Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (review)

In this work, Gerhard Richter examines the theoretical import of the thought-images or pictures used by a number of writers, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Sigfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno. He notes that these writers are associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Theory, but he does not by any means intend to characterize their work as part of a school or to suggest what they have in common with other representatives of the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, or Jürgen Habermas. Instead of representing a school, they count as friends whose works form a cluster or a constellation. Moreover, he takes these constellations of Frankfurt School theorists to reveal affinities with the work of those who are not part of the school. For example, in chapter 3, he suggests biographical and theoretical similarities between Kracauer’s thought-images of homelessness and those of Jacques Derrida. As he says, “Kracauer and Derrida—one a displaced German Jew persecuted by Hitler, the other an Algerian Jew uneasily acculturated to ‘Frenchness’ . . . both share a sustained theoretical interest in themes such as waiting, writing, media technology, photography, the self-portrait, ghosts, architecture, and the philosophy of friendship” (109). There are important citations of Derrida in most chapters, including the conclusion, which takes his notion of friendship to explain the ties of Benjamin, Adorno, Kracauer, and Bloch. Similarly, de Man’s account of rhetorical aberration explains Benjamin’s notion of “radical aberration.” The work of Lyotard and other post-structuralists also explains Adorno’s view of life after Auschwitz.

Since many representatives of the Frankfurt School, especially Habermas, have criticized the poststructuralism of Derrida and others at length, one has to ask how Richter justifies assimilating them. The answer lies in his characterizing the thought-images as a subgenre whose origins are “the tradition of the baroque emblem” (7) and whose “modernist” versions “tend to focus on the specificity of a quotidian object or a seemingly negligible phenomenon . . . in order to place these objects in a new and unexpected constellation” (8). More importantly, he draws on the aesthetic theory of Hegel, Adorno, Derrida, and others in order to suggest that the literary character of the thought-images undermines the conventional distinctions between image and concept, literature and philosophy, and the particular and systems, methods, or schools. As he says, the thought-image or, in German, Denkbild, “as an artwork that differs from and with itself, enacts speculative truth as a sensuously concrete manifestation of the spiritual truth that, as in Hegel, thinks the ways it differs with and from itself” (17). This emphasis on the thought-image’s non-identical character precludes issues of method because they assume that accounts of the thought-images preserve their methodological identity.

This emphasis on the thought-image’s non-identical character enables Richter to produce some very interesting insights, especially in his explanation of how in Minima Moralia Adorno takes Hitler and the Nazis to extend the culture industry dominating Germany in the 1920s and 1930s or to impose a dialectic of culture and barbarism after Auschwitz. At the same time, the detailed textual explanation to which this emphasis commits Richter sometimes turns on minor points: a misplaced comma in de Man’s essay on semiology and rhetoric or a mistranslation of a conjunction in Minima Moralia. As a result, it does not exactly suit work, which, as he notes in Bloch’s case, addresses large issues of history, religion, and politics.

More importantly, this emphasis gives his exposition a highly self-conscious character in which an assertion asserts its claim and its excluded contrary or negation. Impossibility does not exclude and even requires possibility, just as negativity presupposes and, hence, asserts redemption. For example, Richter says that “Benjamin destabilizes the criteria by which one could differentiate between lucid perception and delusion, insight and blindness, hermeneutic success and its failure.” As a result, Benjamin’s example “works to strengthen the point that it seeks to make; illustrating in...