From Tragedy to Iconoclasm:

The Changing Status of Hölderlin

in Adorno’s Conception of History
Jeffrey Bernstein
College of the Holy Cross

Abstract: This paper explores the transformation which Adorno’s conception of his-
tory undergoes from his texts of the 1930s to those of the 1960s. This transformation
involves a change in the role played by Hölderlin’s figure of transience. In the texts of
the ’30s, Hölderlinian transience (in its Benjaminian interpretation) amounts to a
moment of negative content within Adorno’s conception of history. In the texts of the
’60s, such transience becomes the very form of Adornian philosophical history. As such,
his thinking of history changes from a tragic conception (emphasizing a “negative
absolute”) to an iconoclastic one (emphasizing “absolute negativity”).

Introductory Remarks

I begin with two related passages from Adorno. The first comes from his 1931
inaugural lecture at Frankfurt entitled “The Actuality of Philosophy”: “Every
philosophy which today does not depend on the security of current intellectual
and social conditions, but instead upon truth, sees itself facing the problem of
a liquidation of philosophy.”1 The second dramatically opens the introduction
to his Negative Dialectics (published in 1966): “Philosophy, which once seemed
obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”2 In 1931, Adorno
announces philosophy’s demise. Thirty-five years later, he reflects on its belated
survival. Without wishing to overdetermine the sense of either passage too soon,
this paper attempts to think through the space (both temporal and conceptual)
separating the two. Put differently, I ask: what happens to and in Adorno’s thinking
during this thirty-five-year period such that the perception of an ensuing intel-
lectual apocalypse is replaced by a survival constituted by missed fulfillment?

© 2010. Epoché, Volume 15, Issue 1 (Fall 2010). ISSN 1085-1968. 137–161
138 Jeffrey Bernstein

Insofar as this question relates to Adorno’s philosophy, it de facto involves

his understanding of history, given that (according to Adorno) philosophy is the
conceptual labor “whose movement follows history’s path to the very extreme”
in order not to be simply reduced to one historical phenomenon among others.3
Similarly, insofar as history emerges as the suppressed remainder contained in
the material creation of cultural productions, the question of Adorno’s histori-
cally oriented philosophy (which is not to say, in a German Idealist sense, his
“philosophy of history”) inevitably involves his understanding of aesthetics. The
question I wish to pose in this study can, therefore, be stated as follows: how does
the role of aesthetics function in Adorno’s conception of history such that his overall
conception of philosophy changes from one which faces immanent exhaustion to
one which bears witness to an ambivalent survival?
Further complicating this question is the fact that Adorno’s philosophy (in
one respect) exhibits a terminological sameness between these two periods;
this to the point of his incorporation and direct quotation of early material (e.g.,
regarding natural-history) in Negative Dialectics.4 Hence, what is at issue cannot
be thought by means of a reduction to the German Idealist figure of “inner de-
velopment” which would constitute and modify the content of Adorno’s thought.
Rather, the mode of presentation, the Darstellung, of Adorno’s thought is what (I
claim) undergoes a substantial alteration. This change in presentation is, I believe,
a result of the changing (but always crucial) role which the thought and poetry
of Friedrich Hölderlin holds for Adorno.
My position is this: in the early works of the 1930s, Adorno takes Hölderlin’s
theoretical statements concerning transience (Vergänglichkeit) and the tragic
relation to the absolute (which becomes manifest in/through/as transience), as
interpreted by Walter Benjamin, to be the focal point of historical-philosophical
analysis. During this period, Hölderlin’s insights amount to a specific moment of
content within an account of history—i.e., tragedy amounts to a moment where
the absolute (in Benjaminian terms, the “expressionless” [Ausdruckslose]) can be
negatively accessed. In the later works of the 1960s, Adorno begins to focus on
Hölderlin’s poetry (which similarly emphasizes transience) as a stylistic device
which forms a discourse about history. Insofar as Hölderlinian transience now
undergoes a mutation from the realm of content to that of form, Adorno’s 1960s
discourse becomes a presentation of the transience about which he wrote in the
1930s. This becoming-form of what previously existed solely as content, I claim,
transforms Adorno’s conception of history from a tragic discourse (i.e., one where
the absolute is still—in however critically negative a manner, through however
fragmentary a lens—able to be glimpsed) to an iconoclastic discourse (i.e., one
where access to the absolute is systematically denied). Differently stated, Adorno’s
discourse on history changes from one which emphasizes a negative (or negated)
absolute (in the mode of the “expressionless”) to one which emphasizes absolute
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 139

negativity5—i.e., a type of presentation which Adorno terms, with respect to

artworks, “late style.”
The claim of this paper is not that Adorno, in some sense, “gets Hölderlin
right”; it is not a matter of accessing “Hölderlin-in-himself.” Rather, the claim is
that Adorno’s later interpretation, accurate or inaccurate, is an important inter-
pretation for understanding what it means to conceive of history today. Therefore,
my concern centers around what Adorno makes of (1) Hölderlin’s articulations
of the tragic relation between humans and the absolute and (2) his poetic de-
ployment of parataxis.6 (As an initial indication of such a distance, one might
note that the prefix “para-” in the term “parataxis” usually suggests an external
realm to which the work in question ultimately refers. But insofar as, for Adorno,
parataxis is a strategy which aids in the achievement of lateness, it would render
any external reference deeply problematic. Differently stated, “[a]rt can only
protect its referential character by . . . interrupt[ing] the possibility of making
reference to the existing world and hindering the fulfillment of its referential
structure.”7 In this way, art paradoxically bears witness to the circumstances of
an unreconciled world.)
Ironically enough, the aforementioned change coincides with a shift in em-
phasis (on Adorno’s part) away from Hölderlin’s theoretical writings and towards
his late poetry. Perhaps, however, the irony contained in the aforementioned
shift from the theoretical to the poetic work of Hölderlin is only apparent. What
would make such a shift ironic would be the conflict between, on the one hand,
the significant role that poetic imagery would inevitably play in this conception
of history and, on the other hand, the prohibition against such significance result-
ing from the iconoclastic impulse. However, I argue that Adorno’s envisioning
of Hölderlin’s late poetic style as constituting the form of historical discourse
negates the role of images as objects of representation. By situating Hölderlin’s
late poetry thus, Adorno articulates a conception of history which accords no
place to an ultimately redemptive or cathartic role of images. Put differently, one
might describe Adorno’s later thought (with its transformed usage of Hölderlin)
as a philosophical analogue to the aesthetic category of late modernism—i.e.,
Adorno’s later thought, like modernist artworks, “secures its appearing fullness
upon its existential emptiness. . . . [I]ts claim to fullness is made possible by its be-
ing without empirical significance.”8 I will address this point in more depth during
my discussion of Adorno’s late philosophy. Overall, then, this paper assumes the
following structure: (1) a brief discussion of Hölderlin’s theoretical articulation
of the negative absolute (i.e., the absolute in its transient relation to humanity)
and its subsequent re-interpretation by Benjamin, (2) the role which Benjamin’s
interpretation plays in Adorno’s early conception of history (within the particular
context of Adorno’s two early lectures entitled “The Actuality of Philosophy” and
“The Idea of Natural-History”9), and (3) a discussion of Adorno’s later reading
140 Jeffrey Bernstein

of Hölderlin (in “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry”10), the changed emphasis

of Hölderlin’s discourse in Adorno’s thought, and how this changed emphasis
contributes to Adorno’s rethinking of history as absolute negativity (as put forth
in Negative Dialectics). I then conclude with some reflections on how one might
understand this transformation in a manner not reducible to the German Idealist
category of “inner development.”

I. Hölderlin’s Negative Absolute and

its Benjaminian Interpretation
This whole does indeed present edifices to my eye, but only in ruins.
—Immanuel Kant11
But where danger is,
Grows also that which saves.
—Friedrich Hölderlin12
The epigrams for this section form something of a constellation through which
one might be able to appreciate the breadth of the question concerning the tragic,
fragmented relation of humans to the absolute and the influence it exerted on
Adorno’s early thought. It would be a mistake to relegate this issue to a narrowly
construed category of “German Romantic Idealism.” One does well to recall that
Kant’s above mentioned statement occurs as the first paragraph of Kant’s brief
discussion on the history of pure reason (in the First Critique). Thus, even within
a conventionally understood “Enlightenment” context (with its emphasis on the
rational character of the unconditioned/absolute unity), the insight concerning
tragic access is already in play. Moreover, this insight is already situated with re-
spect to history—i.e., the unity of reason gives itself to history only in the most
mediated form (i.e., through its self-errancy and dialectical illusion).
This is the same insight expressed in Hölderlin’s statement from “Patmos,” so
important for Heidegger as a way of recollecting the internal limits of the overarch-
ing technologization of the world; insofar as the danger of the technological mode
of disclosure contains the noncoincidence between what it discloses (objects as
“standing reserve”) and its self-disclosure (being), the self-disclosure of technol-
ogy shows technology to be an epoch of being, and thus, not simply identical to
being; in Heidegger’s terms “the essence of technology is nothing technological.”
To be able to think in and through the danger inherent in the epoch of technology
means to be able to (in a certain respect) see “beyond” technology from within.
Thus, the situation humanity faces regarding technology is tragic, but not yet
hopeless. This shows that thinkers as diverse as Kant and Heidegger take up a
similar relation to the Hölderlinian insight as (I claim) the early Adorno does.
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 141

Perhaps as a result of this issue’s significance, the insight regarding the tragic
unity of human being and the absolute has received an appropriately great deal of
attention from Hölderlin commentators.13 There have been, similarly substantive
discussions (if less widespread) concerning the Benjaminian category of “the
expressionless” as a translation and transmission of the Hölderlinian (or, more
generally, Romantic) articulation of the absolute.14 For these reasons (as well as
limitations of space), a full treatment of these topics lies beyond the scope of this
study. However, a brief sketch of the contours concerning these respective discus-
sions is both appropriate and necessary for investigating the role of Hölderlin’s
thought in Adorno’s early philosophical conception of history.
The primary textual co-ordinates for exploring Hölderlin’s articulation of
the negative absolute (i.e., the absolute in/through transience) are six short texts
which can be developed here in schematic form. “Judgment and Being” (1795)
articulates both (1) the separation between the subject/object dichotomy (as
it occurs in the human world) from its “ground” in absolute unity, and (2) its
conceptually mediated return to such a ground via the power of judgment:
“identity is not a unification of object and subject, which can take place absolutely,
therefore identity is not = to absolute being. . . . The concept of judgment already
contains the concept of the reciprocal relation of object and subject to each other,
as well as the necessary precondition of a whole of which object and subject are
the parts.”15 “The Significance of Tragedy” (1802) outlines the insight that the
absolute is only given in tragedy through its weakest presentation—i.e., in its
negative form (one might say, as “subjectively ineffective”): “in the tragic . . . the
original can only appear in its weakness, but insofar as the [tragic] sign in itself
is posited as meaningless = o, the original too, the hidden ground of everything
in nature can represent itself.”16 The “Remarks on Oedipus” (1803), articulates the
moment when the absolute abruptly (and transiently) presents itself through the
medium of the caesura: “In the rhythmic sequence of representations, in which
the tragic transport exhibits itself, that which one calls the caesura in poetic me-
tre, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic interruption, is necessary; precisely in
order to counter the raging change of representations at its summit so that it is
no longer the change of representations but representation itself which appears.”17
Finally, the “Remarks on Antigone” (1803), “Becoming in Decline” (c. 1800), and
the December 4, 1801 letter to Böhlendorff all locate the horizon in which the
negative absolute appears (to humans) as history. In “Antigone,” Hölderlin holds
that: “the infinite, like the spirit of the states and of the world, cannot be grasped
other than from an askew perspective.”18 One reads in the “Becoming” text that
“the world of all worlds, the all in all, which always is, only manifests itself in all
time—or in the decline or in the moment, or, more genetically, in the becoming of
the moment, and in the beginning of time and world.”19 And according to Heideg­
ger, Hölderlin statement from the letter to Böhlendorff to the effect that “the free
142 Jeffrey Bernstein

use of what is one’s own is the most difficult”20 functions as the “law of history
[which] places historical humankind into a specific essence, as a consequence
of which whatever is one’s own is most remote and the path to one’s ownmost is
the longest and most difficult.”21
In summary, for Hölderlin, that which is most original is “intimately foreign”
to us. We are irreparably severed from absolute unity except by virtue of the tragic
insight which always presents itself to us as belated and ineffective. One might here
also invoke Hegel’s famous remark about the Owl of Minerva as regards the non-
coincidence of experience (which is always embedded in history) and knowing
(which attains to the absolute). And yet, the owl still takes flight; the absolute still
presents itself. Here, what is made present is a problematic object with a negative
content. In the language of “Significance of Tragedy,” what occurs is a presentation
of weakness (understood in both the objective and subjective senses of the geni-
tive). The caesuric irruption of this “object” marks the major events of history.
As stated above, Adorno’s early appropriation of Hölderlin (in contrast to his
later usage) is wholly mediated through Benjamin’s interpretation. Benjamin’s
interpretive substitution of one privative term by another (i.e.,“expressionless” for
“absolute”)—occurring in full recognition of his debt to Hölderlin—occurs largely
(and unsurprisingly) in essays and fragments between the years of 1916 and 1922
(i.e., roughly around the time of the early development of Modernist negativity in
art and literature). In the interest of brevity, I will focus on his most sustained treat-
ment of the “expressionless,” which occurs in his “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.”
In a discussion of art, with its focus on Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus,”
Benjamin notes that the counter-rhythmic caesura brings every aesthetic pre-
sentation—every “expression”—in the artwork to a standstill “in order to give
free reign to an expressionless power inside all artistic media.”22 Benjamin holds
that the category of the “expressionless” finds its most rigorous definition in the
passage from Hölderlin’s remarks on Oedipus concerning the self-appearance
of representation in the caesuric moment (GEA: 340–1). The expressionless, for
Benjamin, is “the critical violence” which prevents semblance from intermix-
ing with “essence in art” (GEA: 340). In this respect, at least, the expressionless
“promises” to prevent the saturation of art by semblance in an analogous manner
to the way in which, for Heidegger, being “promises” to prevent technology from
overwhelming the world. For Benjamin, the expressionless completes the art-
work by shattering it into “a fragment of the true world” (GEA: 340). The totality
bestowed upon art by semblance is decisively interrupted in artwork as a result
of the fragmenting occurrence of the expressionless through the caesuric mo-
ment. Through the disruption and shattering of the semblance of identity—i.e.,
amongst the ruins—one can detect the true world in its tragic distance from the
world of human experience. But again, this recognition functions cathartically
only insofar as it refers to a negativity (i.e., the expressionless). That this cathartic
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 143

moment undergoes an analogous mutation in Benjamin’s thinking to its mutation

in Adorno’s is beyond the scope of this study. It is enough, I believe, to suggest
that the early Benjamin straightforwardly (if not uncritically) takes up the tragic
insight concerning the negative absolute from Hölderlin.
In Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study (1924–1925) the appropriation of Hölderlin
is extended from the tragic insight regarding the absolute (taken as a category)
to the realm of history via the issue of transience. For Benjamin, the Trauerspiel
takes up the question of history in the mode of nature’s corruptible character:
“The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the
Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin, history has
physically merged into the setting.”23 Taking this insight in the light of Benjamin’s
previous articulation of the expressionless, one can say that the ruin—as the
shattered remnant of the ideal unity characteristic of semblance—discloses the
expressionless in a belated and weak form. One might go so far as to suggest that
the “weak messianic power” in Benjamin’s theses “On the Concept of History” is
more appropriately seen as cathartic in this early context than it subsequently
is in the theses themselves. Nonetheless, I hold that Benjamin’s discourse in the
Trauerspiel study is a radicalization (and inversion) of Hölderlin’s tragic absolute
unity into the expressionless intersection of nature and history in reality as made
manifest in/by ruinous transience. The (historical) transience of nature allows
the expressionless to critically interrogate semblance and its claims to totality
and identity. And “it” (the expressionless) accomplishes this not in the name of
an underlying unity subtending the world, but rather in the name of the concrete
lived reality which is this world.
The point can be put as follows: For Hölderlin, what is characteristic of the
absolute—as it is disclosed in tragedy—is nothing other than the a priori condi-
tions which constitute the formal unity of reality: “at the extreme limit of suffering,
nothing more exists than the conditions of time or space” (RO: 201). For Benjamin,
in sharp contrast, the expressionless is that which destroys all semblance of unity
and returns humans to the concrete, material plurality of reality. Nonetheless,
it is still the case (for Benjamin) that the expressionless (like the Hölderlinian
absolute) shows itself in a moment of history—i.e., as a punctuated moment of
content (irrespective of whether this content discloses pure form or material) in a
historical narrative. The expressionless (like the absolute) is, in principle, given to
either representation (even if only as a critically negative “object”), or reconciliation
(even if only in the mode of catharsis). One can here, again, discern a proximity to
Hegel (this time concerning the conception of negation as content). Amidst this
constellation of Hölderlin, Kant, Hegel, (later) Heidegger, and (early) Benjamin,
one also finds Adorno’s thought as it occurs up to and including the mid 1930s. I
will now explore the way in which he takes up Benjamin’s radicalized Hölderlinian
insight into his own articulation of philosophical history.
144 Jeffrey Bernstein

II. The Role of Benjamin’s Interpretation

in Adorno’s Early Conception of History
If anything in Hegel, and in those who turned him right way up, has become
part of my very flesh and blood, it is an asceticism with regard to any unme-
diated expression of the positive. This truly is a case of asceticism . . . since
the opposite impulse, a tendency to the unfettered expression of hope, really
lies much closer to my own nature. But I have the constant feeling that we
are merely encouraging the cause of untruth if we turn prematurely to the
positive and fail to persevere in the negative. . . . I would also ask . . . whether
in the end this whole question concerning the positive and the negative does
not harbour a false, and massively inflated, problem which, through its very
abstractness, merely encourages us to lose sight of what is essential here.
For utopia is the concrete, and not itself some universal theory or finished
recommendation for praxis.
—Adorno to Thomas Mann, December 1, 195224
Although Adorno’s correspondence with Mann occurs during the period of exile
in California, it gives expression, within the context of Adorno’s self-narrative,
to the ambivalence over the place of negativity in his thinking during his early
work. It should, therefore, be understood as an attuning discourse with respect
to the question at hand: is the “utopia of the concrete” properly articulated by
means of a dialectic where negativity functions as a moment of content or, rather,
as the very form of the dialectic itself? This question is another way of marking
the distance between Adorno’s texts of the ’30s and those of the ’60s. If anything,
some of Adorno’s early comments disclose this tension in an even more extreme
manner, as evidenced by the March 30, 1926, correspondence with his musical
mentor Alban Berg in which he states that he is in the process of considering the
possibility of conceptualizing “a positive philosophy of history.”25 However, this
attempt at conceptualization (coinciding with his increased interest in commu-
nism [CB: 50]) is, all the same, ambivalent. Adorno does not yet want to reject
the possibility that there might be a right way to proceed with philosophy, but he
also still proceeds with trepidation; he practices an “ascesis of negativity,” but is
not yet about to think the thought (as he does in 1944) that “a wrong life cannot
be lived rightly.”26
Thus attuned, one can now appreciate Adorno’s taking up of the Hölderlinian-
Benjaminian negative absolute (i.e., in its quiet and remote proximity to cathartic
reconciliation). The context for Adorno’s initial appropriation deals with artistic
form as it relates to music. After seeing the second Frankfurt performance of Berg’s
Wozzek in 1925, Adorno corresponds with Berg about the “High Tavern Scene.”
After extolling Benjamin’s ability to understand Berg’s music, Adorno writes that
“it is then no coincidence that the [High Tavern] scene comes where it does: it is
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 145

the caesura in Hölderlin’s sense, through which the ‘expressionless’ can invade
the music. And what a source of hope it is that precisely here . . . the grand form
asserts itself ” (CB: 33–4).27 In other words, the form of the piece becomes manifest
through the caesuric irruption of the expressionless; the form’s manifestation (as
stated above) occurs in/as a moment of content.
But how can one be sure that Adorno is taking up the category of the “expres-
sionless” in a Benjaminian (which is to say Hölderlinian-Benjaminian) manner?
Could he be re-translating this category back into a more “purely” Hölderlinian
sense? Certainly his reference to the “expressionless” as that which allows music
to attain “imageless presence” (EM: 620) could be construed as a gesture to an
absolute unity anterior to the subject/object split. However, viewed in the light of
his 1930s texts, it becomes clear that he takes the category in a largely Benjamin-
ian manner—i.e., as a negative moment in an unfolding narrative of history and
philosophy which holds out only the most remote hope for catharsis. The point I
wish to make is that, for Adorno, the negative absolute of Hölderlin—as reflected
through Benjamin—remains an opening within a narrative rather than the form
of the narrative itself.
In “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno states that, “only in traces and ruins
is [reason] prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality”
(AP: 24). With this gesture, one sees the trajectory beginning with Kant’s above-
cited statement, moving through Hölderlin, and culminating in Benjamin: reason
can only adequately perceive reality in its transience. Precisely what such “reality”
is remains as yet undeveloped in Adorno, but its connection with transience (and
thus, with history) cannot be in dispute. Philosophy’s operation, therefore, occurs
within the movement of coming to be and passing away: “philosophy has to bring
its elements . . . into changing constellations . . . until they fall into a figure which
can be read as an answer, while at the same time, the question disappears” (AP: 32).
The creation of elemental constellations which constitute a simultaneous answer
to, and negation (one is tempted to say “aufheben”) of, the given question amounts
to a moment of reconciliation (however tentative and remote) in Adorno’s early
thought. In fact, it would not (I believe) be overstating the matter to suggest that,
at this point, Adorno comes ironically close to the positivism he would ultimately
spend his life resisting (recall Wittgenstein’s remark, from the Tractatus, that the
only valid questions are those which admit of answers). But one also sees, at this
early stage, Adorno’s preoccupation with philosophical form (which will undergo a
radicalization in his later texts). As Adorno states in his Kierkegaard: Construction
of the Aesthetic (1933),“Philosophical form requires the interpretation of the real
as a binding nexus of concepts. . . . [I]ts character as philosophy . . . [is] determined
in the first place by the degree to which the real has entered into concepts, mani-
fests itself in these concepts, and comprehensively justifies them.”28 The task of
philosophy is to create a hermeneutically sensitive conceptual constellation which
146 Jeffrey Bernstein

(1) takes its bearings from ruinous transient experience and, as a result, (2) will
allow reality to properly show itself: “construction out of small and unintentional
elements thus counts among the basic assumptions of philosophic interpretation”
(AP: 32). To say that philosophy today must be grounded in ruins and fragments
is to say that the time for positive systematicity is passed; this type of philosophy
is, as it were, dead. “Comprehensible justification of concepts by reality”—i.e.,
conceptual and imagistic representation, reconciliation and catharsis—occurs
piecemeal and amidst transience. In other words,“the mind is indeed not capable
of producing or grasping the totality of the real” (AP: 38).
But if the mind and philosophy cannot grasp the totality of the real, they still
can make reality intelligible (in however momentary a manner) to thought: “The
point of interpretive philosophy is to construct keys, before which reality springs
open. As to the size of the key categories, they are specifically made to order” (AP:
35). There has been some discussion as to what Adorno might mean by “reality
springing open” as a result of the construction of “key categories.” One suggestion
is that Adorno has in mind something like the creation of Weberian ideal-types.29
This may not be wholly incorrect, although, as Adorno will later hold, Weber’s
types are abstractions, while Adorno is seeking conceptual access to the concrete.30
Even if one understands Adorno’s “key categories” as something akin to a We-
berian secularization of Hölderlin’s power of judgment (which would access, via
intellectual intuition, the subject/object unity and the respective ground of such
unity) this still does not explain the character of the reality which “springs open.”
The tacit distinction, in Adorno, between the errant societal perception of reality
and concrete reality itself (present in/as/through ruins) is, I hold, the remnant of
Hölderlin’s absolute as translated and transmitted through Benjamin’s category
of the “expressionless.” For if the term “expression” (in a musical context) refers to
the mimetic aspect of the work’s meaning,31 the “springing open of reality” would
be (in however transient a fashion) the nonmimetic (and, for Adorno, utterly
concrete) aspect of the work. This nonmimetic aspect would correspond to what
Benjamin terms the expressionless (as a secularized and concrete translation of
Hölderlin’s absolute). The philosophical key categories would thus provide the
caesuric constellation which, in turn, ruptures mimetic social perception in order
to let reality show itself.
For Adorno, the “springing open” of “irreducible reality” (AP: 38) can only be
understood via a historical index: “The break in of what is irreducible . . . occurs
concrete-historically and thus it is history which retards the moment of thought
to its presuppositions. The productivity of thinking is able to prove itself only
dialectically, in historical concreteness” (AP: 38). Put differently, the pull of irre-
ducible reality (in its transience) upon thought inevitably occurs in and through
the horizon of history. The philosophical value/importance of history, therefore,
is as the interpretive access-field in which thought and irreducible reality can be
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 147

(if only momentarily) reconciled. It is, to be sure, nothing remotely like a purely
positive reconciliation, an unproblematic identity. It is, following Hölderlin, a tragic
reconciliation—i.e., we achieve at the level of momentary disjunctive recognition
what we can never achieve in unmediated reality. In 1928, Adorno ends his essay
on Schubert with exactly this point: “Confronted with Schubert’s music . . . [w]e
weep without knowing why, because we have not yet become what that music
promises, and because we feel indescribable happiness that the music needs
only to be what it is in order to assure us that we will one day become like that.
We cannot read them, but the music holds out to our fading eyes . . . the ciphers
of ultimate reconciliation.”32 Because the “ciphers of ultimate reconciliation”
(intimated in the manifest ruins where irreducible reality shows itself) occur
in history, history occupies a privileged place for Adorno in the philosophical,
political, and aesthetic registers.
But, thus far, there still seems to be a distinction (in Adorno’s thought) between
nature (i.e., that which is irreducible) and history (i.e., that which serves as the
context/horizon for the self-showing of nature). In 1932 (the year after “The
Actuality of Philosophy”), Adorno seeks to overcome this duality in his Kant
Society lecture “The Idea of Natural-History.” With this text, Adorno re-envisions
the Hölderlinian-Benjaminian absolute/expressionless (qua irreducible nature)
as itself a completely historical phenomenon, and thus brings to fruition a fully
tragic conception of history.
More precisely, one might hold that Adorno brings to fruition the constella-
tion of key-concepts which “springs open” the entrance to a tragic conception
of history; for the “Natural-History” lecture does little more than propose
how philosophy would need to proceed in order to move toward a conception
of natural-history. Nonetheless, the lecture does move further along the path
Adorno had traversed in the “Actuality” lecture of the previous year. For Adorno,
the nature/history dichotomy must be decisively overcome and replaced by a
“formulation that achieves in itself the concrete unity of nature and history . . .
[i.e.,] a unity developed from the elements of real being itself.”33 This, accordingly,
entails a profoundly dialectical move: “If the question of nature and history is to
be seriously posed, then it only offers any chance of solution if it is possible to
comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is
most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as a
historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature” (INH: 260).
Differently stated, it is not a matter of simply collating nature and history in an
abstract or extrinsic manner; rather, it is a matter of showing how nature qua nature
is historical and how history qua history is natural. And, in fact, the two tasks of
the philosophy of history mentioned in the “Natural-History” lecture reflect this
proposed simultaneity: (1) the separation and distinguishing of two historical
elements—the natural past (in the form of myth) and innovation—so that they
148 Jeffrey Bernstein

might be placed in dialectical relation to one another (INH: 266), and (2) “the
retransformation of concrete history into dialectical nature” (INH: 260).
Give that the sources for Adorno’s conception of natural-history are Georg
Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study, one
should again recall the significance of aesthetics (for Adorno) in the construal
of history—i.e., it is only in the wake of concrete material artifacts that history
becomes visible to humans. Through examinations of literature and drama, both
texts explore the category of “second nature” (INH: 260–1) which, in its static
objectification of the transitory, amounts to a reification of artifacts’ (and thus
society’s) history. For Adorno, this category allows access to the following question:
“how [is it] possible to know and interpret this alienated, reified, dead world[?]”
(INH: 261). The category of “second nature,” therefore, negatively illuminates its
categorial opposite—i.e., the element of transience which, for Adorno, is “[t]he
deepest point where history and nature converge” (INH: 262). Stated within the
context of Adorno’s sources in Lukács and Benjamin respectively , one can say
that (1) nature is properly understood—in its transience—as history (INH: 262),
and (2) history (in the mode of, for example, allegory) is nothing other than the
relationship between nature and nature’s transitory signification/meaning (INH:
263). In other words, nature itself is transitory insofar as it occurs historically
(INH: 264). The reverse is also true: wherever “second nature” is locatable (i.e.,
as a result of reifying convention), its meaning can be shown to be its transience
(INH: 264). Taken together, the two formulations bring forth the insight that “ev-
erything that exists transforms itself into ruins and fragments” (INH: 265)—i.e.,
nature transitions historically, and history is the history of transitory nature. Ruins
and fragments are the remnants of the inevitable (historical) decay in all that is
natural. Consequently, the accomplishment of natural-historical philosophy, in
its overcoming of the duality between nature and history, would entail just this
“change of perspective” (INH: 261).
In dialectically unifying nature and history as natural-history, Adorno has now
made clear (as intimated above) the role and function of artifacts for a conception
of history. The artifact is a concrete, momentary instance in which the constel-
lation of the following (Benjaminian) key-concepts: nature, history, transience,
and meaning/signification (INH: 264) both coalesce and hold out the promise of
releasing irreducibly transitory reality from its reification in/as “second nature.”
This reconciliation with irreducible reality can only be negative insofar as it can
only be given as transience. However, it nonetheless can be given. This transitory
givenness constitutes, for Adorno, tragic history.
Had Adorno’s conception of philosophical history ended at this point, it would
have taken its place (as stated above) in a distinguished lineage of tragic constru-
als of history (i.e, including Hegel, Hölderlin, later Heidegger, early Benjamin). By
the 1960s, in texts such as “Parataxis” and Negative Dialectics, however, a different
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 149

conception of history emerges—one which resists all modes of reconciliation

(even negative ones). Simply stated, Adorno’s enacts a “change of perspective” at
least as radical as the one proposed in the “Natural History” lecture. While, the
possible causes of this transformation in Adorno’s thought will be explored in this
study’s conclusion, I can now discuss the transformation itself and its implications
for a philosophical construal of history.

III. From Negative Absolute to Absolute Negativity:

The Role of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Late Conception of History
[C]ritical theory . . . has its roots in Judaism. It arises from the idea: Thou shalt
not make any graven image.
—Horkheimer to Otto O. Herz, September 1, 196934
Once upon a time the image ban extended to pronouncing the [divine] name;
now the ban itself has in that form come to evoke suspicions of superstition.
The ban has been exacerbated: the mere thought of hope is a transgression
against it, an act working against it.
—Adorno, Negative Dialectics35
Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality.
—Edward Said36
To suggest, as I have in the introduction, that Adorno’s conceptual shift is marked
by a terminological sameness is to say that the transformation indicates a moment
of nonidentity operative in Adorno’s terminology. While the terms remain the
stable, the referential horizon—or, constellation—is what changes. This change,
I hold, is in keeping with the iconoclastic impulse (a secularization of the Jew-
ish ban on images) in Adorno’s thinking, which resists imaginal representation
(insofar as such representation is grounded in an identity principle). How is this
possible? Precisely what changes is the form of the constellation rather than the
particular conceptual elements or “objects” which comprise the constellation.
Moreover, this overall change replicates itself on the thematic level as well: the
change of the constellation’s form is precisely that the constellation changes emphasis
from content to form. And this emphatic shift from content to form is what Adorno
names with the phrase “late style”/“late work.” Ironically, he develops this category
as early as 1937 in his essay “Late Style in Beethoven”: “This formal law [of ‘late
style’] is revealed precisely in the thought of death. . . . The power of subjectivity
in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the
works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express, itself, but in order,
expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves
only fragments behind and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the
blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. . . . [T]he conventions . . . are
150 Jeffrey Bernstein

no longer presented and mastered by subjectivity, but simply left to stand. With
the breaking free of subjectivity, they splinter off ” (EM: 566). In late works, the
subjective tendencies of the artist—which in earlier works manifested themselves
at the level of content—now saturate and overwhelm the works as such. What
hitherto occurred as determinate meaning (i.e., expression) is now the whole
of the work—hence, with no referent other than itself, the late work becomes
“expressionless”; it becomes “wholly” a fragment of itself. As such, the transience
(which, at the level of content, simply signifies passing-away) now (at the level of
form) signifies a belated, spectral, lingering remainder. This belatedness indicates
a missed opportunity of reconciliation in favor of formal exaggeration. Hence, the
thought of death, which serves as the formal law of late works, amounts not to a
final, eschatological moment in a process of coming to be and passing away, but
rather a ghostly trace, a perverse “afterlife” of a once vital presence. One might say
that lateness constitutes something like an “eternal transience” insofar as what
remains present is the ruin of what used to be.37 This formal saturation—or, as
Adorno states it in Aesthetic Theory,“the emancipation of form”38—is iconoclastic
precisely because it “refuses to mollify alienation in the image, exclusively thereby
incorporating the alienated; it defines alienation as such” (AT: 145). Put differ-
ently, the emancipation of form resists all aesthetic reconciliation of alienation.
This is another way of articulating Adorno’s point in Negative Dialectics that the
substance of materialism’s negativity is the secularization of the ban on images
“by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured” (ND: 207).
The claim of this study is that Adorno’s re-interpretation of Hölderlin’s nega-
tive absolute in the 1960s contributes to the creation of a “late style” concerning
his own philosophical conceptualization of history by means of displacing his
earlier thinking from the level of content to that of form. The constellation of
expressionlessness, transience, nature and history now becomes the “fragmented
totality” of Adorno’s historical discourse rather than a driving force within such
a discourse. In this sense, (as stated in the introduction), where Adorno’s early
philosophical conception of history bore witness to the imminent end of phi-
losophy, his late conception attests to its “missed moment of realization.” The
displacement of Hölderlin’s negative absolute to the level of form—and hence
the mutation into absolute negativity—occurs by virtue of the literary technique
known as “parataxis.” In other words, parataxis, for Adorno, leads to a formaliza-
tion of the category of “transience.” Hence, in this section I claim that Adorno’s
essay “Parataxis” theorizes what Negative Dialectics to a certain extent enacts—i.e,
the becoming-form, or formalization, of the negative absolute in its transience
understood as the expressionless. The enactment of this, I claim, amounts to an
iconoclastic conception of history which exhibits an elective affinity with late
modernist works of art.
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 151

The first question to ask is: how does Adorno construe form in his late writ-
ings? One should recall that Adorno’s definition of philosophical form (in the
1930s) was that of a “binding nexus of concepts” which nexus allows for adequate
manifestation of “the real.” In Aesthetic Theory, in the context of a discussion of
artifacts, Adorno holds that the form is the artifact’s “coherence” (AT:142); it is
the “mediation” (AT: 149) which organizes and relates the artifact’s elements to
each other. (AT: 143) As mediation, it is the “seal of social labour” (AT: 143); and
insofar as it microcosmically expresses the social whole and organizes the artifact
into a totality (i.e., regarding the relation of parts/details to the whole [AT: 144]),
it amounts to a “secularization of the theological model of the world as the image
of God” (AT: 143). Similar are the emphases on internal coherence and coher-
ence with reality (in the Kierkegaard book, this is expressed as the coherence of
reality with concepts, in Aesthetic Theory, as the coherence of sociality via labour
through artifactual organization). The difference lies precisely in the iconoclastic
tendencies of the “late style”—i.e., the form, as the whole, does not admit of
an imaginal representation insofar as it is not an “object”; thus, the “late style”
artifact—understood as content becoming-form—is imageless, unreconciled.
Late works exhibit an “unreconciled totality,” a whole which does not yield any
transparent, nonsaturated semantic content set in relation to an external refer-
ent. In other words, the form of the late work (qua totality) is expressionlessness.
Consequently, all that it “expresses” is its self-referentiality, which is to say its lack
of separated and identifiable content—i.e., its speechlessness. Therefore, in sharp
contrast to his articulation of the tragic weeping brought about by Schubert’s
music (recounted in his Schubert essay of the 1930s), Adorno now states (in
Aesthetic Theory) that “Authentic art knows the expression of the expressionless,
a kind of weeping without tears” (AT: 117). Like Moses, at the end of Act 2 in
Schoenberg’s Moses Und Aron, late works, in their expressionlessness, stammer
“Oh word, thou word, that I lack.”
To say that the expressionless form of late works manifests speechlessness
is most definitely not (for Adorno) to claim that they lack critical capacity; for
insofar as artifacts are encapsulations of social labour, they inevitably manifest
the social and historical relationships which brought them about.39 So while it
may be incorrect to claim that form coheres with reality in a dualist sense (a sense,
as noted above, still present in Adorno’s early thought), it would be less incor-
rect to suggest that the artifact and its form are related to the social whole (and,
therefore, history) in the aspectival sense that Spinoza’s substance and modes are
related (i.e., as two sides of the same coin). Because of this, Adorno holds that
the liberation of form (characteristic of late works) “holds enciphered within
it above all the liberation of society, for form—the social nexus of everything
particular—represents the social relation in the artwork; this is why liberated
form is anathema to the status quo” (AT: 255). Such liberation does not, to be
152 Jeffrey Bernstein

sure, amount to a positive blueprint for a coming society. All that such liberation
signifies is the non-coincidence—in Adornean terms, “nonidentity”—of late
works with the society in which they come to be. But this nonidentity is also
not identical to societal impotence: “What is social in art is its immanent move-
ment against society. . . . Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which
artworks are nevertheless part in that they are things” (AT: 227). Put differently,
the social-historical quality of artworks constitutes the very function of their
functionlessness (AT: 227). And this functionless nonidentity contained in the
expressionless form of late works (insofar as it resists the status quo) commu-
nicates what one might term “the impulse of ethical negativity”—i.e., “the idea
that anything would be better than for things to go on as they [are].”40 In other
words (in the language of Aesthetic Theory),“what would art be, as the writing of
history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering[?]” (AT: 261). And
to the extent that philosophical discourse also amounts to an artifact, one might
say (as Adorno does in Negative Dialectics) that “the freedom of philosophy is the
capacity to lend a voice to its unfreedom” (ND: 18).
This, no more and no less, is what is at issue in Adorno’s re-interpretation
of Hölderlin in “Parataxis” and in Adorno’s late construal of history in Negative
Dialectics.
Everything in Adorno’s shift turns on the following sentence from “Parataxis”:
“What Benjamin links with Hölderlin’s metaphysics as a balancing of the spheres of
the living and the divine also names Hölderlin’s linguistic technique” (P: 130). It is
precisely in the rethinking of Hölderlinian tragedy in terms of linguistic technique
that Adorno’s construal of history moves from the level of content to that of form
and mutates from an articulation of a negative absolute to one of absolute negativity.
Moreover, it is this rethinking of tragedy in terms of linguistic technique which, for
Adorno, constitutes the substance of the specific “aconceptual synthesis” (P: 130)
identified as “parataxis” with respect to Hölderlin’s late poetry. In this technique,
the semantic content of the poem neither disappears completely nor is simply
independent from the poetic organization.41 Rather, the semantic elements of the
poem are not accorded organizational priority over the syntactic elements.
Given that, according to Adorno, there is “no better model in which to express
the interlocking of nature and history” (HF: 135) than Hölderlin’s poem “The
Shelter at Hardt” (and given that Adorno comments on this poem, in particu-
lar, in a number of different contexts—I shall use it to elucidate what Adorno
understands by parataxis. Here is Hölderlin’s poem (in a modified version of
Hamburger’s translation):
Down slopes the forest
And, bud-like, inward
Hang the leaves, for which
Down below a ground blossoms forth,
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 153

Not at all mute.

For there Ulrich
Once walked; and often, over the footprint,
A great destiny
Ready, among the remains. (SPF: 173)
The shelter of Hardt is the allegorical place where Duke Ulrich of Württemberg
was said to have hid while escaping the imperial ban under which he was placed.
For Hölderlin (according to Adorno), the place itself is poetically “made to
speak” of this historical occurrence (HF: 135). For Adorno, this poetic technique
exhibits the “vanishing of history into nature” which is “also an element of the
expression assumed by nature” (HF: 135)—i.e., the historical event is supposed
to speak with nature’s voice, exhibited in the phrase “not at all mute” (P: 111);
“Nature thus becomes an allegory for the destiny that once manifested itself at
that spot” (P: 111). Hence, the later Adorno continues to think the dialectical unity
constituting natural-history. But, in characteristic “late style,” Hölderlin’s poem
“continues to have, in terms of its expression, a disturbed character” (P: 111). Such
disturbance is inherent in the form/organization of the poem: “It [the poem] will
be understood only by someone who . . . continues to feel the shock of the unex-
pected name Ulrich, someone who will be troubled by the ‘nicht gar unmündig,’
[‘not at all mute’] which acquires meaning only in the context of a conception of
natural-history, and similarly by the construction ‘Ein gross Schiksal,/Bereit an
übrigem Orte.’ [‘A great destiny/Ready, among the remains’]” (P: 111). Put differ-
ently, the language itself—the names, the “image” of nature speaking a historical
occurrence, and the juxtaposition of “destiny” and “remains”—are used both to
make something visible and render such visibility strange, uncomfortable, and
speechless: “The alien quality stems from something objective, the demise of its
basic content in expression, the eloquence of something that has no language.
What has been composed could not exist without the content falling silent, any
more than it could without what it falls silent about” (P: 112). In other words, the
poem does not simply track loss as if loss were merely a moment of semantic
content within the poem. Rather, the loss itself achieves an organizational, formal
integrity with respect to the poem: “loss has migrated into the concept” (P: 125).
Continuing in this line, Adorno notes that the forest referred to, in “The Shelter
at Hardt,” comes across as beautiful because it “bears, however vaguely, the mark
of a past event. . . . In natural beauty, natural and historical elements interact in a
musical and kaleidoscopically changing fashion. . . . Natural beauty is suspended
history, a moment of becoming at a standstill” (AT: 71). But lest the reader come
away with the impression that Adorno is here falling into something like a vulgar
aestheticization of nature and history, s/he would do well to remember that this
“becoming at a standstill” holds true for more than just beauty—i.e., if natural
beauty shows itself as mute and unreconciled, in late works, so also does catas-
154 Jeffrey Bernstein

trophe. Stated differently, violence and suffering are made visible in late works
as precisely the historical (i.e., transient) phenomena they are; they cannot be
rescued or made good; the reconciliation (to the extent that this term is, in any
sense, still appropriate) which occurs in late work “does not eradicate the era of
violence . . . but rather rescues it as it perishes, in the anamnesis of echo” (P: 148;
italics mine). In other words, the violence is not erased (i.e., taken out of its his-
tory), but rather formally preserved—in its transience—as memory’s echo. Qua
form, therefore, this echo of perishing is “eternal.”
This iconoclastic, paratactic formalization of transience which mutely sur-
vives in the work’s anamnetic echo, is (I claim) operative in Adorno’s naming of
“Auschwitz” in Negative Dialectics. In fact, as Adorno claims, “dissociation into
names is the innermost tendency of Hölderlin’s parataxis” (P: 140). Hence, in this
respect, Adorno can be understood to be setting to work his re-interpretation
of Hölderlin within the context of Negative Dialectics. It also should be borne in
mind that Adorno’s paratactic usage of names has a wider field of deployment
than that of catastrophe; Adorno “makes natural-history speak” not only through
the name “Auschwitz,” but also (for that matter) through “Applebacksville,”“Wind
Gap,” and “Lord’s Valley” (ND: 373). Whether the point is to exhibit the current
world as being worse than hell or better (and for Adorno, in a profoundly negative
sense, it is both), (ND: 403) his usage of names paratactically compels nature to
speak—in its iconoclastic echo—as history. Moreover, such names do not sim-
ply signify a neutral semantic content insofar as their significance is dependent
upon their placement in the works organization. Thus, when Adorno asks,“is the
philosophy of history possible without . . . latent idealism, without the guarantee
of meaning?” (HF: 4), the answer would be: only through the becoming-form of
historical content and the liberation of such form from its imagistically represen-
tational function—i.e., only as absolute negativity or (rather) iconoclasm. The
disturbance thus produced by late works is, similarly, non-imagistic; it comes
instead as a result of the paratactic form. Put differently, it is the paratactically
organized whole itself which shocks the reader/listener into confrontation with
the disturbed character of the whole. Here, one can discern the becoming-form
of the Hölderlinian caesura which (earlier on) functioned as a moment within a
whole. In late works, the form itself is the caesura: “it is only the paratactical form
itself that produces the caesura between the halves of life” (P: 133).
In summary, parataxis, “artificial disturbances that evade the logical hierar-
chy of a subordinating syntax” (P: 131),42 works by replacing representational
discourse grounded in deductive reasoning with associative discourse which
emphasizes “explication without deduction” (P: 132). In so doing, (1) form is
momentarily emphasized over content(P: 132), (2) nature and history are non-
cognitively unified as natural-history, and (3) the nonidentical character of
transience is preserved in its transience through memory.
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 155

As mentioned in the Introduction, one might wonder about just how icono-
clastic parataxis really is, given that the prefix “para-” seems to indicate a referent
not simply reducible to the “taxis” (i.e., the arrangement of linguistic units in a
linear sequence). Herein lies the profoundly interpretive moment in Adorno’s
employment of the term. Insofar as “parataxis” names a linguistic arrangement
which is not simply linear, it refers to something other than the simply conven-
tional “taxis.” For Adorno, it is the form itself—the actual organization of the
elements—which constitutes the “para-” in “parataxis.” This does not mean
that the paratactic work admits of a substantially external reference; it remains
iconoclastic by virtue of the fact that the “late” form itself exhibits a nonidentity
with respect to the elements of content (which are, from a different standpoint,
nothing other than aspects of the form). In becoming-form the “taxis” would be
displaced and, as it were, trans-formed.
This nonidentical, expressionless form, however, does not constitute anything
like a positive totality, and this indicates the import of parataxis for Adorno’s
“late style” construal of history in Negative Dialectics. For Adorno, “to experi-
ence the world spirit as a whole means to experience its negativity” (ND: 305).
Hence, “[t]he nonidentical is not to be obtained directly, as something positive
. . . nor is it obtainable by a [Hegelian] negation of the negative. This negation is
not an affirmation itself, as it is to Hegel. . . . To equate the negation of negation
with positivity is the quintessence of identification; it is the formal principle in
its purest form” (ND: 158). But one must recall that late-style paratactic form
does not hold to pure (i.e., identity-oriented) delineations; rather, such form is
the exaggerated emergence of particular content as the whole. As such, it testi-
fies to that which cannot admit of purity. Its essential character, one might say,
lies in its distorted quality; and as a distorted, unreconciled “whole”—i.e., as
nonidentical—it inevitably calls attention to the significance of the nonidentity
of each of its elements. Put differently, the parts/elements replicate the nonidentity
of the whole. In terms of history, this fluid relation of nonidentity between part
and whole is explicated by Adorno as follows: “The history locked in the object
can only be delivered by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of
the object in its relation to other objects—by the actualization and concentra-
tion of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge.
Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the
object” (ND: 163). Hence, both the “whole” and the parts are mediated through
their non-identity. The historical quality contained in artifactual objects, refers
simultaneously to (1) the societal nonidentity within individual artifacts as well
as (2) the nonidentity between the artifacts and the societal totality. As Adorno
states,“Moments which, as in the French Revolution, run counter to the historical
entirety while doing only so much more to promote it—such moments derive
their potency from that historical entirety alone” (ND: 302). In other words, form
156 Jeffrey Bernstein

and content/part and whole, in their nonidentities, are non-hierarchically related

to each other. Therefore, “the philosophy of history comes as close to historiog-
raphy as historiography itself, the insight into the essence veiled by the facticity
it qualifies, has come to be impossible save as philosophy” (ND: 303). This non-
hierarchicality, serves as a model (for Adorno) in relating philosophical, aesthetic,
and historical discourse to one another.
In terms laid out in the previous sections of this study, one can say that the
nonsubsumptive relation between form and content in history (i.e., its noniden-
tity) signals a refusal of reconciliation. If “history is the unity of continuity and
discontinuity” (ND: 320), not understood from the vantage-point of subsumptive
identity, then reconciliation, catharsis, and redemption remain unavailable. Does
this rejection amount to despair on Adorno’s part? By no means; for despair is
every bit as positive as hope is (it is, in fact, simply the inverse of hope): “[a]s a
positive statement, the thesis that life is senseless would be as foolish as it is to
avow the contrary; the thesis is true only as a blow at the high-flown avowal” (ND:
377). What, then, would constitute a negation of the negation of hope which did
not ultimately terminate in an affirmation of hope? Adorno’s answer with respect
to history (much like his answer with respect to aesthetics and philosophy) is:
critical resistance to affirmations of the status quo—“Universal history must be
construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have happened and in view of
the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world
is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however,
is the unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and
phases of history—the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over
men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from
savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the
megaton bomb” (ND: 320). What a philosophy of history can accomplish, in the
light of this rejection of the ideal of historical progress is to resist consenting to
(if not complicity with) the spell of the reconciling totality: “It lies in the defini-
tion of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total.
This is its form of hope” (ND: 406). Relentless self-critique organized, in-formed,
and trans-formed by the nonidentical and the negation of given reality is what
Adorno ironically (and retrospectively) names “hope.” Put differently, Adorno’s
caustic remark (made in the context of his critique of Ernst Bloch) holds here
as well: “Hope is not a principle.”43 Such belated and spectral “hope,” as the
paratactical and speechless form of philosophical discourse on natural-history
is expressionless; this discourse remains on the scene in order to negate the spell
of teleology which would have signaled its end. And an equivalent term for such
expressionlessness in Adorno’s late thought, is negative dialectics. As such, it is a
philosophical construal of history which amounts to both (1) a thinking which
“promises no salvation and offers the possibility of hope only to the concept
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 157

whose movement follows history’s path to the very extreme” (CM: 17), and more
importantly (2) a “thinking against itself ” so as not simply to be “in the nature
of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams
of its victims” (ND: 365).

Conclusion
If the story I have recounted about the transformation in Adorno’s thinking of his-
tory is not given over to a narrative of inner development, what could account for
it? Adorno gives a fragment of an answer in a letter to Ernst Bloch (dated July 26,
1962): “A good deal of what I wrote in my youth has the character of a dreamlike
anticipation, and only after a certain moment of shock, which no doubt coincided
with the outbreak of Hitler’s Reich, did I truly believe that I was right to do what
I did” (OLG: 341). Understood in the present context, one might formulate this
insight in the following manner: far from being a process of inner development, it
was historical circumstances which produced the caesura which negatively showed
Adorno that his thinking was on the right track and resolved his ambivalence
about tragic reconciliatory catharsis in favor of iconoclasm. Negative Dialectics
can thus be read as a late-style formalization of such a historical-political caesura
which—in its exhibition of late-style—is akin to modernist works of art. Qua
reconciliation, Adorno’s late philosophy may amount to an acknowledgment of
the current inoperativity of romantic interpretations of history. Like philosophy,
Hölderlin’s significance for contemporary attempts at critical reflection would,
therefore, lie precisely in its belated, spectral survival.
But in concluding thus, am I not open to the Adornian charge of explanato-
rily substituting the idealist category of “inner development” with the far more
pernicious (because more conventionally accepted) category of “biography”?
In order to attempt to problematize the biographical suspicions provoked by
these concluding remarks (i.e., to show that the category of “circumstances”
is not identical with isolated bourgeois subjectivity), I gesture to a text which
exhibits interesting parallels to Adorno’s late articulation of history—Gershom
Scholem’s “At the Completion of Buber’s Translation of the Bible.” Taken together
with their translation of the Hebrew Bible, I believe that Scholem’s recounting of
the Buber/Rosenzweig achievement ironically constitutes a sympathetic artifact
which echoes many of the themes found in Adorno’s “late-style” work. And so I
end this study by quoting Scholem’s text at some length:
When you [Buber] and Rosenzweig began this undertaking there was a
German Jewry; your work was intended to have a vital influence on them, to
arouse them and lead them to the original. There was also a German language
in which you could find a link with great traditions and achievements. . . . Now
whether you consciously intended it or not, your translation . . . was a kind of
158 Jeffrey Bernstein

Gastgeschenk which German Jewry gave to the German people, a symbolic act
of gratitude upon departure. . . . But events took a different course. . . . I cannot
refrain from asking: For whom is this translation now intended and whom will
it influence? Seen historically, it is no longer a Gastgeschenk of the Jews to the
Germans but rather—and it is not easy for me to say this—the tombstone of
a relationship that was extinguished in unspeakable horror. . . .
As to what the Germans will do with your translation, who can venture
to say? For more has happened to the Germans than Hölderlin foresaw when
he said:
it is not ill if certain things are lost,
and living sound from discourse fade away.
For many of us the living sound which you tried to evoke in the German
language has faded away. Will anyone be found to take it up again?44

Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow, in The
Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 29. Further
citations occur as (AP: page number).
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,
1995), 3. Further citations occur as (ND: page number).
3. Theodor Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy,” Henry W. Pickford, in Theodor Adorno,
Critical Models: Interventions And Catchwords, ed. Henry W. Pickford (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 17.
4. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin Of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977),52–3; Martin
Jay, Marxism And Totality: The Adventures Of A Concept From Lukács To Habermas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 244.
5. I owe this formulation to Jason Kemp Winfree.
6. It would, in my view, be just as legitimate (and not at all exclusive to the tragic or
iconoclastic interpretations) to read Hölderlin in the light of his commitment to the
event of—and principles underlying—the French Revolution as Dilthey has done.
Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Hölderlin,” trans. Joseph Ross, in Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and
Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 312–3.
7. Günter Figal, For a Philosophy of Freedom and Strife: Politics, Aesthetics, Metaphysics,
trans. Wayne Klein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 115.
8. J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism And The Meaning Of
Painting (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 9.
9. Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, in Robert
Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays On Theodor W. Adorno (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 252–69. Citations occur as (INH: page number).
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 159

10. Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Theodor W. Adorno,

Notes To Literature: Volume 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992), 109–49. Citations occur as (P: page number).
11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1996), 771 (A852/B880).
12. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,” in Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael
Hamburger (Cambridge, Mass.: Penguin, 1998), 231; translation slightly modified.
Further citations occur as (SPF: page number).
13. Were one to mention only the variety of commentators who initially set the param-
eters of this discussion in twentieth-century Hölderlin studies, the list would have
to include Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Peter Szondi, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jean-Luc Marion. Cf. Manfred Frank, “Fragments of a History
of the Theory of Self-Consciousness from Kant to Kierkegaard,” trans. Peter Dews
and Simon Critchley, Critical Horizons 5:1 (2004): 53–136; Dieter Henrich, Between
Kant and Hegel: Lectures On German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003), 293; Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance
and other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1997); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,“The Caesura of the Speculative,” in Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 208–35; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
“Hölderlin’s Theatre,” in Philosophy and Tragedy, ed. Miguel de Beistegui and Simon
Sparks (New York: Routledge, 2000), 117–36; Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol And Distance:
Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001),
123; Jean-Luc Nancy,“The Calculation of the Poet,” trans. Simon Sparks, in The Solid
Letter: Readings Of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. Aris Fioretos (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 44–73; and Peter Szondi, An Essay On The Tragic, trans. Paul
Flemming (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).
14. Cf.Andrew Benjamin,“Benjamin’s Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion To Walter
Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 97–114;
and Rodolphe Gasché, “Critique, Authentic Biographism, and Ethical Judgment,” in
Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor Of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 82–7, 98–9.
15. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Being Judgement Possibility,” trans. Stefan Bird-Pollan, in
Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 191–2.
16. Friedrich Hölderlin,“The Significance of Tragedy,” trans. Stefan Bird-Pollan, in Classic
and Romantic German Aesthetics, 193.
17. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Remarks on Oedipus,” trans. Stefan Bird-Pollan, in Classic and
Romantic German Aesthetics, 195; translation slightly modified. Further citations
occur as (RO: page number). There is some dispute over whether to emphasize the
definite article in Hölderlin’s phrase “die Vorstellung selber.” It seems to me that the
significance of the moment of recognition in the Oedipus narrative lies not simply
with Oedipus seeing what he has done, but rather with his seeing that he now sees.
Put slightly differently, the emphasis on blindness vs. sight (occurring throughout the
160 Jeffrey Bernstein

narrative) exceeds the particular tragic representation of the play, but not the insight
that representation as such, in a sense, always comes too late. For this reason, I have
de-emphasized the definite article in my translation.
18. Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1988), 116.
19. Friedrich Hölderlin, “On The Process of Becoming in Passing Away,” trans. Jeremy
Adler, in Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal, 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 168.
20. Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 150.
21. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 143. Although the immediate context
for Heidegger’s discussion is Hölderlin’s poem, it is clear from the overall discussion
that Heidegger’s interpretation has the above-mentioned letter in view as well.
22. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Walter
Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael
W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004),
341. Further citations occur as (GEA: page number).
23. Walter Benjamin, The Origin Of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
Verso, 1998), 177–8. Further citations occur as (T: page number).
24. Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence: 1943–1955, trans. Nicholas
Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 97–8.
25. Theodor W. Adorno and Alban Berg, Correspondence: 1925–1935, Wieland Hoban
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 50. Further citations occur as (CB: page number).
26. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (London: Verso, 1996), 39.
27. Cf. Adorno’s 1929 “The Opera Wozzek,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, trans.
Susan Gillespie, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
625. This piece makes the same point as the correspondence while remaining silent
regarding the references to Hölderlin and Benjamin. Further citations of this volume
occur as (EM: page number).
28. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-
Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3.
29. Cf. Axel Honneth,“A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life: A Sketch of Adorno’s
Social Theory,” Constellations 12:1 (2005): 50–64.
30. Cf. Adorno’s 1968 lectures collected as Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 124. I believe that Weber
himself would agree with Adorno’s assessment (cf. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in
Social Sciences and Social Policy,” in Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social
Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shis and Henry A. Finch [Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press,
1949], 49–112).
31. Theodor W. Adorno, “Criteria of New Music,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures,
trans. Rodney Livignstone (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 161.
The Changing Status of Hölderlin in Adorno’s Conception of History 161

32. Theodor W. Adorno, “Schubert,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Theodor W. Adorno,

Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 313.
33. Theodor Adorno,“The Idea of Natural-History,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, in Robert
Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays On Theodor W. Adorno
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 259. Further citations occur as (INH:
page number).
34. As provided in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008),
365. Further citations occur as (OLG: page number).
35. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 402.
36. Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music And Literature Against the Grain (New York:
Vintage Books, 2006), 9.
37. This formulation of the transformation of the category of “transience” in Adorno’s
thinking is indebted to Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones,
Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
80–1.
38. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 145. Further citations occur as (AT: page
number).
39. Cf. J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and
Adorno (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 4.
40. Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2006), 240. Further citations occur as (HF: page number).
41. Cf. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge Press, 1998),
143.
42. Cf. Robert Hullot-Kentor’s “Translator’s Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory, xiv–xv.
43. Theodor W. Adorno,“Ernst Bloch’s Spuren,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature:
Volume 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991), 213.
44. Gershom Scholem, “At the Completion of Buber’s Translation of the Bible,” trans.
Michael A. Meyer, in Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea In Judaism (New York:
Schocken Books, 1995), 318–9.