DIALECTICS IN TURMOIL

Abstract

Consideration of the work of Sade in relation to Adorno usually refers to the much-discussed chapter from Dialektik der Aufklärung. But Adorno made a number of other remarks across his career that suggest a very different reading. I will discuss the three most significant of these remarks and show how they develop an approach to the libidinal aspect of aesthetic experience that challenges our understanding of the relation of thought and language. In doing so, Sade’s works indicate an extraordinary liberation of the dialectic of natural-history through a mimesis of desire, which is made apparent in what Sade’s texts literally present; in their contingency and also their facticity.

Keywords:

• Adorno
• Sade
• Kant
• aesthetics
• dialectics

ORCID

William S. Allen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4731-2955

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This paper was originally written in response to a request by Gerhard Richter to deliver a paper at a conference at Brown University in 2016. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, this occasion never came to pass, but it has formed the seed from which a book-length study of Sade has arisen, entitled Sade’s Critique of Reason.

1 Adorno, Minima Moralia 53; trans. E.F.N. Jephcott as Minima Moralia 48. Hereafter cited as MM, translations amended throughout. In the fragment preceding this one, “English spoken,” Adorno makes an opposing point, for in coming across books written in English when he was a child, he had the impression that they “were not books at all, but advertisements” (MM 52/47). It says much about Adorno’s situation that encountering French gives rise to thoughts about sexuality, while English, just as incomprehensibly, gives rise to thoughts of commerce. That the lack of understanding can still be interpreted differently indicates something of the mimetic understanding of language within the specific context of Adorno’s childhood, which goes beyond mere clichés about French and English characters.

2 Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 286–87 and 301–02. As the editor’s afterword to Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 221–24, makes clear the chapter on Juliette was written by Horkheimer in late 1942. See also Comay, “Adorno avec Sade,” whose reading of Dialektik der Aufklärung in many ways laid the groundwork for my own.

3 Sade, Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu 133; trans. John Phillips as Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue 7.

4 Adorno, Prismen 279–80; trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber as Prisms 265–66. Hereafter cited as P.

5 I have examined Adorno’s thoughts on Kafka’s and Beckett’s notion of “how it is” in Aesthetics of Negativity. This work also includes an extensive analysis of Adorno’s understanding of mimesis and its relation to language and artworks.

6 Foucault, History of Madness 360–62, 532–35.

7 Adorno, Metaphysik 218; trans. Edmund Jephcott as Metaphysics 140; hereafter cited as M. See also Negative Dialektik 366; trans. E.B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics 373. Skirke gives a very helpful analysis of the literal in “Metaphysical Experience and Constitutive Error in Adorno’s ‘Meditations on Metaphysics.’”

8 This understanding of the literal begins to resemble Paul de Man’s sense of material vision, particularly in terms of the relation between reading and blindness, and of resistance as a mode rather than an obstacle of thought.

9 Background on the development of pornographic literature can be found in Goulemot, Forbidden Texts; Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France; and Hunt, The Invention of Pornography.

10 Sade, Histoire de Juliette 1025; trans. Austryn Wainhouse as Juliette 934. Hereafter cited as HJ.

11 Sade’s readings in libertine and materialist thought have been studied extensively by Jean Deprun and Michel Delon; for a useful overview, which is nevertheless too hasty in assuming that Sade’s thought is incoherent, see Warman, Sade.

12 Lacan, “Kant with Sade”; Žižek, “Kant with (or against) Sade”; David-Ménard, Les Constructions de l’universel; and Banham, “The Antimonies of Pure Practical Libertine Reason.” On diabolical evil, see Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” 57–60.

13 Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade 21–22; trans. Stuart and Michelle Kendall as Lautréamont and Sade 12. Hereafter cited as LS.

14 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment §48, 190. Hereafter cited as CPJ.

15 Sade, “Reflections on the Novel,” trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, in The 120 Days of Sodom and other Writings 113; and Thüsen, “Juliette at the Volcano.” This thought of immanence forms the basis of Macherey’s reading in The Object of Literature 147–77.

16 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie 295; trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor as Aesthetic Theory 198; hereafter cited as AT. Probleme der Moralphilosophie 154; trans. Rodney Livingstone as Problems of Moral Philosophy 103.

17 Adorno, “Die Aktualität der Philosophie” 342; trans. Benjamin Snow as “The Actuality of Philosophy” 37. For Sade’s techniques of fantasy, see Harari, “Sade’s Discourse on Method”; Hénaff, Sade 89–97; and Foucault, Language, Madness, and Desire 103–14.

18 Adorno, Noten zur Literatur 104–05; trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen as Notes to Literature 88–90. It is precisely in relation to the Reign of Terror that Hegel is drawn to make his remark about universal freedom; see Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes 320; trans. A.V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit 360.

19 This notion has been examined by Finlayson in “The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno.”

20 Bernstein has developed this approach in relation to the visual arts; see his studies of Picasso and Cindy Sherman in “‘The Demand for Ugliness’” 210–48; and Against Voluptuous Bodies 281–318.

21 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung 114; trans. Edmund Jephcott as Dialectic of Enlightenment 74. But, as Geulen remarks in a reading of Adorno’s comments on Snow White in Minima Moralia, her death should not be regarded as murder but as a release from the illusions and sickness of life, and, particularly, of the sickness of living one life and sacrificing all the other possibilities. In a notably Sadean conclusion she sees this as evidence of the affinity of pleasure and death in Adorno’s thought and the dissolution of the exclusion between the facticity of life and its unlived possibilities; see “‘No Happiness without Fetishism’” 107–08.

22 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I 356; The Origin of German Tragic Drama 180.

23 Adorno, “Zu Subjekt und Objekt” 752; trans. Henry W. Pickford as “On Subject and Object” 254.