$GRUQR

V&RQFHSWLRQRIWKH)RUPRI3KLORVRSK\
6WHZDUW0DUWLQ

diacritics, Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 48-62 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/dia.2008.0000

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v036/36.1martin.html

Access provided by UNICAMP Universidade Estadual de Campinas (8 May 2015 21:48 GMT)

Adornos conception of
the form of philosophy
Stewart Martin
Adornos attention to issues of form is familiar and routinely discussed, and there have
been numerous studies on Adornos style and of the affinity of his philosophical writing
to literary and, in particular, musical forms. In this essay, however, form is considered
only insofar as it contributes to articulating a conception of philosophy as such. Above
all, Adornos idea of philosophy, as articulated through his idea of its form or presentation, is sought here. Form is considered as one of the principal ways in which Adorno
addressed the decisive issue for Frankfurt School Critical Theory of the redefinition and
reconstitution of philosophy after Marx and the crisis of German Idealism.1 The examination of form here is therefore strictly metaphilosophicala contribution, via Adorno, to
what might be characterized as philosophical morphology, rather than any more generic
mode of criticism.

Adorno is emphatic that the presentation [Darstellung] of philosophy is not an external matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea.2 But, despite such claims, his
conception of what this presentation is, and therefore what the idea of philosophy is to
which it is immanent, remains profoundly obscure. Through the generation of a philosophical context, Adornos few and often elliptical remarks can acquire the legibility and
importance that are at stake here. Adornos renowned declaration of Negative Dialectics
as an anti-system [Negative Dialectics xx/10] is the familiar touchstone for discussions of his conception of form. But for this characterization to be read in terms of the
idea of philosophy as suchrather than in terms of some other stylistic or presentational
problem, and in the absence of much supporting evidenceit needs to be considered in
relation to what it negates, namely, the idea of system as an idea of philosophy. If we
seek to elaborate this idea, we are quickly led to Adornos criticisms of modern systematic philosophy from Descartes to Hegel. These criticisms are complicated, however, by
Adornos critique of dogmatism, which equally motivates his conception of philosophical form, but which is also indebted to certain dimensions of systematic philosophy. The
origin of this complex may be found in Kants critique of dogmatism as it is elaborated as
a critique of dogmatic form.

For Kant, the dogmatic form of philosophy is, strictly speaking, the attempt to achieve
apodictic certainty through the misemployment of philosophical concepts as if they were
mathematical concepts. This is his essential methodological objection to the philosophies
of Descartes, Spinoza, and latterly Wolff.3 It is the source of Kants famous contention that
definitionsat least in the sense of complete and original presentationsare alien to
the form of philosophy and philosophizing. It induces a profound rejection of Descartess
and Spinozas adoption of Euclids axiomatic systematization as a principle of the form
1. This problem was the topic of my PhD thesisAdorno and the Problem of Philosophy,
Middlesex University, 2002from which this essay is derived.

2. Adorno, Negative Dialectics 18/Negative Dialektik 29. Where necessary, I have modified
the English translations cited throughout this essay.

3. The key text here is The Discipline of Pure Reason in its Dogmatic Employment.

48

diacritics 36.1: 4862

of philosophy. However, the qualities Kant attributes to the presentation of philosophical,

as opposed to mathematical, conceptsopen-ended, provisional, discursive, acroamatic,
bound to experience, linguistic; qualities that resonate with the recognition of the historical form of philosophical reasoning or philosophizing4are not only incompatible with
the model of system derived from geometric axiomatization. They also reject the alternative of a mere aggregation of elements, simultaneously developing a form of relation or
unity which generates a new, organic model of system. Rather than a system premised on
the foundation of a set of privileged axioms, which remain unchanged in their extension
or application, a concept of system is generated in which elements are part of a complex,
changing, and open-ended interrelationship, the essence of which is revealed through
each of its parts, rather than merely in one foundational part of it.

This indication of a new concept of system would become fundamental for the development of Romanticism and German Idealism, despite their criticisms of Kant. Adornos
relation to this heritage is effectively to renew and redirect Kants critique of dogmatism
toward this new, nonaxiomatic concept of system, generating a critique of philosophys
aspiration to the form of a system tout court. Adorno argues that even Hegels system of
absolute knowledgethe pinnacle of post-Cartesian systematic philosophyreduces the
absolute (the infinite) to its finite presentation and thereby contradicts it. Adorno maintains that the absolute can only be presented negatively andinsofar as the form of system creates the illusion of a finite presentation of the absoluteantisystematically. Benjamins significant early conception of constellation as a nonsystematic form of philosophy
attempts to register this disjunction between the absolute and the finite. Yet by recourse
to a theological appeal to the name, Benjamin thereby recovers a form of antisystematic
dogmatism. The critique of Benjamins dogmatism produces Adornos distinctive conception of the form of philosophy.

Nonetheless, Adornos rejection of systematic philosophy should not be overstated.
It is directed at the conception of system as an autonomous, self-sufficient and thereby
closed form, founded on its immanence, to which transcendence or externality is either
subsumed or excluded. However, Adorno did not want to dissolve the forms of complex determination generated through systematicity, a project he discerns in Nietzsche,
for whom there belongs a wholly different power and agility to what establishes itself
in an incomplete system with freely unenclosed prospects, than to a dogmatic world.5
Adorno remains our contemporary, insofar as he did not assume the cultural authority of
systematic philosophy. His critique of it is made in the face not of its dominance but of
its decline, and he is concerned to salvage what remains of value from its suppression:
the absoluteness with which the form of the system was infused, in contrast to the injunction typical of sciences that claim to be systematic in the limited form of an ordering of
data for coherence or clarity, or hypothetical modelling. Adornos criticism of systematic
philosophy does not attempt to support its renewal within the sciences or recommend its
reversal into mere aggregation; nor does he seek to retrieve it as it was. In the manner
of Benjamins destructive historiography, he treats it as a ruin, which, as ruined, releases
potentialities that are suppressed within its original form. The critique of system therefore
becomes the remembrance of the coherence of the nonidenticalthe recognition of the
nonidentical as not just an arbitrary or irrational excessthat was repressed with the idea
of an absolute system as a principle of identity, that is to say, as a principle of the transcendental subject:

4. See Discipline of Pure Reason A735/B763

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke 9: 361, qtd. in Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie 1: 26.

diacritics / spring 2006

49

The conception of the system recalls, in reversed form, in the coherence of the
nonidentical, that which is violated by deductive systematics. Criticism of systems and asystematic thought are superficial as long as they cannot release the
cohesive force which the idealistic systems had signed over to the transcendental subject. [Adorno, Negative Dialectics 36/26]
Adorno therefore extends the deconstruction of system as a principle of identity, which
had already been implied by Kants differentiation of systematic reasoning from a system of reason, but which was limited by Kants commitment to the system provided by
the subject as the organon of thinking.6 The destruction of system reveals, in the recollection of its ruined monuments, the fragments of an alternative form of philosophical
presentation.
Constellations
Broadly following Kants methodology, Adorno maintains that philosophical concepts
do not present their content, the nonconceptual, immediately. Philosophizing presents
the nonconceptual indirectly or discursively, through the combination of a plurality of
different concepts, which attempt to present the nonconceptual through their interrelation. The experience of nonidentity, revealed in the failure of a concept to sufficiently
identify the nonconceptual, informs a process whereby such an inadequate concept is
combined with other concepts that attempt, from different vantages, to conceptualize the
nonconceptual; endeavoring to say, through their combination, what they could not say
individually. Through these combinations, or constellations, Adorno argues, a claim to
truth is sustained analogous to the ontological force of the name, but without a delusive
claim to immediacy: The determinable flaw in every concept makes it necessary to cite
others; this is the font of the only constellations which inherited something of the hope
of the name. The language of philosophy approaches that name by denying it [Negative
Dialectics 53/62]. The model for this is not mathematical axiomatization but language,
inasmuch as it is essentially distinct from any immediate presentation of what it seeks to
communicate:
Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. Where it appears
essentially as a language, where it becomes a form of presentation [Darstellung], it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation
into which it puts the concepts centred about a thing. Language thus serves the
intention of the concept to express completely what it means. [162/164]
Constellations attempt to reveal the interior of an object through a combination of concepts that, from the outside, as it were, try to present the relations in which an object
stands and thereby the relations through which the object is internally constituted.

6. Now if in the speculative employment of pure reason there are no dogmas to serve as its
special subject-matter, all dogmatic methods, whether borrowed from the mathematician or specially invented, are as such inappropriate. For they only serve to conceal defects and errors, and
to mislead philosophy, whose true purpose is to present every step of reason in the clearest light.
Nevertheless its method can always be systematic. For our reason is itself, subjectively, a system,
though in its pure employment, by means of concepts, it is no more than a system whereby our investigations can be conducted in accordance with principles of unity, the material being provided
by experience alone [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A73738/B76566].

50


Constellations generate what Adorno refers to as models. Models are the product of constellations; they are the forms generated through thinking in constellations.
Adornos concept of model is obscure. He describes models as an alternative to philosophizing through examples, taken to be merely illustrative of an idea: [Models] are not
examples; they do not simply elucidate general reflections. . . . [They are] opposed to the
use of examples as matters of indifference in themselves [xx/10]. Models are said to be
the working out of the actuality of the idea, not merely abstractive. A model covers the
specific, and more than the specific, without letting it evaporate in its more general super-concept [29/39]. For Adorno, the generation of models as constellations of concepts
is the unit of philosophy as a whole, which is in turn to be composed of a constellation
of models. Thus, the third part of Negative Dialectics is called Models, which are
to make plain what negative dialectics is and to bring it into the realm of reality, in line
with its own concept [xx/10].7 These are not external containers of thought, but a form
of thought or philosophizing itself: Philosophical thinking is the same as thinking in
models; negative dialectics is an ensemble of analyses of models.8

In order to appreciate the concept of model in Adorno it is necessary to see it as an
attempt to appropriate Benjamins early conception of constellation as the mode of presentation of ideas. Adorno effectively introduced the term model as a more scientifically
respectable translation of the rather mystical connotations of constellation.9 Benjamin
introduced the term constellation as a way of describing the presentation of ideas in relation to objects: Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [Origin 34/214]. Constellation is therefore an analogy that attempts to draw attention to the disjunctive relation
of objects to ideas. They refer to the form in which ideas provide a presentation of truth,
as opposed to the presentation of knowledge. But ideas are not presented [darstellen]
in themselves, but solely and exclusively through an arrangement of concrete elements
in the concept: as the configuration of these elements [Origin 34/214]. Concepts are
configured such that the unity that constitutes the order of knowledgethe rules of the
appearance of objectsis transformed into the unity of truth. This introduces Benjamins
strict division between the properly philosophical concern of the presentation of truth
through the configuration of concepts into ideas, and the properly scientific concern
of the presentation of knowledge through concepts of objects. The configuration of
concepts in the presentation of ideas transforms the knowledge of objects into a presentation of truth, in which the absolute or infinite order of their being is revealed.10 Just as

7. Part 3 of Negative Dialectics comprises three models: Freedom: On the Metacritique of
Practical Reason, World Spirit and Natural History: An Excursion into Hegel, and Meditations on Metaphysics.

8. negative Dialektik [ist] ein Ensemble von Modellanalysen [39/29]. Adorno appears to
mimic Marxs phrase from the theses on Feuerbach: In its reality [human essence] is the ensemble
of social relations. In the light of Balibars discussion of Marxs recourse to the French word
ensemble in the Theses on Feuerbach, Adornos own use of this word in this notably emphatic
articulation of the form of negative dialectics takes on a resonance that draws parallels between
the nonessentialist interests of both Balibar and Adorno. Commenting on Marxs sentence, Balibar
speculates that Marx used the foreign word ensemble to avoid using the German Das Ganze, the
whole or totality, in order to stress that his concept of essence is purely constituted through its relations, without any appeal to a superconcept [see Balibar 30]. This directly corresponds to Adornos
interests and may serve as an explanation of his own use of the term ensemble here as a synonym
for constellation.

9. See Adornos early essay The Actuality of Philosophy.

10. Phenomena do not, however, enter into the realm of ideas whole, in their crude empirical
state, adulterated by appearances, but only in their basic elements, redeemed. They are divested of
their false unity so that, thus divided, they might partake of the genuine unity of truth. In this their
division, phenomena are subordinate to concepts, for it is the latter which effect the resolution of

diacritics / spring 2006

51

constellations reveal an order that is not immediately present in the individual starsand
therefore not immediately reducible to the individual stars, but which nonetheless presents the total context in which these stars standanalogously, ideas present the relation
of objects to truth that is not immediately present in their appearance.

Benjamins conception of constellations attempts to characterize the order of ideas
as an order of truth in the quasi-Platonic sense of a timeless order of forms, essentially
irreducible to their appearances within the world: The idea belongs to a fundamentally
different world from that which it apprehends [i.e. phenomena] [Origin 34/214]. Since
the order of truth does not appear directly through the appearance of objects, which is
subject to the finite conditions of experience, it cannot be judged relative to this order of
conditions. As the objective order to which, finally, objects are subjected, the presentation
of ideas is preoccupied with extremes or limits through which the absolute conditions of
objects are indicated, rather than merely the average or normal conditions of the coherent experience of the appearance of objects. Ideas are not subjected to the coherence or
unity of personal or subjective experience; subjective experience is ultimately subjected
to ideas. Ideas are simply given to be reflected upon, as pre-existent and timeless:
Ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements being seen as
points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time
redeemed; so that those elements which it is the function of the concept to elicit
from phenomena are most clearly evident at the extremes. The idea is best understood as the representation of the context within which the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart. [34/214]
This conception of the constellationary form of ideas is understood by the early, theologically minded Benjamin to be a result of their sacred characterwhich he associates with
an Adam-like act of naminginsofar as they intend to present not merely the coherence
of an experience but what something is absolutely. The task of philosophy is therefore to
renew this namelike or symbolic quality of ideas, which is obscured by its subjection to
the conditions of finite (secular) experience.11 Benjamins analysis of allegory in the Baroque mourning play can therefore be understood as a specifically philosophical task,
in which allegories are understood as the secular, profane, or finite historical experience
to which symbols have been subjected. Philosophizing is therefore the renewal of the
presentation of ideas through the renewal of this symbolic dimension, recovering it from
its dissolution into the conditions of finite experience:
The idea is something linguistic, it is that element of the symbolic in the essence
of the word. In empirical perception, in which words have become fragmented,
they possess, in addition to their more or less hidden, symbolic aspect, an obvious profane meaning. It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by presentation,
the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given
self-consciousness. . . . [36/216]

objects into their constituent elements. Conceptual distinctions are above all suspicion of sophistry
only when their purpose is the salvation of phenomena in ideas. . . . Through their mediating role
concepts enable phenomena to participate in the existence of ideas [Origin 21314/33].

11. Adams action of naming things is so far removed from play or caprice that it actually
confirms the state of paradise as a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative significance of words. Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and
they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation [37/217].

52


Adornos reception of Benjamins notion of philosophical presentation is profound
but critical. As such it involves considerable ambiguity. Explicitly, it takes place through a
dialectical transformation of Benjamins antisystematic presentation of ideas. Ultimately,
it is an attempt to salvage Benjamins conception of constellation from its latent dogmatism in the appeal to the namelike quality of ideas, whether in the sacred form of his early
texts or in the profane form of his later, materialist texts. Adornos approach is through
an emphasis on the negative presentation of ideas through constellations of dialectical
concepts. Referring to a letter in which Benjamin professes that his Arcades Project was
only presentable in a form that was an impermissible, poetic one, Adorno writes:
Benjamins defeatism about his own thought was conditioned by the undialectical positivity of which he carried a formally unchanged remnant from his theological phase to his materialistic phase. By comparison, Hegels equating negativity with the thought that keeps philosophy from both the positivity of science
and the contingency of dilettantism has experiential substance. Thought as such,
before all particular contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to that which
is forced upon it. . . . [Negative Dialectics 19, 2930]
This negative dimension reveals an alternative relation to ideas that is suppressed by the
insistence on the given, preexistent, and timeless character of the name or word. Adorno
proposes that philosophizing should present ideas (models) only negatively, through the
presentation of constellations of concepts alone. It is the attempt to conceal this negative
relation through insistence on the namelike quality of concepts that leads to dogmatism:
Benjamins concepts still tend to an authoritarian concealment of their conceptuality.
Concepts alone can achieve what the concept prevents [53/62]. This underpins Adornos
famous criticisms of the later Benjamins presentation of his Arcades Project in The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire:
. . . the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to turn into a
wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wished to put it very drastically, one
could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism.
That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spellyour own resolute,
salutary speculative theory. [Letter 12930]
Adorno diagnoses this oscillation between mysticism and positivism as a result of a lack
of mediation between concept and idea, fact and truth; a lack of the negative labor of
conceptualization [Letter 128]. Benjamins response to Adornos criticismsappealing
to construction alone as an antidote to esotericism12emphasizes the disjunctive relation between the form of presentation and the ideas themselves. It is as such that in both
his early and later work Benjamin insists on a negative presentation of ideas. However,
the force of Adornos criticism is that this negativity is not mediated, in the sense that
there is no determinate relation between concepts and ideashence there tends to be a
collapse or short-circuit between them. In order to prevent this problem, Adorno insists
on philosophizing through determinate negations without positivization. This is also an
attempt to avoid returning to Hegel, since Benjamins lack of mediation is certainly justified insofar as it is mediation in Hegel that determines, and thereby overcomes, the nega
12. I believe that speculation can start its necessary bold flight with some prospect of success
only if, instead of putting on the waxen wings of the esoteric, it seeks its source of strength in construction alone. It is because of the needs of construction that the second part of my book consists
primarily of philological material [Benjamin, Letter 136].

diacritics / spring 2006

53

tive relation of concepts to ideas. This issue is at the heart of the speculative philosophy
that Adornos negative dialectics attempts to wrest from both Benjamin and Hegel.
As a consequence of this criticism, Benjamins account of allegoryas the decay
of symbols into finite, historical, and mimetic formstakes on greater significance for
Adornos conception of philosophical form. In contrast to symbols, in which the mimetic
quality of the sign is a direct obstacle to its symbolic capacity, tying it down to the content of a form that is incidental to its meaning, allegories present ideas through images
in which meaning and form are deeply entwined in an expressive or mimetic relation.
Allegories therefore involve an insistence on the particularity of their expression that is
absent from the symbol. Philosophical or dialectical concepts are, for Adorno, allegorical.
They do not function like symbols, in the sense that their signification transcends form.
Rather, like allegories, dialectical concepts are, for Adorno, bound to the experience of
the nonidenticalof what they attempt to conceptualizethrough the particularity of
their form, their linguistic medium. The expressive power they have is generated through
their limitation to this form. Their inadequacy makes them combine into configurations
or constellations through which they can make good on their insufficiency.
Constellation versus Sublation
Adornos negative dialectics is generated by a Benjaminian critique of Hegel as much
as a Hegelian critique of Benjamin. Adornos attempt to philosophize through determinate negations alone, without positivization, is achieved by replacing sublation with constellation as the form of dialectical mediation. Constellations present an alternative form
of unity to the progressive unfolding of the speculative concept developed by Hegels
conception of sublation, without thereby resorting to a merely formal or nominal classification. According to Hegel, to sublate (aufheben) should be understood in the twofold sense of to preserve and to dissolve [Science 107/114]. This is fundamental to his
speculative logic whereby the erroneous or negative aspect of a concepts relation to the
nonconceptual reveals a determinacy that, once recognized, corrects the initial error of
the concept, negating its negativity, and enabling a positive identity between concept and
conceptualized. Adornos negative dialectics is premised on the critique of the idealism
of this positivization of determinate negation. Gillian Rose has described Adornos critique of Hegelian speculation as leading from Hegels speculative propositions to chiastic
propositions, in which the horizon of reconciliation is blocked by skepticism:
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer develop an account of
domination which owes its credentials to a Nietzscheanism itself reduced from
speculative to chiastic propositions which elaborate the main thesis: myth is
already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology. [59]
But, if Adorno does not propose a speculative sublation of determinate negation, nor
does he propose skepticism. The chiastic dimension of his language is necessary for the
disjunctive experience of negativity, which is essential to his conception of speculative
thought. This is saved from skepticism by an alternative form of unity to that provided by
Hegelian speculation: constellations. They present not a sublation of determinate negation, but a configuration of determinate negations. Simon Jarvis has suggested that these
should be regarded, in distinction from Hegels speculative propositions, as speculative
differentiations, which negatively invoke a speculative experience of something beyond
the choices that frame the present:

54

Life without self-preservation, reconciliation without sacrifice, happiness without power: these as yet barely imaginable differentiations are no less speculatively thought by Adorno than is the identification of the real and rational by
Hegel. These are Adornos speculative differentiations to Hegels speculative
identifications. They are not propositionsthey have no copula and no main
verbbut are negatively articulated by constellations of propositions. [230]
Constellations are not progressive but combinative: a nonprogressive combination.
That is to say, constellations combine concepts in order to illuminate the nonconceptual
through a process of accumulation that aspires to increasing concretion, but which cannot
claim that this process is progressive, inasmuch as it is not achieved through the negation
of negation but rather through a combination of negations. The configuration of concepts
therefore does not present itself as a progressively sufficient identification of the object.
This is how constellation provides unity without sublation:
The unifying moment survives without a negation of negation, but also without
delivering itself to abstraction as a supreme principle. It survives because there
is no step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. [Adorno, Negative Dialectics 162/164]
The model is one of affinity rather than identification: the generation of a likeness that
resembles the object, but without mistaking that likeness for the object itself. In this selfconscious illusion Adornos dialectics meets aesthetics. The configuration of concepts
attempts to generate an image or intuition of the nonconceptual, not through the immediate intuition of the object in the concept, but through configuring the mimetic qualities
submerged in its linguistic medium, in such a way that the nonconceptual is imaged negatively, revealing it as neither identical with the concept nor merely the negation of the
negation of the concept. This is the essentially linguistic exertion of philosophical presentation. Constellations linguistically dissolve the principle of identity: as such, they form
something other than the concepts or identifications from which they are composed.
Essay
Adorno identifies the essay as a privileged form of philosophizing. The essay effectively provides an alternative characterization of the form of models. This view is explicit
from Adornos earliest appropriation of Benjamin to his later reflections on the essay as
form.13 It is also apparent from the essaylike character taken by Adornos models. His reflections on the form of the essay therefore offer further clarifications of his conception of
the form of philosophy. But to understand the essay as simply a genre of philosophizing
through models risks tying it to the fate of a presupposed form, and therefore precisely
what the task of philosophizing, as an essentially critical activity, must question. In its
antipathy to fulfilling a prescribed role, the essay, for Adorno, is a form of intellectual
freedom linked with the emergence and fate of the Enlightenment. This indeterminacy
generates its critical relation to the intellectual division of labor, as a form that does not
correspond to the division between science and art. It does not immediately reconcile this
division, which Adorno considers a utopian or regressive ambition. It is a hybrid form, in

13. Both thought and history come into communication within the models. Regarding efforts
to achieve a form for such communication, I gladly put up with the reproach of essayism [Adorno,
The Actuality of Philosophy 132/343]. See also Adorno, The Essay as Form.

diacritics / spring 2006

55

which the fetishized division of science and art is brought to critical self-reflection. Corresponding to his principal morphological objection to the concept of system as closed
and self-sufficient or autonomous, Adornos concept of the essay is as an incomplete
form, which is both open and free in the sense that it is neither prescribed nor prescriptive in its constitution. The essay involves the articulation of a relation of elements that
is binding, but without being exhaustive or exclusive. Its insubstantiality, as a contingent, mortgaged, and experimental form, inherently abandons the deductive or inductive
completion of a system as self-identical. For Adorno, the essay is not defined by the attempt to establish first principles or origins, or exhaustive ends. It thereby remains true
to the nonidentity of the concepts it combines and the objects it refers to: Because the
unbroken order of concepts is not equivalent to what exists, the essay does not aim at a
closed deductive or inductive structure.14 The essay articulates received elements in their
emergence and develops them as such without seeking to ground or foreclose them completely, or in such a way that would arrest their process of becoming. The essay hereby
manifests the processual transformation of traditional philosophical conceptions of truth.
Adornos reception of this transformation from Hegel is developed into an immanent
critique of Hegels retention of the form of system. The essay proves itself to be a more
radically processual form, uncircumscribed by claims to origin or end. This determines
its relation to totality. It does not posit totality, as does Hegels conception of system,
but presents the attempt to develop a dialectical logic in which the speculative appeal to
totality would remain negative: The essay has to cause the totality to be illuminated in
a partial feature, whether the feature be chosen or merely happened upon, without asserting the presence of the totality [Essay 16/25]. The essay has the paradoxical form of
a totality that is not a total: [The essays] totality, the unity of a form developed immanently, is that of something not total, a totality that does not maintain as form the thesis
of the identity of thought and its object that it rejects as content [17/26]. Its ambivalent
presentation of totality differentiates it from the form of the masterpiece or other forms
of totalized creation. The critique of Hegel induced by the essays form extends to the
contradictory relation of dialectics to its methodologya criticism Adorno makes selfreflectively inasmuch as he is discussing the methodology of the essay:
Idealist philosophy, to be sure, suffered from the inconsistency of criticizing an
abstract overarching concept, a mere result, in the name of process, which is
inherently discontinuous, while at the same time talking about dialectical method in the manner of idealism. For this reason the essay is more dialectical than
the dialectic is when the latter discourses on itself. The essay takes Hegelian
logic at its word: the truth of the totality cannot be played off against individual
judgements. Nor can truth be made finite in the form of an individual judgement;
instead, singularitys claim to truth is taken literally, up to the point where its
untruth becomes evident. [19/2728]
Consistent with the abandonment of rationalist deduction, Adorno makes clear that the
essay rejects definition of its concepts. To compensate, it relies on the determinateness of
its presentation. The meaning of concepts is not established once and for all, but relative
to the process by which they are arranged, a process that does not just indicate or refer but
composes something of the historical process through which its meaning is established.

14. Adorno, The Essay as Form 10/17. This antisystemic critique is extended to the implicitly systemic aspects of empiricism: Even empiricist theories, which give priority to experience
that is open-ended and cannot be anticipated, as opposed to fixed conceptual ordering, remain
systematic in that they deal with preconditions for knowledge that are conceived as more or less
constant and develop them in as homogeneous a context as possible [Essay 9/1617].

56

Because the essay cannot rely on the clarity of its definitions for precision, it is forced to
compensate by the precision of its presentation of its elements, its choice and arrangement of concepts. This accounts for the necessary density of the essay form, which is so
evident in Adornos own writing. This emphasis on presentation generates a quality of
closedness immanent to its openness, which produces an alternative to the closed form
of system:
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would
like. It is more open in that its structure negates system, and it satisfies its inherent requirements better the more rigorously it holds to that negation. . . . But the
essay is also more closed, because it works emphatically at the form of its presentation. Consciousness of the non-identity of presentation and subject matter
forces presentation to unremitting efforts. [1718/26]
This is the labor of presentation that results from philosophizing without origins or
ends.
Fragments
It is notable that Adornos critique of system appeals explicitly to a concept of the fragment.15 Adorno produces very few reflections on the historical derivation of this form
and, despite his debt to Benjamin, rarely discusses its specificity to early German Romanticism. But, regardless of biographical influence, Adornos critique of system in many respects reproduces the Romantics formation of the fragment. This inheritance takes place
through the essay. If the fragment is the primary form of Romanticism, as Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy have argued, it is nonetheless derived explicitly from the various genres developed by the French and English moralistssuch as Montaigne, Chamfort, and Shaftesburyamongst which the essay is also central [see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 3958].
It should therefore come as no surprise that we can diagnose Adornos reception of the
fragment as a form of philosophizing through his understanding of the essay.16

The originality of the Romantic fragment is achieved through the emphasis on its
essential incompleteness, and the insistence on this incompleteness as the essential condition for the presentation of the absolute. Each fragment presents the absolute, but incompletely. Fragments are therefore not just parts or sections, in which the totality is

15. The categories of a critique of systems are at the same time the categories in which the
particular is understood. What has once legitimately transcended particularity in the system has its
place outside the system. The interpretative eye which sees more in a phenomenon than it isand
solely because of what it issecularises metaphysics. Only fragments as the form of philosophy
would give their proper place to the monads, those illusory idealistic drafts. They would be conceptions in the particular of the totality that is inconceivable as such [Adorno, Negative Dialectics
28/3940].

16. Indeed, one of Adornos rare references to the Romantic conception of the fragment is
introduced as part of the elaboration of the essay: If the essay opposes, aesthetically, the meanspirited method whose sole concern is not to leave anything out, it is following an epistemological
impulse. The romantic conception of the fragment [Fragment] as a construction that is not complete but rather progresses onward into the infinite through self-reflection champions this anti-idealist motive in the midst of Idealism. Even in the manner of its presentation, the essay may not act
as though it had deduced its object and there was nothing left to say about it. Its self-relativization
is inherent in its form: it has to be constructed as though it could always break off at any point. It
thinks in fragments [Brchen], just as reality is fragmentary [brchig], and finds its unity in and
through the breaks [Brche] and not by glossing over them [Adorno, Essay 16/2425].

diacritics / spring 2006

57

presented in exclusive particles, like the discreet pieces of a jigsaw. This incompleteness
therefore requires and projects further supplementation. This takes place, not through a
superconcept or the addition of that missing piece of the fragment, but through further
fragments. The absolute is therefore presented through a combination of fragments, each
relating to every other through its fundamentally incomplete presentation of its essence,
the absolute. The system that this combination of fragments generates is therefore an infinite process of reflection. Each fragment reflects each other, generating a systematic interrelation of reflections as a consequence of the incompleteness that binds them together.
The abbreviated length of the fragment does not therefore distinguish it completely from
the extended length of the essay. The essays extended length can be seen as an extension
and intensification of this process of reflection, just as Friedrich Schlegel presented only
fragments, in the plural. And this can be understood as not only internal to one essay,
but also in an essays relation to other essays, and so on to the composition of larger texts.
This is Adornos understanding:
The essay has to cause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature, whether
the feature be chosen or merely happened upon, without asserting the presence
of the totality. It corrects what is contingent and isolated in its insights in that
they multiply, confirm, and disqualify themselves, whether in the further course
of the essay itself or in the mosaic-like relationship to other essays, but not by
a process of abstraction that ends in characteristic features derived from them.
[Essay 1617/2425]
Thus, we can think of this fragmentary principle as the basis of Adornos book-length
works. Inasmuch as each fragment presents the absolute, but incompletely, the essential
law of their interrelation is that each is equally close to the center. Adorno employs the
same principle of composition in Aesthetic Theory:
From my theorem that there is no philosophical first principle, it now also results that one cannot build an argumentative structure that follows the usual
progressive succession of steps, but rather that one must assemble the whole
out of a series of partial complexes that are, so to speak, of equal weight and
concentrically arranged all on the same level; their constellation, not their succession, must yield the idea. [364/541]
The essential incompleteness of fragments departs from the dogmatic form of the system
as a hierarchical structure. Moreover, it departs from the principle of self-sufficiency and
completeness that is still, albeit problematically, retained by Kants organic concept of
system. This establishes the fundamental significance of the fragment as a form of Adornos philosophizing. It also provides a prototype for the peculiarly ambivalent attitude
Adorno has toward the concept of system. The Romantics retain the ideal of the system
as the form of presentation, but structure it through an essentially processual, open, and
nonself-sufficientthat is, fragmentaryapprehension of the absolute. This understanding avoids the reduction of the absolute into the preestablished form of the system.
Rather than apprehending the absolute in terms of a system, the system is apprehended
in terms of the absolute. As Benjamin notably pointed out: Rather than attempting to
grasp the absolute systematically . . . [Friedrich Schlegel] sought conversely to grasp the
system absolutely [Concept 138]. The Romantics therefore extend Kants critique of
dogmatism to the critique of the concept of system itself, as a discourse on method, and
in the process break more radically with Descartess axiomatization. It is in this respect
that Adornos concept of the essay inherits the historic transformation of the presentation

58

of philosophy proposed by Romanticism, and develops it against the idealist tendencies

within Romanticism itself. Indeed, Adornos The Essay as Form is partly structured by
a point-by-point critique of Descartess rules of method.17 Dogmatisms task of definition
is fragmented and replaced by fragmentation.
A New Dictionnaire philosophique
In an attempt to articulate his critique of system in Negative Dialectics, Adorno cites Jean
Le Rond DAlemberts distinction between espirit de systme and espirit systmatique.
He sees DAlemberts proposal of systematic spirit as the method of the Encyclopdie,
as anticipating the critique of system that he is proposing, one that leads from the system
to the open realm of definition by individual moments.18 This unreferenced allusion is
to DAlemberts Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopaedia of Diderot [esp. 2223].
It deserves investigation since it reveals a resonant, if largely subterranean, heritage to
Adornos concept of philosophical form and its peculiar inflection of the Romantic fragment.

DAlemberts distinction between spirit of the system and systematic spirit is
textually obscure, especially when thought in terms of Adornos appropriation. It is produced as a critique of axiomatic definition, derived ostensibly from Descartess Discourse
on Method, but in a form that is distinct from that proposed by Adorno. DAlemberts
concern is with the establishment of principles that will enable the most simple or reduced expression of the unity of the objects of science. Howeverand here is where
Adornos interest can be detectedDAlemberts concern is for these principles to enable the greatest richness in their application. He finds this expansiveness, ironically
perhaps, in the very reduction of the principles: the more one reduces the number of
principles of a science the more one gives them scope, and since the object of a science
is necessarily fixed, the principles applied to that object will be so much more fertile
as they are fewer in number [22]. DAlemberts distinction emphasizes the openness
and richness that is enabled by this systematic spiritsomething he marks by referring to the true systematic spiritas opposed to a reification of the system as a closed
and constrictive apprehension of objects, the spirit of the system. Thus, rather than
the system (of principles) being the spirit, the spirit is to be approached through them,
systematically. This corresponds to Adornos contention that Encyclopaedic thinking
[Denken als Enzyklopdie]rationally organised and yet discontinuous, unsystematic,
looseexpressed the self-critical spirit of reason [Negative Dialectics 29/3940]. It is a
thinking that Adorno interprets Romantically, as a ruin, falling from the destruction of its
original form within Enlightenment rationalism, but thereby transformed as a new possibility released through this destruction.

17. The essay gently challenges the ideal of clara et distincta perceptio and indubitable certainty. Altogether, [the essay] might be interpreted as a protest against the four rules established
by Descartess Discourse on Method at the beginning of modern Western science and its theory
[Adorno, Essay 14/22].

18. Speaking for the espirit systmatique is not only the trivial motive of a cohesion that will
tend to crystallize in the incoherent anyway; it does not only satisfy the bureaucrats desire to stuff
all things into their categories. The form of the system is adequate to the world, whose substance
eludes the hegemony of the human thought; but unity and unanimity are at the same time an oblique
projection of pacified, no longer antagonistic conditions upon the coordinates of supremacist, oppressive thinking. The double meaning of philosophical systematics leaves no choice but to transpose the power of thought, once delivered from the systems, into the open realm of definition by
individual moments [Adorno, Negative Dialectics 2425/35].

diacritics / spring 2006

59


The significance of the project of the Encyclopaedia for Adornos concept of philosophical form has further implications. DAlemberts articulation of the relation of principles to their further elaboration grounds a distinction between philosophy and the encyclopedia itself. Philosophy corresponds to the principal branches of that part of human
knowledge which consists either in the direct ideas which we have received through our
senses, or in the combination or comparison of these ideas [36]; whereas the encyclopaedia consists of the infinite subdivision of these branches. This distinction grounds
two aims within the presentation of the Encyclopaedia: the Encyclopaedia itself and,
corresponding to its philosophical dimension, a Reasoned Dictionary.19 This distinction
between the forms of the encyclopaedia and the dictionary suggests a precursor to the
form of the combination of philosophical texts that Adorno intended above and beyond
the level of any particular text. As he writes in his introduction to a volume of essays
called Catchwords:
The title Catchwords [Stichworte] alludes to the encyclopaedic form that, unsystematically, discontinuously, presents what the unity of experience crystallizes
into a constellation. Thus the technique of a small volume with somewhat arbitrarily chosen catchwords perhaps might make conceivable a new Dictionnaire
philosophique. [Critical Models 126/598]
Adornos suggestion of a new philosophical dictionary appears to register the distinction
that DAlembert makes above, insofar as it concerns the presentation of principles that allow further encyclopaedic elaboration. This impression is deepened once we note both the
correspondence between model and idea and the fact that Catchwords is one part of a
three-volume series of critical models.20 It therefore seems that Adornos understanding
of the relationship of philosophy to empirical science, which has so perplexed commentators, may well be understood in terms of this relation of a philosophical dictionary to an
encyclopaedia: as the generation of a combination of models or ideas, which, in a discontinuous, open-ended form, present the principles for the development and elaboration of
further research. This correspondence has further resonances. Like the French Encyclopaedists, Adorno largely understood his work as part of an inherently collective project,
most directly through the institutional structures and projects of the Frankfurt School.
The collective project of an interdisciplinary materialism, diagnosed in Horkheimers
early directorship of the Institute for Social Research, can therefore be interpreted as inherent in Adornos conception of philosophy and its form. Furthermore, like the French
Encyclopaedists, the Frankfurt School conducted their expansive intellectual programa
theory of society as a social totalityas an explicitly politicized project.

19. The work [i.e. the Encyclopaedia] whose first volume we are presenting today has two
aims. As an Encyclopaedia, it is to set forth as well as possible the order and connection of the parts
of human knowledge. As a Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades, it is to contain
the general principles that form the basis of each science and each art, liberal or mechanical, and
the most essential facts that make up the body and substance of each [4]. This should perhaps be
understood as the model for Voltaires Philosophical Dictionary.

20. These kritische modelle make up the above-cited volume, as its title suggests. As Theodore Besterman comments, with remarkable resonance, in his introduction to the translation of
Voltaires Dictionnaire philosophique: The Dictionnaire philosophique is not what we now understand by a dictionary, least of all a dictionary of philosophy, for its alphabetical arrangement
is little more than a literary trompe loeil. This epoch making little book is in fact a series of essays on a wide variety of subjects, sometimes arranged under convenient headings in alphabetical
sequence, but sometimes placed under deliberately misleading or even provocative catchwords
[5].

60


But Adornos critical salvation of encyclopaedic thinking as a ruin, generated out of
the decay of the French Enlightenment, should be understood as inflected by Romanticism
not just as a characterization of the form of its reception but more substantively. The connection between the Jena Romantics and the Encyclopaedists seems to have been direct,
through the reception of Diderots philology as exemplary of the fragmentary experience
of Antiquity.21 The Romantics also employed collective practices of writing as part of a
simultaneously intellectual and political project. This comparison is equally informative
in the differences it exposes. The Romantics sought to radically depart from the Cartesian
principle of method, which is only tentatively modified by the Encyclopaedists. Adorno
stressed this departure. It is compounded when we think of the alternative that Adornos
intimation of an antisystematic encyclopaedia presents to the systematic encyclopaedia
of Hegel, his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Hegels understanding of the
concept of encyclopaedia is not developed on the basis of a Cartesian concept of system,
derived through axiomatic principles but, following Kant and Romanticism, through a
discursive, processual, and organic concept of system developed through a self-correcting process of speculative reasoning. Hegel characterizes it in relation to a concept of
philosophy but, in certain respects, inverts the relation proposed by DAlembert. For
Hegel, the encyclopaedia is understood as an introductory aid, which is restricted
to the beginnings and fundamental concepts of the particular sciences [Encyclopaedia
39]; it is incomplete and therefore inferior to the full elaboration of philosophy. But
he also makes a notable distinction between his philosophical encyclopaedia and the
ordinary encyclopaedia. The ordinary encyclopaedia presents merely an aggregate of
the sciences, as an arbitrary and externally imposed order, whereas the philosophical encyclopaedia presents the sciences as an essential unity, derived from the perspective that
they finally present one, unified science [3940]. It is notable that Hegel refers to each
particular science as a part that realizes itself with the realization of absolute knowledge.
Like the Romantic fragment, the particular science is understood to involve an apprehension of the absolute intensified within it. But, unlike the fragment, the process of realizing
a sciences relation to the absolute is not interminable.

Adorno does not aspire to a total philosophy, as Hegel did. He nevertheless seeks to
renew the freedom of philosophizing from the constraints of the division of intellectual
labor that results from the decay of systematic philosophy into alienated sciences and
disciplines. His philosophizing, from the level of the individual word to the organization of larger combinations of texts, indicates a fragmentary form of presentation composed through the open-ended, discursive constellation of models or essays. Axiomatic
definition gives way to essayism, and fragmentarily related essays replace definitions in
Adornos new philosophical dictionary. The presentation of philosophy takes the form of
a dictionary of models.
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor W. The Actuality of Philosophy. Trans. B. Snow. Telos 31 (1977):
12033. Trans. of Die Aktualitt der Philosophie. Philosophische Frhschriften.
Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. 32544.
________
. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
sthetische Theorie. 1970. Trans. of Vol. 7 of Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1997.

21. The philological fragment, especially in the tradition of Diderot, takes on the value of a
ruin. Ruin and fragment conjoin the functions of the monument and of evocation; what is thereby
both remembered as lost and presented in a sort of sketch (or blueprint) is always the living unity
of a great individuality, author, or work [Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 42].

diacritics / spring 2006

61

. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. H. W. Pickford. New York:

Columbia UP, 1998. Trans. of Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II. Vol. 10.2 of Gesammelte Schriften. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1997.
________
. The Essay as Form. Trans. S. W. Nicholson. Notes to Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 1: 323. Trans. of Der Essay als Form. 1958. Noten zur Literatur.
Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. 11: 933.
________
. Letter from Theodor Adorno to Walter Benjamin. 10 November 1938. Aesthetics
and Politics. Theodor Adorno et al. London: Verso, 1997. 128-30.
________
. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 1973. Trans. of
Negative Dialektik. 1966. Vol. 6 of Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1997.
________
. Philosophische Terminologie. Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.
Balibar, Etienne. The Philosophy of Marx. Trans. C. Turner. London: Verso, 1995.
Benjamin, Walter. The Concept of [Art] Criticism in German Romanticism. Trans. D.
Lachterman et al. Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.
116200.
________
. Letter from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno. 9 December 1938. Aesthetics
and Politics. Theodor Adorno et al. London: Verso, 2007. 13441.
________
. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso,
1977. Trans. of Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. 1925. Vol. 1.1 of Gesammelte
Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991.
DAlembert, Jean Le Rond. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopaedia of Diderot. 1751.
Trans. Richard N. Swab and Walter E. Rex. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S.
Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991.
________
. Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. NJ: Humanities, 1989. Trans. of Wissenschaft der Logik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986.
Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 1998.
Kant, Immanuel. The Discipline of Pure Reason in Its Dogmatic Employment. Critique
of Pure Reason. Trans. N. K. Smith. London: MacMillan, 1929. A71238/B74166.
Trans. of Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory
of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester. New York:
SUNY, 1988.
Martin, Stewart. Adorno and the Problem of Philosophy. PhD thesis. Middlesex University, 2002.
Rose, Gillian. From Speculative to Dialectic ThinkingHegel and Adorno. Judaism
and Modernity: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary. 1764. Trans. T. Besterman. London: Penguin, 1972.
________

62