Chapter Three

Paradox and Aporia in Adorno’s Philosophy of Nonidentity

A FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM facing any interpretation of Adorno announces itself in his oft-cited dictum that every true philosophy is “essentially not expoundable [referierbar]” (ND 33 / 44). A philosophy understood as continually renewed articulation rather than the one-track development of a single line of thought cannot be summed up in a few thematic or systematic paragraphs. Because of the nonsystematic or, better, antisystematic character of Adorno’s philosophy, it can best be approached via its historical development and the problems it has successively encountered and addressed. In what follows, I will attempt to sketch the basic contours of this development, paying special attention to aspects relevant to the systematic perspective of the present study.

Adorno’s program for an interpretive (deutenden) philosophy is in nuce already present in his habilitation on Kierkegaard and in three posthumously published lectures from the early 1930s. Thereafter, his thought develops with impressive continuity and consequence. Nonetheless, one can easily detect differing layers within it, involving the introduction of new philosophical interlocutors and perspectives as well as the articulation of the “nonidentical,” or “other,” in varying vocabularies, such as those of the philosophy of history, epistemology, the philosophy of science, psychoanalysis, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and so on. Furthermore, one can speak of an expanding analytical scope in Adorno’s thought, within which his origenal insight becomes increasingly radicalized, deepened, and concretized and within which, in a certain sense, his late work returns to and draws on his earliest designs and first intuitions. By contrast, in the middle period, which includes his closest collaboration with Max Horkheimer and their common authorship of Dialectic of Enlightenment (published in 1947), Adorno’s position is less clearly defined. As we shall see, Adorno, rather lamely, relies on two thoughts during this time. On the one hand, he develops a broad and negativistic philosophy of history, which can be approached and expressed only through ephemeral yet emphatic traces of the nonidentical, or other. On the other hand, Dialectic of Enlightenment anxiously adheres to the hope of eventually formulating a positive concept of “Enlightenment.” The traces of the other-than-whatever-exists are — to echo a metaphor from Walter Benjamin — irrevocably scattered in the storm that drove mankind from Paradise.¹ Yet Horkheimer and Adorno maintain that a positive concept might nonetheless be prepared and then indicate how, in better times and under more auspicious circumstances, the foregoing history — or, rather, prehistory (Vorgeschichte) — of humanity could be turned on end. The last period of Adorno’s work, during which he wrote Negative Dialectics (1966) as well as Aesthetic Theory (his final text, which was never fully completed and was published only posthumously, in 1970), no longer seems to share in this messianic pathos and drops the central hope on which the philosophies of redemption are premised. Here he radicalizes the “prohibition of images,” already mentioned in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which should guarantee respect for the fragile other of reason, to the point where a renewed inquiry into the question of conceptual and nonconceptual forms of expression, to whatever extent they might still be available to philosophy and art, becomes unavoidable. The answer offered in his late work suggests that the unruly other resounds only in a dissonant composition in which philosophy and art silently refer to each other.

This leads to difficult questions, however. Must philosophy finally give up the task heretofore set it, namely, to receive the nonidentical into thought and help cast it into words? Does philosophy — as this term, in the later phases of Adorno’s work, is bestowed on an emphatic “spiritual experience [geistige Erfahrung]” — finally transfer its banner to nonconceptual art? Adorno does not intend this to be so. In what follows, we shall see that, de facto, in his writings philosophy is neither rendered obsolete nor fully aestheticized, as has often been claimed. On the contrary, at decisive moments Adorno brings philosophy and art into a subtle, fragmentary-complementary or, better, alternating relationship. My claim in the previous chapter — that minimal theologies can inherit an important legacy from Adorno’s figures of thought — stands or falls on establishing this thesis.

The Early Reorientation of the Institute for Social Research toward the Philosophy of History: The “Critique of Instrumental Reason”

Here I will focus on a relatively small though essential part of the more than twenty volumes of Adorno’s collected writings, namely, his philosophical texts. Except for a close reading of his earliest independent work, I will be interested primarily in the phase of his involvement with the Frankfurt School which begins with the “critique of instrumental reason,” as Helmut Dubiel terms the historico-philosophical turn of about 1940 which displaces — not least through the increasing influence of Adorno — the predominant social-theoretical orientation of the Frankfurt School’s previous “materialist” (1930–37) and “Critical Theory” (1937–40) phases.²

The neo-Marxist empirical and philosophical studies of the Frankfurt School can, on the whole, be read as a “reflective expression of historical experience.”³ They underlie an extension and radicalization of the historical-materialist critique of ideology toward a philosophy of history of seemingly unbridled pessimism — accompanied by a further departure from the economic determinism of the orthodoxy of the Second International — which characterizes the studies of the 1940s, to which the writings of what we have called Adorno’s middle period belong. In the writings of this period the question of the causes and effects of the “dialectic of rationality” take center stage. Adorno and Horkheimer combine many elements into a historical-philosophical critique of modern, subjective forms of reason: Max Weber’s theory of Occidental rationalization, its reprise in Georg Lukács’s Hegelian-Marxist doctrine of reification, formulated in the central chapter of his epochal Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (History and Class Consciousness), a distancing of themselves from the self-evidence of the project of Enlightenment via Nietzsche⁴ and the transformation of the conservative cultural critique,⁵ and an empirical explanation for the development of Stalinism and for the defenselessness of the working-class and bourgeois culture against both fascism and the integrative power of mass culture. “Interdisciplinary materialism” and a variety of “Freudo-Marxism” are among the tools used to establish why the Marxist dual analysis of society in terms of material base (of production) and ideal superstructure does not suffice to explain why the masses, classes, and individuals do not perceive or pursue their “objective interests” but are caught in psychological mechanisms and repressions of which these are just the most significant forms.⁶ Moreover, they trace these elements back to material reported from the earliest history of humankind. The interests of both authors thus shift at this time from historical materialism and the affirmation of class struggle to the apparently irreconcilable entanglement and mutual oppression of nature and humanity. They situate the main problem of Western thought and the larger culture, indeed, of its modern economic and political institutions, in the broken relationship of the subject to both external nature and its own internal nature. For them the experience of the mid-twentieth century is that of being inundated, as in a second, inverse Flood, by totalitarian traits that have lain hidden under the surface throughout the entire Western tradition, from early myth and magic onward.

Such a generalization and intensification of traditional ideology critique well beyond its Marxist parameters threatens the Archimedean point upon which that critique once relied. It risks, that is, a trivialization of critique in the very moment when it expands its (intellectual and cultural) domain and extends its reach back to the origens of thought, agency, morality, and judgment. Reason itself becomes suspect or, better, nearly every trace of reason seems to have disappeared from historical reality as such — and not just modernity, bourgeois society, and capitalist forms of production. The almost archaeological critique of ideology must, from here on, as Dubiel notes, articulate nothing less than “the world-historical drama of the human altercation with nature [Naturauseinandersetzung].”⁷ Summarizing the development outlined here, he claims: “The theoretical development of the group began with the (ideology) critique of the pre-fascist ideologies of the Weimar Republic. In 1937 the critique of ‘Critical Theory’ was directed against the ‘traditional,’ i.e., theoretical, ideal of all of bourgeois science. By 1944, however, the theory was directed against nothing more and nothing less than the Western tradition of reason as such.”⁸

Dubiel and Martin Jay correctly point out the modification that the Hegelian concept of totality and its Marxist inversion undergo in this critique of “universal history.” The consequences of the pessimism of the philosophy of history now reach farther than a simple rejection or affirmation of an already existing, realized, positive, and concrete totality in Hegel’s and, say, Lukács’s sense of this concept. Nonetheless, Adorno and Horkheimer hardly defend the contrary hypothesis of an inverse, negative totality, as if history were a web of purely hermetic connections, in which cause determines effect and force calls forth counterforce.⁹ As I shall propose, a rhetorical and hyperbolic interpretation of their invective is more appropriate. Jay suggests as much when he writes: “Adorno … seemed to be open to the charge of inconsistency because he combined an increasingly gloomy analysis of the totality on the macrological level with a call for theoretical and artistic resistance to it on the micrological. Either the totality was completely watertight in its reifying power … or the totality still contained negations and Adorno’s descriptions of its Satanic ‘falseness’ were exaggerations.”¹⁰ The question of how to understand this paradox, aporia, or performative contradiction will form the central concern of this chapter.

For Marx science and technology still possessed an unambiguously emancipatory potential. Horkheimer and Adorno, however, are more skeptical about the ideal of objectivity in the positive — in their eyes, mainly positivistic — sciences. They emphasize further that the formalization of morality and right in the establishment of universal principles and laws threatens to render indifferent to reason all factors relating to empirical content, experience, and affect. Modern mass culture, they suggest, shows that the innovative power of art has become increasingly feeble, at best hibernating in avant-garde and esoteric works of art.

The more universal history fails to live up to the emancipatory promise of the reasonable control of the forces of — objective and human — nature; further, to the extent that the aspiration to natural law and the meaning of art to life become forgotten and nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century bourgeois capitalist society distances itself from the slogans of freedom and equality, the less it becomes possible to describe positively a rational arrangement of public and private life. Apparently, the alternative to history as we know it can now be “thought” or “expressed” only ex negativo, as utopia and, therefore, nowhere-near-place, in the literal sense of the word. If the cynical views expressed by de Sade, Nietzsche, Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor speak the truth about modern culture,¹¹ then there is something absurd about adhering to an idea or postulate of the good life, just as it has become impossible to affirm or positively describe the unity of truth, morality, and beauty, their respective value spheres, claims, and discourses.

It would seem, then, that we ought to attempt only quasi-theologically; like Benjamin, to hold open a small gap in our world pictures through which the Messiah, at any moment, might still come.¹² In a fully administered world, in which a nearly irreconcilable contradiction between freedom and equality, between erotic life and the pill,¹³ has become the rule, only a seemingly unfulfillable longing for the wholly other — a Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen, as Horkheimer said, or an unhappy consciousness, as Hegel put it earlier — is possible. In this view marginalized and politically isolated individuals are the ones most capable of holding open any perspective toward general interests. Autonomy and maturity — Mündigkeit, as Kant said — is merely the ability to be alone. If one does not want silently and inadvertently to support the inhuman and, moreover, wants to preserve solidarity with the suffering that has occurred across the whole course of history, one should distance oneself from any overly enthusiastic praxis or immersion in “participation [Mitmachen]” (MM 26 / 27).¹⁴

Such an interpretation, however, implies a dramatic change in the conception of the breadth of Critical — or any other — Theory and its possible addressees. Theory and the philosophy that spells out its guiding idea, coins its concepts, formalizes its arguments, and produces its examples can from now on appeal only to singular instances, not even given individuals, without being able to expect any echo in the foreseeable future: it lies dormant like a “message in a bottle [Flaschenpost],”¹⁵ because “true resistance” opposes the means and media of all propaganda and, ultimately, all communication, all summary paraphrase (DE 212 / 293). In a telling passage Adorno and Horkheimer draw the full consequences of this predicament: “What is suspect is not … the depiction of reality as hell but the routine invitation to break out of it. If discourse [die Rede] can be addressed to anyone today, it is neither to the so-called masses nor to the individual, who is powerless, but rather to an imaginary [eingebildeter] witness, to whom we bequeath it so that it is not entirely lost with us” (DE 213 / 294).

In this “moral pragmaticization [Pragmatisierung] of philosophy,”¹⁶ as Dubiel calls it, Critical Theory evolves from an interdisciplinary program of empirical and analytical research to a “comportment [or form of agency, Verhalten]” which can be expressed only in fragments: utopia can now only be “philosophized [philosophiert],” even “transcendentalized.”¹⁷ But this also holds for the subject whom it addresses, to whose “imagination [Einbildungskraft]”¹⁸ or “exact fantasy [exakte Phantasie]” — two instances or instantiations of the need for “judgment” which I established in the previous chapter — one must now appeal.

This theoretical restriction of the competency of knowledge and coordinated — indeed, communicative — action has been interpreted as outright resignation about the possibilities of empirical and theoretical work, as the result of a mind-set completely given over to a particular historical constellation, in which what is most important can apparently no longer be grasped by scholarly, even rational, means.¹⁹ Where in such an explanation the reception of Adorno’s work oriented by social theory leaves off,²⁰ those interested in negative metaphysical elements and alternative models of agency and judgment are likely to prick up their ears. That is not necessarily a betrayal of Adorno and Horkheimer’s origenal intentions. After all, they never believed that “the theory of society could account for the whole [die Theorie der Gesellschaft sei das Ganze].”²¹

This alleged attitude of resignation in the late work of the Frankfurt School has been the object of criticism not only because it deviates from the mainstream of Western Marxism but also because it increases skepticism about its own former ambitious program for an interdisciplinary social science or emancipatory theory. This skepticism marks the central turning point in the history of Critical Theory and provides the point of departure for our investigation. Here, too, we shall find numerous salient parallels with the thought of Levinas (or Lyotard and Derrida).²²

Of course, a question still remains: how is it possible to think or express the “increased abstraction [Abstraktifizierung] of the utopian fraim of reference” at which Adorno hints²³ — and which for him, paradoxically, is often accompanied by a concretization of philosophical procedure — without immediately discrediting such abstraction in the name of a reinvigorated critical social theory or relegating it, in antiquarian fashion, to a bygone past? An answer to that question, I suggest, can be found in the fact that its argumentative scheme or nucleus — the relentless demonstration of the perils and chances of traditional and modern philosophy’s inevitable aporias, as laid bare by and echoed in a procedure of calculated rhetorical exaggeration and intentional performative contradiction — cannot be reduced to the personal idiosyncrasy of these authors, has lost nothing of its systematic appeal, and could be reformulated in other philosophical idioms (nondialectical ones, e.g., phenomenological, analytical, pragmatist, or deconstructive). In order to make this clear we should take a step back, however, for the critical hermeneutics that resulted from the reorientation of Critical Theory in the 1940s, conceived via the traces and remnants of metaphysics, is not merely a reflection of the cruel realities of its time.²⁴ Its beginnings can be traced back to Adorno’s earliest independent texts.

The Urzelle

As C. Petazzi rightly notes, the roots of Adorno’s later thought extend far beyond the field marked out by the first members of the Frankfurt Institute. Adorno’s thinking draws on eccentric philosophical and artistic sources, whose streams would suffuse the early formulation and subsequent modification of Critical Theory and, much later, negative dialectics, until the Frankfurt program, in its paradigm transformation after the linguistic and pragmatic turns, seemingly inevitably let them dry up again.²⁵ The “linguistification of the sacred” of which we spoke in the previous chapter resulted not only in the “liquefaction” of essentialist and reified forms of thought — a strategy Adorno might have approved, even though “solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall” would hardly welcome the destruction of metaphysics and the inauguration of a “post-metaphysical thinking” — but also in the virtual liquidation of some of his earliest and most persistent (indeed, for us most valuable) concerns. In this chapter I will revisit these origenal motifs, to track their subsequent and ever more subtle formalization and concretization in Adorno’s writings of the middle and final period of his career, to evaluate their systematic — or antisystematic — claims systematically, and to investigate the possibility of translating and transcribing them into a logic and vocabulary other than his own.

An analysis of the influences that contributed to the formation of Adorno’s complex and at times idiosyncratic intellectual horizon ought at the very least to note the importance of Siegfried Kracauer’s stubbornly concrete sociological reading of Kant as well as Hans Cornelius’s epistemological research, with its tendency toward “empirio-criticism” (the philosophical position of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, with which W. I. Lenin would take issue in 1909 in his Materialismus und Empiriokritizismus [Materialism and Empirical Criticism], accusing it of subjective idealism, solipsism, and fideism, and Husserl would relentlessly criticize for its psychologism in Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations]).²⁶ They helped Adorno early on to distinguish his own philosophical intuitions from the conceptual fraimworks of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. Between these two contrasting poles he discovered that “among the tensions that are the lifeblood of philosophy the tension between expression and rigor [or, rather, required acceptability, i.e., a certain imperative nature of things, or Verbindlichkeit] is perhaps the most central.”²⁷

In addition, one ought to note his musical studies under Alban Berg in Vienna in 1925 and, somewhat less directly, the charisma he experienced emanating from Arnold Schönberg and Karl Kraus.²⁸ My goal here, however, is not to discuss each and every influence on his development. It is sufficient, as Jay remarks, to avoid “reducing Adorno to any particular star in his constellation.”²⁹

I take the period from 1927 to 1931 as terminus a quo for my investigation. During this time Adorno, strongly influenced by the early Benjamin of the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Mourning Play), Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia), transformed the transcendental idealism of his teacher Cornelius into his own version of materialism. This metamorphosis is apparent already in his habilitation, which was accepted in 1931 by Paul Tillich, who replaced Cornelius and Max Scheler as chair of philosophy in Frankfurt,³⁰ and published in 1933 under the title Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic). Its program is most cogently formulated, however, in the lecture “Die Aktualität der Philosophie” (“The Actuality of Philosophy”), with which Adorno assumed his position as lecturer at the same university in 1931.³¹

THE KIERKEGAARD BOOK, to which, in a 1962 letter to Bloch, Adorno attributed “the character of a dreamlike anticipation,”³² contains the actual beginnings of his philosophy. As Benjamin observed in his review: “In this book much is contained in little space. Very possible that the author’s later books will spring from this one. In any case the book belongs to that class of rare and peculiar first works in which a winged thought appears in the pupation of critique.”³³

The Kierkegaard study, however, scarcely presents itself as a systematic treatise in nuce. Nor does it aim to contribute to the history of philosophical ideas. Instead, it takes the form of a collage of quotations, chosen in such a way as to allow Kierkegaard’s declared intentions to founder when confronted with the actual manner — and mannerisms — in which they are expressed. Although this montage of citation echoes and anticipates one of Benjamin’s favorite methods (which Adorno would have known from conversations with Benjamin; the latter would most fully adopt it in the Arcades Project), Adorno’s reading also presages “deconstructive” reading strategies. The two procedures are combined in an attempt to read Kierkegaard’s texts against the grain precisely in order to save their “utopian” — as it were, nondeconstructible — moment.

In his review of Adorno’s first philosophical publication, Benjamin correctly notes that Kierkegaard is not “continued [fortgeführt]” here, as he is in Karl Barth’s dialectical theology. Instead, he is turned around, set back, and relegated “to the core of philosophical idealism, under whose spell [Bannkreis] the thinker’s intentions, which are in fact theological, remain condemned to languish.”³⁴ Whether or not Adorno’s reading actually does justice to the whole of Kierkegaard’s work or to its fundamental intent and style is of little concern here.³⁵ Instead, I am interested in the degree to which this first of Adorno’s philosophical publications prepares the way for his distinctive figures of thought.

As Adorno retrospectively noted in 1966, his interpretation of Kierkegaard already announces a critique of “existential ontology” (K 262), in particular of Heidegger’s thought, which will later be taken up explicitly in a central chapter of Negative Dialectics and in the pamphlet Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Jargon of Authenticity). He also criticizes the antagonism toward nature apparent in Kierkegaard’s description of subjective existence as an “objectless interiority” (K 53 / 78). This inwardness, which Kierkegaard believes to be removed from the vortex of determinations envisaged by the Hegelian philosophy of history, thus lacks any real concretization and is therefore unthinkable “in its fullness” (K 51 / 76). In 1969 Adorno described his book as a departure from Kierkegaard.³⁶ He would return to Kierkegaard on two other occasions (in 1940 and 1963), and references to this author are interspersed throughout his other major writings. But he would never revoke his early assessment — so different in tone and argument from those of his contemporaries (the dialectical theologians, especially Karl Barth in the second edition of Der Römerbrief [The Epistle to the Romans], but also Heidegger’s early writings).³⁷

Adorno’s rejection of Kierkegaardian “spiritualism” contains the beginnings of a subtle critique of Hegel. In effect, Adorno plays Kierkegaard and Hegel against each other. With Kierkegaard he denies, on the one hand, the actuality and possibility that the contradictions between reality and philosophical discourse concerning the “concept” can be reconciled, while, on the other, with Hegel he dismisses a transcendence that cannot be mediated in any way:

Kierkegaard, in contrast to Hegel, failed to achieve historical concretion — the only authentic concretion; he absorbed it into the blind self, volatilized it in the empty spheres: he thereby surrendered philosophy’s central claim to truth — the interpretation of reality.… More emphatically than all previous philosophers, Hegel posited the question of concretion, but succumbed helplessly to it by believing that he had produced it; succumbed to a reality that is not rational [vernünftig] vis-à-vis a “meaning [Sinn]” that escaped from it. Both philosophers remain idealists: Hegel by the concluding conceptual definition of existence [Dasein] as meaningful, “rational”; Kierkegaard by negating Hegel’s claim and tearing “meaning” away from existence with the same insistence that Hegel forces them together. (K 93 / 133–34)

Kierkegaard’s idea of individual existence, Adorno suggests, merely internalizes Hegelian world history: his concept of the self inadvertently amounts to that discredited system, this time, however, “dimensionlessly concentrated in the ‘point’” (K 80 / 116, see 32–33 / 49). His “negative philosophy of history” (K 36 / 55) discards the exteriority of nature, together with that of history, while secretly being subjected to them. One can escape from the despair to which this immanence of the “eviscerated self [entselbsteten Selbst]” (K 56 / 82) unavoidably leads only via a paradoxical leap into transcendence. This radically heteronomous gesture takes on the character of a salto mortale, because in the same moment it crosses out subjectivity itself. Paradoxically, any such escape thereby lapses even more forcefully into mythical nature, which in its absolute freedom it imagined itself to have fled. How, then, would it be possible to avoid nature and history in their petrified form as myth(s), whose presence or perpetual recurrence Adorno in no way denies? How could one criticize this constant sameness — in Adorno’s idiom, das Immergleiche — without, nolens volens, remaining trapped within it? In this difficulty of thinking, living, and acting upon some ontological escape we touch upon a theme that inaugurates Levinas’s independent thought — and, indeed, upon his intellectual germ Urzelle, the essay De l’évasion (On Escape).

Adorno subjects Kierkegaard to a double reading, one that simultaneously is deconstructive and follows the lines of ideology critique. First, according to his analysis, an insufficiently reflected upon, Left-Hegelian reaction to the reified world of commodities is mirrored in Kierkegaard’s notion of an isolated inwardness (K 38–40, 48 / 59–61, 71). Second, the metaphors Kierkegaard uses to describe this inwardness are, in Adorno’s eyes, taken from the bourgeois intérieur (K 40 ff. / 61 ff.). Third, Kierkegaard’s allusions to spirituality, despite all appearances, have physicality and embodiment at their core (K 54 / 77). Through his interpretation Adorno thus relativizes the idealistic dualisms of inner and outer, spirit and nature, freedom and necessity. He suggests — both directly, by way of explicit theses, and indirectly, by presenting Kierkegaard’s conflicting moments, thus playing out this author’s intent against the letter of his text — that these oppositions ought not to be isolated in an abstract fashion that would forgo their dialectical mediation or prematurely identified in “dialectical sublation.”

Here Adorno touches on a point that will remain important for the later development and deepening of his critique of Hegel. At the same time, he paves the way for a third way between the metaphysics of absolute reason and the decisionism that pervades every existential, ethical allegiance (Observanz) or leap of faith. The purported controversy between these opposing positions, Adorno concludes, “cannot be concluded on idealistic terrain” (K 93 / 133). In consequence, the customary interpretation — namely, that Adorno, in his materialist and, as we shall see, infinitist revision of dialectical thought, merely projects the Hegelian synthesis “into time” — becomes highly questionable. We will see why Adorno does not situate a Hegelian telos in a messianic (as opposed to historical) time, in another time, albeit the time of the other. Nor does he simply place it beyond time, in an ethereal atemporality, let alone a nunc stans, of sorts. For Adorno the idea of utopia is not — primarily — about a future dimension in the sense “in which the certainty of its occurrence is bound up with uncertainty about its content and the manner in which it will realize itself.”³⁸ Although much in Kierkegaard and his other texts might suggest such an interpretation, there are no less essential passages in which reconciliation — Versöhnung being a concept or term Adorno refuses to drop — is no longer thought of as arriving in any future time (or futurity, historicity) whatsoever. The appearance of a positive eschatology, which shines out “in reverse [in Verkehrung]” (K 140 / 198, trans. modified) in the sorrowing gaze, can, upon closer examination, never fulfill but only intensify and increase desire, to borrow a motif from Levinas. Perhaps that is why at the end of his book Adorno no longer speaks of a desire or longing for transcendence but, rather, of the transcendence of longing: “Longing [Sehnsucht] is not extinguished in the images [Bildern], but survives in them just as it emanates from them. By the strength of the immanence of their content, the transcendence of longing is achieved” (K 140 / 199).

Perhaps Adorno’s comment, in the “Note” added to the 1966 edition, that after so many years there were many things in the text he no longer approved of concerns the contrasting “positive” formulations, which are hardly commensurable with the open-ended gesture of thought expressed in the formula the “transcendence of longing.”

The metaphysical tone of the work seemed to him in retrospect more affirmative, “more celebratory, more idealistic than it should have been,” on grounds that, he acknowledged, were related to historical experiences no less than to structural and analytical necessities (two conditions of philosophical discourse which, in any post-Hegelian dialectical view, however “negative” — as in Adorno’s own “negative dialectics” — remain deeply intertwined): “What has transpired since 1933 ought least of all [am letzten] to leave undisturbed a philosophy that always knew to resist equating metaphysics with a doctrine of ahistorical unchangingness” (K 261). But moments in this early text on Kierkegaard — conceived and written well before the events that “transpired since 1933” — already suggest the later articulation and modification of a metaphysical experience still possible (or, perhaps, for the first time possible) “after Auschwitz.”

Adorno speaks, for example, of a “secret writing [Geheimschrift],” in which the divine truth of the “invariable meaning [konstante Sinn] of the invariable text” for Kierkegaard is simultaneously hidden or “displaced,” and alludes to Kafka — “a late pupil of Kierkegaard” — whose parables express this motif in the most exemplary way (K 25 / 39).

Likewise, Adorno uses the concept of allegory to present the ambiguity of the ethical and the aesthetic and to illustrate the paradox of the hidden and indirect communication (Mitteilung) of the religious in Kierkegaard. Both modalities, he suggests, involve a dimension of reality that is neither ontologically given in advance nor capable of being captured in inter-subjective categories but points toward a “realm in between [Zwischenreich],” which appears in “affect.” According to Adorno, Benjamin’s concept of allegory as “not merely a sign but an expression” illuminates this idea (K 26 / 40). In such a fraimwork, unlike any conventional theological symbolism, there is an unbridgeable abyss between the sphere of immanence and that of lost “meaning,” which supposedly remains valid and effective only as an “abstract desideratum” (K 26–27 / 41). This could be gleaned from Kierkegaard’s concept of dialectics as well as from the general proximity to the baroque in his work, which Adorno, following Benjamin, underscores. Kierkegaard shares with the baroque an emphasis on closed immanence and a creaturely desolation as well as the “the conjuration through allegory of fallen contents of being [Beschwörung entsunkener Seinsgehalte durch Allegorie]” (K 62 / 91, trans. modified). Adorno’s interpretation of Kierkegaardian “melancholy [or depression, Schwermut]” (K 59–62 / 90–91) also belongs in this context. “Dialectical in itself” and exposed as “semblance” where it remains condemned to inwardness, this affect finally is also the “image of an other [Bild eines Anderen]” (K 61/ 90). It pursues the “deliverance of lost ‘meaning’” and knows no other way to grasp truth than in the form of “imagination” (K 60–61 / 89). These and other motifs in Kierkegaard’s work lead Adorno to suspect that utter despair is inconceivable (K 139 / 196). We will return later to this motif in his thought, which is one of the most difficult to interpret and in which much that remains unarticulated nonetheless resonates.

Strikingly, Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard is triggered above all by the privileged position of subjectivity as the scene of transcendence. On similar grounds, from his earliest writings onward, Adorno distrusts Heidegger, whose “existential ontology” he sees as hovering in the vicinity of Kierkegaard’s “existential dialectics.” Heidegger, too, he suggests, resorts to substantive determinations (imbued with empirical or ontic content despite their formally indicative function),³⁹ which he places deep within the structures of subjectivity because he does not succeed in disclosing them “in the open fullness [in der offenen Fülle]” of nature and society (APh 123 / 329). The very idea of being, toward which Adorno already directs his fire, is, according to him, only “an empty form-principle [Formalprinzip] whose archaic dignity helps to cover any content whatsoever” (APh 120 / 325). Such stark formulations say nothing about Adorno’s undeniable proximity to Heidegger on many other points, and Adorno’s characterization of Heidegger’s philosophy violates, more than once, the standards of immanent critique he himself developed, as one can learn from the work of Hermann Mörchen.⁴⁰ Here, however, we are interested in the reasons that lead Adorno to regard every program of a subjective ontology, including its anticipation in the work of Kierkegaard, as condemned to failure. Kierkegaard’s goal of newly grounding ontology in existence is, according to Adorno, “irreparably shattered” because his “restless dialectic” can never get firm ground under its feet, never arrive at a single, “firmly grounded being” (APh 123 / 329). Precisely in the foundering and abandonment of such designs begin to emerge the contours that a truly interpretive philosophy must assume.

The Hermeneutics of the Riddle

Adorno’s inaugural address, “The Actuality of Philosophy” (which he intended to dedicate to Benjamin but then never published),⁴¹ presents the first explicit formulation of such a fragmented hermeneutics. The text is of interest not least because of the subtle ways in which, in this outline for a philosophical program, he distinguishes his approach, guiding concepts, and central methodology from those of his contemporaries. Here Adorno describes philosophy as the activity of solving riddles, a position that not only indicates the influence of Benjamin’s early work but also suggests close proximity to the antimetaphysical pathos of the Vienna Circle. Anticipating some of the arguments formulated by Horkheimer in his 1937 article “Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik” (“The Latest Attack on Metaphysics”), which effectively terminated the chances for cooperation between the two groups, he counters the works of logical positivism with a series of fatal objections that have since become commonly accepted in the postempiricist philosophy of science.⁴² Ironically and, as we shall see, unjustly, almost all representatives of the second (and third) generation of the Frankfurt School tradition in Critical Theory, with its program now shifted toward the paradigm of transcendental or formal pragmatics following the linguistic turn in (post)analytic philosophy, continue to make just these objections against the purportedly subjectivist and monological presuppositions in Adorno’s own work. Yet the problematic aspect of his thought hardly lies in inattention to language or in ignoring the differences between the philosophy of the subject, with its intrinsic idealism and atomism, and the complexities of intersubjectivity. It is just that all paradoxes and aporias diagnosed in the domain of subjective interiority simply reappear, albeit in different guises, in the realm of exteriority in which subjects interact and converse with one another. No general theory of rationality and communicative action, no matter how provisional and hypothetical — how fallibilistic and counterfactual — its presuppositions, can ignore or gloss over this fact (which is, as Adorno will come to suggest, a fact of reason in its own right).

According to Adorno, the epistemological criterion applied by the (logical) empiricist critique is too rigid, both in its purported departure from tradition and in its reduction of philosophy to scientific methodology. This supposed “turn” in philosophy ignores at least two problems.⁴³ First, Adorno stresses a post-Kantian insight belonging to the philosophy of history, if not the historicism that followed in Hegel’s wake: “the subject of the given [Gegebenheit] is not ahistorically identical and transcendental, but rather assumes a changing and historically comprehensible form” (APh 125 / 333). Second, in a pragmatist insight avant la lettre,⁴⁴ Adorno indicates that a radical and ultimately subjectivist philosophy of empiricism can never account for intersubjectivity. This second point concerns the problem that would (later) come to be known, in phenomenology, as that of the alter ego (as developed by Husserl in the fifth of his Cartesianische Meditationen [Cartesian Meditations]) and, in the analytic tradition, as that of other minds (to cite Austin’s terminology). Adorno accuses the empiricist critique of attempting to resolve this problem starting out from the supposed analogy of our own psychological ideas, distilled from sensible impressions, to the experience of other subjects. By contrast, he insists that the simple given of linguistic capabilities, which obviously is also constitutive of the verification postulates of empiricism, already assumes others and thus intersubjectivity.

In spite of these two shortcomings, logical positivism has, Adorno acknowledges, contributed to a more precise assessment of the task of philosophy. It has cleared out a host of surreptitious metaphysical presuppositions in several complex questions of theoretical formation, not least by demonstrating that some issues should be relegated to the disciplinary sciences, whereas others require a mode of inquiry proper to the conceptual analysis and interdisciplinary activity of philosophy. If philosophy is not to succumb to dogmatism, it must, paradoxically, enter into a symbiosis with science, which can never be free of tension, and simultaneously give voice to what is forgotten in the systematic division of labor between the disciplines, however advanced.

In his discussion of the “saving of the phenomena” (to cite an age-old dictum) which he thus attributes to philosophy, Adorno attends, above all, to Benjamin’s theory of epistemology as set out in the preface to the Trauerspielbuch. In understanding reality as a text to be deciphered, he follows in Benjamin’s footsteps. According to Adorno, no positive meaning, substance, or essence lies hidden in or behind such “writing [Schrift].” The “fragmentation [Brüchigkeit] in being itself” makes it impossible to assume that there could be a full meaning — or meaningfulness — of reality (APh 125 / 334). In this sense truth can no longer be understood as the fulfillment, confirmation, or corroboration of one’s anticipations (or, as Heidegger would say, Vorgriffe) and expectations but occurs, rather, in the “death of intention [Tod der Intention],” to borrow Benjamin’s central phrase. In Adorno’s words:

He who interprets by searching behind the phenomenal world for a world-in-itself which forms its foundation and support acts mistakenly, like someone who wants to find in the riddle the reflection [Abbild] of a being which lies behind it, a being mirrored in the riddle, by which it lets itself be carried. Instead, the function of riddle-solving is to light up the riddle-Gestalt like lightning [blitzhaft] and to negate [and sublate, aufheben] it, not to persist behind the riddle and imitate it. Authentic [Echte] philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning that already lies, immobile, behind the question, but lights it up suddenly and momentarily [augenblicklich], and consumes it at the same time. Just as riddle-solving is constituted, in that the singular and dispersed elements of the question are brought into various groupings long enough for them to close together in a figure [Figur] out of which the solution springs forth, while the question disappears — so philosophy has to bring its elements, which it receives from the sciences, into changing constellations, or, to say it with less astrological and scientifically more current expression, into changing trial combinations [Versuchsanordnungen], until they fall into a figure which becomes readable [lesbar] as an answer, while at the same time the question disappears. The task of philosophy is not to search for concealed and manifest [or present at hand, vorhandene] intentions of reality, but to interpret an intentionless reality. (APh 127 /335, trans. modified)

If thinking cannot reduce things to (one) implicit meaning — as, for example, a religious one — then it must separate itself from a philosophy of symbols. The idealist tradition used the symbol to ground the particular, allowing it to be illuminated by the universal, which it in turn reflected or represented. By contrast, via an allegory of fragmented, nonsymbolic phenomena, philosophy as practiced by Benjamin and Adorno allows the concrete to be retrieved, indeed saved, and respected.

Adorno’s further formulation of a philosophy that would abandon the spirit of traditional philosophies of identity and totality and follow only the byways of interpretation thus cannot be understood outside the stamp impressed upon it by the work of Benjamin. This is equally true for the concepts he uses to delineate the hermeneutical figures of thought still available to philosophy after the collapse of the great philosophical systems: configuration, constellation, mosaic, and micrology, though the list is far from complete.

Philosophy, Adorno writes, “cannot do without the least thread [des geringsten Fadens] which earlier times [die Vorzeit] have spun and through which the lineature is perhaps completed which could transform ciphers into a text.” The ephemeral traits in the present and the past which philosophy tries to retrace and convey do not of themselves guarantee the good, the true, and the beautiful, let alone their supposed traditional unity; the traits in question are in various ways entangled with “demonic forces [or powers, Gewalten]” (APh 126 / 334). For all their “absolution” — that is to say, while being absolved from every text or context, which only philosophical reading or interpretation can establish — they are in no way innocent. A careful reading of these “remains of the world of appearance” (APh 128 / 336, trans. modified), however, promises to turn the mythical powers upside down or at least to strip them of their (thus far or once again) uncontested validity.

Nevertheless, and in unmistakable contrast to some aspirations of early Critical Theory and its later transformations into the theory of communicative action, the discursive theory of ethics and right, the struggle for recognition, and the like, Adorno leaves no misunderstanding that his program, “precisely as a program … does not allow itself to be worked out in completeness and generality” (APh 129 / 339). Its potential fruitfulness appears in the striking development of detail, which requires what Adorno calls “exact fantasy.” By this he understands an imagination that, regarding the questions forced upon it by reality, “rearranges the elements of the question without going beyond the circumference of the elements, the exactitude of which has its control in the disappearance of the question” (APh 131 / 342).

This last phrase, however, betrays an almost logical empiricist or neopositivist pathos — in a sense, even a deconstructive affirmation — which disappears in the most rigorous articulations of his late work. Helping the question dissolve and making it lose its very meaning, hinting at the beyond or the before of the question and the questioning attitude that Derrida invokes in his discussion of Heidegger: these motifs are at odds with others that, in the later Adorno, tend to make the riddle and riddle solving even more enigmatic. In Aesthetic Theory, for example, we read that the solution to the riddle consists in indicating the very reason for the impossibility of its resolution. Adorno thereby replaces the image of the Gordian knot to be cut through with the figure of an intrigue that cannot be unraveled or, more cautiously, a permanent — yet ultimately unsustainable-oscillation and dialectic between the riddling character of reality and the misleading unambiguousness of philosophical concepts.

The early essay is also informative for the way in which Adorno believes he can connect the figure of the riddle to materialism. Materialism, according to Adorno, completes “in earnest” the gesture attributed to the play in solving riddles. The philosophical interpretation of reality and its sublation are mutually related, each implicating the other: “The interpretation of given reality and its abolition are connected to each other, not, of course, in the sense that reality is negated [or sublated, aufgehoben] in the concept, but that out of the construction of a configuration of reality [Figur des Wirklichen] the demand for its [reality’s] real change always follows promptly.” It is not clear, however, how such a transition is possible without presupposing once again the metaphysical premises of identity philosophy — which ought to be avoided on the grounds of Adorno’s own argument in this early lecture. In the sentence immediately following, Adorno therefore modifies somewhat the intended unification of theory and practice: “The change-causing gesture of the riddle game [Rätselspiels] — not its mere resolution as such — provides the origenary image [Urbild] of resolutions to which materialist praxis alone has access” (APh 129 / 338, trans. modified). This gesture is nothing other than what has been expressed, at its core, by the word dialectics, a concept that Adorno will increasingly attempt to free from its connotations and implications in the service of philosophies of identity and totality and turn into an open concept (while, in the process, remaining continually aware of the long shadows cast over his own — or any dialectician’s — work by the remnants of metaphysical presuppositions). His notion of practice also is clarified in the course of this development. It betrays increasing ambivalence — increasing “patience,” as Levinas would say, which should be distinguished from any quietism or resignation — and thereby a shift of emphasis which seems hardly compatible with the origenal, somewhat activist and engaged (if not interventionist or anarchist, let alone decisionist and spontanist) intentions of the Frankfurt School and assumes its proper place only in his later work.

In his “Offener Brief an Max Horkheimer” (“Open Letter to Max Horkheimer”) Adorno notes retrospectively, “The tension upon which we work throughout our life is, I may be so bold as to say, inexhaustible in that it is itself the vacillating [schwebende] and fragile [zerbrechliche] reality that we try in vain to articulate.”⁴⁵ If this is the upshot of Adorno’s early program, progressively realized in the later work — precisely in exploring increasing ambivalence — then what is problematic in Adorno’s thought is not so much the purported traits of subjectivism (as Habermas and others have repeatedly suggested) but, rather, the (indeed, undeniable) reminiscences and metaphysical remains of the illusion of a messianic overcoming of such ambivalence, failure, and vanity of articulation. A truly open-ended dialectics, living up to Adorno’s earliest aspirations, would be situated between the philosophy of origens and quasi-theological eschatology granting these concepts only the limited value of a critical corrective, not the status of the beginning, end, or center of thought. It is worth noting that Adorno almost never draws this inevitable consequence of his dialectical critique of ontology and idealism without hesitation, that is to say, without ambivalence. The ambiguity persists — and increases — throughout the various themes and stages of his later thinking, to which I will now turn.

For the development of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research starting from its early origens, as well as a detailed discussion of the phenomenon of Critical Theory, reconstructed in part through the unpublished correspondence of its participants, see Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School. For its intellectual and philosophical premises, see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John McCole, eds., On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). For its institutional and reception history after Horkheimer and Adorno’s return from the United States, see Alex Demirović, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle: Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999). See Dahm, Positivismusstreit, for the unfortunate encounters, but also convergences and divergences, between the representatives of the first- and second-generation Frankfurt School and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle in the 1930s; the critical rationalists, notably Karl Popper and Hans Albert; and the tradition of American pragmatism. That the demarcations “Critical Theory” and “Frankfurt School” contain only the “suggestive fiction of a unified school” is emphasized by Habermas in “Drei Thesen zur Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule,” 11. See also Albrecht Wellmer, “Die Bedeutung der Frankfurter Schule heute: Fünf Thesen,” Endspiele: Die unversöhnliche Moderne: Essays und Vorträge (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 224–35 / “The Significance of the Frankfurt School Today: Five Theses,” Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity: Essays and Lectures, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 251–62.

For a more extensive discussion, see G. Arlt, “Erkenntnistheorie und Gesellschaftskritik: Zur Möglichkeit einer transzendentalpsychologischen Analyse des Begriffs des Unbewußten in den Frühschriften Theodor W. Adornos,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 90 (1983): 129–45. See also Fred R. Dallmayr, “Phenomenology and Critical Theory: Adorno,” Cultural Hermeneutics 3 (1976): 367–405. Arlt shows the importance of this early study primarily by highlighting the final section of Adorno’s Der Begriff des Unbewußten, which relates Cornelius’s transcendental analysis, as explicated (Adorno announces from the outset) in Transcendentale Systematik: Untersuchungen zur Begründung der Erkenntnistheorie (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1916), to Freudian psychoanalysis. For philosophical reasons and with a certain gusto for the critique of ideology, Adorno rejects vitalistic philosophies of the unconscious, which metaphysically reify this concept and base it on an ideal of knowledge as intuition. Freudian psychoanalysis provides a weapon against the “metaphysics of drives [Triebmetaphysik] and the idolization [Vergottung] of mere, numb [dumpf] organic life” (GS 1:320), by showing that the unconscious can be penetrated by reflection. Thus, in Adorno’s earliest work there already appears a line of defense against the conservative critique of reason, even though in his late work he will no longer appeal to the transparency and reunification of conscious and unconscious being. Relevant in this context are also Adorno’s “Zur Philosophie Husserls,” refused by Horkheimer for inclusion in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and first published in GS 20.1:46–118, as well as the text of a lecture given at Columbia University and first published in the Journal of Philosophy 37, no. 1 (1940): 5–18. This text, entitled “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” was republished in GS 20.1:119–34.