SOURCE: “Dr. Adorno's Bag of Tricks,” in Encounter, Vol. 47, No. 4, October, 1976, pp. 67-76.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace.

—Matthew Arnold

Those qualified to judge are inclined to regard T. W. Adorno's Minima Moralia¹ as the masterwork of the Frankfurt School. Certainly it illustrates one of that School's cardinal tenets: a rejection of over-arching system. An author who claims that “the whole is the untrue” probably represents his position best by collections of fragments. The Minima Moralia is fragmented in the way Pascal's Pensées is fragmented; and, as with Pascal, one suspects that a work which brought all the bits and pieces into a rounded system would result in distortion. Adorno's work is about multiple distortion, and you can only attack multiple distortion by continually criticising it from different angles and moving in from different starting points. If distortion of nature and man, science and culture is protean, then its negation must acquire a complementary variety of form. If the situation is as deeply distorting and pervasive as you claim, then any rounded system is both impossible and untrue to its object and objective. The rounded-off has no cutting edges to do the job it sets itself. “These fragments have I shored against my ruins.”

The fragmented mode is related more precisely to his view of the role of the individual and of the concept of the individual within a context of deepening cultural and social twilight. After the Twilight of the Gods, the twilight of man. Horkheimer and Adorno, in a sense joint authors of the Minima Moralia, came to see the notion of the individual as containing resistances which the onward march of the collective in its right- and its left-wing formations made doubly precious. After all, in one's social philosophy and political allegiance it is not merely a question of what is right, but where to lay one's weight when the worst tendencies of one or other alternative seem to be dominant. The problem for Adorno was compounded, however, by his belief that the individual was ceasing to have any weight to lay, or for that matter to experience; but that hardly made him less precious. Indeed even such strength as lay in archaic forms of the individual should be salvaged for the unequal battle.

This is his very first point in his dedication to Max Horkheimer, and this the text that informs this work right up to the final reflections on redemption. It is worth quoting:

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

So the plight of the intellectual is precisely how he may preach autonomy when the objective preconditions of the autonomous sermon are not genuinely present. No valid sermon can come from those who are representatives of what they condemn; and insofar as preachers are exempted from the general plight the exemption is almost too shameful to be exploited. Yet the paradox is that the exemption must be exploited, and all the historically outdated resources of the individual drawn upon in order to preserve a memory which can be carried forward into a new realization of individuality whenever that may become possible.

To know the alienation of one's power and experience is to be less than totally alienated. (After all it has been the malign achievement of Marxist régimes to use a vocabulary—in which alienation is central—in order to repress consciousness of its existence.) It is, therefore, possible as well as necessary to protest against the domination of productive forces; against technicism; against the measurement of the incommensurate; against a psychoanalytic cure of souls eliminating the soul in an ideology of adjustment; against the conception of science as a mere accumulation of instrumentalities; and against the ubiquitous character of the exchange relationship. This last is crucial for Adorno. He has a nostalgia for noblesse oblige and a hatred of precisely those aspects of contemporary life which use a parody of noblesse oblige to hide the reality of exchange. His obiter dicta on American hotels and trains are minor outworkings of this point. So strong is this feeling that even degenerations associated with the onset of the bourgeois era appear in retrospect to retain a precious possibility. His remarks on the humane protection afforded by “distance” could have been written by Professor Mary Douglas, and his treatment of “tact” can be taken as a precise illustration of his essential concern. It is worth some consideration.

For Adorno, tact is based on a convention which remains intact yet has lost its binding force. Tact both expresses alienation and represents a saving accommodation between human beings. Though inseparable from renunciation and the loss of the possibility of total contact, tact protects because it discriminates between different persons and situations. Without convention there emerges a demand that each individual shall be met in precisely the manner which befits him, and this replaces the careful modulations of manners by naked power. To be direct “places” a man. The abolition of convention heralds the advent of domination. Freedom dissolves in rib-digging camaraderie.

But why does this last point follow? On the surface it might seem that rib-digging is simply a convention of a pseudo-egalitarian kind supplanting another older type of convention. The answer is found in a typical Adorno paradox. In his view egalitarianism unveils a latent brutality lying behind the façade of affability. This is because condescension and thinking oneself no better are two sides of the same coin. If you adapt to the weakness, style, language, even the music, of the oppressed, you consent to deprivation and so to what makes deprivation possible. And simultaneously you develop in yourself the coarseness and the violence required to be an oppressor. In the end it may be that only the egalitarian adaptation remains visible, and such an adaptation is the perfect mask for power. To share men's pleasures in such a fashion is to collude in their pains. All the intellectual can do under such circumstances is to demonstrate solidarity by remaining inviolable. Hence Adorno's “snobbery” can be reinterpreted as closer to revolutionary solidarity than self-conscious slumming and the inversion of taste.

The excursus on tact, like the fragmentary mode in general, does justice to his main point: the intimate substance is gnawed at by the logic of the productive process. But in dealing with the problem Adorno was faced by a further paradox. He confronted two possibilities. The first was to lay bare with the utmost brutality the ruthless penetration of even sublime relationships by material interests and exchange. The second was to recognise that to assist in the brutal destruction of even the chimeras which impotently point to better things is to collude yet again with barbarism.

It is in the face of all these quite genuine paradoxes that one sees how Adorno could be regarded as a defender, not only of the best in bourgeois culture, but even of those elements that had fallen away from the best. Basically this is because he knows that there is no “good end” mysteriously waiting to be born as the beast of time shuffles towards the last antithesis. He says so precisely. Marxists who are

cured of the Social Democratic belief in cultural progress and confronted by growing barbarism are under constant temptation to advocate the latter in the interests of the “objective tendency” and in an act of desperation to await salvation from their mortal enemy, who, as the antithesis, is supposed in blind and mysterious fashion to help prepare the good end.

That should make everything clear. He does not believe in the long-term beneficence of the objective tendency or therefore in colluding with it to hasten the birth pangs of a better future. However, the passages on tact show that he does believe in an ideal of total contact and of pleasure in the thing itself which has never yet been realised except in constricted mediating forms like tact. As things are today, even the constricting mediations represent archaic sources of strength; and once this weak strength has ebbed away there is only naked confrontation and power. So here we have both his utopia and his nostalgia; and a man is known by his utopias and his nostalgias. What he does not quite admit is that an ancient partial good will never be reabsorbed in a surpassing future good, but that the partial and the constricting elements express certain ineluctable limits and conditions. His utopia is only realizable in love and music; hence perhaps his love of music. To use a phrase of Walter Benjamin, Adorno's angel “flew forward with face turned back.”

The implications of all this go beyond the posing of paradox against paradox and fragment over fragment. They need to be set in the context of Hegel (who stands behind the Minima Moralia) and especially in the context of Hegel and the individual. Hegel, says Adorno, argued against individual “being-for-itself”; and aphoristic fragments are directly drawn from individual selfhood. This tells against Adorno; but if the individual is vanishing, then the self can only fasten on the evanescent. Only by dwelling on what has almost ceased to be has it power to be. At precisely the moment of decay the experience of the individual contributes again to knowledge. What was once obscurantist in viewing itself as dominant now partakes in its weakness of the possibility of liberation. In Adorno's view, Hegel knew nothing of this because his conception of a whole harmonious throughout all its antagonisms assigned inferior status to individuation, whatever its importance as a dynamic force. Just as the social principle of individuation has concluded in the triumph of fatality so philosophy has hitched itself (understandably) to the triumphal car of objective tendencies. Yet in fact the whole is the untrue. Subjective experience, fragmented and without theoretical cohesion, has its contribution to make to truth.

There is one final reason for fragmentation. What Adorno writes is neither philosophy nor sociology but belongs to a class of philosophical reflection on society and on social fact rejecting both reflection and fact conceived in themselves. Merely to reflect on the given is simply to reflect the given, just as merely to reflect (i.e. mirror) the given is to leave everything as it is and claims to be. Philosophy conceived as pure reflection may achieve a systematic, rounded exposition, and science as the mirror of the given may also achieve systematisation. But the complicated reflexives of the critical dialectic have to work backwards, forwards, and across themselves, making every partial truth less partially true in the light of its negation and in the further light of a negation of that negation. Adorno writes in the double or triple negative, and this prevents an elegant, rounded mode of writing. The light has to be dark enough to be light. Nothing is as it seems, and truth is paradoxically layered. You can only break through to truth by exposing the paradoxes and masquerades at each layer and setting them against other masquerades and paradoxes. The first act of unmasking is not enough. The cunning of social reality is to delude you with the pleasure of thinking that you have got somewhere with the first act of unmasking. Indeed, it may even be that the cunning of social reality is to delude you with the pleasure of unmasking right down to that last layer which looks like hiding the truth. It is of the nature of critical reflection always to be discontented, even with a philosophy which insists on the last layer being the true. Maybe there was a truth as well as a lie at each point in the process of unmasking. I do not mean that Adorno held such a view; but that the complexity and constant attempt at self-correction and renewed suspicion of the correction always forces him to move from layer to layer sceptically suspicious and yet also suspicious of mere scepticism.

This makes him very difficult to attack. When you advance on him you have to ask which corner he has just turned around. There are some thinkers who are basically committed to doing the same disappearing trick around the same corner. Once you spot the nature of the disappearing trick you have them by the coat-tails and can haul them over the coals. But Adorno's trick is to look as if disappearing around the first corner when he is really round corner three or corner five, and to go round the corner in such a way as to prevent you supposing that corners one, three, and five can really be categorised over against two, four, and six. He is very tricky, and tempts you to declare you have him in order to laugh triumphantly and say you are illustrating just the point he is making, though not of course realizing it in the sense in which he realises it. He is a specialist in evasive affirmation and does so not only by covering himself at every point but by declaring his exposed parts more virtuous than obscene. The points at which he seems exposed are his virtues. For example, in a world where facts are disguises is it not virtue to be exposed to the charge of indifference to fact? There is a lower and higher form of indifference and to take the measure of the inordinate, incommensurable, is to defeat measurement even more truly than mere refusal to measure.

If one had to invent one of his own aphorisms one would say “the unmeasured is the true.” He is unmeasured and, as he says of psychoanalysis, only the exaggerations are true. Certainly the exaggerations enable one to see. Not that even this is the whole truth: there must be another aphorism posed against that aphorism. The result, as Anthony Quinton has remarked,² resembles a highbrow party very late at night. The clever paradoxes cap each other tipping more and more tipsily towards complementary profundities until the final gross statement, made against all mundane commonsensical likelihood, appears as the only possible stand-in for the enigmatic truth. Be drunk enough on dialectic and the sibylline even becomes the obvious, and vice versa. If you see what I mean. It all depends on how much you have had. A simple man and proud of it can only find Adorno disgusting.

I want to move from approach and style to substance, which is a difficult move with a writer in whom the two are joined together. Basically I want to criticise his uncriticizability, and what bothers me at this juncture is that he evades criticism by never saying anything of substance. He certainly asserts and affirms, but he never says anything is “just so” because he rejects the category of the “just so.” Paul Lazarsfeld parted from him both in anger and in admiration partly because he found that Adorno was indifferent to criteria of more or less “just so”, since if things are not so you cannot have more or less of them. Lazarsfeld found that Adorno's notions just could not be operationalised. I am not surprised. Adorno preferred accentuating the negative to accentuating the positive, and above all he disliked positive science. His own assertions were subject not to the criteria of positive science but interpretative criteria. They constitute a category of statement between the metaphysical and evaluative categories on the one hand and the category of positive science. They make empirical connections, but they are not subject to criteria of test or to falsifiability or verifiability.

It is the fact that Adorno works in this intermediate mode which uses facts but does not allow them to constitute the court of final appeal which makes him ultimately elusive. I want to illustrate this category from his analysis of astrology, because this is relatively well-developed and illustrates very well his style of analysis and the difficulty of subjecting it to tests which might carry much inter-subjective conviction. He is, in short, beyond the verifiability principle. Perhaps I might say, parenthetically, that I do not accept his view that positive science, by paying attention to the given, is thereby committed to defending the given. This is just not true. I am, however, interested in a class of interpretative statement which appears to be beyond the normal criteria of science. As a sociologist I ask myself how such statements are justified and how they may be integrated with that other class of statements which is subject to the normal scientific criteria of justification. How can you use sociology and not be in the sociological mode?

Adorno's whole method is exposed in nuce by his treatment of astrology. I chose astrology because it relates to Adorno's favorite theme of genuine individual subjectivity confronting technology, in that astrology is a pseudo-technology utilised for individual ends. You could regard astrology as the randy grandsire of positive science and as its contemporary parody. The persistence of superstition is necessarily an important issue because it challenges so many assumptions about the unique authority of the scientific world view precisely in those sectors of the population where that authority is supposed to be best established. For Adorno, however, the emphasis of criticism must lie on the notion of a social fate transferred to the individual level. Men are haunted by their own spirits dispossessed of a home in their own concrete existences. Deprived of the Holy Spirit they have lost the instinct for the unconditional set over against the conditional and have confused the two, treating spirit as a form of factuality. (The parody of positivism is here very clear.) At the same time Judicious Reason has become ensnared in the demise of the Spirit. Ratio has become implicated in the fall of Sophia. The fall is a premonition of social disaster. If I may rephrase Adorno: it is an omen, an augury of what lies veiled in the future. The horoscope corresponds to official directives, and number mysticism to the mystique of administrative statistics and cartel prices, the break in the life-line to terminal cancer in the body politic. Official progress mocks the blocked hope of human beings and forces the absent—experience—to make its presence felt elsewhere in phantasmagoria and dreams from which there seems no awakening. The actual content of the dream reflects social nullity. The secondary, projected reality runs parallel to the prosaic emptiness of the primary reality and reinforces it: the spirits have nothing much or interesting to say.

The spirits are also falsely spiritual. In Occultism the Spirit does not vivify matter as in the resurrection of the body but floats above it in permanent schizoid disjunction. Spirit cannot say “This is my body”, demonstrating its reality, but becomes a thing “out there”, demonstrating its unreality. The usual parody of “fact” is conjoined to the self-inflated pomposity of the experimental routine. After the positivist ritual of experiment expels the ghosts and materializations they return to haunt the world with an appeal to experiment. By a parallel progression the idealist exaltation of Mind (rooted in and expressing the social supremacy of the mental over the manual) achieves reabsorption through Occultism in determinate, deterministic categories of Nature. It is the last bankruptcy of Hegel's original investment in the spirit.

I hope I have not given Adorno's views a false Anglo-Saxon clarity, but in any case there are certain things anyone in an Anglo-Saxon tradition can and must say. The first concerns the status of such interpretations. Some of them are simply the working-out of this or that internal logic. What he says, for example, about the relation of body and spirit in Christianity is an exposition, and a correct one at the abstract level, of the inner logic of that religion. Again, the transformations he proposes, such as the “degenerating” shifts in the logic of idealism, are just logical possibilities. So far no difficulty. The trouble comes with such a notion as “correspondence.” By what criteria can we show that there is a correspondence between the break in the life-line and the terminal illness of sick society? Adorno is not merely employing an illustrative image but asserting a link between the palmist practice and social praxis.

So far as I can see “correspondences” of this kind are partly in the hands of intelligent manipulators. There are always some phenomena at the level of everyday practice and some pathic elements in the body politic which permit the determined scryer to see the “correspondence” he wishes to see. The crystal ball is large enough. Fragments of evidence and degrees of similarity are not hard to come by, and even when the similarity is not clear one can always argue it is paradoxically imaged back to front in the mirror, or is “hidden”, or has undergone a “significant” process of distortion. And so you simply manipulate certain notions and make them play crystal ball for your analysis. You determine what shall be truly significant and what not, where real accident begins and genuine essence ends, what is to count under the rubric “It is no accident that. …” It is no accident, implies Adorno, that one man said he believed in the Occult because he did not believe in God. The isolated empirical fragment fits neatly into the logic of part of Adorno's case, but it really remains a question how many empirical swallows are necessary to make a dialectician's summer.

The above is concerned with the technique of picking out the single swallow to validate your hint of summer, but there are certain assertions of a different kind embedded in the dialectical framework. If you choose to take certain phenomena or statements and let the weight of your significance and of meta-interpretation rest on them, no man can say you nay. But if you declare that the secondary projected reality reinforces the primary reality and its conformism, you make what looks like a straight empirical statement. I have said that Lazarsfeld complained during his collaboration with Adorno that he could not derive testable empirical propositions out of his work, and one can indeed see the difficulty, just as one can also understand Adorno's violent rejection of the pomposities attached to the routine of experimental verification. Yet Adorno says something here about conformism which can be construed as an empirical statement about a linkage and about a state of affairs. (As a matter of fact, recent research, such as that of Patricia Hartmann, does indeed suggest the practitioners and devotees of the Occult are very conformist and conventional, which is consistent with Adorno's contention without precisely proving it.)

I mean it is relevant to Adorno's contention without constituting quite direct verification. But if the dialectical, critical mode permits of reference to relevant empirical material, by what criteria can it dismiss other material, or ignore the whole universe of comparative materials over time and social space? Researches also show, to give but one other instance, that Occultists are only marginally less believing in God than their age and status equals. Would this fact disrupt the analysis in terms of the posited transition from the Holy Spirit to the spirits? In other words does the statement of one possible logical transformation which probably exists in a few historical instances carry any weight in terms of an overall balanced interpretation of data? One can see why Adorno thought that in psycho-analysis only the exaggerations were true. I am not saying that all data have the same rights to significance, since there is I believe a class (or classes) of statement which are not open even in principle to empirical proof and yet which do assert empirical connections. At the same time such assertions are often open to some limitation on the ranges of interpretation which are consistent with the data. A clever dialectician may manipulate his framework to achieve an accommodation of the awkward and even make awkward empirical devils sing the dialectical Creator's praise. But the point is that he has to manipulate and can be seen to manipulate.

In Adorno's case he does not manipulate because he is indifferent, and this is exactly the substance of Lazarsfeld's charge against him. Adorno defended a reference to the specificities of history; but by ignoring data as a control on his imagination, he easily converted his assertions into free-floating ahistorical abstract possibilities. He could have looked at the enormous increase for astrology coincident with the rise of the bourgeois world-view, and he could have shuffled his dialectical frame around until he accommodated the fatality of both early bourgeois society and of late bourgeois society. And today he might have looked at the manner in which, under Communism, superstition has in some ways shown more resilience even than religion. Anybody can play the dialectical game and accommodate a vast range of seemingly contradictory evidence. But the act of accommodation in essence acknowledges the existence of a problem: Adorno made no such acknowledgment. His pessimistic dialectics required nothing beyond incidental illustration, which is not to say, of course, that he was not often right. And, in addition, he had the priceless advantage of the pessimist: in the last analysis you are bound to appear right some time. Doomsters cannot in the nature of things be wrong hic ubique et semper. When you are borne out by events, you can then say that the real revelations are now emerging from the veiled. But even religious revelations can utilise that privilege. Men carrying placards announcing that the last day is at hand are only wrong about the date. Adorno saved himself by ignoring both dates and data.

I want now to move on to another interesting analysis by Adorno because it illustrates another facet of his ability to do the disappearing trick. In this instance he not only makes doubtful connections but also refuses to acknowledge an ineluctable contradiction. The issue I select does not arise in the front arena of social debate, yet it presents a sociological and ethical problem of primary importance. It is the question of “first come, first served.”

Adorno argues that, where the intimate affections are concerned, temporal priority excludes genuine preference; the accidental precludes freedom of choice. A man and a woman meet each other at a particular point in time and mutually offer the unrepeatable. Their possession of each other is the very antithesis of the idea of property. Once this process has occurred objective moral right lies with whoever arrived first: priority has priority. But this principle leads to the antagonism of siblings, to age sets, to exclusive rights in a given national inheritance, and to the persecution of minorities. In short, it leads to Fascism.

The crucial reason, says Adorno, lies in the exclusiveness of what comes first. Possession is meaningful in relation to loss, and the fear of loss converts a genuine possession into mere property. The claim “my own, my very own” contains an implicit forfeit of that claim. What is a possession becomes an object in the universe of exchangeable objects and thereby changes the unique into the general and abstract. Yet—he says—truly to love is to speak specifically to the other, and it involves attachment to beloved features, not to some “idol of personality” which merely reflects the notion of possession and abstraction. At this point Adorno has arrived at a happy reprieve from all his difficulties. What is specific, i.e. features and immediate experiences of affection, is by definition unrepeatable. Ergo, infidelity is impossible. The cheat here is that Adorno defines specific features and experiences as concrete, unique, and incapable of distortion into the abstract and exchangeable. Yet, in fact, reaction to features (as distinct from reaction to that unique constellation of features which is a person) precisely converts the specific into the abstract.

Features are repeatable commodities capable of being made up into innumerable supermarket packages. Being loyal to this-or-that feature or experience merely means being loyal when you feel like it. By fragmenting people into features and experiences, Adorno achieves a worse objectification than exists in the idea of exclusive possession. He sidesteps the ineluctable dilemmas of morality and experience by sleight-of-hand. And all the side-stepping by partial analogy through sibling rivalry to Fascism is to throw back on to a genuine dilemma of personal relations the irrelevant odium of Fascism. Loyalty, by virtue of logical tricks and contagious analogy, is somehow tangled up with Fascism and the doctrine of an all-white Australia. Adorno is the kind of intellectual cheat who knows how to look sympathetic and be irresponsibly clever and superior at the same time. It is a capacity few of us lack entirely, but he had it in highly developed form.

Finally, there are two topics which can be used to back up the theme of what Adorno meant by the decomposition of the individual. One is his analysis of the Culture Industry, the other his negative assessment of Existentialist philosophy and theology. They can, and indeed should, be linked together.

The first is bound up with his critique of Positivism, the distortion of technology, social manipulation, technical and conformist concepts of health; and it is of a richness and complexity which summarization is bound to misrepresent. Again, there is the relationship of exchange, and the façade behind which that relationship lies omnipresent. Both can be combined in his image of the Hotel Manager. He outdoes aristocrats with his glossy, hygienic, elegant façade, but he lives by the tip. The Culture Industry, in apparently waiting on the customer, argues that its victims are its judges. It anticipates the spectator's imitation of itself like a parent talking baby language. Even its bad conscience is carefully put on public view. It indulges in a form of knowing self-criticism intended only to quieten the consumer. It admits to the propagation of an ideology of escape, and justifies it by distinguishing escapism from social realism, which is itself a supremely practical distinction because the escapist's dream is no more subversive than a pale reflection of the ordinary and because it carries the message: flee from flight. In all this, the objective character of manipulation, rooted in economic calculation and technical criteria, requires no censorship. In the older folk art, the lament against domination still remained audible, whereas the voice of the Culture Industry is alienation posing as togetherness, human closeness proclaimed through loudspeakers and the psychology of advertising. The confidential touch on the shoulder of Everyman is the consummate act of betrayal. The manufactured immediacy is a mediation reducing men so completely to things that real humanity becomes unimaginable. Men are made objects: decomposed consequences of exchange.

To lament this decay of the individual in the Existential manner is merely to describe a condition and to blame the weakness of individuals on to individuals without paying attention to the social principle lying behind individuation. To see the problem as an individual one is to give way to the social reality in the very act of criticism. Similarly the individual's freedom from society deprives that freedom of any genuine strength. Indeed, direct absolute individuation, beyond the restraint exercised by specific interests, leads to a situation where the weakest individual goes to the wall. The naked individual is easily captured and put in a cage or else himself becomes a keeper. When nothing can be required of the naked individual in terms of content, then all that can be asked for is genuineness and authenticity. From this arises the jargon of authenticity both in a religious form and usurping the place of religion.³

Yet in fact the self is not an absolute but an imitative playful consequence, and without society just a void. The claim of the self to be absolute is itself the consequence of a particular social process and amounts to a glorification of the void. God is the only possible ontological root of selfhood, just as Society is the source of all its richness and content. In a society dominated by exchange and interchangeability the claim to be genuine and unique is the first primal lie. The theological version celebrates faith for its own sake, and thereby breeds a vocabulary of pure inwardness which lives by verbal inflation. Such verbal inflation may be either radical or conformist, since it has no specific content; but either way the tortured wrestling of Jacob always ends up with the self in the right position. It is, perhaps, though Adorno does not say so, the analogue within the intellectual stratum of the colourful original personality, Star of Stage and Screen.

So much Adorno has to say about pure individuality and the naked self. So far I agree with him. In general, however, I am bound to disagree. He generalises far beyond the evidence and even glories in the maltreatment of evidence. He ignores the critical potential in positive knowledge, and he makes a facile link between everything he dislikes and “Fascism.” He mistakes the nostalgia of the haut bourgeois for the reality of general cultural decline. He constantly slides away from real ineluctable alternatives and those general limits on human possibility without which there is no potential at all. Total contact and pure pleasure cannot be socially embodied without disaster. Above all, he puts his criticism beyond criticism, and what is beyond criticism is often just not worth criticising.

Yet his text, fragmented and partial, is richly layered, imaginative, paradoxical. It represents an anti-holistic unity, an anti-individualistic defence of the individual, a critical Marxist attack on the haute bourgeoisie which could be an apologia pro vita sua, a non-believing affirmation that only theology is possible in the world as it now is and is likely to be.

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a stand-point removed, even though by a hair's breadth from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.

Notes

1. T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. New Left Books, £4.25.

2. Anthony Quinton, “Critical Theory”, Encounter (October 1974).

3. See my essay “The Naked Person”, Encounter (June 1973).