the war and painting pictures from the canvas of crashed airplanes.
For Adorno, the ethical function of the work of art is to critique an
unjust world. Kleeís creation of beauty out of the carnage of war fits
the bill of envisioning something beyond the injustices of the failed
politics of war and the failing ideologies of the nation-state. Adorno
describes committed artists pointing to ëa practice from which they
abstain: the creation of a just lifeí.^15
According to Adornoís analysis the role of aesthetics becomes
utopian and visionary since he relies less on transmitting a convenient
political message, and more on attaining an antagonistic and defamil-
iarizing relation to the dominant politics on the ground. Discussing
Berkeleyís poetry crude understandings of a ëcommitted politicsí
connected with the concerns of the nation-state can be left behind, in
favour of an exploration of her ethical relationship with alterity which
will be shown to constitute Berkeleyís aesthetics. In this way it is
possible to move from an understanding of political poetry as
committed to the politics on the ground, to the realization that political
poetry should be informed as much by an ethical relation to alterity.
An Ethical Politics
SÈan Hand notices how for Emmanuel Levinas,
[t]he tensions between identity and assimilation in a modern state whose
monotheistic politics are those of a chosen and persecuted people is to be
transcended ultimately by the original responsibility beyond any universalism,
an ethically necessary politics that will mark the end of such concepts as
assimilation and identity, together with the possibility of totalitarianism which
they to some degree indicate and preserve.^16Hand argues that the politics of the modern nation-state are based
upon assimilating alterity into totality or turning the ëotherí into the
15 Ibid.
16 ‘Introduction’, Séan Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989),
p.7.