KAUFMAN Poetry's Ethics

Poetrys Ethics? Theodor W.
Adorno and
Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and
Sociopolitical Delusion
Robert Kaufman
Odds are that discussions of Adorno and the ethical will arrive at Auschwitz,
if they havent begun there in the first place. Its as good a wager, maybe better, that that arrival will then lead more specifically to Adornos notion of a
new categorical imperative . . . imposed by Hitler upon unfree humankind:
to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself,
so that nothing similar will happen; and it will perhaps prove an even safer
bet that reconsiderations of this preeminently ethical concern with a new
categorical imperative will move at last toward the aesthetic or aesthetically
articulated question of poetry after Auschwitz, unless that notorious phrase
has itself served all along as point of departure.1 But the truly notable thing
For their responses to earlier versions of this essay, I am indebted to Norma Cole, Christina Gerhardt, Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Alex Woloch; additional thanks to Robert Hullot-Kentor for his
generous help with translations from the German.
1. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,
1973), 365, 36263 (trans. amended); Adorno, Negative Dialektik, vol. 6 of Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 358, 35556; see also Lecture Fifteen (July 20, 1965), in
Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2000),
11516; Adorno, Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 18182.
Adornos proposed new categorical imperative of course refers to and modifies Immanuel Kants
categorical imperativeintended on Kants view to hold universally as a law of reason if it is to hold
New German Critique 97, Vol. 33, No. 1, Winter 2006
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2005-006 2006 by New German Critique, Inc.
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74 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion
may be that from the early 1950s onward, within presumably more general,
traditional considerations of poetry and ethics, the odds likewise will become
greater and greater (to the point, finally, of appearing almost unbeatable) that a
quoted, paraphrased, or partially remembered version of Adornos comments
about Lyrik nach Auschwitz will have inflamed or revivified whatever poetryand-ethics or art-and-ethics debate has been on the table. Indeed, Adornos
words have generated such controversy that it has seldom been remarked how
bizarre it isgiven how slim the chances initially would have seemedthat
one barbed aphorism and its reformulations could come to have so much influence on, could create a six-decade donne for, reflection on consummate horror and on art and cultures abilityor incapacityto address such horror
humanely and critically.
From the initial impact of Adornos words in German-speaking countries, the question of poetry, art, and philosophy after Auschwitz inevitably
travels across Western culture. When Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau,
moments into the action of Michelangelo Antonionis La notte (1961), enter
the Milan hospital room of their terminally ill friend and fellow writer, the
film can assume that though it has offered scarcely any other linguistic reference to the fifteen years since the wars end, the audience is prepared to register instantly the grave tone, socio-intellectual subject matter, and emotional
itinerary established as Mastroianni tells his dying colleague, I brought you
[the] Europa Letteraria with your article on Adorno. Nonetheless, for all
the usefulness of thinking of the West, Italian postwar cultural knowledge
to cite only one caseis not so quickly shipped to, say, British, and still less to
American, shores.2
at allthat we act so as to treat humanity, whether in our own person or in that of another, always
at the same time as an end and never as a means. Adorno at various points emphasizes that this
urgent Auschwitz-should-not-repeat-itself modification of the categorical imperative seeks to
address the ways that modern historical experience, and above all the experience of industrialized
genocide, has altered the value of, and required at least a supplement to, formal or structural understandings of ethical judgment and behavior; see, again, Negative Dialectics; see also, e.g., Adornos
compressed formulation on the contemporary need radically to assimilate the relevance of the
temporal [Relevanz des Innerzeitlichen] to thought, Lecture Thirteen (July 13, 1965), in Meta
physics, 101; Metaphysik, 159.
2. See La Notte (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, screenplay by Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, and
Tonino Guerra; 1961); for the braiding of Adorno with the films primary, almost immediately
projected concerns see the screenplay text in Antonioni, Sei film: Le amiche, Il grido, Lavventura,
La notte, Leclisse, Deserto rosso (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 3045; and in Screenplays of Michel
angelo Antonioni: Il Grido, LAvventura, La Notte, LEclisse, trans. Roger J. Moore et al. (New York:
Orion, 1963), 21415. Antonioni and his collaborators further load the dice by making Mastroi
annis characterGiovanni, a novelistquickly admit that, although he has roundly praised his dying
Robert Kaufman 75
Thinking especially about todays American scene, so far removed not

just from the early 1960s but even from the 1970s, it is worth remembering
how important it was for substantial introductions of Adorno to Englishlanguage readersparticularly the book-length studies of the 1980s and early
1990s (rather than the previous treatments of Adorno together with other
Frankfurt School figures)to have underscored, without pretending to have
captured, the place of Auschwitz and the Holocaust in Adornos thought.3
Meanwhile, if a very different reception history evolves in Germany (for obvious sociohistorical reasons, but also and not least because of Paul Celans
incomparable poetry), it cannot be gainsaid that even or especially there Rolf
Tiedemann (the editor of both Adornos and Walter Benjamins Gesammelte
Schriften, and emeritus director of the Adorno Archiv) feels compelled, as
late as 1997, to edit and publish Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse:
Ein philosophisches Lesebuch. In his introduction to that anthology of selections from Adornos engagements with matters related to the Holocaust, Tiede
mann makes clear how much difficulty, controversy, and misunderstanding
occurred because of these writings, even in sectors of German and then international culture from which Adornoperhaps naivelyhad not anticipated
antagonistic reactions.4
Whatever their thoughts, sentiments, and stances, those (starting with
Adorno himself) involved in and affected by the ruminations on poetrys
barbarity or impossibility after Auschwitz never doubted that the political
and, in some even more urgent sense, the ethical value of poetry and the other
comrade Tommasos article on Adorno, he has actually only skimmed the piece (and is thus, the
audience sees, incapable of thinking and talking meaningfully about it with Tommaso [ibid.]).
Tommasos imminent death and Giovannis dedication to skimming generate much of what follows
in La Notte.
3. For an especially important instance see Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984); see also, e.g., Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno; or, The Persis
tence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990); and Lambert Zuidervaart, Adornos Aesthetic The
ory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). In addition to the large literature in German, there had of course been numerous earlier English-language treatments of Adorno
and other members of the Frankfurt School since the early to mid-1970s, many of which touched
on the place of Auschwitz and the Holocaust in Adornos postwar work. But for English-language
audiences, the lengthier and more focused treatments of Adornos entire oeuvre that began appearing in the 1980s often served as the key secondary literature that highlighted, and treated in a more
sustained manner, how the Nazi genocide had assumed an increasingly central place in Adornos
work starting in 1943 or 1944.
4. See Adorno, Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse: Ein philosophisches Lesebuch, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 727; Adorno, Can One Live after Aus
chwitz? A Philosophical Reader, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
arts was at stake. Among the reasons that the ensuing debates have generated
such unceasing interest has been not only the ongoing question of art and criticism in relation to the Holocaust but alsoas progressive and Left participants
have recognized virtually since these discussions began in the late 1940s and
early 1950sthe terrible fact that mass atrocities carried out to further politi
cal objectives would turn out hardly to have ended with the 1945 defeat of
German fascism and its wartime allies. If that painful reality has suffused a
great deal of literary and artistic activity since World War II, it has also made
its presence felt in the sometimes parallel, often overlapping, at times utterly
distinct world of academic discourse.
Across the last decade or so, Anglo-American academic and extraacademic criticism have with increasing frequency and intensity returned to
ethics, without necessarily abandoning criticisms more recent commitments.
To be sure, ethics had never really been forgotten; but it seemed for a period to
have taken a backseat to language, politics, society, history, and culture. Criti
cisms current ethical turn happens to have coincided with related developments in American poetry and poetics (both outside and inside the university), where, for reasons intrinsic to poetrys own history, ethics arguably has
sustained a more continuous presence (even in the recurring heydays of thematized sociopolitical engagement and historical consciousness) than it has
in critical theory and in modes of imaginative writing and art other than poetry.
Andunderstandablyamong the key motifs sounded in contemporary Ameri
can poetrys desire and ability to hold on to ethical questions have been those
that emerge through the configuration of translated, transposed German materials and problems frequently shorthanded as Celan, poetry after Auschwitz,
or Adorno.
Though attending primarily to university-based theoretical writing and
to narrative fiction, Geoffrey Galt Harphams Shadows of Ethics offers what
may be the most trenchant account of this return to ethics yet to appear.
Providing a clarifying historical overviewand nuanced, acute, particularized readingsof the ways and reasons that ethics had apparently receded
from view but was also to varying degrees present inside socially and politically oriented theoretical discourse and literary historiography (and certainly
within literary art itself), Harpham goes on to present remarkably compressed
and illuminating analyses of the special formal relationships between ethics
and literature. Rehearsing the familiar tale of how since at least Hume and
Kant, modern accounts of ethics have centered on the tensions between what
is and ought to be, and have thus centered at least implicitly on the role of
questioning in ethical activity (especially the questioning of why an is rather
Robert Kaufman 77
than a desired ought holds sway), Harpham emphasizes how fundamental

imaginative literary activity, and narrative plotting in particular, is to the
questioning and judging process he persuasively shows to be at the heart of
ethics.
Narrative engages with theory in a process of reciprocal probing and stressing that tests the capacity of theory to comprehend and regulate practice,
and the power of actual lifealbeit in a highly exotic, speculative, and
theoretical formto elude or deform theory. . . . The name for this mutual
stimulation of theory and example, this fundamental instance of the relation of consciousness to life, is ethics: it is in ethics that theory becomes
literary and literature becomes theoretical.5
Harpham proceeds to explain concisely how we can understand narrative as a representational structure that negotiates the relation . . . of is and
ought (rather than, as might seem to be required in philosophy itself,
abstractly deciding between them):
The most general and adequate conception of a narrative plot is that it
moves from an unstable inaugural condition, a condition that is but ought
nota severance of the twothrough a process of sifting and exploration
in search of an unknown but retrospectively inevitable condition that is and
truly ought-to-be. . . . Narrative cannot posit a static is; this function . . . is
allocated to description. . . . Nor can it prescribe an unresisted ought: this
is the business of sermons. What it canindeed what it mustdo is to figure a process of rejecting disjunction in favor of ultimate union. Narrative
plot thus provides what philosophy cannot, a principle of formal necessity
immanent in recognizable worldly and contingent events that governs a
movement toward the eventual identity of is and ought.6
And he further distills the point:

Plot . . . begins with a movement out of a static condition of is [whose] center cannot hold, it repels value; it ought not to be. The movement of the plot
constitutes a process of discovery of what ought to be, a process of winnowing and selection that culminates in closure, wherein the narrative achieves
formal integrity and the regained is truly ought to be.7
5. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999), 35.
6. Ibid., 36.
7. Ibid., 42.
But what, if any, purchase can this conception of narrative plot make
on modernand particularly modern lyricpoetrys relationship to ethics?
After all, modern lyric (perhaps especially those traditions of experiment
and difficulty leading to and beyond poets like Celan, in whom great formal
difficulty and content difficulty seem inseparable) is taken almost conventionally to be nonnarrative. Though many reasons have been advanced in support
of lyrics fundamentally nonnarrative character, two have tended to predomi
nate. First, lyric is given essentially to concretized, particularized intensities
of feeling and to attempts at intersubjective recognitional address; story and
plotting would here seem secondary at best. A second, apparently opposite
contention has been that despite the ostensible primacy and immediacy of
affect and address (over against more mediated phenomena of narrative and
plot), lyric often becomes as abstract as abstraction can get, far more abstract
than even the most experimental versions of narrative fiction and plotting.
This is true not so much in the sense of abstractable or distillable schemata
that do indeed lend themselves to or have affinities with narrative scaffolding.
It is true rather in the sense of lyrics emphasis on giving, and leaving its audiences with, abstract or difficult to grasp but arresting afterimages, an effect
stemming in significant part from lyrics dedication to a profoundly ephemeral musicality constantly on the brink of evaporating (and therefore always
appearing to leave mere aural and, metaphorically, visual traces of itself suspended in the air, as if sensory musical resonance has become a quasi-cognitive
resonance never resolvable into, or as, one determinate cognition, but seeming as if it should and could be). When certain strains in the modernist novel
attempt to assimilate, and happily lend themselves to being characterized by,
such dynamics (especially in terms of sustained focus on the intensification
and heightening of the linguistic medium and our affective relationships to it,
far out of proportion to the attention paid to action or incident), they in a sense
reestablish the narrative rule to which they are the exception by the very fact
of being regarded as lyric: the lyric novel.
These two commonly proffered arguments for modern poetrys essentially nonnarrative statuslyricism (or musicality, including atonalism, dissonance, etc.) and abstractioninflect or become each other, as do the elements
of artistic making and aesthetic form on which the arguments are based. Lyric
poetrys musical, affective stretching, its palpable, immediate, particularizing intensification of its linguistic medium, works also formally to challenge
and expand our capacity to know particularitys other, conceptual abstraction
(which is almost to say, conceptuality itself, at least to the extent that conceptualitys medium remains significantly linguistic). Hence the continuing use-
Robert Kaufman 79
fulness and popularity of the term lyric abstraction to capture lyrics historically constitutive and heightened-in-modernity paradox, whereby immediacy
and abstraction coexist, and so interfuse one another, as to become inseparable.
And if each part of that joint term lyric abstraction seems individually not to
be the first word one would associate with narrative, neither is it clear that combining the terms two elements does the trick, for it is far from evident that
the combination yields a sequence-effect necessarily to be associated with
the movement and structure, however de minimus, of narrative plot. It may
be that the contrary holds; lyric and abstraction in combination or fusion have
seemed to many poets and readers even more stubbornly non- or antinarrative
than either lyric or abstraction standing alone.8
On the inevitable other hand, modern poetics is replete with compelling demonstrations of how even the most manifestly abstract, experimental,
or antinarrative lyric poetry perforce commits itself to narrating, conveying,
building on, or otherwise instantiating a certain ground of story or plot (if only
of the recent dynamics and fortunes of affect, address, recognition, and narrative themselves). (In a closely related artistic context, George Balanchine
responded memorably to criticism that his choreography was too formalist,
too abstract: What is abstract? They [critics decrying his abstractness]
mean storyless. But . . . people meet, give the hand, embrace: its already
meaning. . . . Sohow much story you want?) 9 Thus even where the drama
of sheer formal or linguistic event looks largely to have eclipsed traditional
markers of lyric speech, song, narration, and narrative, precisely those traditional markers are seen to live a heightened, reduced, or simply contemporary existence as form and language. In a related vein, the narrative closure
or immanent formal necessity that we saw Harpham represent as integral to
literatures ethical vocation need not issue in classical desiderata of harmony,
symmetry, reconciliation, and so forth, at least, not in the narrowly conceived
and perhaps straw man senses sometimes projected by an experimental modern
8. For a fuller discussion of these aspects of modern lyric, particularly in relation to modern
aesthetics from Kant through the Frankfurt School and beyond, and highlighting lyrics special
place within the arts because of its inherent tendency formally to expand through musical semblance the medium of conceptualitylanguagesee Robert Kaufman, Lyrics Constellation,
Poetrys Radical Privilege, Modernist Cultures 1, no. 2 (2005): 20934, www.js-modcult.bham.
ac.uk/fetch.asp?article=issue2_kaufman.pdf. For consideration of lyric abstraction in contemporary poetryand its connections to painting and music, as well as its prior histories in Romanticism and modernismsee Kaufman, Aura, Still, October, no. 99 (2002): 4580.
9. Interview with George Balanchine in Balanchine (dir. Merrill Brockway; 1983), originally
produced for the Dance in America series and later broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Systems
American Masters series.
poetics breaking from or periodically pronouncing itself allergic to such perceived decorum.
For the poems creation of a truly ought to be will involve the imageconstruction of a different state of substantive affairs; and that imagined difference often emphasizes or springs fromrather than a harmonious, happily reconciled or utopian, futurist, ought to bethe zero degree of ought to
be, namely, the critique of what now is, a critique presumably absent, unspoken, unavailable within the initial is. Such critique, such zero degree of ought
to be, is inextricable from if not synonymous with recognition. For poetry,
this will mean that the intersubjective recognitions at stake in lyric address
have everything to do with the recognition of the suffering that exists in the
status quo is; the act of recognizing that suffering whereor in ways thatit
has not yet been recognized constitutes the beginning of a truly ought to
be. Vis--vis this task of recognition-critique, notions like closure, formal
necessity, and reconciliation have therefore frequently been understood in
terms of achieved or signifying form, whereby the poem stands as achieved
form insofar as, in its development, it realizes a form that presents, enacts, or
somehow brings into being a content otherwise unavailable. Consequently,
far from being synonymous with caricaturably narrow, predetermined, straitjacketed ideas of form, closure and formal necessity have (in, e.g., constructivist and constellative contexts from Romanticism onward) been deemed
consonant with rather than hostile to critical, achieved artistic-aesthetic experiment (all the way to cases of modernist and postmodernist open or processive form).10
This backdrop may help one begin to understand something of how
contemporary American poetry and poetics have attempted to engage the
ethical, and the ethics of poetry after Auschwitz. It was probably to have
been expected that this engagement would be tied to reflections about where
contemporary poetry stands in relation to modernisms aftermaths, including
questions about the status (within poetic practice and audience response) of
lyric and narrative, aesthetic difficulty and accessibility, and a host of related
formal-historical problems. What may occasion surprise is the degree to which,
across three or more decades, these American weigh-ins have repeated, sometimes knowingly and sometimes as if from scratch, a good deal of the earlier
10. See Kaufman, Lyrics Constellation; see also, particularly on the relationship of lyric to
history and above all to the history of human suffering, Robert Kaufman, Lyrics Expression:
Musicality, Conceptuality, Critical Agency, Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 197216 (a longer version of which will appear in Adorno and Literature, ed. Nigel Mapp and David Cunningham [New
York: Continuum, 2006]).
Robert Kaufman 81
German and wider European responses.11 In recent contributionsemerging

from, and widely read in, an avowedly experimental milieuthe poets Lyn
Hejinian and Joan Retallack signal in the very titles of their books the intensity of contemporary desires to connect or even unify poetics and ethics:
Hejinians Language of Inquiry means to highlight how avant-gardist acts of
questioning may align poetics and ethics, while Retallacks Poethical Wager
goes so far as to hazard their fusion with her neologism poethics. At crucial
points in both texts, Adorno is invoked and responded to, especially, of course,
with regard to poetry after Auschwitz. In their parsings, modifications,
subver[sions], and qualifications of the idea of poetrys post-1945 impossibility or barbarism, Hejinian and Retallack find themselves doubling back not
only on Adorno but likewise on their own initial responses to him; what comes
at least implicitly into play is not just the ambiguous status of Adornos utterances (declarations, bans or prohibitions, provocations, self-contradictions,
hyperbolic gesturings?) but also the kinds of poetry perhaps assumed in
Adornos dictum, and then by those challenging it.12
Related speculations appear in Susan Gubars Poetry after Auschwitz.
Gubars expansive and impassioned study focuses not so much on experimental poetry as on a range of approaches in poetry and the other arts, and it
places special emphasis on poems that have received little critical (or any
other) notice; among Gubars abiding and powerfully voiced concerns are
the ethical imperatives of witnessing, testifying, and memorializing. While
Gubar locates herself primarily in areas of modern and contemporary poetry
distinct from those traversed by Hejinian and Retallack, one of the most
intriguing aspects of her book is something nonetheless shared with their
texts: the metamorphosing character of Adornos thought, here presented initially along the lines of univocal legislative stricture or pronunciamento, but
at other moments seeming to move, under the poet-critics testings, toward
the simultaneous precision and rich indeterminacy historically associated
with poetic language itself. As Gubar painstakingly traces different poetsand
her ownreactions to what they frequently take as Adornos injunction,
11. The import of the German-speaking worlds responses will be threaded through the rest of
this essay. For a thoughtful and moving, relatively belated example of the Europeanin this
instance, Frenchresponse that explicitly integrates and reflects on the German materials see the
late Sarah Kofmans Paroles suffoques (Paris: Galile, 1987), rpt. as Smothered Words, trans.
Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998).
12. See Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
3132, 4058, 89, 14748, and esp. 31836; and Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), esp. 162, 88.
ban, prohibition, or statement against postwar poetry, she at certain

moments appears inclined to suggest that Adorno paradoxically helpedand
had intended somehow to helpprecisely to reestablish poetrys role in relation to ethics and to have underscored the now almost impossibly high stakes
involved in poetrys maintaining, reimagining, or reclaiming that role.13
These and other promising meditations might helpfully be placed
alongside the poet-critic Susan Stewarts recent essay On the Art of the
Future. Bringing Stewarts remarkable piece into this discussion involves no
small irony, since it never mentions the Holocaust, Adorno, or evenexcept
in cited titles in two brief footnotesthe word poetry. The first footnote does,
however, refer to Stewarts own Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002),
one of the most significant defenses of poetry to have been published in some
time, which happens to include an important reconsideration of Adornos 1957
On Lyric Poetry and Society.14 In fact, there is probably no great mystery
about the focus, in Stewarts essay, on art in general rather than poetry in particular, since it was first written for a conference whose motivating question
Does the concept of art do useful work, or is it now primarily a defensive
political gesture?prompted Stewart to respond by considering arts relation to ethics. Engaging Kants aesthetics and Emmanuel Levinass ethics,
Stewart highlights something that not so coincidentally also informs all of
Adornos writings on art and ethics, and nowhere more than in his thinking
about post-1945 poetry. That something is (as Adorno tends to call it) arts
determinate indeterminacy.15
13. See Susan Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). Gubars book is from its first pages so filled with reflections on the ethics of poetry and on arts formal and historical engagements with the Holocaust
and is in such constant dialogue with Adornos statementsthat it is at least here more appropriate
to cite the book as a whole rather than particular portions or pages.
14. Susan Stewart, On the Art of the Future, in The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthet
ics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1527, 25960n3, 260n7 (also published in Chi
cago Review 50 [20045]: 298315, 302n3, 304n7), citing Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the
Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The treatment of Adornos On Lyric Poetry
and Society appears in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses primarily on pp. 4245, though it goes
on to inform much of what follows. See On Lyric Poetry and Society, in Adorno, Notes to Litera
ture, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 199192), 1:3754; Adorno, Rede ber Lyrik und Gesellschaft, in Noten zur Literatur, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 195874), 1:73104.
15. The value of keeping in play and working with (rather than working through) arts determinate
indeterminacy, and of the semblance-character from which the latter stems, is central to Adornos
affinity with Kants aesthetics. See Robert Kaufman, Red Kant; or, The Persistence of the Third
Critique in Adorno and Jameson, Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 682724.
Robert Kaufman 83
In ways I cannot do justice to here, Stewart shows how aesthetics and

ethics are, at some fundamental level, processes of undetermined or reflective judgment. As such, she contends, they depend on face-to-face encounters
between persons or, at least by analogy, between persons and the artistic forms
that in their materials and making are imbued with others existences and intentions. (Among Adornos own favorite ways to articulate this is that aesthetic
form is itself sedimented historical content.) Stewart further contends that the
ability to develop the resources for making reflective ethical judgments may
in no small measure depend on, or be crucially developed by, the reflective
judgment-experience essayed within the semblance of face-to-face encounters in the aesthetic realm. To Stewarts formulations here (and in her Poetry
and the Fate of the Senses), one can add that lyrics relationship to our linguistic medium, and thus to the fundamental medium for significantly communicable conceptuality, has historically given lyric a special role in the reimbuing
of abstract, objective concepts with the affective, concrete particularity of
face-to-face, not already determined (as achieved concepts are, by definition,
already determined) experience and knowledge.16 This would be, at any rate,
the place where Stewarts thinking would meet Harphams related hope
of demonstrating how, in literary (and specifically narrative) form and our
aesthetic experience of it, theoretical questions about law and morality can
acquire . . . a human countenance.17 In the context of historys massive,
nightmarish elevations of abstraction to the principle and practice of genocide, the attempt to encounter the human countenance, especially where one
might least expect to find it (in seemingly mundane, innocuous, usually quite
necessaryand necessarily abstractinstances of conceptuality), is the
aspect of lyric that is in urgent play and heated contestation within the pained
interchanges about the barbarity of post-1945 lyric.
In what followsrisking presentation to New German Critiques readership of some perhaps all-too-familiar texts and contextsI would like
more or less chronologically to revisit the history of what Adorno, and some
of those around him, did and did not say about poetry, the other arts, and
culture after Auschwitz, and to consider the relevant materials with attention
16. For a recent, eye-opening presentation of experience and its relation to conceptual knowledgecontaining both a long-historical view of the status of experience in Western intellectual
and cultural history, as well as discrete, extended analyses of how experience figures in (among
other bodies of work) Kantian and Frankfurt critical theorysee Martin Jay, Songs of Experience:
Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
17. Harpham, Shadows of Ethics, xiii.
not only to questions of ethics and politics but to poetry and poetics themselves. And in the service of trying to understand better how this mostly
German history has come to influenceor, more indirectly, has been paralleled inAmerican poetry and poetics, art and aesthetics, and criticism and
theory, Ill turn finally to the work of one of the United States most important poets of the later modernist and postmodernist period, Robert Duncan
(191988). His is a signal case where poetrys own ethics is at issue in time
of war (a war in Indochina eventually deemed unwise, unjust, and immoral
by a majority of the American peopleand a war whose relative distance from
us today may be of value in considering the situations we now confront socio
politically, ethically, and aesthetically).
What is the cultural and political situation just before and as Adorno writes
and publishes the initial and probably still best-known of his formulations
about poetry after Auschwitz? Some clues are provided in correspondence
between Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, including a letter from
Heidegger to Marcuse that the historian Richard Wolin found in the HerbertMarcuse-Archiv in the Stadtsbibliothek in Frankfurt, and subsequently
translated and published in 1991. On August 28, 1947, Marcuse writes Heidegger to say that he is sending a care package to his former teacher in warravaged Germany, although my friends have recommended strongly against
it and have accused me of helping a man who identified with a regime that
sent millions of my co-religionists to the gas chambers. . . . I excuse myself
in the eyes of my own conscience, by saying I am sending a package to a man
from whom I learned philosophy from 1928 to 1932.18 Marcuses letter at
several points renews earlier requests that Heidegger dissociate himself more
clearly from (if well after the fact of his involvement with) the Nazi regime,
and that Heidegger expres[s his] current attitude about the events that have
occurred.19 Heideggers January 20, 1948, response reads in part:
To the serious legitimate charges that you express about a regime that
murdered millions of Jews, that made terror into an everyday phenomenon,
18. See An Exchange of Letters: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger, in The Heidegger
Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 152, 161
62; the Marcuse-Heidegger exchange was also subsequently published in Marcuse, Technology,
War, and Fascism, vol. 1 of Collected Papers, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1998),
261, 264. For the German texts of Marcuses letters to Heidegger see Pflasterstrand 27980 (1988):
46580, cited in Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 152.
19. Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 161; Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, 26364.
Robert Kaufman 85
and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and
truth into its bloody opposite, I can merely add that if instead of Jews
you had written east Germans [i.e., Germans of the eastern territories],
then the same holds true for one of the allies, with the difference that everything that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the
bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the
German people.20
Marcuse replies:
You write that everything that I say about the extermination of the Jews
applies just as much to the allies, if instead of Jews one were to insert
east Germans. With this sentence dont you stand outside of the dimension
in which a conversation between men is even possibleoutside of Logos?
For only outside of the dimension of logic is it possible to relativize [auszu
gleichen], to comprehend a crime by saying that others would have done
the same thing.21
Having anticipated from figures of great cultural stature in the postwar

period just the sort of attitudes that Heidegger here displays, Marcuse and his
colleagues are hardly taken by surprise when they actually encounter them;
but that lack of surprise hardly tempers the genuine outrage and disgust generated from on-the-pulses experience of those attitudes. Yet that anticipation
says a good deal about the ground from which the Frankfurters later comments will emerge; those comments (about what culture, art, poetry, and
life itself will mean in a presumably postfascist environment) are inseparable from personal experience and political analysis of a postwar sociocultural dispensation where sentiments like Heideggers are frequently all but
officialor, simply, official. Some of Adornos own most-considered ruminations on the subject had already been written during the war, as in this
passage from the Part One: 1944 section of Minima Moralia:
The idea that after this war life will continue normally or even that culture might be rebuiltas if the rebuilding of culture were not already its
negationis idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be
seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture
20. Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 163; Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, 266 (where
the text reads, apparently in typographical error, To the charges of dubious validity that you
express . . .).
21. Wolin, Heidegger Controversy, 164; Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, 267.

waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that the
quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at
large, barbarism? 22
Whats coming appears almost fully present in these words. Yet it is

also evident that, as all-pervasive and permanent as the situation may feel, it
is also historically and socially situated. Rebuilding, including the making
of and acting on assumptions about cultures ability to assimilate or merely
register the degree of inhumanity that has just reigned, is an existential but
likewise a historical matter, and doubts about what humane or even radical
gestures will mean within this overall context are assessments of a historical
moment rather than something henceforth to be deemed eternal; easy enough
to think and say, but not so easyperhaps not even desirableto square with
the moments experience. But then, Minima Moralia had begun by circling
around this set of problems, problems inherited especially from nineteenthand twentieth-century industrial capitalist society, though launched into
quite another realm with and after the Third Reich: Our perspective of life
has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact there is life no longer. . . .
The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to
subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself (MM, 1516; 78).
Indeed, Minima Moralia faces its contexts with the dark epigraph taken
from Ferdinand Krnberger and meant by Adorno as historical description
rather than proclamation: Life does not live (Das Leben lebt nicht) (MM,
19; 13). Or later, in Adornos own words, Life has become the ideology of
its own absence (Leben ist zur Ideologie seiner eigenen Absenz geworden)
(MM, 190; 252). Meanwhile, the old Aristotelian value of arts favoring the
probable impossible over the improbable possible hums in sad resignation or
in perverse, tortured form beneath Adornos hintcertainly anticipating the
coming aphorisms on poetry and Auschwitzthat life now has been made the
realm of the impossible, somehow making barbaric the attempt to have art
(even tragic art) still proceed in accord with prewar desiderata about aesthetic
semblances ability to offer, toward the development of our capacity for critical
agency, the probable impossible or credible impossible. Also already present
22. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 55; Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschdigten Leben
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951), 65. Hereafter cited as MM, with page numbers from the
English and then the German texts.
Robert Kaufman 87
are thoughts tending toward the need for an art that would be humane precisely in its relentless dedication to conveying the inhumane:
All the worlds not a stage. [Staatsaktion.]The coming extinction of art is
prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events. . . .
The impossibility of portraying Fascism springs from the fact that in it, as in
its contemplation, subjective freedom no longer exists. Total unfreedom can
be recognized, but not represented. Where freedom occurs as a motif in politi
cal narratives today, as in the praise of heroic resistance, it has the embarrassing quality of impotent reassurance. The outcome always appears decided in
advance by high politics, and freedom is manifested ideologically, as talk
about freedom, in stereotyped declamations, not in humanly commensurable
actions. Art is least to be saved by stuffing the extinct subject like a museum
piece, and the object, the purely inhuman, which alone is worthy of art today,
escapes its reach at once by excess and inhumanity. (MM, 14345; 18791)
In words and style destined for notoriety, these motifs come into their
own in Adornos Cultural Criticism and Society, written at a moment (1949)
still terribly charged by the wars immediate aftermath (and, apparently,
before Adorno had any knowledge of Celans poetry).23 Because the essays
near-final sentences are the ones so often quoted, it is worth noting that the
entire piece is permeated by an exponentially heightened recoil from almost
all versions of official or consolatory (including much programmatically oppositional and socialist) culture and cultural criticism; along with Benjamin,
Leo Lwenthal, Max Horkheimer, et al., Adorno had already before the war
followed Marcuses lead in designating a great deal of such culture, regardless
of its sometimes humanistic, progressive, or even Left intentions, as formally
or structurally affirmative or affirmational toward bourgeois society. Significantly, then, it is the experience of what is hard-won, and by no means necessarily affirmative in genuine art (perhaps in music and poetry above all), that
provides the opening notes of a critique whose target is wittingly and unwittingly affirmational culture and cultural criticism: To anyone in the habit of
thinking with his or her ears [Wer gewohnt ist, mit den Ohren zu denken], the
words cultural criticism [Kulturkritik] must have an offensive ring (Prisms,
19 [trans. amended]; Prismen, 7).
23. Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1949), in Soziologische Forschung in
unserer Zeit: Ein Sammelwerk; Leopold von Wiese zum 75. Geburtstag (Cologne: Westdeutscher,
1951), also in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1955), 731; Adorno,
Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (1967; rpt.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 1734.
There follow pages of reflection and biting analysis that pose the problem of the rareness of a critique that would argue for a culture that is, and
that would further nurture, Marxs ruthless critique of everything in existence. Such a critique would refuse to abandon culture, and would likewise
refuse to downplay or deny criticisms incalculable debts to culture, even while
fearlessly acknowledging the historical ways that culture has, intentionally
or not, colluded with things as they are. Projected from between the essays
lines of bitter analysis is a critique that would live up to the memorializing
undersong whose strains seem always just to have reached Adornos ears,
namely, the now-deceased Benjamins conjoined aphorisms about cultural
treasures and documents of civilization being also, inescapably, documents
of barbarism (a notion whose relentless logic would extend the judgment of
barbarism to the writings of Marx, Benjamin, Celan, and so forth). Cultural
Criticism and Society then reaches its finale, in which the almost fully conceptualized and totally administered society closes off its ports to preclude
the entry of not-yet-conceptualized, imaginative challenge (and does so precisely by seeming in the phenomenon of standard culture and cultural criticism to have assimilated to itself, or tolerantly to have allowed, the putative
protest that, if actually operative, would have sprung or would spring from an
imagination partly enabled by the very aesthetic experience that might help
create a rather differently inflected culture and cultural criticism). The more
total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more
paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme
consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter (Prisms, 34;
Prismen, 3031).
The infamous lines follow. In the published English translation, they
read: Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic
of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And
this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write
poetry today (Prisms, 34). That is all one sentence in the German: Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei
gegenber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das
frisst auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmglich ward, heute
Gedichte zu schreiben (Prismen, 31).
A serious case could be made that rendering the single German sentence into three English sentences, along with other aspects of the translators choices here, loosens or unravels Adornos carefully constructed web of
tensions, where the initial, seeming separation of identities (conveyed by the
different designative words) culture and barbarism is what allows them so
Robert Kaufman 89
profoundly and infernally to inform if not become one another; where the
initial appearance of poetic art is not the genre or generality poetry but
the particular work, a poem (ein Gedicht), suggesting a dynamic between
the particular and the general or universal in which the sense that its now
become barbaric to write a poem leads to the sense that to write poems or
poetry (Gedichte) has become impossible; and where the sentences unityin-tension, constructed from the various, painful moments, marks the critic
who in 1949 faces in these lines an also barbaric and impossible task, like
the poets task but frankly far less difficult, far less impossible, as criticism
is always less difficult than art, and less difficult in kind rather than degree
(because art even in more propitious circumstances was always in some
sense impossible, was always the probable impossible, the credible impossible). Where the meaning of arts semblance-work with impossibility has
become so literally tortured, it can be seen that, far from pronunciamento,
these lines are meant not to declare death from on high or otherwise or to
address the dead but to present, to enact or be, the half-dead speaking to
and with the half-dead.24
Yet finally these nuances of close reading mean nothing, and not only
for the reasons that inhere in Adornos late statementin the midst of the
work of both philosophy and cultural criticism that is Negative Dialectics
that all culture after Auschwitz, together with its urgent critique, is garbage
(alle Kultur nach Auschwitz, samt der dringlichen Kritik daran, ist Mll).25
For any argument about how the possible inadequacies of the published translation may have prevented English-language readers from gaining a better
idea of what the near-final passage of Cultural Criticism and Society seeks
to dramatize (and may have thereby created the misimpression that Adorno
presumes to stand above, uncontaminated by, the roiling issues) would run
full speed into the historical reality that many of the passages German readers seemed to have been equally outraged. And if that outrage has multiple
sources, surely one is that something in the passages tone and styleas so
24. Compare the lucid reading offered in Russell A. Berman, Modern Culture and Critical
Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989): The only poetry possible after AuschwitzI take this to be the sense of Adornos
dictumis one that explores its own impossibility, its own lack of identity in terms of the classical
subject-object unity (144).
25. Theodor W. Adorno, Meditations on Metaphysics: 2, Metaphysics and Culture, in Nega
tive Dialectics, trans. G. B. Ashton (1966; rpt. New York: Continuum, 1973), 367 (trans. amended);
Adorno, Meditationen zur Metaphysik: 2, in Negative Dialektik, vol. 6 of Gesammelte Schriften,
ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 359. Hereafter cited as ND, with page
numbers from the English and then the German texts.
frequently in Adornoappears willfully unconcerned with the predictable

effect on those whom Adorno is not trying to offend (as opposed to the scandalized reactions that the writing does expect to provoke, often in the same
reader).26
That aspect of Adornos style and personality is pretty much a constant
throughout his life and work. Yet on this question of poetry and art after the
Holocaust, he can at a certain point be seen responding and moving, as perhaps nowhere else in his life and work, to protestations about his apparent
meaning. One can begin to see the force of the issues cumulative pressure
on him, can begin to see what it meansafter an initial perplexity that never
entirely disappearsto have those on his side (Celan, Hans Magnus Enzens
berger, Nelly Sachs, et al.) fiercely questioning and critiquing the words about
poetrys barbarism or impossibility. After publication of Celans Sprachgit
ter (1959) and his composition of the Gesprch im Gebirg that was generated partly from a missed Adorno-Celan rendezvous, Adorno dedicates to
Celan his 1960 essay Valrys Deviations (with its iconoclastic, eyebrowraising-on-the-Left, considered but supportive reinterpretation and critical
endorsementwith a Left difference, of courseof the politically reactionary Paul Valrys dedication to poetic and aesthetic autonomy, which Adorno
identifies as the refusal of socioconceptual determination, so that genuine
dedication to poetry and art is grasped, formally speaking, as deviation
from the socioconceptual status quo).27 The possibility of reconsideration
becomes explicit in Adornos next well-known published words on the
controversy, the 1962 essay Engagement (or Commitment), his reply
to Sartres explicitly Left theory of engag writing. Adornos radio talk and
the published version that quickly follows feature a rather personal, almost
discursive comment: I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz [nach Auschwitz noch
26. Some of the reasons for distress or outrage were overlapping between German- and Englishreading audiences, others distinct. There is of course an enormous literature in German on the subject; English-language readers will find very useful John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), which lays out the problems confronted by Celan
and other German-language poetsparticularly though not exclusively those who were Jewish
when, despite his intentions to the contrary, Adornos comments were used by critics and cultural
figures who wished simply not to have the Holocaust brought into public expression and discussion.
Whatever lower-frequency parallels or sympathies might obtain outside Germany on this score,
poets in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking countries faced nothing remotely similar (when Adornos comments became well known in English after 1967) to what
the German situation had been in the 1950s and 1960s.
27. Theodor W. Adorno, Valrys Deviations, in Notes to Literature, 1:13773; Adorno, Valrys
Abweichungen, in Noten zur Literatur, 2:4294 (first published in Die neue Rundschau 71 [1960]).
Robert Kaufman 91
Lyrik zu schreiben, sei barbarisch]; it expresses, negatively, the impulse that

animates committed literature.28
But this statement is a softening, if only in its effort to explain what
Cultural Criticism and Society had, in its starkness, left implicit: that the
original aphorism was, and is, itself akin to commitment, albeit in the mode of
negative expression befitting a thinker of the via negativa who is dedicated to
the idea that, in not being beholden to determination by extant conceptsand
to that extent provisionally negating themlyric and aesthetic experience are
the ground of possibility for emancipatory thought (which is necessary for, but
by no means equivalent to, concrete critical action). And the style that this
explanatory gesture calls forth likewise registers a softening, an at least
momentary willingness to forego the formal-stylistic pressure Adorno most
favors as a writer. Moreover, in the simultaneous differentiation-from-yetreaching-toward the impulse animating political commitment or engagement
itself, Adorno prefigures later modifications of his position, modifications that
will move toward the necessary articulation of a distinction between poetrys
(or arts) political and ethical involvements. That distinction concerns one of
the few things Adorno and Sartre wholeheartedly agree on, foras people
often forget, and as Sartre himself at moments seems to forget even in the writing of some portions of What Is Literature? (as well as in additional volumes of
his Situations)Sartre usually holds that poetry by its very nature cannot be
engag, cannot be politically committed in the Sartrean sense. And this results
not from some failure on poetrys part, but the reverse. Poetry for Sartre (and
lyric is unquestionably the model) inherently exceeds the already conceptualdeterminate, practical-utilitarian nature of the political and thus does not require
any added theory of, or special intention to be, engag.29
28. Theodor W. Adorno, Commitment, in Notes to Literature, 2:87; Adorno, Engagement, in
Noten zur Literatur, 3:125. A number of American readers, seeing that Adorno here writes Lyrik
rather than Gedicht or Gedichte, have apparently thought that he has now tightened or altered his
genre focus, so that not poetry per se but lyric is the problem. But Lyriks meaning here (as in most
places in modern German and, for the matter, Western poetics) is virtually the same as poetry or a
poem: it has meant modern poetry since Romanticism, which has, for better or worse, been linked
more tightly to lyric, perhaps, than ever before in Western literary-cultural history.
29. Poets . . . refuse to utilize language [Les potes refusent dutiliser la langue]. . . . They do not
speak, neither do they keep silent; it is something different. . . . the poet has withdrawn from
language-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which
considers words as things and not signs (Jean-Paul Sartre, Quest-ce que la littrature? in Situ
ations, vol. 2 [1947; rpt. Paris: Gallimard, 1948], 6364; Sartre, What Is Literature? and Other Essays
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 29). Adorno, of course, has little objection to this
characterization of poetry, butwithout wishing to collapse all genre distinctions into a generalized
writingrather contends for the fundamentally aesthetic, quasi-conceptual and therefore relatively
nonutilitarian, noninstrumental character of the novel, drama, literary essay, etc.
Nevertheless, when all is said and done regarding Sartrean commitment

and Adornian reflections on (or softenings of) the thoughts about barbarism
and impossibility, does not Adornos consistently acted-on first impulse toward
extraordinarily extreme ways of putting matters belong more to Adorno than
to the subject itself, evenor especiallywhen the subject is poetry after Ausch
witz? And even if it is acknowledged that the form of thought and writing is
intended to do justice to the materialsand where it is taken into account that
the operative paradigm is arts heightening or intensification or exaggeration
does not there remain a sense that here the form has inappropriately exceeded
and hence insulted its content, so that, despite such aesthetic, focused-onwriting sentiments as
the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost
consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead
of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far
ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of
stupefaction [MM, 86; 107]
or the kindred observation that

in psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations [MM, 49; 56],
still the thought nags that perhaps even other militant Frankfurters would not
have done it this way, that maybe it is just Adorno himself, his need to formulate the rebarbative yet formally elegant zinger that, perhaps above all in the
discussion of art and the Holocaust, causes so much pain. And given Benjamins quite caustic treatments of even potential allies (let alone opponents,
and particularly during his most Leninist and polemical periods), might not
Benjamins own paradoxical mix of extraordinary aesthetic sensitivity and
give-no-quarter analytic bravado, his bandying, indeed, of the term barba
rism, have more in common with Adorno than might fit comfortably into
much of post-1968 Left cultures canonical, divergent reception of the two
figures?
So maybe the better place to go for evaluative comparison on the question of the ethics of post-1945 poetry and criticism would be the hope-giving,
almost emblematically gentle, quite rightly beloved Herbert Marcuse.
Maybe not:
The dictum that after Auschwitz it is barbaric still to write poetry is
already obsolete. Barbaric no longer captures what transpires [Der Satz,
Robert Kaufman 93
nach Auschwitz noch Lyrik zu schreiben, sei barbarisch, ist schon berholt.
Barbarisch trifft nicht mehr das was geschieht].30
Those are the first two sentences of Marcuses 1963 essay On the Stance of
Thinking Today (Zur Stellung des Denkens heute). The problem, Marcuse
wants to say, lies not in the bite of or outrage against what Adorno wrote in
1949, first published in 1951, and with more measured language or some reservations placed over against Sartrean engagement in 1962. The problem as
Marcuse sees it in 1963 is that Western postwar culture has so rapidly and successfully developed new modes to absorb and neutralize acts of critique and
negationstarting with what Marcuse then sees as the travesty or shadow play
rebellion of Beat poetry, and working all the way back up to great lyricthat
the very characterization of poetry as barbaric, of having become somehow
inextricable from what would always have seemed its nightmare opposite, no
longer suffices to capture the problem, not to mention that it no longer causes
scandal, nor should it. This is because intellectually, spiritually, and even physi
cally, all gestures of opposition are or are being assimilated, Marcuse believes,
by the dominant culture. Whatever the playwrights intentions, things have
evolved to such a point that Samuel Beckett is big box office [grosser Kassen
erfolg] on Broadway.31 The old opposition of art (or culture) and barbarism
and even more anguished dialectical plottings of their nuanced interrelations
now seem quaint. Far from still genuinely finding the meaning of Adornos
dictum too harsh, contemporary society now seems to Marcuse to have made
the very ideathat after Auschwitz poetry has become barbaric and therefore
impossibleinto something patently outmoded, nostalgic, sentimental, naive.
But if Marcuse misses or glosses over the fact that Adornos Commitment essay had shown a tendency to turn, at least on the question of poetry,
toward a different path than the one Marcuse takes in On the Stance of
30. Herbert Marcuse, Zur Stellung des Denkens heute, in Zeugnisse: Theodor W. Adorno am
sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Max Horkheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Europische Verlagsanstalt),
4549. On aesthetic matters, Marcuse often has a tendency to offer helpful restatements of Benjamins and Adornos positions. In that light, it is probably not so surprising that his position on Lyrik
nach Auschwitz often tracks developments within Adornos thought. See, e.g., the way Marcuse
approaches the question in his late meditation posthumously titled by his editors Lyrik nach Auschwitz, in Kunst und Befreiung, vol. 2 of Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen (Lneburg: zu Klampen, 2000), 15766. See also Marcuse, Die Permanenz der Kunst: Wider eine bestim
mte marxistische sthetik (1977), vol. 9 of Nachgelassene Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1987); Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, trans. and rev.
Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon, 1978).
31. Marcuse, Zur Stellung des Denkens heute, 45.
Thinking Today, Adorno will continue where he left off in Commitment

and will go further. This becomes increasingly evident in his university lectures of the mid- to late 1960s, and the writings those lectures found their way
into. Indeed, some of those inevitably discursive and sometimes quite personal lectures, transcribed and published only recently, provide fascinating
insight into the shift in Adornos thinking (or rather what may well have been
behind his thinking since at least Minima Moralia and Cultural Criticism
and Society). It therefore is worth quoting at some length from them.
Here are excerpts from Adornos 1965 lecture course on metaphysics, a
great deal of which reappeared, usually in a more literary rendering, in Nega
tive Dialectics (written between 1959 and 1966, published in 1966). Near the
end of a July 13 lecture, Adorno begins to introduce ideas that, in their break
from classical metaphysics, might paradoxically allow us to perceive what
indeed remains of value in the metaphysical tradition:
The only way a fruitful thinking can save itself is by following the injunction: Cast away, that you may gain.
I mean by this that a metaphysics which fulfilled its own concept,
a concept which (even though this may not be admitted) always consists
of constellations of forms and contents, concepts and what they comprise,
would have radically to assimilate the relevance of the temporal to its own
concept. It would have to realize that it has been separated only apparently
and arbitrarily from its instrument, concepts, and is constantly brought
back to them. I should like to say that in our time the primacy which Sartre
accords to existence over being and its concept reveals an extraordinarily
uncompromising awareness of this state of affairs. . . . [The] assimilation of
the element of content means that metaphysical experience, or the concept
of metaphysicsboth in onepresent themselves quite differently today.
To what does Adorno turn to concretize this abstract discussion of the

dependence of concepts on constellative constructions of forms and contents,
and of the importance of the temporal to the seemingly self-sufficient, formal, eternal concepts of metaphysics?
And as a sign of thisthe world symbol would be wretchedly inadequate,
since we are concerned with the most symbolic thing of allI will take
Auschwitz. Through Auschwitzand by that I mean not only Auschwitz but
the world of torture which has continued to exist and of which we are receiving the most horrifying reports from Vietnamthrough all this the concept
of metaphysics has been changed to its innermost core. Those who continue
to engage in old-style metaphysics, without concerning themselves with what
Robert Kaufman 95
has happened, keeping it at arms length and regarding it as beneath metaphysics, like everything merely earthly and human, thereby prove themselves inhuman. And the inhumanity which is necessarily present in such
an attitude must also infect the concept of a metaphysics which proceeds in
this way. It is therefore impossible, I would say, to insist after Auschwitz on
the presence of a positive meaning or purpose in being. Here, too, though
from a totally different context, I would like to say quite candidly that I am
entirely of one mind with Sartre, from whose outlook I am otherwise
worlds apart. The affirmative character which metaphysics has in Aristotle,
and which it first took on in Platos teaching, has become impossible. To
assert that existence or being has a positive meaning constituted within
itself and orientated towards the divine principle (if one is to put it like
that), would be, like all the principles of truth, beauty and goodness which
philosophers have concocted, a pure mockery in face of the victims and the
infinitude of their torment. And taking this as my reference point, I would
like to reflect with you on what I would describe as the completely changed
status of metaphysics.32
Auschwitz is both particular and part of something universal (here,

Vietnam is mentioned; elsewhere, Adorno will refer to atomic weapons).
Adornos what has happened (das, was geschehen ist) probably alludes (as
perhaps did Marcuses own 1963 variation, quoted earlier) to Celans das was
geschah, that which happened designation for the Holocaust. Again suffusing the thought process is the question of inhumanity and how to approach
rather than ignore the truth of inhumanitys power and of what that power has
wrought. These are ruminations that, it becomes clear, need even more breathing room, as they maintain their intellectual pressure but begin to become
more personal. From Adornos next (July 15) lecture:
Aristotle draws the conclusion . . . that matter . . . as that which is represented
by possibility, must be endowed with some kind of purposiveness. . . . In face
of the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the
introduction of torture as a permanent institution and through the atomic
bomball these things form a kind of coherence, a hellish unityin face of
these experiences the assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative
character which has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception,
become a mockery; and in face of the victims it becomes downright immoral.
For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning moderates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things which have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will
32. Adorno, Lecture Thirteen, in Metaphysics, 1012; Metaphysik, 15960.

have had some kind of purpose. In other words, it might be said that in view
of what we have experiencedand let me say that it is also experienced by
those on whom it was not directly perpetratedthere can be no one, whose
organ of experience has not entirely atrophied, for whom the world after
Auschwitz, that is, the world in which Auschwitz was possible, is the same
world as it was before. And I believe that if one observes and analyses oneself
closely, one will find that the awareness of living in a world in which that is
possibleis possible again and is possible for the first timeplays a quite
crucial role even in ones most secret reactions.
I would say, therefore, that these experiences have a compelling universality, and that one would indeed have to be blind to the worlds course
if one were to wish not to have these experiences.33
In a revealing process of movement, the lecture proceeds to discuss the

writings on torture of the French survivor Jean Amry, which leads to a discussion of the destruction of the subject through his or her reduction to the thingness of body; and here Adorno, in a laudatory and important quotation of Bertolt Brecht, demonstrates the ongoing nature of his own memorializing of
Benjamin (conjured almost inevitably when Adorno thinks of Auschwitz).34 For
the quotation comes from one of Brechts three elegiac lyrics for Benjamin:
33. Theodor W. Adorno, Lecture Fourteen (July 15, 1965), in Metaphysics, 1034; Meta
physik, 16162.
34. Adorno, Lecture Fourteen, in Metaphysics, 106, 1089, 177n5, 179n12; Metaphysik, 166,
16970, 274n187, 27677n195. For a parallel example of how after-Auschwitz experience changes
the very nature of a subject and its studyand how the discussion again makes Benjamin appear
consider Lecture Two (April 15, 1968), in Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie, ed. Christoph Gdde
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993) (pt. 4, Vorlesungen, vol. 15 of Gesammelte Schriften, 3436);
Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2000), 1618. The framework is Adornos discussion of structural-theoretical aspects of sociology, of
what has been deemed essential to the structural study of society, and of what might in that light
initially appear merely particular, unimportant, and untheorizably practical: One cannot predict a
priori which social knowledge should be regarded as relevant and which should not. It is possible that
a concern with apparently out-of-the-way, obscure phenomena could lead to extraordinarily relevant
social insights. This is because areas of knowledge and subjects which have not yet been caught in the
net of the all-embracing communis opinio, which are not yet incorporated in this societys system of
consciousness, have the best chance of providing us with perspectives which are not immanent in the
system, enabling us to view it from outside. In this connection . . . I shall also mention the works of
Walter Benjamin, which today are making an extraordinary impression on sociology, and especially
on the critical theory of culture. . . . Benjamin made it his principle to concern himself only with supposedly apocryphal subjects and phenomena, which have turned out to be more fruitful the more
faithfully he followed this principle. But, of courseI should like to addthis concern for the ephemeral and inconspicuous, for that which is not pre-selected by the official stock of themes, must be
accompanied by a latent interest in, and eye for, what is essential. Had there not been . . . behind
Benjamins conceptions, the theory of the dialectical image as a socially necessary illusion, the
phenomena which brought those theories to incandescence would never have started to glow. . . .
Robert Kaufman 97
Zum Freitod des Flchtlings W.B.
Ich hre, dass du die Hand gegen dich erhoben hast
Dem Schlchter zuvorkommend.
Acht Jahre verbannt, den Augstieg des Feindes beobachtend
Zuletzt an eine unberschreitbare Grenze getrieben
Hast du, heisst es, eine berschreitbare berschritten.
Reiche strzen. Die Bandendfhrer
Schreten daher wie Staatsmnner. Die Vlker
Sieht man nicht mehr unter den Rstungen.
So liegt die Zukunft in Finsternis und die guten Krfte
Sind schwach. All das sahst du
Als du den qulbaren Leib zerstrest.
[On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.
Im told you raised your hand against yourself
Anticipating the butcher.
After eight years in exile, observing the rise of the enemy
Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier
You passed, they say, a passable one.
Empires collapse. Gang leaders
Are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples
Can no longer be seen under all those armaments.
So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.]35
Naturally, this question of the essential always goes hand-in-hand with the practical. I would
therefore saypartly to defend myself against objections which I detect in some of youthat within
a theory of society certain subjective questions relating to social psychology are unavoidably present.
While these may not be accorded the same dignity as the structural problems of society, they are not
without importance. They are important becauseand I cannot help saying thisafter Auschwitz
(and in this respect Auschwitz is a prototype of something which has been repeated incessantly in the
world since then) our interest in ensuring that this should never occur againor, where and when it
occurs, that it should be stoppedthis interest ought to determine our choice of epistemological
methods and our choice of subjects to be studied, even if they appear to be social epiphenomena. I
remember once being reproached . . . for showing an exaggerated interest in Auschwitz and the questions relating to it. It may be that the murder of six million innocent people for a delusory reason is an
epiphenomenon when measured by the standard of a theory of society, something secondary which is
not the key to understanding. However, I would think that merely the dimension of horror attached to
such an event gives it an importance which justifies the pragmatic demand that in this case knowledge
should be prioritizedif I may use that dreadful wordwith the aim of preventing such events.
35. Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., 30 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 198998), 15:48; Brecht,
Poems: 19131956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, trans. John Willett et al. (London:
Methuen, 1987), 363.
Brecht gives the classic dynamic of modern lyric overhearingthought

and sentiment aurally glimpsed, so to speak, in contradistinction to a presumably robust, direct public speech and rhetorica terrible apotheosis, as not
only the reading audience but the lyric speaker himself hears (Ich hre,
which John Willett translates as Im told) or overhears, second- or thirdhand
(as Brecht and Adorno had heard), of Benjamins now-permanent absence. The
poem makes its audience realize as well that the subject within the poem
(Benjamin) has in infernal circumstances been moved to the agency of action
(rather than be allowed to remain in the typical lyric state of thought-feeling)
precisely to destroy himself before others can arrest, torture, and murder him.
Just moments after citing Brechts poem, Adornos lecture moves toward its
notable conclusion:
I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry [dass
nach Auschwitz kein Gedicht mehr zu schreiben sei], and that gave rise to
a discussion I did not anticipate when I wrote those words. I did not anticipate it because it is in the nature of philosophyand everything I write is,
unavoidably, philosophy, even if it is not concerned with so-called philosophical themesthat nothing is meant quite literally. Philosophy always
relates to tendencies and does not consist of statements of fact. It is a misunderstanding of philosophy, resulting from its growing closeness to allpowerful scientific tendencies, to take such a statement at face value and
say: He wrote that after Auschwitz one cannot write any more poems; so
either one really cannot write them, and would be a rogue or a cold-hearted
person if one did write them, or he is wrong, and has said something which
should not be said. Well, I would say that philosophical reflection really
consists precisely in the gap, or, in Kantian terms, in the vibration, between
these two otherwise so flatly opposed possibilities. I would readily concede
that, just as I said that after Auschwitz one could not write poemsby
which I meant to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of that
timeit could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write
poems, in keeping with Hegels statement in his Aesthetics that as long as
there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be
art as the objective form of that awareness. And, heaven knows, I do not
claim to be able to resolve this antinomy, and presume even less to do so
since my own impulses in this antinomy are precisely on the side of art,
which I am mistakenly accused of wishing to suppress. Eastern-zone newspapers even said I had declared my opposition to art and thereby adopted
the standpoint of barbarism. Yet one must ask a further question, and this is
a metaphysical question, although it has its basis in the total suspension of
metaphysics. . . . It is the question whether one can live after Auschwitz.
This question has appeared to me, for example, in the recurring dreams
Robert Kaufman 99
which plague me, in which I have the feeling that I am no longer really alive,
but am just the emanation of a wish of some victim of Auschwitz.36
There are undoubtedly many nameable and nameless victim[s] of Ausch

witz whose presence Adorno invokes. But when, just for starters, one thinks
of the degree of involvement of Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Adornos student Rolf Tiedemann with the preservation, editing, and posthumous publication of Benjamins work, and of Adornos lifelong dialogue and debate, in
almost every page he wrote, with Benjamin, it is harddespite the fact that
Benjamin of course did not perish in Auschwitz itselfnot to sense Benjamins
almost overwhelming presence when Adorno speaks of feeling himself to
have become anothers wish-emanation. This coda to the July 1965 lecture
finds itself reinscribed the following year in the famous retraction passage
of Negative Dialectics:
There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed
wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression
as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that
after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems [darum mag falsch gewe
sen sein, nach Auschwitz liesse kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben]. But it is
not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you
can go on livingespecially whether one who escaped by accident, one
who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival
calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without
which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him
who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such
as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and
his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane
wish of a man killed twenty years earlier. (ND, 36263; 35556)
The only trouble with self-preservation is that we cannot help suspecting
the life to which it attaches us of turning into something that makes us
shudder: into a specter, a piece of the world of ghosts, which our waking
consciousness perceives to be nonexistent. The guilt of a life which purely
as a fact will strangle other life, according to statistics that eke out an overwhelming number of killed with a minimal number of rescued, as if this
were provided in the theory of probabilitiesthis guilt is irreconcilable
with living. And the guilt does not fail to reproduce itself, because not for
an instant can it be made fully, presently conscious.
This, nothing else, is what compels us to philosophize. (ND, 364; 357)
36. Adorno, Lecture Fourteen, in Metaphysics, 110; Metaphysik, 17273.
Before considering what is at stake here for poetry and ethics, it bears
remembering how often the Frankfurt critics, from the late 1920s until our
own time, have been stigmatized for elevating thought far above activity, for
hand-wringing and paralyzing despair. Though Adorno and Horkheimer were
primary targets, Benjamin himself was made such a target, as when Brecht
turns, in a notebook entry, from praising Benjamin to condemning him severely
for intellectual-spiritual abstraction or mysticism. But if Brecht has so frequently been cited as the activist model for the artist or literary intellectual
who breaks free of the anxiety born of excessive philosophical reflection, this
has occurred despite rather than because of attention to Brechts work itself. In
the context of Adornos intense focus on the guilt of luck, chance, odds, and
given what is clearly a concern about the barbarism of statistical survival when
the odds precisely were that one likewise should probably have been among
the systematically murdered, it bears revisiting a notably compressed, wellknown poem Brecht wrote in Santa Monica in April or May 1942.
Ich, der berlebende
Ich weiss natrlich: einzig durch Glck
Habe ich so viele Freunde berlebt. Aber heute nacht im Traum
Hrte ich diese Freunde von mir sagen: Die Strken berleben
Und ich hasste mich.
[I, the Survivor
I know of course: its simply luck
That Ive survived so many friends. But last night in a dream
I heard those friends say of me: Survival of the fittest
And I hated myself.]37
The final lines cruel concision completes and fully realizes the already
foreshortened poems overarching enactment of an odds-based diminishment,
whereby the speakers identity is forged (already starkly given, in fact, as the
title itself) in such a manner that his identity is the collapse-identification of
self-knowledge (or self-reflection) with sheer, brutal, survivalism, regardless of
intentionand which yields self-hatred. The luck, chance, or odds that consistently reduce the number of the speaker-subjects friends also drastically reduce
him or her, reducing too the duration of the final line that represents the subject, Und ich hasste mich: two accents (fewer than even the poems title) that
construct a self-lacerating, appropriately internal because self-enclosing rhyme
37. Brecht, Werke, 12:125; Brecht, Poems, 392.
Robert Kaufman 101
(ich, mich, separatedor rather, joined, identifiedonly by the verb of hatred

that forges identityinself-accusation by uniting nominative and accusative).
In fact, Ich, der berlebende is far from anomalous in Brechts oeuvre
and is part of a series of pained meditations among whose well-known texts
are the poems of, and those connected to, the Hollywoodelegien.38 Part of
the challenge Brecht facesa challenge that will be raised exponentially to an
inestimable power in the materials and situations presented to Celanwill be
how, artistically, to vivify the brutality of mere survival. There is more to say
on the subject, but I would like for the moment to return to the closely related
issue of how and why Adorno turns, from posing the question of the barbarity or impossibility of writing poems after Auschwitz, to the question of the
barbarity or impossibility of living after Auschwitz. These are, or are almost, a
single question. To ask here whether one can live after Auschwitz is to imply
thatas with the writing of poemsit is barbaric to do so; this suggests in
turn, in ways compelling further consideration, that if poetry and life are not
quite identical, neither are they in these matrices quite separable (and not by
a long shot is this lack of separability between poetry and life something that
occurs only to Adorno).
Adorno is not known, nor could he possibly be, for lightly held opinions, for mildness or agreeability, for worrying about looking or being contrarian. Nor is he particularly given to moderating his views on art because
of political considerations where he deems the latter to have been externally
imposed on, rather than immanent within, the artwork; it is his famously
held view that such imposition is bad for art and politics. But Adorno believes
emphatically that genuine or critical artworks grant us access to otherwise
unavailable or unarticulable historical experienceabove all, to the historical
experience of human sufferingand that within this overall artistic-aesthetic
endeavor of making present in semblance the history of human suffering,
lyric expression plays a unique role.39 So while there can be little doubt that
Adorno initially, and for some years thereafter, feels the truth and necessity
of what he has articulated about poetry after Auschwitz, its also clear that he
increasingly allows himself to be affected by suffering that he hadnt (but
probably should have) anticipated having himself provoked (suffering that he
hadnt anticipated because, in his view, his initial formulations attempted
with relentless honesty to adumbrate just how difficult, just how impossible
38. For a more extended discussion see Robert Kaufman, Brechts Autonomous Art, or More
Late Modernism! Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 26 (2001): 191210.
39. See Kaufman, Lyrics Expression.
beyond previous aesthetic-philosophical notions of impossibility, arts task

of presencing suffering had become with and after the Holocaust).
This may represent, to reiterate something said earlier, one of those areas
where the distinction between the ethical and political realms becomes clearest, even where the version of the political at issue emerges from some kind of
reflective rather than determinate-judgment experience. What Adorno responds
to as he more and more fully explains, modulates, and modifies his stance
is his increasing perception of an added measure of pain that seems to have
been caused by what hed originally written with the intent of helping voice
and addressin a culture and cultural criticism of denial and trivialization
the suffering that the continuing effects of the Holocaust had caused for those
who had survived it. It would be an understatement to say that there is no
parallel political case of comparable significance where Adorno cedes or alters
what had seemed to him artistically, aesthetically, and critically necessary
to articulate for the sake of truth. At any rate, this case involving Adorno and
his various interlocutors could serve as an illustration of what Stewart emphasizes as the special, shared reflective-judgment status of aesthetic and ethical
experience, their necessary openness to the others input rather than to predetermined conceptions (even or perhaps especially in situations where it
might seem most otherwisefor example, Theodor W. Adorno giving some
slack when it comes to his own rigorous defense of poetic and artistic rigor
and intensity).
In that light, the July 1965 lecture passage and the 1966 Negative Dia
lectics statement that the initial 1949 formulation may have been wrong (in
view of the reality of human suffering and its need, satisfactorily achieved or
not, to attempt expression) speak volumes in their partial shift from the terms
of lyric poetry and conceptual analysis to the register of experience, of life
however much the term and its referents are in question as never before, and
bring trailing behind them a now darkly retuned history of aesthetic and philosophical agonizing over Erlebnis, Erfahrung, Lebensphilosophie, and all the
rest. This development is already incipient in and even before Adornos 1962
softening gesture toward the recognition of suffering (in his statement that he
doesnt wish to soften the formulation published in Cultural Criticism and
Society). In a vocabulary that is scarcely an imposition (because it flows from
the Frankfurtersespecially from Benjamins and Adornosformal-stylistic
commitment as writers, and because the overarching subject still is, after all,
poetry), we can understand the shift as a recoordination among elements and
registers of poetic practice. For the cherished gestures in play in Frankfurt
writingthe dialectical sentence, the aphoristic or epigrammatic lines of concision and torque, the stanzalike passage or paragraph whose Hlderlinian-
Robert Kaufman 103
paratactical constructions almost magically stage the movement, seemingly

without transition and yet with new coherence, among distinct tonal levels
all stand, having been lifted from poetrys historical basement, as foundation
stones for the construction of Frankfurt constellative form itself.40
So when Adorno turns from lyric to life, he may to a significant degree
be turning from a rigorous focus on lyric form (on what form can and cannot
be now imagined to accomplish vis--vis a new impossible, and on his own
uncompromising form in the crucial sentence of Cultural Criticism and
Society) to a focus on lyric-aesthetic experience or affect. The reason for
this shift has nothing to do with stealth. On the contrary, the passages in the
July 1965 lecture and Negative Dialectics reveal an anguished searching.
One nonetheless can glimpse Adorno feeling his way toward the sense that it
may be wrong to seem to force an insistence on the poetry question as a
question of poetry, but that the point about poetry he wishes to get across can
yet be pursued as a question of life, since it is not wrong to raise the less
cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living. And the
language about life being a less cultural question than poetry would seem
double-edged or double-charged, since there are many moments in Adornos
writings when poetry and art are distinguished from culture, so that here the
less cultural question of life would still be equivalent to, perhaps even coterminous with, the question of poetry (with poetry being deemed closer or more
parallel to life and nature than any of the latter three are to culture). (The
passage in the July Metaphysics lecture does not refer to culture at all but,
naturally enough, to metaphysical questions.) 41
At the end of his final Metaphysics lecture on July 29, 1965, Adorno
notes:
I told you that, where there is no longer life, the temptation to mistake its
remnants for the absolute, for flashes of meaning, is extremely greatand I
do not wish to take that back. Nevertheless, nothing can be even experienced as living if it does not contain a promise of something transcending
life. This transcendence there is, and the same time is notand beyond that
contradiction it is no doubt very difficult, and probably impossible, for
thought to go.42
40. See Kaufman, Lyrics Constellation.

41. For a clear, succinct, essentially Kantian distinction between the aesthetic and the cultural,
one that largely accords with the way Adorno approaches the question (especially in Aesthetic
Theory), see Stewart, On the Art of the Future.
42. Theodor W. Adorno, Lecture Eighteen (July 29, 1965), in Metaphysics, 14445;
Metaphysik, 226.
The related final sections of Negative Dialectics reprise this thinking about
transcendence, but unite it with the workings of art and semblance (Schein):
Art is semblance even at its highest peaks; but its semblance, the irresistible
part of it, is given to it by what is not semblance. . . . Semblance is a promise
of nonsemblance (ND, 4045; 39697). Art or semblance, then, turns out to
be at the heart of the negative dialectic itself; semblance is what allows for
the possibility of a more than completely already determined life, whose
grimmest versionthe most dramatic version of complete determinationis
the genocidal reduction and elimination of particularity on a mass scale. Thats
to say that some relationship to a provisional transcendenceto a sense of, or
a sense of capacity for, an experience of existence that exceeds prior determinationis inextricably related to the capacity to experience semblance,
the phenomenon capable of exfoliating or constructing itself into what would
be, to reverse Adornos dark invocation of Krnberger, life that lives. But
to grasp more fully how semblancehow lyric semblanceis related to life,
to the question of whether after Auschwitz you can go on living, a longer
excursus on semblance and lyric is required.
A starting point is the question of how art or our aesthetic experience of it
imaginesattempts in semblancethe difficult task of bridging otherwise
apparently differentiated realms within thought, and then imagines bridging
the distance between critical thought and concrete action. Decisive here are the
ways that art makes this task (of getting us to stretch, or stretch past, the bounds
of extant concepts) inseparable from pleasure, or at least from affective experience of intrigue or somehow intriguing arrest. In modernist constructivisms
translation of the Kantian and Romantic theory-practice of organic form, this
concerns (as it did in Romanticism) arts modes of pushing or gesturing in
semblance toward the postaesthetic construction of new concepts that would
seem more than instrumental but also more than arbitrary, and that could
appear to achieve such potential noninstrumentality and nonarbitrariness (i.e.,
such potential objectivity or universality) precisely because aesthetic thoughtexperience maintains the formbut only the form, and is thus quite exactly
only the semblanceof objective-substantive conceptuality.
Offering a seeming, apparent, merely formal or semblance-version of
objective-substantive conceptuality makes the aesthetic effectively quasiconceptual. Presented to the subject himself or herself as if it were a logical
objective-substantive concept, but actually characterized by a fundamentally
affective experience of conceptuality (feeling rather than intellectually understanding the concept, so to speak), precisely this aesthetic experience or quasi-
Robert Kaufman 105
conceptuality permits and can even propel the eventual expansion of objective conceptuality. For its mere semblance-character, appearance-character, or
illusion-character (Scheincharakter) is exactly what allows aesthetic thoughtexperience to avoid determination by extant (and therefore substantive, objective) concepts; and the semblance-character of art and aesthetic experience
thus underwrites their relative lack of responsibility totheir relative freedom
from determination byextant concepts. This does not mean freedom from the
sociohistorical or political; it means freedom from determination by extant governing (or, for that matter, extant oppositional) concepts of the sociohistorical or
political. (The difference between the twobetween sociohistorical/political
determination and conceptual determinationhas consistently been collapsed
in variants of Marxian, neo-Marxian, and post-Marxian Left critique. But the
difference is what makes Marx possiblewhat makes a human subject, conditioned by the sociohistorical and subjected to reigning concepts and ideologies, nonetheless capable of thinking through and past existing concepts and
ideologiesin the first place.)
Semblance-characters freedom from substantive conceptual determination permits the aesthetics inherently experimental stretchingits stretching past those already known, determined and determining concepts that it is
not bound byto feel not like dutiful work but rather, to a highly significant
degree, like play. Since by definition aesthetic thought-experience has only
the form, only the semblance, of objective, content-filled conceptuality, aesthetic work with conceptual form literally becomes play-work, the mere form
or semblance of conceptually determined intellectual operations: from the
affective get-go, one plays around with, and is free to recombine, stretch, or
extend the conceptual materials, in ways not usually sanctioned where an
already determined conceptual content necessarily delimits the acceptable
range of results.43
This view of art and aesthetic experience as inherently experimental
leads us to why lyric poetry in particular will mean so much to constellation
theory and practice as developed by the Frankfurters and kindred artists and
critics; and the reasons involved are of a piece with what earlier had made
lyric so crucial to Marx, Engels, and Kant, among others. A tradition of aesthetics and poetics regards Romantic and modern lyric as literary arts gofor-broke-game (Va-banque-Spiel), for the lyric must work coherently in
43. For a more extensive account, and for discussion of the primary philosophical and literary
materials as well as the critical commentary and reception history involved, see Kaufman, Red
Kant.
and with the mediumlanguagethat human beings use to articulate presumably objective concepts, even while the lyric explores in semblance-character
the most subjective, nonconceptual, and ephemeral phenomena. This theoretical or philosophical difficulty, about how simultaneously to think objectivity and subjectivity, also arises practically as lyrics great problem of formconstruction. Howwith language alone as mediumto build a solid, convincing
artistic structure out of something as evanescent as subjective song and how, in
the bargain, to delineate or objectivate the impressively fluid contents of capitalist modernity? How, spontaneously yet rigorously, and with the utmost concision, to make thought sing and to make song think?
For the Frankfurters, lyric dramatizes with special intensity modern
aesthetic quasi-conceptualitys more general attempt in semblance to stretch
conceptual thought proper, precisely in the aesthetics enactment of a thoughtexperience that maintains the form of conceptual thought without being
beholden to extant, status quo concepts and their contents. Lyrics special formal intensity within this larger field of quasi-conceptual aesthetic experience
arises from lyrics historically constitutive need to stretch in semblance, through
its musicality, the very medium of objective conceptual thought, language
to stretch language quasi-conceptually, mimetically, all the way toward affect
and song but without relinquishing any of the rigor and complexity of conceptual intellection, so that in a semblance-character vital to the possibility of
critical agency, speech can appear as song and song can legitimately seem to
be logical, purposeful speech act.44
44. See, e.g., Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and
esp. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 21751, 155200; Benjamin, The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 9106; Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, and ber einige
Motive bei Baudelaire, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser, 7 vols. in 14, plus 3 suppl. vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 197299), 1.2:431654. Most
of these texts are likewise found in Benjamin, Illuminationen: Ausgewhlte Schriften (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1961); see also Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hoch
kapitalismus; Zwei Fragmente, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). See also
Adorno, On Lyric Poetry and Society; Adorno, Rede ber Lyrik und Gesellschaft; Adorno, Aes
thetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), 55, 99, 167; and Adorno, sthetische Theorie, vol. 7 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gretel
Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 88, 152, 24950. Finally, see
Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel, 19281940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 138ff., 364ff., 388ff.; and Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Corre
spondence, 19281940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 104ff., 280ff., 298ff.
Robert Kaufman 107
All this perhaps merely restates, in the vocabulary and from the matrix
of lyric history, the idea that Benjamins and Adornos much-celebrated theory and practice of the constellation, far from being an antidote to immersion in the aesthetic and the literary, is for them the most profound work of
the aesthetic, the literary, and, above all (because of its medium and that
mediums relationship to conceptuality), the poetic in lyric mode. Pace orthodox materialist and determinist critics whose influence has always returned
in new guises, Benjamin perhaps more than any other commentator grasps
how a commitment to formal aesthetic and specifically lyric experience suffuses Marxs Theses on Feuerbach and the famous Eleventh Thesis in particular, whichfar from being an interventionist call for the substantive identi
fication of art, criticism, or theory with a particular concept or program of
politicsis rather an insistence on aesthetic autonomy over against the aestheticism that (in what Marx and Engels will reject as Left Young Hegelian
German Ideology) believes intellectual or aesthetic activity can be collapsed
into, or identified with, substantive political stances and actions.45
Not least important to Benjamin, as he and Adorno go on to theorize the
constellation and force field with one eye reading Marx and one ear overhearing nineteenth- and twentieth-century experimental lyric, will be Marxs own
numerous signals (perhaps above all in the Eleventh Thesis but also scattered
throughout Das Kapital) concerning the inestimable importance of the lyric
subgenre of epigram and the object or objective reality on which epigram aims,
at least mimetically, in semblance, to inscribe itself. It is from this foundationally formal aesthetic source and lyric goad to critical self-activation (which,
again, by definition seeks to exceed determination by extant concepts) that
Benjamin and Adorno elaborate the constellation and force field. Lyric, rather
than being determined by the usual logical-conceptual rules about conceptualitys own medium of language, constellates its workings of conceptualitys linguistic medium so that, while still manifesting the formal appearance of logical
conceptuality, those formal, constellated reworkings will do something that
real, logical, determined concepts generally do not do: sing.
In lyrics semblance-song, not only particular conceptual determinations, and not even just conceptual determinations in large numbers, seem to
have been suspended/transcended. Instead, lyrics semblance-song appears to
have sung into suspension the very medium of logical, conceptual-objective
45. For extended discussion of Marxs Theses on Feuerbach in relation to lyric, aesthetic semblance, and critical theory see Robert Kaufman, Marx against Theory (Much Ado about Nothing
and Poetry) (forthcoming).
determination, to have sung it into rich indeterminacy, into a medium or

modality where determination appears as something still to be decided, where
determination seems to remain an open question subject to the agency of
human subjects (as opposed to the case where human beings, subjected to the
rule of extant conceptual determination, feel that subjective agency is denied
to them). To the degree, then, that lyrics history is inseparable from the affective stretching (through musical semblance) of objective conceptualitys linguistic medium, lyric has been accorded a privileged place in constellation
theory and practice and, therefore, in Frankfurt critical theory in general.
Like the lyric from whose history it in significant part springs, the constellative act provisionally frees itself from the standing rules or determinations
of conceptual order, so that it may reconfigure the materials before it. But the
resulting attempt to constellate is successful only whenlike a successful artwork and (given the importance of the conceptual), especially like a successful lyric poemthe constellative act and the constructed or achieved constellation can seem nonarbitrarily to point toward or begin to instantiate a
newly glimpsed objectivity.
Thus modern lyric from Romanticism through the twentieth century
stands, throughout Benjamins and Adornos writings, as the initial foundation and ultimate instance of how, over against more orthodox historical materialism, constellative form seeks the kind of thought that by definition attempts
to exceed determination by extant concepts while still aiming to configure or
construct something potentially objective or universal. To restate the idea:
the constellation operates as an intellectual attempt nondeterministically yet
also nonarbitrarily to locate and dynamically connect elements (historical,
socioeconomic, cultural) that are not initially given as relational but that,
when animatedconstellatedinto conjunction, create or reveal a signifying
force field neither instrumental nor arbitrary. We have to do here with an intellectual yet to some degree also affective experience meant to pass through
critical subjective agency and activity on its way toward a newly constructed
objectivity or potential universality. This is, of course, almost precisely Benjamins sense of what genuinely experimental lyric does. It is likewise and
even more explicitly Adornos oft-quoted definition of such lyric: A subjectivity that turns into objectivity. Adorno might have remarked as well
the way lyrics perhaps constitutive gestureapostrophetries always to
encapsulate or enact its movement of undetermined but somehow justified,
felt-as-necessary articulation of address directed at once to self and other (a
subjective and yet objectivating address that works in double direction by
generally projecting the emergence of a formalized O!-space for thought,
Robert Kaufman 109
feeling, and engagement).46 At any rate, it is hardly accidental that, again and
again, Benjamin and Adorno will momentarily suspend or interrupt their
considerations of the substantive referents for the constellations under construction to emphasize the formal aesthetic dynamics of construction and
its twinned other, mimetic semblance-expression, almost as if Benjamin and
Adorno were, in that very moment of aesthetic engagement and critique, turning to apostrophize the figure or personification named Constellation. It cannot be gainsaid that such charged momentary suspension is the very calling card of aesthetic experience, and of lyric especially, whose go-for-broke
wager involves reconfiguring the forms of its linguistic medium.
And from the perspective of lyric theory and practice, such wager and
such reconfiguration will mean making the constellationthe heavenly, intelligent, geistige, or public-critical spheresing its music and allow its song to be
heard. The model or spark is, again, lyric semblances taking communicationdetermined conventions of language use and making them sing their way toward
becoming something that has escaped conceptual determination but that
nonetheless does not seem arbitrary. In a dance-tension of thought and affect,
constellation seeks (with at least a hint of the semblance-character that animates lyric) to restore to thought-experience what the invaluable tool of conceptual abstraction perforce has excised from thought, namely, concrete, particu
lar, conceptually undetermined experience (ND, 16266; 16468). As is well
known, the modern withering of experience becomes one of Benjamins
and, largely through Benjamins influence, one of Adornosgreat themes. It is
a theme inseparable from Charles Baudelaire and the modernist poetry following him, whose great question is whether lyric experiment and allied artisticaesthetic endeavors can contribute to reconstituting or reconstructing a notalready-conceptually-determined experience (in particular, an experience
initially not already determined by the superconcept known as exchange value
and, finally and far more grimly, by the world of and after Auschwitz). At all
events, lyric semblance and the other kinds of artistic semblance effect, in their
semblance-character, protocritical illusion: their aesthetic as if announces and
identifies itself as illusion or semblance, so that both the semblance and the
reality it relates to but differs from are simultaneously registered. This aesthetic
46. Adorno, On Lyric Poetry and Society, 43; Adorno, Rede ber Lyrik und Gesellschaft,
85. For further consideration see Robert Kaufman, Adornos Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism
Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity, in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 35475; and Kaufman, Lyrics Expression. See
also Jonathan Culler, Apostrophe, in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction,
augmented ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
experience is to be distinguished from aestheticization, where illusion and reality are no longer simultaneously registered (as they are in aesthetic experience)
butoften with the best, radical, world-changing intentionscollapsed into
identity, so that what was once differentiated aesthetic illusion, now no longer
asking to be recognized as such and in tandem with the reality it imitates but
differs from, ceases to be the critical or protocritical, Benjaminian-Adornian
charged distance phenomenon of aesthetic illusion and instead becomes
the sociopolitical or ethical delusion that the artwork or poem itself constitutes not merely a powerful formal spark toward the sensing of agency but an
already substantive ethical or sociopolitical action.
It is now perhaps easier to understand why, for Adorno, a world utterly without
semblance-experience is a world that prevents its subjectswho are inevitably
conditioned by that worldfrom being able or allowed to think projectively
but nonarbitrarily past that worlds ruling concepts. It is easier to see as well
why Adorno and others associate Auschwitz with the fullest and grimmest
realization of the rule of sheer calculation, sheer odds, chance, luck, statistical
probability, where the numbers rule, favoring no one while branding all. But
is it really barbarism to live with and after this?
Probably the least bearable story my father told mein June and July
1987, when we recorded almost thirteen hours of oral history during the last
months of his lifewas not one that I had expected would be the most difficult. But this story turned out to befor me and, to all appearances, much
more so for himfar worse than his recounting of other terrible incidents:
beatings; a whipping administered by an SS man (in response to an allegation that my father had engaged in sabotage) that appeared as if it might be
continued until death; the loss of a friend and political comrade at the very
end of the death march from Auschwitz-Birkenau back to Germany that they
had both, until then, somehow survived; and too many more to mention here,
though all of the sort very commonly found in survivor narratives. As it happened, he began telling me this particular story on an afternoon when the tape
recorder was momentarily not at hand, and it immediately became clear that
he did not wish to stop and wait for me to retrieve it; nor was he going to want
to tell the story again. It went as follows:
My father was in a boxcar filled with male prisoners. (I think I remember that it was the transport on which he came, in September 1944, to AuschwitzBirkenau from Theresienstadt, but I cannot be sure; it is possible that it was a
transport traveling between camps inside Germany after the death march, in
the winter or spring of 1945.) The car was crowded but not so packed that
Robert Kaufman 111
as sometimes was the casethe bodies of those who had passed out could
hardly fall, in many instances being instead held upright by the press of others around them. Men who were sick, exhausted, or both dropped to the floor,
not rising thereafter; those standing tried to conserve what strength they had
to face whatever awaited them after the trip. At one point a man standing just
beside my father, a stranger, collapsed onto the floor, where he lay quiet and
motionless; like everyone else, my father looked straight ahead or upward. The
configuration of those standing shifted, adjusting to the space opened by the
mans fall. After about twenty minutes, my father felt himself being pinched
on the shin or calf. I remember my father telling me: It was the guy, he wanted
with the pinch to tell me he was still alive. My father steadied himself, leaned
down, and, lowering only one arm so he would not fall himself, managed to
raise the man, who half leaned against my father and one or two others standing near them. My father remembered no words being exchanged. He said the
man stumbled off the boxcar when the train reached its destination. He never
saw the man again; he was sure the man did not survive.
Im well aware, and I believe that my father had reason to be far more
aware, of much that might be said for the ethics or humanity of this act in the
face of the situations hopelessness. But that would have been cold comfort
for my father; actually, it would have been, and was, less: it was no comfort at
all, for there was none to be found, and my fathers exhibiting what looked like
shame, anger, and disgust during his recounting of the incident was unlike
almost anything else I saw in him during the making of the oral history or, for
that matter, during the many occasions through the years when he spoke less
formally about the war. It occurred much, much later to me that acting on the
impulse of fellow feeling and sympathy had for him been connected to something either inseparable from or significantly parallel to an as if assumption,
but exactly the kind of classically emancipatory sense of nondetermination,
of being or feeling free enough to act and address spontaneously the problem
of suffering, here turned exponentially brutal and unbearable. For the very
impulse to act and then the act itself, even where the decision and action had
occurred in a flash, would seem to have had beneath them the subjects foundational assumption (perhaps even cast in explicitly as if form) that his or her
agency might matter, might save or might at least help the person whom the
subject had perceived to be in need.
Yet in the infernally determinative context at hand, it became apparent
that the overwhelming odds were all on the other side, that the act of helping actually was merely helping the suffering person to perish in a slightly
different, and by no means necessarily preferable, manner. The overarching
and thoroughgoing inhumanity of the situation of what Adorno calls damaged life structured everything around it, so that, in Adornos formulation,
wrong life could notcannotbe lived rightly, and the very attempt or reflex
of trying to act ethically, or of finding oneself seeming to act ethically, is precisely what leads one to feel barbaric, for it makes all the more clear that nothing but unjustifiable luck has been operative: at the moment of a sheerly arbitrary, chance, statistical survival, the projection of an ethical attempt to assist
the other comes to feel like an unspeakable mockery or perverse miming of
ethics, since the thought and act meant to differentiate themselves from the
barbarism of survival-due-to-statistical-probability turn out to be not the necessary fiction, not the generative, as if illusion, of undetermined, ethical behavior, but instead the cruel delusion that the latter still has any operative existence in these circumstances. The attempt to counter the situations imposed
barbarism only confirms it, not because the subjects attempt or act has been
intentionally barbaric but because the situation has rendered it null and leaves
remaining that same already determined, barbaric result ofat bestminimalnumbers, odds-based survival. What in other circumstances would indeed be
ethical now only confirms that ethical behavior has come to feel meaningless
or maybe even worse, because the subject again confronts his or her sheer survival of that which the subject, when given what had seemed to be a chance
to help, was unable to save a fellow victim from.
The subject is left with an overwhelming sense that the attempt to project
and act on a feeling, an intuition, of undetermined or as if behavior only confirms that here such otherwise humane comportment too winds up being horribly determined: it leaves the surviving subject with the knowledge or feeling
that nothing but brutal chance has allowed his or her momentary survival, and
that what elsewhere would stand as the foundation of humane action now
points back inexorably to the brutal fact of after-living or beyond-living,
the literal meaning of survival. I hesitate to speak for my father, much less to
claim that what I know of his experience could represent others experiences,
but its true that a great deal of survivor testimony and literature is saturated
with meditations on the awful, inhuman strangeness, and the hideously determining character, of luck, odds, chancewhich are horrible enough as mass
determinants in themselves, but which are apparently made worse when the
ethical effort to resist them seems to leave them ever more triumphant. As in so
much survivor testimony and literature, the keywords at issue were, more casually and consistently than in his tape-recorded oral history, on my fathers lips
throughout his forty-two postwar years of talking about his experiences and
Robert Kaufman 113
the fact of, as he called it, the half-living postwar existence that he was
indeed fortunate enough to have had: just the odds, just luck, no reason.
Though it still would not provide any reconciliatory consolation or comfort, it nonetheless might be said that the ethical is not necessarily negated by
all this, but that it survives in a negative modality whose unbearable character
warrants its authenticity. The attempt to think and act ethically about the situation within the Lager points all too frequently to the terrible knowledge that
the brute odds appear to beat the ethical impulse in every round, or almost.
One might say that this is a different, presumably more reflective knowledge
than a numbed, mechanical, automatically accepting knowledge that this is
just the way it is here. But it is a serious question, at least to many who have
offered testimony on the matter, whether the knowledge gleaned from the frustrated gesture toward the ethical is worth its price. All this seems even more
clear in the closely related matter of poetry (and the other arts). If Adornos
comment about barbarism at some basic level initially implies that the continuation of any kind of recognizable, and to that degree affirmational, poetics would be, after Auschwitz, grotesque, he also means that a truly critical
poetry, after Auschwitz, must be barbaric, in the sense of immersing itself and
its readers in a somehow aesthetic experience of that which happened,
that is, of dehumanization. Humane artistic rendering and aesthetic experience of the content in question risks being deemed itself inhumane, barbaric;
and Adornos point is that, to the extent that poems and other artworks are true
to this material, they are and indeed must be inhumane and barbaric, if homeopathically so. That is why they can feelif they hit the mark and construct a
genuine constellationso unbearable; it is no accident that John Felstiner, in
what almost on publication became the most widely read English-language
account of Celan, emphasizes (as have previous commentators) that in his suicide Celan joined a notable group of great artists whose work was in significant
part based in their survivor-experiences, and whose intensified and repeated
reexperiencing, in their work, of the Holocaust and their to-them-unjustifiable
survival of it proved unbearable; so that the awful answer to the question of
whether one can live after Auschwitz was, ultimately, no.
Of no small importance is the fact that, however much a reflectivejudgment as if may quietly underlie or be implied by ethical acts, the as if of
aesthetic semblance-illusion tends by custom if not definition to be the main
showthe center stagefor poetry and art. And on some initial level, its bound
to appear barbarous to subject Holocaust materials to as if treatment. On a
related level, the barbaric discovery involves (precisely via the post-1945
poems necessary attempt to enact poetrys constitutive semblance-character,

and in a manner parallel to or on a continuum with the camps negation of the
meaning of undetermined ethical judgment and action) the apprehension of
the apparent unavailability of semblance-character. The negative path follows that which we saw earlier in the ethical field; the unavailability is less
negation than a negative knowledge that can be gained only through the attempt
at semblance-character. What can tend to make the aesthetic case seem even
clearer than the ethical one (to which it is at any rate connected) is that the
explicit attempt at and seeming impossibility of semblance is felt as the ground,
or sine qua non, of the impossibility of anything other than already determined
existence, since when it is available, semblance, constructed and recognized
and enjoyed image or illusion, is the ground or sine qua non of that which
is other than, and therefore not already entirely determined by, the existing.
All this indicates why Adorno and the poets involved can move from
poetry to life, or vice versa; or rather, can move from the felt impossibility of
one to the other. The connection, shadowing, or partial identity of ethics and
aesthetics, humane life and poetry, holds in ways that Adorno and the poets are
highly conscious of, with layered reference back to classical and then to
Romantic and modern conjoinings of poetry and life, whether in German
Naturphilosophie and its legacies or in Percy Bysshe Shelleys poetry of life
and all its subsequent influence (extending at least to Muriel Rukeysers Life of
Poetry, in which the circle would seem to be retraced and the life of poetry
turns out to be life). Ancient, classical, or Romantic-modern, all are based to
some significant degree on the notion that lyric bears a special relationship,
because of its intense relationship to the linguistic-conceptual medium, to a
simultaneously affective and conceptual need-activity that is indispensable
to humaneness, reflection, and the history of human emancipation. Life is of
course a precondition for emancipation; to that extent, all the reflection about
poetrys barbarism or impossibility gestures toward humane registration of
how necessarily brutal it is to dedicate life-giving semblance-experience to the
attempt to convey the unredeemable destruction of such life for tens of millions and leaving, in the aftermath, far too much as life that does not live. It
is in all these senses that Adornos shift, positively and negatively, to the discourse of living and life is a continuation of the discussion of poetry.47
47. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman
and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977); Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; rpt.
Ashfield, MA: Paris, 1996); Susan Stewart, What Praise Poems Are For, PMLA 120 (2005):
23545; and Denise Gigante, The Meaning of Life (forthcoming), as well as The Living Voice: The
Meaning of Life in British Romantic Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ross Wilson (forthcoming).
Robert Kaufman 115
The approach presented here to semblance may have the added benefit of
helping clarify some aspects of recent thinking about the relationship between
Adornos aesthetics and Celans poetics, revolving around the issue of aura
for aura is, or at least appears inside of, semblance. Adorno at his death had left
notes for a planned essay on Celans work and had energetically marked up
some of his volumes of Celans poems. But Adornos most-discussed thoughts
on Celan come from a fragment near the end of Aesthetic Theory:
What Benjamin noted in Baudelaire, that his poetry is without aura, comes
into its own in Celans work. . . . The language of the lifeless becomes the
last possible comfort for a death that is deprived of all meaning. . . . Celans
poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth
content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is
that of the dead speaking of stones and stars.48
There is no disputing that these words are meant to champion the poet. Yet
some have seen in them an inaccurate portrait of Celan, an attempt to assimi
late his inextinguishable lyric aura to what they see, and what indeed sounds
like, Adornos modernist program for an aura-destroying aesthetics.
But for Adorno, as very often for Benjamin, there are at least two versions of aura, and they are hostile to one another. The Adorno writing such
elaborate defenses of semblance would not at the same time be attacking the
same phenomenon under the alternate name of aura. To put things somewhat
schematically: socioeconomic modernity itself, particularly in the form of
the superconcept known as exchange value, is what tends to destroy the life
of particularity and of the semblance-character or aura through which particularity appears. Artistic and cultural attempts to preserve semblance, particularity, or aura become, at a certain Romantic or nineteenth-century point,
stultified versions of what genuine aura once was. Critical art and aesthetics
then strive to make work that leaves behind or destroys what Benjamin is at
one point prone to call phony aura and that Brecht often calls the culinary. Vis--vis culinary aura, experimental arts aura often makes itself
seem mute, dissonant, even auraless; it creates, in fact, a critical or at least
via negativa version of aura, rather on the Benjaminian model of how allegory counters the false aesthetic richness or density of a doctrine of a symbolic art whose tendencies toward synthesis and reconciliation have made it
consonant with official culture. In its countermovement, self-consciously
48. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 32122; Adorno, sthetische Theorie, 47677.
thin, artificial, and constructed allegory begins to do the critical work that an
earlier, insurgent symbolism once performed, so that allegory can come to
seem more truly symbolic than the symbol itself. While it by no means need
be the case that each experimental lyric should immerse itself in the thematics of the humane and inhumane, it holds that much of the art that Adorno
sees as being without aura is, in Adornos eyes, critically auratic, seeking
to address an addressee, to make absence present.
The parallel is seen as well in Celans justified concern that his early
workTodesfuge especiallywas being made into museum pieces, was
being treated like the poetry it had put behind it, like the poetry or cultural
criticism Adorno had to some degree initially inveighed against or worried
about. The Benjaminian source of so much of this problem is perhaps best
remembered by turning to a translator and interpreter of Benjamin, Howard
Eilandand by turning to Eilands own imaginative engagement with the
acid-test case of cinema, purportedly the modern cultural-artistic destroyer
of aura and lyricism. In a series of meditations on film form and the aesthetic
experience it effects, Eiland offers suggestive parallels for those making and
thinking about lyric, as he revivifies Benjamins great articulation of lyric
aura as unique or charged distance, arrested movement on the vergebut just
on the vergeof release: The element of stillness, standstill, in film imagery.
Moving picture. Here is perhaps the possibility of films aura.49
What the title of this essay promises as second movement can, for reasons of
space, be delivered here only as coda. On September 14, 2001, a San Francisco bookstore decided that a previously scheduled poetry reading would go
ahead despite the attacks three days earlier; the events poets included former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Forest Hamer, Lyn
Hejinian, and Michael Palmer. Without any discussion or coordination, three
of the poets decided to read some of Robert Duncans work. Hass began by
worrying aloud that the Bush administration was about to hijack a national
tragedy to make unending war and then read Duncans Ingmar Bergmans
Seventh Seal, which begins:
This is the way it is. We see
three ages in one: the child Jesus
49. Howard Eiland, Notes on Film, Telos, no. 130 (2005): 164. For related reflections, in some
sense even closer to lyric because based in music, see Eiland, Jazz Notes, Shuffle Boil, no. 3
(2003): 39; and Eiland, Notes on Eric Dolphy, Shuffle Boil, nos. 56 (forthcoming).
Robert Kaufman 117

innocent of Jerusalem and Rome
magically at home in joy
thats the year from which
our inner persistence has its force.50
Palmerwhose work has been mentioned in connection to Celan more than

perhaps any other recent English-language poetthen read a poem of Duncans that has been a key text since the mid- to late 1970s in the American
reception of Celans poetry, and hence a key moment in American poetrys
reconsideration of the poetry-after-Auschwitz controversies.
A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings
Something has wreckt the world I am in
I think I have wreckt
the world I am in.
It is beautiful. From my wreckage
this world returns
to restore me, overcomes its identity in me.
Nothing has wreckt the world I am in.
It is nothing
in the world that has
workt this
wreckage of me or my world I mean
the possibility of no thing so
being there.
It is totally untranslatable.
Something is there that is it. Must
be nothing ultimately no
thing. In the formula derived
as I go
the something is Nothing I know
obscured in the proposition of No-thingness.
It is Nothing that has
wreckt the world I am in so that it is
beautiful, Nothing in me
50. Robert Duncan, Ingmar Bergmans Seventh Seal, in The Opening of the Field (New
York: New Directions, 1960), 93.

being
beyond the world I am in
something
in the world longs for
nothing there.51
A crucial presence in poetry for four decades until his 1988 death,
Duncan, with his discovery of and affinity with Celan, points to a strain of
American poetry that has gravitated toward Celans poetics while sometimes
paralleling, sometimes being more directly influenced by, Adornos aesthetics. The nothing and No-thingness that Duncan catches from play within
various Celan poems is, at the level of ethical (let alone political) commitment, quite curious at first blush. But Duncans commitment to lyric poetry
and the aesthetic experience of it is, explicitly and repeatedly in his work and
the legacies of influence it has garnered, a commitment to the nothing that is
in fact the yet-to-be-determined: the poems commitment to the space of illusion or semblance that keeps determination and ethical possibility open for
exploration, over against the delusion that the poem itself is already an ethical or political act. Yet the need in thinking is what makes us think, Adorno
writes as the curtain comes down on Negative Dialectics. Duncans ringing
of Celans songand of that songs difficult contentlets us know in a related
vein how it works out that
something
in the world longs for
nothing there.
51. Robert Duncan, A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan
Sings, in Groundwork: Before the War (New York: New Directions, 1984), 8.

KAUFMAN Poetry's Ethics

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Poetrys Ethics? Theodor W.

74 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Thinking especially about todays American scene, so far removed not

76 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

than a desired ought holds sway), Harpham emphasizes how fundamental

And he further distills the point:

78 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

80 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

German and wider European responses.11 In recent contributionsemerging

82 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

ban, prohibition, or statement against postwar poetry, she at certain

In ways I cannot do justice to here, Stewart shows how aesthetics and

84 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Having anticipated from figures of great cultural stature in the postwar

86 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Whats coming appears almost fully present in these words. Yet it is

88 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

90 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

frequently in Adornoappears willfully unconcerned with the predictable

Lyrik zu schreiben, sei barbarisch]; it expresses, negatively, the impulse that

92 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Nevertheless, when all is said and done regarding Sartrean commitment

or the kindred observation that

94 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Thinking Today, Adorno will continue where he left off in Commitment

To what does Adorno turn to concretize this abstract discussion of the

Auschwitz is both particular and part of something universal (here,

96 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

In a revealing process of movement, the lecture proceeds to discuss the

98 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Brecht gives the classic dynamic of modern lyric overhearingthought

There are undoubtedly many nameable and nameless victim[s] of Ausch

100 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Robert Kaufman 101

(ich, mich, separatedor rather, joined, identifiedonly by the verb of hatred

102 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

beyond previous aesthetic-philosophical notions of impossibility, arts task

Robert Kaufman 103

paratactical constructions almost magically stage the movement, seemingly

40. See Kaufman, Lyrics Constellation.

104 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Robert Kaufman 105

106 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Robert Kaufman 107

108 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

determination, to have sung it into rich indeterminacy, into a medium or

Robert Kaufman 109

110 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Robert Kaufman 111

112 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Robert Kaufman 113

114 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

poems necessary attempt to enact poetrys constitutive semblance-character,

Robert Kaufman 115

116 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

Robert Kaufman 117

Palmerwhose work has been mentioned in connection to Celan more than

118 Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

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