THE NECESSITY OF OVER-INTERPRETATION: ADORNO, THE ESSAY, AND THE GESTURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

This article is a discussion of Theodor W. Adorno’s comment, in the beginning of ‘The Essay as Form’, that interpretations of essays are over-interpretations. I argue that this statement is programmatic, and should be understood in the light of Adorno’s essayistic ideal of configuration, his notion of truth, and his idea of the enigmatic character of art. In order to reveal how this over-interpreting appears in practice, I turn to Adorno’s essay on Kafka. According to Adorno, the reader of Kafka is caught in an aporia: Kafka’s work cannot be interpreted, yet every single sentence calls for interpretation. This paradox is related to the gestures and images in Kafka’s work: like Walter Benjamin, Adorno means that they contain sedimented, forgotten experiences. Instead of interpreting these images, Adorno visualizes the experiences indirectly by presenting images of his own. His own essay becomes gestural.


I. INTRODUCTION
The interpretations of the essay 'are not philologically definitive and conscientious; in principle they are over-interpretations' , Theodor W. Adorno states in the beginning of his programmatic 'The Essay as Form' . 1 The interpretations of the essay are over-interpretations -the statement could be mistaken for a defence of the common notion of the essay as a kind of sanctuary for more informal, less stringent analyses, a genre with lower claims to truth than traditional academic research. I would argue, however, that the opposite is the gist: the talk about over-interpretation points to a central aspect of Adorno's attempt to establish a form of critical thinking -in opposition to a positivist epistemological ideal -which has not given up the idea of an objective truth.
In broad terms there are two ways of understanding the status of interpretation in Adorno. According to one opinion his aesthetic theory and essays fit into a hermeneutical tradition. This is contested by other critics who argue that his so-called negative aesthetic implies a fundamental opposition between art and understanding. 2 From the latter perspective his essays appear more deconstructive than hermeneutical. 1 The aim of my essay is to approach the question of Adorno's relation to hermeneutics by way of the often overlooked remark, just quoted, from 'The Essay as Form' . What is actually at issue here? Why are interpretations of the essay overinterpretations? And what does that imply? How does this over-interpretation affect his own essays? Does his over-interpretation differ from what we normally mean when we talk about over-interpretation, and -above all -why does it differ from a traditionally hermeneutical interpretation? There are no clear answers to these questions in the immediate surroundings of the remark, and 'overinterpretation' does not really have the status of a concept in Adorno's work. He makes similar statements in other works -in some passages in Minima Moralia for example -but, as far as I know, without ever using the term 'over-interpretation' again. 3 So even though the term does not return, it seems to point out something important in Adorno's way of writing.
In order to clarify the implications of the remark in 'The Essay as Form' , I will consider his essay 'Notes on Kafka' , first published in 1953, shortly after Adorno's return to Germany from exile in the United States. Adorno himself was obviously very happy with the piece, and his biographer Stefan Müller-Doohm is hardly alone in ascribing to it 'a central importance in his oeuvre' . 4 I would not contest that opinion, even though there are certainly other works on literature (including the essays on Beckett, Hölderlin, and Proust) which may be considered just as important, and in some cases more elegant. In my opinion the Kafka essay does not stand out as exceptional in Adorno's oeuvre, but it is important since it is The Necessity of Over-interpretation: Adorno, the Essay, and the Gesture of Aesthetic Experience without Doctrine: Adorno, Self-Critique, and the Ends of Academic Theology (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 176. And, on the other hand, Arild Linneberg, Bastardforsøk [Hybrid attempts] (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1994), 225-26; Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), chaps. 1, 3. 3 In Minima Moralia, in an aphorism on the nuances of language and thinking, he writes: 'The conclusion to be drawn from the decay of nuance is not to cling obstinately to forms that have decayed, nor yet to extirpate them altogether, but rather to try to outnuance them, to push them to the point where from subjective shading they switch to being a pure, specific definition of the object.' Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexions on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 220-21; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 252: 'Die Konsequenz aus dem Verfall der Nuance ware nicht, an der verfallenen obstinate festzuhalten und auch nicht, jegliche zu extirpieren, sondern sie an Nuanciertheit womöglich zu überbieten, so weit sie zu treiben, bis sie aus der subjektiven Abschattung umschlägt in die reine spezifische Bestimmung des Gegenstandes. ' the first (although he had certainly written on literature before) in a series of literary essays with which it has a lot in common. In that sense 'Notes on Kafka' is typical rather than exceptional, and thus a good choice if one wants to study his essayistic method. But before turning to 'Notes on Kafka' it is necessary to touch upon some other concepts and aspects of Adorno's thinking.

II. DEFINITION/CONFIGURATION
The Danish historian of ideas, Hans-Jørgen Schanz, once remarked that Adorno's writings 'exercise a kind of quotation compulsion' . 5 To a large extent Adorno's work consists of catchphrase-like, paradoxical excesses, statements seemingly made to be wrenched from their context and brought to illuminate other contexts. But since the individual sentences are often peculiarly independent of the textual surroundings, and regularly contradict the adjacent sentences, such a procedure is as risky as it is tempting. In Aesthetic Theory one may, for example, read: 'art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art' . 6 Ten pages later it says: 'the immanence of society in the artwork is the essential social relation of art' . 7 It is not easy to bring those statements together -no matter which quotation one chooses to refer to, one will be guilty of a falsifying simplification. This contradictory character is of course not an expression of sloppiness or disorder; it is the result of a conscious strategy.
What distinguishes the essay, Adorno writes in 'The Essay as Form' , is its refusal to define the concepts it uses. This refusal is based on the idea that all concepts are already defined in so far as they are part of a language. The definitioneagerness of positivist thinking (and the implicit notion of the concept as a tabula rasa that one may define as one wishes) is most of all an expression of its claim to power. Instead of defining its concepts, the essay creates connections between the concepts it has at hand. All its concepts are to be presented in such a way that they support one another, that each becomes articulated through its configuration with the others. In the essay discrete elements set off against one another come together to form a readable context; the essay erects no scaffolding and no structure. But the elements crystallize as a configuration through their motion. 8 This passage elucidates not only the difference between Adorno's idea of the concept and a positivist ideal, but also his way of composing his works.
Against the strategy of definition he puts up the configuration. Whereas the former attempts to penetrate and clear away the ominously opaque in its object by means of fixed concepts and deductive argumentation, the latter strives to create a web of statements and concepts which, through their inherent dynamics and contradictions, may give an image of the opacity of the object. It is a matter of constructing 'a complex of concepts interconnected in the same way it imagines them to be interconnected in the object ' . 9 This means that the configuration is both form and content; as Shierry Weber Nicholsen writes: 'form in the essay is defined by the way concepts are used; essentially, by the way they are set in relation to one another' . 10 The configuration therefore lacks a natural beginning, a centre, and an end. No particular sentence, no single concept, is more important than any other and it is always possible to create yet another connection, to make the web a bit tighter and wider.
But this is just one side of the matter. For even though the notion of configuration is founded on the insight of a discursive deficiency, and even though it advocates an anti-systematic procedure, it is not to be mistaken for a defence of relativism.
The essay does not, according to Adorno,proceed downright unmethodically,but 'methodically unmethodically' . 11 At the same time as the essay is determined by its object of investigation, it is fair to say that it shapes its own object. 12 The lack of  Adorno,'Essay as Form' ,13. 12 That this latter side often prevails is perhaps the most important flaw of Adorno's essays: Adorno often tends to say approximately the same thing, whether writing about Kafka, Proust, Beckett, or someone else. a natural beginning and end also means that the essay 'says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say' . 13 Here one may perceive the beginning of an explanation of the hyperbolic, maxim-like style: it is as if the essay were forced to provide an image of its object in every single sentence, before it is too late. If, as Christoph Menke points out, the configuration form does indeed cause a dissolution of 'the illusion attached to its individual statements: that they are able to depict that which is aesthetically experienced in the medium of statements' , 14 it apparently demands, on the other hand, a kind of categorical exaggeration, a certain force or violence, on behalf of the individual constituents in order for a configuration to take shape. As Alexander García Düttman convincingly argues, thinking depends, according to Adorno, on exaggeration. 'Thinking is essentially exaggeration, at least to the extent that it opens up and discloses a world. Every thought, which depends on such a disclosure, must bear the trace of an exaggeration.' 15 Without exaggeration, no disclosure, and without disclosure, no truth.

III. AN ALTERNATIVE CONCEPT OF TRUTH
In the first of the 'Meditations on Metaphysics' which close Negative Dialectics Adorno returns to his own much debated statement that it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. Perhaps it was a false statement, he admits, but instead of a more balanced argument he then throws an even harsher accusation in the face of the reader: 'But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living. ' 16 Auschwitz caused a guilt that is irreconcilable not only with continued poetry-writing, but with a continued life in general, that is, a life worth living. And since it is impossible to make this guilt 'fully, presently conscious' , it does not cease to reproduce itself -its actuality is therefore just as great today as at the end of World War Two. This harsh comment is, however, followed by yet another surprising turn: it is that situation, that actuality, and nothing else, which 'compels us to philosophize' . 17 Without further explanation Adorno then enters into an epistemological argument about the philosophical possibility of reaching a truth. Is it not in fact so, he asks, that philosophy leads us away from things, the deeper it penetrates them in its search 13 Adorno, 'Essay as Form' , 4. for an essence? This question implies a tension between surface and depth, a tension which then returns in the distinction between, on the one hand, common sense and trivial observations -whose theoretical manifestation, Adorno argues, is positivism and unreflected nominalism -and, on the other hand, speculation and elevated thinking. Adorno neither takes sides nor deconstructs this dichotomy; rather, he holds on to the uncertainty: at the same time as he questions the search for an essence, he writes that it would be denigrating truth as such if the trivial, superficial, immediately observable were taken for the truth. On the other hand the down-to-earth may appear to be truer than the sublime. 18 How should one understand this comment?
One answer is concealed partly in the indeterminate future tense of the discussion, partly in the description of positivist truth as a 'sneering mockery' , partly in the preceding talk about the guilt after Auschwitz. To maintain a transcendent, metaphysical truth is no longer possible; at the same time, however, a truth which confines itself to that which is actually existing would not only be trivial, but would also imply a contented approval of the circumstances that led to the Holocaust. In spite of this aporetical situation, Adorno tries to maintain the idea of objective truth, he even argues that the situation demands it. This is where the compulsion to philosophy arises: by elevating itself above what exists -and even turning against itself -thinking as such may demonstrate that the current circumstances are not necessarily all there is; existence could be different; there are other possibilities. What truth provides is, in other words, a promise. In that sense, Adorno's conception of truth has an unambiguous utopian trait, but this trait has often been exaggerated and interpreted too concretely. 19 The point is not that there is a true utopia to strive for, but that truth as such has become utopian. There are no valid discursive criteria for distinguishing between truth and untruth.
Accordingly, the essay concludes with an outline of another, non-discursive truth concept: 'The innervation that metaphysics might win only by discarding itself applies to such other truth, and it is not the last among motivations for the passage to materialism. ' 20 This comment reflects the dichotomy that was identified earlier. The difference is that the two sides -the particular, trivial, and dirty, on the one hand, and the sublime, general, metaphysical, on the other -are now brought into a dialectical relationship: thinking has to hold on to the material, but at the same time break the positivist ban on thinking the metaphysical. 21 This alternative truth concept would consequently demand a kind of materialist metaphysic. 22 Adorno finds a step in that direction in Marx, Benjamin, and Kafka.
IV. THE ENIGMATIC CHARACTER OF ART 'All artworks -and art altogether -are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art.' 'The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every one. ' 23 What can be concluded from these detached remarks from Aesthetic Theory is that art, according to Adorno, is a privileged form of expression, in the sense that it is a vehicle of truth -the artwork has a truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt), or rather a substance of truth. 24 This truth is not immediately accessible; in order to reach it one has to find the objective solution to the riddle the artwork constitutes.
But the nine pages that separate the two quotations complicate things. What is noteworthy is that the enigmatic character is said to increase, the more one understands the work at hand. In that sense, the riddle simile is ambivalent. On the one hand, Adorno insists that the artwork is a riddle in a strict sense: it potentially contains its own solution. The riddle character is a call for a solution, a demand that the interpretation should reveal the foundation of the enigma. On the other hand, it is emphasized that the enigmatic character survives every interpretation. The artwork and the interpretation, the riddle and the solution, do not form a symbiotic relationship; the riddle is not made to be solved, and the interpretation is not the perfect tool for solving the puzzle. On the contrary, from Adorno's perspective the interpreter is bound to fail. In other words, the interpretation is characterized by a fundamental insufficiency; he even maintains that the very category of understanding becomes problematic in the light of the enigmatic character of the artwork. 25 21 See Schanz, 'Auschwitz og metafysik' , 110. A concise discussion of Adorno's concept of truth appears in Martinson, Perseverance without Doctrine, 69-71. 22 Osborne argues that Adorno's entire project may well be understood as the elaboration of 'a materialist metaphysic of modernity' . This becomes most evident, according to Osborne, in Aesthetic Theory. Peter Osborne, 'Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a"Postmodern" Art' , in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 23. 23 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 120, 128-29; Gesammelte Schriften, 7:182, 193: 'Alle Kunstwerke, und Kunst insgesamt, sind Rätsel; das hat von altersher die Theorie der Kunst irritiert. ' 'Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Kunstwerke ist die objektive Auflösung des Rätsels eines jeden einzelnen. ' 24 One should be careful with the difference between 'Inhalt' (content) and 'Gehalt' (substance): when Adorno speaks of 'Inhalt' he is normally referring to something that can be related (the content of a story, for example), whereas 'Gehalt' , as in 'Wahrheitsgehalt' , refers to a more elusive feature.
Adorno provides no concise explanation for the enigmatic character of art. As is his wont, he approaches this feature in a configuration of statements. Between page 125 and page 128 in Aesthetic Theory, it says, for example, that the enigmatic character is constituted by the immanent processuality of the work of art, that is, by its historicity; what is enigmatic about the artworks is their discontinuity, their lack of transcendence, which is thematized first in Kafka's 'damaged parables'; art is enigmatic since it gives the impression to have solved the enigma of existence; the enigmatic in the artworks is the configuration of mimesis and rationality; the riddle is made up of the zone of indefiniteness between the unattainable and what has been realized in the work of art. And so on. Without entering more deeply into any of these statements, one may note that the many aspects of the enigmatic character make it difficult to arrange it into any harmonizing image of the experience of art. The enigmatic character depends not only on the insufficiency of understanding in the face of the artwork; it is also a result of the non-identity of the artwork. That is why the enigmatic character makes up an invariable threat, not only against understanding, but also against the aesthetic experience as such.
How then should one relate to art? If the insolubility of the riddle is a premise, which attitude is adequate? To try to solve it nevertheless? Has one then really taken the constitutive enigmatic character seriously? Would it not, in the light of the insolubility, be more insightful to refrain from any attempt to find a solution and any effort to say something about the artwork? On the other hand, Adorno underlines that the truth content of the artwork demands interpretation, theoretical reflection, critique (which is expressed in a number of ways throughout Aesthetic Theory) if it is going to unfold at all. Truth subsists in the aesthetic experience that implies the breakdown of understanding; one may only approach it through a 'second reflection' , that is, a form of reflection over the breakdown of understanding as such. It is doubtful, however, whether that makes the situation less aporetic.

V. PERSISTING BEFORE THE ENIGMA
Adorno begins his essay 'Notes on Kafka' with a declaration of his reluctance to take up the task. Kafka's widespread popularity, the false renown that has turned his work into an information bureau -'be it eternal or modern' -makes Adorno sceptical about the possibility of even presenting a dissenting opinion. 26 What he objects to is the widespread tendency to read Kafka symbolically or, more precisely, readings that proceed from the assumption that the particulars of the work form a complex that points above itself, and without interruption passes into a symbolic meaning. Such an assumption may be valid when it comes to a premodern author like Goethe, but not in relation to Kafka. For what is characteristic of Kafka's work is the gap between letter and signification: 'Each sentence is literal and each signifies. The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart and out of the abyss between them blinds the glaring ray of fascination. ' 27 Letter and signification do not form a unity in Kafka. Consequently, every attempt to interpret him conceals rather than reveals something.
The initial reluctance to study Kafka is thus less an expression of an elitist contempt for everything stupid that has been said about Kafka than it is an expression of an insight about the dilemma every critic faces: no matter how one interprets The Trial, the interpretation will inevitably be embraced in -and contribute to -the same stifling layer of significations. In consequence, it is necessary, according to Adorno, to take the novel word for word, to read it literally: 'To guard against this short circuit, which jumps directly to the significance intended by the work, the first rule is: take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above. ' 28 At first glance, this may look like a step in a positivist direction, but the matter is more complicated than that. For together with this argument for a literal reading there is a seemingly opposed demand. Although the sentences in Kafka's work do not tolerate interpretation, they call out for interpretation, against their own good, so to speak. If the chasm between letter and spirit makes it necessary to hold on to the letter, the literal in itself still cannot, according to Adorno, disclose anything. The initial scepticism about the task is also a manifestation of this: it is the hopelessness of the enterprise which 'compels one to persist before the enigma' . 29 What does it mean to persist before an enigma, particularly an enigma that you know you cannot solve? It means, first, that one insists that Kafka's work is a riddle and not the 'information bureau' it has been reduced to. To insist on the enigmatic character of the artwork is thus an implicit rejection of the positivist or nominalist notion, latent in this first rule of Adorno's, of an immediately accessible meaning. All one can do is guess, so to speak. Second, and more important, the persistence in the face of the enigma means that one does not give up, in spite of the insolubility of the enigma. The association is so close that it is almost surprising that Adorno does not compare this to the hopeless persistence in front of the door of the law in Kafka's parable 'Before the Law' . The necessity of the interpretation lies precisely in the fact that Kafka cannot be interpreted, cannot be read symbolically.
The interpreter therefore faces a hopeless dilemma; he or she is tied to the literalness of the text, forced to interpret himself or herself away from that.
'Each sentence says "interpret me", and none will permit it. Each compels the reaction, "that's the way it is", and with it the question, "where have I seen that before?"; the déjà vu is declared permanent. ' 30 It is not easy to make sense of this passage, particularly the talk about recognition and permanent déjà vu. At one level, this is of course the logic of capitalism (the endless repetition of recognizable novelties), but there is obviously more to understand here. Let us leave that problem aside for a while, and return to it later. The artwork does not permit, or endure (dulden), the interpretation it calls for. So far things are clear. In its refusal to be interpreted, it answers 'that's the way it is' (So ist es). That this phrase recurs at least another three times in the essay is an indication of its importance. To some extent this phrase seems to be Adorno's Kafka in a concentrated form; with these words the text destroys every attempt to force a meaning on it. The meaning is drawn back into the literal: 'that's the way it is' -that is, exactly like this wording, not in any other way or sense. The interpretation is thus constantly pushed back to the literal surface from which it has only just set out.
And yet Adorno writes his essay. How, then, does he proceed? How does the persistence 'before the enigma' appear in practice? By way of the assertion that there is a gap between letter and meaning Adorno distances himself from a traditional hermeneutic belief in the possibility of reaching the spirit of the work through its literal surface. The problem with this attitude, Menke notes, is that Adorno operates after all with the same distinction between letter and spirit as is is slightly diminished by the fact that he, in his ambition to give an overarching image of the negative aesthetics of Adorno, tends to disregard some distinctive features of 'Notes on Kafka' . Above all, he ignores -as we shall see -an important third aspect which, to a certain extent, sets aside the opposition between letter and meaning.
But even though Menke's criticism is not beyond objection, his comment should be taken seriously. What is it, after all, he asks, that Adorno accomplishes, apart from a reversal of a hermeneutical approach and thus a confirmation of its premises? What is peculiar about the proposal to adhere to the letter is that Adorno turns out to be bad at following his own rule. The fact is that the discussion, throughout the essay, takes place pretty far from Kafka's text. In that way, his reading may appear a bit sloppy -his statements on Kafka are not really supported by Kafka's oeuvre and the sparse quotations are generally supposed to speak for themselves. The frequent accusation that Adorno's analyses are sketchy and unfinished could then be made about 'Notes on Kafka' as well. 32 Or are those accusations perhaps founded on a misunderstanding? What does Adorno really mean by this 'first rule' he invokes -'take everything literally'?
The literary scholar Isak Winkel Holm contends that there are two aspects of Adorno's notion of literalness: as a rhetorical concept it refers to a proper meaning, in contrast to a figurative sense; as a concept at the level of composition, however, it refers also to a particularity in contrast to a totality. 33 And it is this latter meaning above all, Winkel Holm seems to suggest, that is the point in the essay on Kafka.
That this assumption is reasonable is supported by one of the quotations given earlier: one should take everything literally, Adorno states, and not cover it up 'with concepts invoked from above' , 34 that is, not conceal the particular under general concepts. From this perspective, a literal reading would consequently pay attention not only to the gap in the meaning dimension (letter/signification), but also to the horizontal fractures (part/whole). With that, the remark, made a page or so later, about the importance of dwelling upon 'the incommensurable, opaque details' -that Leni's fingers are connected by a web, that the executioners look like tenors -becomes more comprehensible. 35 The interpretation shall not only adhere to the literalness of language in a traditional sense, but also to the particular a letter to Benjamin, 'What we see in Kafka's gestures is the self-liberation of the creature which has been deprived of the language of things. ' 38 But, one may ask, how does that make sense? And where does it lead in our context? Does one not deprive the gestures of their gesturality in the same moment as one asserts that they may be interpreted? And if they may be interpreted, do they not then provide the same dilemma to the interpreter as language at large? Adorno raises this objection himself, only to overrule it in the next moment, typically without any argument. The beginning of an explanation may, however, be found one page earlier. Kafka turns the relation between concept and gesture upside down, Adorno writes, and continues: 'The gesture is the "that's the way it is"; language, the configuration of which should be truth, is, as a broken one, untruth. ' 39 Here the phrase 'that's the way it is' returns. So how does this comment relate to the passage I quoted earlier? What was being dealt with there was the dilemma of the interpretation: every sentence rejects any attempted interpretation with a'that's the way it is'; with this answer the signification is drawn back into the literalness.
The gesture, we are now told, is this answer. Apparently, when Adorno talks about gestures he refers not only to bodily movements at the level of content in Kafka's oeuvre, but also to something that takes place in the reading, in the aesthetic experience. It is above all this gestural aspect that interests him. 40 If we turn for a moment to a passage in Aesthetic Theory where the expression of art is discussed, this use of the concept of gesture becomes more comprehensible. The expression of art, Adorno writes there, resembles the expression of ordinary, that is, non-aesthetic, things and situations, insofar as they contain a sedimented history that speaks through them. Then he adds: 'Kafka is exemplary for the gesture of art when he carries out the retransformation of expression back into the actual occurrences enciphered in that expression -and from that he derives his irresistibility. Yet expression here becomes doubly puzzling because the sedimented, the expressed meaning, is once more meaningless.  41 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 112; Gesammelte Schriften, 7:170-71: 'Kafka ist darin für den Gestus der Kunst exemplarisch, und zieht daraus seine Unwiderstehlichkeit, daß er solchen Ausdruck in das Geschehende zurückverwandelt, das darin sich chiffriert. Nur wird er doppelt rätselhaft, weil das Sedimentierte, der ausgedrückte Sinn, abermals sinnlos ist. ' as an event -a 'that's the way it is' -in the interpretation: 'gesture' here seems to denote the double movement in which the artwork conceals the meaning which it simultaneously offers. In this oscillating motion all interpretation is, on the one hand, made impossible, while, on the other hand, the movement as such bridges language's fractured nature.
If Kafka is doubly enigmatic, this oscillation is crucial. With this oscillation (the gesture of art) in mind, Adorno's comment about the déjà vu that 'is declared permanent' , which made me halt earlier, suddenly makes sense: the reading of Kafka arouses a feeling of recognition, yet what we recognize is nothing but what we are facing. In the dynamics that evokes this experience, however, lies the promise of something else, something more than what is written, something universal in the particular, eternal in the occasional, metaphysical in the physical.
The problem is that when we try to grasp this in the form of an interpretation, we inevitably turn the permanent déjà vu -that is, the permanent oscillation -into something permanently static. This is probably the way to understand the cryptic last paragraph of the quotation we have already discussed, which includes the idea that 'the déjà vu is declared permanent' .
Kafka, Adorno argues, was facing the impossible task of finding words for the objectless inwardness, but instead of vainly searching for these words, he visualized objectless inwardness gesturally. As Morgan notes: 'It is only the gesture, in its emphatic guise, that can approach a means of expression for the pure space of empty subjectivity but, in the very process of manifesting this expression as bodily gesture, the subject is doubly disgusted and alienated at an element that is seen as alien to the sovereign self. ' 42 This explains the characteristic tableaux in Kafka's work, the strange petrified moments, as well as Adorno's interest in them.
In the same fashion as he isolates, in his thesis on Kierkegaard, 'the cipher-like image that contains no immediately readable meaning, but stands before the reader as a damaged parable' (as Winkel Holm puts it), 43  I indicated above that it is easy to criticize 'Notes on Kafka' for its insufficient argumentation, for the lack of a deductively satisfying demonstration of its conclusions. To that, one could reasonably add its badly arranged content: although the 33-page essay (in the German original) is divided into nine more or less equally long chapters (for Adorno, an unusually reader-oriented device), it is difficult -even after several readings -to form a comprehensive idea of it.
However one struggles to sum up its content and central points, it feels as if one were lacking large parts of text. The reason is that the essay flows along, seemingly aimlessly, discussing this and that -Freud, the Third Reich, sexuality, theology, Expressionism -things partly linked to Kafka. This, I would argue, is not unintentional. On the contrary, the essay is a good example of the strategy of configuration that I discussed earlier: one observation is followed by another and another, in a non-hierarchical, serial design (… and … and … and … and …). It does not lead to any final point; instead it weaves a larger image of Kafka.
But there is another aspect in the way the essay tries to get at Kafka's work.
'Only the visible can be narrated, yet in the same process it becomes completely alien, a picture. Truly a picture. ' 46 At one level, this is a comment on Kafka's attempt to visualize the objectless inwardness, that is, on the function of the gestures and tableaux in his work. It may, however, also be read as a meta-reflection on the interpreter's relation to Kafka's work. Let us take a closer look at a few passages in Adorno's essay: To fully participate in the process that produces the abnormal experiences which in Kafka define the norm, one must have experienced an accident in a large city; uncounted 44 Winkel Holm,Tanken i billedet,113. 45 Ibid., 114. 46 Adorno, 'Notes on Kafka' , 264 (translation modified); 'Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka' , 277-78: 'Nur von Sichtbarem läßt sich erzählen, während es zugleich vollkommen zum Bilde verfremdet wird. Wahrhaft zum Bilde. ' witnesses come forward, proclaiming themselves acquaintances, as though the entire community had gathered to observe the moment when the powerful bus smashed into the flimsy taxicab. The permanent déjà vu is the déjà vu of all. 47 History becomes hell in Kafka because the chance which might have saved was missed. This hell was inaugurated by the late bourgeoisie itself. In the concentration camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated. A middleground was created, inhabited by living skeletons and putrefying bodies, victims unable to take their own lives, Satan's laughter at the hope of abolishing death. As in Kafka's twisted epics, what perished there was that which had provided the criterion of experience -life lived out to its end. 48 His writing feigns a standpoint from which the creation appears as lacerated and mutilated as it itself conceives hell to be. In the middle ages, Jews were tortured and executed 'perversely' -i.e. inversely; as early as Tacitus their religion was branded as perverse in a famous passage. Offenders were hung head down. Kafka, the land-surveyor, photographs the earth's surface just as it must have appeared to these victims during the endless hours of their dying. 49 His world of ideas -as in the 'Natural Theatre of Oklahoma' -resembles a world of shopkeepers; no theologoumenon could describe it more accurately than the title of an American film comedy, 'Shopworn Angel' . Whereas the interiors, where men live, are the homes of the catastrophe, the hide-outs of childhood, forsaken spots like the bottom of the stairs, are the places of hope. The resurrection of the dead would have to take place in the auto graveyards. 50 The Necessity of Over-interpretation: Adorno, the Essay, and the Gesture of Aesthetic Experience What is actually at issue in these passages? Suddenly, the discursive discussions are interrupted by images that are barely integrated into the context. We are talking about strong images, most of them with something violent, almost shocking, about them. They are related to physical experiences, and yet the tacit point seems to be that there is something more to them than the merely corporeal, particular, and literal. Apparently Adorno's purpose -and this is my main point -is to visualize the experiences stored in Kafka's gestures indirectly, using images like these. Instead of interpreting Kafka's tableaux, and thereby covering over the sedimented experiences, he translates them into images of his own. He simply visualizes the forgotten experiences one more time -the procedure is in a way a variant of the 'second reflection' he talks about in Aesthetic Theory. 51 This is all the interpreter of Kafka can do. In accordance with the quotation above ('Only the visible can be narrated, yet in the same process it becomes completely alien, a picture'), one may talk about the visual only by means of images. And the experiences Adorno searches for in Kafka are indeed visual: they are to be found on the surface -in corporeal motions, in the literal, in the particular details -not in something underneath. When Adorno tries to describe these experiences with images of his own, he makes them, as he puts it, completely unfamiliar.
At the same time, there is something peculiarly familiar about the examples above, in particular the first and last ones. Most people probably recognize, from their own lives, the description of the hide-outs of childhood or the depiction of the traffic accident with all the curious witnesses. In that respect the images seem to grasp something general. It is that tension between the simultaneously unfamiliar and familiar character that constitutes the permanent déjà vu, and thus justifies the images. Adorno simply tries to evoke the same oscillation as he finds in Kafka's gestural tableaux.
It is therefore correct that Adorno, as Winkel Holm suspects, focuses and isolates the cipher-like images. But what is interesting is that he also imitates them. Aesthetic understanding, Adorno writes in 'Presuppositions' , can be nothing other than 'a kind of following along afterward [Nachfahren]' , that is, a realization of the objectified process inherent in the artwork. 52 In the Kafka essay, this idea is transformed into practice: instead of vainly searching for the revealing word that would exhaust the meaning of the gestures, Adorno's essay becomes gestural itself. The point is that it thus remains faithful to the oscillation of Kafka's tableaux, while bringing out their general traits. With that, we have finally reached a possible answer to the question of what Adorno has in mind when, in 'The Essay as Form' , he talks about over-interpretation.
The essay becomes true, it says there, 'in its progress, which drives it beyond itself' . 53 The quotation describes what happens now and then in 'Notes on Kafka': the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of the interpretation forces it out of itself. Persistence in the face of the enigma inevitably turns the essay into something other than an account of a secondary interpretation. The essay starts performing its own gestures, presenting its own enigmas, its own images.
Through a configuration of such images, the essay may in the best case present something of the truth content of Kafka's work, without falsifying it.
When Adorno talks about over-interpretation, it is, accordingly, not about driving an interpretation too far, but about a transgression of the current notion of the unity of the symbol (letter/spirit). 54 It is hard to follow the connection from Kafka's text to Adorno's interpretation; it is not possible to analyse one's way, step by step, to the almost hyperbolic images his reading ends up in. They are, to use a comment from 'The Essay as Form' , 'not philologically definitive and conscientious' . 55 At the same time, however, there is a fidelity to the gestural quality of Kafka's work. In that sense, the interpretation is connected to the work on a more profound or, rather, more material level. Or, as it is explained in Aesthetic Theory: the interpretation serves the truth content of the work by transgressing the work. 56 How such a transgression may look in practice can be studied in 'Notes on Kafka' . The criticism of Adorno's faulty analyses is, at least partly, founded on the omission of this aspect. His interpretations are defective from a hermeneutical perspective because they are ultimately something other than traditional interpretations, something more critical in a double sense.

Anders Johansson
Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden anders.johansson@littvet.umu.se The Necessity of Over-interpretation: Adorno, the Essay, and the Gesture of Aesthetic Experience 53 Adorno, 'Essay as Form' , 13; 'Der Essay als Form' , 21: 'in seinem Fortgang, der ihn über sich hinaustreibt' . 54 To put Adorno's over-interpretation into perspective, one could relate it to the discussion between, among others, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and Jonathan Culler in the book Interpretation and Overinterpretation. The central question there is, in broad terms, whether there is a limit where interpretation becomes over-interpretation, and, if the latter, whether there is something reprehensible. Notwithstanding the disagreements, that discussion took place within a hermeneutic paradigm, where the possibility of a symbolic reading was never questioned after all. See Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 55 Adorno, 'Essay as Form' , 4; 'Der Essay als Form' , 11: 'nicht philologisch erhärtet und besonnen' . 56 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 194.