Adorno

"For his part, as a refugee from the Nazis rather than from Irish theocracy (Beckett), Adorno knew that simply to write off a reified rationality was to play into the hands of the savage enemies of reason who murdered his friend Walter Benjamin. But reason was part of the problem as well, which only a certain dialectial deconstructive style of thought could unlock. How could one retrieve that otherness that Western reason has suppressed without falling prey to a barbarious irrationalism? It is a problem that haunts the pages of Thoman Mann - another refugee from Hitler - for whose Doctor Faustus Adorno acted as musicological adviser. In fact, Modernism in general is shot through with a desire for some solid truth while at the same time mourning its elusiveness. Modernist culture of the mid-20th century is by and large a culture of negativity - of absence, lack, void, death, otherness, non-being and non-identity - and Paris is its capital: Sartre, Blanchot, Beckett, Kojève, Lacan, Lévinas, Barthes, Derrida. With Derrida, an aversion to the determinate becomes almost pathological. He does not see that determinacies can emancipate as well as destroy. There are those who need to obtain some reasonably exact knowledge of how the world stands with them in order to diminish their unhappiness, and there are those at the Collège de France who labour under no such necessity.

This cult of the negative is no doubt as much the legacy of Mallarmé as it is of the death camps. Saussure's celebrated claim that there is nothing positive in language was made before the Holocaust. The 'labour of the negative' runs back all the way to Hegel. But there can surely be no doubt that this fear of positivity is also a reaction to the doctrinaire politics of the 20th century. Certainty after Auschwitz is barbaric, to adapt Adorno's famous comment about poetry. The only way to escape this stricture is by becoming, like Adorno or Derrida, a kind of anti-philosopher, forging a whole new style of philosophical writing as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had done before them. The only valid form of reasoning seems to be one which tries to reckon into itself the limits and contradictions against which it is perhaps doomed to silence. One must speak while preserving in one's words a core of silence, in homage to the millions whose tongues have been stilled."

Terry Eagleton, Determinacy Kills, London Review of Books 19 June 2008.