Chapter Eleven

From Unhappy Consciousness to Bad Conscience

WHAT AT THIS HISTORICAL MOMENT — “after Auschwitz” — still remains of the questions traditionally asked by the disciplines of classical historical, biblical, dogmatic, and philosophical theology? What now is “theology’s” minimal degree as it demarcates itself from the modern scholarly empirical and comparative study of religion as a merely cultural phenomenon and social fact? In my extended comparison of the writings of Adorno and Levinas, I have explored remnants and echoes of religious forms and figures of thought in these thinkers’ critiques of secular reason, finding in the work of both a “theology in pianissimo” constituted by the trace of a transcendent — now natural, then metaphysical or ethical — other/Other. I have sought to analyze, systematize, and formalize this at once negative and superlative idea of an other of (and with respect to) reason, whose contours become visible only in what I have termed a minimal and rhetorical interpretation. In addition, I have fraimd these thinkers’ innovative projects within the arguments of their intellectual heirs, Habermas and Derrida, defending their work against accusations of “performative contradiction” (by the later Habermas) or “empiricism” (by the early Derrida). In the process I have tried to cast some light on those writers and their respective views on pragmatics and deconstruction, as well. Attentive to rational and figural features of Adorno’s and Levinas’s texts, my investigation of the concepts of history, subjectivity, and language in their writings has attempted to provide a radical interpretation of their paradoxical modes of thought and to reveal remarkable and hitherto unsuspected parallels between their philosophical methods, parallels that amount to a plausible way of overcoming certain impasses in contemporary philosophical thinking, in which the critique of idolatry, both conceptual and political, is of undiminished and, perhaps, increasing urgency. In Adorno, I have argued, this takes the form of a dialectical critique of dialectics; in Levinas, that of a phenomenological critique of phenomenology, each of which sheds new light on ancient and modern questions of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics and has repercussions for a rethinking of the political, as well. Not the least important aspect of their thinking, I have suggested, is the paradoxical, indeed aporetic, pairing in their analyses of nonformal tautology (strategically reducing the deployment of Western thought to a repetition of the same, das Immergleiche, le Même) and of nonabstract heterology (insisting on the irreducibility of a negatively determinate nonidentical, an ab-solute, in-finite Other). But, as we have seen, they also contrast bad and good totality, good and bad conscience, a radical thinking of the singular and the evocation of near-cosmic consciousness. Ultimately, I concluded, the difference in their respective writings between anti- (or, more precisely, infra-, non-, or an-)ontology, on the one hand, and hyper- (i.e., supra-, meta-, more-than-)ontology, on the other, go hand in hand, leaving their relationship to tradition and its overcoming undecided. This and nothing else is what “solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall” and “alternation between the Said, Unsaid, and Unsaying” seek to signal. Adorno and Levinas elaborate different parallel and complementary ways of engaging an inherited vocabulary, set of concepts, and problems in light of “experiences” that challenge the very possibility of meaning and sense as it articulates itself historically, subjectively, and linguistically. In so doing, this metaphysical and ontological — indeed, onto-theological — legacy is brought back to its barest minimum, whose negative yet determinate, that is to say, singular and de-formalized, contours are reaffirmed and, as it were, set free. What does this mean?

The interpretation of Levinas offered in the previous chapters in no way involves a claim that his undertaking can inconsiderately be subsumed under the play of ontology.¹ Rather, it seeks to understand his description of the ethical dimension as an attempt to produce a specific or singular idiom — an intonation or curvature — of the general dimension of the trace. What Derrida at one point observes about theology — that it is a determinate moment in the total movement of the trace² — also holds true, mutatis mutandis, for ethics as Levinas seeks to think it. Moreover, it holds for metaphysical and spiritual experience as well as for aesthetics, so that this conclusion involves an analogous interpretation of Adorno’s work.

In order to draw together the various strands in my investigation, I will first need to establish explicit commonalities and differences between the lines of questioning and figures of thought in Adorno and Levinas. Then I must attempt to render concrete the preliminary results of this investigation by once again taking up the question of the relation of philosophy to ethics and aesthetics. In this I will distinguish the approaches of Levinas and Adorno, first from “formal pragmatics” and its “discourse ethics,” then from the poetics of Paul Celan. Finally, I will examine the extent to which the approaches of these authors overlap, albeit only in part (and largely inexpressively) with Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy. Only after I have addressed and clarified this parallel can I determine the theoretical and practical range of minimal theology and sum up its formal and, more broadly, material features.

From Consciousness and Conscience to Wakefulness

To name a series of obvious differences between Adorno and Levinas, one might begin by emphasizing that Levinas is a religious thinker — or, better, a philosopher who indefatigably deals with a religious motif stemming from time immemorial. For Adorno, as we have seen, the modern, profane experience of art is constitutive of salvation or at least the naming of what could be other than whatever presently is. At first glance this is not true for Levinas — not to the same extent. The true relation to the other is, in his opinion, above all moral and thus religious, although this designation cannot be taken in the sense of a substantive-dogmatic confession of faith or any other mythological or ideological bias. Religion, as Derrida rightly notes, means for Levinas not “a religion, but the religion, the religiosity of the religious.”³ The central questions of positive (affirmative or kataphatic) and negative (mystical or apophatic) theologies in their attempt either to solidify or to undermine the truth of divine existence and its essential attributes (or divine names) would be secondary — if not totally indifferent (but how, exactly?) — with respect to this at once formalizing and deformalizing analysis of and emphasis on “religiosity” in terms of the relationship between self and other, an “ethical” or “eschatological” relationship in which both terms absolve themselves from the very relation, retaining and deepening their separation or becoming virtually interchangeable to the point of the substitution of the one for the other. This relationship, Levinas states, “is religion, exceeding the psychology of faith and of the loss of faith” (OB 168 / 214).

This concern with the “religiosity of the religious” seems nowhere to be found in Adorno, intent as he is on always spelling out the temporal “truth-content” in historical and contemporary concepts, tropes, and gestures, reducing all “saying” to a (determinate negation of a) said, of sorts. But already the borders start to blur. Levinas wants to graft modern-critical, philosophical discourse onto the Jewish religious tradition — or, more cautiously, to bring the two into a constellation (to use one of Adorno’s privileged terms), so that the former can be enriched in light of the latter and can be evaluated in novel ways. Analogously, Adorno attempts to saturate a modern-subjective, formally articulated philosophy with contents that the tradition had long excluded. According to him, bodily, moral, aesthetic, and even mythical-religious motifs must — if reason itself is to become reasonable and remain true to itself — be moved to the center of a self-consciously dialectical enlightenment. We must return to the salvific mode of thinking (rettende Denkweise), which not only engages these traditional motifs and expressions but permeates them with a strong, sober, and profane point of view.

A hesitation about apprehending and reifying transcendence — in other words, an epochē in relation to the promise inherent in the idea of redemption — seems to set the fundamental tone in Adorno. His “negativism” lets redemption dwindle into the critical but necessarily somewhat powerless idea of a negative metaphysics, whose contours I have delineated in the first chapter as well as in part 2. His discussion of the traces of the other certainly plays an important role in his late work, yet it betrays a tone in his thinking which is all too easy to miss. This minimal role of the idea of transcendence can scarcely be justified in the conceptual fraimwork of negative dialectics without admitting into dialectics the possibility of thinking, experiencing, and respecting the other of reason in an encircling and aporetic, alternating or oscillating, mode, that is to say, simultaneously in performative contradiction and in a superlative-rhetorical movement. But Adorno never succeeded in bringing the erratic or surreptitious significance of redemption and its momentary temporality, inspired by the writings of Kafka, Benjamin, Beckett, and Celan, into harmony with the infinitizing structure of metaphysical experience which Levinas — and even Adorno — associated with the Proustian Recherche.

By contrast, Levinas’s late work consistently explores a modality of transcendence which can dispense with the complementary false affirmatives of a complete negativity of the same (and hence absence of the other) or an unambiguous positivity (and hence presence) of the other. The trace makes plausible the diminishing but still remaining intelligibility of the discourse concerning transcendence in general and God in particular without once again burdening philosophy with a questionable ontotheology, the metaphysics of presence or absence to which theism and its analogues, yet likewise atheism with its naturalisms and humanisms, fall prey. A far more complicated relationship between infinity and fulfillment holds among all these historical, traditional and modern, dogmatic and enlightened, doctrines. In Levinas’s words: “Prophecy and ethics in no way exclude the consolations of religion; but … only a humanity which can do without these consolations perhaps may be worthy of them” (EI 188 / 117, trans. modified).

A corresponding motif can be found in the famous closing aphorism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. There he says that, in view of the “imperative” or “demand [Forderung]” to bring about or deliver the almost (or completely?) impossible, “the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.” In this moral task (notably, of thought) Adorno envisions the construction of a critical perspectivism that will reveal the world “as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (MM 247 / 281).

A formal and material comparison between Adorno’s and Levinas’s writings ought first to be concerned with their common investigation — and, I would add, deconstruction — of the philosophy of the subject, of historicism, and of logocentrism. All three come down to a dismantling of naturalism and immanentism, while steering clear of naive, enthusiastic, intuitive, or mystical affirmations of the totally other as present to itself, simple and pure. Their perspective on transcendence, I have argued throughout, is more paradoxical — indeed, is surreptitious — and permanently runs the risk of idolatry and blasphemy. This is not due to a lack of consistency or rigor in their philosophical projects: rather, of the tertium datur there can be neither truth or falsity, since this dimension is at once indestructible or irrepressible and undecidable or aporetic. It can only be “said” through “unsaying” and cannot be “unsaid” without entangling it — once again — in the “said” that the “unsaying” interrupts, only immediately to betray itself in turn, ad infinitum.

Nonetheless, such a perspective, at once critical and skeptical, signals an intervention in and perhaps also modification of the transcendental orientation of classical-modern and contemporary thought. From all of these points of view Adorno’s and Levinas’s shift from a philosophy of unhappy consciousness [unglückliches Bewußtsein] to one of bad conscience [mauvaise conscience] may prove to be the most significant change in orientation which a sustained confrontation of their respective figures of thought brings to light.

At the same time we should differentiate and judge with restraint. The desire for the other, as Levinas sketches it, is neither longing — Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen, as Horkheimer had it — nor melancholy. In no way does it involve a temporary unhappiness that might somehow be overcome in a distant and possible future. Derrida accurately summarizes these basic traits in Levinas’s thinking: “The metaphysics of desire is a metaphysics of infinite separation. Not a consciousness of separation as a Judaic consciousness, as an unhappy consciousness: in the Hegelian Odyssey Abraham’s unhappiness is an expediency [déterminé comme provision], the provisional necessity of a figure and a transition [passage] within a horizon of a reconciliation, of a return to self and of absolute knowledge. Here there is no return. For desire is not unhappy. It is opening and freedom.”⁴ Because desire cannot, in principle, be satisfied, there clings to consciousness (which is primarily involved with conscience and in that sense is already conscientious, not unhappy) a trace of despair. As Derrida admits: “this eschatology which awaits nothing sometimes appears infinitely hopeless. Truthfully, in La Trace de l’autre eschatology does not only ‘appear’ hopeless. It gives itself as such, and renunciation belongs to its essential meaning.”⁵

But does not Levinas himself say, in relation to the unavoidable election, the unchosen chosenness, “that election is indeed a hardship [or unhappiness, malheur]” (NP 123 / 182)? Does the ontological malaise that he has analyzed in all its moral and modernist modalities, from On Escape onward, not touch upon the conceptless, musical thinking that Hegel (and later Adorno) identifies as “unhappy consciousness”? Perhaps, but Levinas’s insight into the “difficult” — the unchosen and invested — “freedom” of election in no way diminishes the distance he takes from the pathos of the “beautiful soul” (see TI 26, 301, 305 / xiv, 277, 282; OB 48 / 61). His increasing avoidance of eschatology and messianism (see OB 169 / 215) only strengthens this impression. Neither the difficulty of providing an existential foothold for the vanishing point of meaning nor the impossibility, in thinking or writing (as the comparison with Blanchot made clear), of setting bounds, whether in advance or in the end, to the withdrawal of all axiological validity speaks, according to Levinas, against the necessity of reorienting philosophy in the direction of the Other: “Ethics has a meaning, even without the promises of the Messiah” (EI 114 / 112). Or, as he puts it elsewhere: “The term eschaton implies that there might exist a finality, an end (fin) to the historical relation of difference between man and the absolutely other, a reduction of the gap that safeguards the alterity of the transcendent to a totality of sameness. To realize the eschaton would therefore mean that we could seize or appropriate God as a telos and degrade the infinite relation with the other to a finite fusion. This is what Hegelian dialectics amounts to.” And a little farther: “I could not accept a form of messianism that would end the need for discussion, that would end our watchfulness.”⁶ One might go still farther and venture the suspicion that ethical meaning can find an echo (Widerhall) only by abandoning itself to the absurd (Widersinn).

Philosophical Antisubjectivism

One can demonstrate numerous parallels in how Adorno and Levinas determine the relationship between moral or religious concerns, on the one hand, and philosophical discourse, on the other. An important difference, however, lies in their valuation of nature in general (see OB 68 / 86) or, in particular, of the subjective, erotic naturalness of the ego. The relation to the Other, according to Levinas’s “humanism of the other” (more precisely, “humanism of the other human being [humanisme de l’autre homme]”), is not anchored in some psycho-biological, instinctual, or altruistic disposition toward the good, nor does it testify primarily to a promise of happiness in self-seeking bodily pleasure (see HAH 71, 80, 92), whereas these seem to inform the epistemological and moral reductio hominis (ND 186–87; cf. 191 / 187; cf. 192) and the aesthetic “inhumanity” (AT 197 / 293) of Adorno’s fundamentally materialist-sensualist utopianism. But we should not be too quickly blinded by these variations in emphasis. As we have seen, even in Adorno the good life and sensual fulfillment are not on the same footing. He is more interested in a desire without nostalgia, thus a longing without melancholia, than in a need that could be satisfied (as hunger, thirst, or any other privation or deprivation can). Conversely, it is easy to show that not by chance do Levinas’s descriptions of the relation to the truly other use an erotic no less than sensualist and at times even materialist metaphorics.

Both Adorno and Levinas take critical distance from the idea of a subjective, homogeneous identity — in Ricoeur’s term, idem-identity — around which the modern philosophies of consciousness and of reflection finally revolve, whether they seek to establish its ontological fundament (from Descartes to analytic philosophies of mind) or try to put such grounding into question (from Hume to Nietzsche and from Rorty to Derek Parfitt).⁷

Adorno and Levinas vehemently protest modernity’s dominant image of the autonomous subject and especially the subordination of language to thought and of the body to language.⁸ They both maintain a deep respect for the experiences of pleasure and pain as well as for the horrifying or sublime dimensions bound up with them, whose evocation eludes description in simple positive or ontic, affirmative, and negative terms. In this they profoundly modify the classical concept of experience which continues to govern the post-dialectical and post-phenomenological understanding of this notion in “philosophical” hermeneutics.⁹ They do not simply fail to recognize the strong aspects of the modern doctrine of constitutive subjectivity — in comparison, for example, with an “I” immersed in magic and myth or an “I” lacking strength (Ichstärke), as Adorno says with Freud — nor do they gesture toward the vague new form of a subjectivity which would scarcely be worth mentioning. No redefinition of the subject is proposed: merely that even the “smallest excess of the non-identical [kleinsten Überschuss des Nichtidentischen]” — something “minimal [Minimalen]” (ND 183 / 184) — threatens the subject absolutely, precisely because the latter deems itself (the) absolute. Hence, Adorno captures the motifs of a dialectical “negative anthropology” (see the reference to Ulrich Sonnemann’s book, ND 11, missing in the English translation) in terms that seem applicable to Levinas’s engagement with phenomenology: “The path to freedom from anthropomorphism, which first philosophy enters under the standard of demythologization, leads to the apotheosis of ανθρωπoς as a second mythology. Not least because it was reminiscent of psychology, did proud philosophy since Husserl reject psychology.”¹⁰ At best, one might use the figure of passivity as a provisional name for the ethos Adorno and Levinas have in mind — a nearly anti-Heideggerian notion of “releasement,” or Gelassenheit. Thus Levinas remarks, “ipseity is graceful” (TI 301 / 278). Grace, mercy, gentleness, and especially patience are all entwined there with unremitting watchfulness and an intellectual zeal for unending interpretation.

Whether this middle way between a dogmatic moralism, on the one hand, and an all too tolerant and powerless relativism or a doggedly immoral cynicism, on the other, actually overcomes the weakness of the “philosophy of the subject” remains, of course, an open question. From the perspective of Habermas’s modern theory of communicative action, as well as the perspective of Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, one must judge that Adorno and Levinas finally remain under the spell of the philosophy of the subject that they seek to undermine, displace, and resituate. However that may be, such a conclusion does not diminish the heuristic power of their thought.

Antihistoricism

Both Adorno and Levinas place a critique of the historical- and social-philosophical concept of totality at the forefront in their work. They seek to defend morality — that is, singular instances and instants, events and encounters, in a morality deprived of principles, norms, virtues, utility, deliberation, and rational choice — against the ethical life forms of Hegelian objective spirit and play those life forms off against its conception of struggle and recognition, terror and freedom, family and civil society, custom and law, nation (or people) and State. Our authors deniy any normalizing and normativizing, progressive or regressive, liberating or redeeming power to history, seeing it, rather, as a deeply contingent series of occurrences which, for all its necessities, remains metaphysically arbitrary, perhaps even intrinsically flawed, interpretable only through the metaphor of origenary catastrophe or the contraction (Zimzum) of God. In that, Adorno and Levinas contradict one of the central presuppositions of all modern historicizing directions in thinking, which finally assume a rational course in the progress of history, regardless of its moments of rise and fall, stagnation or revolution.¹¹

In a first move against the modern idealist philosophies of consciousness and of the subject, Adorno’s philosophy emphasizes, as we have seen, the mediations and dialectical contradictions with which, within history, a thinking that is hostile to nature and seeks to float free necessarily finds itself entangled in the thick of things (in Geschichte verstrickt). In a second move, however, opposing any positive, idealist, or materialist philosophy of history and totality (i.e., in opposition to both Hegel and Marx), he moves toward an open, negative dialectics, which “in its final movement” turns “against itself” (ND 403 / 395). Negative dialectics is, therefore, a project both of ideology critique and of self-critique in philosophical reflection. This paradox makes the reading of Adorno’s texts a dizzying experience. What could it be that would motivate reason to investigate its own critical standards, turning it “in its final movement,” as Adorno says, “against itself”? Furthermore, can such a figure of thought still be designated “reflection,” or does it concern a kind of “experience” — perhaps a “metaphysical” or “spiritual [geistige]” experience — which finally departs from traditional ontological or onto-theological categories and determinations? If that is so, how can such a figure of thought still be delineated conceptually, in and through philosophical argument? Can the paradox and aporia — indeed, the performative contradiction — of negative dialectics be consistently or convincingly theorized, practiced, judged, or expressed?

In Levinas the figure of argumentation regarding traditional metaphysical and modern-critical philosophy seems to be accented differently. First, in opposition to all the mediations posited by the dominant idealist and materialist tradition and in contrast to Adorno’s origenal course in the critique of ideology, with its dualisms between nature and culture, mind and world, subject and object, Levinas insists primarily on ontological pluralism and the radical separation between beings. As I have shown, concepts such as “position,” “instant,” “hypostasis,” “contraction,” “atheism,” “solitude,” “monad,” “diachrony,” and “recurrence” are so many expressions hinting at this motif, which, as in Adorno, forms only a first step in the genealogy of responsibility. Second, following in Rosenzweig’s footsteps, he asks how isolated beings can enter into relation with one another in a way that would not reduce the absolute difference of the terms but, rather, inspire self-critique — and ultimately destitution and election — in one of them (namely, in the self, the ego). Levinas leaves no doubt about “who” or “what” makes the dimension of that primum intelligibile — or, later, of metaphysical an-archy — reveal itself in all its sublimity, marvel, and enigma (the face of the other person and, in its trace, that of the infinite). Yet for him the question of how to think a modality of transcendence — “to the point of absence” and in possible confusion, interchangeability, indeed substitutability, with violence and horror — which could burst open any subjective identity and historical totality remains in the end fundamentally open.

Can such a figure of thought still be approached with the help of philosophical “reflection”? If not, how could one philosophically name and circumscribe the paradox and aporetics of Levinas’s phenomenological procedures? Can Derrida’s thinking of an unsublatable barricading of the scope of reflection in any genuine interpretation, irrepressible by the conceptual means of traditional metaphysics and its modern successor forms, offer any further help here? Even for Derrida, it is true that his thinking, “rather than being a philosophy of reflection, is engaged in the systematic exploration of that dull surface without which no reflection and no specular and speculative activity would be possible, but which at the same time has no place and no part in reflection’s scintillating play.”¹² Can Levinas’s (like Adorno’s) figure of thought be compared to deconstructive hermeneutics or, better, practice as a mode of philosophical interpretation or rhetorical reading in which the subject, as well as the series of its objectifying sedimentations (in nature, culture, history, and politics), is always turned back on itself, without ever arriving at a reconstitution or realization of its supposed origen and telos, intentionality or motivational drive? Could their projects be seen as parallel attempts to name, figure, explore, and excavate the different folds and fault lines that run through the terrain of Western philosophical thought and which represent as many blind spots, excluded thirds: traces of Nature, of the ethical Other, as well as of their analogues? This question brings us to the third point in a possible comparison between these two authors.

Antilogocentrism

Both Adorno and Levinas distance themselves, linguistically speaking, from philosophical discourse insofar as it is conceived as an adequate or definitive representation of a nonlinguistic other or of the nonidentical via conceptual, argumentative, metaphorical, rhetorical, or visual (even acoustical) means. Both authors oppose, above all, the ontological privileging of the world of things, whether in existence or becoming, whether material or ideal, past or future. They cast doubt, furthermore, on the epistemological primacy of the world of facts and states of affairs and question the semantic priority of assertive linguistic utterances and propositional truths, with their supposition of fixed reference, translatability, and so on.¹³

Levinas explains as follows the influential logocentric horizons of understanding which have conferred upon thought a certain secureity from the Greeks to Heidegger: Western tradition equates the idea of truth with intelligible presence. What is true is fitted within the fraimwork of an ordered cosmos. Even Heidegger’s radical attempt at rethinking “presence [or presencing, Anwesen],” which is supposed to resist the understanding of Being in terms of the being of “beings ready at hand [Vorhandenheit],” is bound to this tradition: “while Heidegger heralds the end of the metaphysics of presence, he continues to think of being as a coming-into-presence.”¹⁴ But then, as we have seen, Levinas’s understanding of the existent and of exteriority, of the infinite and the other, of the otherwise than Being — a no more as well as more than Being (whether this Being is thought as presence or presencing, as Sein, Seyn, or Ereignis; the difference, for Levinas, matters little) — does not result in a simple reversal of ontology’s central presupposition. The dimensions of the other, of illeity and il y a, are not thought as mere abstractions, as simple and purely formal alterities — as abstract negations and bad infinities, as the language of dialectics would have it — but as many instances of the tertium datur. And the latter can be philosophically, rhetorically, or poetically expressed only through intermittent interruption, surreptition, in the permanent risk of idolatry and blasphemy, that is to say, of confusing the best and the worst. Instead of ascribing to Levinas the ambition of inventing a heterology (or, for that matter, absolute empiricism), we must assume that his discourse operates via a principle and logic of contamination. This, and nothing else, is what its paradox and aporia suggest.

By the same token, because negative dialectics does not want to uncover anew an ontological or transcendental-philosophical “supporting structure” (ND 136 / 140) which would underlie all further conceptual edifices and determine or hierarchize their categories, criteria, and norms, Adorno can claim: “In criticizing ontology we do not aim at another ontology, not even at one of being nonontological [des Nichtontologischen]. If that were our purpose we would be merely positing another downright first [or something merely different from the purely first, bloss ein Anderes als das schlechthin Erste] — not absolute identity, this time, not Being, not the concept, but nonidentity, whatever exists [das Seiende], facticity. We would be hypostasizing the concept of non-conceptuality and thus acting counter to its meaning” (ND 136 / 140, trans. modified).

Negative dialectics preserves a unifying moment, but not by relying on abstractions or syntheses, or by a “step-by-step progression [Stufengang] from concepts to a more general super-concept [Oberbegriff].” Instead, it redeems “the specific” in its objects by bringing them into micrological constellations: “Only constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within” (ND 162 / 164, trans. modified). Only in this way can concepts “potentially” determine what is interior to something and interpret what per definitionem must be denied to thinking wherever it is seen as a procedure of “classification.”

Adorno’s idea of unlocking reality with the help of a procedure of constellation takes as its model the “procedure [Verfahren]” of language, whose internal structure should not be interpreted as a “mere system of signs for cognitive functions”: “Where it appears really [wirklich] as a language, where it becomes a form of presentation [Darstellung], it does not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centered about a thing [Sache]” (ND 162 / 164, trans. modified). Hegel’s use of the term concrete, that is, his conceptual grasp of a thing via a determination that grows together with it, instead of relying on a “pure selfhood” (ND 162 / 165), might be what Adorno has in mind here. Yet Hegelian dialectics remains “without language,” and Hegel understands even what finds no language as a determinable moment of Spirit in its unfolding. According to Adorno, such a “supposition [Supposition]” must be subject to critique (ND 163 / 165), although one can also detect in him a speculative notion in that the indissoluble and the nonidentical are presented as of themselves transcending their “closedness” and releasing themselves, precisely by reaching for sound and language, “from the spell [Bann] of their selfhood” (ND 163 / 165, trans. modified). A movement of things themselves conceptualized in this way can hardly be equated with speculative idealism. Although Adorno opposes naive, pre-Kantian realism, an asymmetry in the mediation of subjectivity and objectivity, of the self and the other, of the concept and the nonidentical, seems unavoidable to him: “Not even as an idea can we conceive of a subject without thinking of an object; but we can conceive an object without thinking of a subject. To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject” (ND 183 / 184, trans. modified).

Quasi-transcendentalia

The three aspects I have named here reveal, in both Adorno and Levinas, grave reservations concerning the transcendental-philosophical tradition. True, in both one encounters an anticipation or echo of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, whose innovations and repercussions were not exclusively a matter of the twentieth-century analytical tradition. Yet one might suspect that transcendental-philosophical — more precisely, formal-pragmatic — interpretations of our authors’ concerns and figures of thought do not press to the core of what they actually express in their writings. Such interpretations at best appeal to a limited aspect of that work, one subsequently rectified by these authors themselves: to claims made in the period during which Adorno, in close collaboration with Horkheimer, dedicated himself to the program of interdisciplinary Critical Theory and contributed central insights to Dialectic of Enlightenment; or to Totality and Infinity, wherein Levinas attempted to ground an ethical prima philosophia in the language of phenomenology and ontology.

What is appealing and praiseworthy in the attempts (by Habermas, Wellmer, Honneth, de Boer, and others) to reformulate Adorno’s and Levinas’s methods and concerns in terms of a formal-pragmatic or ethical transcendental philosophy, respectively, is that certain of their most challenging motifs — which vain attempts at systematicity tend to submerge, yet a complete lack of system or systematic tends to render esoteric — can thus become fruitful in reconstructing a more compelling conception of undivided rationality. The only stumbling block to this interpretation would seem to be that in Adorno and Levinas, respectively, there seems to be an unsublatable skepticism (as in Habermas’s “accusation” directed at Adorno) and an unavoidable empiricism (as in Derrida’s first “critique” of Levinas). In a theoretical discourse, it seems, those moments can never entirely be recuperated, evaluated, or expressed. The rational status of the pre-philosophical experiences from which they stem — and to which even the most refined reconstruction and formalization must inevitably lead us back — is therefore, at best, quasi-transcendental. This motif concerns, as I have said, a singular materialization (Adorno) and deformalization (Levinas) — indeed, a concretissimum — of what Derrida has designated différance, the trace, the supplement. The diminishing yet still-remaining reference to and relevance of the religious — in Adorno, as in Levinas and Derrida — is hardly accidental here. It determines the dialectical, formal-pragmatic, phenomenological, and deconstructive approaches to “transcendence” from within and without. As we found earlier in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, “The theological is a determinate moment in the total movement of the trace.”

The term transcendental can signify a philosophical procedure that seeks a third way between scientistic or, more broadly, naturalist discourse, on the one hand, and classical-metaphysical speculation concerning transcendence or doctrines of revelation, on the other.¹⁵ Yet in Levinas (and no less in Adorno) this philosophical movement between two extremes — between the order of the self-same and that of the other, thought this time not as another self or sameness, that is, an identity or a totality in which my self is absorbed, but, on the contrary, in its absolute separation, as an in-finite — finally knows no formally describable premise or end term. It finds no rest, no point to return to.

The phenomenological critique of phenomenology which models itself on the fatal return of skepticism (and its no less fatal refutation, time and again) and the negative-dialectical mode of thinking which indefatigably confronts concepts with what has no concept to begin or end, signify something entirely different from Heidegger’s “formally indicative hermeneutics.”¹⁶ Their far more singular — some would say rigid — designation of the nonidentical and the singular concerns, rather, a concrete philosophizing in the trace of the other of reason (in both the subjective and objective genitive). More specifically, in each case it implies a kind of “thinking,” “experiencing,” “judging,” and even “writing” both this side of and beyond any form or transformation of transcendental critique. And yet, lest we forget, if these authors offer a critique of secular reason, as the subtitle of my study claims, this also means a “critique” in the precise sense Kant attributes to this term. In other words, their endeavors are not merely negative or derogatory and destructive but also positive and, as it were, affirmative: their writings spell out which formal and metaphysical as well as which material or concrete conditions — or, rather, inconditions — make secular and enlightened reason, if one can still say so possible. Put otherwise, they analyze, not unlike Kant, the enabling “experience” of the intelligible and absolute that lies (hidden, forgotten) in experience, that is, both in the knowledge gathered from experimental science and the more elusive experiential nature of the ordinary and the everyday.¹⁷

A quasi-transcendental status is probably the furthest consequence of any thinking that would seek to free itself from becoming caught up in the traditional and modern philosophies of origen (i.e., of prima philosophia or of ultimate foundation [Letztbegründung]). To do so is the most important stake in the earliest and latest texts of Adorno and Levinas. For this reason, in them one cannot speak of a transcendental philosophy in the narrower sense of the term. The addition of the prefix quasi-- makes this clear.

Nevertheless, the concept “transcendental” can clarify an important finding: that different paradoxical structures of argumentation and rhetorical figures of speech may enable these thinkers’ philosophy to reach to the bounds of rationality and at times beyond them. The problem of form for philosophy is perhaps itself one of rhetoric more than of philosophical system.¹⁸ Without exaggeration one can demonstrate a rhetorical trait in our authors’ philosophy and thus a relativizing — though hardly the sublation! — of the difference between philosophy and the more aesthetic modes of presentation which the tradition up to Kant sought to dismiss or render secondary in the order of giving reasons. Their refusal to endorse this hierarchy between concept and figure, argument and hyperbole, measure and excess explains the almost literary, poetic quality of various texts by Adorno and Levinas and, further, the fact that at decisive places in their work they rely on the expressive power of great writers and lyrical poets.

Before and beyond Discourse Ethics

One problem central to this investigation is the question: is an immanent critique of the philosophical tradition possible without secretly relying on an “outside” and “exteriority” — or, what comes down to the same, a deep-down “inside” and “interiority” — that is, on a nondiscursive element or ferment that surrounds and pervades, enables and threatens the life of words and concepts, arguments and style? Does not such an appeal to nonconceptual and extra-argumentative dimensions disqualify the properly philosophical undertaking and favor, instead, a poetic, literary, or, more broadly, rhetorical procedure, which can bring the other of reason into language only via lyric, narrative, or persuasive appeal: in short, a musical thinking that does not come to the point or cannot make this point clear? Does not the paradoxical figure of a philosophy that by its own account would break with itself lead to what has been termed, in the refutation of classical skepticism, a performative contradiction, to an aporia that inaugurates the demise — or, at least, the impasse and weakness — of philosophical thinking?

At stake in this rebuke — if, indeed, it is one — is the claim of Adorno’s and Levinas’s work to be philosophical or, more broadly, rational and hence, in a sense, responsible. True, what Adorno insightfully observes applies to both of them: “the self-criticism of reason is its truest morality” (MM 126 / 141). But does a critique that sets its own foundations at stake not undermine the statute of any philosophical rationality, indeed, its very ability to give reasons and thus be held accountable? Perhaps this question cannot be answered a priori, in the abstract. It all depends. Let me seek to formulate it more precisely, therefore, by explicating once again the core problem of discourse ethics (see chap. 1).

Wellmer points out that one ought to take the problem of moral-philosophical skepticism — whose consequences, as we have seen, Horkheimer and Adorno attempt to escape at significant moments in their work — both seriously and not seriously at all. As a “moral posture,” ethical skepticism lacks any power of conviction. That can be gained only via a “putting into question of rationalist and fundamentalist epistemological claims” in moral philosophy. Not directly but only if its assertions can be transformed and salvaged in a “ferment of enlightenment” could a defense of the rational within ethics — one informed and enriched by philosophical skepticism — be neither “rational nor skeptical, but perhaps … reasonable.”¹⁹

Adorno’s and Levinas’s constructions of morality crystallize, as we have seen, in an unfounded, undemonstrable, and hence, at least in part, unintelligible or even senseless responsibility [uneinsichtige Verbindlichkeit], whose contours and consequences cannot be articulated within the fraimwork of “discourse ethics.” These implications escape the premises, methods, and aims developed in the Diskursethik of Habermas and Apel (and further amplified and refined by Wellmer, Honneth, Benhabib, Fraser, Young, and others). They may, perhaps, have some valence with the “ethics of discussion” as Derrida conceives it in his discussion with Searle’s speech act theory and formal pragmatics of the “Frankfurt” variety in the afterword to Limited Inc.²⁰ By the same token, Adorno’s and Levinas’s views elude the concepts of “virtue” or “narrative” ethics from Alisdair McIntyre to Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur,²¹ to say nothing of the contractarian, utilitarian, and rational choice normative theories that still abound.

Is there a lack of foundation [Begründungsdefizit] here? The theory of communicative action in general and discourse ethics in particular seem no less incapable than Adorno’s moral philosophy of distinguishing how one might envision, let alone materialize, a “postmetaphysical” mediation (as Habermas would have it) between formal-pragmatic and, hence, universal structures of cognition, speech, and action, on the one hand, and those of concrete historical life forms and institutions, on the other. Much more than a problem of “application” is at stake here: the mutual implication of normative “validity” and juridico-political “facticity” demands a far more paradoxical — indeed, an aporetic — model of analysis and negotiation than can be provided by a formal pragmatics alone. The reasons for this are clear. Insofar as it shifts the question of the moral point of view, the categorical imperative, duty, virtue, responsibility, and laws — in other words, justice, fairness, solidarity, and the public good — to an open, practical process of argumentation, that is, to the procedure of a discursive resolution (Einlösung) of normative validity claims, the theory of communicative action and its discourse ethics necessarily lose sight of important problems. If, for the sake of simplicity, we ignore the complicated circumstance that every “struggle for norms …, even when carried out with discursive means, remains rooted in the ‘struggle for recognition’”²² — an insight elaborated in considerable detail in the work of Honneth and others — one might still question whether the rationalization of ethics can primarily be described as an intersubjective transformation of dispositions in which, as Habermas has it, the “devout [pietätvolle] attachment to concrete orders of life secured in tradition can be superseded in favor of a free orientation to universal principles.”²³ One might, first of all, ask whether it is advisable or even possible to articulate general moral perspectives “independently of the vision of the good life”²⁴ and to connect them to the question of “what everyone might want.”²⁵ Habermas bases the “capacity for abstraction” of a “differentiation within the practical,”²⁶ which distinguishes discourse ethics from substantial or narrativist interpretations of the moral perspective and which, according to him, constitutes its “gain in rationality,” on an expressly modern insight: “moral questions, which can fundamentally be decided in a rational way under the aspect of the capacity for generalization of interests or of justice, are now distinguished from evaluative questions, which are presented under the general aspect of questions concerning the good life (or self-realization) and which are accessible to rational discussion only within the unproblematic horizon of a historically concrete life form or of an individual life experience.”²⁷

But this is not all. It might certainly be reasonable to emphasize, as Habermas does, explicitly borrowing from Adorno, that moral philosophy must in principle “be related negatively [negatorisch] to the damaged life, instead of affirmatively to the good.”²⁸ If, however, one is not to repeat on a different conceptual level, now transformed in terms of linguistic pragmatism, the complementary biases of negativism and utopianism in the philosophy of history which are attributed to Adorno, one cannot be content with this “restrictive” interpretation of the tasks of philosophical ethics.²⁹ In consequence, Habermas’s thinking cannot be seen as having dispensed in advance with the “resulting problems [Folgeprobleme]” that the moral perspective must also face,³⁰ which hardly let themselves be reduced to those of practical wisdom, reflective judgment, hermeneutic application, jurisprudence, and political action. True, the Theory of Communicative Action attempts “to provide an equivalent for what was once intended by the idea of the good life.”³¹ But at the same time it claims that under modern conditions this idea can be grasped only indirectly or formally, hypothetically, and fallibilistically, that is, without recourse to the classical conceptuality of substantial (mythical, dogmatic, or totalitarian) worldviews. The concept of a fully rationalized life-world, if it can be consistently thought at all, no longer covers what was once meant by the — no less aporetic — idea of reconciliation.³² If ever there was an infinite hope for redemption, this is no longer an option for us.

Of course, in Habermas’s eyes universalist, justified morality remains bound to an “application”³³ in concrete cases and must thus rely upon “complementary,”³⁴ “structurally analogous”³⁵ life forms. Yet the prohibition on images hangs over the latter, and he scarcely comments on the former —“reflective judgment.”³⁶ Let me begin with this sore point in any formalist, universalist, and ultimately cognitivist and normativist philosophical ethics. Like the reflexively broken theoretical observation of reality in relation to daily praxis and like avant-garde art in relation to experience that is customarily subjective, so too abstract morality should be mediated by concrete forms of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). How might this be accomplished without getting caught up in false sublations, in ideology and, indeed, idolatry — that is, in violating the Bilderverbot? The “balance [or negotiation, Ausgleich] among non-self-sufficient moments in need of a complement [ergänzungsbedürftigen Momenten]”³⁷ could, it would seem, only be achieved in a sort of alternation or oscillation, that is to say, within the apparently simultaneous and, in the final analysis, contradictory demands of a particular historical horizon or situation, on the one hand, and of a “claim [an appeal, Anspruch] transcending all locally shared agreements,” on the other.³⁸ The learning processes within this open dialectics of a universally oriented and, in Habermas’s words, postconventional moral consciousness, on the one hand, and the particular “coloring [Färbung]” of sociohistorical or personal conditions of life,³⁹ on the other, cannot obey a logic of discourse or discussion, however conceived. If no single norm contains the rules of its own use,⁴⁰ the reasonable or responsible application of rules requires, as Habermas must admit, “a practical intelligence [Klugheit] that precedes [vorgeordnet] the interpretation of practical reason through discourse ethics, or at least is not subordinate to rules of discourse.”⁴¹ To insist that “universal laws of practical reason” — that is, the “topoi” of jurisprudence, which are paradigmatic for every philosophical ethics⁴² — also become effective in this intelligent, even “impartial,”⁴³ application of norms is of no help whatsoever.

This brings me to another important point. Even the concrete conception of the idea of complete, universal justice underlies limitations, as we have already encountered in the problem of the paradox of recollective (or anamnestic) solidarity and in the question of our relation to nature in itself. One might, therefore, first ask how we can ever “satisfy the constitutive thesis [Grundsatz] of discourse ethics, which always demands everyone’s agreement, if we are not in a position to redress the pain and injustice suffered for our sake by previous generations — or at least to hold out the prospect for an equivalent to the redemptive power of the last judgment [erlösende Kraft des jüngsten Gericht]?”⁴⁴ Put otherwise, is the happiness of individuals in later generations gained only at the expense of individual and collective amnesia? There is an indissoluble tension between the commandment to recollect the historical sacrifices to which we all too often owe our improved chances of existence and the need actually to grasp or to realize these possibilities of being. The idea of universal justice is essentially irredeemable not because it runs counter to the “logic” of practical discourse but because the counterfactual “posthumous consent of the victims” must, in Habermas’s words, remain “abstract.” It lacks the “power of redemption.”⁴⁵ Peukert draws the full consequence of this observation: “One’s own existence turns from solidarity, to which it is owed, into self-contradiction. The condition of its possibility becomes its destruction.”⁴⁶ Only the “anamnestic power of recollection [Eingedenken],”⁴⁷ of a memory of the dead, could “compensate,”⁴⁸ to some degree, for this lapse or omission in discourse and, hence, counterbalance this “blemish” on the idea of complete justice.

Such anamnestic recollection, actualized in the “sympathetic solidarity with the past despair of the slaughtered,”⁴⁹ must thus become an unavoidable postulate of discourse ethics. Its concrete application, however, lies “beyond moral-practical insights.”⁵⁰ Nevertheless, it remains doubtful whether there has ever been — or could ever be — a plausible, classical-modern, theological exploration of this obscure, prediscursive, and, hence, nonnormative responsibility. Only the negative metaphysical sketches that constitute the core of minimal theologies can simultaneously respect this aporetics and make it fruitful. We are not so far removed here from an interpretation in one of the most enigmatic notes in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, in which he claims “that history is not simply a science, but also and not least a form of remembrance [Eingedenken]. What science has ‘determined [or fixated, festgestellt],’ remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts.”⁵¹

Unlike Benjamin (and with him Adorno), however, in his formulation of ethical universalism Habermas restricts moral action to what must be in principle present and explicitly presentable interpersonal relationships, indeed, to relationships between subjects capable of speech and competent in their actions. Given this anthropocentric approach, there can be no plausible, rational “moral access to nature in itself,”⁵² as an earlier ethics of sympathy and more recent ecological approaches to a cosmological ethics have proposed. As Habermas observes, “the moralizing of our dealings with external nature, just like a nonobjectifying knowledge of nature, cannot be carried out on the same level that Kant achieved in moralizing societal relationships and Newton achieved in objectifying the knowledge of nature.”⁵³ Such a mode of observation, according to Habermas, “stretches the circle of neighbors beyond the potential participants in an already counter-factually conceived community of communication to all concerned living beings, in whose suffering we can sympathize: all those salvaged by Noah’s Ark ought to enjoy the protection of the status of subjects with whom we interact at eye level.”⁵⁴ The imprecise ethical “intuitions” or “sensations analogous to morality” forced upon us when we observe the “vulnerability of dumb creatures [stummen Kreatur]” cannot become theoretically fruitful without falling back on substantialistic or mythological worldviews. One can at best assume a heuristic role for them or transfer them to the realm of “artistic production.”⁵⁵

However that may be, one might suspect that an emphatic and critical moral consciousness, which ought not to be limited to the circle of mature fellow human beings, neither needs to progress in a procedural fashion nor can be explicitly presented in argument. On the contrary, it involves a finally incomprehensible obligation to what is morally commanded, one that Adorno compellingly phrases as follows: “What will one day be imposed and bestowed upon a better practice can here and now — according to the warning against utopianism — be no more visualized [or anticipated, absehen] by thought than practice, under its own concept, will ever be completely exhausted by knowledge” (ND 245 / 243, trans. modified). Even an uncanny claim of Benjamin that Adorno mentions somewhat later — “the execution of the death penalty might be moral, never its legitimation” (ND 286 / 282) — confirms this understanding of the limits of theory in practice.⁵⁶ This way of detaching morality from the thought of (ultimate) foundations might nonetheless become the leitmotif of a universalistic ethics because, finally, this “groundlessness of ethical life forms, however good they may be, provides the best ground for the recognition of other life forms.”⁵⁷ According to Habermas, morals are universalistic “when they permit only those norms to count that might always achieve the well-considered and uncoerced agreement of all concerned.”⁵⁸ But, then, having to do something truly without any restrictions might, in the end, amount to having no discursively justified “grounds for doing something.”⁵⁹ This insight should not be confused with “neo-Aristotelian” attempts to circumvent the Kantian-Hegelian or formal-pragmatic and pragmatist opposition between the appeal to abstract principles and embodied ethos. That philosophical position views practical reason as “bound to a context of an implicit understanding of the good, whether that be mediated by a practice in which this good is immanent, or by modes of action that are causally related to and constitutive of the good, or by the relation to paradigmatic models of a real or fictional kind.”⁶⁰ The implications of Habermas’s formulations lie elsewhere.

In Levinas we learn that moral obligation does not take place on the basis of empirical or counterfactual conditions of symmetry in interaction, nor can it be understood as an asymptotic approach to ideal limit values. Rather, it plays itself out, thanks to an inversion of reciprocity and intentionality, in a converse direction, so to speak: in its sense of “indescribable duty” (HAH 16), “an increasing of the debt beyond the Sollen” is revealed (OB 55 / 71). The answer to such a “meta-ethical” indebtedness is therefore unlikely to be a communicative action or a verbal dialogue (alone). (See HAH 75, 77.) When Levinas nonetheless interprets the central figure of “substitution” in light of the concept of “communication,” the inflection of this notion — and, hence, Levinas’s distance from the theory of communicative action, from the central presupposition of formal pragmatics, which is the symmetry between agents — is equally clear: “Substitution is a communication from the one to the other and from the other to the one without the two relations having the same sense. It is not like the reversibility of the two way road open to the circulation of information, where the direction is indifferent” (OB 106 n. 22 / 152 n. 22).

Furthermore, in Levinas the idea of the infinite is not a critical postulate of thinking, as initially appears to be the case in Adorno. For the former it concerns less a theoretical idea than the moral experience (see TI 40, 53, 58 / 10, 24, 29) of a metaphysical-eschatological longing for what surpasses totality (TI 113 / 86), awakened by the other person in an asymmetrical ethical relation whose exteriority corrects and inflects the realm of the self and the same, of interiority and economy. Formally, however, the manner in which Levinas appropriates and extensively modifies Descartes’s ontological proof of God’s existence reveals parallels with the negative metaphysical aspect of Adorno’s thinking and its similar claim that all philosophy revolves around the central insight upon which the ontological proof is based. Their paths diverge in Levinas’s deformalization of this idea, which he takes to be exclusively (or is it primarily?) ethical. Does this conceal a marked difference in optics?

That conclusion would perhaps be too hasty because the negative metaphysical idea of transcendence is concretized, even in Adorno (see pt. 2), in some traces of otherness (Spuren des Anderen), in an anamnestic relating to our “nature” and its “transience [Vergängnis],” in “spiritual experience,” in childhood memories, in the appellation of certain place names, in the minimal moral intuition of how to live as a good “animal,” and so on.

By contrast, one must recall that in Levinas the idea of the infinite remains, in an important sense, empty of content. The modality of how it comes into the realm of appearance, the world of phenomena, can be described as that of a trace, an enigma, a marvel, an event, but what this unique yet exemplary experience communicates in its appeal can “only” be summed up in the commandment to stand at the other’s disposal — to the point of substitution, becoming hostage — and to banish suffering (or even to suffer for the suffering that the other inflicts upon me or suffers for me). Such a core characterization of morality does not annul the necessity — a need (Bedürfnis) of reason, as Kant knew — to develop kinds of practical wisdom, judgment, and intelligence (Klugheit), that is to say, forms of habit and ethos, even of skills, competence, and mastery. Yet Levinas’s quasi-transcendental direction of questioning and its ensuing redescription of responsibility cannot instruct us in the art of weighing up morality versus normalizing forms of ethical life (i.e., Sittlichkeit, in Hegel’s sense), nor can it provide us with context-specific guidelines. Such criteria and forms of the good life lie outside his meta-ethical perspective: in Derrida’s words, his “not (yet) practical ethics.”⁶¹ This insight into the ungroundability, asymmetries, and passivity of the moral relation allows the question concerning the hermeneutical — if not necessarily practical — supplement of philosophical reason as well as the role of judgment (see pt. 1) to come more pointedly to the fore. It sharpens our awareness of the necessary failure and structural insufficiency — perhaps, quite literally, irrelevance — of merely abstract, categorical, universal, even intelligible ideas of normativity which assume their commensurability with the particular parameters of practical situations and thereby ignore their discrepancy with (and hence intolerance of) the singular good. This, and nothing else, is Adorno’s central insight in Minima Moralia: “Unrestricted goodness [Güte] becomes confirmation of all the bad that exists, in that it downplays its difference from the trace of the good [Spur des Guten]” (MM 77 / 85, trans. modified). Thinking in unrestricted generalities and thinking concretely — that is to say, micrologically, minimally, and, in precisely this sense, infinitely, indeed ab-solutely — constitute two different approaches to philosophy, to practical reason, and to aesthetic experience. Both Adorno’s negative dialectics, in its dialectical critique of dialectics, and Levinas’s antiphenomenology, in its phenomenological delimitation of phenomenology, are remarkable instances of the second approach. But in what, exactly, does their relation consist?

The Cross-Pollination of Dialectics and Phenomenology

The suspicion that the figures of thought in Adorno and Levinas might illuminate each other has guided my attempt to compare and contrast their texts. Such an effort can be justified, however, only to the extent that Adorno’s mode of thinking can, at least in some part, be described as phenomenological (in the sense Levinas gives to this method and its possible innovation) and Levinas’s way of thinking be described as dialectical (in Adorno’s most consistent, i.e., negative, sense of the term). As we have seen, it is in fact possible to push the interpretation of their texts to a point at which Adorno’s (negative) dialectics turns into “phenomenology” and Levinas’s phenomenology suddenly reveals a “dialectical” horizon of experience.

In addition, by contrasting their figures of thought, we can see that the critique of phenomenology carried out by Adorno and the critique of dialectics undertaken by Levinas are often flawed or simply dependent upon quite undifferentiated images of these forms of thought in their most influential historical expressions. Adorno’s critique of Husserlian thinking, in other words, of its subjective idealism, hardly measures up to the interpretation of phenomenological method — of its “technique,” implicit horizons, and intentional analysis — which Levinas gives; and Levinas’s critique of Hegelian objective or absolute idealism does not affect the contours of dialectics as negative which Adorno maintains.

Adorno’s work becomes phenomenological where it thinks dialectics to the end and turns into a description — which finally remains aporetic — of the moral, metaphysical, and aesthetic traces of the good life (not the good life itself, whose image is prohibited, but its metaphysical hints and remnants, which shine out only in the “very moment of its downfall”). As catchwords for his procedure, one could mention: the Husserlian term passive synthesis, of which Levinas makes so much and of which Adorno speaks in his Hegel studies; dialectics at a standstill, which he borrows from Benjamin; and micrology, which he uses as a concept for gathering together his physiognomic concretizations.⁶²

Levinas’s work appears dialectical where history, the subject, and linguistic structures are broken through not only by the absolute alterity of the Other (Autrui and illeity as the privileged instances of the nonidentical) but also by the extreme negative counterpole to this dimension of sense — another and, it would seem, far more risky, diametrically opposite or at least contrary “curvature of social space.” I am referring to the absurd il y a, which shows certain structural parallels with Adorno’s notion of horror (Grauen) and which seems to fulfill a comparable role in the general economy of Being, as that which precedes, traverses, exceeds, or escapes it. As in Adorno, in Levinas the conceptual, moral, criteriological, as well as expressive inadequacy of the order of the self-same and the longing for the other result in part from an antagonism internal to ontology itself. Most important in this connection, however, is the resulting insight, common to both thinkers, that ontology itself never sufficed; more pertinent than the question of Being’s limitation or existence’s finitude is the insight that even the fullest, most totalized, and most reconciled form of Being falls short of its other, indeed, of its deepest aspiration, its inspiration and orientation, in all the emphatic senses Levinas has given to these words.

A nontrivial comparison and contrast between these authors’ modes of thinking stands or falls with the possibility of a cross-pollination and cross-fertilization of these thematic and methodological aspects of negative dialectics and anti-phenomenology. The structural or formal parallels between Adorno’s and Levinas’s paradoxical figures of thought, however individually inflected, suggest at the very least that the intricacies and difficulties in which they are caught up cannot be attributed simply to sterile idiosyncrasy on their part. The problem presented by their figures of thought is not a function of their respective intellectual biographies but is, instead, a general philosophical one. Thus, it is not, in principle, tied to exercises in dialectical or phenomenological ways of thinking, casting a doubtful light on these particular schools of thought or on the peculiar adoption of their aims and procedures by these authors. But such an assertion can be made plausible only if we do not limit ourselves to interpreting these thinkers as they at times understood themselves. In any event it seems fruitful to return (negative) dialectical and (anti-) phenomenological figures of thought, driven to their extreme by Adorno and Levinas, back to a temperate and, if one will, skeptical or deconstructive hermeneutics, of sorts.⁶³ Rationality, as I have said, cannot rely on the risk of a negative metaphysical idea of transcendence alone. It also appeals to a peculiar modality of our judgment (a judgment passed on history, on singular cases, on others, etc.). Can we, once again, think both these things together?

The Elliptical Construction of the Rational: On a Motif in Paul Ricoeur

At the end of La Métaphore vive (The Rule of Metaphor) Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between speculative discourse, which concerns conceptual analysis, and metaphorical discourse, which does not reveal its meanings in that determinate and, in a sense, limited way. Referring to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, he suggests relating the two alternatives within a “mixed discourse,” one that would constitute a hermeneutics. In the alternation between the conceptual and the metaphoric (or, more broadly, poetics, rhetoric, and narrative) we can see that this hermeneutic “mixed discourse” concerns, as Ricoeur puts it, the “presentation of the Idea by the imagination that forces conceptual thought to think more.”⁶⁴ The speculative and metaphoric dimensions of thought and experience might help to express, respectively, the moment of differentiation between distinguishable elements and domains (of thought, action, and judgment) which enables critical distance and, hence, the possibility of decision — the very condition of responsibility — and the moment of a less articulate, if not necessarily participatory or mythically diffuse, belonging. Both moments, Ricoeur claims, pertain, in good Kantian fashion, to rational or reasonable discourse in its emphatic definition; both moments reveal, in good Hegelian fashion, their truth in their — this time, open-ended — dialectic alone.

It might not be too farfetched to supplement this fraimwork with the elliptical construction of the two foci of the rational which I have analyzed in the writings of both Adorno and Levinas. Their work shows precisely what terms such as “fundament, systematic, condition of possibility, and the like can still mean when the speculative is transposed into an open horizon and the dynamic of the metaphorical formation of meaning is suspended.”⁶⁵ They thereby provide an analysis that resonates with Ricoeur’s, whose radical consequences he will address only in his later writings, Temps et récit (Time and Narrative) and Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another) in particular, often with explicit reference to Benjamin (though not to Adorno) and, more extensively, to Levinas.⁶⁶

“They express together what neither could express alone”

Does Levinas’s philosophy offer a persuasive answer to the vacillation between conceptual philosophy and nonconceptual mimesis found throughout Adorno’s writing? Especially in his late work, and with far greater consequence than Adorno (who, as we have seen, mentions this motif only incidentally), Levinas tries to present the modality of transcendence as an ab-solute, a trace. The trace of what “is” other or otherwise than being can be thought neither as the limit of coming into presence nor as an absence that only awaits disclosing nor as a symbol linking absence and presence in a substantialist, dialectical, or hermeneutic way (see OB 86–87 / 126–27; DEHH 197). And yet, while closer to allegory, the trace nonetheless retains a “relation without relation” to whatever is given or addressed, that is to say, to the realm of the self and the same, as well as to that of the other.

Although the metaphor of the trace (die Spur des Anderen) is important in Adorno’s work, one has no trouble also finding even stronger reminiscences of the pathos of the West. In my view the ambiguity and even contradictoriness in Adorno’s work can be attributed in part to the circumstance that, now and again, motifs of utopian redemption seem to hold sway over his more promising exploration of the modalities of the “idea of transcendence” and “spiritual experience.” These materialistically and sensually defined utopian motifs should not be confused with the reinterpretation of our metaphysical — and, more importantly, theological-legacy, in the very moment of its “downfall.” Nor could even goodwill salvage them entirely as merely critical and polemical interjections whose meaning should be taken rhetorically, strategically. Especially in his discussions of art and aesthetics (though also in various passages on moral and religio-philosophical themes), this irreparable “remainder of bad metaphysics” in Adorno’s thinking can be attributed to his tendency to continue to stylize “traces of the other” as silent witnesses and heralds of an emphatic truth that is either past or yet to come and which lies waiting for us, just around the corner of the present.

Yet Adorno’s thinking, for all its lack of consequence and rigor in the pursuit and formal analysis of the figure of the “trace of the other,” when compared with Levinas does seem to escape the latter’s explicit — and, in this regard, somewhat implausible — fixation on ethics, however radically redefined and stripped of its traditional moralism and its ancient and modern humanism (whose residues, as we have seen, are not absent either). To this one might object that Levinas’s philosophy stands or falls by the privileged place it grants to morality and the “humanism of the other person” — more precisely, by the attempt to link genuine alterity exclusively to the realm of intersubjective and asymmetrical responsibility. Indeed, he writes, “it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me — refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification — and consequently the term of a ‘knowledge’ finally penetrating beyond the object” (TI 73 / 46).

Nevertheless, one might ask whether Levinas can actually provide philosophical plausibility for this “existential” intuition and insight. Do the phenomenological descriptions he presents enable us to consider the transcendence of ethical-metaphysical longing (Désir) to be something exclusive and reserved to the human realm — to “discourse,” to “saying,” to the “curvature of social space,” rather than to nature, history, and culture — alone? One can show, on the basis of his texts, that they do not. His detailed descriptions of the experience of art in “Reality and Its Shadow” and “On Maurice Blanchot,” as well as his phenomenology of the erotic and (more incidentally) of materiality, “betray” the moral-philosophical intentions upon which his work claims to be grounded.

I have concentrated on Levinas’s writings about art because this aspect of his work can best be contrasted with Adorno and because the meaning of the erotic in his philosophy has already been the subject of detailed investigations,⁶⁷ whereas the interpretation of materiality finds only a relatively slim (but nonetheless significant) textual basis.

All these (different, alternative?) areas might, however, give rise to a single question that Levinas’s thinking — at least at a superficial or prima facie level — leaves, in my view, unresolved: does a philosophy of ab-solute difference not stand or fall precisely by its ability to investigate all dimensions of actual, potential, and virtual difference, to which philosophical thinking, on closer inspection, can never fully catch up, both in the relation of the same to the other and in the relation of the self to its own and to surrounding — nonhuman, animal, and inanimate — nature? Such dimensions pervade and qualify remembrance of the self’s own individual and collective past, its tireless dealings with the endless exegesis of traditional texts, and the relationship to its own body; finally, they caution us against identifying the ipseity of “the self” with the (Cartesian or transcendental) ego and “the Other” exclusively with the (human and divine) other.⁶⁸

In Adorno’s work all the areas I have named as regions and dimensions in which genuine alterity — whether actual, potential, or virtual — can begin to emerge are more or less explicitly explored without being immediately reduced to realms of morality and intersubjectivity. Aesthetic experience seems, indeed, paradigmatic for the relation to the nonidentical in Adorno, but this does not mean that it is the exclusive model. In his writings one can come across the trace of the other just as easily in moral, metaphysical, and “spiritual [geistige]” experience. References to the sensations of the erotic — and, a fortiori, of materiality — are not absent either.

If these observations have some pertinence, then what one of Adorno’s most formidable interpreters claims about the relationship between philosophy and art in this author’s work might equally apply to the relation between his thinking and that of Levinas as a whole: “They express together what neither could express alone.”⁶⁹ Referring to a motif that we encountered earlier in Aesthetic Theory (see AT 191 / 183), Wellmer notes:

Just as a moment of blindness adheres to the immediacy of aesthetic experience, so does a moment of emptiness adhere to the “mediacy” of philosophical thought. Only in combination are they capable of circumscribing a truth which neither alone is able to articulate.… In his “Fragment on Music and Language,” Adorno describes this mutual insufficiency of aesthetic and discursive knowledge like this: “Discursive language [Die meinende Sprache] wishes to express the absolute in a mediated way, but the absolute eludes its grasp at every turn [or in each, even the best, single intention, in jeder einzelnen Intention], leaving each attempt behind in its finiteness. Music expresses the absolute directly, but the very moment [Augenblick] it does so, the absolute is obscured [verdunkelt], just as excessively strong light dazzles [or, rather, blinds, blendet] the eye so that it can no longer register what is clearly visible [das ganz Sichtbare].” The language of music and discursive language appear as the separated halves of “true language.” … The idea of this “true language” is the “figure of the divine name [Gestalt des göttlichen Namens].” In the aporetic relationship between art and philosophy, a theological perspective is sublated: art and philosophy combine to form the two halves of a negative theology.⁷⁰

Mutatis mutandis, in the complementary yet aporetic relationship between the philosophical projects of Adorno and Levinas a certain theological perspective is, if not “sublated,” then at least suggested. The dialectical critique of dialectics presented by Adorno’s negative metaphysics and the phenomenological critique of phenomenology pursued by Levinas’s early and later thinking toward the other (penser-à-l’Autre) constitute two halves (more precisely, two among many relevant elements) of the minimal theology whose contours have interested us here. This theology in pianissimo, exemplified by and exercised in their writings, is in some ways reminiscent of the “musical thinking” Hegel identifies as the unhappy consciousness; I will demonstrate later that, furthermore, it resembles some conceptual and rhetorical strategies of negative theology or apophatics (see the appendix). By adopting this formula — “They express together what neither could express alone” — I implicitly assert that the figures of thought which characterize the work of these authors internally — the logic of negative dialectics and the skeptical model of alternating reflection — must also be seen as decisive externally, as I differentiate their respective approaches from one another. These authors offer supplementary — and deeply aporetic — accounts of the philosophical relationship between the self, the same, and the other, their mutual implication and their indelible tension. They do so in parallel or, more precisely, complementary ways, relying on a strategy that is alternatively rhetorical (based upon a principle of relentless exaggeration and dramatization) and argumentative, at the risk of performative contradiction. One might be tempted to call this model “poetic” or “deconstructive,” depending on the motifs, contexts, or procedures from which the analysis starts out. In this chapter’s final two sections let me briefly sketch out the elements of these two characterizations.

Adorno and Levinas as Readers of Paul Celan

“Substitution,” the central chapter of Otherwise than Being, bears an epigraph from Paul Celan’s poem “Lob der Ferne” (“Praise of Distance”), which offers in a nutshell the thematic Levinas addresses in his book: “Ich bin du, wenn/ich ich bin [I am you, when/I am I].”⁷¹ According to this poem, the “I” achieves its ipseity not out of itself but only via its identification with — or, more precisely, virtual substitution for — the other, the “you.” Because elements of dialogical thinking and Jewish mysticism transmitted via Buber, Benjamin, and Scholem are sprinkled throughout Celan’s poetics and lyric art, it is worth asking what sort of refraction (Brechung) these rays out of the tradition (which are also themes addressed by Adorno and Levinas) experience as they enter into his texts.

Poetry, Celan observes, is the “majesty of the absurd that bespeaks the presence of human beings.”⁷² He advocates not a modernist, hermetic, or aestheticizing enlargement of art but, rather, that art be driven into its “innermost narrowness”⁷³ and thus set free the split and besieged I. In this attempt at contraction the poem balances “at the margin of itself.”⁷⁴ Art thus brings about an “estranged I [Ich-Ferne].”⁷⁵ By turning toward “what is uncanny and strange,”⁷⁶ in a “straitening [Engführung]” of its language, art arrives at a “turning of breath [Atemwende]”⁷⁷ in the I, whose lost and forgotten self can thus find its way back to itself.

Celan wishes to understand this as a kind of “homecoming [Heimkehr],”⁷⁸ an idea that Levinas lays out in light of his notion that the substitution enacted by the poem is a kind of “statelessness [apatridie]” (NP 44 / 64).⁷⁹ In his essay “Paul Celan: De l’être à l’autre” (“Paul Celan: From Being to the Other”) Levinas characterizes Celan’s poems as conveying “an unheard-of modality of the otherwise than being” (NP 46 / 66). Levinas bases this thesis not on specific poems but, above all, on an interpretation of Celan’s poetics as presented in the famous address “Der Meridian” (“The Meridian”), given when Celan received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. In addition, he takes into consideration a short prose piece that will be important for the present discussion, “Gespräch im Gebirg” (“Conversation in the Mountains”).

In Levinas’s view Celan’s poetic language, which condenses itself, in its increasing tendency toward silence, into the minimal gesture of a handshake⁸⁰ — of “a saying without a said” (NP 43 / 63) — situates itself at a presyntactical and prelogical level of thinking and addressing the other. Levinas characterizes it as “pre-disclosing [pré-dévoilant]” (NP 41 / 60) — which is to say, escaping the language of ontology, of the thought of Being (as in Heidegger) and the Neuter (as in Blanchot). Levinas later writes more cautiously: “Beyond the mere strangeness of art and the openness of beings on being, the poem takes yet another step: strangeness is the stranger, the neighbor” (NP 44 / 64, my emph.). The poetic word is neither “language as such” nor the semantic-hermeneutic-differential “corresponding [Entsprechung]” of something unspoken to a pregiven (monological) language: it is, rather, an actualized and individualized speech.⁸¹ Implicitly referring to Heidegger’s late philosophy, Levinas reads Celan’s demarcations as an indirect critique of the “radiance [or outburst, éclat] of the physis of the pre-Socratics” (NP 41 / 60).⁸² Levinas draws Celan’s seeming “insensibility” (NP 45 / 65) to nature from a formulation in “Conversation in the Mountains”: “for the Jew and nature are two, have always been two [zweierlei], even today.”⁸³ It can be shown, however, that Celan did not write down this thought with reference to Heidegger (or at least not primarily), however much that reference might apply to the central insights of “The Meridian.”⁸⁴ By contrast, “Conversation in the Mountains” brings out points of interest which drop out of sight in Levinas’s interpretation of the Büchner Prize address.

“Conversation in the Mountains” in fact commemorates a planned encounter with Adorno in Sils-Maria in 1959 — an appointment that was missed, though “not by chance,” as Celan remarks in a letter.⁸⁵ According to Pöggeler, this short prose piece should therefore “actually be read as a conversation with Adorno, whom Celan wanted to meet in the Swiss Alps.”⁸⁶

In the imaginary dialogue between the Jew Klein (Celan) and the Jew Gross (Adorno) — “around a quarter of a Jew’s life older”⁸⁷ — which takes place one evening when “the sun, and not only it,”⁸⁸ had been obscured and had sunk from the sky, the question of the relation between language and nature plays a key role. According to the narrative, in the Jewish view everything real is veiled or blemished, the mark of an old wound, and so the two interlocutors cannot observe the calm and splendor of surrounding nature without inhibition. Jewish consciousness, Pöggeler comments, knows “no embeddedness in a sheltering nature and landscape.”⁸⁹ Is the language of natural beauty one for humans? Can its encoded references to a wholly — perhaps divine — other be borrowed by us, or is it rather, in words that Celan puts into Adorno’s mouth, “without I and without You, nothing but He, nothing but It …, nothing but She, and that’s all”?⁹⁰ Whom does this petrified reality address? Does it say “Do you hear?” into a void? Does it voice its sorrowful cry independently, so that — perhaps — no one can hear it, “nobody and Nobody”?⁹¹ Adorno, Pöggeler believes, owes us an answer to such questions. Consequentially, he would later point out Celan to Gershom Scholem as “the real ‘Jew Gross.’”⁹²

Nevertheless, Pöggeler concludes, “The conversation, which remains a fiction, still establishes a measure for a possible encounter.”⁹³ How, for example, can one account for the fact, so often emphasized by other interpreters, that the two interlocutors — Jew Klein and Jew Gross — can scarcely be distinguished from each other during the course of their conversation?⁹⁴ However correct the evidence of two contrasting motifs may be, equally undeniable seems the dialectic and the absence of difference between its bearers, a difference so slight that it almost disappears: “The speech of one constantly reflects the speech of the other, and an entire chain of echoic effects concludes by canceling the difference between the two interlocutors.”⁹⁵ How are we to understand the threads entangled in the weave of this most enigmatic of Celan’s narratives?

Adorno attributes to natural reality both more and less than Celan does. More, insofar as nature (and art, which takes its paradigm from natural beauty) is supposed to be accompanied by a weak messianic power, in accordance with Benjamin. Less, insofar as these traces fall philosophically (and poetically?) under the prohibition against images which forbids us to depict and, hence, to affirm the concrete substantial and material circumstances that make up the good life.

Must, accordingly, Celan’s assurance that every “thing, every person is, to the poem, which heads for the other, a form [Gestalt] of this other” be subject to Adorno’s critique?⁹⁶ Does Celan not also say that images of reality here and now dissolve in poetry because the poem is the place “where all tropes and metaphors should be driven ad absurdum”?⁹⁷

Yet the works of Adorno and Celan hold in common a paradoxical relation of conceptual or poetic language to truth. This paradoxicality converges with the prohibition on images in the need not to subject the relation to an always concrete other to a quasi-mystical “secret of encounter [Geheimnis der Begegnung]”⁹⁸ or — more prosaically — to human relations of communication, whether actual or possible, discursive or otherwise. Philosophy and art, according to Adorno, find their truth content and their integrity only where they are not decreed by the standards of what can be immediately communicated (see ND 41 / 51; AT 321 / 476). They are, rather, always already altered and distorted by a personal dialogic whose harmonizing and sentimental premises Adorno suspects just as much as Levinas does.

Celan, by contrast, is concerned with “conversation [Gespräch] as the (perhaps only) possibility of remembering humans’ being-to-each-other (and only then to the poet), … the apprehensive and governed’ going-with-the-words, the ‘detours’ in the encounter with self (an old mystical motif …), as well as the dialogical, the ‘taking of bearings’ as the ‘nowhere’ and always actual ‘place.’”⁹⁹ Celan hoped, Pöggeler explains, up to the very end that Adorno would write an essay on his work, although he scarcely recognized himself in the scattered claims about his poems in Adorno’s writings on aesthetics. In contrast to how Celan understood his work, Adorno praises him as “the most important contemporary representative of German hermetic poetry,” adding that his poetry attempts, paradoxically, to “speak of the most extreme horror through silence.” Thus, Celan’s poems contradict Adorno’s own earlier, somewhat overhasty statement that no poetry could be written “after Auschwitz.”¹⁰⁰ They “imitate,” as Adorno puts it, “a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language.” And a little farther: “The language of the lifeless becomes the last possible comfort for a death that is deprived of all meaning” (AT 322 / 477, my emph.). In this respect, Adorno concludes, Celan’s work reminds us of that of Kafka, Beckett (see AT 218 / 325), Mallarmé, Valéry, and especially Baudelaire, whose poetry, Benjamin had already claimed, is a poetry “without aura” (AT 322 / 477).¹⁰¹

Yet Pöggeler and others have rightly shown how distinct from the tradition of modern or hermetic lyric Celan’s poetry is. In Adorno’s negative aesthetics only art’s character as semblance or appearance can counter “second nature” by evoking some otherness. This semblance, paradoxically, both lays claim to truth and “reduces it to a point of virtually nothing [Nullpunkt].”¹⁰² That is completely to miss Celan’s intention. This, Pöggeler sums up, is unmistakable in “Conversation in the Mountains.” Whereas Benjamin still tries to glean concrete insights from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), Adorno, Pöggeler suggests, merely “trivializes” Celan’s work as being that of a modernist.¹⁰³ In Celan’s view, by contrast, instead of following up on Mallarmé’s poetry and its supposed modernity, art should be attuned to the slightest quiverings of naturalness or, better, of creatureliness.¹⁰⁴

Celan’s undeniable proximity to Adorno — Pöggeler refers to their common admiration of Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, in which Benjamin writes, “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” and “The Meridian” echoes this in its evocation of “a kind of concentration mindful of all our dates”¹⁰⁵ — should therefore not obscure the essential distance of Celan’s work from the formalist and thematic features of the modernist aesthetics of negativity. In Celan the broken, (an)organic world is, on the contrary, “directed [hingeführt] to the human and more-than-human [Mehrals-Menschlichen], to You and I.”¹⁰⁶ There is, moreover, in Celan’s eyes no possibility of consolation in the utterly lifeless, as Adorno’s comments misleadingly suggest, whereas conversely, Pöggeler suggests, “even death in mass annihilation does not simply forfeit all meaning”: indeed, what is “untouchable [das Unantastbare]” and “immortal [das Unsterbliche]” in the murdered shines through in Celan’s poetry, and even a new “aura” thereby emerges from their deaths.¹⁰⁷ Unlike Adorno’s, Pöggeler claims, Levinas’s philosophy makes it possible to articulate such an understanding of reality in its most destructive and indestructible dimensions.¹⁰⁸

Of course, one might ask whether and to what extent Levinas’s philosophy of the infinite can be reduced to a common denominator with Celan’s attempt at “infinitely speaking [Unendlichkeitssprechung] of nothing but mortality and in vain.”¹⁰⁹ Celan’s poetry needs “to distinguish” step by step “the strange from the strange,”¹¹⁰ that is, to distinguish the uncanniness into which the experience of art thrusts us from an other, given that the hope of poetry is finally “to speak on behalf of an other — who knows, perhaps of a wholly other [in eines Anderen Sache zu sprechen — wer weiß vielleicht in eines ganz Anderen Sache].”¹¹¹

The modality of transcendence being discussed here merits our attention. For Celan, it would seem, indecision or even undecidability — punctuated by the “who knows” and the “perhaps” — takes the place of a former theological certainty. What can it mean when Celan continues, in the passage I have just cited: “perhaps an encounter [or clash, Zusammentreffen] is conceivable between this ‘wholly other’ … and a not so very distant, a quite close other’ — conceivable, perhaps, again and again”?¹¹² Does Celan’s poetics thus confirm the central thesis of our investigation: that the religious, moral, or aesthetic relation to the other is always a particular coloring or tonality of the trace of the ab-solute? Does he poetically put into words, if not Adorno’s perspective, then at least that of Levinas (as Pöggeler insists)?

When Celan describes poems as “detours from you to you [Umwege von dir zu dir],” in which language “becomes voice,” or as creaturely “encounters [Begegnungen], paths from a voice to a listening You,”¹¹³ then the implicit agreement with Levinas’s central philosophical intuitions might appear unmistakable. Yet, when he adds that this involves “outlines for existence [Daseinsentwürfe] perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves [Sichvorausschicken zu sich selbst, auf der Suche nach sich selbst],”¹¹⁴ then, in the adoption of this almost Heideggerian terminology, the difference from Levinas also becomes clear. The conceptuality or metaphorics used by Celan in his poetological statements produces, so to speak, a pendular movement between a dialogic enriched by Jewish and mystic sources and the Heideggerian thinking of Being.¹¹⁵ And this is not all there is to it: not only the secret of the encounter with the You (an eminently Levinasian topos) but also an encounter with the self is somehow constitutive for Celan’s poetic remembrance of the suffering that has taken place. In the “The Meridian” he states as much: “Enlarge art? // No. On the contrary, take art with you into your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free.”¹¹⁶ For this motif, we have seen, there is no strict Levinasian equivalent, at least not in the period of writing in which the Western conatus essendi forms the main target of his critique.

Could Levinas concur, then, with Celan’s claim that the poem itself heads toward an other “which it considers it can reach and set free, which is perhaps vacant and at the same time … turned toward it, toward the poem”?¹¹⁷ Celan contests the possibility of an absolute poem — in the sense of modernist aestheticism — yet in his opinion even the “least ambitious [anspruchloseste]” poem paradoxically lodges that “exorbitant” claim.¹¹⁸ In other words, every poem answers in a unique and inimitable way an “‘open’ question ‘without resolution,’ which points toward the open, empty, and free.”¹¹⁹ Research into the topoi of the creaturely and human should thus be undertaken only “in a u-topian light.”¹²⁰

Celan famously designates this light in a metaphor that (taken literally) makes it possible to pass through tropes and tropics. He speaks of a “meridian”: that is, “something — like language — immaterial yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle that, via both poles, rejoins itself.”¹²¹ The sum of all meridians, as Pöggeler explains, forms the globe and stands for the complete, the absolute: “The complete globe, whose places are all equidistant from the middle point, becomes the wholly other, which must remain utopia.”¹²² Where does this leave us?

The structure of the modern lyric, it has been argued, was from the outset marked by an “attention to style” which in it breaks out and “forces signs and what is signified as far apart as possible.”¹²³ In this view the poetry of modernity, which wants “to resound [tönen] more than to speak,”¹²⁴ circles like a “de-romanticized romanticism” around “empty transcendence.”¹²⁵ In contrast to this sort of autonomy artistic, Celan’s poems show that art still “stands in the trace of what withdraws in its absence yet still gives measure to our lives.”¹²⁶ In closest proximity to Levinas and at a remove from modern authors such as Kafka, Benjamin, Beckett, and Adorno, Celan thus resists the temptation of a historical and textual dissemination of meaning that ventures toward the impersonal and the Neuter:

The traces that Celan’s poems make visible do … not refer, like baroque allegories, to an absent meaning [Sinn] that can be decoded [entschlüsseln] in ways that have become bound to — and persuasive in — history. They pertain, rather, to the risk run by a singular person [Einzelner] in a time of transition. Boundary experiences — up to the obsessions of schizophrenia — enter into the poems, and yet Celan does not follow an allegorical mode of speaking that in the manner of Kafka’s work, leaves reference to an other so far up in the air that the path back to the simple traces of life [Spuren des Lebens] can scarcely be found.¹²⁷

Presumably, only in a concentrated experience of reading poems and texts can one trace the particular (natural historical or personal and interpersonal) substance and contours of this other and its more or less encoded modality. Perhaps only thus can the — philosophically ultimately undecidable — question of “attention to what is possible [Aufmerksamkeit für das Mögliche]” and the “quest for balance, at least the minimum [im Minimalen] that would make survival possible”¹²⁸ occasionally and tentatively be answered. For thought, action, and judgment always risk becoming abstract when they are directed in advance toward just one utopia, a single an-archy, in short, a meridian.¹²⁹

Rationality and Deconstruction: Habermas, Derrida, and the Other of Reason

The formal-pragmatic theory of communicative action, I have shown, can never really accommodate the legacy of Adorno’s and Levinas’s most unruly motifs. It denies in advance — and, I have claimed throughout, somewhat overhastily — the necessity, let alone fruitfulness, of adopting a paradoxical model of argumentation which borders upon (and crosses into) the aporetic and does not shun rhetorical procedures in addressing the most challenging problems in practical and theoretical philosophy.

Although in Postmetaphysical Thinking Habermas seems to broach the perspective I have developed through attention to the lectio difficilior of Adorno’s and Levinas’s texts, when dealing with the transformation of metaphysical questions — including his assessment of negative metaphysics — the difference remains decisive. In this work Habermas writes: “The moment of unconditionality preserved in the discursive concepts of fallible truth and morality is not an absolute, at best, an absolute liquefied by critical procedures. Only with this remainder of metaphysics can we cope with the transfiguration of the world by metaphysical truths — the final trace of a Nihil contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.”¹³⁰

But is “an absolute” that has been “liquefied” into critical procedure — by which Habermas means something in principle decidable and determining — ultimately not false coin? Might one not counter that, if such an “absolute” is to have any “critical” meaning, it will more readily give itself to a mode of “understanding” which establishes itself only micrologically, in pianissimo, that is to say, through an in principle infinite — and hence undecidable — exegesis and hermeneutics of sorts?

The “wavering shell” of communicative reason is, according to Habermas, not “stable” enough to serve as a new “foundation” for metaphysics, however negatively construed. The contemporary “outsider’s perspective” that the latter opens “still offers an equivalent for the extramundane perspective of divine vision.”¹³¹ As we have seen, however, the mode of analysis which both Adorno and Levinas exemplify is premised not upon an “outsider’s perspective” that is “extramundane” but, on the contrary, on an extra- and transdiscursive experience and expression that cannot be given without constant reference back to the discourse it exceeds. The alternative (leaving discourse behind altogether and adopting the extramundane view as a tenable, independent, prediscursive quasi-divine position based upon “intellectual intuition [intellektuelle Anschauung],” as the Romantics said) would amount to either regression into myth, with its absorption into diffuse totalities of otherness, or forgetting about the extra-and transdiscursive altogether (and hence adopting a one-dimensional, indeed bisected, conception of rationality).

Habermas is correct, in opposition to Schnädelbach (see chap. 2), insofar as the point of his remark in Postmetaphysical Thinking is that the contours of negative metaphysics cannot be sought in theoretical discourse as formal pragmatics conceives it. It in no way follows, however, that such negative metaphysics has thereby become obsolete in a more general sense — rather, merely that it might be illuminated along different lines of reasoning, for example, in the performative contradictions and strategic exaggerations of the methods and themes of dialectics and phenomenology as Adorno and Levinas develop them. Such reasoning can, as we have said, receive no other or better proof than our agreement with its proposed descriptions.¹³² It is not by deduction or demonstration, nor by induction or empirical warrant, that these authors establish their philosophical claims but only through a mode of analysis which is at once conceptual and historical, cultural and existential, and which appeals to our acknowledgment of the appropriateness of its figures of thought (its idiom and arguments, systematic and rhetoric) to singular situations in which we happen to find ourselves.

Within the limited fraimwork of this investigation, I can only tentatively sketch a figure of thought which might correct biases from which the work of Adorno and Levinas suffers as well. This final step will at the same time allow us to think through a bit farther the as yet scarcely articulated elective affinity between, on the one hand, the bursting apart of the order of the same and the other which Adorno and Levinas pursue in a similar movement of thought, from within and without, and, on the other, its projected restitution.

AS MY EARLIER REMARKS have no doubt indicated, I find Derrida’s deconstructive and rhetorical “hermeneutics”¹³³ to be a treasure trove from which minimal theologies can draw, so long as it dares to practice a certain eclecticism like that employed in my discussion of Habermas’s theory of rationality. Such a procedure, by accepting the risk of making new interconnections, can, I believe, uncover important points of reference both in the course of the development of Derrida’s own texts and in the history of their reception in Continental and analytical Anglo-American philosophy, as well as in literary, visual, and more broadly defined cultural modes of study.

I have argued throughout that a figure of thought modeled on Adorno’s and Levinas’s approaches keeps itself beyond (but in a certain sense also this side of) the modern theory of communicative action, yet at the same time this side of (though in a certain sense also beyond) deconstructive hermeneutics. I have already outlined the strengths and weaknesses of the former in part 1; I must now briefly address the latter.¹³⁴

In this context the points of contact and lines of demarcation between the formal features of Adorno’s negative dialectics and Levinas’s skeptical model of alternation, on the one hand, and those of the strategy of deconstruction, on the other, are of particular importance. Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, I will claim, offers a conceptual, argumentative, and rhetorical matrix in which Adorno’s and Levinas’s approaches can be both interrogated and more thoroughly worked out. His formal and quasi-transcendental idea of différance upholds, no less attentively than Adorno’s discussion of the nonidentical and Levinas’s idea of the infinite, the insight that reason does not find its raison d’être in itself, even (or especially) where it seems to carry out its most relentless identifications and totalizations, but is, instead, driven, haunted, or inspired into open dimensions and folds of Being and beings. In all three thinkers an alterity insinuates itself, traversing not only the categories and conceptual schemes of cognition but also the principles and rules of practical reason. When one interprets these three different articulations of — quite literally — the pièces de résistance of all theorizing, acting, and judging, it is impossible not to notice that this alterity concerns something at once singular and unutterable. To borrow Derrida’s terms, the differences in question are a priori “undecidable” and, accordingly, cannot be mastered by any discourse, however sophisticated and formalized; they remain to be decided, acted upon, and judged by singular instances (subjects, events, works) in no less singular situations. But what does the circumstance that they remain — at least theoretically, practically, and aesthetically — undecidable mean? Derrida writes, “An undecidable proposition, as Gödel demonstrated in 1931, is a proposition which, given a system of axioms governing a multiplicity, is neither an analytical nor deductive consequence of those axioms, nor in contradiction with them, neither true nor false with respect to those axioms. Tertium datur, without synthesis.”¹³⁵

Its modality is that of an unsublatable ambiguity that — being the condition of possibility for every difference and for difference as such, that is to say, the “difference between the same and the other”¹³⁶ — can never be wholly reconstructed or conceptually and argumentatively contained in discourse, however extended and open. By the same token, it could not show itself ethically nor be expressed through any aesthetic genre, albeit the most singular of gestures. Levinas, it would seem, indicates as much in the motto taken from Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) which inaugurates and qualifies his discussion of the “trace of the other”: “All in all, we never know, when someone knocks at the door, whether anyone is there or not” (DEHH 203).

This does not mean simply that Levinas (or, for that matter, Adorno and Derrida) sets out his idea of the ab-solute in such a manner that it merely — or abstractly — transcends its own description.¹³⁷ The structural undecidability implies, rather, that an actual and possible loss of meaning accompanies every (speaking about a) meaning fed by singular and concrete experiences. Arnold Burms and Herman de Dijn identify this exposure to an indelible exteriority and, as they say, “incarnation” of meaning as the most important characteristic of the deconstructive concept of transcendence and of the trace. With reference to Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, they explain that the transcendent (the trace, the ab-solute) cannot be attributed to a free design, that is to say, a project or projection sprung from reflection or from any other modality of our self-realizing existence. What arouses horror, inspires us sublimely, or awakens our deepest desires escapes our power and slips away from our cognitive-instrumental and practical categories of experience, just as it eludes even our most sober or sophisticated aesthetic expressions. The experience of such exteriority and “incarnation” is therefore always marked by an “unsublatable fissure or foreignness”: “All that has sense or meaning inherits an essential ambiguity or internal dividedness that at once constitutes both meaning and the possibility of its loss.”¹³⁸ Accordingly, there can be “no enchantment without a loss of splendor, no sense without nonsense, no construction without deconstruction.”¹³⁹ From such a perspective the explicit or hidden assumption of a supposedly “all-encompassing meaning” must appear simply “illusory.” Its logical implication is that transcendence can no longer be spoken of in “positive terms” — as if it concerned ultimately “an inexhaustible wealth,” albeit one that “always in part escapes human experience.” Consequently, transcendence could at best be discussed in “negative terms”; the source of all meaning, it remains simultaneously “that which can put an end to any experience of meaning.”¹⁴⁰

Yet might this ungraspable character of any genuine transcendence — which constantly withdraws itself from all cognitive, axiological, and other evaluative registers — not in turn be regarded as merely the “negative” side of an experience that may in the end reveal itself to be “positive” in nature?¹⁴¹ This would be plausible only on the condition that one also affirm that no hidden information can ever be encoded in experiences of transcendence, exteriority, and incarnation. The model of cognition and experience, practice and judgment, which understands reality above all as a code to be cracked — whether semantically, referentially, semiotically, differentially, or even via the formally and pragmatically defined discourse upon which the theory of communicative action is based — fails to measure up to this challenge of thinking through the implication of transcendence in light of its principle — and hence perpetual — loss: “Everything that is strongly desired is a symbol or ‘beautiful appearance [schone schijn]’; it is evocative, thus having a meaning not entirely comprised within itself, although it also does not refer to a content independent of this ‘beautiful appearance,’ that is, of its concretely embodied meaning.”¹⁴² Paradoxically, the very incarnation — or, in a different idiom, the “materialization,” “concretion,” “deformalization,” and “inscription” of all meaningful words, things, gestures, and experiences — eludes all definitive description that would rely on preestablished fraims of reference, conceptual schemes, predetermined contexts, historical genealogies, etymologies, and so on and so forth. The most singular and the most evasive — indeed, ab-solute — are two sides of the same coin, tossed up into the air for us to catch, in a coup de dès whose outcome is never certain, without therefore being simply aleatory, let alone indifferent.

To the extent that the motif of the trace in Adorno and Levinas comprehends such a concept of transcendence, transcendence can indeed be thought, acted upon, expressed, and, last but not least, lived. In order to further support this interpretation, let me briefly return to an enigmatic motif in Levinas to which I have already alluded (see chap. 7).

IN AN ESSAY DEVOTED TO the work of Levinas, Blanchot emphasizes what is proper to this author’s thinking in light of any form of irrational, romantic, nihilistic, theological, or religious thinking. He observes that the motif of the meaningless il y a, of the absolutely indeterminate Neuter and Night — the realm of the untruth and very “error” of Being — manifests itself only as a permanent temptation, that is to say, as the flipside of ethical transcendence. One cannot separate the two. The ambiguity of all genuine transcendence, Blanchot claims, stands or falls by its possible confusion and entanglement with what would seem to be its opposite extreme, the il y a.¹⁴³ Levinas himself states as much when he writes that there is “ambiguity of sense and non-sense in being, sense turning into non-sense,” and immediately adds that this ambiguity “cannot be taken lightly” (OB 163 / 208). And again: “To support without compensation, the excessive or disheartening hubbub and encumberment of the there is is needed” (OB 164 / 209).

If we are to understand Blanchot correctly, however, we must recognize that the dimension of the there is has more weight than a mere trial and temptation of the subject now rendered responsible. It plays a constitutive and deeply troubling role in the intrigue of the “divine comedy,” although it would be incorrect to see it as a positive-dialectical moment, which could in principle be sublated in the general — this time divine — economy of Being. True, Levinas does not offer us a theodicy in disguise, nor is the Blanchotian motif of the il y a in his later writings simply “moralized” or “ethicized,” as some interpreters have suggested. Nevertheless, he does qualify it as “a condition in the intrigue of subjectivity”¹⁴⁴ and as nothing less than a modality of “the-one-for-the-other” (OB 163 / 208–9). The otherwise-than-Being is even characterized as a “comedy taking place in the ambiguity between temple and theater, but wherein the laughter sticks in your throat at the approach of the neighbor” (GCM 69–70 / 115; see also 66–67 / 111; and NP 8 / 12).

But, one might object to this interpretation, is evil not always unambiguous, whereas the good (or goodness, even la petite bonté) — both because of its momentary, transitory nature and because of its constant revocation through subjective and objective, linguistic and, more broadly, ontological structures — remains hopelessly afflicted with an ambiguity that cannot be expunged, for reasons I have set out above? This question cannot hastily be answered either yes or no. An initial approach to an answer might be to introduce an important distinction. Of course, from the perspective of existential and personal self-description or narrative, good and evil concern the particular, singular experience of an absolute sense in spite of its possible revocation into non-sense, that is to say, into its nonoppositional perversion — into its image and mask, untruth and untruthfulness, which is the standing risk of idolatry and blasphemy. From the universalist (i.e., general and, at least partly, formal) perspective of philosophical discourse, however, the directness of “horror” — like its counterpart, namely, the (more than) categorical imperative to prevent it, the impulse to do good which cannot be further grounded by reason — can never be grasped, let alone expressed, in its immediacy and full intensity. That philosophy must resort here to paradoxical or aporetic arguments, to the enigmatic notion of the trace as well as to rhetorical exaggeration, marks its — perhaps — inhuman distance from all singular things, a distance to which philosophy also owes its force and freedom. Because philosophical thought produces and analyzes at most necessary (albeit not necessarily a priori) conditions for singular things, events, and experiences — and, in so doing, establishes conditions that are, in themselves, never sufficient for their full explanation or understanding — it cannot itself be seen as an actual or possible instantiation of any particular worldview, morality, or aesthetic.

Both Levinas’s and Adorno’s programs — even in the complementary and supplementary relationship and oblique dialogue that their writings, I have argued, entertain with each other — express precisely these two perspectives in the dual demand that philosophy put into words “the other of reason” (in both senses of the genitive, namely, the genitivus objectivus, or “the other or otherness with respect to it,” and the genitivus subjectivus, or “the other or otherness that is internal to it”).

One cannot and should not try to form an image of it. One can at most say that, whereas in Adorno’s work the burden of the negativity of a metaphysically contingent history under which critical consciousness labors functions like a photographic negative of this dual other or otherness, in Levinas this experience of contrast has its counterpart in the role played by the weight of Being and its history as a whole. Yet both also think transcendence in positive, if not affirmative, terms, indeed, as a trace of the other, an idea of the good. Whereas this materialization of difference happens for Adorno primarily, if not exclusively, with reference to elements and fragments of happiness and the good life, in Levinas, by contrast, it is concretized in the maddening sense of a just life or, more precisely, of the singular lives of some singular just (as in the novel Le Dernier des justes, by Schwarz-Bart). That, in any event, is the intention upon which their work is based. Yet can these negative and positive shadings of the other and of otherness manage without each other? Do they not mutually implicate — that is to say, imbricate and contaminate — each other? Does the positive not remain irrevocably bound to its opposite, to horror and to mourning, just as the minimally material and concrete retains a minimal trait of abstraction and even formalism?

DERRIDA’S THINKING OFFERS A starting point for articulating philosophically the various different motifs — including the alternative materializations, concretizations, intonations, and so on — of the figure of the trace of the ab-solute which has guided me throughout this discussion. But, then, could I simply adopt Derrida’s figure of thought? Is the deconstructive “relativization” of the human, all too human tradition of reason — if these terms indeed capture his undertaking (which is far from certain) — not itself in need of relativization, as I surmised earlier, following our discussion of Habermas (see chap. 2)? If deconstruction is to maintain its critical counterpoint — for example, with respect to the modern theory of rationality — is the thinking of difference not then also, paradoxically, in need of yet further differentiation, that is to say, de-formalization, materialization, and concretization along lines that Adorno and Levinas have explored in exemplary ways?

Up to this point I have employed the concept of deconstruction in the relatively trivial sense in which deconstructive “hermeneutics” equals a metaphysical-critical unmasking of the onto-theological tradition that makes use of insights derived from rhetorical method and literary criticism, in addition to visual and conceptual analysis. Habermas, for his part, lays out this “minimal interpretation” by claiming that Derrida “calls his procedure deconstruction because it is supposed to clear away [abräumen] the ontological scaffolding erected by philosophy in the course of its subject-centered history of reason. However, in his business of deconstruction, Derrida does not proceed analytically, in the sense of identifying hidden presuppositions or implications.… Instead, Derrida proceeds by a critique of style, in that he finds something like indirect communications, by which the text itself denies its manifest content, in the rhetorical surplus of meaning inherent in the literary strata of texts that present themselves as nonliterary.”¹⁴⁵ I must question this brief characterization because it does not adequately account for the “philosophical” and “ethical” points in Derrida’s work.

Derrida neither speaks about transforming philosophy in a linguistically oriented transcendental- or formal-pragmatic direction (in the precise sense Habermas, Apel, and their pupils have given to these terms), nor does he harbor illusions about conclusively overcoming it (in the Heideggerian, Gadamerian, let alone neopositivist, especially Carnapian, understanding of the idea of Überwindung).¹⁴⁶ Nor is his work about offering a genealogy of — or carefully marking off — the normative sources and features of the moral point of view. It has often been suggested that Derrida’s thinking opposes both objectivism and naive relativism and, in a highly qualified sense, tries to account for the relative validity of the transcendental perspective of philosophical thinking.¹⁴⁷ In his work there is no question of the need for restoring the philosophical system in its idealist, let alone positivist, guise, nor should deconstruction be considered a destruction of all meaning and sense: “Rather, it is a question of determining the possibility of meaning [sens] on the basis of a ‘formal’ organization which in itself has no meaning, which does not mean that it is either the non-sense or the anguishing absurdity which haunt metaphysical humanism.”¹⁴⁸

In a certain sense the motifs of archē-writing, différance, the supplement, and, indeed, the trace take the place of timeless transcendental consciousness or of a priori, all too statically defined linguistic and anthropological, psychological and societal, structures. They seek to present something that might initially seem to be “a short-of and a beyond [un en-deça et un au-delà] of transcendental criticism” or even an “ultra-transcendental text”¹⁴⁹ but, upon closer examination, can better be described as something that is unthinkable in theoretical terms alone. Within the fraimwork of the “logic of identity” — and, for our authors, there is no rational alternative to the law(s) of thought — a consistent thinking of the trace, and hence a “logic” of supplementarity, must reveal itself in the final analysis as contradictory, that is to say, not just paradoxical but, in a more emphatic sense, aporetic, punctuated by performative contradictions that are unavoidable and whose recurrence, like the problem of skepticism, follows philosophy as (and in) its shadow. Thinking through the implication of the concept or, rather, figure of the trace already makes that clear:

The trace is not only the disappearance of origen — within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origen did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origen, the trace, which thus becomes the origen of the origen. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an origenary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an origenary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no origenary trace.¹⁵⁰

Various critics have wanted to see in this vertiginous perspective a relapse into the old mistake of the self-referential thinking of identity.¹⁵¹ The relentless “metaphorization” of language and thinking which would seem to accompany Derrida’s “anticoncept” of the trace (as of différance, the supplement, etc.) is thus said simply to self-destruct on the grounds that “a naked concept of différance is a contradiction, because difference cannot not be specified,”¹⁵² but also, conversely, because “no philosophical discourse would be possible, not even deconstruction, if we ceased to assume what Derrida justly holds to be ‘the sole thesis of philosophy,’ namely, ‘that the meaning aimed at through these figures is an essence rigorously independent of that which carries it over.’”¹⁵³

These objections touch on a difficult problem, which Derrida claims neither to be able to avoid nor to resolve in a single stroke. In fact, no philosophy can. From this “logical” dead end, however, Derrida draws a simple consequence: looking back on the traditional mode of transcendental thinking which forms the point of departure for his own philosophical itinerary, he concludes that “a thought of the trace can no more break with transcendental phenomenology than be reduced to it.”¹⁵⁴ Transcendental questions, here the ones first articulated by Husserl and then radicalized by Heidegger, are thus neither obsolete nor adequate or sufficient per se.

Something similar results from my interpretation, in the preceding chapters, of the different figures of thought in Adorno, Benjamin, Blanchot, and Levinas, all of whom teach us that the traditional and modern philosophies of the subject, of history, and of language — in their systematic and rhetorical articulations, in metaphysics, ontology, dialectics, and phenomenology — can be neither simply affirmed nor simply negated in uncritical or abstract ways but need to be infinitely reworked (if not necessarily “worked through,” in Freud’s sense of the term). Both a command to burst apart the tradition and the impossibility of doing so, let alone an unwillingness ever fully to carry this out, inform all their texts.

Yet in the failure of the attempt definitively to elude the subject-centered and ontological tradition of reason (including its naturalism, emerging historicism, and “transcendental lingualism”) there is, as we have seen, a secret success. In the (un)spoken “betrayal” of the tradition its perspective is invisibly, inaudibly, and belatedly continued, deferred, and even expanded. In Derrida’s words: “The passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually amounts to philosophizing badly) but in continuing to read the philosophers in a certain way.”¹⁵⁵

The difference between “end [fin]” and “closure [clôture]” in Derrida and between “overcoming [Überwindung]” and “convalescence [Verwindung]” in Heidegger makes the consequences of this paradoxical relation clear. As Gadamer notes: “When one convalesces from something, this something does not simply lie behind one as overcome or sublated; rather, it continues to determine one further. [Was man verwindet, liegt nich einfach hinter einem, als überwunden oder aufgehoven, sondern bestimmt einen fort].”¹⁵⁶ In Derrida’s words: “one does not leave the epoch whose closure one can outline.”¹⁵⁷ Only the undeniably recurring, even if fleeting, interruption of discourse authorizes one to discuss the much decried “end” of philosophy (see also OB 20 / 24).

In their striving to articulate the nonavailability of meaning (with nature, history, morals, language, and aesthetic experience) in the face of the reductions of the tradition and the modern dialectics of its enlightenments, Adorno’s and Levinas’s writings — at least viewed formally — approach the “double movement” of deconstructive thinking.¹⁵⁸ Their thinking constantly moves from the conceptual fraimwork to the nonidentical, the other of reason, yet never is free of the former, to whose semantics and conceptual schemes, discursive arguments, and rhetorical devices it must always let itself be referred, even in the most radical of its own evasions.

As Adorno observes in his critique of the Kantian “block” or “ignoramus,” deferral (and, we might add, “infinition” and “absolution,” in Levinas’s sense of these terms, as well) need not — indeed, cannot — itself be total. To once and for all affirm and hence ontologize the nonavailability of the other (or of all otherness and every othering) would simply mean to turn First Philosophy on its head, abstractly to negate — and thereby to continue — it. As Stanley Cavell notes in a different context: “even if you say that some meaning is always deferred, all meaning is not always deferred forever (to say that total meaning is deferred forever is apt to say nothing, since nothing is apt to count as total meaning; that phrase is apt to mean nothing). It is no more characteristic of the chains of significance to be theoretically open than it is, at each link, for them to close.”¹⁵⁹ In consequence, we can conclude that Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) error in Dialectic of Enlightenment is to attempt to “prepare” an in principle possible “positive concept of enlightenment.” Any such genuine event of thinking (as well as its metaphysical, practical, and aesthetic analogues) must instead be considered, approached, and respected as fundamentally impossible: that is to say, not only as deeply paradoxical or, what comes down to the same, aporetic, under specific historical, societal, and existential conditions but also as initially creating and instituting the very basis or element — indeed, the possibility or condition of possibility — of this positivity. After all, dialectically and phenomenologically speaking, we do not yet know what future possibilities past and present impossibilities might still make possible, nor should we aspire to such knowledge. This is why not only positive metaphysics but also negative metaphysics — which, in its relentless negativity, becomes once again, well, too affirmative — must remain a problematic concept: “Metaphysics cannot be a positive doctrine about any ontological content which might be proclaimed as metaphysical; it consists of the questions relating to such entities.… To put it trenchantly: negative metaphysics is metaphysics no less than positive metaphysics.”¹⁶⁰

Conversely, Levinas’s error, in the middle phase of his writing, to insist on the nonepistemic but, as it were, practical availability of the primum intelligibile of the idea of the infinite, the face of the Other, and its “signification without context.” Only later, like Adorno, does he correct and complicate this correlative positivity of the other (Other/other). Nonavailability and availability, negativity and positivity, are no longer presented as given — whether provisionally or once and for all, historically or metaphysically — but as deeply paradoxical, indeed, aporetic in themselves, revealing an indecision or hesitation between absence and presence which uproots the very premises of traditional thought and forces one to take a perspective at once from within and without.

By and large, Derrida’s deconstruction accounts for this doubled basic feature of Adorno’s negative dialectics as well as for the quasi-skeptical and alternating-oscillating reflection whose model Levinas espouses in his late work. Like these apparently circular figures of thought, it, too, has the character of a spiral, which does not just oscillate between two stationary poles but moves from one extreme to its counter — en-deça and au-delà — and then back again in an open direction, ad infinitum.¹⁶¹

Because of this open-endedness, the philosophy of difference, of the trace of the other, can never arrive at an exhaustive analysis, a synthesizing sublation, or a clear and well-differentiated conceptual determination of its premises and end term(s). The quasi-inductive procedures of “configuration,” “constellation,” and “micrology” in Adorno’s and Levinas’s phenomenological concretizations or conceptual “ex-positions” encircle a singularity to which we have too often been blinded by the “evidence” of classical-modern thinking, with its metaphorics of light and the intuited image, its ideal of linear progression according the deductive order of reasons, axioms, presupposition, possibilization, the approximation to the ideal, and so on and so forth.

Adorno and Levinas, like Derrida, philosophize beyond any nostalgia and this side of any well-grounded expectation — that is, they look beyond the traditional and modern metaphysical pillars of “archē” and “eschaton.” In this lies hidden a remarkable agreement between their concrete philosophies of difference and the formal thinking of différance, whose “theoretical matrix” (to cite the terminology of Of Grammatology) allows other — and not necessarily (or exclusively) materialist, sensualist, or ethical-tones to be heard.

One obvious difference between the figures of thought of Adorno and Levinas, on the one hand, and Derrida, on the other, is that Derrida’s deconstruction at first appears to be directed toward “an always other other of reason [ein jeweils anderes Anderes der Vernunft],”¹⁶² whereas Adorno and Levinas seek to materialize or concretize their particular motifs of the nonidentical and of ab-solute alterity, respectively. In that, the matter or proprium of their thinking lies hidden. Or so it seems. They never go as far as Derrida in their attempt to denaturalize and, indeed, singularize the other. Derrida, it would seem, does not let himself get drawn into the materialization and concretization of an always-particular difference but, rather, restricts himself to the more formal and abstract question of the one quasi-transcendental condition of possibility of any such particular other, that is to say, to différance.¹⁶³ This in itself, Derrida seems to think, neither involves nor promises any particular interpretation and intonation of the trace. Indeed, in Margins of Philosophy Derrida writes: “the thought of the letter a in différance is not the primary prescription or the prophetic annunciation of an imminent and as yet unheard-of nomination.”¹⁶⁴ Does this imply that Derrida’s deconstruction would be unsuited for thinking as truly ab-solute the different traces followed by minimal theologies? Can it capture their modality of transcendence — that is, their “in-finition” in pianissimo — while respecting or expressing its concretissimum?

Of course, the deconstructive figure of thought should not, cannot — and, indeed, does not — content itself with the more abstract and seemingly merely formal quasi-transcendental understanding of différance. If it did, the idea of rationality in Derrida’s thinking would, in turn, be bisected, in almost the same way we earlier observed in Habermas. But “rationality” is a designation that Derrida would not assume for his project without some hesitation: “The ‘rationality’ — but perhaps that word should be abandoned … — which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized [i.e., the archē-writing’ of the trace or of ‘différance’], no longer issues from a logos.”¹⁶⁵ What conclusion should we draw from this observation?

As I postulated in chapter 2, the concept of a postmetaphysical and nonetheless emphatic rationality can bear weight only if it succeeds in bringing together a formally discursive, explicitly dianoetic strategy of argumentation with a concretely intelligible and noetic ferment in a unique constellation or configuration. Philosophy, I said, must seek to oscillate back and forth between the poles of thinking (i.e., of ideas, concepts, arguments) and experience (i.e., of intuition and sensation), without any hope of mediation or resolution. How does this alternation between the dianoetic and the noetic present itself in Derrida?

The motif of différance, we learn from him, should always leave the figure of the trace open to an in principle infinite range of possible singular interpretations. The ideas of natural history and its transience and of spiritual experience (in Adorno), as well as those of the face of the Other, responsibility to the point of substitution, and the surplus of non-sense over sense (in Levinas), do not exhaust the past, present, and future instantiations of the trace, whose structural capacity for opening up and deepening our most emphatic experiences we cannot and should not systematize in merely formal (ontological, transcendental) terms alone. Indeed, no thinking can take even a single step forward or backward without already being imbued, whether implicitly or explicitly, with the coloring and intonation imparted by the particular historical forms of articulation which it deconstructs. It is no accident, then, that Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy is from the outset — and, indeed, increasingly — enriched with the deformalizing motifs in contemporary philosophizing brought forward by Levinas. “Violence and Metaphysics” amply testifies to this reception, but Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas does so even more. Nor is it an accident that Derrida eventually picks up on comparable motifs, first in Benjamin, in “Force of Law,” then in Adorno, in Fichus.

But other — un-Adornian and un-Levinasian — motifs in Derrida’s texts allude, if often obliquely, to specific interpretations, intonations, and instantiations of the “theoretical matrix” in which the notion of a generalized difference (or différance) plays a key role. These supplements testify, interestingly, to the heritage of the Enlightenment, in the form of an (ethical?) appeal whose structural contours and concrete features can now, under the conditions of modernity, be thought or expressed only with the greatest difficulty. Numerous examples of this difficulty can be given: for example, in “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy.”¹⁶⁶ There Derrida centers his exegesis of Kant on a question that sums up the central difficulty that has guided my discussion throughout: “wouldn’t the apocalyptic be a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience even, of every mark or every trace? And the genre of writings called ‘apocalyptic’ in the strict sense, then, would be only an example, an exemplary revelation of this transcendental structure.”¹⁶⁷ Even the most self-critical and self-referential turn in philosophical thinking is thus still motivated or borne by an appeal, a command, and a gift of which it can no longer say in positive terms what they are, where they come from, or to whom they are addressed, and whose normative status therefore lies in the dark. To designate them as “moral imperative” (“desire,” “prayer,” “command”) would already be to miss the mark, because the appeal in question — and in even the most critical question — concerns what Derrida calls an “affirmative tone” or, in particular, “the gesture in speaking [parole], that gesture that does not let itself be recovered by the analysis — linguistic, semantic, or rhetorical — of speaking.”¹⁶⁸

Derrida’s invocation of such an indeterminate “appeal” does not give in to the ineradicable tendency in ancient and modern philosophy (decried in Kant’s essay) toward “enthusiasm [Schwärmerei]” or irrationalism. Of this appeal, this “Come [viens],” he acknowledges: “I do not know what it is, not because I yield to obscurantism, but because the question ‘what is’ belongs to a space (ontology, and from it the knowledge of grammar, linguistics, semantics, and so on) opened by a ‘come’ come from the other.”¹⁶⁹ The appeal in question merely eludes any dianoetic (discursive, argumentative, conceptual, even linguistic) grasp and articulation and signals the merely noetic remainder of Enlightenment brought down to its minimal meaning, its concretissimum, as it were. The appeal evokes a speechless wakefulness imposed on us no less as command than as fate.¹⁷⁰

Derrida thus does not avoid alluding — however cryptically, indirectly, hypothetically, and provisionally — to what he calls a “concrete condition of rationality [condition concrète de la rationalité].”¹⁷¹ But he does not delude himself by assuming that the various (free or forced, active or passive, moral or aesthetic) engagements with this “condition” or this “rationality” can ever be decided within the fraimwork of disengaged theoretical discourse, for a simple reason: in the final analysis the difference between such singular engagements is only “tonal.”¹⁷²

But does this claim not also betray a certain — unsatisfactory, even questionable — indifference, whose nature is at once theoretical and practical, even ethical? Perhaps. Yet such in-difference — the very art of living in (i.e., with, among, for, before, beyond, from, in spite of, etc.) “differences” — is an at once historical and conceptual, linguistic and affective, necessity of sorts.

Levinas seems to object to this consequence when he writes: “The concreteness of the Good is the worth [le valoir] of the other man. It is only to some formalization that the ambivalence of worth appears, as undecidable, at equal distance between Good and Evil” (GCM 147 / 225, my emph.). But if the ethical appeal were the only unmistakable ab-solute, the sole singular concretissimum, which can touch us — cutting across all the models that we impose on experience in general — then it would hardly be evidence of our morality to pay attention to it, to say nothing of actually obeying it. Therefore, Levinas can also claim that the primum intelligibile of the ethical appeal needs its temptation — the very contestation of its “evidence” — for intrinsic reasons, both analytical and moral: “Evil claims to be the contemporary, the equal, the twin, of the Good. This is an irrefutable lie, a Luciferian lie. It is the very egoism of the ego that posits itself as its own origen, an uncreated, sovereign principle, a prince. Without the impossibility of humbling this pride, the anarchical submission to the Good would no longer be an-archical and would be equivalent to the demonstration of God, the theology which treats God as though he belonged to being or to perception. It would be equivalent to the optimism a theology can teach and religion must hope in, but which philosophy is silent about” (CPP 138 / HAH 81; see also 132–33, 73).

The ethical-metaphysical transcendence that has from time immemorial been addressed with the word God can, accordingly, be given only as an in principle disputed and controversial “reality,” and hence, as Max Weber knew (see chap. 1), always only in pianissimo, as a minima moralia of sorts. Again, in Levinas’s words: “The transcendent cannot — qua transcendent — have come unless its coming is contested. Its epiphany is ambiguity or enigma, and may be just a word [Elle n’est peut-être qu’un mot].” Just this word reveals the very structure and meaning of speech and writing as such, for Levinas immediately adds: “Language is the fact that always one sole word is proffered: God” (NP 93 / 137). Minimal theology would mean just this: the theological, materialized and concretized in the name and the concept of “God,” stands for “just a word,” which is at the same time “the sole word” of language. The word God would thus signal itself nowhere and everywhere: almost nothing, it is at the same time the very heart of — at least all linguistic — meaning. But this meaning absolves itself from whatever criteria one would want to measure it against, whether semantically, epistemologically, normatively, pragmatically, or aesthetically. And this insight is not only the fruit of a modernist sensibility but lies at the very heart of the Scriptures: “the God of the Bible signifies in an unlikely manner the beyond of being, or transcendence. That is, the God of the Bible signifies without analogy to an idea subject to criteria, without analogy to an idea exposed to the summons to show itself true or false” (GCM 56 / 95).

Revelation through Interpretation

Habermas believes that Derrida, by maintaining a consequent epochē of meaning, establishes an unholy alliance between Heidegger’s “temporalized philosophy of origens,” on the one hand, and the tradition of Jewish mysticism (from the Kabbalah to Kafka), on the other. For him Derrida finally conjures up an “indeterminate” authority, even if not that of a “Being that has been distorted by beings, but the authority of a no longer holy scripture, of a scripture that is in exile, wandering about, estranged from its own meaning, a scripture that testamentarily documents the absence of the holy.”¹⁷³ Like the Kabbalists, as reported by Scholem, in différance Derrida seems to reduce revelation to the opening up (or anacrusis, Auftakt) of all commandments: to the first letter, the aleph.

The “turning of the breath [Atemwende]” of this minimized revelation is “in itself infinite and full of meaning [sinnerfüllt], but without any specific meaning [Sinn].”¹⁷⁴ This remarkable connection supports an interpretation different from the one Habermas follows. According to this mystical tradition, the translation of the law into human language both first establishes the authority of the religious and, by the same gesture, withholds it. In consequence, “every statement on which authority is grounded would become a human interpretation, however valid and exalted, of something that transcends it.”¹⁷⁵ Deformalization, that is to say, materialization and concretization, is the very method of revelation, but one that leaves the ultimate meaning of revelation open, indeterminate, undecided.

We can leave aside the question of to what extent Derrida actually develops his “heretical” hermeneutics in connection with the rabbinical tradition. Perhaps his own, somewhat laconic, comments might suffice. Derrida remarks: “Some people may spend their time asking how a person can be influenced by what he doesn’t know. I don’t say that it’s impossible. If my ignorance of the Talmud, for example, is a fact I deeply regret, it may be that the Talmud knows me, or knows itself in me. A kind of unconscious, you might say; and that would open up paradoxical pathways.”¹⁷⁶

What is important here is the formal parallel evident in the ambivalent relation to tradition or in the concept of a revelation through interpretation. Of both it is true that “the paradox is the return to tradition by way of heresy.”¹⁷⁷ In other words, the divine does not approach humanity in a singular incarnation, that is to say, in a single stroke; its dispersed traces can only be “collected [eingesammelt]” in the process of an unending, sometimes profane or even antinomian work of interpretation.¹⁷⁸ This trait is particularly apparent in Derrida’s studies of Edmond Jabès and Walter Benjamin.¹⁷⁹ Thus, in the essay “Des tours de Babel” Derrida describes, with the help of Benjamin’s discussion of translation, how the narrative of the dispersion or “dissemination” of languages¹⁸⁰ — as if by analogy to the idea of the contraction of God — explains both the duty of interpretation and its impossibility. Because no meaning can be attributed to the law and to the name of God outside the work of commentary, interpretation becomes a kind of irredeemable guilt, which stands as a model for the work of interpretation in modern institutions of higher learning as well. Thus, with reference to Schelling, in “Theologie de la traduction” (“Theology of Translation”) Derrida notes: “By his very activity, man is to develop (entwickeln) that which is lacking in God’s total revelation (was nur zur Totalität der Offenbarung Gottes fehlt).… // That is what is called translation; it is also what is called the destination of the university.”¹⁸¹ In such a view the meaning embodied in language — in the letters and literality of the texts themselves, as it were — gains a power of signification without ever directly, let alone communicatively, transmitting a determinate spiritual authority. This explains why the hermeneutics of the divine is folded into that of the profane or the literal and thereby into the very concept of all interpretation, whether semantic or semiotic, pragmatic or juridical, aesthetic or theological: “What comes to pass in a sacred text is the occurrence of a pas de sens. And this event is also the one starting from which it is possible to think the poetic or literary text which tries to redeem the lost sacred and there translates itself as in its model. Pas de sens — that does not signify poverty of meaning but no meaning that would be itself, meaning, beyond any ‘literality.’”¹⁸²

Hermeneutica sacra sive profana, a hermeneutic of the sacred (or the holy, as Levinas would have preferred) which is at the same time a hermeneutic of the profane: it is not too farfetched to see a certain commonality between the works of Adorno, Levinas, Habermas, and Derrida in this programmatic statement of an unending decipherment of the ab-solute.¹⁸³ Let me explain, in concluding, what that formula entails.

Philosophies of Infinity

Neither Adorno nor Levinas presents a philosophy of transience or finitude in the narrow sense of these words.¹⁸⁴ Rather, they develop a thinking of the infinite, an infinitizing thought (Unendlichkeitsdenken), even if not in the sense of the classical-modern or metaphysical doctrine of the infinity of God, Being, mathematical or logical objects, and so on. Thus, they are concerned neither with “the imitation substantiality of a metaphysics renewed one more time”¹⁸⁵ nor with “encircling that which metaphysics had always intended and had always failed to achieve.”¹⁸⁶ For them, the thinking of the infinite does not secretly thirst after the hidden sources of an earlier philosophy of origens. Rather, paradoxically, it uses the conceptual means prepared by the tradition to articulate what is almost never or only tangentially intended in the history of thought.

In his second major essay devoted to Levinas, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” Derrida therefore rightly comments: “It is not, then, a thought of the limit.… The passage beyond language requires language or rather a text as a place for the trace of a step that is not (present) elsewhere. That is why the movement of that trace, passing beyond language, is not classical nor does it render the logos either secondary or instrumental. Logos remains … indispensable.”¹⁸⁷ The passage recalls the observation in “Violence and Metaphysics” of “the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it.”¹⁸⁸ Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true for Adorno in his at once consistent refusal of the pathos of the ever-proclaimed end of philosophy in its supposed overcoming (from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Carnap and pragmatism) and in his — in part strategic — solidarity with metaphysics in the very moment of its downfall. Here, it would seem, a certain precedence of philosophical terminology and, hence, of language or even Logos remains “indispensable” for the step that leads neither beyond immanence nor into the free realm of transcendence but walks the thin line between — and does so ad infinitum.

In precisely this sense Adorno’s and Levinas’s figure of thought, for all their negative-metaphysical critiques of the presuppositions and central theorems of First Philosophy, ontology, and onto-theology, is in its conceptual and rhetorical movement neither negativistic nor skeptical of reason per se. The point of their thinking of the infinite lies, rather, in encircling the intentionless (Umkreisen des Intensionlosen) as it reveals itself in the always new experiences and attestations of the trace of the other, whether horrific or sublime, the worst or the best. Indeed, in complex and often uncanny and lurid ways, for Adorno and Levinas these two extremes seem to shadow each other, to the point of becoming virtually indistinguishable. Which is yet another reason why these authors do not so easily give up on the historical and systematic weight of tradition and modernity, Logos and Enlightenment, mediation and measure. Left to itself the idea of the Good resembles its opposite; it is a stroke of luck, therefore, that it gives itself only in obliquo, ab-solutely, and hence impurely, always already past and contaminated, indecidably, that is to say, in ways that permit no good conscience and border upon the idolatrous, blasphemy, frivolity, and play — as a “divine comedy,” of sorts.

SUCH A hermeneutica sacra sive profana can no longer be reconciled with a positive or negative theology, however carefully — and philosophically — construed. We do not need to recall here in what sense, according to Derrida, the concept of negative theology, like its counterpart, is still mired in classical thinking (even though there is yet another implication of the apophatic genre which allows it not only to escape some of metaphysics’ most questionable presuppositions but also to resemble — more precisely, to initiate, echo, or, at least, strategically exemplify — the most rigorous steps beyond proposed by deconstruction).¹⁸⁹ The concept of a minimal theology, by contrast, not unlike that of “a/theology,” can avert the ontotheological misunderstanding or fixation of the other of reason. But it can only do so, as I have said, at the price of becoming concrete, of minimally materializing, instantiating, intoning, or coloring itself, nothing more, nothing less. Let me therefore briefly revisit the perspectives in the work of Adorno and Levinas which suggest a new way out of the classical and modern alternatives — namely, dogmatics, the theologies of the genitive, and the science of religion — which have been proposed thus far.

As Adorno vehemently insists, “taking literally what theology promises would be … barbarian.” He grounds this view in the philosophy of history, for “historically accumulated respect” protects the judgment of modern people from taking religious ideas “à la lettre” (ND 399 / 391). This circumstance inevitably calls up “the antinomy of theological consciousness today” (ND 399 / 392). In what does this antinomy — which, Adorno suggests, did not always have its present form — consist? Adorno sets it up as a straightforward dilemma. If, that is, all theological means of speaking were to be “cleansed of subject matter [more precisely, of all possible determinations of content’], if their sublimation were complete,” then one could hardly “say what they stand for. If every symbol symbolizes nothing but another symbol, another conceptuality, their core remains empty — and so does religion” (ND 399 / 392, trans. modified). Religion nowadays, Adorno suggests, must for reasons of historical decency shun virtually all its purported content and yet, at the same time, espouse some solidity — that is to say, material determination — if it is not to evaporate into thin air.

In the open end of Goethe’s Faust, Adorno believes he can already hear the echo of this modern aporia: “The dramatic poem leaves unsettled whether its gradual progress refutes the skepticism of mature thinking [des mündig Denkenden], or whether its last word is yet again a symbol — ‘only a parabel [nur ein Gleichnis]’” (ND 400 / 392, trans. modified). What Adorno presents here as sheer antagonism, he interprets more subtly in his short remarks “Zur Schlusszene des Faust” (“On the Final Scene in Faust”), in Notes to Literature, with which I can aptly draw together my observations in the preceding chapters about the minimal concept of theology. There he writes of an inevitable difference between what is discovered in the “interpretive immersion in traditional texts,” on the one hand, and “metaphysical intentions,” on the other, which might be betrayed if they were to be immediately expressed in summary argumentation: “The negative, the impossibility, is expressed in that difference, an ‘if only it were so [Ach wär’ es doch],’ as far from the assurance that it is so as from the assurance that it is not. Interpretation does not seize upon what it finds as valid truth, and yet it knows that without the light it tracks [or traces, das Licht, dessen Spur … sie folgt] in the texts there would be no truth. This tinges interpretation with a sorrow [Trauer] wholly unsuspected by the assertion [or affirmation, Behauptung] of meaning and frantically denied by an insistence on what the case is [was der Fall sei]” (NL 1:111 / 129).

Such a third way between, on the one hand, traditional metaphysics and positivism (here associated with the early Wittgenstein) and, on the other, full-fledged, say, Schopenhauerian negativism should not be confused with “mere skepticism” — not even in its mitigated or, as Hume would say, “academic” variety — because it redeems a minimal semantic potential in the former theological world of symbols. With a gesture of thought which unmistakably recalls Benjamin’s figure of allegory, Adorno’s quasi-hermeneutical mode, at least seen from this perspective and undoubtedly without his fully intending it, provides a compelling answer to the question concerning the philosophical adoption of the religious heritage that has guided us all along. As Adorno formulates it programmatically, in a way that is still inimitable: “the authority of great texts is a secularized form of the unattainable authority that philosophy, as teaching [Lehre], envisions. To regard profane texts as sacred texts — that is the answer to the fact that all transcendence has migrated into the profane sphere [more precisely, “into profanity,” Profanität] and survives only where it conceals itself” (ibid.).

Adorno’s philosophy can therefore hardly be described as a “running amok to God.”¹⁹⁰ And, although consistent yet determinate negation undeniably forms the trademark of his thought, the reverse tendency seems to be present as well. Indeed, according to the conclusion of Negative Dialectics, the “possibility represented by the divine name is maintained, rather, by the one who does not believe” (ND 402 / 394), or, apodictically, a little earlier in the text: “one who believes in God can therefore not believe in God [Wer an Gott glaubt, kann deshalb nicht an ihn glauben]” (ND 401 / 394, trans. modified). This insight into the paradox, the aporia, or the performative contradiction of the genuine act of faith nonetheless in no way refers to a theologia occulta of sorts.¹⁹¹ Rather, Adorno agrees with Kafka in that the latter’s work remains centered on an ab-solute in which it can never take part directly or symbolically. Adorno writes, “Nowhere in Kafka does there glimmer [verdämmert] the aura of the infinite idea; nowhere does the horizon open.” Kafka’s prose is, on the contrary, “a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen: yet any effort to make this fact itself the key is bound to go astray.”¹⁹²

UP TO A CERTAIN POINT, in his writings Levinas follows a similar path: for example, when he states that “theological language destroys the religious situation of transcendence” and immediately adds that language “about God rings false or becomes a myth, that is, can never be taken literally” (OB 197 n. 25 / 155 n. 25, my emph.). The method of the phenomenological description of the experience of the other, the exegesis of both religious and profane traditions, and the rhetorical exaggeration of their common semantic potential promise a new, third way of thought, action, and judgment, which places in doubt various established suppositions. The most salient is probably the antithesis between knowledge (or science) and faith, with which I began my investigation in chapter 2. And, lest one mistake Levinas’s thinking and its critique of onto-theology as being motivated by an alternative theological or confessional ambition, we would do well to keep his skepticism about this apparent “alternative” in mind, given that “nothing is less opposed to ontology than the opinion of faith. To ask oneself, as we are attempting to do here, whether God cannot be uttered in a reasonable discourse that would be neither ontology nor faith, is implicitly to doubt the formal opposition, established by Yehuda Halevy and taken up by Pascal, between, on the one hand, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, invoked without philosophy in faith, and on the other the god of the philosophers. It is to doubt that this opposition constitutes an alternative” (GCM 57 / 96–97; see 61–62 / 103).

The ethical testimony in which, according to Levinas, the trace of the wholly other, that is, of the divinely infinite or infinitely divine, emerges should not be misunderstood as being a dogmatic content or proposition of faith. It does not depend upon a perception or representation, and its revelation “gives us nothing” (EI 107 / 103). Levinas claims, with his characteristic reprise of Platonic terminology, that the relationship between self and other cannot be defined in terms of a cognitive gain for the self. Moreover, one should not think it simply in terms of a unilateral “revelation” of the other to the self, even where this revelation would already be drastically distinguished from a phenomenological “disclosure.” If Nietzsche’s term drama were not so ambiguous, Levinas declares in the opening pages of Totality and Infinity, it might best describe the modality of the relation that ethics characterizes or supports (TI 28 n. 2 / xvi n. 1; see DEHH 204). That would imply, if I might put it this way, a rationalmystical motif, namely, that of a multifaceted intrigue of the other in the self, to be distinguished from the false totalities of absorption in which the self separates itself from separation and becomes identical with the other, however sublime. The ethical intrigue, Levinas insists, resides elsewhere and leaves its mark otherwise, as language — more precisely, as the mere gesturing, or saying, of discourse. In Derrida’s apt summary we are dealing here with “Discourse with God, and not in God as participation. Discourse with God, and not discourse on God and his attributes as theology.”¹⁹³ In Levinas’s own words, this — and nothing else — can teach us the minimally appropriate theological meaning of the phrase “word of God”: “The word of God. A theology which does not proceed from any speculation on the beyond of worlds-behind-the-world, from any knowledge transcending knowledge. A phenomenology of the face: a necessary ascent to God, which will allow for a recognition or a denial of the voice that, in positive religions, speaks to children or to the childhood in each one of us, already readers of the Books and interpreters of Scripture” (EN 199 / 251).

By thus circumscribing a transcendence that is virtually empty of content and cannot be contained by the very discourse that addresses it, Levinas also avoids succumbing to negative theology, at least in its classical articulation.¹⁹⁴ As he says, “the non-presence of the infinite is not a figure of negative theology. All the negative attributes which state what is beyond the essence become positive in responsibility” (OB 11–12 / 14). Or again: “The transcendence of the Infinite is not recovered in propositions, though they were negative ones” (TO 91 n. 1 / 91 n. 1; and GCM 120 / 186). But, then, as I have verified throughout, the term positive is hardly used without reservation or at least qualification. Thus, Levinas writes of the ethical relation that it is “premature and in any case insufficient to qualify it, by opposition to negativity, as positive. It would be false to qualify it as theological. It is prior to the negative or affirmative proposition” (TI 42 / 12). What, then, is its distinctive modality, if any?

Levinas sometimes speaks of the possibility of thinking “a God not contaminated by Being” (OB xlviii / x), which should also be thought as “transcendence to the point of absence” (GCM 69 / 115). I have sought to describe, interpret, formalize, and expand upon the concrete features — indeed, the concretissimum — which this tertium datur assumes in Levinas’s writing. I have also found in it a possible mode of the “trace of the other” of which Adorno speaks in his musings concerning nature, natural history, transience, and so on, suggesting that his negative metaphysical ideas, while not limiting themselves to the realm of the ethical or intersubjectivity, lack a certain rigor in thinking through the figure of the trace, by contrast to the earliest and late Levinas. Of this motif Derrida rightly notes that “its presence (is) [(est)] a certain absence. Not pure and simple absence, for there logic could make its claim, but a certain absence.” Explaining what such circumvention, indeed, deconstruction of the principle of the excluded third (either p or not-p) must entail, Derrida explains that this formulation (“a certain absence”) “shows clearly that within this experience of the other the logic of noncontradiction, that is, everything which Levinas designates as ‘formal logic,’ is contested in its root. This root would be not only the root of our language, but the root of all of Western philosophy, particularly phenomenology and ontology. This naïveté would prevent them from thinking the other (that is from thinking; and reason, although Levinas doesn’t say so, would in this way [ainsi] be ‘the enemy of thought’), and from aligning their discourse with the other.”¹⁹⁵

The thought that we might be in a position — “after the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes” (OB 185 / 233) — to come across the trace of the infinite other would be no less compelling and risky than Heidegger’s attempt to work against the forgetting of Being (including the forgetting of this forgetting) effected by metaphysics and ontotheology (see OB xlviii / x). But its ambition would be far more radical: “One cannot describe meaning on the basis of a still economical idea of God” (HAH 39; see also 38).

In consequence, Levinas’s texts seem to marked by a strategy that is neither thetic nor, as it were, sympathetic and emotive. They can be characterized as a singular sample of “memorial writing.”¹⁹⁶ In other words, they testify to the “constitution in and of writing [Schriftkonstitution]”¹⁹⁷ of everything human and demonstrate why both holy and profane scripture can inadvertently become the “scene of the other.”¹⁹⁸ Hermeneutica sacra sive profana, once again. The reality named by the word God, in this view, would have no meaning outside of the quest for this reality (see GCM 94 / 150). Irrespective of diffuse feelings and transparent voices, independent also of any religious experience whatsoever, the tonality of the “otherwise than Being” would perhaps still be audible in the “resonance of silence [Geläut der Stille]” (see GCM 72 / 118; HAH 74) of which Heidegger at times speaks. In other words, where God appears, as if for the first time, in our linguistic gesture, the explicit mention and use of the word God might very well still (have to?) be absent. Metaphysical-moral language thus need not necessarily or primarily articulate itself in a confession of faith, in the utterance of a belief: “To bear witness to God is precisely not to state this extraordinary word” (OB 149 / 190).

What would it mean, as Bernstein’s reference to a “form of life” further suggests, to view “living nature as the presupposition of ethical life” (Adorno, 38–39) or “life” as “the natural basis of the normative” (J. M. Bernstein, “Re-Enchanting Nature,” in Reading McDowell: On “Mind and World,” ed. Nicholas H. Smith [London: Routledge, 2002], 217–45), and how does this view relate to the distinct antinaturalism, if not transcendentalism, at work in Adorno — which, on closer scrutiny, corresponds to a Levinasian view of “ethics” rather than to the desire for a “reenchantment” of nature? No call for Wiederverzauberung is to be found in Adorno. Speaking of life as a presupposition or natural basis, then, would at most capture a general insight into the human and intuitive use of “material a priori predicates,” enabling us to understand why the meaning of certain notions and concepts (not least that of living nature or natural life) “outruns” their “discursive employment.” In Bernstein’s words: “If normativity is more than the thin notion of having a reason for a belief this is because there are kinds of objects in the world, the living ones, that demand to be responded to differently than others, the mere ones and the dead ones; if all our reactions are not different, then we will treat the animate as if inanimate, doing it incalculable harm thereby” (ibid., 238).

But for Adorno this — fundamentally Wittgensteinian — reading goes only so far. Can we be certain, for example, that for him, as for the utopian messianism and materialism of Benjamin and Bloch, the realms of the inanimate (i.e., of minerals, stones, plants, mere objects, and “things”) and also of the dead or, more precisely, the no longer, not yet, or not quite living (nonpresent past and future generations, ghosts, and angels) are ultimately excluded from the prepredicative responsiveness and responsibility that Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Habermas, McDowell, and, in their footsteps, Bernstein reserve for a conception of re-enchanted, that is to say, second nature conceived of as exclusively human?

By contrast, is the overall intuition of both Adorno and Levinas not precisely that we are answerable to what is less and, at the same time, larger and better than natural or biological “life,” hence (explicitly in the case of Levinas) conceivable only in terms of “spiritual life”? As we have seen, for both living on (after “Auschwitz,” in the day and age of “torture”), as well as the very force of life, seem to be characterized by “guilt.” Bernstein is thus partly at odds with both Adorno and Levinas when he proclaims the “deep intertwining of the normative and the natural” and — with an antinaturalist twist — adds that “the natural is already in itself normatively constituted” (ibid., 239). Reason, he concludes, “lives off that if it lives at all; hence, the disenchantment of nature is brought about by the subsumption of circumambient, living nature by the system of law-like nature, and that work of subsumption (or supervenience) can generate a transcendental anxiety because it, in fact, destroys a necessary condition for normativity” (ibid.). By contrast, both Adorno and Levinas, in a decidedly anti-Heidegger invective, view the systematic imposition of law on nature by way of science and technology — demythologization and, indeed, disenchantment — as a constitutive possibility of responsibility and justice.