In the Spirit of Critique by Douglas Andrew J

Author:Douglas, Andrew J. [Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438448428
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

In an effort to tie together this discussion, I invoke our guiding passage one last time. “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair,” Adorno says in that final aphorism of Minima Moralia, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light.” In a comment on this very passage, the philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes has noted that “you can tell the difference between substantial and as-if, and you can see how the whole messianic thing becomes [for Adorno] a comme si affair.” On Taubes's reading, Adorno gives us “a wonderful, but finally empty, line.”83 And there is, to be sure, a certain rhetorical quality to this “whole messianic thing” and to the redemptive impulses of Adorno's critical theory. The same can be said of Adorno's figurations of despair and hopelessness, which elicit a certain shock value throughout his writings. But this does not mean that we must denigrate these figurations and deny their substance. The as if, le comme si, born of Adorno's insistence that critical insight often must exaggerate its way beyond the comforts of literality, is a fundamental component of dialectical thinking, which, Adorno says, “advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them.”84 I have suggested that where the exigencies of rhetorical finesse can at least partly explain Adorno's insistence on religious tropes, there is another sense, perhaps what Taubes would regard as a more “substantial” sense, in which theological language is best able to express the nature of the two “extreme” registers, which, in their dialectical interaction, can be said to animate and sustain our thinking.

The tropes of redemption and the messianic allow Adorno to express a distinctive relationship between the immanent and the transcendent, between the ineluctable conditions of our lived experience and the necessary yet undetermined possibility of something beyond. In the first instance the very terrain of the theological—specifically the Judaic separation of the material and the divine as well as the corresponding prohibition on graven images—helps to introduce a tension that is fundamental to the very nature of dialectical reflection. “God, the Absolute, eludes finite beings,” Adorno says in a 1963 essay on Schoenberg. “Where they desire to name him, because they must, they betray him. But if they keep silent about him, they acquiesce in their own impotence and sin against the other, no less binding, commandment to name him.”85 Here we have a kind of theological allegory, one that Adorno draws up on a number of occasions and in a number of slightly different ways. In each case he seems to underscore the fact that we can never really think the sorts of transcendent possibilities that our futures

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