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Antinomic of Form in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Analysed THE NARROWEST PATH: ANTINOMIC OF FORM IN ADORNO’S AESTHETIC THEORY ANALYSED THROUGH KLEIST, HEGEL, AND MARX by Omid Mehrgan A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland September 2018 © 2018 Omid Mehrgan All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT This dissertation takes Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as a point of departure to analyze a number of antinomies basic to modern German thought and bourgeois society. The principal aim of this dissertation is to interpret Aesthetic Theory’s diagnosis of the nature of aesthetic form under the historical conditions of modern bourgeois society since the late eighteenth century as a basis for examining the fate of autonomous form as such under capitalism. The dissertation opens by exploring Adorno’s late thesis that art in bourgeois society must have a double character as “both autonomous and a fait social” if it is to fulfill its condition as something made that appears like nature. I analyze the inevitable conflict between two equally valid aspects of the work of art: the formal law and its genesis in capitalist production. In order to lay bare this antinomy, I employ aesthetic and historical categories from Idealist, Marxist, and neo-Kantian traditions that make up the immediate context for Adorno’s aesthetic theory. After revisiting Adorno’s proposed resolution to the antinomy, in chapter two I read Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810) in terms of the novella’s effort to reconcile its two conflicted tendencies: forensically pursuing its theme, a lawsuit, and moving towards its own lawfulness as a literary work. A reconciliation is necessary so that the novella can separate itself both from the suggestions of the prevalent juridical discourse and from dominant literary habits. While it fails to reconcile them, I argue that by showing the conflict in its formal structure it becomes a successful literary work. Chapter three examines Hegel’s systematic and historical constitution of the person in his Elements of the Philosophy of Rights (1821) and detects a conflict between the self-governing ‘I’ and its emergence out of the modern relations of hired labor. As the first major modern philosopher to turn to the new discipline of political economy, Hegel was at pains to reconcile ii the predominantly economic life of bourgeois society with the autonomy of modern individuals owing their status as persons to their relationship with hired labor. These relationships, by design, make it impossible for all individuals to become persons, however. I discuss the difficulties in Hegel’s resolution to this conflict through his theory of the state. Chapter four shows how, in Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), the revolutionary act of proclaiming the republic as a political form claiming to represent all people comes into conflict with that act as it is conditioned by the rise of capital and the attendant rule of one class over all others. Written at a turning point in modern European history when the idealist projects of autonomy in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics had reached their limits, Marx’s short book reveals, according to my interpretation, the philosophical import and the political implications of the conflict between an autonomous form, the French republic, and its real conditions of possibility in capitalist society. I conclude the dissertation by discussing the political nature of the aesthetic modality in which the modern problem of autonomous form was posed and trace the path to Adorno back through Marx, Kleist, and Hegel. Dissertation Advisors: Prof. Leonardo F. Lisi and Prof. Hent de Vries Dissertation Readers: Prof. Rochelle Tobias, Prof. Dean Moyar, Prof. Becquer Seguin iii ACKNOWEDGEMENTS If the enterprise of dialectics––of which I have tried to offer a piece in this dissertation––is to have a moral, then it must acknowledge the indebtedness of a matter at hand, a work, a state of being, to its conditions of coming to be. The Humanities Center (now the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature) and its decades-long informal extension, the house and personal library of Professor Richard Macksey, provided the real conditions for the life and the study that produced this dissertation. For all their structural confidence and administrative makeup, these conditions could never persist without the commitment, imagination, and courage of a finite number of individuals. If anything in this work is worthy of presenting, it comes from the experience of spending time with the following names in the best socialist mode; all its failures are due to the worst kind of individualism. I thank warmly my advisors Professor Leonardo F. Lisi and Professor Hent de Vries for their unabated backing throughout the past half-decade. Professor de Vries effectively helped me join the Humanities Center. He then lit the narrow trail I chose in the thickets of modern European thought in general and the dark woods of Adorno’s corpus in particular. Professor Lisi suffered with me through every single page of the main text of this dissertation, pages that preserve the memories of his rigorous comments. If advising is making others learn, then it no doubt shares the same genus of suffering that Aeschylus said accompanies learning. I am grateful to Professors Rochelle Tobias and Paola Marrati for all they taught me and for their generosity of spirit. I would like to express my gratitude to Professors Eckart Förster and Dean Moyar for what they taught me in their seminars about German Idealist philosophy. I thank Marva Philip for her radical cordiality and all the help she never stopped giving. I am indebted to my friends and interlocutors in Baltimore: Arash Abazari (whose efforts brought me to Johns Hopkins), Lucy Bergeret, Martijn Buijs, Samantha Carmel, Elena Fabietti, Alexander Host, Jacob Levi, Aviva and Avraham and, very recently, Emmanuelle Rot (whose friendship made Baltimore a warmer place), Hale Şirin, Benjamin Stein. Alexander Host and Monica Birth edited the dissertation and patiently repaired its writing. In thanking my friend, mentor, and colleague, Professor Richard Macksey for all he has done for me, I can do no better than offer a bit of a genealogy of his magnanimity by quoting what the Humanities Center alumnus Oleg Gelikman wrote of him in his 2006 dissertation (“The Idea of Prose as Modernist Poetics”): “[W]ho offered shelter, comfort and friendship during two difficult years.” The remarkable congregation of his books may be safely taken as a synecdoche for the scope of Dick Macksey’s grace. I am forever in his debt. I thank warmly Morad Farhadpour and Professor Yousef Abazari, my friends and mentors of many years in Tehran. It was the fortunate tangential touching of the curves of their intellects and characters, and their passion for a genuine “universal life,” that determined the course that the line of my work and life was to take. I salute my family, whose members now reside in different quarters of the world, for all they gave me, and I gave little in return. iv My sincere thanks go to Michael Schwarz at the Walter Benjamin and Th. W. Adorno Archive (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). With kindness and insight, he devoted time and expertise to help me find my way through Adorno’s lectures transcripts. I am also grateful to the librarians and coordinators and all the workers at Milton S. Eisenhower Library and the affiliated libraries. And I thank, as I owe everything to, my fellow traveler, Bahareh Moazen, a true aesthete who knows how to turn everything, sensible or intelligible, into something “de complet, de serré et de coulant.” With her stalwart character, she never ceased to come up with just syntheses for the conflicts we faced at critical points in our past decade and more together, in Tehran and in Baltimore. Adorno moved to New York at nearly the same age as I moved to Baltimore. For all our grave differences, I would like to think that we have had one concern in common that he voiced in his report on his American years: how to remain what one was back at home while accustoming oneself to the new conditions abroad? The relation of autonomy and assimilation is not alien to the many (non)immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers today who had to abandon home––both those on their Mediterranean journey to the banks of Greek islands or the shores of Italy and Spain, or crossing Rio Grande to reach America, and others who are lucky enough safely to land in educational institutions. The present study wishes to be a tribute to the experience of the uprooted and the displaced. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowedgements .............................................................................................................................. iv AbBreviations ................................................................................................................................... vii IntroDuction: "Not Truth in History, But History in Truth"..................................................................... 1 I. Argument and Organization of the Present Dissertation ...................................................... 1 II. The General Problematic: Validity versus Genesis ............................................................... 8 III. The Special Problematic: What Is An Aesthetic Antinomy? ............................................ 16 Chapter One: Adorno’s Late Thesis: Autonomous Form Is Antinomic ..................................................
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