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MLN, Volume 121, Number 3, April 2006 (German Issue), pp. 757-773
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DOI: 10.1353/mln.2006.0074

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 As If: Kant, Adorno,
and the Politics of Poetry

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

Can anyone, you will ask, but a man who is

insensitive to the Muse talk about lyric poetry
and society?
Theodor Adorno,
On Lyric Poetry and Society.

I. Memory Lapses
Speaking about Adornos reflections on modern poetry inevitably
obliges us to consider the relation between ethics and literature, and
more specifically, the well-known question of writing poetry after
Auschwitz. In this spirit, I would like to preface my paper with a radio
interview, the rhetoric of which is embedded in Adornos thinking of
this question, but an interview which forgets the complex history of
this question and, as a result, inscribes unthinkingly 9/11 into the
discursive history of genocide. Like Adorno, who spoke about poetry
and society through the airwaves, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky
offered his outlook on poetry and politics after 9/11 in an interview
on NPRs Weekend Edition of September 8, 2002, where he also read his
poem, 9/11.1 But unlike Adorno, who advanced a complex, agonis-
tic, and eventually tragic understanding of poetry, the American poet
showed his complicity in the prevailing a-historical rhetoric, and his
preference for some rather facile programmatic answers.
Here is the first question posed to Pinsky: Before we hear your
poem, let me ask how much time passed after 9/11 before you were

1
Robert Pinsky, Interview with Liane Hansen, Weekend Edition, Natl. Public Radio
WBUR, Boston. 8 Sept. 2002.

MLN 121 (2006): 757773 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
758 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

even able to think about writing a poem? The almost unconscious

piling up of chronological markers (before, after, before) along with
the interviewers vocal stress on the word even reinscribe this ques-
tion within the Adornian tradition of interrogating the possibility of
poetry after catastrophe. Auschwitz emerges as the repressed term
of this analogy, which has as its ambition to set up 9/11 as another
date for the end of poetry. Happily enough, however, there is only so
much tragedy and gloom that this bright country of ours can sustain,
so Pinsky hastened to respond that of course he was able to write,
only it took him many months. He then proceeded to explain that
in writing this poem, he came to realize what holds us together, the
us referring exclusively to the American people: As the politicians
say, theres something united about it. I couldnt define it for you. It
seems to have to do with ideas, and it seems to have to do with things
that I cant explain. What is important here is that this undefinability
does not in the least taint Pinskys certainty of the present existence
of a national unity, a unity which his poem is inspired by, but also
hopes to strengthen: positive unity as opposed to imagined commu-
nity; positive unity as opposed to Adornos collective undercurrent
[der kollektive Unterstrom] which, I will argue, is irreducible to any
empirically identifiable group of people. The potentially universal ap-
peal of poetry is thus debased to the caricature of an actualized and
exclusive national unity, in a gesture that unwittingly reaffirms another
of Adornos ominous reflectionsnamely, that Auschwitz confirmed
the philosopheme of pure identity [unity] as death2 Not surprisingly
then, when asked about the effects that the events of 9/11 have had
on poetry, or the world that poetry plays in Americans lives, Pinsky
offered yet another optimistic, self-congratulatory blurb befitting a
poet laureate: Its conceivable that this is a marker, [. . .] a point
where something emerges, and I think that for at least ten years or so
in my experience, Americansalmost in reaction to our love of mass
media and digital informationwe also turn toward this art that is
on an individual scale quite intimate, quite personal. Unfortunately,
though wishing to reconnect poetry to politics, the very setting of the
interview does so at the expense of the poetic. At the same time that
poetry is called to inspire and enrich politics, it is also enframed and
betrayed by politics.
Contrary to Adornos awareness of this tenuousness of speaking

2
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,
1966) 362.
 MLN 759

about poetry and politics, this interview approaches the subject rather
naively. After all, Adorno started his essay On Lyric Poetry and So-
ciety [Rede ber Lyrik und Gesellschaft] rather apologetically, by
invoking the offended Muse and the dismay of a Baudelaire, who
could well have been inspired by such an interview to compare the
modern poet to an awkward albatross.3 At the same time, however,
Adorno saw in this tenuousness the only possibly productive encounter
between the lyrical and the political. Tenuousness, not unqualified
unity of the sort Pinsky imagines, is the place from which the rela-
tion of poetry and politics must be thoughta relation of intimacy,
but also of tension. Yet I chose to start my essay with this interview,
because it re-engagesalbeit only symptomaticallytwo important
issues concerning poetry, which Adorno addressed and which will be
of my concern: first, the more general relation of poetry to the social,
which thematizes one of his cardinal philosophical concerns, namely,
the relation between the individual and the universal; secondly, the
task and vision of the lyric in the face of catastrophe.

II. Preliminary Remarks

In my paper I will address some of Adornos thoughts on the lyric,
particularly the way poetic language mediates the relation between
the subjective and the universal. In order to elucidate Adornos un-
derstanding of the social nature of the lyricwhat he calls the col-
lective undercurrentI will read it as analogous to Kants concept
of the sensus communis.
While Kants Analytic of the Beautiful assumes our familiarity,
Adornos essay On Lyric Poetry and Society may be in need of a brief
summary and contextualization. The essay traces the social function
of the modern lyric by walking on a rather fine line: it critiques the
bourgeois individualist fiction that haunts the lyric in its subjectivism,
while it also refuses to relegate the political responsibility of the lyric
to engaged poetry, and even wishes at times to preserve a good
subjectivism as a more genuine way to universality.
At the heart of this dialectic and at the center of his essay, Adorno
introduces a rather enigmatic term, the collective undercurrent,
which also marks a structural turn from the essays earlier general

3
Theodor W. Adorno, On Lyric Poetry and Society, Notes to Literature I., ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, European Perspectives, vol. 1 (New York:
Columbia UP, 1991) 3754; 37.
760 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

remarks about poetry to readings of specific poemsone by Mrike

and another by Georgethat serve as models illustrating this term.
Interestingly, what he designates as the most socially relevant aspect
in these poems is linguistic anachronism, words or constructions that
evoke failed realities, or aborted possibilities. The collective undercur-
rent, then, has to do with the way in which poetic language becomes
a medium of the social. Adorno calls it the foundation, namely, the
origin or ground of lyric poetry, but it is also the final measure of the
poems quality, insofar as participation in this undercurrent is an es-
sential part of the substantiality of the individual lyric (45).
The problematic of the text unfolds largely around this question
of temporalization: to what extent does the collective undercurrent
precede and define poetic language, or conversely, to what degree
does Adorno choose to pose the question of the social in a study on
the lyric precisely because he considers poetic language as founda-
tional to society? When considering the complexity of this question,
it becomes clear that the term poetry needs to be defined as well.
Poetry in his essay appears at least under two guises. In a more lim-
ited, historical sense, Adorno refers to the modern lyric; but more
generally, he theorizes through this particular genre something larger
and transhistorical about the nature of language qua poetic language.
This latter aspect is of more interest to my present argument as well.
Hence, although Kant, for instance, is not addressing specifically the
poetic genre, but art in general, I do consider poetry as a synecdoche
for the arts because of its originary relation to language as a mode of
disclosure. Although Adornos politics would of necessity refute this
Heideggerianism, I maintain that his treatment of poetry has more in
common with Heidegger than he may have wished, and that poetry
in his text recalls the Greek poiesis, or the German Dichtung, which
designates a way of bringing something into presence.
Having introduced some of the relevant categories in Adornos essay,
let me now contextualize the comparison with Kant. I propose to read
Adornos collective undercurrent along with Kants sensus communis, in
an effort to show how Adorno manages not only to imbue the most
a-political of genres with a social dimension, but more importantly, to
offer art again as a model for politics. I say again in acknowledgement
of the fraught history of the relation between aesthetics and politics
in the post-Kantian era, and in Adornos own work, particularly. After
Hegels systematization and historicization of artwhich entailed the
expulsion of nature and of other such contingencies and particulars,
in an effort to distill free artAdornos insistence on the excess of
 MLN 761

the thing vis vis the concept marks a return to Kant, whose aesthet-
ics is based on conceptual indeterminacy. What I am suggesting is
that the vision of freedom or of the good that art yields in Adorno
and Kant, respectively, rests precisely on the inclusion of subjective
contingency, the a-systematicity of nature, or the excess of the thing,
all aspects which Hegel would critique as unfree.4
Art, as the other of both philosophy and society, becomes in both
Adorno and Kant a model through which philosophy speaks about
society. More poignantly, both of them credit the very possibility of
linking such antithetical domains as art and politics to art alone, be-
cause for both of them, art speaks in the language of pure possibility,
that is also, of impossibility: if art points to the possible, it is also by
allowing for the impossible.
Literarily speaking, analogy, the elucidation of one term through
its similarities to another (exemplarity), is a particularly interesting
methodological venue for my analysis, since Kantwho dismissed the
example as a lesser mode of conceptualizationconstructed many of
his philosophical arguments by way of analogy, using the structure of
the as if. Similarly, Adorno privileges the notion of the model, in
part an analogical structure as well, in which a philosophical idea is
reached not through abstract conceptualization, but via the analysis of
a concrete instance. Though in his preface to Negative Dialectics Adorno
resists equating his models with examples (given the poor treatment
of the example by philosophy), he also recognizes that they are not
unlike the so-called exemplary methodthey serve the purpose
of discussing key concepts of philosophical disciplines and centrally
intervening in those disciplines.5 Thus, analogy as resemblance, but
also as dissimilarity,6 marks a moment of poetization of the concept,

4
In his article, The Theory of Natural Beauty and Its Evil Star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno,
Rodolphe Gasch offers a compelling explanation of the ethical significance of con-
ceptual indeterminacy for a thinking of freedom in Adornos aesthetics. Rodolphe
Gasch, The Theory of Natural Beauty and Its Evil Star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Research
in Phenomenology 32 (2002): 103122.
5
Adorno, Negative Dialectics xx.
6
Certainly, this comparison between Adorno and Kant is not itself unproblematic,
since for all the similarities there are also equally important differences. What comes
immediately to mind is the radically different place reserved for Reason by each of
these thinkers. While Kant privileges Reason in his understanding of aesthetic judg-
ment, Adorno is all too aware of the destructive and irrational side effects of Reason.
In this vein, we may object, along with Nietzsche (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy
of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1989] 103104), that the Kantian disinterestedness, a sign of this belief in
Reason, dismisses an important aspect of the aesthetic experience, namely, the objects
762 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

namelya moment which concretizes the concept without reducing

it to a fixture. In other words, analogy foregrounds and performs the
aspect of indeterminacy, common to both Adornos and Kants aes-
thetics. Indeed, both the notions of the collective undercurrent and
of the sensus communis partake in this indeterminate, non-conceptual,
or at least quasi-conceptual aspect of aesthetics, and it is precisely
this language of non-conceptuality, that is, poetic language, that fur-
nishes an alternative model for a politics. And whereas the collective
undercurrent is some kind of poetic property, an attribute associated
with the side of production, as opposed to the sensus communis which,
being the requirement for aesthetic judgments, belongs to the side of
reception, both are made possible by and attest to the indeterminate
character of the work of art.
Part of my interest in establishing this connection between Kant
and Adorno is to read the latters essay against the grain, that is, to
read it through its own question, which I have chosen as my epigraph:
how can wein our polemic against bourgeois subjectivismspeak
of the social nature of the lyric, without further endangering a genre
already endangered by the bourgeoisie? Though Hegels name and
dialectical method are more than present in Adornos text, I was led
to ask whether Adornos project of elevating the individual voice to
universal legitimacy without simultaneously denying it its origin in
particularity, may be better served by a link to the absent Kant. In
fact, the dialectical peregrinations of On Lyric Poetry and Society,
suggest a profound undecidability as to which of the two terms of the
dialectic needs to be compensated forthe particular or the universal.
The particular is suspect because it glorifies bourgeois isolation, at
the same time that it also stands for the authentic, and is in need of
rescue from totalization. The universal, on the other hand, is champi-
oned as the site of historical objectivity, at the same time that it is also
recognized as the site of domination and reification. Language, then,
both an idiolect and a means of universal communication through
concepts, becomes the mediation between the individual lyric form
and society.7 Revealingly, the essay ends with a reading of Stefan

content as an expression of creativitya domain of truth that is fundamental for Adorno.

Although it is arguable that the requirement of disinterest constitutes a kind of passion
in Kant, and that it has as its ultimate purpose the ascension from mere taste to a more
genuine encounter with the work, the overall difference between Kants Enlightenment
assumptions and Adornos deep suspicion of these assumptions, still remains. Indeed,
to Kants aesthetics of the beautiful, Adorno responds with that of the ugly.
7
Adorno, Notes to Literature I 43.
 MLN 763

George, in which this mediation is performed from the side of the

idiolect, namely, from the profoundly private and uncommunicative
side of language. Georges idiosyncratic language, which to Adorno
sounds like a quotation not from another poet but from something
language has irrevocably failed to achieve,8 emerges as the supreme
social moment of his poetry. This dialectic, which reaches universal-
ity only by throwing it back on the infinitization of the idiolect, is a
gesture similar to Kants postulation of universal assent of singularly
pronounced judgments. But whereas Adorno relies on hyperbolizing
mediation, Kant relies on the guarantees of Reason.

III. The Individual Versus the Collective

Reflecting on postwar questions about the limit of ethics, and perhaps
even revisiting a fin-de-sicle melancholy, the second half of the twentieth
century has continued modernitys fascination with decline, negativ-
ity, and the proclamation of certain ends: the end of art, the end
of metaphysics, and the end of the subject as a viable ethical agent,
namely, the end of the humanist subject. Even art, the pursuit of
which was identified with the search for freedom and enlightenment,
suffers the accusation of complicity with violence. Culture enters into
a dialectic with barbarism.9
In the realm of lyric poetry, one that has been traditionally associ-
ated with the ethical sensibility and expression of the individual, these
crises have destabilized any confidence in providing affirmative visions
of reality. Poetry, which did not triumph over, but merely survived the
debris, is obliged to look back toward the past, remember, reflect on,
and respond to it.
Already in the wake of World War I, Rilkes Malte, for instance, at-
tempts this backward gaze, asking questions about the representability

8
Ibid. 53. This statement is connected to the notion of poetry as Dichtung and poiesis.
Poetry is language showing what remains hidden in it. Language as fallen, post-lapsar-
ian form of naming has always failed, and yet it is out of this failure that possibility
opens up. Orpheus wrote his best songs after failing to retrieve Eurydice, whom he
could have retrievedan impossibility turned into a failed possibility. Similarly, Adorno
often refers to the task of redeeming the past, but he does not mean the past as it has
happened. He means the past that never happened, that could have been but never
came to be. The failure of our history, then, cannot but be a failure of our language
as well. In other words, to fail is also the story of language, and to disclose this wound
by even temporarily healing it, is to show the inner workings of language.
9
Theodor W. Adorno,Cultural Criticism and Society, Prisms. trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1981) 1934. Here 34.
764 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

of experience and the intelligibility of the past, and entertaining

answers as ominous as the prewar atmosphere of the time. Malte
confronts us with the dark possibility that our understanding of the
past is false: Is it possible that the whole history of the world has
been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we
have always spoken about its masses, just as if we were telling about
a gathering of many people, instead of talking about the one person
they were standing around because he was a stranger and was dying?10
The scene describes suffering as the individuals abandon amidst a
collectivity. With this haunting image, Rilke writes history as the his-
tory of scapegoating and sacrifice, in which a forgotten stranger gives
the blood that binds the community.
Rilkes wish to rewrite history from the point of view of individual
suffering should not be dismissed as merely a bourgeois move to re-
store the significance of the individual as an atom or an ego. Instead,
this kind of history restores the importance of suffering as a subjective
experience of the limit, and reinvests the individual with a truth that
transcends the egotistical confines of the bourgeois selfnamely,
the truth of suffering which, no matter how diversely experienced,
is a constitutive, and thus supra-subjective, moment of subjectivity.
Understood as undergoing (according to the Latin sub-fere), suffering
is the condition of subjectivity. Conversely, a subject, as that which is
subjected, which lays under (hypo-keimenon), is synonymous with what
suffers. Thus, remembering history as a history of subjective suffering
is an ethical posture that both strives to preserve the particular in its
unequal struggle against the universal, and insists on the foundational
capacity of the subjective, since the subjective also generates the uni-
versal: for instance, a community does not begin in reason, but in a
moment of supreme arbitrariness, like Hlderlins holy madness,
which is later given a meaning and a purpose. This excess, or mad-
ness, which lingers on the side of the subjective, but at the same time
transcends it, is the reason why Adorno thinks of the poetic subject as
standing always for a far more general collective subject.11 The lyric
I is not collective in the sense of representing the other members of
society; it is itself an expression of the possibility of speaking for, of,
and to others.
This privileging of the particular as the vehicle to the universal has

10
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell
(New York: Vintage, 1985) 23.
11
Adorno 46.
 MLN 765

been the thrust of lyric poetry ever since the moment of its inception:
Complex thoughts and feelings that have no name find perceptible
re-creations and patterns in the sung storythat is, in the lyric form,
writes W. R. Johnson,12 adding that from its Greek origins, the lyric
was written as an address from the speaking subject to one or more
other persons.13 The I-You construction is so deeply embedded in the
lyric that it establishes an imaginary audience even when the empirical
audience is absent. Timothy Bahti acknowledges this peculiar politics
of the lyric when he admits on the one hand that [t]here is no lyric
without reading because we cannot conceive of a poem that does not
have at least the one reader who is its author,14 while agreeing with
Helen Vendler on the other, that the lyrics assumption of an audi-
ence does by no means transform it into a social genre like drama,
epic, or the novel.15 To assume sociality is not coterminous with being
social. The lyric audience is less of a collective constituency defining
itself objectively through a common understanding of the poem (this
being the function of the epic), and more of a discontinuous series of
private responses subjectively forming the poem as a potentially public
event in each reading. Accordingly, the universal, or the common truth,
refuses to disclose itself as a truth obtained by collective sharing, by a
body politic, or by what we may call intersubjective communication;
instead, it lies in the caesura, in the interruption that marks every act
of reading from itself and from another.
If all this sounds a bit too obscurantist, Adorno was prepared for
the objection. Predicting the antagonistic listeners dismay, he states:
You may accuse me of so sublimating the relationship of lyric and
society in this definition out of fear of a crude sociologism that there
is really nothing left of it; it is precisely what is not social in the lyric
poem that is now to become its social aspect.16 However, it turns out
that our accusation expresses best for him the essence of the relation
between lyric poetry and society. He thus reappropriates his critics
statement, affirming that [the poems] social substance is precisely
what is spontaneous in it, what does not simply follow from the exist-
ing conditions at the time.17 Interestingly, this a-political politics of

12
W. R Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley:
U of California P, 1982) 5.
13
Ibid. 4.
14
Timothy Bahti, Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 7.
15
Ibid. 6.
16
Adorno, Notes to Literature I 42.
17
Ibid. 43.
766 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

poetry discloses something of the nature of language and, thus, of the

language of politics as well. If by resisting a communal understanding
of its meanings the lyric manages to instill in each individual reader
a sense of the universal, then it must be so because poetic language
appeals to a more profound level of relationality, one that is beyond
justification, argumentation, or contractual agreementnamely, a
mode of relation that does not rest solely on the communicative,
political aspects of language.
Poetrys dream of redefining politics beyond its empirical manifes-
tations relies precisely on the fact that, at the minimum, the poem
agrees to start with the fundamental aspect of politicsrelationality.
The apostrophic nature of the lyric testifies to this fact, that politics
is necessarily and irrevocably presupposed by the lyric form. For how
else could the diverse experiences of each isolated reader lead to a
consensus, unless by an a priori assumption of the possibility of this
consensus amongst, but also apart from, all other readers?
Despite his insistence on the specificity of the modern lyric, Adorno
starts his essay by espousing the classical definition of the lyric as the
individual expression of the universal, but radicalizes it, by pushing
individuality to its extreme: The lyric work hopes to attain universality
through unrestrained individuation.18 A poem says more things about
the world, the more remote it grows from that world and the more
faithful it remains to the singular experience from which it springs.
By stressing the particular on the way to the universal, Adornoas I
argued earlier on with Rilkeopens the traditional dialectic to a new
ethical posture. In Negative Dialectics he noted the inequality inher-
ent in the concept of mediation,19 which entails that the distance of
going from the particular to the universal is not equal to going from
the universal to the particular. Adornos emphasis on the individual
attenuates this inequality by reaching the universal without the inter-
vention of concepts: immersion in what has taken individual form
elevates the lyric poem to the status of something universal by making
manifest something not distorted, not grasped, not yet subsumed.20
Not grasped means not conceptualized.
This adherence to non-conceptuality as a means of reaching the
universal recalls Kants Analytic of the Beautiful: the beautiful claims
universality without a recourse to concepts, but to imagination and

18
Adorno, Notes to Literature I 38.
19
Adorno, Negative Dialectics 183.
20
Adorno, Notes to Literature I 38.
 MLN 767

subjective feeling21 and Kant calls it subjective universality.22 Kant

states that in judging something beautiful, we refer the representa-
tion, not by the understanding to the object for cognition, but by
the imagination (perhaps in conjunction with the understanding) to
the subject and its feeling of pleasure or pain.23 Thus, an aesthetic
judgment is always intelligible but non-conceptual, it communicates
an affect, not a thought. A beautiful object is not so because of the
sum of its predicates, for this formulation presupposes concepts and
reduces the aesthetic judgment to causality. Instead, beauty is simply
whenever it is announced. Beauty stands beyond justification, legiti-
mation, or qualification, and yet it is because of this capacity that it
becomes in Kant the site of potential universalityhence, the site of
legitimation.
The lack of concepts guarantees that the judgment of taste remains
free and disinterested. Even though it appears that this freedom
from concepts could reduce every aesthetic judgment into a mean-
ingless statement of personal taste, it is actually the guarantee of the
universality of the judgment, and thus provides the way out of an
aesthetics of taste. To understand this paradox, we must consider
that the universality of these judgments is not demanded; it is rather
granted, or presupposed by the judgment: The judgment of taste
itself does not postulate the agreement of everyone . . . it only imputes
this agreement to everyone.24 This imputation is possible by virtue
of the missing concept. Because there are no general propositions
that either legislate the beautiful or justify someones judgment of
the beautiful, because each individual is at a loss finding concepts to
explain his/her liking of the beautiful, the radical subjectivity of the

21
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951)
3738.
22
Ibid. 46. This is not to say that the thinker who advocated black as the color of
modern art (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiede-
mann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Theory and History of Literature 88 [Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1997] 39), and who defended an aesthetics of the ugly, is suddenly
turned into a connoisseur and admirer of things beautiful. In any case, Kants aesthetics
would not allow for such a confusion, since for Kant the judgment of the beautiful says
nothing about the object itself, but about the way in which the beholder is affected.
Thus, if anything, the objection should not be against the overvaluation of beauty, but
against the disappearance of the objectthe preponderance of which Adorno is all
about. Again, what I am proposing here is a more limited claim, namely, that Adornos
understanding of the universality of the lyric bears a structural resemblance to Kants
aesthetic judgment.
23
Kant 37.
24
Kant 51, original emphasis.
768 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

judgments origin is opened up to a potentially universal convergence

at the end: the sensus communis.
Similar to Kants theorization of the beautiful, Adornos essay on
the lyric also understands politics as a notion that is demanded and
promised by the aesthetic experience, but is not necessarily actualized
through such an experience. That is to say, the aesthetic moment
presupposes and anticipates the political as an ideality. For Kant, this
ideality could be understood within his overall project of searching
for conditions of possibility, a search that always throws him at least
one layer behind reality. For Adorno, the political ideality offers the
only space in which he could reconcile his notorious dislike of en-
gaged art along with his anti-bourgeois sentiment that the demand
that the lyric word be virginal is itself social in nature.25 Politics, as
arts anathema and as insensitivity to the Muse, which is ironized but
also deeply feared by Adorno, is then reimagined in the figure of the
collective undercurrent.
Having insisted on unrestrained individuation as a corrective to the
unequal struggle between the individual and the universal in the first
part of his essay, Adorno now turns to the potential misinterpretation
of this gesture, and disclaims any attachment to bourgeois privilege and
bad subjectivism. He introduces collectivity as a second corrective:
Not only does the lyric subject embody the whole all the more cogently, the
more it expresses itself; in addition, poetic subjectivity is itself indebted to
privilege: the pressures of the struggle for survival allow only a few human
beings to grasp the universal through immersion in the self or to develop
autonomous subjects capable of freely expressing themselves. The others,
however, those who not only stand alienated, as though they were objects,
facing the disconcerted poetic subject but who have also literally been
degraded to objects of history, have the same right, or a greater right, to
grope for the sounds in which sufferings and dreams are welded. This
inalienable right has asserted itself again and again, in forms however
impure, mutilated, fragmentary, and intermittentthe only forms possible
for those who have to bear the burden.
A collective undercurrent provides the foundation for all individual lyric
poetry. When that poetry actually bears the whole in mind and is not simply
an expression of the privilege, refinement, and gentility of those who can
afford to be gentle, participation in this undercurrent is an essential part
of the substantiality of the individual lyric as well: it is this undercurrent
that makes language the medium in which the subject becomes more than
a mere subject.26

25
Adorno, Notes to Literature I 39.
26
Ibid. 45.
 MLN 769

Suffering, oblivion, and dispossessionthe hallmarks of modern class

difference, to say the leastdistinguish this collective from Kants
rational community. Instead of an individual judgment of taste that
aspires to universality, this collectivity allows for a rather individualized
encounter with the work, during which the subject recognizes itself
in the work. As opposed to Kants disinterested aesthetics, Adorno
advocates an interested mode of reception, in which the disenfran-
chised have a greater right to demand that art bear witness to their
predicament.
But even the inclusion of social malaise as a mark of historical con-
tingency is not sufficient to render Adornos collective commensurate
with some empirical version of we, the people. Identified partly as
the mutilated vernacular through which the underprivileged as-
sert their inalienable right to expression, and partly through some
opposing examples such as Romanticisms programmatic links to
the folksong, and Baudelaires homage to the outcasts through his
posie pure,27 the collective undercurrent remains a rather open and
indefinite notion.
Unlike Kant, who situates sensus communis on the side of recep-
tion, Adorno speaks both of the collective undercurrent and of
the collective power of contemporary poetry interchangeably,28
indicating that this collective refers both to the expectations we, the
readers, have of the lyric form, but also to the power of evocation, the
expressivity, inherent in poetic language itselfan expressivity that
not only responds to or represents these expectations, but articulates
them in the first place. The collective undercurrent emerges as an
interface between the demand to express (a fusional, supra-individual
force, exemplified in the metaphor of the subterranean stream),
and expression itself (the individuated form that shapes, contains,
and channels this forceful current). Yet we should not be too quick
to associate this individuated form with an objective language, since
social antagonisms survive in language and carry over in the poetic
subject who, in replicating them, risks being condemned to his/her
contingency, to being a mere subject. It seems that what confers
objectivity to language and to the poet is this collective force that
makes language the medium in which the subject becomes more
than a mere subject. According to this reading, the collective under-
current precedes language and lends it universal validity. Perhaps it
is the experience of sufferingwhich constitutes the most persistent

Ibid.
27

Ibid. 45, 46.

28
770 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

characteristic of this collectivethat authenticates language. But this

realization does not resolve the question of how suffering could be
expressed before language. The attempt to define what comes first gets
even more complicated, since we can read the opposite chronology
as well in Adornos description. While the collective undercurrent is
the foundation of the individual lyric voice, it also needs this voice to
assert its own right to existence: the destitute have turned to poetry
for expression, and we hear of their demand and their sufferings
through these mutilated poetic forms.
I suggest that this impasse of temporalization and mediation,
processes that are themselves abstract and thus miss the poetic,
compels Adorno to displace his theoretical discussion of the social
nature of poetry into concrete instances of reading. We are to un-
derstand implicitly that, if anything, this principal matter of the col-
lective foundation of poetry is not simply a matter of principlenot
in the abstract sense in which we have come to know principles as
formal rules. The collective undercurrent acts as the force behind
the essays performative movement toward concretization: Because
considerations of principle are not sufficient, I would like to use a
few poems to concretize the relationship of the poetic subject, which
always stands for a far more general collective subject, to the social
reality that is its antithesis.29 Clearly the collective undercurrent is not
equivalent to the social; on the contrary, the social is antithetical and
hostile to it. As such it does not belong to the ordinary language of
communication either. It can only inaugurate a specific practice, an
encounter with language to which we may be drawn by something in
language yearning for completion: a past trace, the ferment of indi-
vidual expression, the linguistic and psychic residues of a condition
that is not yet fully individuated, a state of affairs that is prebourgeois
in the broadest sensedialect; or a future anticipation of a world
that would transcend mere individuality.30 Collectivity is thematized
in linguistic peculiarities such as archaisms and absurdities which, in
particularizing language, also disclose languages intrinsic being, its
most universal aspect, as one opposed to the world of instrumentality
and utilitarianism.31 These odd, deeply idiosyncratic moments reveal
the universality of languages desire to be for itself, not a means to
an end. Just as the wrinkles and scars of a face make it unique and
at the same time evocative and transindividual in its expressivity, the

29
Ibid. 46.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid. 53.
 MLN 771

fissures of language show most expressively and universally what lan-

guage actually is: the medium of our existence, not a tool amongst
our possessions.
Adorno concludes by troping the collective in the language of desire,
namely, the language of incompletion and impossibility: languages
chimerical yearning for the impossible becomes an expression of the
subjects insatiable erotic longing, which finds relief from the self in
the other.32 Language is always the language of desire, the expres-
sion of something transcending itself, just like the lovers impossible
wish to dissolve and fuse with the beloved. The power, then, of the
collective undercurrent rests on the fact that it speaks the language of
impossibility. It calls for a community not yet in place, a community
also out of time, for if this community is foundational, it is also only
possible by what it founds: the lyric.
This utopian formulation resembles Kants subjective universal-
ity, particularly in its peculiar and unresolved chronology. Just as in
Adorno, the collective undercurrent, which precedes and legitimizes
the individual voice turns out dialectically to be also poetrys effect, we
can also read in Kant a similar temporal torsion: the sensus communis is
not the indisputable end to which all judgments of taste are destined,
but it stands as a question at the beginning of the aesthetic judgment
begging the beautiful as its answer. Put differently, it is not that the
beautiful assumes a potential universality in order to exist, but on the
contraryyearning for a condition of possibility for universality, Kant
invents the beautiful as a site necessitating universal judgment. Art
compels and precipitates the notion of the sensus communis. Where
politics failed to articulate its own necessity, aesthetics provided the
vocabulary; conversely, art is a response to what politics could not
even questionhence both anticipating and ensuing politics. This
is why for Kant, the necessity of the satisfaction that arises from a
beautiful object is neither theoretical (as in the law of causality), nor
practical (as in the assumption of a moral law), but rather exemplary
(as a model to be followed by others).33 The coexistence of freedom
32
Ibid.
33
J.H. Bernard, introduction, Critique of Judgement, by Immanuel Kant (New York:
Hafner, 1951) xix. This is a deconstructive aspect of Kant: in positing necessity where
it is not externally necessary, he both undercuts and discloses something of the very
definition of necessity. Necessity has always been thought of as an external and un-
questionable demand that cannot be altered. In other words, whether I think or not
that a ball will roll down a hill or not, it will. Whether or not Hamlet composed and
executed the correct maxim, the situation will unfold in a necessary manner that
corresponds to the actions taken. This correspondence is not so detectable in the work
of art, which demands that we invest it with necessity beforehand. Exemplary neces-
772 KALLIOPI NIKOLOPOULOU

(radical subjectivity) and objectivity (potential universality), which is

presupposed by aesthetic judgment functions analogically as a model
for a politics of free consensus. Politics is performed in the as if of
aesthetics.

IV. Coda: Back to the Lyric

Having survived a catastrophe from which Kant was spared, Adorno
was led to think of poetry at the limit and as a limit. The tragic legacy
of twentieth-century poetry consists not only in the degradation of
its principal voice (the individual), but also in the destabilization
of this collective undercurrent. Not only is the integrity of its de-
mand for expression undermined, but arts capacity to express this
demand is undermined as well. Hence, a large part of the discourse
on the Holocaust is about the impossibility of both representing and
understanding. This shattering is expressed in Adornos ambivalent
remarks concerning the viability of such a collective voice. While in
the present essay he remarks rather optimistically that, Today, when
individual expression . . . seems shaken to its very core in the crisis
of the individual, the collective undercurrent in the lyric surfaces in
the most diverse places,34 he also proclaims in Commitment that
to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,35 only to concede
in Negative Dialectics that, 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.36
Thus Adorno returns to the notion that poetry still offers the last
refuge of expression for the destitute.
In this maze of ambivalence concerning the task of the lyric after
catastrophe, Adornos guide was Celan, whose tenuous apostrophes,
are examples of this state of complicity in which any form of address
to the other is both tainted, but also absolutely necessary. Aware of
the complicity of both individuality and collectivity, Celan insists on
the impossibility of not writing. From this vantage point, it is fair to
say that Adornos harsh pronouncement on poetry after Auschwitz is

sity (as if I could pick and choose one kind of necessity from another as an example)
is thus both a twist of the definition of necessity as a must, at the same time that it
discloses this must of necessity at its innermost: what can be more necessary than
what necessitates the presence of necessity?
34
Adorno, Notes to Literature I 46.
35
Adorno, Commitment, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh (London:
Verso, 1977) 177195; 188.
36
Adorno, Negative Dialectics 362.
 MLN 773

neither a condemnation of poetry as an unethical enterprise, nor a

simple prohibition against the writing of poetry, as he himself partly
interprets it. Adornos dictum has to do with what we (the collective)
mean by poetry, and what we expect it to meannamely, it poses
the question of ideology in the space of the lyric, and in doing so, it
acknowledges the lyric as the space par excellence of ethics.
Hence Adorno advocates throughout his Aesthetic Theory that arts
project of offering an alternative vision for society must be performed
dialectically. Poetry, according to this scheme, has to be written in a
way that opposes what the writing itself promises. This gap between
form and content reflects a parallel historical lag: the past and present
conditions of reality from where the poem draws its raw material are
hostile to the vision of freedom that the poem wants to yield.
The persistence of the lyric to sketch a visionary world, despite the
historical betrayal of the possibility of such a world, is a gesture of
deferral important to the performativity of poetrys plight. In turn, I
would also myself like to close my remarks by deferring to the words
not of the philosophers, but of the poets themselves. In Cantique des
Colonnes, Paul Valry summarizes the task of poetry in its promise
to carry us through a world without guarantees, a world that is god-
less: Nous allons sans les dieux / A la divinit! [Without the gods
we go / Towards divinity]37 This is of course a majestic but one-way
street, which poetry always takes with the almost certain risk of failing.
As the gods have turned away from us, we continue to head toward
them without guidance. But what does it mean to head toward that
which is absent, or whose face is turned opposite our direction? In
attempting to interpret and answer this question, poets experiment
along different paths on their way to the visionary. However, as another
poetthe Nobel laureate Czeslaw Miloszreminds us, these elevated
paths begin from the same point of earthly reality, a point from which
every poet is obliged to depart before he or she parts with it:
The poetic act changes with the amount of background reality embraced by
the poets consciousness. On our century that background is, in my opinion,
related to the fragility of those things we call civilization or culture. What
surrounds us, here and now, is not guaranteed. It could just as well not exist
and so man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins.38
SUNY Buffalo

37
Paul Valry, The Collected Works, trans. David Paul, ed. Jackson Mathews, Bollingen
Series I (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) 117.
38
Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983) 9697.