Word: adorno
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...failure. We've heard this before, from Romantics like Goethe and Blake and even from contemporaries of the Enlightenment like Rousseau. We've heard it from the extreme right (from Goebbels, for instance, and from Heidegger, who championed Nazism) and from the left (from Sartre and neo-Marxists like Adorno and Habermas). We've heard it from the post-structuralists and indeed from all sorts of intellectuals whose vanity has convinced them that because their beliefs did not square with reason then reason was at fault...
...accusations po-mo linguistic pretension. By recalling sleep, dreams, unrecoverable history (see "About Troy") and the personalities of dumb material objects (see "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp"), Herbert selects the very topics that demand linguistic self-consciousness, save that topic of genocide and terror which Adorno famously said would make "all lyricafter the holocaust...barbaric...
When Theodor Adorno read Celan's poem, he proclaimed that "After Auschwitz, poetry is barbaric." The problem, he felt, was that it was impossible to talk about the Holocaust without depriving it of its meaning, its force, its incomprehensibility. But he also knew it was impossible not to talk about the Holocaust and that doing so was to side with those who did nothing to stop it, with the people who claimed to have no idea of the camps just over the hill...
Derrida's Cinders is an answer to Adorno's problem, and, to may mind, a better one. Adorno himself never came to a firm conclusion about what to do, about how to speak properly for these dead, but, in effect, he did. By summarizing the Holocaust as "Auschwitz," Adorno was able to reduce the ethics of surviving to an aphorism--neat and tidy and quotable...
Which returns my gaze to the wreckage. Out of all these broken things, I pull pieces for my collection, detritis, filed away and rigorously catalogued. The architects of cowardice come from all sides: the pacifists, Albert Camus, Kurt Schwitters, Ilya Kabakov, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ross McElwee's "Sherman's March," Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker," Robert Oppen-heimer, Ella Baker. It is not much, but, as King said in '67, "Now there is little left to build on--save bitterness...