Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 361interpretation and derived from ideas he had previously stated in his
important essay ‘The Essay as Form’.^184 His view was that the adventi-
tious causes, particular intentions and individual goals of the authorial
personality could only be reconstructed if they had been objectified in
the text. With Hölderlin especially, the critic’s task was to focus entirely
on the ‘objective linguistic shape’. Rather than the poetic work comply-
ing with the author’s intentions, the author obeyed the ‘compulsion of
the work itself. The more completely the artist’s intention is taken up
into what he makes and disappears in it without a trace, the more
successful the work is.’^185 This view, which is in harmony with Adorno’s
theory of musical reproduction,^186 is repeated with particular emphasis
in this lecture.^187 ‘What unfolds and becomes visible in the works, the
source of their authority, is nothing other than the truth manifested
objectively in them, the truth that consumes the subjective intention
and leaves it behind as irrelevant.’^188 How can the objective truth con-
tent of Hölderlin’s poetry be made accessible? Adorno appealed to
immanent analysis, which he distinguished from both the genetic and
the biographical methods. The immanent method strives to grasp the
poetic structure that is made up of a multiplicity of individual moments.
It then proceeds to penetrate ‘the configuration of moments that taken
together signify more than the structure intends.’^189
When Adorno said of music, and indeed art in general, that it needs
the assistance of philosophy to interpret it, this was intended to apply
also to Hölderlin’s poetry, which, however, he was concerned to snatch
from the jaws of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. His own philo-
sophical access to the riddle of Hölderlin’s poems was gained in the
relations between intellectual content and lyrical form. ‘What philo-
sophy can hope for in poetry is constituted only in this relationship;
only here can it be grasped without violence.’^190 The propositional con-
tent of the poems is made available through a particular expressive
method, through ‘the parataxes... artificial disturbances that evade the
logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax.’^191 Paratactic language is the
attempt to suspend the logic of syntax. This enabled the poems to draw
their dignity from the artistic aspect of language formation. What
Hölderlin wanted, according to Adorno, was ‘to allow language itself to
speak’.^192 This primacy of expression made it possible to elevate lan-
guage above the human subject through the free action of the subject.
‘In this process the illusion that the language would be consonant with
the subject or that the truth manifested in language would be identical
with a subjectivity manifesting itself disintegrates.’^193 From a historico-
philosophical perspective, Adorno interpreted the content of his poems
as a lament about the domination of nature. Even though Hölderlin was
aware that the appropriation of nature was a condition of humanity, he
was not blind to the oppression that resulted from the principle of self-
assertion. ‘The immanent dialectic of the late Hölderlin... is a critique
of the subject as much as a critique of the rigidified world.... For the