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.
Adorno-Metaphysics
But what is the content of this thinking?
All thinking derives its value from what is thought, but divine thinking can derive it from nothing lying outside itself, and can have no content other than what is best; but it alone is the best.
God therefore thinks himself, and his thinking is a thinking of thinking, so that in divine thinking, as cannot be otherwise for pure intellect, thinking and its object coincide absolutely.
This immut- able abiding of thinking in itself, this indivisible unity of the thinker and the thought, is the absolute bliss of God.
(Zeller 11.
2, pp.
366f)
In his lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vemunft' Adorno attaches his own definition of philosophy to that of Aristotle when he says that philosophy 'is really concerned with the "thinking of thinking", as Aristotle has defined it - in which the thought processes of logic and the
positive sciences must review themselves critically' (NaS IV. 4, p. 127). Cf. the paragraph with this title in 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus':
The necessity of the contingency of the factual in idealism is made by Husser! into the virtue of the purity of the idea. The ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of a life deserted by spirit. The various material
sciences are conceived in a totally empiricist way. . . . In his conception of 'absolutely strict regularity' he is too free with the 'thousands of accidents' which are not accidents. For the scientist, chance is the unwelcome re- sidue which settles at the bottom of his concepts, while for the 'common man', whose name Husserl utters without any compunction, it is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The scientist fancies that he can prescribe laws to the world; the 'common man' must obey each law in practical terms. He can do nothing about this, and may rightly
? 4
5
? NOTES TO PAGES 96-98
175
? consider it fortuitous; but that the world is made up of those who are exposed to such accidents and others who, though they may not make the law, can console themselves with its existence, is no accident, but is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which considers the 'world's conception' should ignore this. For Husserl, however, the sacrifice of empiricism does not open unrestricted insight to such connections, but he simply repeats the shoulder-shrugging prejudice that it all depends on one's point of view. Knowledge of the factual need not be too punctili- ous, since it in any case bears the taint of fortuitousness. Reality becomes an object of mere opinion. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. (GS 5, pp. 92f)
6 Cf. the preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1 977, p. 9).
7 Which text of Lessing's Adorno was thinking of here, and whether he was thinking of a particular text, has not been ascertained. Behind it is probably Lessing's realization that the 'gratuitous truths of history
. . . can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason'; Lessing called this the 'wretched wide ditch . . . that I can never get across, no matter how often and earnestly I have attempted the leap' (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke in 10 Banden, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 8: Philosophische und theologische Schriften II, Berlin 1956, pp. 12, 14) - a ditch which, according to Ernst Cassirer, had been overleapt in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), with its discovery of the truth of the historical; as a young lecturer Adorno gave one of his first seminars on Lessing's last work on the philosophy of religion.
8 Cf. for example, the report by Hippolytos (AD c. 220) in his Refutatio omnium haeresium:
Epicurus assures us that God is eternal and immortal, but that he troubles himself about nothing, in short, that there is neither solicitude nor fate, for everything takes place by itself (mechanically). The god abides in what he calls the World-Between . . . There he enjoys a feeling of supreme happiness in tranquil unconcern, has no difficulties himself and causes none to others. (Griechische Atomisten. Texte und Kommentare zum materialistischen Denken der Antike, ed. Fritz Jiirss et ai. , Leipzig 1977,
9 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, especially the last section,
'Meditations on Metaphysics'; the first edition of the book came out in
1966. The 'reflections on metaphysics which seem [to Adorno] timely
and unavoidable today', which are set out in the foIlowing pages, draw
on the first five (of the total of twelve) 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (see Lecture 1, n. 1), a 'second intermediate copy' of which is dated
? ?
? p. 333)
176
NOTES TO PAGES 98-105
? 7. 7. 1965 (cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Ts 15813ff). Adorno prob- ably drew on this intermediate copy for the notes on which he based the last lectures, which were given extempore: a kind of improvised variation on what had already been fixed in writing, which, after fur- ther revision, was finally published for the first time in Negative Dialektik the following year. The notes relate, with some omissions, to the text running from p. 361 to p. 376 in Negative Dialectics; whereas the
lecture notes conclude with 'The totum is the totem' (cf. ibid. , p. 376), Adorno had to end the lecture somewhat earlier through lack of time
(see Lecture 18, n. 16).
10 See p. 20 passim above.
11 Cf. the quotations from the Encyclopaedia and the Logic in Lecture 1,
n. 8.
12 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien
uber Husserl und die phanomenologischen Antinomien, Stuttgart 1 956; now GS 5, pp. 48-95.
Lecture Fourteen
1 See p. 101 above.
2 Schopenhauer's 'doctrine of the denial of the Will to Live', which forms
part of his system relating to moral philosophy, is to be found in Book 4 of The World as Will and Representation, in ? 68 of vol. 1 and in Chapter 48 of vol. 2; also see Chapter 14 of vol. 2 of Parerga and Paralipomena (cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa- tion, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, New York 1958, vol. 1, pp. 378ff, vol. 2, pp. 603ff; Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, Oxford
1974, vol. 2, pp. 312ff).
3 On 1 November 1755 the Portuguese capital was devastated by an
earthquake in which a quarter of its inhabitants lost their lives. Voltaire, deeply shaken, wrote his 'Poeme sur Ie desastre de Lisbonne, ou examen de cet axiome: tout est bien':
o malheureux mortels! {) terre deplorable! o de tous les fleaux assemblage effroyable! D'inutiles douleurs eternel entretien!
? ? ?
Quel crime, quelie faute ont commis ces enfans Sur Ie sein maternel ecrases et sanglans? Lisbonne qui n'est plus eut-elle plus de vices
Que Londres, que Paris, plonges dans les delices? Lisbonne est abimee, et l'on danse ii Paris.
? ? ?
Ce monde, ce theatre et d'orgueil et d'erreur, Est plein d'infortunes qui parlent de bonheur.
? ? ?
Nos chagrins, nos regrets, nos pertes sont sans nombre.
NOTES TO PAGES 106-108 177
? Le passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir; Le present est affreux s'il n'est point d'avenir, Si la nuit du tombeau detruit l'etre qui pense.
Un jour tout sera bien, voila votre esperance: Tout est bien au;ourd'hui, voila l'illusion.
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
? 8
?
178
NOTES TO PAGES 108-109
? ? 9
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
? 1 3
NOTES TO PAGES 109-110
? 12
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)
? ? ,,
?
179
180
NOTES TO
PAGES 110-120
? 14 1 5
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 ?
? ? 1
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.
-
NOTES TO PAGE 121 181
? 2 3
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)
4
? ?
?
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.
In his lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vemunft' Adorno attaches his own definition of philosophy to that of Aristotle when he says that philosophy 'is really concerned with the "thinking of thinking", as Aristotle has defined it - in which the thought processes of logic and the
positive sciences must review themselves critically' (NaS IV. 4, p. 127). Cf. the paragraph with this title in 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus':
The necessity of the contingency of the factual in idealism is made by Husser! into the virtue of the purity of the idea. The ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of a life deserted by spirit. The various material
sciences are conceived in a totally empiricist way. . . . In his conception of 'absolutely strict regularity' he is too free with the 'thousands of accidents' which are not accidents. For the scientist, chance is the unwelcome re- sidue which settles at the bottom of his concepts, while for the 'common man', whose name Husserl utters without any compunction, it is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The scientist fancies that he can prescribe laws to the world; the 'common man' must obey each law in practical terms. He can do nothing about this, and may rightly
? 4
5
? NOTES TO PAGES 96-98
175
? consider it fortuitous; but that the world is made up of those who are exposed to such accidents and others who, though they may not make the law, can console themselves with its existence, is no accident, but is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which considers the 'world's conception' should ignore this. For Husserl, however, the sacrifice of empiricism does not open unrestricted insight to such connections, but he simply repeats the shoulder-shrugging prejudice that it all depends on one's point of view. Knowledge of the factual need not be too punctili- ous, since it in any case bears the taint of fortuitousness. Reality becomes an object of mere opinion. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. (GS 5, pp. 92f)
6 Cf. the preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1 977, p. 9).
7 Which text of Lessing's Adorno was thinking of here, and whether he was thinking of a particular text, has not been ascertained. Behind it is probably Lessing's realization that the 'gratuitous truths of history
. . . can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason'; Lessing called this the 'wretched wide ditch . . . that I can never get across, no matter how often and earnestly I have attempted the leap' (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke in 10 Banden, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 8: Philosophische und theologische Schriften II, Berlin 1956, pp. 12, 14) - a ditch which, according to Ernst Cassirer, had been overleapt in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), with its discovery of the truth of the historical; as a young lecturer Adorno gave one of his first seminars on Lessing's last work on the philosophy of religion.
8 Cf. for example, the report by Hippolytos (AD c. 220) in his Refutatio omnium haeresium:
Epicurus assures us that God is eternal and immortal, but that he troubles himself about nothing, in short, that there is neither solicitude nor fate, for everything takes place by itself (mechanically). The god abides in what he calls the World-Between . . . There he enjoys a feeling of supreme happiness in tranquil unconcern, has no difficulties himself and causes none to others. (Griechische Atomisten. Texte und Kommentare zum materialistischen Denken der Antike, ed. Fritz Jiirss et ai. , Leipzig 1977,
9 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, especially the last section,
'Meditations on Metaphysics'; the first edition of the book came out in
1966. The 'reflections on metaphysics which seem [to Adorno] timely
and unavoidable today', which are set out in the foIlowing pages, draw
on the first five (of the total of twelve) 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (see Lecture 1, n. 1), a 'second intermediate copy' of which is dated
? ?
? p. 333)
176
NOTES TO PAGES 98-105
? 7. 7. 1965 (cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Ts 15813ff). Adorno prob- ably drew on this intermediate copy for the notes on which he based the last lectures, which were given extempore: a kind of improvised variation on what had already been fixed in writing, which, after fur- ther revision, was finally published for the first time in Negative Dialektik the following year. The notes relate, with some omissions, to the text running from p. 361 to p. 376 in Negative Dialectics; whereas the
lecture notes conclude with 'The totum is the totem' (cf. ibid. , p. 376), Adorno had to end the lecture somewhat earlier through lack of time
(see Lecture 18, n. 16).
10 See p. 20 passim above.
11 Cf. the quotations from the Encyclopaedia and the Logic in Lecture 1,
n. 8.
12 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien
uber Husserl und die phanomenologischen Antinomien, Stuttgart 1 956; now GS 5, pp. 48-95.
Lecture Fourteen
1 See p. 101 above.
2 Schopenhauer's 'doctrine of the denial of the Will to Live', which forms
part of his system relating to moral philosophy, is to be found in Book 4 of The World as Will and Representation, in ? 68 of vol. 1 and in Chapter 48 of vol. 2; also see Chapter 14 of vol. 2 of Parerga and Paralipomena (cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa- tion, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, New York 1958, vol. 1, pp. 378ff, vol. 2, pp. 603ff; Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, Oxford
1974, vol. 2, pp. 312ff).
3 On 1 November 1755 the Portuguese capital was devastated by an
earthquake in which a quarter of its inhabitants lost their lives. Voltaire, deeply shaken, wrote his 'Poeme sur Ie desastre de Lisbonne, ou examen de cet axiome: tout est bien':
o malheureux mortels! {) terre deplorable! o de tous les fleaux assemblage effroyable! D'inutiles douleurs eternel entretien!
? ? ?
Quel crime, quelie faute ont commis ces enfans Sur Ie sein maternel ecrases et sanglans? Lisbonne qui n'est plus eut-elle plus de vices
Que Londres, que Paris, plonges dans les delices? Lisbonne est abimee, et l'on danse ii Paris.
? ? ?
Ce monde, ce theatre et d'orgueil et d'erreur, Est plein d'infortunes qui parlent de bonheur.
? ? ?
Nos chagrins, nos regrets, nos pertes sont sans nombre.
NOTES TO PAGES 106-108 177
? Le passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir; Le present est affreux s'il n'est point d'avenir, Si la nuit du tombeau detruit l'etre qui pense.
Un jour tout sera bien, voila votre esperance: Tout est bien au;ourd'hui, voila l'illusion.
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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178
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.
