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Language and History in Theodor W.
Adornos Notes to LiteratureULRICHPLASSroutledge. 2006. pp. xl + 296. 50. 00 (hbk).
Despite the growing body of work on Adornos aesthetics
(an aspect of his thought that has itself received much
less attention than with other elements of his philoso-
phy), his writings on literature seem almost to have
been ignored. This is the first book-length study in
English of Notes to Literature(I am aware of the exis-tence of a further study in German dating from 1979),
and attempts to treat Adornos literary criticism assomething intimately linked to his philosophy as a
whole (p. vx). The nature of this intimate link clearly
provides some trouble to the books author, who in
the preface explains his indebtedness to Simon Jarviss
view that it is more helpful to think of Adorno as a
philosophically informed reader of literature than as a
literary theorist. It is a distinction that Plass elucidates
in the following terms:
The philosophical literary critic treats a literary
text as if every word mattered; he overestimatesthe significance of literature because he lacks the
professional distance of the literary theorist. As a
literary critic, Adorno acts as if the separation be-
tween literature and philosophy were a mere for-
mality; he seeks to acknowledge what in his view
philosophy has neglected, namely the aestheticdignity of words (GS 1: 370). (pp. xixxx)
The distinction is drawn between a reader of lit-
erature, concerned with the details of the words that
are to be discussed, and a literary theorist, suppos-
edly indifferent to them. Plasss almost surprised-
sounding remark that Adornos great book on
aesthetics does not offer any guidelines on how todevelop a method for understanding works of art
(p. 49) is indicative of scepticism towards any attempt
either to conduct the study of literature by applying
externally derived philosophical categories to it, or to
attempt to extrapolate from the study of individual
works a method that can be applied more generally.
Indeed, this scepticism is well placed, since Adornos
aesthetic materialism explicitly precludes recourse to
some sort of invariant method: such an approach can-
not for Adorno be considered materialist, since itnecessarily fails to take into account any variations in
the objects under examination, and ends up telling us
more about the method than about the works under
consideration.
However, this does notas the existence of Ador-
nos unfinished magnun opussthetische Theorieservesto testifysignal the end of philosophical aesthetics.
And while Plasss hostility to crass generalizations is
well founded, his laudable insistence on the impor-
tance of the particular tends on occasion towards a
certain fuzziness as to what is at stake. Indeed, at times
I was unsure as to what precisely is Plasss object of
studythe poems discussed in Notes to Literature, thespecific readings of them advanced by Adorno, or their
consequences either for his thought or for literary
aesthetics understood more broadly. To put it some-
what more extremely, I was left without a sense as to
why the opinion of a mid-twentieth-century philoso-
pher, musicologist, social theorist, and literary critic
about five German poets (Eichendorff, Borchardt,
George, Heine, and Goethe) might be thought to mat-ter. This is not an issue on which I am personally in
need of convincing, but this makes it all the more dis-
appointing that a book on Adornos aesthetics of lit-
erature is not prepared to make a case as to its
significanceas to why, that is, we should be inter-
ested in these readings of the poems in question, rath-
er than any other interpretations of them, beyond the
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scholarly relevance for those already interested in
Adorno.
Despite Plasss distrust of attempts to reconstruct a
critical method from Adornos thought, he is at times
in danger of doing just that. In the first chapter he in-
troduces the dialectical understanding of language de-veloped by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic ofEnlightenment: language is to be thought of as compris-ing two opposing poles of sign and image. As sign, the
significative pole, at which it attempts to classify, it
must abandon its attempt to resemble nature; as im-
age, the mimetic pole, at which it attempts to resemble
nature, it must abandon the attempt to know it (68,
cf. GS 3: 34). This theory is of course hugely signifi-
cant for the study of Adornos writings on literature,
but there is something unsatisfying about the way inwhich it is deployed. It is used in relation to Heine as
an explicative tool, as some sort of confirmation that
for Heine, as for Odysseus, subjectivity is gained at
the cost of denying ones identity, that language ef-
fects the disintegration of subjectivity (p. 138). There
is hardly a hint in Plasss reading of Notes to Literaturethat anything might have changed in Adornos under-
standing of language between the publication of Dia-lectic of Enlightenmentin 1947 and the writing, mostly
in the 1960s, of the literary essays that constitute Notesto Literature.It is perhaps symptomatic of this absence that Plass
does not offer a reading of Parataxis, Adornos essay
on Hlderlins late poetry, which Adorno described in
a letter to Jochen Schmidt as the most important in
the third volume of Notes to Literature. It is in this essaymore than any other that Adorno insists on the cen-
trality of lyric poetry to any attempt to develop a the-
ory of language. For example:
As conceptual and predicative, language standsopposed to subjective expression; by virtue of
its generality, it reduces what is to be expressed
to something already pre-given and known.
Against this the poets rebel. They attempt unre-
mittingly to embody the subject and its expres-
sion in language, to the point of its demise. (GS
11: 477)
This is not the place to attempt to expound on what
precisely Adorno means by the embodiment of the
subject in poetic language, nor to give an account of
how this process could take place. But it is not only that
the absence of discussion of this essay would be a gap-
ing hole in any study of Notes to Literature, but also thatit is the text that is perhaps the most relevant for a the
discussion of language within Adornos literary criti-
cism, supposedly a central theme within the book.
This is not to detract from the points at which Plass
advances sensitive and elucidating readings of the essays
in Notes to Literature. Adornos literary criticism can beat its most frustratingly enigmatic at the points at which
he makes comparisons with music, particularly in such
claims as renouncing predicative assertion brings the
rhythm close to musical development (GS 11: 472) orthat within Prousts writing there is without any cheap
analogy to composition, a musical impulse (GS 11:
203). Plasss discussion of such analogies and how they
might be understoodand just as importantly, how
they are not to be understoodoffers both care and
nuance: The affinities between musical and verbal (es-
sayistic) progression or movement do not extend to
their respective forms as a whole; they are limited to
brief and elusive aesthetic moments (p. 45). There is
an awareness throughout of the dangers inherent insuch analogies, but also of their potential when used
and indeed interpretedcarefully.
But even this does not convey a sense of why Ador-
nos writings on literature might be of consequence to
literary criticism more generally. Somewhat strangely,
many of the books references to aesthetics seem to
refer not to an Adornian model in which the subjec-
tive aesthetic experience takes on a central role, but to
precisely the mode of enquiry rejected by both Ador-
no and Plass, namely the application of a pre-giventheoretical method. For example:
With Heine, poetic language cannot be under-
stand with the tools of formalist poetics or aes-
thetics. His poetic language is no longer formally
or functionally different from everyday language,
and aesthetic categories therefore do not suffice
to describe it. (p. 120)
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Plass advances very little to suggest what sort of
aesthetic procedures might constitute an aesthetics
capable of describing or even accounting for Heines
poetic language. Indeed, the consequences of Notes toLiteraturefor Adornian aesthetics more broadly are left
unspoken. The insistence that [b]ecause literature andphilosophy are both made of language, they require
scrupulous textual examination (p. xx) seems to lead
to a situation in which the question cannot be raised as
to what, if anything, in Adornos accounts of literature
whether in the objects of consideration or the responses
to themdistinguishes literary from non-literary
texts. At other points, Plass relies on a crude distinc-
tion between literary and colloquial language (e.g. p.
5), a distinction that, if clear, would have wide-ranging
consequences for literary aesthetics. There is no con-sideration of the nature of aesthetic judgements in
Adorno (indeed, nor of which judgements constitute
aesthetic judgements), or of the transition from Kants
concentration on the aesthetic judgement to Adornos
apparently broader categories of aesthetic or artistic
experience, a distinction that Plass conflates in refer-
ring to the question of why we talk about aesthetic
experiences, why we continue to call certain objects
beautiful (p. xxxix).
Perhaps symptomatic of this is the ambiguous status
of many of the judgements that Plass advances. The
books first chapter begins with an explicitly aesthetic
judgement: Adornos prose is not beautiful (p. 1).
Perhaps unusually for an aesthetic judgement, it is fol-
lowed by a footnote. Turning to it, hoping to find fur-
ther discussion of the claima claim with which, I
might add, I disagree vehementlyI was disappointed
to find it supported only by an assertion and counter-
assertion from Robert Hullot-Kentors translation of
Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des sthetischen(This is beau-tiful) and and Peter Fenvess review of it (The pas-
sage is hardly beautiful; it is bombastic, both cited pp.
186187). Plass offers no discussion of the passage thatconstitutes the source of contention, no further reason
for arbitrating on the dispute in this manner, and, indeed,
no reason why we might choose to infer from the claim
that a particular passage is bombastic that Adornos prose
is not beautiful. It is a question from consideration of
which this study would have benefited considerably.
References to works by Adorno
Thesen ber die Sprache des Philosophen, in Philoso-phische Frhschriften, Gesammelte Schriften 1 [GS 1](Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 366371.
(with Max Horkheimer) Dialektik der Aufklrung, Gesa-mmelte Schriften 3 [GS 3] (Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1981)
Kleine Proust-Kommentare, in Noten zur Literatur,Gesammelte Schriften 11 [GS 11] (Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 203215.
Parataxis: Zur spten Lyrik Hlderlins in Noten zur
Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften 11 [GS 11] (Frank-furt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 447491.
JoshRobinsonQueens College, University of Cambridge, and University
of Haifa, Israel
doi: 10.1093/aesthj/ayp011