Five

OUT OF THE PETRIFIED PRIMORDIAL LANDSCAPE (THEODOR ADORNO)

Open up, open up, you’ll be alright, you’ll see. What a joy it is, to turn and look astern, between two visits to the depths, scan in vain the horizon for a sail, it’s a real pleasure, upon my word it is, to be unable to drown, under such conditions. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

When Walter Benjamin reviewed Adorno’s first major work, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, he presented Kierkegaard as a latecomer to idealism (SW2, 703). For Adorno, Kierkegaard paradoxically becomes an idealist by virtue of his critique and undermining of idealism. Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard brings out the most fundamental elements of Kierkegaard’s thought in Adorno. Of all the thinkers in conversation with Kierkegaard in this book, Adorno quotes Kierkegaard’s work most extensively, and it is fitting that the book culiminate in Adorno’s relationship to Kierkegaard’s work. Adorno directly confronts and engages with Kierkegaard in his first published book Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Following his precocious critique, Adorno adopts Kierkegaard’s indirect politics more stridently than the other key figures in this book. It is incredible to see that Adorno is mentioned so rarely in Kierkegaard scholarship, and when he is it is often with distaste and dismissal by some of the most excellent Kierkegaard scholars—mostly because of Adorno’s intermingling of pseudonyms in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. For example, Merold Westphal calls Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic “the most irresponsible book ever written on Kierkegaard.”1 Westphal attacks Adorno for taking Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms literally, thereby constructing an entire philosophy of Kierkegaard which, according to Westphal, makes Kierkegaard seem incoherent and unintelligible; and Alastair Hannay cites Adorno as an example of “ignoring the interpretational challenges of the pseudonymity.”2 And yet he is one of few major figures of twentieth century European philosophy and critical theory to have devoted a whole book on Kierkegaard and penetratively explore many overlooked aspects of the writer. There are a few works who have treated the subject of Adorno seriously alongside Kierkegaard such as Hermann Deuser’s Dialektische Theologie: Studien zu Adornos Metaphysik und zum Spätwerk Kierkegaards, Geoffrey A. Hale’s Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, Isak Winkel Holm’s Tanken i Billedet: Søren Kierkegaards Poetik, Thomas Pepper’s Singularities

178 KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS

Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century, and Roland Boer’s article “A Totality of Ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard”.3 The book’s controversy is not in doubt, as Adorno freely conflates various pseudonyms and uses now obsolete translations, while his critique is unrelenting. Adorno’s merciless critique is a similar kind to the type that Kierkegaard practiced in relation to Hegel at times. However, Adorno’s Kierkegaard, to quote from a recent text that tackles this relationship, is “[…] a testament to the importance of Kierkegaard’s work for Adorno’s understanding of philosophy.”4 Adorno regarded his book, as his “farewell” to Kierkegaard,5 after many years of obsessive reading (in his youth) of him. Paul Tillich was the supervisor of Adorno’s Kierkegaard, which was ‘passed’ in 1931 and published on the day Hitler came to power in 1933. In the book, Adorno argues that Kierkegaard fails to develop a dialectic, and that Kierkegaard’s turn towards inwardness leads further into despair and to the exclusion of the possibility of historical change. Yet Adorno’s affinity with Kierkegaard operates on multiple levels: the belief in the connection between philosophical thinking and literary reflection, the perception of the beginnings of a faceless society, opening up Hegel’s system, the engagement with music, bringing Christianity to an extreme tension with bourgeois society, the use of paradox and unresolved contradiction in thinking, the eternal position of non- compromise, and the many allusions to metaphor, image and fairytale for philosophical use. And yet Adorno criticises Kierkegaard for so many of these aspects latent in the latter’s thinking, such as falling prey to the bourgeois interior, sacrificing intellect for belief by using paradox, mixing literature or art with philosophy or truth content, distorting Hegel’s philosophy, and turning inwardness into myth and metaphor. I will examine Adorno’s texts, most especially Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment, essays from Notes on Literature 1-2, Prisms, and the later essays on Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” and “Kierkegaard Once Again”, and develop my points further that, first, Kierkegaard’s inwardness can be used as an expression for praxis, and how it does not succumb to Adorno’s critique of inwardness as petrified; second, Adorno’s negative dialectic is rather a continuation of Kierkegaard’s dialectic of disintegration; third, through the use and analysis of myth, both Adorno and Kierkegaard incorporate their melancholy into philosophical writing; and finally, by exploring Adorno’s critique as well as his own philosophy as a form of Kierkegaardian praxis, the negative space and sets of masks that make up indirect politics are deepened in this final chapter.