Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
by Jean-Frangois Lyotard
The loss of the content of the work is thought as alienation. The artist
has become the mere executor of his own intentions, which appear before
him as strangers—inexorable demands risen up from the compositions on
which he is working. What Adorno does not see is that they are no longer
even his intentions which the artist realizes, but rather anonymous inten-
sities. Klossowski: the intensities beyond the intentions. The latter belong to
the category and to the thought of a subject, of a subject of creation, or
production, of a prop [suppot] for the qualities attributable to it. The dissi-
pation of subjectivity in and by capitalism; Adorno, like Marx, sees there a
defeat; he will only be able to surmount this pessimism by making of this
defeat a negative moment in a dialectics of emancipation and of the
conquest of creativity. But this dialectics is no less theological than the
nihilism of the loss of the creative subject; it is its therapeutic resolution in
the framework of a religion, here the religion of history. Thus, the justi-
fication given the new music, essentially that of SchOnberg, is that it has
taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world, that it finds all its
happiness, all its beauty in forbidding itself the appearance of the beautiful.
Art is a kind of Christ in its denunciating function. As for effective
redemption, it is even further away than in christology, and must be; art is
not reconciliatory, that is its force, to hold itself inside nihilism, to assume
it, and thus to manifest it. Hope, the principle, keeps the works open, says
Ernst Bloch the Marxist. Adorno nourishes this same Marxism almost
entirely withdrawn into a demythologized christianism. The breakdown of
all criteria for judging a musical work is recorded nihilistically, as the possi-
bility of launching crazed products [des toquards] on the musical market,
by way of great composers. This devaluation cannot be grasped positively;
yet it is the liquifaction of traditional limits which allowed the separation of
"great music" from the other kind; it is the bringing down of the walls
circumscribing the musical domain, circumscribing the museum, culture.
The positive grasp of the breakdown of values does not permit one to take it
for an indispensable and painful moment in the process of reconstitution.
Have we ever thought the revolution other than negatively, as nihilists, that
is to say, as disorder in a change of order, as passage? So long as we
continue to think it that way, we will not know what to do. The same holds
for "art."
The category of the subject remains uncriticized. It is the nucleus not
* Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.
128 / TELOS
not go without the other, that is quite simply the metamorphosis of energies
and investments; that which is dead is not dead, but only converted, no
procurism [proxe'ne'tisme] in that. The latter begins with the idea and the
practice that the metamorphosis will be paid for. The devil is first of all a
middleman (the capitalist) placed between the states of libidinal energy.
"The devil, the true lord of enthusiasm": the intensities referred to a
master, the forces [puissances] subordinated to a power [pouvoir]—there-
upon, Adorno's mask and his words arrive in a dissolve to mount
themselves onto those of the master pimp and enlighten them. "What these
beings (like Leverkuhn) in classical decades could have without us,
certainly, that, nowadays, we alone have to offer." In modern times, great
inspiration can only be demoniacal: the master of enthusiasm can no longer
be God. In order for God and inspiration to be compatible, a cult must be
able to welcome the works. An order, embracing all activities, has to enable
them to be tied together into a totality. A religion must unite the affects.
The modern is the loss of this totality. Every work appears and lives there in
disaffection, in distrust. The artist is a solitary voyager. There are no more
cults, only a culture. Diabolism is then the testimony that the paroxismic
force or power persists in the confines of a world which has no place for
it—it can only persist as disease, syphilis, neurosis, etc.: ways by which this
world of weakened affects names the high intensities in order to neutralize
them, efforts to bring them back into its positivist "order." Thus, according
to Adorno, the great music of SchOnberg gives testimony that the force of
intensities has not disappeared, but the counterpart of the witness it carries
is its incomprehensibility, the darkness where it remains submerged, and
which qualifies it as the work of the diseased.
Thomas Mann's devil, and Leverkuhn in his crises, notably the last,
speak old German, "the good old German without palliatives or garlands,"
that of Luther. The diabolistic position of the work is a Christian position,
but from a medieval christianism, from the kind where a narrow complicity
is established between the sinner and the confessor, the witch and the
exorcisor, sex and sainthood. Modern christianism, next to this force for
marshalling paroxysms, is a paganism of mediocrities, that is why the devil
appears to Leverkuhn when he is residing near Rome, pagan city: extreme
contrast with the Pallid from Pallas, laxist, sumptuous displays of the
capital of all beliefs, of all skepticisms. It has been said that Leverkuhn was
Nietzsche, but he is Pascal, it is an interpretation of Nietzsche as Pascal,
that is to say, the most sensible misunderstanding of Nietzsche, maintaining
him inside theology, drawn and quartered to be sure. An apostasy not of
faith, but in faith. Diabolo again as simbolo. Grave error with regard to
Nietzsche, but a just perspective on Schb'nberg: the new music was indeed
the emergence of a new deployment, "radical," critical, inside the womb of
the old, the classical deployment; but a deployment which was itself
liturgical; the Marxism of Frankfurt, the emergence of a deployment which
130 / TELOS
have been able to conceive of several writing types), etc. The artist has
become the mere executor of his own intentions, plus: intensities, which do
not belong to him. "We are getting rid of ownership," "our poetry is the
realization that we possess nothing:" Cage. The artist no longer composes,
he lets his deployment's desire go its way. That is affirmation. The quotes
from Adorno are noted in italics, those of other writers are between
quotation marks. The designation of this item is: affirmation 13.
By relaying the tendency of Beethoven and Brahms (to immerse, to
subscribe the theme under the variations, to suppress the domination over
the implied time, in classical music, by the opposition of the theme and the
development) Schb'nberg can claim to be the inheritor of classical music in a
sense fairly comparable to that of the relationship of the materialist
dialectic and Hegel. Schb'nberg is to Brahms as Marx is to Hegel, as the
romantic subject (= bourgeois revolutionary) is to the subject of the last
bourgeois period, rendered solitary, emancipated, says Adorno. But the
Marxism of this tragic subject is that of Adorno, of Frankfurt. The
mutation of the relationship with time implies not only the work's
disappearance as totality, the end resolving the development in a kind of
perfect super-cadence, hence the analogy of the work with the narrative, the
diachrony of a fall (of a dissonance) and of a redemption (of a good
harmony) which refers to the achronics of a stable cultural system, as in the
Bildungsromanen which served as a model for the Phenomenologies des
Geistes, but should imply the disappearance of the work itself; if the latter
remains, in so far as it is "musical," a privileged place of the relationship to
time, hence still a privileged time, it will be in a disinherited capacity.
Instead of the music-narrative, Adorno sees that SchOnberg composes a
music-discourse (but a paradoxical discourse, a discourse of faith); and
SchOnberg composes in fact such a music, Schb'nberg and Adorno on the
razor's edge. We who are no longer there need a music-intensity, a sonorous
machine without finality. What Morton Feldman says very well: a surface
music, without depth, preventing representation. And a politics-intensity,
rather than a politics-tragedy. Therefore to leave the "radical" Marxism of
Frankfurt.
At the end of the introduction to the Philosophy of Modern Music which
dates from 1948, a year after the publication of Doctor Faustus, Adorno
defines his method as a dialectics of works and of contradiction: the
modern work deserves the name when it gives form to contradiction, hence
is imperfect; and contradiction leads to the work's destruction. It is a non-
Hegelian dialectics, because the totality is missing: the reconciliation of the
subject and the object has been perverted into a satanic parody, into a
liquidation of the subject in the objective order. Totality is missing = there
is no god to reconcile = all reconciliation can only be represented in its
impossibility, parodied = it is a satanic work. You wasted your time
replacing God with the devil, the prefix super—with the old sub—terranean
ADORNO AS THE DEVIL / 133
mole, you remain in the same theological deployment. You pass from
shamefaced nihilism to flaunted nihilism. Adorno's work, just as Mann's
and Schonberg's, is marked by nostalgia. The devil is the nostalgia of God,
impossible god, therefore possible precisely as a god.
When Adorno sees well that modern art is the end of appearance, the
elimination of the sensuous [du sensible], the impossibility of the unity of
concept (form) with intuition (material), it is to conclude that it sets itself to
functioning as a process of knowledge. Through its hostility for art, the
work of art approaches knowledge. Its disarticulation signifies the
emergence of its critical content, and the truth content of works of art fuses
with their critical content. But the critical content is not a content, is not
material, is not intuitive, it is a relation, and as such a knowledge. Thus the
alternative to fusion with the material, the alternative to enjoyment
[jouissance], consists in the ascese of knowing. This knowledge cannot be
the Hegelian knowledge, which is still enjoyment at finding itself in the
object; it is unhappy like the sevfere god Logos, dear to Freud. We have to
leave behind this alternative: neither appearance, musica ficta, nor
laborious knowledge, musica fingens; the metamorphic game of sonorous
intensities, the parodic work of nothing, musica figura.
Is it still a current matter, to struggle against Zhdanov, to affirm that to
reduce advanced music to its social origins and functions, is to find the
language of a pompous and bureaucratic oppression, to affirm that
dialectics has degenerated into a religion of the State? 1948. More relevant:
to affirm that to reduce advanced politics to its social origins and functions
is to find the language of the religion of the State, of its priests, Sfiguy,
Marchais, of their vicars in partibus intelligence, and of several leftisms,
Zhdanov and his papa ready to blossom again on the lips, under the plume
of young Maos. That is the religious raw material in nihilistic Marxism, and
enough material for a Holy Office and an Inquisition. Dialectics has not
degenerated into a State religion. The modern State can only have for its
religion dialectics, this catchall for skepticisms and nihilisms, this
ready-to-wear for melancholy.
Facing bureaucratism, useless to invoke the young Marx, Kierkegaard
facing Hegel, Pascal facing the Jesuits; this will give rise to churches, to
chapels, to countercurrents in the river. And bureaucracy today is not the
Stalinist monstrosity foisted onto the body of the proletarian revolution, as
Trotsky tried and the Trotskyists still try to persuade themselves, it is
everywhere the machinery of capital itself as a claim to the proper order, its
so-called rational circulation. Don't react toward the period of the
individual subject, act toward the time of the circulation of energy liberated
from the law of value. The secret located between these fragments lets itself
be evoked only in the figure they form together: Beethoven's last works,
dislocated, detotalized. Mallarme'. The same silence reigns in SchSnberg,
says Adorno. And the same silence of lacunae in the wandering disposition
134 / TELOS
well as for a severe art. Yet at the same time that capital maintains, in life
and in art, the law of value as separation, savings, rupture, selection,
protection, privatization—at the same time, it undermines everywhere the
value of the law, constrains us to regard it as arbitrary, forbids us to believe
in it. It is a buffoon. It plunges everything into skepticism, that is, into
asceticism and its uselessness. Criticism cannot go beyond that buffoonery.
It is not criticism, it is the emergence (non-ordered, non-dialectical,
unnecessary, but effective) of another deployment, of a dementia with
regard to the law of value, which reveals the latter as a gray disease, a
general depression and equalling-out \per6quation\ of affects and depressed
products. What brings us out of capital and out of "art" (and out of the
Entkunstung, its complement) is not criticism, which is language-bound
[langagiere], nihilistic, but a deployment of libidinal investment. We do not
desire to possess, to "work," to dominate... What can they do about that?
The Aesthetische Theorie is not constructed like a Phenomenologie or a
Dialectics, like a discourse proceeding to its proper conclusion, it is frag-
mented, full of silences, and full of silence, as Jiminez shows. It carries the
loss of the totality in its form: the sweeping of a field, a fragmentation never
reclosed. But why say loss of the totality? This discourse of rhetoric and
classical and romantic philosophy is a deployment (implying representation
of the totality by its very construction), this deployment is disinvested.
Another deployment sets itself in place, there the representation of the
totality is not pertinent. The libido is not necessarily attached to a total
object. What Cage looks for in the I Ching, in what respect is that a
deconstruction?
How is it that I am writing this? Is it that I have an interest in this
skepticism toward everything, even the most serious crises? This skepticism
of writing and of the West, which causes one to act as if one were saying:
always the most important, the most important even in the crisis is what
will be left from it, let us write, let us inscribe the crisis, that will remain,
and will be therefore the most important. All music, insofar as it is
notation, is this skepticism, skepticism too with regard to what is skeptical,
with regard to what is the most painful.
The diabolical figure is not just dialectical, it is expressly the failure of
dialectics in dialectics, the negative in the heart of negativity, the suspended
moment or momentaneous suspension. Therefore something like the affir-
mative, the demented, but placed inside the horizon of a negativity, of a
broken-down negativity. Instant of disequilibrium, razor's edge, brink.
Adorno is the edge. Dialectics broken-down was: the German proletariat
joining Hitlerism; the Russian proletariat joining Stalin; the one and the
other massacring each other; the Spanish proletariat crushed by the fascist
air force, finished off in Barcelona by the Stalinists; the French proletariat
deserting the positions occupied in '36, finished-off by the reformists; the
Chinese proletariat whiped out by Chiang and Stalin's politics. The red god
ADORNO AS THE DEVIL / 137
no longer speaking, the culture being nothing more than the residue of the
cult, once God fell mute (Zhdanov), what place could Adorno assign
himself, if not that of the devil? That is not a bad place when evil is on
God's side. When the Creation raves, it is the devil who risks being right.
Nothing left to invoke, everything to revoke. Hence Judaism as a reemerging
deployment: dementia ( = the devil) bound up, religified [religiose].
Just as with Schb'nberg there is a reference to tonality in absentia, which
is the revocation in absentia of sensuality, of the feminine, of Catholicism, of
the reconciled god, so with Adorno there is a reference to the cult and to
nature in absentia. Freud says that no one can kill in absentia. To place
something in absentia is to place it outside the range of murder, to conserve
it, to memorize [memoriser] it, to invest it. Schonberg's libidinal investment
in totality is powerful, powerful remains that of the devil Adorno in the
divinity of a reconciled humanity. To cease conserving tonality on the
horizon is to cease composing. To cease composing in politics is to cease
conserving in absentia the idea of the totality, the military, industrial,
clerical organization which represents totaliy, to cease constructing a
"party." In place of the politico ficta-fingens, a politico figura. What can
an affirmative politics be, which does not look for support in a
representative (a party) of the negative, etc.? That is the question left,
abandoned by Adorno. I doubt that Marcuse or Reich, dialecticizing once
more the unconscious, will rid us of it. No more than Rousseau rids his
reader of Hegel, but rather innoculates him against Hegel. Us, we are
beyond Hegel. Hegel did not die in the death camps (on the contrary,
tragical dialectics feeds only on cadavers), he did not die from Criticism (on
the contrary, he lives through it), he died in abundance, he passed away
from prosperity, he croaked from health.
Adorno saw in the German "student" movement of the sixties a political
Stravinskyism.
Leverkuhn is the musician of the "magical square," which one finds for
example in Dlirer's Melancholy: a deployment of numbers such that the
sum of the units place on the columns, on the lines, or on the diagonals is
always the same. Schb'nberg is also the musician of the square: suppress the
difference between the verticals and the horizontals, between the harmony
and the melody. In Klee too, there is the magical square of colors. The
magical square is the end of the narrative, the emergence of the structure.
The neutralization of intensive differences. A narrative will still be possible,
but only as one realization among others of a structure, the performance of
a competence. Diachrony is a surface thing like history. The melodic
statement [6nonc6], the historical development, become desperate. The
magical square is to sound what capital is to the product (as the law of
value permitting the principle of permutating all the exchanges into the
nullified circuit of simple reproduction). A square diabolical for religion,
not at all magical for capital and for ourselves.