JOSEPH WINTERS

University of North Carolina, Charlotte

THEODOR ADORNO AND THE UNHOPELESS WORK OF THE NEGATIVE

Theodor Adorno is read, more often than not, as a somber theorist whose
reflections on modern life lead to despair. According to this view, Adorno examines
the world and can only see in it instrumental reason, domination, and
cultural conformity. Although influenced by Marx, he refuses to place his faith
in the proletariat or some revolutionary group that might alter these conditions.1
He consequently ignores everyday forms of resistance that emerge from the
“masses.” He only finds resistance to the status quo in occasional works of high
art, a Beckett play or a Schonberg musical piece. For Adorno, our world is damaged,
broken, and in ruins. There are no prospects for a different kind of future.

The image of Adorno as despairing and hopeless has been advanced by many
contemporary thinkers, most notably Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas,
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment marks a radical break
from Marx’s notion of ideology critique and an acceptance of Nietzsche’s radical
skepticism toward reason. Whereas Marx’s notion of ideology exposes the
“untruthfulness” of theories that conflate knowledge and power (thereby implying
the possibility of knowledge that is not tantamount to power), Nietzsche reduces all
forms of knowledge to the will to dominate. By adopting Nietzsche’s reduction of
reason to power, Adorno’s thought turns into a debilitating form of despair.2
According to Habermas, Adorno cannot see the promising aspects of an
alternative form of reason based on inter-subjective

1 On Adorno’s refusal to place hope in any collective revolutionary subject, see Susan

Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter

Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 24-42.
As Martin Jay points out, part of this loss of confidence in the proletariat (which can be
attributed to the Frankfurt School as a whole) has to do with historical developments in
Germany (the rise of the National Socialist Party) and the Soviet Union (the
dictatorship of Stalin). See Jay, The
Dialectical Imagination: A History of The Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social
Research
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 43-45. But this lack of confidence in a
revolutionary collective subject also is related to Adorno’s concern about the
“liquidation” of the individual within totalizing collectives. Adorno’s relationship to
Marx is definitely complicated as many commentators have suggested. I agree with
Frederic Jameson that, despite Adorno’s refusal to align himself with the proletariat, he
does offer fecund resources for Marxism, especially in its late, “post-modern” form. See
Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London:
Verso, 1990). I also agree with Martin Jay that Marxism is one star within a
constellation or forcefield (Kraftfeld) of traditions that animate his thinking. See Jay,
Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 11-23.
2 For Habermas’ critique of Adorno and Horkheimer’s co-authored text, see The

Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1987), 106-130.

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communication and mutual understanding. He gives up on modernity; he
jettisons hope in the modern project.

In this article, I challenge the standard interpretation of Adorno. 3 I argue that the
Habermasian claim that Adorno’s thought leads to a hopeless “negativism” eschews
the dialectical nature of Adorno’s thought, particularly the relationship between
melancholy, resistance, and hope. For Adorno, I argue, it is precisely our capacity to
register and remember the intensity of the damages and modes of suffering in the
past and present, that occasions hope for a more desirable world. While Adorno
acknowledges that hope is often a set of desires and expectations that keep
subjects attached to the status quo, he also acknowledges that an alternative kind of
hope is possible, one that is marked by a greater vulnerability to the
uncomfortable and dissonant features of our worlds. To flesh out this melancholic
hope, a hope that relies on the possibility of refusing and thinking against rigid
structures of power, I focus particularly on passages and themes in Negative
Dialectics. In the concluding part of this article, I think about the relevance of
Adorno’s thought for contemporary discussions within queer theory, particularly
the arguments advanced by Lee Edelman’s No Future. While Edelman insists that
our commitment to a determinate future reproduces the order of things, he does
suggest that a better world has something to do with queer subjects embodying
the proverbial negative.

The Vicissitudes of Modern Life: Power, Violence, and the Refusal of the
Negative

Dialectic of Enlightenment4 is animated by a harrowing question: How is it that

a project so dedicated to freedom and equality results in the horrific forms of

3 My alternative reading if of course inspired by a number of authors and commentators

who have attempted to offer more generative readings of Adorno. See for instance
Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of
Caritas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 75-137; JM Bernstein, Adorno:
Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 371-
414; Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2006). I also
draw from other readings of Adorno. Drucilla Cornell, for instance, contends that
Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity reminds us of the relations of power and violence that
are intertwined with abstract appeals to a collective “We” in the thought, for instance, of
Gadamer and Rorty. See Drucilla Cornell, “The Ethical Message of Negative Dialectics” in
American Continental Philosophy: A Reader, ed. Walter Brogan and James Risser
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 147-175. Another careful reader of
Adorno is Gillian Rose. While mindful of the limitations in Adorno’s thought, she contends
that Adorno is not pessimistic. Rather his “melancholy science” is an “ethics of thinking”
which registers the paradoxes and tensions involved in confronting capitalism in its latest
“stage.” See Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of
Theodor W. Adorno (London: MacMillan Press, 1978), 138-148.
4 Although this book is co-authored by Adorno and Horkheimer, throughout the

chapter, I will only refer to Adorno’s contribution. I do this for practical reasons, not to
obscure Horkheimer’s contribution to this powerful text. It is important to note that
there is some contention over which portions of the text can be attributed to Adorno
and which sections to Horkheimer. For instance, Habermas contends that Horkheimer
alone wrote the first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment”, while Adorno alone wrote
the second essay on Odysseus. Robert Hullot-Kentor argues, however, that the text is
co-authored throughout. On this disagreement, see Robert Hullot-Kentor, things
beyond

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domination and violence witnessed in the 20th century (The Shoah, Communist
terror, and the World Wars)?5 Adorno has a provocative story to tell in response
to this question. For Adorno, these events are not simply aberrations; rather
these twentieth century atrocities are a culmination of processes, arrangements,
practices, and modes of thought that shape and constitute modern life. In other
words, there has always been an underside to the Enlightenment and the
modern forms of life intertwined with this project, an underside that is covered
over by narratives of progress and increased freedom. The Enlightenment
project, he tells us, is motivated by a “fear of fear”; and consequently, a desire to
eradicate fear. Insofar as the unknown, the other, or the mysterious is the source
of fear, the Enlightenment responds with the dictum that “nothing is allowed to
remain outside.”6 In other words, everything in the world must be illumined,
rendered intelligible, and brought to light in order to be managed and
manipulated. Therefore, a confession like that of Antigone in response to divine
laws (“where they come from, none of us can tell” 7) becomes an anathema for
the Enlightenment because she acknowledges a mysterious source of authority
and dependence that cannot be elucidated, scrutinized, and managed by human
subjects. Similar to Plato banning the Homeric stories from his idealized
Republic, “the Enlightenment’s program wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow
fantasy with knowledge.”8

Yet the attempt by the proponents of the Enlightenment to jettison all myths (and
liberate humans from the fear that these myths elicit) is ironically intertwined with
a new, more powerful set of myths. If myth, according to Adorno, is characterized by
fate, repetition, and sacrifice, then the Enlightenment repeats these qualities in a
less explicit manner. To begin to address this entanglement of Enlightenment and
myth, Adorno identifies Francis Bacon as one of the progenitors of modern
thought. For Bacon, according to Adorno, knowledge is a mode of power with the
aim of probing the depths of nature in order to master and dominate it. Using
knowledge as a method or a means to support or pursue various human ends
(making life easier, enabling humans to live longer, or travel greater distances) is
certainly not bad in itself. What Adorno resists is the

resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2006), 25-27.
5 Adorno is understandably focusing on events and conditions in Europe and, while in

exile, the more subtle forms of domination in America. Yet I would argue that
modernity is born in the moving crucible of imperial expansion (supported by the
production of colonies), rendering violence and terror a constitutive part of the lives of
many non-European denizens of modernity. Paul Gilroy makes this point about the
relationship between terror and modernity in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double
Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also Saidiya
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
6 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 11.
7 Quoted from Sophocles’ Antigone in GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. AV

Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 261.

8 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1. But of course Plato’s Republic relies on its

own set of Myths including the fabricated story of the creation of social strata out of
different metals.

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pervasive, expansive impact of means/end reasoning, a tendency that he traces
back to Bacon’s reduction of knowledge to power. What he resists, therefore, is
the way in which this form of reasoning increasingly forecloses other ways of
understanding and relating to the world. Within the fold of instrumental
reasoning, “what human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to
dominate wholly it and human beings. Nothing else counts.”9 In order to
count, to be meaningful or significant, an object, event, or phenomenon must be
useful; it must already conform to the schema of means/end reasoning. (A tree, for
instance, is only meaningful because it provides paper or timber and has no
importance apart from its utility for us). Since “nothing else counts”, all the
other aspects and dimensions of a particular thing (those that do not seem
immediately usable) are rendered otiose, meaningless, and so forth. The natural
world increasing becomes what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve”, a mass of
amorphous objects that acquires meaning only through human shaping,
molding, and classifying. Another way of putting it is that concrete
particulars are repeatedly subsumed and absorbed into ready - made
concepts and rules. This is the place where myth and Enlightenment converge
according to Adorno. Both deny particularity, difference, and newness, thereby
leading to the repetition of the same. The following passage is telling:
The principle of fated necessity which caused the downfall of the mythical hero,
and finally evolved as the logical conclusion from the oracular utterance,
predominates, refined to the cogency of formal logic, in every rationalistic system
of Western philosophy…In myths, everything that happens must atone for the fact
of having happened. It is no different in enlightenment: no sooner has a fact
been established than it is rendered insignificant…The arid wisdom which
acknowledges nothing new under the sun, because all possible discoveries can
be construed in advance and human beings are defined by self-preservation
through adaptation – this barren wisdom merely reproduces the fantastic
doctrine it rejects: the sanction of fate which incessantly states what always was.
Whatever might be different is made the same.10

9 Ibid., 2. Emphasis mine.

10Ibid., 8. This relationship between Enlightenment and myth is prefigured in the work
of other thinkers that influenced Adorno. Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, suggests that
both modern reason and mythological doctrines are forms of abstraction. See Kracauer,
The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), 75-86. The following line is telling: “The prevailing abstractness reveals that the
process of demythologization has not come to an end”(p.82). Hegel also sees a
connection between Enlightenment and myth, or Enlightenment and superstition. For
Hegel, both superstition/faith and the Enlightenment ground authority in a subject that
is detached/abstracted from tradition, social practices, and so forth. As Bernstein
points out, the basic claim in Dialectic of Enlightenment is really just a radical version
of Hegel’s discussion of the unacknowledged affinity between Enlightenment and faith
in
the Phenomenology. See JM Bernstein, “Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and
Hegel” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19-50. For Hegel’s discussion of the dialectic of faith
and Enlightenment, see Hegel, Phenomenology, 328-355. For a helpful
interpretation of this
section, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 165-179.

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The Enlightenment becomes its other, myth, insofar as the meaning and
significance of phenomena within the frame of the Enlightenment are
predetermined by means/end reasoning, “fated” by ready-made schemes, rules,
and concepts. The subsumption of particular bodies and objects into abstract,
ready-made concepts has ethical and political implications for Adorno. This
process perpetually enacts a certain violence on concrete particulars; it
“sacrifices” the particular. Thus Adorno offers the following analogy:
“Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to
human beings.”11 This analogy suggests that the epistemic stance of the
Enlightenment is intertwined with pernicious ethical/political habits and
dispositions. Dictators stand apart from and manipulate subjects as the
Enlightenment manipulates the contents of the natural world (which humans
are a part of for Adorno). Hegel, to some degree, anticipates this connection with
his discussion of absolute freedom in Phenomenology of Spirit. Absolute
freedom, according to Hegel, is freedom without constraints. It denotes an
“abstract self- consciousness, which effaces all distinction and all continuance of
distinction within it.”12 This effacement of difference, according to Hegel, is
historically manifested in the French Revolution as those who dissented from
the so-called general will were violently purged. These dissidents experienced
what Hegel calls the terror of absolute freedom, or the violence of a general will
that is detached from the concrete, differentiated world.13

But if Hegel prefigures Adorno’s account of the Enlightenment, then Adorno

supplements Hegel’s story with a Marxist understanding of the effects of
capitalism on the shaping of modern subjects. As intimated above, instrumental
reason and capitalism are intertwined. For Adorno, the treatment of others as a
means to an end is a hallmark of capitalism, which, “aims to produce the
exploitation of the labor of others.”14 In addition to and in connection with this
exploitation of labor, capitalism is delineated by the pursuit of profit, the
expansion of markets, the exchange principle, and the distribution of
commodities. Adorno, as we will see, is concerned about what these modern
conditions do to our structures of perception, our modes of attentiveness, or our
in/ability to respond adequately to various dimensions of the world. In other
words, since “the exchange form is the standard social structure, its rationality
constitutes people.”15 And part of Adorno’s project is to show us what kinds of
people are being constituted within this “standard social structure.” How do
these constituted subjects respond to difference, non-identity, or the unfamiliar?
How are we being shaped to encounter that which is dissonant and

11 Ibid.,
6.
12 Hegel, 361.
13 I am not necessarily saying that Hegel’s notion of absolute freedom is the same thing

as subsuming particulars under concepts. The concern here for Adorno is how difference or
particularity is ignored or erased, how subjects hastily identify objects without experiencing
the alterity and recalcitrance of these objects. Hegel’s absolute freedom is an extreme
example of the means/end schema that Adorno is concerned about.
14 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2.
15 Adorno, “Subject and Object” in The Essential Frankfurt Reader, ed. Andrew

Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 501.

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uncomfortable? If we are being shaped to respond to that which is dissonant and
uncomfortable in certain ways, how does this “shaping” affect our propensity to
be moved and unsettled by various modes of suffering? Similarly, how does it
influence our tendency to remember/forget painful events, conditions, and
arrangements?

Adorno begins to respond to these questions through his analysis of Homer’s

account of Odysseus and the Sirens. According to Adorno, in this narrative we
see “the intertwinement of myth, power, and labor.”16 The Sirens, as the story
goes, are the winged sea creatures whose songs are both seductive and
dangerous to travelers. When sea travelers hear these songs, they are captivated and
lured by the enticing sounds of the Sirens, until their respective ships crash into the
treacherous rocks that these mythic creatures inhabit. Odysseus, however,
concocts a plan in order for him and his crew to escape the seductive creatures. He
plugs the ears of his crew members with wax and ties himself to the mast of the
ship. Odysseus therefore can hear and contemplate the beauty and terror of the
songs, but is immobilized while listening. The crew members are rendered deaf
to the songs, while their labor (rowing the ship) enables Odysseus to enjoy the
Sirens. As many commentators point out, this segment of the Odyssey serves as an
allegory for the divisions internal to modern life, particularly the division between
intellectual and manual labor or the bourgeois and the proletariat. According to
Rebecca Comay, for instance, “The sailors with their plugged up ears are like the
factory workers of the modern age: busy hands, strong arms, senses dulled by the
brutalizing boredom of wage labor. Odysseus strapped to the mast in solitary
delectation would be the bourgeois as modern concertgoer, taking cautious pleasure
in “art” as an idle luxury to be enjoyed at safe remove.” 17 I take it that Adorno is
suggesting that both conditions – brutalizing labor and enjoyment of culture at a
safe distance – vitiate our propensity to experience and respond to various
dimensions and aspects of the world. These separate conditions are therefore two
sides of the same broken coin. The detached intellectual, who can critique the world
and listen to the suffering and pain expressed by various forms of art, but from a
safe distance, is just as confined and constrained as the factory worker whose bodily
habits are increasingly determined by the qualities and ends of capitalist
production – speed, efficiency, consistency, profit, and so forth.18

Adorno therefore evokes the story of Odysseus and the Sirens to serve as an
allegory (a limited, incomplete allegory as I explain below); Homer’s story

16 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25.

17 Rebecca Comay, “Adorno’s Siren Song”, New German Critique 81 (Autumn 2000): 21-
48. For a powerful explication of how Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens shapes
Adorno’s understanding of modern aesthetics, see Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism,
127- 154.
18 This is why it is difficult to levy the charge of elitism against Adorno. For Adorno,

the detached intellectual or cultural theorist who claims he possesses the refined
qualities of culture that the masses lack is also a product of the forms of alienation
within modern life. His/her detachment from the substance of culture (cultural life) is
indicative of reification. This is a central motif in Minima Moralia. His concerns
about the detached critic are formulated powerfully in “Cultural Criticism and Society”
in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), 19-34.

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provides an image which disrupts the Enlightenment’s “faith” in a universal
form of reason disconnected from myth. It reveals the hidden affinities between
the Enlightenment and its imagined other. More importantly, he employs this
story to underscore how labor and power shape and animate modern practices,
ideas, and dispositions. Adorno therefore wants to make us more attuned to the
ways in which the aforementioned ends of capitalism shape our bodily habits;
our structures of perception; our responsiveness to aspects of the world that we
inhabit. These ends of capitalism also impact how subjects remember and relate
to the past. The following passage is revealing as he draws parallels between
Odysseus’s crew and modern labor:

Anyone (of Odysseus’s crew) who wishes to survive must not listen to
the temptation of the irrecoverable, and is unable to listen only if he is
unable to hear. Society has made sure this was the case. Workers must
look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to
one side. The urge toward distraction must be grimly sublimated in
redoubled exertions. Thus the workers are made practical.19

The injunction to not listen to the “irrecoverable” (das Unwiederbringliche or

“that which cannot be called back from the past” 20) is not necessarily referring to
that which cannot be remembered. Insofar as the Sirens express the past and
present suffering and anguish of humanity21, Adorno is making an allusion to
painful, dissonant elements of the past that are rendered insignificant by
progressive notions of history, or that become meaningful only by fitting within
and going with the grain of progressive renderings of historical movement.
Indebted to Walter Benjamin, Adorno is implicitly referring here to conceptions of
time that stifle the “urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as
the material of progress.”22 These conceptions of time “intend to liberate the present
moment from the power of the past by banishing the latter beyond the absolute
boundary of the irrecoverable.”23 Like Odysseus’s crew members, these notions
of time compel us to keep looking forward, to not be distracted by what
Benjamin calls the shards of the past. These shards or ruins might disrupt the
dominant rhythms and frameworks of the present and reveal aspects of our
world that have been forgotten or neglected. In other words, these shards that
don’t quite fit within progressive accounts of history potentially prompt us to be
more receptive to neglected stories, events, desires, and possibilities from the
past that, through a difficult kind of remembrance, might contribute to thinking
and acting differently.

19 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 26.

20 This is Frederic Jameson’s translation. See Late Marxism, 130.
21 I am indebted here to Nancy Love’s provocative reading of Adorno’s appropriation of

Odysseus’s journey.. See her “Why do the Sirens Sing?: Figuring the Feminine in
Dialectic of Enlightenment”, Theory and Event 3.1 (1999). Love seems to answer the
question posed by the title in the concluding sentence of the essay: “Through image and
word – they (the Sirens’ Songs) remind us of sound – and sound – crying, laughing, and
singing reminds us of a suffering humanity, differently embodied together.”
22 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25.
23 Ibid.

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Remembrance of the past is connected to awareness and consciousness in the
present. For Adorno, the modern push toward efficiency, profit, and accelerated
production shapes how and what subjects see, hear, and feel in the present. This
push, in other words, works on our capacity to sense and respond to facets of the
world, particularly those facets which are dissonant, opaque, and ambiguous.
Subjects are compelled to avoid “what lies to the side”, to ignore those pressures,
forces, and tensional pulls that might reveal possibilities beyond the ends of
profit and control. According to Adorno, the cultivation of this heightened
attentiveness is strained because modern denizens are shaped to “look ahead
with alert concentration and ignore that which lies to one side”. To be sure,
Adorno would insist that we all have blind spots and, with Gadamer, that any
horizon is limited and shortsighted. Yet we can also become aware of these blind
spots; we can become more attentive to those hazy, partially visible, and partially
audible others that reside at the periphery of our fields of vision. We might also
become more open to the ways in which these “distractions” which “lie to the
side” can influence the course and direction of our Odyssean journey(s), opening
up routes and possibilities that promise different modes of relating to and living
with others.

Adorno is skeptical, however, that this can happen under the prevailing
conditions of capitalism, within which bodies are integrated and used to further
the interests of power and profit. He therefore claims, “ The more complex and
sensitive the social, economic, and scientific mechanism, to the operation of
which the system of production has long since attuned the body, the more
impoverished are the experiences of which the body is capable. The regression
of the masses today lies in their inability to hear what has not already been
heard, to touch with their hands what has not already been grasped; it is the new
form of blindness which supersedes that of vanquished myth.” 24 For Adorno,
our bodily experiences become more impoverished as mechanisms (culture
industry, market expansion, other modes of power) that bring about conformity
and consistency get more entrenched in the modern world. Modern subjects
increasingly become like Odysseus’s rowers – unable to speak to or engage
one another, but yet collectively “harnessed to the same rhythms.” This
“harnessing” produces consistency, or at least the semblance of consistency, but
only by denying difference, or by rendering us less receptive to dissonance,
ambiguity, and the unfamiliar. The increasing influence of instrumental reason,
which enables us to hastily incorporate the unfamiliar into our familiar projects
and ventures, prevents us from engaging the unfamiliar, from responding to
those aspects of the world that don’t quite fit within our frameworks. This
fastening to the tempos of capital, in other words, shapes how our bodies are
affected/moved by the actions, events, and conditions of the world we inhabit.
The push toward coherence and efficiency specifically tends to undermine our
vulnerability to suffering insofar as this mode of receptivity entails an openness
to dissonance and ambiguity, an openness to qualities and features which might
alter and interrupt our everyday courses and trajectories.

24 Ibid., 28.

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As intimated above, this mode of attention also requires “slow time”, a
temporality that is out of joint with the accelerated speed of capitalism. “Slow
time” enables us to linger, to adjust our dispositions and perceptions to the
suffering and pain of others in addition to their joys, aspirations, and general
concerns. On the importance of tempo, Adorno suggests, “One might almost say
that truth itself depends on the tempo, the patience and perseverance of
lingering with the particular.”25 With Levinas, the particular here might be the
face of the hungry other, a face that resists being assimilated into means/end
schemas or projects.26 Truth, according to Adorno, depends in part on our
capacity to develop slow, patient relationships with particular others, enabling
us to be more attentive and responsive to the unique qualities, dimensions, and
concerns of these others. Lingering in this case is associated with waiting,
tending, taking time; this mode of being potentially defuses the desire to grasp
and control the world or determine the quality of the relationship with the
exterior world prior to the encounter(s). “Lingering with the particular” is a
relevant image insofar as being responsive to the suffering of others requires
habits of patience, receptivity, and vulnerability. These habits run counter to the
practices of domination and control associated with war, empire, and
unrestrained market expansion.27 These habits similarly challenge what Adorno
alludes to as the principle of self-preservation or “the fear of losing the self and
suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life.” 28 Similar to an
author like Georges Bataille, Adorno suggests that the pernicious relationships
between self and other have something to do with our desire to preserve a
coherent sense of self, a self that requires a “safe” distance from uncomfortable
forms of difference, non-identity, and materiality.

25 Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. EFN Jephcott

(New York: Verso, 1978), 77.

26 For Levinas’s understanding of the singularity of the other indicated by the

transcendence of the face of the other, see Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University, 1969).
Although there are similarities between Levinas and Adorno, Adorno might worry that
Levinas’s ethics eschews mediation by the concept. Although Adorno’s negative
dialectics attempts to get at the non-conceptual, the tension or paradox is that any
relationship to the non- conceptual is conceptually mediated. Levinas, at times, places
the ethical relationship to the other outside of conceptual mediation. For a critique of
Levinas’s attempt to formulate an immediate ethical relationship with the other, see
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel
Levinas” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1978), 79-153. I think Adorno would share Derrida’s concerns.
27 For a recent, fascinating account of the political and ethical possibilities associated

with receptivity patience, and vulnerability, see Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles,
Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a
Radical Democrat and a Christian (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2008).
Exploring the practices and theoretical resources that emerge from SNCC, Industrial
Areas Foundation, Jean Vanier’s L’Arche, and other radically democratic communities,
Coles and Hauerwas attempt to trace and develop lines of flight that promise something
different than what they call a “politics of death” (which includes both a reproduction
and denial of death by the megastate and the vehicles of global capitalism).
28 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 26.

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Before making the passage into Adorno’s negative dialectics, we must address
several questions concerning the persuasiveness of Adorno’s reading of modern
life. I imagine three related questions: Isn’t Adorno’s depiction of modern life
(driven by instrumental reason, violence, and a general denial of suffering) too
all encompassing, too excessively somber? And because of this totalizing
critique, isn’t Adorno, as Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and others suggest,
compelled to find redemption or hope “elsewhere” – in a Utopian realm outside
of language and rational discourse? Isn’t his totalizing critique a result of using
Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens as the allegory for modern life just as Weber
uses the “iron cage” as the dominant image for modernity?

Adorno in-famously exaggerates his claims. He uses excessive rhetoric, in part,

as a strategy. Among other effects, it is a way to inventory and illumine the
intensity of the damages of the past and present. More importantly, this strategy
resists the frequent denial and forgetfulness of conditions, practices, and
dispositions that enabled the extermination of six million Jews, the release of the
atomic bomb on Japanese citizens, or the death of eight million Congolese under
Belgium’s rapacious pursuit of copper, glass, and rubber. Yet Adorno also
acknowledges the limits of totalizing, somber assessments of modern life expressed
in claims such as: “Life lives no longer”, “The whole world is passed through the
filter of the culture industry” 29 , and “To write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric.”30 He is often vigilant of the dangers of (his own) excessive rhetoric.
For instance, in the middle of “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”, an
essay which traces the residual elements of Fascism in post-war Germany, he
admits: “I have exaggerated the somber side, following the maxim that only
exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth. Do not mistake my
fragmentary and often rhapsodic remarks for Spenglerism; Spenglerism itself makes
common cause with the catastrophe. My intention is to delineate a tendency
concealed behind the smooth façade of everyday life.”31 In this passage, Adorno
connects the tactic of exaggeration with the intention of “delineating” features and
tendencies that are concealed and ignored to maintain the appearance of peace
and well-being.32 Yet he also distances his thought from

29 Ibid., 99.
30 Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society”, 34.
31 Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” in Critical Models, trans. Henry

Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 99. The reference here is to
Oswlad Spengler who wrote an influential book, Decline of the West, in 1918. For
Adorno’s interpretation of Spengler and the latter’s theory of cultural decadence, see
Adorno, “Spengler after the Decline” in Prisms, 51-72.
32 This discussion of exaggeration and excessive rhetoric conjures up discussions

between Jeff Stout and Romand Coles over radical democracy. In Stout’s masterful
Democracy and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2004), he suggests that the
excessive rhetoric in thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard
Rorty has “outlived its use.” Stout suggests that this excess tends to obscure and cover
over what these thinkers mean to say. Coles responds to Stout in “Democracy,
Theology, and the Question of Excess: A Review of Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and
Tradition”, Modern Theology 21.2 (April 2005): 301-321. In this review, Coles
reminds Stout that the rhetorical excessive is an important device for thinkers, such as
Emerson,
that Stout uses to articulate his understanding of democracy. Coles, drawing from
Adorno and Freud, claims that this excess can challenge and disrupt “troubling

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that of Spenglerism – which, according to Adorno, pronounces the inevitability
of cultural decay and decline. Spenglerism, according to Adorno, “makes
common cause with the catastrophe” by denying the possibilities and hope that
emerge from the “protest of the powerless.”33 The very term “protest of the
powerless” suggests that individuals and communities that are typically stifled
by social arrangements simultaneously provide some friction against the smooth
flow of things.

It is important to keep in mind that while Adorno employs terms like “system”
and “totality”, he uses these terms with a tinge of irony. Certainly he wants to
make us more attentive to totalizing processes and tendencies, to unjust
arrangements that are becoming more pervasive and obstructive of freedom,
creativity, solidarity, and general flourishing. He worries about the ways in
which the world is “becoming like an open-air iron cage.”34 Yet, as he points
out in his essay on Kafka, “There is no system without its residue.”35 Any movement
toward totality necessarily fails to reach completion insofar as the identity of
that totalizing movement would have to be mediated by something other
than itself. In other words, any arrangement of power generates resistance,
exclusions, and ways of being that trouble and destabilize that arrangement.
Consequently, part of Adorno’s problem with Spengler is that the latter formulates a
conception of history that “in the end everything is taken care of. Nothing is left
over and all resistances have been liquidated.”36 I am not concerned with the
accuracy of his reading of Spengler. What is significant is Adorno’s fidelity to
resistance, his commitment to residual “left overs” that “slip through” and challenge
totalizing frameworks and arrangements. As Martin Jay points out, Adorno’s break
with previous Marxist thinkers is animated, in part, by his fidelity to non-identity
and his “animus towards totality”, closure, and universal accounts of history .37 This
enables an initial response to critics like Habermas and Seyla Benhabib who
claim that Adorno can only find hope in some redemptive sphere outside of
rational discourse because of his totalizing critique, especially of modern reason.
Adorno, especially in his later writings, seems to find flickers of hope in
everyday discourses that might challenge and resist domination, forgetfulness of
suffering, and so forth. He points, for instance, to philosophy as a tradition that
cultivates habits of critical reflection, careful attentiveness to the world around
us, and resistance to the status quo. He also skeptically endorses education and

affective commitments lodged in our disciplined flesh.” It can counter the pervasive
incapacity to be affected by troubling conditions, practices, and arrangements. For
Stout’s response, see “The Spirit of Democracy and the Rhetoric of Excess”, Journal of
Religious Ethics 35.1 (Feb 2007): 3-21. I take it that for Stout, the excess can blind us to
possibilities; it can hinder us from thinking that things can get better. For Coles the
excess actually brings to light dimensions that have been blocked from view, obscured,
and so forth. A voice that is excessively loud can either deafen/impair one’s ability to
hear or render that voice audible to those who have trouble hearing. I take it that we
have to keep both tendencies/possibilities in mind.
33Adorno, “Spengler after the Decline”, 72.
34 Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, 34.
35 Adorno, “Notes on Kafka” in Prisms, 257.
36 Adorno, “Spengler after the Decline”, 62
37 Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to

Habermas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 241-275.

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psychology as domains that might help people confront and work through the
catastrophes of the past and present, defusing the tendency to deny, repress, and
thus reproduce these catastrophes.38

Finally, the allegory of Odysseus and the Sirens is only one model or lens that
Adorno uses to think through the features of modernity. Although this allegory,
along with Weber’s image of the iron cage, is significant, it doesn’t exhaust his
imagination. And Adorno would be the first to claim that the configuration of
images, models, and concepts that he constructs to think about modernity is in
no way definitive. In fact, his configurations are designed to “furnish models for
a future exertion of thought.”39 Another image that Adorno offers, for instance, is
“the child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This chord,
however, was always there; the possible combinations are limited and actually
everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the keyboard.” 40 This image,
according to Adorno, expresses a subject’s longing (Sehnsucht) for the new. But
notice that the chord “never previously heard” was “always there” and the
“possible combinations” that can be played are “implicitly given in the keyboard.”
Adorno is suggesting that the new is located within the mundane; that which is
potentially transformative is immanent to our everyday practices and
interactions. Perhaps this image should be juxtaposed, with tension, to the Odysseus
allegory. Perhaps our heightened awareness of pernicious practices and
arrangements, which are sustained in part by reducing our awareness, is connected
to the possibility of something new and more desirable. Put differently, hope
might be generated by our heightened capacity to register, contemplate, and
respond to the damages and forms of suffering that beset our world. In the next
section, I trace this possibility.

Negative Dialectics as a Practice of Unhopeless Tarrying

Negative dialectics, among other possibilities, is a philosophical response to the

pernicious features of modernity and social existence more generally. In this
section, I tease out elements within Adorno’s dialectic that resist the tendency to
deny death, suffering, and loss. His thought, in other words, attempts to make
us more responsive to these conditions. But this is not all it offers. Negative
dialectics, in opposition to instrumental reason, remains faithful to what Adorno
calls the non-identical or the excess that slips through concepts. This fidelity to a
“More” indicates a desire for a better world; it denotes a certain kind of hope. It
is important, I argue, that both moments be held together, in tension.

38 On the possibilities and virtues that Adorno sees as inherent to the philosophical

tradition, see Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?” in Critical Models, 5-17. For his
suggestion that teachers and psychologists might, in a limited way, help subjects deal
with the lingering traces of Anti-Semitism and Fascism and also encourage them to
confront the ideologies and mechanisms that generate hate and violence, see “The
Meaning of Working Through the Past”, 102-103.
39 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 18.
40 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1997), 32.

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As we work through Adorno’s philosophy, we must keep in mind that negative
dialectics is an activity, a practice, a mode of being in the world. It is not an
expression of “self-satisfied” contemplation. Gillian Rose insists on this connection
between thought and activity in Adorno’s dialectic. She claims that for Adorno,
“thinking is a form of praxis. The title Negative Dialectic is intended to cut
across the conventional theory/praxis distinction by delineating theory as a form
of intervention which combats prevalent modes of identity thinking.”41 Romand
Coles similarly contends that we must think of Adorno’s negative dialectics as a
“performance, a happening, a textual practice. It is not a practice whose meaning
would lie in some transparent presence utterly incommensurable with itself, but
rather whose meanings lie largely in the ways its very movements exemplify
ethical engagement.”42 As a performance and movement, negative dialectics does
something to the reader. It animates and gestures toward different ways of
interacting with others. It cultivates different habits of attentiveness, alternative
ways of perceiving the world we live in. It compels us, for instance, to be more
attuned and receptive to ambiguity, contradiction, and dissonance. This mode of
thinking and engaging the world prompts us to resist closure, complacency, and
comfort especially when these states are sustained through denial. In a world
suffused with suffering that many ignore or turn away from, negative dialectics
endeavors to register, traverse, and articulate this general condition of suffering.

According to Adorno, negative dialectics “says no more, to begin with, than

that objects to not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that
they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”43 This initial
definition sounds familiar. Like Kant, his philosophical predecessor, Adorno is
suggesting that our concepts are limited. He seems to be reiterating Kant’s idea
that concepts don’t fully correspond to their designated objects. Therefore
Adorno is indebted, to some degree, to Kant’s distinction between appearances
and things-in themselves (the difference between objects as they appear to the
structures of the mind and the object as it is apart from conceptual mediation).44
Although Adorno contends that “the concept does not exhaust the thing
conceived”, he also acknowledges that thinking necessarily seeks to identify. We
therefore have to actively resist the inherent tendency within thinking to absorb
and exhaust the objects of thinking. In other words, “To think is to identify.
Conceptual order is

41 Rose, Melancholy Science, 147. Of course Adorno wants to maintain some

distance between theory and praxis; the two are therefore never identical just as
subject and object are never identical. Yet this distance does not foreclose a
relationship, a relationship fraught with tensions and ambiguities no doubt.
42 Coles, Rethinking Generosity, 80.
43 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5.
44Kant’s critical enterprise recognizes the limits of human thought. It acknowledges the

tension that haunts human reason – reason is beset by questions that, by its very
nature, it cannot answer nor ignore. Kant’s claim that the “things-in-themselves” exceed
the clutches of our thought is a testament to the “slippage of being”, the slippage that
animates negative dialectics. The problem, from an Adornian perspective, is that Kant’s
acknowledgement of the world’s alterity very quickly turns into a yearning to overcome
it. Thus Kant imagines a subject whose concepts and categories are impervious to a
recalcitrant world, a subject that imposes its self-given laws on an inscrutable world
without receiving any content from the world.

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content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend…Aware that the
conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently,
in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity.” 45 The term
“totality” here refers to thinking, ways of being, and dispositions that tend to
absorb or integrate various modes of non-identity. It refers to conceptual
schemes, narratives, and practices that deny difficult, unwieldy forms of
difference. When Adorno claims that thinking can only break immanently
“through the appearance of total identity”, he is suggesting that any attempt to
think beyond totalizing frameworks will necessarily occur within those
frameworks. Prefiguring the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Adorno
is suggesting that resistance to any arrangement of power necessarily relies to
some extent on that arrangement. More specifically, Adorno acknowledges that
any attempt to counter the tendency of concepts to subsume particular objects
without registering the alterity of these objects, will require the use of concepts.
Negative dialectics is therefore always subject to the problems, limitations,
blindnesses, and erasures that accompany identity thinking.

If the alterity that exceeds the concept is designated as the non-identical, then
negative dialectics expresses the fraught relationship between identity and non-
identity. Even as Adorno “sides” with the non-identical or the heterogeneous
(that which cannot be totally grasped by the concept), he acknowledges the
necessity of conceptualizing, or the importance of finding the familiar in the
other. In fact, the excess that slips through the concept prompts further
conceptualizing, including the creation of new concepts. Adorno calls this
fraught relationship between non-identity and identity a “contradiction.”
He writes, “Contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity.” 46
Contradiction intensifies the more desperately we strive for unity and order. The
non-identical, according to Adorno, “appears divergent, dissonant, negative for
just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity, as
long as its demand for totality will be its measure for whatever is not identical
with it.”47 In other words, things, ideas, people, desires, and events appear more
out of place and dissonant the more we are shaped to desire unity, order, ease,
and comfort. Because these aspects appear out of place, dissonant, and
unfamiliar, we tend to repress or repel these aspects to maintain the
semblance of order. Similarly, we tend to overlook the ways in which the desire
for order and comfort produces dissonance, suffering, and pain for those who
inhabit the underside of various orders and arrangements. To strive for unity is
not bad per se. Yet a striving for unity that neglects, covers over, or represses the
dissonance that thwarts this striving can be pernicious. A desire for unity that
becomes too comfortable, too at ease with it itself, can produce a blindness to
the dissonance, ambiguity, and unease that this desire for unity generates.

Therefore Adorno claims that negative dialectics is “the consistent sense

(Bewusstsein) of non-identity.”48 Negative dialectics animates an attentiveness to
qualities, relations, and conditions that the various drives toward unity might

45 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5..

46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 5-6.
48 Ibid., 5.

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screen from view. It cultivates a heightened sense of ongoing tensions and
conflicts that shape our world. The basic movement of the dialectic endeavors to
make us more receptive to these conflicts and tensions. In fact, it compels us to
think within and from the wounds produced by these conflicts. As Adorno
moves back and forth between various binaries such as subject and object,
idealism and materialism, the conceptual and the non-conceptual, or theory and
practice, he refuses to privilege one side of the binary. As Adorno puts it,
“Dialectics does not begin by taking a standpoint.”49 Negative dialectics, in other
words, does not offer a stable, comfortable position that enables a subject to
interpret the world from that position. It does not begin with a secure subject
who confers meaning on the world. Negative dialectics is always embroiled in
the messy, contingent, tension-filled world. Experience, according to negative
dialectics, always occurs in the precarious space between subjects and objects;
between ideas and the concrete world; between selves and others.

My formulation thus far might suggest that Adorno is attached to a defunct

subject/object dualism, a dualism that post-Hegelian philosophy has left behind.
In the introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel refutes the assumption that the
subject or mind is on one side of a boundary and objective truth is another side.
What Hegel offers in this influential text is a story about the historical
development of a third, mediating term that always already enables and shapes
the relationship between subjects and objects, selves and others, thoughts and the
world. Hegel calls this third, mediating term Geist; we can think of Geist or
Spirit as naming the primacy of social practices which shape and constitute the
interaction between subjects and objects. Adorno is not so confident about the
unifying quality of this third term; although he agrees that there is no
fundamental split between subject and object or mind and world, he does
suggest that the proverbial subject/object split reflects divisions and conflicts
that pervade modern life. According to Adorno, “the separation of subject and
object is both real and illusory. True because in the cognitive realm it serves to
express real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive
development. False, because the resulting separation must not be hypostasized,
not magically transformed into an invariant.”50

As I take it, Adorno is claiming that we cannot ontologize the separation between
subject and object or, in a Kantian manner, declare that there is an invariant
demarcation between things in themselves and things as they appear to a subject.
At the same time, historical processes and conditions associated with the
expansion of capital have produced concrete divisions and ruptures. For
Adorno, Kant’s solution might leave us with a subject whose norms and rules are
detached from the material world, yet Hegel leaves us with a collective subject
that too easily resolves the tensions and modes of non-identity that mark our
interactions with the world. If Adorno is somewhere between and beyond Kant
and Hegel, the following formulation expresses Adorno’s critical piety toward
his predecessors: “The difference between subject and object cannot be simply
negated. They are neither an ultimate duality nor a screen hiding ultimate unity.
They constitute one another as much as – by virtue of such constitution – they

49 Ibid.
50 Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 498-499.

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depart from one another.”51 This mutual constitution, at its best, is marked by a
tension-filled, back and forth movement between self and other, a movement
(not predetermined by a unifying “third” term or framework) in which both
participants are affected, enriched, and transformed.52 At the same time, a
proximate distance is maintained between self and other and this distance is
pivotal to the quality of the interactions.

If Adorno’s dialectic teaches selves to move in between and trouble binaries, this
mobility is coupled with a willingness to linger, to tarry with the other. As
described above, when thought lingers with the particular, concrete other, our
thinking becomes more receptive, patient, and less inclined to hastily determine
its relationship with that other. Thus Adorno claims, “If thought really yielded
to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very
objects would start talking under the lingering eye.”53 The point here is not that
we can relate to others without categories or concepts. The point is that we must
“strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept.”54 Even though our
relationship to others is always conceptually and linguistically mediated,
Adorno’s hope is that through careful attention, patience, and a willingness to
linger, these others might transform our prefabricated concepts, thoughts, and
dispositions. They might express or reveal facets of the world that cannot be
fully anticipated by familiar, “ready to use” concepts. By lingering with the
suffering and pain of others, we might become more attuned and responsive to
their conditions. We might, for instance, become more willing to listen to and
register stories that both disconcert us and offer new meanings and possibilities.
Similarly, we might be less inclined to hastily render these stories intelligible,
lucid, and consistent with previous thoughts.

For Adorno, a heightened awareness of suffering is related to the capacity to

think and experience contradictions and antagonisms. In a passage at the end of
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno professes that philosophy must express
“the voice of the contradiction which otherwise would not be heard, but would
triumph silently.”55 In Negative Dialectics, he claims that “the need to lend a
voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that
weighs upon the subject.”56 Giving a voice to suffering is for Adorno related to the
expression of contradiction, the expression of conflicts that disturb neat,
consistent theories, perspectives, or narratives. As Lambert Zuidervaart points
out, when Adorno speaks of contradictions, he is “not simply referring to logical
incongruities that could be cleared up by more careful thought. Instead his
51 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 174.
52 Mutual constitution certain requires something like the social practical plane to enable
this interaction. Yet Adorno would be worried about appeals to the social world, community,
language games, or tradition that did not take into account the violent dimensions of the We
with respect to the shaping of selves. See for instance Judith Butler’s illuminating
interpretation of Adorno’s distinction between morality and ethos in Giving an
Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 3-9. Also see
Drucilla Cornell, “The Ethical Message of Negative Dialectics,” 170.
53 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 28.
54 Ibid., p.15.
55 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 203.
56 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17-18.

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reference is to unavoidable conflicts in a historical society.”57 Adorno also
describes the articulation of suffering/contradiction as an expression of the
weightiness of the world on subjects – the pain involved in inhabiting a world
always already riddled and burdened with conflict, poverty, and hunger, world
that can be overwhelming for subjects. This articulation, in other words, is a
response to the often-denied “coercive state of reality”, the antagonistic quality
of the world. A kind of hope for Adorno lies in articulating the contradictions of
the world, which if not expressed, “would triumph silently.” Thus, explicating
the contradictory relationship between freedom and domination within
modernity in Dialectic of Enlightenment (the ways in which the flourishing
of some has been intertwined with and predicated on the suffering and agony of
others) becomes a site of possibility by confronting the conditions and practices
that “silently” sustain misery and prevent flourishing for many people. In
addition, by refusing to easily resolve opposing claims and arguments within
Negative Dialectics (such as the injunction that we must strive to get beyond
the concept even though our relationship to the world is conceptually mediated),
Adorno works on and against the reader’s expectations and desires. The
dialectic thwarts the expectation of resolution and closure. It exposes the desire
to keep moving forward without being haunted by conflicts and tensions that
one would prefer to “leave behind.”

Is Adorno’s tendency to linger in antagonism and contradiction simply an excuse

for not being clear, for not making a sustained, coherent argument? Is Adorno
confined to this lingering because he cannot find anything positive or affirmative
to hold on to, because he has no coherent goods or ends to endorse? These
questions provoke Adorno’s detractors. According to Raymond Geuss, for
instance, Adorno’s negative dialectic is simply incoherent. Geuss suggests that
part of Adorno’s problem is that he celebrates contradiction without the
possibility of resolution. Adorno’s dialectic remains too negative, too
incomplete. Geuss therefore juxtaposes Adorno’s thought to Hegel’s dialectic
because the latter offers a more coherent, productive way of dealing with
contradiction and conflict. Geuss claims that Hegel’s dialectic “is precisely an
attempt to understand how our initially vague concepts gain content and become
more ‘adequate’ to the reality they purport to describe. A “logic” that wants to
understand this kind of conceptual change must countenance contradictions –
they are the force that pushes toward increased adequacy. However, since
Adorno’s dialectic is negative, this kind of justification for the use of
contradiction in philosophy is not open for him; his contradictions don’t get us
anywhere, least of all an improved conceptual scheme in which the relevant
contradiction can be avoided.”58 Habermas supplements Geuss’s critique by
suggesting a reason for Adorno’s inability to think beyond contradictions.
According to Habermas, after Adorno accepts a totalizing critique of modern

57 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion

(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 51.

58 Raymond Geuss, “Review [untitled],” The Journal of Philosophy 72.6 (March 27,

1975):170-171. I am not concerned with Geuss’s reading of Hegel here. What is

important is the contention that Adorno’s dialectic gets us nowhere; that negative
dialectics leaves us stuck in contradictions, and without a resolution or a more adequate
set of concepts to describe the world around us.

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reason, his thought is animated and haunted by a glaring contradiction – how is
it that he can defend his own position if there is no position outside the realm of
instrumental reason and domination. According to Habermas, “Adorno’s
Negative Dialectics reads like a continuing explanation of why we have to circle
within this performative contradiction, and indeed even remain there.”59

To claim, as Geuss does, that Adorno’s dialectic “gets us nowhere” presupposes

a certain understanding of where we are. If, as Adorno thinks, we live in a world
that is increasingly becoming insensitive to suffering and violence, then
Adorno’s reflections and inquiries might contribute to “getting us somewhere.”
In other words, if we live among people who tend to avoid contradiction,
ambiguity, and unease, then the movement, style, and content of Adorno’s
thought is doing something significant and even productive. At the same time,
Adorno is not averse to the idea of improving our concepts and offering more
accurate descriptions of the world. In fact, he is calling for the active creation of
concepts (the process of conceptualizing always exceeds the concept) which,
among other effects, “lends a voice” to the contradictions that remain silent and
ignored. What both Geuss and Habermas seem to miss is what Joshua Cohen
calls the “morality of contradiction”60, the ethical dispositions and stances that
are intertwined with Adorno’s thought. As Cohen points out, “The more
contradiction remains unvoiced, the more violently it will come to impose itself.
… Against society’s unconsciously willed forgetting of the violence by which its
rationality has been forged, Adorno seeks to develop a mode of thought and
action which always begins from recognition of its implication in that
violence.” 61 Adorno’s “persistent sense of the non-identical” or the
contradictions that constitute modern life resists the pervasive forgetfulness of
violence, that general condition that all human selves participate in but tend to
deny. If amnesia is a problem, then giving a voice to contradiction, conflict, and
suffering “gets us somewhere”; cultivating a heightened awareness of these
painful aspects of life enables us to begin to confront, work through, and
potentially reduce them.

Another aspect of Adorno’s thought that these detractors overlook is the

relationship between the dissonance expressed in negative dialectics and
physical, bodily pain. As JM Bernstein points out, the ethical thrust of negative
dialectics should be understood as an alternative to “ethical coldness” which is
characterized by a stance of indifference toward the materiality and concreteness
of the pain of others.62 Ethical coldness is a correlate to instrumental reason or
the efficient, hasty integration of concrete particulars into abstract, ready-made
concepts. Being attuned to the sensuous pain of others, on the other hand, marks
a break or interruption from our familiar courses, structures of meaning, and
sensibilities. Thus, for Adorno, the movement and contour of negative dialectics
is animated by the body’s unrest. The movement of negative dialectics, in other
words, resists closure in part because of it is motivated by the consistent pain

59 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity, 119.

60 See Joshua Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (New
York: Continuum, 2005), 36-40.
61 Ibid., pp. 37-39.
62 Bernstein, Disenchantment and Ethics, 396-414.

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that the body experiences. We might think here of the bodily pain caused by a
lack of food. Think of the pain caused by a whip lashing the back of a black
slave. Or the pain involved in current practices of torture. According to Adorno,
“It is the somatic element’s survival, in knowledge, as the unrest that reproduces
itself in the advancement of knowledge.”63 If pain and suffering are “moving
forces of dialectical thinking”, then our ways of thinking and being in the world
“advance”, in part, by contemplating and registering the “unrest” that bodies
experience in a world riddled with violence. For Adorno, concrete bodily
suffering undermines endeavors to render the world neat and coherent, to
explain away dissonance and contradiction through our languages and
discourses. As he puts it, “The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the
empirical world belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of
that suffering.”64

But the body is not only susceptible to pain. Bodies also resist violence, torture,
and hurt. The body cries out as an initial form of resistance to pernicious
arrangements and conditions. The body’s resistance expressed in a cry of pain
opens up the possibility that the world could be better. People don’t have to be
hungry; prisoners don’t have to be tortured. The cry of pain can be a “no” to
prevailing conditions and an implicit “yes” to something better, to a state in
which pain is not so widespread. Or as Adorno writes, “The physical moment
tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things could be
different.”65 The “physical moment” of suffering endured by an individual
expresses to us that, at the moment, something is wrong. It is a signal that
something is out of joint, that the body is being affected in a harmful manner. A
cry, in response to the “physical moment”, is the body’s expression of and
resistance to pain. At the same time, a cry beckons toward another world where
the conditions that produce anguish are less pervasive.

Negative dialectics doesn’t only induce dispositions toward the present. It also
offers powerful resources to think about suffering, loss, and missed
opportunities in the past. In response to conceptions of world history, for
instance, the “consistent sense of non-identity” encourages us to be more attuned
to facets of the past that trouble and undermine sweeping narratives, aspects of
the past that are nevertheless always under the threat of erasure. The sense of
the non-identical similarly compels us to think through the tensions and conflicts
of the past, tensions that linger in the present and hinder us from constructing
neat, smooth narratives to “connect the dots” throughout time.

This work of the negative resists what Adorno calls “universal history”,
constructions of history that gather and unify the moments and events in time
according to the idea of progress.66 Adorno is not against the idea of progress
per se. He is against the idea that somehow progress is inscribed in the

63 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203.

64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Adorno is indebted to Benjamin’s understanding of empty, homogenous time. See

Benjamin, “Theses on the Phiosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn,

ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-264.

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movement of history. He is concerned about what aspects of the past are being
denied and foreclosed by these narratives of progress. Thus he writes,
“Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that
have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to
say that plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it.”67 Notice
that the cynicism, the lack of hope, is associated with denying the catastrophes
and ruins that constitute history. Lack of hope is attributed to accounts of
history that privilege unity, thereby obscuring the fragmentation, dissonance,
and tension inscribed within the unfolding of history. Lack of hope, in other
words, is associated with accounts of history that deny or downplay the violence
and terror that these accounts are implicated in. According to Adorno, “The
unity of world history which animates the philosopher to trace it as the path of
world spirit is the unity of terror rolling over mankind; it is the immediacy of
antagonism.”68 Adorno is well aware that conquest, war, and empire have
historically been intertwined with universal narratives that: locate truth and
meaning on the side of the powerful, on the side of the victors; that imagine the
present as the acme of historical development and the past as indicative of a less
developed phase; that legitimate violence and terror by either placing the victims
of conquest outside of history and truth or locating them in a lower phase of
historical development. Adorno’s dialectic underscores the “terror” connected
with universal history, to the catastrophes and suffering produced by the “march
of progress.” As I explain below, it also compels us to retrieve discarded and
forgotten possibilities within the ruins produced by historical catastrophes.

The process of connecting the past and present, of imagining the relationship
between different moments/events in time is always riddled with myopia and
selectivity. Even if we deny the pretensions of universal history, we are still
vulnerable to its blindnesses and vices. As finite, limited beings, we necessarily
forget aspects of the past and present; we tend to remember what is useful and
expedient for our everyday ventures; we remember the past in light of present
concerns, desires, and frames of meaning; yet we also revise previous
understandings of the past (and present) as new information comes in, as new
stories are presented to us. In addition, through education, holidays, and public
rituals, we are perpetually shaped to remember and forget various dimensions of
the past and present. Adorno’s “sense of the non-identical” resists the specific
tendency to deny aspects of the past that might disrupt and trouble our sense of
the present. This heightened sense of non-identity compels us to be patient with

67 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320. It is important that universal history must be

both “construed and denied.” It must be construed because one must still connect the
dots of history, one must still discover levels of continuity among the fragments, ruins,
and discontinuous events of history. For Adorno, violence is a unifying category through
which he understands and reads history. Thus he writes, “No universal history leads
from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the
megaton bomb”(p.320). I take it that by imagining continuity between the slingshot and
the megaton bomb, Adorno is not only suggesting that violence is a unifying principle
within the movement of history. He is also inscribing discontinuity, fragmentation, and
ruin into the interval between “the slingshot and the megaton bomb” insofar as this
space is constituted by catastrophe and suffering. It allows him to imagine history as
“the unity of continuity and discontinuity”(p.320).
68 Ibid., 341.

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dimensions of the past that don’t quite fit within prevailing narratives and
frameworks of meaning. It makes us more aware of those facets that extant
structures of meaning code as irrelevant or outmoded. Consider the following
passage from Minima Moralia:

If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the
standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the
vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed present the
fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also
address itself to those things which are not embraced by this dynamic,
which fell by the wayside – which might be called the waste products
and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. It is in the nature of the
defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory.
What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops
but also that which does not fit properly into the laws of historical
movement. Theory must needs deal with cross-grained, opaque,
unassimilated material, which as such from the start has an anachronistic
quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical
dynamic.69

Adorno is not suggesting here that we venerate the past or those facets of the
past that seem obsolete. He is not claiming that what has been “defeated” in
history necessarily offers us insurgent meanings and possibilities. In America, for
instance, the historical proponents of chattel slavery or the disenfranchisement of
women have been defeated to some extent.70 Certain practices and ways of being
are obsolete for good reasons. Certain defeats have enabled more people to live
better. What Adorno is resisting is the tendency to declare a practice, idea, or
commitment irrelevant simply because it doesn’t seem to fit into or accord with
the present state of things. He is challenging the idea that “that which does not
fit properly into the laws of historical movement” should be completely
discarded and considered insignificant. He is similarly challenging the idea that
the past is only useful if it reinforces the present and its dominant modes of
being.

To tend to the “blind spots and waste products” of history is to remember both
the suffering of those who “didn’t fit” and the hope generated by their dissonant
desires, practices, and ways of being. This form of attentiveness reminds us that
our narratives, horizons, and fields of vision are always producing blind spots,
violent exclusions, and injustices that we cannot always see, hear, or respond to.
Yet beyond these limits, beyond these blind spots, lie possibilities and not yet
realized meanings that, with a different kind of attention and openness, might
transform us. “Waste” signifies that which can be discarded, or treated as
insignificant and expendable. It also signifies excess or slippage. It can refer to
the bodies that have been the detritus of imperial regimes, the waste products of
violent exertions of power. Yet when interpreting waste as slippage or excess,

69Adorno, Minima Moralia, 151

70I say to some extent because slavery still exists (human trafficking of young women
for sexual labor) and women, as the human trafficking example shows, continue to
confront the effects of patriarchy.

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this term registers the ways in which those who have suffered these
arrangements of power have generated practices of resistance, practices that are
out of joint with these arrangements, habits and ways of living that “transcend
the ruling society” and promise us something more desirable. The waste or trash
of history refers to “that which still remains”, the leftovers of history. These
“leftovers” may be ideas, meanings, and possibilities that have not been fully
considered or realized. These “remains” might contribute to thinking differently
about the present and resisting the present’s pernicious features. This of course
depends on how these gathered remains are juxtaposed and combined with
present desires, hopes, and concerns.71 Thus negative dialectics, according to
Adorno, is “not only an advancing process but a retrograde one at the same time.
The concept’s unfolding is also a reaching back.”72 The advancement of concepts
and ideas is enabled in part by the capacity to remember and “reach back”
toward dimensions of the past that have been neglected, forgotten, or that have
yet to be discovered.

Negative dialectics, as intimated throughout this section, registers the excess or

“more” connoted by the term “waste product.” The sense of the non-identical
therefore doesn’t only cultivate a heightened attentiveness to contradiction, pain,
and suffering. It also draws attention to the fecundity of meaning in the world.
It reminds us that there is always “more” to be discovered, sensed, experienced,
and thought in the world. Our concepts never exhaust the objects of thought; the
world retains its heterogeneity in our ongoing interactions with it. Adorno
writes, “What is, is more than it is. This “more” is not imposed upon it but
remains immanent to it, as that which has been pushed out of it. In that sense,
the non-identical would be the thing’s own identity against its identifications.” 73
Adorno suggests here that life is always exceeding itself. The world is always
offering us more; it is always pregnant with meanings and possibilities that slip
through and evade our extant horizons and conceptual frameworks prompting
us to interpret and engage this world in new ways. This “more”, however, is not
attributable to a transcendent realm outside of time and experience. The “more”,
in other words, is not “imposed” upon “what is” from a source that is exterior to
the world. The “more” is internal to “what is”, immanent to a world that is
always in flux and incomplete.74 Because we live amidst a world that is in flux,
in a perpetual state of becoming, the non-identical is “the thing’s own identity
against identifications.” Against attempts to fully capture or exhaust the
meaning of objects in the world, the non-identical excess internal to life
consistently remains; it sustains its primacy over our identifications. Hope,
Adorno suggests, is cultivated by the persistent awareness of this “more”, the
consistent attentiveness to that which exceeds, resists, and potentially undoes
totalizing arrangements. He writes, “It lies in the definition of negative dialectics

71 For a helpful interpretation of how this idea of the remainder operates in Adorno’s

thought, see The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the
Postmodern, ed. Max Pensky (Albany: State University of New York Press), 10-11.
72 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 157.
73 Ibid., p. 161.
74 I am indebted to my conversations with Dan Barber on this issue. His dissertation,

The Production of Immanence: Deleuze, Yoder, and Adorno develops the idea
of an immanent “more” in a powerful, rigorous way.

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that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope.” 75
Hope for Adorno lies in the capacity of our thinking to constantly challenge,
refuse, and think beyond rigid concepts, exhaustive definitions, and congealed
frameworks of meaning. At the same time, selves must be aware of the material
conditions and practices that tend to block the movement of thought and screen
the “more” from view. Hope must confront subjugative mechanisms that
increasingly pervade lifeworlds and prevent individuals from imagining
possibilities within and beyond the existing order.

Some commentators have accused Adorno of locating hope or the possibility of

redemption outside the realm of discourse, time, and experience. Albrecht
Wellmer, for instance, argues that redemption for Adorno “is not only not of this
world; it issues from a world that lies beyond space, time, causality, and
individuation.”76 Adorno must draw his hope from somewhere else because he
assumes that our world is so thoroughly damaged. I won’t deny that Adorno is
at times susceptible to this critique. Yet I suggest a more productive reading of
Adorno’s hope in the non-identical.

Adorno offers pithy descriptions of what a reconciled world might look like. He
provides clues to what constitutes his utopian vision. He claims for instance,
“Reconcilement would release the non-identical, would rid it of coercion; it
would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of
its power over them. Reconcilement would be thought of the many as no longer
inimical.”77 Here Adorno contends that a reconciled state would be one in which
difference and multiplicity would flourish freely, even free from dialectical
thought. In other words, the “more” that is internal to the world would flourish
without the imposition of concepts, without the violent imposition of order and
unity. The non-identical would no longer suffer the pervasive thrust toward
identity. Adorno’s utopian state is one in which “people could be different
without fear.”78 This emancipated state “would not be a unitary state, but the
realization of universality in the reconciliation (Versöhnung) of differences.”79
Here one model for Adorno is atonal music, a genre that supposedly allows
harmony to emerge in and through the different musical materials; structure is
not imposed externally. Yet how could we relate to the world, others, difference,
and so forth without the use and imposition of concepts? How can we relate to
the non-identical without forms of identification – forestructures, horizons,
familiar concepts, and language in general? Adorno himself claims we must use
concepts to reach the non-conceptual or non-identical. How do we solve this
apparent contradiction in Adorno’s thought? How can he claim that we must

75 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 406.

76 Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics,
and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 11. I
don’t want to portray Wellmer as one of Adorno’s detractors. He provides a very charitable
reading of Adorno that attempts to build on Adorno’s strengths and think through and
beyond Adorno’s blind spots. I simply want to take one aspect of his powerful
interpretation in another direction.
77 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 6.
78 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 103.
79 Ibid.

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strive by way of concepts/identity to reach the non-identical, to reach a state in
which the non-identical is released and difference flourishes without coercion?

I don’t think the contradiction can be resolved easily. Yet we can attempt to read
this contradiction in a fruitful way. For one, Adorno is not doing away with the
importance of concept creation. We cannot have an immediate relationship with
the world (or in order for that an immediate contact with the world to be
meaningful, we need concepts). Relating to “the more” will always involve the
construction and use of concepts. The “more” prompts us to actively construct
constellations of concepts that are more attuned to non-identity than previous
concepts.80 A constellation is a configuration of concepts; it is the juxtaposition of
concepts that are related through dissonance and tension. The gathering of
different concepts to actively interpret the world (concepts that are fluid,
dynamic, dissonant with one another) resists the tendency to subsume objects
into ready-made, rigid categories. As Shane Phelan emphasizes, constellations
are constructed to articulate the diverse, complex, and messy relationships
among elements in the world.81 Constellations might be ordered but they are not
systems; they do not endeavor to exhaust meaning in the world. Adorno claims
that “constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away
within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of
being.”82

I take it that Adorno is suggesting that our sense of the non-identical “more”
should incite the construction of concepts, which in turn should register and
reflect our awareness of the non-identical. Constellations should express the
difference and dissonance in the world, even as this difference is ordered,
gathered, and assimilated to some extent by the configuration of concepts and
ideas. The creation of constellations elicits hope insofar as these configurations
counter ways of thinking that are linked to domination and an aversion to
difference. Adorno’s faith in constellational thinking suggests that by
juxtaposing different perspectives, narratives, and conceptual frameworks, and
by tending to the tensions and the affinities between these perspectives, a richer
understanding of the world might emerge. Dimensions of the world that were
previously neglected might come into view through the relating of these
different stories, perspectives, and interpretations of the world. At the same
time, constellational thinking compels us to acknowledge the limits of our
concepts, the inability of our conceptual configurations to fully capture the
“more.” The hope is that in the process of making constellations, we become
more open and attuned to ambiguity and dissonance. Even as we
actively

80 See Negative Dialectics, 162-163. Adorno gets the idea of the constellation from

Walter Benjamin. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 34. According to Benjamin, “Ideas are to objects as
constellations are to stars.” Although Adotno rejects the Platonic quality of Benjamin’s
“Ideas”, the former does borrow the idea of configuring concepts (that shift, overlap at
times, clash
at other times) to illumine and interpret the world. For a fascinating account of
Adorno’s constellative thinking, see Shane Phelan, “Interpretation and Domination:
Adorno and the Habermas – Lyotard Debate,” Polity 25, no. 4 (1993): 597-616.
82 Adorno, Negative

Dialectics,162.
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Phelan, 603. Negative 195
81

82Adorno, Negative
Dialectics,162.
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produce, juxtapose, and apply concepts, through the activity, we might become
more receptive and patient toward that which doesn’t completely fit within our
familiar conceptual frameworks. As Phelan writes, “It is in non-identity that
Adorno places his hope for the future.”83

Yet even if the world is always conceptually mediated, Adorno is clearly willing
to offer a picture of a state in which non-identity would be “released” from the
imposition of concepts. For Adorno “utopia would be above identity and
contradiction; it would be a togetherness of diversity.” 84 If a reconciled state is
characterized by a peaceful, non-dominating relationship between self and other,
Adorno affirms the value of imagining and desiring this reconciled state (even as
we acknowledge the impossibility of this state). Consider the concluding
passage to Minima Moralia:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of

despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves from the standpoint of redemption… Perspectives must be
fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its
rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in
the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or
violence, entirely from felt contacts with its objects – this alone is the task
of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls
imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate
negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its
opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it
presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth,
from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible
knowledge must not only be wrested from what is, if it shall hold good,
but is also marked, for this very reason by the same distortion and
indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought
denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more
unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even
its own impossibility it must at least comprehend for the sake of the
possible.85

This is a difficult passage with many possible interpretations. Here I focus on

two important steps in the movement of this passage. First, Adorno is claiming
that a utopian vision enables us to see our world differently. This vision compels
subjects to look more closely at our world’s “distorted” and “indigent” features.
It renders these features more horrifying, less consistent with everyday courses
and dominant ways of seeing, and potentially less tolerable. Of course one might
argue that it is precisely by using utopia as a measure of this world that our
world seems so thoroughly damaged. The world we live in looks so imperfect
because we are using an ideal, perfect world as the benchmark. I suggest,
however, that Adorno urges individuals to take the indigence of the world more
seriously. He wants us to be more uncomfortable with poverty, hunger, war,

83 Phelan, 608.
84 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 150.

85Adorno, Minima Moralia,

247.
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and so forth. The utopian vision brings the intensity of suffering into view; this
vision amplifies the pain and misery that characterizes its opposite - the
contingent, fallible world. This amplification works to challenge the tendency to
deny and ignore the severity of human suffering.

Secondly, Adorno is suggesting that utopia or a redeemed state must be

understood as both a possibility and an impossibility. It is always a possibility or
“the simplest of things” because a utopian vision is always already intertwined
with critique (even if only in a subtle manner); it is always animating the refusal
to accept things as they are. We refuse undesirable arrangements because we can
imagine something more desirable, a place or condition that enables more people
to flourish and live well. Thus Adorno claims in the above passage that
“consummate negativity delineates the mirror image of its opposite.” Our
assessment of the world as damaged clings to the remote possibility of a world
that is not damaged, that is not suffused with suffering, pain, and conflict. At the
same time, Adorno claims that this redeemed world must be thought of as an
impossibility. If we cling too tightly to “a standpoint removed from existence”,
then we succumb to the conditions that this standpoint attempts to escape. We
fail to confront and engage the problems of the concrete, contingent world. With
Foucault, Adorno is also claiming that any vision beyond the present order is
constrained, tainted, and shaped by the problems of the present order. In
addition, the impossibility of a world without suffering is a result of our finitude,
mortality, and fleshly existence. To have a body is to incarnate a life always
already susceptible to suffering and disappointment; to live in the flesh entails an
incessant confrontation with the possibility of death as if anticipating the loss of
self is already inscribed in the self’s lived experiences.

Adorno therefore ends up suggesting that we linger in this fraught space

between possibility and impossibility. As Joshua Cohen points out, Adorno
wants to take seriously both contingency and the (im)possibility of redemption. 86
They must be held together in tension. Even as Adorno acknowledges our
conditioned nature, he leaves open the room for radical transformation.
Openness to the possibility of the impossible should be interpreted as an
openness to that which cannot be anticipated, to that which might transform our
horizons. Yet this transformation will occur immanently, within and through
conditioned categories, concepts, and practices. Or as Adorno puts it, “What
would lie in the beyond (redemption, reconciliation, a world in which people
related to each other without violence) makes its appearance only in the
materials and categories within.”87 Adorno, in other words, retains the idea of
redemption as one star in his conceptual constellation.88 This star illumines the
contours of a transfigured world, a world characterized by “togetherness of
diversity.” At the same time this star is constantly being checked by another star,
the idea of human contingency, which reminds us of conditions that will always
thwart the realization of utopia, the fulfillment of a reconciled world. Perhaps,
as Cohen argues, the promise of a better world lies precisely in the deferral of
reconciliation. Perhaps “the more” that is internal to human interactions enables

86 Cohen, 26.
87 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 140
88 Coles develops this point powerfully in Rethinking Generosity, 109-

119.
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perpetual transformation precisely in its resistance to closure. This possibility of
perpetual transformation, however, depends on how we relate to the various
modes of non-identity in the world. To return to the above image of the child
and the keyboard, this transformation depends in part on how individuals search
for, discover, receive, and relate to chords that have always been on the
keyboard, but have yet to be touched or heard.

Queer Affinities: Adorno and Edelman

It might seem strange to make a transition to Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer

Theory and the Death Drive immediately after highlighting Adorno’s trope of
the child at the keyboard. Edelman’s provocative text argues against the
figure/metaphor of the child and the desire for a reproductive future that the
child signifies. According to Edelman, “For politics, however radical the means
by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social
order, remains at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to
authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the
form of its inner child.”89 While Edelman insists that he is not averse to “real”
children, he does reject the ways in which the image of the child functions in our
culture as a site that reinforces fantasies of fullness, completion, and fulfillment.
In opposition to both liberals and conservatives who claim to be “fighting for
children,” queerness for Edelman names “the side outside the consensus by
which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”90 For
Edleman, queerness marks a space that refuses to accede to the social order, an
order that can only be replicated by collective investments in futurity and hope.

Drawing from Lacan and Freud, Edelman suggests that queerness has a special
relationship to the death drive. While there is a part of human subjects that
desires to preserve life, accumulate objects, and sustain meaning, the death drive
registers “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability…, a will to
undo what is thereby instituted, to begin again ex-nihilo.”91 The death drive,
according to Edleman, unravels coherent frameworks of meaning and congealed
forms of identity. It is a kind of excess or surplus, akin to Adorno’s More, that
the Symbolic produces but that threatens to undermine the realm of language,
meaning, and signification. Queerness therefore encompasses those desires,
attachments, sites, and subject positions that constantly “muck up” the system,
that thwart the fulfillment of any social order. (One should recall Adorno’s
aforementioned claim that any system necessarily leaves a residue.) Although
Edelman’s focus on the “negativity of the drive” is indebted for the most part to
Lacan and Freud, he does explicitly cite Adorno. Edelman writes, “In contrast to
what Adorno describes as the “grimness with which a man clings to himself, as
to the immediately sure and substantial,” the queerness of which I speak would
deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing
ourselves and hence of knowing our good.”92 Similar to Adorno’s negative

89 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2004), 3.

90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 9.
92 Ibid., 5.

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dialectic, which cuts against reassuring identities, ideas, and frameworks of
meaning, Edelman defines queerness as a kind of severing, a figurative cut to
identity that renders self, world, and social goods/ends strange and uncertain.

But Adorno might push back against Edelman’s particular use of the negative.
While the labor of the negative for Adorno certainly names modes of being and
thinking that destabilize coherent frameworks of meaning, Adorno suggests that
utopian desires constitute a form of negativity. Utopian longings can both
expose and reduce the tendency to cling on to the immediate present. In other
words, a hazy vision of a radically different world, a world defined by generous
and vulnerable relationships, a world that allows for a wider proliferation of
difference and pleasure, can be a reminder that the current order of things does
not exhaust all possibilities, that it is contingent and revisable. Things could be
different. As the late Jose Muñoz points out, in response to the arguments made
in No Future, one might think of queerness through a Blochian register of the not-
yet, as a dawning horizon that promises something better and more desirable.93
But of course Edelman might respond by identifying the ineluctable limitations
to endeavors to think and bring about this more desirable world. Even though
Edelman endorses the term “better” instead of the more determinate “good,” he
is reluctant to delineate the features and qualities of this better world. To do this
would be to affirm a structure, to accede to the pressures of social intelligibility
and viability; queerness for Edelman finds its possibilities by aligning itself with
the force of the negative, with the drive that cannot be fully integrated into
systems of meaning. For Edelman, any social order will require and produce
bodies, desires, and positions that do not fit and that pose a threat to the
reproduction of that order. Therefore, hope for a more perfect world/order
“would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such
order would equally occasion the negativity of the queer…[hope as affirmation]
is always an affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable,
irresponsible, and inhumane.”94

I take it that Adorno would think more dialectically about the relationship
between structure and anti-structure, order and negativity, determinacy and
indeterminacy. He underscores more than Edelman the importance and value of
conceptual mediation, construction, and play in the face of non-identity. In
addition, while Edelman underscores the pitfalls of the desire for a more perfect
world or structure, Adorno holds onto the idea of redemption/reconciliation as
one star in a constellation of concepts and images; while this star beckons a
brighter alternative, it is always constrained and in tension with qualities and
conditions that will always render utopian longings broken and incomplete. At
the same time, both authors agree that hope is conservative when it simply
affirms the status quo or when it clings to reliable forms, practices, and
frameworks of meaning. Hope is therefore re-imagined as a set of expectations
and un-doings that are mediated and informed by melancholy, loss, dissonant
desires and memories, irremediable rifts and fissures within the social order, and

93 See Munoz, Cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity (New

York: NYU Press, 2009).

94 Edelman, 4.

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a risky openness toward features of the world that appear strange and out of
place.

Concluding Remarks

Adorno is not the first person to be thought of in conversations about critical

theory and hope (Marcuse and Bloch for sure, maybe Benjamin, but certainly not
the pessimistic Adorno). Adorno’s corpus seems to be replete with despairing
statements about the futility of trying to imagine or construct a less violent and
cruel world. His focus on the so-called “negative” produces a litany of
contradictions and tensions in his writing that can be tortuous and dizzying. Yet
as I have tried to demonstrate, Adorno suggests that a better and more
vulnerable hope lies in our openness to the dissonant and uncomfortable features
of our social worlds. By taking the reader through a tortuous path of tension-
filled and fragmented claims, queries, and gestures, Adorno endeavors to undo
the reader’s attachment to stable identities and coherent frameworks of meaning
(especially when this stability and coherence relies on denial of suffering and
violence). Linking the possibility of a better world to melancholy, contemplation,
and a heightened awareness of the violence of mundane life is important in a
culture that typically musters hope and optimism—especially in response to
tragedies and crises—by clinging to familiar narratives, arrangements and symbols
—Progress, American exceptionalism, American Dream, free market capitalism,
spreading democracy to the rest of the world, and so forth. While clinging to these
kinds of narratives is understandable and somewhat unavoidable, Adorno
suggests that a different kind of hope involves a greater vulnerability to those non-
identicial experiences, objects, bodies, struggles, and sufferings that triumphant
frameworks and tropes attempt to erase, assimilate, or explain away.

In the middle of the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as Adorno is

delineating how Enlightenment thought mimics and repeats certain features of
myth, Adorno writes: “It is not existence that is without hope, but knowledge
which appropriates existence as a schema in the pictorial or mathematical
model.”95 Notwithstanding Adorno’s reductive understanding of math and
science, the “mathematical model” signifies modes of thinking and relating to the
world that are indifferent to and unaffected by concrete particulars, material
suffering, and contradiction. Existence, therefore, is not hopeless; yet a better
existence depends on our capacity to encounter, receptively engage, and
critically reflect on life’s excessive and coherence-undermining qualities and
features.

JOSEPH WINTERS is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte

in the Department of Religious Studies. His research interests lie at the intersection of
Modern Religious Thought, Africana Studies, and Critical Theory. He teaches courses on
race and religion, race and film, religion and critical theory, as well as courses on
literature and literary theory. His current book project, Hope Draped in Black: Race,
Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, examines the relationship between loss and hope
in the black literary tradition (WEB DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison) and the
Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin). Overall, he is interested in
the ways in which our social worlds both produce and deny various forms of trauma

95 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21.

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and loss. He is also interested in locating discourses and practices (religious, aesthetic,
political) that articulate and respond to these all too human conditions.

©Joseph Winters
Winters, Joseph. “Theodor Adorno and the Unhopeless Work of the Negative,” in Journal
for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 14 no. 1 (Fall 2014): 171-200.

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(2014)