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    But the essay ["as form"] is also more closed [than "systematic" thought], because it works emphatically at the form of its presentation. Consciousness of the non-identity of presentation and subject matter forces presentation to unremitting efforts. In this alone the essay resembles art.

    --Adorno, "The Essay as Form" 18

    Criticism has power only to the extent which every successful or unsuccessful sentence has something to do with the fate of humankind.

    --Adorno, "On the Crisis of Literary Criticism" 307

    The dialectic's protest against language cannot be voiced except in language.

    --Adorno, Hegel 121

  1. This essay is part of a larger study about how Adorno writes, and how self-consciously he writes: about how his thinking and his writing are functions of each other, implicated in each other, how indeed they produce each other. My premise is that in Adorno's usage such terms as "constellation," "dialectic," "concept," "negation," and "immanent critique"[1] exert their force as much on questions of (to adapt Gertrude Stein) "how the writing of critique should be written"--how Adorno's own writing is written--as on questions of critical or cognitive motives or purposes. Their point-d'appui is how to write as much as, maybe more than--or perhaps simply as--how to think. It is usual in this connection to cite Adorno's mid-1950s essay, "The Essay as Form," because it is so patently a manifesto for Adorno's own work as a writer-critic. Shierry Weber Nicholsen's Exact Imagination, for the most prominent example, makes "The Essay as Form" the centerpiece of her chapter on "Configurational (sc. "Constellational") Form" (103-36; see especially 105-13, 123-30). I want here, however, to treat an essay much more charged and thus more suggestive for Adorno's writing practice and for his view of language, the important late text dating from 1963, "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel"--an essay not only about reading Hegel, but about the problems of philosophical writing and expression in practice, and specifically about Adorno's own critical practice.[2]

  2. The idea that Hegel's writing--his "textuality"--can facilitate a discussion of his work was just emerging in the period (1962-63) when Adorno was writing "Skoteinos." It doesn't feature, for example, in early Heidegger, Gadamer, or Kojève, nor in Hyppolite's magnum opus of 1946, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The later Heidegger's "linguistic turn," however, put the problem of "literature and philosophy" on the agenda, and by 1966 Hyppolite appropriated the theme in "The Structure of Philosophic Language According to the 'Preface' to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind," his contribution to the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that brought "French theory" (then called "structuralism") to America. Younger participants included Lacan and Derrida (and de Man, in attendance, though not on the program), for whom Hegel on the one hand and problems of "representation" on the other were equally central preoccupations (see especially Derrida's Glas and his essays on Hegel in Margins of Philosophy). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy develop relevant questions in a series of texts, most interesting for our purposes The Literary Absolute (originally published in 1978), whose titular provocation was generated by a discussion of the Jena circle's negotiation of the tensions between what the authors inventively term "eidetics" (philosophy) and "aesthetics" (literature) in an "eidaesthetics" that in effect, and usually against the intentions of these figures, foregrounds the writing, the written-ness, of the philosophical text, and perforce also its writer, as intrinsic to its condition or horizon of thought; thus the dynamic that makes "the Subject" absolute could not but entail "the literary absolute" as well. While Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy mention Hegel only glancingly in The Literary Absolute, others, preeminently Andrzej Warminski, read passages in Hegel closely as "allegories of reading" and writing.[3] (None of these treatments, by the way, adduces "Skoteinos.")

  3. As we know, this style of commentary proscribes virtually any resort to "the Subject" as a critical category: "the Subject" is summoned almost exclusively as an object of ideological unmasking, which its historical implication in ideologies of "the absolute" quite justifies. Programmatic taboos can, however, be constraining. It's one thing to deconstruct Hegel's prose; it's something else to foreclose inquiry into Hegel's avowed motivations and investments in (his own) writing. (For me, Werner Hamacher's commentary on Hegel negotiates the conflicting demands most satisfyingly.) But just such an inquiry into Hegel is what "Skoteinos" undertakes. I follow Nicholsen in thinking that Adorno, too, warrants such an inquiry. The project is all the edgier in the case of "Skoteinos," because Adorno does not aim to assess Hegel dispassionately; on the contrary, "Skoteinos" engages with problems of philosophical writing that are clearly close to the quick for Adorno and for his own writing. To the extent that Hegel looks to be something like Adorno's "Covering Cherub"--no other figure except Freud could possibly summon Harold Bloom in connection with Adorno--"Skoteinos" raises, indeed, agonizes over, problems that are much more, and more tellingly, Adorno-specific as well. In particular, as we'll see, Adorno's objections to Hegel's lapses as writer tell us much about Adorno's self-consciousness ("anxiety" of, one might say, many more things than "influence") about his own effort to get right what his great precursor got wrong. In the process we'll see Adorno elaborating what amounts to a poetics of critique, a poetics, moreover, overtly modernist in its relation to problems of language, expression, and representation.

  4. Let me sketch some premises for what follows concerning Adorno's view of language. Adorno rejects the adequatio theory current since Plato, that language "represents," or should represent, more or less accurately or "adequately," a world whose precedence is the standard against which any representation must be measured. Adorno nowhere works out programmatically his case against that view and the metaphysics sustaining and sustained by it, but the pervasiveness of this idea throughout his corpus has prompted many to see in Adorno a "family resemblance" to or an anticipation of Derrida. Adorno's theory and practice of language, of philosophical writing-and/as-thinking, emphatically dissent from any value-scheme rooted in the obedience of language to "what is," to a pre-existing, pre-given "reality." And the same refusal of adequatio as measure of the relation of word and thing attaches to "the concept," which is to say, to thinking itself. Neither, though, is critical "negation" simply an affair of fidelity (sc. adequatio) to "what should be"--the usual comeback, since at least the Renaissance, to Plato's dismissal of art: that what art copies is a "golden [or "second"] nature," closer than actual nature itself to the Platonic ideal. Adorno's presuppositions are Hegelian, and modernist, as if having "overcome metaphysics" in advance--though of course Adorno makes this move not (as Hegel and Nietzsche do) with the air of liberating philosophy from a false problem, but rather of obliging it to confront a dilemma that is far heavier.

  5. As I read him, Adorno's view of language is close to Nietzsche's in "Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense": language as not a re-presentation of some precedent standard-setting reality, but rather a tool, or even a weapon, a survival adaptation, like the claws and fangs of the tiger. (Adorno would of course find Nietzsche's imagery disagreeably fierce; likewise he might think the figuration of "weapon" and "tool" too suggestive of instrumentality.) Like Hegel, like Lacan, Adorno finds in the slippage or "nonidentity" between reality and language--what "The Essay as Form" calls "the non-identity of presentation and subject matter" in the first epigraph above--the space where desire and will, and critique, and art, make their case and their campaign against "what is." Such motifs in Adorno as "dialectic," "concept," and "negation" are functions of that performative agon language incites between conflicting human interests and indeed between human interests and material circumstance itself. When Adorno writes that "dialectics means intransigence towards all reification" (Prisms 31), it is clear that "dialectics" operates in language and in thought--or I'd better say, in language-and-thought, because I can't see any sense in which Adorno separates the two: indeed, their correlation is not only everywhere assumed in the Adorno force-field, but virtually named in the Hegelian category of "the concept." When Adorno alludes to "the kinetic force of [the] concept" (Philosophy of Modern Music 26), he is evoking the power of "the concept" to unfreeze, unfix, set back into kinesis, the congealed and hardened petrifications of ideology--to enact, in other words, what Hegel memorably calls "the power of the negative." "Negation" is the alternative to, indeed the critique of, adequatio: not the mind's deplorable failure to see things as they really are, but on the contrary, the mind's "dialectical" dissonance ("non-identity") with what is, in which is coiled the critical potential of affect and critique. To this extent, "the power of the negative" is convertible with the power of "dialectic" itself--and this is a kind of power activated in semiosis: in language and in thinking: in making meaning, not in more or less accurately (or "adequately") discovering (and then "representing") it. Like Hegel, Adorno puts "negation" in the place where "representation" used to be--and if that way of putting it risks exaggeration, I'll hope to find my license in Adorno's maxim that in matters like these "only exaggeration is true."

  6. This sketch, albeit brief, suggests the extent of Adorno's immersion and investment in Hegelian themes and vocabularies--a way of introducing some of the interest of attending to his advice in "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel."

    7. "SKOTEINOS"

  7. The Greek word "skoteinos"--it means "the obscure one"--was an ancient epithet for Heraclitus; as title for Adorno's essay it makes a complex gesture: it reprises Adorno's chronic (and Hegelian) animus against (Cartesian) "clarity" and "certitudo" ("the cold and brutal commandment of clarity . . . amounts to the injunction that one speak as others do and refrain from anything that would be different and could only be said differently" [Hegel 106]) on behalf of the more difficult duty incumbent on philosophy, namely adhering to "the matter in hand" at whatever cost in "obscurity" (99-107; cf. "Essay" 14-15). Hegel is often taken as standing to Kant somewhat as Aristotle stands to Plato, and this philosophical chestnut is discernible in Adorno's 1965 lecture series (nearly contemporaneous with "Skoteinos"), Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, in which Aristotle and Hegel are the organizing binary; but "Skoteinos" goes further in implicitly nominating (and valorizing) Hegel as something like an avatar of the Heraclitean alternative to the Plato-and-Aristotle legacy (a.k.a. "Western metaphysics," "logocentrism," etc.) so implicated in modernity's "dialectic of enlightenment." For Hegel's (and Adorno's) program of undoing the fixities of received thought Heraclitus is, of course, an apt totem. But the subtitle of Adorno's essay--"How to Read Hegel"--is where, for our purposes, the action is: it indicates the essay's preoccupation with Hegel as exemplar of the problems and possibilities of the-philosopher-as-writer. Indeed, "Skoteinos," we'll see, mounts a powerful critique of Hegel precisely on the charge that his failures as writer compromise his "claim to truth" as philosopher (Hegel 146). Implicit throughout is the manifold ways in which Hegel serves as an inspiration, but also a cautionary example, for Adorno's own ambitions as philosopher and as writer.[4]

  8. "Skoteinos" begins with an uncompromising assertion (not, for once, an "exaggeration"!) of Hegel's difficulty or obscurity:

    The ways in which Hegel's great systematic works . . . resist understanding are qualitatively different from those of other infamous texts. With Hegel the task is not simply to ascertain, through intellectual effort and careful examination of the wording, a meaning of whose existence one has no doubt. Rather at many points the meaning itself is uncertain, and no hermeneutic art has yet established it indisputably . . . . For all their pettiness and ressentiment, Schopenhauer's tirades about Hegel's alleged bombast evidenced a relationship to the matter itself, at least negatively, like the child and the emperor's new clothes, in a situation where respect for culture and fear of embarrassment merely dodge the issue. In the realm of great philosophy Hegel is no doubt the only one with whom at times one literally does not and cannot conclusively determine what is being talked about, and with whom there is no guarantee that such a judgment is even possible. (Hegel 89)

    On the following page Adorno declares a quoted sentence from Hegel "a match"--i.e., comparably difficult--"for Hölderlin's most advanced prose of the same years" (90; cf. "Parataxis" 134).[5] Adorno urges that Hegel's thematic of the disintricability of part and whole is enacted in Hegel's writing, with the consequence that Hegel's word-by-word meaning must be inferred with the aid of the reader's (developing) sense of Hegel's overall "conceptual structure," not, as per usual, the other way around. In a quotation from Hegel's Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, Adorno advises:

    The passage becomes susceptible of interpretation in the light of knowledge of the general train of Hegel's thought, especially the conceptual structure of the chapter, but it cannot be interpreted from the wording of the paragraph alone. (Hegel 91)

    Despite Adorno's (presumably pointed) non-mention of the "hermeneutic circle" here, his account of interpretation as a process of continual back-and-forth of interadjustment between the larger "conceptual structure" and the more immediate processing of "the wording" evokes the textual habitus of modernist literature, in which "structure," "form," and "configuration" (sc. "constellation") are not mere epiphenomena of the meaning of the text, but its very constituents:

    To the person who holds doggedly to the wording and then in disappointment refuses to get involved with Hegel because of his unfathomable quality, one can offer little but generalities . . . . There is a sort of suspended quality associated with his philosophy, in accordance with the idea that truth cannot be grasped in any individual thesis or any delimited positive statement. Form in Hegel follows this intention. Nothing can be understood in isolation, everything is to be understood only in the context of the whole, with the awkward qualification that the whole lives only in the individual moments . . . however, this kind of doubleness of the dialectic eludes literary presentation . . . it cannot in principle achieve the unity of the whole and its parts at one blow . . . . Every single sentence in Hegel's philosophy proves itself unsuitable for that philosophy, and the form expresses this in its inability to grasp any content with complete adequacy. If this were not the case, the form would be free of the poverty and the fallibility of concepts that Hegel tells us about. (Hegel 91-92)

    For Adorno, at issue here are not deficits in Hegel's skill as a writer; rather, Hegel's foregrounding of the failures elicited here amounts to a unique success--the evocation of an experience that is the very "truth" of our condition, and indissociable from predicaments that Hegel registers as endemic to language itself:

    if Hegel's verdict that no individual sentence can be philosophically true holds outside his own work, then each sentence should also be confronted with its linguistic inadequacy . . . the unclarity for which [Hegel] never ceases to be reproached is not simply a weakness; it is also the force that drives him to correct the untruth of the particular, an untruth that acknowledges itself in the unclarity of the individual sentence.

    Best able to meet the demands of this predicament would be a philosophical language that would strive for intelligibility without confusing it with clarity. (Hegel 105)

    Although in one place Nicholsen treats "intelligibility" and "clarity" as synonymous (Hegel xxv), she elsewhere (see Exact Imagination 91-92) distinguishes them along the lines amenable to our discussion above of interpretation as a vigilant back-and-forth between a developing sense of the larger "conceptual structure" and the more immediate experience of "the wording": "intelligibility" ("Verständlichkeit" [Drei Studien 339]) results from this (crypto-"hermeneutic circle") attention to structure or form as well as word-by-word meaning; whereas the "clarity" that would be a trap ("Klarheit" [Drei Studien 339]) would spring from a fixation on "the wording alone." Adorno has a suggestive metaphor for this process: you must learn "How to Read Hegel" the way an émigré learns an adopted language: not with your nose in the dictionary, but by full immersion in the verbal and textual environment with the "linguistic sensorium" open (Hegel 107; the émigré image recurs in "The Essay as Form" [13]).

  9. Adorno speaks of the "doubleness of the dialectic elud[ing] literary presentation" as a predicament incumbent on philosophy (including critique, theory, and other such truth-discourses) generically and as such. But later in the essay, Adorno talks as if some measure of this deficit in Hegel is Hegel-specific, a symptom of Hegel's carelessness as a writer, his "stylistic indifference" to "linguistic praxis," even the "skeptical relation to language" that Hegel "raised . . . to a stylistic principle" (Hegel 118)--as if Hegel has forgotten his own dialectical premises:

    Constellation is not system. Everything does not become resolved, everything does not come out even; rather, one moment sheds light on the other, and the figures that the individual moments form together are specific signs and a legible script. This is not yet articulated in Hegel, whose mode of presentation is characterized by a sovereignly indifferent attitude toward language; at any rate it has not penetrated into the chemism of his own linguistic form. In its all-too-simpleminded confidence in the totality, the latter lacks the sharpness derived from the critical self-awareness that, in combination with reflection on the necessary disproportion, could bring the dialectic into language . . . . Vagueness, something that cannot be eliminated in dialectic, becomes a defect in Hegel because he did not include an antidote to it in his language . . . . The loyal interpreter of Hegel has to take account of this deficiency. It is up to him to do what Hegel failed to do: to produce as much conciseness of formulation as possible in order to reveal the rigor of the dialectical movement, a rigor that is not content with such conciseness. (Hegel 109-10)

    Hegel failed "to bring the dialectic into language"--yet elsewhere Adorno usually speaks as if dialectic and language were indissociable--as if error could lie only with those (positivists and empiricists) who deludedly suppose that dialectic could ever be purged from language. Left vague here is the question whether the "antidote" Hegel should have found for the "vagueness" Adorno deplores should have been a greater "intelligibility," amounting to a more self-conscious and concrete apprehension of the inevitable predicament of vagueness itself (which may well have augmented the vagueness rather than reducing it). However that may be, "the loyal interpreter of Hegel" (here, Adorno himself) offers "to do what Hegel failed to do": to elicit the "critical self-awareness" in which Hegel fell short, and thus to "bring the dialectic into language."

  10. Adorno seems to me to overstate his case here; I have always taken Hegel's frequent (if ad hoc) comments on language (the metaphysics of grammar, syntax, and the copula, the form of the judgment, the proposition, the syllogism, etc., as shapes and shapers of consciousness) as self-consciously and self-referentially operative in Hegel's own writing, in theory if not always so self-consciously in (writing) practice. Hegel's global premise that the result of thought is indissociable from the thinking process that produced it, linked so firmly in the Phenomenology's "Preface" to the necessary difficulty of reading and writing philosophy, participates in the period shift in the conception of literature from, in De Quincey's terms, "literature of knowledge" to "literature of power," or more broadly the shift from a conception of literature as repository of valuable truths extracted from experience, to a conception of reading and writing as themselves a kind of experience. "Experience" (philosophical) is another theme salient in Hegel's "Preface,"[6] everywhere assuming that the philosophical adventure of Spirit is a narrative, a historical narrative, and not merely narrated but enacted or performed in the labor of the philosopher's (Hegel's) writing of the text and of the reader's reading of it. "The power of Spirit," writes Hegel near the opening of the Phenomenology, "is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition" (6). What Hegel regularly advocates as the "dialectical movement" of consciousness--the condition of "the power of the negative," when indeed it is not imagined as the very thing itself--is enacted in the forms and formats of language, including written language, to the effect that subject and object interact in a participatory methexis that anticipates the poetics of Romantic and modernist literature (from the mirror to the lamp), and the linguistic vision developed from von Humboldt (recall Hegel's ambition to "teach philosophy to speak German" [Letters 107]) to Sapir and Whorf, all the way indeed to the contemporary meme of "performativity," so thoroughly does Hegel sublate language's supposed "representational" or "constative" responsibilities into its "negative" or "performative" powers (Hegel 109; "Parataxis" 134). Such are the stakes when Derrida calls Hegel "the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing" (26). Hegel's polemic about philosophy is always also a polemic on behalf of a certain program for philosophical writing--a way of putting it that recalls Richard Rorty's phrase about "philosophy as a kind of writing," except that Rorty's phrase, not least in his own usage, can too readily seem reductive (as if it means "philosophy as nothing but a kind of writing") in ways that diminish both philosophy and writing. Hegel (and Adorno, and many others who would presumably refuse Rorty's characterization of "private ironists") aspires to enlarge both terms.

  11. I'll risk a digression here to illustrate how Hegel's sense of language overlaps with Adorno's, and also how they differ, in ways that might clarify Adorno's complaint that Hegel is "sovereignly indifferent" to language.[7] Our proof-text (so to speak) is the astonishing sequence of paragraphs in the "Preface" to the Phenomenology in which Hegel dramatizes the fermentation or sublation by which the merely "ratiocinative" import of the philosophical proposition becomes "speculative." Crucial to Hegel's account of the process and the effects of this "becoming-speculative" is the figuration, frequent throughout the Phenomenology and especially in the "Preface," of movement versus fixity: whereas the "proposition" in "ratiocinative thinking" aims to fix or stabilize or define a meaning, the labor and the reward of "speculative thinking" (Hegel urges) is to set the properties thus fixed back into motion, into a jostling "unrest" that answers to the very movement of the reading-and-thinking consciousness itself, as it scans a sentence, sequentially, word by word, subject, verb, predicate, the will to understanding reaching always forward for the next semantic/syntactic member, even as it processes each new input retrospectively, against what sense has been collected so far, so that the "movement which is thinking apprehension . . . runs back and forth" until at last--and this is the very point of "speculative thinking" for Hegel--"the movement itself becomes the object" and "goes beyond" the grammatical parts of speech thus mobilized, even as this movement is at times (inevitably? at any rate, properly, and even providentially) "checked in its progress" and "suffers, as we might put it, a counterthrust" (Phenomenology 36-37). In this vertiginous hurly-burly, much more dizzying in Hegel's full text than in my excerpts, the sentence or "proposition" appears as a sort of conduit through which the "meaning" sloshes back and forth as in the ebb-and-flow of liquid pulsing in adjoining lengths of pipe--to the effect that "the general nature of the judgment or the proposition"--i.e., the traditional device by which philosophy tried, syllogistically, to stabilize chains of deduction from premise to QED--"is destroyed by the speculative proposition" (Phenomenology 38). "Power of the negative" indeed! Terms that the ratiocinative proposition identifies, and virtually equates, the "speculative proposition" maintains in their difference, thus arraying the identity and the non-identity before the mind simultaneously.

  12. The trouble, says Hegel, is that the very format of the proposition itself, its shape and its conventional acceptation (Adorno would say, the ideology of its "form"), conditions us to read ratiocinatively rather than speculatively:

    The philosophical proposition, since it is a proposition, leads one to believe that the usual subject-predicate relation obtains, as well as the usual attitude toward knowing. But the philosophical [sc. "speculative"] content destroys this attitude and this opinion. (Phenomenology 39)

    The part of this that is a complaint remains a complaint today, two centuries later: from the poets, artists, and composers of modernism to the theorists of postmodernism, "the prison-house of language" has prompted calls to un-make, to "destroy" if necessary (or possible), the usual ways of making sense--a program ubiquitous in Adorno's own investments: in the modernist art he valorizes, in the philosophical and political commitments his work undertakes, in the burdens and the self-consciousness he assumes for his own writing practice. But Hegel's response to the predicament--his faith in the "speculative" power of the "counterthrust"--is sanguine to the point most moderns scorn as complacency: "We learn by experience," writes Hegel, "that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way" (Phenomenology 39). The dramatic reflexivity here--as if the "proposition" just now being "speculatively" read stands revealed, at a stroke, as a proposition the reader himself (Hegel) had earlier written--sets the writer in a relation to his "own" words not to be so frontally problematized again for 175 years (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida).[8]

  13. But the prophetic radicalism of Hegel's gesture is softened by his complacency about the incommensurability of language (mediated and mediating, irredeemably "universal") and perception (immediate, sensual). At the opening of the "Sense-Certainty" chapter, Hegel casts the inevitable "universality" of language as a sort of saving grace against the solicitations of "sense-certainty":

    It is as a universal that we utter what the sensuous is . . . . Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say. But language . . . is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say. (Phenomenology 60)

    Hegel is surely one of the first, and still one of the most thorough, to theorize the problematic of language, the "crisis of representation" that Adorno and other moderns find so anguishing.[9] It is a theme familiar to students of modern culture: we might mention, to start with figures Adorno himself critiques, Husserl's epoché of (in effect) "mediation" itself in the name of a "return to the things themselves"; and Heidegger's "jargon of authenticity," a mystification (in Adorno's view) that fantasizes recovering a "primordial" immediacy, or achieving at least an immediate sense of the Angst that should attach to the loss of that primordiality. Adorno sees something similar at work in the lush orchestral effects of Wagner and the faux-primitivism of Stravinsky; more visceral lunges toward immediacy animate Dada and Surrealism, and the mystiques variously attaching to Van Gogh, Gauguin, and les fauves. In literature, writers have been seeking since Romanticism to make their writing more life-like, which has typically meant more "immediate," less familiarized by the mediations of literary tradition and convention; this is the claim especially staked out by the "realist" novel. Some poets can sound the theme with something of Hegel's sense of the "happy" potentials peculiar to language by reason of its inevitable "universality"--Mallarmé's flower absent from all bouquets, e.g.--but more typical, especially in the twentieth century, has been the much-discussed aspiration to "the concrete," understood as the opposite of the conceptual, the universal, the abstract: "No ideas but in things" (Williams), "Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself" (Stevens). Williams and Stevens can sound, Kant notwithstanding, as if this program could be realized.

  14. There is a reach of Adorno's thinking that can look very like a version of this "immediacy"-hunger, and its association with, or expression as, a distrust of "the concept" and all its works. Adorno is as alive as anyone to the liability of the concept to reification or hypostatization: to becoming, as Nietzsche warned, a stale counter of thought and feeling that threatens to become a narcotic against thinking and feeling both. To prevent such hypostatization of "the concept," to keep it concrete, is primary among the many tasks Adorno assigns to "the labor of the concept" (see my "During Auschwitz" paragraphs 9-15). But there is another, more complicated liability attaching to the concept, which manifests most often and most elaborately in Adorno in connection with Kant. Adorno is usually on Hegel's side of the Hegel/Kant binary; but perhaps the most important of Adorno's still-Kantian commitments is an entailment of his critique of idealism, the "identity thinking" that identifies thinking and being, and which, in Adorno's view, ultimately vitiates Hegel's thinking. Here Adorno's construction of the problem is Kantian and materialist at once: Kantian in that the inaccessible, unknowable Ding an sich cannot be mastered (though it can be hypostatized, a sort of illusion of "mastery") by "the labor of the concept"; materialist or Marxist in that the reaches of experience Adorno calls "non-conceptual" are not merely (as in Kant's trinity) sheerly cognitive, moral, or aesthetic, but social and historical as well.[10] Adorno follows Benjamin in seeking in "mimesis" an approach to making the "non-conceptual" available to art and language without betraying, by rendering it conceptual, its non-conceptual character. The point: contra the (modern) ideology of the aesthetic as usual, Adorno repudiates rhetorics of immediacy that call for an "absolute negation" of the concept in the name of recovering "non-conceptual" (sensual, concrete, immediate) experience. For Adorno, only through the "labor of the concept" can the limits of the concept be tested and probed--indeed, experienced. Beyond those limits, "mimesis" and other such strategies of the "non-conceptual" offer not a triumphant victory over or liberation from "the labor of the concept" but rather a tragic or "unhappy" brake on its potentials, a check to "the power of the negative."

  15. And so Adorno consistently scorns, as an ideology that not only defaults from the "labor of the concept," but makes a righteousness of doing so, all Romantic and modern aesthetics of recovering immediacy: Adorno accepts the imperative to "make it new," and all the burdens and impossibilities of that task in a numbed, instrumentalized, "administered world," and to that extent he can make common cause with many an artist--Proust, for example--whose theory (if one may use the word) might subscribe to naïve rhetorics of immediacy. Still, Adorno joins that understandable and nostalgic longing or "ontological need" to his own subtler and more challenging Hegelian account of aesthetic experience, according to which the transit from immediacy to mediation is necessary and, though irreversible, may nevertheless sublate further into what Hegel calls "mediated immediacy": indeed, it's only the "mediated" part of the response, Adorno would say, that enables the "reader" of the new artwork not merely to experience the freshness (or "immediacy") of the new, but to know that immediacy for the complexly mediated thing experience is.

  16. All that notwithstanding, Adorno is typically "modern" in casting this problematic of "immediacy" in dark and desperate colors, an instance or symptom or pretext--even a "medium"--for "unhappy consciousness" of a very specifically modern type. In Hegel's terms, we might characterize modernity's anguish over lost immediacy as the latest reinvention of the "unattainable beyond" underlying our species being's chronic "unhappy consciousness"; Adorno is notable only for the intensity with which he renders or performs this problem. And here, too, his complaints about Hegel's language are part and parcel of his unease with what we usually reprehend today as Hegel's Panglossian "happy consciousness," for the modern anguish about the irredeemable mediatedness of language is something Hegel simply does not feel. Again, Hegel finds a (typically) providential grace of Geist, not a tragic estrangement or fallen-ness, in the circumstance that "[what] is meant [in "sense-certainty"] cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently universal" (Phenomenology 66). Or as Hegel puts it elsewhere, "because language is the work of thought, nothing can be said in it that is not universal" (Encyclopedia [§ 20] 49)--and that (for Hegel) is good: for from that condition, Spirit will learn the limitations of sense-certainty, of perception, and eventually even of the merely "ratiocinative" powers of "Understanding." Moreover, Hegel seems confident that language can and will do the job by itself: the inadequacy of the "ratiocinative proposition" to "speculative" consciousness is a redemptive difficulty, a sort of felix culpa, that "seems . . . to recur perpetually, and to be inherent in the very nature of philosophical exposition" (Phenomenology 40); hence Hegel is not moved to call for a new language or a new grammar that can express the "speculative" meaning that the old propositional language cannot. The challenge is rather to the reader than to the writer: the "speculative" (new) insight is to be read out of the old proposition by the reader, rather than written into it by the writer. Hegel's complacent faith in the dynamic of the "counterthrust" apparently rationalizes his "sovereign indifference" to his own compositional practice: the counterthrust will wreak its speculative work on the ratiocinative inertia of what the writer "meant to mean" regardless. Hegel anticipates both deconstruction and Harold Bloom by the ironic route of a faith that there is a special providence of "misreading" that mis-shapes our texts, rough-hew them how we will.

  17. By contrast, for Adorno, as for so many modern writers and thinkers, it is upon the writer that the burden falls when historically new predicaments call for historically new ways of writing or representing them--and if the predicaments are chronic, that only makes more urgent the need for newly "defamiliarizing" (re- or de-) constructions of them. If Adorno (et al.) bewail the need for new expressive means to escape from old "familiarized" fixities of consciousness, Hegel enjoys a more robust confidence not only in the power of the new to unfold itself, but also in the fundamental benignity of the past which can thus be more generously and happily sublated--"preserved" in, even as it is "cancelled" by, the new. (For Adorno and other moderns, the anxiety--"dialectics at a standstill"--is that the cancellation part won't take effect.) Hegel would have savored Nietzsche's quip, in Twilight of the Idols, that "we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar" (Portable Nietzsche 483); but he would have taken the point rather as endorsing the continuity than protesting it. I'm trying here to "motivate" the contrast of Hegel's textual effect or affect (to come back to the question of "affect") with the "unhappy consciousness" of Adorno and, so frequently, of modernity at large.[11]

  18. For many readers of Adorno, the "unhappy consciousness" may effectively eclipse the Hegelian point about mediation--as if "immediate experience" and "unhappy consciousness" were tantamount to the same thing, or were each the other's object. When Adorno writes that "all philosophical language is a language in opposition to language, marked with the stigma of its own impossibility" (Hegel 100), one might think of Beckett or of Wittgenstein; I suspect Adorno's "unhappy consciousness" imperative motivates much in his discourse that might pardonably be mis-taken for a version of the immediacy-hunger of so much modern aestheticism. In my own experience of reading Adorno, the chronic motif of the "non-conceptual" seems to imply some qualification, some im-mediation or de-mediation, of mediation itself. And from (so to speak) the other end of the telescope, Adorno finds much more threatening and anguishing than Hegel the potential in language to "fix" or "freeze" or (borrowing a Platonic word) "hypostatize" thought-moments that ought to remain or be rendered fluid--an anxiety widespread, under various aliases, in modernity (Lukács's "reification," Wittgenstein's "category mistake," Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness"). When Horkheimer and Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, warn of "the universality necessarily assumed by the bad content of language, both metaphysical and scientific" (22, Cumming translation), they are sounding a familiar modern theme, and a theme in which concerns about feeling and thinking fuse with issues of writing--and of the burdens incurred by serious writing and serious writers. No less than the poet must the philosopher struggle to get the "exact curve of the thing" (T.E. Hulme) down on the page; to quote "Skoteinos" again:

    The moment of universality in language, without which there would be no language, does irrevocable damage to the complete objective specificity of the particular thing it wants to define. The corrective to this lies in efforts to achieve [an] intelligibility [that is] the opposite pole to pure linguistic objectivity. The truth of expression flourishes only in the tension between the two. (Hegel 106)

    The complaint here about Hegel's overestimation of the universal is a legitimately philosophical point--that "the truth of expression" involves both the (bad) universality of language and its inevitable contravention of the "concreteness" of the particular--but "the bad content of language" ("der schlechte Inhalt in der Sprache" [Dialektik 39]) also encodes a "higher-level" version of the "tension [the "performative contradiction"?] between the two." In translation, the English suggests a "content" distinct from the container: whereas the German ("Inhalt") can imply a more disintricably Aristotelian fusion of form-and-content (form as content, content as form), of substance and form as indissociable correlatives of a single spatio-temporal manifold, for which the nearest English I can think of is Hopkins's (admittedly outré, but conveniently Aquinian) "inscape." Cumming's translation, "bad content," suggests better than Jephcott's "faulty content" (Dialectic 17, Jephcott translation) that the "bad content" is formal beyond any particular content: the "bad content," along the lines of "bad infinity," involves the "universality"-effect itself. But Adorno's point is not, pace Williams and Stevens et al., that this "bad content" should be overcome; the point is that it can't be--with the consequence that this "bad content" itself must be part of what a critique of universality performs.

  19. The difficulty of such writing and reading, what Hegel called the "labor and the suffering of the negative," is just the askesis Adorno charges Hegel with having shirked. Hence what might seem the near-ressentiment of Adorno's complaint that Hegel is "sovereignly indifferent" to language--to the extent at least that it amounts to the complaint that Hegel doesn't share Adorno's Angst in addressing an historical crisis that requires crisis-agitations in critique's own expressive means. Which is not, of course, at all to discount Adorno's point: frequently enough, Hegel does indeed write with a haste and an impatience that seem willfully to incur, even defy, the risks of using language "as if" transparently--though Hegel seems to me to incur the risk knowingly, not naïvely. On the other hand, there are no motifs in Hegel corresponding to such chronically and insistently self-reflexive evocations of thematics-and-technics, theories-and-practices, as Adorno's "immanent critique," "dialectical image," "constellation," "mediation," "expression," "parataxis," "mimesis," and the like.

  20. The further question for Adorno is, what can a practitioner of "immanent critique" (an Adorno) do in the face of the reification, "the [false] universality necessarily assumed by the bad content of language"? As we've seen, Hegel's adviso--that we must "go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way" (Phenomenology 39)--assigns the task to the reader, not the writer; moreover, Hegel's stipulation that we must "understand . . . in some other way" is prodigiously vague. As for the strategies usual to the modern literary arts, Adorno (as we've seen) considers that they mistake their medium if they really suppose, or hope, that they can eliminate "universality" by reverting to (Keats) "sensations rather than thoughts," mobilizing the mantra of "concrete-not-abstract" against the supposed pitfalls of thinking as such--as if not noticing (perfect illustration of Hegel's point about language "speaking the universal") that when we invoke "the concrete" in this way, we are using the word abstractly. As for the logical positivists who sought to reduce language to a mathematical ideal of immutable significations ("the most recent school of logic denounces--for the impressions they bear--the words of language, holding them to be false coins better replaced by neutral counters" [5, Cumming translation]); Adorno regards them as a virtual ne plus ultra of the dead-end of "the dialectic of enlightenment."

  21. Adorno, of course, carries no brief for "abstraction": his imperative is to concretize the abstract. As he writes in "The Essay as Form":

    Higher levels of abstraction invest thought neither with greater sanctity nor metaphysical substance; on the contrary, the latter tends to evaporate with the advance of abstraction, and the essay [i.e., philosophical writing as Adorno would prescribe it] tries to compensate for some of that.

    The point is that to concretize the abstract is to grapple with it, not to refuse it, as so many Romantic-to-modern aestheticisms make a glamorous "impossibility" of attempting to do:

    Thought's depth depends on how deeply it penetrates its object, not on the extent to which it reduces it to something else . . . . The essay quietly puts an end to the illusion that thought could break out of the realm of thesis, culture, and move into that of physis, nature. ("Essay" 11)

    For Adorno, all such efforts to escape the predicaments of language--to escape from the mediations of culture into un-mediated nature--are not only futile, but (variously) ideological: dupes of a false consciousness more comprehensive than the version of false universality they would evade. For Adorno, it is part of philosophy's task, part of the askesis specific to the agon of philosophical labor, to confront head-on--not to evade, but fully to suffer--the dilemma that "all philosophical language is a language in opposition to language, marked with the stigma of its own impossibility" (Hegel 100). Immanent critique must own that it operates from inside the horizon of the problems it takes on: from inside the "impossibility" it protests, and that it must, as writing, dramatize. Entire success in philosophical projects cannot be expected: and least of all from any program guided by the expectation that part of the success would be utter clarity of results:

    To the extent to which philosophy makes an ongoing effort to break out of the reification of consciousness and its objects, it cannot comply with the rules of the game of reified consciousness without negating itself, even though in other respects it is not permitted simply to disregard those rules if it does not want to degenerate into empty words. Wittgenstein's maxim, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," in which the extreme of positivism spills over into the gesture of reverent authoritarianism authenticity, and which for that reason exerts a kind of intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly antiphilosophical. If philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time. Hegel attempts to do this. (Hegel 101-02)

    The expressive demand for "a philosophical language that would strive for intelligibility without confusing it with clarity" (Hegel 105) engages contradictions rather to display and dramatize than to reconcile them; the differences between them cannot and should not, for purposes of critique, be "resolved": to preserve the "objective contradictoriness" (Negative Dialectics 151) of the dilemma must be one of the conditions--"the labor and the suffering," indeed--of philosophy as such.

  22. A related difficulty from which Adorno would forbid philosophy to flinch is one for which Hegel, again, supplies the terms: the "Preface" to the Phenomenology recurs repeatedly to the figure of "fixity" ("das Fixe")--for example in the famous passage about "tarrying with the negative," in which Hegel announces the program for a new, a modern, philosophy, in the very terms (restoring "sensuous apprehension" to over-cerebral and -systematic ways of thinking) that a later age will deploy against thinking and "the universal" themselves. Hegel writes that ancient philosophy sought

    the proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness [and] made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving-forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it a spiritual life. (Phenomenology 19-20)

    Anxious moderns, worried that intellectualism desiccates feeling, may yearn to purge thought altogether; for Adorno, as here for Hegel, to impoverish either is to impoverish both. The good news, symmetrically, is that to rejuvenate either is to rejuvenate both; thinking and feeling cannot and should not be sundered. But in the figure of undoing "fixity," Hegel anticipates the modern aspiration to undo what we would now call the reifications of habit and ideology. (I have discussed elsewhere Adorno's characterization of "immanent critique" as aiming to "reliquify" apprehensions that familiarization and false universality have "congealed," "hardened," "frozen," "petrified" ["Immanent Critique" 101-03; cf. Negative Dialectics 97].) And it would be easy to see Hegel here as anticipating the modern suspicion of Plato, whose search for the eternal, the "really real," was ready to dismiss "the concrete" altogether in favor of a "form" or an "idea" whose guarantee of "real"-ity was, precisely, its unchangingness--its (in Hegel's terms) "fixity." And here we see another way in which the "Skoteinos" essay's insinuation of a Heraclitean Hegel implies a fundamental philosophical sympathy as well as a comparable "obscurity" or "difficulty" of expression:

    The substance of Hegel's philosophy is process, and it wants to express itself as process, in permanent status nascendi, the negation of presentation as something congealed, something that would correspond to what was presented only if the latter were itself something congealed . . . . Hegel's publications are more like films of thought than texts. The untutored eye can never capture the details of a film the way it can those of a still image, and so it is with Hegel's writings. This is the locus of the forbidding quality in them, and it is precisely here that Hegel regresses behind his dialectical content. (Hegel 121)

    The "film" metaphor insinuates that Hegel's rush and blur, however admirably it may "reliquify" what had been congealed, can generate an immediacy-effect that goes too far in the other direction, thus imperiling the "speculative" consciousness that would maintain the "content" as dialectical rather than "regress[ing] behind" it.

  23. Here, as elsewhere, Adorno charges such deficits to Hegel's "lack of sensitivity to the linguistic medium" (Hegel 121)--again, that "sovereignly indifferent attitude toward language" (109)--a lack or lapse with more than merely stylistic consequences: Hegel's failure "to reflect on his own language," Nicholsen writes, "is the failure of his philosophy": she goes on to confirm that it is on this ground that Adorno "differentiates himself from the Hegel who failed to reflect on language" (Exact Imagination 93). It might sharpen a point to draw a contrast: Nicholsen takes Adorno as defending Hegel's mimetic or gestural, non-conceptual language, and deploring his apparently unwitting or inadvertent lapses into anti-mimetic, over-abstract expression. It seems to me the reverse: that Adorno regards the mimetic and musical features of Hegel's prose as the persistence of a sort of linguistic unconscious that intermittently manages to get the better of Hegel's programmatic determination to transcend the "limits of language"[12]:

    Perhaps however, the antilinguistic impulse in his thought, which perceives the limits of any particular existing thing as limits of language, was so deep that as a stylist Hegel sacrificed the primacy of objectification that governed his oeuvre as a whole. This man who reflected on all reflection did not reflect on language; he moved about in language with a carelessness that is incompatible with what he said. In the presentation his writings attempt a direct resemblance to the substance. Their significative character recedes in favor of a mimetic one, a kind of gestural or curvilinear writing strangely at odds with the solemn claims of reason that Hegel inherited from Kant and the Enlightenment . . . . The romanticism that the mature Hegel treated with contempt, but which was the ferment of his own speculation, may have taken its revenge on him by taking over his language . . . . Abstractly flowing, Hegel's style, like Hölderlin's abstractions, takes on a musical quality. (Hegel 122)

    Here Hegel seems to succumb, against his own principles, to an unwitting "romanticism," and thus lapses into mimesis that repeats (or "reflects") the "substance" his "dialectic" should be rendering speculative, should be subjecting to a "determinate negation" whose force and effect would be ineluctably critical, a "counterthrust" to the substance's received, "fixed," "congealed," reified and reifying acceptation.

  24. But as the passage continues, Hegel's unwitting contravention of his own anti-mimetic commitments develops unlooked-for potentials:

    No doubt Hegel's style goes against customary philosophical understanding, yet in his weaknesses he paves the way for a different kind of understanding; one must read Hegel by describing along with him the curves of his intellectual movement, by playing his ideas with the speculative ear as if they were musical notes. Philosophy as a whole is allied with art in wanting to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses, and here Hegel behaves like Alexander with the Gordian knot. He disempowers individual concepts, uses them as though they were the imageless images of what they mean. Hence the Goethean "residue of absurdity" in the philosophy of absolute spirit. What it wants to use to get beyond the concept always drives it back beneath the concept in the details. The only reader who does justice to Hegel is the one who does not denounce him for such indubitable weakness but instead perceives the impulse in that weakness: who understands why this or that must be incomprehensible and in fact thereby understands it. (Hegel 122-23)

    Both Nicholsen (Exact Imagination 92) and J.M. Bernstein (43-4) take this passage as commending Hegel's "musical" and "romantic" (Nicholsen) or (Bernstein) "more than logical" (i.e.,"non-conceptual") effects as attesting Hegel's deliberate effort "to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses"--but I see the passage as staging a more conflicted apprehension of Hegel than that. I can't substantiate (but neither could Nicholsen or Bernstein refute) my reading by rigorous appeal to Adorno's exact wording; as we've seen, Adorno advises that reading Hegel (and, implicitly, Adorno) requires a back-and-forth between the words on the page and your (developing) sense of the "conceptual structure" and "of the general train of Hegel's thought": Hegel's meanings, Adorno warns, "cannot be interpreted from the wording . . . alone" (Hegel 91)--and in fact the paragraph above is followed by a further elaboration of that theme.[13]

  25. So, emboldened by the license Adorno thereby extends, I'll suggest that when Adorno writes that "philosophy as a whole is allied with art in wanting to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses," he is suggesting that Hegel's prose, whether abetted or duped by Hegel's "sovereignly indifferent attitude to language," achieves such an effect against its author's intention: that it is "Philosophy," not (always) Hegel, that has willed this "rescue" of the "mimetic." We've already seen Hegel anticipating the postmodern maxim that "language speaks us." Just as, above, "the romanticism that the mature Hegel treated with contempt" took its "revenge" by infusing his "abstract" style behind his back with a Hölderlinian musicality, here Adorno intimates that Hegel's unself-consciously mimetic practice has gotten the better of his avowedly anti-mimetic theory. The point: it's the practice that "rescues" what the theory "represses." Thus Hegel, impresario of "the concept" (at least as he himself reinvented it), aspiring to soar "beyond" the concept, suffers instead a fortunate fall "back beneath the concept." The prophet of "the end of art" in its sublation into philosophy reinvents philosophy, despite himself, as a quasi-Romantic kind of art, of music, mimesis. Classic Aufhebung: philosophy's Hegelian mission to "end" (or "cancel") art proves rather to prolong ("preserve") it. Or such seems to me the suggestion, the alchimie du verbe, of Hegel's "disempowered concepts . . . use[d] as imageless images of what they mean" (the English-speaker recalls this Plato-haunted problematic in Shelley, a poet the reverse of "sovereignly indifferent" to language), not to mention the profanatory ("enlightened") hubris of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot. If "immediacy"-hunger too often drives artists to refuse the concept in favor of a plunge into the non-conceptual concrete, Hegel's Promethean aspirations soar the other way, to levitate "beyond" the concept into the ozone of the too-rarefied/reified abstract.

  26. But whatever his point about Hegel, Adorno in this passage has the air of finding, as if in despite of what Hegel "meant to mean," a model for Adorno's own attempt "to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses": that is, to undo the "chorismos" of philosophy from art, of "the [allegedly, ideologically "abstract"] concept" from "the [mimetic] concrete," of thinking from feeling. Adorno's commitment to rehabilitating, by "concretizing," the concept, shows the labor of "rescue" to be a double project: both a rescue of the mimetic from the "bad content" of the concept (i.e., from its liability to reification, abstraction, false universalization, etc.); but also, reciprocally, a rescue of the concept from its liabilities by way of a determined discipline of the concrete, maintained in the writing by a mimetic methexis between the writing and "the matter at hand." The negative project of keeping "the concept" and "the concrete" from betraying each other--for the naïve de-mediations of anti-intellectual art practices attest that this is a double danger--can be reimagined to open the prospect of "the concept" and "the concrete" redeeming each other.

  27. It's something like this project that Rolf Tiedemann characterizes as "Adorno's Utopia of Knowledge," in a formulation evincing an exuberance Adorno never allowed himself. But Tiedemann isn't forgetting Adorno's Bilderverbot on utopia, nor his stipulation that the Stendhalian "promise of happiness" can today be evoked only negatively, as a "broken promise"; when Tiedemann cites Adorno using the phrase, it's as a contrafactual: "The utopia of knowledge would be to disclose the nonconceptual with concepts while not imitating them" (qtd. 132, from Negative Dialectics 10). But if Tiedemann can seem too sanguine here about utopian promise, in another sense he breaks this particular promise too much, to the extent that, in order to argue Adorno's favor to "mimesis" as an antidote to the conceptual, he overstates Adorno's despair of "the concept." What he seems to me to miss is the twofold ambition of Adorno's project, to redeem the mimetic and the concept both. Hence Tiedemann presents as Adorno's utopian escape from (not "rescue" of or in) "the medium of the concept," the program announced in Adorno's 1931 inaugural lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy": "interpretation of images" (132; italics Tiedemann's), which proposes, Tiedemann's argues, a "mimesis" secured against, or insulated from, conceptualization by reason of its grounding in the "historical image" or "dialectical image" that Adorno theorized in collaboration with Benjamin--and in which, again, "concretization" is a driving motivation. (Tiedemann quotes a letter to Adorno, in which Benjamin characterized the Arcades Project as testing "the extent to which it is possible to be 'concrete' in the context of the philosophy of history" [132].) The image, especially the photographic image, figures as guarantor of the concrete, and only the more poignantly when the image is of (say) a Paris vanished long ago. (Nadar was for Benjamin what Atget and Lartigue are for us.) Benjamin, more hopefully and more naively than Adorno, construes the photographic concrete as other and antidote to "aura." (Post-Baudrillard, it may rather appear as an "aura" in its own right.) In any case, and however illusorily, the photograph quite affectingly preserves the vanished historical past; with Benjamin's Baudelairean sense of evanescence in mind (and compare Adorno's "Idea of Natural History") we might liken this "preserving" to the more conservative prong of the twofold, "cancel-and-preserve" Aufhebung-effect. As for the other prong, the "dialectical image" mobilizes its "power of the negative" precisely in its presentation of the vanished past. The image, we might say, enacts that double-rescue evoked above: preserving a vanished past, but also preserving its own concreteness against the liabilities of hypostatization and abstraction ("bad content") imperiling "the concept."[14]

  28. But Adorno also had his differences from Benjamin, best documented in their 1938 correspondence (some call it a "debate") following Adorno's rejection of Benjamin's "Baudelaire" essay. Most relevantly for us, this dispute hinged on the stasis of "the image," its stillness, its fixed-ness. As Adorno wrote later, in critical hommage to his friend:

    [Benjamin] was drawn to the petrified, frozen or obsolete elements of civilization, to everything in it devoid of domestic vitality . . . . The French word for still-life, nature morte, could be written above the portals of his philosophical dungeons . . . . Benjamin's thought is so saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it . . . the glance of his philosophy is Medusan. (Prisms 233)

    Adorno wants a critical "mimesis" that will imitate not merely the static object, but the "dialectical movement" of "theory" in agon with it, the "kinetic force of the concept" that struggles to "negate" the merely given. About the "Baudelaire" essay, Adorno complained that:

    the mediation which I miss, and find obscured by materialistic-historical evocation, is simply the theory which your study has omitted . . . one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. The spot is bewitched. Only theory could break this spell--your own resolute and salutarily speculative theory. It is simply the claim of this theory that I bring against you here. (Complete Correspondence 281-83)

    In other words, Benjamin's "ascetic refusal of interpretation" has shirked "mediation" and "theory," a.k.a. "the labor of the concept."[15] If "concept" is to "image" as "subject" is to "object," Benjamin's "materialistic-historical evocation" has overstressed the "object" in its effort to bypass "theory," and the problematics attaching to the agency, the "subject," of theory. (Benjamin is explicit that this is the motive of his "literary montage": "I needn't say anything. Merely show" [Arcades 476].) By contrast, Adorno's "negations" always evince the agency of the critical subject (alias "theory" in the quotation just cited)--a contrast of critical theory substantiated most palpably in writing practice, in the contrast between Benjamin's "nature-morte" mimesis of "dialectics at a standstill" that lays Benjamin's prose itself under the Medusan pall of a stasis-effect, versus the agitations of Adorno's energetic and volatile, even hyperactive writing. If Benjamin's method wants (to adapt Mallarmé) to aboutir dans un image, Adorno's reversal of that direction is signaled in the adviso from Dialectic of Enlightenment that "dialectic . . . interprets every image as writing" (24, Cumming translation). The "image" is to be "reliquified" into writing, a writing that pulses with "the kinetic force of the concept."

  29. This kinesis--this aspiration to enact "process" and "the negation of presentation as congealed"--is part of what makes Adorno's writing so challenging, so agitated, so energetic, so difficult, and not only for us to read, but also (such was the challenge he imposed on himself) for Adorno to write. And here, too, Hegel serves as a cautionary example, insofar as it is Hegel's commitment, tonally or stylistically as much as substantively, to "happy consciousness" that betrays his radical premises, "regresses behind his dialectical content." Thus does Hegel's way of writing, his "sovereign indifference" to language, compromise--and not, contra Hegel, in a providentially good way--what Hegel "meant to mean":

    In the Phenomenology Hegel still wanted to believe that [philosophical] experience could simply be described. But intellectual experience can be expressed only by being reflected in its mediation--that is, actively thought. There is no way to make the intellectual experience expressed and the medium of thought irrelevant to one another. What is false in Hegel's philosophy manifests itself precisely in the notion that with enough conceptual effort it could realize this kind of irrelevance. (Hegel 138)

    To "realize this kind of irrelevance": it's a cheeky formula for Hegel's noble hankering after an "Absolute knowledge" that would break free from "the medium," language, altogether--as if, in aspiring to the transcendence of the "end of art," Hegel contravened the very condition, the achieved immanence, of his own "Absolute philosophy":

    He who entrusts himself to Hegel will be led to the threshold at which a decision must be made about Hegel's claim to truth. He becomes Hegel's critic by following him. From the point of view of understanding, the incomprehensible in Hegel is the scar left by identity-thinking. Hegel's dialectical philosophy gets into a dialectic it cannot account for and whose solution is beyond its omnipotence. Within the system, and in terms of the laws of the system, the truth of the nonidentical manifests itself as error, as unresolved, in the other sense of being unmastered, as the untruth of the system; and nothing that is untrue can be understood. Thus the incomprehensible explodes the system. (Hegel 146-47)

    That last quotation, from the closing paragraph--i.e., the peroration--of "Skoteinos" (Hegel 146-47) pulses with high energies: the "scar," the problem "beyond omnipotence," the "incomprehensible" that "explodes"--on the next-to-last-page!--Hegel's mighty "system": this is a peroration, even by Adorno's standards, of unusual force, ore rotondo, multo con brio.

  30. How words on a page can propose a system and then "explode" it would be hard, indeed impossible, to explain according to adequatio conceptions of language, those ruled by the "logocentric metaphysics" of "representation." (And, by the way, whose words? Is it Adorno who has exploded Hegel's system, or is it Hegel who has exploded it despite himself, and even unawares?--as in the rhetoric of de Man and Derrida, according to which texts less suffer deconstruction at the hands of the critic than "deconstruct themselves.") Yet an adequatio acceptation of language proves, as the peroration continues (we know Adorno's penchant for long paragraphs), to have persisted in Hegel's thinking-and-writing, which is to say that Adorno here diagnoses how Hegel himself falls victim to "the bad content of language," the falsifying "universality"-effect that implies, that can only arise from, a logocentric metaphysics of "representation," of thing and word conceived on the model of original and copy, of which the telling symptom in Hegel is the motif of "identity":

    For all his emphasis on negativity, division, and nonidentity, Hegel actually takes cognizance of that dimension only . . . as an instrument of identity . . . . This is where the idealist dialectic commits its fallacy. It says, with pathos, nonidentity. Nonidentity is to be defined . . . as something heterogeneous. But by defining it nonetheless, the dialectic imagines itself to have gone beyond nonidentity and be assured of absolute identity. (Hegel 147)

    It is as if Hegel complacently inferred, from all his Geisteswanderung, that "the identity of identity and nonidentity" really were so simply an identity, and not always and necessarily an irreducible nonidentity as well. (Why Adorno appears not to be hoist by his own pétard insofar as his own "negative dialectics" seems to undertake a comparably "absolute [rather than "determinate"] negation" of "identity" is a rum question, which may one day seem richly symptomatic for our period.)[16] But it is along these lines that the closing sentences of "Skoteinos" aim to clinch a critique of Hegel in which the philosophical lapse can't be disentangled from the literary lapse, that is, from Hegel's inattention (or "sovereign indifference") to language as the fundamental condition of "the concept":

    One cannot move from the logical movement of concepts to existence. According to Hegel there is a constitutive need for the nonidentical in order for concepts, identity, to come into being; just as conversely there is a need for the concept in order to become aware of the nonconceptual, the nonidentical. But Hegel violates his own concept of the dialectic, which should be defended against him, by not violating it, by closing it off and making it the supreme unity, free of contradiction. (Hegel 147)

    For Adorno, as we have seen, "contradiction" is virtually a condition (necessary, not sufficient) of truth; again, our administered world's "objective contradictoriness" (Negative Dialectics 151) is just the "truth content" critical writing must try to express. The very last words of "Skoteinos" are these:

    only by a Münchhausen trick, by pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, could [dialectic] eliminate the moment that cannot be fully absorbed, a moment that is posited along with it. What causes the dialectic problems is the truth content that needs to be derived from it. The dialectic could be consistent only in sacrificing consistency by following its own logic to the end. These, and nothing less, are the stakes in understanding Hegel. (Hegel 147-48)

    These, and nothing less, are the stakes of Adorno's own project. "The dialectic that eludes literary representation," the "inexpressible" that the writing of critique obliges itself to (try to) express, are burdens incumbent on the imperative to express both the ideological condition and (or rather, by way of) its critical "negation." Its critical (sc. "determinate") negation, not (à la Hegel) its utopian ("absolute") negation: Adorno's diagnosis of Hegel's failures here implies the program of his own critical activity. The "embittering part of dialectics" (Negative Dialectics 151), the principled "unhappy consciousness" of critique, prescribe a "taboo on utopia" precisely as prophylaxis against all "imaginary solutions" and false (ideological) consolations, which can look to some like "defeatism," what one commentator has drily diagnosed in left-discourses generally as a "will-to-powerlessness" (Niethammer 138-42). Hence the prohibitive conflictedness of what Adorno's labored "immanent critique," his critical writing, "the chemism of [Adorno's] own linguistic form" (Hegel 109), his "literary presentation," aims to express: the "objectivity of [social] contradiction" (Negative Dialectics 151-53), to cite one of his pithier formulations, or "dialectics at a standstill," to cite another he borrows from Walter Benjamin (e.g., Arcades 463, 865, 911). Adorno's critical performative must perform both the "standstill" and the "dialectic," both the "contradiction" and the "objectivity," both the promise and its broken-ness--both the utopia, so to speak, and the ideology.[17]

    31. Department of English
    University of Delaware
    helmling@udel.edu

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    Notes

    1. See my "Constellation and Critique" and "'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialectical Mimesis.'"

    2. Apart from a few asides, Nicholsen's Exact Imagination considers "Skoteinos" only briefly (91-93) in connection with Adorno's critique of "clarity," a point reprised in a broader context in the "Introduction," co-authored with Jeremy J. Shapiro, to her translation of Hegel: Three Studies, in which "Skoteinos" is the concluding "study" (Hegel xxv-xxxiii). J.M. Bernstein, in his essay "Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel" (Huhn 19-50), cites "Skoteinos" for what it implies about Adorno's sense of the limits of "the concept" (on which, more later).

    3. See, especially, the last three chapters and the "Epilogue" in Warminski. This would be the place to mention as well de Man's two essays specifically on Hegel, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics" and "Hegel on the Sublime."

    4. This gambit is not original with me. Nicholsen and Shapiro write that Adorno's Three Studies critiques Hegel but also serves as "Adorno's self-defense in the medium of Hegel" (Hegel xxix-xxx), and J.M. Bernstein confides, in "Negative Dialectic as Fate," that he likewise takes "Skoteinos" as "explicating 'How to Read Adorno'" (Huhn 39), though it's not particularly a premise of that essay.

    5. Hegel's most recent biographer argues that Hegel's writing practice was crucially influenced by Hölderlin's proto-"modernist" example (Pinkard 82, 676n79).

    6. It is also the subject of the second of Adorno's "Three Studies" of Hegel: "The Experiential Content of Hegel's Philosophy" (Hegel 53-88).

    7. For more on this, see Nicholsen 93.

    8. For Jean-Luc Nancy on this passage, see Speculative Remark 10-19; on "the proposition," see 73-101. For Hamacher's reading, see Pleroma 5-8, 78, and the following note.

    9. See Warminski 163-79 for a detailed reading of Hegel's treatment, in the "Sense-Certainty" chapter of the Phenomenology, of "the 'this' and meaning"--instantiation, for Hegel, of the ineluctable universality of language, insofar as apodictics like "this," "here," and "now" designate not only "this" particular (here, now), but also, more abstractly, particularity in general, particularity as such, particularity as (oxymoronic as it sounds) universal. For Hamacher's reading of these passages, see Pleroma 206-19. Hamacher stresses the "now" more than the "this," in order to elicit the subl(im)ated sacramentalism in Hegel's pleromatics of "the time of reading" (and of writing). Hamacher is especially suggestive on Hegel's metaphors of eating (communion, the Mass, the Last Supper, etc.), ingestion of food being an operation in which "this" meal becomes my nourishment for "now" that, while time-limited, stakes some claim on the eternal. Hamacher quotes Hegel on how sense-certainty, like writing (like digestion), evacuates what it feeds on: "In order to test the truth of this sensuous certainty a simple experiment is all that is required. We write this truth down . . . . When we look again now, today, at the written truth, we shall have to say that it has become stale" (Phenomenology 60; qtd. Pleroma 208). Oddly, Hamacher's discussion of the same passages on the "proposition" that I quote above passes over Hegel's dizzying observation that "we learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way" (Phenomenology 39)--for here Hegel suggests that if writing can "stale [sense's] infinite variety," it can also, as speculative, open access to constant freshness. For Adorno, by contrast, the danger of staleness (including the dynamic by which radical expressive innovations become familiarized, conventional, ideological) is chronic, and the necessary freshness hard to get at best, and most of the time "impossible."

    10. For a lucid exposition of this aspect of the Kant-Adorno relation and its relevance to Adorno's socio-political concerns, see Huhn, "Kant."

    11. For an extended discussion, see my "During Auschwitz."

    12. It's my impression that the impact of Derrida and deconstruction has encouraged an assimilation of "mimesis" to "representation"--that is, encouraged suspicion of mimesis's implication in the same logocentric problem of adequatio, original and copy, presence and absence, noumenon and phenomenon, etc., that entails representation, reference, and language at large. Martin Jay helpfully refines this picture by making explicit a point often left implicit in accounts of what Adorno took from Benjamin, namely that Benjamin projected "mimesis" (and "dialectical image," "allegory," etc.) as variously alternative to, evasion of, or complexifying supplement to the Platonic metaphysic. Benjamin's quest was for some degree of ontological restitution of disenchanted modernity's traumatic losses; Adorno's more "materialist" and "nominalist" rigor was famously inhospitable to Benjamin's "Platonizing residues," but the point remains that for Adorno, the liabilities of "mimesis" as ideology (from the sympathetic magic of prehistory to the fantasy-identifications encouraged by the culture industry's "mass deception") provoke potentials of resistance in artistic "semblance"--to "negative," that is to say critical, effect. I have elaborated this under the rubric of "dialectical mimesis" in "'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialectical Mimesis'"; see also Michael Cahn. On Adorno's debts to and differences from Benjamin, see Nicholsen's Exact Imagination, chapters 4 and 5.

    13. For the pleasure of it:

    Hegel has a twofold expectation of the reader, not ill-suited to the nature of the dialectic. The reader is to float along, to let himself be borne by the current and not to force the momentary to linger. Otherwise he would change it, despite and through the greatest fidelity to it. On the other hand, the reader has [also] to develop a slow-motion procedure, to slow down the tempo at the cloudy places in such a way that they do not evaporate and their motion can be seen. It is rare that the two modes of operation fall to the same act of reading. The act of reading has to separate into its polarities like the content itself. . . . With Hegel philosophy becomes the activity of looking at and describing the movement of the concept. (Hegel 123-4)

    It seems a warrantable inference, though Adorno doesn't make the point explicitly, that it is "the movement of the concept" that renders the concept phenomenal, transitive, negative, and thereby makes Hegel's "looking at and describing" it ineluctably mimetic.

    14. See especially Tiedemann 132-35. Zuidervaart, concerned to ground Adorno's politics and aesthetic philosophically, usefully stages this operation in the rather different terms of "sublation and imitation" (180-82).

    15. For more on this see my "Constellation and Critique," especially paragraphs 22-23.

    16. Rose makes something like this argument in her fascinating essay, "From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking: Hegel and Adorno." Rose's argument is brief (indeed, it's a conference paper) but profound, and remarkable not least because it defends Hegel against Adorno, in effect turning Adorno's critique of Hegel back on Adorno himself. "Adorno reduces [Hegel's] speculative to dialectical thinking, replacing recollections of the whole by judged oppositions" (54)--that is, it's not Hegel who betrays the dialectic by making it serve "identity," but Adorno who betrays "the speculative" by confusing it with, and confining it to, a reflexively antinomic thought-tic that reifies what Hegel aimed to loosen. Through the nineteenth century--indeed, through the young Lukács--the argument over Hegel was, who were his real legatees, Left-Hegelians, or Right-? The premise was that Hegel's legacy was property worth fighting for title to. Since Stalin and Hitler, Hegel has looked like a Panglossian apologist for totalitarian or authoritarian statism, and Adorno's critique of Hegel has usually been welcomed in that spirit. (This bias discounts Adorno's effort to validate what can still be potent in Hegel.) But Rose goes daringly against the grain in valuing Hegel against modern anti-Hegelians from Nietzsche on: in addition to the essay just cited, see her remarkable brief for (in effect) "happy consciousness," "The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy."

    17. For more on Adorno's recurrences to Benjamin's "dialectics at a standstill," see my "Constellation and Critique" paragraphs 2-13, and "'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialectical Mimesis'" 113-17.

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    Adorno, Theodor W. Drei Studien zu Hegel. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.

    ---. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.

    ---. "On the Crisis of Literary Criticism." Notes to Literature. Vol. 2. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 305-08.

    ---. "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry." Notes to Literature. Vol. 2. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 109-49.

    ---. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Continuum, 1994.

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    Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

    Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Teidemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1999.

    Bernstein, J.M. "Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel." The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 19-50.

    Cahn, Michael. "Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of Critique." Mimesis in Contemporary Theory. Ed. Mihai Spariosu. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984. 27-64.

    de Man, Paul. "Hegel on the Sublime." Displacement: Derrida and After. Ed. Mark Krupnik. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. 139-53.

    ---. "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics." Critical Inquiry 8.4: 761-75.

    Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

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    ---. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

    Helmling, Steven. "Constellation and Critique: Adorno's 'Constellation,' Benjamin's 'Dialectical Image'." Postmodern Culture 14.1 (September 2003). <pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.903/14.1helmling.txt>

    ---. "'During Auschwitz': Adorno, Hegel, and the Unhappy Consciousness of Critique." Postmodern Culture 15.2 (May 2005). <muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v015/15.2helmling.html>

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    ---. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3. Theodor W. Adorno. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.

    ---. "The Essay as Form." Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 3-23.

    ---. Hegel: Three Studies. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994.

    Huhn, Tom. "Kant, Adorno, and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic." Huhn and Zuidervaart 237-57.

    Huhn, Tom, and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.

    Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1974.

    ---. "The Structure of Philosophic Language According to the 'Preface' to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind." The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972. 157-85.

    Jay, Martin. "Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacou-Labarthe." Huhn and Zuidervaart 29-53.

    Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: SUNY, 1988.

    Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Speculative Remark: (One of Hegel's Bon Mots). Trans. Céline Surprenant. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

    Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.

    Niethammer, Lutz. Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: Verso, 1992.

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    Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

    Rose, Gillian. "The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy." Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. 105-12.

    ---. "From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking: Hegel and Adorno." Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. 53-63.

    Tiedemann, Rolf. "Adorno's Utopia of Knowledge." Huhn and Zuidervaart 123-45.

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    Zuidervaart, Lambert. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.

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