Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature

Corey McCall, Nathan Ross, Corey McCall, Nathan Ross

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351592963
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria moderna

This collection features original essays that examine Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's essays and correspondence on literature. Taken together, the essays present the view that these two monumental figures of 20th-century philosophy were not simply philosophers who wrote about literature, but that they developed their philosophies in and through their encounters with literature.

Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature is divided into three thematic sections. The first section contains essays that directly demonstrate the ways in which literature enriched the thinking of Benjamin and Adorno. It explores themes that are recognized to be central to their thinking—mimesis, the critique of historical progress, and the loss and recovery of experience—through their readings of literary authors such as Baudelaire, Beckett, and Proust. The second section continues the trajectory of the first by bringing together four essays on Benjamin's and Adorno's reading of Kafka, whose work helped them develop a distinctive critique of and response to capitalism. The third and final section focuses more intently on the question of what it means to gain authentically critical insight into a literary work. The essays examine Benjamin's response to specific figures, including Georg Büchner, Robert Walser, and Julien Green, whose work he sees as neglected, undigested, or misunderstood.

This book offers a unique examination of two pivotal 20th-century philosophers through the lens of their shared experiences with literature. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars across philosophy, literature, and German studies.

Part I
Benjamin and Adorno

Literary Themes and Philosophical Debates

1
Against the Reification of History

Benjamin and Adorno on Baudelaire

Corey McCall

History, time, temporality: these have become Heidegger’s terms, or at least these are terms that acquire a strongly Heideggerian resonance, especially during the height of his fame in Germany shortly after the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927. Reification, of course, is a term one finds in Adorno’s work, though less frequently than one might find it in, say, the work of Lukács, who made this term the central concept of his History and Class Consciousness (1923).¹ Although he does not specifically employ the term “reification,” one finds in Benjamin’s work evidence of related notions such as “self-alienation” and “phantasmagoria.”² Memory, experience, history—these are among the key concepts that Adorno and Benjamin share during the 1930s, when Benjamin was at his most productive and Adorno still considered Benjamin his mentor. It is during this fraught period that Benjamin conducts his most sustained work on the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, one of the touchstones, along with figures such as Proust and Kafka, for his mature work.

While it is clear that Baudelaire’s work provides a touchstone for Benjamin, we cannot say the same for Adorno. One finds scattered references to the poet’s work throughout Adorno’s writings, but not the same sort of sustained attention to Baudelaire one finds in Benjamin’s work. However, Adorno carefully reads Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire during the 1930s, and he critically responds to Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire during Benjamin’s final decade. It is in this critical response to Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire that one finds Adorno’s most considered response to Baudelaire’s work as well as a critical response to his friend’s interpretation of Baudelaire as the poet of modern life. Furthermore, these exchanges reveal important things about the later trajectory of Adorno’s work as well, for during the 1930s Adorno delivers his lecture “The Idea of Natural-History” and publishes his study of Kierkegaard, key texts that both display his debt to Benjamin’s work (his Ursprung des deutschen Traurspiels in particular) and set the stage for his later work. My essay begins with a reconsideration of the debate between Benjamin and Adorno over how one ought to read Baudelaire. Specifically, the exchange of letters in November and December 1938 provides a matrix for understanding their work in the early 1930s. This exchanges points us back to the philosophical context of their work in general and to questions related to the meaning of history in particular. In order to understand Adorno’s critique of Benjamin, we must return to Adorno’s dialectical account of the relationship between nature and history in “The Idea of Natural-History” and the Kierkegaard book. Indeed, Robert Hullot-Kentor claims that we can read the Kierkegaard study as a rehearsal of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which construes “sacrifice as the dialectical truth of domination.”³ A careful reconsideration of their exchange of letters in November–December 1938 shows that what is at stake for Adorno in Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire as the poet of modernity is the question of dialectic, which he believes that Benjamin neglects. In other words, Adorno’s main worry is that Benjamin reifies history by neglecting the dialectical relationship between history and nature in his Baudelaire writings.⁴ As I show in the first section, this concern about the lack of dialectical movement in Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire in “The Paris of the Second Empire” is in part a function of the work that Adorno had been doing in New York, both with Max Horkheimer and Paul Lazarsfeld in 1938. I argue that Adorno’s criticism of Benjamin during this exchange can be better understood if we recall Horkheimer’s critique of Positivism as well as Adorno’s later criticisms of Lazarsfeld’s empirical approach to sociology exemplified in the Radio Research Project, to which Adorno contributed from 1938 to 1941.

While I will not be able to comprehensively analyze the intertextuality one finds in the Benjamin-Adorno relationship here, one important dimension of the manifold relationships between the two men’s work can be found in the claim, advanced by Robert Hullot-Kentor among others, that we read Adorno’s 1933 Habilitationsschrift published as Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic as a work indebted to Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama and, in addition, that we read Benjamin’s extended engagement with Baudelaire in terms of the Trauerspiel book.⁵ In his recent reading of Benjamin’s late work in terms of political philosophy, James Martel also suggests that we ought to read Benjamin’s Baudelaire in terms of the Trauerspiel book. So, if the touchstone for both Benjamin and Adorno had been Benjamin’s earlier work on the German mourning-play, then why is Adorno so harshly critical of his friend’s work on the nineteenth century French poet? In other words, why does he believe that Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” falls into the same trap as Heidegger and Kierkegaard?

This essay attempts to answer this question in three parts. The first section re-examines the debate during the last years of Benjamin’s life over the significance of Baudelaire’s work for critical theory. The second section traces this late dispute between Benjamin and Adorno back to one of its sources: Adorno’s attempt in the 1930s to work out the dialectics of nature and history and focuses first on his lecture “The Idea of Natural-History” and subsequently on his critique of idealism in his Kierkegaard book. Finally, I return to Benjamin in the final section, which focuses on Benjamin’s attempts to overcome the reification of history. In Adorno’s writings on Baudelaire and in The Arcades Project more generally, reification is typically couched in terms of the phantasmagoria of modern capitalism. Accordingly, the final section focuses on Benjamin’s development of this term out of his reading of Baudelaire as the poet of high capitalism. I do not attempt to adjudicate the dispute between Benjamin and Adorno. Rather, I argue that if we look carefully at how the question of history manifests itself in Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire and in Adorno’s criticisms of these texts, we can begin to see how this key concept operates in the writings of both men during this period.

The Baudelaire Debate of 1938

The Benjamin–Adorno correspondence includes fascinating and often contentious discussions of Benjamin’s late work on Baudelaire composed during the 1930s. In these exchanges, we can see Adorno become increasingly critical of what he sees as a lack of consideration for dialectic in Benjamin’s treatment of Baudelaire. But what is the significance of this criticism? What does this debate over dialectic (or its lack) in Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s writings tell us about the work of the two thinkers?

In a letter dated November 10, 1938, Adorno responds to Benjamin’s essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” He worries that Benjamin’s presentation, both in this essay and in The Arcades Project mores generally, presents a series of phantasmagoria without theoretical explication.⁶ In other words, Benjamin’s text consists of a series of isolated images without dialectical mediation.⁷ After noting that he has carefully discussed the dialectical question of the “Paris of the Second Empire” with Max Horkheimer, Adorno states his objection plainly:

If I am not much mistaken, this dialectic lacks one thing: mediation. There is a persistent tendency to relate the pragmatic content of Baudelaire’s work directly to adjacent features of the social history of his time, especially economic ones. I’m thinking, for example, of the passage on the wine tax, some reflections on the barricades, or the aforementioned remark about the arcades. This seems to me particularly problematic, since the transition from an inherently theoretical consideration of physiologies to the “concrete” portrayal of the flâneur is especially tenuous.

(SW4: 101)

In other words, Adorno’s critique here amounts to the complaint that the relationship between Baudelaire’s literary production and the socioeconomic conditions to which it relates is simply assumed rather than developed. He finds especially problematic the “[substitution] of a metaphorical statement for a bindingly literal one” (SW4:101). Indeed, these substitutions give Adorno a “sense of artificiality.” Most egregious in Adorno’s view is when Benjamin claims that the city transforms into “an intérieur for the flâneur” (SW4:101). As we shall see in the next section, one of Adorno’s worries is that Benjamin is here falling prey to the same temptation that befell Kierkegaard. Indeed, both the distinction between nature and artifice and the reference to the bourgeois intérieur figure prominently in Adorno’s 1933 critical reading of Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic, as we shall see in the following section.

Adorno further charges that Benjamin’s project leaves the distinction between the subjective experience of the artist and its objective conditions intact, for it does not adequately account for the manifold connections between them. In other words, subject and object are reified in Benjamin’s analysis. In leaving these terms intact and unmediated, Benjamin’s work fails to do justice to the totalizing effort embodied in Marxism.⁸ In other words, Adorno charges in effect that Benjamin only pays lip service to Marx because he feels that this is what Horkheimer and the other members of the Institute want to hear, but that Benjamin’s turn to Marx is an artificial one. If we set aside Adorno’s charge of pandering, there is an important philosophical point here which receives its elaboration in Adorno’s “The Idea of Natural-History.” As we shall see subsequently, in this lecture Adorno proposes to articulate the dialectical relationship between history and nature, so as to avoid the reduction of history to natural fate. Adorno charges that Benjamin’s inattention to the dialectical relationship between history and nature in his account of Baudelaire and the nineteenth century has reified history into something akin to objective fate that remains utterly distinct from subjective experience, and the relationship between subject and object unquestioned. The relationship between nature and artifice and its role in Adorno’s work of the 1930s will be my focus in the next section; in the remainder of this section I shall consider Adorno’s claim that Benjamin’s text as both pragmatic and positivist before turning to Benjamin’s rejoinder.

In his letter dated November 10, Adorno repeatedly characterizes Benjamin’s analysis as pragmatic, and praises “the ascetic discipline to which you’ve subjected yourself in omitting all the crucial theoretical answers and even in making the questions invisible to all but initiates” (SW4:99–100). He wonders whether “the pragmatic content of these subjects … conspire almost demonically against the possibility of its interpretation” (SW4:100). This question provides a key to my reading, for it both distills Adorno’s criticisms of Benjamin’s methodology and shows what’s at stake in their dispute. We get a better sense of what Adorno means by this characterization of Benjamin’s work as “pragmatic” if we consider Max Horkheimer’s use of the term during this period. By 1938 Horkheimer and Adorno had already begun working out the preliminary ideas for The Dialectic of Enlightenment, so we can surmise that Adorno is using the term in much the same way that he and his collaborator will subsequently use it in their published work. Furthermore, he had begun working with Paul Lazarsfeld in January 1938, following Horkheimer’s invitation to work with him at the Institute part-time and on Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio Research Project. It was Lazarsfeld who introduced him to empirical social research, and Adorno’s many reservations about this research program are likely informing his reservations about Benjamin’s Baudelaire as well.

Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason provides an account of the hegemony of subjective or instrumental reason.⁹ The eclipse of reason to which the title refers is the eclipse of objective reason, which “aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims.”¹⁰ Objective reason gets eclipsed by the rise of modern instrumental reason, which “proves to be the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end.”¹¹ Horkheimer traces the origin of instrumental reason back to Empiricism, in particular to the work of John Locke.¹² Horkheimer even indirectly references Baudelaire when he claims that the French Symbolists embraced the absurdity of subjective reason:

The French Symbolists had a special term to express their love for the things which had lost their objective significance, namely, “spleen.” The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its “absurdity,” “perverseness,” as if by a sil...