Abstract

This article analyses the book on Beethoven, which Adorno worked on for more than 30 years without having time to complete it. The long-awaited French translation now makes it possible to fully appreciate the importance of this volume, which is, at the same time, a workshop and an echo chamber for Adorno’s entire work. The main thrust of the book is the connection between Beethoven and Hegel, which raises the issue of a relationship between identity and difference that ensures that otherness is not absorbed into the economy of speculative thought. In this respect, we should first bear in mind that, for Adorno, it is to the very extent that Beethovenian form aims at the constitution of an “intensive totality” that it leads to the exposure, within and through aesthetic appearance, of the arbitrary character of such primacy granted to the whole. If this is the “truth content” of this music, then we might consider that Beethoven’s “late style” (a reasoning present from the first to the last of Adorno’s texts on the composer) constitutes its full unfolding, as a critique, immanent in the musical material, of the illusion of the reconciled. While it is well known that the last quartets or sonatas are exemplary of such a gesture, we wished to show that it was both duplicated and altered in the composition of the Missa solemnis, which Adorno said he could not understand. We, therefore, put forward the following assumption: this tension between two forms of distancing, or “estrangement” (Verfremdung), expresses in an eminent way untimeliness that runs through the whole of Beethoven’s work, and at the same time crystallises the fundamental theoretical requirements of this reform of dialectics that Adorno calls negative dialectics, and, inseparably, of the concept of a non-linear, non-teleological historical temporality.