through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense.«21
The shock and the terror, the fear and trembling I have been discussing, are the points of subjective intensity at which objectivity in the sense of truth invades the subject. This is the point of contact with infinitude in which the subject vanishes into the work of art. But this is the same point at which the work becomes fragmented and enigmatic through the irruption of objectivity into it in the form of its idea. It is not only the subject who is shocked and broken when truth invades him. The Hammerklavier too trembles and breaks under the strain.
At this point I would like to turn to a piece of Adorno’s own writing to illustrate these ideas. As we saw in Adorno’s comments about structuring his book Aesthetic Theory, Adorno’s writing too has an aesthetic dimension. It too is composed of fragments that take the form of a constellation that is a tour de force. The piece is from his essay »Titles«, included in Notes to Literature (Noten zur Literatur). It is about the title of Kafka’s novel Amerika. In it we can see the relationship between the work as constellation and the work as tour de force, as well as the broken, fragmentary quality and the intrusion of death. Adorno writes:
»For Kafka’s America novel, the title he used in his diary, The One Who Was Never Heard of Again [Der Verschollene], would have been better than the title under which the book went down in history. That too is a fine title; for the work has as much to do with America as the prehistoric photograph »In New York Harbor« that is included in my edition of the Stoker fragment of 1913. The novel takes place in an America that moved while the picture was being taken, the same and yet not the same America on which the emigrant seeks to rest his eye after a long, barren crossing. – But nothing would fit that better than The One Who Was Never Heard of Again, a blank space for a name that cannot be found. The perfect passive participle verschollen, »never heard of again,« has lost its verb the way the family’s memory loses the emigrant who goes to ruin and dies. Far beyond its actual meaning, the expression of the word verschollen is the expression of the novel itself.«22
In the six sentences that make up this small piece we become aware both of an abrupt, uneven movement from one sentence to another and of threads of associative links that draw us along and embroil us in an ever tighter web of connections. We move from a comparison between the original title and the final title of Kafka’s book to an old (Adorno says prehistoric) photograph that Adorno possessed, and then to the image of an emigrant looking for a resting place. Then suddenly a blank space is mentioned, and something that has been lost. Then the family has forgotten and the emigrant has »gone to ruin« and died. And in the final sentence, Adorno speaks of the aesthetic concept of expression and tells us that it is the expression contained in that single word verschollen that is the expression of Kafka’s novel. A scintillating constellation has been formed around the idea of expression. But the notion of expression itself remains enigmatic, the blank space at the center of the constellation called Der Verschollene.
Not only are we dealing here with fragmentary thoughts that nevertheless hint at coherence, but the elements that are brought into the constellation are themselves broken and ruined: Adorno evokes things ancient, barren, ruined, exiled, lost, blurred and erased to form the constellation around his topic, the word or title der Verschollene. Even the word verschollen, as Adorno points out, is only the after-effect of a verb that has vanished into the void. The shudder that grips the subject in the arena of aesthetic experience finds its reflection here, in the blurred photograph of an »America that moved while the picture was being taken.« Of course Adorno’s topic here is not only Kafka’s novel but also America, the land of Adorno’s own emigration and exile. Thus his topic is also the damaged life, the mutilation of experience. In this little piece Adorno conjoins recognition of horror – the horror of vanishing from human memory – and the enigmatic suggestion that true expression may be possible in art, in this case, Kafka’s novel.
Erschütterung again
In closing, I will return to Adorno’s notion of Erschütterung and to my earlier statement that it is not only the subject’s mutilations but to some extent the subject himself who is extinguished in the arena of aesthetic experience as he vanishes into the work of art. If the shock of Erschütterung forcibly negates the mutilations that are denial of the truth, one of those denials is the notion of the dominating subject itself – »the I, that internal agent of repression,« as Adorno refers to it, the subject in its false identification with the false universal, das Immergleiche. The work of art forces the subject to look into the abyss. As Adorno puts it, this experience of Erschütterung or shudder is »radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience […]. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives its own limitedness and finitude. […] This subjective experience directed against the I is an element of the objective truth of art.«23
Of course, as Adorno points out, the experience of liquidation is a semblance; people do not literally die of aesthetic experience. But to the extent that in aesthetic experience the subject is subordinated to the work of art, to the extent to which aesthetic experience is indeed an experience of the primacy of the object, the subject’s attention is literally reshaped as he strains to follow the internal logic of the fragmentary and enigmatic work. It is as though the artwork, having trapped the subject, now forces him to perform arduous labors almost beyond his endurance. It is those labors we are not sure we will survive. And indeed, in this process, which Adorno, following Hegel, calls the Arbeit des Begriffs, the labor of thought, the subject is in fact extinguished to some degree, divested of his old mutilated and dominating self, and becomes not a new self but Geist, spirit. This is the way in which aesthetic violence differs from the violence of the totally administered society.
Susanne Lettow
Philosophiegeschichte als Verflechtungsgeschichte
Globalität, Naturwissen und Kants Theorie der Menschenrassen1
Seit einigen Jahren werden in den Sozial-, Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften Ansätze diskutiert, die darauf zielen, den »methodischen Nationalismus« und den Eurozentrismus der verschiedenen Disziplinen zu überwinden. Postkoloniale Theorie, Verflechtungs- und Globalgeschichte sind dabei zu zentralen Bezugspunkten geworden, um zu rekonstruieren, inwiefern jene Entwicklungen, die der europäischen Moderne ihre spezifischen Konturen verliehen haben, von den kolonialen Verhältnissen Europas zur nicht-europäischen Welt geprägt sind.2 In der Philosophie sind diese Debatten und Problematisierungen jedoch bisher kaum angekommen.3 Im Folgenden soll daher anhand von Kants Theorie der Menschenrassen und den naturphilosophischen Überlegungen, die mit ihr verbunden sind, der Versuch unternommen werden, eine globalgeschichtliche Perspektive für die Philosophiegeschichte fruchtbar zu machen. Ausgehend von einer kurzen Skizze der Zusammenhänge zwischen Globalisierungsprozessen, Naturforschung und Naturphilosophie in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts, werde ich jene Texte von Kant analysieren, in denen er in den Jahren zwischen 1775 und 1788 mehrfach den Versuch unternimmt, den Begriff der Menschenrasse zu bestimmen. Ich zeige an diesen Texten, inwiefern Kant in einem global gewordenen Wissens- und Erfahrungshorizont operiert und gleichzeitig an dessen Konstitution mitwirkt. Vor dem Hintergrund der Kontroverse zwischen Kant und Georg Forster rekonstruiere ich dann in einem dritten Schritt die Bedeutung von Kants Rassenbegriff, der – wie ich ausführen werde – eng mit seiner Rekonzeptualisierung von Naturwissen verbunden ist. Daran anschließend zeige ich, inwiefern sich in Kants naturphilosophischen Überlegungen, die er im zweiten Teil der Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) näher ausführt, die Konturen einer Wissenschaft vom Leben abzeichnen. Vermittelt über den Begriff der Rasse, so argumentiere ich, ist Kants naturphilosophische Intervention mit den Prozessen europäischer Expansion und Globalisierung um 1800 verbunden. Schließlich plädiere ich, von diesen Befunden ausgehend, dafür, auch Philosophiegeschichte als globale Verflechtungsgeschichte zu lesen und diskutiere einige methodische Fragen, die sich aus einem solchen Konzepttransfer ergeben.
Globalität, Naturwissen, Naturphilosophie
Vielfach ist darauf hingewiesen worden,