SOURCE: Butterfield, Bradley. “Enlightenment's Other in Patrick Süskind's Das Parfum: Adorno and the Ineffable Utopia of Modern Art.” Comparative Literature Studies 32, no. 3 (1995): 401-18.

In the following essay, Butterfield examines Das Parfum in terms of the positive values of the text's negativity as postulated by Theodor Adorno's concept of “determinate negation” which concerns the consciousness of contradiction which denies resolution.

(T)here is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.

Theodor Adorno¹

The legacy of nineteenth-century detective fiction includes an ever growing body of criticism—a poetics of detection, if you will—as well as a number of variations on the detective theme, including what William Spanos has termed “the anti-detective story.”² Peter Brooks finds in the detective plot a paradigm for the way that desire...