Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno

A thousand lamentable objects there,

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

—SHAKESPEARE, “The Rape of Lucrece”

THIS IS AN UNLIKELY SPOT FOR A YIDDISH STORY, but nevertheless: the chancellor rushes into the throne room and informs the king that the harvest has been infected; whoever eats from it falls insane. He urges the king to seize what untainted stores remain and rule a mad people sanely. The king refuses; he will not be separated from his people. “Instead” he tells his chancellor, “we will make signs on our foreheads so that when we are mad we will know what has happened.” The idea of a mark that would awaken them from history turned disaster bears some interest, but it is not beyond suspicion. For the mark on the forehead is of sacrificial lineage and recurrence to it in difficult times is not a thought to crack open history, but its most dependable reflex. The struggle to win control has always had the form of sacrifice, not because domination has been mismanaged, but because sacrifice is the dialectical truth of domination. This is the point of Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Domination does not contingently imply sacrifice, but is structurally sacrificial: the ego “owes its existence to the sacrifice of the present moment to the future”;¹ abstraction, the modus operandi of scientific control, is nothing other than the sacrifice of the particular to the universal. Adorno’s aim in tracing out this dialectic was to show that the historical effort to escape the compulsions of nature fails to achieve human autonomy because the nature that self-preservation is to preserve is destroyed by the logic of self-preservation. History is therefore a process of its own transformation into nature or—in Adorno’s alternate formulation—into myth, the condition of necessity from which it meant to escape. This analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment implies an aesthetics, and here the interest of the mark on the forehead returns somewhat transformed: Adorno’s aesthetics attempts to locate an image that would awaken history from its self-consuming progress as the compulsion to sacrifice. Such an image, however, would not be simple mimicry of the logic of sacrifice, but neither is it dialectically conceivable that the image would circumvent sacrifice. Rather, as Adorno wrote in one of his last formulations, it would be sacrifice that would become memory of nature as the expression of sacrifice: “All that art is capable of is to grieve for the sacrifice it makes and which it itself, in its powerlessness, is.”² Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic was the first major philosophical study Adorno published; it appeared in bookstores on February 27, 1933, the day that Hitler declared a national emergency and suspended the freedom of the press, marking the transition from chancellor to dictator.³ References to this moment in the appearance of Kierkegaard generally note this as “ironic.” But there is nothing ironic about it: Kierkegaard is the study of the unconscious reversal of history into nature, Adorno’s first analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment. According to Adorno, sacrifice “occupies the innermost cell of his [Kierkegaard’s] thought.”⁴ The process of his philosophy is a sacrificial struggle against nature: “through sacrifice he asserts his rule,”⁵ which nevertheless succumbs to nature because “sacrifice is itself mythical.”⁶ Although the ostensible claim of the philosophy of existence was to overcome the abstractness of idealism, abstraction remains its unwitting course in its sacrificial progress through Kierkegaard’s hierarchy of the “stages on life’s way”: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious spheres. “Existence” itself turns out to be a pure abstraction of which nothing can be predicated, and the redoubtable leap of faith is not an act of transcendence but the despairing culmination of self-sacrifice. The truth-content of “existence,” on the other hand, is in the sphere that “existence” rejects by its own progress, the aesthetic sphere of semblance: the sphere of melancholy, fragmentation, transience. In aesthetic semblance, existence passes away as the wish for a reality without sacrifice; it is the sphere of the memory of nature. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic of existence: “not to forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image.”⁷

Although Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic was Adorno’s first published philosophical work, this is not the work of a novice. Adorno had already written more than a hundred articles—mainly on music—as well as two extensive philosophical studies: a doctoral dissertation, The Transcendent Thing and Noema in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1924), and a professorial dissertation, a Habililationsschrift, The Concept of the Unconscious in Transcendental Psychology (1927), an analysis of the concept of the unconscious in Freud and Kant. This latter work should have qualified Adorno for a professorship at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, but its neo-Kantian sponsor, Hans Cornelius, rejected it—frankly hedging—as an “unworthy topic.” Three years later, Adorno, age twenty-seven, submitted the Kierkegaard study, this time successfully, under the direction of Paul Tillich. The order of these projects of course does not document when Adorno became interested in them. As far as the Kierkegaard study is concerned, it was not exclusively written in the three years following the completion of the Kant/Freud study. Its gapless density depended on a visceral familiarity with every word of Kierkegaard ‘s extensive oeuvre. From a letter of Siegfried Kracauer to Leo Lowenthal, dated 1923, it is evident that the twenty-year-old Adorno was already completely familiar with Kierkegaard’s writings and perhaps spoke an adolescent Kierkegaardese: “If Teddie one day makes a real declaration of his love . . . it will undoubtably take such a difficult form that the young lady will have to have read the whole of Kierkegaard . . . to understand Teddie at all.”⁸ Kierkegaard, then, was one of Adorno’s earliest interests, which is not surprising. In the early 1920s German philosophy was in the midst of a Kierkegaard renaissance, as it was called, and almost every major development in philosophy depended on how Kierkegaard was appropriated: the emergence of existential philosophy in Jaspers first publications, the “dialectical theology” of Barth and Tillich, and, later in the decade, Heidegger’s Being and Time, all drew on Kierkegaard’s concept of existence as antidote to idealism. In this historical context the contentiousness of Adorno’s decipherment of Kierkegaard’s philosophy as the apex of idealism becomes evident. Although political turmoil and the war dissolved this context, Adorno’s interest in Kierkegaard continued through the war and after. In 1940 he gave a talk, later published in English as “Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,”⁹ to a seminar convened by Paul Tillich in New York City, where both had emigrated several years earlier. Whereas the Construction of the Aesthetic dealt exclusively with Kierkegaard as a philosopher, the 1940 lecture extended the analysis to his religious writings. In 1963, six years before his death, he wrote “Kierkegaard, One More Time,” a study of Kierkegaard’s last publications, their political implications, and his polemic against the established church.¹⁰ Apart from works directly on Kierkegaard, and there are several smaller pieces not mentioned here, Adorno’s writings bristle with reference to him, often explicitly, frequently as sous-entendu. And in another sense all of Adorno’s works draw arcs out from his involvement with Kierkegaard because it was in this first major work that Adorno developed the fundamental ideas and forms of everything he ever wrote after it. Passages from Kierkegaard could be transposed seamlessly to his final works, as well as the reverse. In his review of the book, published only several days after it appeared, but after he had already fled the country, Benjamin was prescient: “In this book much is contained in little space. Very possible that the author’s later books will spring from this one. In any case the book belongs to that class of rare and peculiar first-works in which a winged thought appears in the puppation of critique.”¹¹ The image, however, Adorno would dispute: the organic was not the measure of his work.

Whether they admired the book or not, the other early reviewers of Kierkegaard, like most since, found it impossible to summarize. F. J. Brecht wrote: “To discuss this book is difficult; to sum it up without distorting it, impossible,”¹² and then Mr. Brecht seized the reviewer’s prerogative to shoot and run and panned the book in half a page. Helmut Kuhn found the study brilliant but flawed: “Its deficiency . . . is that its energetic and adroit thought does not solidify into binding and definitive concepts; rather it rolls by in expressive and polished formulations that are frequently overwhelmingly successful but also hovering and fragile.”¹³ Another complained that the reading was fatiguing: “the peculiarly swirling and swimming” text made understanding difficult.¹⁴ Karl Loewith called the book insightful in spite of its “dictatorial, ranting and mannered style:”¹⁵ if he had added “arty” and “artificial” he would have covered the field of invectives leveled at Adorno and his writings ever since. Loewith snipped out lists of themes from the book and packed them miscellaneously into paragraphs, quoting extensively. This was characteristic of the reviews. None of the reviewers considered why the book’s style was so difficult or offputting, or if what they found interesting in it might have been an accomplishment of a style that they all considered a distraction. They all could, and did, deftly recite the problem of idealism, in Hegel, in Kierkegaard, in Adorno, but as a parody of the critique of idealism. Idealism foundered because of its inability to fulfill its claim of overcoming the division of form and content, of bringing its object to speech. All of Adorno’s reviewers took their pose of masterful distance from the book as assurance that they could not possibly be implicated in such a difficult problem. It occurred to none of them to bring to bear on the form of the review a central insight of the book: that abstraction is the mark of the mythical. Bound to clearheadedness yet unable to organize a work that fragmented into a chaos of partial themes under the pressure of summarizing it, their vision drifted through the text with an archaic anxiety.

It is hard to find other words than paragraph and chapter to describe the basic organization of Kierkegaard. Apparently, seven chapters are composed of a sequence of paragraphs. But these concepts are misleading, as any attempt to read straight from one paragraph to the next, even one sentence to the next, makes evident. The parts are not related to each other by way of the compulsion of argumentation, logic’s instinctual life; while they are thoroughly logical, they do not develop by way of a subordinating logic of chapter and paragraph.¹⁶ Adorno’s ideal of form was that “every sentence should be equally near the center-point.”¹⁷ The parts refer to one another and complete one another by a principle of contrast. Topics develop without any schematized preparation and are taken up again at later points without any reference back to earlier discussions or any attempt to sum up the thoughts that have been developed. There is no “as we have seen,” no “as we will see later,” no introduction, summary, or conclusion.¹⁸ There are no transitions other than those made by the material itself.¹⁹ No more than New Music would settle for paraphrasing expression would the Construction of the Aesthetic settle for paraphrasing Kierkegaard. For Adorno the only solution to idealism is to fulfill it: to achieve the self-expression of the material. Each section of the book studies details and fragments of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre as a microcosm of the whole. The image of an outdated travel guide, for example, studied at the beginning of chapter 2, shows the decay of a meaning that should be canonical. Adorno continues to pursue the figure of the separation of a canonical meaning from the text in other of Kierkegaard’s images. This antinomy emerges as the figure of an objectless inwardness, one from which both meaning and the world of things are absolutely separate: “there is only an isolated subjectivity, surrounded by a dark otherness.”²⁰ The construction pursues a compositional nominalism.²¹ But because the particular element is itself a microcosm of the whole, every element is mediated by the whole. The construction obviates the distinction of thesis and argument.²² Only to the extent that Kierkegaard fails could his early reviewers have succeeded at extracting the main points; every point succeeds at becoming the main point. To call the style mannered hedges: it is pretentious. Although this is galling, it follows from the demands of the material, not from Adorno’s supposed high-handedness. If the material is to have full autonomy, if it is not to be subordinated to anything, a coyness is required: unerringly Adorno seems to take up something else whenever the text finally seems to settle into an issue. The result is hardly a harmonious flow, and it is not uncommon to find the jaggedness of Adorno’s language censured in reviews as no longer German or any language at all. Adorno went so far as to displace the reflexive pronoun to the end of the sentence²³ to trip up its natural momentum. Related to his critique of the organic idiom of tonality, which achieves a gaplessness under a forward pressure that drives one note into the next with which it merges, the gesture of Adorno’s language is an awkwardness to undo awkwardness: language that refuses to push—the idea of the human itself.²⁴

When Adorno was fifteen he studied Kant on Sundays with Siegfried Kracauer, who was, if anyone, the origin of Adorno’s idea of philosophy. Adorno wrote of these Sunday meetings: “I don’t exaggerate in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers. Extraordinarily talented pedagogically, Kracauer brought Kant to life for me. From the beginning, with his guidance, I discovered that the work was not to be read as pure epistemology, as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a sort of encipherment from which the historical situation of the mind could be read, with the vague expectation that with it something of the truth itself was to be won.”²⁵ This “vague expectation” of truth directed the initial impulse of Adorno’s study to decipher the social content of Kierkegaard’s thought. But this expectation would never have sufficed for the writing of the Construction of the Aesthetic. With characteristic generosity devoid of any desire to claim Adorno as his student, it was Kracauer who pointed out in an affectionately careful and judicious review of the book that its methodology derived from the concept of truth developed by Benjamin in his studies of Goethe and the Baroque drama: “In the view of these studies [i.e. Benjamin’s] the truth-content of a work reveals itself only in its collapse. . . . The work’s claim to totality, its systematic structure, as well as its superficial intentions share the fate of everything transient, but as they pass away with time the work brings characteristics and configurations to the fore that are actually images of truth.”²⁶ This process could be exemplified by a recurrent dream: throughout its recurrences its images age, if imperceptibly; its historical truth takes shape as its thematic content dissolves. It is the truth-content that gives the dream, the philosophical work, or the novel its resilience. This idea of historical truth is one of the most provocative rebuttals to historicism ever conceived: works are not studied in the interest of returning them to their own time and period, documents of “how it really was,” but rather according to the truth they release in their own process of disintegration. Thus Adorno writes in Kierkegaard: “the innermost (and hence from Kierkegaard hidden) dialectical truth could only be disclosed in the posthumous history of his work.”²⁷ Interpretation therefore depends on the historical configuration of the material.²⁸ The presentation of truth-content proceeds as a critique of the semblance of the organic, the claim to totality. The first step of Adorno’s work is therefore to challenge the purported living autonomy of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms through a critique of his poetic claim: “By rejecting his claim to be a poet . . . his pseudonyms are excluded as the constitutive element of his philosophy. . . . They are not living bodies in whose incomparable existence intention is densely embedded.”²⁹ Adorno shows the pseudonyms to be illustrations of philosophemes and thus breaks the shell of the philosophy; the imagery, however, rather than being reduced to the intention of these philosophemes, distances itself from it: “What the pseudonyms then turn out to say that is more than what the philosophical schematism had intended, their secret and concrete essence, falls, in the literalness of the disclosure, into the hands of interpretation.”³⁰ This is not a matter of subtracting philosophical intention from imagery. Once interpretation has rejected the compulsion of identity,³¹ the relation of the philosophemes to the imagery that illustrates them is reversed. The philosophemes become metaphors of the imagery that, taken literally, hold the keys to the philosophy. In Construction of the Aesthetic the bourgeois intérieur of the nineteenth century emerges as the central image of Kierkegaard’s philosophy: this image is a peculiar interweaving of nature and history, and it pulls all of his thought into its perspective.

Studies of Adorno’s early writings have stuck to the facts and thus distorted them. They characteristically embrace Adorno’s stated allegiance to neo-Kantian idealism in his dissertation and find a break from this position midway through his Kant/Freud study. This break is said to mark a transition from Kant to Marx; the first mature work of this Marxist was Kierkegaard.³² But Adorno no more started off as a neo-Kantian—as is clear from his reminiscences of Kracauer—than he matured in any simple sense as a Marxist. Kierkegaard, in fact, itself places Marx in the idealist tradition by taking cognizance of Marx’s effort in Capital to deduce society from the principle of exchange (a critique Adorno reiterated throughout his life). Adorno’s positions in his early works did indeed become increasingly Marxist, but once Marx is recognized as part of the idealist tradition it is no longer possible to suppose that, as Adorno became a Marxist, a complete break from idealism was made. While there are points of complete opposition, philosophies are not mutually exclusive; it is possible, even necessary, to have Marxian thoughts as a neo-Kantian, and the reverse. When Adorno’s works are not simply sorted according to the old saw of pre-and post-Marxist, a more concrete figure emerges. In his dissertation, The Transcendent Thing and Noema in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Adorno criticizes the claim of phenomenology to having secured the mind as a sphere of directly experiential, absolute origins. This sphere of immediacy—Adorno shows—is predicated on a subterfuge. Husserl excluded the structural aspect of the object—which would have introduced synthetic, mediating mental functions—by positing a transcendental object, which was then placed by methodological caveat beyond the bounds of investigation.³³ This critique of a spurious immediacy is fundamental to all critique of ideology. In Adorno’s work, however, this critique becomes more emphatic by drawing on the cognate critique of a false nature, as becomes more apparent in the Kant/Freud study. In this work Adorno employed neo-Kantian transcendental psychology to justify the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious in opposition to the organic ideal of vitalism. An unconscious that is rationally investigable is defended against one conceived as incommensurable with reason and available only to intuition. Adorno then gives a social analysis of the motivation of the vitalist doctrine: it is an effort to establish “islands . . . for the individual to which the person need only withdraw from the flood of the economic struggle in order, in contemplation or pleasure, to rest from the pressure of economic forces as at a summer camp for consciousness.” But the separateness of these islands is illusory: “Freedom from the economy is nothing else than economic freedom and remains restricted to a small circle of people as a luxury.”³⁴ The island beyond is dead center. Neither this Marxian analysis nor the psychoanalytic unconscious could finally be justified in neo-Kantian terms: both ultimately spring the unity of transcendental apperception; both reject the claim of consciousness that all its contents are “mine.” It is not a surprise, then, that Adorno’s neo-Kantian examiner, Cornelius, rejected the study. But however antagonistic these positions may be, Adorno was carrying out a related reflection as a neo-Kantian and as a Marxist: a realm of immediacy is shown to be established on the basis of a sort of dualism, which is itself shown to be merely tactical; once criticized, the claim to immediacy collapses. A great deal is implied here, much of which becomes apparent only in Adorno’s later writings: the critique of a false immediacy, a false nature, has as its intention a true immediacy, a new nature, but dialectically through the greatest distance from it. The idea of the reversal of mediation into a second immediacy, a second nature, has its source in the romantic rejection of the antithesis of nature and technique and can be traced from Rousseau and Kant through Schiller, Hegel, and Marx, alternately functioning—as throughout Adorno’s work—in sociopolitical and aesthetic contexts. In his aesthetics Adorno pursues this idea in every possible direction. In an early critique of the sound motion picture he writes that its effort to achieve a perfect organicity composed of image and voice actually tends toward stiltedness: “There is every reason to believe that the more closely pictures and words are coordinated, the more emphatically their intrinsic contradiction and the actual muteness of those who seem to be speaking are felt by the spectators.” Although the effort to mimetically achieve organicity ultimately leads to stiltedness, which it is the role of film music to obscure, a true organicity can be achieved only by way of a principle of dissonant composition: “The relation between music and picture is antithetic at the very moment when the deepest unity is achieved.”³⁵ Adorno pursues this same dialectic throughout his later writings, here characteristically: “Only the aesthetically completely articulated art work offers an image of an unmutilated reality, and thus of freedom. The art work that has been completely articulated through the most extreme mastery of the material, a work that by means of that mastery escapes most completely from simple organic existence, is once again closest to the organic.”³⁶

Kierkegaard’s critique of idealism, particularly in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, was devastating, to the point that subsequently the major works of objective idealism were hardly read.³⁷ Benjamin’s unfamiliarity with most of these works, for example, was probably part of Kierkegaard’s legacy. What is so important then, in Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard, is that it situates Kierkegaard within the idealist tradition, while taking the side of idealism against Kierkegaard. For Adorno, Enlightenment is bound to the problem of the recuperation of idealism because idealism holds the fate of the principle of identity. If reason is to be rescued from the vitalist critique, or the Kierkegaardian—in which thought attempts to repent for its claim to absoluteness by sacrificing itself in the paradox—then identity must become the force of nonidentity in such a way as to fulfill the claim to knowledge. It is therefore relevant to notice that the Construction of the Aesthetic is itself in the first place a “construction,” a concept with a long tradition in objective idealism. Although Adorno’s work does not deduce the object from the principle of identity, it remains allied with idealism in the ambiguity of its title as to whether the book is a presentation of Kierkegaard’s construction or is itself the construction of the aesthetic; this ambiguity, it must be noted, amounts to a claim to know the object from within, the most emphatic concept of experience. Central to Adorno’s construction is a reappropriation of Hegelian mediation. Mediation is usually understood as a going between, a third element that reconciles opposites, conceived on the model of communication and compromise. In Hegel’s philosophy, however, mediation is the dialectical—that is, antagonistic—process of the object itself in its inadvertent yet constitutive dependency on what it resists; the object comes to have its other in itself in differentiating itself from its other, so that the more it is itself, the more it is finally not itself. What is excluded prevails, and this transpires most intensely and is best seen as the object’s essence in the extremes of the object under consideration. In these terms, any effort to discover the truth of a matter by seeking the average or the mean of its reality sets up a smoke screen. Truth appears in the dialectical extreme; exaggeration is not just a rhetorical gesture, but reality’s own route to the truth to which dialectical thinking relentlessly devotes itself. Thus, where the distinguished Helmut Kuhn felt that the failure of Adorno’s work was that no fixed concepts emerged, he would have done well to have emphasized the difference between vagueness and a conceptual acuity that seeks reality at just that point where the concept itself is no longer absolute. Had he done so, Kuhn would have put his finger on the book’s achievement, which is its capacity to immerse itself in the realia of Kierkegaard. In Adorno’s study every fragment of Kierkegaard’s work can be treated micrologically because each includes in itself its opposite as its own essence, and this opposite is the whole. This whole, however, is not the totality of thought but a self-antagonistic reality whose comprehension has been chastened of any last claim to organic oneness. There is a systematic aspect to this reasoning, certainly, and to the structure of Adorno’s philosophy as well, but only insofar as that power is the capacity of the system militated in opposition to itself. Just as in Adorno’s aesthetics, then, the art work is socially interpretable not because it represents society but because it acquires its social content through resistance to society and is thus the unconscious writing of history, so Kierkegaardian inwardness, the spiritual intérieur, gains its determinations through negation. In opposition to the privations of early high capitalism, the Kierkegaardian intérieur was to encompass “a lost ‘immediacy’ “³⁸ and function “as a romantic island where the individual undertakes to shelter his ‘meaning’ from the historical flood.”³⁹ But precisely “by denying the social question Kierkegaard falls to the mercy of his own historical situation, that of the rentier in the first half of the nineteenth century.”⁴⁰ The imagery of the intérieur reveals social contents: a class-based asceticism is sedimented in it. By the effort to overcome the body, this sociological spiritualism turns back on itself. Kierkegaard’s imagery uses the living body exclusively as an allegory of truth and untruth: “This, to be sure, indicates the crucial reversal. If the body only appears under the sign of the ‘meaning’ of the truth and untruth of spirit, then in return spirit remains bound to the body as its expression.”⁴¹ The more spirit eviscerates the body, the more it depends on what it excludes: ultimately, “nature takes possession of it [spirit] where it occurs most historically in objectless interiority.”⁴² In the spirit’s will to autonomy, it falls to the mercy of nature: “My soul is so heavy that thought can no more sustain it, no wingbeat lift it up into the ether.”⁴³ Autonomous spirit is necessarily melancholic: “Bodiless spirit for him [Kierkegaard] becomes a burden that drags him into despair.”⁴⁴

In the setting of the sun, the Baroque allegorists pictured the fall of the king. This allegorical image bears “the seal of the all too earthly”: history, the king, “has physically merged into the setting,” nature.⁴⁵ The unpuzzling of such natural-historical figures is the primary interest of Benjamin’s study of the Baroque, The Origin of the German Play of Lamentation. In his study of Kierkegaard’s imagery, Adorno explicitly followed Benjamin’s lead. Since Benjamin’s theory of allegory stands at the center of Kierkegaard, as it does at the center of Adorno’s philosophy altogether, its introduction would be useful here. This, however, would be made more difficult by drawing directly on Benjamin’s work rather than on the work he was translating while he was preparing his study of the Baroque, and that may have given him his own critical insight into allegory, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In Combray Marcel tries to understand the allegorical character of a servant girl, “a sickly creature far ‘gone’ in pregnancy.”⁴⁶ What strikes Marcel about her is that her face shows no spiritual trace of the symbol born by her body: “The figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol that she carried in her body, without appearing to understand what it meant, without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary and rather heavy burden.”⁴⁷ Here significance is not meaningful but a physical burden, and in this transformation of meaning into nature Marcel recognizes the servant girl’s relation to other allegorical characters. Like the pregnancy of the servant, a portrait of “Envy” bears a serpent on her tongue. But, rather than the serpent being expressed in her face as “envy,” Envy herself looked like “a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue.”⁴⁸ Marcel sums up his observations and the entire fascination of allegory in a single parenthesis that distinguishes it from symbol: allegories are not symbols “(for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed).”⁴⁹ This, however, does not mean that the allegories are inexpressive; their expression, rather, is by way of nonexpression; the collapse of meaning into nature. In a talk Adorno gave just before the final revisions of Kierkegaard, “The Idea of Natural-History,” he presented the methodological idea of Kierkegaard (though not by name) as that of allegory: “Whenever ‘second nature’ appears, when the world of convention approaches, it can be deciphered in that its meaning is shown to be precisely its transience.”⁵⁰ Paraphrasing Adorno, nature appears at the greatest extreme of second nature.⁵¹ Although this thought is drawn from Benjamin, its form is Hegelian. The Hegelian dialectic, passed through Benjamin’s idea of allegory, became in Adorno’s work the form for the interpretation of all culture. No longer a dialectic of progress, shorn of any last trace of organicism, the Hegelian dialectic, as the critique of any first, continually transforms meaning into the expression of transience. For Adorno, as he once said in a lecture, “the aim of philosophy is to say by way of concepts precisely what it is that cannot be said, to say the unsayable.”⁵² He clarified this at another point: “One could almost say that the aim of philosophy is to translate pain into the concept.”⁵³ This would be the aim of a Hegelian dialectic that has become the presentation of allegory.

In a letter of September 20, 1932, written from the home of his fiancée, Adorno apologized to the composer Ernst Krenek for having been unable to respond sooner:

I have been here for two months and living under the most extreme pressure. November 1st I must deliver the final manuscript for my book on Kierkegaard to Mohr, the publisher. Initially the revisions were only to trim the manuscript for publication; once I got into it, however, I found that I had to rewrite it altogether; certainly every stone of the original has been maintained, but not one remains where it once stood, every sentence has been reformulated, the whole has now for the first time been truly worked-through . . . and large and precisely central sections have been completely rethought. And all this has been compressed into the period between September 8th and November 1st. I must tell you, I am really in the harness: in three weeks I’ve dragged eighty pages out of myself, and I may say of the most rigorous sort.⁵⁴

Adorno did not exaggerate the intensity with which the material was at once maintained and completely transformed. Here is a juxtaposition of the manuscript’s first few lines followed by the corresponding lines of the revision:

All attempts to comprehend the writings of philosophers as poetry have missed their truth-content. The object of philosophy is reality, which is interpreted by philosophy. Only by comprehending reality does the subjectivity of the philosopher stand the test. Neither the communication of this subjectivity, however profound, nor the degree of the work’s internal coherence, decide its philosophical quality, but only the claim and the justice of the claim to state the truth about the real.⁵⁵

All attempts to comprehend the writings of philosophers as poetry have missed their truth-content. Philosophical form requires the interpretation of the real as a binding nexus of concepts. Neither the manifestation of the thinker’s subjectivity nor the pure coherence of the work determines its character as philosophy. This is, rather, determined in the first place by the degree to which the real has entered into concepts, manifests itself in these concepts, and comprehensibly justifies them.⁵⁶

Adorno’s excitement in his letter was not only over his productivity but also over the unexpected emergence of what became his mature style. Characteristic of the revisions was that the language becomes more self-assuredly Hegelian; the most capable phrases—among which the first line of this passage—were maintained, while the rest (though this is not true of this passage) underwent extreme condensation. By the time Adorno delivered the manuscript to Mohr a month later, he had cut it by half. Structurally, the basic order of the chapters remained intact; Chapters 1, 4, and 6 were least revised, and many headings and subheadings were maintained throughout. Yet much was changed, most important: chapter 1 lost a section entitled “The Aesthetic as a Category of Knowledge”; the title of chapter 2 changed from “Subject and Ontology” to “Constitution of Inwardness”; the title of chapter 4 changed from “Analysis of the Existential” to “Concept of Existence”; chapter 5 lost three major sections—“Excursus on Constellation,” “Excursus on Goethe,” and “Abstraction and Concretion”; chapter 6 lost sections on the “Mythical Character of Kierkegaard’s Christentum” and “Demythologization”; the title of chapter 7 changed from “Rescuing the Aesthetic” to the title of the book, “Construction of the Aesthetic,” its first section from “Apology of Melancholy” to “Transformation of Melancholy,” the second from “Semblance and Reconciliation” to “Disappearance of Existence,” and the last from “Outline of the Ontological in the Fragment” to “Transcendence of Longing.” Without trying to find the common denominator of all these revisions, what is evident is a trimming back of ontological efforts, though not to the point demanded by his later philosophy. In Kierkegaard Adorno is still concerned with the possibility of a rescue of ontology. Along with the reduction of passages on ontology, theological motifs are also dropped at many points. This, however, is more of a sublimation than excision, for theology is always moving right under the surface of all Adorno’s writings. This theological context is so dense that one can easily fail to be struck by the peculiarity that, for example, Adorno dated the published notice of an edition of Kierkegaard “Easter 1963.” The degree to which theology penetrates every word of his writings can be measured by the most misfired sentence he ever wrote, what is perhaps the lamest appreciation the philosopher of negation ever penned, one that points far beyond biographical attachments: in his introduction to Benjamin’s writings he compared Benjamin’s fascination to that of the reflected light of a Christmas tree.⁵⁷ Opaque ideas in Adorno (as in Benjamin) often become immediately comprehensible when grasped in this context of theological interests. The idea of “truth-content” for example, which has remained so obscure, is a work’s content of hope. Kierkegaard itself is the research of hope in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. It is not hard to sympathize with this effort in any year, least of all 1933. Still, as the research of hope, Kierkegaard wants to take hope under its wing; when it does, it becomes ministerial and damages itself. On the last page of the book, Adorno writes of the “inconspicuous hope” sedimented in Kierkegaard’s imagery; lists of similar passages could be given, including a passage in which he writes, “No truer image of hope can be imagined than that of ciphers, readable as traces, dissolving in history, disappearing in front of overflowing eyes, indeed confirmed in lamentation.”⁵⁸ The passage is beautiful, but the mistakenness of this beauty is betrayed by its coziness, which brings it to the edge of rationalization.⁵⁹ Kafka’s often quoted response to the question of whether there is hope, liberally translated, “Oh yes, great hope, but not for us,” is soberly optimistic in comparison with these passages. The best that can be done for them is to translate them back into the helplessness that motivates them. In the revisions of Kierkegaard, particularly in the sublimation of the theological, the distance to his later works was already being covered. The author’s notice to the 1966 edition of Kierkegaard drops “Easter.” In Aesthetic Theory (1969), his last work, the idea of hope no longer sails in through the window on a silken pillow: rather the work hones itself rigorously to the idea of allegory’s own jagged boundaries. In the sparseness of the late Adorno the air may be thin, but it is what can be breathed; it carries out the revision of the earlier image of the reading of the palimpsest: “Authentic art knows the expression of the expressionless, a crying from which the tears are missing.”⁶⁰