408 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditionalresolved in favour of one side or the other, but ‘is respected as an
antinomy’.^223 Confronted with the experimental lyric poetry of H. G.
Helms, Adorno pointed out that the recent avant-garde was striving to
surpass both Proust and Kafka, and even Joyce, although the affinity
between Helms’s poem and Finnegans Wake was as self-evident as the
links with Karlheinz Stockhausen. The most advanced literary works
take ‘the same steps in literature that contemporary music has taken in
music... The construction no longer conceives itself as an achievement
of spontaneous subjectivity... The whole is composed in structures,
put together in each case from a series of dimensions, or in the termino-
logy of serial music, parameters, that appear autonomously, or combined,
or ordered hierarchically.’^224
Thus Adorno took the works of the artistic avant-garde very seriously
and made them the object of his philosophical reflections – Stockhausen
and Cage in music, the novels and plays of Beckett and the works of
Helms in literature. In the same way, he responded to Alexander Kluge,
a film-maker and writer who had previously studied law as well as history
and church music. Kluge was also a qualified lawyer who succeeded
Hellmut Becker in advising the Institute of Social Research on legal
matters and who sat on the board of trustees. Adorno had been on
friendly terms with him since the 1950s. With a side glance at the age of
Kluge’s mother, he had even jokingly referred to Kluge, who had been
born in 1932, as the nonconformist child he had always wanted. He even
recommended him to the legendary Fritz Lang, with whom Kluge then
worked for some time as an assistant. Kluge was one of the moving spirits
behind the Oberhausen Manifesto and was in Adorno’s eyes the chief
representative of ambitious developments in the medium of film. Adorno
saw the films that Kluge made during this period: Yesterday Girl (1966)
and Artistes at the Top of the Big Top: Disorientated (1967). However, this
did not mean that Adorno was ready to abandon his contempt for film
as a genre, even though under Kluge’s influence he did show himself
willing to allow the validity of exceptional films like Antonioni’s La Notte.
Nevertheless, we can find this statement in Negative Dialectics: ‘Demytho-
logization, the intention of thought to bring enlightenment, destroys the
image character of consciousness.’^225 Kluge believed that what Adorno
really liked about his films was his use of music, the sound track. Adorno
was also familiar with Kluge’s literary works, Lebensläufe (Curricula
Vitae), first published in 1962, and his Stalingrad novel, Schlachtbeschrei-
bung (Description of a Battle), of 1964. In addition the two shared an
interest in music, a passion for the opera, the opera as ‘a power house of
the feelings’. The kind of question they discussed in their conversations
in Adorno’s flat or during the evening visits to a restaurant or wine bar
near the Frankfurt Opera was whether the making of a film resembled
the composition of a piece of music, or how the visual dimensions of the
musical and linguistic side of films could be exploited to achieve a three-
fold harmony of image, words and music. When Adorno wished for