Content area
Full text
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press. Volume one, 1991 ($35 hb/$15 pb); Volume two, 1992 ($39 hb/$ 15.50 Pb)
Rarely has a writer so acutely plumbed philosophy's relationship to literary creation as in the essays and near-fragments of the "immanent" or dialectical criticism collected in Adomo's Notes to Literature, most of its components only at this late date reaching an English authence. For Adorno, the part and the whole, the singular and the universal, intuition and the concept are united in the semblance of philosophy and art, crystallized or monadological forms that allow true cognitive models to function, and from this arena, Adomo wrote in Minima Moralia, "cognition has no light to see but that which shines down onto the world from redemption." This theme of the necessary if shut down utopia is relentless in the Notes to Literature, shining through even, or especially, in Valéry's "pure poetry" or Beckett's monosyllabic bums. Notes to Literature stands as a kind of antimonument to Adorno's knotty, exacting type of insight in which "only what does not fit into this world is true."
Paradoxically a by-principle anti-systematic philosopher who could wryly note that the word "Progress" was missing from the authoritative Hermann Glockner lexicon of Hegel (in "Bibliographical Musings"), in the Notes to Literature Adorno's unique if not perverse use of that German philosopher is everywhere in evidence, a "miraculous weapon" that shoehorns the qualities of resistance or "reconciliation" out of the most obdurate texts. For Adorno, it would appear, Hegel may be the more revolutionary thinker in comparison with Marx, if he is subjected to Adorno's own "negative thinking" or "negative dialectics" that borders on a deconstruction. As his translator Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Schapiro noted in their introduction to Adorno's Hegel: Three Studies (MYY Press, 1993), Adomo can only be understood if one grasps that his "negative dialectics" as a mode of unifying theory and practice, experience, thought and sensibility, is also "a lesson in negative experience" as well. Adorno's work, particularly in his aesthetic writings, is an "ensemble" of practice and experience and the insights gleaned from an imminently concrete and contingent reading of Hegel's dialectic. In Adorno's view, Hegel can...