Bilderverbot: Adorno & the Ban on Images Sebastian Truskolaski Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD in Visual Cultures February 2016 1 Declaration: I, Sebastian Truskolaski, hereby confirm that the content of this thesis is entirely my own. Signature:_______________________________________ Date:_______________ 2 Acknowledgments: I’d like to thank my family, my supervisors and my friends who generously commented on sections of this thesis. Vielen Dank. 3 Abstract: My thesis examines the significance of Theodor W. Adorno’s recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God: the ‘Bilderverbot’. In particular I focus on three facets of this figure that occur at prominent junctures of Adorno’s work: his ‘imageless materialism’ (Chapter One), his ‘inverse theology’ (Chapter Two) and his ‘negative aesthetics’ (Chapter Three). In each case I argue that Adorno strips the image ban of its religious associations and enlists it in the service of a broadly Marxian critique of capitalist modernity. The ban on picturing the absolute is rendered as a ban on pre-determining a future in which all historical antagonisms are reconciled. As Adorno argues, only an unflinching criticism of the present can throw into relief the contours of an ‘imageless’ Utopia. I approach Adorno’s writings with a view to his sources, many of which contain notable references to the image ban that span the history of modern German thought. They include: Marx and Lukács, Benjamin and Bloch, Kant and Hegel, as well as Hölderlin, Kafka and Schoenberg. By emphasising these elective affinities, I aim to shed light on Adorno’s singular application of the figure of the image ban to his critical project. In this regard, I hope to dispense with certain prevalent characterisations of Adorno as a quietistic aesthete advanced by critics such as Habermas, Taubes and Agamben. Far from designating a merely historical curio, I argue that Adorno’s singular appropriation of the image ban serves as a potent model for thinking an aesthetics of resistance in the present. 4 Table of Contents: Title Page...………………………………………………………………………………….....1 Declaration…………………………………………………………………………………..…2 Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….3 Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………...4 Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………5 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………...168 Image Credits………………………………………………………………………………..179 *** Prelude: Adorno and the Ban on Images……………………………………………………8 Chapter One: Imageless Materialism……………………………………………………...17 Part I: Adorno & Materialism………………………………………………………...21 i.) The Theory of Reflection…………………………………………………..21 a.) Engels……………………………………………………………...22 b.) Lenin...…………………………………………………………….24 ii.) Adorno’s Critique of Reflection Theory…………………………………..28 a.) Hegel……………………………………………………………….29 b.) Atomism…………………………………………………………...32 iii.) Speculative Realism……………………………………………………...35 a.) Correlationism……………………………………………………..37 b.) Hume’s Problem…………………………………………………...40 Conclusion…………………………………………………….43 Part II: Adorno & The Image Ban…………………………………………………….44 i.) Image & Imagelessness.…………………………………………………...45 a.) Inversion…………………………………………………………...46 b.) Negation…………………………………………………………...50 ii.) Adorno’s Concept of Materialism………………………………………...53 a.) Primacy of the Object……..………………………………………54 5 b.) Suffering…………………………………………………………..58 Conclusion…………………………………………………….60 Chapter Two: Inverse Theology:.…………………………………………………………..62 Part I: Adorno & Theology…………………………………………………………...66 i.) Life & Work………………………………………………………………..66 ii.) Negative Universal History: Religion – Theology – Metaphysics………..68 a.) Negative Universal History………………………………………..69 b.) Dialectic of Reason………………………………………………..71 Religion……………………………………………………….74 Theology………………………………………………………76 a.) Reason & Revelation…………………………………76 b.) Negative Theology..………………………………….81 Metaphysics…………………………………………………..83 a.) Metaphysics at the Time of its Fall……..……………85 b.) Solidarity with Metaphysics...………..………………86 iii.) Capitalism as Religion……………………………………………………88 a.) Benjamin’s Fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’…………………...89 b.) The Capitalist Cult Religion…...………………………………….90 ‘Guilt History’….………………...…………………………...92 iv.) Secularisation…………………………………………………………….96 a.) Blumenberg………………………………………………………..97 b.) Agamben…………………………………………………………..99 c.) Freud...…...………………………………………………………102 Part II: Adorno’s Inverse Theology…………………………………………………103 i.) Inversion (ii)………………………………………………………………105 ii.) ‘As If’…………………………………………………………………….107 Conclusion…………………………………………………...111 Chapter Three: Negative Aesthetics.……………………………………………………...113 Part I: Aesthetics & Bilderverbot…………………………………………………....116 i.) Kant……………………………………………………………………….117 a.) Critique of the Power of Judgement……………………………...117 6 b.) Beauty & Sublimity………………………………………………119 ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’…………………………………...119 ‘Analytic of the Sublime’……………………………………124 ii.) Lyotard…………………………………………………………………...128 a.) Lyotard, Kant & the Imageless Sublime…...…………………….129 b.) Lyotard, Adorno & Poetry After Auschwitz…………………….133 iii.) Hegel…………………………………………………………………….136 a.) The Denigration of Natural Beauty………………………………137 ‘The Idea as Life’……………………………………………138 ‘Deficiency of Natural Beauty’……………………………...139 b.) Hegel & the Imageless Sublime…………………………………141 ‘The Particular Forms of Art – The Symbolic’.……………..142 Judaism & Sublimity………………………………………...144 Conclusion…………………………………………………...145 Part II: Natural Beauty & Bilderverbot……………………………………………………...146 i.) Adorno’s Return to Natural Beauty………………………………………………148 ii.) Art, Nature & Beauty in Capitalist Modernity…………………………………..150 The Promise of Natural Beauty……………………………………………...152 a.) Promise……………………………………………………………..152 b.) Remembrance……………………………………………………....153 c.) Language……………………………………………………………154 iii.) Imagelessness & Natural Beauty (Conclusion)….……………………………...157 Reprise: ‘Zum Ende’..……………………………………………………………………..161 7 Prelude: Adorno and the Ban on Images “Die Kinder haben keine Zukunft. Sie fürchten sich vor der ganzen Welt. Sie machen sich kein Bild von ihr, nur von dem Hüben und Drüben, denn es läßt sich mit Kreidestrichen begrenzen.”1 Ingeborg Bachmann In an essay titled ‘Sacred Fragment’ (1963), Theodor W. Adorno gestures towards an irreducible iconoclasm at the heart of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera Moses und Aron (1932).2 Schoenberg’s Exodus-adaptation “is in pieces”, we are told; it is “fragmentary, like the tables of the law which Moses smashed”.3 This sense of fragmentation is thematised in Act Two, Scene Four of Schoenberg’s libretto – an episode that has been memorably committed to film by the French directors Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.4 It portrays Moses’ descent from Mount Sinai where he had received the tables with the Ten Commandments “written with the finger of God”.5 Upon returning, Moses finds that the Israelites had grown restless during his forty-day absence. They had urged his brother Aron to reinstate their old religious ways: “[g]ive us back our Gods to worship; let them bring us order”.6 Under the threat of death, Aron had relented. “O Israel, I return your gods to you, and also give you to them, just as you have demanded”.7 Famously, Aron had proceeded to fashion an effigy in the form of a golden calf: “common and visible, imaged in gold”.8 The Israelites, in turn, had frenziedly worshipped this idol. Schoenberg’s stage notes laconically sum up the action: “[b]urnt offerings are brought to 1 “The children have no future. They are afraid of the whole world. They do not make themselves an image of it; they only picture hopscotch squares, for they can be delimited in chalk.” Ingeborg Bachmann, “Jugend in einer österreichischen Stadt”, in Werke, Bd. 2: Erzählungen, ed. Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum & Clemens Münster (Munich: Piper, 1980), 86-87 [My translation] 2 Schoenberg composed the first two acts of his opera between 1930-32, i.e. before his re-conversion to Judaism and his forced emigration to the United States in 1933. Schoenberg omitted the second ‘a’ in his spelling of Aron because the amount of letters in the title would have otherwise tallied 13 – a bad omen, in his view. The English translators of Schoenberg’s libretto apparently did not share his concern. Cf. Allen Shaw, Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 148 3 Theodor W. Adorno, “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’”, in Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 225 4 Cf. Barton Bryg, “Musical Modernism and the Schoenberg Films”, in Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 139-163 5 Exodus, 31:18 6 Arnold Schoenberg, “Moses and Aaron (Act Two, Scene Two)”, in Schoenberg’s ‘Moses and Aaron’, with the Complete Libretto in German and English, ed. Karl Wörner, trans. Paul Hamburger (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 161 7 Ibid 8 Ibid [My emphasis] 8 the altar”; 9 “wild drunkenness overtakes everyone”; 10 “extravagant dancing”; 11 “blood off’rings”; 12 “Destruction and Suicide”; 13 “Erotic Orgy”. 14 Upon witnessing the Israelites’ idolatrous excesses, Moses furiously smashes the tables with the law: “[a]nd it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon