No More Learning

Voltaire's 'Poeme', which, with another 'sur la loi naturelle' was pub- lished as a book, was condemned and burned in 1759. Rousseau's 'Letter on Providence' is dated 18. 8. 1756; he later commented rather aptly on it in his Confessions:
Struck by seeing that poor man, weighed down, so to speak, by fame and prosperity. Bitterly complaining, nevertheless, against the wretchedness of this life and finding everything invariably bad, I formed the insane plan of bringing him back to himself and proving to him that all was well. Though Voltaire has always appeared to believe in God, he has really only believed in the Devil, because his so-called God is nothing but a malicious being who, according to his belief, only takes pleasure in doing
harm. (Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen, Harmondsworth 1953, pp. 399f)
And: 'In the meantime Voltaire has published the reply that he promised
me. It is nothing less than his novel Candide . . . ' (ibid. , p. 400).
4 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut
Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston 1 973.
5 Cf. Jean Amery, 'Die Tortur', in Merkur 208, vol. 19 (1965), pp. 623ff
(Issue 7, July 1965); now in a revised version in Amery, Jenseits von Schuld und Siihne. Bewiiltigungsversuche eines Oberwiiltigten, 2nd edn, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 46ff.
6 Cf. Ch. 1 : 'Dasein's Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards- Death' of Division 2 on 'Dasein and Temporality' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 279ff), 'The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being - that is to say, to existence - limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein,' and 'When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its "there'" ? (ibid. , pp. 276-7 and 281); also Adorno's critique in TheJargon ofAuthenticity, pp. 130ff.
7 Cf. Brecht, A Man's A Man, in Baal, A Man's A Man and The Elephant Calf, trans. Eric Bentley, New York 1 964, pp. 1 1 7ff; on the status of the text of the play, written in 1 924-6, cf. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke
in acht Biinden, Frankfurt/Main 1 976, vol. 1 , pp. 363, n. and p. 4 * . Cf. , for example, the chapter on the 'culture industry':
Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitation naively to identify, it is immediately withdrawn. No one can escape from himself any more. Once a member of the audience could see his own wedding in the one shown in the film. Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of the public, but such equality only
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NOTES TO PAGES 108-109
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1 0
demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements. The perfect similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of the category forbids that of the individual cases. Ironically, man as a member of a species has been made a reality by the culture industry. Now any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant, and this is just what he finds out when time deprives him of this similarity. (Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London/New York
1997, pp. 145-6)
The reduction of the individual to the mere specimen of its species is one of the central ideas in Dialectic af Enlightenment. In 'Elements . . of Anti-Semitism', where the theory of logic is traced right to the exter- mination camps, the formulation 'specimen' is, however, lacking:
In the world of mass series production, stereotypes replace individual categories. . . . If, even within the framework of logic, the concept en- counters the particular only on an external plane, everything which stands for difference in society is threatened. Everyone is either a friend or an enemy; there are no half measures. The lack of concern for the subject makes things easy for administration. Ethnic groups are forced to move to a different region; individuals are branded as Jews and sent to the gas
chamber. (ibid. , pp. 201? )
Regarding the text of the lecture see the parallel passage in Negative Dialectics: That in the concentration camps it was no longer an indi- vidual who died but a specimen - this is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure' (ibid. , p. 362), and especially the conclusion of the book: The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is help-
lessly isolated and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen' (ibid. , p. 408).
Cf. Brecht's poem 'On the Suicide of the Refugee W. B. ': 'So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right / Are weak. All this was plain to you / When you destroyed a torturable body' (Brecht, Paems 1913-
1 956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, London 1 976, p. 363). Cf. the section 'Absolute Freedom and Terror':
The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, p. 360)
11 Cf. Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Kanzentratians! ager, 2nd edn, Berlin 1947. The quotation, also to be
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NOTES TO PAGES 109-110
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found, though not attributed, in Negative Dialectics (d. p. 362), has not been traced; however, a similar passage has been found: 'Someone called out to a Jew: "It's now 12 o'clock. At 12. 05 you'll be with Jehovah! " It didn't take even five minutes' (translated from Kogon, Der SS-Staat, p. 94).
Amery describes being tortured:
Now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders which I have not forgotten to this day. . . . Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. The torture is burnt into him inextinguishably, even if no clin- ical or objective traces can be found. . . . Finally I became unconscious - and it was over for once. It is still not over. . . . You cannot rid yourself of torture any more than you can rid yourself of the question about the possibilities and limits of the power to resist it. (Amery, in Merkur 208,
pp. 632, 634 and 636)
And at the end of the essay he writes:
As far as any knowledge remains from the experience of torture beyond that of mere nightmare, it is that of a great amazement, and of being a stranger in the world, which cannot be compensated by any later human communication. Astonishment at the existence of the Other which asserts itself boundlessly in torture, and at what one can oneself become: flesh and death. That life is fragile, and that it can be ended 'with a mere needle' - that truism has always been known. But that a living human being can be made half-and-half the prey of death while still alive is only experienced under torture. The shame of such annihilation can never be effaced. Anyone who has been tormented remains defencelessly exposed to fear. It henceforth wields its sceptre over him. It - and also what is called ressentiment, which remains behind and has not even the chance to condense into a desire for revenge - and to be purged. From there, no one
looks out onto a world in which the principle of hope holds sway. (ibid. , p. 638)
That is the text to which Adorno refers. Amery later intensified it still further in a book version: 'Anyone who has been subjected to torture cannot again feel at home in the world. The shame of annihilation cannot be expunged. The trust in the world, which collapses partly with the first blow but only fully under torture, is never regained' (Amery,
Jenseits von Schuld und Suhne, p. 73).
First in the essay 'Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft' of 1 949:
Even the most extreme awareness of calamity threatens to degenerate into chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself facing the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes even the knowledge which states why it has become impossible to write poetry today. The critical mind, as long as it remains comfortably ensconced in contemplation, . . . is no match for absolute reification. (GS 10. 1, p. 30)
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179
180
NOTES TO
PAGES 110-120
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Adorno later came back repeatedly to his dictum, for the last time in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', where he seems to revoke it (d. Neg- ative Dialectics, p. 362); for an<interpretation d. Tiedemann, 'Nicht
die Erste Philosophie sondern eine letzte', pp. 1 1 ff.
On the proposition in question, d. NaS IV. 4, p. 400, n. 234. Cf. Sartre, Morts sans sepulture, Tableau IV, scene III:
HENRI: Est-ce que I,;a garde un sens de vivre quand il y a des hommes qui vous tapent dessus jusqu'a vous casser les os? Tout est noir. (II regarde par la fenetre. ) Tu as raison, la pluie va tomber. ['Do you still feel alive while men beat you until they break your bones? It's very dark. (He looks
out of the window. ) You are right, it's going to rain. '}
(Jean-Paul Sartre, La p . . . respectueuse . . . suivi de Morts sans sepulture.
Piece en deux actes et quatre tableaux, Paris 1972, p. 210) Lecture Fifteen
The title of Beckett's last novel (Paris 1961), frequently quoted by
Adorno in Aesthetic Theory.
Cf. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Munich 1 964.
An allusion to the book with the same title by Otto Friedrich Bollnow
(Stuttgart 1956); d. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 9f and ?
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2 3
4 5
6 7
8
9 1 0
1 1
1
See Lecture 11, n. 7.
On the category of the addendum d. Negative Dialectics, pp. 226ff; also d. Eckart Goebet, 'Das Hinzutretende. Ein Kommentar zu den Seiten 226 bis 230 der Negativen Dialektik', in Frankfurter Adorno Bli:itter IV, Munich 1995, pp. 109ff.
See Lecture 14, p. 108 and n. 9.
Here Adorno is referring to his essay on Beckett's Endgame (d. GS 1 1 , pp. 281ff). Adorno's interest in Samuel Beckett is now documented fully in Frankfurter Adorno Bli:itter III (Munich 1994).
Similarly in Negative Dialectics: 'It [culture] abhors stench because it
stinks - because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit.
Years after that line was written, Auschwitz demon- strated irrefutably that culture has failed' (ibid. , p. 366). The passage in Brecht has not been traced.
Not traced.
Not traced.
Cf. the essay 'Die auferstandene Kultur' of 1950, now GS 20. 2, pp. 453ff.
Lecture Sixteen
One or more sentences appear to be missing at the start of the lecture; at any rate, the text source begins: '. . . Ich meine damit konkret, Sie konnten denken . . . '
pasSIm.
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NOTES TO PAGE 121 181
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For 'these things' read 'Auschwitz or the atomic bomb or all these things which cohere' (d. p. 1 1 6 above).
The category of the 'wholly other' was introduced by the Marburg Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto ( 1 869-1 937), who defined the numinous, the mysterium tremendum and finally the divine itself with this term; however, the thing referred to as the mysterium,
that is, the religious mystery, the genuine mirum, is, to express it perhaps most aptly, the 'wholly other', the thateron, the anyad, the alienum, the aliud valde, the alien and perplexing thing which falls outside the realm of the familiar and understood and thus outside the 'homely', setting itself up in opposition to it and therefore filling the mind with petrified amazement. (Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Ober das Irrationale in der Idee des Gottlichen und sein Verhiiltnis zum Rationalen [1st edn 1917], Munich 1991, p. 31)
Otto finds moments of the wholly other especially in mysticism: 'Myst- icism contains essentially and primarily a theology of the mirum, the "wholly other'" ? (ibid. , p. 36). Horkheimer appears to have responded affirmatively to this category in his last years; at any rate, he did not object to the publication of a conversation on theology and critical theory with the title 'Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen' (d.
Horkheimer, Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen. Ein Interview mit Kommentar von Hellmut Gummior, Hamburg 1970). However, all he actually said was: 'Critical theory contains at least one idea about the theological, the other' (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7:
Vortriige und Aufzeichnungen 1 949-1973, Frankfurt/Main 1 985, p. 398), and he spoke of 'the point on which Judaism is of such interest to me: the identification not with the other but with the others' (ibid. , p. 40 1 ) . Elsewhere, he describes theology as 'the expression of a yearn- ing', 'a yearning for a state in which the murderer might not triumph over the innocent victim' (ibid. , p. 389). Adorno would have subscribed to this.
Cf. Adorno's Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka:
Kafka's theology - if one can speak of such a thing at all - is antinomian towards the same God whose concept Lessing had championed against orthodoxy, the God of the Enlightenment. But that is a deus absconditus. Kafka becomes an accuser of dialectical theology, which he is mistakenly believed to support. Its absolutely Other converges with the mythical powers. The entirely abstract, indeterminate God cleansed of all anthro- pomorphic and mythological qualities is transformed into the fateful, ambivalent and threatening God who instils nothing but fear and trem-
bling. In the terror in face of the radically unknown, his 'purity', modelled on mind, which the expressionist inwardness in Kafka sets up as abso- lute, reinstates the ancient humanity entrapped in nature. Kafka's work records the striking of the hour when purified faith reveals itself as im- pure, demythologization as demonology. (GS 10. 1, p. 283)
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182 NOTES TO PAGES 121-122
? That Adorno had a no less critical attitude towards the restitution of the theology of the Enlightenment can be seen from his correspondence with Paul Tillich of 1964. Tillich had asked him: 'What do you think about the new phase of theology which - following Heidegger and Bultmann's philosophy of language - replaces all ontology with the
"word of God"? With Heidegger they let language be as the "house of
being", but without any "being" in the house! ' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Paul Tillich to Adorno, undated [co early October 1 965] ) . From Adorno's reply:
The word-of-God theology in the sense you refer to, which, by the way, had been prepared by Heidegger since his 'turning point', I reject no less than you do. The mystical conception of language of which it is so remin- iscent has meaning only in the context of a positive theology. Otherwise the philosophy of language becomes something like a fetishism of lan- guage. What is the word of God supposed to mean without God? No, that won't do, and not only will it finally lead to a resurrection of the liberal-secular moralization of theology, but these theologians will make common cause with the logical positivists, for whom language has a very similar function, namely to replace the subject. (9. 10. 1965, to Paul Tillich)
Probably an allusion to the metaphor used by Kleist to describe his acquaintance with 'the new, so-called Kantian philosophy' (d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 376f, n. 99).
Cf. Karl Barth, Der Romerbrief, 1st version 1919, 2nd version 1920; now 15th edn, Zurich 1989.
7 The text source reads 'Konstantin Brunn', but undoubtedly the Zurich Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology Emil Brunner (1889- 1966) is meant; he was one of the co-founders of dialectical theology,
and was also a participant, with Adorno and Horkheimer, in the so- called Frankfurt conversation of 1931 on the 'meeting' of Protestant theology with the proletariat and with secular culture; d. 'Das Frank- furter Gesprach', in Paul Tillich, Briefwechsel und Streitschriften.
Theologische, philosophische und politische Stellungnahmen und Gesprache, ed. Renate Albrecht and Rene Tautmann, Frankfurt/Main
1983, pp. 314ff).
8 Ferdinand Ebner (1882-1931), an Austrian primary school teacher and
Catholic linguistic philosopher, was a member of the circle associated
with the periodical Der Brenner.
9 Friedrich Gogarten ( 1 887-1 967), a Protestant theologian and pupil of
Ernst Troeltsch. Since 1933 Gogarten had held a Chair at Gbttingen.
10 Adorno is thinking primarily of Gogarten, who wrote in 1933 on the 'unity of Gospel and national character', arguing that 'we must strive, bound by God's words, to perceive in the great events of our days a new task which our Lord has set for our Church' (quoted by Erich Trier [review]: 'Friedrich Gogarten, Einheit von Evangelium und Volkstum? ' Hamburg 1933, in ZeitschriftfurSozialforschung3 [1934],
5
6
p. 307 [vol. 2]).
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12 13
14 15
Adorno is referring to Schweppenhauser's doctoral thesis, not published until 1 967, and especially to the last chapter, entitled 'Postscript' ( cf. Her- mann Schweppenhauser, Kierkegaards Angriffaufdie Spekulation. Eine Verteidigung, Frankfurt/Main 1967; 2nd, revised version, Munich 1993). First published in 1902; now in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Prosa II, ed. Herbert Steiner, Frankfurt/Main 1959 (Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben), pp. 7ff.
Adorno is speaking of H. G. Adler (1910-88) and his book
Theresienstadt 1 94 1 - 1 945. Das A ntlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte Soziologie Psychologie (Tiibingen 1955). On H. G. Adler also cf. GS 20. 2, p. 495; on Beckett's statement referred to in the fol-
lowing text cf. Negative Dialectics, pp. 367f.
See Lecture 14, n. 11. In a letter of 24. 5. 1947 Horkheimer reported on his reading of Der SS-Staat, cf. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17: Briefwechsel 1941-1948, Frankfurt/Main 1996, p. 814.
The passage Adorno is referring to is in ? 28 of the Critique of
Judgement:
Nature considered in an aesthetical judgment as might has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime. If nature is to be judged by us as dynamically sublime, it must be represented as exciting fear. . . . But we can regard an object as fearful, without being afraid ofit; viz. if we judge of it in such a way that we merely think a case in which we would wish
to resist it, and yet in which all resistance would be altogether vain. [Adorno annotated the last sentence in his copy with: 'Critique ofJudge- ment: rather: the image mediates the fear concealed in reality'. J Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security. (Kant's Kritik ofJudgment, trans. ]. H. Bernard, London/New York 1 892,
pp. 123-5)
Adorno annotated the last paragraph in the margin: 'Like the poetry of the young Goethe. ' Cf. NaS 1. 1, p. 243, and ibid. , n. 284.
Part of the sentence has been omitted from the text source.
? August Strindberg's novel Black Banners (cf. A. Strindberg, Schwarze Fahnen, Munich/Leipzig 1916, p. 254).
NOTES TO PAGES 122-130 183
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1
Lecture Seventeen
Allusion to Schelling'S writings on 'Die Weltalter' (see the reference in Lecture 2, n. 6) on which Adorno and Horkheimer had held their advanced philosophy seminar in the winter semester of 1960/1.
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NOTES TO PAGES 130-131
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Cf. Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II in der Fassung der Handschriften, ed. Jost Schillemeit, Frankfurt/Main 1 992, p. 123: 'To have faith in progress does not mean to have faith that any progress has yet taken place. That would not be faith. '
Published in London, 1948. Conjectural reading.
Cf. ? 53 of Being and Time:
if by Being towards death we do not have in view an 'actualizing' of death, neither can we mean 'dwelling upon the end in its possibility'. This is the way one comports oneself when one 'thinks about death', ponder- ing over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized. Of course, such brooding over death does not fully take away from it its character as a possibility. Indeed, it always gets brooded over as something that is coming; but in such brooding we weaken it by calculating how we are to have it at our disposal. (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 305-6; d. Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity, where this formulation is quoted
(ibid. , p. 131)
The National Socialist Ernst Krieck (1882-1947), professor at the Piidagogische Akademie in Frankfurt/Main since 1928, had become rector of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitiit in 1933. In a report on Arnold Gehlen, Horkheimer refers to the same quotation when he compares Gehlen's theory of institutions with 'Krieck's thesis' 'that only sacrifice makes us free, sacrifice for its own sake' (Horkheimer,
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 8 : Briefwechsel 1 949-73, Frankfurt/Main 1996, p. 420). Whether the quotation is correctly attributed to Krieck, in whose work it has not been traced, seems doubtful in view of a passage in The Jargon of Authenticity: 'In 1938 a National Socialist functionary wrote, in a polemical variation on a Social Democratic phrase: " Sacrifice will make us free" '; the source given is: 'd. Herbert Marcuse's critique in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, vol. VII (1938), p. 408'. However, Marcuse's critique is of a book by Franz B6hm (Anti-Cartesianismus. Deutsche Philosophie im Widerstand, Leipzig 1938); as a review of a book by Krieck begins on the next page, a lapse
of memory by both Horkheimer and Adorno seems likely.
Cf. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 1 3 8 : 'Death is the possibil- ity of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. ' (Quoted from Being and Time, ? 50. )
Adorno probably has a passage from ? 47 of Being and Time in mind:
Yet when someone has died, his Being-no-longer-in-the-world (if we understand it in an extreme way) is still a Being, but in the sense of the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of a corporeal Thing. . . . The end of the entity qua Dasein is the beginning of the same entity qua some- thing present-at-hand. . . . From a theoretical point of view, even the corpse which is present-at-hand is still a possible object for the student of patho- logical anatomy, whose understanding tends to be oriented to the idea of life. (ibid. , pp. 281-2)
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? ? NOTES TO PAGES 132-134 9 Cf. the following passage from ? 54:
185
? ? Man alone carries about with him in abstract concepts the certainty of his death, and yet, most strangely, this certainty arouses anxiety in him only at isolated moments when some cause brings it vividly to his imagination. Against the mighty voice of nature reflection can do little.