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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Adorno, shudder and the aura of art « Previous | |Next »
June 25, 2008

In The Splinter in Your Ear: Noise as the Semblance of Critique in Culture, Theory & Critique, (2005) Nick Smith says that the source of the new aura of the work of art, rather than unblemished Romantic beauty, is now its sheer irreconcilability. Smith says that for Adorno:

The strangeness of the object evokes a response not like the fawning admiration of the beautiful but more like the suppliant terror of the sublime. ‘Shudder’, Adorno’s shorthand for this aesthetic fear, elicits ‘responses like real anxiety, a violent drawing back, an almost physical revulsion’...... Shudder horrifies us by inducing ‘a sense of being touched by the other’, and the point of contact reaches us not in a long awaited embrace, but in a harrowing shock.... Unlike the angelic offering of the beautiful, the hand that grabs us from behind in shudder will be disfigured by ‘the scars of damage and disruption…’ When we encounter the possibility of a suffering, gasping breath beneath a cacophony of unnerving noise, we feel offended, afraid, and complicit. Just as J. M. Bernstein argues that a work of art expresses meaning like a body suffering expresses meaning, so when confronted with such an object we feel the need to assuage the suffering and fear being overtaken by whatever has inflicted the pain. ...The very distinction between witnessing suffering and undergoing suffering is threatened.

Smith says that the entirety of Aesthetic Theory is devoted to mapping these limits of instrumental reason and art, and narrating how art embodies what philosophy cannot translate into conceptual knowledge and how art depends on philosophy to interpret its nonparaphrasable claims.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:12 AM |