adorno theessayasform

7/28/2019 Adorno TheEssayAsForm

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EuroPean PersPectivesA Series n Social Philosopltl and Cultural CriticismLawrence D. Kritzman an dRichard Wolin, Editors

Earopean Perspeaiues seeks to make available works ofinterdisciplinary interestby leading European thinkers' Bypresentingclassic textsand outstandingcontemporaryworks, theserieshopes o shape he major intellectualcontroversies f ourday and thereby to facilitate he tasksof historical understanding'

TheodorW. AdornoRichard Wol inAntonio GramsciAlain FinkielkrautPierre Vidal-NaquetJacquesLe GoffJul ia Kristeva

Notes to Literatilrz, vols. I and llTltt H dryger Controtersl: A Critical ReaderPrisan Notebooks, vol. IRemembering in Vain: Tfu Klaus BarbieTrial and Crimes Against HtmanttlAssassinsof MemarvHitorl and MemortN ati oxs W itho u N ationalis m

EIEIINOTtr,S

TOLITE,RATTJREVolame One

THEODOR W. ADORNOEDITED BY ROLF TIEDEMANNTRANSLATED FROM THE GERMANBY SHIERRY WEBER NICHOLSEN

L.C OLU M B I A U N I V ERS lTY PRESSNew York


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conditionsr rormar ::":, :,::':::',,j,-n..0"- hasnever uitedeveloped bu t has.ahvays been ready to prociaim its subordination toexternal authorities as its real concern. The cssav, however, does not le tit s dornain be prescribed fbr it. Instead of accompiishing somethingscientifically or creatirrgsomething art ist ical lv, i ts efforts re ]ect he lei-sure


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Nor's r rirrr^rr*u,the neutralization f cultural rvorks o commodities, process ha t nrecent ntellectual istoryhas rresistibly akenhold of what heEasternbloc ignominiouslycalls "the heritage."The process s perhapsmostobvious in Stefan Zweig, who produced several sophisticated ssays nhis youth and ended up descending to the psychology of the creativeindividual n his book onBalzac. This kind of writing doesnot criticizeabstract undamental concePts' aconceptual ata, or habituated iich s;instead, t presupposeshem, mplicitly but by the same okenwith allth e more complicity.The refuse f interpretive sychologys fusedwithcurrent categories rom the Weltanschauungf the cultural philistine,categories ike "personality"or "the irrational."Such essays onfusethemselves ith the same euil letonwith which the enemies f the essayform confuse t. Forcibly separated rom the discipline of academicunfreedom, intellectual reedom itself becomesunfree and serves thesociallypreformedneeds f it s clientele. rresponsibil ity,tselfan aspectof all truth thatdoesno texhaust tself n responsibiliry o thestatus uo ,then justifies tself to the needs of established onsciousness; ad essaysar e just as conformist as bad dissertations. esponsibiiity, however,respects ot only authorities nd committees, ut also he object tself.

The essay orm, however, bears some responsibility or the fact thatthe bad essay ellsstories boutpeople nstead felucidating he matter thand. The separation f science nd scholarship rom ar t is irreversible.only the naivet f the manufacturer f l iterature akesno noticeof it;he consider s himself at least an organizat onal enius and grinds goodworks of art down ntobad ones.With theobjectificationf theworld inthe course of progressivedemythologrzation, rt and sciencehave sepa-rated.A consciousnessor which intuitionand concept, mageand signwouid be one and the same-if such a consciousnessver existed-cannot e magically estored, nd ts estitution ouldconstitute regres-sion o chaos.Such a consciousnesss conceivabl e nly as he completionof the process f mediation, s utopia,conceived y the dealist hiloso-phers since Kant under the name of intellektue lle nschauung,ntellectualintuition,something hat broke down wheneveractualknowledgeap -pealed o it. Wherever philosophy magines hat by bor rowing fromliterature t can abolishobjecti6ed hought and its history-what iscommonly ermed he antithesis f subject nd object-and evenhopesthat Being itself v'/ i i lspeak' in a po s ieoncocted ParmenidesandJungnickel, t starts o turn into a washed-out ultural babble.With apeasant unning that ustifies tself as primordiality, t refuses o honor

.". "..o As FoRMthe obligations of conceptual thought, to which, however. it ha d sub-scribed when it used concepts n its propositions and judgments. At thesame time, it s aesthetic lement consistsmerely of watered-down, second-hand reminiscences of Holderlin or Expressionism, or perhaps Jugend-stil, because no thought can entrusr itself as absolutely rnd tlindlv tolanguage as the notion of a primordial utterancewould lead us to believe.From the violence that image and concept thereby do to one anothersprings th e jargon of authenticity, n which words vibrate with emotionwhile keeping quiet about what has moved them. Language's ambitioustranscendenceof meaning ends up in a meaningressnesswhich can beeasily seized upon by a positivism to which one feels superior; one playsinto the hands of positivism through the very meaninglessness t criti-cizes, a meaninglessnesswhich one shares by adopting it s tokens. Underth e spel l of such developments, language comes, where it st i l l dares tostir in scholarship and science, to resemble the handicrafts, and th eresearcher who resists language altogether and, instead of degradinglanguage to a mere paraphrase of his numbers uses tabres ha t unquali-fiedly acknowledge the reification of consciousness, s the one who dem-onstrates,negatively, faithfuiness to the aesthetic. n his charts he findssomething like a forrn fo r that reification without apologetic borrowingfrom art. To be sure, art has always been so intertwined with thedominant tendencies of enlightenment that it ha s made use of scientificand scholarly findings in it s techniques since classical antiquitv. Bu tquantity becomcs quality. If technique is made absolute n the work ofartr if construction becomes total and eradicatesexpression, it s oppositeand it s motivating force; if art thus crainrs to be direct scientific tnowt-edge and correct bv scientific standards, it is sanctioning a preartisticmanipulation o mater ials as devoid of mean ng ". only the ..Seyn,,fBeing] of the philosophy departmenrs can be . it is frate.nizing withreification-against which it has been and stiil is the function of what isfunctionless, of art, to protesr, however mute and reified that protestitself may be .But although ar t and sciencebecame separate n the course of history,the opposition between them shourd not be hypostatized,. Aversion to ananachronistic conflation of the two does no t render a compartmentalizedcuiture sacrosanct. F'or al l their necessity, hose compartments representinstitutional confirmation of the renunciation of the whole ,.uah. rh "ideals of purity and tidiness that ar e common to the enterprises of averitable philosophv versed in eternar varLres, n airtight and ihoroughly


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INOTES TO LITER,4TLIREorganized science, and an aconcePtual ntuitive art' bear the marks of a."f,r ... iv. order. A certificateof competency s required of the mind sothat it will not transgress upon official culture by crossing culturallyconfirmed boundary lines. Presupposed in this is the notion that al lknolvledge can potentially be converted to science. The epistemologiesthat distinguish prescientific from scientific consciousness have one andall conceived the distinction solely as one o degree. The fact that it hasgone no farther than the mere assuranceof this convertibiliry, without iv i .,g consciousnessever in actualiry having been transformed into sci-e n t i f i c c o n s c i o u sne s s ' p o i n t s up t h e p r e c a r i o u sne s s o f t h e t r a n s i t i o n , aquaiitative dif erence.The simplest reflectionon the life of consciousnesswould te"ch us to what a slight extent insights' which are by no meansarbitrary, hunches, can be fully captured within the net of science' Thework of Nlarcel Proust, which is no more lacking in a scientific-positivistelement than Bergson's, is an attempt to exPress necessaryand compellingi n s i g h t s i n t o huma nb e i n g s a nd so c i a l r e l a t i o n s t h a t a r e no t r e a d i l yaccJmmodated within science and scholarship, despite the fact that theirclaim to objectivity is neither diminished no r abandoned to a vagueplausibility. The rneasure of such objectivity is not the verification ofassertions hrough repeated esting bu t rather individual human experi-ence, mainta,neii th.otrgh hope and disillusionment' Such experiencethrows its observatrons into relief through confirmation or refutation rnthe process of recollection. Bu t it s inclividually synthesized unitv, inwhich the whole neverthelessappears, cannot be distributed and recate-gorized under the separate Persons and apparatuses of psychology andiociology. Under rhe pressure of th e scie'tistic spirit and it s desiderata,which -are ubiquitous, in latent form, even in the artist' Proust tried'through a technique itselI modeled on the sciences,a kind of experimen-tul -.thod, to salvage, or perhaps restore, what used to be thought ofin the days of bourgeois individualism, when individual consciousnessstill hari confidence in itself and was not intimidated by organizational

censorship-as the knowledge of a man of experience like the nowextinct /t,onlmele ettres,who. P.o.,.t conjures up as the highest form othe dilettante. It would no t have occurred to anyone to dismiss what sucha man of experience had to say as insignificant' arbitrary' and irrationalon the grounds that it was only hi s own and could no t simply begene.alized in scientific fashion. Those of hi s findings that slip throughthe meshes of science most certainly elude science itself' As Geistes'n^issen-sc/raft, literally the science of mind, scientific scholarship fails to deliver

9THE ESSAY AS FoRNwhat it promises the mind: to i]]uminate ts works rom the inside. Thevoung writer who rvants o learn u'hat a work of art is, what linguistrc :o rm,aestheticquality' and even aesthetic echnique are at college lvillusual ly earn about them only haphazardly, or at best receive nformationtaken readvmade from whatever philosophy is in vogue and more or lessarbitrarily applied to the content of the works in question. Bu t if he turnsto phiiosophical aestheticshe is besieged with abstract propositions thatar e not related to the works he u'ants to understand and do not in factrepresent he content he is groping toward. The division of labor in thekosmos aetikos, he intellectual world, between ar t on th e one hand andscience and scholarship on the other, however, is not solely responsiblefo r all that; ts lines of dernarcation annot be se t aside through good willand comprehensive planning. Rather, an intellect irrevocably modeiedon the domination of nature and material production abandons the recol-lection of the stage t has overcome, a stage that promises a uture otre,the transcendenceo rigidified relations of production; and this cripplesit s specialist's pproach precisely when it comes to it s specific objects.In its relat ionship to scient i rc rocedure and its philosophical ground-ing as method, the essay, n accordance with its idea, draws the fullestconclusions from the critique of systen"r- ,r,enernpiricist theories, rvhichgive priority to experience that s open-ended and cannot be anticipated,as opposed to fixed conceptual ordering, renrain systematic n that thevdeal with preconditions for knowledge that are conceived as more or lessconstantand develop them in as homogeneousa contextas possible. SinceBacon-himself an essayist-empiricis m has been as much a "method"as rationalism. In the realm of thought it is virtually the essal'al,rne hathas successfully raised doubts about the absolute privilege of method.The essayallows for the consciousness f nonidentity, lvithout expressingit directly; it is radical in it s non-radicalisn.r, n refraining fron.r anyreduction to a principle, in it s accentuation fthe partial against the total,in i ts fragmentary characte .

Perhaps he great Sieur de Montaigne felt something ik e this when hegave his writings the wonderfullyelegant nd apt title of "Essa1,." hesimplemodestr'of hi s word s an a rrgant ourtesy.l .heessayist ismisseshis own proud hopcs which sometimes ead him to believe hat he hascome close to the ultimate:he has, after all, no more to offer thanexplanations.l f he poemsoi others,or at bestof his own ideas. But heironically adaptshimself to this smallness-the eternal mallness f the


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NorES r., irro^'rr,*umost profound work o the inte l lect in face of l i fe-and even emphasizesi t w i t h r r on i c modcs t y .*

The essay does not play by the rules of organized science and theory,according to which, in Spinoza's formulation, the order of things is thesame as the order of ideas. Because the unbroken order of concepts is notequivalent to what exists, the es say does not aim at a closed deductive orinductive structure. In particular, it rebels against the doctrine, deeplyrooted since Plato, that what is transient and ephemeral is unworthy ofphilosophy-that old injustice done to the transitory, whereby it rscondemned again in the concept. The essay ecoils from the violence rnthe dogma according to which the result of the process of abstraction, heconcept, which, in contrast to the individual it grasps, is temporallyinvariant, should be granted ontological dignity. The fallacy that theordo idearum, the order of ideas, isthe ordo rerum, the order of things, isfounded on the imputation of imrnediacy to something mediated. Just assomething that is merely factual cannot be conceived without a concept,because to think it is always already to conceive it, so too the purestconcept cannot be thought except in relation to facticity. Even the con-structs of fantasy, presumably free of time and space, refer, if deriva-tively, to individual existence. This is why the essay refuses to beintimidated by the depraved profundiry according to which truth andhistory are incompatible and opposed to one another. If truth has in facta temporal core, then the full historical content becomes an integralmoment in it ; th e a posteriori becomes the a priori concretely and notmerely in general, as Fichte and his followers claimed. The relationshipto experience-and the essay nvests experience with as much substanceas traditionai theory does mere categories-is the relationship to all ofhistory. Merely individual experience, which consciousness akes as it spoint of departur , since it is what is ciosest o it , is itself mediated bythe overarching experience of historical humankind. The noti on that theIatter is mediated and one's own experience unmediated is mere self-deception on the part of an individualistic soc ie y nd ideology. Hencethe essay challenges the notion that what has been produced historicalyis not a fit object of theory. The distinction between a prima philosophia,a first philosophv, and a mere philosophy of culture that would presup-pose that first philosophy and build upon it-the distinction used as atheoretical ationalization or the taboo on the essay-cannot be salvaged.An intellectual modus operandi that honors the division between the

THE ESSAY AS FORMtemporal nd the atemporal s though t werecanonicaloses ts author-ity. Higher levels of abstractionnvest thought with neither greatersanctrty or metaphysical ubstance;n the contrary, he atter ends oevaporate it h the advance f abstraction,nd theessay ries o comDen_sate or someof that. The customaryobjection hat he ssay s f.ugn.,..,-taryand contingenttselfpostulatesha t otality s given, and with it theidentity f subject nd object, nd actsas thoughone were n possessionof thewhole.The essay, ou'ever, oe sno t tr y to seek he eternal n thetransient nd distill it out; it tries to render the transient ternal. tsweakness earswitness o the very nonidentityt had to express. t alsotestifieso an excess f intentionover objectand thereby o the utoprawhich is blockedby the partitionof the world into rhe eternaland thetransient. n the cmphaticessay houghtdivests tseifof the traditionaiideaof truth.In doing so t alsosuspendshe raditional oncept f method.Thought'sdepthdepends n how deeplv t penetratesrs object, ot on rheextelt owhich it reduces t to something lse.The essay ives this a polemicalturn bv dealing vithobjectsha twouldbe considerederivative,withoutitself pursuing their ultimatederivation.It thinks conjointlyand rnfreedomabout hings that meet n its freerychosen bject. t doesno tinsist on somethingbevond msdiz1i6n5-an,l thoseare the historicalmediationsn whichthewhole ocierys sedimented-but seekshe ruthcontent n its objects, tself nherentlyhistorical, t doesno t seekanyprimordial given, thus spiting a societalized ftergesellschaftetefocierythat' becauset doesno t tolerate nything ha tdoesno t bear t, ,t".np,tolerateseastof all anything ha t reminds t of its own ubiquiry,andinevitably itesas its ideological omplement he very nature ts'praxishascompletely liminated. he essay uietlyputsan end to the rlusionthat hought ould breakou t ofthe sphereoi t/tuis, ulture,and nroveinto thatof phlsis, nature.Spellboundby what s fixedand acknowledgedto be derivative,by artifacts, t honorsnaturcby confirming ha t t-nolongerexists or humanbeings. ts alexandrinisms a ..rpo.,.i to the ac tthatby theirveryexistence,iracs nd nightingaies-where theuniversaine t has permitted hem to 5r.r1yiys-rn2keus believe ha t life is sti l lal ive' The essay bandonshe oyar oad o theorigins, which eadsonlyto what is most dsliv2livs-Being, the ideology ha t duplicateswhataTready xists' but the dea of immediacy, an ideaposited n the meaningof mediationtseJf, oesno tdisappear ompletely. or theessay ll lev.sls--_of mediationare mmediareuntil it begins o ..fi..t. ...""{,i-

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NoTEs ,'r , , rr^^.uou ,Just as the essay rejects primordial givens, so it rejects definition of itsconcepts. Philosophy has arrived at a thoroughgoing critique of defini-tions from the most divergent perspectives-in Kant, in Hegel, inNietzsche. Bu t science has never adopted this critique. Whereas th emovement that begins with Kant, a movement against the scholastrcresidues in modern thought, repiaces verbal definitions with an under-standing of concepts in terms of the process through w hich they are

produced, the individuai sciences, in order to Pre'/ent the security oftheir operations from being disturbed, still insist on the pre-criticalobligation to define. In this the neopositivists, who call the scientificmethod philosophy, ar e in agreement with scholasticism. The essay, onthe other hand, incorporates he antisystematic mpulse into its own wayof proceeding and introduces concepts unceremoniously, "immediately,"just as it receives them. They ar e made more precise only through theirrelationship to one another. In this, however, the essay inds support inthe concepts themselves. For it is mere superstition on th e part of ascience ha t operatesby processing raw materials to think that conceptsassuch ar e unspecified and become determinate only when defined. Scienceneeds the notion of the concept as a tabula rasa to consolidate its ciaim toauthority, its claim to be the sole power to occupy the head o the tabie.In actuality, all concepts ar e already implicitly concretized through theIanguage in which they stand. The essay starts with these meanings, and,being essentially language itself, takes them farther; it wants to helplanguage in its relation to concepts, to take them in reflection as they havebeen named unreflectingly in language. The phenomenoiogical methodof interpretive analysis embodies a sense of this, but it fetishizes th erelationship of concepts o language. The essay s as skeptical about thisas it is about the definition of concepts. Unapologetically it lays itselfopen to the objection that one does not know for sure how one is tounCerstand its concepts. For it understands that the demand for strictdefinition has long served to eliminate-through stipulative manipula-tions of the meanings of concepts-the irritating and dangerous aspectsof the things that live in the concepts. But the essay does not make dowithout general concepts-even ianguage ha t does no t fetishize concePtscannot do without them-nor does it deal with them arbitrarily. Henceit takes presentation more seriously than do modes of proceeding thatseparate method and object and are indifferent to the presentation of theirobjectified contents. The manner of expression is to salvage the precisionsacrificed when definition is omitted, without betraying the subject matterto the arbitrariness of conceptual meanings decreed once and for ail. ln

r"u "..,J"'o. o**this, Benjamin was the unsurpassed master. This kind of precision,however, cannot remain atomistic. Not less but more than a definitionalprocedure, the essay presses for the reciprocal interaction of its conceptsin the processof intellectual experience. In such experience, conceptsdonot form a continuum of operations. Thought does no t progress in asingle direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. Thefruitfulness of the thoughts depends on rhe densiry of the texture. Thethinker does not actually think bu t rather makes himself into an arena fo rintellectual experience, without unraveling it. while even traditionalthought is fe d by impulses from such experience, it eliminates thememory of the process by virtue of its form. The essay, however, takesthis experience as its model without, as reflected orm, simply imitatingit. The experience is mediated through the essay's own conceptual orga-nization; the essay proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodicaliy.Th e way the essav appropriates concepts can best be compared to thebehavior of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak itslanguage instead of piecing it together ou t of its eiements according torules learned in school. Such a person will read without a dictionary. Ifhe sees he same word thirry times in continually changing contexts, hewill have ascertained ts meaning bemer rhan if he had looked up all themeanings listed, which ar e usually too narrow in relation to the changesthat occur with changing contexts and too vague in relation to theunmistakable nuances that the context gives rise to in every individuaicase.This kind of learning remains vulnerable to error, as does the essayas form; it has to pay fo r it s affinity with open intellectuar experiencewith a lack of security rhar the norm of established hought fears likedeath. It is no t so much that the essay neglects ndubitable certainty asthat it abrogates t as an ideal. l 'he essay becomes true in its progress,which drives it beyond itself, not in a treasure-hunting obsession withfoundations. Its concepts receive their light from a terminus atl quemhidden from the essay tself, not from any obvious terminus a quo, and, nthis the method itself expresses ts utopian intention. Al l its concepts ar eto be presented n such a way that they support one another, that eachbecomes articulated through it s configuration with the others. In theessay discrete elements set off against one another come together to forma readable context; the essay erects no scaffolding and no structure. Butthe elements crystallize as a configuration through their motion. Theconstellation s a force field, us t as every intellectual structure s necessar-ily transformed into a force field under the essay,sgaze.EIE


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r 4NOTESTO LITERAT'UREThe essaygently challenges the ideal of clara et distinctaperceptioandindubitable certain y.Altogether, it might be interpreted as a protestagainst he four rules established y Descartes'Discourse nMethod atthebeginning of modern Western science nd ts theory. The seco nd f thoserules, the division of the object nto "as many parts as possible,and asmight be nece ssary or its adequate olution,"5 outlines the analysisofeiements nder whose ign traditional heoryequates onceptual chemata

of classificationwith the structure of being. Artifacts, however, whichare he subjectmatterof the essay,do not yield to an analysisof elementsand can be constructedonly from their specific dea. Kant had goodreasons or treating works of art and organi sms as analogous n thisrespect,although at the same ime, in unerring opposition o Romanticobscurantism, e took pains to distinguish hem. The totalitycan nomore be hypostatized s somethingprimary thancan elements, he prod-uct of analysis. n contrast o both, the essay rients tself to the dea of areciprocal interaction that is as rigorously intolerant of the quest forelementsas of that for the elementary.The specificmomentsare not tobe simply derived from the whole, nor vice versa.The whole s a monad,and ye t it is not; its moments,which as momentsare conceptual nnature, point beyond he specificobject n which theyare assembled. utthe essaydoes not pursue hem to the point where they would legitimatethemselves utside he specific bject; f it did so, t would end up in aninfiniry of the wrong kind. Instead, t moves n so close o thehic et nilncof the object that the objec t becomes dissociated nto the moments nwhich it has ts ife instead f being a mereobject.The thi rd Carte sian rule, "to conduct my thoughts n such an orderthat, by commencing with ob.jects he simplest and easiest o know, Irnight ascendby little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to theknowledgeof the more complex," is in gla ring contradictio n o the essayform, in that the latterstarts rom the most complex, not rom what issimplest and already familiar. The essay orm maintains he attitudeofsomeonewho is beginning to study philosophyand somehowalreadyhasits dea n hi s mind. He will hardly begin by reading he mostsimple-minded writers, whose common sense or the most part simply babbleson past he pointswhere one should inger; instead,he reaches or thosewho are allegedly the most difficult and who then cast heir light back-wards onto the simple things and illuminate them as an "attitude ofthought toward objectivity.'' The naivet f the studentwho finds diffi-cult and formidable things good enough or him has more wisdom in itthan a grown-up pedantry hat shakes ts finger at thought, warning it

t"a ura,nt"toao**that t should undersrand he simprethings before t tackles he complexones, which, however, are the only ones that tempt it. postponingknowledge n this way only obstructs t' In opposition o the clich of"comprehensibility,"henotionoftruth as a casual elationship, heessavrequires hatone's houghtabout he matterbe from the outset s o-pl.*as the object tself; it servesas a corrective o the stubbornprimitivenessthatalwaysaccompanieshe prevail ing form of reason. i science ndscholarship, falsifying as is their cusrom, reduce what is difficurt andcompiex n a reality ha t s antagonistic nd split nt o monads o simpli-6ed modelsand then differentiate he models n termsof their ostensiblematerial' the essay, n contrast,shakesoff the i.lusion of a simple andfundamentally ogical world, an iilusion weil suited o the defense f thestatus uo. The essay's ifferentiatednesss not somethingadded o it butits medium. Established thought s quick ro ascribe hai differentiated-ness o the mere psychologyof the cognitive subjects nd thinks that bydoing so it has'eliminatedwhat s compell ing n it . In reality,scienceand scholarship'self-righteous enunciations f oversophistiationreaimed no t at a precocious nd unreiiablemethodbut at the upsettingaspects f the object hat methodmakesmanifest.

The fourth cartesian rule, that one "should in every case nstitutesuchexhaustive numerations nd such generalsurveys" hat one ,is sureof leaving nothing out," the true princille of systematic hought, recursunchanged n Kant's polemic againstAristotle's"rhapsodic;thought.This rule corresponds o the charge hat the essay s, as the schoolmiterwould put it' not exhaustive,whire n fact everyobject,and certainryanintellectual ne ' encompassesn nfinitenumberof aspects, nd only theintention f thecognitive ubject ecides mong h.-. A ',generalover-view" would be possibleonly if it were established n advance hat theobject o be dealtwith was fulry graspedby the conceprs sed ro treat r,that nothing would be ieft over that could not be anticipated rom theconcepts' he rule about he exhaustive numeration f the individualpartsclaims, as a consequence f that irst assumption, hat he objectcanbe presentedn a seamless eductive ystem, supposition f the phiio-sophies f identity.As in the requirement f definition, he cartesi"nrule has survived the rationarist heorem t was basedon, in the form ofa guide o practical hought: he comprehensive verviewand continuiryof presentationre demanded venoi empiricallyopenscience.what inDescarteswas o be an intellectuar onsciencemonitoring the necessity fknowledge s thereby ransformed nto arbitrariness, he arbitrarinessofa "frame of reference"'an axiomatics o be estabrished t the outset o


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NorESo ,,lrrr^rr^usatisfya methodologicalneed and for the sake of the plausibility of thewhole, but no longer able to demonstrate ts own validity or self-evi-dence. n the German version, this is the arbitrariness f an Entzuurf,aproject, that merely hides its subjective determinantsunder a pathos-laden quest for Being. The demand for continui y n one's train ofthought tends to prejudge the inner coherence of the object, its ownharmony. A presentation haracterized y continuitywould contradictanantagonistic ubjectmatterunless t definedcontinuiryas discontinuityatthe same time. In the essay as a form, the need makes itself felt,unconsciously nd atheoretically, o annul theoretically utdated laims tocompleteness nd continui y n the concretemodu.sperandi f the mindas well. If the essay opposes,aesthetically, he mean-spirited methodwhose sole concern is not to leave anything out, it is following anepistemological mpulse. The romantic conceptionof the fragment as aconstruction hat is not completebut rather progresses nward into theinfinite through self-reflection hampions his anti-idealistmotive in themidst of Idealism.Even in the mannerof its presentation,he essaymaynot act as though t had deduced ts object and there was nothing eft tosay about it. Its self-relativization s inherent n its form: it has to beconstructed s hough it could always break off at any point. It thinks infragments, just as reality is fragmentary, and finds its unity in andthrough the breaks and not by glossing them over. An unequivocallogical order deceivesus about he antagonistic atureof what that orderis imposed upon. Discontinuiry s essential o the essay; ts subjectmatteris always a conflict brought to a standstill. While the essaycoordinatesconceptswith oneanotherby meansof their function n theparallelogramof forces n its objects, t shrinks from any overarchingconcept o whichthev could all be subordinated.What such conceptsgive the illusion ofachieving, heir methodknows o be impossible nd ye t tries o accom-plish. The word Versuclt, ttempt or essay, n which thought's utopianvision of hitting the bullseye s united with the consciousness f its ownfall ibil ity and provisionai character, ndicates, s do most historicallysurviving terminologies, omethingabout the form, something o betaken all the more seriously n that t takesplace not systematically utrather asa characteristic f an intentiongroping its way. The essayhas ocause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature, whether thefeaturebe chosenor merely happenedupon, without asserting he pres-ence of the totality. It corrects what is contingentand isolated n itsinsights n that hey multiply,confirm,and qualify hemselves, hether

r"u u.r,Jrto,o"*in the further course of the essay tself or in a mosaiclike elationshio ootheressays, ut not by a process fabstractionha tends n characteristicfeaturesderived from them. "This, then, is how the essay s distin-guished from a treatise.The person who writes essayistically s the onewho composes s he experiments,who turns his objectaround, questionsit, feels t, tests t, reflects n it, who attacks t from different sidesandassembleswhat he sees n his mind's eye and puts into words what theobject allows one to see under the conditions created n the course ofwriting."o rhere is both truth and untruth in the discomfort this proce-dure arouses, he feeling that it could continue on arbitrarily. Truth,because he essaydoes not in fact come to a conclusionand displays tsown inability to do so as a parody of its own a priori. The essay s thensaddledwith the blame for something or which forms thaterase ll traceof arbitrarinessare actually responsible. That discomfort also has itsuntruth, however, because he essay's onstellation s not arbitrary n theway a philosophical subjectivism hat displaces he consrraintemanatingfrom the object onto the conceptual order imagines it to be. whatdetermines heessay s theunity of its objectalong with thatof the theoryand experience hat have migrated nto the object. The essay's pennessis not the vagueopenness f feeling and mood; t i s given contour by itssubstance. t resists he dea of a masterpiece, n ideawhich itself reflectsthe dea of creationand totality. Its form complieswith the critical ideathat the human being is not a creator and that nothing human is acreation.The essay,which is alwaysdirected toward somethingalreadycreated,does.notpresent tself as creation,nor does t covet somethingall-encompassingwhose totality would resemble that of creation. ltstotality, he unity of a form developed mmanently, s that of somethingnot total,a totaliy hat doesnot maintainas orm the hesisof the dentiryof thoughtand ts object hat t rejects scontent.At times, emancipationfrom the compuision of identity gives the essaysomething that eludesoFficial thought-a moment of something inextinguishble, of in-delible color. certain foreign words in Georg simmsl's welk-636hs1,211i1pd6-16veal his intention,although t is not discussed n theoreticalterms.The essay s both more openand more closed han traditional houghtwould like' It is more open in that its structurenegates ystem,and itsatisfiests inherent requirementsbetter he mo.e .ilo.ously it holds tothat negation; esidues fsystem n essays, hrough*ti.t it.y hope omake themselves espectable, s for instance he infiltration of literarv


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I EI',|OTES O I,]TERATURE Istudies by ready-nrade popular philosophical ideas, are as worthless aspsychoiogical trivalities. Bu t the cssaf is also more closed, because itworks emphatically at the form of its presentation.Consciousness of thenon-identity of presentation and subject matter fbrces presentation tounremitting efforts. In this alone the essay resembles art. In otherrespects t is necessariiy reiated to theory by virtue of the concepts thatappear in it, bringing with them not only their meanings but also theirtheoretical contexts. To be sure, the essay behaves as cautiously towardtheory as it does toward concepts. It does not de


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worrd, ecomes" ,,. ;::i:'::::,':,un'. .,."",,"' or historicarconcepts n historical languages o primai words, to academic nstructionin "creative writing," and to primitiveness pursued as a handicraft, torecorders and finger painting, in which pedagogical necessity acts asthough it were a metaphysical virtue. Baudelaire's revolt of literatureagainst nature as a social preserve does not spare thought. The paradisesof thought too are now only artificial ones, and the essay strolls in them.Since, in F{egel's dictum, there is nothing between heaven and earth thatis not mediated, thought remains faithful to the idea of immediacy onlyin and through what is mediated; conversely' it falls prey to the mediatedas soon as it tries to grasp the unmediated directly. The essay cunningiyanchors itseif in texts as though they were simply there and had authority.In this way, without the deception of a first principle, the essay gets aground, however dubious, under its feet, comparable to theologicalexegesesof sacred texts in earlier times. Its tendency, however, is th eopposite, a critical one: to shatter culture's claims by confronting textswith their own emphatic concept, with the truth that each one intendseven if it does not want to intend it, and to move culture to becomemindful of its own untruth, of the ideological illusion in which culturereveals its bondage to nature. Under the essay's gaze second naturerecognizes itself as first nature.If the essay's truth gains its force from its untruth, that truth shouldbe sought not in mere opposition to the dishonorable and proscribedelement in the essay but rather within that element itself, in the essay'smobility, its lack of the solidity the demand for which science ransferredfrom property relations to the mind. Those who believe that they have todefend the mind against lack of solidity are its enemies: the mind itself,once emancipated, is mobile. Once it wants more than the mere admin-istrative duplication and processing of what has always already existed,the mind seems to have an exposed qualiry; abandoned by play, truthwould be nothing but tautology. For historically the essay too is relatedto rhetoric, which the scientific mentality has wanted to get rid of sinceBacon and Descartes-until, appropriately, in a scientific age it degen-erated to a science sui generis, that of communications. Rhetoric wasprobably never anything but thought in its adaptation to communicativeirng,rug.. Such thought aimed at something unmediated: the vicariousgratification of the listeners. The essay etains, precisely in the autonomyof it. p....ntation, which distinguishes it from scientific and scholarlyinformation, traces of the communicative element such information dis-

'", ".. "'o. .o*'penses with. In the essay he satisfactions that rhetoric tries to provide forthe listener are sublimated into the idea of a happiness n freedom vis vis the object, a freedom that gives the object more of what belongs to itthan if it were mercilessly incorporated into the order of ideas. Scientificconsciousness,which opposes al l anthropomorphic conceptions, was al-ways allied with the reality principle and, like the latter, antagonistic ohappiness. While happiness is always supposed to be the aim of alldomination of nature, it is always envisioned as a regression to merenature. This is evident all the way up to the highest philosophies, eventhose of Kant and Hegel. These philosophies have their pathos in theabsolute idea of reason, but at the same time they always denigrate it asinsolent and disrespectfui when it relativizes acceptedvalues. In opposi-tion to this tendency, the essay salvages a moment of sophistry. Thehostility to happiness in official critical thought is especially marked inKant's transcendental dialectic, which wants to immortalize the linebetween understanding and speculation and prevent thought from "wan-dering off into inteliigible worlds," as the characteristic metaphor ex-presses t. Whereas a self-critical reason should, according to Kant, haveboth feet firmly on the ground, should ground itself, it tends inherentlyto seal itself off from everything new and also from curiosi y, thepleasure principle of thought, someth ing existential ontology vilifies aswell. What Kant saw, in terms of content, as the goal of reason, thecreation of humankind, utopia, is hindered by the form of his thought,epistemoiogy. It does no t permit reason to go beyond the realm ofexperience, which, in the mechanism of mere material and invariantcategories, shrinks to what has always already existed. The essay's objecthowever, is the new in its newness) not as something that can be trans-lated back into the old existing forms. By reflecting the object withoutviolence, as it were, the essay mutely laments the fact that truth hasbetrayed happiness and itself along with it, and this lament provokes th erage directed against the essay.The persuasiveelement of communicationis alienated from its original aim in the essay-just as the function ofmany musical features changes in autonomous music-and becomes apure determinant of the presentation tself; it becomes the compellingelement in its construction, whose aim is not to copy the object but toreconstitute it from its conceptual membra disjecta. The offensive transi-tions n rhetoric, in which association, erbal ambiguity, and a relaxationof logical synthesis made it easy for the listener and subjugated him,enfeebled, to the orator's will, are fused i n the essay with the truth


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NO'TES TO LITERATURE Icontent. Its transitions repudiate conclusive deductions n favor of cross-connections berween elements, something for which discursive iogic hasno placc . The essay uses equivocat ionsno t ou t of s iopp iness,no r inignorance of the scientific ban on them, but to make it clear-somethingthe critique of equivocation, which merely separatesmeanings, seldomsucceeds n doing-that when a word covers different things they ar eno t completely different; the unity of the word calls to mind a unity,however hidden, i n the object tse]f. This uniy , however' shouid not bemistaken for linguistic affinir,v,as is th e practice of contemporary resto-rationist philosophies. Here too the essavapproaches he logic o music ,that stringent and ye t aconceptual art of transition, in order to appro-priate for verbal language something it forfeited under the dominationof discursive logic-although that logic cannot be set aside but onlyoutwitted within it s own forms by dint of incisive subjective expression.For the essaydoes no t stand n simple opposition to discursive procedure.It is no t unlogical; it obeys iogical criteria nsofaras the totality o i t spropositions must fi t together coherently. No mere contradictions mayremain unless they are es tablished as belonging to the object itself. Bu tthe essay does not develop it s ideas in accordancewith discursive logic.It neither makes deductions fiom a principie nor draws conciusions romcoherent individual observations. It coordinateselements nsteadof suo-ordinating them, and oniv the essenceof its content, not the manner inwhich it is presented, s commensurable with logical criteria. In compar-ison with forms in u,hich a preformed content s communicated indiffer-ently, the essay s more dynamic than traditional thought by virtue of theter.rsion etween the presentation and the matter presented. But at th esame time, as a constructed uxtaposition of elements t i s more static. tsaffinity r,vith hc image lies soielv in this, except that th e staticness f theessay s one in which relationships of tension have been brought, as rtwere, to a standstili. The slight elasticity of the essayist's rain of thoughtforces him to greater ntensity than discursive thought, because he essaydoes not proceed blindly and automatically, as th e latter does, bu t mustreflect on itself at every moment. This reflection extends no t only to it srelationship to established hought but also t o i s elationship with rheto.ric and communication. Otherwise the essay, which fancies itself morethan science, becomes rui tlessly prescientific.The contemporarv relevance of the essay s that of anachronism. Thetinre is less favorable to it than ever. It is ground to pieces between anorganized system of science and scholarship on the one side, in which

.|ITE ESSAY AS FORMeveryone presumes to control everyone and everything and where every-thing no t tailored to the ur rent consensus is excluded rvhile beingpraised hypocritically as "intuitive" or "stimuiating," and on the otherside a philosophy that has to make do with the empty and abstractreInnants of what the scient i ic enterprise lras not yet taken over andwhich thereby become th e object of s econd-order operations on it s part.Th e essay, however, is concerned rvith what is blind in its objects. Itwants to use concepts o pr y open the aspect of its objects ha t cannot beaccommodated by concepts, the aspect that reveals, through the contra-dictions in which concepts become enrangled, that the net of their objec-tivity is a merely subjective arrangement. It wants to polarize the opaqueelement and release he latent forces in it. Its efforts ar e directed towardconcretizing a content defined n time and space; t constructs a complexof concepts interconnected in the same wal, it inragines fhem to beinterconnected n the object. It eludes the dictates of the attributes tharhave been ascribed to ideas since Plato's definition )n the stnposiurn,"existing eternally and neither coming into being nor passing away,ne i therchanging no r d imin ish ing," "a be ing in and fo r i t se l f e terna l lyuniform," and yet it remains idea in that it does no t capitulate before theburden of what exists, does no t submit to nhat merely is. Thc essay,,however, judges what exists not against something eternal but by anenthus;astic ragment from Nietzsche's at e per-iod:

If we affirmonesinglemoment, ve husaffirm not only ourselves ut al lexlstence For nothing is sel .-sufEcielrt ,leither n us ourselvesnor inthings:a'd if our soul has rembled vith happiness nd sounderi ik e aharp string us t once,all etcrnitywas nceded o produce hi s one event_and in this single moment of affirmational l eternitvwas called good,redeemed,ustified, nd affirmed.8Except that the essaydistrusts even this kind ofjustification and affirma-tion. It has no name but a negative one for the happiness hat nas sacredto Nietzsche. Even th e highest manifesrations f the spirit, u,hich expressthis happiness, are always also guilty of obstructing happiness as long asthet' rema n mere spirit. Hence tbe essay's nnerrnost formal law isheresv. lhrough violations of the orthodoxy of thought, something inthe object becorres visible rvhich it is orthodoxy's secret and obiectir,.eai m to keep nv is ib le .


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7'HE ESSAY AS FORMl. Georg Lukcs, ..on th e Nature and Form o the Essay, ' ' in Soal and F,orm,translatedby Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, r974), p. I3 . (Firstpublished as Die Seele xd die F'armer, Ber l in, E. Fleischel, r9r r).z . Ib id., p. lo: "The essay s always concernedwith somethingalready ormed,or at best, with sopething that has been; it is part of its essence hat it does not drawsoniething new out of an empty vacuum) but only gives a nerv order to suc h thrngsas once ived. An d becausehe only newll 'orders them, not forming so mething newout o[ the formless, he is bound to them; he must always speak 'the truth' aboutthem, find, that s, th e expression or heir essence.' '3 . C f . i b i d . , p p . r r 8 .a . I b i d . , p p . 9 - r o .5. Ren Descartes, A Discourse on LIethod, translated by John Veitch (NewYork : E . P . Du t t on , r g r) , p. r .6 ' Nl taxBense, .ber de n E'ssay nd seine Prosa,' ' ]|[erkur :3 (I9 '17), p. 4r8.7. Ib i d . , p . 4 zo.8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Pouer, translated by W. Kaufmann andR. J. Holl ingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, r968), pp . 532-33.

OIVEPIC A"1|VETL.r. '[he Odlssel oJ'Homer, translated bv Richmond Lattimore (Neiv York: Llarper& Row, r965), Book XXIII' rI' 233ff. dorno quotes Voss'eighteenth-c enturytranslation.z. Cf. Gilbert N1urray, F'ive Stngesof Greek Religion, New York: Columbia,I925, p. r6; U. von Wi lamorv i tz.Mci l lendor , Dcr claube der Hellenen,I, p. 9.j. Od1sse1, ook XXIV, r r. r5zff.4. Schrcider translates:"und wahr.lich Odysseus blieb zuruck" [and truly Odys-seus remained behind]. The l iteral translation of the fi as a particle of a ffirmationrather than explication does not alter the cnigmatic character of the passage.5. Friedrich H lderlin, Gesatn ausgae,dited by Zinkernagel (Leipzig: Insel,n.d.), p. tj9; Hd/dtlin, /rispoems, ranslated by Michael Hamburger (New York:Pantheon, I952), p. Iz9. There are l iterary-historical inks beween 'oss andHolderl in.

adorno theessayasform

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