Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

Appendix: Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno

a p p e n d i x Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Gerhard Richter ‘‘Philosophy, which once seemed passé,’’ Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics begins, ‘‘remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed’’ [‘‘Philosophie, die einmal überholt schien, erhält sich am Leben, weil der Augenblick ihrer Verwirklichung versäumt ward’’].1 This perspective encrypts the double movement of a simultaneous resignation or lament and a productive , enabling force. It is only because the philosophy of which Adorno speaks—negative dialectics—was not realized that its actualization is yet to come. That it once existed without becoming an actuality means that it still remains to be thought, both as a failure and a promise. The erratic traces of this double movement not only name but also enact Adorno’s notion of a negative dialectic. The movement of the negative dialectic of failure and promise has strongly marked the reception of the English translations of his writings. After all, Adorno’s German, and the thought that it enacts, is rigorously and infamously resistant to translation. His writing is both strange and foreign—fremd—even in its ‘‘original’’ German. To acknowledge this strangeness is also to acknowledge that what Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. As Samuel Weber, one of Adorno’s earliest translators, so apodictically and incontrovertibly puts it in his 1967 ‘‘Translating the Untranslatable,’’ the ‘‘specificity of 227 228 Appendix: A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno Adorno’s thought is inseparable from its articulation,’’ so that ‘‘conceptual concreteness may be measured by the density with which thought and articulation permeate each other.’’2 For this reason, any translator who, in spite of these difficulties, attempts to translate Adorno’s sentences runs the risk of constructing an Adorno who, in the words of translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, appears ‘‘dubbed rather than translated.’’3 Thus, as Hullot -Kentor points out, while many admirable English translations of Adorno’s texts exist, others deserve to be retranslated.4 The process is now well under way, with, for instance, the re-translation of Aesthetic Theory, which replaces the British version of 1984. The following interview with Adorno has not received the attention that it deserves. It originally appeared on 5 May 1969, three months before the philosopher’s death, under the title ‘‘Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm ’’ in the widely circulating German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel .5 Shortly after it appeared in Germany, an English translation, which has been virtually ignored in the American context, was published in a British journal.6 In a very real sense, then, the ‘‘moment of its realization was missed.’’ To present this important document today in an entirely new translation means to take seriously—with a bit of Blochian nonsynchronicity —the critical potential that it still may hold for readers interested in the relation between aesthetics and politics. But the re-presentation of the document today also requires an explanation of historical contexts and political references, glosses that culturally aware readers in 1969 may not have required and that were provided neither in the British translation nor by Adorno’s German editors, who later included the text in his collected writings [Gesammelte Schriften].7 I have therefore provided explanatory notes to clarify historical references for today’s readers. To appropriate the conceptual content of the discussion with Adorno for our time also requires some contextualization in the tensions of its own time. The immediate occasion for the highly visible interview was Adorno’s cancellation of his University of Frankfurt lecture course ‘‘Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’’ during the summer semester of 1969, following confrontations with student activists who disrupted his lectures with heckling. During the previous semester, Adorno’s decision to involve the police in clearing student occupiers from the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School’s departmental unit at the University of Frankfurt) had caused controversy. While some regarded Adorno’s reliance on the authorities as a betrayal—a siding with the enemy against the common cause of social progress—others tended to agree with Adorno’s assessment of the radical activism of some students as misguided or even, 229 Gerhard Richter in the words of his former research assistant Jürgen Habermas, as a form of ‘‘left-wing fascism.’’8 On the day that the Spiegel interview appeared...