Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

court of appeal, or, adorno 169
Hegel’s performative message is that the nonidentity of world and spirit
is perfectly noticeable but doesn’t matter: the difference is simultaneously
observed and dismissed. This difference, isomorphic with alternative possibility,
lacks the authoritative value that, after Hegel, the course of the
world—“the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose [als Ruhe
aufgefasst]” (Hegel, Phenomenology, 28) 29 —alone confers. Adorno observes
that Hegel’s commentators have the same tendency to round off the corners
when reading Hegel: “the intention is taken for the deed [Tat], and
orientation to the general direction of the ideas is taken for their correctness:
to follow them through would then be superfluous. Hegel himself is
by no means innocent of this inadequate way of proceeding” (“Skoteinos,”
HTS 93; GS 5:329). Such writing acts as though one doesn’t have to concern
oneself with the distinction between the probable and the inexorable;
everybody knows what’s important and what’s going to happen. To Hegel,
the course of the world furnishes an authentic “court [Gericht]” (Phenomenology,
27; Werke II:3, 46) because history is such a frictive and critical
medium. But Adorno argues that Hegel creates facts of unheard-of vigor
by crediting the energy of the process cumulatively to the outcome and
“tend[ing] simply to accept that something that has evolved then disappears
into what has evolved” (HF 136, translation modified; NaS 13:192).
When Adorno writes that Hegel “believes that non-identity ...should
somehow be incorporated into the concept of identity in the course of its
elaboration” (HF 65; NaS 13:96), he means that Hegel is not content
to leave uncooperative particulars “lying who knows where outside it”
by reality [Realität]. By the same token, if freedom and autonomy still had any substance,
Auschwitz could not have happened. And by Auschwitz I mean of course the entire
system” (HF 7; NaS 13, 14).
29. Hegel’s point in this passage is that “negative and evanescent [verschwindend]”
moments are preserved in the movement of appearance taken as a whole, not “left lying
who knows where outside it” (Phenomenology, 28, 27; Werke, II:3, 46). For Adorno’s response,
see HF 64–65, discussed below. Benjamin inverts Hegel’s figure of history as a
static image of a moving stream in his idea of the dialectical image (“Theses on the Philosophy
of History” [1940], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
[New York: Schocken, 1969], 255). Max Horkheimer and Adorno, writing of symbols as
cultural sediment, claim that “the dread objectified as a fixed image becomes a sign of
the established domination of the privileged” (Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans.
John Cumming [New York: Continuum, 1993], 16).