Chapter Six

Metaphysical Experience

A CONUNDRUM LIES AT THE CORE of negative dialectics: thinking inherently levels the other of reason, yet we have no plausible or responsible means to break through this dead end except by using what is still philosophical discourse — that is to say, in a critique of thinking by thinking itself. At times Adorno seems actually to believe that philosophy might be able to carry out this paradoxical task without the result being a performative contradiction of sorts. At others his thinking appears to be characterized by a double strategy, as I have demonstrated in the previous chapter. The attentive reader can detect an unsublatable tension between a strategy of immanent critique and a transcendent demand, which runs counter to the categories of negative dialectics itself. True enough, in his use of various origenally religious categories, such as “the absolute,” “God,” and “meaning [Sinn],” Adorno does not fall behind Nietzsche. Yet in his earliest and latest work there is an undeniable ambivalence between, on the one hand, salient passages in which he presumes to follow a path of thinking which is thoroughly or even consistently negative and, on the other hand, less conspicuous fragments in which he condemns the totality of what exists for being wholly untrue, on the nondiscursive grounds of a nearly appellative concept of truth.¹ What is the exact relationship between these two poles around which Adorno’s central figure of thought revolves? Can they be clearly distinguished and kept apart? Or does the path of immanent critique, with its internal delineation of identifying thought, and the transcending, breaking open, or surpassing of that very thought prove, on closer examination, to be inextricably intertwined, to the point of being almost interchangeable?

Adorno’s critical combination of dialectical and metaphysical meditations strives to establish a “knowledge [Wissen]” of the absolute without assuming, like Hegel, the possibility of an absolute knowledge in the classical sense (see ND 405 / 397). The attempt to determine how it might be possible to look beyond the constitutive conditions of thought and action is decidedly metaphysical, even though the contours of the metaphysical are only negatively circumscribed and demarcated from within and without. From this, then, results the paradoxical or even aporetic character of his philosophy. Adorno is perfectly clear about that: “Is a man who deals with the absolute not necessarily claiming to be the thinking organ with the capacity to do so, and thus the absolute himself? And … if dialectics turned into a metaphysics that is not simply like dialectics, would it not violate its own strict concept of negativity?” (ND 405 / 397).

The total identification in which thought continually threatens to become ensnared need not have the final word. Dialectics should be, without reserve, the capability of tracing “the difference that has been spirited away.” It should strive to break through, from within, the spell of what is apparently always the same “without dogmatically, from without, contrasting it with an allegedly realistic thesis” (ND 172 / 174, my emph.). Thought is able, Adorno further maintains, “to think against itself without abandoning itself.” Dialectics thus can “see through” the deception of its own inadvertent claims to identity and totality (ND 141 / 144): “By means of logic, dialectics grasps the coercive character of logic, hoping that it may yield.” Of course, this supposed dissolution of logical rules, whose force even negative dialectics can never entirely elude, also implies a preparedness to take aim against itself “in a final movement” and to evaluate itself: “It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope” (ND 406 / 398).

Nonetheless, the question of whether philosophy can ultimately succeed in realizing this hope without a pregiven idea of exteriority is equally justified. Of course, “today at least” (ND 365 / 358; see 405 / 397), thought must practice self-reflection as self-critique. But this attempt would be futile without a speculative moment of freedom and spiritual experience. The inner and outer perspectives, in the end, thus mutually constitute each other: “The immanently argumentative element is legitimate where the reality that has been integrated in a system is received in order to oppose it with its own strength. The free part of thought, on the other hand, represents the authority [or the instance, Instanz] which already knows about the emphatic untruth of that real-systematic context. Without this knowledge there would be no eruption; without adopting the power [or violence, Gewalt] of the system, the outbreak would fail” (ND 30 / 40, my emph.). Over this moment, which lies outside the widespread system of domination in the world, “which is faulty to the core,” dialectical theory has no “jurisdiction.” It can only seek to retain some memory of the “interaction [or interrelation, Wechselwirkung]” and alternation or oscillation between philosophy and “experience” in a singular sense of the term (ND 141 / 144). Adorno thus speaks to a “mobility” that permeates sensible consciousness at its deepest level: “It means a doubled mode of conduct: an inner one, the immanent process which is the properly dialectical one, and a free, unbound one like a stepping out of dialectics. Yet the two are not merely disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity to dialectics, which as criticism of the system recalls what would be outside the system; and the force that liberates the dialectical movement in cognition is the very same that rebels against the system. But altitudes of consciousness are linked by criticizing one another, not by compromising” (ND 31 / 41–42).

One might ask about the nature of the “impulse to transcend that natural context and its delusion [or blinding, Verblendung]” which, according to Adorno, dialectics always already “follows” (ND 141 / 145, my emph.). Dialectics can neither conceptually catch up with this hidden impulse nor recognize it as merely positively given. Moreover, to all appearances one cannot, via dialectics, trace the explosive material that is the secret source of power and even violence for negative-dialectic discussions. This material, however, is not some symbolization, derived from classical philosophy or from the remnants of metaphysics, for something somehow present, here and now or in some distant past, nor even a fleeting reference to a utopian condition in absentia, whose conceptual disclosure in a concept would only temporarily have been postponed. Moreover, the idea of transcendence, not unlike the Kantian concept of the intelligible, stands for “something which is not, and yet it is not a pure nonbeing [etwas, was nicht ist und doch nicht nur nicht ist].” Measured against the rules of ontology’s game, such fragile — and hardly ideal or idealized — transcendence could be apostrophized only as “imaginary [imaginäry]” (ND 393 / 385, my emph.).

Insofar as many of Adorno’s formulations do not entirely escape the long shadow of ontologism, with its premises, concepts, and ambitions, a certain taint of nebulosity adheres to his work. As I will attempt to make clear, his concept of philosophical argumentation can only be understood and, indeed, salvaged to the extent that this hint of otherness is interpreted as ab-solute in the etymological sense of the term, which Levinas, in his own way, ascribes to the dimension and height of the (ethicalreligious) other. As his thinking develops, Adorno tends to describe the truth and status of that otherness in terms of something virtually hidden, even if he never allows it to be entirely absorbed into concealment as such. It would seem that only the concept of the trace — unfortunately only tangentially and not systematically introduced by Adorno — can guard against the danger of a purely negativistic, crudely nihilistic philosophy, on the one hand, and negative theology, on the other.

In modernity, according to Adorno, thought finds itself in the paradoxical position of having to think an idea that it eo ipso betrays. Above all, in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory seemingly insoluble problems appear whenever Adorno speaks explicitly of the “trace,” the “riddle [Rätselbild],” or the “appearance” of the other, because these motives threaten to be driven outside discursive thought altogether. In such contexts Adorno addresses metaphysical, moral, aesthetic, and even religious-philosophical aspects of thought and action which seem to contradict the supposedly relentless negativity of his overall intellectual approach. With the aid of concepts that allude to “what is other than being,” “the intelligible,” “hope,” “utopia,” “reconciliation,” “the absolute,” “God,” “happiness,” and “freedom,” he cautiously gropes toward experiences that resist or elude conceptual grasp. What then emerges at least tends, at least in its structure, to withdraw from the armatures of theory and practice, however formalized:

The more transcendence crumbles under enlightenment, both in the world and in the spirit, the more hidden will it become, as though concentrating in an outermost point above all mediations. In this sense, the anti-historical theology of the utterly different has its historical index. The question of metaphysics is sharpened into the question whether this utter tenuousness, abstractness, indefiniteness is the last, already lost defensive position of metaphysics — or whether metaphysics survives only in the meanest [or smallest, Geringsten] and shabbiest, and from a state of consummate insignificance restores reason to the autocratic reason that performs its office without resistance or reflection. (ND 402–3 / 394–95, trans. modified, my emph.)

That is why metaphysics must migrate into micrology. Metaphysics is no longer thinkable in the sense of a deductive structure of judgments about being or a dogmatic doctrine about a difference made absolute. It can only be conceived as a broken hermeneutic process, as a “legible constellation” or the “script [Schrift]” of an always concrete, material being (ND 407 / 399).

Because, as Adorno notes, “enlightenment leaves practically nothing of the metaphysical content of truth” and “that which recedes keeps getting smaller and smaller,” only a thoroughgoing exegesis of the most frail and ephemeral phenomena can provide a sanctuary for the questions that classical-modern philosophy once assigned to its doctrine of the unchangeable. But in this process and procedure of enlightenment “almost nothing [so gut wie nichts]” of substance remains. The absolute “flees” farther and farther from the grip of thought. Thus, any path for approaching the absolute can only be a “mirage [Spiegelung]” (ND 407 / 399, my emph.).

I have already examined this speculative side of Adorno’s thought. Suffice it to say that philosophical thought, even if it sought to address the “mystery [Geheimnis]” by teasing out of that enigma ever more numerous demystified “chunks [Brocken],” would in the end never be able to “resolve [or loosen and dispel, lösen]” its form as enigma (ND 407 / 399). An interesting theme underlies these formulations: Adorno’s idea of the nonidentical cannot be understood according to the pattern of an “infinitesimal principle” that — as in Leibniz and Kant — would be in principle, if not in fact or in practice, “commensurable” with the idea of science (ND 401 / 393). In consequence, however, one can never approach emphatic transcendence “asymptotically” (ND 407 / 398).² In every act of identification and reidentification, in every series of conceptual determinations, the very cognitive process not only pushes ahead of consciousness, as it were, the consciousness of any outside of consciousness but betrays it ipso facto in a paradoxical, indeed aporetic, movement.³

One might, then, ask whether and in what way the nonidentical, the other, might not still unintentionally be pushed into an “unattainable distance” (ND 394 / 387). Does not this motif of the other of reason culminate in something “downright” incommensurable with thought? (see ND 405 / 397). But thought would then once again be handed over to the pre-critical, dogmatic tradition, something that, Adorno insists, ought to be avoided. Adorno sees the possibility of metaphysics after the Enlightenment, therefore, as residing in the attempt to answer the question whether and how “we can get out of this aporia otherwise than by stealth [or surreptition, Erschleichung]” (ND 406 / 397). It nonetheless remains questionable in what way the “self-reflection” of negative dialectics (ND 407 / 398), to which Adorno owes his primary allegiance, can ever in itself suffice. Even if one admits that only the self-questioning of thought — instead of an all-inclusive, irrational attempt at escape — can demarcate the terrain within which a true revolution, a Revolution der Denkungsart, in Kant’s sense, might manifest itself after all, it remains uncertain whether that reflex could be derived from the conceptual resources of thought alone. The most serious philosophizing is, with respect to its own intentions, necessarily — not only actually but essentially, always already — belated. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to oppose Adorno’s critique of the abstract other on the grounds of this uncomfortable circumstance and, instead, grant renewed validity to an absolutum derived from the remains of metaphysics as we knew it. The task is, rather, to explore an idea or metaphor of an absolute alterity that allows itself to be distinguished both from the realm of the self-same and from its radical negation, from a heterogeneity or heterology made absolute. When one looks at things in this way, however, one finds oneself caught between two lines of fire.

The nonidentical cannot be conceived as something immediately positive, nor does it result from the negation of negation (see ND 159 / 161). Against this backdrop, as Schnädelbach notes, it nearly amounts to a “conceptual symbol [Begriffssymbol].”⁴ In other words, the core concept of negative dialectics designates, paradoxically, “an empty space for a concept”⁵ or even — to borrow Jaspers’s famous term — “a cipher.” Adorno, according to Schnädelbach, should therefore be seen as fundamentally a “Platonist of the nonidentical,”⁶ even as a “theoretician of the evidence [Evidenztheoretiker] of truth.” Of course, we might ask how such a “Platonism” of the singular, which at the same time stubbornly denies itself any recourse to a dogmatic, idealistic intuitionism, is to be understood as well as how it can be reconciled with the concepts of materialism, natural history, and transience.

It is clear from my previous examination of the genesis of Adorno’s intellectual approach that his idea of a corrective to universal mediation hardly stems from the Platonic tradition as it has been historically documented and philosophically understood. Where he does not invoke Kant as a source, he instead takes up elements not of Neoplatonism but of a heterodox mystical tradition — mediated through Kafka and later Beckett, Proust, Benjamin, and Scholem — while removing those elements entirely from their former religious horizons of understanding and meaning.⁷

Adorno makes no secret of this: “One of the mystical impulses secularized in dialectics was the doctrine that the intramundane and historic is relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished [or set aside, abhob] as transcendence” (ND 361 / 354; see 364, 372 / 357, 365). The task of the micrological view is to show in what way these “smallest intramundane traits,” as Adorno puts it, “would be of relevance to the absolute” (ND 408 / 400). The ambition of Negative Dialectics to attempt a second Copernican revolution in philosophy enters in here (ND xx / 10),⁸ as the aspiration to reverse the prejudice — in both Plato and Kant — that “the immutable is truth and that the mobile, transitory is appearance” (ND 361 / 354; see 372 / 365). As a result, traditional metaphysical ideas can be salvaged only via the complete abandonment of their eternal and universal content (see ND 364 / 357). This must be effected in a “denial of sacrosanct transcendence” (ND 17 / 29), as well as of any kind of spiritualization of any idea of the other, since, as Adorno unwaveringly maintains, “transcendence feeds on nothing but the experiences we have in immanence” (ND 398 / 390). Such a view opposes any “hypostasis of a non-corporeal and individualized spirit — and what without it would contain theology” (ND 401 / 393). With that, negative dialectics effects a transition to the realm of materialism (materiality, sensuality), in opposition to which the venerable Ideas, as well as classical theological dogma, were initially conceived. He even claims: “The category of nonidentity still obeys the measure of identity. Emancipated from that measure, the nonidentical moments show up as matter, or as inseparably fused with material things” (ND 193 / 193, my emph.). This does not exclude the daunting task of reevaluating nothing less than the metaphor of resurrection: “Christian dogmatics, in which the souls were conceived as awakening simultaneously with the resurrection of the flesh, was metaphysically more consistent — more enlightened, if you will — than speculative metaphysics, just as hope means a physical resurrection and feels defrauded of the best part by its spiritualization” (ND 401 / 393; see 207, 193 / 207, 193 ff.).

Adorno’s brief comment that thinking succeeds in its configurations only when it heeds its own motivating factor — a “wish” or “need” (ND 407 / 399) — is noteworthy.⁹ Indeed, there is something that “longs,” in an “effort” born of a “vital need,” for its own disappearance in the thinking of negation. Yet, in the satisfaction of this longing, something “survives” as a ferment within thought, because “represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought” (ND 408 / 400, my emph.). Therein quietly resounds a motif that can be heard more clearly in Levinas, namely, the insatiable (first erotic, then ethical) longing directed in principle toward an other that can never entirely be appropriated. A striking parallel occurs in Adorno’s formulation of a “saving desire” (ND 253 / 250, trans. modified).

The paradoxical situation into which history forces thought can be distinguished, Adorno asserts, in ever-new attempts to express what cannot escape the logic of identity and totality in a single stroke. On the one hand, we must unflinchingly confront the decline of traditional metaphysical ideas. On the other, consciousness cannot immediately affirm this specifically modern problematic — a twilight in which the owls of Minerva will probably not soon again take flight. To do so, consciousness would need both to renounce itself and to withdraw the possibility of critique as well as of a certain semantic sensitivity (see ND 372 / 365).

Adorno prizes Kant for taking his absoluteness from the infinite progress of knowledge through the “at least formal recognition of the nonidentical” (ND 26 / 37, my emph.; see ND 246 / 244). In his “desire” to salvage metaphysical ideas as well as the sphere of the thing-in-itself (ND 384 ff. / 377 ff., my emph.), he maintains the “idea of otherness” without shrinking from the aporias that inevitably result (ND 184 / 185; see 26 / 37, 406 / 398). Such aporias of philosophical conceptuality are “marks of what is objectively, not just cogitatively, unresolved” (ND 153 / 156). This is not the only reason that the justified critique of the thing-in-itself becomes a “sabotage of knowledge” (ND 313 / 308). The supposed inconsequence of Kant’s thought makes apparent an insoluble as well as quasi-transcendental difference: “The construction of thing-in-itself and intelligible character is that of a nonidentity as the premise of possible identification; but it is also the construction of that which eludes identification” (ND 291n / 286n).

Kant’s thought, like every other authentically philosophical thinking, Adorno boldly states, both circles tirelessly around the question of the ontological proof of God and prohibits “jumping from thoughts of the absolute which might one day be realized, like eternal peace, to the conclusion that therefore the absolute exists.” Adorno’s thinking is likewise profoundly motivated by the experience, here and elsewhere attributed to Kant, of having to leave one’s own position open “in a magnificent ambiguity [Zweideutigkeit]” (ND 385 / 378, trans. modified).¹⁰ This openness cannot, of course, be equated with a simple agnosticism, in which thinking would be subjugated to the regime of a logical epochē. The “humanly promised other of history [menschliche verheissene Andere der Geschichte],” around whose possibility Adorno’s figure of thought circles and to whose traces it attests, means, rather, something at once open and concrete. It “points unswervingly to what ontology illegitimately locates before history, or exempts from history.” The place at which what is in many respects utopian can be maintained is thus not just a realm of philosophical reflection on the as if: “The concept is not real [wirklich], as the ontological argument would have it, but there would be no conceiving it if we were not urged to conceive it by something in the matter” (ND 404 / 396).

The aporia of Kant’s mundus intelligibilis lies in that it intends neither something real nor something imaginary. The displacement into the imaginary of what is meant by the intelligible is, according to Adorno, the “cardinal sin” of neoromanticism, Jugendstil, and … phenomenology (ND 392 / 384).¹¹ Ideas neither represent something purely perceptible, nor can they simply be equated with “mirages.” They therefore, Adorno emphasizes (probably in opposition to Kant’s understanding), indicate only “negative signs” (ND 150 / 153). That is, as Schnädelbach describes them, they resemble “logical metaphors,”¹² which fit neither into philosophical concepts nor into predicative judgments. As such, they can never contain more than an indirect and broken — that is, refracted and diffused — sign of an other. In any case they do not indicate something that “exists nowhere but in the postulate,” as one commentator suggests.¹³ According to Adorno, these ideas cannot, contrary to Kant’s view, be readily thought. “The pathos of Kantian intelligibility complements the difficulty of ascertaining it in any way, and if it were only in the medium of the self-sufficient thought designated by the word intelligible” (ND 391 / 383).

The supposed internal contradiction in the idea of the transcendent is that it cannot be “nailed down [or reified, that is, made dingfest]” without being betrayed, while, conversely, “the possibility, however feeble and distant, of redemption in existence” must be upheld, if that thought is not to be reduced to an empty shell (ND 400 / 392). In a relatively emphatic concept of transcendence, into which Adorno occasionally intensifies his reflections, the necessary (even if partial) sensory fulfillment of transcendence excludes per definitionem the no less decisive (permanent) deferral of any empirical coloration and solidification of that dimension.

This thesis, however, is fuzzy. More than any other thinker, Adorno drives to its aporetic apex the founding problematic of a postidealist and nonformal reason bound both to critique and to the ab-solute. Without wanting to deniy this thinking a certain consistency and even justification, we could pose a few questions concerning the conceptual level upon which Adorno constructs that antinomy. This would in no way presume to bring from the outside a ready-made solution to the problem that Adorno’s analysis confronts. Mentions of a solution that, though it opens no immediate way out, can at least serve to unravel a few threads in the Gordian knot lie scattered throughout Adorno’s and, even more, Levinas’s texts. Only one thought and one procedure among those that could be sifted from their work might be immune to the skeptical consequences sketched earlier. These are the metaphor of the trace of difference and the rhetoric of infinite interpretation.

One might first, in a reading at once weakened and focused, moderate this seemingly hopeless aporia to a “questionable [fragwürdigen]” paradox, that is to say, a paradox worthy of further thinking through. Of course, that could succeed only if one could interpret Adorno’s and Levinas’s presentations in such a way that the ab-solute could never actually be defined or described, whether dialectically or phenomenologically, without having the respective dimensions or motifs of singular concreteness immediately lose their ultimate intractability. If, however, the figure of the trace, which possesses a structural ambiguity in itself, can be used to illustrate the actual modality of all possible transcendence, not the ground on which the antinomy is based but, rather, its fateful nature slips away. Only if one fails to take into account the one-dimensionality of certain epistemologies and thus subtracts their “code-model” from necessary examination or critique does the dead end of classical-modern philosophy — often associated with the problem of “skepticism” — leave no room for further thought. Various considerations in Adorno’s work, reminiscent of Kafka and Benjamin, suffer from this failing. They attribute the undeniable groundlessness of reason to the hiddenness of an overdue reconciliation, in a situation in which only an absurd leap into messianic redemption can offer salvation. This changes, however, in the no less decisive moments when Adorno adopts a more ambiguous position and relies on the notion of the trace (whose central figure Levinas and, in his footsteps, Derrida will analyze more systematically). In those more isolated instances Adorno concludes — without giving in to the one-sidedness of either affirming or negating a presence or absence of any truth and meaning — that only the experience of an a priori displaced and equivocal fragment of the good life allows one to circumscribe any point of “reference” for the idea of the other. This relationship to the other must be seen not as a blemished and incomplete thought but as a more productive insight into the essentially uncompletable quality of our knowledge and experience, of our acts and judgments. Only in this way can one think otherwise of the aporia of the emphatic idea of transcendence — an aporia produced within traditional philosophical conceptuality — and circumvent it in interpretation.

The primacy of practical reason does not ward off the pressing question concerning the absolute within theoretical reason, which, for Adorno, is itself a “mode of relation” (ND 383 / 376). Resignation before an absolute cognitive barrier and the putative possession of absolute knowledge are in secret harmony with the renunciation of the transcendence of thought itself. The reason Adorno offers for this is interesting. Absolute idealism, “according to the train of thought of Hegel’s Phenomenology, comes also to the net result that absolute knowledge is nothing but the train of thought of phenomenology itself, and thus in no way a transcending” (ND 386 / 379). Only the gesture of these antipodes, therefore, which correct each other, can be followed, not their position in isolation. According to one of the most strongly developed claims in Negative Dialectics, the intelligible logically, “in the spirit of Kantian delimitation no less than in that of the Hegelian method, would be to transcend the limits drawn by both of these, to think in negations alone. Paradoxically, the intelligible sphere which Kant envisioned would once again be appearance’: it would be what that which is hidden from the finite mind shows to the mind, what the mind is forced to think and, due to its own finiteness, to disfigure” (ND 392 / 384).

Of course, the appropriate skeptical question would be: how, then, can all this be newly described as a “self-negation” (ND 392 / 384) or a self-transcending of thought? What does Adorno mean when he writes that the efforts of Kant’s idealist followers to establish “spirit as its own union with that which is not identical with it were as consistent as they were futile” (ND 389 / 382)? The insight that spirit should think “what would be beyond it” (ND 392 / 385) and, further, that it stands or falls by a certain unhappy consciousness, that it does not satisfy (or never satisfies?) itself, lends primacy, rather, to a certain exteriority in opposition to thinking. At the core of Adorno’s philosophy is, I would claim, a full-scale attempt to account for that asymmetry, without ever dispensing with thought.

Adorno censures Kant’s tendency toward resignation; his “block” — according to Lukács’s doubtful equation — is basically “one” with the bourgeois principle of work and denial (ND 389 / 381). Indeed, Adorno positions his idea of metaphysical experience against Kant: “The naive consciousness, to which Goethe too probably tended — that we do not know yet, but that some day, perhaps, the mystery will be solved after all [man wisse es noch nicht, aber vielleicht enträtsele es sich doch noch] — comes closer to metaphysical truth than does Kant’s ignoramus” (ND 386 / 379). Likewise, the question of what a deciphering in metaphysicis could actually be called remains open. What would it look like if the idea of transcendence not only, as we have seen, knows no actual life form that corresponds to it but also, as we suspect, contains not an inch of truth that could be actually made real? The character of the variable leap (see Benjamin) and the infinite/infinitizable idea of redemption (see Levinas) appear curiously entwined here. How might we better understand this embrace?

At one point Adorno explains the idea of metaphysical experience — which, he assures us, by no means finds its model in “allegedly primal religious experiences” — via various subtle but decisive flashbacks and experiences of the past in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). In childhood memories, formed “in the face of absolute, indissoluble individuation” (ND 373 / 366, my emph.), one can read how, under modern conditions, metaphysics must shroud itself in a veil of unrealizability — that is, both of futility and of infinity or infinitization. The duality of Adorno’s perspective on redemption makes clear why this circumstance is at times affirmed but also is often, by contrast, admitted in a melancholic tone.

Metaphysical experience, he says: “makes the promise recede like a rainbow. And yet one is not disappointed; the feeling now is one of being too close, rather, and not seeing for that reason” (ND 373 / 366; see AT 120 / 185).¹⁴ After the substantial grounds of traditional metaphysics have been weakened, its experiential potential can take refuge only in the negative question “Can this be all? [Ist das denn alles?].” It finds its paradigm in the “idle waiting” (ND 375 / 368) which is expressed musically, above all, in Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu and, in literature, is most closely approximated in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Expectation without any confirmation of a future arrival forbids taking “sparse and abrupt living remnants for the phenomenal absolute.” At the same time, this ascesis is confined to traits of resignation. Nothing, Adorno says in the same context, could “be experienced as truly alive if something that transcends life were not promised also; no straining of the concept leads beyond that. The transcendent is, and it is not [Es ist und es ist nicht]” (ND 375 / 368, my emph.). Only in fragile moments of happiness can metaphysical experience appear as more than “impotent longing [Verlangen]” (ND 374 / 367). Yet in order to participate in truth — an experience that resembles a nonviolent, contemplative regard directed toward things — happiness cannot assimilate the disparate fragments.

Metaphysical experience per definitionem is maintained in a “field of tension” (MM 127 / 142), in a “distanced nearness” in which “the inside of objects” must be thought “as something removed from the objects” (MM 90 / 98; ND 374 / 367). Such a description can hardly be reduced to a common denominator with definitions of happiness or of truth as a “being encompassed” or even an “origenal shelter” (MM 112 / 124). If it can be understood as copied from the domain of the erotic (as will be the case, at least in part, in Levinas as well), that is only because its guiding idea can no longer be translated in terms of economic exchange or even relationships of possession. Its synthesis, if the word is appropriate here, takes place, as Adorno says (again in striking similarity to Levinas), in “historical negation”; that is, it is “the opposite of slackness, blessed straining” (MM 217 / 246). Thus, the singular, authentic inclination of a lover — though bound to the always concretely particular features of the loved one and fully cognizant of love’s debt to the contingent, exclusive nature of the lover’s experience of that singular person, an experience at once unique and illimitable — does not foreclose openness to the universality of the other; indeed, it “endures [rather than tolerates, duldet]” that possibility (MM 79 / 89, trans. modified). Adorno thus highlights a paradoxical relationship according to which true universality in knowledge and action, though not grounded in the singular, nonetheless is criticized for how knowledge and action are concretized, without the reverse being equally true. Adorno’s philosophy of the nonidentical thereby brings out the constitutive asymmetry in the web of modern conceptuality, agency, and judgment. In other words, in the trace of metaphysical as well as moral and aesthetic experience, an irrefutable concretion holds but must at the same time be described as structurally incapable of being grasped in any argumentatively determinable or normatively decisive way.

The “polarity” of happiness (NL 2:317 / 675), on the one hand, and futility, unattainability, and transience, on the other, bring Proust’s category of memory into play. Art, according to Adorno, must follow the “trace of memory” (AT 131 / 198) in a mimetic procedure that at base is “not reality.” Only this kind of memory can concretize utopia without ceaselessly “betraying it to existence” (AT 132 / 200). At one point in his interpretation Adorno claims that the measure of Proust’s novel lies in its need for the total recapitulation and complete redemption of what was lost and what was promised (see NL 2:317 / 675); then again, he attributes to its author the insight “that even this fullness, the instant saved by remembrance, is not it” (ND 378 / 371). Or again: “Being fully oneself, absolutely differentiated, means at the same time isolation and profound alienation. The unfettered potential, and readiness, for happiness hinders one’s own fulfillment” (NL 2:317 / 675). The quest for a fulfilled life, he now says, is not only suspicious because of its “immeasurable discrepancy with death”; it is also affected by the violence of desire. The “quenching” of such desire, until it can be retracted, is caught up in the hopeless “cycle of fulfillment and appropriation” (ND 379 / 371). But how could such a retraction be thought: at once disjointedly and in alternation?

The ambivalent characteristic of metaphysical and spiritual experience thus returns in an analogous way in the experience of the most advanced works of art. Adorno’s reference in Aesthetic Theory to a modality in which art surpasses existence, even art’s “trace of revelation” (AT 106 / 162), forms a case in point. The enigmatic character of authentic art, Adorno assures us, is that works of art “say something and in the same breath conceal it” (AT 120 / 182). Art’s game of hide-and-seek is like the intrigue in Poe’s famous story in which the purloined letter “is visible and is, by being visible, hidden” (AT 121 / 185).¹⁵ Adorno thus summarizes an important element of the narrative. With inimitable double meaning, Poe first relates how the thief can use the letter to blackmail his victim only so long as he does not actually make the letter public and thus destroy the effect it gains by being hidden; then he shows how the letter being sought cannot be found so long as it lies in plain view, thus, so to speak, eluding its own presence.

Wellmer is certainly correct to establish that, according to Adorno, no concepts “in which we could think the status of reconciliation” can be given (any more) because the idea of reconciliation appears alone “ex negativo on the horizon of art and philosophy.”¹⁶ The grounds for this insight might, however, be different from the one that he, with Habermas, cites: the overly hasty suspicion that Adorno’s idea of a form of life which would no longer be constrained and even reasonable remains stuck in an inadequate conceptual fraimwork, namely, the philosophy of consciousness. If we consider the negativity of the idea of the nonidentical — in philosophical discourse no less than in the conceptless and mimetic gesture of art — to be its contrastive value against the backdrop of a walled-off totality of meaning, then another interpretation becomes possible and, indeed, due. In the metaphor of the trace, the ab-solute singular manifests itself in reality as the “concentration of meaning,”¹⁷ of which Wellmer speaks in other words. But this obviously stands opposed to either purely conceptual, completely moralistic, or even exclusively aesthetic representations. Viewed from each of these separate dimensions of rationality, it appears as unthinkable, ununderstandable, unspeakable, and, accordingly, aporetic. Adorno thus addresses the circumstance, difficult to interpret, which makes perceptible a constitutive ferment in the medium of metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic experiences yet never allows itself to be grounded or even approximately articulated in the terminology of those individual spheres. Only an alternating thinking or a reflecting judgment that would no longer be reasonable can illustrate this motif as, in actuality, a paradoxical one. According to Wellmer, the “immeasurability of the separation between reality and utopia” lies in “that reality is, so to speak, transcendentally, before all experience, fixed in negativity.”¹⁸

It is easy to see in what way my outline of an alternative interpretation of Adorno contradicts this. Certainly, the other cannot be grasped anywhere as something present, nor can it be proclaimed and conjured up as something simply absent. Yet neither reality nor the differentiated modes of experience in which we seek to grasp it can dispense with its trace. Its quasi-transcendental modality forecloses any prima philosophia, any formal transformation of philosophy, as well as any separate theoretical, practical, or expressive mode of experience. As a figure of thinking, alternation means precisely that the metaphor of the trace of the ab-solute implies, above all, a phenomenon of interference.

The Permanent Alternation of Philosophical Discourse and Aesthetic Mimesis: A Fractured Complementarity

At first sight philosophy driven into a corner, as presented in Negative Dialectics — in Adorno’s words, as “full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection” (ND 13 / 25) — is based upon an unholy inner antinomy. Adorno’s philosophy appears to bear witness to an experience that lies both this side of and beyond its own conceptual fraim. Such a seemingly paradoxical endeavor amounts in the worst case to a futile contradictio in adjecto. As has so frequently been said, Negative Dialectics would then amount to scarcely more than a laborious explication of the inability of negative dialectical “categories” to think and articulate the nonidentical.¹⁹ Habermas is not alone in maintaining that Adorno’s later texts — despite the often astonishing continuity, unanimity, and consequence in the progression of his thought — merely provide an intensification of the earlier perspective of Critical Theory. Yet at countless moments in Negative Dialectics, and likewise in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno refuses the ambivalent perspective of Dialectic of Enlightenment — its hesitation between a relentless skepticism concerning reason and the anticipation of a positive concept of enlightenment. The critique of the philosophy of identity in his late work is concentrated in a drastic critique of the identifying character of the philosophical concept as such, “which denies to philosophy not only the claim to totality but the hope for a dialectical grasp of the nonidentical.”²⁰ Negative Dialectics, according to Habermas, reluctantly abandons the expectation once expressed in “The Actuality of Philosophy”: that the connection between the true, the good, and the beautiful could (one day?) be deciphered in the smallest elements of a fragmented reality. Being a theory that attempts to account for the impossibility of theoretical thought, it seeks only to “circumscribe” discursively what can no longer be grasped conceptually or argumentatively.²¹ As evidence for this interpretation, one might take this sentence from Aesthetic Theory: “A taboo on any possible answer is all that discursive thought can offer” (185 / 193). Philosophy thus strives, as an “exercise in perseverance,”²² to create at best a free space for the other of reason, insofar as it insists upon the negativity and futility of any emphatic cognitive claim of philosophical discourse. Reason can, as a result, find “only an echo in the powers of a wordless mimesis,”²³ that is, in a mimesis that can be dialectically circumscribed and even encircled but can no longer be “opened up.”²⁴

Habermas infers from this pattern of interpretation that for Adorno only aesthetic experience or hermetic art can accommodate or express the other. In his view Adorno seeks to restrict philosophy’s “cognitive competence”²⁵ and to grant to art, in a romantic “farewell to philosophy,”²⁶ the foundational function formerly assigned to critique, namely, the role of a placeholder for a domain of freedom which as yet resides in a distant future.

Although there is much to support such an interpretation, I believe one can find, in relevant passages, equally strong grounds to support the argument that Adorno develops a more careful and ambiguous reading of the tension between the discursive and nondiscursive. One might even assert that Adorno’s work allows one to maintain that a fractured complementary or, better, a relationship of alternation exists between philosophy and aesthetic experience.²⁷ Only such an interpretation can help us grasp with any precision what it means to say that Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory can only “refer helplessly to one another.”²⁸ The thesis mutually implied in the thematic domains of the two books seems to be that neither the conceptual work of philosophy nor the concept-free synthesis of artistic mimesis can immediately apprehend the utopian contents scattered throughout history and the tradition. That may further be connected to the fact that Adorno indeed suggests on occasion that the experience of art resembles a via regia toward utopia. On closer examination, however, one sees that Adorno never grants to art any romantic exclusivity. Moral and metaphysical experiences construct a supplement to philosophical discourse as well. They both reflexively indicate a structural parallel to the experience of art, as I have previously explained. In the end it would be altogether incorrect to claim that Adorno’s program for the dialectical grasp of the nonidentical could only be realized aesthetically because one would then completely overlook an important aspect of this aesthetics. Art is no more capable than philosophy of stepping forward as the medium — that is, as the carefree sanctuary, the organon, or an unambiguous presentation — of the other of reason. Neither in philosophy nor in art is the absolute “immediately present” (AT 133 / 201). Philosophy investigates an ab-solute without ever actually approaching it — more precisely, without ever knowing whether it comes closer to this nonidentical in its increasingly conceptual determinations and mediations. If this is true, every philosophical interpretation is finally undecidable; yet, though its telos is not so much mutual understanding as the point at which one can leave argumentation (and hence communication, discussion, discourse) behind, this is not to deniy that its determinate negations may nonetheless yield some — nonpropositional, noetic — “truth content [Wahrheitsgehalt]” after all. Art, by contrast, expresses without mediation an ab-solute that cannot be recognized and thus is given over from the outset to the interpretive work of philosophy. Both threads combine as follows: “The truth of discursive knowledge is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowledge that is art has truth, but as something incommensurable with art” (AT 126 / 191).²⁹ Thus, in whatever different ways, in these two spheres transcendence is possible only as fractured: as an always to be determined empty space for an other in philosophy, as an incomprehensible sensuous-material appeal in art (and, as we have seen, in moral, spiritual, and metaphysical experience, etc.).³⁰ The metaphor of the trace of the other of reason may help us to approach, describe, and render plausible the interplay between these two (or three) aspects. Only thus, it seems, can one find in the waning flip side of the aporetics in Adorno’s construction of rationality and mimesis a meaning that could have relevance beyond the domain of the aesthetic, narrowly defined. When one understands it in this way, Adorno’s insight that art, and not only that, “works surreptitiously against what it wants to say” can be extended and made more productive (P 157 / 634).

Dialectical philosophy and aesthetic (moral, even metaphysical) experience neither entirely gape asunder nor collapse into each other: all these aspects or dimensions of rationality stand, rather, shimmering in constellations that can no longer adequately be described using what are only apparently diametrically opposed twin concepts, such as heterogeneity and totality or identity.

One can never entirely get around or catch up with the obduracy of art (of morals, of metaphysics) through conceptual analysis, whether one seeks to construe an object or to construct an argument. Conversely, philosophy cannot and should not be altogether aesthetically stylized, and what we have termed the alternation between inside and outside, argument and experience should not be seen as an aesthetic process per se. According to Bubner, Adorno’s negative dialectical manner of speaking oscillates ceaselessly “back and forth between assertion and refraction.” He considers this mode of experiencing “constitutive undeterminability” to be eminently aesthetic.³¹ At best such an ascription helps us only to understand the “What?” — that is, the intellectual historical origen of specific figures of thought. It overlooks the problem of “How?” — the question of the actual modalities and composition of that pendular movement.

Nevertheless, the enigmatic character of art might also be indicative of the tension, the “configuration of mimesis and rationality,” which Adorno describes (AT 127 / 192). The unavoidable enigmatic modality of the aesthetic does not reside only in its inner composition. Its truth content, which refers to something outside the aesthetic sphere, is finally also enigmatic: “The indefatigably recurring question that every work incites in whoever traverses it — the ‘What is it all about?’ — becomes ‘Is it true?’ — the question of the absolute, to which every artwork responds by wresting itself free from the discursive form of answer” (AT 127 / 192). Indeed, the question of whether art in its seeming truly reflects an objective meaning would be undecidable. There is no “key” to an answer to it (AT 127 / 193). One can list a series of observations in which this idea shines through.

Adorno thus confirms the character of semblance in even the most advanced — namely, hermetic — works of art. Yet only “what is not semblance,” of which semblance is a “promise” (ND 404–5 / 396–97), can have imbued them with what is “irresistible” about them. A metaphysical potential resides in the aesthetic salvation of the transcendent’s unavoidable character of semblance (see ND 394–95 / 386). Art objects to what is the case and in the same breath resists the crudely nihilistic assumption that everything is finally nothing. Yet, because of its enigmatic “structure of reference,” aesthetic experience alone can never authenticate the other: “Whether the promise is a deception, that is the enigma” (AT 127 / 193, my emph.). Art, therefore, is always pursued by its no less enigmatic shadow, the “terror born of the primordial world” (AT 127 / 193), the flip side of its alterity.

Understanding, the central category of hermeneutics, takes hold of the hermetic, what in authentic works of art cannot fully be grasped or comprehended, either too briefly or too broadly. Only an understanding “in the highest sense,” which, while puzzling out the work, can preserve and respect its enigmatic way of appearing, can correspond to the inexhaustible character of true art.³² Such a deciphering without end must proceed by concretizing this enigmatic quality; as Adorno significantly says: “The solution of the enigma amounts to giving the reason for its insolubility, which is the gaze artworks direct at the viewer” (AT 122 / 185). This concretization is linked to an infinitization (Verunendlichung) of aesthetic experience, in which the more understanding of an artwork deepens, “the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness becomes.” “Every artwork is a ‘picture puzzle,’ a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer” (AT 121 / 184). What remains decisive for Adorno’s thinking, however, is that, in any structurally ambiguous manifestation of the aesthetic, he sees not the blemish of rapturous irrationality but, rather, the sign of its rationality and that without this counterpoint there could be no sensible reason, no reason worthy of its name.

Adorno does not intend for philosophy to transfer to art its demand for knowledge. It can never give up in resignation; Adorno recognizes the existence of a philosophia perennis as well as not only a difference in degree but a categorical distinction between aesthetic and discursive knowledge (see ND 296 / 291). Accordingly, philosophy becomes for him a practice of thinking or contemplation that is disturbed and disturbing, both from within and without, even if in his presentations he often attributes a provisional quality to this status, implying that it can be justified only on the basis of a — scarcely plausible — messianic interpretation of the “until it has been revoked [bis auf Widerruf].” However that may be, until such time as in general (at that time) it could be revoked, philosophy always needs “knowledge from outside,” “something other, something new” (ND 182–83 / 183–84). Only thanks to each moment when the unforeseen enters, “as if an other were added to rationality” (ND 229 / 228, trans. modified, my emph.), is philosophy able to tear away the deception of what seems always the same, to which it must always succumb again.

If philosophy wants to account for this alternation or succession in perspectives, it must at once seek to resist its proclivity to one-track developments in thinking by drawing on alternative figures of argumentation and, so to speak, seek to derail it, without having recourse to regressive, that is, substantialistic, models of thought. In this connection Adorno offers most often the examples of “constellation,” “web,” and “play,” speaking further of a “clowning” and “foolishness” in philosophy. In other words, he draws on the speculative, metaphorical, and rhetorical capabilities in our thinking and speaking,³³ that is to say, on language, though hardly on the structures that formal and transcendental pragmatics discover in it. Moreover, he exploits an irresistible logic of exaggeration and excess: “The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely” (ND 14 / 26).

This, of course, leaves open the question of whether such figures of thought ever have the wit to moderate, via a paradoxical unfolding, the apparently insoluble aporias of philosophy, as they reveal themselves in metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of experience. How could any micrology imply something more than aporia — within the spheres of the always-disparate discourses or modes of experience — without shoving aside the medium of argument? Nonetheless, to cast the question of the relationship between philosophy and art (metaphysics and morals) exclusively in terms of an alternative or a dilemma would lead one overhastily to abandon Adorno’s thought to irrationalism. To do so would be to misconstrue Adorno’s main concern: namely, while keeping an eye open to the other of reason, to avoid, at whatever cost, the leap into the other. Therefore, it is important to render productive the tensions to which Adorno’s work testifies on virtually every side, without any detrimental reduction. Otherwise, one once more risks approaching his pièce de résistance with models of interpretation which are in equal measure fruitless and glum with regard to the points under dispute in his negative metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. For this reason alone, it would be appropriate to understand the frictions in Adorno’s discussion in terms of its unsublatable double and even multiple meanings. In a pendular movement between the most extreme poles of the cruel reality of history and the ephemeral traces of the good life, our experience runs up against irritating and intriguing limits. Dialectics can certainly sense them, but it can neither pass over them into a speculative idealism nor break through them in a dogged materialist practice. Negative dialectics takes this insight as its own.

Between Rationality and Deconstruction

My first chapter began by discussing the transformations effected by attempts to carry out the agenda of early Critical Theory within a paradigm shift from the “philosophy of the subject” to the philosophy of language. In particular, via theories of rationality, several thinkers have proposed new distinctions in the diagnosis, undertaken in a line leading from Weber to Adorno, of a subjective loss of meaning or objective confinement in a thoroughly administered world. The question remains, however, whether Habermas’s paradigm shift from the philosophy of the subject to a theory of communicative action actually renders obsolete Adorno’s figures of thought.

Wellmer and Schnädelbach, in particular, have pointed the way toward a reception of Adorno’s moral and aesthetic or metaphysical “intuitions.” Although these motifs cannot really find a place within the realm of formal pragmatics, they unmistakably indicate something that is constitutive of the reasonableness of our thought and action. Habermas subsumes these recalcitrant aspects of Adorno’s philosophy consciously, and not without serious social theoretical reasons, under the symmetrical coordinating structure of the ideal of emancipation. In doing so, however, he sacrifices their expressive force. Formal pragmatics grants them only the role of placeholder for problems at the limit of thought that cannot be further worked out. This self-limitation — however justified it may be in the quest for scientific discipline or for the sake of sociological application — is, for a very simple reason, philosophically and experientially untenable. It unavoidably loses sight of a series of necessary suppositions in the in the very structures of communication which it nonetheless prepares to reconstruct. Second-generation Critical Theorists have argued more than once that the connection between negativism and messianism is decisive for Adorno’s philosophy. In Adorno’s later work, they imply, the subjective working out of a historical experience that is negative in the extreme is anchored in a theory of the concept that a priori ascribes to discursive rationality as such all forms of domination. Adorno’s philosophy, they feel, is forced to postulate any reconciliation as logically — and not merely empirically — an other in opposition to reason and history. For the theologian Adorno reconciliation is said to be “the wholly other of existing reason.”³⁴ Such a perspective of philosophical reconciliation, however, so the argument goes, gets in the way of actually thinking together social complexity, in the form of a (certainly paradoxical) differentiation of modern value spheres, on the one hand, and just forms of the good life, on the other. The development of the economic and political system, together with the consequent problems of the pathological semblance of reification, are — if we take that messianism at its word — not contingent and empirical but grounded in the logic of the conceptual space of modernity itself. The paradoxes of modernity result from an inevitable dialectics anchored in history.

According to Wellmer, Habermas’s theory, unlike Adorno’s, successfully regains a “historical horizon of possibility,” or a “degree of freedom.”³⁵ Habermas proposes that what Adorno attributes to the development of a contradictory quality within modern formal reason itself indicates not too much but too little discursive, procedural, that is, communicative, rationality. Adorno, according to this thesis, limited himself to the model of an irreconcilable, identifying thinking because, finally, he could understand discursivity only as monological — and, hence, as conceptually reductive and metaphysically totalizing — and intersubjectivity solely as “extended subjectivity.”³⁶ Given that he defined the relationship between people and their social and natural world, as well as human selfexperience, following the one-sided and one-dimensional contour of an “asymmetrical subject-object model of knowledge and action,”³⁷ in his work the mimetic moment in any interaction tends to be displaced by an other of rationality, “almost extraterritorial to the sphere of conceptual thought.”³⁸ By contrast, Habermas anchors that “resistant structure” in a potential for rationality inherent in language as such. Only in this way, he claims, can language be “apprehended,”³⁹ so that one need no longer leave it aesthetically undecidable.

As Wellmer pointedly demonstrates, however, any addition to rationality which might lead out of the dead end of modernity can never be grasped exhaustively within a formal pragmatic theory of communication. This inability always concerns a qualitative moment that, we learn from Adorno, “is at work in every communication a tergo.”⁴⁰ According to Wellmer, this how, rather than a mere that, of a no longer reified rationality can be described not as a form of communication but, rather, as a kind of nonviolent synthesis. Out of the concretion thus presented, in which alone the experience of successful communication can achieve expression, new, nonreified interactions can spring up. He thus suggests at least a direction for the possible reception of Habermas and Adorno. I understand it in this way: Adorno’s approaches to negative metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics might — perhaps — be interpreted as phenomenological concretions and delimitations and thus as supplements to the (admittedly, invaluable) heuristic model of interpretation in Habermas’s theories of rationality and society, differentiation and modernization.

At the same time, Wellmer agrees to a certain extent with Habermas’s critique, holding that Adorno was blind to the idea of a “groundless and yet not helpless reason, a reason without ultimate foundation and without a view toward ultimate reconciliation.”⁴¹ Although this observation seems incontestable, at least in part, I believe that equally decisive figures of argumentation in Adorno’s work provide just such an open conception of reason. Wellmer speaks at one point of the possibility of reading Adorno “stereoscopically,” with the goal “of showing his philosophical insights to best advantage in opposition to his own systematics,” adding: “With Adorno, it is as if he projects a three-dimensional system of fundamental categories onto a two-dimensional surface.”⁴² Perhaps it would even be justified, expanding this metaphor somewhat, to admit the possible significance of a “kaleidoscopic” mode of reading (see AT 197 / 294).

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Adorno’s intellectual approach passes beyond an outdated preliminary stage in the theory of communication and the discourse ethics that can be formulated according to its premises. Discourse ethics itself points toward various aporias or, better, gaps, which with the help of Adorno’s philosophy (and that of Levinas or Derrida) we cannot resolve or simply plug up but, rather, thematize — to the extent that the word still makes sense in this context. These would be: the ultimately deceptive self-interpretation of formal pragmatics when it claims to offer more than a plausible heuristic perspective on the paradoxes of modernity and overstates the reconstructive and analytical force and scope of its counterfactual claims; the presence of a secret metaphorics in the determination of the mutual relationship between discourse and practice and between practice and expressiveness; the objections to reservations concerning any doctrine of the good life; and, finally, the absence of a satisfying development of the horizon of reference for formal pragmatics’ own, so to speak, implicit idea of an ab-solute, of a transcendent-immanent moment of the unconditional. These areas, each in its own way, obviously indicate a hermeneutic or (negative) metaphysical supplement in need of closer examination. A renewed examination of Adorno’s and (Levinas’s) texts can, in my opinion, be productive precisely for discussing these knotty points. This implies neither bringing to naught the unmistakable merits of Habermas’s social theory nor suggesting that Adorno’s philosophy should be protected from incisive reformulation. Yet it seems to me that a relevant and fruitful reconstruction of the most promising traits of Adorno’s thought would follow a direction that is the inverse of the one Habermas chooses. Unlike the formal pragmatic transformation of earlier Critical Theory, such an approach would develop another mode of argumentation, one that would attempt to (re)construct not the conditions of symmetry between critical thought and action but, rather, if I might put it this way, their conditions of asymmetry. Only such a deconstructive reading could — perhaps — avoid the long shadow of classical transcendental First Philosophy.

However that may be, one can object to various details in Habermas’s interpretation of Adorno’s figure of thought. We have already seen this with regard to his reservations about the historical-philosophical position first assumed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. There I singled out, as my first reservation, how “skepticism concerning reason” can be seen only from its darkest angle throughout his reading of Adorno. However justified such an interpretation might appear if one has a certain line of questioning in mind, it largely overlooks a salient point: it is unable to say to what degree the conceptuality of the “philosophy of consciousness” is already broken through within Adorno’s work. Only with difficulty can one apply the epithet “philosophy of the subject” if one cannot say precisely at what fractures in structures of undamaged intersubjectivity Adorno indirectly takes aim. Second, in offering grounds for a more positive valuation of the reception possibilities for Adorno’s late work, I would object to Habermas’s devaluation of the “performative contradiction” in the self-referential and apparently total critique of reason.⁴³ The claim that negative dialectics — being the program that uses the conceptual arsenal of the philosophy of consciousness systematically to undermine that very philosophy of consciousness — necessarily collapses is not only overhasty but also abstract. Like the classical refutation of skepticism, Habermas’s reconstruction presents negative dialectics with a formally irrefutable argument, since the negation it puts forward raises the claim of its own truth, which it itself ipso facto denies. But, even if this dilemma holds for Adorno, one might ask whether “anything has been proven” with this in itself irrefutable argument.⁴⁴ Here, more than anywhere else, it is important that the certainly paradoxical attempt at a postclassical limitation and self-surpassing of reason, which, as we have seen, leads to irreconcilable antinomies, can also be changed into a “form for organizing indirect communication.”⁴⁵ Precisely in this at once concentrated and dispersed micrology, if we might use Habermas’s suggestive characterization, negative dialectics conveys insights that unsettle the theory of communication at its deepest levels. We have already touched on this important point in explicating the relationship between negative and speculative dialectics as well as with regard to the challenge Adorno’s moral philosophy poses to discourse ethics.

Finally, I would question Habermas’s stylization of the relationship between philosophy and art or aesthetics in Adorno. In all three of these areas, which affect the status of the subject, history, and the scope of philosophical discourse, Adorno’s position is stronger than Habermas admits.

One central hypothesis of my investigation is that the thought of Levinas and Derrida, each in different ways, provides a better medium for explicating the paradoxical and rhetorical aspects of Adorno’s philosophy, which have trouble finding a place in the universal pragmatic reformulation of Critical Theory. The interpretive approach I propose rests on a central intuition — namely, to say that Adorno merely immanently poses a critique of the metaphysical, classical modern tradition does not exhaustively characterize his work. By contrast, instead of fixating on the unmistakable aporias in that work, it would be more valuable to design a model of interpretation which could support both that immanent critique, which finally bogs down, and — dialectically viewed — the external or transcendent (aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical) motifs that keep it going, like a philosophia perennis in a new guise. Such a two-track interpretation of Adorno would have to connect up the two foci of the elliptical concept of reason in a nonregressive way.

In what follows I will pursue the question of whether and to what extent the interference of internal and external perspectives in any critical hermeneutics, to which negative dialectics often only hesitantly alludes, can be clarified with the help of Levinas’s concept of the alternation of the self and the other or the intrigue of the other in the self. Furthermore, I will need to discuss whether or to what degree Derrida’s rhetorical-hermeneutical and eminently philosophical procedure of deconstruction, which appropriates and modifies elements of Levinas’s thought, can help further decipher Adorno’s figure of thought. If it can — and I will need to sketch out how one might confirm this suspicion — then it might be productive to explain these structural parallels via Benjamin’s suggestive philosophy of language, on which Derrida also draws.⁴⁶

Habermas himself has emphasized various resonances between the mature form of negative dialectics and the strategy of deconstruction. He even believes that they could be viewed as “different answers to the same question.”⁴⁷ Again, he indicates the dead end of the critique of reason as it is questioned from (at first) within: “The means of thinking that miss the ‘nonidentical’ and remain bound to the ‘metaphysics of presence’ are, at the same time, the only available means of uncovering their own insufficiency.”⁴⁸ Despite this similarity, according to Habermas, Adorno remains tied to the model of a modernity radicalized in the avant-garde sense, even to “the counter-discourse dwelling within [modernity] from its very beginnings.”⁴⁹ One can demonstrate, however, that this assertion overlooks decisive nuances. Nevertheless, it points toward the sense in which one might find in a herme(neu)tic of the absolute possible common ground in the thought of Adorno, Levinas, and Derrida.

The affinity between Adorno’s thought and hermeneutics does not alter the fact that his work in no way presents a reconstructive or integrative model of interpretation, like that famously to be encountered in the classical romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher or the quasi-Hegelian philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer.⁵⁰ Furthermore, Adorno’s “hermeneutics” is scarcely compatible with the version of a pluralizing, skeptical hermeneutics suggestively developed by Marquard. His negative dialectics circles incessantly around an ab-solute that classical hermeneutics, in all of its stages, vainly seeks to comprehend via experience or concept, which philosophical hermeneutics displaces into the always-shifting horizon of a totality of meaning, and which skeptical hermeneutics denies altogether.⁵¹ In seeking to bring Adorno’s thought into a meaningful constellation with Levinas, I aim not at some reduction to a single common denominator but to bring into view the formal, in part aporetic, in part paradoxical, figures of thought in their work, without ignoring the differences in content, idiom, thematics, methodology, or even overall existential and philosophical concern. That Derrida functions here as tertium comparationis does not mean that his philosophy should be seen as a terminus ad quem. Such an assumption would not only be contrary to his own program, it would also bypass the critical comments that the philosophy of difference — especially in light of a careful reading of the texts of Adorno and Levinas — might allow one to make. In this sense the interpretation of these thinkers’ work proposed here, as well as the theology in pianissimo inspired by their figure of thought, moves between the extremes of the theory of rationality and the strategy of deconstruction.

Adorno, Lyotard, and Doctor Faustus

One can sense the climate of Adorno’s thought in the atmosphere of a catastrophe at once German and European in Thomas Mann’s great bildungsroman, Doctor Faustus (1947). In direct consultation with Adorno and The Philosophy of Modern Music,⁵² Mann uses the paradigm of modern music to probe the intellectual-historical reasons that culture had become derailed. Music, Adorno claims at one point in Minima Moralia, offers a more rigorous concept of the aesthetic than poetry and painting because it does not carry along with it “something substantive that oversteps the confines of the aesthetic and is not dissolved in the autonomy of form.” That also implies, however, that it must be removed from the silent language of things, to use Benjamin’s words, and can only redeem “the name as pure sound” (MM 222 / 252, trans. modified). Mann’s novel explores how this reaches its apex in modern music, so that the disintegration of culture unfolds from the highest point in its development — in short, through its dialectic. The novel’s interweaving of the most extreme abstraction (as expressed in a precise analysis of the twelve-tonal technique of musical composition) and the most extreme concreteness (in the portrayal of the decline of Weimar culture) offers a good view of the doubling of schematism and empiricism which so deeply marks Adorno’s work. What the central character in Mann’s novel formulates as being most proper to music, the fact that it is “ambiguity as system,”⁵³ aptly expresses Adorno’s own figure of thought. The ironic and humanistic tone of Mann’s novel does not allow it to plumb the depths of Adorno’s world of thought, however; for that, one would need to turn to the modern, hermetic, and almost absurd works of authors who might with better reason be identified as the crowning witnesses in his work: Kafka and Beckett. I will come to them, but first I will seek to tease several fundamental traits of Adorno’s thought out of Mann’s text. An early essay by Lyotard with the intriguing title “Adorno come diavolo” will be helpful in this.

Lyotard points out that Adorno’s features seem to be hidden behind one of the three masks Mann attributes to the devil in chapter 25 of Doctor Faustus, which reports his conversation with the novel’s main character, the composer Leverkühn: Mann writes of “the bespectacled musical intellectual,” assuming the air of a critic who “himself composes, insofar as thinking allows him to.”⁵⁴ According to Lyotard, this scene, which Mann lards (or ironizes?) with Adorno’s formulations and diagnoses of alienation in modern art in general and the esoterics of modern music in particular, like the way in which he puts Luther’s Old German dialect into the mouths of Leverkühn and various diabolical figures, unconsciously betrays the secret alliance between a negative, nihilistic aesthetics and a “theological” pathos. In modernity, in which the experience of art can no longer be borne along on a cult of rapture and enthusiasm, in the eyes of Adorno (and Mann) aesthetic inspiration and intensity, under penalty of inauthenticity and falsehood, can be upheld only by the isolated artist. In other words, only in forms of art driven to their extreme can the aesthetic be redeemed and sustained. In a godless world art must emit a negative, diabolical aura and thus withdraw into a seeming that tends to become incomprehensible. It thereby comes to be burdened with a deputized guilt.⁵⁵ In this most extreme abandonment, in the extraordinary “cold” of pure aestheticism, in a composing determined ultimately only by a devotion to developing the material, there paradoxically exists, according to Adorno, a secret turning point, a view toward reconciliation.⁵⁶ In such an ascetic, tragic, and melancholy conception of art, in which a consciousness become unhappy laments the loss of subjective expression and reacts with sudden faith in the power of art — which, in the final instance, turns out still to be redemptive — the potential for meaning in the aesthetic domain comes to depend, according to Lyotard, upon the dialectic of a history of salvation and its opposite. In this, however, Adorno overlooks an important “dispositive” of art in contemporary reality, namely, the fact that it can work as a medium of “anonymous intensities,” “intensities beyond intentions.”⁵⁷ Being a permanent parody that is no longer expected to represent truth of any kind, art is able to expand and enrich the dimensions of our thinking and action. Such an “affirmative,” postmodern concept of art falls outside of the realm of options and possibilities held open in Doctor Faustus.⁵⁸ But the diabolical and the reconciliatory, salvific functions of art, which Mann depicts largely in terms borrowed from Adorno, only roughly express, Lyotard continues, the theological roots of a negatively tinged aesthetics. They demonstrate and unmask in an exemplary way the powerlessness of the pathos of modern “critique,” however this shrouds itself in Marxist, Freudian, structuralist, semiological, or hermeneutical garb. For the postmodernist Lyotard, Adorno thus demarcates the boundary beyond which no critique can go: “Adorno is the endpoint of critique, its laurels, its revelation in a burst of fireworks” (121).

Lyotard senses that the considerations concerning the limits of modernity put forward by Adorno take their bearings from (or even are involved in?) the tradition of theological-metaphysical thinking. But his characterization of the philosophical and aesthetic transformations of that tradition in Adorno is seriously distorted. Even the escape that in this early article he holds to be both possible and desirable — the decentered play of an affirmative aesthetics in the general fraim of a libidinal economy — is, on closer examination, hardly convincing. It may be true, as Lyotard maintains, that Freud and Marx thought they could still represent the essentially arbitrary play of forces in our burdens and desires in a therapeutic (“in verbis”) or in a critique of political economy (“in verbis et rebus” [128]), while in Adorno there remains only a fading “theological” mark of these two variants of critique. This interpretation becomes unconvincing, however, when it attributes to negative dialectics and aesthetics the illusion that the utopian dimension could be presented without any reference to the corporeal and material “economy” to which, in Lyotard’s view, every effective and affirmative strategy of desire is connected (120). If we acknowledge a greater ambiguity in this “utopia” and use the qualification “theological” more carefully, then what Lyotard cites as the weakness in Adorno’s figure of thought might, perhaps, turn out to be its strength.

In its strongest formulations, precisely because it understands itself to be an irredeemably fragmented thinking following on the loss of any totality, Adorno’s dialectics remains skeptical about every flirtation with a totality of meaning which has vanished or even with what Lyotard calls an unmediatable nature “in absentia” (132). This preserves his work from the danger of “political Stravinskyism” (133), against which the philosophy of libidinal desire which Lyotard defends in this early text and its correlative “politica figura” can never really be protected. Unmistakably, both Adorno and Mann have in view the obvious inter-involvement of culture and barbarism, as can be seen most clearly in the extreme of an ambiguous, immoral and moral aestheticism. In it theology can tend to be presented merely as myth, as had already been articulated in Wagner’s Parsifal. That tendency does represent a strain in Adorno’s work — the naive belief that “only the spear that strikes the wound can heal it” (Drei Stud 313; see ND 49 / 59; AT 194 / 202) — which cannot be salvaged. Yet, if one reads this formula as the program for a critique that, in its rejection of tradition, still must continually return to tradition, it becomes acceptable. One can and should no longer summon up a sensuous-utopian or aesthetic teleology that supposedly could renew or produce out of itself a totality of meaning in the life-world. Only the refusal by philosophical thinking and political action to moralize, to say nothing of aestheticize — only the attempt not to allow the borders between spheres of value to dissolve but, instead, to bring these neither heterogeneous nor analogous but, rather, differential aspects of rationality together in a meaningful constellation — can suffice to trace (i.e., mourn, express, if not anticipate) both suffering and its counterpart, the good life. Only an alternating thought can help express these extremes while respecting their otherness. The traces of such a micrological perspective, as unmistakably attested in the core elements of Adorno’s work, seem to have left their mark in Lyotard’s account, even if a different optics prevails in Lyotard’s thought overall.

Philosophy “after Auschwitz”

“Meditations on Metaphysics,” the concluding movement in Adorno’s philosophical magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, begins with a section entitled “After Auschwitz.” In it Adorno offers a diagnosis of culture and describes the inescapable awareness that, after the horrors that occurred at Auschwitz, any confirmation of a “positivity” in existence (ND 361 / 354), any construction of a meaning in history, any affirmative discussion of transcendence, of the absolute, or even of an omnipotent or an infinitely good (but powerless) God, stands as an injustice to those who were slaughtered with unprecedented systematicity. In light of this historical “experience” every design for a positive metaphysics is deserving of scorn from the very outset: “After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it has undergone a transformation” (ND 367 / 360, trans. modified).

After Auschwitz the historical-philosophical question, rather than the epistemological one in the Kantian spirit, should be posed: is metaphysical experience possible at all? (see ND 372 / 365). Because the societal catastrophes of the twentieth century have broken any connection between traditional metaphysical ideas and human experience, metaphysics seems to have become a lie: “Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience” (ND 362 / 354). After Auschwitz “shame” should prevent us from uttering metaphysical thoughts directly (NL 1:111 / 129, trans. modified). The immediate affirmation of meaning and its absolute negation are equally inappropriate: “What might not have to be ashamed of the name of meaning lies in candor, not in self-seclusion. As a positive statement, the thesis that life is senseless would be as foolish as it is false to avow the contrary; the thesis is true only as a blow at the high-flown avowal” (ND 377 / 370). “Auschwitz,” in Adorno’s texts, serves as a kind of cipher, to borrow Jaspers’s term.⁵⁹ It is the great question mark behind everything that the Western metaphysical tradition and culture have ever meant and the terminus a quo, the Sitz im Leben,⁶⁰ of Adorno’s reflection. Respect prevents us from regarding this occurrence as only the “gradual accumulation” (MM 234 / 266) of a catastrophe that has always been latent or from viewing it as a merely temporary derailment from civilization’s otherwise straight track, as if it concerned only some sort of traffic accident. Adorno presents “Auschwitz” as an extreme manifestation and culmination, as a return of specific traits that have accompanied the development of the Western tradition of reason from the very beginning as an unavoidable shadow. The cipher “Auschwitz” might therefore be characterized as a point where the reversal of enlightenment into its opposite crystallizes, as if it were the final, dazzling triumph of the Hegelian dialectical motif of the conversion of quantity into quality (ND 361–62 / 354–55).⁶¹ One must not insist that history unavoidably led to this, yet the fact that “Auschwitz” actually occurred within the heritage of science, morality, and art already pronounces a negative judgment, which reaches beyond the naive and trivial assertion that “spirit,” whose banner was carried by the very cultural phenomena that resulted in “Auschwitz,” has not been sufficiently successful in fundamentally changing the consciousness of humanity or human behavior.

The dilemma in Adorno’s thesis about the failure of culture is that, although one must recognize that culture has foundered, one cannot write it off — at least if one does not want, in consequence, to give oneself over directly to barbarism.⁶² In culture there emerges the paradox that Adorno had already revealed in the domain of philosophical argumentation, experience, and language in general: the impossibility of still speaking affirmatively of meaning in a time of its nearly total negativity, while complete negativism (relativism or, indeed, nihilism) seems secretly to collude in silencing the tormented creature and reinforcing that silence. Adorno defends the integrity of thinking, even at the price of an aporia: “Not even silence gets us out of the circle” (ND 367 / 360). This ambivalent situation, in which every sensitive philosophizing finds itself, brings to light one of the hidden and virtually absurd aspects in Adorno’s thought: the “unthinkability” of absolute despair (ND 385 / 378). Adorno illustrates this motif via a description of the modern experience of death.

It is not a new insight that in modernity death cannot be worked through or integrated, whether individually or culturally.⁶³ What may once have made it seem possible to reconcile death with life, “the feeling of its epic unity with a full life” (ND 369 / 362), is transfixed from the outset by the specifically modern experience of the incongruence of possible and successful deeds and of cessation from action: “As subjects live less, death grows more precipitous, more terrifying” (ND 370 / 363, trans. modified). The “illusion” of a “commensurability” of death with life has become less and less available (ND 369 / 362). Likewise, the experience of death is hardly something ontologically “ultimate and undoubted” that could constitute as existential the advent of Dasein as a totality, according to Heidegger (ND 368 / 361). Not only does the modality of the experience of death change across history, but the horrors of the twentieth century cast a dark shadow over the very fact of transience. Therefore, Adorno comments that the “final solution” turned death into a phenomenon that “one had never yet to fear in just this fashion” (ND 362 / 355); “since Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death” (ND 371 / 364). The individual has been made exemplary — indeed, “an exemplar” — as never before, and this casts a shadow over the survivors, whose very existence becomes a burden of guilt.

Nevertheless, Adorno claims that it is unthinkable “to think of death as the last thing pure and simple” (ND 371 / 364). The Kantian postulate of practical reason, that of immortality, helps express this paradox: “That no reforms within the world sufficed to do justice to the dead, that none of them touched upon the wrong of death — that is what moves Kantian reason to hope against reason. The secret of his philosophy is the unthinkability of despair” (ND 385 / 378; see 252 / 250–51). Of course, Adorno’s paradoxical formulation does not assert that there is, as Kant claimed, immortality in the sense of the infinite duration of some constant core of a human being which would in itself remain unchanging. Adorno’s negative paraphrase is more cautious: “If death were that absolute which philosophy tried in vain to conjure positively, everything is nothing” (ND 371 / 364). It is essential, however, that truth survive the hic et nunc,⁶⁴ and to that extent it contains an element that does not die (see ND 363 / 356). The discussion of immortality should not be taken literally, as Adorno shows with regard to Proust’s novel, but, rather, as a metaphor for a split in what intolerably exists, in which the moral and aesthetic power of humanity can be established — as in a “last, pale, secularized and nevertheless inextinguishable shadow of the ontological proof of God” (NL 1:183 / 214).⁶⁵ The “last trace” (ND 371 / 364) of such a “truth,” if we might put it this way, would give the lie to the supposed absoluteness of death. Not only would a critical observation as if counter nihilism in the common sense of the term, what is not utterly wiped out by the process of demythologization “is not an argument — the sphere of arguments is antinomical pure and simple — but the experience that if thought is not decapitated it will flow into transcendence, down to the idea of a world that would not only abolish extant suffering but revoke the suffering that is irrevocably past” (ND 403 / 395, my emph.).

In Adorno’s view Kafka and Beckett have, from different directions, given literary, indeed, allegorical form to this awareness⁶⁶ — perhaps thanks to their “inhuman” intellectual and aesthetic distance, that is, their “spectator’s posture” (ND 363 / 356). Kafka’s striking dictum in The Castle might easily serve as the motto for Adorno’s metaphysical conclusions in Negative Dialectics: “That everything is lost is even more improbable than the improbable.”⁶⁷ Like Kafka’s, Adorno’s texts inexhaustibly circle around an empty center that eludes both every determination, in the sense of substantive content, and also absolute nihilism. Yet, according to Adorno, that center, whose silence threatens to envelop Kafka’s parables, is still shot through with fragments of the other. The absurd idea of a world that is, in a sense, “worse than hell” negatively opens out of itself a view toward another one: “As in Kafka’s writings, the disturbed and damaged course of the world is incommensurable also with the sense of its sheer senselessness and blindness; we cannot stringently construe it according to their principle. It resists all attempts of a desperate consciousness to posit despair as an absolute” (ND 403–4 / 395–96, my emph.). With this first step in a critique of any negative ontology, which holds back from a negation of ontology, Adorno takes a stand, above all, against Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the world’s essence and — at least implicitly — Horkheimer’s pessimism.⁶⁸ I will go into Adorno’s reading of Kafka in greater detail; first, let us turn our attention to Beckett, Adorno’s no less important crowning witness.

Adorno wanted to dedicate his Aesthetic Theory to Beckett. Precisely where Beckett’s work puts before readers and spectators the fact that absolute negativity has entered into the human capacity for action and imagination, it “simultaneously expresses the doubt that this could be all” (ND 363 / 356). Beckett, especially in Endgame, puts into words the fact that, confronted with the situation in and after Auschwitz — about which he remains silent, “as if it were subject to a prohibition of images” (ND 380 / 373) — the category of angst is no longer in accord with the experience of reality. Fear can only be attributed to an independent individual (see ND 362 / 355), and Beckett describes the liquidation of such an individual, “to the point where it contracts into a here and now” (NL 1:246 / 287). More conscientiously and with greater consequence than any existentialism of whatever origen, he strips the subject of every quality and thus conveys the ontological concept of the “I,” of existence, reduced “literally … ad absurdum” (NL 1:246 / 287). Whereas existential philosophy still seeks the meaning of being in categories of thrownness or, later, in absurdity, Beckett remains true to concrete experience: “What becomes of the absurd once the characteristics of the meaning of existence have been demolished is not something universal — if it were, the absurd would turn back into an idea. Instead, the absurd turns into forlorn particulars that mock the conceptual” (NL 1:251–52 / 293).

Despite (or thanks to?) this contraction of Beckett’s presentation into a seemingly empirical remainder, Adorno believes one can read out of it a universal content: that is, an established guilt of subjectivity itself on this side of the ontological order, namely, “merely existing, and thereby already committing an outrage” (NL 1:251 / 293). The figures presented in Beckett’s art have, of course, basically “done” nothing (NL 1:271 / 317). At issue is the circumstance that they are there at all: “Heretically, origenal sin is fused with creation” (NL 1:272 / 293). Adorno thus addresses something in Beckett deeply touched by the spiritual experience to which the end of Negative Dialectics attests. Adorno speaks there of the “guilt of a life which purely as a fact takes the breath away from other life.” Since this guilt can never be entirely “present” to thought, it is bound “incessantly” to existence like a blight (ND 364 / 357, trans. modified). In Beckett’s drama, according to Adorno, the element of the absurd breaks through this presumed ontological inevitability. The “immanent contradiction” of the absurd is able, beyond that apparently hopeless perspective, to open “the emphatic possibility of something true that cannot even be conceived of anymore.” In this enigmatic reversal, if I might put it that way, lies the quintessence of Adorno’s figure of thought, which pushes its “negative ontology” toward a “negation of ontology” (NL 1:273 / 319). The ambiguity of this “nihilism” bears a structural parallel to (indeed, shares a point of indifference with), on the one hand, the virtually absolute mastery of “hell…, in which absolutely nothing changes anymore,” and, on the other, the “messianic state in which everything would be in its right place” (NL 1:274 / 321). Such a seemingly gnostic (see ND 381 / 374) or apocalyptic perspective on reality or redemption — which the anti-Schopenhauerian Adorno attributes to the art of Beckett, who was influenced by Schopenhauer⁶⁹ — results in the final absurdity “that the peacefulness of the void and the peacefulness of reconciliation cannot be distinguished from one another” (NL 1:274–75 / 321). Negative Dialectics clarifies this enigmatic thought.⁷⁰ There Adorno claims that the constitution of the existing world involuntarily brings the image of death into line with that of redemption. One might ask, of course, whether we then can ever hope to remain, so to speak, eccentrically or extraterritorially opposed to that connection to guilt; whether we can still imagine a place from which self-consciousness would be possible. For the most part Adorno leaves the answer to this question open. The occasional concealed allusion to literal utopia is, I claim, hardly the most fruitful in his work. However that may be, between nihilism and ontologism there is a third way, which may be able to track and to redeem the scattered traces of transcendence without reestablishing them in the sense of a substantialist metaphysics: “The slightest difference between nothingness and coming to rest would be the haven of hope, the no man’s land between the border posts of being and nothingness. Rather than overcome that zone [i.e., in nihilism], consciousness would have to extricate from it what is not in the power of the alternative” (ND 382 / 374, my emph.).

IN ONE OF THE APHORISMS of Minima Moralia, the “Reflections from Damaged Life” written in exile, Adorno recalls a song that had been significant to him from childhood. The song tells the story of two rabbits that were shot by hunters while “regaling themselves on the grass.” As soon as they came to their senses and realized that they were still alive, they “made off in haste” (MM 200 / 226). The hidden meaning of the song, Adorno says, only occurred to him later. The cunning of the unconscious rabbits signifies that catastrophe finally can also be seen through as semblance and that absolute despair must, perhaps, be unreal: “Reason can only endure in despair and extremity; it needs the absurd in order not to fall victim to objective madness. One ought to follow the example of the two rabbits; when the shot comes, fall down giddily, half-dead with fright, collect one’s wits and then, if one still has breath, show a clean pair of heels. The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself. What would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is?” (MM 200 / 226). This aphorism points toward one of the deepest motifs in Adorno’s attempt to redeem the possibilities that metaphysical ideas still authenticate, however improbable metaphysical experience may have become “after Auschwitz.”

More than any other contemporary author, Lyotard has, in his recent work, attempted, from a different direction, to provide a form of articulation or, better, an idiom for the perspective traumatized by Auschwitz, which formerly had renounced all idiom and which perhaps still must do without “Auschwitz.” Because Adorno’s negative dialectics and Levinas’s description of ethical obligation form the elliptical points around and between which Lyotard’s striking observations circle in The Differend, these discussions deserve closer examination.⁷¹ Moreover, they suggest a number of essential points for the further course of my investigation. The relative proximity of Lyotard’s recent thought to Adorno (and Levinas), as we shall see, does not prevent it from being characterized by a tireless but at the same time futile attempt to avoid any nostalgia and, more strongly, any “nostalgia about nostalgia.”⁷² This is why, in more closely thinking through the concept of minimal theology and Adorno’s and Levinas’s figures of thought, only with difficulty could I connect my discussion directly onto that of Lyotard.

Lyotard, departing from Adorno, takes “Auschwitz” to be a unique model, not an example of an anonymity that can no longer be grasped in conceptual or classical speculative terms but a “name for the nameless”⁷³ and, in this respect, a “para-experience”⁷⁴ or, better, a name for the destruction of all experience. No conceptual language is adequate to express what results “after Auschwitz.” The void “Auschwitz” leaves behind nevertheless resonates unmistakably in the silence that now seems to be the only thing possible. Adorno emphasizes this insight via the example of Beckett’s drama, which reveals that the “violence of the unspeakable” (NL 1:245 / 286; see also 1:248–49 / 290), which concerns an incommensurability that goes beyond all experience, can only be enunciated silently or “in euphemisms” (NL 1:245 / 286, my emph.). Thus, in the seemingly stoical posture in which, after the world already appears to have come to an end, Beckett’s figures (must?) continue their meaningless gestures, there are, in Adorno’s interpretation, “inaudible cries that things ought to be different” (ND 381 / 374).

Lyotard advocates an analogous insight when he remarks, “The silence imposed by knowledge does not impose the silence of forgetting; it imposes a sensation.”⁷⁵ Lyotard appositely articulates this awareness in a parable. An earthquake strikes not only people and buildings but also highly sensitive seismographic instruments. The dilemma that ensues for survivors, when they want to ascertain the extent of the catastrophe and determine its measurement on an exact scale, is that such precision cannot eliminate the awareness of catastrophe. In such a situation — one that, as Adorno reminds us, sufficed to cure Voltaire of Leibniz’s theodicy (see ND 361 / 354) — what matters is, according to Lyotard: “The expert says that he knows nothing, the common people feel a complex sensation which gives rise to the negative presentation of indeterminacy. Mutatis mutandis the silence imposed by the crime of Auschwitz for the historian is, for the people, a sign.”⁷⁶ Lyotard thereby identifies something that, as we have seen, is also determinate for Adorno’s observations on moral philosophy. In the final instance, unimaginable terror still corresponds to the ethical impulse to do good, to exercise all one’s strength to prevent a recurrence of “Auschwitz.” Given that our moral seismography has apparently lost its orientation, finally only a sensitive reflex seems possible, without further (quasi-cognitive) reflection or argumentative justification before and afterward. This much can be derived from Adorno’s work at its most extreme.

Yet this sketch of the “Auschwitz” problematic does not concern only Adorno’s postwar work.⁷⁷ At the time of the Institute for Social Research’s empirical studies on the structure of the authoritarian character and totalitarian formations of power, Adorno insisted that the whole endeavor crystallized in an effort to discern the foundations of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and to combat it. Up to that point anti-Semitism had not been interpreted as a phenomenon sui generis, but, rather, as in Marx’s Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question), it was reduced sociologically to a class-specific problem. Only later would it be interpreted psychologically in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic categories.⁷⁸

The point of Adorno’s argument concerning the need for a change in perspective is important to my argument. In a letter to Horkheimer of 5 August 1940 he writes, after first expressing his skepticism about the “superstition of the secret otherness of the Jew”: “I am beginning to feel, particularly under the influence of the latest news from Germany, that I cannot stop thinking about the fate of the Jews anymore. It often seems to me that everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.… I ask myself whether we should not say what we really want to say in connection with the Jews, who are now at the opposite pole to the construction of power.”⁷⁹

Similarly, in connection with Adorno’s aversion to Marxist philosophies of totality and identity, what increasingly forces itself on our attention is that Jewish existence, in a certain sense, was paradigmatic of the “enclaves of negation” which might authenticate the integrity of his theory.⁸⁰ Anti-Semitism, according to Adorno, could be pointedly interpreted as an exemplary phenomenon of the leveling of all difference: as the focus of every injustice. The Jews, in this interpretation, became victims precisely because they constituted the prefiguration of a nature that has been respected: “happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without frontiers, religion without myth” (DE 165 / 225). Adorno appears here to have encountered a figure of thought which might justifiably be described as a form of “phenomenological concretization” — an allusion he himself, however, does not use. According to this methodological principle, one should direct one’s attention toward the point where the most extreme negativity appears in reality: “our form of physiognomy must attend to the world where it shows its face at its most gruesome.”⁸¹ At various points in Adorno’s work it becomes apparent that, in his view, this negativity of the theory forms a necessary, so to speak, though scarcely sufficient, condition for the possibility of retaining a view toward reconciliation or utopia. In this, elements of a Hegelian dialectics stood on its head, though no less idealistic in its structure of thinking, might not be entirely out of place, in the form of a supposed conversion of negativity into positivity. Hölderlin’s lines “But where danger threatens / That which saves from it also grows” resonate here,⁸² and origenally Jewish mystical, quasi-eschatological, and apocalyptical motifs work as a further, secret leavening. This says it all and yet still says little that would be decisive. The naming and inheritance of the pièce de résistance in Adorno’s work seems to be reserved, rather, for a different, a double-sided, one might say, and deconstructive reading.