SOURCE: "The Caesura of Religion," in Opera Through Other Eyes, edited by David J. Levin, Stanford University Press, 1994, pp. 45-77.

No doubt, it is not impossible to say that Wagner fundamentally saturated opera. A proof of this, which is nonetheless indirect, is that everything which followed without exempting itself from the exorbitant ambition he had imposed upon the form carries the stigmata of the end. This may be in the nostalgic and relatively comfortable mode to which the late Strauss resigned himself, a mode that in short ended his career with an adieu, more disenchanted than really melancholic, to the two genres in which, as he well recognized, a limit had been reached (this is why the so-called Four Last Songs, if only because they return to the "law of genre," that is, to a preMahlerian state of the Lied, have a meaning analogous to the autoreflection "in the manner of which orders Capriccio). But it may also be in the mode of redundancy, and thus of oversaturation, for which the early Strauss was renowned (or the Schönberg of the Gurrelieder) and in which the Puccini of Turandot pathetically exhausted himself. But then again, it may be in the more equivocal and more subtle (more "French") mode of déstructuration à la Debussy. Or finally, it may be in the style of properly modern radicality, the style of violent rupture and incompleteness, of "failure": Berg's Lulu, Schönberg's Moses and Aaron. And here, it is incontestable, things are much more grave. One might say, not only because it raises the ante where the means of expression are concerned (a move that Nietzsche had already denounced as an art subordinated to the search for effects), but rather because of its systematic character, in the strict sense of the term, that Wagner's work left to its posterity a task every bit as impossible as the one left by German Idealism (Hegel) to its great followers in philosophy: to continue that which is finished. Thus, just as one may speak of the "Hegelian closure" of philosophy, one might speak of the Wagnerian closure of opera and even of art itself, or as they said at the time, of great art, for such was the "ambition" of art. As a result of their anti-Hegelianism, what Wagner's writings and The Birth of Tragedy most clearly show is that in wishing to overcome [überwinden] opera and all its "culture," Wagner devotes himself with the Gesamtkunstwerk to a totalizing sublation, to an Aufhebung of all the arts, and to a restoration of "great art" which is all the more powerful for being all the more modern (with other technical means, in effect): a restoration of Greek tragedy, of course. At the same time, if the other arts were able to take another direction, and allowed themselves to be guided from the outset by another concept of "great" and another intuition of "art," opera, itself a recent art though it would wish itself ancient, suffered severely from such a declaration of completion. In fact, it was unable to recover from it, or only did so poorly.

Here saturate means simply: too much music or, if one prefers, despite the paradox, too much "Italianism" and too much credit accorded the prima la musica. In short it is the belief in music's "sublational" capacity (or, as he would say, its "synthesizing" capacity) that destroys for Wagner any chance of acceding to "totality" and binds him to musical saturation, condemning him to choose sides in what is after all nothing but the classical dilemma of opera. Saturation is a false totalization, at least insofar as it testifies to the false character of any will to totalization, be it conceptual or not. On this point at least, though for entirely different reasons, Heidegger and Adorno agree with one another, and both of them attribute the responsibility for this unrestrained, "infinite" melocentrism to Schopenhauer, to the metaphysics of "feeling" and the "unconscious" (to the vague mysticism, Adorno says, of "thalassal regression"). Wagner definitively considered nothing but the problem of opera and did so to the nearly exclusive benefit of music and not to that of theater, where, in relation to the Italian apparatus, his innovations are rather slim. Or to put it otherwise: as a Dichterkomponist (a monstrous term, as Adorno remarks), Wagner confused language with "words" and music with the essence of language, its origin and its assumption. In the demonstration which he conducts in the "Music Drama" chapter of In Search of Wagner, Adorno cites some passages that are in this sense damning:

Science has laid bare to us the organism of language, but what she showed us was a dead organism, which only the poet's utmost can bring to life again, namely, by suturing the wounds with which the anatomic scalpel has gashed the body of language and by breathing into it the breath that may animate it with living motion. This breath, however, is—music.…

The necessary bestowal from within oneself, the seed that can only in the most ardent transports of love condense itself from its noblest forces—which grows only in order to be released, i.e. to be released for the purposes of fertilization, indeed which is in and of itself [an sich] this more or less materialized drive—this procreative seed is the poetic intention, which brings to the gloriously loving woman, Music, the stuff for bearing.

Despite their erotico-dialectical pathos (the same pathos, though less rigorous, or, as Adorno would say, more "voluptuous" than that which governs the opening paragraphs of The Birth of Tragedy), texts of this genre have at least one merit: they reveal the reason why all operas that have seriously tried to resist Wagnerian saturation, leaving aside those that have deliberately renounced totalization (this is above all true of Berg), have taken the form of a sort of "performative" meditation on the essence of language (of speech) in its relation to music, and thus on the very nature of the opera form. In Strauss, who is the most belated and no doubt the most "informed," the protocol, under its slightly belabored eighteenth-century elegance, is relatively coarse, even if it gives ample evidence of a certain intelligence about what is at stake. But finally it is a bit disarming to take as one's subject the Querelle des Bouffons or that of the Piccinists and the Gluckists, for with an opera in opera or about opera (Ariadne, Capriccio) one remains in the simple register of the mise en abïme and citation. In the end, one does not choose at all; with an emphatic wink one leaves the generic conflict of opera in suspense. By contrast, in Berg (Wozzeck, the "poor creature," is the interdiction of eloquence and music, and consequently is interdiction itself) and above all in Schönberg, the problem is touched upon with an entirely different profundity, and with an entirely different acuity.

Above all in Schönberg: it is well known that this problem is the very subject of Moses and Aaron and, what is more essential, that it is constitutive of the opera's treatment. The opposition of speech and singing (or, more exactly, of Sprechgesang and Gesang) which, no matter what Adorno says, very rigorously transposes the biblical opposition of Moses' stammering and Aaron's eloquence into the register of the work—and here the very question of the prohibition of (re)presentation, which thus is also the subject of the opera, is condensed—leads the opera to put its own principle into question with great lucidity. And consequently it reopens the scar that Wagner, by musical saturation, had intended to suture definitively in a sort of hyperbolic assumption of opera itself. Now what Adorno, who is in fact one of the few who have confronted Schönberg's oeuvre désoeuvrée, "saves" from Moses, despite his vigilance with respect to Wagnerism, is precisely musical saturation. In the final pages of his great essay of 1963, "Sakrales Fragment: Über Schönberg's Moses und Aron" Adorno remarks that Schönberg, who evidently does not order his work according to a serialist dramaturgy of opera, also does not order his work according to a dramaturgy of the Wagnerian type (if a traditional model is still operative, it would be that of oratorio). This prevents nothing: when Adorno wants to justify what he calls the "success" of Moses, what he brings forward is the work's "power," and does so all the more because this power accords with the metaphysical (or religious) aims of the work. Now with what does this power or, and this amounts to the same thing, this "monumentality of tone" have to do? Not with simplicity, at least not immediately, but rather "with everything which is gathered together in this music and which occupies the musical space." Adorno comments:

In no other work does Schönberg so consistently and with such facility follow the rule that the compositional effort—that is to say, in the first place the sheer quantity of simultaneous events—should correspond to the content of the music, of the events to be represented. In Moses he takes this to extremes. Nowhere else is there so much music, almost in the literal sense of so many notes, as here ad majorent Dei gloriam. The sheer density of the construction becomes the medium in which the ineffable can manifest itself without usurpation. For it is this that can be wholly and convincingly created in the material by Schönberg's own musical consciousness.

Once again the style of this saturation is not Wagnerian, if only because the writing is too complex and because it no longer orders itself according to the imperative of a melos. But all the same, it is a saturation. And it is linked to a religious or metaphysical content as its most adequate mode of expression. It is as if in the end Moses and Aaron were nothing other than the negative (in the photographic sense) of Parsifal, thus accomplishing, in a paradoxical manner, the project of the total work. And in fact, this is virtually what we read in Adorno's final remarks:

By conceptualizing this we have probably arrived at the full measure of Schönberg's success in his biblical opera. It is intensified by what seems at first to stand in its way: the inordinate complexity of the music. This leads to the liberation of Schönberg's supreme talent, his gift for combination, his precise grasp of distinct but simultaneous events. The idea of unity in diversity becomes a sensuous musical reality in him. He was able not just to imagine, but actually to invent complexes of opposed extremes, which yet occur simultaneously. In this respect he represents the culmination of the tradition in which every detail is composed. This talent reveals his metaphysical ingenuity. The unity of what he had imagined truly does justice to the idea which forms the subject of the text. The striking effect and the unity of the disparate are one and the same. Hence the simplicity of the end result. The complexity is nowhere suppressed, but is so shaped as to become transparent. If everything in the score is clearly heard, its very clarity means that it is heard as a synthesis.

In its near clarity (and yet … ), one sees that this description could apply to Wagner. In any case, the possibility of a synthetic perception, the unified (and thus totalizing) character of music, the adequation of such a unity to the "idea" of the text (to its metaphysical significance), "obligation" itself, these are all incontestably principles which pertain to Wagnerian aesthetics. Thus we are confronted with a question, and one which is not without consequences: How is it that the shadow of Wagner can continue to cloud the hope, which was as much Schönberg's as Adorno's, to put an end—lucidly—to Wagnerism? Which is to say, to the worst (the most disastrous) conception of "great art"?

If there is any chance of making sense of this, we must reread "Sakrales Fragment."

At the end of his analysis, that is, just before the Benjaminian Rettung of the work which neatly finishes the essay on Schönberg, we find this statement (Adorno, who, without ever mentioning the word, has cataloged the reasons for the failure of Moses, has just indicated that in the end, Schönberg was the victim of the bourgeois illusion of the "immortality of art," of the belief in genius—that metaphysical transfiguration of bourgeois individualism—indeed, of the absence of doubt as to the reality of greatness; or to put it otherwise, that he was the victim of his own renunciation of "that extreme of the aesthetic, the sole legitimation of art," and he continues):

In Schönberg's fragmentary main works—the term 'main work' is itself symptomatic—there is something of the spirit that Huxley castigated in one of his early novels. The greatness, universal validity, totality of the masters and masterpieces of yore—all this can be regained if only you are strong enough and have the genius. This has something of the outlook that plays off Michelangelo against Picasso. Such blindness about the philosophy of history has causes rooted in the philosophy of history itself. They are to be found in the feeling of an inadequate sense of authority, the shadow-side of modern individuation. To overcome this blindness would mean relativizing the idea of great art even though great art alone can provide the aesthetic seriousness in whose absence authentic works can no longer be written. Schönberg has actually rendered visible one of the antinomies of art itself. The most powerful argument in his favour is that he introduced this antinomy, which is anything but peculiar to him, into the innermost recesses of his own oeuvre. It is not to be overcome simply by an act of will or by virtue of the power of his own works. The fallacy that it is necessary to negotiate or depict the most rarefied contents in order to produce the greatest works of art—a fallacy which puts an end to the Hegelian aesthetics—derives from the same misconception. The elusive content is to be captured by chaining it to the subject matter which, according to tradition, it once inhabited. A futile endeavor. The prohibition on graven images which Schönberg heeded as few others have done, nevertheless extends further than even he imagined. To thematize great subjects directly today means projecting their image after the event. But this in turn inevitably means that, disguised as themselves, they fail to make contact with the work of art. (translation slightly modified)

Schönberg's merit, which all the same no longer permits one to "save" the work, is thus to have "rendered visible one of the antinomies of art itself (and not just, as one might think, an antinomy of the art of the "bourgeois era" and of the epoch of individuation, even if it has devolved to properly modern art to manifest it). This antinomy is very simple, and is without resolution: "great art" is and cannot be (or can no longer be) the guarantee, indeed, the norm of authenticity in art. The notion of "great art," which alone provides "the aesthetic seriousness in whose absence authentic works can no longer be written," must be "relativized." But one does not relativize the absolute. "Great art" remains the norm—just as, for reasons that are hardly different, it was for Hegel and Schelling, for Nietzsche, for Heidegger—but it is a ruinous norm for all art which would submit itself to this category. This is why "great art," the will to "great art" is the impossibility of art. This contradiction is at the very heart of Schönberg's work, and especially of Moses, and we will see that it is this which makes for its "greatness," beyond its "intention." In its Wahrheitsgehalt, as Benjamin said: in its truth content.

This is, at bottom, what defines the essence of art, at least of modern art: it is only itself in the impossibility of effecting that which founds its authenticity. It does not follow from this that one must renounce apprehending "the most rarefied contents" (the spiritual contents, as Hegel said, the metaphysical as such, for this is and has always been "the high"). But it does follow, on the other hand, that one must renounce "negotiating or depicting [darstellen] the most rarefied contents." If one credits Adorno, here, with the greatest lucidity (and the allusion to Hegel cannot but lead one to do so), what is seen as the "error" is exactly what Heidegger, in the first version of his lectures The Origin of the Work of Art, denounced as the "remarkable fatality" to which "all meditation about art and the work of art, every theory of art and all aesthetics" is submitted, from the Greeks at least to Hegel, which is to say, to us: the artwork "always allows itself also to be considered as a fabricated thing [ein Zeugwerk, an allusion to the Platonico-Aristotelian mis-interpretation of tekhne,] presenting a 'spiritual content.' Thus art becomes the presentation of something supersensible in a palpable material submitted to a form." Now because of Schönberg but also beyond him, Adorno refers this questioning of Darstellung—art is not essentially (re)presentation—to the biblical prohibition of representation—to the "iconoclastic prescription," as Jean-Joseph Goux says—which "Schönberg heeded as few others have done," and which "extends further than even he imagined." It goes without saying that here all comparison with the Heideggerian procedure ends. If there is indeed something which Heidegger could not—or rather would not—recognize, even if his thought and the deconstruction of Hegelian aesthetics ought to have forced him to do so, it is that one might refer the problematic of Darstellung to such an origin. But Adorno had every reason to do just this. And so it is that he affirms, in a mode that Heidegger would probably have impugned, that all that is left is to "conceive" the "trace" of these "great contents" today, which brings us back all the same to modern art, to an art in which, by tradition, the content was attached to certain subjects. All of which amounts to saying that great contents "fail to make contact with the work of art."

Here it is clear that we have touched the problem of the "end of art." Since Hegel, the end of art signifies the birth of aesthetics (the philosophy or science of art, or even the simple "reflection" on art) no matter where one situates the event: in the decline of the Greek fifth century, as Heidegger above all would be tempted to think, or in the exhaustion of Christian art. (In the meantime, the question is relatively secondary: in both cases, the end of art means in reality the end of religion, and this is the essential point.) In his manner, Adorno remains faithful to this determination: no doubt there was once "great art," which is to say that "great contents" were once able to supply matter to artworks. But that all that remains is to conceive the trace of this—and this makes all the difference—in no way suffices to define the program of an aesthetics. The reason is simply that "great contents" do not belong essentially to the work of art. If one must maintain the project of an aesthetics—and it is well known that Adorno, perhaps against Heidegger, will resolutely devote himself to this—this will not reduce itself to end, as is the case in Hegel and also, though in a more complex fashion, in Heidegger, as a nostalgia for a religion, which is to say, a community.

This is why it is not at all a matter of indifference that this bundle of questions—at once very close to and very far from Heideggerian questions, but near at least in that it is the enclosing domination of Hegelian aesthetics that is abjured—should thus present all the marks of a philosophical reflection on the essence, the history, and the destination of art even as it proceeds both very rigorously and very loyally in its interpretation of Moses. This is an artwork, and not just any artwork, in its intentions, in what lies beyond its intentions, and in the failure or success of the two, which carries or at least allows one to assemble such a bundle of questions. All things being equal, Schönberg is for Adorno what Schiller, for example, is for Hegel, Wagner for the early Nietzsche, and Hölderlin for Heidegger: the offering of a work which explicitly thematizes the question of its own possibility as a work—this makes it modern—and which thereby carries in itself, as its most intimate subject, the question of the essence of art. Such works necessitate a philosophical decision as to the future of art or its chances today—which is to say, from now on. Schiller sanctions the end of art (its "death"), but Wagner is the hope of a rebirth. And Hölderlin, always on the condition that we do not envisage his final dereliction, is the hope of "another beginning."

Thus the question is to know exactly what Moses and Aaron offers to Adorno (to the continuing project of aesthetics).

The response to this question lies entirely in the title Adorno gives to his essay: "Sakrales Fragment."

Despite the peremptory (and perhaps uselessly romantic) declaration that virtually opens the essay, according to which "everything is in pieces, fragmentary, like the Tablets of the Law which Moses smashed," this title is not justified solely by the fact that Moses and Aaron is unfinished. This would hardly explain the fact that, despite appearances, the simplest meaning of the word "fragment" is in the end not at all the meaning retained by Adorno. The reference here to the Tablets is in reality not formal; it is even less formalist, in the genre of a more or less subtle mise en abïme. As it appears a bit further on, only the word "sacred" is able to explain the "fragment," and it is to the meta-romantic speculation of Benjamin that one must connect the following corrective:

Important works of art are the ones that aim for an extreme; they are destroyed in the process and their broken outlines survive as the ciphers of a supreme, unnameable truth. It is in this positive sense that Moses und Aron is a fragment and it would not be extravagant to attempt to explain why it was left incomplete by arguing that it could not be completed.

No doubt there is still something of the mise en abïme in this final formula. But the mise en abïme is necessary here because it is nothing other than the effect of the reflection that structures Moses and Aaron. And it is difficult to see how an art that takes itself as its own object, being constrained to put its own possibility to the test, might escape from it.

The Benjaminian hermeneutic principle that Adorno obeys obliges him in effect to perform a double reading.

On the one hand he locates, as the very intention that presides over the work, what he calls the "fundamental experience" of Moses: that of properly meta-physical heroism (more so, it would seem, than that of "religious" heroism). In applying himself to the beginning of the Pieces for Choir, op. 27: "Heroic, those who accomplish acts for which they are lacking in courage," Adorno designates the subject of Moses as the pure contradiction of a (consequently impossible) task, the task of being "the mouthpiece of the Almighty." This task is defined in a strictly Hegelian manner if one remembers the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion where Hegel says that Moses has nothing other than "the value of an organ" "over there" (in the Orient, I suppose). Moreover, "contradiction" is defined in the Hegelian lexicon as the contradiction of the finite and the infinite: the absolute—rather than God, for what is at stake in Schönberg's libretto is "thought" and not faith—evades finite beings with which it is incommensurable.

[According to Moses,] to act as the mouthpiece of the Almighty is blasphemy for mortal man. Schönberg must have touched on this theme even before Die Jakobsleiter, when he composed a setting for Rilke's poem in the songs Opus 22: "All who attempt to find you, they tempt you / And they who thus find you, they bind you / to image and gesture." Thus God, the Absolute, eludes finite beings. Where they desire to name him, because they must, they betray him. But if they keep silent about him, they acquiesce in their own impotence and sin against the other, no less binding, commandment to name him. They lose heart because they are not up to the task which they are otherwise enjoined to attempt, (trans. slightly modified)

And it is, moreover, to this contradiction that Adorno refers Moses' exclamation, at which point the music composed by Schönberg interrupts itself. For Adorno, this is the point where the work itself is condemned to fragmentation:

At the end of Act II of the biblical opera, in the final sentence which has become music, Moses breaks down and laments, 'O word, thou word that I lack.' The insoluble contradiction which Schönberg has taken as his project and which is attested by the entire tradition of tragedy, is also the contradiction of the actual work. If it is obvious that Schönberg felt himself to be a courageous man and that he invested much of himself in Moses, this implies that he advanced to the threshold of self-knowledge about his own project. He must have grasped the fact that its absolute metaphysical content would prevent it from becoming an aesthetic totality. But by the same token he refused to accept anything less.

Now this contradiction, which Adorno very strangely calls "tragic" (I will come back to this), is not simply the subject of the work. Adorno insists a great deal on this: it is indeed the contradiction of the work itself, that is, "the fact that its absolute metaphysical content would prevent it from becoming an aesthetic totality." Thus the essential and not accidental incompleteness of Moses. This incompleteness is inscribed, at bottom, in Moses' very first words, which Adorno has no need to recall: "Unique, eternal, omnipresent, invisible, and unrepresentable God."

But, Adorno remarks, "tragic" is not an adequate adjective. And suddenly the structure of the mise en abïme (the impossibility that the "work reflects as properly its own") is insufficient to open an adequate access to the work, for it is too premeditated: "The impossibility which appears intrinsic to the work is, in reality, an impossibility which was not intended. It is well known that great works can be recognized by the gap between their aim and their actual achievement."

This is why, on the other hand, with all due respect this time to the "truth content"—to that very thing, Benjamin would say, which constitutes the work as an "object of knowledge"—Adorno invokes a second, more essential reason for the incompleteness of Moses, for its impossibility. This reason is the end of art, that is, the end of the possibility of "great art":

The impossibility we have in mind is historical: that of sacred art today and the idea of the binding, canonical, all-inclusive work that Schönberg aspired to. The desire to outdo every form of subjectivity meant that he had subjectively to create a powerful, dominant self amidst all the feeble ones. An immense gulf opens up between the trans-subjective, the transcendentally valid that is linked to the Torah, on the one hand, and the free aesthetic act which created the work on the other. This contradiction becomes fused with the one which forms the theme of the work and directly constitutes its impossibility. Theologians have complained that the designation of monotheism as 'thought'—that is, something which is only subjectively intended—diminishes the idea of transcendence in the text, since every thought is in a sense transcendental. Nevertheless, a truth manifests itself in this, however clumsily it is expressed: the absolute was not present in the work other than as a subjective intention—or idea, as the philosophers would say. By conjuring up the Absolute, and hence making it dependent on the conjurer, Schönberg ensured that the work could not make it real.

Whence Adorno's thesis, if I may drily summarize it: in its intention, Moses is a "sacred opera"; but because "cultic music cannot be willed" and because "the problematic character of a religious art that single-handedly tears itself free from its epoch" cannot efface itself (trans. modified), Moses is in truth a "sacred fragment."

It is not my intention to critique this thesis. It is perfectly solid, and takes its authority from precise and reliable historical and sociological considerations. It is supported by extremely fine textual and musical analyses, and the whole thing has the weight of self-evidence. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to put this thesis to the test of an "aesthetic" category to which Adorno, at least here, does not make the slightest allusion although everything in his text calls for it, and does so constantly: the category of the sublime.

If I was astonished a moment ago that Adorno could describe as tragic the contradiction of the finite and the infinite, which according to him is the subject of Moses, this is because this contradiction in Hegel—and this contradiction as Adorno himself envisions it—is nothing other than that of "sublimity," which, as is well known, defines the properly Jewish moment of religion. Moreover, at least since Kant, the Mosaic utterance (the Law, but above all the prohibition of representation) has been presented as the paradigm of the sublime utterance. And it is probably the case that since Michelangelo, if we correctly interpret what Freud wished to say, the figure of Moses, as paradoxical as this might seem, has been taken as the emblematic figure of the sublime. The sublime, in the tradition of the sublime, is overdetermined by the biblical reference. And everything takes place as if Adorno did not want to hear a word of this.

Here things necessarily take a turn: though he manifests the will to exceed the Hegelian determination of "great art," and thus of the beautiful—of the sensual presentation that is adequate to a spiritual content, to an Idea, which is for Hegel the (Greek) truth of the (Jewish) sub-lime, that is, of the affirmation of the fundamental inadequation of the sensual and the Idea, or of the incommensurability of the finite and the infinite, whence the prohibition of representation precisely originates—and given that he sketches this gesture vis-à-vis Hegel and, behind him, vis-à-vis the whole philosophical tradition since Plato, insofar as it thinks the beautiful as the eidetic apprehension of being (and Adorno has a very clear consciousness, for example, of the "figurative character of all European art," including music, if only because of the invention of the stilo rappresentativo and of musica ficta), how is it that Adorno was unable to see or did not want to see that in reality Schönberg's endeavor expressly inscribes itself in the canonical tradition of the sublime? This would have in no way prevented him from producing the demonstration that he produces and which is incontestable because the contradiction of Moses is in fact incontestable. But this would have permitted him, perhaps, to reach another "truth" of Moses or to attempt a Rettung which would not be solely aesthetic, that is, imprisoned by the principle of adequation and judging the "failure" or "success" of the work solely from the viewpoint of the beautiful. That is, definitively, judging from the Hegelian point of view.

For, if there is no "critique" to be made, there is all the same a "reproach" to be offered. I will try briefly to explain myself.

One can begin again with this: if Adorno were attentive to the problematic of the sublime—if only he had remembered that Kant offers the prohibition of representation itself as the privileged example of the sublime—he would have been able to maintain his analysis without any essential modifications. In any case, it is the Hegel of the considerations on Judaism and sublimity which props up Adorno's procedure here, whether he knows this or not, and these considerations presuppose the "Analytic of the Sublime." Thus with one stroke he could have returned to all the analyses of purportedly sublime works or works recognized as sublime which, since Kant and Schiller, generally agree with one another in thinking that there is no possible sublime presentation—or, a fortiori, figuration—and thus that the question of the very possibility of a sublime art always arises, at least as long as we continue to define art by (re)presentation. To take an example which Adorno could not but be aware of, this is exactly the difficulty Freud encounters when, on the basis of Schillerian aesthetics (the essay "Grace and Dignity"), he tackles Michelangelo's figure of Moses: not only does he remain perplexed as to the meaning of the figure, but in fact he wonders whether in the end it is still art, that is, if it is "successful" (and it is a "limit," he thinks).

At the same time, one cannot forget that, as regards Kant, leaving out that which arises from nature's sublime (and which poses altogether different problems), the only examples of the sublime given by the Third Critique are examples of sublime utterances (as is traditional since Longinus), of which the most important are not poetic utterances but are, rather, prescriptive utterances and more specifically prohibitions, precisely like the Mosaic Law. Thus Kant speaks of "abstract (or restrictive) representation," indeed, of "negative representation." And because it also bears on representation or figuration, the Mosaic utterance, in its sublime simplicity (it is a purely negative commandment), is evidently a meta-sublime utterance, if I may use this term: It tells the truth of the sublime in a sublime manner: that there is to possible presentation of the meta-physical or of the absolute. Mutatis mutandis, this is a bit like the exclamation "O word, thou word that I lack," which for Adorno completes Schönberg's Moses. But above all, and one must not forget this, Kant says that inasmuch as a "presentation of the sublime" can belong to the fine arts (and one can well imagine why he remains extremely circumspect on this point), the only three modes or genres that one can rigorously recognize as "sublime genres" are (sacred) oratorio, the didactic (that is, philosophical) poem, and verse tragedy (Critique of Judgment).

Now it is precisely these three genres of the art of the sublime—if such a thing exists or can exist—that Moses works together jointly, for it is simultaneously oratorio ("sacred" as Adorno says), philosophical poem (whose subject is nothing less than the absolute itself), and, I will come to this, tragedy (in verse). It is, at least, if we abstract from the opera form. And this is why I ask the question whether Adorno, beyond his critique of the opera as such, might not have been able to accede to another "truth" of the work.

That Moses is an opera, this is particularly difficult to dispute. From the dramaturgical point of view, it has all the faults of the genre: among other things, I am thinking of the episode of worshipping the Golden Calf, which Adorno considers admirable from the viewpoint of musical composition, but which, in the style of an "obligatory ballet" (in the second act, of course), lacks nothing of the lascivious absurdity of the "flower maidens" in Parsifal. But it is already less difficult to dispute that the dramaturgical principles which he obeys are those of the Wagnerian music-drama. Even if Moses can be understood as an anti-Parsifal (which would thus retain all that is essential from that against which it protests), it does not seem to me that one might affirm without further consideration, as does Adorno, that Schönberg has the same attitude toward the biblical text that Wagner has toward the myths that he reelaborates, even if Adorno's argumentation appears from the outset unimpeachable and is difficult to resume. Adorno conducts his demonstration in the following manner:

With the vestiges of a naivety which is perhaps indispensible [Schönberg] puts his trust in proven methods. Not that he is tempted to resort to formulae in order to revive or renew sacred music. But he does strive for a balance between the pure musical development and the desire for monumentality, much as Wagner had done. He too extended his critique of the musical theatre to the bounds of what was possible in his day. But at the same time he wanted the larger-than-life as evidence of the sacred. He deluded himself into believing that he would find it in myths. They are inaccessible to the subjective imagination that aspires to the monumental while suspending the traditional canon of forms which alone would create it. Moses und Aron is traditional in the sense that it follows the methods of Wagnerian dramaturgy without a hiatus. It relates to the biblical narrative in just the same way as the music of the Ring or Parsifal relate to their underlying texts. The central problem is to find musical and dramatic methods whereby to represent the idea of the sacred—that is to say, not a mythical but an anti-mythical event.

There is no doubt that Moses represents a compromise, nor is it doubtful that, as Adorno insists a bit further on, the musical language that Schönberg wanted to enlist in the service of monumentality, subject to dramaturgical constraints that are contrary to him, ruins itself as such: "The new language of music, entirely renovated to its innermost core, speaks as if it were still the old one." And it is true that the "unified pathos" of the work, a pathos which hardly suits "the specifically Jewish inflection" of Moses, causes the musical elaboration, because of this exterior fact, to disavow "the over-specific idea of the work as a whole": "The aesthetic drive towards sensuous expression works to the detriment of what that drive brings into being." Is the dramaturgical model on which Schönberg bases his work that of Wagner?

Adorno points out this contradiction: a mythical dramaturgy with antimythical aims is only in effect a contradiction under two conditions: on the one hand the dramatic action must be of a mythical type, which is not to say that the myth must supply the material for the libretto, but—this at least is the solution Wagner found—that the scenic acts, indeed all the signifiers and mythical cells, must be constantly musically overdetermined (hence, the Leitmotiv). This is not at all the case in Schönberg. (To put it otherwise, Schönberg no doubt aims for a "music-drama," in the broad sense of the term, yet all the same he does not respect Wagnerian dramaturgy.) And on the other hand, it is necessary that opera should wish itself, as Adorno says, a "sacred opera," which Parsifal manifestly wanted to be.

Now it is exactly on this point that Schönberg's lucidity is greatest. His religious intentions, his search for a "great sacred art" are undeniable. Equally undeniable is his determination to write an anti-Parsifal (at bottom, this imposed itself). At the time when Moses was in the works, this determination is indissolubly artistic, philosophical, and political. All the same, he renounced this determination, and not just at any time, but in 1933 precisely. On this point Adorno says what must be said, and not just in any way, though his remarks appear a bit short.

Perhaps it is the case that in all of his argumentation—and this would be at the very least my hypothesis—Adorno twice allows himself to get carried away: the first time by the Wagnero-Nietzschean determination of music-drama, conceived as "new tragedy" or as "modern tragedy," the second time by the Hegelian determination of tragedy.

Hegel defines tragedy, or more exactly the tragic scenario, as "the struggle of new gods against ancient gods." This is obviously the kind of scenario that Adorno rediscovers in Moses: the struggle of monotheism, as he says, against the gods of the tribe. Now as this is also, mutatis mutandis, the Wagnerian scenario (that of the Ring or of Parsifal), it is easy to see how the assimilation of the two is possible. (And this was surely the case, in one way or another, for Schönberg. Even if his true subject lay elsewhere—for as Adorno sees very well, it had to do with the very possibility of art—the rivalry with Wagner, and with Wagnerism, weighed on him with too great a force. Here I must admit that I am allowing myself to be guided by the admirable filmic version of Moses by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, for one must recognize that it is their dramaturgical intuition that is, as it happens, decisive. They stage the first two acts, but not that which remains of the third, in a Greek fashion, even if it is, for this production, actually the Roman theater of Alba Fucense in the Abruzzi region. In its original intention, in fact, Moses is a tragedy.)

But to continue from this point and think that an identity of scenario implies an identity of function, this is a great step. In the direct line of the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, but equally that of the Hegel who analyzes tragedy as a "religious" work of art (which is also to say, a political work of art), Adorno spontaneously thinks of tragedy from the starting point of the chorus, and of the chorus as the bearer of "religion" itself, not so much as fervor or belief, but as being-in-community. The chorus is not the people, or the representative of the people (of the spectators); but it is all the same the index that tragedy is originally a common or communitarian work of art, that it is community in and through the work, that is, a work without an individual or singular subject. That all "great art" is in the last resort the creation of a people, this is a dogma of German aesthetics from Hegel to Heidegger. And despite everything—I mean: despite "critical theory"—Adorno accepts this dogma right up to the moment in which it is revealed that the failure of a music which "extends a hand to the cult" with such force and determination has to do with the fact that such a music, not-withstanding the affirmation of the "obligatory character" of its content, fails in being "substantial" in the Hegelian sense, because it is too "willed." An art can only attain greatness if the subject which carries it is—Adorno of course does not say: the people—society. This is why at bottom Adorno condenses all the questions of Moses in this question, itself of a transcendental sort: How is a cultic music simply possible outside of any cult? This is also to say, outside of any religious belonging and of any faith, and above all outside of all (social effectiveness of the cultic. I attach here, with no commentary, the two following pieces:

The impossibility of the sacred work of art becomes increasingly evident the more the work insists on its claim to be one without invoking the support of any outside authority. With the modesty characteristic of the greatest emotional integrity, Schonberg ventured into this realm. The objection that the individual is no longer capable of the subjective piety which the biblical story calls for misses the mark. Bruckner was presumably a believer in an anachronistic sense and as musically inspired as any composer can be. Yet the Promised Land remained closed to him, and perhaps even to the Beethoven of the Missa Solemnis. The impossibility we are speaking of extends right into the objective preconditions of the form. Sacred works of art—and the fact that Moses und Aron was written as an opera does not disqualify it from being one—claim that their substance is valid and binding, beyond all yearning and subjective expression. The very choice of canonical biblical events implies such a claim. It is certainly implicit in the pathos of the music of Moses und Aron, whose intensity gives reality to a communal 'we' at every moment, a collective consciousness that takes precedence over every individual feeling, something of the order of the togetherness of a congregation. Were it otherwise, the predominance of the choruses would scarcely be imaginable. Without this transindividual element or, in other words, if it were merely a case of what is known as religious lyric poetry, the music would simply accompany the events or illustrate them. The compulsion to introduce into the music a sense of its own intellectual situation, to organize it in such a way that it expresses the underlying foundation of the events described, in short, its high aesthetic seriousness forces it into a collective stance. It must of necessity extend a hand to the cult if it is not entirely to fail its own intention. But cultic music cannot simply be willed. Anyone who goes in search of it compromises the very concept. (translation slightly modified)

We may legitimately ask what produced the conception of this work in the light of such immense difficulties, which may be compared to those experienced twenty years before in connection with Die Jakobsleiter. It is not the product of that misconceived monumentality, that unlegitimated gesture of authority which marks so much of the pictorial arts of the nineteenth century, from Puvis de Chavannes down to Marées. Of course it was Schönberg's own individual makeup that provided the critical impetus. His parents do not seem to have been orthodox in their beliefs, but it may be supposed that the descendant of a family of Bratislava Jews living in the Leopoldstadt, and anything but fully emancipated, was not wholly free of that subterranean mystical tradition to be found in many of his contemporaries of similar origins, men such as Kraus, Kafka and Mahler.

The Enlightenment displaced the theological heritage, shifting it on to the plane of the apocryphal, as we can infer from Schönberg's own autobiographical remarks. In particular, superstition survived tenaciously in his life and he often reflected on it. It is doubtless an instance of secularized mysticism. The experience of pre-fascist Germany, in which he rediscovered his Jewish roots, must have released this repressed dimension of his nature. Moses und Aron was composed directly before the outbreak of the Third Reich, probably as a defensive reaction to what was about to sweep over him. Later, even after Hitler's fall, he did not return to the score.

It is hardly doubtful that a question of the transcendental type is fundamental to Moses, and it would probably have been difficult for it to be otherwise if one considers that which in the German tradition regularly associated Kant and the figure of Moses ("Kant is the Moses of our nation," said Hölderlin). But it is perhaps not so certain that this question bears on the possibility of a sacred art in the final analysis.

In reality Adorno's demonstration is only possible inasmuch as it attaches itself almost exclusively to the music and remains perfectly indifferent to the rest, which is to say, if you will, to the text. This will not in any way be reduced to the libretto, but implies, beyond the scenario itself (in its strange loyalty to the biblical text, which Adorno greatly underestimates all the same), the dramaturgical structures which this scenario induces (for example, the chorus, which is in effect the people, is not Greek at all and in no way has a relation of the tragic type to the protagonists, despite immediate appearances) and, above all, the poem. Now not only does Adorno pay no attention to the text of Act III, under the pretext that it is not set to music (even so, this is decisive for the meaning that Schönberg expressly wished to confer upon the work, which thus concludes, as it is effectively written, with a pardon), but he systematically minimizes the problem of the relation between thought and language, a relation which is central, by assigning it to an inevitably subjective and profane ("heretical") interpretation of revelation, even though it is perhaps here that the transcendental question is articulated for Moses himself.

This exclusive attention accorded the music verifies itself in a privileged manner in the final Rettung, which is entirely given over to demonstrating the "success" of the work, which is to say, its adequation, despite the fundamental contradiction between intention and composition which subtends the opera. All of this comes down to displaying an internal adequation of the musical texture itself (identified infine with the final accomplishment, by way of musical genius, of the passage to monotheism), which properly redeems the fault that had consisted in making musica ficta serve against the figure. And it is such an adequation which fundamentally re-establishes, beyond the peripeteias of "great art" in the bourgeois era, the enigmatic but unseverable link between music and Jewishness.

At the same time, if one pays attention this time to the critical aspect of the analysis, it is still this exclusive attention to the music which explains that besides the main grievance (music would be the image of that which eludes all images), one of the major accusations bears on the "unified pathos" of the work. As Adorno very clearly indicates, the incrimination does not take aim only at the "factitious" character of pathos, which arises because the religious content has lost all "substantiality." As a result of this, the "new language," withdrawing from itself, "speaks as if it were still the old one," according to a compromise of the Wagnerian type between monumentality and musical modernity, which authorizes Adorno to speak of the strangely "traditional" effect of Moses. Nor does it take aim only at the insufficient differentiation of the couple formed by Moses and Aaron, the one who speaks and the one who sings, due this time to the "imitative" over-determination of the music. Moses, says Adorno, should not speak, for in the Bible he stutters. He adds that "it highlights the crisis of an art which makes use of this text purely as art and of its own free will." But it essentially aims for obedience to the Wagnerian principle of the unity of language, which "cannot accommodate what the subject matter requires above all: the strict separation of Moses' monotheism from the realm of myth, the regression to the tribal gods. The pathos of the music is identical in both." And it is here, moreover, that Adorno puts his fundamental hermeneutic principle into play, one which is borrowed once again from Benjamin, this time from the Benjamin of the celebrated essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities." For he explains that if one wishes to break the "vicious circle" of "entrapment in the coils of myth" which alone justifies the unity of language and technique in Wagner, "the caesura was to be decisive." But, he remarks, "the rupture was to become music." This is evidently not the case:

The undifferentiated unity from which the ruthless process of integration allows nothing to be exempted comes into collision with the idea of the One itself. Moses and the Dance round the Golden Calf actually speak the same language in the opera, although the latter must aim to distinguish between them. This brings us close to the source of traditionalism in Schönberg, an issue which has only started to become visible in recent decades and especially since his death. In his eyes the idea of musical vocabulary as the organ of meaning was still instinctive and unquestioned. This vocabulary imagined itself able to articulate everything at any time. But this assumption was shaken by Schönberg's own innovations.

To put it in other words, Schönberg betrays his own modernism. He bases his work on the codified syntax of tonality while his atonality would demand that he break it, in conformity with the subject of the work (which would thus be, one must believe: how is it that only atonal music is adequate to the monotheistic idea?). Because of this, Schönberg would be a victim of his epoch, exactly as Schiller was for Hegel. He would succumb to the bourgeois idea of genius, which is to say—but Adorno, precisely, does not say this and probably could not say this, at least not as crudely—of the sublime. But all the same, it is this which is at stake; the lexicon does not fool us:

This introduces a fictional element into the actual construction which so energetically opposes one. The situation points back to an illusion from which the bourgeois spirit has never been able to free itself: that of the unhistorical immortality of art. It forms a perfect complement to that decorative stance from which the Schonbergian innovations had effected their escape. The belief in genius, that metaphysical transfiguration of bourgeois individualism, does not allow any doubt to arise that great men can achieve great things at any time and that the greatest achievements are always available to them. No doubt can be permitted to impugn the category of greatness, not even for Schönberg. A justified scepticism towards that belief, which is based on a naive view of culture as a whole, is to be found in that specialization which Schönberg rightly opposed on the grounds that it acquiesced in the division of labor and renounced that extreme of the aesthetic, the sole legitimation of art.

A verdict without appeal, but which is all the same astonishing on the part of someone who bases his work on the past existence of a "great sacred art" in order to condemn any and all factitious "restorations," as if at the same time, to put it by way of a shortcut, the sublime (grandeur) were a bourgeois invention and "great sacred art" were not a retrospective illusion—a projection—of the educated German bourgeoisie from Hegel to Heidegger, or from Kant to Adorno himself. That "aesthetic extremism" should be "the sole legitimation of art" for us, today, this is not doubtful. Who knows if this was not the case for Sophocles, or for Bach? And who knows if it is not precisely this that Wagner betrayed with his "compromises," but not Schönberg, who, as a victim of the bourgeois mythology of art—as Adorno is right to emphasize—all the same chose to abandon (one can suppose: knowing full well the cause of his decision) Moses, to interrupt it, rather than present supplementary evidence for the re-mythologization of art and of religion.

In any case, the question remains: What exactly does Adorno mean when he declares that the rupture (or the caesura) should have made "itself music"? It is easy to see that what is incriminated here is the too powerful homogeneity of the music, its flawless density which paradoxically (or, rather, dialectically) "redeems" or "saves" it as music to the detriment of the work itself in its project, that is, as a "sacred opera." The opposition of the Sprechgesang and the melos, to put it otherwise, does not "caesure" the continuity of the musical discourse, nor therefore does it bring out the monotheistic idea. The unity of language is pagan, idolatrous. But is the caesura simply a matter of differentiation internal to language—indeed, of the clear-cut opposition of voices? In what sense, at bottom, does Adorno understand "caesura"? And, an inseparable question: Why does he make so little of the interruption of the work—apparently accidental, "empirical," but does one ever know?—and above all, why does he make so little of the very strange mode in which this interruption comes about? I do not at all wish to suggest that the interruption is the caesura, but perhaps rather that the caesura, more inaudible to Adorno's ear than it is invisible to his eyes, masks itself in the interruption—which, from then on, would no longer be thinkable as interruption.

Here of course we must credit Adorno, in an analogous manner to that which he uses with the word Rettung, for using the word caesura in the enlarged but rigorous sense which Benjamin gives it in his essay on Goethe, where it is the technical term forged by Hölderlin for his structural theory of tragedy which is elevated to the level of a general critical (or aesthetic) concept: all works are organized as such from the starting point of the caesura inasmuch as the caesura is the hiatus, the suspension or the "anti-rhythmic" interruption which is not only necessary, as in metrics, to the articulation and the equilibrium of verse (of the phrase and, by extension, of what one might call the work phrase), but, more essentially, the place whence that which Hölderlin calls "pure speech" surges forth. The caesura, to put it otherwise, is the liberation by default—but a non-negative default—of the meaning itself or of the truth of the work. And from the critical point of view, it is only the caesura that indicates, in the work, the place that one must reach in order to accede to the Wahrheitsgehalt.

On the basis of this hermeneutic model, Adorno is right to look for the caesura in Moses, as in any supposedly great work. Perhaps his only fault is to look for it, by "melocentrism," only in the music. For if one takes stock of what Schönberg effectively wrote, one can just as well construct the hypothesis that it is at the very place where the music—but not the work—interrupts itself, that is, precisely where Moses proclaims that the word (speech) fails him: "O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!"

Indeed, it is well known that up until the end of the second act Schönberg simultaneously composed the libretto and the score. And that at the moment when he was to begin composing the third act—whether it is an accidental cause or not does not matter here—abruptly and without giving any indication exactly why, he only wrote the text of one scene, the scene where Moses, who reaffirms his "idea," pardons Aaron or at least orders that he not be executed. And here again it is necessary to recognize that the dramaturgical choice of Straub and Huillet is particularly illuminating: for not only do they play this merely spoken scene in the unbearable silence which succeeds the unfurling of the music, a silence that Adorno analyzes so well, but they have it played in a place other than that which, since the outset, was properly the stage or the theater. They do this in such a way that it is not only the tragic apparatus as Adorno understands it that collapses in a single stroke, but the entire apparatus which kept Moses within the frame of opera or music-drama. And it is here, probably, that religion is interrupted.

If such an indication is fair, if, dramaturgically, one must take into account this rupture or this hiatus and the passage to simple speech—for such is the enigma of that which remains of Schönberg's work—then there is indeed a caesura, and it clarifies the truth of the work in another way. In particular, it no longer permits one to refer the difference in enunciation between the two protagonists to Schönberg's submission to the imperatives of musica ficta (and of Wagnerian dramaturgy). It is from this principle that the music must despoil itself and remain nothing other than naked speech.

Beyond its structural function, in Hölderlin the caesura signifies—and it is because of this that it holds Benjamin's attention—the interruption necessary for tragic truth to appear, which is to say, the necessary sepa-ration, the necessary cut which must (but in the sense of a sollen) produce itself in the process of infinite collusion between the human and the divine which is the tragic flaw itself, hubris. The tragic separation, the uncoupling of God and man (which Hölderlin interprets as /catharsis), thus signifies the law of finitude, which is to say, the impossibility of the immediate: "For mortals just as for immortals, the immediate is prohibited." An immediate interpretation of the divine (Oedipus) is no more possible than an immediate identification with the divine (Antigone). Mediation is the law [Gesetz,] a law, moreover, that Hölderlin thinks in a rigorously Kantian fashion (as when he speaks of the "categorical diversion" of the divine which brings about the imperative obligation for man to return toward the earth).

From here on, according to this model—and according to the logic of the extension of the concept inaugurated by Benjamin and apparently recognized by Adorno himself—why should we not think that insofar as it strikes and suspends the music in the course of a brief and dry scene, the caesura in Moses brutally makes it appear that Moses, the inflexible guardian of the Law and the defender of his own great—of his own sublime—conception of God, is also the one who by virtue of immoderation wants to be the too immediate interpreter of God: the mouth or the organ of the absolute, the very voice of God as its truth. This is why in never ceasing to proclaim the unrepresentability of God, indeed his ineffability, neither will he cease (on the same ground of musica ficta where Aaron moves around in all his ease) from striving to sing and not to confine himself strictly to speech, as if, by the effect of a compromise induced by his rivalry with Aaron, he were secretly tempted by the idea of a possible presentation (a sublime presentation, according to the rules of his great eloquence) of the true God, of the unpresentable itself. To the point where, for lack of speech or a word, in the despairing recognition of this lack—and here, precisely at this phrase the caesura is situated—he is swallowed up by his own great audacity and the music interrupts itself. By this one may under-stand why, in the only scene of the final act, all "sobriety" as Hölderlin would have said, Moses grants his pardon, which is to say that he renounces murder. Thus is verified the profound insight that underlies Freud's Moses and Monotheism, according to which the prohibition of representation is nothing other than the prohibition of murder.

Such is the reason for which that which interrupts itself along with the music, that which is "caesured," is religion itself, if religion is defined as the belief in a possible (re)presentation of the divine, that is, if religion is unthinkable without an art or as an art (which, happily, does not mean—"we have passed this step"—that art would be unthinkable without religion or as religion). What is at stake here, in the interruption of that which was without a doubt at the outset the project of a "sacred opera," is the very thing that Adorno considers beyond doubt for Schönberg: the figurativity of music. But in order to recognize this, it would have been necessary for Adorno to have been ready to read Moses, and not simply to hear it. Or it would have been necessary perhaps for him to have been able to recognize, in according more credit (or confidence) to Schönberg, the limits of his own musical mysticism.

At one moment in his analysis, Adorno notes this:

Schönberg's own need to express is one that rejects mediation and convention and therefore one which names its object directly. Its secret model is that of revealing the Name. Whatever subjective motive lay behind Schönberg's choice of a religious work, it possessed an objective aspect from the very outset—a purely musical one in the first instance.

But is it not the same Adorno who had written some years earlier:

The language of music is quite different from the language of intentionality. It contains a theological dimension. What it has to say is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Its Idea is the divine Name which has been given shape. It is demythologized prayer, rid of efficacious magic. It is the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, not to communicate meanings.

For Adorno as for Schönberg, music in its very intention would, in short, come under the horizon of that which Benjamin called "pure language," which is perhaps not without a rapport to that which Hölderlin, on the subject of the caesura, called "pure speech." But the Name, as Adorno well knows, is unpronounceable—and music is a vain prayer, the sublime as such, according to its most tried and true code since Kant: "[Music's] Idea is the divine Name which has been given shape." An art (of the) beyond (of) signification, which is to say, (of the) beyond (of) representation. All the same, under the "O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!" that Moses proclaims in the last burst of music, it is not prohibited to hear resonating an "O Name, du Name, der mir fehlt!" As when Kant takes as his major example of the sublime utterance the very prohibition of representation (the Mosaic law), this is in reality a meta-sublime utterance which tells in a sublime manner—and the passage to the naked word in Act III of Moses is absolutely sublime—the truth of the sublime, itself sublime. Ultimate paradox: the naked word—the language of signification itself—comes to tell of the impossible beyond signification, something which Benjamin would not have denied, and to signify the transcendental illusion of expression. This is why Moses is not "successful." It is "unsaveable" if for Adorno "to save" never means anything other than to consider art-works according to the scale of adequation, which is to say, of beauty: the religious gesture par excellence. Now what Moses says precisely, but despite itself—and one must well imagine Schönberg constrained and forced, which is after all the lot of every modern artist—is that art is religion in the limits of simple inadéquation; probably the end, in every sense, of religion. Or to be more just: the caesura of religion.