Re: Celan and Adorno, Art and Auschwitz (WAS Re: Paul Celan - music on . . .)


"SG" <SGG217@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1136066323.225298.310330@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


> There wasn't a lot of "reactionary" philosophy allowed to reach the
printers, mind you, and "reactionary" all philosophy nonlethally kissed
by Marxism was seen as. Among the barely tolerated authors, there were
these "marginally Marxist" authors (like Adorno, whom I would call a
"Marxist malgré soi-même" - because he unlikely combines a
Spenglerian -- "decadent" and "bourgeois"-pessimistic -- outlook with a
stubborn use of boring Marxist slang)... [authors] whom, not lacking
talent, struggled to express themselves in ways which were not totally,
rigidly, ideologically dead. They were struggling against their own
upbringing and categorical insufficiency.

> Even just by comparing the
earlier, more party-line Adorno

Which party-line was Adorno subscribing to in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, or his book on Wagner, say?

> with the latter, subtler author, one
could notice signs of the mentioned struggle. Compared to hardcore
Marxists, even a bore like Marcuse, with his Freud-Marx combinatorial
obsession, could be perceived as a breath of relatively fresh air as
also, having to choose on aesthetics' terrain between Zhdanov and
Lukacs, a choice was not difficult to make. Perhaps that's the personal
reason I was more inclined toward seeing the "good" in an author like
Adorno, even if I realize that by the free world's standards, his
writings are on the ideologized side,

I'd like to see an example of what apparently is 'non-ideologized' writing.

> as opposed to an epitome of
creative, unregimented style of writing.

Precisely what Adorno valued the most - but he didn't think such a thing was
achieved easily.

> Even in the texts offered by IP, one finds a lot of long sentences,

As one tends to in most writing originally in German.

> buzzwords and ideological dust (I mean, how many times can an author
use the words "reification/reified" in a single paragraph and still be
taken seriously?),

As many times as one encounters the phenomenon.

> but also one can suddenly read a lovely,
penetrating, concentrated passage about Celan rather than about
Adornian-ideology-forced-upon-Celan - I am talking about the very last
quoted paragraph in that long post.

Adorno's thinking is anti-totalising throughout and in one sense of the word
anti-ideological (though I use the term more broadly than Adorno's use to
indicate reified consciousness). That's why it doesn't become formulaic, and
one reason why it consequently isn't easy to read. His resistance to
totalising grand theories is shown through his privileging of the fragment
and the epistemological use of the 'constellation' (especially in Minima
Moralia).

That quote on Celan is indeed a beautiful and intense piece of writing, but
an expansion rather than a break with his earlier writings. I do agree
though that the later Adorno is probably the most interesting work,
especially 'Aesthetic Theory'. That work was incomplete at the time of his
death; it's a shame we'll never know what else he would have gone on to
write. But there are some (including Lorenz Jager) who identify close
correspondences between that magnum opus and Adorno's earliest thoughts. The
newer translation of this work (by Hullot-Kanter) is generally regarded as a
significant improvement on the earlier one. A lot of the earlier
translations of Adorno are notoriously problematic (especially the
Philosophy of Modern Music and Negative Dialectics), though some new ones
are appearing (I haven't yet read the new Jephcott translation of Dialectic
of Enlightement).

Ian


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