Adornos Background

// Max Pensky, The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on

Adorno and the Postmodern [G-Book] --- UQ Lib
Introduction
-Fundamentally dynamic and historically and socially mediated character of subject-object
relations --- Negative Dialectic --- self -liquidation

-Interpretation in post-idealist philosophy (mark the philosophical import in the collapse of

philosophical idealism, deconstruction of the philosophical idealism)

3-4

-Puzzle-like character of the seamless social whole

 4

-thinking the particular without simply submitting it sacrificially to the imperatives of

universalization

-history, mimesis, homogenizing, ruins of dominant discourse, temporal slippings, gaps,

discontinuities, paradoxical returns, reanimations or material, resisting the modern imperature
for temporal continuity and historical progress 9

-Seismic critical power, negative temporality

10

-Metaphysics, hope, belief, metaphysics must know how to wish 12, Benjamins ethical
talent (a love of things)

-Subjectivity: not disappearing or overcoming of the subject, but an integrity that appears
only in the process of its dismantling 14, not erasure of subjectivity but the search for the
moments of possible transgression within the concept itself 15, Adorno does not cancel the
subject, he reclaims it through a postulate of transgressions 15

-Configurative language --- problematicization of language 15

The Discourse of Philosophy

-Hohendahl makes a case that Adorno does not neglect the philosophy of language in favour
of the philosophy of the concept
-Adorno: changes in the perception of language, the problematicization of language 63 ---
Benjamins On Language as Such and the Language of Man (1916) and On the Program
of the Coming Philosophy (1918) --- neo-Kantian tradition --- Adorno: The Actuality of
Philosophy (1931) and Why Philosophy 63 --- philosophy, language, epistemology 65:
For Adorno, it is language after all that makes the mediation possible, since language is not
limited to a model of identity (a is b) but can, through negativity, articulate difference

// Molt, Adorno and the Myth of Subjectivity

-Molt explicates Adornos attitude towards subjectivity while defending him against
Habermas
-Subjectivity, Enlightenment, Reason, John Locke, Kant, freedom, that makes an individual a
subject, subject-centred reason of Enlightenment --- the deterioration of the subject-centred
reason of Enlightenment into instrumental reason --- Adorno wants a fuller conception of
reason 4 --- immanent critique 6 --- Negative dialectics: non-identity of objects 6, rejects the
notion of synthesis 6
-Definitions of subject and object 8 --- the relations between them can be measured by
representation and action 8 ---- the priority of the object will offer Adorno a way out of the
philosophy of the subject 8 --- the subject itself is an object 9 --- Peace 10
---Subject is not free, instrumental reason
---Subject is an object, objectivity resides in subject
---The object is prioritized
---Non-identity of objects that affirm the continued existence of the subject and negate the
imposition power of the subject

// Edgar, Adorno and the Early Frankfurt School

-Adornos contribution to literary theory would not come until 1950s
-Lowenthal reduces works of art to the status of ideological encounters in class struggles. His
essays include On Sociology of Literature and Knut Hamsun 3 --- A different view
emerges when Horkheimers essay Art and Mass Culture emerged 4
-Subject-Object: subject is constituted by object and object is constituted by subject because
of the concept of mediation 7 --- the subject is the unfolding product of an engagement with
nature and the given cultural environment 7, the object is a crystallization of historically
unfolding practice and thought 7 --- reification ---- foreground the work of art 9
-Adornos Cultural Criticism and Society written in 1949 --- exposition of the tensions
-Contradiction: well, not exactly, but something that cant be found in the existing social
paradigms, it can be inconsistency, excess, the unknown, the unknowable

10
-immanent critique 10
-The structures of artistic form (one interpretation of how Adorno says the art transgresses the
utilitarian ends of social principles) --- adopts and reinterprets Kants formulation that art is
purposiveness without a purpose):
 11

// Cunningham, Introduction, Adorno and Literature

-The publication of his great, last, unfinished work, Aesthetic Theory in 1984 and then in a
new translation in 1997 14

// Zuidervarrt, Introduction, The Semblance of Subjectivity

-Post-modern era and the more interdisciplinary inclinations will make it inappropriate to
assume that anything is outmoded 2
-Aura 11-12 --- Enigmatic quality --- mimesis 12
-utopia of knowledge 14

// Mayo, Introduction of Adornos Lyric Poetry and Society

[PC]

// Kaufman, Red Kant [PC]

Adornos On Lyric Poetry and Society (1957)

[Aesthetic Theory (1970)]
// Caygill, Lyric Poetry Before Auschwitz, Adorno and
Literature
-Adorno situates lyric between two aspects of language --- the individual and the collective
85 --- sociological terminology of individual and collective, philosophical language of subject
and object 85 --- lyric poetry is a process of mutual reflection and determination between
subject and object 86
-The Possible: the various calibrations possible within the general conditions of possibility
86 --- concern the conditions of possibility rather than actuality 86 --- an image of a promise
happiness not an actual happiness 87 --- create conditions 91, into a mediation on the
relationship 91 --- bring out a potential contained in the poem, the transcendence into song
that arises in the movement beyond all specificity of image and concept 91, effecting a
movement beyond the identities of the possible to the impossible 91 --- now-time: not just
defined present but a few possible futures 96 (the conditions of possibility)
-Not subjective, but dedicated to the surrender of the I --- is lost in images:
 90

// Hohendahl, The Discourse of Philosophy, in The Actuality of

Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, Max
Pensky [Borrow]

// Kaufman, Adornos Social Lyric [PC]

// Nikolopoulou, Kant, Adorno, and the Politics of Poetry [PC]

Application of Adornoss Lyric Theory

// Kaufman, A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guests Recent

Poetry
-art by its nature turns accidents or contingencies into necessity 1
-a rigorous theorization of critical aesthetic subjectivity
-lyric, a term for him means the modern lyric traditions whose trajectory runs from
Romanticism through 20th C 1
-via-negativa aura 1 --- To make things of which we do not know what they are 1 --- lyric
negation 1
-Modernism: a continued experiment 2 --- the impossibility 2 --- the reanimation of aura 2 ---
modern lyric poetry 2
-Guests An Emphasis Falls on Reality 2
-Kaufman explains how the lyric brings forth the social 4
-staccato clip, uninterrupted flow, disappears from and disappears into the text 6
-Possibility 6
-forthcoming: Lyrics Barbarisms in the Americas
// Noland, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of
Technology [G-Book]
73-75

Others:
-The Origin of Negative Dialectics (book)
-Rainer Naegele

-Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction

-Norma Cole, The Poetics of Vertigo, Denver Quarterly 34:4 (Winter 2000): 71-99
-Denver Quarterly 34:4 (Winter 2000) p86: asocial radicality claimed by and for poetry

***

// Rumeau, Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, American

Camerados