(Email, Cornell University)
Sounds of Silence: ‘Notes’ to Adorno’s Philosophy of Language
Often neglected in Adorno scholarship are his literary aesthetics, appearing in their most condensed form in his collection of essays entitled Noten zur Literatur. Tracing the development of language through the works of such varied writers as Goethe, Mörike, and Beckett, Adorno touches on many of the same themes that he discusses in greater detail in his posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie, where one can find Adorno’s most philosophically sustained treatment of art in the modern era. This paper attempts to discern a significant aspect of Adorno’s philosophy of language by analyzing two themes found in his essays on Eichendorff and Beckett: Rauschen and Schweigen. I will show that, for Adorno, language strives to achieve the untarnished, natural state of Rauschen, but that silence, the true expression of suffering, serves as a check on this desire.
Eichendorff’s poetry for Adorno offers a glimpse into this reconciled world, where language and nature are one and the same, where resistance is nowhere to be found. However, in accordance with Adorno’s negative dialectic, the truth content found in Eichendorff’s poetry is not what the poetry itself contains but rather that “plane of humanness” toward which it points. In what I call the “negative space” of the poetry lies the truth-content of the work. Similarly, in Beckett’s Endgame, the profundity of the play is not in its dialogue but rather in its exposure of the silence that makes its presence felt—a silence that suggests the impossibility of producing dramatic pathos in a world spiraling toward nihilism. Thus I argue that language is situated, for Adorno, between these two poles, gravitating toward the former, but, like an asymptote, never reaching its final destination.
