Snapshots of the Impossible: The Image as Critique Author(s): Lucas Wood Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.

33, No. 1 (Fall 2009), pp. 159-163 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/JML.2009.33.1.159 . Accessed: 29/03/2014 03:20
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Snapshots of the Impossible: The Image as Critique

Lucas Wood
University of Pennsylvania

Gerhard Richter. Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford: Stanford UP (Cultural Memory in the Present), 2007. ix, 233 pp. $65.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. Gerhard Richters Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers Reflections from Damaged Life approaches the work of Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Bloch through the genre of the thought-image (Denkbild), whose ambiguous situation between philosophical argument and aesthetic production makes it a privileged site for the performance of anti-totalizing critique. This review analyzes Richters reading of the thought-image as a form of resistance to the premature closure of meaning, and presents the book as an illuminating close reading of the Frankfurt School archive with sometimes problematic debts to Derridean deconstruction. Keywords: thought-image / Denkbild / Frankfurt School / possibility / extraterritoriality

he first epigraph to Gerhard Richters Thought-Images is an aphorism taken from Blanchots The Writing of the Disaster : Optimists write badly. (Valry) But pessimists do not write. It is a fitting motto for a book that grapples with the ethical, political and aesthetic ramifications of optimism and pessimism, utopian hopefulness and sober historical consciousness, as they inform and are informed by philosophical and literary production. But it is equally in keeping with Richters subject that the subsequent text should unfold less under the aegis of this quotation than in tension with it, as a problematization of the dichotomies it erects. Richters key interlocutors are Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer, reunited here not as members of a monolithic Frankfurt School, but rather as a constellation of friends thinking in and through fruitful conversation with each other. Indisputably, these men wrote, and wrote prolifically, with remarkable eloquence and intensity. However, Thought-Images announces in its very subtitle a concern for the ways in which their writing is

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indelibly marked by modernitys damaged life, which demands in response the material inscription of the aesthetic event as a political act (28) that occurs, for Adorno, as a scar (dis)figuring the form of thought. If the melancholia of these authors ruptures the silence prescribed by pessimism, their philosophical poetics programmatically destabilize all optimistic (and especially progressivist) narratives and the inexorable dialectics above all, perhaps, what Adorno and Horkheimer described as the dominating dialectic of enlightenment that undergird them. And yet, what Richter is at pains to show is that the self-conscious literariness of the Frankfurt Schools unclassifiable writings does constitute a wary, circumscribed, post-lapsarian optimism. This optimism is rooted in attentiveness to the promise of the possible preserved when meaning fails, and emphatically exhibits its own failure to achieve perfect identity with the form in which it is expressed preserved, that is, in a certain practice of turning thought against itself, of philosophizing badly so as to legitimate hope by keeping utopian thinking in, and in tension with, what must be recognized as the contingent reality of the status quo. If coming to terms with the texts treated here is never easy, it is because their authors deliberately cultivate an ethos and an ethics of problematic intelligibility. Their anti-systematic tactics, however, bespeak neither a complacent esotericism nor the intellectual snobbery of which Adorno in particular is often accused. On the contrary, their insistence on the enigmatically aesthetic character of philosophical thought, and by the same token on philosophical discourses dependence on the language that bears it, is a way of making a virtue of necessity under historical conditions of the utmost urgency. The staging of the barely surmountable difficulty of thinking, writing and reading (in) modernity constitutes a strategy of political resistance with which the Frankfurt Schools readers, and Richters, are asked to collaborate. Philosophys failure coincides here with the reduction of transcendent meaning to the material substrate of language, whose radical ambiguity prevents discourses of power-knowledge from being hypostatized as unassailable truths. Writing toward the ambiguation of reality thus becomes a way of disputing Hegels equation of the rational with the real, a high-stakes play to preserve the possibility of genuinely philosophical speculation of difference, now and in the future in the face of the forces of totalization that beset thought on all sides. In meanings withdrawal into the shadowy recesses of the image, these texts seek what Kracauer once called, in his magisterial History: The Last Things Before the Last, holes in the wall of determinism (historical and logical), spaces of opportunity for us to evade and the improbable to slip in. Thought-Images brings these issues into focus through the apt and novel lens of the eponymous Denkbild, or thought-image, a literary genre-cum-critical strategy favored by the writers in question and deployed by them to various effects. Denkbilder are performative insights in prose, positioned between and exploiting the fissures in and among philosophical argument and aesthetic production, literary form and conceptual content, intelligibility and enigma. Crafted, in Adornos words, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting

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that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire (qtd. in Richter 13), they represent a mode of charged speech that is therefore also radically resistant, even to its own truth, which is overtly metaphorical or allegorical in a way that makes the Denkbild an ideal locus of ongoing, self-problematizing, and thus authentically revolutionary critique. The Frankfurt Schools theory and practice of the Denkbild is fascinating in and of itself, and Richters rich introduction offers engaging perspectives on the genre along with a brief account of its twentieth-century appropriation from the German Romantic and Idealist traditions via Baudelaire and Nietzsche. The thought-image itself is not, however, the real subject of this book. Rather, the Denkbild elaborated in the introduction serves Richter as a kind of organizing symbol. It becomes the model of a recurring thought-structure and a critical stance that proves to underlie and link the eclectic intellectual projects undertaken by Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Bloch. Although Richters book is studded with brilliant set-piece commentaries on individual Denkbilder, his idea of the Denkbild is most important as the prismatic gathering point for a set of problems and dialectical motifs. A discussion of the forms, and the stakes, of a present experience of history (and especially of a past precariously grasped as ones own) complements philosophical musings on the status of rupture or interruption as the condition of a contested, and therefore genuine, continuity; ruminations on the strange coincidence of proximity and distance, arrival and departure, and the situation of critical thinking between these poles accentuate the aporias that underwrite philosophys imperative desire and necessitate its reconceptualization as a performative, and above all a poetic, act. Haunting the entire project is an ongoing inquiry into the possibility of holding on to indeterminacy without relinquishing it to the chaos of mere arbitrariness. At issue, in other words, is a desire to see modernitys scarred and fragmented meanings less as lost than as being still and always under construction in a way that holds them open to what might be (and be thought), that is, to a radical otherness not contained in or developing from the real, but nonetheless proper to its inmost potential. In a sense, the task Richter sets himself can be figured as an attempt to discern the political promise and the philosophical pledge hiding in the writerly resignation espoused by Benjamin in his collection of Denkbilder entitled One-Way Street : Nothing is more miserable than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such a case, it is not even a bad photograph. And the truth refuses (like a child or a woman who does not love us), facing the lens of writing while we crouch under the black cloth, to keep still and look amiable. This nexus of themes is knotted and unraveled in a sustained meditation that charts its own course between literary criticism and philosophy as it winds through four dense, complex chapters. Each explores one thoroughly modulated aspect of a single thinkers engagement with the Denkbild form writ large. The first chapter, which is also the most interested in the thought-image per se, uses the disciplinary indeterminacy of the Denkbild to study Benjamins search, in One-Way

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Street and the Arcades Project, for a critical stance and a philosophically inflected brand of urban experience determined by a constant oscillation between intimate proximity and distantiation. The second elliptically explores Blochs insistence on the world as a singular and abiding question concerning its meaning to be excavated (81) i.e., his utopian fixation on the incompleteness of meaning and the excess of the signifier, on the performance of supplementarity and deferral in terms of the paired notions of music and the dream, or of Blochs dream of music as an allegory of an entire constellation of aporetic aesthetico-political practices (103). This discussion of the politics of representation takes a more concrete form to direct a rapprochement, in Chapter Three, between the ethical encounters with alterity named by Kracauers concept of extraterritoriality and the Derridean monolingualism of the other. Finally, the last, most expansive, comprehensive and sensitive chapter addresses Adornos attempt to find, through an avowal and rigorous reading of the rhetorical remainder that shadows propositional cognition, a philosophical voice in which to make sense of ethical and intellectual life after Hitler (149) in a way that acknowledges the aberrant event of Nazism as somehow proper to and produced by the rationalist dialectic of culture and barbarism and thus, by the civilization that would prefer to decry and dismiss Hitler as its own antithesis. Throughout, Richter handles his authors deftly, with understanding, affection and impressive erudition. His theoretical orbit is nearly as wide as his familiarity with the Frankfurt Schools archive, and he demands a corresponding competency of the reader. Perhaps counting on the fact that he is adding his voice to a well-established discourse surrounding works whose stock in the academy is only continuing to rise, he leaps from text to text at will and almost never summarizes his sources, so that newcomers to the field are likely to be left struggling in his wake. The same may be said of Richters fluent and subtle, heavily metaphorical prose, whose occasionally irritating obeisance to post-structuralist idioms and mannerisms (Thinking, and the thinking of thinking, is the thinking of, by, and for the sibling [43]) detracts little from its seductive intricacy. More generally, however, the way deconstruction figures in Thought-Images is both more interesting and, perhaps, less benign. The book ostensibly cycles smoothly from Benjamin through Bloch and Kracauer to Adorno, that is, from one cluster of close readings to another. But it can also be read as a theoretical text structured and divided by the contrary pulls of two intellectual lodestars: Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida. In the introduction and first chapter of his book, Richter, ironically for a critic who holds, with Benjamin, that criticism is a matter of the right distance (56), positions himself very close, even excessively close, to the ideas he reads. He theorizes their intellectual gambits in formulations that often derive from the very texts and authors under analysis, deferring with particular regularity to Adorno, whose admittedly mesmerizing exegeses of his associates work are allowed to resonate in Thought-Images with oracular force. It would seem that Richter, who avows an abiding fascination with the dynamics of philosophical

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friendship, seeks to insert himself, not as a critic but as a peer, into his own reconstruction of the conversation between thinkers he describes as a constellation of friends and colleagues (1). On the other hand, a parallel strand in Richters discourse consistently translates Frankfurt School ideas into Derridean parlance, refiguring their mobilization of the Denkbild s philosophical and literary potential in terms of supplementarity and deferral, aporia and criture. For the most part, this interpretive tactic is unobtrusive and fertile. The conceptual arsenal of deconstruction enriches Richters close readings. More importantly, it facilitates what is perhaps his most original project in Thought-Images: to articulate a vision of the Frankfurt Schools use of the Denkbild form the readings it carries out thereby, and the reading practice it demands and enforces as a model of responsible literary criticism absolutely necessary to a present academy that is increasingly vulnerable, Richter argues, to the seduction of the realityeffect, and shows signs of a widespread return to forms of aesthetic ideology, to models of mimetic correspondence between the aesthetic and the political (28), the artifact and its world. What is not true, however, is the dust-jackets pronouncement that the books major accomplishment is to establish a significant connection between the work of the Frankfurt School and contemporary French thinkers, in particular, Deleuze and Derrida. On the contrary, the direct encounter between the Frankfurt School and deconstruction produces some of this volumes most cumbersome passages and a few disappointing digressions, notably Richters exposition of a neglected subterranean affinity (109) between Kracauer and Derrida. The implication seems to be that juxtaposing Kracauer with Derrida will allow the former to be revealed, in the light of the latters reflected glory, as the important philosopher he is. In fact, the insights of Kracauer and his colleagues can showcase their own merits (Richters work proves this, if it proves anything). The sections devoted to Derrida seem to intrude like a foreign voice into the tightly-woven fabric of Thought-Imagess ongoing conversation. In his lovely and provocative final chapter, however, Richter returns to Adorno and to the reflections on philosophical poetics, where his own readership shines. The books ending conclusively demonstrates why its key contribution is not a positioning of the Frankfurt School relative to contemporary French thinkers. Its accomplishment is a creative, idiosyncratic, but nevertheless focused and above all closely attentive elucidation of Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Bloch by a virtuoso reader who, by the end of Thought-Images, has earned the right to call himself their friend.

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