Negativity (Dis)embodied:

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
and Theodor W. Adorno on Mimesis

Artemy Magun

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in memoriam

Theodor W. Adorno and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe never met. They belonged

to different generations (Adorno lived from 1903 to 1969; Lacoue-Labarthe,
from 1940 to 2007) and to different schools of thought (Adorno’s main inspira-
tions were G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and particularly Walter
Benjamin; Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophy matured under the influence of
Martin Heidegger, French Heideggerianism, and particularly Jacques Der-
rida), although Lacoue-Labarthe was familiar early on with the work of Benja-
min, Adorno’s teacher and opponent. The “Frankfurt School,” alias “critical
theory,” and French “deconstruction” (both designations are, of course,
extremely broad and vague) were in many ways parallel, originating in Ger-
man idealism and taking a critical stand versus contemporary culture and
theory, be it fascist or liberal. The criticism, in both cases, went against tech-
nological rationality, against the “irrational” myth that complemented it, and
against the humanist ideology of a moral subject, of transparent communica-
tion. Both the Frankfurt School and “deconstruction” insist on a critique of a
self-identity based on suppressing internal “difference” and/or immanent tran-
scendence (although the concept of “difference”-“différance” is much more

New German Critique 118, Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter 2013

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-1812595  © 2013 by New German Critique, Inc.

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120  Negativity (Dis)embodied

developed in Derrida than in Adorno, its general thrust is the same). As to

method, both schools make art and aesthetics a via regia of their approach to
ontology and history, and it is via the interpretation of artworks that many of
their philosophical positions are presented and defended. Often denigrated by
the academic and political mainstream as “irrationalist” and “skeptical,” both
schools (at least if we speak of the German postwar brand of “critical theory”)
distanced themselves from practical politics.
The major difference between the two schools lies in their intellectual
origin. The Frankfurt School relies mainly on a version of Hegelian dialectic
that both Herbert Marcuse and Adorno specified as “negative.” Derrida’s phi-
losophy develops within the tradition of phenomenology and particularly of
Heidegger’s philosophy, which explicitly rejects Hegelian dialectics or, in the
case of Heidegger, aspires to surpass it. While Marcuse was initially a disciple
of Heidegger before distancing himself from him, both Benjamin and Adorno
castigated the author of the Sein und Zeit and developed their theories in
open polemics with him. Therefore, where Benjamin speaks of “dialectical
images” and of “dialectics at a standstill,” and where Max Horkheimer and
Adorno draw an obverse version of Hegelian dialectic showing the triumph
of myth in its very suppression by the formal rationality of “Enlightenment,”
Derrida and his followers, although they take great interest in Hegel, do not
follow his method—they prefer to avoid the overly logical language of nega-
tions and contradictions.1 They reject historical narratives of a dialectical kind,
presenting history, instead, in a more Kantian style—as a series of oblitera-
tions and suppressions, by “metaphysical” fixations of meaning, of open and
risky calls and gestures. The rhetorical and poetical analysis of such calls and
gestures demonstrates the unconscious background of the theses advanced in
the text. Finally, the “deconstructionists” rely, much more than the school of
critical theory, on an almost utopian, spiritu 1968, vision of a world of anony-
mous, nonideological communication, of solitary friendship and “nonproduc-
tive” community.
Against this background stand Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, two fig-
ures of an elective affinity that appears even more striking because the younger,
Lacoue-Labarthe, came to read Adorno only late in his career and never

1. On this, see particularly Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hege-
lianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001),
317–50. See also Lacoue-Labarthe’s note against Adorno’s misinterpretation of Heidegger as
speaking of “opposition” between being and beings: “Il faut,” MLN 107 (1992): 421–40, here 430;
repr. in Heidegger: La politique du poème (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 79–116.
 Artemy Magun  121

addressed his teaching on nonidentity, negativity, mimesis, focusing instead on

the relatively minor arguments and concepts of the great Frankfurt philoso-
pher. Nevertheless, the points of convergence are striking, and the principal
one is the theme of mimesis, which both philosophers “save” from the standard
and despised meaning of representation in art and knowledge, and which both
of them associate with anthropological phenomena of miming others. Adorno
focuses more on the spontaneous mimesis of animals and inanimate objects,
while Lacoue-Labarthe privileges interhuman identification, but both use
the double meaning of mimesis (representation and miming) to criticize the
concept of representation “from within,” through its actual origin. For both
Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, mimesis, unlike simple imitation, means the
moment of actual repetition that transgresses the frame of the image (Adorno
gives an example of a locomotive that would shoot out of the cinema screen
onto the public)2 while dislocating and disrupting identity and authenticity.3
Martin Jay, in his fine article on the interrelation between Adorno and
Lacoue-Labarthe (which remains, to my knowledge, the only study of this
subject), notes certain themes and theses that unite the two authors: the valori-
zation of mimesis as a sphere of nonidentity (in opposition to the “mimetic
taboo” and “antimimeticism” of the metaphysical tradition), the focus on music
as the mimetic art par excellence (precisely because it is not a representative
art), and the devotion to Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet for whom mimesis pro-
vided dissociation and paralysis (Adorno) or “caesuration” and suspension
(Lacoue-Labarthe) of the speculative, synthesizing version of dialectic.4 For
both Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, as Jay shows, mimesis is a true root of
appearance, Schein in its (dialectical?) interplay with truth. Jay notes that in

2. “Among Kafka’s presuppositions, not the least one is that the contemplative distance between
text and reader is shaken to its very roots. His texts are designed not to sustain a constant distance
between themselves and their victim, but rather to agitate his feelings to a point where he fears that
the narrative will shoot towards him like a locomotive in a three-dimensional film. Such aggressive
physical proximity undermines the reader’s habit of identifying himself with the figures in the novel”
(“Notes to Kafka,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber
[Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983], 246).
3. Cf. another passage from Adorno’s Kafka: “The sameness or intriguing similarity of a vari-
ety of objects is one of Kafka’s most persistent motifs; all possible demi-creatures step forward in
pairs, often marked by the childish and the silly, oscillating between affability and cruelty like
savages in children’s books. Individuation has become such a burden for men and has remained so
precarious, that they are mortally frightened when its veil is raised a little” (“Notes to Kafka,” 253).
Similar passages could be drawn from Lacoue-Labarthe.
4. Martin Jay, “Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe,” in Cultural Seman-
tics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 120–37.
122  Negativity (Dis)embodied

both authors, one of the main targets of criticism is myth (and, I would add, the
whole nest of concepts linked to the fascinating capture: piety, religion, the
sacred). Finally, Jay observes that the explanation of the extermination of Jews
is associated by both authors with their exceptionally mimetic sociopsycho-
logical traits.5 In conclusion, Jay notes that where Lacoue-Labarthe unilater-
ally “defends” the side of mimesis as nonidentity (and thus of melancholia, of
the subject’s weakness and fragility, etc.),6 Adorno does not advocate a return
to the pure mimesis but suggests combining it with “construction” as another
fundamental principle of art. “It is the constellation of mimesis and rationality,
expression and spirit, that defines the unsublated aesthetic prefiguration of uto-
pia that Adorno refuses to abandon.”7 Thus, to Jay, Adorno does not fully reject
rationality; he “posits a constellation in which reason and mimesis each make
up for the deficiencies of the other.”8 Lacoue-Labarthe, by contrast, “advocates
the surrender of the subject’s ego strength” and embraces a “masochistic self-
shattering.”9 Despite his respect for Lacoue-Labarthe, Jay clearly takes the
side of Adorno, who appears in this account as someone more moderate and
reasonably, or comfortably, dualistic.
This difference follows from the divergent approaches of (dialectical)
critical theory and (more Kantian) deconstruction. However, this conclusion
by Jay seems fragile itself, since he opposes Lacoue-Labarthe’s insistence
on instability and oscillation to Adorno’s . . . dialectical indecision and oscilla-
tion between formless mimesis (which he rarely defines as instability per se)
and formal construction. The indecision and oscillation return, in Adorno,
at the level of dialectic itself. The comparison of two authors has to be studied
in more detail, first, because of this ambiguity in comparing their theses, and
second, because after Jay’s general comparative overview, we would profit from
a more detailed comparison of their concepts of mimesis, which, for all their
similarity, do not coincide. We need to grant particular attention to Lacoue-
Lebarthe’s explicit readings of Adorno, which Jay does not mention, and of
which there are three: the discussion of Adorno’s “Quasi una fantasia” in

5. To this list of obvious affinities one could add a more anecdotal trait: coauthorship of major
works with a friend (Horkheimer and Jean-Luc Nancy, respectively).
6. It is subject to question whether philosophical arguments can be presented from the point
of view of their value preferences: both Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe take an analytic, problem-
oriented approach to mimesis. It is, however, correct to say that, for Lacoue-Labarthe, the indeter-
minately mimetic subjectivity is a criterion for criticizing the bad (“typographic”) politics and bad
art that rely on this subjectivity but obliterates it.
7. Jay, “Mimesis and Mimetology,” 133.
8. Ibid., 136.
9. Ibid., 134.
 Artemy Magun  123

Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner (1991),10 the discussion of

Adorno’s “Parataxis” in the article “Il faut” (1992),11 and the “Remarque sur
Adorno et le jazz” (1994).12

The Common Theme: Critique of Religion as Fascination

Our time, deprived of transcendent belief, increasingly falls into various forms
of immanent religion. The critique and understanding of this religion, or piety,
or “myth,” were Adorno’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s constant preoccupation. As
the latter says, “Are we capable of a praxis which wouldn’t be religious?”13
For Lacoue-Labarthe, the question is about the effect that religion and
mimesis, broadly understood, produce on the subject. He sees this effect,
largely, as a paralysis produced by “apotyposis,”14 the “impression” that an
object or a sign leaves on the subject’s psyche and body. He speaks of “typog-
raphy” in the cases where the “impression” is reinforced through the pretense
of overcoming it, and where the subject, failing to imitate the other, inverts the
picture and becomes a model himself or herself. A type, a figure or Gestalt,
stands somewhere between an image and a pure symbol: it is an image, stan-
dardized and made into a recognizable “character.”
Religion, on the surface, is fascination and piety. A religious text, and its
reading, partly forbid “understanding” and impose a slow solemn rhythm of
advancement. While we understand the text’s logic, we miss its external mean-
ing, which only retrospectively falls on us, as a moment of conversion. The
more pious the text, the more we read it piously, in our own turn. But, gener-
ally, the pious attitude toward signs belongs to the rules of any linguistic game,
in particular of reading. If we do not respect signs and, for instance, go directly
to their “meaning,” then we will forever lose the chance of subjectivization
while remaining under the spell of language nevertheless.
The project of Lacoue-Labarthe follows the classical strategy of cri-
tique: to undermine the spell of these texts by exposing their “true” mecha-
nism. Hence his obstinate efforts to prove that the truth of the impressive and
obsessive “type” is hesitation, instability. And the truth of the imaginary

10. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. Felicia McCarren (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
11. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Il faut,” 441–51.
12. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Remarque sur Adorno et le jazz,” L’animal, nos. 19–20 (2008):
203–9.
13. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Scène: Un échange des lettres,” Nouvelle
revue de psychanalyse, no. 46 (1992): 73–98.
14. Cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La vérité sublime,” in Du sublime (Paris: Belin, 1988), 139.
124  Negativity (Dis)embodied

(speculative/specular) reconciliation of opposites is the caesura, interruption,

also understood by Lacoue-Labarthe primarily as the moment of hesitation.
In his general criticism of Heidegger, as well as in his ontological posi-
tion, Lacoue-Labarthe is quite close to the Young Hegelian tradition and to
Adorno, who continued it in the twentieth century. Where Lacoue-Labarthe
speaks of mimetic “undiscernability” and “instability,”15 Adorno emphasizes
that singular “difference” or “nonidentity” is erased by the processes of iden-
tification inherent in technoscientific rationality. Very early, after having read
the essay by Roger Caillois on the “mantis religiosa,” the fascinating, mimetic,
and anthropomorphic insect,16 Adorno associates mimetic fascination with
protoreligion, and both with fascism.
For both Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, as for Caillois, mimesis is the
core of religion, although for both it also has prereligious or postreligious
aspects. The religious obsession (to use Freud’s well-known “diagnosis”) con-
sists, first, in the fascination with a figure one cannot fully separate from one-
self—“psychasthenia,” as Caillois referred to it—and, second, in obedience to a
sign (or symbol) whose meaning (or, more precisely, a promise or a warning of
a meaning) is both contained and not contained in it. Thus a sign imposes a
double bind: if we ignore it, it keeps evoking its meanings in us; if we fully
attribute its meaning to it and mix up the promise with its realization, we lose
our mind, start hallucinating—and lose the very significative nature of the sign.
Both Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno point to the ambiguity of mimesis.
On the one hand, mimesis is linked to the spontaneous expression and anxious
reception of the other (animal or rival). On the other, it converts itself into rep-

15. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography,” in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics,

by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989), 121, passim.
16. Roger Caillois, “La mante religieuse” (1934), in Le mythe et l’homme (Paris: Gallimard,
1938), 209–22; Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1935), trans. John Shepley, Octo-
ber, no. 31 (1984): 16–32. In these powerful texts, Caillois depicts the “praying mantis” as a bio-
logical prototype of what becomes myth in human societies. What the animal lives “as a form of its
destiny,” humans experience in their mythical imagination. The content of this myth is the regres-
sion of animals toward the inanimate, the parallel of which, in humans, is the Freudian “death
drive.” The sexual habits of the mantis and its capacity for mimicry both point toward this desire to
dissolve into nature. The condition of mimicry and of myth is thus a certain weakness of the ani-
mal or of a subject—“psychasthenia.” Adorno wrote an engaged but negative review of this piece in
1938, accusing Caillois of the irrationalist apology of myth (Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiede-
mann with the assistance of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. [Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971–86], 20.1:229–30). However, the brochure made a strong impression
on him. See Michael Weingrad, “The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research,”
New German Critique, no. 84 (2001): 129–61.
 Artemy Magun  125

resentation and technology (Heidegger’s Gestell, Adorno’s Aufklärung).

Lacoue-Labarthe speaks specifically of the post-Christian “typology” (the
imposition by the subject of an ideal type, Gestalt, on matter), while Adorno,
at least in Dialectic of Enlightenment, speaks more broadly of the identifica-
tory rationality, which is itself a paradoxical offspring of mimesis and which
relies on a hidden mythical, or religious, force. “The ratio which supplants
mimesis is not simply its counterpart. It is itself a mimesis—mimesis of the
dead [Mimesis ans Tote]. The subjective spirit that cancels the animation of
nature can master a despiritualized nature only by imitating its rigidity and
despiritualizing itself in turn. . . . The pattern of Odyssean cunning is the mas-
tery of nature through such adaptation.”17 Thus, say Horkheimer and Adorno,
Enlightenment dialectically returns to myth as to a sphere of universal iden-
tity. Mimesis as such belongs to the nonidentical and is thus repressed in a
“mimetic taboo.” The culmination of this movement is the Nazi regime and its
persecution of the Jews.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s understanding of the extermination of Jews as of
violence against a mime (a theme appearing already in “Typography” à pro-
pos of Girard18 and continued in Heidegger, Art, and Politics19) also vividly
recalls Horkheimer and Adorno’s treatment of the issue in Dialectic of
Enlightenment:

The undisciplined mimetic expression is the brand of the old form of dom-
ination, engraved in the living substance of the dominated and passed down
by a process of unconscious imitation in infancy from generation to gen-
eration, from the down-to-heel Jew to the rich banker. This mimic provokes
anger because, in the face of the new conditions of production, it displays
the old fear which, in order to survive these conditions, has to be forgot-
ten. . . . The impotent semblance is answered by deadly reality, the game by
seriousness.20

17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cum-
ming (London: Verso, 1979), 57. Translation modified.
18. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography,” 116.
19. “All in all, Jews are infinitely mimetic beings, or, in other words, the site of an endless
mimesis, which is both interminable and inorganic, producing no art and achieving no appropria-
tion. They are destabilization itself” (Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics [New York:
Blackwell, 1990], 96). Lacoue-Labarthe speaks here of the conception of Rosenberg, not of the
actual state of affairs, of course.
20. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 182; translation modified. Jay, noting
this motif in Dialectic of Enlightenment, strangely fails to quote this passage (“Mimesis and
Mimetology”).
126  Negativity (Dis)embodied

It is hard not to see here an analogy to Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of Pla-

tonic forms and of Jüngerian Gestalt. The French thinker speaks of both as
instances of “anti-mimetic mimesis”: in both cases, a mimetic image “types,”
imprints itself in plastic matter and then violently turns against all plasticity
and ambivalence. In “The Nazi Myth” Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy,
like Horkheimer and Adorno, associate this structure with the concept of
myth.21
Both authors show how seemingly polar phenomena “pass” into each
other, and even though Adorno explicitly calls this process a “dialectic,” and
Lacoue-Labarthe does not, they share the notion of the mutual transforma-
tion of opposites. Adorno points out how the subject, after being affected by
fear, in the face of the mimetic power of nature, becomes self-identical and
represses this nature by sublating mimesis into a distancing representation
and thus imposing on nature both this representation and the fear that nature
used to impose on itself. However, Adorno’s positive program, his aesthetics
(in a way that is traditional for German idealism, Adorno sees aesthetics as
the only viable praxis in the circumstances) is dialectical, too: mimesis can
burst through the deadly form of representation and dislocate it in such a way
that it, itself, becomes expressive of its own limitations.
Lacoue-Labarthe describes the same phenomenon of a self-identical
subject of representation who imposes form on matter. Like Adorno, he thinks
that this subject is the result of a fatal inversion of the original mimesis. The
logic, however, is different. Lacoue-Labarthe maintains that it is the attempt
to imitate the inimitable that allows a passage from an indeterminate mimetic
being into an identitary type that makes others imitate it as a model. Thus
Adorno’s proposed solution may itself be a source of the mimesis’s fatal trans-
formation. I examine below how this plays out in Lacoue-Labarthe’s explicit
discussions of Adorno.

Mimesis as Negativity: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe on Mimesis

The two thinkers deploy the very concept of mimesis differently. Adorno
understands mimesis chiefly as expression, an emotion inseparable from the
sign of this emotion, a theatricalized realization or articulation of what cannot
be actualized or articulated. This expression is, most paradigmatically, that of
pain and suffering, of a spasm or a scream. Lacoue-Labarthe, who realizes, of
course, the close connection between mimesis and the passions, pays less

21. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes,
Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (1990): 291–312.
 Artemy Magun  127

attention to the suffering as such and more to the passivity and receptivity of
both mimesis and passion. Hence the key motive of the “desisting,”22 weak
“subject” of mimesis, an infinitely plastic “man without qualities.”23 Mimesis
becomes, for Lacoue-Labarthe, a form of “self-affection”—a concept that Hei-
degger, in his reading of Immanuel Kant,24 understands as a site of human
openness toward the “nothing.” Expression—in Adorno, plasticity—in Lacoue-
Labarthe. It is as though they relied on two different aspects of mimesis as
underlined in Caillois’s essay on the mantis: the unconscious spontaneity and
the stillness of the imitative insect, the mimicry of an inanimate or dead
object, is more important for Adorno, while the “psychasthenia,” the concept
of the subject’s weakness that Caillois borrows from the famous French psy-
chologist Pierre Janet, is more important for Lacoue-Labarthe.
In both cases, mimesis rises out of a certain negativity of the human
being. In Adorno its origin is the natural limitation and vulnerability of
humans in the face of nature. Later, the power of human civilization turns this
negativity against the nature itself, and against the very mimesis that had been
the consequence of its weakness. The result is “the mimetic taboo,” the repres-
sion of immediate, expressive mimesis in favor of a mediated representation.
Lacoue-Labarthe, although he belongs to a school of thought that has
been critical of the logic of negativity and dialectics and has insisted instead on
difference and alterity,25 later in life also recognized “transcendental negativ-
ity” as the actual mood of radical modernity.26 For him, the pure nothingness
of a theatrical actor is, it seems, a fundamental human capacity and is tightly
linked to the mimetic relationship of a human with the (human) other, a nec-
essary step in the constitution of subjectivity. Thus negativity works as an
inseparable obverse of positivity, as its unconscious spring and an involuntary
by-product. But the subject as an image and a type, once formed, tends to oblit-
erate and suppress the mimetic indeterminacy that called it into being. It is
hard to ignore a dialectical moment that is involved here: Lacoue-Labarthe
shares with Adorno the understanding that mimesis is essentially ambivalent.

22. On “desistance,” see the important commentary by Jacques Derrida, “Desistance,” in

Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 1–42.
23. On plasticity, see Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography,” 115.
24. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
25. For a good analysis and critique of this tendency in the French philosophy, see Benjamin
Noys, Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of the Contemporary Continental Theory (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
26. See La poétique de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 64, where Lacoue-Labarthe speaks of
the “négativité transcendantale.”
128  Negativity (Dis)embodied

But, unlike Adorno, Lacoue-Labarthe seems to imply that this two-sidedness

does not prevent mimesis from being enacted by the subject in its pure, origi-
nary form of a “mimesis of nothing”27 or “mimesis of oneself.” For Adorno, a
purified mimesis is possible only as a result: it returns as a sublation (Aufhe-
bung) of representation in a constructed and reified work of art.
It follows from the above that Adorno understands this process via
its object, as a regression into the inanimate. Lacoue-Labarthe understands
mimesis, rather, from the side of its subject (and not what he or she identifies
with) and therefore tends to underline the openness and instability of a mime
(which are opposite to Adorno’s paralysis).
Adorno claims that his “negative” dialectic rests on the “preponderance
of the object,”28 that it is asymmetrical in this sense, and that the object belongs
on the side of the “nonidentical” (Adorno’s logical analogon to mimesis).
By this, he does not mean that the subject should simply be open, receptive to
something beyond it. No, the object is not a “beyond”; it is rather a chaotic
confusing movement already within the subject, and the only way to access it,
for the subject, is to disrupt any formal identity, to analyze his or her own
objective determinations, and to express himself or herself in an objective
medium, thrusting into the unknown with metaphors and paradoxes.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophy aims, on the contrary, at the recovery of
the negative, “desistent” subject who is “hidden” beyond the self-identical Sub-
ject of ideology with whom he or she identifies. It is the subject rather than the
object who would be nonidentical, or negative. Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophi-
cal strategy is to combat the antisubjective tendency of contemporary French
thought (Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault) and the analogous tendency in
avant-garde art by inscribing the figure of subject as the site of failure and
negativity. The subject, to him, emerges in the blank spots of an artwork, or
any work: it is a point of nonidentity that makes an image possible but at the
same time resists its completion and fixation. Adorno, for Lacoue-Labarthe,
would thus fall on the side of the devaluation of the subject (subject, for

27. For this central concept, see, e.g., Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’histoire, 129–30 (in refer-
ence to Rousseau). Lacoue-Labarthe sends us back to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where Hei-
degger famously says that “an artwork presents nothing” (stellt nichts da) (Basic Writings, trans. D. F.
Krell [New York: HarperPerennial, 2008], 167; translation modified). But for Lacoue-Labarthe,
unlike for Heidegger, such presentation of presence itself is mimesis at its purest. Because mimesis
repeats a thing or event, suspends its reality, undoes the seriousness of its positing, it puts the empha-
sis not on the thing itself (as it had already been) but on the very act and on the conditions of its pre-
sentation. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Scène,” 90.
28. See “Carried through, the critique of identity is a groping for the preponderance of the
object” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 183).
 Artemy Magun  129

Adorno, is “the latest, but equivalent to most ancient ones, form [Gestalt] of
myth”).29 In fact, for Adorno, the object is the reason for representation’s fail-
ure: the subject resists the violence of nature and is “reified” (verdinglicht) in
the process. The objective, alien force throws a shadow on the subject and
deprives him or her of autonomy.
However, Lacoue-Labarthe’s understanding of the subject is not fully
alien to Adorno. It is less close to Aesthetic Theory and closer to Dialectic of
Enlightenment, where the subject of the Enlightenment, the aforementioned
Odysseus first presented as bound to the mast, is secondly characterized, fol-
lowing Homer, as “Nobody,” Oudeis. “Because both the hero and Nobody
are possible connotations of the word Udeis, the former is able to break the
anathema of the name. . . . [Odysseus] acknowledges himself to himself [iden-
tifies himself] by denying himself under the name ‘Nobody’; he saves his life
by losing himself. This linguistic adaptation to death contains the schema
of modern mathematics.”30 Thus Odysseus is a subject constituted mimeti-
cally, on a symbolic, not imaginary, level. He is a mimetic subject qua origin
of Enlightenment. But, again, the accent is on the dead stillness and on the
“nobody” as a name (a name of anonymity, an antiname), not as actual ano-
nymity and indeterminacy.
The respective weight given to subject and object explains why, for
Adorno, the paradigm of mimesis is spasm and convulsion, the shocklike
regression into the inanimate, while for Lacoue-Labarthe it is primarily dem-
onstrated by the mime’s plasticity. However, Lacoue-Labarthe also realizes
that paralysis is intimately linked to the mimetic effects: he puts it on the side
of the “bad,” typographic and typological mimesis, while unstable oscillation
would belong on the side of the originary, hidden mimesis of the mime. In
“Typography”31 and in “Echo of the Subject,”32 Lacoue-Labarthe criticizes the
mirror as a popular model of mimesis (from Plato to Jacques Lacan) precisely
for reducing mimesis to paralysis, for associating it with imitation and the
image. (Adorno, while associating mimesis and paralysis, nevertheless shares
Lacoue-Labarthe’s rejection of “mirroring” as a form of mimetic mediation,
instead privileging a practical understanding of nature by a subject who is
himself or herself materially constituted by it.)33

29. “The subject is the late form of the myth, and yet the equal of its oldest form” (ibid., 186).
30. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 60. The cryptic reference to modern
mathematics has in mind the role of the sign “zero.”
31. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography,” 92.
32. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Echo of the Subject,” in Typography, 171.
33. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 210.
130  Negativity (Dis)embodied

For Adorno, paralysis, or mimesis of death, is one major paradigm of

mimesis, like the way (mentioned in Caillois but far from being his central
theme) in which insects imitate death. The convulsion of fear translates into
the fixed order of Enlightenment. For instance:

The motives to which idiosyncrasy [mobilized against Jews] appeals recall

the ultimate origins. They produce moments of biological prehistory: dan-
ger signs which make the hair stand on end and the heart stop beating. . . .
When men try to become like nature they harden themselves against it. Pro-
tection as fear is a form of mimicry. The reflexes of stiffening and numb-
ness in humans are archaic schemata of the urge to survive: by adaptation
to death, life pays the toll of its continued existence.34

Adorno takes the stillness of image seriously. He shows, in a more dialecti-

cal than purely critical mood, how the paralytic effect of mimesis is originally
a genuine expressive reaction, which is only subsequently suppressed and
mimed (again)—that is, sublated, in the “bad” way—in the frozen totality of
representation. Not the instability (or not just the instability), but a brusque
interruption, convulsion, paralysis are at the origin of what now appears as the
repressive totality.
But in Aesthetic Theory (the second major text, after Dialectic of Enlight-
enment, where Adorno analyzes mimesis), the picture becomes more dialec-
tically ambivalent. Here he emphasizes the negative, potentially subversive
nature of stability, even as it is reflected into form. Any rest is pregnant with
danger and fear, and it has been the fruit of a strike, of a stasis. The image of
Odysseus tied to the mast to listen to the Sirens expresses the immobilization
that makes aesthetic fascination possible,35 but this immobility is meant pre-
cisely to stop the other sort of capture, the one that would stop labor and divert
the subject to the abyss.
The same is true of other “metaphysical” notions, such as unity:

By its opposition to the empirical world each artwork programmatically,

as it were, establishes its unity. . . . The unity of artworks is their caesura
of myth. In themselves, and in accord with their immanent determina-
tion, they achieve a unity that is impressed [note the Lacoue-Labarthean
theme of imprinting, here seen only as the inadequate, intermediary moment
of the dialectic of unity] upon the empirical objects of rational knowl-

34. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 180.

35. Ibid., 34–35.
 Artemy Magun  131

edge. . . .36 In the artworks is imprinted [drückt sich ab] [thus the imprint-
ing paradigm works in an inverse way, the works of art are imprinted, not
imprinting] what would otherwise vanish.37 . . . Yet this unity is not bind-
ing, and an element of this absence of binding is probably binding in all
artworks. As soon as unity becomes stable, it is lost.38

Despite this last stroke, which is quite Lacoue-Labarthean, Adorno’s emphasis

is on unity and fixity, which, itself, has a negative and instantaneous character.
Unity can be disruptive as a unique cutting moment, but it is the same unity that
subsequently becomes the totality of an artwork. Therefore, in Adorno, when we
see the mute totality of an artwork, it expresses the negative caesura. In the case
of the aesthetic work, its unity also saves its interruptive moment. Of course,
only an intense and contradictory unity, which is characteristic of a good art-
work, can bring together the normally separate fields of life and language.
Often in Aesthetic Theory Adorno speaks of the ambivalence of reifi-
cation. The latter may simply coincide with alienation, if mimesis is under-
stood as reproduction of the existent. On the other hand, it becomes genu-
inely expressed when mimesis, as it must be, is reified into a work of art. The
paralyzing effect of mimesis is transformed into the frozen form of the work.
One expression of this tendency is the poetry of Paul Celan:

Celan’s poems want to speak out the most extreme horror through silence.
Their truth content is itself negative. They imitate a language beneath the
helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: it
is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars. . . . The language of the
lifeless becomes the last possible comfort for a death that is deprived of all
meaning. Distantly analogous to Kafka’s treatment of expressionist paint-
ing, Celan transposes into linguistic processes the increasing abstraction of
landscape, progressively approximating it to the inorganic.39

Or see another passage to the same account:

Only a philistine and stubborn faith in the artist could overlook the com-
plicity of the artwork’s thing-character with social reification and thus with

36. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rob-
ert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 186. Translation modified.
37. Ibid., 186. Translation modified.
38. Ibid., 187. But cf. ibid., 105 (Semblance and Expression): “No artwork is an undiminished
unity; each must simulate it and thus collide with itself.”
39. Ibid., 322. Translation modified.
132  Negativity (Dis)embodied

its untruth: the fetishization of what is in itself a process as a relation between

elements. The artwork is at once process and instant. Its objectivation, a
condition of aesthetic autonomy, is also rigidification. The more the social
labor sedimented in the artwork is objectified and fully formed, the more
the work echoes hollowly and becomes alien to itself.40

As mentioned above, Lacoue-Labarthe is aware of the paralytic effect of

mimesis but is suspicious of it. In Typography, he writes (when speaking of
Heidegger’s reading of Plato in which mimesis, again, becomes assimilated
to the paradigm of the mirror):

The mirror is an absolute instrument, as has been known ever since (at least)
the story of Perseus: it is the apparatus for gorgonizing Medusa [méduser la
Méduse], a fabulous “machine.” . . . The trick is perhaps one of those we
attribute to magic (but isn’t Socrates just a bit of a sorcerer?), by which the
subject is “torpedoed,” immobilized, put into catalepsy—just as Socrates, as
it happens, falls into it sua sponte (dixit Plato at least, whose advantage is
certainly served by this) . . . theorization is thaumaturgy, but one in which
the thaumaturge himself is the victim. Indeed, what is involved is the anti-
thaumaturgic thaumaturgy (a mise-en-abîme that neutralizes the mirror),
destined to contain the thaumaturge, to reduce his disquieting and prodigious
power by simply revealing that it rests upon a play of mirror and is therefore
nothing—or nearly nothing: a mere sleight of hand, a Stellvertretung.41

Thus, in this early and fundamental work of Lacoue-Labarthe, paralysis

appears as a caricature of mimesis and provides for a turn of mimesis against
itself, for the stalling (by Socrates) of mimetic ambivalence by the paralyzing
act of “torpedoeing.” Mirror is a figure of the fascination, religious, or, liter-
ally, speculative mimesis, as opposed to the true, originary mimesis that con-
sists in the instability excluding any Stellung. Or, more precisely, the suspen-
sion inherent in mimesis is, in its truth, oscillation. Where Adorno emphasizes
stoppage, Lacoue-Labarthe speaks of suspension and oscillation.
The situation becomes more complicated in the later work of Lacoue-
Labarthe, namely, the “Caesura of the Speculative.”42 He discovers how Höl­
der­lin’s concept of caesura destabilizes and unsettles Hegel’s speculative
dialectic (in the same sense that mimesis, in “Typography,” was said to be
“destabilizing” Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia). Caesura, according

40. Ibid., 100.

41. Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 92–94.
42. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Caesura of the Speculative,” in Typography, 208–35.
 Artemy Magun  133

to Lacoue-Labarthe, is also intimately linked to mimesis, since it comes as a

convulsive shortcut in the irresolvable paradox of identification: “I like him
and I am like him but therefore I hate him as a rival.” Unlike the Hegelian
dialectic, this mimetic paradox does not have a solution and can only be
brusquely interrupted. Caesura is not the same as mimesis, however, and it is
not quite clear whether it is mimetic itself. Moreover, caesura is clearly a stop-
page, not the plastic “désinstallation” earlier attributed to a mime. It is even, as
Lacoue-Labarthe says, “spasm” and “paralysis.” “[Caesura] interrupts [the spec-
ulative], from place to place, and provokes its spasm”; “the structure of the
tragedy itself becomes thus immobilized and paralyzed.”43 Lacoue-Labarthe
comes to appreciate spasm and paralysis as salutary effects, although still not
in the exact sense of Adorno, for whom these were the effects of inanimate
nature on the subject and the expressions of the violent antagonism between
the subject and the object. A spasm, for Lacoue-Labarthe, is not itself a kind
of mimesis, but a certain interruption of mimesis. However, as long as it
stalls the speculative movement, it can also lead to an identitary metaphysi-
cal closure—if only we ignore the irregularity of the spasm itself. We should
distinguish between the spasm and the effect of the spasm. This is why, for
Lacoue-Labarthe, Hölderlin “rigorously dismantles the speculative-tragic
matrix he himself helped to elaborate”44—this should be understood in the
sense that the dismantling and elaboration go on simultaneously.
In the “Caesura of the Speculative,” Lacoue-Labarthe cites Adorno’s
“Parataxis” approvingly, albeit in passing. The only reproach that Lacoue-
Labarthe makes here to Adorno, as to Heidegger, is that neither of them dis-
cusses Hölderlin’s theater or his theoretical writings in any detail. This, he
claims, is responsible for the failure to “follow, at one time, both the way in
which Hölderlin rigorously dismantles the speculative-tragic matrix” and the
way in which “nothing, finally, could offer him [i.e., to Hölderlin] resources
for an ‘other’ thought.”45 The former criticism cannot apply to Adorno at all
(it applies to Heidegger); thus Lacoue-Labarthe clearly blames the Frankfurt
School thinker for the failure to recognize that Hölderlin had not, in fact, over-
come the speculative. The problem with Adorno is that he sees the work of
Hölderlin as an alternative to speculative thought and to metaphysics in gen-
eral, while Lacoue-Labarthe sees it not as such an alternative but as an (auto)
critique of metaphysics.

43. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Caesura of the Speculative,” 227.

44. Ibid., 211.
45. Ibid., 221.
134  Negativity (Dis)embodied

In his essay Lacoue-Labarthe speaks of the caesura as a moment of

dislocation and disarticulation of the speculative structure. Adorno, in his
“Parataxis,” also concentrates on the structural effects of caesura (or “hia-
tus,” as he calls it). He ascribes the destruction of the syntactic, hierarchical
structure to Hölderlin’s expression of nature. “Nature” revolts against the
technical structure and form that subsumes it, thus disrupting the form.
In fact, the two readings are very close. But for Adorno, the caesura is
itself an important expressive moment, and not just an empty negative rup-
ture. He writes, for instance:

Only through the hiatus of form does the content [Inhalt] become substance
[Ge­halt]. At one point in the “Mnemosyne” even the support of meaning is
dispensed with, and the expressed hiatus is set purely within the language, in
that the descriptive response to the question “Wie aber Liebes?” [But how do
we love?]—how, that is, love is to occur—is wiped out by the second, dis-
turbed question, “Aber was ist dies?” [But what is this?].46

Thus caesura, to Adorno, is a revenge taken by the content on its form. In the
dialectical movement of the pair expression and construction, construction
itself becomes expressive at the moment of its self-negation. Moreover, the
revenge is taken in an expressive form of what Hölderlin himself calls “pure
word.” Adorno, here and throughout his essay, speaks of caesuras and hiatuses
as of actual verbal formulas. Not so Lacoue-Labarthe, who defines the caesura
as “empty articulation or the lack of all articulation, a pure asyndeton.”47 It is
here that the difference lies. For Lacoue-Labarthe, caesura is a purely negative
act, in the retreat of the (mimetic) subject from the vicious circle of mimetic
identification or in the escape from representation. For Adorno, caesura is an
expression of negativity. This is also why Lacoue-Labarthe criticizes him for
not seeing Hölderlin’s impasse. He says: “Need I repeat again? Hölderlin’s
theory of tragedy is, through and through, speculative.”48 In other words, the
caesura does not really add anything to what it disarticulates, does not produce
a true “negative dialectic” of Adorno’s type. It simply suspends and stalls the
dialectical movement.
In a yet later work dedicated to Hölderlin,49 Lacoue-Labarthe writes:

46. Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholson, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 129.
47. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Caesura of the Speculative,” 244.
48. Ibid., 226.
49. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Métaphrasis, suivi de Le théâtre de Hölderlin (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1998).
 Artemy Magun  135

[In Hölderlin’s “empty transport”] the sense of tragedy manifests itself, the
Vorstellung, as far as it is withdrawn from the agonistic, from the incessant
alternation of contradiction, from the indefinitely “binary” rhythm of the
conflict. This void of the tragic transport corresponds structurally to cae-
sura . . . the condition of possibility of manifestation, of the (re-) presenta-
tion [Darstellung] of the tragic.50

Does this mean that Lacoue-Labarthe, in 1995, comes closer to Adorno and
accepts that caesura can be expressed, or “manifested”? Even if so, this expres-
sion remains purely negative (only in the moment of interruption, at the zero
point of “manifestation,” do we perceive the a priori conditions of a process),
while in Adorno it carries a meaning of embodiment, even if he, like Lacoue-
Labarthe, speaks of the work’s entire structure.
In truth, even here Lacoue-Labarthe cannot allow for an expression of
negativity, even for a negative expression. His negation is inapparent. This is
the core of Lacoue-Labarthe’s outlook, which goes back to his studies of
German Romanticism. In “The Literary Absolute,” he and Nancy write:

Within the romantic work, there is interruption and dissemination of the

romantic work, and this in fact is not readable in the work itself, even and
especially not when the fragment, Witz, and chaos are privileged. Rather,
according to another term of Blanchot, it is readable in the unworking
[désoeuvre­ment], never named and still less thought, that insinuates itself
throughout the interstices of the romantic work. Unworking is not incom-
pletion, for as we have seen incompletion completes itself and is the frag-
ment as such; unworking is nothing, only the interruption of the fragment.51

Thus, even though Hölderlin is usually considered a figure outside the Roman-
tic movement, we see that Lacoue-Labarthe reads him in a way continuous
with his readings of the Romantics. For them, the unthinkable and unname-
able interruption is an effect of the infinity of the Romantic subject, while for
Hölderlin, it is rather an intrusion of the subject’s finitude as negativity. Hölder-
lin’s fragment is not the absolutely accomplished Romantic fragment—not a
“hedgehog.” Nevertheless, like the Romantics, Hölderlin builds his poetry
on an interruption that is not itself a part of the work. This interruption is a
refusal from the subject’s (speculative) identification with the work. It is here

50. Ibid., 72–73.

51. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Lit-
erature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1988), 58.
136  Negativity (Dis)embodied

that Lacoue-Labarthe differs from Adorno, for whom an incorporation of

a contradiction or negation is necessary precisely because it is a passage
from the identifying power of the subjective consciousness into the medium
of the nonidentical, which an object is. Thus Adorno wants an incorpora-
tion of art for the very same reason that Lacoue-Labarthe forbids such incor-
poration (an important scholia to Jay, who presents Adorno as somehow
more rationalist).
Now, let me tentatively conclude. In the case of both the plasticity of
mime and the suspending caesura, Lacoue-Labarthe speaks, in fact, of the
irreducible negativity that cannot and must not be incorporated or expressed,
and that is carried by a “desisting” subject. Adorno, on the other hand, sees
the negation as incorporated in a modernist artwork, with its inner disac-
cord, and expressed in caesuras and hiatuses. This dilemma has its serious
philosophical grounds. Indeed, negation is a particular logical operation that
is, in a way, doomed to failure.52 It inevitably reaffirms what it negates (if I
say, this is not my mother, I evoke the idea that this is my mother), and, to be
successful, it seeks to erase itself and to concentrate attention on the inade-
quacy of its negated object. In the twentieth-century thought, this produced
a series of reflections: namely, by Freud, Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sar-
tre, to name only a few. Kojève criticized Hegel for the attempt to incorpo-
rate the negative in an absolute and reformulated it as a simple external end
of human history and return to nature.53 Sartre insisted on the irreducible
and incorporeal nature of consciousness as “nothing.” Freud,54 for his part,
demonstrated the powerlessness of negation and defined the unconscious as
the sphere that “does not know” negation. Sartre emphasized the “nothing-
ness” of the negative, denying any tangible substantiality to the negativity of
consciousness.55 It is this tradition (and this is partly a French tradition, after
all) that Lacoue-Labarthe follows, consciously or not, with his negative and
nonobjectifiable notion of the subject, and with the concept of caesura as
failure.
However, the same character of negativity makes it possible to draw a
different conclusion: because negation is always failed, it must always be reit-

52. On these paradoxes of negation, see Artemy Magun, La révolution négative (Paris: Har-
mattan, 2009).
53. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), esp. 435.
54. Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works,
ed. James Strachey, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth, 1974),
235–40.
55. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1956).
 Artemy Magun  137

erated; moreover, it is itself only an expressive, not a logical, operation. Such

was the position of Henri Bergson;56 in another sense, it was reproduced by
Lacan, who developed Freud’s theory of inefficient negation into the concept
of the ne explétif (a negation superfluously repeated in a sentence, such as “We
don’t need no education”). Lacan showed that the need to repeat a negation as
on an inevitable compulsion was constitutive of subjectivity.57 It is on this
expressive nature of negation beyond meaning that Adorno insists in his work,
trusting less than Lacoue-Labarthe in the possibility of a negation that would
be pure even if inapparent.

The Auseinandersetzungen
Until the 1990s Lacoue-Labarthe rarely mentions Adorno. There is a positive
mention of “Parataxis” in the “Caesura of the Speculative” and a harsh criti-
cism of Adorno’s attacks on Heidegger in Heidegger, Art, and Politics. In
response to Adorno’s words that “Heidegger’s philosophy is fascist right down
to its most intimate components,” Lacoue-Labarthe accuses him of failing to
analyze the essence of fascism, using too much Marxism, and treating fas-
cism as “pathological” instead of recognizing it as “a political form that is
perhaps best able to bring us enlightenment concerning the essence of Mod-
ern politics.”58 This is a criticism whose injustice can be compared only with
Adorno’s own campaign against Heidegger—and it sounds even stranger
given all I have said above on the proximity of Adorno’s critique of fascism
with that of Lacoue-Labarthe. We do not know if Lacoue-Labarthe had atten-
tively read Adorno’s relevant works by that time. The archival research does
not give an unambiguous answer to this question: French translations of
Adorno’s main works, made in the 1970s, were present in Lacoue-Labarthe’s
library, but the exact time and extent of his reading is hard to establish. How-
ever, it is certain that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lacoue-Labarthe
intensively read Adorno.
As mentioned above, there are three serious treatments of Adorno in
Lacoue-Labarthe’s publications of the early 1990s: the discussion of Adorno’s
“Quasi una fantasia” in Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musica Ficta: Figures of Wag-
ner (1991), the discussion of Adorno’s “Parataxis” in the article “Il faut”
(1992), and the “Remarque sur Adorno et le jazz” (1994). In 1990–91 Lacoue-
Labarthe gave a course on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, together with Alexan-
der Garcia Düttmann. Notes for this course are present in Lacoue-Labarthe’s

56. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 272.
57. Jacques Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986), v, 79.
58. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, 105–7.
138  Negativity (Dis)embodied

posthumous archive, and I had a chance to read them.59 Starting in the same
period, Lacoue-Labarthe works on Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and on
the “triangle” of Mann, Adorno, and Schoenberg surrounding this book. But
this project was never accomplished, and the archive contains only a limited
amount of notes made for it.
I want to discuss the three essays written by Lacoue-Labarthe on
Adorno and the notes for his course on Aesthetic Theory. The first two
essays, one on Adorno’s reading of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, the other
on his denunciation of jazz in “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,”60 are devoted to
Adorno’s music studies and are quite close in their problematic and argu-
mentation. The third one, on Adorno’s Hölderlin study, “Parataxis,” is some-
what different but converges on the same issue. In the three texts Lacoue-
Labarthe reproaches Adorno for fetishizing the artwork and opposes to the
German thinker’s search for the embodiment of negativity in art the more
radical version of negativity as a rejection, interruption, or failure of this
work as such. Lacoue-Labarthe presents art, at least modern art, as a tension
between the subject (i.e., the plastic and psychasthenic mime) and his or
her work (oeuvre). However, Lacoue-Labarthe also welcomes and praises
Adorno for the latter’s account of the modern process of de-arting (Entkuns-
tung): this concept, as I show, allows Lacoue-Labarthe to integrate Adorno’s
philosophy into his own. It is striking that in neither of these texts or notes
does Lacoue-Labarthe take issue with the central concept of Adorno’s Aes-
thetic Theory, mimesis. In the marginal notes in Lacoue-Labarthe’s copy of
the book, and in the notes for his course, there is only one mark, and a para-
phrase, of a passage where Adorno writes about mimesis in a way that is
very close to Lacoue-Labarthe’s—this remark appears in the Three Studies
on Hegel.61 But the note remains isolated and without commentary.

59. I am deeply grateful to Claire Nancy and to Leonid Kharlamov (keeper of Lacoue-Labarthe’s
archive) for providing me with an opportunity to study it, specifically as it relates to Adorno.
The archive was not yet cataloged or open to the general public at the moment of this article’s
composition. Now it is deposed in the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, Abbaye
d’Ardenne, Caen.
60. Theodor W. Adorno, “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” in Prisms, 119–33. In this essay Adorno
describes jazz as the fashion that is frozen in its transience and, paradoxically, does not go away.
This brilliant paradox, meant as a reproach to jazz, however, dangerously recalls Adorno’s positive
examples of artworks, for example, of Kafka, whose “eternalized gestures are the momentaneous
brought to a standstill” (“Notes to Kafka,” 252–53).
61. Lacoue-Labarthe rephrases the passage where Adorno, after accusing idealism of being
subordinated to the principle of identity, nevertheless notes that this principle contains a moment of
truth, namely, the mimesis. Lacoue-Labarthe speaks in his note of a “mimetic élan” of thought that
ties together the subject and the object. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Drei Studien zu Hegel,” in Gesam­
melte Schriften, 5:285.
 Artemy Magun  139

Musica Ficta
Let us start with the first text, the chapter from Musica Ficta, “Sacred
Fragment.”62
As I have shown, for Lacoue-Labarthe and for Adorno, the modern
work of art produces a moment of silence, which both call a “caesura.” How-
ever, Lacoue-Labarthe interprets this caesura as a failure rather than as a
success of an artwork. It is this issue that stands in the center of Lacoue-
Labarthe’s reading of Adorno’s essay on Schoenberg in Musica Ficta. Lacoue-
Labarthe follows Adorno’s reading of Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aaron
in its minute detail, agrees with it for most of the time, but comes to a dis-
agreement only in reference to the localization of the caesura in Schoen-
berg’s unfinished opera. Like Lacoue-Labarthe, Adorno perceives this cae-
sura in the very fragmentary nature of Schoenberg’s work. But he locates the
failure of the project in Schoenberg’s not having expressed the caesura in
the music itself, by clashing two different voices or styles of the same lan-
guage in the opera.63 The music of Schoenberg’s opera, says Adorno, is too
homogeneous and thus “unmodern,” “traditional.” It is still too dependent on
Wagner, whose “myth,” at the same time, it aspires to interrupt at the level
of content.
Adorno says that for Schoenberg, “the circularity [of the myth] has to
be interrupted: the caesura was to be decisive. The interrupting principle was
to become music. The undifferentiated unity, from which the ruthless process
of integration allows nothing to be exempted, comes into collision with the
idea of the One itself.”64 Lacoue-Labarthe rightly interprets this “was to be”
(in German, subjunctive wäre) as “would have to be”—this passage is a cri-
tique of Schoenberg by Adorno, a description of what he should but could
not, objectively, have done.
Lacoue-Labarthe disagrees, however, with Adorno’s reproach. He con-
tends that “the caesura, more inaudible to Adorno’s ears than it is invisible to
his eyes, is hidden in the interruption—which, from then on, would no longer
be thinkable as interruption.”65 The interruption in question is the one that
separates music from the speech, that is, the finished part of Schoenberg’s
opera from the part for which he only wrote a libretto.66 The opera’s ending
would thus be a sobering passage from poetry to prose, from religion to the

62. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 117–45.

63. Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi una fantasia (New York: Verso, 1992), 241.
64. Ibid., 241; translation modified.
65. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 141.
66. At the end of Moses and Aaron Schoenberg wrote the text of the final act, but not the music
for it.
140  Negativity (Dis)embodied

sheer and literal sign (although the religious and poetic project is a necessary
part of this negative passage). Lacoue-Labarthe locates the caesura between
the music and the speech, as the (latent) expression of the hesitation of its
author between music and speech as the universal media of the opera. The
caesura is “hidden in the interruption”—a cryptic formula that points, again,
to a strange status of the caesura, which is a negative condition of manifesta-
tion that is not itself manifest, and which is a moment of failure that also, in
some way, belongs to the work itself as its internal border (and thus does not
literally coincide with the interruption of the opera but is “hidden” inside it).
Lacoue-Labarthe takes issue with Adorno’s “melocentrism,” his belief in
a superior power of music as an art that goes beyond representation. Of course,
Adorno is no naive melocentrist of the Schopenhauerian type. He shrewdly
perceives the continuous affinity of music with language and even praises
Schoenberg for the “prose-like language rhythm” of the music.67 As elsewhere,
Adorno practices a dialectic in which the expressive immediacy of sheer
sound, or scream, passes through the semantic language that limits it and gives
it form, and then returns on a higher level in music, as the ultimate culmination
of the expressive power of language, which negates and overcomes (sublates)
language itself (as a semantic medium) from within.68 Music is thus a language
of pure names, an ultimate culmination of language. For Lacoue-Labarthe,
however, this dialectic is not persuasive. It is just a complex way to restore the
religion of art via the logic of the sublime (expression of the inexpressible).
It is the sublime, says Lacoue-Labarthe, that poses a problem. Adorno
uses the logic of sublimation and discusses Schoenberg’s concept of Judaism,
which is thoroughly sublime, though he never calls the sublime by name. Thus
the Frankfurt philosopher misses the critical turn in the modern tradition of
thinking the sublime. Indeed, “all the analyses of purportedly sublime works
have been generally in agreement in thinking that there is no possible sublime
presentation—or, a fortiori, figuration—and thus in thinking that the very
question of sublime art always arises.”69 The failure to objectify the sublime,
for which Adorno reproaches Schoenberg, is inscribed in the very concept of
the sublime, and therefore Adorno’s opposition between Schoenberg’s subjec-
tive attempt and the supposedly “great sacred art” of the past is a naive, uncrit-
ical reproduction of “a retrospective illusion—a projection—of the educated

67. Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, 247.

68. “The opera ‘Moses and Aaron’ is musica ficta, but in a sublated form [aber als aufge-
hobene]” (ibid., 231–32; translation modified).
69. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 131.
 Artemy Magun  141

German bourgeoisie.”70 To which Adorno would immediately respond, one

would guess, by attacking Lacoue-Labarthe as an unhistorical thinker, who
universalizes his resignation and thus unwittingly strengthens the position of
the modern metaphysic of the Subject (resignation converts into repression).
In this polemic against Adorno’s dialectics, Lacoue-Labarthe empha-
sizes the theatrical features of Schoenberg’s opera (those, precisely, of musica
ficta). He points at the unstable hesitation in which Moses, instigated by the
mimetic rivalry with Aaron, keeps trying to sing, keeps searching for a word
that, though not itself an image, would still represent God, in a certain way. At
the same time, he needs to sharply oppose his brother and defend his icono-
clastic stance. The final caesura (Moses’s words: “Oh, the word that I lack”
and the interruption of the musical part of the opera) is then a logical though
brusque result of the previous mimetic instability. Moses partly becomes a
representation of Adorno himself—Adorno is the part of Moses that impels
him to sing and to search for “the Word.”
Lacoue-Labarthe concludes the essay by affirming that “art is a religion
within the limits of inadequation alone. Probably the end, in every sense, of
religion. Or to be more precise: the caesura of religion.”71 Thus, again, reli-
gion is inevitably present in art, but true art limits it by destabilizing it and
interrupting it. The question remains, however, if the ambivalent suspension
(implicit in the destabilization) and the spasm of interruption do not sustain, on
another level, the fascinating power of an image that is the source of religion
as such . . .
Here is the problematic that I discussed above. Adorno wants the cae-
sura, in poetry or in music, to be expressed, be it in the form of a word, a musi-
cal phrase, or a structural disjuncture in the work. Lacoue-Labarthe thinks
of a caesura as a moment of failure; he wants an honest negativity, a real
interruption, that makes the subject withdraw from his or her work. Adorno,
with his “preponderance of the object,” wants the subject, on the contrary, to
become an object and to obtain a body, so that the rupture becomes enacted
and expressed in the nonidentical and nontransparent medium. Thus, for
Adorno, the expressive incorporation does not exactly mean what Lacoue-
Labarthe reproaches him for, namely, the sublime sublation of negativity. On
the contrary, Adorno maintains that if we remain at the level of nonconformist

70. Ibid., 140.

71. Ibid., 145; translation modified. The paraphrase of Kant’s famous formula (unnoticed by the
English translator, Felicia McCarren) shows Lacoue-Labarthe’s essentially critical position, in
opposition to Adorno’s dialectical one.
142  Negativity (Dis)embodied

subjectivity, we fail to confront our internal contradiction and to reach outside

ourselves: if today we can speak of religion at all, then it is the religion of a
transcendent and mystical withdrawal from the world.
In Adorno’s view, Schoenberg fails to compose a “sacred work of art”
precisely because he remains subjective. The powerful work of “integration”
that his music possesses is just the force of subjective integration. It cannot
become objective and concrete, since it lacks the capacity to express the divi-
sion of which it speaks at the level of content.

Theologians have complained that the designation of monotheism as

“thought”—that is, something which is only subjectively intended—
diminishes the idea of transcendence, which must, however, be the content
of this thought. Nevertheless, a truth manifests itself in this, however clum-
sily it is expressed: the absolute was not present in the work other than as a
subjective intention—or idea, as the philosophers would say.72

This is why, for Adorno, Schoenberg’s “theology” remains negative,73 as a sign

of this theology’s failure and resignation in the face of an object that it cannot
touch. Or, perhaps, this is just a religion of the Subject, which prevents this
subject from reaching outside itself toward the object; that is, in our time, reli-
gion has become an inadequate, limiting force. However, Schoenberg suc-
ceeds in expressing this very limitation.
With his critique of subjective art and of “negative theology,” Adorno
acts as if anticipating Lacoue-Labarthe’s criticism. Lacoue-Labarthe would
of course immediately contend that “his” subject does not resign in the face of
exterior object but enacts the internal disruption of this object, or objects: it
is Adorno who wants the object to appear inside the music, and it is Lacoue-
Labarthe who reaches outside the opera’s musical totality and notices that its
prosaic textual part is also part of the work, of the “object” in question. The
external negation is no less “objective” than the internal, expressive one. This
clash between the two authors could be described as a clash between Catholi-

72. Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, 227; translation modified. Lacoue-Labarthe quotes this pas-
sage (Musica Ficta, 129) in presenting Adorno’s position and criticizing his assumption of a pos-
sibility of “objective” art.
73. “In Schönberg’s development, as in Strindberg’s, this expression qua negativity, this interior
suffering of a person, gets carried away to the point that it becomes negative theology, a conjuring
up of that all-embracing, conciliatory meaning which is denied to an absolute subjectivity”
(Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, 236). Here Adorno connects the negative mimetic subjectivity in the
sense of Lacoue-Labarthe with the all-encompassing subjectivity of the late Schoenberg—the for-
mer is the truth of the latter.
 Artemy Magun  143

cism and Protestantism (as transposed into art),74 each one accusing the other of
being only a religion and trying to salvage art and mimesis from this religion.

“Il faut”
Lacoue-Labarthe’s second large discussion of Adorno occurs in the detailed
discussion of Adorno’s “Parataxis,” in the essay “Il faut” (“It Needs to Be”; the
author plays on the etymology of the word falloir and interprets the title also as
“It Lacks”), which was originally published in MLN 75 and then reprinted in
Heidegger: La politique du poème.76 Here, even more than in the Schoenberg
essay, Lacoue-Labarthe agrees with Adorno on virtually every point. Because
Adorno, in “Parataxis,” attacks Heidegger’s sublimation for the sake of Hölder-
lin’s prosaism, Lacoue-Labarthe sees this as an argument for the critical and
demythologizing character of Hölderlin’s art, citing Adorno’s later concept of
de-arting as going in the same direction.
Strangely, Lacoue-Labarthe does not mention here the important dif-
ferences between his and Adorno’s treatments of caesura and mimesis that I
discussed above. Clearly, this is because he does not really perceive Adorno
as a thinker on mimesis. Discussing “Parataxis,” Lacoue-Labarthe misses the
“mimetic” aspect of Adorno’s argument. In his essay Adorno draws on two
elements of Hölderlin’s poetics: one is the famous “parataxis,” the structural
dislocation of the work (here Lacoue-Labarthe fully agrees), and the second,
on the level of content, is the use of “correspondences”—a system of horizontal
ties among objects, like the one later evoked by Baudelaire (this part of the
argument is ignored by Lacoue-Labarthe). In fact, “correspondences,” although
Adorno does not say this directly, are forces of mimetic destabilization and
dissolution of meaning, which complement and mirror what “parataxis” does
at the structural level (the universal connection parallels the universal disar-
ticulation). Moreover, correspondences are a force of unsettling fusion (of
meanings), while parataxis is the force of unsettling disjuncture. We recog-
nize the two faces of mimesis as negativity, as they are present in Lacoue-
Labarthe’s work: the plasticity of the mime (“Typography”) and the caesura
as paralysis (“Caesura of the Speculative”). In a way, Adorno’s essay could
provide a way to synthesize these two negative functions of mimesis that

74. Adorno’s mother was Catholic, his father Protestant. Theodor was baptized as a Catholic
but later, at a conscious age, switched to Protestantism. Lacoue-Labarthe received a Protestant
upbringing.
75. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Il faut,” 421–40.
76. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger: La politique du poème (Paris: Galilée, 2002).
144  Negativity (Dis)embodied

Lacoue-Labarthe himself does not see or does not want to see. But Lacoue-
Labarthe, as already noted, does not notice this.
Instead, he focuses on two seemingly minor points. First, Lacoue-
Labarthe thinks that Adorno misses the philosophical meaning of Heideg­
ger’s “mistake,” where the latter identifies Hölderlin’s “femmes brunes” from
Bordeaux with German women. Adorno notices this mistake but does not see
that it points at the problem of a mimetic double bind. To Adorno, Hölderlin
identifies with the French women, while Heidegger identifies them with the
German ones, thus “pulling” them home. But—adds Lacoue-Labarthe—there
is a hidden move of self-alienation involved in this identification. Adorno, for
whom mimesis does not mean interhuman identification and for whom the
nonidentity (of German and French women) goes without saying, does not
notice the imperialist double bind between exoticism and nostalgia in Hei-
degger’s gesture. Adorno does not pay attention to what Lacoue-Labarthe calls
“hyperbologic,” the escalating oscillation of “near” and “far,” which, in his
view, cannot be dialectically mediated and which therefore can only be inter-
rupted. Hölderlin’s attitude to these women is characterized by this vertiginous
oscillation, of which he is conscious and which, for Heidegger, is an uncon-
scious source of a blinding fascination.
Second, Lacoue-Labarthe disagrees when Adorno compares Hölderlin’s
prose to “sacred texts” and associates it, here too, with the name going “beyond
the concept” (an issue that had already emerged in Musica Ficta with regard
to Adorno’s notion of music as a language of names). The whole issue of prose,
says Lacoue-Labarthe, is that it does not really arrive to names. Hölderlin,
rather, practices “unnaming.” Strangely, Lacoue-Labarthe uses a very “Ador-
nian” argument to fight Adorno on this point. Pointing out that Hölderlin’s
“Bellarmin” is an obscure word, which might be not a proper name but a
wordplay (“bello Arminius”), Lacoue-Labarthe writes: “Calcination of the
name: the figure is there, the Gestalt, but it presents itself as a forever with-
drawn or destroyed secret of the name.”77 In fact, such “calcination,” incorpo-
ration of language and image, is what Adorno himself liked to emphasize (see,
e.g., the quote above about Celan and Kafka). But for him, such denomination
of names is itself a moment to be expressed in the objective medium, a word
becoming a thing is a moment of expressive mimesis par excellence. It is the
same tension that we had discussed in the case of “Typography”: for Lacoue-
Labarthe, the petrification of signs and bodies undoes mimesis, while for
Adorno, it is one of its two dialectical poles.

77. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Il faut,” 438.

 Artemy Magun  145

“Prose,” for Lacoue-Labarthe, is an instance of a failure of naming, of

the language approaching the anonymous. As such, this language is less a
matter of expression and more a matter of a dictamen—an imperative, a call.
This call is addressed to the subject in its subjectivity, is constitutive for the
subject. Thus Adorno once again affirms an expression and incorporation of
negativity, where Lacoue-Labarthe sees a failure. But Adorno does solve
similar tasks in his own philosophy. He also speaks of the subject’s failure as
the source of an artwork. And, unlike Lacoue-Labarthe, he attributes this
failure to the object and sees the object as the only remaining venue of
expression: “If the subject is no longer able to speak directly, then at least it
should—in accord with modernism that has not pledged itself to absolute
construction—speak through things, through their alienated and mutilated
form.”78 That the subject cannot speak freely is, according to Adorno, the
result of the social pressure qua objective force. The subject is reified. How-
ever (as he argues here against the ideology of abstract art), today the very
things that have reified the subject can serve the purpose of its expression.
It is hard not to see here a proximity between Lacoue-Labarthe and
Adorno: both see modern art as an expression of the impossibility of direct
expression, and for both, the new mode of expression is predominantly nega-
tive. The difference is, again, in the degree of negativity: for Lacoue-Labarthe,
such art exists by virtue of its negative reference to itself, while for Adorno, it
is capable of a mimesis of itself, thus successfully embodying the nonidentity.

On Jazz
Finally, let us take the third Auseinandersetzung: Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of
Adorno’s writings on jazz, particularly “Perennial Fashion—Jazz.” Here
Lacoue-Labarthe tries to go beyond a simple disagreement of taste (he, Lacoue-
Labarthe, likes jazz, and Adorno despises it). In fact, in this text Lacoue-
Labarthe subjects Adorno to a rather violent interpretation, which is more sim-
ilar to his (or to Derrida’s) treatment of classical authors than to his treatment of
their own contemporaries.
Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes Adorno’s concept of Entkunstung, which
first appears in his writing on jazz and later plays a large role in Aesthetic
Theory. By “de-arting” Adorno means the actual process of the disappearance
of the prestige of art, of its autonomy—and the ideology, like that of Hegel or
Benjamin, that justifies this process. Jazz is a model of such de-arting, and
throughout Aesthetic Theory the word is used in a polemical or pejorative

78. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 118.

146  Negativity (Dis)embodied

context. Here is a typical example: “As a tabula rasa of subjective projections,

however, the artwork is shorn of its qualitative dimensions [entqualifiziert]. The
poles of its ‘de-arting’ are that it is made as much a thing among things as a
psychological vehicle of the spectator.”79 Adorno explicitly associates this de-
arting with Benjamin’s theory of “art in the age of its technical reproduction,”
as of art losing its autonomy and mixing into life. At least if Benjamin is under-
stood too literally: “On the other hand, conceived undialectically, the theory of
aura lends itself to misuse. It becomes a slogan of the de-arting of art that is
under way in the age of the technical reproducibility of the artwork.”80
Adorno’s stance is quite clear. He wants to salvage art from assaults on
its autonomy and views the de-arting as one more instance of the techno-
capitalist alienation. But Lacoue-Labarthe reads him against the grain. He
emphasizes the first sentence of Aesthetic Theory: “It is self-evident that
nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its rela-
tion to the totality, not even its right to exist.”81 This phrase lets him reinter-
pret Entkunstung as an innovative substantive concept and not as a polemi-
cal quotation and description of a banal and unfortunate tendency. “By this
questioning of the ‘right to existence,’ Adorno aims at at least two things:
Entkunstung, in the sense in which we had understood the word up to now:
the shipwreck of art in the cultural industry, de-arting; but also the very exis-
tence of art.”82 It then appears that “Adorno wanted to oppose [to Hegel who
conceived art in its essence—Washeit, quidditas] the question of the very fact
of art’s existence [the question of the Dasheit, haecceitas].”83 And right after
this, jazz suddenly becomes important as a “strange art that carries in itself,
naïvely of course, the obsession with its own ‘right to existence.’ And thus
the torturing anxiety of art itself.”84
Lacoue-Labarthe reads Adorno as though the latter himself held the
position that Lacoue-Labarthe had opposed to him in his reading of “Quasi
una fantasia.” The artwork itself is suspect, and if it is genuine, it must include
not just its automimesis but also its autocritique. Moreover, mimesis itself is
nothing but this autocritical, iconoclastic force that destroys the fascinating
power of an image (or of a voice).

79. Ibid., 17; translation modified.

80. Ibid., 45; translation modified.
81. Ibid., 1; translation modified.
82. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Remarque sur Adorno,” 208.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., 209.
 Artemy Magun  147

Thus art, for Lacoue-Labarthe, is not “finished,” but it is on the verge of

finishing, hence the emergence of artistic genres that stand, like jazz, on the
verge of being nonart. Adorno’s concept of de-arting, if read despite him, is in
fact fortunate because it describes the end of art as a process, not a moment: a
process internal to art itself, in the same way that the question of its being
is internal, according to Heidegger, to the very being of a human. Jazz is then
redeemed as a risky art, art in which the being and value of art are preserved
via a process of their continuous loss. Analogously, in the “sobering up” of
prose (a metaphor beloved by Hölderlin and Lacoue-Labarthe, and also used by
Adorno), the “intoxication” of poetry helps clear out the view while retreating.
Adorno himself, however, did not think so. For him, jazz failed to
express its own negativity, to incorporate it into its monotonous structure. As
in the two other debates, Lacoue-Labarthe opposes the negation as a limit of
art, both external and internal, to the idea of an incorporated and thus subli-
mated negation.

The Course on Adorno

Finally, let us consider the notes of the seminar on aesthetic theory that
Lacoue-Labarthe taught jointly with Garcia Düttmann in 1990–91. Certainly,
the archival notes cannot give us a full or precise idea of what Lacoue-
Labarthe’s interpretation was. Yet they can lead us in a right direction.
Judging by these notes, the issue of this seminar was closest to the
issue of Lacoue-Labarthe’s article on Adorno and jazz. The central concept of
Aesthetic Theory, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, is de-arting. According to
Lacoue-Labarthe, Adorno radicalizes Hegel’s thesis on the end of art by add-
ing that art had from its very beginning been something “ephemeral,” uncer-
tain in its existence. This further allows the French thinker to tie the thesis of
de-arting to another central thesis of Aesthetic Theory: Adorno’s insistence on
the artwork as an objective physical existence. As I have shown, this thesis
generally contradicts Lacoue-Labarthe’s own aesthetic principles. In this
course, however, he takes it seriously and tries to justify it by the historical
situation of de-arting. Art, as it exists now, is the “survival” of art. And this
survival happens in the form of a sheer thing. “Entkunstete art—thing among
things,” writes Lacoue-Labarthe. Then, and only then, the understanding of
art as an object makes sense—this object or, better, thing, is a sheer prosaic
remainder of what has once been aesthetic. “The thing: what remains at the
limit of the destruction of transcendence and of positivism.” An artwork qua
thing is, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, a Dasheit (thisness) in opposition to
148  Negativity (Dis)embodied

Washeit (whatness): it is exposed to the destruction that it has survived, and its
essence consists in its existence: what such an artwork conveys is its existence
as such, and the question of its existence. This is an explicitly Heideggerian
logic,85 and Lacoue-Labarthe does indeed mention Heidegger in the notes,
adding that in Adorno there is a lack of questioning of the “thing.”
Thus Lacoue-Labarthe interprets Adorno, with sympathy, in the way
that allows him to reconcile Adorno’s aesthetics with his own. An artwork
understood as a thing at the limit of (in)existence plays virtually the same
role as the subject who withdraws and interrupts a work or an image that he
or she creates. In both cases, the issue consists in the very fragile existence
of art, and art, in its turn, becomes an organon for expressing the problem of
meaningless existence.
In the end, it is hard to say whether the solution tentatively proposed
by Lacoue-Labarthe in his seminar can really reconcile the two authors
and, largely, the two schools of thought—the Hegelian and the Heideggerian
approaches to what the former designates as “negativity.” Lacoue-Labarthe
never takes back his criticism of Adorno for his will to embodiment and com-
pletion. The article “Il faut,” which criticizes Adorno for his will to nomina-
tion, is based on a lecture given in Tübingen in 1991, at the same time that the
more reconciliatory course was taught in Strasbourg. The two perspectives on
the modern art, and on negativity at large, respectively oriented to subjective
hesitation and fragmentation, and to the cold petrified constructions, remain
divergent. Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Adorno’s Entkunstung does not
coincide with the literal, critical meaning of this concept in Aesthetic Theory.
His treatment of thingness as postcatastrophic survival ignores the future-
oriented, utopian aspect of art, in Adorno’s creative version of Marxism.
Nevertheless, the “dialogue” between the two authors shows the path of syn-
thesizing and renewing the critical philosophies of the twentieth century.

85. The question of their own “thisness” characterizes, for Heidegger, the being of humans—
Dasein. Heidegger also analyzes art as what presents nothing but its own presence. And, in “The
Origin of the Work of Art,” he explicitly starts the discussion with the question of an artwork as
a thing.