Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent, however, than in the widespread notion that the style of these works is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract——or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistie writing taught in the schools. But what ff those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind？ What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quiek reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence？ In the language of Adorno——perhaps the finest dialectical intelligence, the finest stylist, of them all——density is itself a eonduet of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking, The resolute abstractness of this style stands as an imperative to pass beyond the individual empirical phenomenon to its meaning: abstract terminology clings to its object as a sign of the latters ineompleteness in itself, of its need to be replaced in the context of the totality. I cannot imagine anyone with the slightest feeling for the dialectical nature of reality remsining insensible to the purely formal pleasure of such sentences, in which the shifting of the worlds gears and the unexpected contact between apparently unrelated and distant categories and objects find sudden and dramatic formulation.
展开
