TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

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―argumentation is fruitless.‖ The standard mode of philosophical argument – the statement of an assumption, its development, supplies of proof, and a conclusion – betrays a naïve faith in the genetic stability of the real and its assumed continuity with reason. Adorno rejects this faith and finds in the micrological study of things the generative force for a limited facticity to emerge in finding the concrete dialectical origins promised by natural history. Hullot-Kentor, then, in helping us to further set the stage for our apprehension of Adorno‘s acute reaction to Heidegger and how this reaction effected his understanding of natural history, also begins to provide us with reason to doubt that the purpose of Benjamin‘s OGT was to return to the word ―idea‖ its name bearing qualities, in contradistinction to ―natural history.‖ Motivated to survive Heidegger‘s transcendent reception in Germany, Adorno developed an argument that sought to demonstrate Heidegger‘s flaw: ―the conceptual synonymity of myth and nature.‖ Further, Adorno demonstrates how this synonymity would lead to the ‗neo-ontological‘ (Adorno‘s word for Heidegger‘s philosophy) repression of the non-organic identities of nature and history by way of the existential invariables incumbent to Heidegger‘s thought that produced an essentialism that was akin to Benjamin‘s beliefs about fate. Nonetheless, identity and its relationship to fate is not such an invariant in Adorno‘s thinking about nature and history. Adorno‘s critique of the enlightenment, that reason becomes the myth it sought to replace, begins in his early work on rethinking natural history away from the existential roots Benjamin granted to the concept. Hullot-Kentor reminds us of why Adorno‘s break with Benjaminian existentialism occurred in Adorno‘s reading of Odysseus, a reading that pays special 171
attention to the way names effect the identity of the hero. That is, Adorno concentrates on the way disguise affects Odysseus‘ own personal psychology in the Polyphemus section of The Odyssesy. Using the word ―Udeis‖ to both disclose and conceal his identity before the Cyclops, Polyphemus, Odysseus is shown to be sacrificing his own transitory identity. ―Udeis‖ – the response Odysseus gives to Polyphemus when that monster asks Odysseus to identify himself – rather than being just a clever pun on Odysseus‘ own name, is also a scream of terror: to avoid being eaten, Odysseus screams out to Polyphemus that he is ―nobody/Udeis.‖ It is because the scream is also a pun that Odysseus can re-count to himself, after danger has passed, that he was always the naturally rational schemer. That is, he fixes his identity retroactively. This identity is inherently duplicitous as the ―schemer‖ gets away with fooling Polyphemus by accidentally mimicking his own name while sincerely fulfilling Polyphemus‘ expectation that he provokes fear and trembling in Odysseus. The monster‘s ―first‖ nature has possessed Odysseus‘ identity in that moment of fear; Adorno castigates Odysseus for taking credit for the merit of his accidental fortune: By making himself like Polyphemus, in answering to his needs, he gains power over him, destroys first nature, and differentiates himself from what would overwhelm him. Yet this differentiation is apocryphal. Ulysses emerges from the struggle a self-identical, invariable, force of nature as the power of self-preservation, a second immanence, that does to itself and first nature, by self control, what it once feared from first nature: it destroys particularity. He has become ―nobody.‖ The historical voyage itself has become a natural event. External mimicry of the natural force of the Cyclops becomes internal self-identical mimesis, ultimately the order of the ratio; which is itself a structure of the self-sacrifice of particularity to universality. Thus, in its conscious control of nature, the self has triumphed by becoming opaque to its self-reproduction as second nature. (237) 172
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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where fate - the agent of nature‟
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Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
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come into their meaning through the
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meaning in the words he appoints to
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―The Role of Language in Trauersp
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God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
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conceived of as a pantomime where t
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ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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aspects of his linguistic theory th
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decision-making powers, we can demo
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him to transpose arguments about th
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Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
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eath of this world, and from it the
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magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
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elegated to the setting in which th
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Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
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every locution being, in essence, e
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CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
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dramatic monologue, a feat he would
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terms that this chapter wishes to c
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structural factitiousness that the
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is implicit to baroque criticisms o
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meaning of the poems it collects. P
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Pound's fragments as commentary on
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Few critics read these poems in the
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a diorama booth in which his hero a
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the genetic milieu into which it be
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In fact, two complaints can be hear
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while keeping lines that praise Bro
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Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
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Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
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George Steiner uncovers the ramific
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to register history differently to
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commitment to past modes of critica
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modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
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the case, is deliberately making ou
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Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
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delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
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presence of a continuous patina of
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described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
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10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
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obsessive desire most critics find
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passing from hand to hand, becomes
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Propertius as Propertius once had C
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saw no viable future for his own ex
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then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
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‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
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difference between his intention an
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itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
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subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
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his subjectivity as a blend of fact
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eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
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dogmatic binding and over which to
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Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
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Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
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Page 143 and 144: The library of the dukes of Milan w
Page 145 and 146: Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
Page 147 and 148: Bornstein, for example, is interest
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Page 151 and 152: Do come, do come. I can see us at B
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Page 155 and 156: the winners of its game (148). Beca
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Page 159 and 160: to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
Page 161 and 162: view of Pound‘s political beliefs
Page 163 and 164: which to describe the force of natu
Page 165 and 166: interrogation of that two-word theo
Page 167 and 168: elationships that they believed to
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Page 171 and 172: knowable “as a combination of ato
Page 173 and 174: new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
Page 175 and 176: ejects any teleological argument fo
Page 177 and 178: Ontologies, such as those that belo
Page 179: this mystery could only be experien
Page 183 and 184: Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
Page 185 and 186: understanding how de-personalizatio
Page 187 and 188: Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
Page 189 and 190: WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
Page 191: The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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