grgr (20): life, art & death

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 hippopotamus king archibald (big melancholy eyes, sounding serious in a 
 playful melodious way):

 "works of art are a priori negative through the law of their objectivation: 
 they kill what they objectivate by wrenching it from the immidiacy of life.  
 their own life is nourished by death. this defines the qualitative doorstep to 
 modernity. its creations mimetically leave themselves to reification, their 
 principle of death. to escape from this is the illusionary moment in art, which 
 it, since baudelaire, trys to throw off without resignedly becoming a thing 
 among things. the heralds of modernity, baudelaire, poe, were as artists the 
 first technocrats of art. without admixing the poison, virtually the negation 
 of the living, the objection of art against civilization's repression would be 
 consolingly helpless. since the beginning of modernity art absorbed objects 
 alien to art, which can't be totally put into its formal law. this shows, up to 
 the montage, the mimesis of art to its counterpart. art is forced to do so by 
 social reality. while opposing to society, art cannot reach a point of view 
 beyond. opposition is successful only through identification with that, which 
 it is up against. that was already the content of baudelaire's satanism, far 
 beyond the concrete critique of bourgeois morals, which, topped by reality, 
 became silly. would art like to object directly to the unbroken net, it would 
 fail all the more: that's why it has to attack or eliminate the nature it is 
 speaking for, as it is exemplaryly done in beckett's endgame. art's only still 
 possible parti pris is that for death, is critical and metaphysical at the 
 same time."

 (m.o.p.a.t. from adorno's ästhetische theorie [1970, posthum], p. 201)

                     nichtidentisch: kfl