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Introduction
- Fordham University Press
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i n t r o d u c t i o n Gerhard Richter In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes. adorno, ‘‘Beethoven’s Late Style’’ The renaissance that has developed on both sides of the Atlantic around the work of philosopher, sociologist, political thinker, musician, musicologist , and cultural theorist Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) has outpaced interest in other members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in recent years.1 Indeed, his multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. Adorno’s analyses of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives ‘‘after Auschwitz,’’ of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the relentless manipulation of mass consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, all speak to central concerns of our time. For Adorno, every uncompromisingly critical act is performed in the name of an other-directedness, the commitment to an Other that, by extension, also is a commitment to a reconceived future. The liberatory hope in Adorno’s philosophical thought, if any is to be found, resides in the ways in which language, forever at odds with its own intentions and strivings, gestures toward a futurity that does not yet possess a name, toward a form of community that has yet to be imagined, and toward that most difficult of all tasks, a learning to ‘‘live together’’ for which no ethicopolitical model exists. This nameless futurity, bound as it is to the belatedness of the past, calls upon us as though it belonged to the stunning and perplexing protocols of Adorno’s dreams—in turn paranoid and political, optimistic and perverse—recorded upon awakening, which now have been made available to us.2 The dreaming of which Adorno dreams has little to do with wishful thinking or political escapism. Rather, it embodies a deliberate affront to those forms of thinking that have given up on the hope embedded in a dream, a moment of contrary-to-factness 1 2 Introduction that has not been exhausted once and for all. The sentences that Adorno devotes to his friend Walter Benjamin apply equally well to his own project : ‘‘In the paradox of the impossible possibility, mysticism and enlightenment are joined for the last time in him. He overcame the dream without betraying it and making himself an accomplice in that on which the philosophers have always agreed: that it shall not be.’’3 The felt contemporaneity of Adorno’s thought to the concerns of our late modernity nevertheless unfolds in a certain noncontemporaneity of thinking. In 1967, two years before his death, Adorno formulates the complexity of this noncontemporaneity in the opening to his philosophical magnum opus, the Negative Dialectics: ‘‘Philosophy, which once seemed passé, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.’’4 For Adorno, the missed opportunity of thinking—and especially the realization or actualization of that thinking—is to be both mourned and welcomed . While the condition of having-missed suggests a failure in and of thinking as a form of praxis, it also names, for him, the condition of possibility for any future act of thinking that still may be to come and that refuses to exhaust itself in the stale programs of the received agendas associated with this or that theoretical ‘‘orientation’’ or predictable political marching plan. If there is a late modernity that still can be grasped in conceptual terms—even in the wake, perhaps, of Jean-François Lyotard’s well-known diagnosis of the end of all master narratives in what some call postmodernity—it, too, will have to engage its own lateness, its delay and deferral, its perpetual disruption of any adequately temporal construct of thought. This is also why, for Adorno, lateness and belatedness—in a manner contiguous with, but not identical to, Freud’s insistence on the psyche ’s delayed action—cannot be thought in isolation from the far-reaching constellation of critical concerns that occupy him in so many heterogeneous registers. Adorno’s concerns with lateness emerge as early as his 1937 essay on the complexity and madness of considering ‘‘Beethoven’s Late Style.’’5 Adorno’s late modernity—the modernity that always will have arrived too late and the modernity that will come into its own only later—cannot...