“The Visual Poetry of the Work”

AbstractThis article addresses the work of the German-language philosopher and theorist Theodor W. Adorno and the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum in order to ask after the form of the subject and the sense of life privileged in critique. I consider the form of the subject and the sense of the social presumed and generalized in Adorno in relation to his reading of Hegel and his discussion of race, anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, and “the American landscape” in aphorisms twenty-eight and sixty-eight in Minima Moralia. Drawing on scholarship in Black and Indigenous studies, I argue that in Adorno a particular sense of the subject, with and against Adorno's language, is advanced: the subject of the law, right, property, and whiteness, what one might call the subject of settler life. I suggest that this is a sense of the subject that privileges its ethicality in relation to social violence and world, and I notice that this privilege is constitutive of what critique, for Adorno, is. I then turn to Hatoum and offer a reading of several of her works and installations alongside her discussion of her art in a series of interviews, where I focus on Light at the End (1989), Present Tense (1996), Hair Lines (1979), and Socle du Monde (1992–1993). I study Hatoum's work in order to understand the sense of the social it enlivens, and the sense of being and language it makes manifest, and I argue that, in Hatoum's work, art becomes critique, critique becomes a theorization of the social, and theorization becomes a temporal practice of sociality, an inessential, inidentical sharing in language and form. In Hatoum's art, a sociality of collective form displaces the critical terms of self-possession, self-orientation, and philosophical self-reflection, where property is unmoored as a logic of reading and life and a principle of form.