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"Beziehung ist alles. Und willst du sie näher bei Namen nennen, so ist ihr Name 'Zweideutigkeit.'"
Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus1
I
Adorno's study of the essay form, published in 1958 as the opening piece of the volume Noten zur Literatur, has long been considered one of the classic discussions of the genre.2 Yet to the earlier investigations of the essay form on which his text both builds and plays, Adorno appears to add little that could be considered truly new. His characterization of the essayistic endeavor borrows heavily and self-consciously from an established tradition of genre exploration that reaches back-despite the prevalence of quotations from more immediate predecessors like Georg Lukács and Max Bense-to Montaigne's sixteenth-century reflections on method, and thus to the origins of the form itself. Nearly all the familiar topoi are here: the apparent spontaneity of presentation, the emphasis on rhetorical sophistication, the exaltation of the incomplete, the rejection of a purely deductive logic, the eschewal of heavy-handed profundity, the antipathy toward systematic dogmatism, the treatment of non-scientific, often unconventional subject matter, the central importance of play, the insistence on human fallibility, the image of a meandering, exploratory journey. Bordering as Adorno's text therefore does on the peculiar combination of superficial sophistication and philosophical banality he explicitly attributes only to the "schlechten Essay" (13), his apparent refusal to say anything new requires an explanation.3 Where, here, is "das Neue als Neues, nicht ins Alte der bestehenden Formen Zurückübersetzbares" (30), celebrated by his text as the only true object of the essay? Where is the insight he claims can emerge from an essayistic reorganization of traditional platitudes?4 It is tempting to avoid this quandary entirely by locating the relevance of Adorno's text beyond the realm of the essay as literary form-by assuming that Adorno is really speaking about "something else," like the theory of negative dialectics. This approach, however, is a dangerous one. In the attempt to "decode" a description that refers almost exclusively to an entity labeled "the essay as form," the reader risks losing sight of the actual text. Deprived of any necessary relation to the title that binds its elements together, "Der Essay als Form" would disappear completely beneath a profusion of generalizable, translatable claims about Adornian philosophy. The apparent...