576 Notes to pp. 359–362
175 Benjamin had met Kraft (1896–1991) while studying in Berlin. In the
early 1920s they fell out and only resumed their friendship during their
exile in Paris.
176 Adorno to Werner Kraft, 21 May 1952, quoted by Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Gegen
den Trug der Frage nach Sinn’, p. 34. (‘Indian Summer’ = Der Nachsommer
by the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, a lengthy elegiac novel of 1857
[trans.].)
177 Tiedemann has included a transcription of these notes in his essay,
together with a facsimile of Adorno’s manuscript. Ibid., p. 60ff. Adorno
also commented on Beckett’s novel in the Aesthetic Theory: ‘The “Il faut
continuer”, the conclusion of Beckett’s The Unnameable, condenses this
antinomy into its essence: that externally art appears impossible while
immanently it must be pursued’ (Aesthetic Theory, p. 320).
178 Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn’, pp. 65
and 67.
179 Adorno et al., ‘Optimistisch zu denken ist kriminell’, Frankfurter Adorno
Blätter, III, 1994, p. 91.
180 Ibid., p. 122.
181 Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, Notes to Literature, vol. 1,
p. 262.
182 Adorno to Marcuse, 12 December 1963, Herbert Marcuse Archive, Stadt-
und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main.
183 Hölderlin Jahrbuch, vol. 13; cf. Gerhard van den Bergh, Adornos
philosophisches Deuten von Dichtung, p. 143ff.; Pierre Bertaux, Friedrich
Hölderlin, p. 119ff.
184 There was every reason for this essay to have been placed right at the
beginning of the Notes to Literature, vol. 1, p. 3ff.
185 Adorno, ‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry’, Notes to Literature,
vol. 2, p. 110.
186 See, for example, the notes he made for his Darmstadt lecture of 1954 on
the interpretation of music: ‘Music – mediated by the text – has a right
of its own as against the author.... How little of a work, conceived as
the unity of material and the objective context of meaning, belongs to the
author. For the most part, no more than the spontaneous act of synthesis.
The author is indeed decisive – but he can only be discovered through
the text, not from something beyond it’ (Adorno, Zu einer Theorie der
musikalischen Reproduktion, NaS, vol. 2, p. 122).
187 Adorno always resisted the idea that the task of the critic is to discover
what the author meant to say with one statement or another. He made it
a rule to insist on ‘the consistency of the interpretation with the text’.
Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Frankfurt am Main (Ts 52026).
188 Adorno, ‘Parataxis’, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 110.
189 Ibid., p. 112f.
190 Ibid., p. 128.
191 Ibid., p. 131.
192 Ibid., p. 477.
193 Ibid.
194 Ibid., p. 143.
195 Adorno to Habermas, 22 July 1963, Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Frank-
furt am Main (Br 536/14).