Adorno and the Guilt of Thinking
In: Territories of EvilSearch for other papers by Anders Johansson in
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There has been an increasing scholarly interest in the problem of evil during the last decades. The essay discerns two opposed approaches to evil in this trend, each of them with its fallacy: evil is either treated as a practical issue, and thus trivialized, or as an ontological issue, and thus mystified. This dilemma is one explanation for the widespread notion that literature is better suited than philosophy for understanding and relating experiences of evil. A problem with this supposedly post-metaphysical approach is that it implies a metaphysical conception of an inherent goodness in literature. To find a more critical approach, the paper turns to Theodor W. Adorno, and his comments on poetry after Auschwitz. From his perspective evil is just as present in the interior of every artwork as in society in general - literature is no less evil than anything else. Due to its material character, however, every artwork does harbor a possibility of understanding and reconciliation that philosophical thinking lacks. Finally, two examples are used to illustrate Adorno’s points: Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, and the Swedish novel Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen by Nikanor Teratologen. Both could be seen as two extremely cruel narrations of evil, totally lacking all reconciliation. However, a reconciliation can be found in the interior of the works. In that way, the two works demonstrate a sensibility of the immanent violence of their own form.