an international and
interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 3, June 2006, ISSN 1552-5112
When the Other Comes Too Close: Derrida and the Threat
of Affinity
Between the early 1960s and his death in October
2004, Derrida published over seventy books, not to mention the many articles,
chapters, forewords, afterwords, and other forms of
textual intervention for which he was responsible during those years. No less
astounding than the sheer number of texts, however, is the diversity of their
subjects: Derrida’s range is, to say the least, formidable, extending from
Plato to Jean-Luc Nancy, from philosophy to literature, from political writings
to psychoanalysis and beyond. Few writers, let alone philosophers, have ranged
so widely, while also reading so closely. And this virtual textual panopticon is constructed not simply through a
multiplication of volumes, but also through the multiplicity characterizing
many of those volumes. To take, for instance, the 1994 volume Politics of Friendship—the range of
authors covered in this text is daunting, to say the least: Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, to name only a
few.
And
yet, even for Derrida there appear to have been certain limits. It would
certainly be possible to produce a list of those philosophers—major
philosophers, too, some of them—on whom he did not write, or on whom he wrote
very little. Such a list would include Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. It is not my intention
here, however, to reflect upon the reasons for such non-encounters. Those
reasons are no doubt various in nature, and of distinctly variable value in the
light they might throw upon Derrida’s own work and, indeed, upon deconstruction
more generally. Instead, I would like to comment briefly, and in a very
preliminary fashion, upon Derrida’s relation to two figures on whom he did not
write, or on whom he wrote very little, not because they were too alien to his
own thinking, not because there was no conceivable point of intersection
between his work and theirs, not even because he proved to be mortal and thus
lacked the time, but precisely (and this is what interests me) because those
two figures were, in his opinion, too familiar or too close to him. The figures
that I have in mind are, rightly or wrongly, and for all their differences,
often taken together; they might even be described as a kind of
literary-philosophical couple or, perhaps more accurately, a
literary-philosophical pseudocouple. That they met,
in person, on more than one occasion, first in
Beckett and Adorno, then,
as two figures whom Derrida avoided, or almost avoided, since, as it happens,
he found himself cornered into speaking of them, found himself having to
explain why he had never quite engaged publicly with them, and in so doing made
it clear that, for him—which is to say, for deconstruction—there is nothing
more debilitating, nothing more speech-robbing, than a certain kind of
affinity. Derrida’s remarks on his reasons for not writing on either Beckett or
Adorno, or for writing very little on them, help to
clarify the fact that it is not ignorance or unfamiliarity, but rather
proximity, familiarity, or terminal convergence that blocks deconstruction in a
manner that is not, strictly speaking, aporetic.
Indeed, Derrida’s avoidance of both Beckett and Adorno
signals that the greatest threat to deconstruction lies in just such terminal
convergence, this being one way of reading the term “affinity,” which,
etymologically, consists of the Latin preposition ad (“to” or “towards”) and the Latin noun finis (“border,” “limit,” or “end”). Affinity, then—and the threat
thereof—ad finem,
as a movement to the border, limit, or end of deconstruction.
Derrida’s sense of affinity with Beckett and Adorno, and why, for him, there will always be something
fatal about affinity: this is my point of departure here. As for where these
two terminal convergences might lead us: arguably, above all towards the
question of literature, towards that privileging of literature which, among
friends of literature and in particular among friends of the friendship between
philosophy and literature, might well cause no distress at all, not least
because the history of that friendship remains to be written. What Derrida
himself has to say of his own affinities makes him not the writer of that
history, but rather one, albeit crucial, moment within it.
Terminal
convergence 1: Derrida/Beckett
When asked by Derek Attridge
in April 1989 why he had never written on Beckett, Derrida responded in a
fashion that is not only highly paradoxical but also suggests that, for
deconstruction, there is in fact a limit to invention, a border or end (finis) beyond which deconstructive
invention cannot pass. That limit would lie, however, not in some hypothetical
distance—it is not an horizon—not in the alien or alterior,
but precisely in the most familiar, in that which is so close that all
difference threatens to collapse within it, as into a black hole of similitude.
Faced with this familiar, which is not a deconstructible
Heimlichkeit,
invention fails, response is reduced to weak
repetition, to a stammering of the same. If that familiarity is conjoined with
unfamiliarity or difference, then that difference remains very easy to
isolate—it is a philosopheme. Here is Derrida’s
response to Attridge’s question:
[Beckett] is an author to whom I feel very close, or
to whom I would like to feel myself very close; but also too close. Precisely
because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and too hard. I have
perhaps avoided him a bit because of this identification. Too hard also because
he writes—in my language, in a language which is his up to a point, mine up to
a point (for both of us it is a “differently” foreign language)—texts which are
both too close to me and too distant for me to be able to “respond” to them.
How could I write in French in the wake of or “with” someone who does
operations on this language which seem to be so strong and so necessary, but
which remain idiomatic? How could I write, sign, countersign performatively texts which “respond” to Beckett? How could
I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage?
It is very hard. […] Given that Beckett writes in a particular French, it would
be necessary, in order to “respond” to his oeuvre, to attempt writing
performances that are impossible for me (apart from a few stammering [and thus
oral] tries in some seminars devoted to Beckett in the last few years).1
The debilitating proximity to which Derrida refers here
would distinguish his relation to Beckett from his relation to all those other
modern writers to whom he found himself perfectly able to respond: these
include Mallarmé, Artaud,
Kafka, Blanchot, and Celan,
with all of whom, of course, Beckett is so often, and so blithely, associated,
in a friendly, even cozy constellation that would be characterized by its
radical, aporetic problematization
of language and the literary. But how exactly, for Derrida, does Beckett differ
from these other writers? How does Beckett differ from Cixous,
with whom Derrida would appear to share so much and yet on whom he was able to
write so extensively? Derek Attridge suggests that
the problem lies in the fact that Beckett is already thoroughly
self-deconstructive. But Derrida, while agreeing with this, chooses to focus
not on this aspect of Beckett’s writing, but rather on the problem of finding a
kind of French in which to respond to Beckett’s French. It is, in short, as
though Beckett’s oeuvre stymied all power of invention in Derrida, precisely
because his relation to the French language converges in some way with
Derrida’s own, and, perhaps surprisingly, converges in a way that Cixous’s French does not. Beckett, then, stands out for
Derrida as a familiar other from whom no power of invention springs, an other in whom alterity
threatens to reach degree zero.
And yet, returning to the paradox of proximity and
distance upon which Derrida insists in his relation to Beckett, he appears
content (and this is surely problematic) to characterize Beckett’s oeuvre as
radically divided against itself, at war with itself, or at the very least less
than friends with itself, in a way that would mark its difference from his own,
even if Derrida claims in his last interview (published in 2005 under the title
Apprendre à vivre enfin) that one cannot imagine how at war with himself
he, Derrida, really is.2 In response to Attridge’s
suggestion that perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Beckett is already
self-deconstructive to the point of leaving nothing to be done—nothing, at
least, to be done by deconstruction—Derrida fatefully introduces the concept of
nihilism, or more precisely two nihilisms, one of which, as it soon turns out,
is not really nihilism at all, in a proximity that strangely mirrors that
affinity proposed by Derrida as his own relation to Beckett: “No doubt that’s
true,” Derrida replies to the suggestion that Beckett is already
self-deconstructive. And then he continues—but there is an anacoluthon here, an
interruption or sudden change in direction, from truth to nihilism, or from
truth in general to the truth of nihilism, as though to generate a little space
in which to invent:
No doubt that’s true. A certain nihilism is both
interior to metaphysics (the final fulfillment of metaphysics, as Heidegger
would say) and then, already, beyond. With Beckett in particular, the two
possibilities are in the greatest possible proximity and competition. He is
nihilist and not nihilist. Above all, this question should not be treated as a
philosophical problem outside or above the texts.3
Now, this claim might be transposed to read as
follows: the radical proximity between nihilism and non-nihilism is figurable as the radical, paralyzing proximity between
Beckett and Derrida, with Beckett the nihilist opposed to Derrida the
non-nihilist, or, more precisely, the non-nihilist in Beckett being nothing
other than the Derrida in Beckett. Were this the case,
then it would be a telling irony that Derrida identifies the nihilism in
Beckett’s oeuvre as lying in the philosophical. The resistance to nihilism in
Beckett—in other words, the Derrida in Beckett, one might even go so far as to
say the literary, as distinct from the philosophical, in Beckett—would lie
beyond any theme, philosopheme, content, or idea:
“The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of [Beckett’s]
works, even the ones that seem the most ‘decomposed,’ that’s what ‘remains’
finally the most ‘interesting,’ that’s the work, the signature, this remainder
which remains when the thematics is exhausted.”4
Derrida’s response to the question of why he has
never responded to Beckett helps, then, to focus what might be termed the
threat of an affinity that concerns his own conception of literature.
Certainly, literature has a crucial role to play in deconstruction, arguably becoming
(as it does for Heidegger) a privileged form of resistance to nihilism. But
this privilege is grounded in a radical negation—or, more precisely, a radical
denegation—of affinity; for, in speaking of his affinity for Beckett, Derrida
insists upon a decidedly binary distinction between the thematics
and the rhetoric of Beckett’s works, a distinction that arguably those works
not only place in question but actually disintegrate, such that it becomes very
difficult to localize any properly nihilistic tendency. It is perhaps just such
a delocalization of the nihil
beyond the thematic/rhetorical distinction that troubles Derrida in Beckett. But why? Because this delocalization threatens any
privileging of literature in the struggle against what Derrida elsewhere terms
the “bad violence” of nihilism, defined as the absolute negation of the other,
the reduction to nothing of the future as à venir.5 Were one to insist upon the singularity of
Beckett’s oeuvre, then, contra
Derrida, it might just be said to lie precisely in this delocalization of the nihil.
Terminal
convergence 2: Derrida/Adorno
Derrida is far from being the first to think Beckett
in relation to the question of nihilism. Adorno, for
instance, towards the end of Negative
Dialectics (1966), defends Beckett against the charge of a nihilism that,
he argues, is to be found not in Beckettian
negativity but in all forms of positivity (including
positivism).6 And if Beckett is the literary figure with whom
Derrida feels an affinity so close that it frustrates all inventive response, Adorno is arguably the philosopher with whom another such
disabling affinity is operative. That Adorno should
himself encounter no impediment in responding to Beckett’s oeuvre, championing
it unreservedly as one of the only responsible forms of post-Holocaust art,
raises the stakes here considerably.
If Derrida never responds to Beckett in the form of a
published work, his public response to Adorno is
limited to the speech entitled “Fichus,”
which was delivered in
For decades I have been hearing voices, as they say,
in my dreams. They are sometimes friendly voices, sometimes not. They are
voices in me. All of them seem to be saying to me: why not recognize, clearly
and publicly, once and for all, the affinities [les affinités] between your work and Adorno’s, in truth your debt to Adorno?
Aren’t you an heir of the
As with Beckett, so here with Adorno,
Derrida presents himself as unable (as yet) to respond adequately, which is to
say inventively, establishing a kind of distance, a space in which Derrida’s
own singularity would be marked. Unlike Beckett, however, Adorno
is a figure to whom Derrida is ready to acknowledge a debt. (Indebtedness does
not figure at all in Derrida’s characterization of his relation to Beckett.)
And yet, for all his readiness to acknowledge such an
indebtedness to Adorno in the above passage,
in “Fichus” Derrida in fact
repeatedly presents their relation as an affinity. This terminal convergence
between Adorno’s thinking and his own occurs at the
following borders:
- First,
in their hesitations, and above all in their hesitations between the
philosophical and the literary: “I admire and love in Adorno
someone who never stopped hesitating between the philosopher’s ‘no’ and
the ‘yes, perhaps, sometimes that does happen’ of the poet, the writer or
the essayist, the musician, the painter, or the scriptwriter, or even the
psychoanalyst. In hesitating between the ‘no’ and the ‘yes, sometimes,
perhaps,’ Adorno was heir to both. He took
account of what the concept, even the dialectic, could not conceptualize
in the singular event, and he did everything he could to take on the
responsibility of this double legacy.”8
- Secondly,
in their thinking—or their dreaming—the impossible. Indeed, Derrida claims
that the kind of thinking he has sought to achieve is one that “perhaps
has more affinity than philosophy itself with this dream.”9 One
more affinity to be considered, then, this time the affinity between
deconstruction and the possibility of the impossible, or, as Derrida terms
it elsewhere, the “im-possible.”10
- Thirdly,
in their love of language: “what I most understand and share with Adorno, to the point of compassion, is perhaps his
love of language, and even a sort of nostalgia for what will still have
been his own language.” That said, Adorno claims
that there is “a special affinity” (eine besondere Wahlvervandtschaft)
between the German language and philosophy which might be heard to echo
Heidegger’s own thinking of the relation between Denken and Dichten,
even if Adorno does his best to keep his
distance from Heidegger by denationalizing the German language.11
This “special affinity” Derrida does not dismiss, but he does, for obvious
reasons, see it as dangerous.
- And
fourthly—and this is arguably the essential in the affinity that Derrida
feels for Adorno, drawing together the other
three—there is what Adorno describes as the “radical alliance between philosophy
and literature,” a friendship like no other. But this alliance is also,
like every alliance, one that separates, and what it separates is
deconstruction from metaphysics: “What I shared most easily with Adorno, even took from him, as did other French
philosophers—although again in different ways—is his interest in literature
and in what, like the other arts, it can critically decenter
in the field of university philosophy.”12
As
with Beckett, so with Adorno, Derrida’s sense of
affinity is certainly not unqualified: were it unqualified, then it is doubtful
that we would have any response at all. Derrida is not quite at one, for
instance, with Adorno in his response to Benjamin,
with whom, Derrida observes, not merely anecdotally, he shares a birthday. He
is not quite at one with Adorno in his response to
Heidegger either.
And he can imagine writing a chapter of “about ten
thousand pages” on the difference between critique (Kritik) and deconstruction, so
many pages (no doubt) not because the difference is so great but rather because
it is so slight.
For all these qualifications, the affinity that
Derrida feels for Adorno is arguably as debilitating
as his affinity for Beckett. It lies in their sharing the conviction that
literature possesses a power to resist that “bad violence” to which I referred
earlier, that violence directed against the absolutely other, that closing down
of a future from which this absolutely other would come: in short, the negation of difference as a value.
Now,
this privileging of literature is something that Derrida shares not only with Adorno, but also with Heidegger and Blanchot,
among others. But then, if that is the case, why should his affinity with Adorno have proven to be more debilitating than that with
either Heidegger or Blanchot, to both of whom he
found himself able to respond with almost inexhaustible invention? This, of
course, returns us to the question of Derrida’s non-response to Beckett: why is
it that he can respond to Celan, to Blanchot, and to Cixous, but not
to Beckett? In search of an answer to this double question, which is in fact
the question of the affinity between philosophy and literature, one has to look
in a little more detail first at Adorno’s and
Derrida’s conceptions of literature, and in particular their thinking of its
relation to the alterity of the absolutely other.
Terminal
convergence 3: philosophy/literature
Adorno’s most developed theorization of literature (and of
art more generally) is to be found in his unfinished and posthumously published
Aesthetic Theory (1970), a work that
he intended to dedicate to Beckett and in which art is consistently thought in
terms of both aporia and alterity.
If Beckett’s “radically darkened art” is, for Adorno,
the only responsible form for the aesthetic to take in radically darkened
times, then this is because Beckett’s works are, on the one hand,
“realistic”—his “shabby, damaged world of images is the negative imprint of the
administered world”13—while, on the other hand, they manage against
all the odds to keep open that space from which an other, better future might
arrive, a future characterized by Adorno as a not
necessarily possible reconciliation (Versöhnung), by which he means the non-hostile coexistence
of the non-identical. The apprehension of this radical other, this future that
is perhaps beyond the possible, is, for Adorno, the
experience of the “shudder” that is art:
Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as
the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What
later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of
the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the
subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that
transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness.
The shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the
act of being touched by the other.14
To shudder, to be “touched by the other” in art, is
to apprehend a future that is not necessarily possible, a future that remains
to come and to which art constitutes not simply a privileged form of testimony
but its very experience. In short, art becomes the experience of the
impossible, an experience of scarcely calculable value in what for Adorno are radically darkened times, governed as they are
by the principle of identity.
It would not be difficult to demonstrate that, from
the outset, one of Derrida’s abiding concerns is the deconstruction of the
opposition between philosophy and literature. It is this he admits to loving
in, and sharing with, Adorno, and this which, as we
have seen, may even be said to frustrate any response on his part to Adorno. In order to achieve such a deconstruction, however,
Derrida has to demonstrate that there is in fact no essence to literature,
nothing that can be identified and demarcated as the strictly literary. This
demonstration is undertaken perhaps most forcefully in the reading of Mallarmé in Dissemination (1972), in which Derrida
declares: “If this handbook of literature [Mallarmé’s
Mimique] meant to say something, which
we now have some reason to doubt, it would proclaim first of all that there is
no—or hardly any, ever so little [à peine, si peu
de]—literature; that in any event there is no essence of literature, no
truth of literature, no literary-being or being-literary of literature.”15
This take on literature is still firmly in place two
decades later, as is clear from Derrida’s remarks in the interview in which he
speaks of his affinity for Beckett. In this interview, however, Derrida
elaborates on the residual possibility for literature retained in that “ever so
little” (si peu de).
Rather than literature or the literary, he now refers to the “literary event,”
of which he states: “the existence of something like a literary reality in
itself will always remain problematic. The literary event is perhaps more
of an event (because less natural) than any other, but by the same token it
becomes very improbable, hard to verify.”16 Thus, if literature
lacks any essence, if it hardly exists, if it “voids itself,” it nonetheless
retains a certain specificity. Indeed, not only does
literature not simply disappear as a category under the pressure of its
deconstruction, but it retains a radical privilege.
The privilege of the literary event would lie in its
being “perhaps more of an event (because less natural) than any other,” the
event in question being an opening to the other as that which is “to come.” For
Derrida, however, alterity is related to literature
not as theme or content, not as literature’s “said,” but rather in its being
always already alterior to itself, and in its
remarking upon this fact. Kafka’s “Before the Law” (1919) is an instance of
just such remarking:
[“Before the Law”] points obliquely to literature, speaking of itself as
a literary effect—and thereby exceeding the literature of which it speaks. But is it not necessary for all literature to
exceed literature? What would be a literature that would be only what it is,
literature? It would no longer be itself if it were itself.17
Derrida relates this aporetic conception of
literature to a history of the experience of alterity.
Literature becomes the privileged form of this experience of alterity at a particular historical moment—namely, our own:
It is quite possible that literary writing in the modern period is more
than one example among others, rather a privileged guiding thread for access to
the general structure of textuality [...]. What
literature “does” with language holds a revealing power which is certainly not
unique, which it can share up to a point with law, for example with judicial
language, but which in a given historical situation (precisely our own, and
this is one more reason for feeling concerned, provoked, summoned by “the
question of literature”) teaches us more, and even the “essential,” about
writing in general, about the philosophical or scientific (for example
linguistic) limits of the interpretation of writing.18
For Derrida, then, alterity
is written into the heart of the literary event. Were literature on friendly
terms with itself, there would be no literary event at all. And it is precisely
in its auto-immunity that, in the present historical situation, literature has
a “revealing power” that is greater than that of other forms of writing, a
power whose object of revelation is precisely the alterity
of that absolutely other which is for ever to come (à
venir). All value will reside, if anywhere, in
this other beyond all possible presentation. This localization of value is
arguably what Derrida shares most closely with Adorno.
And a
terminal divergence, to end: friendship/affinity
To draws things very quickly, and no doubt all too
neatly, towards some kind of conclusion, we might turn to that friendship (amitié) of which
Derrida dreams in Politics of Friendship,
a friendship of and with the future, a friendship beyond that theorized by so
many others, including both Levinas and Blanchot, a friendship that would entail no “bad violence,”
a friendship of, with, and from the other; in short, a friendship “beyond the
homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema,” with the
promise of an “experience of freedom and equality this is capable of
respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just
beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness.”19
Among the many figures who do not figure, at least explicitly or by name, in Politics of Friendship, there are two
with whom, as we have seen, Derrida elsewhere acknowledges not a friendship,
but that terminal convergence which goes by the name of affinity. It is the
difference between the friendship of which Derrida dreams in Politics of Friendship and such
debilitating affinities that I wish to emphasize here. In Beckett, for all the
disintegrations, there is arguably a community of sorts: that of father and
son—something upon which Kristeva remarks so
persuasively in a brief essay published in Polylogue.20
And in Adorno, too, there is in the end, beyond the
negative dialectic, a friendship that goes, as we have seen, by the name of
“reconciliation” (Versöhnung),
in which the trace of filiation remains (Sohn). Thus, where
in Beckett one finds the dream of a community of father and son,
in Adorno one finds the dream of a community of
fatherless sons. These forms of friendship would no doubt remain homo-fraternal
and phallogocentric. But the same is not necessarily
the case for that indifference (Gleichgültigkeit) which is certainly to be found in Beckett
and is thought by Adorno under the sign of
reconciliation, that indifference which would take the form of “the
multiplicity of different things” (die Vielheit
des Verschiedenen), the experience of “the many
as no longer inimical.”21
Derrida
certainly shares Adorno’s dream of releasing the nonidentical. Arguably, deconstruction dreams of achieving
nothing else. Both Derrida and Adorno fear the threat
of a terminal convergence that comes to be framed within an ethical discourse,
as though it really mattered whether one achieved indifference or not. Friendship, then, but not affinity, elective or otherwise, because
affinity, unlike debt, unlike legacy, would seem, for Derrida at least, to
leave no room for response, no space for invention. But
also because affinity marks the death of
difference as a value. In this death, there would no doubt lie
another point of departure, this time for a reading of the deconstructive
thinking of friendship via the specter of affinity, as, despite itself, the
dream of its own terminal convergence with itself.
an international and
interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 3, June 2006, ISSN 1552-5112
Notes
1. Jacques
Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with
Jacques Derrida,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby,
in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60–1.
2. See Jacques Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin: entretien avec Jean Birnbaum
(Paris: Galilée/Le Monde, 2005), 49.
3.
Derrida, “This Strange Institution,” 61.
4. Ibid.
5. See
Jacques Derrida, “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” in Jacques Derrida and
Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret,
ed. Giacomo Donis and David
Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 92.
6. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 380–1.
7. Jacques
Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,”
in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford:
8. Ibid.
166.
9. Ibid.
168.
10. For
the distinction between the “impossible” and the “im-possible,”
see Jacques Derrida, “As If It Were Possible: ‘Within Such Limits,’” in Paper Machine, 73–99.
11. See Adorno in Derrida, “Fichus,”
170.
12. Ibid.
180.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone,
1997), 31.
14. Ibid.
331.
15.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination,
trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 223.
16.
Derrida, “This Strange Institution,” 73.
17. Ibid.
215.
18. Ibid.
71–2.
19.
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship,
trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 306.
20. See
Julia Kristeva, “The Father, Love, and Banishment,”
in Desire in Language: A Semiotic
Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez,
trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine,
and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1980), 148–58.
21. Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, 6.