Book Reviews 165

verstärken, sondern auch, welche eigens hergestellten, para-und intertextuellen Be-

züge in den jeweiligen Übersetzungen offenkundig werden.
Hier tritt Telge als kompetenter Kritiker der Übersetzungen auf, andernorts
verweist er auf interessante Details in den verschiedenen Übersetzungen. Ein Beispiel
(246ff.) hierfür ist, dass Enzensberger in einem ebenfalls von Arendt übersetzten
Gedicht Nerudas (,,Las furias y las penas“) den Hauptmarker im Partizip Perfekt des
Verbs ,,romper“ (dt. ,,zerstören“) sieht; er hebt dies auf eine semantische Ebene, die
politisch weniger engagierten Übersetzern nicht auffallen würde: nämlich dass im
chilenischen Sprachgebrauch eben jenes Partizip ,,roto“ für Mitglieder des Proletariats
,,und als abwertende Bezeichnung für die einfache Bevölkerung gebraucht wird“
(248). Somit schwingt in Nerudas Beschreibung zerstörter, hässlicher oder kaputt-
gegangener Objekte eben auch eine sozialpolitische Komponente mit, die bei poeti-
schen Puristen, wie etwa Baudelaire, nicht so offenkundig vorhanden ist, wenn sie
die gleichen Termini verwenden. Telge zeichnet verständlich nach, welch große Rolle
der Autor-Übersetzer Enzensberger spielt, wenn er internationale Dichtung in einem
Kompendium namens ,,Museum der modernen Poesie“ zusammenfasst, das verschie-
dene Texte miteinander in Bezug und aktiv in einen gemeinsamen Kontext setzt,
nämlich in der Zusammenstellung und Abfolge seiner Dichtungssammlung. In seiner
Skepsis gegenüber Metaphorik versucht Enzensberger eine Brücke zwischen Latein-
amerikanern wie Neruda und Vallejo und dem deutschen Vorahnen einer sozialistisch-
funktionalen Poesie, Bertolt Brecht, zu schlagen, lässt dabei allerdings Nerudas eigene
Metaphorik außer Acht. Dass dem zum verdunkelnden Gongorismus neigenden
Neruda-Übersetzer Arendt jene Skepsis gegenüber Metaphorik weitgehend fehlte, gibt
zurecht Futter in die antagonistische, rivalisierende Beziehung zwischen Enzensberger
und Arendt.
Anhand der Gegenüberstellung der beiden Autor-Übersetzer Enzensberger und
Arendt zeichnet Telge anschaulich und dennoch gründlich viele der Konfliktlinien im
translationstheoretischen Diskurs nach, nämlich zwischen der bewussten Sichtbarkeit
des Autor-Übersetzers und dem Versuch einer Verdunkelung desselben; zwischen
Statik und Lebendigkeit der Übersetzung; zwischen Metonymie und Metaphorik; zwi-
schen politisch-engagierter Poesie und poetisch-ästhetischem Purismus. Darüberhi-
naus geht Telge auch auf politische Faktoren mit ein, die entweder auf textlicher
Ebene sichtbar sind oder auf außertextliche Realitäten verweisen, wie etwa auf Fragen
darüber, welche Übersetzungen in welcher politischen Konstellation veröffentlicht
werden, wie gekürzt wird, und wer aus welchen Gründen die Rechte eines Autors zu
seiner Übersetzung erhält.
Alles in allem beleuchtet Telge diverse relevante Problemfelder aktueller Über-
setzungspraxis. Sein Buch schafft den Spagat, sowohl formelle und inhaltliche Tiefe
in weitgehend leicht verständlicher Sprache zu schaffen als auch ein breites Spektrum
translationstheoretischer und kontextbezogener Fragen aufzuwerfen.
University of Arizona —Thomas Fuhr

Adorno and Existence.

By Peter E. Gordon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. xiv + 256 pages.
$29.95.
In his introduction, Peter Gordon states that the primary aim of the present work is
to “trace the complex history of Adorno’s critical engagement with existentialism”
166 Monatshefte, Vol. 111, No. 1, 2019
(3). Tailored to this end, Adorno and Existence can be seen as a finely calibrated
combination of intellectual biography and philosophical analysis. As the author un-
derscores at several junctures of his discussion, Adorno’s approach is best construed
as a special brand of immanent critique (esp. 72, 124, 146, 156, 171). In a later
segment, this methodological orientation is explicated in relation to Negative Dialec-
tics, the book Adorno himself identified as “my chief philosophical work” (121). Thus,
Gordon observes, “Adorno’s characterization of his philosophical task alerts us to the
intriguing irony that Negative Dialectics contains both a critique of existentialism and
a reprisal of gestures associated with the philosophy of existence itself” (124). Yet
this dual gesture is by no means confined to Adorno’s last major publication, but
recurs throughout the four decades of his prolific career.
As crucial signposts for tracking such a formidable itinerary, Gordon singles
out Adorno’s encounter with three prominent thinkers: Kierkegaard, Husserl, and
Heidegger. While the spotlight remains on these three, “this should not deter us from
recognizing that Adorno’s own model of negative dialectics was conceived [ . . . ] as
a radicalization and transformation of Hegel” (164). Specifically, Adorno is said to
adhere to the “critical promise of negation,” with the important qualifier that any
vision of “final reconciliation” implied by “Hegel’s mature system” be resisted (ibid.).
Operating from this post-Hegelian platform, then, Adorno emerges as the critical
diagnostician of a series of “significan[t] [ . . . ] failure[s]” (77), which is reflected in
the organization of Gordon’s chapters.
Forming the bookends of the present study, the first and the fifth chapter dem-
onstrate that Kierkegaard ought to be considered one of the strongest influences—
arguably, the strongest influence—on Adorno’s intellectual development (cf. 14). Ini-
tially, Adorno criticized Kierkegaard for taking refuge in a religiously framed
conception of subjectivity that was inadvertently modeled on the “poetic-metaphoric
figure of the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois dwelling, or intérieur [ . . . ] so as to
secure immunity against all historical conditioning” (25). While Adorno found this
“retreat into asocial interiority” unacceptable, over time he grew more and more ap-
preciative of Kierkegaard’s plea “for the subject to resists its own compulsory rec-
onciliation with the false totality of the merely given world” (186–187). This trope
of the “merely given world” announces one of the pivotal challenges for Adorno’s
agenda, which Gordon summarizes thus: “A genuinely critical philosophy of history
must undo the false naturalization of the social world and restore it to the volatile
space of a genuinely historical consciousness” (56). Both Husserl and Heidegger are
judged to fall short of this critical standard, even though Adorno is prepared to ac-
knowledge a kernel of “disavowed truth” (78) in their respective versions of phenom-
enology.
Thus, the second chapter attends to Husserl’s ambition “to isolate the experi-
ential elements of immanent consciousness from its necessary appeal to the transcen-
dent objects of the world” (59). Yet, rather than illuminating the “intentional bond”
between mind and world (59; cf. 72), Husserl, in the end, replaced historical con-
sciousness with the optics of a bodiless “camera,” thus “fortifying the authority of
consciousness over the real”—an idealistic relapse into “solipsism” (68–69). Heideg-
ger, for his part, does not succeed where Husserl failed, yet the aspects of his failure
are interestingly different. Expounded in the third and fourth chapter, the main charge
leveled against Heideggerian phenomenology is that it champions a rhetorically potent
Book Reviews 167
variety of “pseudo-concreteness” couched in the quasi-religious language that became
the target of Adorno’s acerbic criticism in The Jargon of Authenticity (130–131).
Within Heidegger’s œuvre, gestures at pseudo-concreteness are detected in Being and
Time’s account of Jemeinigkeit or “mineness” as well as in texts from the mid-1930s
such as the essay on “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” from which Adorno
quotes the symptomatic line, “Man is he, who he is, precisely in testifying to his own
Dasein” (100). Accordingly, human existence remains caught in a self-referential
hermeneutic circle that is more vicious than virtuous, for it distorts any revelation of
an independently existing world into an idolatrous reverence of Dasein’s own reve-
latory powers (cf. 93, 101). But then, what is Adorno’s own alternative?
An intriguing answer to this question is sketched in Gordon’s fifth and final
chapter where, as mentioned, he follows Adorno’s return to Kierkegaard. In this place,
the author reconstructs Adorno’s proposal for reading Kierkegaard as prismatized
through the writings of Franz Kafka. In an effort to wrest both Kierkegaard’s and
Kafka’s works away from their presumed misappropriation by dialectical theology
associated with the names of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Friedrich Gogarten (175;
cf. 17, 20, 180), Adorno draws attention to the figure of Odradek featured in Kafka’s
story “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” (The Cares of a Family Man). According to
Adorno’s “Notes on Kafka,” Odradek is an uncanny creature that dwells in the “no-
man’s land between man and thing” (177). In this sense, Odradek intimates a mode
of undead existence or what Giorgio Agamben would call “bare life,” though Gordon
does not make this connection. If we read Kafka’s tale as a “philosophical allegory”
(178), then it becomes clear that Odradek “is nothing but the debased image of God
as he appears in a messianic light” (179). As a “sign of distortion,” the allegorical
figure of Odradek embodies an “inverted” hope (ibid.), which may serve as the guiding
impulse for a novel species of “materialist religion, but without the ideal of a higher
subjectivity that remains free from the pain of incarnation” (179–180).
This highly condensed passage near the end of Gordon’s study leaves the reader
wanting more. Thus one may wonder whether Adorno’s invective against dialectical
theology aims at a straw man, for the more pressing question appears to be how
Adorno’s account of Odradek might compare to Paul Tillich’s account of the life and
death of religious symbols. As Gordon notes early on, Tillich was not only the su-
pervisor of Adorno’s habilitation thesis on Kierkegaard but also proposed the topic
(13). Following Schelling’s Christology (rather than Hegel’s idealism), Tillich’s re-
ligious existentialism was focused on the symbol of Christ as the “middle of history.”
In this regard, it would seem worthwhile to further gauge the distance (or proximity?)
of Adorno’s programmatic sketch for a materialist religion vis-à-vis his mentor’s
previous forays into a theology of culture. By the same token, those readers who are
taken aback by Adorno’s sweeping dismissal of Husserl and Heidegger in tandem
may wish to revisit some of the Catholic or post-Catholic extensions of Husserlian
phenomenology, for example, by Edith Stein (who is not mentioned) and by Max
Scheler, whom—in this reviewer’s opinion—Adorno clearly shortchanged (cf. 129,
133, 215n93).
In keeping with his disclaimer in the preface, Gordon’s “pedagogical aims” in
the present volume are “chiefly confined to philosophical exposition [ . . . ] only oc-
casionally touching upon the question as to whether his [Adorno’s] thoughts were
philosophically defensible” (xii). In this spirit, Adorno and Existence self-consciously
168 Monatshefte, Vol. 111, No. 1, 2019
offers the different facets of its protagonist’s philosophical project as so many launch-
pads for constructive criticism and independent future research. Written with the same
lucidity and acumen that is characteristic of his previous publications, Gordon’s el-
egant discussion delivers what it promises.
Columbus State University —Markus Weidler

W.G. Sebald-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung.

Herausgegeben von Claudia Öhlschläger und Michael Niehaus. Stuttgart: Metzler,
2017. ix + 333 Seiten. €89,95 gebunden, €69,99 eBook.
As international engagement with W. G. Sebald’s exceptionally influential body of
work continues to grow, Öhlschlaeger and Niehaus have produced what is likely to
become a standard handbook for students and researchers working in the area of
Sebald studies in German, amplifying such earlier publications as Saturn’s Moons:
W.G. Sebald—A Handbook (Catling and Hibbet, 2011) [ed. note: see review in
Monatshefte 104.4, Winter 2012, 685–88]. The volume is thorough and comprehen-
sive, its 325 pages densely packed with 53 authoritative entries covering a vast range
of concerns inherent to Sebald’s own complex work, methodology, biography, and
reception. Significantly, while the entries, in keeping with the Metzler format, for the
most part are no longer than five pages, in the main they go far beyond a descriptive
or encyclopedic approach, instead offering critical perspectives both on Sebald’s work
and on the existing scholarship. Such an approach is, indeed, in keeping with Sebald’s
own, as Torsten Hoffmann points out in one of the most interesting interventions in
the volume, “Polemik.” Sebald himself reserved some of his most scathing polemic
for works where he sensed “the methods of academic processing rather than an in-
dependent analysis” (Sebald 1973, 98, cited on 156). The high quality of independent
analysis here, from established experts in Sebald studies, is one of the hallmarks of
the volume. While the essays contain a valuable quantity of solid information about
such essential matters to the student and scholar as publication history, intertexts, and
literary debates, the majority also make significant, individual but interlinked inter-
ventions of their own.
In their introduction, the editors explain that, although they have kept to the
standard Metzler handbook format, they have shied away from the usual detailed
biographical section, due to an ethical refusal to intrude into the author’s private life.
Thus the handbook’s biographical section focusses only on Sebald’s literary and ac-
ademic careers, making of “W. G. Sebald” a textual and intertextual construct not
unlike the characters in his own fiction. The next section, “Schriften,” contains essays
summarizing and interpreting each of his literary texts individually, as well as his
poetry, his academic publications, and his interviews. It is particularly welcome that
a section here is devoted to Sebald’s lyric poetry, which, as Sven Meyer acknowl-
edges, is often seen as of secondary importance to the prose works. The inclusion of
Sebald’s Nachlass as a literary text is also unexpected and welcome; this essay is,
appropriately, written by Ulrich von Bülow and Heike Gfrereis, curators of the Mar-
bach exhibition Wandernde Schatten. W.G. Sebalds Unterwelt. Torsten Hoffmann’s
 Adorno and Existence by Peter E. Gordon (review)
Markus Weidler

Monatshefte, Volume 111, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 165-168 (Review)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

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