Adornean Catchwords in David Grossman’s See Under: Love
Adornean Catchwords in David Grossman’s See Under: Love

Summary/Abstract: Referring to the Shoah, Paul Ricoeur once spoke of the “ruinous dichotomy between a history that would dissolve the event in explanation and a purely emotional retort that would dispense us from thinking the unthinkable.” Whereas traditional historiography’s explanatory power runs the risk of occluding precisely the ways in which memory of the past is constructed and represented, thereby unwittingly contributing to the forgetting of the past, art in both Grossman and Adorno guards against this danger by reflecting incessantly upon the aporetic processes of memory. Art’s hermeneutic of memory, its capacity for remembrance, is relevant to Grossman and Adorno because it attempts to break the silence imposed on the Shoah both by certain (past) national-political discourses and a certain “obsessive focus on the unspeakable and unrepresentable”; moreover, it also articulates the utopia of non-identical individuality.

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