Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

Notes

n o t e s introduction Gerhard Richter 1. Besides the major new intellectual biographies occasioned by the recent centenary of Adorno’s birth—Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: Ein letztes Genie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002); Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: Eine politische Biographie (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2003); and Stefan MüllerDoohm , Adorno: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003)— examples of the most significant recent work engaging Adorno’s orbit of thought include the account of modernism based on Adorno’s aesthetic theory offered by J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), as well as the discussions of Adorno’s unorthodox ethical thought in Judith Butler, Kritik der ethischen Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); Jochen Hörisch , Es gibt (k)ein richtiges Leben im Falschen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); and Alexander Garcı́a Düttmann, So ist es: Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos ‘‘Minima Moralia’’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). These works are joined, most recently, by an attempt at a sustained comparison between Adorno and the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger: Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions, ed. Iain Mcdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). 2. Traumprotokolle, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, with an afterword by Jan Phillip Reemtsma (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). 3. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,’’ Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 227–41, here 241. 4. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 6:15. 5. Adorno, ‘‘Spätstil Beethovens,’’ Musikalische Schriften IV: Moments musicaux, Impromptus, in Gesammelte Schriften, 17:13–17. For a general meditation on late style in the arts, see the posthumously published notes by Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Language Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon , 2006). 239 240 Notes 6. Adorno, ‘‘Aus einem Schulheft ohne Deckel. Bar Harbor, Sommer 1939,’’ in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 4 (1995): 7. 7. Adorno, ‘‘Wörter aus der Fremde,’’ Noten zur Literatur, in Gesammelte Schriften, 11:216–32, here 224. 8. Ibid., 218. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 224. 11. For an extended analysis of this mode of writing in the orbit of Adorno’s aesthetics, see Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). 12. Adorno, ‘‘Commitment,’’ Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:76–94, here 93f; and ‘‘Engagement,’’ Noten zur Literatur, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 11:409–30, here 430. 13. Franz Kafka, ‘‘Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904,’’ Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. and trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 193. 14. Adorno, ‘‘Notes on Kafka,’’ Prisms, 243–71, here 246. 15. For a useful overview of this project, see Stolpersteine: Gunter Demnig und sein Projekt, ed. NS-Dokumentationszentrum (Cologne: Emons, 2007). 16. Adorno, ‘‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today,’’ Critical Models: Catchwords and Interventions, trans. Henry W. Pickford, introduction by Lydia Goehr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 71–88, here 71. 17. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 358. 1. without soil: a figure in adorno’s thought Alexander Garcı́a Düttmann 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 391–92. 2. Ibid., 392. 3. Joseph Margolis, Moral Philosophy After 9/11 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), xvi. 4. Ibid., ix. 5. Ibid., 45. 6. Ibid., 99. 7. Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Routledge, 2004), xv. 8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘‘Nächtliches (Traum-)Erlebnis,’’ in Wittgenstein , Licht und Schatten, ed. Ilse Somavilla (Innsbruck and Vienna: Haymon Verlag, 2004), 20–21. 241 Notes 9. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:192; translation amended. ‘‘Earth’’ and ‘‘soil’’ have been used throughout to translate Adorno’s Erde.—Trans. 10. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, Band II, 1938–1944 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 101. 11. In the early essay on Schubert, Adorno speaks of a ‘‘dialect without soil,’’ that is, a dialect that has relinquished its immediate ties to the homeland, because the homeland has receded into the distance; Gesammelte Schriften, 17:33. The earth frequently signifies the spell of myth, unfreedom; in texts on Mahler, above all, the melancholy gaze upon the faraway...