194 | BOOK REVIEWS

ULRICH PLASS
routledge. 2006. pp. xl + 296. 50. 00 (hbk).

Despite the growing body of work on Adornos aesthetics

(an aspect of his thought that has itself received much
less attention than with other elements of his philosophy), his writings on literature seem almost to have
been ignored. This is the first book-length study in
English of Notes to Literature (I am aware of the existence of a further study in German dating from 1979),
and attempts to treat Adornos literary criticism as
something intimately linked to his philosophy as a
whole (p. vx). The nature of this intimate link clearly
provides some trouble to the books author, who in
the preface explains his indebtedness to Simon Jarviss
view that it is more helpful to think of Adorno as a
philosophically informed reader of literature than as a
literary theorist. It is a distinction that Plass elucidates
in the following terms:
The philosophical literary critic treats a literary
text as if every word mattered; he overestimates
the significance of literature because he lacks the
professional distance of the literary theorist. As a
literary critic, Adorno acts as if the separation between literature and philosophy were a mere formality; he seeks to acknowledge what in his view
philosophy has neglected, namely the aesthetic
dignity of words (GS 1: 370). (pp. xixxx)

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Language and History in Theodor W.

Adornos Notes to Literature

The distinction is drawn between a reader of literature, concerned with the details of the words that
are to be discussed, and a literary theorist, supposedly indifferent to them. Plasss almost surprisedsounding remark that Adornos great book on
aesthetics does not offer any guidelines on how to
develop a method for understanding works of art
(p. 49) is indicative of scepticism towards any attempt
either to conduct the study of literature by applying
externally derived philosophical categories to it, or to
attempt to extrapolate from the study of individual
works a method that can be applied more generally.
Indeed, this scepticism is well placed, since Adornos
aesthetic materialism explicitly precludes recourse to
some sort of invariant method: such an approach cannot for Adorno be considered materialist, since it
necessarily fails to take into account any variations in
the objects under examination, and ends up telling us
more about the method than about the works under
consideration.
However, this does notas the existence of Adornos unfinished magnun opus sthetische Theorie serves
to testifysignal the end of philosophical aesthetics.
And while Plasss hostility to crass generalizations is
well founded, his laudable insistence on the importance of the particular tends on occasion towards a
certain fuzziness as to what is at stake. Indeed, at times
I was unsure as to what precisely is Plasss object of
studythe poems discussed in Notes to Literature, the
specific readings of them advanced by Adorno, or their
consequences either for his thought or for literary
aesthetics understood more broadly. To put it somewhat more extremely, I was left without a sense as to
why the opinion of a mid-twentieth-century philosopher, musicologist, social theorist, and literary critic
about five German poets (Eichendorff, Borchardt,
George, Heine, and Goethe) might be thought to matter. This is not an issue on which I am personally in
need of convincing, but this makes it all the more disappointing that a book on Adornos aesthetics of literature is not prepared to make a case as to its
significanceas to why, that is, we should be interested in these readings of the poems in question, rather than any other interpretations of them, beyond the

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As conceptual and predicative, language stands

opposed to subjective expression; by virtue of
its generality, it reduces what is to be expressed
to something already pre-given and known.
Against this the poets rebel. They attempt unremittingly to embody the subject and its expression in language, to the point of its demise. (GS
11: 477)

This is not the place to attempt to expound on what

precisely Adorno means by the embodiment of the
subject in poetic language, nor to give an account of
how this process could take place. But it is not only that
the absence of discussion of this essay would be a gaping hole in any study of Notes to Literature, but also that
it is the text that is perhaps the most relevant for a the
discussion of language within Adornos literary criticism, supposedly a central theme within the book.
This is not to detract from the points at which Plass
advances sensitive and elucidating readings of the essays
in Notes to Literature. Adornos literary criticism can be
at its most frustratingly enigmatic at the points at which
he makes comparisons with music, particularly in such
claims as renouncing predicative assertion brings the
rhythm close to musical development (GS 11: 472) or
that within Prousts writing there is without any cheap
analogy to composition, a musical impulse (GS 11:
203). Plasss discussion of such analogies and how they
might be understoodand just as importantly, how
they are not to be understoodoffers both care and
nuance: The affinities between musical and verbal (essayistic) progression or movement do not extend to
their respective forms as a whole; they are limited to
brief and elusive aesthetic moments (p. 45). There is
an awareness throughout of the dangers inherent in
such analogies, but also of their potential when used
and indeed interpretedcarefully.
But even this does not convey a sense of why Adornos writings on literature might be of consequence to
literary criticism more generally. Somewhat strangely,
many of the books references to aesthetics seem to
refer not to an Adornian model in which the subjective aesthetic experience takes on a central role, but to
precisely the mode of enquiry rejected by both Adorno and Plass, namely the application of a pre-given
theoretical method. For example:
With Heine, poetic language cannot be understand with the tools of formalist poetics or aesthetics. His poetic language is no longer formally
or functionally different from everyday language,
and aesthetic categories therefore do not suffice
to describe it. (p. 120)

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scholarly relevance for those already interested in

Adorno.
Despite Plasss distrust of attempts to reconstruct a
critical method from Adornos thought, he is at times
in danger of doing just that. In the first chapter he introduces the dialectical understanding of language developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of
Enlightenment: language is to be thought of as comprising two opposing poles of sign and image. As sign, the
significative pole, at which it attempts to classify, it
must abandon its attempt to resemble nature; as image, the mimetic pole, at which it attempts to resemble
nature, it must abandon the attempt to know it (68,
cf. GS 3: 34). This theory is of course hugely significant for the study of Adornos writings on literature,
but there is something unsatisfying about the way in
which it is deployed. It is used in relation to Heine as
an explicative tool, as some sort of confirmation that
for Heine, as for Odysseus, subjectivity is gained at
the cost of denying ones identity, that language effects the disintegration of subjectivity (p. 138). There
is hardly a hint in Plasss reading of Notes to Literature
that anything might have changed in Adornos understanding of language between the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947 and the writing, mostly
in the 1960s, of the literary essays that constitute Notes
to Literature.
It is perhaps symptomatic of this absence that Plass
does not offer a reading of Parataxis, Adornos essay
on Hlderlins late poetry, which Adorno described in
a letter to Jochen Schmidt as the most important in
the third volume of Notes to Literature. It is in this essay
more than any other that Adorno insists on the centrality of lyric poetry to any attempt to develop a theory of language. For example:

196 | BOOK REVIEWS

to find it supported only by an assertion and counterassertion from Robert Hullot-Kentors translation of
Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des sthetischen (This is beautiful) and and Peter Fenvess review of it (The passage is hardly beautiful; it is bombastic, both cited pp.
186187). Plass offers no discussion of the passage that
constitutes the source of contention, no further reason
for arbitrating on the dispute in this manner, and, indeed,
no reason why we might choose to infer from the claim
that a particular passage is bombastic that Adornos prose
is not beautiful. It is a question from consideration of
which this study would have benefited considerably.

References to works by Adorno

Thesen ber die Sprache des Philosophen, in Philosophische Frhschriften, Gesammelte Schriften 1 [GS 1]
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 366371.
(with Max Horkheimer) Dialektik der Aufklrung, Gesammelte Schriften 3 [GS 3] (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1981)
Kleine Proust-Kommentare, in Noten zur Literatur,
Gesammelte Schriften 11 [GS 11] (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 203215.
Parataxis: Zur spten Lyrik Hlderlins in Noten zur
Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften 11 [GS 11] (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 447491.
Josh Robinson
Queens College, University of Cambridge, and University
of Haifa, Israel
doi: 10.1093/aesthj/ayp011

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Plass advances very little to suggest what sort of

aesthetic procedures might constitute an aesthetics
capable of describing or even accounting for Heines
poetic language. Indeed, the consequences of Notes to
Literature for Adornian aesthetics more broadly are left
unspoken. The insistence that [b]ecause literature and
philosophy are both made of language, they require
scrupulous textual examination (p. xx) seems to lead
to a situation in which the question cannot be raised as
to what, if anything, in Adornos accounts of literature
whether in the objects of consideration or the responses
to themdistinguishes literary from non-literary
texts. At other points, Plass relies on a crude distinction between literary and colloquial language (e.g. p.
5), a distinction that, if clear, would have wide-ranging
consequences for literary aesthetics. There is no consideration of the nature of aesthetic judgements in
Adorno (indeed, nor of which judgements constitute
aesthetic judgements), or of the transition from Kants
concentration on the aesthetic judgement to Adornos
apparently broader categories of aesthetic or artistic
experience, a distinction that Plass conflates in referring to the question of why we talk about aesthetic
experiences, why we continue to call certain objects
beautiful (p. xxxix).
Perhaps symptomatic of this is the ambiguous status
of many of the judgements that Plass advances. The
books first chapter begins with an explicitly aesthetic
judgement: Adornos prose is not beautiful (p. 1).
Perhaps unusually for an aesthetic judgement, it is followed by a footnote. Turning to it, hoping to find further discussion of the claima claim with which, I
might add, I disagree vehementlyI was disappointed