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This article is an inquiry into the concept of metaphysical experience through a joint discussion of two authors and philosophers with different approaches that nevertheless converge in the reclamation of the concept and rely both on the experience of death as an example. In both cases, the authors are guided by the central problem of how not to relinquish metaphysical experience to unscrutinized immediacy or a powerful conversion which enjoins subjection, putting it in contact with aesthetics and ethics at once. Theodor Adorno situates metaphysical experience as a problem of philosophy of history and devotes attention to the contemporary possibility of experiences that evoke transcendence. The transformations he identifies in the concept also lead him to propose art as a domain where metaphysical experience is alive. The implicit personal investment Adorno makes is much more clear in Lacoue-Labarthe who, in a dialogue with Maurice Blanchot, shows the experience as deeply bound up with literature and its links to subjectivity. The article argues that the main difference between the two approaches is modal and temporal from the side of the object, aside from the different modes of interrogation recognized with the labels deconstruction and critical theory.
This essay focuses on the relationship between solipsism and aesthetic subjectivity, as outlined in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. As he mentions, according to dialectical materialism, solipsism gained actuality within (radical) modernism as general “standpoint”, realized in atomistic society through “reified division of labor”. This also applies to artistic production. At the same time, solipsism constitutes a long standing philosophical hypothesis, which concerns the truth value of perception, thus imitating the “subjective point of reference in art”. Therefore, Adorno’s brief statements on the relationship between epistemological solipsism and immanent artistic subjectivity designate different phenomena under the same heading; these concern sociological, cognitive and existential aspects of artistic creation and aesthetic experience, sedimented in the artwork’s content. However, he often undertakes abrupt conceptual transitions within them. In this essay, I mainly focus on the cognitive aspect, especially on the relationship between solipsism and art’s “subjective point of reference”. For this purpose, I reconstruct Adorno’s relevant ideas on the role of subjectivity within art and relate them to his elaborated analysis of the process of aesthetic experience. Finally, I scrutinize the value of this non-apodictic truth and its relationship to particular aspects of “truth-content” and to Adorno’s redemption of the artwork’s fragile ontological status, its semblance character.
The necessity of over-interpretation: Adorno, the essay, and the gesture of aesthetic experience
(2013)
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.
Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of human beings’ domination of nature is a familiar topic to Adorno scholars. Its connection to the central relationship between art and nature in his aesthetics has, however, been less analysed. In the following paper, I claim that Adorno’s discussion of art’s truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt) is to be understood as art’s ability to give voice to nature (both human and non-human) since it has been subjugated by the growth of civilization. I focus on repressed non-human nature and examine Adorno’s interpretation of Eduard Mörike’s poem ‘Mausfallen-Sprüchlein’ (Mousetrap rhyme). By giving voice to the repressed animal, Mörike’s poem manages to point towards the possibility of a changed relationship between mice and men, between nature and humanity, which is necessary in order to achieve reconciliation amongst humans as well.
To imitate all that is hidden. The place of mimesis in Adorno’s theory of musical performance
(2017)
The article examines the use of the concept of mimesis in Adorno’s notes towards a theory of musical performance. In trying to idiosyncratically define the latter as “reproduction”, Adorno relied on a framework elaborating on concepts introduced by Arnold Schoenberg, Hugo Riemann and Walter Benjamin – a framework that the article discusses insofar as it deals with the problem of mimesis. Specific attention is devoted to the relation between Benjamin’s essays on language and translation and Adorno’s theory of notation, that soon became the crucial aspect of his theory of reproduction. Given the shortcomings of Adorno’s theory, which in the end did not achieve its goals, the article proposes to capitalize on his terminology while at the same time rethinking his framework in the light of recent musicological paradigms for the study of musical performance. On the whole, the article shows that it was Adorno’s philosophical assumptions – in particular the theses of music’s non-intentionality and of its non-similarity to language – that prevented him from convincingly theorizing musical performance, and suggests an alternative framework for future research.
In my paper, I intend firmly to criticize Taubes' interpretation of Benjamin's Theology as a modern form of Gnosticism (Benjamin as a modern Marcionit). In a positive way, I sustain rather the thesis that Benjamin's Messianism is in close connection with his conception of reason (“the sharpened axe of reason”) and, in particularly, with the paradoxical unity of Mysticism and Enlightenment, which, according to the famous definition of Adorno, distinguishes his thought. As a radically anti-magical and anti-mythical conception of the historical time, Benjamin's Messianism has to be considered as an original synthesis between motifs of the mystical tradition of the Jewish Kabbalah and motifs belonging to the rationalist tradition of the Jewish philosophy. Moving from Cohen's standpoint of a continuity between Maimonides and Kant, I consider therefore the affinity between his messianic conception of history and that of Benjamin. Both, Benjamin and Cohen, share, together with the reference to the a priori of the idea of justice, the reference to the Kantian connection between rationality and hope. Hence originates the non-eschatological Messianism of both. Motives of difference between Cohen and Benjamin’s messianic idea are to be found, conversely, in their different way to consider the idea of "the infinite task" and of its infinite fulfillment in the context of the historical time. Unlike the fundamentally ethical interpretation that Cohen gives of this relationship, Benjamin understands it ontologically in a monadological sense. This explains the constitutive relationship that exists, in Benjamin's philosophy, between Origin, Fragment and Revelation. In the light of this connection, Benjamin's messianic understanding of the historical time exceeds the Scholemian alternative between a restorative and a utopian conception of Messianism. Consequently, the Krausian motto “Ursprung ist das Ziel” (“The Origin is the Goal”) displays its truth in the idea of the messianic fragment or spark.
Hamlet or Europe and the end of modern Trauerspiel. On some shakespearians motifs in Walter Benjamin
(2019)
Hamlet’s character sets, under different shapes and extents, the benchmark against which a large part of the European philosophy of the very long «short twentieth-century» behind us has had to measure. In the name of Hamlet as the most enigmatic among Shakespeare’s creatures, even Europe, its spirit and destiny, is identified, according to the well-known claim by Paul Valery.
Common trait to a big part of these interpretations – from the juvenile works of Pavel Florenskij and Lev S. Vygotskij (respectively written in 1905 and 1915) to Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet oder Ekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (1956) – is offered by the detection, in Hamlet’s figure, of the contradiction inherent to an epochal transition: the time of an unresolved passage between two ages that only knows the endless pain of an “interim”. My paper concerns the possibility to interpret Hamlet’s time as the time of an “interim” in light of Benjamin’s claims about Shakespeare’s drama contained in his book on the German Trauerspiel.
While Florenskij interprets Hamlet’s time as tragic and the figure of Hamlet as a tragic one, in my essay - moving from some observations on the " Hamlet Problem " by the young Franz Rosenzweig - I consider the original Benjaminian thesis about the character and the drama of Hamlet as the end of the modern Trauerspiel. Starting from a statement by Theodor Adorno in the famed Hornberger Brief to Benjamin of August 2, 1935, I outline, therefore, how Benjamin characterizes the figure of Hamlet. This, from his early writings on the relationship between tragedy and Trauerspiel up to the great book on the Origin of the German Trauerspiel.
In the frame of Benjamin’s interpretation, exactly by virtue of its distance from the thesis on the duality of tragedy (evoked by Florenskij’s interpretation as well as other ones), the Shakespearian theatrum of consciousness, paradigmatically represented in the figure of Hamlet and in the intimately dialectic character of his drama, is accounted for as necessary correlate of the Cartesian’s theatrum of consciousness. From a theoretical point of view, the Benjaminian characterization of Hamlet's figure reveals, therefore, something of the nature of modern consciousness and of consciousness in general in relation to the problem of truth and its representation. Hence the end of modern Trauerspiel coincides with the original incompleteness of its time. Consequently, I also claim Hamlet's dramatic figure to represent the aporetic characters of modern politics. This contrasts the thesis of Carl Schmitt who (in direct controversy with Benjamin) speaks, instead, of the Shakespearean drama as an expression of a pre-modern barbaric time.
In the nineties, Habermas redirected his political writings to the post-national constellation (global and European) and the possibilities of a society politically integrated through transnational democracy (or post-national democracy). This thematic reorientation took place on two fronts. The first one is the global transnational democracy, which includes the impacts of the economic globalization on national democracies, as well the proposal for a political Constitution for a pluralistic world society, based on a constitutionalization of international law. The second one is the European transnational democracy, which includes the redefinition of the political profile of European welfare state for an economic liberal profile, as well the paradox of democratic technocracy operated by European institutions and the proposal to overcome the decoupled technocratic policy model. This paper will address only this last topic, describing the reasons of the democratic deficit and the consequent delay of European political Union. Despite numerous reforms, the technocratic policies have not eliminated the discrepancy between centralization and democratization, and mistakenly indicate another direction further reinforcing the problem of European undemocratic institutions. In contrast, Habermas argues that the democratic deficit could only be overcome replacing the technocratic approach by a deeper democratization of European institutions.
It is difficult to think of another area of literary discourse in which a critic has brought such a profound influence to bear, as Theodor W. Adorno has, in the area of literature concerning the Shoah. It is also difficult to think of another area of literary discourse in which a critic’s pronouncements have been misinterpreted so often and to such a degree as have Adorno’s reflections concerning the status of art after the Shoah. Reference here is of course being made to Adorno’s (supposed) ‘dictum’ concerning the barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz. The principle aims of this paper are to restore his reflections to their argumentative context and to restore the dialectical tension conferred on them in the original text. I will examine what I have termed the “after-Auschwitz” aporia, so evident in Adorno’s reflections on post-Shoah art and yet overlooked all too frequently in the research literature. Defined as an irresolvable impasse as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises the term “aporia” succinctly captures the essence of Adorno’s deliberations on post-Shoah art: the imperative to represent the egregious crimes and the impossibility of doing so. I will demonstrate that Adorno’s pronouncements were never meant as silence-inducing taboos, but rather as concrete theoretical reflections upon the moral status of art in the aftermath of the Shoah and as warnings of the moral peril involved in the artistic rendering of mass extermination.