The point of departure of this article is the presumption that the avant-garde in arts and literature is always aging. In regard to this thesis, shared by Martin Jay and Theodor W. Adorno, supported by Jürgen Habermas, but with hesitation, my question to be discussed here is how to understand criticism in the late phase of modern age. Criticism, as we know it by reading the essays of Charles Baudelaire, was always an act of provocation, a critique of the conventions and taboos by dealing with them in a rather scandalous way. In cases like these Benjamin talked of a profane enlightenment that we could experience. In his dissertation on “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” Benjamin agued that in regard to novels criticism would emphasize tendencies that were not mentioned in novels so openly. In his understanding criticism was more than a critique of a certain work of literature, but realizing the hidden potentials of a novel.
Compared to the experience of modernity embedded in this theory of criticism the Marxist idea of art – i.e. socialist realism as already criticized by Adorno – looks rather anti-modern. The same could be said about the idea of art in the civil society-group （shimin shakai ha） or in the thought of Martin Heidegger. Japan-centred discourses like those of Nishitani Keiji or Nishio Kanji are anti-modern in a similar way. All four forms of critique regarding modernity fail to grasp the specific outlook of modern societies: the avant-garde’s works of art as “signs of destruction”. According to Adorno these signs proof the “coherence of modernity as an anti-traditionalist explosion”.
In critical comparison to these four trends the article deals with Alexander Kluge’s “Chronicle of Emotions” as a literary phenomenon that binds texts and criticism together. Kluge’s work is seen as a unique example of how to show the actuality of modernity. He follows and continues the paths of Benjamin and Adorno as well as those of Berthold Brecht and Fritz Lang. In Kluge’s writings we see a convergence of criticism and literature with a certain focus on alternatives. Kluge deals with certain events, which could have happened in different ways based on our emotions and on “an ever-evolving ability to ask new questions” （Amir Eshel in “Futurity”）.
