On the “Difference between Preaching an Ideal and Giving Artistic Form to the Historical Tension Inherent in It”

Abstract

This difference, concerning an ideal (which also suggests the potential of and for a political theatre), is noted by Adorno in the course of an essay that seeks to rescue the notion of Goethe’s “classicism” from its received tradition (not least, by saving questions of form and art from those of “style” and “culture”).¹ Following an analysis already proposed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), an “affirmative” reading of the relation between reason and sacrifice (or between law and power) is critically addressed here through the example of Goethe’s play Iphigenia in Tauris.² This play is traditionally seen to reconcile the very antinomies that constitute its drama — between the humane and the barbaric, enlightenment and myth, reason and nature — through the “progressive” repression of the second value by the first; a tradition that makes of the play, indeed, the “preaching of an ideal.”³ Adorno’s reading, by contrast, seeks to draw out the historical tensions to which the question of aesthetic form testifies, which itself raises a question as to the reading of Adorno.