7/28/2019 Determinacy Kills (Eagleton)

1/5

Determinacy KillsTerry Eagleton

Theodor Adorno: One Last Genius byDetlev ClaussenHarvard, 440 pp, 22.95, May 2008, ISBN 978 0 674 02618 6

One of the many things that Adorno admired about Becketts writing was its

scrupulous meanness, to borrow Joyces description of his own literary style

inDubliners. Becketts works take a few sparse elements and permutate them with

Irish-scholastic ingenuity into slightly altered patterns. Complete dramas are

conjured out of reshuffled arrangements of the same few scraps and leavings. It

is an economy with which Beckett had some acquaintance in real life, when

towards the end of the Second World War in Nazi-occupied France, he and his

wife scrabbled about for a few carrots or onions along with the rest of the half-

starved population. The tramps ofWaiting for Godot(though who says they aretramps?) are similarly reduced to hoarding the odd vegetable. Beckettian

humanity is famished, depleted, emptied out of any rich bourgeois inwardness;

and though there may be an Irish memory of famine here for Beckett, Adorno

could find in this image the poor forked creatures of Auschwitz. The Jew and the

Irishman could find common ground in this stark extremity, as they find common

ground in Ulysses and in many popular jokes. Both understood that one could live

and write well only by preserving a secret compact with failure.

What is most drastically impoverished in Beckett is language itself, which in a

Protestant animus against the ornamental is hacked to the bone. Perhaps there isan Irish exiles reaction to blarney here, a monkish distaste for the swollen

rhetoric of the Irish Revival. Like Stephen Dedaluss, Becketts is a life devoted

to silence, exile and cunning. Adornos style reveals a similar austerity, as each

phrase is forced to work overtime to earn its keep, each sentence wrought into a

little miracle or masterpiece of dialectics. Both men have an aversion to

opulence, one which is both aesthetic and political. In an age of propaganda, the

fewer words you spin, the less likely you are to lie. Simply to propose was to risk

being complicit with a language degraded by the horrors of modernity. Like

Becketts, Adornos is a language rammed up against silence, a set of guerrillaraids on the inarticulable, in which the reader has no sooner registered a truth

claim than the opposite is instantly advanced. Each proposition loops back on

itself, struggling to avoid a bald presentation of the isolated object, but also to

avoid swallowing it up in some ghastly concentration camp of the Absolute Idea.

It is a distinctively Modernist style, in which the truth can no longer be portrayed

directly but can only be squinted at out of the corner of ones eye, grasped only

by bouncing one proposition against its opposite. Perhaps this is what Adorno

had in mind when he called art a negative image of reality.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Claussen,+Detlevhttp://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Claussen,+Detlevhttp://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Claussen,+Detlevhttp://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Claussen,+Detlev

7/28/2019 Determinacy Kills (Eagleton)

2/5

Becketts language, which manages like some wounded animal to drag itself

along when it has long since run out of breath, is constantly threatening to slip

into the chaos that laps at its edges. What strikes us most, however, is the

meticulous exactness with which it weaves the wind, the rigorous logic with

which it tries, in the authors phrase, to eff the ineffable. This is an art that tradesin wisps and rumours of meaning; but it does so with a balletic elegance, a clear-

headed, mock-pedantic precision that recalls Adornos stringently analytic

attempts to give voice to the unsayable. Mock pedantry is a familiar Irish genre,

from Swift and Sterne to Joyce and Flann OBrien. Language must lend shape to

truth without betraying its essential indeterminacy. In the Beckettian phrase, it

must keep trying to fail better. Beckett once remarked that his favourite word

was perhaps; and it is not too fanciful to link this to his membership of the

French Resistance, for which he was later decorated by the French state. The

opposite of indeterminacy from this viewpoint is Fascism or Stalinism, with theircrazed assurances. Determinacy is what kills. Moreover, indeterminacy is a

source of hope as well as scepticism, since if the world has no definitive shape to

it then there is no reason why Godot may not show up after all. Instability may be

a cause for comfort as well as distress.

For his part, as a refugee from the Nazis rather than from Irish theocracy, Adorno knew

that simply to write off a reified rationality was to play into the hands of the savage

enemies of reason who murdered his friend Walter Benjamin. But reason was part of

the problem as well, which only a certain dialectical or deconstructive style of thought

could unlock. How could one retrieve that otherness that Western reason has

suppressed without falling prey to a barbarous irrationalism? It is a problem that

haunts the pages of Thomas Mann another refugee from Hitler for whoseDoctor

Faustus Adorno acted as musicological adviser. In fact, Modernism in general is shot

through with a desire for some solid truth while at the same time mourning its

elusiveness. Modernist culture of the mid-20th century is by and large a culture of

negativity of absence, lack, void, death, otherness, non-being and non-identity and

Paris is its capital: Sartre, Blanchot, Beckett, Kojve, Lacan, Levinas, Barthes, Derrida.

With Derrida, an aversion to the determinate becomes almost pathological. He does not

see that determinacies can emancipate as well as destroy. There are those who need to

obtain some reasonably exact knowledge of how the world stands with them in order to

diminish their unhappiness, and there are those at the Collge de France who labour

under no such necessity.

This cult of the negative is no doubt as much the legacy of Mallarm as it is of the death

camps. Saussures celebrated claim that there is nothing positive in language was made

long before the Holocaust. The labour of the negative runs back all the way to Hegel.

But there can surely be no doubt that this fear of positivity is also a reaction to the

doctrinaire politics of the 20th century. Certainty after Auschwitz is barbaric, to adapt

Adornos famous comment about poetry. The only way to escape this stricture is bybecoming, like Adorno or Derrida, a kind of anti-philosopher, forging a whole new style

7/28/2019 Determinacy Kills (Eagleton)

3/5

of philosophical writing as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had done before them. The only

valid form of reasoning seems to be one which tries to reckon into itself the limits and

contradictions against which it is bound to run up, and without which it is perhaps

doomed to silence. One must speak while preserving in ones words a core of silence, in

homage to the millions whose tongues have been stilled. The trick is to engage with theliving while keeping faith with the dead. Before Adorno began to write, another part-

Jewish thinker, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a man who once observed that his thought was

Jewish all the way through, had questioned the limits of representation in his Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus, faithful among other things to the traditional Judaic ban on graven

images. Adorno, too, warns of the delusory power of the image.

For a pious Jew (Adorno was the latter but not the former), such icons smack of false

utopia in their beauty and integrity, and hence distract us from the unreconciled nature

of the present. One such false hope is the illusion that Jews like himself can be

smoothly assimilated. In the end, only God can restore a damaged Creation, so strivingfor totality is a kind of blasphemy. Pessimistic thinkers like Freud, Adorno considered,

are of more service to human emancipation than those who seduce us with their roseate

visions of the future. The only authentic image of the future is the failure of the present.

It was, then, an ironic move on the part of Providence to have this critic of seductive

appearances born and brought up in a Frankfurt street called Schne Aussicht. It is

rather less ironic, given Adornos well-known melancholia, that the gloomy

Schopenhauer should once have inhabited the same spot.

To be faithful to political reality, art must preserve a certain discordance or non-

identity, displaying in its inner contradictions the shattered state of the world.

Philosophy, too, must go atonal. As Adorno writes inMinima Moralia, it must seek to

displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent

and distorted as it will appear one day in the Messianic light. There are flickers of

redemption here and there in history; but these traces, ruins and rumours of utopia can

only be deciphered, Cabbalah-like, by a thought which is alert to what resists its own

concepts. The opposite of this for Adorno is ideology, which as a form of identity

thinking is blind to the marginal, askew or excessive. It is surprising that Derrida took

so long to recognise that many of the leading motifs of deconstruction were prefigured

in AdornosNegative Dialectics,Dialectic of EnlightenmentandAesthetic Theory. There is a

kind of materialism at work here too. In Adornos view, the only philosophy worthy of

the name is one that allows the material conditions which make thought possible to

speak in thought itself.

Dismayingly, this vein of anti-philosophy receives scant attention in Detlev Claussens

biography of Adorno, serviceably translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone.

Claussen is illuminating on his subjects politics, cultural heritage, historical context,

musicology, intellectual liaisons and reflections on the culture industry, but remains

lamentably tight-lipped about his philosophy.Negative Dialectics, Adornos

philosophicalsumma, is dispatched in a couple of paragraphs. The book, however,compensates for this a little by refusing to be the kind of biography exemplified by

7/28/2019 Determinacy Kills (Eagleton)

4/5

Claire Tomalins recent, oddly acclaimed life of Thomas Hardy. Like much Anglo-Saxon

life-writing, Tomalins study is covertly anti-intellectual. Writing about Hardys

childhood, married life and so on becomes for the most part a way of displacing his

work, ideas and social context. The English have always prized the lovably idiosyncratic

individual over those arid entities known as ideas, which is one of the least creditablereasons to admire Cobbett, Orwell or Samuel Johnson. If they arent able to extricate

the man or woman behind the work, they tend to feel a little cheated. Their fondness

for biography, a superior version of what the media know as human interest, goes

hand in hand with their philistinism. It is not surprising that Adorno himself detested

the genre. It is too often a middle-class alternative to material history, one in which that

supreme creation known as the individual may hold untrammelled sway. Discussing

the prosody ofDon Juan is all very well, but how on earth did Byron get to Sintra on a

club foot?

As far as such literary prurience goes, Claussen remains high-mindedly Teutonic.Beyond a discreet allusion to the fact that female students found him attractive, a fact

the photographs of him provided in this volume do nothing to confirm, there is not a

word about Adornos notorious philandering. On the contrary,Theodor Adorno: One Last

Genius is a strenuously intellectual biography, the only sort the master himself might

just have approved, in which the bare facts of his life always come to us interwoven with

historical currents and philosophical wrangles. The method of the book is dialogical,

tracing Adornos relations with that extraordinary generation of Middle European left-

wing Jewish intellectuals who managed to survive the Second World War with their

lives (if not always their left-wing opinions) guiltily intact: Horkheimer, Lukcs,

Kracauer, Hans Eisler, Fritz Lang, Paul Lazarsfeld, Leo Lwenthal, Friedrich Pollock

and others. A handful of Gentiles notably Brecht and Thomas Mann are thrown in

for good measure.

As far as the bare facts go, this future doyen of Critical Theory was born in Frankfurt in

1903, the son of an assimilated Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic mother who had

been a court singer in Vienna. Claussen provides us with a vividly detailed portrait of

the emergent Jewish bourgeoisie of the day. At the age of 15 Adorno was reading Kants

first Critique and playing the piano magnificently; after graduating in philosophy in

Frankfurt he migrated to Vienna to study music under Berg, himself a protg of

Schoenberg. By the late 1920s, he was affiliated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social

Research, later to be called the Frankfurt School, acquiring Marxist sympathies and

rubbing shoulders with Brecht, Eisler, Bloch and Benjamin in Berlin.

HisHabilitationsthesis on Kierkegaard was accepted the day Hitler came to power.

Claussen sees Adorno as oddly sanguine about the Nazi threat. Having left Germany, he

returned home more than once in the Hitlerite 1930s on one occasion, with

remarkable insouciance, to enjoy a vacation in the Black Forest. The sociologist Leo

Lwenthal thought that he had to be dragged from his homeland kicking and

screaming, unable to believe that anything bad could befall the son of such a privileged

father. There was always a touch of the patrician about this champion of socialism, with

7/28/2019 Determinacy Kills (Eagleton)

5/5

his impeccable haut bourgeois tastes and well-bred disdain for much of modern life.

Thomas Mann, who knew a German bourgeois when he saw one, found in him an

aloof, tragically clever and exclusive form of spirit. It was impossible to live as a

bourgeois, Adorno once remarked, and just as impossible to live as anything else. If the

intelligentsia were the last enemies of the bourgeoisie, he remarked, they were also thelast bourgeois. Scornful of Adornos left-pessimism, the pathologically upbeat Lukcs

described him as living in the Grand Hotel Abyss. Hans Eisler proposed an allegory of

the Frankfurt School (which had been founded by German commercial capital) in

which a rich old man, disturbed by the poverty in the world, sets up an institute to

inquire into its cause. The institute duly reports back that the cause is himself.

Horkheimer eventually transplanted the Institute for Social Research to Columbia

University in New York, and Adorno joined him there in 1938, after a spell as an

advanced student at Merton College, Oxford. Advanced smacks a little of English

understatement. In 1941, he moved with Horkheimer to California, where a bizarre

alliance between Hollywood and German Marxist migrs was unfolding. Brecht and

Eisler both did work for the movie industry, while Adorno struck up friendships with

Charlie Chaplin and Fritz Lang. Chaplin once did an impromptu imitation of him, while

Lang coyly addressed him in correspondence as Hippopotamus King Archibald and

was rewarded with the pet name Badger. Among the beaches and fish restaurants of

southern California, the refugee intellectuals, in Claussens memorable phrase, had

been expelled into paradise. Mann lived in the vicinity, while Marcuse came to settle

there and never left. Hollywood played its part in the war effort by granting parts as SS

officers to migr actors whose thick accents had made them previously unemployable.

It was here that Adorno collaborated with Horkheimer on the studies of anti-semitism

which were to find their way into The Authoritarian Personality. It was here, too, that

Adorno became what many remember him as today: the first great scourge of the so-

called culture industry, with its reification of emotional life. Claussen, however,

questions the standard view of the man as a supercilious, jazz-hating cultural patrician,

one of the last of the great GermanKulturkritiker. He knew the film industry from the

inside, observed it with some sympathy and never condemned film as a genre.