Love of Things: Reconsidering Adorno’s Criticism of Rilke

As Rainer Maria Rilke began to spend more time in Paris around 1900, his contact with Paul Cézanne’s still lifes and his time working as Auguste Rodin’s secretary led him to develop a sophisticated theory of how the artist should relate to the world of things.1 After his work on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1904, Rilke began to express his conception of the artist’s relation to things more concretely through the concept of love. In a letter to an anonymous female friend in August of 1920, Rilke reflected back upon the way that Malte helped shape his relation to things, writing: “Besides, it is he [Malte] who obliges me to continue my devotion, who asks me to love all the things I want to shape with all my faculties of love” (Briefe 246). He continues to write that these things present the poet with a series of questions: “Are you free? Are you ready to consecrate all your love to me […] all the love that exists on earth?”2 (Briefe 246). For Rilke, the role of the artist was not a matter of expressing one’s genius, but rather, to form an attentive, loving response to the world of things. The ability to respond to things in this way is framed here as freedom, and this capacity to love things acts as a litmus test for the artist to determine whether or not they are free. Rilke’s conception inverts the typical, 19th-century relation between the artist and thing: to allow the thing to speak, to allow the thing to question the status of the supposedly autonomous artist. In his New Poems, this inversion is almost omnipresent, not limited to artists and the things they seek to represent, but more generally we find a reversal of the power dynamics between the subject and object. Things are brought to life in Rilke’s poems and, as their invisible powers are revealed, they begin to threaten their perceivers.3