Anyone who has immersed himself for any length of time in the labyrinthine and often refractory world of texts signed by Adorno is confronted with a singular mode of formulation and argumentation. Whatever else may be said about Adorno’s inimitable way of thinking and writing, it is immediately recognizable. If one were to tear out a random page from each of several hundred scholarly books in German, including one book by Adorno, throw these pages in the air, and allow them to land on the ground in an aleatory way, one always would be able to identify with certainty the one page of German prose that had been written by Adorno. One could even allude to the musicological realm of the acoustic that was so central to Adorno’s thinking in speaking of a signature “Adorno sound.” From his typical movements between hypotactical and paratactical sentence constructions, via his transformative evocations of the tropes of German Idealism, to his well-known preference for deferring self-reflexive pronouns, Adorno’s singular ways of mobilizing and engaging the German language does not readily lend itself to translation into other idioms, even into related Germanic languages such as English. Adorno himself is very aware of the intricate imbrication of his thinking with the German language. For instance, in a letter dated September 1, 1955, that he wrote from Frankfurt to Siegfried Kracauer in New York, Adorno reminds his older friend and colleague “that what is most decisive in what someone like us has to say can be said by us only in German. We can write English, at best, like the others; like ourselves, only German [daß das Entscheidende, was unsereins zu sagen hat, von uns nur auf deutsch gesagt werden kann. Englisch können wir allenfalls so schreiben wie die anderen, so wie wir selbst nur deutsch].”1 And ten years later, in his 1965 essay “On the Question: ‘What Is German?,’ ” in which Adorno meditates on what propelled him to move back, after World War II, from his American exile to Germany, the country of the perpetrators, he confesses that a central reason for returning, in spite of everything, was the German language itself, in which the essential features of his movements of thinking are lodged:
The decision to return to Germany was hardly motivated by a merely subjective need, or homesickness, as little as I deny having had such sentiments. An objective factor also made itself felt. It is the language. Not only because one can never express one’s intention so exactly, with all the nuances and the rhythm of the train of thought in the newly acquired language as in one’s own. Rather, the German language also apparently has a special elective affinity with philosophy and particularly with its speculative element that in the West is so easily suspected of being dangerously unclear, and by no means completely without justification. Historically, in a process that finally needs to be analyzed seriously, the German language has become capable of expressing something in the phenomena that is not exhausted in their mere thus-ness, their positivity and givenness. This specific quality of the German language can be most graphically demonstrated in the nearly prohibitive difficulty of translating into another language philosophical texts of supreme difficulty such as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or his Science of Logic. German is not merely the signification of fixed meanings; rather, it has retained more of the power of expression—more in any case than would be perceived in the Western languages by someone who had not grown up in them and for whom they are not second nature.2
Adorno continues by arguing that “whoever remains convinced” that “the mode of presentation [Darstellung] is essential to philosophy” will be “disposed to the German language.” For him, “the native German will feel that he cannot fully acquire the essential aspect of presentation or of expression in the foreign language” because if “one writes in a truly foreign language, then whether it is acknowledged or not, one falls under the spell of wanting to communicate, to say it in such a way that others can understand.” To which Adorno juxtaposes a contrasting linguistic experience: “In one’s own language, however, if one says the matter as exactly and uncompromisingly as possible, one may hope through such unyielding efforts to become understandable as well.” Although Adorno concedes that he is unable to decide whether “this circumstance is specific to German or whether it affects far more generally the relationship between each person’s native language and a foreign language,” he does emphasize the peculiarity of German by stressing the “impossibility of conveying without violence not only high-reaching speculative thoughts but even particular, quite precise concepts such as those of Geist [spirit, mind, intellect], Moment [moment, element, aspect], and Erfahrung [experience], including everything with which they resonate in German.” What, from a conceptual perspective, might be called “a specific, objective quality of the German language” pertains to the philosophical thought that can be produced within it.3 This perspective on the special philosophical status of German is one that Adorno shares, in spite of all the differences between them, with Heidegger, for whom ancient Greek and German are the languages in which Being can come to be thought.
But this “metaphysical excess” of German also comes at a price. As Adorno cautions, no one “who writes in German and who knows how much his thoughts are saturated with the German language should forget Nietzsche’s critique” that a “self-righteous German profundity [selbstgerechte deutsche Tiefe] was ominously in accord with suffering and its justification.”4 If there is a negative dialectic between, on the one hand, the apparent elective affinity of the German language with speculative philosophy and, on the other hand, a certain tendency toward delusion and intellectual self-righteousness, the implications of this dialectic are never far from Adorno’s own textual production. On the contrary, this negative dialectic binds the thinker to the very objects that his discourse wishes to illuminate. The result is a pellucid and rigorous German prose that nevertheless pushes against the limits of conventional hermeneutic understanding.
In Adorno’s self-conscious critical “models” (as he would often refer to his work), the thinking of philosophy is inseparable from its always specific formulation in language, which is why “presentation is not a matter of indifference to philosophy, or external to it, but immanent to its idea [warum der Philosophie ihre Darstellung nicht gleichgültig und äußerlich ist sondern ihrer Idee immanent],” as we read in Negative Dialectics.5 This moment of presentation cannot be separated from the language in which it was first thought, especially if that language may be considered, rightly or wrongly, to hold a special relationship to speculative thought itself. Elsewhere in Negative Dialectics, Adorno thus emphasizes that any attempt to eradicate in philosophical thinking a consideration of the language in which philosophical ideas are thought and written is doomed to failure—a sign of the reification of mind itself. For him, “to abolish language in thought is not to demythologize thought” because the “rhetorical element is on the side of content.”6 After all, through its “dependence—patent or latent—on texts [sei’s offenbare, sei’s latente Gebundenheit an Texte], philosophy admits that which the ideal of method leads it to deny in vain: its linguistic nature [ihr sprachliches Wesen].”7 If rhetoric therefore “presents in philosophy that which cannot be thought except in language,” it is because it belongs to those “postulates of presentation [Postulaten der Darstellung]” through which “philosophy differs from the communication of already known and fixed contents.”8 Adorno thus urges philosophy to untether itself from the misguided desire to regard the language in which it is thought, written, and spoken as more or less transparent, unproblematic, and wholly subservient to the conceptual content in which it is interested at any given moment.
Taking into account the imbrication of Adorno’s works with their linguistic or textual nature is not to suggest that Adorno should be seen as a literary author rather than as a philosopher and critical theorist, nor is it to assume a pragmatist view of the Rortian kind that the particular discourse that we name philosophy is, in the end, nothing more than “a kind of writing.” On the contrary, although Adorno self-consciously wrestles with the linguistic modes of presentation that impose themselves on him, down to the very fibers of his prose, his texts have significant philosophical and conceptual arguments to make. These important arguments, however, are not indifferent to the particular ways in which they are cast linguistically or to the manner in which their linguisticality may work to disrupt the conceptual labor that they set out to perform. Rather, the relationship of rhetoric and logic, language and argument, draws attention to itself as an abiding and irreducible conceptual concern—and therefore ultimately as a central concern of philosophical thought itself.
This perspective illuminates why readers who are attentive to the rhetorical structure of Adorno’s philosophical writings have remarked that his prose “breathes in German,” where “its ductus is freer” and where the “exquisiteness of its word choice—the Parnassian face of a negative Reason—gives it a lustrous obscurity,” something that “marks precisely its origin in Europe—in Germany” and that, even “with the best will in the world, is lost in translation.”9 Perhaps it is no accident that, when one encounters Adorno in a language other than the original German, one has the eerie sense, no matter how adroit the rendering, that the text is “dubbed rather than translated.”10 Whether this marked singularity is admired or ridiculed, made the object of imitation or of resistance, one thing is clear: What Adorno says and thinks cannot be separated from how he says and thinks it. The moment of presentation (Darstellung) is integral to the thought itself. Samuel Weber, one of Adorno’s earliest American translators—in both the literal and the figurative senses—puts it as follows in his 1967 introduction to Adorno’s essay collection Prisms, “Translating the Untranslatable”: the “specificity of Adorno’s thought is inseparable from its articulation,” so “conceptual concreteness may be measured by the density with which thought and articulation permeate each other.”11 Adorno’s emphasis on the inter-permeation of thought and its articulation not only places the thinker within the German tradition of writers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and many others, but it also challenges us to concretize the specifically Adornean contours of an experience of thinking and writing that may still hold out previously unsaturated critical potentialities.
There is no question about the continued relevance of these reflections on the relationship between Adorno’s arguments and his methods of engagement, his Auseinandersetzung, with the German language. Yet in order to think the possibilities of Adorno’s thought more fully, I wish to proceed not merely by adding another layer of commentary on the idiosyncrasies of Adorno’s writing style or his relationship to philosophical German as such but rather by supplementing the existing sphere of rhetorical analysis with an account of Adorno’s transformative yet refractory idea of philosophical thinking itself. The singularity of his writing and thinking cannot be explained by stylistic features of his German prose style alone (although it certainly does play out in that sphere as well); it is, rather, inextricably intertwined with his comportment toward philosophical thinking as such, including the specific manner of relating to his objects of study and his attitude or stance toward the unfolding of conceptual problems. In other words, to begin to appreciate what is seminal and irreducible in Adorno’s writing and thinking, the question of how he reconfigures the idea of philosophical thinking itself needs to be cast into sharper relief. In keeping with Adorno’s understanding of philosophical activity and in an attempt not to remain deaf to the rigorous demands that this understanding places on critical practice, no viable reading of Adorno may reduce his thinking to any kind of rigid system, unchanging method, or stable orthodoxy. It is possible nevertheless to attempt to specify some of the more persistent contours, rhythmic patterns, and characteristic features of this thinking.
To this end, I wish to linger with his inexhaustibly rich but often-overlooked late essay “Notes on Philosophical Thinking” (“Anmerkungen zum philosophischen Denken”), a first version of which was broadcast as a radio address for Deutschlandfunk on October 9, 1964, appearing in print for the first time in Neue Deutsche Hefte in October 1965. Whereas other essays by Adorno that exhibit a certain “programmatic” character have received attention in the scholarship on Adorno—especially the 1931 “The Actuality of Philosophy” (“Die Aktualität der Philosophie”) and the 1962 “Why Still Philosophy?” (“Wozu noch Philosophie?”), but also the “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher” (“Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen”), which Adorno did not date but which his editor Rolf Tiedemann maintains were written “without doubt also in the early thirties”—the “Notes on Philosophical Thinking” are typically neglected.12 This remarkable text, dedicated to Herbert Marcuse on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, contains the mature Adorno’s pivotal, if underappreciated, reflections on what philosophical and theoretical thinking requires of the one who wishes to engage in it with rigor and stringency. The essay’s significance in Adorno’s corpus is further underscored by the fact that it was written at the same time as his philosophical magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, and its published version appeared in the same year in which Adorno delivered the seminal lecture course on negative dialectics (1965–1966) in Frankfurt. As such, it may be regarded as a highly condensed distillation of the movements of thought that are at work in his larger engagements with a negatively dialectical philosophy and cultural criticism. It is thus hardly an accident that in June 1969, he accords this text the following significance in the introduction to this essay collection Stichworte, or Catchwords, which would appear the fall of that same year, shortly after his unexpected death in August: “The ‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking’ offer reflection upon the procedure that can provide an introduction to the content of thought [Die ‘Anmerkungen zum philosophischen Denken’ bieten eine Reflexion der Verfahrungsweise, die ins Gedachte einleiten mag].”13 According to the gesture of thought encoded in this sentence, it is as if learning to read the reflections offered in the sentences that constitute this particular essay provided one with an intimation of how to approach all of Adorno’s sentences. What comes to be thought in these sentences, or what addresses itself in these sentences to that which has been thought elsewhere, das Gedachte, opens onto a particular kind of analysis. This analysis serves as an Einleitung, a “leading-into” what has been thought—which is to say, it shows the path or opens up a way toward what has been thought, tracing the movements by which what has been thought, das Gedachte, came to be thought in this particular way.
When the published English translation provides “content of thought” for Adorno’s phrase das Gedachte, the translator is rightly aware of the difficulty that attaches to das Gedachte beyond this or that stable piece of content: “ ‘Content of thought’ cannot convey the density of Adorno’s expression das Gedachte, which is the substantivized past participle of the verb ‘to think’ (denken) but also of the verb ‘to remember, be mindful of’ (gedenken); the interrelationship between these two actions is central to the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s philosophy of nature.”14 One might add that we also should be mindful of the key role that das Gedachte plays in the respective projects of thinkers such as Heidegger and Adorno’s friend Benjamin, both of whom self-consciously employ this term as well. In the case of Adorno, one could say that das Gedachte, as that which has been thought and that which has been made the object of an act of mindfulness and remembrance, refers both to his own acts of thinking—its very formation as that-which-has-been-thought—and to his thinking of thinking as such—that is, to his understanding of the modalities of thinking pursued by the kind of philosophical thought that is worthy of its name.
The relationship to das Gedachte that philosophical thinking is meant to pursue is elusive on at least two counts: first, in that it demands to be reinvented each time it turns to a new and different object and, second, in that it itself resists being cast into a descriptive or normative formulation. Adorno thus begins his essay with a striking image in part to illustrate the position from which his reflections on philosophical thinking emanate: “If one is obliged to say something about philosophical thinking, stopping in midstride as it were, and not wanting to slip into the arbitrary, then one should confine oneself to just a single aspect.”15 What, one may ask, would it mean to interrogate philosophical thinking precisely “in midstride”? Does Adorno mean to suggest that such thinking only ever can be thought about when one is actually in the process of engaging in it? Or does the locution “in midstride” rather imply that when one finds oneself engaged in the process of thinking philosophically, the question of the very status of this thinking tacitly imposes itself on the one who thinks? Or does this trope rather suggest that ongoing philosophical thinking, a thinking that is alive and going somewhere—that is, taking a step or stride somewhere—requires suspension in mid-activity, a kind of freeze-frame, in order for the one who thinks to gain insight into its procedures and movements? In that case, thinking about thinking could be thought to take place precisely in the moment when it has left the place from which it set out but has not yet arrived at a new position—that is, when it has departed but now finds itself in the no-man’s-land between origin and arrival, between the point of its former situatedness and the as-yet-unattained (and perhaps as-yet-unknown) point toward which it strives and strides.
If one wished to emphasize this particular aspect of philosophical thinking, one could place this moment into a constellation with other Adornean moments in which the time and space between two points becomes the sphere of engaged philosophical reflection and conceptual meditation. One is reminded, for instance, of the famous rhetorical image in the final sentence of Negative Dialectics—written at the same time as the “Notes”—in which Adorno evokes the “solidarity of such thinking with metaphysics in the moment of its fall [Solches Denken ist solidarisch mit Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres Sturzes]”16 or the luminous passage in Aesthetic Theory in which artworks set out to depart from the empirical world in order to create and reach another world, another Adornean “midstride” moment (discussed more fully in chapter 4).17 For Adorno, thinking philosophically about thinking philosophically thus cannot be accomplished from a position of secured knowledge or a priori conceptual stability; if it can be done at all, it happens en passant, in midstride, in mid-sentence, on one’s way elsewhere, in the middle of things, in medias res.
A further perspective on Adorno’s richly textured opening sentence emerges when one turns from the published English translation to the original German. There, the sentence begins: “Soll man, gleichsam auf einem Beine stehend, etwas über philosophisches Denken sagen . . . .”18 In German, Adorno’s image is even more peculiar than in its translation. The phrase “gleichsam auf einem Beine stehend,” which is quite justifiably rendered as “stopping in midstride as it were,” literally means “as if standing on one leg” or “standing on one leg, as it were.” Adorno’s original phrasing does not explicitly deploy the imagery of stopping or of finding oneself suspended while taking a step, although it is possible to interpret the phrase “gleichsam auf einem Beine stehend” to refer to the moment in a stride when one leg is in the air, while the other leg is still on the ground to provide the moving body with balance. Were one to take seriously, which is to say literally, Adorno’s trope of standing on a single leg, rather than on two, one could also interpret this figure to suggest the absence of movement and, by extension, even the absence of the interruption of that movement—that is, without the stopping that the English translation hears in it. Auf einem Beine stehen, standing on one leg, in German also implies a precarious instability, a moment at which one’s powers of balance and skill are tested because one can tip over very easily. For instance, children will often play games involving auf einem Beine stehen in order to determine who among them can perform a number of difficult tasks under similarly challenging conditions. Auf einem Beine stehen also is used in German in counterdistinction to auf zwei Beinen stehen, to stand on two legs, which refers to a place of solidity and stability, whereas a related form, auf eigenen Beinen stehen, to stand on one’s own legs, is the German locution, together with its close relative auf eigenen Füßen stehen, to stand on one’s own two feet, for autonomy, self-reliance, and self-determination. Auf einem Bein kann man nicht stehen, one cannot stand on one leg alone, is a German idiomatic expression that suggests the importance of ensuring that one keeps more than one option open to oneself, especially with regard to earning a living, and it is simultaneously a German Trinkspruch, a saying by means of which one invites someone (or oneself) to have another drink. Auf einem Bein kann man nicht stehen is also akin to the English clause “a bird never flew on one wing.” If Adorno, at the beginning of the essay, finds himself standing on one leg, he will have to probe just how much he can accomplish in this awkward position, just how much he will be able to say and think about philosophical thinking. Standing on one leg, the other either suspended in midstride or simply lifted in the air, he will think about thinking, knowing at the same time that this enterprise may be a foolish attempt, perhaps doomed from the very beginning. Thinking about philosophical thinking while standing on only one wobbly leg—perhaps because one has chosen to assume this position or perhaps because this position happens to be where one inevitably finds oneself whenever one sets out to make thinking the very subject of thinking—may belong to the domain of those who, like Adorno, “sensed that whatever one accomplishes in life is little other than the attempt to catch up with one’s childhood [die Kindheit einzuholen]” and in this way to begin to learn to relate to “what is specifically mine.”19
Partly because of the difficulties of standing on one leg, or of being suspended in midstride, Adorno’s reflections on philosophical thinking thus wish “only to impart a few things I believe I have observed in my own thinking [nur einiges mitteilen, was ich am eigenen Denken glaube beobachtet zu haben].”20 This wish to share, report, communicate, or im-part (mitteilen) certain aspects of the experience of a thinking while standing on one leg implies that a difference can be made, at least in principle, between what is thought and how the what is thought, between the alleged content of thinking and the procedure of thinking. Adorno concedes that this premise or assumption stands in opposition to Hegel’s insight, which Adorno nevertheless calls “unsurpassed,” that one of the tasks of dialectical philosophical thought is to sublate the false distinction between the what and the how of thinking—that is, to correct the error of a bad abstraction not merely by arguing against it but precisely by developing a form of philosophical thought in which the tacit fissure between thought and content is no longer operative. If Adorno nevertheless allows himself to indulge, at least for the time being, the idea that the how and the what of philosophical thinking could be kept apart, it is not because he simply wishes to rebel against Hegel or to reject his conceptual stance but rather because he sees the—however problematic—distinction in question as necessary from the point of view of diagnosing, and then working to undo, certain intellectual tendencies that foster the reification of thinking in the contemporary critical field. In particular, the kind of thinking that he calls into question exemplifies the ways in which the reason-based, liberation-oriented form of Enlightenment thought tacitly turns against itself. As “it became autonomous,” Adorno therefore argues, “and developed into an apparatus, thinking also became the prey of reification and congealed into high-handed method. Cybernetic machines are a crude example of this.” These machines “graphically demonstrate to people the nullity of formalized thinking abstracted from the contents insofar as such machines perform better than thinking subjects much of what used to be the proud achievement of the method of subjective reason.”21 The thinking, in other words, that was once considered to be the domain of the reflective, autonomous subject has become formalized in the manner of machine-like algorithms that perform versions of what is already assumed to be the case—that is to say, of the existing status quo and its implicit parameters of what to think and how it is acceptable to think. Here, the remnants of the thinking subject have become degraded and an “imperfect replica” of the machines they are encouraged to emulate. But, by contrast, Adorno’s point of departure is the articulation of another kind of thinking, a genuine—and genuinely critical—thinking that is still to commence:
Philosophical thinking begins as soon as it ceases to content itself with cognitions that are predictable and from which nothing more emerges than what had been placed there beforehand. The humane significance of computers would be to unburden the thinking of living beings [das Denken der Lebendigen] to the extent that thought would gain the freedom to attain a knowledge that is not already implicit.22
The kind of thinking that Adorno thus wishes to pursue is at odds with the kind of philosophical thinking that reaffirms the logic and substance of that which precedes it. In this context, the point of thinking-machines such as the computer would not be to provide an exemplary model according to which philosophical thinking should fashion itself, in an ongoing effort to become ever-more machine-like, predictable, and largely self-contained. Instead, such machines would be seen as mere instruments that take on some of our menial tasks and quotidian cognitive requirements so that genuine thinking may learn to open onto the experience of freedom that is required to pursue the unpredictable paths of thought in the emphatic sense. If any knowledge is attained on the paths of this new thinking, wherever these paths may lead, it can only be the sort of knowledge that is not already implied by that which is the case anyway or by the expectations of the totality of a given set of (often unconscious) assumptions and modes of knowing that obtain in a certain time and space, which is to say, in what in a Foucauldian register might be called an episteme. One might say that this, for Adorno, would be the true thinking of die Lebendigen, the thinking of and by the living, if such a thing exists, whether the living are standing on one leg or two.
Yet how can one begin to understand this thinking of and by the living, this living thinking, this thinking on the far side of what already is implicit? Taking seriously Kant’s refusal simply to identify the concept of thinking as spontaneity, in the Critique of Pure Reason, with conscious activity, Adorno points out that even for Kant the “definitive, constitutive achievements of thinking” are “not the same acts of thought within the already constituted world,” and their “fulfillment is hardly present to self-consciousness.”23 If, according to Adorno’s understanding, the Critique of Pure Reason already is a Phenomenology of Spirit “in the sense in which Hegel later entitled his analysis of consciousness, a Phenomenology of Spirit,” this is so because no “objectivity of thinking as an act would be possible at all if thinking in itself, according to its own form, were not bound to what is not itself properly thinking: this is where one must seek and work out what is enigmatic in thinking [was an Denken zu enträtseln wäre].”24 One can interpret Adorno’s statement as saying that, for thinking to come into its own, to become that which it is, it must rely on what is not thinking, on a residue of otherness to thinking that always also attaches to an act of thinking. Thinking thinking therefore also requires thinking nonthinking. Yet, according to the path of thinking that Adorno pursues, this negative dialectic does not result, through a Hegelian sublation, in some ultimate identity of thinking and nonthinking. Rather, as a form of nonidentity, it retains the otherness and particularity of nonthinking within the very act of thinking, keeping alive in thought that which within thinking does not yet think but, in the form of an otherness, nevertheless makes thinking, including the thinking of thinking, possible in the first place.
To open up to the aspect of thinking that also resists thinking, the part of thinking that is tacitly nonthinking, would mean to affirm the view that thinking, as a gesture of critical philosophy, fastens not merely upon an idea or matter external to it—an idea, a view, a practice, or a state of affairs to be criticized—but also upon itself. To register the urgency of this (partial) self-directness of genuine thinking, Adorno therefore emphasizes that any “adequate philosophical thinking is not only critical of the status quo and its reified replica in consciousness [seinem dinghaften Abguß im Bewußtsein] but is equally critical of itself,” so that the one who “thinks philosophically hardens intellectual experience by the same logical consistency whose antithesis he wields.”25 For thinking to be something other than a form of mere repetition, even if negatively, of that which is the case, it is not enough to depart from the forces of reification that leap from the object to the consciousness that criticizes it by submitting it to sustained scrutiny. It is no accident that Adorno returns to an observation that he had made in his introductory essay to the writings of Benjamin, that “Benjamin once alluded” to the idea that “to every respectable thought belongs a respectable portion of stupidity as well [zu einem ordendlichen Gedanken gehöre eine ordentliche Portion Dummheit dazu].”26 The point, however, in referring to Benjamin’s dictum is not to excise from genuine thinking the element of stupidity that also comes with it, the way a butcher chops off unwanted elements from a choice piece of prime meat, but rather to submit to scrutiny the tension between thinking and forms of nonthinking—the usually repressed conditions of thinking and knowledge—that makes genuine thinking what it is.27 Thinking therefore must also subject itself to criticism; it must actively seek to make itself the target of its own critique. Taking up a trope that, in various formulations, also animates other seminal works such as Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory, Adorno thus affirms a kind of thinking that also thinks against itself, or, more precisely, that makes the act of thinking against itself one of the conditions of possibility for genuine thinking in the first place. Such thinking does not exhaust itself in self-preservation, in fending off that which threatens to enter it from an elsewhere—that is, from the provenance of a distant otherness that is to be kept at bay. Rather, this thinking is exposed thinking, a form of thought that, by admitting into itself its own criticizability, does not take its own self-identity for granted.
One particular form that this nonidentity of thinking assumes is that of Nachdenken. The German language differentiates, when speaking of thinking, between Denken and Nachdenken. Attempting to mark something of the difference between these two words and concepts for thinking, the English translation of Adorno’s essay provides “thinking” for Denken and “reflective thinking” for Nachdenken, even though the English cannot fully capture all the nuanced semantic work that the prefix and preposition “nach” (after) performs in Nachdenken. Well aware that Heidegger also had meditated on the “nach” in Nachdenken, Adorno asserts that, even if one is not a devotee of Heideggerean philology, one still must not “disavow that reflective thinking, as opposed to thinking, linguistically refers to the idea of philosophical construction as one of reconstruction.”28 It is especially difficult here to render in English the conceptual movement of Adorno’s argument as it unfolds in his mobilization of different German words and concepts that share “nach,” “Zug,” and “Vollzug,” when he says that one “wird sich doch nicht die Erinnerung daran verbieten, daß Nachdenken, gegenüber Denken, sprachlich auf die Idee philosophischen Vollzugs als eines Nachvollzugs verweist.”29 As the English translator of the text correctly points out, “Adorno plays on the ambiguity of the preposition and verbal prefix nach, which can mean (among much else) ‘after’ in the temporal and spatial senses. So denken ‘to think’ but nachdenken ‘to reflect deeply upon.’ ” And Vollzug, itself the “nominalization of the verb vollziehen,” which means “to perform, to carry out,” signifies “action, performance.” Nachvollziehen, in turn, means “ ‘to comprehend’ ” or to “ ‘understand something that has occurred as though one had done it oneself,’ from which Adorno coins the analogous noun Nachvollzug, here translated as ‘reconstruction.’ ”30 The constellation of Nachdenken, Vollzug, and Nachvollzug that Adorno here constructs points to the significance of the idea that the acceptance or afterlife of a philosophical idea is too often predicated upon its having been translated, by a move of facile thinking, into a mere instantiation, after the fact, of what could have been understood as a matter of received common sense, that is, “understood” as if anyone at all could have uttered the idea. Nachdenken, one might say, in this model threatens to degenerate into idle repetition of what was always already implied—it can merely be nachvollzogen, understood as if it were a commonly shared and therefore, in principle, already articulated and available experience of thinking. But the point, rather, is to find in Nachdenken—conceived not as a shortcut to achieved, commonsense understanding but rather as a reflective, creative, and incommensurable activity—an opportunity to extricate one’s thinking from the mere “convention of received thought,” the “Convenu des Vorgedachten.”31 The Vorgedachte is not merely received thought but literally the pre-thought or that which someone else thinks for me, in front of me, and in my stead (as in “Ich lasse mir etwas vordenken”). It is to be broken open through genuine, nonossified Nachdenken. Vordenken versus Nachdenken: genuine thinking detaches itself from the pre-thought in order to chart new territory in the reflective engagement with an object, experience, or idea to come—which is to say, to come after, nach.
Whereas the thinking that is tied to the concept of identity is concerned, by convention, with eliminating disturbances and deviations from methodological prescriptions—that is, with safeguarding against and eradicating any aberrations from its established norms—the thinking of thinking that Adorno’s thinking strives to unfold is explicitly hospitable to such disturbances of its norms. His strategy is thus to identify moments that disrupt, interrupt, and disturb thought, viewing in such disturbances not mere embarrassments or obstacles to be overcome but conditions of possibility for genuine thought to unfold. The specific name that Adorno bestows on these disturbances is “intermittences.” From Adorno’s perspective, to “think philosophically means as much as to think intermittences, to be interrupted by that which is not the thought itself [Philosophisch denken ist soviel wie Intermittenzen denken, gestört werden durch das, was der Gedanke nicht selber ist].” As a result, in “emphatic thinking the analytic judgments it unavoidably must use become false. The force of thinking, not to swim with its own current, is the strength of resistance to what has been previously thought.”32 Emphatic or genuine thinking in the Adornean sense thus names the mode of thought that registers the ways in which it allows itself to become affected, even interrupted, by what is not already included in it. This genuine thinking consists neither in a defensive gesture of fending off nor in an acquisitive gesture of appropriation, in which what is different from the thought that is being unfolded is made to conform to its precepts, but rather in an attitude that also honors what resists it.
One might say, then, that Adorno here thinks a version of the thought that, in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere, he terms the nonidentical. It is nonidentity that, by preserving the ways in which it remains at odds with the assumed identity or self-identity of a thought, makes itself felt in the reality of emphatic thinking as an aleatory element, a wild card of incommensurability and otherness that introduces risk and tension into the act of thinking. Yet without taking this risk, there can be no freedom and no autonomy in thinking—and ultimately no truth. In an epigrammatically condensed formulation from Minima Moralia, Adorno avers that “only those thoughts are true which do not understand themselves.”33 In light of our discussion here, this sentence does not embody a plea for ignorance or for a facile lack of understanding but rather marks the result of a courageous struggle with the nonidentical in which thought drives itself forward precisely by confronting the otherness that keeps interrupting it, contradicting it, and talking back at it. To think the nonidentity of philosophical thinking is to think thinking in terms of its multiple intermittences and ruptures, its vulnerability and exposedness to, but also its hospitality and nonaggression toward, that which disturbs it and which remains irreducibly other to it.
From the outset of thinking thinking, even the nonidentity of thinking, along the lines that Adorno develops, it must be made clear that genuine thinking cannot be subsumed under any method or under any concept of method. To the extent that “thinking should not reduce itself to method,” any truth that such thinking may yield is not to be regarded as “the residue [der Rest] that remains after the subject has been eradicated.”34 Thinking must, rather, “incorporate all innervation and experience into the contemplation of the subject matter [in die Betrachtung der Sache] in order, according to its ideal, to vanish within it [in ihr zu verschwinden].”35 Philosophical thinking, once it opens onto the experience of contemplation in a critical and sensitive manner, is thus no longer a discourse on method, to employ Descartes’ formulation, but rather a kind of self-delivery into the sphere of its subject matter and its requirements. This self-delivery is nothing to be frightened of, according to Adorno’s logic, but rather a harbinger of a possible bliss, happiness, and good fortune to come. To be sure, Adorno points out, during his years in American exile he learned that the “Americans have their own pejorative expression of this: armchair thinking, the behavior of one who comfortably sits in an easy chair like a friendly and superfluous grandfather enjoying his retirement.”36 Yet what is at stake in the philosophical thinking developed here is not the superfluousness of a grandfatherly armchair thinking, which basks in its passivity and presumed self-satisfied irrelevance, but the most active actualization of the possibilities of thinking itself, a thinking that relates to an experience of Glück whose “calmness retains something of that happiness” which “the conventional notions of thinking finds unbearable.”37 This thinking, for all its negativity, is thus a thinking of the future, and of as-yet-unsaturated potentialities to come, for which no method has as yet been scripted.
These potentialities, however much they seem to resist premature codification, are tied in Adorno’s thinking to a moment of happiness not because they provide a picture of what could be or because they could transcend a relentless emphasis on the kind of unyielding negativity in which, from Adorno’s perspective, genuine thinking must be rooted. Rather, the potentialities of philosophical thinking in the Adornean sense cannot be thought in separation from their basis in desperation. “Philosophy’s power of attraction, its happiness [ihr Glück],” Adorno avers, “is the fact that even the desperate thought [der verzweifelte Gedanke] conveys something of this certainty about what has been thought [Gewißheit des Gedachten], a final trace [Spur] of the ontological proof of God, possibly its ineradicable core [das Unauslöschliche an ihm].”38 Genuine thinking would proceed from the cognition that thinking out of desperation is also an affirmation, just as writing a pessimistic book of philosophy is an optimistic act, because true pessimists would never have begun to think or to write in the first place, as Maurice Blanchot and others will have taught us. The certainty of what has been thought, the “Gewißheit des Gedachten,” does not signify the infallibility of what has been thought but rather the fact that thought has come to pass, the that of true thinking, not its what. In his attempt to make this point vivid, Adorno refers to the ontological proof of God, first developed by the medieval Benedictine monk Anselm of Canterbury, the Catholic theologian and philosopher for whom the existence of God can be deduced from the fact that the human being is capable of thinking something that in itself cannot be exceeded, which is to say, it has been endowed by God with the special capability of thinking the existence of the highest being. As such, the highest being, merely by being thought, is affirmed in its existence. While Adorno’s perspective is certainly not a theological one, he nevertheless does mobilize in his argument the post-secular afterness of the ontological proof of God, something that lingers in, as he writes, its Spur or trace.39 Yet here it is not a transcendental signified that makes itself felt but rather a fallible, exposed, vulnerable, nonself-identical thinking, a form of reflection that has engaged in genuine thought and that can hardly be canceled or eradicated once it has been thought. What is perhaps inextinguishable in it is the very fact of its having been stringently and rigorously thought, and, as such, it cannot be revoked. To be sure, Adorno is enough of a Freudian not to wish to repress Freud’s laconic reminder, in Civilization and Its Discontents, that “the intention that the human being should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of Creation.”40 Still, the one who has dared to think in this way experiences a certain moment of Glück, however momentary and elusive, a rare instance of happiness or sense of fortune in the shadow of catastrophe and in the face of all that mitigates against thinking—and against happiness. This experience of thinking, and this experience of experience itself, is ultimately tied not to negative theology but to negative dialectics.
The thinking that is to be thought here, in excess of any positive method, feels itself responsible for articulating a certain dimension that is not normally available to critical insight or to the positive scientific disciplines, what, in the essay we have been reading, Adorno refers to as “die positiven wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen.”41 The focus, within the philosophical thinking that is to be thought, on a critical reflection of experience is not concerned with mobilizing any empirical concept of experience in order to insert the achieved data into a statistical method or model but rather with capturing, in the act of thinking, something of the singularity and specificity of an experience. If, therefore, “philosophical thinking continually attempts to express experiences [Erfahrungen auszudrücken],” it does so not by reinserting experience into empiricist models of explanation but rather by “assuring oneself” of an “experience by reflecting on a problem autonomously yet always remaining in the closest contact with the problem in its given configuration [autonom und doch im engsten Kontakt mit dem jeweils vorgezeichneten Problem über es reflektiert].”42 One could argue that what is at stake is not the processing of experiential data in the empiricist sense but rather a careful reconsideration of the very category of experience, whose difficulty, elusiveness, and resistance to hermeneutic understanding are a shared trope in the larger orbit of the early Frankfurt School. Here, the “Notes on Philosophical Thinking” enter not only an implied syntactical relation with Benjamin’s “Experience and Poverty” and his reflections on the waning of experience in “The Storyteller” but also with Kracauer’s meditation on the fraught category of experience in his Weimar essays, such as “Those Who Wait,” “Boredom,” and “Farewell to the Linden Arcade,” not to mention Adorno’s own “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America.”43 For Adorno, any rigorous reflection on experience strives to do justice to the unsublatable dialectical tension obtaining between, on the one hand, the need for autonomy, or self-law-giving, in the thinking of experience and, on the other hand, the importance of allowing that autonomous thinking to unfold in close proximity, in felt critical contact, with its respective objects and their singular requirements and demands.
To appreciate the specific nature and implications of this thinking (of) thinking, it is necessary to cast into sharper relief the particular ways in which Adorno’s thought relates to its object. After all, the thinking of thinking that he performs hinges on the specific relationship of thought to what he here, in the essay we have been reading as well as in many other places across his far-reaching oeuvre, names Vorrang des Objekts, a “preponderance of the object” or “primacy of the object.” One thinks especially of the crisp section devoted to the primacy of the object in part 2 of Negative Dialectics, “Negative Dialectics: Concepts and Categories.”44 Yet even when he does not explicitly speak of the primacy of the object by name, Adorno will evoke this very primacy in the critical act itself. One thinks, among many other key places in his corpus, of the trenchant passage in the final thought-image of Minima Moralia, in which “what matters to thinking” is to gain “perspectives without arbitrariness and violence, wholly from one’s felt contact with the objects [ganz aus der Fühlung mit den Gegenständen heraus].”45 Although the primacy of the object assumes various tonalities and differently inflected modulations across Adorno’s corpus, in the “Notes on Philosophical Thinking” it emerges with a particular vividness and elegance:
There is hardly a stronger argument for the fragile primacy of the object [Vorrang des Objekts] and for its being conceivable only in the reciprocal mediation of subject and object than that thinking must snuggle up to an object [daß Denken einem Objekt sich anschmiegen muß], even when it does not yet have such an object, even intends to produce it . . . . Despite the Copernican turn, and thanks to it, Kant inadvertently confirms the primacy of the object.46
What exactly does thinking do, one might wonder, when it “snuggles up” to an object? Why choose this phrase? Adorno’s German term anschmiegen, like the somewhat more quotidian, home-spun phrase “snuggling up” in English, conjures images of intimacy, proximity, and closely felt contact that bespeaks a certain tenderness. It is hardly an accident that Adorno, in a letter to Gershom Scholem from March 14, 1967—only two years after “Notes on Philosophical Thinking” was published—speaks of this tenderness in direct terms, emphasizing that “what I, in the immanently epistemological discussion, call the primacy of the object” should indeed be conceptualized as “something indeed very tender [sehr zart],” “namely only within dialectics, not as a crude assertion [nicht als krude Behauptung].”47 This tenderness suggests not a false familiarity borne out of a merely mimetic impulse but a strategic clinging to and a nestling against. For thinking to engage in this Anschmiegen to an object implies that, while the former sees itself as fundamentally distinct from the latter, it takes its shape and form from the object; rather than simply speaking about the object—or, as German would have it, “over” the object, as in “über ein Objekt sprechen”—thinking takes its sense of direction and purpose from it. The object, once it comes into clear view, teaches thinking how to proceed, how to reinvent itself, how to allow the one who thinks to become a careful and caring reader of the object and, by extension, of the object world in which this particular object is situated. To be sure, thinking may be, following the Copernican turn in Western philosophy, accustomed to relinquishing something of the world because of the cognitive inaccessibility of the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, as Kant refers to it, an inaccessibility that makes thinking focus on problems related to the cognitive representation of entities or issues in the mind—that is, of how the mind presents something to itself—rather than on the object that is external to a subject’s cognitive faculties. And yet, for Adorno’s thinking of thinking, it is only by seeking contact with the very object that is to be the focus of a critical act of thinking—that is, by self-reflexively snuggling up to the object—that thinking can become something other than an expression of that which, before and during the act of thinking, was already implied and tacitly anticipated.
To appreciate more fully the ways in which the primacy of the object conditions the thinking of thinking in this key passage, it is important to note the specification that Adorno’s if-clause adds to our understanding of the act of snuggling up to an object. After all, we are told that this act of snuggling up to the object is to occur “even when it does not yet have such an object, even intends to produce it.” But how would this be possible? In what sense can thinking be expected to snuggle up to an object that does even exist yet? And how could thinking be said to produce or create the very object against which it snuggles up, when the potentiality of thinking, its capability of performing this or that action, precisely depends on its having snuggled up to its object already? What Adorno seems to be suggesting is that even in cases when thinking does not yet have the contours of a firm object before it, its proclivity for snuggling up to its object will provide it with an intuition, or at least a preliminary insight, regarding the contours and eventual requirements of that which will need to be thought, that which has created a certain need in thinking. As he avers at the end of Negative Dialectics, “the need in thinking is what makes us think.”48 One can take the Adorno of the “Notes” to mean that, even if the precise shape of that need initially remains diffuse, thinking will seek preliminary contact with it in order to learn how to relate to it and finally to read it, more fully and rigorously. It is as if Adorno wished to preserve, one might say, the possibility of thinking thinking as an act that does not merely, or not exclusively, depend on its contact with an object—which, of course, in the case of thinking, can also be an idea or a concept—that already exists and that has been waiting, as it were, for an analytic gaze to fasten upon it. Rather, thinking, when thought in the rigorous and open-ended sense proposed here, is in principle capable of generating an intimate relation to an object in the broad sense (a thing, idea, experience, problem, or concept) that has not yet fully revealed itself to the one who thinks. It is in the snuggling up performed by the act of thinking that the contours, logic, and special interpretive and analytic requirements of the object come into ever-sharper focus. This is not to suggest that Adorno would fully share the view of Deleuze and Guattari that “philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts.”49 Adorno is too historical a thinker to subscribe to such as view, for the creation of concepts can also work to obliterate the history—Nietzsche would call it, more precisely, the genealogy—of the very concept upon which an act of thinking fastens. Nevertheless, there is, in Adorno’s understanding of the act of thinking as an intimate snuggling up to the object, an element of creation, the generation of an idea or a singular sphere of reflection without which thinking would not be capable of attaining results that are not already either implicit or else pre-understood—and therefore not in need of understanding.
One may begin to understand more concretely what Adorno’s specific thinking of thinking entails if one connects the act of snuggling up to the object to the different modalities of gazing upon this very object in the critical act. To the extent that the thinking of thinking that Adorno is after “can no more be reduced to a psychological process than to timelessly pure, formal logic,” thinking is “a mode of comportment [eine Verhaltensweise], and its relation to the subject matter with which it comports itself [die Beziehung zu dem, wozu es sich verhält] is indispensable.”50 The Verhaltensweise, the mode of comportment or way of relating, that is in question here can best be interrogated by focusing on the ways in which different kinds of gazing relate to their objects. In particular, two different forms of the gaze, der Blick, come into focus. The first kind of gaze is the enemy of that which is required by thinking: the “active moment of the thinking comportment [aktive Moment des denkenden Verhaltens],” which bears the name “concentration.”51 This active moment of thinking “mediates the exertions of the ego through what is opposed to it.”52 It is with this active, concentrated comportment toward thinking that the first kind of gaze clashes. This first kind of gaze thus deserves to be named “der abgelenkte Blick,” the distracted gaze:
Hostile to thought is avidity, the distracted gaze out past the window that wants nothing to escape it [Denkfeindlich ist die Gier, der abgelenkte Blick zum Fenster hinaus, der möchte, daß ihm nichts entgehe]; theological traditions such as the Talmud have warned of it. The concentration of thought bestows upon productive thinking a quality the cliché denies it. Not unlike so-called artistic inspiration, it lets itself be directed, to the extent that nothing distracts it from the matter at hand.53
The distracted gaze out the window, the gaze that wants to take in too much, the insatiable gaze that wishes to survey everything and to allow for the loss of nothing, is the enemy of concentrated, active thought. Thinking is active only when it knows how to bring a gaze to limit itself, to constrain its purview in the name of the cause of thinking. Even though Adorno does not mention Hegel in this passage, we might say that his reflections on the distracted gaze relate back to a passage in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. There, evoking Goethe, Hegel makes a point similar to Adorno’s:
Someone who wants to do something great [Wer etwas Großes will] must know, as Goethe says, how to limit himself [zu beschränken wissen]. By contrast, someone who wants everything in fact wants nothing and accomplishes nothing. There are a lot of interesting things in the world: Spanish poetry, chemistry, politics, music. All of that is very interesting, and one cannot blame anybody who takes an interest in them. However, if as an individual one wants to achieve something in a particular situation, one must stick to something determinate and not split up one’s power in various directions [muß man sich an etwas Bestimmtes halten und seine Kraft nicht nach vielen Seiten hin zersplittern].54
Like Adorno’s critique of the distracted gaze that fatefully wishes to include everything and to miss nothing, Hegel’s mobilization of Goethe’s exhortation serves to emphasize the necessity of thinking to limit itself—to constrain itself to one matter, the matter at hand. The distracted gaze out the window that wishes to take all in is to be interrupted in order for genuine thinking to unfold. This interruption does not imply that curtains are to be drawn before the window or that the one who thinks retreats from the world of lived experience into a solipsism and single-mindedness in which he succumbs to the delusion of assuming that his thinking is not affected by the forces of history, politics, and the variegated issues of the day that circulate through his community and his entire lifeworld. This is also why eschewing the distracted gaze is precisely not to be misunderstood as a procedure “for transforming reflective thinking into a form of indirect practical activity; that would only foster, from a societal perspective, the repression of thinking.”55 If one were to assign thinking the function of indirect practical activity, or as a mere preparation for a later praxis, one would implicitly subject it to a practice-based precensorship, in which thinking were only legitimate to the extent that it is translatable, even if only indirectly, into praxis. Seeking in advance such an instrumentalizing link between thinking and practical activity would rob thinking of the very freedom and autonomy it seeks to think into presence; abstaining from seeking such a link sets the stage for the possibility of genuine thinking having unexpected, transformative effects on the world, even if these are not implied, predictable, or necessary for thinking to come into its own. In order slowly and carefully to work its way through these force fields, genuine thinking requires a concentrated, nondistracted relationship to the object to which it can forge a thoughtful, intimate, and critical comportment.
The second form of the gaze that Adorno develops belongs precisely to such a comportment. In contrast to the first gaze (the distracted gaze), this other gaze is situated not in hurried distraction or restless window-gazing, but in patience and deceleration, a special kind of critical intimacy. It is here, in relation to the second gaze, that what is to be thought first offers itself to thinking:
The subject matter opens us to patience, the virtue of thinking. The saying, “genius is diligence [Genie sei Fleiß ],” has its truth not in a slavish drudgery but rather in this patience toward the subject matter. The passive connotation of the word “patience” expresses well the nature of this comportment [Verhaltensweise]: neither zealous bustling about nor stubborn obsession but rather the long and uncoercive gaze upon the object [weder emsiges sich Tummeln noch stures sich Verbohren, sondern der lange und gewaltlose Blick auf den Gegenstand].56
While der abgelenkte Blick, the distracted gaze, loses itself and any critical potentiality in its hopeless search for a totality that it can never take in, it is der lange und gewaltlose Blick auf den Gegenstand, the long and uncoercive gaze upon the object, that intimates how true thinking may proceed. The uncoercive gaze embodies the specific comportment of thinking (through) the primacy of the object because it enables the one who thinks to snuggle up to the object by tarrying with it, by lingering with its singularities, its idiomaticities and differences. One might say that there obtains a marked difference between the uncoercive gaze that Adorno evokes here and the kind of staring that he, in his 1960–1961 lecture course on Ontologie und Dialektik, associates with a certain mode of ontology. There is, for Adorno, a kind of ontologico-philosophical gaze that “one can hardly term a thinking any longer” but rather “a kind of manically fascinated staring [manisch-fasziniertes Hinstarren].”57 In that case, the actual work of thinking threatens to surrender to a riveted, quasi-hypnotized staring at an object or a concept. But the uncoercive gaze is not a transfixed staring, a fierce glare. As opposed to any kind of cold Hinstarren, der gewaltlose Blick, the uncoercive gaze, which is also a nonviolent, violent-free, or, most literarily, violent-less (gewalt-los) gaze, comes to pass in the moment—or Augenblick, blink-of-the-eye—in which that same gaze strives to learn from the singular and as yet nonimplied and unverifiable object. It rejects violence, Gewalt, in that it does not seek to superimpose upon the object a variety of standards and assumptions that are alien to it. The lingering, intent, and focused gaze is not a cold stare at the other; it seeks and invites the other into an intimate critical communion because it sees in the very otherness of the object upon which it fastens its ownmost conditions of possibility. The uncoercive gaze is the steady, intent, and attentive mode of comportment through which, in critical intimacy, genuine thinking honors the productive primacy of the object by snuggling up to it. This is where philosophical thinking would have to begin.