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Cultural Critique
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"NOT YET"
ADORNO AND THE UTOPIA OF CONSCIENCE
Max Blechman
Only the critical idea that unleashes the force stored up in its own object is fruitful;
fruitful both for the object, by helping it to come into its own, and against it,
reminding it that it is not yet itself.
?T. W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies
That the subjective conscience will "with good reason" consider objective morality
most hostile to itself?this word of Hegel's looks like a philosophical slip of the pen.
So it seems necessary at this point to let Kant burn through Hegel: the self must
remain in everything; though it may at first exteriorize itself everywhere, move
reverberantly through everything in order to break the world open, in order above
all to pass through a thousand doorways, but precisely the self that desires and
demands, the not yet implanted postulated world of its a priori is the system's
finest fruit and sole purpose, and therefore Kant ultimately stands above Hegel as
surely as psyche above pneuma, Self above Pan, ethics above Encyclopedia, and
the moral nominalism of the End above the still half cosmological realism of Hegel's
world-idea.
?Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia
A
flmong the various intellectual gymnastics and surgical oper
ations proposed in the critical reception of Hegel, from "turning Hegel
off his head" (Marx and EngelsfQl}) to "separating the living from the
dead" (CrocefQl}), the strategy suggested by Bloch in The Spirit of
Utopia, "to let Kant burn through Hegel," might best serve to high
light what is at stake in the project of negative dialectics. Indeed,
Adorno may be interpreted as taking this strategy over for himself
when, in an essay from 1965, he states: "The book, Bloch's first, bear
ing all his later work within it, seemed to me to be one prolonged re
bellion against the renunciation within thought that extends even into
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178 | MAX BLECHMAN
its purely formal character. ... I do not believe I have ever written
anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit."1
A Blochian motif that equally structures Adorno's writings, it
acts as an ongoing reprise or, better still, as the "temporal organizing
principle"2 of his philosophical criticism. But the whole movement?
beyond the spirit of "prolonged rebellion," beyond the imperative re
sistance to a false reconciliation in relation to which the Hegelian sys
tem is ultimately judged guilty?itself represents a retrieval of the
fundamental in Hegel's philosophy. Dialectics is true to itself only
insofar as it does justice to the "not yet" of human reconciliation, inas
much as it keeps in view, as Hegel himself had insisted, the "tarrying
with the negative" that alone brings spirit towards "an achieved com
munity of minds."3
This core Hegelian insight, hermetically outlined in the preface
of Phenomenology, is taken up by Adorno as the "system's finest fruit
and sole purpose," to borrow Bloch's phrase. Yet this Hegelian pur
pose, even as it transforms the transcendental basis of the practical in
Kant, expresses in Bloch and Adorno a Kantian qualification of Hegel.
Letting Kant burn through Hegel while acknowledging that "Kant can
not be done without Hegel,"4 maintaining that "the debate between
Kant and Hegel, in which Hegel's devastating argument had the last
word, is not over"5?these formulations rest on a complex exchange:
1) Against the limits set by Kant, the abstractions of formalism, and with
the experiential, the at once historical and substantial core of Hegelian
dialectics that marks the starting-point of speculation. "It is absurd to
prevent the subject's internal cognition of the very thing it dwells in, of
the thing in which it has far too much of its own interior."6
2) Against the Hegelian closure, the mapping of the system onto
objective reality, and with the transcendental Maximum, the normative
ideal of Kantian practice that unveils the disparity between the rational
and the real. "The ray of light that reveals the whole to be untrue in all
its moments is none other than Utopia, the utopia of the whole truth,
which is still to be realized."7
The reciprocal movement carried in the motif, from Kant to Hegel and
from Hegel to Kant, moving "forward and backward at the same time"8
like the thematic articulations of Beethoven's music, reconfigures the
necessary standpoint of speculation against the teleological assurance
of rational totality. In both Bloch and Adorno, the dialectical Kant/
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"NOT YET" | 179
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180 | MAX BLECHMAN
finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death for the
sake of a reconciliation occurring merely in reflection."17
It is a winding pathway that Adorno opens through Kant and Hegel.
For he seeks to maintain with Hegel, and against the self-sufficient
autonomy of Kantian practical reason, a dialectically grounded cri
tique of the particular. "The false consciousness of isolated things as
being themselves alone and not moments of the whole" will inevitably
"break down with the power of the whole."18 Yet with Kantian auton
omy, and against the Hegelian rationalization of objectification, Adorno
wishes simultaneously to maintain a space for an objectivity whose
reality would have to "measure up to the subject's criticism," that is,
a space for "the continuing irreconcilability of subject and object, which
constitutes the theme of dialectical criticism."19
Put differently, the standpoint of totality must be adopted in order
to counteract the delusion of the particular; but without a ground for
the rational independence of the particular, it becomes increasingly
difficult to point to how, in principle, a rational self-consciousness of
the social is to be differentiated from conformity to the delusions of
an irrational totality. Adorno suggests that the standpoint of genuine
totality can be achieved only negatively, as "antagonistic totality,"20
by attending dialectically to the real tensions of the social. But again,
the question remains as to how these tensions may be evaluated crit
ically if the independent, moral voice of criticism is held to be subjec
tive vanity. Indeed, if it is granted that "morality, autonomy founded
on pure self-certainty, together with conscience, is mere illusion,"21
then we risk having the pretense to an independence of the particular
dispelled only by a whole itself caught in the spell of existing social
ity?that of the "insuperable inertia of facts."22
By specifying the problem in this way, we come up against the
contentious knot of the Kant-through-Hegel motif, that is, conscience,
the moral self-certainty charged by Hegel with ambiguity and self
deception. The Phenomenology's suggestion that there is no indepen
dent moral reality is not only a keystone for the self-understanding of
concrete ethical life. It is above all "the recognition that the moral can
by no means be taken for granted, that conscience does not guaran
tee right action, and that pure immersion of the self in the question of
what to do and what not to do entangle one in contradiction and futil
ity."23 In Adorno's view, the Phenomenology pulls the carpet from under
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"NOT YET" | 181
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182 | MAX BLECHMAN
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"NOT YET" | 183
1) Human reason is retrieved in its speculative aspect, that is, in its tie
to the Utopian idea of a fulfilled human sociality. "Reason as the tran
scendental, supraindividual self contains the idea of a free coexistence
in which human beings organize themselves to form the universal sub
ject and resolve the conflict between pure and empirical reason in the
conscious solidarity of the whole. The whole represents the idea of true
universality, Utopia."38
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184 | MAX BLECHMAN
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"NOT YET" | 185
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186 | MAX BLECHMAN
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"NOT YET" | 187
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188 | MAX BLECHMAN
He lacks sympathy with the Utopian particular that has been buried
underneath the universal?with that nonidentity which would not come
into being until realized reason has left the particular reason of the uni
versal behind. The sense of the wrong implied by the concept of the uni
versal, a sense which Hegel chides, would deserve his respect because
of the universality of wrong itself.56
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"NOT YET" | 189
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190 | MAX BLECHMAN
The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all
the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering: "while
there is a beggar, there is a myth," as Benjamin put it. This is why the
philosophy of identity is the mythological form of thought. The physical
moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things
should be different. "Woe speaks: 'Go.'" Hence the convergence of spe
cific materialism with criticism, with social change in practice.60
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"NOT YET" | 191
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192 | MAX BLECHMAN
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"NOT YET" | 193
would uphold them. Indeed, if, for Adorno, "the concept of metaphys
ics has been transformed to its innermost core,"78 is it not because today
"the possibility of metaphysical experience is akin to the possibility
of freedom . . . one that has torn the bonds advertised as salutary"?79
As seen, Adorno does not hesitate to speak of natural law when
he thinks the perseverance of a morality that undermines its own pet
rifaction. m In a sense, the restructuring of materialism so as to include
metaphysica naturalis already opens this door. Once spiritual need is
recognized as material need?once moral aversion to injustice is seen
as an extension of the natural aversion to physical pain?the whole
"ought" of collective self-transformation is placed on the axis of a
self-constituting dignity in human nature, as if without this grounding,
there could be no morality to be had or to be measured. Awareness of
the factum of conscience?"the awareness that the sphere of right action
does not coincide with mere rationality, that it has an 'addendum'"?
thus underscores a practical reason that contains within itself the in
telligence of an unyielding, rebellious nature.81
Clearly, Bloch encouraged Adorno to think the "specific materi
alism" of his morality under the sign of natural law and to revalue
"utopian-conscience-and-knowledge" as a mainspring of modern
resistance.82 Far from indexing extant institutions and ideology, Bloch
staged natural law?in a reinterpretation of the Cynics, the Stoics, and
of Rousseauism?as dissidence in the face of "the idolization of exter
nal correlates."83 For Bloch, the givenness of natural law is essentially
dialectical. As it were, the negativity of natural law permanently tran
scends the positivity of its social codification, sparking an inexhaust
ible responsibility, that of "passing beyond givenness, in the belief that
present existents must be pushed aside in order to liberate and open
the way to a better status."84 Thus, the pain conscience suffers in fact
expresses the material origin of immanent critique: it is at the heart of
the utopian ideals that have informed modern revolutions and institu
tions, and it signals the ongoing capacity to resist historical departures
from what was intended by them.85 In a word, "utopian-conscience
and-knowledge" burns through its own objectifications in view of
rescuing their truth-content.
It is this nonidentity that compels Adorno to tarry with the par
ticular that resists the social norms that have grown extraneous to
it. At stake is pointing?beyond the purported preservation and
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194 | MAX BLECHMAN
Notes
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"NOT YET" | 195
a Marxist Schelling (J. Habermas and Ernst Bloch, "Ein Marxistischer Schelling?"
Philosophisch-Politische Profile, I [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973]). In other words, the
"return to Kant" that is here operative is of an order other than the political, moral,
and epistemological agnosticism characteristic of liberal neo-Kantianism. At issue,
as Bloch writes in his 1963 postface to The Spirit of Utopia (279), is a "new, utopian
kind of philosophy"?a reawakening of "revolutionary gnosis." "Letting Kant
burn through Hegel" therefore signals a two-way movement: breaking the limits
set by Kant on theoretical reason in favor of Hegel's historical, speculative reason,
but rendering speculative knowledge in terms of the living and demanding
knowledge of conscience and practical reason.
12. Adorno, Hegel, 86.
13. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 307.
14. Ibid., 307-8.
15. Hegel, Phenomenology, 33.
16. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 74.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 246.
19. Ibid. The parallel with Bloch is striking. As Pierre Bouretz puts it, "To
answer the question of human meaning by the reality of the world; to displace
conscience's thirst for the infinite by the rationality of things; finally, to assuage
the dissatisfaction of the moral subject in the experience of evil by means of a con
ciliatory contemplation of history: these are the elements of the Hegelian attitude
that motivate Bloch to turn back on his tracks and to find in Kant more authentic
figures of the human spirit." See his Temoins du Futur: Philosophic et Messianisme
(Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 5S5.
20. Adorno, Hegel, 78.
21. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 245.
22. Ibid., 247. The critique of the untruth of the whole demands the critical
independence of the particular, but if the particular is necessarily mediated by the
whole of which it is a part, it becomes difficult to see how its critique of the whole's
partiality would not be likewise infected. The problem is internal to immanent
critique, as Adorno admits in his essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Theo
dor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1981).
23. Adorno, Hegel, 48.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 88.
26. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247.
27. Ibid.
28. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 17.
29. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 74. For Adorno, the "beautiful soul" standpoint
is at once necessary to moral thought (Kant's metaphysical dualism) and morally
impossible (Hegel's empirical monism), and self-consciousness of this contradic
tion is precisely what defines the modern moralist's melancholia as both judge
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196 | MAX BLECHMAN
and member of society. The science of the good life is a melancholy science, then,
because "wrong life cannot be lived rightly" (Minima Moralia, s. 18)?or in Bloch's
terms, because "only after what is false has fallen away can what is genuine live"
(Spirit of Utopia, 238). Indeed, the extant social ontology that conditions moral
thought as melancholic contradiction points directly to why moral philosophy is
possible only from the standpoint of redemption. Which leaves untouched the
question: how is such philosophy possible?that is, what are the conditions of pos
sibility for this standpoint?
30. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 74.
31. Ibid.
32. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 185.
33. Adorno, Hegel, 44.
34. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (Buffalo: Pro
metheus Books, 1990), 198.
35. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 57.
36. Adorno insists that the Kantian block on the intelligible refers to histor
ical as opposed to ontological conditions. The severance of experience into nou
menal and phenomenal realms reflects the emerging exchange-relations that make
human species-being increasingly undefined, abstract, and ethereal, while forcing
the living reality of nature to recede into mere appearance. Thinking Kant in
materialist terms thus means showing how the supposed chasm between reason
and nature is coextensive with the historical alienation of human beings from
each other and from the world. But this also means showing how the Kantian
chasm was meant to preserve in pure possibility?in the realm of genuine self
determination and freedom?the promise of an authentic human universality. In
this sense, the transcendent object of the block?the practical content of the tran
scendental subject?points to "the overall social rationality in which the utopia of
a rationally organized society is already implicit." See Theodor W. Adorno, Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 172-73.
37. Ibid.
38. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 65.
39. Ibid., xi (translation modified).
40. I am borrowing the term "speculative materialism" from Hans-Heinz
Holz (Logos Spermatikos [Darmstadt-Neuwied: Luctherhand, 1975], cited in Arno
Miinster, Ernst Bloch: Messianisme et Utopie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1989], 244). I believe it also usefully captures Adorno's attempt to transform his
torical materialism into critical theory: that is, to take the Utopian truth-content
of speculative idealism as immanent to materialist method. As such, speculative
materialism implies a radical reinterpretation of subjective cognition in light of
the mind's physicality, or what Adorno calls its "immanent somatic side" (see the
chapters Passage to Materialism, Materialism and Immediacy, and Suffering Phys
ical in Negative Dialectics). In this respect, what Arno Miinster says of Bloch equally
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"NOT YET" | 197
applies to Adorno: "By contrast to Lenin who states that matter and objective real
ity exist independently of human consciousness, Bloch suggests that being and
consciousness are but two aspects (products) of matter." Or more poetically: "Man
is created from matter, he is its child: in him matter opens its eyes and is reflected"
(Ernst Bloch, Messianisme et Utopie, 249). We may note that this led both Bloch and
Adorno to Schelling's conception of the urge: "And thus, from the bottom stage
on, we see nature follow its inmost, most hidden desire to keep rising and advanc
ing in its urge, until at last it has attracted the highest essentiality, the pure spiri
tuality itself, and has made it its own" (F. W. Schelling, Die Waltalter, ed. M. Schroter
(Munich: Biederstein, 1946), 136, cited in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202).
41. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 150 (emphasis mine).
42. Ibid., 150-51.
43. Ibid., 151.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Adorno, Hegel, 20.
50. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowsky and
F. Will (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 115.
51. Ibid., 65.
52. Ibid., 65-66.
53. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, cited in Adorno,
Hegel, 101.
54. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 153.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 318. The conflict thus involves a fundamental opposition of world
views: for Adorno, to "let Kant burn through Hegel" is to claim against Hegel that
"evil rules in this world, that this world is the realm of evil." (See T. W. Adorno,
Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. R. Livingstone [Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001], 149.) In other words, Kantian Moralitat is ultimately more truthful
than Hegelian Sittlichkeit precisely because the modern world is such that norma
tive primacy must be given to individual resistance before given circumstances
and existing social institutions.
57. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 186.
58. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 318.
59. Ibid., 203.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 243.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 242.
64. Ibid., 243.
65. Ibid., 282.
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198 | MAX BLECHMAN
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