesthetic experience.50 Adorno’s philosophy of the language of
music attempts to capture the foreign-derived sense of all naming structures
constitutive of originary language acquisition.
The aim of this explication of Adorno’s theory of the language of music is
meant to bring closure to the argument against superficial claims that attack
the difficulty of interpreting Adorno, and which therefore reject his aesthetic
theory outright as having little to no practical consequence for transfor-
mative aesthetic experience. It is also meant to facilitate an opening to his
reception of Beckett in the Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s attempt in that text
68 Marcia Morgan
was to create a written form of aesthetic theory that could generate an expe-
rience like the language of music he regarded as transformative, but never
sentimental or regressive. Beckett is a model literary figure for him precisely
on the conditions just articulated. I turn now to the specific integration of
Beckett in the Aesthetic Theory.

Beckett’s Exemplarity of “The New” for Adorno’s

Aesthetic Theory
In light of Adorno’s criticism of transparency and monolingual meaning in
language in an effort to create “the new” in epistemological meaning through
aesthetics, he embraces an enigmaticalness and defamiliarization of the empty
subject-object relation in late modernity. Beckett serves as an exemplar for
Adorno’s in this project. At the beginning of the second section of the Aeth-
etic Theory, Adorno already enters Beckett into his thought constellations on
art. Related to the conclusion of the previous section of the present chapter,
Adorno references Beckett on the “decay of material” in poetry in the mod-
ern era. In the previous section in Aesthetic Theory on “Aesthetic Hedonism
and the Happiness of Knowledge,” Adorno has made clear that art desires
for both its truth and untruth to be experienced in a way that confronts aes-
thetic hedonism, such that any concept of aesthetic pleasure is superseded.
Adorno here describes the happiness in artworks as “the feeling they instill of
standing firm”51 against any immediate satisfaction in art which merely con-
soles and does not productively alter the social situation. There is a resolute-
ness of the successful artwork not to appease the longing for pleasure, but
rather to generate a pleasure in the new knowledge gained from the aesthetic
experience of contradictoriness. Hence, Bowie’s thesis that the aesthetic for
Adorno is more philosophical in its knowledgeable advancements about the
contradictoriness internal to knowledge itself, than analytic concepts in epis-
temology and metaphysics which attempt an erasure of contradiction.
Beckett’s works are most instructive in the above context. Adorno argues
not only that the aesthetic categories have lost their givenness or “self-
evidence,” but so has the materiality of the art work:

Along with the categories, the materials [of art] too have lost their a pri-
ori self-evidence, and this is apparent in the case of poetic language. The
disintegration of the materials is the triumph of their being-for-other . . .
Neo-romantic poetry as a whole can be considered as an effort to oppose
this disintegration and to win back for language and other materials a
degree of substantiality. The aversion felt toward Jugendstil, however, is
a response to the failure of this effort. Retrospectively, in Kafka’s words,
it appears as a highlighted journey going nowhere.52

Apropros Kafkas’s representation of a “journey going nowhere,” Adorno

focuses on the discordant language in Beckett which establishes a temporality
 Adorno and Beckett 69
of “walking in place”—a hic et nunc that does not evade the disintegration
of materiality and meaning, but makes it ever the more manifest through an
aesthetic unhinging of both material and meaning.53 This creates a “deso-
late” situation that nonetheless provides more meaning than the kind of art
that consoles through pleasure. Adorno writes:

The gesture of walking in place at the end of Godot, which is the funda-
mental motif of the whole of his work, reacts precisely to this situation.
Without exception his response is violent. His work is the extrapola-
tion of a negative Kairos. The fulfilled moment reverses into perpetual
repetition that converges with desolation .  .  . [His] novels do, how-
ever, touch on fundamental layers of experience hic et nunc, which are
brought together into a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill.54

Beckett’s works create an experience that succeeds in a substantiveness in

language which constructs a visceral grasping of the disillusionment of mean-
ing, as we can likewise assert of Adorno’s creations. Adorno writes further:

The fate suffered by this generation’s works [that of nineteenth century

romanticism and proto-existentialism], their juxtaposition and keys,
inexorably befell the traditional concept of the poetic as something cat-
egorically higher and sacred. Poetry retreated into what abandons itself
unreservedly to the process of disillusionment. It is this that constitutes
the irresistibility of Beckett’s work.55

The disillusionment in meaning takes place for Adorno and Beckett through
an aesthetic experience of the emptiness of normatively rational meaning and
its dissolution of contradiction. For this reason, both embrace the necessity of
enigmaticalness as the window to successful works of art, as elaborated in the
previous section of the present chapter. How this relates to “the new” Adorno
begins to elucidate in a section titled “The New: Its Philosophy of History”:

Immersion in the historical dimension should reveal what previously

remained unsolved; in no other way can a relation between the present
and the past be established. In comparison, the aim of the current history
of ideas is virtually to demonstrate that the new does not exist. Yet since
the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of high capitalism, the category
of the new has been central, though admittedly in conjunction with the
question whether anything new had ever existed. Since that moment no
artwork has succeeded that rebuffed the ever fluctuating concept of the
modern. Works that thought they would save themselves from the prob-
lematic attributed to the modern only accelerated their demise.56

Thus, for Adorno, there is no way out of the modern; rather, there exists
the need to create a new language for art despite the entrenched position in
70 Marcia Morgan
the contemporary, which he has painstakingly elaborated in the Aesthetic
Theory, with its concomitant question whether anything new is ever really
possible. Adorno is therefore opposed to regression, sentimentality, nostal-
gia, and any attempt to recapture the past in a manner that does not re-read
history into the present and generate substantively new meaning by allow-
ing the subject to speak through its own disillusionment of meaning, as
described earlier in the present chapter, through an intentionless position of
the subject relinquishing itself to the societal object.
Adorno defines “the new” as a form of truth “situated in the intention-
less.” This is the obverse of the “objectless intentions” he rejects in proto-
existentialism. This is furthermore a fertile connection to what Adorno
regarded as the intentionless language of successful or “new music.” Adorno
proceeds to claim that if “the truth of the new, as the truth of what is not
already used up, is situated in the intentionless,” then “this sets truth in
opposition to reflection, which is the motor of the new; and raises reflection
to a second order, to second reflection.”57 Adorno elaborates:

It is the opposite of its usual philosophical concept, as it is used, for

instance, in Schiller’s doctrine of sentimental poetry, where reflection
means burdening artworks down with intentions. Second reflection lays
hold of the technical procedures, the language of the artwork in the
broadest sense, but it aims at blindness. “The absurd,” however inad-
equate as a slogan, testifies to this.58

Adorno continues by ascertaining the need of successful artworks to maintain

opaqueness. Beckett is a model in accomplishing this because he embraces
absurdity as a sort of blind experience of meaninglessness in all representation:

Beckett’s refusal to interpret his works, combined with the most extreme
consciousness of techniques and of the implications of the theatrical
and linguistic material, is not merely a subjective aversion: As reflection
increases in scope and power, content itself becomes ever more opaque.
Certainly this does not mean that interpretation can be dispensed with
as if there were nothing to interpret: to remain content with that is the
confused claim that all the talk about the absurd gave rise to. Any art-
work that supposes it is in possession of its content is plainly naïve it is
rationalism.59

A rejection of naïve rationalism lies at the heart of Beckett’s literary construc-

tions which so influenced Adorno. Absurdity requires more interpretation,
not less; the opaqueness of Beckett’s literary pieces challenges interpreta-
tive subjects to try harder, to dig deeper, and to refuse any reconciliatory
stance between subject and the societal object that would eliminate differ-
ence. For Adorno, the second reflection of successful artworks reinvigorates
new questions about art while not negating or diminishing art’s historicism,
 Adorno and Beckett 71
including the tragedies of the twentieth century that have relegated not only
aesthetic meaning but all meaning to nullity. “The new” is then Adorno’s
striving for meaning because of and in spite of his current social situation of
desolation and a desperation to create regardless of the emptiness of both
subjectivity and objectivity. Adorno writes further:

Unexpectedly confirming Hegel’s thesis of the transformation of media-

tion into immediacy, second reflection restores naïvete in the relation of
content to first reflection. What is today called a “message” is no more
to be squeezed out of Shakespeare’s great dramas than out of Beckett’s
works. But the increasing opacity is itself a function of transformed
content. As the negation of the absolute ideas, content can no longer
be identified with reason as it is postulated by idealism; content has
become the critique of the omnipotence of reason, and it can there-
fore no longer be reasonable according to the norms set by discursive
thought. The darkness of the absurd is the old darkness of the new. This
darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning.60

For Adorno, “the increasing opacity is itself a function of transformed con-

tent.” Thus, there is no “message” to be gleaned from Beckett’s work, rather
there is an experience of the opacity of new meaning. The content of suc-
cessful artworks, and therefore meaning, “has become the critique of the
omnipotence of reason” which is “no longer reasonable,” judged by the
norms of discursive reason. Adorno is rejecting the transparency of commu-
nicative discourse through his aesthetic theory and his positive assessment
of Beckett’s opaque dramas. The truth content of the artwork is separated
from the consciousness of the author and any accompanying intentionality,
as Adorno has made repeatedly clear throughout all his writings. Later in
the Aesthetic Theory in a section on enigmaticalness and truth content, he
further argues that the great artists therefore eschew interpretation:

That great artists, the Goethe who wrote fairy tales no less than Beck-
ett, want nothing to do with interpretations only underscores the dif-
ference of the truth content from the consciousness and the intention
of the author and does so by the strength of the author’s own self-
consciousness. Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await
their interpretation.61

Interpretation is the task of the artwork’s receiver, not creator, for the suc-
cessful artwork is intentionless in nature. Beckett’s works do not renounce
meaning; they “put meaning on trial.”62 Beckett’s works are absurd “not
because of any absence of meaning, for then they would be simply irrel-
evant.”63 Adorno advocates that the capacity of art today is for artworks to
“enunciate their meaninglessness with the same determinacy as traditional
artworks enunciate their positive meaning.”64
72 Marcia Morgan
In a culminating passage from Aesthetic Theory, Adorno sees meaning
per se through the lens of aesthetic meaning and specifically through his
understanding of the significance of Beckett. Adorno writes:

Everything depends on this: whether meaning inheres in the negation of

meaning in the artwork or if the negation conforms to the status quo;
whether the crisis of meaning is reflected in the works or whether it remains
immediate and therefore alien to the subject . . . What governs Beckett’s
work, certainly, is a parodic unity of time, place, and action, combined
with artfully fitted and balanced episodes and a catastrophe that consists
solely in the fact that it never takes place. Truly, one of the enigmas of art,
and evidence of the force of its logicality, is that all radical consistency,
even that called absurd, culminates in similitude of meaning.65

Meaning is constituted as a contrast of the given with its other. This com-
prises the content [Gehalt] of artworks, which is expressed through a mute
language that mimetically and affectively grasps the musicality of “the new”:

the artwork is the language of this wanting [of the other]. The elements
of this other are present in reality and they require only the most min-
ute displacement into a new constellation to find their right position.
Rather than imitating reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement
to reality.66

In this way Adorno’s theory of mimêsis connects to a memory of some-

thing that has never existed, “the new.” “The new” is mimetically captured
through the experience created by the artwork that upholds the contradic-
toriness of the subject-object relation in late modernity. Beckett stands as an
exemplar for Adorno by constructing a possibility for redemption through
impossible, technical contortions of art with philosophy. Both Beckett and
Adorno reject abstract knowledge and any omnipotence of reason because
of the demonstrated failures of rationality in the twentieth century. For
Adorno, Beckett’s works create a language that imitates the muteness of
music’s expression of otherness internal to the empty state of subjectivity in
authoritarian times. For both Adorno and Beckett, this is the greatest hope
that art can offer, and it does at times succeed, albeit in a transitory and
fleeting manner.

Notes
1. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2016), 137.
2. For interesting and helpful commentary on this passage, see Gerhard Richter,
Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 147–190; and Whitney Howell,
“Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, and Beckett,” in Licia Carlson and Peter R. Costello
 Adorno and Beckett 73
(eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2016),
177–192.
3. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics,
and Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 11. Cited therein:
Adorno, AT, 222.
4. Michael Kelly, The Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
5. Wellmer, ibid., 21.
6. Ibid., 22.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Rabaté, ibid., 3. Cited therein: Harold Pinter, “Samuel Beckett,” in Various
Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 55.
10. Rabaté, ibid.
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London and New
York: Verso, 1974), 19.
12. Rabaté, ibid., 4.
13. Adorno, ND, 3.
14. For helpful literature on this theme, see Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images:
Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007), Chapter 4: Nazism and Negative Dialectics: Adorno’s
Hitler in Minima Moralia, 147–190; Sonja Boos, Speaking the Unspeakable in
Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust (Ithaca NY:
Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2014), the Conclusion:
“Speaking of the Noose in the Country of the Hangman (Theodor W. Adorno),”
195–211; Amy Lynn Wlodarski, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representa-
tion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Chapter 2: “The Phi-
losopher as Witness: Theodor Adorno’s A Survivor from Warsaw,” 36–56; and
Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2013), Chapter 7: “Exile: Theodor Adorno,” 160–188; David Huebert,
“Outrunning Silence: Adorno, Beckett, and the Question of Art after the Holo-
caust,” Dissonance, August 30, 2010; Marta Figlerowicz, “Bounding the Self:
Ethics, Anxiety, and Territories of Personhood in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction,” Jour-
nal of Modern Literature, Winter 2011, vol. 34, no. 2, 76–97; Mike Marais, “A
Step Towards Silence,” Journal of Literary Studies, December 2016, vol. 32, no.
4, 89–106; Michael D’Arcy, “Adorno, Beckett, and ‘The Duty of Reason’ after
Auschwitz,” Journal of Beckett Studies, Fall 2006/Spring 2007, vol. 16, no. 1–2,
259–277.
15. Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Cambridge, UK and Mal-
den, MA: Polity, 2013), 135.
16. See the “Editorisches Nachwort” in Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie,
ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970),
544: “Ein Fragment von Friedrich Schlegel sollte der ‘Ästhetischen Theorie’” als
Motto dienen: “In dem, was man Philosophie der Kunst nennt, fehlt gewöhnlich
eins von beiden; entweder die Philosophie oder die Kunst.” The above quotation
is my translation of Schiller’s fragment.
17. See Wellmer’s endorsement of Bowie’s book: Bowie, ibid., back cover.
18. Bowie, ibid., 50.
19. See Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. and
ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
20. Bowie, ibid., 51.
21. Rabaté, ibid., 134.
22. Ibid., 137.
23. See Adorno, ibid.
74 Marcia Morgan
24. See W. Martin Lüdke, Anmerkungen zi einer “Logik des Zerfalls”: Adorno-
Beckett (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981); Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1994), 152–162; and Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames, trans. David Midgley (Cam-
bridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998), 170–179.
25. See Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 17.
26. See Shane Weller, “Adorno’s Notes on The Unnameable,” Journal of Beckett
Studies, September 2010, vol. 19, no. 2, 179–195; Dirk Van Hulle, “Adorno’s
Notes on Endgame,” Journal of Beckett Studies, September 2010, vol. 19, no. 2,
196–217; See also Peter Zazzalo, “Trying to Understand Waiting for Godot: An
Adornian Analysis of Beckett’s Significant Work,” European Legacy, November
2016, vol. 21, no. 7, 694–704.
27. Rabaté, ibid., 225 n. 3.
28. “Editorisches Nachwort” in Adorno, ibid.: “Adornos Absicht war, das Buch
Samuel Beckett zu widmen.”
29. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthet-
ics (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997), 151.
30. Ibid., 150.
31. Wellmer, ibid., 22.
32. Nicholsen, ibid., 150
33. Nicholsen, ibid., 150. Cited therein: Adorno, AT, 179.
34. Nicholsen, ibid., 150.
35. Ibid.
36. I highly recommend Nicholsen’s entire chapter, “Aesthetic Theory’s mimêsis of
Walter Benjamin,” Nicholson, ibid., 137–180. Although Nicholsen’s main argu-
ment is Adorno’s, Aesthetic Theory as a mimetic resemblance of the writings of
Walter Benjamin, I retain the initial conversation by Nicholsen on nature and
language, and delineate my own project in the present chapter with Beckett’s
influence on Adorno.
37. Nicholsen, ibid., 71.
38. The following paragraphs in the second section of the present chapter were
previously published in open access form in Marcia Morgan, “The Affect of
Dissident Language: A Possible Dialogue between Theodor W. Adorno and
Julia Kristeva,” in Scott Davidson (ed.), Journal of French and Francophone
Philosophy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), vol. 24, no. 1, 167–191,
Available at doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2016.716. They have been edited and modi-
fied to fit the present chapter.
39. Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rod-
ney Livingstone (London and New York: Verso Books, 1963), 1.
40. Ibid., 2.
41. Ibid., 5.
42. Adorno, ibid.
43. Ibid., 6.
44. Ibid.
45. Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 67–108.
46. Ibid., 80.
47. Ibid., 67.
48. Ibid., 71.
49. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Use of Foreign Words,” in NL, vol. 2, 288.
50. See Richard Leppert, “Introduction,” in Theodor W. Adorno (ed.), Essays on
Music: Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Lep-
pert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York: University
of California Press, 2002), especially 62–65.
 Adorno and Beckett 75
51. Adorno, AT, 15.
52. Ibid., 16.
53. Ibid., 30.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 16.
56. Ibid., 20.
57. Ibid., 26.
58. Ibid., 26–27.
59. Ibid., 27.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 128.
62. Ibid., 153.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 154.
66. Ibid., 133.
4 Abysmal Humanity
Anthropological Materialism
in Georg Büchner and Walter
Benjamin
Cat Moir

In his 1929 essay on surrealism and in a number of convolutes of The

Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin refers to a neglected tradition in Euro-
pean intellectual and cultural history, which he called “anthropological
materialism.” Benjamin associates the term with a disparate group of art-
ists, thinkers, and activists working in France and Germany in the period
“anterior to the Congress of Tours” of 1920, as well as in the decades prior
to the 1848 revolution: Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Rimbaud, Balzac, the utopian
socialists and Saint-Simonian feminists, the radical playwright Georg Büch-
ner (AP, 698). Anthropological materialism was clearly at the forefront of
Benjamin’s thinking during the last decade of his life, but he never defines
it explicitly. The closest he comes is to identify it with a certain “hostility to
progress” that is, as he puts it, “refractory to Marxism” (ibid.).
Adorno questions the relationship between anthropological and Marx-
ian historical materialism in a letter written to Benjamin in 1936. There,
Adorno described his friend’s own thought as a form of “anthropological
materialism,” which he saw as the decisive factor distinguishing their two
perspectives. “All those points in which . . . I differ from you,” Adorno wrote,
“could be summed up and characterized as an anthropological materialism
that I cannot accept.”1 By accusing Benjamin of constructing an “undialec-
tical ontology of the body,” Adorno was referring to what he perceived as
Benjamin’s insufficient attention to the way in which experience is condi-
tioned by the particular historical context in which it is lived.2 Regardless of
whether Adorno’s assessment here was right, one thing his letter makes clear
is that the concept of anthropological materialism is essential to understand-
ing Benjamin’s thought during the 1930s.
This chapter reconstructs Benjamin’s concept of anthropological material-
ism by bringing him into dialogue with Büchner as the figure Benjamin cites
most frequently in connection with it. Although Benjamin engages in-depth
with Büchner’s writing only once, in Deutsche Menschen (1935) (SW3,
207–208), his comments there and elsewhere reveal a striking proximity
in philosophical outlook, particularly when it comes to the relationship
between embodiment, history, and social justice. Through a comparative
analysis of Benjamin’s and Büchner’s work, the chapter aims to develop a
 Abysmal Humanity 77
deeper understanding of the concept of anthropological materialism, and to
highlight the parallels between Büchner’s thought and Benjamin’s.

Ontology of the Body

As Axel Honneth and Hans Joas have pointed out, in the German-speaking
world, the concept of anthropology is associated not so much with ques-
tions of human cultural variation, as it is in the Anglo-Saxon context, but
with “the human being’s fundamental biological nature.”3 Anthropological
materialism, following their definition, would accordingly be a variety of
materialist philosophy that takes the human body as a kind of universal
starting point for thinking about such questions as the nature of experience,
historicity, and social action.
In fact, when we consider both Benjamin’s and Adorno’s comments on
anthropological materialism, this preliminary definition turns out to be
rather fitting. Benjamin mentions anthropological materialism for the first
time in his 1929 essay on surrealism, where he connects it with not only
the surrealists, but also Nietzsche; Rimbaud; the pedagogue and writer of
calendar stories, Johann Peter Hebel; and, crucially, Büchner (SW2, 217).
The surrealists, Benjamin argues, are unique in having developed a poetic
language that reveals the need for revolution in images of the body. “They
exchange,” as he puts it in the essay’s final sentence, “to a man the play of
human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for
sixty seconds” (ibid.). It is a dense image that neatly captures the sense of
urgency and absurdism the surrealists achieved through their characteristic
intermingling of bodily and technological elements. Its message seems to be
that since embodied life is finite, it is senseless to waste our time enslaved to
the dead clock of labour. Time is life: if we want to live in freedom, we must
act, and the time to do so is now.
The surrealist demand as sketched in the 1929 essay drew its force from a
certain universalism of the body, of embodied life, which Benjamin shared.
For Benjamin, the body was the privileged site in which physical nature and
subjective history intersect. We find this idea crystallized in another potent
image, this time in Benjamin’s essay “Poverty and Experience” from 1933.
“A generation,” he writes there—his generation, the one whose childhood
spanned the years around 1900—

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now

stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained
unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a force field of
destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
(SW2, 732)

Trapped between unchanging nature in the form of the clouds, and advanc-
ing history represented by the new technology that creates “destructive
78 Cat Moir
explosions,” Benjamin’s “tiny, fragile human body” becomes, as Adorno
rather disparagingly put it in his 1936 letter, “the measure of all concrete-
ness,” Adorno was responding to Benjamin’s short text on the storyteller,
which he had obviously sent him to read.4 Tellingly, Benjamin included this
same passage from “Experience and Poverty” also in the storyteller essay.
According to Adorno, taking the body as the measure of all concreteness
according to Adorno resulted in an “undialectical ontology of the body,”
which he saw as the hallmark of Benjamin’s anthropological materialism.5
The problem from Adorno’s point of view was as follows: to what extent
can we assume that embodied experience—or indeed, the experience of
embodiment—is universal? Is not the latter historically variable, and the
former irreducibly singular?
In fact the irreducible singularity of embodied human experience was at
the heart of anthropological materialism’s concerns according to Benjamin,
especially in its German variant, where the “human individual” was all-
important (AP, 633). He is especially keen in this regard to distinguish the
“metaphysical materialism” of figures like Karl Vogt and Nikolai Bukha-
rin, from the “anthropological materialism” of Büchner and the surreal-
ists (SW2, 217).6 According to Vogt’s “metaphysical” materialism, human
subjectivity—our needs, desires, imagination—were mere epiphenomenal
effects of physical mechanism. In the late 1840s, while studying physiol-
ogy in Paris, Vogt had conducted experiments with live subjects that had
convinced him that “the seat of consciousness, the will, and thought must
be sought only and exclusively in the brain.”7 His remark in the Physiologi-
cal Letters (1845–1847) that “thoughts stand in the same relation to the
brain as bile to the liver and urine to the kidneys” became one of the most
famous programmatic statements of a new brand of “mechanical” materi-
alism, which Benjamin called “metaphysical” because, despite its scientific
credentials, its underlying idea—that the world as a whole, including con-
sciousness and its products, is merely matter in motion—seemed to return to
a pre-Kantian mode of metaphysics, making ontological statements about
the world based on pure conceptual reasoning rather than experience.8
These ideas were controversial, appearing as they did to refute not only
the existence of an immortal soul, but also the very idea of free will. They
nevertheless became highly influential in late nineteenth-century Germany,
where they were popularized by the Dutch physiologist and disciple of
Feuerbach Jacob Moleschott, as well as Büchner’s younger brother Ludwig,
whose Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter) became the biggest science best-
seller of the period.
A physiologist and anatomist by training himself, Georg Büchner undoubt-
edly shared many of the same concerns as Vogt. Indeed, while both under-
graduates at the University of Giessen, in the winter semester of 1833–1834,
they even attended the same private seminar held by Friedrich Christian
Gregor Wernekinck, professor of comparative anatomy, the subject in which
Büchner would go on to lecture in Zürich in the months before he died, aged
 Abysmal Humanity 79
just 23, in 1837.9 Like Vogt, Büchner was supremely fascinated with the
question of free will and the implications for it of modern science. Nowhere
is this more clearly expressed than in his play Woyzeck.10
Begun while Büchner was in exile in Strasbourg in 1836, and left incom-
plete at his death, the work is based on the real-life case of Johann Christian
Woyzeck, the penniless son of a wig-maker who murdered his lover Chris-
tiane Woost in a fit of rage in June 1821. It was one of the first cases of its
kind in the German-speaking territories in which the social and psychologi-
cal circumstances of the accused were called into question in determining his
legal accountability. Büchner’s drama adapts the story, portraying the oppres-
sion and torment of a young soldier Franz Woyzeck at the hands of his social
superiors. Struggling to earn enough to keep his common law partner, Marie,
and their small child, Franz is forced to perform degrading and ultimately
deranging tasks: shaving his captain for additional money, and being the paid
guinea pig of a doctor who restricts him to a diet of peas in the context of a
perverse experiment. Suffering its mentally and physically distorting effects,
and observing Marie’s flirtation with a certain Drum Major—the result, it
is intimated, of Franz’s sexual disinterest, another effect of his debilitating
regime—Franz becomes enraged and murders Marie, leaving open the ques-
tion as to whether he can be deemed responsible for his actions.
At the center of the play is the devastating effect that Büchner’s deterio-
rating physical state, which is caused by his participation in the doctor’s
experiment, has on his mental well-being and capacity for reasoned action.
In a scene in which the doctor chastises his subject for having “pissed on the
wall like a dog,” Woyzeck puts his improper behaviour down to the “call
of nature,” highlighting the shared somatic reality that lies behind his social
inequality with the doctor.11 Indeed, the doctor’s scientistic condescension,
telling Woyzeck that the urinary muscles are subject to the will, rings hol-
low: the audience can see that Woyzeck’s increasingly fractured capacity for
self-control is a direct result of his participation, out of sheer financial need,
in this perverse experiment. On a simplistic reading, one might be tempted
to read a kind of Vogtian reductivism at work in Woyzeck: just as Vogt
described how he “cut away the mental functions” of a live pigeon as he
“cut away its brain piece by piece,” Woyzeck’s mental state deteriorates as
his physical condition worsens.12
Yet Büchner’s materialism differed from Vogt’s in important respects. As
Esther Leslie has put it, a kind of “double bind” intermeshing physical nature
and political reality—consciousness, activity, history—distinguishes anthro-
pological from metaphysical materialism.13 It is clear from the outset that
the protagonist’s physical and mental impairment has social causes; if his
ultimate action—the murder of Marie—is determined by his physical state,
then his physical state is nonetheless the product of his social condition.
This “double bind” has the peculiar effect of both affirming and denying the
freedom of the will. On the one hand, Büchner depicts his characters—not
only the uneducated and impoverished Woyzeck and Marie, but also the
80 Cat Moir
doctor, who is portrayed as the archetypal Fachidiot—as unable to do oth-
erwise, given their circumstances. Yet on the other he is at pains to demon-
strate that those circumstances are the contingent product of human action.
When Woyzeck’s captain questions the morality of his having a child out of
wedlock, Franz rightly points out that that “whoever has no money” cannot
afford to have morals.14 Büchner’s determinism is not merely physical, like
Vogt’s but social through and through.
In a letter to his family from 1834, Büchner writes:

I despise nobody, least of all on account of their intelligence or education,

because it is in nobody’s power not to become an idiot or a criminal—
because in the same circumstances we would all likely become the same,
and because the causes lie outside of us.15

Yet if this passage makes Büchner’s social determinism clear, it also reveals
a certain universalism of the body underlying it. The idea that we would all
become the same under the same circumstances implies that, at the basic
level of embodied being, we are all equal. And indeed, it is by appealing to
the universality of embodied experience that Woyzeck articulates its social
critique most forcefully. In the scene with the captain, Woyzeck reminds his
superior that the poor, too, are made of “flesh and blood.”16 The captain
agrees, and although he insists that it is “morality” that separates them, as
we have seen, Woyzeck, in the role of a fool who speaks the truth, recognizes
that morality is really a code word for money. Hans Mayer has argued that
determinism and sympathy are the two central motifs of the play, and from
Büchner’s anthropological materialist perspective, the ground of sympathy
is the insight that, beyond social difference, we are all flesh and blood.17

Hostility Towards Progress

The phenomenological perspective that Büchner’s materialism implies is
closely connected to a philosophy of history that eschews the idea of prog-
ress in the face of a perpetually brutal human nature. It is an attitude that
Büchner seems to have acquired while reading the history of the French
Revolution in preparation for writing his first play, Dantons Tod. Set during
the French Revolution, and drawing on numerous historical sources and
documents, Danton follows revolutionary leader Georges Danton during
the period between the first and second terrors. Having played a central role
in creating the Revolutionary Tribunal, which assumed the right to con-
demn and guillotine without trial anyone suspected of anti-revolutionary
activities, Danton himself eventually succumbed to the mechanisms of his
own making. After attempting to shift the direction of the revolution away
from institutionalized terror, Danton was accused of counter-revolutionary
activities by his opponent in the Revolutionary Government Maximilien
Robespierre and executed by guillotine in April 1794.
 Abysmal Humanity 81
Although the downfall of the historical Danton was the result of numer-
ous contingencies and surprises, Büchner’s protagonist behaves as if he is
aware of the Revolution’s, and his own, probable fate. In a scene in which
Danton has just learned that the Committee of Public Safety has ordered
his arrest, he soliloquises about “flirting with death,” and “laughs” at the
course of history, saying “There is a feeling of permanence in me, which tells
me that tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow, and after
that everything is the same.”18 This was the “gruesome fatalism of history”
beneath which Büchner reported he felt “crushed” in a letter to his fiancée
Minna Jaeglé, written in March 1834 while he was studying the Revolu-
tion.19 Born in the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
Büchner was a lifelong Francophile and ardent republican, equally repelled
and fascinated by the seemingly inexorable logic of violence that the Revo-
lution had unleashed despite its emancipatory aims and achievements.20 Yet
his was not a progressive fatalism that trusted in the laws of history to bring
about a brighter future. At the root of Büchner’s fatalism lies the “terrify-
ing sameness” that he, like his Danton, found in “human nature” and the
“human condition,” a sameness that confounded the very idea of progress
with unrelenting brutality. “What is it in us that lies, murders, steals?” Büch-
ner asked in the letter to Minna, words that he also would put into Danton’s
mouth.21 Whatever it is, his implication is that it connects human beings
through the passage of time, whatever else changes around us.
Büchner wrote Danton in just five weeks, as he informs Karl Gutzkow
in a letter written in late February 1835.22 At that time, Büchner was hid-
ing from the authorities in his hometown of Darmstadt, wanted as one of
the authors of the Hessian Courier, an incendiary pamphlet inciting the
provincial peasantry to revolt against feudal injustices against them. Plan-
ning to escape to Strasbourg, at the time under more liberal Napoleonic
rule, Büchner needed money fast. In his letter to Gutzkow, he asks his friend
to recommend the play to renowned publisher Johann David Sauerländer.
Stressing the desperate nature of the situation, Büchner urged Gutzkow to
reply in haste.
Büchner’s letter to Gutzkow was one of those on which Benjamin would
comment in Deutsche Menschen. It is Benjamin’s most sustained engagement
with Büchner’s work, and reveals some of the striking parallels between his
own philosophy of history and Büchner’s. Benjamin depicts Büchner’s let-
ter as standing in a long line of emissaries by German authors who had to
beg for bread and salvation from exile because their writing challenged the
status quo. Büchner’s appeal to Gutzkow was indeed visceral. He found
himself, he claimed, in a “degree of misery that makes every consideration
forgotten and every feeling numb” (SW3, 208). Yet he insisted he would
not “starve himself out of this world,” as some might consider the solution.
Recalling his encounter with a recently blinded captain begging on the street
who had assured him he would “shoot himself were he not forced to live in
order to support his family,” Büchner claimed to Gutzkow that he was now
82 Cat Moir
in “similar circumstances.” He would not, he protested, “make an anchor of
[his] body to be thrown from the wreck of this world into the water.” He
would rather beg for charity, would almost rather rob at gunpoint than sur-
render to the censorious authorities.
Reflecting on the “good fortune” that Büchner’s letter had survived amid
conditions in which many others to his relatives and wife were long lost, he
recalls a remark made by the playwright’s brother, the physiologist Ludwig
Büchner: what was most important to the younger Georg was to preserve
only “those things which seemed important for a knowledge of the political
movement of that time, and of the contribution Büchner himself made to it”
(SW3, 207). That these traces and fragments had been preserved alongside
Büchner’s literary estate was for Benjamin essential to understanding the
historical significance of his work. They had facilitated the rediscovery of
Büchner in the years before the First World War, which Benjamin described
as one of the few episodes in the literary politics of that era that had not
been retrospectively devalued by the trauma of the conflict. Büchner’s work,
Benjamin argued, highlighted a world in common among German writers
who had been persecuted down the ages for their efforts at social critique.23
Now on the run from National Socialism, penniless and at risk of being
arrested or killed, Benjamin clearly identified himself with the “long proces-
sion of German writers and thinkers” forced to drag themselves along, “fet-
tered to a common chain of penury.” The “topicality” of Büchner’s work,
he argued, would be “blindingly obvious” given the rapid proliferation of
German writers seeking refuge from authoritarianism yet again. However
much may have changed over the hundred years separating him from Büch-
ner, with respect to what mattered—to the integrity of one’s life, one’s very
survival—they were contemporaries. So much for progress.
In convolute a1,1 of the Arcades, Benjamin writes that “hostility towards
progress” is the hallmark of anthropological materialism (AP, 698). That, he
believed, was what attracted the surrealists to this perspective, what made
them identify, as he did, with the mood of the period in which Büchner was
writing. The “hostility” Benjamin had in mind was no nostalgic technopho-
bia, however. It was rather a rejection of the idea of progress, the idea that the
advance of technology necessarily brings about improvements to human life.
Already in 1929 Benjamin had expressed his frustration with the pre-
vailing faith in progress among social democrats. In the surrealism essay,
he describes the “program of the bourgeois parties” as a “bad poem on
springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors” (SW2, 216). Socialists waxed
lyrical about the “finer future” of freedom and plenty their grandchildren
would enjoy, while everywhere people lived in poverty and servitude. The
“[o]ptimism” that inspired the stock imagery of the left, Benjamin observed,
was a handicap when faced with fascism. Benjamin wrote disparagingly in
the theses of the “astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the
20th century are ‘still’ possible,” saying that “the conception of history on
which it rests is untenable” (SW4, 392). The belief in progress, he thought,
 Abysmal Humanity 83
was paralyzing people from combatting fascism. His project was now to
articulate a philosophy of history that would inspire solidarity and action.
“All rulers,” as Benjamin writes in his 7th thesis on the concept of history,
“are the heirs of prior conquerors” (SW4, 391). By acknowledging oppres-
sion and injustice as historical constants, the impact of which is endured
at the level of individual embodied experience, Benjamin thus sought to
reinsert a critical anthropology into the historical materialist tradition. Since
it is lived, bodily experience which binds us most immediately to our fore-
bears and possible successors—the fact of having a life, and of being able
to have that life diminished or cut short by those more powerful—the body
became for Benjamin the site at which biological and historical forces meet.
While the task of what Benjamin called the “historicist” was thus to write
history from the victor’s perspective, that of the materialist historian was,
in his view, to identify with the “tradition of the oppressed,” by hearing the
unfulfilled cries for emancipation of the past, and recognising our present
as essentially beholden to the same brutal logic (SW4, 392). For Benjamin,
the material traces of these past injustices, such as Büchner’s letter, were like
images or fragments of memory that could remind us of the political task
at hand: to introduce a “real state of emergency,” as Benjamin put it, out of
which a more humane, just, equal society could emerge (ibid.).
Büchner’s view of the task of the socially engaged dramatist shares much
in common with Benjamin’s vision of the task of the materialist historian. In
a letter to his family, written at the end of July 1835, shortly after the publi-
cation of Dantons Tod, Büchner claims that the dramatic writer is “nothing
but a writer of history, but stands above the latter in that he creates history
for us a second time and simultaneously, instead of giving us a dry narra-
tive, puts us into the life of a time.”24 Büchner achieved this by basing his
works on historical sources. While writing Woyzeck, for instance, Büch-
ner read Professor Clarus’ medical report on the historical subject’s men-
tal health in a medical journal to which his father subscribed.25 Although
Clarus recognised in the report that “indolence, gambling, drunkenness,
irregular satisfaction of sexual desire, and bad company can lead gradually
and unexpectedly to crime,” he nevertheless declared Woyzeck accountable
for his actions, condemning him to execution in the Leipzig marketplace in
August 1824.
A second historical case Büchner integrated into his drama are the experi-
ments carried out on soldiers forced to eat a diet of only pea soup for three
months in an attempt to discover whether the military and the poor could
be fed more cheaply by replacing meat protein with that of pulses. The
experiments had disastrous consequences: as a result of malnutrition, the
subjects suffered hallucinations and lost control of their bodily functions,
symptoms which would later come to be associated with the overconsump-
tion of certain amino acids. Meanwhile, the novella Lenz, which depicts the
historical author J.M.R. Lenz, Goethe’s friend and contemporary, suffering
from mental illness in the care of his friend Jean-Frederic Oberlin, drew
84 Cat Moir
large sections verbatim from Oberlin’s diary. At one point in the narrative,
Lenz argues that the task of the materialist poet is to “sink into the lives of
the lowest and represent it in all its convulsions, intimations, the fine, barely
noticed play of facial expressions.”26 In many respects Lenz’s words can
be read as a programmatic statement of Büchner’s own creative method,
which, like Benjamin’s was underpinned by an anti-progressive conception
of history based on a minimalist universalism of the body. As Lenz puts it,
“the emotional artery is the same in almost everyone, only the shell through
which it must break is more or less sealed.”27 Sinking into the lives of the
lowest, Büchner was no historicist, whose empathy with the victors comes
to benefit the rulers every time. Rather, Büchner’s sympathies always lie with
the “tradition of the oppressed” to which his central characters belong.

Refractory to Marxism
The point of all this, for both men, was political. As Benjamin puts it in con-
volute K of the Arcades, in the “Copernican revolution in historical percep-
tion” that he aimed to bring about, “politics attains primacy over history” (AP,
388–389). What mattered was the now, the immediacy of the present moment
as the only authentic moment of political action. Meanwhile, even if Büchner
thought the individual “mere froth on the wave” of history, he too nevertheless
believed in the need to act.28 Writing to Gutzkow in 1836, he argued that it
was impossible for the “educated and well-to-do class” to reform society, since
“no matter how many concessions from violence they secure for themselves,”
they would “never voluntarily give up their superior position in relation to the
great class.”29 Revolution, it would seem, was the only option.
According to Benjamin, what held the masses back was not only a mis-
taken belief in progress, but an absence of images that could communicate
effectively to them the need for change. “Must the Marxist understanding
of history,” Benjamin asks in Convolute N of the Arcades, “necessarily be
acquired at the expense of history’s perceptibility? .  .  . In what way is it
possible to conjoin a heightened vividness to the realization of the Marxist
method?” (AP, 461). What Benjamin wanted was the kind of immediacy
he believed the surrealists had achieved with their visual language. It was
an idiom in which Büchner himself was well versed. In the Hessian Cou-
rier he depicts what he saw as the violence to humanity done by modern
capitalism in graphic terms. State revenue is the “blood debt taken from
the body of the people,” while the princes and their officials are “butchers”
who “light their homes with the fat of the peasants” and commit legalized
murder and theft.30 It is language like this that has caused many commenta-
tors to see in Büchner a forerunner of Marx, but as Benjamin reminds us,
anthropological materialism is “refractory” to Marxism: it bends it in a
new direction (AP, 698).
What is striking about Büchner’s prose in the Courier is its peculiar atten-
tion to the embodied effects of poverty and social conflict. In Convolute U
 Abysmal Humanity 85
of the Arcades, Benjamin insists that Büchner’s radicalism is aimed at an
“emancipation of the flesh” in the manner of Enfantin, and compares him
in this respect to Feuerbach (AP, 591). Indeed, despite Marc Berdet’s claim
that Benjamin’s concept of anthropological materialism has “nothing, or
very little, to do with Feuerbach,” on closer inspection, it turns out that
Feuerbach holds the key to understanding the phenomenological relation-
ship between the body and history in Benjamin’s thought.31
Honneth and Joas class Feuerbach as an anthropological materialist
because his materialism sets out from the perspective of human beings as
corporeal beings endowed with universal needs.32 This, I argue, is also the
starting point for both Büchner and Benjamin. In Benjamin’s case, Feuer-
bach’s sensualism and his emphasis on the embodied nature of cognition
provides the model for rethinking historical perceptibility.
Feuerbach’s sensualism reformulated the traditional distinction between
rationalism and empiricism more fundamentally than Kant had done.
The major discovery of Kant’s transcendental philosophy had been that
knowledge was not a matter of the mind conforming to the way things are
“in themselves” in a mind-independent world, but rather the external world
conforms to the structure of the mind, and that therefore human subjectiv-
ity plays an active role in shaping our knowledge of the world. Feuerbach
largely agreed with this insight, but he distrusted the mind-body dualism he
found in Kant’s theory. “How are we able to suppose the existence of an ego
that thus enquires and can thus enquire?” Feuerbach asked in his Principles
of the Philosophy of the Future.33 “It is through the body,” he continued,
“that the ego is not just an ego but also an object. To be embodied is to be
in the world; it means to have so many senses, i.e., so many pores and naked
surfaces. The body is nothing but the porous ego.”34 For Feuerbach, then,
the human body was the hinge between the empirical and theoretical realms.
However, he ultimately saw physical, or material, experience as primary. As
he put it in a set of theses on the reformulation of philosophy from 1842,
thought “comes from being, but being does not come from thought.”35 By
emphasizing the embodied nature of cognition, Feuerbach was criticizing a
tendency within epistemology towards “the abstraction from the sensuous
[Sinnlichkeit], from matter.”36 It is a species of the same problem with which
Benjamin grapples in Convolute N.
For Feuerbach, the universal structure of embodied subjectivity was one
of being “open to the world” and materially dependent on others. If the Ger-
man Idealists had already acknowledged the intersubjectivity of knowledge
at the conceptual level, Feuerbach now pushed this in a more materialist
direction. Because we are “porous” beings, there are no definite boundar-
ies that distinguish one embodied ego from another. Feuerbach recognized
“that I am nothing without a not-I which is distinct from me yet intimately
related to me, something other, which is at the same time my own being.”37
In other words, knowledge for Feuerbach was as much a product of mate-
rial social interactions as it was of apperception or sensory experience. This
86 Cat Moir
insight, of course, would be reformulated by Marx, who recognized that
the sensual world around us that we know and with which we interact is
not merely given, but has been produced by human subjects with specific
desires and interests, and under particular conditions. This was the reason
why Marx turned away from Feuerbach, who, he thought, was mistaken in
referring to a universal embodied human nature.38
Yet this, I am suggesting here, is precisely the perspective Benjamin seeks
to revive, within Marxism, in order to refract it and make it bend in a
new direction. Anthropological materialism, as he puts it in Convolute U,
“is comprised within the dialectical”—in other words, there is a danger
in erasing a certain anthropological perspective from historical material-
ism (AP, 591). For despite all the historical specificity of human experience
which a materialist perspective helps us to see, that historical specificity, as
Benjamin recognized, is purchased time and again at the same price: the
violent exploitation of the many by the few. Feuerbach named it “politi-
cal brutality and despotism,” while for Büchner it was history’s “gruesome
fatalism.”39 In his theses on the concept of history, Benjamin called it the
“triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying
prostrate,” a parallel procession to the one that linked him to Büchner at
the foot of the Weimar Parnassus (SW4, 391). This is the anthropological
basis for a historical materialism that understands social justice as always
pursued from the perspective of embodied, individual lived life.
Both Benjamin and Büchner have been described as pessimists when it
comes to history, but given their commitment to the potential of revolution-
ary action, as well as their sympathy with the “tradition of the oppressed,”
this reading would be too simple. Richard Wolin’s claim that Benjamin
avowed anthropological materialism as a means of “denigrating human-
ity in its current, degraded state in order better to prepare the ground for
its final, eschatological renewal” is closer to the truth.40 His aim, like that
of Lenz, was to show us the fine details of history in all its continuous
abjection in order that we might take the “tiger’s leap” into the open air
of history, clearing the “abyss” before which, Benjamin argued, every age
supposes it stands (SW4, 395; AP, 545). For Benjamin, however, this would
necessarily be not only a creative, but a destructive act. Through the experi-
ence of embodiment, we can identify with the history’s chain gang, but the
emancipation of the flesh requires us to break the chains.
Once again, Büchner’s “nihilist poetics” offer a similar image.41 In
Woyzeck, Marie is depicted in terms reminiscent of an abyss at several
points during the play. When the Under-Officer and Drum Major encounter
her at the fair, they say that looking at her is like “looking down into a well
or a chimney flue,” and that it is “as if her dark hair pulls you downwards,
like a weight.”42 In the second draft version of the play, in which Marie is
still called Louisel, when Woyzeck confronts Marie about his suspicions, he
stands before her and, looking directly at her repeats, “I see nothing, I see
nothing,” before finally exclaiming that “every person is an abyss: it makes
 Abysmal Humanity 87
you dizzy to look down into it.”43 Here the female character is depicted alle-
gorically both as the abysmal embodied experience of every human being,
and as the embodiment of the abyss of historical action before which we
perpetually stand. On the one hand, she represents the reproduction of the
very conditions of her own oppression in her role as mother and as the lover
of the Drum Major, her social superior, who desires her only to “spawn
a generation of Drum Majors” thus perpetuating the social hierarchy of
which both she and Woyzeck are victims.44 Marie points to the need to
break this cycle, to forego the notion of progress in favour of what French
feminist Claire Démar called an “end to the law of blood and of genera-
tion.”45 Like Benjamin, Büchner saw that modernity did not truly break
with tradition, if by tradition we understand the physical reproduction of
conditions of social injustice. When he wrote in a letter to Karl Gutzkow in
June 1836 that “to die” was the “only novelty” of which “worn-out modern
society” was capable, Büchner called for an end to the myth of progress.46
For Benjamin, Büchner’s work epitomized the tradition of anthropologi-
cal materialism to which Adorno claimed Benjamin also belonged. Although
Benjamin offers few concrete clues to what this term, to which he returned
again and again in the last decade of his life, meant for him, a comparison
of some of the main motifs in his and Büchner’s work reveals much. Anthro-
pological materialism is a philosophical outlook that challenges the idea
of progress with the aim of inciting social revolution. The entanglement of
literature and history is central to the methodology of the anthropologi-
cal materialist, since it is only by piecing together fragments and images
of the past that the need for transformation is revealed. By articulating an
experience of history as irreducibly embodied, anthropological materialism
aims to inspire a kind of social transformation that would not sacrifice the
individual to the impersonal force of events. If the humanist universalism
implied in this idea may at first appear at odds with the logic of a Marx-
ian historical materialism, from Benjamin’s perspective, accepting a minimal
universality of individual experience was a precondition for grasping the
nature of historicity. From the viewpoint of anthropological materialism
as reconstructed here, it is for the sake of the multitude of real, historical
individuals, and not in the name of some abstract collective, that the call for
collective transformation is made.

Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence,
1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 146.
2. Ibid., 147.
3. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. Ray-
mond Meyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1.
4. Adorno and Benjamin, Correspondence, 147.
5. Ibid.
88 Cat Moir
6. Benjamin’s original sentence states that the “metaphysical materialism, of the
brand of Vogt and Bukharin—as is attested by the experience of the Surrealists,
and earlier by that of Hebel, Georg Büchner, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud—cannot
lead without rupture to anthropological materialism.” It is a curious formu-
lation when it comes to the relationship between Büchner and Vogt: with or
without rupture, there is no sense in which Vogt’s materialism could have led
chronologically to Büchner’s. Vogt did not develop the “metaphysical” mate-
rialism for which he became known until the late 1840s, several years after
Büchner’s death, and it only became popular in the disillusioned atmosphere
following the failure of the 1848 revolution, when Vogt fought on the barricades
and became one of the deputies who remained as part of the failed rump parlia-
ment when Prussian troops dissolved the Frankfurt National Assembly.
7. Carl Vogt, Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände (Stuttgart and Tübin-
gen: Cottascher Verlag, 1846), 322.
8. Ibid., 323. In his review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859), Engels already claimed to “find the narrow-minded philis-
tine mode of thinking of the pre-Kantian period reproduced in its most banal
form by Büchner and Vogt” (Friedrich Engels, ‘Karl Marx: A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy’, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume
16 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), 465–477, 473). The neo-Kantian
Otto Liebman would make the point more forcefully still in 1865 when he
wrote that scientific materialism “considers its doctrine to be highly plausible,
because it rests on matter as the most solid basis that everyone can grasp with
their hands” (Otto Liebman, Kant und die Epigonen: Eine kritische Abhandlung
(Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1865), 32). But, Liebman continued, “somebody
only has to ask ‘Yes, but what is matter, in fact?’ and its [materialism’s] wisdom
is at an end” (Ibid.). In Liebman’s view, the “matter” to which the mechanical
materialists reduced the entire world including consciousness, was not an object
of experience: there is no matter-as-such to which one can point. In reducing
everything to an apparently scientific concept of “matter” that nowhere actu-
ally exists, “metaphysical materialism” reproduces a quasi-theological world-
view that sacrifices human will and consciousness to impersonal and apparently
immutable “natural” forces.
9. The description Vogt gives of Büchner in his 1896 memoir is an intriguing mix-
ture of veneration and ridicule (see Carl Vogt, Aus meinem Leben. Erinnerungen
und Rückblicke (Stuttgart: Erwin Pägels, 1896), 121). Büchner’s knowledge of
the subject instilled “respect” in the other students, Vogt claimed, though his
aloof manner meant that the two men did not become better acquainted at that
time. Büchner’s reputation as a revolutionary also seems to have provoked deri-
sion among his peers, including Vogt: ironic, when one considers the role Vogt
himself would later play in 1848 and after. Vogt recounts that he and his friends,
after a night at the pub, would often stop outside Büchner’s house in Giessen
and “bring him an ironic vivat: ‘The upholder of the European balance of power,
abolitionist of the slave trade, long live Georg Büchner!’” According to Vogt,
Büchner pretended not to hear the commotion, despite the fact that his burning
lamp showed that he was at home.
10. Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe. Münchner Ausgabe, ed. Karl Pörnbacher
(München: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004).
11. Ibid., 242.
12. Carl Vogt, Bilder aus dem Thierleben (Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt,
1852), 443.
13. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London/Sterling,
VA: Pluto Press, 2000), 13.
 Abysmal Humanity 89
14. Büchner, Werke, 240.
15. Ibid., 285.
16. Ibid., 240.
17. Cited in David G. Richards, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck: A History of Its Criti-
cism (Rochester: Camden House, 2001), 28.
18. Büchner, Werke, 98.
19. Ibid., 288.
20. When Napoleon had invaded the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, the landgraviate
of Hessen-Darmstadt, where Büchner was born in the small town of Goddelau
in 1813 at the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars, had joined his Confederation
of the Rhine, and the ideals of the French Revolution ran deep in the region. As
a schoolboy Büchner is reported to have greeted his classmates with “Bonjour
Citoyen.”
21. Büchner, Werke, 288; 100.
22. Ibid., 297.
23. In another episode in his memoirs (Vogt, Aus meinem Leben, 142–143), Vogt
recalls Professor Johann Bernhard Wilbrand, a scientist who, under the influ-
ence of a certain interpretation of Schellingian nature philosophy, denied such
discoveries as the circulation of the blood and the theory of fertilization, earning
Vogt’s ridicule. Vogt’s description of Wilbrand has led some commentators to
surmise that Büchner also attended his lectures. In his memoir, Vogt describes
an occasion when Wilbrand forced his son Julius to wiggle his ears in front of
the class, exclaiming that the ear muscles had become obsolete in humans and
only “little apes” could use them. Not only does the doctor in Woyzeck make
his subject wiggle his ears, but the scene in the marketplace when an ape is com-
pared to a man also recalls this incident. Wilbrand was also Professor of Botany,
and Vogt recounts how he led lengthy excursions in the botanical garden. It is
to him, perhaps, that Benjamin obliquely refers in Deutsche Menschen when he
ridicules the professors who have “just set off on another one of their botanical
rambles.”
24. Büchner, Werke, 305.
25. Clarus’ two reports are included in full in Büchner, Werke, 630–653.
26. Büchner, Werke, 144.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 188.
29. Ibid., 319.
30. Ibid., 42; 51.
31. Marc Berdet, “In the Magnetic Fields of Materialism and Anthropology,”
Anthropology & Materialism [Online], 1 | 2013, Online since 15 October 2013,
connection on 11 March 2018. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/am/431.
32. Honneth and Joas, Social Action, 14.
33. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings (London: Verso, 2013),
140.
34. Feuerbach, Fiery Brook, 143.
35. Ibid., 168.
36. Ibid., 13.
37. Ibid., 311.
38. See Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 7–8.
39. Feuerbach, Fiery Brook, 50.
40. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1994), xxviii.
41. Ibid.
90 Cat Moir
42. Büchner, Werke, 238; 237.
43. Ibid., 217.
44. Ibid., 237.
45. Claire Démar, Ma loi d’avenir (Paris: Bureau de la Tribune des femmes, 1834),
55–59. Benjamin also identifies Démar with anthropological materialism in the
Arcades. See in particular AP, 809–810.
46. Büchner, Werke, 320.
Part II

Kafka
“Fairy Tales for Dialecticians”
 5 Breaking Through the Mythic
Organization of Life
On the Critique of Capitalism
in Benjamin and Kafka
Nathan Ross

To what extent is Kafka a political writer? In what sense can his writings
provide insights into the nature of modern society and how it can be trans-
formed? The goal of this essay is to approach these questions through a
reconstructive reading of the role that Kafka played in the philosophical
development of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin understands modern society,
and especially capitalism, as a mythic power: and he interprets Kafka not as
a writer of myths, but as an author who conquered myth by writing “fairy
tales for dialecticians.”1 While a myth teaches us to accept fate, a fairy tale
reveals a trick enclosed in fate that allows us to outwit it. My goal in this
essay is to unfold Benjamin’s reading of Kafka along the broader axes of
Benjamin’s critique of modern society, in order to reveal how Kafka helps
Benjamin navigate the relationship between myth and redemption, between
capitalism and critical praxis. His reading of Kafka is unique and creative in
that he takes Kafka not merely as a descriptive or diagnostic critic of capital-
ism, but as developing an attitude or posture that undermines capitalism’s
hold. I will argue that reading Kafka provided Benjamin with a solution to
a problem that he had formulated in his earlier writings: the problem of
capitalism as a religion. Many readers might find in Kafka a dark forest of
absurdity or a series of pessimistic metaphors for modern life: Benjamin, I
will demonstrate, found in Kafka a compass for the dark forest that he had
already found within his own thinking.

Capitalism as Mythic Guilt

First, I will need to make the argument that capitalism stands at the center of
Kafka’s works, a point that is by no means obvious. Kafka does not directly
describe class conflict, relations of production, or means for revolting against
capitalism, at least not in a realistic manner, and so he would not seem to
be the most obvious author to read as a critic of capitalism. Some Kafka
scholars have argued that a Marxist reading must necessarily superimpose
foreign themes onto Kafka’s work. Nevertheless, it seems clear that one of
the central themes of Kafka’s work is the experience of guilt or debt, for
which the German has a single term: Schuld. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor
94 Nathan Ross
Samsa has to work because of his parent’s ruinous debt to his employer; in
The Trial, the feeling of guilt is established groundlessly in the opening scene,
and each subsequent situation in the novel heightens this feeling; in one of
Benjamin’s favorite works by Kafka, “On the Building of the Chinese Wall,”
Kafka describes a complex social labor carried out over great incomprehen-
sible distances by multiple generations, a labor made possible by the intan-
gible feeling of obligation to an invisible authority structure.2 (This is not to
mention a number of other works, such as “The Judgment” or The Castle, in
which both economic debt and feelings of guilt play crucial roles.) It would
be safe to say that much of the “action” in many of Kafka’s major works
emerges from the need to repay a debt or respond to some form of guilt.
What does this guilt/debt have to do with a philosophy of capitalism? I will
demonstrate by way of a short detour through Benjamin’s early work that
this represents the central concept that connects Kafka’s world of images with
Benjamin’s distinctive philosophy of capitalism. In reading Kafka as a critic
of capitalism, Benjamin was not superimposing a Marxist framework upon
Kafka, but applying a conception of capitalism unique to his own philosophy
and at the same time interpreting Kafka “from the center of his world of
images.” According to Benjamin, the central problem and point of resistance
in capitalism has to do with the unique way in which it creates guilt.
Benjamin formulates a remarkably original critical insight on capital-
ism in his 1921 fragment “Capitalism as Religion,” hence before his deep
encounter with Kafka’s works. In this piece he argues that capitalism not
only shares certain features with religion, but that it embodies these features
in a special and problematic way. Following a central insight of Nietzsche’s
On the Genealogy of Morals, Benjamin argues that an essential defining
feature of religion is the way in which it establishes obligations and molds
belief through a sense of debt or guilt. In noting the “diabolical ambigu-
ity” of this German word Schuld, Benjamin highlights that it is both an
economic term and a moral sentiment, both a way of binding people to a
social authority and a way of defining oneself in relation to this authority.
In the second essay from On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that
archaic societies demonstrate feelings of “debt” that connect younger gen-
erations to their elders. This sense of indebtedness grows from generation
to generation, until it becomes so great that it cannot be discharged through
filial piety, at which point it becomes a pervasive sense of guilt to the creator.
In this religious context, the debt is tied to the possibility of atonement:
theological religion offers the possibility of atonement through good con-
duct, through punishment (which serves to discharge the debt), or through
faith alone, that is, through identification with the will of the creator.
In Nietzsche, the direction of this analysis of debt is to show the genea-
logical origin of religious, theological guilt in a kind of archaic social psy-
chology. Benjamin takes the genealogical analysis a step further in treating
capitalism as a social system that develops out of such an archaic social
psychology only in order to perpetuate it in an even more extreme form.
 The Mythic Organization of Life 95
Capitalism, like theological religion, rests on a series of obligations, a series
of moral judgments about what we owe and to whom we owe it. But Ben-
jamin argues that what is radical in capitalism in comparison to theologi-
cal religion is that “(c)apitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that
produces guilt, not atonement” (SW1, 288). If in Nietzsche’s argument, reli-
gion makes sick in order to offer a remedy, in Benjamin’s interpretation of
capitalism as religion, it makes sick in such a way as to establish absolute
despair of any remedy as a universal condition. He writes: “A vast sense of
guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt,
but in order to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind,
so as at once to include God within the context of guilt” (ibid.) Just as in
Nietzsche’s analysis the nature of guilt changes when it is projected beyond
social interaction into a metaphysical beyond, Benjamin argues for another
shift in the nature of guilt, where this metaphysically charged guilt no longer
attaches to a being with a sovereign will, but to a set of social relations that
have no sovereign pole. As Benjamin would argue, the guilt/debt of Kafka’s
characters resembles more the latter than the former, i.e., it is not theologi-
cal guilt but secularized, cultic guilt (SW2.2, 496). That is, Kafka describes a
world in which guilt is without hope of atonement, because the guilt is not
between subjects or between beings endowed with a will, but a universal
system. This distinction between theological religion and purely cultic reli-
gion that Benjamin makes here also sheds light on his later assertion that
Kafka is not to be taken in a theological sense: he is not denying the religious
dimension of Kafka’s writings altogether, but showing that the context of
guilt produces itself out of ordinary social interactions.
Here it is necessary to consider Benjamin’s conception of capitalism as
mythic guilt/debt not merely as a subjective condition of people within soci-
ety, but as an organizing principle of the capitalist economic system through
which it reproduces itself and expands. Profit is the organizing principle
of capitalist ownership: an activity is only attractive to capital insofar as it
produces a profit. Insofar as capital owns the material basis of society (not
only the “means of production,” but also the means of living and enjoy-
ment), and human labor exists in order to create a surplus labor value for
capital, there is a sense in which all human activity is caught up in a constant
cycle of repaying capital. Even the investor, the presumed owner of capital,
is still not the sovereign owner, who can dispose over resources according to
personal wishes, but is merely “capital embodied with a will”; that is, even
the investor must ruthlessly follow the dictates of increasingly profitable
exchange or be dispossessed by a more ruthless investor. Thus all human
activity, labor, thought, planning, and even enjoyment, is endowed with an
intense consciousness of debt/guilt: it may only exist to the extent that it
profits capital to an increasing degree, and it only generates a profit through
allowing its own surplus labor value to be appropriated by another. Debt
thus characterizes the relation of the worker to the employer, the relation of
the employer to capital markets, the relation of capital owner to the act of
96 Nathan Ross
investing, even the relation of the consumer to industry. It seems that this is
what Benjamin means in arguing that in the capitalist religion, “even God is
drawn into the nexus of guilt”: it is no longer the matter of being indebted
to a greater power with a sovereign will of its own. The theological religion
regards atonement as possible because ultimately one’s debt is to God, who
possesses subjective qualities such as love, forgiveness, and understanding.
But in organizing a cultic religion around capital, there is no sovereign pole,
no creditor who corresponds to the debtor. He writes: “(Capitalism) is the
expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world”
(SW1, 288). Despair, in Benjamin’s term, is the state of guilt that is so power-
ful because it has lost any hope of a life in the future that is free from guilt.
Benjamin’s thesis on capitalism as religion rests on the separation between
two elements of hitherto religion, cult and theology. He writes that capi-
talism is “a religion of pure cult, without dogma” (SW1, 289). And later:
“Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever
existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relation to the
cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology” (Ibid.). The
cultic religion is characterized by an intense identification of the individual
with the group and the pursuit of extreme practice as a show of faith. Ben-
jamin’s thesis on capitalism as religion is thus explicitly not a theory of
ideology, of subjective belief. Rather, capitalism’s religious dimension shows
itself in the way that individual judgment is replaced by group psychology.
It would be highly insightful to hear an echo of Freud’s Group Psychol-
ogy (Massenpsycholgie) here, a text that Benjamin seems to reference in his
adoption of the term “mass.” What characterizes the “mass,” according to
Freud, is that it is able to call forth extremes of devotion, energetic action,
generosity, as well as stupidity and cruelty that are not attributable to the
subjects that make up the group, but a kind of chemical reaction emerging
from their involvement in the “mass.” Benjamin develops this theme even
more clearly in One-way Street. He writes here of the group psychology
particular to the Weimar Republic:

A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest

when they act, yet they are the same time more than ever determined
in their behavior by the instinct of the mass. And mass instincts have
become more confused and estranged from life than ever before.
(SW1, 451)

This passage seems to express the paradox of the capitalist cult: the relation
between blind self-interest and conformity to an irrational group behavior.
While the capitalist ethic seems to be characterized by devotion to one’s own
self-interest, greed rooted in the desire for self-preservation, this ethic of self-
ishness actually implies a conformity to mass instinct, the deadening of any
individual, self-posited goal so as to devote oneself blindly to the pursuit of
profitable exchange. Just as debt is the underlying reality behind profit, the
 The Mythic Organization of Life 97
sacrifice of the individual to the cult, the mind of the group, is the truth of
the ethic of self-interest.
However, Benjamin’s critique of capitalism as a religion holds fast to the
possibility of redemption: the more pervasive and ingrained the relation of
debt becomes in our consciousness, the more redemption comes into view as
a possibility of action. He writes of a potential link between the pervasive-
ness of debt as a form of universal despair and the possibility of hope:

The nature of the religious movement of capitalism entails endurance

right up to the end, to the point where God too finally takes on the
entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe is finally taken
over by the despair which is actually its secret hope.

And: “It is the expansion of despair until it becomes a religious state of the
world, in the hope that this will lead to redemption.” (SW1, 289) This frag-
mentary early text does not fully elaborate how Benjamin conceived of such
a redemption, yet it ends with a few hints on how Benjamin did not think of
redemption. Although Benjamin has drawn from the philosophies of both
Marx and Nietzsche in formulating his notion of capitalism as religion, he
ends with a passage that argues, in highly truncated form, that these think-
ers do not offer a satisfactory model of redemption:

The paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently formulated

by Nietzsche’s philosophy . . . Nietzsche’s Übermensch is the man who
has arrived where his at without changing his ways; he is historical man
who has grown right up through the sky . . . Marx is a similar case: the
capitalism that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of
the simple and compound interest that are functions of debt (Schuld).
(SW1, 290)3

While his argument here is too shortly phrased to be perfectly clear as a

reading of Marx or Nietzsche, it seems that he is critical of the way in
which Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Marx’s post-capitalist society rest on
extending the movement of guilt to an extreme. Nietzsche sees the way that
religions make us sick in order to make us indebted to them for a solution,
but he also sees the actually existing human as a sickly being that must
struggle to repay the debt that we owe to the future human. Marx sees the
misery and expropriation entailed by capitalist progress as the very means
that give birth to a future realm of freedom. This means that Benjamin ends
this essay-fragment with a problem: how to recognize the power of guilt in
modern life in a way that would truly redeem us from it?
In my view, Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion” is a fragment that carries
great weight for his further thinking. It describes a problem in striking terms
(guilt/debt), rejects a straightforward dialectical solution to this problem,
and yet faintly holds open the possibility of a solution. He had not yet read
98 Nathan Ross
Kafka deeply at this point. And yet, I believe that the text ends at a point
that hints at why he would come to value Kafka as a writer with a unique
method for breaking through the mythology of modern society. Kafka
would provide an alternative to what he found wanting in both Marx and
Nietzsche at the end of his essay. Kafka would not only construct a world
governed by mythic guilt, a guilt heightened to the point of utter despair, but
even more importantly, he also wrote about this guilt in a way that resists
the urge to identify oneself with it.

The Subject of Kafka’s Writing: Two Renderings

What is the subject of Kafka’s writings? To what extent can we even claim
that Kafka is a writer who approaches the subject of capitalism? It seems
clear that there are a variety of different levels on which Kafka’s writings
can be read. And whether one finds Kafka to be a writer with something
original to say about capitalism will depend on what understanding of capi-
talism one brings to the reading. When Benjamin first encountered Kafka’s
writings, he had already formulated his conception of capitalism as a society
organized around guilt. He thus regarded Kafka as an author with some-
thing to say about the internal dynamic of capitalism in this specific sense.
But as we will see, he formulated multiple answers to the question of what
Kafka’s fundamental concern was. And rather than merely projecting his
thesis on mythic guilt onto Kafka’s universe of images, he sought in Kafka
a solution to the unresolved problem of redemption that lingers at the end
of his 1921 essay.
I have already given several examples to illustrate that Kafka’s writing
revolves around the experience of guilt, the same kind of secular, economic/
moral, cultic, non-theological guilt that Benjamin saw as the inner reality
of capitalism. Yet instead of reading Kafka as an author who reinforced the
centrality of guilt in modern society, Benjamin attempted something much
more challenging:4 to read Kafka as an author with a solution to the impasse
that he reached in his early understanding of capitalism.
From the start, Benjamin sought to challenge two already established
approaches to reading Kafka: “There are two ways to miss the point of Kaf-
ka’s works. One is to interpret them naturally; the other is to interpret them
from a supernatural perspective” (806). Instead of either of these methods
of reading, he suggests a framework that is both more straightforward, and
more related to the intellectual concerns of the early Frankfurt school:

It is a question of how life and work are organized in human society.

(SW2.2, 803)

Kafka, in a variation of this dictum, could have defined organization as

destiny.
(SW2.2, 803)
 The Mythic Organization of Life 99
While there are unquestionably psychological components to Kafka’s writ-
ing, they always stand in relation to the problem of “organization.” That is,
if guilt is the central motivating feature in Kafka’s world, then it is crucial
to see this guilt not merely as arising out of some past, childhood situation,
nor merely as arising out of the relation between human and God. Rather,
it is necessary to see the relation between guilt and ordinary, everyday situ-
ations, the way that guilt is produced and reproduced within the family, the
workplace, relations between strangers in a modern city. Put another way,
it is a matter of seeing guilt as something that is immanent, rather than
transcendent, to see guilt as something that is produced by our form of life,
not a result of some mysterious dispensation. To say that Kafka’s stories are
about the organization of people in society is to bring them in contact with
the underlying concerns of critical theory: they contain psychology, but in
relation to tangible social situations. They express myth, but demonstrate
this myth to be inherent in situations that make up the everyday content of
modern secularized institutions.
In Benjamin’s earlier essay on Kafka, a radio address on Kafka’s Chinese
wall story, we find a somewhat contrasting overarching statement on the
meaning of Kafka’s writings. He writes that “the sole topic of his work” is
“the distortion of existence” (SW2.2, 496). He elaborates: “(Kafka) is inca-
pable of imagining any event that would not be distorted by the mere act
of describing it” (SW2.2, 496). Benjamin compares Kafka’s style of literary
creation to the method of the quantum physicist, who makes the divergence
in reality caused by the act of observation into the basis for a new theory of
reality. The distortion of existence is both a result of the act of description
and subsequently a facet of reality. In imagining the anxiety of the animal
or the guilt of the subject before an incomprehensible law, Kafka is unset-
tling our basic understanding of reality by showing how a society organized
around guilt or anxiety leads to a mode of reflection that constantly distorts
the problem it is trying to master.
How do we square these two interpretive statements, the earlier statement
that the sole topic is the distortion of existence, and the latter one that the
sole topic of Kafka’s work is the organization of people in society? Both
statements seem to be all encompassing interpretative statements, and even
if they are not contradictory, they do seem to lead in different directions.
The latter statement seems to emphasize the realism inherent in Kafka, his
work’s application to social reality, while the earlier one seems to empha-
size the fantastic or surrealistic side of Kafka, the way in which he invents
situations that stand ever so slightly at odds with the real possibilities of
empirical reality. It seems possible to square the earlier, fantastic element of
Benjamin’s reading with the latter more realistic perspective if we posit that
distortion of reality is in fact the primary way in which life is organized in
modern society. The word for this distortion in Marxist theory is ideology;
in Benjamin’s critical theory, the more precise term would be myth. That is,
Kafka’s literary practice involves distortion of reality for the sake of literary
100 Nathan Ross
effect. But this distortion is actually not merely a fictional device, but a
result of the kind of critical rationality at work in Kafka’s writing. Kafka
must distort the experience of guilt in order to illustrate the way in which
guilt itself distorts reality: in The Trial, for example, he removes the straight-
forward juridical identification of the crime, in order to provide an example
of guilt that is a total condition of the world. In this story, the law does not
identify guilt, but produces it. Only this perspective, and not a more realistic
juridical one, can demonstrate the way in which guilt is not a result of cer-
tain failings of rational conduct, but a hidden context that shapes our very
conception of what is reasonable.
Benjamin’s overarching thesis is thus: the fundamental subject of Kafka’s
writings is the critique of mythology, that is, they reveal the role of mythol-
ogy in modern life, the way in which it organizes our interactions, and they
reveal it in such a way as to break its hold over us. He approvingly cites
Werner Kraft’s statement on Kafka: “Nowhere else in literature is there
such a powerful and penetrating criticism of myth in all of its scope” (cited
SW2.2, 815). What is the sense of mythology in Benjamin’s writing, and to
what extent does he find such structures in Kafka’s writing?
While it is challenging to find a single definition for the term mythology
in Benjamin’s texts, one key sense is the false belief in progress, the tendency
to mystify the present by seeing it as part of a movement of progress. That
is, Benjamin equates mythology with the overarching belief that modern
society embodies progress even where its real tendency is stasis of archaic
forms of social interaction.
As Susan Buck-Morss, argues he sought to “free dialectical materialism of
the appearance of progress.”5 In his late essay on history, Benjamin develops
a critique of the concept of progress that demonstrates the relation between
progress and barbarism.
To what extent does Benjamin discover a critique of the concept of prog-
ress in Kafka’s writings? We find that Kafka is an author who not only seeks
to provide examples of lack of progress, but who attacks the very epistemic
foundations on which the notion of progress rests. Kafka writes: “To believe
in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That
would not be belief.” Benjamin comments on this:

Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the
beginnings of time . . . The fact that this (hetaeric) stage is now forgot-
ten does not mean that it does not extend into the present.
(SW2.2, 809)6

Kafka’s works involve constant interpenetration between the archaic state

and the civilized state of right.7 The protagonist in The Trial insists that this
sham trial cannot be happening to him, since he lives in a modern constitu-
tional democracy (Rechtstaat), a gesture that proves completely futile, but
serves to illustrate how a civilized state of right can exist alongside a state
 The Mythic Organization of Life 101
of affairs in which there are no rights. At every point in The Trial, Kafka
emphasizes that it is not the absence of law, but the very belief in law that
places a resolution out of reach. Kafka creates scenarios that constantly
force us to reflect on the fact that the archaic state of fear, anxiety, and
uncertainty has not vanished or receded, but dwells at the very heart of our
civilized impulses. He does not show how delicate our state of right is, how
prone to descend into barbarism, but rather how the very practices and pro-
cesses of civilization are motivated by the persistence of barbarism. The feel-
ing of anxiety, which in a natural state would derive from the uncertainty of
being able to meet one’s needs, becomes in modern society a constant state
that holds us in suspense.8
What seems most strikingly original in Benjamin’s reading of Kafka as
a critic of mythology is that Kafka not only reveals or diagnoses the con-
nection between progress and the archaic, the connection between capital-
ism and guilt, but that he also makes this self-perpetuating context of guilt
explicit in such a way as to undermine it. As Benjamin writes, Kafka did not
write myths, but “fairy tales for dialecticians” (SW2.2, 799). That is, even if
mythology is in some sense the subject matter of Kafka’s writing, the form
of Kafka’s writing provides a strategic act of resistance that undermines the
hold of mythology.
Benjamin discovers in Kafka’s writings a movement that stands in contrast
to the one that he located in Marx and Nietzsche at the end of his frag-
ment on capitalism as religion. The challenge inherent in Benjamin’s early
critique of capitalism can best be illustrated by his claim that both of these
two radical thinkers remain stuck within the cycle of guilt that they describe.
By contrast, the movement of Kafka’s writing is not one of progress through
activity, but one of surrender: “[It] brings only one blessing: it makes the guilt
explicit” (SW2.2, 498). The way in which guilt functions is precisely by moti-
vating us to act through a sense of the difference between our activity and
that which would give our activity value. Kafka arrives at the only honestly
critical insight into this guilt: precisely by yielding to it, one robs this guilt
of its power to distort reality any more.9 Kafka is not merely an author who
lays out a descriptive rendering of the role of guilt in modern life, but also
devises an attitude that would lead to a transformative redemption of life
organized around anxiety-ridden distortion of life. He does this by writing
“fairytales for dialecticians.” In order to grasp Kafka as a true critic of mythic
guilt, we must thus go beyond the subject matter of his writings and proceed
to Benjamin’s grasp of what is innovative in his literary form.

Kafka’s Literary and Political Tendency

One of the central insights of Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” is that
the political tendency of a work is indebted to its literary tendency. That is, a
work cannot be radical and critical in a political sense if it does not embody
a literary form of creation that is radical and critical of established forms.
102 Nathan Ross
This is most emphatically the case in reading Kafka as a critic of capitalism.
There are certainly authors who more explicitly wrote realist novels about
the evils of capitalism, or more explicitly envisioned alternative forms of
society. Yet we could say that what Benjamin finds indispensable in Kafka is
a form of writing that bursts the seems of the novel in a manner that has the
power to break the mythic nature of capitalism through its very form. That
is to say, he makes guilt into a total state of the world and yet writes in a way
that does not make the subject guilty of its guilt. Instead of writing novels
or stories that could be consumed in the manner Benjamin considers defini-
tive of the modern novel, Kafka devises a form of writing that is a practice
of fragmentary, incessant study. It is this very process of study embodied in
Kafka’s manner of writing that provides Benjamin the model for a praxis
that is not burdened by the kind of mythic guilt that Benjamin sees as the
fundamental experience of modern society.
While the first generation of Kafka readers tended to see his works, for-
mally speaking, as failed attempts to write novels and stories, Benjamin is
among the first to see Kafka as an inventor of new forms that distort the
novel in a meaningful way. He writes to Adorno: “A more precise definition
of the novel form in Kafka, which I agree with you in thinking essential,
does not as yet exist and can only be accomplished along an indirect path.”10
I will emphasize three aspects of Kafka’s literary form that Benjamin found
fruitful in terms of their political tendency: their fragmentary form; their
quality as study, rather than works; and the way in which they strip human
gestures of their ordinary context. It should be noted that all three of these
features more or less reformulate the idea of “mystery mongering” that Ber-
tolt Brecht used to deride Kafka in his conversations with Benjamin.11 It
is as if Benjamin is holding out to Brecht the idea that he did not take the
“mystery mongering” activity of Kafka in as deeply troubling and transfor-
mative a sense as he should.

1. Benjamin had already paid close attention to the theme of fragmen-

tary form in his groundbreaking doctoral dissertation on the German
Romantics. In that study, he distinguishes between the ancient and
the modern fragment: the ancient fragment is a broken off piece of
an organic work that has come down to us and thus conjures the
imagination with visions of a lost unity. The Romantic fragment,
by contrast, aims at incompleteness in its very form. By dedicating
themselves to fragmentary creation in this way, the German Roman-
tics sought to give aesthetic expression to the paradoxical notion of a
metaphysical absolute that on the one hand we cannot renounce, but
that on the other hand cannot ever be given as an object of experience.
For Benjamin, this Romantic conception of the fragment expresses the
movement of modern art into an essentially reflective, philosophical
enterprise. The meaning of the work is not given, but requires cease-
less reflection. Benjamin formulated these ideas before encountering
 The Mythic Organization of Life 103
the mother-lode of fragmentary works by Kafka released on the world
by Max Brod after his death, and Benjamin could not help but have
a special appreciation for one of the most vexing problems of Kafka
scholarship.
Kafka’s works are fragmentary in at least two distinct, but perhaps
related senses: on the one hand, Kafka never completed to his satis-
faction several of his most extensive projects, Amerika (Der Verschol-
lene), The Trial, The Castle. Each of these projects grew to the length
of a novel, and today we can appreciate them as more or less coher-
ent stories with beginning, middle, and ending. But Kafka was never
able to satisfy himself that these works were finished and never tried to
publish them as finished manuscripts. Before his death, he advised the
executor of his will, Max Brod, to burn them along with many other
unpublished texts, knowing perhaps that his friend would do no such
thing. On the other hand, many of his works contain deliberately con-
fusing riddles and paradoxes that elude interpretation. Where Kafka
imitates the parable-like aspect of religious scripture, he does so in a
way that seems deliberately to resist the urge to find some moral or
metaphysical teaching. (A prime example of this is his text “On Para-
bles.”) Thus Kafka’s works are fragmentary both in the author’s attitude
towards their completion, and in the sense that they present puzzles that
deliberately avoid solution. Benjamin recognized both of these aspects
of Kafka’s works as crucial to their effect. He approvingly cites Max
Brod’s statement about Kafka’s works that “the reflections they give
rise to are interminable.” As a citation from Benjamin, this statement
gains a special significance, since in his earlier work on the Romantics,
Benjamin develops the thesis that that the artwork comes into its own
as a “medium of reflection.” The Romantics seek to make good on the
Fichtean view that infinite reflection represents the nature of reality by
creating experiences of reality that contain an impetus to infinite reflec-
tion. For the Romantics, Benjamin writes, the artwork represents the
single greatest realization of the medium of reflection. We thus see that
Benjamin had an ontological reason to take Kafka’s so called “mystery
mongering” as a positive feature. He captures this aspect of Kafka quite
effectively as follows: “Novels are sufficient unto themselves. Kafka’s
stories are never that; they are stories pregnant with a moral to which
they never give birth” (SW2.2, 497). The pleasure of the modern novel,
for Benjamin, is essentially that of consumption, taking great pleasure
in devouring a work designed to be read in a serial manner. By contrast
to this, he notes that modern writers such as Proust and Kafka already
represent a crisis in the form of the novel. Kafka in particular, does not
stand in simple affirmative or negative relation to the novel form.12
Kafka’s works seem to aim beyond themselves with an edifying teach-
ing, and yet they do not give us the satisfying aspect of at least knowing
what this teaching is. Even the famous parable “Before the Law” in The
104 Nathan Ross
Trial gets presented in a such a way that Kafka makes sure to under-
mine every possible interpretation that the reader might assign it.
Benjamin seems to have been able to give special meaning to the fact
that Kafka left his works unfinished. His work process was not cut
off by his death: in each of his three great extended works, he broke
off work near the point of having a finished story. Biographers might
attribute this to Kafka’s extreme self-doubt, his fear of success, or per-
haps the difficulties of reconciling his lifestyle with that of a successful
author. But Benjamin gives Kafka much deeper credit by relating these
works’ lack of completion to their internal subject matter, namely, guilt
and redemption. “Yet it is the fact that his books are incomplete which
shows the true workings of grace in his writings. The fact that the law
never finds expression as such—this and nothing else is the gracious
dispensation of the fragment” (SW2.2, 497). The essential movement in
works such as The Trial and The Castle is one of increasing despair in
relation to an authority that is completely inscrutable. In The Trial, it
stands that the only known means of escaping punishment is constantly
to defer the decision of ones case. And yet Benjamin argues that this is
precisely the form that grace takes in Kafka’s writing: Kafka creates a
world in which myth achieves incredible control over all aspects of life,
and yet he does not allow this world to come to completion.
2. There is a positive way to reframe what was just expressed in a negative
way as incompletion: Kafka’s writings are incomplete as works, that is,
they refuse or fail in a decisive sense to become works, but are instead
studies. Benjamin relates the essential quality of Kafka’s writing activity
to the solitary activity of studying the scripture. “The crowning achieve-
ment of asceticism is study . . . Perhaps all of these studies amounted to
nothing. But they came very close to that nothing which alone makes it
possible for something to be useful” (SW2.2, 813). Study is a form of
activity that does not come to completion in a finished work. A person
studies medicine or law or philosophy because they are not yet ready to
put any of these pursuits into practice, and instead want to perfect their
own understanding of these matters regardless of any possible practice.
Kafka’s writings often offer us images of study as a blissful escape from
the demands of the world. But what is more, his writing often has the
quality of study. (It is sometimes hard for editors of Kafka to distinguish
between a diary entry and a literary work.) He aims to write perfectly
simple and clear prose. He reworks an idea many times to see how the
nuances of narration change its meaning. And he often presents situ-
ations in which characters engage in a complex discussion about the
meaning of an irresolvable difficulty. In many texts, Kafka enumerates
repeated, varying solutions to the same problem, but does not assert any
of the solutions as a final state. Kafka does not just express the despair
of characters trying to unload their guilt, but even more he expresses
an infinite process of trying to come to terms with the reasons for their
 The Mythic Organization of Life 105
despair. As Benjamin realizes, study is a practice that has a transforma-
tive impact on the nature of the self. Where one cannot see beyond an
incomprehensible and all powerful social authority, one can transform
ones own subjectivity through study, and seek out the hold that this
authority has in ones own thinking.
It still might not be clear how this notion of study represents a real
political practice. If study is only focused on refining ones own subjec-
tivity, then how does it transform the world? Here, it becomes necessary
to say something about relation of Kafka to the law. Benjamin expresses
this movement as follows: “Reversal is the direction of study that trans-
forms existence into script” (SW2.2, 815). Reversal (Umkehr) becomes
the central concept that Benjamin uses to understand both the political
and the aesthetic efficacy of Kafka’s writing.13 Kafka starts with some
basic experience of how modern society is organized and converts it
into what Benjamin calls a “Schrift,” something like an obscure, ancient
text, one that only gains meaning by being interpreted. Kafka’s writings
move in the opposite direction of social Darwinism: rather than con-
verting the organization of society into a law of nature, they convert the
organization of society into a mythic text.
Benjamin expresses the practical significance of study in a most
compelling way as follows: “The law which is studied but no longer
practiced is the gateway to justice” (SW2.2, 815). In other words, the
surest way to suspend and critique mythology as a practical force in
life is to make it into an object of infinite reflection. As Benjamin was
wont to quote from Kafka, “inadequate, even childish means, may
serve as a means of rescue” (SW2.2, 799). The means for rescuing our-
selves from the enormous power of guilt in modern life do not consist
in generating a counter force that would be more powerful, but rather
making the source of guilt into something ancient, incomprehensible,
and foreign, something to be studied and formulated in paradoxical
reflections. We see here the contrast between Benjamin’s Kafka and
his earlier critique of Marx and Nietzsche: Kafka does not seek to
comprehend the way of the world, as something that one could inter-
vene in and control, but he rather seeks to make the world into some-
thing incomprehensible. Kafka does not study the law in the manner
of someone who wants to master it so as to win cases, but rather in
the manner of someone who wants to make it ineffective by making it
an object of infinite contemplation that cannot give birth to any prac-
tical consequences. After reading Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, Adorno
commented: “He represents a photograph of our earthly life from the
perspective of redeemed life.”14 Following the schema of this essay,
Kafka shows us our guilt from a perspective that makes it not guilty.
In order for this critique to be complete, it will be necessary to show
us not only our world, but our own activity from such an off-kilter
perspective.
106 Nathan Ross
3. While Kafka’s writing attacks guilt by making the source of guilt, the
law, into something mythic, to be studied rather than practiced, it also
makes us redirect our gaze at our own physical comportment. This is an
aspect of Kafka’s writing that Benjamin was among the first to notice as
crucial. We see our ordinary way of dealing with the world reflected back
in Kafka’s writings as something mysterious and lacking in its ordinary
sense of purpose. If the incompleteness of Kafka’s plots suspends the
teleology inherent in the law from coming to fruition, then his attention
to physical detail also suspends the teleology inherent in human activity.
Kafka’s depiction of gestures allows us to see our own actions reflected
back to us as fragments. Benjamin notes the importance of the gesture in
Kafka’s writing: Kafka goes to great length to describe human gestures in
ways that are both recognizable from life, and lacking in their ordinary
sense. This aspect of Kafka’s writing fascinated Benjamin because it held
the potential to transform our way of perceiving our material existence.

Experiments have proven that a man does not recognize his own
gait on film or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation
of the subject in such situations is Kafka’s situation; this is what
leads him to study, where he may encounter fragments of his own
existence—fragments that are still in the context of the role.
(SW2.2, 814)

This passage circumscribing the meaning of the gesture in Kafka starts

with a sentence that Benjamin would use again repeatedly in his writ-
ings on photography and film. For Benjamin, what was fascinating
about these new technological media was their ability to make us see
realistic objects of everyday experience in ways that would unsettle
our certainty in dealing with these objects.15 In Kafka, the attention is
always on the aspect of human gestures that falls outside of our normal
sense of conscious purpose: “The animal gesture combines the utmost
mysteriousness with the utmost simplicity . . . He divests human ges-
ture of its supports, and then has a subject for reflection without end”
(SW2.2, 802). This is the sense Benjamin finds in Kafka’s stories about
animals. What is striking about these stories is that they describe recog-
nizable human activities that are reflected back to us in the bizarre form
of animals. In “Report for an Academy,” we find so many human activi-
ties carried out by an ape in such a way that they unsettle us: education,
entertainment, friendship, and work appear here not as noble accom-
plishments that express the nature of the subject, but as acts of assimila-
tion done out of fear and desperation. Kafka even makes the drinking of
schnapps into an act of the utmost confusion and alienation. He strips
gestures of their ordinary sense of self-assurance, and what remains is a
sense of going through the motions that at each moment is completely
sober about its meaning within a context of guilt.
 The Mythic Organization of Life 107
Interestingly, Benjamin’s focus on the role of gesture in Kafka, as well
as his claim that Kafka’s world of images is essentially theatrical, bear a
marked resemblance to his interpretation of Brecht’s epic theater from
this period. It would be insightful to consider how much the following
passage on Brecht from “The Author as Producer” could be brought to
bear on his reading of Kafka instead:

At the center of (Brecht’s) experiment stands the human being. Pres-

ent day man: therefore, a chilly man in a chilly environment . . .
What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes,
not by virtue and resolution, but only in their habitual course, by
reason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements of
behavior what in Aristotelian dramaturgy is called “action” .  .  .
It is concerned less with filling the audience with feelings, even
seditious ones, than with alienating it in an enduring way, through
thinking, from the conditions in which it lives.
(SW2.2, 779)

We recognize some of the hallmarks of his reading of Kafka in his

description of Brecht’s epic theater: depicting small units of action in
such a way that they are both realistic and yet alienating; the insertion
of reflection into these units of everyday action. The difference between
the two models, in Benjamin’s mind, is perhaps the role of myth that
predominates in Kafka. In Kafka’s work, the fragmentation of activity
into gestures that are mysterious and worthy of reflection stands within
a framework of guilt that is not so easily overcome by action. While
Kafka’s writing also tends toward “alienating” us “in an enduring way”
from the condition in which we live, this process of alienation takes less
the form of a transformation of society into a new one, and more the
form of a chess match in which we are struggling to outwit an over-
whelming context of our thoughts and actions. While Brecht tended
to see “mystery mongering” in this posture of Kafka’s, Benjamin’s own
understanding of capitalism as a universalizing context of despairing
guilt lead him to see this reflective, fragmentary, and studious approach
as a valid way of penetrating into the essential dilemma of capitalism:
that the effort to fight against it and resist it might simply represent an
embodiment of its guilt producing tendency.

With these three features of Kafka’s writings, we see how Benjamin empha-
sizes the original aspects of his writing that go beyond being critical in a
descriptive sense. It is not enough to describe the law that produces guilt: one
must outwit it by writing about it in a fragmentary way that suspends it from
coming into fruition. And it is not enough to write about the law as an external
force that impinges on the subject’s actions: one must write about these actions
in such a way that robs them of their identification with the law. Kafka does
108 Nathan Ross
not merely depict the absurdity of the world and then despair over the impos-
sibility of changing it; rather, he formulates the “attitude” or orientation that
provides a truly dialectical reversal of the guilt structure of capitalism.
Within larger debates about the meaning of art in critical theory, it seems
tempting to assimilate Benjamin’s reading of Kafka to the theory of aesthetic
negativity. In the paradigmatic version of aesthetic negativity formulated by
Christoph Menke, the purpose of art is to undermine or negate the ordinary
processes by which we create meaning in everyday life.16 Under such an
interpretation, Kafka would be the author who redeems us from instrumen-
tal rationality by presenting us with a world devoid of hope or purpose,
broken into fragments that elude meaning. While such a negative moment
certainly has a prominent role in this reading of Kafka, there are certain lim-
itations to a theory of aesthetic negativity that have to be resisted. For one
thing, critical theory cannot simply posit art as a negation of everyday expe-
rience or everyday rationality, without actually delineating what is worth
negating within this mode of experience. For another thing, if artworks such
as Kafka’s fictions are defined in terms of a purely negative gesture, then the
question emerges of how such a gesture actually alters or transforms our
way of interacting with or experiencing the world.17 Benjamin’s reading of
Kafka is especially suited to overcoming these two limitations. First, I have
argued that Kafka’s unique form of writing stands in a negative relationship
not with the understanding in general or with instrumental rationality, but
with a vision of society that is organized around extreme, self-perpetuating
guilt. That is, Benjamin did not read Kafka simply as an author who under-
mines every common sense effort to understand the world, but rather as
an author who grasps the way in which capitalist society organizes people
through guilt. Secondly, I have argued that Kafka does not simply negate or
critically reject the posture of guilt in capitalist society, but that he writes in
a way that represents a true alternative to this posture, the attitude embod-
ied in the form of his writing, namely study of life for its own sake.
In much of Kafka’s writing, whether it be a story like The Trial or The
Castle, or a personal text such as the Zürau reflections, there is a sense of
being up against an unseen adversary, an overwhelming, pernicious force. He
is trying to grasp the adversary through writing, but also trying to outwit the
adversary by using the resources of writing to undermine the pernicious logic
of the adversary. He is making the adversary larger than life, but also making
the subject smaller, so that it can slip through the fingers of the adversary.
I have argued that we can understand this adversary essentially as the form
of guilt/debt engendered by capitalist society, according to Benjamin’s thesis.
And I have argued that even attempts to resist the outward trappings of this
guilt can succumb to it by replicating its logic. Kafka provides us with a
form of writing that seeks to outwit guilt/debt through a process of study, a form
of writing that replaces works with fragment, that replaces the demand for
an answer with a steady stream of questions, a form of writing that does not
describe capitalism, but converts its maxims into a mythic scripture, and thus
 The Mythic Organization of Life 109
reverses its direction. Kafka writes “fairy tales for dialecticians” in the sense
that he makes a state of affairs that is already confusing, mystified, and guilt
inducing even more infinitely confusing and mysterious, and in so doing,
inserts a trick into the myth that allows us to escape its unquestioned force.

Notes
1. “Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale. Rea-
son and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invin-
cible. Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces, and
fairy tales for dialecticians are what Kafka wrote when he went to work on
legends.” (SW2.2, 799)
2. Benjamin summarizes the motive of this story:

A life giving river requires on pain of death a close and permanent solidar-
ity among groups of people that are frequently alien and even hostile to
one another. It sentences everyone to labors whose common usefulness is
revealed only by time and whose design quite often remains incomprehen-
sible to an ordinary man.
(SW2.2, 803–804)

3. Benjamin discusses Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the three “priests” of the
capitalist religion. This might seem curious especially in relation to Marx, the
adamant critic of capitalism. Uwe Steiner gives a strong explanation of how
Benjamin means this: “The three theories of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche
prove themselves to be ‘thought in a thoroughly capitalistic manner’ in that
the religious structure of capitalism leaves its mimetic traces in their works.”
See Uwe Steiner, ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’ in Burckhart Linkner, ed. Benjamin
Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 171.
4. It is Adorno, more than Benjamin, who explicitly reads Kafka as an author who
gives a descriptive rendering of the role of guilt within capitalist society in his
‘Notes on Kafka.’ (P, 256) In this text, Adorno essentially applies Benjamin’s
thesis on capitalism as a universal context of guilt to Kafka’s world of images.
5. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 90.
6. See Paul North, The Yield (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 105.
7. This thesis takes a variety of forms in Benjamin’s writings, especially his Arcades
Project and represents one of Benjamin’s major contributions to critical theory.
As Adorno writes to Benjamin, “The relationship between primal history and
modernity has yet to be conceptualized, and the success of any interpretation of
Kafka must depend on the former” (CWB, 68).
8. “As we see, even the people in power are as lawless as those at the bottom of the
pile, and creatures from every level of society mix indiscriminately; the only bond
that unites them is the feeling of anxiety. This anxiety is not a reaction, but some-
thing organic. And we can specify what it is constantly and infallibly alert to. But
before its object is defined, the remarkable dual nature of this organic fear should
give us pause. For it is . . . at one and the same time both fear of the primeval, the
immemorial, and also fear of what is close by, the immediate future with all of its
urgency. In a word, it is fear of an unknown guilt and of the atonement, which
brings only one blessing: it makes guilt explicit.” (SW2.2, 498).
9. See Paul North, The Yield (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). North
demonstrates the way in which Kafka’s writings embody a posture of transfor-
mational surrender.
110 Nathan Ross
10. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence
1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 74.
11. Benjamin’s diaries from his stay on the island of Svendborg in 1931 reveal that
he had several intense dialogues with Brecht about the political meaning of
Kafka’s writings. Brecht’s main point was that Kafka is a “mystery monger”
whose writings could reveal contradictions in modern society, but not inspire
any transformative praxis. In the diary, we find that Benjamin somewhat agreed
with Brecht’s interpretation of Kafka as “mystery monger,” and initially ques-
tioned his own interest in Kafka, but that he sought some kind of dialectically
fruitful sense in this aspect of Kafka. See SW2.2 , 469–485.
12. Benjamin writes to Adorno of this ambivalent relation: “A more precise defini-
tion of the novel form in Kafka, which I agree with you in thinking essential,
does not as yet exist and can only be accomplished along an indirect path.”
Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, 74.
13. This concept of reversal gains more depth in Benjamin’s letters to Scholem. “It
is in the attempt to metamorphize life into scripture that I perceive the meaning
of the reversal which so many of Kafka’s parables intend to bring about” (CWB,
134–135).
14. Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondences 1928–1940, 66.
15. For the relationship between Benjamin’s study of Kafka and his media theory,
see Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 445. “Like the photographic
image, the gesture makes of the protagonist a test subject, one alienated from the
look of his own stride in the photograph or alienated from his own voice in the
gramophone.”
16. Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and
Derrida (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
17. This second critique is developed by Georg Bertram in the first chapter of Die
Kunst als menschliche Praxis (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014).
6 The Virtue or Power of the
Useless
Benjamin and Adorno on Kafka
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein

Theoretically there exists a perfect possibility of happiness: to believe in the

indestructible elements in oneself and not strive after it.
—Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Hope and the True Way”1

Preface: On the Classification of Historical Objects

When God wills, even a broom shoots.
—Yiddish joke about Abraham

Definition 1: By “virtue” I understand possibility; by “power” I understand

the same except that, as power, it harbors concrete, material, or, which is the
same, historical force.

Definition 2: By “useless” I understand what is outside the economy of

exchange, what has “escaped” its fate in official history as well as the condi-
tions of its production and reproduction.

I begin deliberately with an uncanny, obsolete, or discarded mode of defini-

tions in order to wrench the question of possibility out of the two modalities
in which it is generally understood in relation to necessity, namely, the pre-
Modern and Modern ones. Both of these modes are mathematical, albeit in
significantly different ways. The former mode is Euclidian, the latter Carte-
sian/analytic. The former, especially when it is deployed outside the domain
of mathematical objects, which “objects” do not exist by nature, subordi-
nated possibility to necessity even when they were understood to be concur-
rent, e.g., cause and effect. Although Euclidian possibility is determinate
(rather than determined) it, nonetheless, does not appear to be historical.
Thus, even when the radical epistemic distinction between the pre-Modern
and Modern status of definitions is acknowledged, with very few excep-
tions, what is taken to be historical is decidedly other than natural, and
depends upon a linear understanding of history as a homogenous contin-
uum. Nonetheless, the pre-Modern definition of possibility can become his-
torical when or if it becomes dialectical and is understood to begin with
“endoxa.” Its form or, as will become evident in the discussions of Benjamin
112 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
and Adorno, mode may thereby blast open the homogenous continuum that
is taken to be history. Rather than stating what something is or even how it
is understood, the form such a definition takes is “something is said to be.”
Although this formulation dates back to Aristotle’s Topics, it is my claim
that, with respect to “virtue” or “power,” it is also a new mode where the
new is decidedly not the Modern and may have the power to break the spell
of the Modern as the ever-same.
In contradistinction, the Modern or Cartesian form or mode of defini-
tions is analytic and tautological, taking the form of “X is.” Moreover, and
ironically, insofar as “X” “originates” in the object, prima facie, the nec-
essary, under such analytic definitions, modally, the possible precedes the
necessary and “determines” it. Appearance notwithstanding, insofar as for
Modernity and the Enlightenment, possibility is determined by the subject—
for, intelligibility is in accord with the subject—it is at best transcendental.
To the extent that such possibility is said to enter into history, including the
history of philosophy, it is history as the homogenous continuum and is
politically, at best, neutral. In short, there is a contradiction at the center of
Modernity and the Enlightenment that can be overcome only by displacing
the question of the possibility of freedom—hope from history and politics to
metaphysics, thereby also severing freedom from happiness.
Since it is my claim that Benjamin’s and Adorno’s understanding of the
new is a category at once aesthetic and political, insofar as their readings of
Kafka force a confrontation between the Modern and the new, and empha-
size the possibility abandoned or lost to history, and more insidiously dis-
torted by it, they offer a “new” modality of the relation between necessity
and possibility, or more precisely virtue or power that resist appropriation
into logical, ontological, ontotheological, transcendental, or even phenom-
enological arguments to the possibility of freedom or happiness. And, as
a careful reader of Kafka, Benjamin emphasizes both in the “Theologico-
Political Fragment” and in the writings on history, the striving for happiness
or eternity, Kafka’s “indestructible element in oneself” is nihilistic.

Tradition, Transmissibility, and History in Benjamin

and Kafka
Insofar as Benjamin’s reflections on translation are reflections on the after-
lives of works, their history or destiny, they help illuminate the central, albeit
ambivalent, role of tradition in Kafka’s works. Benjamin’s claims about
translation, the arche of which is Scripture, are equally apt descriptions of
his reading of Kafka.

Translation is a [mode]. To comprehend it as a [mode] one must go back

to the original for the laws governing translation lie within the original,
contained in the issue of its translatability . . . If translation is a [mode],
translatability must be an essential feature of certain work.2
 The Virtue or Power of the Useless 113
In the same manner as a translation is a mode whose law governs translat-
ability, so also is transmission a mode governed by a law of transmissibility.
The mode in which the law governing transmissibility is understood and
expressed as intrinsic or extrinsic to the original determines the mode in
which its past will appear and affect the present either as governed by neces-
sity and hence justified, even if not just, or as capable of being otherwise.
The interpretation of the law of transmissibility is as true of traditions, in
this case the philosophical tradition, as it is of individual books and art
works; it determines the mode in which the tradition is received and hence
decides the intelligibility—in fact, legitimacy—of other possible modes of
the transmission of the “same” tradition. Thus, it is not surprising that when
Benjamin’s collector seeks to liberate the artwork (including books) from
use value, his concern is transmissibility. Ironically, for Benjamin, it is pre-
cisely in a private collection freed from codified, social norms that artworks
and books receive an afterlife whose possibilities have not been foreclosed.
“Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more
useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only
in the latter,”3 and their due, for Benjamin, is their transmissibility. And, as
will become evident, in relation to tradition, transmissibility is in dialectical
tension with truth understood trans-or extra-historically. For a collector,
according to Benjamin, “the acquisition of a book is its rebirth,” its freeing
to new possibilities. Benjamin’s collector is a strange hybrid entity of the
child and old man who seeks to renew the old world. “For children can
accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways.”4
Viewed in this light, if public libraries and surely museums, are tombs for
useful objects, certain private collections are shelters from conformity to
the principle of utility. And here I would like to suggest that this is also true
of certain archives, especially archives for manuscripts that have not yet,
and may never, become books, e.g., non-Western medieval commentaries
on Plato and Aristotle, written in Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, and Hebrew, com-
mentaries that do not con-form to the single dominant form of the history
of philosophy.5 The turn to private collection and archive as sites of possible
rebirth is a strange turn to the subject, a turn that offers “hope” for the
resuscitation of inanimate “objects,” objects, without soul or, more precisely,
objects whose fate has been sealed, whose death required the separation of
soul and form, where form is no longer a mode and thus where all there
remains is uni-form. It is indeed ironic that, precisely as historical material-
ists, both Benjamin and later Adorno would turn to the subject in order to
return to the object as object of experience.6
As I have argued previously, Benjamin’s and Adorno’s understanding of the
fate of art and other human made or produced collectible objects is concerned
not only or simply with late capitalism or the age of commodity fetishism
but also, and more important, it constitutes these as sites where the collusion
between fetishism and barbarism (vulgar Marxism/Stalinism and fascism) can
become visible. But, precisely for this reason, precisely where the art work
114 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
becomes the emblematic fetish, the exemplary mystified commodity, it is also
the site where the liberation from the spell might occur and with it, perhaps,
also the liberation of the human world from the utility of objects, or the expe-
rience of products of human labor as reified and hence a-social. Following
Marx’s striking statement “I am not interested in people, I’m interested only
in things,” cited by Benjamin in The Arcades Project, Benjamin intensifies
the force of this claim stating, “I can, in practice, relate myself humanly to an
object only if the object relates itself humanly to man.”7 The object that can
relate itself humanly to men is the one given an afterlife by the subject. It is the
object’s rebirth or de-reification. As Adorno will further explore and under-
score, insofar as Kafka’s subject as an historical subject opposed to nature is
an “objectless interiority” imprisoned in itself, “the subject holds its breath,
as though it were not permitted to touch anything unlike itself.” But, Adorno
adds as a critical cautionary note: “under this spell pure subjectivity turns
into mythology, and spiritualism carried to its logical extreme, turns into the
cult of nature.”8 It is not surprising that in his essay on Kafka, not only does
Adorno refer several times to Benjamin but he situates Kafka’s and Benjamin’s
relation precisely in the transfiguration of the human world into the world of
things. As he states, “the crucial moment, however, toward which everything
in Kafka is directed is that in which men become aware that they are not
themselves—that they themselves are things.”9 No wonder that Benjamin was
so interested in Kafka.

Disjecta Membra, Pre-History, and Oblivion

in Benjamin and Adorno
Insofar as it is my claim that for Kafka, Benjamin, and Adorno the question
of uselessness is a question of history, the problem it presents can be best
formulated as: “whose subject, which object?” or, which is the same, “whose
history or tradition, which objects?” In order to bring this problem into
sharper relief I first turn to Benjamin’s essay “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and
Historian,” in which the dialectical proximity of this relation is explored and,
indeed, practiced by Benjamin as a relation between the collector and the
theoretician. According to Benjamin, by straying into the margins of accept-
able art, caricature, and pornographic imagery, Fuchs was able to wrest what
is enduring in his own work from an “intellectual constellation that could
hardly have appeared less propitious.”10 Benjamin argues that, following the
supercession of the contradiction between the disjecta membra contained in
idealism as “historical representation” and “appreciation,” Fuchs practiced a

mode of historical science which fashions its objects not out of a tangle
of mere facticities but out of a numbered group of threads representing
the woof of a past fed into a warp of the present . . . it is thoroughly
dialectical. The historical object removed from pure facticity does not
need any “appreciation.” It does not offer vague analogies to actuality
 The Virtue or Power of the Useless 115
but constitutes itself in the precise dialectical problem (Aufgabe) which
actuality is obliged to resolve.11

In this light, Fuchs the collector is also the dialectical historical materialist
who “supplies a unique experience of the past” that “blasts open the con-
tinuum of history” or its “eternal image.”12 In so doing, he wrenches free
the virtue or power of the disjecta membra, the forgotten, the lost to official
history or conformity to the economy of exchange.
That the dialectical problem of history forms the background to Benja-
min’s and Adorno’s discussions of art, in general, and Kafka’s work, in par-
ticular, cannot be overemphasized. That is why both emphasize the uncanny
place(s) that hope occupies in Kafka’s work, a hope situated in a dialectic of
extremes with respect to the history of salvation.
Kafka’s exchange with Brod concerning hope is cited often. However, it is
also mis-cited insofar as it is taken out of its precise context in Benjamin’s
essay on Kafka. The oft-repeated—by now a cliché—citation reproduces an
exchange between Brod and Kafka in which, in response to Brod’s statement
“then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know,”
Kafka replies: “Plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”
Benjamin does not leave this as a merely hermetic puzzle. Rather he states,
“these words provide a bridge to those extremely strange figures in Kafka,
the only ones who have escaped from the family circle and for whom there
may be hope.”13 In a similar manner, Adorno situates hope in Kafka’s works
in the dialectic of extremes. As he states, “if there is hope in Kafka’s work , it
is in those extremes rather than in the milder phases: in the capacity to stand
up to the worst by making it into language.”14 Later, Adorno would attri-
bute such a capacity or power “to stand up to the worst” to Schoenberg’s
music. And just as Benjamin points out that “no other writer has obeyed
the commandment ‘thou shall not make unto thee a graven image’ so faith-
fully,”15 so Adorno will present Schoenberg’s music as a strict embodiment
of the commandment, making present the catastrophe without interpreta-
tion. Viewed in this light, and as will become evident, there is an affinity
between Schoenberg’s music, Kafka’s parables, and the collector’s presenta-
tion, they represent in a manner such that “allow[s] no mediating construc-
tion from out of ‘large contexts.’”16 More important, the mode in which
these works, as single and singular events, make present is the dialectical
contradictory of traditional histories; they make things present by repre-
senting them in our space rather than representing ourselves in their space.
This is equally true of great monuments from the past—especially religious
ones—and smaller relics which, unlike ruins, are liberated from official his-
tory, from the past as a dialectic of progress or destruction. As will become
evident, Kafka’s singular mode of presentation, the resistance of his diverse
works to interpretation or appreciation, of which the exemplary mode is his
parables, are unique not only as parables but also as distinct from allegory;
rather than presenting ruins or fragments of the past, of which the allegory
116 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
is an interpretation, they escape its fate and resist interpretation. And, while
both ruins and relics are useless, their liberations from use value are radi-
cally distinct.17 If, as Benjamin points out “the experience of allegory, which
holds fast to ruins, is properly an experience of eternal transience,”18 then
I would like to suggest that Kafka’s parables and Benjamin’s constellations
of them provide a unique and complete bodily experience now, one without
a past or a future and hence without use, let alone didactic use value . . I
would also like to suggest that the power or virtue of Kafka’s parables, their
mode of uselessness, is unique precisely insofar as they need no liberation
from use value, never having existed in the economy of use value. Kafka’s
brief reflection on the uselessness of parables is worthy of quoting at length:

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables
(nur gleichnisse seien) and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we
have. When the sage says: “go over,” he does not mean that we should
cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were
worth it; he means some fabulous yonder something unknown to us (das
wir nich kennen), something too that he cannot designate more precisely
and therefore, cannot help us here in the very least (Hier gar nicht helfen
kann). And these parables really set out to say merely that the incom-
prehensible is incomprehensible (das Unfassbare unfassbar ist), and we
know that already. But the care we have to struggle with every day: that
is a different matter.19

To the extent that there is a key to unlocking Benjamin’s and Adorno’s dis-
cussions of Kafka’s works, this fragment may best serve as one, a strange
key, indeed, one that, by emphasizing incomprehensibility, nonetheless con-
stitutes an experience.20

Unavoidable Mis-Readings of Kafka and Benjamin

For a very long time I too neglected, to some extent, Benjamin’s discussion
of those who, in Benjamin’s elaboration on the story of “Potemkin,” do not
escape the family circle, even though they may appear to do so. In so doing,
I too readily identified the strange “creatures” inhabiting Kafka’s works
with the historical disjecta membra, viewing both those strange creatures
assigned to oblivion, such as the Cat-Lamb, Odradek, and especially the
hunchback, and the disjecta membra, as lost to history, albeit in different
modes. But, as Adorno tells us, Benjamin’s writings invite misinterpreta-
tion.21 What I failed to appreciate in Benjamin’s writings on Kafka is that
each part, each elaboration bearing a different title, is a constellation, setting
in relief different possibilities or modes of hope for the hopeless. All of these
modes escape the Modern form of the possibility of hope or freedom, and
all of them arise out of their uselessness, a uselessness emphasized by Kafka,
and thereby they also refuse the separation between freedom and happiness.
 The Virtue or Power of the Useless 117
More precisely, just as Kafka composed unique parables, parables whose
“effect is literary,” although they do not “entirely belong to the tradition of
Western prose forms,”22 so Benjamin’s presentations of Kafka are unique
philosophical constellations whose literary form does not entirely belong
to the Western philosophical tradition nor, however, do they belong to a
mystical religious tradition, to which tradition all too many of Benjamin’s
readers seeks to assimilate him. In affinity with Kafka, Benjamin’s prose has
“a relationship to religious teachings similar to the one Haggadah has to the
Halachah.”23 And, in a similar manner there exists no Halachah or tradition
to which they can be referred.
In the first constellation on, or prism into, Kafka’s works through the lens
of “Potemkin,” Benjamin invites mis-interpretation by stating explicitly, even
emphatically that the ones for whom there may be hope, the ones who have
escaped the family circle “are not the animals, not even those hybrids or imag-
inary creatures like the Cat-Lamb or Odradek; they all still live under the spell
of the family.”24 In contradistinction to these strange or deformed members
who are in the care of the father, bound up by his mythic spell and always
already guilty of being in his care, Benjamin presents Kafka’s “assistants,”
whom he tells us “are outside of this circle.” The central question then is: how
do the oblivion of which the hunchback and Odradek are the archetype, and
the unintelligibility of the assistants differ, especially in relation to history,
that is, in relation to which they can be said to have hope, if only negatively?
And, as will become evident, for Adorno, too, inscrutability, or resistance to
interpretation or appreciation,25 is at the heart of Kafka’s work. Moreover,
for both Benjamin and Adorno, the gesture is central to breaking the spell
of myth, by refusing interpretation, except that for Adorno, the primacy of
inscrutability is explicitly explored in terms of the obliteration of the relation
between subject and object, and with it the absolute reification of the subject.
In “Notes on Kafka,” it becomes evident that Adorno’s insistent concern with
the possibility of experience originates not only from the fear of the oblitera-
tion of the subject of experience, but also, and simultaneously the obliteration
of the object of experience. And, with the disappearance of the “object,” all
that remains is the hermetically self-enclosed “reified subject,” or “thing.”26
Who and how are the assistants? In what sense are they simultaneously
lost to the history of salvation and may have hope? In what sense is their
“deformation” radically different than that of the figures belonging to the
family circle? Or, differently stated, how is their deformation not imaginary?
How does it break the spell of the family circle, a spell bound by guilt? In
anticipation and tentatively, I would like to suggest that the key distinction
here is between deformation within and of tradition and pre-formation, out-
side, or before tradition. The former is a mode of the dialectic of Enlighten-
ment, of enlightenment becoming myth, the latter “pre-history” escapes or is
other than myth. As Adorno states at the end of “Notes on Kafka,” “Kafka
reacts in the spirit of enlightenment to its reversion into mythology. He has
often been compared to Kabbalah, whether justifiably or not can be decided
118 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
only by those who know that text.”27 I would like to point out that, unlike
Kabbalah, which does not foreclose interpretation, even if the key is known
only to the very few who have been granted entry to PaRDeS, Kafka’s ges-
tures defy interpretation. Irrespective of whether or not Adorno knew the
story of PaRDeS as the key to Kabbalah interpretation, he is adamantly
opposed to existentialist or symbolist interpretation of Kafka’s work. He
argues that Kafka’s prose strives for allegory rather than symbolism, identi-
fying with the outcast. More important, he adds,

Walter Benjamin rightly defined [Kafka’s prose] as parable. It expresses

itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off. It
is a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen; yet, any effort to
make this fact itself the key is bound to go astray by confounding the
abstract thesis of Kafka’s work, the obscurity of the existent, with its
substance.28

And, Benjamin, indeed, was familiar with Kabbalah, although, as I have

argued extensively, he was no Kabbalist.29
According to Benjamin, “the assistants belong to a group of figures which
recurs throughout Kafka’s entire work. In Indian mythology they are the
gandharvas, mist-bound creatures, being in an unfinished state.”30 But,
unlike the deformed members of the family circle, or more precisely, the
family members deformed by the family circle, the assistants and others
like them are not-deformed; rather they are pre-formed. They are not at
all deformed by oppressive, paternal, Modern late bourgeois institutions,
but are somehow outside their economy. “It is for them and their kind, the
unfinished and the hapless, that there is hope.”31 Kafka’s assistant are pre-
formed, change forms, neither familiar nor strangers because “they have not
yet been released from the womb of nature.”32
It is important to note that the “nature” from whose womb the unformed
have not yet been released is not nature as the contrary of history, or myth as
precursor to history. Not only are the transformations and experimentations
of these entities with changing form not discernible, but also, their vari-
ous movements are not gestures, although Kafka’s gestures in the “Nature
Theater” may hearken back to them without bridging the insurmountable
abyss between them. The domain of these entities, if one can call them that,
is infinitely older than that of myth, which myth promised redemption in
Kafka’s world, i.e., which myth is already bound to the history of enlight-
enment as salvation. And, as Benjamin emphatically points out, Kafka did
not succumb to these temptations—his sirens were silent. After he presents
Kafka’s ancestors in the ancient world as the Jews and the Chinese, Benja-
min adds that Ulysses should also be included here, a Ulysses transformed
by Kafka’s tale, a trickster of myth with cunning, a later day Ulysses, named
Kafka. His sirens are silent because, for Kafka, “music and singing are an
expression or at least a token of escape, a token of hope which comes to us
 The Virtue or Power of the Useless 119
from the intermediate world, at once unfinished and everyday, comforting
and silly.”33 This is a world similar to that of the collector as child “who can
accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways” or as the
child who sought to know what fear was and encountered Josephine, the
singing mouse, in the cellar of Potemkin’s palace.
As already indicated, in in his reading of Kafka’s Nature Theater of Okla-
homa, Kafka may be said to construct possibility, that is, a glimmer of hope
or happiness, by harking back to the Chinese theater as a theater of ges-
ture, a theater of which “one of the most important functions is to dissolve
events into their gestural components.”34 Benjamin adds that many of Kaf-
ka’s stories can be properly understood when they are viewed as acts in the
Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Rejecting any symbolic meaning to them, like
Adorno, Benjamin claims that “Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of
gestures whose meaning Kafka attempts to derive “in the ever-changing con-
texts and experimental groupings. The theater is the logical place for such
groupings.”35 The actors, or rather the gestures do not belong to individual
characters, rather they “create” individuals who have no place outside the
theater. Viewed in this light, with the code of gestures that is the experimental
grouping of the theater, Kafka enacts on the “empty” stage, something akin
to the experiments of the un-formed entities of nature’s womb; it is only here
that the actors may find an escape from the family circle. Surprisingly, cit-
ing Max Brod, whose biography of Kafka Benjamin subjects to the harshest
criticism,36 Benjamin emphasizes the fact that each gesture for Kafka was an
event; as such it is complete, and as such it is not subject to interpretation.
When Benjamin states that no talent is required for acting in the Nature
Theater, that the requirement that they play, the only requirement placed on
them, is not really possible nor can be fulfilled by them, he is not foreclosing
possibility but rather transforming it through roles, “as a place of last refuge,
which does not preclude it from being their salvation,”37 the only salvation
available to the Modern human being. More important, he adds, “[s]salva-
tion is not a premium on existence.”38 Only in the gesture that is the Nature
Theater, that is certainly not Nature, can the Modern city-dweller find the
hope of escape from the history that befalls members of the household.
As alluded to above, if experimental groupings bring into relief possibili-
ties, Benjamin’s writings on Kafka can be seen as such groupings, as a code of
gestures, each of which constitutes an event. Thus understood, the possibility
or hope found in the Nature Theater is distinct but not at odds with that
found in the discussion under the heading “The Little Hunchback.” Unlike
the pre-formed entities of nature’s womb that cannot, properly speaking, be
forgotten because they cannot be perceived, represented, let alone known,
and for whom there is hope, the pre-historic swamp creatures which inhabit
Kafka’s novels are characterized by oblivion and distortion, the exemplary
form of which in Kafka’s stories is Odradek, the “singular bastard which the
prehistoric world has begotten with guilt.”39 More precisely, for Benjamin,
the form (or mode) which things assume in oblivion is “distorted.” Differently
120 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
stated, “distortion” is only possible for things that have some “form,” a form
which is distorted by history as a history of oppression. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the hunchback of children’s folk-song is the prototype for
such distortion, but also that such distortion will disappear with the com-
ing of the Messiah by slight adjustment rather than force. Understood as
prismatic paralipomena, both Kafka’s stories and Benjamin’s presentations
of Kafka force a break with tradition, are gestures that, as gestures, make
no claims to truth; each gesture is a complete event. And, as Benjamin points
out, “Kafka’s genius lay in that fact that he tried something altogether new:
he gave up truth so that he could hold on to its transmissibility, the haggadic
element.”40 Understood in its historical, material specificity, Kafka’s power to
break off with tradition, to bring into sharp relief the oppressive condition
of form (and institutions) is a mode of what Adorno presents as late style or
as the new. It is a power of subjectivity that, by breaking traditional form,
brings into relief the destitution of the present, exposing it as catastrophe. As
Adorno points out in “Late Style in Beethoven,”

The power of subjectivity in late works of art is the irascible gesture

with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds,
not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the
appearance of art.41

For Adorno, this mode of freedom from traditional form, in Beethoven,

is not at all the freeing of musical language from mere phrases; rather, “it
seeks (sie will) to free the mere phrase from the appearance of subjective
mastery.”42 In this light, Beethoven’s late style is an historical expression of
the “new” as a breach of the Modern, as an attempt to cast off its oppressive
necessity, in the same mode as Kafka’s, Klee’s, and Schoenberg’s are, how-
ever futile such attempts may be. As Benjamin’s points out, the purity and
beauty of Kafka is the beauty of failure. And in “Why Is New Art so Hard
to Understand,” Adorno is emphatic that the “difficulty” in understanding
New Art is a manifestation of its experience as “accompanied by the shock
of its strangeness and enigmatic form, a shock that is actually the basis of
all talk about its being hard to understand.”43 Thus understood in terms of
“late style” and “new art” as concrete, material, historical forms, it is not
surprising that in quite a few of his essays on music as well as in Philoso-
phy of New Music, Adorno brings Kafka and Schoenberg into the closest
proximity. For both, classical form (whatever the standard taste seeks) is not
merely adaptation and acquiescence to oppression, according to Adorno,
but, deploying Kafka’s words, “it degenerates into a facile, happy journey,
the autonomous self-movement of the conceptual.”44 Ironically, the more
works of both resist imitation and or interpretation, the greater are subse-
quent attempts to imitate and interpret them by the very “hip” or epigone.
Attempts to interpret Kafka’s works, as well as those of Benjamin and
even Adorno,45 as versions of traditional negative theology do not merely
 The Virtue or Power of the Useless 121
fail to understand the depth and extent of their radical critique but also
occlude the manner in which the critique of late capitalism is at the same
time a critique of theology. As Adorno points out

dialectical theology fails in its attempt to appropriate [Kafka], not

merely because of the mythical powers of the powers at work, an aspect
that Benjamin rightly emphasizes, but also because in Kafka, unlike
Fear and Trembling, ambiguity and obscurity are attributed not exclu-
sively to the Other as such but to human beings and to the conditions
in which they live. Precisely that “infinite qualitative distinction” taught
by Kierkegaard and Barth is leveled off; there is no real distinction.46

Understood in this light, Kafka’s “Other” is anything but God as other, the
Deus absconditus of negative theology. Rather, in Adorno’s reading, Kaflka’s
“other” is the reified human being, the one who, like Gracchus, is unable to
die. As Adorno poignantly notes

just as the bourgeoisie failed to die, History (Geschichte) becomes hell

in Kafka because the chance that might have saved was missed. This
hell was inaugurated by the late bourgeoisie itself. In the concentration
camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated.47

Adorno’s reading of Kafka takes his prophecies to their material historical

conclusions, conclusions that he confronts even more intensively in his read-
ing of Beckett.
If the violence of many inheritance claims to the “fathers” fortunes may still
lend itself to critique and hence, may be contained, the alternative that deploys
his literary legacy to its final conclusion is much starker, indeed. As Adorno
points out, Beckett’s inheritance of Kafka “provides Kafka with a further self-
reflection and turns him upside down by totalizing his principle.”48 Once dra-
matic forms become impossible, even as relics, once the differences between
life and death, catastrophe and the everyday have been eradicated because the
difference between dramatic forms and the human life that is heterogeneous to
them has been destroyed, the prohibition on graven images turns into a prohi-
bition against language, and mention of hope becomes blasphemy. As Adorno
points out, in Beckett’s Endgame, a play followed by Acte sans paroles, the
Hebrew Scripture’s “‘dust thou shalt become’ is translated into: filth. Excre-
tion becomes the substance of a life that is death . . . and hope skulks out of
the world . . . back to where it came from, death.”49 If the ruin in allegory
“preserves the image of beauty,” and Kafka’s relic still presents the hope of the
hopeless, for his heir Beckett the refuse of dramatic constituents, “exposition
complication, plot, peripetia, and catastrophe return in decomposed form as
participants in an examination of the dramaturgical corpse.” In the bleakest of
dry parody reflecting Beckett’s, Adorno notes: “Representing catastrophe, for
instance, is the announcement that there are no more pain killers.”50
122 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
Like Benjamin, Adorno emphasizes the useless and obsolete as the sites
both of historical condemnation and hope in Kafka. And, like Benjamin,
against the narrative of history as progress, he presents possibility or “hope”
as “the child’s image of Modernity,” i.e., the child for whom history, as his-
tory of the “Other,” may still begin. In a striking deployment of a dialectic of
extremes, after he depicts Kafka’s stark presentation of everything historical
as condemned, “the moment, the absolutely transient, as the likeness of the
eternity of passing away, of damnation” (an almost identical formulation
to Benjamin’s “Theologico-Political Fragment”), Adorno provides a strange
mediation where the child is she who is “freed” of historical necessity, a
child for whom the obsolete, the useless, may harbor an infinite number of
possibilities. Adorno’s child here is clearly a mode of pre-formation outside
or before tradition.
The dialectic of extremes in which Adorno situates Kafka’s work is an
inverted or shadow theology or the exposition of theology’s complicity
with late capitalism and its justification.51 For, it is precisely by juxtaposing
“everything historical as condemned,” a condemnation concomitant with
the economy of exchange, to the “obsolete [as] the stigma of the present,”
and Kafka as collector of such stigmata, that Adorno’s stigmata, like Benja-
min’s relics, are outside history. The theological idiom of relic and stigmata
undermines the doctrine of history as the history of salvation and dam-
nation, of which the economy of exchange is a quasi-secular expression.
Being useless, each stigma presents a complete hermetic present. Moreover,
it cannot be overemphasized that “present” here not only has no relation to
history but also and, more important, is decidedly not parousia nor pres-
ence to consciousness. Rather, its effect is somatic. Adorno is emphatic that
Kafka’s depictions of the historical world (Historischen Welt) are presen-
tations of a world overstuffed with the refuse of the monopolism of the
liberal era, whose complement is the history (Geschichte) of salvation as
the history whose justification is eternity as “endlessly repeated sacrifice.”52
Further emphasizing the catastrophe unleashed by the theologico-political
myth of salvation, Adorno cites Kafka’s ironic reference to judgment day,
where Kafka wryly observes that “[o]nly our notion of time permits us to
speak of the Last Judgment: actually, it is a summary court in perpetual ses-
sion.”53 More precisely, according to Adorno, Kafka’s rejection of history is
manifest as a taboo over the concept of history, the metaphysical justifica-
tion of sacrifice. Focusing upon the shabbiness of the historical moment,
exposing the eternal moment (Augenblick) as untruth, Kafka’s prophetic
prohibitions toward history undermine both its material necessity and its
justification.
Kafka’s refuse, Benjamin’s relics, and Adorno’s obsolete stigmata are
indeed useless in the historical world whose disintegration they expose.
They are not, however, useless for children for whom history (Geschichte)
has not yet begun, or rather for whom, qua children, it never will begin.
Lacking a notion of time, children’s present is not a transition but is rather
complete. For them there may be hope precisely because they do not strive
 The Virtue or Power of the Useless 123
for redemption.54 As Adorno points out, whereas for Kafka, “the obsolete is
the stigma of the present,”

But, similarly for children, who have to do with the disintegration of the
historical world, the obsolete is the image of that in which history as such
first appears, it is the “child’s image of Modernity,” the hope bequeathed
them that history might yet come to be. The feeling of one who is in need
and help comes, one who is happy not because he is saved—he is not
saved—but rather because new (neue), young people, come confident,
ready to take up the struggle, ignorant of course (zwar unwissend) of
what stands before them, yet in an ignorance which does not cause the
observer to lose hope but rather fills him with awe , with joy, with tears.55

For children everything is possible precisely because they are not constrained
by the knowledge or tradition of what is and is not necessary, possible or
impossible. Kafka’s children in Adorno are the same children whom Benja-
min tells us “can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing
ways.”56 For them, a broken gun is a perfectly good revolutionary toy.

Notes
1. Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Hope, and the True Way,” in The Basic Kafka
(Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 240 (emphasis mine).
Selections made by Michael Kowal. Introduction, Erich Heller. Theoretisch gibt
es eine vollkommene Glücksmöglichkeit: An das Unzerstörbare in sich glauben
und nicht zu ihm streben (69).
2. Walter Benjamin, SW1, 254. I translate “eine Form” by “mode” rather than the
vaguer and general form, as in “modus” in Spinoza.
3. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” SW2, 491–492 (emphasis mine).
4. Ibid., 487.
5. That such manuscripts may never become books is increasingly likely not only
because books are progressively viewed as useless but also, and more important,
the knowledge required to transform such manuscripts into books is deemed
to be useless and is rapidly disappearing. I choose this set of examples because
turning these manuscripts into books requires knowledge of classical Greek,
medieval Arabic, Biblical and medieval Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic, Latin, as
well as at least German, the “classical” language of classical philology, paleogra-
phy, and editing. The uselessness of such efforts is amply evident by the lack of
support they receive even within research universities.
6. I have discussed the threat to the subject of experience at length. Such a discus-
sion now proves to be incomplete without consideration of the possibility of
the object of experience. See Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Spinoza’s Critique of Reli-
gion and Its Heirs: Marx, Benjamin, Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015). Henceforth, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs.
7. Benjamin, AP, E, “The Collector,” 209.
8. Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz, Rolf
Tiedemann, ed., Rodney Livingstone and others, trans. (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2003), p. 229. Cf. Benjamin,
You can read Kafka’s stories for quite a while without realizing that they are
not about human beings at all. When you finally come upon the name of the
124 Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
creature—monkey, dog, mole—you look up in fright and realize that you are
already far away from the continent of man.
(“Franz Kafka,” SW2, 802)
9. Ibid., 222.
10. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” SW3, 268.
11. Ibid., 268–269. Note that in the consideration of historical materialism “Auf-
gabe” may be translated by ”task,” which translation would underscore its dia-
lectic’s relation to praxis or rather the inseparability of theory and praxis. Cf.
“Paralipomena to the Theses on the Concept of History,” SW4, 401–402.
12. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” SW4, 396.
13. “für die es vielleicht Hoffnung gibt . . .” “Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniver-
sary of His Death,” SW2, 798 (emphasis mine).
14. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 221.
15. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” SW2, 808.
16. Benjamin, AP, H, The Collector, 206. The same affinity can be extended to the
Chinese Theater and the anecdote.
17. For a discussion of allegory in relation to the ruin see: Walter Benjamin, The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, John Osborne, trans. (London and New York:
Verso, 2003).
18. Benjamin, AP, J, Baudelaire, 348.
19. Franz Kafka, Parables in German and English (New York: Schocken Books,
1946, 1947), p. 11. This fragment is translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
(emphases mine).
20. Understood in this light, Kafka’s parables bear a resemblance to some prophetic
parables in Hebrew Scripture. Adorno, in fact, refers to Kafka’s writings as
prophecy. See, “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” GS, Band 10, p. 269.
21. Adorno, “Benjamin’s philosophy invites misreading: it dares the reader to con-
sume and reduce it to a succession of desultory apreçus, governed by the happen-
stance of mood and light. “Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften,” in On Walter
Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, Gary Smith, ed. (Cambridge, MA
and London, England: The MIT Press, 1991).
22. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” SW2, 802–803.
23. Ibid., 803.
24. Ibid., 798.
25. See above, p. 7.
26. It is noteworthy that Adorno views Beckett, especially in Endgame, as Kafka’s
heir in a manner analogous to the serial composers’ relation to Schoenberg.
Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” NL1, 241–275.
27. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 235.
28. Ibid., 212 (emphasis mine).
Benjamin hat sie mit Grund als parabel definiert. Sie drückt sich nicht
aus durch den Ausdruck sondern durch dessen Verweigerung, durch ein
Abbrechen. Es ist eine Parabolik, zu der der Schlὔssel entwendet ward;
selbst der, welcher eben dies zum Schlὔssel zu Machen zuchte, wὔrde in die
Irre gefὔrt, indemer die abstrakte These von Kafkas Werk, die Dunkelheit
des Daseins, mit einem Gehalt verwechstele.
(GS, Band 10. 1, 255)
29. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs, passim. For Benjamin’s discussion
of the radical difference between Symbolism and Allegory and scathing criticism
of Symbolism, see The Origin of German Tragic Drama, John Osborne, trans.
(London and New York: Verso, 1998); “Allegory and Trauespiel,” pp. 159–235.
30. Benjamin, “Fraz Kafka,” SW2, 798.
 The Virtue or Power of the Useless 125
31. Ibid., 799.
32. Ibid., 798.
33. Ibid., 799.
34. Ibid., 801.
35. Ibid.
36. Benjamin, “Review of Brod’s Franz Kafka,” SW3, 317–321. Cf. Letter to Ger-
shom Scholem, June 12, 1938, where it first appeared.
37. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” SW2, 804.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 811.
40. Benjamin, SW3, 326.
41. Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, Richard Leppert, ed., Susan S. Gillespie,
trans. (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 566 (emphasis mine).
42. Ibid. (GS, Vol. 17, p. 16) Cf. “Trying to Understand Endgame”:
The localization of Endgame in that zone [where the most limited becomes
the most general] mocks the spectator with the suggestion of something
symbolic, some which, like Kafka, it then withholds. Because no subject
matter is simply what it is, all subject matter appears to be a sign of an
inner sphere of which it would be a sign no longer exists, and the signs do
not point to anything else.
NL, 251
43. Ibid., 127. (GS, Vol. 18).
44. Ibid. “The Relationship of Philosophy and Music,” in Philosophy of New Music,
Robert Hullot-Kentor, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), p. 149.
45. See Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, “Negative Dialectics as the Radical or Jewish Spe-
cies of Negative Theology,” in Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, Michael
Figenblat, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 198–237.
46. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 226 (emphasis mine).
47. Ibid., 227. Cf. the similarity between the fate of philosophy and the fate of
literature (and music) after Auschwitz in the introduction to Theodor Adorno,
Negative Dialectics, E. B. Ashton, trans. (New York: Continuum, 1999, 1973).
“Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to real-
ize it was missed” (p. 3).
48. Adorno, NL, Vol. 1, 259.
49. Ibid., 274–275.
50. Ibid. It is important to note that parody is not derisory. Rather, as Adorno points
out “In its emphatic sense, parody means the use of forms in the era of their
impossibility.” Ibid., 260.
51. Cf. Benjamin’s, “Thesis on the Concept of History,” I, for a crystallization of the
complicity between theology and economico-political power. SW4, 389.
52. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 224.
53. Ibid.
54. Cf. Benjamin’s, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” SW3, 305–306.
55. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 224 (GS, Vol. 10, p. 270). The first two lines of the
translation are significantly modified since the original was misleading.
56. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” SW2, 491–492.
7 Discovering the Truth of Sancho
Panza
The Meaning of Comedy in
Adorno’s and Benjamin’s Divergent
Readings of Don Quixote
Menachem Feuer

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno were both interested in the meaning
and place of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote (and his eponymous character)
in modernity and history. They also looked to find a place for this comic
character (and this novel) in their own thought. But if we are to understand
the differences and similarities between the two thinkers’ philosophies—via
the lens of Don Quixote—it is not Don Quixote so much, as Kafka suggests,
as the “truth” of Sancho Panza that should concern us most. Although San-
cho Panza is not—by any means—a mirror image of Don Quixote, he takes
the place of the thinker/reader, who follows in his wake. What—the reader
wonders—does Sancho Panza make of Don Quixote? Does he dismiss him
out of hand or does he take something away from his encounter with Don
Quixote, something that can touch on a deeper philosophical understand-
ing of the world or modernity? What, in other words (playing on Kafka), is
the “truth” of Sancho Panza? This title of Kafka’s parable was “The Truth
of Sancho Panza.” It is a key text in Walter Benjamin’s reading of Kafka. To
be sure, Benjamin gives the last words on Kafka (in his important Kafka
essay) to this parable: “Sancho Panza, a sedate fool and clumsy assistant,
sent his rider ahead; Bucephaulus outlived his. Whether it is a man or a
horse is no longer important, if only the burden is removed from the back.”1
Likewise, Adorno addresses Don Quixote in different places in his corpus
and marks this character (and its author) as marking an epoch and bearing
consequence.
If Kafka is the quintessential modern author for both Adorno and Benja-
min, his take on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza must inform their reading
to a major extent. If Sancho Panza is the figure of the modern thinker, what
does it imply that the thinker follows the lead of not just any fool, but Don
Quixote? The difference between their two readings of Dox Quixote marks
two different approaches to thinking the “truth of Sancho Panza.” While
Adorno opts to “laugh at the laugh” (at Don Quixote)—to give himself (and
all modern thinkers) a critical distance from the Bourgeoisie and put forth
a kind of melancholy science “after Auschwitz”—Benjamin decides to fol-
low Kafka’s version of Sancho Panza. For Benjamin, Kafka’s figurations of
 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza 127
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza suggest that going backwards accomplishes
what he calls a “messianic reversal” of time. On the other hand, both agree
that reading Don Quixote’s comic failure presents the thinker with the pos-
sibility of thinking modernity and opening the door to thinking what is to
come. However, it is what Kafka would call the truth of Sancho Panza that
is the truth of these thinkers’ differing relationships to Don Quixote. That
difference and its meaning—which has to decide on whether to take Don
Quixote up (via or not via Kafka) or leave him behind—is the subject of this
chapter. Moreover, this difference between Adorno and Benjamin is between
two different readings of laughter and the relationship of comical literary
figures (in this case Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) to Kafka and modern
thought. A lot is at stake in this difference.

Adorno on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

In a lecture dated 29 January 1965 (the eighteenth and final lecture Adorno
gave on the topic of Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems), Adorno argues
that what he is “unwilling” to attach “metaphysical experience” to “reli-
gious experience” because “this kind of experience, as handed down by very
great figures of Catholicism, such as St John of the Cross, hardly seems to
be accessible any longer, given the assumptions regarding the philosophy of
history under which we live today.”2 Instead, he turns to Marcel Proust (a
fiction writer and poet, not a philosopher3), who explored the “possibility
of experience” that “should be taken seriously from a philosophical point
of view.”4 Through Proust, one can visit “places” that are often “just foolish
villages. If there is still a single stable door open in them (the names we find
in his books) and a smell of a real live cow and dung and such things, to
which this experience is no doubt attached, one must be thankful today.”5
Giving thanks, he argues, is the “only relationship that consciousness can
have to happiness.”6 But, adds Adorno, one will “not” find “it” (metaphysi-
cal experience) there. The metaphysical experience is one of withdrawal:

at such moments one has a curious feeling that something is receding—

as is also familiar from an old symbol of happiness, the rainbow—rather
than that one has really been done out of it . . . I would say, therefore,
that happiness—and there is an extremely deep constellation between
metaphysical experience and happiness—is something within objects
and, at the same time, remote from them.7

This feeling is the feeling of déjà vu. This feeling recovers something true,
something real. Adorno’s reflection on Proust suggests that the source of
“metaphysical experience” is traced by and in literature (“something within
objects and . . . remote from them”).
Building on this, Adorno argues that the feeling of “déjà vu” has some-
thing to do with childhood experience and failure (something we often find
128 Menachem Feuer
in Proust’s fiction). It can be “induced by a certain type of children’s book. In
such experiences one succumbs to the conditions of the empirical world; one
succumbs to all the fallibility which attaches to one’s own psychology, one’s
wishes, one’s longing.”8 This succumbing to the “conditions of the empirical
world” and to “fallibility” is a mark of “metaphysical experience.” Out of
this observation, Adorno moves from the particular to a general concept:

All metaphysical experiences—I should like to state as a proposition

here—are fallible. I would say, in general, that all experiences which have
to be lived, which are not mere copies or reconstructions of that which
is in any case, contain the possibility of error, the possibility that they
can completely miss the mark . . . It might well be that, according to this
criterion, everything which really matters would be excluded as being
unworthy of being known; whereas in truth—so it seems to me, only
what can be refuted, what can be disappointed, what can be wrong, has
the openness I have spoken of, that is, it is the only thing that matters. It is
in the concept of openness, as that which is not already subsumed under
the identity of the concept, that the possibility of disappointment lies.9

Based on these reflections and this generality, Adorno argues that “fallibility . . .
is the condition of the possibility of such metaphysical experience. And it seems
to attach most strongly to the weakest and most fragile experiences.”10
Based on this argument and considering Adorno’s reflections on Proust,
children’s experiences which are mediated through children’s literature, we
can see that his notion of “metaphysical experience,” his concept of “open-
ness,” and his take of “fallibility” can be best understood by way of reading
characters who are disappointed or disappointing (in other words, comical
characters). They err, but they are not tragic since fate is not at issue here so
much as freedom and its relationship to unforeseen chance and accidents.
Literature—Adorno suggests—grants a kind of comical/reflective transcen-
dence or distance from this loss. Our response or relationship to these acci-
dents is something that can prompt—as Adorno notes—a sense of failure
and fallibility, gratitude, and the possibility of happiness. Given the basis of
our query, how does Don Quixote—a comic figure of loss—fit into Ador-
no’s reflections on metaphysical experience and fallibility? And how does
Kafka’s reflection on Sancho Panza and Don Quixote—which Walter Ben-
jamin pays close attention to—give this comical fallibility a different shade?
While, in the above-mentioned passages, Adorno takes note of the fallibil-
ity and the possibility of metaphysical experience in literature and literary
figures, he also look at the literary figure in terms of secularization, the
failure of mastery over the world, and an epochal moment. In Aesthetic
Theory, Adorno argues that modern artwork manifests a “consciousness
of its temporal essence.”11 And “if all art is the secularization of transcen-
dence, it participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has confronted
this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of anti-art; indeed, without this
 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza 129
element art is no longer thinkable.”12 Modern art expresses a “cultural lag,
that ever-sluggish revolution of the superstructure. The source of art’s power
of resistance is . . . its powerlessness.”13 Its powerlessness, its weakness, must
do with the fact that modern art doesn’t express a mastery over the world
(as opposed to philosophy, etc.). It is Don Quixote’s inability to demonstrate
a mastery over the world—his “cultural lag”—that makes him an emblem-
atic figure in Adorno’s history of modern aesthetics because it, in some way,
goes against the social grain. This reading of Don Quixote—as a comic
figure—adds another dimension to his reading of failure. It has wider, social
consequences:

The object of bourgeois art is the relation of itself as an artifact to

empirical society; Don Quixote stands at the beginning of this develop-
ment. Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of projection,
in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is con-
centrated, nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic
material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition
to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crys-
tallizing itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with
existing social norms and qualifying as “socially un-useful” it criticizes
society by merely existing, for which all puritans of all stripes condemn
it.14

This has epochal import. According to Adorno, Don Quixote demonstrates

the “antagonism of literary genres” and “historical eras”:15

Don Quixote may have served an irrelevant program, that of abolish-

ing the chivalric romance, which had been dragged along from feudal
times into the bourgeois age. This modest program served as the vehicle
by which the novel became an exemplary artwork. The antagonism of
literary genres in which Cervantes’s work originates was transformed,
in his hands, into the antagonism of historical eras of, ultimately, meta-
physical dimension: the authentic expression of the crisis of immanent
meaning in the demystified world.16

Here, the possibility of a metaphysical experience, is associated with the

epochal quality of this text. Happiness inheres in the reflection that this
text can offer. But given what we learned above, however, one needs to ask
whether reading Don Quixote, today, provides a “metaphysical experience”
worthy of gratitude. Can one, reading Don Quixote, today . . . be happy? Or
has the possibility of the metaphysical experience it has offered, with time,
passed away into the dustbin of history?
In an essay entitled, “Can Art Be Lighthearted?” Adorno argues that the
answer to this question can be understood through the dimension of laugh-
ter. Laughter, as Adorno understands it, is connected to the Enlightenment
130 Menachem Feuer
and freedom. He associates laughter with “lightheartedness” and after doing
this he historicizes it by using the laughter at Don Quixote as an example.

How art frees itself of myth, of the dark and aporetic, is essentially a
process, not an invariant fundamental choice between the serious and
the lighthearted. It is in the lightheartedness of art that subjectivity first
comes to know and become conscious of itself. Through lightheartedness
it escapes from entanglement and returns to itself. There is something of
bourgeois personal freedom in lightheartedness, though it also shares
thereby in the historical fate of the bourgeoisie. What was once humor
becoming irretrievably dull; the later variety denigrates into the hearty
contentment of complicity. In the end, it becomes intolerable. After that,
however, who could still laugh at Don Quixote and its sadistic mockery
of the man who breaks down in the face of the bourgeois reality prin-
ciple? The more profoundly society fails to deliver the reconciliation that
the bourgeois spirit promised as the enlightenment of myth, the more
irresistibly humor is pulled down into the netherworld and laughter,
once the image of humanness, becomes a regression into inhumanity.17

Contrast these words on Don Quixote, which historicize bourgeois laugher,

to those we find in an exchange of letters (dated 1 February 1939 and 23
February 1939) between Walter Benjamin and Adorno about Don Quixote
(and other literary figures that branch out of this novel and comic character).
In Adorno’s February 1 letter to Benjamin, he notes that Benjamin’s desire
to contrast Balzac and Don Quixote—which was based on Benjamin’s cri-
tique of Lukacs’s distinction —needs to be rethought: “Balzac himself is very
much a Don Quixote type. His generalizations reveal a tendency to transfig-
ure capitalist alienation into ‘sense’ rather like the way Don Quixote responds
to the barber’s placard.”18 And when thinking the nineteenth-century French
caricaturist, Daumier by way of Don Quixote, Adorno suggests that:

Daumier must indulge in caricature, to present us with “types” in order

to reveal the sartorial world of the ever-same speculatively, to show
it to be just as strange as the early world of the emergent bourgeois
once appeared to Don Quixote. In this connection, the concept of type
is especially important, since the image of the universal must also be
maintained within the image of with his hugely exaggerated nose or
protruding shoulders, and it is much the same with Balzac.19

While Adorno focuses on “types” and how Cervantes creates the first type
through Don Quixote, Walter Benjamin, in his February 23 response to
Adorno, strangely enough focuses on laughter:

In Don Quixote, the reader’s laughter salvages the honor of the bour-
geois world, in contrast to which the chivalric world presents itself as
 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza 131
uniform and simplistic. But Daumier’s laughter is directed against the
bourgeoisie; he sees through the “equality” it flaunts: namely, as the same
tenuous égalité that was vaunted in Louis Philippe’s sobriquet. By means
of laughter, Cervantes and Daumier both dispel a sameness and equality
which they firmly recognize as a historically generated illusion.20

For Benjamin, in this letter, the difference between Cervantes’s Don Quixote
and Daumier’s caricature is not simply a temporal difference or a difference
in types; the difference is between two kinds of laughter. The laughter at Don
Quixote, for the person in that era—gives them what Adorno would call
(as we see above) self-consciousness. It marks a kind of “lightheartedness”
that is indicative of the experience of freedom. For Benjamin, laughing at
Don Quixote is redemptive—it “salvages the honor of the bourgeois world.”
But what Daumier introduces is a laughter directed against the bourgeoisie.
This new kind of laughter distinguishes between what Adorno would call
the laugh and the laugh that laughs at the laugh. The latter—Adorno tells
us-comes from Beckett. This is the laugh that Adorno is interested in and,
drawing on Adorno’s argument about “metaphysical experience,” perhaps
one can argue that this laugh at the laugh prompts what Adorno calls “grati-
tude.” For Adorno, the truth of Sancho Panza is twofold. It is not simply that
Panza laughs at Quixote; it is also that we laugh at Panza’s laugh because,
in our time, this laughter is absurd and cruel.
This is the case because, after Auschwitz, lightheartedness (the laughter at
Don Quixote) would now seem sadistic. Don Quixote—as Adorno notes—
should no longer prompt laughter. And that is because he is forced to accept
the “bourgeois reality principle.” This suggests that—for Adorno—Don Quix-
ote should be historicized and the novel (and character) given its rightful place
in relation to the birth and growth of bourgeois self-consciousness and light-
heartedness. Benjamin, it seems, by way of this response to Adorno, would
agree. The laughter one has at Don Quixote or Quixotic characters gives birth
to bourgeoisie self-consciousness. It seems as if the metaphysical experience
that Adorno speaks of with Proust is not available through Don Quixote
because his erring is the basis for bourgeois laughter and power which has,
today, been superseded by an era that is critical of the bourgeoisie and its types.
However, while Adorno and Benjamin seem to agree on this point, Benjamin
takes on another rendering of Don Quixote which is influenced by Franz Kafka.
In the very same letter to Adorno, Benjamin, in fact, suggests that one move
from reflecting on Don Quixote and Daumier to reflecting on Kafka (who rec-
onciles the two and their invention of different “types”). There is something in
Kafka’s fiction that should prompt one to think differently of these comic types.
Strangely enough, Benjamin puts this reflection in parenthesis as if it were a side
note when, in fact, it is central to his own reflections on Quixote:

(For the novel, I think Kafka was the first person to combine these
two aspects successfully—in his work Balzac’s types have firmly taken
132 Menachem Feuer
residence in the sphere of illusion: they have now become all those
“aides,” “officials,” “villagers,” and “lawyers” which whom K. find
himself confronted as the only individual human being, as an atypical
being for all his typical averageness.)21

These types—in Kafka—are comical but they are in the “sphere of illusion.”
I would now like to look at Benjamin’s reading of Quixote in a twofold
manner: one, in terms of Benjamin’s reflections on Quixote, irrespective of
Kafka and, secondly, through his reading of Franz Kafka. They will help us
to understand this sphere and the “truth of Sancho Panza.”

Benjamin on Don Quixote, Kafka, and the Truth of

Sancho Panza
Benjamin’s first and last reflections on comedy—vis-à-vis his first discus-
sions with friends about comedy and his reflections on Kafka’s “The Truth
of Sancho Panza” near the end of this life—circle around Don Quixote.
While he turned to Don Quixote as an important figure in the early years of
his reflection, near the end of his life Benjamin realized that Kafka’s version
of Don Quixote has more in common with the schlemiel than with Cer-
vantes’ original. He was able to see a distinct difference between two types
of comedy: one Jewish and the other not. Over time, Benjamin decided on a
comic tradition that speaks to the condition of Exile and his modern Jewish
particularity. And while that tradition may find a root in Don Quixote, it
is ultimately a tradition that emerges out of Kafka’s world (and his version
of Don Quixote); but its main character is not Don Quixote so much as the
Jewish comic character otherwise known as the schlemiel. To understand
what is at stake in Benjamin’s reading of comedy, which finds its start with
Don Quixote and ends with a reading of Kafka’s version, let’s trace its ori-
gins from Benjamin’s first reflections on comedy to the moments before he
wrote his essay on Kafka (and his version of Don Quixote).
One of the first major moments we see the comedic emerge in Benjamin’s
reflections can be found in 1916, when he was twenty-five years old. In a
letter he wrote to his friend Harry Belmore, Benjamin makes an important
distinction between language and criticism:

Language resides only in what is positive, and completely in whatever

strives for the most fervent unity with life; which does not maintain the
pretense of criticism . . . of discriminating between good and bad; but
transposes everything critical to the inside, transposes the crisis to the
heart of language.22

Benjamin sees criticism that is guided by language (as opposed to reason) as

a “chemical substance” which “decomposes” an object in order to “expose
its inner nature.” But, in doing so, “true criticism” does not “destroy” its
 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza 133
object. “True criticism” preserves the object’s inner nature while, so to
speak, eliminating the protective shell of this or that material thing.
But “true criticism” has its limits. Benjamin argues that while “true criti-
cism” is the domain of language, “criticism of spiritual things” is not. Ben-
jamin equates the “criticism of spiritual things,” which distinguishes the
“genuine from the non-genuine,” with humor and argues that it “only in
humor can language be critical.”23 The reason for this is that humor, like a
chemical substance, disintegrates “spiritual things.” And in the wake of com-
edy, the “genuine remains . . . as ash.” Language becomes critical through
humor because humor has a way of reducing its object to nothing.
Benjamin tells us that “we laugh about this” chemical breakdown because,
in such a breakdown, there is a revelation of what is genuine. This laugh,
one can assume, is the laugh of spiritual discovery: that beneath all the
things we take to be solid and true is nothingness. Humor, in this instance,
discloses a spiritual void. And through this comic disclosure, language (and
not reason), finally, becomes critical. One would be remiss not to see that
Benjamin’s first recorded words on comedy are explicitly mystical.
The example he cites for such a critical disclosure vis-à-vis comedy can be
found in Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes, the author, is one of the “great
critics.” His humor, in other words, has the power to break down spiritual
things and disclose to us what is genuine. Moreover, Benjamin argues that
writers who followed Cervantes’ comic legacy—such as Lawrence Sterne—
were so moved by this revelation of comedy’s critical function that they
could “barely engage in criticism anymore.”24 According to Benjamin, they
realized that literary comedy is more effective than simple criticism.
The reason for this has to do with the fact that, by way of their humor,
Benjamin believed Cervantes and Sterne had a “reverence for words” which
surpassed the critical distinction between good and bad or good and evil. To
be sure, this initial reading of humor (the first one we can find in his letters,
notes, and essays) gives humor a religious kind of status and teaches us that,
for Benjamin, “reverence for words”—and not the distinction between good
and evil—was the ultimate goal for humankind. Humor, in other words,
brings us to language that is, as Nietzsche might say, beyond good and evil.
In contrast to Biblical reverence for the word of God, which is full of gravi-
tas and literalism, this reverence for language is won by way of literary
humor and wit.
The constellation of failure, comedy, and Don Quixote remerges three
years later in Ibiza between April and May 1932, which is around the time
Benjamin started working on his Kafka essay. What is most important about
these reflections, which can be found in a section entitled “The Compass
of Success,” is the fact that, for the first time in his work, Benjamin men-
tions the schlemiel. He starts narrowing down the character that will preoc-
cupy him in his study of Kafka. But, more importantly, Benjamin, in this
Ibiza Sequence, mentions the schlemiel in relation to two comic figures that
emerge in his work and in Arendt’s work vis-à-vis comedy and the schlemiel:
134 Menachem Feuer
Don Quixote and Charlie Chaplin. These pieces are, at one and the same
time, autobiographical and academic. The topic, which has personal and
academic interest, is the meaning of failure vis-à-vis success.
Benjamin begins this section by addressing the essential question regard-
ing failure and success: are we responsible for our failure or success or is
it fated? In relation to this question, Benjamin argues that “it is a deeply
rooted prejudice that willpower is the key to success.”25 Following this, Ben-
jamin ponders whether success is rooted in the “individual” or the “world
as a whole.” The issue being whether one’s efforts to be successful are
accomplished by chance or wit. Benjamin sides with success as the “deepest
expressions of the contingencies of existence” which has “little to do with
the willpower that pursues it”:

So we may say that success, which some people so readily dismiss as the
blind activity of chance, is the deepest expression of the contingencies
of existence. Success is a caprice in the workings of the universe. To this
extent, it has very little to do with the willpower that pursues it.26

To understand the “true nature of success” (and failure), Benjamin suggests

that instead of looking for the reasons why someone is successful we should
look at “the human figures it affects.”27 Success, writes Benjamin, makes
“itself known in them.” But instead of looking at these “human figures” in
a positive way, he looks at them through a comedic lens. Benjamin notes
that “this caprice of the universe corresponds to idiosyncrasy in the indi-
vidual.”28 This suggests that success and failure are idiosyncratic and excep-
tional and that it is not individuals who are responsible for this so much as
the “caprice of the universe.” And when we see these exceptional individuals
who have been touched by caprice, Benjamin suggests that we often see
them in a comical manner. What Benjamin doesn’t mention, however, is that
comedy focuses more on failure than success. This comes out in his explana-
tion and then, in an interesting moment, Benjamin moves from the “caprice
of the universe” to the individual and his or her “conviction,” which, as he
notes, is the real basis for comedy:

To account for this has always been the prerogative of comedy, whose
justice is the work not of heaven but of countless mistakes that end up
producing an exact result, thanks to one last little error. But where can
we locate the idiosyncrasy of the subject? In conviction.29

Benjamin points out that the “sober man” has “no idiosyncrasies” because
he “lives without convictions.” Those whose “life and thought” are grounded
in wisdom are not exceptional. In contrast, those people who have convic-
tions that are not based on wisdom are comical: “he is a rogue, a simple-
ton, a fool, a schlemiel (poor devil).”30 Benjamin suggests that, in his eyes,
“success is no lucky star” and “failure no unlucky star.” In other words, the
 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza 135
schlemiel—in contrast to other comic characters—is indifferent to success
and failure. His comedy is a comedy of conviction. And this makes him
idiosyncratic. To explain, Benjamin creates two categories “Success” and
“Lack of Success” and in each category has two subsets along with different
examples of comedic figures that match each category and subset.
The first category is labeled: “success at the cost of abandoning every con-
viction.”31 The example of this is the “confidence trickster” who “lets him
be guided by the situation, like a medium.”32 This character is, to be sure,
self-confident. The second category is: “success in testing every conviction.”
In this category Benjamin, places Schweik (that is “Good Soldier Schweik”
from the novel of the same name; a figure that Bertolt Brecht favored) who
he associates with the “genius of success.” He is the “lucky devil,” an “hon-
est fellow who wants to please everyone.”33
From here, Benjamin discusses two categories of failure. The first category
is: “lack of success in testing every conviction.” Benjamin calls this “normal
failure” and suggests that Bouvard and Pecuchet, the two main characters of
Gustav Flaubert’s unfinished satirical novel by the same name. Their failure
is not exceptional; it is normal.
In contrast, the second category of failure is the one closest to Benjamin
and to the Jews. He names this category: “lack of success at the cost of aban-
doning every conviction.”34 This comic character is literally on the limit of
nihilism. In contrast to the first category of success, Benjamin notes that this
category evinces the “genius of failure” and the two examples he gives are
“Chaplin or Schlemihl” (although the word “or” separates the two, Benja-
min thinks of Chaplin as a schlemiel).
Following these examples, Benjamin describes the main trait of the schle-
miel: “The schlemiel takes offence at nothing; he just stumbles over his own
feet. He is the only angel of peace who is suited to this world.”35 I want
to underscore the fact that Benjamin identifies with this character to such
an extent that he calls him the “only angel of peace who is suited to this
world.” Although it is the last of his categories, Benjamin sees it as the most
meaningful comic character since it is “suited to this world” which is not, as
Benjamin sees it, a world of good fortune. After all, the schlemiel is called,
by the translators of the “Selected Writings,” the “unlucky devil,” and for
good reason. But the name is deceptive since the schlemiel is also an agent
of bad luck and not just its target.
The other comic characters, apparently, are not, , “suited for the world.”
And this suggests that idiosyncratic or exceptional failure is more meaning-
ful to Benjamin that “normal failure” or the comedy of success. It has more
in common with his Jewishness and the world of exile than all of the other
comic figures. This comic angel, to be sure, should be read against the other
angel, the one popularized by academia and Gershom Scholem: Paul Klee’s
Angel and the one Benjamin wrote two fragments on—Agesilaus Santander.
It shows us that Benjamin’s other angel, the comic one otherwise known as
the schlemiel has not received due attention by any scholar. Perhaps this has
136 Menachem Feuer
to do with the fact that Scholem himself was put off by Benjamin’s interest
in comedy and failure. Regardless, even Scholem admitted that Benjamin
found Kafka’s aphorism on Don Quixote to be the most Jewish of Kafka’s
texts.
Benjamin finishes this section by arguing that if we were to look at the
“intersection of the axes” (of these categories) we can get to the “heart”
and “site of the complete identity of success and failure.”36 And who do we
find there but “Don Quixote, the man with a single conviction, whose story
teaches us that in this, the best or worst of all conceivable worlds(except that
this world is inconceivable), the conviction that stories of chivalry are true
can make a whipped fool happy, if it is his only conviction.”37 This, it seems,
was Benjamin’s hope. After all, as I have shown, Benjamin, since he was in his
mid-twenties, had great interest in Don Quixote. But is this really the case?
One wonders what Don Quixote would mean for a Jew. And this, I would
suggest, can be found in the fact that Benjamin, though attracted to Quix-
ote, is more drawn to the schlemiel. From this reflection, it seems as if Benja-
min is caught between them. He would like to be like Don Quixote, but the
world he lives in, the world of exile, is much different from the world Don
Quixote freely roams around. Only the schlemiel—an “angel of peace”—is
suited for the world. Don Quixote is not.

Kafka and the Jewish Don Quixote

In The Story of a Friendship, Gershom Scholem notes that Walter Benja-
min “knew little about Judaism.” But in his essay “Walter Benjamin and
His Angel,” he argues that Benjamin was “fully aware that Jewishness con-
stituted both the foundation of his being and the goal of his thinking.”38
Scholem argues that we see this Jewishness best in Benjamin’s appreciation
for Kafka: “Benjamin . . . . saw in the exegetic passages so often presented
by Kafka the crystallization of the Torah tradition mirrored in itself.”39 But
of all these “exegetic passages,” Scholem points out that there was one that
captured Benjamin’s imagination more than any other. Benjamin considered
“the twelve lines of the interpretation of Don Quixote” to be “the most
perfect extant piece of Kafka’s writing.”40 Taken together, Scholem seems
to be telling us that Walter Benjamin saw the “crystallization of the Torah
tradition mirrored in itself” in Franz Kafka’s parable on Don Quixote.
Although Scholem underestimated Benjamin’s interest in the comic, these
claims imply (a) that the Torah tradition is mirrored in itself through com-
edy (since Don Quixote is a comedy); (b) that there is something Jewish
about Franz Kafka’s “Truth of Sancho Panza.” Kafka’s interpretations, for
Scholem, teach us something that Cervantes’ interpretation of Don Quixote
doesn’t—something Jewish. This lesson—which is suggested by Scholem’s
reading of Benjamin and Kafka—is what I would call the comic secret of
Judaism. As we can already see, Walter Benjamin was fascinated with the
comedic and its relation to mystery.
 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza 137
To be sure, Benjamin saw his relationship to himself, to Kafka, and to
his Jewishness through the comic character that was the subject of Kaf-
ka’s “interpretation” of Don Quixote. The secret of this interpretation, for
Benjamin, is not Don Quixote so much as the “hidden tradition” of der
Shlemihl (the schlemiel). The closest a Jew can come to Don Quixote would
have to be by way of the schlemiel. But the schlemiel is not just Kafka’s
secret; it is Benjamin’s. The schlemiel belongs to what Benjamin and Arendt
(for altogether different reasons) might call a “hidden (Jewish) tradition”
(the subtitle of Arendt’s famous essay, “The Jew as Pariah,” which takes the
schlemiel as one of its main subjects, is “A Hidden Tradition”). Since Benja-
min was fascinated with the notion of tradition, we can say that Benjamin
was entertaining the idea that one receives and passes on this hidden Jewish
tradition by way of a religious-comic interpretation of Kafka. This suggests
that Benjamin—unlike Adorno—sees Kafka’s reading of Sancho Panza and
Don Quixote not simply in terms of modernity but in terms of Jewishness.
But this is more than a passing on of tradition: this is a tradition through
which Benjamin saw himself and Kafka. It was, as Adorno might say, more
relevant to Benjamin because it was so close to him (in a historical and social
sense). Perhaps Benjamin—in his letters to Scholem and Adorno—was trying
to pass it on to his future readers by way of allusion. After all, as Maimonides
well knew and demonstrated in his Guide to the Perplexed, one doesn’t pass
on a secret by telling it to another person: one passes it on by giving the atten-
tive reader an opportunity to connect the dots (or, as Maimonides might say,
connect the “chapter headings”). This—unfortunately—didn’t happen with
Adorno because he was more interested in Daumier than in Cervantes. And
while Scholem saw the importance of Kafka’s version of Quixote as central
for Benjamin, he didn’t see it as a secret so much as a disclosure of Benjamin’s
interest in Jewishness.

Conclusion
Benjamin wrote several letters to Scholem discussing Kafka. In a letter to
Gershom Scholem dated 11 August 11 1934, Walter Benjamin argues that
we find “Kafka’s messianic category” which is embodied in the “reversal”
of “studying.” Don Quixote goes backwards and by following him Sancho
Panzo “rereads his own existence.” Benjamin, to be sure, situates Kafka’s
version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at the very end of his own essay
on Kafka. In fact, the last words go to it.
Playing on Adorno, I would argue that Benjamin’s decision to do this
suggests that he saw something of a “metaphysical experience” in Kafka’s
version of Don Quixote. In this version, Benjamin didn’t simply experience
something general—or, as he says in a letter to Scholem, “Kafka’s messi-
anic category”—he also saw something deeply personal: namely, his Jew-
ish particularity (his Jewishness). Kafka’s Sancho Panza—Benjamin tells us,
echoing Kafka—has a philosophical delight in following Don Quixote all
138 Menachem Feuer
his life. But this pleasure—for Benjamin, and perhaps for Kafka—has to do
with the gratitude they have (as Adorno would put it) in finding something
that is concrete, situated, empirical—albeit in withdrawal. The schlemiel is
a character—a “type,” as Adorno and even Benjamin would put it—that
belongs neither to the bourgeosie nor to those who laugh at him. He belongs
to a distinctly Jewish form of failure. The laughter at this character doesn’t,
as Benjamin said of Don Quixote, salvage bourgeoisie consciousness. Rather,
it is a laugh at the laugh. The Jew doesn’t have the privilege of laughing as
does the reader of Don Quixote. However, this may be—for Benjamin—
the secret of Jewish laughter (a particular kind of laughter based on a very
particular kind of history which, at Benjamin’s time of writing his Kafka
essay and his letters to Adorno, was far from over; after all, these were the
moments before the Holocaust).
As Adorno argued in his final lecture on metaphysics, “fallibility . . . is the
condition of the possibility of such metaphysical experience. And it seems
to attach most strongly to the weakest and most fragile experiences” (140).
For a Jew, as Benjamin understands the schlemiel, fallibility is the condi-
tion of the possibility of Jewish experience. And it is, as we saw above in
his reading of “compass of success,” the “weakest and most fragile experi-
ences” because it is the experience of utter failure. This knowledge, this
“metaphysical experience,” is the “truth of Sancho Panza.” While it may be
the source of happiness and gratitude—for Adorno—it is also the source of
so much melancholy and sadness. And that is the irony of it all. Even though
Kafka’s characters and his version of Don Quixote are comical, they are not
laughable. At them we laugh, as Beckett would suggest and as Adorno takes
to in his critique of lightheartedness, the laugh that laughs at the laugh. It is,
so to speak, a laugh of the powerless not of the powerful. It expresses a kind
of happiness that is connected to the metaphysical experience of the Jewish
Don Quixote. And that experience belongs to Sancho Panza. It is his truth.
Perhaps it is ours as well.

Notes
1. Benjamin, SW2, 816.
2. Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann.
Trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 139.
3. By doing this, Adorno suggests that literature—rather than philosophy—is
the best source for understanding the meaning and possibility of what he calls
“metaphysical experience.” Philosophy reflects on this possible experience.
4. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, 140.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 141.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. AT, p. 29.
 Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza 139
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 226.
15. Ibid., p. 247.
16. Ibid., pp. 247–248.
17. NL, p. 251.
18. CC, p. 301.
19. Ibid., p. 302.
20. Ibid., pp. 309–310.
21. Ibid., pp. 310–311.
22. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940. Ed.
Gershom Scholem and Thodor Adorno. Trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn
M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 84.
23. Ibid., p. 84.
24. Ibid., p. 85.
25. Benjamin, SW3, 589.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 590.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York:
Paul Dry Books, 2012), 214.
39. Ibid., p. 196.
40. Ibid.
Part III

Proust
Recovering Experience
8 Adorno and Proust
Memory, Childhood, and the
Experiential Grounds of Social
Criticism
Roger Foster

Adorno often writes about childhood experience as a sort of refuge from

the alienated, deadening forms of experience that prevail in the world of
late modernity. The experiences accessible in a sheltered, pampered, and
happy childhood function as a kind of protective barrier that allows the
adult to withstand the shocks and blows of the withered experience of the
adult world. Adorno developed this elevated sense of childhood, as a kind
of placeholder for utopian social possibility, in large part from his reading
of Proust. Proust, Adorno writes, “kept faith with the childhood potential
for unimpaired experience and, with all the reflectiveness and awareness of
an adult, perceived the world in as undeformed a manner as the day it was
created” (NL2, 315–16). Proust managed to do this by constructing a form
of writing capable of resisting the tendency of thought towards “automa-
tization and mechanization,” which tends to force experience into regular
and predictable channels rather than tracing its own unique imprint. The
importance of this idea for Adorno is signaled by the fact that he described
his decision to return to Germany after 1945 in precisely these terms, assert-
ing his desire to “return to the scene of my childhood, ultimately with the
feeling that what we can achieve in life is little other than the attempt to
recapture our childhood in a different form.”1 Childhood is here an image
of an ideal happiness, one that also sustains the self in the face of an inhu-
man world. Thus Adorno writes of his early experience of the twilight in the
small village of Amorbach as taking away, in advance, the trauma of com-
modified experience for the German emigré in the United States.2 Adorno
writes of the frequent trips he took, especially with his mother and his aunt,
to this small village in the northeastern part of the Odenwald. Adorno met
the painter Max Rossmann, who had a studio in Amorbach, where Adorno
and his mother and aunt would drink coffee in the afternoon. Rossmann
was also partial to Wagner’s music, and Adorno writes that a phrase in Wag-
ner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg became associated in his mind with
Amorbach.3 Adorno came upon the phrase in Proust’s early collection of
short stories, Pleasures and Days.4 In Proust’s story, the phrase serves as an
early version of the short phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, which expresses for
Swann the essence of his love for Odette when that love has withered away.
144 Roger Foster
In the earlier story, the phrase becomes for Madam de Breyves the leitmotif
of her lover. On hearing the motif one day at a concert in Trouville, Madam
de Breyves “burst into tears.”5 In a twist that anticipates the development of
Proust’s idealism in In Search of Lost Time, Wagner’s phrase allows memory
to stand in for the true reality, allowing everything else to fade away, “as if
he alone were a real person, and all those present were as unreal as memo-
ries and shadows.”6
Adorno was well aware of this deep connection between his experience of
his own childhood and his reading of Proust. In his book on Mahler, Adorno
associates both Mahler and Proust with the idea of irrecoverable time as a
site of both unfettered melancholy and unfettered joy.7 Like Proust, Adorno
suggests, “Mahler rescued his idea from childhood.” In Negative Dialectic,
Adorno associates this idea of a unique happiness associated with childhood
memory with the possibility of metaphysical experience. Small villages with
names like Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, or Monbrunn hold out the
promise of unspoiled happiness to the visitor (ND, 373).8 But if one were to
actually visit, “what is promised would recede like the rainbow.” But rather
than leading to disappointment, this leads to the impression that one is actu-
ally too close to be able to see it. Adorno suggests that there is something
vital for metaphysical experience in the child’s sense that what he or she feels
and experiences in a beloved place is unrepeatable and unique, to be found
only in this particular place. The belief itself is in error, since the same expe-
rience is accessible to countless others from a similar social strata. But the
error “creates the model of experience, of a concept, which would finally be
that of the thing itself, not the paltry remainder that is split off from it” (ND,
373). The (ultimately) illusory promise of childhood experience is nonethe-
less powerful enough to create an expectant hope, against which experience
is made to constantly measure itself. Childhood experience, the wish that is
father to the thought, imbues thought with an expectation of utopian pos-
sibility that becomes the crucial motor of the striving of conceptual thinking
for its object. Opposed to the routine, mechanical application of concepts
which is concerned with which concept a particular case falls under, child-
hood experience enables a more demanding form of conceptual identifi-
cation. This involves saying “what something is” rather than what it falls
under. It involves identifying “with” rather than identifying “as” (ND, 149).
By holding out for this more demanding and rigorous form of knowing,
thinking, under the sway of the utopian promise of childhood experience, is
able to mount a concerted resistance to the dominance of superficial forms of
conceptual identification in social reality. In this essay, I want to excavate the
Proustian origins of Adorno’s understanding of the utopian concept.

The Artistic Self and the Social Self

It is in Contre Sainte-Beuve, an unfinished manuscript written in the last
years of the nineteenth century, that Proust first formulates the contrast
 Adorno and Proust 145
between the deep self (le moi profond) and the social self.9 Proust used
this contrast to mount a critique of the style of literary criticism developed
by Charles Sainte-Beuve, which focuses on the meticulous investigation of
the milieu of the artist in order to explain what a literary work is trying to
accomplish. The core of Sainte-Beuve’s method, argues Proust, consists in
the refusal to separate the person and the work. All manner of private details
about the author’s life become relevant, on this view, to the task of discern-
ing what the work means. This view, according to Proust, fails to understand
that “a book is a product of a different self than the one we manifest in our
daily habits.”10 There is a solid demarcation of literary creativity, Proust
is suggesting, from the rest of the social life of the artist. In the case of the
former, we come face to face with ourselves and our authentic voice, which
never appears as such in the social world of conversation. The artist is as
banal as all other selves in the world of daily social routines; the profound
self only emerges in the solitary work of literary creation. In Search of Lost
Time portrays the allure of friendship and the conversational scene of the
nineteenth-century salon as a distraction from the core task of literary cre-
ation, which “makes us sacrifice the sole real and incommunicable (other-
wise than by means of art) part of ourselves.”11 The social self is described as
a “superficial self” which is incapable of finding true joy or happiness, but is
lulled into an emotional stupor by the inducements of social intercourse. At
key points in the work, this distinction is developed into a theory of artistic
creativity. Proust describes music, for instance, as comprising a “communi-
cation of souls” that takes place at a depth greater than that achievable by
human language and theoretical ideas.12 What stirs within the deep self in
the experience of a work of art, Proust suggests, cannot be communicated in
the stock, repeatable phrases that make up the currency of social conversa-
tion. The deep self, Proust intimates, can only communicate with other deep
selves via the medium of art. The work of the artist is described by Proust as
a “return to the depths,” away from the social forces that distract us from
the creative task of the deep self. Self-love, passions, intelligence and habit
turn the self towards the “practical ends that we falsely call life.”13
In his 1958 lectures on dialectic at the University of Frankfurt, Adorno
credits Henri Bergson, Proust’s contemporary, with the insight that the rou-
tine work of conceptual classification falls short of the idea of philosophical
truth. Bergson’s focus on intuition as another form of knowledge, Adorno
argues, intends to capture the moment when “living experience or living
knowledge breaks through the crust of the reified, conventional representa-
tions given in advance.” In doing so, Adorno claims, thinking is able to reach
its object, “instead of having to make do with the already socially approved
insight about the thing.”14 Living experience corresponds here to the experi-
ence that, for Proust, is accessible to the deep self, beyond the conventional
schemes of habit and the intelligence. The central task of philosophy, accord-
ing to Adorno, involves the attempt to raise living experience into the form
of the concept, by stretching and manipulating our rigid, reified concepts
146 Roger Foster
until they start to move. Adorno lauds Hegel’s philosophy, for example, for
its concerted effort to absorb the “moment of irrationality and cast it into
conceptual structures.”15 It will be helpful, firstly, to excavate the roots of
Bergson’s notion of knowledge in the early Nietzsche.
In his early, unpublished epistemological writings, Nietzsche first develops
his view of the origin of concepts in a metaphorical process by which singular
things or events become accessible as exhibiting a similarity. Nietzsche por-
trays human knowledge as involving “the identification of things which are
not the same.”16 In the early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,”
Nietzsche argues that conceptual thought originates in a creative process by
which a physical stimulus is transformed into a sensory image. The image is
possessed of an experiential density that ties it to the original experience in
which it was formed. Nietzsche describes the process of the formation of con-
cepts as taking place through the enervation and depletion of the experiential
substance of the image. Every word becomes a concept “precisely insofar as
it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual
original experience to which it owes its origin.”17 Through the effacement of
its experiential specificity, the concept is able to establish likenesses among
things that are not the same. Nietzsche’s argument suggests that knowledge is
grounded in an underlying aesthetic activity, the creative response whereby a
stimulus is turned into an image. But concepts are essentially metaphors that
are in denial about their own creative, metaphorical basis. Because concepts
allow us to organize experience into regular, predictable, and repeatable ele-
ments, they serve a fundamental human need for security:

Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with
any repose, security and consistency: only by means of the petrification
and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from
the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, . . . only by
forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man
live with any repose, security and consistency.18

The scientific systematization of concepts leads to their increasing detach-

ment from the fundamental human drive to express experience through
metaphor, leading to the confinement of this drive to the realms of myth
and art. The aesthetic-creative activity comes to the surface at unpredictable
moments, leading potentially to the transformation of a system of concepts
on the basis of the disruption of the prevailing organization of similarities.
In Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion, this Nietzschean
distinction between a creative aesthetic activity, rooted in metaphor, and a
form of conceptual generality that serves the ends of security and stability,
is reinterpreted as an argument about the dual origins of moral obligation.
One root of obligation, Bergson argues, is a social pressure that reflects the
binding force of habit. Bergson describes this as a “closed” form of morality,
since its purpose is to preserve society’s current normative order by applying
 Adorno and Proust 147
a form of pressure, through the regularity of habit, to acts that constitute a
threat to the social totality. The second root of morality, which clearly aligns
with Nietzsche’s notion of an original aesthetic creativity, is described by
Bergson as a creative emotion that is generative of thoughts, beliefs, and
ideas.19 Bergson distinguishes two forms of emotion. There is firstly, the
emotion that is subsequent to the contemplation of an idea or of an image.
This is described as a kind of agitation of our sensibility by a mental repre-
sentation, an after-effect of an intellectual process that it does not control. In
the second case, Bergson argues, emotion is a cause of ideas rather than an
effect. And instead of being a form of social pressure that preserves stability
and security, this form of morality works by way of an attraction to the new
possibilities for meaning opened up by creative emotion.
In the case of the creative form of morality, emotion takes the form of what
Bergson calls the “joy of enthusiasm.”20 This is generated by the opening up
of new possibilities for progress and transformation, and hence has the qual-
ity of a feeling of liberation. Bergson associates this creative form of morality
with influential individuals in history who have initiated a new way of seeing
the world. Life has, for these creative types, “resonances of unsuspected senti-
ments, of the kind which might give birth to a new symphony.”21 Instead of
working to shore up the existing conceptual order and its parceling out of
reality, these creative individuals construct, on the basis of their emotional
creativity, an entirely new way of seeing that attracts converts who might
subsequently undertake the work of systematizing its insights. In contrast to
the “closed” form of morality, which is static and intolerant of change, the
second form of morality embodies movement and transformation. Bergson
associates this form with the aspiration towards a form of universal humanity,
in contrast to the restricted focus on the closure of society’s normative order.
The open form of morality is engendered by a supra-intellectual emotion that
precedes its own articulation and development in systematic form. Bergson
compares this construction to a Beethoven symphony, where the thematic
arrangement is guided constantly by the insight of an indivisible emotion.22
The contrast Bergson draws between the constructive and systematizing
work of the intelligence in articulating a moral system and the emotional
engagement that first opens out a new vision of the moral life, can be dis-
cerned in other modernist writers of the same era. In Robert Musil’s writ-
ings, emotional creativity is associated with the “other condition,” which
does the work of “exploding or dissolving the intellectualized, voluntarized
normal relationship between ‘I’ and (physical, social) world.”23 In the other
condition, Musil argues, the self adopts an ethical attitude the focus of which
is contemplative rather than practical. Virginia Woolf referred to the trans-
formative emotional experiences in question as “moments of being,” which
disrupt the security of our everyday schemes of ordering experience. Woolf
defines literary creativity in terms of the capacity to receive the shock of
these experiences, and the effort to translate them into an aesthetic arrange-
ment of elements that makes a moment of being perceptible in ordinary
148 Roger Foster
experience.24 Proust, like Musil and Woolf, associates art with the expres-
sion of a deeper self. The task of the artist is to externalize in the aesthetic
arrangement the unique emotional relation to the world that marks the
experience of the deep self.25 Through its capacity to raise the deep self to
the form of self-expression, art makes possible the deeper sharing of mean-
ing that Proust calls the communication of souls.

Ethical Experience and Modernity

The association of the ethical point of view with the emotional experience
of the deep self makes possible a supra-rationalist understanding of ethi-
cal critique. Moral progress, on this view, does not follow a plan set out in
advance by thought, divisible in stages and guided by explicit principles.
Rather, ethical experience transforms our sense of the everyday such that it
opens up a new type of universal obligation constituted by a break with the
past. This notion of moral progress places particular emphasis on ethical
experiences of injury and injustice. It is the concrete experience of injustice
that first opens up a perspective in which the abolition of injury and suffer-
ing becomes a goal of collective human action. Ethical ends and aspirations
are not the fruits of theoretical inquiry and its systematization of current
opinions and ideas; they emerge rather through the transformative force
of the concrete disclosure of injustice and its delineation of a trajectory of
movement towards a universal goal. The crucial thing here is to appreciate
Bergson’s point that emotional creativity (understood here as ethical insight)
enables the temporal experience of movement towards a goal, where the
goal is not a finished state specified in thought, but rather a trajectory driven
and guided by the sense of harmony with an underlying emotional experi-
ence. The notions of liberty and equality that powered the French Revolu-
tion, for instance, possess a semantic indeterminacy that makes them open
to the creation of new conditions for the development of liberty and equality
in previously inconceivable directions. But the experience of injustice and
social oppression that formed the original experience continues to guide the
trajectory of these terms, making possible creative appropriations of equal-
ity and liberty that flesh out the original experience of injustice.
The motor for the generalization of moral principles, on this view, comes
from the experience of injustice. Thinking through this idea would give us an
alternative way of understanding the fundamental aspirations of democratic
societies. The notion of democratic progress becomes problematic when it
becomes conceived in terms of a fixed goal that forms the terminus of prog-
ress. The aspiration of democratic progress, as Frédéric Worms has recently
argued, does not define an ultimate goal, but rather “an ongoing and specific
fight against the precise forms of ‘chronic’ harm, which is characterized by
the progress against regressions and reversals.”26 Democracy, understood in
this sense, is essentially conceived as an aspiration that wells up in response
to the forms of injustice and violence that are co-constructive of human
 Adorno and Proust 149
relations. It is precisely when understood in this sense that democracy takes
on a temporal trajectory, establishing the present as an orientation towards
a possible future driven by the imperative to continue and transform the
past. When an injustice is denounced or a wall is brought down, Worms
suggests, “in that instant, a temporality opens up.”27 This orientation gets
distorted when the idea of democracy is presented as an achievable state of
affairs rather than a trajectory of struggle, subsequently giving rise to the
illusion of an “end” of democracy, as though human relations might be con-
ceivable beyond the ever present possibility of power and struggle.
The importance of the temporal horizon in democratic struggle helps to
make sense of the reading of Adorno as what Freyenhagen has called a “thor-
ough negativist,” meaning that Adorno denies that we can currently know
the good, but we do not need to do so in order to oppose injustice.28 Freyen-
hagen suggests that Adorno’s adherence to this idea derives primarily from
his sense that, in current conditions, the good life is unlivable and unknow-
able. He argues that even in an “administered and radically evil world, dif-
ferent kinds of living can be evaluated differently, although these evaluations
can never add up to more than a minima moralia.”29 However the broadly
Bergsonian account developed above suggests that a negativist denial of
knowledge of the good is in fact crucial to temporal horizon opened up by
the identification of and struggle against forms of injustice. The attempt to
establish fixed principles of the good life capable of guiding the trajectory of
struggle threatens to break the connection between the motivating experi-
ences that open up a horizon of social justice and the forms of struggle that
carry those experiences forward. It is not so much, as Freyenhagen argues,
the extent of current injustice that makes specific claims about the good state
of affairs impossible. Rather, the absence of substantive claims about the
good reflects the experiential situation of a horizon of struggle opened up by
concrete experiences of suffering. This follows from the awareness of the role
of emotional creativity at the root of the struggle against forms of injustice.
Instead of following fixed points on a pre-given intellectual map, the ethical
experience that discloses injustice at the same time creates a new understand-
ing of justice that is present at an aspiration. The negative understanding of
the good life is in fact the only conception with an adequate understanding of
the creative role of emotional experience in opening up new and previously
undiscovered forms of injustice to social awareness and criticism.
The role of negative experience, in the form of suffering or injustice, in
orienting ethical critique is elucidated in Bernstein’s idea of “fugitive ethical
events.”30 These events represent the fleeting appearance of the possibility
of ethics, when ethical life itself has been rendered unlivable by the hol-
lowing out of the ethical substance of social practice. In late modernity,
Bernstein argues, ethical actions and experiences are “enclosed on all sides
in rationalized institutional structures and social practices.” What makes
ethical experience “fugitive” is therefore “the experience of the ethical as
withdrawn from the possibility of general circulation.”31 These experiences,
150 Roger Foster
therefore, cannot exert a transformative effect on everyday practice. There
is “no habitable space,” Bernstein insists, between these fugitive episodes
and mundane existence. Those episodes remain forms of resistance to the
rationalized whole that turns ethical experience into enervated norms and
rules. But there is no way of leading fugitive experience into the realm of the
everyday. The question, for Bernstein, concerns how we can recover ethical
knowledge, when its possibility has been eroded by the loss of the kind of
material meaning that lies at the origin of ethical experience. While I am in
general agreement with Bernstein’s view of what is at stake in modernist eth-
ics, I want to emphasize, in the account to follow, that moral insight is not,
according to the modernist picture, a purely cognitive operation. It involves,
as part of its very sense, a self-transformative moment, a dis-location of the
self in relation to its experience. Thus moral insight can be thought of as “a
form of conceptuality that is capable of responding to injurable bodies as
themselves imposing demands to respond in a particular way.”32 Bernstein
goes on to say that the structure of fugitive ethical events is generated “on
analogy with modernist works of art.”33 This is an intriguing claim, however
I want to suggest that if we think through this connection, we come upon a
moment of dis-location of the self which subverts the attempt to construct
ethical experience on the model of conceptual cognition, even according to
the expanded operation of the concept that Bernstein advocates. My dis-
agreement with Bernstein’s model, then, is that it subordinates the transfor-
mative force of aesthetic experience to its purely cognitive role in serving
to expand the realm of ethical knowledge. I want to say, instead, that the
ethical import of aesthetic experience derives from its capacity to displace
the self into a different relation to its experience. It is not only an expansion
of knowledge, but also a convulsion of the self.
The difficulty with reading the connection between aesthetic and ethical
experience purely as an expansion of cognitive capacity becomes evident if
we consider the emphasis that Adorno places on the moment of convulsion
(Erschütterung) in aesthetic experience. What is most significant about mod-
ernist works of art, according to Adorno, is that they make possible what,
in the 1958/9 lectures on aesthetics, he calls “moments of breakthrough,”
moments, that is, of “being overwhelmed [des Überwältigtwerdens], of for-
getting of self, in fact of the extinguishing [Auslöschung] of the subject,” as
though in these moments the subject, “convulsed within itself, would col-
lapse in on itself.”34 Adorno emphasizes that the utopian intention of the
artwork derives from its character as “ein Verletzendes,” that is, something
which injures, and hence something which not only repulses the expectation
that the work is to be enjoyed, as amenable to the faculty of taste, but which
unsettles any attempt to adopt a purely contemplative stance to the artwork
tout court. And it is in this dissolution that the transformative force of aes-
thetic experience is situated, its capacity to engender the “Enthobenwerden
aus der alltäglichen Sphäre,” the movement by which the self is raised above
the everyday, which makes aesthetic experience more than a purely cognitive
 Adorno and Proust 151
experience.35 It is not simply an expansion of what we know; its potential
to shift our cognitive engagement with the world is rather a consequence of
its capacity to transform the self. And this is where, I suggest, the focus on
reflective judgment as expanding the scope of cognition rather than trans-
forming it through its self-reflective qualities, falls short. The connection lies
instead in the dis-location of self which allows the self to break through the
purely theoretical stance towards experience underlying the constitution of
the modern subject.
Adorno found the theoretical resources for this notion of an ethical con-
vulsion that dislocates the self in Proust’s notion of an alternative tempo-
rality, made possible by the work of memory, which breaks apart linear
temporality and its systematic exclusion of ethical experience.

Proust and Metaphor

Adorno saw the early twentieth-century modernist writers as responding to a
crisis of time. The roots of this crisis in its relation to literature can be traced
to the responses of nineteenth-century writers like Baudelaire and Flaubert
to the disintegration of the temporal continuum, its dissociation into a suc-
cession of meaningless moments. Marder notes that Baudelaire and Flau-
bert regard literary writing as “an antidote to the corrosive temporality of
lived life.”36 In early twentieth-century modernists such as Proust and Joyce,
Adorno argues, it is not individuals who experience disintegration through
the passing of dead time, but rather time itself begins to dissociate itself into
moments that resist the idea of temporal succession. In Proust and Joyce,
“the temporal moments into which the narrative has disintegrated now even
begin to escape from the relationship of temporal succession and through
the power of memory draw all temporal events back into themselves like a
whirlpool.”37 A feature of this process in Proust is the use of what Weinstein
calls the “long-dilated present.”38 Things do not feature in a linear history
which links their present to their past forms and future transformations;
single moments of vision and contemplation often stand in for realist narra-
tive, unfolding deeper motives and hidden characteristics in a meticulously
described scene. One particularly significant element of this opposition to
linear history in Proust is the role of metaphor.
In his book on Proust and metaphor, de Beistegui argues that Proust dis-
tinguishes linear time from the time that is rescued in memory:

there is something that passes in time (this lived present that is replaced
by another one while still being retained by it); but there’s also something
that doesn’t pass, something that remains, not as present but as a power
of becoming, as what can return, surprising consciousness and exceeding
the reduced scope of our perception. Time’s split from the outset, then
(into linear time and sedimented time, into incorporated and incorporeal
time), the present fractured (into the lived and the unlived present).39
152 Roger Foster
The experience of time comprises more than linear time, splitting into the
time of instants and a time of essential moments that open out onto latent
possibilities buried within the folds of linear, lived time. The insight that
there is more than linear, lived time comes to fruition in experiences of
involuntary memory. With this idea, Proust had in mind a kind of memory
of the body that is stored in the accumulated reactions and impressions
by which the body assimilates its environment. The very beginning of the
novel signals this focus on bodily memory, with its singular description of
how, on waking, the body slowly recovers its awareness of its environment.
Proust’s narrator describes voluntary memory as the “memory of the intel-
ligence,” whose store of information about the past conserves nothing that
truly belongs to it.40 While voluntary memory tells us nothing about the
past itself, bodily memory is subject to the deadening force of habitude or
habit, which over time converts the experience stored in the body into a
scheme of automatic reactions allowing the self to competently navigate its
environment. The experience of the past itself, stored in the body, is only
able to return when the daily routines constructed by the work of habitude
are momentarily disrupted or overcome. A clear example of this occurs in
the passage “Intermittences of the heart,” in Sodom and Gomorrah, where
Proust’s narrator discusses his grandmother’s death. The disruption of habit
in this episode occurs because the narrator returns to the Grand Hotel at
the seaside town, Balbec, where he had last stayed with his grandmother.
It is interesting to note the physical descriptions by which Proust conveys
the narrator’s recall of the sensory qualities of the original experience. The
narrator feels “filled with an unknown and divine presence” and is suddenly
shaken by sobs and tears.41 It is as though “the self whom I was at that
time,” and which had disappeared for many years, “was once more very
close to me.”42 It is now that the narrator writes “I had only just understood
that [my grandmother] was dead.” It is only now, that is to say, after the
experience has been worked upon by memory, that the experience is able to
be contemplated in its truth.
Sometimes, of course, these efforts to recover an embodied memory are
doomed to failure. But this often stems from a failure to appreciate that
experiences of involuntary memory, while founded in the body’s responses
to its environment, require the reconstructive work of the imagination to
be worked up into the kind of experience that disrupts the flow of habi-
tude. Proust’s narrator notes that in looking in things for the reflection pro-
jected into them by our mind, we are “deceived in noticing that things seem
deprived in nature of the charm that they acquired in our thinking through
their proximity to certain ideas.”43 This is why true reality is only discovered
by the mind (l’esprit), “being the object of a mental operation.”44 This is the
disappointment that happens when the narrator visits the church at Balbec,
experiencing a sense of deception when seeing the church façade situated
among mundane objects and in relation with grimy bustle of daily life. But
this sense of disappointment with reality that runs throughout Proust’s novel
 Adorno and Proust 153
is eventually supplanted by a sense of joy that emerges with the realization
that genuine reality is a work of the mind as it strives to make its embodied
experience communicable. The narrator’s assertion that “true life, life finally
discovered and illuminated,” is literature, associates literary creativity with
the expression of the “deep self” that is absent from the give and take of
everyday social interaction.45 The joy that accompanies the expression of
the deeper self is like the “joy of enthusiasm” that, for Bergson, is associated
with the emergence of a new, emotionally resonant way of seeing the world.
For Proust, as for Bergson, this joy or happiness is the province of art.
Proust began to think of the revelation of truth as occurring in a singular
vision of the artist at the time when he was moving away from Ruskin’s Pla-
tonic notion of beauty as a fixed order accessible to contemplation. Proust had
translated Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens in 1901, and was deeply influenced by its
notion of aesthetic beauty. But in subsequent years, Proust began to think of
the artist’s vision as a disclosure of the deeper significance of phenomena that
was nonetheless tied to an individual perspective on things. Ideas, as Proust
came to conceive them, are not extracted from the sensible by an operation
of the intelligence; they are rather, as de Beistegui notes, the form by which
the sensible transcends itself, going “beyond itself in depth, implicitly offering
itself as meaning.”46 The world of ideas or essences is not a timeless realm
accessible to human contemplation, but is rather constructed by the artist
who responds to the striving for sense of the material world. The truths that
well up in involuntary memory, since they are not under the conscious control
of the subject, seem to respond to an outside and in fact always have a mate-
rial reference that is unfolded in the articulation of its sense.
In a series of lecture notes concerning Proust for his 1960/61 course on
ontology, Merleau-Ponty depicts Proustian ideas as a kind of “lining” (dou-
blure) or membrane of the visible.47 Proust’s ideas, unlike Platonic ideas,
are not released by the illumination of the intelligence, they are like another
dimension of the visible that can only be decoded by art. The revelation of
the visible world in art, Merleau-Ponty suggests, does not take place via a
signification that is an “idea of the intelligence,” but is rather a “significa-
tion that is metaphor.”48 It achieves this through establishing connections
between things that are separated by our habits and intellectual practices.
An example of this process in the novel is provided by the impressionist
painter Elstir and the reversing of the significations “sea” and “land” in his
paintings. The narrator notes at a later point in the novel that he had learned
from Elstir to deconstruct these oppositions that disguise the underlying
correspondences of reality. Thus the sea would appear to be like a vast rural
countryside on certain days.49 This distinction corresponds to the differ-
ence between what Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible calls “the
order of the true,” where things are understood as objects of thought with
their intrinsic properties, in contrast to the “order of the event.”50 Literature,
music, and art in general are for Merleau-Ponty aligned with the order of
the event, where ideas are not separable from their sensible appearance,
154 Roger Foster
and are given in what he refers to as a “carnal experience.”51 These ideas
owe their authority, power, and fascination to the fact that they are “visible
through the sensible or in its heart.” But also, events can inaugurate a new
way of seeing the world that is capable of exerting a transformative effect.
Events disrupt the logic of linear time by instantiating a new sense of how
the past is carried forward into the future, a sense that is itself inseparable
from the experience of the event.
What emerges here, as Vanzago explains, is a view of metaphor as a cre-
ative vision that weaves an emotional and also aspirational component into
the notion of truth:

a good metaphor is not good because it gives an object a new, unex-

pected name, but because it lets something different become visible.
Metaphors, accordingly, are instruments of vision, in the sense that they
allow one to see differently. They institute new relations, bring to light
what was concealed.52

Vanzago here aligns Merleau-Ponty’s view of metaphor with the Nietzs-

chean scheme whereby metaphor, reflecting the nature of man as an “artis-
tically creating subject” is the original creative appropriation of the world
underlying human language itself. Metaphors are not extensions of literal
meaning; they are the creative appropriation of sensibility that is at the very
core of human cognition. This is why, as Merleau-Ponty insists, painting
does not imitate the visible, it “renders visible” what otherwise remains
unknown, providing the “sketch of a genesis of things.”53 Art deals with
sensible ideas that are inseparable from the texture of the visible world to
which they respond. These ideas do not obey the theoretical imperative
of making the world available for the conceptual operations of thinking.
Rather, they impose a new way of seeing that is not a theory about sensible
particulars; it is rather a call to transform our forms of interaction with
things, a transformation given in promissory form in the creative vision
itself.
Sensible ideas, as Vanzago points out, are also elusive. If we were to pos-
sess them completely, “we would not really have them, we would rather lose
them.”54 This recalls a point Adorno makes in Negative Dialectic concerning
the expression of the inexpressible. Adorno suggests that when the expression
of the inexpressible succeeds, as in the case of great music, “its seal was that
which slips away [das Entgleitende] and the transient, and it attached itself
to the course, not to the ‘that’s it!’ that points it out” (ND, 110). For Adorno,
the key to allowing the inexpressible to find its way to language without
turning it into a theory about things is to allow it to appear in the concep-
tual movement. The inexpressible is nowhere asserted, but it pervades the
movement itself without one ever being able to grasp it, without, as Adorno
sometimes puts it, ever becoming dingfest, nailed down as a thing. The suc-
cess of an expression is marked by its slipping from one’s grasp as soon as
 Adorno and Proust 155
it appears. The point here is that the inexpressible is not a state of affairs, it
is a possibility, an opening to the future that emerges in a creative vision of
the sensible world. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the “lining” of the sensible, a fold
that forever prevents it from coinciding with itself, and makes any genuine
attempt to grasp it into a creative vision that transforms it.

Conclusion
In 1968, when Adorno was working on his last major work, Aesthetic The-
ory, and embroiled in an increasingly antagonistic relationship with student
activists, he wrote a letter to the city of Amorbach protesting (successfully, it
turned out) the projected route of a planned new road construction in Amor-
bach. Adorno writes in the letter of being “deeply connected with Amorbach
since my childhood,” referring to the town as meine Heimat (“my home”).55
Amorbach was for Adorno the memory of the utopian possibility of an
experience that coincides with its concept, where language says what some-
thing is rather than what it falls under. The “universality of beauty,” Adorno
writes in Minima Moralia, “can communicate itself to the subject in no other
way than in obsession with the particular.” This necessitates an indifference,
“almost contempt” for all that lies outside the object itself.56 Adorno fur-
ther elaborates on this point in stating that “injustice is the medium of true
justice.” Justice is not a set of general properties abstracted by treating par-
ticular events as interchangeable bearers of those properties. It is the fruit
of a never ending series of interventions and struggles that creatively extend
the meaning of justice on the basis of particular experiences of injustice. In
another section of Minima Moralia, Adorno makes the case that there is an
emotional component at the core of thinking that powers thought’s engage-
ment with the potential of its object:

Because even its remotest objectifications are nourished by impulses,

thought destroys in the latter the condition of its own existence. Is not
memory inseparable from love, which seeks to preserve what yet must
pass away? Is not each stirring of fantasy engendered by desire which, in
displacing the elements of what exists, transcends it without betrayal?
Is not the simplest perception shaped by fear of the thing perceived, or
desire for it?57

Memory is a form of love, we might say, because it exhibits a partiality

towards experiences that the subject’s emotional creativity makes into a
source of profound joy or suffering. As Adorno recognizes, there is some-
thing false and misleading about the experience of a happiness that is only
available here and nowhere else. But it is this partiality, this injustice on
behalf of the particular, the subject’s love for this experience and indiffer-
ence to others available to persons of the same milieu, that allows the love
for the particular to function as an incipient claim of ethical obligation.
156 Roger Foster
Proust’s notion of the transformative power of the deep self draws on the
understanding of emotional creativity in Nietzsche and Bergson, but also
goes beyond them in showing how that transformative potential resides in
the time of the event and its power to resonate across different strata of time.
This is effectuated through the power of metaphor to create new connec-
tions and correspondences. Unlike the capacity of the intellect to establish
commonality through the identification of common properties, involuntary
memory makes connections that are infused with a personal resonance, and
for which the creative task of the thinker is to “release the spirit” from the
sensible impression.58 The source of creative insight is contemplation that
lingers with an impression until it is able to find an adequate expressive form.
Truth itself, Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, depends on the “tempo, the
patience and perseverance of lingering with the particular.”59 Lingering com-
prises what Adorno calls here the “injustice of contemplation” that immerses
itself in the object. The truths that emerge here, Proust claims, are superior to
the truths of the intelligence because they embody a personal, creative vision.
This disappearance of the self into the object, as Adorno saw, provides an
imaginative space for the construction of new concepts, opening up new areas
of experience to the creative work of contemplation as if for the first time.
Adorno spoke often of the importance of fantasy, imagination, and desire in
nourishing contemplation, making of it more than the pale reproduction of
what already is. “Once the last traces of emotion have been eradicated,” he
wrote in Minima Moralia, “nothing remains of thought but absolute tautol-
ogy.”60 The model of experience that Adorno imbibed in childhood, the idea
of a concept which would “finally be that of the thing itself,” was itself the
creative-emotional root of Adorno’s social-critical philosophy.

Notes
1. Quoted in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Living-
stone (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 25.
2. Reinhard Pabst (ed.), Adorno: Kindheit in Amorbach (Frankfurt am Main: Insel
Verlag, 2003), 18.
3. ‘Dem Vogel, der da sang, dem war der Schnabel hold gewachsen’ (The bird that
sang today had a finely-formed beak), Adorno: Kindheit in Amorbach, 17. The
phrase occurs at the end of scene 3, Act 1 of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meis-
tersinger von Nürnberg.
4. Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days, trans. Edward Ousselin (New York: Dover,
2014), 136.
5. Ibid., Pleasures and Days, 138.
6. Ibid., Pleasures and Days, 141.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 146.
8. I have altered the English translation of Negative Dialektik where necessary.
9. Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).
10. Contre Sainte-Beuve, 127.
11. Marcel Proust, À la Recherche de Temps Perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 1051.
12. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 1797.
 Adorno and Proust 157
13. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 2285.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, Einführung in die Dialektik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 144.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, 3 Studes on Hegel, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 108.
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Note-
books of the early 1870’s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 51.
17. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early
1870’s, 83.
18. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early
1870’s, 86.
19. Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Presses
universitaries de France, 1932), 40.
20. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 49.
21. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 36.
22. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 268.
23. Robert Musil, Diaries 1899–1941 (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 320.
24. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being (London: Harcourt,
1985), 72.
25. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 1797.
26. Frédéric Worms, Les maladies chroniques de la democratie (Paris: Desclée de
Brouwer, 2017), 52.
27. Les maladies chroniques de la democratie, 74.
28. Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 33.
29. Adorno’s Practical Philosophy, 199.
30. Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 419ff.
31. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 420.
32. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 323.
33. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 420.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetik 1958/9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009),
196–197.
35. Ästhetik 1958/9, 193.
36. Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5.
37. Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Essays on Mass Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 75.
38. Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 2005), 126.
39. Miguel de Beistegui, Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 53.
40. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 44.
41. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 1326.
42. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 1328.
43. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 77.
44. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 1337.
45. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 2284.
46. Proust and Metaphor, 60.
47. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de Cours 1959–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 194.
48. Notes de Cours 1959–1961, 202.
49. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 1347.
50. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 72.
51. Le visible et l’invisible, 197.
158 Roger Foster
52. Luca Vanzago, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s
Last Writings’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (2005), 563–474, 467.
53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et L’Esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 74.
54. ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s Last Writ-
ings’, 472.
55. Adorno: Kindheit in Amorbach, 10.
56. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Rodney Livingston (London: Verso,
2005), 76.
57. Minima Moralia, 122.
58. À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, 2271.
59. Minima Moralia, 77.
60. Minima Moralia, 123.
9 Seeing In, Seeing Through
Adorno and Proust
Owen Hulatt

Introduction
In Adorno’s canon of self-ascribed influences, touchstones, and inspirations,
there is no figure which occupies as curious a position as Proust. Where
Proust appears, we are regularly informed that he is a central, even totemic
figure for Adorno, whose concerns are, we are assured, utterly character-
istic and illustrative of Adorno’s own. And yet, despite these bold asser-
tions about Proust’s centrality, we do not find Proust, or work on him, at
the centre of any conspectus of Adorno’s work. Kafka and Beckett, who
are comparable recipients of Adorno’s enthusiasm and acclaim, take center
stage repeatedly in the course of both of Adorno’s most important works,
Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, and receive dedicated essays to
boot. Proust, by contrast, receives far less sustained or direct attention.
We have three pieces: “Proust Valery Museum,” “Short Commentaries
on Proust,” and the very brief “On Proust.” The first tackles a somewhat
peripheral controversy, concerning the status and function of museums,
being based on remarks by Proust and Paul Valéry in this connection. The
latter two are directly addressed to Proust’s great novel A la Recherché de
Temps Perdu, but are constrained by their brevity and somewhat fragmen-
tary structure. They also do not find Adorno at the height of his analytical
powers. Outside of these resources, and some remarks in “Meine Stärkste
Eindrücke 1953,” we are bereft of a sustained, unified, and direct dealing
with Proust. There is nothing of the sustained insight and detail of Adorno’s
Trying to Understand Endgame,1 nor indeed any fine-grained readings of
the sort which Adorno applied to Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.2
This leaves us in a difficult position, but also one of promise. What is
required is to trace Adorno’s remarks on Proust across his oeuvre, scattered,
incomplete, and allusive as they may be. This will establish just why and how
Adorno took Proust to be of importance. It is to this which we will first turn.

The Importance of Proust

Adorno, for all that he is an opponent of instrumental reason, is often all too
happy to instrumentalize Proust’s novel in ways which often betoken both
160 Owen Hulatt
an aggressively tendentious interpretation, and the beginnings of an appeal
to authority. For example, we find in Aesthetic Theory that

Proust’s insight that Renoir transformed the perception of nature not

only offers the consolation that the writer imbibed from impressionism,
it also implies horror.3

Or in Minima Moralia that

Proust’s observation that in photographs, the grandfather of a duke or

of a middle-class Jew are so alike that we forget their difference of social
rank, has a much wider application: the unity of an epoch objectively
abolishes all the distinctions that constitute the happiness, even the
moral substance, of individual existence.4

Or in Negative Dialectics that

There is one variant that should not be missing from the excessively
narrow initial questions in the Critique of Pure Reason, and that is the
question how a thinking obliged to relinquish tradition might preserve
and transform tradition. For this and nothing else is the mental expe-
rience. It was plumbed by Bergson in philosophy, and even more by
Proust in the novel.5

Proust functions here, then, as a kind of associational peg on which to hang

Adorno’s own philosophy; and the use of Proust as a touchstone in elabo-
rating these ideas serves primarily, if one may be cynical, to burnish them
through the luster of his name. Here, then, we learn incomparably more
about Adorno than we do about Proust, and the importance and influence
of Proust is hard to discern. Indeed, it can appear that Adorno’s own ideas
are of primary importance, in coloring—sometimes aggressively so—his
appreciation of Proust.
These are, however, fleeting references only. And Adorno often makes use
of any number of figures as kinds of shorthand for evidence of, or support
for, claims; the names of Kafka and Beckett take on almost an incantatory
role in this way. However, in the case of Kafka and Beckett, we are able to
direct ourselves to engaged and thorough readings of these figures, which
reveals a rather more sensitive and complete aesthetic treatment of them.6 In
the case of Proust, the only remotely similar piece we have is Adorno’s Short
Commentaries on Proust, which hews closely to passages from Proust’s
great novel. This begins with Adorno noting, and valorising, its somewhat
fragmentary and occasional form:

[In Proust’s work] the whole, resistant to abstract outlines, crystallizes

out of intertwined individual presentations. Each of them conceals
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 161
within itself constellations of what ultimately emerges as the idea of the
novel . . . . I hope through immersion in fragments to illuminate some-
thing of the work’s substance.7

There is much of interest and worth here; Adorno is certainly correct that
Proust’s novel, while having a complex and considered architecture, realizes
that architecture through flowing, episodic paroxysms of descriptive enthu-
siasm. These descriptive flows invite and sustain our attention, and indeed
refract and help constitute, through their very particularity, the overarching
nature of the novel as a whole. This will become important presently.
After this promising beginning, however, Adorno is unable to execute this
kind of epigrammatic treatment of Proust. For example:

The episode about Marcel’s disagreement with his revered Uncle Adolf,
the demimondaine who occasions the disaster through no fault of her
own is not lost to the novel. As Odette Swann, she .  .  . manages to
achieve the highest social honours . . . . Proust’s work captures one of
the strangest experiences; . . . that the people who are decisive in our
lives appear in them as though appointed and dispensed by an unknown
author, as though we had awaited them in this place and no other.8

This does not find Adorno at his analytical best, and more clearly remains
to be said about why Proust looms so large in Adorno’s mental economy.
I take my goal in this paper, in line with the orienting topic of this edited
collection, to explore the importance of the experience of reading Proust, of
the nature of that aesthetic object and its proper aesthetic experience, for
Adorno’s philosophy. Due to a combination of historical factors, Adorno
was not able to fully unpack what this importance was, although he often
gestured towards it, or asserted that it was there. To anticipate, we will
find that the experience of Proust’s work—grounded in the peculiar use of
concepts, form, and particularity proper to that work—provides a plausible
inspiration, and perhaps something approaching justification, for many of
the more controversial and under-explained features of Adorno’s work, its
epistemology in particular.
In order to proceed, we need to get a fix on which general features of
Proust’s work—not his specific claims, or passages—were of such impor-
tance to Adorno. We have a handful of passages from Adorno which I
believe begin to open up what they might be.
The more important references to Proust in Adorno are always epistemic.
They are descriptions of the specific nature of Proust’s ability to describe,
analyse, and know things. They are important both because they dovetail
with Adorno’s own idiosyncratic epistemology in enlightening ways, and
because they are the best evidence we have as to why Adorno claimed that
Proust “has played a central role in my intellectual economy for decades, and
I simply could not imagine him absent from the continuity of my concerns.”9
162 Owen Hulatt
For brevity, I will focus on two of these, both of which stem from Nega-
tive Dialectics. The first of these concerns Adorno’s account of the “meta-
physical experience,” a fugitive and unclear notion in Adorno. While, as the
phrase implies, this notion has a strong metaphysical content, it also gives
onto the epistemological question of the ideal relationship between concepts
and particulars:

What is a metaphysical experience? If we disdain projecting it upon

allegedly primal religious experiences, we are most likely to visualize it
as Proust did, in the happiness, for instance, that is promised by village
names like Applebachsville, Wind Gap, or Lords Valley. One thinks that
going there would bring the fulfilment, as if there were such a thing.
Being really there makes the promise recede like a rainbow. And yet one
is not disappointed; the feeling now is one of being too close, rather, and
not seeing it for that reason. And the difference between the landscapes
and regions that determine the imagery of a childhood is presumably
not great at all; what Proust saw in Illiers must have happened else-
where to many children of the same social stratum. But what it takes to
form this universal, this authentic part of Proust’s presentation, is to be
entranced in one place without squinting at the universal. . . . Happi-
ness, the only part of metaphysical experience that is more than impo-
tent longing, gives us the inside of objects as something removed from
the objects.10

What is of interest here is Adorno’s conception of a “metaphysical experi-

ence” as one which syncopates particularity and universality, without doing
interpretive violence to either. In such an experience, one is “entranced in
one place without squinting at the universal”—namely, without forcibly
abductively applying concepts to one’s experience—and yet nonetheless, this
experience has an authentic universality. It is this, Adorno claims, which is
the “authentic part of Proust’s presentation.”
Secondly, we find in Aesthetic Theory this short but important claim
about Proust and Bergson:

The reality of artworks testifies to the possibility of the possible. The

object of art’s longing, the reality of what is not, is metamorphosed in
art as remembrance.  .  .  . Remembrance remains bound up with sem-
blance: for even in the past the dream was not reality. Yet art’s imago
is precisely what, according to Bergson’s and Proust’s thesis, seeks to
awaken involuntary remembrance in the empirical, a thesis that proves
them to be genuine idealists. . . . They seek to escape the curse of aes-
thetic semblance by displacing its quality to reality.11

What emerges as characteristic of Proust, on Adorno’s reading, is an inter-

mingling of the empirically present, the particular, with universal, conceptual
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 163
content. This intermingling is not a violent one, in which universals are applied
to particulars, but rather a one in which universals show forth through par-
ticulars. This is what leads Adorno to term Proust a “Platonist.”12 Proust
sees in, and sees through, the real, and finds conceptual content genuinely if
imperfectly intermingled with it. As Adorno puts it, in Proust “false general-
ity disintegrates under Proust’s ravenous gaze, but in return what is usually
considered coincidental acquires an oblique, irrational universality.”13 An
important remark, which may testify to a related reading, can be found in
Walter Benjamain’s piece “The Image of Proust,” in which we are informed
that Proust “lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the
world distorted in the state of resemblance, world in which the true surrealist
face of existence breaks through.”14 It is this conception of surrealism which,
I argue, is at work also in Adorno’s valorization of Proust. Adorno himself
notes this connection to both Proust and Benjamin:

[Proust’s work is] surrealist in that it coaxes mythological images out of

modernity at the points where it is most modern; in this, it is akin to the
philosophy of Walter Benjamin.15

In the work of Roger Caillois, one of the arch Surrealist philosophers—who

was not unknown to Adorno, incidentally16—we find this programmatic
statement being made about surrealism:

Certain objects and images are endowed with a comparatively high

degree of lyrical force because their form or content is especially sig-
nificant. This force affects many, if not all, people, and so it seems to
be, in essence, an integral part of the given phenomenon. Consequently,
this power appears to have as much claim to objective status as the
phenomenon itself.17

Surrealism, and in an attenuated sense Platonism, consists in the claim that

reality is a mixed diet of irreducibly particular states and objects, and yet
also causally active, fully real, universal, and conceptual content. It is the
work of the surrealist to not generate concepts in isolation, but rather to
advert closely to the experienced world, and find these fugitive and incom-
plete moments and evidences of the work of the universal in them.
To see this at work in Adorno, we can refer back to his elusive and diffi-
cult notion of the “metaphysical experience,” in which fidelity to particulars
generates also a higher-order interpretive perspective, from which possibili-
ties, universals, and general tendencies can be grasped without intentionally
attempting to raise oneself to the level of the concept. One can see in, and
see through, the particular to non-particular content without “squinting at
the universal.”
We should also consider here Adorno’s conception of “exact fantasy,”
which makes similar use of the syncopation of the particular and universal,
164 Owen Hulatt
while claiming that it is fidelity to the particular itself which generates this
movement outwards into the realm of the general and universal:

An exact fantasy: fantasy which abides strictly within the material

which the sciences present to it, and reaches beyond them only in the
smallest aspects of their arrangement: aspects, granted, which fantasy
itself must originally generate. If the idea of philosophic interpretation
which I tried to develop for you is valid, then it can be expressed as
the demand to answer the questions of a pre-given reality each time,
through a fantasy which rearranges the elements of the question with-
out going beyond the circumference of the elements, the exactitude of
which has its control in the disappearance of the question . . . thinking
which aims at relations with the object, and not at validity isolated in
itself, is accustomed to prove its right to exist not by refuting the objec-
tions which are voiced against it and which consider themselves irrefut-
able, but by its fruitfulness.18

So, we find in Adorno a recurrent epistemic and metaphysical view, in which

the world of experienced objects can be treated in a number of registers and
methods. On the one hand, one can advert wholly and exclusively to the
presented properties of these particulars. Adorno often collects these kinds
of strategies under the catch-all concept of “positivism,” of an intentional
restriction of scope to immediately, empirically verifiable facts. Given that
Adorno held that society was determined by non-particular features (such as
its status as a “totality,”19 irreducible to its parts), it is no surprise that Adorno
rejects this approach. Indeed, his claim is that it ironically misconstrues the
object through its very attempt to exhibit fidelity to it (or “literalness”):

Literalness and precision are not the same but rather the two diverge.
Without the broken, the inauthentic there can be no knowledge which
might be more than an ordering repetition. That, thereby, the idea of
truth is nevertheless not sacrificed, as it tends to be in the most consis-
tent representatives of positivism, expresses an essential contradiction:
knowledge is, and by no means per accidens, exaggeration. For just as
little as something particular is “true” but rather by virtue of its mediat-
edness is always its own other, so the whole is no less true.20

Alternatively, one may take a top-down approach, and begin with concep-
tual categories, and apply them forcibly to particulars. This, too, is incor-
rect, by Adorno’s lights. Just this is “identity thinking,” which screens off the
genuine nature of particulars, by virtue of substituting conceptual defini-
tions for them:

Dialectically, cognition of nonidentity lies also in the fact that this very
cognition identifies—that it identifies to a greater extent, and in other
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 165
ways, than identitarian thinking. This cognition seeks to say what some-
thing is, while identitarian thinking says what something comes under,
what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself.
The more relentlessly our identitarian thinking besets its object, the far-
ther will it take us from the identity of the object.21

Given that these two means of proceeding (holding particular facts as pri-
mary and deriving conceptual claims from them; or holding conceptual facts
as primary, and interpreting particular facts through them) are counted out,
a third means of epistemic enquiry is proposed. What is proposed is a tricky
and subtle syncopation of particularity and universality, in which particu-
lars are held to have real, fugitive traces of universality in them, which it is
the work of dialectical philosophy to unpack, in such a way that it neither
hews too close to the particular, nor privileges the universal.22
We may certainly wonder at what the metaphysical enabling conditions
are for such a view of the world, where the world provides sufficient affor-
dances within the particular to make such transitions to the general possible
and necessary. But Adorno’s reference to Proust as an “idealist” perhaps
already gives us a significant clue in this direction. Indeed, we are told that
in Proust:

The sense [of Proust’s work] emanates of something familiar in the

midst of what is most out of the ordinary is due to the unparalleled
discipline with which he handles things . . . What seems so extremely
individuated in Proust is not inherently individuated; it seems so only
because we no longer dare to react in this way, or are no longer capable
of doing so. Actually, Proust restores the promise of the universality we
were cheated of. . . . Remembrance of Things Past examines internal and
external reality, using as its instrument the existence of a man without
a skin.23

And we find a parallel in Adorno—in his argument against positivism, we

find the claim:

In sharp contrast to the usual ideal of science, the objectivity of dia-

lectical cognition needs not less subjectivity, but more. Philosophical
experience withers otherwise. But our positivistic zeitgeist is allergic to
this need.24

This transition between particular and general, then, is accomplished

through fidelity to the texture of our subjective experience of objects, a sub-
jective experience which nonetheless can render up objective knowledge of
the constitution of the intermingled realms of particular and universal facts.
It is this confinement of attention to the precise make-up of our experience
which leads Adorno to term Proust (together with Bergson) an “idealist,”
166 Owen Hulatt
and which has such clear parallels with Adorno’s own approach. In what
follows, I will work through Proust’s great novel to attempt to expand
on Adorno’s use of him a touchstone; to try and unpack how and where
Proust exhibits this kind of intermingling of particular and general, and why
Adorno takes Proust to be such an exemplary case of the kind of interpretive
activity which is proper, also, to philosophy.

Surrealism and Aesthetics

What has emerged from the foregoing is that Adorno understands the value
of Proust as being comprised mainly—though not exclusively—through his
ability to syncopate and put into a non-violent relationship the categories
of the particular, and the universal. Indeed, the linkage between Proust and
French Surrealism, first advanced by Adorno’s friend Benjamin, is helpful
in this regard. The resonances between French surrealism and Adorno’s
own epistemology are clear; in either case, the experienced world cannot be
reduced to mere appearance (Adorno would understand this to be “identity-
thinking” or, in a more pronounced case, verificationism), nor indeed to a
kind of realm of abstract laws. Rather, what is required is to see the experi-
enced world in-itself as comprised of a set of particulars which, under closer
examination, reveal their latent and governing interconnections with other
particulars, with universal concepts, and with trans-particular processes.
Now, Adorno applies this approach both within his epistemology, and
within his aesthetics. We have already seen examples of Adorno’s applica-
tion of this explanatory approach in the epistemic register; but we might
pause to consider how this cashes out in the context of his aesthetics.
Adorno’s aesthetics is highly peculiar, in that it fastens almost monoma-
niacally on the formal composition and innovation of modernist artworks,
while entirely refusing any attempt to confine the scope of formal analysis
to purely formal properties. Indeed, Adorno advances a number of difficult
remarks, in a musical context, on the use of formal analysis:

If, without analysis, [music] cannot be presented in even the simplest

sense as being meaningful, then this is as much as to say that analysis is
no mere stopgap, but is an essential element of art itself. As such it will
only begin to be able to correspond to the status of art when it takes
the demands of its own autonomy upon itself. Otherwise, in the words
of Heinz-Klaus Metzger, it remains “mere tautology”—that is to say, a
simple translation into words of that which everyone can hear in the
music anyway. Analysis has to do with the surplus in art . . . Analysis
is more than merely “the facts,” but is so only and solely by virtue of
going beyond the simple facts by absorbing itself into them . . . . Now,
the ultimate “surplus” over and beyond the factual level is the truth con-
tent, and naturally it is only critique that can discover the truth content.
[Truth content] . . . is mediated through the work’s technical structure.25
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 167
What this shows is that the formal is not for Adorno ever purely formal;
it is rather reflective of extra-aesthetic content, and indeed critical of it.
Indeed, the contributions of form and content for Adorno seem as mutable
and difficult to fix as the relationship between particularity and universal-
ity in philosophy more generally. Adorno’s ideal form of aesthetic response,
and indeed of aesthetic analysis, is one which adheres closely to the tex-
ture and make-up of an artwork, and yet—through this very procedure of
fine-grained analysis—gives on to consideration of the world outside of the
artwork (to which the “truth content” of the artwork relates). Adorno the-
matizes this aspect of his aesthetics, and gives it an official ontology, as it
were, in claiming that artworks are constitutively “windowless monads.”26
This conception of the windowless monad is designed to have clear Leib-
nizian resonances, but yet again returns us to Proust, and the qualities which
Adorno values in him. A Leibnizian monad is acausally related to all other
monads; and yet, by the pursuit of its own internal principle, nonetheless
comes to reflect those other monads. The artwork, by analogy, concerns itself
exclusively with aesthetico-formal qualities, and yet by doing just this comes
to occupy a determinate stance with relation to the world external to it.
In Adorno’s reception of Proust, his epistemology, and his aesthetics, we
find a tightly related collection of claims, indeed a central and unified meth-
odology. And this, again, is a claim about the interleaved and syncopated
relationship between particulars and universals. If one properly attends to
particulars, it is claimed, one can see in, and see through these particulars
to their genuine imbrication with other particulars, their bearing universal
and general features in themselves. And it is the task of philosophy to con-
struct its armature of universals not deductively—as deduction pre-judges
that particulars will fall under universals in a certain way, ahistorically—but
with continual reference back to the genuine constitution of these particu-
lars in experience, which themselves recommend and determine which uni-
versals be applied to them, and how.
If Adorno does have a programmatic commitment, this must surely be it.
It governs his work across all of the fields he enters into, and indeed is almost
obsessively revisited with a view to produce fresh evidence for it. In Nega-
tive Dialectics, for example, we receive a—rather poor—argument which
purports to show, through the structure of predication, that subsumptive
universals can never exhibit full identity to the particulars they are applied
to.27 In Against Epistemology, we find in the context of Husserl’s phenom-
enology the argument being advanced that there cannot be the derivation of
fixed phenomenological structures through imaginative variation, as these
structures must ever and again be checked against genuine experience of
genuine particulars.28 In Aesthetic Theory, we are assured that the materials
of which artworks are composed are possessed of a kind of compositional
force of their own, which artistic structures (e.g., abstract pre-set literary,
pictorial, or musical forms and genre-demands) cannot ride roughshod over,
but must instead attend to closely and carefully. And such attention by the
168 Owen Hulatt
artist will inevitably lead to the distorting and breaking of these abstract
compositional structures.29
So, over and again, we have this background commitment to the exis-
tence of an experienced world which combines and recombines moments
of particularity and universality, which it is the task of any knower—be
they philosopher, artist or sociologist—to attend to and follow. Attendance
to the particular, and to grounded experiences of particulars, is always pri-
mary. And attending to particulars in this way will recommend the appro-
priate manner of applying universals to them; and this will frequently, if not
always, break with our conventional, instrumental approach to concept use.
There are deep grounds for concern here. Not the least of these relates to
what could count as evidence for this background commitment. We might
also have concerns about whether these diverse arguments for the back-
ground picture in each of these domains (the epistemic; the ontological; the
aesthetic) are sufficiently unified, and hang together in the way in which
Adorno assumes. On top of this, turning to the specific arguments them-
selves, there continue to be obscurities, and quite possibly inconsistencies,
about the way in which they are developed, and the way in which they
operate in each of these distinct domains. Much, if not all, of my work on
Adorno to date has pursued these questions.30 Here, however, I would like
to leave these questions to one side, and consider the deeper point: what
motivates Adorno to hold this background commitment?
It is clear that it cannot be unadorned philosophical argumentation
which leads Adorno to this commitment. As outlined above, and examined
in more detail in the pieces of work the reader is directed to in note 30 in
this chapter, Adorno’s arguments which directly support his overall position
are of variable quality. Nor, by definition, can Adorno have arrived at his
position through simple observation. Adorno’s position is one which rests
on interpretation—the view that when attended to, particulars present us
with genuine interpretive demands, which can be resolved in a number of
ways. It is Adorno’s background picture—with its attendant constraints on
interpretation—which allow and recommend that he interpret the troubling
evidence in such a way that it coheres with his “totality” model. But, before
Adorno had fixed this interpretive model, he could not have been justified
in interpreting the troubling empirical evidence in this way rather than some
other. (Indeed, Adorno’s philosophy for just this reason seems to rest upon a
particularly tight and—potentially—vicious interpretive circle. For a discus-
sion, and proposed amelioration, of this problem).
As Adorno’s position rests on a syncopation and interrelation of abstract
and general, particular and universal, it therefore could not have been
derived through attending to either in isolation. And yet neither in isolation
could have provided cause to posit a dialectical picture which demanded
that they were so syncopated.
For these reasons, I believe there is a good question about how Adorno
could—and how we, if we doubt him, could—acquire the necessary
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 169
motivation, and interpretive justification, to take up his background pic-
ture, with its attendant claims about the intrinsic interleaving of particular-
ity and universality. And it is precisely here, I would contend, that Proust is
of importance.

Proust as Philosophical Resource

Walter Benjamin read Paysan de Paris by the Surrealist Louis Aragon and
was convinced that he had found the outline of a workable and desirable
epistemology. Buck-Morss gives a helpful account of this:

that which distinguished the theological symbol, the “unity of sensory

and supersensory object” is precisely what Benjamin found in these Sur-
realist texts [like those of Breton and Aragon] . . . As with the Trauer-
spiel allegoricists, Benjamin considered the Surrealists’ revelatory vision
of historically transient objects a philosophical position rather than an
aesthetic technique.31

And, indeed, Buck-Morss also gives us a helpful extract from the novel in
question—

It seemed to me that the essence of these pleasures was totally meta-

physical, that it implied a kind of passionate taste for revelation. An
object transfirgured itself before my eyes, taking on neither the allure of
allegory nor the character of the [aesthetic] symbol; it was less the mani-
festation of an idea than the idea itself. It extended deep into earthly
matter.32

What we find in Aragon’s novel is a performed instance of a position which

Benjamin would make theoretical, and then indeed attempt to repeat in his
Arcades Project. Namely, a view which attempted to deliver a science of the
hidden machinations which ruled the experienced life of mankind; the com-
mingling of the experienced particular, and the fugitive but utterly essential
universal content which unified and determined those particulars. And here,
we find that critical theory was informed by experience of literature; indeed,
it was lent a shape and the beginnings of a self-understanding by literature.
I would suggest that Adorno’s claim in “On Proust” about the “central
role” of Proust in his thought should be understood in much the same way:
as showing a deep connection between the self-understood theoretical pro-
gram which Adorno pursued, and the experience of literature which drove
both his belief in the sustainability of this program, but also exhibited and
performed, in a literary fashion, this very epistemic approach to the world.
As has been said, we are required to amplify on Adorno’s own fragmen-
tary and unsatisfactory remarks about the importance of Proust. What I will
now do is work through some specific passages from Proust, and attempt
170 Owen Hulatt
to unriddle and exhibit just how they might have served as philosophical
sources for Adorno’s own background picture; and how his own approach
to critical theory profited and drew on his experience of Proust’s work.

Proust as Epistemologist
As Adorno himself points out, Proust largely confines his attention to mat-
ters which could scarcely appear more ephemeral—social mores, fashion,
snobbery, experiences of nature, and the aesthetic pleasure which these
domains, among others, afford him. But it is through exacting attention to
these matters—which can verge on the exhausting, rather than exhaustive—
that Proust’s peculiar approach to knowledge, and the surprising configu-
rations which the search for knowledge throws up, emerges. This exacting
attention is often unfolded across several pages, or thematically and episodi-
cally elaborated across the six volumes of his novel, and so of course pres-
ents challenges in being excerpted neatly. With this in mind, we now move
to some miniature examples of Proust’s approach.
The first of these is taken from Within a Budding Grove, where we find
the narrator newly accepted into the “little band” of young girls at Balbec,
marvelling at their patterns of speech—

When I talked with any one of my young friends I was conscious that
the original, the unique portrait of her individuality had been skilfully
traced, tyrannically imposed on my mind as much by the inflexions
of her voice as by those of her face, and that they were two separate
spectacles which expressed, each on its own plane, the same singular
reality. . . . In spite of everything, the voices of these girls already gave
a clear indication of the attitude that each of these young people had
adopted towards life . . . No doubt these characteristics did not belong
only to these girls. They were those of their parents. The individual is
submerged in something more general than himself. By this reckon-
ing, our parents furnish us not only with those habitual gestures which
are the outlines of our face and voice, but also certain mannerisms of
speech [which .  .  .] indicate likewise a definite point of view towards
life. . . . Albertine had begun to say, like a friend of her aunt: “It sounds
to me pretty awful.” She had also inherited the habit of making one
repeat whatever one had said to her, so as to appear to be interested . . .
Finally, and more general still than the family heritage, was the rich layer
imposed by the native province from which they derived their voices
and of which their inflexions smacked. . . . Between that province and
the temperament of the girl that dictated these inflexions, I perceived a
charming dialogue.33

The first thing of note here is Proust’s careful doubling, sustained through-
out his novel, between objects in themselves, and the impressions of them
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 171
“imposed on [his] mind”—the fugitive appearances of the former in the
latter, and the impossibility of gaining certainty about their matching up,
underwrites a great deal of Proust’s central concerns, not least his preoccu-
pation with jealousy and the fear of infidelity. Here traces of Proust’s puta-
tive “idealism” can be found; we only relate to objects through the lenses of
impressions, rather than directly, and the sources of these impressions are
multiple, disparate, and complex. In his attempt to understand the savour
and nature of his young friend’s speech, he finds interleaved layers of the
hereditary, the geographic, their facial expressions, and the fine-grained
diversions and innovations in their intonation. Between these various deter-
mining factors, the narrator finds a “charming dialogue”—a constant flux
and interplay which, together, account for his impression of and approach
to not only their speech, but also their underlying “point of view towards
life,” which appears in shifting form throughout the changes their diction
undergoes. Here we find a trivial matter—the manner of one’s speech—
“submerged in something more general,” a determining constellation of
determining factors to be ferreted out and asked after, all of which together
make up and determine a single, presented phenomenon—namely, the free
and easy practice of speech and conversation which the narrator and his
companions engage in. At the social level, then, in the perception of persons,
Proust engages in the surrealist business of digging out the objective and
general tendencies which show up, in distorted form, in particulars.
This is not only confined to the realm of social behaviour—more intrigu-
ingly still, Proust finds these selfsame webs of determination and intercon-
nection in his experience of inanimate objects. There is, in them, an objective
expressivity, which speaks beyond them to a broader web of tendencies and
interconnections. For example, in The Captive, we find the narrator pay-
ing close attention to the Verdurin’s furniture, newly transported from La
Raspelière to Quai Conti:

Now, as I emerged from the room known as the concert-room and

crossed the other drawing-rooms [I discovered] . . . transposed among
others, certain pieces of furniture which I had seen at La Raspelière [and
perceived] . . . a certain family resemblance . . . What Brichot, perhaps
without realizing it, preferred in the old drawing-room. . . . was that
unreal aspect .  .  . of which, in a drawing-room as in everything else,
the actual, external aspect, verifiable by everyone, is but the prolonga-
tion, the aspect which has detached itself from the outer world to take
refuge in our soul, to which it gives as it were a surplus-value, in which
it is absorbed into its habitual substance, transforming itself .  .  . all
those things, in short, which one could not have isolated from the rest
but which for Brichot, an old habitue of Verdurin festivities, had that
patina, that velevety bloom of things to which, giving them a sort of
depth, a spitirual Doppelgänger has come to be attached . . . the fur-
niture and carpets, pursued, from a cushion to a flower-stand, from a
172 Owen Hulatt
footstool to a lingering scent, from a lighting arrangement to a colour
scheme, sculpted, evoked, spiritualized, called to life, a form which was
as it were the idealisation, immanent in each of their successive homes,
of the Verdurin drawing-room.34

Here we find the same interpretive approach, so profitably applied to man-

ners of speech, to arrangements of possessions. Their “spiritual Doppelgän-
ger,” the “sort of depth” which these arrangements attain is their acting as
a showing forthof the very approach to life, the essence of the social com-
portment, of their owners. Sustained across a greater length of the novel
than I can here reproduce, the narrator perceives and pulls out of these
objects the very real relationships and interpretively accessible information
which objectively inhere in them. Here again, we have a doubling of ontol-
ogy between the reductive facts about these objects “verifiable by everyone,”
and the spiritual “surplus-value” which has been absorbed into them, and
which offer up a web of interconnections to past events, other locations,
and the mental economy of their owners. Caillois’ attempt to find in the
“lyrical force” of objects an objectivity equal to their physical constitution
is here borne out once more, and realizes itself through the conversion of
our impressions of irreducibly particular objects into webs of universality,
association, and concepts.
This is an interpretive approach which Proust makes constant use of, in
unriddling the general (whether it be hereditary laws, the social tenden-
cies unleashed by the Dreyfus case, laws of memory, laws of attraction, the
structure of love, and so on) submerged in the particular. And it is applicable
equally to the natural as to the social. Proust is sufficiently aware of this to
discuss it directly and programmatically:

I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had
compelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower,
a stone, because I had the feeling that perhaps beneath these signs there
lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some
thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic
characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material
objects. No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by
accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth there was to read.
For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full
and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than
those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression
which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a
spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract . . . the task was
to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas.35

This concluding remark, the valorization of an attempt to “interpret the

given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas” serves, I would suggest,
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 173
not only as an allowable summary of surrealist approaches to knowledge,
but also of the central preoccupation of Adorno’s account of the task of
philosophy. While Proust allows himself direct remarks like the above which
make apparent his approach, what is so often noted as a source of value in
Proust is his direct execution of this programme, a relentless unpacking of
the particular into its associations, its transient and tricky ontology across
time, and the submergence of our everyday experience into subtle laws of
association and social determination, such that every object and occurrence,
no matter how meagre, serves as a sensuous exhibitionof more general and
universal tendencies and laws.

The Experience of Literature

Where Adorno’s philosophy is weakest, I have suggested,36 is in the jus-
tification of its interpretive approach. We are told that the phenomena
we encounter are underwritten by a concealed set of processes (the social
totality; “identity thinking”; a growing dearth of mimetic engagement with
the world, and so on) which show up in those phenomena as symptoms.
The governing problem is that “symptoms” are multiply construable; they
prove equally compatible with diverse sets of aetiologies. Indeed, just this
no doubt underwrites a great deal of Adorno’s vituperative rejection of Hei-
degger, who in many respects share common concerns about the ostensible
pathologies of modernity, while offering often radically distinct diagnoses of
these pathologies’ origin.
What is needed is some inducement to take up an interpretive stance; to
see the fractured state of the world as shot through with supra-particular
tendencies, developments, and problematics. (As opposed to the world sim-
ply tending towards a fallen state; or being the product of innumerable, irre-
ducibly particular, factors and failures). Adorno, of course, gestures towards
the irreducible normative content of suffering in an attempt to close this
gap, in claiming that somatic states of harm contain an irreducible norma-
tive motivation for changing extant social conditions.37 Even if this is suc-
cessful, this answers a normative question; of why we should see these states
of affairs as imperfect, as requiring investigation and alteration. It leaves
untouched the epistemic question of why we should see these harms and ills
as underwritten by broader pathologies, lines of historical development, or
indeed “dialectically” interrelated concepts and processes.
Just as Louis Aragon and his surrealist ilk were of crucial importance
for Benjamin in demonstrating—rather than arguing for—the suspension of
universal content in the particular, so too, I would argue, Proust served for
Adorno as a demonstration of a successful model of epistemic inquiry. In
Proust we find a delicate and thorough interweaving of the particular and
universal. While Proust cannot provide philosophical evidence in any com-
pelling sense, he can serve as an exemplar for a given model—in this case,
the Platonism Adorno approvingly refers to in Proust and, in an attenuated
174 Owen Hulatt
sense, executes in his own work, is given a demonstration. It is shown rather
than said.
But why should this “showing” count as any kind of philosophical evi-
dence, as a reason to take up one philosophical position, rather than another?
Fiction is capable of making connections between objects, instances, and
concepts, and rendering them beautiful or aesthetically compelling. But just
this ability to embellish them, as it were, opens the very real danger that
the artist leads us astray; that the connections and implicit claims are made
beguiling, but in reality are otiose, unhelpful, or incorrect. The oldest accusa-
tion against rhetoric, the ability to make argumentation beautiful and com-
pelling, is that it allowed “the weaker argument to defeat the stronger.”38
Plato’s banishment of the artist from the Republic follows directly from
this thought; the artist arrogates knowledge to themselves not through the
honest labour of philosophical labour and insight, but through the dishon-
est manipulation of mere semblances and appearances. While they might be
capable of producing an appearance of knowledge or insight, it is merely
hollow.39
So, if I am right that Adorno took evidential support, or substantive phil-
osophical inspiration, from a novel—even if it was arguably the greatest
novel ever written—one might wonder if this is not a deficiency. Fiction
cannot serve as a justification for a philosophical position—and if Adorno
thought so, we might say, so much the worse for Adorno and his philosophy.
There are concerns raised here which have force. But it should also be
noted that Adorno had an idiosyncratic idea of philosophical justification,
which proves highly compatible with the idea that our basic philosophi-
cal picture—about the relationship between particularity and universality,
for example—could be shown rather than said; demonstrated rather than
argued for. And, in fact, his theory of justification demands that showing,
rather than inductive or deductive justification, takes place. We can see this
in both Adorno’s epistemology proper, and his theory of artistic truth con-
tent. In Negative Dialectics, we are told—

In philosophy the authentic question will somehow almost always

include its answer. Unlike science, philosophy knows no fixed sequence
of question and answer . . . . This distinguishes the relation of under-
standing and judgment from the usual order of time . . . . What is trans-
mitted here is the fiber of the so-called philosophical demonstration,
a mode of proof that contrasts with the mathematical model. And yet
that model does not simply disappear, for the stringency of a philo-
sophical thought requires its mode of proceeding to be measured by the
forms of inference. Philosophical proof is the effort to give statements
a binding quality by making them commensurable with the means of
discursive thinking. But it does not purely follow from that thinking:
the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity is itself a philo-
sophical content.40
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 175
There is plenty to disambiguate and work through here, but for our purposes
the crucial claims come at the very beginning of the quote. Philosophical jus-
tification, for Adorno—and indeed philosophical enquiry—is not a business
of posing questions, and then pursuing disconnected answers. Rather, in the
giving of a philosophical proof, we find both question and answer given
together; the very matter of enquiry, in being properly given, has resonances
and universal contents which together fall into the shape of a solution. As a
consequence, this philosophical “demonstration” does not hold its content
merely in its individual sentences, but enacts this content through the par-
ticular organization and movement of the various claims and concepts. This
accounts for Adorno’s use of parataxis—a highly formalized style of writing
in which each sentence is intended to carry equal weight—and an essayistic
approach. In Adorno remarks on the essay form, we find further evidence
for this:

The how of expression should rescue, in precision, what the refusal to

outline sacrifices, without, however, betraying the intended matter to
the arbitrariness of previously decreed significations . . . . In the essay,
concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not
advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argument inter-
weave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the
density of this texture.41

For Adorno, then, one must prove and justify one’s claim through the means
in which one presents one’s philosophical claims—through form—equally
as much as through the content of the claims themselves. We find the same
claim—which, for a variety of complex reasons, stems from the same episte-
mology, and from the same premises—being applied to art. For Adorno, art
has cognitive value; it can deliver socially critical and conceptually germane
truths. And it does so through the way in which it is formed, and the way in
which it elaborates its form:

The truth content of artworks, as the negation of their existence, is

mediated by them though they do not in any way communicate it. That
by which truth content is more than what is posited by artworks is
their methexis in history and the determinate critique that they exercise
through their form.42

Art, then, just like philosophy, is obliged to give expression to its truth con-
tent through its formal organization of its materials; to show and demon-
strate, rather than directly assert, its central claims. Art, of course, is working
in more straitened conditions than philosophy—if it attempts, even in pass-
ing, to give direct communication to conceptual critique, it ceases to be
art, and passes over into embellished philosophy. This is what accounts for
Adorno’s note of caution that the truth content of artworks threatens to be
176 Owen Hulatt
“the negation of their existence,” a threat overcome by (going further than
philosophy) the complete disavowal of any direct communication.
This parity between philosophy and art in Adorno’s theory of truth is of
great interest in its own right.43 But it also provides insight into the case of
Proust. As the artwork realizes its truth content through its form, and not
the intrinsic meaning of its materials, an artwork might achieve a demon-
stration of truth through the consideration of very unpromising materials.
The treatment of the childhood and development of a member of the French
upper-middle class, and that person’s infatuation with the French aristoc-
racy, might be just as fertile material for the realization of truth as Kafka’s
lugubrious parables. Indeed, Adorno writes:

But only someone who has succumbed to social relationships in his

own way instead of denying them with the resentment of one who has
been excluded can reflect them back. What Proust came to see in these
allegedly superfluous lives of luxury, however, vindicates his infatua-
tion [. . . For Proust] contingency is not completely bereft of meaning.
It carries with it a semblance of necessity, as though some reference to
meaning had been interspersed throughout existence, chaotic, mocking,
haunting in its dissociated fragments. This constellation of a necessity
in something that is wholly contingent, a necessity that can be perceived
only negatively—this too anticipating Kafka—carries Proust’s fanati-
cally individuated work far beyond his own individuation: at its center
he reveals the universality through which it is mediated.44

And so, equipped with Adorno’s understanding of justification, as idiosyn-

cratic as it is, it is a short step to seeing how Proust’s novel can meaningfully
be understood as a genuine piece of evidence for Adorno that his peculiar
approach to epistemology, and the relationship between universality and
particularity, is justified.
In closing, we might note one further point. Adorno’s aesthetics can often
appear to be an appendage of his broader philosophical commitments.
Indeed, just this problem in Adorno’s reception of Proust was mentioned at
the head of this paper. Carl Dahlhaus, in the context of Adorno’s theory of
musical truth content, advances a similar note of caution—

The contrast between . . . . the formal-analytically individualizing and

the sociological generalizing procedure .  .  . returns as a flaw in the
individual analyses, though Adorno was able at times, by dint of great
effort, to reconcile the opposing views by force. And the verbal analo-
gies perform the function of hiding a gap which the arguments could
not close.45

The suspicion often emerges that Adorno’s philosophy came first, and was
then applied—and not without violence—to artworks, to force them to
 Seeing In, Seeing Through 177
conform to his philosophical program. Given Adorno’s sincere claims about
the importance of Proust, however, and his theory of philosophical justifica-
tion and evidence, the possibility emerges that the truth is in fact the reverse.
That perhaps, it was Adorno’s experience of literature—of Proust—which
served in the first instance as the inspiration of his philosophy; and that his
philosophy, and his critical theory, is a working through of the insight which
the experience of literature first gave to him.

Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame.” Translated by Michael
T. Jones. New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Stud-
ies, 26 (Spring-Summer 1982) 119–150.
2. NL: 171–178.
3. AT: 88.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London and New York: Verso Books,
2005), 26.
5. ND: 54–55.
6. For Kafka, see P 243–272. For Beckett, see Adorno, “Trying to Understand
Endgame.”
7. NL: 174.
8. NL: 176.
9. NL: 312.
10. ND: 373–374.
11. AT: 174–175, emphasis mine.
12. Theodor W. Adorno, "Short Commentaries on Proust", in Notes to Literature
Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 174–185): 176.
13. NL: 181.
14. Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflec-
tions, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
2007), 205.
15. NL: 178.
16. I examine the relationship between Adorno and Caillois at length in “Reason,
mimêsis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno,” Journal of the History of Philoso-
phy, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2016), 135–151.
17. Roger Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine
Frank, trans. Caludine Frank and Camille Naish (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2003), 69.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow,
Telos, No. 31 (1977), 131.
19. ND: 47.
20. Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald
Pilot, and Karl R. Popper, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans.
Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd,
1976), 35–36.
21. ND: 149.
22. ND: 12.
23. NL: 316.
24. ND: 40, first emphasis mine.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Problem of Musical Analysis,” trans. Max Pad-
dison, Music Analysis, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1982), 177.
26. AT: 6.
178 Owen Hulatt
27. ND: 5.
28. Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and
the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1985), 119–120.
29. AT: 302.
30. See for example Owen Hulatt, “Adorno, Interpretation, and the Body,” Inter-
national Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2014); “Reason,
mimêsis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno”; Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical
and Aesthetic Truth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); “Modal and
Epistemic Immodesty: An Incoherence in Adorno’s Social Philosophy,” Constel-
lations, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2016).
31. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 238.
32. Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 141, extracted in
Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 238.
33. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Ter-
ence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000), 565–566.
34. Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Ter-
ence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000), 321–323.
35. Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin,
revised by D.J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000), 232.
36. See in particular Hulatt, “Reason, mimêsis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno.”
37. For excellent work on this feature of Adorno’s philosophy, see Fabian Freyenha-
gen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
38. For a good overview of this complaint in Ancient Greece, particularly in Plato,
see Alexander Sesonske, “To Make the Weaker Argument Defeat the Stronger,”
Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1968), 271–231.
39. Plato, The Republic, 601a–602d.
40. ND: 63–64.
41. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Fred-
eric Will, New German Critique, No. 32 (1984), 151–171, 160.
42. AT: 175.
43. For more on this, see my Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth.
44. NL: 180–181.
45. Carl Dahlhaus, “The Musical Work of Art as a Subject of Sociology.” Schoen-
berg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffet and Alfred Clayton. (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 234–248), 244. Cited in Max
Paddison, “Immanent Critique or Musical Stocktaking? Adorno and the Prob-
lem of Musical Analysis,” in Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin, Adorno: A Criti-
cal Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 209–233), 223.
Part IV

From Hölderlin to Walser

Poetic Afterlives
10 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique
of Modernity
Michael J. Thompson

I
The poetry and philosophy of Friedrich Hölderlin remains shrouded in
Romantic association. His ideas strike many as exemplary of an age that
reacted to the Enlightenment ideas of reason as an organism in shock.
Folded into the delusions of Romantic Idealism, his ideas have too often
been passed over. Adorno once wrote about Hölderlin that he

breaks out of the idealist sphere of influence and towers above it. His
poetry expresses, better than any maxims could and to an extent that
Hegel would not approved, that life is not an idea, that the quintessence
of existing entities is not essence.
(NL2, 123)

I think Adorno’s insight is a prescient one. That Hölderlin is not an abstruse

idealist, but a thinker who wanted to penetrate into the nucleus of human
reason itself—human reason as a creative process akin to that of nature itself.
Aesthetic would therefore serve not as a replacement—or displacement—of
reason, rather it would be the true expression of reason itself. A modernity
that was rooted in the narrow conception of reason and the individual that
sprang from the Enlightenment would therefore miss the broader, richer
essence of reason and humanism. In the end, what Hölderlin asks us to con-
sider is the extent to which modernity confronts us with a choice: between a
life of one-dimensionality, of domination and unrealized potential and what
he sees as a “new world” or “new age”: as a way of living, thinking, feeling
that will be able to encompass the full potentialities contained within nature.
Hölderlin poses a new conception of thought and the idea that the whole
must be experienced before it can be known. He seems to be concerned to
defend a human experience against the mechanistic, the subjectivistic, and
the dualistic. His conception of an aesthetic is one that senses the reified
stale reality that pervaded his time. Of the rise of instrumental reason, of
the division of labor, of the rise of the market mentality and the increasingly
shallow culture of bourgeois life. He sees the seeds of what will become an
182 Michael J. Thompson
alienation of human life and the deformation of human reason and culture
because of the wayward direction to which modern culture has succumbed.
This is a conception of reason and individuality that is expanded, one that
is connected to the whole, a vital, organic conception of the totality that
connects the subject and object, and which prevents the separation of man
from himself and from nature. But his poetry probes the dilemma of a kind
of consciousness that cannot grasp this; it is a tragic art that shows the limits
of everyday experience, of constrained life and thought. It is the tragedy of
modernity: to be caught between the potential experience of the expanded
self and the constrained world of subjectivism. Beauty and truth are there-
fore connected, and the lack of the aesthetic experience therefore limits
exposure to truth. The regeneration of modern culture will come about only
once man and nature are once again reconciled.
Indeed, it can be said that Hölderlin’s problematic was a similar one to
that explored by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is
man’s separation from nature—and hence his separation from himself—and
his domination of nature—and hence his systematic domination of himself—
that Enlightenment reason has spawned. For the Enlightenment is therefore
a necessary but deficient development in human culture. It requires that we
expand the circle of reason—expand it to the extent that is encompasses
beauty as well as truth. That our ability to know truth is only possible once
we can experience the absolute, the “unconditioned,” and overcome the radi-
cal separation between the subject and the object. Once this is done, a new
man will emerge: a new form of subjectivity, of agency, of culture, of society,
and a true kind of freedom. In the end, Hölderlin’s critique of modernity
is not a regressive, Romantic movement to the past, as Lukács and others
have seen it.1 It is, rather, a critique of an age that has lost touch with a
humanism but at the same time allows us to glimpse a new world, a new
conception of what human culture can become. Though the efforts of Kant’s
and Fichte’s critical philosophy, the political efforts of the French Revolu-
tion, and the gradual secularization of ethical Protestantism, the paradigm
of the Greeks can now be seen to be a renewable, achievable goal. Now
man has the potential to grasp the “absolute,” the deeper reality of his rela-
tion to nature, the totality of rational existence. What Hölderlin offers us is
an aesthetic-philosophical vision of a form of being that exists in potentia
within us. It is an emancipatory form of reason that seeks to overcome what
he thought was the narrow Enlightenment conception of the rational subject.
For Hölderlin, the new man will create the new culture—a culture that will
live without the dichotomies and contradictions of subject and object, hope
and despair, freedom and necessity, and individual and community.

II
To understand Hölderlin’s project, we have to grasp why he thinks that
aesthetics grants us access to a higher sense of our unity with nature, and
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 183
how this is conceived as a pathway to an emancipated form of being. Rea-
son for Hölderlin has different gradations relating to how humans relate
to the whole, to the unity of subject and object. He therefore presages a
distinction between the instrumental use of reason, that which is circum-
scribed by utility, by function, by operationalization on the one hand and
the kind of emancipatory rationality that can allow for a creative form of
agency that can embody the full, developed powers inherent within human
being. For Hölderlin, the world is a totality, it is organic, it is dynamic, and
it is constituted by different levels of organization. Our capacity to perceive
and to experience this and these higher levels of organization entails a dif-
ferent relation of the part and the whole, but not only in a conceptual,
but also an actual sense. For one of Hölderlin’s great problems with Kant’s
philosophy—a problem he saw rooted in the Kritik der Urteilskraft—was
the distinction between regulative and constitutive powers of reason and
the aesthetic. For Hölderlin, the experience of art and nature (of the sublime
more broadly) was not something merely captured by the regulative pow-
ers of the understanding, a mere phenomenon given shape by subjective
consciousness alone. Rather, aesthetic ideas, those conveyed particularly by
poetry itself, are constitutive of the world itself: it possesses a creative power,
a power to transform oneself into a subject ready to unite with nature, with
one’s essence. To perceive beauty, to articulate aesthetic ideas, was to convey
the organic, rational structure of nature and to aid the infinite striving of the
ego not against nature, not to dominate or subjugate it, but to expand itself
to be able to unite oneself with it. To be able to experience the sublimity of
nature is to experience “pure being” (reines Seyn), the true structure and
substance of nature. Once we experience this, we have the capacity to return
to it, to create a culture that can embody true being.
Beauty is therefore more than an aesthetic category, it also encompasses
truth. The reason for this is that once we are able to see what nature really
is—i.e., that it is characterized by growth, development, differentiation,
and organization—what we come to see in experiencing nature is the very
substance of all being itself. We as human beings are therefore the ultimate
expression of nature, of its most highly organized, self-conscious manifesta-
tion: we possesses the creative powers that manifests the most developed form
of nature. Beauty therefore has a wider scope of meaning than merely an aes-
thetic category—indeed, not unlike classical Greek culture, which would use
the term καλλός (beauty) to describe not only objects relating to art and nature,
but also those aspects of human life that expressed the “good” (ἀγαθός), i.e.,
those things that contributed to the well-being, the goodness of the whole
community. Like Plato, the good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) and the beautiful (τὸ καλλόν) are
pursued not for the sake of some other good, but for themselves—because
in so doing, we express a self-determination that manifests the fullness of
nature and our Being. What beauty is and why it plays such an important
role for Hölderlin can be seen once we understand his opposition to Fichte.
For modern rationalism, knowledge is posed as the problem of the subject’s
184 Michael J. Thompson
relation to the object. This entails that thought is about the object, that the
thinking subject is external to and sealed off from the object, the Ding an
sich. What Hölderlin proposes, in his philosophical fragment “Judgment and
Being” (Urtheil und Seyn), is that this separation is an original unity. As Dieter
Henrich remarks on this point, “Yet we would not even seek after it if that
infinite unification, that being in the only sense of the word, were not present
to us. It is present—as beauty.”2
Beauty is now more than merely a feeling and more than mere cognition.
It is deeper experience of that basic unity of the self with the totality of
nature and the ability to see that the ego and nature, the subject and object,
are both unified parts of a larger totality. “Holy nature!” Hölderlin writes
in Hyperion, “you are the same within me and outside of me. It need not be
so difficult to unite what it outside of me with the divine within me.”3 This
unity of nature is not mechanistic, however, as it was for Spinoza. The key
here is that nature be understood as organic and dynamic, that the subject
comes to relate to the objective world of nature once it realizes that it is an
integral part of it, that subject and object constitute to facets of the same
substance, that any true knowledge must encompass nature since nature is
itself the essence of subjectivity itself—subjectivity that is fully realized, fully
developed. Human freedom therefore can be construed as the realization of
this capacity in man, the development of these powers of creation as free
beings aware of their essential, substantial being.
This necessity is one that yields freedom for the self once there is the
realization that this beauty represents the lost memory, inscribed in our
intuitions, that a broader relation with the world is not only possible, but
also the true essence of our being. To properly grasp nature is to properly
grasp ourselves. To come to this kind of knowledge is therefore to over-
come the subject-object divide, between the thinking agent and nature. We
must make this turn toward nature, Hölderlin suggests, because not to do
so would restrict us to our own subjectivity; it would rob us of the norma-
tive, aesthetic, and intellectual ground for truth. And this is not simply a
philosophical choice, it is also a cultural condition. To be dirempted from
nature is tantamount to the isolation of the self from the source of real value
and therefore marks a slippage into nihilism.4 This is the fate of Alabanda in
Hyperion who cannot bear to see the fate to which humans are locked into:

When I look at a child, he cried, and think how shameful and corrupt-
ing is the yoke that it will bear, and that it will starve as we do, that it
will seek men as we do, search as we do for the beautiful and the true,
that it will pine away fruitlessly, because it will be alone as we are, that
it—O take your sons from the cradle, compatriots, and case them into
the river, so as to rescue them at least from your disgrace!5

The nihilist is one that denies not only the essential relation that the self,
that each ego, has with nature—a relation that exists ontologically but of
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 185
which he is unaware. It is also to be caught within the circle of the ego, to
either not see, or have frustrated the capacity to see that aesthetics grants us
not simply experience, but an experience that possesses constitutive power
rather than merely regulative power. What this means is that aesthetic expe-
rience is the experience not of an idea, but of “Being” itself, the source of all
that is beautiful and all that is good and worthy of our strivings.
This will require a different conception of the subject and object, of self
and world, and of reason and feeling than modern culture has brought forth
to us. The basic formula for this form of reason—a rationality that attains the
status of beauty—is described in Hyperion with the Greek phrase, derived
from Heraklitis, ἐν διαφέρον ἐαῦτῳ: or “that which is differentiated in itself.”
The individual’s return to nature is not done out of resignation, nor is it
an absorption of the subject, the ego, into the manifold of nature. Rather,
it represents the achieved status accomplished through the realization that
there is a deeper truth than what our own subjective cognitive powers can
reveal to us. To be “differentiated in oneself,” therefore means that the ego
has undergone a transformation via aesthetic experience wherein his agency
is now rooted not in his own atomistic and subjectivist confines, but through
his conscious, rational relation to nature, in a real, rational totality. One’s
freedom is therefore the result of this capacity to have this relationship with
nature, with the source of what is truly rational. For now, the free person is
one who is transformed, constituted by the knowledge that the subject and
object belong to the same structure, are in fact interdependent aspects of
higher totality.
The individual is now brought back to nature through his own strivings,
his own choice, his own direction once he sees his own fragmented, deformed
state by being estranged from nature, from the essence of his being. A new
individual now emerged, one who can integrate the self and its essential
nature. Since Kant and especially Fichte had made it the hallmark of their
respective philosophical systems to chart the ego as the center of reason,
Hölderlin’s opposition to this was to see the necessary linkage between the
ego and nature; to perceive that this unite of man and nature was not some
static unity, but one of self-differentiation. The richer form of reason that
can be achieved is one that dialectically sublates (to employ Hegel’s later
language) the atomic ego with the rational, organic, and dynamic structure
of nature—a structure of nature which is also constitutive of himself. The
problem with modernity was its confusion about the source of reason: it
was not contained in us, as Kant and Fichte had claimed.6 This mistake led
to the problem of stripping reason of its relation to the whole. “From mere
intellect comes no philosophy,” he writes in Hyperion,

for philosophy is more than the limited knowledge of what exists . . . .
From mere reason comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than
the blind demand for an interminable progress in the unification and
differentiation of a particular material.
186 Michael J. Thompson
Rather, he continues, “when the divine ἐν διαφέρον ἐαῦτῳ, striving reason’s
ideal of beauty, shines forth, then it does not demand blindly, and knows
why and wherefore it demands.”7
This means that the concept of the subject, of agency has to be recon-
structed. The new kind of agency and subjectivity that emerges from
Hölderlin’s ideas is one that takes the “eccentric path” between the poles
of reflection and organized experience on the one hand and a fundamental
unity with nature, on the other. But the new, integrated self is only capable
of this Hölderlin’s ideas matured as a reaction to his studies of Kant and
Fichte on the one hand and Spinoza and Leibniz on the other. What he saw
was that the subjective Idealism of Kant and Fichte was problematic because
it restricted reason to the rational subject, excluding the entirety of nature.
Reason was restricted to the noumenal, broken off from the “phenomena” of
nature and the world as a whole. With Spinoza, who recognized the absolute
character of nature, but saw it as defined by mechanism and causation, there
was a denial of the power of the will and what Fichte called the “eternal striv-
ing” of the self. For Fichte, the “eternal striving” was done by the ego against
nature, nature being the field within which the ego was to posit his freedom.
But Hölderlin’s radical proposition is that we synthesize these two poles of
philosophy; that we see the subject not as the antithesis to nature, nor as sim-
ply absorbed into the totality of rational nature. Rather, the idea is that the
rational subject now represents that part of nature, of organic, rational mat-
ter that is most highly organized, capable of reflecting on itself. In this sense,
the Fichtean “eternal striving” is not to be construed as acting against nature,
but seeking to be part again of that whole from which it has been alienated,
dirempted. Nature itself is not a static totality, it is an organic, developmental,
self-differentiating whole. This growth of things from that which is inchoate
to that which is organized and developed—resonant with Aristotle’s meta-
physical concepts of δυνάμις (potentiality) and ἐνέργεια (actuality or activity)
and with Hegel’s later distinction between Dasein and Wirklichkeit—entails
a distinction between that which is fully developed and realized and that
which is defective or stunted. This forms the basis of Hölderlin’s critique of
modernity in that since he sees the relation between subject and object as
continuous rather than discrete, so too the relation between what is real and
ideal have an organic relation.8 The ideal is not a regulative principle, but is
constitutive of reality, and it is this that provides him with a critical concep-
tion of modernity. Our culture can be critiqued not from the standpoint of an
a priori or transcendental principle, but rather from what is constitutive of
that reality itself. The ideal is present in nuce within reality. It is our relation
with the absolute, with the true essence of nature that determines the relative
perfection or imperfection of man.
But even more, this leads us to a point of view—philosophical but also
accessible, according to Hölderlin—only through aesthetic experience that
the absolute, the whole is to be understood as the totality of the vital, sys-
temic organization of nature. And this is something that cannot be grasped
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 187
through conceptual thought alone. It must be experienced. Love—a theme
made trite by its overuse in Romanticism—is no mere sentiment, but is the
force, the emotional drive, that draws us out of our subjectivity and gives
us the feeling of the need to reunite with others, with the whole itself. As
Frederick Beiser puts it

The feeling of the sublime, the longing to reunite ourselves with all
things, and the experience of love, in which I see myself in others as oth-
ers see themselves in me, show us that we know an other that transcends
our own circle of consciousness.9

Love now becomes, for Hölderlin, the supreme creative force, the experience
of which requires the other, and which is satisfied only by one’s unification
with an other. When animated by love, man begins to reach a status of
perfection, reaching beyond his narrow subjectivity: “Yes! Man is a sun, all-
seeing, all-illuminating when he loves, and when he loves not, he is a dark
dwelling in which a smoking little lamp burns.”10 It is also the ground for
friendship, the kind of sociation that reflects the actual substance of human
nature, the truth of our being, one reason why Hölderlin holds that: “It is a
better time, that is what you seek, a more beautiful world. In your friends
you embraced only that world, with them you were that world.”11
The paradigm of reason that advocates the separation of man from
nature, that entails his domination over nature, is consequently, as Adorno
and Horkheimer pointed out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the terminus
of a kind of rationality that Hölderlin sought to stop in its tracks, to, in
effect, block before it grew out of control. For Adorno and Horkheimer saw
the way that this narrow, reified form of Enlightenment reason refracts the
world back to us as a field for our domination:

Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men
pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which
they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dic-
tator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them.
(DE, 9)

But for Hölderlin, this is the outcome of what he saw already predominant
in his own time—a modernity that has divorced reason from beauty, intel-
lect from feeling. “Intellect without beauty of spirit,” he writes in Hyperion,
“is like a subservient journeyman who constructs the fence out of coarse
wood as sketched out for him, and nails the carpentered posts together for
the garden that the master shall cultivate.”12 For Hölderlin, the overcom-
ing of the subject-object problem, the move toward an aesthetic experience
granting us access to that which is absolute, which is “unconditioned,”
provides us with a wholly different way of conceiving the powers and the
purposes of reason. Contrary to the domination of nature because of our
188 Michael J. Thompson
separation from it, Hölderlin’s claim is that we must explode the confines of
the anthropocentric, subjectivist model of reason and expand what it means
to think and feel.
But one important theme that emerges from Hyperion is what can happen
to the actually lived experience of the modern subject who struggles with
the complexity of this insight. This is why he refers to the ἐν διαφέρον ἐαῦτῳ
as “striving reason’s idea of beauty,” since it is only when reason has been
mediated by the experience of the sublime that an expanded ego can be free,
can be truly self-determined because it has incorporated within itself the
structure of the universal:

When the sun of the beautiful shined upon the intellect at its business as
a May day shines into the artist’s workshop, then it does not rush out
and abandon its makeshift work, yet it thinks fondly of the festive day
when it will wander in the rejuvenating spring light.13

It is as if Hölderlin is portraying for us a vision of man on the cusp of

some great ontological shift, on a precipice between the present, dirempted
condition and the possibility of the new realization of a totality, the ἐν
καὶ πᾶν, the “one and all,” that he sought as the great regenerative tonic
for modern culture. By moving beyond the confines of the self-sufficient
ego, of self-consciousness itself as the basis for human knowledge and
experience, Hölderlin posits “being” (Seyn) as the “single universal sub-
stance of which thought and extension, the subjective and objective, are
only manifestations or appearances.”14 The content of true thoughts, of
beauty, therefore are constitutive of reality, of nature of being itself. Once
a culture no longer cultivates this basic truth, man is lost, a mere frag-
ment, and no longer possesses of his true powers: “one who is a man,”
he writes in Hyperion, “can he not do more than hundreds who are only
fragments of men?”15

III
But it is precisely of this that Hölderlin’s critique of modernity consists.
Modern man, the modern subject, is, for Hölderlin, a tragic figure. “Nothing
can grow,” he writes in Hyperion, “and nothing so profoundly waste away,
as man.”16 The great problem of modernity is that the kind of rationality
that it embodies chases out what he sees as the higher capacity of the subject
to experience and to grasp the absolute and reconcile subject and object.
This is a core theme of Hölderlin’s work and is points to a core, living theme
in modernity: namely, the loss of meaning, the loss of the individual’s con-
nection with the world as a whole. Modernity has killed off the pre-modern
religio-communal framework of life that once guided us. Now, after the
French Revolution, after Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and the Enlightenment, we
stand at a juncture—a juncture where the old culture has been destroyed
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 189
and the new has yet to take shape. Not unlike Matthew Arnold’s narrator
in his “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” who wanders “between two
worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born,”17 Hölderlin’s modern
man is one who suffers from the limits of the Cartesian-Kantian world-view
where the individual ego is the sole font of reason.
The alternative is for us to see that aesthetic experience provides us with
the proper transcendental deduction necessary for man’s capacity to grasp
truth. Hölderlin’s argument here is that aesthetic judgment and experience
is necessary so as to prevent the slippage into nihilism and skepticism; it is
also necessary to anchor the expanded form of reasoning and judgment that
Hölderlin saw as capable of grasping true being, of nature and its rational,
dynamic structure. And this is of importance because without aesthetic judg-
ment as a ground for human reason, we will drift into a blind instrumental-
ity, split what is human from what is will become merely “technical,” and
block our achievement of a higher form of being. Intellect, reason, requires
beauty since without it, it will be unable to grasp truth. “From mere intellect
comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the limited knowledge of
what exists,”18 he writes in Hyperion. And this is meant to convey the idea
that a self-sufficient epistemology is a defective approach to the world no
less than the rigors of moral perfectionism and the categorical imperative;
it is so because it does not—it cannot—adequately grasp the true essence
of nature and of life since it attempts to do so from a one-sided and hence
deficient vantage point.
Not unlike Rousseau, whose Emile learns of the proper ways of being
before the deformative powers of socialization, Hölderlin’s view of youth
is one that is full of potentiality. But the spirit of the age is what gives even
the young the basic pattern for a life of truth and beauty—a free, emanci-
pated life that grasps the absolute. As Hyperion laments: “I had grown up
like a vine without a pole, and the wild tendrils spread aimlessly over the
ground. You know how so much noble strength perishes among us because
it is not used.”19 It is the fate of modern culture to produce individuals
unable to realize that higher truth and the tragic nature of modern culture
is that it is unable to provide the foundation, the ground for the developed
self. In Hölderlin’s lyric poem “Hyperion’s Song of Fate” we are told this
explicitly:

Doch uns ist gegeben,

Auf keiner Statte zu ruhn,
Es schwinden, es fallen
Die leidenden Menschen
Blindlings von einer
Stunde zur andern,
Wie Wasser von Klippe
Zu Klippe geworfen,
Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.
190 Michael J. Thompson
[But to us it is given
To find no place of peace,
And suffering mortals
Dwindle and fall
Headlong from one
Hour to the next,
Like water from cliff
To cliff thrown
Downward for years into the unknown.]

Hölderlin makes his relation to Rousseau explicit in his poem “Rous-

seau” which paints a picture of the citizen of Geneva as a kind of prophet:
“How narrowly confined is our day-time here./You were and saw and
wondered, and yet, darkness falls.” Rousseau’s message goes unheeded by
modern man, for what he can be and what he contains within him he is
unable to grasp:

Des Lebens Überfluß, das Unendliche,

Das um ihn und dämmert, er faßt es nie.
Doch lebts in ihm und gegenwärtig,
Wärmend und wirkend, die Frucht entquillt ihm.

Du hast gelebt! Auch dir, auch dir

Erfreuet die ferne Sonne dein Haupt,
Und Stralen aus der schönern Zeit. Es
Haben die Boten dein Herz gefunden.

[Life’s abundance, its infinity

That teems and glimmers around him, he’ll never grasp.
And yet it lives in him, and is present,
Warming and effective, the fruit springs forth from him.

You have lived! And you, your head

Rejoices by the light of a distant sun,
The radiance of a more beautiful age.
The messengers have discovered your heart.]

The age of reason predisposes us to a fragmented view of life. It spawns

a culture and institutions that deform humanity, severing us from the link
between aesthetic experience as the ground for a proper form of cognition
that can place the unity of being as the telos of human life. But this is no
mere ideal, it is real in the sense that aesthetic experience grants us access to
the powers of unified nature, of its organic, teleological structure.
With the power of love, that force that is within us seeking unity with the
whole, that which seeks the reconciliation of opposites within the self, that
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 191
force which can grant us experience of the true nature of the whole—that
force, represented by Diotima in Hyperion, is alienated from him. Indeed,
after losing Diotima Hyperion laments that “My soul is like a fish cast out
of its element onto the sandy shore, and it writhes and flings itself about
until it dries up in the heat of the day.”20 The regeneration of man, the resto-
ration of what was prefigured in classical Athens, is dependent upon return-
ing to human experience as a whole experience, not simply to cognition.
Aesthetics and philosophy must be brought together and the point of this
is to be able to grasp the whole, the experience of the sublime is not mere
feeling, it possesses philosophical power as well. The whole man, the full,
developed self is one who has perfected this capacity and who belongs to
a culture that embodies these capacities. These people would be capable of
free being and free activity; without an integration of aesthetic experience of
beauty, our science, our politics, our philosophy—all will degenerate leaving
man fragmented. From Hyperion again:

Where divine nature and its artists are so insulted, oh there life’s best
pleasure is gone, and every other star is better than the earth. There
the men become ever more barren, more desolate, though they were all
born beautiful; servility grows, with it impudence, intoxication grows
with worries, and with plenty grow hunger and fear of famine; the
blessing of every year becomes a curse, and all gods flee.21

This is why Hölderlin sees Athens—classical Greece in general—as the

idealized paradigm for culture and the whole man. In Hyperion, the con-
trast between classical Greece and the Germans represents this opposition
between the two poles of humanity. Greek culture was the product of a peo-
ple who were able to merge feeling with thought, to grasp true being. Their
art and their politics were expressions of a people that thought and felt
widely. The Germans, of the “people of the North,” as he refers to them in
Hyperion, are different. They have shorn thought from feeling, fragmented
man, and stultified him:

In the North, a man must already be sensible even before a mature

feeling is in him, he imputes guilt to himself for everything even before
ingenuousness has reached its beautiful end; he must become rational,
become self-conscious spirit before he is a man, must become a shrewd
man before he is a child; he does not allow the unity of the whole man,
beauty, to thrive and ripen in him before he cultivates and develops him-
self. Mere intellect, mere reason, are always the kings of the North.22

The critique of modernity is therefore a critique not of reason itself, not

a reactionary retreat into sentiment and feeling, but of a kind of reason
that lacks the necessary moorings in aesthetic experience that can grant us
access into the fullness of true being. The division of labor between man’s
192 Michael J. Thompson
capacities—between his labor, art, thinking, feeling, all instantiate a kind of
decadence. The rejuvenation of modern culture can come about only after
this fragmentation has been restored to a coherent unity; only once reason
is once again resonant with a harmony with nature rather than a persistent
one-sidedness.

IV
What must be emphasized is the way that Hölderlin views the connection—
indeed, the essential connection—between the act of the poet and the con-
ception of truth he is working with. Indeed, we must be clear that the
radicalness of Hölderlin’s ideas rests here in this idea of the nature of truth
and its relationship to the aesthetic act because it grants us insight into
the very structural essence of all truth-claims: namely that we must see
the totality of things as the product of a dynamic, creative process. His
indebtedness to Plato here and his reworking of Platonic ideas in the light
of Spinoza, Kant, and Fichte, in particular, means that he is seeking to
grasp a conception of truth that unites what he saw as the fragmented
quality of modern reason and modern society and man. Unlike the Greeks
who, he would have said, viewed the totality of human experience and
did not divide knowledge from beauty and the Good, modern man has
divided these concerns. The result is the fall into despair and nihilism that
he explores in the vicissitudes of Hyperion. But if we go back to Hölderlin’s
Platonic roots, then we begin to see a very different set of ideas emerge—
ideas that can, I think, give to critical theory and critical philosophy more
generally a more radically humanistic set of ethical and intellectual goals
and purposes.
To be more specific, Hölderlin’s relevance for critical theory can only be
grasped once we are willing to see that he is pursuing a form of rational-
ity that achieves two interdependent aims. First, an expanded capacity of
the subject to grasp a truer, more comprehensive account of reality as a
whole, as a totality. Second, and related to this, an account of rationality
that mitigates against forms of reason that can lead to the fragmented and
instrumentalized form that he saw implicit in the narrower conception of
reason championed by the Aufklärer. The dichotomy between the Enlight-
enment ideas of the eighteenth century and the “Romantic” ideas of the late-
eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries needs to be called into question.
Indeed, the Frühromantik defense of the aesthetic, which Hölderlin champi-
oned, was in fact seeking to complete the ideas started by the Aufklärer. As
Frederick Beiser has forcefully put the matter:

The goal of art was to achieve one of the Aufklärung’s most cherished
ideals—namely, the closing of the gap between theory and practice so
that the principles of reason could be realized in public life. The value of
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 193
art was that it could inspire the people to act according to the principles
of reason.23

This latter point is of prime importance, for without understanding what

kind of rationality Hölderlin was seeking to articulate. Specifically, we will
fail to understand his idealization of classical Greece and its emphasis on
the Greek ideas about the synthesis of theory and practice, of the realiza-
tion of the individual through the solidaristic community, of the aesthetic
quality of this process of self-formation, and the full, flourishing form of
life it envisioned for members of the political community. In this respect,
Hölderlin’s connection with Platonic ideas is therefore of prime impor-
tance because he sees in Plato’s ideas a conception of reason that unites
the polarities of modern thought and culture. The most significant polarity
is that between—not only theory and practice, as Beiser points out—but
also between the realm of theoretical knowledge, moral judgment, and aes-
thetic quality. Put differently, Hölderlin grasps on to Plato’s complex thesis
that the True, the Good and the Beautiful are all to be synthesized into a
single conception; that the chasm between these three realms of thought,
made explicit by Kant, was to be overcome. The implications of Hölder-
lin’s project are what make him so centrally significant today, for in his
emphasis on the aesthetic function of reason, we see the importance of an
anti-instrumental, humanistic expression of reason. Hölderlin’s project was
not to escape into emotivism and feeling but to fill out it out with the actual
purposes of developing human life and creating the conditions for a kind
of human reflection that would allow a more humane, more emancipated
form of self and society to emerge.24 “Ohne Dichtung nie ein philosophisch
Volk gewesen,” Hölderlin says in his Hyperion, and it is this fundamental
problem he wishes to address and to solve for modern man via Plato.
We can take the idea of aesthetic creation as a first entry point. For
Hölderlin’s claim is, as I have shown above, that aesthetics and truth are
bound together, indeed, two facets of the same faculty. In the Symposium,
Plato’s understanding of the concept of poetry (ποίησις) is greatly expanded
beyond the act of literary production. Both Agathon and Diotima in the dia-
logue stress the original concept of the term poieisis (ποίησις) as “creation.”
Plato’s Diotima goes on to say:

you know that poetry is many things; for any thing that passes from
non-being into being, the whole cause is poetry (ποίησις), with the result
that all arts (πάσαις ταῖς τέχναις) are kinds of poetry, and their craftsmen
(δημιουργοί) are poets.
(205C)

Plato’s thesis here is an important one for Hölderlin: he is saying that cre-
ativity is the essence not only of literary poetry, but that poetry itself is an
194 Michael J. Thompson
expanded notion that captures the creation of any thing by any craftsmen.25
Poetry is the source of the ens creatum, that realm of all that is created. To
grasp nature as creative, to see that man, too, has the power to create, means
that the aesthetic plays a central role in the cognition of truth and in the
constitution of the beautiful as perfection.26
But at an even more important level, the capacity to create, the power of
ποίησις, is directly related to that of truth. In the Timaeus Plato makes this
link between creation and truth explicit by invoking the idea of creation
as an organization into coherence from chaos.27 This idea of creation is an
important one for another reason. For Plato, the relation between the Good
(τὸ ἀγαθόν) and Truth (τὸ ἀλήθειον) is synthetic, by which is meant that they
are both terms that explain the same object because both categories con-
stitute the same object. At the heart of the Platonic thesis about truth and
beauty, however, is the idea that the form of the good is the very precondi-
tion for genuine knowledge. The thesis here is that the “form of the good”
(ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα) is one that comes to govern truth. In his Republic, Plato
further explores the thesis that rational knowledge (i.e., knowledge capable
of cognizing Truth) is rooted in the Good and that these, in turn, are related
to the Beautiful or that, as Socrates puts it:

beautiful too, as are both truth and knowledge, you will be right in
esteeming this other nature as more beautiful than either; and, as in the
previous instance, light and sight may be truly said to be like the sun,
and yet not to be the sun, so in this other sphere, science and truth may
be deemed to be like the good, but not the good; the good has a place
of honor yet higher.
(509a)

This relation between the Good and Truth conveys a conception of reason
that seeks to capture a much richer and more complete grasp of the totality
of any thing. The Platonic Idea (ἰδέα) is therefore not only a non-material
thing, it is more importantly an infinite pattern and source for creation of
all things. It is not simply that, but perhaps more importantly it is the very
principle, the first cause of what any thing actually is. This is both beautiful
and good and true at the same time since Plato does not separate cognition
into epistemic, evaluative, and aesthetic spheres, a la Kant, but instead sees
that the idea of the good is the pattern and form that allows knowledge
of the truth which is never properly manifest in the world of phenomena.
The idea of the Good allows us access to a higher form of truth because the
Good and the Beautiful in this context mean the fully functioning, perfected
form of any thing. To know what a true X is is therefore to know the per-
fect, fully functioning, and developed X. For Plato, the Idea or Form (ἰδέα
or εἶδος) is not transcendent and separate from any object, as is too often
assumed; it is, rather, the creative principle that constitutes the object. The
thesis here is that the concept of the Good relates to the notion of truth in
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 195
the sense that the fullness and completeness of what anything is a condition
of its goodness and its truth.
Reason is therefore not an instrumental capacity of the mind, something
to be used for the mastery over things and the analytic power to break it
down in order to be able to utilize it, in some Baconion or Cartesian sense
of reason. Nature is not mechanism, but process; it is not a machine, but,
as the Timaeus tells us, a living creature. Even more, Truth is not simply the
collection of empirical facts and hypotheses. Rather, Plato’s thesis is that the
Good and Truth are united concepts insofar as the processual structure of
nature is also the very process of aesthetic production. To know truth is to
know beauty. This becomes the Good only once we see that the Good of any
thing is its truth, its true, complete manifestation, its relative approximation
of the ἰδέα, of the formal principles that are inherent in what any thing truly
is. Plato employs a neologism, ἀγαθοειδῆ, which means literally the “good-
form,” and which Plato seems to have invented to capture this complex
philosophical concept. This is no doubt why Plato says in the Republic that:
“for we can say that the things that are known are known not only because
of the good, but also their being (τὸ εἶναι) and essence (τὴν οὐσίαν) come
from it as well” (509b). What can this mean? For one thing, it means seeing
that the essence of any thing, its truth-content, is dependent it being what
it is, in fulfilling its essential (ideal) structure. Similarly, for something to be
good, it must also realize this structure. Trees that do not manifest their ideal
form of tree-ness are “bad” trees, they are defective trees. Similarly, trees are
beautiful when they manifest this ideal form. The Good, the Beautiful, and
the True are interdependent dimensions of any object. They constitute the
highest status that any object can attain. In this sense, we cannot separate,
as Enlightenment rationality sought to do, the relation between these three
dimensions of reality.
Separating fact from value, cognition from judgment, can only lead us
to the sterile path that Hölderlin is diagnosing and to which he is react-
ing in Hyperion. Reason must attain a higher, more complete and com-
prehensive grasp of the world. For Hölderlin, this is the core aim of his
aesthetic-philosophical project: to show that the overcoming of the subject-
object divide can only truly be done through a grasp of aesthetic process.
For only the aesthetic—viewed as a process of creation, of the move from
chaos to order—actually captures the true structure of the objective world.
To understand the process of creation is also to understand truth; we are
no longer held under the spell of atomism, empiricism, nominalism, or of
utilitarianism—aesthetic reflection brings us into the core of being and, in
so doing, united beauty with truth. For these cannot capture the whole, can-
not capture process, cannot capture what truly is. The ideal and the real are
now reconciled and brought into a new revitalizing force. The subject and
the object, once reconciled, constitute a new totality that expands the hori-
zons of the agent and allows him to grasp the true, actual nature of himself
and reality. This reconciliation of subject and object is therefore not the
196 Michael J. Thompson
absorption of the subject into nature, but a realization of one’s part within
a system of creation and becoming.
Plato’s argument therefore holds, in its own way, a key to those who
would seek an alternative form of rationality that (a) does not abandon the
principles of reason and (b) allows for reason to be subsumed under the
guidance of the principle of the good, as a theory of judgment. Plato’s argu-
ment is a difficult one, but I think Hölderlin’s reception of this thesis is one
that seeks to expand the compartmentalized conception of human reason
that Kant had delineated and instead insist upon a synthetic understanding
of the capacity for reason, one that would overcome the split between nou-
mena and phenomena, Sein and Sollen, and ultimately lay the foundation
for a more critical conception of human reflection and judgment. Now we
are to see reason and creation as aspects of the same faculty, as a faculty that
can peer into the essential nature of truth as dynamic, total, processual, and
objective.28 The reason is that, Hölderlin suggests, the poetic faculty is the
form-imposing faculty. It creates reality not ex nihlo, but through the orga-
nization of form from chaos. It is able to create truth, knowable objects and
nature itself is the most primordial exemplar of this same capacity. As the
Timaeus made clear, the key to creation was the higher organization of what
was already existent. For Hölderlin, the aesthetic was now further allied to
the capacity to know truth.
We need to make this move because by doing so we see that the evalua-
tive concepts of the Good, the epistemic concepts that delineate Truth, and
the aesthetic concepts that describe the Beautiful, are all now describing the
same reality. What Hölderlin saw as problematic was the way that mod-
ern Enlightenment rationality divided reason into theoretical, practical, and
aesthetic forms of cognition. Plato’s path was to see that these three spheres
of human thinking converged in the domain of real truth. This is because
the Good is a prerequisite of any kind of true thing or form. It is “good” in
this sense that the stomach secretes digestive enzymes; it is “good” that it
do this, it is not only a “fact” that it does it. And we know real truth when
we know this kind of good because we know what things are in their most
ideal, formal sense. We are able to apprehend the ideal pattern that gener-
ates the changing forms of empirical reality. The good and the true are there-
fore united. Proper knowledge, the highest form of intellect—dianoia for
Plato—is the capacity to grasp the infinite ideal that lies behind the plethora
of empirical, temporal manifestations of being. True knowledge of a tree is
also knowledge of the best tree, i.e., a tree whose functions and properties
are near perfection and, in this sense, closer to the ideal pattern of tree-ness.
In this sense, it can also be seen to be beautiful. To know and to judge are
the same capacity. As Plato puts it in the Republic: “This thing that gives the
truth to things that are known and grants the knower the capacity to know
is, we can say, the form of the good” (508e).
How well this fits with Hölderlin’s project of refuting the narrow and
instrumental impulse of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed, he is concerned
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 197
not with the refutation of reason itself and with a Romantic return to feeling
and to the mystical. He is concerned that the narrowing of reason will lead
to the degradation of man, not his expansion and fulfillment. The unity of
aesthetics with rationality therefore means a thicker form of reasoning that
is granted critical ballast. The analytic, instrumental force of modern reason
is now contrasted with reason as a vehicle not of control and dominance
over nature, but rather as the vehicle for the expansion of human flourish-
ing and well-being. Here we can glimpse a kind of rationality that resists the
reificatory tendencies of technical reason. For Hölderlin, the Enlightenment
must therefore be critiqued from within; its principles must be deepened and
enriched if they are not to fall into the various problems that he probes in
Hyperion. Where later critical theorists would react to the alliance between
instrumental reason and administered capitalism, Hölderlin sees that the
solution to this is to impose an alternative form of rationality, one that is
able to capture the capacity to think and to judge. A culture that severs the
relation between fact and value, between what is and what ought to be,
can no longer perceive what the true, good forms of life can be. Aesthetics
is therefore, for Hölderlin, a means out of the iron cage, a path out of the
incomplete and stunted world of human nihilism sustained by the problem-
atic chasm between subject and object as well as idealism and realism that
causes the degeneration of the modern world.

V
Hölderlin’s relation to critical theory should therefore be appreciated in
this context. What his ideas about human reason and creation entail is a
broader, rich conception of reason that can serve emancipatory potential.
The reaction to instrumental reason, to technical efficiency, the atomistic
model of the ego, has led to a cynicism of reason more broadly. In this sense,
Hölderlin’s ideas retain their salience within the critical theory tradition, in
particular. The pathologies of alienation, reification, and so on all can be
understood as generated by the one-sidedness of a deficient form of reason
that pervades our self-understanding as well as the institutions of our soci-
ety. The purposes and ends of our culture no longer provide a home for the
kind of unified self that Hölderlin insists exists in potentia within us. Only
the non-instrumental conception of reason that seeks our development and
the higher forms of being of which we are capable are worthy of what we
can call a critical social rationality with emancipatory and transformative
intent.
For this reason, Hölderlin’s conception of nature and of human freedom
possesses compelling weight for critical theorists. For unlike the concept
of utopia put forward by Ernst Bloch, it is not some kind of “anticipatory
illumination” playing a regulative function in relation to our ideas. Rather,
for Hölderlin, it is constitutive of our status and activity as free beings. We
are free only when we create the kind of selves, the kind of culture, that
198 Michael J. Thompson
is guided by beauty, by the striving to fulfill the unity of ourselves with
nature and to see that the experience of beauty is constitutive of what nature
actually is in its highest, most developed form and, therefore, what a real-
ized, free humanity can actually become. But this relation between the ego
and nature should be understood in deeper terms: it is not a merging with
nature, it is the realization that the “eccentric path” of the individual to see
the deeper essential truth of what it means to be human, to see the organic,
dynamic, purpose of human existence; that modern culture must give way
to a “springtime of humanity” where each individual will operate under the
constitutive guidance of nature. “Love gave birth to the world, friendship
will give birth to it again.”29
In this sense, we can perhaps return to Mann’s proposal about the nec-
essary relation between Hölderlin and Marx: that a non-anthropocentric
humanism is not only an ethic, but a foundation—a foundation for our
culture, our ethics, our philosophy, the ends and purposes of our institu-
tions, and so on. Indeed, if Marcuse, in his book The Aesthetic Dimension,
makes use of Schiller’s conception of Spiel, or “play” as a central category of
an aesthetics with emancipatory potential, then perhaps we can see Hölder-
lin’s conception of an aesthetic-philosophical form of reason as a way to
rejuvinate the critical force of critical theory. For although Marcuse saw
Schiller and his concept of the “play drive” (Spieltrieb) as an emancipatory
force, Hölderlin’s alternative is able to posit for us more than a drive within
the self, it is also able provide for us a much more expanded criterion for
our reasons, our laws, culture, art, institutions, etc.30 For Hölderlin, eros
plays a role not of subjective creation only, but an expanded role in actu-
ally constituting the good: it is only when we strive for the absolute, when
we can experience the beuaty of nature and our our inherent connection
(Verbindung) with it that we can constitute new sensibilities, new powers,
and new creations—in short a new way of being. A humanized critical the-
ory would therefore be able to keep in view the irreducibly human ends and
purposes of our social world and culture, and these human ends can perhaps
be turned into normative-critical categories. It would possess a wider, more
encompassing view of reason oriented toward non-destructive purposes and
aims; a form of reason circumscribed not in the epistemic subject or con-
gealed in technological objects, but embedded in a developmental and teleo-
logical conception of the species and our relation with nature as a whole
making it capable of serving as the ground for a truly radical-transformative
paradigm. Indeed, perhaps then the words of Hyperion will anticipate a
freer, more evolved age:

We are like fire that sleeps in the dry branch or in flint; and in every
moment we struggle and seek the end of our narrow confinements. But
they come, they make up for eons of battle, the moments of liberation,
when the divine bursts open the prison, when the flame frees itself from
the wood and surges victoriously over the ashes, ha! when we feel as
 Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity 199
if, the sorrows and servitude forgotten, the unfettered spirit returned in
triumph into the halls of the sun.31

Notes
1. Although the conservative nature of much of Romanticism must be accepted, it
cannot be applied to Hölderlin’s work and his aesthetic-philosophical project.
Lukács’s critique can be found in his essay “Hölderlins Hyperion.” In his Goethe
und Seine Zeit (Bern: A. Franck AG, Verlag, 1947), 110ff.
2. Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 84.
3. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion. In Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser
Verlag, 1990), 119.
4. Cf. the discussion by Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Sub-
jectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 397ff.
5. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, 38.
6. Hegel and Hölderlin agree on this point. As Adorno points out: “Hegel and
Hölderlin were in agreement down to explicit theorems, as in the critique of
Fichte’s absolute ‘I’ as something without object and therefore trivial, a critique
that must have been canonical for the late Hölderlin’s transition to empirical
particulars.” “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” 122.
7. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, 112.
8. The resonance here with certain themes in Marx should not be overlooked, in
particular the normative categories that ground his critical ideas about capital-
ist society. See Michael J. Thompson, “Philosophical Foundations for a Marxian
Ethics.” In M. Thompson (ed.) Constructing Marxist Ethics: Critique, Norma-
tivity, Praxis (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 235–265.
9. Beiser, German Idealism, 373.
10. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, 100 and 89.
11. Ibid., 85.
12. Ibid., 111.
13. Ibid., 112.
14. Beiser, German Idealism, 387.
15. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, 119.
16. Ibid., 58.
17. Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse.” In A. Dwight Culler
(ed.) Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1961), 187.
18. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, 112.
19. Ibid., Hyperion, 18.
20. Ibid., Hyperion, 79.
21. Ibid., Hyperion, 210–211.
22. Ibid., Hyperion, 111.
23. Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German
Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 57.
24. Nathan Ross insightfully comments on Hölderlin’s project as one that urges
modern man “to think of an ideal state of freedom, in which the subject does not
command itself but enters into a fruitful interplay with the world, and to think
of the experience of beauty as the transformative experience that would allow
us to cognize and realize such a state.” Nathan Ross, The Philosophy and Poli-
tics of Aesthetic Experience: German Romanticism and Critical Theory (New
York: Palgrave, 2017), 82.
200 Michael J. Thompson
25. See the important discussion of the Platonic ἰδέα and its function as a creative
process by L.P. Chambers, “Plato’s Objective Standard of Value.” Journal of Phi-
losophy, no. 33(22) (1936): 596–605.
26. As Hölderlin remarks in his essay “Grund zum Empedokles”:
Nature and Art are only opposed harmoniously in pure life. Art is the blos-
som, the perfected completion (Vollendung) of nature; Nature first becomes
divine through the conjunction with the diverse, but harmonious art; when
everything is what it can be and one conjoins itself with the other, compen-
sates for the defects of the other, which that one necessarily must have, in
order to be that which it can as a particular, then there exists completed
perfection (die Vollendung), and the divine rests in the middle of both.
(“Grund zum Empedokles.” In Gesammelte Werke
[Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990], 560)
The aesthetic reflection of man therefore helps to complete the brute facts
of raw nature. In the process, man is brought to perfection as well since he is
brought into the realm of perfection and into the realm of the universal thereby
overcoming his particularity as his aesthetic reflection overcomes the particular-
ity of the object of nature.
27. See Timaeus D 33 and passim. In particular, Plato points to the idea that the
creation of the cosmos by God was intended to be like a living creature as well
as being a whole, composite of all other wholes. “These were his intentions:
first, in order for it to be whole, it would be like a grown creature perfected from
its perfected parts (ὅ τι μάλιστα ζῶον τέλεον ἐκ τελέων τῶν μερῶν εἴη)” (D 33).
The idea of the cosmos as a living creature, of nature as a living creature with
the ends and processes of a living creature is what Hölderlin refers to with the
subjective factor of man and his ability to complete and to cognize this truth in
nature. This truth is also, at the same time, constitutive of the Beautiful and the
Good.
28. As Beiser (German Idealism, 61) aptly puts it:
It is indeed more accurate to regard understanding and reason as distinct
functions of a single faculty rather than distinct faculties: they are ulti-
mately the same faculty because they have the same source and object,
namely, the striving toward the infinite. It’s just that they approach their
object in different ways.
29. Hölderlin, Hyperion, 85.
30. See the discussion of Marcuse’s use of Schiller by Paul Guyer who argues that
in spite of his Kantian language he meant to praise Kant himself only as a
precursor of Schiller. That may be, but then the important point is Schiller
too understands the free play of our powers in aesthetic experience in more
narrowly cognitive and metaphysical and less globally psychological terms
than Marcuse does.
Paul Guyer, “Marcuse and Classical Aesthetics.” Revue Internationale de Phi-
losophie, no. 246 (2008): 349–365. Also cf. the discussion by Charles Larmore,
“Hölderlin and Novalis.” In Karl Ameriks (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to
German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 141ff.
31. Hölderlin, Hyperion, 70.
11 Walter Benjamin on Hölderlin’s
“Poetic Cosmos”*
Hyun Höchsmann

“The Broadest Base Imaginable for Coming to Terms

with Hölderlin”
Benjamin’s pleasure and excitement in reading Hölderlin (who was being
rediscovered at the time)1 and his desire for “the broadest basis imaginable
for coming to terms with Hölderlin,” culminated in a pioneering study of
Hölderlin, Benjamin’s first substantive essay on aesthetics, “Two poems by
Friedrich Hölderlin—‘Poet’s Courage’ and ‘Timidity’ ” (1914–1915).2

I do not believe you have any idea of the pleasure that the arrival of the
fourth volume of Hölderlin’s collected works provided me. I had been
waiting for it so long and so eagerly . . . Because of my excitement, I
was almost incapable of doing anything else the entire day . . . I need the
broadest basis imaginable for coming to terms with Hölderlin.3

Benjamin’s “aesthetics of poetry” formulates significant interpretive prin-

ciples for philosophical analysis of literature and engages with the central
topics of philosophy of literature which will be discussed in this chapter: the
task of poetry, truth in poetry, the relation between poetry and life, form and
content, and the function of aesthetic criticism.
Benjamin’s essay on Hölderlin has been formative in the development
of his philosophy. Benjamin regarded the Hölderlin essay as being foun-
dational for his subsequent work.4 Benjamin’s Hölderlin essay can be con-
sidered as an introduction to his dissertation (1918) on the concept of art
criticism (Kunstkritik) in the early Romantics.5
The present chapter sets out to follow Benjamin’s approach: to seek the
broadest possible basis for reading Benjamin’s “aesthetic commentary” on
Hölderlin. Benjamin’s construction of the theoretical framework in the
Hölderlin essay will be studied in relation to his other writings and also to
Adorno’s interpretation of the philosophical significance of poetic language
of Hölderlin in “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” which incorporates
the concepts clarified by Benjamin.6 Benjamin’s commentary and Adorno’s
essay, while not intended as historical scholarship, engage with (Benjamin to
a lesser extent then Adorno) the extant approaches to reading Hölderlin to
202 Hyun Höchsmann
accentuate the differences. Benjamin and Adorno set forth distinctive meth-
ods and aims, but in articulating the aesthetic concepts and principles which
have a broader significance at the intersection of literature and philosophy,
their close readings and interpretive analyses of Hölderlin present possibili-
ties of advancing the understanding of poetry and philosophy.
Benjamin’s incorporation of the ideas of Goethe and Novalis on the
nature of poetry can be expanded with a further engagement with Novalis7
and Hölderlin’s translation of Pindar’s odes (from the same period as “Poet’s
Courage”).8 Benjamin held in high esteem Norbert von Hellingrath’s edi-
tions of Hölderlin’s writings and his dissertation on Hölderlin’s translation
of Pindar, which put forward the original thesis that the key to understand-
ing Hölderlin’s poetry was via the study of his translation of Pindar. As R.
Nägele has explained, in the way that “Hölderlin’s translation of Pindar
formed his poetic language and method, Benjamin’s reading of Hölderlin
participates in the shaping his thought.”9
Exploring the interconnections of Benjamin’s philosophical frame of refer-
ence for the nature of poetry and truth with the aesthetics and epistemol-
ogy of Plato and Kant, both of whom Hölderlin and Benjamin had studied
closely, will prepare the ground for indicating the broad basis of Benjamin’s
philosophical perspectives on literature and his reading of Hölderlin’s poems.
Engagement with the aesthetics and the epistemology of Plato and Kant form
the foundations of philosophical thinking in Hölderlin and Benjamin.
The philosophical and poetic significance of Hölderlin’s work has been
recognized in Hölderlin studies.10 Five decades after Benjamin’s essay, Paul
de Man wrote that Hölderlin’s works receive more expert critical attention
than any other poet and that the foremost philological and critical scholar-
ship has been devoted to the publication and interpretation of Hölderlin.11
Benjamin’s essay on Hölderlin is considered to be one of his most difficult
texts.12 The present approach to Benjamin’s essay proceeds from discerning
the reasons for the difficulty of the essay as follows: Benjamin’s simultane-
ous striving for the broadest basis for coming to terms with Hölderlin by
incorporating aesthetic and epistemological concepts which can be traced
to Plato, Kant, Goethe, and Novalis, and for the transmutation of these
concepts which are closely interwoven in their functions; and the concise
articulation of the application of concepts in place of discursive theoretical
argumentation. The archival study of Benjamin’s drafts and related materi-
als which show the interconnections among his ideas is particularly perti-
nent for understanding his Hölderlin essay.13

The Poetized, the Inner Form, the Poetic Task, and the Law
of Identity
In establishing the theoretical foundations in the first part of the Hölderlin
essay, Benjamin clarifies that the essay is not an analysis or an interpreta-
tion of Hölderlin’s two poems but an “aesthetic commentary” (ästhetischer
Kommentar). Benjamin observes that “a commentary outside classical drama
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 203
tended to be philological rather than aesthetic” (SW1, 18). In contrast to this,
the first part of Benjamin’s essay, in formulating “several preliminary remarks
on method,” aims at articulating “aesthetic categories” for responding to
Hölderlin’s poems in the second part. Benjamin sets forth the concepts of “the
poetized,” “inner form,” “poetic task,” and “the law of identity” to provide the
theoretical framework for aesthetics of poetry. In compact passages, Benjamin
encapsulates the connections among the central concepts of his commentary:
the poetized as the synthetic unity of the intellectual and perceptual orders,
the inner form as the configuration of this unity, and truth of the poem as the
objectivity of poetic production which fulfills the poetic task of the poem.

The Poetized
Transforming Goethe’s terms, “the poetized” (das Gedichtete, that which
has been poetically formed or composed) and “the inner form” (Gehalt),14
Benjamin defines the poetized as the “particular and unique sphere in which
the task and precondition of the poem lie” (SW1, 18) and a “category of
aesthetic investigation” (SW1, 19). Comprehending the poetized of a poem
consists in understanding how “the task or problem” (what a poem sets out
to achieve or solve), the solution (what a poem elucidates as a “witness”),15
and “the precondition” (what is necessary or makes it possible for a poem
to come to exist) of the poem (SW1, 20).
In Benjamin’s conception of the poetized, the task of the poem in relation
to life is not mimêsis, representation, or the expression of “the individual life-
mood of the artist” but the “life-context determined by art.” Benjamin’s clari-
fication that the “life-context determined by art” provides the “underlying
basis of the poem” places the poetized at the intersection of life and the poem
(SW1, 20).16 Benjamin’s explanation that “life as the ultimate unity,” is at the
basis of the poetized and that the task of the poem envisaged in Hölderlin’s
poetry is the life of the whole connects directly to the opening line of “Poet’s
Courage”: “Are then to you not related all that are alive?” “The unity of poet-
ized” becomes perceivable when the poetic task of giving form to “surging
and formless” life has been carried out as far as it can be; it is in this sense that
the poetized is at the limit of life. The poetized differs from the poem insofar
as it is a “limit-concept” (SW1, 19), not in the sense of drawing the external
boundaries of its application or defines the scope of the content and the form
of the poem, but a concept which makes explicit the potential features which
are inherent in the poem. The poetized as a limit-concept manifests the task
of the poem which is determined from within the poem as it comes to exist.
Benjamin develops a theory of truth in poetry in putting forward the con-
cepts of the poetized and poetic task.

This “truth,” which the most serious artists so insistently claim for their
creations, shall be understood as the objectivity of their production, as
the fulfillment of the artistic task in each case.
(SW1, 19)
204 Hyun Höchsmann
The poetized makes evident the truth of the context of the poem (Wah-
rheit der Lage). In clear distinction from the tradition of Kant and Hume,
which maintains that aesthetic judgements are judgements of taste and non-
conceptual and non-cognitive, Benjamin and Adorno uphold that art has a
“truth content.” Benjamin’s conception of the truth of a poem as the fulfill-
ment of its task and of the objectivity of production confirms the autonomy
of the work as an objective activity and not a subjective expression. Aris-
totle’s insight that poetry has more truth than history renders support for
Benjamin’s views on poetic truth and objectivity. For Aristotle, since history
pertains to what is actual, life recorded in history may be confined to par-
tiality and contingency, whereas poetry comprehends both the actual and
the possible.17 Poetry is more “philosophical” than history, in seeking to
present the internal logic and the consequences of events and Benjamin’s
view “the truth of the poem” is attained in accordance with the law of poi-
esis or Gestaltung (configuration or structure)18 can be regarded as invok-
ing the coherence theory of truth in which truth is understood as internal
consistency. Aristotle’s view that poetry comprises both what is actual and
possible and Benjamin’s explanation that truth in poetry consists the objec-
tivity of poetic production are also committed to the correspondence theory
of truth in which truth consists in correspondence with an objective reality.

Inner Form
Benjamin explains that the inner form of art is “the sphere of relations
between life and art,” emphasizing that the inner form is not connected to
the process of composition or to external circumstances or beliefs of the
author.19 Benjamin’s conception of poetry is distinct from the emotivism of
“spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions” (or “emotions recollected in
tranquility”) and also from formalism (art as significant form). In Benja-
min’s exploration of how the inner form of a poem comprises its content the
conventional form and content distinction is recalibrated.
Benjamin expounds that the inner form stands in relation to the poetized as
a particular configuration of the unity between the intellectual and perceptual:

In its general character the poetized is the synthetic unity of the intellec-
tual and perceptual orders. This unity gains its particular configuration
as the inner form of the particular creation.
(SW1, 19)

The poetized is a process which brings together the intuitive or perceptual

(anschaulich) and the spiritual or intellectual (geistig) orders. Benjamin’s
adaptation of Kant’s “synthetic unity” indicates that his aesthetics of poetry
builds on a Kantian epistemology.20 Kant argues that in sense perception we
encounter “a manifold of the phenomena” and it is the activity of the under-
standing as the power to form judgements which combines this manifold
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 205
in a synthesis and gives unity to the phenomena presented in perception.
But in maintaining that our knowledge is restricted to what is experienced
in the empirical domain, the gulf between perceptual and the intellectual
remains in Kant’s epistemology. Benjamin’s articulation of the poetized as
the synthesis which unifies the perceptual and the intellectual and the inner
form as the configuration of this unity can be regarded as a way of bridging
the Kantian epistemological gulf between sense perception and intellect via
“the aesthetic categories” of the poetized and the inner form. Benjamin’s dis-
cussion of the inner form of poetry can be related to his explanation of the
“inner unity” of the intellectual and communal life of students in his essay,
“The Life of Students” (SW1, 37–49). The search for inner unity of life is
transposed as the search for the inner form in the Hölderlin essay.21

Poetic Task
Benjamin conceives the poetic task as what a poem seeks to achieve inde-
pendently of the external factors of history and society. The poetic task per-
tains to intrinsically poetic characteristics or the essence of poetry distinct
from the circumstances of its production: “Nothing will be said here about
the process of lyrical composition, nothing about the person or world view
of the creator” (SW1, 18). The task “is derived from the poem itself.”

the particular and unique sphere in which the task and precondition of the
poem lie will be addressed. This sphere is at once the product and the subject
of this investigation.
(SW1, 18)

Benjamin aims at ascertaining how the poetic task is the “preliminary con-
dition for an evaluation of the poem” (SW1, 18).22 Benjamin’s conception
of the poetic task as a normative teleological concept engages the central
question of literature at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and episte-
mology. “The task is also to be understood as the intellectual-perceptual
(geistig-anschaulich) structure of the world to which the poem bears wit-
ness” (SW1, 18). In Hölderlin’s poetic cosmos the poem exists as a “witness”
to “the intensity of the world order.” The task of poetry is bring together
and envisage in the intellect the perceived structure of the world so that the
poem bears witness to the world. Benjamin’s understanding of the poem as
a witness confers on poetry an aesthetic requirement of discernment of sig-
nificance and meaning, a moral responsibility of impartiality and freedom
from the constraints of subjectivity, and an epistemological responsibility of
comprehension and striving for truth. In Benjamin’s conception, a poem is
neither a mirror (which reflects the world) nor a lamp (which illuminates
the world) but a witness who stands apart—as in the observation attributed
to Pythagoras regarding life as a contest: Some come to compete, others, to
sell, while the best are those who stand apart to watch.
206 Hyun Höchsmann
Benjamin refers to Novalis to elucidate the goal towards which works of
art strive: “Every work of art has in and of itself an a priori ideal, a neces-
sity for being in the world (Novalis)” (SW1, 19).23 Benjamin’s reference to
Novalis’ conception of the a priori ideal invokes and modifies Platonic ideas
or forms: the relation between the poetic task and the poem is akin to that
between a Platonic idea and its particular instance. Every work of art has
an a priori ideal but unlike the forms, the ideals are not universal since each
work of art has its own ideal. Novalis and Benjamin modify Platonic episte-
mology in which the separation between the forms and the sensible objects
prevail, towards an asymptotic convergence of the eternal and ephemeral,
and spiritual (intelligible) and perceptual (sensible).24
The unity of the intellectual and perceptual orders in Benjamin’s study is
not a discernment of a pre-existing unity but is to be achieved in the align-
ment of the poetic task with life. Benjamin formulates “the law of identity”
which sets the parameters of this synthetic unity.

Benjamin’s Law of Identity in Relation to Hölderlin’s

Law of Poetry
Benjamin explains that the law of identity “brings about the identity of the
perceptual and intellectual forms” at the center of “all poetic connections,”
establishing “the spatiotemporal interpenetrations of all configurations”
confirming that the poetized “is identical with life” (SW1, 25).25

This is the law of identity—the law according to which all essences in

the poetized are revealed as the unity of what are in principle infinite
functions. No element can ever be singled out void of relation, from the
intensity of the world order, which is fundamentally felt.
(SW1, 25)

In contrast to the formal property of Leibnizian “absolute identity,” the

equivalence relation (the reflexive relation) in which everything has to itself
and to nothing else, Benjamin’s law of identity can be characterized a “rela-
tive identity”: identity which holds among distinct entities “not singled out”
in isolation but only in relation to the whole.26 Benjamin’s law of identity
is normative: the extent to which the law is implemented enhances the pos-
sibility of poetic task of achieving the unity between the perceptual and
intellectual orders.
In its normative aspect Benjamin’s law of identity can be related to Hölder-
lin’s law of poetry. In “Remarks” on Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone,
Hölderlin calls for a poetry which can be taught according to a “calculable
law” (jener geseztliche Kalkül) and “mode of operation” (Verfahrungsart).27
The poetry of his time lacked “training and craftsmanship” in comparison
with “Greek artworks” in which the “mode of operation can be calculated
and taught and, once it has been learned, is always capable of being repeated
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 207
reliably in practice.”28 Hölderlin emphasizes that poetry becomes “some-
thing” (etwas) and achieves a philosophical significance when the “medium
(moyen) of its appearance” can be distinguishable so that “the way in which
it is delimited can be determined and taught.”29 The “calculable law” of
poetry is the “rule” which determines the “successions” of “representation,
sensation, and reason” (Vorstellung, Empfindung und Räsonnement).30
Hölderlin’s conception of law of poetry can be amplified by the Greek term,
“nomos,” meaning both law and song, as the laws were originally sung.31
Hölderlin’s identification of poetry as song corresponds directly to the iden-
tity of law and song.

Benjamin’s Reading of “Dichtermut” and “Blödigkeit”

In clarifying the parameters of his comparison of the poems, Benjamin empha-
sizes that it is “urgent to question the basis for a comparisons of two drafts
that differ so markedly in detail and exposition” (SW, 33). Benjamin explains
that the basis of their comparability emerges not in any similarity “which
is nonexistent,” between elements but in the poetized of the two versions
(SW1, 33). The “comparativeness” of the two versions consist in the fact that
“both poems are connected in their poetic form and in their stance toward
the world”: “This stance is courage.” In both “Poet’s Courage” and “Timid-
ity,” “with great affirmative strength,”32 Hölderlin calls for striding forward
without fear. Benjamin’s reading of the two versions with the same organiz-
ing theme of poetic courage contributes to understanding the development
of Hölderlin’s work as a whole. Benjamin’s comparative reading of “Poet’s
Courage” and “Timidity” is aligned with Paul de Man’s confirmation of the
interpretive significance of studying different versions of Hölderlin’s poems:

Hölderlin’s innumerable variants and rewritings always indicate changes

and evolutions of his own mind or technique; they are therefore them-
selves a very fruitful source for interpretation.33

“Poet’s Courage”
Benjamin begins his reading of “Poet’s Courage” with an exhortation:

It must be fully recognized that the basic feeling underlying this poem . . .
is the feeling of life, of life spread out and undefined; . . . this gives rise
to the coherence, charged with mood, of the poem’s elements isolated in
beauty.
(SW1, 24)

To Benjamin’s observation that the feeling of life as an open and undefined

possibility is the basis of the poem, it can be added that it is life as a continu-
ous activity which pervades the poem with a full awareness of the transience
208 Hyun Höchsmann
of life. In the opening line of “Poet’s Courage,” Benjamin notes that the
“relation of the poet to all of living was appealed to as the origin of cour-
age” (SW1, 26).
Benjamin emphasizes that since the essay is “concerned with the poetized
of individual poems,” its aim is not “a theoretical critique of their aesthetic
significance.” However, given that aesthetic categories of the poetized and
inner form and the analysis of their functions in ascertaining the extent to
which a specific poetic task has been attained are applicable to poems in
general, Benjamin’s commentary can be regarded as a paradigm of a theo-
retical critique regarding aesthetic significance. This is evident in Benjamin’s
conclusion that in “Poet’s Courage,” there is no unity of the poetized insofar
as “the tension between two worlds—that of the poet and that of ‘reality’ in
which death threatens.” Benjamin regards the analogy of the sun god with
the poet (“Our ancestor, the sun god”34) as maintaining the duality of two
worlds. The invocation of Fate (“Nourishes the Parca then not herself you
for service?”) can also be regarded as maintaining the duality of two worlds
as it does not indicate how in the domain of Fate who ordains the course of
events for all, gods and mortals are identical.
Benjamin explains that courage is “less a quality than a relation of man
to world and of world to man” and that the “poetized of the first version
knows courage only as quality” (SW1, 33). To know courage only as a qual-
ity is to regard courage as an attribute of the poet; to know courage as a rela-
tion is to recognize it in the activity of the poet in the world. Because “[m]an
and death stand, both rigid, opposing each other” and “share no perceptual
world” (SW1, 33), Benjamin considers “Poet’s Courage” to be restricted by
a “considerable indeterminacy of the perceptual” and an “incoherence of
detail” and “Timidity” to be more advanced as the distance between the
divine and the mortal are diminished (SW1, 22).

In this poem [“Poet’s Courage”] the danger of death was overcome

through beauty. In the later version all beauty flows from the overcom-
ing of danger.
(SW1, 33)

“Timidity”
In “Timidity” Benjamin finds a different conception of life: With “a mighty
freedom, the poet enters into life; he does not wander forth into it” (SW1,
28). In “Poet’s Courage,” before the “poetic existence,” which begins with
“We, the singers of the people/Gladly among the living” in the fourth stanza,
the poet is urged to “wander simply unguarded/Forth through life.” In
“Timidity,” the poet is called upon to “Step only/ Directly into life.”
Benjamin explains that “Timidity” resolves “the paradox of courage”:
courage consists in acknowledging and acting in full recognition of danger,
being fearful and fearless at the same time.35
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 209
Timidity has now become the authentic stance of the poet. Since he has
been transposed into the middle of life, nothing awaits him but motion-
less existence, complete passivity, which is the essence of the courageous
man—nothing except to surrender himself wholly to the relation.
(SW1, 34)

“Timidity” resolves the rigid opposition between man and death assumed
in “Poet’s Courage”: “Courage is submission to the danger that threatens
the world” (SW1, 33). What is the danger which the courageous man faces
such that “in his death he expands that danger into a danger for the world
and at the same time overcomes it”? (SW1, 34) Benjamin describes the
dangers facing an individual as the “immense forces which, every day, in
the form of bounded things, surround the body,” threatening to destroy it
(SW1, 34).

Courage is the life-feeling of the courageous man who surrenders him-

self to danger . . .
(SW1, 34)

The courage of the poet who surrenders himself to danger is not self-sacrifice
but consists in the recognition that, as Hölderlin wrote in Patmos, “Where
the danger is, grows that which saves also” (Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst /
Das Rettende auch).
Hölderlin affirms a further source of courage in the first stanza of “Poet’s
Courage”: knowledge of Fate (Parca) which leads to the readiness to delve
into action without fear.

Nourishes the Parca then not herself you for service?

Then wander simply unguarded
Forth through life, and fear nothing!

Hölderlin’s conception of Fate in “Poet’s Courage” can be understood in

terms of Benjamin’s conception of “poetic destiny.” Poetic destiny, the fac-
tors which bring about the existence of the poem and manifested inexora-
bly in poetic activity, can be further elaborated in relation to Benjamin’s
exposition of the poetic task and his reference to Novalis’ view that “every
work of art has in and of itself . . . a necessity for being in the world”
(SW1, 19).36

This destiny itself . . . is poetry.

(SW1, 28)

Benjamin explains that the existence the proximity of the people to the poet
testify to the way in which “the activity of the poet always reaches into the
orders determined by destiny.” as the activity of the poet (SW1, 26).
210 Hyun Höchsmann
In the activity of the poet, the poet and the people are “transposed into
the circle of the song.” In “Timidity” the poet is

. . . gladly among the living

Where many are joined together, joyful and to everyone alike
To everyone open . . .

Celebrating “a planar unity of the people with its poet,” Benjamin describes
the unity of the poet with the people with an alluring imagery of “Byzantine
mosaics”:

For the poet, and with him the people, from whose midst he sings, are
wholly transposed into the circle of the song, and a planar unity of the
people with its poet (in the poetic destiny) is once again the conclusion . . . .
the people appears (may we compare this with Byzantine mosaics?) as if
pressed in the surface around the great flat figure of its sacred poet. This is
a different people, more definite than in its essence than in that of the first
version.
(SW1, 28)

In Benjamin’s conception of poetic destiny, the poet and the people amidst
whom he sings constitute a coherently integrated whole while maintaining
their individual and particular contours as each glistening stone in a mosaic.
Benjamin’s elucidation of poetic destiny is further consolidated in De
Man’s clarification of the “important task to warrant the effort” of seeking
to understand the “extraordinary rigor” of Hölderlin’s poetry:

every progress made into the understanding of the work contributes not
only to the definition of poetry as such, but brings new insight into the
historical destiny of poetic consciousness, which this writer exemplified
with extraordinary rigor.37

De Man’s succinct encapsulation is an affirmation of Hölderlin’s explora-

tion of the nature of poetry in the context of the historical manifestation of
poetic consciousness sustained throughout his poems (“To the Young Poet,”
“To the Fates,” “Poet’s Courage,” “Timidity,” “Poet’s Profession,” “Patmos,”
among others). In his translations of Pindar and Sophocles, as well as in his
theoretical writings on aesthetics of poetry and philosophical reflections,
Hölderlin enhances the poetic endeavour of creation of meaning.38
Complementing Benjamin’s aesthetic commentary on Hölderlin, Adorno’s
essay on Hölderlin can be introduced with Benjamin’s celebration of the
“life in songs” in Hölderlin’s world of poetic destiny:

Life in songs, in the unchanging poetic destiny, which is the law of

Hölderlin’s world, we shall pursue in the correlation among its figures.
(SW1, 26)
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 211
Comparing the different interpretations of Hölderlin set forth by Benjamin
and Adorno provides a broader basis for reading Hölderlin, bringing into
focus the two strands of distinctness and connectedness of the individual
with the whole accentuated in Hölderlin’s poetry.39

Adorno’s Reading of Hölderlin

Adorno’s boldly affirms the necessity for commitment to comprehend
the difficult texts of Hölderlin: the difficulty of a text “does not prohibit
interpretation so much as demand it.”40 Incorporating the concept of the
poetized from Benjamin’s essay, in “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,”
Adorno considers Hölderlin’s “serial technique” of parataxis as signifying a
“resistance to synthesis,” imbuing Hölderlin’s parataxis with philosophical
significance.41 While Benjamin seeks to comprehend the nature of the essen-
tial poetic task, Adorno investigates the emergence of meaning from the
semantic structures of parataxis.42 Adorno applauds Benjamin’s illumina-
tion of the poetized and Hölderlin’s serial arrangement of relations in “one
of his greatest poems, ‘Patmos’ ”:

Benjamin captured this state of affairs descriptively in the concept of the

series: “So that here at the center of the poem, human beings, divinities,
and princes are arranged serially, catapulted, as it were out of their old
orderings.”43

Adorno finds that the central role of the paratactic is evident in Benjamin’s
understanding of timidity as the attitude of the poet who is placed “in the
midst of life” in “a motionless existence, the complete passivity that is the
essence of the courageous person.”44
Adorno states that the relations between content (“including the intellectual
content”) and form can be understood in the analysis of paratactic construc-
tions.45 In Hölderlin’s later hymns, the paratactical constructions interrupt
“the logical movement of the thought and the regular pattern of the rhythm”
and establish a principle of organization which is not based in an identity,
continuity, or an analogy between the different parts of the poem. Adorno’s
interpretation of parataxis in Hölderlin as “resistance to synthesis” is a seman-
tic rendering of the syntactic pattern of parataxis, a juxtaposition of words
in place of logical arrangements of syntax and predication. Adorno explains
that “the Hölderlinian correspondences,” which present “sudden connections
between ancient and modern scenes and figures,” and his tendency to bring
together eras and events which are remote and unconnected exemplify “the
most profound relation to the paratactic method.” The principle of Hölder-
lin’s serial associations is the opposite of the “discursive principle.”46
As Paul de Man has explained, “Hölderlin’s own term for what Adorno
calls parataxis is the caesura referred to in Hölderlin’s commentaries on
the Oedipus tragedies.”47 De Man extends Adorno’s observation that in the
nature-spirit antithesis in Hölderlin it is “the tension between two moments,
212 Hyun Höchsmann
not a thesis, which is the vital element in Hölderlin’s work” to “all the ten-
sions that appear in Hölderlin’s work.”48 De Man’s reading of Hölderlin is
closer to Benjamin’s ascertainment of synthetic unity as he concludes that
“unity . . . is achieved in spite of these discontinuities.”49
Adorno’s emphasis on parataxis as resistance to synthesis differs from Ben-
jamin’s discernment of synthetic unity of the intellectual and the perceptual
in Hölderlin. But Adorno’s recognition that “Hölderlin sees correspondences
between ideas and particular existents everywhere,”50 can be connected to
Benjamin’s explanation of synthetic unity. Adorno’s insightful analysis, that the
aim of the technique of parataxis in Hölderlin is not disjunction or separation
but connection, confirms the overarching poetic aim of Hölderlin’s work, the
connection and unity of all life. “Hölderlin is after connection, which allows
words, which are condemned to abstractness, to sound, as it were, again.”51
Benjamin, who compared the first level of writing to a musical compo-
sition, would have found the parallels between Hölderlin’s parataxis and
music drawn by Adorno illuminating: “The transformation of language
into a serial order whose elements are linked differently than in judgment is
music-like.”52 Hölderlin’s parataxis, in “dispensing with predicative asser-
tion causes the rhythm to approach musical development.”53 Adorno’s
analogy of Hölderlin’s poetry with music opens up new approaches to
understanding Hölderlin’s poetry. Adorno observes that “the transition to
the free forms” of the late hymns and the elegies is comparable to “the struc-
turing of the sonata forms” in the music of the same period.54
Adorno points out that in Hölderlin, it is not only in “the micrological
forms of serial transition in a narrow sense” but there are “whole forms
that could be called paratactical in the broader sense” and that as in music,
“in larger structures parataxis takes over.” Regarding “Hälfte des Leb-
ens” (Half of Life) as the best known of Hölderlin’s larger scale parataxis,
Adorno observes that this is “something that happens not infrequently in
Beethoven’s late style.”55 Adorno’s analogy of Hölderlin’s poetry with music
expands Benjamin’s conception of synthesis in Hölderlin. Adorno empha-
sizes that “aconceptual synthesis” epitomizes “great music” and Hölderlin’s
late poetry. “Hölderlin’s idea of song (Gesang) holds precisely for music—
an abandoned flowing nature which transcends itself.”56 Adorno also points
out that there is an important difference between music and poetry regard-
ing synthesis. Language, the medium of poetry, unlike the medium of music,
is “chained” to conceptual synthesis: “Hence Hölderlin merely gently sus-
pends the traditional logic of synthesis.”57
Adorno discovers in Hölderlin’s parataxis a fundamental poetic method
of bringing out “the expression of alienation” even when the apparent
grammatical construction does not fully indicate parataxis; the first elegy
of “Brot und Wein” is “paradigmatic of this and extraordinarily effec-
tive.”58 Regarding the origins and the development of parataxis in Hölder-
lin and Hölderlin’s work on Pindar, Adorno explains: “One should not
fail to hear the Pindaric model in the Patmos hymn, the most magnificent
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 213
paratactic structure Hölderlin created.”59 The central place of Pindar for
Hölderlin is evident in his poems in Pindaric mode (as early as “Wie wenn
am Feiertage . .  .” in 1799). But at the same time, Adorno emphasizes the
originality of Hölderlin’s parataxis which is not derived from Pindar as it
is “determined by a way of proceeding deeply rooted in his spirit.”60 As
Adorno points out in Hölderlin’s theoretical writings we find his reasons
for the poetic technique of parataxis: Hölderlin states that “the inversions
of words” and inversions of periods are “greater and more effective” than
logical placement of periods.61
Adorno interprets Hölderlin’s parataxis as “intentionless language,” lan-
guage which is free of mediation through the intervening intention of the
subject, as a way of enabling “language to speak for itself.” Adorno’s view
that “Hölderlin put his trust in language as the organon of reflection” can be
seen as the ground of Hölderlin’s “intentionless language.” Adorno concludes
that our effort to understand “Hölderlin’s campaign to allow language itself
to speak” and “his objectivism” can lead us to “an incomparably broader
understanding of Hölderlin than was formerly possible.”62 The objectivity
of Hölderlin’s poetry is determined by his intention, the subject matter, “the
immanent law of the work,” and “the objective linguistic form.”63 Adorno’s
reference to “the self-reflection in Hölderlin’s late poetry,” as well as his
observation that what divides Hölderlin from both myth and romanticism is
reflection, point to the elective affinity between Hölderlin’s poetic language
and the discursive language of philosophy as the discourse of refection.64
Adorno’s endorsement of Benjamin’s concluding remarks in the Hölder-
lin essay that Hölderlin’s poems lead “not to myths but—in the greatest cre-
ations—only of mythic connections and unmythic forms” (SW1, 35)65 is a
launching point of Benjamin’s exploration of “the poetic cosmos” of Hölderlin.

“The Poetic Cosmos” of Hölderlin

In Hölderlin’s poetic cosmos Benjamin observes that the poet “signifies the
untouchable center of all relations.” (SW1, 35) This is “most powerfully
conveyed in the last two verses”: “.  .  . and bring One/From the heavenly
ones/Yet we ourselves bring appropriate hands.” Benjamin emphasizes that
“the intrusive caesura” of this passage produces the unity of the poet and
poetry: “Poet and poetry in the cosmos of the poem are not differentiated”
(SW1, 35). Since poetry is what the poets themselves bring with their own
hands the unity of the poet and poetry is confirmed in the activity of the
poet. Radiating from the poet as the center of all relations, the “power of
transformation” in a poem and the certainty and vitality of life determine
Hölderlin’s poetic cosmos and the poem’s relation to life.

Life as an undoubted basic fact—perhaps lovely, perhaps sublime—still

determines (while also veiling thought) this world of Hölderlin’s.
(SW1, 24)
214 Hyun Höchsmann
Benjamin explains that Hölderlin’s poetic cosmos consists in “the structural
ordering of perception and the construction of a spiritual world” (SW1, 20).
In “Timidity” Benjamin notes:

A great deal, a very great deal, of Hölderlin’s cosmos is laid out in

the following words . . . “Does not your foot stride upon truth, as on
carpets?”
(SW1, 26)

In the simile of the poet walking on truth as on a carpet, truth is not arrived
at by trial and error or by inordinate suffering (as in the tragedies of Aeschy-
lus and Sophocles) but present on the path of the poet. The imagery of walk-
ing on truth—as on a sacred ground—brings to the forefront Hölderlin’s
focus on truth as the ground of poetic courage.
The unifying principle in the construction of Hölderlin’s “poetic cosmos”
is Benjamin’s law of identity which affirms the connectedness of the many
forms of living, the gods and the mortals, the poet and the people, and also
the unity of the manifold of the perceptual phenomena and the intellectual
orders. Benjamin’s formulation of the law of identity enables the simultane-
ous focus on individual qualities and their affinity with the contexts beyond
the surface differences.
The law of identity in the poetic cosmos illuminates the interconnect-
edness of life affirmed in the opening lines of both “Dichtermut” and
“Blödigkeit.” Benjamin’s unity of the perceptual and intellectual resonates
with Hölderlin’s thesis of the unity of poetry and philosophy in Hyperion.
Hölderlin affirms that the connectedness of entities is present in the ini-
tial encounter with the world. When the tendency to maintain separation
and differentiation among objects become dominant the original insight is
obscured.
In light of Hölderlin’s extensive work on Empedocles (three versions
of Death of Empedocles) it is meaningful to point to the clear parallel
between Hölderlin’s poetic cosmos and pre-socratic cosmology. The origi-
nal unity Hölderlin invokes in Hyperion and Benjamin’s law of identity
(“No element can ever be singled out void of relation, from the intensity
of the world order, which is fundamentally felt,” SW1, 25) correspond
to the thesis of the connectedness of entities in the Pre-socratic cosmol-
ogy of Empedocles, Democritus, and Parmenides.66 Benjamin’s synthetic
unity of the perceptual and the intellectual affirms the identity of per-
ception and thought in Pre-socratic epistemology discussed in Aristotle’s
Metaphysics.67
In the conclusion of the essay, Benjamin focuses on Hölderlin’s “sacred
sobriety” (heilige Nüchternheit, from “Hälfte des Lebens”/ “Half of Life”),
which has been recognized as a central theme in his late works.
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 215
“Sacred Sobriety” (heilige Nüchternheit)
Hölderlin regarded the high achievement of Greek poetry to be the expres-
sion of pathos and nature (“fire from heaven”) in “the clarity of presenta-
tion” (Darstellung) of “Junonian sobriety” (junoische Nüchternheit).68 In
“Half of Life” Hölderlin urges the swans (the poets) to plunge their heads in
“the sacred sober water” (heilignüchternes Wasser). Hölderlin’s understand-
ing of Greek poetry as excelling in presentation of pathos in sacred sobriety
can be directly related to Benjamin’s conception of the poetized as the syn-
thetic unity of the perceptual and the intellectual orders, and the inner form
as the configuration of this unity (SW1, 19). To Benjamin’s discernment of
sacred sobriety arising from the inner certainty of Hölderlin’s late poems, it
can be added that Benjamin’s understanding of life as being sacred confirms
the activity of the poets, “who come from the heavenly,”69 bringing with
their own hands, the sacred to life.

[the words, “sacred sobriety”] arise from the inner certainty with which
[his later creations] stand in his intellectual life, in which sobriety is
now allowed, is called for, because this life is sacred, standing beyond
all exaltation in the sublime.
(SW1, 35)

With this resounding affirmation of life in Hölderlin’s sacred sobriety, Ben-

jamin asks the one rhetorical question in the essay: “Is this life still that of
Hellenism?” and answers immediately:

That is as little the case here as that the life of any pure work of art
could be of a people; and as little the case too, that what we find in the
poetized might be the life of an individual and nothing else.
(SW1, 35)

While the context of Hölderlin’s poetic cosmos and its frame of reference
is Greek, Hölderlin’s poetry as a “pure work of art” surpasses Hellenism.
Benjamin’s understanding of “the sphere of relations” between life and art,
which constitutes the inner form of a poem, extends beyond the confines of
particular individual domains. What then is the poet as an individual in the
sphere of relations between life and art? Benjamin replies: “[In ‘Timidity,’]
the poet is nothing but a limit with respect to life, . . . surrounded by the
immense sensuous powers and the idea, which preserve the law of the poet
in themselves” (SW1, 35). From Benjamin’s explanation that the poetized is
at the limit of life (SW1, 19)70 and that the poet and poetry are not differ-
entiated in Hölderlin’s poetic cosmos, it can be inferred that in Benjamin’s
understanding both the poet and poetry are at the limit of life as the poem
comes to existence at the frontier or boundary of life.
216 Hyun Höchsmann
“An Infinite Approximation” (eine unendliche Annäherung)
With the recognition that “whether a decisive question” on understanding
Hölderlin remains “concealed” cannot be determined the context of his aes-
thetic commentary on Hölderlin, Benjamin takes us to the limit of under-
standing Hölderlin’s poetry:

The contemplation of the poetized . . . leads us not to myths but—in

the greatest creations—only of mythic connections and unmythic forms
that cannot be better understood by us.
(SW1, 35)

The mythic connections between the sun god, the poets, and the people in
“Poet’s Courage” and “Timidity” are made evident in the logos of unmythic
forms. Benjamin’s explanation of mythic connections and unmythic forms
can be related to the intertwining of mythos and logos and the significance
of myths in Plato’s dialogues in which myths are not the terminus but point
towards the “unmythic forms that cannot be better understood by us.” Benja-
min does not stop at what is “unprovable”: “What will emerge more clearly,
however, is that with respect to lyric poetry, a judgment, even if unprovable,
can nonetheless be justified” (SW1, 21). The ground of justification of an
unprovable judgment regarding poetry is found in Benjamin’s affirmation of
the “mythic relations” which resonates with Hölderlin’s return of the myths.
With philosophical fortitude and poetic courage in his exploration of the
poetic task, Benjamin delves further to find in Hölderlin a way forward and
points towards a horizon of anticipation—

But if there were words with which to grasp the relation between the
myth and the inner life from which the later poem sprang, it would
be those of Hölderlin from a period still later than that of this poem:
“Myths which take leave of the earth . . . /They return to mankind.”
(SW1, 36)71

Hölderlin, in the exploration of the theme of the unity between the gods
and the mortals (in the odes, “Poet’s Vocation,” “To the Fates,” “Blind
Singer,” “Poet’s Courage,” and “Timidity”) and Benjamin, in the search for
the unities of life, would agree with Novalis that “a poem must be inex-
haustible, like a human being,” and that philosophy must be an unend-
ing activity.72 Benjamin emphasizes that it is “impossible to exhaust all
the possible ways in which life and work may be related” because the
unities of life are “wholly ungraspable,” and that “the disclosures of the
pure poetized, the absolute task, must remain . . . a purely methodologi-
cal, ideal goal” (SW1, 20–21).73 Benjamin’s understanding of “the ideal
goals” of the poetized and poetic task to envisage the configuration of the
unities of life (conceived as the dynamic correlation between the subjective
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 217
and the objective domains of striving) resonates with Hölderlin’s affirma-
tion of approaching unity: “The unity of subject and object is possible by
means of theory only through an infinite approximation (eine unendliche
Annäherung).”74

Notes
* This chapter is dedicated to Paul de Man, an inspiring and generous teacher. I
am indebted to C. Duttlinger and B. Morgan (International Walter Benjamin
Society Conference 2017) and to S. Giacchetti (9th International Critical Theory
Conference of Rome) for the invitations to read earlier versions of this chapter.
Citations of Hölderlin’s works are from Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Aus-
gabe and from the Stuttgart edition, Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Grosser Stutt-
garter Ausgabe, 15 vols., Friedrich Beissner, ed., (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1943–85).
Benjamin’s Hölderlin essay, “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘Poet’s Cour-
age’ and ‘Timidity’ ” (“Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘Dichtermut’—
‘Blödigkeit’ ” in Gesammelte Schriften 2.1: 105–26) is adapted from S. Corngold’s
translation in Benjamin, Selected Writings 1: 18–36 (SW1). Selected Writings. 4
vols. Ed. M. W. Jennings et al. Trans. R. Livingstone, E. Jephcott, H. Eiland, et al.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003.
1. See D. E. Wellbery, “Benjamin’s Theory of the Lyric,” in Benjamin’s Ground:
New Readings of Walter Benjamin, R. Nägele, ed. (Detroit, IL: Wayne State
University Press, 1988), 39–59; H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin:
A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014).
2. What Walter Benjamin refers to as the first version of “Poet’s Courage” has sub-
sequently been identified as the second version (SW1: 21; GS 2.1: 109; cf. GS
2.3: 923).
“Poet’s Courage” (“Dichtermut,”1800) and “Timidity” (“Blödigkeit,” 1802),
published as part of the Nachtgesänge (1805). Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke,
Grosser Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 15 vols., Friedrich Beissner, ed. (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1943–85).11.2, 527; Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe 5: 684–98.
3. Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gershom Scholem, December 23, 1917. The Corre-
spondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 105. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe. Vol. 3. C. von Gödde
and H. Lonitz, eds. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997).
4. See Benjamin (1997, 521) See also M. Mergenthaler, “The ‘Paradox’ of Poetic
Courage: Hölderlin’s Ode ‘Timidity’ and Benjamin’s Commentary Recon-
sidered,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 85:3 (2010),
224–249.
5. See B. Hanssen, “‘Dichtermut’ and ‘Blödigkeit’: Two Poems by Hölderlin Inter-
preted by Walter Benjamin,” MLN, 112:5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec.
1997), 797–816, 790.
6. T. W. Adorno, “Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins,” in Noten zur Literatur
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 447–491. “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s
Late Poetry,” in T. W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, R. Tiedemann, ed.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 109–149.
7. Novalis and Hölderlin met in the presence of Fichte in 1795. See Manfred Frank,
“Unendliche Annäherung,” in Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 571.
8. See Mergenthaler (2010, 226) and also M. Franz, “Pindarfragmente,” in Hölder-
lin Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung, J. Kreuzer, ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler,
2002), 254–269.
218 Hyun Höchsmann
9. R. Nägele has also emphasized the fundamental importance of Plato’s philos-
ophy in Benjamin’s epistemological introduction to the Trauerspiel book. R.
Nägele, “Benjamin’s Ground,” in Benjamin’s Ground, R. Nägele, ed. (Detroit,
IL: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 19–38.
10. See Paul de Man’s illuminating essays on Hölderlin in The Rhetoric of Romanti-
cism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
11. Paul de Man, “Hölderlin and the Romantic Tradition,” in Romanticism and
Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, E. S. Burt, K.
Newmark, and A. Warminski, eds. (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 123.
12. Hanssen (1997, 797). See also D. S. Ferris, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34. Ferris
observes that “the difficulty of its concepts or its exposition” of the Hölderlin
essay indicates Benjamin’s distinctive compacted way of thinking in contrast to
the familiar logical and expository presentation. Gershom Scholem remarked
that the essay is highly “metaphysical.”
13. I am indebted to Pauline Selbig for her comments on an earlier draft of this
chapter and specifically on this point.
14. Also from Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose writings on language Benjamin stud-
ied when he was writing the Hölderlin essay. Hanssen (1997, 797) explains that
this term was a translation of the Greek endon eidos from Plotinus’ Enneads
and was central in the discussions on among some of Benjamin’s contempo-
raries, for instance, in Norbert von Hellingrath’s dissertation on Hölderlin’s
Pindar translations. See also, D. Wellbery, “Benjamin’s Theory of the Lyric,” in
Nägele (1988), 39–59. Wellbery gives a detailed analysis of das Gedichtete.
15. Benjamin (SW1, 18). See below the section on Poetic Task.
16. D. Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), 34.
17. Aristotle, Poetics, IX, 1451b.
18. Hanssen (1997, 798).
19. Ferris (2008, 35) explains that in Benjamin’s conception poetry is an autono-
mous creation whose aesthetic significance lies in its inner form, its freedom
from external sources of meaning.
20. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason §15 The synthetic unity of the manifold in intu-
ition in general (A79/B105).
21. Ferris (2008, 35).
22. Benjamin (GS II 1, 105).
23. Hanssen (1997, 798). From Novalis’ notes on the Sistine Madonna. As Hanssen
has explained, the reference to Novalis is significant in Benjamin’s early writ-
ings: Benjamin refers to it in the dissertation, the work’s Darstellungsform as its
“ideal a priori,” or its Daseinsprinzip, and also regarding in the prologue of the
Trauerspiel study.
24. See below the last paragraph of the section “Sacred sobriety” (heilige Nücheternheit).
25. Mergenthaler (2010, 230, note 16) has pointed out that the concept of identity
in the Hölderlin commentary anticipates “Theses on the Problem of Identity”
from 1916 (SW1, 75–77; GS 6, 27–28). Benjamin postulates identity as a rela-
tion which is not explainable in terms of formal logic: In the identity statement
“a = a,” “a” refers to what is “beyond space and time.” (SW1. 76; GS 6, 28)
26. For “relative identity,” see P. Geach, Logic Matters (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1972).
27. Mergenthaler (2010, 227) points out that Benjamin’s view that Hölderlin
regards poetry as a unity of relations is corroborated in Hölderlin’s “Remarks”
on Sophocles’ tragedies Antigone and Oedipus, Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter
 Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos” 219
Ausgabe, 16: 249. Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory. T. Pfau,
ed. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 101.
28. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe, 16:249. Friedrich Hölderlin:
Essays and Letters on Theory, 101. See Mergenthaler (2010, 243).
29. Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe, 16:249.
30. Ibid., 16:250.
31. See S. Benardete, Plato’s Laws: The Discovery of Being (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
32. Paul de Man (1993, 135).
33. Ibid.
34. Since Apollo, the sun god, is also the god of poetry.
35. As in Aristotle’s explanation of the virtue of courage (arête, excellent activity) as
not absence of fear, which is recklessness but the mean between recklessness and
fearfulness. While there is no evidence that either Hölderlin or Benjamin drew
upon Aristotle’s views on courage, a parallel can be drawn.
36. See above, the section on Poetic Task.
37. Paul de Man (1993, 54), “Temporality in Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage
. . .’ .”
38. See Hölderlin’s historical understanding of Greek poetry and poetry of his time
in the section above, Benjamin’s Law of Identity and Hölderlin’s Law of Poetry.
See also, Hölderlin, “Judgment and Being” (“Urteil und Sein”), Sämtliche
Werke, Grosser Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 4, 1961, 216–217; D. Henrich, Der Grund
im Bewußtsein. Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1992); C. Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge
Companion to German Idealism, K. Ameriks, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 141–160.
39. For the central place of the relation between the individual and the whole in
Hölderlin see the section, Poetic Courage above.
40. Adorno (1974, 109).
41. Adorno (1974, 140, Note 36). notes that according to Peter Szondi (to whom
his essay is dedicated) Hellingrath’s dissertation, Pindarübersetzungen Hölder-
lins (1910) was the first to describe the language of the late Hölderlin with the
classical term of rhetoric, “harte Fügung” (hard arrangement).
42. See D. F. Krell, “Twelve Anacoluthic Theses on Adorno’s ‘Parataxis: On Hölder-
lin’s Late Poetry’,” in Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical
Modernity, G. Richter, ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
43. Adorno (1974, 130). Benjamin (GS Vol. 2, 385).
44. Adorno (1974, 135). See Benjamin (SW1, 34), cited above in the section on
“Blödigkeit.”
45. Paul de Man (1993, 71), “Temporality in Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage
. . .’ ”
46. Adorno (1974, 138).
47. Paul de Man (1993, 72), “Temporality in Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage
. . .’”
48. Ibid., 72.
49. Ibid., 75.
50. Ibid., 122.
51. Adorno (1974, 340), Note 35.
52. Ibid., 131.
53. Ibid., 132.
54. Ibid., 130.
55. Ibid., 133.
56. Ibid., 130.
220 Hyun Höchsmann
57. Ibid., 130.
58. Ibid., 340, Note 35.
59. Ibid., 134.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 135. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (Leipzig: Insel,
1914), 761. Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory (1988, 45).
62. Adorno (1974, 137).
63. Ibid., 110.
64. Ibid., 134, 147.
65. For Benjamin’s distinction between myths and unmythic forms, see the section
in this chapter on “Sacred sobriety.”
66. H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weid-
mannscheVerlagsbuchhandlung, 1960).
67. Aristotle, Metaphysics 10009b10–20; Theophrastus On the Senses, DK24 A5;
Theophrastus On the Soul, DK24 A8. See C. Zatta, Interconnectedness: The
Living World of the Early Greek Philosophers (Sankt Augustin: Academia Ver-
lag, 2017).
68. Hölderlin’s letter to Böhlendorff, Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory. T.
Pfau, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 149–150.
69. See “Timidity” in note 2 of this chapter.
70. See above the section, The Poetized.
71. “Der Herbst” (Autumn). In “The Rainbow,” a dialogue on aesthetics and color
from the same period as the essay on Hölderlin, Benjamin writes that the artist
comprehends nature and “takes leave of the earth . . . return to mankind.”
72. Novalis, “Fragmente und Studien 1799–1800” §603 (Schriften III, 664) in
Schriften, 5 vols., R. Samuel, H. J. Mähl, and G. Schulz, eds. (Stuttgart: Kohl-
hammer, 1960 ff.), II, 114. Novalis, “Fichte-Studien,” V.566 (Schriften II, 269).
73. The ungraspability of the unities of life can be related to the incompleteness of
history in Benjamin’s Theses on History. The impossibility of comprehending all
different ways in which life and work are connected leads to Adorno’s view that
truth, which can be known, can only be partial and fragmentary.
74. Hölderlin’s letter to Schiller, 4 September 1795. Cited in Larmore (2000, 149).
12 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches!
Sobriety and Poetic Determinability
in Hölderlin and Walser
Stéphane Symons

Introduction
When Benjamin’s essay on the Swiss author Robert Walser (1878–1956) is
read alongside his early text on the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, what
comes to the surface is a shared interest in the experience that our world
cannot be reconnected to an ultimate ground or trans-historical essence.
Both Hölderlin and Walser share in a “matter-of-factness” or “sobriety”
[Nüchternheit] that forecloses the legitimation by an overarching truth. In
the works of both Hölderlin and Walser, this lack of determination opens
towards an experience of non-exhausted opportunities. Hölderlin’s poem
Blödigkeit and Walser’s stories tap into an unsuspected potential of reju-
venation that belongs to this world. For Benjamin, therefore, Hölderlin’s
poems and Walser’s stories are to be considered as novel realities with a
unity of their own. Rather than seeking legitimation in the murky grounds
of pseudo-transcendent and absolute origins, the works of Hölderlin and
Walser are characterized by the “inner certainty with which [they] stand in
[their] own spiritual life [im eignen geistigen Leben]” (SW1, 35; GS II, 125
(translation modified)). These texts are neither a mere expression of the
universe that surrounds us, nor do they raise themselves above it, but they
shape it anew and thus uncover a surprising force of renewal and change
within it.
This potential to re-open the very contingencies of the surrounding world
as a space of opportunities will be connected to Benjamin’s concept of
“thought.” For “the spiritual life” of such works, Benjamin argues, “is stand-
ing beyond all exaltation in the sublime” and “is in itself sacred” (SW1, 35
(translation modified)). With this, Benjamin frames thought as a capacity to
both void the object or phenomenon that is being thought from its reference
to an ultimate truth and rediscover it as something that shares in an unex-
pected process of renewal. Thought uncovers a lack of determination on the
part of what is being thought but this experience that something “remains
to be determined” replenishes our belief in true change.
For this reason, Benjamin’s interpretation of the stories and novels of
Robert Walser indicates a sensibility for the unsuspected significance of
222 Stéphane Symons
seemingly worthless elements. This sensibility springs from the same phil-
osophical interest that lead to essays on, amongst other figures, Mickey
Mouse, Charlie Chaplin, and Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of Dos-
toevsky’s novel The Idiot. In Benjamin’s view, Myshkin, for instance, is
“utterly modest, even humble,” “completely unapproachable,” and “resem-
bles nothing so much as an ailing incompetent” but he also considers him
“unforgettable” and “immortal” (SW1, 79–80; GS II, 238–239). Benjamin’s
reading of Walser is based on the idea put forward in his essay “Fate and
Character” that a true character “develop[s] . . . like a sun, in the brilliance
of [a] single trait,” and “allow[s] [no other] to remain visible in its proxim-
ity” (SW1, 205). Walser’s characters can therefore be described from the
perspective of their all-encompassing submissiveness. They are indeed idiots
and, in making their own actions wholly dependent on the directions of oth-
ers, they both void their own intentions of any firm ground of meaning and
reinstall the possibility of meaningful change. Moreover, Benjamin makes
clear that, in Walser’s stories, the “reticence” of his protagonists is pushed
to such extremes that it becomes a literary principle. In line with Hölder-
lin’s capacity to transform seemingly arbitrary qualities of words and sets
of words (e.g., rhyme or alliteration) into an added, albeit merely literary
reality (the novel unity of the poem), Walser’s stories are believed to give
shape to a novel reality with a unity of its own. The rhythmic quality of his
sentences embodies a force of interruption that parts with an overarching
plot or narrative framework but not without thereby establishing surprising
connections between seemingly unrelated fragments of texts.

Submissiveness
In his essay on The Idiot (1917), Benjamin describes how Myshkin never
seems to achieve anything worthwhile and wanders around quite aimlessly.
On account of a fundamental “solitariness,” Myshkin’s world lacks a center
that can organize his existence and give meaning to his actions. Still, the
solitariness of Myshkin’s existence does not uproot his life or deplete it of
meaning. It is, rather, this very solitariness that animates Myshkin with the
capacity to inject an unsuspected noteworthiness into his surroundings. For,
in Benjamin’s mind, on account of his solitariness it is Myshkin himself who
becomes a draw to other things. By becoming the enigmatic focal point of
a world that is his own, and cannot be truly shared with others, Myshkin
enables his environment to suddenly take on a renewed intensity. “Every
event,” Benjamin notes, “however remote from him it appears to be, seems
to gravitate toward him, and this process in which all things and people
gravitate toward this one center [dieses Gravitieren aller Dinge und Men-
schen gegen den Einen] constitutes the content of the novel” (SW1, 79;
GS II, 238).
Fifteen years later, in his “Ibizen Sequence,” Benjamin gives us a simple
example of the same potential to re-open the world on one’s own terms.
 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! 223
The famous juggler Enrico Rastelli does not look for the ball since, to the
contrary, his “stretched-out little finger attracts the ball [rief . . . den Ball
herbei], which hops onto it like a bird . . . . [This] does not mean that either
his body or the ball is in his power but it enables the two to reach an under-
standing behind his back” (SW2, 591; GS IV, 406 (my emphasis)). “Success”
is the term Benjamin uses to describe this experience in which a deeply con-
tingent world is nonetheless re-opened as somehow wished-for. Benjamin
renders it as follows:

This is why you can look for something for days, until you finally forget
it; then, one day, when you are looking for something else, you suddenly
find the first object. Your hand has, so to speak, taken the matter in
hand and has joined forces with the object.
(SW2, 591; GS IV, 406–407)

In Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten (1909) the protagonist describes the
same potential to re-open an otherwise insignificant world as meaningful:
“There’s a strange energy in me, an urge to learn life from the roots, and an
irrepressible desire to provoke people and things into revealing themselves
to me.”1 Walser’s protagonists are no less solitary than Myshkin and the
world they open is no less idiosyncratic. In Benjamin’s reading, they are
characterized by an inexorable sense of “reticence” [Scham]. Like Mysh-
kin’s, their world lacks a center that orients their actions in a meaning-
ful way. Like Myshkin’s solitariness, moreover, the “reticence” of Walser’s
characters allows for an experience in which the world sheds its seemingly
indifferent and contingent nature, and shows itself as having somehow been
expected all along.
In the universe of Walser’s stories and novels, this strange phenomenon,
in which solitariness can no longer be disentangled from a surprising “suc-
cess,” results from the submissiveness of Walser’s characters. As is noted by
almost all prominent Walser-commentators, his protagonists are marked by
an exaggerated and even inhuman form of submissiveness that has replaced
all subtleties and nuances of a “normal” individual psyche.2 This intensified
form of obedience, however, is lighthearted and joyful and does not at all
testify to a merely reactive form of existence, let alone to any resentment in
the Nietzschean sense of the term. In Benjamin’s view, what is most funda-
mental to Walser’s writings is the idea that “a nothingness could be weighty
and that [a] chaotic scatteredness could be a sign of stamina” (SW1, 257; GS
II, 325 (translation modified)).3 Simon, the main character of Walser’s novel
The Tanners (1907), for instance, expresses this submissiveness as follows:

in fact, I must confess that to this day I’ve never once carried intentions
of any sort with me, as I’ve never before been asked by anyone to enter-
tain an intention . . . . The path my life will follow is of no interest to me,
let it meander as it likes, just so people are pleased with me.4
224 Stéphane Symons
On account of this submissiveness, Walser’s characters are comparable to
the assistants and students of Kafka’s stories:

None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines. There
is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading
its qualities [tauscht] with its enemy or neighbor, none that has not
completed its period of time and yet is unripe [ihre Zeit vollbracht und
dennoch unreif], none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the
beginning of a long existence.
(SW2, 799; GS II, 415)5

Always taking their cue from elsewhere, the actions of Walser’s charac-
ters are dislodged from any overarching context of meaning.6 Because it is
always someone else who tells them what to do, these characters are never
in the position of legitimating their actions or decisions through the refer-
ence to a goal that seems worth its while. On account of their submissive-
ness, therefore, the question as to why Walser’s characters are doing what
they are doing is ceaselessly deferred and never finds a convincing answer.
In voiding this reference to any ground that would render their actions and
decisions meaningful, the characters in Walser’s stories share in the Blö-
digkeit that Benjamin analyzes in the context of Hölderlin’s poem with the
same title.7 The German word Blödigkeit can best be translated into English
as “bashfulness” or “unintrusiveness” but it also associates with “stupidity”
[Blödheit] and “lack of experience.” Blödigkeit is described as “the authen-
tic stance of the poet” since the latter “is transposed into the middle of
life” (SW1, 34). Moreover, cut off from a stabile ground of meaning, such
Blödigkeit involves a specific type of submissiveness that is described in
the Hölderlin essay as a “motionless existence, complete passivity, which is
[however] the essence of the courageous man” (SW1, 34).
Reading Hölderlin’s poems Dichtermut and Blödigkeit together, Ben-
jamin retraces the evolution of a fundamental insight. The Hölderlin-
interpretation prepares his interpretation of Robert Walser because, here
already, Benjamin criticizes all forms of writing that appeal to “ultimate
elements” (SW1, 32) and foundational principles that are supposed to give
“form” [Gestalt] to our lives. Benjamin criticizes Hölderlin’s earlier poem
Dichtermut for its high-strung and far-fetched appeal to a form-giving
“sun-God” and a deeply ambiguous “affinity” with the supposed purity of
a People [Volk]. Rejecting the idea that the writer has a “sacred-natural
existence” that “approximate[s] [him] to God” (SW1, 33), Benjamin empha-
sizes that the poet should instead “surrender himself wholly to relationship”
[ganz hinzugeben der Beziehung] (SW1, 34; GS II, 125). In contrast to the
form-giving ground that is referred to in Dichtermut, such relationships, as
is illustrated in the poem Blödigkeit, cannot ever be wholly released from
the contingencies of the world in which we live. Poetry “seizes hold of the
living” [ergreift . . . die Lebendigen] (SW1, 34; GS II, 125) and expresses life
 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! 225
as something that is not predetermined by a form-giving principle. As such,
in Blödigkeit, Hölderlin overcomes the distinction between life and art (Ben-
jamin mentions “a limit with respect to life,” and “the point of indifference”
(SW1, 35)) and, rather than being associated with “form,” the poem points
to a “formless, polymorphous, event and existence, temporal plasticity and
spatial happening” (SW1, 34). For Benjamin, this “sublat[ion] [of] the dif-
ference between form and the formless” (SW1, 31) entails the substitution of
the reference to a “sun-god” (in Dichtermut) with the image of “heaven” (in
Blödigkeit). At odds with the belief in a unifying ground, the “architectonic
significance of the heavens” embodies a plentitude of relations that cannot
be wholly encompassed (SW1, 31).
The submissiveness of his protagonists explains to a large degree why
Walser’s stories are similarly expressive of a world that brings about ever
new relations. This submissiveness brings Walser’s characters to a level of
acting that comes closest to not-acting at all. One could claim that, in wholly
emptying their own sense of self and seemingly reducing their actions and
thoughts to a level of responsiveness, they replace any reference to an under-
lying ground or unifying form with a feeling for non-exhausted relations.
The Blödigkeit of Walser’s own characters enables them to gain the capabil-
ity to preserve their own feelings, thoughts and actions in a state of mere
possibility. The protagonists of novels like The Assistant (1908) or Jakob
von Gunten are either servants or trainee servants and they act only accord-
ing to the intentions of others. This seeming passivity, however, is a token
of “success” and even “courage” in that their own potential to act, think
and love is thus kept in an unspoiled and pure form. “To do nothing and
yet maintain one’s bearing,” it is stated in Jakob von Gunten, “that requires
energy, a person doing something has an easy time in comparison.”8 This
ability to preserve desire in its state of potentiality sets up a specific type
of responding to the outside world. This responsiveness is attested to by
the fact that the objects that Walser’s protagonists are most drawn to are
usually rather insignificant. Because these seemingly nonsensical elements
are so obviously unworthy of the attention they receive, they are incapable
of exhausting these emotions and thereby grant these emotions a means to
subsist in an otherwise disenchanted environment.9 One of the protagonists
in The Tanners, Hedwig, exclaims: “I’m not inclined to feel pressured just
because something’s lacking. Why would I! On the contrary, there’s some-
thing liberating, relief-bringing about this. And after all—Gaps exist to be
filled with something new.”10 In Walser’s universe, as a consequence, desires
and emotions are always in excess of their object: objects are not desired
because they are noteworthy but, vice versa, the most inconsequential thing
can somehow become strangely noteworthy because, for some reason or
other, it is desired.11 Not truly acting and even repressing the quest to sat-
isfy a given desire therefore comes together with the possibility that a new
relationship to the surrounding world will grant Walser’s characters what
they truly long for, albeit perhaps by making the initial desire go away and
226 Stéphane Symons
by dislodging the accompanying fixation on what is as yet absent. “To forgo
something,” Walser writes in Jakob von Gunten, “that also has its fragrance
and its power.”12

“Linguistic Reticence”
In his analysis of Hölderlin’s poems Dichtermut and Blödigkeit, Benjamin
opposes two concepts of “courage.” While, in Dichtermut, the “courage” of
the poet is presented as a “quality” through which the poet can “mediat[e]”
with God and thus overcome the danger of death (SW1, 33), in Blödigkeit,
Benjamin discovers a much more prosaic concept of “courage” that matches
Walser’s characters as well. In Blödigkeit, “courage” refers first and fore-
most to the aforementioned, rejuvenated experience of our surroundings,
that is, to a “relation of man to world and of world to man” (SW1, 33).
However, to understand the significance of such a rejuvenated experience,
Benjamin shifts his attention away from the writer or his characters and
turns to the structure of the literary text itself. In having rid itself from any
direct appeal to a form-giving God or People, Benjamin discovers nothing
but the poem Blödigkeit itself as a renewed perspective on the world that
surrounds us. Benjamin connects this novel view of the world to the poem’s
“intensification of intention in the domain of pure sound” [die Steigerung
der Absicht im rein Lautlichen] (SW1, 30; GS II, 119). With this, he draws
attention to the importance of effects within the poem that are of a merely
artistic nature, that is, “rhyme” and “alliteration.” These qualities of words
only become manifest when the poem is read out loud and thus surrendered
to the flow of time. For this reason, they are dependent on what Benjamin
calls the specific “temporal plasticity” [zeitliche Plastik] (see e.g. SW1, 31;
GS II, 120) of a given poem. Moreover, because the sound of a word is
wholly unrelated to its content, it is to be regarded as a deeply contingent
element that can nonetheless be used to add extra layers of meaning. Ben-
jamin gives us the example of Hölderlin’s phrase “Wo bist du, Nachdenkli-
ches! das immer muß/Zur Seite gehn zu Zeiten, wo bist du Licht?” [“Where
are you that thinks (literally: “after-thinks”), that must always/Go to one
side at times? Where are you, Light?”] (SW1, 30–1; GS II, 119 (transla-
tion modified)) from the poem Chiron to indicate the rhyming effect of the
words Seite [side] and Zeiten [times]. These two words refer to very differ-
ent things. However, since they sound more or less alike, their juxtaposition
introduces a new idea that goes beyond the initial meaning of both terms.
Benjamin connects the phrase “Zur Seite gehn zu Zeiten” with the “time
that switches sides,” [Wende der Zeit] (SW1, 31; GS II, 120 (translation
modified)) that is referred to in Blödigkeit, and thus with the possibility that
an otherwise overwhelming transience and ephemerality is overcome in an
unsuspected “instant of persistence” [den Augenblick der Beharrung] (SW1,
31; GS II, 120). Making use of the temporal and contingent qualities of
words (their “pure sound”), Hölderlin’s poems set up new “relations” that
 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! 227
do not require the legitimation of an underlying ground or external form,
let alone the reference to such lofty ideals as a form-giving God or People.
For a large part of his essay on Walser, Benjamin similarly focuses on
artistic qualities and literary strategies that manage to restore a world of
hitherto undisclosed opportunities. In line with his reading of Hölderlin,
Benjamin’s interpretation of Walser explores how elements of a contingent
and temporal nature are reworked into novel relations. In Walser’s work,
this does not so much have to do with the “rhyme” or “alliteration” of sets
of words as with the “rhythm” of entire sentences. Benjamin emphasizes
Walser’s “neglect of style,” his “seemingly quite unintentional, but attractive,
even fascinating linguistic wilderness” and recalls his “admission that he
never corrected a single line in his writing” (SWII, 257–258). Most intriguing
in this regard is that Benjamin applies the principle of reticence to Walser’s
literary style as well. In his view, reticence is not to be considered solely as a
theme in his novels or a character trait of his protagonists since a specifically
“linguistic reticence” [Sprachscham] (SW2, 258; GS II, 326 (my emphasis))
can be found within their very structure. Walser, that is, is both unable to
cease writing and deeply reluctant to write anything at all. “Scarcely has he
taken up his pen,” notes Benjamin, “than he is overwhelmed by the mood of
a desperado [Desperadostimmung]. Everything seems lost to him; a torrent
of words pours from him in which the only point of every sentence is to
make the reader forget the previous one” (SW2, 258; GS II, 326 (translation
modified)).13 Walser’s writing sets up a series of sentences that appear to
take shape without any underlying intention but, on account of its discon-
tinuous structure, every sentence can seemingly undo the one that preceded
it. His supposed “neglect of style,” therefore, indicates in truth a rhythmic
style: linguistic movement is here constructed out of a temporal succession
of sentences that are not ostensibly held together by an underlying principle
of continuity. For this reason, the movement of the sentences can conceiv-
ably be interrupted at every instant.14 His novels and stories do not form
a systematic unity because each of the sentences they consist of is allowed
to keep itself somehow apart from the totality it simultaneously belongs to.
However, Walser’s so-called lack of clarity conceals a “temporal plasticity”
in which any given sentence takes on a status of its own, being capable of
suddenly referring back to another, seemingly disconnected, one. Irreducible
to the overarching unity of a plot or story line, no one, underlying idea can
be discovered to streamline the entire text: yet, the constant interruptions of
the narrative flow shake up the entire literary construction in such a manner
that the most contingent and ostensibly nonsensical relations can neverthe-
less yield a striking literary effect.
This process of fashioning a truly novel, artistic unity out of a multi-
plicity of temporal and contingent elements such as rhyme, alliteration, or
rhythm, is an illustration of what Benjamin calls “thought” [das Denken]
(SW1, 30; GS II, 119). For him, thinking does not indicate that something is
“characterized in its essence” [in seiner Eigenschaft gekennzeichnet] (SW1,
228 Stéphane Symons
30; GS II, 119 (translation modified)) or that the foundational truth of
a given phenomenon has been uncovered. Instead, the act of thinking is
inseparable from a process that voids the phenomenon under consideration
of all reference to anything absolute. In Benjamin’s account it is precisely a
process of “objectification” [Versachlichung] that allows the sphere of life
to be reworked into “an idea” or “something spiritual” [das Geistige] (see
e.g. SW1, 30; GS II, 119 (translation modified)). For this reason, think-
ing should not be mistaken for a force of determination [Bestimmung]
that penetrates into the stability and rigidity of a formative ground. For
thinking affirms precisely the seeming randomness and arbitrariness of life,
while nonetheless managing to express it as determinable.15 When some-
thing is thought, this does not mean that it is allowed to express any bed-
rock truth. To the contrary, it is only because no such foundational truth
or ground can be brought to full expression, that the process of thinking
marks the possibility that the phenomenon under consideration remains
open to be engaged with.
Throughout Benjamin’s oeuvre, such activities of thought are analyzed
with a variety of different concepts (e.g., translation, criticism, or reproduc-
tion), all being dependent on the underlying “-ability” of the object at hand
(resp. its translatability, criticizability, reproducibility).16 Like Hölderlin’s ear-
lier quoted line “Nachdenkliches, das immer muß/Zur Seite gehn zu Zeiten,”
Benjamin’s own concept of thought always refers to what is an after-thought
to life. Benjamin likens thought to “a gift that is added to” life [es wird . . .
die Gabe beigelegt] (SW1, 30; GS II, 119 (translation modified)), overwriting
its very contingencies with an unsuspected layer of necessity. This transmu-
tation of contingency into a puzzling type of necessity is what renders the
poem Blödigkeit most relevant to Benjamin. Because the “pure sound” of its
words adds layers of meaning to life by enabling the construction of relations
that had hitherto not been actualized, the poem can indeed be believed to
render possible a process of true “thought.”17 In Benjamin’s reading, Blödig-
keit replaces the belief in a divine legitimation of the poet’s work with the
opposite belief that it is nothing but the poem itself which actively brings
about a true “lawfulness” [Gesetz] (see e.g. SW1, 20; GS II, 108 (translation
modified)). The “ancestor” or “sun god” who, in Dichtermut, “grants the
joyful day to poor and rich” has, in Blödigkeit, “cease[d] to determine the
cosmos of the poem” (SW1, 32). In Blödigkeit, art is discovered to “freely
elect for itself that which is objective,” thereby even having become capable
of “bring[ing] the god” (SW1, 32). According to Benjamin, Blödigkeit there-
fore parts with the mythological belief that “destiny determined life” and
replaces it with the expression of a spiritual world where “every function of
life is destiny” (SW1, 34). The difference between both worldviews is unmis-
takable. While the former surrenders life fully to the all-determining, and
pre-determining forces of Fate, the latter replenishes it with a multiplicity
of fates that resonate with a necessity of their own but can nonetheless be
actively engaged with.
 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! 229
When the poem shapes the world anew in such a manner, it restores the
openness of history and discovers a plenitude of possibilities: in contrast to
the fake depths of mythological foundations, the “domain of the spiritual”
is a “surface” that one “can stride upon” (SW1, 27; GS II, 113 (transla-
tion modified)). Such a surface is depicted by Hölderlin as a “carpet” where
“every arbitrary step is necessarily within reach of the true” (SW1, 27, GS
II, 115 (translation modified)). “The living are always clearly the extension
of the space, the plane spread out, in which . . . destiny extends itself [Die
Lebendigen sind jeweils deutlich .  .  . die E r s t r e c k u n g des Rau-
mes, der gebreitete Plan, in dem .  .  . sich das Schicksal erstreckt]” (SW1,
26; GS II, 113). According to Benjamin, this overcoming of a mythological
worldview explains why the line “Whatever happens, let everything be a
blessing for you” (in Dichtermut) has later been changed into “Whatever
happens, let it all be opportune for you!” With the substitution of the word
“gesegnet” [blessed] by “gelegen” [opportune], a “dislocation of the mytho-
logical” (SW1, 28) arises that renounces the belief in an ultimate force of
determination, though not without injecting the world with an infinity of
opportunities.
In a similar manner, the “linguistic reticence” of Walser’s writing does not
subtract anything from the world but, instead, adds a novel layer of mean-
ing to it. Like Hölderlin’s poem, Walser’s texts can be believed to condition
a process of genuine “thought.” Here, as well, a process of “objectification”
reworks the world into “something spiritual” by charging it with hitherto
non-exhausted possibilities. Benjamin writes:

For Walser the manner of working is so little of secondary importance

that, for him, everything he has to say fully retreats in favor of the
significance of writing itself. We could claim that what he has to say is
exhausted in the process.
(SW2, 258; SWII, 325 (translation modified))

With this idea that Walser’s very act of writing is capable of “exhausting”
what he writes about, Benjamin indicates that his novels and stories set up
a world with a “lawfulness” of their own. These novels and stories do not
uncover an “ultimate essence” or contain a moral or a universal lesson that
is valid outside of the literary text itself. It is for this reason that Benjamin
emphasizes that Walser’s universe, like Hölderlin’s, dismisses the appeal
to deeper and foundational truths. Like Hölderlin’s “spiritual surface,” it
is marked by a “consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality” [einer
so zerreißenden, so ganz unmenschlichen, unbeirrbarren Oberflächlichkeit]
(SW2, 259; GS II, 327). On account of the rhythmic quality and poten-
tially interruptive effect of every sentence one could even claim that Walser
aspires to a manner of writing that comes closest to not-writing at all.
When the act of writing is capable of “exhausting” its content, it injects
a semantic instability into the overall context of the story that prevents
230 Stéphane Symons
internal closure. Walser’s books use strategies of fragmentation and recon-
figuration to show off that theirs is a meaningfulness that remains open.
It is for this reason that Walser’s stories, like Hölderlin’s poem Blödigkeit,
express a world that is deeply historical. They explore a sphere of life that is
released from any foundational truth or absolute ground. A space-for-play
[Spielraum] for a multiplicity of fates, such a sphere of life resonates with a
necessity of its own but never closes itself off to human intervention. Benja-
min’s example of how Walser (in his story Tell in Prosa) modifies Schiller’s
line “Along this narrow pathway must he come” into “Along this narrow
pathway must he come, I think” is the best possible example of such a liter-
ary expression of openness and reconfiguration (SW2, 258). This transition
can be understood with the same terms that explained the modification
of the term “gesegnet” [blessed] into “gelegen” [opportune] in Hölderlin’s
poems. Here, as well, a “dislocation of the mythological” is at stake. In
contrast to Schiller, Walser presents Wilhelm Tell as someone who is “weak,
insignificant, lost” [haltlos, klein, verloren] and “overcome by self-doubt”
(SW2, 258; GS II, 326). By way of a purely artistic and literary interven-
tion, which does not itself convey any new information (the insertion of the
suffix “I think”), an extra layer is added to the initial context of meaning.
The suffix “I think” “exhausts” the original meaning of Schiller’s sentence,
in which the moment of change and salvation was presented as somehow
already determined (“he must come”). The addition of Walser’s formula
“I think,” sets up a new and highly charged openness towards opportu-
nities that are always to be determined. The literary intervention which
abolishes the idea that liberation and justice are Fated is therefore not only
annihilating. The addition of the suffix “I think” does inject doubt into the
certainty that genuine change will come from some type of ultimate ground
or super-historical event (the arrival of a heroic figure). It thereby seems to
increase the despair of both the narrator and the reader. Yet, the addition of
this same suffix has also become the very means to increase their hope and
restore a sense of determinability: the presence of an “I think” reasserts the
possibility that salvation is at hand and perhaps even, indeed, that “every
arbitrary step is necessarily within reach of the true.”

Conclusion
Benjamin notes that Walser’s characters “emerge from the night and from
madness-namely from the madness of myth” and reads his narrative as a
“process of awakening” [dies Erwachen] (SW2, 259–260; GS II, 327).18 He
places Walser in the Germanic, literary tradition that gives a central posi-
tion to “heroes who are windbags, wastrels, and thieves, and who in general
have gone to the dogs” but adds that, whereas most of these literary figures
belong to a Romantic universe of woods, dales, fjords, mountains or mead-
ows, Walser’s characters have escaped from a much darker place still. “They
come from the night at its blackest . . . with a little of the party spirit shining
 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! 231
in their eyes, but distraught and sad to the point of tears” (SW2, 259; GS II,
326–327).19 To indicate this juxtaposition of despair and hope in Walser’s
universe, Benjamin emphasizes not just that his characters “come from insan-
ity and nowhere else” but, most important of all, that “they have all been
healed” [s i e s i n d a l l e g e h e i l t]: “They wish to enjoy themselves, and
in this respect they display a quite exceptional ingenuity. Furthermore, they
also display a quite exceptional nobility. And a quite exceptional legitimacy.
For no one enjoys like the convalescent [Denn niemand genießt wie der Gen-
esende]” (SW2, 259; GS II, 327).20 The all-encompassing submissiveness of
Walser’s protagonists pawns away all reference to an overarching context
of meaning but, for that reason precisely, it does indeed allow for a certain
immunity against a world that is experienced as merely threatening.21
In his study of Kafka’s letters to Felice, Elias Canetti describes a “transfor-
mation into something small” that can just as well be deemed characteristic
to Walser’s protagonists.

Since [Kafka] abominated violence, but did not credit himself with the
strength to combat it, he enlarged the distance between the stronger
entity and himself by becoming smaller and smaller in relation to it.
Through this shrinkage . . . he evaded the threat by becoming too dimin-
utive for it.22

Walser’s characters, it seems, derive their resilience from a similar capacity

for self-diminution. “How fortunate I am,” Jakob proclaims in Jakob von
Gunten,

not to be able to see in myself anything worth respecting and watching!

To be small and to stay small. And if a hand, a situation, a wave were
ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and
influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favored me, and I
would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant dark-
ness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.23

This shrinkage of the self that marks Walser’s protagonists is connected to

the awareness that no event can necessitate, out of its own account, any
one, particular outcome. Walser’s characters, it seems, can only survive in
the distance that separates a possibility from its actualization and in the
space-for-play [Spielraum] that exists between an event and the reaction
that it demands. In this manner, Walser’s protagonists resemble Abraham
in Kafka’s parable whose urgent readiness for whatever assignment that is
required becomes a means to continuously postpone a response to the com-
mand to sacrifice his own son. Kafka writes:

I could conceive of another Abraham for myself—he certainly would

have never gotten to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer—who
232 Stéphane Symons
was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the
promptness of a waiter, but was unable to bring it off because he could
not get away, being indispensable; the household needed him, there was
perpetually something or other to put in order, the house was never
ready; for without having his house ready, without having something to
fall back on, he could not leave this the Bible also realized, for it says:
“He set his house in order.”24

Similarly, the actions of Walser’s characters can be likened to such a series

of interruptions. Their continuous readiness to jump up from what they
are doing and to instantly comply with unexpected demands from without
can be taken for a gesture that wards off the supposed inevitability of a
Fate. By way of whichever ridiculous task that may be at hand, the actions
of Walser’s characters arrest a seemingly predetermined but potentially
unhappy course of events. Their very obedience to all and even ostensibly
ridiculous demands restores a buoyancy to them. This very submissiveness
constantly confronts them with the feeling that no course of events could
become actual on their own account and that the world, therefore, is never
devoid of opportunities.

Notes
1. Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, trans. Christopher Middleton (New York:
New York Review Books, 1999), 122.
2. See J.M. Coetzee, “Robert Walser” in Inner Workings. Literary Essays 2000–
2005 (New York: Viking, 2007), 20 (“his elevation of obedience to the highest of
virtues”); Susan Sontag, “Walser’s Voice,” in Where the Stress Falls (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 90 (“someone ‘drowning in obedience’”);
William H. Gass, “Robert Walser,” in Finding a Form (London: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1996), 74 (“[W]hat Robert Walser fears, and flees from, is power when
he feels it in his own hands.”); W.G. Sebald, “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” in Robert
Walser, The Tanners, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions Books,
2009), 19–20 (Walser’s “own martyrdom”). The most clear-cut examples of this
obedience-elevated-to-a-principle can be found in Jakob von Gunten, e.g., 35
(“We obey, without considering what will one day come of all this thoughtless
obedience, and we work without thinking if it is right and good to do our work”)
and 95 (“to comply, that is much more refined, much more than thinking”).
3. [[d]aß [eine] Nichtigkeit Gewicht, die Zerfahrenheit Ausdauer ist].
4. Walser, The Tanners, 208–209. See also the following statement in an internal
monologue in Jakob von Gunten:
A person can be utterly foolish and unknowing: as long as he knows the
way to adapt, to be flexible, and how to move about, he is still not lost,
but will come through life better perhaps than someone who is clever and
stuffed with knowledge.
(Walser, Jakob von Gunten, 29)
5. [ihren festen, nicht eintauschbaren Umriß] [tief erschöpft und dennoch erst am
Anfang einer langen Dauer].
6. See also Jan Plug’s interpretation of Walser’s Snow White and his reference to
“the absence of a principle . . . . whether of reality or meaning, that could act
 Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! 233
as [the] guarantee” for the establishment of guilt or innocence in Jan Plug, They
Have All Been Healed: Reading Robert Walser (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 9.
7. On the issue of stupidity [Dummheit] in Walser, and the difference with the con-
cept of “ninnihood” or “mental incompetence,” see Coetzee, “Robert Walser,” 27.
8. Ibid., 74. In his novel The Robber (1925), Walser connects this theme of non-
acting to sexual impotence. In an important scene, the protagonist confesses that
he lacks the urge to spend nights with women but does not consider this a mere
incapacity. “I have quite horrifying stockpiles of amorous potential,” the pro-
tagonist states, “and every time I go out on the street, I immediately start falling
in love with something or someone.” In Robert Walser, The Robber, trans. Susan
Bernofsky (Lincoln and London: The University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 105.
For a similar idea in the context of an interpretation of Kafka, see Samuel Weber,
“Violence and Gesture. Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading
Cervantes .  .  .,” in Benjamin’s-Abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), 195–210. Weber’s analysis revolves around Benjamin’s statement
that the studies of the students in Kafka may lead to nothing but cannot how-
ever be considered worthless at all: “Perhaps these studies amounted to noth-
ing. But if so, they stand in close proximity to that nothing, which alone makes
anything useful—namely the Tao” (SW2, 813).
9. In this context Sebald has famously called Walser a “clairvoyant of the small”
and remarks about Walser’s protagonists that
in life, as in fairy tales, there are those who, out of fear and poverty, can-
not afford emotions and who therefore . . . have to try out their seemingly
atrophied ability to love on inanimate substances and objects unheeded by
anyone else—such as ash, a needle, a pencil, or a matchstick. Yet the way in
which Walser then breathes life into them, in an act of complete assimila-
tion and empathy, reveals how in the end emotions are perhaps most deeply
felt when applied to the most insignificant things.
(Sebald, “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” 19)
10. Walser, The Tanners, 199. See also, ibid., 259: “Misfortune allows us to grow
tired of beautiful things and shows us new ones with its outstretched fingers.”
11. See, e.g., Jakob’s remarks: “I like listening for something that doesn’t want to
make a sound. I pay attention, and that makes life more beautiful, for if we don’t
have to pay attention, there really is no life.” and “If I oughtn’t love, I love ten
times as much. Everything that’s forbidden lives a hundred times over; thus, if
something’s supposed to be dead, its life is all the livelier” (Walser, Jakob von
Gunten, 50 and 111).
12. Walser, Jakob von Gunten, 19.
13. [Alles scheint ihm verloren] [ein Wortschwall bricht aus, in dem jeder Satz nur
die Aufgabe hat, den vorigen vergessen zu machen].
14. On the rhytmicality of his sentences, see for instance, Walser, The Robber, 54:
“A pen would rather say something improper than lie idle even for an instant.
This is perhaps the secret quality of literature, in other words, the writing pro-
cess must work on impulse.”
15. See, for instance, Benjamin’s reference to the “determinability” of the poem
through the “poeticized” in SW1, 19.
16. For an excellent, and by now canonized analysis of this issue, see Weber,
Benjamin’s-Abilities.
17. In the first pages of his essay on Hölderlin, Benjamin introduces the concept
of the “poetized” to identify precisely the “category of aesthetic investigation”
that opens up the poem to the process of thought. The poetized is to be differ-
entiated from the poem itself because it is only by a “loosening up of the firm
234 Stéphane Symons
functional coherence” of the poem, that the poetized can recover a greater sense
of determinability: the poetized retains the “potential existence of those that
are effectively [aktuell] present in the poem-and others” (SW1, 19 (my empha-
sis)). For an excellent analysis of these issues, see Bart Philipsen, “‘ein gelobtes
Land.’ Hölderlins Nüchternheit zu Ende gelesen (mit Benjamin, Adorno, Szondi,
Agamben),” in Gattung und Geschichte. Literatur-und medienwissenschaftliche
Ansätze zu einer neuen Gattungstheorie, ed. C. Liebrand and O. Kohns (Biele-
feld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 127–150.
18. [enttauchen . . . auch der Nacht und dem Wahnsinn, dems des Mythos nämlich]
For a development of this theme, applied to an interpretation of Walser’s Snow
White, see Plug, The Have All Been Healed, 17–56.
19. [aus der Nacht, wo sie am schwärzesten ist] [mit etwas Festglanz im Auge, aber
verstört und zum Weinen traurig].
20. [ein ganz ungewöhnliches Geschick] [einen ganz ungewöhnlichen Adel] [ein
ganz ungewöhnliches Recht].
21. See also Gass, “Robert Walser,” 74: “The power others possess is something
that, like a great outcropping of rock, may fall upon you, but it also makes a
shade under which you may find shelter.”
22. Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. Christopher Mid-
dleton (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 89.
23. Walser, Jakob von Gunten, 155. See also Coetzee, “Robert Walser,” 17 and Gass,
“Robert Walser,” 73.
24. Kafka, Abraham, available at http://zork.net/~patty/pattyland/kafka/parables/
abraham.htm (retrieved on 28 October 2017). For an interesting interpretation
of this story, see Friedlander, Walter Benjamin. A Philosophical Portrait, 216.
13 Ramble On
Robert Walser at the Limits
of Critical Theory
Jeffrey A. Bernstein

Introduction
If there is a gravitational pull that constitutes the “shared work”1 of The-
odor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, it most surely involves the explication
of artistic works in such a way as to show how they reflect the unjust char-
acter of modern life. Further, these explications—far from being neutral and
abstract reports—are themselves supposed to deliver a shock to unreflective
consciousness about its own complicity with such life. Writing to Benjamin
in 1934, Adorno held that each sentence of such an exposition needs to be
“laden with political dynamite” (CC: 54); his statement thus pre-figures the
17th thesis of Benjamin’s well-known “On the Concept of History,” in which
the historical materialist “blasts a specific era out of the homogenous course
of history; thus he blasts a specific life out of the era or a specific work out
of the lifework.”2 But critical consciousness, as dialectical, always depends
on a prior unreflective consciousness as the site of a possible disruption.
Therefore, the artistic works in which Adorno and Benjamin plant their
metaphorical dynamite have to register both the unreflective consciousness
of administered society and the dialectical capacity for a critical interrup-
tion or explosion. Put differently, these works (like Kafka’s parables) have
the ability to “raise a mighty paw” against the societal consciousness out
of which they emerge.3 Critical theory—as Adorno and Benjamin practiced
it—thus stands or falls on the capacity for works (as registries of history) to
be read “against the grain” (I: 257); failing this criterion, both the artistic
works and the critical practice that focuses on them are simply complicit in
unjust life: they are “from the outset in the nature of the musical accompa-
niment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.”4
These reflections attempt to read the Adornean and Benjaminian iteration
of critical theory against the grain with respect to a writer whom both men-
tion but about whom little (in either case) is said—Robert Walser (1878–
1956). There is nothing a priori problematic about this; neither Adorno
nor Benjamin approach artistic subjects systematically or with the aim to
present a total picture of the relation of art to society (quite the contrary).
However, when an artist makes both a cameo appearance and nothing more
236 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
than a cameo appearance in their writings, it is not unreasonable to wonder
whether a symptom is being communicated. What would be the meaning
of this symptom for thinking in an Adornean and Benjaminian key? What
aspects of critical theory might it jeopardize and what might it reinvigorate?
Finally, in what way might a renewed investigation of Walser’s texts aid the
always-unfinished practice of attaining and disseminating critical conscious-
ness? Given the paucity of references to Walser in the works of Adorno and
Benjamin, these reflections necessarily assume a dialectical form—dealing
also with the latters’ comments about others (and what they might sug-
gest about Walser). Overall, this study attempts to provide an outline of
an engagement between the critical practice of Adorno and Benjamin (on
the one hand) and Walser (on the other). Beyond that, if this study begins
to trouble the (non-)relation of Walser’s writings to Adorno’s and Benja-
min’s critical practice, it will approach (however asymptotically) a point of
success.5

Cameos of Walser
To some, it may seem that even calling Walser’s presence in Adorno and
Benjamin a “cameo” is an overstatement. In 1929, Benjamin published a
self-proclaimed “hostile”6 essay on his work7 and gave a radio broadcast
in which he read Walser’s works (the text of which is lost8). Walser appears
once more, in passing, in Benjamin’s famous 1934 “Franz Kafka: On the
Tenth Anniversary of His Death” (SW2:798). The sole appearances of
Walser in Adorno’s work occur his essay “Notes on Kafka”—once in pass-
ing, and once in a qualitatively more substantial statement.9 It is notable
that both Adorno and Benjamin cite Walser in a context that includes Franz
Kafka (Benjamin’s essay on Walser also includes a reference to the latter).
Recognizing Walser’s influence on Kafka (SW2: 259, 798, P: 253, 265),
as well as the literary similarities between the two, made these citations
nearly unavoidable. Although Adorno’s Kafka piece was composed and
published later than Benjamin’s Walser essay, beginning with the extreme
(albeit compressed) provocation of the former may help open up the full
range of thinking in the latter. For this reason, I begin with Adorno’s:

The social origin of the individual ultimately reveals itself as the power
to annihilate him. Kafka’s work is an attempt to absorb this. There is
nothing mad in his prose, unlike the writer from whom he learned deci-
sively, Robert Walser; every sentence has been shaped by a mind in full
control of itself; yet, at the same time, every sentence has been snatched
from the zone of madness into which all knowledge must venture if it
is to become such in an age when sound common sense only reinforces
universal blindness.
(P: 253–254)
 Ramble On 237
Kafka’s work shows the unbridled power of society in its ability to bestow
creation and annihilation on the individual. It is certainly fair to say that
the social world, holding individuals’ lives fatefully in the balance, in the
manner of a god, expresses a species of madness—this is a state that both
Adorno and Benjamin would have little trouble referring to as “mythic.”10
In his radio address “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” Adorno
elaborates on this theme:

Collective delusions, like anti-Semitism, confirm the pathology of the

individual, who shows that psychologically he is no longer a match
for the world and is thrown back upon an illusory inner realm .  .  .
Delusional mania is the substitute for the dream that humanity would
organize the world humanely, a dream the actual world of humanity is
resolutely eradicating.11

Differently stated, individual and collective delusions emerge from a social world
that is itself out of control. For Adorno, Kafka’s work ventures into this “zone
of madness” in order to successfully register it and present it as knowledge.
If this is the case, however, what might it mean to claim that Walser’s work
contains “something mad,” that his “sentence[s] have [not] been shaped by
a mind fully in control of himself”? For Adorno, there is some real sense in
which Walser’s work fails to “work through” the madness in which it—in
which Walser himself—has fallen prey to. It is certainly the case that Walser’s
life (at least from 1929 on) was marked by his stays at mental hospitals.12
But an undue and hasty focus on the psychological condition of an author
would ignore the dialectical relations between individual, society and artistic
work that both Adorno and Benjamin held (rightly) to be central to the criti-
cal project. This much, however, can be said: for Adorno, there is something
in Walser’s work that blocks the critical exposition of societal mediation that
one sees clearly in Kafka. Adorno refers to this block as madness.
Benjamin, too, is quick to notice that Walser’s work (in particular, his char-
acters) lacks a certain kind of control. Whether or not, he tells us, Walser was
serious in his declaration that he never revised his work, it nonetheless exhib-
its a “chaotic scatteredness” and constitutes a “linguistic wilderness” (SW2:
257). In Walser, there is a “neglect” of every conceivable literary style except
for “one in which only content and nothing else counts” (SW2: 258). This
wild, rambling prose, moving hither and thither, focusing only on the con-
crete at the expense of the formal, discloses a “mood of desperation. Every-
thing seems to be on the verge of disaster; a torrent of words pours from him
in which the only point of every sentence is to make the reader forget the
previous one” (SW2: 258). What does this suggest about Walser’s characters?

They come from the night at its blackest—a Venetian night, if you will,
illuminated by the faint lamps of hope—with a little of the party spirit
238 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
shining in their eyes, but distraught and sad to the point of tears. The tears
they shed are his prose. For sobbing is the melody of Walser’s loquacious-
ness. It reveals to us where his favorite characters come from—namely
madness and nowhere else. They are figures who have left madness
behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently
heartrending, inhuman superficiality. If we were to attempt to sum up
in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we
would have to say: they have all been healed . . . These tales . . . are the
product not of the nervous tension of the decadent, but of the pure and
vibrant mood of the convalescent . . . Walser’s characters share this child-
like nobility with the characters in fairy-tales, who likewise emerge from
the night and from madness—namely, from the madness of myth . . . Of
course, fairy-tale characters are not like Walser’s in any simple manner.
They are still struggling to free themselves from their sufferings. Walser
begins where the fairy-tales stop. “And if they have not died, they live
there still.” Walser shows how they live.
(SW2: 259–260)13

Like Adorno, Benjamin construes Walser’s work—by way of the latter’s

characters—as emerging from the “night” of madness. Into what, then, do
these characters emerge? Benjamin’s response: into “convalescence.” Yet
readers have a right to mistrust the simple sense of this term. There is, after
all, convalescence that leads to fully-restored health, and convalescence
that continues indefinitely. The former—for Adorno and Benjamin—could
only mean a continued struggle against the unjust life. But Walser’s charac-
ters (on Benjamin’s account) exhibit no struggle. If they live “happily ever
after,” it is only by virtue of the fact that they “live there still.” But where,
then, do they live? In “convalescence.” For Benjamin, the noble, child-like
simplicity of Walser’s “healed” characters exist in something like a “con-
valescent home.” And given that their struggle is psychological, this home
resembles nothing so much as an asylum. Absent is the “nervous tension”
that characterizes the healthy struggle against madness. If Walser’s char-
acters are “healed,” it is within a literary context in which they ramble on
and on yet go nowhere, in much the same way as Walser took daily rambles
during his final, asylum-stricken decades. The “pure and vibrant mood” of
Walser’s convalescent characters resembles the unearthly, halo-like appear-
ance of the delusional. If these characters have “free[d] themselves from
their sufferings” it is not the freedom accorded to the nervous, the worried,
and the anxious—i.e., anyone impacted by the mediations constitutive of
modern life.
If Walser’s characters are indefinitely convalescing, this exhibits a discon-
certingly cheerful characteristic. One finds an example of both the rambling
prose and the confused blurring of the narratorial “I” with the content of the
story (this to the extent that one can no longer tell which is the “concept”
 Ramble On 239
and which the “analogue”) near the beginning of Walser’s 1907 “Do You
Know Meier?” gives a good example of this:

This man, this Meier, this fellow is a genius. It’s not just that he can
make you laugh harder than twenty men can laugh in all their added-
together lives, make you laugh till you split your sides or, what am I say-
ing, till you roll in the aisles, or wait a bit, till you die laughing, oh what
a simpleton I am if I cannot pound a better comparison form the quarry
of my authorial cranium, it’s not just that but also that, how confusing
this is, yes, quite right, but also that even the quite natural inducement
of a tragic frisson is by no means beyond his reach, in fact, he finds it
all too easy. So have I actually finished my sentence now or not? If not,
what a lovely pretext for going on.14

One could, to be sure, give an interpretation of this passage along Adornean

and Benjmanian lines: The insistent insertion of the narratorial “I” into the
account of Meier (praised as a genius) suggests something akin to the hol-
lowing out of communal experience in the face of modern bourgeois indi-
vidualism which ceaselessly (and narcissistically) attempts to crown itself
sovereign even in the midst of extolling the virtues of others. Readers have
the right to ask why neither Adorno nor Benjamin themselves give this type
of interpretation.
The question of madness, as stated above, cannot be the sole determin-
ing factor in considering Adorno’s and Benjamin’s concerns about Walser’s
work. It can, however, contribute to a deeper understanding of the literary
or narrative style to which Walser gives voice. Viewed within a thought-
constellation that includes discussions of (a) dream and (b) late style, I
believe that readers can better appreciate both what bothers Adorno and
Benjamin about Walser and in what ways Walser tests the limit of the criti-
cal enterprise embodied by their work. It would be as absurd to reduce the
whole of Walser’s writings to his own apparently psychotic mental illness
as it would be to analogously reduce Kafka’s works to his neurotic con-
flicts about travel, women, etc. If the question of madness is to have any
significance—concerning both how Adorno and Benjamin view it and how
Walser’s texts register it—it must be understood as a literary or narrative
style. For it is precisely the question of style or form—i.e., the organiza-
tion of the text—that communicates (successfully or otherwise) the relation
between the artistic work and the society out of which it emerges.

Dream
In Freud’s 1916 paper “Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of
Dreams,” one reads the following: “[dreams] are remnants of mental activity
made possible by the imperfect extent to which the narcissistic state of sleep
240 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
has been achieved”15 (GPT: 159). That dreams should be first, and primarily,
indexed to the horizon of sleep is in itself unremarkable. Freud’s elaboration
(in the aforementioned paper from 1924) raises more interesting issues:

The close affinity of . . . psychosis with normal dreams is unmistakable.

A pre-condition of dreaming, however, is a state of sleep, and complete
abandonment of perceptive capacity and of the outer world is one of
the features of sleep.
(GPT: 187)

In other words, psychotic hallucinations or delusions amount to dreams

that occur outside the province of sleep. The delusional psychotic “dreams”
during waking life—or better, the psychotic episode is one in which the very
distinction between being asleep and being awake does not simply hold.
While Freud focused on the distinction between sleep and wakefulness
mainly in terms of its impact on individuals (a point recognized by Ben-
jamin in his Arcades Project16), it is clear that both Adorno and Benjamin
widen the context to include society (and even history). In a letter from
6 June 1935, Benjamin asks Adorno if the latter can “recall whether there
is any psychoanalytic study of waking, or studies to that effect, in Freud or
his school” (CC: 99). To be sure, the two disagreed on whether “dream” is
at all an appropriate category for a historical-materialist analyses of society.
Adorno takes Benjamin to task (in his letter of 2–4 August 1935) for reify-
ing the concept of “dialectical image” (in his work on Baudelaire) precisely
insofar as Benjamin fuses it with “dream”:

If you [Benjamin] transpose the dialectical image into consciousness as

a “dream,” you not only rob the concept of its magic and thereby rather
domesticate it, but it is also deprived of precisely that crucial and objec-
tive liberating potential that would legitimate it in materialist terms.
The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; it
is rather dialectical in character, in the eminent sense that it produces
consciousness. But if so, then neither consciousness nor unconscious-
ness can simply replicate it as a dream.
(CC: 105)

Be this as it may, the question of achieving a level of reflective and critical

capacity out of the dogmatically unquestioning gravitational pull of society
is a clear analogue to the sleep/wakefulness distinction of Freud. It is no sur-
prise, therefore, that dreams become an important issue for both thinkers.17
Benjamin’s most articulate account of the distinction between sleep and
wakefulness, understood as epochal structures, occurs in his “Paris, the Cap-
ital of the Nineteenth Century” from 1935. Attempting to show how Paris
(the city, its architecture, its writers, etc.) serves as a dialectical image of
nineteenth-century modernity, he writes,
 Ramble On 241
The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the
paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ
of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one
to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates it’s awakening. It bears its end
within itself and unfolds it—as Hegel already noticed—by cunning.18

For Benjamin, dialectical thinking allows for one to both locate the dream
elements in society and to awaken from them; dialectical thinking is the
catalyst for societal disenchantment. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin elabo-
rates on this process:

Awakening is a graduated process that goes on in the life of the indi-

vidual as in the life of generations. Sleep is its initial stage. A genera-
tion’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience
of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every
epoch has such a side turned towards dreams, the child’s side.
(AP: 388)

If the child(-like aspect of an age) creates a “symbolic space” (AP: 390) for a
new and emerging society by means of the dream, the adult’s responsibility
is both (a) (in Adornean parlance) to “break this spell” (CC: 283) that the
dream has over society and (b) to become aware of this dialectical character
of the dream (i.e., its affirmative and its occluding character).19 Put differ-
ently, the dream both allows for the new to be imagined just as it enraptures
the dreamer in its magical spell—one might say, in its “aura.”
There is (to my knowledge) only one manuscript, amidst the numerous
places where Benjamin discusses the topic,20 in which he explicitly and
immediately connects “aura” with “dream”—being an undated manuscript,
it is difficult to know whether this text is an ur-text or elaboration of his
more famous discussions; nevertheless, its importance for the present set of
reflections cannot be overstated:

What is aura? The experience of aura rests on the transposition of a

form of reaction normal in human society to the relationship of nature
to people. The one who is seen or believes himself to be seen . . . answers
with a glance. To experience the aura of an appearance or a being means
becoming aware of its ability . . . to respond to a glance. This ability is full
of poetry. When a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our
glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is
dreaming, draws us after its dream. Aura is the appearance of a distance
however close it might be. Words themselves have an aura . . . As much
aura in the world as there is dream in it.21

That the aura of a work gives the experience of “glancing back” expresses
the dialectical character of this “appearance of distance.” The work possesses
242 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
a “uniqueness” (WoA: 24) and a “prehistory” (WML: 202) that both shows
itself to us as well as requires interpretation to understand it. As with
“dream,” Adorno had conflicts over Benjamin’s usage of “aura” insofar as
he believed that Benjamin’s extreme project of disenchanting auratic experi-
ence would lead to the commodity fetishism and the instrumentalization of
perception.22 Again, however, one thing is clear: Both Adorno and Benjamin
were attempting to articulate a factor of experience (both subjective and
objective) that allowed for the relation of work to society and history to be
adequately (i.e., critically) seen and understood.
What happens, however, in a situation whereby one dreams in waking life?
What happens when the very distinction upon which the critical enterprise
is founded collapses? Finally, what happens when the entire world appears
auratic, thus foreclosing the possibility of discerning between prehistory and
history, reality and semblance or fiction? In this case, the narrative leads one
to believe that the author has, in some sense, literarily disavowed (or with-
drawn from) reality. Adorno is explicit about the feeling of dis-ease over this
kind of narrative: “When . . . the social contract with reality is canceled, in
that literary works no longer speak as though they were talking about some-
thing real, one’s hair stands on end.”23 As I see it, this dis-ease is precisely
the feeling that Adorno and Benjamin had concerning Walser’s work. Thus,
Walser’s work can indeed be located as a species of madness—where objec-
tive perceptions are substituted with subjective representations.
An example of this type of narrative can be seen in Walser’s 1907 text
“The Theater, A Dream.” In the context of making the comparison between
watching a theatrical performance and dreaming, Walser elaborates the fol-
lowing description of dreams:

How melodious are colors in a dream! They seem to be turning into

faces, and suddenly a color threatens, sobs, sings, or smiles; a river
becomes a horse, and the horse is about to climb a narrow staircase
with its hoofed feet; the knight is forcing it, he is being pursued, they
intend to tear his heart from his body, they are getting closer, in the
distance you can see the murderers racing towards him, a nameless
fear seizes you—the curtain falls. An earthquake strikes a municipal
square, the buildings sink and tilt, the air appears to be splattered
with blood, fiery-red wounds are hanging everywhere; people are fir-
ing their rifles, meaning to compete with nature in murderousness; all
the while the sky is a sweet pale blue, but it lies so childishly above
the buildings, like a painted sky. This bleeding is like small roses being
thrown about; the buildings keep falling and yet they stand, and con-
stantly there is a horrific screaming and the crack of rifle fire and
yet there is none. Oh, how divinely this dream is playacting! It pres-
ents incontestably pure images of the horrific, but also of sweetness,
oppression, melancholy, and anxious remembrance. It instantly paints
settings to match sentiments, persons, and sounds, supplementing the
sweet prattling of a virtuous woman with her face, giving snakes the
 Ramble On 243
strange weeds from which they horrifically slither forth; the cries of
the drowning the dreary evening landscape of river and shore; and a
smile the mouth that expresses it.
Amid dark-green bushes, white faces lean out, each with a request,
a plaint or with hatred in its horrifically clear eyes. Sometimes we see
only features, lines, sometimes only eyes; then the pale features come
and frame these eyes, then come the wild black waves of hair and bury
the face; then once more there is only a voice, then a door opens; two
figures charge in, you try to wake up, but the inexorable charging-in
continues. There are moments in a dream whose memory stays with us
as long as we live.
(BS: 34–35)

In addition to the remarkably vivid and detailed—albeit rambling—account

given by Walser, readers are faced with the following situation: Walser has
given us a text about dreams that is itself dream-like. If it is to be taken
as an account of a dream, the dream-like aspect or style intrudes into the
account (in much the way that the narratorial “I” intrudes into the account
in “Do You Know Meier?”). Moreover, is this text supposed to be a non-
fictional account of dreams, or a fictional one? It is surely a sketch of some
sort. Given that all of Walser’s works constitute “chapters . . . of a sliced-up
or torn-apart book of myself,”24 this leaves any attribution of genre vastly
underdetermined. About the most that can be said of Walser’s text is that it
is a dreamlike account of dreams about which readers are unsure whether
Walser is reporting or dreaming—it is stricto sensu a dream-text. But if the
dreamlike character of the text “cancels the social contract with the reader,”
it more closely resembles a delusion than a dream. Walser’s literary style,
can be termed psychotic on this account—i.e., it is a narrative that blurs the
distinction between (and, thus, forecloses the possibility of) the dialectical
relation between work and society that allow for a critical (awakened) con-
sciousness to arise. Concerning literary style, however, there are many writ-
ers who have not simply spoken about reality. Are they all, for that reason,
suspect? For Adorno, this is certainly not the case—and it is at this point
that a discussion of his conception of “late style” may have consequences for
an understanding of Walser’s work.

Late Style
In his study on late style, Edward Said encapsulates the Adornean theme in
a provocative (if programmatic) statement: “Late style is what happens if art
does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality.”25 While the statement is cor-
rect, it needs to be given its dialectical due by being situated within Adorno’s
thought about art more generally:

The work of art’s detachment from reality is at the same time medi-
ated by that reality . . . By opposing empirical reality, works of art obey
244 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
its forces, which repulse the spiritual construction, as it were, throw-
ing itself back upon itself. There is no content, no formal category of
the literary work that does not, however transformed and however
unawarely, derive from the empirical reality from which it has escaped.
(NL2: 89)

Despite the fact that late style art amounts to an extreme form of rejec-
tion of reality, it is not a complete severing of the social contract with its
readers about reality—late style art is that particular kind of art whose
maximal disengagement from reality is itself a mediation of reality. This
it does by a means of raising reality—which occurs through the artistic
subjectivity and conventions—to the level of a formal principle: “The rela-
tionship between the conventions to the subjectivity itself must be seen
as constituting the formal law from which the content of the late works
emerges—at least to the extent that the latter are ultimately taken to signify
more than touching relics.”26 If the aforementioned social contract with
the readers/listeners/viewers is to be upheld in late style artworks, this can
only be communicated through the form of the work (which form is itself
the mediated constellation of reality). However, insofar as the bond is now
no longer held together by a represented content (but rather by a formal
principle), communication to audiences becomes problematic. The “con-
tent” of a late style work “communicates itself, like a cipher only through
the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself” (EM: 566). Due to
the fragmentary character of their communicative ability, late style works
“show more traces of history than growth” (EM: 564), this to such an
extent that “The formal law [of late style works] is revealed precisely in
the thought of death” (EM: 566). Put differently, the in-formed content of
the late style artwork is communicated as something that cannot be sim-
ply communicated.27 This, however, does not mean that no communication
exists—only that the communication is not representational. In Hölderlin’s
works, Adorno holds that “the real is honored, in that [he] keeps silent
about it, not merely as something anti-poetical but because poetic language
feels shame at the unreconciled form of what exists” (NL2: 127). If soci-
ety exhibits alienation (in Hölderlin’s time, from God; in our time, from
each other and the society in which we live), the silence that in-forms the
poet’s work bears an uncanny witness to this lack of reconciliation. This is
disturbing to readers precisely because it addresses the issue of alienation
without speaking about it. In this respect, late style artworks are literally
“catastrophes” (EM: 567)—i.e., they overturn the conventions that art is
supposed to uphold. They present the fragmented character of modernity
in a manner formed by that fragmentation.
In sharp contrast to Adorno’s characterization of late-style, Walser’s texts
break the social contract with their readers by their refusal to formally deter-
mine the content contained therein. Readers are therefore transported into
a dream world in which the content seems to survive or exceed such formal
 Ramble On 245
determination. Readers should recall Benjamin’s claim that the latter’s char-
acters “begin where fairy-tales stop” (SW2: 260). Differently stated, Walser’s
characters survive their own deaths. It is little wonder, then, that Benjamin
singles out Walser’s “Snow White” (published in 1901) as one of the hall-
marks of modern literature (and this, again, occurring in a “hostile” review);
Walser explicitly shows how the fairly-tale characters live on belatedly. The
“dramolette” is at once hilarious and maddeningly dark.28 Far from being
simple replicas of their fairy-tale analogues, Walser’s characters

exemplify the modern individual who exists to understand the possible

terms of his or her fate. For the characters, the fairy-tale is the world
and language out of which they are made, their nature. Walser depicts
self-knowledge as an existential state of poetic exaggeration. When the
characters speak of their existence, they stand as if beside themselves.
Everything has already happened; time has stopped; life becomes reflec-
tively stretched apart. It is transformed into this dream reality.29

As with the narratorial intrusions in “Do You Know Meier?,” the charac-
ters’ self-reflections continually interrupt the dramatic action. In so doing,
the entire play takes place in an eternal present—only heightened by the re-
enactment of the fairy-tale within Walser’s dramolette—that accomplishes
nothing save showing how the characters survived their own death in the
form of the ending of the fairy-tale.
This survival takes the form of an attempt at reconciliation between the
Queen and Snow White for past guilt by means of recollection of events.
This recollective process constitutes the dramatic action of the play. Put
differently, the existence of the characters occurs on the hither side of the
attempted murder that took place in the fairy tale; now, they are convalesc-
ing and remembering. Waves of emotion and recollection replace primary
action. Deceit and honesty are the figures around which both (a) the dra-
matic action takes place and (b) the self-commentary is enacted. One sees
this clearly near the beginning of the play when the Queen first attempts to
convince Snow White of the former’s innocence:

I did not send the Hunter off/after you with kisses. Blind fear/ has made
you too apprehensive . . . Believe your right, not your left ear/I mean
that false one telling you/that I am this evil mother/green-eyed at beauty.
Don’t be fooled/by such an absurd fairy tale/stuffing the world’s greedy
ears full/of these newsy bits that I am/mad with jealousy, by nature/evil.
It is just idle talk.
(FT: 5)

In the Queen’s attempted negation of the very fairy-tale that serves as the
basis for her continued existence (by means of a self-reflection that intrudes
on the story of which she is a character), the reader is immediately confronted
246 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
with one aspect of late-style artworks—i.e., the breaking of the conventions
characteristic of more recognizable artistic production.
Matters only become more entangled when the Queen orders a re-enactment
of the supposed murder of Snow White:

As though it were real, reenact/that scene of Snow White’s distress/that

she had in the forest here./Do so as though you wished to kill./You, girl,
beg as though you mean it./Me and the Prince, we will just watch/and
critique if you play your roles/too lightly. Now then, let’s begin!
(FT: 23)

How is the reader to understand the Queen’s plaintive cry “Perform it like
its real”? Would reality, here, refer back to the fairy-tale? Would it refer
to a static point outside of the fairy tale as such? Or, would it simply refer
to what the Queen—vacillating between the desire to hurt and to repair—
considers as real? Put differently, the reader becomes an audience member
of a play-within-a-play based on a fairy-tale of which the characters are
both trying to honestly recapture and trying to deceitfully disavow. At
one moment, the Queen levels an angry outburst at Snow White’s perfor-
mance, thereby completely overwhelming any distinction between appear-
ance and reality:

Queen
So? Really? You’re dead serious.
Do you forget and speak the truth?—
Then Hunter, please step from this role.
It’s unbefitting such a man.
Run the evil whore through, right now.
For the entire afternoon
she’s been hectoring me with her
two-faced blathering. O slay her.
Bring that lying heart of hers here
and lay it down at your Queen’s feet.
The Hunter points his dagger at Snow White

Prince
What, what is going on? Snow White, run.
Stop that you, you villain. O Queen,
What a snake you are after all.

Queen (Laughing at the Hunter While Stopping His Arm)

All of this is only a game.
Come into the garden. Spring air,
 Ramble On 247
rising, falling, in the park’s shade,
chatting along the graveled path,
is the bickering’s happy end . . .
(FT: 24–25)

In accusing Snow White of speaking the truth (in a play that was supposed
to be indexed to the figure of truth by means of a realistic performance), the
Queen has interrupted the performance with her own assessment of reality—
i.e., that Snow White had really not been truthful in the performance. In so
doing, the Queen orders the Hunter to really perform (by murdering Snow
White) the actual truth of the fairy-tale that she so desperately wanted to
hide (in ordering the play to be performed realistically). Taking his proper
cue, the Prince realizes that the play has been interrupted and makes the
quite real and truthful appeal that Snow White escape and save herself—at
which point, the Queen (deceitfully? Who can tell anymore?) pulls the inter-
rupted performance back into the performance in order to interrupt it once
again with the appeal to a convalescence in nature (one which will really
bring this play to a happy end). This moment not only marks the point of
greatest intensity in Walser’s dramolette, but it also confronts the reader
with its reality (which, from this point on, continues until the dramolette’s
“end”)—i.e., that there is no proper ending to Walser’s post-fairy-tale; the
final reconciliation is nothing other than the unending belated existence of
the characters in Walser’s dramolette. One way to express the insight con-
tained in this narrative is that “to live on, to survive, to be healed or saved,
then, can no longer be conceived as an essentially teleological movement”
(THABH: 56). But it is unclear what kind of “living” this really is. It is even
unclear as to whether the characters escape their fate (or death) provided
by the ending of the actual fairy-tale insofar as they exhibit absolutely no
growth or development in Walser’s text. They remain stuck in a state hover-
ing between dreaming and wakefulness. Their continued existence shows
that their psychotic state is not simply episodic.
As with the previous examples, an Adornean and Benjaminian reading
can be given to Walser’s dramolette: “Snow White” is catastrophic precisely
because, in saturating the play with the kind of interruptive subjectivity
characteristic of stories like “Do You Know Meier?,” his narrative evokes
the same chaotic social alienation that individuals experience with respect
to one another and to society as a whole. The lack of a perspective exter-
nal to “Snow White” (for the characters to draw on regarding standards of
“truth” and “reality”) mirrors the dizzying ever-changing-ever-same hor-
rific modal efflux (to use Spinozan parlance) that individuals and societies
experience at the hands of the culture industry and the creative-destructive
impulses of consumer capitalism (and which horror is evoked in Walser’s
aforementioned passage on dreams). The only survival of this chaos would
be one in which the very chaotic reality is disavowed. That disavowal, in the
form of convalescing amidst nature, ought not be taken literally; rather, in
248 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
late style fashion, it silently points to its opposite. If Walser’s text falls short
of Adorno’s construal of late style, it might perhaps be that the organizing
artistic force is still tied somewhat tied to the content of the narrative. The
condition for the possibility of a successful or failed reconciliation for Snow
White is the stability of the fairy-tale that Walser’s text takes as its ambiva-
lent point of departure. Walser’s narrative hovers in between the priority of
form and that of content. In that respect, the signification, reference, and
meaning contained in “Snow White” exists in a dream world in between
representative and evocative modes of discourse. In his failure to decide
between the two—in his possible disavowal of the distinction—Walser’s
text breaks the social contract with his audience. And, in this way, it makes
Adorno’s hair stand on end.

Conclusion
Walser, in his life and his writings, was an inveterate rambler (this was the
case to such an extent that his own death occurred when he was on one of his
walks). Massimo Cacciari is correct in his assessment that Walser’s manner
of rambling is not in the service of an end, but rather becomes (in a sense) an
end in itself (PP: 149). I believe that such physical and literary rambling—
with its evocation of freedom from spatial and temporal constraint—was
profoundly troubling for Adorno and Benjamin. Both thinkers diagnose it
as, in some sense, a failure to reflect on the unfreedom of modern life. In
One-Way Street, discussing travel and habitation in early twentieth-century
Europe, Benjamin states that

Any human movement, whether it springs from an intellectual or even

a natural impulse, is impeded in its unfolding by the boundless resis-
tance of the outside world. A shortage of houses and the rising cost of
travel are in the process of annihilating the elementary symbol of Euro-
pean freedom . . . Few things will further the ominous spread of the cult
of rambling as much as the strangulation of the freedom of residence.30

Rambling is thus an effect of a housing crisis and declining possibility for

travel. If rambling is a form of convalescing in nature, it not only remains
unreflective in the extreme, but amounts to a disavowal of reality in favor
of a dream.
One finds an analogous discussion of the same problem in Adorno’s radio
address on “Free Time”:

free time depends upon the totality of societal conditions. That total-
ity now as much as ever holds people under a spell. In reality, neither
in their work nor in their consciousness are people freely in charge of
themselves.
(CM: 167)
 Ramble On 249
That is why the integration of leisure time [in the work schedule of busi-
nesses] succeeds so smoothly; people do not notice in what ways they
are unfree even in the areas where they feel the most free, because the
rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.
(CM: 170)

free time is the unmediated continuation of labor as its shadow.

(CM: 173)

As for Benjamin, Adorno sees free time (with its particular manifestations
in “camping” [CM: 170] and by extension rambling) as the uncritical and
un-negotiated extension of societal unfreedom into the private lives of the
individual. Again, the pretense to any activity (any “hobby” [CM: 170]) as
free from this encroachment amounts to a dream—the individual perpetu-
ation of which would constitute psychotic disavowal. Rambling freedom
is always already circumscribed by the work of society. Consequently, it
is only by working through this societal work that one breaks the societal
spell, awakens from the dream, and lives a life not wholly identical to unjust
society.
It is no condemnation of Adorno and Benjamin that they themselves were
unable to see Walser’s mad, psychotic narrative as a resource for the critical
theory of society; their own intellectual practices can certainly pave the way
for a critical re-appropriation of his remarkable body of work. The impor-
tant question is whether the critical enterprise (as Adorno and Benjamin
conceived it) is able to accommodate a narrative such as Walser’s. I see one
of two paths that critical theory can take concerning this issue: (a) Critical
theory (a la Adorno and Benjamin) can discount Walser’s work as pre- or
uncritical insofar as it accomplishes nothing but psychotic rambling. On this
path, one finds the surprising consequence that, despite the critiques leveled
at instrumental reason and industrial society in the propagation of societal
unfreedom, critical theory still insists on a (however minimal) measure of
industry in order to disrupt the unfreedom—i.e., the purpose of an artistic
work is . . . to work. (b) Critical theory can take into account those artistic
productions that assert no function other than their bare existence. On this
path, one encounters not only Walser, but also the writers who take seriously
the literary situation referred to as “unemployed negativity,” such as George
Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski (the list could, obviously
increase almost factorially). We know that Benjamin, through his friendship
with Georges Bataille, attended the latter’s Contre-Attaque and Collège de
Sociologie organizations. We also know that he was less than enamored by
them. The reasons for this, as recounted in a letter of Klossowski, indicate
that Bataille’s organizations were too dream-like—too “unemployed”—for
Benjamin’s philosophical temperament: “[Benjamin] lived torn between the
problems that only historical necessity would solve, and images of an occult
world that often imposed itself as the only solution. But this is what he
250 Jeffrey A. Bernstein
deemed to be the most dangerous temptation.”31 The real test (on this sec-
ond path) is whether such “unemployed” images, texts, and figures—far
from being excluded from nor rashly assimilated into critical theory—can
be dialectically examined for their own capacities for seeing society for what
it is. Such seeing, even if it passes beyond a neurotic register, might articu-
late something actual about the unjust life. Perhaps it may even surprisingly
show us, by way of negation, what the just life would have to entail. Put
differently, is there a critical potential to be found in the final sentences of
Walser’s “A Little Ramble” (1914), “We don’t need to see anything out of
the ordinary. We already see so much” (SS: 31)?

Notes
1. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence: 1928–
1940, trans., Nicholas Walker, ed., Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 21, 52. Subsequently, CC.
2. Benjamin, SW4, 396.
3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans., Harry Zohn, ed., Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968), 144.
4. Adorno, ND, 365.
5. This (non-)relation admits of a signal qualification. During the composition of
these reflections, I discovered Jan Plug’s magisterial They Have All Been Healed:
Reading Robert Walser, in which Walser is read in terms of a deep and sustained
engagement with Benjamin (as well as with Giorgio Agamben, W. G. Sebald, and
the Brothers Quay). This text, in my view, is the current gold standard for the
type of dialogic reading I attempt to outline here. See Jan Plug, The Have All
Been Healed: Reading Robert Walser (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2016) (subsequently, THABH). The one basic difference between Plug’s
approach and my own is difference of emphasis each place on Benjamin’s char-
acterization of his Walser essay as hostile. In a sense, everything else follows
from the emphasis one places on that moment.
6. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940, trans., Manfred R.
Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, ed., Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 357.
7. Benjamin, “Robert Walser,” SW, 2, 257–260.
8. Walter Benjamin, Radio Benjamin, trans., Jonathan Lutes, Lisa Harries
Schumann, and Diana K. Reese, ed., Lecia Rosenthal (New York: Verso Books,
2014), 377.
9. Adorno, P, 265 and 253 respectively.
10. Cf., Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,”
SW, 2, 797; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Englight-
enment: Philosophical Fragments, trans., Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 4–5. See also Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disen-
chantment and Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambrige University Press, 2001), 30,
90–91; Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 112–113. Subsequently as WB; Rodolphe
Gasché, “Kafka’s Law: In the Field of Forces between Judaism and Hellenism,”
MLN, 117: 5 (December 2002), 975–976; Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s
Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2000), 134; Martin Shuster, Autonomy after
Auschwtiz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2014), 15.
 Ramble On 251
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans.,
Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 98. Subse-
quently, CM.
12. Christopher Middleton, “Postscript,” in Selected Stories, ed., Robert Walser,
trans., Christopher Middleton, et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2012), 193. Subsequently, SS.
13. For elaborations on the Benjaminian context of Walser’s work, see Massimo
Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, trans., Rodger Fried-
man (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 140–156. Subsequently,
PP; John Maxwell Coetzee, Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005
(New York: Penguin, 2007), 15–29.
14. Robert Walser, Berlin Stories, trans., Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York
Review of Books, 2006), 48. Subsequently, BS.
15. Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 159. Subsequently, GPT.
16. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans., Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaugh-
lin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 389. Subsequently, AP.
17. One sees this, at the very least, from Adorno’s accounts of his own dreams.
See Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes, trans., Rodney Livingstone, ed., Chis-
toph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007). Subse-
quently, DN.
18. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire,
trans., Howard Eiland, et al., ed., Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2006), 45. Subsequently, WML.
19. An excellent discussion of this can be found in WB: 90–97.
20. See, e.g., WoA: 23–24, 285; WML: 202.
21. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans., Esther
Leslie, ed., Ursula Marx, et al. (New York: Verso Books, 2007), 45.
22. Lutz Koepnick, “Aura Reconsidered: Benjamin and Contemporary Visual
Culture,” in Benjmain’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and
Cultural Theory, ed., Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002), 102. See also Rodolphe Gasché, “Objective Diversions: On Some Kan-
tian Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-
duction’,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed.,
Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London, UK: Routledge, 1994), 201.
23. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes To Literature: Volume Two, trans., Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 79. Subsequently, NL2.
24. Robert Walser, “Eine Art Erählung (1928–1929),” in SS, n/p.
25. Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New
York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 9.
26. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays
On Music, trans., Susan H. Gillespie, ed., Richard Leppert (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2002), 566. Subsequently, EM.
27. I explore this theme in Jeffrey A. Bernstein, “From Tragedy to Iconoclasm: The
Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History,” Epoché, 15:
1 (Fall 2010), 137–161.
28. For an in-depth explication of this aspect of Walser’s “Snow White,” see THABH:
17–56.
29. Reto Sorg, “Forward,” in Robert Walser, Fairy Tales: Dramolettes, trans., Daniele
Pantano and James Reidel (New York: New Directions, 2015), ix. Subsequently: FT.
30. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans., Edmund Jephcott, ed., Michael W.
Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 38–39.
31. See Klossowski’s letter to Adrienne Monnier, in Pierre Klossowski, “Letter on
Walter Benjamin,” trans., Christian Hite, Parrhesia, 19 (2014), 17.
Contributors

Jeffrey A. Bernstein is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Col-

lege of the Holy Cross. He works in the areas of Spinoza, German phi-
losophy, and Jewish thought. His book Leo Strauss on the Borders of
Judaism, Philosophy, and History was published by SUNY Press in 2015.
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, Jewish Stud-
ies, in the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. Her
overarching project seeks to retrieve a materialist Aristotelian tradition
suppressed by eccesiastico-political condemnations. She is the author of
Maimonides and St. Thomas on the Limits of Reason, Maimonides and
Jewish Philosophy, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs: Marx,
Benjamin, Adorno, co-editor of Maimonides and His Heritage, as well
as many articles on Maimonides, Gersonides, Spinoza, Benjamin, and
Adorno.
Menachem Feuer has a PhD in Comparative Literature and a Masters in
Philosophy. Feuer teaches in the Center for Jewish Studies at York Uni-
versity in Toronto. He has published essays, book chapters, and book
reviews on philosophy, literature, and Jewish studies in several book
collections and peer-reviewed journals including Modern Fiction Stud-
ies, Shofar, MELUS, German Studies Review, International Studies in
Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Culture, Ctheory, The Journal
of French and Francophone Philosophy, and Cinemaction. Feuer’s main
academic focus over the last five years is on the schlemiel—a variant of
the Jewish fool that we often see in Yiddish literature, Jewish American
fiction, on several television sitcoms, on the stand-up comedy stage, and
in countless comedy films.
Roger Foster is a Professor in the Department of Social Science at the Bor-
ough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. He is the author of
Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (Routledge, 2007) and Adorno and
Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things (Lexington, 2016), and
has also published numerous articles on the tradition of critical social
theory.
 Contributors 253
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is an award-winning Latin American author,
philosopher, playwright, and literary and art critic. A founding mem-
ber of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, board member of the
Fondation Frantz Fanon, and Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts
(RSA), he teaches Political Philosophy and Law at Birkbeck, University
of London.
Hyun Höchsmann studied philosophy, art history, and literature at Lud-
wig Maximilian University and the University of London. She is affili-
ated with East China Normal University as a Visiting Professor. Her
research interests include critical theory, philosophy of music, and Eastern
philosophy.
Owen Hulatt is a Lecturer at the Philosophy Department of the University
of York. He is the author of Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aes-
thetic Truth (Columbia University Press, 2016). His research interests
include aesthetics, Althusser, and Spinoza. He is currently working on a
book on aleatory materialism.
Corey McCall is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College in
New York. He has interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French,
German, and American philosophy and in aesthetics and philosophy and
literature. He is co-editor of Melville Among the Philosophers (Lexington
Books, 2017).
Cat Moir is a Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Sydney. She
is an intellectual historian specializing in the history of German and Euro-
pean thought in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
Marcia Morgan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg Col-
lege in Pennsylvania. She has published three books: a sole-authored
monograph on Kierkegaard and Critical Theory, an edited and co-authored
book with Agnes Heller on The Concept of the Beautiful, and a co-edited
and co-authored anthology with Megan Craig on Richard J. Bernstein
and the Expansion of American Philosophy: Thinking the Plural (all
published by Rowman & Littlefield). She has also published articles
and contributed chapters on Kierkegaard, critical theory, ethics, and
aesthetics.
Nathan Ross is Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma City University. He
is the author of books and articles on Hegel, critical theory, and German
Romantic philosophy. He has had a long interest in exploring the bound-
aries and interchange between philosophy and literature.
Stéphane Symons is an Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Philosophy of
Culture at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. His most recent book
publication is The Work of Forgetting: Or How Can We Make the Future
254 Contributors
Possible? and has published numerous articles on the Frankfurt School
and continental philosophy.
Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Theory in the Deptartment
of Political Science, William Paterson University. His forthcoming books
include The Specter of Babel: Political Judgment and the Crisis of Moder-
nity (SUNY Press) and Twilight of the Self: The Eclipse of Autonomy in
Modern Society (Stanford University Press).
Index
Adorno, Theodor W.: “The Actuality of
Philosophy” 177; Aesthetic Theory
1, 5, 10–11, 57, 61–64, 67–68,
70–72, 128, 159–160, 162, 167;
Dialectic of Enlightenment 1, 3, 20,
117, 128, 182, 187; “The Idea of
Natural-History” 1, 20, 22, 25–26,
29; Kierkegaard: Construction of the
Aesthetic 20; Minima Moralia
155–156, 160; Negative Dialectics
60, 159–160, 174; Notes to
Literature 58, 64; “On the Use of
Foreign Words” 8, 67; relation to
Benjamin 1–14, 19–33, 44, 47–48,
76–78, 87, 102, 105, 112–118,
120–122, 126–127, 130–131,
137–138, 163, 166, 169, 173,
201–202, 204, 211–213, 235–240,
242, 248–249
aesthetic autonomy 6, 166, 204
aesthetic experience 5–6, 58–64, 67–72,
150, 161, 182, 185–187, 189–191
aesthetic judgment 189
aesthetics 62, 68, 129, 150, 166–167,
176, 182, 185, 191, 193, 197–198,
201–205, 210
alienation 5, 15, 23, 106–107, 130, 182,
187, 197, 212, 244, 247
allegory/allegorical 115–116, 118,
121, 169
apparatus 40
Arendt, Hannah 133, 137
art 1, 5–6, 10–12, 24–25, 47–49, 58–64,
68–72, 102–103, 108, 113–115, 120,
128–130, 145–146, 148, 150, 153–154,
162, 166, 175–176, 182–183,
191–193, 206, 209, 215, 225, 228,
235, 243–244
artifice 22, 48
artwork 5–6, 25, 37, 58–59, 62–65,
68–72, 103, 108, 113, 128–129, 150,
162, 166–167, 175–176, 206, 244,
246
aura 24, 25, 30, 49, 241–242
Austin, J. L. 38, 42
authenticity 27, 35, 58, 64
balance 72, 237
Balzac, Honoré de 29–30, 76, 130–131
Baudelaire, Charles 7, 9–10, 19–26, 30–33,
37–39, 44, 47–48, 52, 151, 240
beauty 60, 63, 120–121, 153, 155,
182–189, 191–192, 194–195, 198,
207–208
Beckett, Samuel 7, 9–10, 57–62, 67–72,
121, 131, 138, 159–160
Benjamin, Walter: The Arcades Project
(Arcades) 21, 76, 114, 169, 240–241;
“The Author as Producer” 6, 101,
107; Deutsche Menschen 76, 81;
elective affinities, essay on 213; “The
Image of Proust” 1, 12, 163; “On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 34; The
Origin of German Tragic Drama
1, 20, 24; “The Paris of the Second
Empire in Baudelaire” 20–21, 30, 33;
the storyteller essay 78; “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (various versions)
24–25, 40
Bergson, Henri 145–149, 153, 156,
160, 162, 165
bourgeois intérieur 22, 29
Bowie, Andrew 60–62, 68
Brecht, Bertold 102, 107, 135
Brod, Max 11, 103, 119
256 Index
Büchner, Georg 10, 76–87
Buck-Morss, Susan 100, 169
Butler, Judith 38, 42
Canetti, Elias 231
capacity 6, 39, 59, 66, 71, 79, 115,
147–148, 150–151, 156, 183–185,
188–189, 191–192, 194–197,
221–222, 231, 235, 240
capitalism 10–11, 21, 38, 40, 69, 84,
93–98, 101–102, 107–108, 113,
121–122, 197, 247
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
11–12, 126–138
Césaire, Aimé 47–48
collective meaning 32, 38, 40, 42, 45,
47, 51, 53, 87, 148, 237
comedy 11–12, 61, 132–136, 252
commodity 31–33, 113–114, 240, 242
communication 7–8, 10, 38, 51, 59, 67,
148, 175–176, 244
comprehension 205
concept/conceptual 5, 8–9, 13, 24–28,
32, 38, 41, 43–44, 47–48, 52, 57,
59, 61, 65–66, 68–70, 76–78, 82–86,
94–95, 98, 100, 102, 105, 120, 128,
130, 144–150, 154–156, 161–168,
172–175, 181–187, 192–198, 201–212,
221, 226–228, 238, 240
constellation/constellational 10, 14, 24,
32–33, 57–58, 60, 68, 72, 114–117,
127, 133, 161, 171, 176, 239, 244
contradiction 14, 61, 64, 68–69, 112,
114, 164, 182
Cooper, James Fenimore 29–30
cosmology/cosmological 38, 44, 48–49,
52–53, 205, 213–215, 228
critical practice 236, 249
critique 2, 6, 9–11, 13, 20–21, 24, 45,
47, 65, 71, 80, 82, 93, 97, 100–101,
105, 121, 138, 145, 148–149, 160,
166, 175, 181–183, 186, 188, 191,
197, 208, 246, 249
crowd 25, 29–32, 39–40
determination 14, 24, 27, 61, 171, 173,
221, 228–229, 245
dialectics/dialectical 9–12, 14, 20–22,
24–26, 28, 33, 40–42, 78, 86, 93, 97,
100–101, 108–109, 111, 113–115,
117, 121–122, 128–129, 145,
164–165, 168, 173, 185, 235–237,
240–243, 250
dignity 71
domination 12–13, 20, 45, 181–182,
187
dream 37–41, 44–47, 51–52, 162, 237,
239–249
Dumas, Alexandre 29–30
emancipation 83, 85–86
enigma/enigmatic/enigmaticalness 5, 10,
62–65, 67–69, 71–72, 103, 121, 222
enlightenment/Enlightenment 13, 59,
63, 112, 117, 128–130, 181–182,
187–188, 195–197
epistemology 65, 68, 85, 146, 161–162,
166–167, 169–170, 174, 176, 189,
202, 204–205, 214
essence 128, 153, 181, 183–186, 189,
192–193, 195, 205–206, 209–211,
221, 224, 227, 229
exchange 28, 45, 48–49, 52, 95–96,
111, 115, 122
experience 2–10, 12–13, 19, 22–23, 28,
37–38, 40–41, 58–64, 66–72, 76–68,
80, 83, 85–87, 93, 98, 100, 102–106,
108, 113, 115–117, 120, 127–131,
137–138, 143–156, 161–173, 177,
181–192, 198, 205, 221, 223, 226,
231, 239, 241–242, 247; Erfahrung vs.
Erlebnis 6, 12
false consciousness 100, 145, 155,
163, 245
fate 22, 26, 28–29, 31, 37, 69, 93, 111,
113, 116, 128, 130, 134, 184, 189,
208–210, 228, 230, 232, 245, 247
Feuerbach, Ludwig 76, 78, 85–86
flâneur 21–24, 29, 31
form/aesthetic form 5, 60–61, 67–68,
166–167, 176, 182, 198, 202–205,
208
fragment/fragmentary 28, 51, 82–83,
87, 102–104, 106–108, 115,
160–161, 176, 185, 188, 190–192,
230, 244
freedom 8, 11–13, 29, 44–46, 67, 77,
79, 82, 97, 112, 116, 120, 128,
130–131, 182, 184–186, 197, 205,
208, 138, 248–249
Freud, Sigmund 96, 239–240
gambler 39
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 71, 83,
202–203
guilt 11, 58, 93–109, 117, 119,
191, 245

Habermas, Jürgen 57–58
Hansen, Miriam 25
harmony 41, 65, 148, 192
Hegel, G.W.F. 28, 46, 53, 71, 146, 181,
185–186, 241, 253
Heidegger, Martin 19–20, 25–28, 33
history 9–11, 19–28, 32–33, 37,
39–46, 52–53, 69–70, 76–87, 100,
111–123, 126–129, 138, 147, 151;
of philosophy 112–113
Homer: Iliad 51–52
Horkheimer, Max 20, 22–23, 182, 187;
Eclipse of Reason 23
Hugo, Victor 31, 38
Husserl, Edmund 167
identification 94, 96, 100, 107, 144,
146, 149, 156, 207
ideology 32, 96, 99
illusion 37, 41, 53, 58, 65, 131–132, 149
image 21, 32, 37–47
insignificant 223, 225, 230, 231
Institute for Social Research 22–23
interpretation 22, 24, 28, 62–63, 70–71,
95, 103–104, 107–108, 113–120,
136–137, 160, 164, 168, 201–202,
207, 211, 224, 242
judgment 42–44, 94–96, 151, 174, 189,
193, 195–196, 212, 216
Kafka, Franz 1, 3–4, 7, 11–12, 14,
19, 68, 93–95, 98–109, 111–123,
126–133, 136–138, 159–160,
176, 224, 231, 235–237, 239; The
Metamorphosis 93; relation to Brecht
102, 107; The Trial 94, 100–101,
103–104, 108
Kant, Immanuel 5–6, 25–26, 45, 49, 51,
78, 85, 182–186, 188, 189, 192–194,
196, 200, 202, 204–205
Kierkegaard, Søren 19–31, 62, 66, 121
Klossowski, Pierre 40, 52–53, 249
Kracauer, Siegfried 35
labor 2, 45, 53, 94, 114, 116, 181,
191–192, 249
language 1, 3–5, 7–10, 13, 26, 33,
37–38, 40, 50, 52, 57–62, 64–72, 77,
84, 115, 120–121, 132–133, 145,
154–155, 185, 201–202, 212–213,
244–245
late style 120, 212, 239, 243–244,
246, 248
Index 257
Lazarsfeld, Paul 20, 22–23
Leibniz, G. W. 167, 186, 206
letter exchange between Benjamin and
Adorno 9, 19–26, 76, 78, 130–131,
137–138, 240
life 6, 11–19, 25, 27, 30, 32, 38–39,
41–44, 51, 60–61, 67, 77, 82–83, 86,
96–101, 104–106, 116, 121, 132,
134, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151–153,
169–172, 181–183, 188–193, 197,
201, 203–216, 221–225, 228, 230,
235, 238, 240–242, 245, 248–250
Luckács, George 6
materialism 10, 53, 76–82, 84–88
melancholy 33, 126, 138, 144, 242
Menke, Christoph 6, 108
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 153–155
metaphysics 49, 68, 78, 95, 102–103,
112, 122, 127–131, 137–138, 144,
162–165, 214; ontology 26–27,
76–78, 153, 167, 173
method 1, 3–4, 6, 11, 22, 24, 30, 39–40,
47, 57, 61, 84, 97–99, 145, 164,
202–203, 211–212, 216
mimêsis/mimetic 6–7, 9–10, 57–58,
61–64, 72, 173
mode of experience 2, 5–7, 12, 108
monad 2, 45, 167
mother tongue 66–67
music 1–2, 57, 62–68, 70, 72, 115, 118,
120, 143, 145, 153–154, 166–167,
176, 212, 235
myth 26, 37, 40–44, 47, 49, 51, 66, 87,
93, 95, 98–109, 117–118, 121–122,
130, 146, 163, 187, 213, 216,
228–230, 237–238
natural-history 19–20, 22, 25–26,
27–29, 32, 111, 118–119
nature 8, 14, 20–22, 25–26, 28–30,
40–42, 45, 47–48, 52–53, 64, 67, 71,
77, 79, 85, 111, 114, 118–119, 170,
181–199, 241–242, 247–248
need 29, 52–54, 78–79, 85, 101, 146,
165, 187
negativity, aesthetic 59, 108
Nietzsche, Friedrich 76–77, 94–98, 101,
105, 133, 146–147, 156, 223
nonidentity 164
object/objectivity 2, 5–6, 21–26, 28–29,
31–49, 52, 58–59, 61–66, 68, 70–72,
102, 105–106, 112–114, 117, 127,
258 Index
129, 132–133, 152–156, 160–165,
169–174, 182–188, 194–198,
203–206, 213, 217, 221, 223, 225,
228–229, 242
Ortsbestimmung 57
painting 35, 153–154
parataxis/paratactical 13, 175, 201,
211–213
perception 151, 155, 160, 171,
204–205, 214, 242
perfectibility 41
philosophy 2–6, 8–10, 60–64, 72, 104,
112–113, 129, 145, 165–167,
173–177, 185–186, 189, 191–192,
198, 213–214, 216
Plato 5, 24, 113, 153, 163, 173–174,
183, 192–196, 202, 206, 216
play (Spiel) 37–38, 40–42, 48, 52, 169,
198, 230–231
Poe, Edgar Allan 30–31, 37, 39
political meaning of art and literature
6–7, 101–102
positivism 20, 22–24, 164–165
poverty 39, 77–78, 82, 84
progress 6, 13, 31–33, 41, 59, 76,
81–82, 84, 87, 97, 100–101, 115,
122–123, 147–148, 185, 210
Proust, Marcel 1, 4, 7, 12, 15, 19, 103,
127–128, 131, 143–145, 148,
151–156, 159–173, 176–177
reason/rationality 8, 10, 12–13, 23,
63–64, 67, 71–72, 78, 100, 103,
107–108, 132, 146, 159–160,
181–183, 185–198, 207, 249
redemption/redemptive 11, 40, 61, 72,
93, 97–98, 101, 104–105, 108, 118,
123, 131, 151, 175
reification 14, 19–29, 32, 58, 61, 65, 114,
117, 121, 145, 181, 187, 197, 240
representation (Darstellung) 4, 57, 68,
70, 114, 203, 207, 215, 242, 244
ritual 38–49, 52–55
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 189–190
Schiller, Friedrich 60, 70, 198, 230
Scholem, Gershom 135–137
security vs. risk 39
sedimented history 65–66, 151
semblance 58, 63, 162, 174, 176, 242
sensual aspect of art 35, 66, 85–86,
153–156, 173, 191, 206, 215
Sophocles 206, 210, 214
spirit 29, 35–37, 40, 43, 46, 49, 51,
53–54, 117, 130, 156, 187, 189–191,
199, 204, 206, 211, 213–214,
229–230, 237, 244
spiritualization 114, 172
Stevenson, Robert Louis 30
storyteller essay 78
sublime 47, 183, 187–188, 191, 213,
215, 221
surrealism 1, 76–77, 82, 163, 166
symbol 12, 23, 28, 51, 53, 59, 66,
118–119, 127, 161, 241, 248
synthesis 193, 205, 211–212
system 4, 23, 25, 62, 65–66, 94–95,
118, 146–148, 151, 182, 185, 196,
227, 235
technology 40, 48, 77, 82; first and
second 40–42, 48, 50, 52, 54
theology/theological 39–40, 44, 48, 52,
66, 94–96, 98, 112, 120–122, 169
tradition 5, 10–11, 26, 37, 52, 69, 71,
76, 83–87, 112–117, 120–123, 132,
136–137, 160, 197, 204, 212, 230
tragedy (Trauerspiel) 20, 182
translation 7–9, 30, 112–113, 166,
202
truth/truth content 2, 4–5, 8, 6, 70–71,
166–167, 174–176, 188, 195, 201,
203–204, 229
unconscious 41, 240
utopia 10, 37–38, 40–48, 50, 52, 76,
143–144, 150, 155, 197
Valéry, Paul 159
violence 38–39, 44–45, 49, 50, 54, 81,
84, 121, 148, 162, 176, 231
Walser, Robert 13–15, 221–232,
236–239, 242–250
war 37–38, 42, 45, 51, 54, 62, 81–82
Weber, Max 39–40
Wellmer, Albrecht 58–64