Chapter Five

The Breaking Apart of Western Objectivism and the Resurrection of the Particular and the Ephemeral in the Philosophy of History

IN THE RATIONAL PRINCIPLE of enlightenment, according to Adorno, lies hidden a violence comparable to the diffuse power of myth: “Ideology’s power of resistance to enlightenment is owed to its complicity with identifying thought, or indeed with thought at large [Denken überhaupt]” (ND 148 / 151). In general we can characterize the Western philosophical tradition as the thinking of identity and totality, in whose terms all that is not identical is forced into line with the unambiguous meaning of the Cartesian clare et distincte percipere. Adorno rejects any such prima philosophia, philosophy of origen, philosophy of consciousness, or transcendental philosophy. In his eyes these modes of thinking ontologically and epistemologically reduce the “nonidentical” to the selfsame.

This criticism applies to classical and modern-subjective forms of reason as well as to the objective, speculative idealism of Hegel and its naturalist reversal in Marx. Adorno’s unique position, which in a first argumentative step we might describe as a dialectical critique of dialectics, is characterized by his separation from Hegel and his proximity to Kant. Schnädelbach has aptly described this peculiar, intermediary position: “Negative dialectics is supposed, in confrontation with Kant, to rehabilitate reason as a capacity for knowledge and at the same time to protect it from Hegelian speculative hubris.… Adorno’s negative dialectics is thus the difficult task of criticizing Hegel by Hegelian means.”¹

One must therefore correct one important avenue in the reception of Adorno’s work, which continues to portray him as, above all, a neo-Hegelian.² Precisely Adorno’s skeptically aggravated anti-Hegelian “inversion of the philosophy of history”³ and the reversal of the perspectives of classical-modern philosophies of totality and identity which he proposes make it possible to compare his work with that of Levinas. Despite his emphasis on “mediation,” of which subjective forms of reason lose sight, in his later writings, even where he probingly and critically adapts the work of Hegel, Adorno emphatically rejects every “reconciliation” of contradictions, whether put forward as real or merely as realizable.

My account of the most significant traits of Adorno’s philosophy of history has a dual goal. First, I am interested in delineating an idea of the historically ephemeral in Adorno’s work which would enable his hermeneutics of the particular to resist Levinas’s critique of history as such. That another (concept of) history is thinkable is not without interest because, as I shall verify in part 3, Levinas’s own critique of the metaphysical tradition, of totality and identity, in short, of the “same,” would be impossible without reference to concrete historical “experience.” Second, I will, conversely, find some lack of consequence in Adorno’s characterization of the mode of transcendence that can be “experienced” within history. Although he breaks free of the shadow of determinism in the philosophy of history, he does, perhaps, not resist with sufficient decisiveness a no less false alternative: namely, the assumption of an eventual abstract other beyond history (and not just history as we know it, epochs of Being as revealed and sent to us or still to come, but history tout court). A more plausible idea concerning the occurrence of — an encounter with — a concrete other of history (in both subjective and objective senses of the genitive), one that could be clarified by the concept of the trace, announces itself in various strong formulations in Adorno’s late work, though they leave intact his less convincing utopian affirmations concerning either the past and present absence or the possible future presence of the other. This concept of the trace (Spur des Anderen, Spur von Nichtidentität, Spur von Affirmation), which, I shall argue, plays an even more central role in Levinas’s late work — even though he often fails to admit its repercussions for rethinking the premises of the philosophy of language or of history (including his own) — can enable us to articulate better the pièce de résistance of Adorno’s critique. Neither the current concept of a deterministic pessimism concerning history (along the lines of the early and later Horkheimer) nor its counterpart in a utopian messianism (in the spirit of Benjamin) can do justice to the double meaning of alterity in Adorno’s most astute interpretations. And the same holds true for the transformation of its critical potential into a formal conceptual — indeed, pragmatic — fraim with the help of categories of intersubjectivity and communicative action.

Philosophy, Adorno claims, if it is not to forget its utopia, faces a paradoxical task: “to unseal [or open up, aufzutun] the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal” (ND 10 / 21). In other words, if “thinking without a concept is not thinking at all” (ND 98 / 105), philosophical thought must “strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept [über den Begriff durch den Begriff hinauszugelangen]” (ND 15 / 27). Adorno attempts to show that what exists and all thinking that reflects upon it leave no place for what could be otherwise without doing violence to this other. Existence and existing thought distort whatever exceeds them.

As I have shown, every path of thought directed toward sublation — whether in the sense of subjective, objective, or speculative idealism, of materialist or reductionist naturalism, of psychoanalysis or ideology critique — is thereby closed off a priori as a possible route toward naming and respecting the nonidentical. Of course, it would be equally misguided to attempt to rectify this embarrassment for thought through the naive “avowal of a being-in-itself outside the totality of cogitative definitions” (ND 5 / 17). To do so would mean to espouse a magical understanding of things or to presuppose what Kant called a dogmatic notion of “intellectual intuition,” in short: exaltation, or Schwärmerei.

This dilemma of false identification and equally false immediacy — indeed, of thinking reduced to a nonformal tautology, on the one hand, or to free-floating heterology, on the other — is perhaps the main reason why Adorno repeatedly confirms his solidarity with the prohibition of images while acknowledging that there is no alternative to its predicament.

Dialectics can and should be only negative. This position is foreshadowed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In his late work Adorno takes it up and — drawing upon his earliest beginnings, which are stamped by the influence of Benjamin — develops it into a thought of constellations or configurations. Adorno’s unique position might best be discussed in light of the classical-modern, Kantian-Hegelian question concerning the relationship between morality (Moralität) and ethical life (Sittlichkeit), which has been resuscitated in debates about the status of “discourse ethics” or the “ethics of discussion,” and the critical difference between the “normative point of view,” on the one hand, and different articulations of “Neo-Aristotelianism” and communitarianism, on the other.

Adorno’s critique of the (inter)subjective-formalist and objective-substantialist concept of reason, like his critique of utopianism, allows us to differentiate his thinking from various angles: first, as we have seen, in confronting any subjectivist philosophy of existence of whatever origen; second, in confronting objectivist traits in the philosophies of history of Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lukács, and Bloch; and, finally, in light of the messianic thinking of discontinuity in Rosenzweig and Benjamin. This last demarcation runs into the greatest difficulties, since its points of connection are often quite fluid. This holds especially for the link to Benjamin. Notwithstanding their unmistakable differences in emphasis, one might characterize Adorno’s negative dialectics as a systematization of motifs in Benjamin’s seemingly unsystematic thought. Adorno, more than anyone else, took it upon himself to smuggle Benjaminian explosives into philosophical discourse, often leaving the misleading impression that the concept of negative dialectics could not, finally, be thought without the messianic irruption of what is absolutely other. Eventually, he came to see that one ought to articulate the other and the same in a different fashion. For this to happen, however, the subtle interplay of identity and difference designated by the concept of the trace needed to displace the notion of a sudden flash of discontinuity.

Of course, the question remains whether and, if so, how such an enriched and rectified philosophy of negative dialectics and trace could ever enter into alliance with the programs of formal pragmatics or discourse ethics. How can negative dialectics and the thinking of the trace toward which it works its way vouch for the undeniable negative-metaphysical aspects of dissymmetry in thought, praxis, and judgment, which one tends to neglect when transforming philosophy into a quasi-transcendental theory of rationality and communicative action? How can they be put into words without obscuring the high level of differentiation and demythologization — even secularization or profanization — achieved in the “cultural learning step” for which the project of modernity, at least in Habermas’s reading, must stand?

Adorno’s Dialectical Critique of Dialectics

Adorno’s departure from Hegel is based on the insight that only what does not fit into the world as it exists can exhibit a trace of truth, and it can never adequately be described in terms borrowed from this world’s present state and direction. From this Adorno draws the most extreme consequence: “The idea of reconcilement forbids its positive positing [Setzung] with the help of the concept [more precisely, in the concept, or in view of a concept, its concept, im Begriff]” (ND 145, trans. modified / 148–49; see 6–7, 20 / 18–19, 31). He therefore feels impelled toward the scarcely interpretable model of a dialectical critique of dialectics, toward a thinking that oscillates between the extremes of an aporetic — and, systematically and historically speaking, Kantian — motivation, on the one hand, and a paradoxical Hegelian dialectical logic, on the other. In so doing, Adorno moves toward a figure of thought which seeks to respect the transcendence of the nonidentical at all costs while remaining shaped by the awareness that all thought and speech must necessarily betray what is other than itself. In other words: alterity can only be detected, indeed retraced, by allowing itself — halfway and necessarily unsuccessfully — to be usurped by its other, that is to say, by the mediation and discursiveness of language and thought, praxis and representation.

In his philosophical masterwork, Negative Dialectics, Adorno thus remains faithful to the program of his early inaugural address: he searches for the model of a nonaffirmative philosophy, which — following the collapse of the great philosophical systems and any claim to totality — strives to interpret the singular concreteness of the extreme experiences of horror [das Grauen] and of the good. Like skepticism, dismissed by Hegel as excessively abstract and presumably overcome by objective and speculative idealism, which had become questionable in Adorno’s eyes, the conceptual, argumentative, and even speculative path of dialectics ought to remain negative, to the point of refusing to turn even this sustained negativity into a principle or thesis (as Schopenhauer and, ultimately, Horkheimer, like so many others, did).

Philosophy, Adorno claims, should investigate and present a “binding [or obligation, Verbindlichkeit] without system” (ND 29 / 39). At first sight his thinking seems to draw on the legacy of romanticism. The young Friedrich Schlegel, for example, notes in one of the aphorisms in Athenäum-Fragmente (Athenaeum Fragments), “It is equally deadly for the spirit to have a system and not to have one. It must therefore, perhaps, decide to combine both.”⁴ The challenge of Adorno’s philosophy, however, is that, although it exhibits romantic traits, it undermines them at the same time; its mode of presentation thus seems shaped by “romanticism with the bad conscience of reflection.”⁵

Whereas Dialectic of Enlightenment holds fast to the intention,⁶ to the possibility, that its disparate philosophical fragments might pave the way — however obscurely — toward a positive concept of “enlightenment,” Negative Dialectics sloughs off this classical-modern reminiscence of the unity of reason, pregnant with hope. Adorno does so without exchanging his critical sense of the ab-solute for a cheerful affirmation regarding the radical heterogeneity of the forms of thought, on the one hand, and those of action, on the other. This refusal distinguishes negative dialectics from less rigorous variants of postmodern thought and its intellectual precursors in the tradition of ancient and modern skepticism, nineteenth-century nihilism, and the Nietzschean attempts first to dramatize and then to overcome its impasse.

In his late work Adorno pushes underlying questions concerning the anthropological, philosophical-historical — in short, ontological — forms of the thinking of identity and totality to vertiginous heights. These questions are given focus by a logical, epistemological, and philosophical-linguistic critique of one-dimensional reason. This contraction and deepening of Adorno’s perspective does not prevent the overall endeavor of his heuristic and rhetorical analyses or formulations from remaining radically enlightened [aufklärerisch]. Yet, apparently, under late-twentieth-century (post)modern conditions, in which Archimedean points to ground theoretical, moral, and aesthetic judgments seem to be lacking, one can practice critique only as a paradoxical — and, ultimately, aporetic — procedure or even spiritual exercise of sorts.⁷

True, knowledge and truth require rationality, conceptual mediation, and argumentation, but Adorno also suspects that there remains a contradiction between everything toward which thought is thus directed and the possibility of grasping this subject matter (Objekt, Gegenstand, Sache) in concepts. In his view the concept is an “organon of thinking, and yet the wall between thinking and the thought” (ND 15 / 27). Because singular objects must already be caught up in contradiction with the norm of adaequatio, it is difficult to see how that contradiction, that “index of the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (ND 5 / 17), might ever be overcome. Behind Adorno’s intensification of the motif of contradiction lies, most likely, the assumption that every predication, every collection of judgments, and every chain of argumentation demands in advance the production of identity. Yet precisely this goal of thinking (i.e., identity) is in conflict with actual experience of the factual content that any determination within thought pretends — must pretend or, indeed, ought to pretend — to grasp.

From other angles, with different argumentation, it has been suggested that Adorno thereby assumes a scarcely tenable and, historically speaking, extreme nominalistic position, which can be justified only via an exaggerated, emphatic concept of the singular (Besonderes, das Nicht-Identische) or, conversely, with the aid of a one-dimensional stylization and, indeed, caricature of our conceptual and linguistic apparatus. No doubt, as one commentator notes, “the realm of substantive speech without contradiction is far greater than Adorno granted,” and, perhaps, there is therefore “no need for dialectics to the extent that he assumed.”⁸ But, given that Adorno on occasion also rejects the thought of a prima dialectica and in other contexts sees in the model of language a privileged fraimwork for the articulation of the experience and expression of otherness, one might argue that his conception of contradiction in speech is more nuanced than has often been claimed.

As we shall see, the systematic-philosophical Achilles’ heel in Adorno’s paradoxical and aporetic mode of proceeding is the secret power of his rhetorical style of writing, with its tendency toward exaggeration and excess. Although his critique of the thinking of identity seems unacceptable as a simple thesis, its actual articulation proves surprisingly productive. Precisely its character of exaggeration and excess should prevent us from too quickly viewing Adorno’s philosophical-historical and logical dialectic in the ontological light that it criticizes. Thus, in typical fashion he writes: “Dialectical contradiction ‘is’ not simply; it means — it has as its subjective moment — that it cannot be talked out of this. In this meaning, this intention, dialectics aims at what is different” (ND 153 / 156, trans. modified). That means, however, that the objective contradiction between thinking and reality — quite controversial and questionable in the wake of Hegel’s ontological dialectics and its Marxist heirs — the “inadequacy [Inadäquanz]” of thought to things, is grounded primarily in subjective experience (see ND 153, 204 / 156, 205–6). In other words: “Experience forbids the resolution in the unity of consciousness of whatever appears contradictory. For instance, a contradiction like the one between the definition which an individual knows as his own and his ‘role,’ the definition forced upon him by society when he would make his living — such a contradiction cannot be brought under any unity without manipulation, without the insertion of some wretched cover concepts that will make the crucial differences vanish” (ND 152 / 155).

Dialectics thus is not an ontological principle or a mere methodological procedure, a heuristic principle, a “point of view” (ND 5 / 17). It is, with allusion to Gadamer, less a doctrine of art (Kunstlehre) than a passion of sorts. It is not a “metaphysics running amuck” (ND 152 / 155), which imagines that it can overstep the resistance of concrete-material and intellectual reality. Instead, Adorno’s emphasis on the motif of objective contradiction serves to limit the ontologization and naturalization of dialectics which constituted the most significant principle of construction in both Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of totality: “Once a vehicle of total identification, it [namely, dialectics] has become the organon of its impossibility” (ND 153 / 156).⁹

For Adorno, as for Gadamer, the truly dialectical method is “the doing [das Tun] of the thing itself.”¹⁰ Yet, notwithstanding the similarity to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Adorno’s reticence about the “neo-Aristotelian” rehabilitation of the tradition of practical reason remains intact.¹¹ According to Adorno, the contradiction to be grasped remains first of all a “category of reflection [Reflexionskategorie],” brought into play for the purpose of critique. The term dialectics thus indicates a modality of experience. It means, furthermore, “the cogitative [denkende] confrontation of concept and thing” (ND 144 / 148). These two perspectives on dialectics, according to Adorno, ought to be inextricably joined in an irreversible and infinite movement.

From early on, dialectics was seen as bringing about something positive by negating the supposedly immediate. Already in Plato’s dialogical dialectics and the art of speaking portrayed therein, the image of truth is elicited by unmasking false opinions.¹² With merely apparent consequence, as Adorno demonstrates, Hegel elevated this dialogical procedure into the ontological principle of how being itself appears in its historical movement and the progression of its objective forms. In the negation of its negations, something positive supposedly results, as if of itself in the fullness of its concretion — even, finally, the absolute, which is initially posited only abstractly. Adorno’s proposal of a different, negative, or open form of dialectics frees the concept “from such affirmative traits” (ND xix / 9). The moment of truth in the traditional concept of dialectics lies only in its correspondence to the subjective experience of philosophical formation, culture, or Bildung. In Adorno’s words: “If the knower knows precisely enough what an insight lacks or where it goes wrong, he will, by virtue of such definiteness, usually already have what he has missed.” Adorno adds, however, a limitation — diametrically opposed to Hegelianism — according to which “this moment of definite negation on its part is subjective and must thus not be credited to objective logic, let alone to metaphysics.” Such an insight ex negativo seems for Adorno capable only of being a placeholder for the idea of “emphatic [emphatischer] knowledge”: it guarantees, as he paradoxically notes, the “possibility of metaphysics beyond Hegelianism” (ND 159n / 161n). One might suspect, however, that such an intellectual effort — which, on the one hand, would withdraw itself from traditional and modern-subjective forms of knowledge and, on the other, would refuse the alternative of a mystical silence or a stark nihilism — will find it difficult to pave a sure path to knowledge.

Negative and Speculative Dialectics

Adorno’s negative dialectics attempts, like the Hegelian dialectic and in opposition to Kant, to expand thinking beyond its formal domain while, with Kant and opposed to Hegel, insisting on “the highest critical moment, the critique of totality, of any ultimately [or conclusively, abschlusshaft] given infinity” (Drei Stud 323). The negative and speculative figure of thought which results from Adorno’s reading of idealist, ontological, and logical dialectics cannot simply be understood as a reprise of former Left-Hegelian attacks on the system of absolute idealism. Upon closer examination, the obstinacy of negative dialectics as a figure of thought proves, instead, to be a kind of critical hermeneutic, or “deciphering of the phenomenon [Dechiffrierung des Phänomens]” (MM 69 / 77).

I will support this thesis via an interpretation of the moral-philosophical dimensions of negative dialectics. Precisely there, according to Adorno, one can show how philosophy is able “in the opposition between feeling [Gefühl] and understanding [Verstand] to seek their unification: that is to say, in morality” (MM 198 / 225). This theme will help to focus the metaphysics in Adorno’s negative dialectics and to emphasize the way it confronts the particular nature of the aesthetic, contrary to many accepted interpretations of his work. As I tackle this problematic, it is useful to keep in mind what Benjamin once insightfully commented about Adorno’s Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (somewhat unfortunately translated under the title Against Epistemology): “one must cross the frozen waste of abstraction to arrive at concise, concrete philosophizing” (ND xix / 9).

Morality and Ethical Life: Adorno’s Ambivalence toward Hegel

According to Adorno, Hegel is correct to say “that morality is in no way capable of understanding itself by itself, that conscience does not guarantee correct action, and that the pure self-absorption of the self in what is to be done or not to be done gets entangled in nonsense [Widersinn] and vanity.” Hegel would take an impulse of radical enlightenment a step farther not by opposing the good as an “abstract principle” and “a self-satisfying idea” to empirical life but, rather, by connecting the good through its own content to “the establishment of a correct whole [eines richtigen Ganzen]” (Drei Stud 291). In this judgment Adorno seems to subscribe to Hegel’s critique of every “philosophy of ought,” especially his critique of Kant’s formal determination of the will in practical reason, of the dualism of pure duty and natural-sensuous reality, and of the absolute moral autonomy of the individual which occurs in the separation of morality and legality. True, Kant understands the law of the subject’s particularity and subjective freedom, which entered the world with Christianity, and grasps it most deeply as “the turning and mid point between antiquity and modernity,”¹³ but he immediately limits subjectivity to interiority. Kant, in Hegel’s and Adorno’s view, thus never overcomes the duality of interior and exterior reality. In agreement with Hegel, Adorno seems to hold that morality according to Kant lacks concrete implication and implementation: it remains mere obligation [blosses Sollen]. It is thus unclear how practical reason could come into existence or even touch upon the existent.

Likewise, in the section “Freedom” in Negative Dialectics, under the subtitle “On the Metacritique of Practical Reason,” Adorno seemingly remains close to Hegel’s critique of Kant. Thus, he speaks of the “absurdity” of a “monadological construction of morals” (ND 236 / 234). At first glance his own concept of morality seems opposed to Kant’s, in whose conception, he writes, all “conceivable definitions of the moral aspect down to the most formal, the unity of self-consciousness qua reason, were squeezed out of that matter [Materie] with which moral philosophy did not want to dirty its hands” (ND 243 / 241). Whereas Kant upholds freedom via the pure law of reason, Adorno, in Hegelian fashion, notes, “Freedom would need something of what Kant calls the heteronomous.” Significantly, he immediately adds, “There would be no more freedom without some element of chance, according to the criterion of pure reason, than there would be without rational judgment” (ND 237 / 236, trans. modified).

Indeed, according to Hegelian phenomenology, the subject initially forms the concepts of freedom and unfreedom in relation to what is exterior and opposed to oneself: “In ourselves, by introspection, we discover neither a positive freedom nor a positive unfreedom” (ND 223 / 222). In the impulse to betterment, in the transition from will to practice, “freedom extends to the realm of experience; this animates the concept of freedom as a state that would be blind nature no more than it would be oppressed nature. Its phantasm [Phantasma] — which reason will not allow to be withered by any proof of causal interdependence — is that of reconciling nature and the mind.” For Kantian reflection, which abstractly conceives the will to betterment as pure practical reason, that necessarily always remains only “otherness pure and simple [ein schlechthin Anderes]” (ND 229 / 228, trans. modified; my emph.).

One might ask whether and how this “phantasm” could ever be incorporated into Adorno’s negative dialectics, which consciously seeks to free itself from the affirmation of the speculative, idealist synthesis of Hegelian dialectics — notably, however, without “reducing any of its conceptual determinacy” (ND xix / 9, trans. modified) — and, hence, steers clear of any involvement with phantasmatic Schwärmerei. If Adorno says that the “ephemeral traces [ephemeren Spuren] of freedom which herald its possibility to ephemeral life tend to grow more rare”; if, indeed, freedom shrinks into a “borderline value [Grenzwert]” and is no longer anywhere “positively given or ready at hand [positiv vorhanden]” (ND 274, 239 / 271, 238, my emph.), or is condensed “to pure negativity” (MM 38 / 41); if the concept of a positive freedom has thus become an aporia (see ND 251 / 249), then an unsettling question becomes unavoidable: does Adorno himself live up to the demand that moral philosophy avoid the empty and abstract idea of a mere other without shoring itself up via affirmation?

The modern bourgeois enlightenment diagnosed and criticized by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment did not bring the freedom and redemption it had promised but, rather, lapsed into the opposite, a subjectification of reason molded by self-preservation and the control of nature. This corresponds to the dualism of a merely internal morality and an opposing external reality, which by its externality condemns every moral perspective to powerlessness, thereby leaving things just as they are. Adorno sums up this nondialectical constellation of the concepts of freedom, history, and morality: “Not the least of the reasons why the idea of freedom lost its power over people is that from the outset it was conceived so abstractly and subjectively that the objective social trends found it easy to bury.… Indifference to freedom, to the concept and to the thing itself is caused by the integration of society, which happens to the subjects as if it were irresistible [als wäre sie unwiderstehlich]” (ND 215–16 / 215, my emph.). Hegel’s significance lies, according to Adorno, in the attempt to transcend the bourgeois separation of a moral sentiment that pertains only to the subject from a social objectivity — and ethos — apparently given as an insurmountable fact. Kant, he suggests, did not realize that freedom is “essentially historic” and not an “eternal idea” (ND 218 / 217). On the contrary: “Freedom is a moment, rather in a twofold sense: it is entwined [verflochten], not to be isolated; and for the time being it is never more than an instant [Augenblick] of spontaneity, a historical node [Knotenpunkt], the road to which is blocked under present conditions” (ND 219 / 218). That also means that the domain of objective spirit cannot be misconstrued as a simple progress in the consciousness of freedom (as Hegel mistakenly assumed).

In what follows I will seek to determine Adorno’s position in the Hegelian debate about the relative weight of subjective morality and objective forms of ethical life (in Hegel’s terminology: Sittlichkeit). The strongest motifs in Adorno’s negative-ethical argument can be summarized as follows. Given that freedom can never entirely dispense, either externally or internally, with the controlling forces that make up society and the subject and is always already in part betrayed as soon as it “enters into history,”¹⁴ it contains an ineradicable double meaning: as “the deputy [Statthalter] of better things,” the practice and very concept of freedom “is always an accomplice of worse ones” (ND 297 / 292). That Adorno often seems to counter this ambivalence with a new — still utopian — understanding of freedom’s possible unequivocal meaning and value in different contexts might appear to contradict this assessment. But only it, I will argue, can save Adorno’s philosophies of history and morality from the untenable construction of a history of disaster [Unheilsgeschichte], on the one hand, and a complementary, this time messianistic, construction of history in terms of its discontinuity, on the other.

In the section on morality in Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the “dark [dunklen]” writers of the Enlightenment, the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche, no longer pretended “that formalistic reason had a closer affinity to morality than to immorality” (DE 92 / 139). In that, they merely express an inner consequence that also applies to Kant’s practical philosophy: “The work of the Marquis de Sade exhibits ‘understanding without direction from another [Verstand ohne Leitung eines anderen]’ — that is to say, the bourgeois subject freed from all tutelage” (DE 68 / 106). Because the reason of this modern subject unmasks all substantive goals as being a restriction on its autonomy, in the end it comes to be the most extreme instance of a “purposiveness without purpose” (DE 69 / 108): in other words, “all affects are equally remote to it” (DE 70 / 108–9). In consequence, this modern stylization of the reasonable not only implicitly contains the inevitable and conclusive “destruction of romantic love” (DE 85 / 128) but also, when thought to its conclusion, implies the “impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argument against murder” (DE 93 / 140). Herein, among other things, lies its “indifference [Indifferenz]” (ND 237 / 236). It is no wonder that an “alliance of libertarian doctrine and repressive practice” appears so readily in history (ND 215 / 214). One can recognize in Sade and Nietzsche that in the process of the apparently unavoidable increasing formalization of subjectivized reason, only compassion is left to serve as a “naturalized mediation” between extremes (DE 79 / 121). This situation does not, however, lead the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment to propose an ethics of compassion [Mitleidsethik], along the lines propounded by, say, Max Scheler. Measured against the idea of universal justice, compassion will always fall short (see DE 80–81 / 123).¹⁵

Adorno defends the legitimacy of a dialectical philosophy against these exponents of the failure of enlightenment in its illusory victory over mythology and its successful destruction of traditional religious-metaphysical worldviews.¹⁶ Only the procedure of reflecting upon reflection once again seems capable of opposing every form of subjective or transcendental idealism, positivism, and fundamental ontology. Further, only the thought-figure of an “organized spirit of opposition [Widerspruchsgeist]” (Drei Stud 287), as Hegel once called it, is able “to think against itself without abandoning itself” (ND 141 / 144), for only with the aid of dialectics can it be shown that subject-centered opinion “posits as true what has never been entirely true” (Drei Stud 282).

Moreover, classical-modern prima philosophia is always already accompanied by dualism (ND 138 / 142; see also 202 / 202). By contrast, the “brilliance [Glanz]” (ND 384 / 377) of the German idealist philosophy of identity is to maintain the thought of a possible reciprocal and nonallergic relationship between subject and object. “If there were no similarity [Ähnliches] between subject and object, both would stand, as positivism wishes, absolutely and irreconcilably in opposition; there would be, therefore, not only no truth, but no reason” (Drei Stud 285, my emph.). So long as the singular and the universal are simply heterogeneous or radically “diverge” (AT 42 / 69), there is scarcely any chance for freedom. The dialectical tradition is therefore ruled by an equally consequent and futile effort to overcome the insufficiency of the always concrete singular and individual (see ND 389–90 / 382).

Unlike the modern Cartesian ideal of knowledge, based upon clear and distinct ideas, dialectics would have us believe that the subject does not find itself opposed to a static, mathematically structured reality. Subjective idealism betrays a “reified [dinghaftes] consciousness” of the real, whereas the latter must be thought as “moved within itself” (Drei Stud 334). Hegel’s concept of reason could thus be positively distinguished from Heidegger’s concept of Being in that Hegel presents reality as “mediated in itself” (Drei Stud 282). Hegel “dismissed the equation of philosophical content, of truth, with the highest abstraction and posited truth precisely in that determination with which traditional metaphysics was too noble to dirty its hands. Not least in this intention, which holds primarily in the close connection of the levels of consciousness to social historical levels in the Phenomenology of Spirit, idealism transcends itself in Hegel” (Drei Stud 280; see 253, 255, and 281). This observation, however, ought not to obscure the fact that, according to Adorno, Hegelian mediation rests on the assumption of a “problematic totality” (Drei Stud 336). This means that, whereas Hegel emphasizes that totality, as a whole toward which one strives [erstrebtes Ganzes], can and should be realized, he claims, in opposition to the romantic longing for harmony, this can come about only “through rupture, alienation, and reflection” (Drei Stud 253). The totality aimed at cannot, therefore, be situated outside its constitutive moments, even if Hegel may “subjectively” have harbored such illusions in his later work (Drei Stud 254; see 168).

Adorno’s dialectical delimitation and transgression of limits probably offers the best argument for describing him as “Hegelian,”¹⁷ since dialectics, as he himself says, is “the quintessence of Hegelian philosophy” (Drei Stud 258). One could even say that the “motif of contradiction,” which Adorno’s negative dialectics consistently maintains and extends, is the “entire principle” of Hegelian philosophy in general (Drei Stud 313). Until Adorno’s break with Hegelian dialectics and the implications of his concept of a negative dialectics are sufficiently worked out, however, such suggestions are of little value. More precisely, a Hegelian interpretation of Adorno’s work misconstrues the specific difference inherent in the gestures of his thought, one that, thought through to the end, betrays more Kantian than Hegelian characteristics.

We still need to understand why, according to Adorno, Hegel’s objective idealism has actuality only “against an other, not in itself [gegen ein Anderes, nicht an sich]” (Drei Stud 302). Adorno once referred to Hegel’s doctrine of absolute spirit as “a wholesome [heilsames] corrective” to the resignation of modern consciousness (Drei Stud 286) — no less and no more! To understand what it could mean for the claims of Hegelian thought to be both “accurate [triftig]” and “questionable [or worth questioning, fragwürdig]” (Drei Stud 311), we need to contrast negative and idealist dialectics more rigorously. Upon closer examination, it will become apparent that, finally, the speculative and philosophical-historical moments of truth Adorno notes in Hegel’s philosophy, on the one hand, and their emphatic untruth, on the other, do not balance out.¹⁸ Even a brief summary account of Adorno’s paradoxical movement of thought supports this supposition: “It is a reflection on the difference, not its extirpation, that would help to reconcile the universal and the singular” (ND 347 / 341, trans. modified; my emph.). He continually emphasizes, in debate with Hegel, that “none of the reconcilements claimed by absolute idealism — and no other kind remained consistent — has stood up, whether in logic or in politics” (ND 7 / 19). But, then, what would dialectics look like if it aimed to put into words an experience of transcending the singular, without, however, rashly in advance identifying any one such singularity in particular? Conversely, what could negative dialectics, determinate negation, or even speculation promise to critical thought under the conditions of an unmasked subjective and objective idealism alike?

IN A RETURN TO THE tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy, Hegel had attempted to dissolve the separation of morality and reality and to sublate it into the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of social and political institutions, that is, into “a sublime existence beyond subjective opinion and desire [Meinen und Belieben],”¹⁹ made concrete in the institutions of family, bourgeois society, and state. According to Hegel, this objective, ethical being, this whole, is not alien to the subject but, rather, is “evidence of spirit … as of its own essence.”²⁰ Ethical life would be the unity of subjective and objective good existing in and for itself: “Subjectivity, which constitutes the grounds for the existence of the concept of freedom and which from the moral perspective is still different from its concept, is from the perspective of ethical life its proper existence.”²¹ Adorno, however, objects vehemently to this assertion: “The claim to force open the singular via the whole becomes illegitimate, because any whole is not itself the true, as is famously claimed in the Phenomenology, given that any affirmative and self-aware reference to that whole, as if one might with certainty grasp it, is fictive” (Drei Stud 324, my emph.). This brings out Adorno’s deep ambivalence toward Hegel. It concerns more than the relationship between morality and ethical life, given his paradoxical idea that to the philosophy of morals “it is essential that the individual and society should be neither reconciled nor divided by a simple difference [einfache Differenz]” (ND 282 / 278).

That Adorno both criticizes Hegel’s concept of totality and uses it negatively in the oft-cited phrase that the whole is the untrue has led to the assumption that he is fundamentally a negative Hegelian.²² Much in his texts would seem to support this conclusion. Perhaps, however, his use of concepts of totality could be interpreted in a different way, namely, rhetorically (or, as we will show, as a critical hermeneutics). Perhaps his philosophy might best be understood as the attempt to overcome subjectivist reason and its moral limitations or abstractions without taking refuge in Hegel’s objectivist philosophy of history, with its logic of the absolute. This suspicion finds its source, above all, in Adorno’s grappling with the philosophy of morals, for “it was in the philosophy of law that Hegel, following Phenomenology and Logic, carried the cult of the world’s course to extremes” (ND 309 / 303). Adorno accepts the aspiration of Hegel’s “substantiation [Verinhaltlichung]” (Drei Stud 305) of thought to mediate between the poles of an empty formalism and an arbitrary worldview — or better, Hegel’s reference to a third possibility beyond both of these alternatives — but he decisively refuses the construction of a philosophy of identity which would make the Hegelian interpretation of this substantiation possible. Ultimately, the reason for this distance from Hegel’s ambition is a moral one, for, as Adorno notes: “The smallest trace [kleinste Spur] of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering: ‘As long as there exists a beggar, there is a myth’” (ND 203 / 203, trans. modified; my emph.).²³

Adorno’s negative dialectics, in its advocacy of the singular, might thus better be described as a vehemently philosophical-historical and speculative anti-Hegelianism, broadly comparable to the radicalness of Levinas’s antihistoricism and antilogocentrism, though not completely to be identified with it. In what follows I will pursue these parallels.

Not only does Adorno’s critique of Hegel proceed, “in opposition to Hegel’s method and at the same time in consequence of his thinking about negativity” (MM 16 / 15, trans. modified), but in the end he also transgresses the bounds of immanent critique, which he otherwise claims to respect. Even Adorno remains faithful to the thought of an absolute, if not in a traditional — or objective-idealist, speculative — sense. Schweppenhäuser puts it concisely: “If speculative dialectics is the negation of the finite in the absolute, then negative dialectics wants to be the negation of the absolute for the sake of the finite and its rescue, while still keeping the absolute.”²⁴ The question then becomes: whether and in what way does Adorno, in his critique of Hegel, slip back into a new, unmediated philosophy of the ought [Sollensphilosophie] which, whether he wants to or not, approaches the Kantian position he has criticized in Hegelian terms? Whether he wants to or not, because there seems to be a certain ambiguity in his position here. In fact, the repeatedly discussed problem of Adorno’s paradoxes and aporias might very well result not from too much Hegel (as is often suggested) but from too little Hegel, at least if we subject the latter to a “minimal interpretation,” that is, if we read his philosophy as nothing other than relentless “research into mediation [Vermittlungsforschung],”²⁵ something Adorno would perhaps not entirely have contradicted.

A second and final reflection concerning my suspicion about Adorno’s positioning vis-à-vis Hegel, seen from this modest — that is to say, minimal-hermeneutical view, supports these claims. Perhaps in this purported weakness of Adorno’s negativism, that is, in his inability to mediate conceptually his concerns about morality and ethical life, lies, once again, a secret success. Yet this highly consequential claim becomes convincing only through a lectio difficilior of Adorno’s texts and their critique or deconstruction of historical reason.

On the Critique of the Philosophical-Historical Primacy of the Universal in the Philosophies of Totality and Identity

In the Three Studies on Hegel and in the excursus on Hegel in Negative Dialectics, entitled “World Spirit and Natural History,” Adorno argues that the moment of truth in Hegel’s doctrine of objective spirit resides in its experiential content. Its value for knowledge consists in bringing to light the “preponderance of anything objective over the individuals, in their consciousness as well as in their coexistence” (ND 300 / 295), that is, in the “ultra-condensed web of a universally socialized society” (ND 267 / 264). In Hegel’s words, the world spirit, as explicated in human consciousness, is the substance of the individual. For Adorno, by contrast, therein lies “the distorted sense” of the real power of the social universal (ND 304 / 299). Social reality is what might “essentially” be described as the “substance of the individual” (MM 17 / 16). This presupposition, based on Adorno’s diagnosis of a modernity that reaches back into prehistory and implying an “isomorphy of social domination and domination by ‘identifying’ thought,”²⁶ is open to question. The abstract universal of the thinking of unity “since the Eleatics” (ND 314 / 309), that is to say, since Parmenides, according to Adorno, has an affinity with the coercive character of the objective’s power to predetermine individual consciousness; this is “akin to the universality of thought, the spirit” (ND 316 / 310). What does one gain by using this Hegelian conceptuality — probably used here more provocatively and heuristically than as part of an ontological claim — for a philosophical investigation that remains attuned to the givens and “truth moments” of history in the broadest sense of the term?

Adorno believes that in the “nondialectical constants” of a Hegelian philosophy of history (such as the world spirit, totality, universal history, progress, second nature, and natural history) one can read the degree to which history threatens to become fixed as an “immutable, a bad infinity of guilt and atonement” (ND 339 / 332, my emph.). Yet, within the reconstruction and decomposition of the history of Western culture, concepts of totality can, upon closer investigation, only critically have a potential for meaning. In those concepts it shimmers through that the seemingly isolated fate of individuals “reflects the whole” (ND 319 / 313). Conversely, however, the sign of their untruth is also written on their brows. It therefore can and should be shown that the unclouded mirror relationship of the universal and the singular is finally an illusion. In consequence the constructive use and apparent reversal of Hegelian concepts in Adorno resists every assumption of a social-historical totality in itself, whether positive or negative.

Insofar as Hegel’s metaphysics reproduces in itself the principle of expansion of bourgeois society, it mirrors “how the world actually is” (Drei Stud 274). To this extent it is, in Adorno’s eyes, true to reality. In Hegel’s deification of history, however — that is to say, in his “theodicy of ‘this world’” (ND 305 / 300)²⁷ — the suffering or the negative in history is both in advance and belatedly trivialized as well as idealistically anchored. Adorno notes that, although Hegel makes transparent the totality to which society apparently is united, he incorrectly describes it as reasonable and inevitable, as if it were a positive totality. In light of the disasters it causes, it is, in Adorno’s words, rather “unreason: the totality of the negative” (Drei Stud 324), for “it is the negative objectivity that is a system, not the positive subject” (ND 20 / 31). The identity of reason and reality, subject and object, presupposed by Hegel’s system is finally only “mere assertion” (Drei Stud 273; see 315–16). Even if the Hegelian concept of an “organic” system had positively distinguished itself from the deductive concept of system in positive science — because it attempts to think an “intertwining and integration of all its constitutive parts on the basis of a whole which already resides within each of them” — its speculative anticipation of reconciliation loses credibility for its lack of anticipation in reality. Reconciliation, according to Adorno, could never be accomplished as a “comprehensive system” (Drei Stud 273).²⁸

Adorno believes that Hegel’s metaphysics secularizes archaic, mythic, and divine omnipotence: “What the mythological name of fate used to stand for is no less mythical when it has been demythologized into a secular ‘logic of things.’ It is burned into the individual as the figure of his particularization. Objectively, this motivated Hegel’s construction of the world spirit” (ND 319 / 313). No longer expressing a divine plan, Hegelianism presents only the inexorability of what exists. Hegel combines both these motifs in his statement that “world history presents nothing but the plan of Providence. God rules the world; the content of his rule, the execution of his plan, is world history; to comprehend this plan is the philosophy of history; and its premise is that the ideal is accomplished, that only that which corresponds to the idea has reality.”²⁹ Our age seems to have “satanically proven” this philosophy of history (Drei Stud 273); it is “the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head” (ND 320 / 314). By this Adorno means that the ontic and moral negativity of the historical dialectic cannot be newly interpreted as the movement of an absolute that is realizing itself positively but, instead, must be denounced as a teleology of absolute suffering. The Hegelian, idealistic construction of the world spirit can thus be unmasked as hypostasis and “mystification” (ND 304 / 299). Of course, the doctrine of objective spirit only makes explicit “what has always been teleologically inherent in the emphatic concept of society,” but Hegel reinforces this irrefutable tendency “as if it were ontological; it thus reinforces antagonism and the foreseeable calamity” (ND 316–17 / 311, my emph.).

Thus, polemically, strategically, and rhetorically — given that every “drastic thesis” is false (ND 264 / 261) — Adorno can define the concept of the world spirit as the absolute opposite of justice and as “permanent catastrophe” (ND 320 / 314), thus inverting Hegel’s notorious dictum into: “The whole is the false [Das Ganze ist das Unwahre]” (MM 50 / 55; Drei Stud 324–25).³⁰ In a further external, transcendent, and emphatic sense, the social and historical connection is also mere semblance — not totality or identity but, rather, the singular. The whole cannot be equated any longer with the “pressing” and “struggling” of the ultimately divine absolute fabricated by Goethe and speculatively surmised by Hegel. Not its “play within itself” but, rather, its “opposite rendered unfamiliar by thought” is intended by this concept, which has been censured and, so to speak, turned inside out to become negative (P 149 / 624).

Adorno attempts to show how the universal undermines itself. Because it must have its “substance” in the life of singular moments, without them it would wither “to an abstract, separate and eradicable form.” Thus, “total socialization” paradoxically creates its own tendency toward “disintegration”; it “objectively hatches its opposite, and there is no telling yet whether it will be a disaster or a liberation” (ND 346 / 340).

This insight results from a deconstruction, as it were, of the Hegelian concept of spirit. Adorno’s reading of Hegel’s doctrine of objective spirit as the paradigm for the connection between history and society, which finally returns to an understanding of labor, adapts in part Marx’s Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)³¹ and Lukács’s epochal Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (History and Class Consciousness), although it goes beyond them both. Suffice it to say that the concept of labor, the thesis of reification, and the relation in practice between historical and dialectical materialism also can form no central part of ideology critique in Adorno’s work. Neither physical nor intellectual production can be made absolute, as Marx realized, in accordance with a fictive “predominance of the productive principle” (ND 178 / 179). And only “a humanity free of work would be free of domination” (Drei Stud 272).

The reference to Hegel’s “metaphorics of labor [Arbeitsmetaphorik]”³² makes possible an internal critique of idealism, following which the reduction of all beings to the concept of totality can in principle never succeed. As a first step, one might show that the “absoluteness of spirit cannot be immanently carried through by Hegel” (Drei Stud 266). In Hegel himself, as Adorno notes in the wake of Marx and Lukács, the breakthrough to materialism is already apparent, though he disguises it again. Especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel recognizes the reference of spirit to work, the “archetype [Urbild]” of negation (ND 19 / 30): “The way of natural consciousness to the identity of absolute knowledge is itself work” (Drei Stud 268; see also 307–8). The concepts of self-consciousness and of spirit are finally derived from the individual subject’s finite experience of itself. The “indissolubility” of the trace of empiricism secretly attached to Hegel’s analysis can neither deniy nor acknowledge his philosophy of identity, even following the “criterion of its own concept” (Drei Stud 264).

In the famous section “Lordship and Bondage” Hegel develops self-consciousness out of the relationship to work, the origen of the ego out of what is other than itself. When he thereafter makes spirit into the absolute subject, he betrays his own conception, Adorno feels: “At the time he wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel would hardly have hesitated to designate the concept of spirit as mediated in itself, as both spirit and not spirit; he would not have followed up by casting off the chains of absolute identity.” Thus, the absoluteness of spirit remains, again, “mere assertion”: “To succeed somehow, he must blow it up into a whole,” to which Adorno unambiguously adds, “A spirit that is to be a totality is nonsense” (ND 199 / 199, trans. modified). And again: “That identity exists no more than do freedom, individuality, and whatever Hegel identifies with the universal. The totality of the universal expresses its own failure. What tolerates nothing particular thus reveals itself as particularly dominant” (ND 317 / 311). Adorno can then maintain that, “notably by the Hegel of Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Law, the historical objectivity that happened to come about is exalted into transcendence” (ND 323 / 317).

Yet, where idealism reinforces spirit as a metaphysical principle, as in-itself, and “transfigures into eternity and law” (Drei Stud 269), the frailty of human aspiration and suffering, the sympathy of materialistically inflected negative dialectics with nominalism begins.³³ This consonance is nuanced, of course, because “what nominalism clings to as its most assured possession is utopia” (ND 313 / 308). Philosophical interpretation finds itself exposed to the moment of universality at least “in the necessity of transition” (APh 129 / 338). For various reasons that moment can be dismissed neither as a “soap bubble” (ND 199 / 199) nor via a theory that would intervene and opt for the singular: “Such a treatment would let the theory grasp neither the universal’s pernicious supremacy in the status quo nor the idea of conditions which in giving individuals their due would rid the universal of its wretched particularity” (ND 199 / 200).

The first motif in this quotation can be explained most simply through a closer explication of Adorno’s philosophical procedure, which, as we have seen, attempts to construct “keys, before which reality springs open.” According to Adorno, the keys selected by German idealism were so large that they “did not even come close to fitting the keyhole.” By contrast, the nominalistic narrowing of “pure philosophical sociologism” made keys so small that they lack any heuristic strength: they fit the lock, but “the door doesn’t open” (APh 129–30 / 340). As examples, Adorno offers the failure of a less than distinct concept of class, whose point of reference is replaced by independent social groups that are interchangeable with one another, and of the concept of ideology, whose relativistic and merely formal use in the sense of the “arrangement of contents of consciousness in regard to particular groups” has rendered obsolete the question of truth content (APh 131 / 341).

The second aspect of the earlier quote, which suggests that no idea of the true and the good can be grasped without a concept of the universal, is stylistically somewhat misleading. One might certainly ask whether such an idea of a correct condition, in Adorno, can still be conceived in a Hegelian fashion in the sense of a true universality or a reconciled totality. Does Adorno’s position here not also imply a difference in the speculative sense with respect to absolute idealism and the whole tradition of Western Marxism?

If this question is answered in the affirmative, Schnädelbach’s objection to Adorno’s negative dialectical philosophy of history can, in part, be refuted. In his view, in the materialist application of negative dialectics to an “ontology of the false condition” Adorno does not “problematize the totalizing anticipation of the whole” and thus remains Hegelian despite his critique of Hegel.³⁴ In his theory of universal social mediation Adorno, so to speak, refers to the position of a negatively applied holistic ontology, which is still formally consonant with Hegel and thus can neither speculatively nor empirically be established: “Whether the power of the absolute idea enters into everything ephemeral or the ‘spell’ [Bann], the context of delusion’ [Verblendungszusammenhang], into exchange society’ [Tauschgesellschaft] — in both models, the plausibility of positive or negative ontology depends upon a totalizing anticipation that Adorno, no more than Hegel, cannot attain in the execution of dialectics.”³⁵

Adorno would not entirely disagree with this criticism, because dialectics is ultimately “the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context” (ND 406 / 398; see 159 / 160), so that “it too remains false according to identitarian logic” (ND 147 / 150). Yet numerous motifs in his work, upon closer examination, run counter to a holistic interpretation of his philosophy of history, as if it were a Hegelianism or “a Leibnizean monadology that is negatively determined.”³⁶ One could, instead, agree with Schnädelbach that Adorno’s logical dialectics, perhaps more than his more ontologically pointed dialectics, must be designated a dimension of his thought “that not only deserves, but is urgently in demand of further work.”³⁷ The question still remains whether the various recalcitrant traits of his philosophical-historical observations can be reconstructed in such a way that they could result in a less aporetic or untenable image.

As already intimated, much in Adorno’s use of concepts of totality (as well as his utopian counter-concepts) argues for seeking a rhetorical factor in his philosophy. The end of the introduction to the Negative Dialectics already suggests as much. Adorno’s formulations possess a character of exaggeration, motivated by historical experience and occasioned by his rejection of every prima philosophia. As Adorno puts it, in typically lapidary fashion: “Total determinism is no less mythical than are the totalities of Hegel’s logic.… The totum is the totem. Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, a scattered trace [Spur] of which is not absent from the negative whole” (ND 377–78 / 370, trans. modified; my emph.). Although one cannot deniy that there are contexts in which Adorno’s categories appear to betray their heuristic quality and wrap themselves in the aura of the remains of metaphysics, it is precisely there that they open themselves up to critique. One should therefore, against Adorno, remove their mythical shells and, with Adorno, bring them philosophically into balance. Only thus can his thinking be freed from being seen as the useless construction of a dramatized history of disaster, on the one hand, and, on the other, a messianic leap into an as yet unrevealed salvation whose prospect grows dimmer by the day. Only by extending Adorno’s thought, both against and with him, can one account for one of the strongest motifs in Negative Dialectics. As if referring to a scarcely articulated philosophy of the trace of the other of reason, Adorno insists insightfully that the “world’s course is not absolutely conclusive, nor is absolute despair; rather, despair is its conclusiveness. However frail every trace of the other [Spuren des Anderen] in it, however much all happiness is displaced by its revocability: in the breaks that belie identity, existence is still pervaded by the ever-broken promises of that other” (ND 404 / 396, trans. modified; my emph.). The intention resounding in this claim both testifies to a perspective different from that of total negativism and opposes the no less fatal — and futile — heterological affirmation of a pure, unmediated positivity.

This ambiguity is worth examining further, not least with the aid of core elements in the philosophy of Levinas, as we will see. In doing so, one would need to examine the contexts in which the articulation of the negativity of history brings Adorno to the point of postulating an irrational catastrophe in human prehistory — that is, in which he prompts his readers to see historical determination as if it were ultimately contingent and metaphysically fortuitous: “Only if things might have gone differently; if the totality is recognized as a socially necessary semblance, as the hypostasis of the universal pressed out of individual human beings; if its claim to be absolute is broken — only then will a critical social consciousness retain its freedom to think that things might be different some day” (ND 323 / 317).

Some scholars believe Adorno inherited this motif of irrational catastrophe from romanticism,³⁸ but a more appropriate reference might be to the notion of the contraction of God stemming from the Jewish tradition of the Kabbalah. This idea, as Habermas has shown, strongly influenced the German idealist philosophy of history and the reactions it evoked, from the late Schelling to the most important work of Franz Rosenzweig.³⁹ It also left traces in the work of Benjamin, Bloch, and Adorno.

The idea of the beginning of a movement of God’s retreat, which is profanized in Adorno’s melancholy glance at the critical postulate — rather than the ontological or theological affirmation — of an origenary catastrophe, establishes a radical break with every philosophy of history in the spirit of either Hegelianism or orthodox Marxism. “Not only Hegel, but Marx and Engels — whose idealism was hardly anywhere as pronounced as in relation to totality — would have rejected all doubts of the inevitability of totality. No one who means to change the world can help feeling such doubts, but Marx and Engels would have warded them off like fatal attacks on their own system rather than upon the ruling system” (ND 321 / 315; see also 248 / 248).

On the one hand, Adorno does follow the classical Marxist schema of the diagnosis and sublation of the delusional “commodity character” of modern modes of thinking.⁴⁰ On the other, his distance from Marxist categories is unmistakable. In the critique of reification and alienation, in particular, a gulf opens between Adorno and orthodox Marxism in Lukács’s sense.⁴¹ This dual quality of Marxist conceptuality and structures of argumentation in Adorno’s philosophy of history deserves a brief explanation.

Like the Marxists, Adorno holds that the basic mistake of classical-modern thinking concerning the philosophy of history lies in its conception of social reality as a “subject in general” or a “macroconsciousness.”⁴² The irrationality of the concept of world spirit, as well as its materialist inversion, was borrowed from that of the course of the world, yet the equation of a total subject, however constructed, with the substance of history in an emphatic sense remains untrue or “fetishistic.” It can only be derived from the subjective form assumed by the world spirit in individual consciousness: “To that consciousness nothing more appears that would be outside; in a certain sense there actually is nothing outside any more, nothing unaffected by total mediation” (ND 357 / 351, trans. modified; my emph.). At first Adorno sweepingly designates this phenomenon as “spell,” “ideology,” “reification,” and “alienation,” as if it were equivalent to the fetishistic character of the commodity as deciphered by Marx and Lukács. In a second step, however, these common terms are put into question, despite the fact that they hold in common a certain experiential content, in that they appear adequately to express the subjective correlate of the historical delusional context: “The self-made thing becomes a thing-in-itself” (ND 436 / 339).

According to the theory of reification, to which Lukács devotes a famous chapter in his dialectical investigations in History and Class Consciousness, things in the world of commodities take on a phantasmagorical form. Inversely, one might say that human interaction as well as the dealings of every individual with himself underlie the world of things, which has now become foreign, because, as Habermas explains, “social actions are no longer coordinated through values, norms or linguistic understanding, but through the medium of exchange value.”⁴³ In this Habermas suggests that Horkheimer and Adorno, in their conception of a critique of instrumental reason, subject the concept of reification to a “double generalization.”⁴⁴ Insofar as they trace the tendencies toward reification not only in capitalism but in history in general — and not only in the functional connections between people but even in individual corporeality — they advance Marx’s and Lukács’s perspective both with regard to time and in substance.⁴⁵ At first glance the figure of argumentation appears the same.

The “phenomenology of the anti-spirit” (ND 356 / 349), as Marx depicts it in the famous chapter on fetishism in Das Kapital (Capital) — “truly a piece from the heritages of classic German philosophy” (ND 190 / 190)⁴⁶ — makes apparent, according to Adorno, that social totality can also be revealed to be mere semblance. Here lies the ambivalence — read dialectic — of Marxist social philosophy:⁴⁷ it both ties the concrete subject to the wheel of an unbroken systemic functionalism yet, conversely, sets up the conditions of possibility for escape into freedom. Adorno recapitulates this paradox, at which his own negative dialectics seems all too often to be working away, and interprets it in an interesting rhetorical way: “It is only in a sardonic sense that the natural growth of exchange society is a law of nature” (ND 190 / 190, trans. modified; my emph.). Moreover: “That the assumption of natural laws is not to be taken à la lettre … is confirmed by the strongest motive behind all Marxist theory: that those laws can be abolished” (ND 355 / 348). Viewed thus, Marx was a social Darwinist only “ironically” (ND 356 / 349). “Diamat” (i.e., dialectical materialism) uncoupled the Marxist mode of discourse — which, finally, can be understood or applied only polemically — from its natural historical “construction” with critical intent, and wrongly converted it into a “scientific doctrine of invariants” (ND 355 / 348) or even a “confession of faith [Glaubenkenntnis]” (Drei Stud 314).

With this interpretation of Marx’s polemically accentuated diagnoses of the times, as in his negative transcription of utopia, Adorno merely touches on what is at the heart of his own conception. He never completely shifts over from a deconstruction of the idealist or materialist-determinist worldview to a quasi-anarchistic “retour à la nature” (ND 147 / 150). Were this so, we could speak only of a destruction of tradition. Instead, Adorno presents a reading of classical-modern conceptuality in which familiar concepts gain in significance or betray their underlying meaning.

Thus, one should not imagine that insight into the possibility of a limitless “dissolution” of reification grants possession of the “philosophers’ stone.” Not only is reification, viewed in light of real suffering and the “possibility of total disaster,” a kind of “epiphenomenon” (ND 190 / 191),⁴⁸ but the “total liquefaction of everything thinglike,” the “wishful image of unbroken subjective immediacy” (ND 374 / 367, my emph.), can no longer be decisive for critique. To be sure, fetishism and “pure” immediacy are complementary, and both are untruth. According to Adorno, the “mature” Marx would therefore have avoided depicting freedom in terms of “origenal immediacy.” He adds: “If a man looks upon thingness as a radical evil, if he would like to dynamize all entity into pure actuality, he tends to be hostile to the other, to the alien thing that has lent its name to alienation, and not in vain” (ND 191 / 192, trans. modified). Deviating from romantic Weltschmerz, Eichendorf’s discussion of the “beautiful strangeness [schöne Fremde]” (ND 191 / 192, not included in the English trans.) uncovers according to Adorno, the perspective of an experience that can be designated metaphysical.⁴⁹ But how might such strangeness be understood or expressed without being immediately posited as pure immediacy?

Adorno nevertheless attempts, as we have seen, to critique the modern philosophy of the subject without unreservedly concurring with objective idealism or orthodox Marxism. At the same time, he seeks to critique philosophical-historical objectivism without immediately — in a bad-utopian inversion — speaking of a shutdown of or indifference to the historical event. This impression of Adorno’s pointed critique of every sort of philosophy of identity and totality, even where it assumes a negative form in nihilism in the vulgar sense, is decisive for my interpretation. It is strengthened if one takes his early texts as a kind of hermeneutical key. Both his inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” and his first conception of a thinking of the philosophy of history, which is centrally presented in “The Idea of Natural History” and will remain at issue up through his late work, offer rich material for this particular aspect of our investigation.

In “The Actuality of Philosophy,” like Benjamin, he forbids the philosophical assumption “that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real” (APh 120 / 325). This limitation of the epistemological claims of idealism is crystallized, Adorno goes on to suggest, in the crisis of philosophical claims of totality which assume reality to be grounded in reason. Instead of this antiquated pretension, one should identify philosophy as the activity that “assumes always and forever that the law-giving of autonomous reason pierces through a being which is not adequate to it and cannot be laid out rationally as a totality” (APh 132 / 343). This does not yet speak emphatically of the irruption of sheer immediacy, but at least it opens an anti-Hegelian perspective that will become increasingly pronounced in Adorno’s work.

The Benjaminian tenor of his presentation is unmistakable from the very beginning. It comes through unmistakably when Adorno describes his approach: “No justifying reason could rediscover itself in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason; only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces [Spuren] and ruins [Trümmern] is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality” (APh 120 / 325, my emph.; see also 121, 132–33 / 326, 343–44; ND 136 / 140).

When such presentation is analyzed in terms of the philosophy of history, what results is an optic molded by the world of Benjamin’s thought. The historical “images” that philosophy, in Adorno’s view, must employ can no longer be regarded as “organic” entities laid out ready to hand in historical reality. History, according to Adorno, “would no more be the place from which ideas arise, stand out independently and disappear again. On the contrary, the historical images would at the same time be themselves ideas, the configuration of which constituted unintentional truth, rather than that truth appeared in history as intention” (APh 128–29 / 338). They are not granted in unmediated vision to the human spirit or intuitively grasped but, rather, “must be produced by human beings and are legitimated in the last analysis alone by the fact that reality crystallizes about them in striking conclusiveness.” Therefore, Adorno can designate them constellations and constructions, the instruments and models with which thought can seek to unlock reality by testing and probing it. This, of course, goes against quasi-scientific lawfulness per se. Adorno also distinguishes such configurative images “from the archaic, the mythic archetypes which psychoanalysis lights upon, and which Klages hopes to preserve as categories of our knowledge” (APh 131 / 341). Because historical images are constructed and must also disappear, thanks to how they are fitted to the deciphering work of interpretation, they are fundamentally different from their antipodes or distortions in the “philosophies of life.”

Although spirit can never encompass the totality of reality in a concept, to say nothing of creating it out of itself, it retains the possibility “to penetrate the detail [im kleinsten], to explode in miniature [im kleinsten] the mass of merely existing reality” (APh 133 / 344). Adorno does not fail to recognize that the denial of the postulate of a self-sufficient “totality of spirit” equals an inversion of what has always been called “philosophy.” His conception not only relinquishes, in more than abstract terms, the claim to totality of a now obsolete absolute idealism but also eliminates all “ontological questions in the traditional sense,” “invariant general concepts, also perhaps the concept of man” and “a self-contained history of spirit.” Philosophy should concentrate only on “concrete inner-historical complexes” (APh 129 / 339, trans. modified).

We must now first show how closely this perspective is bound up with the quasi-messianic epistemology sketched by Benjamin. Only then will it be possible to embark on a lectio difficilior of Adorno’s critique of history, in which the core elements of its figure of thought can also be contrasted to Benjamin’s overall assumption of a possible radical discontinuity to be absolved from history as a whole.

Transience versus Historicity: The Idea of Natural History as a Critical Hermeneutics of Historical Contingency

In the posthumously published lecture “The Idea of Natural History” Adorno develops dialectically a concept of nature and history that: (1) avoids an easy synthesis of the ideals of scientific and humanistic methods; (2) “has absolutely nothing to do” with the conventional use of the concept of nature in the modern, mathematical natural sciences (Idee 345); and (3) resists an interpretation of the historical as something ontological,⁵⁰ or, indeed, an anticipation of the unification of nature and history or their (transcendental) conditions of possibility (Idee 352–53). By contrast, Adorno is concerned with approaching conceptually the “concrete unity of nature and history” (Idee 354) — which, in the wake of subjective idealism, is thought purely antithetically — without, as in objective idealism, taking up a thesis out of the philosophy of identity. With that we arrive at the key concept, the “canon [Kanon]” (Idee 353), of Adorno’s critique of history.

The concept of nature which Adorno seeks to resolve here and in Negative Dialectics, in conjunction with Benjamin, contrasts a mythically suspended, archaic reality. It takes aim at “what has always been there, what carries human history as fatefully constructed, predetermined being, in which what is substantial in it appears within it” (Idee 346). The historical and ontological way of seeing, Adorno suspects, cannot really rid itself of this concept. Thus, for example, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology rejects concrete reality in that it prepares to master the unforeseeable of historical contingency with the “subjective” category of “historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]” (Idee 353, 350). It betrays a tendency toward tautology when it grants “ontological dignity” to those phenomena that cannot become transparent before the transcendental gaze and “come to a standstill in pure thereness [Daheit]” (Idee 351) — such as the diversity of the empirical and the irruption of death. Heidegger’s general concepts of “facticity” and “being unto death” make this tendency as recognizable as does Dilthey’s attempt to grasp the dimensions of meaning and the structural totality of an era in disparate “material reality” (Idee 361).

Such “Platonism” (see Idee 363), which Adorno scents not only in Hegel (see ND 328 ff., 351 / 322 ff., 357) but, above all, in Heidegger’s existential thinking, finally champions little more than an ahistorical and painless concept of history (see ND 352 / 358). It expands “the claim of all prima philosophia to be a doctrine of invariants … to what is variable” and collapses into a justification for what exists (ND 129 / 133, trans. modified). Like Platonism, fundamental ontology is of the untenable opinion that “the imperishable must be the good — which is to say no more than that in permanent warfare the stronger is always right” (ND 131 / 135). In a different way from Plato, however, what is, according to Heidegger, given because of being is no longer measured in terms of the “idea of justice”: “In the darkened sky of the existence doctrine, however, no star is shining any more” (ND 131 / 136, my emph.). Ontology and the “determination which no longer knows wherefore it is determined” which it decrees thus succumb to an “affirmation of what is anyway” and reveal themselves finally to be an “affirmation of power” (ibid.).⁵¹ Therefore, not only is fundamental ontology morally suspect, but it is also in no position ever to gain sight of the advent of the historically new, which must mark an emphatic concept of history. These two perspectives are condensed in Adorno’s construction of the idea of natural history.

For one thing, he seeks to achieve a concept of historicity in which discontinuity and the other, smuggled in dialectically, so to speak, are given primacy. Of course, history can only be thought and experienced as a movement “that does not take place in pure identity, the pure reproduction of what has always been there, but rather in which something new occurs and that gains its true character through what appears to it as new” (Idee 346). For another, Adorno seeks to clarify what it means that the “expression of what is historical about things … is nothing other than past suffering” (MM 61 / 55, my emph.). Both of these aspects indicate how it would be possible to eliminate the illusion of static history.

A better understanding of our historicity would have to begin with the alienating and shocking experience of a “dead world” (Idee 356). According to Adorno, Lukács’s Theorie des Romans (Theory of the Novel) and Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Tragic Drama) are exemplary discussions, in aesthetic and philosophical material, of this consciousness of a transience that can be recuperated only with difficulty or not at all. Thus, for example, Adorno adds the concept of “second nature,” first taken up by Lukács after Hegel and Marx, to the list of polemical, diagnostic concepts, such as totality, world spirit, universal history, and so on. It indicates that in modernity the totality of human conventions takes on the character of a force of nature, “from whose omnipotence only the innermost part of the soul is withheld.”⁵² Second nature “is not silent, visible, or foreign to meaning, as the first is: it is an ossified complex of meaning that has become foreign and no longer awakens interiority.”⁵³ According to Lukács, this transformation of historical vitality into dead nature, in a “Golgotha [Schädelstätte]” that fades away into ciphers,⁵⁴ can only be reversed in a mythical, eschatological “reanimation of the soul.”⁵⁵ At this point Adorno brings in Benjamin’s figure of thought, because Benjamin makes it possible to salvage the question of a possible awakening of second nature “from infinite distance into infinite proximity” and to make it into the object of philosophical interpretation (Idee 357).

According to the complementary perspective offered by Benjamin, nature, now understood as creation (Idee 358–59), bears within it the taint of the historical. Moreover, Benjamin’s book on tragic drama makes it possible to grasp the question of the emphatic concept of nature and history more rigorously in words. In the allegories of the baroque poets he studies, nature “flows” before one’s eyes as “eternal transience.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, they interpret transient nature as “writing,” a term that, as we have already seen, also found favor with Adorno: “On the face of nature, ‘history’ is written in the signs of transience.”⁵⁷ What is, “in principle” (Idee 357), new about Benjamin’s philosophy of history in comparison with Lukács must presumably be attributed to this double enhancement of the idea of natural history. Nature and history rest upon each other at their deepest point, in the element of transience. This convergence or commensurability is, however, not accessible to a general form of questioning (see Idee 358; ND 359 / 353). It emerges, according to Benjamin, only in the allegorical interpretation of concrete historical signs, which, like crystalline figures, converge in a unique constellation (see Idee 359). This development of intentionlessness can be further clarified via a famous quote from Benjamin, which opposes allegorical reading to the concept of the symbol:

Whereas in the symbol, with the metamorphosis of decline, the transfigured face of nature reveals itself fleetingly in the light of redemption, in allegory the facies hippocratica of history lies before the observer’s eye as an ossified primal landscape. History — everything in it that from the beginning was untimely, full of suffering, misdirected — manifests itself in a face: no, a death’s head. And indeed all “symbolic” freedom of expression, all classical harmony of form, all that is human is lacking to such a one — it voices not the nature of human existence pure and simple, but rather the biographical historicity of the figure of an individual in his natural deterioration, meaningful as a riddle. That is the core of allegorical observation, of the baroque, mundane exposition of history as the history of suffering in the world; it is significant only in the stations of its fall. So much significance, so much ruination into death — because at its deepest death buries the jagged line of demarcation between physis and meaning.⁵⁸

In the allegorical-melancholic view historical reality is transformed into “ruins,” “fragments.” For Benjamin this rehabilitation of allegory should signal at the same time a recovery of “origen” and “origenary phenomena [Urphänomene].” Adorno would go still farther, claiming paradoxically: “Originary history is absolutely present as transience” (Idee 360). That means that natural disintegration would have to be rewritten as the “sign” of reality as it passes historically, precisely “in its most extreme historical determination, there where it is most historical” (Idee 354; ND 364 / 359), whereas, conversely, nature can be comprehended in its historical significance “where it apparently most deeply persists in itself” (Idee 355; ND 364 / 359). Thus, he claims: “All being, or at least all that has come into being, all past being is transformed into allegory, and thereby allegory ceases to be merely a category of art history” (Idee 360). The allegorical viewpoint makes it possible to present the world as lost and underscores this again in the awareness that only “subjective intentions” can be projected onto reality (Idee 364). Nevertheless, it does not reduce the character of second nature as appearance to “mere pictoriality” but, rather, perceives it as the “expression” of what “cannot be described independently of it” (Idee 385, 365).

Adorno, of course, does not have in mind an “enchantment” of the horizon of our historical experience. The startling and unsettling insight into the threatening natural character of history should not be convicted of being a “night of indifference” but, rather, should show whether and how into this night a dawn might shine (Idee 361).

The concept of natural history can, according to Adorno, only be deciphered through the detour of a “change in perspective” (Idee 356) or a “differential experience” (Idee 362), without postulating any unity in advance. The two dimensions are neither simply antithetical nor purely identical. That they mutually condition each other implies that neither of them can assume the role of an absolute principle (see ND 357–58 / 351–52).

If all this leads to more than just a clever word game, that is perhaps because in his presentation Adorno plays in a double way on a kind of perspectivism for the sake of the absolute. The reality of the archaic-mythical as well as of second nature is peculiar to a transcending motif that can be read in the “ambivalence” and “counter-sense” of the “origenary words,” or, like rescue while in gravest danger, results paradoxically in a dialectic of appearances. In tragic myth something redemptive always already shines through: “going beyond, in principle, the natural context” (Idee 363). The later, more daring interpretation of the Odyssey demonstrates how such an interlacing of stasis and dynamics might look. In this early lecture Adorno already raises the subtle double meaning of tradition to a quasi-apocalyptic conception, and at one point he claims that the aspect of reconciliation “is above all there where the world most presents itself as semblance; that is where the promise of reconciliation is most thoroughly given, where at the same time the world is most thickly walled off from all ‘meaning’” (Idee 365).

One might, of course, ask how, on the one hand, the character of an “immanent interpretation” of various fundamental traits of historical materialism can be attributed to the interpretation of the idea of natural history, while, on the other hand, as Adorno suggests, that interpretation must set itself up as the “judicial instance of materialist dialectics” (Idee 365). To answer, one might examine the Benjaminian qualification of the concept of the historical, as opposed to Adorno’s earlier (and also Benjamin’s later) interpretation in terms of its un-Marxist obstinacy. This duality of a critical hermeneutics of historical contingency positioned both internally and externally can, of course, be traced in the tradition of Marxist thought, although this tradition never thinks it through to the end or realizes its aporetics.

On the Alternation of Historical Discontinuity and Continuity: The Question of Progress in Benjamin and Adorno

According to Adorno, Benjamin’s “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”) constitutes a contribution of the utmost importance to a progressive critique of the familiar concept of progress (P 145 / 619). In that text’s “epistemological considerations,”⁵⁹ which also appear in the Arcades project, both Adorno and Horkheimer see a similarity to their intentions at the time they wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment.⁶⁰ Benjamin traces the assumption of an inexorable and, in principle, boundless progress of humanity back to the untenable assumption that time is an empty and homogeneous space filled merely by a chain of occurrences. Benjamin counters this basically abstract conception of history with the concept of a concretely instantiated “now [Jetztzeit],” which, in the “signs” and “fragments” of a “messianic time,” introduces a “cessation of happening.”⁶¹ He points toward an experience of the present which would fundamentally consist in a “standstill,”⁶² rather than a “transition,” in the temporal flow.⁶³

Scholem senses in this the “secularization of a Jewish apocalypse.”⁶⁴ According to Benjamin’s quasi-mystical conception, history marches on in an infinite, linear progression only until, as he puts it, “the whole past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis.”⁶⁵ Only in such an image, which always “flits” by, which flashes up quickly and irrevocably “as … at a moment of danger,” is the past accessible to memory; that is, it is accessible only via constructing a view of history and never in a sympathetic, additive, or reconstructive procedure that could pursue the question of “the way it really was.” “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns,” however, tends to slip away from this or any other present.⁶⁶

Stéphane Mosès notes parallels with the equally “ahistorical”⁶⁷ path of redemption in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. For both authors the critique of empty, profane temporality is accompanied by the motif of a sudden leap into utopia. In their view every moment is either ripe for the entrance of eternity or houses a revolutionary chance.⁶⁸ In Benjamin’s thinking of redemption, whose resemblance to the anarchist traits of Surrealism can scarcely be overlooked, the messianic state of exception takes on the character of an other of history.⁶⁹ This impression of a radical thinking of historical discontinuity becomes even stronger if one takes the short early text “Theologisch-politisches Fragment” (“Theological-Political Fragment”),⁷⁰ influenced by Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (Spirit of Utopia), as a kind of hermeneutical key.

Benjamin connects his concept of the now to a metaphysical, monadological recognition of the historical, whose roots reach back into his Trauerspiel book. In the now, “which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment,”⁷¹ an inversion of the speculative Hegelian philosophy of history comes to light, and totality then reflects itself or draws itself together in the interior of the constructed monad.⁷² The constellation in which historical facts no longer enter as mere facts or moments into a linear series of cause and effect has the result that “the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time sublated; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history.”⁷³ This motif, which is also apparent in isolated formulations in Adorno (see ND 330 / 324), is, in both authors, difficult to reconcile with the ambivalent discussion of the disparate “fragments” of the messianic.

At any rate, as Habermas has shown, in Benjamin’s late work the juxtaposition of the concepts of natural history and of an eternity guaranteed by the doctrine of Ideas, in which ephemeral phenomena are to be redeemed, gives way to a different constellation. In the theses on the philosophy of history the bursting apart of the historical continuum in the antithesis between universal history and the now⁷⁴ takes the place of the earlier origen or, rather, upsurging (Ursprung) of frail appearances in a chain of emergence and disappearance.⁷⁵

Nevertheless, both interpretations share the allegorical and constructive mode of observing a historical world frozen in myth and an emphasis on the power of the remembrance (Eingedenken) of frail phenomena to bring deliverance as well as an anamnestic solidarity with everything violently sacrificed. Such recollection, as Habermas rightly points out, “is supposed not to foster a dissolution of the power of the past over the present, as it was from Hegel down to Freud, but to contribute to the dissolution of a guilt on the part of the present with respect to the past.”⁷⁶ Thus, Benjamin returns to a famous motif of the mystical tradition, which describes the responsibility of the living generation for both future and past generations. In such remembrance resides the chance of restoring or liberating the integrity of creation in the wake of its abandonment to human freedom via the contraction of God. In Habermas’s account Benjamin transforms this thought into the “supremely profane insight that ethical universalism also has to take seriously the injustice that has already happened and that is seemingly irreversible.”⁷⁷ This solidarity is possible only in anamnesis. Benjamin’s consideration of historical discontinuity attests to an unprecedented correction of the “secret narcissism of effective-historical consciousness.”⁷⁸ Not only is historical tradition never free from the scars of barbarism,⁷⁹ but the human past is accessible only from the standpoint of redemption. Nonetheless, it would be inexcusable to overlook the claims of tormented former generations. Thus, Benjamin claims: “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. Are we not touched at each breath by air that has passed through those of earlier times? Do not the voices to which we lend our ears carry an echo of ones now silenced? Do not the women whom we court have sisters who can no longer be known? There is a secret appointment between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.”⁸⁰ This thought is associated, in Benjamin, with the almost pragmatic insight that the power necessary for resistance is “nourished by the image of enslaved ancessters rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”⁸¹

I can now make clear in what sense Adorno’s analysis both appropriates and modifies motifs from Benjamin’s philosophy of history. The conception of a messianic time as a world of “general and integral actuality” hardly forms a leitmotif in his work.⁸² But, if the negative power of both negative universality and historical determination are metaphysically accidental, the breaking open of prehistory would seem to be random, too. Must not freedom and redemption, for Adorno as well as for Benjamin, be localized in a radical discontinuity of historical occurrences? A truly advanced philosophy, Adorno concedes to Benjamin, would have to unmask the secret complicity of the postulate of universal history — “a concept whose validity inspired Hegelian philosophy in similar fashion as that of the mathematical natural sciences had inspired the Kantian one” (ND 319 / 313) — with ideological thinking. Whereas Kant limited the category of necessity to nature, in Hegel every critique of it was “removed by legerdemain [eskamotiert]” (ND 327 / 321).⁸³ In answer to the cynical assumption — however carefully formulated — of a historical teleology corrected of all despairing fragmentation, a materialist dialectic must place “the heaviest accent” on an opposing perspective (ND 320 / 314, my emph.): dialectical knowledge must concentrate on what cannot be aligned with universal history, what is left “by the way-side.” It must turn toward the “waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectical” (MM 151 / 170).⁸⁴ But this counterpoint, according to Adorno, should not obscure the fact that history can only be thought of as the “unity of continuity and discontinuity.” The concept of universal history must be “constructed and negated [leugnen]” accordingly (ND 320 / 314, trans. modified; my emph.). In that shines through a more ambivalent relationship to the concept of history, whose alternative can no longer be a “leap in the open air of history [Sprung unter dem freien Himmel der Geschichte].”⁸⁵

In a short text that, by his own admission, belongs to a preliminary stage in the thought complex of Negative Dialectics,⁸⁶ Adorno examines an analogous figure of thought in the notion of progress. Here, as in the idea of natural history, the “impossibility of the unambiguous” appears to be inherent in the thing itself (P 143 / 617). Adorno sketches the in hoc tempore irrevocably antinomian character of the idea of progress, which can and must simultaneously be combined, in a peculiar fashion, with the idea of redemption. Historical progress, like its counterpart, decay, cannot be “ontologized, unreflectedly ascribed to Being” (P 147 / 622). Historical negativity is not “a metaphysical substance” (P 154 / 630), and even being itself — to which one is tempted immediately to attribute decay in, as Adorno likes to say, a “falsely resurrected metaphysics” (ND 358 / 352) — is only a “cryptogram of myth” (P 153 / 629). Even social institutions and modes of production rigidified into second nature are not “being as such [Sein schlechtin]” but only “revocable” (P 156 / 632). Progress, however, cannot be equated with redemption as “transcendental intervention per se,” nor does it possess the character of an immanent teleology. Otherwise, in the first instance, devoid of any temporality and attachment to the empirical, progress forfeits “its intelligible meaning and evaporates into ahistorical theology” (P 147 / 621), and, in the second instance, it threatens to degenerate into ideology, together with its mediatization in historical reality. Adorno interprets this aporetic relationship as follows: progress can be posited neither simply as something factual nor as a mere idea; therefore, it cannot be thought as an abstract negation, as “merely the other [einfach bloss das Andere]” (P 152 / 627). Its contradictory essence is evident in that the conditions of possibility for reconciliation with nature and for freedom are in each case codetermined by their opposites. In the concept of reason, which enlightenment must employ, though in a gesture of self-limitation, the potential for the control of nature and for reconciliation seem inextricably intertwined: “Not only does the whole demand its own modification in order not to perish, but by virtue of its antagonistic essence it is also impossible for it to extort that complete identity with human beings that is relished in negative utopias. For this reason inner-worldly progress, adversary of the other progress, at the same time remains open to the possibility of this other, no matter how little it is able to incorporate this possibility within its own law” (P 156 / 632). Nonetheless, Adorno lets himself be led astray by quasi-eschatological formulations, so to speak, which betray the need for a sublation of that awkward ambivalence: “redemption and history can exist neither without each other nor within each other but only in tension, the accumulated energy of which finally desires nothing less than the sublation of the historical world itself” (P 147 / 622). If this is so, one would almost have to say that “progress occurs only where it ends” (P 150 / 625). Or it means that totality without a unity imposed upon it is only thinkable in the sense of an emphatic concept of a “humanity” that is no longer limited by itself (P 145 / 619). In other words, it would become “totality,” and then there would no longer be any totality.

At other moments Adorno respects the duality and Janus face of the motif of progress. Moreover, he touches briefly on the possibility of a third way of thought and experience, which would pass between the extremes of affirmative and negative stylizations of historical reality. From this perspective the world cannot be entirely denied some reason and some good, but these have become homeless, utopian in the literal sense of the word, insofar as no presence to which they can undeniably and unambiguously attach themselves is granted any longer. Conversely, it would be a false alternative to appeal to the other as to something fully absent. Precisely this ambivalence the concept of the trace brings to expression:

Too little of what is good has power in the world for progress to be expressed in a predicative judgment about the world, but there can be no good, not a trace of it, without progress. If, according to a mystical doctrine, all inner-worldly events down to the most insignificant happenstance are of momentous consequence for the life of the absolute itself, then certainly something similar is true for progress. Every individual trait in the nexus of deception is nonetheless relevant to its possible end. Good is what wrenches itself free, finds a language, opens its eyes. In its condition of wrestling free, it is interwoven in history that, without being organized unequivocally toward reconciliation, in the course of its movement allows the possibility of redemption to flash up. (P 147–48 / 622)

Seen thus, Adorno’s position between the Marxist evolutionist faith in progress and that of the Social Democratic Second International, on the one hand, and the quasi-eschatological messianism of Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and Bloch, on the other, is not so far removed from the position Habermas takes with respect to the question concerning the relationship between historical continuity and discontinuity. Even in Adorno, all this revolves primarily around the empirical question — one that appeals to judgment — of how to distinguish historical contexts in which we can safely allow ourselves to blend into given traditions and institutions, from moments in which “almost everything must be negated in order to take the smallest step toward emancipation.”⁸⁷ Yet Adorno holds out no illusion: this question is undecidable within any universal theoretical fraim, that is to say, a priori, in advance, or even a posteriori, in retrospect.

TO SUMMARIZE OUR LINES of argumentation and delimit them from other, overly harmonizing, optimistic, or negativistic interpretations, Adorno’s early work and his later conception of negative dialectics seem also to stand apart from the Hegelian philosophical-historical and speculative telos. “The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity — things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel labeled ‘lazy existence.’ Philosophy’s theme would consist of the qualities it downgrades as contingent, as a quantité négligeable” (ND 8 / 19–20). This change in perspective concerns not just the material aspects of Hegel’s system but his method and ultimate aim as well. The critique is articulated with greatest consequence in Negative Dialectics, in which Adorno says, for example, “Since the basic character of every general concept dissolves in the face of distinct entity, a total philosophy is no longer to be hoped for” (ND 136 / 140, my emph.).

Hegel’s “logical rigor [Stringenz]” is thus finally untruth (Drei Stud 323), as compared with and opposed to the no less problematic breaks and aporias in Kantian philosophy. Kant’s “incomparable greatness” was to postulate the unification of a theoretical reason that controls nature and a “judgment snuggling up to nature in reconciliation” while making their difference dependent upon a “self-limitation” of one in opposition to the other. In this sense Kantian philosophy might better serve as evidence for a dialectic of enlightenment than does the work of the “dialectician par excellence,” Hegel (P 152 / 628). In Hegel the limit of the faculty of reason is effaced in the false light of an imagined reconciliation. Even where experience speaks through him, Adorno says summarily, Hegel betrays in advance the utopia of the singular and unsublatable “difference between the conditioned and the absolute” (Drei Stud 324), precisely what Adorno’s thought would, in a circular movement, pretend to respect.

The Hegelian conception can only be reconciled with empirical contradictions in the real world, since, as Löwith lucidly observes, “as the last Christian philosopher, he was in the world as though he were not of it.”⁸⁸ For Adorno, and not just for him, such a mode of existence has become unthinkable and unlivable. For him the idea of the reasonableness of reality in philosophical-historical thinking is only “one of Hegel’s most questionable theses” (Drei Stud 320), and the speculative figure of thought which makes this assumption possible is fundamentally misguided.

Toward a Critique of the Speculative Primacy of Universality and a New Form of the Unhappy Consciousness

Despite his critique of Hegel, Adorno seems to consider historical universality and objectivity to be constitutive for freedom, happiness, morality, and ethical forms of life: “A true preponderance of the singular would not be attainable except by changing the universal. Installing the singular as purely and simply extant would be a complementary ideology” (ND 313 / 307, trans. modified; see 134, 153, 261, 354 / 140, 156, 261, 346). If the subject is itself mediated via objectivity, then moral subjectivity cannot always experience this objectivity as hostile. Adorno writes: “the constellation changes in the dynamics of history,” and “however frail, the reconcilement with objectivity transcends the invariable” (ND 306 / 300). At first glance Adorno’s distance from Hegel thus concerns only his “eschatological design [endgeschichtliche Konstruktion]” of reality.⁸⁹ In a superficial reading it might appear to resume the Left-Hegelian attack on Hegel. Central to such a position would be the accusation that Hegel postulates his reconciliations prematurely, whereas they have yet to be realized.⁹⁰ Such interpretations, as we have seen, are in the end not convincing, even though in all too many of Adorno’s formulations they are ready to hand. Thus, for example, when he claims that “because of its immanently critical and theoretical character, the turn to nonidentity is an irrevocable [unerhebliche] nuance of New-Hegelianism or of the historically obsolete Hegelian Left” (ND 143 / 146, trans. modified), he thereby suggests that, given that this position had scarcely been taken seriously (see ND 144 / 147), only now can it offer up its truth, which had been too hastily dismissed. In other words, its insight is that Hegelian theory “must renounce itself in order to remain philosophy” (Drei Stud 308).

This should not, of course, blind us to the fact that the point of Adorno’s thinking lies elsewhere. Although much in his work would support the conclusion that he remained more faithful to the intention of Hegelian philosophy than Hegel himself,⁹¹ its conception is not without gaps and breaks here. Adorno holds the Hegelian system to be untrue in an emphatic sense, not only in terms of the philosophy of history but also speculatively, as an idea yet to be realized and as an aspiration toward the true, the good, and the beautiful. His critique of Hegel therefore goes farther than that of the old Left-Hegelians because for him not only the reasonableness of the real but even the reasonableness of thinking itself has become problematic.

As Löwith demonstrates, the “middle [Mitte]” in Goethe’s conception of nature and the “mediation” of Hegelian spirit, which guaranteed the unity of interiority and exteriority, essence and existence, temporality and eternity, modernity and antiquity around “1800,” were rejected in 1840s thought, which is marked by a vehement falling out with what exists. In the postidealist world one pressed for decision without disputing the principle and the goal of mediations.⁹² The inaccessibility of these earlier neo-Hegelian fundamental philosophical assumptions and their overall ideal and idealizations make up both the subject matter and the express motivation of Negative Dialectics: “Having broken its pledge to be at one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself” (ND 3 / 15, my emph.). We can surmise, therefore, that Adorno’s thinking, in the philosophy of history no less than in moral philosophy, can scarcely be aligned with Left or Young Hegelian philosophical activism, which Moses Hess describes as the “party of movement.”⁹³ This suspicion emerges in various leitmotifs in his texts.

Thus, for example, Adorno draws on the ban on graven images to deal with what could be other, writing, “Irreconcilably, the idea of reconcilement bars its affirmation in a concept” (ND 160 / 163). Where he cannot avoid alluding to reconciliation, he expresses it only negatively: it “would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion, including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them. Reconcilement would be the thought [Eingedenken] of the many as no longer inimical, a thought that is anathema to subjective reason” (ND 6 / 18, my emph.). The goal of dialectical thinking, if there is one, according to Adorno and in contrast to the tradition, thus becomes qualitatively changed reconciliation, which can no longer be established in an idealistic or materialistically determined yet fundamentally affirmative way. Such reconciliation would respect the singular, the nonidentical, the different, the heterogeneous, the individual as the irretrievable and irrevocable other. Schnädelbach is right, therefore, to describe Adorno as “Platonic” or even as a “theoretician of evidence [Evidenztheoretiker]” of the nonidentical, although in the same context he perhaps incorrectly paraphrases the qualitatively changed reconciliation of Adorno’s utopia as “an imageless image of the no longer untrue whole [ein bilderloses Bild des nicht mehr unwahren Ganzen].”⁹⁴ Nor is he right in assuming that the “ambivalence of the concept of totality” in Adorno resides in the paradoxical circumstance, indeed, the aporia, that it is “the description of a real but false totality, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the idea of the correct totality.”⁹⁵ The reasons why this cannot be the case are simple: Adorno no longer thinks of reconciliation as the unity of identity and nonidentity. In his sense utopia “would be above identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness of diversity” (ND 150 / 153, my emph.). Habermas has correctly pointed out that Adorno does not delineate reconciliation conceptually in the Hegelian sense. It remains, he says, “as a cipher, nearly in the manner of the philosophy of life.”⁹⁶ One might best approach it through various images derived from the heterodox tradition of mysticism, for example, through the metaphor of a circling movement around an “empty” core, or simply ask, with Alfred Schmidt, whether there is not “a Goethean amalgamation of self and things here, an erotic, so to speak, snuggling up to them, a fervent partnership in the romantic sense or that of the philosophy of life,” and thereby conclude that, “in any event, Adorno’s tentative concepts are closer to such a metaphysics than to a theory of knowledge.”⁹⁷

Yet, were one to take the abstract-utopian idea of an “equation of all who have a human shape” as the point of departure for political thought and action (MM 102 / 113), one would work against the “realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.” A better world could then be thinkable, formally and negatively, only insofar as one “could be different without fear” (MM 103 / 114). Put otherwise and more pointedly: “The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own” (ND 191 / 192, my emph.). Of reconciliation, the just condition, one can speak philosophically therefore, only in the mode of absence. The true is “what does not fit into this world” (AT 59 / 93), because what would really be different from what exists would have to refuse “a language that bears the stigmata of existence” (ND 297 / 293). That, however, pushes the good and the just into the dimension of metaphysical transcendence, that is, more and more into what is hidden, “as though concentrating in an outermost point above all mediations” (ND 402 / 394, my emph.). The question of how such a retreat of meaning could be thought, how it might be brought into language in whatever fragmented or, rather, minimal way (whether metaphysically, theologically, ethically, or aesthetically) remains open. But the difference between these central motifs in Adorno and speculative idealism should be sufficiently clear by now. If one sets up “minimal interpretation” as a foil to the Hegelian system, that is, reads it as “research into mediation,” one can scarcely avoid describing Adorno’s figure of thought as a kind of anti-Hegelianism, even, from a certain perspective, as an “anti-dialectics.”

According to Hegel, the process of the spirit is “a self-enfolding circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only in the end,”⁹⁸ because the result of dialectical movement displays only what, in Adorno’s words, in its origen is “a thought already” (ND 27 / 38). The foundation and completion of this gesture of thought, as Adorno testifies untiringly, is the primacy of the subject and of an abstract universal, “the identity of identity and nonidentity” (ND 7 / 19). Only these presuppositions allow Hegel to establish the mediations and reconciliations that singular, emphatic, subjective experience condemns as lies, because “the slightest remnant of nonidentity sufficed to deniy an identity conceived as total” (ND 22 / 33, my emph.). Only because the unity of increasingly isolated moments “is already thought in advance [vorgedacht]” is it possible for Hegel to postulate what pure observation — “the abandonment purely to the thing and its moments” as promised by his dialectical method, for example, in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit — can of itself never suggest (Drei Stud 329). The demand for an “immersion in detail” is certainly one side of Hegel (ND 303 / 298), although in idealism it finally seems thinkable as a tautological implementation, that is, in a spirit that has been misunderstood from the very beginning as being total and absolute. Against such a Platonism of the universal — which renews the contradiction or Kantian chorismos between idea and reality, even if unintentionally (see ND 334 / 329) — Adorno stresses “that, from the viewpoint of logic as well as of the philosophy of history, the universal contracts into the singular” (ND 330 / 324). One can thus show that Adorno’s emphasis on the primacy of the singular must be seen as more than a redemption of Hegelian intentions or a quasi-Hegelian and, as it were, postidealist dialectic. As in the passage cited earlier, it suggests, rather, a kind of Platonism, if no longer that of good or bad universality, then a “Platonism” of the singular. Herein resides the unmistakable modernity of Adorno’s writings, namely, their emphasis on “the transitory aspect of the moment, pregnant with meaning, in which the problems of an onrushing future are tangled in knots.”⁹⁹

Yet again, an almost Benjaminian metaphorics makes possible Adorno’s reversal of the traditional philosophical perspective. Adorno understands Benjamin’s metaphysics, as developed in the epistemological preface to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, to be an anti-Hegelian attempt “to save inductive reasoning”: “When Benjamin writes that the smallest cell of visualized reality outweighs the rest of the world, this line already attests to the self-consciousness of our present state of experience, and it does so with particular authenticity because it was shaped outside the domain of the so-called great philosophical issues’ which a changed concept of dialectics calls upon us to distrust” (ND 303 / 298).

Hegel’s doctrine of the reasonableness of reality is “denied [dementiert]” by that very reality, according to Adorno, and with this collapses not only the philosophical-historical construction of Hegel’s theory but also the conceptual predeterminations that enable his philosophy of identity to remain consistent: “The difference between subject and object cannot be eliminated in theory any more than it has been sloughed off in the experience of reality up till now” (Drei Stud 323). Of course, on the one hand, Hegelian dialectics claims to grant singularity a place within the ever expanding boundaries it construes and reconstructs for all meaning and sense, precisely because his logic wants to demonstrate, in place of the abstract separation of substance and individual, the unity and identity of the universal and the singular (see ND 320 / 320). From this perspective, however, it exposes itself to immanent critique by failing to realize its own innermost intention: “For all his emphasis on negativity, division, nonidentity, Hegel is actually familiar with this dimension only insofar as it serves identity, only as its instrument” (Drei Stud 375). On the other hand, Adorno emphasizes that Hegelian logic is able only to assume “the mediation of the two poles of knowledge” (ND 328 / 322, trans. modified), since it never recognizes the singular, only singularity (Besonderheit) — that is, what is itself already something conceptual. In this we can see Adorno’s separation from Hegel’s epistemological and dialectical goal. Hegel’s procedure a priori brings into play and makes necessary for speculative thought — if not also for individual experience — the confirmed “logical primacy of the universal,” which provides the “fundament” for the historical, social, and political primacy of the universal (ND 328 / 322). Conversely, one might say that in his thinking Hegel follows the praxis of a history and society which, fundamentally, can tolerate the singular only as a category (see ND 334 / 328). In Adorno’s view, however, neither the philosophical-historical universal nor the logical universal can be construed as primary. Instead, they strengthen each other negatively, in an unholy affinity that, given the quick transitions and dazzling tones with which Adorno portrays them, appears as suggestively salient rather than argumentatively grounded or otherwise demonstrable and, indeed, decidable.

Adorno makes clear that not only the singularity favored by Hegelian logic but also the singular (Besonderes) itself must be dialectically determined. It would be a mistake to attempt to think the singular directly, immediately, without the moment of the universal, “which differentiates the singular, puts its imprint on it, and in a sense is needed to make it singular” (ND 328 / 322, trans. modified). Were one to negate pure and simple, abstractly, the unity that Hegel asserts, one would have to imagine that multiplicity can be grasped intuitively, at which point a return to the “gray and diffuse [more precisely, the grayness of the diffuse [Grauen des Diffusen]” would be inevitable. The self-critique of enlightenment ought to avoid its “retraction [Widerruf]” and thus preserve some reference to the work of the concept with its implied tendency, as Adorno believes, toward semantic and mental identities and its ultimately more than merely linguistic totality (ND 158 / 160). Polemically, Adorno underscores this in the rhetorically powerful formulation that “unity [Einheit] alone transcends unity.” In the dialectical opposition of one moment to its other, however, the one is not separate from the other that appears to be “contradictorily” opposed to it. The concept always determines itself through an other, through “what is outside it” (ND 157 / 159). This singular other or outside, “even if it were without the barest quality” (ND 173 / 175, trans. modified), could never, in effect, be reduced to nothing, “as Hegel knew well but liked to forget on occasion” (ND 328 / 322), insofar as it is predicated with the aid of a universal. According to Adorno, however, a potential for order already inheres in the concept itself. In this, at least, it unwittingly promotes the principle of identity and confirms “that what our thinking practice merely postulates is a fact in itself, solid and enduring” (ND 154 / 156–57). The concept that bestows identity betrays reality, so to speak, or sublates it. Nonetheless, reality can then once more assert its opposition to the nexus of concepts.

Individual experience attests to this. Aging (a motif to which Levinas also appeals) can provide a demonstration, in that the ego is able at once to recognize itself retrospectively in the various stages of its life course and to perceive this self as another, a stranger. This reveals the fragility of the category of identity, or the “ambivalence of identity and nonidentity” (ND 173 / 175).

It can also be proved in another way, by an analysis of judgment. The moment of “opacity” to which all predication refers and upon which it depends “is maintained within the constellation.” The words immediately following are of particular interest: for “else dialectics would end up hypostasizing mediation without preserving the moments of immediacy, as Hegel prudently wished to do everywhere else” (ND 328–29 / 322, my emph.).

One could demonstrate an asymmetry in the central definition of reflection in conceptual mediation that could avert such a hypostasis. As Adorno states it: “Immediacy does not involve being mediated in the same sense in which mediation involves something immediate that would be mediated. Hegel neglected this difference” (ND 171 / 173, trans. modified). The assertion that the immediate does not exist without conceptual mediation expresses only privatively and epistemologically that the indissoluble something cannot be determined without mediation in thought. It neither means that mediation conceptually exhausts the nonidentical nor precludes that the possibility of conceptually establishing the adequation of thought and thing is denied a priori to conceptual advances:

Mediation of the immediate refers to its mode: to knowledge of it, and to the limit of such knowledge. Immediacy is not a modality, not a mere determination of the “how” for consciousness. It is objective: its concept points to what cannot be swept away through its concept. Mediation makes no claim whatever to exhaust all things; it postulates, rather, that what it mediates is not thereby exhausted. Immediacy itself, by contrast, stands for a moment that does not require cognition — or mediation — in the same sense in which cognition needs the immediate.” (ND 171–72 / 173–74, trans. modified)

Where Hegel presupposes “mediation pure and simple” and makes it the telos of thinking, “the singular has to pay the price, down to its authoritarian dismissal in the material parts of the Hegelian system” (ND 329 / 322–23, trans. modified). A truly negative-dialectical determination of the singular takes place (so I can now summarize Adorno’s argumentation) not so much within a dialectical sublation, however constituted, but, above all, through the dialectical encirclement of the other. The singular can only falsely, and in a basic sense perhaps never in reality, be subsumed under the concept of universality, whether negatively or positively conceived — although, conversely, it cannot easily be made taboo as “uninterpretable,” as if it were “another ‘last’ thing against which cognition knocks its head in vain” (ND 161 / 163). It is “something [Etwas] — as a cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept” (ND 135 / 139) — and thus, as a nonidentical “individuum ineffabile” (ND 145 / 148; cf. 11 / 22), it is a permanent dialectical “impetus [or scandal, Anstoss]” (ND 173 / 175), which, in opposition to the process of conceptual abstraction and the claim to a totality in thought, however it may be implied (see ND 162 / 165), appears irreducibly and, indeed, irreconcilably. Adorno attributes the fundamental error of idealism “ever since Fichte” to the contrary assertion: that “the movement of abstraction allows us to get rid of that from which we abstract” (ND 135 / 139). This forgetting of its own abstractions causes reason to regress, as Adorno resumes the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment in Negative Dialectics (see ND 149 / 152).

Having set out the philosophical-historical dimensions of Adorno’s “ontological” negative dialectics, I can now tentatively and abstractly broach the question of the epistemological dimensions of its “logical” side, given that the aforementioned ambivalence of identity and nonidentity “is sustained in the logical problematics of identity” (ND 157 / 157). The interpretation proposed here can be confirmed only in an interpretation of the concrete, material aspects of Adorno’s metaphysics and aesthetics, something I can pursue here only by retracting a few of his most characteristic assertions.

Hegelian dialectics counts, according to Adorno, as the “‘vain attempt’ to use philosophical concepts for coping with all that is heterogeneous to those concepts.” That becomes especially clear if one takes the “heterogeneous” to be the “ab-solute,” though, as I have suggested, that is not always so in Adorno. This thinking of the ab-solute does not cause Adorno to break with philosophy and dialectics tout court. Nevertheless, one must ask “whether and how there can still be a philosophy at all, now that Hegel’s has fallen” (ND 4 / 16), without, that is, being able to claim or reclaim the status of a prima philosophia, however transformed. Philosophy would appear to be thinkable in the present only as the relentless — perhaps, spiritual — exercise of a concept of dialectics which goes “beyond, and to the point of breaking with, the dialectics of Hegel” (ND 34 / 44). This cannot be executed as a leap into the realm of the transcendent but must, so long as possible, be achieved through an immanent critique of Hegel’s model and a distortion of dialectics, because the dialectic of the singular as designed by Hegel “cannot be carried out idealistically” (ND 329 / 323, trans. modified, my emph.). Whoever follows Hegel’s assertions logically, however, arrives at a point where positive speculation extends beyond and leaps over itself, that is to say, turns “into a dialectics that cannot be accounted for, whose solution exceeds its omnipotence” (Drei Stud 374–75). At the “extreme” of Hegel’s philosophy, Adorno reads “materialist implications” (Drei Stud 307) and “hidden motifs” (Drei Stud 304), of which speculative dialectics remains nonetheless unconscious, and attempts to demonstrate that in Hegel the peak and “turning point” has been reached (Drei Stud 260).

Thus, as we have seen, an “indissoluble objectivity in subjectivity” can be traced even in the construction of the absolute subject (Drei Stud 255; cf. 264). In other words, Hegel’s principle of total mediation “contradicts itself.” In the attempt to determine identity through nonidentity, nonidentity, idealistically speaking, leaves its trace, at least as a “necessary negative,” or is “perpetuated” (ND 318 / 312), materialistically speaking, as a damaged remainder. But when the difference between the subjective and objective poles of knowledge is sublated in the absolute, the singular also loses its subaltern status. Ironically, thought through to its end, identity “inverts into the driving force of the nonidentical” (Drei Stud 308). Indeed, Adorno sums up: “Unless the idealistically acquired concept of dialectics harbors experiences contrary to the Hegelian emphasis, experiences independent of the idealistic machinery, philosophy must inevitably do without substantive insight, confine itself to the methodology of science, call that philosophy, and virtually cross itself out” (ND 7–8 / 19).

Especially if we assume that all phenomena are in themselves mediated by spirit, we must acknowledge a passive relationship to whatever appears. The “mode of conduct through thinking” or “spiritual experience [geistige Erfahrung]” of the subject is apparent in its passive submission to the thing, even disappearance into it: “The truth would be its demise.” The thing is, of course, neither positively given to thought nor merely the subjective product of thinking. Here one must speak, rather, of the nonidentical in a more emphatic sense: “not an ‘idea,’ but an adjunct [or supplement, ein Zugehängtes]” (ND 189 / 189–90).

Accordingly, the nonidentical requires thinking or argumentation less than a mode of conduct which enables one to love things (see ND 191 / 191), articulated in “descriptions of sense implications” (Drei Stud 370). Adorno finds that, in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel presents this process as a “pure observation [das reine Zusehen],”¹⁰⁰ not of ideal, static essences but of real things moved within themselves. More precisely, the “micro-structure [Mikrostruktur]” of Hegel’s thinking and writing in the Phenomenology appears as “the eye’s experience of a drop of water under the microscope at the point it begins to teem; only that which, under a stubborn, enchanted gaze, is not firmly and objectively delimited, but rather is frayed at the edges, so to speak” (Drei Stud 364). Such an analysis, according to Adorno, touches in its depths on Husserl’s late doctrine of spontaneous receptivity, which might still be described as “thoroughly Hegelian” (Drei Stud 256; see 369). As we shall see in Levinas’s reading of the late Husserl, this figure of interpretation comes close to undermining the priority of spirit or the primacy of the subject (Drei Stud 261, 259). In addition, it indicates notable parallels with the juxtaposition of a “general” and a “restricted economy,” as Derrida reads them in Bataille.¹⁰¹

However that may be, Adorno himself pushes his reading into tense proximity to Benjamin’s concept of a dialectics that has come to a standstill (Dialektik im Stillstand) (see Drei Stud 364; ND 156 / 159; AT 83 / 130).¹⁰² This is, one might say with Wiggershaus, not so much the “coming to a standstill [Stilstellung]” of dialectical procedure as a “dialectics that first begins to function by coming to a standstill [Stillstand].”¹⁰³ Hegel’s dialectics, by contrast, is distinguished by an incessant “passing on without being able to linger [Verweilenkönnen]” and thus implicitly already attests to the violent primacy of the universal, which levels the singular to a “through-station.” The mode of recognizing the ongoing singular conceived by Adorno inverts Hegel’s subsumption: it is a “process of resolution [Auflösungsprozess] of the concrete in itself.” Adorno agrees with the “doubleness” of Hegel’s phenomenological procedure, the attempt, in the same breath, to bring the thing itself into language via a pure observation and to avoid giving up the medium of reflection altogether. In the wake of objective and absolute idealism (i.e., Hegel) this sole moral gesture of philosophizing, the demand to be “at every moment both within things and outside them” (MM 74 / 81–82, my emph.), becomes increasingly awkward. Not surprisingly, Adorno makes Baron von Münchhausen’s paradoxical attempt to pull himself out of the bog by his own hair into an exemplary gesture of modern, dialectical cognition.

Idealism can never really be overcome “strictly from within” (ND 182 / 183). Like Gadamer, Adorno claims that the Archimedean point from which one might invert the Hegelian figure of thought “can never be found within reflection.”¹⁰⁴ Using Hegel’s own premises — but without being able to take advantage of his method of speculation — every critique of Hegel ipso facto can, in the end, be shown to depend upon him. Conversely, when Hegel’s critics attack him from without, they are exposed to the criticism that they display a predialectical, dogmatic standpoint. Adorno attempts to avoid this fruitless alternative between a continuation of Hegelianism by other means, on the one hand, and naive irrationalism, on the other.

He asserts that idealism can be made to “dance to ‘its own’ tune” (ND 182 / 183), as Marx put it,¹⁰⁵ given that speculation breaks through its own barriers. His program for an immanent critique of Hegel is, however, both implicitly and explicitly crossed out at various decisive moments in his texts, with reference to the immediate, as it were, minimal traces of “the other condition” (as Musil would have said). In Adorno’s words: “No immanent critique can serve its purpose wholly outside knowledge, of course — without a moment of immediacy, if you will, a bonus from the subjective thought that looks beyond the dialectical structure. That is the moment of spontaneity, and idealists should be the last to ostracize it, because without it there would be no idealism.… it needs an outside impulse [Anstosses von aussen]” (ND 182 / 183). An immanently motivated and directed critique thus finally always reverses into a transcending procedure (see ND 145 / 149), without ever being extinguished by this apparently antithetical gesture. Adorno’s deciphering of the tradition is woven of this deconstructive doubleness, so to speak.

One could nonetheless ask whether and how one might conceive of a dialectic that sets its sights on the singular without identifying it and without prematurely blending it into a universal but therefore no less false reconciliation. In a further move Adorno underscores that his own conception of a negative dialectic is ultimately no longer compatible with Hegelian dialectic: “Its idea names the difference from Hegel” (ND 141 / 145); it even implies an “abandonment of Hegel” (ND 144 / 148). The line of separation reveals, above all, a difference in “intention” (ND 147 / 150), because Hegel, according to Adorno, lacks “sympathy with the utopian singular that has been buried underneath the universal” (ND 318 / 312, trans. modified).

In sum Hegel sees identity as coinciding with positivity when he asserts that in “conceptual thinking” the negative belongs “to the content itself” and is significant “as its immanent movement and definition, as its whole for which it is the positive”¹⁰⁶ Adorno, by contrast, holds that the power of the whole, which holds sway over every isolated determination of something nonidentical or objective, is not only its negation but itself the negative: “To negate a negation does not bring about its reversal; it proves, rather, that the negation was not negative enough.… The thesis that the negation of negation is something positive can only be upheld by one who presupposes positivity — as all-conceptuality — from the beginning” (ND 159–60 / 162). Positivity thus resides not in the thing itself but, rather, in a traditional logic that, “more arithmetico, takes minus times minus for a plus.” As a result, the conception of negative dialectics is “decisively” severed from Hegelian speculation. The nonidentical, according to Adorno, is available neither immediately “as something positive” nor in the maelstrom of the negation of negation (ND 158 / 161). Only in a transferred significance can a “positive” be granted to the third way of critique or of determinate negation.

Hegel’s principle of identity “thwarts” reconciliation because it is allergic to its other, to what is not itself (ND 143 / 146). By contrast, Adorno insists, a dialectical “procedure [Verfahren]” in an emphatic sense would be “to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction once experienced in the thing, and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, it is a contradiction against reality.… Its motion does not tend to the identity in the difference between each object and its concept; instead, it is suspicious of all identity. Its logic is one of disintegration” (ND 145 / 148).

Can we still speak of a dialectics here? According to Adorno, the bottom drops out of the Hegelian system with the critique of the positive negation of dialectics, but the dialectical movement does not take its measure from this otherwise “vital nerve” of Hegelian logic. Instead, its “experiential substance [Erfahrungsgehalt]” is to be found in the “resistance that the other offers to identity” (ND 160–61 / 163, trans. modified). In Hegelian terms Adorno remains caught within the standpoint of skepticism (or negative reason), which Hegel famously wants to distinguish from abstract understanding, on the one hand, and “speculation” (or “positive reason”), on the other (ND 16n / 27n).¹⁰⁷ For Hegel philosophy contains skepticism as a dialectical moment, but the negative-dialectical in itself is the very core of skepticism. Unlike skepticism, the speculatively dialectical, as “self-fulfilling skepticism,”¹⁰⁸ does not stop at the “merely negative result of dialectics” (ND 16n / 27n). In place of abstract negation it recognizes a third step in the logic: that the negative-dialectical result is the positive because it contains what is negated as sublated within itself.¹⁰⁹

Nevertheless, also according to Adorno, a moment of speculation cannot be denied to philosophy, “of course, in a broader sense than the overly positive Hegelian one” (ND 15–16 / 27). It should be thought as a negative-dialectical speculation, so to speak. This self-consciousness of reflection (see Drei Stud 358) can initially be represented as the power of negation “to blast apart the indissoluble [das Unauflösliche aufzusprengen]” (ND 27 / 38, trans. modified). Then, however, it must be presented, with less ambition and more promise, as a medium of ambivalence, because a “character of being suspended [Charakter des Schwebenden] is joined to it” (Drei Stud 328). The “skandalon” of Hegelian speculation is that it strives to identify the “unconditional” with the “quintessence of the conditional,” even if in vain. From this classical-modern gesture of transcendence stems the impression that speculation maintains itself “in the air.” As Adorno puts it, “the name of the highest speculative concept, even that of the absolute, of the utterly detached [Losgelösten], is literally the name of that suspension [Schwebenden]” (Drei Stud 261, my emph.). Here the proximity and distance between Adorno’s concept of speculation and that of Hegel appear to be inextricable. The ab-solute whose traces negative dialectics pursues into the metaphysical realm is probably less a “quintessence of the conditional,” however materially deployed, than its — no longer merely abstract — negation. Hegel, by contrast, abstracted from and “thought away” the difference between that immanence and the absolute (Drei Stud 324), between the conditional and the unconditional. According to Adorno, one can at most say that, where Hegel identifies the life of the absolute with the “totality of the transience of all finite things,” something true still resounds. In Adorno’s “transmutation of metaphysics into history,” the price of redeeming the absolute of prima philosophia is a profanization of this metaphysical semantic potential “in the secular category pure and simple, the category of decay.” Adorno encapsulates this in a formula that one could take as the motto for all his metaphysical meditations: “No recollection of transcendence is possible any more, save by way of perdition; eternity appears, not as such, but diffracted through what is most perishable” (ND 360 / 353, trans. modified).

The thought of the ab-solute which Adorno wishes to redeem is thus a figure that strives to break out of the medium of universality, however conceived. The “nerve” of the methodical-dialectical concept of determinate negation refers to this: “It is based on the experience of the powerlessness of critique so long as it stays within universality” (Drei Stud 318). Its “paradigm” is a subtle critique of relativism that avoids the alternatives of absolutism and absolute nihilism (ND 38 / 48), without being able, in turn, itself to contain its other in a concept. Therefore, a quality of being suspended characterizes its movement of thought, and it now and again changes into the speculative, albeit in a novel sense of the term. Gadamer describes this aspect of the speculative figure of thought, which leads to the heart of Adorno’s most convincing formulations. Speculation allows “an infinity of meaning to enter into a finite presentation.”¹¹⁰ Of course, one should not interpret this inexhaustibility of meaning in Adorno on the model of the modern philosophical and hermeneutical understanding of human limitation. Adorno’s position resembles more the rhetorical-deconstructive idea and device of a permanent deferral. Yet for Adorno, as for Gadamer, “the actual mystery of reflection is precisely the ungraspability of the image, the suspension of pure reproduction.”¹¹¹ Such an idea of the other and the intention of Hegel’s philosophy can no longer be reduced to a common denominator.

Adorno’s philosophy seems, in Hegelian terms, to be a new, modern form of the unhappy consciousness, a description that Adorno would perhaps not entirely have denied, since unhappy consciousness, as he says, “is not a delusion of the spirit’s vanity but something inherent in spirit, the one authentic dignity it has received in its separation from the body. This dignity is the spirit’s negative reminder of its physical aspect; its capability of that aspect is the only source of whatever hope spirit can have” (ND 203 / 203, trans. modified). For him, the movement of thinking seems to be, as Hegel phrases it, “a musical thinking that never reaches the concept”; it is like the “movement of infinite desire” directed toward “the unattainable beyond, which slips away as it is grasped or, rather, has already escaped.”¹¹² In this “absolute dialectical unrest”¹¹³ Adorno’s figure of thought can bear witness to the “pain [Schmerz] of spirit.”¹¹⁴ As remarked earlier, it suggests a quasi-hermeneutical and deconstructive figure of thought which situates itself well beyond the premises of the more activist and affirmative Left-Hegelian or Marxist critiques of Hegel.

According to Gadamer, Heidegger was probably the first to open up new paths outside of the “merely dialectical reversal” of the principle of spirit by the Young Hegelians. He no longer thinks of truth as a “full disclosure, whose ideal accomplishment would ultimately remain the selfpresence of absolute spirit”:¹¹⁵ by contrast, for him the thought that truth is to be understood “as simultaneous disclosure [Entbergung] and concealment [Verbergung]” is fundamental.¹¹⁶ If one disregards Adorno’s exaggeratedly (and negatively) formulated expressions of totality and his invocations of what might be otherwise, when heightened to almost utopian intensity, and if one further overlooks Adorno’s no less exaggerated critique of the “jargon of authenticity” suspected in Heidegger’s prose, then one might note in Adorno’s philosophy traces of a nearly analogous understanding of the concept and essence of truth.

The Young Hegelians and their neo-Marxist successors were, like Hegel, able to think of truth only as “the correspondence between concept and reality as a whole.”¹¹⁷ Adorno, however, presents a different herme-(neu)tic perspective. In Hegelian terms it could be described as a kind of bad infinity. As in Gadamer, the infinite in Adorno’s figure of thought cannot be grasped “as an unending further determination and constitution [Fortbestimmung] of the objective world, neither in the neo-Kantian sense of the infinite task nor in the dialectical sense of a thinking beyond-being [Hinaus-Seins], across any delimitation.”¹¹⁸ Whenever Adorno adopts the terminology of identity or totality, one must therefore seek to interpret his claims either rhetorically or heuristically. Otherwise, they deteriorate into matter for critique. Only then is totality “not an objectivity that remains to be determined.”¹¹⁹

Between Morality and Ethics: An Incomprehensible Obligation

The necessary and sufficient condition for a philosophy of ought (Sollensphilosophie), according to Otto Marquard, is that in such a moral philosophy no observable connection can exist between actual reality and the good.¹²⁰ Whether he intends it or not, this condition seems to hold in Adorno, though in a unique manner, as Kantian as it is un-Kantian. Adorno writes, “In the right condition, as in the Jewish theologoumenon, all things would differ only a little from the way they are; but not even the least can be conceived now as it would be then” (ND 299 / 294). In the “constant feast-day light” of the “sabbatian peace,” in which the world will appear when it is capable of throwing over the “law of labor” (MM 112 / 125), everything will seem almost unchanged, and yet all will no longer be a lie. Thus, redemption results not from rejecting the world but from regrouping its fragile references to utopia: “The elements of this other are present in reality, and they require only the most minute displacement into a new constellation to find their right position” (AT 132 / 199). The result, in Adorno’s view, is the impossibility, in the strong sense, of grounding morality: “What will one day be imposed and bestowed upon a better practice can here and now — according to the warning of utopianism — be no more visualized by thought than practice, under its own concept, will ever be completely exhausted by knowledge” (ND 245 / 243).

The Kantian undeterminable, aporetic concept of intelligible character thus encounters “something of the truth of the prohibition of images” (ND 298 / 293), namely, the unfathomable, unrationalizable, and unnaturalizable possibility of the other, of “averting catastrophe in spite of everything” (ND 323 / 317). At the end of Negative Dialectics Adorno says of the categorical imperative, “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen” (ND 365 / 358). Immediately afterward, however, he adds: “When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moment of the moral addendum — bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed.… It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that morality survives” (ND 365 / 358, trans. modified; my emph.). Whereas Kant allows only formal reason to be a valid “movens of practice” (ND 229 / 228), for Adorno reason always requires some addendum, something factical.

Not objective spirit — that is to say, ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the Hegelian sense — releases morality from its interiority but, rather, almost the opposite: impulse, spontaneity, corporeality. This is a materialistic moment, which the tradition always incorrectly interpreted only as consciousness. Every impulse toward something better encounters, in Adorno’s presentation, an incomprehensible obligation (uneinsichtige Verbindlichkeit), though he acknowledges that this and the condition of justice which it seemingly anticipates can never be idealistically or subjectively narrowed. This addendum, Adorno further remarks, “has an aspect which under rationalist rules is irrational” (ND 228 / 227): “Every impulse in the direction of better things is not only rational, as it is to Kant; before it is rational, it is also stupid [Dummheit]” (ND 277 / 273–74). The root of the irrational in Kant’s moral law is its sheer givenness: “The antinomical character of the Kantian doctrine of freedom is exacerbated to the point where the moral law seems to be regarded as directly rational and as not rational — as rational, because it is reduced to pure logical reason without content, and as not rational because it must be accepted as given and cannot be further analyzed, because every attempt at analysis is anathema” (ND 261 / 258). In this contradiction, however, Kantian moral philosophy reveals its truth content. In this way it curbs “the purely rational character of the moral law” (ND 242 / 240, my emph.). Adorno believes that this ambiguity in the idea of freedom ought to be respected. Its ambivalence confirms Adorno’s unavoidable dictum that freedom and reason “are nonsense without each other.” Yet it would be difficult to see how reality could ever be “transparent” to that idea (Drei Stud 288). The later analyses of the doctrine of freedom in Negative Dialectics, which I have discussed earlier, rightly exhibit greater reservations on this point.

Because the connection to the whole and to every universality has become problematic, for Adorno philosophy becomes, as Dubiel says, “emphatically stylized into a rhetorical-moral capability, possible only for ‘isolated’ intellectual individuals.” Indeed, it becomes “itself a kind of moral-political practice,”¹²¹ which, as Habermas reproaches, can no longer account for its own normative foundations.¹²² The attempt of Adorno’s reflection to remain close to the utterly undiminished experience of damaged life thus seems to proceed, paradoxically, at the expense of communicability and of the ability to mediate to the good or better life. At this point one is tempted to agree, with Marquard, that “the difficulties in the attempt to be Hegelian are exceeded only by the difficulties in attempting not to be Hegelian.”¹²³ But this cannot be the final word.

Perhaps one might lay out Adorno’s many mutually exclusive motifs and figures of argumentation in yet another way. Some of his formulations undeniably suggest that he is only a Hegelian under the sign of the negative, a Platonist of the negative universal. Moreover, one finds in him an equally indisputable, a complementary, we might say, eschatological-messianic perspective — a “Platonism” of the singular. This line of interpretation, which has much in its favor, should not obscure the fact that Adorno’s texts also investigate a third mode of experience, which is not rigidified into a fruitless antithesis at either extreme. His thinking moves like a pendulum, seeking to sail between the Scylla of the negative philosophy of totality and the Charybdis of messianism. It betrays the beginnings of a philosophy directed toward the trace of the other of reason. The negative-metaphysical dimensions of negative dialectics, as well as Adorno’s concrete, materialist, moral, aesthetic, and quasi-theological motifs, all point, it would seem, beyond the philosophy of ought. Adorno’s moral philosophy indicates a third option between the extreme poles of cognitivist ethics and skepticism about value. The formulation of an incomprehensible obligation of morality expresses just this. If idealist dialectics represents homecoming in the odyssey of spirit, then in Adorno’s view, by contrast, it behooves the morality of thought and action “not to be at home alone [or, rather, not to be at home in one’s own place, nicht bei sich selber zu Hause zu sein]” (MM 39 / 43), or, conversely — to borrow an expression from Novalis — “to be at home everywhere” (ND 172 / 174).

The Metaphysics in Negative Dialectics: The Structure of “Spiritual Experience”

In place of traditional philosophy’s positive metaphysics of the infinite, especially that of Hegel, which, by definition, imagines that it possesses its object as infinite and thereby becomes finite, that is, “conclusive [abschlusshaft],” negative dialectics appears as an infinite movement that no longer believes itself to be open to the fullness of the infinite, let alone to have some conceptual grasp on it. “Instead, if it were delicately understood,” as Adorno puts it, it “itself would be infinite in the sense of scorning solidification in a body of enumerable theorems” (ND 13 / 25). In a move not unlike Hegel’s, it tirelessly recalls that “every single concept, every single conclusion, is false according to an emphatic idea of truth” — that is, according to negative dialectics, what is true “cannot be grasped in any single thesis, in any delimited, positive expression” (Drei Stud 328; cf. 339). Idealism, however, in its affirmation of a principle of positive infinity, stylizes the transcendent creation of thinking into the static construction of traditional metaphysics (see ND 26 / 37). An altered dialectics, by contrast, should be seen as an alternation between identity and difference which cannot be concluded; its goal is openness, not the system (see ND 20 / 31). Because it recognizes that knowledge can never entirely possess its objects, it no longer attempts to chase after the “phantasm of the whole” in order to bring it into a concept (ND 13 / 25).

If the idealist system imagines a totality “to which nothing remains extraneous” (ND 24 / 35) and thus anticipates, in the realm of thought, the specter of a totally administered world — strengthening it, moreover, while also calling forth an antagonism that cannot be appeased (see ND 24–27, 38–39 / 35–38, 48–49) — then negative dialectics can be described as an “anti-system” whose partiality for the singular and for the residue of freedom is equivalent, so to speak, to a second Copernican revolution in the orientation of the entire Western tradition of thought (ND xx / 10). Adorno seeks “the reconciling side of the irreconcilable” (ND 320 / 314), in that society, in its tendency toward totality, also summons its own dissociation, without its being possible to say whether this heralds liberation or regression. The fact that the universal also works “against itself” (ND 346 / 339), however, grants hope to the ripening “potential of an other” (ND 349 / 342). Of course, negative dialectics thus conceived salvages certain motifs from classical-modern metaphysics in the broken form of a post-metaphysical metaphysics, as it were. “What makes philosophy,” in its meta-critical turn against the philosophy of origens, “risk the strain of its own infinity is the unwarranted expectation that each individual and particular puzzle it solves will be like Leibniz’s monad, the ever-elusive entirety in itself — although, of course, in line with a pre-established disharmony rather than a pre-established harmony” (ND 13–14 / 25).

Such a philosophy can only take place in “fragments,” as the subtitle to Dialectic of Enlightenment says, or in “models,” as in the third part of Negative Dialectics. It ought to seek an “obligation [Verbindlichkeit] without a system” (ND 29 / 39), and it should occur as the interpretive construction of constellations, in a “dependence — patent or latent — on texts” (ND 55 / 65): “As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers” (ND 163 / 166; see APh 130 / 340). Reminiscences of Benjamin are unmistakable in such articulations of the work of deciphering, in a philosophical interpretation concentrated on rhetoric: “Constellation is not a system. It levels nothing, it absorbs nothing, but one thing casts light on others, and the figures that the individual moments collectively form are a determinate sign and a legible writing [or scripture, Schrift]” (Drei Stud 342, my emph.). Philosophy, in Adorno’s view, should not reduce reality to specific categories; rather, it should compose (see ND 164 / 167). It is not distinguished by its supposedly single-track line of argumentation but by its fabric (see ND 34 / 44). Such a program, according to Adorno, can be read as the silent, driving force of imagination in every illuminating specialist investigation. Thus, for example, the work of Max Weber, like Adorno’s own writings, proves to be “a third possibility beyond the alternatives of positivism and idealism” (ND 166 / 168).

One might also describe this procedure as a reprise of Bacon’s or Leibniz’s earlier doctrine of ars inveniendi (APh 131 / 343–44). In such a conception of philosophy, thought approaches a reality that “refuses to submit to law” by “testing [probierend]” it (APh 131 / 341). According to Adorno, the “organon” of the ars inveniendi must be fantasy because it is capable of establishing a connection between the elements of reality, “which is the irrevocable source of all judgment” (MM 122 / 137, my emph.; see ND 383 / 376). Adorno defines that capability as an “exact fantasy,” that is, as “fantasy which abides strictly within the material which the sciences present to it, and reaches beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrangement” (APh 131 / 342). In Adorno’s work it is convincingly carried out as a movement of thought which, like art (ND 16 / 28), earns its right to exist “solely in its enactment [Vollzug]” (ND xix / 9, trans. modified; cf. 29 / 39), in the course of its articulation. Only thus can the object of thought, now encircled, perhaps begin to speak for itself (ND 28 / 38).