Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization 0300250762, 9780300250763

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Migrants in the Profane

The Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Jewish Theology and History are sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University. The Lectures were established in 1987 by the Estate of Arthur A. Cohen and are named for theologian Franz Rosenzweig. Other volumes in the Franz Rosenzweig Lecture series available from Yale University Press: The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life, by David N. Myers Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition, by Arthur Green Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture, by Robert Alter German Jews: A Dual Identity, by Paul Mendes-Flohr Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

Migrants in the Profane Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization PETER E. GORDON

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Jewish Theology and History Fund in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University. Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2020 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Minion type by Integrated Publishing Solutions, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933179 ISBN 978-0-300-25076-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Martin Jay With deepest gratitude

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Contents

Acknowledgments  ix IN TRODUC TION. Peregrina in Saeculo 1 An Elective Affinity  2 Migration and Modernity  9 A Critical Inheritance  13 ON E. Benjamin; or, The Ambivalence of Secularization  20 A Secular Miracle  22 Benjamin’s Turk  25 The Religious Secret  32 Trauerspiel, History, Salvation  36 Aesthetics and the Aura  40 Illuminations Sacred and Profane  47 The Backward Glance  51 A Theological-Political Predicament  55 Secularization and Indecision  59 T WO. Horkheimer; or, The Longing for the Wholly Other  64 Between Schopenhauer and Marx  69

viii Contents

A Dialectic of Religion  72 The Weberian Background  77 Judaism and Enlightenment  79 A Divine Return  89 THRE E. Adorno; or, Negative Dialectics as Negative Theology 96 A Migrant in the Profane  104 Hegelianism Without Closure  113 The Persistence of Negativity  117 From Kabbalah to Enlightenment  121 Negative Dialectics as Negative Theology?  129 A Last Rejoinder  137 C ONC LUSION. Dialectics and Disenchantment  143 Notes  157 Index  183

Acknowledgments

This book originated as a series of three lectures that were delivered at Yale in the spring of 2017 as the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Jewish Theology and History, a distinguished series sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University. For the invitation to deliver these lectures I am deeply grateful to Steven Fraade and to the affiliated members of Yale’s Program in Judaic Studies, along with Renee Reed, who kindly arranged the details of my visit. For their faithful attendance of the lectures and for their insightful comments and suggestions, I am grateful most of all to members of the Yale academic community, including Elli Stern, Noreen Khawaja, Martin Hägglund, Asaf Angermann, and Seyla Benhabib. Also attending the lectures were several other colleagues whose questions helped me develop thoughts that were only implicit or stated in abbreviated fashion in the format of the original lectures. I hope they will forgive me if I have neglected to name them all here. The task of transforming a series of spoken lectures into a written book is seldom easy. Revision often requires a fundamental reconsideration of key claims, and one asks oneself if it might not be better to begin the entire process of composition anew. Even the book’s subtitle changed, from “concept”

x Acknowledgments

to “question.” I received much-needed encouragement from Yale University Press and specifically from Jennifer Banks, who helped me to see the way forward from the lectures to the book. Susan Laity at Yale is a copyeditor of incomparable skills, and the reader will never know how many catastrophes in grammar and style have now disappeared thanks to her keen eye. Lev Asimow read the entire manuscript for me in an early draft, and he offered a great many thoughtful comments while also assisting me in technical matters of grammar and citation. The index was prepared with great precision by Michael Mango, with support from the Harvard University publication fund. Of the three lectures presented in 2016 only traces remain, since ongoing reflection prompted me to modify many arguments, and I have also expanded on themes that were originally mentioned only in passing. La pâte s’est étendue sous le rouleau. I finished the initial phase of revision during my sabbatical year 2017–2018, when I was living abroad and serving as professeur invité in the Department of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure, Paris. For arranging this visiting professorship I am exceptionally grateful to my dear friends JeanClaude Monod and Marc Crépon. I am also grateful to Perrine Simon-Nahum for inviting me to speak to her seminar on the topic of Carl Schmitt’s concept of secularization, a welcome opportunity that helped me to refine the arguments presented here. The year that my wife and I spent in France gave us a muchneeded respite from the cares of institutional life in the States, and it is chiefly thanks to Harvard University that I was able to afford this time away. I also owe a personal thanks to Helga and André for their hospitality. Their warmth and attention throughout our stay made the year a memorable one, and it does not seem improper to add a special acknowledgment here to two quadrupeds, Cosette and Morin, who were always eager for our visits, especially when we came bearing slices of apple.

Acknowledgments xi

Two esteemed colleagues, Robert Kaufman and Max Pensky, served as readers for Yale University Press and saved me from numerous errors while offering invaluable suggestions for improvement. In my experience it is a rare thing indeed to encounter individuals who combine critical acumen with kindness and good humor. I am especially grateful to count them among my friends. The image on the jacket of this book is by Felix Nussbaum, a painter who was born in Osnabrück, Germany, and died in Auschwitz. This painting has a personal significance for me that deserves explanation. Among his many subjects, Nussbaum was interested in the fortunes of the German-Jewish community and its historical transformation in the post-emancipation era. In one of his paintings Nussbaum portrays a bearded gentleman named Eli Gittelsohn, who was a cantor and composer of music in the Osnabrück synagogue. It so happens that Eli was my great-grandfather, and it is from him, I suspect, that I inherited my love of music. I am grateful to the Felix-NussbaumHaus in Osnabrück for permission to use Nussbaum’s painting, The Wandering Jew (Der wandernde Jude [Wanderer im Ge­ birge]), on the jacket of this book. It would be wrong to conclude these acknowledgments without mentioning a biographical fact. I spent many years wandering in the Heideggerian wilderness, and I have only recently effected a shift in the terrain of my interests toward critical theory. This passage took many years. But the community of scholars that I have encountered, in both the United States and Europe, has bolstered my confidence that the shift was entirely the right one, since this is a community that best honors the emancipatory interests of humanity. First and foremost among these esteemed scholars is Jürgen Habermas, whose work stands as an enduring source of inspiration not only for me but for so many of us in philosophy and social theory, and whose

xii Acknowledgments

own thoughts concerning the possibility of a secularizing translation of theological concepts has informed many of the themes I explore here. It has been my great pleasure to engage in ongoing conversations with him in recent years, especially during the period when he was nearing the conclusion of writing his latest magnum opus, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, a work that I had the great pleasure to read in manuscript form. It is a special honor for me that he agreed to offer some kind words about my own book. From the beginning of my career, Martin Jay has served not only as a teacher but also as my trusted guide as I wandered the landscape of critical theory. It is heartwarming to recall that he completed his doctoral dissertation on the origins and development of Frankfurt School critical theory at Harvard University, the institution where I now have the good fortune to teach. Marty’s guidance and his friendship mean the world to me, and to summarize my manifold debt would surely test my capacities for expression. It will suffice to say that this book is dedicated to him.

Introduction

Peregrina in Saeculo

Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

T

his book is a meditation on a philosophical and religious theme. In it I explore the problem of secularization, not as a social process, but as a conceptual gesture that appears with some prominence in the writings of three key theorists: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. The fact that all three of these writers were affiliates of the Institute for Social Research, the so-called Frankfurt School of social philosophy and cultural criticism, may encourage the impression that they agreed upon a common doctrine, though in fact their differences were often profound. This is especially clear when we examine their distinctive views on secularization, a topic that surely ranks among the more controversial problems in modern social theory. Philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, and historians con-

2 Introduction

tinue to disagree as to what secularization means, whether we should consider it a welcome development or something to be regretted, and whether it happened at all. So it should hardly surprise us that three key theorists of the early Frankfurt School would have developed distinctive views on this problem, and that they conceived of it in remarkably dissimilar ways. A comparative treatment may therefore prove helpful. Just as an object is thrown into sharpest relief when illumined from all sides, an inquiry into these thinkers’ distinctive views can shed further light on the concept of secularization itself. In this book I offer a comparative study of three of the most remarkable minds of the twentieth century. I shall confine myself to one rather specific question. How did they conceive of secularization and how does it serve as an organizing theme in their work? This question might be rephrased in a variety of ways: Does secularization mean the disappearance of religion or its transformation? In the modern era can religious concepts survive or are they irrevocably lost? Can religious concepts retain both their relevance and their validity in a secular age, or is the dissolution of religion a philosophical and political necessity if we are to think of ourselves as truly modern? Such questions do not admit of facile solutions, and it seems unlikely that we will ever arrive at a moment when a given answer will strike us as definitive. The three philosophers examined here were all deeply troubled by the question of secularization, and they were notably ambivalent as regards both its meaning and its effects. This book is an attempt to make sense of that ambivalence.

An Elective Affinity It is well known that most (but not all) of the theorists asso­ ciated with the Frankfurt School were of Jewish descent. But

Introduction 3

what they made of this inheritance varied from individual to individual, and we should take care to avoid any generalizations that would portray their work as the expression of some kind of essential or enduring “identity.”1 For some members of the Frankfurt School, the fact of their Jewish origin was a matter of great personal importance, while for others it was little more than a fate to be endured. Walter Benjamin was raised in a predominantly Jewish milieu in Berlin, and throughout his life he sustained a special fascination for Jewish themes, finding special inspiration in the Kabbalistic research of his friend Gershom Scholem. Drawn not only to Jewish ideas but also to diverse strains of Christianity and esoteric religion, Benjamin nonetheless saw himself as an independent thinker and a historical materialist who sought to organize his cultural and philosophical insights into unique constellations. Max Horkheimer was raised in a religiously observant family and clearly took some pride in his Jewish identity, even though it left him vulnerable to anti-Semitic prejudice from fellow soldiers during the First World War. But it would be misleading to characterize Horkheimer as a religious thinker—in his social philosophy, he sustained a strong attachment to historical materialism. By the end of his life, however, religious themes had become far more prominent in his work, and he even came to believe that Marxism itself was animated by Judaism’s messianic longing for a better world. The case of Theodor W. Adorno is even more complicated. Although his father, Oscar Wiesengrund, was of Jewish descent, he had converted to Protestantism when his son Teddie was only seven years old. Adorno’s mother, Maria Cavelli, was from a Catholic family, and there is little reason to endorse the view that he was in any straightforward sense a “Jewish” thinker. The young Adorno was actually baptized as a Catholic, later identified himself as a Protestant, and ultimately con-

4 Introduction

sidered himself as having no religion at all. Yet even if he had wished to, he could never wholly shed the rumor of a Jewish identity he did not openly embrace. Through friendships both early in life and late, and also by marriage, he remained tethered to this identity. The anti-Semitic legislation introduced in Nazi Germany in 1933 took no notice of his own preferences. He was unseated from his professorship and forced into exile. Did the common experience of identification, however conflicted or complex, with the history of central European Jewry play any role in the development of the Frankfurt School philosophy we now refer to as “critical theory”? The answer to this question is by no means simple. Among both friends and enemies of the Jews it was common knowledge that an elective affinity had developed between Jewish identity and radical politics.2 Traces of this old idea remain visible even today, though for various reasons of acculturation and political exigency the old alliance has begun to dissolve. But we can cast a backward glance to tell the familiar tale: Over many centuries, a hard schooling in social and political exclusion had solidified in the hearts and minds of Jewish intellectuals a fervent attachment to the principles of the Enlightenment. Its uni­ versalist ideal of equality for all citizens, irrespective of faith or social status, furnished the ideological groundwork for campaigns of Jewish emancipation that, over the course of the nineteenth century, gradually opened spaces for European Jewry in the liberal professions. Many Jews welcomed these changes and developed a political cathexis with the ideologies of statist liberalism.3 A smaller share, however, nourished more radical dreams of social transformation, and they contributed to the development of universalist-emancipatory ideologies associated most of all with socialism.4 This narrative varies in its details with differences of geography and political culture.5 But the general pattern of enthusiasm for the emancipatory ideals

Introduction 5

of the Enlightenment remains more or less consistent across western and central Europe, and it helps to explain the bio­ graphical trajectory of radical democrats such as Heinrich Heine and Eduard Gans alongside more impassioned revolutionaries such as Karl Marx and Rosa Luxembourg.6 By the 1920s, the European Jewish Bildungsbürgertum, or educated bourgeoisie, was a flourishing and well-established tribe. It had produced a host of educated daughters and sons who still cleaved to the ancestral dream of universal emancipation, even if they now expressed their idealism in the subtle languages of European high culture. Some chose to ease the path to cultural acceptance through religious conversion; others chose to remain attached to their ancestral faith even if their outsidership left them exposed to prejudice. Secularization nevertheless transformed the inner meaning of their identity, and, as conventional religion lost its appeal, a new path of spiritual fulfillment had become accessible to them in the German religion of Bildung, humanistic education.7 But they could not fail to notice that their acceptance in circles of European culture remained fragile. For young intellectuals or artists who hoped for inclusion, the dismaying persistence of political anti-Semitism or even the most casual anti-Semitic comment uttered sotto voce was sufficient to remind them that, even as insiders, they still remained in some sense outsiders to whom the doors of tradition might be shut once again. Although the liberal professions were gradually becoming a preferred route to social acceptance, the path through higher education remained hazardous. In his famous address “Science as a Vocation” (1918), the sociologist Max Weber noted that although any aspiring student might gaze upon the hierarchies of the German university with some anxiety, the student who was of Jewish descent would confront added difficulties: to such a student it was only honest to say, “Lasciate ogni speranza.”8 The encounter with

6 Introduction

prejudice, official and unofficial, may help to explain why so many Jewish intellectuals, even in the ostensibly enlightened culture of the Weimar Republic, felt themselves drawn to styles of thought and expression that tested the limits of convention. This may also explain why they often evinced an unusual passion for movements of aesthetic modernism and the cultural avant-garde. The sociological group that Isaac Deutscher once called “non-Jewish Jews” resists any facile generalization.9 But they have always exhibited one distinctive trait that in retrospect may now strike many of us as rather exotic: they saw little or no contradiction between a commitment to socialism and a passion for the most esoteric strains of European high culture. Marxism and modernism went hand in hand.10 The neo-Marxist collective of sociologists and philosophers that we now call the Frankfurt School was founded in 1923, in affiliation with the newly created University of Frankfurt. Known officially as the Institute for Social Research, it was first conceived as an academic collective for multidisciplinary inquiry in a Marxist key: an early proposal to call it the Institut für Marxismus was set aside as an invitation to controversy.11 In retrospect, given what we know would happen in Germany only ten years later, the creation of this unusual institution may strike us as highly improbable. The constitution of the Weimar Republic had been ratified only a few years earlier, and its enemies on the right seldom let the opportunity pass to slander it as a Judenrepublik.12 But the founding of the institute in the dawning era of German democracy reflects a spirit of openness, when Jewish intellectuals on the left might still feel justified in their optimism for the political future.13 Nearly all the core members of the Frankfurt School were Jewish by heritage if not by conviction or practice. The original founder of the Institute, Felix J. Weil, was the son of a GermanJewish grain merchant who had made his fortune in Argen-

Introduction 7

tina.14 The intellectual leadership best known as the core of the Frankfurt School in its early or classical years included Erich Fromm, Julian Gomperz, Henryk Grossmann, Carl Grünberg, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, and Friedrich Pollock—all exemplars of what Michael Löwy has called the elective affinity between Jewish identity and socialist utopia.15 This fact is often noted only in whispers and with some embarrassment, since it fits too easily into the crackpot theories of conspiracy that have circulated with remarkable longevity through the circuits of the radical right.16 But anti-Semitism should not inhibit us from acknowledging what was after all a sociological fact: the inherited memory of persecution tells us why so many Jews who were the children or grandchildren of an excluded minority felt drawn to movements of universalist emancipation. But it also tells us why that alliance was the product of unique historical conditions, and why, under the combined solvents of assimilation and economic success, the much-discussed Jewish passion for socialist and Marxist-humanist values has grown increasingly fragile and seems likely to dissolve. Whatever their differences in biography, the crucial fact remains that all three of the thinkers examined in this book— Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno—were born at a moment in European history when even the most minimal bond with the Jewish community could have the most dramatic consequences. By the 1930s, intellectuals from well-acculturated families who in other circumstances might have wished to forget that a so-called Jewish question had ever existed, found much to their chagrin that this question was thrust before them once again. The experience was devastating: persecution, expulsion, and mass murder. We should not forget that Benjamin himself ultimately died as a consequence of the anti-Semitism that swept across the European continent in the mid-twentieth century. Although we should resist the temptation of reducing philos-

8 Introduction

ophy to biography, we might entertain the possibility that the experience of assimilation and the gradual loss of religion may have left a philosophical imprint on the Frankfurt School. It may have conditioned its members’ understanding of secularization as a deeply ambivalent process entailing both promise and loss.17 And it may have nourished an attitude of melancholia that did not cohere easily with their Marxist or neo-Marxist commitments. The present book, however, is not an exercise in prosopography. I am not interested here in the biographical question as to how the various thinkers of the Frankfurt School conceived of their own Jewish inheritance. Nor will I address in detail the tragic history of anti-Semitism and how that history might have informed their work.18 Rather, I am interested only in the narrower and more theoretical matter as to how a religious inheritance and its gradual disappearance came to assume a philosophical meaning. As we shall see, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno were all concerned with the concept of secularization and its implications for the philosophy of history. More specifically, they were concerned with the question of what happens when a concept that originally belonged to religion undergoes a shift of terrain and migrates into the profane. The arguments developed in this book all converge upon the question as to whether it is possible for modern society to move forward without the guidance of religion. Ever since Weber set forth his grim reflections on “the disenchantment of the world,” social theorists of various schools have not ceased to ask whether the process of secularization should be lamented or embraced. Even those who see the process as somehow inevitable have raised the doubt as to whether secularization does not leave modern society with a fatal deficit in normativity. Some thinkers have suggested that religion may be a privi-

Introduction 9

leged or even unique resource of moral and political instruction, and that it may furnish the only remedy for a modern social order that would otherwise lack the normative orientation it needs. I have examined the problem of a “normative deficit of modernity” in greater detail elsewhere, and I do not wish to burden the reader with repetition.19 My purpose here is to pursue this problem as it appears in the classical writings of the Frankfurt School, focusing more specifically on the question of whether theological concepts can serve as normative resources for secular modernity without comprising our distinctively modern sense of autonomy.

Migration and Modernity The phrase “migration into the profane” comes from Adorno. On several different occasions, and with only minor variations, he suggests that theological concepts will persist in the modern world only if they undergo a difficult trial of secularization; their meaning can survive only once they submit themselves to what he terms “a migration into the profane [Einwanderung ins Profane].” Elsewhere Adorno writes of a metaphysics that has “taken flight into the profane [der in Profanität geflüchteten Metaphysik],” a line that dramatizes the sense of persecution: a Flüchtling is a refugee.20 The frequent appearance of such a striking image is not only a matter of philological curiosity; it alerts us to a philosophical principle of profound importance for the early tradition of critical theory. It is indeed a noteworthy if seldom noted fact that many of the classical thinkers of the Frankfurt School were keenly interested in the question of secularization, and much of what they wrote might be understood as a series of philosophical meditations on Adorno’s stated principle that theological concepts must undergo a migration into the profane. As we shall see, neither Benjamin nor Hork­

10 Introduction

heimer could altogether agree on this point. In their work, theological concepts seem to persist without undergoing such a stringent test. But their rather different perspectives on the possible lines of continuity between religious and secular concepts nonetheless merit our examination here. The idea of migration has deep roots in the history of religion. “A wandering Aramean was my father . . .” This phrase from Deuteronomy 26:5 identifies the patriarch Abraham as a migrant from the East, from an area that we would today call Syria or upper Mesopotamia. For centuries, Jews have repeated these words at the opening of the Passover Seder, when they recall their origin as a people who suffered in slavery and gained its freedom only thanks to divine intervention. During their migration in the desert, the Jews were sustained by the promise of a land that they could finally call their own, a worldly utopia that would flow with milk and honey. But throughout their history, the Jews have navigated between the contesting values of displacement and arrival, uprootedness and land. We should not forget that rabbinic Judaism was born not within the confines of a sovereign state or a specific territory but only once the state was destroyed and the Jewish people was cast into exile. To be a stranger, to be elsewhere than one’s home, is and arguably remains the central experience of Jewish history.21 Nor should it surprise us that the experience of outsidership remains a central theme in Jewish ethics: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). The principle of concern for the stranger stands as one of the strongest lines of thematic continuity between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus himself was said to be in the world but not of the world (John 17:14), and for any Christian who wishes to emulate Jesus, the world itself is understood as a place of wandering or exile rather than ultimate fulfillment. The Latin

Introduction 11

verb peregrinor means “wander,” “sojourn,” or “migrate.” In The City of God, Augustine explains that humility is highly recommended for those who inhabit the city of God during their “pilgrimage in this world [hoc peregrinanti saeculo].”22 Christians are quite literally migrants in the saeculum; they are pilgrims in a profane realm that is not, Augustine hastens to add, the final object of their longing. The citizens of the city of God may “sojourn on this earth [in hac terra peregrinantes],” he tells us, but they feel comforted only when they keep faith in God and “sigh for the peace of their heavenly country.”23 It is perhaps unsurprising that the theme of migration appears in both Judaism and Christianity, since both religions claim a common origin as the offspring of Abraham, the wandering Aramean. In the modern era, migration has become an inescapable fact of the human condition. Following the First World War, great masses of people numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled war and poverty and sought refuge in western Europe and the Americas. In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of fascism once again forced refugees into exile, and, following the Second World War, the number of displaced persons soared into the millions. In her 1943 essay “We Refugees,” Hannah Arendt writes of the “desperate confusion of these Ulysseswanderers,” who fled Europe and sought places of safety elsewhere, primarily in the United States and what was then Mandate Palestine, but also in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Latin America. She emphasizes the experience of loss, not only the loss of home and occupation, but also the loss of comfort in one’s native language, an experience that includes “the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.” To be a refugee, Arendt tells us, is to be deprived of the assurances of identity.24 Today, as I write this introduction, this loss has become a

12 Introduction

global experience. For nearly a decade, a terrible war has decimated the people of modern Syria, the country from which Abraham the biblical patriarch is said to have wandered. The statistics from Human Rights Watch and the United Nations are staggering: “More than 400,000 have died because of the Syrian conflict since 2011 . . . with 5 million seeking refuge abroad and over 6 million displaced internally.” In June 2017, the United Nations reported, more than 500,000 people were still living in besieged areas. To be sure, the violence cannot be blamed on one side alone. “Civilian casualties from airstrikes by the US-led coalition fighting ISIS increased with a local group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, reporting 2,286 civilian deaths since the beginning of the campaign until September 2017.”25 Strong evidence suggests that the Syrian government has used chlorine gas as a weapon on civilian populations. Many individuals and families remain trapped in areas that are under siege, while those who have managed to escape in search of safety abroad have often died en route. On September 2, 2015, news media across the globe circulated the photograph of Alan Kurdî, a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy whose lifeless body had washed ashore on the beach of the Mediterranean near the Turkish city of Bodrum. This image, unfortunately, is not unique; but in its very particularity it has become a concrete and heartrending reminder of the desperate condition of the great many migrants who are today fleeing poverty and war. We should not forget that Kurdî is only one among the millions of refugees from the Middle East and Africa who have braved both the desert and the sea to reach Europe. At the height of the European migrant crisis in the fall of 2015, the number of individual migrants who arrived at the refugee center on the Greek island of Lesbos on a single day had reached a high point of 10,000.26 In his Notes on a Shipwreck, the Italian playwright Davide Enia describes the

Introduction 13

daily struggles on the island of Lampedusa, where residents have devoted themselves to the task of recovering the bodies of refugees who have perished while trying to cross the sea. A single resident has built with his own hands a cemetery where he has buried 80 people.27 The arrival of migrants in such astonishing numbers should leave no conscience at rest. The painful truth, however, is that the presence of these strangers has awakened as much fear as sympathy. Since the turn of the millennium, the political culture of the West has been seized by a spirit of bellicose nationalism which has not enjoyed such popular appeal since the fascist era of the mid-twentieth century. Across western Europe and North America, the migration crisis seems to have only emboldened political movements that thrive on the worst sentiments of hatred, racism, and xenophobia. Nationalists call for borders and walls. In his book Frères migrants, the poet Patrick Chamoiseau writes of these borders that they are “sharpened more and more like the blade of a guillotine.”28 As these ideologies grow ever stronger, an increasing number of intellectuals on the left have adopted the self-sabotaging posture of generalized skepticism. They affirm only power as the highest reality and regard the old ideals of universal justice with cool disbelief. In this ideological contest we seem once again confronted with an awful situation in which the left has ceded the terrain of idealism to the right, and it is not hard to imagine which faction will prevail. Those who study the history of European fascism cannot help but watch the unfolding spectacle with a painful sense of déjà vu.

A Critical Inheritance In our present moment of political crisis, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School still have much to teach us. They re-

14 Introduction

mained faithful to the emancipatory promise of enlightenment rationality without indulging in the one-sided and facile optimism of technocratic reason. Dialecticians who recognized the bad complicity between reason and myth, they nonetheless understood that power and reason are not identical and that only the unforced force of rational critique has the power to shatter the myths that sustain worldly domination. Unlike so many intellectuals on the left today, the Frankfurt School theorists were unwilling to abandon the redemptive ideal of a universal justice whose genuine promise still lies, distorted and unfulfilled, within bourgeois modernity itself. It is one of the most crucial but misunderstand insights of dialectical criticism that an ideal can still retain its critical force against society even while it also serves as society’s apologia. The practice of immanent social critique that began with Hegel and Marx permits us to see that norms that are available to us at any given moment in history are “ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology.”29 We have no sources for our critical leverage against the social world we inhabit other than the resources that belong to this same world. This selfreflexivity, however, is not disabling. It is the necessary axiom of any critical practice that it aims to transform social reality not by appealing to an unworldly utopia but rather by looking to the standards that lie within our current order. “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself.”30 To deny this insight is to fall into a one-sided critique of ideology without explaining what normative resources survive in our own historical moment that would make such a critique possible. This genuinely dialectical understanding of ideology is one of the great advantages of the tradition of critical theory, which distinguishes the Frankfurt tradition of critical theory from the historical

Introduction 15

practice of genealogy associated most of all with theorists such as Nietzsche and Foucault. This insight is applicable even to freighted concepts such as progress, enlightenment, and secularization.31 Conservatives may believe that the world is already the way it should be. But such a belief can only retain its validity for those who enjoy great privilege and shut their eyes to others’ social suffering. For those who do not feel that the world is already good enough and cannot be improved, it belongs to the very concept of social action that one intervenes in the historical nexus of human affairs with the aim of achieving certain transformative effects. All emancipatory social action takes the measure of a given reality and judges it deficient. The distance between that reality and its unrealized remedy is the measure of progress. Adorno, of course, understood that concepts such as progress also have an apologetic character. But he would never have accepted the genealogical claim that our normative concepts are simply masks for power. This is surely the double-edged meaning of his aphoristic remark, “Progress occurs where it ends.”32 The aphorism does not imply a one-sided abolition of the concept but rather a determinate negation that judges the concept deficient by its own standards and in this act of judgment holds fast to its validity. In this respect Adorno could never permit himself to endorse the genealogical practice that lands us in a state of thoroughgoing cynicism concerning all available normativity. In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno stated precisely this point with unusual candor. It was “a metaphysical fallacy,” he declared, “to believe that because culture has failed; because it has not kept its promise, because it has denied human beings freedom, individuality, true universality; because it has not fulfilled its own concept, it should therefore be thrown on the scrap-heap and cheerfully replaced by the cynical establishment of immediate power relation-

16 Introduction

ships.”33 All too often this warning goes unnoticed by critics who for various reasons now draw back in embarrassment from the normative ideal of a “true universality.” But Adorno himself was not embarrassed by his own devotion to the unrealized promise that inheres in critical theory. It was “one of the most dangerous errors now lurking in the collective consciousness,” he wrote, “to assume that because something is not what it promises to be, because it does not yet match its concept, it is therefore worse than its opposite, the pure immediacy which destroys it.”34 Today our confidence in the normative resources of modernity has been shaken—and with good reason. But total­ izing skepticism regarding such resources loses all critical lev­ erage against present injustice. The classical theorists of the Frankfurt School were saved from lapsing into this skepticism owing in part to their own historical experience as children of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Because Jews throughout central Europe had been the beneficiaries of the German Enlightenment and gained their emancipation only thanks to the bourgeois ideals of tolerance and historical progress, they also became its most ardent champions. There is still much truth in the cliché that the most educated stratum of the German-­ Jewish middle class held fast to the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment even while the surrounding culture came to adopt the values of an exclusionary nationalism.35 In a 1961 essay, “The German Jews,” Max Horkheimer spoke of the “Jewish enthusiasm for advanced German culture.”36 This enthusiasm was born from the dialectic of emancipation and oppression. Having suffered for so many centuries from their systematic exclusion, German Jews had developed a distinctive cast of mind that could discern both the promises and the failures of bourgeois society. As the beneficiaries of bourgeois-universalist ideology they were well situated to discern the gap between its

Introduction 17

stated ambition and its imperfect realization. “So deeply did they identify themselves with the order in which they now shared, that they could not but measure it against their own ideal for it.”37 The most progressive elements among the German Jews thus became fierce critics of bourgeois society, not because they wished for its downfall but because they remained faithful votaries of its unrealized promise. Early in his career, when postwar Germany had not yet even begun to reckon with the political legacies of its Nazi past, the young philosopher Jürgen Habermas published a lecture titled “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers.”38 As a student of the Frankfurt School who had developed a close bond especially with Adorno in the 1950s and 1960s, Habermas reflected on the historical irony that the critical spirit of the German-Jewish philosophers—which the Nazis had set out to destroy—would now prove necessary for the task of rebuilding Germany as a genuine democracy. “If there were not extant a German-Jewish tradition,” he observed, “we would have to discover one for our own sakes.” Even those wary of identifying anything so coherent as a German-Jewish tradition must acknowledge that a certain spirit of rational criticism, of which Kant was the major exponent, found a ready audience among the Jewish intelligentsia of central Europe. In Kant’s philosophy, wrote Habermas, Jewish intellectuals discovered “a free attitude of criticism” and a “cosmopolitan humanity” from which they could draw inspiration for their own philosophical efforts.39 “Jewish philosophy, in all its versions,” Habermas declared, “has remained critique.” From Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen, and from Ernst Bloch to Theodor W. Adorno, German-Jewish philosophers have selectively appropriated the critical power of German Idealism. Even in exile, they remained guardians of this inheritance during the darkest phase of German history, when too many of the

18 Introduction

country’s self-appointed “native” thinkers, from Martin Hei­ degger to Carl Schmitt, had not only abandoned it but actively sought its destruction. For Habermas the German-Jewish inheritance was therefore a vital resource. “The Jewish heritage drawn from the German spirit has become indispensable for our own life and survival.”40 It was left to Max Horkheimer to entertain the rather more bold proposition that the idealist spirit of the Jewish philosophers was traceable not only to Kant but to the most ancient values in Judaism itself. That the highest name of the divine should remain unspoken, if not unknown, suggests a principled refusal to grant any perfect or premature reconciliation between our ideals of justice and the laws of the world: “This element of contradiction,” Horkheimer wrote, is as “inherent in the Jewish tradition as it is in dialectical philosophy.”41 Judaism does not suppress this contradiction. Rather, it fastens our attention on the rift between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Awareness of this rift becomes a call to a sacred mission: That the Jews should through long centuries cling to a doctrine in which neither the reward of individual blessedness nor the eternal punishment of the individual played any role; that they should remain faithful to a law after the disappearance of the state that might have enforced the law, solely because of the hope in store for the just men of all nations— this is the contradiction which links the Jews with Germany’s major philosophy and indeed with all that is popularly or ironically called idealism.42 For Horkheimer as for Habermas, the Frankfurt School was the most recent embodiment of the spirit of emancipatory cri-

Introduction 19

tique that emerged from the combined heritage of German and Jewish philosophy, and it stood opposed to political barbarism in all its forms. The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School may have disagreed on many points. But they were united in the conviction that it is still possible to hold on to the concepts of religion, even while one submits them to a trial of rationalizing secularization. In what follows I want to examine this idea of secularization as it was developed in different ways by Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno. What lessons may be learned from this exercise is a question that can be answered only at the end.

one

Benjamin; or, The Ambivalence of Secularization Only the Messiah himself consummates all history. —Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment”

I

n 1770, the empress Maria Theresa summoned to the Viennese court an imperial counselor named Wolfgang von Kempelen, a man from the Hungarian city of Pressburg who was already well esteemed for his services to the state. In an era when the German language was displacing Latin throughout Habsburg lands as the official medium of enlightened absolutism, von Kempelen was prized at court especially for his linguistic skill in translating the text of the Hungarian civil code from Latin into the German vernacular. In later years, however, von Kempelen devoted a greater share of his time to practical invention. As comptroller of the imperial salt mines in Transylvania, he had proven his talent for the control of nature by designing a system of pumps to clear the tunnels of floodwater. He was then hired to build the waterworks for the

Benjamin 21

castle in Pressburg, and as a civil servant he applied himself to the problem of introducing order and bureaucratic planning into villages that lay at some distance from the imperial capital. It should not surprise us that by 1770 he had grown to be a powerful figure at court, especially esteemed as a man of science.1 In 1770, before an expectant audience that included the empress herself, the inventor wheeled out his newest creation for its public debut. It was a strange apparition: a life-size figure carved of wood and clothed in the style of a Turk, with a turban and a fur-trimmed robe. Seated behind a large cabinet with a chessboard on its top, one arm extended forward in readiness, it held a long and slender pipe in its other hand. Its unmoving eyes seemed to fasten with quiet attention on the unplayed game. Von Kempelen then showed his audience the cabinet itself. He unlocked its front door on the left to display a thick mechanism of gears and wheels that resembled the inner workings of a music box or clock. He opened another door at the back, and used a candle to light the mechanism from the rear to prove that the cabinet held no secrets. He then opened the front compartment on the right to reveal a space that was empty save for a few cylinders and wheels. Von Kempelen concluded his introduction by opening the main compartment from behind and lifting the robe of the uncanny figure to reveal its inner mechanism: the audience could see that this was merely a machine. Finally, the inventor arranged the pieces on the board and asked for a volunteer to engage the Turk in a game. The first human being to compete with the mechanical Turk was a courtier by the name of Count von Cobenzel, the scion of a noble family known for promoting the policies and philosophies of the Enlightenment. The automaton played with unflappable confidence, its head moving from one side to the other, its gestures accompanied by the sound of spinning gears. When its turn came, its left hand would seize a piece and

22 Benjamin

advance it to a new position. When menacing its opponent’s pieces, it would nod its head: twice if menacing the queen, thrice if threatening the king. Throughout the game von Kempelen remained nearby, though he did not interfere with the game except occasionally to wind the clockwork within the cabinet. The count proved no match for the mechanical man: he was soon defeated, and the victorious Turk embarked on its illustrious career.

A Secular Miracle This enchanting tale has a philosophical significance, as it tells us something about the Enlightenment’s ideal of a pure mechanism. Well before Walter Benjamin wrote his celebrated essay on von Kempelen’s ingenious contraption, intellectuals and scientists had been fascinated by automata. Especially during the age of Enlightenment, automata such as the chess-playing Turk were objects of popular entertainment and scientific curiosity. Pierre Jaquet-Droz (an inventor born into a Swiss family of clockmakers) designed no less than three fantastical protoandroids—known as the “Writer,” the “Draftsman,” and the “Lady Musician”—which entertained audiences across Europe.2 Some of these machines, of course, were exposed as fakes: an automaton harpsichord player that was presented to Louis XV turned out to be animated by a five-year-old girl hidden inside it. But others were genuine feats of mechanical engineering. In the 1730s, Jacques de Vaucanson created an automaton flute player and displayed it in Paris before the Académie des sciences, whose skeptical members verified that it was in fact what it seemed to be: an ingenious machine. Vaucanson also built a mechanical pipe-playing boy, then shifted to the animal world to fashion an artificial duck that could not only quack and swim but also eat, digest, and even defecate. Such wonders

Benjamin 23

of invention were a testament to Enlightenment science. But as both Simon Schaffer and Adelheid Voskuhl have observed, they could also serve as object lessons in the mechanistic and materialist doctrines associated with French philosophes such as Diderot and La Mettrie.3 Enlightenment theology also helped to breathe life into these inventions. For the Deists, God was a watchmaker, and all of creation resembled an invention whose clockwork perfection bore witness to the skills of its creator. But such inventions could be easily imagined without a divine being to set them in motion. Schaffer suggests that such automata also furnished a root metaphor for the emergent model of society as a self-regulating machine. Once society was conceived as a mechanism crafted by human hands, all appeals to religious intervention became superfluous. It was this model of unthinking perfection that encouraged Adam Smith to imagine the market as a self-regulating domain that would achieve universal opulence when set free of mercantilist intrusion and allowed to run on its own, as if in obedience to nothing but an invisible hand. Smith, we should recall, invokes the invisible hand only as a figurative illustration: no external manipulation is actually necessary for the functioning of a market economy. Rather, he believed that human trade exhibits the same regularity that physical nature does, as it had been conceived by Isaac Newton not long before in his Principia Mathematica.4 Smith’s reflections on the quasi-naturalistic workings of the economy were not unique; they were instances of the notion of “selforganization” that took hold in the eighteenth century.5 Early theorists of manufacture also likened the repetitive gestures of industrial labor to the workings of automata. Schaffer has suggested that this metaphor reinforced the social distinction between labor and the intellectual elite: the automata merely accomplished the physical activity while knowledge of the so-

24 Benjamin

cial process remained the privileged domain of scientists, philosophers, and politicians. Karl Marx himself described the mode of industrial production as “an automatic system of machinery,” a system which was “set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.” Capitalism, Marx wrote, resembled an artificial being, fashioned not by divine hands but by merely “mechanical and intellectual organs.”6 In his lively history of the mechanical Turk, Tom Standage describes not only its Enlightenment-era origins but also its legacy for artificial intelligence in the twentieth century. The chess-playing automaton is an early ancestor, Standage notes, of both the Turing machine, the early computer invented by Alan Turing and his colleagues in 1936, and “Deep Blue,” the IBM supercomputer that defeated Garry Kasparov at chess in 1996.7 I do not mean to pursue such historical connections here, since my interest lies not in the actual history of the automaton but in the philosophical lessons it could be made to bear. From all of the details I have related thus far we can glean a simple fact: throughout its artificial life the chess-playing Turk was understood to be a specimen of purely human ingenuity. For this reason the connection with modern experiments in artificial intelligence (AI) is of some philosophical importance. Today scientists and philosophers are preoccupied with the question of whether the emergence of AI marks a new epoch in our understanding of what it means to be human and whether we have already trespassed onto the terrain that was once the exclusive province of the life-giving gods. If humanity now has the power to create artificial life, then have we not stolen the fire from Olympus and usurped the role of the divine creator? But if we have taken this step, does the very distinction between the sacred and the secular lose all meaning? Such questions, I would suggest, were already in view when von Kempelen first wheeled his ingenious contraption before

Benjamin 25

the Viennese court. Though it may have seemed miraculous, everyone looked upon it as an entirely secular miracle.

Benjamin’s Turk At some point between February and May 1940, the literary critic Walter Benjamin, in flight from Paris and the Nazi invasion, began to draft a series of speculative “theses” which were to become known under the title “On the Concept of History.” The first thesis involves a commentary on the mechanical Turk. The most striking feature of this commentary is that it pushes back against the merely secular and mechanistic interpretations of the Turk that had been the rule ever since its eighteenth-­ century debut. Benjamin writes: There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf—a master at chess—sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings.8 The image is arresting, and Benjamin is no doubt aware of the fact that he has aroused the reader’s curiosity as to why an essay on the concept of history would begin in this way. He immediately provides an answer: “One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called ‘historical materialism,’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which

26 Benjamin

today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight.”9 Though much has been written about this unusual commentary, the task of deciphering the author’s true purposes remains formidable. Perhaps the greatest difficulty that confronts any reader of Benjamin is his penchant for metaphorical thinking: he does not develop his arguments through what Hegel called “the rigorous exertion of the concept [die Anstrengung des Be­ griffs].”10 As a method of reflection Benjamin preferred not the linear development of hard-won, logical argumentation but a kaleidoscopic meditation on the latent and overdetermined meanings of a static object or image. In the Arcades Project, he called this “dialectics at a standstill.”11 This method can be thought provoking, and it is perhaps the imagistic quality of Benjamin’s writing that partly accounts for the author’s enduring appeal. But the method places an added burden of philosophical clarification on the reader, who cannot simply accept without criticism the intuitive content that his images may contain. Benjamin’s friend and colleague Theodor W. Adorno once observed that Benjamin treated even profane texts as though they were sacred.12 But this remark only underscores the dif­ ficulty of reading Benjamin’s work, since genuine criticism demands a gesture of disenchantment whereby sacred contents are made available for profane scrutiny. How, then, are we to understand Benjamin’s essay on the concept of history? Composed in a moment of political crisis, the essay confronts us with an urgent question. Once history reveals itself as catastrophe, how can the old genre of a philosophy of history retain any merit? To answer this question we should first recall that during the age of Enlightenment the philosophy of history occupied a privileged status as a speculative genre. It affirmed the optimistic belief in history as an open-ended terrain for the realization of humanity’s highest aspirations. This

Benjamin 27

remained true even following the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. In Candide, Voltaire subjected Leibnizian optimism to unsparing ridicule. But French materialists such as Condorcet still placed confidence in an ideal of endless progress that found its plausible validation in the French Revolution. And in the era of the Aufklärung, German philosophers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Kant developed sophisticated theories that affirmed history as the only possible domain in which we are permitted to chart the moral betterment of humankind. In 1780 the aged Lessing composed Die Erziehung des Menschen­ geschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), a work in which religious revelation is interpreted as an educational spur to human development. Meanwhile, at the very end of the eighteenth century, Kant once again posed the question: “Is the human race constantly progressing?” In his answer Kant condemned the metaphysical notion that history in itself somehow bore within itself a necessary automatism for the production of happiness, but he nonetheless found a way to justify the moral notion of progress as a postulate of practical action, by appealing to the enthusiasm generated across Europe for the revolutionary events in France.13 Well into the nineteenth century, even while historicist modes of thinking assumed greater authority, the conviction that history would eventually bring freedom retained its hold. It furnished the architectural narrative not only for Hegel’s philosophy of history but also for the left-Hegelian Karl Marx, who founded his materialist theory of history on the expec­ tation that even the great misery that capitalism caused was a necessary stage through which the proletariat would have to pass on its way toward revolution. For Marx the contradictions of history called for a final remedy. In “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Marx affirms, “Communism is the riddle of history solved.”14 In this respect, if not in others,

28 Benjamin

Marx remained in his progressivist thinking captive to the optimistic philosophies of the eighteenth century.15 This was the kind of historical optimism that Benjamin sought to dismantle. He was especially keen to demonstrate that the only honest and effective form of historical materialism would be one that dispensed with the naive trust in history as an automatism of progress. So it is hardly surprising that Benjamin invoked the image of the Turkish chess player—a lifeless being that somehow appears capable of besting all competitors through the miracle of sheer mechanism alone. In his essay on the concept of history, Benjamin associates such mechanistic faith with the revisionist Eduard Bernstein, whose “evolutionary socialism” sought to replace the Marxian doctrine of necessary catastrophe with the rather less dramatic practice of social betterment through parliamentary reform. According to Benjamin, such gradualism places too much faith in economic progress; it subscribes to a technological determinism which sees all of human history as an uninterrupted narrative of humanity’s ever increasing capacity to gain mastery over nature. Benjamin faults this conception of history not only for its empirical inaccuracy but also because its optimism leads the historian to sympathize with the victors. Those who are on the losing side of progress are consigned to oblivion, or their suffering is seen to be justified by the happiness that only coming generations may enjoy. But Benjamin does not direct his polemic solely against the ideologues of naive evolutionism. He is no less critical of naive historicism. Sympathy with the victors found a specious warrant in the teachings of nineteenth-century historicists such as Leopold von Ranke and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, who offered the unusual counsel that to write the history of the past one must “blot out” everything one knows about the future. This historical technique was meant to dis-

Benjamin 29

tribute the universal balm of empathy across each and every historical epoch: as Ranke said, “Every age is equally close to God.”16 But in practice an empathy that is shared equally and without prejudice for both the victors and the victims alike lends the past an illusion of unity that obscures the specificity of the victims’ trauma. When suffering becomes nothing but a generalized feature of the historical continuum, it takes on the appearance of necessity: whatever happens to have occurred is thereby justified. Both Bernsteinian revisionism and nineteenth-­ century historicism remain captive to the naive optimism of the Enlightenment. Whatever happened must have happened precisely as it did: in the words of Alexander Pope, “Whatever is, is right.”17 Benjamin rejects both evolutionary socialism and Romantic historicism as variations on the same theme, insofar as they share an understanding of history as a mere automatism that unfolds as a smooth and uninterrupted justification for all that occurs. Historicism sees time as the succession of what is always the same: for the historicist, time will tick by without interruption or distinction, and with the same deadening repetition as the endless counting of beads on a rosary. Benjamin insists that the model of history-as-automatism is utterly incompatible with the logic of revolution. A genuinely materialist theory of history must break from the historicist fantasy that would see history as the unified and necessary unfolding of a single purpose. To shatter this illusion, however, demands that the historical materialist subscribe to an altogether different concept of time. Against this historicist understanding of time as “empty” or “homogeneous,” Benjamin introduces a conception of time that he calls “messianic.” Time is messianic when one conceives of any moment as a “gateway” through which the messiah of revolution could arrive. Such an event is un­ expected since it always marks a catastrophic rupture with the

30 Benjamin

way things have been. Its logic is that of the revolutionary instant, the “now-time,” or Jetzt Zeit, that breaks into history as if from the outside rather than simply realizing purposes that are generated within the temporal continuum. Only this conception of time permits us to understand that every instant is what Benjamin calls “a real state of exception.”18 The reference is to Carl Schmitt, for whom Benjamin professed some admiration, though here Schmitt’s notion is turned against its author: Benjamin generalizes the state of exception into an indictment of the entire historical continuum. The state of exception for Benjamin is “not the exception but the rule,” and for this reason (in an obvious rejoinder to Schmitt) he demands “a true state of exception.”19 The ultimate lesson of Benjamin’s argument is that we should conceive of historical materialism not as a philosophy of historical progress but as a philosophy of anti-historical catastrophe. Hope for human fulfillment lies not in the gradualist improvement of society through time but instead in a catastrophic event of rupture with time itself. The figure of such a rupture is the Messiah. Permit me to interrupt this exposition of Benjamin’s commentary to note that his knowledge of the Turk was largely correct: it only seemed to be an automaton, when in fact it was a sham, since the main compartment of the cabinet beneath was sufficiently large to accommodate a human being. But Benjamin was mistaken on one minor detail: the person hidden within the mechanism was not a “dwarf,” as he believed. (Another commonplace view was that the person within was a child, though a child who was uncommonly gifted at chess.) The truth of the matter was simple: The cabinet was simply more capacious than it appeared. A seat mounted on rails permitted the operator to roll to either the right or the left when the two sides of the cabinet were examined. The machinery that appeared to extend to the back of the cabinet in fact stopped

Benjamin 31

short, leaving sufficient room for the individual to rest undetected during the performance. A lever extended from the puppet’s arm to a second chessboard within the cabinet, and it was on this second chessboard that the operator would play his side of the game, moving both his opponent’s pieces and his own. All these details underscore the simple but crucial fact that the mechanism was controlled by a human being, regardless of stature. The original operator of von Kempelen’s Turkish puppet remains unknown, though we now know the identity of several later operators who animated it from within once it passed to other owners over the course of the nineteenth century. Von Kempelen eventually sold it to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a Viennese engineer also known for his musical automata, who then packed it into a shipping crate and sailed with it to America, where it astonished a new world of critics and writers. Maelzel, incidentally, invented both the metronome and the panharmonicon, a mechanical device that could simulate the sounds of orchestral instruments, for which his friend Beethoven composed his Battle Symphony in 1813. Among the many enthusiasts was Edgar Allan Poe, who in 1836 published his own explanation regarding its secret: “We find everywhere,” he wrote, “men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind. And such it would undoubtedly be, were they right in their supposition.”20 With forensic skills not unlike those of C. Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe speculated that the mechanism was controlled by a human being who was concealed within. Unfortunately, Poe was among the last genera-

32 Benjamin

tion of eyewitnesses to see the Turk in action. In 1854, shortly after it had been sold to a new owner in Philadelphia, a fire broke out nearby and it was consumed in the flames.

The Religious Secret Nearly a century later, when Walter Benjamin wrote his essay on the concept of history, he knew the basic contours of this tale, even if he was mistaken about a detail or two. The most striking feature of his interpretation, however, is the way in which it turns the scandal of its hidden animus into an object lesson for the survival of theology. This interpretative reversal deserves closer inspection. For its Enlightenment audiences, the chess player had only appeared to be a miracle. It provoked not because it was seen as a genuine transgression of natural law but only as an especially unprecedented application of scientific principles. In an era of other, genuine automata that could actually play the harpsichord or the flute, an automaton that could play chess became an object of purely secular wonder. No one believed that it was an actual miracle in the religious sense, just as no one would take the existence of an actual clock as a validation of Deist principles. Some who examined the chess player had already surmised that the mechanism was a trick. Other, more credulous critics admired it as an especially fine specimen of technical design, no different in kind from the other automata of the era or the elaborate clocks whose perfection testified to merely human ingenuity. This is why Poe ranked the automaton among “the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind.”21 This historical background is not incidental to our reading of Benjamin’s essay. The fact should not go unnoticed that Benjamin’s allegorical interpretation of the Turk as animated by the hidden powers of “theology” marks a radical departure

Benjamin 33

from the earlier, naturalistic explanations. All the earlier efforts to explain the Turk’s chess-playing power assumed (and quite rightly) that the contraption was somehow controlled by a human being. They suspected that this control was either direct, manipulated by a person within the cabinet, or indirect, its mechanism set in motion by its ingenious inventor. In either case, they saw it merely as a device whose functioning was altogether natural, not miraculous. For Benjamin, however, the Turk is only apparently a secular mechanism. Its movements may appear automatic, just as the movements of history will appear automatic for those who subscribe to speciously mechanistic philosophies of historical progress. But if history is understood to have any meaning at all, then this automatism must be somehow exposed as an illusion. It is here that Benjamin parts company with prior interpretations: the illusion is not due to a human being who serves as the hidden animus for the mechanical miracle. Such an explanation would have made good sense for an Enlightenment consciousness that sought to discover the secular secret behind all apparent mysteries. For Benjamin, however, we can only explain the apparent miracle of the Turk’s achievements if we look beyond the realm of secular explanation. The Turk functions as well as it does not because it is animated by a human being but rather because it is moved by the occluded power of theology. This solution is remarkable, since it turns the scandalous “secret” of the Turk inside out. Benjamin is willing to concede at least one important principle that sociologists have typically associated with secularization: namely, that in the modern era religion has lost much of its authority and has retreated into a sphere of private sentiment, or what Weber called “the irrational.”22 Benjamin echoes this principle when he writes in his essay that the animating forces of theology have grown “ugly” and must now remain “out of sight.” But he then revokes the

34 Benjamin

theory of secularization when he declares that theology operates as an occluded force that retains its full power as the unmoved mover behind secular events. All this motivates his striking conclusion that history is not truly an automatism but only appears to be so. If history bears any promise, this is only because it serves as a theater for the explosion of messianic energies which disrupt the continuous and clocklike movements of secular time. We are confronted here with a striking ambivalence. Benjamin both affirms and contests the classical paradigm of secularization that had governed the philosophy of history since the age of Enlightenment. As a theorist of revolution rather than reform, Benjamin had grown skeptical of historical progress, the now-familiar claim that sees in progress merely the illicit secularization of an outdated theodicy.23 But even while he wishes to rupture any affiliation with the concept of progress, he does not wish to sever his own bond with theology. His only solution is to align himself with a theological concept of the messianic that will support his understanding of revolution as a radical break in time. To retain this concept for secular history, the theory of secularization must itself be refashioned: it becomes not the disappearance of religion but only its concealment. For the theorist of historical revolution, theology is preserved as a kind of life force that pulses within the automatism and directs its movements, much like a spirit that directs the actions of the otherwise lifeless body. Without this hidden religious animus, the notion of a break with history would remain unintelligible. Throughout most of the twentieth century, sociologists and philosophers along with historians and political theorists subscribed to a classical theory of secularization that saw human history as a contingent but nonetheless largely unidirectional movement in which the bonds of traditional religion were grad-

Benjamin 35

ually losing their strength . For Max Weber, as for so many of the representatives of the new sociological discipline, secularization was a manifold historical process whose validity could be affirmed by means of a highly stylized (but empirically verified) reconstruction. The story went roughly as follows: Re­ ligion had once served as the principle of sacred unity across all domains of human experience—economic conduct, aesthetic experience, even the most intimate forms of familial and sexual life were all interlaced with sacred meaning. The unifying force of religion held sway in politics most of all: the social collective traced the ultimate source of political legitimacy back to a primal moment such as the theophany at the burning bush or the annunciation of Jesus as Messiah. Political leadership was possible thanks to the divine pneuma that had first endowed the leader with personal charisma. Only his founding principle of political theology could explain why the ancient collectives had assigned to their leaders an unquestioned and incorrigible authority. But according to Weber, this unifying aura of the sacred began to dissipate once the various precincts of social conduct underwent the trial of rationalization: the aesthetic, economic, and affective value-spheres broke away from religion and developed forms of rationality that no longer took their cue from the sacred whole. The result was a species of fractured social modernity that Weber called “value-pluralism,” or, in an ironic homage to John Stuart Mill, “polytheism.”24 Charismatic authority in particular suffered a terrific demotion in prestige: it was routinized, replaced first by traditionalistic and then by legal-bureaucratic modes of government. Under these conditions charismatic leadership could no longer survive except as an atavism—a momentary regression to modes of religious experience that were otherwise defunct.25 It is one of the most striking features of Walter Benjamin’s historical imagination that he invokes but ultimately con-

36 Benjamin

tests the classical theory of secularization. Weber presents us with a vision of a disenchanted modernity that has lost all contact with the explosive powers of religion. Against Weber, Benjamin appeals to the “messianic” as the enduring but hidden force within history. This not only marks a decisive break with Weber; it also signals Benjamin’s ambivalent stance toward the broader ideal of thoroughgoing secularization that underwrites classical Marxism. The Marxian theory of history in its classical form tells us that the bourgeoisie deserves the primary credit for bringing about the dissolution of feudal and religious ties. The bourgeoisie has “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour” in “the icy water of egotistical calculation,” and for exploitation that was once “veiled by religious and political illusions” it has substituted exploitation that is “naked, shameless, direct.” As it ascends to power it sweeps away the train of “ancient and venerable prejudices.” The bourgeoisie, in sum, is the historical agent of disenchantment. Marx and Engels portray this historical achievement without qualification, as it is a precondition for our awakening to the very truths of historical materialism. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Into this unidirectional narrative of historical change Benjamin injects a strong note of ambivalence. For Benjamin revolution does not simply dissolve religion. Revolution actually requires the energies of religion even while it also turns those energies toward secular ends.26

Trauerspiel, History, Salvation The concept of history as catastrophe emerged in Benjamin’s work well before he developed an interest in Marxist theory. It appears as a central theme in the Origin of the German Mourn­

Benjamin 37

ing Play (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), the work that Benjamin first conceived as early as 1916 and finished in February 1925 with the intention of submitting it for the habilitation. His plans ended in shipwreck—the faculty in humanities at the University of Frankfurt found the work “incomprehensible,” and Benjamin was advised to withdraw his application— but what may have seemed a failure in his professional career actually marked a new and more productive phase. Unconstrained by academic disciplines and demands, he became an itinerant intellectual, eventually quitting Germany as the Nazis came to power and wandering the major cities of Europe (Moscow, Nice, Svendborg, San Remo, and most of all Paris) while writing for a variety of journals on diverse topics in philosophy and cultural criticism. To characterize Benjamin’s study of the trauerspiel as enigmatic would be an understatement. It resurrects a much disdained and half-forgotten genre of theatrical works from the seventeenth-century baroque era—a period of “decadence” that the author likens to the years of expressionist aesthetics that followed the catastrophe of Germany’s defeat in World War I. The trauerspiel is not to be confused with the genre of classical tragedy, not least because it portrays princes and kings who lack the will and decisiveness to resolve upon any course of action. Rather, the trauerspiel is a “play of mourning,” in which sovereign power appears as one afflicted with melancholy. This reflects what Benjamin calls “the theological situation of the epoch”: “The German trauerspiel wholly buries itself in the desolation of the earthly estate. Such redemption as it knows will lie more in the depths of these vicissitudes themselves than in the fulfillment of a divine plan of salvation. The repudiation of eschatology in religious plays is characteristic of the new drama throughout Europe; nevertheless, the headlong flight into a nature without grace is specifically German.” Ben-

38 Benjamin

jamin attaches distinctive importance to the origins of this genre in Lutheran doctrine: because Luther robbed human works of their earlier efficacy in the Christian narrative of salvation, he left the human being more exposed to the vicissitudes of his own fallen nature. Human action itself now appeared in all its contingency and was “deprived of all value.” This crucial shift in the new theology had implications not only for the understanding of human nature; it also brought into being a new conception of the natural surroundings to which humanity was condemned. Nature itself is now radically fallen: it is “an empty world.”27 The trauerspiel portrays this theological condition as a comprehensive unity that conflates history with nature. Because human action appears altogether fruitless, history loses its distinctive prestige as a theater for self-assertion, and it collapses into a quasi-natural condition: it becomes a ruin. “The allegorical physiognomy of natural history, which is brought onstage in the trauerspiel, is actually present as ruin. In the ruin, history has passed perceptibly into the setting. And so configured, history finds expression not as a process of eternal life but as a process of incessant decline.” The trauerspiel does not have the rational power of discerning historical events as a differentiated totality of consciously intended effects. Instead it sees history only with the eyes of an allegorist, as a ruin: its strategy is to “heap up fragments uninterruptedly, without any well-defined idea of a goal.” Protagonists in the trauerspiel seem to lack the critical ability to understand their own condition; the genre as such remains “obscure to itself.” The capacity for self-awareness was achieved not in the German trauerspiel but only in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose protagonist’s melancholy signifies not self-ignorance but self-knowledge. Unlike the princes in the trauerspiel, Prince Hamlet exhibits an “awakening” to self-reflection and genuine interiority.28

Benjamin 39

Benjamin’s study of the trauerspiel concludes on a paradoxical note. The entire genre seems to portray the mundane world as little more than the “bleak confusion of Golgotha.” It provides a theatrical illustration of human history in an unredeemed state, as a place of “darkness, vainglory, and distance from God.” Human life is a “time of hell,” that “abandoned and betrayed itself to the deep spirit of Satan.” But this very distance from redemption is the darkness that precedes the light. Here the trauerspiel demonstrates its fidelity to Lutheran doctrine: fallenness opens itself to grace. Allegorical immersion is “thrown back entirely upon itself,” and it rediscovers itself not “in the earthly world of things” but instead “seriously under heaven.” Benjamin describes this as the final “turnabout,” in which the trauerspiel’s spectacle of endless ruin becomes a necessary stage in the narrative of salvation: “Precisely this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects, in which it thinks to assure itself most fully of what is debased, abruptly change into allegories, and that these allegories fulfill and revoke the nothingness in which they present themselves, just as the intention finally does not faithfully abide in sight of bones but faithlessly leaps across to resurrection.”29 With this conclusion Benjamin dramatizes the contrast between history and redemption that would recur with some frequency throughout his career. The allegorist who appears in the Origin of the German Trauerspiel is a harbinger of the angel of history whose flight is described in the “Theses.” The resemblance between these two figures in Benjamin’s writing should not be missed. For both the allegorist and the angel, history is a field of ruins—an apocalyptic landscape that seems utterly without redemptive possibility. In both cases, however, radical hopelessness also serves as an opening for hope. The historical continuum itself is “incapable of radiating a meaning.” It therefore loses even its temporal character and becomes “secular-

40 Benjamin

ized in space.”30 This means that history alone cannot validate our concept of progress, and all hope for a meaningful transformation of history must come from a space outside it. The future is “disenchanted,” it is reduced to “homogenous, empty time.”31 But redemption appears as the radical alternative to this disenchantment. In both the trauerspiel study and the “Theses,” Benjamin sustains a stark dualism between history and religion, and seems unable to conceive of any means by which the two might be reconciled. Here we might detect his enduring commitment to a crypto-Lutheran distinction between fallenness and grace. For a secular theory of historical change, the consequences of this distinction are fatal. Rather than theorizing history as a site of internal transformation, he assigns all change to a principle that lies beyond history, conceiving change only as radical irruption. “For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”32

Aesthetics and the Aura We can detect the ambivalent historical role that Benjamin assigns to theology elsewhere in his work, specifically in his reflections on art. For the remainder of this chapter I would like to address the well-known topic of the artwork’s “aura” and its dissolution in order to bring into better focus the question of whether Benjamin can embrace secularization without ambivalence or whether he remains poised in indecision between a theological and a nontheological understanding of modernity. The topic of the aura is central to Benjamin’s thought. It appears with special prominence in one of his most celebrated texts, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” an essay that was composed perhaps as early as the spring of 1936 or, according to some estimates, as late as March–April 1939. Although the artwork essay has received copious attention in

Benjamin 41

the secondary literature, my purpose here is limited to the question concerning its implications for the theory of secularization. According to Benjamin, when we scrutinize the history of art we discover that there is no fixed and eternal answer to the question of what an artwork is. An artwork becomes what it is only through particular conditions of social context and use. Since those conditions have transformed over time, so too we have seen a transformation both in the actual content of our aesthetic experience and in our governing theoretical conception of what we take aesthetic experience to be. Benjamin introduces the concept of the aura as a categorial term to describe the conception of art that remained dominant at least within the frameworks of traditional society. For most of human history, Benjamin argues, works of art were interwoven into the social experience of the sacred. If they glowed with significance, this was only because they assumed their meaning within the broader context of cultic practice. “The earliest artworks,” Benjamin explains, “originated in the service of rituals—first magical, then religious.”33 This ritual quality will be either praised or condemned in accordance with changes in the dominant forms of religious belief. An ancient statue of Venus, Benjamin notes, could serve as an object of cultic worship for the ancient Greeks, while that same statue became for medieval clerics a  sinister idol which they condemned as a vestige of a vanquished paganism. In all such contexts, whether ancient or medieval, an artwork presented itself with a certain quality of uniqueness that Benjamin calls “the aura.” Like a painted halo over the head of a Christian saint, the aura is a penumbra of sacred tradition. It indicates that the artwork is incomparable and commands veneration much like a charismatic leader or prophet who is touched by the divine. In this respect, the aura is not only a category of religious experience; it is also a term that describes

42 Benjamin

the surrounding social and historical conditions that must obtain if there is to be religious experience at all. These sociological and historical implications might tempt us into believing that Benjamin would consider the dissolution of the artwork’s aura as an aesthetic analogue to the secularization of society. But Benjamin defeats this expectation: he tells us that even in  secular modernity “the auratic mode of existence” of the artwork has not yet wholly disappeared.34 On the contrary: in bourgeois society a late-modern variant of auratic experience survives even while it has migrated into what Benjamin calls the “secularized ritual [säkularisiertes Ritual]” of modern bourgeois aesthetics.35 Here Benjamin seems to rely on the Marxist critique of commodity fetishism. For Marx, the commodity is “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”36 Its value is “metaphysical” or “theological” in the sense that our idea of God, too, is the idea of an autonomous being who is said to enjoy an existence entirely independent of human reality. In the sphere of capitalist exchange the commodity is likewise granted the illusion of an autonomous and nonsocial value. This illusory independence permits bourgeois society to carry on as if exchange were untethered from labor, obscuring the truth that the commodity’s value derives ultimately from the extraction of surplus value that lies at the heart of capitalist exploitation. Here Benjamin sees an analogy with aesthetics: the quasi-independence of the bourgeois commodity is like the quasi-independence of the bourgeois work of art. In both cases, we falsely ascribe an independent value to the object as if this value were an intrinsic feature of the commodity that could exist independent of the social world and the laboring process from which it has emerged. Just as the fetishism of commodities forgets the origin of the commodity in social labor, so too the fetishism of aesthetics ignores the

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origin of the artwork in social experience. For Benjamin this analogy underscores the fact that the bourgeois artwork has never wholly succeeded in liberating itself from its religious origins. The religiously derived survives even in “the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.”37 It is this religious or “cultic” understanding of the artwork that eventually confronts its greatest threat with the emergence of new technologies of reproduction. In photography and film, the artwork begins to lose its self-identical authority. The new technologies of printing and reproduction enable the circulation of aesthetic experience throughout all networks of society. They introduce the possibility of experiencing artworks that are no longer unique, that are no longer confined to holistic contexts of a magical or religious ritual. Benjamin finds it highly significant that photography and socialism were born in the same historical moment: he describes the new aesthetic technique as a “revolutionary means of reproduction [Re­ produktionsmittel],” an obvious play on the Marxian term for “means of production [Produktionsmittel].” For the bourgeoisie, the introduction of these new technologies into aesthetic production was felt as a threat to traditional norms of art. The first response of bourgeois apologists was to insist with even greater conviction on the ideal of aesthetic autonomy, enhancing the auratic element in aesthetic experience with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art. But this did not succeed in liberating modern aesthetics from the inherited forms of cultic experience. The bourgeoisie only fashioned for itself what Benjamin calls a the­ ology of art (Theologie der Kunst). So it was only to be expected that the worshipful stance of the bourgeoisie would culminate in what Benjamin calls a “negative theology” (negative Theolo­ gie) of an absolutely “pure” art. The bourgeois cult of elevated aesthetic experience guards itself against any social functionality and purges the artwork of all representational content. Benja-

44 Benjamin

min calls this “the worship of beauty at its most profane.”38 I will have more to say on this notion of negative theology in relation to Adorno farther on. For the time being, it is only important to anticipate the strong differences between Adorno and Benjamin.39 Adorno is not embarrassed to say that the auratic element must be retained in any genuinely aesthetic experience, and in this respect it may seem that he endorses the aesthetic posture of high-bourgeois modernism that Benjamin associated with “negative theology.” Benjamin is eager to bring this aesthetic era to an end. Against the authoritarian tradition of art that is made into an object of secular worship, he welcomes the “decay of the aura [Verfall der Aura].”40 With this event the artwork is emancipated from the illusion of uniqueness; it is secularized for the first time. Against the bourgeois cult of art, technological reproduction actually hastens the aura’s decay, and thereby prepares the way for a new and unprecedented kind of aesthetic experience. The traditional artwork, as surrounded by auratic magic, compelled the solitary viewer to adopt a posture of worshipful distance. But the desacralized artwork does not require this social isolation, nor does it demand that the viewer adopt a stance of abject veneration. Instead it offers a possibility of wide circulation in a social collective. The modern masses are no longer supine before an enchanted singularity; they instead draw near to the artwork and are themselves mobilized by its technological volatility. Benjamin sees a reciprocal dynamic between the artwork and its viewership. Just as the artwork can be set free of its sacred bonds, so too the masses who experience the artwork can awaken from the spell of bourgeois ideology to embrace the promise of their own social agency. Such an experience qualifies as a true novum in the history of aesthetics. Just as the artwork is no longer individual but a phenomenon that can be repeated by mechanical means,

Benjamin 45

so too the observers are no longer individuals but masses who have emerged with the potential to act in solidaristic unison. Their consciousness is submerged into the group, and they are at last released from bourgeois solipsism. Their aesthetic consciousness is emancipated from the authoritarian cult of the aura. They experience the artwork not in worshipful contemplation but in a state that Benjamin calls distraction (Ablen­ kung). According to Benjamin, the crucial lesson of this innovation is that the decay of the aura should not be resisted in the name of an aesthetic absolute. The decay should rather be embraced as a welcome step in the transformation of aesthetic experience that might assist the proletariat in its struggle. For Benjamin the aura is an instrument of enchantment that holds the working classes in its manipulative spell. The proletariat will awaken to the real conditions of its existence and throw off its chains only once the aura is dissolved. In our current age of mediatized distraction, certain features in Benjamin’s argument may strike us as implausible. Benjamin apparently felt that the conventional ideal of modern agency places undue stress on the isolated self whose chief objective is the mastery of external reality. This model of the self would esteem focus over dispersion, concentration over distraction. But it is difficult to see how dispersion can become the organizing principle for a political movement that demands concerted and purposive action. Is distraction compatible with agency? To intervene in history as a collective would seem to require the focused attention of a group rather than the dispersal of its energy. Nor is it clear how distraction allows for a critical assessment of ideology. Would not distraction leave the contemporary masses more vulnerable to ideological manipulation? For my argument here such questions are not of central importance. But it is worth noting before I proceed that they

46 Benjamin

underscore a curious difficulty in Benjamin’s politico-aesthetic project. Benjamin needs to explain the difference in collective experience between a mere manipulation of the masses and genuine mobilization based on a common purpose. We should not forget that in the political situation of the 1930s, Benjamin saw in fascist aesthetics the greatest threat to the aesthetics of the Communist movement. In Ernst Jünger’s fantasies of technological violence, and also in the annual mass rallies at Nuremberg, Benjamin found baleful instances of what he called “the aestheticizing of politics [Ästhetisierung der Politik].”41 Fascism attempts to re-sacralize the forms of mass ritual and mass spectacle that are most characteristic of modern political experience. It resists the decay of the aura; instead it seeks to restore the aura in the name of authoritarian mystery. Overwhelmed by the modern spectacle, the fascist crowd adopts once again an antimodern posture of worshipful submission. On Benjamin’s interpretation, fascism is therefore a paradoxical fusion of modern technology and aesthetic mystification. With this idea, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the analysis of fascism that would preoccupy his colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer in the early 1940s. Benjamin refuses to see fascism merely as regression into a barbaric prehistory. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, he sees it as a dialectical consequence of a modernity that has ossified into unreflective myth.42 Against this aesthetico-political threat, Benjamin urges a Communist response. Where fascism represents the aestheticization of politics, communism must embrace what he calls the politici­ zation of art.43 Communism therefore signifies the only viable alternative for effecting a true emancipation from the politics of the aura. One might go so far as to say that it represents the only form of truly secular politics. This points toward the resolution of the difficulties I raised above: Benjamin can distinguish between an aesthetic manipulation of the masses and

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their authentic mobilization only if he holds fast to the ideal of a thoroughgoing secularization of aesthetic experience.44

Illuminations Sacred and Profane During the phase of his career when his enthusiasm for Marxism soared to its greatest heights, Benjamin expressed little regret about the aura’s decay. Nor did he indulge in a great deal of melancholy regarding the eclipse of traditional forms of ­sacred illumination. In a 1929 essay on surrealism he praised André Breton as the first to perceive “the revolutionary energies” that still lay dormant in the outmoded furnishings of the industrial age: “the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings,” and other “objects that have begun to be extinct” but represented the declining powers of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, from old photographs to discarded dresses, grand pianos, and even “fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.”45 Breton recognized “the relation of these things to revolution” and how “destitution . . . can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.”46 In such reflections, Benjamin does not succumb to religious nostalgia. The latent energies of revolution that still inhere in the ruins of the bourgeois past compel him to burrow into those ruins for the sake of the future. But he does not feel himself bound to the past as such, nor does he express any genuine regret for the eclipse of its sacred light. Rather, he longs for a “true, creative overcoming of religious illumination,” and he expressly advocates a “profane illumination.” Benjamin goes out of his way to explain that such an illumination has no religious meaning: its sources of inspiration are purely “materialist” and “anthropological.”47 The deepest forms of human satisfaction demand not the persistence of the sacred but its complete overcoming. Even in the “Theological-Political Frag-

48 Benjamin

ment” Benjamin affirms that “the order of the profane should be erected upon the idea of happiness.”48 All these reflections, it seems, would force us to conclude that Benjamin remained faithful to Marxism as a wholly secularist creed: revolution is conditional upon demystification, and the decay of the aura is a necessary step on the path to social emancipation. But with Benjamin things are rarely so simple. In the arguments I have summarized thus far I have made little mention of the ambivalence and even the melancholy that creeps into his writing when he reflects on the aura’s decline. In “Little History of Photography,” he characterizes the aura as “the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.”49 Nearly identical language recurs in the essay on mechanical reproducibility. But in Benjamin’s reflections “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” from 1940, the aura expands into domains far beyond the artwork, and it loses its sociohistorical specificity. Here the experience of the aura is defined as a way of seeing nature whereby the responsiveness that we expect from another person is “transposed” to natural things. “The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.”50 As Miriam Bratu Hansen has observed, this definition of the aura sees it as an experience of investment. The human capacity to return a gaze is transposed into the object, and the object in turn gains a certain kind of luminous power or authority.51 This suggests that the aura enjoys an independent power—as if it had the ability to “look back at us.” Here we may detect a connection between Benjamin’s understanding of the aura and what Marx called “the fetishism of commodities.” In Capital, Marx writes that the commodity in the capitalist system is falsely seen as possessing an intrinsic value that is independent of its social origins: “The social character of

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men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.” The “social relation between men . . . assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”52 Marx likens this misunderstanding to the religious phenomenon of the fetish, an object that is produced by human hands that then assumes a power over us and becomes an object of worship. This is apparently his meaning when he observes that a commodity is a “queer thing” entangled in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”53 Lest we misunderstand him on this point, we should not imagine that Marx believed that a commodity actually bears within itself a religious power, as if it were in fact the secularized remnant of a sacred age. He meant only to summon an analogy that might help motivate his secular criticism of the ideologies that underwrite modern capitalism.54 For Benjamin, however, it would seem that the comparison to religion is not merely analogical; it suggests a genuinely religious inheritance, a continuity via secularization. Like Marx, Benjamin thinks that the aura that surrounds the artwork is a quasi-religious constraint insofar as it inhibits us from recognizing ourselves as collective agents. Implicit in his definition, however, is the stronger suggestion that the aura actually retains the enchanted experience that once bound together culture with nature in a sacred whole. In the “Artwork” essay, Benjamin tells us that technology has eroded this experience, and that the aura has become obsolete. But he also takes care to note how in early photographs a trace of the aura lingered nevertheless. Such pho­ tographs reveal the “fleeting expression of a human face,” in which “the aura beckons . . . for the last time.”55 It is not altogether certain that Benjamin anticipated the phenomenon of the aura’s decay without strong misgivings. In the 1931 essay “Little History of Photography,” an unmistakable note of nostalgia intrudes upon Benjamin’s prose as he narrates

50 Benjamin

the history of auratic decline. The essay presents us with a striking contrast to the better-known argument in which Benjamin celebrates without qualification the revolutionary potential of the de-auratic artwork in the age of reproductive techniques. But the nostalgic essay on photography is not unique. The same mood of melancholy informs Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust, in whose writing the memory of childhood becomes saturated with auratic power. In a late essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (first published in January 1940 in the Zeitzschrift für Sozialforschung), Benjamin remarks upon the persistence of the aura as exemplified by Proust’s exercises in redemptive memory. For Benjamin, Proust’s success in resurrecting the otherwise forgotten events of the past serves as a poignant counterexample to the dissolution of the aura as it is thematized in Baudelaire’s poems. Proust, with his method of mémoire in­ volontaire, experiences the past as an endless flood of memories that overwhelm the writer and dramatize the difference between the richness of the past and the poverty of his present isolation. This permits Proust to focus all his literary power on the resurrection of everyday objects from a past that he has invested with “love and reverence.”56 For Baudelaire, however, modernity entailed a loss of auratic experience, its dissolution or decline (déchéance). Benjamin traces the conditions for this decline back to what Baudelaire called the “shock-experience” (Chockerlebnis, or sensation du choc) that seizes both the passerby in the urban crowd and the worker at the machine.57 As we move through the chaos of the city, for example, the traffic and the noise transform our experience and confront us with “a series of shocks and collisions.”58 The modern city presents us with the spatialized experience of modern technology, which has (in Benjamin’s words) “subjected the human sensorium to a kind of training.”59

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In this complicated history, we cannot ascribe to Benjamin the dogmatic attitude of a technological optimist who would happily surrender the enchantment of the aura as the trace of an unwanted and irrecoverable past. Some readers may nonetheless feel tempted to construct a crude narrative that moves from Proust to Baudelaire—from aura to shock—as if Benjamin were charting the personal and historical passage of time from the casual animism of the child’s imagination to the urbane realism of the adult. No doubt, such a narrative would confirm Benjamin’s reputation as a resolute secularist: it would suggest his adherence to the classical theory of secularization, with its shattering of holistic experience and its condescending view of the religious believer as a man who flees back into the open arms of the church because he (in Max Weber’s phrase) “cannot bear the fate of the times.”60 Those who read Benjamin as an unflinching modernist and a militant ally of Bertolt Brecht may find this narrative convincing; it would place Benjamin alongside other theorists of secular modernity in the canons of Western Marxism.

The Backward Glance It should be obvious, however, that the reading of Benjamin as a resolute secularist can convince only if one ignores all the backward gestures of nostalgia and regret that recur so frequently in his work. This is true not only of those works in which past enchantment and childhood loom as the dominant themes, such as the posthumously published Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert), the 1928 essay on old toys, or the essay a year later on children’s literature. These are only the specific symptoms of a general sensibility that pervades Benjamin’s thinking about the relationship

52 Benjamin

between past and present. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the gesture of the Rücksicht, or “backward glance,” recurs throughout Benjamin’s written corpus as something of an idée fixe. To confirm this point, it may suffice to recall the poignant figure of the angel from Benjamin’s “Theses” on history (composed in the same year as “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”). We are told that the angel is caught in a storm of progress and moves backward into the future while its face is turned toward the past. Where humanity sees a chain of discrete historical events, the angel sees a single catastrophe. In developing this haunting idea Benjamin drew inspiration from Angelus Novus, a painting by Paul Klee that he had purchased in 1921 and displayed on the wall of his office in Berlin. According to his friend Gershom Scholem, Benjamin considered Klee’s angel “his most important possession” and clearly invested it with enormous significance. Over the course of his life he reverted to the idea of an angel on several occasions, embroidering and transforming its meaning in accordance with his changing philosophical interests. In November 1927 he wrote a letter to Scholem in which he treats the angel with sacramental care: one “lays him down on twigs of roses [Rosenzweigen],” writes Benjamin. As Scholem reminds us, this obvious allusion to the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig reconfirms the sense that Benjamin’s angel had a more than metaphorical bond with theology.61 Benjamin displayed Klee’s Angelus Novus in his successive residences, first in Berlin and later in his apartment in Paris. He left it behind only when he was forced to flee south to Marseille, and he then entrusted the painting, without its frame, to Georges Bataille, who safeguarded it during the war in a suitcase hidden in the Bibliothèque nationale.62 After the war Theodor and Gretel Adorno kept a reproduction of Klee’s

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painting on the wall of their Frankfurt apartment.63 But there is a small inconsistency in this history. In “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” Gershom Scholem writes that the painting migrated to Adorno in America and returned with him to Frankfurt.64 Adorno’s biographer Stefan Müller-Doohm, however, corrects this; he informs us that the Adornos possessed a reproduction, not the original.65 The details of the angel’s actual peregrinations across the globe are not my concern. More pertinent here are the meanings that Benjamin may have found in the image. We can imagine the angel staring down from the wall to bestow its uncanny gaze upon the writer as he composed his final essay on the paradoxes of modern civilization. It is tempting to think of the angel as a muse who inspired Benjamin’s conflicted meditations on the concept of history. The ambivalence of the angel, we might infer, is also the ambivalence of the author himself, whose work documents the relentless storm of progress but also looks back with longing and regret at the “paradise” that lies not in the future but in the past. The strange posture of this angel, however, compels us to recognize that for Benjamin the primal past and the utopian future had fused into a single image of longing: the fourteenth thesis in the history essay bears a quotation from Karl Kraus, “Origin is the goal.”66 Benjamin, then, was a theorist of ambivalent secularization, poised in indecision between Marxism and messianism. If we cannot resolve this tension it is because he simultaneously radicalizes both elements to such a degree that they become strict polarities. When they are defined in mutual opposition, no true reconciliation is possible. On one hand, Benjamin the partisan of revolution wishes to affirm the ideal of a modernity that is wholly discontinuous from tradition: he celebrates the dissolution of the aura precisely because he sees its disappearance as a necessary condition for a species of truly modern con-

54 Benjamin

sciousness that could leave behind the consoling illusions of bourgeois society. In rejecting these illusions, he overcomes not only bourgeois aesthetics but also the quasi-theological confidence in the historical continuum as holding any promise of intrinsic meaning. History itself is exposed as mere catastrophe. On the other hand, Benjamin understands the theological inheritance in such a way that he cannot imagine the messianic as the completion of time; instead, he sees it as a rupture with time, an explosion from the outside. He opposes to his catastrophic understanding of history a conception of religion that is its precise counterpart but no less catastrophic. The divine appears as a messianic “event” only because Benjamin conceives of the messiah as the “other” to all history. It is this nominalistic understanding of the divine not as the rational unfolding of a providential plan within history but as an irruption into history from a transcendent beyond that alerts us to the troubling affinities between Benjamin and Carl Schmitt.67 Benjamin’s biographers Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland have observed that Benjamin’s essay on the concept of history still expresses the melancholic opinion that was elaborated in his failed 1925 habilitation: history itself becomes a trauerspiel, a drama of mourning.68 But this grim view of history as catastrophe robs Benjamin of any mundane resources by which he might have developed his own theory of modernity. He is left with the same affect of sadness and loss that he elsewhere called “left-wing melancholy,” a term which he had deployed as an accusation against writers such as Erich Kästner whose politics he deemed fatalistic.69 The accusation strikes the accuser: because he could not find in the secular continuum any internal moments of normative potential that he could enlist in the service of revolution, Benjamin is compelled to adopt the drastic alternative of appealing to a force that is altogether discontinuous with time. In calling this force the “mes-

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sianic” he does not resolve this difficulty. He only dramatizes the paradox in which he has been caught due to his own disenchantment with mundane history.70

A Theological-Political Predicament This paradox becomes most evident in the “Theological-Political Fragment,” a short meditation that continues to puzzle scholars of Benjamin to this day. Even its original date of composition remains uncertain. Scholem believed that Benjamin wrote it in 1920 or 1921, while Adorno considered it a product of Benjamin’s later years and suggested it was written in 1937 or early 1938.71 The difficulty of determining its date of composition might be read as symptomatic of its own refusal to find higher meaning in secular time. In the fragment, Benjamin declares that “nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic.”72 But he then binds himself in a paradox, since the extra-historical concept of the messianic has become the only source of inspiration for history itself. The indeterminate dating of the theological-political fragment may serve as a reminder that we cannot separate Benjamin’s oeuvre into ideologically distinct phases in which either theological or revolutionary motifs wholly prevail. It is characteristic of his thought that these two motifs remain fused together in a way that belies any strictly analytical separation. In “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” Scholem prosecuted a vigorous case against the New Left’s Marxist interpretations of Benjamin, arguing that if his late friend’s work displayed a curious “interweaving of mystical-cosmic and Marxist insights,” this was only because the theological core had been “dressed up” in the garments of historical materialism.73 Scholem’s unstated allusion to the puppet in Turkish dress, which owed its lifelike movements to a hidden religious animus, achieves

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merely a metaphorical resolution: it evades the genuinely philosophical conflict between the two contradictory themes in Benjamin’s work by asserting that only one of them is real.74 How, then, are we to understand the relationship between theology and historical materialism in Benjamin’s thought? To answer this question, we can find a further clue in a note from the Arcades Project in Convolute N, in which Benjamin writes, “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” This metaphor urges us to conclude that Benjamin’s thought indeed relies on a theological substance that has flowed like ink onto the written page. Without this ink there would be no content to his ideas, though the distinctively theological origin of his thinking is not evident in his written work since it has been absorbed by what he calls the blotting pad. The metaphor is meant to suggest that the theological provenance of his thought is necessary but invis­ ible: “Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.”75 In his philosophical reconstruction of Benjamin’s work, Eli Friedländer seems to confirm this strongly secularist statement when he observes that for Benjamin any reliance on explicitly religious concepts was “out of the question.”76 But if we take Benjamin’s own metaphorical expression as a genuine statement of philosophical intent, such a distinction cannot be sustained. Benjamin clearly states that his thought draws instruction from theological resources even if it also ef­ faces the sources upon which it relies. The quarrels in contemporary Benjamin scholarship as to how to assign the proper weight to its theological and Marxist themes would hardly have endured were there not ample evidence in the written work for both sides.77 But the analogy to ink and blotter suggests that Benjamin conceived of his work as the secularized trace of theological ideas.

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We are left to confront anew the well-known question: How can Benjamin rely on theological sources of inspiration even while affirming his fidelity to a political task whose ends are wholly profane? In the theses on history, Benjamin makes this problem even more apparent: he affirms the angel’s view of history as catastrophe, but he claims that he adopts this perspective only so as to secure the integrity of historical materialism. Only this can explain why he does not endorse messianism in the unqualified sense. He turns away from genuine messianism, but he is nonetheless willing to enlist its conceptual energy for the purposes of a historical materialism that wields a “weak messianic power.”78 To be sure, Benjamin is not so naive as to suppose that this transfer from messianism to materialism can be achieved without cost. The true powers of the Messiah are beyond our reach. All the same, the borrowed light of the messianic nonetheless retains enough of its original power to equip the historical materialist with the energy she or he needs to effect a break with the historical continuum. If Benjamin wishes to rescind the Marxist ban on religion, we should acknowledge the irony that he violates the ban precisely in the name of Marxism itself. In this he follows the logic of heresy: he strives for a more faithful realization of the law he has transgressed. Here one detects an homage to Jewish messianism (as researched by Scholem) and its Kabbalistic doctrine of “redemption through sin.”79 All the same, we must resist the temptation to interpret Benjamin as a theologian: if he deploys the figure of the messianic, he does so only to ensure a species of Marxism that can confirm a genuine concept of revolution. A persistent question looms over these arguments: Can Benjamin affirm his understanding of messianism as a persistent feature of modern political action while also remaining faithful to Marxism as a secular discourse? And this prompts a host

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of further questions: Is historical materialism not a theory of history? And if we accept this definition, then how can it tolerate the idea of a messianic intrusion from outside the historical plane? To these questions, we can try to rescue Benjamin from himself by observing that he does not equate secularization with disappearance. Inside the seemingly lifeless puppet of historical materialism, the revolutionary energies of the messianic remain as the animating force. As I noted above, Benjamin understands secularization not as true disappearance but only as concealment. We could therefore say that his concept of secularization is dialectical: it not only annuls, it also sustains the theological concepts it applies to historical materialism. Here we are reminded of the German term for secularization: Ver­ weltlichung, the worldly application of theological values. But the language of dialectics can only partly reveal the conceptual puzzle at the core of Benjamin’s argument. The fact remains that historical materialism was born as a gesture of secularizing critique that shifted the locus of redemption from the heavens to the earth. In “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx wrote, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”80 When Benjamin develops his own theory of the aura’s decay it may seem to us that he has merely recapitulated the gesture of secularization that derives from Marx. But if Benjamin also wishes to rescind the Marxist ban on religion by turning theology into the hidden life force in materialist criticism, it is not clear how he can still affirm his fidelity to a species of materialism that condemned religion as an illusion. Once he lifts the ban, religion ceases to be an illusion and becomes

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yet again an autonomous power. This is what happens once Benjamin adopts the perspective of the angel and permits himself to borrow from the conceptual archive of theology. But this lands him in a dilemma: having elevated himself to the angelic perspective, it is not religion but history that loses its meaning. We cannot evade the question: What integrity remains to historical materialism if it sees the entire realm of historical immanence as catastrophe?

Secularization and Indecision The difficulties discussed above remind us that Benjamin’s ambivalence regarding the classical theory of secularization stands as a sign for the unresolved conflict in his work. I am hardly the first to observe that Benjamin stages a permanent contest between Marxism and messianism. The esteemed scholar Rolf Tiedemann, who studied with Adorno and Horkheimer and wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Benjamin, offered the strong verdict that in the “Theses” Benjamin’s reflections on political praxis resulted in “a cloudy mixture of aspects of utopian socialism and of Blanquism, producing a political Messianism which can neither take Messianism really seriously nor be seriously transposed into politics.” In Tiedemann’s critique we can hear the distant echo of a 1931 letter to Benjamin from Gershom Scholem, who warned his friend that any attempt to bring these two traditions into dialectical union could only result in a “self-deception” and a “confusion between religion and politics.”81 Unlike Scholem, however, I am not concerned with the integrity of rival doctrines. The conflict in Benjamin’s work has broader implications for the way we think about the normative resources that are available to us in modern politics. When Benjamin appeals to theological concepts as a necessary supplement to politics, he also implies that without this

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supplement our political beliefs and practices would lack the normative meaning they require. In Benjamin’s meditations on religion and politics this problem appears with marked clarity, but it is hardly unique to his work. Any theory of secularization that sees normativity as the exclusive property of religion alone will also tend to embrace the logical correlative—namely, that a thoroughly secu­ lar politics must suffer from a fatal deficit of normativity. Only on this premise can one explain the urgency with which modern political theorists have turned back to religious concepts as if they were the necessary and irreplaceable resources for moral-­political instruction. Ever since Max Weber, the notion of a normative deficit has accompanied social criticism as if it were the bad conscience of a modernity that has repressed all doubt concerning its own achievements. It has also played a special role in modern discourses of political theology. At the darkest moment in twentieth-century history, the political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt mobilized this polemic to condemn modern liberal democracy as a mere “machine.” For Schmitt, the only recourse for an ostensibly secular politics was to animate its movements in the person of a worldly God, a sovereign leader whose decisionistic intrusion upon the mechanism of democracy he likened to a miracle.82 In the writings of the Frankfurt School, the appeal to theology as a resource for normative instruction has played an especially powerful role both for good and for ill. We know from the art historian Horst Bredekamp and others that Benjamin drew occasionally upon the arguments of Schmitt, even if he modified those arguments or turned them against the author’s right-wing, authoritarian aims.83 As early as 1923 Benjamin referred favorably to Schmitt’s Politische Theologie (1922), which he later credited as a crucial source of inspiration for his inquiry into the origins of the German mourning play (Ur­

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sprung des deutschen Trauerspiels). But already in the “Critique of Violence” (1921), Benjamin’s distinction between “mythic” and “divine” violence seems to betray at least some familiarity with Schmitt’s critique of liberal parliamentarism. The mythic violence that Benjamin associates with administrative power is “law-preserving,” whereas the divine violence that he associates with sovereign power is “law-destroying” and thus belongs to the logic of revolutionary destruction.84 In Schmitt’s political theology, the sovereign within any given political order is the agent who possesses the extra-systemic power to decide upon cases of exception where the law falls silent. Whereas liberalism prefers to imagine that politics can be reduced to an immanent and self-regulating mechanism requiring no such external ground, Schmitt believed that any genuinely political order must find its ultimate grounding in a sovereign whose unprecedented and irrationalistic intrusion into politics represents the functional analogue to a miraculous event.85 He saw in liberalism a misguided and anti-metaphysical attempt to purge the miracle of sovereign decision from political life. The transition from theological and then metaphysical conceptions of the political to a purely scientific and “immanent” worldview meant that any appeal to such a sovereign became impermissible: “The machine,” Schmitt wrote, “now runs by itself.”86 In Benjamin’s interpretation, the chess-playing Turk illustrates the dull and lifeless repetition of modern politics that functions as a mere machine and has banished all that is messianic or miraculous from the world. To be sure, Benjamin was hardly a Schmittian apologist for the authoritarian decision; the alleged affinities between Schmitt and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School have been too often exaggerated.87 As I noted above, Benjamin’s late essay on the concept of history offers a sharp rejoinder to Schmitt’s notion of a “state of emergency,” insofar as it directly contests Schmitt’s view of the emergency

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as an “exception.” Unlike Schmitt, Benjamin sees the true emergency as not the exception but the norm. Benjamin’s appeal to an angel nonetheless replicates the Schmittian critique of liberal politics, though it does so in the name of a revolution from the left rather than the right. The “messianic” bears the unique and anti-systemic force that can blast open the historical continuum at any point and interrupt the deadening repetition that Benjamin associates with bourgeois ideologies of political progress.88 Implicit in this book is the question of whether we can afford the angel’s perspective. Throughout the twentieth century, social theorists and philosophers have not infrequently entertained the thought that without religion modern society would suffer a grave deficit in normative resources. Max Weber foresaw that with the rationalization and disenchantment of the world, modern societies would display a multitude of pathologies and a general loss of “meaning.”89 From Weber to Schmitt, and throughout the twentieth century, the grim prognosis of a normative deficit has accompanied the theory of secularization like its own shadow. A comparable theme appears in Benjamin’s reflections when he suggests that historical materialism will be reduced to a lifeless mechanism if it cannot enlist the hidden energies of theology.90 Such arguments, I would suggest, betray a lack of confidence in the normative potentials of secular life, and we might ask ourselves how the theory of secularization came to be so disabled by a self-reflexive skepticism concerning its own consequences. I would propose that the origins of this skepticism derive from religion itself. Consider the words of the Hebrew prophet: “Surely man walketh as a mere semblance; Surely for vanity they are in turmoil; He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what wait I for? My hope, it is in Thee” (Psalms 39:4–8, JPS Bible). This is the

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key topos of a religious polemic which places its trust in God alone and condemns all human striving as lacking in purpose. In modern philosophy, this polemic still retains its edge whenever it is claimed that modernity cannot survive upon its own normative resources but must invest its hopes in religion alone. It is a poignant irony that in the writings of the Frankfurt School this very polemic appears in a secular guise. Even when Benjamin claims an allegiance to historical materialism, he can justify his argument against progress only by assuming a mortgage to religion that can never be fully repaid. But a theory of revolution that comes burdened with such a debt does a grave injustice to the purely secular potentials that still await their realization. The urgent question that concerns me in this book is whether one can simultaneously sustain a full recognition of religion in all its enduring power while also paying homage to the independent possibilities of a thoroughly secular life. Benjamin did not succeed in achieving any such harmony. His thinking oscillates without resolution between messianism and materialism.91

t wo

Horkheimer; or, The Longing for the Wholly Other The hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word is, to be sure, a non-scientific wish. —Max Horkheimer, foreword to Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination

I

n the early spring of 1972 Max Horkheimer had just entered his seventy-eighth year. The aging doyen of critical theory had retired from his official post in Frankfurt as director of the Institute for Social Research many years before and had retreated to his home in Montagnola, a Swiss town perched above Lake Lugano just north of the Italian border.1 In the postwar era, Horkheimer had played a prestigious role as the director of the Frankfurt School. In the 1950s, the left-oriented institute, which students had once called “Café Marx,” came to be known as “Café Max.”2 Horkheimer was also elevated to positions of considerable prestige, first in 1950, when

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he was made dean of the philosophy department, and then a year later, when he was appointed rector of the university, an honor that distinguished him as the first Jewish rector in the Federal Republic of Germany. It risks no exaggeration to say that his final years as a professor in Frankfurt had been difficult. Among the new generation of students on the German left were militants who felt that the institute had capitulated to the establishment. In 1969 Theodor Adorno, Horkheimer’s close colleague and friend since before the war, had suffered a terrific humiliation in the classroom when students showered him with flower petals and bared their breasts, a gesture of ridicule that moved him to cancel his lectures for the remainder of the semester and retreat to the alpine village of Zermatt, where an ill-advised hike in the mountains provoked the heart attack that claimed his life that August. Horkheimer’s wife, Maidon, died in October of the same year. Horkheimer himself was already suffering from illness. The double loss, of both his wife and his most trusted colleague, left Horkheimer in a state of isolation that only compounded his fears for the future of critical theory.3 One suspects that Horkheimer’s confidence must have been somewhat bolstered, however, when he learned that the legacy of the Frankfurt School had found a reliable historian in Martin Jay, a doctoral candidate from Harvard University who, by 1972, was nearing the end of his study of the Frankfurt School. The dissertation would be published as a book the following year, and over the next decades it would become the standard, most reliable resource in English, and in many other languages, for those who wished to understand the institute’s history.4 During his research, Jay had conducted interviews with Horkheimer and other core members of the Frankfurt School. Adorno, aging and embattled, seems to have harbored some

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private concerns about Jay’s true intentions, and he even warned his colleague Herbert Marcuse against offering any assistance to the young graduate student from America, who, he feared, possessed an “unerring instinct to direct himself to the dirt.”5 Adorno’s fears were of course unfounded, and he seriously misunderstood Jay’s intentions. But his anxiety about the young researcher’s aims was no doubt due to the new spirit of militancy and oedipal rebellion that was sweeping through the ranks of the student movement on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a testament to Jay’s tenacity, however, that notwithstanding his colleague’s concerns Horkheimer came to trust and admire the young historian from America, and, despite serious illness, he even agreed to write a brief foreword to Jay’s forthcoming book. In 1971, Horkheimer sent a German-language draft of the foreword to Jay so that he could translate it and return it to Horkheimer for final corrections. A foreword of this kind has a symbolic importance. Written by Horkheimer himself but published in the United States in the first major study of the Frankfurt School, it served as a message from the past to the present, from the institute to a new generation of American readers. One could even say that it marks the moment when critical theory in its “classical” phase began to migrate from actuality to afterlife, and from the volatile period of contestation and argument into the less troubled era of its reception and canonization. But the foreword also merits scrutiny here for more substantive reasons. In the manuscript of his book, Jay had taken care to avoid any suggestion that the content of critical theory could be reductively explained with reference to the Jewish heritage of its founders. Their own sensitivity to such speculation is apparent. Consider, for instance, the letter to Jay from the institute’s founder, Felix Weil, in August 1971, in which

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Weil warned the young scholar that allusions to “the so-called joint ethnic origins of our group” would only help “retroactively to justify all the attacks our enemies launched against the Institute,” namely, the charge that they were “rootless outsiders” who had misled German students with “un-German thoughts” (undeutsche Gedanken).6 Especially in the interwar era, the fear among German intellectuals of Jewish descent that their efforts would be dismissed as somehow inauthentic or particularistic was pronounced. One need only recall the often-­heard anti-Semitic canard promulgated by the Nazis and others that psychoanalysis was merely a “Jewish science” ( jüdische Wissenschaft).7 A similar charge, interlaced with antiSemitism, was also directed against members of the Frankfurt School. That Jay himself was born into an American-Jewish household in the Bronx, New York, probably did little to allay Weil’s concerns, because the relatively encouraging story of American-Jewish assimilation contrasted so sharply with the traumatic experience of central European Jewry in the midtwentieth century. One could even say that The Dialectical Imagination is a work that bespeaks a distinctively American confidence in the prospects for cultural pluralism. Without embarrassment, its author permits himself to speculate on the role that Jewish identity may have played in the development of critical theory. In The Dialectical Imagination, Jay makes reference to the “ethnic roots” of the Frankfurt School’s affiliates even while he records Weil’s denial that these roots are of any deep importance for the interpretation of their ideas. All the same, Jay himself entertains the notion that the “strong ethical tone” of critical theory may reflect “the incorporation of values likely to be espoused in a close-knit Jewish home.”8 In a more philosophical register, Jay also speculates that critical theory may

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express the enduring Jewish preference for the word and its corresponding aversion to the sensuous image as the vehicle for a nonconceptual and unmediated religious experience.9 In his 1971 correspondence with Weil, Jay elaborated on this theme. He specifically alluded to the possible link between critical theory and the so-called Bilderverbot, “ban on graven images,” announced in the Second Commandment. Weil, however, resisted such explanations, as Jay recorded in the published book. By contrast, Horkheimer readily acknowledged the connection with this theological concept: in a July 1971 letter to Jay he expressed his personal regret that he could not engage in a more extensive conversation with him regarding “the materialistic as well as the theological elements in the development of critical theory.”10 Consider, too, Helmut Bubiel’s 1987 interview with the sociologist Leo Löwenthal in which Löwenthal confessed, “However much I once tried to convince Martin Jay that there were no Jewish motifs among us at the Institute, now, years later and after mature consideration, I must admit to a certain influence of Jewish traditions, which were codeterminative.”11 But the decisive statement comes from a letter that Horkheimer wrote to the theologian Otto Herz in September 1969, in which Horkheimer affirmed that “Critical Theory . . . has its roots in Judaism. It derives from the idea that thou shalt make no image of God.”12 With such examples in mind, I wish to begin this chapter with a closer look at Horkheimer’s foreword to The Dialectical Imagination, which underwent a small and seemingly insignificant metamorphosis as it changed hands from Horkheimer to Jay and then back to the author for his final corrections. In the original text, Horkheimer had written in German: “Die Hoffnung, irdisches Grauen möge nicht das letzte Wort haben, ist zweifellos ein metaphysisches Wunsch.” In Jay’s English this became: “The hope, that earthly horror does not possess the

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last word, is admittedly a metaphysical wish.” But in his final corrections to the foreword, Horkheimer apparently suffered a change of heart and he replaced the word metaphysical with non-scientific.13 Whatever one makes of this minor amendment, it is worth noting that the terms are not conceptual equivalents. The reference to a “metaphysical” wish bespeaks an appeal to the transcendent, whereas the term “non-scientific” silences this appeal. At the very least, it banishes the wish as unsuitable within the bounds of scholarship. In calling the wish metaphysical, one states affirmatively what that wish is, even if such a characterization remains lacking in determinate content. In calling the wish nonscientific, however, one merely states what it is not. In this subtle change one may detect a gesture of modesty at an unwanted lapse. If at first Horkheimer had confessed to a “metaphysical wish,” it seems that he later regretted his boldness and disavowed the original word. I would like to suggest that this brief excursus into the editorial history of the foreword can shed some light on Horkheimer’s growing attachment to religion, and especially to Judaism, in his final years.

Between Schopenhauer and Marx If we survey the long arc of Horkheimer’s career, we may feel tempted to see this last phase of religious reawakening as a return to the faith of his childhood. Born in 1895 not far from Stuttgart, Horkheimer was raised in an observant Jewish family. Neither orthodox nor reform, the family followed the traditional dietary laws, at least until a physician, with the consent of the family rabbi, advised that they be broken for the sake of the son’s health. Max’s father, a businessman and successful textile manufacturer, attended synagogue on a regular basis and was a member of the international Jewish organiza-

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tion B’nai B’rith; his son Max had a bar mitzvah and afterward sustained some attachment to his Jewish identity. During his military service in the First World War, the young Horkheimer encountered a pronounced anti-Semitism that apparently left a deep wound. His early encounters with prejudice surely laid the foundations for his later contributions to the empirical sociology of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism in both Germany and the United States. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to characterize the early Horkheimer as preoccupied with overtly religious themes. By the 1920s he had articulated nearly all his thoughts in a secular key. During the war, he wrote short stories in which he expressed a species of political radicalism and strong sympathies with the working classes, and after the war, during the abortive socialist rebellion in Munich, he even had the misfortune to be mistaken for Ernst Toller, the playwright who was tried for revolutionary activity. Notwithstanding his political radicalism, however, Horkheimer remained skeptical of all political dogmas. Although he never abandoned his sympathies for emancipatory politics and continued to articulate his ideas in a critical dialogue with the Marxist tradition, he could never bring himself into full alignment with Marxist orthodoxy. The First World War, it seems, left him with an especially dark streak of pessimism regarding all prospects for political transformation. This may help explain why he found in Arthur Scho­penhauer a kindred spirit. Horkheimer’s biographer John Abromeit cautions us against exaggerating this influence, and he proposes that we read the young Horkheimer not as a Scho­ penhauerian pessimist but instead as a “critical realist.”14 His commitment to a certain kind of realism was perhaps most explicit in the 1920s, when the young Horkheimer was a student at the University of Frankfurt and devoted himself most of all to Gestalt psychology and neo-Kantian philosophy.

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Nor can we ignore the strongly Marxian themes that came to the fore once Horkheimer had assumed the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1931. In this earlier phase of his career, Horkheimer exhibited what we might call a purely secular Denkstil. In a 1933 essay on the problem of moral concepts in materialist philosophy, he declares: “Materialism finds no transcendent authority over human beings that would distinguish between good will and the lust for profit, kindness and cruelty, avarice and self-sacrifice.”15 Against any metaphysical or Kantian grounding for our moral concepts, Horkheimer appealed instead to purely immanent features of both the social structure and the socially conditioned psyche. Most of all, he brought his psychological research to bear on the phenomenon of bourgeois repression. Modern efforts to deny human desire not only result in personal unhappiness, they also conspire against the emergence of a genuinely free society.16 Scholars such as Alfred Schmidt have observed that for Horkheimer the enduring affirmation of historical materialism not only coexisted with but may have actually helped to reinforce his underlying Schopenhauerian pessimism. This is evident, for example, in the early collection of notes and aphorisms from the period 1926–1931, in which Horkheimer interlaces his materialism with grim observations on “the senselessness of the world.”17 When theologians affirm the existence of a “Beyond,” he writes, and when they seek to prove “the perfection of this eternal something by pointing to the hope in our heart, they forget that fear and mistrust are equally good reasons for inference about the absolute as is our trust in a divine justice.”18 In the early years, such notes of Schopenhauerian pessimism did not yet awaken a yearning for theological solutions. Our investment in the future requires not a belief in “the afterlife of individual existence in a Beyond” but rather “the solidarity with men who will come after us in this world.”19

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A Dialectic of Religion Despite the darkening mood that predominates in his work during the later 1930s, Horkheimer remained in those years strongly Marxist in his orientation, even while he had largely abandoned his confidence in a unified social class that could embody the anticipated transformation. Critical theory, if it still sustained hope for historical transformation, now sought the locus of such transformation not in the working class but in the generalized anthropological category of humankind. In the programmatic statement “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), Horkheimer expressed his longing for “a state of affairs in which there will be no exploitation or oppression, in which an all-embracing subject, namely self-aware mankind, exists.”20 In this situation, theory and practice would at last come together, not only within the concrete unity of the class-conscious proletariat but within the embodied agency of the human species. In this case, Horkheimer still imagined that “it will be possible to speak of a unified theoretical creation and a thinking that transcends individuals.”21 But the norm was now expressed as a mere possibility: “To strive for this,” he admits, “is not yet to bring it to pass.”22 Although the current disunity of theory and practice does not license a retreat into absolute pessimism, the space for critical insight remains severely limited. This was especially true as the world prepared for war and propaganda spread across the globe: “Today,” Horkheimer observed, “when the whole weight of the existing state of affairs is pushing mankind towards the surrender of all culture and relapse into darkest barbarism, the circle of solidarity is narrow enough.”23 Horkheimer did not relish this fact, but neither did he see how it could be redressed. With grim realism he admitted that “in the general historical upheaval the truth may reside with numerically small groups of men.”24

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During the later 1930s and especially during the dark years of the Second World War, it should not surprise us that Horkheimer grew increasingly skeptical about the possibility for social emancipation. He also grew fearful of both antiSemitism and authoritarianism—the correlative elements of fascist ideology—whose rising power he witnessed all around him, even in the relative safety of his United States exile. With support from the American Jewish Committee, he served as director for a massive and multivolume empirical research program, Studies in Prejudice, which eventually produced several monographs on anti-Semitism and demagoguery as well as the now-famous inquiry into social psychology, The Authori­ tarian Personality, co-authored by Adorno in concert with a team of psychologists in Berkeley, California, and first published in 1950.25 But here I want to note that in his growing pessimism Horkheimer could also find theoretical support in the last works of Walter Benjamin. In June 1941, Hannah Arendt gave to Adorno Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History,” a copy of which Adorno then sent to Horkheimer with a cover letter in which he expressed his admiration for its claims. To Adorno the “Theses” were especially welcome as he had quarreled with Benjamin not long before over the latter’s celebratory views on the aesthetic prospects for emancipation via technological innovation in photography and film. The “Theses” marked a return to themes about which Benjamin and his Frankfurt School colleagues found themselves in broad agreement. Upon receiving the manuscript Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in a state of intellectual excitement and laid special emphasis on the “conception of history as permanent catastrophe.” Hork­ heimer wrote back: “I share your happiness that we have Benjamin’s history theses. They will keep us busy for some time to come, and he will still be with us. The identity of barbarism

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and culture . . . was, by the way, the subject of one of my last conversations with him in a café near the Gare Montparnasse.”26 The exchange of letters between Horkheimer and Adorno merits further attention here as it may help us appreciate how both philosophers came to adopt such a profoundly negative view of modern social-political possibilities. In the later writings of the Frankfurt School, the verdict on the contemporary world as a condition of “permanent catastrophe” was to become a kind of leitmotif, repeated with innumerable variations though always in a minor key. In the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the work that Adorno and Horkheimer were writing together in the early 1940s, the theme is stated with hyperbolic force: Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fort­ schreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils.27 Edmund Jephcott translates the passage as follows: Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.28 Jephcott’s translation is excellent, but it belongs to the very nature of translation that it must place greater emphasis on certain meanings while leaving others unstated. No translation can do full justice to the range of associations that resonate for each word in the original language. The word Unheil, for ex-

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ample, is overdetermined. Jephcott chooses “calamity,” but Un­ heil also evokes terror, misfortune, even apocalypse. In relation to both healing (heilen) and the holy (das Heilige) it also suggests the complete negation or absence of the sacred. But we should not place undue stress on this philological connection; at least to the contemporary German ear, the theological provenance of the term has grown nearly inaudible. Still, it cannot be denied that these opening lines portray modernity as a historical condition that no longer proffers any grounds for hope. For Adorno and Horkheimer, modernity verges on catastrophe: the fully enlightened and rationalized world has lost nearly all the normative potentials that would point beyond the present to its possible redemption. It is not by accident that Adorno and Horkheimer follow this catastrophic report with an implicit reference to Max Weber: “Enlightenment’s program,” they note, was “the disenchantment of the world [die Entzauberung der Welt].”29 If we fasten our philological attention on the religious resonance of their language, we can detect the counterpoint between Unheil and Entzauberung, between apocalypse and disenchantment. The tension between these two terms alerts us to the general thesis of the book: the project of enlightenment, which promised to set humanity free through rationalization and demythologization, has instead locked us into an administered society without any promise of release. Disenchantment (Entzauberung) has brought us mere disaster (Unheil); enlightenment has reverted into a world without redemption. For Horkheimer this statement marked the beginning of a shift toward a more radical pessimism that would set the stage for the reprisal of the sacred. In the period after 1950, we find a remarkable aphorism in which Horkheimer writes that critical theory has “replaced theology, but found no new heaven to which it can point, not even a heaven on earth.”30 Notice

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that in this aphorism Horkheimer does not actually affirm theology; his only point is that critical theory cannot wholly dispense with the idea of heaven even while it also recognizes the ideological and pacifying role that dreams of an afterlife once played in traditional society. This concession, he admits, is already sufficient to leave critical theory in a paradoxical position. Although it has undermined all norms of bourgeois consolation, critical theory cannot conceive any new norm by which to support its own critical practice. “The heaven to which one can show the way is no heaven at all.”31 Elsewhere Horkheimer is even more emphatic concerning the indispensability of religious concepts. In his 1967 radio address “Religion and Philosophy,” he laments that in secular society the “thinking on an Other” has begun to fade.32 With this historical transformation he fears we have lost a rare and even vital conceptual resource by which to gain critical distance and leverage against the given conditions of contemporary society. He is ready to admit that Christianity and Marxism are not opposed but rather share in common the critical function of relativizing what happens to exist. Christianity relativizes existence as mere finitude in contrast to the divine; Marxism relativizes existence as merely a stage of prehistory in contrast to the socialist future. But in the administered world, both critical gestures—Christian and Marxist—are typically disparaged as symptoms of romanticism or psychological mal­ adjustment.33 By the later 1960s, Horkheimer had come to fear that industrial society was reaching a point of complete in­ tegration from which there seemed no realistic possibility of escape. With the shift to a “totally organized and automated society,” it seemed all the more crucial for critical theory somehow to sustain what he called “messianic time” along with “its secularized form, the Marxist utopia.”34

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The Weberian Background The argument from Horkheimer as I have summarized it above signals his place in the broad tradition of post-Weberian social theory that assigned to religion a crucial role as the original source of normativity and meaning. In The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, Weber had suggested that only the religious background of our collective life can explain the genesis of early modern capitalism with its theologically derived notion of a calling in one’s trade. Calvinism, for Weber, represented religion at its rationalized extreme: to the Calvinist, the world had been wholly evacuated of saints and priestly intermediaries, and the Calvinist believer stood in isolation, separated from the divine by an impassible chasm. In this situation, knowledge of one’s standing in God’s eyes became a theological impossibility. Nor could one hope to influence a divine judgment that was as irrevocable as it was unknown. God became entirely other: a deus absconditus. Lacking all access to any court of appeal or any hope for salvation through works, the solitary believer could know only the stark truth, that one belonged to a fated community of either the redeemed or the damned. It was part of Weber’s genius as a historical sociologist to empathically reconstruct the psychological effects of this doctrine: Without any prospect for changing their predestined status, the members of Calvin’s fellowship were afflicted with feelings of anxiety and hopelessness. Popular preachers in the Calvinist fold responded to this predicament by introducing a subtle modification into the founder’s teaching. Though material prospects could not effect an actual change in the status of one’s election (since this would violate the principle of divine freedom), the fact of material wealth could at least serve as a sign of divine favor. Catholicism’s doctrinal emphasis on works was thereby displaced by a Protestant logic of signs. Thanks to this

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doctrinal modification, Calvinism could find religious meaning in the material fact of worldly success. Equipped with this new teaching, it came to furnish a theological support for the methodical conduct of the typical early-modern merchant, whose increased wealth, if secured with a proper sense of “calling” and in a spirit of this-worldly asceticism, would testify to his membership among the redeemed. This is what Weber identified as an “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandtschaft) between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.35 According to Weber this affinity lasted for some time, but eventually it lost its cultural authority, and it gave way to the manifold historical process of rationalization and disenchantment. Once the rationalizing ethos of capitalism had penetrated all spheres of society, it began to dissolve the religious beliefs that had once served as its support. Capitalism turned dialectically upon its own normative foundations and extinguished the spirit of religion that in an earlier age had infused entrepreneurial conduct with redemptive meaning. But once the bureaucratic and legal structures of the capitalistic occident had been shorn of their motivational significance, they were experienced as little more than empty tombs without spirit or solace. Those condemned to live out their lives in these social forms bore a strong resemblance to Nietzsche’s “last men.”36 In my discussion of Walter Benjamin in Chapter 1, I explored the ways in which Benjamin might have inherited the Weberian theme of radical disenchantment. Modern history for Benjamin was a continuum without teleological significance; from the angel’s perspective it was seen not as a series of discrete events but as a single catastrophe. This rather drastic conception of modern society as a fallen realm without consolation helps to explain why Benjamin felt moved to develop the counter thesis according to which only religion retained suffi-

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cient energy to break free of the modern prison. In this sense Benjamin subscribed to the idea of a normative deficit of mo­ dernity. Lacking any mundane resources for the construction of worldly meaning, Benjamin developed a political theology that could see redemption only as the unexpected breakthrough of transmundane meaning into the sphere of immanence during a “state of emergency.” This appeal to the messianic became the radical antidote for his own radical portrait of disenchanted history. It was this political-theological theme in Benjamin’s work that demonstrated his troubling proximity to the political-­theological decisionism of Carl Schmitt. In what follows, I want to suggest that Max Horkheimer further radicalized the notion of a normative deficit. His shift into pessimism is especially evident in his later years, when he lost much of his confidence in the prospects for mundane social transformation and began to articulate his commitment to critical theory in an explicitly theological key.

Judaism and Enlightenment To grasp the true significance of this late shift in perspective, however, I must first recall an earlier moment in the genesis of critical theory, when Horkheimer exhibited greater sensitivity to the paradoxical status of religion in the philosophy of history. His awareness of this paradox is especially evident if we reexamine the status of religion in Dialectic of Enlightenment. I have already mentioned the opening lines of the text, in which the authors note with irony that the project of emancipatory disenchantment has betrayed its original promise and fashioned a world of thoroughgoing calamity. But if we are to appreciate how Horkheimer changed his views on religion, it will be necessary to examine the arguments of this work in greater detail.

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Dialectic of Enlightenment offers a stylized history of human subjectivity. This history is largely conjectural, much like Kant’s essay on the “beginning of human history.” Kant wished to recast the biblical story of Genesis so as to reduce to a minimum its conflict with Enlightenment principles of rational religion.37 Unlike Kant, the Frankfurt School critics who still cherished the emancipatory ideals of Kant’s Enlightenment now claimed that these same ideals were also complicit in the process of their dialectical undoing. Dialectic of Enlight­ enment is a meditation on this inner complicity—between the enlightenment model of thoroughgoing self-determination and the authoritarian model of total domination. Needless to say, this dialectical thesis undermines the Kantian “antinomy” between freedom and necessity. As Kant explained in the first Critique, it is possible to lay out a consistent argument that portrays the world as a realm of thoroughgoing naturalistic causality. According to this portrait, the universe is a deterministic spatio-temporal order in which all events can be shown to follow from prior conditions without exception. However, Kant also showed that it was possible to leave open a conceptual space for a different kind of causality other than the causality of nature. On this view, metaphysical speculation still allows for the self-causality that we consider intrinsic to our freedom as practical agents. Kant portrays the conflict between these two understandings of the world as an antinomy, in the sense that he sees a manifest contradiction between two internally consistent but mutually incompatible conceptions of reality. He believed that the apparent contradiction between these two arguments could be resolved only through the doctrine of transcendental idealism. The conception of the world as a realm of naturalistic causality describes the objective universe as the law-governed space of appearances: this is the orderly world as it appears to us in virtue of

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the categories and the pure forms of space and time. However, the conception of the world as a realm hospitable to human freedom remains available to us once we think of the world apart from the epistemic conditions through which it first appears to us as an object of possible knowledge. Conceived from the purely practical point of view, the free will still enjoys the prestige of reality. Kant felt he had thereby achieved nothing less than a reconciliation between naturalistic determination and human morality. Dialectic of Enlightenment purports to show that this apparent reconciliation is an illusion. To demonstrate their point, Horkheimer and Adorno begin with an anthropological story that traces the betrayal of the Enlightenment all the way to its origins. At this zero hour in the history of subjectivity, human beings were seized with fear for their lives when faced with the terrifying forces of nature. Humanity first developed reason as an instrument to overcome this fear and gain some measure of mastery over its surroundings. But this conjectural beginning already marks the moment of original sin in the narrative of Enlightenment: reason was born out of the drive for selfpreservation, and it was then perfected as a tool for the domination of the environment. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the earliest mythological systems were already rudimentary tools for the explanation and manipulation of nature. Myth thus cleared the historical path for the later and more sophisticated instruments of scientific explanation that would enable humanity to exploit nature without restraint. This process culminated in a standoff between subject and object: humanity now stood in triumph as a self-determining moral agency that sustained no relation with the surrounding world other than that of instrumental mastery. Here Adorno and Horkheimer clearly borrow from Max Weber’s analysis of instrumental reason, or Zweckrationalität. The subject is rational only in the restrictive

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sense: namely, the subject can decide upon and pursue its self-­ assigned aims in a rational manner, though all questions concerning the substantive rationality of its stated aims have been silenced. But the authors press this analysis well beyond Weber’s original intentions: their speculative history of instrumental reason culminates in a grim portrait of modern capitalism, in which unfreedom becomes not only a socioeconomic condition but an anthropological cul-de-sac from which there is no apparent exit. At this endgame in the dialectic of enlightenment, nature endures as only a meaningless and undifferentiated substrate. Once nature has lost its internal differentiation it becomes thoroughly disenchanted, and it can no longer resist the principle of universal exchange. So too in modern philosophy, where this instrumentalist approach to nature conspires with the pure formalism of mathematics to reinforce a positivistic affirmation of the given. The mind loses its critical capacities, and the very sense of possibility, the thought that the world can be transformed, dwindles away until the human being can do nothing but engage in the compulsory affirmation of what is already the case. Wittgenstein’s dictum “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” becomes an apologia for whatever happens to exist: The world is that which is the case. This loss of possibility deforms not only the world but the human being as well. Because nature is now seen only as an external object for domination, the nature that inheres in human nature now falls victim to the subject’s own self-preserving efforts at repression. The bourgeois subject of modernity gains mastery over the world through a practice of this-worldly asceticism that drains everyday experience of its sensual pleasure and eventually destroys even the thought of a happiness beyond the iron laws of the current order. The history of rational

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self-liberation culminates in fatalism, the bid for freedom ends in unfreedom, and enlightenment reverts to myth.38 The crucial work of this narrative is to expose the ironic reversal (or bad dialectic) in the project of Enlightenment: the historical attempt to realize autonomous subjectivity culminates in a quasi-naturalistic determinism. This means that the Kantian distinction between two modes of reflection—one that allows for self-determination and another that subscribes to naturalistic causality—collapses into a single, dialectical narrative. The structure of this narrative resembles an inverted Hegelian phenomenology of spirit: it describes not spirit’s selfrealization but its self-sabotage. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the Enlightenment has betrayed its true promise precisely because it confined itself to the distorted and one-sided ideal of absolute self-determination. Now the place of religion in this argument is by no means self-evident. But we should begin by noticing that the authors draw a sharp distinction between religion and myth. Myth has the noteworthy distinction of preserving at least some awareness of the differentiation of nature: the mythic gods are plural, and they remain organically bound to the panoply of naturalistic phenomena. Monotheism destroys this differentiation; it elevates the divine into a transcendent agency. In tracing out the history of this transformation, Horkheimer and Adorno assign a special role to Judaism, in which “the idea of patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth.”39 Judaism for Adorno and Horkheimer thus represents something like the apotheosis of subjectivity: it does not yet succumb to the logic of modern nominalism, which dissolves subjectivity into a reality without essential differences. Instead, it installs one subject as a metaphysical force that dominates all of disenchanted nature, and it preserves this subject in its uniqueness

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and transcendence to nature by insisting that God’s highest name cannot be pronounced. “The Jewish religion,” they write, “brooks no word which might bring solace to the despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth.”40 For the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Judaism thus appears, much as it did for Hegel, as “the religion of sublimity [die Religion der Erhabenheit].”41 Unlike Hegel, however, they do not hasten to condemn Judaism for its elevated conception of God. Without explicit acknowledgment, and perhaps without even knowing much in detail of their theological antecedents, they replicate the basic argumentation of negative theology, according to which one honors the divine precisely through the rejection of any and all discursive instruments as inadequate to its transmundane reality: “The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion.”42 At this moment in the book, the authors come as close as they can to an affirmation of the Jewish religion, although they do so in accordance with the traditional logic of a via negativa. True knowledge is gained only through the negation of propositional falsehood. I will turn to the comparison with negative theology in Chapter 3 when I address Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics. Here I wish only to note that even this apparent affirmation of Judaism has a dialectical structure. On one hand, Adorno and Horkheimer conceive of Judaism as a force of critical resistance against determinism. God transcends the mythic sphere of natural immanence that is governed by immutable laws. Especially for a modern society that has hardened into what Lukács called “second nature,”43 the memory of a sharp distinction between natural necessity and divine will recalls a  historical moment when the rational subject had not yet fully capitulated to social determinism. On the other hand, in

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their interpretation of the Jewish God, Adorno and Horkheimer do not hesitate to mark its emergence as a stage in the apotheosis of subjectivity. Its historical significance lies in the victory of patriarchal society over paganism, but its philosophical significance lies at an even deeper stratum: it represents the paradigm for all subjectivity, both divine and human. The concept of God contains both moments of this unresolved dialectic. It signifies both the principle of rational freedom and the principle of subjective domination. This dialectical tension places Dialectic of Enlightenment at the crossroads between two quite distinctive interpretations of Judaism. On one hand, it articulates what amounts to a standard complaint against the sublimity or otherworldliness of the Jewish God: Judaism’s transcendence becomes a mark of its imperfection, and its fear of pronouncing the highest name means that it is a religion irrelevant to human beings in their finitude and imperfection. If it is patriarchal, this is because the religion of the Father must eventually cede its place to the religion of the Son. Following this interpretation, it would appear that Dialectic of Enlightenment repeats the theological narrative of supersessionism. But on the other hand, it is a book that bears within itself a silent homage to the Mosaic critique of idolatry. The notion of divine transcendence, when understood in accordance with Jewish tradition, stands as a mark of metaphysical perfection. Meanwhile, the unresolved tension between the divine subject and the created world becomes a justification for prophetic criticism, since it serves as a reminder that the world still awaits its redemption. On this interpretation, Dialectic of Enlightenment belongs to an enduring tradition of Jewish theological speculation even though it does not expressly identify itself with that tradition. The coexistence of these two perspectives in Dialectic of Enlightenment may serve as a reminder that its authors were

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neither apologists for Judaism nor its unremitting detractors. In their speculative history of Enlightenment, the Jewish religion has a dialectical inheritance: it marks the simultaneous birth of both metaphysical subjectivity and the principles by which subjectivity can be contested. Seen from a broader perspective, Judaism appears in Di­ alectic of Enlightenment as the pivotal point of transition between mythical prehistory and disenchanted modernity. Judaism has already broken with the mythical immanence of primitive society, but it has not yet achieved the thoroughgoing immanence that the authors associate with late-modern systems of legal-bureaucratic capitalism. Here it may be helpful to recall my earlier remarks on Weber’s analysis of Calvinism. For the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Judaism appears as the functional analogue to Weber’s Calvinism: it is the exemplar sine qua non of a rationalized religion at the historical moment before religion’s fall. Both Judaism and Calvinism are figures of dialectical ambivalence in the history of secularization. They mark the apotheosis of reason in religious culture even as they enhance the rationalizing tendencies that will ultimately bring religion to an end. But there are limits to this analogy. Weber felt no compunction about assigning Calvinist believers a leading role in his narrative as the heroes of entrepreneurial capitalism. But Adorno and Horkheimer took special care to resist any analogous claims concerning an alleged bond between European Jewry and modern capitalism. “The Jews,” they wrote, “had not been the only people active in the circulation sphere.”44 For the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the historically dubious charge concerning the special relationship between capitalism and the Jews (such as had inspired even a distinguished sociologist like Max Weber’s contemporary Werner Sombart) had long been exposed as an anti-Semitic canard.45 All the

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same, we should not miss the striking fact that in these two sociohistorical narratives Calvinism and Judaism stood as unlikely twins: in his sociological study Ancient Judaism, Weber had already recognized in Judaism a preparatory stage in the development of rationalized religion, though he believed that the distinctive status of the Jews as a “pariah” people set sharp limits on their religious influence, and he therefore assigned the greater share of both praise and blame to early-modern Calvinism for bringing this rationalizing development in religious history to its sociohistorical conclusion.46 So we should not be surprised if Weber’s analysis of the religious genesis of modern capitalism prefigures the role of Judaism in Dialectic of En­ lightenment. Both are contributions to a historically and philosophically informed sociology, in which both ideational and material components conspire to explain the pathogenesis of the modern world. The chief lesson I wish to draw from this comparison is that at an earlier phase of his career, Horkheimer, alongside Adorno, remained sensitive to the ambivalent role of Judaism in the philosophy of history. For the authors of Dialectic of En­ lightenment, Judaism signified both domination and the critique of domination. One could even say that it stood as the privileged and pivotal sign for monotheism in a philosophical-­ historical argument that traced the historical path from myth through disenchantment to enlightenment—but then returned dialectically to myth. In their narrative of secularization, Judaism is Janus-faced: it has the power to wrest humanity from myth even as it subordinates humanity to a new and more forbidding authority. This ambivalent view of Judaism casts a new light on the pivotal epoch in world religion that Karl Jaspers once called the Achsenzeit, or “axial age,” an era stretching from 800 to 200 B.C.E. which marked the conclusion of the “mythical age” and

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inaugurated a common religious emphasis on ethical principle and spiritual transcendence.47 According to Jaspers, the axial revolution in religion introduced a new esteem for the individual subject as a transcendental principle. It applied this novel emphasis to both the human being and the human conception of God. Even for those world religions which could not be characterized as purely monotheistic, the general trend was the same: the sacred gradually shed its this-worldly character and was refined into a single point, transcendent and incommensurable, that now lay beyond the phenomenal world. To be sure, it is well known that the authors of Dialectic of Enlight­ enment harbored strong resentments against Jaspers as a ponderous thinker whose woolly and Protestant-derived existentialism Adorno would later vilify as exemplifying the “jargon of authenticity.”48 It is all the more striking, then, that in their book the theme of an axial turn makes an unacknowledged reappearance: Judaism assumes a singular role as the historical pivot from myth to rational religion. All the same, we should not miss the ways in which Adorno and Horkheimer dissent from Jaspers. They offer a more discerning and philosophically differentiated analysis regarding the dialectical consequences of a monotheistic idea that already contained within itself an anticipation of its own negation. Earlier I proposed that we might read Dialectic of En­ lightenment as a critical commentary on Kant’s model of unconditioned subjectivity. This critique alerts us to a hidden and unresolved tension in the book. It develops a critique of the unconditioned subject, yet at the same time it charts the rise of the monotheistic subject as a metaphysical breakthrough from the immanence of primitive naturalism. But these two themes, both celebratory and tragic, cannot remain isolated from one another. Dialectic of Enlightenment sustains without resolution

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an insight into the dialectical status of Judaism: it announces both the possibility of emancipatory criticism and the apotheosis of subjectivity.

A Divine Return In Horkheimer’s later work this dialectical tension is largely abandoned. Monotheism is no longer an ambivalent event in the dialectic of modernity; instead, it becomes the only redemptive alternative for a modernity that seems to have lost any awareness of even the sheer possibility for social transformation. In his 1963 radio address “Theism and Atheism,” Horkheimer expresses these views in the starkest terms. Retelling the history of secularization, Horkheimer meditates on the irony that over the course of modern history atheism had gradually lost its status as critique. “Atheism was once a sign of inner independence and incredible courage,” he observes, and it remains so in “authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries,” where it is vilified as “a symptom of the hated liberal spirit.”49 But the critical function of atheism belongs to a vanishing era that is coming rapidly to a close: “Nowadays atheism is . . . the attitude of those who follow whatever power happens to be dominant whether they pay lip service to a religion or whether they can afford to disavow it openly.”50 In the contest between atheism and theism, the force of critical resistance has changed sides; it is no longer atheism but theism alone that sustains what Horkheimer calls “the longing for something other than this world.”51 He admits that in an era of accelerating secularization such a longing has grown feeble, but he is nonetheless fulsome in his praise for “those who resist the prevailing wind.”52 In the context of a talk for the West German radio, it is altogether natural that he directs his remarks primarily to a Chris-

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tian audience: “Even though Catholics and Protestants are nowadays both on the defensive, theism is again becoming an actual force in the period of its decline.”53 When we step back to consider the longer history of the Frankfurt School over the course of the twentieth century, Horkheimer’s favorable remarks on religion may come as a surprise. We cannot forget that the “Café Marx” was born as a research center for a species of materialist criticism. Though it had relaxed its commitment to Marxist orthodoxy, it held fast to the principled idea that any dialectical remedy of social injustice must come not from a metaphysical other but wholly from within. This emphasis on the internal dialectic of human history would seem to render invalid any appeal to a worldtranscendent principle of normativity. But as the early Hork­ heimer knew, the historical entanglement of materialism with religion cannot be so easily dismissed. Recall that the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment regarded the historical emergence of monotheism as a highly ambivalent event: their analysis contained both critique and praise. And yet in the spirit of dialectical reasoning, they never tried to resolve this ambivalence into a single verdict. Horkheimer’s late reversal of opinion signals a departure from this dialectical pattern. We should not neglect the fact that even this bolder affirmation of religion has a noteworthy antecedent in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses” on history, which intimated that materialism can remain effective only if it calls upon the enduring power of “the messianic.” In 1970, Horkheimer met with Hellmut Gumnior for an interview that would be published in Der Spiegel under the title “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen” (The Longing for the Wholly Other).54 In the interview, Horkheimer addressed with great candor the affinities between Judaism and critical theory, between theology and Marxism, and along the way he also

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touched upon his opinions about Schopenhauer and the differences between Judaism and Christianity, and even shared his views on the papal encyclical on birth control—which (to the surprise of the sexually emancipated student left) he endorsed, since it preserved within sexual relations heightened experiences of longing and love that he feared would vanish if  sexual taboos were annulled. He feared that the Pill had made Romeo and Juliet a “museum-piece.”55 Most striking of all, however, was Horkheimer’s readiness to assign to Jewish precepts a foundational role in the philosophical genesis of critical theory. On this point Horkheimer was emphatic. In Judaism one could not represent or make descriptive statements about the unknowable God, nor could the pious Jew pronounce the highest name. In obedience to this principle of absolute transcendence, Judaism could grant all worldly powers only a relative legitimacy. According to Horkheimer, the critical element in Jewish teachings had survived even in the ostensible teachings of Karl Marx himself. The Marxist prohibition against imagining the future derived from a Jewish precept that God cannot be represented and that the Unrepresentable (the Nicht-­ Darstellbare) remains the highest object of our longing.56 When pressed more than once in the interview to specify in greater detail just what he meant by “theology,” Horkheimer responded with an insight derived from Schopenhauer: “Theology here means the consciousness that the world is appearance [Er­ scheinung], that it is not the absolute truth, the ultimate [das Letzte].” Theology, he concluded, is “the hope, that the injustice by which the world is known . . . shall not have the last word.”57 The significance of this interview, and the scandal it provoked, especially within the ranks of the student movement, is

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the topic a recent book by the historian Pascal Eitler with the wry title “Gott ist tot—Gott ist rot” (“God Is Dead—God Is Red”).58 For Eitler, the long-term importance of the interview is that it marked a pivotal moment in the transformation of public religious consciousness in the Federal Republic. Although Catholic conservatives continued to subscribe to a species of political theology, even if they disavowed any affiliation with the most prominent doctrine of political theology associated with the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt, left-leaning intellectuals felt themselves increasingly drawn to the prospects of a Marxist-Christian dialogue, with consequences that would surge in importance during the era of political rebellion across the Third World and especially in Latin America. However, notwithstanding this shift toward a more charitable understanding of the relation between religion and left-wing politics, many students in Germany who had once held Horkheimer in high esteem found it difficult to accept his late affirmation of religion. His appeal to the theological category of the “wholly other” was seen as negation of the left-secular task of transforming history from within. At the beginning of this chapter, I discussed the foreword to Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, in which Horkheimer wrote that “the appeal to an entirely other [ein ganz Anderes] than this world had primarily a social-philosophical impetus.” Horkheimer also admitted that this appeal led to “a more positive evaluation of certain metaphysical trends.” In his original version of the foreword, as we saw, Horkheimer had described the wish that earthly horror should not have the last word as “metaphysical.” But he later emended the text and redescribed the wish as “non-scientific” (nicht-wissenschaft­ lich).59 Such a minor emendation, I have suggested, is not as insignificant as it might seem. To grasp the deeper implications of Horkheimer’s distinction—between a wish that is genuinely

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metaphysical and one that is merely nonscientific—we need only consider the extraordinarily controversial status of metaphysics in the lexicon of modern German philosophy. Consider, for instance, the Kantian distinction between faith and knowledge. In Preface B to the first Critique, Kant explains that genuine cognition of metaphysical ideas (God, freedom, immortality) is not possible. Speculative reason must be deprived of its pretension to “extravagant insights” that transgress the limits of any possible experience. Any attempts to grasp these ideas as appearances would violate their meaning by construing them under the conditions of space and time from which they are supposedly exempt. Knowledge of the metaphysical sphere is thus prohibited according to the very rules that make knowledge possible. As a philosopher who was committed to securing legitimacy for the natural sciences, Kant felt that only a principled distinction between knowledge and faith could safeguard their respective modes of validity within their proper domains. Hence Kant’s often-cited confession: “I had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.”60 In the late-modern era, Horkheimer reasoned, the natural sciences had metastasized into something far more ominous that now threatened to dominate and eventually displace all alternative modes of thought. In this situation theology and science had exchanged roles: the species of nonscientific thinking exemplified by theology had become a final refuge for critical resistance to the supremacy of the merely given. Horkheimer further elaborated upon this idea in one of his late Notizen, written between 1966 and 1969: “Any person that clings to the theological tradition in however tenuous a manner should also be sincere enough to admit that there is a contradiction between such loyalty and not just science but any form of thought that sees reality for what it is.”61 For Horkheimer, the fully administered world had more or less shut down any prospects

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for an epistemological grasp of alternatives. The prestigious name of “genuine” knowledge was now reserved only for the positivistic affirmation of what is given within the narrow bounds of instrumental reason. “Knowledge,” he wrote, “is ultimately governed by [instrumentalist] purposes,” while “Theology wants to be free of earthly ends.”62 Horkheimer was ready to concede that as a bid to escape the clutches of late-modern positivism, theology now found itself positioned in an uncertain realm that was “both lower and higher” than knowledge.63 Perhaps he was even aware that in positing a transmundane “other” he left himself vulnerable to the charge that he had reified a moment of false transcendence and thereby violated a cardinal law of dialectics. This may explain why he came to reject any bold affirmation of metaphysics as unsuitable and retreated into the neutral language of the “non-scientific.” Horkheimer seems to have recognized that his appeal to metaphysics was a philosophical embarrassment: it was not even a species of knowledge but merely a “wish.” But this retreat into subjective and unscientific desire confirms the judgment of Jürgen Habermas, who observed that for the older Horkheimer theology became “the only alternative to a desolate positivism.”64 Whether we find Habermas’s criticism persuasive or not, we must at least confront the challenge it presents for the future of critical theory. The modern appeal to religion as the sole preserve of normativity has no alternative but to condemn the nonreligious world as catastrophe. This dark verdict on secular modernity is the subterranean line of criticism that connects Benjamin’s appeal to theological concepts (especially in the “Theses” on history) to the later Horkheimer’s affirmation of theology. Like Benjamin, Horkheimer remained captive to the thesis of a normative deficit that has accompanied the classical narrative of secularization since its inception. In both

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cases we confront a similar problem. An emancipatory project that hopes to redeem modernity of its this-worldly contradictions risks self-contradiction if it cannot locate the resources for this redemption within modernity itself. Whether Adorno managed to escape this difficulty remains to be seen.

three

Adorno; or, Negative Dialectics as Negative Theology If religion is accepted for the sake of something other than its own truth content, then it undermines itself. —Theodor W. Adorno, “Revelation or Autonomous Reason”

I

n April 1963 Theodor Adorno gave a lecture in Berlin titled “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron.”1 Esteemed not only as a philosopher and social theorist but also as a musicologist with a gift for detecting even the most delicate resonances between musical and social form, Adorno could be a fierce polemicist. It was a reputation he had earned as early as 1949 for his notorious Philosophy of New Music, in which he contrasted Schoenberg as a force for musical progress with Stravinsky as the exemplar of musical and cultural regression. Though Adorno revered Arnold Schoenberg, and in the 1920s had studied composition in Vienna under the master’s pupil Alban Berg, this did not deter him from

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criticizing the later Schoenberg for betraying the free atonal techniques of his earlier expressionist period when he adopted the rigorous methods of twelve-tone composition. In Philosophy of New Music, Adorno did not hold back, accusing Schoenberg of a “reversal into unfreedom.”2 Adorno’s ambivalence about Schoenberg comes to the fore in the lecture on Moses und Aron, and it attaches specifically to what Adorno saw as the opera’s inevitable, if poignant, failure to realize in musical form what he called “the idea of the sacred.” For Adorno this was the “central problem” of an opera which drew upon biblical episodes from Exodus in the same way that Richard Wagner had called upon mythological and Christian topoi in the Ring and, much later, in Parsifal.3 Schoenberg constructs from the biblical drama of M ­ oses’s struggles with idolatry a compelling allegory, a theatrical inquiry into the dilemmas of musical modernism. The first act opens with material that the composer started writing as early as 1926, when he sketched out rudiments of a cantata that he meant to title “Moses and the Burning Bush.” In the uncanny half-spoken style of singing known as Sprechgesang, which indicates his difficulty with communication, Moses praises the absolute transcendence of the divine: “Einziger, ewiger, allgegenwärtiger, unsichtbarer und unvorstellbarer Gott! [Unique, eternal, omnipresent, invisible, and unrepresentable God!].”4 The voice from the bush, which is spoken in unison by a chorus, instructs Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage. But Moses begs to be released from this mission because of his age and difficulty in speaking. “Meine Zunge ist ungelenk [My tongue is not flexible]”; “Ich kann denken, aber nicht reden [I can think, but not speak].” The voice from the bush assures Moses that his brother Aron will serve as his mouthpiece, and together they will lead the chosen people to the promised land, where they will shine as a beacon unto all the nations. We are

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then introduced to Aron, whose charismatic gift for popular leadership is signified in the opera as a capacity for song: Moses speaks, Aron sings. At first the Israelites react with disdain to the notion of an invisible God. Aron entrances them with miracles, while Moses retreats in despair. In act 2 we learn that Moses has been absent for forty days on the mountaintop. The Elders have grown angry, the people restive. In response to their entreaties and threats, Aron gathers up the Israelites’ gold and fashions from it a sensual object of worship. “Leave distant things to the one infinite,” he says, “since to you the gods have ever-present and always common substance. You shall provide the stuff: I shall give it a form, common and visible, tangible eternally in gold.” Sacrifices are made to the Golden Calf; wine flows freely, the ritual slaughter of four naked virgins is followed by a frenzy of violence and suicide that culminates in erotic abandon. “Holy is desire,” the Israelites cry. “Gold is as pleasure [Gold gleicht Lust].” In exhaustion they collapse. At this point Moses descends from the mountain with the tables of the law and looks with fury upon what the people have done. Aron seeks to placate his brother, explaining that the common people crave some representation for a divinity who would otherwise remain inapproachable and abstract. Moses objects: “Gottes Ewigkeit vernichtet Göttergegenwart! Das ist kein Bild, kein Wunder! Das ist das Gesetz” [God’s eternity negates the transience of mere idols; it is no mere image, no marvel. It is the law].” Moses is outraged that Aron would debase the unrepresentable God: “Ich soll den Gedanken verfälschen? [Should I debase the idea?].” But Aron reminds his brother of the irony that even the tables of the law are themselves images. To this Moses responds in anger by shattering the tables, an act that Aron condemns. “I simply yield before necessity,” Aron explains. The Israelites now reappear; they are

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following a pillar of fire. “Through me,” says Aron, “God has given to the people a signal that will lead them by night and by day.” Moses denounces even this sign as Götzenbilder, idolatrous imagery. The Israelites leave the stage, following the cloudlike pillar that will guide them to the promised land. Moses is left behind in a state of despair. He realizes that, with Aron as his accomplice, he has conspired to fashion an image. The holy idea has been betrayed. “Thus am I defeated!” he cries. “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt! [Oh Word, you word that I lack!]” Thus ends the only portion of the opera that Schoenberg finished. For a third and final act the composer left only the libretto for a single scene, in which Moses and Aron engage in a dialogue while soldiers hold Aron captive as he awaits M ­ oses’s verdict on his fate. “To serve the divine idea,” Moses notes. This was to be the Israelites’ highest mission. But now that Aron has exposed them to strange divinities they have strayed from their holy task. Sensual images have usurped the place of the divine idea: “You have betrayed God to the gods [Verraten hast du Gott an die Götter], the idea to images [den Gedanken an die Bilder], the chosen people to others, the extraordinary to the commonplace.” Despite this harsh judgment, Moses commands the soldiers to set Aron free. But at the last moment, Aron suddenly falls dead. Moses, his faith unshaken, predicts that in the wasteland the people will prove themselves invincible. They will finally achieve their goal of unity with God. There is a strange parallel between the plot of Moses und Aron and the history of its composition. Schoenberg began to compose the opera in earnest in 1930. The first two acts were completed in 1932, shortly before the composer was forced into exile from Berlin, where he had held a post at the Prussian Academy of Arts. In 1933 he left for France, where he officially embraced once again the Jewish faith of his childhood, a faith he had abandoned some years earlier. (He had converted to

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Christianity in 1898.) Later that year, he came to the United States, and in 1937 he tried to work on the third act, without success. The opera remained incomplete, and its creator did not live to see a full performance of the two completed acts. In 1951, just days before Schoenberg’s death, the Dance Around the Golden Calf scene received its world premiere in Darmstadt, the postwar center for the musical avant-garde. From a musicological perspective, the great pathos of the opera is due to the fact that it offers an explicit and self-reflexive meditation on a central problem of musical aesthetics. Schoenberg conceived of himself as a new Moses, the harbinger of a new and more stringent musical language that disavowed the facile pleasures of conventional tonality. As the music critic Paul Griffiths has observed, the opera ranks as “perhaps the biggest work ever created out of a single twelve-note series.”5 But of course the opera itself is also an aesthetic creation, an artwork that organizes its materials in such a way that the senses are provoked and aroused, even if sensual pleasure is not quite the intended effect. We must conclude that Schoenberg’s loyalties remained divided: although he may have imagined himself a new Moses, as a composer he was no less the embodiment of Aron, a servant to the human senses. (The name Aron, as Griffiths suggests, is a mirror for Arnold.) The opera’s very title captures the symbolic character of the protagonists’ contest, staging the struggle of idealism versus sensuality, solitary devotion versus popular need. Within the opera but also within the history of aesthetics, such a contest cannot be wholly resolved. For this reason the opera must remain incomplete. In his 1963 essay, Adorno interprets the dispute between Moses and Aron from a philosophical perspective, entertaining the question as to whether the principles of sacred art can survive in a secular age. Is the stringency of the Mosaic law and the transcendence of its God compatible with a world that

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worships only material things that possess a demonstrable utility? Are aesthetic standards no less absolute than the standards of religion? Can such standards be compromised for the sake of the masses? Adorno condenses these questions into a single problem: “How is cultic music possible in the absence of a cult?”6 For Adorno this problem was hardly unique to Schoenberg’s opera: it was already evident when Beethoven composed the Missa Solemnis, a work that Adorno characterized as an “alienated masterpiece” precisely for its willful archaism—its use of the Latin mass and medieval church modes in an epoch that had deprived these forms of their original meaning. Though it exemplified what Adorno called Beethoven’s “late style,” the Missa Solemnis nonetheless stood out in all of its uncanny power as a work alienated from the rest of the composer’s oeuvre, and even from the historical epoch of its appearance: in its temporal dislocation its archaism became a species of modernism.7 It anticipated the musical radicalism of the twentieth century, whose greatest exemplars in Adorno’s view were the core composers of the Second Viennese School, namely, Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg.8 If we follow Adorno’s analysis, the difficulty of Schoenberg’s own masterpiece of sacred music dramatizes a problem that will confront any artist who tries to refashion a sacred work in a secular age. Cultic music, Adorno writes, “cannot simply be willed.”9 This presents us with a contradiction in the modern phenomenon of religious music. A genuine experience of the sacred must be one that seizes the subject beyond the secular powers of human volition. If one can fabricate the sacred or somehow will its appearance, then by definition it is not what it pretends to be. To create a sacred ritual in an aesthetic medium is to ally oneself with Aron, debasing the divine by conflating it with the senses. For Adorno anyone who strives to resurrect the sacred thereby “compromises the very con-

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cept.”10 That we crave such an experience does not make it possible. (“Yearning, even need,” Adorno writes, “do not suffice.”)11 This prompts Adorno to observe in rather apodictic terms that “a secular world can scarcely tolerate any sacred art.” But he hastens to add that it is precisely its untimely character that makes Moses und Aron a work of such paradoxical significance: it is an artwork that both thematizes the sacred and betrays it. “Schoenberg’s greatness,” Adorno explains, “is that he faces this fact squarely and refuses to fudge the contradiction.”12 As a consequence, the opera presents us with a series of paradoxes: it is an aesthetic creation that strives for a purity beyond aesthetics. The theological truth expressed in the work can be expressed only through a subjective medium that belies that truth. The opera is therefore “an image of something without images—the very last thing the story wanted.”13 This helps us appreciate the strange fact that Moses does not (and perhaps cannot) sing. Recourse to song would violate the anti-sensualism of his religion. For Adorno the failure that we witness within the dramatic action—namely, when Moses confesses to his own lack of proper words to convey the religious truth— corresponds to the compositional failure of the opera. It is a musical work that not only strives to break free of conventional standards of beauty; it also strains against the bonds of music itself. Schoenberg, Adorno claims, left the opera incomplete because it had to be incomplete: the opera is a meditation on its own impossibility. In 1963 Adorno published the text of his lecture on Moses und Aron in a collection of his musicological essays under the title Quasi una Fantasia. On the essay’s first page, he included a dedication to Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism with whom he had forged a friendship following the death of Walter Benjamin, who was separately a friend to them both. In the collected volume of their correspondence from

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1939 to 1969, Benjamin’s memory is a constant presence: it haunts the epistolary dialogue between Adorno and Scholem like a third but absent voice. But they heard that voice in different ways. For Adorno, Benjamin had been at heart a dialectician whose best writing drew him into the proximity of the Frankfurt School. For Scholem, Benjamin had been primarily a Jewish thinker whose best ideas were disfigured by the dogmatic Marxism that Scholem not only despised but actually considered a species of heresy. In his early letters to Benjamin, Scholem expresses strong misgivings about Adorno, whose writings he considered clotted and unoriginal. Concerning Adorno’s 1933 dissertation on Kierkegaard, Scholem had confided to Benjamin that “the book combines a sublime plagiarism of your thought with an uncommon chutzpah.”14 But especially after Benjamin’s death, relations between Adorno and Scholem greatly improved; they became mutual guardians of Benjamin’s flame, and co-editors of his essays and correspondence. So it is hardly surprising that Adorno chose to dedicate his essay on Moses und Aron to Scholem. In a February 1964 letter to Adorno, Scholem expressed his gratitude for the dedication. But since he was never one to keep his opinions to himself, Scholem also expressed doubt concerning the essay’s argument. “Whether you can really deny the possibility of such music, I do not know,” Scholem wrote. “For indeed it cannot be foreseen, where and in what form in our world the tradition of the sacred can find expression. That it is a priori impossible,” he concluded, was something “I would not care to admit.”15 This dispute runs through their correspondence, with Adorno playing Moses (apodictic, uncompromising) to Scholem’s Aron (moderate, adaptive). In his reply to Scholem, Adorno momentarily retracted his earlier verdict against the possibility of sacred art, and he admitted that his actual opinion was “more careful than came out in

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that text.” It was not his intent to pronounce “an a priori No.” But he then hastened to confirm his stronger opinion: “To me it would seem, and I would have thought you must tend to agree, that the only possibility for the rescue of sacred art, just as for its philosophical truth-content, would lie today in a ruthless migration into the profane [in der rücksichtslosen Einwanderung ins Profane].”16 The phrase is a striking one and we have encountered it before. But how should we unlock its meaning?

A Migrant in the Profane When we consider the fellowship of intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School, we cannot ignore their shared experience of exile. My approach in this book is more philosophical than biographical, but we should not neglect the biographical fact that the critical theorists of the first generation were united by trauma. Their lives were interrupted or, in Benjamin’s case, stopped short entirely, by the mid-century assault on those who were classified by official decree as “outsiders.” The history of critical theory and the history of the European Jews do not fully coincide—not all the first-generation affiliates of the Institute for Social Research were Jewish—but the two histories nonetheless intersect in ways that may help us to appreciate the lived pathos of theory. The experience of exclusion was taken up into the discourse of critical theory as a philosophical theme, even when it appears only in a sublime and transfigured form as an image of the fragment, of what is missing or does not belong. Critical theory bears within itself, in both explicit and implicit form, the memory of dislocation, persecution, and exile. In Adorno’s case the question of religious inheritance is unusually complicated. Adorno’s father, Oscar, was Jewish by

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origin (though in 1910 he had officially “detached himself ” from the Jewish community in Frankfurt), and Adorno’s mother, Maria, was Catholic.17 Although the young Teddie Wiesen­ grund was known in early years by his father’s family name, he  was baptized in 1903 at the Frankfurt Cathedral into his mother’s faith. Sometime later he was confirmed in a Protestant church. Erich Pfeiffer-Belli, an acquaintance from childhood, would later recall that Adorno was the victim of daily schoolyard brutalities. Older boys mocked him for his childish nickname and fixed a paper with “Teddy” (so spelled) written on it to his back: “In a trice there was a howling mob after him shouting ‘Teddy’ at their unsuspecting victim. At the time, Teddy was a slightly built, shy boy. . . . We all knew that he was Jewish. But the uproar in the playground was not an anti-­ Semitic demonstration. Its target was this unique person who outshone even the best boys in the class.”18 By the mid-1940s when Adorno was living in exile in the United States, the seeming innocence of such childhood cruelties would appear in a rather different light. In Minima Moralia, a 1951 collection of aphorisms, he writes, “I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood”: As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. If the bourgeois class has from time immemorial nurtured the dream of a brutal national community, of oppression of all by all; children already equipped with Christian names . . . enacted the dreams before the adults were historically ripe for its reali­ zation. . . . The five patriots who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him and, when he complained to the teacher, defamed him a traitor to the

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class—are they not the same as those who tortured prisoners to refute claims by foreigners that prisoners were tortured? They whose hallooing knew no end when the top boy blundered—did they not stand grinning and sheepish round the Jewish detainee, poking fun at his maladroit attempt to hang himself?19 Painful recollections such as this may suggest a certain identification with the Jewish victim, though not because Adorno thought of himself in any straightforward sense as Jewish; he did not. But life circumstances nonetheless made it impossible for him to remain indifferent to the facts of his paternal inheritance, and in retrospect he could see even in the typical conduct of schoolyard bullies a harbinger of later horrors. “In Fascism,” he wrote, “the nightmare of childhood has come true.”20 It was apparently due to his mother’s pride that her son carried not only “Wiesengrund” but also “Adorno” as his last name. Well into the mid-1930s he frequently signed his correspondence simply “Wiesengrund,” though by the time he completed his application for citizenship in the United States, he was habitually joining the two names with a hyphen, “Wiesengrund-Adorno,” and eventually he dropped the hyphen and allowed his father’s name to dwindle to an initial. The philosopher for whom aesthetic categories carried not just social prestige but intrinsic force seems to have cherished the lilting sound of the Italianate name that once belonged to his maternal grandfather. The fact that he transgressed patriarchal custom and delighted in the maternal name that honored his nonJewish ancestors has occasionally drawn the accusation that Adorno found his Jewish lineage an embarrassment or that he was stricken with Jewish self-hatred. Hannah Arendt, for example, may have intended to express her personal discontent

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with Adorno by referring to him as “Wiesengrund,” as if to emphasize the identity he seemed (in her view) keen to disavow. After his death the complaint was raised that his funeral ceremony made no mention of Judaism.21 But there is little evidence that Adorno ever tried to suppress the fact of his paternal lineage. He found it especially painful, for instance, that his father was listed incorrectly as “Oscar Adorno” in the index to Benjamin’s letters, and he took care to see that the error was corrected.22 The broader lesson to be learned from these details is that Adorno was reluctant to affirm ethno-religious or national identity of any kind, even while he was deeply conscious of his historical and cultural bond with the German-Jewish community in which he had been raised. This bond was personal but also political. Throughout his childhood and the years of education in Frankfurt he remained in a cultural milieu that was notably, though by no means exclusively, Jewish. This was true of his early friendships—with Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer—and it should not surprise us that he eventually married a woman who was also Jewish by birth, though it seems she shared her husband’s indifference to questions of identity. Personal intimacy was further solidified by political experience. The complex matter of his dual ChristianJewish inheritance left him vulnerable to dismissal from his Frankfurt professorship as a “non-Aryan” according to the terms of the Nazi Party’s April 1933 legislation. His aging parents were also victimized. On February 1, 1939, he wrote to Benjamin with the news that his parents had been arrested. “We did succeed in getting my father out of prison, but he suffered further injury to his already bad eye during the pogrom; his offices were destroyed, and a short time afterwards he was deprived of all legal control over his property. My mother, who is now 73 years old, also found herself in custody for two days.”23

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Fortunately, soon afterward his parents succeeded in securing an entrance visa to Cuba, and from there they traveled to the United States. In these dark times Adorno occasionally permits himself an ironic allusion to anti-Semitism. In one of his first letters from New York he writes to reassure his parents that the Institute for Social Research’s neo-Marxist reputation has not impeded his warm reception. He is faring well, he writes, and “for all of the accusations of Jewish-Hegelian dialectics directed at me, I am clearly coping well with Americans even of the most Aryan blood.”24 Upon hearing the news that Germany has invaded Poland, Adorno writes to his parents, “We are now left with our theory as the disgraced Hebrews.” The “theory” to which he refers here is presumably the Marxist theory that did not predict fascism’s ascent. But he then refers to a fictional man with a recognizably Jewish name who was used by the institute’s members as a caricature of the good bourgeois: “But those Hebrews who turned out to be right, all the Walter Rosenthals who view Hitler as a madman and hail the peace front against him as a blessing, are nonetheless wrong in a more profound sense. If it is really true, then the world spirit has had an occupational accident, and the world of appearances has gained control over the intrinsic order—or rather disorder— of the present historical phase in a truly demonic fashion.”25 Exiled from Germany, Adorno was distressed by reports of the anti-Semitic persecution spreading across Europe. But he also disdained representatives of the liberal establishment who looked upon fascism as a mere aberration in history. Even from the safety of his California exile the reports consumed his attention. By this point he was assisting Horkheimer in finalizing sponsorship by the American Jewish Committee for research on anti-Semitism, and the two men were also working on Dialectic of Enlightenment, which contained the co-written

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chapter “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” In a letter dated April 15, 1943, he wrote to his parents in a bitter if facetious mood: “I am totally Jewified i.e. have nothing but anti-Semitism on my mind. It is hard to find anything new because Jews are so clever— ‘Jews know everything’!”26 Such remarks, at once playful and fearful, speak to ­Adorno’s penchant for irony and his characteristic refusal to attach himself to collectives of any kind. Upon his return to Germany after the war, when he resumed his instructional duties, he wrote to Thomas Mann that he found it exhilarating to engage with students on “extremely obscure questions at the very limits of logic and metaphysics, but precisely as if they were political issues—perhaps because there is in truth no longer any politics.” He then added an odd remark: “I am tempted to compare it with a Talmudic school. It sometimes seems to me as though the spirits of the murdered Jews have entered into our German intellectuals.”27 Such remarks exemplify Adorno’s general manner of thinking about the stakes of philosophy “after Auschwitz.” The disbelieving son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother could not bring himself to identify with any particular group except to invoke the memory of suffering as a moral standard that must haunt all philosophical reflection. Although his life was touched by anti-Semitism, it did not prompt him to attach himself with increased fervor to Judaism or to consider himself a full-fledged member of the Jewish milieu. It only enhanced his hostility to all modes of attachment that submerge the particular into the collective and use the fact of ethno-national difference as the groundwork for a new nationalist mythology.28 The fact remains, however, that had he not had the foresight and good fortune to leave Germany, Adorno himself would have become a victim of anti-Semitic persecution. Given the complexities of his own personal identity and his hostility

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to all forms of collective identification, the trauma of his uprooting left him with no alternative but to see himself as a permanent exile from all homelands even when he returned to Germany after the war. Only this can explain the significance of the idea of migration in his work. The migrant, I would suggest, is the projection into his philosophy of an experience that is at once traumatic and liberating. To be torn from one’s home is a terrifying experience, and no romanticism should be permitted to diminish its horror. But from the philosophical perspective the idea of migration can nonetheless serve as an important reminder of the epistemic and moral advantages of displacement. It helps us to see not only the broadening of intellectual horizons but also the genuinely emancipatory promise that inheres in the experience of defamiliarization. Karl Mannheim’s sociological category of “die freischwebende Intelligenz” (free-floating intelligentsia) suggests that a critical or even utopian perspective on worldly convention becomes possible only if one slackens the social and historical bonds that connect the mind to the world.29 The experience of ironic detachment can even assume the character of what Georg Lukács called “transcendental homelessness.”30 Here the sociological alienation of the critical intelligentsia converges with the melancholy stance of Benjamin’s angel, who gazes from a higher vantage upon the wreckage of history. But my interest here is the philosophical rather than the biographical sense we can make of Adorno’s idea of migration into the profane. I would like to propose that this idea suggests a rudimentary theory of secularization. Typically, we conceive of secularization as extended through time; but the idea of migration encourages us to imagine it as a movement through space. In Enlightenment narratives of travel such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (with its picaresque story of Turks in

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France), secularization figures as a geographical adventure from East to West. We can still detect that westward developmentalism in Hegel’s narrative of Spirit, and even here one detects more than a trace of orientalism. In Walter Benjamin’s story of the Turkish automaton, the orientalist theme remains. But the evolutionist premise that typically informs the chauvinistic contrast between orient and occident has vanished, and the geographical distinction is now compressed into a static image: the enchanted East conceals itself within the disenchanted West. Benjamin, I have argued, could never fully overcome his feelings of ambivalence regarding secularization. But in Adorno we find a theorist who seems determined to embrace the profane without regret. In his February 1964 letter to Scholem, Adorno described a migration into the profane that would be “ruthless,” rücksichtslos.31 The German term means “without pity or compassion,” though etymologically it suggests an action taken without regret. A Rücksicht is, literally, a backward glance. Adorno’s notion of a ruthless movement into the profane could thus be understood as a recommendation that we travel into secular territory without regret. Here we see the strong contrast between Adorno and Benjamin: whereas Adorno advocates a ruthless movement into the profane, Benjamin imagines the angel of history as a being who glances backward, with both melancholy and hope, even as it is blown into the future. In a 1957 conversation on West German radio, Adorno made this rejoinder explicit. Recalling the Turkish automaton from Benjamin’s essay, Adorno explained that the image of religion as “ugly” and hidden from public sight was “infinitely ironic.”32 In nearly the same terms that he would use in his letter to Scholem six years later, he then added the memorable formula: “Nothing of theological content will persist without

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being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane.”33 For the remainder of this chapter I would like to further examine this formula, and I will pose the question of what it might imply for our understanding of Adorno’s own views on the possibility—or the impossibility—of secularization. My claim will be that Adorno remains committed to a dialectical conception of secularization. On his view, the practice of negative dialectics is directed toward profane reality, but this very critical practice would not be possible without some concept of what transcends current conditions. The form of his argument is broadly transcendental: if we take ourselves to be capable of achieving a kind of critical perspective on social reality, then we are compelled to postulate—if only for the sake of  our own criticism—a standpoint that is removed, at least conceptually, from the world we confront before us and whose conditions we take for granted as factually given. The appeal to such a critical standpoint is what Adorno would characterize as “theological.” Adorno is careful to say, however, that such an appeal is merely conceptual. The notion of this theological vantage on the world is postulated in thought alone, and it does not entail any sort of corresponding metaphysical reality. As a postulate of critical practice it forbids all representation, and for this reason it may seem tempting to see Adorno as obeying the ban on graven images and a representative of a “secular Jewish theology.”34 But such conclusions strike me as mistaken. The persistence of the theological, if only as an idea, means that Adorno’s own philosophy remains in dialectical suspension between the sacred and the profane. To develop this argument in greater detail, I would like to entertain a comparison between Adorno and Maimonides. The comparison may strike many readers as rather unlikely, not least because of the historical chasm that separates the dis-

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believing son of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie from the paragon of medieval Jewish rationalism. My chief justification for pursuing it is that it is in Maimonides’ work that we find perhaps the most sophisticated exemplar of negative theology.35 To pursue the comparison in greater detail, however, will require that we first look more closely at the philosophical themes of Adorno’s mature work.

Hegelianism Without Closure The crucial point of departure for any understanding of Adorno’s philosophy is the notion of a negative dialectic. Although a full exposition of the concept far exceeds the purposes of this book, some rudimentary grasp of what it entails will be necessary if I am to pursue the comparison between negative dialectics and negative theology. To introduce this comparison it may prove helpful to begin by considering the ways Adorno’s concept of a negative dialectic differs from the concept of the dialectic as developed by G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel conceived of the dialectic as the logical dynamic by which any subject, individual or collective, establishes a relation to an object such that the object can be seen as the fulfillment of the subject’s purposes. To appreciate what such fulfillment entails, we need to understand that for Hegel a subject is not merely an epistemic agent but also a practical one: subjectivity, in other words, is not a reflective mind that remains passive and hopes to gain knowledge about the external world that presses upon the senses. Subjectivity is instead a dynamic force that impresses its own purposes upon the world; it gains knowledge of both the world and itself through its own action. This dialectical relation between subject and object can be seen as a fulfillment of the subject’s own purposes only if the subject bears within itself some idea of what it wishes to achieve

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and then succeeds in realizing that idea in the fullest possible way. A subject seeks such fulfillment through externalization, or Entäußerung. Consider, for instance, the case of a subject who is seized in a moment of philosophical inspiration by a powerful idea. This idea may seem to have great promise, but if it remains merely an idea in the subject’s mind then it remains abstract in the bad sense—an empty universal that cannot exfoliate its innermost purposes into reality. The idea must undergo a process of actualization if it is to count as real. Now, it is a crucial feature  of this process that actualization is also self-actualization. Any idea that is truly pertinent to my identity cannot remain wholly separate from worldly action, since I can only realize who I am through a trial of self-becoming. For Hegel this is especially the case for the idea of the subjectas-agency. If I conceive of myself as an agent then the process of manifestation is also self-realization. My sense of myself as an agent will cease to be a mere abstraction within the mind and will assume a concrete or this-worldly expression in the object.36 Now, the subject cannot presume that the object will yield easily to its aims. The object may appear as an obstruction that temporarily thwarts the subject’s purposes and prevents the subject from realizing what it can be. For this reason we can say that the process of self-actualization will involve moments of great negativity or the overcoming of resistance. This is why Hegel describes the process of self-actualization as “a long and laborious journey.”37 Hegel was confident that the dynamic of the dialectic must eventually reach a point of fullness or reconciliation (Ver­ söhnung), where the subject would recognize the object as a wholly adequate expression of its original aims. At stake in this process is nothing less than the subject’s idea of itself as an agent. This idea is satisfied only when agency no longer encounters any obstructions. But that is precisely what it means

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for the subject to understand itself as free. This kind of freedom is “rational” in the sense that there is no longer any dissonance between the subject’s concept of itself as an agent and the objective conditions in which it seeks to realize its aims. This is what Hegel meant when he wrote (in a rather provocative phrase) that with the benefit of dialectical insight we can recognize that “the rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”38 Finally, it is crucial to note that even at this higher stage of satisfaction the subject must also be able to think of itself as distinct from the object. Hegel is not an advocate of irrational fusion. He calls this remaining distinction between subject and object their “non-identity.” At the same time, the satisfactory realization of the subject’s aims also means that the object itself has become an adequate reflection of those very aims. This consonance between subject and object is what Hegel calls their “identity.” In the rational structure of the dialectic both moments are preserved. The dialectic reaches its consummation only where thought has achieved the fullest differentiation and yet also grasps this differentiation as a rationally mediated whole. Hegel characterizes this point of rational completion as “the absolute idea.” Philosophy culminates in “the absolute form that has proved itself to be the absolute foundation and the ultimate truth.”39 The entirety of Hegel’s philosophical system is built upon the logical framework of the dialectic, with its basic narrative of the subject’s bid for self-actualization. In whatever domain one looks, the dialectical pattern moves from primitive unity through difference and on to a higher plateau of reconciliation in which difference is both canceled and preserved. This is the case in Hegel’s political philosophy, in which the state is seen as the higher and mediated whole that sustains both the differentiation of our economic conduct and the sense of common purpose that unites us as citizens of a state. And it is also the

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case in Hegel’s philosophy of history, in which we are told that a retrospective view permits us to see that even the most negative moments of violence and struggle ultimately contribute to our understanding of history as a theater for the rational self-realization of humankind. This same dialectical pattern can be found in Hegel’s philosophy of religion. Although Hegel was by no means a religious traditionalist (despite his training at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen), it does not take a great effort to see that the narrative of the dialectic expresses in rationalized and philosophical terms the Christian logic of incarnation: it traces the history of the divine as it passes from primitive innocence through the trauma of division (the Passion) and on to the redemption of the world. “A true philosophy,” Hegel wrote, “leads to God.”40 Nor should it surprise us that Hegel also construed the movement from Judaism to Christianity as an instance of dialectical overcoming: Judaism is at once annulled and completed in Christianity. In this sense the dialectic can be understood as the ultimate expression of Christian supersessionism. The sublimity (Erhabenheit) of the Jewish God represents the stage of nonidentity, whereas Christ represents the worldly manifestation of the divine in concrete form.41 But for Hegel the history of religion was only one instance of dialectical reconciliation. In all domains of his philosophy, he discerned the ingenious workings of the dialectic as it aimed toward a higher and more sophisticated realization of human freedom. Such freedom could not remain abstract. Humanity can find its final and highest realization only in worldly institutions that transform our freedom into something concrete. For Hegel, the trial of reason’s self-manifestation had reached its stage of historical and political fulfillment in the modern European state. Interpreters of Hegel’s philosophy today are inclined to dismiss the triumphalist notion of dialec-

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tical closure as an embarrassing remnant of metaphysics that can be discarded without doing violence to Hegel’s true insights.42 But it seems clear that Hegel himself subscribed to a logic of rational closure. The dialectic as he conceived it is directed toward a thoroughgoing reconciliation (Versöhnung), insofar as this is what rationality itself was said to demand: the world merits the title of rational only insofar as it has succeeded in the dialectical overcoming of division. Those who wish to rescue Hegel from his principled commitment to closure find themselves in some interpretative difficulty when they try to explain why his dialectic should culminate in “absolute knowing [das absolute Wissen].”43 Needless to say, this stated commitment to closure does not rule out a recognition of difference. Hegel understands the stage of absolute knowing as a higher mediated identity that sustains within itself both identity and difference. The Hegelian totality is a differentiated or rationally meditated whole. “The true is the whole [Das Wahre ist das Ganze].”44

The Persistence of Negativity Adorno’s philosophy can be understood in large measure as a complaint against the rationalist demand for identity that governs the Hegelian dialectic. At first glance this complaint may look to be an extension of the left-Hegelian gesture that sought to secularize the dialectic by dethroning the metaphysical category of Spirit, or Geist.45 For Marx, the ultimate subject of history is not Spirit but human society. Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out that Adorno’s resemblance to the left-Hegelians is rather superficial. For a left-Hegelian social theorist such as Marx, the pattern of the dialectic retains its validity, though it now describes the immanent logic of the social world and the material tensions between different forces

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in society. Marx, like Hegel, still subscribed to a logic of identity: he believed that present society was scored with division, but its contradictions pointed toward the promise of their future reconciliation in communism. Adorno breaks with this logic of identity. He differs from both Hegel and Marx in his unremitting skepticism regarding the possibility of any such reconciliation. For Adorno, the structures of late-modern capitalism have achieved a degree of integration and permanence that belie any real hope for systematic change. But this means that the left-Hegelian principle of identity would now describe not the Marxist ideal of a future freedom but instead the present reality of unfreedom. The dialectical unity of subject and object is not the image of an unrealized social perfection, as Hegel thought; rather, it describes our own experience of a wholly administered society from which any sense of negativity has been reduced to an absolute minimum. A truly critical philosophy, for Adorno, would be one that alerts us to the persistence of negativity and thereby resists the ideological, falsely affirmative view of the world as a reconciled whole. For this reason, Adorno characterizes his own philosophy as an exercise in negative dialectics. I will pause here to note that, due to considerations already mentioned above, the question of whether Adorno can be assigned a place in the canon of Western Marxism remains controversial. The horrors of the twentieth century had all but shattered his confidence in the triumphalist dialectic of reconciliation that had once inspired Hegel and Marx, leaving him to face the grim task of crafting a philosophy that was truly responsive to the catastrophes of mass suffering and death in the modern era. “After Auschwitz,” he wrote, “no word intoned from on high, nor any theological one, has any right in its original form.”46 In Adorno’s writings we are confronted with a demand for a mode of thinking as dark as the world itself. This

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requirement imprints his work with an air of resolute skepticism: the emphasis has shifted almost entirely from social trans­ formation to social critique. The idea of revolution, if it survives at all, survives solely as a conceptual counterweight to present despair. It is this stance, uncompromising in its stringency, that best explains his allegiance to the “negative,” his steadfast refusal to affirm the world as it is. The urgent task was not class struggle but the mind’s own efforts to resist its absorption into the social whole.47 With this rudimentary reconstruction of Adorno’s philosophical commitments, we are now poised to entertain the question of his attitude toward religion and how he conceived of a migration into the profane. In 1966, Adorno presented Scholem with a newly published copy of Negative Dialectics, the dense and difficult work in which Adorno ruminated on the predicament of philosophy in the late-modern age. Although hardly a conclusive or systematic treatise, it summarizes the terms of his critique of identity-theory and points toward an alternative practice of negative dialectics—a dialectics set free from the illusion of an “extorted reconciliation” (erpreßte Versöhnung).48 In his reply, Scholem thanked Adorno for the book, but confessed that he had nearly broken his head in trying to make sense of its claims. He then offered an opinion: never before had he encountered “a more chaste and guarded [verhaltene] defense of metaphysics.” He admired Adorno’s attempt to wrest from Hegel’s dialectic a new species of “negative” criticism that did not lapse into “false affirmation.”49 But he could not share Adorno’s continued faith in materialism, nor could he see how this materialism could be harmonized with the book’s conclusion, in which Adorno had permitted himself an appeal to metaphysics. Scholem recognized that Adorno had abandoned the Marxist commitment to class struggle but still believed he

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could detect in Adorno’s work at least a trace of dogmatic materialism, insofar as Adorno upheld the axiom that consciousness exists only as it is mediated through social processes. To Scholem, this last remnant of historical materialism played the part in Adorno’s philosophy of a deus ex machina. Like the hidden animus within Benjamin’s Turkish puppet, it functioned as a metaphysical god who remains hidden within the otherwise lifeless mechanism. But it was only owing to this dogmatic remnant that Adorno’s philosophy could “win” at its games of dialectical chess. In his response to Scholem’s challenge, Adorno betrays a startling readiness to surrender identifiably Marxist categories: “The salvation of metaphysics,” he admits, “is in fact central to my intentions in Negative Dialectics.” But this does not preclude a commitment to materialism, which, Adorno insists, is far from being a worldview or a “fixed thing.” The path to materialism, he assures Scholem, is “totally different from dogma,” and it does not prevent but instead guarantees what he calls “an affinity with metaphysics.” He then hastens to add a corrective: “metaphysics, I might almost have said, theology.”50 This is an astonishing confession, not least because it suggests a dialectical alliance between theology and materialist criticism. On such topics Scholem and Adorno were not always in agreement, as any reader of their correspondence will immediately discover. Scholem’s fascination with the explosive powers of myth could hardly present a more striking contrast with Adorno’s interpretation of myth as merely the name for the mind’s descent into fatalism and thoughtlessness. For Scholem, the mystical element in Judaism was also the vehicle for creative and revolutionary change: even those occurrences of modern history that seemed most secular and most distant from mysticism, such as the French Revolution, could be shown to have a secret lineage going back to the Kabbalah.

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From Adorno’s perspective, however, any intrusion of mysticism or the occult into secular life represented another instance of the Enlightenment’s regression into myth. But Scholem and Adorno’s disagreement was perhaps not as stark as it might have seemed. In December 1967 Adorno published a brief encomium of Scholem in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the occasion of the historian’s seventieth birthday. In commenting on Scholem’s well-known allergy to the Marxist orientation of the Frankfurt School, Adorno remarked that “it seems to me the profoundest irony, that the conception of mysticism that he urges presents itself in historical-philosophical terms as just that migration into the profane [jene Einwanderung in die Profan­ ität] that he had considered so noxious in us.”51 It was Adorno’s opinion that the entire pathos of Scholem’s scholarship lay in the fact that it committed itself to the rational reconstruction of the irrational, and so, notwithstanding his subject matter, Scholem sustained an unbroken alliance with the process of secularization.52 His historical studies of the Kabbalah did not attempt to isolate the mystical tradition within sacred walls. They acknowledged, and even celebrated, “the entry of mysticism into the profane [jener Einzug von Mystik in die Profanität].”53

From Kabbalah to Enlightenment What, then, can we make of Adorno’s allusion to the secret affinity between theology and historical materialism? Here we should note that what most aroused Scholem’s interest in Negative Dialectics was a startling passage in the concluding portion of the book called “Meditations on Metaphysics,” in which Adorno characterized the task of critical thinking as an exercise in negation. Thought, Adorno wrote, is not merely an affirmation of what there is, for any such affirmation would force subject and object into a premature unity. Pace Hegel, we

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cannot permit the mind this sort of complacency, for in doing so we would grant the world itself the false prestige of rational intelligibility. But if the social order remains irrational and essentially unfree, then it cannot exhibit the illusory luster of conceptual clarity. For the sake of criticism alone, then, we must contest the mind’s confidence in the adequacy of its own concepts. Our capacity to sustain a truly critical perspective on social reality is possible only if we remain alive to that which re­ sists rational reflection, or what is otherwise than thought. But the notion of what is otherwise is not merely a cognitive concern. It is also the notion of what cannot be absorbed into the social whole. In this sense the non-reconciliation of subject and object becomes for Adorno the epistemological and experiential analogue of a society that is not reconciled with itself. This sociological claim requires further elaboration. In the late-modern capitalist order, Adorno claims, our capacity for sustaining an awareness of any historical alternatives to given reality has been nearly extinguished. Manifold forces, both economic and cultural, conspire to obscure our vision of persistent irrationality or negativity. Yet even in a society that has nearly succeeded in shutting down our awareness of such negativity, there will nonetheless remain small signs of fracture that reveal the essential irrationality or brokenness of the world. Adorno refers to these signs as “rifts and crevices [Risse und Schründe]” or the “smallest innerworldly markings.”54 Such marks can be found, for instance, in the paradigmatic specimens of aesthetic modernism—from the late works of Beethoven to the atonal compositions of the Second Viennese School—in which bourgeois experience becomes self-conscious and thematizes its own imperfection. “Scars of damage and disruption,” Adorno wrote, “are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-­ same.”55 The marks of negativity signify the irrationality of the

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seemingly rationalized world.56 In Minima Moralia Adorno suggests that these marks could be illumined only by a “messianic light.” In Negative Dialectics, Adorno adds the further suggestion that the deceptive unity of our social experience can be exposed only if its marks and flaws are seen with a “micrological glance.”57 But how would such a critical practice be possible? Adorno’s answer is a surprising one. If we are to identify moments of negativity within our social world, we can do so only by holding on to the concept of something that resists our cognition as if from the outside. But the only concept sufficiently powerful to resist the arrogance of the mind would be a metaphysical concept; it would be the concept of something that resists conceptualization. This is why Adorno says in the concluding passage of Negative Dialectics that the smallest inner-­worldly markings are of relevance to the “absolute.” He insists, however, that such a micrological method of criticism is not conceivable except as a gesture of secularization. With reference to Benjamin’s analysis of the ruinous landscapes depicted in the genre of the trauerspiel, Adorno writes that in the modern era metaphysics must undergo a “transmutation” into history. This transmutation “secularizes metaphysics into the secular category pure and simple, that of decay [des Verfalls]. Philosophy points to that signifying text, the always new Menetekel, in that which is smallest, the fragments struck loose by decay and which bear objective meanings. No meditation [Eingedenken] on transcendence is possible any more except by virtue of transience; eternity appears not as such but as shot through with what is most transient.”58 It is not insignificant that in elaborating upon this idea in the closing passage of Negative Dialectics he once again appeals to the concept of migration. “Metaphysics migrates into micrology [Metaphysik in die Mikrologie einwandert].”59 Those “smallest innerworldly

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markings” become “the place of metaphysics as the refuge from what is total.”60 Metaphysics, then, is condemned to wandering: it travels, and eventually seeks refuge, in a worldly realm of transience or decay that we might have considered its very opposite. All of this, to be sure, is exceedingly odd language for a philosopher who is supposed to be in some sense still allied with the tradition of neo-Marxist materialism. What, then, does Adorno mean by “metaphysics” and what is the subject that is supposed to seek out a place of inner-worldly refuge? From his response to Scholem we might suppose that by invoking metaphysics Adorno means to affirm a central idea in theology. But this inference would be too simple. Adorno recognizes, of course, that with the rationalization and disenchantment of late-modern capitalism traditional religion is not faring well at all: it exhibits a steep and perhaps inexorable decline. Nor does he raise his voice in protest against this process or betray any longing to reverse its course. But even as he mentions secularization, he nonetheless appeals to the theological concept that secularization conspires to dissolve. In the concluding lines of Negative Dialectics he acknowledges this double bind, and he positions himself at the dialectical juncture between the sacred and profane. The task of emancipatory criticism will demand nothing less than “solidarity with metaphysics at the moment of its fall.”61 In the closing lines of his book, Adorno even permits himself a momentary and rather oblique reference to the Kabbalah. In the medieval teachings of Isaac Luria we are told that God withdrew into his own being, but then flowed forth into creation and filled its vessels with the divine light. When this light proved too powerful, the vessels were shattered, and divine fragments were lost throughout creation and attached themselves to kelipot, “shells,” that represent the “spirit of evil”

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in the lowers depths of the world.62 Humanity must share in the task of redeeming the world, by setting free the fragments and restoring unity to the divine. Adorno was familiar with at least the rudiments of this teaching from the masterful reconstruction set forth by Scholem in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, a work that was published by Schocken in 1941, based on the Hilda Stroock Lectures Scholem delivered at the Jewish Institute for Religion in New York in 1937–1938.63 It was during this same visit that Scholem met Adorno in a March 1938 gathering at the home of the theologian Paul Tillich, who had supervised Adorno’s habilitation on Kierkegaard at the University of Frankfurt.64 It is never entirely clear in Adorno’s writing whether he is inclined to respect Kabbalistic thinking or dismiss it as yet another specimen of mythic irrationalism. In a March 4, 1938, letter to Benjamin, Adorno refers to his first meeting with Scholem, whom he describes as “the antinomian Maggid.” Adorno further remarks that the Tillich home was “not exactly the best atmosphere in which to be introduced to the Sohar; and especially since Frau Tillich’s relationship with the Kabbala seems to resemble that of a terrified teenager to pornography.”65 The subsequent correspondence between Adorno and the historian of the Kabbalah provides ample evidence for the deepening bond of friendship between them. Clearly, Adorno held Scholem in the highest esteem. All the same, we should not exaggerate the similarities between them. Adorno seems to have felt that Scholem could not fully overcome his neoRomantic inclination to affirm the reality of theological categories: in his work history appeared without materialistic substance as an arena in which one witnessed the constant irruption of idealistic and irrational powers of myth. Such misgivings about Scholem are evident as early as his 1938 letter to Benjamin, in which Adorno writes that he strongly prefers Benjamin’s

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own appeal to the metaphor of the ink and blotting paper to Scholem’s historical efforts to revivify the powers of the Kabbalah: “Your own comparison with the sheet of blotting paper, your own intention to mobilize the power of theological experience anonymously within the realm of the profane, seems to me utterly superior to all of Scholem’s attempts to salve the theological moment.”66 Adorno distinguishes between Scholem’s view of mysticism as an independent theological tradition and Benjamin’s view of theology as an interpretative method that mobilizes the power of theological experience “within the realm of the profane.”67 According to Adorno, at first glance it may appear as if this division is insurmountable. Benjamin’s method is dialectical, while Scholem’s attempted salvation of theology is “strangely linear and romantic.” Appearances, however, are deceptive: But when one takes a closer look at the things which [Scholem] himself presents . . . then their most essential characteristic seems to be the fact that they “explode.” He himself insists upon a sort of radioactive decay which drives us on from mysticism, and indeed equally in all of its monadically conceived historical shapes and forms, towards enlightenment. It strikes me as an expression of the most profound irony that the very conception of mysticism which he urges presents itself from the perspective of a philosophy of history precisely as that same migration into the profane with which he reproaches both of us. In Adorno’s view, Scholem is hardly the unremitting advocate of an otherworldly mysticism. For Scholem himself is chiefly interested in the worldly fortunes of a mystical power that can

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be traced historically as it travels outward from the realm of metaphysics “towards enlightenment.”68 It is therefore unfair of Scholem to fault Benjamin and Adorno for focusing their attention on the profane effects of theology. For Scholem, too, is interested in a “migration into the profane” [Einwanderung in die Profanität]. Here, then, is further evidence for Adorno’s interest in the category of secularization. Adorno’s observations regarding Scholem’s dialectical conception of history are of particular relevance when we turn to the conclusion of Negative Dialectics. In the book’s penultimate sentence, Adorno writes that “the smallest innerworldly markings would be relevant to the absolute” because “the mi­ crological glance demolishes the shells [Schalen] of that which is helplessly compartmentalized.”69 Here, it would seem, the image of shells, which Adorno has borrowed from the Lurianic Kabbalah, has reappeared—but it receives a newly critical and philosophical meaning. Adorno wishes to affirm the dialectical bond between the sacred and the profane even while he insists on the necessity of their separation. What may seem most insignificant in the mundane realm nonetheless retains some reference to the “absolute” since criticism fastens on the smallest inner-worldly markings, or moments of negativity that point toward the world’s redemption. In the Lurianic Kabbalah we are told that the fragments of the divine have been scattered throughout the darkest cracks and fissures of creation. Adorno reads this cosmogonic narrative as an allegory for secularization: “Metaphysics migrates into micrology.” But he follows the Kabbalah in insisting that these inner-worldly markings retain a metaphysical significance after the metaphysical tradition has collapsed. “In place of the Kantian epistemological question, as to how metaphysics would be possible, steps the one from the philosophy of history, as to whether metaphysical experience is even possible at all.”70

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In Negative Dialectics the category of “metaphysical experience” remains charged with the redemptive significance that was once reserved for traditional religion. To be sure, Adorno explicitly acknowledges that religious metaphysics and “metaphysical experience” are different. But he insists that the relevance of the temporal or inner-worldly realm was already a prominent theme in the heretical tradition of the Kabbalah. Metaphysical experience, Adorno tells us, was never so far beyond what is temporal as in the scholastic usage of the word metaphysics. It has been observed that mysticism, whose name hopes to rescue the immediacy of metaphysical experience against its loss through institutional construction, forms a social tradition for its part and stems from tradition, across the demarcation lines of religions, which are heresies to each other. The name of the corpus of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, means tradition. Metaphysical immediacy, where it dared to venture the furthest, did not deny how very mediated it is.71 In his attempt to rescue the category of “metaphysical experience” Adorno identifies the redemptive potential that still lies hidden in the “cracks and fissures” that signify “the place of metaphysics as a refuge from what is total.” In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, he alludes to the “mystical doctrine—which is common to the Kabbalah and to Christian mysticism such as Angelus Silesius—of the infinite relevance of the intra-mundane, and thus the historical, to transcendence, and to any possible conception of transcendence.”72 Here we see how Adorno calls upon theological language but changes its direction: it points away from the conventional

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or metaphysical referent (divine transcendence) and toward the plane of this-worldly, historical experience. Although it is no longer possible to affirm the absoluteness of God, one can still make use of the thought of divine absoluteness in worldly terms. One can express the absolute, Adorno writes, “in the subject matter and categories of immanence.”73 This new understanding of theology bears upon our conception of social criticism. In Adorno’s view it is the task of criticism to expose the negativity of the world. One must break open the shells, or conceptual categories, that lend the world its illusory perfection. The imagery of the Lurianic Kabbalah here becomes an allegory for the critique of ideology. Adorno pays homage to the metaphysical concept of the messianic, but uses this concept for the sake of this-worldly critique. We can appreciate why Scholem would have characterized the book as a “guarded defense of metaphysics.” But we should not exaggerate Adorno’s defense, nor should we mistake it for a genuine confession of religious longing. Like Benjamin’s angel, Adorno seems to acknowledge the storm of secularizing progress even while he keeps one eye fixed on the theological ideal it destroys. On this point, however, we can still detect a subtle note of dissent: Benjamin’s angel glances back, while Adorno’s philosopher effects the conceptual gesture of migration ohne Rücksicht—ruthlessly, or without regret. We must conclude that what Adorno wishes to retain from theology amounts to little more than a conceptual gesture, like a vanishing point on the distant horizon that remains infinitely behind us as we move forward in time.

Negative Dialectics as Negative Theology? How might we characterize this odd practice of a negative dialectic that pays homage to the concept of God even as it de-

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nies this concept any corresponding reality? In a 1934 letter to Benjamin, Adorno described his recent dissertation on Kierkegaard as an exercise in “‘inverse’ theology.”74 The phrase has puzzled many critics as it seems to pivot on a semantic ambiguity: Did Adorno mean to say that his dissertation remains in some sense devoted to theological speculation even as it turns that speculation toward materialist ends? Or does the irony cut even deeper, such that the inversion of theological discourse entails its wholesale negation? We should find it striking that Adorno would have suggested such a description, since his early dissertation on Kierkegaard clearly presents itself as an exercise in materialist criticism. More striking still, Adorno never mentions theology throughout the length of the book. He confines himself to exploring the metaphorical substructure or the aesthetic dimension of Kierkegaard’s writing, in obedience to the interpretative principle that the aesthetic is what truly betrays Kierkegaard’s social and historical conditions as a thinker of the early bourgeois era.75 But then why does Adorno compound our confusion by invoking theology at all? In what sense could his book be a theology, even if only an “inverse” theology? This kind of semantic ambiguity recurs with some frequency in Adorno’s later work whenever he permits himself a fleeting reference to theology—and just as quickly rescinds its mention and declares theology a historical impossibility. To grasp the philosophical implications of this strangely ambivalent posture, I would like to entertain the question of whether there is any instructive resemblance between ­Adorno’s “negative dialectic” and the theological doctrine that is commonly referred to as “negative theology.” This question is not as far-fetched as it may seem.76 Upon receiving Adorno’s Min­ ima Moralia, Scholem expressed his gratitude and declared it  “a remarkable document of negative theology.”77 To this

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Adorno responded with the sly, if perplexing, comment that he considered the characterization “just as esoteric as the topic itself.”78 It is perhaps safe to infer that Scholem associated the book with negative theology chiefly because of its concluding aphorism, in which Adorno presents the memorable claim that “the only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” Adorno further explained that this messianic perspective was both necessary and impossible—necessary because critical reflection demands that we draw back from our worldly conditions, impossible because the more we insist on this withdrawal the more we are delivered over unreflectively to those same conditions. As a close reader of Kierkegaard, Adorno is unashamed at finding himself caught in such a paradox. The standpoint of the messianic may be impossible, but we must at least permit ourselves to think this very impossibility “for the sake of the possible.” But Adorno does not consider even this conceptual necessity a sufficient warrant for genuine theology. “Beside the demand thus placed on thought,” he writes, “the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.”79 In the entire span of Adorno’s philosophical writing, these lines rank among the most cited and the least understood. Although I cannot claim to have unlocked their full meaning, in the remaining portions of this chapter I wish to offer a few observations as to how they might be interpreted. The first question to ask ourselves is whether they justify Scholem’s characterization. Does Adorno align himself, even in some qualified or dialectical fashion, with the tradition of

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negative theology? To answer this question, I will conclude this chapter by entertaining an admittedly unlikely comparison between Adorno and the medieval philosopher Moses ben Maimon, customarily known in philosophical circles by his Hellenized name Maimonides. As Moshe Halbertal reminds us in his intellectual biography, Maimonides’ major contribution to philosophy, The Guide of the Perplexed, does not advertise itself as a systematic theological treatise; rather, it presents itself prima facie as a study in biblical exegesis. At least in its most exoteric purposes, Maimonides writes the Guide to explain and justify anthropomorphism in the Hebrew Bible. This is a task of supreme importance, since any literal understanding of anthropomorphic remarks concerning God’s hand or eyes would violate the Second Commandment: to take such language literally would implicate the reader in the idolatry that Moses condemned in the episode with the Golden Calf. Maimonides even warns his reader, “Know that when you make an affirmation ascribing another thing to Him, you become more remote from Him.”80 For Maimonides, religious and epistemic aims are intertwined: one can only draw near God if one develops the proper understanding as to what can be known about him. Absent this understanding we not only suffer ignorance, we also find ourselves at a great remove from that being who is ultimate source of all justice and mercy. The proper epistemology is therefore a matter of greatest importance. If we are to gain any proximity to God, we must give some nonliteral explanation for biblical anthropomorphism. This exegetical challenge can be resolved only through a logical analysis of divine predication. It is at this point that the Guide diverts us from the more familiar path of biblical exegesis and draws us into a forbidding exercise in logic and speculative metaphysics. As a preliminary step, we must remember that Maimonides rejects any attempt to assign multiple predi-

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cates to God even when these predicates are meant in praise: to characterize God as “powerful,” or “just,” or “wise” would be to risk introducing multiplicity into the divine essence itself. But with this multiplicity we would jeopardize the unity of the divine. For Judaism, the absolute otherness of God—the divine’s singularity and indivisibility—is an article of faith, Judaism’s highest principle. (Thus the line from Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”) Maimonides suggests that many such predicates describe not the divine essence itself but only attributes of its worldly action. But this does not get to the heart of the problem. After all, many attributes (“God is all-powerful,” “God is all-knowing,” and so forth) also purport to characterize the nature of the divine even apart from the event of God’s worldly manifestation. Here Maimonides introduces the logical core of his negative theology. A propositional statement that takes the form of “God is x” is to be understood not as an affirmation of knowledge but as the negation of a privation. An affirmation such as “God is all-powerful” would attach a mundane predicate to the divine, and such an attribution would only diminish the divine essence that transcends all mundane categories. We should accordingly interpret “God is all-powerful” as the negation of a privative term: “God is not unpowerful.” This negative proposition takes the special form of an “infinite judgment.”81 It does not succeed as a propositional description at all. Instead it turns the mind aside from the space of mundane predication where the accumulation of predicates might have promised the accumulation of positive knowledge. With apologies to the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, we could say that for Maimonides the logical analysis of language disallows all metaphysical knowledge. This is not because metaphysics is meaningless but only because the metaphysical object necessarily exceeds the bounds of human cognition. It should not

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surprise us that the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen found in Maimonides a worthy antecedent to Kant. For Maimonides as for Kant, philosophy places sharp limits on metaphysical knowledge, not in order to destroy religion but only to affirm the transcendence of the divine. The claims of knowledge are limited in such a way as to preserve “faith.”82 Maimonides, of course, could only glimpse the radical consequences that would become explicit when Kant turned the doctrine of divine transcendence into a ban on all metaphysical speculation. After Kant, God could no longer stand as an object of valid theoretical cognition; God become merely a transcendental Idea. Adorno’s appeal to metaphysics as a conceptual element of negative dialectics shares a number of themes in common with the Maimonidean practice of negative theology. Both theorists affirm the logic of negation, the via negativa, as the route to philosophical insight. But this formal similarity is grounded in a deeper and more substantive resemblance. In wielding the power of negation to shatter illusion, they share a readiness to elevate an esoteric species of philosophical truth above conventional understanding. Maimonides sees biblical anthro­ pomorphism as an error that is deeply anchored in collective consciousness: it reflects a constitutive frailty of human cognition. Adorno likewise sees capitalist ideology as an error that is anchored in collective consciousness and constitutive features of the social order. Furthermore, both regard the error in question as simultaneously cognitive and practical. For Maimonides, even a theoretical misunderstanding of the divine already amounts to avodah zar’a, the practice of idolatry. For Adorno, the theoretical dimension of bourgeois philosophy only hardens the ideological and practical distortions in bourgeois society that he associates with reification.83 Nor should we miss the fact that both Adorno and Maimonides conceive of philosophical criticism itself as a practice with emancipa-

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tory consequences. This similarity should not surprise us once we recall the fact that the left-Hegelian critique of reification actually began as a critique of religious illusion. As Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit remind us in their fascinating study of the topic, the ancient battle against idolatry has enjoyed a remarkable longevity, and it survived even in Marxism, where it assumed a secular guise as the critique of commodity fetishism.84 The critique of idolatry, we might say, migrated into the critique of ideology. In this respect Adorno and Maimonides could appear as distant branches on a common tree. But the skeptic will now offer a bold retort than any such resemblance is ultimately superficial. Before I conclude, I think the skeptic’s voice should be heard. Maimonides, the skeptic will say, works through and beyond the negative so as to arrive at a higher and more philosophical understanding of the divine. But Adorno wishes to enlist the conceptual forms of theology in service of a critical, this-worldly practice that diverts itself away from the loftier realms of metaphysics and plunges us back into materialism. Surely, Adorno will not permit himself to conceive of the via negativa as a path that stretches out beyond propositional knowledge into the transmundane. On this crucial point the comparison between Adorno and Maimonides may appear fruitless; their paths must sharply diverge. Any interpretation that follows Scholem’s suggestion that we read Adorno’s philosophical contribution as an exercise in negative theology will have to grapple with the stubborn fact that Adorno has no genuine interest in the affirmation of religious consciousness even as it may be refined through philosophy. Scholem could be forgiven for the suggestion, since as a historian of religion he tended to refract even the most secular phenomena through the prism of his own erudition. It is one of the habitual problems of Kabbalistic esotericism that it detects the hidden pres-

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ence of mysticism nearly everywhere it looks. But Scholem is not solely to blame. Adorno himself may have encouraged the impression of a covertly theological agenda. His esteem for Scholem, and his desire to present himself as a trusted ally, may even have tempted him into an exaggerated confession of quasi-theological purpose that may have had little to do with his actual aims. Elsewhere Adorno made it abundantly clear that he felt little kinship with religion. In the autumn of 1957, he partic­ ipated in a conversation with the Catholic theologian Eugen Kogon on West German radio on the topic of “revelation or autonomous reason,” in which he recalled Benjamin’s image of theology, “which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight.”85 As an explanation Adorno adds a formula: “Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane [Nichts an theologischem Gehalt wird unverwandelt fortbeste­ hen; ein jeglicher wird der Probe sich stellen müssen, ins Säku­ lare, Profane einzuwandern].”86 It will not be lost on the reader that this is nearly the same phraseology as would reappear in the correspondence with Scholem, except that in the letter Adorno intensifies his argument when he characterizes the migration as “ruthless [rücksichtslos].”87 In the radio lecture, Adorno takes exception to the proposal that religious morality can be of any relevance to the problems that afflict modern society. “The concept of the neighbor,” he observes, “refers to communities where people know each other face to face. Helping one’s neighbors, no matter how urgent this remains in a world devastated by those natural catastrophes produced by society, is insignificant in comparison with a praxis that extends beyond every mere immediacy of human relationships.”88 Not only does Adorno re-

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ject the intersubjective locus of religious morality as irrelevant to the social pathologies of the modern era, he also adopts a recognizably Marxist critique of religion as an ideological distortion that helps to mask those pathologies: “The turn toward transcendence,” he writes, “functions as a screen-image for immanent, societal hopelessness.”89 With this statement it may seem as if Adorno is ready to condemn religion in toto as false consciousness, since he reduces the idea of a secularizing bridge between religious and nonreligious forms to an absolute minimum. Here the skeptic may appear to have the better argument: Adorno, it would appear, is a thoroughgoing critic of religion and an unqualified partisan of secular life.

A Last Rejoinder But with Adorno matters are rarely so simple. The skeptic’s challenge calls out for at least some measure of qualification. In Adorno’s negative dialectic, after all, even the affirmation of secularism would become dogmatic if it did not take note of the religious truth it condemns. The sharp distinction between “the religious” and “the secular” is undialectical, not least because a migration into the profane can only be understood as a secularizing dynamic that traces out a difficult passage from the one to the other. In this respect we would do a grave injustice to Adorno if we were to rest content with the claim that he had severed all bonds with religion. In the concluding portion of this chapter I want to offer some remarks as to how this bond still obtains and what it might signify regarding the place of religion in critical theory. First of all, there is the perplexing matter of Adorno’s religious language. If Maimonides wrote the Guide as a remedy for the scandal of anthropomorphic language, any reader of Adorno should feel no less obliged to explain the dilemma of

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why a self-declared materialist would have permitted himself the use of theological terms. The reference to a “messianic light” in Minima Moralia is only the most poignant example.90 But even if we were to dismiss Adorno’s religious language as an indulgence in mere metaphor, this would only beg the question of why he found theological language helpful at all. It is not only Adorno’s lifelong affiliation with a neo-Marxist program that raises the stakes of this question. Elsewhere in his work he condemns philosophers such as Heidegger and Jaspers who regressively fight against social disenchantment and cloak themselves with the aura of the sacred. For Adorno, even if one makes allowances for the fact that existentialism forbids any explicit appeal to God, the mere aura of the sacred survives and turns existentialism into a conservative ideology that affirms social existence as it is.91 In his polemic against Heideggerian existentialism, Adorno complains that “the jargon sanctifies the everyday world.”92 In Negative Dialectics Adorno adds the further comment that in the pseudo-pieties of Heidegger’s thinking, “Existence is sanctified without any sanctifying factor [Existenz wird geweiht ohne das Weihende].”93 As a result, existentialism effects an unlikely convergence with positivism. If Adorno’s critique of what he calls the “jargon of authenticity” has any merit, this only intensifies the need to explain his own recourse to religious terms. To those who are convinced of Adorno’s unqualified allegiance to materialism, my proposal may come as a surprise. I do not think his “theomorphisms” can be stripped away as merely metaphorical husks for a purely secular philosophy. On the contrary, I would contend we must take seriously Scholem’s suggestion that Adorno was in fact practicing something that resembles a negative theology. But we must push the claim a step farther than Scholem might have allowed. For Adorno, philosophical criticism pays homage to the truth content in

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theology only when it exercises the negation of that content without restraint. A negative theology that is truly negative cannot stop short before the threshold of metaphysics. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno suggests that we should salvage the redemptive content of theology, but only in a new form of metaphysical experience that also subjects theology itself to unrelenting criticism: “Metaphysics is in contrast to theology not merely, as per positivistic doctrine, a historically later stage, not only the secularization of theology into the concept. It preserves theology in its critique of it, by uncovering to human beings the possibility of what theology imposed on them and thereby violated.”94 Adorno thus resists any affirmation of theology; he seeks to preserve theology only by overcoming it entirely.95 Nowhere in Adorno’s work does he place greater dialectical emphasis on the power of the negative. This means that Adorno pursues the Maimonidean project even farther than Maimonides himself. The evacuation of positive terms in negative theology achieves its full meaning only when it touches the concept of God and evacuates even that concept of its reality. This critical process ends in what Hent de Vries has called a “minimal theology,” or a “theology in pianissimo.”96 This may help explain why Adorno says that the messianic light is known only as a negative principle, and that “beside the demand thus placed on thought” the reality or unreality of redemption is a matter of near indifference.97 This confession suggests the pragmatic status of the messianic as a counterfactual ideal that is posited only to secure a critical vantage on social reality. Its counterfactual status is far more legible in the German original than in Jephcott’s well-known English translation. For Jephcott, the “perspectives” that are revealed by this messianic light, and that “displace and estrange the world,” “must be fashioned.” But Adorno’s German phrasing is more tentative. He writes that perspectives “would have to be fashioned [müßten hergestellt

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werden].” The conclusion to this sentence makes the analogical nature of the messianic explicit. The perspectives that we are asked to fashion will reveal the world to be “as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light [wie sie einmal als bedürftig und entstellt im Messianischen Lichte daliegen wird].”98 The German “wie sie einmal” suggests that our own critical efforts yield an effect that is much as we would see the world if it were to be illumined by a messianic light. Adorno appeals to theology only to illustrate what our critical practice is like, and he is still careful to register the difference between them. We must therefore conclude that Adorno’s atheism is the dialectical consequence of a negative theology that is pursued to its absolute terminus. Theology survives only when its critical power is permitted to flow unchecked and results in its dissolution. It does not suffice to say that theology has been reduced to a mere illustration. This cannot account for the strong and even indispensable role that the analogy plays in Adorno’s thinking. To explain this point, let us consider a remark Adorno embeds in his polemic against existentialism, in which he writes that “a profane language could only approach the sacred one by distancing itself from the sound of the holy instead of by trying to imitate it.”99 Here I take Adorno to be stating a dialectical principle: the affirmation of religion would dishonor its meaning, while only the negation of religion can fulfill its truth. If this principle strikes us as a paradox, it is hardly surprising when we recall that Adorno began his philosophical career as a reader of Kierkegaard. Just as for Kierkegaard “Christendom” blasphemes against Christianity, so too for Adorno any affirmation of the divine amounts to idolatry. Religion and dialectical negation, therefore, are not fatally opposed. On the contrary; negative theology completes itself in negative dialectics.100

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In the previous chapters, I raised the concern that both Benjamin and Horkheimer opened themselves to a disabling skepticism about the very possibility of modern life. For Benjamin, this skepticism showed itself in his recourse to the category of the “messianic” as the only redemptive option for a historical continuum that would be otherwise consumed by catastrophe. For Horkheimer, this same skepticism came most to the fore in his later reflections on the “yearning for the wholly other.” Implicit in this skepticism was the view that nothing but an otherworldly God could furnish the remedy for our this-worldly pathologies. Neither Benjamin nor Horkheimer could fully recognize the discomfiting fact that their skepticism came to resemble the conservative and crypto-Gnostic critique of secular modernity as a fallen world. Where the Frankfurt School permitted itself to imagine only religion as the solution to our social affliction, it burdened secular modernity with the stigma of a normative deficit that cannot be healed on its own terms. But this complaint is hardly new: it has been the believer’s charge against unbelief since the birth of religious consciousness. We are now confronted with a final question. Does A ­ dorno’s appeal to the “messianic light” leave him vulnerable to the same charge that he is captive to the idea of a normative deficit in secular modernity? My answer to this question should now be clear. In his steadfast allegiance to the negative, Adorno took his leave of both radical atheism and radical theism alike. But this dialectical moment permitted him to see in modernity the realization rather than the betrayal of a religious truth he could not affirm. In this way, Adorno presents us with a curious response to the problem of a normative deficit. He shared with Benjamin and Horkheimer a grim verdict on the poverty of moral-­ political resources in modern life; but, unlike his colleagues,

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he did not seek in religion a substantive remedy for this condition. Instead, he found in religion the critical energy that could make the deficit visible. He thereby honored religion even while he sustained a principled commitment to the dialectical redemption of secular society from within. Such was the strange practice we may still wish to characterize as his negative theology. Like Moses, he remained true, through negation, to the word that he lacked.

Conclusion

Dialectics and Disenchantment

Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country. —Genesis 12:1

I

n a 1978 lecture on the occasion of Gershom Scholem’s eightieth birthday, Jürgen Habermas offered a summary of his friend’s understanding of secularization. The lecture bears witness to the enduring friendship between two of the most consequential intellectuals of the modern era, and it testifies to the postwar reality of a “German-Jewish dialogue” whose existence in pre-Holocaust Europe Scholem himself had dismissed as little more than a myth. Of greater relevance here, however, is Habermas’s sympathetic attempt to reconstruct a theoretical justification for the persistence of religious concepts in profane life. Scholem, claims Habermas, grasped the dialectical principle that secular society might still need religion: “Only those who can bring essential elements of their religious tradition, which points beyond the merely

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human, into the spheres of the profane will be able to save the substance of the human as well.”1 The endurance of religion is supposed to be not only possible but also necessary. Without the resources kept alive through religious tradition, Habermas suggests, modern society might very well lose contact with an essential understanding of its own humanity. A philosopher who served as an assistant to Adorno and widely considered the foremost representative of the Frankfurt School in its “second generation,” Jürgen Habermas has traveled a great distance over the course of his career from the insights we typically associate with the founding members of critical theory whom I have discussed in this book. Nor has he refrained from criticizing what he identifies as the philosophical aporias in their work. His complaints have focused on the “performative contradiction” of an ostensibly totalizing critique of reason that seeks to expose the inner complicity between reason and domination, even while it must nevertheless appeal to reason as the animating principle of its own critique.2 To escape this vicious circle, Habermas has devoted the greater share of his career to developing a normative foundation for critical theory in the intersubjective medium of communicative reason. In recent years he has deepened and supplemented this theory of rational normativity with ongoing work on the question of how religious sources of normativity might be salvaged for secular society. Such concerns have brought him back into closer proximity with the arguments of the first-generation critical theorists, who were notably less sanguine regarding the powers of secular reason. The remarks on Scholem quoted above recapitulate what we might call a dialectical concept of secularization: religion does not altogether vanish; rather, its normative contents survive even as they are compelled to undergo a migration into the profane. This survival, Habermas claims,

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is an urgent necessity, since religion is the bearer of lessons that are not only inspiring but perhaps even “indispensable” for a secular modernity that seems unable to secure its own normative grounding and, without such normative principles, might spin out of control.3 A dialectical understanding of secularization was the common point of reference for Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno. As we have seen, this general principle was open to a variety of interpretations. Benjamin could not resolve the question as to whether the dialectical secularization of religion was a precondition or an obstruction to political action. In his reflections on modern art and technological reproducibility, he portrayed the aura as a religious or cultic remnant that must be shed entirely if art is to serve as an instrument for mass political mobilization. Elsewhere, however, and especially in his late “theses” on the concept of history, religion no longer appears as the trace of an unwanted tradition. Rather, it assumes the role of an indispensable but hidden core of a historical materialism that can effect a revolutionary break with capitalism if and only if it invokes the powers of the messianic. In the case of Horkheimer, the dialectical role assigned to religion in critical theory was no less conflicted. The younger Horkheimer embraced a strong version of historical materialism that silenced all yearning for a metaphysical “beyond” and affirmed only “the solidarity with men who will come after us in this world.”4 Later, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, he came to recognize the Janus-faced character of monotheism: it signified both an emancipatory principle opposed to the world-immanence of myth and a model for world-transcendent reason whose appearance marked an inaugural stage in the dialectic of enlightenment. In his last decades, however, this dialectical understanding of religion vanished almost entirely. The concept of

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God as “something other than this world” became for Hork­ heimer the last hope for a philosophy that could find no profane resources for the redemption of society from within. Religion became “indispensable,” the necessary counterpart to secular despair. For Adorno, meanwhile, the principle of secularization meant that no religious concept could serve the purposes of critique without submitting itself to a ruthless transformation. If criticism still owed something to the idea of a “messianic light,” this debt could be valid only if religion itself underwent a trial of reflexive self-criticism. Ultimately, this trial would demand that religious norms be evacuated of all metaphysical authority: they would be permitted to retain only as much of their redemptive meaning as was necessary for them to serve the task of critical negation. This was the necessary price of religion’s trial of secularization. Negative theology became negative dialectics. Within the confines of this book I have not taken a final stand on whose understanding of secularization is most defensible. But the reader will no doubt have noticed that my remarks lend greater credence to Adorno’s dialectical view that religion can survive only as a point of critical leverage against social immanence even while it must surrender any further meaning as a world-transcendent truth. This, to be sure, is a minimalist concession to religion, and it is one articulated within the bounds of secular reason alone. Whether it is compatible with the self-conception of the religious believer is a different matter altogether: I am inclined to say that no such concession could ever be enough to satisfy those who seek in religion some affirmation of a genuinely metaphysical reality. It is perhaps unsurprising that Adorno found in Kierkegaard a kindred spirit: much like Adorno, Kierkegaard was willing to dwell without resolution in the paradox of a religious faith that

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contradicts profane reason. A major difference is that Kierkegaard made this contradiction itself a badge of piety, whereas for Adorno it served as a reminder that reason had not yet lived up to its own secular promise. For Adorno, ultimately, secularization remained an imperative. All restorative efforts to turn back the tidal forces of disenchantment were in vain. At best such efforts could only delay but not forestall the process of social rationalization that had already turned religion into an anachronism; at worst they could subject the world once again to the absolutistic moralism of a divine terror that was hardly preferable to the profane terror of the present. Faced with this situation, Adorno could see no other alternative than the difficult process of a migration into the profane. In our present condition of global crisis, we now witness a widening line of fracture between those who adhere to the principle of secular reason and those who are ready to embrace the temptations of theocracy. The promise of religious certitude beckons with enhanced luster, especially for those who suffer the sting of discrimination or find themselves, through no fault of their own, on the losing side of a dangerously imbalanced globalization process. For the pathologies that afflict us today, however, the turn to religious tradition is no remedy. In the United States, as in so many regions across the globe, the regressive dream of monocultural purity has become not only a practical impossibility but a violent affront to the irreducible fact of religious and ethno-racial pluralism. This dream is no less evident, however, among ideologues of an absolutist “secularism” who somehow imagine that multireligious societies can be forced to conform to a single standard of enlightenment. Secularism in this sense is no less dogmatic than the religion it combats. This is one reason why we would do well to resist arguments that wish to found justice in metaphysical

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schemes, as if we could identify a sharp and undialectical division between the “truth” of human finitude and the illusions of religious belief.5 A genuinely critical consciousness must be responsive to difference and hold open the doors to peoples of all faiths. The longing for purity is a kind of pathology, a homesickness in societies that feel their homelands are under threat. Mal du pays has a twofold meaning: it signifies not just nostalgia for an absent homeland but also the evil that is implicit in the very idea of a homeland itself. The mere distinction between those who belong and those who do not is already a warrant for persecution.6 The three so-called Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are said to share a common ancestor in Abraham, the “wandering Aramean.” In the opening pages of this book, I suggested that the contemporary hostility to migrants stands in stark contradiction to the deepest teachings of these religions. At issue, I believe, is a refusal to acknowledge the deeper fact that we are all in some sense elsewhere, and that this kind of uprooting is not a condition we could ever hope to undo. The stranger is always and everywhere our own mirror image: the migrant is ourselves. What first occurs in the book of Exodus as a historical event reappears in Augustine’s City of God as a peregrina in saeculo. But if we are all the migrant then migration is not merely a specific political condition. Rather, it might be understood as the constitutive condition of humanity. To borrow the phrase that Martin Jay originally intended as the title of his first book, we are all “permanent exiles.”7 To honor this truth, however, would seem to suggest that we make at least some attempt to unbind ourselves from the dream of self-identical existence. The longing to occupy any spaces, real or symbolic, that we claim as wholly “our own” is a politicaltheological fantasy: it suggests an end to wandering, an end to

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the challenge of living in conditions of heterogeneity. Such a heterogeneity would appear not only as social diversity; it would manifest itself within each and any one of us, as a subjectivity that is no longer unified with itself, and no longer captive to the dream of authenticity. To embrace our own peregrina in saeculo would be to untether ourselves from the exclusionary bonds of a single faith. Whether this is too high a price to pay for the application of religious concepts in secular society remains an open question. Many believers would no doubt resist the thought that one can best uphold the universalist promise of religion only through its negation.8 But emancipatory criticism cannot stop halfway before whatever gods may present themselves as sacred; it must subject every mystery, without exception, to the disenchanting scrutiny of reason.9 The philosophers of the Enlightenment may have been content with the notion of a compatibility between reason and religion; they may have thought, with Kant, that it was possible to conceive of a genuinely phil­ osophical religion that could assume its true shape “within the boundaries of mere reason.”10 But if philosophy is to honor its own ideal as the exercise of a critical impulse without boundaries or limits, then we should no longer be ashamed to draw the conclusion that “mere reason” already bears within itself an imperative of secularization that points beyond the horizons of religious belief. It is a commandment, both ancient and modern, that urges us to uproot ourselves from the certitude of sacred truths and accept the challenge of a life that has no foundations other than the ones that we fashion, through symbolic and normative communication, with all the other inhabitants of our crowded planet.11 Whether we can still find such arguments plausible in our own time remains uncertain. Today it is hard to resist the

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impression that, with the rise of Jewish nationalist consciousness, the critical moment in Jewish thought that once drew strength from the idea of an unrepresentable God has fallen into eclipse. Already in the early 1960s, Horkheimer feared that by affirming allegiance to their own sovereign nation-state in the Middle East, Jews had adapted themselves too easily to the nationalism that had once claimed them as its victims. “Through millennia of persecution,” he wrote, “the Jews held together for the sake of justice.”12 The Jewish community was “not a powerful state but the hope for justice at the end of the world.”13 Hork­heimer lamented the collapse of this ideal: “How profound a resignation in the very triumph of its temporal success. [The Jewish people] purchases its survival by paying tribute to the world as it is.”14 The deepest irony of this historical transformation is that a state which was meant to provide a haven for the wanderers and the persecuted did so only by casting another people into a condition of statelessness. Many consider this a tragic but unavoidable concession to existential reality. They do not pause to ask whether this reality should be affirmed when it stands in such stark contradiction to the ideals of justice they still ascribe to their religion. Such a question, however, must be posed not only to one religion, but to all modes of religious and ethno-national identification. For all peoples, whatever their national or religious inheritance, the fact of multiplicity presents a challenge. Not only religious but also national consciousness must accept the cognitive dissonance of encountering representatives of other cultures and faiths.15 Seyla Benhabib writes that “the much-­ maligned term ‘multiculturalism’ cannot capture the complexities of creating a culture in which those who are not at home can nonetheless find a home; a culture in which those who feel their otherness can nonetheless create a new vocabulary such as to extend the limits of our imagination.” Stretching our

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thoughts in this way is crucial not least if we are willing honestly to accept what Benhabib calls “the multiplicity within each one of us.”16 The view I am proposing here—that we are all migrants, and that no claim to belonging can supersede another—should not be taken to imply any romantic idealization of homelessness. The suffering of those who find themselves forced— whether by war, violence, or poverty—to flee the places where they have lived is a genuine affliction, and it is one that must be remedied through practical action, not inflated into a mere signature of the human condition. The migrant is not a philosopheme. But even while resisting such inflation, I nonetheless want to suggest that the status of the migrant has something important to tell us about the way we should all regard all claims to belonging. The thought that we are all in a very deep sense homeless should inform how we conceive of home, and it should help us sustain a posture of openness and welcome toward all those who come from elsewhere. “It is part of morality,” Adorno once observed, “not to be at home in one’s home.”17 Against this proposal, a strong and enduring tradition in philosophy would have us believe that domesticity is the highest ideal. In the modern era Martin Heidegger was surely the most prominent thinker to meditate upon the significance of “dwelling,” and to warn of the danger that would arise should the human being enter into a condition of metaphysical worldlessness. For Heidegger, the summum bonum of human life is to arrive at an understanding of that which can be claimed as wholly “one’s own.” Authenticity, Eigentlichkeit, was his name for the state of self-ownership, of seizing upon one’s “ownmost self ” (das eigenste Selbst). It can hardly surprise us if this ideal of self-possession made existential ontology vulnerable to a nationalist interpretation according to which the boundaries of a people are the only proper means of marking out the limits of

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their collective being-in-the-world. The result was an ontologized xenophobia. In the winter semester 1933–1934, between November 3 and February 23, when Heidegger was serving as rector at the University of Freiburg under the newly established Nazi regime, he offered a seminar titled “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State.” In student protocols for the seminar the philosopher expatiated on the thought that “people and space mutually belong to each other.” Such a statement elevated worldliness (Weltlichkeit) and “settledness” into ontological categories that were the particular privilege of an authentic people. Those who were gifted with this privilege would cultivate “rootedness in the soil” but also strive for “rule over soil and space.” Meanwhile, Heidegger warned of those “Semitic nomads” (den semitschen Nomaden) for whom the very essence of nature and space might never be revealed: “History teaches us that nomads have not only been made nomadic by the desolation of wastelands and steppes, but they have often left wastelands behind them where they found fruitful and cultivated land—and that human beings who are rooted in the soil have known how to make a home for themselves even in the wilderness.”18 This contrast, between authentic dwelling and nomadic existence, is so saturated with historical memory that it should astonish us that any partisans of Heidegger would still seek to redeem such arguments from the violence they imply. Heideg­ ger, too, recognized our Unheimlichkeit, our not-at-homeness or finitude, but his own xenophobia betrayed him. But ongoing debates over the political character of Heidegger’s philosophy are hardly of great concern here. Far more pertinent is the question of whether any philosophy can retain its legitimacy in the late-modern era if it continues to insist on the ontological virtues of rootedness and national distinction. It should be readily apparent that such a philosophy can have little rele-

Conclusion 153

vance today. “Dwelling in the authentic sense,” writes Adorno, “is no longer possible [Eigentlich kann man überhaupt nicht mehr wohnen].”19 This is not only an anticipatory rejoinder to Heidegger, who, in a now-classic lecture from 1951, rhapsodized on the themes of authenticity and dwelling. Far more impor­ tant than any theoretical debate with the old existentialism is the fact of a humanity that long ago surrendered its right to live without the complications of multiplicity. Our thinking must now adapt itself to historical and sociological conditions that preclude all claims to national primacy and call into question the dream of a unified collective that jealously guards its privileges against whose who are seen as coming from the outside. Instead we must try to recognize the outsider at the heart of our own identity, such that the very claim to identity begins to lose its appeal. Georg Lukács once observed that modern experience has now assumed the character of “transcendental homelessness.”20 The world that would emerge from such an insight could no longer harden itself against the stranger; it would accept the stranger in the spirit of the old words, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). Multiplicity, then, is both relational and internal. No identity can claim for itself the prestige of an “authentic” existence that is free of contradiction. Rather, we must embrace what Georg Simmel called “the potential wanderer” as a constitutive feature of the self.21 Today, of course, too many of us wish to turn our backs on this multiplicity and make a fetish of national and sacred isolation. The new xenophobia and the flight into integral modes of self-affirmation clearly serve a compensatory function: we take an unwarranted pride in collective identities that offer the false comfort of permanence even as global markets dissolve traditions at an accelerating pace. But those who nourish the fantasy of a return to great-

154 Conclusion

ness can only sustain such an illusion if they build walls against those whose suffering and destitution should call into question their own humanity. This fantasy must be abandoned. Utopia lies not in the infantile dream of a collective that has armed itself against the world. Utopia survives, if it survives at all, not when one embraces the sacred without criticism, but only when one honors its commandment to uproot oneself from all claims of sacred belonging and to embark on the difficult if necessary adventure of a migration into the profane.22 This book, though modest in size, had an immodest aim. I have explored the concept of secularization as it was developed by three thinkers, but I have also tried to suggest that the concept still has philosophical and political merit. Secularization, of course, is an old but often disputed idea: it is a name we confer on the difficult and uneven process that disenchants our social being and unbinds us from the spell of mythic belonging. But secularism is also our way of structuring the modern political order without recourse to the comforts of enchantment. These two concepts—secularization and secularism—belong together as process and consequence, since it is only through a disenchantment of collective identity that we can achieve the kind of institutionalized coexistence that is crucial to our shared life today. To be sure, secularism in the political and legal sense remains as much an ideal as an actual practice: even in polities that proudly insist on their adherence to its principles, these principles are often violated or selectively enforced to such an extent that many critics have decided that the principles have lost their validity and are best discarded entirely. But such principles, I would suggest, nevertheless deserve our ongoing commitment. Especially in an age of increased migration this commitment has become a matter of greatest urgency, not only in one particular region of the globe but in every region and in every culture that is willing to

Conclusion 155

abandon the old dreams of exclusionary and ethno-religious cohesion. Secularism may be a battered and much-abused term, but it is only by advancing its principles that we can create a social order that will allow for plurality without dispersal, and difference without domination. In such a world no walls would stand that could not be breached, and no stranger in our midst would not be at home.

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Notes

Introduction 1. On the Jewish identity of the Frankfurt School, see Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Anti-Semitism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 2. Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe; A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 3. On German Jews and statist liberalism, see Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Hoboken, N.J.: Blackwell, 1992). 4. See, e.g., Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Move­ ments, 1871–1917 (New York: Schocken, 1977); Eliyahu Stern, Jewish Materi­ alism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 5. For an overview of the various trajectories, see the excellent collection of essays Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 6. This history has a darker side, insofar as the prominent role of Jews in the leadership of European socialist and Communist movements nourished rumors of a conspiracy. On this theme see Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunt­ ing Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 7. See George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985). 8. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 134.

158

Notes to Pages 6–9

9. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2017). 10. For a general treatment, see Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 11. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). 12. We should recall, for example, that Hugo Preuß, the liberal lawyer and politician who had drafted the constitution, was of Jewish descent. For a historical summary, see Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Arnold Paucker, Der jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg, 1968); Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2003). For the classic study of the Weimar Republic, see Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, trans. Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 13. For the flourishing of Jewish culture in Germany between the wars, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 14. For details on the founding of the institute, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, esp. 3–40; also see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 9–24. 15. Löwy, Redemption and Utopia. 16. For a discussion of these conspiracy theories, see Martin Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” Salmagundi 168–169 (Fall 2010–Winter 2011): 30–40. 17. For speculative reflections on modern Jewish thought and responses to disenchantment, see Agata Bielek-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (New York: Routledge, 2014). 18. On these questions, see Jacobs, The Frankfurt School. 19. Specifically, see my essay, “Contesting Secularization: The Idea of a Normative Deficit of Modernity After Max Weber,” in Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, ed. Philip Nord, Katja Guenther, and Max Weiss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 184– 201. Also see my remarks on Adorno and Habermas in “Kritische Theorie zwischen Sakralen und Profane,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (2016): 3–34; the essay has appeared in English as “Critical Theory Between the Sacred and the Profane,” Constellations 23, no. 4 (May 2016): 466–481. 20. Theodor W. Adorno to Gershom Scholem, February 17, 1964, in The-

Notes to Pages 10–12

159

odor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail”: Briefwechsel 1939–1960, ed. Asaf Angermann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 308; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), 393. For a variation on the phrase, see Adorno’s lecture, “Reason and Revelation,” in Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 135–142, quote on 136. For the original German of this lecture (originally from a conversation with Eugen Kogon and first broadcast November 20, 1957, on West German radio), see Adorno, “Vernunft und Offenbarung,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 10.2: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, II. Eingriffe, Stichworte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 608–616. The original title of the published version of this lecture was “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” in Frankfurter Hefte: Zeitschrift für Kultur und Politik 13 (June 7, 1958), 484–498. The original title places greater stress on the sharp alternative, either revelation or autonomous reason, an emphasis that is lost in the later title. For variations on Adorno’s phrase, also see Adorno, “Grüß an G. Scholem. Zum 70. Geburt­ stag: 5. Dezember, 1967,” in Gesammelte Schriften 20.2: Vermischte Schriften II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 478–486, esp. “Einwanderung in die Profanität” (481) and “. . . Einzug von Mystik in die Profanität” (485). 21. David L. Lieber, senior ed., and Jules Harlow, literary ed., Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 2001). All quotations from the Torah are from this edition. On the Jews as strangers, see Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 5–6 and passim. 22. “Quapropter quod nunc in civitate Dei et civitati Dei in hoc peregrinanti saeculo maxime commendatur humilitas”: Saint Augustine, The City of God, book 14, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 461. 23. “Hoc modo curantur cives civitatis Dei in hac terra peregrinantes et paci supernae patriae suspirantes”: ibid., 484. 24. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 264–274. 25. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2018: Syria, Events of 2017,” https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/syria (accessed March, 23, 2018). 26. Griff White, “Conditions Are Horrific at Greece’s ‘Island Prisons’ for Refugees. Is That the Point?,” Washington Post, January 15, 2018, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/conditions-are-horrific-at-greeces -island-prisons-for-refugees-is-that-the-point/2018/01/15/b93765ac-f546-11e7 -9af7-a50bc3300042_story.html?utm_term=.87c2d70a96b2 (accessed March 23, 2018).

160

Notes to Pages 13–21

27. Davide Enia, Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope, trans. Antony Shugaar (New York: Other Press, 2019), 226. 28. Patrick Chamoiseau, Frères migrants (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017)/ Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, trans. Mathew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), xiv. 29. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öfftentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962)/The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 88. 30. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 7. 31. On this point, I must register my subtle disagreement with the ar­ guments set forth by Amy Allen in The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 32. Theodor Adorno, “Progress,” in Adorno, Critical Models, 150. 33. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 127–128. 34. Ibid. 35. See David Jan Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). 36. Max Horkheimer, “The German Jews,” in Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Seabury, 1974), 106. 37. Ibid., 107. 38. Jürgen Habermas, “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers,” in Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 42. 39. Ibid., 27. 40. Ibid., 42. 41. Horkheimer, “The German Jews,” 113. 42. Ibid., 113–114.

one Benjamin; or, The Ambivalence of Secularization 1. For historical details on Kempelen and his inventions related in this section, I have relied on the delightful book by Tom Standage, The Turk: The

Notes to Pages 22–26

161

Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (New York: Berkley Trade, 2002). 2. See Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Arti­ sans, and Cultures of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 3. Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in The Sciences in Enlight­ ened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and John Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 126–165; Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment. 4. N. S. Hetherington, “Isaac Newton’s Influence on Adam Smith’s Natural Laws in Economics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 497–505. See also D. D. Raphael, “Newton and Adam Smith,” in Newton’s Dream, ed. Marcia Sweet Stayer (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1988), 36–49. 5. On the theme of self-organization, see Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), Notebooks VI—VII, 690. 7. Standage, The Turk. 8. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 389. 9. Ibid. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), “Preface” (§58), 36. German from Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 43. 11. “It’s not that what is past that casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of whathas-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.—Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.” Walter Benjamin, “Awakening,” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap, 2002), 462 (N2a, 3). For an excellent commentary on this method see Max Pensky, “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,” in The Cambridge Com­ panion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177–198.

162

Notes to Pages 26–33

12. Theodor W. Adorno, “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” in Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 234. 13. Immanuel Kant, “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 14. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 84. 15. Marx’s intellectual debt to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century currents of thought is a major (and even overstated) theme in Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: Liveright, 2014). Sperber adopts the strategy of defeatist historicism, as if demonstrating the historical origins of an idea were sufficient to call into question the possibility of its persistence and validity in the future. But the fact that Marxian themes still remain available for creative and critical reappropriation in the present already indicates the limitations of this historicist strategy. 16. Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. Georg G. Iggers, trans. Wilma A. Iggers (London: Routledge, 2011). In this translation the famous slogan appears in a slightly different version: “Every age is next to God”(22). 17. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Tom Jones (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 97. 18. Benjamin’s reference is to an Ausnahmezustand. The crucial arguments on this theme are to be found in the eighth thesis in Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392 (translation modified). 19. On Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt, see, e.g., the special issue of Telos devoted to Schmitt and the Frankfurt School, and especially the essay therein by Martin Jay, “Reconciling the Irreconcilable? Rejoinder to Kennedy,” Telos 71 (Spring 1987): 67–80; see also Duncan Kelly, “Rethinking Franz Neumann’s Route to Behemoth,” History of Political Thought 23, no. 3 (Autumn, 2002): 458–496, esp. 480. 20. For further information on Maelzel, see Henrike Leonhardt, Der Taktmesser: Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, ein lückenhafter Lebenslauf (Hamburg: Kellner Verlag, 1990); Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (April 1836): 318–326. 21. Ibid. (emphasis mine). 22. Max Weber, “Zwischenbetrachtung,” in English as “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 323–359, quote on 351.

Notes to Pages 34–40

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23. For the classic statement on progress as secularized eschatology, see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philoso­ phy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). For a rejoinder, see Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), in English as The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). For an assessment of this debate and a suggestion as to how one might move beyond its rather dualistic concepts of dependency and legitimacy, see Peter E. Gordon, “Secularization, Genealogy, and the Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Remarks on the LöwithBlumenberg Debate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (January 2019): 147–170. 24. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 22. In his “Three Essays on Religion,” John Stuart Mill had suggested that monotheism, not polytheism, furnished the metaphysical preconditions for the emergence of the modern scientific understanding of nature as governed by unified laws. See John Stuart Mill, “Theism,” in Mill, Three Essays on Religion (New York: Holt, 1874), esp. the arguments at 130–131. Weber consciously inverts this argument with the suggestion that science fractures the unified value-schema of the traditional monotheistic cosmos and introduces a polytheism of values. 25. The classical version of this secularization thesis can be found in Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 1–31. But also see the “the so-called Zwischen­ betrachtung,” or “Intermediary Reflection,” known in English as “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in Weber, From Max Weber. It is a striking fact that even an accomplished sociologist such as Peter Berger could declare that Weber “did not use the concept of secularization.” See Peter Berger, Sehnsucht nach Sinn. Glauben in einer Zeit der Leichtgläubigkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1994), 34. This is mistaken. For a corrective, see Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entzauberung der Welt. Sechs Studien zu Max Weber (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), esp. 14n44. 26. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The MarxEngels Reader, 469–500, quotes at 475. Among the paralipomena to the essay on history, for instance, Benjamin observed that “in the idea of the classless society, Marx secularized the concept of the messianic age. And that was as it should be.” Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 401. 27. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 68, 141. 28. Ibid., 188, 189, 164. 29. Ibid., 253, 254, 254–55. 30. Ibid., 196, 254.

164

Notes to Pages 40–46

31. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395. 32. Ibid., 397. 33. “Die ältesten Kunstwerke sind, wie wir wissen, im Dienst eines Rituals entstanden, zuerst eines magischen, dann eines religiösen.” Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), 355; in English as “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Third Version) in Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 256. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1: The Process of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 81. 37. “Noch in den profansten Formen des Schönheitsdienstes.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), 355; English from Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 256. This is of course only one theme in Benjamin’s complex meditations on the aura. The term appears elsewhere in his writing and with other meanings, e.g., in the 1931 essay “Little History of Photography,” where he describes the aura as “a strange weave [Gespinst] of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be. While resting on a summer afternoon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer—this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.” This alternative understanding of aura diverges sharply from the more “Brechtian” theory set forth in the “Work of Art” essay. For a penetrating analysis of this different theme, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 336–375. 38. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 256. German from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7:355. 39. On the question of whether Benjamin might have misread Marx’s critique of the commodity, see the insightful essay by Robert Kaufman, “Nothing if Not Determined: Marxian Criticism in History,” in A Companion to Literary Theory, ed. David Richter (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 2015– 2017; and Kaufman, “Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire Baudelaire,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 207–215. 40. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 255 (emphasis mine). 41. Ibid., 270. 42. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Notes to Pages 46–54

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43. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 270 44. See especially the remarks on secularization ibid., 256. 45. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 209. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2004), 263. 49. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Benjamin: Se­ lected Writings, vol. 2, 518. 50. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Benjamin: Se­ lected Writings, vol. 4, 338. 51. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 336–375. 52. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 164–65 (emphasis mine). 53. Ibid., 163. 54. For a further clarification of this point, see Peter E. Gordon, “Secularization, Dialectics, and Critique,” in Eric Santner et al., The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 183–203. 55. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 258. 56. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 339. 57. Ibid., 329. 58. Ibid., 328. 59. Ibid. 60. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 155. 61. Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 62, 65. 62. Ibid. 63. Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 347. 64. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” 62. 65. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 347. 66. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395. 67. On the charged issue of Benjamin’s relationship to Schmitt, see Horst

166

Notes to Pages 54–59

Bredekamp, “Walter Benjamin’s Esteem for Carl Schmitt,” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, ed., Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 68. I owe this insight to Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014). 69. Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” in Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 423–427. 70. For an insightful meditation on these themes see Max Pensky, Melan­ choly Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). 71. See Michael Jennings’s note in Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 306. 72. Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 305. 73. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” 51–89 (quotes on 54 and 52). 74. For an excellent discussion of the debate, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), especially the section titled “Benjamin’s Janus Face,” 141–146. 75. Walter Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 471 (N7a, 7). 76. Eli Friedländer, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 77. See, e.g., the excellent new collection of essays, Walter Benjamin and Theology, ed. Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Also see Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Agata Bielek-Robson, “Mysteries of the Promise: Negative Theology in Benjamin and Scholem,” in Negative The­ ology as Jewish Modernity, ed., Michael Fagenblat (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 258–281. 78. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390. 79. Gershom Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 78–141. For a comment see David Biale, “Gershom Scholem on Nihilism and Anarchism,” in Rethinking History 19, no. 1 (2015): 611–671. 80. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 54. 81. Rolf Tiedemann, “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses ‘On the Concept of History,’ ” Philosophical Forum, 15, nos. 1–2 (Fall–Winter 1983–1984), 95; Gershom Scholem, Walter

Notes to Pages 60–62

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Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1981), “Appendix: Correspondence from the Spring of 1931 Concerning Historical Materialism,” 228. 82. On this theme see Peter E. Gordon, “Contesting Secularization: Remarks on the Normative Deficit of Modernity After Weber,” in Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, ed. Philip Nord, Katja Guenther, and Max Weiss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 83. Bredekamp, “Walter Benjamin’s Esteem for Carl Schmitt.” 84. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 236–252 (quotes on 249 and 252). 85. For an excellent summary of Schmitt’s assessment of political theology, see Andrew Norris, “Carl Schmitt’s Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of ‘the Outermost Sphere,’ ” Theory & Event 4, no. 1 (2000), online at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/2219/print. 86. Schmitt, Political Theology, 48. 87. For a bold statement regarding these alleged affinities see Ellen Kennedy, “Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School,” Telos 71 (March 1987): 37–66; for a corrective, see Jay, “Reconciling the Irreconcilable?” 67–80. 88. As Jürgen Habermas has observed, Adorno may not have realized just how much Benjamin still remained attached to a political-theological and perhaps even a conservative-revolutionary conception of the redemptive path beyond profane history. “Adorno, who in comparison to Benjamin was certainly the better Marxist, did not see that his friend was never prepared to give up the theological heritage, inasmuch as he always kept his mimetic theory of language, his messianic theory of history, and his conservativerevolutionary understanding of criticism immune against objections from historical materialism (to the degree that this puppet could not simply be brought under his direction).”: Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: ConsciousnessRaising or Rescuing Critique,” in On Walter Benjamin, 90–128 (quote on 117). 89. Weber, “Science as a Vocation.” 90. Rolf Tiedemann, for example, writes that “Benjamin’s historical materialism was only historically true as the puppet, ‘which enlists the services of theology.’ Nevertheless, it was supposed to ‘win.’ . . . One can be excused for doubting whether this intricate claim could ever be honored.”: Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagenwerk.” In On Walter Benjamin, 260–291 (quote on 289).

168

Notes to Pages 63–68

91. See also Jürgen Habermas’s conclusion that “Benjamin did not succeed in his intention of uniting enlightenment and mysticism because the theologian in him could not bring himself to make the messianic theory of experience serviceable for historical materialism. That much, I believe, has to be conceded in Scholem’s favor.”: Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,” 114.

t wo Horkheimer; or, The Longing for the Wholly Other 1. Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 368. But see On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John McCole (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), in which his retirement is listed as 1959. A small shift in geography often misidentifies Montagnola as a town in Italy, e.g., ibid., 10. 2. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 286. 3. Martin Jay, “‘Die Hoffnung, irdisches Grauen möge nicht das letzte Wort haben’: Max Horkheimer und die Dialektische Phantasie,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 12 (2015): 133–146. See esp. 144. 4. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. 5. See Martin Jay, “The Ungrateful Dead,“ in his Refractions of Violence (New York; Routledge, 2003), 39–46. 6. Jay, “‘Die Hoffnung, irdisches Grauen möge nicht das letzte Wort haben,’ ” 143. 7. Freud was especially distressed by this charge. See, e.g., Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 204–205. For a different example of this charge, see the case of Charles Maylan as discussed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 58. 8. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 35. 9. The Jewish preference for the word over the image also appears as a major theme in a 1961 essay by Jürgen Habermas, ”The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers,” in Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 21–44. 10. Max Horkheimer to Martin Jay, July 25, 1971, in “‘Die Hoffnung, ­irdisches Grauen möge nicht das letzte Wort haben,’ ” 141. 11. Quoted ibid., 141.

Notes to Pages 68–76

169

12. Max Horkheimer, A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence, ed. and trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 361 (emphasis mine). 13. Jay, “‘Die Hoffnung, irdisches Grauen möge nicht das letzte Wort haben,’ ” 144. 14. John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frank­ furt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 48. 15. Max Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality,” in Horkheimer, Be­ tween Philosophy and Social Science, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 33. 16. Ibid., 44. 17. On “senselessness” and related themes, see the comments in Alfred Schmidt, “Max Horkheimer’s Intellectual Physiognomy,” in On Max Hork­ heimer: New Perspectives, 25–48, esp. 28 and passim. 18. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes, 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury, 1978), 102. 19. Ibid. 20. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical The­ ory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 1975), 241. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice (New York: Harper and Row, 1950). For an overview of this work and its continued significance today, see Peter E. Gordon, “Introduction,” in Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, new ed. (London: Verso, 2019). 26. Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theo­ ries, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 311. 27. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1969 [originally 1944]), 9. 28. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten­ ment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1. 29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 9/Dialectic of En­ lightenment, 1. 30. Horkheimer, “Notizen, 61,” in Dawn and Decline, 148. 31. Ibid. For further comments on this phrase, see Jürgen Habermas, “Re-

170

Notes to Pages 76–89

marks on the Development of Horkheimer’s Work,” in On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, 49–66 (the phrase is quoted on 61). 32. Horkheimer, “Religion and Philosophy,” in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2004), 249. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 250. 35. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002). 36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1999). 37. Immanuel Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 38. I have reconstructed this argument with reference to my earlier publication. See Peter E. Gordon, “Interpretations of Catastrophe,” in The Cam­ bridge History of World War Two, vol. 3: Total War, ed. Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 39. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 29–30/Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17. 40. Ibid. 41. On Hegel’s assessment of Judaism see Peter E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 2, “Hegel’s Fate,” esp. 52n23, 93. 42. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17. 43. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Di­ alectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 128. 44. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 143. 45. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1911). 46. On this theme, see, e.g., Arnaldo Momigliano, “A Note on Max ­Weber’s Definition of Judaism as a Pariah-Religion,” History and Theory 19, no.  3 (1980): 313–318. 47. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge, 2011). For a superb collection of critical essays on Jaspers’s concept, see The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 48. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2002). 49. Max Horkheimer, “Theism and Atheism,” in The Frankfurt School on Religion, 222.

Notes to Pages 89–101

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50. Ibid., 223. 51. Ibid., 222. 52. Ibid., 223. 53. Ibid., 222. 54. Max Horkheimer, Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen. Ein Inter­ view mit Kommentar von Helmut Gumnior (Hamburg: Furche-Verlag, 1970). 55. Ibid., 74. 56. Ibid., 77. 57. Ibid., 61. 58. Pascal Eitler, “Gott ist tot—Gott ist rot”: Max Horkheimer und die Poli­ tisierung der Religion um 1968, Historische Politikforschung, Bd. 17 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2009). 59. Jay, “‘Die Hoffnung, irdisches Grauen möge nicht das letzte Wort haben,’ ” 144. 60. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Preface B, xxx, 117. 61. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, 234–235. 62. Ibid., 235 (emphasis mine). 63. Ibid. 64. Habermas, “Remarks on the Development of Horkheimer’s Work,” 60.

three Adorno; or, Negative Dialectics as Negative Theology 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron” in Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2012). 2. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-­ Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 55. 3. Ibid., 239. 4. All quotations are from the libretto accompanying Arnold Schoenberg, Moses und Aron, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Sir Georg Solti, director (Decca Record Company, 1985), 2 compact discs. 5. Paul Griffiths, “Notes to Moses und Aron,” ibid., 13. 6. Adorno, “Sacred Fragment,” 229. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style,” in Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); see also Michael Spitzer, Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Bloomington: In­

172

Notes to Pages 101–107

diana University Press, 2006); and Peter E. Gordon, “The Artwork Beyond Itself: Adorno, Beethoven, and Late Style,” in The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory in Honor of Martin Jay, ed. Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliott Neaman (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 77–98. 8. On the Missa Solemnis, see Theodor W. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” in Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie and others (Berkeley: University of California Press ), 569–583. 9. Adorno, “Sacred Fragment,” 228. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 229. 14. Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, October 24, 1933, in The Cor­ respondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevre (New York: Schocken, 1980), 84. 15. Gershom Scholem to Theodor W. Adorno, February 9, 1964, in Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail”: Briefwechsel 1939–1960, ed. Asaf Angermann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 304. 16. Theodor W. Adorno to Gershom Scholem, February 17, 1964, ibid., 308. 17. The question of Oscar Wiesengrund’s relationship with the Jewish community in Frankfurt is uncertain. In a footnote to his biography of Adorno, Stefan Müller-Doohm writes that no evidence has been found to support the claim that Oscar actually converted to Protestantism, though Müller-Doohm adds in a later footnote that “in 1910, when Adorno was seven, his father announced his departure from the Frankfurt am Main Israelite community.” See Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 494nn12, 16. This uncertainty disappears in the account given by Jack Jacobs in The Frankfurt School, Jew­ ish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), in which Müller-Doohm’s book is cited to support the claim that Oscar “had converted to Protestantism in 1910” (54). My personal thanks to Stefan Müller-Doohm for confirming this detail. 18. Quoted in Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 34. 19. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 192–193. 20. Ibid., 193. 21. See, for example, the letter by Max Horkheimer (September 1, 1969)

Notes to Pages 107–109

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to Otto O. Herz, who had expressed his disappointment that no mention was made of Judaism at Adorno’s funeral. Horkheimer’s response is worth quoting at length: “Your regret, that at the burial of my friend Adorno no expression was made of the confessional bond with Judaism, is deeply understandable to me. The external reasons for this are publicly known. His father descended from Jews, the mother, born Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, as was her sister the artist, both of whom were decisively for his education, represented the Catholic tradition. Teddie Adorno was baptized as a Catholic, and owing to the influence of a Protestant teacher of religion confirmed as a Protestant. I share with you these communications in order to make clear the complicated stance of the deceased toward religion, toward confession. On the other hand I must say that Critical Theory, as we both developed it, has its roots in Judaism. It springs from the thought: Thou shalt have no Image of God. That Adorno identified with the Persecuted is proven by his saying, that after what happened in Auschwitz, there can no longer be any poetry.” Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften: Briefwechsel, Band XVIII (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1996), Letter 5 (translation mine). The letter is also reproduced in translation in Max Horkheimer, A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence, ed. and trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 361. For alerting me to this letter, I am grateful to a gentleman in Munich who attended my lecture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (June 2018) and gave me a copy from the original German volume of Horkheimer’s collected letters. Unfortunately this gentleman did not give me his name. 22. Adorno and Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 388–389. 23. Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin, February 1, 1939, in Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1929–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 298. 24. As the editors of Adorno’s correspondence with his parents note, this is presumably an allusion to Horkheimer’s essay “The Jews and Europe,” which opens with a remark on the “Jewish-Hegelian jargon.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to His Parents, 1939–1951, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2006), 7. 25. Adorno, Letters to His Parents, 16. Regarding the significance of “Walter Rosenthal,” the editors explain that Rosenthal was a “fictitious figure” who became a “parodistic projection” for members of the institute (19n3). 26. Ibid., 132. 27. Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence, 1943–1955, ed. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher, trans. Nicholas Walker (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2006), 34. 28. Adorno’s studious resistance to claims of membership in any ethno-

174

Notes to Pages 110–114

national collective deserves emphasis if only because some scholars are keen to include Adorno in a canon of modern Jewish thought. In his case such designations make little sense, as I shall explain below. 29. Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995). 30. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (1916; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). 31. Adorno to Scholem, February 17, 1964, in Adorno and Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 308. 32. Theodor W. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2004), 167. 33. Ibid. 34. See, e.g., Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, “Negative Dialectics, Sive Secular Jewish Theology: Adorno and the Prohibition on Graven Images and the Imperative of Historical Critique,” in Negative Theology as Jewish Moder­ nity, ed. Michael Fagenblat (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 198–212. 35. There are, of course, many other exemplars of negative theology in the history of religion. James Gordon Finlayson offers a deeply illuminating comparison between Adorno and the negative theology developed by Dionysius the Areopagite. See James Gordon Finlayson, “On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism,” Harvard Theological Re­ view 105, no. 1 (2012): 1–32. See also the remarks on negative theology in Rudolf J. Siebert, “Adorno’s Theory of Religion,” Telos 58 (Winter 1983–1984): 108–114; Gerrit Steunebrink, “Is Adorno’s Philosophy a Negative Theology?” in Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, ed. Ilse Nina Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 293–319. Also see Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetic, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), in which Wellmer argues, “In the aporetic relationship between art and philosophy, a theological perspective is sublated: art and philosophy combine to form the two halves of a negative theology” (7). 36. Charles Taylor uses a different terminology. Borrowing from Isaiah Berlin and J. G. Herder, Taylor characterizes the logic of self-manifestation as Hegel’s “expressivist” understanding of the subject. See Taylor, Hegel, an Exposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). Historically this is helpful, but philosophically it may invite misunderstanding. Against the terminology of “expressive” subjectivity (or the cognate “expressivism”), I prefer to speak of “manifestation” because the latter avoids unwanted associations with irrationalist currents in the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. 37. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, “Preface,” §27. I am quot-

Notes to Pages 115–119

175

ing this famous phrase from the (now-antiquated but very elegant) translation by J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Colophon, 1967), 15. For a more accurate version of the quotation see the recent version, Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. and ed. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 17. 38. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), “Preface,” 20; also see Wood’s remarks on this phrase in the editor’s introduction, viii. 39. G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vol. 2, sect. 3, chap. 3, “The Absolute Idea,” 735, 737. 40. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, “Preface.” 41. On Judaism as the religion of sublimity, see G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. One Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827, trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. 366; and for a commentary see Yirmayahu Yovel, “Hegel’s Concept of Religion and Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity” Tarbiz 16, nos. 3–4 (April–September, 1976): 303–326. Also see Peter E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Be­ tween Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 91–100. 42. The neo-Hegelian revival in the Anglophone world has been especially helpful in clarifying those elements in Hegel’s dialectic that can be retained without reference to a strong metaphysics of closure. See, e.g., the interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic as an ongoing practice of “giving and asking for reasons” in Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 367. 43. The best deflationary, non-metaphysical reading of absolute knowing, in my view, is the one offered by Terry Pinkard in his Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 6, “The Self-Reflection of the Human Community,” 221–268. 44. Hegel, “Vorrede,” Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 15/ “Preface,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, 13. 45. On this theme see Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 46. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), online, unpaginated. 47. Portions of this exposition are borrowed from my review of the AdornoScholem letters in the Nation: Peter E. Gordon, “The Odd Couple,” Nation (June 9, 2016): https://www.thenation.com/article/the-odd-couple/.

176

Notes to Pages 119–123

48. Theodor W. Adorno, “Erpreßte Versöhnung,” in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 264. 49. Scholem to Adorno, March 1, 1967, in Adorno and Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 407. 50. Adorno to Scholem, March 14, 1967, ibid., 413. On the problem of “metaphysics” in Adorno, see the superb chapter on this topic in Brian O’Connor, Adorno (New York: Routledge, 2013), esp. chap. 4, 86–109. 51. Theodor W. Adorno, “Gruß an G. Scholem. Zum 70. Geburtstag: 5. Dezember, 1967,” in Gesammelte Schriften 20.2: Vermischte Schriften II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 478–486. 52. On this theme also see Pawel Maciejko, “Gershom Scholem’s Dialectic of Jewish History,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 3, no. 2 (2007): 207– 220; Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Wal­ ter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), and David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). For further comments see Michael Charles Fagenblat, “Frankism and Frankfurtism: Historical Heresies for a Metaphysics of Our Most Human Experiences,” Bamidbar: Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7, no. 1 (2015): 21–55. 53. Adorno, “Gruß an G. Scholem. Zum 70. Geburtstag: 5. Dezember, 1967,” 485. 54. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 55. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 23. 56. A specific kind of aesthetic modernism thus becomes a paradigm for aesthetic experience as such. James Gordon Finlayson contests my claim that Adorno defends Beethoven’s late style as “the essence of authentic art.” Finlayson suggests instead that “Adorno’s view is that Beethoven’s late music remained authentic, in spite of the changed social and historical situation of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century capitalism. Aesthetically it initiates (albeit intuitively) the revolution in music that was to emerge in Vienna from the collapse of tonality in the work of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg.”: James Gordon Finlayson, “The Artwork and the Promesse du Bon­ heur in Adorno,” European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2015): 392–419. This is correct. Adorno himself writes in the draft of his introduction to Aesthetic Theory, “History is inherent to aesthetic theory. Its categories are radically historical” (359, emphasis mine). But Adorno nonetheless (and quite ironically, given his historicist pronouncements) upholds a specific historical ideal as his transhistorical paradigm of aesthetic success. He argues, for instance, that “art’s dissatisfaction with itself, has been an intermittent

Notes to Pages 123–127

177

element of its claim to truth from time immemorial. Art, whatever its material, has always desired dissonance.” “Art that makes the highest claim compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary” (110, 147; emphasis mine). 57. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 58. Ibid./Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), 351 (emphasis mine). 59. Adorno, Negative Dialectics/Negative Dialektik, 397. 60. Adorno, Negative Dialectics/Negative Dialektik, 399. 61. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 62. See “Seventh Lecture: Isaac Luria and His School,” in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941), 244–286; on the doctrine of the kelipot, see especially 267. 63. On the details of Scholem’s preparation for these lectures and his correspondence with Benjamin, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Introductory Essay: The Spiritual Quest of the Philologist,” in Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 1–28. 64. “Editorische Nachbemerkung,” in Adorno and Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 537–548. 65. Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin, March 4, 1938, in Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 248. 66. Ibid., 249–250. 67. On this theme see the comparative study by Eric Jacobson, Metaphys­ ics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 68. Adorno to Benjamin, March 4, 1938, in Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 249–250. On this point also see Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 6. Biale identifies this dialectical gesture as the key to Scholem’s counter-history. There was, Biale notes, a “hidden” but “positive” relation to the Wissenschaft des Judentums as evidence for Scholem’s dialectical conception of Jewish history, in which the profane study of mysticism would both liquidate and resurrect its hidden power. Scholem called this a chisul ha-chisul, a liquidation of the liquidation, a formula, as Biale observes, that not only suggests his bond with Hegelian dialectics but also marks that point in Scholem’s work at which Adorno could discern the faint outlines of his own dialectical method. 69. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 70. Ibid./“Metaphysik in die Mikrologie einwandert”: Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 397.

178

Notes to Pages 128–135

71. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 72. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 100 (emphasis mine). 73. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 74. Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin, December 17, 1934, in Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 66–71; the reference to an “‘inverse’ theology” is at 67. 75. For a discussion of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 111–121. Also see Marcia Morgan, Kierkegaard and Critical Theory (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012) and Peter E. Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), esp. 12–36. 76. See, e.g., the essays in Michael Fagenblatt, ed., Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2017). 77. Scholem to Adorno, February 22, 1952, in Adorno and Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 82–83. 78. Adorno to Scholem, April 13, 1952, in Adorno and Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 84–85. 79. Theodor W. Adorno, “Finale,” in Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247. 80. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol. 1, sec. 59. 81. On the importance of infinite judgment in Maimonides, see Peter E. Gordon, “The Erotics of Negative Theology: Maimonides on Apprehension,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1995), 1–38; for a general treatment of infinite judgment in modern Jewish thought, see Peter E. Gordon, “Science, Finitude, and Infinity: Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 1. (Spring 2000): 30–53. For the Kantian implications of this idea, see the brilliant exposition by Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Cen­ tury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 350–360. 82. “Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Preface B, xxx, 117. 83. On this theme see the superb study by Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Berkeley Tanner Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 84. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Notes to Pages 136–140

179

85. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” 167 (translation modified). 86. Ibid. German from Adorno, “Vernunft und Offenbarung,” in Gesam­ melte Schriften, 10.2: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, II. Eingriffe, Stichworte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 608–616. 87. Adorno to Scholem, February 17, 1964, in Adorno and Scholem, “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail,” 308. 88. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” 173. 89. Ibid., 170. 90. Adorno, “Finale,” 247. 91. See Gordon, Adorno and Existence, esp. 139. 92. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnow­ ski and Frederic Will (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 33. 93. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics/Negative Dialektik, 134. 94. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 95. This dialectical relationship with theology is something that Martin Hägglund misses when he insists on the sharp dualism between religious and secular faith and mischaracterizes Adorno’s understanding of human existence as essentially “religious.” See Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 325. 96. Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 97. “Gegenüber der Forderung, die damit an ihn ergeht, ist die Frage nach der Wirklichkeit oder Unwirklichkeit der Erlösung selber fast gleichgültig”: Adorno, “Zum Ende,” in Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem bes­ chädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), 283/Adorno, “Finale,” 247. 98. Ibid. 99. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 12. For a discussion of Adorno’s critique of existentialism and the existentialist attempt to recapture the immediacy of religion, see Gordon, Adorno and Existence, esp. 93. 100. My arguments here are in close dialogue with several scholars, all of whom have contributed to the ongoing debate as to whether or how Adorno’s negative dialectic relates to negative theology. Especially notable are the superb essays in the collection edited by Michael Fagenblat, Negative Theol­ ogy as Jewish Modernity. To be sure, one cannot easily rank Adorno alongside other thinkers in a canon of “Jewish modernity.” On Adorno and negative theology, see Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 3 (July 2002): 291–318; James Gordon Finlayson, “On Not Being Silent in the Darkness”; Martin Schuster, “Adorno and Negative Theology,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37, no. 1 (2016): 97–130; and Deborah Cook, “Through a Glass Darkly:

180

Notes to Pages 144–148

Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Adorno Studies 1, no. 1 (January 2017): 66–78. Cook offers a bracing summary of Adorno’s method as follows: “Adorno thinks that truth wrested from reality by negating it offers the only legitimate grounds for hope. Even as he acknowledges the limits to his ‘inverse theology,’ Adorno suggests that there are fragments of good in the world, but that these only appear through a glass darkly; they are glimpsed by those who resist (in thought, action, or both) injustice, unfreedom, intolerance, and oppression. Society’s rational potential manifests itself wherever individuals confront and contest the limits to their freedom, in their struggles against their status as mere cogs in the wheels of the economic machinery, or in their challenges to multifarious forms of state oppression” (76).

Conclusion 1. Gershom Scholem, “The Myth of a German-Jewish Dialogue,” in Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2012); Jürgen Habermas, “The Torah in Disguise: Gershom Scholem,” in Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 212. 2. Jürgen Habermas, “The Mutual Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,” in Habermas, The Philosoph­ ical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 106–130. 3. Jürgen Habermas, “Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking,” in Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); 51; Jürgen Habermas, “Motive nachmetaphysischen Denkens,“ in Nachmetaphysisches Denken—Philoso­ phische Aufsätze (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 60. For a criticism of Habermas, see Peter E. Gordon, “Critical Theory Between the Sacred and the Profane,” Constellations 23, no. 4 (May 2016): 466–481; in German as “Kritische Theorie zwischen Sakralen und Profane” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (2016): 3–34, with a response by Richard Bernstein. In his most recent work on the “genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas offers a sophisticated and compelling illustration of how secular modernity has emerged from a learning process with religious tradition without sacrificing its secular commitments. 4. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes, 1926–1931, and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury, 1978), 102. 5. See, e.g., Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Free­ dom (New York: Pantheon, 2019). A modern polity that has broken with

Notes to Pages 148–149

181

obsolete schemes of authoritarian metaphysics and now wishes to make room for true differentiation among its citizens should no longer demand that they obey a single metaphysical principle. Hägglund clearly wishes to reject the authoritarian (religious) metaphysics of eternity, but he repeats this demand when he insists on an exclusive metaphysics of human finitude. What he calls “secular faith” describes an existential commitment to our own finite temporality that is said to underwrite any and all investment in life. The metaphysical stricture appears in the guise of a transcendental argument: what he calls “secular faith” is supposed to be “a condition of intelligibility for any form of care” (29, my emphasis). It follows that religious co-­ citizens do not and cannot care for their lives in the way they imagine, since their religious commitments are deemed to be at odds with their worldly attachments. This results in a sharp dualism without dialectical mediation: either one loves this world in its finitude, or one loves eternity. Such arguments are presented with philosophical acumen and passionate conviction, and I admire Hägglund for his readiness to take on questions of such far-­ reaching consequence. But I fear the arguments are misguided. Modern political life can survive as a nonauthoritarian and inclusive practice only if it leaves space for citizens who may acknowledge a variety of metaphysical schemes. Otherwise the merely procedural rules of a secular-democratic polity can easily degenerate into a bad form of metaphysical secularism. 6.“Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other”: Theodor W. Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” in Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 247. 7. Here it seems relevant to note that Martin Jay originally meant to give his book on the history of the Frankfurt School the title “Permanent Exiles,” a phrase which underscores the thought I have proposed in this book as regards the permanence or constitutive character of homelessness. When both Horkheimer and Felix Weil expressed their discontent with this proposed title, Jay opted for “The Dialectical Imagination” but later used the original title for a collection of his essays. See Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). For a full account of the title change see Jay, “‘Die Hoffnung, irdisches Grauen möge nicht das letzte Wort haben’: Max Hork­ heimer und die Dialektische Phantasie,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozial­ forschung 12 (2015): 133–146. 8. On this point see the challenging reflections, Is Critique Secular? Blas­ phemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Townsend Papers in the Humanities 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 9. For reflections on the survival of a more chastened and de-transcen-

182

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dentalized form of rationality, see especially the discussion on Habermas in Martin Jay, Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 145–163. 10. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11. Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981)/The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas A. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1985). 12. Max Horkheimer, “The State of Israel,” in Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, 206–207. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. Hella Beister, Max Pensky, and William Rehg (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2003). 16. Seyla Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 32. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 39. 18. Quoted in Peter E. Gordon, “Heidegger in Purgatory,” in Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 1933–34, ed. and trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 19. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, in Gesammelte Schriften 4 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), 42. 20. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 41. 21. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 143. Published in German as “Der Fremde,” in Soziologie (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1908), 685–691. 22. For related arguments, see Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, especially Band 2: Vernünftige Freiheit: Spuren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019); in particular, see the “Postskriptum,” 767–807.

Index

Abraham (biblical figure), 10–12, 148 Abromeit, John, 70 actualization or externalization (Entäußerung), 114–115 Adorno, Gretel, 52 Adorno, Theodor W., biography: and anti-Semitism, 4, 7, 105–110; collaboration with Horkheimer, 108–109; final years, 65; friendship with Benjamin, 102–103; friendship with Scholem, 102–103, 125; and Habermas, 17; and Klee’s Angelus Novus, 52–53; and Jay, 65–66; musical studies with Berg, 96; religious identity, 3–4, 104–110 Adorno, Theodor W., works: The Authoritarian Personality (co-author), 73; Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-author), 74–75, 79–90, 108–109, 145; “Gruß an G. Scholem. Zum 70. Geburtstag: 5. Dezember, 1967,” 121; Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 103, 125, 130; Metaphysics: Concept and

Problems, 15–16, 128; Minima Moralia, 1, 105–106, 123, 130–131, 138–140; Negative Dialectics, 119–124, 127–129, 138–139; Philosophy of New Music, 96–97; Quasi una Fantasia, 102; “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” 96–97, 100–104 aesthetics, 6, 35, 37, 102, 122, 130; in Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, 41–47, 54; disagreement between Benjamin and Adorno about, 44, 73; and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, 100–102. See also aura; technology allegory, 32, 97, 127, 129; Benjamin’s theory of, 38–39 ambivalence: Adorno’s toward Schoenberg, 97; Adorno’s toward theology, 130; Benjamin’s about auratic decline, 40, 48; and role of monotheism in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 86–87, 89–90; about secularization, 2, 8, 34, 36, 53–54, 59, 111 American Jewish Committee, 73, 108

184 Index angel of history, 39, 52–53, 57, 59, 62, 78, 110–111, 129. See also history anti-Semitism, 3–5, 7–8, 67, 86; and Adorno, 4, 105, 108–109; and Benjamin’s death, 7; and Horkheimer, 3, 70, 73. See also Auschwitz; Holocaust; Judaism and Jewish identity Arcades Project (Benjamin), 26, 56 Arendt, Hannah, 73, 106–107; “We Refugees,” 11 Aron (in Schoenberg opera), 97–101, 103 atheism, 89, 140–141. See also theism; “Theism and Atheism” (Horkheimer) Augustine, Saint, The City of God, 11, 148 aura: Benjamin’s theory of the, 40–51, 53, 58, 138; in existen­ tialism, 138; and religion in Weber, 35. See also aesthetics; technology Auschwitz, 109, 118. See also anti-Semitism; Holocaust authenticity: in Heidegger, 151–153; jargon of, 88, 138; in modern art, 122; and subjectivity, 149. See also Heidegger, Martin authoritarianism, 44–46, 60–61, 70, 73, 80, 89. See also fascism; National Socialists Authoritarian Personality (Adorno), 73 automaton/automatism, 21–25, 27–34; history as, 27–29, 33–34. See also history; Turk, chessplaying axial age, 87–88. See also Jaspers, Karl; religion

Bataille, Georges, 52 Baudelaire, Charles, 50–51. See also “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin) Beethoven, Ludwig van, 122; Battle Symphony (op. 91), 31; Missa Solemnis, 101 Benhabib, Seyla, 150–151 Benjamin, Walter, biography: death as consequence of antiSemitism, 7, 104; failure of academic career, 37; flight from Paris, 25; friendships with Adorno and Scholem, 102–103; Jewish identity, 3; and Klee’s Angelus Novus, 52–53 Benjamin, Walter, works: Arcades Project, 26, 56; Berlin Childhood Around 1900, 51; “Children’s Literature,” 51; “Critique of Violence,” 61; “The Cultural History of Toys,” 51; “Little History of Photography,” 48–49; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 48, 50, 52; “On the Concept of History,” 25–26, 32–34, 39–40, 52–53, 57, 59, 73–74, 90, 94, 145; Origin of the German Mourning Play, 36–40, 54, 60–61; “Surrealism,” 47; “Theological-Political Fragment,” 47–48, 55; “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” 40–47, 145 Berg, Alban, 96, 101 Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Benjamin), 51 Bernstein, Eduard, 28–29 Bilderverbot, or ban on represen­ tation, 68, 91, 97–98, 112, 150. See also idolatry; Judaism and

Index 185 Jewish identity; transcendence; wholly other, the Bloch, Ernst, 17 Brecht, Bertolt, 51 Bredekamp, Horst, 60 Breton, André, 47 Bubiel, Helmut, 68   Calvelli-Adorno, Maria, 3, 105, 107–108 Calvin, John, 77 Calvinism, 77–78, 86–87 capitalism: as automatic mechanism, 24; and commodity fetishism, 42, 48–49; and critique, 82, 86, 118, 122, 134, 145; effect on religion, 124; in Marx’s philos­ ophy of history, 27; Weber’s theory of elective affinity with Calvinism, 77–78, 86–87 Carnap, Rudolf, 133 catastrophe: Germany’s defeat in World War I as, 37; history as, 26, 36, 52, 54, 57, 59, 73, 78, 141; Marxian doctrine of necessary, 28; and messianism, 29–30; modernity as, 74–75, 94, 118, 136. See also history; messianism Catholicism, 3, 77, 90, 92, 105, 109, 136. See also Christianity; Protestantism Chamoiseau, Patrick, Frères migrants, 13 Christianity, 41, 97, 100, 107, 128, 140, 148; Benjamin’s interest in, 3; and critique in Horkheimer, 76, 89–92; dialogue with Marxism, 76, 92; Hegel’s dialectic and, 116; and migration, 10–11; and nature in trauerspiel, 38. See also Calvinism; Catholicism; Protestantism

Cobenzel, Count von, 21. See also Turk, chess-playing Cohen, Hermann, 17, 134. See also neo-Kantianism commodity fetishism, 42–43, 48–49, 135. See also Marx, Karl; Marxism communism, 27, 46, 118. See also Marxism; materialism, historical; socialism Condorcet, marquis de (Marie-­ Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat), 27 critical theory: and appeal to theology/religion as normative resource, 76, 79, 94–95, 137, 144–145; commitment to rational critique, 13–16; end of first generation of, 64–66; and experience of exile, 104; Horkheimer’s conception of, 72; relation to Jewish history and thought, 4, 66–68, 90–91; and secularization, 9, 19. See also critique; Frankfurt School; Institute for Social Research critique: of commodity fetishism, 42, 49; and distraction, 45; and exile, 110; Horkheimer on theology as resource for, 76, 89, 91, 93; immanent, in Frankfurt School, 14–15; of jargon of authenticity, 138; and Jewish tradition, 16–19, 84–91, 150; lack of critical perspective in modernity, 72, 76, 82, 118–119, 131; of liberalism in Schmitt, 61–62; need for secularizing critique of religion, 26, 149, 154; in negative dialectics, 118–123; and normative deficit of modernity, 16, 60,

186 Index critique (continued) 94, 141–142; performative contradiction in Habermas’s critique of reason, 144; of religion in Marxism, 58, 137; and responsiveness to difference, 148; role of theology in Adorno’s conception of, 112, 120, 123–124, 127, 129–131, 134–142, 146; and trauerspiel, 38; of unconditioned subject, 88–89. See also critical theory; normative deficit of modernity; normativity; rationality “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin), 61   decisionism, 60–61, 79. See also Schmitt, Carl; state of emergency/exception deism, 23, 32. See also Enlightenment determinate negation. See negation, determinate de Vries, Hent, 139 dialectic: Adorno’s critique of Hegelian, 118–119; as approach to theology, 94, 124, 126–127, 131–132, 139–142; of capitalism and religion in Weber, 78; and concept of secularization, 58, 112, 137, 143–145; “dialectics at a standstill” (Benjamin), 26; dogmatic secularism as undialectical, 137, 148; of enlightenment, 46, 80, 82–83, 87, 145; in Hegel, 113–117; and immanent critique, 14, 16, 18, 90, 142; and Jewish thought, 16, 18, 108; in Marx, 117–118; of Marxism and messianism in Benjamin, 59; and

role of monotheism in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 84–86, 88–90, 145; of theology and materialism in Adorno, 120. See also dialectics, negative Dialectical Imagination (Jay), 65–69, 148; Horkheimer’s foreword to, 66, 68–69, 92–93. See also Jay, Martin dialectic of enlightenment. See dialectic; Enlightenment Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 74–75, 79–90, 108–109, 145 dialectics, negative, 84, 112–113, 118–119; as “inverse” theology, 129–130; relation to negative theology, 130, 134–135, 137, 140. See also dialectic; negativity; theology, negative Diderot, Denis, 23 disenchantment: and Benjamin’s conception of history, 40, 55, 79, 111; and dialectic of enlightenment, 75, 79, 82–83, 86–87; Heidegger’s response to, 138; and secularization, 26, 124, 147, 149, 154; in Weber, 8, 36, 62, 78. See also secularization/secular; Weber, Max   Eiland, Howard, 54 Eitler, Pascal, Gott ist tot—Gott ist rot (God Is Dead—God Is Red), 92 Engels, Friedrich, 36 Enia, Davide, Notes on a Ship­ wreck, 12 Enlightenment: affinity between German-Jewish experience and, 4–5, 16; automata as secular

Index 187 miracles in, 21–24, 32–33; dialectic of, 74–75, 80–83, 86–87, 121, 145; and Frankfurt School, 14–15; philosophy of history, 26, 29, 34; and Scholem’s understanding of mysticism, 126–127; and secularization, 34, 110, 147, 149 exile, 4, 11, 17, 73, 99, 105, 108; as constitutive condition of humanity, 148; influence on Adorno, 110; influence on Frankfurt School, 104; in Judaism and Christianity, 10. See also migration existentialism, 88, 138, 140, 153. See also existential ontology; Heidegger, Martin existential ontology, 151 expressionism, 37, 97 externalization (Entäußerung). See actualization or externalization   fascism, 11, 13, 46, 73, 105–106, 108. See also authoritarianism; National Socialists Foucault, Michel, 15 Frankfurt, University of (Goethe University Frankfurt), 6, 37, 64–65, 70, 125 Frankfurt School: and Benjamin, 73–74, 103; and exile, 104; and Habermas, 17, 144; history of, 6, 64; and Jay, 65–68; and Jewish identity, 2–4, 6–8, 16, 18–19, 66–68; and Marxism, 6, 90, 121; and rational critique, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 80; and Schmitt, 61; and secularization, 1–2, 8–9, 19; and theology as normative resource, 9, 60, 63, 141. See also critical

theory; Institute for Social Research freedom: and atonal music, 97; and critique, 17; and dialectic of enlightenment, 75, 82–83, 85; and God, 77, 85; in Hegel, 114–116; in Jewish history, 10; in Kant, 80–81, 93; in Marx, 27; modern society as unfree, 15, 71, 118, 122 Freiburg, University of (Albert-­ Ludwigs Universität Freiburg), 152 French Revolution, 27, 120 Friedländer, Eli, 56 Fromm, Erich, 7 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 28   Gans, Eduard, 5 “German Jews,” (Horkheimer), 16–19 Gnosticism, 141 Gomperz, Julian, 7 Grossman, Henryk, 7 Grünberg, Carl, 7 Gumnior, Hellmut, 90   Habermas, Jürgen, 17, 94, 143–145; “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers,” 17–18; “The Torah in Disguise: Gershom Scholem,” 143–144 Halbertal, Moshe, 132, 135 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 48 Hegel, G. W. F.: Adorno’s critique of, 117–119, 121–122; dialectic, 113–117; and dialectic of enlightenment, 83; and immanent critique, 14; on Judaism, 84; philosophy of history, 27, 111; mentioned, 26, 108

188 Index Heidegger, Martin, 18, 138, 151–153; “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” 153; “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State,” 152. See also authenticity; existentialism; existential ontology Heine, Heinrich, 5 Herz, Otto, 68 history: Benjamin’s critique of progressive view of, 28–29, 34, 40, 62; as catastrophe, 26, 30, 36–40, 52, 54–55, 57–59, 73, 78–79, 110, 141; in Hegel, 27, 116; in Heidegger, 152; and historicism, 27–29; and Horkheimer’s appeal to the “wholly other,” 92; in Marx, 27, 36, 57–58, 90, 117; and messianism, 29–30, 34, 36, 39–40, 54–55, 57–58, 62, 79, 141; and metaphysical experience in Adorno, 123, 128–129; natural, 38; as progress, 16, 26–28, 33–34, 116; and secularization in Benjamin, 33–36, 57–58; in Scholem, 125–127. See also angel of history history, philosophy of 8, 26–27, 33–34, 79, 87, 116, 126–127 Hitler, Adolf, 108 Holocaust, 143. See also anti-­ Semitism; Auschwitz Horkheimer, Maidon, 65 Horkheimer, Max, biography: collaboration with Adorno, 108–109; director of Institute for Social Research, 71; exile in United States and oversight of Studies in Prejudice, 73; experience of anti-Semitism, 3, 70; final years, 65; and Jay, 65–66; Jewish identity, 3, 7, 69–70;

postwar career, 64–65; student days and reaction to First World War, 70 Horkheimer, Max, works: Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-author), 74–75, 79–90, 108–109, 145; foreword to The Dialectical Imagination (Jay), 64, 66, 68–69; “The German Jews,” 16–19; “Religion and Philosophy,” 76; “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen” (The Longing for the Wholly Other), 90–92; “Theism and Atheism,” 89–90; “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 72   identity: in Hegelian logic, 115, 117–119; social or ethnic, 3, 11, 153–154. See also Judaism and Jewish identity; multiplicity; nonidentity ideology: 4, 13, 44–45, 49, 73, 76, 138; Adorno’s critique of reconciliation as, 118; dialectical understanding of, 14–15; German-Jewish history and universalist, 16–17; and idolatry, 134–135; and messianism, 62, 129; and theology, 76, 137 idolatry, 85, 97–99, 132, 134–135, 140. See also Bilderverbot, or ban on representation Institute for Social Research, 1, 6, 64–68, 71, 104, 108. See also critical theory; Frankfurt School irrationality, 33, 38, 115, 125; and Adorno’s views on negativity in society, 122–123; in Benjamin and Schmitt, 54, 61. See also rationality; rationalization Islam, 148

Index 189 Jaquet-Droz, Pierre, 22 jargon of authenticity. See authenticity: jargon of Jaspers, Karl, 87–88, 138 Jay, Martin, 65–69, 92, 148. See also Dialectical Imagination Jennings, Michael, 54 Jephcott, Edmund, 74–75, 139 Jesus Christ, 10, 35, 116 Jewish Institute for Religion, 125 Judaism and Jewish identity: and Adorno, 3–4, 104–109, 112–113; affinity with radical politics and Enlightenment ideals, 4–5, 7, 16–19, 143; and Benjamin, 3, 103; and Bildungsbürgertum, 5–6; and Calvinism, 86–87; and dialectic of enlightenment, 83–89; and experience of migration, 10–11, 148; Hegel on, 116; and Horkheimer, 3, 65, 69–70, 90–91; influence on Frankfurt School, 2–4, 6–8, 66–68, 90–91, 104; and Maimonides, 133; and nationalism, 150; and Schoenberg, 99. See also anti-Semitism; Kabbalah; messianism; monotheism Jünger, Ernst, 46   Kabbalah, 3, 57, 102, 120–121, 135–136; and critique in Adorno, 124–129. See also Judaism and Jewish identity; Luria, Isaac; mysticism; Scholem, Gershom Kant, Immanuel, 17–18, 27, 71, 83, 88, 127, 134, 149; “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” 80; Critique of Pure Reason, 80–81, 93 Kasparov, Garry, 24

Kästner, Erich, 54 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 20–22, 24, 31. See also Turk, chessplaying Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Adorno), 103, 125, 130 Kierkegaard, Søren, 130–131, 140, 146–147 Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus, 52–53 Kogon, Eugen, 136 Kracauer, Siegfried, 107 Kraus, Karl, 53 Kurdî, Alan, 12   La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 23 left-Hegelians, 27, 117–118, 135. See also Hegel, G. W. F.; Marx, Karl; Marxism Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Die Erziehung des Menschenge­ schlechts (The Education of the Human Race), 27 liberalism, 4, 60–62, 89, 108 “Little History of Photography” (Benjamin), 48–49 logical positivism, 133 “Longing for the Wholly Other” (Horkheimer). See “Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen” (Horkheimer) Löwenthal, Leo, 7, 68 Löwy, Michael, 7 Lukács, Georg, 84, 110, 153 Luria, Isaac, 124, 127, 129. See also Kabbalah Luther, Martin, 38 Lutheranism, 38–40 Luxembourg, Rosa, 5   Maelzel, Johann Nepomuk, 31. See also Turk, chess-playing

190 Index Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), 112–113, 132–135, 139; The Guide of the Perplexed, 132–133, 137. See also theology, negative Mann, Thomas, 109 Mannheim, Karl, 110 Marcuse, Herbert, 66 Margalit, Avishai, 135 Marx, Karl, 5, 14, 24, 27–28, 36, 42, 91, 117–118; Capital, 48–49; “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 58; “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 27; Grundrisse, 161; Institute for Social Research as “Café Marx,” 64, 90. Marxism: affinity with Jewish experience, 6–7; and commodity fetishism, 42, 135; contrasted with Bernsteinian socialism, 28; and critique of religion, 36, 57–58, 90, 137; and decay of the aura in Benjamin, 42–43, 47–48, 51; and the Frankfurt School, 6, 8, 108, 121; and Horkheimer, 70–72; Horkheimer on religion and, 3, 76, 90–92; and logic of identity, 118; and messianism in Benjamin, 36, 53, 55–59, 103; and metaphysics in Adorno, 119–120, 124, 137–138; and modernism, 6. See also communism; materialism, historical; socialism materialism (French), 23, 27 materialism, historical: Adorno on Scholem and, 125; Benjamin’s critique of Marx’s, 27–30; in the early Horkheimer, 71, 145; and messianism in Benjamin, 3, 25–26, 29–30, 55–59, 62–63, 90, 145; and profane illumination,

47; and secularization in Marx, 36; and theology in Adorno, 119–121, 124, 130, 135, 137–138; and theology in Horkheimer, 3, 68, 90. See also Marxism melancholia, 8, 47–48, 50; and Benjamin’s angel, 110–11; “leftwing melancholia,” 54; and trauerspiel, 37–39 Mendelssohn, Moses, 17 messianism: Benjamin on secularization and, 34, 36, 57–58; and Benjamin’s historical materialism, 29–30, 57–58; Benjamin’s indecision between Marxism and, 53, 59, 63; as break with history in Benjamin, 29–30, 34, 40, 54–55, 79, 90, 141, 145; in Horkheimer, 3, 76; “messianic light” in Adorno, 123, 129, 131, 138–141, 146; and state of emergency, 30, 61–62. See also Judaism and Jewish identity metaphysics: and Hegel, 117; and Heidegger, 151; Horkheimer’s “metaphysical wish,” 68–69, 92–94; and Jewish God as apotheosis of subjectivity, 83, 85–86, 88; and Kant, 27, 80, 93, 134; and Maimonides, 132–134; and Marx, 42, 49, 117; and materialist criticism in Adorno, 9, 112, 119–120, 123–124, 127–129, 134–135, 139, 146; as politics, 109; and problem of normativity, 15, 90; and Schmitt, 61; and secularism, 147–148; the young Horkheimer’s opposition to, 71, 145. See also theology migration, 10–13, 110, 148, 151, 154. See also exile

Index 191 migration into the profane, 8–10, 154; and Habermas, 144–145; and Maimonides’ critique of idolatry, 135; and metaphysical experience in Adorno, 123–124, 127, 129; and ruthless seculari­ zation of theology in Adorno, 110–112, 119, 129, 136–137, 146–147; and sacred art, 42, 104; and Scholem, 121. See also secularization/secular Minima Moralia (Adorno), 1, 105–106, 123, 130–131, 138–140 modernism, 6, 44, 51, 97, 101, 122 modernity: Adorno on lack of critical perspectives in, 118–119, 122; and aura in Benjamin, 40, 42–46, 50; and bourgeois repression, 71, 82; and capitalism, 49, 82, 86–87, 118; and cultic music, 101; in dialectic of enlightenment, 46, 74–75, 82–84, 86; and disenchantment of collective identity, 152–154; and the Kabbalah, 120; and metaphysical experience in Adorno, 123–124, 136–137; and migration, 11; and normative deficit in secular, 2, 8–9, 14, 16, 141–142; and normativity problem, 33, 35–36, 51, 53–54, 57, 59–63, 78–79, 89, 93–95, 144–145; and the state in Hegel, 116. See also normative deficit of modernity; normativity monotheism, 83, 87–90, 145. See also Judaism and Jewish identity Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, Persian Letters, 110–111 Moses (in Schoenberg opera), 97–100, 102–103, 132, 142

Müller-Doohm, Stefan, 53 multiplicity, 150–151, 153. See also identity mysticism, 55, 102, 120–121, 126–128, 135–136. See also Kabbalah; Luria, Isaac myth, 14, 61, 97, 109, 154; Adorno’s and Scholem’s divergent conceptions of, 120–121, 125; contrast between Judaism and, 83–84, 86–88, 145; and dialectic of enlightenment, 46, 81–83   nationalism, 13, 16, 105, 107, 109, 150–153 National Socialists (Nazis), 17, 25, 37, 67, 152; anti-Semitic legis­ lation (1933), 4, 107. See also authoritarianism; fascism; Hitler, Adolf; Nuremberg rallies nature: and aura, 48–49; Benjamin on history as fallen, 37–38; and chess-playing Turk, 32–33; and dialectic of enlightenment, 81–83; Enlightenment view of, 20, 23, 28; in Heidegger, 152; Kant on freedom and causality in, 80–81, 83; monotheistic God and, 83–84, 88; “natural” catastrophes produced by society, 136 negation, determinate 15. See also critique; negativity negative dialectics. See dialectics, negative Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 119–124, 127–129, 138–139 negative theology. See theology, negative negativity: in Adorno, 118–119, 122–123, 127, 129, 139, 141; in

192 Index negativity (continued) Hegel, 114, 116; in Maimonides, 135. See also dialectics, negative; theology, negative neo-Kantianism, 70, 134. See also Cohen, Hermann New Left, 55, 65, 91 Newton, Isaac, Principia Mathe­ matica, 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15, 78 nonidentity, 115, 116. See also identity normative deficit of modernity, 8–9; and Adorno, 141–142; in Adorno compared with Habermas, 144–145; in Benjamin and Schmitt, 60–63; in Benjamin compared with Horkheimer, 78–79; and Horkheimer, 90, 94–95; and Weber, 59–60. See also modernity; normativity normativity, 8–9; Adorno’s response to problem of, 141–142; in Benjamin, 54, 59–63, 78–79, 94–95; and communicative reason, 144, 149; and dialectic of enlightenment, 75; in Habermas, 94, 144–145; in Horkheimer, 76, 79, 90, 94–95; and immanent critique in Frankfurt School, 14–16, 90; Weberian background for problem of, 77–78. See also critique; modernity; normative deficit of modernity; secularization Nuremberg rallies, 46. See also National Socialists   “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin), 48, 50, 52

“On the Concept of History” (Benjamin): Adorno and Horkheimer’s reaction to, 73–74; and angel of history, 52–53, 57; and chess-playing Turk, 25–26, 32–34; Marxism and messianism in, 59, 90, 94, 145. See also angel of history; materialism, historical; messianism; theology; Turk, chess-playing Origin of the German Mourning Play (Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels) (Benjamin), 36–40, 54, 60–61   philosophy of history. See history, philosophy of Philosophy of New Music (Adorno), 96–97 Poe, Edgar Allan, 31–32; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 31 Pollock, Friedrich, 7 Pope, Alexander, 29 positivism, 82, 94, 138–139 profane illumination, 47 progress, 15–17, 27–28, 40, 52–53, 62–63, 129 Protestantism, 3, 77–78, 88, 90, 105, 116 Proust, Marcel, 50–51   Ranke, Leopold von, 28–29 rationality: and critique in German-Jewish tradition, 17; and dialectic of enlightenment, 81–83; in Frankfurt School, 14; in Habermas, 144; in Hegel’s dialectic, 115–117; and imperative of secularization, 149; instrumental reason, 81–82, 94; and Jewish God, 84–85, 88, 145; in

Index 193 Kant, 80, 93; and Maimonides, 113; and Scholem, 121; and secularization in Adorno, 136, 146–147. See also critique; rationalization rationalization, 19, 116, 122–123, 124, 147; Weberian model of rationalized religion, 77–78, 86–87; and Weber’s disenchantment thesis, 35, 62, 75. See also irrationality; rationality reconciliation, 18, 81; Adorno’s skepticism regarding, 118–119, 122; in Hegel, 114–117 redemption, 50, 57–58, 116; in dialectic of enlightenment, 75, 85; and history in Benjamin, 37, 39–40, 78–79, 141; and metaphysical experience in Adorno, 127–128, 131, 139; and normative deficit of modernity, 14, 95, 142, 146; and theology in Horkheimer, 89, 146 reification, 94, 134–135 religion: in Adorno, 3–4, 101–102, 104, 107, 111, 119, 124, 128–129, 135–138, 140; and “axial age,” 87–88; in Benjamin, 3, 32–37, 40–43, 47, 54–60, 62–63, 78–79, 94–95; and dangers of ethno-­ national identification, 147–148, 150, 155; in Dialectic of Enlight­ enment, 75, 79, 83–88, 90; in Enlightenment, 23, 27, 80; in Habermas, 94–95, 143–145; Hegel’s philosophy of, 116; in Horkheimer, 3, 69, 76, 78–79, 90, 92, 94–95; and Jewish Bilderverbot, 68; in Maimonides, 132, 134–135; in Marxism, 36, 49, 57–58, 90, 135, 137; and migra-

tion, 10–11, 148; and normative deficit of modernity, 8–9, 59–60, 62–63, 78–79, 90, 94–95, 141–142, 144–145; and secularization, 1–2, 5, 8–10, 19, 144–147, 149; in Weber, 34–36, 51, 77–78. See also theology “Religion and Philosophy” (Horkheimer), 76 revolution, 43, 50, 55, 61–62, 70, 88; in Adorno, 119; in Marx, 27, 48; and messianism in Benjamin, 29–30, 34, 36, 53–54, 57–58, 63, 145; and myth in Scholem, 120 Rosenzweig, Franz, 52   “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron” (Adorno), 96–97, 100–104. See also Schoenberg, Arnold Schaffer, Simon, 23 Schmidt, Alfred, 71 Schmitt, Carl, 18, 30, 54, 60–62, 79, 92; Politische Theologie (Political Theology), 60–61. See also decisionism; sovereignty; state of emergency/exception Schoenberg, Arnold, 96–97, 99–101; Moses und Aron, 97–102. See also Second Viennese School Scholem, Gershom: on Benjamin, 52–53, 55–56, 59; dialogue with Adorno on dialectics and theology, 111, 119–121, 124–127, 129–131, 135–136, 138; friendship with Benjamin and Adorno, 3, 102–103, 125; Habermas on, 143–144; Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 125; and “redemption through sin,” 57; “Walter

194 Index Scholem, Gershom (continued ) Benjamin and His Angel,” 53, 55–56. See also Kabbalah Schopenhauer, Arthur, 70–71, 91 Second Viennese School, 101, 122. See also Schoenberg, Arnold secularism, 48, 51, 56, 137; danger of dogmatic, 147, 148; as disenchantment of collective identity, 154–155 secularization/secular, 1–2, 15, 55; Adorno on sacred art and, 100–102; of aesthetic experience in Benjamin, 40–42, 44, 46–47, 49, 51; Benjamin as theorist of ambivalent, 33–36, 53–54, 56–59, 111, 145; and chess-playing Turk, 24–25, 32–33; dialectical understanding of, 19, 58, 86–87, 112, 124, 137, 144–147; in German-­ Jewish history, 5, 8; in Habermas, 143–145; in Horkheimer, 70–71, 76, 89, 92, 94–95, 145; as imperative, 147, 149; and Judaism in Dialectic of Enlight­ enment, 86–87; in Marxism, 36, 49, 58, 117, 135; of metaphysics in Adorno, 123–124, 127, 138–139; as migration into the profane, 8–10, 110–112, 129, 136–137, 145; and normative deficit of modernity, 8–9, 54–55, 59–63, 94–95, 141–142; in Scholem, 120–121, 127, 135; and trauerspiel, 39–40; in Weber, 34–35, 60, 86–87. See also disenchantment; migration into the profane; normative deficit of modernity; normativity; secularism “Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen” (The Longing for the

Wholly Other) (Horkheimer), 90–92 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 38; Romeo and Juliet, 91 shock-experience (Chockerlebnis), 50–51 Silesius, Angelus, 128 Simmel, Georg, 153 Smith, Adam, 23 socialism, 4, 6–7, 28–29, 43, 59, 70, 76. See also communism; materialism, historical; Marxism Sombart, Werner, 86 sovereignty, 37, 60–61; and Jewish state, 10, 150. See also nationalism; Schmitt, Carl Standage, Tom, 24 state of emergency/exception, 30, 61–62, 79. See also decisionism; Schmitt, Carl Stravinsky, Igor, 96 Studies in Prejudice (research program), 73 subjectivity, 72, 101, 149; and Adorno’s critique of logic of identity, 117–118, 121–122; and dialectic of enlightenment, 80–86; in Hegel’s dialectic, 113–115; Judaism as apotheosis of, 83–86, 88–89 “Surrealism” (Benjamin), 47 Syrian Civil War, 12   technology, 28, 43–44, 46, 49–51, 73, 145. See also aura theism, 89–90, 141. See also atheism “Theism and Atheism” (Horkheimer), 89–90 “Theological-Political Fragment” (Benjamin), 47–48, 55

Index 195 theology, 9–10; in Adorno, 111–112, 118, 120–121, 124, 128–129, 130–131, 135–140; and auratic art in Benjamin, 40, 43–44, 53–54; and Benjamin’s critical method, 25, 32–34, 52, 54–63, 79; and capitalism in Weber, 77–78; and commodity fetishism, 42, 49; in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 75, 84–85; in Enlightenment, 23; in Horkheimer, 68, 71, 76, 79, 90–94; and normative deficit of secular modernity, 9, 40, 54, 59–63, 76, 78–79, 94; in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, 102; in Scholem and Benjamin, 125–127; in trauerspiel, 37–38. See also metaphysics; religion theology, negative, 43–44, 84, 113; in Maimonides, 132–135; and negative dialectics, 130–132, 134–135, 138–140, 142. See also dialectics, negative; Maimonides theology, political, 35, 60–61, 79, 92, 148 Tiedemann, Rolf, 59 Tillich, Paul, 125 Toller, Ernst, 70 “Traditional and Critical Theory” (Horkheimer), 72 transcendence: in axial age religions, 88; as conceptual gesture in Adorno, 112, 137, 146; of God in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, 97, 100; of Jewish God in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83–85, 145; in Maimonides, 133–134; and the messianic in Benjamin, 54; of “something other” as normative principle in Horkheimer, 69, 90–91, 94; and

transience in Adorno, 123, 128–129; young Horkheimer’s rejection of, 71. See also Bilderverbot, or ban on representation; wholly other, the trauerspiel, 37–39, 54, 123 Tübinger Stift (seminary), 116 Turing, Alan, 24 Turk, chess-playing: historical account of, 21–22, 24, 30–32; as image of theology, 25–26, 28, 32–34, 55–56, 61, 120, 136; and orientalism in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, 110–111. See also automaton/automatism; “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin)   Vaucanson, Jacques de, 22 Voltaire, Candide, 27 Voskuhl, Adelheid, 23   Wagner, Richard: The Ring of the Nibelung, 97; Parsifal, 97 Weber, Max: Ancient Judaism, 87; on disenchantment and secularization, 8, 35–36, 75; on instrumental reason, 81–82; on Judaism and Calvinism as rationalized religions, 86–87; and normative deficit of modernity, 60, 62; The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, 77–79; on religion and the irrational, 33, 51; “Science as a Vocation,” 5. See also disenchantment; secularization/ secular Webern, Anton, 101 Weil, Felix J., 6, 66–68 Weimar Republic, 6

196 Index wholly other, the, 54, 77, 133; Calvinist God as, 77; Horkheimer’s longing for, 76, 89, 92, 94, 141, 146; in Judaism, 133; the messianic in Benjamin as, 54; opposed to Frankfurt School’s commitment to immanent critique, 90. See also Bilderver­ bot, or ban on representation; “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz

Anderen” (Horkheimer); transcendence Wiesengrund, Oscar, 3, 104–105, 107–108 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 82 “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (Benjamin), 40–47, 145 World War, First, 3, 11, 37, 70 World War, Second, 11, 73