KAUFMAN Poetry’s Ethics

8/18/2019 KAUFMAN Poetry’s Ethics

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Poetry’s Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion andSociopolitical Delusion

Robert Kaufman

Odds are that discussions of Adorno and the ethical will arrive at Auschwitz,if they haven’t begun there in the rst place. It’s as good a wager, maybe bet-ter, that that arrival will then lead more specically to Adorno’s notion of “anew categorical imperative . . . imposed by Hitler upon unfree humankind:to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself,so that nothing similar will happen”; and it will perhaps prove an even saferbet that reconsiderations of this preeminently ethical concern with a newcategorical imperative will move at last toward the aesthetic or aestheticallyarticulated question of “poetry after Auschwitz,” unless that notorious phrasehas itself served all along as point of departure.1 But the truly notable thing

New German Critique 97, Vol. 33, No. 1, Winter 2006DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2005-006 © 2006 by New German Critique, Inc.

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For their responses to earlier versions of this essay, I am indebted to Norma Cole, Christina Ger-hardt, Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Alex Woloch; additional thanks to Robert Hullot-Kentor for hisgenerous help with translations from the German.

1. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,1973), 365, 362–63 (trans. amended); Adorno, Negative Dialektik , vol. 6 ofGesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 358, 355–56; see also “Lecture Fifteen” (July 20, 1965), inAdorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2000),115–16; Adorno, Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 181–82.Adorno’s proposed “new categorical imperative” of course refers to and modies Immanuel Kant’scategorical imperative—intended on Kant’s view to hold universally as a law of reason if it is to hold


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74 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

may be that from the early 1950s onward, within presumably more general,traditional considerations of poetry and ethics, the odds likewise will becomegreater and greater (to the point, nally, of appearing almost unbeatable) that aquoted, paraphrased, or partially remembered version of Adorno’s commentsabout Lyrik nach Auschwitz will have inamed or revivied whatever poetry-and-ethics or art-and-ethics debate has been on the table. Indeed, Adorno’swords have generated such controversy that it has seldom been remarked howbizarre it is—given how slim the chances initially would have seemed—thatone barbed aphorism and its reformulations could come to have so much inu-ence on, could create a six-decade donnée for, reection on consummate hor-ror and on art and culture’s ability—or incapacity—to address such horrorhumanely and critically.

From the initial impact of Adorno’s words in German-speaking coun-tries, the question of poetry, art, and philosophy after Auschwitz inevitablytravels across Western culture. When Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau,moments into the action of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961), enterthe Milan hospital room of their terminally ill friend and fellow writer, thelm can assume that though it has offered scarcely any other linguistic refer-ence to the fteen years since the war’s end, the audience is prepared to regis-ter instantly the grave tone, socio-intellectual subject matter, and emotional

itinerary established as Mastroianni tells his dying colleague, “I brought you[the] Europa Letteraria with your article on Adorno.” Nonetheless, for allthe usefulness of thinking of “the West,” Italian postwar cultural knowledge—to cite only one case—is not so quickly shipped to, say, British, and still less toAmerican, shores.2

at all—that we act so as to treat humanity, whether in our own person or in that of another, alwaysat the same time as an end and never as a means. Adorno at various points emphasizes that thisurgent Auschwitz-should-not-repeat-itself modication of the categorical imperative seeks toaddress the ways that modern historical experience, and above all the experience of industrializedgenocide, has altered the value of, and required at least a supplement to, formal or structural under-standings of ethical judgment and behavior; see, again, Negative Dialectics; see also, e.g., Adorno’scompressed formulation on the contemporary need “radically to assimilate therelevance of thetemporal [ Relevanz des Innerzeitlichen]” to thought, “Lecture Thirteen” (July 13, 1965), in Meta- physics, 101; Metaphysik , 159.

2. See La Notte (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, screenplay by Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, andTonino Guerra; 1961); for the braiding of Adorno with the lm’s primary, almost immediatelyprojected concerns see the screenplay text in Antonioni,Sei lm: Le amiche, Il grido, L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, Deserto rosso (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 304–5; and inScreenplays of Michel-angelo Antonioni: Il Grido, L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse, trans. Roger J. Moore et al. (New York:Orion, 1963), 214–15. Antonioni and his collaborators fur ther load the dice by making Mastroi-anni’s character—Giovanni, a novelist—quickly admit that, although he has roundly praised his dying


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Thinking especially about today’s American scene, so far removed not just from the early 1960s but even from the 1970s, it is worth rememberinghow important it was for substantial introductions of Adorno to English-language readers—particularly the book-length studies of the 1980s and early1990s (rather than the previous treatments of Adorno together with otherFrankfurt School gures)—to have underscored, without pretending to havecaptured, the place of Auschwitz and the Holocaust in Adorno’s thought.3 Meanwhile, if a very different reception history evolves in Germany (for obvi-ous sociohistorical reasons, but also and not least because of Paul Celan’sincomparable poetry), it cannot be gainsaid that even or especially there RolfTiedemann (the editor of both Adorno’s and Walter Benjamin’sGesammelteSchriften, and emeritus director of the Adorno Archiv) feels compelled, aslate as 1997, to edit and publish“Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse”: Ein philosophisches Lesebuch. In his introduction to that anthology of selec-tions from Adorno’s engagements with matters related to the Holocaust, Tiede-mann makes clear how much difculty, controversy, and misunderstandingoccurred because of these writings, even in sectors of German and then inter-national culture from which Adorno—perhaps naively—had not anticipatedantagonistic reactions.4

Whatever their thoughts, sentiments, and stances, those (starting with

Adorno himself ) involved in and affected by the ruminations on poetry’s“barbarity” or “impossibility” after Auschwitz never doubted that the politicaland, in some even more urgent sense, the ethical value of poetry and the other

comrade Tommaso’s article on Adorno, he has actually only skimmed the piece (and is thus, theaudience sees, incapable of thinking and talking meaningfully about it with Tommaso [ibid.]).Tommaso’s imminent death and Giovanni’s dedication to skimming generate much of what followsin La Notte.

3. For an especially important instance see Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1984); see also, e.g., Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno; or, The Persis-

tence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990); and Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic The-ory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). In addition to the large litera-ture in German, there had of course been numerous earlier English-language treatments of Adornoand other members of the Frankfurt School since the early to mid-1970s, many of which touchedon the place of Auschwitz and the Holocaust in Adorno’s postwar work. But for English-languageaudiences, the lengthier and more focused treatments of Adorno’s entire oeuvre that began appear-ing in the 1980s often served as the key secondary literature that highlighted, and treated in a moresustained manner, how the Nazi genocide had assumed an increasingly central place in Adorno’swork starting in 1943 or 1944.

4. See Adorno,“Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse”: Ein philosophisches Lesebuch, ed.Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 7–27; Adorno,Can One Live after Aus-chwitz? A Philosophical Reader , trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-

sity Press, 2003).


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arts was at stake. Among the reasons that the ensuing debates have generatedsuch unceasing interest has been not only the ongoing question of art and criti-cism in relation to the Holocaust but also—as progressive and Left participantshave recognized virtually since these discussions began in the late 1940s andearly 1950s—the terrible fact that mass atrocities carried out to further politi-cal objectives would turn out hardly to have ended with the 1945 defeat ofGerman fascism and its wartime allies. If that painful reality has suffused agreat deal of literary and artistic activity since World War II, it has also madeits presence felt in the sometimes parallel, often overlapping, at times utterlydistinct world of academic discourse.

Across the last decade or so, Anglo-American academic and extra-academic criticism have with increasing frequency and intensity returned toethics, without necessarily abandoning criticism’s more recent commitments.To be sure, ethics had never really been forgotten; but it seemed for a period tohave taken a backseat to language, politics, society, history, and culture. Criti-cism’s current “ethical turn” happens to have coincided with related develop-ments in American poetry and poetics (both outside and inside the univer-sity), where, for reasons intrinsic to poetry’s own history, ethics arguably hassustained a more continuous presence (even in the recurring heydays of the-matized sociopolitical engagement and historical consciousness) than it has

in critical theory and in modes of imaginative writing and art other than poetry.And—understandably—among the key motifs sounded in contemporary Ameri-can poetry’s desire and ability to hold on to ethical questions have been thosethat emerge through the conguration of translated, transposed German mate-rials and problems frequently shorthanded asCelan, poetry after Auschwitz,or Adorno.

Though attending primarily to university-based theoretical writing andto narrative ction, Geoffrey Galt Harpham’sShadows of Ethics offers whatmay be the most trenchant account of this “return to ethics” yet to appear.

Providing a clarifying historical overview—and nuanced, acute, particular-ized readings—of the ways and reasons that ethics had apparently recededfrom view but was also to varying degrees present inside socially and politi-cally oriented theoretical discourse and literary historiography (and certainlywithin literary art itself), Harpham goes on to present remarkably compressedand illuminating analyses of the special formal relationships between ethicsand literature. Rehearsing the familiar tale of how since at least Hume andKant, modern accounts of ethics have centered on the tensions between whatis and ought to be, and have thus centered at least implicitly on the role ofquestioning in ethical activity (especially the questioning of why anis rather


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than a desiredought holds sway), Harpham emphasizes how fundamentalimaginative literary activity, and narrative plotting in particular, is to thequestioning and judging process he persuasively shows to be at the heart ofethics.

Narrative engages with theory in a process of reciprocal probing and stress-ing that tests the capacity of theory to comprehend and regulate practice,and the power of “actual life”—albeit in a highly exotic, speculative, andtheoretical form—to elude or deform theory. . . . The name for this mutualstimulation of theory and example, this fundamental instance of the rela-tion of consciousness to life, is ethics: it is “in ethics” that theory becomesliterary and literature becomes theoretical.5

Harpham proceeds to explain concisely how we can understand “nar-rative as a representational structure that negotiates the relation . . . ofis andought ” (rather than, as might seem to be required in philosophy itself,abstractly deciding between them):

The most general and adequate conception of a narrative plot is that itmoves from an unstable inaugural condition, a condition thatis but oughtnot —a severance of the two—through a process of sifting and exploration

in search of an unknown but retrospectively inevitable condition thatis andtruly ought-to-be. . . . Narrative cannot posit a staticis; this function . . . isallocated to “description.” . . . Nor can it prescribe an unresistedought : thisis the business of sermons. What it can—indeed what it must—do is to g-ure a process of rejecting disjunction in favor of ultimate union. Narrativeplot thus provides what philosophy cannot, a principle of formal necessityimmanent in recognizable worldly and contingent events that governs amovement toward the eventual identity ofis and ought .6

And he further distills the point:

Plot . . . begins with a movement out of a static condition ofis [whose] cen-ter cannot hold, it repels value; itought not to be. The movement of the plotconstitutes a process of discovery of whatought to be, a process of winnow-ing and selection that culminates in closure, wherein the narrative achievesformal integrity and the regainedis truly ought to be.7

5. Geoffrey Galt Harpham,Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 1999), 35.

6. Ibid., 36.7. Ibid., 42.


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But what, if any, purchase can this conception of narrative plot makeon modern—and particularly modern lyric—poetry’s relationship to ethics?After all, modern lyric (perhaps especially those traditions of experimentand difculty leading to and beyond poets like Celan, in whom great formaldifculty and content difculty seem inseparable) is taken almost convention-ally to be nonnarrative. Though many reasons have been advanced in supportof lyric’s fundamentally nonnarrative character, two have tended to predomi-nate. First, lyric is given essentially to concretized, particularized intensitiesof feeling and to attempts at intersubjective recognitional address; story andplotting would here seem secondary at best. A second, apparently oppositecontention has been that despite the ostensible primacy and immediacy ofaffect and address (over against more mediated phenomena of narrative andplot), lyric often becomes as abstract as abstraction can get, far more abstractthan even the most experimental versions of narrative ction and plotting.This is true not so much in the sense of abstractable or distillable schematathat do indeed lend themselves to or have afnities with narrative scaffolding.It is true rather in the sense of lyric’s emphasis on giving, and leaving its audi-ences with, abstract or difcult to grasp but arresting afterimages, an effectstemming in signicant part from lyric’s dedication to a profoundly ephem-eral musicality constantly on the brink of evaporating (and therefore always

appearing to leave mere aural and, metaphorically, visual traces of itself sus-pended in the air, as if sensory musical resonance has become a quasi-cognitiveresonance never resolvable into, or as, one determinate cognition, but seem-ing as if it should and could be). When certain strains in the modernist novelattempt to assimilate, and happily lend themselves to being characterized by,such dynamics (especially in terms of sustained focus on the intensicationand heightening of the linguistic medium and our affective relationships to it,far out of proportion to the attention paid to action or incident), they in a sensereestablish the narrative rule to which they are the exception by the very fact

of being regarded aslyric: the lyric novel.These two commonly proffered arguments for modern poetry’s essen-tially nonnarrative status—lyricism (or musicality, including atonalism, disso-nance, etc.) and abstraction—inect or become each other, as do the elementsof artistic making and aesthetic form on which the arguments are based. Lyricpoetry’s “musical,” affective stretching, its palpable, immediate, particulariz-ing intensication of its linguistic medium, works also formally to challengeand expand our capacity to know particularity’s other, conceptual abstraction(which is almost to say, conceptuality itself, at least to the extent that concep-tuality’s medium remains signicantly linguistic). Hence the continuing use-


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fulness and popularity of the termlyric abstraction to capture lyric’s histori-cally constitutive and heightened-in-modernity paradox, whereby immediacyand abstraction coexist, and so interfuse one another, as to become inseparable.And if each part of that joint termlyric abstraction seems individually not tobe the rst word one would associate with narrative, neither is it clear that com-bining the term’s two elements does the trick, for it is far from evident thatthe combination yields a sequence-effect necessarily to be associated withthe movement and structure, however de minimus, of narrative plot. It maybe that the contrary holds; lyric and abstraction in combination or fusion haveseemed to many poets and readers even more stubbornly non- or antinarrativethan either lyric or abstraction standing alone.8

On the inevitable other hand, modern poetics is replete with compel-ling demonstrations of how even the most manifestly abstract, experimental,or antinarrative lyric poetry perforce commits itself to narrating, conveying,building on, or otherwise instantiating a certain ground of story or plot (if onlyof the recent dynamics and fortunes of affect, address, recognition, and nar-rative themselves). (In a closely related artistic context, George Balanchineresponded memorably to criticism that his choreography was too formalist,too “abstract”: “What is ‘abstract’? They [critics decrying his ‘abstractness’]mean ‘storyless.’ But . . . people meet, give the hand, embrace: it’s already

meaning. . . . So—how much ‘story’ you want?”)9 Thus even where the dramaof sheer formal or linguistic event looks largely to have eclipsed traditionalmarkers of lyric speech, song, narration, and narrative, precisely those tradi-tional markers are seen to live a heightened, reduced, or simply contempo-rary existenceas form and language. In a related vein, the narrative closureor immanent formal necessity that we saw Harpham represent as integral toliterature’s ethical vocation need not issue in classical desiderata of harmony,symmetry, reconciliation, and so forth, at least, not in the narrowly conceivedand perhaps straw man senses sometimes projected by an experimental modern

8. For a fuller discussion of these aspects of modern lyric, particularly in relation to modernaesthetics from Kant through the Frankfurt School and beyond, and highlighting lyric’s specialplace within the arts because of its inherent tendency formally to expand through musical sem-blance the medium of conceptuality—language—see Robert Kaufman, “Lyric’s Constellation,Poetry’s Radical Privilege,” Modernist Cultures 1, no. 2 (2005): 209–34, www.js-modcult.bham.ac.uk/fetch.asp?article=issue2_kaufman.pdf. For consideration of lyric abstraction in contempo-rary poetry—and its connections to painting and music, as well as its pr ior histories in Romanti-cism and modernism—see Kaufman, “Aura, Still,”October , no. 99 (2002): 45–80.

9. Interview with George Balanchine in Balanchine (dir. Merrill Brockway; 1983), originallyproduced for the Dance in America series and later broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System’sAmerican Masters series.


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poetics breaking from or periodically pronouncing itself allergic to such per-ceived decorum.

For the poem’s creation of a “trulyought to be” will involve the image-construction of a different state of substantive affairs; and that imagined dif-ference often emphasizes or springs from—rather than a harmonious, hap-pily reconciled or utopian, futurist,ought to be—the zero degree ofought tobe, namely, the critique of what nowis, a critique presumably absent, unspo-ken, unavailable within the initialis. Such critique, such zero degree ofoughtto be, is inextricable from if not synonymous withrecognition. For poetry,this will mean that the intersubjective recognitions at stake in lyric addresshave everything to do with the recognition of the suffering that exists in thestatus quois; the act of recognizing that suffering where—or in ways that—ithas not yet been recognized constitutes the beginning of a “trulyought tobe.” Vis-à-vis this task of recognition-critique, notions like closure, formalnecessity, and reconciliation have therefore frequently been understood interms of achieved or signifying form, whereby the poem stands as achievedform insofar as, in its development, it realizes a form that presents, enacts, orsomehow brings into being a content otherwise unavailable. Consequently,far from being synonymous with caricaturably narrow, predetermined, strait- jacketed ideas of form, “closure” and “formal necessity” have (in, e.g., con-

structivist and constellative contexts from Romanticism onward) been deemedconsonant with rather than hostile to critical, achieved artistic-aesthetic exper-iment (all the way to cases of modernist and postmodernist “open” or “pro-cessive” form).10

This backdrop may help one begin to understand something of howcontemporary American poetry and poetics have attempted to engage theethical, and the ethics of poetry after Auschwitz. It was probably to havebeen expected that this engagement would be tied to reections about wherecontemporary poetry stands in relation to modernism’s aftermaths, including

questions about the status (within poetic practice and audience response) oflyric and narrative, aesthetic difculty and accessibility, and a host of relatedformal-historical problems. Whatmay occasion surprise is the degree to which,across three or more decades, these American weigh-ins have repeated, some-times knowingly and sometimes as if from scratch, a good deal of the earlier

10. See Kaufman, “Lyric’s Constellation”; see also, particularly on the relationship of lyric tohistory and above all to the history of human suffering, Robert Kaufman, “Lyric’s Expression:Musicality, Conceptuality, Critical Agency,”Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 197–216 (a longer ver-sion of which will appear in Adorno and Literature, ed. Nigel Mapp and David Cunningham [NewYork: Continuum, 2006]).


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German and wider European responses.11 In recent contributions—emergingfrom, and widely read in, an avowedly experimental milieu—the poets LynHejinian and Joan Retallack signal in the very titles of their books the inten-sity of contemporary desires to connect or even unify poetics and ethics:Hejinian’s Language of Inquiry means to highlight how avant-gardist acts ofquestioning may align poetics and ethics, while Retallack’sPoethical Wager goes so far as to hazard their fusion with her neologism “poethics.” At crucialpoints in both texts, Adorno is invoked and responded to, especially, of course,with regard to poetry after Auschwitz. In their parsings, modifications,“subver[sions],” and qualications of the idea of poetry’s post-1945 impossi-bility or barbarism, Hejinian and Retallack nd themselves doubling back notonly on Adorno but likewise on their own initial responses to him; what comesat least implicitly into play is not just the ambiguous status of Adorno’s utter-ances (declarations, bans or prohibitions, provocations, self-contradictions,hyperbolic gesturings?) but also the kinds of poetry perhaps assumed inAdorno’s dictum, and then by those challenging it.12

Related speculations appear in Susan Gubar’sPoetry after Auschwitz.Gubar’s expansive and impassioned study focuses not so much on experi-mental poetry as on a range of approaches in poetry and the other arts, and itplaces special emphasis on poems that have received little critical (or any

other) notice; among Gubar’s abiding and powerfully voiced concerns arethe ethical imperatives of witnessing, testifying, and memorializing. WhileGubar locates herself primarily in areas of modern and contemporary poetrydistinct from those traversed by Hejinian and Retallack, one of the mostintriguing aspects of her book is something nonetheless shared with theirtexts: the metamorphosing character of Adorno’s thought, here presented ini-tially along the lines of univocal legislative stricture or pronunciamento, butat other moments seeming to move, under the poet-critic’s testings, towardthe simultaneous precision and rich indeterminacy historically associated

with poetic language itself. As Gubar painstakingly traces different poets’—andher own—reactions to what they frequently take as Adorno’s “injunction,”

11. The import of the German-speaking world’s responses will be threaded through the rest ofthis essay. For a thoughtful and moving, relatively belated example of the European—in thisinstance, French—response that explicitly integrates and reects on the German materials see thelate Sarah Kofman’sParoles suffoquées (Paris: Galilée, 1987), rpt. asSmothered Words, trans.Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998).

12. See Lyn Hejinian,The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),31–32, 40–58, 89, 147–48, and esp. 318–36; and Joan Retallack,The Poethical Wager (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2003), esp. 1–62, 88.


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“ban,” “prohibition,” or “statement against” postwar poetry, she at certainmoments appears inclined to suggest that Adorno paradoxically helped—andhad intended somehow to help—precisely to reestablish poetry’s role in rela-tion to ethics and to have underscored the now almost impossibly high stakesinvolved in poetry’s maintaining, reimagining, or reclaiming that role.13

These and other promising meditations might helpfully be placedalongside the poet-critic Susan Stewart’s recent essay “On the Art of theFuture.” Bringing Stewart’s remarkable piece into this discussion involves nosmall irony, since it never mentions the Holocaust, Adorno, or even—exceptin cited titles in two brief footnotes—the word poetry. The rst footnote does,however, refer to Stewart’s ownPoetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002),one of the most signicant defenses of poetry to have been published in sometime, which happens to include an important reconsideration of Adorno’s 1957“On Lyric Poetry and Society.”14 In fact, there is probably no great mysteryabout the focus, in Stewart’s essay, on art in general rather than poetry in par-ticular, since it was rst written for a conference whose motivating question—“Does the concept of art do useful work, or is it now primarily a defensivepolitical gesture?”—prompted Stewart to respond by “considering art’s rela-tion to ethics.” Engaging Kant’s aesthetics and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics,Stewart highlights something that not so coincidentally also informs all of

Adorno’s writings on art and ethics, and nowhere more than in his thinkingabout post-1945 poetry. That something is (as Adorno tends to call it) art’sdeterminate indeterminacy.15

13. See Susan Gubar,Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 2003). Gubar’s book is from its rst pages so lled with reec-tions on the ethics of poetry and on art’s formal and historical engagements with the Holocaust—and is in such constant dialogue with Adorno’s statements—that it is at least here more appropriateto cite the book as a whole rather than particular portions or pages.

14. Susan Stewart, “On the Art of the Future,” inThe Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthet-ics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15–27, 259–60n3, 260n7 (also published inChi-cago Review 50 [2004–5]: 298–315, 302n3, 304n7), citing Stewart,Poetry and the Fate of theSenses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The treatment of Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetryand Society” appears inPoetry and the Fate of the Senses primarily on pp. 42–45, though it goeson to inform much of what follows. See “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Adorno, Notes to Litera-ture, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1991–92), 1:37–54; Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” in Noten zur Literatur , ed.Rolf Tiedemann, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1958–74), 1:73–104.

15. The value of keeping in play and working with (rather than working through) art’s determinateindeterminacy, and of the semblance-character from which the latter stems, is central to Adorno’safnity with Kant’s aesthetics. See Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant; or, The Persistence of the ThirdCritique in Adorno and Jameson,”Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 682–724.


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In ways I cannot do justice to here, Stewart shows how aesthetics andethics are, at some fundamental level, processes of undetermined or reec-tive judgment. As such, she contends, they depend on face-to-face encountersbetween persons or, at least by analogy, between persons and the artistic formsthat in their materials and making are imbued with others’ existences and inten-tions. (Among Adorno’s own favorite ways to articulate this is that aestheticform is itself sedimented historical content.) Stewart further contends that theability to develop the resources for making reective ethical judgments mayin no small measure depend on, or be crucially developed by, the reective judgment-experience essayed within the semblance of face-to-face encoun-ters in the aesthetic realm. To Stewart’s formulations here (and in herPoetryand the Fate of the Senses), one can add that lyric’s relationship to our linguis-tic medium, and thus to the fundamental medium for signicantly communi-cable conceptuality, has historically given lyric a special role in the reimbuingof abstract, “objective” concepts with the affective, concrete particularity offace-to-face, not already determined (as achieved concepts are, by denition,already determined) experience and knowledge.16 This would be, at any rate,the place where Stewart’s thinking would meet Harpham’s related “hope”of demonstrating how, in literary (and specically narrative) form and ouraesthetic experience of it, “theoretical questions” about law and morality can

“acquire . . . a human countenance.”17 In the context of history’s massive,nightmarish elevations ofabstraction to the principle and practice of geno-cide, the attempt to encounter the human countenance, especially where onemight least expect to nd it (in seemingly mundane, innocuous, usually quitenecessary—and necessarily abstract—instances of conceptuality), is theaspect of lyric that is in urgent play and heated contestation within the painedinterchanges about the “barbarity” of post-1945 lyric.

In what follows—risking presentation to New German Critique’s read-ership of some perhaps all-too-familiar texts and contexts—I would like

more or less chronologically to revisit the history of what Adorno, and someof those around him, did and did not say about poetry, the other arts, andculture after Auschwitz, and to consider the relevant materials with attention

16. For a recent, eye-opening presentation of “experience” and its relation to conceptual knowl-edge—containing both a long-historical view of the status of experience in Western intellectualand cultural history, as well as discrete, extended analyses of how experience gures in (amongother bodies of work) Kantian and Frankfurt critical theory—see Martin Jay,Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2005).

17. Harpham,Shadows of Ethics, xiii.


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not only to questions of ethics and politics but to poetry and poetics them-selves. And in the service of trying to understand better how this mostlyGerman history has come to inuence—or, more indirectly, has been paral-leled in—American poetry and poetics, art and aesthetics, and criticism andtheory, I’ll turn nally to the work of one of the United States’ most impor-tant poets of the later modernist and postmodernist period, Robert Duncan(1919–88). His is a signal case where poetry’s own ethics is at issue in timeof war (a war in Indochina eventually deemed unwise, unjust, and immoralby a majority of the American people—and a war whose relative distance fromus today may be of value in considering the situations we now confront socio-politically, ethically, and aesthetically).

What is the cultural and political situation just before and as Adorno writesand publishes the initial and probably still best-known of his formulationsabout poetry after Auschwitz? Some clues are provided in correspondencebetween Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, including a letter fromHeidegger to Marcuse that the historian Richard Wolin found in the Herbert-Marcuse-Archiv in the Stadtsbibliothek in Frankfurt, and subsequentlytranslated and published in 1991. On August 28, 1947, Marcuse writes Hei-degger to say that he is sending a care package to his former teacher in war-

ravaged Germany, although “my friends have recommended strongly againstit and have accused me of helping a man who identied with a regime thatsent millions of my co-religionists to the gas chambers. . . . I excuse myselfin the eyes of my own conscience, by saying I am sending a package to a manfrom whom I learned philosophy from 1928 to 1932.”18 Marcuse’s letter atseveral points renews earlier requests that Heidegger dissociate himself moreclearly from (if well after the fact of his involvement with) the Nazi regime,and that Heidegger “expres[s his] current attitude about the events that haveoccurred.”19 Heidegger’s January 20, 1948, response reads in part:

To the serious legitimate charges that you express “about a regime thatmurdered millions of Jews, that made terror into an everyday phenomenon,

18. See “An Exchange of Letters: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger,” inThe HeideggerControversy: A Critical Reader , ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 152, 161–62; the Marcuse-Heidegger exchange was also subsequently published in Marcuse,Technology,War, and Fascism, vol. 1 ofCollected Papers, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1998),261, 264. For the German texts of Marcuse’s letters to Heidegger seePasterstrand 279–80 (1988):465–80, cited in Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 152.

19. Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 161; Marcuse,Technology, War, and Fascism, 263–64.


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and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom andtruth into its bloody opposite,” I can merely add that if instead of “Jews”you had written “east Germans” [i.e., Germans of the eastern territories],then the same holds true for one of the allies, with the difference that every-thing that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while thebloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from theGerman people.20

Marcuse replies:

You write that everything that I say about the extermination of the Jewsapplies just as much to the allies, if instead of “Jews” one were to insert

“east Germans.” With this sentence don’t you stand outside of the dimensionin which a conversation between men is even possible—outside of Logos?For only outside of the dimension of logic is it possible to relativize [auszu-gleichen], to “comprehend” a crime by saying that others would have donethe same thing.21

Having anticipated from gures of great cultural stature in the postwarperiod just the sort of attitudes that Heidegger here displays, Marcuse and hiscolleagues are hardly taken by surprise when they actually encounter them;but that lack of surprise hardly tempers the genuine outrage and disgust gen-erated from on-the-pulses experience of those attitudes. Yet that anticipationsays a good deal about the ground from which the Frankfurters’ later com-ments will emerge; those comments (about what culture, art, poetry, and“life” itself will mean in a presumably postfascist environment) are insepa-rable from personal experience and political analysis of a postwar sociocul-tural dispensation where sentiments like Heidegger’s are frequently all butofcial—or, simply, ofcial. Some of Adorno’s own most-considered rumi-nations on the subject had already been written during the war, as in thispassage from the “Part One: 1944” section of Minima Moralia:

The idea that after this war life will continue “normally” or even that cul-ture might be “rebuilt”—as if the rebuilding of culture were not already itsnegation—is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to beseen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture

20. Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 163; Marcuse,Technology, War, and Fascism, 266 (wherethe text reads, apparently in typographical error, “To the charges of dubious validity that youexpress . . .”).

21. Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 164; Marcuse,Technology, War, and Fascism, 267.


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waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it con-ceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that thequantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society atlarge, barbarism?22

What’s coming appears almost fully present in these words. Yet it isalso evident that, as all-pervasive and permanent as the situation may feel, itis also historically and socially situated. “Rebuilding,” including the makingof and acting on assumptions about culture’s ability to assimilate or merelyregister the degree of inhumanity that has just reigned, is an existential butlikewise a historical matter, and doubts about what humane or even radical

gestures will mean within this overall context are assessments of a historicalmoment rather than something henceforth to be deemed eternal; easy enoughto think and say, but not so easy—perhaps not even desirable—to square withthe moment’s experience. But then, Minima Moralia had begun by circlingaround this set of problems, problems inherited especially from nineteenth-and twentieth-century industrial capitalist society, though launched intoquite another realm with and after the Third Reich: “Our perspective of lifehas passed into an ideology which conceals the fact there is life no longer. . . .The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated tosubjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjec-tivity itself” ( MM , 15–16; 7–8).

Indeed, Minima Moralia faces its contexts with the dark epigraph takenfrom Ferdinand Kürnberger and meant by Adorno as historical descriptionrather than proclamation: “Life does not live” (Das Leben lebt nicht) ( MM ,19; 13). Or later, in Adorno’s own words, “Life has become the ideology ofits own absence” (Leben ist zur Ideologie seiner eigenen Absenz geworden)( MM , 190; 252). Meanwhile, the old Aristotelian value of art’s favoring theprobable impossible over the improbable possible hums in sad resignation orin perverse, tortured form beneath Adorno’s hint—certainly anticipating thecoming aphorisms on poetry and Auschwitz—thatlife now has been made therealm of the impossible, somehow making barbaric the attempt to have art(even tragic art) still proceed in accord with prewar desiderata about aestheticsemblance’s ability to offer, toward the development of our capacity for criticalagency, the probable impossible or credible impossible. Also already present

22. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jeph-cott (London: NLB, 1974), 55; Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951), 65. Hereafter cited as MM , with page numbers from theEnglish and then the German texts.


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are thoughts tending toward the need for an art that would be humane pre-cisely in its relentless dedication to conveying the inhumane:

All the world’s not a stage. [Staatsaktion.]—The coming extinction of art ispregured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events. . . .The impossibility of portraying Fascism springs from the fact that in it, as inits contemplation, subjective freedom no longer exists. Total unfreedom canbe recognized, but not represented. Where freedom occurs as a motif in politi-cal narratives today, as in the praise of heroic resistance, it has the embarrass-ing quality of impotent reassurance. The outcome always appears decided inadvance by high politics, and freedom is manifested ideologically, as talkabout freedom, in stereotyped declamations, not in humanly commensurable

actions. Art is least to be saved by stufng the extinct subject like a museumpiece, and the object, the purely inhuman, which alone is worthy of art today,escapes its reach at once by excess and inhumanity. ( MM , 143–45; 187–91)

In words and style destined for notoriety, these motifs come into theirown in Adorno’s “Cultural Criticism and Society,” written at a moment (1949)still terribly charged by the war’s immediate aftermath (and, apparently,before Adorno had any knowledge of Celan’s poetry).23 Because the essay’snear-nal sentences are the ones so often quoted, it is worth noting that theentire piece is permeated by an exponentially heightened recoil from almostall versions of ofcial or consolatory (including much programmatically oppo-sitional and socialist) culture and cultural criticism; along with Benjamin,Leo Löwenthal, Max Horkheimer, et al., Adorno had already before the warfollowed Marcuse’s lead in designating a great deal of such culture, regardlessof its sometimes humanistic, progressive, or even Left intentions, as formallyor structurally “afrmative” or afrmational toward bourgeois society. Signi-cantly, then, it is the experience of what is hard-won, and by no means neces-sarily afrmative in genuine art (perhaps in music and poetry above all), thatprovides the opening notes of a critique whose target is wittinglyand unwit-tingly afrmational culture and cultural criticism: “To anyone in the habit ofthinking with his or her ears [Wer gewohnt ist, mit den Ohren zu denken], thewords ‘cultural criticism’ [Kulturkritik ] must have an offensive ring” (Prisms,19 [trans. amended];Prismen, 7).

23. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkr itik und Gesellschaft” (1949), inSoziologische Forschung inunserer Zeit: Ein Sammelwerk; Leopold von Wiese zum 75. Geburtstag (Cologne: Westdeutscher,1951), also inPrismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1955), 7–31; Adorno,“Cultural Criticism and Society,” inPrisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (1967; rpt.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 17–34.


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There follow pages of reection and biting analysis that pose the prob-lem of the rareness of a critique that would argue for a culture that is, andthat would further nurture, Marx’s “ruthless critique of everything in exis-tence.” Such a critique would refuse to abandon culture, and would likewiserefuse to downplay or deny criticism’s incalculable debts to culture, even whilefearlessly acknowledging the historical ways that culture has, intentionallyor not, colluded with things as they are. Projected from between the essay’slines of bitter analysis is a critique that would live up to the memorializingundersong whose strains seem always just to have reached Adorno’s ears,namely, the now-deceased Benjamin’s conjoined aphorisms about culturaltreasures and documents of civilization being also, inescapably, documentsof barbarism (a notion whose relentless logic would extend the judgment ofbarbarism to the writings of Marx, Benjamin, Celan, and so forth). “CulturalCriticism and Society” then reaches its nale, in which the almost fully con-ceptualized and totally administered society closes off its ports to precludethe entry of not-yet-conceptualized, imaginative challenge (and does so pre-cisely by seeming in the phenomenon of standard “culture” and “cultural criti-cism” to have assimilated to itself, or tolerantly to have allowed, the putativeprotest that, if actually operative, would have sprung or would spring from animagination partly enabled by the very aesthetic experience that might help

create a rather differently inected culture and cultural criticism). “The moretotal society becomes, the greater the reication of the mind and the moreparadoxical its effort to escape reication on its own. Even the most extremeconsciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter” (Prisms, 34;Prismen, 30–31).

The infamous lines follow. In the published English translation, theyread: “Cultural criticism nds itself faced with the nal stage of the dialecticof culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Andthis corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write

poetry today” (Prisms, 34). That is all one sentence in the German: “Kul-turkritik ndet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbareigegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und dasfrisst auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heuteGedichte zu schreiben” (Prismen, 31).

A serious case could be made that rendering the single German sen-tence into three English sentences, along with other aspects of the transla-tors’ choices here, loosens or unravels Adorno’s carefully constructed web oftensions, where the initial, seeming separation of identities (conveyed by thedifferent designative words)culture and barbarism is what allows them so


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profoundly and infernally to inform if not become one another; where theinitial appearance of poetic art isnot the genre or generality “poetry” butthe particular work, “a poem” (ein Gedicht ), suggesting a dynamic betweenthe particular and the general or universal in which the sense that it’s nowbecome barbaric to writea poem leads to the sense that to write poems or poetry (Gedichte) has become impossible; and where the sentences’ unity-in-tension, constructed from the various, painful moments, marks the criticwho in 1949 faces in these lines an also barbaric and impossible task, likethe poet’s task but frankly far less difcult, far less impossible, as criticismis always less difcult than art, and less difcult in kind rather than degree(because art even in more propitious circumstances was always in somesense impossible, was always the probable impossible, the credible impos-sible). Where the meaning of art’s semblance-work with impossibility hasbecome so literally tortured, it can be seen that, far from pronunciamento,these lines are meant not to declare death from on high or otherwise or toaddress the dead but to present, to enact or be, the half-dead speaking toand with the half-dead.24

Yet nally these nuances of close reading mean nothing, and not onlyfor the reasons that inhere in Adorno’s late statement—in the midst of thework of both philosophy and cultural criticism that is Negative Dialectics—

that “all culture after Auschwitz, together with its urgent critique, is garbage”(alle Kultur nach Auschwitz, samt der dringlichen Kritik daran, ist Müll).25 For any argument about how the possible inadequacies of the published trans-lation may have prevented English-language readers from gaining a betteridea of what the near-nal passage of “Cultural Criticism and Society” seeksto dramatize (and may have thereby created the misimpression that Adornopresumes to stand above, uncontaminated by, the roiling issues) would runfull speed into the historical reality that many of the passage’s German read-ers seemed to have been equally outraged. And if that outrage has multiple

sources, surely one is that something in the passage’s tone and style—as so24. Compare the lucid reading offered in Russell A. Berman, Modern Culture and Critical

Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1989): “The only poetry possible after Auschwitz—I take this to be the sense of Adorno’sdictum—is one that explores its own impossibility, its own lack of identity in terms of the classicalsubject-object unity” (144).

25. Theodor W. Adorno, “Meditations on Metaphysics: 2, Metaphysics and Culture,” in Nega-tive Dialectics, trans. G. B. Ashton (1966; rpt. New York: Continuum, 1973), 367 (trans. amended);Adorno, “Meditationen zur Metaphysik: 2,” in Negative Dialektik , vol. 6 ofGesammelte Schriften,ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 359. Hereafter cited as ND, with pagenumbers from the English and then the German texts.


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Lyrik zu schreiben, sei barbarisch]; it expresses, negatively, the impulse thatanimates committed literature.”28

But this statementis a softening, if only in its effort to explain what“Cultural Criticism and Society” had, in its starkness, left implicit: that theoriginal aphorism was, and is, itself akin to commitment, albeit in the mode ofnegative expression betting a thinker of thevia negativa who is dedicated tothe idea that, in not being beholden to determination by extant concepts—andto that extent provisionally negating them—lyric and aesthetic experience arethe ground of possibility for emancipatory thought (which is necessary for, butby no means equivalent to, concrete critical action). And the style that thisexplanatory gesture calls forth likewise registers a softening, an at leastmomentary willingness to forego the formal-stylistic pressure Adorno mostfavors as a writer. Moreover, in the simultaneous differentiation-from-yet-reaching-toward the impulse animating political commitment or engagementitself, Adorno pregures later modications of his position, modications thatwill move toward the necessary articulation of a distinction between poetry’s(or art’s) political and ethical involvements. That distinction concerns one ofthe few things Adorno and Sartre wholeheartedly agree on, for—as peopleoften forget, and as Sartre himself at moments seems to forget even in the writ-ing of some portions ofWhat Is Literature? (as well as in additional volumes of

his Situations)—Sartre usually holds that poetry by its very nature cannot beengagé, cannot be politically committed in the Sartrean sense. And this resultsnot from some failure on poetry’s part, but the reverse. Poetry for Sartre (andlyric is unquestionably the model) inherently exceeds the already conceptual-determinate, practical-utilitarian nature of the political and thus does not requireany added theory of, or special intention to be, engagé.29

28. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, 2:87; Adorno, “Engagement,” in Noten zur Literatur , 3:125. A number of American readers, seeing that Adorno here writes “Lyrik”rather than “Gedicht” or “Gedichte,” have apparently thought that he has now tightened or altered hisgenre focus, so that not poetry per se but lyric is the problem. But “Lyrik”’s meaning here (as in mostplaces in modern German and, for the matter, Western poetics) is virtually the same as “poetry” or “apoem”: it has meant modern poetry since Romanticism, which has, for better or worse, been linkedmore tightly to lyric, perhaps, than ever before in Western literary-cultural history.

29. “Poets . . . refuse toutilize language [ Les poètes refusent d’utiliser la langue]. . . . They do notspeak, neither do they keep silent; it is something different. . . . the poet has withdrawn fromlanguage-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude whichconsiders words as things and not signs” (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” inSitu-ations, vol. 2 [1947; rpt. Paris: Gallimard, 1948], 63–64; Sartre,What Is Literature? and Other Essays [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 29). Adorno, of course, has little objection to thischaracterization of poetry, but—without wishing to collapse all genre distinctions into a generalizedwriting—rather contends for the fundamentally aesthetic, quasi-conceptual and therefore relativelynonutilitarian, noninstrumental character of the novel, drama, literary essay, etc.


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Nevertheless, when all is said and done regarding Sartrean commitmentand Adornian reections on (or softenings of) the thoughts about barbarismand impossibility, does not Adorno’s consistently acted-on rst impulse towardextraordinarily extreme ways of putting matters belong more to Adorno thanto the subject itself, even—or especially—when the subject is poetry after Ausch-witz? And even if it is acknowledged that the form of thought and writing isintended to do justice to the materials—and where it is taken into account thatthe operative paradigm is art’s heightening or intensication or exaggeration—does not there remain a sense that here the form has inappropriately exceededand hence insulted its content, so that, despite such aesthetic, focused-on-writing sentiments as

the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmostconsequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, insteadof qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too farahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so ofstupefaction [ MM , 86; 107]

or the kindred observation that

in psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations [ MM , 49; 56],

still the thought nags that perhaps even other militant Frankfurters would nothave done it this way, that maybe itis just Adorno himself, his need to formu-late the rebarbative yet formally elegant zinger that, perhaps above all in thediscussion of art and the Holocaust, causes so much pain. And given Benja-min’s quite caustic treatments of even potential allies (let alone opponents,and particularly during his most Leninist and polemical periods), might notBenjamin’s own paradoxical mix of extraordinary aesthetic sensitivity andgive-no-quarter analytic bravado, his bandying, indeed, of the termbarba-

rism, have more in common with Adorno than might t comfortably intomuch of post-1968 Left culture’s canonical, divergent reception of the twogures?

So maybe the better place to go for evaluative comparison on the ques-tion of the ethics of post-1945 poetry and criticism would be the hope-giving,almost emblematically gentle, quite rightly beloved Herbert Marcuse.

Maybe not:

The dictum that “after Auschwitz it is barbaric still to write poetry” isalready obsolete. “Barbaric” no longer captures what transpires [Der Satz,


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nach Auschwitz noch Lyrik zu schreiben, sei barbarisch, ist schon überholt.“Barbarisch” trifft nicht mehr das was geschieht].30

Those are the rst two sentences of Marcuse’s 1963 essay “On the Stance ofThinking Today” (“Zur Stellung des Denkens heute”). The problem, Marcusewants to say, lies not in the bite of or outrage against what Adorno wrote in1949, rst published in 1951, and with more measured language or some reser-vations placed over against Sartrean engagement in 1962. The problem asMarcuse sees it in 1963 is that Western postwar culture has so rapidly and suc-cessfully developed new modes to absorb and neutralize acts of critique andnegation—starting with what Marcuse then sees as the travesty or shadow play

rebellion of Beat poetry, and working all the way back up to great lyric—thatthe very characterization of poetry as “barbaric,” of having become somehowinextricable from what would always have seemed its nightmare opposite, nolonger sufces to capture the problem, not to mention that it no longer causesscandal, nor should it. This is because intellectually, spiritually, and even physi-cally, all gestures of opposition are or are being assimilated, Marcuse believes,by the dominant culture. Whatever the playwright’s intentions, things haveevolved to such a point that “Samuel Beckett is big box ofce [grosser Kassen-erfolg] on Broadway.”31 The old opposition of art (or culture) and barbarism

and even more anguished dialectical plottings of their nuanced interrelationsnow seem quaint. Far from still genuinely nding the meaning of Adorno’sdictum too harsh, contemporary society now seems to Marcuse to have madethe very idea—that after Auschwitz poetry has become barbaric and thereforeimpossible—into something patently outmoded, nostalgic, sentimental, naive.

But if Marcuse misses or glosses over the fact that Adorno’s “Commit-ment” essay had shown a tendency to turn, at least on the question of poetry,toward a different path than the one Marcuse takes in “On the Stance of

30. Herbert Marcuse, “Zur Stellung des Denkens heute,” in Zeugnisse: Theodor W. Adorno amsechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Max Horkheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt),45–49. On aesthetic matters, Marcuse often has a tendency to offer helpful restatements of Benja-min’s and Adorno’s positions. In that light, it is probably not so surprising that his position on Lyriknach Auschwitz often tracks developments within Adorno’s thought. See, e.g., the way Marcuseapproaches the question in his late meditation posthumously titled by his editors “Lyrik nach Aus-chwitz,” inKunst und Befreiung, vol. 2 of Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen (Lüne-burg: zu Klampen, 2000), 157–66. See also Marcuse, Die Permanenz der Kunst: Wider eine bestim-mte marxistische Ästhetik (1977), vol. 9 of Nachgelassene Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1987); Marcuse,The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, trans. and rev.Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon, 1978).

31. Marcuse, “Zur Stellung des Denkens heute,” 45.


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Thinking Today,” Adorno will continue where he left off in “Commitment”—and will go further. This becomes increasingly evident in his university lec-tures of the mid- to late 1960s, and the writings those lectures found their wayinto. Indeed, some of those inevitably discursive and sometimes quite per-sonal lectures, transcribed and published only recently, provide fascinatinginsight into the shift in Adorno’s thinking (or rather what may well have beenbehind his thinking since at least Minima Moralia and “Cultural Criticismand Society”). It therefore is worth quoting at some length from them.

Here are excerpts from Adorno’s 1965 lecture course on metaphysics, agreat deal of which reappeared, usually in a more literary rendering, in Nega-tive Dialectics (written between 1959 and 1966, published in 1966). Near theend of a July 13 lecture, Adorno begins to introduce ideas that, in their breakfrom classical metaphysics, might paradoxically allow us to perceive whatindeed remains of value in the metaphysical tradition:

The only way a fruitful thinking can save itself is by following the injunc-tion: “Cast away, that you may gain.”

I mean by this that a metaphysics which fullled its own concept,a concept which (even though this may not be admitted) always consistsof constellations of forms and contents, concepts and what they comprise,would have radically to assimilatethe relevance of the temporal to its ownconcept. It would have to realize that it has been separated only apparentlyand arbitrarily from its instrument, concepts, and is constantly broughtback to them. I should like to say that in our time the primacy which Sartreaccords to existence over being and its concept reveals an extraordinarilyuncompromising awareness of this state of affairs. . . . [The] assimilation ofthe element of content means that metaphysical experience, or the conceptof metaphysics—both in one—present themselves quite differently today.

To what does Adorno turn to concretize this abstract discussion of thedependence of concepts on constellative constructions of forms and contents,and of the importance of the temporal to the seemingly self-sufcient, for-mal, eternal concepts of metaphysics?

And as asign of this—the world symbol would be wretchedly inadequate,since we are concerned with the most symbolic thing of all—I will takeAuschwitz. Through Auschwitz—and by that I mean not only Auschwitz butthe world of torture which has continued to exist and of which we are receiv-ing the most horrifying reports from Vietnam—through all this the conceptof metaphysics has been changed to its innermost core. Those who continueto engage in old-style metaphysics, without concerning themselves with what


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has happened, keeping it at arm’s length and regarding it as beneath meta-physics, like everything merely earthly and human, thereby prove them-selves inhuman. And the inhumanity which is necessarily present in suchan attitude must also infect the concept of a metaphysics which proceeds inthis way. It is therefore impossible, I would say, to insist after Auschwitz onthe presence of a positive meaning or purpose in being. Here, too, thoughfrom a totally different context, I would like to say quite candidly that I amentirely of one mind with Sartre, from whose outlook I am otherwiseworlds apart. The afrmative character which metaphysics has in Aristotle,and which it rst took on in Plato’s teaching, has become impossible. Toassert that existence or being has a positive meaning constituted withinitself and orientated towards the divine principle (if one is to put it like

that), would be, like all the principles of truth, beauty and goodness whichphilosophers have concocted, a pure mockery in face of the victims and theinnitude of their torment. And taking this as my reference point, I wouldlike to reect with you on what I would describe as the completely changedstatus of metaphysics.32

Auschwitz is both particular and part of something universal (here,Vietnam is mentioned; elsewhere, Adorno will refer to atomic weapons).Adorno’s “what has happened” (das, was geschehen ist) probably alludes (asperhaps did Marcuse’s own 1963 variation, quoted earlier) to Celan’sdas was

geschah, “that which happened” designation for the Holocaust. Again suffus-ing the thought process is the question of inhumanity and how to approachrather than ignore the truth of inhumanity’s power and of what that power haswrought. These are ruminations that, it becomes clear, need even more breath-ing room, as they maintain their intellectual pressure but begin to becomemore personal. From Adorno’s next (July 15) lecture:

Aristotle draws the conclusion . . . that matter . . . as that which is representedby possibility, must be endowed with some kind of purposiveness. . . . In faceof the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through theintroduction of torture as a permanent institution and through the atomicbomb—all these things form a kind of coherence, a hellish unity—in face ofthese experiences the assertion that what is has meaning, and the afrmativecharacter which has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception,become a mockery; and in face of the victims it becomes downright immoral.For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning moder-ates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things which have hap-pened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will

32. Adorno, “Lecture Thirteen,” in Metaphysics, 101–2; Metaphysik , 159–60.


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have had some kind of purpose. In other words, it might be said that in viewof what we have experienced—and let me say that it is also experienced bythose on whom it was not directly perpetrated—there can be no one, whoseorgan of experience has not entirely atrophied, for whom the worldafter Auschwitz, that is, the world in which Auschwitz was possible, is the sameworld as it was before. And I believe that if one observes and analyses oneselfclosely, one will nd that the awareness of living in a world in which that ispossible—is possibleagain and is possible for the rst time—plays a quitecrucial role even in one’s most secret reactions.

I would say, therefore, that these experiences have a compelling uni-versality, and that one would indeed have to be blind to the world’s courseif one were to wishnot to have these experiences.33

In a revealing process of movement, the lecture proceeds to discuss thewritings on torture of the French survivor Jean Améry, which leads to a discus-sion of the destruction of the subject through his or her reduction to the thing-ness of body; and here Adorno, in a laudatory and important quotation of Ber-tolt Brecht, demonstrates the ongoing nature of his own memorializing ofBenjamin (conjured almost inevitably when Adorno thinks of Auschwitz).34 Forthe quotation comes from one of Brecht’s three elegiac lyrics for Benjamin:

33. Theodor W. Adorno, “Lecture Fourteen” (July 15, 1965), in Metaphysics, 103–4; Meta- physik , 161–62.

34. Adorno, “Lecture Fourteen,” in Metaphysics, 106, 108–9, 177n5, 179n12; Metaphysik , 166,169–70, 274n187, 276–77n195. For a parallel example of how after-Auschwitz experience changesthe very nature of a subject and its study—and how the discussion again makes Benjamin appear—consider “Lecture Two” (April 15, 1968), in Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie, ed. Christoph Gödde(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993) (pt. 4,Vorlesungen, vol. 15 ofGesammelte Schriften, 34–36);Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,2000), 16–18. The framework is Adorno’s discussion of structural-theoretical aspects of sociology, ofwhat has been deemed “essential” to the structural study of society, and of what might in that lightinitially appear merely particular, unimportant, and untheorizably practical: “One cannot predict a

priori which social knowledge should be regarded as relevant and which should not. It is possible thata concern with apparently out-of-the-way, obscure phenomena could lead to extraordinarily relevantsocial insights. This is because areas of knowledge and subjects which have not yet been caught in thenet of the all-embracingcommunis opinio, which are not yet incorporated in this society’s system ofconsciousness, have the best chance of providing us with perspectives which are not immanent in thesystem, enabling us to view it from outside. In this connection . . . I shall also mention the works ofWalter Benjamin, which today are making an extraordinary impression on sociology, and especiallyon the critical theory of culture. . . . Benjamin made it his principle to concern himself only with sup-posedly apocryphal subjects and phenomena, which have turned out to be more fruitful the morefaithfully he followed this principle. But, of course—I should like to add—this concern for the ephem-eral and inconspicuous, for that which is not pre-selected by the ofcial stock of themes, must beaccompanied by a latent interest in, and eye for, what is essential. Had there not been . . . behind

Benjamin’s conceptions, the theory of the ‘dialectical image’ as a socially necessary illusion, thephenomena which brought those theories to incandescence would never have started to glow. . . .


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Zum Freitod des Flüchtlings W.B.Ich höre, dass du die Hand gegen dich erhoben hastDem Schlächter zuvorkommend.Acht Jahre verbannt, den Augstieg des Feindes beobachtendZuletzt an eine unüberschreitbare Grenze getriebenHast du, heisst es, eine überschreitbare überschritten.

Reiche stürzen. Die BandendführerSchreten daher wie Staatsmänner. Die VölkerSieht man nicht mehr unter den Rüstungen.

So liegt die Zukunft in Finsternis und die guten KräfteSind schwach. All das sahst du

Als du den quälbaren Leib zerstörest.

[On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.I’m told you raised your hand against yourself Anticipating the butcher.After eight years in exile, observing the rise of the enemyThen at last, brought up against an impassable frontierYou passed, they say, a passable one.

Empires collapse. Gang leadersAre strutting about like statesmen. The peoplesCan no longer be seen under all those armaments.So the future lies in darkness and the forces of rightAre weak. All this was plain to youWhen you destroyed a torturable body.]35

“Naturally, this question of the essential always goes hand-in-hand with the practical. I wouldtherefore say—partly to defend myself against objections which I detect in some of you—that withina theory of society certain subjective questions relating to social psychology are unavoidably present.While these may not be accorded the same dignity as the structural problems of society, they are notwithout importance. They are important because—and I cannot help saying this—after Auschwitz(and in this respect Auschwitz is a prototype of something which has been repeated incessantly in theworld since then) our interest in ensuring that this should never occur again—or, where and when itoccurs, that it should be stopped—this interest ought to determine our choice of epistemologicalmethods and our choice of subjects to be studied, even if they appear to be social epiphenomena. Iremember once being reproached . . . for showing an exaggerated interest in Auschwitz and the ques-tions relating to it. It may be that the murder of six million innocent people for a delusory reason is anepiphenomenon when measured by the standard of a theory of society, something secondary which isnot the key to understanding. However, I would think that merely the dimension of horror attached tosuch an event gives it an importance which justies the pragmatic demand that in this case knowledgeshould be prioritized—if I may use that dreadful word—with the aim of preventing such events.”

35. Bertolt Brecht,Werke: Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Wer-ner Hecht et al., 30 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989–98), 15:48; Brecht,Poems: 1913–1956 , ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, trans. John Willett et al. (London:Methuen, 1987), 363.


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Brecht gives the classic dynamic of modern lyric “overhearing”—thoughtand sentiment aurally glimpsed, so to speak, in contradistinction to a presum-ably robust, direct public speech and rhetoric—a terrible apotheosis, as notonly the reading audience but the lyric speaker himself hears (“Ich höre,”which John Willett translates as “I’m told”) or overhears, second- or thirdhand(as Brecht and Adorno had heard), of Benjamin’s now-permanent absence. Thepoem makes its audience realize as well that the subject within the poem(Benjamin) has in infernal circumstances been moved to the agency of action(rather than be allowed to remain in the typical lyric state of thought-feeling)precisely to destroy himself before others can arrest, torture, and murder him.Just moments after citing Brecht’s poem, Adorno’s lecture moves toward itsnotable conclusion:

I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry [dassnach Auschwitz kein Gedicht mehr zu schreiben sei], and that gave rise toa discussion I did not anticipate when I wrote those words. I did not antici-pate it because it is in the nature of philosophy—and everything I write is,unavoidably, philosophy, even if it is not concerned with so-called philo-sophical themes—that nothing is meant quite literally. Philosophy alwaysrelates to tendencies and does not consist of statements of fact. It is a mis-understanding of philosophy, resulting from its growing closeness to all-

powerful scientic tendencies, to take such a statement at face value andsay: “He wrote that after Auschwitz one cannot write any more poems; soeither one really cannot write them, and would be a rogue or a cold-heartedperson if one did write them, or he is wrong, and has said something whichshould not be said.” Well, I would say that philosophical reection reallyconsists precisely in the gap, or, in Kantian terms, in the vibration, betweenthese two otherwise so atly opposed possibilities. I would readily concedethat, just as I said that after Auschwitz onecould not write poems—bywhich I meant to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of thattime—it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that onemust writepoems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long asthere is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also beart as the objective form of that awareness. And, heaven knows, I do notclaim to be able to resolve this antinomy, and presume even less to do sosince my own impulses in this antinomy are precisely on the side of art,which I am mistakenly accused of wishing to suppress. Eastern-zone news-papers even said I had declared my opposition to art and thereby adoptedthe standpoint of barbarism. Yet one must ask a further question, and this isa metaphysical question, although it has its basis in the total suspension ofmetaphysics. . . . It is the question whether one canlive after Auschwitz.This question has appeared to me, for example, in the recurring dreams


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which plague me, in which I have the feeling that I am no longer really alive,but am just the emanation of a wish of some victim of Auschwitz.36

There are undoubtedly many nameable and nameless “victim[s] of Ausch-witz” whose presence Adorno invokes. But when, just for starters, one thinksof the degree of involvement of Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Adorno’s stu-dent Rolf Tiedemann with the preservation, editing, and posthumous publi-cation of Benjamin’s work, and of Adorno’s lifelong dialogue and debate, inalmost every page he wrote, with Benjamin, it is hard—despite the fact thatBenjamin of course did not perish in Auschwitz itself—not to sense Benjamin’salmost overwhelming presence when Adorno speaks of feeling himself to

have become another’s wish-emanation. This coda to the July 1965 lecturends itself reinscribed the following year in the famous “retraction” passageof Negative Dialectics:

There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electried barbedwire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much right to expressionas a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say thatafter Auschwitz you could no longer write poems [darum mag falsch gewe-sen sein, nach Auschwitz liesse kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben]. But it isnot wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you

can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, onewho by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survivalcalls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, withoutwhich there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of himwho was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams suchas that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 andhis whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insanewish of a man killed twenty years earlier. ( ND, 362–63; 355–56)

The only trouble with self-preservation is that we cannot help suspecting

the life to which it attaches us of turning into something that makes usshudder: into a specter, a piece of the world of ghosts, which our wakingconsciousness perceives to be nonexistent. The guilt of a life which purelyas a fact will strangle other life, according to statistics that eke out an over-whelming number of killed with a minimal number of rescued, as if thiswere provided in the theory of probabilities—this guilt is irreconcilablewith living. And the guilt does not fail to reproduce itself, because not foran instant can it be made fully, presently conscious.

This, nothing else, is what compels us to philosophize. ( ND, 364; 357)

36. Adorno, “Lecture Fourteen,” in Metaphysics, 110; Metaphysik , 172–73.


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Before considering what is at stake here for poetry and ethics, it bearsremembering how often the Frankfurt critics, from the late 1920s until ourown time, have been stigmatized for elevating thought far above activity, forhand-wringing and paralyzing despair. Though Adorno and Horkheimer wereprimary targets, Benjamin himself was made such a target, as when Brechtturns, in a notebook entry, from praising Benjamin to condemning him severelyfor intellectual-spiritual abstraction or mysticism. But if Brecht has so fre-quently been cited as the activist model for the artist or literary intellectualwho breaks free of the anxiety born of excessive philosophical reection, thishas occurred despite rather than because of attention to Brecht’s work itself. Inthe context of Adorno’s intense focus on the guilt of luck, chance, odds, andgiven what is clearly a concern about the barbarism of statistical survival whenthe odds precisely were that one likewise should probably have been amongthe systematically murdered, it bears revisiting a notably compressed, well-known poem Brecht wrote in Santa Monica in April or May 1942.

Ich, der ÜberlebendeIch weiss natürlich: einzig durch GlückHabe ich so viele Freunde überlebt. Aber heute nacht im TraumHörte ich diese Freunde von mir sagen: “Die Stärken überleben”Und ich hasste mich.

[I, the SurvivorI know of course: it’s simply luckThat I’ve survived so many friends. But last night in a dreamI heard those friends say of me: “Survival of the ttest”And I hated myself.]37

The nal line’s cruel concision completes and fully realizes the alreadyforeshortened poem’s overarching enactment of an odds-based diminishment,whereby the speaker’s identity is forged (already starkly given, in fact, as thetitle itself) in such a manner that his identityis the collapse-identication ofself-knowledge (or self-reection) with sheer, brutal, survivalism, regardless ofintention—and which yields self-hatred. The luck, chance, or odds that consis-tently reduce the number of the speaker-subject’s friends also drastically reducehim or her, reducing too the duration of the nal line that represents the subject, “Und ich hasste mich”: two accents (fewer than even the poem’s title) thatconstruct a self-lacerating, appropriately internal because self-enclosing rhyme

37. Brecht,Werke, 12:125; Brecht,Poems, 392.


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(ich, mich, separated—or rather, joined, identied—only by the verb of hatredthat forges identity–in–self-accusation by uniting nominative and accusative).

In fact, “Ich, der Überlebende” is far from anomalous in Brecht’s oeuvreand is part of a series of pained meditations among whose well-known textsare the poems of, and those connected to, the “Hollywoodelegien.”38 Part ofthe challenge Brecht faces—a challenge that will be raised exponentially to aninestimable power in the materials and situations presented to Celan—will behow, artistically, to vivify the brutality of mere survival. There is more to sayon the subject, but I would like for the moment to return to the closely relatedissue of how and why Adorno turns, from posing the question of the barbar-ity or impossibility of writing poems after Auschwitz, to the question of thebarbarity or impossibility of living after Auschwitz. These are, or are almost, asingle question. To ask here whether one can live after Auschwitz is to implythat—as with the writing of poems—it is barbaric to do so; this suggests inturn, in ways compelling further consideration, that if poetry and life are notquite identical, neither are they in these matrices quite separable (and not bya long shot is this lack of separability between poetry and life something thatoccurs only to Adorno).

Adorno is not known, nor could he possibly be, for lightly held opin-ions, for mildness or agreeability, for worrying about looking or being con-

trarian. Nor is he particularly given to moderating his views on art becauseof political considerations where he deems the latter to have been externallyimposed on, rather than immanent within, the artwork; it is his famouslyheld view that such imposition is bad for artand politics. But Adorno believesemphatically that genuine or critical artworks grant us access to otherwiseunavailable or unarticulable historical experience—above all, to the historicalexperience of human suffering—and that within this overall artistic-aestheticendeavor of making present in semblance the history of human suffering,lyric expression plays a unique role.39 So while there can be little doubt that

Adorno initially, and for some years thereafter, feels the truth and necessityof what he has articulated about poetry after Auschwitz, it’s also clear that heincreasingly allows himself to be affected by suffering that he hadn’t (butprobably should have) anticipated having himself provoked (suffering that hehadn’t anticipated because, in his view, his initial formulations attemptedwith relentless honesty to adumbrate just how difcult, just how impossible

38. For a more extended discussion see Robert Kaufman, “Brecht’s Autonomous Art, or MoreLate Modernism!” Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 26 (2001): 191–210.

39. See Kaufman, “Lyric’s Expression.”


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beyond previous aesthetic-philosophical notions of impossibility, art’s taskof presencing suffering had become with and after the Holocaust).

This may represent, to reiterate something said earlier, one of those areaswhere the distinction between the ethical and political realms becomes clear-est, even where the version of the political at issue emerges from some kind ofreective rather than determinate-judgment experience. What Adorno respondsto as he more and more fully explains, modulates, and modies his stanceis his increasing perception of an added measure of pain that seems to havebeen caused by what he’d originally written with the intent of helping voiceand address—in a culture and cultural criticism of denial and trivialization—the suffering that the continuing effects of the Holocaust had caused for thosewho had survived it. It would be an understatement to say that there is noparallel political case of comparable signicance where Adorno cedes or alterswhat had seemed to him artistically, aesthetically, and critically necessaryto articulate for the sake of truth. At any rate, this case involving Adorno andhis various interlocutors could serve as an illustration of what Stewart empha-sizes as the special, shared reective-judgment status of aesthetic and ethicalexperience, their necessary openness to the other’s input rather than to pre-determined conceptions (even or perhaps especially in situations where itmight seem most otherwise—for example, Theodor W. Adorno giving some

slack when it comes to his own rigorous defense of poetic and artistic rigorand intensity).In that light, the July 1965 lecture passage and the 1966 Negative Dia-

lectics statement that the initial 1949 formulation “may have been wrong” (inview of the reality of human suffering and its need, satisfactorily achieved ornot, to attempt expression) speak volumes in their partial shift from the termsof lyric poetry and conceptual analysis to the register of experience, oflife—however much the term and its referents are in question as never before, andbring trailing behind them a now darkly retuned history of aesthetic and philo-

sophical agonizing over Erlebnis, Erfahrung, Lebensphilosophie, and all therest. This development is already incipient in and even before Adorno’s 1962softening gesture toward the recognition of suffering (in his statement that hedoesn’t wish to soften the formulation published in “Cultural Criticism andSociety”). In a vocabulary that is scarcely an imposition (because it ows fromthe Frankfurters’—especially from Benjamin’s and Adorno’s—formal-stylisticcommitment as writers, and because the overarching subject still is, after all,poetry), we can understand the shift as a recoordination among elements andregisters of poetic practice. For the cherished gestures in play in Frankfurtwriting—the dialectical sentence, the aphoristic or epigrammatic lines of con-cision and torque, the stanzalike passage or paragraph whose Hölderlinian-


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paratactical constructions almost magically stage the movement, seeminglywithout transition and yet with new coherence, among distinct tonal levels—all stand, having been lifted from poetry’s historical basement, as foundationstones for the construction of Frankfurt constellative form itself.40

So when Adorno turns from lyric to life, he may to a signicant degreebe turning from a rigorous focus on lyric form (on what form can and cannotbe now imagined to accomplish vis-à-vis a new impossible, and on his ownuncompromising form in the crucial sentence of “Cultural Criticism andSociety”) to a focus on lyric-aesthetic experience or affect. The reason forthis shift has nothing to do with stealth. On the contrary, the passages in theJuly 1965 lecture and Negative Dialectics reveal an anguis

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KAUFMAN Poetry’s Ethics