I write here on commentary. This dissertation thus consists of commentary. It comments on texts that I call "commentaries." Commentary consists, minimally, in the relation between a "subject" and an "object" of commentary. Generally speaking, commentary is understood to bear a dependent relation to that which it comments upon. It may follow the order of that which it comments on, if, that is, there is an object of commentary. The "object" may actually consist of a topic, rather than a text or other object. The word "commentary" can thus be applied to any remark; it is, in this way, just another word for "talk." It is, more narrowly, another word for "reading," and more narrowly still, can be used to specify a particular form of reading. One speaks of Heidegger's commentaries on Hölderlin, not because Heidegger insists on this word, but rather, because of the form his reading takes. Commentary is often figured as being a preliminary step, a step that is, perhaps, not productive in and of itself, a step that does not produce an argument but, rather, makes an argument possible. Although Walter Benjamin denigrates commentary at the beginning of his essay on Goethe for precisely this reason, his argument points towards a different relation to commentary. The critic begins with commentary, rather than with the object of commentary.;Although the interest of commentary may derive from the comments themselves, in some cases it may be tied to the status of other work by the same author. All of the texts I have chosen argue for the singularity of something, not necessarily that which they comment upon. As a result, the question is not how to pass from one object of commentary to another, but rather how to pass from commentary to aesthetics. The most important relation at work in these texts is also expressed as a separation: between music and commentary, between music and painting, between art and Dichtung, and between "biographie" and commentary.
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