Critique, Thus also Silence: Adorno on Celan and Beckett

Adorno never finished his commentary on the work of Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett, the two most important literary figures in his aesthetic theory. The writing Adorno did complete on their union suggests overlapping concerns with problems of form, the silence of art, and art’s critical potential. Here, following the internal movement of the literary works and of Adorno’s project, I offer close readings of key Celan and Beckett texts — especially the movement from Celan’s ‘Deathfugue’ to ‘Stretto’ and the opening of Beckett’s The Unnamable — to argue for the critical potential of a work that speaks of nothing but itself, of nothing but its universal form. It is, I argue, only via the universal as the ground of the aesthetic that the critique of the contingent, of unspeakable historical catastrophe, is possible.