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2001 27: 77Philosophy Social CriticismDavid 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:Construction of the Aesthetic. 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 attacks on identity-thinking, the retention of a negative utopian stand-point of critique, and a deliberately provocative style of writing, all of whichare 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 byHabermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Kierkegaard’sacceptance by deconstructionists, in contrast, has been somewhat slowerin coming – though certain philosophers, such as Louis Mackey, Mark

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Taylor and John D. Caputo, have been making the argument for sometime. With the publication of Derrida’s ‘Donner la mort’, however, thissituation has changed.1 And, indeed, given Kierkegaard’s unremittingattacks 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 that which deconstruction cannotabide, namely, an efficacious subject who is far more than just a functionof language. Indeed, although it goes without saying that deconstruc-tionists are heavily influenced by Heidegger’s thought, what theydisagree with most in it is Heidegger’s idea of existential authenticity,which is the very point at which he draws most heavily uponKierkegaard.

Given his rejection of every ‘philosophy of the subject’, which is aposition that he shares with deconstructionists, it is ironic that 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 thatKierkegaard 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 attained, then both the speaker and the listener werealready 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’sarchitectonic, 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

78Philosophy & Social Criticism 27 (1)





never explicitly sought to connect with Kierkegaard. Adorno was inhis twenties when his only major work on Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard:Construction of the Aesthetic, 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 renaissance in Germany due to the writings of Tillich, Barth, Jaspersand 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:‘Heidegger “falls behind” Kierkegaard, by Adorno’s criteria, since thelatter’s critical perception of social reality led him at least to posethe ontological question negatively.’4 Going a step further, I wouldargue that a good deal of Adorno’s hostility toward existentialismarose from his distaste for its particular German manifestation, which,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 affinitieswith many elements of Kierkegaard’s ‘negative’ existential philosophy,5and that a comparison of their works suggests that various Kierkegaar-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 Hegel, Adorno is sympathetic 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?

79Sherman: Adorno’s Kierkegaardian debt





I

After opening Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic with a crucialdiscussion of the need to avoid interpreting philosophy as poetry, which‘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 stating, in various ways, that he is ‘a kind of poet’,Kierkegaard also sees himself as a philosopher, declaring in Fear andTrembling, for instance, that ‘I am no poet and I go at things only dialec-tically’.8 And, indeed, according to Adorno, in spite of Kierkegaard’svarious claims to being a poet, it is ultimately the latter claim that shouldbe privileged: ‘He calls himself a poet when he undertakes to recapitu-late the poetic existence that constitutes . . . the location of depravity inhuman life. Without exception, the origin of the name poetry inKierkegaard’s work is transparently philosophical’ (K, p. 6). Still, certaindistinctive 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 ofthese 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 Kierkegaardhimself demands), we must penetrate his poetic pseudonyms, those‘altogether abstract representational figures’ through whom 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 intangibility of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors is sympto-matic of his deeper perspective on the nature of subjectivity itself, which,Adorno contends, can be correctly interpreted only by considering therelationship 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






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 adeclining 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 that transcends consciousness. The world of things is for himneither part of the subject nor independent of it. Rather, this world isomitted. It supplies the subject with the mere ‘occasion’ for the deed, withmere resistance to the act of faith. In itself, this world remains random andtotally indeterminate. (K, p. 29)9

As evidenced by the ‘immanent dialectic’ that he proffers within 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, thealienation 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 object originate historically. . . . If subject and object 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 conceivesof 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 castingout 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).






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 isunreachable’ (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 all the more to fall 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 father and son would stroll within the parlor, all 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 unseenworld. (The only semblance of the external world that manages to workits way into the intérieur does so through the hall mirror, and what isreflected – the endless row of apartment buildings off which the rentiermakes 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 world that has already effectively receded into thepast, the intérieur, which is designed to preserve that past, would makeof it something that transcends the merely historical. It would make thisbygone era into something eternal and natural – in other words, into athing of unchanging nature. In the apartment, then, eternity and historymerge together: ‘In semblance . . . the historical world 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 way that clearly anticipates the themes of Dialectic of Enlightenment.10

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






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 God. Adorno thus asserts:

The category that dialectically unfolds here is that of paradoxical sacrifice.Nowhere is the prerogative of consciousness pushed further, nowhere morecompletely denied, than in the sacrifice of consciousness as the fulfillmentof ontological reconciliation. With a truly Pascalian expanse, Kierkegaard’sdialectic swings between the negation of consciousness and its unchallengedauthority. . . . The category of sacrifice, by means of which the system tran-scends itself, at the same time and fully contrary to expectation, holdsKierkegaard’s philosophy systematically together as its encompassing 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 nature; originating in nature itself, hopeis only able to truly overcome it by maintaining 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 ofreason, 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 with the concrete contents of experience. To the extentthat the aesthetic deals with the non-spiritual, i.e. the object, sensuous


05 Sherman (jl/d) 24/11/00 9:02 am 3




matter, or nature, Kierkegaard depreciates it. (While referring to thelater Kierkegaard’s aversion to art, Adorno declares: ‘His antipathy forart expresses the longing for an imageless presence . . . an imageless self-presentation of truth’ [K, p. 136].) The Kierkegaardian aesthetic is thuswholly rarefied – devoid of a trace of nature. But by virtue of this denialof 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 ‘existentialdialectic’ (and prior to both religion and philosophy in Hegel’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, therecan 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, however, 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, which employs the same method that 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 does not meet up with a fixed 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 and dispersed elements of the question arebrought into various groupings long enough for them to close together ina figure out of which the solution springs forth, while the question dis-appears – so philosophy has to bring its elements . . . into changing trialcombinations [constellations], until they fall into a figure which can be readas an answer.14

In Kierkegaard, Adorno arranged the miscellaneous elements ofKierkegaard’s oeuvre into a constellation of images that metaphoricallyilluminated the historical truth that was the impulse for his philosophy.As previously discussed, from the petrified reproductions of nature tothe threatening social reality that was reflected in the hallway mirror, itwas 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






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 meansembracing 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 theperpetuation of this sacrifice had outlasted any of 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 that by which he immediately is what he is’15), Kierkegaard falls intothe very idealism that he sought to escape. According to Adorno, thisis invariably the result when the dualism of form and content is rigidlymaintained, as is the case with Kierkegaard, who attempts 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 ofsocial 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 – whichfrom 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 thefirst place, a failure that sets a precedent the German existentialists ofthis century would emulate.

Accordingly, as was indicated at the start of this paper, Adorno’sattack on Kierkegaard also functions as an attack on Heidegger. In con-cluding this review of Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 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 between Adorno and Kierkegaardare more productive than for seeking one between Adorno andHeidegger, which, nonetheless, has 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






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 otherwords, unlike Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, which holds thatthere is a meaning to which existence must correspond, the meaningKierkegaard would find is generated entirely out of the domain 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 comprehension of the 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-statizations under the sign of identity and are rejected precisely to the extentthat they set up a pure being of existence in opposition to the existing ‘par-ticular individual’. . . . Because the existing takes 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. Hence the existence of the person is for Kierkegaard a processthat 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 Negative Dialectics (‘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 Heideggerwould call the ontical. But in taking the general term ‘is’ by itself, devoidof both subject and predicate, Heidegger transfigures this ontical term,whose ‘generality is a promissory note on particularization’, into onethat is first and foremost ontological, and therefore hypostatizes it in itsgenerality. Being itself thus becomes an object. ‘Yet Being is no moreindependent of the “is” than that state 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






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 ofBeing 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 between the concept and that whichit means; but Heidegger treats it as identity, as pure Being itself, devoid ofits otherness. (ND, p. 104)

Given its objectless inwardness, Kierkegaard’s ‘infinitely negative’subject itself arguably 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 spiritual 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 thatcannot 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, Kierkegaard: Construction ofthe Aesthetic was written before Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany.And although, in one sense, Adorno’s work was relatively unified overhis 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 attacks Kierkegaard for breaking off the subject–object dialec-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, during the war years, when it became increasingly clear that ‘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






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. ‘Worldhistory is for Hegel what the individual is for Kierkegaard’ (K, p. 74),and in both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, whichwere written around the time of the war, Adorno no longer feels com-pelled to show that the individual cannot escape world 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 favorableanalysis of Kierkegaard in ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, whichwill briefly be considered below.

In the opening paragraphs of Minima Moralia, for instance, Adornodeclares that Hegel ultimately denied his own thought by failing to carrythrough the dialectic, and that this failure, which arose from his system’sclaim to totality, led him to give short shrift to the individual:

The dismissive gesture which Hegel, in contradiction to his own 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 status in the construction of the whole. The knowledge that in pre-history the objective tendency asserts 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 again for the liquidation of the particular. . . . The individual as suchhe for the most part considers, naively, as an irreducible datum – just whatin his theory of knowledge he decomposes.18

In spite of the fact that Hegel’s ‘method schooled that of MinimaMoralia’ (MM, p. 16), his ‘large historical categories’ not only reflecthistory’s ‘objective tendency’ to destroy individuality, but also 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 face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradi-cation of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of thesocial force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the 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






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 would seem that the way in which Adorno would deal withthese 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 tovindicate 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 world, Kierkegaard’s notion of individuality is based on an infi-nitely negative ‘vertical’ relationship with God. Conversely, as we justsaw, Adorno is no less troubled by Hegel’s individual, who 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 Hegel’s dialectic, i.e. determinate negativity, 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 inHegel’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.






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 notionthat 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, which is the very title that Adorno and Horkheimerfirst selected for what would become Dialectic of Enlightenment,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 try 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 approach is less self-conscious than it is for Adorno.According to Adorno,

Kierkegaard’s project is the precise antithesis of the Kantian thesis and theHegelian synthesis. Against Kant, he pursues the plan of concrete ontology;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 Hegelian synthesis but rather in a final 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 formation in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Despite its cheap-ening of individuality, then, Hegel’s dialectic offers a level of concretionthat is missing in, say, the Kantian subject, the transcendental unity ofapperception.

On the other hand, while Adorno’s debt to Kant’s aesthetics is alsoclear enough, less clear is the fact that both Adorno and Kierkegaarddraw sustenance from the Critique of Pure Reason. Thus, although the






critical philosophy proffers the kind of ‘constitutive subjectivity’ thatAdorno so ardently rejects in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics,Adorno claims that Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself at least acknow-ledges the ultimate impossibility of obtaining a conceptual 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-torical reconciliation. Of course, such sociohistorical reconciliations 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 tomake room for faith, which includes rejecting those proofs of God’sexistence that Kierkegaard perceives as an affront to Christianity.Moreover, while neither Adorno nor Kierkegaard buys into Kant’sCritique of Practical Reason, both of them avail 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 hair’s breadth, from 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, isactually to be accounted for by drawing on that which is already withinthe realm of existence, but has not yet been conceptualized due toidentity-thinking. Implicitly referring to Hegel’s claim in the Philosophyof 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 conceptof 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 than 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, while for the other it is sociohistorical. Thus, in the Prefaceto the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard says that ‘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:






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. Preciselybecause the negative is present in existence and present everywhere(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 ‘what is’ and try to reconstruct it through his orher own actions. The negative also reflects our essential existentialposition 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), and thus must bear an intermi-nable deferral of truth. Yet, Kierkegaard says, we must strive towardthis deferred truth in passion – that is, we 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 asKierkegaard’s existing person must constantly embrace the Absurd withan 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 (while 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 the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shedon the world 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






one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleityor violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is thetask of thought. . . . Beside the demand thus placed on thought, thequestion 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 which was written in 1939, the sameyear that Adorno and Horkheimer began their collaboration on Dialec-tic of Enlightenment. This article begins with an examination ofKierkegaard’s Works of Love, 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 own 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 hatred of other human beings, and, accord-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 lovethe universalized other reflects an expulsion of nature, and, in turn,nature revenges itself on this abstract 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 faras 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 motiveshave good critical sense as soon as they are interpreted in terms of socialcritique. Many of his positive assertions gain the concrete significance theyotherwise lack as soon as one translates them into concepts of a rightsociety.27

Kierkegaard’s hostility toward the masses, in other words, implicitlyincorporates within it a hostility toward the dominating 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 own historical situation. . . . Kierkegaardwas Hegelian enough to have a clean-cut idea of history.’28)






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 findthis surprising, of course, since both are preoccupied with resurrectingthe 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 first of his four ‘Possible and Actual Theses by Lessing’, whichdeals with the ‘paradox’ of communication, Kierkegaard asserts thatthere are actually two types of communication. The first type, which isnot of particular interest, is that ‘direct’ form of communication that ‘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 amanner that forces the recipients to contribute something to theirassimilation of the communication (which is precisely what mass societytends to discourage), and it is this objective that motivates both thecomplex and fragmentary nature of his works. Even Adorno’s most ‘sys-tematic’ works, such as Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory,appear to be little more than a constellation of essays structured aroundan organizing principle, whereas other works, such as Dialectic ofEnlightenment and Minima Moralia, are comprised (in part and whole,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






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

III

In Kierkegaard, it will be recalled, Adorno asserts that Kierkegaardbreaks off the subject–object dialectic by retreating to the ‘objectlessinwardness’ of ‘pure’ subjectivity, but that in abstractly fleeing his socio-historical context, Kierkegaard ultimately, albeit unwittingly, drags itssubstance into the core of his subjectivity, where it then conditions histhought in an unmediated fashion. Given the similarities betweenAdorno 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 off the subject–object dialectic with analogous 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, which affords his standpoint of critique, does his own 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 which 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:






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 poorly 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, which is reminiscent of Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard,is based upon Lyotard’s broader claim that Adorno represents the badfinale of dialectical thinking. According to Lyotard, although Marx’sHegelian-inspired dialectic tended to enervate ‘the libidinal 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 justnegative 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 canonly 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 affirm that which Lyotard’s positivistic Libidinal Economy wouldhave us unreservedly affirm as an initial matter. Accordingly, for theLyotard of Libidinal Economy, which was written 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 practice that causeshim to abstain from practice altogether.

In concluding this paper, I shall offer a few thoughts on the problemof the relationship between theory and practice 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






political practice is not tantamount to an (inadvertent) embrace of theexisting practices, which is his own charge against Kierkegaard. I intendto show that, contrary to the generally accepted belief, Adorno’s theorycan translate into political practice.

Generally speaking, the argument against Adorno’s approach to theproblem 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 practice. But inasmuch as Adorno rejectsthe underpinnings of ‘traditional theory’, critically recognizing thattheory 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 practice, therefore, theory is no less imperiled by engaging in practicethan 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 toward the GermanNew 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 apologies 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 ‘attempting 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 contestsor is rechanneled by that totality toward its own ends.34 To the contrary,above all, he argues, ‘the force of resistance’ lies with ‘the uncompro-misingly critical thinker’, whose thinking not only ‘points beyond itself’,but, crucially, at least in some form (even if suppressed or forgotten),






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 paragraph, however, this position maywell be unduly optimistic. Similarly, in Negative Dialectics, 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 framework of our situation – that ‘under existing circumstancesthere 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 theexisting coercive structure?

Peter Uwe Hohendahl argues that ‘the adequacy or failure ofAdorno’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 atheory of political action might be culled from an 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 that‘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 Dialectic of Enlightenment 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 ofconcrete practices that maintain this tension between 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






type of concrete practice,38 they are, to be sure, correct in the sense thatart evidences such a practice, but not in the sense for which Adorno hasbeen reproached – namely, for failing to provide a basis for politicalpractice. 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 was possible only by escaping into esthetics,where micrological analyses of the particular provide aphoristic glimpsesof that ‘false totality’ no longer immediately apprehensible through dis-credited traditional conceptual means. . . . Adorno’s micrological analysissucceeds 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 Dialectic of Enlightenment, which insists upon the ‘remembranceof 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‘irrational’ reactions themselves occur within an experiential frameworkthat is theoretically informed – but Adorno’s critical point is that anypossibility for a genuinely progressive practice must sublate a somaticresponse 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 of subjectivity. To this,






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 ofexperience. Experience without thought is as far removed from true experi-ence as is experience without idiosyncrasy.43

Because Adorno sees idiosyncratic or blind reactions, such as one’s hairstanding on end,44 as subjective responses to social phenomena that areno less important than reason, he asserts in Negative Dialectics 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).Viewed from a somewhat different angle, this is why Adorno took greatpains to attack the neo-Freudian theorists, such as Karen Horney, whoin turning toward ego psychology discarded (or, at 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-psychologisticmorality to the extent that instinct is subordinated to reason – or, morespecifically, the particular reason of the sociohistorical context withinwhich 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 Libidinal Economy – leads the individual tofall prey to a bad reality no less than Kant’s pure practical reason orego psychology.

In sum, as we 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 would immediately follow theobject in either of these forms – that is, it precludes a practice that wouldimmediately 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 thecontext 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






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 that he diagnoses in Kierkegaardand Heidegger. In other words, as Adorno himself recognizes, he cannotsubordinate practice to theory any more than the decisionists whom 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 that a non-repressive praxis is actually 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 coterminouswith the theoretical sphere, and this fact is itself a basic philosophicaldeterminant of the sphere of practical 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 insiststhat ‘spontaneity . . . attach itself to the vulnerable places of rigidifiedreality, where the ruptures caused by the pressure of rigidification appearexternally, [and] not thrash about indiscriminately, abstractly’.51

Tethered to a particular setting, which 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






have to look on any longer, rationalizes the pang of conscience. The attitudeat the edge of uttermost horror, such as was felt by the conspirators of 20July who preferred to risk perishing under torture to doing nothing, waspossible and admirable. To claim from a distance that one feels the sameway as they do confuses the power of imagination with the violence of theimmediately 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 otherwise lose it through theoretical abstraction), as is the case ‘withwhat Kafka 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.

Department of Philosophy, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

Notes

1 See, for example, John D. Caputo, ‘Instants, Secrets and Singularities:Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida’, in Martin J. Matustik andMerold Westphal (eds) Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1995).

2 See, for example, Martin J. Matustik, Postnational Identity: Critical Theoryand Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (NewYork: Guilford Press, 1993), which was inspired by Habermas’s 1987Copenhagen lectures.

3 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to PhilosophicalFragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 72–3. Further references to theConcluding Unscientific Postscript will appear in the text as CUP plus pagereference.

4 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: FreePress, 1977), p. 121.

5 See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories andPolitical Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1995), p. 609. See also p. 606 (in reviewing Negative Dialectics,Wiggershaus asserts that Adorno was aware of how certain of his viewswere ‘close’ to ‘existential philosophy’).


PSC





6 This is not coincidental. As a young man, Adorno was so immersed inKierkegaard’s thought that Siegfried Kracauer wrote to Leo Lowenthal that‘if Teddie one day makes a real declaration of his love . . . it will undoubt-edly take such a difficult form that the young lady will have to have readthe whole of Kierkegaard . . . to understand Teddie at all’. See RobertHullot-Kentor’s Foreword to Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construc-tion 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 those who wouldinterpret Adorno as an archetypal poststructuralist. In the openingsentences, Adorno declares: ‘All attempts to comprehend the writings ofphilosophers as poetry have missed their truth content. Philosophical formrequires the interpretation of the real as a binding nexus of concepts’ (K, p.3). The poststructuralist rejection of Hegel’s ‘labor of the concept’ in favorof an open analysis of ‘the text’ is not one that Adorno would embrace.

8 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling /Repetition, ed. and trans. HowardV. 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 toward Adorno’sinterpretation of Kierkegaard – much of it revolving around 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 scholarswould disagree with Adorno on this point. See, for example, Louis Mackey,‘The Loss of the World in Kierkegaard’s Ethics’, in his Points of View:Readings of Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986).

10 Walter Benjamin, whose own work 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 My following explication of the ambiguous phrase ‘construction of theaesthetic’ draws upon both Buck-Morss and Wiggershaus.

12 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, Telos 60 (Summer1984): 111.

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

14 ibid., 127.15 See Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University

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

Heidegger, Adorno’s opposition to Heidegger was primarily motivated bythe latter’s politics. See, for example, Fred Dallmayr, Between Freiburg andFrankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology (Amherst: University of Massachu-setts Press, 1991), p. 54: ‘Needless to say, Adorno’s antagonism was greatlydeepened and intensified by Heidegger’s pro-Nazi affiliation.’ (Dallmayrbuilds upon Hermann Mörchen’s Adorno und Heidegger: Untersuchung






Einer Philosophischen Kommunikations verweigerung [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981].) In contrast, it is my belief that this understates the deepphilosophical differences that existed between the two thinkers – differencesthat I can only touch upon here.

17 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:Continuum, 1992), p. 101. Further references to Negative Dialectics willappear in the text as ND plus page reference.

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

19 Whether, in fact, the social state of the community is ‘rational’ presents acomplicated question. To be sure, Hegel’s famous claim in the Philosophyof Right that ‘what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ isnot an apologetic for the status quo, i.e. if a state exists it must be rational,as Right Hegelians have maintained. To be ‘actual’ carries a specializedmeaning for Hegel (as, for example, to ‘exist’ carries a specialized meaningfor Kierkegaard). ‘Actuality’ is synonymous with rationality; mereexistence is not enough. (And Hegel really wasn’t a fan of the Prussian stateanyway.) Therefore, might it be that a truly ‘rational’ Hegelian societywould require the kind of freedom for particularity that would meetAdorno’s objections? This question must still be answered in the negative.Although Hegel speaks of subjective freedom, which suggests a concernwith a unity of differences, he still saw his world as largely rational, albeitin need of reform. This suggests a failure to carry through his owndialectic. (See the following note. )

20 Along these lines, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialecticof Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 24: ‘With the notionof determinate negativity, Hegel revealed an element that 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’ was the book’s title when it was 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, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V.Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985),pp. 44–5.

23 ‘Mediately to affirm 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 privatepigheadedness of “life’s-like-that” to the justification of social injustice asa law of nature. . . . Dialectical 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 Introduction (NewYork: Routledge, 1998), p. 212.

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






Adorno’s concern with trying to experience otherness in its concreteness. Inthe Concept of Irony, for example, Kierkegaard compares the concept to aphilosophical knight and the phenomenon to a woman, and asserts that‘even if the observer does bring the concept along with 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 resonates with Adorno’s claim that 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 nature of the phenomenon. See Søren Kierkegaard, TheConcept of Irony, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 9.

26 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, in HaroldBloom (ed.) Soren Kierkegaard: Modern Critical Views (New York: ChelseaHouse Publishers, 1989), pp. 19–34.

27 ibid., p. 28.28 ibid., p. 29. Kierkegaard 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 rightcontemptibly 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 differences, the ability of the media to arouse a debased formof passion, and the license to dismiss complicated works that are not easilyreduced to the lowest common denominator. See James L. Marsh,‘Kierkegaard and Critical Theory’, in Matustik and Westphal, Kierkegaardin Post/Modernity, pp. 199–215.

29 Adorno begins Minima Moralia by chastising modern philosophy for givingup ‘the teaching of the good life’, which ‘from time immemorial wasregarded as the true field of philosophy’ (MM, p. 15).

30 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Adorno as the Devil’, Telos 19 (1974): 127.31 ibid., 130.32 ibid., 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 CriticalModels: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 259.

34 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Resignation’, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.) The CultureIndustry (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 Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker, ‘Between Impotence and Illusion:






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

38 See ibid., 121. 39 Paul Piccone, General Introduction to The Essential Frankfurt School

Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum,1993), p. xvi.

40 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 40.41 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness’,

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

as Testing Laws’, because the categorical imperative ‘is a tautology, andindifferent to the content, one content is just as acceptable to it as itsopposite’, and the content that will prevail 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, ‘Marginalia to Theory and Practice’, p. 265.47 ibid., p. 277.48 ibid., p. 274.49 Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (1963 lecture series),

trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000),p. 7.

50 ibid., pp. 7–8.51 Adorno, ‘Marginalia to Theory and Practice’, p. 266.52 ibid., p. 274. The ‘conspirators of 20 July’ refers to those German officers

who tried to kill Hitler in his bunker in East Prussia.53 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, p. 7.54 Adorno, ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness’, p. 102.






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