Adorno renewed

Gilles Moutot’s book offers a masterful and renewed reading of the philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), which gives it a unique place in the field of French studies, and certainly also in the broader theoretical context of discussions in Germany and the United States. This reading, without a doubt, became possible due to a philosophical conjuncture which passes through the names of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who constitute in an explicit, and not exclusive, way the working partners who make it possible to read Adorno’s text fresh. The objective, deployed in a tight argument and always attentive to its interlocutors, is nonetheless very specific and targeted as it concerns critical theory today. Against the reception of Jürgen Habermas, whose ambivalence was to make himself the heir of the said first critical theory by sacrificing in certain respects Theodor W. Adorno, it is a question of showing that there is, in the latter, a critical theory which remains to be discovered and whose understanding could justify the idea of ​​its philosophical relevance, in the context of questions linked to social theory. Taking into account also the very recent developments of the Frankfurt School represented by Axel Honneth, in the inflection initiated in relation to the thought of Adorno which seemed definitively condemned for having been judged too absolutely pessimistic and without emancipatory potential in the eyes of Habermas, unless recast in the new paradigm of communication, Gilles Moutot shows, on the contrary, that the structural distrust that Adorno always adopted vis-à-vis the communication and meaning, is what gives his philosophical work its dynamic coherence and a critical status irreducible to any other. A double reading strategy follows, carried out in a fascinating journey through Adorno’s abundant work in German: taking up the question of history on one side, and that of language on the other, in order to confront to the definition, status and issues of a dialectic qualified as negative.

The allegory

To the extent that Habermas’s reading of T.W. Adorno’s main issue was the so-called philosophy of history contained in Dialectics of reason co-written with Max Horkheimer during the Second World War, but also to the extent that history, in any case, represents one of the major issues of any thought claiming any link to Marxism, Gilles Moutot gives this theme a special place and guiding principle in his book. The significant and inaugural movement consists of opening up Dialectics of reason from any insular position, in order to situate the work in the context of a philosophy which finds its first and lasting impulses in Adorno’s earliest texts, written in the early 1930s, including Philosophy news And The idea of ​​natural history. Gilles Moutot shows the astonishing continuity which exists between these first philosophical steps and the work of great maturity which is Negative Dialectic, seeing in the problem of allegory, coming from Walter Benjamin and very early present in Adorno, the matrix capable of identifying many essential aspects of the latter’s conception of history, and also of the critique of the totality which will have as its issue the relationship to Hegel. In at least two ways the idea of ​​allegory, forged by Benjamin in his reflection on German baroque drama and taken up by Adorno in the form of an operational concept, makes it possible to identify the modalities of a thought of history which cannot, and even must no longer be measured in terms of the philosophies of history (Marx and finally Hegel), which are on the contrary refuted in their claim to anticipate, declare, or simply identify a meaning in the course of events.

Allegory, in fact, in the relationship it weaves between what is called “ arch-history » (Urgeschichte), nature and history, prohibits any constitution and resumption of a meaning, contrary to what defines the logic of the symbol. An abyss between image and meaning, it suggests the modalities of an interpretation which ruins both the original and the expressive totality. It is also, as an image, a writing (Schrift), a text that must be deciphered, but in a way that cannot resolve a constitutive strangeness. Thus allegory becomes the pivot of what allows us to understand more accurately the orientation of Adorno’s own philosophical work, not only in the direction of history, but also of aesthetics. Rereading and commenting in detail on the correspondence between Benjamin and Adorno between 1928 and 1940, Gilles Moutot relativizes, among the comments, the simplistic oppositions which have caused the latter to be relegated to a historicism of bad quality, unlike the former which would have demonstrates in this area a misunderstood originality and audacity. Joining the analyzes of Georges Didi-Huberman devoted to Benjamin, he argues on the subject of Adorno in favor of a history made of heterogeneous temporalities, of anachronisms, removed from any representation of a continuous and oriented time.

The progress of the material, principle of reflection on the works

The very specific extension that Adorno’s allegorical orientation finds, in the field of aesthetics, provides particularly rich and accurate pages on the status of the progress of the material, particularly in the field of music. Here again, and refuting any historicist type explanation, Gilles Moutot specifies the determinations independently of which we cannot access the status of the historicity of the material ; namely the difference that must be established between production and technique in art, that existing between instrumental and technical reason, or even between the intention of the artist and the content (Gehalt) of the work. The material, thus, does not arise for Adorno from an alleged necessity of history, but rather from this “ exact imagination » (Exact Phantasie) with which Gilles Moutot closes his book, and which, in the particular field of music, makes possible the idea of ​​composition, then conceived as the “ differential of freedom within determination » (p. 634). The progress of the material is not a principle of artistic evolution, but a “ principle of reflection on works » (p. 290), themselves considered as writing, a hieroglyph containing an insurmountable element of otherness and strangeness. These analyses, in a more general way, find their developments in the vis-à-vis constructed with regard to contemporary philosophies which are those on the one hand, of the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, in the resumption of the theses formulated by Christoph Menke – in his book The sovereignty of art who had worked to thematize a possible relationship between Derridean deconstruction and the negativity of Adornian aesthetics, approaching the aesthetic experience as an indefinite postponement of meanings ; and on the other the ontology of Martin Heidegger, which gives material for subtle and differentiated comments having at stake not only the technique, but on Adorno’s side the work, the image, and especially the language. The author of The essay on Adorno works to redraw the contours of an open present, and thus to promote the reworked definition of a utopia which is not that of a planned, promised or hoped for beyond, but that of the factor of internal indetermination to historical effectiveness ; this very thing which makes possible and justifies the bias of micrology in the theoretical and practical domain. Paying attention to the motive of messianism and redemption, the one which closes in particular Minima MoraliaGilles Moutot supports, for Adorno, the idea of ​​a messianism without messianism (p. 235).

The refusal of the communication paradigm

One of the most original and fruitful reading choices is to relativize the doctrinal aspect of Adorno’s text and to question, in a way considered essential here, the form, that is to say the discursive practices which provide the Adornian philosophical gesture with being intrinsically in the language, and in this carrying a polemical charge whose final stirrings target the Hegelian dialectic. This is the aspect that Adorno’s most informed detractors would not have noticed, especially for Dialectics of reasona text that is effectively illegible if we do not integrate the art of exaggeration and screening which aims to ruin, in the present, the representations that we could still have of history and its supposed meaning . By analyzing the argument linked to psychoanalysis, as well as to myth, Gilles Moutot explores these discursive strategies which despite everything make the Dialectics of reason “ insoluble in postmodernity » (p. 434). One of the issues is therefore also the status of language, in Adorno’s philosophy, especially since the succession of Habermas contributed to ratifying the requirement for a paradigm shift, that of communicative rationality, in order to save the potential for emancipation deemed ruined by presuppositions linked to a philosophy of consciousness.

But more generally, this is the situation of Adorno’s philosophy in relation to the linguistic turn of XX^e century that arises, whether we consider it with regard to its communicative, hermeneutical, or pragmatic determinations. The thesis that Gilles Moutot defends is that, not of ignorance on the part of Adorno, of this turning point, but of a refusal whose implications we can find and measure within his philosophy, in the implementation of the critical dimension that negative dialectics carries within it. Chapter six, which leads to a lively confrontation with Jürgen Habermas and his emulator Albrecht Wellmer, also supported by the openings proposed by Axel Honneth, is very stimulating. It is a question of reconnecting with Adorno’s critique of the primacy of the subject, and thus of exploring the motif of the non-self-identity of the subject which is on the contrary dismissed, unknown to all philosophical orientations which favor a dialectic of the universal to think the particular, which is the case, from different perspectives, for Hegel, Marx, and Habermas. The negative dialectic is that which, internal to the particular, can identify the possibility of a differential within the subject itself, and become a lever for other modalities of individuation than those imposed by the social order, as Foucault has it. worked on his side. Also Gilles Moutot, mobilizing in particular the question of psychoanalysis – via Sigmund Freud and Donald W. Winnicott – which proves crucial here, he opposes, to the philosophy of intersubjectivity which is that of Habermas, a primacy of intersubjectivity in Adorno – which would correspond in Axel Honneth to the “ intrapsychic communication » (p. 519) – which cannot in any way be reabsorbed into a theory of communication, in the argumentative sense. For all this it is therefore also necessary to identify a status of language, in Adorno, which his immediate successor was unable or unwilling to recognize: this is what Gilles Moutot patiently endeavors to do, by questioning the status of the mimesisa somatic impulse that he considers as part of a non-discursive conception of language, particularly evident in art with regard to its resistance to meaning. Hence the strategic character of aesthetics, which “ could well be the arrow stuck in the Achilles heel of the theory of communicational action » (p. 526). There would remain, for the author of these few lines, the question of knowing to what extent the mimetic relationship is not itself susceptible to being caught up in the logic of domination.