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2005 8: 281European Journal of Social TheoryRobert Savage

Adorno's Philopolemology: The 'Parataxis' Speech as Example  

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Adorno’s PhilopolemologyThe ‘Parataxis’ Speech as Example

Robert SavageMONASH UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA

AbstractThis article argues that the polemic(al) plays a crucial mediating role inAdorno’s philosophy. As a theoretical category, it describes the resistance tothought which inevitably frustrates attempts to reconstruct the world in theimage of reason. As a political and rhetorical strategy, it contributes in largemeasure to Adorno’s self-understanding as a public intellectual in post-warGermany. The article attempts to chart the interrelationship and interdepen-dence of these two aspects through a reading of ‘Parataxis’, Adorno’s 1963speech on Hölderlin. This speech suggests that art instantiates a polemicwhich first comes to be activated through the (polemical) speaking engage-ment of the philosopher.

Key words■ Adorno ■ aesthetics ■ critical theory ■ Heidegger ■ polemics

Introduction

Polemics have fallen into disrepute since their heyday in the age of Voltaire. Thehistorical project of Enlightenment was marked from the beginning by anambivalence toward polemics, which derived from the necessity of establishingand maintaining, if necessary through violent means, a space in which only thenon-coercive force of the better argument would hold sway. Once this forumfor the free exchange of ideas had been secured against those who threatened itfrom outside – ‘obscurantists’ was the insult of choice – the shock troops ofEnlightenment found that their services were no longer required. Today, thosewho engage in polemics are commonly viewed as individuals of questionablemoral character who vent their spleen upon their victims without the least regardfor decorum or academic nicety. Michel Foucault (1997: 112) echoed a wide-spread sentiment when he justified his own aversion to the practice by remark-ing that the polemicist ‘proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advanceand will never agree to question. . . . [H]is final objective will be not to come asclose as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the justcause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies

European Journal of Social Theory 8(3): 281–295

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on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied’. The polemicist violates,in other words, the very norms of communicative rationality he had once foughttooth and nail to defend.

No philosopher since Nietzsche polemicized more persistently, with suchobvious relish, or to deadlier effect, than Theodor W. Adorno; at the same time,no philosopher espoused the legacy and unfulfilled potential of the Enlighten-ment with greater passion. These two moments in his thought need to be under-stood in their relation to each other. From what source did Adorno derive thelegitimacy that he denied his numerous adversaries? How, to misquote Trollope,did he know he was right? And what implications does his virulent philopole-mology1 have for his philosophy as a whole? In what follows, I will approachthese questions by examining the role played by the crucial, yet hitherto largelyneglected concept of the polemic(al) in Adorno.2 In the first section of the article,I demonstrate how this concept informs both his theoretical production and hisself-understanding as a public intellectual, arguing that his occasional fits ofcontumely were far from incidental to his more straightforwardly philosophicalconcerns. In the second, longer section, I use the example of ‘Parataxis’, his 1963Berlin address on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, to suggest that for Adorno, artinstantiates a polemic which first comes to be activated through the speakingengagement of the philosopher. The address will be examined as an interventionwhose perlocutionary effect proves inseparable from its propositional content. Ihope thereby to shift the focus of interpretation from the well-worn question: ‘Iswhat Adorno is saying true?’ to the no less pertinent question: ‘What does it do?’.

The Strange Case of Dr Wiesengrund and Mr Rottweiler

Although the term ‘polemic(al)’ does not crop up very often in Adorno – it is notto be found listed in the index to Aesthetic Theory, for example – the strategicweight and semantic density that accrue to it when it does appear belie its sparsedeployment. Symptomatically, the term stands watch over both the entry- andexit-points to Adorno’s oeuvre, taking up a conspicuous position in the lectureon ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ from 1932, Adorno’s first as a professionalphilosopher, and in the introduction to Stichworte, the last text he was tocomplete before his untimely death in 1969. While its use elsewhere would repayinvestigation, notably in the monograph on Kierkegaard, I will restrict myself toexamining its meaning and function in these two liminal texts.

As its title suggests, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ is concerned with justify-ing the philosophical enterprise in the face of mounting doubts as to its relevanceand even possibility. These doubts may come from outside philosophy, fromthose who believe it to be an idle or meaningless pursuit, but they also gnaw atphilosophy from within, as Adorno’s opening statement makes clear: ‘Whoeverchooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlierphilosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient tograsp the totality of the real’ (Adorno, 2000: 24). What is at stake here is precisely

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the relationship between the ‘within’ and the ‘without’, the system and theenvironment of philosophy: between the operational effectiveness of the concep-tual arsenal philosophy develops in its ever more sophisticated attempts to ‘grasp’(ergreifen, closely related to angreifen, attack) the real, conceived here as the worldin its totality, and the continuing recalcitrance of the real to submit to its author-ity. Because philosophy cannot regulate its traffic with its outside in an internallyconsistent manner, the crisis of philosophical system engenders a crisis in thesystem of philosophy. Adorno’s response to this impasse, however, is not to rejectthe ‘totality of the real’ as a pseudo-problem thrown up by the very sort ofthinking that seeks to capture it in its conceptual net, as would a later generationof philosophers, nor to replace it as the goal of philosophical activity with a moremodest proposal, such as the analytic effort to clarify language use. Adornomanages instead to maintain philosophy’s traditional objective, while at the sametime recognizing the futility of its ever being achieved, with the help of anunlikely ally: the polemic. For it is the polemic that emerges as philosophy’sultima ratio once the ultimacy of ratio presumed by the great metaphysicaledifices has been revealed to be wishful thinking: ‘No justifying reason couldrediscover itself in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim toreason; only polemically does it present itself to the knower as total reality’(Adorno, 2000: 24; translation modified).

These programmatic lines, rescinded by nothing Adorno would write later,invest the oft-maligned polemic with a quite extraordinary epistemologicalsignificance. The polemical vigour with which an irrational reality repudiatesthe advances of reason, far from driving the philosopher into an all-engulfingscepticism, itself gives rise to philosophical knowledge. Moreover, becauseAdorno continues to insist on defining philosophy in terms of a totality withwhich it is never identical, but which it is nonetheless called upon to identify,this insurmountable resistance becomes the only possible source of such knowl-edge. The gravest danger to philosophy is equally its saving power. While reasonstill proves capable of learning about the world, it does so solely insofar as itsattempts to rediscover itself in a regular and universal lawfulness, whetherconstrued as world-spirit, divine plan or great chain of Being, are perpetuallythwarted.

Two consequences can be drawn from Adorno’s reformulation of his own jobdescription. First, the polemic compels the philosopher to interpret reality ratherthan schematize it. Whereas the philosopher’s task had once been to refine hisinstrumentarium of concepts until he had removed all the obstacles that stood inthe way of the rational reconstruction of the world, i.e. the reconstruction of theworld as a rational one, it now consists in accepting that these obstacles areactually the ineliminable symptoms or traces of a whole that does not yield todirect interrogation. The philosophical habitus changes accordingly: the ‘strong’subject bent on tailoring the world to his system makes way for a ‘weak’ subjectto whom totality offers itself ex negativo, in the fractures and opacities with whichit taunts the concept; Adorno speaks of ‘exact imagination’ as the requirementfor this new type of philosopher. Second and correlatively, the polemical refusal

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of the real to comply with his categories must still be provoked by the philoso-pher, who in this sense acts no differently than his idealist counterpart. In otherwords, the fundamental difference between the two conceptions of philosophyoutlined at the beginning of ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ does not lie so muchin how they operate – both share the same horizon, use the same tools and arefrustrated in the same way – as in how they make sense of their inevitable failure:in the first case, as a temporary and rectifiable setback; in the second, as evidenceof a polemic that flares up whenever reason tests its strength against itsindomitable other (which, as Dialectic of Enlightenment will argue, is also theother of reason: the irrational whole that evades the grasp of reason is itself weirdlyrational). Both philosophers bear the brunt of the polemic, but only the secondrecognizes it as such.

Such a polemic can end neither in victory for the philosopher – this was theself-deception to which the metaphysician succumbed – nor in defeat, whichwould mean renouncing the possibility of philosophical knowledge. In fact, itcannot end at all; this is doubtless why Adorno almost always refers to thepolemic in its adverbial form. The polemic figures instead as the field of tensionmaintained between its constitutive poles, a productive friction which wouldrigidify into simple opposition did not philosophy shuttle back and forthbetween them in its struggle to translate the inconceivable into the medium ofthought. The polemic is the inhospitable element in which philosophy, under-stood by Adorno (via Novalis and the early Lukács) as a transcendental home-sickness, takes up provisional quarters. We can already discern here the tentativeoutline of what, 30 years later, will go by the name of negative dialectics, whichlikewise seeks to make fruitful for philosophy the very incommensurability (or‘non-identity’) of concept and conceptualized. For now, I retain Adorno’s char-acterization of the polemic as a disproportionate relation in which philosophyfinds itself destroyed and redeemed in one and the same gesture.

The second incidence of the term mentioned above appears much less idio-syncratic, at least to a cursory reading. It strikes a note of defiance in the finalsentence of the introduction to Stichworte, a collection of occasional essays andradio addresses translated into English as Catchwords: ‘The title Catchwordsalludes to the encyclopaedic form that, unsystematically, discontinuously,presents what the unity of experience cystallizes into a constellation. Thus thetechnique of a small volume with somewhat arbitrarily chosen catchwordsperhaps might make conceivable a new Dictionnaire philosophique. The associ-ation with polemics that the title conveys is a welcome one to the author’(Adorno, 1998: 126). What is the polemical association to which Adorno refers?The word Stichworte derives from the verb stechen, to cut, scratch or stab. Accord-ingly, Stichworte are words intended to draw blood, just as the title of Adorno’sprevious collection of critical models, Interventions, evokes the flash of thesurgeon’s scalpel laying open the object with a few deft strokes. At a time whenAdorno found himself under fierce attack from his critics on both right and left– the former for allegedly encouraging the student protests, the latter for notencouraging them enough – his introductory words to the last book he would

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prepare for publication announce his refusal to retire wounded from the fray. Thepugnacious self-image they project seems diametrically opposed to that sketchedin ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’. There, the polemic dealt the philosopher asalutary shock that rocked his claims to mastery; here, it is the philosopher whoflaunts his mastery of the polemic. Teddie Wiesengrund, the pampered philoso-pher-aesthete, has transmogrified into Hektor Rottweiler,3 the feared and fearful‘theory- and man-eating dialectical monster’ (Lütkehaus, 2003: 17).

As the English translation correctly suggests, the primary meaning ofStichworte has nothing whatsoever to do with polemics, and the word’s violentconnotations usually go unheard in German. The first definition listed in theGrimm dictionary under the Stichwort ‘Stichwort’ is a word that is ‘injurious,generally malicious and secretly apposite, sometimes also meant to be benevo-lently teasing’, but the entry goes on to note that this meaning died out aroundthe middle of the 19th century. Ever since, the term has denoted first andforemost a word in a reference work, a keyword or heading; hence Adorno’sallusion to the dictionnaire philosophique. When Adorno draws attention to itspolemical association, he is thus playing off the original, long-submergedmeaning of the term against its more familiar, modern usage: his catchwords arelong-range missiles, not harmless captions. The introduction expressly invites usto read the essays that follow in the light of these polemical Stichworte. Takingup the invitation, one notices that if there is a common thread binding togetherthe pieces that make up the book, if there is a single concern unifying Adorno’streatment of such diverse topics as ‘Education after Auschwitz’, ‘On Subject andObject’, ‘Experiences of a European Scientist in America’ and ‘On the Question:What is German?’, then it is with fighting ‘the type of reified consciousness’ thatautomatically subsumes its material under catchwords, so excluding or forcefullyassimilating whatever crosses its path (Adorno, 1998: 199). Stichworte is apolemic against thinking in Stichworte (in the customary meaning), and as such,it designates as much the enemy as the means of attack.

Retrospectively, the title assumes a radicality to which the closing words of theintroduction provide the decisive clue. For we can see now how Adorno has usedthe word Stichworte as a Stichwort in the precise sense of the term given byGrimm, that is, as an ‘injurious, generally malicious and secretly apposite . . .word’. Only on this occasion, instead of being used to stab a foreign body, theStichwort has been turned upon itself. From this self-inflicted gash, this Stich-wunde, bleed the words that congeal into Adorno’s philosophical dictionary. Aswas the case in ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, the polemic both indicated anddemonstrated in the title marks a productive tension structurally incapable ofreaching a conclusion, inasmuch as the destructive force of the Stichwort remainsparasitically dependent upon its target. Once again, the polemic is heralded, witha quasi-Heraclitean claim to universality, as the element in which the philoso-pher feels most at home. The polemical association welcomed by Adorno, farfrom contradicting his earlier adumbration of the polemic, is thus entirelyconsistent with it.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that a shift in emphasis has taken place

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between the two texts from what one might call a theoretical to an applied pole-mology, a shift that mirrors a dramatic change in Adorno’s standing as a publicphilosopher in Germany during the same period. In 1932, Adorno was interestedin the polemic to the extent that it threatens the age-old philosophical dream ofpenetrating appearances to apprehend the ‘totality of the real’. Almost fourdecades later, he is its avowed practitioner, and his polemics in the interveningyears against such epiphenomena of modern life as jazz, horoscopes and Holly-wood, and against such figures as Lukács, Stravinsky and Heidegger had becomethe stuff of legend. Upon being told that one of the epigonal Heideggerians hehad savaged in the Jargon of Authenticity had suffered a nervous breakdown as aresult, Adorno reportedly snarled that it served him right. This ferocious, divisiveAdorno is very much on display in the ‘Parataxis’ speech – one thinks of hissplendidly contemptuous dismissal of Heidegger’s language as ‘high-falutinggobbledegook’ (Adorno, 1992: 114; translation modified) – but in the courseof the essay’s second half, which is devoted to exploring the polemic that isHölderlin’s late poetry, Adorno also revisits the terrain first charted in ‘TheActuality of Philosophy’. Almost alone among his writings, ‘Parataxis’ allows usto observe Teddie Wiesengrund and Hektor Rottweiler side by side, paratacti-cally cohabiting the same textual space. Les extrèmes se touchent, the extremitiesof Adorno’s career as well as the extremes of his public persona, in the fault-linethat runs down the middle of his performance in Berlin.

Understanding Polemically

‘Parataxis’ was delivered on 7 June 1963, the 120th anniversary of Hölderlin’sdeath, at the biennial convention of the Hölderlin Society. Simply by addressinga group of people gathered to commemorate the poet on this symbolic occasion,Adorno automatically adopts the discursive stance of the eulogist; the personconsidered best qualified to speak well of the deceased, a task which for Adornoextended to speaking ill of those who profane his memory. The first half of thespeech was taken up with a sweeping polemic against the reading of the poetadvanced by Martin Heidegger, who had himself addressed the Society exactlyfour years earlier. In the second half, Adorno offered his own, rival interpretationof Hölderlin’s late work. He thus made a ‘refusal of communication’ (Mörchen,1981) with Heidegger his condition sine qua non for communicating with theassembled specialists.4 Nothing less than Heidegger’s ritual expulsion from thecommunity of the initiated was the price demanded by Adorno for an undis-torted conversation about Hölderlin. Needless to say, many of his listeners provedunwilling to enter into a dialogue on such terms. What began as an attempt tobuild a bridge between philosophy and philology – for unlike his opponent,Adorno stressed their interreliance – ended in a minor scandal. ‘Scarcely anotherlecture provoked such impassioned discussion as did this one’, read theeuphemistic report in the 1963/4 yearbook of the Society, in which the speech,

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contrary to the Society’s custom of publishing all the lectures from that year’sconference, was conspicuously absent.

There is some disagreement about what actually came to pass on that summerday in Berlin. The eminence grise of German literary criticism, Emil Staiger, comedown from Zürich to speak on Empedocles, recalled his version of events yearslater. No friend of Adorno’s, he was not amused by the twenty-minute long‘polemical tirade against Heidegger’ that thundered from the podium. ‘Adornohad to be rapped over the knuckles’, he told an interviewer in 1975:

Someone in the audience – he could no longer remember whom – got up in protestand interrupted the lecturer with the words: it was an unbelievable impudence toattack someone who was not there and had no chance to defend himself. [Peter] Szondi[the speech’s eventual dedicatee] then made the unnecessary comment: Heideggermight not be there in person, but he had been cited at length; that was a legitimateand unobjectionable method of critique. (van den Bergh, 1989: 233)

Jochen Schmidt, considerably younger than Staiger and by no means so well-disposed toward the sage from the Black Forest, takes up the story from a differ-ent angle: ‘In the middle of a fulminating speech . . . the Heidegger faction stoodup, led by a well-regarded Hölderlin scholar, und left the hall in protest’(Schmidt, 1989: 684). For Schmidt, the address contained little of value on itsostensible topic, but its withering critique of Heidegger succeeded in breakingthe hold of the existentialist reading once and for all. As if in symbolic affirma-tion of the break, Heidegger cancelled his membership in the Society shortlyafterwards, furious that it had granted ‘that man’, as he was wont to call Adorno,a forum at which to speak against him.

Adorno failed to turn up, as planned, to the general discussion of the threemain lectures on the following afternoon: ‘it is reported that he was unexpect-edly called away and had to excuse himself at the last moment’ (van den Bergh,1989: 145). One suspects that Binder’s lapidary comment in the yearbook maybe deliberately vague: ‘Unfortunately Mr Theodor Adorno was prevented fromattending the plenary session, so his lecture could not formally be discussed’(Binder, 1964: 185). For according to Schmidt, the respected scholar who hadled the exodus of Heideggerians on the previous day, and who was now entrustedwith directing the discussion of Adorno’s talk (most of which he had not evenheard), was none other than Binder himself. Seen in this light, Adorno’s decisionto leave Berlin prematurely does not seem surprising at all. Binder, who haddedicated one of his most important monographs ‘in grateful esteem’ toHeidegger (Binder, 1962: 95), opened the sitting in Adorno’s absence by citingthe verse, ‘Since we are a conversation and can hear from one another’ – in thecontext perhaps a snub at the guest speaker who had so flagrantly refused toconverse with Heidegger and then made off without hearing what his audiencehad to say in response.

Bernhard Böschenstein, meanwhile, recalls that the address met with neitherheckling nor a spontaneous walk-out, and that the heated exchange to whichStaiger refers in fact took place in Adorno’s absence, during the discussion session

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the following day. If that is the case, then Staiger and Schmidt’s conflation of twoseparate incidents – the speech and the objections raised against it in response –into a single fictitious primal scene testifies all the more tellingly to the enduringimpact the speech made upon its audience: for Staiger, to its ‘unbelievableimpudence’, which was still provoking his indignation a dozen years after theevent; for Schmidt, to its significance as a ‘caesura’ in the history of the poet’sreception, which perhaps led him to fantasize a visual correspondence to, andcorroboration of, Adorno’s rhetorical purging of Heidegger’s influence from theHölderlin community. Precisely because of their empirical unreliability, botheyewitness reports accurately reflect the lived reality of the occasion, and boththereby attest to the speech’s effectiveness as an intervention in the previouslywell-regulated, somewhat sleepy field of postwar Hölderlin scholarship.‘Parataxis’ was a scandal, regardless of whether it can be shown to have causedone. Adorno’s own account of the speech, to be found in a letter to HerbertMarcuse written shortly thereafter, only adds to the confusion on this point.According to Adorno, the address was interrupted at one stage, not by an irateHeideggerian, but by a deranged ‘Megaera’ who took him to task for changinghis surname from ‘Wiesengrund’ to the less Jewish-sounding ‘Adorno’ while inAmerican exile (Müller-Doohm, 2003: 548). Suffice to conclude that where somuch smoke clouds the latecomer’s vision, a fire must once have raged.

I have gone in some detail into the fracas that accompanied the lecture becauseI believe it to be anything but tangential to the views advanced in the lectureitself. If Adorno’s claim is to be taken seriously that his philosophical statementsrepresent a form of praxis, indeed the only legitimate form at a time when mean-ingful political change is blocked on all sides, then the fate that befalls them inthe world must be understood as a calculated effect of their argumentativecontent. Adorno’s polemic against Heidegger demands dissent and would havemissed its target had it been greeted with polite applause. Furthermore, theprovocative intention underlying the opening polemic extends to the interpret-ation of Hölderlin advanced in its wake, disallowing any hard and fast distinc-tion between Adorno the incendiary publicist and the sober hermeneut. Thisinterpretation sets out to release the ‘critical and utopian’ energies in Hölderlin’spoetry supposedly stifled by Heidegger, i.e. to rehabilitate that poetry as itselfpolemical, directed against an existing society in view of a better one (Adorno,1992: 115). For Adorno, ‘Hölderlin did not play along’, and on the 120thanniversary of his death and 20th anniversary of his consecration by the Nazis,it is high time his intransigence toward all ideological appropriations be given theattention it deserves (p. 127).

Assuming Adorno is right, how is one to account for the fact that, until 1963,those who busied themselves with the poet had all but unanimously overheardor chosen to ignore the polemical tenor of his work? The OED defines polemicas ‘a controversial argument or discussion; argumentation against some opinion,doctrine, etc.; aggressive controversy’, making clear that a non-controversialpolemic, a polemic with which everyone heartily agrees, is a thing of impossi-bility. Adorno can only refashion Hölderlin into a polemical author, then, by

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smashing the broad consensus that had hitherto prevailed on his poetry and madepossible his institutionalization in a society bearing his name. The controversyfanned by the polemic against Heidegger provides a practical demonstration ofanother polemic, Hölderlin’s own: ‘Asserted too soon [by Heidegger], the realityof the poetic undermines the tension between Hölderlin’s poetry and reality andneutralizes his work into something in league with fate’ (Adorno, 1992: 115).

Adorno explores this tension in more detail in his discussion of the relation-ship between language and subjectivity in Hölderlin’s poetry, the only occasionin the speech on which the polemic surfaces from its pervasive anonymity.Adorno is concerned here to relate the peculiarities of Hölderlin’s linguistictechnique, most particularly the paratactic scars which furrow the late work, towhat he calls the ‘truth content’ of his poetry. I will cite and analyse this passageat some length:

The linguistic technique coincides with the antisubjectivism of the content. It revisesthe deceptive middle-of-the-road synthesis from an extreme point – from languageitself; it provides a corrective to the primacy of the subject as an organon of suchsynthesis. Hölderlin’s procedure takes into account the fact that the subject, whichmistakes itself for something immediate and ultimate, is something utterly mediated.This incalculably portentous change in the linguistic gesture must, however, be understoodpolemically and not ontologically; not as if language, strengthened by the sacrificed ofsubjective intention, were simply something beyond the subject. In cutting the tiesthat bind it to the subject, language speaks for the subject, which – and Hölderlin wasprobably the first whose art intimated this – can no longer speak for itself. (p. 137;translation modified, emphasis added)

What does it mean to understand something polemically, not ontologically?Before examining the explanation subsequently offered by Adorno, let me firstconsider this injunction on ‘How one is to read’ (Adorno, 1971: 84) at a basicsemantic level. The italicized sentence can be construed in one of two ways.Either the change ascribed to Hölderlin in the relation between language andsubject – better, in the linguistic constitution of subjectivity – is to be understoodas being of a polemical, rather than an ontological nature; or this change is to beunderstood in a polemical, rather than an ontological fashion. In the first case,the statement makes an objective claim about Hölderlin’s poetry, namely, that itleaves the attentive reader no choice but to understand the change as a polemi-cal one. Whoever understands it otherwise has simply misunderstood it,disregarding the implied imperative (the change should or must be understood so)dictated by the poetry itself. In the second case, the statement concerns theposition the reader is to take up in relation to that change, and hence in relationto Hölderlin’s work as a whole. It prescribes not as what it is to be understood,but how we are to understand it, and thus problematizes the act of interpretationwhich the first variant treats as straightforward. While the imperative force ofAdorno’s dictum may still issue from Hölderlin’s poetry, in a manner that willhave to be explored further, it may also come from outside that poetry, from ahermeneutics that brings certain methodological presuppositions to bear uponthe analysis of a poem.

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One might be tempted to dismiss the second proposed reading on the groundsthat Adorno could not possibly mean that we should read Hölderlin in apolemical fashion. Does his interpretation not purport, on the contrary, to freeHölderlin from a hermeneutics of violence? Does he not claim, as an exponentof the ‘immanent analysis of literary works’, to break through the monadologicalenclosedness of a poem by patiently immersing himself in it (Adorno, 1992:112)? How then can he seriously suggest we adopt a polemical attitude toward acentral aspect of Hölderlin’s work – and this at the moment when he most directlycontrasts his own interpretation to Heidegger’s, just pages after warning: ‘Oneshould not set up an abstract contrast between Heidegger’s method and someother method’ (p. 128)?

Three factors speak against this objection. The first is that if Adorno hadwanted to preclude the latter reading, he would have written: ‘This change is tobe understood as polemical’. As it stands, the grammar favours the conclusionthat the polemical relation holds sway between reader and text, rather than withinthe text itself. If I were to recommend that a set of instructions be read carefully,for instance, I would not mean that the instructions themselves were careful. Theproblem lies here in an ambiguity in the concept of understanding, which canimply both a correct or adequate grasp of the meaning of Hölderlin’s words and,more broadly, a particular view of those words which need not coincide with anyobjectively ascertainable meaning. Second, the contention that something is of apolemical rather than an ontological nature is itself an ontological one, henceself-contradictory. The third factor to bear in mind is that to understand some-thing in a polemical fashion is not the same as to polemicise against it. Adornois clearly not arguing that the change by which the subject comes to recognizeitself as utterly mediated should be denounced by the reader, as if she hopedthereby to regain that immediacy and ultimacy Hölderlin has already revealedto be delusional. What understanding polemically does mean will have to beclarified by examining the context of Adorno’s remark. Provisionally, one can saythat the prejudice which sees in polemics little more than a form of wilfulmisunderstanding is one not shared by Adorno.

The first transcription ventured above can therefore be ruled out in favour ofthe second. What still requires explaining is how this distinction between polem-ical and ontological ways of understanding relates to its referent, the anti-subjectivism whose effects Adorno describes at the beginning of the passage. Intexts by Adorno, the word ‘however’ usually betrays something other than thechronic scrupulousness with which the conscientious scholar hastens to qualifyhis every generalization. It serves instead to signpost a dialectical turning-point,the moment at which a necessarily one-sided line of argument, pursued withsufficient rigour, brings forth its own corrective. When Adorno maintains thatthe change which strips the subject of the semblance of spontaneity ‘must,however, be understood polemically’, he thus hints that this change stands noless in need of critical revision than the ideology it unmasks. Just as the anti-subjective impulse animating Hölderlin’s poetry ‘corrects’ the preponderance ofthe subject, so a polemical understanding will correct that very correction,

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whereas an ontological understanding will enshrine or hypostatize it. Theontologist accepts the ‘death sentence’ pronounced by Hölderlin; the polemicistcontests the verdict (Adorno, 1992: 122).

Adorno now expands upon how Hölderlin is not to be understood, clearingthe ground for the positive determination of polemical understanding to come:‘not as if language, strengthened by the sacrifice of subjective intention, weresimply something beyond the subject’. This is an obvious shot at Heidegger’s viewthat Hölderlin has left behind the modern subject–object dichotomy, along withthe scientific approach to nature that is its corollary, to found a more originaryrelation to Being; a gibe, too, at the mysticism that would transfigure Hölderlininto an empty vessel through which language itself comes to speak. For Adorno,Heidegger confuses the sacrifice of subjective intention in a poem with theobliteration (Heidegger would say: overcoming) of subjectivity as such, failing torealize that even the most devastating demonstration of the subject’s nugatorinessmust still be subjectively articulated. The ontologist’s denigration of the subjectnegatively mirrors the celebration of the subject indulged in by many ofHölderlin’s contemporaries. For just as the bourgeois ideology of autonomoussubjectivity neglects the constitutive role of language in subject-formation, soHeidegger ignores the equally important counter-truth that language woulddissolve into the empyrean without a concrete subject to speak it. While recog-nizing, indeed greedily seizing upon the genuinely anti-subjective dimension ofHölderlin’s poetry, Heidegger distorts its philosophical meaning by taking it atits word.

Under the catchword ‘deaestheticization’, this reproach had delivered theground-bass to Adorno’s polemic at the beginning of the essay. Here, it furthercomplicates the binary opposition ‘polemical/ontological understanding’ that isgradually taking shape as perhaps the most important in ‘Parataxis.’ ForHeidegger, the p�keloy launched by language against the subject actually resultsin the latter’s destruction. If a polemical understanding, by contrast, holds thatthe subject survives this assault; if it insists that the interdependence of languageand subjectivity prevents the acknowledged supremacy of language ever beingconverted into absolute victory; if it refuses to take the anti-subjectivism ofHölderlin’s poetry at face value; and if it consequently emphasizes what onemight call the anti-anti-subjective aspect of Hölderlin’s language critique (whichis not to be confused with the restoration of the autonomous subject), then tounderstand the language–subject relation polemically means to understand thatit is a polemical relation, in the precise sense of the term given in ‘The Actualityof Philosophy’. The philosopher’s repudiation of the subject’s demise correspondsto, and releases, a polemic in Hölderlin prematurely foreclosed by Heidegger.

Adorno’s next sentence, the culmination of his argument, leaves no room fordoubt on this: ‘In cutting the ties that bind it to the subject, language speaks forthe subject, which . . . can no longer speak for itself ’. The subject has taken theplace of reason, language that of a hostile reality, but otherwise the narrativeschema has barely changed since 1932. At first, the subject imagines it can uselanguage to authenticate its expressive ideal, the Wordsworthian spontaneous

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overflow of powerful feelings, much as the traditional philosopher hoped tofathom the world through the exercise of reason alone. The subject’s inability toinfuse language with the quick of individual feeling, manifested in the drabconformism of conventional lyric poetry, leads it to relinquish this ambition. ‘Inthis process the illusion that language would be consonant with the subject orthat the truth manifested in language would be intentical with a subjectivitymanifesting itself disintegrates’ (Adorno, 1992: 137). Oddly foreshadowing thefate of the mad poet in the tower, language declares the subject to be unmündig,henceforth unauthorized to speak for itself. As if in mimicry of Hölderlin’scapitulation before language, the very syntax of Adorno’s passage twice concedesthe subject-position (in both senses of the term) to its usurper: ‘language speaksfor the subject’; ‘Hölderlin was probably the first whose art intimated this.’Hölderlin will have marked, then, that point in the history of literature at whichthe expressive paradigm of early romanticism first becomes a problem, and if thischange is described as ‘incalculably portentous’, then because it represents, yearsbefore Baudelaire or Rimbaud, the opening move in the endless endgame ofartistic modernity in which we are still caught up: ‘The idealistic Hölderlininaugurates the process that leads to Beckett’s protocol sentences, empty ofmeaning’ (Adorno, 1992: 137).

Just as, in ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, the antagonism met with by reasonproved its unexpected ally, so the polemic that once prevented the subject fromspeaking now helps it find its voice. No longer purporting to control meaning,the subject discovers, without actively searching for it, a new language commen-surate to its experience of the incommensurability of language and subjectivity.To borrow the passive verb used by Adorno in 1932, language ‘offers itself ’ as alifeboat to the subject set adrift from its moorings in a transcendentally guaran-teed substantiality. Hölderlin’s ‘sacrifice of subjective intention’ is undertaken ‘outof subjective freedom’, just as Adorno had earlier held fast to philosophy’smillennial goal of cognizing totality by abandoning it. Here as there, the polemicdesignates an unequal relation in which one term of the dyad finds itself simul-taneously destroyed and redeemed by the antagonist it had originally sought tobring under its dominion.

Notwithstanding these family resemblances, the polemic sketched withincomparable density in ‘Parataxis’ bears a further trait that singles it out asunique. Every polemic must satisfy at least two basic formal requirements: it mustinvolve a refusal of communication (in the case of the ‘Parataxis’ speech, Adorno’srefusal to communicate with Heidegger), and a communication of this refusal ofcommunication to a third party (e.g. the Hölderlin Society). The target of apolemic is never the same as its addressee. This is why Horkheimer and Adorno,having written a polemic so wide-ranging that it seemed to set every conceivablecontemporary readership in its sights, were forced to address it as a ‘message in abottle’ to an unknown posterity. Though it may bristle with all manner ofinvectives, exaggerations and deliberate distortions, no strictly private correspon-dence may be deemed to be polemical. The open letter, on the other hand, issuited to polemical speech because it is pitched not so much at the target of the

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polemic, its ostensible addressee, as at the public peering over his or her shoulder;this detour enables it to communicate the non-communication indispensable tothe functioning of the polemic. The polemic thus appears to its target as thecommunication, via an addressee with which it is not identical, of a refusal ofcommunication. The polemic under discussion represents a limit case insofar asthe agent which refuses to communicate with the subject is language itself, thevery means of communication. This refusal of language (genitivus obiectivus aswell as subiectivus) gives rise to the following difficulty: if the cutting of communi-cative threads adduced by Adorno is to be taken seriously, if language’s self-refusalis absolute, how is its polemic against the subject to be recognized as polemical,i.e. as a communicable refusal of communication? To whom can languagecommunicate its refusal to speak, if not to the subject with which it has brokenoff all communicative ties?

Adorno has already given us the answer. To whom else but the reader whounderstands Hölderlin’s poetry in a polemical, rather than an ontological fashion?Whereas Adorno’s ontological reader must grasp the refusal of language as animperious silence which banishes the subject to oblivion, leaving language tounfold unperturbed in an impossibly rarefied, subject-free space, only the readerwho refuses this refusal can recognize it as polemical – and as such, despite every-thing, as a means of communicating with the subject. Against Heidegger, Adornopresses home both the rhetoricity of Hölderlin’s performance, which mitigates itsanti-subjectivism, and its efficacy as a rhetorical performance, which empowersit to speak for the subject. The polemic unleashed in Hölderlin’s late work reliesupon the active resistance of its addressee (the philosophically qualified reader:Adorno) in order to reach, and redeem, its target; or rather, this resistance firsttransforms what would otherwise be a purely destructive relation, and hence norelation at all, into a properly polemical one.

We are now in a better position to make sense of one of the passage’s mostpuzzling features. Adorno seems to digress in the course of his argument fromspecifying how the portentous change inaugurated by Hölderlin is to be under-stood, namely polemically, not ontologically, to detailing what manner of changeit might be, namely a polemical, not an ontological one. He seems thereby torepeat the misconstrual of polemical understanding identified earlier, whichproved guilty of smudging just that distinction. Yet we can see now why thisslippage was both legitimate and necessary. Just as the ‘linguistic technique’ and‘content’ of Hölderlin’s poetry converge in their shared anti-subjectivism, so thereader’s technique ultimately joins up with an objective ‘truth content’ in thepolemical structure they have in common, but which only a polemical interpre-tative procedure can bring to light. The methodological comments which prefacethe essay state nothing less: ‘The path of the determinate negation of meaning isthe path to the truth content’ (Adorno, 1992: 112). Determinate negation in‘Parataxis’ is the polemical resistance to the surface meaning of Hölderlin’s poetrythat leads straight to its polemical heart, philosophy’s response to the dilemma‘that every work wants to be understood purely on its own terms but none canin fact be so understood’ (Adorno, 1992: 112). To understand Hölderlin’s work

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polemically is thus to understand it polemically, not to strike an arbitrary pose thatleaves the reader blind or insensitive to it. And of course, the abstract confronta-tion of polemical and ontological understandings by means of which Adornodenies any point of contact between his approach and Heidegger’s is itself apolemical move, the local effect of a polemologic that underwrites his entireargument.

I want to conclude by suggesting that this self-implicating strategy – intendedto release in Hölderlin an implacable antagonism toward the status quo whichphilology had left unheeded, and which Heidegger had transmuted into the mythof the founder-poet – is common to all of Adorno’s writings on art, even if it israrely stated so explicitly elsewhere. For Adorno, the task of a philosophicalaesthetics is to actualise a polemic that ordinarily lies dormant in artworks, i.e.to recognize that art’s refusal of communication, the monadic imperviousness toexternal demands which constitutes its autonomy, is itself a form of communi-cation, and so to realize it as polemical. I lack the space to expand upon this thesishere, or to demonstrate how it is imbricated with the ubiquitous motif ofredemption in Adorno. But if one were searching for an initial confirmation, oneneed look no further than Negative Dialectics. ‘Nothing,’ Adorno announces therein a fortissimo passage, ‘nothing on earth and nothing in the empty sky is to besaved through being defended. . . . Nothing can be saved without first beingtransformed, nothing that has not already passed through the gate of its death’(Adorno, 1966: 382). Whether one applies these apocalyptic lines to Adorno’srescue of Hölderlin or to Hölderlin’s rescue of the subject, the same holds true:salvation lies, if anywhere, in the polemic.

Notes

1 I borrow the term ‘philopolemology’ from Jacques Derrida, who offers it as a transla-tion of Heidegger’s Feind-seligkeit.

2 As far as I am aware, the only detailed discussion of the topic is in Thorsten Bonacker’sunpublished MS: ‘Dabei sein ist alles. Kulturindustrie und die Polemik Adornos’.Some useful comments on ideology critique as a form of polemical speech are also tobe found in Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason.

3 Teddie Wiesengrund was the name by which family and friends addressed him up untilthe late 1930s, when he adopted his mother’s maiden name; Hektor Rottweiler was apseudonym he used in articles from the 1920s, which he also briefly revived in the1950s.

4 A veiled reference to this strategy is already to be found in the speech’s opening line,in which Adorno reminds his audience that a moment of radical discontinuity ornecessary violence is sometimes required to set in motion the tranquil dialectic of intel-lectual progress: ‘There is no question that understanding of Hölderlin’s work hasgrown along with his fame since the school of Stefan George demolished the concep-tion of him as a quiet, refined minor poet with a touching life story’ (Adorno, 1992:109; emphasis added).

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trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, pp. 109–49. New York: Columbia University Press.—— (1998) Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford.

New York: Columbia University Press.—— (2000) ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, trans. Benjamin Snow, in The Adorno Reader,

ed. Brian O’Connor, pp. 23–39. Oxford: Blackwell.Binder, Wolfgang (1964) ‘Bericht über die Diskussion’, Jahrbuch der Hölderlin-Gesellschaft

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and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, pp. 111–19. London: Penguin.Lütkehaus, Ludger (2003) ‘Mangel an Güte, objektive Solidarität’, Die Zeit 16 (10 April):

17.Mörchen, Herrmann (1981) Adorno und Heidegger. Untersuchung einer philosophischen

Kommunikationsverweigerung. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.Müller-Doohm, Stefan (2003) Adorno. Eine Biographie. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.Schmidt, Jochen (1989) ‘Stellungnahme’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 63: 679–711.Van den Bergh, Gerhard (1989) Adornos philosophisches Deuten von Dichtung. Ästhetische

Theorie und Praxis der Interpretation: Der Hölderlin-Essay als Modell. Bonn: Bouvier.

■ Robert Savage works in the Centre for Comparative Literature and CulturalStudies at Monash University, Australia. [email: Robert.Savage@arts.monash.edu.au] ■

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