" There are, furthermore, various circumstances in which other German concepts than those just mentioned are also best
translated
as "content.
Theoder-Adorno-Aesthetic-Theory
The construction of such problem nexuses leads to what art has yet to become and that in which aesthetics would ultimately have its object.
The concrete historical situation of art registers concrete demands.
Aesthetics begins with reflection on them; only through them does a perspective open on what art is.
For art and art- works are exclusively what they are able to become .
In that no artwork is capable of resolving its immanent tension fully, and in that history ultimately attacks even the idea of such resolution, aesthetic theory cannot rest content with the interpre- tation of given artworks and their concept.
By turning toward their truth content, aesthetics is compelled-as philosophy-beyond the works.
The consciousness of the truth of artworks is, precisely as philosophical truth , in accord with the ap- parently most ephemeral form of aesthetic reflection, the manifesto.
The principle of method here is that light should be cast on all art from the vantage point of the most recent artworks, rather than the reverse, following the custom of histori- cism and philology, which, bourgeois at heart, prefers that nothing ever change.
If Valery ' s thesis is true that the best in the new corresponds to an old need , then the most authentic works are critiques of past works.
Aesthetics becomes normative by articulating such criticism.
This, however, has retroactive force, and from it alone is it possible to expect what general aesthetics offered merely as a hope and a sham.
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Editors' Afterword
Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann
Adorno's metaphor for works ofart applies literally to the last philosophical text on which he worked: "The fragment is the intrusion of death into the work. While destroying it, it removes the stain of semblance. " The text of Aesthetic Theory, as it was in August 1969, which the editors present here as faithfully as possible, is the text of a work in progress; this is not the form in which Adorno would have published this book . Several days before his death he wrote in a letter that the final version "still needed a desperate effort" but that "basically it is now a matter of organization and hardly that of the substance of the book. " Of this substance, ac- cording to Adorno, "essentially everything is, as one says, all there. " The remain- ing final revision, which Adorno hoped to finish by the middle of 1970, would have involved much shifting of passages within the text as well as abbreviations of it; the insertion of the fragments collected here as the "Paralipomena" had been reserved for this final revision; and the "Draft Introduction" would have been replaced by another. Finally, Adorno would have improved many stylistic details. Thus the work as a whole remained a torso that, along with Negative Dialectics' and a volume planned on moral philosophy, "will show what I have to throw into the scale. "2 If the comment does injustice to Adorno's other books, from Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic3 to Alban Berg4-an injustice that
only the author could possibly possess the slightest right to inflict-it all the same gives a sense of what work was intruded upon, what work broken off. For even if the "fragmentary accrues as expression to the work"-the expression of the cri- tique of what is systematically fixed and closed in itself, the critique that most fun- damentally motivates Adorno ' s philosophy - and removes the stain of semblance
361
362 0 EDITORS' AFfERWORD
in which, according to Adorno's insight, all spirit necessarily becomes ensnared, still this hardly counterbalances the destruction to which the text of Aesthetic The- ory testifies. Adorno employs the concept of the fragment in a double sense. He means on the one hand, something productive: that theories that bear a systematic intention must collapse in fragments in order to release their truth content. Noth- ing of the sort holds for the Aesthetic Theory. Its fragmentariness is the intrusion of death into a work before it had entirely realized its law of form. Essential to Adorno's philosophy as a whole is that no meaning be extracted from the ravages of death that would permit collusion with them. Two biographical fragments of comparable rank held eminent importance for Adorno: Right up to the end of his life he refused to acquiesce that Benjamin' s Arcades Project was beyond saving or that the instrumentation of Berg ' s Lulu had to remain incomplete . As little as an edition of Aesthetic Theory can disguise the fragmentary character of the work , or should even attempt to do so, it is just as impossible to be reconciled with it. There is no acquiescing in something that is incomplete merely because of contingency , and yet true fidelity , which Adorno himself practiced incomparably , prohibits that hands be laid on the fragmentary to complete it.
Adorno resumed his teaching at the University of Frankfurt in the winter semester of 1949-1950, and already in the summer term 1950 he held a seminar on aesthet- ics. In the following years he lectured four more times on the same topic, the final course extending over the summer and winter terms of 1967-1968, when large parts of the Aesthetic Theory were already written. Precisely when he conceived the plan for a book on aesthetics is not known; occasionally Adorno spoke of it as one of the projects that "I've been putting off my whole life. " He began making notes for the planned aesthetics in June 1956 at the latest. The wish of his friend Peter Suhrkamp, who died in 1959, to have an aesthetics from Adorno for his press, may have contributed to the concretization of the project. More important, obviously , was Adorno' s intention of integrating his ideas on aesthetics and to de- velop as a theory what until then he had notated in his many writings on music and literature . These ideas had often been taken to be, if not downright rhapsodic, then mere flashes of insight. The primacy of substantive thought in Adorno's philoso- phy may have blocked any view of the unity of his philosophical consciousness. For Adorno the material studies on art comprise not "applications but rather in- tegral elements of aesthetic theory itself. "-On May 4 , 1 96 1 , Adorno began to dictate the first version of Aesthetic Theory, which consisted of relatively short paragraphs. The work was soon broken off in favor of Negative Dialectics. After this was finished in the summer of 1966, Adorno undertook a new version of the aesthetics on October 25, 1966. The division into paragraphs gave way to one by chapters . He devoted great effort to the "schematization," a detailed disposition of the book. Already by the end of January 1967, approximately one fourth of the text had been completed in dictation. Dictation continued throughout 1967. More or less as an aside Adorno wrote studies such as the introduction to Durkheim5
EDITORS' AFTERWORD 0 363
and the preface to the selection of Rudolf Borchardt's poems. 6 According to a diary note, "The rough dictation of Aesthetic Theory was finished" on December 25, 1967; the entry appears to have been premature, however, for on January 8 , 1968, he wrote in a letter, "The rough draft is almost complete," and on January 24 finally, "Meanwhile I have finished the first draft of my big book on aesthetics. "-The dictated version comprises, along with the introduction, seven chapters entitled: "Situation," "What Art Was, or On Primal History," "Materialism," "Nominal- ism," "Society," "Watchwords," and "Metaphysics. " With the exception of sev- eral paragraphs, the 1961 text was wholly subsumed in the new version. But even this new version is scarcely recognizable in the final draft that is published here. Adorno commented in a letter on the preparation of the final version in relation to the first draft: "Only then does the real task begin , that i s , the final revision; for me the second drafts are always the decisive effort, the first only assembles the raw material . . . : They are an organized self-deception by which I maneuver myself into the position of the critic of my own work, the position that is for me always the most productive. " In the critical revision of Aesthetic Theory, however, it turned out that this time the second draft was itself only a provisional version . After completion of the draft the work came to a halt. Adorno turned his atten- tion to sociological essays such as the keynote address for the 1 6th Congress of German Sociologists and the introduction to the Positivism Dispute in German Sociology;7 at the same time he wrote the book on Berg. Adorno always took these distractions from his "main task" as salutary correctives. In addition, how- ever, there were the discussions with the student protest movement and a growing involvement in university politics; from the former much originated that went into the "Marginalia to Theory and Practice,"S but the latter fruitlessly consumed time and energy . It was not until the beginning of September 1 968 that he was able to continue work on Aesthetic Theory. First he critically annotated the entire text as a preliminary to the actual revision. This consisted in a detailed, handwritten refor- mulation of the typescript of the dictated material, a reformulation in which no sentence remained unchanged and scarcely one remained where it stood; innu- merable passages were added and not a few, some of them lengthy, were rigor- ously deleted. In the course of this revision, which Adorno began on October 9, 1 968 , the division into chapters was relinquished. I t was superseded b y a continu- ous text that was to be articulated only spatially; the text was finished on March 5 ,
1969. Three chapters of the old version were left out of the main text; two of them-"Watchwords" and "Situation"-were both corrected in March; the revi- sion of the final chapter, "Metaphysics," was completed on May 1 4 . In the follow- ing weeks many additions were written that in the course of the third revision would have been incorporated in the main text and would to some extent have re- placed passages with which Adorno was still not satisfied. The last dated text was inscribed July 16, 1969.
The presentation ofthe book, which may appreciably burden its reception, is the
364 0 EDITORS' AFfERWORD
result not only of the fragmentary character of Aesthetic Theory. During work on the second draft Adorno found himself confronted with problems he had not an- ticipated. These concerned the organization of the text and above all the problem of the relation of the presentation to what is presented. Adorno gives an account of these issues in his correspondence: "It is interesting that in working there obtrudes from the content [Inhalt] various implications for the form that I long expected but that now indeed astonish me. It is simply that from my theorem that there is no philosophical first principle , it now also results that one cannot build an argumen- tative structure that follows the usual progressive succession of steps, but rather that one must assemble the whole out of a series of partial complexes that are , so to speak, of equal weight and concentrically arranged all on the same level; their constellation, not their succession, must yield the idea. " In another letter Adorno speaks of the difficulties in the presentation ofAesthetic Theory: "These difficul- ties consist . . . in this, that a book's almost ineluctable movement from antecedent to consequence proved so incompatible with the content that for this reason any organization in the traditional sense- which up until now I have continued to fol- low (even in Negative Dialectics)-proved impracticable. The book must, so to speak , be written in equally weighted , paratactical parts that are arranged around a midpoint that they express through their constellation. " The problems of a para- tactical form of presentation, such as they appear in the last version of Aesthetic Theory, with which Adorno would not have said he was content, are objectively determined: They are the expression of the attitude of thought to objectivity. Philosophical parataxis seeks to fulfill the promise of Hegel's program of a pure contemplation by not distorting things through the violence of preforming them subjectively, but rather by bringing their muteness, their nonidentity, to speech. Using Holderlin's work, Adorno presented the implications of a serializ- ing procedure, and he noted of his own method that it had the closest affinities with the aesthetic texts of the late Holderlin. A theory , however, that is sparked by the individuum ineffabile, that wants to make amends to the unrepeatable, the non- conceptual , for what identifying thought inflicts on it, necessarily comes into con- flict with the abstractness to which, as theory, it is compelled. By its philosophical content [Gehalt] , Adorno's aesthetic is driven to paratactical presentation, yet this form is aporetic; it demands the solution of a problem of whose ultimate insolu- bility, in the medium oftheory, Adorno had no doubt. At the same time, however, the bindingness of theory is bound to the obligation that labor and the effort of thought not renounce the effort to solve the insoluble. This paradoxy could also provide a model for the reception of this work. The difficulties that confront the 1tOPOC;, the direct access to the text of Aesthetic Theory, could not have been cleared away by further revision of the text, yet doubtlessly in such a fully articu- lated text these difficulties would have been articulated and thus minimized. - Adorno planned to work through Aesthetic Theory a third time , a revision i n which
EDITORS' AFTERWORD 0 365
the text would have taken its definitive form, as soon as he returned from his vaca-
tion, which turned out to be his last.
This volume, which makes no claim to being a critical-historical edition, contains the complete text of the final version. Only those passages of the initial dictated version that were not incorporated in the second revision were omitted; even when Adorno did not explicitly strike them out, they must be regarded as having been rejected by him. On the other hand, because of their pertinence a number of shorter, uncorrected fragments are collected in the "Paralipomena. " The corrected draft introduction, though it was discarded by Adorno, is appended to the text; its substantive importance prohibited its exclusion. -Idiosyncrasies of spelling have been maintained. The punctuation remains unchanged as well, although it still largely follows an oral rhythm; for publication Adorno would undoubtedly have adjusted it to standard practice. Because the handwritten corrections made the manuscript difficult for Adorno himself to read , occasional anacoluthic and el- liptical formulations remain; these were discreetly corrected. Beyond such gram- matical intrusions the editors felt under obligation to refrain wherever possible from conjecture, however frequently this was suggested by the repetitions, occa- sionally also by contradictions. Innumerable formulations and passages, which the editors were convinced Adorno would have changed, were incorporated un- changed. Conjectures were made only in instances where they were required to exclude misunderstandings of meaning .
The ordering of the book posed substantial difficulties. The corrected main text was the basic manuscript, into which the earlier mentioned, reworked but uninte- grated three chapters were inserted. The chapter entitled "Situation"-a philoso- phy of history of modernite , which was the first chapter of the original version - had to be placed relatively early: Central to Aesthetic Theory is the insight that only from the most advanced contemporary art is light cast on the work of the past. According to a note, Adorno intended to combine the chapters "Situation" and "Watchwords," and the editors proceeded accordingly. The insertion of the chapter "Metaphysics" at the end of the section on "Enigmatic Character" fol- lowed compellingly from that section ' s course of thought . - With regard to par- ticular passages, it was necessary to reorganize a number of them. In marginalia in the text Adorno himself had considered most of these shifts. In many instances, the shifts undertaken by the editors intended to accentuate the book's paratactical principle of presentation; they were not intended to sacrifice the book to a deduc- tive hierarchical structure of presentation . - Those fragments treated by the edi- tors as "Paralipomena" were in part later additions and in part "extracts": passages excised from the original text that Adorno intended to place elsewhere . The inte- gration of these fragments into the main text proved to be impracticable . Only sel- dom did Adorno mark the exact place where he wanted them, and almost always there were a number of possible places for their insertion . Furthermore , the inser-
366 D EDITORS' AFfERWORD
tion of these texts would have required the formulation of transitional phrases, which the editors did not feel authorized to undertake. The organization of the "Paralipomena" is the work of the editors. -The passage headings are also ad- ditions made by the editors, who were often enough able to draw on "headings," the descriptive keywords with which Adorno notated the majority of the manu- script pages.
A quotation from Friedrich Schlegel was to have served as a motto for Aesthetic Theory: "What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art. " Adorno had intended to dedicate the book to Samuel Beckett.
The editors want to thank Elfriede Olbrich, Adorno's secretary of many years, who undertook the decipherment and copying of the text .
July 1970
Notes
Translator's Introduction
1 . Bamett Newman, in Painters Painting: The New York An Scene, 1940-1970, directed by Emile de Antonio.
2. Adorno,Beethoven,ed. RolfTiedemann(Frankfurt,1993),p. 15.
3. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973), p. xx (translation amended) .
4. Adorno, "Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch;' in Gesammelte Schriften 10. 2 (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 693.
5. Ibid. ,p. 698.
6. Ibid.
7. Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York. 1984).
8. C. Lenhardt, "Response to Hullot-Kentor," Telos, no. 65 (Fall 1985): 153.
9. See Hullot-Kentor, "Aesthetic Theory: The Translation," Telos, no. 65 (Fall 1985): 147-152.
10. Adorno,Mahler:AMusicalPhysiognomy, trans. EdmundJephcott(Chicago,1992),p. 84. 11. SeetheAfterwordtothistranslation.
1 2 . See Jiirgen Habermas , "A Letter to Christa Wolf," from The Normalcy of a Berlin Republic,
trans . Michael Roloff (forthcoming).
13. Conversation with Rolf Tiedemann, October 15, 1995.
14. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfun School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance,
trans. MichaelRobertson(Cambridge,Mass. : 1994);see,e. g. ,pp. 245,246,254,458,and510.
There are three levels ofnotes: Adorno's own, some ofwhich were addedby the German editors in accord with the author's sparse style ofannotation; thosefew additional comments contributed by the German editors, which are marked as such and are in square brackets; and those explanatory notes specific to this translation, also in square brackets and identified by trans. Citations are given exclu- sively in English except when German or French poetry is qudted in the text, in which case the original
367
368 0 NOTES TO PAGES xx-19
is provided in the note. In the several instances i n which n o English citation is givenfor translations of
poetry in the main text, the translations are my own.
Art, Society, Aesthetics
I . Helmut Kuhn, Schriften zur Aesthetik (Munich, 1 966), pp. 236ff.
2. [See "Excursus: Theories on the Origin of Art. "]
3. See Adorno, "Die Kunst und die Kiinste," in Ohne Leitbild, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10. 1
(Frankfurt, 1977), p. 432ff.
4. ["Stellung zur ObjektivitiH": The phrase is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Science of
Logic,trans. WilliamWallace(Oxford, 1975),pp. 47-112,inwhichthree"attitudesofthoughttoob- jectivity" are e1ucidated. -trans. ]
5. [Although the direct reference is to Hegel, the phraseology at the same time quotes the title of Walter Benjamin's essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction"), a title on which Adorno works re- peated variations, often in ways that cannot be matched with adequate compactness in translation. - trans. ]
6. ["II faut etre absolument moderne. "-trans. ]
7. [For the English "content" German has both "Inhalt" and "Gehalt," which, in aesthetic contexts , serve to distinguish the idea of thematic content or subject matter from that of content in the sense of import, essence, or substance of a work. This distinction, however, is not terminologically fixed in German or in Adorno's writings. One concept may well be used in place of the other. In some sections of Aesthetic Theory it is relatively easy to recognize which concept is at stake, as for instance in the lengthy development of the relation ofform and content, where content is obviously "Iohalt. " In these passages, the German is given when the concept is first introduced. At other points in the text, how- ever, differentiation becomes more difficult. Where it has been necessary to emphasize the distinction between the terms, the much less frequently used term "Inhalt" accompanies the English concept. At points, however, where there is an ongoing, explicit, contrasting discussion of the two concepts, or where confusion seemed likely, the German concepts accompany the single English concept. At one point it has been necessary to translate "Gehalt" as "substance"; in all other instances "substance" is the translation of "Substanz.
" There are, furthermore, various circumstances in which other German concepts than those just mentioned are also best translated as "content. "-trans. ]
8. ["ZweckmaBigkeit": For Kantian terms I generally follow Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Critique ofJudgment (Indianapolis, 1987)-trans. ]
9. [Rene Laforgue, The Defeat ofBaudelaire (Folcroft, 1977). -trans. ] 10. See Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, section 2, pp. 45ff.
1 1 . Ibid. , p. 45.
1 2. Ibid. , p. 46.
13. Ibid. ,p. 45.
Situation
I . [Hugo von Hofmannstha1, The Lord Chandos Letter (Marlboro, 1986). -trans. ]
2. See Stefan George, "Darkness of Dream" ["Foliage and fruit of camelian and gold"], in The Works ofStefan George, trans. Marx and Merwitz (Chapel Hill, 1974),p. 270.
3. ["Entkunstung": Literally,thedestructionofart'squalityasart. -trans. ]
4. See Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 17ff.
5. [Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), the Austrian novelist of eerie and grotesque novels, most famously The Golem. -trans. ]
? NOTES TO PAGES 19-66 0 369
6. [Ferdinand Kiirnberger (1821-1879), the Austrian dramatist and novelist. -trans. ]
7. See Adorno, Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, 4th ed. (Gottingen, 1969), pp. 19ff. 8. [A reference especially to Martin Heidegger. -trans. ]
9. ["Aussage": SeeAdorno,TheJargon ofAuthenticity, trans. KnutTarnowskyandFredericWill
(Evanston, 1976) , p. 14. -trans. ]
10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, 1977). I I . See Adolf Loos, Samtliche Schriften, ed. F. Gliick, vol. I (Vienna and Munich, 1 962), pp. 278,
393, andpassim.
12. Friedrich Schiller, "Nenia," in Poetical Works, trans. Percy E. Pinkerton (Boston, 1902), p. 253. 13. [Adorno is quoting from his own Ohne Leitbild, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10. I (Frankfurt,
1977). -trans. ]
14. Friedrich HOiderlin, "German Song," in Freidrich Holderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans.
Michael Hamburger (Cambridge, 1966), p. 505. 15. BertoltBrecht,"AndieNachgeborenen,"inGesammelte Werke, vol. 9(Frankfurt,1967),p. 723.
["Was sind das fur Zeiten, wo / Ein Gespriich tiber Biiume fast ein Verbrechen ist / Weil es ein Schweigen tiber so viele Untaten einschlieBt"; "To Posterity," in German Poetry, 1910-1975, trans. and ed. Michael Hamburger (New York, 1976), p. 168. -trans. ]
16. See Charles Baudelaire, "TheTaste for nothingness," from Flowers ofEvil, trans. S. McGowan (Oxford, 1993), p. 153: "The Spring, once wonderful, has lost its scent! " p. 72.
17. [A reference to the Mephistopheles of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe' s Faust, described there as "The spirit that negates itself. "-trans. ]
18. [A critical reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein's maxim in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that "Die Welt ist a1les was der Fall ist" (The world is all that is the case). Throughout Aesthetic Theory and many of his other writings Adorno similarly recasts Wittgenstein ' s expression . - trans . ]
On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique
1 . Karl Rosenkranz, Asthetik des HiijJlichen (Konigsberg, 1853. ).
2. See Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New
York, 1972).
3. SeeArthurRimbaud,"The Blacksmith,"fromPoems 1870, in Complete Works, trans. Wallace
Fowlie (Chicago, 1966) , p. 23.
4. [Gerhart Hauptmann, Hannele 's Ascension, in Three Plays, trans. H. Frenz and M. Waggoner
(New York, 1951),pp. 99-143. -trans. ]
5. ["ein kleinster Ubergang": The smallest transition, is a fundamental aestheticotheological
motifin both WalterBenjamin's and Adorno's writings. See Adorno,Alban Berg: Masterofthe Small- est Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge, 1 99 1 ) - trans. ]
6. "Wolken ziehn wie schwere Triiume," from Joseph von Eichendorffs "ZwieIicht," in Werke ed. W. Rasch (Munich, 1955), p. I I .
7 . See Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography," in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephottt and Kingley Shorter (London, 1979), pp. 240ff. , and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1 968), pp. 2 17ff.
8. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, pp. 120ff. Natural Beauty
1 . Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 300. 2. Ibid. , pp. 300-30 1 .
3 . [Karl Kraus's maxim, which became a motto both for Benjamin and Adomo. -trans. ]
370 0 NOTES TO PAGES 68-84
4. See Rudolf Borchardt, Gedichte. ed. M. L. Borchardt and H. Steiner (Stuttgart, 1957), pp. l 13ff.
5. FriedrichHebbel,"Herbstbild,"inWerkeinzweiBiinden,ed. G. Fricke(Munich,1952),vol. I, p. 12.
6. See Friedrich Holderiin, "Winkel von Hardt," from Gedichte nach 1800. in Siimtliche Werke, vol. 2, ed. F. BeiSner (Stuttgart, 1953), p. 120. [Adorno discusses this poem in detail in "Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry," in Notes to Literature. trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), pp. 11l-1l2. -trans. ]
7. Paul Valt? ry, Windstriche: Au/zeichnungen und Aphorismen. trans. B. Boschenstein et al. (Wiesbaden, 1959) p. 94. [Originally published in OEuvres, vol. 2 (Paris, 1957), p. 681 . -trans. ]
8. Rudolf Borchardt, "Tagelied," ["Tod, sitz aufs Bett, und Herzen, horcht hinaus: / Ein alter Mann zeigt in den schwachen Schein / Unterm Rand des ersten Blaus: I Fiir Gott, den Ungebornen, stehe I Ich euch ein: / Welt, und sei dir noch so wehe, / Es kehrt von Anfang, alles ist noch dein! "- trans . ]
9. Georg WilhelmFriedrich Hegel,Aesthetics. trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1975), p. 123. [Translation amended.
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Editors' Afterword
Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann
Adorno's metaphor for works ofart applies literally to the last philosophical text on which he worked: "The fragment is the intrusion of death into the work. While destroying it, it removes the stain of semblance. " The text of Aesthetic Theory, as it was in August 1969, which the editors present here as faithfully as possible, is the text of a work in progress; this is not the form in which Adorno would have published this book . Several days before his death he wrote in a letter that the final version "still needed a desperate effort" but that "basically it is now a matter of organization and hardly that of the substance of the book. " Of this substance, ac- cording to Adorno, "essentially everything is, as one says, all there. " The remain- ing final revision, which Adorno hoped to finish by the middle of 1970, would have involved much shifting of passages within the text as well as abbreviations of it; the insertion of the fragments collected here as the "Paralipomena" had been reserved for this final revision; and the "Draft Introduction" would have been replaced by another. Finally, Adorno would have improved many stylistic details. Thus the work as a whole remained a torso that, along with Negative Dialectics' and a volume planned on moral philosophy, "will show what I have to throw into the scale. "2 If the comment does injustice to Adorno's other books, from Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic3 to Alban Berg4-an injustice that
only the author could possibly possess the slightest right to inflict-it all the same gives a sense of what work was intruded upon, what work broken off. For even if the "fragmentary accrues as expression to the work"-the expression of the cri- tique of what is systematically fixed and closed in itself, the critique that most fun- damentally motivates Adorno ' s philosophy - and removes the stain of semblance
361
362 0 EDITORS' AFfERWORD
in which, according to Adorno's insight, all spirit necessarily becomes ensnared, still this hardly counterbalances the destruction to which the text of Aesthetic The- ory testifies. Adorno employs the concept of the fragment in a double sense. He means on the one hand, something productive: that theories that bear a systematic intention must collapse in fragments in order to release their truth content. Noth- ing of the sort holds for the Aesthetic Theory. Its fragmentariness is the intrusion of death into a work before it had entirely realized its law of form. Essential to Adorno's philosophy as a whole is that no meaning be extracted from the ravages of death that would permit collusion with them. Two biographical fragments of comparable rank held eminent importance for Adorno: Right up to the end of his life he refused to acquiesce that Benjamin' s Arcades Project was beyond saving or that the instrumentation of Berg ' s Lulu had to remain incomplete . As little as an edition of Aesthetic Theory can disguise the fragmentary character of the work , or should even attempt to do so, it is just as impossible to be reconciled with it. There is no acquiescing in something that is incomplete merely because of contingency , and yet true fidelity , which Adorno himself practiced incomparably , prohibits that hands be laid on the fragmentary to complete it.
Adorno resumed his teaching at the University of Frankfurt in the winter semester of 1949-1950, and already in the summer term 1950 he held a seminar on aesthet- ics. In the following years he lectured four more times on the same topic, the final course extending over the summer and winter terms of 1967-1968, when large parts of the Aesthetic Theory were already written. Precisely when he conceived the plan for a book on aesthetics is not known; occasionally Adorno spoke of it as one of the projects that "I've been putting off my whole life. " He began making notes for the planned aesthetics in June 1956 at the latest. The wish of his friend Peter Suhrkamp, who died in 1959, to have an aesthetics from Adorno for his press, may have contributed to the concretization of the project. More important, obviously , was Adorno' s intention of integrating his ideas on aesthetics and to de- velop as a theory what until then he had notated in his many writings on music and literature . These ideas had often been taken to be, if not downright rhapsodic, then mere flashes of insight. The primacy of substantive thought in Adorno's philoso- phy may have blocked any view of the unity of his philosophical consciousness. For Adorno the material studies on art comprise not "applications but rather in- tegral elements of aesthetic theory itself. "-On May 4 , 1 96 1 , Adorno began to dictate the first version of Aesthetic Theory, which consisted of relatively short paragraphs. The work was soon broken off in favor of Negative Dialectics. After this was finished in the summer of 1966, Adorno undertook a new version of the aesthetics on October 25, 1966. The division into paragraphs gave way to one by chapters . He devoted great effort to the "schematization," a detailed disposition of the book. Already by the end of January 1967, approximately one fourth of the text had been completed in dictation. Dictation continued throughout 1967. More or less as an aside Adorno wrote studies such as the introduction to Durkheim5
EDITORS' AFTERWORD 0 363
and the preface to the selection of Rudolf Borchardt's poems. 6 According to a diary note, "The rough dictation of Aesthetic Theory was finished" on December 25, 1967; the entry appears to have been premature, however, for on January 8 , 1968, he wrote in a letter, "The rough draft is almost complete," and on January 24 finally, "Meanwhile I have finished the first draft of my big book on aesthetics. "-The dictated version comprises, along with the introduction, seven chapters entitled: "Situation," "What Art Was, or On Primal History," "Materialism," "Nominal- ism," "Society," "Watchwords," and "Metaphysics. " With the exception of sev- eral paragraphs, the 1961 text was wholly subsumed in the new version. But even this new version is scarcely recognizable in the final draft that is published here. Adorno commented in a letter on the preparation of the final version in relation to the first draft: "Only then does the real task begin , that i s , the final revision; for me the second drafts are always the decisive effort, the first only assembles the raw material . . . : They are an organized self-deception by which I maneuver myself into the position of the critic of my own work, the position that is for me always the most productive. " In the critical revision of Aesthetic Theory, however, it turned out that this time the second draft was itself only a provisional version . After completion of the draft the work came to a halt. Adorno turned his atten- tion to sociological essays such as the keynote address for the 1 6th Congress of German Sociologists and the introduction to the Positivism Dispute in German Sociology;7 at the same time he wrote the book on Berg. Adorno always took these distractions from his "main task" as salutary correctives. In addition, how- ever, there were the discussions with the student protest movement and a growing involvement in university politics; from the former much originated that went into the "Marginalia to Theory and Practice,"S but the latter fruitlessly consumed time and energy . It was not until the beginning of September 1 968 that he was able to continue work on Aesthetic Theory. First he critically annotated the entire text as a preliminary to the actual revision. This consisted in a detailed, handwritten refor- mulation of the typescript of the dictated material, a reformulation in which no sentence remained unchanged and scarcely one remained where it stood; innu- merable passages were added and not a few, some of them lengthy, were rigor- ously deleted. In the course of this revision, which Adorno began on October 9, 1 968 , the division into chapters was relinquished. I t was superseded b y a continu- ous text that was to be articulated only spatially; the text was finished on March 5 ,
1969. Three chapters of the old version were left out of the main text; two of them-"Watchwords" and "Situation"-were both corrected in March; the revi- sion of the final chapter, "Metaphysics," was completed on May 1 4 . In the follow- ing weeks many additions were written that in the course of the third revision would have been incorporated in the main text and would to some extent have re- placed passages with which Adorno was still not satisfied. The last dated text was inscribed July 16, 1969.
The presentation ofthe book, which may appreciably burden its reception, is the
364 0 EDITORS' AFfERWORD
result not only of the fragmentary character of Aesthetic Theory. During work on the second draft Adorno found himself confronted with problems he had not an- ticipated. These concerned the organization of the text and above all the problem of the relation of the presentation to what is presented. Adorno gives an account of these issues in his correspondence: "It is interesting that in working there obtrudes from the content [Inhalt] various implications for the form that I long expected but that now indeed astonish me. It is simply that from my theorem that there is no philosophical first principle , it now also results that one cannot build an argumen- tative structure that follows the usual progressive succession of steps, but rather that one must assemble the whole out of a series of partial complexes that are , so to speak, of equal weight and concentrically arranged all on the same level; their constellation, not their succession, must yield the idea. " In another letter Adorno speaks of the difficulties in the presentation ofAesthetic Theory: "These difficul- ties consist . . . in this, that a book's almost ineluctable movement from antecedent to consequence proved so incompatible with the content that for this reason any organization in the traditional sense- which up until now I have continued to fol- low (even in Negative Dialectics)-proved impracticable. The book must, so to speak , be written in equally weighted , paratactical parts that are arranged around a midpoint that they express through their constellation. " The problems of a para- tactical form of presentation, such as they appear in the last version of Aesthetic Theory, with which Adorno would not have said he was content, are objectively determined: They are the expression of the attitude of thought to objectivity. Philosophical parataxis seeks to fulfill the promise of Hegel's program of a pure contemplation by not distorting things through the violence of preforming them subjectively, but rather by bringing their muteness, their nonidentity, to speech. Using Holderlin's work, Adorno presented the implications of a serializ- ing procedure, and he noted of his own method that it had the closest affinities with the aesthetic texts of the late Holderlin. A theory , however, that is sparked by the individuum ineffabile, that wants to make amends to the unrepeatable, the non- conceptual , for what identifying thought inflicts on it, necessarily comes into con- flict with the abstractness to which, as theory, it is compelled. By its philosophical content [Gehalt] , Adorno's aesthetic is driven to paratactical presentation, yet this form is aporetic; it demands the solution of a problem of whose ultimate insolu- bility, in the medium oftheory, Adorno had no doubt. At the same time, however, the bindingness of theory is bound to the obligation that labor and the effort of thought not renounce the effort to solve the insoluble. This paradoxy could also provide a model for the reception of this work. The difficulties that confront the 1tOPOC;, the direct access to the text of Aesthetic Theory, could not have been cleared away by further revision of the text, yet doubtlessly in such a fully articu- lated text these difficulties would have been articulated and thus minimized. - Adorno planned to work through Aesthetic Theory a third time , a revision i n which
EDITORS' AFTERWORD 0 365
the text would have taken its definitive form, as soon as he returned from his vaca-
tion, which turned out to be his last.
This volume, which makes no claim to being a critical-historical edition, contains the complete text of the final version. Only those passages of the initial dictated version that were not incorporated in the second revision were omitted; even when Adorno did not explicitly strike them out, they must be regarded as having been rejected by him. On the other hand, because of their pertinence a number of shorter, uncorrected fragments are collected in the "Paralipomena. " The corrected draft introduction, though it was discarded by Adorno, is appended to the text; its substantive importance prohibited its exclusion. -Idiosyncrasies of spelling have been maintained. The punctuation remains unchanged as well, although it still largely follows an oral rhythm; for publication Adorno would undoubtedly have adjusted it to standard practice. Because the handwritten corrections made the manuscript difficult for Adorno himself to read , occasional anacoluthic and el- liptical formulations remain; these were discreetly corrected. Beyond such gram- matical intrusions the editors felt under obligation to refrain wherever possible from conjecture, however frequently this was suggested by the repetitions, occa- sionally also by contradictions. Innumerable formulations and passages, which the editors were convinced Adorno would have changed, were incorporated un- changed. Conjectures were made only in instances where they were required to exclude misunderstandings of meaning .
The ordering of the book posed substantial difficulties. The corrected main text was the basic manuscript, into which the earlier mentioned, reworked but uninte- grated three chapters were inserted. The chapter entitled "Situation"-a philoso- phy of history of modernite , which was the first chapter of the original version - had to be placed relatively early: Central to Aesthetic Theory is the insight that only from the most advanced contemporary art is light cast on the work of the past. According to a note, Adorno intended to combine the chapters "Situation" and "Watchwords," and the editors proceeded accordingly. The insertion of the chapter "Metaphysics" at the end of the section on "Enigmatic Character" fol- lowed compellingly from that section ' s course of thought . - With regard to par- ticular passages, it was necessary to reorganize a number of them. In marginalia in the text Adorno himself had considered most of these shifts. In many instances, the shifts undertaken by the editors intended to accentuate the book's paratactical principle of presentation; they were not intended to sacrifice the book to a deduc- tive hierarchical structure of presentation . - Those fragments treated by the edi- tors as "Paralipomena" were in part later additions and in part "extracts": passages excised from the original text that Adorno intended to place elsewhere . The inte- gration of these fragments into the main text proved to be impracticable . Only sel- dom did Adorno mark the exact place where he wanted them, and almost always there were a number of possible places for their insertion . Furthermore , the inser-
366 D EDITORS' AFfERWORD
tion of these texts would have required the formulation of transitional phrases, which the editors did not feel authorized to undertake. The organization of the "Paralipomena" is the work of the editors. -The passage headings are also ad- ditions made by the editors, who were often enough able to draw on "headings," the descriptive keywords with which Adorno notated the majority of the manu- script pages.
A quotation from Friedrich Schlegel was to have served as a motto for Aesthetic Theory: "What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art. " Adorno had intended to dedicate the book to Samuel Beckett.
The editors want to thank Elfriede Olbrich, Adorno's secretary of many years, who undertook the decipherment and copying of the text .
July 1970
Notes
Translator's Introduction
1 . Bamett Newman, in Painters Painting: The New York An Scene, 1940-1970, directed by Emile de Antonio.
2. Adorno,Beethoven,ed. RolfTiedemann(Frankfurt,1993),p. 15.
3. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973), p. xx (translation amended) .
4. Adorno, "Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch;' in Gesammelte Schriften 10. 2 (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 693.
5. Ibid. ,p. 698.
6. Ibid.
7. Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York. 1984).
8. C. Lenhardt, "Response to Hullot-Kentor," Telos, no. 65 (Fall 1985): 153.
9. See Hullot-Kentor, "Aesthetic Theory: The Translation," Telos, no. 65 (Fall 1985): 147-152.
10. Adorno,Mahler:AMusicalPhysiognomy, trans. EdmundJephcott(Chicago,1992),p. 84. 11. SeetheAfterwordtothistranslation.
1 2 . See Jiirgen Habermas , "A Letter to Christa Wolf," from The Normalcy of a Berlin Republic,
trans . Michael Roloff (forthcoming).
13. Conversation with Rolf Tiedemann, October 15, 1995.
14. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfun School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance,
trans. MichaelRobertson(Cambridge,Mass. : 1994);see,e. g. ,pp. 245,246,254,458,and510.
There are three levels ofnotes: Adorno's own, some ofwhich were addedby the German editors in accord with the author's sparse style ofannotation; thosefew additional comments contributed by the German editors, which are marked as such and are in square brackets; and those explanatory notes specific to this translation, also in square brackets and identified by trans. Citations are given exclu- sively in English except when German or French poetry is qudted in the text, in which case the original
367
368 0 NOTES TO PAGES xx-19
is provided in the note. In the several instances i n which n o English citation is givenfor translations of
poetry in the main text, the translations are my own.
Art, Society, Aesthetics
I . Helmut Kuhn, Schriften zur Aesthetik (Munich, 1 966), pp. 236ff.
2. [See "Excursus: Theories on the Origin of Art. "]
3. See Adorno, "Die Kunst und die Kiinste," in Ohne Leitbild, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10. 1
(Frankfurt, 1977), p. 432ff.
4. ["Stellung zur ObjektivitiH": The phrase is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Science of
Logic,trans. WilliamWallace(Oxford, 1975),pp. 47-112,inwhichthree"attitudesofthoughttoob- jectivity" are e1ucidated. -trans. ]
5. [Although the direct reference is to Hegel, the phraseology at the same time quotes the title of Walter Benjamin's essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction"), a title on which Adorno works re- peated variations, often in ways that cannot be matched with adequate compactness in translation. - trans. ]
6. ["II faut etre absolument moderne. "-trans. ]
7. [For the English "content" German has both "Inhalt" and "Gehalt," which, in aesthetic contexts , serve to distinguish the idea of thematic content or subject matter from that of content in the sense of import, essence, or substance of a work. This distinction, however, is not terminologically fixed in German or in Adorno's writings. One concept may well be used in place of the other. In some sections of Aesthetic Theory it is relatively easy to recognize which concept is at stake, as for instance in the lengthy development of the relation ofform and content, where content is obviously "Iohalt. " In these passages, the German is given when the concept is first introduced. At other points in the text, how- ever, differentiation becomes more difficult. Where it has been necessary to emphasize the distinction between the terms, the much less frequently used term "Inhalt" accompanies the English concept. At points, however, where there is an ongoing, explicit, contrasting discussion of the two concepts, or where confusion seemed likely, the German concepts accompany the single English concept. At one point it has been necessary to translate "Gehalt" as "substance"; in all other instances "substance" is the translation of "Substanz.
" There are, furthermore, various circumstances in which other German concepts than those just mentioned are also best translated as "content. "-trans. ]
8. ["ZweckmaBigkeit": For Kantian terms I generally follow Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Critique ofJudgment (Indianapolis, 1987)-trans. ]
9. [Rene Laforgue, The Defeat ofBaudelaire (Folcroft, 1977). -trans. ] 10. See Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, section 2, pp. 45ff.
1 1 . Ibid. , p. 45.
1 2. Ibid. , p. 46.
13. Ibid. ,p. 45.
Situation
I . [Hugo von Hofmannstha1, The Lord Chandos Letter (Marlboro, 1986). -trans. ]
2. See Stefan George, "Darkness of Dream" ["Foliage and fruit of camelian and gold"], in The Works ofStefan George, trans. Marx and Merwitz (Chapel Hill, 1974),p. 270.
3. ["Entkunstung": Literally,thedestructionofart'squalityasart. -trans. ]
4. See Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 17ff.
5. [Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), the Austrian novelist of eerie and grotesque novels, most famously The Golem. -trans. ]
? NOTES TO PAGES 19-66 0 369
6. [Ferdinand Kiirnberger (1821-1879), the Austrian dramatist and novelist. -trans. ]
7. See Adorno, Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, 4th ed. (Gottingen, 1969), pp. 19ff. 8. [A reference especially to Martin Heidegger. -trans. ]
9. ["Aussage": SeeAdorno,TheJargon ofAuthenticity, trans. KnutTarnowskyandFredericWill
(Evanston, 1976) , p. 14. -trans. ]
10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, 1977). I I . See Adolf Loos, Samtliche Schriften, ed. F. Gliick, vol. I (Vienna and Munich, 1 962), pp. 278,
393, andpassim.
12. Friedrich Schiller, "Nenia," in Poetical Works, trans. Percy E. Pinkerton (Boston, 1902), p. 253. 13. [Adorno is quoting from his own Ohne Leitbild, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10. I (Frankfurt,
1977). -trans. ]
14. Friedrich HOiderlin, "German Song," in Freidrich Holderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans.
Michael Hamburger (Cambridge, 1966), p. 505. 15. BertoltBrecht,"AndieNachgeborenen,"inGesammelte Werke, vol. 9(Frankfurt,1967),p. 723.
["Was sind das fur Zeiten, wo / Ein Gespriich tiber Biiume fast ein Verbrechen ist / Weil es ein Schweigen tiber so viele Untaten einschlieBt"; "To Posterity," in German Poetry, 1910-1975, trans. and ed. Michael Hamburger (New York, 1976), p. 168. -trans. ]
16. See Charles Baudelaire, "TheTaste for nothingness," from Flowers ofEvil, trans. S. McGowan (Oxford, 1993), p. 153: "The Spring, once wonderful, has lost its scent! " p. 72.
17. [A reference to the Mephistopheles of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe' s Faust, described there as "The spirit that negates itself. "-trans. ]
18. [A critical reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein's maxim in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that "Die Welt ist a1les was der Fall ist" (The world is all that is the case). Throughout Aesthetic Theory and many of his other writings Adorno similarly recasts Wittgenstein ' s expression . - trans . ]
On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique
1 . Karl Rosenkranz, Asthetik des HiijJlichen (Konigsberg, 1853. ).
2. See Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New
York, 1972).
3. SeeArthurRimbaud,"The Blacksmith,"fromPoems 1870, in Complete Works, trans. Wallace
Fowlie (Chicago, 1966) , p. 23.
4. [Gerhart Hauptmann, Hannele 's Ascension, in Three Plays, trans. H. Frenz and M. Waggoner
(New York, 1951),pp. 99-143. -trans. ]
5. ["ein kleinster Ubergang": The smallest transition, is a fundamental aestheticotheological
motifin both WalterBenjamin's and Adorno's writings. See Adorno,Alban Berg: Masterofthe Small- est Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge, 1 99 1 ) - trans. ]
6. "Wolken ziehn wie schwere Triiume," from Joseph von Eichendorffs "ZwieIicht," in Werke ed. W. Rasch (Munich, 1955), p. I I .
7 . See Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography," in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephottt and Kingley Shorter (London, 1979), pp. 240ff. , and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1 968), pp. 2 17ff.
8. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, pp. 120ff. Natural Beauty
1 . Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 300. 2. Ibid. , pp. 300-30 1 .
3 . [Karl Kraus's maxim, which became a motto both for Benjamin and Adomo. -trans. ]
370 0 NOTES TO PAGES 68-84
4. See Rudolf Borchardt, Gedichte. ed. M. L. Borchardt and H. Steiner (Stuttgart, 1957), pp. l 13ff.
5. FriedrichHebbel,"Herbstbild,"inWerkeinzweiBiinden,ed. G. Fricke(Munich,1952),vol. I, p. 12.
6. See Friedrich Holderiin, "Winkel von Hardt," from Gedichte nach 1800. in Siimtliche Werke, vol. 2, ed. F. BeiSner (Stuttgart, 1953), p. 120. [Adorno discusses this poem in detail in "Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry," in Notes to Literature. trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), pp. 11l-1l2. -trans. ]
7. Paul Valt? ry, Windstriche: Au/zeichnungen und Aphorismen. trans. B. Boschenstein et al. (Wiesbaden, 1959) p. 94. [Originally published in OEuvres, vol. 2 (Paris, 1957), p. 681 . -trans. ]
8. Rudolf Borchardt, "Tagelied," ["Tod, sitz aufs Bett, und Herzen, horcht hinaus: / Ein alter Mann zeigt in den schwachen Schein / Unterm Rand des ersten Blaus: I Fiir Gott, den Ungebornen, stehe I Ich euch ein: / Welt, und sei dir noch so wehe, / Es kehrt von Anfang, alles ist noch dein! "- trans . ]
9. Georg WilhelmFriedrich Hegel,Aesthetics. trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1975), p. 123. [Translation amended.
