Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno's Inverse Theology

Harvard Divinity School
Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno's Inverse Theology

Author(s): Elizabeth A. Pritchard
Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp. 291-318
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4150749
Accessed: 24-01-2019 06:39 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambridge University Press, Harvard Divinity School are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to The Harvard Theological Review
This content downloaded from 93.243.106.135 on Thu, 24 Jan 2019 06:39:16 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W.
Adorno's Inverse Theology
Elizabeth A. Pritchard
Bowdoin College
A recurring issue in analyzing the work of the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno
(d. 1969) is how to understand his professed adherence to the biblical com-
mandment that prohibits the manufacture of images of the divine-referred to
as the "image ban" or Bilderverbot (Exod 20:4-5). Adorno writes, "I see no
other possibility than that of extreme asceticism toward any faith in revelation,
and extreme allegiance to the Bilderverbot."' Some readers' interest in the sig-
nificance of Adorno's allegiance to the Bilderverbot is primarily theological;
they focus on whether this allegiance is tantamount to a "negative theology."2
'Theodor W. Adorno, "Vernunft und Offenbarung," Gesammelte Schriften (20 vols.; Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970-1993) 10:616. See also Gesammelte Schriften 6:207, 293-94;
idem, Negative Dialectics (trans. E. B. Ashton; New York: Continuum, 1994) 207, 298-99.
Gesammelte Schriften 3:40; idem and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans.
John Cumming; New York: Continuum, 1994). Adorno also prohibits pronunciation of the
divine name; see Gesammelte Schriften 6:394; Negative Dialectics, 402.
2The Bilderverbot and negative theology are often associated in both Adorno scholar-
ship and theological scholarship insofar as they are read as attempts to communicate divine
transcendence by prohibiting its depiction. The term Bilderverbot refers to the biblical
commandment: "You shall not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in
heaven or on earth beneath or in the waters under the earth; you shall not bow down to them
or serve them" (Exod 20:4-5). This commandment obviously forbids the making and wor-
shipping of images. These activities are forbidden, so the text reads, because YHWH is a
jealous god. Negative theology refers to those traditions, predominantly Neoplatonic and
Christian (although it is also associated with Philo and Maimonides), which advocate the
use of negative attributes or the systematic denial of all attributes in order to convey the
idea that the divine is utterly transcendent or ineffable, i.e., beyond the confines of discur-
sive reason. Whereas sources of negative theology declare that the divine, qua divine, is
unknowable, the Bilderverbot, per se, does not include this declaration. It should be noted,
HTR 95:3 (2002) 291-318
292 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Others' interest, particularly that of his successors in critical theory, is primar

political. In their estimation, Adorno's allegiance to the Bilderverbot und
mines any contribution he might make to contemporary formulations of
emancipatory praxis.
Jtirgen Habermas, for instance, recognizes that, for Adorno, the "prohibitio
upon graven images" requires that reconciliation of human antagonisms, muc
then, that to see a connection between the Bilderverbot and negative theology is to insi
that the "message" of the Bilderverbot is that of divine transcendence, i.e., that the divi
per se, does not admit of description. It need not, of course, be read this way. Neverthel
a number of Adorno's readers as well as a number of scholars in theology and religiou
studies assign the same thesis, i.e., divine transcendence, to both the Bilderverbot and
negative theology. Indeed, Adorno himself makes a correlation between the Bilderverbo
and negative theology. He refers to both "[d]as jiidische Bilderverbot" and "negative the
ology" to describe Schinberg's opera, Moses und Aron. See his "Sakrales Fragment: O
Schdnbergs Moses und Aron" (1958) in Gesammelte Schriften, 16:458, 463, 470; "Sacred
Fragment: Schoenberg's Moses und Aron" in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Mus
(trans. Rodney Livingstone; New York: Verso, 1992) 230, 236, 243. Susan Buck-Morss,
who introduced the term "negative theology" into Adorno scholarship, writes: "Adorno
used both these words ['inverse' and 'negative'] to describe what he referred to as 'our
theology' in a letter to Benjamin, December 17, 1934," The Origin of Negative Dialectics
(New York: Macmillan, 1977) 195 n. 51. Buck-Morss also conflates "negative" and "in-
verse" theology in her subsequent work, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) 246. However, I see no evidence to support
Buck-Morss's claim that Adorno used the word "negative theology" to describe his and
Benjamin's work. For references to Adorno's supposed "negative theology," see Joseph
Colombo, An Essay on Theology and History (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990) 152; and
Hauke Brunkhorst, "Irreconcilable Modernity: Adorno's Aesthetic Experimentalism and
the Transgression Theorem," in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the
Postmodern (ed. Max Pensky; Albany: State University of New York, 1997) 50. Four au-
thors who explicitly reject the reading of Adorno's work as a negative theology are Peter
Osborne, J. M. Bernstein, Simon Jarvis, and Gerhard Schweppenhiuser. Peter Osborne,
"Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a 'Postmodern' Art" in The
Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (ed. Andrew Benjamin; New York: Routledge,
1989) 23, disputes the reading of Adorno's work as a "negative theology" insofar as he
argues that Adorno's aesthetic theory affirms the possibility of metaphysical experience. J.
M. Bernstein argues that traditional negative theology involves the "negation of predicates
which would limit Him [the divine]." This kind of negation is, according to Bernstein,
abstract rather than determinate and thus is not congruent with Adorno's form of negation
(The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno [University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992] 256). Simon Jarvis insists, contra Albrecht Wellmer,
that "Adorno's thought cannot be adequately understood as a 'negative theology' " but does not
elaborate upon this point (Adorno: A Critical Introduction [New York: Routledge, 1998] 112).
Although he insists that Adorno's concept of praxis retains undeniable aspects of negative
theology, Schweppenhiuser argues that Adorno frees the notion of "transcendence" from its
theological shell. Hence, Schweppenhiuser envisions the ethical and utopian dimensions of
Adorno's work as primarily constituting a negative "moral philosophy" and not a negative
"theology" (Ethik nach Auschwitz: Adornos negative Moralphilosophie [Hamburg: Argu-
ment, 1993] 9).
ELIZABETH A. PRITCHARD 293
like the "wholly other" (i.e., the divine), be indicated but not described.3 Haberm
argues that Adorno adheres to the Bilderverbot in order to preserve the transc
dental character of reconciliation. In this reading, Adorno's adherence to
Bilderverbot is indicative of his conviction that discursive reason, per se, is redu
tive, if not destructive, of difference; thus, to preserve the difference of a tru
reconciled state, one must refrain from describing it. Seyla Benhabib also mak
this point clear with regard to Adorno:
The end of Enlightenment, the end of the "natural sinfulness of hu-

manity," cannot be stated discursively. Since even language itself is
burdened by the curse of the concept that represses the other in the
very act of naming it . . . we can evoke the other but we cannot name
it. Like the God of the Jewish tradition that must not be named but
evoked, the utopian transcendence of the history of reason cannot be
named but only reinvoked.4
Similarly, Albrecht Wellmer, who describes Adorno's work as a negative theol-

ogy, argues that Adorno's disallowing of concepts in which to conceive the condition
of reconciliation cuts a chasm between history and utopia; Wellmer observes "a
fissure between messianic-utopian and materialistic motifs in Adorno's thought.
... The light of redemption which ... should be cast upon reality . .. is not only
not of this world; it issues ... from a world that lies beyond space, time, causality
and individuation."5 For these critics, Adorno's adherence to the Bilderverbot en-
tails his renunciation of the only tool, i.e., discursive reason, with which one might
construct an alternative praxis. If Adorno would prohibit us from describing the
contours of reconciliation, then, tragically, he provides us with no way out of "dam-
aged life."6 Indeed, Habermas speaks for his fellow critical theorists when he writes
3Jiirgen Habermas, "Theodor Adorno- The Primal History of Subjectivity - Self-Affirma-

tion Gone Wild," in Philosophical-Political Profiles (trans. Frederick Lawrence; Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1987) 107.
4Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical
Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 169-70.
SAlbrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Postmodernism (trans. David Midgeley; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 11; italics in original.
In the same work, Wellmer refers to Adorno's work as a negative theology (7).
6The phrase "damaged life" is taken from the subtitle of Adorno's book, Minima Moralia:
Reflections from Damaged Life (trans. E. F. N. Jephcott; New York: Verso, 1978). Other
authors who argue that Adorno's theological predilections undercut his contribution to con-
structions of an emancipatory praxis include Martin Jay and Jean-Frangois Lyotard. Martin
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social
Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co 1973) 27, 51; in his later work, Jay pre-
sents a more nuanced depiction of Adorno's relationship to the Bilderverbot, seeing it embedded
in his aesthetic theory and not necessarily apolitical; see Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984) 19-20, 110, 155-60. Lyotard is frankly dismissive of Adorno's
theology; see Jean-Franqois Lyotard, "Adorno as the Devil," trans. Robert Hurley, Telos 19
that the consequence of Adorno's desire to keep reconciliation unsullied by de-

scription is that his philosophy pays the price of "renouncing contestab
knowledge."7
In my estimation, Adorno's successors in critical theory have not done justice to
the complexity of Adorno's position on the Bilderverbot. Adorno's appropriatio
of the Bilderverbot is not symptomatic of an allergy to discursive reason, nor is
indicative of a chasm between materialist and messianic motifs in his work. I argu
instead that Adorno deploys the Bilderverbot for the purposes of a constructiv
materialist critique and strategy. In his last published work before his death, Adorno
articulated his proposed link between the Bilderverbot and materialism. He write
The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite [of
idealism]: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could
be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on im-
ages. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting
Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity.
At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology. Its
great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire utterly
foreign to idealism, the realm of the absolute spirit.8
The Bilderverbot is generally understood to be a repudiation of the limitations an

contingencies that constitute materiality, and, concomitantly, an exaltation of th
which is in no way encumbered by materiality. In this passage, the Bilderverbo
retains its traditional negativity, i.e., depictions of utopia are not permitted. At th
same time, Adorno connects the Bilderverbot with materialism, and more specifi
cally, with that conspicuous image of material limitation and longing: bodil
resurrection. Indeed, for Adorno, "hope clings to ... the transfigured body."9 Wha
Adorno proposes is, then, a Bilderverbot in the service of a "bodily resurrection.
(1983-84) 108-14, esp. 113. For Wayne Floyd, Adorno's adherence reflects his insistence
that the evil of this world not be rationalized; see Floyd, Theology and the Dialectics o
Otherness: On Reading Bonhoeffer and Adorno (Lanham, Md.: University Press of Americ
1988) 268. Neither author develops this argument; moreover, neither seems familiar with h
critique of the Bilderverbot and negative theology.
7 Jiirgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (trans. William Mark
Hohengarten; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 37.
8Gesammelte Schriften 6:206-7; Negative Dialectics, 207; italics added.
9Gesammelte Schriften 6:393; Negative Dialectics, 400. According to Adorno, Christianity'
doctrine of the resurrection is its fundamental truth. He declares, "Christian dogmatics,
which the souls were conceived as awakening simultaneously with the resurrection of the
flesh, was metaphysically more consistent-more enlightened, if you will-than speculati
metaphysics, just as hope means a physical resurrection and feels defrauded of the best par
by its spiritualization" (Gesammelte Schriften 6:393; Negative Dialectics, 401). Adorno's
nai'vet6 with regard to Judaism is evident in his assumption that the doctrine of the resurrectio
of the body is specifically Christian. See, for instance, Gesammelte Schriften 6:119, 39
Negative Dialectics, 113, 401; for discussion of the varying significance of resurrection in
Bilderverbot meets body in Adorno's "inverse theology." As early as 193

Adorno selected this phrase, "inverse theology," to describe his and Walt
Benjamin's work.'o Viewed within the context of his inverse theology, th
Bilderverbot that Adorno deploys can be seen not to create and maintain a chasm
between this world and that of the divine or redemption, but rather to investig
the specific causes of this perceived chasm. In order to do this, Adorno inverts o
gaze; he does not simply prohibit pictures of the absolute, but would have us
semble pictures of this fallen world from the imagined perspective of the absolu
He is convinced that the divine and/or reconciliation cannot be simply an exten
sion of the status quo. This is not because either is, per se, "wholly other," bu
because the status quo is hellish. Consequently, Adorno pledges his allegiance t
the Bilderverbot in order to focus attention on the lived realities of "damaged lif
i.e., the antagonistic social relations and material deprivations that make a mock
ery of any and all depictions of reconciliation. Alternatively stated, Adorno's
"inverse theology" entails not the concealment of the divine, but the revelation
our fallen reality. Indeed, for Adorno, to insist that the absolute is unspeakab
and thus unknowable, prevents us from coming to terms with the precise featur
of reality that keep reconciliation beyond our reach.
This seeming inversion of more conventional readings of the Bilderverbot lend
itself to two emancipatory strategies. First, for Adorno, the Bilderverbot comp
a practice of negating the negative, i.e., of denouncing the injustices that constit
damaged life. Adorno's appropriation of the Bilderverbot, rather than entailing t
renunciation of discursive reason advocates its use in order to arrive at the speci
reasons why reconciliation remains an elusive reality. Furthermore, as I will dem
onstrate, Adorno suggests that this practice of determinate negation of the negativ
is the inverse image of redemption. Second, Adorno's professed adherence to th
Bilderverbot reflects his conviction that nothing can be contained or exhausted
a single description. The problem with identifying the absolute is the problem w
identifying any and all things: identification courts the danger that things are p
sumed to be what the ruling elite declares them to be. Consequently, Adorno expand
the applicability of the Bilderverbot in order to promote the interrogation of a
settled definitions. This is his intention when he refers to "the materialist longi
to grasp the thing" (as opposed to its naturalized or idolized definition). Adorn
then, is not renouncing contestable knowledge as inherently repressive; rather
is attempting to provide a theoretical (and theological) basis for political contestatio
Jewish thought, see, for instance, M. Greenberg, "Resurrection," Encyclopedia Judaica 1

(Jerusalem: Keter, 1971) 95-103.
'0Adorno maintained a friendship and close professional collaboration with the essayist
Walter Benjamin [d. 1940]. Although Benjamin was not a member of the Institute for Soc
Research, his work was supported by the ISR as a result of Adorno's efforts.
In what follows, I reconstruct Adorno's inverse theology. First, I present

Adorno's critique of modern appropriations of the Bilderverbot and negative the-
ology in order to rebut his critics and to distinguish the specificity of Adorno
appropriation of the image ban. As I will demonstrate, Adorno's critique of the
political liabilities of the Bilderverbot is more extensive and nuanced than is that
of his critics. Second, I piece together various clues to Adorno's inverse theology,
starting with the all-important distinction between determinate and abstract nega
tion and ending with Adomo's discussions of Kafka's "theology." Third, I illustrat
the significant contribution Adorno makes to contemporary formulations of an
emancipatory praxis by reexamining his "negative dialectics" and "new categori
cal imperative" in light of his inverse theology.
M Adorno's Critique of the Bilderverbot and Negative Theology

As noted above, Adorno explicitly endorses the Bilderverbot. However, Adorno
makes clear that he does so not because language is inherently repressive, but be-
cause he is convinced that the presumption that one may represent redemption
obscures its pragmatic character. Adorno cites a precedent for his position. He writes
Kant's doctrine, the elusive, abstract side of the intelligible character,

has a touch of the truth of the anti-image ban [Bilderverbot] which
post-Kantian philosophers -including Marx -extended to all concepts
of positivity. Like freedom, the intelligible character as a subjective
possibility is a thing that comes to be, not a thing that is. It would be a
betrayal to incorporate it into existence by description, even by the
most cautious description. . . . [W]e cannot discuss the intelligible
character as hovering abstractly, impotently above things in being; we
can talk of it only insofar as it keeps arising in reality, in the guilty
context of things as they are, brought about by that context."1
In this passage, Adomo explicitly rejects the characterization of the intelligible as

set over and above this world. Indeed, he insists that we can only talk of the intel
ligible within the context of damaged life--a significant point and one that I will
develop subsequently. Accordingly, the betrayal Adomo has in mind here con-
cerns not the maintenance of the transcendent character of the absolute, but the
maintenance of its imperative character. To offer a description of the analogou
"Kantian intelligible" or "freedom" (or the "Jewish theologoumenon" or the "righ
condition"), is to turn what should be regarded as yet to be fulfilled ethical impera
tives into nice-sounding slogans. In other words, the obligatory character of thes
"Gesammelte Schriften 6:293-94; Negative Dialectics, 299; italics added. Immanuel Kant
writes, "For the idea of freedom is inscrutable and thereby precludes all positive exhibitio
whatever .. " (Critique of Judgment [trans. Werner S. Pluhar; Indianapolis: Hackett, 198
135); italics in original.
ideas would be jettisoned in favor of religious reassurance and political quietude

But, for Adorno, this reassurance nullifies redemption's status as a task that is our
to perform. Hence, by refusing to posit the existence of these ideas, Adorno main
tains their binding character. Adorno asserts, "But beside the demand thus placed
on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly mat
ters."'2 According to Adorno, redemption is negated as a presumed reality (and, o
course, unreality); it is efficacious only in serving as a goad to thought and action
Nonetheless, Adorno's endorsement of the Bilderverbot is a qualified one.
Adorno points out--long before his critical successors -the political liabilities of
the image ban. Adorno observes that the Bilderverbot, which was to serve the end
of demythologization, had itself recoiled into myth. He writes:
Once upon a time the image ban [Bilderverbot] extended to pronounc-

ing the name; now the ban itself has in that form come to evoke
suspicions of superstition. The ban has been exacerbated: the mere
thought of hope is a transgression against it, an act of working against
it. Thus deeply embedded is the history of metaphysical truth-of the
truth that vainly denies history, which is progressive demythologiza-
tion. Yet demythologization devours itself, as the mythical gods liked
to devour their children. Leaving behind nothing but what merely is,
demythologization recoils into the mythus; for the mythus is nothing
else than the closed system of immanence of that which is.13
Adorno worries that the Bilderverbot stifles hope for something beyond the statu
quo. The modem exacerbation of the Bilderverbot means that there is to be no
peeking beyond the veil of "reality." As a result, the Bilderverbot, which was t
serve the ends of demythologization, i.e., the scrupulous avoidance of any identity
between the human realm and that of the divine (or redemption), ends up enthron
ing things as they are. The severing of all ties between this fallen world and it
reconciliation amounts to locking us into a closed system of ever-sameness. Hence
demythologization reverts to myth.
Indeed, Adomo argues that the renunciation of redemption that he sees in mod-
em appropriations of the Bilderverbot is tantamount to the renunciation of reason
Adorno makes this point in reference to Kant:
The authority of the Kantian concept of truth turned terroristic with the
ban [Verbot] on thinking the absolute. Irresistibly it drifts toward a ban
on all thinking [Denkverbot]. What the Kantian block [Block] projects
on truth is the self-maiming of reason, the mutilation reason inflicted
upon itself as a rite of initiation into its own scientific character. Hence,
the scantiness of what happens in Kant as cognition, compared with
12Gesammelte Schriften 4:281; Minima Moralia, 247.

'3Gesammelte Schriften 6:394; Negative Dialectics, 402; trans, altered.
the experience of the living. . . . Socially there is good reason to suspect

that block, the bar erected against the absolute, of being one with the
necessity to labor, which in reality keeps mankind under the same spell
[Bann] that Kant transfigured into a philosophy.14
According to Adorno, Kant's "critical" reason renounces the possibility of experi-

encing, and thus knowing, the absolute. Indeed, for Kant, the mark of "critical
reason is that it duly humbles itself and renounces all access to the "transcenden-
tal" ideas.'" Adorno sees in this renunciation the construction of science's
purportedly objective character. And he suspects that it also legitimizes the mod-
em rationalization of labor. In both cases, needs and desires are bracketed or ignored
in order to reproduce scientists who valorize supposedly disinterested inquiry and
workers who regard labor as an end in itself. Kant's dogmatic block upon the
experience of transcendental ideas does not acknowledge the context of damaged
life that preempts the possibility of such experience. Indeed, Kant's deployment of
the Bilderverbot shifts attention away from the social reality that makes the abso-
lute so elusive; this social reality consists of the multifaceted forms of suffering
and oppression to which Adorno refers again and again in his writings: poverty,
class exploitation, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and sexism. Consequently,
Kant's so-called critical reason transforms what, to Adorno, is a social-historical
inability to experience the absolute (given the context of damaged life), into an
invariant that constitutes the human condition. Kant serves up a version of reason
that justifies the continual postponement of gratification: redemption is beyond
our reach, not because of the injustices of this world, but because of the transcen-
dent nature of redemption. So-called "critical reason" is constituted by sacrificing
somatic satisfaction and by sticking to the well-worn paths of official knowledge;
according to Adorno, this type of reason is not rational.
'4Gesammelte Schriften 6:381; Negative Dialectics, 388-89. Adorno is a bit imprecise

here; Kant does not ban thought of the absolute, he prohibits theoretical knowledge of it. "But
though I cannot know, I can yet think freedom; that is to say the representation of it is at least
not self-contradictory, provided due account is taken of our critical distinction between the
two modes of representation, the sensible and the intellectual" (Critique of Pure Reason
[trans. Norman Kemp Smith; New York: St. Martin's, 1961] 28); italics in original. This
passage does not, however, reflect a simple oversight on Adorno's part. Adorno rejects Kant's
distinction between thinking and knowing. He does not agree that the sole qualification of a
thought's "thinkability" is its noncontradictoriness. He insists that thinkability requires a
reference; and thus, that there is no such thing as a pure concept of the understanding. For
Adorno, all our concepts are "contaminated" via our immersion in the world. Hence, for
Adorno, Kant's ban on knowledge of the absolute amounts to a ban on thinking the absolute.
"5Perhaps Adorno has in mind the following passage in Kant: "It is humiliating to human
reason that it achieves nothing in its pure employment, and indeed stands in need of a disci-
pline to check its extravagances, and to guard it against the deceptions which arise therefrom.
But, on the other hand, reason is reassured and gains self-confidence, on finding that it itself
can and must apply this discipline" (Critique of Pure Reason, 629).
Adorno's wariness of the ideological implications of the modem enforcemen

of the Bilderverbot receives further elaboration in his expressed misgivings r
garding negative theology. This elaboration is contained in his commentary o
Sch6nberg's biblical opera Moses und Aron. Adorno's essay was written in 196
three years before Negative Dialectics and six years before his death. According
Adomo, "The Jewish prohibition on making images ... forms the centre of th
text [Moses und Aron]."'6 Adorno points out that, indeed, Sch6nberg "heeded th
prohibition as few others have done." In this same essay, Adorno also refers t
Sch6nberg's "negative theology," about which he has reservations. He writes,
In Schoenberg's development . . . expression as negativity, as per-

sonal suffering, gets carried away [iiberschltigt sich] to the point
where it becomes negative theology [negativen Theologie], a conjur-
ing up [Beschwdrung] of that objective, all-embracing, conciliatory
meaning which is denied to an absolute subjectivity for which there
is no escape.17
In this passage, Adorno associates "negative theology" with the invocation of

reconciliation to which we are denied access. Adorno objects to negative theol
precisely because it legitimizes the renunciation of reconciliation. As this passag
shows, he consistently warns that modem appropriations of the Bilderverbot
negative theology) atrophy critical thinking and utopian longing, and thus und
write the continuation of "damaged life."
Adomo also critiques what he sees as negative (or dialectical) theology's tech
nique of accommodating the "wholly other" by renouncing discursive reason. T
critique is contained in his article on Kierkegaard's doctrine of love. Adorno refe
to Kierkegaard's theology as both "dialectical" and "negative."'8 Adorno tra
Kierkegaard's negative theology to the latter's insistence that Christianity is no
pure movement of thought but involves a "transcendence of the movement o
thought." Adorno also correlates negative theology with "the doctrine of the ra
cally different" in Kierkegaard's thought.19 On the one hand, Adorno approves
'6Gesammelte Schriften 16:458; Quasi una Fantasia, 230.

"Gesammelte Schriften 16:463; Quasi una Fantasia, 236; italics added.
" Adorno's exposure to dialectical (and perhaps negative) theology was most likely at t
behest of the theologian Paul Tillich, who supervised Adorno's Habilitationsschrift o
Kierkegaard. Some of Adorno's language betrays a familiarity with the theologian most close
associated with dialectical theology, Karl Barth; for instance, he refers on a number of o
sions to dialectical theology as a theology of "downright otherness." (Adorno [and Horkheime
make reference to Barth in Gesammelte Schriften, 3:203; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17
Adorno may also have had discussions about "negative theology" with Gershom Schol
who uses the term in his Origins of the Kabbalah (trans. Allan Arkush; Berlin: de Gruyt
1962) 441-42.
"Theodor W. Adorno, "On Kierkegaard's Doctrine of Love," Studies in Philosophy and
Social Science (formerly Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung) 8 (1939) 414.
Kierkegaard's negativity. Kierkegaard, Adorno maintains, "did not share

philosophy's optimism of being able to produce the Absolute from itself ... ; he
did not believe that a pure movement of thought could possibly lead up to Chris-
tianity." With these comments, Adorno aligns himself with Kierkegaard agains
Hegel. Adorno obviously respects Kierkegaard's rebuff of a reason that is thought
to generate the Absolute. On the other hand, Adorno argues that Kierkegaard's
rebuff of a generative reason veers toward an outright repudiation of reason. Adorno
argues that Kierkegaard's insistence on a "transcendence of thought" reflects "the
idea of a reason which attains the Absolute not by maintaining itself in complete
consistency of thinking, but by sacrificing itself ... ."20 For Adorno, thought that is
consistent recognizes that while it coats everything to which it attends, it does no
thereby constitute everything. Accordingly, he concludes that Kierkegaard's nega-
tive theology is irrational. It accommodates the otherness of the other (specifically
the divine) not by reckoning the resistance of the other in the midst of its inescap
ably mediated character, but by suspending, indeed renouncing, thought vis-a-vis
the divine. Adorno explicitly repudiates this strategy, writing elsewhere: "To b
insisted upon [is] ... uttering the unutterable. The plain contradictoriness of thi
challenge is that of philosophy itself, which is thereby qualified as dialectics."21
Adorno's analysis of modem appropriations of the Bilderverbot and negative
theology anticipates the critique of his successors in critical theory. Adorno no
tices that these appropriations cut a chasm between this world and its redemption
by legitimating the renunciation of reconciliation, and concomitantly, reason. So,
too, he explicitly repudiates a negative theology that would account for the differ
ence that is the absolute by surrendering discursive reason. Certainly his critics
have overlooked key passages with which they would find agreement; moreover
they have misread Adorno in insisting that his adherence to the Bilderverbot sig-
nals his renunciation of language in order to preserve the otherness of the other.
20Ibid., 414.
2"The passage in fuller detail reads, "To be insisted upon [is] ... to counter Wittgenstein by
uttering the unutterable. The plain contradictoriness of this challenge is that of philosophy itself
which is thereby qualified as dialectics. ... The work of philosophical self-reflection is unraveling
that paradox. Everything else is signification, secondhand construction, pre-philosophical activ-
ity" (Gesammelte Schriften 6:21; Negative Dialectics, 9-10; italics added). This is one of three
references to Wittgenstein's famous conclusion, "What we cannot speak about we must pass ove
in silence" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]; trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness
[London: Routledge, 1961] 74). The other references are: ". . . however well his [Wittgenstein's]
commandment of silence may go with a dogmatic, falsely resurrected metaphysics that can no
longer be distinguished from the wordless rapture of believers in Being" (Gesammelte Schriften
6:395; Negative Dialectics, 403); and "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
authoritarian authenticity, and which for that reason exerts a kind of intellectual mass suggestion
is utterly antiphilosophical" (Gesammelte Schriften 5:336; Hegel: Three Studies [trans. Shierr
Weber Nicholson; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993] 101).
Indeed, I claim that Adorno's critique of the political liabilities of the Bilderverbot
is more extensive and nuanced than is that of his successors in critical theory.
Adorno provides an explanation for the seeming chasm between damaged life and
reconciliation opened up by modern appropriations of the Bilderverbot. Adorno
argues that in these appropriations, unintelligibility becomes an attribute of the
unattainable, unthinkable absolute, rather than of the historical social reality that
defers gratification. Consequently, the impossibility of reconciliation receives theo-
logical warrant (reconciliation, per se, is unknowable and thus impossible), and
the concrete reasons for this historical impossibility go unheeded and unchecked.
I argue that Adorno's appropriation of the Bilderverbot would reverse this pro-
cess; Adorno would turn our gaze away from the so-called "Other" and focus it on
the historical social reality that begs close scrutiny and careful correction. The first
step in this reversal is Adorno's distinction between abstract and determinate ne-
gation. This distinction then sets the stage for introducing the constructive
theological move that reflects Adorno's materialist appropriation of the
Bilderverbot: his "inverse theology."
M Negating the Negative

In his early collaborative work Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno distinguishes
between abstract negation and determinate negation. In dloing so, he is relying on
Hegel. For Hegel, abstract negation is the process of expunging all content and
specificity from something; the process yields a flat indeterminacy that is indistin-
guishable from nothingness. Adorno follows Hegel in repudiating the notion of an
indeterminate absolute that is set over against the world as that which defies de-
scription. For both Hegel and Adorno, this form of negation reflects the idealization
of an impossible purity and actually contracts the absolute; for if the absolute is
thought to be threatened by contact with the material world, it appears finite and
static. In contrast, the process of determinate negation preserves content insofar as
something is defined in relation to, specifically in opposition to, certain character-
istics. The differences between Adorno and Hegel are, first, whereas Hegel
associates abstract negation with Enlightenment and Judaism, Adorno insists that
Judaism's deployment of the Bilderverbot entails determinate negation.22 Second,
Adorno wishes to exploit the critical, political power of determinate negation by
revealing and denouncing the injustices that constitute life on earth; however,
Adorno is careful to insist that this practice of critical negation is neither the ac-
complishment of reconciliation nor the guarantee that damaged life will be
redeemed.
Adorno (and Horkheimer) write as follows:
22G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1977) 50-51, 340, 346.
Jewish religion . . . associates hope only with the prohibition against

calling on what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite,
lies as truth. . . . Admittedly, the negation is not abstract. . . . [T]he
justness of the image is preserved in the faithful pursuit of its prohibition.
This pursuit, 'determinate negativity' does not receive from the sover-
eignty of the abstract concept any immunity against corrupting intuition,
as does skepticism, for which the false as well as the true count as noth-
ing. Determinate negation rejects the defective ideas of the absolute, the
idols, differently than does rigorism which confronts them with the Idea
that they cannot match up to. Dialectic, on the contrary, interprets every
image as writing. It shows how the admission of its falsity is to be read in
the lines of its features--a confession that deprives it of its power and
appropriates it for truth.23
For Adorno, a specific, Jewish, deployment of the Bilderverbot entails not an in

discriminate negation of any and all images of the divine, but rather a judiciou
analysis of and denunciation of that which would feign to pass for the absolute
This is the difference between abstract negation and determinate negation. The
former method consists in sloughing off all mediations of the absolute; conse-
quently it renders an indeterminate something that mocks rationality; and hence
Adorno associates it with skepticism. For Adorno, this method of negation does
not negate the specific material and historical configurations that make for dam
aged life--a negation that would require a critical reading and diagnosis of
contemporary life. Rather, it negates everything without distinction. Theologi
that espouse abstract negation offer a false view of redemption as consisting merel
in an escape from determinateness; they simply repudiate materiality and histor
in toto and fail to offer specific condemnations of fallen reality.
For Adorno, the Bilderverbot has critical power if, instead of promoting an
abstract divinity and unattainable redemption, it draws attention to the features o
damaged life that warrant condemnation. In other words, instead of veiling th
divinity, the Bilderverbot must unveil fallen reality. For Adorno the ethical an
political potential of the Bilderverbot is fully exploited only when it includes th
demonstration as to why various identifications of the absolute are insufficien
This is determinate, as opposed to abstract, negation. Moreover, Adorno argues
that the practice of determinate negation, which focuses attention on the precise
contours of damaged life, actually does provide a glimpse of that which lies be-
yond the status quo. Adorno avers, "The power of determinate negation is the onl
permissible figure [Chiffre] of the Other."24 The following quotation sheds light
on this claim:
23Gesammelte Schriften 3:40-41; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 23-24; trans. altered; italics added.
24Gesammelte Schriften 11:341; Theodor W. Adorno, "Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann,"
in Notes to Literature (ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen; 2 vols.; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991) 2:18.
No absolute can be expressed otherwise than in topics and categories

of immanence, although neither in its conditionality nor as its totality
is immanence to be deified [vergdttern]. According to its own concept,
metaphysics cannot be a deductive context of judgments about things
in being, neither can it be conceived after the mode of an absolute
otherness terribly defying thought. It would be possible only as a leg-
ible constellation of things in being. From those it would get the material
without which it would not be; it would not transfigure the existence
of its elements, however, but would bring them into a configuration in
which the elements unite to form a script.25
The attempt to express the absolute throws us back upon the resources at our dis-
posal. These resources, the topics and categories of this world, are not, however, to
be elevated to the status of the divine. Rather, their determinate negation is indica-
tive of the character of the absolute. This negation forms a script of the absolute; it
does not actually accomplish the transformation of society from damaged life to
reconciliation. Note that Adorno's reference to "script" in this passage from Nega-
tive Dialectics echoes the earlier passage from Dialectic ofEnlightenment, in which
he claims that dialectics interprets every image as writing. What Adorno is sug-
gesting is that this script, composed from the ruins of damaged life, contains a
code of the absolute. His point is that the ability to see and read damaged life, is, in
some sense, to have an inkling of the absolute.
What Adorno is getting at in this passage is further elucidated in his essay on
Sch6nberg's Moses und Aron. He writes,
Schoenberg's theological turn would negate the negation which he detects
in his historical context. The element of truth in this is that by defining
itself as negative, his approach thereby assumes positivity. But its exist-
ence is not guaranteed through such postulation. It is a reflex toward a
false reality, an inverted reflection of that reality in consciousness; it does
not exist in and for itself. As a chimera it remains marked by the false.
This is no less evident in the positive language of music than in the leap
from negative to positive theology.26
Adorno reminds us in this passage that to be opposed to something necessarily

entails a positing. But for Adorno, the positivity that emerges from Sch6nberg's
thoroughgoing negativity cannot claim the status of "reality"; it is, instead, a "chi-
mera." It is an "inverted" reflection of the false reality toward which the protest or
denunciation is directed; indeed it is itself "contaminated" by the false reality to
which it opposes itself. Hence, being able to see that things should not be as they
are does not thereby allow one to produce a picture of the way things should be or
will be. Adorno declares: "But the fallacy is the direct elevation of negativity, the
25Gesammelte Schriften 6.399; Negative Dialectics, 407; italics added.

26Gesammelte Schriften 16.463; Quasi una Fantasia, 236.
critique of what merely is, into positivity as if the insufficiency of what is mi

guarantee that what is will be rid of that insufficiency. Even in extremis, a neg
negative is not a positive."27 To elevate negativity into an existing positive is
pretend that the longed-for reconciliation is an extension of the status quo; alt
nately stated, it is to mistake critical insight for the achievement of liv
reconciliation. As noted earlier, Adorno's concern here is that one will conceal
reality of damaged life by anticipating, indeed presupposing, its self-correctio
I have argued that Adorno repudiates any deployment of the Bilderverbot th
entails the renunciation of redemption (which, for him, is equivalent to the ren
ciation of reason) as well as the theological legitimation of this renunciation (where
the absolute, per se, is scripted as unknowable). Adorno's own deployment wo
reveal the features of damaged life that preempt redemption, and furthermore
doing so, indicate something determinate about that redemption, without ther
presuming its imminent arrival. As stated above, Adorno insists, "The power
determinate negation is the only permissible figure [Chiffre] of the Other."28 Aga
27Gesammelte Schriften 6:385; Negative Dialectics, 393; italics added. Adorno's locat
a positivity within negativity calls to mind Edward Schillebeeckx's description of "nega
contrast experiences." Schillebeeckx writes, "Ideas and expectations of salvation and hum
happiness are invariably projected from within concrete experience and the pondered fac
calamity, pain, misery and alienation -from within negative experiences accumulated thro
centuries of affliction" (Jesus: An Experiment in Christology [trans. Hubert Hoskins; N
York: Seabury Press, 1979] 19). For Schillebeeckx, the cognitive value of negative cont
experiences is primarily critical. They call into question contemplative knowledge that cl
to provide a total perception or theoretically unified system (and thus declares that recon
ation is accomplished); they also challenge scientific technological knowledge that posits
human as the controlling subject of nature and history. I am quite certain that Adorno w
agree with Schillebeeckx's contention that the notion of salvation comes to life only in
context of evil and that as there can be no theory of evil, "the only adequate response [to ev
is via a practical exercise of resistance to evil," ibid., 620. Adorno would dispute, howev
Schillebeeckx's depiction of the vision of damaged life as ordinary; Schillebeeckx opens
large volume on Christology with the remark, "We have all seen him [the crippled man],
we not?" For Adorno, we have not all seen him. Adorno would also object to Schillebeeck
tendency to universalize, whether it be human suffering or a "universal meaning yet to com
or authentic human being (humanum), ibid., 622. Adorno would concur with Schillebeec
sense of uncertainty as to the success of the better future that is obliquely indicated in n
tivity. Nonetheless, Schillebeeckx shores up this uncertainty with a proclamation that m
his distance from Adorno: "[T]he Father is greater than all our suffering and grief and grea
than our inability to experience the deepest reality as in the end a trustworthy gift." F
declarations as to the uncertainty of the longed-for utopia see ibid., 620, 621, 623, and
quoted sentence see 625. Related to this is Schillebeeckx's contention that the univers
significance of Jesus consists in the question as to the ultimate sense or nonsense of hist
as evoked by negative contrast experiences; Jesus reassures humans as to the ultimate s
of history. Clearly this is not how Adorno sees Jesus; Adorno foregoes the possibilit
finding that reassuring ultimate sense.
28Gesammelte Schriften 11:341; "Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann," 2:18.
Adorno insists this negation is not to be mistaken for the accomplishment of r

demption. Nonetheless, Adorno's specific deployment of the Bilderverbot is clear
intended to reveal both the precise features of damaged life as well as our proxi
ity to redemption. Adorno dismisses outright description of the absolute (posit
theology) and repudiates the prohibition upon such description based on the pu
portedly "wholly other" character of the absolute (negative theology). W
theological space is left for Adorno to inhabit?
Adorno struggles to convey his theological inclination in a 1941 letter to M
Horkheimer. He confides,
I have a weak, infinitely weak, feeling that it is still possible to think

the secret, but I am honestly not yet in a position today to formulate
the way in which it might be possible. The premise that theology is
shrinking and will soon become invisible is one motif, while another is
the conviction that, from the most central point of view, there is no
difference between theology's relation to the negative and its relation
to the positive .... But above all I think that everything we experience
as true-not blindly, but as a conceptual impulse-and what presents
itself to us as the index sui et falsi, only conveys this light as a reflec-
tion of that other light.29
These confidential comments to Horkheimer suggest that Adorno is groping

ward an alternative to either negative (or dialectical) or positive theology. The
comments also suggest that, for Adorno, the truth of theology ultimately resides
whether it conveys "that other light," i.e., the light of redemption. Adorno's d
scription of the inverted image, his reference to the "leap from negative to positiv
theology" in his analysis of Sch6nberg's theological turn, and his above co
ments to Horkheimer regarding theology's relation to the negative and the posit
is, I argue, connected to Adorno's early choice of the designation "inverse the
ogy" in order to describe his and Walter Benjamin's projects.30 In choosing th
phrase, Adorno seems to be looking to avoid the extremes that he associates wit
29Adorno, letter to Horkheimer, 4 September 1941; quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfu
School: Its History, Theories and Significance (trans. Michael Robertson; Cambridge, Engla
Polity Press, 1994; and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 503.
300ne author who consistently refers to Adorno's "inverse" theology is Ren6 Buchholz; s
his Zwischen Mythos und Bilderverbot: Die Philosophie Adornos als AnstoJ3 zu einer kritisch
Fundamental Theologie in Kontext der spdten Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Peter La
1991). For Buchholz, "inverse theology" signifies Adorno's retaining theological categorie
but "shrouding them in black," his surrendering access to revelation, and his adoptin
micrological perspective in which metaphysical categories migrate into history (136). Buchho
also suggests a connection between materialism and the Bilderverbot in Adorno's theolog
(141). Buchholz does not, however, systematically explore the significance of "inversion"
Adorno's corpus; nor does he discuss Adorno's critical remarks regarding the Bilderverb
and negative theology; nor does he connect his reading with the discussions of Ador
"negative theology."
adhering to either a positive or a negative theology. Positive theology is mythic

the extent to which it allows for a continuity between the absolute and the hum
and thus sanctions the horrors which constitute damaged life. Negative theolog
veers off into myth in renouncing discursive reason and in conjuring a reconci
tion that must be denied. Adorno's inverse theology avoids these pitfalls
deploying a materialist reading of the Bilderverbot: To negate the negativity th
is damaged life is not to thereby posit redemption; nonetheless, the unblinki
uncompromising vision of damaged life is a kind of photographic negative of t
messianic light.
i Inverse Theology
In 1934, in a letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno floated an unprecedented combi
tion of terms. He suggested that his and Walter Benjamin's projects were instan
of "inverse theology." In this same letter, Adomo responds to Benjamin's essay
the writer Franz Kafka (d. 1924). Adorno begins his response by describing a ph
tograph that he associates with Kafka and which he thinks captures Benjamin
analysis. Adorno says it is a photograph of "earthly life from the perspective of
redeemed." The photograph is of a comer of black fabric. It suggests a "dreadfu
and "displaced" point of view - an effect achieved, Adorno writes, by the "obliqu
location of the camera. Adorno goes on to remark that this image captures the p
tion of theology in their work. He then claims that the image of theology into wh
he gladly sees their [Adorno's and Benjamin's] thought vanishing [verschwind
may be called an "inverse" theology. Adorno rebuts any "natural" or "supernatur
interpretation of this theology, preferring instead to see it as a type of "writing." B
the writing that Adorno associates with inverse theology is not straightforward
goes on to refer to "the encrypted character of our theology."31
Adorno does provide some clues by which one might crack the code of his an
Benjamin's "inverse theology." First, there is Adorno's description of the pho
graph that portrays a "dreadful" or "displaced" viewpoint, which, he argues, reflect
"earthly life from the perspective of the redeemed." This idea of seeing earthly
from the perspective of the redeemed reappears in Adorno's text Minima Mora
Reflections from Damaged Life, published seventeen years later (1954). Adorn
writes, "Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, rev
it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one d
in the messianic light."32 If one is able to portray just how "damaged" life is, t
fact intimates that one has caught a glimmer of the messianic light. Hence, t
perspective of negativity is the inverted image projected by the light of redemptio
3 1Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin Briefwechsel 1928-1940 (ed. Henri Lonitz; Frank
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), Adorno to Benjamin 17 December 1934, Berlin, 90-91
32Gesammelte Schriften 4:281; Minima Moralia, 247; italics added; trans. altered.
Second, he insists that the writing that is projected by this inverted image is a
"prolegomenon" for society. Adorno's use of the term "prolegomenon" suggests
that his inverse theology should be understood as forward-looking and potentially
transformative. Indeed, he writes, "[C]onsummate negativity, once squarely faced
explodes into the mirror writing of its opposite."33 The catastrophic image yielded
by consummate negativity contains a code (the mirror or inverse writing) of re-
demption. This echoes Adorno's point about dialectics interpreting every image as
writing and his idea for a metaphysics as a "legible constellation of things in be-
ing" that would unite to form a script.34 This script may not amount to a blueprint
for utopia, but Adorno is apparently willing to refer to this encrypted message as
"prolegomenon" to a new reality. The critical negation of damaged life is, per-
haps, a prelude to a new life.
The most important clues for understanding Adorno's "inverse" theology are
contained, however, in Adorno's reconstruction of Kafka's theology. Adorno quali
fies his reference to Kafka's theology by adding "if one can speak of such at all1."3
In light of the comments I have reproduced from both his letters and his various
texts, it is difficult not to see Adorno's descriptions of Kafka's theology as indica-
tive of his own theological predilections.
Adorno calls Kafka's artistic vision "hell seen from the perspective of salva-
tion."36 This description echoes both his reference to the photograph that remind
him of Kafka (in which dreadful earthly life is seen from the perspective of the
redeemed) and his insistence that perspectives be fashioned that reveal the earth a
it will appear in the messianic light, i.e., as indigent and distorted. He elaborate
upon Kafka's inverted vision as follows:
Kafka's artistic alienation, the means by which objective estrangement is

made visible, receives its legitimation from the work's inner substance. His
writing feigns a standpoint from which creation appears as lacerated and
mutilated as it itself conceives hell to be. . . . The light source which shows
the world's crevices to be infernal is the optimal one.37
33Ibid.; trans. altered. The English text translates Spiegelschrift as "mirror image." The
translation of zusammenschieJft as "delineate" does not reflect the complexity of this word. It
primary meaning is to shoot up or riddle with bullets, to pound to pieces (artillery) or to shatte
(crystal), but it also means "come together," as of various colors.
34See n. 25.
35Gesammelte Schriften 10:283; idem, Prisms, 268. Michael L6wy asserts, "Kafka's 'the-
ology'-if we can use that word-is therefore negative, in the precise sense that its content
is God's non-presence in the world and the lack of redemption for mankind." Redemption an
Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe [trans. Hope Heaney; Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1992] 81. As I will demonstrate, this reading of Kafka's theology differs
from that of Adorno.
36Gesammelte Schriften 10:284; Prisms, 269.
37Ibid.
The "optimal light source," surely a reference to the light of redemption, does no
grant a vision of redemption; rather it reveals the world as one of suffering. "Opt
mal" light grants a vision of the "infernal." We see the world as hell; we do not
countenance salvation, per se.38 According to Adorno's reading of Kafka, the stand
point of a resolute negativity is indistinguishable from the perspective of
salvation-both reveal the world as hell. But because the vision of resolute nega-
tivity is at the same time the perspective of salvation, it is a source of hope.
Adorno asserts of Kafka: "To include him among the pessimists, the existen-
tialists of despair, is as misguided as to make him a prophet of salvation."39 Kafka'
vision of the world as hell ought not lead to despair and pessimism. His terrible
vision is, according to Adorno, the inverted reflection of the light of redemption
The ability to see just how damaged life is provides a glimmer of the possibility
that things might be otherwise. At the same time, Kafka is no prophet of salvation
Kafka does not assure us that we will be saved. He cannot and does not tell us what
salvation looks like. The challenge he presents to us is whether we can see what he
sees and how we will respond to such a vision of the world.
In addition to the inverse relation between infernal world and redemptive light,
Adorno points out two further inversions in Kafka's so-called theology. Kafka's
vision entails an inversion of theology. Adorno writes,
But what for dialectical theology is light and shadow is reversed. The
absolute does not turn its absurd side to the finite creature-a doctrine
which already in Kierkegaard leads to things much more vexing than
mere paradox and which in Kafka would have amounted to the en-
throning of madness. Rather, the world is revealed to be as absurd as it
would be for the intellectus archetypus. The middle realm of the finite
and the contingent become infernal to the eye of the artificial angel
[kiinstlichen Engelsaugen].40
Here again, Adorno rebuts the theological doctrine of the unknowable divine. For
dialectical (and negative) theology, the divine must remain shrouded in darkness,
must remain unknowable or "absurd," lest it be reduced to the dimensions of the
finite and contingent. In the case of "inverse" theology, subject and object are
reversed: it is the world which appears "absurd" from the supposed standpoint of
the divine. "Inverse" here is related to negative as in a photographic negative, in
which what is light and dark is the reverse of its developed image. Hence, inverse
38The epigraph to Adorno's essay, "The Essay as Form," makes a similar point. It is
borrowed from Goethe's Pandora; it reads: "Destined to see what is illuminated, not the
light," Gesammelte Schriften 11:9; Notes to Literature 1:3.
39Gesammelte Schriften 10:284; Prisms, 269.
40Gesammelte Schriften 10:284; Prisms, 269. In this same text, Adorno writes that Kafka is the
accuser and not the adherent of dialectical theology. Kafka, Adorno insists, reveals how the "purified
faith" is really "impure," its "demythologizing appear[ing] as demonology," Gesammelte Schriften
10:283; Prisms, 268.
theology entails a reversal of theology. It is not a logos about theos, but a logos
the world, as delivered by an imagined theos. Inverse theology "feigns" the div
or angelic standpoint in order to see the fallenness of the world. The point is not
veil the absolute, but to unveil a broken world.
Kafka's theology also entails an inversion of historical standpoint. The vision
of damaged life is not recorded in official histories; it can only be seen when o
adopts the perspective of the oppressed. Accordingly, Kafka sides not with th
winners who draft history but with its forgotten victims. Adorno describes
inversion thus:
In the middle ages, Jews were tortured and executed 'perversely'--i.e.,

inversely; as early as Tacitus [d. 117? C.E.], their religion was branded
as perverse in a famous passage. Offenders were hung head down.
Kafka, the land-surveyor, photographs the earth's surface just as it
must have appeared to these victims during the endless hours of their
dying. It is for nothing less than such unmitigated torture that the
perspective of redemption presents itself to him.41
Again, the standpoint involves an inversion: the world is upside down. It is

the world seen from the perspective of those who are declared perverse or as
inverting the world's order. Rather than identifying with the vision of victors,
for whom the world is basked in a positive light, the vision of inverse theol-
ogy is the sore sight from the throbbing eyes of Jews executed in the name of
the Roman Empire. If the world is not seen as "lacerated and mutilated," or as
topsy-turvy, but rather as paradisal, one may be sure that the light which af-
fords this vision is not that of redemption, nor is it that of the oppressed.
Adorno's "inverse theology" takes the perspective not of triumphant and
persecutorial Christianity, but of its Jewish victims.
There is, in addition to his comments on Kafka, another instance in Adorno's
work that reflects the motif of inversion and its connection to his materialist com-
mitments. If Marx thought of his own work as an inversion of Hegel, Adorno's

work is, in turn, a theological inversion of Marx. According to Marx, religion (or
theology) directs human energies away from the earth, it prioritizes spiritual well-
being over material well-being.42 Consequently, it is ideological, i.e., it contributes
4 Gesammelte Schriften 10:284; Prisms, 269.

42Marx uses metaphors of inversion throughout his work: "If in the whole of ideology men and
their relations appear upside down as in a camera obscura this is due as much to their historical
life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina is due to their immediate physical life-process.
In direct opposition to German philosophy, which comes down from heaven to earth, here there
is ascension from earth to heaven" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology in Karl
Marx: Selected Writings [ed. David McLellan; New York: Oxford University Press, 1977] 164).
And again, "This state, this society produces religion's inverted attitude to the world, because they
are an inverted world themselves" ("Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," in Karl Marx:
Selected Writings, 63).
to continuing oppression and mystifies the causes of this oppression. Marx w

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the deman
their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their conditio
demand to give up a condition that requires illusion."43 For Marx, then, mat
ism represents the inversion of the inverted picture presented by theology.
Although Adorno sees affinities between Marx's dialectical materialism a
his and Benjamin's method, he also proclaims a convergence between mater
ism and theology where Marx sees contradiction.44 Adorno's statement in
regard bears repeating: "At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree
theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire ut
foreign to idealism, the realm of absolute spirit."45 In addition, Adorno claim
the "great religious traditions" have always insisted upon material well-bei
For him, Marx's repudiation of religion is an indication of how his materi
retains a subject-centered identity thinking, and thus, for Adorno, is not as ma
alistic as it purports to be. Marx writes, "Religion is only the illusory sun w
revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself."47 Ado
materialism repudiates the idea of "man" revolving around himself. Adorno w
of Marx: "He thus underwrote something as arch-bourgeois [Urbiirgerliche
the program of an absolute control of nature. What is felt here is the effort to
things unlike the subject and make them like the subject-the real model o
principle of identity, which dialectical materialism disavows as such."48
Contra Marx, Adorno insists upon the "preponderance" of "objects" (includ
"nature")- a preponderance that preempts Marx's subject-centered vision. Ad
writes, "It is by passing to the object's preponderance that dialectics is rend
materialistic.'"49 Adorno is convinced that without this preponderance, the wor
43"Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 64.

44Adorno urges in an early letter to Benjamin that "[a] restitution of theology, or better
a radicalization of the dialectic into the glowing center of theology [den theologischen Glut
would at the same time have to mean the utmost intensification of the social-dialect
indeed economic, motifs" (Adorno to Benjamin, Hornberg, Black Forest, 2 August
Adorno Benjamin Briefwechsel, 143). In an earlier letter, Adorno urges Benjamin to "[i
the objections of that Brechtian atheism, for under no circumstances do we wish to pres
theology but to redeem it as inverse theology .... [F]ull categorial depth must be achi
without sparing [ausgespart] theology; but then I also believe that we help in this de
level of Marxist theory all the more, the less we submissively appropriate [that theor
ourselves externally; that here the 'aesthetic' will intervene into reality with incompa
more revolutionary depth than the theory of class brought in as a deus ex machina" (A
to Benjamin, Merton College, Oxford, 6 November 1934; Adorno Benjamin Briefwechse
45Gesammelte Schriften 6:207; Negative Dialectics, 207.
46See, for instance, Gesammelte Schriften 6:393; Negative Dialectics, 401.
47"Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 64.
regarded as simply a projection of the human (more specifically, of those human

with the requisite status to name reality); consequently, in Adorno's estimation
particularity and difference are suppressed, if not destroyed. Adorno's theologi-
cal-materialist imperative of the "resurrection of the body" demands that all thin
and persons be recognized in their particularity, along with, and apart from, the
mediation at the hands of human interpreters.
Based on my reconstruction of Adorno's somewhat cryptic references to invers
theology, his writings on Kafka, and his attempt to appropriate and radicalize el
ments from Marx, I argue that Adorno's theological appropriation of the Bilderverb
inverts the repudiation of materiality and history that he locates in modem appr
priations of the Bilderverbot and dialectical and negative theology. Adorno doe
not conjure a divinity or redemption that lies beyond materiality and history. Fo
him, the idea of redemption compels us to immerse ourselves in the vulnerabl
tissues and sordid scenes of a history lit by the torch of an angelic artist. Adorno ca
find no bridge from damaged life to redemption that does not lead straight int
history's cavities of death, suffering, and oppression. Adorno will not leave history'
victims in order to scout out a passage that leads away from them and toward t
promised land. Indeed, he is convinced that it is only by abiding with those w
unjustly suffer that one might catch a glimpse of the light of redemption.
In light of his nuanced critique of modern appropriations of the Bilderverbot
and of his consequent critical materialist appropriation of the Bilderverbot, i.e
his inverse theology, I argue that Adorno's project is not subject to the criticism
of Habermas, Wellmer, and others. I see no evidence that Adorno's allegiance t
the Bilderverbot entails his renunciation of either contestable knowledge
reconciliation. Rather, Adorno seeks to deploy the Bilderverbot in order to focu
attention on the suffering and oppression that constitute "damaged life." The re
maining question is, then, whether Adorno's "inverse theology" offers any mean
of intervening in and altering the course of damaged life. In my estimation, Adorno
offers at least two interventionist strategies, both of which betray his fidelity t
the Bilderverbot and the resurrection. The first is his "negative dialectics" and
the second is his formulation of a "new categorical imperative." Whereas much
has been written on the former, I am convinced that the former ought to be under
stood within the framework of Adorno's materialist appropriation of t
Bilderverbot, i.e., his inverse theology." In the remainder of this essay, I sketc
the relevant contours of Adorno's negative dialectics and categorical imperativ
in order to elaborate and extend my reading of his particular appropriation of th
Bilderverbot, and to suggest his relevance for contemporary formulations of a
emancipatory praxis.
5ODrucilla Cornell, for instance, writes about the ethical significance of negative dialectics
in her book, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992) 13-38.
E Negative Dialectics
In order to demonstrate how Adorno's negative dialectics is related to his appro
priation of the Bilderverbot and how it constitutes a strategy for democratic
contestation, I return to the passage I quoted above in support of my contentio
that Adorno proffers a materialist rereading of the Bilderverbot. He writes,
A consciousness interpolating images, a third element, between itself and

that which it thinks would unwittingly reproduce idealism. A body of
ideas would substitute for the object of cognition. . . . The materialist
longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of
images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with
the theological ban on images.51
Here Adorno envisions the Bilderverbot as a constant reminder that a given refe
ent (divine or mundane) must never be reduced to our representations of it; instea
we must be ever mindful of the fact that the referent resists our identificatory
reach. This passage makes it clear that Adorno sees the Bilderverbot not just as
divine commandment prohibiting depiction of the divine, but also as a rebuke
the identifying thrust of discursive reason (epitomized by idealism). Moreover,
this rebuke of an identificatory discursive reason instantiates his materialist com
mitments. According to Adorno, "[T]he critique of identity is a groping for [taste
nach] the preponderance [Priponderanz] of the object."52 And again: "It is b
passing to the object's preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic."5
For Adorno, the epistemological endeavor to attend to the particularity of per-
sons and things is essential to a materialist transformation of society. For in h
estimation, "[D]omination in the conceptual sphere, is raised up on the basis of
actual domination."54
Adorno feels compelled to make recourse to the Bilderverbot because, in his
estimation, one of the chief characteristics of damaged life is the repressive rule of
identity thinking. Adorno does not think that language, per se, is repressive. Rather,
as a result of the presumption that referents are identical to their concepts, linguis-
tic mediation, albeit indispensable, functions in a repressive fashion. For Adorno,
the repressive hierarchical relation in which words subsume referents without re-
mainder is most obviously reflected in idealism, but is also mirrored in concomitant
hierarchies of reason and materiality, male and female, capital and labor, etc., in
which the second member of the binary is assumed to be a mere extension of, and
hence, at the disposal of, the first. He wishes to challenge the reduction of persons
and things to the definitions assigned them by the ruling elite. Therefore, Adorno
51Gesammelte Schriften 6:206-7; Negative Dialetics, 207.

54Gesammelte Schriften 3:29-30; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 14.
distributes the privilege of resisting representation, i.e., the Bilderverbot, to

referents. No longer the purview of the divine, Adorno casts this lifesaving buf
to all that is at risk of being summoned and named by the ruling elite.
Adorno's program for redistributing the "privilege" of the Bilderverbot is hi
"negative dialectics." Negative dialectics proceeds from a tenacious insistence o
an ineluctable gap between concepts and referents. Adorno writes, "The name
dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their co
cepts without leaving a remainder.""55 In other words, although Adorno insis
that everything is conceptually mediated, he also resolutely insists that concep
fail to capture referents. Adorno wishes to accommodate the particularity of thing
his negative dialectics does so by testifying to the excessive character of thing
an excess that defies conceptual ordination.
Adorno's insistence upon giving way to, indeed resurrecting, difference and
particularity is both an ethical and political gesture. Pace Habermas, Adorno doe
not renounce contestable knowledge; rather he exploits the Bilderverbot in ord
to resist the rule of identity thinking and provide a theoretical basis for politi
contestation. According to Adorno, the failure of concepts to capture and conta
their referents provides the necessary maneuvering room by which to contest h
gemonic and naturalized definitions and the hierarchical arrangements that flo
from them. Adorno writes, "The determinableflaw in every concept makes it n
essary to cite others; this is the font of the only [conceptual] constellations wh
inherited some of the hope of the name." (For a name is particular, whereas a
concept is not.)56 Flaw is transformed into font; a miscarriage turns fruitful.
other words, for Adorno, the failure of any given concept to grab hold is wh
prompts the generation of several interpretive possibilities, i.e., a conceptual "co
stellation." If conceptual determination threatens difference, the solution is not
renounce language but to exploit it. Adorno's strategy here is analogous to that
Judith Butler when she writes, "The instability in all discursive fixing is the pro
ise of a teleologically unconstrained futurity for the political signifier. In this sens
the failure of any ideological formation to establish itself as necessary is part of
democratic promise.""' Adorno's insistence that discursive reason is bound to
to determine referents opens up significations to new interpretations and psyc
investments. Consequently, Adorno's negative dialectics helps to widen and le
the playing field; according to the rules of negative dialectics no group can la
claim to the meaning or range of a given term. Even if such meanings were arri
at by consensus, Adorno would insist that the democratic value of this consens
55Gesammelte Schriften 6:16-17; Negative Dialectics, 5. "Objectively, dialectics mea

to break the compulsion to achieve identity" (Gesammelte Schriften 6:159; Negative D
lectics, 157).
56Gesammelte Schriften 6:62; Negative Dialectics, 53; italics added.
57Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993) 195.
is not universal agreement (the unforced achievement of which he doubts), but it

instability and susceptibility to challenge.
In addition to the deconstructive, and eminently democratic, strategy of nega-
tive dialectics, Adorno constructs a "new categorical imperative." This imperative
heeds the directive of the Bilderverbot by refraining from visions of the good lif
Nonetheless, it reflects Adorno's materialist strategy of negating the negative tha
is damaged life. Moreover, it reflects the imperative of a bodily resurrection inso
far as it inverts the conventional logic of categorical imperatives: it is authorized
not by a version of formal reason but by a somatic solidarity with sufferers, and
furthermore, it makes imperative the elimination of this suffering.
M The New Categorical Imperative

Adorno's categorical imperative may be read as an inversion of Kantian morality.
Kant's categorical imperative can be summarized as follows: act only according to
a maxim that could qualify as a universal law. Kant's categorical imperative is
premised upon a version of reason as unencumbered by historical and material
contingencies. Adorno's categorical imperative would immerse us in such contin
gencies; his is premised upon a somatic reaction to the suffering of others. Adorn
describes his "new" categorical imperative as follows:
A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree

humankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz
will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we
want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given
one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would
be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of
the moral addendum-bodily because it is now the practical abhor-
rence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed.
... It is in the unvarnished [ungeschminkt] materialistic motive only
that morality survives. The course of history forces materialism upon
metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism.58
Adorno intends his imperative to have the same binding force as Kant's imperative
Both he and Kant portray their imperative as "categorical," i.e., absolute and without
qualification. Although intended to be as binding as that of Kant, Adorno's "cat
egorical imperative" is not qualified by a "reason" that is purportedly ahistorical an
immaterial. His categorical imperative is derived from the historical event itself, i.e.,
the Holocaust, which evokes in him an abhorrence of the unbearable agony to whic
its victims were exposed. In asserting that the course of history forces materialism
upon metaphysics, Adorno suggests that morality can only be rescued if it recon
nects with empathy, abhorrence, and other materialist vehicles of solidarity. A "reason
that is purged of all ties to emotion or solidarity, is, in Adorno's estimation, an insuf
ficient barrier to such crimes as the Holocaust. In other words, such a reason is
irrational. Here again, as in the case of his critique of the so-called mature reason tha
embraces the renunciatory character of the Bilderverbot, Adorno refuses to abide by
the binary of the rational and the material. Morality, for Adorno, is a "dirty" affair-
it cannot be cordoned off from the specific historical configurations and particula
material arrangements and interests that constitute damaged life.
Indeed, what Adorno insists upon in his formulation of negative categorical
imperatives is the centrality of the affective/materialist element. Here, Adorn
echoes Hegel's critique of Kant's formalism.59 For Hegel, as for Adorno, morality
or more accurately ethical life, cannot be separated from sensuality; it is inextrica
bly bound up with content, with desires, aims, and moreover, with historical and
material arrangements. Adorno is emphatic that thinking is indissoluble from th
body and that this somatic element is what "makes knowledge move"; it is what
lends morality its imperative aspect. Adorno observes, "The physical moment tell
our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. Wo
speaks: 'Go.' Hence, the convergence of specific materialism with criticism, with
social change in practice."60 For Adorno, the will to protect other humans from
harm and to seek justice on their behalf is, then, motivated not by rationalization
but by a visceral form of solidarity. Hence, rather than seeking to expunge the
bodily in order to arrive at a "universal reason," we should seek to activate thos
feelings which reflect our lived connection to others.
Moreover, Adorno is primarily concerned with the accomplishment of acts of
solidarity and rescue, and not with their justification. He dismisses the notion of
good that is not externalized in action. This externalization requires an act of will-
which is itself constituted by impulse and drive. Adorno declares:
No man should be tortured; there should be no concentration camps ...

The lines are true as an impulse, as a reaction to the news that torture
is going on somewhere. They must not be rationalized; as an abstract
principle they would fall promptly into the bad infinities of derivation
and validity. We criticize morality by criticizing the extension of the
logic of consistency to the conduct of men; this is where the stringent
logic of consistency becomes an organ of unfreedom. The impulse-
naked physical fear, and the sense of solidarity with what Brecht called
'tormentable bodies' -is immanent in moral conduct and would be
denied in attempts at ruthless rationalization. What is most urgent would

become contemplative again, mocking its own urgency.61
59G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox; Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1952) 89-90.
60Gesammelte Schriften 6:203, 203; Negative Dialectics, 203, 203.
61Gesammelte Schriften 6:281-82; Negative Dialectics, 285-86; italics added.
Since Adorno refuses to uncouple morality from motivation and action, he has
patience for what he refers to as "attempts at ruthless justification.'"62 According
Adorno, such attempts dilute the imperative quality of categorical imperatives
believes one may give reasons for acting morally, but he does not think that mo
ity can ever be rationally justified. To attempt to supply such reasons involves
in an infinite regress of reasons as to why we should behave morally, since no
are finally convincing -hence, Adorno's reference to the "bad infinities of deri
tion and validity."63 Moreover, such justification ends up reducing morality
logic of consistency. A morality reduced to abstract considerations of consisten
suppresses both the solidarity and urgency that activate moral behavior.
Adorno's moral philosophy does not amount to a repudiation of reason; it her
alds, rather, a reinvigoration of reason -reason empowered by affectivity, histo
and materiality. For Adorno, the true measure of morality does not consist in rati
nal argumentation that is premised upon consistency and universality.64 The f
measure of morality includes feelings of outrage as well as the careful discer
ment of how it is that moral atrocities continue unabated, warranting neither noti
nor calls for intervention. As Adorno puts it: "What has not been severed liv
solely in the extremes, in a spontaneously stirring impatience with argumentati
in the unwillingness to let the horror go on, and in the theoretical discernmen
unterrorized by commands, that shows us why the horror goes on anyway, a
infinitum."65 Adorno is aware that there may be tensions between the somatic
62It is not clear whom Adorno has in mind here.

63Adorno notes that it is no more difficult to supply reasons for his categorical imperative
than it is for Kant's. Indeed, for Kant, the attempt to give reasons for that which would qualify
as a categorical imperative looks suspiciously like utilitarianism. Such an attempt introduces
considerations that corrupt the formal character which alone constitutes the rationality of the
moral law. If imperatives are contingent upon certain considerations and societal arrange-
ments, they lose their categorical quality. Kant's categorical imperatives reflect the "fact" of
pure reason.
64This is not to say that Adorno does not appreciate the role of reason in morality. He
writes, "True practice, the totality of acts that would satisfy the idea of freedom, does indeed
require full theoretical consciousness. In decisionism, which strikes out reason in the passage
to the act, the act is delivered to the automatism of dominion: the unreflected freedom to which
it presumes comes to serve total unfreedom. We have been taught this lesson by Hitler's Reich
and its union of decisionism and social Darwinism, the affirmative extension of natural cau-
sality. But practice also needs something else, something physical which consciousness does
not exhaust, something conveyed to reason and qualitatively different from it. The two mo-
ments are by no means separately experienced; but philosophical analysis has tailored the
phenomenon in such a way that afterwards, in philosophical language, it simply cannot be put
otherwise than as if something else were added to rationality" (Gesammelte Schriften 6:228;
Negative Dialectics, 229).
65Gesammelte Schriften 6:281-82; Negative Dialectics, 285-86. Schweppenhiuser argues that
the distinctiveness of Adorno's moral philosophy consists in his bringing together normative
reflection and the historical situatedness of ethical problems; see Schweppenhiuser Ethik nach
Auschwitz 185.
rational aspects of morality. In fact, he recognizes the strengths of Kant's form

ism.66 Nonetheless, he insists that the demands of morality require that we grap
with these tensions, knowing that they do not admit of a neat synthesis.
An additional feature of Adorno's moral philosophy is the negative character o
his "new" categorical imperative. Adorno declares that the Holocaust must never
repeated, that no one should ever go hungry again, and that torture and violen
should be abolished.67 Interestingly, Adorno's categorical imperative bears a str
ing resemblance to that of Marx, who refers to "the categorical imperative t
overthrow all circumstances in which man is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, a
despised .... ."68 Adorno's imperative heeds the directive of the Bilderverbot b
refraining from visions of the good life. Nonetheless, it reflects his materialist str
egy of negating the negative that is damaged life. Moreover, it reflects the imperat
of a bodily resurrection insofar as it inverts the conventional logic of categori
imperatives: it is authorized not by a version of formal reason but by a soma
solidarity with sufferers, and furthermore, it makes imperative the elimination
this suffering.
Adorno's new categorical imperative, like his negative dialectics, betrays his
commitment to the theological "doctrines" of the Bilderverbot and the resurrec-
tion of the body. Both strategies are critical of attempts to insulate the divine,
redemption, or even reason from the material-historical realm and from critical
interrogation. And both seek to heed and alleviate the suffering of all that has been
marginalized and oppressed by relationships of dominance: the body generally
and marked bodies particularly: poor, dark, Jewish, female. On the one hand,
Adorno's negative dialectics compels him to insist that concepts fail to capture
referents. This declared gap between signs and referents is at the same time an
opening for a materialist-inspired democratic contestation; it provides leverage
against the naturalization, or shall I say, idolization, of the elite's interpretation of
things. On the other hand, Adorno's categorical imperative demands that one do
more than simply reign in a predatory discursive reason. Indeed, with this second
strategy, Adorno distances his projects from those that rely solely upon a pur-
ported discursive instability or ludic sensibility in order to accomplish societal
transformation. Adorno's categorical imperative requires that one undo the rela-
tionships of dominance that cause undue suffering. For Adorno, this imperative
arises out of a felt (and fostered) solidarity -a solidarity that is in jeopardy given
the continued antagonisms and injustices that constitute damaged life.
66Adorno states, "True the formalism of Kant's ethics is not merely damnable.... Though
failing to provide us with a positive casuistry for future action, this formalism humanely
prevents the abuse of substantial-qualitative differences in favor of privilege and ideology. ...
There survives in it something of substance: the egalitarian idea" (Gesammelte Schriften 6:234-
35; Negative Dialectics, 236).
67See Gesammelte Schriften 4:105; Minima Moralia, 95.
68"Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 69.
Interestingly, Jirgen Habermas throws his tacit support behind negative im

peratives but without explicitly mentioning Adorno. Habermas states, "Negat
versions of the moral principle seem to be a step in the right direction. They h
the prohibition of graven images, refrain from positive depiction, and as in
case of discourse ethics, refer negatively to the damaged life instead of poin
affirmatively to the good life."69 Adorno's categorical imperative appears to m
Habermas's criteria. Nonetheless, Habermas, together with Benhabib and Wellm
rejects Adorno's possible contribution to contemporary discussions of ethics
politics; moreover, this rejection is based on Adorno's adherence to "the proh
tion upon graven images." An examination of Habermas's contradictory stanc
on the Bilderverbot is beyond the scope of this paper. The purpose of this pa
has been to lay out carefully Adorno's position on the Bilderverbot in order
support my contention that, pace his successors, Adorno's theological predile
tions do not disqualify his potential contribution to contemporary formulations
an emancipatory praxis.
69Jiirgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (tran

Ciaran Cronin; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 205.

Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno&#39;s Inverse Theology

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno&#39;s Inverse Theology

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno&#39;s Inverse Theology

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Harvard Divinity School