1-adorno's kierkegaardian debt

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Philosophy & Social Criticism

2001; 27; 77Philosophy Social Criticism David Sherman

Adorno's Kierkegaardian debt

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David Sherman

Adorno’s Kierkegaardiandebt

Abstract Although Adorno criticizes the existential tradition, it isfrequently argued that he and Heidegger share a number of theoreticalinterests. Adorno does come into direct contact with existential thought atcertain points, but it is Kierkegaard, not Heidegger, who more closelyapproaches his concerns. I begin by reviewing Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Constr uction of the Aestheti c . I then argue that, unlike Hegel, who is alsocriticized by Adorno on various grounds, Kierkegaard has had an influenceon Adorno that has been underappreciated. While Adorno criticizesKierkegaard for breaking off the subject–object dialectic, they converge intheir atta cks on identity-thinking, the retention of a negative utopian stand-

point of critique, and a deliberately provocative style of w riting, a ll of w hichare marshaled in defense of the individual, who is besieged by modernsociety. Unlike Kierkegaard, however, and despite the generally acceptedview, I conclude by arguing that because Adorno does not break off thesubject–object dialectic, he has the necessary theoretical resources to dealwith the theory–practice problem.

Key words Adorno · communication · dialectic · individual ·Kierkegaard · subject–object · subjectivity · theory–practice

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were generally viewed as the fathers of exis-tentialism, but, unlike Nietzsche’s, Kierkegaard’s perceived relationshipto subsequent philosophical movements such as deconstruction andsecond-generation critical theory has been somewhat more ambiguous.Deconstructionists, of course, have always viewed Nietzsche as one oftheir primary benefactors, a view that has been readily endorsed byH abermas in The Philosophi cal D iscourse of M oderni ty . Kierkegaard’saccepta nce by deconstructionists, in contra st, has been somew hat slow erin coming – though certain philosophers, such as Louis Mackey, Mark

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Taylor and John D . C aputo, ha ve been making the argument for sometime. With the publication of Derrida’s ‘D onner la mort ’, however, thissituation has changed.1 And, indeed, given Kierkegaard’s unremitting

attacks on the pretensions of Hegelian reason, with its alleged ability tosublate ‘otherness’, his embrace of irony, and his use of pseudonyms(which presages the idea of a decentered subject), this change wouldseem to be justified. Still, the ‘Kierkegaard as proto-deconstructionist’line can be pushed too strongly, for each of the aforementioned theor-etical commitments is in the service of tha t w hich deconstruction cannotab ide, na mely, a n efficacious subject w ho is fa r more than just a functionof language. Indeed, although it goes without saying that deconstruc-tionists are heavily influenced by Heidegger’s thought, what they

disagree with most in it is Heidegger’s idea of existential authenticity,which is the very point at which he draws most heavily uponKierkegaard.

G iven his rejection o f every ‘philosophy o f the subject’, w hich is aposition tha t he shares w ith deconstructionists, it is ironic tha t it is pre-cisely Kierkegaard’s defense of individual subjectivity that motivatesHabermas to assert that elements of Kierkegaard’s thought are indis-pensable to his own philosophical enterprise, which is based upon theidea of ‘communicative rationality’.2 But while the appeal that

Kierkegaard holds for Habermas is, in some sense, understandable –in the absence of vigorous personal subjectivities the uncoerced con-sensus of Habermas’s ‘ideal speech community’ rings a bit hollow – itis hard to conclude that Habermas’s attempt to incorporateKierkegaard into his own project is anything but misconceived. If, asKierkegaard contends, only subjective thought can be meaningfullycommunicated, and then only ‘indirectly’ so as to provide an occasionfor the listener to come to his or her own subjective truth, how canmeaningful intersubjective agreement be attained within the overlyrationalistic confines of Habermas’s ideal speech community? Suchagreement would seem to smack of the very objectivity that renders‘direct’ communication superfluous. In other words, if intersubjectiveagreement can be a tta ined, then bo th the speaker and the listener w erealready in possession of the truth, which is the situation with whatKierkegaard describes as that unmeaningful ‘objective thinking [that]is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence’.3 Under theseconditions, however, the very notion of subjective truth goes by thewayside, and therefore so does the vigorous individualism with whichHabermas would energize his system. Thus, to fit within Habermas’s

architectonic, Kierkegaard’s thought would have to be domesticated tothe point that it would fail to meet the very needs for which it wasinitially imported.

In contrast to both deconstructionists and Habermas, Adorno

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 27 (1)








never explicitly sought to connect with Kierkegaard. Adorno was inhis twenties when his only major work on Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard: Constr uction of the Aestheti c , was published in 1933. And, moreover,

the book is highly critical of Kierkegaard, which put it at odds withthe sentiment of the time, for Kierkegaard’s thought was experiencinga rena issance in G ermany due to the w ritings of Tillich, Ba rth, J a spersand Heidegger. Yet, as Susan Buck-Morss points out, although he wasnominally attacking Kierkegaard, Adorno actually had his sights onthe entire existential tradition and, at least with respect to Heidegger,who was his secondary target, Kierkegaard compares favorably:‘H eidegger “ fa lls behind” Kierkegaard, by Adorno ’s criteria, since thelatter’s critical perception of social reality led him at least to pose

the ontological question negatively.’4

G oing a step further, I w ouldargue that a good deal of Adorno’s hostility toward existentialismaro se from his dista ste for its part icula r G erman manifesta tion, w hich,like deconstruction and second-generation critical theory, not onlyfailed to work dialectically through the subject–object paradigm, but(in contrast to Kierkegaard) rejected it altogether. In this paper,therefore, I intend to show that Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics, [which]kept alive an insistence on undefined experience’, has deep affinitiesw ith ma ny elements o f K ierkegaard’s ‘nega tive’ existential philosophy,5

and tha t a comparison of their w orks suggests that various Kierkegaa r-dian themes were actually assimilated by Adorno, albeit, of course,within a dialectical framework that is more mediative and materialis-tic.6

Thus, after first examining Kierkegaard , which anticipates muchof Adorno’s later work, I shall try to show that Buck-Morss actuallytends to understate the allure that Kierkegaard holds for Adorno.While Adorno uses Hegel’s dialectic to expose the ways in whichKierkegaard’s thought collapses into the sort of idealism that itpurports to leave behind by rejecting H egel, Adorno is sympa thetic tothe defense of non-identicalness that leads Kierkegaard to attackHegel, which purports to leave open spaces for the individual. ForAdorno, of course, Kierkegaard’s ultimately undialectical approachbackfires, which leaves him open to attack on the very ground uponwhich he attacks Hegel: Kierkegaard makes individual existenceabstract. Still, in his commitment to fostering a more individualizedsubjectivity in the face of mass society’s leveling push, as well as in thephilosophical tools that he uses in pursuing this objective, Adorno ishighly reminiscent of Kierkegaard. Indeed, this gives rise to an import-

ant question, which I shall consider in concluding this paper: Does theconceptual space that Adorno affords ‘the individual’ cause him tobreak off the subject–object dialectic, and thus fall prey to the veryproblems that he diagnoses in Kierkegaard?

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Sherm an: Adorno’s Kierkegaardian debt








I

After opening K ierk egaard: Constr uction of the Aestheti c w ith a crucial

discussion of the need to a void interpreting philosophy a s poetry, w hich‘tear[s] philosophy away from the standard of the real’, and thus‘deprives it of the possibility of adequate criticism’ (K , p. 3),7 Adornostates that Kierkegaard vacillates with regard to his own status.Although generally adopting the poet’s stance of ‘speaking withoutauthority’, and often sta ting, in various ways, that he is ‘a kind of poet’,Kierkegaard also sees himself as a philosopher, declaring in Fear and Trembling , for instance, tha t ‘I am no poet and I go a t things only dialec-tically’.8 And, indeed, according to Adorno, in spite of Kierkegaard’s

various claims to being a poet, it is ultima tely the lat ter claim tha t shouldbe privileged: ‘He calls himself a poet when he undertakes to recapitu-late the poetic existence tha t constitutes . . . the locat ion of depravity inhuman life. Without exception, the origin of the name poetry inKierkegaard’s w ork is tra nsparently philosophical’ (K , p. 6). Still, certa indistinctive attributes of poetry do resonate within Kierkegaard’s philo-sophy, and nowhere is this phenomenon in greater evidence than in hisexposition of ‘the aesthetic’, which, in addition to art and art theory,can refer to immediacy or subjective communication. In every one of

these cases, however, Kierkegaard ‘was not involved with giving formto the contents of experience’, which, for Adorno, is the hallmark ofaesthetics, ‘but [merely] with the reflection of the aesthetic process andof the artistic individual himself’ (K , p. 8). This leads to what will bethe essence of Adorno’s charge: ‘He who as a philosopher steadfastlychallenged the identity of thought and being, casually lets existence begoverned by thought in the aesthetic object’ (K , p. 6). Thus, in responseto Kierkegaard’s brand of dialectics, in which both the concrete subjectand the concrete object are lost, Adorno maintains that to understandKierkegaard philosophically rather than poetically (as Kierkegaard

himself demands), we must penetrate his poetic pseudonyms, those‘a ltogether abstract representa tiona l fi gures’ through w hom he offers hisphilosophy, which is simply in keeping with his own requirements:‘Kierkegaard the person cannot simply be banished from his work inthe style of an objective philosophy, which Kierkegaard unrelentingly,and not without good cause, fought’ (K , p. 13).

The inta ngibility of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous autho rs is sympto-matic of his deeper perspective on the na ture of subjectivity itself, w hich,Adorno contends, can be correctly interpreted only by considering the

relationship between the flesh-and-blood Kierkegaard and the socio-historical conditions within which he lived, and from which he waslargely estranged. Kierkegaard, an early 19th-century rentier , wasinvolved in neither economic production nor capital accumulation, but

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as one living off a fixed sum of invested money, he was highly subjectto the market fluctuations of his age (such as the economic downturnengendered by the worker revolts of 1848). He was a member of a

declining class, and, as such, was externally powerless. Under thesecircumstances, his philosophy ‘adapts’:

In Kierkegaard the ‘I’ is thrown back on itself by the superior power ofotherness. He is not a philosopher of identity; nor does he recognize anypositive being tha t t ranscends consciousness. The world of things is for himneither part of the subject nor independent of it. Rather, this world isomitted. It supplies the subject w ith the mere ‘occasion’ fo r the deed, w ithmere resistance to the act of faith. In itself, this world remains random andtotally indeterminate. (K , p. 29)9

As evidenced by the ‘immanent dia lectic’ tha t he proffers w ithin theframework of his explanation of the three ‘spheres of existence’,Kierkegaard purports to operate in a dialectical way. Yet, this estrange-ment from the world leads him to take undialectical stances on theinternal relations between subject and object, internal and externalhistory, and history and nature. As to the subject–object relation,Adorno tells us:

What Kierkegaard describes as ‘being quit with everything fundamental tohuman existence’ was called, in the philosophical language of his age, the

alienation of subject and object. Any critical interpretation of Kierkegaardmust take this alienation as its starting point. Not that such interpretationwould want to conceive the structure of existence as one of ‘subject’ and‘object’ within the framework of an ontological ‘project.’ The categories ofsubject and o bject originate historically. . . . If subject and o bject are his-torical concepts, they constitute at the same time the concrete conditionsof Kierkegaard’s description of human existence. This description concealsan antinomy in his thought that becomes evident in the subject–objectrelation, to which ‘being quit’ may be traced. This is an antinomy in theconception of the relation to ontological ‘meaning.’ Kierkegaard conceives

of such meaning, contradictorily, as radically devolved upon the ‘I,’ aspurely immanent to the subject and, at the same time, as renounced andunreachable transcendence. – Free, active subjectivity is for Kierkegaardthe bearer of all reality. (K , p. 27)

By breaking off the subject–object dialectic, Kierkegaard hopes to openup spaces within which (come what may) one’s personal ‘meaning’ canbe preserved. (Of course, one’s personal meaning does not even have tobe ‘positive’, as is the case with Kierkegaard’s negative theology.) Butthis tactic, i.e. the attempt to isolate subjectivity protectively by casting

out everything that is not subjectivity, is fundamentally misguided. Thus,‘the harder subjectivity rebounds back into itself from the het-eronomous, indeterminate, or simply mean world, the more clearly theexternal world expresses itself, mediatedly, in subjectivity’ (K , p. 38).

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When internalized, therefore, the melancholy that is engendered by analienated existence becomes an ‘existential condition’. Kierkegaard’smelancholy ‘does not mourn vanished happiness. It knows that it is

unreachable’ (K , p. 126).Just as Kierkegaard aims to exclude the external world from sub-

jectivity, he aims to exclude external history from one’s ‘personal’history, which is marked completely by interiority. But again, externalhistory comes crashing through the perimeter. Language, ostensibly theform of the communication of pure subjectivity, is itself sedimented bythe historical dialectic that Kierkegaard refuses to recognize; thus, itdrags external history’s meanings into the core of inwardness (K , pp.34–5), thereby leading Kierkegaard a ll the more to fa ll prey to the objec-

tive historical situation that he would just as soon escape. For Adorno,Kierkegaard’s objectless ‘I’ and its immanent history is spatio-tempo-rally symbolized by the historical image of the intérieur of Kierkegaard’schildhood apartment. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s own works, Adornorecounts how fa ther and son w ould stroll w ithin the parlor, a ll the whilepretending that they were passing exciting places. In this way, theexternal world is subordinated to the intérieur , but the very nature ofexistence in the intérieur is simultaneously delimited by the unseenw orld. (The only semblance of the external w orld tha t ma nages to w ork

its way into the intérieur does so through the hall mirror, and what isreflected – the endless row of apartment buildings off which the rentier makes his living – is the very historical situation that imprisons itsinhabitants.) The intérieur is thus analogous to the role of subjectivityin Kierkegaard’s philosophy.

Finally, in characterizing the Kierkegaardian intérieur , which con-tains images of the sea, flowers and other things from nature, Adornomaintains that Kierkegaard fails to differentiate history and nature. Intrying to hold onto a w orld tha t has already effectively receded into thepast, the intérieur , w hich is designed to preserve tha t pa st, w ould make

of it something that transcends the merely historical. It would make thisbygone era into something eternal and natural – in other words, into athing of unchanging na ture. In the apartment, then, eternity and historymerge together: ‘In semblance . . . the historical w orld presents itself asnature’ (K , p. 44). Of course, this consolidation of history and naturein the intérieur is a counterfeit one, and the artificial representations ofnature are symbolic of Kierkegaard’s desire to dominate nature, which,according to Adorno, all but precludes an existentially meaningful re-conciliation.

Adorno goes on to explicate this relationship between history andnature in the penultimate section of the book (‘Reason and Sacrifice’) ina w ay tha t clearly anticipates the themes of D ialecti c of Enl ightenment .10

Accordingly, he asserts that objectless, self-identical consciousness, which

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is Kierkegaard’s ‘exclusive category’ for breaking out of systematicidealism, is actually ‘the archimedian point of systematic idealism itself:the prerogative of thought, as its own law, to found reality’ (K , p. 107).

But, paradoxically, while consciousness is posited as an empirically purefoundation on which self-liberation hinges, its sacrifice is ultimately theprice of ontological reconciliation, for a meaningful personal existencedemands a spiritually inspired leap of faith that requires consciousnessto disavow itself in the process of submitting to G od. Adorno thus asserts:

The category that dialectically unfolds here is that of paradoxical sacrifice.Now here is the preroga tive of consciousness pushed further, no w here morecompletely denied, than in the sacrifice of consciousness as the fulfillmentof o nto logical reconciliat ion. With a t ruly Pasca lian expa nse, Kierkegaard’s

dia lectic swings between the negat ion o f co nsciousness and its unchallengedauthority. . . . The category of sacrifi ce, by means of w hich the system tran-scends itself, at the same time and fully contrary to expectation, holdsKierkegaard’s philosophy systemat ically to gether a s its encompa ssing unitythrough the sacrificial abstraction of all encountered phenomena. (K , p.107)

Kierkegaard’s trumpeting of consciousness sacrificing itself to achievereconciliation is mythical in character, as is the broader project ofidealism itself, for the commitment to reconciliation cannot be imma-

nently fulfilled. By placing nature out of bounds in favor of a spiritualcomportment, Kierkegaard’s brand of idealism more firmly entanglesitself in the very nature that it tries to escape: ‘By annihilating nature,hope enters the vicious circle of na ture; originating in na ture itself, ho peis only a ble to t ruly overcome it by mainta ining the trace of nature’ (K ,pp. 109–10).

According to Adorno, then, much like his nemesis Hegel,Kierkegaard relies upon reason to bring about a mythic reconciliation.In contrast to Hegel’s use of reason, which ‘produces actuality out ofitself’ to bring about ‘universal sovereignty’, Kierkegaard’s use of

reason, which results in ‘the negation of all finite knowledge’, suggests‘universal annihilation’ (K , p. 119). Adorno claims that the mythicquality of these thinkers arises from a depreciation of aesthetic con-siderations, and, moreover, that it is only by returning to ‘the aesthetic’as a methodological principle that the concrete social reality that is themoving force behind these opposed philosophies can be revealed. Thesewould seem to be the two impulses that hang behind Adorno’s phrase‘construction of the aesthetic’, which is the book’s subtitle, as well asthe name of its final chapter.11

At the outset of the book, we saw that while Kierkegaard equivo-cates with regard to ‘the aesthetic’, every one of its articulations failedto make contact w ith the concrete contents of experience. To the extentthat the aesthetic deals with the non-spiritual, i.e. the object, sensuous

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matter, or nature, Kierkegaard depreciates it. (While referring to thelater Kierkegaa rd’s aversion to art , Adorno declares: ‘H is antipathy forart expresses the longing for an imageless presence . . . an imageless self-

presenta tion of truth’ [K , p. 136].) The Kierkegaardian aesthetic is thusw holly rarefied – devoid of a trace of na ture. But by virtue of this denia lof nature, as we previously saw, Kierkegaard’s thought becomes blindlyentangled within it. Adorno asserts, to the contrary, that the aesthetic‘sphere of existence’, which is the first step in Kierkegaard’s ‘existentialdia lectic’ (and prior to both religion a nd philosophy in H egel’s dialectic),is where the greatest truth lies: ‘Where his philosophy, in the self-con-sciousness of its mythical semblance, encounters aesthetic character-istics, it comes closest to reality’ (K , p. 66). According to Adorno, there

can be no impetus for reconciling with reality without initially comingto grips with both history and nature, which dialectically ‘interweave’,but can be neither reduced nor sublated.12 Kierkegaard, how ever, simplyavoids the dialectical problem altogether by fleeing both.

Adorno’s ‘construction of the aesthetic’ also demonstrates hisBenjamin-inspired methodology. According to Adorno, for whom,roughly speaking, ‘the aesthetic’ relates to the ‘object’ position of thesubject–object dialectic, ‘the category of the aesthetic is, in contrast tothe position of [Kierkegaard’s] aesthete, one of knowledge’ (K , p. 14).

And in Kierkegaard , w hich employs the same method tha t he delineatedin ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Adorno indicates how such knowledgeis to be acquired. In ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Adorno had main-tained that ‘philosophy is interpretation’13 and that philosophicalinterpretation involves a process akin to ‘riddle-solving’:

Authentic philosophic interpretation do es not meet up w ith a fi xed meaningwhich already lies behind the question, but lights it up suddenly andmomentarily, and consumes it at the same time. Just as riddle-solving isconstituted, in that the singular a nd d ispersed elements of the question a rebrought into various groupings long enough for them to close together in

a figure out of which the solution springs forth, while the question dis-appears – so philosophy has to b ring its elements . . . into changing trialcombina tions [constellatio ns], until they fall into a fi gure w hich can b e readas a n a nswer.14

In Kierkegaard , Adorno arranged the miscellaneous elements ofKierkegaard’s oeuvre into a constellation o f images that meta phorica llyilluminated the historical truth that was the impulse for his philosophy.As previously discussed, from the petrified reproductions of nature tothe threatening social rea lity tha t w as reflected in the hallway mirror, it

was the image of Kierkegaard’s childhood apartment, the bourgeoisintérieur , that symbolized Kierkegaard’s philosophy of inwardness. Andwhile Kierkegaard could no more escape the reality from which hesought refuge in ‘inwardness’ than in his childhood apartment, the

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attempt itself, Adorno states, reflects the social truth of his time. ForAdorno, the appropriate response to this bad reality is to move toward‘the aesthetic’, not away from it, as Kierkegaard does. This means

embracing a dialectically informed materialist aesthetics that mightinduce the recognition that, historically, both external and internalnature had been sacrificed in the name of self-preservation, but that theperpetua tion o f this sacrifice had outlasted any o f the objective demandsthat might have precipitated it.

Yet, in moving away from Hegel’s dialectically informed idealisticaesthetics toward what he mistakenly takes to be a ‘materialist’ aes-thetics based upon ‘sense perception’ (in which ‘the aesthetic in a manis tha t by w hich he immediately is w hat he is’15), Kierkegaard falls into

the very idealism that he sought to escape. According to Adorno, thisis invariably the result when the dualism of form and content is rigidlymainta ined, a s is the case w ith Kierkegaa rd, w ho a ttempts to master thebreach with the primacy of a subjectively engendered form that ‘cancelsthe specific substance of the contents’ while simultaneously purportingto give the contents their due: ‘Through selection, subjectivity becomesthe dominant factor by its prerogative over the material, and thosecontents are omitted that would challenge the rule’ (K , p. 18). Bymanaging ‘the material’ in such a way as to exclude the treatment of

social experience, Adorno argues, Kierkegaard falls behind Hegel, whomediates the relationship between form and content (as well as subjectand object, external history and personal history, and history andnature), but veers into idealism by producing the entire process – w hichfrom the contrived standpoint of the Absolute is ‘meaningful’ and‘rational’ throughout – out of his own thought-determinations. Thus,although Hegel precipitously brings this concrete dialectical process tocompletion, Kierkegaard, by stripping ‘meaning’ from existence, nevereven embarks upon it, i.e. he fails to attain historical concretion in thefi rst place, a fa ilure tha t sets a precedent the G erman existentialists of

this century would emulate.Accordingly, as was indicated at the start of this paper, Adorno’s

at ta ck on Kierkegaa rd a lso functions as an a tta ck on H eidegger. In con-cluding this review of K ierk egaard: Constr uction of the Aestheti c , there-fore, I shall briefly examine Adorno’s analysis of the relationshipbetween Kierkegaard and Heidegger, which is cursorily set forth insection four (‘The Concept of Existence’). Since it is my view that thegrounds for seeking a rapprochement betw een Adorno a nd Kierkegaa rdare more productive than for seeking one between Adorno and

H eidegger, w hich, nonetheless, ha s been the far more dominant trend,16

it is necessary to clarify the essential differences, as Adorno sees them,between Kierkegaard and Heidegger.

According to Adorno, Heidegger erroneously reads the question of

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the ‘meaning of existence’ out of Kierkegaard because, for Kierkegaard,‘existence’ is not to be seen as some ‘manner of being’; rather, thequestion for Kierkegaard is what gives existence meaning. In other

words, unlike Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, which holds thatthere is a meaning to which existence must correspond, the meaningKierkegaa rd w ould fi nd is generated entirely out o f the doma in of exist-ence itself. Without the input of the subject, existence itself is mean-ingless. Consequently, Kierkegaard would have found Heidegger’sfundamental ontology as intolerable as Hegel’s system, for it fosters thekind of objectifying attitude toward existence that Kierkegaard sothoroughly denounced:

[Kierkegaard] critiques not only the scientific co mprehension o f t he objec-

tive world, but equally the ‘objectifying’ interpretation of subjectivity and,therefore, a priori, the possibility of an ‘existential analytic of existence.’Fichte’s ‘I am I’ and Hegel’s ‘subject–object’ are for Kierkegaard hypo-stat izatio ns under the sign of identity a nd a re rejected precisely to the extenttha t they set up a pure being of existence in opposition to t he existing ‘par-ticular individual’. . . . Because the existing ta kes the place of existence,ontology is removed from existence the more that the question of theexisting is directed toward the existing particular person. Individual exist-ence is for Kierkegaard the arena of ontology only because it itself is notontological. H ence the existence of t he person is for Kierkegaa rd a process

that mocks any objectivation. (K , pp. 70–1)

More broadly, as this passage suggests, what ultimately differenti-ates Kierkegaard and Heidegger is that Kierkegaard is a philosopher ofnon-identity, whereas Heidegger is a philosopher of identity. Since, forKierkegaard, there is no transcendent meaning at a distance from theindividual’s interpretation of his or her own particular existence, and,moreover, since the move toward his ultimate ‘sphere of existence’, thereligious sphere, involves a leap of faith into ‘absolute difference’,Kierkegaard’s ‘ontology’ is negative. Heidegger’s ontology, in contrast,is essentially positive. In one of a number of passages on the matter,Adorno says in N egati ve D ialecti cs (‘Copula’) that Heidegger’s positiv-ity arises from his misuse of ‘is’. ‘By definition’, he begins, the copulais ‘fulfilled only in the relation between subject and predicate. It is notindependent.’17 Seen in this way, the copula smacks of what Heideggerw ould ca ll the ontical. But in ta king the genera l term ‘is’ by itself, devoidof both subject and predicate, Heidegger transfigures this ontical term,whose ‘generality is a promissory note on particularization’, into onetha t is first and foremost ontological, and therefore hypostatizes it in its

generality. Being itself thus becomes an object. ‘Yet Being is no moreindependent of the “ is” than tha t sta te of facts in a judgment is inde-pendent of it’ (ND , p. 102). Despite Heidegger’s claim, it is not the casethat Being ‘is’, which implies that it transcends the subject–object

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relation; to the contrary, Being is intertwined in this dialectical relation.Thus, while Heidegger revives the question of the meaning of Being inresponse to the drive for identity inherent in positivism, his notion of

Being collapses into the same sort of identity-thinking, albeit from theother extreme:

Heidegger gets as far as the borderline of dialectical insight into the non-identity in identity. But he does not carry through the contradiction in theconcept of Being. He suppresses it. What can somehow be conceived asBeing mocks the notion of an identity betw een the concept a nd tha t w hichit means; but Heidegger treats it as identity, as pure Being itself, devoid ofits otherness. (ND , p. 104)

G iven its objectless inw ardness, Kierkegaard’s ‘infinitely negative’subject itself a rguably becomes something positive due to its indetermi-nate nature, which would imply that, like Hegel and Heidegger, histhought ultimately collapses into an identity theory as well. Still, byvirtue of Kierkegaard’s refusal to equate the attainment of what hewould deem a truly Christian comportment with a state of reconcilia-tion in either a spiritua l or a secular sense, it seems to me that he funda -mentally remains, like Adorno, a philosopher of non-identity andnegativity. Like Adorno, Kierkegaard both longs for a reconciliation tha tcannot be spoken and is a keen critic of mass society who seeks torevivify individual subjectivity within it. In the next section, I shallpursue these similarities.

II

Unlike most of Adorno’s other works, K ierk egaard: Constr uction of the Aesthet ic w as written before H itler’s seizure of pow er in G ermany.And a lthough, in one sense, Adorno ’s w ork w as relat ively unified o verhis lifetime – one cannot clearly distinguish between an early and alate period in his works as is often the case with other philosophers –it is, in another sense, undoubtedly the case that his war experiencesled him to emphasize different aspects of his thought. In Kierkegaard ,Adorno a tt acks Kierkegaard fo r breaking of f the subject–object dia lec-tic by setting forth an ‘abstract self’ whose ‘abstractness is the coun-terpole to the abstractness of the universal’ (K , p. 75) – in other words,his attack on Kierkegaard’s ‘abstract self’ comes from the viewpointof the universal, which dialectically shapes the individual’s existence.

But, d uring the w ar years, w hen it became increasingly clear tha t ‘ theabstract universal’ (namely, advanced capitalist society, both in itsfascist and its liberal forms) was tending to wholly assimilate indi-viduality with its homogenizing impulse, Adorno turns his attention to

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the individual’s standpoint so as to revivify his or her subjectivity –albeit, of course, without sacrificing his earlier criticisms of abstractsubjectivity, which are the flip-side of the dialectical coin. ‘World

history is for H egel w hat the individua l is for Kierkegaa rd’ (K , p. 74),and in both D ialecti c of Enli ghtenment and M inima M oral ia , whichwere written around the time of the war, Adorno no longer feels com-pelled to show tha t the individual canno t escape w orld history. To thecontrary, he seeks to expose world history so that he might at leastopen up spaces for critical thought to think against it. Accordingly,during this time period Adorno also advances a more favorableana lysis of Kierkegaa rd in ‘O n Kierkegaa rd’s D octrine of Love’, w hichwill briefly be considered below.

In the opening paragraphs of M inima M oral ia , for instance, Adornodeclares tha t H egel ultimately denied his ow n thought by fa iling to ca rrythrough the dia lectic, and tha t this fa ilure, w hich arose from his system’sclaim to totality, led him to give short shrift to the individual:

The dismissive gesture w hich H egel, in contra diction t o his ow n insight,constantly accords the individual, derives paradoxically enough from hisentanglement in liberal thinking. The conception of a totality harmoniousthrough all its contradictions compels him to assign to individuation,however much he may designate it as a driving moment in the process, aninferior sta tus in the construction o f the whole. The know ledge tha t in pre-history the ob jective tendency a sserts itself over the heads of human beings,indeed by annihilating individual qualities, without the reconciliation ofgeneral and particular – constructed in thought – ever yet being accom-plished in history, is distorted in Hegel: with serene indifference he optsonce aga in for the liq uidation of the particular. . . . The individual as suchhe for the most part considers, na ively, a s an irreducible datum – just w ha tin his theory of knowledge he decomposes.18

In spite of the fact that Hegel’s ‘method schooled that of Minima Moral ia ’ (MM , p. 16), his ‘large historical categories’ not only reflect

history’s ‘objective tendency’ t o destroy individuality, but a lso help con-tribute to the process, and are therefore ‘no longer above suspicion offraud’ (MM , p. 17). Adorno thus states that it may have become neces-sary for resistance to revert back to the individual:

In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and whathe encounters contributes to knowledge, which he had merely obscured aslong as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as thedominant category. In fa ce of t he totalitarian unison w ith w hich the eradi-cation of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the

social fo rce of liberation ma y ha ve temporarily w ithdraw n to t he individualsphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience.(MM , pp. 17–18)

It is clear from these statements that Adorno stands in an ambivalent

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relation to Hegel, and that the source of this ambivalence arises fromconcerns that are not at all dissimilar to those of Kierkegaard. At thevery least, it w ould seem tha t the way in which Adorno w ould deal with

these concerns, i.e. ‘a withdrawal to the individual sphere’, puts him incloser proximity to Kierkegaard than one might have initially suspectedgiven his critique in Kierkegaard . In what follows, I shall try to putAdorno’s interpretation of Kierkegaard in a somewhat broader per-spective.

In Kierkegaard , Adorno rails against Kierkegaard because he, likeHegel, fails to carry through adequately the dialectic. But in legitimatelyattempting to recuperate the individual in the face of Hegel’s idea ofworld history, Kierkegaard catapults to the other extreme. In order to

vindicate the individual’s existence in the face of objective history, hedoes away with the object, external history and nature, thereby leavingthe individual in objectless inwardness. Thus, Adorno contends, exist-ence is really no less abstract for Kierkegaard than Kierkegaard claimsit is for Hegel: ‘Kierkegaard’s doctrine of existence could be calledrealism without reality’ (K , p. 86). Jettisoning both the social and thenatural w orld, Kierkegaa rd’s notion of individuality is based on a n infi-nitely negative ‘vertical’ relat ionship w ith G od. C onversely, as we justsaw, Adorno is no less troubled by H egel’s individua l, w ho is concretized

– indeed, in a sense, perhaps all too concretized. Hegel’s depiction ofSittlichkeit is based on a view of ‘horizontal’ relations among people.The community is the ethical substance of the individual, and if it is‘rational’, according to Hegel, the individual should be reconciled to it.On Adorno’s account, however, Hegel’s ethical community achieves itsharmony by crushing the particularities of individuality. Thus, harmony– or at least what has historically passed for harmony – is essentiallythe ‘totalitarian unison’ to which Adorno refers above.19

Adorno, therefore, buys into neither Kierkegaard’s ‘vertical’ modelnor Hegel’s ‘horizontal’ one; indeed, inasmuch as both ultimatelysuccumb to idealism’s siren song, he thinks that neither one gives ‘theother’ its due. Yet, both have an undeniably strong influence on histhought. Of course, this influence has always been much clearer in thecase of Hegel, for there can be no question that Adorno embraces thedriving impulse in H egel’s dia lectic, i.e. determinate negat ivity, if not theends with which he precipitately brings the process to a conclusion.20

(And, of course, it is just as clear that he rejects the indeterminate nega-tivity of Kierkegaard’s wholly inward dialectic.) But in terms ofAdorno’s attack on the unyielding drive toward systematic totality in

Hegel’s philosophy, Kierkegaard’s influence has been underappreciated.In seeking to resuscitate the subject in the face of a society that has lefthim or her with few resources with which to resist it, Kierkegaard andAdorno share a number of theoretical and stylistic commitments.

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Above all, Kierkegaard and Adorno are averse to Hegel’s ‘meta-physics’, which both take to be a system that purports to reconcilethought and being at the expense of the latter. By rejecting the notion

that this is a relationship of identity, they converge in their aim to openup spaces for ‘the other’, which is just what Hegel’s ‘system’ closes off.But by ‘the other’ they mean different things. In Kierkegaard’s Philo- sophical Fragments , w hich is the very title that Adorno and H orkheimerfirst selected for what would become D ialectic of Enl ightenment ,21

Johannes Climacus offers up the ‘absolute paradox’ to confound allattempts to identify ‘the absolutely different’ (which he calls ‘the god’),of which there is not even a distinguishing mark. 22 This ‘absolutelydifferent’ is designed to escape thought, and the price of reconciliation,

as we saw, is intellectual suicide. For Adorno, who still defends a self-conscious form of enlightened thought, ‘the paradox’ itself is an illicitresort to metaphysics, ‘the other’ is not ‘absolute’ because everything ismediated,23 and the job of philosophy is to t ry to ‘unlock’ the ephemeralother from the petrified sociohistorical forms within which it has notbeen permitted to express itself.

Despite their differing theoretical conceptions of ‘otherness’, bothalso play Kant and Hegel off one another – although, for Kierkegaard,this methodological approa ch is less self-conscious tha n it is for Adorno.

According to Adorno,Kierkegaard’s project is the precise ant ithesis of the Ka ntian thesis and theH egelian synthesis. Against Kant, he pursues the plan of concrete ont ology ;against Hegel he pursues the plan of an ontology that does not succumbto the existent by absorbing it into itself. He therefore revises the processof post-Kantian idealism; he surrenders the claim of identity. (K , p. 74)

As an initial matter, it should be noted that if we substituted ‘dialectics’for ‘ontology’ in this passage, it could refer to Adorno himself.Moreover, as antitheses to the ‘Kantian thesis’ and the ‘Hegelian syn-thesis’, Adorno and Kierkegaard could not help but draw upon thethought of both. On the one hand, Adorno’s debt to Hegel is clearenough. And although Kierkegaard’s ‘existential dialectic’ culminatesnot in a H egelian synthesis but ra ther in a fi na l either/or, it is imposs-ible for even the staunchest anti-Hegelian to deny that ‘the existentialdialectic’ bears strong similarities to Hegel’s characterization of con-sciousness forma tion in the Phenomenology of Spir it . D espite its cheap-ening of individuality, then, H egel’s dia lectic offers a level of concretionthat is missing in, say, the Kantian subject, the transcendental unity of

apperception.O n the other hand , w hile Adorno ’s debt to Ka nt’s aesthetics is a lso

clear enough, less clear is the fact that both Adorno and Kierkegaarddraw sustenance from the Cr it ique of Pure Reason . Thus, although the

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critical philosophy proffers the kind of ‘constitutive subjectivity’ thatAdorno so ardently rejects in the Introduction to N egati ve D ialectics ,Adorno claims tha t Ka nt’s not ion of the thing-in-itself at least acknow -

ledges the ultima te impossibility of obta ining a conceptua l strangleholdon reality – though, clearly, Adorno does not want to buy into itsdeeper metaphysical implications. Instead, as Adorno sees it, the thing-in-itself is the phenomenon grasped from the standpoint of a sociohis-torica l reconciliat ion. O f course, such sociohistorical reconcilia tions donot attract Kierkegaard, or, at least, not in the same way as Adorno,but, despite Kant’s emphasis on reason, Kierkegaard also adverts tohim so as to protect ‘otherness’ from being conceptually hypostatized.It is Kant, after all, who limits the pretensions of reason in order to

make room for fa ith, w hich includes rejecting those proofs of G od’sexistence that Kierkegaard perceives as an affront to Christianity.Moreover, while neither Adorno nor Kierkegaard buys into Kant’sCr it ique of Practi cal Reason , bo th o f them a vail themselves of the spacethat it affords to critical thought. Despite his rejection of Kant’s tran-scendental subject on the grounds of its abstractness, Kierkegaard seesin irony the ability of subjectivity to absolutely detach itself from alldeterminations, which is precisely why Adorno claims that theKierkegaardian subject is in no way less abstract than the Kantian one

(see K , pp. 74–5). Still, Adorno, too, ‘presupposes a standpointremoved, even though by a ha ir’s breadth, f rom the scope of existence’(MM , p. 247) – though, to be more exact, Adorno would argue thatthis ‘hair’s breadth’, which runs against the grain of existence, isactua lly to be accounted for by dra w ing on tha t w hich is already w ithinthe realm of existence, but has not yet been conceptualized due toidentity-thinking. Implicitly referring to H egel’s cla im in the Philosophy of Right that ‘philosophy paints its grey on grey’, which means that‘philosophy succumbs to the existent’, Adorno declares that ‘graynesscould not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept

of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from thenegative whole. The traces always come from the past’ (ND , pp.377–8).24 Thus, although Kierkegaard and Adorno have differingtheoretical commitments, the form of their thought is more tha n super-ficially similar.25

This similarity in form is largely due to the fact that bothKierkegaard and Adorno passionately embrace ‘the negative’ and bothhold fast to the idea of a ‘negative utopia’, albeit for one this idea istheological, w hile for the other it is sociohistorical. Thus, in the Preface

to the Conclud ing Unscient ific Postscr ip t , Kierkegaa rd says tha t ‘dialec-tically understood, the negative is not an intervention, but only thepositive’ (CUP , p. 8). And in the chapter entitled ‘Possible and ActualTheses by Lessing’, he states:

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The negative thinkers therefore always have the advantage that they havesomething positive, namely this, that they are aware of the negative; thepositive thinkers have nothing whatever, for they are deluded. Precisely

because the negat ive is present in existence and present everyw here(because being there, existence is continually in the process of becoming)the only deliverance from it is to become continually aware of it. By beingpositively secured, the subject is indeed fooled. (CUP , pp. 81–2)

As this passage suggests, the negative has a number of connotations forKierkegaard. It is the source of our freedom; as was suggested abovewith respect to irony, the individual is always in a position to detachhimself or herself from ‘w hat is’ a nd t ry to reconstruct it through his orher own actions. The negative also reflects our essential existential

position in the world; there is no resting-place, no end-point at whichwe can just ‘be done with it’. It is only through the wholly negativephenomenon of death that this can come about. (The will to meta-physics is thus a will to death.) In life, however, we who actually ‘exist’are trapped in a negative relationship between the rock of being and thehard place of thought (CUP , pp. 191–2), a nd thus must bear a n intermi-nable deferral of truth. Yet, Kierkegaard says, we must strive towardthis deferred truth in passion – tha t is, w e must keep the negative tensionalive – lest we become ‘deluded’ and ‘fooled’ persons that fail to ‘exist’.

For Adorno, in contrast, the negative does not refer to metaphysicalinquiries, but, instead, to the dialectical relationship that constitutessuch linked dualities as subject and object, individual and society, andnature and history. The fluid tension that should internally characterizethese dualities, however, is fractured by the prevalence of identity-thinking, which, in the pursuit of control and, ultimately, self-preser-vation, eradicates not only the other, but the self as well. (Kierkegaardwould see identity-thinking as the result of the subject’s confused desireto be ‘positively secured’.) Nevertheless, these dualities must be viewedfrom the standpoint of their potential reconciliation, just as

Kierkegaard’s existing person must consta ntly embra ce the Absurd w ithan eye toward his metaphysical reconciliation – regardless of whetherthe price of this metaphysical reconciliation is ‘the Absurd’, or it isabsurd to believe in this metaphysical reconciliation. And, indeed, morelike Kierkegaard than one would expect given his atheism, Adornospeaks of a utopian social reconciliation (w hile questioning its prospect)in theological terms:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despairis the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselvesfrom t he stand point of redemption. Kno w ledge has no light but tha t shedon the w orld by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Per-spectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal itto be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear

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one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives witho ut velleityor violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is thetask of thought. . . . Beside the demand thus placed on thought, the

question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.(MM , p. 247)

It is from this ‘standpoint of redemption’ that Adorno advances asomewhat more favorable interpretation of Kierkegaard in ‘OnKierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’,26 w hich w as w ritten in 1939, the sameyear tha t Adorno and H orkheimer began their collabora tion on D ialectic of Enlightenment . This article begins with an examination ofKierkegaard’s Works of L ove , in which Kierkegaard upholds the uni-versality of a Christian love that is ultimately based upon pure subjec-

tive inwardness. But this love is like the Kantian ethics of duty.Concerned more with its ow n status than the other, the inward self mustabstract from all natural preferences that its empirical self may harborregarding the particularities of others in order to meet the requirementof universality. Such an undiscriminating love, however, can easily turninto its opposite, a universal hat red o f o ther human beings, a nd, a ccord-ing to Adorno, this is what happens in the case of Kierkegaard. So far,Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love reflects his previouscritique in Kierkegaard . The demand that the purely inward self love

the universalized other reflects an expulsion of nature, and, in turn,na ture revenges itself on this abstra ct self in the form of a mythical tabooagainst the preferences of natural love, which ultimately transforms intoa universal hatred. Yet, Adorno goes beyond this analysis:

Kierkegaard’s misanthropy, the paradoxical callousness of his doctrine oflove, enables him, like few other writers, to perceive decisive characterfeatures of the typical individual of modern society. Even if one goes so f aras to admit that Kierkegaard’s love is actually demonic hatred, one maywell imagine certain situations where hatred contains more of love thanthe latter’s immediate manifestations. All Kierkegaard’s gloomy motives

have good critical sense as soon as they are interpreted in terms of socialcritique. M any o f his positive assertions gain the concrete signifi cance theyotherwise lack as soon as one translates them into concepts of a rightsociety.27

Kierkegaard’s hostility toward the masses, in other words, implicitlyincorpora tes w ithin it a hostility tow ard the dominat ing mechanisms ofa society that turns human beings into a mass. And, in contrast to apositivistic outlook, this hostility can arise only because it is opposedto the ever present moment of ‘possibility’ in Kierkegaard’s thought –

that is, the possibility of a transfigured world. (Furthermore, Adornoexplicitly recognizes in this article that ‘as a critic, he actually graspedthe instant, that is to say, his ow n historical situation. . . . Kierkegaa rdwas Hegelian enough to have a clean-cut idea of history.’28)

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Finally, despite the differing nature of their substantive commit-ments to ‘the other’ – that is, the difference between seeing ‘the other’in theological-metaphysical terms (which raises questions of ‘immedi-

acy’ and ‘self-presence’) and seeing ‘the other’ in sociohistorical terms(which, among other things, raises questions regarding ‘the good life’ 29)– Kierkegaard and Adorno converge in the tactics that they use to facili-tate their ends. (For instance, Kierkegaard would have us ‘believeagainst the understanding’ [CUP , p. 233], while Adorno, who stressesthe need to retain conceptuality, would have us understand against theexisting understanding.) In particular, they share remarkably similarperspectives on the nature of communication. There is no reason to fi ndthis surprising, of course, since both are preoccupied with resurrecting

the individual in the face of an intransigent social context that woulddo its best to wipe out all particularity. Under these circumstances, tospoon-feed a doctrine – even an ‘anti-doctrine’ – would only reinstan-tiate the type of passive individuality that is being mass-produced. Thevery form of the communication must also be its content to perform itstherapeutic task, and this is indeed the case for both Kierkegaard andAdorno.

In the fi rst of his four ‘Possible and Actua l Theses by Lessing’, w hichdeals with the ‘paradox’ of communication, Kierkegaard asserts that

there are actually tw o t ypes of communica tion. The first type, w hich isnot o f particular interest, is tha t ‘d irect’ form o f communicat ion tha t ‘iscompletely indifferent to subjectivity and thereby to inwardness andappropriation’ (CUP , p. 75). It has no ‘secrets’, but merely seeks toimpart objective knowledge that is already possessed by every party tothe communication. It is only the second type of communication, the‘indirect’ form, that is meaningful. Instead of conveying ‘objective’truths, it respects the freedom of all parties to the communication byonly providing the occasion for the recipients to come to their own sub-jective truths. For Adorno, too, the objective is to communicate in a

manner that forces the recipients to contribute something to theirassimilation o f the communicat ion (which is precisely w hat ma ss societytends to discourage), and it is this objective that motivates both thecomplex a nd f ragmentary nature of his w orks. Even Adorno’s most ‘sys-tematic’ works, such as N egati ve D ialecti cs and Aesthetic Theory ,appear to be little more than a constellation of essays structured aroundan organizing principle, whereas other works, such as D ialecti c of Enlightenment and M inima M oral ia , a re comprised (in part a nd w hole,respectively) of aphorisms. Consequently, in contrast to Hegel’s sys-

tematic ‘dialectical theory, [which] abhorring anything isolated cannotadmit aphorisms as such’, Adorno’s anti-systematic style seeks to openup spaces for late capitalism’s overdetermined subject: ‘If today thesubject is vanishing, aphorisms take upon themselves the duty to

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consider the evanescent as essential’ (MM , p. 16). Ultimately, o f course,Adorno, in contrast to Kierkegaard and the later Heidegger, will notidentify his philosophical form with poetry, for in trying to break

through language’s reified form, Adorno still relies upon ‘the labor ofthe concept’ to illume sociohistorical truths. Still, in virtue ofKierkegaard’s attempt to resurrect the subject through language, hestands in much closer proximity to Adorno than Heidegger. UnlikeHeidegger (as well as deconstructionists and second-generation criticaltheorists), who believes that a proper understanding of language leadsto the elimination of the very notion of the individual subject, it is pre-cisely to the individual subject that the works of Kierkegaard andAdorno are ultimately geared.

II I

In Kierkegaard , it will be recalled, Adorno asserts that Kierkegaardbreaks off the subject–object dialectic by retreating to the ‘objectlessinw ardness’ of ‘pure’ subjectivity, but tha t in abstractly fleeing his socio-historical context, Kierkegaard ultimately, albeit unwittingly, drags itssubstance into the core of his subjectivity, where it then conditions his

thought in an unmediated fa shion. G iven the similarities betw eenAdorno and Kierkegaard that are raised in the previous section,however, it must be asked whether, ultimately, Adorno himself alsoretreats to the ‘objectless inwardness’ of an isolated subjectivity, andthus breaks of f t he subject–object d ialectic w ith a nalogous results? Tobe sure, in sharp contrast to Kierkegaard, who casts out the objectiveworld in the service of a subjectivity that is first absolutized and thensacrificed, Adorno not only purports to incorporate the object (in itsmultifaceted sense) into his ‘negative dialectic’, but actually privileges it– all the while rejecting Kierkegaard’s ultimate sacrifice of subjectivityin the name of an unrealizable ontological reconciliation. Still, if, insome sense, Adorno privileges a thin negative space between subject andobject, w hich a ffords his standpoint of critique, does his ow n sociohis-torical context inevitably colonize it, thus conditioning his thought aswell?

At first blush, it would seem that Lyotard begins to deal with thisquestion in ‘Adorno as the Devil’. Writing at a time when he styledhimself a ‘libidinal economist’, Lyotard theorizes here from the stand-point of a metaphysics of the libido, in w hich the striving for ‘high inten-

sities’ is valorized. According to Lyotard, Adorno’s philosophicalstandpoint, in contrast, is completely devoid of libidinal intensity, andtherefore ‘finishes the obliteration of the libidinal body’.30 He articu-lates this position as follows:

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Adorno’s problematic belongs to a libidinal deployment, that of remissionby sacrifice, that of the martyr, that of the paradox of faith, the great workbeing all the more true the more poo rly it is received in the world of alien-

ation – to a deployment which modern capitalism has now disinvested,which it has emptied of all affective intensity.31

This excerpt, w hich is reminiscent of Adorno’s critiq ue of Kierkegaard,is based upon Lyotard’s broader claim that Adorno represents the badfinale of dialectical thinking. According to Lyotard, although Marx’sH egelian-inspired dia lectic tended to enervate ‘the libidina l body’, sinceit also perniciously availed itself of ‘negative critique’, it was not nearlyas nettlesome as Adorno’s expressly ‘negative’ dialectics, for at leastMarx’s sociohistorical context enabled his theory to be more than just

negative criticism; it also furnished the opportunity for the deploymentof libidinal intensities because resistance to capitalism then occurredwithin the dynamics of capitalism – that is, it was a cathected resist-ance. In contrast, Lyotard goes on to say, Adorno’s standpoint ofcritique does not take itself to exist within the libidinal economy ofsociety’s prevailing institutions, but outside them altogether, given the‘totally administered’ nature of society. For this reason, Adorno’snegative criticism demands the ‘occultation of the ear’.

Even though Lyotard goes so far as to suggest that ‘criticism can

only redouble the empty space where its discourse plunges its object’,and that ‘it can no longer think the object’,32 which, again, sounds agood deal like Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard, he undialectically veersoff by hypostatizing Adorno’s negative conceptual space without con-sidering how it is mediated by the very sociohistorical context that itcritiques. This facilely suggests that Adorno truly can achieve a com-pletely external standpoint of critique (if not actually the Devil’s stand-point itself). The question, to the contrary, is whether Adorno’s‘negative’ critique is not, in some sense, more cathected than Lyotardrecognizes, and, therefore, subservient to its sociohistorical context,which is permeated by advanced capitalism. If so, it would just unwit-tingly affi rm tha t w hich Lyotard ’s positivistic L ibidinal Economy wouldhave us unreservedly affirm as an initial matter. Accordingly, for theLyota rd of L ibidinal Economy , w hich was w ritten around the same timeas ‘Adorno as the Devil’, negative critique should be jettisoned in favorof a high-energy collapse into capitalism. And, of course, for Adorno,this reflects the very sort of theoretical collapse into pra ctice tha t causeshim to abstain from practice altogether.

In concluding this paper, I shall offer a few thoughts on the problem

of the relat ionship betw een theory a nd pra ctice in Adorno’s philosophy,which, ultimately, is what is at stake in the questions that are beingposed about the relationship between subject and object.33 In particu-lar, I shall consider whether Adorno’s forbearance from any kind of

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political practice is not tantamount to an (inadvertent) embrace of theexisting practices, which is his ow n charge aga inst Kierkegaard. I intendto show tha t, contrary to the generally a ccepted belief, Adorno’s theory

can translate into political practice.G enerally speaking, the argument aga inst Adorno ’s approach to the

problem of theory and practice can be formulated along the followinglines: Adorno explicitly rejects praxis on the ground that theory invari-ably becomes subordinated to practice. As a result, despite his insist-ence upon the mediation of subject and object, and, indeed, theory andpractice, in theory , Adorno breaks off the dialectic between subject andobject, theory and practice, in practi ce . But inasmuch as Adorno rejectsthe underpinnings of ‘traditional theory’, critically recognizing that

theory is generated within the framework of prevailing sociohistoricalpractices, how could a ‘critical’ perspective survive a context that doesall it can to extirpate it? In other words, the argument would be thatpractice is required to keep critical theory alive, for in the absence ofoppositional practices that might mitigate the movement toward the‘totally administered society’, there will ultimately no longer be anyspace open for oppositional theories. Even if Adorno is right about thetendency for engaged theory to be reduced to that which is expedientfor pra ctice, therefore, theory is no less imperiled by engaging in practice

than it is by abstaining from it. Adorno’s occasional references to histheory as a ‘message in a bottle’ for future generations are thus undulyoptimistic. Moreover, even before the final triumph of an oppressive,totalizing practice, there is the question of the consciousness of thephilosopher himself, because, as Adorno asserts in regard toKierkegaard and, for that matter, Heidegger, the philosopher whoabstractly breaks off the subject–object dialectic in the name of theorytends to capitulate both theoretically and practically to the prevailingpractices. And, indeed, so this argument might go, this is evinced byAdorno himself – namely, in his theoretical stance tow ard the G erman

New Left, and his decision to call in the police to quell the politicalactivities of the student movement on campus.

For his part , Adorno makes no a pologies for his unwillingness eitherto engage in political practice himself, or to support the oppositionalpolitical practices of others. In ‘Resignation’, for example, he refers(without explicit attribution) to ‘pseudo-activity’, which is the action ofsmall groups ‘at tempting to preserve enclaves of immediacy in the midstof a thoroughly mediated and obdurate society’, and argues that suchactivity either ‘atrophies beneath the encrusted totality’ that it contests

or is rechanneled by that totality tow ard its ow n ends.34 To the contra ry,above all, he argues, ‘the force of resistance’ lies with ‘the uncompro-misingly critica l thinker’, w hose thinking not only ‘points beyond itself’,but, crucially, at least in some form (even if suppressed or forgotten),

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survives: ‘Thinking has the momentum of the general. What has beencogently thought must be thought in some other place and by otherpeople.’35 As suggested in the last pa ragraph, how ever, this position ma y

well be unduly optimistic. Similarly, in N egati ve D ialecti cs , Adornomaintains – in opposition to Sartre’s notion that we are always alreadyup to our elbows in blood, and that we must freely choose within thecoercive fra mework of our situat ion – tha t ‘under existing circumsta ncesthere is a touch of freedom in refusing to accept the alternatives.Freedom means to criticize and change situations, not to confirm themby deciding within their coercive structure’ (ND , p. 226). But, again,the question remains: How does one ‘change situations’ withoutengaging in practical action that is, in some sense, circumscribed by the

existing coercive structure?Peter Uwe Hohendahl argues that ‘the adequacy or failure of

Adorno’s position during the postwar period’ and ‘the legitimacy ofAdorno’s work for the present’ must not be conflated if we are effec-tively to come to grips with the implications of his work for politicalaction.36 Of course, as was suggested earlier, his personal positions andhis work could dialectically implicate one another, as Adorno contendsis the situation with Kierkegaard, but, at least theoretically, this is notnecessarily so, and, in any event, it may well be that the kernel of a

theory of political action might be culled from a n oeuvre that, in otherrespects, might be tainted by a quietistic personal propensity. Thus, anumber of commentators have attempted to carve out a notion ofpractice from Adorno’s thought, but, invariably, this has occurred alongaesthetic lines. In ‘Between Impotence and Illusion: Adorno’s Art ofTheory and Practice’,37 which is the most thoroughgoing of theseattempts, Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker rightly point out tha t‘any question of political action is simultaneously a question of reasonand its critique’, and, moreover, that the claim of Habermas and othersecond-generation critical theorists to the effect that Adorno has givenup on the emancipatory possibilities of enlightenment rationality is atbest one-sided, if not just plain wrong. Sullivan and Lysaker also rightlyassert that it is precisely the critique of reason by reason that affordswhatever basis there could possibly be for an emancipatory reason, i.e.a reason that does not unreflectively incorporate the violent instrumen-talization of reason that D ialecti c of Enli ghtenment found to be thebasis of subject formation, and that to accomplish this feat it is crucialto maintain the tension between subject and object. And, finally, theyare also right on target when they declare that it is in the analysis of

concrete practices tha t ma inta in this tension betw een subject and object(which must go through the self-critical subject) that an emancipatorymodel can be found.

Yet, when Sullivan and Lysaker offer up art as an example of this

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type of concrete practice,38 they a re, to be sure, correct in the sense tha tart evidences such a practice, but not in the sense for which Adorno hasbeen reproached – namely, for failing to provide a basis for political

practice. Aesthetic reflection has a lofty enlightenment pedigree, and,indeed, may well be a necessary condition of emancipation by provid-ing a corrective to current epistemological paradigms, which invariablyfail to maintain the subject–object tension, but it is not a sufficient con-dition of emancipation. It is this general tendency to pin exclusively onart any possibility for praxis in Adorno’s philosophy that allows PaulPiccone to state:

For Adorno . . . social theory w as possible only by escaping into esthetics,where micrological analyses of the particular provide aphoristic glimpses

of that ‘false totality’ no longer immediately apprehensible through dis-credited traditional conceptual means. . . . Adorno ’s micrological ana lysissucceeds in salvaging revolutionary subjectivity in social theory as art, butat the price of destroying any possible normative political mediationalfunction.39

It seems to me that Adorno does offer us more than ‘social theory asart’, and that it is possible to find a fulcrum within his thought that isable to provide a ‘normative political mediational function’. Drawingupon D ialectic of Enli ghtenment , which insists upon the ‘remembrance

of nature in the subject’,40 I would argue that this fulcrum is the body– not ‘the body’ in an abstract sense, as an unmediated ideal in whichdesire is ahistorically given free play, which involves (either implicitlyor explicitly) a loss of the subject, but the body as it manifests itself inconcrete practices. This requires the reflection of a self-critical subject,who mediates these bodily responses with a comprehension of his orher own particular practices – a comprehension that includes the waysin which these particular practices impact on and are impacted by thesociohistorical totality of which they are an inextricable part.

According to Adorno, ‘the possibilities of a truly progressive con-sciousness’ first depend on one’s ‘nerval reactions’ and ‘idiosyncrasies’,i.e. on one’s peculiar somatic reactions to social phenomena, and‘whoever lacks this manner of irrational reaction is also bereft of pro-gressive consciousness’.41 Of course, he quickly goes on to say, thesereactions must then be sublimated into a theory42 – indeed, these‘irra tiona l’ reactions themselves occur within an experientia l framew orkthat is theoretically informed – but Adorno’s critical point is that anypossibility for a genuinely progressive practice must sublate a somatic

response to experience no less than a theoretical one:Adequate expression of a matter does not involve an elimination of sub-jectivity, but rather that the matter itself can be brought to language onlythrough the most extreme refinement and exertion o f subjectivity. To this,

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I would add that this process equally demands the work and exertion ofthe concept in order to get beyond blind idiosyncrasy and for thought tocatch up with experience, simply because thought itself is an element of

experience. Ex perience without thought is a s fa r removed fro m true experi-ence as is experience without idiosyncrasy.43

Because Adorno sees idiosyncra tic or blind reactions, such as one’s ha irstanding on end,44 as subjective responses to social phenomena tha t a reno less important than reason, he asserts in N egati ve D ialecti cs that ‘ifthe motor form of reaction were liquidated altogether, if the hand nolonger twitched, there would be no will’, and thus ‘what the greatrationalistic philosophers conceived as the will is already, and withoutaccounting for it, a denial of the will’ (ND , p. 230). Even freedom,

Adorno argues, ‘needs what Kant calls heteronomous’ (ND , p. 237).View ed from a somew hat different a ngle, this is why Adorno took greatpains to attack the neo-Freudian theorists, such as Karen Horney, whoin turning tow ard ego psychology discarded (or, a t the very least, domes-ticated) Freud’s earlier drive theory. As an initial matter, by valorizingthe subjugation of the libido, which otherwise affords a somatic basisfor an emancipatory impulse, they approach Kant’s anti-psychologisticmora lity to the extent tha t instinct is subord inated to reason – or, morespecifically, the particular reason of the sociohistorical context within

which it finds itself.

45

So, too, ego psychology would overcome idio-syncrasy, for idiosyncrasy is unsuited to the ‘well-adjusted personality’that it seeks to promote, but, as Adorno points out, this seamless re-conciliation of the individual with an untoward social totality is a falseone (and, in any case, occurs more in thought than it does in reality).Of course, as the last line in this passage implies, to reverse field andsimply privilege the body at the cost of theory – as Lyotard does in‘Adorno as the Devil’ and L ibidinal Economy – leads the individual tofall prey to a bad reality no less than Kant’s pure practical reason orego psychology.

In sum, as w e have seen throughout, Adorno seeks to give the objectits due, and, moreover, as he asserts, ‘praxis follows the object’s needi-ness’,46 but this precludes a practice that w ould immediately follow theobject in either of these forms – that is, it precludes a practice tha t w ouldimmediately follow either our libidinal impulses (‘first nature’) or thesocial world (‘second nature’) – for both (unmediated) approaches onlyreaffirm the regressive social conditions that a true theory and practicewould surmount, and therefore collapse into identity-thinking, as allprima philosophia does. Accordingly, if ‘identity-thinking’ within the

context of subject and object arises not only by positing the equivalenceof the two terms, but also by artificially separating them, as is the casewith Kierkegaard and Heidegger (who lose the object and subject,respectively), and if the relation between theory and practice follows

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from the relation between subject and object, as Adorno acknowledges,Adorno must mediate the relation between theory and practice, lest hecollapse into the very identity-thinking tha t he diagnoses in Kierkegaard

and H eidegger. In other w ords, as Adorno himself recognizes, he cannotsubordinate practice to theory any more than the decisionists w hom hecriticizes subordinate theory to practice, but must maintain a tensionbetween the two akin to the tension that must be maintained betweensubject and object. Thus, Adorno states: ‘The relationship betweentheory and practice, after both have once distanced themselves fromeach other, is that of qualitative reversal, not transition, and surely notsubordination.’47

To the extent tha t a non-repressive prax is is actua lly possible,

according to Adorno, it involves ‘steering between the alternatives ofspontaneity and organization’.48 Without spontaneity – which is tied tothe subjective, somatic reactions previously discussed, and het-eronomously manifests the ‘neediness of the object’ within the subject– ‘something like a valid practice is not possible’.49 And, indeed, this isbecause spontaneity is the remainder that escapes theoretical subsump-tion. As Adorno haltingly states, when discussing spontaneity ‘we areattempting to describe in theoretical terms an element of morality thatis actually foreign to theory’; thus, ‘the moral sphere is not coterminous

with the theoretical sphere, and this fact is itself a basic philosophicaldeterminant of the sphere of pra ctical action’.50 In other words, the non-identical spontaneous moment is what helps protect against the sophis-tic tendencies of theory when it is abstractly pressed into practice –tendencies that were evidenced by the Soviet-style organization ofsociety, which justified the ongoing repression of workers in the nameof their emancipation, and are still evidenced by American-style capi-talist organization, which increasingly subordinates people to work inthe hollow name of ‘delivering the goods’. This is why Adorno insiststha t ‘spontaneity . . . at ta ch itself to the vulnerab le places of rigidifiedreality, w here the ruptures caused by the pressure of rigidificat ion appearexternally, [and] not thrash about indiscriminately, abstractly’.51

Tethered to a particular setting, w hich gives rise to particular injusticesthat affect subjectivity in palpable, physical ways, a theoreticallyinformed spontaneity gives rise to practices that will not be the resultof a cold, ossified theory that has lost the object, which itself is theproduct of a cold, ossified subject that has lost the object. Accordingly,Adorno states:

Whoever imagines that as a product of this society he is free of the bour-geois coldness harbors illusions about himself as much as about the world;without such coldness one could not live. The ability of anyone, withoutexception, to identify with another’s suffering is slight. The fact that onesimply could not look on any longer, and that no one of goodwill should

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have to loo k on a ny longer, ra tiona lizes the pang of conscience. The att itudeat the edge of uttermost horror, such as was felt by the conspirators of 20July who preferred to risk perishing under torture to doing nothing, was

possible and ad mirable. To claim f rom a distance tha t o ne feels the samew ay as they do confuses the pow er of imagination w ith the violence of t heimmediately present.52

The spur to true praxis for Adorno, in short, is ‘the violence of theimmediately present’, which can engender ‘a refusal that always impliesresisting something stronger and hence always contains an element ofdespair’.53 It is only in this way that thought can give rise to practicesthat truly ‘absorb the weight of reality and [do] not simply flee from it’(or otherw ise lose it through theoretica l abstraction), as is the case ‘w ith

w hat Ka fka called the “ the empty, happy journey” ’.54 Indeed, this isprecisely where Adorno breaks with Kierkegaard, whose ‘unhappyjourney’ was ‘empty’ insofar as it left the object behind. It is onlythrough a theoretically mediated sensitivity to the object in its multi-fariousness that the subject can hope to resist and transcend a badreality.

D epartment of Phi losophy, Uni versit y of M ontana, M issoula, M T, USA

Notes

1 See, for exa mple, John D. C aputo, ‘Instants, Secrets and Singularities:Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida’, in Martin J. Matustik andMerold Westphal (eds) K ierk egaard in Post/M oderni ty (Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1995).

2 See, for example, M artin J. Matustik, Postnational Identi ty: Cri ti cal Theory

and Ex istential Phil osophy in H abermas, Ki erk egaard, and Havel (New York: G uilford Press, 1993), w hich was inspired by H ab ermas’s 1987Copenhagen lectures.

3 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscient ific Postscri pt to Philosophi cal Fragments , ed. and trans. H ow ard V. H ong and Edna H . H ong (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 72–3. Further references to theConcluding Unscient ific Postscri pt w ill appear in the text a s CUP plus pagereference.

4 Susan Buck-Morss, The O rigin of N egative D ialectics (New York: FreePress, 1977), p. 121.

5 See Rolf Wiggershaus,The Frankfurt School: I ts H istory, Theor ies and Poli ti cal Significance , trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1995), p. 609. See a lso p. 606 (in review ing N egati ve D ialecti cs ,Wiggershaus asserts that Adorno was aware of how certain of his viewsw ere ‘close’ t o ‘existential philosophy’).

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6 This is not coincidental. As a yo ung man, Adorno w as so immersed inKierkegaa rd’s thought tha t Siegfried Kracauer w rote to Leo Low enthal t hat‘if Teddie one day ma kes a real declara tion of his love . . . it w ill undoubt-

edly take such a difficult form that the young lady will have to have readthe who le of Kierkegaa rd . . . to understa nd Teddie at all’. See Ro bertH ullot-Kentor’s Forew ord to Theodor W. Adorno, K ierkegaard: Constr uc- ti on of the Aesthetic , trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1989), p. xii citing Leo Lowenthal, ‘Recollections ofAdorno’, Telos 61 (Fall 1984): 160. Further references to Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic will appear in the text as K plus pagereference.

7 This discussion serves as an important rejoinder to tho se w ho w ouldinterpret Adorno as an archetypal poststructuralist. In the opening

sentences, Adorno declares: ‘All attempts to comprehend the writings ofphilosophers as poetry ha ve missed their truth content. P hilosophical formrequires the interpretation of the real a s a bind ing nexus of concepts’ (K , p.3). The poststructuralist rejection of H egel’s ‘labor o f t he concept’ in fa vorof a n open analysis of ‘ the text’ is not o ne that Adorno w ould embrace.

8 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembl ing /Repetition , ed. and trans. H ow ardV. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1971), p. 90.

9 I should indicate that there is a good deal of hostility tow ard Adorno’sinterpreta tion o f Kierkegaard – much of it revolving aro und this very point.

(Indeed, I had the chance personally to encounter some of this hostilitywhen presenting an earlier draft of this paper at the Society for Phenom-enology and Existential Philosophy.) Still, not all Kierkegaard scholarsw ould disagree w ith Ado rno o n this point. See, fo r example, Louis M ackey,‘The Loss of the World in Kierkegaard’s Ethics’, in his Points of V iew : Readings of K ierkegaard (Tallaha ssee: Florida Sta te University Press, 1986).

10 Walter Benjamin, whose ow n wo rk inspired Adorno ’s characterization ofthe bourgeois intérieur , presciently stated that it is ‘very possible theauthor’s later books will spring from this one’ (K , p. xii).

11 M y following explication of the ambiguous phrase ‘construction of the

aesthetic’ draws upon both Buck-Morss and Wiggershaus.12 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea o f N atural H istory’, Telos 60 (Summer1984): 111.

13 Theodo r W. Adorno , ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos 31 (Spring 1977):126.

14 ib id ., 127.15 See Louis Ma ckey, Kierk egaard: A K ind of Poet (Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. 3–4.16 According to those critics w ho seek a rapprochement between Adorno a nd

Heidegger, Adorno’s opposition to Heidegger was primarily motivated bythe lat ter’s politics. See, fo r exa mple, Fred D allma yr,

Between Freibur g and Frankfurt: Toward a Crit ical O ntology (Amherst: University of M assachu-setts Press, 1991), p. 54: ‘Needless to sa y, Adorno ’s anta gonism w as great lydeepened and intensified by Heidegger’s pro-Nazi affiliation.’ (Dallmayrbuilds upon Hermann Mörchen’s Adorno und H eidegger: Untersuchung

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Einer Philosophischen Kommunikations verweigerung [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981].) In contrast, it is my belief that this understates the deepphilosophical differences tha t existed betw een the tw o thinkers – differences

that I can o nly touch upon here.17 Theodor W. Adorno, N egati ve D ialecti cs , tra ns. E. B. Ashton (New York:

Continuum, 1992), p. 101. Further references to N egati ve D ialecti cs willappear in the text as ND plus page reference.

18 Theodor W. Adorno, M inima M oralia , trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York:Verso, 1978), pp. 16–17. Further references to M inima M oralia w ill appearin the text as MM plus page reference.

19 Whether, in fact, the social sta te of the community is ‘ra tiona l’ presents acomplicated question . To b e sure, H egel’s famous claim in the Philosophy of Right that ‘what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ is

not an apo logetic for the status quo, i.e. if a sta te exists it must be rationa l,as Right H egelians ha ve ma inta ined. To be ‘a ctual’ ca rries a specia lizedmeaning fo r H egel (as, for exa mple, to ‘ exist’ carries a specialized meaningfor Kierkegaard). ‘Actuality’ is synonymous with rationality; mereexistence is not enough. (And H egel really w asn’t a fa n o f the Prussian stateanyway.) Therefore, might it be that a truly ‘rational’ Hegelian societywould require the kind of freedom for particularity that would meetAdorno ’s ob jections? This question must still be answ ered in t he nega tive.Although Hegel speaks of subjective freedom, which suggests a concernw ith a unity o f diff erences, he still saw his w orld a s largely rat iona l, albeit

in need of reform. This suggests a failure to carry through his owndialectic. (See the following note. )20 Along these lines, see Ma x H orkheimer and Theodo r W. Adorno’sD ialectic

of Enli ghtenment (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 24: ‘With the notionof determina te negativity, H egel revealed a n element tha t distinguishes theEnlightenment from the positivist degeneracy to which he attributes it. Byultimately making the conscious result of the whole process of negation –totality in system and in history – into an absolute, he of course contra-vened the prohibition and himself lapsed into mythology.’

21 ‘Philosophical Fragments’ w as the boo k’s title w hen it wa s initially circu-

lated among the other members of the exiled Institute for Social Research.See Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘Back to Adorno’, Telos 81 (Fall 1989): 6.22 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophi cal Fragments , ed. and trans. Howard V.

H ong a nd Edna H . H ong (Princeton, NJ: P rinceton University P ress, 1985),pp. 44–5.

23 ‘M ediately to affi rm immediacy, instead of comprehending it as mediatedwithin itself, is to pervert thought into an apologia of its antithesis, into theimmediate lie. This perversion serves all bad purposes, from the privatepighead edness of “ life’s-like-tha t” to the justifica tion o f social injustice asa law of nature. . . . D ialectical mediation is not a recourse to the moreabstract, but a resolution of the concrete in itself’ (

MM , pp. 73–4).

24 Simon Jarvis makes this point in Adorno: A Critical I ntroduction (New York: R outledge, 1998), p. 212.

25 Without putting too fi ne a point on it, even certain substantive aspects ofKierkegaard’s thought – albeit his earlier thought – tend to approach

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Adorno’s concern with trying to experience otherness in its concreteness. Inthe Concept of I rony , for example, Kierkegaard compares the concept to aphilosophical knight and the phenomenon to a woman, and asserts that

‘even if the observer do es bring the concept along w ith him, it is still of greatimportance that the phenomenon remain inviolate and that the concept beseen as coming into existence through the phenomenon’. As far as it goes,this resona tes w ith Adorno ’s cla im tha t the concept is true only to the degreethat it is false – that is, a true concept is a concept that is not ‘true’ in ametaphysical sense, for only a concept that is not ‘true’ in the metaphysi-cal sense retains the fluidity to let itself continually pass away in responseto the ever changing na ture of the phenomenon. See Søren Kierkegaa rd, The Concept of I rony , ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong(Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 9.

26 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s D octrine of Love’, in H aroldBloo m (ed.) Soren K ierk egaard: M odern Cri ti cal Views (New York: C helseaHouse Publishers, 1989), pp. 19–34.

27 ibid ., p. 28.28 ibid., p. 29. Kierkegaa rd even had the beginnings of a critique of capital-

ism that augurs certain Adornian themes. While battling the Corsair , helaments that ‘when passion and commercial interests determine the issue,when there is no room for the harmony of category relations but only therattle of money in the cash box, and when passion is propelled to theextreme that even the subscriber buys along with the paper the right

contemptibly to dispatch what is being written – this is another matter’. AsJames Marsh has pointed out, much of the critique is already present,namely, the corrupting influence of money, the way that money smoothesover category d ifferences, the ab ility o f the media to a rouse a debased formof passion, and the license to dismiss complicated w orks tha t a re not easilyreduced to the lowest common denominator. See James L. Marsh,‘Kierkegaard and Critical Theory’, in Matustik and Westphal, Kierkegaard in Post/M oderni ty , pp. 199–215.

29 Adorno beginsM inima M oralia by cha stising modern philosophy for givingup ‘the teaching of the good life’, which ‘from time immemorial was

regarded as the true field of philosophy’ (MM , p. 15).30 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Adorno as the D evil’, Telos 19 (1974): 127.31 ib id ., 130.32 ib id ., 135.33 ‘A simple consideration of history demonstrates just how much the question

of theory and practice depends upon the question of subject and object.’Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Marginalia to Theory and Practice’, in Critical M odels: I nterventi ons and Catchwords , tra ns. H enry W. Pickford (New York: C olumbia University P ress, 1998), p. 259.

34 Theodo r W. Adorno , ‘Resignation’, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.) The Culture

Industry (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 173.

35 ibid. , pp. 174–5.36 Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln,

NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 17.37 M ichael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker, ‘Betw een Impotence and Illusion:

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Adorno’s Art of Theory and Practice’, N ew German Critique 57 (Fall1992): 87.

38 See ibid. , 121.

39 Paul Piccone, G eneral Introduction to The Essent ial Frankfur t School Reader , ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum,1993), p. xvi.

40 Horkheimer and Adorno, D ialectic of Enli ghtenment , p. 40.41 Theodo r W. Adorno , ‘O n the H istorical Adequacy of C onsciousness’,

interview with Peter von Haselberg, Telos 56 (Summer 1983): 100–1.42 ib id ., 101.43 ib id ., 102.44 ib id ., 101.45 As Hegel points out in the section of the Phenomenology entitled ‘Reason

as Testing La w s’, because the categorical imperative ‘is a ta utology, a ndindifferent to the content, one content is just as acceptable to it as itsopposite’, and t he content tha t w ill preva il is the existing one. G . W. F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1977), pp. 257–8. Ego psychology’s normalizing pushcashes out in much the same way.

46 Adorno, ‘M arginalia to Theory and Practice’, p. 265.47 ibid ., p. 277.48 ibid ., p. 274.49 Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of M oral Philosophy (1963 lecture series),

tra ns. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford , C A: Sta nford University Press, 2000),p. 7.50 ibid. , pp. 7–8.51 Adorno, ‘Ma rginalia to Theory and Practice’, p. 266.52 ibid., p. 274. The ‘conspirators of 20 July’ refers to those G erman offi cers

who tried to kill Hitler in his bunker in East Prussia.53 Adorno, Problems of M oral Philosophy , p. 7.54 Adorno, ‘O n the H istorical Adeq uacy of C onsciousness’, p. 102.

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1-adorno's kierkegaardian debt

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