Adorno as memory. Inheriting, resurfacing and replaying confidence in Kluge’s late work

Alexander Kluge’s artistic and intellectual career has long been marked and remains so to this very day by a number of direct and indirect influences by Theodor W. Adorno. Our basic assumption is that these multiple and sometimes divergent »activations« or »appropriations« of Adorno’s legacy are provoked by Adorno himself who fashioned himself in his writings as a memory, particularly in some of his late texts. Moreover, we will argue that this influence – what we shall call »Adorno-as-memory« – is built upon Adorno’s auto-marginalization via a kind of delay and an anachronistic position. Taking Edward W. Said’s On Late Style. Music and Literature Against the Grain as a starting point with which we identify a particular mode of Adorno’s reactivation, we shall argue, in fact, that the Adornian legacy for a contemporary of Said’s, namely Kluge, actually relies on the fragmentation, the contradictions, and the delay of Adorno’s late philosophy.