15. Judging by Refraining from Judgment: The Artwork and Its Einordnung

Agamben here implicitly, and in a highly mediated way, takes up aspects of his earlier interpretation of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s differences in the chapter “The Prince and the Frog: The Question of Method in Adorno and Benjamin” of his study, originally published in Italian in 1978, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (Agamben 1993).

For readings that emphasize precisely the political dimension that Agamben finds occluded in Adorno’s Minima Moralia, see Gerhard Richter, “Nazism and Negative Dialectics: Adorno’s Hitler in Minima Moralia” (Richter 2007) and Gerhard Richter, “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno” (Richter 2006).

Adorno here implicitly returns to a train of thought from his earlier essay on Thomas Mann, first published in “Die Neue Rundschau” in 1962. There, he writes: “However rigorously Thomas Mann’s oeuvre separates itself in its linguistic form its origins in the individual, pedagogues … revel in it because it encourages them to take out of it as its substance [als Gehalt herauszuholen] what the author put into it … Instead, however, I believe that the substance [Gehalt] of a work of art begins precisely where the author’s intention stops; the intention is extinguished in the substance” (Adorno 1992: 12f.). But this thought from Adorno’s Mann essay and the passage from Aesthetic Theory are strongly indebted to Benjamin’s anti-intentionalist conception of truth as outlined in the epistemo-critical prologue to his book on the German Trauerspiel. Adorno was very familiar with Benjamin’s text, which was first published in 1928 and became the subject of a seminar that Adorno taught at the University of Frankfurt in the early 1930s—most likely the first university seminar on Benjamin ever. In the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin argues: “Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather of total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention … The structure of truth, then, demands a mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simplest existence of things, but which is superior in its permanence” (Benjamin 1998: 36).

Der Gehalt, which as a masculine noun signifies import, substance, or significance, is not be confused with the neuter version of the same noun, das Gehalt, which means “salary.”

This is the case even though the translator of Aesthetic Theory is aware that there is a difference between Inhalt and Gehalt and that this difference ought to have implications for the translation as a whole. But one might say that the practical conclusions the translator draws from this state of affairs are hard to accept (Adorno 1997a: 368, translator’s note).