The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope by Márton Dornbach (review)

In the first chapter of his study, Dornbach ventures to describe the challenges confronting the readers of Walter Benjamin's "Goethe's Elective Affinities," thereby drafting a picture of Benjamin's style: "Apodictic and incisive, Benjamin's formulations throughout the essay never stop short of the utmost of semantic compression. His train of thought alternates between philological arcana and rarefied speculation, and is made all the more opaque by an idiosyncratic use of concepts that are often left undefined. The rhythmic progression of the argument—what is called Duktus in German—follows a rigorously constructive, quasi-musical sequencing that places each sentence in a determinate relation to the one that came before as well as to the ensuing one, a stringency that seems all the more noteworthy because straightforward argumentative continuity is often lacking…" (19). If this marginal passage contained the best bit of Dornbach's new book, it alone would grant his style the grace it describes. But his study is rich in enticing observations.

Complying with the most rigorous scholarly obligations, Márton Dornbach's The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope, builds up the author's argument by alternating close and meticulous readings with his minute interventions whose theoretical implications—according to the ultimate genre—are nonetheless of great proportions. The reader would hardly imagine that adjustments to secondary readings, as well as Dornbach's own erudite and precise textual interpretations would lead to a historical shift of paradigm, a new two-caesuras exegetic model, and impact wide-ranging ethical issues as well as expose the question of human survival on earth.¹ Yet, those who recently went through the breakdown of a marriage know all too well the scope of the disaster unleashed by a failing promise, as if there were unwavering ones. But I will get to the heart of the matter later.

The thematic core of Dornbach's book is constituted by a reading of Benjamin's "Goethe's Elective Affinities" through Adorno's reading of two passages from Homer et al.'s The Odyssey, and vice versa. As is befitting of marriages, Dornbach's reading starts from—what could be described with ease—a mistake, or a misreading by Adorno. Dornbach tells us that what gave him "pause was a remark on, precisely, pausing" (1). Where the philosopher of the Frankfurt School registers a caesura in Book 22 of the Odyssey, actually "no discernable pause separates the two episodes. […] Adorno's comments regarding a pause in narration would appear to be a wishful fabrication" (2). This 'error,' which Dornbach proves necessary to Adorno's argument, constitutes not only the first caesura but also the first dot of the line that reaches its other end at the second caesura by drawing what the author calls "the saving line" (129). The argument builds on two further mistakes. Dornbach relates this passage from The Dialectic of Enlightenment to Benjamin's understanding of caesura in his essay on the Elective Affinities, when the latter distinguishes a caesura in the well-known sentence describing the appearance of the shooting star in the novel. Yet, Dornbach observes, "Benjamin's interpretation of the narrator's sentence as a caesura is bound to appear as an arbitrary, 'erratic accent'" (66). Just like in Adorno's case, this interruption can hardly be described as a typical caesura. If these two caesuras are extratextual in their own way, Dornbach argues that both Benjamin and Adorno need to locate a second caesura coming from the inner development of the works to embed transcendence—as it is heralded by the first caesuras—into the turf of history. Adorno does name a second caesura in the Odyssey, and Benjamin comes very close to finding a second caesura in Elective Affinities, without ultimately identifying it as such. This disavowal by Benjamin intrigues Dornbach as another necessary mistake the German philosopher had to commit at a time when he had not successfully elaborated...