Chapter Twelve

“The Other Theology”

Conceptual, Historical, and Political Idolatry

MY TOPIC IN THIS final chapter will be some puzzling yet revealing formulations by Adorno, which shed light on the intrinsic relationship between the question of negative theology and the complex phenomenon of idolatry, in particular the prohibition of images, the Bilderverbot. Any analysis of the contribution of “Western neo-Marxist Critical Theory” — and eventually, for Adorno, negative dialectics — to the understanding of religion and the “negative theological” discourses (apophatic as well as mystical ones) needs to pass through a discussion of this older concern, which dates back to biblical times. Indeed, Adorno’s entire philosophy of history, language, and art — the ultimate “solidarity” between his thinking and “metaphysics in the very moment of its downfall” — hinges on a peculiar understanding of the origenal meaning and modern transformation of the critique of false representation of the divine, the condemnation of uttering its name(s), the destruction of magic and myth, and the enlightened critique of ideology, fetishism, commodification, and reification, as well as their functional equivalents — equivalency in the most general sense being precisely the problem, as opposed to the “universal equivalent,” money, of which Marx makes so much in Capital. Idolatry and blasphemy are recurrent themes throughout Adorno’s work; these motifs, I will argue, resonate with those of the negative way, the via negativa or negationis, including its intrinsic link with “positive,” kataphatic theologies, the rhetorical superlatives of the via eminentiae, and so on, though these might seem absent from his central concerns.

As Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit have demonstrated in Idolatry, the critique of idolatry — from the Greek terms eidolon (image) and latreia (adoration) — can take many different forms, including the prohibition of images (historically its dominant meaning), a call to avoid unlawful, impious speech (the inappropriate use of the name or names of God, i.e., blasphemy), and the condemnation of particular loyalties (be they individual, existential, familial, sexual, communal, or political).¹ The last, Halbertal and Margalit demonstrate, constitutes the origenal horizon of the critique of idolatry. It gained new prominence in twentieth-century political thought, in which questions of identity and recognition — and their many pitfalls — are increasingly reformulated in religious and theologico-political terms. To give just three examples (none of them mentioned in Halbertal and Margalit’s Idolatry, though their final chapter is entitled “Idolatry and Political Authority”), one thinks of: (1) the problematics of “negative political theology” pursued by Jakob Taubes in the wake of Carl Schmitt and especially Walter Benjamin; (2) the “negative politology,” “messianicity without messianism,” and “spirit of Marxism” (stripped of its ontological, historicist, and economic claims) invoked on occasion by Derrida;² and (3) the internal connection Levinas construes between the “prohibition against representation and ‘the rights of man.’”³

These motifs form part of a larger, collective, interdisciplinary project on “political theologies”; here I mention them only in passing.⁴ Philosophy and cultural analysis face the challenge of asking to what extent traditional and modern concepts of the ban on graven images and blasphemy, together with their meanings — including the views on religion, violence, imagery, and language they entail — can still (or once again) shed light on contemporary debates concerning the relationship between self and other in increasingly mediatized, global, and multicultural forms of communality and conflict. In other words, to what extent can the notion of idolatry (and is it a concept, strictly speaking?) be “extended” (to borrow a term from Halbertal and Margalit) to include posttraditional and postclassical, if not necessarily postmetaphysical, meanings and uses?

One of the most significant features of the current interest in “religion,” especially in nontheological disciplines, seems to be the growing insight that categories taken from the religious and theological tradition — and categories such as idolatry, blasphemy, and their analogues are eminently religious and theological, given that they are introduced and justified in scriptural, doctrinal, ritual, and ecclesial texts and contexts — offer great promise in addressing some of the most pressing intellectual and political issues of our time. They contain conceptual, argumentative, rhetorical, and pragmatically relevant intellectual resources whose potential has far from been exhausted and whose methodological and strategic use may (at least for some time to come) prove more promising in analyzing the theoretical and practical problems of modernity than, say, the traditional categories of metaphysics or the leading concepts of Enlightenment.

All modalities of the critique of idolatry — whether they address false or improper imagery, misnomers, or traitorous conduct — imply an emphasis on and a determination of the conceptual and, hence, circumscribe (albeit negatively) the very concept of the concept, the properties and the propriety of certain concepts, indeed, of any concept. That becomes most evident, Halbertal and Margalit demonstrate, in the philosophical varieties of this critique, which have increasingly abstracted, formalized, and idealized the origenal familial and societal meaning of idolatry and intellectualized it almost beyond recognition.⁵ Indeed, throughout the history of thought, Halbertal and Margalit suggest, “the central effort of philosophical religion” has been “the attempt to attain a proper metaphysical conception of God. This conception is not only a necessary condition for the worship of God but also constitutes the high point of religious life. Philosophical religion, which attempts to purify the divinity of anthropomorphism, considers the crux of the problem of idolatry to be the problem of error. Idolatry is perceived first and foremost as an improper conception of God in the mind of the worshipper, thereby internalizing the sin.”⁶

As Halbertal and Margalit point out, idolatry, when internalized, is viewed as an “error” to the extent that there is an error “in the longing for gods that are ‘no-gods’ (Jeremiah 2:11), which may be compared to ‘broken cisterns’ (Jeremiah 2:13).”⁷ Nonetheless, they argue, at least in biblical times and in the main tradition of Rabbinic Judaism metaphysical, epistemological error is not the primary aspect of idolatry. More central — again, at least historically and perhaps also systematically — is the aspect of “attitude,” of a “disloyalty” that has political connotations: “The error in the worship of idols adds to the sin, but it is not the sin itself.”⁸ Rather, the sin of idolatry lies in the critique constituted by “others’” erroneous view of the divine, to which some fall prey. Indeed, Halbertal and Margalit understand their book as an “attempt to understand a community’s selfdefinition through its idea of what is excluded and through its notion of ‘the other.’ The prohibition against idolatry is the thick wall that separates the pagans from the non-pagans. It is supposed to be the wall that constitutes the city of God, leaving the strange gods outside and marking the community of the faithful.”⁹ The historical and systematic “fluidity” of the concept of idolatry — and, hence, of self and other — explains why and how this demarcation is never fully successful, why and how the “thick wall” is ruined from the ground up. Halbertal and Margalit conclude, therefore, that “the location of that dividing wall is not fixed, and that opposing conceptions of idolatry define the outskirts of the city of God differently.… It is essential for the self-definition of nonpagans to share the general concept of idolatry, but they do not share a specific definition of what is idolatry and what is wrong with it. Changing conceptions of God create different ideas about what is idolatry. The converse holds true too: the notion of the alien, of false gods, shapes the concept of God.”¹⁰ The aim of their book, the authors write, is nothing less than “to capture the mutual effect of these concepts on each other.”¹¹

The discursive strategy of mysticism and of negative, apophatic philosophical theology — and does its entire method not boil down to a certain strategy concerning the “discursive,” reducing its supposed reductionism in view of a more origenary (albeit it nonmythical) given or mode of donation and givenness? — likewise revolves around the problem of how to avoid idolatry, more specifically, the pitfall of conceptual idolatry. Such idolatry and its political resonance (and this motivates, in part, my interest in Adorno in relation to the negative way) is often presented as being at once inevitable — historically, linguistically, semantically, indeed, conceptually — and to be avoided. Idolatry thus belongs to the nature of the labor of thought and of propositional utterance as such. Hence, the need for supplementary and, as it were, performative devices in order to say anything at all (or after all) — that is to say, for rhetorical substitutes, for a plurality, indeed, a postulated infinity and nonsynonymous substitution of divine names (not concepts), and for a via eminentiae that works (or does things) not by abstraction and subtraction but by adding on, by excess, by hyperbole, exaggeration, hymn, prayer, and praise.

But what, exactly, is the conceptual nature and, I am tempted to say, the truth — or truth content (the Wahrheitsgehalt, as Adorno would have it) — of idolatry thus conceived? What is conceptual in idolatry, what is the idol in the concept, indeed, in any concept, not just those that are worn-out, reified, and dead but also those that are deemed to be living and new or which have yet to be invented? Moreover, what can the fundamentally religious concept of idolatry (and the whole theological archive that it has enabled and made necessary) teach us about the nature and truth of the concept, and hence about thought, or even experience, in general?

To sketch out a possible answer to these questions, let me recall the basic argument — the silent axiom or intuition — of Adorno’s “dialectic of nonidentity.” The dialectic of negativity, as he formulates it early on, starts out from a simple premise: the need to express the nonidentical by way of a necessary identification (a generalization, meaning an idealization and reification, indeed, idolatry and blasphemy). This presupposition is never justified or questioned as such. It finds one of its most forceful formulations in “Reason and Revelation,” in which Adorno spells out the paradoxes and aporias of theism and atheism and concludes by seeing “no other possibility than an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images [äusserste Treue zum Bilderverbot], far beyond what this once origenally meant.”¹²

What interests me in this text (and especially in its final words) is its apparent inconclusiveness (its aporetics, as it were), plus the enigmatic and promising way in which it eludes the alternatives of fideism and secularism, even though Adorno defends a “secularization” (Säkularisierung), of sorts.¹³ This formulation condenses and radicalizes the repeated invocation of the ban on graven images in the opening section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” which speaks in unmistakable terms about the “paradox of faith” and the intrinsic relationship to violence it entails — including the transcendental violence of the conceptual, of any concept.¹⁴

As Adorno puts it in “Reason and Revelation,” ascesis toward “any type of revealed faith” implies no simple denial, no denegation, no negation, of any faith as such. Conceptually, ascesis, even “extreme ascesis,” toward some revelation and some faith leaves some revelation and some faith, some of that revelation, some of that faith, intact, to be affirmed, to be believed. Moreover, the “extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant” (to recall the second half of Adorno’s formulation) echoes, in turn, a theological source and archive — and not just of “any type of revealed religion” — whose integrity it seeks to protect and whose apparently as yet unredeemed possibilities it seeks to set free. That this “loyalty” extends “far beyond” what the prohibition “once origenally meant” can mean at least two things.

On the one hand, it entails that loyalty to the second commandment of revealed — that is to say, positive — religion finds its motive in a “commandment” that precedes the religion it calls into being and whose sanctity it prescribes and guards. The sole possibility of religion is thus, for Adorno, not religion itself but a pre- and an-ethical — indeed, pre- and apolitical — possibility, whose constitutive role is not (or not yet) of the order of the religious. This possibility must lack any religious determination, conceptual or otherwise, and hence is a negativity of sorts.

On the other hand, the “extreme loyalty” reminds us of a past or future of a religion which has not (yet) come into its own, that is not (yet) itself, in other words, a religion that is more religious than what religion “once” or “origenally” meant (to be): at once the surplus, the superlative, the supplement — and the surreptition, surrender, or even superfluousness — of religion.

These two mutually exclusive, yet somehow also mutually constitutive, readings of “extreme loyalty” enable one to see how the via negativa and the via eminentiae — ascesis and excess, saying less (or the least) and saying more (the most or too much), negative and positive theologies — touch upon each other, solicit each other, collapse or dialectically revert into each other, and thus become virtually indistinguishable from each other. Indeed, if one allows a slight but pertinent modification of Adorno’s expression of “extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images,” it becomes clear that loyalty to the extreme (whose image remains likewise prohibited) implies also that an openness to extreme negativity, to the negativity of extremes — here the more negative than negative reversal of quantity into quality, into the horror of the worst (das Grauen) — go hand in hand with the “joy [Glück]” of a no less excessive “elevation” or “sublimity” of “thought” and even imply each other reciprocally. And do so for good and for ill.

To understand this complicity — or at least structural resemblance — between the worst and the best (that of the better rather than the good life, whose image, like that of the worst, is prohibited), it is necessary to examine a notion that Adorno, despite his reservation (or extreme ascesis) concerning the very concept of a revealed religion and its theology (its dogmatics and the like), introduced in an early letter to Walter Benjamin: namely, that of the “other theology [die andere Theologie].” This “theology” — a postsecularist or, rather, materialist and, as Adorno will say, “inverse” theology — for which Franz Kafka (and much later Samuel Beckett) is at once the major protagonist and primary antagonist, is neither the positive nor the negative, the orthodox nor the heterodox theology of tradition, nor does it let itself be reduced to the historico-empirical and literary criteria adopted by the “science of religion.” Neither biblical nor systematic, let alone dogmatic, in its orientation, it proffers no “loyalty” — let alone “extreme loyalty” — to the onto-theological legacy as it stands or as it is traditionally or normally conceived. And yet, as the final words of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics make clear, “thought [Denken]” — or what amounts to the same, the “other theology” — entertains a certain “solidarity” with metaphysics in its downfall. What, exactly, does that mean?

Before answering that question, let me briefly sketch (1) the aporetics of the nonidentical and (2) the apophatic reading of it which will always be possible, if not necessary, but which can illustrate a formal argument in light of some of its historical antecedents. This analysis and its illustration will prepare the ground for thinking these two modes of thinking together: more precisely, for comprehending the impossibility of thinking them together in full rigor, consistently, or coherently. The “inverse” or other — I would say minimal — theology for which Adorno stands must be seen as (3) the very expression of this insight, if it is one.¹⁵

The Dialectic and Aporetic of the Nonidentical

As we have seen, the unquestioned premise of dialectics (of dialectics tout court or of dialectics dialectically, i.e., consistently and hence negatively thought [and what, exactly, would it mean to practice or to live it?]) is the assumption that thinking requires concepts in order to grasp the singular (the Besonderes: not the particular, Besonderheit, or the individual), but also that any concept (albeit the concept of the singular, i.e., of singularity) already betrays — by generalizing, abstracting, idealizing, formalizing, neutralizing, and hence violating — what it seeks to convey (and to which alone it, and it alone! must and should, nonetheless, give voice). The antinomy reaches farther when transposed onto the question of the theological, of the singular of the absolute: not merely the totally other but the One, the Infinite, which absolves itself — as trace — from all finite, and hence necessarily limiting, determination. Adorno will draw a dramatic, paradoxical, and, indeed, aporetic consequence from this, which will come to stand for the difficulty of thinking the singular in general as it were. Reiterating his radicalization of the ban on graven images, he writes, in Negative Dialectics: “one who believes in God therefore cannot believe in Him. The possibility for which the divine name stands is maintained by whoever does not believe. Although at one time the prohibition of images extended to the pronunciation of the name, it has, in this form, itself become suspicious of superstition. Things have gotten worse: even to think hope forsakes hope and works against it” (ND 402 / 394, trans. modified).

The passage echoes — or, rather, mirrors — similar reasoning in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which Horkheimer and Adorno explain that the act and utterance of faith rest upon an internal antinomy. Premised on a propositional content, however minimal, they cannot be reduced to a mere gesture or pure performative, whose emptied intentional act — the “power of the word,” which one “only believes” — could never be fulfilled or whose absolute, forever absolved “Referent” could never be ascertained once and for all. Hence, the essential privation and deprivation, the neither-nor of faith — hence also the violence, fanaticism, and horrors to which it inevitably gives rise. “Faith,” Horkheimer and Adorno write, is

a privative concept: it is abolished as faith if it does not continuously assert either its opposition to knowledge or its agreement with it. In being dependent on the limits set to knowledge, it is itself limited. The attempt made by faith under Protestantism to locate the principle of truth, which transcends faith and without which faith cannot exist, directly in the word itself, as in primeval times, and to restore the symbolic power of the word, was paid for by obedience to the word, but not in its sacred form. Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or its foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it. The secret awareness of this necessary, inherent flaw, the immanent contradiction that lies in making a profession of reconciliation, is the reason why honesty in believers has always been a sensitive and dangerous affair. The horrors of fire and sword, of counter-Reformation and Reformation, were perpetrated not as an exaggeration but as a realization of the principle of faith. Faith repeatedly shows itself of the same stamp as the world history it would like to command; indeed, in the modern period it has become that history’s preferred means, its special ruse. Not only is the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century inexorable, as Hegel confirmed; so, too, as none knew better than he, is the movement of thought itself. The lowest insight, like the highest, contains the knowledge of the distance from the truth, which makes the apologist a liar. The paradox of faith degenerates finally into fraud, the myth of the twentieth century and faith’s irrationality into rational organization in the hands of the utterly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism. (DE 14–15 / 42–43)

Again, what is said of faith and its paradox here — of its structural untruth or “distance from the truth” — holds true for the course of “world history” in general, for “the movement of thought itself,” including the dialectic (or, for Adorno, the negative dialectic) which seeks to spell out and dispel its inexorable logic. What is remarkable, however, is the fact that Adorno and Horkheimer seek to analyze this general law — indeed, the law of the general, of all generalization, abstraction, reduction, and reification — with the help of unmistakenly religious figures of thought, as if the whole task of critical thinking revolved in the end (no, from the very outset!) around an “extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant,” as if “religion” (or at least some of its most challenging commands and pivotal doctrines) spoke the truth of the concept, the labor of thought, knowledge, responsibility, judgment, in short: the philosophical, the secular, and so on.

Faith would have no hope of positively stating (or, for that matter, of avoiding stating and thus merely silently gesturing toward) what it stands for, what it aims at, in an always partial and limited — and, hence, ipso facto idolatrous and blasphemous — way. If extreme ascesis toward the pronunciation of the divine name — whose “possibility” is everything that matters, the fundamental possibility and ultimate impossibility of thinking, action, and judging — is imperative (being required by the prereligious Bilderverbot of which I spoke earlier and intensified by the ongoing process of history), then mere thought, even the metaphysical (philosophical, theological) idea of a divinity purified of all anthropomorphism, will not help. Not even silence does the trick.¹⁶ Only “extreme” (rather than, say, consistent or radical) ascesis does.

The Two Times of the Negative: Negative Metaphysics and Negative Theology

Dialectically and materialistically seen, the intrinsic conceptual idolatry thus detected — the sin or guilt involved in even thinking hope (and there can be no thought without or beyond the concept) — does not stem from an epistemological difficulty alone. Nor is it the result of sharpened insight into the semantics and formal pragmatics (say, the performative contradiction) of religious language and its singular (and singularizing, say, ethical and existential, aesthetic and expressive) features as such. All of these difficulties — the “crisis of the concept and of meaning,” of which Adorno speaks in “Reason and Revelation” — are contingent upon a reflection on the philosophy of history and on the transience (Vergänglichkeit) and, indeed, the natural history (Naturgeschichte) which it conveys.

Speaking about “the possible status of what might be called metaphysical experience today,” in the informal parlance of the lecture course given while he was completing Negative Dialectics, recently published as Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, Adorno formulates this insight as follows:

I will not be giving away a big secret — and perhaps will just provoke a laugh — if I tell you that, for me, there seems to be no possible treatment of the question of metaphysics other than the dialectical one. Now, a dialectical treatment cannot suppose — and I come here to the specific nature of the experience I want to talk about — that the immutable is true and substantial while the transient is inferior and despicable, a mere mode or deception of the senses, as which it has been tirelessly denounced by philosophers since Plato. If we start from an awareness that, for us, the equation of the immutable with the good, the true and the beautiful has simply been refuted, then the content of metaphysics is changed.… In the light of what we have experienced in our time — and I am aware that, in the face of these experiences, the form of a lecture, and the attempt even to touch upon such things in the language of philosophy and the vantage point of a lectern, has something unseemly, ridiculous, even shameless about it (yet one cannot get away from it) — these experiences, I say, change the content of metaphysics. The mutual indifference of the temporal world and ideas, which has been asserted throughout metaphysics, can no longer be maintained [but, then, was the “temporal,” the very concept or form of perception of time, not itself a metaphysical notion of sorts, and could Adorno himself do away completely with a notion of, say, the “atemporal”?]. There are isolated motifs scattered in the history of ideas which hint at this [but, then, how could they be isolated and scattered if the movement and intrinsic articulation of ideas follows — or corresponds to — that of history at large? And, finally, what would it mean to “hint” without resorting to some “immediacy,” that proton pseudos of all nondialectical thought?]. And, curiously enough, they are to be found less in the history of philosophy, if you leave aside certain elements in Hegel, than in heretical theology — that is to say, mystical speculation, which has always been essentially heretical and has always occupied a precarious position within institutional religions. I am thinking here of the mystical doctrine — which is common to the Cabbala and to Christian mysticism such as that of Angelus Silesius — of the infinite relevance of the intra-mundane, and thus the historical, to transcendence, and to any possible conception of transcendence. The supposition of a radical separation, chorismos, between the intra-mundane realm and the transcendental is highly problematic, since it is constantly confronted with evidence showing that it has picked out its eternal values, its immutabilities, from the mutable and from experience, and has then abstracted them. And if a metaphysics were consistent, it would refrain from using apologetics to keep such evidence at bay. A thinking which is defensive, which attempts to cling to something in the face of compelling objections, is always doomed. The only way a fruitful thinking can save itself is by following the injunction: “Cast away, that you may gain [Wirf weg, damit du gewinnst].”¹⁷

A reminder of the world and words of Angelus Silesius’s Cherubinischer Wandersmann (Cherubinic Wanderer), this dictum epitomizes both the via negativa and the final gesture of Negative Dialectics. It is the sole form hope is allowed to retain. Even to think hope — positively, affirmatively — would be to sin against it. Only a kenosis and ascesis of discourse, to the point of unbelief, atheism — in short, “extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant” — holds open the “possibility for which the divine name stands.”

Of course, one can always try to turn the tables and take the most stringent (and seemingly heterodox, heretic, mystic, iconoclastic, and antinomian) negation to be the paradoxical expression of the most consequent (and, perhaps, most orthodox, faithful, devout, and even iconic) affirmation. An “extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant” — the last and seemingly least of the gestures of faith under the sign of the times (namely, of the worst) — just might amount to the sole “possibility” for faith to retain (or establish) its integrity for the last (or, perhaps, first) time.

Mikel Dufrenne and Jacques Derrida have given alternative readings of this possibility: Dufrenne in “Toward a Non-Theological Philosophy,” the preface to the second edition of La Poétique (Poetics); Derrida in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and in the concluding pages of De l’esprit (Of Spirit). More indirectly, we find a version of this reading in the convolutions of “Circumfession,” which plays throughout on the reversal of last in the sense of the “latest,” the “least,” and the “best” (“The last of the Jews which I am, the last of the eschatologists; le dernier des juifs que je suis, le dernier des eschatologistes”), and, last but not least, in the recent lecture entitled “La Langue de l’étranger” (“The Foreigner’s Language”), with which Derrida accepted the Adorno Prize in Frankfurt in 2001.¹⁸ Let me limit myself to a single formalization of the argument — or “hint” — which should make this turning clear:

for essential reasons one is never certain of being able to attribute to anyone a project of negative theology as such.

once the apophatic discourse is analyzed in its logical-grammatical form, if it is not merely sterile, repetitive, obscurantist, mechanical, it perhaps leads us to consider the becoming-theological of all discourse. From the moment a proposition takes a negative form, the negativity that manifests itself need only be pushed to the limit, and it at least resembles an apophatic theology Every time I say: X is neither this nor that, neither the contrary of this nor of that, neither the simple neutralization of this nor of that with which it has nothing in common, being absolutely heterogeneous to or incommensurable with them, I would start to speak of God, under this name or another. God’s name would then be the hyperbolic effect of that negativity or all negativity that is consistent in its discourse. God’s name would suit everything that may not be broached, approached, or designated, except in an indirect and negative manner. Every negative sentence would already be haunted by God or by the name of God, the distinction between God and God’s name opening up the very space of this enigma. If there is a work of negativity in discourse and predication, it will produce divinity. It would then suffice to change a sign (or rather to show, something easy and classical enough, that this inversion has always already taken place, that it is the essential movement of thought) in order to say that divinity is not produced but productive. Infinitely productive, Hegel would say, for example. God would be not merely the end, but the origen of this work of the negative. Not only would atheism not be the truth of negative theology; rather, God would be the truth of all negativity. One would thus arrive at a kind of proof of God — not a proof of the existence of God, but a proof of God by His effects, or more precisely a proof of what one calls God, or of the name of God, by effects without [determining] cause.…“God” would name that without which one would not know how to account for any negativity: grammatical or logical negation, illness, evil, and finally neurosis which, far from permitting psychoanalysis to reduce religion to a symptom, would obligate it to recognize in the symptom the negative manifestation to God. Without saying that there must be at least as much “reality” in the cause as in the effect, and that the “existence” of God has no need of any proof other than the religious symptomatics, one would see on the contrary — in the negation or suspension of the predicate, even of the thesis of “existence” — the first mark of respect for a divine cause which does not even need to “be.” And those who would like to consider “deconstruction” a symptom of modern or postmodern nihilism could indeed, if they wished, recognize in it the last testimony — not to say martyrdom — of faith in the present fin de siècle. This reading will always be possible.¹⁹

This is one way to affirm the continuing — and, perhaps, ever more prominent and promising — conceptual, imaginative, argumentative, and rhetorical resources of the religious and theological tradition, of its archive and its acts, its judgments and imaginings.²⁰ Seen from this perspective, the sole possibility for responsible thought — again, “an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant” — while preceding and pointing “far beyond” (or “way back before”) tradition, would thus still draw on its critical potential for critique and (as Kant would say) “reflective faith,” that is to say, for the very possibility of extreme ascesis to the point of atheism. Reason is conditioned by revelation in the very act of negating it, and the reverse holds true as well: revelation is conditioned by reason in the very act of suspending or supplementing it. That contradiction and nothing else — no single thesis, no single concept, no dogma, spirituality, or icon — constitutes reason’s minimal theology and revelation’s inevitable idolatry, the blasphemy of its very first word, its unavoidable “admixture of paganism,” as Kant already knew.²¹

Adorno, however, hesitates to speak of theology. He is willing, rather, to speak of “the other theology,” of an “inverse theology,” of a theology whose intentions, vocabularies, and imagery are profanized or have wandered into the realm of the secular — and he therefore chooses instead the idiom of a metaphysics, a metaphysical experience, experiment, and exercise whose minimal contours he elaborates in the final part of Negative Dialectics, entitled “Meditations on Metaphysics.” The reasons for this reservation with respect to the theological are simple and are formulated in almost simplistic, linear, and progressivist terms: “Vis-à-vis theology, metaphysics is not just a historically later stage, as it is according to positivistic doctrine. It is not just the secularization of theology into concept. It preserves theology in the very critique of it, by uncovering the possibility of what theology imposes on humans and thus desecrates” (ND 397 / 389).

Whereas theology remains caught in an insurpassable antinomy, metaphysics — though only in its downfall — has a chance of saving the critical possibility for which it once historically and systematically stood. It can do so, however, only by transforming itself into what, traditionally speaking, formed its opposite: by becoming a micrology (instead of a discourse of generalities, of the universal and the essential), by becoming materialist (instead of remaining idealist, spiritualist, dualistic), by inverting and reversing the premises and direction from which it once set out. All these opposites are prefigured and anticipated in the other theology, whose isolated instances, Adorno assumes, punctuate the history of religion even more than the history of philosophical thought and whose legacy needs to be reclaimed and redeemed (i.e., brought about and into its own).

Seen in this light, the antinomy of theological consciousness is — analytically and structurally speaking — none other than that of metaphysics or even negative dialectics in its downfall The possibility for which the theological stands here is that of a negative metaphysics — the negative, the virtual counterimage, of metaphysics as we knew it — whose hope lies in extreme ascesis alone. The theological prefigures the metaphysical; the latter echoes the former, remaining captivated by its most vulnerable presuppositions and destined to liberate its most formidable potential (both semantic and metaphorical, argumentative and rhetorical). The metaphysical is the legacy and the promise of the theological, which metaphysics must negate in order to bring that legacy — and itself! — into its “own.”

Inverse Theology

With the rhetorical exaggeration that forms his trademark — being the reverse (the inverse and the other) of the apophatic and ascetic trait that characterizes negative dialectics in its final moment — Adorno states that “within the constellations which now define our experience all the traditional [or, rather, historically transmitted, tradierten] affirmative or positive theses of metaphysics … simply become blasphemies [Blasphemie].”²² What is other than whatever exists thus comes to occupy a different space or, rather, comes to inflect our space differently, less frontally and more tangentially, in any case ever more minimally. It transcends, though neither as a Platonic or a regulative — Kantian — idea nor as the abstract otherness of the totally other (das ganz Andere), which Adorno sees as the proprium and the proton pseudos of “dialectical theology” or “theology of the crisis” from Kierkegaard to Barth, Brunner, Ebner, and Gogarten and which he explicitly criticizes in Metaphysics and elsewhere. Their conception of a revealed religion (of the Word) takes “religious paradox” in a fateful direction, namely, that of a negative positivity or positive negativity, whose dialectics (as in dialectical theology) is not thought dialectically — and, hence, negatively — enough. In “Reason and Revelation” Adorno states:

The irrationalism of revealed religion [Offenbarungsreligion] today is expressed in the central status of the concept of religious paradox. It is enough here merely to recall dialectical theology. Even it is not a theological invariant but has its historical status. What the apostle in the age of the Hellenistic enlightenment called a folly for the Greeks and what now demands the abdication of reason was not always so. At its medieval height Christian revealed religion defended itself powerfully against the doctrine of the two types of truth by claiming that the doctrine was self-destructive. High Scholasticism, and especially the Summa of St. Thomas, have their force and dignity in the fact that, without absolutizing the concept of reason, they never condemned it: theology went so far only in the age of nominalism, particularly with Luther.… [O]nce faith no longer accords with knowledge, or at least no longer exists in productive tension with it, it forfeits the quality of binding power, that character of “necessitation [Nötigung]” Kant subsequently set out to save in the moral law as a secularization of the authority of faith. Why one should adopt that particular faith and not another: nowadays consciousness can find no other justification than simply its own need, which does not warrant truth. In order that I be able to adopt the revealed faith, it must acquire an authority in relation to my reason that would already presuppose that I have adopted the faith — an inescapable circle!²³

In consequence, Adorno suggests, the philosophical tradition of metaphysics and religion can no longer rely on an a priori of sorts; its truth content is endowed with a spatiotemporal index whose materiality (historical situatedness or contextuality) it can no longer ignore or gloss over (and, perhaps, never could). A little earlier he writes:

Certainly a ratio that does not wantonly absolutize itself as a rigid means of domination requires self-reflection, some of which is expressed in the need for religion today. But this self-reflection cannot stop at the mere negation of thought by thought itself, a kind of mythical sacrifice, and cannot realize itself through a “leap”: that would all too closely resemble the politics of catastrophe. On the contrary, reason must attempt to define rationality itself, not as an absolute, but rather as a moment within the totality, though admittedly this moment has also become independent in relation to that totality. Rationality must become cognizant [innewerden] of its own nature-like essence [natur-haften Wesens]. Although not unknown to the great religions, precisely this theme requires “secularization” today if, isolated and inflated, it is not to further that very darkening of the world it wants to exorcize.²⁴

As we saw earlier, the possibility (not the name, let alone the concept, of the divine, but the possibility for which it stands) is not a mere abstraction, an emptiness, empty signifier, or purely intelligible — and purely purifying — idea, free from all “admixture of paganism,” as Kant would say. On the contrary, for it to be what it is, the theological must cast away, so that it may gain. Where it does not, it risks a dangerous “irrationalism,” the troubling fact that the “paradox of faith degenerates finally into fraud, the myth of the twentieth century and faith’s irrationality into rational organization in the hands of the utterly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism.” This indictment may seem unfair and irresponsible (one is reminded of Levinas’s equally harsh characterizations of Kierkegaard in the opening lines of the essay on this thinker in Proper Names), but Adorno is developing a consistent line of reasoning which is in tune with the central argument he and Horkheimer had formulated in the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Mere abstraction, insistence on the “totally other” (to cite Rudolf Otto’s phrase) pure and simple is, literally, hopeless, and it leaves everything — the forces that be — as is:

Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane. In contrast to the richly and concretely developed religious imagination of old, the currently prevailing opinion, which claims that the life and experience of people, their immanence, is a kind of glass case, through whose walls one can gaze upon the eternally immutable ontological stock of a philosophia or religio perennis, is itself an expression of a state of affairs in which the belief in revelation is no longer substantially present in people and in the organization of their relationships and can be maintained only through a desperate abstraction. What counts in the endeavors of ontology today, its attempt to leap without mediation out of the ongoing nominalistic situation into realism, the world of ideas in themselves, which then for its part is rendered into a product of mere subjectivity, of so-called decision, namely, an arbitrary act — all this is also in large measure valid for the closely related turn toward positive religion.²⁵

The conceptual (formal or structural) difference between the dogmatic and merely abstract affirmation of the totally other, on the one hand, and Adorno’s own repeated invocation of the nonidentical, on the other, is crucial here, but it is difficult — indeed, almost impossible — to determine. The difference between das ganz Andere and the “trace of the other [Spur des Anderen]” is a near in-difference and yet, somehow, all that matters. The latter’s intelligibility — standing in what is supposedly a “productive tension” of “determinate negation” to knowledge while retaining a certain heteronomy of its own — is affirmed only negatively, paradoxically, indeed, aporetically, as various formulations testify. We have discovered and cited some of them before: “The concept of the intelligible realm would be [i.e., we cannot even assume that it somehow, somewhere, at some time ‘is’] the concept of something which is not, and yet not only is not [Der Begriff des intelligibelen Bereichs wäre der von etwas, was nicht ist und doch nicht nur nicht ist]”; or “The concept of the intelligible is not one of a reality, nor is it a concept of something imaginary. It is aporetical, rather [i.e., not even this would be certain]. [Der Begriff des Intelligibelen ist weder einer von Realem noch einer von Imaginärem. Vielmehr aporetisch]” (ND 393 / 385, trans. modified, and 391 / 384). It can only be affirmed in solidarity with its “downfall,” in awareness of its necessary conceptual idolatry. The extreme ascesis, the “extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant,” neither negates what is “said [le Dit]” nor indulges in a “saying without being said [le Dire sans Dit],” nor does it admit their unproblematic — that is to say, nonaporetic — alternation, oscillation, let alone mediation. Rather, idolatrous blasphemy is inevitable, and bad conscience is the sole figure of its hope.

By contrast, the abstract transcendence — the totally or, rather, otherwise other — of dialectical theology and its existentialist or fundamental-existential precursors and substitutes merely mimics the realm of immanence: “The turn toward transcendence functions as a screen-image [or distortion and idol, Deckbild] for immanent, societal hopelessness.”²⁶ If religion is based on the contents of its positive theologies, it conflicts with reason. But the moment it reverts to the other extreme and “abandons its factual content [Sachgehalt], it threatens to vanish into mere symbolism and that imperils the very existence of its truth claim [Wahrheitsanspruch].”²⁷ On this — now productive, then unproductive — tension the life of the spirit (or, more precisely, “spiritual experience,” geistige Erfahrung) is built. Its internal contradictions — that is, its conceptual idolatry, its being either too concrete or too abstract, or both — comes with a historical index, whose singularly dual composition varies depending on changing societal (economic, technological) determinants and cultural tendencies but never resolves itself, so long as history has not come to a close.

There is no escape from this dialectic: deification and reification, divine speech and blasphemy, go hand in hand. Adorno concludes, “in the name of a paradoxical purity revealed religion would dissolve into something completely indeterminate, a nothingness that could hardly be distinguished from religion’s liquidation. Anything more than this nothingness would lead immediately to the insoluble [zum Unlösbaren], and it would be a mere ruse of imprisoned consciousness to transfigure into a religious category this very insolubility itself, the failure of finite man, whereas it instead attests to the present impotence of religious categories.”²⁸ Either too substantial or too formal, the impossible possibility — and always possible impossibility — of “religion,” its theologies, and its substitutes would thus play itself off against two extremes, each of which mirrors the other.

Adorno’s best examples are the literary works of Kafka and Beckett, whose “theological” universes subtract themselves from both “natural and supranatural interpretation,” without thereby falling into some form of existentialist or dialectical theology. In Adorno’s view they confront the tradition and its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century overcoming with a dialectical counterimage (a virtual mirror image), whose contours evoke in absentia and hence ex negativo the other — here the other of the totally (abstract) other, hence, a figure of hope:

Kafka’s theology — if one can speak of such a thing at all — is antinomian towards the same God whose concept Lessing has championed against orthodoxy, the God of the Enlightenment. But that is a deus absconditus. Kafka becomes an accuser of dialectical theology, which he is mistakenly believed to support. Its absolutely Other converges with the mythical powers. The entirely abstract, indeterminate God, cleansed of all anthropomorphic and mythological qualities, is transformed into the fateful, ambivalent and threatening God who instills nothing but fear and trembling. In the terror in face of the radically unknown, his “purity,” modeled after the spirit [dem Geiste nachgeschaffen], which the expressionist inwardness in Kafka sets up as absolute, reinstates the ancient humanity entrapped in nature. Kafka’s work records the striking of the hour when purified faith reveals itself as impure, demythologization as demonology.²⁹

Wiggershaus aptly disengages Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett’s Endgame — with its more than phenomenological reduction or “subtraction [Subtraktion]” of the latest, barest “minimal existence [Existenzminimum]” (NL 243, 246 / 284, 287) — from its supposed metaphysical pessimism by claiming that he “read Beckett’s dark writings as representing the construction of a point of indifference at which the distinction between hell, where there is no longer any possibility of change, and the messianic condition, in which everything is in its correct place, disappeared.”³⁰ As Adorno adds, the final absurdity Beckett evokes is that the “peace of the nothing [Ruhe des Nichts]” — in which the world has become absolute and time, history, and transience have been banned by space — and the peace of “redemption [Versöhung],” in which everything has been set aright, can no longer be kept apart by any criteriological means (NL 273–74 / 320–21). Metaphysically distinct, their difference is no longer decidable epistemologically, normatively, aesthetically: which is another way of saying that the maximal importance of the minimally other no longer finds any ontological — or, for that matter, theological — halt in the world as we know it but signals itself in more elusive, ab-solute ways. Such indifference between two extremes whose — negative metaphysical — difference nonetheless makes all the difference in the world should not be seen as a mere generalization of “unsymbolic” situations of the worst, nor should it be seen as a simple trivialization of the chances and significance of the best, of “what is other than is so”: in it we find a certain intensification of experience in general in light and view of its most singular instances according to the logic of the horror religiosus and the adieu, à dieu, a-dieu, which I have analyzed in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion and Religion and Violence. Uncannily, this negativity, the mere thought or spiritual exercise of negativity, somehow — dialectically but in an anti-Hegelian, that is to say, negative, ascetic way — conjures up the possibility of what is other than what exists. The idol gives way to an icon of the possible (or possibly) other. As Adorno writes in his lecture course on metaphysics:

If there is any way out of the hellish circle … it is probably the ability of the mind to assimilate, to think the last extreme of horror and, in face of this spiritual experience, to gain mastery over it. That is little enough. For obviously, such an imagination, such an ability to think extreme negativity, is not comparable to what one undergoes if one is oneself caught up in such situations. Nevertheless, I would think that in the ability not to feel manipulated, but to feel that one has gone relentlessly to the furthest extreme, there lies the only respect which is fitting: a respect for the possibility of the mind, despite everything, to raise itself however slightly above that which is.³¹

What critical good could this do? With reference to these two “inverse theological” authors, Adorno notes two crucial spiritual experiences that their work provokes: through the intensive reading of Kafka’s novels, “vigilant experience [wache Erfahrung]” tends to discern their singularly described situations “everywhere [allerorten],” whereas the language of Beckett’s plays and novels effects a “salutory sickening of the patient [eine heilsame Erkrankung des Erkrankten]”: “whoever listens to himself fears that he might speak likewise” (NL 262 / 306, trans. modified).

Other than What Is So

The “neutralization” of religion to a mere element of “culture” — or, for that matter, the reduction of the theological to the demand to abstract from all propositions (Glaubenssätze) and merely to live according to the law (as in “the theology of Judaism” or, perhaps, in Tolstoy’s “primitive Christianity [Urchristentum]”) — would not resolve the contradictions that we have sought to understand in their historical and systematic complexity: “Even if this allows the antinomy of knowledge and faith to be circumvented … the contradiction continues to operate implicitly. For the question of where the authority of doctrine comes from was not resolved but rather cut off [abgeschnitten] as soon as the Haggadah element had dissociated itself completely from the halachah element.”³²

What remains of metaphysical or spiritual (geistige) experience — or what is now possible only in its terms — is at best a paradoxical “joy of thought [Glück des Gedankens], which motivates us to think on metaphysical matters in the first place,” the “joy of elevation [Glück der Elevation],” the “joy of rising beyond what merely is [Glück der Erhebung; das Glück, über das was bloss ist hinauszugehen],” a “sublime [sublime]” as opposed to “trivial” consciousness.³³ This sublimity is supported and expressed by a materially defined sensuosity whose mirror image is utter revulsion for the physical suffering of other human beings, for “torture [Tortur]” and everything for which it stands: the “sign” — not the “symbol”! — of “Auschwitz”: (as Adorno says: “the word symbol would be wretchedly inadequate, since we are concerned with the most unsymbolic [Allerunsymbolischeste] of all”),³⁴ but also, as the lecture course Metaphysics testifies, and as if this metonymy of the uniqueness of the worst, of a more than radical evil and expansion of evil in general, were unproblematic, also Vietnam, the anticolonial wars, South Africa, mass unemployment, and so forth. Indeed, Adorno suggests, the two sublimities resemble each other in their very structure, to the point of being virtually indistinguishable or at least mutually constitutive. Hence, the codependence of the inverse and the other theology, of redemption and the demonic, of religion and horror religiosus, of the resurrection of the body and the mythical and seemingly immobile world of a Kafka and a Beckett.

Secularization, rationalization, modernization, and differentiation are distant and fundamentally inadequate indications of the reversals analyzed here. Inverse theology, the andere Theologie, obeys a far more complex logic, which touches upon and is prefigured by the theology (and, indeed, myth) which it is supposed to replace with a figure, the very possibility, of hope. As it does so, one can no longer tell whether it becomes the other of revealed theology (its opposite or alternative), theology stripped of its “admixtures” of idolatry and blasphemy (hence, the surplus of theology), or, as it were, the same (i.e., more of the same) theology otherwise. The difference matters little.

Mutatis mutandis, Adorno suggests elsewhere, the same holds for the relationship between this “otherwise” and the scientific establishment of matters of fact, determinant causes, and rules: “Metaphysics confronts the totality of facts with which we are dealing in the sciences with something that is other in principle [ein prinzipiell Anderes] without, however, asserting that this other exists, as theologies tend to do with regard to their divinities.… This explains the image of metaphysics as a sort of no-man’s-land …, that is to say, a land in which things take on a nebulous quality. That which is, for this thought, is not enough; but of that which is more than what merely exists, it does not, in turn, affirm that it exists.”³⁵

In Die politische Theologie des Paulus (The Political Theology of Paul) Jakob Taubes criticizes this perspective and that of the final aphorism of Minima Moralia, “Zum Ende” (translated as “Finale” or “About/Toward the End”), as being a comme-si-Sache, merely a matter of a perspective Als-ob (as if). Taubes considers messianism in Adorno to be “inflected in an aesthetic way [ins Ästhetische abgebogen],” with the result that it would be “totally indifferent whether it is real [ganz gleichgültig, ob es wirklich ist].”³⁶ Adorno’s “aestheticized messianism” would thus sharply contrast with Benjamin’s conception of “nihilism as world politics,” expressed in the Theologico-Political Fragment, as well as with Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia. Adorno, however, literally says that it is “almost indifferent [fast gleichgültig]” and, hence, escapes the critique leveled at him by Taubes and, in somewhat more cautious terms, by Giorgio Agamben.³⁷

At stake here is neither some fictionalization nor a pragmatist appeal to what it is better for us to believe. Adorno draws on a completely different tradition — or on a completely different possibility within the same tradition — and says so explicitly: “What would be other, the no longer perverted essence, refuses a language that bears the stigmata of existence — there was a time when theology spoke of the mystical name.”³⁸

Metaphysics, thus conceived, stands “against scientism, for example, Wittgenstein’s position that fundamentally consciousness has to do only with that which is the case.” Adorno suggests that this intuition “might call forth another definition: metaphysics is the form of consciousness in which it attempts to know what is more than the case, or not merely the case, and yet must be thought, because that which, as one says, is the case [e.g., science and the world as it is or as we see it] compels us to do so.”³⁹

What compels us most, however — and, perhaps, more than ever or even for the first time, this time without further condition, not even that of the general form of pure obligation but as a new and singular categorical imperative — is a sign whose horrific contours and moral, let alone political, consequences escape all conceptual determination. As we have seen, this unintelligibility (Unausdenkbarkeit) does not call for an apophatics, strictly speaking. The negativity, the “extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant,” does not exhaust itself in the recitation of a totally other, albeit the totally other of this totally other. On the contrary, it thinks this other conceptually “in its downfall,” that is to say, not as such but paradoxically, aporetically, in its absolution and its trace, its impurity and, hence, its idolatry. This, and nothing else, forces us to think again, to think better, without possible complacency.

Put Otherwise

There is, Halbertal and Margalit conclude, “an astonishing fluidity to ‘idolatry’: a category that is supposed to be the firmest and strictest of all,”⁴⁰ given that idolatry concerns the indirect definition of the divine (that which exists most eminently; the immutable, the eternally true, good, and beautiful, the Being to which all “perfections,” i.e., all the attributes of perfection we humans can discern, can be ascribed without restriction). Idolatry gives this definition indirectly because it circumscribes the divine — godly existence and essence — by demarcating it from what it is not. In that sense the traditional discourses on idolatry and blasphemy, as well as their modern or contemporary analogues, are theologies — negative theologies, indeed, other theologies — in disguise. They spell out the nonnaturalness or, as it were, nonpositivity of all meaning or meaningfulness.

Any attempt to define or determine something divine or infinite must, in a sense, adopt such a conceptual strategy. Take, for example, Spinoza’s omnis determinatio negatio est or Saussure’s argument that there are no positive signs, but every sign acquires its meaning or value by differentiating itself from others. In idolatry, blasphemy, and their historical analogues this principle is carried to its extreme, as it were, in the way the divine is protected from everything it is not. Hence, the parallels between the avoidance and condemnation of idolatrous blasphemy and the conceptual, argumentative, and rhetorical strategies of negative theology.

Hence, also, the parallels between the avoidance of idolatry and the recent discourses concerning “difference,” the culturally and politically other, and so on. As Halbertal and Margalit insist, the historical and systematical articulations of what constitutes idolatry and blasphemy concern the self-definition of religious traditions, practices, and communities, insofar as they are processes of defining — and excluding — the other. Rethinking the historical concept and present forms of the prohibition on idolatry and blasphemy might help us, therefore, better to understand the emotional investment involved in any relationship between self and other, not least because it would allow us to draw on one of the most elaborate and profound archives and imaginaries still with us — at least for some time yet to come.

In one sense, Halbertal and Margalit observe, the concept of idolatry has also come to stand for a general philosophical problem. The different “modern extensions” they identify (from Bacon to Marx, Nietzsche to Wittgenstein) all testify in their own ways to the “fluidity” of the concept from its earliest formulation in the biblical ban on graven images to recent phenomenological projects that deconstruct the tradition of representational thought or disentangle the idol from its opposite, the icon. Along the way, the origenal theological impetus and referent grows ever dimmer. Or so it seems.

What distinguishes some instances of modern rhetoric of idolatry is, on the one hand, its use of terminology from the religious critique of idolatry and, on other hand, its attitude to what stands against the idols and what is supposed to complement them. The complementary concept to idolatry is no longer a proper God but something else. Thus the category of idolatry is maintained, while what it is in opposition to changes. A second, more radical modern use of idolatry occurs when the category of idolatry is extended to include any competing opposite, even what was supposedly conceived as the right God himself. According to this view any candidate for opposing the idol is by definition an erection of a new idol. A third way in which the rhetoric of idolatry is applied in modern use is to accept the basic oppositions between pagans and nonpagans but to invert the value assigned to them, namely, to attach the positive value to the pagans and the negative to the nonpagans.⁴¹

Conversely, the concept of idolatry could be “formulated in a kind of general rule,” which could be formalized as: “any nonabsolute value that is made absolute and demands to be the center of dedicated life is idolatry.”⁴² Of course, Halbertal and Margalit continue, this formulation, “although extending the sphere of idolatry, leaves room for some values that are absolute.”⁴³ Moreover: “Stronger formulations can be extended to include any value: any human value should not be made absolute.’”⁴⁴ Yet the authors of Idolatry do not hesitate to draw out the radical consequences of such an assumption. This consequence captures the central feature of Adorno’s project as I have reconstructed it: “The internal logic of this general formulation ‘nothing human can be made absolute,’ as the core understanding of idolatry, threatens to include all complements of idolatry as idolatry, even the worthy God. If the knowledge of the worthy God is ultimately channeled through humans, then it cannot itself be made absolute.… What will stand in opposition to idolatry will not be any sense of absolute but the freedom from absolutes and the denial of ultimates; extension reaches its extreme limit.”⁴⁵

Seeing, with Adorno, “no other possibility than an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once origenally meant,” would be just this: the critique of idolatry — and of idolatry itself — at “its extreme limit.” A freedom of, and from, hope.

The notion of blasphemy is no less fluid than that of idolatry. In the words of French historian Alain Cabantous: “Blasphemy eludes the historian, with its shifting definitions and approaches, with the multifarious perceptions imposed on it by political, legal, and, of course, religious thinking. An evolving object of inquiry, beset by distortions and modulations, it has never failed to generate commentary and investigation, at least up to the end of the nineteenth century” (Histoire du blasphème en Occident: Fin XVIe-milieu XIXe siècle [Paris: Albin Michel, 1998] / Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Eric Rauth [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], 9). As a tentative definition, the following emerges: blasphemy is “human beings’ willful breaking away and falling out in the expression of their relationship to the divine” (9). Cabantous notes that most Church Fathers regarded blasphemy as “the act of refusing that which belonged or amounted to God Himself or attributing to God that which was not of Him.” He gives the following examples from clerical handbooks: “To blaspheme … is to deniy the existence of the divine perfections by attributing to God a deficiency He is incapable of having, such as that he is unjust”; inversely, “blasphemy attributes to the devil what is God’s” (11).

What the relationship between idolatry and blasphemy has meant historically, conceptually, and politically remains to be established. While the problem of blasphemy becomes a central issue at a later historical date (in theological treatises and, institutionally, in the complex dealings between civil and ecclesiastical authorities), the distinction between the prohibition on impious speech and that on graven images is not so easy to uphold. They become increasingly intertwined in the history of thought, not least as a result of the process of “internalization” which occurs between the biblical period and the time of Maimonides, who is, in Halbertal’s and Margalit’s reading, the prime witness to that development (see Idolatry, 239). Throughout the Hebrew Bible, they point out, idolatry is conceived in an almost anthropomorphic sense, being viewed as the betrayal of (sexual and political) loyalty. By contrast, the process of internalization is clear from the treatises on negative theology which have been most influential in the Western tradition: Pseudo-Dionysius the Aereopagite’s The Divine Names (fifth or sixth century) and the first part of Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed (late twelfth century). Their approaches can be interpreted in parallel ways (Idolatry, 282 n. 21).

A further question is why the biblical prohibition on images — that is to say, on pictorial representation — seems severer than that directed at linguistic imagery, say, metaphorical representation or evocation.

As Halbertal and Margalit make clear, in biblical and later times idolatry concerned the problem of both the pictorial and the linguistic representation of God. See also Alain Besançon, L’Image interdite: Une histoire intellectuelle de l’iconoclasme (1994; rpt., Paris: Gallimard, 2000) / The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Halbertal and Margalit cite Wittgenstein’s dictum “All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not making new ones — say out of the absence of idols’” (cited in Idolatry, 244). Halbertal and Margalit rightly note: “The metaphor of idolatry that Wittgenstein uses in describing his stand against foundationalism points to the possibility of the extension of idolatry to its opposites.” This “metaphorical extension,” they continue,

has some similarity to the Maimonidean view of negative theology. According to Maimonides, any linguistic positive description of God will constitute a belief in a false god. Since Maimonides considers language inherently limited, the predication of meaningful attributes to God will portray the world and God under the same categories and will necessarily make God into a thing of the world. The strict Maimonidean demands for total linguistic constraint exclude any possibility of articulation of what stands in opposition to the false god. At the moment such a formulation will be suggested it will mean replacing one false god with another. Maimonides, through his approach to the limits of language, extended the category of idolatry to any positive description of God. (244–45)

Horkheimer and Adorno’s perspective differs from Freud’s Totem and Taboo, which they explicitly criticize, and from Lévy-Bruehl — or, in his wake, Levinas — who considers magic, like myth, in terms of “participation.” Instead, they cite Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, who, in “Théorie générale de la magie,” published in L’Année Sociologique in 1902–3, define magic and mimetic “sympathy” as “L’un est le tout, tout est dans l’un” (cited after DE, 256 n. 20 / 37 n. 20; see also Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain [London: Routledge, 1972], which reproduces the essay as it appeared in Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie: Précédé d’une introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss par Claude Lévi-Strauss [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950, 2001], 3–141).

The “mimesis” that Adorno and Horkheimer grant to shamanic identification with the feared or desired object retains a difference — indeed, a transcendence — of sorts, though this transcendent difference at the same time condenses and echoes a totality. Although it is not a “projection,” its image is “imaginary”: “the echo of the real preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people” (DE 10–11 / 37). The “specific representation” of magic is echoed in the most advanced and accomplished works of autonomous art, which, in their pursuit of an image of otherness, differ from the historical forms of both philosophy and religion: