"WHEN WILL I BE BLOWN UP?"

The Current Theory Won't Touch

2011-03-13T22:06:00.005-04:00

Toward the end of his life, Immanuel Kant was afflicted with a sickness whose cause he attributed to certain atmospheric transformations: “That I have been so powerless,” he explains, “stems from a revolution in the air, which has been in place for several years.”[i] The first victims of this revolution were the cats of Copenhagen, killed en masse by the same electric current oppressing Kant. The spark of political revolutions—American and French—undoubtedly contributed to the revolution Kant’s body and thought registered like a seismograph. Kant, of course, never says as much. Instead, he stumbles through the newly charged earth, desperately trying to discern the nature of the current coursing through the atmosphere. There is something in the air today too, but few concerned with Theory dare to be caught stumbling after its source.

Instead, theory licks its index finger, sticks it in the air and finds itself confirmed of what it had long predicted: the wind is moving according to long-known currents. One need only turn to the recent remarks of Alain Badiou,[ii] Peter Hallward,[iii] Antontio Negri and Michael Hardt[iv] on the events in North Africa to encounter the contemporary theorist’s proud, unblinking stare. His hands are not used to rub his eyes in disbelief, but to point: Tunisia is the land of the EVENT; Egypt is the theater of COLLECTIVE WILL; there is no center because it’s THE MULTITUDE! No one finds anything they hadn’t put there in the first place. Wait as we might, good idolators that we are, we deceive ourselves if we feign illumination from these men of Enlightenment; this false luminosity imitates those neon-lights that would be convicted of increasing the world’s darkness were the current charging the air to overpower the forces of reaction. It’s time to stop waiting and ask—at the very least—why theory is so woefully indisposed to following this current wherever it might lead.

In The Honor of Thinking, Rodolphe Gasché writes that no matter what Jean-Francois Lyotard turned his eye to—the inhuman, affect, etc—he was everywhere driven by a single task: to “think thinking.” Undoubtedly, the same could be said for any number of thinkers elected to the pantheon of twentieth century philosophy. Though there is no doubt something peculiarly captivating about this task, we would do well to feel our way around the dark chamber to which it consigns us before installing ourselves there. In any direction, blind, groping fingers hit the wall before the arm is fully extended. Whether we find comfort in this confinement or curse its limitation determines the extent to which thought is capable of tracking the revolution in the atmosphere. The entrance to the chamber in which thought is limited to “think thinking” bears an inscription that—like the Temple of Apollo at Delphi—demands “Nothing In Excess.” That the current remains alien to theory is hardly surprising: all the oxygen has already been drained from its thought chamber. Steeped in the lessons of the mirror stage, theory remains entranced by its own image, carefully noting every change: left-eye open, now closed, now squint. “We are,” as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “like sleepwalkers treading in a gutter, dreaming of our genitals rather than looking at our feet.”[v] Stylistic transformations—like double columns simulating a change in content it entrusts form to achieve as if by magic—mask a resistance to the societal content philosophy has always suppressed by standing above it. Like the return to ontology orchestrated by the jargon of authenticity and the desperate appeal to science and mathemes, contemporary theory’s stuttering repetition of well-worn catchphrases about absolute breaks provides the semblance of consolation philosophy requires to maintain a good conscience while remaining at arm’s length from the society it fears has already outstripped it.

Make no mistake: There is no return to Marx’s eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. Yet philosophy can remain faithful to Marx’s hope without falling into either Narcissus’s pool or thoughtless actionism if it beats back the fear that the binds tying it to society are only marionette’s strings it must continually shake off. This is the Hegelian legacy of “capturing the age in thought,” which makes philosophy equal to the content it otherwise looks down on from a height suitable for surveying the sorely ontic world but unfit for sinking down into the muck of things. There are as many ways of avoiding this Hegelian task as there are repercussions for breaking the pact philosophy has long ratified. A set of stale phrases—“always already,” “the exception is, in fact, the condition of possibility of…,” etc.—unthinkingly roll off the tongue no matter what object is approached. These expressions—as wooden and contagious as the hook of the worst pop songs—are the signs of paralyzed thinking, endlessly invoked for fear that there are no longer any experiences capable of achieving expression. An aura of depth surrounds theory’s desperate reliance on a set of formulas designed to provide cover for refusing to expose oneself to the object of thought. Party membership—where one might advance by reviving the ghost of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault or Deleuze—is purchased at the cost of no longer approaching the object of society with eyes wide open. Then as now, the need for support results in clinging to an ontology that promises reconciliation in an unreconciled world. When proof of ontological credentials seemed capable of ensuring the stamp of science, Lacan was asked by Jacques-Alain Miller if he too laid claim to ontology. “Of course, I have my ontology—why not?—like everyone else,” Lacan replied, strengthening the reaction against a practice of philosophy that had indicted ontology for serving as a weapon of domination.[vi] Whatever lack empties out the world and its subjects is not, however, an ontological condition, but a social one. Its workings are not clarified by reading off a crib sheet, but by a fanatical thought that abandons itself to the matter at hand, without the aid of readymade rules. Automatized dependence on a system is here, as everywhere else, the mark of submission. That film analysis ceaselessly props up Lacanian formulas is evidence, not of that dogma’s truth, but its poverty: as the film reel spins, the dogma closes its eyes. Gone is the theorist’s surrender to material that, after the destruction of systematic philosophy, took on the appearance of debris. Instead, the object of analysis is measured against a yardstick provided by teacher and whatever fits in easily gets good marks, while demerits are handed out to those aspects that seem to cause trouble. It is for this reason that the safest course lies in either the adolescent method of compare and contrast or submitting an object to the standards of pregiven theoretical rules: if you don’t aim to tackle society, best to make it perfectly clear that the scholastic enterprise is only that, pure and unmixed.

But the Enlightenment’s attempt to shake off the bonds that kept mankind in perpetual immaturity fails to secure its mandate if it ratifies the division of labor meted out over the heads of subjects by peacefully tending its garden. Philosophy’s restriction to examining the nature of thinking—where it does little but reinforce or uproot figures in the history of philosophy—is itself conducted by a current in the atmosphere. A philosophy that only refers to itself is itself socially determined: it grits its teeth and closes its eyes under compulsion, repeating the self-flagellation society everywhere commands its subjects to perform. When atmospheric pressure becomes too great, philosophy releases the safety valve and expels whatever would force it to stare the situation in the face. Theory without content: no matter what happens, the formal line remains unchanged.

Because it is new, the current electrifying the atmosphere today is necessarily obscure: there is only a sense that something new is taking place; the content itself remains cryptically shut up in a form we can only trace with our fingers. The theorist’s failure before the new is only to be condemned when the new is made to dance to the tune of a by now long familiar song. The new is then nothing but an additional permutation of the ever-same. When apprehended in all its novelty, revolutions in the atmosphere force formal laws guiding earlier understanding to fall off because they are only keyed to what would present no surprise. Condemn Foucault’s naïve enthusiasm for the Iranian Revolution all you like; at least he admitted that predetermined categories no longer functioned and set about reconfiguring thought in light of material transformations. Nothing like this happens today: the events in North Africa are treated as simple confirmations.

When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire he struck the match to a region the world had written off as a petrified forest, unable to support the inferno that has now engulfed the world. There is something in the air. If theory remains untouched by this current it deserves the silence in which it now madly gesticulates, shadowboxing with the ghost of a thought that remains unbidden to anything but its own self-reflection.

[i] As quoted in Peter Fenves, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5.

[ii] Alain Badiou, “Tunisia, Egypt: The Universal Reach of Popular Uprisings.” http://www.lacan.com//thesymptom/?page_id=1031

[iii] Peter Hallward, “Arab Uprisings Marks a Turning Point for the Taking.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/22/arab-uprisings-world-order-middle-east

[iv] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Arabs are Democracy’s New Pioners.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/24/arabs-democracy-latin-america

[v] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Czechoslovakia: The Socialism That Came In From the Cold,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism: Sartre on Psychology, Politics, Psychology and the Art (translated by John Mathews; New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 107

[vi] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (translated by Alan Sheridan; edited by Jacques-Alain Miller; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981), 72.

In the Name of the Good Life: Literature as Collateral

2011-03-03T21:53:00.007-05:00

For too long literature has been used to hawk shitty goods. Junk of doubtful quality takes on doubtless value once literature lends it an aura of finer things. Having eased his conscience, the seller makes a killing. Notwithstanding its pretense to the contrary, this swindle illuminates little of either the shoddy product or the literary object. No matter how desperately they are rubbed, the eyes see nothing but a gilded product likely to buckle under the slightest pressure. Yet this technique of street-hawkers and conmen is by no means indisposed to serving the wishes of those standing above the gullible, lower orders. When trash pawned off as a literary analog secures sizable returns, no one asks after the technique’s class origin. Literature is trusted to mask the infernal stench of war with the smell of the good life for poor prolos at the same time as it assures the better educated that the next world is only won by attending to one’s sorry lot with penitent devotion. We are well aware that this sham, of which we are all willing dupes, elevates literature to a height from which it mocks our genuflection, the sign of our enjoying a humiliation we feel incapable of contradicting. The passerby who laughs at the street-hawker’s coupling of a sorry rug with Aladdin’s flight gives the lie to the literary expert’s ceaseless attempt to peddle junk by ornamenting it with literature: the degradations of reality are irreconcilable with the image of utopia literature creates as semblance.

Of course the tendency to use literature’s death mask for fashioning the face of contemporary people and events is backed by a long critical tradition. Yet with the rise of New Historicism and Continental methods of textual analysis during the second half of the 20^th century, the days of employing crude allegories for ideological purposes appeared numbered: once its logic was unraveled, literature appeared unwilling to continue serving the ends of war-hawks and street-hawkers. But it’s hard to forswear the use of a device so well calibrated to generate returns hand over fist. The avatars of advanced consciousness exposed the machinations of domination and blindness at work wherever literature was used to mobilize allies or disarm enemies. Literature, they claimed, is silenced to the extent it is forced to lend its voice to a world it, as art, necessarily opposes. Where it marches in lockstep with the modern world’s brutality, literature forfeits its status as art and becomes communication, propaganda. The text’s autonomy, its stubborn resistance to appropriation, presented itself as incontrovertible. Those who climbed the academic ladder by assigning unquestionable veracity to an author’s expressed intention and using literature to create a formula for the good life felt the rungs being torn out from under their feet. The invasion of European methods of literary analysis was made to foot the bill for the old guards’ lost prestige, with representatives of deconstruction and formalist analysis receiving the lion’s share of blame. An import had taken root in American soil and stolen the oxygen from the academic chamber, leaving breathless those who relied on earlier methods. Methods that aimed to close the gap between literature and reality were impugned with perpetuating a logic of domination to which the writer was unwittingly responsible. Language became party to innumerable atrocities, aided by those who held fast to the ability of literature to communicate a meaning reality could exploit. The new guard—led by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and others—denounced the swindle that had undermined literature, outraging those who noticed that the ground on which they stood was slowly giving way. But an opportunity for vengeful American critics presented itself in December 1987 when it was revealed that de Man had written articles for an anti-Semitic Belgian newspaper controlled by the Nazis until 1942. American critics presented this as confirmation of what they had long suspected: the silence de Man had riven to the heart of texts, as well as the de-historicization his method seemed to demand, was, so they claimed, itself motivated by complicity with a past de Man—and, by association, deconstruction—never chose to disclose. Whatever the merits of the arguments advanced by either de Man’s defenders or his accusers, this controversy is noteworthy insofar as it demonstrates just how seductive the literary swindle remains.

In an issue of Critical Inquiry largely dedicated to the controversy, Shoshana Felman, a former colleague of de Man, set de Man’s silence about his past in relation to both the discourse of witnessing as it emerged out of Auschwitz as well as the peculiar function of the witness, Ishmael, in Melville’s Moby-Dick, the novel de Man translated after resigning from the Nazi-controlled newspaper and before emigrating to the United States. The position of the witness is, according to Felman, the cipher through which the meaning of de Man’s silence discloses itself. For all its studied elegance, Felman’s disquisition on de Man the witness nevertheless leaves a rotten taste in the mouth, a rotten taste that recalls the passerby’s laugh of disbelief at the lengths to which the swindler will go in order to pull the wool over the consumers’ eyes. The street-hawker’s trick, which pawns off a $5 rug to the first fool duped by the mention of the Arabian Nights, powers Felman’s exercise. The hope and despair of German-Jewish writers Primo Levi, Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin is called in by Felman to vouch for the silence of de Man, whose work with Le Soir earned him a place on a list of enemies published by the French Resistance. The unspeakable problems of testifying articulated by Levi, Celan and Benjamin seem to have asphyxiated de Man too, a dubious parallel in no way allayed by the sleight of hand by which Levi’s “We survivors…” somehow comes to speak for de Man as well. The despair faced by the writer who survives in a language unable to communicate the horror—in which people were turned into things and words became levers of death—is magically transformed into the same despair felt by he who transformed the word ‘Jew’ into a summons. According to Felman, de Man remained silent and installed this silence within his own language out of respect for the horror. This obfuscation, in which the victim’s despair becomes indistinguishable from the despair felt by the executioner, is not without precedent: it is a reprisal of earlier efforts in the Federal Republic that aimed to work through the past by mystifying and eliminating any reference to that past. Like de Man’s silence, the circumspect silence of those who, after the war, let nothing slip of their knowledge of the atrocities does not testify to the profundity of their despair but to a defense as calculating as it is dubious. Amidst the tightly arranged web of parallels on which Felman’s text relies, this parallel—like the one between Felman’s account of Moby-Dick and the fantasy of American penitence and resurrection—is never drawn out; its success, however, rests on its being keyed to a wish that fulfills itself even if it is not acknowledged.

Upon their return to the Federal Republic following the war, members of the Institute for Social Research conducted a study of Germans’ relation to their recent past. One of the conclusions of the 1952 Group Experiment held that collective narcissism—manifest, for example, in the evasions and silence of participants—facilitated Germans’ avoidance of the past. In a review of the Institute’s study, Peter R. Hofstätter claimed that the silence researchers had interpreted as a defense reaction was, in fact, a sign of the unspeakable despair these participants must have felt in the face of the atrocities. Silence was thus only natural since, as Hofstatter writes, “There is simply no individual feeling that could satisfactorily correspond to constantly considering the annihilation of a million people.”[i] In his reply to Hofstätter, Theodor W. Adorno countered that it was “the victims of Auschwitz who had to take its horrors upon themselves, not those who, to their own disgrace and that of their nation, prefer not to admit it.”[ii] For those who survived, those who were, as Jean Améry writes, “firmly promised to death, already in the midst of life” after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935,[iii] silence is understandable. As the proverb has it, “In the house of the hanged, one should not mention the noose.” Sanctioning the silence of executioners, on the other hand, claiming that their aphasia must be respected, turns everything on its head. The imperative to respect a victim’s despair has been mangled, yet the aim of this mangling is clear. To excuse the executioner’s silence is tantamount to claiming that, in Adorno’s words, “In the house of the hangman one should not mention the noose” (ibid). Unless one is willing to eviscerate the claims of history and blot out any trace of the past, one will surely admit that it is one thing to not mention the noose in the house of the hanged and something quite different to ignore the same noose in the house of the hangman. By slipping the problem of silence and testimony faced by German Jews into the cause of de Man’s silence, Felman makes it clear, against her intentions, that de Man’s silence is incommensurate with the witnessing of those who suffered the extermination. Yet de Man surely witnessed a disaster, so he must be a witness of some sort. At this point Felman indicates that Moby-Dick might provide the necessary lens through which to understand de Man’s silence and form of testimony.

As the chronicle of a catastrophe, Moby-Dick is no less troubled by guilt, testimony and evasion. The ship tearing through the ocean is called the Pequod, the name of a now “extinct,” Melville writes, Native American tribe. As Wai-Chee Dimock rightly points out, there is an element of subterfuge at work in associating the disappearance of the Pequod tribe with the natural forces that lead to extinction. The tribe did not fall prey to natural forces, sending it to an extinction as blameless as that which befell the dinosaurs: the tribe was exterminated. The ship itself is an exterminating machine. Whaling vessels were designed to exterminate as many whales as possible in order to secure the spermaceti then powering the lights illuminating the United States. But the Pequod is an especially peculiar exterminating machine: it has decided to buck the market and aim at a single whale, the infamous Moby-Dick responsible for taking off Captain Ahab’s leg. Riveted to their task, the crew met disaster when they encountered the object they exhaustively pursued. The ship sank and only Ishmael remained. According to many, Moby-Dick is the story of Ishmael’s path from suicidal despair to monomaniacal exaltation to an apostle of the disaster. For nearly a century, Moby-Dick has been used to warn against the dangers of following a madmen and the fatal lengths to which one is driven when inspired by an idea. Ishmael survives in order to teach us to beware of monomania, fanaticism and the like. Ahab’s mad extremism must, so they tell us, give way to Ishmael’s moderation, a sanity he provides evidence of by renouncing what once made him lose his head. The birth of American Studies rests on appropriating Moby-Dick for an American mythology of WWII: F.O. Mathiesson’s discipline inaugurating The American Renaisance left no doubt about Ahab’s proximity to Hitler and the dangers posed by a “man possessed”: with the destruction of the Pequod, Ahab met a “rightful end”[iv] Mathiessen and a century of critics have celebrated. Ishmael’s glorious resurrection requires, then as now, Ahab’s dead body. It is thus no surprise that, as Felman writes, “[de Man] dies as Ahab and survives as Ishmael.”[v]

Although this analogy is no doubt easier to stomach than the identity Felman draws between de Man’s silence and that of the victims—since Ishmael was, like de Man and unlike the Jews, not simply the victim, but an enthusiast of the disaster—the deployment of literary figures as allegories betrays the very autonomy of the text de Man had committed himself to protecting. As Felman turns literature into the silent script of contemporary events in order to ensure that the swindle does its magic, she relies on a method of arming oneself that the very man to whom she pays homage had worked to disarm. Literature is ripped out of its textual surface and forced to dance to the critic’s tune. For Felman, de Man is a modern-day Ishmael who, having once fallen for the seductions of Ahab’s totalizing vision, survived and wrote as a form of penitence. With this, theory’s avant-garde turns an artwork—whose incommensurability with reality it tirelessly defended—into a form of collateral capable of backing de Man’s name. This is, indeed, the most traditional and ideologically effective method of interpretation. Literature sweetens the deal, masking the rotten taste in the mouth. Felman’s effort here is no different than that of the century of critics who preceded her: the symbol she squeezes out of Moby-Dick is an afterimage of the what critics have always used to either ratify or denounce wars in Germany, Vietnam, and Iraq. Felman’s Moby-Dick is a reprise of the struggle of good (Ishmael) against evil (Ahab), in which the survivor confesses his disillusionment with the grand narrative in which he tried to play a minor part, thereby winning his freedom. This is the story of regeneration through resignation that has marked the long history of American Studies. As the shadow of Auschwitz looms over the world, the Pequod becomes—like the Native American tribe from which its name derives—the sign of what deserves extermination.

The memory of Auschwitz—as well as de Man’s unarticulated memory of Auschwitz—has forced questions of ethical responsibility upon literary studies. Justly or not, the question is asked: How does the writer concerned with memory and disaster fail to own up to his own memory of the disaster? The reflex of disgust that swells the head when confronted by those who lent their names to the Nazi apparatus is stilled by treating literature as a source for devising rules designed to understand what would have otherwise incited demands for revenge. Clearing de Man’s name by appealing to Moby-Dick forces Felman to locate a wise man in the disaster of the Pequod; she finds this figure behind the door a century of critics have already opened for her. Yet the lesson Ishmael imparts, which prefigures, according to Felman, the lessons de Man installs within his own work, has no place within an artwork, which, as an artwork, casts its lot with whatever resists subsumption into the world’s morality. According to Felman, Moby-Dick—like de Man’s writing—furthers the aesthetic education of man because it foregrounds, via its specific mode of witnessing, “the bankruptcy of all conventional historical divisions and the blurring of all boundaries” (PM 719). De Man and Ishmael teach us that, after the disaster, “It is no longer possible to distinguish between heroes and knaves, regeneration and destruction, deliverance and entanglement, speeches and acts, history and faith, idealistic faith and (self-)deception, justice and totalitarianism, utmost barbarism and utmost civilized refinement, freedom of will and radical enslavement to historical manipulations and ideological coercions” (PM 719-20). Whether this loss of distinctions corresponds to either de Man’s literary project or the situation confronting the witness—both seem doubtful—has no bearing on the aesthetic, social and epistemological forces behind the swindle to which Moby-Dick is subjected [*1]. The success of Felman’s defense relies on a series of operations—leveling the distinction between art and reality, instrumentalizing art for the education of mankind, relying on a tradition that petrifies the artwork into an easily recognized form—that remain uncontested. Nothing resists this swindle’s appropriation of Moby-Dick. There are reasons we do not blush at this appropriation of literature in general and Moby-Dick in particular. There are reasons why the novel always conforms to the same image no matter what ideological or methodological concern animates the critic. This swindle—of which Shoshana Felman’s caricature of Moby-Dick is but a single example—only works for as long as the structure securing its obviousness remains unarticulated and the situation in which it answers a real need continues to reign.

[*1] The apparent impossibility of distinguishing between "heroes and knaves, regeneration and destruction ..." is a symptom of what Max Horkheimer, in "The End of Reason," chalks up to the triumph of so-called 'value judgments' over reason and science. "It is regarded as a matter of subjective preference," Horkheimer writes, "whether one decides for liberty or obedience, democracy or fascism, enlightenment or authority, mass culture or truth. Freedom of choice, however, has always been the privilege of the small groups which enjoyed a life of abundance" (Max Horkheimer, "The End of Reason," The Essential Frankfurt School Reader [edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt; New York: Continuum, 1982], 31). The place in which these distinctions lose their meaning thus come to resemble a so-called boundary situation: "In this cozy atmosphere," Adorno writes in his essay "Commitment," "the distinction between victim and executioner becomes blurred, since after all both are equally vulnerable to the possibility of nothingness, something generally, of course, more bearable for the executioners" (Notes to Literature: II, 89).

[i] Peter Hofstätter, “On Group Experiment by F. Pollock: A Critical Appraisal,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany (translated and edited by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 195.

[ii] Theodor W. Adorno, “Reply to Peter R. Hofstätter’s Critique of Group Experiment,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany (translated and edited by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 208.

[iii] Jean Améry, “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella Rosenfeld, New German Critique, No.20, Special Issue 2: Germans and Jews (Spring – Summer, 1980), 17.

[iv] F.O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 456.

[v] Shoshana Felman, “Paul de Man’s Silence,” Critical Inquiry. Vol. 15. No. 4 (Summer, 1989), 718; herafter referred to as PM.

The Collège de Sociologie and the Institute for Social Research: Between Fascism and Mimesis

2011-02-25T20:03:00.015-05:00

Seeking clemency for the disaster, consciousness is enjoined to admit there might be nothing separating mimesis from fascism. Mimesis, no matter how it is understood—as imitation, mimicry, identity, fakery, magical possession—appears fatally responsible for fascism’s ritualized simulations of identity, complicit with the Führer’s purported incarnation of primordial power as much as the imitative conformity that makes the thoughtless repetition of stock-phrases a sign of the speaker’s wise assimilation to the environment. In contemporary theory too, mimesis is convicted for conspiring with reaction. As Martin Jay notes in his "Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe," from Deleuze and Guattari, to Lyotard and de Man, theory appears unequivocally hostile to the concept of mimesis, indicting it for its "false belief in the fixity of meaning and the possibility of achieving full presence, a language game that fails to see itself as such."[i] Accused of striving to eliminate difference, mimesis hides distinctions behind a veil of sameness. For others, however, this mimetic desire to blot out all distinctions does not result in fusion but remains, instead, riven to the very distinction it attempts to overcome. It is, thus, not simply Janus-faced—a monumental gaze fixed in two different directions that nevertheless sees the same thing—but dialectical: resemblance turns into difference at the very moment difference passes over into resemblance.[ii] Mimesis becomes a name for the labor of differentiation itself,[iii] as the identity-inducing notion of mimesis gives way to an inherently dynamic mimesis perpetually chasing its own tail. Everything transforms itself into its opposite, endlessly. And whatever refuses to offer up its difference to generalized sublation, whatever relies on a deed of ownership in order to mark out the ground it shares with no other, is quickly uprooted by the finger-wagging reproaches of mimesis: "The signature securing ownership is, after all, always already a forgery," reminds the force of mimetic deterritorialization leading us by the nose.

According to Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "the division between appearance and reality, presence and absence, the same and the other, or identity and difference … grounds (and ... constantly unsteadies) mimesis."[iv] But something in this reclamation of mimesis rings hollow. It is not dialectical, but skeptical. If the claim to truth integral to presence is only a posture always already undermined, then there is no tension animating the relation between presence and absence; presence is then nothing but a straw man blown away the moment it is erected. When this skeptical mimesis surveys oppositions, it does not see each in its materiality, but only generalized semblance. The form this opposition takes—form and content, mind and body, true and false—is irrelevant because the content of the opposition is always wholly arbitrary, capable of being endlessly exchanged with anything else without effecting any change. This world of semblance, untethered to the dirt on which it would combat truth, is nothing but simulacra, another turn of the screw performed by the invisible hand of exchange value. Once mimesis represses its relation to materiality, its gestures cannot even cut through its own hot air. Perpetual deterritorialization appropriates land that is never anything other than virtual. It is undialectical because it does not insist on the mediation of presence and absence but, instead, silences the demands of both by abstract negation on its way to legitimating the reign of the reification of which it is itself endemic. No matter where it casts its glance, skeptical mimesis never finds anything resistant to its leveling power, thus providing contemporary consciousness with the phantasmagoria of power and security it can only secure by convincing itself of possessing a claim to authority contemporary society renders impossible. The historical demand that nothing stand on its own two feet when facing the coercive power of exchange is accommodated by the mimetic stare that tears out its eyes for fear of what it might see.

Because the claim to truth is everywhere denounced as cryptofascist, mimesis is only elected for rehabiliation once it has been deprived of its share of truth, shorn of its materiality and surrendered its title to skepticism’s ascendant monopoly. What confesses its ignorance of truth thereby proves itself immune to suspicions of fascism. Contemporary thought attempts to tear out the thorn history has grafted onto concepts by disavowing its relation to history, remobilizing concepts purged of anything that would incriminate the speaker. Mimesis thus becomes deaf to the entreaties of objects it pretends to give an audience to: it fears that, if it gives itself over to the call of objects, it will lose itself and so, like Odysseus, ties itself to the mast. Ever vigilant against giving way to its desire, against committing an error that, like an inexpiable sin, allows for no redemption, skeptical mimesis repeats the work of that skeptical consciousness which, in Hegel, "seeks only to be for itself."[v] It is this consciousness, wary of unleashing the terror mimesis is believed to promise, that produces skeptical mimesis. Forever surveying things from a height removed from the muck of things, its furious work "understands how to belittle every truth, in order to turn back into itself and gloat over its own understanding, which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any content" (ibid). Dynamic but struck dumb by fear of error, skeptical mimesis anxiously covers its ears whenever it appears someone might ask "whether this fear of error is not just the error itself" (PS 47). Mimesis is exiled to a house of mirrors in which it everywhere mistakes its own image for that of another. Because nothing is permitted to change, skeptical mimesis is able to demonstrate the same phenomenon animating every reflection of itself. Devised as a method for rescuing mimesis from its deployment in that aestheticization of politics we call fascism, skeptical mimesis cowers under the shadow of a century that opposed reification and unleashed disaster; by declaring its obedience to a residual theory of truth it imagines will protect itself against the strong truth contained within fascism’s opposition to reification, mimesis casts its lot with reification.

Unconsciously faithful to the categorical imperative Adorno claimed Hitler to have imposed upon the human race—"to organize its thinking and its action in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself, that nothing comparable can occur in future"[vi]—this skeptical concept of mimesis is, like much contemporary theory, haunted by the screams of the victims. Respect for the victims is proven by stripping mimesis of what, in it, greased the tracks to its fascist appropriation, making mimesis synonymous with the resignation of the German who, in order to survive, mimetically approximates his surroundings in order to survive as well as he who, like the French writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, aims to combat fascism by turning its own weapons against it. In "To Die as Democrats or to Survive as Fascists," Drieu attempted to mobilize the "terrible pragmatism" of fascism: "I call fascist the only method capable of withstanding and deterring the expansion of fascist countries. And I say: you will sleep and die as democrats, as liberals, or you will revive, resurge, and triumph as fascists."[vii] The interwar years witnessed an increased interest in everything that, like mimesis and the sacred, seemed to disclose an essential affinity between modern Western civilization and primitive societies. After fascism unleashed a new barbarism, the reintroduction of these primitive notions was itself blamed for providing the foundation for fascism’s primitive violence. In a world ruined by the return of powers which manipulated the forces of the sacred and mimesis for destructive ends, interest in these notions was retroactively identified with complicity in the terror. In the midst of claims that those who examined the primitive and its force in modern society were forerunners of fascism, Marcel Mauss, who was, with his uncle Emile Durkheim, instrumental in reintroducing the discourse of the sacred, remarked

That great modern societies, and ones that had more or less emerged from the Middle Ages, could be subject to suggestions as Australians are by their dances, and made to turn around like children in a ring, is something we had not really foreseen. We did not put our minds to this return to primitivism.[viii]

Tarred by their association with fascism, these primitive notions appear unrecoverable. Throughout his writings, Adorno demonstrated that, because of mimesis's plasticity, nearly every reaction to the rise of Hitler could be keyed to one of its senses. Expertly mobilized by fascism, mimesis is, for Adorno, nonetheless essential to making good on "the new categorical imperative.” Between the neutralization of mimesis at the hands of contemporary skepticism, its fascist instrumentalization and its misdirected invocation by members of the Collège de Sociologie, Adorno’s affirmation of mimesis remains bound to the erotic and archaic heritage of mimesis at the same time as it resists sinking into irrationality. Refusing to resign itself to mirroring the work of reification out of fear, mimesis in Adorno serves as the name for a form of cognition that neither deceives itself by clinging to identity nor buries its head in mimesis’s archaic inheritance in order to counter fascist irrationality with an irrationality of its own. Although Adorno's concept of mimesis most visibly distinguishes itself in Aesthetic Theory, little light is shed on either the historical movement of this concept or its many distinctions from skeptical mimesis by simply invoking its status in that text. A passing familiarity with Adorno's Aesthetic Theory—where art serves as the "indigenous domain of mimesis"[ix] and mimesis provides for an "attitude toward reality distinct from the fixed antithesis of subject and object" at work in instrumental rationality (AT 110)—makes it sufficiently clear that, because it remains tethered to both truth and negative dialectics, Adorno’s affirmation of mimesis is irreconcilable with skeptical mimesis. Yet the status of mimesis within Adorno’s thought, as both a danger and a sign of reconciliation, emerges most clearly in Adorno's fraught relationship with the work of the French theorist of mimesis and Georges Bataille collaborator, Roger Caillois. Credited with developing novel ways of conceiving mimesis and considered for collaboration with the Institute for Social Research, Caillois also evinces a mimetic reaction to the rise of Hitler Adorno denounced in no uncertain terms: "I can only reinforce your own considered judgment,” Adorno writes to Benjamin in 1937, “that the man really belongs to the other side…”[x] Because the explosiveness of the concept of mimesis is bound up with the question of taking sides, it is necessary to come to grips with the many political valences of mimesis that emerge among the members of the Institute for Social Research and the Collège de Sociologie in order to properly determine how Adorno's concept of mimesis takes the side of the political emancipation it everywhere promises.

Mimesis, in each of its permutations, always concerns a relationship between nature and history. Adorno's 1932 lecture "The Idea of Natural-History" first formulates the task under which his life's work will proceed: to push the concepts of nature and history to the point that their customary antithesis breaks down. In his 1964-1965 lectures on History and Freedom, Adorno refers to that early lecture and repeats the necessity of "behold[ing] all nature, and whatever regards itself as nature, as history ... Conversely, however, everything historical has to be regarded as nature..."[xi] This demand—that history and nature be brought into such close proximity that an immersion in the other explodes the antithesis in which they are traditionally separated—becomes urgent in the face of theoretical and practical tendencies that, raising the ghost of prima philosophia, distinguish between the saving power of the ontological and ontic particulars requiring adaptation. Against the ontological need then ascendant in Germany and which has, since then, consolidated its global advances with the irresistible mystification that promises an escape from the wretched world of second nature by way of a telos issuing from an unsullied first nature, Adorno breaks the spell ontologists have cast over the laws of gravity and accelerates their free fall: "Second nature is, in truth, first nature."[xii] Ontology’s attempt at saving the purity and honor of first nature for those who are properly attuned to it, this need for a first principle can "no more guarantee its object than the agony of the starving assures them of food" (ND 65). The problem cannot be spirited away. It is, instead, internal to the customary antithesis of first and second nature, subject and object, to which we remain entranced. By now consciousness has blown so much dust over its object that it begins to regard this shroud of dirt as the thing itself. Fixed by the subject's gaze, nature is petrified and, like everything that meets the Gorgon's stare, turned to stone. But who, if anyone, has the last laugh? The diremption of subject and object, of first and second nature, whose partition divides the two at the same time as it presses the subject's nose to the window it cannot break through, razes nature until, as in Beckett's Endgame, there is no longer anything to see:

HAMM:

Open the window.

CLOV:

What for?

HAMM:

I want to hear the sea.

CLOV:

You wouldn't hear it.

HAMM:

Have you opened the window?

CLOV:

No.

HAMM:

Then it's not worth while opening it?

CLOV:

No.

HAMM (violently):

Then open it!

(Clov gets up on the ladder, opens the window. Pause.)

Have you opened it?

CLOV:

Yes.

(Pause.)

HAMM:

You swear you've opened it?

CLOV:

Yes.

(Pause.)

HAMM:

Well ... !

(Pause.)

It must be very calm.

(Pause. Violently.)

I'm asking you is it very calm!

CLOV:

Yes.[xiii]

But whatever laughter is provoked here provides no relief. It is, instead, a verdict on a situation that, cleaved to the antithesis of first and second nature, mutilates both. When nature is nothing other than what history pins beneath its boots, barbarism becomes the truth of progress. “The domination of nature,” Rolf Tiedemann writes, “always meant first the domination of man’s own nature, just as domination originally formed out of the model of the domination of nature.”[xiv] The dialectical conception of natural history Adorno calls for reanimates the object progress has everywhere pacified at the same time as it disorients the gaze of the subject; dialectics is, as Adorno writes, "comparable to the experience the eye has when looking through a microscope at a drop of water that begins to teem with life."[xv] Disinterred by dialectics, nature returns the subject's gaze and, refusing the suffering it bore throughout the history of domination, demands reparations. It is here, in the requirement that the relationship between nature and man be rethought, that Caillois's work on mimesis intersects with Adorno.

Caillois's "Le mante religieuse" [The Praying Mantis], first published in the Surrealist review Minotaure (1934), then republished in Le mythe et l'homme (1938), aims to demonstrate that human activity—even at its most singular, in the act of love—is not distinct from, but a mere reflection of, naturally existing phenomena by examining the force the praying mantis holds over the human imagination. The praying mantis—its name, form and habits—is what Caillois calls an “objective ideogram”: that is, an image which, realizing the “virtualities of the mind in the outside world,” seizes the affected mind.[xvi] Rather than seek the source of this “primal emotional constellation” in the human mind alone—as he charges psychoanalysis with doing—Caillois suggests that comparative biology, because it traces the link between human reactions and those observable in the rest of nature, is best equipped to clarify these constellations (ibid). Caillois’s examination of the praying mantis alights to prove that human’s relation to love and death is prefigured in the habits of the praying mantis, a link that accounts for the affective grip the mantis secretly holds over the human imagination. The “obscure sense of identification” (PM 73) governing our relation to the praying mantis testifies to the “continuity between nature and the mind” (PM 76), a continuity in which both the desire to return to an insensate condition and the fear of death linked to the sexual act are hauntingly illustrated by the praying mantis. Caillois’s sensitivity to the link between nature and the mind—or, what Adorno calls in a letter to Benjamin, the “relationship between human imagination and zoological behavior”—reveals a profound affinity between the three, each of whom attempt “to shatter the reified separation of spheres like the biological on the one hand and the socio-historical on the other.”[xvii] Like Benjamin and Adorno, Caillois does not seek to dissolve myths by simply appealing to enlightened consciousness; he fails, however, to subject myth to social analysis, introducing an historical dynamic into biology but stopping short of inserting biology into the historical dynamic itself. This lack of mediation results in continuity, grafting the one to the other, the lack of a dialectical relation making one a mere copy of the other. Even if there is, as Adorno writes, “only the slightest difference between a head-eating mantis and man himself,” this difference—to which Adorno replies, “Vive la petite difference”—must be maintained if the relation between first and second nature is not to collapse into unmediated identity (ibid).

Yet despite his criticisms of Caillois—his Jung and Klages-like “vulgar materialism” and political tendencies that converge all too easily with calls for a national community—Adorno is nevertheless attracted to Caillois. In a 1938 letter to Benjamin, Adorno criticizes Caillois’s “L'Aridité” at the same time as he cannot help but remark upon “[Caillois’s] quite extraordinary gifts” (CC 266). “There are,” Adorno continues, “very few human beings about whom one can feel such regret as one does with him” (ibid). In their 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkeimer approvingly cite Caillois’s remarks on festival[xviii] and mimetic behavior (DoE 188-9), the former marking a point prior to the ruler’s introduction of pleasure as a rational measure, the latter, in accord with Freud’s death drive, corresponding to an “inclination to let oneself go, to lapse back into nature” at work in both the criminal and the work of art (ibid). In his 1938 review of "Le mante religieuse" for Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Adorno notes that Caillois’s work has “its progressive side;”[xix] yet there can be little doubt that Benjamin’s characterization of Caillois’s work as a cryptogram of “fascist praxis”[xx]—in “L'Aridité,” Caillois calls for “a dialectic of voluntary servitude” to counteract the “carelessness” and “ostentation” of the modern world[xxi]—made urgent the task of isolating the element of regression within this putatively progressive thought.

Caillois’s concept of mimesis, as it appears in “The Praying Mantis” and the essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” also collected in Le mythe et l'homme, includes two sets of mimetic relations: first, mimetic relations between species—whereby man (history) imitates other organisms (nature)—and, second, mimetic relations within each species—whereby an organism (be it historical or natural) imitates either its own surroundings or another organism of the same species. Despite the politically dubious accent Caillois attached to mimesis, it nevertheless intersects with two of Adorno’s abiding concerns—that is, the attempt to bring first and second nature into closer proximity and the search for a thought of existence beyond the logic of self-preservation. Adorno would surely agree that, as Caillois writes in “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” “… there remains in the ‘primitive’ an overwhelming tendency to imitate … a tendency still quite strong in ‘civilized’ man,” as well as Caillois’s insistence on the existence of a process of “depersonalization”[xxii] (ML 30) “alongside the instinct of self-preservation” oriented “toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling” (ML 32). The decisive difference between Caillois and Adorno on the question of mimesis turns on the place this other instinct—which pulls mimesis, likeness, sacrifice and desire within its orbit—holds within the project of critical thought.

Yet the language of instinct is not Adorno’s, who, instead, speaks of a mimetic impulse, detectable as much in the fascist collaborator’s compulsive attempt to blend into his environment as it is in the degenerate art the Nazi’s prohibited. For Caillois, on the other hand, mimetic activity is essential solely on account of its relation to excess, to what exceeds the evolutionist’s imperative that everything act in the interest of utilitarian advantage: it is for this reason that Caillois opposes the evolutionist’s explanation of the mantis’ act of decapitation—according to which the female devours the male’s head in order to secure the nutrients necessary for laying eggs—by pointing to the wholly excessive, strictly unnecessary motive of the mantis’ act: Caillois asks “whether the mantis’s goal in beheading the male before mating might not be to obtain a better and longer performance of the spasmodic coital movements, through the removal of the brain’s inhibitory centers” (PM 78). Mimesis, like excess and the sacred, belonged to a host of concepts the founders of the Collège de Sociologie, Caillois and Bataille, hoped to resuscitate in order to quicken the pulse of a society seemingly incapable of opposing the stultifying effects of parliamentary democracy and the nascent fascist threat. The return of a certain type of primitivism is not to be stalled, but accelerated. “Excess,” Caillois writes, “generates the ferment from which a new, revived order will be born.”[xxiii] The form of mimesis urged by the Collège was, as Bataille declared in a 1934 letter to Pierre Kaan, outfitted to meet the fascist threat on the same “mythological level”[xxiv] it had staked out for itself and stoke “not the reason but the passions of the masses,” as Bataille wrote in “Popular Front in the Street.”[xxv] Like Adorno and Caillois, Bataille claimed that early human beings “were brought together by disgust and by common terror”[xxvi]; but for the Collège and Acéphale, the secret society it founded in order to make practical its theoretical preoccupations, this common terror was to be the source of a new sacred society, a birth in blood Adorno would regard as inherently irrational, a mimetic identification with the fascist aggressor. Mimesis, excess, and the sacred, concepts central to Adorno’s critical theory, became watchwords for imminent horror because of their fascist deployment and affirmation by Collège members, like Bataille, whose political sympathies were suspect. The dangerous ambiguity at the heart of the Collège’s concepts provides, what Simonetta Zamponi-Falasca calls, “an instructive legacy.” “When one invokes a more expansive affective notion of the political,” she continues, “when one invokes a more involving sense of community, one is a razor-thin margin away from falling prey to aestheticized fascism. The Collège in its own way showed us such a risk” (LS 52). This is the instructive lesson one is asked to bear in mind when considering a reclamation of mimesis. For Adorno, however, the “good advice” contained within such instruction belongs to that form of “ultra-wisdom” Hegel derided as inimical to the task of philosophy.[xxvii] The fate of mimesis at the hands of the Nazis does not signal the need for disposing of the concept out of fear of the ‘razor-thin margin’ one approaches in invoking it. When it calculates the distance it must maintain in order to guard itself against these forbidden objects, philosophy acts as if its every word were chosen in order to justify itself at any price in front of an imaginary courtroom empowered to grant it the clemency it secretly suspects it doesn't deserve.

Mimesis is not, in Adorno, keyed to a determinative goal; it is, instead, fundamentally ambivalent, riven to the history of subject and object relations—from the primitive’s imitation of overwhelming nature to modernist art’s imitation of non-conceptual material banished by instrumental rationality. Mimesis accompanies fear, domination and the image of reconciliation, serving reaction as compliantly as it does the avant-garde. It is pharmakon, both poison and cure. Yet, for Adorno, it is hardly undecidable. From the first to the last, Adorno does not hesitate to distinguish between genuine and false mimesis, an impulse that remembers the mediation of nature and man as well as the calculated manipulation of imitation to further suppress nature. As a reflex camouflaging the threatened insect in its environment, mimesis is simple, mindless repetition. In order to serve as a sign of reconciliation, mimesis must recall and assimilate itself to what has been sacrificed and dominated in order to guarantee the self’s unity. Fascism, “the mimesis of mimesis” (DoE 152), is, for Adorno, the perversion of genuine mimesis, the deformed emergence of a form of mimesis civilization has repressed that is then simulated by the abracadabra of the leader in order to make mimesis work against the reconciliation it longs for.

Yet the genuine, primitive dimension of mimesis Adorno endorses undoubtedly grates our modern ears. Robert Hullot-Kentor’s elegant formulation—“Mimesis is the affinity of subject and object as it is felt in one’s knees on seeing someone else stumble on theirs”[xxviii]—registers something of the archaic trace legible in mimesis’ irruption in the modern world that appears, if note convincing, at least plausible. This kind of mimesis, which recalls the work of empathy, spontaneity, and reflex, strikes the mind as inexplicable at the same time as the body accedes to its truth. It is this obscurity that leads J.M. Bernstein, surely one of Adorno’s most sympathetic explicators, to conclude that Adorno’s dependence on mimesis—that, in Adorno’s words, “Rather than imitating reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement to reality. Ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be reversed; in a sublimated sense reality should imitate the artworks” (AT 132)—constitutes a “tendentious line in argument”[xxix] at the same time as he assents to the viscerally mimetic effect of art without being able to discursively account for it (FA 220). Yet the charge Bernstein brings against Adorno’s dependence on mimesis—that it “gives mimesis a substantiality and independence it does not possess” (FA 204)—misfires, since mimesis’s lack of substantiality is not proof against the position it holds. Were it substantial, a ready and unquestionable foundation for the sound argumentation Bernstein desires, mimesis would not be inimical to the violence of the substantial subject but part and parcel of it. It is doubtless true that mimesis lacks substantiality. Yet this lack is due, above all, to mimesis’s historical marginalization. The prohibition on mimetic modes of existence is, as Adorno writes, the condition of civilization enforced by rulers and their minions throughout history, the force behind the ancient ban on images, the banishment of actors and gypsies and the demand that children be cured of their childishness (DoE 148). If it does not serve the interest of domination, imitation must be prohibited. The weakness in the knees felt by one who sees another stumble to theirs is the memory of an affinity the ego must have hardened itself against in order to constitute itself as the cold subject of modernity. Yet the subject that dominates itself in order to defend itself against the mimetic impulse is only a single episode in the long struggle against uncontrollable mimesis.

Like the yawn spreading among a human group as if it were a contagion, the insect vanishing into its surroundings belongs to what Adorno calls mimetic behavior proper, an organic adaptation to others that will be overcome by subsequent phases of mimetic reactions (ibid). In Adorno’s anthropological account of mimesis’s development, a particular, historically saturated form of sacrifice always follows the course of mimesis. In the magical phase of human history, for example, the sacrificed animal is a stand-in for the god that, with the death of the animal, dies its own death. Here the shaman becomes the demon in order to borrow its power, vanishing in identification through controlled mimesis. But this essential likeness inspiring mimetic behavior is lost in the mythological phase, when mimesis begins to operate by way of substitution, not identity. The sacrificed calf is only an offering, a substitution for the spared first born. Yet even here the singularity of the calf is essential; another animal would not do. In the historical phase, the age of Enlightenment, singularity and substitution give way to arbitrary exchange, as the particularity of the sacrificial object becomes irrelevant. The victim is no longer a substitute for another but wholly arbitrary, like the victims Sade everywhere sacrifices to his desire. In consumer society, the disposable, arbitrary object is coupled with an illusory subject who everywhere mimics the image of an individual he will never become. This is, as Karla L. Schultz writes, the “tragedy of mimesis” inscribed within the history of rationality traced in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which culminates in the Fascist imitation of magical mimesis for the ends of domination.[xxx]

This anthropological history of mimesis could also be read off the face of the subject, since the history of the subject is also the story of mimesis’s subjugation. The subject’s unity, its identity with itself, is only guaranteed by its absolute differentiation from its other, its repulsion of the affinity spontaneously called up again at the sight of another’s falling. The false projection manipulated by the anti-Semite has its prehistory in the ego’s consecration of whatever is different from itself as alien and therefore threatening (DoE 154). Struggling to banish the affect it feels unable to tame, the ego hardens itself against affective affinity, thereby sanctioning the division of thought from feeling that eventuates in the determination that only what does not suffer, what feels nothing, can become the material and source of knowledge. Instrumental rationality is the product of this struggle against the claims of nature mimesis articulates. In Adorno, mimesis is a form of cognition, not because it acknowledges our shared participation in what Kaja Silverstein calls “the Book of Life,”[xxxi] but because it insists on the mediation of subject and object, of feeling and thinking, prohibited by the subject whose domination is assured by the extermination of whatever is capable of generating a feeling of affinity the subject finds intolerable. In this way, the affective aspect of the relation between subject and object is excised, an excision Adorno’s notion of reflective mimesis aims to repair. “Uncontrolled mimesis is,” as Adorno and Horkheimer write, “outlawed.”[xxxii] In contemporary society, objects are determined according to whether or not they can become acceptable objects of worship and charges of idolatry are brought against those who—like the fetishist or the collector of knick-knacks—remain attached to objects deemed worthless by the law of ratio (DoEC 114). In conformity with this prohibition, knowledge reveals itself as the organization of a fear it must perpetually defend itself against. This fear, once responsible for the animal’s assimilation to its environment, becomes the motivation for isolating distasteful aspects of oneself and transferring them onto others as nature is transformed from a cover for the subject to the enemy the subject finds both within and outside itself.

If genuine mimesis is little more than a feeling of empathy—as Hullot-Kentor’s example and Adorno’s own writing sometimes suggests—it would hardly prove itself capable of countering instrumental rationality. Empathy remains a liberal half-measure, sloganeering about how we are all German Jews and the like. The mimetic demand calls, it is true, for a form of identification—in artworks, for example, the move from instrumental to mimetic rationality brings about a change in identification: “Spirit does not identify the nonidentical: It identifies with it” (AT 134)—but this identification does not belong to the tempered, mawkish notion of empathy, a feeling one can maintain while safely removed from the suffering of another; the form of identification at work in mimesis has, instead, shorn itself of the fear of both losing itself as well as meeting the object’s wrath. Adorno calls for a thought that “abandons itself without reservation to the predominant impression” (DoEC 189), without fear. It is in this sense that we are to understand Adorno’s critique of Kant’s perpetual attempt to “punish reason’s exceeding its bounds” and bridle whatever “irresistibly surges past its own limits.”[xxxiii] It is the epistemological constraint—the subject must remain at a distance from the object—ratifying the traditional antithesis of subject and object that mimesis attempts to undermine so as to generate a mode of cognition that is no longer based upon the subjugation of the object. “A thinking that approaches its objects openly, rigorously, and on the basis of progressive knowledge,” Adorno writes

is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It turns the quintessence of experience accumulated in it to the objects, rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew. Were philosophy to beat back the fear caused by the tyranny of the prevailing philosophical movements … then it would be capable of recognizing what that fear prohibits, what an unmarred consciousness would be intent upon.[xxxiv]

Knowledge accrues to the abandon that ignores limits, to the pursuit of an object that risks vanishing in the object. This is why mimesis is, in contrast to instrumental rationality, fundamentally erotic. It is thus no coincidence that art, the indigenous domain of mimesis, is also akin to sex, that “[sexual] experience [is] the incarnate prototype of aesthetic experience” (AT 176). The clear cut dividing subject from object is transgressed as the relation between the two is saturated with libidinal energy. Thought requires affective investment: “… thought’s affective investment in the object [is],” Adorno writes, “… the condition of its truth. Where cathexis atrophies, intelligence becomes stultified.”[xxxv] “Subjectivity slips and slides toward the loved (or hated) object,” Schultz writes, “to attach itself to it and nestle into it, to gain ground, to make visible.” “Thought becomes,” Schultz continues, “persistent and eager, comes so close to the object as to disappear into the form of its content” (MM 148). Although this cathexis is certainly, as Bernstein notes, a “primitive form of love,” there is little reason to suspect that such a primitive love is analogous to empathy.[xxxvi] Empathy implies a distance from the object disallowed by the primacy of the object, as when the subject is so shaken by the object that it risks vanishing in it. The object-cathexis involved in mimesis, involved in a thinking that would join eros and knowledge, is not that of empathy, but of the “want to be extinguished” involved in both sexual and aesthetic experience (AT 176). Mimesis as cognition requires a relationship with eros traditional knowledge has long since shaken off. Yet the affective dimension thus recovered, the call for abandon that replaces the safe wisdom of epistemology, must not forget that—as the next post will detail—the demand for a form of relations that ignores content is itself regressive and risks forgetting that affect itself is never unmediated but ineluctably tied to the bad society it can never move beyond.

Even if philosophy is, as Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, "the thought that refuses all restrictions" (AT 262) and follows the demand of mimesis—to assimilate the self to the other—there is nothing laissez faire about its relation to purveyors of destruction; the sense of affinity mimesis longs for does not, in Adorno, extend to every object, regardless of content, making of this erotic attachment a merely formal command to love others since we are all composed of the same flesh. Hardly so: When Adorno discusses the antinomial structure of Kantian moral philosophy, he identifies a "bodily impulse" that, when combined with consciousness, points to the necessity of, not honoring every object on account of its essential affinity to ourselves, but, instead, taking life by any means necessary (HF 239). Recalling a conversation with Fabian von Schlabrendorff, one of the few survivors of the bomb plot of 20 July 1944 against Hitler, Adorno writes that this spontaneous act constitutes "the true primal phenomenon of moral behavior" (HF 240). Mimesis, despite all its exhortations to reinstall an emotive, erotic element the traditional antithesis of subject and object has suppressed, does not close its eyes to the approach of enemies that, armed to the teeth, seek to cement the domination of nature reflecting mimesis militates against.

[i] Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 21. On the status of mimesis in contemporary theory see, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Jean-Francois Lyotard, "On the Strength of the Weak" in Toward the Postmodern and Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory.

[ii] See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

[iii] This "labor of differentiation" could also be called, among other names, the "differenciator" that generates "identity and resemblance" so central to Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (translated by Paul Patton; New York: Continuum, 2004), 149.

[iv] Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (ed. Christopher Fynsk; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 260.

[v] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (translated by A.V. Miller; New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 52; hereafter referred to as PS.

[vi] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (translated by E.B. Ashton; New York: Continuum, 1973), 365; hereafter referred to as ND.

[vii] As quoted in Michael Weingrad, "The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research," New German Critique, No. 84 (Autumn 2001), 159, n3; hereafter referred to as CS.

[viii] As quoted in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, “A Left Sacred or a Sacred Left? The Collège de Sociologie, Fascism, and Political Culture in Interwar France,” in South Central Review, Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2006, 43; hereafter referred to as LS.

[ix] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 92; hereafter referred to as AT.

[x] As quoted in CS 139.

[xi] Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (edited by Rolf Tiedemann; translated by Rodney Livingstone; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006), 124; hereafter referred to as HF.

[xii] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History” in Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), 268.

[xiii] Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1968, 64-5.

[xiv] Rolf Tiedemann, “‘Do You Know What It Will Look Like?’ On the Relevance of Adorno’s Theory of Society,” Translated by Sean Nye. Cultural Critique, 70, Fall 2008, 133.

[xv] Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 133.

[xvi] Roger Callois, “The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Callois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 80. Hereafter referred to as PM.

[xvii] Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940 (edited by Henri Lonitz; translated by Nicholas Walker; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 212; hereafter referred to as CC.

[xviii] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; translated by Edmund Jephcott; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 82-3; hereafter referred to as DoE. In a 1962 radio interview with Elias Canetti, Adorno draws Canetti’s attention to the “very significant work on the feast by the French cultural anthropologist Roger Caillois, in which he attributes the feast to a reactive formation, to a reversal of hierarchically strict rites within very rigid, barbaric societies. They an only assure their own institutional survival by reversing their rules and by allowing in certain exceptional situations, even making a duty of precisely what is otherwise forbidden.” See “Elias Canetti: Discussion with Theodor Adorno.” Thesis Eleven, No. 45, 14. The text Adorno refers to, “Théorie de la fête”—which bears an uncanny resemblance to the later and better-known study by Bakhtin on Rabelais—appeared in Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Jan. 1940.

[xix] Adorno, (review of) Roger Caillois, “La Mante religieuse,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung VII (1938): 411. As quoted in CS 139.

[xx] Benjamin, (review of) Roger Caillois, “L'Aridité,” et. al., Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung VII (1938), 264. As quoted in CS 147.

[xxi] Caillois, “L'Aridité,” Measures 2 (15 April 1938): 8. As quoted in CS 146.

[xxii] Adorno’s account of depersonalization in Dialectic of Enlightenment appears to be indebted to Caillois’s “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” There Caillois argues that certain animal species—and, in humans, psychotics—undergo a “depersonalization by assimilation to space.” “To these dispossessed souls,” Caillois continues, “space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put … This assimilation to space is necessarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life,” in Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” in October, Vol. 31 (Winter, 1984), 30; hereafter referred to as ML. In a discussion of the body’s reaction to frightening stimuli, which “recreate moments of biological prehistory,” Adorno and Horkheimer write in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The self which experiences itself in such reactions—rigidity of skin, muscles and limbs—is not quite master of them. For a few moments they mimic the motionlessness of surrounding nature. But as a what is mobile draws closer to the immobile, more highly developed life to mere nature, it is also estranged from it, since immobile nature, which living creatures, like Daphne, seek with utmost agitation to become, is capable of only the most external, spatial relationships. Space is absolute alienation. Where the human seeks to resemble nature, at the same time it hardens itself against it. Protection as petrified terror is a form of camouflage. These numb human reactions are archaic patterns of self-preservation: the tribute life pays for its continued existence is adaptation to death” (DoE 148).

[xxiii] As quoted in LS 49.

[xxiv] Georges Bataille, L’Apprenti sorcier (Paris: Editions de la Difference, 1999), edited by Marina Galletti, 112. As quoted in LS 46.

[xxv] Georges Bataille, “The Popular Front in the Street,” in Visions of Excess, 167. As quoted in LS 46.

[xxvi] Dennis Hollier, ed. The College of Sociology, 1937-39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 105. As quoted in LS 48.

[xxvii] G.W.F Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (edited by Allen W. Wood; translated by H.B. Nisbet; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21.

[xxviii] Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno,” in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 228

[xxix] J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 204; hereafter referred to as FA.

[xxx] Karla L. Schultz, Mimesis on the Move: Theodor W. Adorno’s Concept of Imitation (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 51; hereafter referred to as MM.

[xxxi] Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14.

[xxxii] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (translated by John Cumming; New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 180. Hereafter referred to as DoEC.

[xxxiii] Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (translated by Henry W. Pickford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 282.

[xxxiv] Theodor W. Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (translated by Henry W. Pickford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 13.

[xxxv] Theodor W. Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (translated by Henry W. Pickford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 109.

[xxxvi] J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 401.

Monstrous Objects: Moby-Dick and Monomania

2011-02-12T20:11:00.009-05:00

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius sent lions into battle along with his soldiers, against a barbarian tribe. Members of this tribe had never seen lions so they asked their leader what these animals were. This leader, who ‘knew the significance of names and words,’ replied: ‘These are dogs, Roman dogs.’ Upon which they proceeded to treat them like dogs: they beat them to death with their clubs.’[i]

In order to ensure we take up arms against him, Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab is, like the Emperor’s lions, always called other names, names designed to be as familiar to our ears as they are upsetting to our stomachs. At once the menacing specters clinging to everything unfamiliar are dissolved and an easily recognizable target, whose nature is no longer subject to doubt, stands before us, an enemy we must oppose. Ahab, that ancient name borne by the “ungodly, god-like” Captain of the great American novel, gives way to less ambivalent names whose meaning goes without saying.[i] Ahab becomes a monomaniac, a totalitarian dictator, a fanatic, whatever cuts off the questioning of the reader. As Ahab is turned into an alias assumed by evil, the artwork vanishes, replaced by the finger-wagging of an old-wives’ tale.

Moby-Dick is not simply a text. Saturated by a history of interpretation and commentary, subject to the vicissitudes of society, its force, its very existence, is bound up with this compression neither author nor reader is solely responsible for. The artwork is an index of history, its status ineluctably tied to the society it struggles to free itself from. That some elements of the artwork light up while others remain dark is not simply to due that element’s eloquence or lack thereof. Instead, each element only exists to the extent that it is tailored to society’s brittle constitution. If we cannot, for example, listen to Schoenberg’s atonal compositions without tapping our toes and humming along, it is not because the music allows for the type of head-nodding popular music has accustomed us to. The music itself does not provoke this reaction. Instead, every tap testifies to the dominance of an ear incapable of hearing whatever is not keyed to the rhythms of a reality whose movement corresponds to nothing, except compulsion. If we nod along to the music it is owing, above all, to our resistance to the music, afraid of what we might find—or not find. As a defense, a predetermined mechanism screens out all that would break in upon the mind at the same time as it provides the semblance of an experience it can never achieve. The phantom beat makes it possible to blot out the object while maintaining the delusion of experience. Where no sound is recognizable, the ear creates one. Dedicated to defamiliarization, the artwork is forced to bear a likeness to the familiar. In Moby-Dick, this forced assimilation is engineered by a series of names that have always turned the unrecognizable into an identifiable foe who, if kept at a distance, unhesistatingly disarms itself, petrified before a force sharpening its own weapons. The subject, always cast out to sea when faced with an enigmatic artwork, drops anchor once it finds a name that—because it indicates a danger to be avoided at all costs—provides it with a sense of direction, an orientation needed to gain mastery over the work and simulate its sense of operating on solid ground. Ventriloquized, the artwork can no longer moves on its own.

Monomania, the diagnosis Melville’s Ishmael and a century of critics have used to describe and indict inflexible Ahab, continues to serve as an unquestioned sign of monstrosity because it carries with it the echo of a command as imperative today as it was for the alienists of the early 19^th century: subjugate the object of fear in order to know it. Within both the concept of monomania and our treatment of Ahab lies concealed a prescription, a rule for object relations no less operative today than it was in the early 19^th century. Knowledge is due to he who, when faced with a monstrous object, turns away in fright since staring is—in deference to the chaste mores and sexual taboos he unconsciously abides—regarded as the very mark of perversity; with a blinking look terrified of its own desire for seeing, the man of knowledge squints at the object and sees no more than is thought safe. The object his gaze was to illuminate remains indistinct, its outline obscured by the conviction that eyes wide open court nothing but disaster. The object remains bewitched, monstrous, to the extent that the gaze remains entranced by a rule whose transgression exposes the subject to a shudder that would outstrip its capacity for experience. Outfitted in all the tell-tale signs of monstrosity, Ahab is not confronted but diagnosed and cast aside by the language of 19^th century psychiatry. Readers of Moby-Dick have never ceased following doctor’s orders.

The terror inspired by monomania has outlived its clinical relevance. Invented in 1810, monomania vanished by the 1870s, when the records of Paris asylums no longer bore the marks of monomania.[ii] Yet no fear of anachronism prevents contemporary writers from affixing this archaic diagnosis to Ahab. Drained of any recognizable content, monomania still functions as a watchword for monstrosity because it names a fear that continues to terrify. Its afterlife proves that what is archaic is at once eminently modern. Something of the fear monomania inspired, as well as the doctor’s orders that were to stop the contagion it promised, remains in force. “In Melville’s time,” Donald E. Pease writes, “Ahab’s need for absolute power over the crew was interpreted psychologically as monomania rather than politically as totalitarianism.”[iii] Encoded within the center of totalitarianism, monomania is both the first image of contemporary political fears and the cipher of a terror haunting the entire course of modernity. The uncritical contemporary acceptance of Ahab as a damned monomaniac has its truth in this coincidence: monomania is modern because society still conceives objects of fear and the way around them according to rules determined by 19^th century alienists. Modern civilization, whose economic barbarism has rendered the individual superfluous, demands, at the same tame, that its problems be cast in terms of individual pathology. To the reader of Moby-Dick, Ahab’s monomania thus appears constitutive of society as such, a fatal flaw riven to the core of the individual and civilization. It is this double sense that allows William V. Spanos to convict Ahab of “ontological”[iv] and “metaphysical monomania” (EA 132) at the same time as he claims that “Melville seems to be saying [that this monomania] is not Ahab’s alone; it is, Western civilization’s at large” (EA 124). Whether Melville intends this or not is of little interest; that the link Spanos forges in 1995 repeats the efforts of alienists from 1838 points, however, to an inheritance that is no less forceful for its having been forgotten. “It has long been said,” Jean-Étienne Esquirol writes in his Mental Maladies, “that insanity is a disease of civilization; it would have been more correct to have said this respecting monomania. Monomania is indeed frequent in proportion to the advancement of civilization.”[v] Between the fanaticism released by the wars of religion and the obsession of the fin-de-siècle, monomania emerged as the primal form of modern extremism, a form that has, in the two centuries since its first appearance, lost none of its power to recall the dangers it prophesied. Yet the significance of monomania for modern society is hardly disclosed by pointing to instances in which it is mentioned in the same breath as modern fears. An examination of monomania demonstrates, to the contrary, that modern fears are afterimages of older fears to which we remain spellbound. Terrified by the monstrosity monomania poses, modern society, like the alienists of the 19^th century, guards against a relation to objects that defines the affliction of the monomaniac and devises, instead, a program for self-management capable of warding off those dangers to the imagination let loose by the autonomy inaugurated by the enlightenment and revolution. Because any deviation from this relation to objects spells the onset of a madness that threatens contagion, society immunizes itself against the flight of the monomaniac.

This work of self-immunization is necessary because, unlike earlier determinations of madness, monomania defies easy detection, presenting none of the established signs of madness at the same time as it poses—as its first judicially relevant case, that of Henriette Cornier, demonstrates—a far greater risk. Ms. Cornier’s actions were inexplicable: a doting servant one day chopped off the head of the child she was taking care of.[vi] Before they found her, she threw the head out the window and, when questioned, showed no sign of mental disturbance, no confusion, and although she was unable to provide a motive for her actions, remained fully cognizant of their horror. Prior to the entrance of monomania, madness was always visible to the naked eye; the scarred face and embellished speech of the madman were traces of a lesion to the understanding that cut through the body. The monomaniac, by contrast, often reasons rightly, acts in conformity with prevailing mores and bears but a single, fatal flaw: he cannot shake his attachment to an object. He is neither delirious nor unreasonable; his insanity lies in his being riven to an idea. The monomaniac is a body stuffed by the pathology animating him. In this, however, the monomaniac—which, according to Esquirol, includes Pinel’s manie sans delirie and Pritchard’s moral insanity—is distinguished from the reasonable man only by a matter of degree since he possesses the very same faculties present in the reasonable man. The monomaniac is not deaf to the discourse of mankind; to the contrary, the conversation of mankind, to which his ear is too finely tuned, is the cause of his madness. He lacks neither understanding nor concentration; he is monstrous because, in him, these features are without admixture, so magnified that they overwhelm the eye. Advances in understanding, civilization’s progress, are not inimical to this madness, but provide for its onset (MM 200). The monomaniac, driven by a desire that can only appear to the man of health as belonging to the fixed movements of an automaton,[vii] is, in fact, inspired by the same emotions operative in the normal world. Only here these emotions have been pushed beyond their “just bounds” (MM 27). The world populated by this type of madness is, as Esquirol writes, the same world as our own, only more naked, ungoverned by authorities the healthy mind respects (MM 19). Nothing stands between the monomaniac and his privileged object; reason gives way to an instinct nothing can frustrate. The skin, which usually shields the organs from the external world, offers no resistance when the object impresses itself upon the monomaniac, forcing his hand. The monomaniac is, to borrow an expression from Theodor W. Adorno, “a man with no skin,” the sport of an object reason cannot temper.[viii] Yet monomania’s monstrosity does not end with the neutralization of the individual monomaniac. It is not only the logic of monomania that spells disaster, but also the force of a logic derived from the history of medicine with which it is coupled that, if it is not interrupted, leads to a monomania epidemic. According to the understanding of the 18^th century, diseases were communicated by way of sympathy, as one organ received the impressions of another and suffered as had the other. Similarly, the real threat posed by monomania is not figured by the lone, dangerous individual; far more menacing is the risk that an overpowering idea fatal to one should be communicated to another, that imitation should produce a society of monomaniacs (MM 33, 243). Unleashed by the speculative ideas and dangerous innovations that followed in the wake of the French Revolution, the outbreak of monomania required the construction of a shelter for subjects vulnerable to ideas capable of exalting the mind beyond its ordinary limits (MM 42). After shaking off those ancient usages and opinions that had directed men’s actions and governed their passions, the French populace—like those confined to the asylums— required the resurrection of an authority capable of channeling energies fixed on a single object into more moderate and diffuse habits (MM 279). The impression made by a dominating object must be moderated by an authority capable of restoring the mind to an earlier, less exalted state. Monomania—the site where the normal and the pathological begin to blend into eachother—is also the name of the dread suspicion that the normal is itself pathological, that pathology can infiltrate normality and so pervert order that its turn into disorder becomes, as it does for the monomaniac, the very sign of normality itself.

It is not the monomaniac’s bloodlust that decisively marks the difference between the normal and the pathological here but, instead, the fundamental transformation in object relations introduced by the monomaniac. And yet, when cured, the monomaniac does not regain a unity of mind possessed by the normal man. The alienist’s work—to restore man to himself (MM 21), to correct the mind’s duplicity and make its two halves work simultaneously (MM 363)—creates a new type of human being, a human being compulsively obedient to the imperative of unity. But this unity can only be achieved by recalibrating the human’s relation to its object. The well-tempered relation between subject and object desired by the alienist requires sacrifice: of the subject’s tendency to become absorbed by its object; of the object’s tendency to leave an impression. This double evisceration, which subdues anything capable of outstripping its just bounds, is the cost of securing knowledge and stability. Although the famous image with which Pinel inaugurates the work of moral therapy—that of the freeing of the mad of Bicêtre from their chains—appears to depart form earlier methods that, in order to cure the insane first required their being held under water until the mad ideas drowned as the body neared death, the alienist’s task continues the work of that tradition: dismantle the mind’s fixation on an object and ensure that no such object cathexis will again seize the mind. This task, developed in modernity’s wake, responds to a problem that has lost none of its urgency. For the problem is ultimately one of the imagination: How is the imagination, unshackled by revolution and enlightenment, to be governed so as to prevent the repetition of terrors? Immoderate actions inspired by the mind’s liberation required the expansion of measures designed to prevent further flights of fury. This is the work of the Restoration: the preservation of order necessitates the detection of threats that have not yet turned into crimes. Monomania was, thus, never exclusively psychological but, because it was the name of a monstrosity riven to the individual and civilization, social through and through.

Of course none of this is either recognized or stated quite so baldly by Moby-Dick commentators, for whom the diagnosis of Ahab as a monomaniac provides the lettres du cachet necessary to guarantee his internment. Yet the fears and solutions animating contemporary critics are infused with the alienists’ prescriptions and distrust of the imagination. Where Ahab appears as, what Pinel called, an “automatic atrocity,” the critic betrays the secret trust he continually draws from in order to turn Ahab into an opportunity for saving ourselves by sacrificing a particular relation to objects that, so they say, can only end in calamity (TI 21). Obedient to doctor’s orders, critics turn Ahab into a lesson in the aesthetic education of man: unlike Ahab, we are to keep the object at a distance, forsake any undue attraction to it and, in keeping with the alienist’s prescriptions, grow a thick skin so that nothing can make such a great impression on us. Moby-Dick becomes a case study, an object lesson in preventing our imitating the “fatal lengths to which Ahab has gone from normality” in pursuit of his object.[ix]

In his introduction to Moby-Dick, David Herd instructs the reader with a schoolmasterly tone that, when followed by raps to the student’s knuckles, aims to disabuse readers of the idea that they might buck tradition. Invoking the post-9.11 situation of the USA, “once more at odds with a fanatical force,” Herd—employing a tactic authorized by a century of literary criticism—deploys the novel to the front lines of the newly minted War on Terror. “Again,” Herd continues, “Melville is diagnosing our condition. Always we need to know what Moby-Dick has to teach.”[x] There is no dissension in the critical tradition: Moby-Dick teaches us to militate against the fanatical force symbolized by the figure of Captain Ahab. From F.O. Mathiesson’s creation of the American canon in 1941 to the rhizomatic interpretations of the 21^st century, Ahab’s bust is always made to bear the marks of a monstrous monomania that can only end in disaster. But with an important difference: because the alienists of 19^th century fancied themselves philanthropists, they aimed at curing monomania; no such fellow feeling stirs Ahab’s interpreters as they everywhere repeat Mathiesson’s judgment: Ahab met his “rightful end” (AR 456). For this terrified, conservative pedagogy, the sign of monstrosity figured by monomania cannot be healed, only wiped out; curing gives way to cleansing. Monomania’s symptomatology does more than simply indicate symptoms; each symptom bears the mark of fate and carries within itself a tendency we should welcome and accelerate. The thoughtless, century-long enumeration of these symptoms indicts Ahab and teaches us that Ahab, long since dead, met his rightful end, and we should continue to praise such a wise killing.

The epidemic feared by 19^th century alienists is, according to Melville’s readers, realized on the ship Ahab captains. When Ahab—unflinching pupil of the maddened head governing his body—loses his head and proposes Moby-Dick’s pursuit, monomania spreads, invading the body of the ship and fastening its crew to an object it pursues with the abandon typical of monomaniacs.[xi] Monomania spreads, as if by contagion, from one to all. A single monster turns into universalized monstrosity: a way of being inflexible, audacious and indifferent that exists as a possibility for all. The Pequod becomes a ship of fools, driven by a madness that has turned “impulse into a reason.”[xii] Yet this impulse, which refashions Ahab and his crew into instruments, can produce nothing but a “monstrous offspring” (BI 88) that, like all monstrosities, deserves the killing meted out by the white whale’s just verdict. That is the moral of the story: the object you pursue wants nothing but your own destruction. The end assured, an escape must be recommended. The pull of the object must be refused, its force defused, unmasked as illusion. Ishmael, lone survivor of the Pequod’s destruction, becomes the mouthpiece for this renunciation. The tragedy of the quest, its just end, the diagnoses of monomania, all are scripted by a narrator who, once enthralled by the object, must distance himself from the contagion he too was afflicted with. Ishmael, we are given to understand, learned from his mistakes and bears testimony to crises he overcome by luck but that we, fortunate readers, can learn from at a distance. This is the story told by Moby-Dick’s readers who, like Ishmael, are ever intent on drawing lessons from disaster in order to save themselves. The novel becomes the story of Ishmael’s “terrible psychological struggle” against Ahab’s view of the world,[xiii] a “proto-psychoanalytical case study”[xiv] in which Ishmael develops a “psycho-archeaology of Ahab” that is able to “successfully … reconstruct and interpret Ahab’s ‘monomania’” (MS 122). Once this interpretation is complete, once the reader achieves a measured distance from the seductive object, the reader is, like Ishmael “psychologically reborn” (SSM 233). Secure on the safe shore of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, the reader, like Ishmael, watches the spectacle of this disaster from a distance and, learning its lessons from the shipwreck, “return[s] to health and sanity” (SSM 232). Bearing witness to Ahab’s monstrosity becomes, like an encounter with the sublime, an opportunity for self-improvement, as the mind comprehends an object of terror and consoles itself with its own sovereignty. Knowledge and health accrue to one who refuses the object’s seductive advances.

With few noteworthy exceptions, readers of Moby-Dick turn Ishmael’s narrative into a prophecy of doom intended to warn the reader against the excesses of Ahab’s pursuit of his object.[xv] As though it were the stare of the Gorgon immediately before the eyes of the reader and not the monomaniac Ahab, the reader quickly diverts his eyes. If he dares look, it is only for a moment; in the interest of self-preservation, he turns away. A passing glance, if extended, risks fixing the reader’s gaze to a figure that can only petrify. The critic, fearful of being counted among Ahab’s crew, betrays no attraction to the old man. Yet even when this attraction is admitted, it is just as quickly repulsed. In his How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom writes, “After more than sixty years rereading Moby-Dick, I have not swerved from my reading experience as a nine-year-old: Ahab, to me, is primarily a hero…”[xvi] But Bloom quickly catches himself, wary of breaking the pact a century of critics have ratified: we must, after all, Bloom writes, “recoil from [Ahab’s] monomania” (HR 238). Similarly, Robert Zoellner, at times seduced by a sympathetic portrait of Ahab, ultimately deems this temptation a mark of perversity and permits no trace of his unconscionable perversion to interfere with the monstrous picture of Ahab he crafts (SSM 277, n5). What accounts for this perversity; and, moreover, why should the literary critic fear perversion? Like one who stands before a corpse, transfixed by its stinking rot, the reader who betrays any attraction to Ahab is liable to meet the censure of his own conscience: he should know better. It is as though Melville’s claim—that his ‘wicked book’ had been baptized ‘In Nominee Diaboli’ – points to that smell of sulfur around Ahab from which readers flee. The reader’s allergy to this smell has not been diminished, but increased, with time because Ahab has, whenever required by political expediency, served as an historical symbol of monstrosity. Ahab is not simply the emblem of the alienists’ fear; the monstrous figures of the 20^th century—Hitler, Stalin, bin Laden—have left their imprint on Ahab, as each was militated against by bringing their mad fury into proximity with Ahab’s drive to destruction. The story of the 20^th century could be told according to the history of Ahab interpretation: his face bears the scowl and furious gaze of the century’s worst tyrants. Small wonder then that Ahab’s physiogamy, marked by these threats to civilization, should provoke in the reader stirred by attraction a feeling of disgust with himself, an attraction renounced once better judgment intervenes and quiets this perverse feeling of affinity. Similarly, Esquirol claimed that the history of France could be told by the history of mental illness, where monomaniacs, exaggerations of objective conditions—the leading idea of the mad always corresponded to the status of society: after the Terror, many imagined they’d lost their head; during the Restoration, many imagined they’d been crowned king—that testify to the course of history as surely as the examination of skulls tells the story of mankind’s emergence (MM 44). With monomania, the incidence of madness is no longer tied to the anatomy but, instead, follows the flights of the imagination stirred up in society at large, making its onset a distillation of societal crises. Ahab’s face, twisted by a similar logic, acquires its monstrosity once monomania, invoked though never subject to second reflection, casts a shadow over his profile. Should monomania become subject to reflection, should its telos of destruction remain distinct from Ahab’s drive, we might hope that readers, like barbarians no longer mobilized by the identification of recognizable enemies, would be permitted an alternative way of approaching objects. Yet those commentators who pass through the history of monomania never deviate from the path prescribed by tradition and, instead, raid the archives of psychiatry in order to furnish further proof of Ahab’s rightful killing.[xvii]

When the critic turns to the clinical history of the term, the result is, in fact, the same: diagnose in order to destroy. There is, in this fever for diagnostic categories, something like a categorical confusion at work: the literary critic, whose task it is to come to terms with aesthetic experience and the enigma of the artwork, employs concepts which aimed, via classification and proper treatment, to rescue a person from ill-health and prevent this sickness from spreading throughout society. Where monomania is affixed to Ahab as though it were a death sentence, the critic performs the work of pathography—that is, the reduction of art to psychological motivations. This tradition belongs as much to psychoanalysis’s infancy as it does to the contemporary critic’s modus operandi. It assumes that a figure—be it a character from an artwork or the author himself—has empowered the interpreter with divining the cause of his actions and reducing to a minimal, pathological force all that one finds improper or unruly. Karl Kraus, Viennese satirist and editor of Die Fackel, was one of the earliest victims of that pathography endemic to contemporary readings of Moby-Dick. Critical of Freud’s analyses of famous personalities, Kraus had suggested in 1908 that “nerve doctors who pathologize genius should have their skulls bashed in with the collected works of the genius.”[xviii] Such remarks made Kraus a target for psyco-pathological analysis. Franz Wittel’s 1910 pathography of Kraus, which, according to Ernest Jones, Freud found “clever and just,” concluded that Kraus attacked a competing newspaper because it represented, for Kraus, “the father’s organ, which corrupts the whole world; the Fackel, on the other hand, is but a small organ… From all this, it is evident that it was a neurotic attitude toward one particular newspaper that was the starting point of [Kraus’s] hatred for journalists.”[xix] In response to the paper, Otto Rank, official secretary of the Society, recorded that, “[Kraus] lacks any trace of self-mastery, and seems to be altogether unrestrictedly at the mercy of his instinct.” Other psychoanalysts, like Albert Joachim (“this is a question of a maniac”) and Max Graf (“a definitely pathological character”), multiplied the number of diagnoses by which this fundamentally ‘corrupting’ pathology could be named.

Although the findings of this technique are self-evidently idiotic, the logic behind its functioning continues to power the work of literary criticism: analysis identifies points corresponding to good health, others that augur ill health and determines a regimen for recovery. Yet here it is imperative to strictly distinguish the historical function of the alienist from the task of the literary critic. After the collapse of ancient usages and customs, once classical authorities failed to adequately judge issues of the day, alienists assumed the role of judges: in the interest of the individual’s self-preservation and the health of society, they decided on questions of life and death. The literary critic has, like the alienist of the 19^th century, assumed the task of reaffirming the social contract by identifying elements inimical to its signing and those that act in its furtherance. Yet one should wonder why an artwork, its interpretation, its critique and the aesthetic experience underlying each, should bear a necessary relationship to the social contract. Why should the critic concern himself with defending society, with providing for the self-preservation of the individual? The artwork is, at all times, opposed to the social contract, whose silent respect it everywhere mocks. Based on a principle of exchange art necessarily undermines, the social contract demands a healthy, well-organized and rationally arranged life in which, as Adorno writes echoing Baudelaire, “où l'action n'est pas la soeur du rêve” [“action is not the sister of dreams”].[xx] The monomaniac inspires dread because in him the distance between dream and reality is short-circuited. Just as Kant feared the “dreaming according to principles” characteristic of fanaticism,[xxi] so too did alienists warn against the potential actualization of the monomaniac’s dreams. “Man then gives a form to the offspring of his mind,” Esquirol writes, “He dreams, while fully awake” (MM 107). Defending society from the perils bound to a world in which action remains the sister of dream, in which impulse itself becomes reason and idea is immediately actualized, becomes the task of the reader drunk on the alienist’s magic potion. Ishmael’s restorative cure is recommended for universal consumption, his wise uncoupling of dream and action serves as a symbol all imitate. Yet Baudelaire’s lament over this dissociation, like the attraction felt by Bloom, Zoellner and generations of critics, registers a protest against this separation, a suspicion that this identity itself contains an idea of utopia we forsake at the cost of sacrificing ourselves. The universal spell cast over Moby-Dick’s readers proscribes a relation to objects in the name of improving society’s health; yet this spell, for all its promise of self-preservation, fails to hasten the slide into barbarism because its code for object relations mistakes the subject’s yearning for its object for a sign of monstrosity and introduces a program for ridding both of its desire for the other, a feeling of affinity for the other, without which there is nothing but a self-satisfied, terrified subject and a menacing, wholly monstrous object. This feeling of affinity, misrecognized as fatal, haunts the de-eroticized knowledge of resigned modernity. The neutered knowledge with which humanity sought to conquer its fears reverses before its eyes into an image of fruitless sacrifice. Its flight from the object, undertaken in order to stay the disaster tied to attraction, fails to satisfy the desire for knowledge of the object, consoling itself, instead, with a cringing comprehension. At the same time as it installs automatic atrocity in the center of Ahab, whimpering humanity constructs a modern subject capable of standing against him, treating him judiciously and vaccinating itself against his advances. The pull of the object felt by Moby-Dick’s readers, formalized in Ahab and warned against by 19^th century alienists, contains a secret society refuses to recognize: The identification of Ahab with evil is historical and thus revocable. It’s time to give up the ghost.

[i] Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002), 68. Hereafter referred to as MD.

[ii] See Jan Goldstein’s analysis of the admission registers in the years 1826-33, 1841 and 1870 in Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 154-5.

[iii] Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Conext (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 245.

[iv] William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 127-8. Hereafter referred to as EA.

[v] Jean-Étienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (trans. E.K. Hunt, M.D.; Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 200. Hereafter referred to as MM.

[vi] See Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salmoni; trans. Graham Burchell; New York: Picador, 2003), 109-136.

[vii] Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity (trans. D. D. Davis, M.D.; Sheffield: Cadell and Davies, 1806), 186. Herafter referred to as TI.

[viii] Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature: Volume Two (ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen; New York: Columbia University Press), 59.

[ix] F.O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 449. Herafter referred to as AR.

[x] David Herd, “Introduction: How the Whale Got Its Lungs,” in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002), xxx.

[xi] Richard Manley Blau, The Body Impolitic: A Reading of Four Novels by Herman Melville (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1979), 86. Hereafter referred to as BI.

[xii] Paul Brodtkorb, Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby-Dick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 80.

[xiii] Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick (Berkley: University of California Press, 1973), 120. Herafter referred to as SSM.

[xiv] Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 123. Hereafter referred to as MS.

[xv] See Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in ed. Joy James, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, The Black Feminist Reader (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 200), 24-56; Timothy B. Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 153-176; the Weatherman’s Mark Rudd in Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 160; Alan Lebowitz, Progress Into Silence: A Study of Melville’s Heroes (Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press, 1970); Clare L. Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2006).

[xvi] Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 235. Hereafter referred to as HR.

[xvii] See, for example, Marina van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) and Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Vulture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[xviii] Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 256 June 5, 1908, 21-2; as quoted in Thomas Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors: A Pioneer Critic and His Criticism of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 24.

[xix] “Scientific Meeting on January 12, 1910,” in Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn (eds.), Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Vol. II: 1908-1910, trans. M Nunberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1967), 382-93; as quoted in Szasz, 33; the following relies on Szasz (19-40) and Szasz’s citation of the Minutes.

[xx] This translation of Baudelaire’s “Saint Peter’s Denial” - “— Certes, je sortirai, quant à moi, satisfait D'un monde où l'action n'est pas la soeur du rêve…” - can be found in William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). For Adorno’s invocation of Baudelaire’s line – “Disciplined happiness presupposes class society, presupposes a world ‘où l'action n'est pas la soeur du rêve’ – see Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940 (ed. Henri Lonitz; trans. Nicholas Walker; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 336n37.

[xxi] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (trans. Werner S. Pluhar; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 135.

[i] Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, as quoted in Thomas Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors: A Pioneer Critic and His Criticism of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 49.

Adorno's Labor of Affect: "... nothing but what shudders"

2011-01-24T18:19:00.016-05:00

“You create a new shudder” [“Vous créez un frisson nouveau”], Victor Hugo wrote to Baudelaire in 1859. In his unfinished Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno cites Hugo’s comment and introduces, for the first time, the shudder [frisson in French, Schauder in German] whose essential role in breaking the spell of reification—“… life in the subject is nothing but what shudders … Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness” [*1]—is often lost on readers of Adorno, as though the mind were under orders to ignore the trembling of the flesh. That its mere existence—to say nothing of its explosive force—has gone largely unnoticed is, however, wholly unsurprising. When properly appreciated, Adorno’s notion of the shudder—and, more decisively, that shudder’s unsettling intimacy with Adorno’s critical project—threatens to dissolve the prevailing image of a moderate, Bartleby-like Adorno at the same time is it rips off the Kantian and Wittgenstinian masks that have softened Adorno’s figure and made it all but impossible to determine where the classical tradition ends and the critical break begins. The rules of chaste epistemology, like the moralizing sermons of ethics or the comportment of “I’d prefer not to,” are utterly incompatible with the unblinking Promethean demand registered in Adorno's shudder. Because Adorno seems to be everywhere concerned, not with the labor of the body to which affects like the shudder belong, but, instead, with the labor of the concept, the work of abstraction and its discontents, it is no doubt easy to overlook the significance of the shudder. Because Adorno appears to be unequivocally hostile to violence of any kind—be it the violence instrumental rationality commits in its domination of nature or the violence that sent him into exile—it is tempting to neutralize the violence Adorno acknowledges and encourages in the shudder. Yet the acceptance of these positions as self-evident—which inevitably, by refusing second reflection, brings Adorno into seamless correspondence with false consciousness—betrays both the spirit and the letter of Adorno’s thought and, consequently, cut the legs out from under Adorno’s project before it has even gotten off the ground. The shudder is, after all, wholly necessary: without the shudder, there is nothing but reified consciousness. If the subject does not convulse with a shudder then it is little more than another arm of that second nature that, in order to make a fist, mutilates itself and bloodies everything that crosses its path.

Although the shudder is, in Aesthetic Theory, the mark of Adorno’s attempt to unite eros and knowledge, to revoke the Enlightenment’s fatal separation of feeling and thinking, its entwinement with myth, mimesis and the body provide sufficient grounds for readers to still its shaking in order to proceed to less troubling aspects of critical philosophy (AT 331). In both Aesthetic Theory and Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno claims that the shudder felt in contemporary society is related to rationality’s emergence out of the shudder that first gripped primordial man in confrontation with the terrors of the natural world [*2]. The shudder is both wholly modern and prehistorical. It is the speculative anthropology at work in the nexus of concepts distilled in the shudder that makes us uneasy. “This is,” according to Jay M. Bernstein, “the most speculative line of interrogation in Aesthetic Theory” [*3]. Similarly, Frederic Jameson claims that, although “Adorno’s Marxism … may turn out to be just what we need today” [*4], the function Adorno assigns to mimesis tests the limits of plausibility and is, therefore “open to some doubt” (LM 65). The shudder carries within itself something archaic and insisting upon its primacy, elevating it to the status of a concept, risks accusations of irrationality because it neither offers itself up to readymade definitions nor presents its true colors at first blush. Like attempts to couple knowledge to similarly obscure elements like the unconscious or déjà vu, Adorno’s inclusion of the shudder within a form of knowledge must smack of so much dissonant nonsense to the ear that tunes out everything that resembles the involuntary and uncontrollable. An alliance with the shudder is doubly condemned because—in contrast to the truth inscribed by the unconscious or déjà vu—the shudder imparts nothing private, singular to the subject but, instead, convulses the body with the current of History in an age when the grand narrative to which History belongs has long since been declared obsolete. The knowledge imparted by the shudder sounds like hocus pocus, the ruins of magical wishes resurrected by modern day wizards resistant to the authority of technocrats. What conforms to neither common sense nor logical consistency is convicted of obscurantism. Ever vigilant against reactionary mystifications lurking behind whatever claims both resistance to and primacy over concepts, Adorno himself stands convicted of guarding the property of the ineffable because the shudder does not don the chasteness proper concepts should present but, instead, admits its kinship with the nonconceptual and the affective.

In the shudder of aesthetic experience, the ego finds no satisfaction but, instead, suffers an experience [Erfahrung] that, as long as the subject remains riveted to its convulsions, discloses the truth of the social totality. As it begins to disappear, the ego hears “the historical voice of repressed nature” screaming out of the artwork and becomes conscious that “it itself is not the ultimate” (AT 246). The culture industry, which exacts its own form of subjective evisceration on its subjects, regards the experience of the shudder—in which the subject finds not consolation but truth—as “idle nonsense” (AT 245). For Jameson too, that great man of learned doubt, a close reading of concepts like mimesis and shudder leads to the suspicion that Adorno is really pushing it. What is pawned off as commentary in Jameson betrays its inability to confront the concept, relying instead on the relief the Professor expects his vacillation will provide to readers who, like himself, prefer not to give another thought to concepts, like mimesis, that have already been deemed obsolete. If mimesis is “open to some doubt,” then the difficulty that sticks to mimesis can be left as it is: mimesis does not present its papers and is therefore suspect. Yet familiarity with Adorno’s work, in which mimesis plays such a central role, teaches us that the doubtful quality of mimesis, its apparent resistance to easy acknowledgement and serviceability, is borne of the very process of dissimulation it attempts to bring to consciousness. A concept that appears plausible, whose relevance strikes us as obvious, is, for that very reason, suspect since its pretension to exhaust the thing in the concept is always subterfuge. In line with a tradition that stretches from Aristotle to Kant, Adorno is suspicious of the very operation – of definition and plausible examples—Jameson here demands. The concept in Adorno—at once discursive and expressive—remains bound to its affective element by resisting easy conversion into logical construction and insisting, instead, on piercing the concept with a glimpse of the feeling it tries to shake off in order to steady itself.

On the last page of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno indicts the mind that steadies itself and purchases its sovereignty at the price of sacrificing its relation to affect. “The narrow minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is—as trivialities sometimes are—,” Adorno writes

The caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about historically and is revocable (AT 331).

This fatal separation is no doubt partly responsible for the poverty of critical commentary on Adorno. Although the shudder is essential to Adorno’s analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment as well as the force of art, it rarely receives even passing mention in the authoritative work on Adorno. Instead, it is those concepts that seem to correspond to thinking—dialectics, constellation, etc.—that receive the lion’s share of attention. Where affects like the shudder do enter into the commentary, these affects are either deprived of their objectivity and placed on the side of subjective style—his writing makes me shudder, etc.—or so diluted that they turn into sentimental banalities. Adorno’s writing is often either celebrated or condemned for its tone, its saturation with affect that turns his polemics into thinly veiled sublimations of rage. Yet affect itself is rarely raised to the dignity of a concept. The critic notes the feeling that charges Adorno’s paratactic construction as well as the destabilizing effect produced by his style, but little else. Yet Adorno’s thought, which is inseparable from the objective character of affect, everywhere aims at revoking the historical separation of feeling and thinking. It is for this reason that Adorno’s concepts are not rattled off as so many items on an inventory but, instead, shot through with a tension that shakes the concept out of its purported chastity. In Adorno, the concept twitches. For example, Adorno writes that affect is so tightly bound to aesthetics that it “is as if goosebumps were the first aesthetic image” (AT 331). To gain consciousness of absolute knowledge, Adorno recommends, not Hegel’s chapter bearing that name but, instead, recollection of what struck the ear upon hearing the words “dung hill” and “pig sty” for the first time [*5]. Aesthetic experience, that object of patient contemplation that has always been modeled on our contemplation of the most perfect being is, in Adorno, scandalized: sexual experience provides the prototype of aesthetic experience (AT 176). Animated by the affect it must still in order to raise itself to the chaste dignity of abstraction, the concept convulses. The claim that something doubtful sticks to mimesis mistakes the structure of the concept for an error of formulation. The opacity of mimesis is proportional to the critic’s desire to pull the wool over our eyes. To the confidant incomprehension that, in Jameson, masks itself as judicious doubt, Robert Hullot-Kentor replies that the matter is not so very obscure. “Mimesis,” he writes, “is the affinity of subject and object as it is felt in one’s knees on seeing someone else stumble on theirs” [*6]. Feeling and thinking, knowledge and eros, are here brought together into a nexus the critic ignores at the cost of sanctioning the fatal separation Adorno’s thought everywhere militates against.

Like mimesis, the shudder is not nearly as obscure as it appears to the mind bent on ignorance. The shudder is, first of all, the bodily inscription of subjective powerlessness in the face of an overwhelming object. Its tremors register the force of an object the subject is otherwise capable of mastering, if not ignoring altogether. Before it can devise a strategy for overcoming this experience, the subject admits, wordlessly, its own subjection to the primacy of the object. It is, as always, a question of domination; the story of the Enlightenment is the chronicle of cunning strategies to turn the deficit felt in the shudder into a profit for the subject. The history of the shudder is also the history of consolation squeezed out of what pushes the subject to the limit of experience. As the subject’s power is threatened, a scheme is devised for subduing that threat. This scheme—deployed in the discourses of the sublime, the sacred and revolution—neutralizes the fear of dissolution bound to the shudder. Subjective sovereignty is regained once the experience is tamed. The promise of Enlightenment—that man should break any bind tying his hands—must be fulfilled, domination assured. Whatever makes you shudder must be domesticated or kept at a distance because it is impossible to remain seized to a shudder without losing yourself.

Gripped by this shudder, modern thought convulses and immunizes itself against dissolution when confronted with experiences that appear to shake the earth. Although talk of a crisis of experience saturated both Weimar Germany and post-Auschwitz Europe, it is in reacting to the sublime, the sacred and the French Revolution that the shudder first emerges as a problem for modernity. In each instance, a defiant, overpowering object induces sickness in the subject. A remedy is quickly prescribed. The shudder is then nothing but a stage, an unmenacing detour on the road of progress. By contrast, in the work of Adorno, the shudder carries with it the possibility of loosening society’s grip on all that it dominated in order to preserve itself. Its tremors recall the violence the Enlightenment subject has done to nature and itself and, insofar as the subject does not flee from the shudder but gives itself over to the object whose power both terrifies and attracts, allows for an experience that cuts through the semblance of immediacy produced by a second nature bought at the price of the subject’s own evisceration. But this shudder, itself non-rational, carries with it no program and cannot transform the worst as if by magic. Instead, it must be allied with a subjective work that uses the power of the subject against its own compulsion to dominate. Against a reason that promised liberation but produced a “wholly enlightened earth […] radiant with triumphant calamity” (DoE 1), Adorno’s notion of a shudder twinned with mimesis sketches a “rationality without regression” (AT 20). Operative throughout discourses on the sublime, the sacred and the French Revolution, the shudder only becomes thematic in Adorno’s work on enlightenment and aesthetics. Now raised to the level of the concept, the shudder in Adorno must distinguish itself from the will to domination and self-destruction that followed the shuddering of critical philosophy and reactionary politics. Owing to the history compressed within it and Adorno’s violent dialectical resistance to simplification, shudder is, like all of Adorno’s concepts, never ultimately defined. To determine why the shudder is essential to Adorno’s thought as well as the possibility of reading Moby-Dick, it is necessary to uncoil the tangled historical knot of the sacred, the sublime and revolution that survives in Adorno’s concept of shudder. By unworking this weave, a weave whose texture remains indistinct as long as it is set within that second nature Adorno calls a web of delusion, a secret affinity emerges between Ahab’s reaction to the shudder in Melville’s Moby-Dick and what Adorno, in opposition to the discourses of the sublime, etc., presents as the appropriate reaction to the shudder in aesthetic experience. This affinity is, by no means, an identity. Yet both demand a concentration that borders on obsession, a subjection to the object that resembles perversion, and a self-annihilation that cannot but appear as madness. It is the fanatical pursuit of an object that risks self-preservation that unites the reaction to the shudder in both Ahab and Adorno’s concept of aesthetic experience. And it is this very pursuit that is forbidden by both the discourse of atrocity stitching the corset into which Ahab has been fitted for over a century and the shuddering reactions found in the discourses of the sublime, the sacred, and revolution. Because Ahab resembles all that these discourses militate against, because he is the easily recognizable object that must be avoided at all costs, the possibility of getting near the artwork, of abandoning oneself to the artwork, is foreclosed. Object relations guarantees this distance and, hence, the impossibility of experience. Adorno, by contrast, requires that the shudder formerly fled from, the shudder overcome by sealing the object in predetermined categories, is no longer elided, but, instead, approached with abandon. In the discourses of the sublime, the sacred and revolution, comprehension of the object requires distance. In order to protect itself from the object of dread, the subject must retreat to that “quiet shore” from which it may, as in Hegel’s critique of the unhappy consciousness, “enjoy in safety the distant spectacle of ‘wrecks confusedly hurled’” [*7]. Mistaking enjoyment of its security for knowledge of the object, the subject of these discourses sacrifices experience of the object to the imperative of self-preservation. The shudder they register is only a momentary fright that strengthens the will to ignorance driving Enlightenment knowledge. “Aesthetic experience” in Adorno, by contrast, “cancels the distance held by the subject” (AT 269) and approaches the object with an abandon that becomes aware “of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away” (AT 245). It is this abandon, feared in Ahab, forbidden by the shuddering discourses of the sublime, the sacred and revolution, that is prescribed by Adorno and serves as the condition for both making Moby-Dick an object of experience and turning the discourses that preach distance against themselves.

Even if Adorno’s concept of shudder, like the frisson nouveau of Baudelaire Adorno tirelessly invokes, possesses something wholly novel, it deceives itself if it pretends to inauguratesomething absolutely new and forgets the historical dynamic that made it what it is. A consequence of the Hegelian dictum according to which there is nothing between heaven and earth that is not itself mediated is that there is no such thing as the wholly new [*Z], even if the contemporary renaissance of the novelty of the Event shamelessly pretends that it can do without its theological inheritance. The shudder is at once a novel expression of experience as well as the distillation of the historical remainders of the sublime, the sacred and the French Revolution. Even if talk of the sublime has degenerated into “cultural twaddle,” as Adorno says, the desideratum of the sublime nevertheless inheres within the aesthetic experience Adorno registers with the concept of shudder (AT 198). Insofar as these shards of the sublime still contain both an alliance with domination as well as the revelation of the limits to human domination (AT 70), it is the task of Adorno’s concept of experience [Erfahrung] to strip the sublime of everything in it that is still in league with domination and purchases the preservation of the subject at the price of the subjective freedom that purchase intended to gain. The shudder of aesthetic experience is no less implicated in the theology of revelation, which not only occupies the aesthetic category of the sublime (AT 198), but lends to art the measure of truth and meaning without which it is nothing more than a repetition of the status quo (AT 106). The guilt aesthetic experience owes to its necessary collusion with the sublime and the sacred cannot be expiated. The only chance for shaking off this inheritance lies in exposing what, encoded within each reaction, conspired with the worst and, at the same time, setting aright the possibility each concept aimed to quash. Only a seismographic registration of the shudder coursing through these discourses allows us to measure their distance from Adorno’s concept of experience and mark out the urgency of giving to the object something these discourses have militated against: that is, a gaze that returns the subject’s stare.

Art cannot disavow its sacred legacy. Its meaning, once inseparable from the glorification of God, has, in its secularization, emptied itself of all that bound it to worship and veneration; but the more violently it does so, the louder its profane work resounds in the hollowed out house of the holy, the more shrill and ineluctable does the echo of its condition become: it cannot escape without destroying itself. Every confrontation with art—which is to say: every confrontation with something that insists on its having exceeded reality—is entranced by the murmurs of the emblematic excess that is the sacred. Like the sacred, the artwork cannot remain what it is if it is made commensurate with reality. Its power for subjecting the onlooker derives from something inexplicable to consciousness. At once, the subject catches fright and shakes before an object of awe it cannot master. Like the sacred, the artwork disorients the mind that would seek to turn it into an object of knowledge, convulsing the body in a shudder. Although this experience of the foreign and its subsequent neutralization is, for Adorno, bound to a history of subjection and cunning in which the experience of the artwork is also an afterimage of a prehistorical shudder, for the Enlightenment of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant the shudder is first registered in the sublime confrontation with natural beauty. It is here that the shudder first grips modernity; it is here that modernity begins to immunize itself against the shudder.

For enlightenment thinking—as either Aufklärung or lumières—only the light of reason was thought capable of casting out the darkness hanging over Europe. The power of reason was to clarify everything that once appeared opaque or irrational, unseat whatever frustrated mankind’s autonomy and correct errors accumulated during centuries of subjection and blindness. This illumination would reveal that what had earlier kept man in a state of perpetual fear was nothing but a ghost, so many phantoms of the mind that must be spirited away so that superstition can give way to knowledge. What was once shrouded in darkness became petrified by the blinding light of reason, appropriated, classified and turned into an instrument of reason’s ascendent sovereignty. In order to serve reason, objects must first be made subordinate to reason, whittled down to a size capable of being comprehended and set within a theory of knowledge. But the terror Enlightenment sought to banish always returns. Instrumental rationality, in its perpetual work of demythologization, itself becomes mythical. The knowledge that was to banish fear proves too shoddy to hold: wherever the subject subordinates the object in the name of knowledge, a trace of archaic anxiety remains behind the wall of light experience reveals to be a mere façade. Emancipated reason may repress this fear, but it cannot forget it. The anxiety provoked by objects can no more be eliminated than can the subject cut the lines of dependence that bind it to those objects. The child knows better: The silence of the night brings no comfort; instead, the child speaks to himself interminably in order to alleviate the anxiety silence causes him. Cold-blooded rationality is unable to banish those experiences that leave it chilled to the bone. Suppressed and deprived of the right to appear, objects of fright constantly shake the bogus subject whose triumph enlightenment everywhere announces. The spectre of this outrage is riven to the subject that anxiously turns away from the object it attempts to master by denying it. The enlightenment subject that has wrung itself free of this fear stands above objects its epistemology has reduced to inert husks. Allergic to a relation to objects that risks overturning the domination it has secured, the subject’s knowledge is emptied of the concretion obtainable only by way of nearness to the materiality of those objects. The only good object is a dead object, one that does not recall the subject’s suffering at the hands of the object. Knowledge is thus shorn of any attraction to the object, immunized against its advances and becomes inimical to the very desire that set it in motion in the first place. Inscribed within its will to knowledge is an equally powerful will to ignorance it must compulsively mobilize in order to keep the object at bay. This is the dialectic of enlightenment Adorno relentlessly militates against: the history of sacrifices the subject must make in order to gain the object it everywhere emasculates; in the interest of self-preservation, the subject sacrifices that part of it that suffers, sanctions the antithesis of subject and object and accepts the renunciation of the object as the condition of knowledge of that object. The knowledge gained must everywhere cover up the scars it has inflicted on itself and the object on the way to its domination.

The alienation and worldlessness produced by this dialectic motivated the return of 20^th century political and philosophical fundamentalism. After modernity successfully melted everything solid into air and rationality stood accused of complicity with this evisceration, philosophy attempted to salvage the meaning rationality had killed off. But the hermeneutics devised to answer this task could not help but revive the old saw of the sovereign subject, this time not a bearer of light, but a cryptologist capable of deciphering the still legible message out of the remaining ruins. But the distance separating the subject from the object is preserved even if the subject is rhetorically spirited away in favor of something else. So long as knowledge is borne of the antithesis of subject and object, knowledge is only ever a shadow of the subject. Knowledge of objects is thus nothing but an afterimage of the subject’s misrecognition of itself. The revolt against epistemology that began with Hegel decries this projection at the same time as it forecloses the possibility of working through the problem by robbing the subject of the power of reflection without which there is no chance of grasping reality. It is no doubt true that the coldness of Enlightenment rationality “misses the object,” as Adorno writes, “because it subjugates it” (AT 330). But there can be no reclamation of the object that does not pass through the subject. The object cannot be known except by way of being riveted to the shudder that takes the legs out from under the subject. Enlightenment knowledge, the knowledge gained by epistemology, presents a world emptied of concretion because the suppression of materiality and subjective feeling is the condition of its advancement. This rationality results, as Adorno writes, in the “narrow-minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced” (AT 331). The loss of experience everywhere lamented in the 20^th century can be traced back to a critique of the consolation provided by this separation. Yet this separation cannot be overcome abstractly, tossed aside as a mere chimera. The warmth provided when the subject rubs its hands together at the sight of the proper division of feeling and knowing is itself the expression an historical necessity. Their separation is born of the need to master what otherwise overwhelms the subject. And so long as the subject remains threatened, this antithesis will strike it with the force of necessity. There is no way out.

But if their separation is essentially historical then it is also, as Adorno writes, “revocable” (AT 331). Adorno’s work is everywhere animated by the desire to revoke this separation, to join eros and knowledge, to allow for the possibility of a knowledge that does not stand above the object in order to know it but, instead, assimilates itself to that object in order to know it from within. The object of fear that is everywhere warded against in both classical and contemporary theories of knowledge is, in Adorno, stripped of its menacing grin and approached with abandon. The risk refused by epistemology—that the subject should be touched by the object, risking transformation and annihilation—is here encouraged. Readers bristle at the idea that Adorno should require the annihilation of the subject in aesthetic experience because so much of his work is keyed to the critique of the subject’s effacement at the hands of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, positivism, the Enlightenment, etc. Yet Adorno’s critique is leveled at a very specific type of self-sacrifice. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, Adorno critiques the annihilation of the subject required by the development of modern subjectivity which, in order to secure the self-preservation of the self, sacrifices the living entity in whose name that drive took hold in the first place (DoE 43). Yet there is another form of annihilation that is not decried in Adorno but, instead, endorsed. In aesthetic experience, the “recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible” (AT 244-5). Here, in an experience that has torn out the roots of that second nature that has left everything reified, it is not the living entity that is destroyed but the constituting subject itself, the subject of domination and mastery. “Shudder,” Adorno writes, “radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience [Erlebnis], provides no particular satisfaction for the I; it bears no similarity to desire. Rather,” he continues

It is a memento of the liquidation of the I … This experience [Erfahrung] is contrary to the weakening of the I that the culture industry manipulates … For the subject, this transforms art into what it is in-itself, the historical voice of repressed nature, ultimately critical of the principle of the I, that internal agent of repression […] In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation … does art give empirical reality its due, the epiphany of its shrouded essence and the merited shudder in the face of it as in the face of a monstrosity. The primacy of the object is affirmed aesthetically only in the character of art as the unconscious writing of history, as anamnesis of the vanquished, of the repressed, and perhaps of what is possible (AT 245-9).

When it is not stilled but, instead, borne by the subject, shudder becomes the name for the affective work of negative dialectics whose aim is, as Adorno writes, “total self-relinquishment [ungeschmalalerte Entausserung]” (ND 13). Tied to a form of knowledge that does not sever its link to eros, shudder, in its demand for self-annihilation and self-relinquishment, forces us to reconsider the assumption that empathy provides the emotive corollary to mimesis. Empathy implies a distance from the object that is disallowed by the primacy of the object. There is no self-annihilation involved in empathy but instead, as in the discourse of the sublime, always the refuge provided by the ‘safe shore.’ In “Opinion Delusion Society,” Adorno writes of thought’s affective investment in an object—that is, cathexis—as the condition of truth [*8]. In order for there to be mimesis, there must also be a relation between objects mediated by object-cathexis, or, what J.M. Bernsten describes as a “primitive form of love” [*9]. If some form of love is involved in mimesis, in the experience [Erfahrung] of objects, it might be better approximated by sexual experience, not empathy. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno describes the artwork’s need:

It is as a result of their own constitution that [artworks] go over into their other, find continuance in it, want to be extinguished in it, and in their demise determine what follows them. If anywhere, then it is here that aesthetic experience resembles sexual experience, indeed its culmination. The way the beloved image is transformed in this experience, the way rigidification is unified with what is most intensely alive, effectively makes the experience the incarnate prototype of aesthetic experience (AT 176).

By bringing mimesis and aesthetic experience closer to this “want to be extinguished,” those notions are brought into greater proximity to that ‘total self-relinqueshment’ that is the ‘aim’ of negative dialectics. At the same time, however, just as identification is at work in the choice of the beloved, so too must it be operative in this wish to be extinguished in the object, in the gesture of mimesis to which the shudder testifies. This ferocious desire for assimilation to the other, this need for self-relinquishment required for arriving at the truth of the object, this affirmative accent on cathexis, sets Adorno in stark opposition to his readers and the current cohort of theoretical watchdogs who, today as ever, protect the hearth against fanaticism. And this difference—in which a form of self-destruction is necessary, not feared—no doubt also points to the “possibility of letting self-preservation fall away” the subject becomes aware of as it shudders.

Implicit in the formulas for object-relations devised by the shuddering discourses on the sublime, the sacred and revolution is the need to guarantee the self-preservation of the subject. Such a need is no doubt also felt in the Lacanian ban on the desire for the One as well as the Derridean elevation of survival (or the trace) to the status of the holy of holies (see Martin Haggalund). Lost in this fever for survival is the object at which the struggle aimed in the first place. Prohibitions multiply in front of a subject that must exercise moderation in order to survive. It would seem that, according to Adorno, this ceaseless work of self-limitation should be called what it is: a “doctrine of ignorance” as Hegel wrote [*10]. The imperative of self-preservation needlessly mobilized by that doctrine—and the disciplines responsible for stitching the web of delusion in which the sublime, the sacred and revolution are entangled—stands in radical opposition to the Hegel Adorno approvingly cites in his Hegel: Three Studies: because the world is a “web of guilt,” “everything that exists deserves to perish” (HT 30). Yet Adorno is never made to wear the mask of this Hegel. Instead, Adorno is turned into a Kantian man of moderation. The shudder will impart the need for empathy, not the self-disappearance provoked by the shudder and felt in aesthetic experience’s prototype, sexual experience. One way of stilling the shudder is turning Adorno into a Kantian, thus making the protection of the “safe shore” into the ultimate task of critique. In “Why Rescue Semblance: Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics,” J.M. Bernstein claims that

In turning to Kant after his discussion of Auschwitz and the fate of metaphysics in contemporary culture, Adorno is implicitly contending that, from the perspective of the philosophy of history, Kant’s aporetic accounting immanence and transcendence is more applicable to the present than Hegel’s more sanguine speculative dialectic, which presupposed metaphysical experience: self-recognition in absolute otherness … Out post-Auschwitz problem is thus the opposite of Hegel’s: we have lost sight of the moment of transcendence, of absolute otherness, of the ‘something’ without which our mediations would be mere mirrors of our eviscerated subjectivities. The thing-in-itself thus becomes what is to be rescued…” [*11].

And yet, in his Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno makes the opposite point. There Adorno identifies the “resignation of the current era” with the “regressive and tyrannical moment in Kant,” whose collusion with all those who denounced the dogmatism of metaphysics barred access to “the whole of reality and its contents” (HT 67-8). Against this alliance with obscurantism, Adorno recalls Hegel’s rejoinder to Kant— “The sealed essence of the universe has no power that could withstand the spirit of knowledge”—and claims that this formulation is powered by an “impulse [that] establishes Hegel’s true contemporary relevance” and represents a “mature mankind” that proceeds under watchwords prohibited by Kantian moderation: “we may yet succeed” (ibid).

In order to conclude that Adorno’s project might be reduced to a “rescue” of the thing-in-itself, Bernstein is forced to occlude what drives Adorno’s entire work: that is, the fact that there is nothing between heaven and earth that is not mediated. Were the thing-in-itself to be “rescued,” it would vanish into the dirt it pulled itself out from. The guilt borne by the thing-in-itself, insofar as it promises a reconciliation it cannot achieve, must be forgotten if one needs the thing-in-itself without admixture. But this need, like the ontological need that meets Adorno’s critique, “can no more guarantee its object than the agony of the starving assures them of food” (ND 65). Bernstein’s attempt to enlist Adorno in the project of rescuing the thing-in-itself not only threatens to roll back the advances made with the Hegelian critique of Kant but also moderates Adorno’s critique of the fate of affects in Kant. This fate, most evident in Kant’s discussion of the sublime and the French Revolution, is subject to immanent critique in Adorno, as the shudder Kant forgets is recalled and made constitutive of the self that has not been brought into seamless correspondence with reification. The lie Kant was forced to authorize in order to still the shudder felt at the sight of regicide turned into the normalization of false consciousness, a reason that desperately boxed its ears and closed its eyes to what stood in front of it. Riven to the experience of contradiction and domination, Adorno’s shudder is the somatization of false consciousness’s passing, the self-consciousness of reification that refuses to subordinate the particular to the universal, the nonconceptual to the conceptual.

Like most of his contemporaries, Adorno inherits the critique of false consciousness, of a form of experience [Erlebnis] that has become reified and dead. Yet the critique of false consciousness, as Adorno makes clear, is only relevant if it is opposed to true consciousness, to an experience [Ehrfahrung] that has rended the veil of second nature and remains essential to a form of knowledge opposed to that of instrumental rationality. It is at those points where a trace of this true consciousness is glimpsed that affects and experiences of the body unsettle Adorno’s texts. At these points, the “fatal separation” of knowing and feeling is momentarily closed. Shudder, bound to the tradition of the sublime, the sacred and revolution—that is, to modernity as such—is the cipher of what both resists the labor of the concept and remains essential to a life opposed to reification. I take it as a watchword for Adorno’s attempt to trace a path along which it would be possible revoke that fatal separation. Leaning on a somatic feeling whose terrors have been long documented in the discourses of the sublime, the sacred and revolution, the shudder both inherits and transcends these terrors. The risk of getting too close, of the subject’s annihilation in rapture, of overturning reason, inhere within the shaking urged by Adorno’s shudder.

The central place accorded to the shudder in Adorno makes it clear that the labor of the concept [die Arbeit des Begriffs] Adorno relentlessly admonishes us to perservere in must be joined by an equally necessary labor of suffering, a labor of affect that does not flee from the shudder of experience but, instead, remains riveted to it. Inextricably bound to the Enlightenment’s reaction to the sublime, the sacred and revolution out of which it emerges, shudder is, in Adorno, the name for what works, by way of determinate negation, against the reification that calcifies around the world as a result of these separations: “life in the subject,” Adorno writes, “is nothing but what shudders” [AT 331]. Borrowing a term from Steven Helmling’s “During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ of Critique,” we could say that it is not only the labor of the concept that is necessary in the struggle against the dialectic of enlightenment but also, and perhaps more importantly, a labor of affectualization [*12]. Helmling is right to insist that, if the labor of the concept admonishes us to think thinking—to become conscious of the work of thought—then the labor of affectualization demands that the concept no longer raise itself above the suffering material it aims to express but, instead, remain riveted to the affect it cannot shake off. “The concept of suffering,” Helmling writes, “ought surely to hurt.”

Rather than determine the place of affect within Adorno’s thought, Helmling – like many who attempt to place affect at the center of Adorno’s though—does little more than make a case for the affectivity of Adorno’s writing—its ‘textual effect’—resulting in caricatures of Adorno that are, nevertheless, instructive insofar as they are part of a tendency that celebrates affect at the same time as it silences it. Although Helmling’s essay begins with an epigraph containing Adorno’s remarks on the shudder and closes with a differentiation of the effect of shudder from that of Aristotelian catharsis in order to underline the energy behind the prose of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Helmling nowhere offers a systematic account of affect, an absence that allows Helmling to present naïve positions as Adorno’s own. For example, Helmling claims that “Adorno affects no pose, a la Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, of facing down the abyss from which the rest of us cower away in denial.” Common to these poses, according to Helmling, is the conviction—operative, for example, in Burke’s identity of pain and self-preservation—that “We need our fear, to make ourselves heroic.” According to Helmling, Adorno opposes this “glamorization of fear” with a “visceral refusal” by noting its resonance with “the cheerleaders of Thanatos” and the “SS Ubermenschen.” According to Helmling, Adorno conceives “fear as a humiliation, a non-elective ordeal imposed on us by the brutality of our historical circumstances, a suffering that may or may not elicit heroism from some of the sufferers, but that is sure to damage and debase, not to ennoble, most of its victims.” Yet this is not the whole truth. Were it to be so, there would be no explanation for why shudder and the experience of fear produces, in Adorno, the conditions required for, as Hullot-Kentor writes, “reality to break in upon the mind that masters it.” Helmlng unwittingly registers the problem he refuses to look in the eye, as when he rightly notes that Dialectic of Enlightenment is, in large measure, a critique of the repression of fear at work in Enlightenment thought, a repression that can only be understood as the fear of truth. What, then, accounts for this discrepancy?

It is true, of course, that fear often corresponds to humiliation in Adorno; one need only recall his sense of fear when the National Socialist police arrived at his doorstep in Frankfurt [*13]. Yet fear is also a constitutive aspect of the life that escapes reification. “Among the dangers faced by new art,” Adorno writes, “the worst is the absence of danger” (AT 29). Fear is part of the shudder, the self-annihilation of aesthetic experience, the work of making the constituting subject disappear. All of this cannot help but induce fear. Adorno insists on risking these fearful events. Yet Helmling cannot admit this if Adorno is to remain the obvious opponent of those who glamorize fear. After comparing the concepts of fear in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Nietzsche with Thanatos and the SS, Helmling writes:

For Adorno, by contrast, “the goal of the revolution is the elimination of anxiety. That is why we need not fear the former, and need not ontologize the latter” (Complete Correspondence 131). For me, indeed, one of the most attractive things about Adorno is his visceral refusal of any such glamorization of fear, not least because the “violence” of which some intellectual speak so grandiosely is often merely figurative – indeed, sheerly “imaginary.” Hegel’s “tarrying with the negative” (“to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength”) becomes in Adorno the more muted formula, “the embittering part of dialectics” (ND 151). Not for him the accents of Zarathustrian bravado, pistol [sic] heroically cocked at the void.

This image of Adorno is emblematic. Adorno has all the audacity of Hegel, but stops Hegel when he goes off the handle. Although Adorno would never argue for the necessity of fear, both Aesthetic Theory and “A New Type of Human Being” are concerned with the loss that would accrue to humanity were we to lose the possibility of experiencing a type of fear—call it self-loss, shudder, feeling—essential for resisting the reified world. The point, in Adorno, is not: do not glamorize fear; but instead: do not turn away from fear. They are two very different things. Objects of fear (according to a reified world) should no longer be feared. Objects of fear must be regarded as capable of serving as ciphers for both the guilt incurred from the split of subject and object and the semblance of reconciliation it produces.

Helmling’s attempt to counter this glorification of fear by demonstrating how well Adorno moderates Hegel’s insistence on tarrying with the negative misses its mark. When Adorno writes of “the embittering part of dialectics,” he does not claim that Hegel’s labor of the negative has become that part of dialectics that leaves us bitter. Instead, Adorno writes, “The embittering part of dialectics, notably for the reflexive philosophy that prevails now as in Hegel’s day, is its objective contradictoriness” (ND 151). It does not make us bitter. It makes bitter those who insist on the unity of consciousness, those who charge dialectics with “being obsessed with the fixed idea of objective conflict in a thing already pacified” (ND 153). It is bitter because “A subjective consciousness to which the contradiction is unbearable faces a desperate choice”: obey the harmonious world you have stylized or act as if the course of the world—as contradiction—does not exist, and perish by it (ND 152).

As in Helmling, James Gordon Finlayson’s “Adorno: Modern Art, Metaphysics and Radical Evil” attempts to relocate the place of affect, and in particular that of the shudder, within Adorno’s thought [*14]. Finlayson’s essay is to be credited for dealing with mimesis through an examination of the shudder as it emerges in the anthropological account of the prehistory of rationality in Dialectic of Enlightenment. After marking the five stages of this history, Finalyson explains that the shudder is “epistemically speaking, a positive experience that is true to what is there prior to conceptual identification—the amorphous, the undifferentiated, the strange” (AMA 80) and that taking flight in the face of the unknown lies at the origin of instrumental reason, identity thinking. Here is where Finlayson goes wrong:

Here [in Aesthetic Theory] the shudder is not just a response to primal amorphousness and non-differentiation; it is the appropriate response to the abstract nature of modern life: “The shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of indeterminancy. At the same time however, the shudder is a mimetic comportment reacting mimetically to abstractness” (AT, 20). As we have seen the abstractness of modern life, its invariance, its universality, its (virtual) absence of particularity, its characteristic lifelessness, is what Adorno calls “the horror” (das Grauen) [ND 122]. Thus shudder is the involuntary and immediate reaction of revulsion, which discloses the modern administered world as radically evil (AMA 81).

In this passage, Finlayson reduces the shudder to nothing more than a cipher of evil. That the shudder does more than disclose the false—that it is also, as Adorno writes, an index of the true—is forgotten [*15]. Lost is the shudder’s relation to nature, reconciliation and truth. To claim that the shudder of aesthetic experience does nothing more than whisper “radical evil” in the ear of the subject is to reduce aesthetic experience to the production of a sociological theorem [*16). After describing the experience of philosophy as born of wonder in Aristotle, Finlayson writes that

Shudder, then, is a response arising from the metaphysical experience of a world characterized by horror (das Grauen). Shudder is the equivalent in the modern, disenchanted, capitalist world of the classical metaphysical experience of wonder: it is the gateway to the path of truth; but the truth to which it leads is the awful one that the social world is radically evil (AMA 83).

Though Finlayson continually talks about the “positive epistemic function of shudder” (AMA 82), he never mentions the way the disappearance of the self into the object, which is the experience of shudder, bears on this epistemic function. In fact, it is unclear what shudder has to do with epistemology in Finlayson’s account, apart from noting that shudder is different from classical epistemology and leading him to claim that, because the shudder is the only appropriate response to Auschwitz, “this interpretation saddles Adorno with the uncomfortable implication that Auschwitz—the paradigm instance of horror—has after all some positive, redemptive significance” (AMA 89). Finlayson here mistakenly folds Adorno’s shudder back into the tradition of the sublime out of which it emerged as its immanent critique. Yet this is exactly what Adorno’s shudder renders impossible. In the Kantian sublime, disaster never lost its luster because second nature— human reason and dignity—profited from the catastrophe of first nature. In Adorno, however, “the compensatory, second-stage pleasure of the traditional sublime, anchored in metaphysical optimism, is,” as Gene Ray writes, “no longer possible” [*17]. As Ray rightly points out, the saving power in Kant’s account of the sublime—where physical capability (first nature) is defeated by the object, the supremacy of the power of reason (second nature) asserts itself—no longer holds because, in Auschwitz, this second nature lost its possibility of saving anything and proved itself to be, like the Lisbon earthquake that sounded the power of first nature for Kant, a force of pure destruction (RL 11-12). The change wrought to the shudder at Adorno’s hands is ignored by Finlayson. Yet his mistake is itself symptomatic of a state of affairs in which the shudder one feels when confronted with something foreign inspires nothing but the desire to flee. Finlayson pretends that the shudder was not itself subject to the critique of the dialectic of enlightenment Adorno spent his life carrying out, that this shudder continues to function as the trigger for reason’s consolation rather than, as it is in Adorno, the bodily inscription of an experience from which the only faithful reaction is one that refuses the imperative of self-preservation that has always served as a cover for domination.

Yet Finlayson is by no means alone in mistaking the shudder for Kant’s sublime and thus, like the near enthusiasm felt by the spectators of the French Revolution, turning the shudder into the trigger for empathy. In J.M. Bernstein’s The Fate of Art, the shudder becomes “the address of the other … [and] Above all, the shudder is the terror of the sublime in Kant” [FA 220]. Yet Adorno’s shudder is—as we saw in Gene Ray and throughout our examination of the relation of the sublime to Adorno’s shudder—utterly irreconciliable with Kant’s sublime. In both a shudder is registered, but there the similarity ends: Adorno urges the shudder Kant must forget in order to preserve the primacy of reason. In the shudder felt in Adorno’s aesthetic experience, “the I becomes aware, in real terms, of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away” (AT 245-6), an awareness that stands in stark contradiction to the salutary effects of Kant’s sublime, which works in the interest of self-preservation and the sovereignty of reason. In Kant’s sublime, nature is dominated; in Adorno’s shudder, the subject becomes aware of the terrifying object as the “historical voice of repressed nature” (ibid). The shudder, in Adorno, testifies to the primacy of the object while the Kantian sublime testifies to the primacy of the subject. Bernstein’s continual reduction of the shudder to the ‘address’ or ‘call of the other’ threatens to undermine the distinction he had earlier drawn between Adorno and Derrida/Heidegger. There Bernstein had noted that, although Adorno, Derrida and Heidegger each ascribe a certain incomprehensibility to the artwork, in Adorno that incomprehensibility “is not absolute but a particular historical formation which itself means and signifies. The law governing the formation of this incomprehensibility can be known” (FA 218). Yet the shudder, if it is nothing more than the call of the other, is stripped of its particularity, its historical force and rendered dull, abstract. Bernstein rightly notes that “Shudder and mimesis are different aspects of the same moment. Through them there occurs a joining of eros and knowledge which is art’s articulation of ethics and knowledge. Shudder, as dissonance (AT, 124), is staged, aestheticized, sublime fear. It is the affective acknowledgement of the otherness of the other” (FA 222). The shudder does not testify to the otherness of the other, but to the sameness of the other, which is why it is, as Bernstein rightly acknowledges, tied to mimesis. The primacy of the object introduced by the shudder, the subject’s immersion in the object, is caused by an essential similarity and kinship, not a fundamental disjunction. Elsewhere, Bernstein will claim that the shudder is the creation of distance—“Shudder, then, is the generation of distance and angle with respect to the other” (FA 223)—even though Adorno writes that “The aesthetic shudder cancels the distance held by the subject” (AT 269; my italics).

Shudder is the somatic trace of subjective abandon, of the immersion in the object that leads to knowledge. Against the cold rationality of the Enlightenment, as well as the shuddering discourses of the sublime, the sacred and revolution which everywhere claim that distance and safety, moderation and temperance are constitutive of knowledge, Adorno claims—via the shudder—that, as Eckart Goebel, writes, “the contradiction between abandonment and knowledge … is only apparent” [*18]. This abandonment, which proceeds by way of immersion in the object, always entails a disappearance of the self. The story of the Chinese painter from Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 provides an image of this disappearance. “[The story],” Benjamin writes

... comes from China and tells of an old painter who showed his friends his most recent painting. In it a park was represented, a narrow path along the water and through a stand of trees, coming out in front of a little door that gave access to a little house at the back. But when the friends looked for the painter, he was gone and in the picture. There he wandered up the narrow path to the door, stopped in front of it, turned around, smiled, and disappeared into its opening. So I too, there by my plates and brushes, was suddenly transposed into the picture [*19].

While this image does justice to the loss of the self that is essential to the shudder and aesthetic experience in Adorno, it nevertheless registers no trace of the pain, the affective trace left on the body that suffers this experience. According to Goebel’s elegant description, the shudder occurs when, at “the appearance of a second world in the first, the constitution of the subject that attempts to correspond to the cramped confines of the first world bodily convulses … The shaken subject abandons itself to the work and remembers a mimetic proximity that it had lost” (OBS 173). Without this convulsion and the subsequent demand Adorno places on aesthetic experience—that the subject remain concentrated, in a relation of utmost tension with the object that makes it shudder—this transposition of the first world within the second occurs as if by magic, unmediated and without effort.

[*1] Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory (eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 331; hereafter referred to as AT.

[*2] See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcott; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),15-23; hereafter referred to as DoE.

[*3] Jay M. Bernstein. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1992), 219. Hereafter referred to as FA.

[*4] Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 5; hereafter referred to as LM.

[*5] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton; New York: Continuum, 1973), 366. Hereafter referred to as ND.

[*6] Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno,” in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 228.

[*Z] Adorno's phrase - "there is nothing between heaven and earth that is not mediated" - is repeated in Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, Hegel: Three Studies (57), and Introduction to Sociology (64-5) and derives from the following passage in Hegel's Science of Logic: "... there is nothing, nothing in heaven or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them a nullity" (68).

[*7] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), 21.

[*8] Theodor W. Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. Henry W. Pickford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 109.

[*9] J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 419.

[*10] Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 36. Hereafter referred to as HT.

[*11] J.M. Bernstein, “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics,” in eds. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 187.

[*12] Steven Helmling, “During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ of Critique,” in Postmodern Culture. Volume 15, Number 2.

[*13] Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Rodney Livingstone; Malden, MA: Polity, 2006), 19-20.

[*14] Gordon Finlayson, “Adorno: Modern Art, Metaphysics and Radical Evil,” in Modernism/Modernity. Volume 10, Number 1. January 2003. Hereafter referred to as AMA.

[*15] “Those talking most about the positive are in agreement with destructive power,” Adorno writes, “The collective compulsion for a positivity that allows its immediate translation into practice has in the meantime gripped precisely those people who believe they stand in the starkest opposition to society … This should be opposed by the idea, in a variation of a famous proposition of Spinoza, that the false, once determinably known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. Henry W. Pickford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 288.

[*16] If some sort of ‘evil’ inheres within Adorno’s conception of contemporary society, it is not the ‘radical’ evil Kant is comfortable acknowledging, but, instead, the absolute evil he does not allow for in the case of the French Revolution.

[*17] Gene Ray, “Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism. Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2004, 12. Herafter referred to as RL.

[*18] Eckart Goebel, “On Being Shaken: Theodor W. Adorno on Sublimation,” in Cultural Critique, 70, Fall 2008, 172. Herafter referred to as OBS.

[*19] Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 134.

Shudder and Revolution

2011-01-10T02:09:00.014-05:00

It is glorious to see what philosophy has ripened in the brain and realized in the State.

- George Foster, 1789 [*1]

I am aware of the excess; but they are not too great a price to pay for a free constitution. Can there be any question that a clearing storm, even when it works some havoc, is better than a plague?

- Johannes von Muller, 1789

Kant said to some friends, on hearing of the French Republic, with tears in his eyes, "Now I say, like Simeon, 'Lord, now let they servant depart in peace, for I have seen this day of salvation'" (GF 264n)

It seems impossible to destroy with bayonets the human spirit that has been spreading over Europe for fifty years.

- Johannes von Muller, 1792

... the French are becoming the nightmare of the human race.

- Johannes von Muller, 1792

Good God, what hideous abortionists are our leaders of the Aufklarung!

- Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 1790

There is no work of German Idealism that does not bear the mark of the French Revolution. For Hegel's contemporary Heinrich Heine, German philosophy is, in fact "nothing but the dream of the French Revolution" [*1]. Without provoking much controversy, we rattle off Kant's identification of the revolution as an "historical sign" that filled spectators with a sympathy bordering on enthusiasm ("Contest of Faculties" 181-2) and Hegel's celebration of the "glorious mental dawn" introduced by the revolution (Philosophy of History 447). But just as quickly, we qualify these suggestions of partisanship: For Kant, the revolution was, of course, momentous, but it was only a sign, mere semblance, nothing more; for Hegel, the "sole work and deed" of that new dawn was, ultimately, death, "the coldest and meanest of all deaths" (Phenomenology 360). From this quick history we derive the following lesson: disinterested sympathy is all well and good, but be sure militate against fanaticism. And, above all, don't get too close.

We know this story. We have heeded its lessons. But there is something missing from this account, something belonging to the somatic reaction to the revolution that, unlike sympathy, was never elevated to the dignity of the concept. And yet, from Burke to Kant, from Hegel to Nietzsche, this reaction is named and remains inextricably bound to the affective aftermath of the revolution. Humanity may very well be exalted by this sign of a new day, but the body knows nothing of this consolation. Indeed, it neither shares in the spoils nor counts its disinterested blessings; instead, the body, convulsing, cannot help but shudder. This shudder is the bodily index of what, when confronted with something terrible, must be overcome in order to secure the greater glory of humanity. Momentarily incapacitated, the subject quickly stills its trembling, regains its composure and credits the shudder with imparting an invaluable lesson. Invoked though never once thematized in the tradition that stretches from Burke to Nietzsche, the shudder is nevertheless essential to philosophy’s effort to rescue reason after the guillotine left the reason of state [raison d'État] without a head. But this reclamation of reason always falls into delusion because it is forced to repress the truth borne by the shudder it cannot tolerate. As a response to the revolution, the shudder is not only the mark of the body’s fear, but also and more importantly, the name of a contradiction the subject must forget forever in order to guarantee a sovereignty that shudder everywhere throws off as mere pretense.

This affect is not only keyed to the interests of man's ultimate sovereignty but also, and perhaps more importantly, serves as the bodily inscription of a weakness in modern philosophy that, once exploited, urges us to give up the ghost and sketch a thought of affect unafraid of enthusiasm. In order to perform this critique, we will trace the function of an affect - shudder [Schaudern] - that pulses through philosophy's reaction to the French Revolution in order to show that the reentrance of this affect in Adorno's critical philosophy – “… life in the subject is nothing but what shudders… Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness” (AT 331) – constitutes both an inheritance and a devastating critique of previous elements and aims of that affect. For Adorno, the only appropriate reply to the somatization of collapse induced by the shudder is one that, anathema to the shudder of German Idealism, abandons the primacy of the principle of self-preservation as well as reason’s veneration in the name of a truth that is nowhere guaranteed. To understand why the shudder serves as a cryptogram for what has everywhere been forsworn, we must trace the way in which it threatened to overtake the modern world, a threat registered and defended against since the Enlightenment.

In both Burke and Kant, the shudder is related to the dread image of regicide. Yet this affect, which seems to be the sign of a fundamental deficit, is ultimately the source of man’s greatest profit. The image of the guillotine is instrumentalized; the revolution becomes a learning play, the shudder leads to a lesson in aesthetic and moral education. First registered by Burke’s “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” the shudder is, at this point, still joined to the discourse of the sacred, a name for the affliction of he who contemplates God:

Now, though in a just idea of the Deity perhaps none of his attributes are predominant, yet to our imagination, his power is by far the most striking. Some reflection, some comparing, is necessary to satisfy us of his wisdom, his justice, and his goodness. To be struck with his power, it is only necessary that we should open our eyes. But whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him. And though a consideration of his other attributes may relieve, in some measure, our apprehensions; yet no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand. If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at a power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance (58).

It appears that the shudder is here still bound to theology, little more than an extension of the Old Testament shudder presented in the Book of Isaiah (“ye that tremble at His word” [66:5]). But, for Burke, the ‘power’ inducing a subjective shudder does not simply testify to the greater glory of God. This power, by producing a fear of pain, signals to the organism that it must rouse itself if it is to survive. Recall that, in Burke’s account of the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, pride of place is accorded to the sublime because its evocation of pain works in the interest of self-preservation. Overwhelming power, even that which carries with it the threat of annihilation, serves the interests of humanity because its sublime aspect quickens the pulse of the individual and society. In order to demonstrate that terror is “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (35) and is, therefore, essentially productive, Burke invokes the French Revolution: The promise of a life of the most perfect satisfaction becomes terrible if it comes at the “price of ending it in the torments, which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late unfortunate regicide in France” (36). The fear of death, that “king of terrors” (36), excited at the thought of this ‘unfortunate regicide’ is enough to prove the power of terror, a terror whose function is essentially pedagogical. Images testifying to the power of terror - our shudder upon contemplating God and the dread image of the guillotine – ultimately demonstrate that the fear of pain outmatches feelings of pleasure and is, therefore, more instructive for the training of mankind.

Doggedly dedicated to self-preservation and placing untoward emphasis on the “mechanical structure of our bodies” (40), Burke’s notion of the sublime appeared at loggerheads with religion. The section in which the shudder is invoked (“Power”) was, in fact, part of a series of amendments Burke introduced to bring his text into conformity with theology. To speak of the strongest emotion of which the mind is capable without referring to religion but, instead, to the French Revolution, made it appear as though Burke had forgotten that the profane world is not the measure of all things. Burke’s compromise, however, brought the profane into an analogical relationship with the sacred and revolution became as fitting an example of awesome power and dread as was contemplation of the divine. Burke’s shudder is, thus, already a secularization of the sacred shudder experienced in the face of the mysterium tremendum analyzed in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. According to Otto, the sacred shudder is, like Burke’s, both productive and disorienting: “It gives the peace that passes understanding,” Otto writes, “and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly” (34). But the class of experiences to which Burke’s shudder belongs – buildings, shouting multitudes, food, poetry, etc. – in order to culminate in the sight of regicide, are –with the exception of the religious experience included in Burke’s amendment – part of the profane world, in open contradiction with the requirement of the sacred shudder that it can only occur in relation to what is numinous: “Here,” Otto writes, “we have a terror fraught with an inward shuddering such as not even the most menacing and overpowering created things can instill” (14). Yet in Burke it is the revolution that presents the most menacing of sights, it is in view of the terrible fate of Louis XVI that everything else pales. The shudder, once the affective state of he who trembled before God, becomes the affect proper to the experience of revolution. For all its instructive force, however, the revolutionary shudder is haunted by the possibility that the reason of state, once beheaded, will not lead to a more moral or better trained humanity but points, instead, to an insoluble contradiction from which reason can recover only so long as it abandons the consolation it squeezes out of everything.

Yet philosophy cannot do without this consolation. Reason must turn the shudder over for a profit if it is to guarantee its distance from the terrible object and claim for itself the sovereignty the guillotine had separated from the body of the sovereign. The cut of the guillotine and the shudder it provokes must point to an improvement that will take place, a condition that will be achieved, so that the evil of that regicide does not have the last word. In Burke, that evil only threatened life; in Kant, the evil of regicide is an affront to reason itself that not only threatens the head of state, but the head – that is the reason – of mankind. In his discussion of the supposed right to rebellion in Metaphysics of Morals, Kant, in the wake of the French Revolution, is concerned with the possibility of an act that, like an inexpiable sin, permits of no future redemption. “A people,” Kant writes, “has a duty to put up with what is held to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority (96-7). Yet the problem, for Kant, resides not in their refusal: “Of all the atrocities involved in overthrowing a state by rebellion, the assassination of the monarch is not itself the worst” (97). The worst is, instead, that which produces a shudder:

It is the formal execution [formale Hinrichtung] of a monarch that grips the soul filled with ideas of human justice with a shudder that one repeatedly feels as soon as and as often as one thinks of this scene [was mit Ideen des Menschenrechts erfullte Seele mit einem Schaudern ergreift, das man widerholentlich fuhlt, so bald und so oft man sich diesen Auftritt denkt], like the fate [Schicksal] of Charles I or Louis XVI. (ibid) [*2]

According to Kant, the formal execution of the monarch induces a shudder because that execution is itself self-contradictory. It takes with one hand what it gives with the other. Like the right to rebellion, it appeals to the force of law in order to negate the sovereignty of law. “As far as we can see,” Kant writes, “it is impossible for a human being to commit a crime of this kind” (ibid). It is an impossible crime because it does not simply transgress the law, but invokes the law at the same time as it rejects the concept of law as such [*3]. It is impossible for a human being to commit this crime because it contradicts those claims of reason that justify our speaking of a human being in the first place. This rejection is then elevated above right and law and, “like a chasm,” “irretrievably swallows everything” (ibid). And yet, if we are to regard human beings as free, this crime could not take place because it violates the sense according to which he is free in the first place. This shudder is not an aesthetic feeling – “sympathy, an effect of imagination by which we put ourselves in the place of the sufferer” (ibid) – but a moral revulsion at the “complete overturning of all concepts of right” (ibid). It is, as Kant writes, “as if the state commits suicide” (98) because, like suicide, it negates its own cause. Like an “inexiable sin,” it is “formally evil” and cannot be redeemed (97).

Kant’s shudder [Schaudern] is another name for what is, according to the spectator’s gaze, self-contradictory; it overturns everything that allows for overturning itself (life is necessary for its suicidal negation; the rights guaranteed by the relation between sovereign and subject are necessary for the claims of political right in whose name the king is beheaded). Where the Kantian system reveals its blind spot, where lawgiving reason presents a maxim contrary to reason itself, the body convulses in a shudder. Like the one who defends a right to lie, he who defends the right of regicide is, strictly speaking, impossible. To the spectator’s gaze, there is an irremovable contradiction between the idea of human justice he carries in his soul and the act that proclaims itself just yet operates without a ground. The shudder provoked by this contradiction is the somatic memory of the violence inherent in abstraction: at a distance, the spectator turns its eye to the world and sees not a world in accord with its concept but the chasm separating the particular from the universal. The shudder is the experience of this contradiction, the chasm the subject must forget in order to guarantee the coherence of its own reason. It must be overcome. Yet it is unclear how the French Revolution can inspire moral revulsion at the same as it proves the existence of man’s moral tendency and progress. What sort of historical sign is provided by a revolution that has overturned the concept of reason and leaves us with nothing but a shudder?

In A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant, Peter Fenves draws out the consequences that would accrue to Kant’s concept of history were the shudder to be accorded the force of truth. In “The Contest of Faculties,” Kant leaves behind his own critique of the spirit-seer and plays the role of the fortune teller. He predicts that the human race will constantly improve on the basis of the historical sign (signum rememorativum) provided by the French Revolution (181-5). But if the image of revolution registered by the shudder is not overcome, then the sign of thought (Denkzeichen) proper to the revolution can only be read from a gravestone (Denkmal) (Fenves 269). The foresight thus afforded will doubtless still concern the interests of mankind but the promise of progress will likely be replaced by a perennial nightmare. “Shudder takes place in sight of a singular disrespect for the law,” Fenves writes

… a misdeed (Untat) never to be undone is nevertheless done. Without the possibility of erasure, it constitutes a mark that is as indelible as it is unreadable. This immoral as well as immortal affect can be attributed only to devils” (273)

According to Fenves, this crime is greater than the radical evil one finds in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone: “The unforgettable crime is, rather infinitely more evil: not Bosartigkeit – evil of a kind – but Bosheit pure and simple, that is, unkind, orphaned, and indeed absolute evil” (274). This crime does not involve “a suspension of an unconditioned good – the moral law, freedom – in favor of various conditioned ends,” as is the case with radical evil (ibid). Fenves continues:

A transgression of all ends for which human reason is supposed to be determined, natural or otherwise, is impossible to overlook. And yet it is just as impossible to include in a system of morality. It therefore marks the liminal point of a metaphysics whose aim is the establishment of moral doctrine; indeed, it is liminal to the point of undecideability: neither inside nor outside the system, it circumscribes the system in its entirety; neither teachable nor capable of being neglected in the act of teaching, it circumscribes doctrine altogether (274).

The future loses its luster and the present cannot shake the disorder that has undercut reason. Fenves continues:

The misdeed cannot be undone. No matter what else happens, a shudder haunts any thought receptive to Ideas. For whoever thinks (Denken) of its eventuality and hence remembers (Andenken) the event undergoes a shudder. This petrifying affect is as little susceptible to temporal predicates as the ‘I think’ that can accompany every possible representation. Shuddering, however, does not simply rest on the thought of this event; something else must be added to the mere thought in order to constitute the signum rememorativum that designates the catastrophe par excellence. What muse be added to the thought is nothing other than the fact that the misdeed took place […] This dreadful shudder carries out the erase of every prescribed natural telos as it leaves itself in the absolute position of the unerasable. Every definition of man is undone when the absolutely evil Untat is done […] A shudder turns into the endlessly repeatable self-inflicted affect of complete uprootedness, an act that undermines not only nobility but even the very continuity of disposition that underlies cosmopolitanism. Kant, however, will not go so far. If he is to maintain his thesis of a merely radical evil that is the erasure of human racination itself, he will have to consider this event as nothing more than an Idea. It did not happen; the execution, as he goes on to insist […] was done on the basis of fear. The unthinkable Untat, he insists, was not done (PF 275-6).

In the interest of reason, that which is absolutely evil must be forgotten. So that the shudder can give way to sympathy with the revolutionaries’ exaltation, the gravestone must be knocked down, covered up and replaced by something more fitting for a joyful commemoration. The event is made to conform with the splendid dawn celebrated all over Europe. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel too notes the shudder gripping the Continent. “A sublime thrill rules that time,” he writes, “an enthusiasm of spirit shuddered through and through [durchschauert] the world as though it had come to the actual reconciliation of the divine with the world” (447; Fenves’s translation 283n). But on the basis of the shudder’s antinomial status, we have reason to question the nature of the spectator’s feelings. The compulsion at work in Kant’s will to ignorance in front of the revolution, the need for consolation that neutralizes the shudder and shines the light of promise on the darkness into which reason is thrown, all this sounds like a trick the spectators must perform at the same time as they erase their own cognizance of it. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche parodies “that shuddering [schauerlichen] and … superfluous farce [Posse]” acted out all over Europe by those who saturated their interpretation of the revolution with their own enthusiasm “until the text vanished under the interpretation” [bis der Text unter der Interpretation verschwanden]” (44) [*4]. The shudder everywhere invoked in the texts of German Idealism, these dream notes of the French Revolution, not only testify to the somatic trace of horror inscribed on the bodies of onlookers but, more importantly, constitutes a moment Idealism must overcome in order to recover the reason lost at the guillotine. Nietzsche’s parody already points the way to that determinate negation of the Idealist shudder at work in Adorno.

While it is true that Kant nowhere follows the reactionary course outlined in the above epigraphs – from abstract enthusiasm to violent antagonism and disappointment – the necessity of overcoming the shudder – and the manner in which that shudder is overcome – attempts, like Jacobi and von Muller, to save something the revolution appears to threaten. The shudder is an outrage to reason, to justice, to the human being. To save humanity the shudder must be neutralized; the revolution must become the cause of a sooth-saying that promises progress, not the elevation of overturning and violence to principles in themselves. The shudder’s neutralization is always accompanied by a chorus singing the praises of mankind. Survival and sovereignty must be guaranteed at all costs. A gravestone must not be the source from which humanity’s future is deciphered; a human being that would invoke the concept of right in order to overturn right must be an impossible human being. The image and ideas induced by the shudder must be written off as aberrations. But at what cost?

The profit that accrues to mankind once this shudder is experienced and left behind is only possible if the revolution that induces the shudder is only an image of revolution. In this, the shudder bears a secret affinity to the sublime. Just as the sublime is only possible for he who is not threatened by natural disasters, so too can Europe only shake with sympathy if the ground beneath its own feet is secure. Just as the sublime testifies to reason’s superiority over the nature that seems to overwhelm it, so too does the Revolution signal a moral disposition in man that is otherwise in little evidence. The affect provoked by the sight of each event serves to guarantee man's sense of his own providential destiny at the same time as it immobilizes the subject. Exaltation in the face of the terrible is always bought at the price of both the subject's and nature's evisceration. The mind's exaltation is always coupled with the body's shudder.

Yet this evisceration remains unregistered and mankind everywhere tallies up what it loses dominating itself and nature as so many gains. But the damage done becomes clear once we attend to the machinery of domination that flees from this affect in order to warm the soul of justice-seeking men. The reason that represses the shudder out of fear and writes off the somatic truth of the revolution is, ultimately, sacrificial reason. In its attempt to forestall the recurrence of sovereign sacrifice, reason itself becomes sacrificial. Both the object that incites fear and the subjective element that suffers must be dominated. This domination is then turned into the condition of the subject’s knowledge. In the interest of the subject’s sovereignty, both the object and suffering subject are sacrificed. The poverty of the subject that results from this dual sacrifice, outfitted in the costume of necessity, stamps the eviscerated subject and world as natural. The demand to overcome the shudder is thus little more than the normalization of reification, the sanctioned forgetting of the object’s impression on the subject. Justified by teleology, the distance required for self-preservation prohibits a nearness to the object that, in the shudder, seemed to threaten the onset of evil. Although Kant’s remarks on the French Revolution have justly led many to interpret Kant’s relation to the revolution in terms of an aesthetic judgment of the sublime, it is, in truth, teleological judgment at work in his analysis of the revolution.

The shudder must either be forgotten – in order to blot out the sky of everything that would tarnish the new dawn proclaimed by philosophy– or simulated and repeated in order to train the subject in its mastery of this affect and the object responsible for its onset. Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 “Of the Sublime” outlines the program for a tragic theater that accepts the French Revolution as a gravestone and insists that, by presenting the terrifying sublime on the stage, it will train spectators in confronting that terror should they ever meet its resemblance in real life. In the wake of the revolution, Schiller revised his thinking on the sublime so that the sublime object – always one of dread (hence, the new accent on the status of the revolution) – would impart something instructive. Schiller answered the question – posed by the evil sign of regicide – Kant brushed aside: If recollection of the past provides some foresight, and every stone from the past provides some idea of human destiny, then what are we to do with this stone when it is, in the case of the revolution, a gravestone? It is this paradox – the past is to impart the destiny of reason; the past as revolution contains the suicide of reason (the State commits suicide; self-contradiction, etc.) – that produces the shudder as an everlasting affect. The shudder says: self-contradiction, overturning is the rule. Schematized in this way, it is clear that Schiller is replying to Kant: in order to make this gravestone work in the interest of reason – where ‘reason,’ here, means reaction, something not yet risible in Kant, for whom the atrocity in fact never took place because the crime was, so he says, committed out of fear, absolute evil did not take place – it must be put on the stage, dramatized as a lesson. Thus, while the world-historical sign was, in Kant, always the promise of peace, the token of progress, here, in Schiller, the world-historical sign wears a grimace whose face, when presented often enough, teaches us not what to do, but what not to do. Here the sign evinces, not the promise of happiness, but the memory of the guillotine we can never escape.

The change in the status of the sublime – and the French Revolution – between Schiller’s first essay on the sublime in 1793 and the later 1801 essay testifies to a refunctionalization of the shudder produced by the revolution. According to Charles H. Hinnant, in the later essay “the sublime is no longer inspired by our atavistic shudders in a darkened and empty space or by our identification with the sufferings of others but rather by an active resistance to what he now calls ‘brute force’” (*5). The experience of the sublime is “a combination of being in anguish (at its peak this expresses itself as a shudder) and being happy (something that can escalate to a kind of ecstasy) ([Schiller] 74)” (SPS 131). History is now called sublime and it is the function of the sublime in theater to unveil the dangers of history as part of an aesthetic education designed to guard against actual dangers. As Hinnant writes,

For Schiller, the depiction of these exemplary scenes would serve the function of a practice run, permitting us to become aware of the actualities of history through a protective but transparent barrier. As spectators, we remain outside the representation, even as we identify with the surrogate figures for the purpose of gaining an aesthetic education. The appeal of such an educational program is twofold: intellectual and emotional. On the one hand, its tragic plots provide a lucid demonstration of vicissitudes of history, a primer of the dangers confronting heroic figures that corresponds to what might happen to us in the immediate present or future. On the other hand, these struggling figures could inspire in us ‘a painful feeling of our limitations,’ or, more dramatically, the sublime courage associated with the nobility and endurance of those who remain steadfast in defeat (SPS 135).

The absolute evil repressed in Kant’s account of the French Revolution is here, in Schiller, determinative, yet without paying the costs this evil entails. The shudder, in Kant’s remarks on the French Revolution, accompanies the sense that absolute evil is possible, even though Kant claims that, in fact, it did not occur. And, in order for reason to maintain its sovereignty and its teleological promise, absolute evil must never happen, the mind must explain every crime that makes us shudder as the result of some cause that is not inimical to the interest of reason. Everything, even the motives driving those who committed regicide, must serve the good. By regarding the King’s executioners as impossible, the Kantian response to the shudder of revolution – determined by a moral theory without ears and an ever-fearful epistemology – binds itself to an instrumental rationality that wants to know nothing of what is not like itself. Its inherent weakness – which it counts as its strength – lies in its inability or unwillingness to tarry with the shudder felt by Edgar Allen Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse”:

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain…. there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall – this rushing annihilation – for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination – for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demonically impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipace, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot… We perpetrate [this and similar actions] merely because we feel that we should not. [*6]

Gripped by this shudder, modern thought convulses and immunizes itself against dissolution when confronted with experiences that appear to shake the earth. By contrast, in Adorno, the shudder carries with it the possibility of loosening society’s grip on all that it dominated in order to preserve itself. Adorno’s shudder is at once a novel expression of experience and the distillation of the historical remainders of Idealism’s shudder in front of the French Revolution. Its tremors recall the violence the Enlightenment subject has done to nature and itself and, insofar as the subject does not flee from the shudder but gives itself over to the object whose power both terrifies and attracts, allows for an experience that cuts through the semblance of immediacy produced by a second nature bought at the price of the subject’s own evisceration. Adorno requires that the shudder formerly fled from, the shudder overcome by sealing the object in predetermined categories, is no longer elided, but, instead, approached with abandon.

[*2] As quoted in Peter D. Fenves, A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (Ithaca: Cornell University press, 1991), 272. This is Fenves’s translation.

[*3] This formulation – not transgression but absolute rejection – anticipates Hegel’s critique of abstract negation.

[*4] This is Fenves’s translation. See A Peculiar Fate, 284n.

[*5] Charles H. Hinnant, “Schiller and the Political Sublime: Two Perspectives.” [SPS] Criticism. Volume 44. No.2, 131.

[*6] Edgar Allen Poe, The Unknown Poe (ed. Raymond Foye; San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1980), 60-1).

Unbound Energy: The Sublime, Hypercathexis

2011-01-05T23:38:00.001-05:00

According to Robert Hullot-Kentor, Adorno's work aims at comprehending critical thought's capacity "to cause reality to break in on the mind that masters it" (Things Beyond Resemblance 15). What is taken hold of in this comprehension, what serves this work of breaking in on the mind, is then, rightly, taken in hand by Adorno and used to crack open the mind. All the tools used for this purpose - paratactical writing, constellations, etc. - have received their due in the critical literature; at this point, those tools have become fetishes, to which the critic offers a homily at the cost of tracing and repeating the labor of the concept at work in critique. But there is something far more provocative in Adorno's project than the way in which his writing achieves actuality as it shakes off the subjective costume stitching together the concept of style [*1]. Adorno does not simply call for the mind to disarm itself of the weapons it's fashioned in order to dominate nature; his task is far more unsettling: because the mind will not surrender of its own accord, something outside it must light the fuse, causing it to detonate. The history of the West Adorno rewrites as the dialectic of enlightenment everywhere militates against this explosion. The history of progress is also, and most importantly, the history of a certain cunning whereby the mind immunizes itself against invasion in order to guarantee its self-preservation. "The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity" because the preservation of the self is bought at the price of self-sacrifice (Dialectic of Enlightenment 1). Everywhere electric shocks are meted out in order to save a belligerently defensive mind. Adorno aims to crack the skull history has strengthened. Yet the Promethean character of Adorno's desire to crack that skull - or, better, the shield protecting the individual from what is external to it - sets him at odds with both his own commentators - who cast him in the role of a melancholy ethicist - and a philosophical tradition that will always sell off the world in order to hold onto points of redemption the world has already rendered ineffectual.

The demand for self-preservation saturates every concept designed to cover objects and experiences perceived to be threatening. As is abundantly clear in the case of the Edmund Burke's sublime and Sigmund Freud's hypercathexis, every moderating concept stages a drama in which external forces are measured according to the subject's capacity to withstand that force, quickly domesticated and, if the subject is strong enough, neutralized. Whether or not the subject survives is, in the case of the sublime and hypercathexis, largely a question of energy: either external energy is moderated or the subject is lost to an external object. Between the threatening object and the fragile organism stands a shield of nerves, muscles and energies designed to preserve the self. While Adorno, via the concept of aesthetic experience (shudder + mimesis), aims at piercing this shield so that reality breaks in upon the subject, the concepts of the sublime and hypercathexis unite in their ultimate concern with the self's preservation.

In the case of the Burke's sublime, the need for self-preservation is not simply implicit with the concept, but explicitly celebrated. Its primacy sets it in opposition to the beautiful, which is derided because it relaxes the body, rendering it defenseless against the evils of "melancholy, dejection, despair and often self-murder" to which it is then subject ("On the Sublime and Beautiful" 108). For Burke, it is utter blasphemy to hold onto the classical equation of beauty and Godliness because this identity would, according to its own inner logic, imply that God resembles all that threatens to annihilate mankind by enfeebling it. God is, instead, on the side of the sublime because the semblance of pain evoked by the sublime sets the body in motion and trains it in militating against what terrifies and threatens it [*2]. "In everything sudden and unexpected," Burke writes, "we are apt to start; that is, we have a perception of danger, and our nature rouses us to guard against it" (70). Our nature rouses us to do so because, like corporeal pain, the terror provoked by the sublime produces "tension, contraction or violent emotion of the nerves" (105-6). This "violent pulling of the fibers" shakes the body from its lethargy and, with fear orchestrating the exercises of the nerves, aids us in our labor of preserving the body.

But the damage caused by this "violent pulling" cannot be too great or it loses its resemblance to pain and simply becomes painful, puncturing the shield protecting the individual and derailing the drive for self-preservation. But even if the astonishment produced by the sublime requires the absence of pain, it nevertheless bears the same structural relation to the terror to which pain is subject. The difference between the sublime, actual pain and madness is only a matter of degree. Astonishment, the passion underwriting each state, is described as "that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it ... No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear" (49). This state, in which the soul is suspended and the mind is so filled with an object that it is prevented from reasoning or entertaining any other object, bears a structural affinity to the madness produced by love - that is, “When men have suffered their imaginations to be long affected with an idea, it so wholly engrosses them as to shut out by degrees almost every other, and to break down every partition of the mind which would confine it” (37). The madman is “unrestrained by the curb of reason” (63), gets hold of an idea and repeats it for the rest of his life (62-3). We might then say, contra Burke, that terror - the "ruling principle of the sublime" - turns all those subjected to it - madmen, sublime men and soon-to-be dead men - into little more than another limb of the fearful object that cannot be mastered. Something has broken in and the subject is defenseless.

In Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trauma is the name of this something. Here too the subject must defend itself against "any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield" (33). When something breaks down the barrier protecting the organism from the stimuli of the external world, the "pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus;" to defend against this flood, the organism must become capable of "mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them" (ibid). What was once the sole privilege of whatever lay within the body - an unmediated passage to the mind - is taken over by an object in the external world, thus producing a continuous stream of excitations the mind cannot help but suffer (34). The body defends itself: "cathectic energy is summoned from all sides"in order to set up an "anticathexis" system (ibid). Yet the consequences of this breach are uncertain - preparedness for trauma depends on the degree to which the system has been prepared for anxiety (whether or not the system has manufactured sufficient warning signals in preparation for traumatic events) and the level of "hypercathexis" present in the system capable of binding inflowing amounts of excitation (36).

According to Freud, "Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli" (30). Although Freud everywhere qualifies these "often far-fetched speculations" (26) with the proviso that, because "we know nothing of the nature of the excitatory process that takes place in the elements of the psychical systems ... We are consequently operating all the time with a large unknown fact, which we are obliged to carry over into every new formula" (35), we cannot help but suspect that the work of hypercathexis, which Freud presents as merely descriptive, is, nevertheless, fundamentally prescriptive for psychoanalysis. When the organism's mobilization of anticathexis falls short, the talking cure takes up the work of hypercathexis. Measuring everything from the perspective of self-preservation, psychoanalysis is in league with the reality principle. Like the object breaking through the subject's shield, indifference to the dictates of self-preservation must be combatted.

Above all else, the border between outside and inside must not be breached. But of course, for Burke and Freud, it is important to know something about that outside. But because the external world is suffused with an energy that tends toward the individual's destruction, a virtue is made of whatever moderates the external world's capacity to overwhelm the subject. Anathema to this conservative form of object relations is the idea that comprehension of what is outside the subject requires that "reality break in upon the mind." In the sublime and hypercathexis, it is best that the organism should, as in Freud's description, only take in "small specimens of the external world, to sample it in small quantities" by "making tentative advances towards the external world and then drawing back from it" (Beyond 31). But as it withdraws to its safe shore, it renounces the object animating its own desire: knowledge of what is not itself.

[*1] "Actuality" in the sense of the Wirklichkeit of Hegel's notorious Doppelsatz - "Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; Und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig" ["What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational"] - which Adorno, uncritically accepting the conflation of actuality and existence - of wirklich and vernünftig - he shares with Russell and Popper, mistakenly interprets as a "justification of what exists (Elements of the Philosophy of Right 20).

[*2] There is here a distinct analogy between this function of the sublime and Schiller's directive that aesthetic education emphasize the pedagogical effects of the sublime: In the essay of 1793, the sublime leads us to a "consciousness of our moral freedom," while, in the essay of 1801, the sublime teaches us of the historical terrors inflicted on our forebears in order to guide us in avoiding their fate. See Hinnant, Charles H. (Spring 2002) "Schiller and the Political Sublime: Two Perspectives." Criticism. Volume 44, No. 2.

Faulkner's Question and the Mocking Peasant

2011-01-03T20:59:00.003-05:00

"When Will I Be Blown Up?"

First posed in William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech, this question continues to resonate with the force of a secret we'd rather not admit to ourselves. For the man of 1950, the question's threat of dismemberment had become both universal and bearable. Under the spell of this fear, writers had "forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." Until this spell is broken, all writing is, according to Faulkner, cursed: "His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands." The only way out is through: "He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever..."

Unable to shake a fear that presses too close, the question "When will I be blown up?" strips any other question of whatever urgency it shamelessly insists on. There is no time for those questions. And the condition required for those questions to be asked - a distance from events without which the subject is simply asphyxiated - has already collapsed. There is no speaking about the conflicts of the heart to a man whose head is set in a vice. This is the situation of, what Adorno called, "bombed out consciousness" (Notes to Literature II 246) .

For anyone working on aesthetics, there is no getting around a confrontation with the state of contemporary historical consciousness evoked by Faulkner's question. Historical conditions determine what questions are imperative and what questions are worthless. The category of the sublime, for example, is stamped by the experience of an English ruling class that, following the religious wars and the Restoration, turned the previously harrowing experience of crossing the Alps into an aesthetic experience as great as that of contemplating the Mediterranean art that Grand Tour set out to discover. The mix of terror and delight recorded by travel writers, then taken over root and branch by Burke and Kant, was the mark of distinctive taste. To experience avalanches and fissured glacial fields as terrible joys that are ultimately pleasing requires a specific historical consciousness present in the English ruling class, but unavailable to the Swiss peasants for whom nature was little more than a daily danger.

It is to the credit of Kant and Schiller that they regard the peasant as a problem - those peasants for whom the only question is not "When will I be blown up?" but "When will I be buried alive?" - on the way to securing the sublime as fundamental to human nature. In order to prove that a judgment about the sublime is not a product of "mere convention" -that is, culture, wealth, etc. - Kant attempts to answer the "Savoyard peasant [who] did not hesitate to call anyone a fool who fancies glaciered mountains" (Critique of Judgment 124). Even if the problem of historical experience is transcendentally spirited away, it is at least registered; by contrast, in its tireless celebration of a sublime whose possibility it never questions, much contemporary art and aesthetics simply drowns out the protest of the peasant. Not yet cold enough to sweep the problem under the rug, Schiller lamented the fact that "not everyone has sufficient imagination to produce in themselves a vivid image of the danger, nor do they all have enough moral self-sufficiency not to try to avoid such an image" ("On the Sublime" 36).

If you are not willing to draw out the consequences of historical progress and its regression into a new barbarism, then you should keep silent about art and aesthetic experience. The force and possibility of art depends on its relation to the slaughter-bench of history none can avoid. Picasso's obsession with African art was only possible once civilization itself generated the primitive conditions it promised to pull itself out from. Montage could provide a shock so long as juxtaposed images undermined the spectator's delusion of a unified gaze; once the shock no longer frustrated, montage became kitsch. Benjamin's promotion of film-as-shock rested on a mistaken diagnosis of historical consciousness: the consumers of the Dream Factory walked out of the cinema whistling and smiling, not shaken out of reified consciousness. Atonal music staged the dissonant truth of a harmony whose lies were exploded by the First World War. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I do not pretend that art is simply a copy of the social world out of which it emerges. When art is art, it uncovers a tendency in the artistic material that history had suppressed. The truth-content of art is as much bound to its fidelity to the speechless demands of the object - its material - as it is riven to an historical consciousness whose form determines whether the artwork is eloquent or mute. But if our historical situation has produced that bombed out consciousness warned against by Faulkner, the promise of aesthetic experience, which draws its life from the difference between art and reality, has turned into a lie.

In Burke, Kant and Schiller, the peasant's complaint echoes through a condition of the sublime each insists upon: for the sublime to produce a painful joy, it is necessary that one be without pain. Only those who read about the Lisbon earthquake in the papers, only those who pass unmolested through the Alps, can experience the terrible as an idea; for the others, it is simply terrible. If you are not a spectator, the never far off cut of the guillotine makes the sublime simply grotesque. Once disinterestedness turns into enthusiasm, you are implicated and, therefore, at risk. Aesthetic experience requires that we, in Hegel's words, "draw back ... retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoy in safety the spectacle of 'wrecks confusedly hurled'" ( The Philosophy of History 21).

Aesthetic experience requires that there is still a "quiet shore" to which we can retreat; requires that we can accept the baseness of being afraid and, in Faulkner's words, "forget it forever." But even if the wisdom of prescribing repression for the problem of contemporary fear is not problematized, it might be that we cannot retreat to the shores of the Lotus Eaters, where we are safe and delightfully forgetful, because that land no longer exists. But even if that land no longer exists, even if the shores are soaked with the blood of the Lotus Eaters, even if there is no sublime to testify to the powers of imagination or providing for the self-preservation of the individual organism, the theoretical evisceration of experience achieved by an abstract negation of aesthetic experience risks stamping reality with a uniformity it nowhere possesses, thereby reproducing the society that has so boxed our ears that we all hear the same shrill ringing wherever we go. To claim, with Agamben, that "we are all virtually homines sacri" does not testify to an alliance with the victims but, instead, to an identification with the aggressor (Homo Sacer 15). The force of critique, which is nothing other than the capacity for differentiation through and against the power of identity thinking, is here turned to stone before a Gorgon stare. As Pierre Bourdieu pointed out, aesthetic experience, registered in a shudder that, in Kant and Burke, strengthens the body that need not fear for its life, issues in judgments of taste for those who can afford taste: taste testifies to the hierarchy produced by an antagonistic society. And aesthetic experience remains cleaved to the leisure afforded by capital.

Thus the question is not: Is experience possible in a world ruled by Faulkner's menacing question?; but: What form of experience and what form of art is capable of tarrying with that question without either sweeping the peasant's complaint under the rug or forgetting that the ennobling effects of aesthetic experience resulted in nothing but broken promises? To answer this question, it is necessary to determine how aesthetic experience is saturated by what history has made of contemporary consciousness because, in Kant's time and our own, consciousness is little more than the afterimage of a society that aims at preventing experience from calling it by its proper name.