Abstracts

Anda Pleniceanu (Bio)

Voices from the void: working to not work with Adorno and Blanchot

Adorno’s notion of art’s linguistic character (Sprachcharakter), elaborated in Aesthetic Theory, emphasizes the dual nature of artistic expression: art is a medium in which rational articulation and the non-conceptual, represented by the mimetic relations of art to the sensuous world, converge. At the same time, Adorno rejects an understanding of art as a mere communicative tool by emphasizing the significance of its inherent opacity. In his view, it is the artwork’s incomprehensibility that must be comprehended, along with art’s ability to articulate the non-conceptual, the silent, and the negative.

Using Adorno’s aesthetic framework as foundation, my project argues that the act of communication through absence in art is not a passive surrender to silence but an active engagement with the unspeakable. I posit that the dialectical nature of art encompasses both conceptual and non-conceptual aspects—rationality intertwined with materiality, speech coupled with silence. This project aims to contribute to the broader discourse on the nature of artistic expression and its capability to mediate the unspoken and unspeakable aspects of human experience. As methodology, I rely on Adorno’s constellation of thought—an assemblage of concepts whose mediating relationship leads to an enriched understanding of the concepts in themselves and as an ensemble. Thus, in addition to Adorno’s aesthetic framework, this project examines concepts from the works of Max Horkheimer, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, and Maurice Blanchot.

The language-like character of art involves another concept prevalent in Adorno’s work, namely, mimesis. In Adorno’s book with Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, mimesis appears as a mode of self-preservation, a mechanism for an organism to merge with its environment for survival. Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea of mimesis is inspired by Caillois’s interpretation of mimesis as a bizarre-privileged item that moves beyond the understanding of mimicry premised on self-preservation, which suggests a more fundamental connection with the surrounding world, including with the inorganic. Transferring this conception of mimesis to art, Adorno includes a negative dimension through the mimetic interaction of art with the material, amorphous part of itself.

Paul Celan’s poetry exemplifies this interaction between art and its exteriority and between the spoken and the unspoken. Celan’s work expresses the most profound horrors, the suffering of victims whose voices have been silenced, the experience of “the dead speaking of stones and stars” (Adorno 2013, 423). This project explores how Celan’s poetry embodies Adorno’s concepts of ‘language-like quality’ and mimesis in art, representing suffering as an external object resistant to representational sublation.

The final section of the project will focus on Maurice Blanchot’s literary response to the concepts of silence and absence. His writing, particularly in the context of the political upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s, advocates for a literature that emphasizes the subject’s fragility and exhaustion. Blanchot’s focus on the moment preceding the act of writing, a space of vulnerability and potentiality, leads to his notion of ‘worklessness’—an act of creation without a predetermined content that does not silence the absent, the unarticulated, or the silent itself.

Overall, this project aims to develop a theory of innovation for artistic expression. Insofar as contemporary society incorporates artistic innovation into its production circuits, this kind of artistic innovation, which requires worklessness, is an inherent element of our social-economic life.