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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