Act/ Art

There is an aphorism from Adorno that ‘every work of art is an uncommitted crime.’

cf this from Zizek:

‘From the perspective of the existing positive laws of a symbolic community, an act appears by definition as a crime.’

Also: ‘A work of art creates the taste by which it is to be consumed’ cf ‘an act.. defines its own conditions, retroactively produces the grounds which justify it.’

The question arises of the relation between Act and Art and of the resemblance between the two.

The work of art, like the act, confronts its author as something alien, object-like. It seems to have exceeded any intention, and redefines (claims a kind of ownership over) its author, rather than the author being able simply to claim it. The writer (or whatever) can never entirely ‘assume’ his/her work, for the work operates according to a logic that has finally escaped him/her.. Kafka writes 'The Judgement' in a single night. It is if he were able to key in to the logic of the story which then carried him, depositing him the following morning, tired and bewildered.


Sometimes a writer will live in the shadow of a great work, be unable to live down, or live up to it. Somehow his freedom and identity has been confiscated by that of which he was nominally the author.

Indeed, it is a commonplace, but many writers (see Kafka's visit to Dr Steiner) report on writing as an experience in which the ‘I’ is almost incidental. Doesn’t Rilke speak of receiving the ‘enigmatic dictation’ of the Duino Elegies. Beckett pictures himself as a 'clerk or scribe'. The writer is taken over, compelled, etc, and yet it is not quite he/ she who is doing the compelling. The writer is ‘de-subjectified’ by his work. The art work has an impetus of its ‘own’ and has made me its object; it calls me to work on it. As with the act, the (Imaginary) ‘I’ is not able to entirely ‘assume responsibility’ for what has arisen – daemons or supernatural instructors are invoked to paper over the gap.


The Act, we are told, transforms it bearer. What does the artwork transform? Is its 'bearer' the author or, somehow, the history of art within which it intervenes? Like the act, it demands new criteria of evaluation, but has also simultaneously given birth to those criteria/ created them through sheer declarative fiat.

So what is the relation here (if any) between the art work and the Act. Is the art work like the ghostly adumbration of the act, does it delineate the shape of the act? Or can it be, in fact, an Act? Or are we merely dealing with a forced analogy here?