TY  - JOUR
A1  - Johansson, Anders
T1  - The necessity of over-interpretation: Adorno, the essay, and the gesture of aesthetic experience
T2  - Estetika
N2  - This article is a discussion of Theodor W. Adorno’s comment, in the beginning of ‘The Essay as Form’, that interpretations of essays are over-interpretations. I argue that this statement is programmatic, and should be understood in the light of Adorno’s essayistic ideal of configuration, his notion of truth, and his idea of the enigmatic character of art. In order to reveal how this over-interpreting appears in practice, I turn to Adorno’s essay on Kafka. According to Adorno, the reader of Kafka is caught in an aporia: Kafka’s work cannot be interpreted, yet every single sentence calls for interpretation. This paradox is related to the gestures and images in Kafka’s work: like Walter Benjamin, Adorno means that they contain sedimented, forgotten experiences. Instead of interpreting these images, Adorno visualizes the experiences indirectly by presenting images of his own. His own essay becomes gestural.
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/56587
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-565879
SN  - 2571-0915
SN  - 0014-1291
VL  - 50
IS  - 2
SP  - 149
EP  - 168
PB  - Helsinki University Press
CY  - Helsinki
ER  -