The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art

Notes

no t e s acknowledgments 1. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 70. Stück, in Werke, 4: 558–59. introduction: the judgment of holocaust art 1. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 184 (translation modified). 2. Langer, Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, 8–9. 3. Ibid., 30. The exhortation with which his programmatic first chapter concludes, however, appears to suggest that aesthetic displeasure and disharmony alone can replace or “translate” the historical relation: “To create beauty out of nothingness—this is the dark challenge facing the human spirits who sought expression, if not renewal, by translating the agony of annihilation into the painful harmonies—and discords—of an art of atrocity” (30). 4. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, 14. Rosenfeld, in A Double Dying, seeks to develop “practical criticism that will allow us to read, interpret, and evaluate Holocaust literature” (19), and posits “governing laws” (29) of successful Holocaust literature while recognizing “the writer’s ability to absorb history into myth or legend” (80). Ezrahi faults works for their “imposition of aesthetic forms on historical events rather than transforming those events through the imagination” (32), and in effect places works according to the extent to which they imaginatively distort historical facts: “At the furthest end of the spectrum that measures the imaginative representation of cataclysmic history is the writer who distills reality into the essential symbols or myths of the concentrationary universe, which is thereby transformed from a historical event or social aberration into a human mutation” (150). 5. I venture some thoughts on one theory of the imagination in Chapter 4, in the interests of explicating the artworks under consideration in that chapter. 6. Young, in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (85–89), recounts the emergence of various terms to name these events during and after World War II; and Agamben, in Remnants of Auschwitz (28–31), claims that the history of the term “Holocaust” reveals its usage to be “essentially Christian” and anti-Semitic, and that both “Holocaust” and “Shoah” are euphemisms Notes 212 with connotations of religious sacrifice, and therefore should not be used. Adorno uses “Auschwitz” synecdochically to name not only the planning and execution of the Final Solution, but also the subjective and objective conditions that brought about the industrial murder of entire groups of people, conditions he held to continue unabated in the postwar period. This study observes established convention in its use of “Holocaust” and “Shoah,” but strictly speaking the terms are being used “under erasure.” 7. While this relation is conceived here as generally as possible, for one explication see Genette, Aesthetic Relation. 8. I take up these questions to a limited extent below and in the Conclusion to this study. 9. There is a second line of argument motivating my turn to Adorno’s philosophical aesthetics. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Adorno’s infamous dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, 34) was a response to Celan’s poem “Todesfuge,” and that Celan’s later poetry, which divests itself of traditional aesthetic ornament, induced Adorno to develop an aesthetic theory that could conceptually ground and explicate such works. The result was his posthumous work Aesthetic Theory. Cf. Rosenfeld, Double Dying, 13; Claussen, “Nach Auschwtiz,” 54–68; Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 25–58 (esp. 46–47); Tiedemann, “‘Not the First Philosophy,’” x–xxvii (esp. n12). 10. For helpful introductions to Adorno’s aesthetic theory, see Zuidervaart , Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, successfully presents Adorno’s aesthetics in the context of his entire oeuvre. On aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy, see Bubner, “Über einige Bedingungen gegenwärtiger Ästhetik”; and Geuss, “Form and ‘the new’ in Adorno’s ‘Vers une musique informelle.’” 11. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1: 111 (translation modified). 12. “According to traditional aesthetics, classical sculpture aimed at the identity of the universal and the particular—the idea and the individual— because already it could no longer depend on the sensual appearance of the idea” (Aesthetic Theory, 160–61); “Though in classicism the subject stands aesthetically upright, violence is done to it, to that eloquent particular that opposes the mute universal” (Aesthetic Theory, 162). 13. Echoed by Adorno: “If, however, art were totally without the element of intuition, it would be theory, whereas art is instead obviously impotent in itself when, emulating science, it ignores its own qualitative difference from the discursive concept; precisely art’s spiritualization, as the primacy of its procedures, distances art from naïve conceptuality and the commonsense idea of comprehensibility” (Aesthetic Theory...