Rebecca Dolgoy (Montreal / FU Berlin): ‘The Work of Art as Archive: Adorno’s Zeitkern as Time Capsule’

If etymologically archive is both arkhe (origin) and arkheia (repository of public records), then it is simultaneously the theory of new beginnings and the praxis of maintaining the already existing. In response to this tension, my essay will examine Adorno’s concept of the Zeitkern (literally: time seed). In Adorno’s work, the Zeitkern takes the form of a work of art. I will argue that: the work of art, first of all, is incarnated temporality, and furthermore, when read as an archive, the work of art both conserves and transforms the historical moment, thereby, in Adorno’s terms, rupturing the temporal continuum.

This rupture is neither a simple tear nor an open hole because it has content. Through this rupture, the historical moment expels a seed, the Zeitkern, containing its genealogy as well as its negative imprint in the form of social critique. This dual character, also exemplified in the simultaneous workings of the archive, is demonstrated in Adorno’s work wherein the Zeitkern is the sublation (Aufhebung: the simultaneous preservation, negation and transcendence) of moments within temporality. As such, Adorno’s Zeitkern also challenges Benjamin’s notion of dialectics at a standstill.

 Though my paper will largely draw from Adorno’s work on art, memory and temporality, I will call upon other thinkers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries notably Marx, Hegel, and Benjamin (particularly in the context of his dialectical images) in order to establish a clear notion of the Zeitkern as archive.