Lying with her back to him, Ulrike’s short brown hair leaves naked and exposed the vertebrae of her neck. Teddie traces the undulating ridge with his finger, she stirs and sighs, suddenly conscious of comfort, warmth, intrusion.
“I have to go,” he says.
“Mmm.”
She doesn’t turn; her acceptance, which is rejection, disappoints him. Instead of leaving the bed as he ought, he gazes at the ceiling, noting its hairline cracks and peeling paint. One day Ulrike will be a philosophy lecturer, as he is now. At least that’s the dream, though he doubts she’s up to it.
She becomes fully awake. “Want some coffee?” she asks, sitting up and reaching for her cigarettes and lighter. Teddie doesn’t care either way. He answers a different question.
“Tomorrow would have been Walter Benjamin’s seventy-fifth birthday.” Even as he says it, the future conditional evokes an inescapable antinomy. “There’s a symposium at the university.”
“I know.”
“Will you come?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I’m to be the main speaker.”
“Will Gretel be there?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think so.”
Ulrike breathes blue smoke into the static air. “Sure, I’ll come.”
Just how little truth converges with subjective idea, with intention, is evident to the most rudimentary consideration. Benjamin’s dictum — the paradox of beauty is that it appears — is less enigmatic than it sounds.
“What’ll you say?” she asks.
“Obviously I won’t offer an hommage or appreciation. That would be vulgar.”
She gets up, standing thin and naked in thought beside the bed. Her breasts are small, there is something almost emaciated about her appearance, yet youthful, defiant. She could be contemplating her own execution. She picks up some underwear, pulls a shirt over her head, begins to walk away. “What if there’s another protest?” She peeks through the curtains at whatever isn’t happening in the void outside.
“I’m sure there won’t be.”
“The movement’s gaining support.”
“Its motives are compromised.”
At a recent seminar a group of students came and stood in front of the lectern, completely blocking Adorno’s view of the audience. One of them read a series of pledges and demands ranging from solidarity with the people of Vietnam to complaints about the university cafeteria, then there was an open discussion about the meaning of political action in which Adorno took no part.
“They won’t disrupt the symposium,” he says. “Not given the sort of saintly figure Benjamin has become.”
She turns. “You sound almost jealous.”
Ulrike’s swinging rump departs to the kitchen while Teddie remains prostrate, wondering if there will be coffee or even further sex before he goes. Of course he isn’t jealous. His position in the Institute makes him custodian of the Benjamin archive, while his work on the same questions his late friend confronted, his duty to correct error, becomes easily equated in some minds with the false notion of legacy. All that is least essential in a philosopher can be summarised under the heading “biography”. Hence the snide attacks and mischief-making of people like Arendt. What matters to them is not truth-content, but the preservation of a dead man’s every sacred word, even the wrong ones. That is touching but misguided. Were Walter Benjamin alive today, thinks Teddie, he would have destroyed and rewritten a large proportion of the texts for which he is celebrated. He would have cared little for the birthday festivities planned in his honour.
He hears the water hiss and begin to boil. He knows he has never been handsome or attractive in the reified sense of movie actors; but there will always be discerning women for whom a discourse on Hegel is more seductive than a bunch of flowers. Ulrike is able to see beneath the social superstructure; he has taught her how. She comes back holding a striped mug in her hand. “I’ve never thought to ask you, Teddie. When’s your birthday?”
“September eleven.”
She sips, pauses. “That’s a long way off.”
“You don’t think we’ll be together then?”
“I mean, it’s still only July.”
No coffee, no sex. When Teddie gets home he finds his wife has already left for the theatre alone. He needs to prepare for the symposium. He should like to say something about Benjamin’s position on Heidegger; Teddie has discussed his own in his most recent book, Negative Dialectics. The first edition has already sold out, a new one is being printed. Everyone has an opinion about it, even if they don’t understand it, which is the majority position. Adorno is accused of obscurity, jargon-mongering, the very things he opposes. When the world is discussed in the clearest possible terms it becomes infinitely opaque. Are there existing things that cannot be considered concepts? A clear enough question, surely. That phoney Heidegger merely ontologises the pre-existing; Walter saw clearly enough the fascism already implicit in Heidegger’s return to the mythological.
Not enough, though, to expound on negative dialectics, even given the level of public interest, not after recent events, the student shot by riot police. Adorno made his lecture class stand for a minute’s silence in honour of the victim. One could call it a sentimental and therefore anti-philosophical gesture, like the Benjamin symposium with its tang of hero-worship, but the point was to recognise the significance of the present, not dwell on an invented past. Some of the students are speaking of a revolutionary moment, they say the Federal Republic is a fascist state, utter nonsense. They condemn a country where there are free elections and praise Mao for terrorising his own people. Their condition is despair, like Walter’s, but also, fatally, it is disillusion.
He should address the question they keep asking him. At one of his lectures a girl came and handed him a teddy bear, simply trying to embarrass him, and said to the audience, how is critical theory to become critical practice? Some applauded, others jeered, but the question dogs him. He is a thinker, a theoretician, but what the youth of today demand is action, any sort of action. Class struggle is a mythology that lies conveniently within their grasp. By asking people to think, he becomes identified with the forces of oppression.
He has been accused of suppressing or distorting Benjamin’s work because Benjamin was insufficiently Marxist, or else too much of a Marxist. His frantic and ultimately doomed efforts to give Benjamin research money and get him out of Europe are portrayed as manipulation, the arbitrary exertion of power. He has been a selective and partisan editor of their published correspondence. Let’s be honest about all this. If Benjamin had not killed himself then he would not be on the pedestal posterity has made for him. He’s like Anne Frank, a symbol that becomes a substitute for thought, a point of adhesion for pre-existing emotion. What of the forgotten? What of those denied even the status of concept?
He’s beginning to feel his age. Two tasks lie before him: his aesthetic theory, which he expects to be his most lasting work, and his book on Beethoven. Perhaps he should talk about one of those. As long as some bearded hippie doesn’t intervene.
He’s already asleep when Gretel gets back, doesn’t see her until next morning. Of course she’ll be coming to the symposium; how could she miss such an important event? She loved Walter too. But she hasn’t heard anything about the programme, nor can Teddie enlighten her. He understands it’s a university event, but the organisation of it has been ramshackle, he’s not even sure if it’s intended for academics or the general public. Somebody noticed the anniversary, that’s all. Felt it should be marked. Adorno’s publisher is possibly involved. Perhaps the entire thing is a marketing exercise.