ABSTRACT
The problem of violence and its social origins is old and vexed. If it is not to be attributed to an imputed human nature already conceding inevitability, then violence must be grasped as the product of social forms and processes. However, the public debates following the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under the sign of a globalized “war on terror” have made clear that the longstanding disputes over the roots and springs of violence remain unresolved. Critical reflection on the social character of violence quickly touches the foundations and legitimacy of existing forms of society and their conflict-generating stratifications and concentrations of power. In its traumatic character, violence has affinities with the traditional aesthetic category
of the sublime, which names the mixed feelings of terror and pleasure triggered by encounters with excessive power or magnitude. That in the twentieth century, a period of unprecedented global violence, sublime strategies of “negative” or indirect representation reached new peaks of development in art should be no surprise. The Frankfurt critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno was among the first to explore this conjunction. His theory of modernism contains a coded rewriting of the sublime that positions it as the only adequate artistic response to historical catastrophe. However, as a cliché of contemporary cultural writing, the formula “after Auschwitz, no poetry” has been distorted and domesticated by its severance from Adorno’s critique of enlightenment culture and capitalist modernity-a severance that allows it to be unjustly reduced to a moralizing judgment of taste. For Adorno the catastrophe is social, rather than some exceptional genocidal eruption within a continuing and reassuring historical progress.
