Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature by Corey McCall Nathan Ross & Nathan Ross

Author:Corey McCall,Nathan Ross & Nathan Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Adorno on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

In a lecture dated 29 January 1965 (the eighteenth and final lecture Adorno gave on the topic of Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems), Adorno argues that what he is “unwilling” to attach “metaphysical experience” to “religious experience” because “this kind of experience, as handed down by very great figures of Catholicism, such as St John of the Cross, hardly seems to be accessible any longer, given the assumptions regarding the philosophy of history under which we live today.”2 Instead, he turns to Marcel Proust (a fiction writer and poet, not a philosopher3), who explored the “possibility of experience” that “should be taken seriously from a philosophical point of view.”4 Through Proust, one can visit “places” that are often “just foolish villages. If there is still a single stable door open in them (the names we find in his books) and a smell of a real live cow and dung and such things, to which this experience is no doubt attached, one must be thankful today.”5 Giving thanks, he argues, is the “only relationship that consciousness can have to happiness.”6 But, adds Adorno, one will “not” find “it” (metaphysical experience) there. The metaphysical experience is one of withdrawal:

at such moments one has a curious feeling that something is receding—as is also familiar from an old symbol of happiness, the rainbow—rather than that one has really been done out of it … I would say, therefore, that happiness—and there is an extremely deep constellation between metaphysical experience and happiness—is something within objects and, at the same time, remote from them.7

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