Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

11. The Polemic of the Late Work: Adorno’s Holderlin

c h a p t e r 1 1 The Polemic of the Late Work: Adorno’s Hölderlin Robert Savage What does it mean to conceive of philosophy, in an essential and not merely incidental sense, as polemical? What is at stake when a philosopher polemicizes on behalf of poetry in order to salvage a polemic deemed to be proper to poetry itself? I want to explore these questions in this essay through a selective reading of ‘‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,’’ an address to the Hölderlin Society delivered by Adorno on 7 June 1963, the 120th anniversary of the poet’s death.1 Polemic and rescue [Rettung], it will be argued, are the twin poles between which ‘‘Parataxis’’ oscillates and that delimit its field of argumentation. Their relationship generates a ferment in which each term passes imperceptibly into the other. On the one hand, the polemic figures a kind of loving hate that mortifies in order to save: no resurrection without the stench of death. In Gnostic terms, the polemic affords a glimpse of divine truth through its absolute negation of the fallen world of the demiurge, anticipating the rescue of the particular in the universal envisaged by Adorno’s regulative ‘‘utopia of knowledge.’’2 On the other hand, as an unrelieved negativity that resists being swept into the speculative movement of Aufhebung, the polemic equally designates the rescue of the particular from the universal. Adorno explains how in his Philosophy of Modern Music: ‘‘The absolute liberation of the particular from the universal renders it universal through the polemical and principal 172 173 Robert Savage relationship of the universal to the particular.’’3 The polemic becomes the marginalized placeholder for a good universality through the intransigence of its opposition to a bad one. It permits Adorno to think reconciliation without giving up on contingency, and to uphold the claims of the non-identical without saturating it in the light of the idea. Yet because a refusal of communication is also a refusal of media(tiza)tion, Adorno’s theoretical domestication of the polemic, while allowing it to be perceived as such, also threatens to downgrade it into just another discursive turn. The challenge lies in enduring the tension of polemic and rescue without dissolving it in favor of one or the other. Three interrelated questions need to be posed here: 1. How do polemic and rescue belong together in Adorno’s reading of Hölderlin’s late work? By what law can something fallen, attacked, negated, and repudiated be simultaneously raised, transcended, affirmed, and fulfilled? 2. How is their co-belonging structurally articulated in the essay? What does the form of ‘‘Parataxis,’’ as ‘‘sedimented content,’’ reveal about the polemic?4 3. What is the relationship between this oxymoronic polemic, this rescue without armistice or amnesty, and the polemic as it is commonly understood, which certainly does not intend the rescue of its target? I will address these questions in reverse order, moving from a consideration of Adorno’s decidedly nonredemptive polemic against the Hölderlin interpretation advanced by Martin Heidegger, which takes up the first half of his address, to a discussion of ‘‘late style’’ as the self-reflection of the polemic in the medium of art, the focus of its second half. Polemical Semblance To ground these questions, a brief recapitulation of Adorno’s concept of aesthetic rescue is called for. This concept receives its most comprehensive treatment in Aesthetic Theory, where Adorno decrees ‘‘the rescue of semblance ’’ to be ‘‘central to aesthetics,’’ adding that ‘‘the emphatic right of art, the legitimation of its truth, depends on this rescue.’’5 For Adorno, art requires the intervention of philosophy in order to transform its semblance character, the stigma inflicted upon it by a bad social totality and the mark of its impotence, into utopian Vor-Schein or pre-semblance, the 174 The Polemic of the Late Work: Adorno’s Hölderlin source of its minimal discrepancy from the realm of means-ends rationality and the sole guarantor of its truth. While an artwork is the product of human activity, hence subjectively willed, it can only instantiate a form of cognition to be found nowhere else if its truth content transcends volition. Art justifies itself as art, rather than as a sugarcoating to make otherwise unpalatable religious, political, or philosophical messages easier to swallow , when it reflects...