1-Adorno's Kierkegaardian Debt

Philosophy & Social Criticism
http://psc.sagepub.com Adorno's Kierkegaardian debt

David Sherman Philosophy Social Criticism 2001; 27; 77 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/1/77
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David Sherman
Adornos Kierkegaardian debt
Abstract Although Adorno criticizes the existential tradition, it is frequently argued that he and Heidegger share a number of theoretical interests. Adorno does come into direct contact with existential thought at certain points, but it is Kierkegaard, not Heidegger, who more closely approaches his concerns. I begin by reviewing Adornos Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. I then argue that, unlike Hegel, who is also criticized by Adorno on various grounds, Kierkegaard has had an inuence on Adorno that has been underappreciated. While Adorno criticizes Kierkegaard for breaking off the subjectobject dialectic, they converge in their attacks on identity-thinking, the retention of a negative utopian standpoint of critique, and a deliberately provocative style of writing, all of which are marshaled in defense of the individual, who is besieged by modern society. Unlike Kierkegaard, however, and despite the generally accepted view, I conclude by arguing that because Adorno does not break off the subjectobject dialectic, he has the necessary theoretical resources to deal with the theorypractice problem. Key words Adorno communication dialectic individual Kierkegaard subjectobject subjectivity theorypractice
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were generally viewed as the fathers of existentialism, but, unlike Nietzsches, Kierkegaards perceived relationship to subsequent philosophical movements such as deconstruction and second-generation critical theory has been somewhat more ambiguous. Deconstructionists, of course, have always viewed Nietzsche as one of their primary benefactors, a view that has been readily endorsed by Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Kierkegaards acceptance by deconstructionists, in contrast, has been somewhat slower in coming though certain philosophers, such as Louis Mackey, Mark
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 27 no 1 pp. 77106
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78 Philosophy & Social Criticism 27 (1)

Taylor and John D. Caputo, have been making the argument for some time. With the publication of Derridas Donner la mort, however, this situation has changed.1 And, indeed, given Kierkegaards unremitting attacks on the pretensions of Hegelian reason, with its alleged ability to sublate otherness, his embrace of irony, and his use of pseudonyms (which presages the idea of a decentered subject), this change would seem to be justied. Still, the Kierkegaard as proto-deconstructionist line can be pushed too strongly, for each of the aforementioned theoretical commitments is in the service of that which deconstruction cannot abide, namely, an efcacious subject who is far more than just a function of language. Indeed, although it goes without saying that deconstructionists are heavily inuenced by Heideggers thought, what they disagree with most in it is Heideggers idea of existential authenticity, which is the very point at which he draws most heavily upon Kierkegaard. Given his rejection of every philosophy of the subject, which is a position that he shares with deconstructionists, it is ironic that it is precisely Kierkegaards defense of individual subjectivity that motivates Habermas to assert that elements of Kierkegaards thought are indispensable to his own philosophical enterprise, which is based upon the idea of communicative rationality.2 But while the appeal that Kierkegaard holds for Habermas is, in some sense, understandable in the absence of vigorous personal subjectivities the uncoerced consensus of Habermass ideal speech community rings a bit hollow it is hard to conclude that Habermass attempt to incorporate Kierkegaard into his own project is anything but misconceived. If, as Kierkegaard contends, only subjective thought can be meaningfully communicated, and then only indirectly so as to provide an occasion for the listener to come to his or her own subjective truth, how can meaningful intersubjective agreement be attained within the overly rationalistic connes of Habermass ideal speech community? Such agreement would seem to smack of the very objectivity that renders direct communication superuous. In other words, if intersubjective agreement can be attained, then both the speaker and the listener were already in possession of the truth, which is the situation with what Kierkegaard describes as that unmeaningful objective thinking [that] is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence.3 Under these conditions, however, the very notion of subjective truth goes by the wayside, and therefore so does the vigorous individualism with which Habermas would energize his system. Thus, to t within Habermass architectonic, Kierkegaards thought would have to be domesticated to the point that it would fail to meet the very needs for which it was initially imported. In contrast to both deconstructionists and Habermas, Adorno
79 Sherman: Adornos Kierkegaardian debt

never explicitly sought to connect with Kierkegaard. Adorno was in his twenties when his only major work on Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, was published in 1933. And, moreover, the book is highly critical of Kierkegaard, which put it at odds with the sentiment of the time, for Kierkegaards thought was experiencing a renaissance in Germany due to the writings of Tillich, Barth, Jaspers and Heidegger. Yet, as Susan Buck-Morss points out, although he was nominally attacking Kierkegaard, Adorno actually had his sights on the entire existential tradition and, at least with respect to Heidegger, who was his secondary target, Kierkegaard compares favorably: Heidegger falls behind Kierkegaard, by Adornos criteria, since the latters critical perception of social reality led him at least to pose the ontological question negatively.4 Going a step further, I would argue that a good deal of Adornos hostility toward existentialism arose from his distaste for its particular German manifestation, which, like deconstruction and second-generation critical theory, not only failed to work dialectically through the subjectobject paradigm, but (in contrast to Kierkegaard) rejected it altogether. In this paper, therefore, I intend to show that Adornos negative dialectics, [which] kept alive an insistence on undefined experience, has deep affinities with many elements of Kierkegaards negative existential philosophy,5 and that a comparison of their works suggests that various Kierkegaardian themes were actually assimilated by Adorno, albeit, of course, within a dialectical framework that is more mediative and materialistic.6 Thus, after first examining Kierkegaard, which anticipates much of Adornos later work, I shall try to show that Buck-Morss actually tends to understate the allure that Kierkegaard holds for Adorno. While Adorno uses Hegels dialectic to expose the ways in which Kierkegaards thought collapses into the sort of idealism that it purports to leave behind by rejecting Hegel, Adorno is sympathetic to the defense of non-identicalness that leads Kierkegaard to attack Hegel, which purports to leave open spaces for the individual. For Adorno, of course, Kierkegaards ultimately undialectical approach backfires, which leaves him open to attack on the very ground upon which he attacks Hegel: Kierkegaard makes individual existence abstract. Still, in his commitment to fostering a more individualized subjectivity in the face of mass societys leveling push, as well as in the philosophical tools that he uses in pursuing this objective, Adorno is highly reminiscent of Kierkegaard. Indeed, this gives rise to an important question, which I shall consider in concluding this paper: Does the conceptual space that Adorno affords the individual cause him to break off the subjectobject dialectic, and thus fall prey to the very problems that he diagnoses in Kierkegaard?
80 Philosophy & Social Criticism 27 (1) I

After opening Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic with a crucial discussion of the need to avoid interpreting philosophy as poetry, which tear[s] philosophy away from the standard of the real, and thus deprives it of the possibility of adequate criticism (K, p. 3),7 Adorno states that Kierkegaard vacillates with regard to his own status. Although generally adopting the poets stance of speaking without authority, and often stating, in various ways, that he is a kind of poet, Kierkegaard also sees himself as a philosopher, declaring in Fear and Trembling, for instance, that I am no poet and I go at things only dialectically.8 And, indeed, according to Adorno, in spite of Kierkegaards various claims to being a poet, it is ultimately the latter claim that should be privileged: He calls himself a poet when he undertakes to recapitulate the poetic existence that constitutes . . . the location of depravity in human life. Without exception, the origin of the name poetry in Kierkegaards work is transparently philosophical (K, p. 6). Still, certain distinctive attributes of poetry do resonate within Kierkegaards philosophy, and nowhere is this phenomenon in greater evidence than in his exposition of the aesthetic, which, in addition to art and art theory, can refer to immediacy or subjective communication. In every one of these cases, however, Kierkegaard was not involved with giving form to the contents of experience, which, for Adorno, is the hallmark of aesthetics, but [merely] with the reection of the aesthetic process and of the artistic individual himself (K, p. 8). This leads to what will be the essence of Adornos charge: He who as a philosopher steadfastly challenged the identity of thought and being, casually lets existence be governed by thought in the aesthetic object (K, p. 6). Thus, in response to Kierkegaards brand of dialectics, in which both the concrete subject and the concrete object are lost, Adorno maintains that to understand Kierkegaard philosophically rather than poetically (as Kierkegaard himself demands), we must penetrate his poetic pseudonyms, those altogether abstract representational gures through whom he offers his philosophy, which is simply in keeping with his own requirements: Kierkegaard the person cannot simply be banished from his work in the style of an objective philosophy, which Kierkegaard unrelentingly, and not without good cause, fought (K, p. 13). The intangibility of Kierkegaards pseudonymous authors is symptomatic of his deeper perspective on the nature of subjectivity itself, which, Adorno contends, can be correctly interpreted only by considering the relationship between the esh-and-blood Kierkegaard and the sociohistorical conditions within which he lived, and from which he was largely estranged. Kierkegaard, an early 19th-century rentier, was involved in neither economic production nor capital accumulation, but

as one living off a xed sum of invested money, he was highly subject to the market uctuations of his age (such as the economic downturn engendered by the worker revolts of 1848). He was a member of a declining class, and, as such, was externally powerless. Under these circumstances, his philosophy adapts:
In Kierkegaard the I is thrown back on itself by the superior power of otherness. He is not a philosopher of identity; nor does he recognize any positive being that transcends consciousness. The world of things is for him neither part of the subject nor independent of it. Rather, this world is omitted. It supplies the subject with the mere occasion for the deed, with mere resistance to the act of faith. In itself, this world remains random and totally indeterminate. (K, p. 29)9
As evidenced by the immanent dialectic that he proffers within the framework of his explanation of the three spheres of existence, Kierkegaard purports to operate in a dialectical way. Yet, this estrangement from the world leads him to take undialectical stances on the internal relations between subject and object, internal and external history, and history and nature. As to the subjectobject relation, Adorno tells us:
What Kierkegaard describes as being quit with everything fundamental to human existence was called, in the philosophical language of his age, the alienation of subject and object. Any critical interpretation of Kierkegaard must take this alienation as its starting point. Not that such interpretation would want to conceive the structure of existence as one of subject and object within the framework of an ontological project. The categories of subject and object originate historically. . . . If subject and object are historical concepts, they constitute at the same time the concrete conditions of Kierkegaards description of human existence. This description conceals an antinomy in his thought that becomes evident in the subjectobject relation, to which being quit may be traced. This is an antinomy in the conception of the relation to ontological meaning. Kierkegaard conceives of such meaning, contradictorily, as radically devolved upon the I, as purely immanent to the subject and, at the same time, as renounced and unreachable transcendence. Free, active subjectivity is for Kierkegaard the bearer of all reality. (K, p. 27)
By breaking off the subjectobject dialectic, Kierkegaard hopes to open up spaces within which (come what may) ones personal meaning can be preserved. (Of course, ones personal meaning does not even have to be positive, as is the case with Kierkegaards negative theology.) But this tactic, i.e. the attempt to isolate subjectivity protectively by casting out everything that is not subjectivity, is fundamentally misguided. Thus, the harder subjectivity rebounds back into itself from the heteronomous, indeterminate, or simply mean world, the more clearly the external world expresses itself, mediatedly, in subjectivity (K, p. 38).

When internalized, therefore, the melancholy that is engendered by an alienated existence becomes an existential condition. Kierkegaards melancholy does not mourn vanished happiness. It knows that it is unreachable (K, p. 126). Just as Kierkegaard aims to exclude the external world from subjectivity, he aims to exclude external history from ones personal history, which is marked completely by interiority. But again, external history comes crashing through the perimeter. Language, ostensibly the form of the communication of pure subjectivity, is itself sedimented by the historical dialectic that Kierkegaard refuses to recognize; thus, it drags external historys meanings into the core of inwardness (K, pp. 345), thereby leading Kierkegaard all the more to fall prey to the objective historical situation that he would just as soon escape. For Adorno, Kierkegaards objectless I and its immanent history is spatio-temporally symbolized by the historical image of the intrieur of Kierkegaards childhood apartment. Drawing on Kierkegaards own works, Adorno recounts how father and son would stroll within the parlor, all the while pretending that they were passing exciting places. In this way, the external world is subordinated to the intrieur, but the very nature of existence in the intrieur is simultaneously delimited by the unseen world. (The only semblance of the external world that manages to work its way into the intrieur does so through the hall mirror, and what is reected the endless row of apartment buildings off which the rentier makes his living is the very historical situation that imprisons its inhabitants.) The intrieur is thus analogous to the role of subjectivity in Kierkegaards philosophy. Finally, in characterizing the Kierkegaardian intrieur, which contains images of the sea, owers and other things from nature, Adorno maintains that Kierkegaard fails to differentiate history and nature. In trying to hold onto a world that has already effectively receded into the past, the intrieur, which is designed to preserve that past, would make of it something that transcends the merely historical. It would make this bygone era into something eternal and natural in other words, into a thing of unchanging nature. In the apartment, then, eternity and history merge together: In semblance . . . the historical world presents itself as nature (K, p. 44). Of course, this consolidation of history and nature in the intrieur is a counterfeit one, and the articial representations of nature are symbolic of Kierkegaards desire to dominate nature, which, according to Adorno, all but precludes an existentially meaningful reconciliation. Adorno goes on to explicate this relationship between history and nature in the penultimate section of the book (Reason and Sacrice) in a way that clearly anticipates the themes of Dialectic of Enlightenment.10 Accordingly, he asserts that objectless, self-identical consciousness, which

is Kierkegaards exclusive category for breaking out of systematic idealism, is actually the archimedian point of systematic idealism itself: the prerogative of thought, as its own law, to found reality (K, p. 107). But, paradoxically, while consciousness is posited as an empirically pure foundation on which self-liberation hinges, its sacrice is ultimately the price of ontological reconciliation, for a meaningful personal existence demands a spiritually inspired leap of faith that requires consciousness to disavow itself in the process of submitting to God. Adorno thus asserts:
The category that dialectically unfolds here is that of paradoxical sacrice. Nowhere is the prerogative of consciousness pushed further, nowhere more completely denied, than in the sacrice of consciousness as the fulllment of ontological reconciliation. With a truly Pascalian expanse, Kierkegaards dialectic swings between the negation of consciousness and its unchallenged authority. . . . The category of sacrice, by means of which the system transcends itself, at the same time and fully contrary to expectation, holds Kierkegaards philosophy systematically together as its encompassing unity through the sacricial abstraction of all encountered phenomena. (K, p. 107)
Kierkegaards trumpeting of consciousness sacricing itself to achieve reconciliation is mythical in character, as is the broader project of idealism itself, for the commitment to reconciliation cannot be immanently fullled. By placing nature out of bounds in favor of a spiritual comportment, Kierkegaards brand of idealism more rmly entangles itself in the very nature that it tries to escape: By annihilating nature, hope enters the vicious circle of nature; originating in nature itself, hope is only able to truly overcome it by maintaining the trace of nature (K, pp. 10910). According to Adorno, then, much like his nemesis Hegel, Kierkegaard relies upon reason to bring about a mythic reconciliation. In contrast to Hegels use of reason, which produces actuality out of itself to bring about universal sovereignty, Kierkegaards use of reason, which results in the negation of all nite knowledge, suggests universal annihilation (K, p. 119). Adorno claims that the mythic quality of these thinkers arises from a depreciation of aesthetic considerations, and, moreover, that it is only by returning to the aesthetic as a methodological principle that the concrete social reality that is the moving force behind these opposed philosophies can be revealed. These would seem to be the two impulses that hang behind Adornos phrase construction of the aesthetic, which is the books subtitle, as well as the name of its nal chapter.11 At the outset of the book, we saw that while Kierkegaard equivocates with regard to the aesthetic, every one of its articulations failed to make contact with the concrete contents of experience. To the extent that the aesthetic deals with the non-spiritual, i.e. the object, sensuous

matter, or nature, Kierkegaard depreciates it. (While referring to the later Kierkegaards aversion to art, Adorno declares: His antipathy for art expresses the longing for an imageless presence . . . an imageless selfpresentation of truth [K, p. 136].) The Kierkegaardian aesthetic is thus wholly rareed devoid of a trace of nature. But by virtue of this denial of nature, as we previously saw, Kierkegaards thought becomes blindly entangled within it. Adorno asserts, to the contrary, that the aesthetic sphere of existence, which is the rst step in Kierkegaards existential dialectic (and prior to both religion and philosophy in Hegels dialectic), is where the greatest truth lies: Where his philosophy, in the self-consciousness of its mythical semblance, encounters aesthetic characteristics, it comes closest to reality (K, p. 66). According to Adorno, there can be no impetus for reconciling with reality without initially coming to grips with both history and nature, which dialectically interweave, but can be neither reduced nor sublated.12 Kierkegaard, however, simply avoids the dialectical problem altogether by eeing both. Adornos construction of the aesthetic also demonstrates his Benjamin-inspired methodology. According to Adorno, for whom, roughly speaking, the aesthetic relates to the object position of the subjectobject dialectic, the category of the aesthetic is, in contrast to the position of [Kierkegaards] aesthete, one of knowledge (K, p. 14). And in Kierkegaard, which employs the same method that he delineated in The Actuality of Philosophy, Adorno indicates how such knowledge is to be acquired. In The Actuality of Philosophy, Adorno had maintained that philosophy is interpretation13 and that philosophical interpretation involves a process akin to riddle-solving:
Authentic philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a xed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights it up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the same time. Just as riddle-solving is constituted, in that the singular and dispersed elements of the question are brought into various groupings long enough for them to close together in a gure out of which the solution springs forth, while the question disappears so philosophy has to bring its elements . . . into changing trial combinations [constellations], until they fall into a gure which can be read as an answer.14
In Kierkegaard, Adorno arranged the miscellaneous elements of Kierkegaards oeuvre into a constellation of images that metaphorically illuminated the historical truth that was the impulse for his philosophy. As previously discussed, from the petried reproductions of nature to the threatening social reality that was reected in the hallway mirror, it was the image of Kierkegaards childhood apartment, the bourgeois intrieur, that symbolized Kierkegaards philosophy of inwardness. And while Kierkegaard could no more escape the reality from which he sought refuge in inwardness than in his childhood apartment, the

attempt itself, Adorno states, reects the social truth of his time. For Adorno, the appropriate response to this bad reality is to move toward the aesthetic, not away from it, as Kierkegaard does. This means embracing a dialectically informed materialist aesthetics that might induce the recognition that, historically, both external and internal nature had been sacriced in the name of self-preservation, but that the perpetuation of this sacrice had outlasted any of the objective demands that might have precipitated it. Yet, in moving away from Hegels dialectically informed idealistic aesthetics toward what he mistakenly takes to be a materialist aesthetics based upon sense perception (in which the aesthetic in a man is that by which he immediately is what he is15), Kierkegaard falls into the very idealism that he sought to escape. According to Adorno, this is invariably the result when the dualism of form and content is rigidly maintained, as is the case with Kierkegaard, who attempts to master the breach with the primacy of a subjectively engendered form that cancels the specic substance of the contents while simultaneously purporting to give the contents their due: Through selection, subjectivity becomes the dominant factor by its prerogative over the material, and those contents are omitted that would challenge the rule (K, p. 18). By managing the material in such a way as to exclude the treatment of social experience, Adorno argues, Kierkegaard falls behind Hegel, who mediates the relationship between form and content (as well as subject and object, external history and personal history, and history and nature), but veers into idealism by producing the entire process which from the contrived standpoint of the Absolute is meaningful and rational throughout out of his own thought-determinations. Thus, although Hegel precipitously brings this concrete dialectical process to completion, Kierkegaard, by stripping meaning from existence, never even embarks upon it, i.e. he fails to attain historical concretion in the rst place, a failure that sets a precedent the German existentialists of this century would emulate. Accordingly, as was indicated at the start of this paper, Adornos attack on Kierkegaard also functions as an attack on Heidegger. In concluding this review of Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, therefore, I shall briey examine Adornos analysis of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Heidegger, which is cursorily set forth in section four (The Concept of Existence). Since it is my view that the grounds for seeking a rapprochement between Adorno and Kierkegaard are more productive than for seeking one between Adorno and Heidegger, which, nonetheless, has been the far more dominant trend,16 it is necessary to clarify the essential differences, as Adorno sees them, between Kierkegaard and Heidegger. According to Adorno, Heidegger erroneously reads the question of

the meaning of existence out of Kierkegaard because, for Kierkegaard, existence is not to be seen as some manner of being; rather, the question for Kierkegaard is what gives existence meaning. In other words, unlike Heideggers fundamental ontology, which holds that there is a meaning to which existence must correspond, the meaning Kierkegaard would nd is generated entirely out of the domain of existence itself. Without the input of the subject, existence itself is meaningless. Consequently, Kierkegaard would have found Heideggers fundamental ontology as intolerable as Hegels system, for it fosters the kind of objectifying attitude toward existence that Kierkegaard so thoroughly denounced:
[Kierkegaard] critiques not only the scientic comprehension of the objective world, but equally the objectifying interpretation of subjectivity and, therefore, a priori, the possibility of an existential analytic of existence. Fichtes I am I and Hegels subjectobject are for Kierkegaard hypostatizations under the sign of identity and are rejected precisely to the extent that they set up a pure being of existence in opposition to the existing particular individual. . . . Because the existing takes the place of existence, ontology is removed from existence the more that the question of the existing is directed toward the existing particular person. Individual existence is for Kierkegaard the arena of ontology only because it itself is not ontological. Hence the existence of the person is for Kierkegaard a process that mocks any objectivation. (K, pp. 701)
More broadly, as this passage suggests, what ultimately differentiates Kierkegaard and Heidegger is that Kierkegaard is a philosopher of non-identity, whereas Heidegger is a philosopher of identity. Since, for Kierkegaard, there is no transcendent meaning at a distance from the individuals interpretation of his or her own particular existence, and, moreover, since the move toward his ultimate sphere of existence, the religious sphere, involves a leap of faith into absolute difference, Kierkegaards ontology is negative. Heideggers ontology, in contrast, is essentially positive. In one of a number of passages on the matter, Adorno says in Negative Dialectics (Copula) that Heideggers positivity arises from his misuse of is. By denition, he begins, the copula is fullled only in the relation between subject and predicate. It is not independent.17 Seen in this way, the copula smacks of what Heidegger would call the ontical. But in taking the general term is by itself, devoid of both subject and predicate, Heidegger transgures this ontical term, whose generality is a promissory note on particularization, into one that is rst and foremost ontological, and therefore hypostatizes it in its generality. Being itself thus becomes an object. Yet Being is no more independent of the is than that state of facts in a judgment is independent of it (ND, p. 102). Despite Heideggers claim, it is not the case that Being is, which implies that it transcends the subjectobject

relation; to the contrary, Being is intertwined in this dialectical relation. Thus, while Heidegger revives the question of the meaning of Being in response to the drive for identity inherent in positivism, his notion of Being collapses into the same sort of identity-thinking, albeit from the other extreme:
Heidegger gets as far as the borderline of dialectical insight into the nonidentity in identity. But he does not carry through the contradiction in the concept of Being. He suppresses it. What can somehow be conceived as Being mocks the notion of an identity between the concept and that which it means; but Heidegger treats it as identity, as pure Being itself, devoid of its otherness. (ND, p. 104)
Given its objectless inwardness, Kierkegaards innitely negative subject itself arguably becomes something positive due to its indeterminate nature, which would imply that, like Hegel and Heidegger, his thought ultimately collapses into an identity theory as well. Still, by virtue of Kierkegaards refusal to equate the attainment of what he would deem a truly Christian comportment with a state of reconciliation in either a spiritual or a secular sense, it seems to me that he fundamentally remains, like Adorno, a philosopher of non-identity and negativity. Like Adorno, Kierkegaard both longs for a reconciliation that cannot be spoken and is a keen critic of mass society who seeks to revivify individual subjectivity within it. In the next section, I shall pursue these similarities.
II
Unlike most of Adornos other works, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic was written before Hitlers seizure of power in Germany. And although, in one sense, Adornos work was relatively unified over his lifetime one cannot clearly distinguish between an early and a late period in his works as is often the case with other philosophers it is, in another sense, undoubtedly the case that his war experiences led him to emphasize different aspects of his thought. In Kierkegaard, Adorno attacks Kierkegaard for breaking off the subjectobject dialectic by setting forth an abstract self whose abstractness is the counterpole to the abstractness of the universal (K, p. 75) in other words, his attack on Kierkegaards abstract self comes from the viewpoint of the universal, which dialectically shapes the individuals existence. But, during the war years, when it became increasingly clear that the abstract universal (namely, advanced capitalist society, both in its fascist and its liberal forms) was tending to wholly assimilate individuality with its homogenizing impulse, Adorno turns his attention to

the individuals standpoint so as to revivify his or her subjectivity albeit, of course, without sacrificing his earlier criticisms of abstract subjectivity, which are the flip-side of the dialectical coin. World history is for Hegel what the individual is for Kierkegaard (K, p. 74), and in both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, which were written around the time of the war, Adorno no longer feels compelled to show that the individual cannot escape world history. To the contrary, he seeks to expose world history so that he might at least open up spaces for critical thought to think against it. Accordingly, during this time period Adorno also advances a more favorable analysis of Kierkegaard in On Kierkegaards Doctrine of Love, which will briefly be considered below. In the opening paragraphs of Minima Moralia, for instance, Adorno declares that Hegel ultimately denied his own thought by failing to carry through the dialectic, and that this failure, which arose from his systems claim to totality, led him to give short shrift to the individual:
The dismissive gesture which Hegel, in contradiction to his own insight, constantly accords the individual, derives paradoxically enough from his entanglement in liberal thinking. The conception of a totality harmonious through all its contradictions compels him to assign to individuation, however much he may designate it as a driving moment in the process, an inferior status in the construction of the whole. The knowledge that in prehistory the objective tendency asserts itself over the heads of human beings, indeed by annihilating individual qualities, without the reconciliation of general and particular constructed in thought ever yet being accomplished in history, is distorted in Hegel: with serene indifference he opts once again for the liquidation of the particular. . . . The individual as such he for the most part considers, naively, as an irreducible datum just what in his theory of knowledge he decomposes.18
In spite of the fact that Hegels method schooled that of Minima Moralia (MM, p. 16), his large historical categories not only reect historys objective tendency to destroy individuality, but also help contribute to the process, and are therefore no longer above suspicion of fraud (MM, p. 17). Adorno thus states that it may have become necessary for resistance to revert back to the individual:
In the period of his decay, the individuals experience of himself and what he encounters contributes to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category. In face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience. (MM, pp. 1718)
It is clear from these statements that Adorno stands in an ambivalent

relation to Hegel, and that the source of this ambivalence arises from concerns that are not at all dissimilar to those of Kierkegaard. At the very least, it would seem that the way in which Adorno would deal with these concerns, i.e. a withdrawal to the individual sphere, puts him in closer proximity to Kierkegaard than one might have initially suspected given his critique in Kierkegaard. In what follows, I shall try to put Adornos interpretation of Kierkegaard in a somewhat broader perspective. In Kierkegaard, Adorno rails against Kierkegaard because he, like Hegel, fails to carry through adequately the dialectic. But in legitimately attempting to recuperate the individual in the face of Hegels idea of world history, Kierkegaard catapults to the other extreme. In order to vindicate the individuals existence in the face of objective history, he does away with the object, external history and nature, thereby leaving the individual in objectless inwardness. Thus, Adorno contends, existence is really no less abstract for Kierkegaard than Kierkegaard claims it is for Hegel: Kierkegaards doctrine of existence could be called realism without reality (K, p. 86). Jettisoning both the social and the natural world, Kierkegaards notion of individuality is based on an innitely negative vertical relationship with God. Conversely, as we just saw, Adorno is no less troubled by Hegels individual, who is concretized indeed, in a sense, perhaps all too concretized. Hegels depiction of Sittlichkeit is based on a view of horizontal relations among people. The community is the ethical substance of the individual, and if it is rational, according to Hegel, the individual should be reconciled to it. On Adornos account, however, Hegels ethical community achieves its harmony by crushing the particularities of individuality. Thus, harmony or at least what has historically passed for harmony is essentially the totalitarian unison to which Adorno refers above.19 Adorno, therefore, buys into neither Kierkegaards vertical model nor Hegels horizontal one; indeed, inasmuch as both ultimately succumb to idealisms siren song, he thinks that neither one gives the other its due. Yet, both have an undeniably strong inuence on his thought. Of course, this inuence has always been much clearer in the case of Hegel, for there can be no question that Adorno embraces the driving impulse in Hegels dialectic, i.e. determinate negativity, if not the ends with which he precipitately brings the process to a conclusion.20 (And, of course, it is just as clear that he rejects the indeterminate negativity of Kierkegaards wholly inward dialectic.) But in terms of Adornos attack on the unyielding drive toward systematic totality in Hegels philosophy, Kierkegaards inuence has been underappreciated. In seeking to resuscitate the subject in the face of a society that has left him or her with few resources with which to resist it, Kierkegaard and Adorno share a number of theoretical and stylistic commitments.

Above all, Kierkegaard and Adorno are averse to Hegels metaphysics, which both take to be a system that purports to reconcile thought and being at the expense of the latter. By rejecting the notion that this is a relationship of identity, they converge in their aim to open up spaces for the other, which is just what Hegels system closes off. But by the other they mean different things. In Kierkegaards Philosophical Fragments, which is the very title that Adorno and Horkheimer rst selected for what would become Dialectic of Enlightenment,21 Johannes Climacus offers up the absolute paradox to confound all attempts to identify the absolutely different (which he calls the god), of which there is not even a distinguishing mark.22 This absolutely different is designed to escape thought, and the price of reconciliation, as we saw, is intellectual suicide. For Adorno, who still defends a selfconscious form of enlightened thought, the paradox itself is an illicit resort to metaphysics, the other is not absolute because everything is mediated,23 and the job of philosophy is to try to unlock the ephemeral other from the petried sociohistorical forms within which it has not been permitted to express itself. Despite their differing theoretical conceptions of otherness, both also play Kant and Hegel off one another although, for Kierkegaard, this methodological approach is less self-conscious than it is for Adorno. According to Adorno,
Kierkegaards project is the precise antithesis of the Kantian thesis and the Hegelian synthesis. Against Kant, he pursues the plan of concrete ontology; against Hegel he pursues the plan of an ontology that does not succumb to the existent by absorbing it into itself. He therefore revises the process of post-Kantian idealism; he surrenders the claim of identity. (K, p. 74)
As an initial matter, it should be noted that if we substituted dialectics for ontology in this passage, it could refer to Adorno himself. Moreover, as antitheses to the Kantian thesis and the Hegelian synthesis, Adorno and Kierkegaard could not help but draw upon the thought of both. On the one hand, Adornos debt to Hegel is clear enough. And although Kierkegaards existential dialectic culminates not in a Hegelian synthesis but rather in a nal either/or, it is impossible for even the staunchest anti-Hegelian to deny that the existential dialectic bears strong similarities to Hegels characterization of consciousness formation in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Despite its cheapening of individuality, then, Hegels dialectic offers a level of concretion that is missing in, say, the Kantian subject, the transcendental unity of apperception. On the other hand, while Adornos debt to Kants aesthetics is also clear enough, less clear is the fact that both Adorno and Kierkegaard draw sustenance from the Critique of Pure Reason. Thus, although the

critical philosophy proffers the kind of constitutive subjectivity that Adorno so ardently rejects in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that Kants notion of the thing-in-itself at least acknowledges the ultimate impossibility of obtaining a conceptual stranglehold on reality though, clearly, Adorno does not want to buy into its deeper metaphysical implications. Instead, as Adorno sees it, the thingin-itself is the phenomenon grasped from the standpoint of a sociohistorical reconciliation. Of course, such sociohistorical reconciliations do not attract Kierkegaard, or, at least, not in the same way as Adorno, but, despite Kants emphasis on reason, Kierkegaard also adverts to him so as to protect otherness from being conceptually hypostatized. It is Kant, after all, who limits the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith, which includes rejecting those proofs of Gods existence that Kierkegaard perceives as an affront to Christianity. Moreover, while neither Adorno nor Kierkegaard buys into Kants Critique of Practical Reason, both of them avail themselves of the space that it affords to critical thought. Despite his rejection of Kants transcendental subject on the grounds of its abstractness, Kierkegaard sees in irony the ability of subjectivity to absolutely detach itself from all determinations, which is precisely why Adorno claims that the Kierkegaardian subject is in no way less abstract than the Kantian one (see K, pp. 745). Still, Adorno, too, presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hairs breadth, from the scope of existence (MM, p. 247) though, to be more exact, Adorno would argue that this hairs breadth, which runs against the grain of existence, is actually to be accounted for by drawing on that which is already within the realm of existence, but has not yet been conceptualized due to identity-thinking. Implicitly referring to Hegels claim in the Philosophy of Right that philosophy paints its grey on grey, which means that philosophy succumbs to the existent, Adorno declares that grayness could not ll us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole. The traces always come from the past (ND, pp. 3778).24 Thus, although Kierkegaard and Adorno have differing theoretical commitments, the form of their thought is more than supercially similar.25 This similarity in form is largely due to the fact that both Kierkegaard and Adorno passionately embrace the negative and both hold fast to the idea of a negative utopia, albeit for one this idea is theological, while for the other it is sociohistorical. Thus, in the Preface to the Concluding Unscientic Postscript, Kierkegaard says that dialectically understood, the negative is not an intervention, but only the positive (CUP, p. 8). And in the chapter entitled Possible and Actual Theses by Lessing, he states:

The negative thinkers therefore always have the advantage that they have something positive, namely this, that they are aware of the negative; the positive thinkers have nothing whatever, for they are deluded. Precisely because the negative is present in existence and present everywhere (because being there, existence is continually in the process of becoming) the only deliverance from it is to become continually aware of it. By being positively secured, the subject is indeed fooled. (CUP, pp. 812)
As this passage suggests, the negative has a number of connotations for Kierkegaard. It is the source of our freedom; as was suggested above with respect to irony, the individual is always in a position to detach himself or herself from what is and try to reconstruct it through his or her own actions. The negative also reects our essential existential position in the world; there is no resting-place, no end-point at which we can just be done with it. It is only through the wholly negative phenomenon of death that this can come about. (The will to metaphysics is thus a will to death.) In life, however, we who actually exist are trapped in a negative relationship between the rock of being and the hard place of thought (CUP, pp. 1912), and thus must bear an interminable deferral of truth. Yet, Kierkegaard says, we must strive toward this deferred truth in passion that is, we must keep the negative tension alive lest we become deluded and fooled persons that fail to exist. For Adorno, in contrast, the negative does not refer to metaphysical inquiries, but, instead, to the dialectical relationship that constitutes such linked dualities as subject and object, individual and society, and nature and history. The uid tension that should internally characterize these dualities, however, is fractured by the prevalence of identitythinking, which, in the pursuit of control and, ultimately, self-preservation, eradicates not only the other, but the self as well. (Kierkegaard would see identity-thinking as the result of the subjects confused desire to be positively secured.) Nevertheless, these dualities must be viewed from the standpoint of their potential reconciliation, just as Kierkegaards existing person must constantly embrace the Absurd with an eye toward his metaphysical reconciliation regardless of whether the price of this metaphysical reconciliation is the Absurd, or it is absurd to believe in this metaphysical reconciliation. And, indeed, more like Kierkegaard than one would expect given his atheism, Adorno speaks of a utopian social reconciliation (while questioning its prospect) in theological terms:
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. 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 appear

one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects this alone is the task of thought. . . . Beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters. (MM, p. 247)
It is from this standpoint of redemption that Adorno advances a somewhat more favorable interpretation of Kierkegaard in On Kierkegaards Doctrine of Love,26 which was written in 1939, the same year that Adorno and Horkheimer began their collaboration on Dialectic of Enlightenment. This article begins with an examination of Kierkegaards Works of Love, in which Kierkegaard upholds the universality of a Christian love that is ultimately based upon pure subjective inwardness. But this love is like the Kantian ethics of duty. Concerned more with its own status than the other, the inward self must abstract from all natural preferences that its empirical self may harbor regarding the particularities of others in order to meet the requirement of universality. Such an undiscriminating love, however, can easily turn into its opposite, a universal hatred of other human beings, and, according to Adorno, this is what happens in the case of Kierkegaard. So far, Adornos critique of Kierkegaards doctrine of love reects his previous critique in Kierkegaard. The demand that the purely inward self love the universalized other reects an expulsion of nature, and, in turn, nature revenges itself on this abstract self in the form of a mythical taboo against the preferences of natural love, which ultimately transforms into a universal hatred. Yet, Adorno goes beyond this analysis:
Kierkegaards misanthropy, the paradoxical callousness of his doctrine of love, enables him, like few other writers, to perceive decisive character features of the typical individual of modern society. Even if one goes so far as to admit that Kierkegaards love is actually demonic hatred, one may well imagine certain situations where hatred contains more of love than the latters immediate manifestations. All Kierkegaards gloomy motives have good critical sense as soon as they are interpreted in terms of social critique. Many of his positive assertions gain the concrete signicance they otherwise lack as soon as one translates them into concepts of a right society.27
Kierkegaards hostility toward the masses, in other words, implicitly incorporates within it a hostility toward the dominating mechanisms of a society that turns human beings into a mass. And, in contrast to a positivistic outlook, this hostility can arise only because it is opposed to the ever present moment of possibility in Kierkegaards thought that is, the possibility of a transgured world. (Furthermore, Adorno explicitly recognizes in this article that as a critic, he actually grasped the instant, that is to say, his own historical situation. . . . Kierkegaard was Hegelian enough to have a clean-cut idea of history.28)

Finally, despite the differing nature of their substantive commitments to the other that is, the difference between seeing the other in theological-metaphysical terms (which raises questions of immediacy and self-presence) and seeing the other in sociohistorical terms (which, among other things, raises questions regarding the good life29) Kierkegaard and Adorno converge in the tactics that they use to facilitate their ends. (For instance, Kierkegaard would have us believe against the understanding [CUP, p. 233], while Adorno, who stresses the need to retain conceptuality, would have us understand against the existing understanding.) In particular, they share remarkably similar perspectives on the nature of communication. There is no reason to nd this surprising, of course, since both are preoccupied with resurrecting the individual in the face of an intransigent social context that would do its best to wipe out all particularity. Under these circumstances, to spoon-feed a doctrine even an anti-doctrine would only reinstantiate the type of passive individuality that is being mass-produced. The very form of the communication must also be its content to perform its therapeutic task, and this is indeed the case for both Kierkegaard and Adorno. In the rst of his four Possible and Actual Theses by Lessing, which deals with the paradox of communication, Kierkegaard asserts that there are actually two types of communication. The rst type, which is not of particular interest, is that direct form of communication that is completely indifferent to subjectivity and thereby to inwardness and appropriation (CUP, p. 75). It has no secrets, but merely seeks to impart objective knowledge that is already possessed by every party to the communication. It is only the second type of communication, the indirect form, that is meaningful. Instead of conveying objective truths, it respects the freedom of all parties to the communication by only providing the occasion for the recipients to come to their own subjective truths. For Adorno, too, the objective is to communicate in a manner that forces the recipients to contribute something to their assimilation of the communication (which is precisely what mass society tends to discourage), and it is this objective that motivates both the complex and fragmentary nature of his works. Even Adornos most systematic works, such as Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, appear to be little more than a constellation of essays structured around an organizing principle, whereas other works, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, are comprised (in part and whole, respectively) of aphorisms. Consequently, in contrast to Hegels systematic dialectical theory, [which] abhorring anything isolated cannot admit aphorisms as such, Adornos anti-systematic style seeks to open up spaces for late capitalisms overdetermined subject: If today the subject is vanishing, aphorisms take upon themselves the duty to

consider the evanescent as essential (MM, p. 16). Ultimately, of course, Adorno, in contrast to Kierkegaard and the later Heidegger, will not identify his philosophical form with poetry, for in trying to break through languages reied form, Adorno still relies upon the labor of the concept to illume sociohistorical truths. Still, in virtue of Kierkegaards attempt to resurrect the subject through language, he stands in much closer proximity to Adorno than Heidegger. Unlike Heidegger (as well as deconstructionists and second-generation critical theorists), who believes that a proper understanding of language leads to the elimination of the very notion of the individual subject, it is precisely to the individual subject that the works of Kierkegaard and Adorno are ultimately geared.
III
In Kierkegaard, it will be recalled, Adorno asserts that Kierkegaard breaks off the subjectobject dialectic by retreating to the objectless inwardness of pure subjectivity, but that in abstractly eeing his sociohistorical context, Kierkegaard ultimately, albeit unwittingly, drags its substance into the core of his subjectivity, where it then conditions his thought in an unmediated fashion. Given the similarities between Adorno and Kierkegaard that are raised in the previous section, however, it must be asked whether, ultimately, Adorno himself also retreats to the objectless inwardness of an isolated subjectivity, and thus breaks off the subjectobject dialectic with analogous results? To be sure, in sharp contrast to Kierkegaard, who casts out the objective world in the service of a subjectivity that is rst absolutized and then sacriced, Adorno not only purports to incorporate the object (in its multifaceted sense) into his negative dialectic, but actually privileges it all the while rejecting Kierkegaards ultimate sacrice of subjectivity in the name of an unrealizable ontological reconciliation. Still, if, in some sense, Adorno privileges a thin negative space between subject and object, which affords his standpoint of critique, does his own sociohistorical context inevitably colonize it, thus conditioning his thought as well? At rst blush, it would seem that Lyotard begins to deal with this question in Adorno as the Devil. Writing at a time when he styled himself a libidinal economist, Lyotard theorizes here from the standpoint of a metaphysics of the libido, in which the striving for high intensities is valorized. According to Lyotard, Adornos philosophical standpoint, in contrast, is completely devoid of libidinal intensity, and therefore nishes the obliteration of the libidinal body.30 He articulates this position as follows:

Adornos problematic belongs to a libidinal deployment, that of remission by sacrice, that of the martyr, that of the paradox of faith, the great work being all the more true the more poorly it is received in the world of alienation to a deployment which modern capitalism has now disinvested, which it has emptied of all affective intensity.31
This excerpt, which is reminiscent of Adornos critique of Kierkegaard, is based upon Lyotards broader claim that Adorno represents the bad nale of dialectical thinking. According to Lyotard, although Marxs Hegelian-inspired dialectic tended to enervate the libidinal body, since it also perniciously availed itself of negative critique, it was not nearly as nettlesome as Adornos expressly negative dialectics, for at least Marxs sociohistorical context enabled his theory to be more than just negative criticism; it also furnished the opportunity for the deployment of libidinal intensities because resistance to capitalism then occurred within the dynamics of capitalism that is, it was a cathected resistance. In contrast, Lyotard goes on to say, Adornos standpoint of critique does not take itself to exist within the libidinal economy of societys prevailing institutions, but outside them altogether, given the totally administered nature of society. For this reason, Adornos negative criticism demands the occultation of the ear. Even though Lyotard goes so far as to suggest that criticism can only redouble the empty space where its discourse plunges its object, and that it can no longer think the object,32 which, again, sounds a good deal like Adornos critique of Kierkegaard, he undialectically veers off by hypostatizing Adornos negative conceptual space without considering how it is mediated by the very sociohistorical context that it critiques. This facilely suggests that Adorno truly can achieve a completely external standpoint of critique (if not actually the Devils standpoint itself). The question, to the contrary, is whether Adornos negative critique is not, in some sense, more cathected than Lyotard recognizes, and, therefore, subservient to its sociohistorical context, which is permeated by advanced capitalism. If so, it would just unwittingly afrm that which Lyotards positivistic Libidinal Economy would have us unreservedly afrm as an initial matter. Accordingly, for the Lyotard of Libidinal Economy, which was written around the same time as Adorno as the Devil, negative critique should be jettisoned in favor of a high-energy collapse into capitalism. And, of course, for Adorno, this reects the very sort of theoretical collapse into practice that causes him to abstain from practice altogether. In concluding this paper, I shall offer a few thoughts on the problem of the relationship between theory and practice in Adornos philosophy, which, ultimately, is what is at stake in the questions that are being posed about the relationship between subject and object.33 In particular, I shall consider whether Adornos forbearance from any kind of

political practice is not tantamount to an (inadvertent) embrace of the existing practices, which is his own charge against Kierkegaard. I intend to show that, contrary to the generally accepted belief, Adornos theory can translate into political practice. Generally speaking, the argument against Adornos approach to the problem of theory and practice can be formulated along the following lines: Adorno explicitly rejects praxis on the ground that theory invariably becomes subordinated to practice. As a result, despite his insistence upon the mediation of subject and object, and, indeed, theory and practice, in theory, Adorno breaks off the dialectic between subject and object, theory and practice, in practice. But inasmuch as Adorno rejects the underpinnings of traditional theory, critically recognizing that theory is generated within the framework of prevailing sociohistorical practices, how could a critical perspective survive a context that does all it can to extirpate it? In other words, the argument would be that practice is required to keep critical theory alive, for in the absence of oppositional practices that might mitigate the movement toward the totally administered society, there will ultimately no longer be any space open for oppositional theories. Even if Adorno is right about the tendency for engaged theory to be reduced to that which is expedient for practice, therefore, theory is no less imperiled by engaging in practice than it is by abstaining from it. Adornos occasional references to his theory as a message in a bottle for future generations are thus unduly optimistic. Moreover, even before the nal triumph of an oppressive, totalizing practice, there is the question of the consciousness of the philosopher himself, because, as Adorno asserts in regard to Kierkegaard and, for that matter, Heidegger, the philosopher who abstractly breaks off the subjectobject dialectic in the name of theory tends to capitulate both theoretically and practically to the prevailing practices. And, indeed, so this argument might go, this is evinced by Adorno himself namely, in his theoretical stance toward the German New Left, and his decision to call in the police to quell the political activities of the student movement on campus. For his part, Adorno makes no apologies for his unwillingness either to engage in political practice himself, or to support the oppositional political practices of others. In Resignation, for example, he refers (without explicit attribution) to pseudo-activity, which is the action of small groups attempting to preserve enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and obdurate society, and argues that such activity either atrophies beneath the encrusted totality that it contests or is rechanneled by that totality toward its own ends.34 To the contrary, above all, he argues, the force of resistance lies with the uncompromisingly critical thinker, whose thinking not only points beyond itself, but, crucially, at least in some form (even if suppressed or forgotten),

survives: Thinking has the momentum of the general. What has been cogently thought must be thought in some other place and by other people.35 As suggested in the last paragraph, however, this position may well be unduly optimistic. Similarly, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno maintains in opposition to Sartres notion that we are always already up to our elbows in blood, and that we must freely choose within the coercive framework of our situation that under existing circumstances there is a touch of freedom in refusing to accept the alternatives. Freedom means to criticize and change situations, not to conrm them by deciding within their coercive structure (ND, p. 226). But, again, the question remains: How does one change situations without engaging in practical action that is, in some sense, circumscribed by the existing coercive structure? Peter Uwe Hohendahl argues that the adequacy or failure of Adornos position during the postwar period and the legitimacy of Adornos work for the present must not be conated if we are effectively to come to grips with the implications of his work for political action.36 Of course, as was suggested earlier, his personal positions and his work could dialectically implicate one another, as Adorno contends is the situation with Kierkegaard, but, at least theoretically, this is not necessarily so, and, in any event, it may well be that the kernel of a theory of political action might be culled from an oeuvre that, in other respects, might be tainted by a quietistic personal propensity. Thus, a number of commentators have attempted to carve out a notion of practice from Adornos thought, but, invariably, this has occurred along aesthetic lines. In Between Impotence and Illusion: Adornos Art of Theory and Practice,37 which is the most thoroughgoing of these attempts, Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker rightly point out that any question of political action is simultaneously a question of reason and its critique, and, moreover, that the claim of Habermas and other second-generation critical theorists to the effect that Adorno has given up on the emancipatory possibilities of enlightenment rationality is at best one-sided, if not just plain wrong. Sullivan and Lysaker also rightly assert that it is precisely the critique of reason by reason that affords whatever basis there could possibly be for an emancipatory reason, i.e. a reason that does not unreectively incorporate the violent instrumentalization of reason that Dialectic of Enlightenment found to be the basis of subject formation, and that to accomplish this feat it is crucial to maintain the tension between subject and object. And, nally, they are also right on target when they declare that it is in the analysis of concrete practices that maintain this tension between subject and object (which must go through the self-critical subject) that an emancipatory model can be found. Yet, when Sullivan and Lysaker offer up art as an example of this

type of concrete practice,38 they are, to be sure, correct in the sense that art evidences such a practice, but not in the sense for which Adorno has been reproached namely, for failing to provide a basis for political practice. Aesthetic reection has a lofty enlightenment pedigree, and, indeed, may well be a necessary condition of emancipation by providing a corrective to current epistemological paradigms, which invariably fail to maintain the subjectobject tension, but it is not a sufcient condition of emancipation. It is this general tendency to pin exclusively on art any possibility for praxis in Adornos philosophy that allows Paul Piccone to state:
For Adorno . . . social theory was possible only by escaping into esthetics, where micrological analyses of the particular provide aphoristic glimpses of that false totality no longer immediately apprehensible through discredited traditional conceptual means. . . . Adornos micrological analysis succeeds in salvaging revolutionary subjectivity in social theory as art, but at the price of destroying any possible normative political mediational function.39
It seems to me that Adorno does offer us more than social theory as art, and that it is possible to nd a fulcrum within his thought that is able to provide a normative political mediational function. Drawing upon Dialectic of Enlightenment, which insists upon the remembrance of nature in the subject,40 I would argue that this fulcrum is the body not the body in an abstract sense, as an unmediated ideal in which desire is ahistorically given free play, which involves (either implicitly or explicitly) a loss of the subject, but the body as it manifests itself in concrete practices. This requires the reection of a self-critical subject, who mediates these bodily responses with a comprehension of his or her own particular practices a comprehension that includes the ways in which these particular practices impact on and are impacted by the sociohistorical totality of which they are an inextricable part. According to Adorno, the possibilities of a truly progressive consciousness rst depend on ones nerval reactions and idiosyncrasies, i.e. on ones peculiar somatic reactions to social phenomena, and whoever lacks this manner of irrational reaction is also bereft of progressive consciousness.41 Of course, he quickly goes on to say, these reactions must then be sublimated into a theory42 indeed, these irrational reactions themselves occur within an experiential framework that is theoretically informed but Adornos critical point is that any possibility for a genuinely progressive practice must sublate a somatic response to experience no less than a theoretical one:
Adequate expression of a matter does not involve an elimination of subjectivity, but rather that the matter itself can be brought to language only through the most extreme renement and exertion of subjectivity. To this,

I would add that this process equally demands the work and exertion of the concept in order to get beyond blind idiosyncrasy and for thought to catch up with experience, simply because thought itself is an element of experience. Experience without thought is as far removed from true experience as is experience without idiosyncrasy.43
Because Adorno sees idiosyncratic or blind reactions, such as ones hair standing on end,44 as subjective responses to social phenomena that are no less important than reason, he asserts in Negative Dialectics that if the motor form of reaction were liquidated altogether, if the hand no longer twitched, there would be no will, and thus what the great rationalistic philosophers conceived as the will is already, and without accounting for it, a denial of the will (ND, p. 230). Even freedom, Adorno argues, needs what Kant calls heteronomous (ND, p. 237). Viewed from a somewhat different angle, this is why Adorno took great pains to attack the neo-Freudian theorists, such as Karen Horney, who in turning toward ego psychology discarded (or, at the very least, domesticated) Freuds earlier drive theory. As an initial matter, by valorizing the subjugation of the libido, which otherwise affords a somatic basis for an emancipatory impulse, they approach Kants anti-psychologistic morality to the extent that instinct is subordinated to reason or, more specically, the particular reason of the sociohistorical context within which it nds itself.45 So, too, ego psychology would overcome idiosyncrasy, for idiosyncrasy is unsuited to the well-adjusted personality that it seeks to promote, but, as Adorno points out, this seamless reconciliation of the individual with an untoward social totality is a false one (and, in any case, occurs more in thought than it does in reality). Of course, as the last line in this passage implies, to reverse eld and simply privilege the body at the cost of theory as Lyotard does in Adorno as the Devil and Libidinal Economy leads the individual to fall prey to a bad reality no less than Kants pure practical reason or ego psychology. In sum, as we have seen throughout, Adorno seeks to give the object its due, and, moreover, as he asserts, praxis follows the objects neediness,46 but this precludes a practice that would immediately follow the object in either of these forms that is, it precludes a practice that would immediately follow either our libidinal impulses (rst nature) or the social world (second nature) for both (unmediated) approaches only reafrm the regressive social conditions that a true theory and practice would surmount, and therefore collapse into identity-thinking, as all prima philosophia does. Accordingly, if identity-thinking within the context of subject and object arises not only by positing the equivalence of the two terms, but also by articially separating them, as is the case with Kierkegaard and Heidegger (who lose the object and subject, respectively), and if the relation between theory and practice follows

from the relation between subject and object, as Adorno acknowledges, Adorno must mediate the relation between theory and practice, lest he collapse into the very identity-thinking that he diagnoses in Kierkegaard and Heidegger. In other words, as Adorno himself recognizes, he cannot subordinate practice to theory any more than the decisionists whom he criticizes subordinate theory to practice, but must maintain a tension between the two akin to the tension that must be maintained between subject and object. Thus, Adorno states: The relationship between theory and practice, after both have once distanced themselves from each other, is that of qualitative reversal, not transition, and surely not subordination.47 To the extent that a non-repressive praxis is actually possible, according to Adorno, it involves steering between the alternatives of spontaneity and organization.48 Without spontaneity which is tied to the subjective, somatic reactions previously discussed, and heteronomously manifests the neediness of the object within the subject something like a valid practice is not possible.49 And, indeed, this is because spontaneity is the remainder that escapes theoretical subsumption. As Adorno haltingly states, when discussing spontaneity we are attempting to describe in theoretical terms an element of morality that is actually foreign to theory; thus, the moral sphere is not coterminous with the theoretical sphere, and this fact is itself a basic philosophical determinant of the sphere of practical action.50 In other words, the nonidentical spontaneous moment is what helps protect against the sophistic tendencies of theory when it is abstractly pressed into practice tendencies that were evidenced by the Soviet-style organization of society, which justied the ongoing repression of workers in the name of their emancipation, and are still evidenced by American-style capitalist organization, which increasingly subordinates people to work in the hollow name of delivering the goods. This is why Adorno insists that spontaneity . . . attach itself to the vulnerable places of rigidied reality, where the ruptures caused by the pressure of rigidication appear externally, [and] not thrash about indiscriminately, abstractly.51 Tethered to a particular setting, which gives rise to particular injustices that affect subjectivity in palpable, physical ways, a theoretically informed spontaneity gives rise to practices that will not be the result of a cold, ossied theory that has lost the object, which itself is the product of a cold, ossied subject that has lost the object. Accordingly, Adorno states:
Whoever imagines that as a product of this society he is free of the bourgeois coldness harbors illusions about himself as much as about the world; without such coldness one could not live. The ability of anyone, without exception, to identify with anothers suffering is slight. The fact that one simply could not look on any longer, and that no one of goodwill should

have to look on any longer, rationalizes the pang of conscience. The attitude at the edge of uttermost horror, such as was felt by the conspirators of 20 July who preferred to risk perishing under torture to doing nothing, was possible and admirable. To claim from a distance that one feels the same way as they do confuses the power of imagination with the violence of the immediately present.52
The spur to true praxis for Adorno, in short, is the violence of the immediately present, which can engender a refusal that always implies resisting something stronger and hence always contains an element of despair.53 It is only in this way that thought can give rise to practices that truly absorb the weight of reality and [do] not simply ee from it (or otherwise lose it through theoretical abstraction), as is the case with what Kafka called the the empty, happy journey .54 Indeed, this is precisely where Adorno breaks with Kierkegaard, whose unhappy journey was empty insofar as it left the object behind. It is only through a theoretically mediated sensitivity to the object in its multifariousness that the subject can hope to resist and transcend a bad reality. Department of Philosophy, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA
PSC
Notes
1 See, for example, John D. Caputo, Instants, Secrets and Singularities: Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida, in Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal (eds) Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). 2 See, for example, Martin J. Matustik, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), which was inspired by Habermass 1987 Copenhagen lectures. 3 Sren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 723. Further references to the Concluding Unscientic Postscript will appear in the text as CUP plus page reference. 4 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 121. 5 See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Signicance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 609. See also p. 606 (in reviewing Negative Dialectics, Wiggershaus asserts that Adorno was aware of how certain of his views were close to existential philosophy).

6 This is not coincidental. As a young man, Adorno was so immersed in Kierkegaards thought that Siegfried Kracauer wrote to Leo Lowenthal that if Teddie one day makes a real declaration of his love . . . it will undoubtedly take such a difcult form that the young lady will have to have read the whole of Kierkegaard . . . to understand Teddie at all. See Robert Hullot-Kentors Foreword to Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. xii citing Leo Lowenthal, Recollections of Adorno, Telos 61 (Fall 1984): 160. Further references to Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic will appear in the text as K plus page reference. 7 This discussion serves as an important rejoinder to those who would interpret Adorno as an archetypal poststructuralist. In the opening sentences, Adorno declares: 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 (K, p. 3). The poststructuralist rejection of Hegels labor of the concept in favor of an open analysis of the text is not one that Adorno would embrace. 8 Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling /Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 90. 9 I should indicate that there is a good deal of hostility toward Adornos interpretation of Kierkegaard much of it revolving around this very point. (Indeed, I had the chance personally to encounter some of this hostility when presenting an earlier draft of this paper at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.) Still, not all Kierkegaard scholars would disagree with Adorno on this point. See, for example, Louis Mackey, The Loss of the World in Kierkegaards Ethics, in his Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986). 10 Walter Benjamin, whose own work inspired Adornos characterization of the bourgeois intrieur, presciently stated that it is very possible the authors later books will spring from this one (K, p. xii). 11 My following explication of the ambiguous phrase construction of the aesthetic draws upon both Buck-Morss and Wiggershaus. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, The Idea of Natural History, Telos 60 (Summer 1984): 111. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, The Actuality of Philosophy, Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 126. 14 ibid., 127. 15 See Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. 34. 16 According to those critics who seek a rapprochement between Adorno and Heidegger, Adornos opposition to Heidegger was primarily motivated by the latters politics. See, for example, Fred Dallmayr, Between Freiburg and Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 54: Needless to say, Adornos antagonism was greatly deepened and intensied by Heideggers pro-Nazi afliation. (Dallmayr builds upon Hermann Mrchens Adorno und Heidegger: Untersuchung

Einer Philosophischen Kommunikations verweigerung [Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1981].) In contrast, it is my belief that this understates the deep philosophical differences that existed between the two thinkers differences that I can only touch upon here. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1992), p. 101. Further references to Negative Dialectics will appear in the text as ND plus page reference. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1978), pp. 1617. Further references to Minima Moralia will appear in the text as MM plus page reference. Whether, in fact, the social state of the community is rational presents a complicated question. To be sure, Hegels famous claim in the Philosophy of Right that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational is not an apologetic for the status quo, i.e. if a state exists it must be rational, as Right Hegelians have maintained. To be actual carries a specialized meaning for Hegel (as, for example, to exist carries a specialized meaning for Kierkegaard). Actuality is synonymous with rationality; mere existence is not enough. (And Hegel really wasnt a fan of the Prussian state anyway.) Therefore, might it be that a truly rational Hegelian society would require the kind of freedom for particularity that would meet Adornos objections? This question must still be answered in the negative. Although Hegel speaks of subjective freedom, which suggests a concern with a unity of differences, he still saw his world as largely rational, albeit in need of reform. This suggests a failure to carry through his own dialectic. (See the following note. ) Along these lines, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 24: With the notion of determinate negativity, Hegel revealed an element that distinguishes the Enlightenment from the positivist degeneracy to which he attributes it. By ultimately making the conscious result of the whole process of negation totality in system and in history into an absolute, he of course contravened the prohibition and himself lapsed into mythology. Philosophical Fragments was the books title when it was initially circulated among the other members of the exiled Institute for Social Research. See Robert Hullot-Kentor, Back to Adorno, Telos 81 (Fall 1989): 6. Sren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 445. Mediately to afrm immediacy, instead of comprehending it as mediated within itself, is to pervert thought into an apologia of its antithesis, into the immediate lie. This perversion serves all bad purposes, from the private pigheadedness of lifes-like-that to the justication of social injustice as a law of nature. . . . Dialectical mediation is not a recourse to the more abstract, but a resolution of the concrete in itself (MM, pp. 734). Simon Jarvis makes this point in Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 212. Without putting too ne a point on it, even certain substantive aspects of Kierkegaards thought albeit his earlier thought tend to approach
17 18 19
20
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Adornos concern with trying to experience otherness in its concreteness. In the Concept of Irony, for example, Kierkegaard compares the concept to a philosophical knight and the phenomenon to a woman, and asserts that even if the observer does bring the concept along with him, it is still of great importance that the phenomenon remain inviolate and that the concept be seen as coming into existence through the phenomenon. As far as it goes, this resonates with Adornos claim that the concept is true only to the degree that it is false that is, a true concept is a concept that is not true in a metaphysical sense, for only a concept that is not true in the metaphysical sense retains the uidity to let itself continually pass away in response to the ever changing nature of the phenomenon. See Sren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 9. Theodor W. Adorno, On Kierkegaards Doctrine of Love, in Harold Bloom (ed.) Soren Kierkegaard: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989), pp. 1934. ibid., p. 28. ibid., p. 29. Kierkegaard even had the beginnings of a critique of capitalism that augurs certain Adornian themes. While battling the Corsair, he laments that when passion and commercial interests determine the issue, when there is no room for the harmony of category relations but only the rattle of money in the cash box, and when passion is propelled to the extreme that even the subscriber buys along with the paper the right contemptibly to dispatch what is being written this is another matter. As James Marsh has pointed out, much of the critique is already present, namely, the corrupting inuence of money, the way that money smoothes over category differences, the ability of the media to arouse a debased form of passion, and the license to dismiss complicated works that are not easily reduced to the lowest common denominator. See James L. Marsh, Kierkegaard and Critical Theory, in Matustik and Westphal, Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, pp. 199215. Adorno begins Minima Moralia by chastising modern philosophy for giving up the teaching of the good life, which from time immemorial was regarded as the true eld of philosophy (MM, p. 15). Jean-Franois Lyotard, Adorno as the Devil, Telos 19 (1974): 127. ibid., 130. ibid., 135. A simple consideration of history demonstrates just how much the question of theory and practice depends upon the question of subject and object. Theodor W. Adorno, Marginalia to Theory and Practice, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 259. Theodor W. Adorno, Resignation, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.) The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 173. ibid., pp. 1745. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 17. Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker, Between Impotence and Illusion:
26 27 28
29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37

Adornos Art of Theory and Practice, New German Critique 57 (Fall 1992): 87. See ibid., 121. Paul Piccone, General Introduction to The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. xvi. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 40. Theodor W. Adorno, On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness, interview with Peter von Haselberg, Telos 56 (Summer 1983): 1001. ibid., 101. ibid., 102. ibid., 101. As Hegel points out in the section of the Phenomenology entitled Reason as Testing Laws, because the categorical imperative is a tautology, and indifferent to the content, one content is just as acceptable to it as its opposite, and the content that will prevail is the existing one. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 2578. Ego psychologys normalizing push cashes out in much the same way. Adorno, Marginalia to Theory and Practice, p. 265. ibid., p. 277. ibid., p. 274. Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (1963 lecture series), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 7. ibid., pp. 78. Adorno, Marginalia to Theory and Practice, p. 266. ibid., p. 274. The conspirators of 20 July refers to those German ofcers who tried to kill Hitler in his bunker in East Prussia. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, p. 7. Adorno, On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness, p. 102.
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