ABSTRACT
Born in 1932, Alexander Kluge was best known in the twentieth century for probing contributions to New German Cinema, and for broadcasting innovations in German television. The German title of Kluge's prose miniature 'Samstag in Utopia' involves translational features lost in the English, 'Saturday in Utopia'. There are two reasons for this that both bespeak gaps in time. G. appears in Supplement 4 anachronistically as 'a mistress from 1941', whom her distressed husband was unable to 'translate into the year 1967'. Ethical stakes are high when the empirical limits of existing reality cease to oscillate, for that would leave us only 'things in being' or that which merely exists, as Adorno put it when condemning European metaphysics for complicity in catastrophe. The grammatical subject of the supplement's final declaration of equivalence in an ostensibly realist key is not in fact 'utopia' but a German word related to and resembling it spelled 'Utopie'.
