Adorno as the Devil*

by Jean-Frangois Lyotard

The loss of the content of the work is thought as alienation. The artist
has become the mere executor of his own intentions, which appear before
him as strangers—inexorable demands risen up from the compositions on
which he is working. What Adorno does not see is that they are no longer
even his intentions which the artist realizes, but rather anonymous inten-
sities. Klossowski: the intensities beyond the intentions. The latter belong to
the category and to the thought of a subject, of a subject of creation, or
production, of a prop [suppot] for the qualities attributable to it. The dissi-
pation of subjectivity in and by capitalism; Adorno, like Marx, sees there a
defeat; he will only be able to surmount this pessimism by making of this
defeat a negative moment in a dialectics of emancipation and of the
conquest of creativity. But this dialectics is no less theological than the
nihilism of the loss of the creative subject; it is its therapeutic resolution in
the framework of a religion, here the religion of history. Thus, the justi-
fication given the new music, essentially that of SchOnberg, is that it has
taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world, that it finds all its
happiness, all its beauty in forbidding itself the appearance of the beautiful.
Art is a kind of Christ in its denunciating function. As for effective
redemption, it is even further away than in christology, and must be; art is
not reconciliatory, that is its force, to hold itself inside nihilism, to assume
it, and thus to manifest it. Hope, the principle, keeps the works open, says
Ernst Bloch the Marxist. Adorno nourishes this same Marxism almost
entirely withdrawn into a demythologized christianism. The breakdown of
all criteria for judging a musical work is recorded nihilistically, as the possi-
bility of launching crazed products [des toquards] on the musical market,
by way of great composers. This devaluation cannot be grasped positively;
yet it is the liquifaction of traditional limits which allowed the separation of
"great music" from the other kind; it is the bringing down of the walls
circumscribing the musical domain, circumscribing the museum, culture.
The positive grasp of the breakdown of values does not permit one to take it
for an indispensable and painful moment in the process of reconstitution.
Have we ever thought the revolution other than negatively, as nihilists, that
is to say, as disorder in a change of order, as passage? So long as we
continue to think it that way, we will not know what to do. The same holds
for "art."
The category of the subject remains uncriticized. It is the nucleus not
* Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.
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only of the interpretation of society as alienation and of art as its martyred

witness, but of all theory of expression. That the subject, and consequently
its so-called expression, may be itself a product, and a hoarder of
production, and not a producer, Adorno would have been able to pose the
doubt only by doubting representation. The critique of representation
would have led him to a critique of politics (even "Marxist" politics), and of
dialectics. To raise doubts about representation is to manifest the theatrical
relation (in music, in painting, in politics, in the theater, in literature, in
film) as being directed by an arbitrary libidinal deployment [dispositif
libidinal], sometimes invested in a predominant fashion, sometimes not. By
extending this relation to a number of domains, capitalism brings about the
emergence of the libidinal, irrational nature of the apparatus which
supports it. We have the advantage over Adorno of living in a capitalism
that is more energetic, more cynical, less tragic. It places everything inside
representation, representation doubles itself (as in Brecht), therefore
presents itself. The tragic gives way to the parodic, the libido retracts its
investment from the stage, and invests the ensemble stage/hall, the whole
interior of the theater, including the wings and underneath the stage. What
remains is the walls, the entry, the exit. If we do not destroy the walls/en-
try/exit, inside there can be a reconstitution under different names:
happenings, communes, "events," autogestion, T-groups, institutional
analysis, automatic writing, the open work, workers' councils, a practice
which however critical is no less theatrical although in a different way, a
Critical Theater, a critical theology, with a torn subject, the Lacanians say
"re-split"; and no more history-narrative, but the discourse in place, the
discourse of the complaint [le discours de la plainte\ "Razorblades.. .half
the blades into one side... rest of the blades into... other side, Paul Bowles"
(Cage). One of the masks that the devil assumes, in Chapter XXV of Doctor
Faustus, is the image of Adorno. In succession, the demoniacal principle, or
demonic principle, as Freud would say, disguises itself as pimp, as hustler,
as theoretician and critic of musical composition, and as horned devil. The
devil, travestied as an intellectual, delivers whole phrases from the
Philosophy of Modern Music just as they were written. The supporting devil
is an allusion to the syphilis contracted by Adrian Leverkuhn, the musician
"hero" of Thomas Mann's novel. He causes his victim and accomplice to
understand that the evil contracted in the bordello comes as genius'
counterpart, "For we purvey the uttermost in this direction; we purvey
towering flights and illuminations, experiences of upliftings and unfet-
terings, of freedom, certainty, facility, feeling of power and triumph... And
correspondingly deep, honorably deep, doth he sink in between-time, not
only into void and desolation and unfruitful melancholy but also into pains
and sicknesse." What is diabolical in this Nietzschean alternation? Well, its
pimpery: that it is necessary to pay for the highest with the lowest, for the
lightest with the heaviest, for the intense life with death. That the one does
 ADORNO AS THE DEVIL / 129

not go without the other, that is quite simply the metamorphosis of energies
and investments; that which is dead is not dead, but only converted, no
procurism [proxe'ne'tisme] in that. The latter begins with the idea and the
practice that the metamorphosis will be paid for. The devil is first of all a
middleman (the capitalist) placed between the states of libidinal energy.
"The devil, the true lord of enthusiasm": the intensities referred to a
master, the forces [puissances] subordinated to a power [pouvoir]—there-
upon, Adorno's mask and his words arrive in a dissolve to mount
themselves onto those of the master pimp and enlighten them. "What these
beings (like Leverkuhn) in classical decades could have without us,
certainly, that, nowadays, we alone have to offer." In modern times, great
inspiration can only be demoniacal: the master of enthusiasm can no longer
be God. In order for God and inspiration to be compatible, a cult must be
able to welcome the works. An order, embracing all activities, has to enable
them to be tied together into a totality. A religion must unite the affects.
The modern is the loss of this totality. Every work appears and lives there in
disaffection, in distrust. The artist is a solitary voyager. There are no more
cults, only a culture. Diabolism is then the testimony that the paroxismic
force or power persists in the confines of a world which has no place for
it—it can only persist as disease, syphilis, neurosis, etc.: ways by which this
world of weakened affects names the high intensities in order to neutralize
them, efforts to bring them back into its positivist "order." Thus, according
to Adorno, the great music of SchOnberg gives testimony that the force of
intensities has not disappeared, but the counterpart of the witness it carries
is its incomprehensibility, the darkness where it remains submerged, and
which qualifies it as the work of the diseased.
Thomas Mann's devil, and Leverkuhn in his crises, notably the last,
speak old German, "the good old German without palliatives or garlands,"
that of Luther. The diabolistic position of the work is a Christian position,
but from a medieval christianism, from the kind where a narrow complicity
is established between the sinner and the confessor, the witch and the
exorcisor, sex and sainthood. Modern christianism, next to this force for
marshalling paroxysms, is a paganism of mediocrities, that is why the devil
appears to Leverkuhn when he is residing near Rome, pagan city: extreme
contrast with the Pallid from Pallas, laxist, sumptuous displays of the
capital of all beliefs, of all skepticisms. It has been said that Leverkuhn was
Nietzsche, but he is Pascal, it is an interpretation of Nietzsche as Pascal,
that is to say, the most sensible misunderstanding of Nietzsche, maintaining
him inside theology, drawn and quartered to be sure. An apostasy not of
faith, but in faith. Diabolo again as simbolo. Grave error with regard to
Nietzsche, but a just perspective on Schb'nberg: the new music was indeed
the emergence of a new deployment, "radical," critical, inside the womb of
the old, the classical deployment; but a deployment which was itself
liturgical; the Marxism of Frankfurt, the emergence of a deployment which
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was "radical," Lutheran, Jewish, in the womb of the "Roman," Viennese,

and Stalinist Marxism.
At the end of Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann writes: I, Zeitblom (the
story teller), I am not from the same epoch, from the same Germany, that
of 1945. He causes Leverkuhn to die August 25, 1940. The problematics of
Leverkuhn is not (yet) that of totalitarianism, and Hitlerism is itself only
possible according to a libidinal deployment foreign to Leverkuhn's.
Adorno's problematic belongs, similarly, to a libidinal deployment, that of
remission by sacrifice, that of the martyr, that of the paradox of faith, the
great work being all the more true the more poorly it is received in the
world of alienation—to a deployment which modern capitalism has now
disinvested, which it has emptied of all affective intensity. If Marxism were
that, the Marxism that caused Marx to write in 1842 a note on the miracle
of Luther according to Strauss and Feuerbach, in 1844 an Introduction on
the proletariat as suffering destined to triumph, in 1856 in the Grundrisse,
and still in 1859, in the unpublished Chapter VI of Kapital I, pages on the
dialectics of alienation in labor—Marxism would be entirely disaffected
today, as is every religion. But the "radical" religious function in Marxism
covers another operation, perfectly effective in the most modern capitalism,
and which permits doing much more than "criticism" allows for, the
operation of revealing the entire society as an economy (in the Freudian
sense), as the expense and the metamorphosis of libidinal energy. It is
precisely this affirmative operation which is lacking in the Marxism of
Frankfurt. It is vain to reinforce composition in the Schonbergian sense, as
it is vain to search out the right position from which to struggle [contester]
in the leftist sense: these activities remain inside faith. In a sense,
capitalism is stronger than these kinds of projects, not because it engulfs
them, "co-opts" them, but rather because it renders them useless, and its
deployment is posed otherwise, elsewhere.
Adorno is criticism's finale, its bouquet, its revelation as fireworks. There
is a skepticism in all criticism, it is the skepticism of writing, of thinking
d I'occidentale. This skepticism explodes in the new music: the material has
value only as relation, there is only relation. The sound refers to the series,
the series refers to the possible operations on it. When serialism extends its
principle to all the dimensions of sound, skepticism will attain its acme. "In
my opinion, it is fully enough that a thing has been heard a single time:
when the composer imagined it," says Leverkuhn-Schonberg. The material
being fully desensitized, the energetics is supposed to become entirely
channelable in a combinatory schema [combinatoire]. Criticism requires the
occultation of the ear, it finishes the obliteration of the libidinal body, as in
Hegel. Similarly, in capitalism, the predominance of the law of value
desensitizes the material, obliges us to abandon the naive concept of use
value, and the concept of a corporal reference, reputed to be natural,
carried by the commodity: as in serialism, everything has value through
 ADORNO AS THE DEVIL / 131

relation, here in so far as it is exchangeable. And theoretically, criticism

occupies the same position and implies the same consequences: it has value
only in relation to its object. Structuralism, semiology, and hermeneutics
are critical positions in this sense. And if you add to them the epithet
"dialectical," all you accomplish is a little displacement in the interior of
skepticism.
Dissonance does not have value for Adorno solely as the heart-rending
witness to the suffering imposed on the subject, as the subjective side. It has
value also as its objective side, as the affirmation to the heart of the melody
of the principle of indifference which reigns in capitalism. The melodic
detail degenerates into a simple consequence of the total construction
without having any longer the least influence on it. It becomes the image of
the sort of technical progress of which the world is full. There is no longer
anything which is not relation; but the relation is not immanent to the
sounds, it is no longer the affinity said to be natural, for example that of the
sensory [celle de la sensible] in the diatonic scale, the attraction among the
chords—thought to be more archaic than all conscious organization—which
used to authorize preparation and resolution: the chords are henceforth
simple monades held together by a planifying domination. The dissonant
chords cease then to be expressive of the suffering subjectivity, they are the
sonorous effects of composition's bureaucratic power. This description is
entirely parallel to Marx's analysis of 1844 in the Manuscripts as well as
that of 1857 in the unpublished Introduction to the Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy: also an analysis centered on the category of
indifference, industrial labor tending to be able to be accomplished by every
labor power independently of its qualification (breakdown of the trades)
and of its activity (the worker placed on the margin of the production
process itself), money able to exchange itself for every object regardless of
its possessors' qualities (breakdown of social roles and status, breakdown of
use values). But one sees that such an analysis, made by Marx-Adorno, is
constrained to produce its antibody, the natural, as that which capitalism
comes to lack. Capitalism is thought nihilistically, relative to a natural
subject. That is found in Marx as well. The price paid for the apparatus of
representation.
I have determined six ideas (dialectics, criticism, indifference, position,
theology and expression, affirmation) under which I have distributed all my
reflexions in the form of items. A first drawing has assigned to each of these
items the face of a dice. A second drawing (another throw of the dice) has
permitted me to establish the diachronic series of the ideas' appearance.
Next a drawing (little papers carrying the numbers 1 to 20) has determined
which item, number 5 or number 14, for example, belonging to which idea
(for example, indifference) would occupy place n of the series. Several
dimensions are left undetermined: the duration of each item, the duration
of the blanks-silences which separate them, the chromatism (one would
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have been able to conceive of several writing types), etc. The artist has
become the mere executor of his own intentions, plus: intensities, which do
not belong to him. "We are getting rid of ownership," "our poetry is the
realization that we possess nothing:" Cage. The artist no longer composes,
he lets his deployment's desire go its way. That is affirmation. The quotes
from Adorno are noted in italics, those of other writers are between
quotation marks. The designation of this item is: affirmation 13.
By relaying the tendency of Beethoven and Brahms (to immerse, to
subscribe the theme under the variations, to suppress the domination over
the implied time, in classical music, by the opposition of the theme and the
development) Schb'nberg can claim to be the inheritor of classical music in a
sense fairly comparable to that of the relationship of the materialist
dialectic and Hegel. Schb'nberg is to Brahms as Marx is to Hegel, as the
romantic subject (= bourgeois revolutionary) is to the subject of the last
bourgeois period, rendered solitary, emancipated, says Adorno. But the
Marxism of this tragic subject is that of Adorno, of Frankfurt. The
mutation of the relationship with time implies not only the work's
disappearance as totality, the end resolving the development in a kind of
perfect super-cadence, hence the analogy of the work with the narrative, the
diachrony of a fall (of a dissonance) and of a redemption (of a good
harmony) which refers to the achronics of a stable cultural system, as in the
Bildungsromanen which served as a model for the Phenomenologies des
Geistes, but should imply the disappearance of the work itself; if the latter
remains, in so far as it is "musical," a privileged place of the relationship to
time, hence still a privileged time, it will be in a disinherited capacity.
Instead of the music-narrative, Adorno sees that SchOnberg composes a
music-discourse (but a paradoxical discourse, a discourse of faith); and
SchOnberg composes in fact such a music, Schb'nberg and Adorno on the
razor's edge. We who are no longer there need a music-intensity, a sonorous
machine without finality. What Morton Feldman says very well: a surface
music, without depth, preventing representation. And a politics-intensity,
rather than a politics-tragedy. Therefore to leave the "radical" Marxism of
Frankfurt.
At the end of the introduction to the Philosophy of Modern Music which
dates from 1948, a year after the publication of Doctor Faustus, Adorno
defines his method as a dialectics of works and of contradiction: the
modern work deserves the name when it gives form to contradiction, hence
is imperfect; and contradiction leads to the work's destruction. It is a non-
Hegelian dialectics, because the totality is missing: the reconciliation of the
subject and the object has been perverted into a satanic parody, into a
liquidation of the subject in the objective order. Totality is missing = there
is no god to reconcile = all reconciliation can only be represented in its
impossibility, parodied = it is a satanic work. You wasted your time
replacing God with the devil, the prefix super—with the old sub—terranean
 ADORNO AS THE DEVIL / 133

mole, you remain in the same theological deployment. You pass from
shamefaced nihilism to flaunted nihilism. Adorno's work, just as Mann's
and Schonberg's, is marked by nostalgia. The devil is the nostalgia of God,
impossible god, therefore possible precisely as a god.
When Adorno sees well that modern art is the end of appearance, the
elimination of the sensuous [du sensible], the impossibility of the unity of
concept (form) with intuition (material), it is to conclude that it sets itself to
functioning as a process of knowledge. Through its hostility for art, the
work of art approaches knowledge. Its disarticulation signifies the
emergence of its critical content, and the truth content of works of art fuses
with their critical content. But the critical content is not a content, is not
material, is not intuitive, it is a relation, and as such a knowledge. Thus the
alternative to fusion with the material, the alternative to enjoyment
[jouissance], consists in the ascese of knowing. This knowledge cannot be
the Hegelian knowledge, which is still enjoyment at finding itself in the
object; it is unhappy like the sevfere god Logos, dear to Freud. We have to
leave behind this alternative: neither appearance, musica ficta, nor
laborious knowledge, musica fingens; the metamorphic game of sonorous
intensities, the parodic work of nothing, musica figura.
Is it still a current matter, to struggle against Zhdanov, to affirm that to
reduce advanced music to its social origins and functions, is to find the
language of a pompous and bureaucratic oppression, to affirm that
dialectics has degenerated into a religion of the State? 1948. More relevant:
to affirm that to reduce advanced politics to its social origins and functions
is to find the language of the religion of the State, of its priests, Sfiguy,
Marchais, of their vicars in partibus intelligence, and of several leftisms,
Zhdanov and his papa ready to blossom again on the lips, under the plume
of young Maos. That is the religious raw material in nihilistic Marxism, and
enough material for a Holy Office and an Inquisition. Dialectics has not
degenerated into a State religion. The modern State can only have for its
religion dialectics, this catchall for skepticisms and nihilisms, this
ready-to-wear for melancholy.
Facing bureaucratism, useless to invoke the young Marx, Kierkegaard
facing Hegel, Pascal facing the Jesuits; this will give rise to churches, to
chapels, to countercurrents in the river. And bureaucracy today is not the
Stalinist monstrosity foisted onto the body of the proletarian revolution, as
Trotsky tried and the Trotskyists still try to persuade themselves, it is
everywhere the machinery of capital itself as a claim to the proper order, its
so-called rational circulation. Don't react toward the period of the
individual subject, act toward the time of the circulation of energy liberated
from the law of value. The secret located between these fragments lets itself
be evoked only in the figure they form together: Beethoven's last works,
dislocated, detotalized. Mallarme'. The same silence reigns in SchSnberg,
says Adorno. And the same silence of lacunae in the wandering disposition
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of the Aesthetische Theorie. Disfunctioning machines, Tinguely's machines.

Blank events where dialectics derails.
Schb'nberg says halt to dialectics. But dialectically.
Perfect harmonies are to be compared with the circumstantial
expressions of language, still more with money in the economy. Their
abstract character renders them capable of intervening everywhere in
mediation and their crisis is profoundly linked, in its present phase, to the
crisis of all the functions of mediation. It is necessary to overthrow the
parameters of this Adornian equation. The critique of political economy
teaches that money resolves nothing, that "its" abstraction is the
abstraction of the law of value, which permits placing in an exchange
relation, as commodities, the most different/indifferent objects. The tonal,
the dominant, and the seventh dominant chords are not money, on the
contrary, they are the analogs, in classical and baroque music, of the
minutely observed rules weighing on artisan fabrication and its product,
they are the "chefs-d'oeuvre," they incarnate the supposedly perfect recon-
ciliation of material and form. They are the cult. What Adorno describes is
their cynical use in culture, something like the "guaranteed hand made" or
the "mis en bouteille au chateau" which will come to distinguish, in a
reactionary fashion, certain commodities in the industrial economy and
which will make use of them, for an instant, objects of prestige. Money, in
its capacity as the visible law of value, is, in the new music, not the harmony
of consonance, but the audible abstraction, the indifference to the reputedly
natural deviations, the cutting up of the octave into twelve half tones, the
exchangeability of the degrees according to the values of reversal and retro-
gradation, the universalization of the principle of the series to include all
the dimensions of sound. Schb'nberg once spoke out against the animal
warmth of music and against its woeful demeanor. His coldness is that of
the survivor, the inverse of Weberian warmth, close to the material, says
Adorno. Now, the Schonbergian chill is that of those waters where capital
plunges all things according to calculation alone. Dissonance leads to its
extreme consequences: it is a formula of modern capitalism.
In Marx as in Freud, the laying bare of the economic, of the political and
libidinal economy, remains inhibited by a theology. It is not the same one:
in Freud, it is judaical, critical, somber (forgetful of the political); in Marx,
it is catholic, Hegelian, reconciliatory. But the occultation effect on the
economic is almost as strong in the one as in the other. It is in this way that
in the one and in the other the relationship of the economic with meaning is
blocked in the category of representation. The fact that the representation
of instincts [pulsions] by phantasies and illusions in Freud, that the repre-
sentation of productive forces by superstructures and ideologies in Marx is
criticized here and there does not change in the least the principle whereby
the economic is and can only be represented; for Freud, the proper repre-
sentation of instincts happens in verbis on the couch, for Marx, the re-
 ADORNO AS THE DEVIL / 135

presentation of forces occurs in verbis et rebus in the streets during the

period of the Commune, in the party during the period of the Gotha
congress. Here a politics, there a therapeutics, in both cases a laical
theology, on top of the arbitrariness and the roaming of forces. In Adorno,
all that is left is the theology, Freud's theology, tragic, refusing all recon-
ciliation, displaced and applied to Marx's; but in any case theology, without
any economics. Thomas Mann goes further when he makes his Leverkuhn
say about Lionore 3: "But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet
not as idea, rather in its actuality." (But he quickly adds: "I call your
attention to the fact that that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei"
the same pascaloid repression which nourishes the whole book.)
Nietzsche understood very quickly, after The Birth of Tragedy, that one
must not count on the tragic any longer, that the tragic, if one wanted to
restore it, would be a clown's affair. Napoleon, great clown: "Tragedy today
is politics." What makes intolerable the Final Solution that the Nazis gave
to the supposed Jewish Question, the liquidation of the left oppositions by
Stalinism, the extermination of the Indochinese peoples by U.S. democracy,
is the impossibility of inscribing them in any destiny. To firmly grasp the
fact that any production of a "destiny," on any of these occasions, is a
buffoonery, a mystification whose purpose is necessarily to cause us to
accept, even in the fatal's [fatidique] most revolting form, what is unac-
ceptable and without any fatum whatsoever. In this sense, the "tragic" that
Vienna produced in the first half of the century in music, politics, theory,
psychoanalysis, philosophy, science, poetry (and even a little in painting),
belongs to the clown genre. Parody in the bad sense: the representation of
something which "outside" the representative space (in "society") is already
dead, dialectics' Finale.
"Since then, several incidents have occurred [in the Dijon prison]. Last
week two prisoners swallowed razor blades and had to be hospitalized"
(report in Le Monde, August, 1972).
The critical relation cannot criticize itself, it can only parody itself in the
derision of autocritique. And in this impossibility, it shows that it is still an
authoritarian dominating relation, that it is negativity as power. This power
is that of language, which annihilates what it speaks of. Criticism can only
redouble the empty space where its discourse plunges its object, it is
cloistered in this space of vacuity, it belongs to language and to represen-
tation, it can no longer think the object, the work and history, except as
language. But at the same time it understands that what is in the process of
destroying itself today is precisely the predominance of language, the
asceticism of the work, the asceticism of history and politics. Now criticism,
far from criticizing asceticism, hopes that it will be redistributed differently:
the bourgeois want a sensual art and an ascetic life, the inverse would be
preferable. Criticism wants more asceticism in art (and more "sexuality" in
life). But it is capitalism itself which pushes for a life without asceticism as
136 / TELOS

well as for a severe art. Yet at the same time that capital maintains, in life
and in art, the law of value as separation, savings, rupture, selection,
protection, privatization—at the same time, it undermines everywhere the
value of the law, constrains us to regard it as arbitrary, forbids us to believe
in it. It is a buffoon. It plunges everything into skepticism, that is, into
asceticism and its uselessness. Criticism cannot go beyond that buffoonery.
It is not criticism, it is the emergence (non-ordered, non-dialectical,
unnecessary, but effective) of another deployment, of a dementia with
regard to the law of value, which reveals the latter as a gray disease, a
general depression and equalling-out \per6quation\ of affects and depressed
products. What brings us out of capital and out of "art" (and out of the
Entkunstung, its complement) is not criticism, which is language-bound
[langagiere], nihilistic, but a deployment of libidinal investment. We do not
desire to possess, to "work," to dominate... What can they do about that?
The Aesthetische Theorie is not constructed like a Phenomenologie or a
Dialectics, like a discourse proceeding to its proper conclusion, it is frag-
mented, full of silences, and full of silence, as Jiminez shows. It carries the
loss of the totality in its form: the sweeping of a field, a fragmentation never
reclosed. But why say loss of the totality? This discourse of rhetoric and
classical and romantic philosophy is a deployment (implying representation
of the totality by its very construction), this deployment is disinvested.
Another deployment sets itself in place, there the representation of the
totality is not pertinent. The libido is not necessarily attached to a total
object. What Cage looks for in the I Ching, in what respect is that a
deconstruction?
How is it that I am writing this? Is it that I have an interest in this
skepticism toward everything, even the most serious crises? This skepticism
of writing and of the West, which causes one to act as if one were saying:
always the most important, the most important even in the crisis is what
will be left from it, let us write, let us inscribe the crisis, that will remain,
and will be therefore the most important. All music, insofar as it is
notation, is this skepticism, skepticism too with regard to what is skeptical,
with regard to what is the most painful.
The diabolical figure is not just dialectical, it is expressly the failure of
dialectics in dialectics, the negative in the heart of negativity, the suspended
moment or momentaneous suspension. Therefore something like the affir-
mative, the demented, but placed inside the horizon of a negativity, of a
broken-down negativity. Instant of disequilibrium, razor's edge, brink.
Adorno is the edge. Dialectics broken-down was: the German proletariat
joining Hitlerism; the Russian proletariat joining Stalin; the one and the
other massacring each other; the Spanish proletariat crushed by the fascist
air force, finished off in Barcelona by the Stalinists; the French proletariat
deserting the positions occupied in '36, finished-off by the reformists; the
Chinese proletariat whiped out by Chiang and Stalin's politics. The red god
 ADORNO AS THE DEVIL / 137

no longer speaking, the culture being nothing more than the residue of the
cult, once God fell mute (Zhdanov), what place could Adorno assign
himself, if not that of the devil? That is not a bad place when evil is on
God's side. When the Creation raves, it is the devil who risks being right.
Nothing left to invoke, everything to revoke. Hence Judaism as a reemerging
deployment: dementia ( = the devil) bound up, religified [religiose].
Just as with Schb'nberg there is a reference to tonality in absentia, which
is the revocation in absentia of sensuality, of the feminine, of Catholicism, of
the reconciled god, so with Adorno there is a reference to the cult and to
nature in absentia. Freud says that no one can kill in absentia. To place
something in absentia is to place it outside the range of murder, to conserve
it, to memorize [memoriser] it, to invest it. Schonberg's libidinal investment
in totality is powerful, powerful remains that of the devil Adorno in the
divinity of a reconciled humanity. To cease conserving tonality on the
horizon is to cease composing. To cease composing in politics is to cease
conserving in absentia the idea of the totality, the military, industrial,
clerical organization which represents totaliy, to cease constructing a
"party." In place of the politico ficta-fingens, a politico figura. What can
an affirmative politics be, which does not look for support in a
representative (a party) of the negative, etc.? That is the question left,
abandoned by Adorno. I doubt that Marcuse or Reich, dialecticizing once
more the unconscious, will rid us of it. No more than Rousseau rids his
reader of Hegel, but rather innoculates him against Hegel. Us, we are
beyond Hegel. Hegel did not die in the death camps (on the contrary,
tragical dialectics feeds only on cadavers), he did not die from Criticism (on
the contrary, he lives through it), he died in abundance, he passed away
from prosperity, he croaked from health.
Adorno saw in the German "student" movement of the sixties a political
Stravinskyism.
Leverkuhn is the musician of the "magical square," which one finds for
example in Dlirer's Melancholy: a deployment of numbers such that the
sum of the units place on the columns, on the lines, or on the diagonals is
always the same. Schb'nberg is also the musician of the square: suppress the
difference between the verticals and the horizontals, between the harmony
and the melody. In Klee too, there is the magical square of colors. The
magical square is the end of the narrative, the emergence of the structure.
The neutralization of intensive differences. A narrative will still be possible,
but only as one realization among others of a structure, the performance of
a competence. Diachrony is a surface thing like history. The melodic
statement [6nonc6], the historical development, become desperate. The
magical square is to sound what capital is to the product (as the law of
value permitting the principle of permutating all the exchanges into the
nullified circuit of simple reproduction). A square diabolical for religion,
not at all magical for capital and for ourselves.