374 RüdigerKunow
Adorno and others of his generation who lived and wrote in the
shadowoftheShoahtendedtobehighlypessimisticaboutthecapacities
of language. He even seems to have felt that it was something like an
obstacle, an impediment which could only be incompletely removed,as
his much-quoted dictum suggests: "All expression is the trace left by
suffering" ("Heine" 82). The use of "suffering," not "pain," for the
German "Leiden" is the choice of Adorno's translator. For the sake of
terminologicalconsistency,andbecauseIamhereinterestedinboththe
individualandthecollectivedimensionofanguish,Iwillcontinuetouse
"pain" but retain the main point of Adorno's argument, namely the
intimatelinkagebetweenexpressionandphysicaldistress.
Ifpainleaves(only)tracesintheavailablelinguisticregisters,giving
full expression to the pain experience would have to be relegated to the
realmofutopia.Regardlessofwhetherwewouldconcurwiththisrather
summaryandpessimisticpronouncement,^70 itnonethelessleavesuswith
the quandary of what happens when the connection between somatics
and semantics, pain and representation is becoming fragile or even is
broken.
The ascendency of "High Theory," especially of French post-
structuralism and deconstruction, has done much to resolve this
quandary, conceptually, as it were. This was achieved mainly by
changing the terms of the debate. If the human body, the realm of the
somatic, is regarded not as given but made, culturally constructed, then
finding a representation, a semantics, for somatic problems or
pathologies is no longer a question ofwhetherbut only ofhow, of
finding an appropriate construction for such contingencies. In other
words,givingrepresentationtoexperiencesofextremeanguishbecomes
a—I am tempted to add the term "mere" here—technicality, a question
of developing working or "passable" discursive constructions. In other
Criticism.Ed.RüdigerKunowandStephanMussil.ZAAMonographSeries,15.
Würzburg:KönigshausenundNeumann,2013.79-93.
(^70) Fredric Jameson registers an "occasional irritation with Adorno's
temperamentalnegativism..."Giventhelatter'smoregeneralaesthetictastefor
irreconcilablesuffering,"...joydoesnothavetherighttoexistinhisschemeof
things. It is this structural absence of a place for cessation,... of suffering that
occasionally lends his incessant reminders of universal misery their fatuous
overtones..."(Ancients106-07).