1162021, issue 2
For Felicitas
Jelle P. Baan
Paragraph 135 of the Minima Moralia, in which Adorno draws our attention to the
formal advantages of the “technical aid” of dictating for the dialectical procedure, could
be read as an ode to Gretel.1 She was the one who helped during those rst phases of
writing by translating, as it were, his spoken words into written form. The advantage
of this technique is that you can fall in the middle of the dialectic without having to
worry that the burden of the beginning, in which you make naïve and ungrounded
assumptions, will start to weigh as bad conscience later on. Because whoever starts
dialecticizing will almost immediately realize that the dialectical movement had always
already begun. How to catch up with the dialectic? Instead of being caught up in it, you
want to be engaged in the dialectic, to participate in it.
The technique of dictating functions like a dialectical trampoline that allows
the latecomer to arrive just in time by catapulting him directly towards that middle. Its
paradoxical logic lets Adorno outwit the dialectic. For “dictation makes it possible for
the writer, in the earliest phases of production, to maneuver himself into the position
of critic”, he explains. “What he sets down is tentative, provisional, mere material for
revision, yet appears to him, once transcribed, as something estranged and in some
measure objective. He need have no fear of committing something inadequate to paper,
for he is not the one who has to write it […] In face of the diculty, now grown to
desperate proportions, of every theoretical utterance, such tricks become a blessing”
(§ 135). By exteriorizing himself through Gretel, he does not have to feel the pain of
those rst torsions of dialecticizing. Before he has to put his thoughts on paper, he is
rst already his own second reader. She allows him to mediate immediately, and thus to
begin in the middle. The middle of the beginning is posited or gesetzt by that rst draft
of the transcript which is both his own and not his own, as if he was his own soueur.
But this contradiction is immediately sublated and in that sense gets to the bottom of
the text, to formulate it in Hegelian terms, because the transcripts reveals itself to be a
palimpsest. This rst version does not register the rst moment of the dialectic, but the
virtual trajectory before that. Thanks to their shared ruse Adorno is not the rst of the
dialectic, which is impossible, but the one before the rst. Thinking after Hegel is for
Adorno the heroic attempt to think before him. In that sense the dialectical trick of
dictating, too, is a ruse of reason, but then one that wrestles itself from the magic circle
of identity-thought.2 And that is precisely why “… thanks are due to the person taking
down the dictation, if at the right moment [s]he pulls up the writer by contradiction,
irony, nervosity, impatience and disrespect” (§ 135).
As Müller-Doohm demonstrates in his biography, Adorno used to call this
intensive dialectic between him and Gretel in those rst phases of the writing process
lämmergeieren. This is conrmed by the original German title of this fragment: Lämmergeier.
“Why this word?”, Müller-Doohm asks himself. As “a keen visitor to Frankfurt Zoo”,
he suggests, “he presumably saw lammergeiers or bearded vultures there (Gypaëtus bar-
batus). They feed mainly on carrion, but also on small mammals and birds. They are
particularly partial to bones. Very large bones are dropped from a height onto rocks to
1172021, issue 2
break them; the marrow can then be devoured. This method of arriving at the kernel
of a problem which at rst appears too dicult or inaccessible, of ‘cracking’ it in order
to extract its essence, may well have been the reason for choosing this word” (2005,
57). Combining this vital anecdote with Adorno’s own interpretation of the activity of
lämmergeieren reveals why any thinker who wants to taste the marrow of the dialectic
can never work entirely alone. Even the Sprechstimme of the couple Teddy-Gretel is
only the dominant voice in the contrapuntal composition of a philosophy in which the
faculties enter into a new dissonant accord.
Adorno does not mention Gretel by name once in a fragment that seems
entirely devoted to her (“thanks are due to the person…”). What interests him in this
fragment is not so much his wife Gretel, but only her formal function as a transcriber
in “cracking” the bones of the dialectic. More than a personal ode to Gretel then, this is
a conceptual reconstruction of the remarkable role of what we could call the Felicitas-
eect within the formal dynamics that keeps the chess-machine of negative dialectics
running. The head of this thought-machine is not Adorno himself but Horkheimer. He
is the director who administers the dialectic and keeps a close watch on its practical
applicability. He plays the role of the Understanding. Adorno himself is the incarnation
of Reason. He’s the man of Ideas, and in that sense the very heart of the dialectic. This
necessary division of labor is the secret behind what Adorno once described as their
gemeinsame Existenz. And yet that shared existence is supported by even more intimate
relations. Because the intuition of this dialectic falls apart in two uneven halves, which
could never t together, even though they do belong together: Felicitas and Detlef 3
(cf. Adorno and Benjamin 2014) which is to say Gretel Karplus and Walter Benjamin.
They represent feeling and imagination, even if it would be impossible to separate the
two, since they are always entangled. Only together they constitute the exact fantasy
that according to Adorno is the organon of the ars inveniendi that philosophy should
be (cf. Adorno 1977, 131). Gretel is the representative of the couple Detlef-Felicitas,
while inversely Felizitas, as Benjamin wrote, is what binds Benjamin to Adorno and in
a sense compensates for the latter’s absence. Without their aid, Adorno would indeed
remain a “Sorgenkind”, a problem child, as Gretel frequently wrote in her letters to
Benjamin (Müller-Doohm 2005, op. cit. 56). Whenever she wrote “be careful, T.W.A.”
in the margins of a transcribed manuscript this was from keeping their problem child
of innite reason to lose itself in the wild speculations that characterize the Ideenucht
of the dialectic.
The process that Adorno called lämmergeieren is the schematism of the dialectic. It
is the soul of the dialectic. During this intensive process reason and intuition enter into
direct contact and start to resonate; Adorno improvises and dictates, while Gretel makes
notes, but also directly comments and sometimes even corrects him.4 The notes taken
are so much more than a mere representation of what was said. What the transcript
should capture are the traces of the dark precursor of the dialectic, 5 the “non-identical”
that both animate it and keeps it moving, yet never nds its proper place within it. This
primary torsion of the dialectic, its original twist so to say, forms an aberrant movement
(cf. Lapoujade 2017), a “wavering, deviating line” (Adorno § 60) by which the whole
vertiginous trajectory of his “unleashed” dialectic is intagliated. Only together were
1182021, issue 2
Teddy and Felicitas able to crack the biggest bone of the dialectic, Hegel’s skull, in order
to devour the marrow inside, the cerebrospinal uid that is the lifeblood of this thought.
What they crack by way of negative dialectics as a logic of disintegration is the skeleton of
identity; the marrow which is released however, is the element of dierence that nour-
ishes their inventive schemas for tracing the aberrant movements of the non-identical
that secretly animate this dialectic. Thus, the trick of dictating is the ruse of a metasche-
matism6 in which the dialectic (Reason) and the aesthetic (Intuition) enter into an
immediate union, temporarily short-circuiting the analytic (Understanding).7 Only
together do they think those thoughts that do not comprehend themselves.8 And those
thoughts alone are true, claims Adorno.
That’s why thanks are due to Gretel-Felicitas. She operates as the organ of the
non-identical that picks up on the traces of the dierential element that precedes the
dialectic. The Felicitas-eect is the direct mediation by which reason and the “exact
imagination” (cf. Weber-Nicholsen 1997) produce schemas together that pick up on
the perplexities of the non-identical. Only by exteriorizing himself through her and
writing with her, could Adorno make the Ideas tangible. The irresistible charm of
Felicitas is that she operates as an intercesseur (Deleuze 1990), a mediator that helps
Reason orientate in thought, even in those distinct-obscure zones where the virtual
spasms of the dialectic are almost imperceptible. It’s in a very literal sense then that we
should think of her as Adorno’s ghostwriter that pregured his thought, and allowed
him to materialize the Ideas. Dialectics in its purest form.
Notes
Thanks are due to Gijs van Oenen for
functioning as the head of my dialectic.
This idea of a Zauberkreis, a “magic circle”
of identity-thought refers to a formulation used
frequently by Adorno himself, cf. Adorno 2007, 145;
177; 406.
Cf. Lonitz & Gödde, 2014, 6: “In her
correspondence with Benjamin, Gretel Karplus
adopted this name which belonged to a figure
from Wilhelm Speyer’s play Ein Mantel, ein Hut,
ein Handschuh [A Coat, a Hat, a Glove], in which
Benjamin had been a collaborator”.
This is alluded to in the fragment by Adorno
himself: “… thanks are due to the person taking
down the dictation, if at the right moment [italics
added] he pulls up the writer by contradiction, irony,
nervosity, impatience and disrespect”.
For the dark precursor, cf. Deleuze 2004,
145, 146.
On metaschematism, cf. Deleuze 2004, 316.
He discusses the term in relation to Leibniz who
borrowed the term from Francis Bacon’s Novum
Organon.
I take this formulation directly from David
Lapoujade who explains Gilles Deleuze’s logic in
these exact terms: “what characterizes transcendental
empiricism is the immediate relation between
aesthetic and dialectic, between the sensible and the
Idea […] There is in Deleuze only one aesthetic of
intensities and one dialectic of ideas, and no more”
(Lapoujade, 2017, 113). A similar, yet not the same,
immediate relation between a dialectic of Ideas and
an aesthetic of intensities is alluded to here.
“True are those thoughts alone that do not
comprehend themselves” (§ 122).
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
1192021, issue 2
Jelle P. Baan (1986) studied sociology and philosophy
in Rotterdam and Paris and wroteAdorno,noch
einmal.Een partituur voor esthetische theorie(2015,
Klement). He’s a Barthesian epigone who works
onamathesis singularis. His current research is
focused on metaschematism, panoramic intelligence,
late style, firstness, and what a soul is capable of.
Adorno, Gretel and Walter Benjamin. 2008.
Correspondence 1930-1940. Edited by Henri
Lönitz and Christoph Gödde. Translated by
Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity.
Adorno, Theodor. W. 1977. “The Actuality of
Philosophy.”Telos 31: 120-133.
Adorno, Theodor. W. 2005. Minima Moralia. London/
New York: Verso.
Adorno, Theodor. W. 2007. Negative dialectics.
London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Pourparlers. 1972 – 1990. Paris:
Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition.
London: Continuum.
Lapoujade, David. 2017. Aberrant Movements. The
Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e).
Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Weber-Nicholsen, Shierry. 1997. Exact Imagination,
Late Work. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
References Biography
