Abstract
This article is an attempt to re-read the magnum opus of Adorno’s philosophy, namely Aesthetic Theory, using an interpretative key offered by Agata Bielik-Robson’s book entitled Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos. This interpretative key, called by the Author The Marrano Strategy implemented to Adorno’s late philosophy allows us to investigate the common points of Adorno’s theory of art criticism and modern Jewish thought. Therefore the main question of this text concerns the characteristics of Jewishness and messianicity (Scholem, Derrida) in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The thesis that I am attempting to justify is as follows: the implementation of Marrano strategy to the modern art criticism redefines and reverses the relationship between the particular element and the universal domain. Consequently, this dialectical ‘appreciation’ of the particular establishes a common conceptual field for critical thinking and traditional, religious motifs.
Highlights
The Marrano Strategy implemented to Adorno’s late philosophy allows us to investigate the common points of Adorno’s theory of art criticism and modern Jewish thought
I describe the specificity of Jewish thought, as defined by Bielik-Robson, focusing on the answer to the question of how language, interpretation, and criticism are understood in this thought
Once we have the general characteristics of Marrano nominalism and the understanding of language as such, it is possible to consider the specific issue of the title and attempt to highlight the features of a linguistic martial strategy in Adorno’s aesthetic thought
Summary
What unites the creation within itself and with its Creator is not the Neoplatonic structure of participation, where all beings share in various degrees the flow of divine power, but language and linguistic communication, in which all of these ontologically separate elements come into a cosmic dialogue This emphasis on language as the only metaphysical ‘glue’ of the otherwise fragmented and horizontally diversified universe, accounts for the special, elect position of man who is the only being capable of using language, that is, of maintaining a relationship with created reality via giving names.”. “in modern Jewish thought—death is a dialectical point of departure beyond the world of creation, a beginning of the ‘path’ driving from absolute ‘meaninglessness’ to absolute ‘meaningfulness’; from the mute ‘marble-like’ existence of death-destined things to the condition of a dialogue in which every expression acquires a meaning It is a point of recognition and clarity that, once all the beautiful and deceptive appearances are gone, lends a rock-bottom of semantic orientation.”. As it will turn out, this is the shortest way to define the “dialectical negativity” of Adorno’s philosophy and to combine it through irrevocable marriage with the modern Jewish tradition in order to use such a perverse term
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