EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND THEODOR ADORNO ON ETHICS AND AESTHETICS

Abstract

This article examines similarities between Theodor Adorno’s account of the artwork’s disorienting effect on subjectivity in Aesthetic Theory and Emmanuel Levinas’s description of the effect of alterity on the subject in Otherwise than Being. By exposing these shared concerns, it is possible to attribute a Levinasian ethical dimension to Adornian aesthetic experience and thereby push Adorno beyond his reliance on a privative description of aesthetics. In making this argument, this article hopes to broaden the scope of artistic practices onto which Adorno’s aesthetic theory can be brought to bear.

Keywords:

• Adorno
• Levinas
• aesthetics
• ethics
• shudder

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See especially Cohen; Eisenstadt; Smith; De Vries; Horowitz; Jackson; Alford; Sachs.

2 418. I am indebted here to Alastair Morgan for drawing my attention to the concept of life as a central ethical concern within Adorno’s philosophy: “The concept of life figures in Adorno’s philosophy as antagonist, ideological consolation, but also as an ethical demand for the possibility of a different way of living […]” (Adorno’s Concept 1). See especially Morgan, Adorno’s Concept 97–99; idem, “Mere Life.”

3 The discussion of shudder is different from Adorno’s discussions elsewhere of the “more” because of its emphasis on the shudder’s affective quality. For instance, Adorno compares the shudder to goose bumps, and describes it as a “physical symptom” of the work. As he puts it: “Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image” (Aesthetic Theory 418). Just as goose bumps are provoked by what is inexplicable or overwhelming and are a physical symptom, or appearance, of this feeling of being overcome, the shudder of aesthetic comportment is an affective, physical symptom of being overcome. For Adorno, this shudder occurs both at the level of the artwork – the shudder is like a physical marker of alterity within the work of art – and at the level of the subject responding to the work.

4 Artists such as Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravani, Pierre Huyghes, Carsten Höller, and Vanessa Beecroft work collaboratively with their audience; others, including Taryn Simon, Sophie Calle, Sable Elyse-Smith, and Jill Magid (whose work I will consider in detail below), choose to emphasize a collaborative approach during the production stage.

5 See, in particular, Bourriaud; Kester; Bishop; Martin; Lind.

6 Michael Morgan aptly describes this as a shift from a language of distance and height in Levinas’s earlier works to a language of disturbance and disorder in Otherwise than Being where: “[t]he face not only pleas and commands; it is strange and disorienting; it unsettles – and overwhelms” (M. Morgan 81). Morgan notes that Levinas begins to use the language of proximity, obsession, persecution, and hostage to highlight the urgency of ethics and give it “a disturbing, almost assaulting register” (82).

7 Otherwise than Being 84. This is echoed in Levinas’s earlier description of Celan’s poetry as employing a “language of proximity” (Levinas, “Paul Celan” 41) and enacting a “dehiscence of the world” (45).

8 As will be seen in the section below, Adorno describes the shudder in very similar terms – as a moment “in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity” (Aesthetic Theory 418).

9 Drabinski clarifies Levinas’s meaning here as follows:

For Levinas, the exposed body of ethical subjectivity is animated as a for-the-Other. It is animated to the point of obsession by the Other […] The subject is rendered unique – it recurs – as for-the-Other in the interruptive awakening of the body from outside. (208)

10 It must be noted that, for Levinas, the transcendence of the face-to-face encounter is inseparable from the speech and living expression of a living human being and thus greatly differs from an aesthetic experience grounded in the sensible response to a work of art. My aim here is to demonstrate that the artwork produces an ethical experience from within a specifically aesthetic sphere.

11 This feeling that things ought to be different, of protest against needless suffering, is the somatic motive behind Adorno’s revised categorical imperative at the end of Negative Dialectics: to prevent the event of Auschwitz from being repeated. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics 365.

12 According to Beistegui: “What we have, in the end, are the elements or moments of the Hegelian dialectic, but without the moment of resolution” (55). De Duve describes Adorno’s shortcomings with regard to the notion of reconciliation in art in much harsher terms:

His aesthetic theory is fraught with Hegelian readings of Kantian issues (never the other way around, of course): solvable antinomies interpreted as irresolvable contradictions, ideas of reason recast as moments of spirit, ethical imperatives rewritten as historical programs, and so on. I am tempted to read the particular brand of pathos the Aesthetic Theory yields as the symptom of the willfully impossible reconciliation of Kant and Hegel. (258)

13 Adorno frequently employs the German word Affirmation to describe a false notion of reconciliation (de Duve 260).

14 De Duve makes his argument for transcendentalism over dialectics, or for Kant over Hegel, by rereading Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” from the third Critique. According to de Duve, Kant’s transcendentalism need not be construed as idealist, nor must his analytic of the beautiful be construed as affirmative relative to the negativity of the sublime. See de Duve 263–66.

15 In Aesthetic Theory Adorno introduces the “primordial shudder” (106) as characteristic of an early stage of human history. Adorno often describes the shudder as a remnant of an early experience of the natural world, as something overwhelming and frightening. “The shudder is a response,” Adorno writes, “colored by fear of the overwhelming” (319). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer view this moment of terror in front of the unknown as precisely what the spirit of Western thought has progressively sought to overcome.

16 Levinas, Proper Names 4–5. In his foreword to the collection, Levinas presents recent historical events in Europe, “world wars (and local ones), National Socialism, Stalinism (even de-Stalinization), the camps, the gas chambers, nuclear weapons, terrorism and unemployment” (3) as demanding of his generation that they acknowledge the ethical imperative.

17 I have listed a selection of artists in note 4 above.

18 Magid (www.evidencelocker.net/story.php). Through the website for the project, it is possible to access the footage from Magid’s Evidence Locker along with the letters she sent to the City of Liverpool over a thirty-one-day period. The letters are also compiled in diary form in Magid, One Cycle of Memory in the City of L.

19 From Magid’s letter to the City of Liverpool, Day 15.

20 Magid (www.veryrealtime.co.za/jill_text.htm).

21 From Magid’s letter to the City of Liverpool, Day 30.

22 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 233.