Horner's Corner

Marcel Proust

Alexander García Düttmann

The name of a place can promise happiness, Adorno says in this section (“Meditations on Metaphysics”, Negative Dialectics) after appealing to Proust. For the promise to be kept, for happiness to come into existence, all that would seem to be required is a visit to the actual place. And yet when, attracted by the force inherent in the promise of happiness, one arrives at the place in question, one finds that happiness withdraws as if it were a rainbow. What has allowed then for an experience here is precisely the difference between the name and the named. Adorno does not wish to denounce the anticipation of the imagination as an illusion, just as he does not wish to reduce the experience to the discovery of an empirical truth. This is why he insists on the fact that the withdrawal of happiness at the point where one would expect to be happy does not amount to a disappointment. Rather, one realizes that, having arrived at the place itself by following the trail laid out by the name, one has been brought too close to the promised happiness for it to be experienced as such. Happiness, then, lies neither in the image emanating from the name nor in the reality of the place named, but in the space and in the time stretched out between the image and reality. It springs from seeing something from the inside. However, insofar as the inside is just the other side of the outside, it only appears truly when removed from the thing. What Adorno gives here is the exact definition of the idea, even if he does not employ the philosophical term. In his “Short Commentaries,” he characterizes Proust as a “Platonist” who dismissed opinion. Could one summarize Adorno’s argument by asserting that happiness is linked to the disclosure of the idea? That happiness is to be found residing in neither the name nor the named may only be understood once one has undergone the experience of searching for it in the place or the reality towards which the name points. Happiness, in other words, would depend entirely on whether one reaches a limit at which a second life could begin; one that is not the imaginary life of the promise and yet does not merge with real life in the conventional sense. It is as if the fulfillment of the promise of happiness consisted in the preservation of its form instead of the actualization of its content, or as if keeping the promise meant returning to it so as to render the form a part of the content. Adorno speaks here of a “metaphysical experience,” and not of experience in general, because he wants to highlight the distance that separates happiness from both a matter of fact and a state of mind. Metaphysics interpreted in this manner has something to do with one’s own comportment towards life, with a pursuit of happiness and the yielding of an insight that manifests itself in the form of a lack of disappointment. It thereby acquires a moral or ethical dimension. By protecting each other from dumbness and madness—from the necessity of the literal and the vacuity of the figurative, from the ontological “there is” and the psychological “as if”—the name and the named bestow happiness with the reality of a second life. What Adorno ultimately suggests is that the named is too real to be real in any morally relevant fashion while the name, on the contrary, is never real enough. Does Proust not write, in the last volume of the Recherche, that it is always the attachment to an object owned that provokes the death of the owner? In the wake of Adorno’s reading of Proust, one could claim that happiness is not an object to be owned, that it does not have the form of a real thing, and that in becoming attached to it one runs the danger of turning it into something that could be appropriated. …(more)

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