Vivian Liska
Vivian Liska is director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author most recently of German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife (Indiana University Press).
BOOKS
Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem Correspondence, 1939-1969
Edited by Asaf Angermann
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski and Paula Schwebel
Polity Press, 520 pages, $45
“A stellar hour of German-Jewish intellectual history.” This is how the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas describes the correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, published in German in 2015, and now appearing for the first time in English.
In bringing a whole era to life, the epistolary dialogue continuously negotiates the proximity and distance of this “odd couple”: Adorno, a German philosopher of Jewish descent best known for his neo-Marxist, materialist aesthetic theory and social criticism, and Scholem, the German-born Israeli founder of the modern study of Kabbalah. After a jarring start, the more than two-hundred letters between them become more intimate, informed by an authentic respect of each other’s brilliance, a deepening interest in each other’s writing, and a finely tuned conversational style. Yet their relationship is punctuated by discord to the end.
The correspondence begins shortly after their first meeting in New York in 1938 and ends with Adorno’s death in 1969. It centers on their mutual friend Walter Benjamin, on the planning of a jointly edited volume of his letters and other writings, and on their achievements and failures in chasing Benjamin’s letters, dispersed to all corners of the world after his suicide in 1940 while fleeing Vichy France.
The correspondence also offers fresh insights into Adorno’s and Scholem’s shared ambivalence about other figures in their orbit like Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber. It includes occasionally outrageous comments, such as Adorno’s remarks about his “disdain” for Arendt, whom he calls “an old washer-woman.” Yet such cutting comments serve to enhance the mutual complicity between the two friends, and as a code to situate themselves within their shared intellectual landscape.
As their epistolary relationship unfolds, it becomes a fascinating testimony of an exchange of ideas between these two domineering and competitive personalities. Gradually, a common intellectual quest comes to light: an astute attention for what had been repressed by Enlightenment rationality gone awry. Writing after Auschwitz, Adorno and Scholem shared a sense that the Enlightenment—as well as the hopes and expectations attached to it—had proven to be a chimera: instead of bringing freedom and emancipation, it had relapsed into myth. For both, theology plays an important but not unambiguous role in their endeavor to counter this disastrous regression.
One senses just below the surface that the two correspondents’ core beliefs are at stake: the relationship between philosophy and religion, modernity and tradition, and the universal and the particular. Adorno suggests that metaphysical and theological truths can survive in the modern world only if they are secularized, only if they undergo what he calls “a migration into the profane.”
It comes as no surprise, then, that Adorno frequently expresses his admiration of Scholem’s studies into how the forces of Kabbalah intruded into secular history. In 1938, upon his first encounter with Scholem, Adorno reports to Benjamin that Scholem’s belief in the truth content of theology made him think of someone releasing a lifeboat, but then “swamping it with water and getting it to capsize” instead of saving “at least some of the freight: presumably transcendence.” Adorno adds that Scholem’s historical interpretations of the “‘explosions’ of Jewish mysticism” ignored the driving force of social processes. In his letters to Scholem, however, Adorno insists on the closeness of their standpoints. At times, he insists too much. Sentences starting with ingenious variations of “I’m sure you will agree…” become frequent.
Scholem’s idea that heretical mysticism prefigured and eventually transformed into the Enlightenment deeply resonated with Adorno’s premise of his own dialectical understanding of modernity. In one of the first letters of their correspondence, Adorno excitedly expresses the discovery of a common ground between his own philosophy and Scholem’s understanding of Jewish mysticism. It becomes increasingly clear that what Adorno hopes to find in Scholem’s thought is a Jewish version of what will become the core idea of his own theory developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer): that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.”
“Only thoughts which cannot understand themselves are true.”
At the same time, Scholem is reluctant to express his complicity with Adorno’s thinking, or even to fully disclose his own standpoint. In his answer to Adorno’s enthusiastic letter about the Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms, Scholem dismisses Adorno’s continuing request for additional explanations: “Now you want a commentary – what are you thinking? … I will guard myself against getting into hot water here. One credo that applies to my aphorisms is: every man for himself.”
Scholem, in keeping with the esotericism of his subject matter, hides behind witticisms and every so often keeps the answers to himself. Where Adorno recognizes an agreement at the core of their thought, Scholem more often than not feels the need to set himself apart.
In a lengthy letter responding to Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s magnum opus, Scholem remains too repelled by Adorno’s neo-Marxist terminology to submit to his flattering advances. The same reservations can be felt in Scholem’s response to Adorno’s request to have a look at his musical writings, which he regards as closely related to Scholem’s view of the relationship between mysticism, Enlightenment, and myth. Scholem shirks the issue and protests his ignorance in musical matters. When Adorno calls Arnold Schönberg’s opera Moses and Aron “Jewish music,” Scholem replies that this very notion must be endowed with a perennial question mark. The form of Scholem’s rebuttals ranges from gentle jokes – often about the notorious obscurity of Adorno’s style – to pure provocation. “Who, may I ask,” Scholem writes in a letter from February 6, 1967, “is the author of the lovely line ‘Only thoughts which cannot understand themselves are true’? I presume I would approve if only I understood it.” The author of the line, as Adorno admits in his reply, is none other than himself.
Adorno once remarked to Benjamin that Scholem’s “very conception of mysticism … presents itself … as that same incursion into the profane with which he reproaches both of us.” Three decades later, when Adorno points to the convergence between his own dialectics and Scholem’s sympathies for redemptive transgression, Scholem mischievously borrows the weapons of the adversary to launch his dismissive reply: “It will appeal to your dialectical sensibility when I tell you that my sympathies extend not only to the heterodox but also to the orthodox… You know very well that I’m anything but an atheist.” In the same letter, Scholem rejects Adorno’s rapprochement of their ideas about the question of secularization: “While you are right to point out that I have said much about the secularization of mysticism – and what is more, of religion,” Scholem writes, “it should also be noted that I see secularization not as something definitive.” For Scholem, against Adorno, the Jewish tradition’s modern decline was far from final.
One of the most explicit passages in the correspondence wrestles with what Habermas called “the destiny of the sacred after the Enlightenment.” Adorno writes: “It would seem to me that in the present day, the only possibility of salvaging sacred art and its philosophical truth-content lies in its unflinching migration into the profane.” Adorno adds: “You must also be inclined to this view.” Scholem is not.
Why does Scholem so stubbornly ward off Adorno’s attempts to align their thinking? Scholem’s resistance to submit to Adorno’s embrace might be explained most directly by his rejection of the Frankfurt School’s Marxist leanings, and by his instinct to guard against too great a proximity to someone who in his view could not participate in the renewal of Judaism as a lived reality. One senses in Scholem’s repeated withdrawal from Adorno’s admiring grip a suspicion (spiced with pride and resentment) that his Jewishly particularistic work might be appropriated for Adorno’s larger cause.
Beyond the content of their conversation, however, what makes their correspondence truly enchanting, emerges from the style in which they deal with their affinities and differences. One cannot help admire their art of conversing—their irony and perceptible pleasure in delivering the finest amalgams of German Geist and Jewish wit. A splendid example is one of Scholem’s letters announcing his arrival in the spring of 1966 in Frankfurt, where he hopes to meet Adorno under a clear blue sky:
Please arrange with the dwellers of the Marxian heaven for the sun to shine on the 16th of March. That is, if you don’t maintain any diplomatic relations with the other heavenly inhabitants. I would rather rely on the old angels, especially since I recently looked back over Marx’s pages on the Jewish Question, which, once again, almost made me vomit. The Talmud states that the keys to making it rain were not even entrusted to (Kafka’s?) angels. However, the same Talmud also states that, on the Day of Atonement, as the high priest in Jerusalem entered the holiest of holies, he implored God with particular vigor not to heed the prayers of the tourists (who had asked for good weather) – a purely materialist consideration in the interest of the conditions of agricultural production. So one has a choice between these Talmudic utterances about the weather and its masters.
The urge to check the Frankfurt weather conditions in March 1966 is irresistible, but one looks for this information in vain in Asaf Angermann’s rich annotations. Instead, one finds there one of the many gems that adorn this superbly edited book: the passage from the Babylonian Talmud to which Scholem refers (Ta’anit 2a).
The elegantly translated English edition of this correspondence now allows a wider readership to witness a dazzling dialogue carried out on the peaks of the German-Jewish landscape.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021
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