The Subject’s Destruction? A Note on Adorno’s Sublime

Abstract

Our expectations were far from fulfilled since almost no space had been given to theology. My automatic grammar checking immediately marked this opening sentence as undesirable. It runs against one of the basic rules on which all writing manuals agree: ‘Avoid the passive’. It is not only a question of economy: the passive voice makes sentences excessively wordy. It introduces vagueness and confusion, since the word order situates the cause of the action at the end of the sentence, or even allows omitting it altogether, thereby evading the question ‘By whom?’ The active voice is to be preferred because the reader should know from the outset who the subject of the action is...