A Kind of Leave-Taking

The conclusion revists major results of the study and ties Adorno’s concept of the uncoercive gaze to the question of writing as “leave-taking.”

The Artwork without Cardinal Direction

Chapter 6 marks a transition from the uncoercive gaze as it finds expression in other aspects of Adorno’s work to the problem of orientation, understood both as an intellectual phenomenon and as a problem to be considered in relation to the work of art. This chapter adds another case study to the examination of Adorno’s critical practice of the uncoercive gaze by complicating the concept of orientation and supposed “cognitive maps” provided by the artwork and by theoretical discourse. Tracing Adorno’s abiding engagement with the problem of orientation back to Kant’s essay on what it might mean to orient oneself in thinking, the chapter interrogates how Adorno’s engagement with the problem of orientation and the attendant specter of disorientation inflects a broader set of concerns that traverse his writing throughout its various periods.

The Literary Artwork between Word and Concept

This chapter investigates another set of problems with which the uncoercive gaze must contend when it fastens upon a work: the relationship of speculative thought to the work of art and the ways in which the chasm between literal and figurative speech bears upon that relationship. One of the themes that a reading of Kafka’s The Trial should emphasize is the way in which a literary text both calls for philosophical interpretation and resists such interpretation at the same time. One problem that arises out of this constellation concerns the question of the relationship between the literal and the figurative nature of a text’s rhetorical operations. If Kafka’s novel, by causing the relation between the literal and the figural to enter a space of indeterminacy, enacts a situation in which, as Adorno characterizes it, “a sickness means everything [eine Krankheit alles Bedeuten],” no reading of Kafka—at least no reading informed by the sensibilities of the uncoercive gaze—can afford to ignore the precise conceptual terms of this sickness. Finally, to cast Adorno’s reflections on Kafka into sharper relief, the chapter also considers them in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s recent interpretation of The Trial as Kafka’s commentary on the imbrication of law and slander.

Judging by Refraining from Judgment

This chapter focuses on Adorno’s understanding of the category of judgment. Proceeding from Adorno’s apodictic interpretation of a poem by the German Biedermeier writer Eduard Mörike, it reconstructs what it might mean for Adorno to argue for the critical practice of judging by refraining from judgment. Mörike’s children’s poem “Mousetrap Rhyme” is the only poem that Adorno chooses to quote in its entirety in his Aesthetic Theory. His surprising choice reveals how the uncoercive gaze can never be reduced to a set of ideological operations or a priori correspondences but rather must confront, in the space of the work of art, the question of its judgment—and the typically unspoken premises and presuppositions of any judgment—always one more time. Here, the uncoercive gaze fastens upon the artwork in a way that allows art to become world without reducing the art to the condition of being merely that which already is the case or that which already claims to be world. The artwork keeps alive the singular form of judgment as judgment without judging, in which the ultimate arrest of judgment remains deferred in virtue of another judgment, based on a future critical engagement, that is always still to come.

Adorno and the Uncoercive Gaze

Chapter 1 develops in detail Adorno’s concept of the uncoercive gaze as the primary mode of reflective engagement with his objects of thinking. Proceeding from an explication of his conviction that the kind of thinking that philosophy performs cannot be performed without also considering its relation to questions of language, this chapter sets the stage for our understanding of the uncoercive gaze. By refusing to submit to the dictates of an obscene and transfixed Hinstarren—a mere staring—at the object, Adorno’s uncoercive gaze eschews the critical violence that attends to the moment in which a thinker or writer works to superimpose onto the object this or that set standard of measurement, premise, agenda, or assumption that, as a priori ossified modes of relating to the object, only ends up by missing a certain critical intimacy with the object—and thus its productive primacy, its critical Vorrang.

The Inheritance of the Constellation

This chapter devotes itself to the complex relation between Adorno and Hegel via the question of inheritance and the constellative form itself. To refine our understanding of Adorno’s critical gesture of the uncoercive gaze in relation to certain aspects of Hegelian thought, the chapter focuses in particular on Adorno’s understanding of Hegel’s masterful early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), a text without which Adorno’s practice of negative dialectics hardly would be graspable. By focusing on the question of an uneasily “inherited” intellectual tradition—an inheritance with which it is ultimately impossible fully to come to terms and that continues to remain something of an unhealed wound—Adorno’s uncoercive gaze here is exposed and enriched in terms of its genealogical and historical substrata. In works such as Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno not only grapples with the “with” when he thinks “with Hegel,” he also theorizes his own intellectual project in terms of a spectral inheritance, a legacy that is enigmatic and demands to be interpreted always one more time, rather than being taken for granted as a stable system of precepts, dialectical or otherwise.

Buried Possibility

This chapter explores instances of the uncoercive gaze in Adorno’s thinking of tradition in relation to that of his allegedly antipodal contemporary, Hannah Arendt. Adorno’s and Arendt’s respective thinking of the difficult concept of tradition is itself in constant dialogue with that of Benjamin, a mutual friend over whose intellectual legacy the two would often quarrel. But rather than follow the tradition of much of the existing scholarship by merely positing Benjamin as the point of division between the irreconcilable projects of Adorno and Arendt, for all their differences, the two also interconnected in that both of their reflections on the concept of tradition powerfully engage with Benjamin’s thinking of this problem. Especially in Adorno’s often-overlooked 1966 essay “On Tradition” and in Arendt’s Between Past and Future, their two conceptions of thinking tradition crystallize into conceptual rigor. While Adorno develops a concept of tradition that affirms the critical potential of the traditional by dismantling it through the movement of a dialectical negativity, Arendt engages tradition by examining experiential gaps in our thinking of temporality. The two ways of conceptualizing tradition, each in their unique way, both hinge on the aporetic structure that powerfully traverses any thinking of tradition in modernity.

Introduction

The introduction situates the main concerns of the book, especially Adorno’s concept of the “uncoercive gaze,” in relation to his work as a whole. It also analyzes Adorno’s “art of reading” and articulates some of the stakes of reading Adorno’s challenging texts. Adorno emerges both as a thinker who invites us to learn to think with him and as a thinker who himself thinks with others (such as Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, Arendt, Kafka, Derrida, and Agamben) and thus always is a thinker in dialogue.

False Life, Living on

This chapter casts an uncoercive gaze at the relation between Adorno and Derrida, with special emphasis on the problem of desiring to live a right life inside of a wrong one. Tracing a set of uneasy couplets—including thinking and thanking, the prize and the price, and false life in relation to living on—this chapter augments, with the strategic help of suggestive Derridean concepts such as sur-vivance as well as remarks delivered by Derrida on the occasion of being awarded the Adorno Prize, our understanding of the stakes of Adorno’s uncoercive gaze by returning to a vexing statement from Minima Moralia: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”—meaning “there is no right (or correct) life within (or inside of) a wrong (or false) one”—which in the standard English translation is rendered as “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” How precisely one chooses to translate Adorno’s apodictic sentence has far-reaching implications. What emerges here is an engagement with the very forms of survival that promise, ever so fleetingly and intermittently, the experience of life as lived, fragile life.