way, what the mutilated subject encounters in the arena of aesthetic experience is something that is emphatically not das Immergleiche, not the familiar »always-the-same.« What is beyond one’s capacity by definition produces anxiety. It is potentially ungraspable and potentially lethal. One cannot see its bounds; perhaps it is infinite. This is what Adorno refers to as Erschütterung, being shaken to one’s foundations. The potentially infinite has entered into the subject’s very structure.
With the entry of the potentially infinite, the arena of aesthetic experience ceases to be merely a space that extends horizontally. It opens up vertically, to the heavens, the infinite and ungraspable, the void and the abyss. For the presence of the potentially infinite is also the possibility of our own death, the death of ourselves as we have known ourselves. In a similar vein, the psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer, speaking of a child’s »amazement« at an unbelievably new experience, cites the Jewish Book of the Dead with its admonition, »Stand close to the dying, because when the soul sees the abyss it is amazed.«11 A glimpse of the abyss – that which is without form and potentially without bounds: this is the fearful infinity into which the subject may vanish. It is as though the subject, finding himself in the arena of aesthetic experience, hears the gates closing behind him, senses the overwhelming power of his entrancing opponent, and looks up amazed into an infinite sky.
Will this mean catastrophe or deliverance? The contemporary psychoanalyst Michael Eigen has captured this vital ambiguity and the inexorable quality of its logic in an essay on the writer Flannery O’Connor. He calls it »the Sword of Grace.« Eigen is writing of the issue of religious faith in O’Connor’s fiction, but the inexorability and ambiguity apply equally to her writing and to the aesthetic encounter as Adorno conceives it. »In O’Connor’s fiction faith is a violent business,«12 Eigen writes. Her stories, he says,
»move toward some central shock or jolt, which may convey a certain mystery, but which also seems to rise inevitably from the nature of her characters and life itself. […] Often these telling moments are catastrophic and do not always result in a reorientation of the characters in question. Many of her characters break under the strain of a potential conversion experience they refuse or are unable to sustain. In extreme terms, one either changes or dies, possibly both. The logic of the Biblical call to die to be reborn can be ruthless.«13
Eigen raises the question of whether the strain of the encounter with mystery, as he calls it, can be sustained, whether we will survive it. The same question arises with the aesthetic encounter. It exposes us to the infinite and the abyss. Can we bear it?
Exposure to the infinite threatens to destroy the mind with its limited powers of coherence and control. The work of art can arouse emotions of such overpowering intensity that we feel brought to the brink of madness. The abyss and the most primal are close. Shakespeare’s King Lear is a case in point. Not only does the old King Lear go mad in the course of the play, but in the final scenes of the play, confronted with Cordelia’s death, Lear is so undone by overwhelming grief that he can only howl. If he had words, he says, he would »use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack«14 – in other words, so that the abyss he is exposed to would be laid bare.
The threat of madness also takes the form of feeling invaded by the forces the work of art stirs up. Earlier I compared the work of art to a Venus fly trap. We can also compare it to a Trojan Horse: something that presents itself as a gift unleashes a swarm of conquerors. As we all know, the approach of madness is often experienced as an infestation of bugs or worms. Adorno points out that the tendency of modern artworks to be composed of multiple small pieces that are not readily grasped as a unity is disturbing in precisely this way. He uses the word Gewürm, a multiplicity of creeping things.15 This is what is evoked in the disturbed mind of the listener, he says – masses of creeping, crawling things, maggots swarming in carrion. The old mutilated mind is prey to the fear that it itself has become the carcass.
The Brink and the Enigma, Truth and Constellation
If the aesthetic encounter brings with it violence, terror and suspicion, surely the question arises, How does this terrifying violence and suspicious seductiveness differ from the ordinary violence and deception that pervade the totally administered society, sometimes in naked form and sometimes clothed in the garb of »fun«? Put in a different way, what makes the aesthetic encounter worth the risk?
Certainly the shock and terror of the »aesthetic arrest« are a far cry from the pleasure and enjoyment promised by the culture industry. But the violence of the work’s impact is accompanied by a promesse de bonheur, a promise of a different kind of happiness. That happiness is intimately connected with truth. If, as Adorno says, the more works of art are understood, the less they are enjoyed, it is because what opens up to and overpowers the beholder is their truth.16 Truth flashes out as the abyss opens before us. Or as Charles Williams says, writing about the figure of Beatrice in Dante, beauty »arrests« us because it presents a glimmer of truth, something that is far beyond our grasp, but nevertheless awakens, as he puts it, a »noble awe« and a »noble curiosity«17. In other words, the shock that shakes the subject to his foundations is the shock of an intimation of truth that both exposes horror and points to freedom from it.
But though the glimpse promises truth, the artwork does not fulfill this promise. The truth is never fully conveyed to us. The work hints, but it does not speak clearly. If in some sense the scales of mutilation are ripped from our eyes, still we are left, so to speak, on the brink. Adorno refers to this essential characteristic of the artwork as the enigma. »Enigmaticness,« he writes, »peers out of every artwork with a different face but as if the answer that it requires – like that of the sphinx – were always the same, although only by way of the diversity, not the unity that the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise is a deception – that is the enigma.«18
The enigmatic quality of art is related to the way it brings the subject to the brink of the abyss and gives him a glimpse into it. The truth that inheres in the artwork is a truth intimately related to the subject himself. To echo Michael Eigen writing about Flannery O’Connor, the mystery it seems to convey seems at the same time to arise inevitably from our very nature and what we have become. Standing at the brink and looking down into the abyss, we are aware that the sword of grace, in Eigen’s phrase, hangs over our heads. The experience is shot through with infinitude. We realize that we will not escape. The question is, will we survive, and in what form? It is those very questions that the artwork will not answer. We are left in the arena of aesthetic experience with that uncertainty.
For Adorno, it is the brokenness of the work of art, its inherent fragmentary quality, that signals the presence of the enigma and the abyss it points to. Despite all resolutions, all happy or tragic endings, Adorno says, every artwork breaks off. It is fragmentary. Modern works point up the fragmentary quality with their discontinuities and ruptures. Such works, Adorno says, are organized paratactically. What this means is that the work is a set of fragments arranged in and around a space – the same space that becomes the arena of aesthetic experience in which subject and object are merged. The abyss is at the center of the work, and the work’s fragmentary quality points to it.
Freud notes something similar in his book on the interpretation of dreams. Every dream, he says, has a point where it is unplumbable, a tangle of dream thoughts that cannot be unraveled. This is the dream’s navel, the point where its origin meets the infinitude of the unknown which is the ground from which it emerges.19 For Adorno too, Erschütterung includes a terror that extends to the depths of the primeval fear of the dark or the unutterable grief into which Lear is plunged. But for him the abyss is not only the darkness of the archaic or the unconscious but also the infinitude of the heavens, the realm of Geist or spirit, a realm that is terrifying in its own right.
Adorno often uses the image of a constellation to convey the enigmaticness of the artwork, the way it hints but does not speak directly. In these terms, the work of art consists of a grouping of stars,
